His right eye twitched. At first, Dan thought it was another of the demon’s involuntary motions, but then something in his brain exploded and the cell became a swirling vortex of fire and pain and screaming.
Everything rushed together like a collapsing black hole, leaving Dan in an icy cold black. He tried to breathe, but there was no air down here in the darkness. There was nothing but the damp soil forcing its way up his nostrils, and the sound of his heart’s panicky pounding.
It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. He didn’t need to breathe, and he couldn’t remember if he currently even had a heart. But it was big and bold and vibrant, and every fiber of him screamed for it to stop.
And it did stop. Twenty minutes later.
Dan shuddered violently as he was snapped back to reality. The room resonated with the dying echo of his howls, and there was a pool of tar-like vomit in his lap and spattered down the front of his shirt.
“Where did you go?” Aranok asked. “Where did I send you?”
Dan’s chest heaved from the memory of trying to breathe. He could still taste the bitter soil way at the back of his throat, and could still feel the pressure of it pinning him down.
“Not sure,” Dan grunted. He spat the final remnants of his puke onto the floor. “But I think I left my wallet there. Any chance you could…?”
Aranok’s eyes narrowed. He twitched again. Dan just had time to mumble a quick, “Thanks, man,” before the pain and the panic and the pressure returned, and he was once more lost to his nightmares.
Dan spent the next hour or so dipping in and out of steadily escalating terror. He’d thought he’d learn to adapt, to get used to it, but his attempts to find some happy place down there in the darkness proved to be a big old waste of time.
After the fourth – or fifth? – return trip to his shallow grave, he knew he couldn’t go back. His brain felt like soup. His lungs, which until earlier that day he’d gone months without even thinking about, now roared at him to inhale, exhale and repeat.
“No, don’t. Wait,” he said, stopping the demon mid-twitch. “Wait.”
He shifted in the chair, twisting his wrists inside their restraints. He knew four different ways to get out of these things, only one of which involved the loss of his hands. He could have got his hands free at pretty much any time, but the legs were the problem. There was no way of getting himself out of the leg shackles without becoming a double amputee, and while that might not be too much of a problem at any other time, he doubted Aranok would give him the twenty-minute head start and the sewing kit he’d need to make his escape.
The hands would just have to do.
“What do you want it for? The power,” Dan asked, stalling for time.
“I already explained,” the demon said. “To rule. To rule everything.”
“Yeah, but why?” Dan asked. “I mean, ruling the galaxy, isn’t it a bit of a cliché? How would you rule a whole galaxy? Why would you even want to? I haven’t seen much of it, but what I have seen… It looks like it’d be hard work.”
He leaned his weight to his left and leaned forwards a little to cover what was going on with his wrist. “Take public services, for example. You know, trash disposal, education, cops, even. Bad enough trying to deal with that shizz for one city, never mind billions of planets. And that’s just for starters. Trade routes, planetary disputes, hostile takeovers from other galaxies. You can’t be everywhere at once, so you’re going to need people you trust to keep order. Where are you finding them? And how are you paying them if and when you do? You need to keep those guys loyal, so are you offering benefits? Who’s providing them, and what’s in it for them?”
Dan leaned to his right this time. “Look, I admire your ambition, I do. But, to be honest, I don’t think you’ve really thought it through. You’ve set your sights on ruling the galaxy without even the faintest idea what that actually involves, or how mind-bogglingly fonking tedious it would be. Personally, if I were you, I’d go back to whichever bug-infested shizzhole I crawled out of and find something else to do with my time. Suicide, maybe. Just a suggestion.”
Throughout all this, Aranok’s face had been growing tighter, as if the demon was getting larger inside his stolen skin. He was trembling now, fury blazing behind his eyes.
“But OK, OK,” Dan said. He beckoned with his head for the Inhabitant to come closer. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
The leather uniform creaked again as Aranok bent forwards at the waist. Dan lunged, throwing himself across the gap, his arms outstretched, his legs still fastened to the unmovable chair behind him.
Aranok twitched, and Dan felt the soil start to pour over him again, but then his hands found the demon’s head, and a thumb found one of his eyes.
Dan’s legs jerked as he reached full stretch. For a moment, he lost his grip on the demon-cop, but a frantic scramble found a handhold in the uniform’s chest plate. They both crashed to the floor and Dan drove a forearm into Aranok’s exposed throat, partially crushing his windpipe. Let’s see how he fonking liked it.
That sinking sensation began to drag Dan down into the darkness again. He grabbed Aranok by the hair and smashed his head against the floor. Once. Twice. The darkness pulled back as the demon diverted his efforts into wrestling himself free, but Dan had no intention of letting him get away.
He told himself he shouldn’t feel sorry for the kid. He was a Tribunal captain, which meant he was arguably worse than the demon. Still, it was hard not to feel a pang of guilt as he grabbed him by the head and wrenched it around until his neck splintered and the life left his eyes.
For a moment, everything was still, and Dan almost allowed himself to believe it was over.
And then the figure appeared beside him. It was more a suggestion of a figure, like a shadow of a shadow standing upright beside him. He swung an arm, trying to knock the thing over, but there was nothing solid to connect with.
The incorporeal form of Aranok dropped into a squat, and Dan felt the demon’s cold fingers reaching inside his head, searching for somewhere to install itself. He sensed the thing’s increasing confusion as its probing became faster and more insistent.
“Good luck setting up shop in me, you son of a bedge,” he muttered. “Guess you can only inhabit the living.”
The icy fingers retreated. The shape rose silently upwards out of sight, like smoke on the wind.
Dan heard the door open behind him and footsteps rush in. He remembered the bleeding, broken-necked corpse of the captain pinned beneath him.
“Ah… fonk,” he grunted, and then pain exploded through his skull and he was reunited, once again, with sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ollie paced back and forth, her eyes darting to the door every time she about-turned. Artur sat cross-legged on the table, his chin resting on one tiny hand.
“Ye’re expendin’ a whole lot of energy there for nothing,” he told her. “He ain’t coming back, and that’s that. I’m sorry, peaches, he’s gone.”
“Where?” Ollie asked. “Where has he gone? Where is he?”
“My guess? Probably in a number of different pieces waiting to be tossed into a furnace,” Artur said. He caught the look of horror on Ollie’s face and winced. “Sorry, I maybe could’ve sugar-coated that a bit more.”
Ollie turned and started walking back across the office again. “We shouldn’t have let them take him. We should’ve stopped them.”
“There’s no point beating yerself up. Or beating me up, for that matter. Even if we’d have managed to stop them, ye think there weren’t more of the bastards lurking around, watching on and waiting to come battering the door down?” Artur said. “Anyway, he told us himself to stay back. He might be a bastard, but he’s not a fecking bastard, ye know? He didn’t want to go dragging ye into it. Best if we keep out of it, keep our heads down, and stay out of trouble.”
Ollie looked him up and down. Due to his size, this didn’t take her long. Artur shifted uncomfortably,
wilting beneath her stare.
“Alternatively, ye know, on the other hand, we could always track down the feckers what took him, and I could murder them all with me bare hands,” he suggested. “It’ll be getting late soon, and I do love me a bit of violence when it gets late. We might not have been able to save him, but we can have a high old time to ourselves avenging his death.”
“I don’t think he’s dead,” Ollie said.
“Have ye seen him?” Artur asked. “Sure, I’ve seen fossils with more life in them.”
“I don’t think he’s more dead, I mean,” Ollie said.
Artur’s caterpillar eyebrows knotted together. “And what’re ye basing that on, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “Kind of…” She pointed to a spot on her head just above the bridge of her nose. “Kind of there.”
“Well sure, that’s cast iron, that is,” Artur said, standing up. “That’s good enough for me. If ye can’t trust her own forehead to tell ye if a guy ye basically just met is dead or not, then who can ye trust, am I right?”
Ollie wasn’t familiar with sarcasm, so she just nodded. “Right.”
Artur clicked this tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I don’t suppose yer forehead can provide us with an address, or directions to where we might find him?”
Ollie frowned in concentration. “No. I don’t know.”
“Then we have a problem. It’s a big city, there are lots of Tribunal stations dotted all around the place. It’d take us weeks to check them all, and even if Deadman is somehow still alive, he sure as shoite won’t be by then.”
“I don’t know,” said Ollie.
“Yeah, I got that, peaches. Ye said already.”
Ollie’s eyes widened. “But I might know someone who does.”
* * *
“Oledol Lodelo, as I live and breathe,” oozed the Worm, a gummy smile taking up most of his face. He waited for the bump as the elevator touched down, then beckoned for her to step out.
A tall, broad-set man with a rough, chalk-white hide and a wide assortment of body piercings stood beside a stack of books, his muscular arms folded across his chest. He watched Ollie in silence, his long ears twitching occasionally as if flicking away bugs.
Ollie emerged from the elevator and the Worm’s smile grew wider. “I did wonder why someone was thumping on the door. Remind me to teach you my secret knock.”
There was something salacious about the way he said those last two words that made Ollie’s skin crawl, although she couldn’t quite figure out why.
“It’s funny, actually,” the Worm continued. “Janus and I were just talking about you. Weren’t we, Janus.”
“Yup,” said Janus.
“And now here you are. And without a chaperone this time!”
Artur chose that moment to pop his head up from behind Ollie’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t exactly say that now,” he said. When he saw Artur, the Worm’s face fell.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“Ye bet yer bollocks it’s me,” Artur said. He nodded towards the brute by the bookshelves. “Who did ye say this was?”
“Janus,” the stranger intoned.
Artur frowned. “Janice? Sure, what kind of name is Janice for a big lad like yerself?”
“Not Janice. Janus,” Janus corrected.
Artur looked at Ollie. “Is it me? Is it my ears, or something? I’m still hearing Janice.”
“Ja-nus!”
“I’m pretty sure ye’re still just saying ‘Janice’ at me,” Artur said. “Or… wait. D’ye mean like ‘anus’ with a ‘J’ at the start? Is that it? Like Jay Anus?”
Janus smiled, but in a way that showed a lot of teeth, and bore no relationship to his current level of amusement. “It’s Janus. Yes.”
“If it’s alright with you I’m going to call you Jay Anus,” Artur said. “It’s just easier for me, ye know? More convenient.”
The Worm, who had been twisting his neckless torso to look between Janus and Artur, let out a high-pitched and painfully artificial laugh. “Ahaha. Such fun!” He pointedly ignored Artur and fixed his attention on Ollie, instead. “Now, what brings you back to my Onyx Vault, my dear?”
“We’re looking for Dan.”
“Oh. And here I thought you missed me,” the Worm said, his face squelching lightly as his bottom lip stuck out.
“No,” Ollie said. “I didn’t.”
The Worm made a show of looking hurt. “Ouch! Careful, my dear. If you cut me, do I not bleed?”
“Dunno,” said Artur. “But we could find out if ye like.”
“Haha. Perhaps not,” said the Worm, shooting him the briefest of glances. He gestured around the place with his stubby arms. “Well, as you can see, Mr Deadman isn’t here. Sorry to disappoint.”
“We know he isn’t here,” Ollie said. “We came to ask where he was.”
The Worm shrugged. At least, he made some sort of shoulder movement, but without a neck it was difficult to pin down what it was. “I’m afraid I have no idea.”
Ollie shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean that,” she said, turning towards the library door. “We didn’t come to ask you.”
* * *
When Dan next woke up, his hands and feet were free. Or free to the extent that they weren’t shackled to anything, at least. As he was lying flat on his back in a locked prison cell, though, they weren’t all that free in the overall grand scheme of things.
He sat up, but his head demanded to know what the fonk he thought he was doing, and he was forced to lie back down again until the world stopped spinning and the red-hot spikes stopped stabbing him through the eyes and cranium.
From flat on his back, he took in what he could see of his surroundings. The ceiling made up the bulk of the view. It was padded with a soft material, and had a single light fitting designed to be physically impossible to hang a body by the neck from.
He had seen similar rooms often enough to know the other details without having to look. The walls would have the same uniform padding, with smooth corners leading down to the similarly soft floor. One wall would be a semi-transparent counterweight shielding, and any attempts to push through it would be met by an identical amount of force pushing in the opposite direction. Anyone running at the shield would find themselves decelerating just as quickly as they had accelerated, before finishing up on the same spot they’d started from.
Dan rolled slowly onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow. Sure enough, the wispy fog of the counterweight shield hung in the air just a few feet away.
So, he was on suicide watch. The irony of this didn’t escape him, but nor did the meaning of it. It meant someone didn’t want him getting off easily. The Tribunal didn’t care whether prisoners offed themselves in custody – it was practically encouraged. The only time these rooms were used was for prisoners destined for the Hollows, who’d jump at the opportunity to check out of life rather than check in for a life sentence. Someone wanted him to suffer. Figured.
Dan made a deal with his headache that he wouldn’t make any sudden movements and his headache, for its part, made no attempt to shoot his brains out through his nose. The floor felt soft and spongy beneath him, although he couldn’t be sure if that was the padding or a problem with his legs. Probably a little of both, he decided, as he struggled into a standing position.
The room tilted like the deck of a ship. Dan shifted his weight backwards and forwards, struggling to keep his balance.
It was only once he had found his footing that he addressed the figure on the other side of the shield. She had been there since Dan woke up, but he had been in no mood or condition to give her any real thought.
The expression on her face was unmistakable. It was the same one the grunt in the interrogation room had worn.
“Still here, huh?” Dan said. He limped towards the woman, but the counterweight effect of the shielding nudged backwards against him, stopping him getting too close.
“Yes. Still here,�
�� Aranok confirmed. The female officer’s arms jerked upwards, indicating either the rest of the building, the whole of Down Here, or possibly the Universe in general. “And soon everywhere.”
“Wow. You haven’t let that go?” Dan asked. “I thought after our little chat…”
“The power. Who is it?”
Dan rolled his eyes. “You really don’t get it, do you? I’m not going to tell you. You can mess around inside my head, bury me alive, smother me with dirt, whatever floats your boat. But I’m not going to tell you.”
“Interesting,” said Aranok. One of the woman’s eyebrows raised cartoonishly high. “So much for your surface fears. Let’s see what happens when we go deeper.”
Inside his skin suit, Aranok twitched. Dan felt the room spin again. He saw a face, sad but beautiful. He saw an old friend, gun in hand.
No. Please. Not her. Not that.
Dan convulsed as a nightmare swallowed him whole.
* * *
Ollie stood well back from the square of vinyl flooring this time, in case her power fed the Scryer’s portal again. The Worm had recreated the mucus-textured symbol on the floor, tossed in his pebbles, and was now muttering below his breath.
Very little seemed to be happening.
Artur stood on the carpet at Ollie’s side, fiddling with the neck of the pink and yellow sweater he wore. The sweater was ludicrously soft and comfortable, but the floppy roll-neck was annoying, and it pushed upwards into his beard whenever he moved his head.
In hindsight, he should’ve taken the suede jacket with the elbow pads. Maybe paired it with a floaty vest top underneath. Combined with the ankle length denim skirt he currently wore, it would’ve made a powerful statement.
Quite what that statement would be, he had no idea, but it would’ve been a powerful one all the same.
“So, he’s summoning some kind of Malwhere gossip?” Artur whispered, although his understanding of the word ‘whispered’ was quite different to everyone else’s.
“Yes,” Ollie replied.
“And this thing is somehow going to know where Deadman is?”
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