by Harvey Click
After he turned off the highway, she started bitching that the GPS was telling him to turn right where he didn’t want to turn right. He ignored her directions and drove through a suburb for the rich and worthless until he found what he was looking for. He turned into the condo complex and peered at the numbers. Except for the numbers all the condos looked the same, crammed together like honey cells in a beehive full of jerks. Here was the New Society, bunch of young lawyers with fancy cars and mutual funds and everybody else shining their shoes.
“It’s that one,” Kat said.
He parked. They went to the door, and it was opened by a skinny blonde wearing nothing but a red bandanna around her neck. Kat knelt with her forehead touching the foyer carpet while Ryver touched the butt of his gun and stared at the rings in the woman’s nipples and belly button. Her crotch was shaved, and there were more rings there.
New Society, he thought. God’s got a pussy but you ain’t allowed to get a hard-on, just stick your nose in the rug and your ass in the air. He remembered his favorite saloon whore and wished he was still there and now was still then, old society where a few things still made sense and the women were fat and friendly with nice dimpled asses.
“Don’t try to draw that gun,” the woman said. “Your hand is too cold.”
The nerves in Ryver’s hand froze hard, old mind-control con that the Man had taught him years ago, but this was the first time anyone had used it on him. He let go of the gun, and his fingers ached while cold blood trickled through the icy veins.
“Is your name Toya Jones?” he asked.
“I’m the Cypher who once was Toya Jones.”
“If you’re Cypher, prove it.”
“Must I prove it again?” she said. “Fall to the floor and prove it to yourself.”
Ryver’s legs turned to ice water, and he fell to the floor.
The naked blonde smiled and picked clotted blood from her nose. “It’s interesting to see you in the flesh after all these years, Jeremiah Ring,” she said. “Our memories walk long paths.”
“Yeah, but I done most of the walking,” Ryver said.
“Blessed Shakti, I need no proof,” Kat said with her nose still stuck in the carpet.
“You may both stand up,” Cypher said. “Get a bottle of wine from the kitchen, Kat, and we’ll go out back. It’s a nice afternoon, and fresh air feels good after what I’m used to.”
Ryver followed the Cypher-woman to the deck and watched her climb into a steaming hot tub. So the Man was pulling some kind of possession number. It sounded like a shakedown, and maybe these New Society freaks were about to learn a hard lesson. He sat on a bench beside some empty wine bottles and pulled his coat tight. The breeze was cold, and the fresh air didn’t feel good.
“This is my last job,” he said. “I get my pay and I’m done.”
“You’ll be paid,” Cypher said. “But can the tide stop working for the moon?”
Kat came out with a bottle of wine and some glasses.
“Come into the warm water with me,” Cypher said. “We’ll share this sweet hour of sinking sun.”
Kat stripped off her clothes, and Ryver saw something he’d never seen before. It was a pair of steel mesh panties with a little padlock. He wondered how she would go to the bathroom if she ever lost the key.
“Give me your weapons,” Cypher said. Kat handed over her Walther and a knife, and Cypher placed them in easy reach on the rim of the tub. “Yours too, Jeremiah Ring.”
“I keep mine,” Ryver said.
“Kat, take his gun,” Cypher said.
“Go ahead and try,” Ryver said. “I ain’t had much fun yet today.”
Kat looked at him and looked back at the thing in the tub, and Ryver watched her skinny naked shoulders tremble in the breeze.
“Blessed Shakti, if I try to take his gun I don’t think I’ll live long enough to do you any more favors,” she said.
“You’ll live,” Cypher said. “I say that he’s too cold to move a muscle, and my word gives shape and form. Let this be a test of your faith, my child.”
Suddenly there was a deep arctic ache in Ryver’s muscles, and he felt too cold and stiff to move. He tried to scare away Kat’s little bit of faith by giving her the evil eye, but apparently the thing in the tub scared her more. She pulled the Peacemaker from his belt and smirked with easy courage as soon as she got it cocked.
“He has a knife in his boot,” she said. “Want me to take that too?”
“I’m sure he has plenty of weapons, but they won’t do him any good in his condition,” Cypher said. “Give me his gun and get in the tub.”
Kat did. Ryver sat paralyzed on the bench and watched the women drink wine and whisper, if you could call them women. He heard accountants and lawyers coming home to their New Society beehive after a hard day of thievery. He watched the sun ooze down behind the privacy fence like a fat yellow egg yolk turning dark and rotten. Finally Cypher smiled at him and said, “I shall melt the frost in your bones, Jeremiah Ring, but I forbid you to touch your weapons without my permission.”
Arthritis flared as Ryver’s joints snapped and thawed. It took him a few seconds to make his cold mouth move well enough to talk.
“What’re we waiting for here, a sun tan?” he asked.
“We’re waiting for Mark Burton to come home,” Cypher said. “If Toya Jones disappears he’ll probably be suspicious, and that could become messy.”
“Killing gets messy too,” Ryver said.
“He’ll die of natural causes,” Cypher said. “All you need to do is hold him still while I induce the causes.”
The women drank wine and whispered, and the cold breeze sharpened. When the bottle was empty, the Cypher-woman slit her wrist with Kat’s knife and let her blood fill the wineglass. She pressed her tongue against the wound and somehow sealed it shut. Useful trick, Ryver thought.
Cypher raised the glass and said, “Drink of this blood. It is my brain. Do this to become me.”
Kat drank greedily, as if she’d been guzzling blood her whole life.
“Leave a few drops for Ryver,” Cypher said.
Kat licked her lips and frowned. “Why does he get any?” she asked. “He’s a man.”
Cypher took the glass from her hand. “When all of us are God, what will the words man and woman mean?”
“They’ll always mean something,” Kat said. “You told me you killed your husband Shiva because he was a man.”
“I kill those who don’t obey me,” Cypher said. “Men and women are very much alike when they’re dead.”
Kat’s frown tightened while the thing in the tub offered the glass to Ryver. “Drink,” he or she or it said. “This is your paycheck.”
“Drink it yourself,” Ryver said. “I’m not thirsty just now.”
Cypher took Kat’s Walther from the tub rim and held it in one hand and held the wineglass in the other. “Which shall it be? Immortal life or eternal death?”
“Reckon there ain’t much difference,” Ryver said.
The Man had been sloppy wording his hex, and Ryver’s thawed bones remembered every syllable: “I forbid you to touch your weapons without my permission.” He didn’t need to touch his wire to make it work. It slid out of his coat sleeve and wrapped around Cypher’s neck nice and neat.
The empty wine bottles littering the bench weren’t Ryver’s weapons, and therefore he could touch them. He grabbed one and hurled it at Kat’s face as she sprang out of the tub. It cracked her forehead good, and she stumbled to her knees. He tried to kick the side of her head, but she was too quick. She clawed her way over the privacy fence like a snarling polecat while he yanked his wire tight and cut through Cypher’s soft girl throat to the hard spine.
The Man wasn’t in any shape to word new hexes or make the old one stick, so Ryver grabbed his revolver and let his trusty wire slip back into his sleeve. The body was still standing upright in the tub, arms twitching and neck gaping like an idiot mouth spurting bloody immortality i
n the water. Ryver spat a gob of tobacco juice at the twitching face, and it caught on one of the lip rings and hung there quivering.
He peered through a crack in the fence and saw Kat hiding under a neighbor’s patio deck, not likely to go very far with no clothes on. He went to the front door and looked out the little panes of glass. Twilight quiet, lawyers and accountants already snug in their beehive or else holed up in a bar drinking their clients’ money. He saw the little white Honda parked half a block away with that stupid skirt named Emily scrunched down inside. He had watched her following them all the way from Cincinnati. She wasn’t anything to worry about, but she probably had a phone and would use it to call headquarters if she hadn’t already. Pretty soon every creep in the Society would be on his trail.
He touched the doorknob, and the air cracked with a sharp electric smell. Somebody was using listening shells nearby. He opened the door an inch and sniffed and watched but couldn’t see anyone except Emily, and she wasn’t wearing shells. No one else was out there unless he was damn good at hiding, but shellers are hard to see. A jerk in a stretch-suit jogged by, and the dry listening shell odor was lost in wet jockstrap stink.
Ryver walked to his truck fast and slow and obvious and invisible and peaceful and ready to kill, the way Cypher had taught him long ago. He fired up the V-8 and roared out of the New Society condo complex. He found his spit can and spit in it.
Streets looked safe for the moment, but he knew he’d never be safe again.
***
Somebody named Garrick Haldan was using listening shells nearby. He had arrived a few minutes before Kat and Ryver and had parked his utility van out of view around the corner and had been watching the whole show. Seeing the two naked women on the deck had disturbed his concentration so badly that for a moment scenes from a dozen different condos blurred together with his favorite old fantasies. He bit his lips with his little pointy teeth and told himself that he needed to stay in focus because he was here on serious business, but even now, after he had seen all that blood spurt into the hot tub, his erection still rubbed hard and sore against his pants. He was thirty-five years old and had never touched a naked woman with his hands, and sometimes blood can be a turn-on too.
He watched Ryver’s truck roar away and watched Kat slip out from her hiding place under a neighbor’s deck. He waited and listened.
***
Kat waited and listened until she heard Ryver’s V-8 roar away, and then she slipped out from her hiding place and tried the gate to Mark Burton’s deck, but it was locked, so she had to scramble over the fence. It was tall and she wasn’t, and her skin prickled with pine splinters by the time she dropped to the deck floor.
What she saw was hard to believe: Toya Jones was still alive. She was lying against the side of the tub with her head hanging half off her shoulders, jerking limbs stirring eddies of blood in the water, cut windpipe gaping like an extra mouth drooling pink foam. The eyes were the worst, watching Kat with machine calm like luminous balls of blue glass.
Kat turned away, but she felt the eyes on her body as she pulled on her clothes. She felt them trying to plant words in her brain, and she didn’t want to listen to the words so she got out her phone and called headquarters. She asked for Bert, a big burly woman she halfway trusted, and told her to send a team to find Ryver and snap it up.
“And remind those fools they need Hermesium bullets,” Kat said. “I want the cowboy full of holes and just plain dead.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bert said.
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
Ryver’s truck was bugged, and Bert’s team was already trained to find it because Kat had been hoping that Ryver would pull something like this. She was good at making plans, but she hadn’t planned on the thing twitching in the water behind her and trying to talk to her with its eyes. She still didn’t want to listen to them, so she called Emily.
“There’s a crime scene here,” Kat said, “and pretty soon somebody named Mark Burton is going to come home and find it, so stay awake out there and call me when his car pulls in.”
“What does he drive?” Emily asked.
“How the hell would I know?” Kat said. “It’s your job to know a few things, and if you don’t start using your head I’ll use it for a bowling ball. Now keep your eyes open and remember who loves you.”
She put on the pair of thin cotton gloves that she kept for times when there shouldn’t be fingerprints and went to the tub without looking at the eyes. She wiped the wineglasses and bottle clean and smashed them on the floor so forensics could have fun with the pieces. Her Walther was at the bottom of the tub, and she fished it out of the pink water.
“This isn’t a pleasant way to live,” Toya Jones said. “The pain is excruciating.”
The voice was in Kat’s head, but she knew it was real. As she reached for her knife on the tub rim, a twitching hand suddenly jumped up from the water and grasped her wrist.
“Look at me and tell me if this is a pleasant way to live,” the thing said. “Look at my throat and tell me if Mommy thinks it’s sore.”
Kat looked, and the glassy blue eyes caught her gaze and held it fast.
“You see my problem,” the thing said. “Though Zyx is my servant, his will is not always amenable to mine, and his little ambassadors will keep this poor carcass alive so long as there’s a scrap of meat to nourish them. ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ So the good book says.”
Kat jerked her wrist free of the tight grip. “Cypher, Zyx, who the hell are you?” she asked.
“More Zyx than Cypher right now, but it’s Cypher who feels the pain.”
“You told me you were Shatki,” Kat said.
Toya Jones’ foamy lips twisted into a grinning rictus. “Shakti is a myth invented for fools to worship,” the eyes said, “and you, my child, were especially easy to fool.”
“Just tell me one thing,” Kat said. “Are you a man or a woman?”
“Once I was a man, but that was long centuries ago. Now Cypher is many things, and soon he shall be all things.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Kat said.
“Yes, that’s precisely what I want you to do.”
“Then I’ll leave you here to suffer, you filthy prick, I’ll . . .” Kat’s head hurt, and she couldn’t find her own words inside it, only his.
“You shall kill me because I tell you to,” the thing said, “and Cypher’s word gives shape and form. Watch now while I show you how to do it.”
Pictures flashed through Kat’s brain, a circular saw in the basement, a can of poison under the kitchen sink.
“Fuck you,” she said.
“I’m not in the mood for sex at the moment,” the thing said, “but if it’s any consolation our marriage has already been consummated. Already you’re pregnant with my seed, and for three days you’ll feel sick, as pregnant women do. Then you’ll be reborn as my child. I warn you, those three days shall not be pleasant. You may even desire suicide, but as your husband I hereby forbid you to take your own life. Hurry now and do your housework like a good wife before Mark Burton comes home.”
Kat hurried. She cut through the spine with her knife and carried the head by its long blond hair to the kitchen. She went to the basement and found the electric circular saw. She started cutting just above the eyebrows, but even after the whirling blade was halfway through the skull the face still wasn’t dead, mouth biting and the glassy blue eyes blinking and staring. She told herself she wasn’t obeying a husband, she was just trying to kill the Goddamn thing. At last the crown came off and fell upside down on the table like a cereal bowl full of blood.
Blood and something worse. They writhed out of the skull bowl like living oatmeal and crawled across the table. There was a whole colony of them squirming inside the head, a brain-sized mass of tiny white worms.
Kat went to the sink and gagged up her lunch red with wine and Cypher’s blo
od. Her yoni dangled in the vomit, and she played with it like a rosary bead, but it gave no comfort. Even when she was a girl, the Great Mother named Shakti had shaped her dreams waking and sleeping with visions of mystical transformation, and now her dreams had been transformed to nightmares. Her stomach kept seizing after there was nothing left in it.
Kat found the can of bug spray beneath the sink. She didn’t want to return to the table and see the thing she would become in three days, but Cypher’s command pulsed in her head like a muscle spasm.
Worms were tumbling out of the head and crawling across the table. She sprayed, and they swam vigorously in puddles of insecticide before they curled up and died. Her empty stomach seized again as she sprayed inside the skull cavity. Horrible mess in there, little maggots wriggling over a tangle of bloody veins and brain matter porous as a sponge. They were chewing their way down to the stem.
Three days. She felt so sick that it took her a few seconds to recognize the ringing of her phone.
“There’s a sports car just parked out front,” Emily said. “I think it might be Mark Burton. You need some help with him?”
“No, I’ll do it myself,” Kat said. “I need something to do with my hands right now.”
Chapter Twenty
Mark Burton got bags of groceries out of the passenger’s seat, careful not to crush the dozen yellow carnations he had bought for Toya. She had said she was feeling better when he called her from work, but he didn’t believe it. Her voice had sounded hoarse and strange, so strange that he’d wanted to come home and check on her, but his boss had dumped a pile of work on his desk.
Not quite 7:00 but already dark, evening air chilling into night, and as he kicked the car door shut he wondered if Linda was warm enough wherever she was, in the cold dark pit or in the City of Light or maybe nowhere. He noticed a star blinking awake like a faraway streetlight and wondered if she was out there in another galaxy or another dimension or if she existed only in his memory, his and Toya’s. No matter how credulous he became each night, a day at the insurance office looking at death statistics always brought out his skepticism, and right now he was halfway between the two states. He wondered if the séance-voice was really Linda speaking or just the voice of memory and loss. He wondered if Linda really wanted him to have sex with Toya, or if the two of them had merely fabricated a nice rationale.