As the circle broke, I stepped forward. “Might I suggest you line your trunk with plastic and take good gloves?”
The Elders turned as one to face me, momentarily stunned.
“If there is evidence, and you do end up taking from the changing ground, you don’t want any oil or fibers to get on it.” I shrugged. “Besides that, magical objects are often triggered by skin contact.”
“We won’t be touching anything,” Spotted Elk said. “There will be no magical objects.”
I sighed. “A Spook disappeared there. It suggests something happened.”
“Cut Rex some slack. He’s a professional.” Jenner grinned as she joined me by my side. “Wanna go with them?”
“I have to work on something else tonight,” I said, fighting the instinctive urge to glance at Spotted Elk. He was still fidgeting nervously, deep in quiet conversation with Aaron. “Something relevant to the investigation.”
“And what would that be?” Spotted Elk said.
Admitting my plan to visit Moris Falkovich was almost certain to cause another childish fight as pointless as it was ridiculous. I’d been twisting the wrists of freaks like Falkovich since I was in highschool. If he had the kind of security I couldn’t manage alone, I’d tell Jenner before I admitted anything to John Spotted Elk.
I attempted a smile as the pleasant, cool certainty of impending violence settled through my body. “Research. One of my contacts has given me information that could result in a lead. With luck, we will make two breakthroughs in one night.”
“Good.” Jenner slapped me on the back. “About time someone took some initiative. You look into that, while Michael and me go out back and discuss the location of the changing ground. Won’t we, Michael?”
“You presume much.” Michael’s still face had taken a cold, arrogant cast.
“I presume you’re going to help your Elder find twenty-one missing children, yeah.” Jenner gave him a stiff little grin.
The Pathrunner grimaced, looking to Spotted Elk. When he saw that John and the other Fires were already heading for the exit, he turned on his heel and headed for the red door, his back straight, shoulders tense. Jenner followed him. Her hands were fisted by her sides.
“I see.” I drew a deep breath, and looked back at the rest of the Tigers. The majority of them were dispersing. Duke, Zane, Big Ron and the mechanic-looking man had moved to the side and were now in a tight huddle of conversation. The only person still interested in me was Aaron, as he pushed through the milling bikers with a smile.
“How was your meeting with Christopher?” He asked. “More productive than this, I hope?”
“In theory.” I crossed my arms instinctively. Binah was still riding on my shoulder, silent, her purring having died against the wall of tension. “He was charming, and he was able to tell me a lot about the church, but very little about the couple. The children didn’t even really come up.”
“Well, the police have already been through all that with him,” Aaron said.
“Not you, I assume?” I arched an eyebrow.
“Not a chance,” Aaron said. He shook his head. “Conflict of interest.”
When I got to the bedroom to get ready for my night’s outing, I took the chance to read through the written information my doctor had passed to me. The one on Falkovich was just an address. The other one, my trade for Celso, went into a bit more detail. As I began to read through it, my heart sank.
“GOD damn it!” With the luxury of privacy, I swore out loud and threw the slip down onto the floor, exasperated. Doctor Levental’s fighter was a man named Viktor Bravic. His opponent for the Saturday semi-final was Zane Salter.
Chapter 23
When one went to accost a well-known, expensive ex-Jewish surgeon at his place of residence, one did not expect to end up in Hunts Point. A prestigious title like ‘Pediatric Transplant Specialist’ generally conveyed a love of comfortable living somewhere east of Brooklyn: Colonial architecture, a well-manicured lawn, small fluffy dogs. Doctors tended to keep houses that were clean and respectable, at least by appearances.
I forgot all about Zane and Celso when I pulled up in front of the house, checked the address, rubbed my eyes and read the number on the fence again to make sure. Moris Falkovich's house was a dump. He lived in a two-story white clapboard squeezed between a warehouse and a wholesale bakery in what was otherwise an industrialized wasteland. The strip of buildings – including the house – backed out onto a large, empty dirt lot with a lot of trash and rows of jagged concrete stumps that could be seen from the end of the driveway. There was a huge scrapyard across the street. It was desolate, cramped, and dismal. It was the perfect place to hide a monster.
The place made my lip curl and my feet hesitate. The tiny yard and driveway had a short, white chain link fence that reminded me all too much of my family home in Brighton Beach. The yard was studded with old merry-go round horses impaled on poles. Their intricate details were blocked out by thick layers of cheap acrylic paint, each horse a different solid color. Their eyes were flat and lifeless, painted solid black.
The cold wind had turned to pelting rain. I ran from my car to the shelter of the porch, my hand on the butt of the pistol under my jacket. When the wind turned right, the gusting rain carried the smell of something unpleasant, wrong, a sick sweetness that stood out against the normal rusty undertone that pervaded all of these older parts of New York. It smelled like meat left out for too many days in the weak winter sun. I was glad that I’d left Binah behind, but the gun was looking like a bad decision. I drew the knife instead, turning it back along my arm.
The front door was loose, banging with each shift in the storm as it blew down the street in waves. I reached for the handle: from the back of the warehouse next door, something rattled and banged, loudly. I threw myself around the concrete retainer separating the porch from the yard, pulse hammering in my throat. A long, tense minute passed, but no one rounded the yard, no shoes sounded against the pavement. Warily, I rose, and sniffed. Nothing, no one was out there that I could see, but it had put me off wanting to try the front door.
I went back out into the wall of rain, jumped the flimsy chain link gate dividing the rear from the front, and dropped down to the mud on the other side. The empty lot was very dark, lit only by the low reddish clouds. Here and there, old children's toys were scattered like rubbish. A sour feeling pressed at the back of my throat, and I turned the knife around on the way to the back door, blade facing out. It was locked, but the deadbolt was old and easy to slip. I bumped it carefully, pausing after the handle turned to see if anyone had heard the knock of the knife hilt against the bump key. No one responded. I opened the door and slid through in a wary crouch, only to back out half a second later as the stench of decaying meat, old piss and rotten food slapped me so hard that my eyes watered. "Jesus Christ."
It was warm inside, and lightless. GOD help me, but I wanted the gun. The knife felt tiny, useless, as I pulled my cap off and pressed it over my mouth and nose. I slipped back inside, letting my eyes adjust before heading deeper into the house.
The kitchen was the source of the smell. The counters were piled with dirty dishes, many of which had slipped to the ground and shattered amongst empty mac and cheese boxes and crumpled cling film. There was a dog bowl half full of rotten food, and the room reeked of animal urine, acrid and suffocating. Microwave meal trays and empty plates had been thrown against one of the walls, the overflow from trash bags tied to the cupboard handles. My boots crunched on broken porcelain and glass from one end of the room to the other. There was a short hall leading to the den, where the fetid odor of death and feces gathered in a grim, stagnant cloud.
The den was where I found the fluffy dogs: two Pomeranians. One had its skull crushed along the floor in a long smear of dried gore, recognizable only by its fox-like fur and drumstick legs. The other dog hung over the back of the shabby sofa like an abandoned accordion. Something had not quite pulled it apart into a distended
mess. Blood was smeared in double tracks across the ground, a ten-fingered trail from the sofa to the stairs and up. The bloody trail continued up to the loft landing and around the corner.
The door at the end was closed, smeared with black and red. There was no hiding my approach – the floor creaked under my weight as I stepped forward and tapped the door hilt with the handle of the knife. No static, no explosions, no trappings of a ward that I could see. I was beginning to regret not bringing any of the Weeders, but the dead weren’t dangerous in and of themselves – merely disturbing.
I took a moment to steel my stomach and my nerves, then turned the knob and kicked the door in, flashlight held up, the knife held low. The door swung in and crashed off the wall inside. A wave of putrefaction roiled out from the room into the hallway. Whoever, whatever was in there, it was extremely dead.
Moris Falkovich – I presumed it was Moris – hung motionless from the exposed rafters of his attic bedroom: a large space with a huge bed in the center, a door leading off to some smaller room on my right. His face was swollen, a livid, eyeless lumpy sack close to bursting with old blood. Empty orbital sockets stared straight at the entryway, boring into me. A thin whine was growing in my ears, a chorus of tiny drills that grew louder and more insistent over seconds of time. Then I saw her, smelled her. Another hanging, another death.
My mother.
No. No! I locked my teeth and focused on the real, the man. Moris was small and thin, with a deeply recessed chin and a hairy, bony pigeon chest. His mouth was open. It was full of black things, crawling. My vision cut, chopped, blurred: I saw my mother hanging in his place, her dress limp, her blue eyes bloodshot and bulging.
My teeth creaked. I stumbled back against the wall, hands burning inside my gloves. They itched like they were covered in dirt and slime, blood, fluids. Dirty dirty dirty.
"Why weren't you there, Alexi?" The body's stiff, slug-thick lips twisted. The tongue moved, rasping each word into the echoing darkness of the attic, and in the torch beam, I saw a convulsive ripple pass through its limbs.
"No." I stepped back, behind the threshold, slapping at the wall to find the light switch. “This is a trap.”
"You weren't there, Alexi." It spoke in her voice now, breathy and fragile, ripping it from my memory. "Why did you leave me here with him?"
I strained against the illusion, popping my teeth. The taste of blood flooded my mouth. My fingers hit something small and hard. They were shaking so bad that I slipped across the light switch before I caught it and flipped it up. Light flooded the room – and a cloud of black motes, finer than flies but larger than dust – burst from the hanged man's mouth and flew straight at my face as two shambling figures lurched from the unnaturally thick shadows and began to limp towards me.
I threw the knife up as the cloud swarmed me and staggered forwards, trying to break through the cloud and away. Pinhead-sized bugs landed on my exposed skin and began to drill and dig, shrieking like rusty machinery. I covered my face with my arms and tripped into the dresser beside the bed, spinning crazily, and burst through the door in the bedroom into an ensuite bathroom, clawing and scraping at my cheeks and scalp. The knife drew cold lines through my own flesh: it was all that kept the black screeching motes from boring in all the way.
The bugs fled from the touch of the blade with the deafening flicker of metallic wings, coming back to jab at my eyes, my nose, my lips. The things were gathering at my mouth, trying to prise it open. Clawing and fighting the urge to cry out, I hit something at knee-height, tumbled, and fell heavily into a bathtub. A flailing hand struck something. The faucet?
I fumbled for it again, blind, flesh burning as things began to wriggle under the skin of my scalp. A flood of water struck me in the face, washing away blood and a crowd of screaming, furious insects. The water turned hot, and the wail built to an ear-shattering pitch as they pulled themselves free from my head and withdrew like angry hornets.
The stench of a slaughterhouse broke through the rushing water: the reek of rotten meat and the clinging odor of chlorine mingled into a violet smell so powerful that my vision pulsed with the color, nauseating and unnatural and dead. Sputtering, I forced my eyes open and flushed them with hot water, turning blindly towards the door on instinct. Through the fog and mist, a pig’s head swam into view. It was slack-jawed and flopped weirdly to one side, the liquefying remains of its eyes streaked down its sagging, rotten jowls. The head was roughly stitched to the swollen, mutilated corpse of a child rendered sexless by a thick line of stitches from collarbone to crotch. A wave of toxic air blew into the bathroom in its wake.
Jesus fucking Christ. I retched, choking on bile and pressing back against the wall as lizard brain took the wheel. In one smooth motion, I pulled the pistol from my sopping jacket, aimed, and plugged three rounds into the nightmare before it reached the tub. It careened into the bathroom sink, scattering toiletries and chintzy statuettes to the floor. Bottles and cans rolled towards the bathtub, drowned out by the bark of the silenced rounds as I fired two more shots through the spray. Gelatinous, rotten blood blew backwards from the corpse, splattering the wall and a second ghoul crowding in behind it, this one with the head of a goat. The second dead child reached for me with skeletal hands turned to claws as it tripped over its brother and righted itself on the way forward.
The cloud of insects was still in here. They swarmed for the splattered mess on the mirror, congregating on it like wasps on honey as Goathead swiped at me through the water. The claws missed my groin by an inch as I scrambled to one side and emptied the clip point-blank into its skull. Six bullets were enough to blow it back and put it down, thrashing and jerking on the floor, but it they didn’t kill it. Tumorous masses bubbled up from the entry and exit wounds. They fleshed out and then erupted into more black bugs.
They were some kind of Morphorde. DOGs, demons. Shit. Shit shit shit, I’d used the gun!
Pighead was struggling to sit up as I dropped the pistol and got out of the bath, went to the window and smashed it with the end of my knife, shattering it and admitted a blast of cold, sweet air. The sound drew the attention of the DOG-bugs. They broke away from their meal with an angry screech, a dark arrow of spined bodies that flew at my face through the cooling water.
I swept off the counter beside me and threw whatever came to hand, cursing myself all the while. I’d forgotten that DOGs were vulnerable to eggs. EGGS. I’d forgotten to bring the one stupid thing that would save my life, and it was going to be my last and only mistake.
Chapter 24
The enlarged swarm passed around everything hurled and sprayed at it. Soap, shampoo, a can of hairspray. I picked up a featureless brown bottle and pulled the cork out, intending to throw it and whatever was inside of it. A sharp green odor cut through the putrefaction of the air, and the swarm turned away with a scream of fury, wings slicing at the skin of my guarding forearm as they curved around and then started back towards me.
It was peppermint oil. I swigged a mouthful of it and spat it as a mist as the spear of bodies closed in a second time. The DOGs screeched like a rusty drill burrowing through sheet metal. The flock symmetry of the swarm dissolved as tiny bodies tumbled against my face like gravel and bounced lifelessly to the floor. The stuff burned my nose and eyes, but I spat again, sputtering and coughing, and sure enough, they continued to fall. The bugs whirled in the air like sparrows and blew through the en suite door, fleeing to the fetid safety of the bedroom.
Pighead took me at waist height, charging like a bull. It slammed into me with heedless strength, bouncing me off the wall. Black peg teeth sunk into my belly and gripped skin, worrying at me while I stabbed down at its head. The knife punched its rot-softened skull like soggy cardboard. It didn’t slow in the slightest, squealing and thrashing until I poured the oil into the wounds. The teeth released as the dead thing reeled away. Its entire head collapsed into reeking black sludge.
I shoved it away and it toppled backwards, limbs jerking as namele
ss slime oozed across the floor. The smell burned the air and dulled the light and I threw up, right there on the spot. There was nothing in my stomach but acid and peppermint oil, and it burned my already-inflamed mouth like fire. Through a film of tears, I saw Goathead trying to get to its feet. The bullets had blown its head back, exposing the severed human neck underneath, but it hadn’t killed it.
Coughing, choking on fumes and struggling against the retching, I dumped the rest of the bottle onto it as it staggered at me. There wasn’t much peppermint oil left. It kept on coming for a few seconds, while I kicked it away and stomped, crushing it underfoot until the spastic limbs fell still.
GOD, what else could I use in here? I scanned the clutter on the counter for anything else I had to destroy the DOGs, the insects. My scalp was still crawling and stinging, and my brain couldn’t help but associate the sensation with larvae pulsing under my skin. I searched through bottles with my nose, keeping one eye on the bathroom door and my knife in hand. Yellow smells, sharp and muddy smells… I found a pump bottle of tea-tree oil in a small first aid kit. It had a similar sharp green smell as the peppermint, so I dumped the lot of it over my head, rubbing it over the burning wounds. I didn’t even feel the pain, too desperate to care. Nothing crawled out and plopped onto the counter. I leaned in to stare in the broken mirror, clawing at my face, my scalp and mouth until I was sure nothing had burrowed in or reproduced in my body. The wounds were angry and bleeding, but they didn’t bulge or wriggle.
I stumbled along the wall, holding my breath, and only gasped for air once I was out beyond the reach of the fetid stench from the bathroom. The bedroom stunk like an abandoned abattoir, but it was leagues better than the stench of those… things? Zombies? I had no fucking idea what they were. All I knew is that children had been murdered to create them. My stomach trembled, my throat hurt, and my breath wheezed as I fought for composure, for insight, for anything other than visions of dead children. Dripping water and tea-tree oil and blood, I stared around the room, and really saw it for the first time.
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 22