Ollie sounded less convinced about that part. “Yes.”
“And it’s all going to go fine, and nothing terrible is going to happen?”
“Yes,” Ollie confirmed. “Probably.”
“OK, then. Just wanted to make sure I was up to speed,” Artur said. He tapped a high-heeled foot, fiddled with his roll-neck, then puffed out his cheek. “Sure, he’s taking his time about it.”
He raised his voice. “I said, ye’re taking yer time about it.”
“Shh,” the Worm urged, not turning.
The mumbling resumed.
“How come ye know about this?” Artur asked. “The Malwhere guy, I mean.”
“We summoned one earlier,” Ollie said.
“Oh, did ye now? Right. Fair enough, then,” said Artur. “And how did that work out?”
“We got dragged into… I don’t know. Like, have you ever had a waking nightmare, but one that feels completely real?”
Artur blinked. “I’m going to stop ye there, peaches. I’ll be honest, that feels like something that should maybe have been mentioned at an earlier opportunity. No-one said anything about waking nightmares.”
“It won’t happen again,” Ollie assured him. “It was my fault. That’s why I’m standing back here out of the way, and the Worm’s doing it himself.”
Artur nodded, but frowned. “Why is he doing it himself?” he wondered. “Why not ask his old pal, Jay Anus to give him a hand? Hey, Jay Anus, where are ye hiding?”
Artur turned and found himself face to toecap with Janus’s boot. “Oh! There ye are. Sure, why are ye lurking there behind us like a creepy big—” he managed to say, before a metal bucket clanged down around him, and something heavy was deposited on the upturned bottom, pinning it in place.
“Hey watch it, ye big bollocks!” Artur protested, his voice echoing inside the bucket. He hammered a fist against the side and pain exploded through his knuckles. “Owyebastard!” he spat. He kicked the smooth curved walls of his pitch-dark prison, but the plastic pointed toes of his heels weren’t getting through it any time soon. “What d’ye think ye’re doing?”
Janus’s hand caught Ollie by the hair and spun her around before she could scream. The Worm stopped chanting and squelched around in a semi-circle, his tail curling beneath him. “Careful. She has power, remember?” he warned.
“Yeah? Well, so do I,” Janus hissed, his voice close in Ollie’s ear as he wrapped an arm around her throat and pulled her backwards against him. Ollie struggled in his grip, but he tightened his arm across her windpipe and sniggered. “Oh yeah, she’s real powerful.”
The bucket on the floor shifted half an inch as Artur hurled himself against the inside. He was still shouting, but his voice was too faint and muffled to make out a word of what he was saying.
Ollie stopped struggling as the Worm slithered towards her, the lights reflecting off his slick, slimy skin. “As I said, Janus and I were talking about you just before you arrived. I was asking him to bring you to me. Imagine my surprise, then, when you came here of your own free will.”
He inhaled deeply, making his nose flaps open. “Meant to be, I think. Truly meant to be.”
Ollie tried to speak, but the arm across her throat was too tight, so only a cheep emerged. The Worm gestured for Janus to ease off. He did, but not by much. His other arm slipped around Ollie’s waist, pressing her bottom half more firmly against him. The Worm twitched with an annoyance born of jealousy, but said nothing of it.
“I just want to know where Dan is,” Ollie said, something shrill and primal coloring the notes of her voice. “Let me go.”
Something flashed behind her eyes, making the Worm shrink back a little. He reached quickly into one of the folds of flab on his chest, and withdrew a sachet of what could have been magic powder, but might equally have been a blend of herbs and spices.
Ollie coughed as the powder hit her in the face. The Worm spat on her, then muttered something unintelligible. Ollie’s head went light, and her will to struggle drained out through the bottoms of her feet.
“Sorry about that, my dear, but we can’t have you demonstrating that delicious power of yours just yet,” the Worm told her. The tip of his tongue flicked in and out of his mouth like it was playing peek-a-boo. “See, I want it. Whatever’s inside you. Whatever you are. I want it. I want you. And if you’re anything like what I think you are, it was important for me to subdue you, lest you unleashed all that power on yours truly.”
Shuffling closer, he ran a stubby finger down Ollie’s cheek, scraping up some of the spit and dust mush. “This is a binding agent. It holds back that power. Keeps it in. Temporarily, of course, nothing lasts forever, but long enough for me to take what I want.”
His tongue came out again, but this time licked slowly across his lips as his eyes flicked across Ollie’s face. “Everything I want.” He oozed in close and tight, so his face was just inches from Ollie’s own. She could see herself reflected in the slimy sheen. “I’m afraid you’ll be quite conscious during the process. I’m not being unkind, it’s simply necessary so that I can—”
He stopped talking when Janus flew backwards across the room and crashed into a rack of books with enough force to buckle the metal shelves. The Worm’s eyes widened as he tried to back away, but something held him in place. The claggy clumps of damp powder on Ollie’s face sizzled, turned black, then fell to the floor as dust.
“I just wanted to know where Dan was,” she said, her voice emerging as a scratchy whisper. The Worm continued to push backwards, but succeeded only in flattening himself against some invisible wall that had appeared behind him.
Behind her, Janus had extracted himself from the shelves. He hurried towards Ollie, moving surprisingly quietly for a thing his size.
He was around halfway to his target when every one of his countless face and body piercings were torn out, and an immense force swatted him across the room. He screamed as he cartwheeled through the air, before smashing through a glass display case.
“Now summon the Scryer,” commanded Ollie, in a voice that was only a reasonable approximation of her usual one. Sparks flickered across the gaps in her hair. “And tell me where my friend is.”
* * *
Dan gasped awake, Vanshie’s dying screams still clawing their fingernails down the blackboard at the back of his brain. How many times had he watched Noops or Polani kill her now? One hundred? Two? How many ways, each one slower and more visceral than the last?
“You’ll tell me eventually,” Aranok said, his voice rumbling from the female officer’s mouth. “Perhaps in an hour from now. Perhaps in a month. You’ll tell me. You think you won’t, but you will. You’ll tell me who has the power, and then I’ll have the power, and all this will be over.”
Dan’s arms shook as he pushed himself up. He’d managed to stand after all the previous nightmares, but this time he remained on his knees, either his legs or his willpower calling it a day.
“This is all so unnecessary. I don’t want to be doing this,” Aranok said. “But you are forcing me to.”
He/She leaned forwards, bringing his/her face more sharply into focus through the fog of the counterweight shield. “So, tell me. Tell me who it is, and where I can find them,” the demon said. “And the nightmares will be over.”
“S-so you’ll bring her back?” Dan wheezed. “If I tell you, you’ll bring her back?”
Aranok’s brow furrowed. “Bring who back?”
Dan nodded, as if his question had been answered. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Fonk willpower. Fonk his legs.
He stood up.
“That the best you got?” he asked, then he held his arms out at his sides and laughed as Aranok’s face twisted into a snarl, and he watched the love of his life die screaming again and again and again.
* * *
The Worm huddled over by the markings on the floor, his whole body oozing sweat as he recited the summoning chant.
Ollie had freed Artur from benea
th his bucket. He now stood beside the partially decapitated remains of Janus, trying to avoid getting blood on his sweater.
“Yep, I’m pretty sure old Jay Anus is dead, alright?” he announced. “Unless he can survive a big spike of broken glass through the neck. Can ye, Jay Anus? Can ye survive that?”
Artur listened.
“No. No, it seems like he can’t.”
He returned to Ollie and looked up at her. Her faintly purple skin was going red around the cheeks, as if she was either embarrassed, or struggling to hold something in. Artur was no expert, but suspected it was probably the latter.
“Ye alright there, peaches?” he asked her. “Ye’re looking a little uptight there, so ye are.”
“I just want to know where Dan is,” she said, her voice hissing out through her teeth. “Find him,” she barked, and the Worm spasmed.
“I’m trying!” he said. “I’m trying!”
He resumed his muttering. Artur rubbed his beard. “Ye seem a little, how can I put this? On edge. Maybe ye should try to cool yer boots a little? Sure, I don’t want ye exploding on me or nothing.”
“It’s taking too long,” Ollie said.
“It’s not easy,” the Worm protested. “The summoning chant is like making a bargain. I have to persuade a Scryer to appear, tease it with the offerings I have made. I can’t make one appear just like that.”
A Scryer appeared, just like that. It materialized above the symbol with a soft pop, then looked around, apparently as surprised by its sudden appearance as anyone.
Bewildered, the Worm turned to find Ollie holding a hand out in front of her face, fingers splayed, a sparkling blue aura wrapped around it like a glove.
“What’s all this, then?” the Scryer demanded. “Who’s dragged me here?”
The Worm seemed to shrink under the demon-thing’s gaze. “Uh, she has,” he said, pointing in Ollie’s direction.
The Scryer looked over and saw the expression on Ollie’s face. He felt the power rolling off her in waves and decided that, on balance, it might be best not to make too much of a fuss.
“Uh. Right. Fair enough, then,” he said. “Um, any particular reason, or…?”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” said Ollie.
“Great. I’m all for that,” said the Scryer. “I don’t want you to hurt me, either.”
“But you will tell me where my friend is.” Ollie made a grabbing motion with her hand. The Scryer was yanked across the room, then came to a stop in the air just in front of her. “And you will tell me right fonking now.”
“I’d probably do what she says there,” Artur added. He glanced up at Ollie, then back to the Scryer. “Because between you and me, like, I’m not sure she’s entirely in her right mind.”
* * *
Dan jerked from his nightmare too late to see Aranok’s eyes widen, and his stolen face contort in delight. He missed the demon-thing billowing like smoke from the cop’s mouth, and rolling under the door as a swirl of dark vapor.
Despite not seeing any of it, he knew immediately what had happened. The female officer was curled up on the floor, sobbing and retching and clawing at her own face.
“Where is it?” Dan asked. “Where did it go?”
The woman didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Instead, she just wailed and scratched and choked on the floor, the mere memory of the demon inside her reducing her to some primitive animal state.
Aranok was gone, and the only reason he would leave was if he’d found what he was looking for.
Ollie.
Dan got as close to the counterweight shield as he could without it nudging him backwards. “Get me out of here!” he said, barking the words out in the hope they somehow got through to her. “I can stop it. I have to stop it.”
Down on the floor, the cop was lost in her own nightmarish bubble. Dan’s demands washed right over her as she pulled her knees in to her chest, and screamed at all the many horrors running rampant inside her head.
* * *
The Scryer placed the notebook carefully on the floor, then clicked the button on the pen and sat it neatly on top. “There we go,” he said, trying to inject a note of lightness into his voice to disguise the panic. “All done. That’s where you’ll find him.”
Ollie’s face was devoid of all expression now. Her pupils were spiraling hollows that seemed to bore down into infinity. The blue aura around her hand had spread so it covered both her arms, and her hair floated in the air around her as if she was suspended in water.
“How do I know you’re not lying?” she demanded.
“Uh, because I don’t want you to kill me?” the Scryer said. He laughed awkwardly, then swallowed when he realized Ollie wasn’t joining in. “No? OK. That’s… that’s…” He swallowed again and indicated the notebook with one of his many arms. “But seriously, that’s where you’ll find him. In a holding cell at Tribunal Station 42. I… I drew a map. I’m telling the truth.”
“I reckon he’s being straight with us, peaches,” said Artur, pushing the pen aside and flipping to a page filled with scribbly scrawls. “I mean, it makes sense. It’s only a few blocks from the office, and… This is quite a good drawing, by the way,” he said, nodding up at the Scryer. “I’m impressed.”
The demon nodded nervously, his eyes darting across to Ollie. “Thanks.” He jabbed three thumbs in the direction of the glowing floor symbol. The Worm still lurked there, looking terrified and perplexed in equal measures.
“So, if that’s everything, I’ll just be off,” the Scryer continued.
Ollie’s face softened. Whatever invisible force had been levitating her hair faded along with her aura, and she blinked as if snapping out of a trance.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice fully her own again. “That’s really useful.”
“Please, any time, the pleasure was all mine,” the Scryer said, bowing and scraping as he drifted back in the direction of the symbol. He had almost reached it when he looked over Ollie’s shoulder in surprise. “Oh, what’s this now?” he wondered, and then a knot of black vapor clamped over Ollie’s head from behind and forced itself in through her nose, mouth and ears.
“What the feck?” Artur yelped. He pointed a tiny finger in the Worm’s direction. “You! What was that thing? What’ve you done?”
“It… it wasn’t me,” the Worm said, then he screamed as he was propelled vertically upwards. Artur watched him smash against the high ceiling, then flop to the floor like wet pancake batter. The Scryer quickly sized the situation up, realized he didn’t want to hang around, and was about to hurl himself back into the glowing circle when he was neatly cleaved into sixteen evenly-sized cubes in mid-air. They fell like lumps of fleshy rain, pitter-pattering onto the vinyl floor.
“Oh yes,” said Ollie, in a voice that wasn’t even attempting to sound like her own. She held her hands up and examined them front and back. Her aura returned, but this time the blue was marbled with purples and reds.
Artur opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it when Ollie lifted several inches off the floor and sparks spat from every one of her pores. He scurried inside the metal bucket and held his breath as Ollie whooshed up towards the ceiling. There was a crash of shattering stone and splintering wood.
“Oh yes!” came that voice again, louder this time, but much further away.
“Oh, Holy Father,” Artur muttered, once the voice had tailed off into silence. “I knew we should’ve just gone to the pub.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dan sat with his back against the wall, waiting for something to happen. What that something was, he didn’t know. He didn’t know much at this point beyond the fact that the Inhabitant was out there somewhere, either hunting for Ollie, or already installed inside her head.
The female cop had stopped crying and clawing at herself, and now lay almost completely motionless on the floor, giving only the occasional faint whimper to suggest she was still alive. Dan had expected someone to come in when t
hey’d spotted what was happening on the security cameras, but Aranok must have switched them off.
Gritting his teeth, Dan thumped his head against the padded wall behind him a few times, then got to his feet. He knew throwing himself at the counterweight shield was pointless, but he did it anyway. As expected, he wound up right back where he’d started.
“Damn it!” he spat. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried that approach in the past hour or so, and it had proven completely useless every time before, but he wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice when it came for alternatives.
“Officer down! Repeat, officer down! Can anyone hear me?”
He listened. No response. No sound. No real surprise.
Wait.
He had heard something. Voices shouting far in the distance.
Gunfire staccatoed along the corridor outside. More voices followed, then something solid hit something wet and a man screamed in agony. No, not a man, several men. A chorus of suffering.
An alarm wailed. More blaster shots howled past the cell, their glows briefly lighting up the narrow gap beneath the door.
The wall of the cell shook. There was another burst of gunfire and another round of screaming.
Something exploded not too far away, making the fog of the counterweight shield become thinner and more faint. Dan lunged for it, but while it was less forceful with its pushback than before, it still resisted his attempts to force his way through.
Dan cursed. “Hey, you. Get up. You have to get up right now!” he told the woman, but she was still unresponsive, blissfully oblivious to whatever was closing in along the corridor.
A shadow appeared at the bottom of the cell’s outer door. Dan stepped back, clenching his fists and bracing himself for Aranok in an Ollie-skin to come stumbling inside.
The door shook as something was slammed against it. It flew inwards to reveal a figure in badly dented body armor framed in the doorway.
Dan watched the Tribunal grunt topple forwards onto the floor, probably unconscious but very possibly dead.
“There ye are, ye big ugly bastard,” said Artur, clambering up onto the fallen officer’s back. He was stripped to the waist, his chest and face smeared with streaks of blood. He looked up through the fog at Dan and winked. “Now, am I a sight for sore eyes, or what?”
Dead Inside: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 2) Page 18