Salt and Iron

by Tam MacNeil

  The team reassembles at the top of a broad set of stairs that go down to the actual warehouse area. The stairs are enormous, the kind of stairs you can go down with half a dozen friends walking side by side, and they pool onto a landing every twenty steps or so. He knows from the plans he and James once looked at that there are a couple of warehouse spaces down there, and a loading bay that faces the river. He’s got a hunch the bay is where they’re going to end up, and he knows the others do too.

  Benecio nods at Rob. He’s senior, and Rob’s worked with him a long time, and anyway, Benecio leads from the front, always has. Rob doesn’t protest. He steps aside and lets Benecio walk down the stairs first, and Gabe follows. He hears the others coming along behind them. But sound is weird now too, and the sound of their footsteps on the stairs is growing distorted, as if they’re getting farther away and not walking in time.

  Descending the stairs is like walking into a pool. If the air was charged before, now it’s thick with magnetism and energy, cloying, sticky. He wonders, for the first time ever, if it’s bad to breathe in magic. The beam of his flashlight catches something that glimmers on the stair. Looks like somebody’s spilled sawdust or sand or salt here. Couldn’t be a salt circle; it’d be the biggest damn salt circle in the world. He looks back over his shoulder to make a crack about stuff on the stairs and about health and safety to Tim or Rob or somebody, but no one’s there. And the air’s changed and gone thick. And something’s wrong.

  “Wait, Dad,” he says, “wait, wait.”

  Benecio glances back up at him, and Gabe shines the beam of the flashlight up the stairs, but there’s nothing up there, just darkness. Even the stairs don’t continue. He shines it down on the stair, on the stuff spilled there. He licks his fingertip, touches it to the stuff, and brings it to his lips.

  Salt. A circle. Impossibly large. They’ve breached it.

  He hears his dad say “Shit” and gasp. Hears a wet sound, a tumbling sort of slap. He smells sewer stink, smells blood and shit. Catches his dad as Benecio goes backward, suddenly unbalanced, because everything that’s usually in the front of a human body is now lying on the stairs.

  “Rob!” He’s screaming, knowing as he does there’s no point, there’s nothing left inside Benecio’s chest or stomach, knowing circles keep things in. Benecio’s been opened and everything’s been pulled out, as if he’s a fish ready for the pan, and there’s blood everywhere.

  Benecio sags back against him, hanging like a doll in his arms. There’s something in the dark. Gabe lurches backward up a stair, dragging his dad and slipping on the blood that’s everywhere on the floor, all over it, slipping and toppling backward.

  Something grabs on to him, hauls him by his legs and pulls him away from his dad, hauls him down the stairs. He can’t reach the hands around his ankles; they’re dragging him belly-down. The concrete must be covered in tiny pebbles and maybe pieces of glass, because something is cutting his soft belly and his face, and his mouth is full of the taste of dust and blood. The stink of it is in his nostrils.

  The hands on his legs are warm and smooth as ceramic. He manages to twist himself semisitting, gets his fingers around one of the hands and pulls. He might as well be trying to pry up a wall, so he grabs for whatever the hand is attached to. He gets a handful of something soft—feathers, hair, cloth maybe—before something takes him across the face and slams him down and his head bounces hard against the floor.

  He’s dazed for a while, not sure how long. There are some more stairs. Someone grabs him by the hair so his head doesn’t bounce around so much. There’s a warped wooden door. Someone opens it, or something opens it, or it opens somehow. Maybe it was always open. There’s light, soft and orange and low. There’s a fingernail of salt on the floor, and against the illumination of magic hitting the salt, he can see what’s dragging him. It has too many hands, too many arms, too many eyes and mouths all over, on hands and arms and on its naked back.

  He starts screaming. Thrashing, screaming. He can’t make words. His head is booming with the passage of his panicked blood, too full of animal terror to be able to do anything but scream and scrabble. It’s unseelie, whatever it is, and Gabe didn’t know they really existed. He didn’t know they weren’t just a story told to children on Hallowe’en, and he knows what they do. They change people, they turn them, they’re corrupters and destroyers, they’re monsters. He didn’t know they were real.

  It turns, head turning as if to look at him, but it doesn’t have a face. It drops his legs. They’ve gone as far as they’re going to go. Gabe scrambles to his feet and sags back down, his head reeling.

  He crawls for the edge of the salt, salt in his mouth and his eyes and on the little scratches and the little cuts all over his belly and his arms and his face. The unseelie behind him follows like a cat that’s got a baby bird. He looks over his shoulder at it. Didn’t mean to. Shouldn’t have. Couldn’t stop himself.

  The thing is woman-shaped and featureless. Pale as the early autumn moon. Hands perfect, as if manicured, but short two fingers on one side and gloved in blood. She takes him by the leg and drags him back from the salt.

  “You’re making a mistake,” he screams, “you’re making a mistake my team will come for me they’ll burn you to ash and dust they’ll take this place to pieces you’re making a mistake they’ll come for me!”

  “Not you, dear boy,” the blank-faced woman whispers in a chorus of quiet voices that come from all the mouths on her. She holds up her hands and seems to be looking at them, as if she’s never seen them before. Then she takes the middle finger of her mangled hand and bends it back, and back, and back, until it snaps with a sound like a twig breaking. She twists it back and forth, as if it’s wet wood, until the finger comes free. “Not you,” she says, holding the finger and looking at it. “Not you. Somebody gave you to me. You’re a little gift.”

  She leans over him like a surgeon. There are hands all over him, nails and claws that pick and pull as if peeling him, and when the screaming comes back, helpless terror, animal terror, the hands open up his mouth, and she puts the finger in his mouth. He gags and spits, but the hands close his mouth and hold it closed. Then they cover his eyes, as if they don’t want him to see what happens next.

  GABE WAKES in a puddle of vomit and piss. He wakes, and every part of him stings and aches. He wakes stripped to the waist, bloody, in a warehouse. In the warehouse. It’s a tall room, slab-built concrete and twice or three times the height of a normal room. A metal staircase hugs one wall, up to the door. A loading bay stands to one side, and he can smell the rush of the river. There’s a crane hook, empty, hanging in the middle of the space, and a few tool chests on wheels that are long since past their prime. And Gabe, Gabe is in a corner, a circle of plain white table salt drawn thick around him.

  His stomach lurches. He works himself up to his knees and vomits. What comes out is black as old blood and puddles like shadow between his hands. The skin of the front of him hurts. It hurts in a way that commands his attention. It hurts like a burn. His belly and his face and his hands. He scrubs at himself, scrabbling at his torn and weeping skin.

  He stumbles to his feet and takes a step, and when he hits the salt it’s like acid, like bones breaking. It sticks to him like burning plastic. He screams and screams and screams, and when he finally faints, it’s a goddamned blessing.

  Eight

  SOMETHING CHANGES in the air. The dark seems to become somehow thicker. The difference between nightfall and a cellar. Rob stops, and the others do the same. “Benecio?” he calls, but there’s no answer. “Gabe? Gabriel?”

  Silence. The warehouse seems to breathe, and the smell of blood comes rushing up. Might be animal sacrifice; might be human sacrifice.

  “Everybody back,” Rob says quietly, calmly. “Everybody back, nice and slow. Therese, Sam, you guys at the back?”

  “Yeah,” Therese says softly.

  “You guys, eyes forward.” He raises his voice. “Benecio, Gabe, w
e’re going back.”

  No answer. He didn’t really expect one. He’s seen things like this. In old places, when they get saturated with magic, sometimes people wind up in weird rooms and don’t know how they got there. But the smell of blood, that smell of blood. That’s never happened before. They start back up, but he doesn’t hear Gabe and Benecio coming up with them.

  “Hey,” he shouts down. There’s so much magic even he can see it, so much magic it’s fucking up reality. “Benecio, if you can hear me—”

  And then he hears the screams. Below him and above. Everything moves. Tim shouts a warning and then shouts again in pain. Rob can’t see the enemy, looks down to find himself bleeding, arms scored with razor cuts. The shadows have coalesced around them, turned jagged as glass, and they’re growing across the broad width of the stair like thorns filling in a hedge. Magic crystallizing. Whatever is in here is way too fucking big for them.

  “Back,” he shouts to the others. “Back, out of the fucking stairs, back, back.” And they’re all rushing up, where there’s daylight and space to move. He does a head count when they get to the top level. They’re still short two.

  “Where’s Benecio?” he shouts. “Anybody see him or Gabe?”

  Screams echo up. He looks down, but the way is obscured, a solid mass of darkness now. If they were still in there, they’re trapped, or impaled, or both now.

  “Jesus,” Tim whispers. “Oh, Jesus. Sorry, guys, I-I think I gotta call it.”

  Rob turns. Steve’s got Tim, threading his arm over his shoulder. The whole side of his gear is shiny with blood, and there’s a hand-sized tear in the stab vest that did absolutely no good against the thorns.

  “Everybody out,” Rob says.

  Steve’s face is white. “But they’re—”

  “Everybody out,” Rob says again, yelling this time.

  Steve shakes his head. “Can’t leave them there.”

  “Not leaving them,” Rob says. “Now go. We are getting out.”

  They go back, and he’s so glad they were smashing mirrors on the way, because whatever it is that’s downstairs he doesn’t need something coming through those to go after them too. They get out, Tim still sagging hard on Steve’s arm. Matthew and Therese holding doors. Sam at Rob’s elbow, eyes enormous, face totally blanched out, keeping an eye on the hall behind them. Rob looks down at himself. He didn’t realize the cuts on his arms were so bad. There’s blood on everything.

  Outside the air is hot and still, as if something is holding its breath. Rob does a head count again. They haven’t lost anyone else. Small mercies. He closes his eyes. One dead, one missing, two injured, maybe two dead.

  “I saw,” Sam whispers. Rob opens his eyes and looks over at him. “I saw,” Sam says again. “It came out of the dark. It unzipped him, man, like, like from neck to nuts.”

  “Who?”

  “Benecio.”

  “What about Gabe?”

  Sam shakes her head. “He went down. I didn’t see. There was something in the dark.”

  Rob nods. They’d planned for this, him and Yuko, when she’d told him they were going to be three. The Thing that’s loose in the city. It was only a matter of time before they ran across it, either of them. They’d planned for this, and plans always make him calm. He knows what to do.

  He goes around, opens the back door of the SUV, and drags the case toward him. Inside, salt, and a bag of the soft, gray snow of iron filings, and the revolver he loves for target shooting. He takes that and a box of the silver-tipped bullets, not that he saw any sign of needing them, but the place was not what it seemed, and it’s not like the silver-tips have a disadvantage in a situation like this.

  “You’re going back,” Sam says. She’s shaking where she stands.

  He nods. “Of course I’m going back. You guys get Tim to medical and then go and get Abraham van Helsing. Tell him I’m going back in and I’ll take Gabe to the hospital.”

  Sam puts a hand on his arm. “Man, you didn’t see it. You didn’t see it, but I did. You can’t go back in there alone.”

  “It’s better if I go alone. Quiet. And if things go wrong, there’s only one more casualty.”

  “Jesus,” Sam whispers. “Rob.”

  “I made a promise to every one of you when you agreed to work with me. I don’t leave the living behind,” Rob says. He smiles faintly at Sam. “You did me a good turn when you went back for me that time, remember?”

  Sam looks away.

  “Yeah. So it’s time I did a good turn for somebody else.” He shuts the case and nods at them. “I have everything I need. You guys get going.”

  HE GOES back inside, even in the thickness of the magic and the dark. He texts Yuko their code word so she will know and act. Then he turns off the phone and goes to the stairs.

  They’re open again, just stairs now. No sharp-edged blackness turning into thorns. No shadowed things. But the stench of death comes up when the wind sighs through the open spaces, and washes over him. He shines the beam of his flashlight down.

  Benecio is down there on a landing, lying on his side. Rob takes the stairs two at a time, rushing down, and then realizes. He realizes that Benecio isn’t moving, and that there’s something under him. He’s almost pillowed by a mess that Rob is not going to either look at too hard or contemplate. He tries not to look. He doesn’t see any sign of Gabe, except a patch where the dark blood smeared across the concrete floor vanishes into a wall, as if there had once been a doorway there. The stench in the hallway makes his throat close up.

  He swallows and calls out, “Gabe?” pretty quietly, and then waits. The breeze picks up again, wailing through cracks and open places. Doesn’t sound like the wind. It sounds like an animal sound. He realizes what it is, can guess where it’s coming from. His skin crawls. He’ll have to go down the stairs, past Benecio’s body, maybe in the warehouse down below. But no way he’s going down the rest of those fucking stairs. The warehouses open out to the river. He’ll go out a side door and around.

  “I’m coming, Gabe,” he shouts. “Hold on. Help’s coming!”

  He turns, and there’s a woman standing behind him. His height, white-skinned but faceless, as if somebody erased all of her features and never drew them back again. Mouths all over her, eyes all over her, except where they should be. There’s nothing there. He’s heard of these before. Didn’t know they were real. He takes a step back and almost tumbles down the stairs.

  “Unseelie,” he breathes.

  “No, it is not,” she says. “He’s mine. A little gift. But maybe. Maybe if I’m good, he’ll let me have you too.”

  Rob grabs for iron, but he never stood a chance.

  WHEN JAMES got the plans for the warehouse from city hall, somebody mentioned that it had been empty since the Second World War. It’s not really surprising. The building lists toward the river, like a kid sinking his legs in the water before getting all the way in. Abandoned, water access, in a commercial area of town. Of course it was going to be a monster magnet. Of course it was going to be trouble. He wishes he could remember what his dad had said about why it couldn’t be torn down. These places are getting to be a problem.

  Between the industrial garbage bins and the fleet SUVs and Rob’s brown pickup truck, there’s not much parking on the street. He parks about half a block down, slides out from behind the wheel, and grabs his bag from the back. There’s more salt in there of course, and a pouch of iron filings. And a crucifix, which is stupid and a little embarrassing, because even though he tries to be rational, he’s actually really superstitious.

  He hesitates and climbs back into the cab and closes the door. This is stupid, he thinks. It is. Rob sidelined him. He’s going to be pissed if he bumps into James in a dark hallway, and he’s just as likely to stab someone on his team as a monster if the place is as decrepit inside as it looks from the outside.

  Someone’s levered off the graffiti-covered plywood that used to cover the door, and it’s standing, nails out, besid
e the open door. Easy way in. He can’t just sit here and wait for them, or he might as well have stayed home. He chews his thumbnail down.

  “Fuck it,” he whispers after a minute, and climbs out of the SUV and shoves the door shut with his hip and starts down the street toward the open door.

  Suddenly people come boiling out of the building. It’s not monsters or witches making an escape, it’s the fucking team. Matthew comes first, panting, sweat covered. He doesn’t even see James, just turns, hands grabbing for Tim, who’s leaning hard on Steve. The side of Tim’s shirt is dark and shiny with blood, and his face is moon white.

  “Jesus,” James whispers. He starts running. It’s only half a block, but it feels like it’s way too fucking far. They’re in a tight knot, and Rob is giving orders, moving around the fleet SUV, grabbing stuff. Things have gone wrong. Things have gone bad. Rob’s going right back in. Of course he is. Sam and Matthew look up at the same time and see him running toward them.

  “What happened?” he shouts.

  “Holy Christ, James,” Sam answers, “am I glad to see you.”

  “Hey, get that door,” Matthew says, “Tim’s not gonna….” He doesn’t bother to say what’s going to or not going to happen, and James doesn’t need him to. He hurries over, pulls open the back door of the SUV, and Tim sags down on the floor there, and then lies back, panting. Matthew crawls in, groping for the first aid kit. Steve leans, panting, on the side.

  “It’s okay,” Tim says softly. “Seriously, guys, it’s okay.”

  “Naw, that’s a hospital trip,” Steve tells him. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “C’mon.”

  James helps Tim up, into the cab. “What happened?”

  Steve looks at him, mouth tight at the corners. “Could have used an extra person in there,” he says.

  He drops a heavy hand on James’s shoulder and heads around to the driver’s side, and James turns back to the door where Therese’s standing now. Her face is a harlequin mask, half-blackened with blood that’s running from a gash up in her hair and half-whitened by the glare of the light of her phone.