Salt and Iron

by Tam MacNeil

  “She’s downstairs,” Brett says again. She keeps her distance. The tattoos on her bare arms squirm. “You, uh, you still eat? Like, food, I mean?”

  He realizes he hasn’t been hungry for days. He wants something, but the craving is small and vague and he doesn’t know what it is that he wants. A small change lost among all the big ones. “No,” he says.

  She nods. She inclines her head to the stairs that go spilling down to the foyer. The place must have been full before. There are signs of habitation. Books open on tables. Laptops. Dishes. But there’s nobody there anymore. The place is empty. He has to go backward down the stairs, so he goes carefully, gripping the banister rail as he does.

  He only notices when he gets to the bottom of the stairs the way the carpet pulled apart and stained under his feet. The way paint peeled where he touched it, and mushrooms sprouted at the joints of the spindles. The way destruction follows in his wake.

  Eleven

  AT THE door he can hear music. Someone playing a five-string banjo at a pace that strongly implies stimulant use. He’s never been a fan of folk music. He turns the door handle and pushes through the door. The porcelain handle crumbles under his hand; the door sighs and warps.

  Beyond, it’s a dining room. A table in the middle of the room is stripped and bare polished wood, a deep, rich coffee color. It’s heavy with candles and fruit and partially eaten loaves of bread, and there’s something moving between the piled food that he can’t quite track. A snake maybe. Maybe a mouse.

  If there are windows here, he can’t tell. Maybe they’ve been blocked up, or maybe these eyes only show some things. The air is heavy with the chocolate scent of cigarillos and the richer scent of good tobacco, of expensive men’s cologne, and under it, the citrus tang of furniture polish. There’s a woman there, and she must be Skinny Mary.

  Skinny Mary glows like a torch, like a Madonna. She is sitting in one of the dining room chairs, one leg thrown over one arm, the other bouncing to the time of the music, foot tapping on the floor, cigarillo in her hand. Sitting near to her, chair drawn up close, grinning like a skull, is a man Gabe has never seen before, but God, he knows about him. He glows too, and where Skinny Mary glows golden, the Baron glows a pale green, like fungus phosphorescing.

  Beyond the glow, Gabe can’t see much except that the Baron is skull-faced and gaunt, his teeth large and white, his eyes yellow and glowing, the great cigar that he holds in a gold-ring-heavy hand looks like something you’d smack a bad dog’s nose with, and Gabe, who’s never smoked cigars, he knows that the smell that cigar is giving off is the smell of money burning. The Baron’s got a mason jar of something rich and amber and heavily sedimented in one gold-encrusted hand. When he moves it, the banjo player sings.

  The Baron stops moving his hand, and the music stops like it never was. Heads turn. The banjo player and the guy who was singing, they start toward him.

  The player is good-looking, with the beard of King Leonidas, and the grin of Hugh Hefner, and a golden pin of a horse head on his suit lapel. The man beside him, slimmer, younger-looking, unbearded, shares the gold pin but lacks any instrument at all. They’ve both got clenched fists.

  “Now, now,” the Baron says.

  “No, no,” Skinny Mary says. She sits up a little straighter and looks at Gabe. Her eyes are enormous, beetle-black and piercing. The Baron sits forward, both hands clasping a black, wooden stick topped with a grinning, golden skull.

  “Well, well,” he says. “Well, well,” he says again.

  “Is this some kind of ritual I should know about?” Gabe asks. “Do I have to say everything twice?”

  The Baron turns to Skinny Mary. “Mouth on that boy.”

  “He’s upset,” she answers.

  “No call for rudeness.”

  “Didn’t mean to be rude,” Gabe says. “It’s just…. Everyone’s afraid of me. And I’m pretty scared myself.”

  “And how you like that?” the Baron asks.

  He’s not sure what he expected from the Baron and Skinny Mary. He never really gave it any thought before. This is not the sort of situation he ever imagined himself getting into—half-turned and seeking refuge in Shadow. He laughs softly. “I don’t like it at all.”

  The Baron smiles. He has two gold teeth on the left side. “Good boy, knows what’s right for him.” He gestures with his cane. “Have some brandy, son. Brandy and gunpowder like me. That’ll wake you up.”

  Gabe smiles, or tries to. He is still groggy, and he’s got the strong suspicion that he’s supposed to stay that way. “Thanks, I… is it okay if I wake up? I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  Skinny Mary smiles at him, and it’s hard to tell, but he thinks the expression might be, maybe, just a little bit fond. She turns to the Baron.

  “A good kid,” she says.

  “A good kid,” he says right back.

  She looks at him again. “Maybe it’d be better if you didn’t. What do we have that you might like, hmm?” She looks at the spread on the table.

  The Baron passes his tongue over his teeth. “There’s the donuts from Belle’s.” He looks at Gabe. “You’ll like them. Powdered-sugar kind. Get a coffee and have a seat.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gabe says. There’s something about obeying that’s making him feel better. The constant pressure of horror in his chest is ebbing just a little.

  He goes to the urn on the sideboard and pours a coffee and then comes back to the table. The Baron pushes out a chair with the tip of his cane. Gabe sits backward on the chair, so that he’ll be able to see the other two and won’t squash the wings that ache like they’ve been bruised. The Baron pushes a box of donuts toward him. He takes one. It’s not easy to reach the table. He’s facing the wrong way, and his arms were never meant to bend the way they’re bending now. He eats, but the donut tastes like cardboard.

  “Well?” Skinny Mary asks. “Nobody comes to see Skinny Mary without a request to make. That’s the way it goes.”

  He nods. “Yeah,” he says softly. “I heard from James there’s something you want from me.”

  She laughs. The Baron laughs. They share a look, and then the Baron sighs and shakes his head and pulls a leather billfold out of his suit jacket. He thumbs a crisp, new twenty-dollar bill out and passes it to Mary.

  “Thank you,” she says, folding it into half and then half again and one more time and then popping it in her mouth.

  “Thought he’d just tell you what to do,” the Baron says by way of explanation, although that’s not the question Gabe would have asked, given the opportunity. “What with being a van Helsing and all.”

  “I don’t think you guys understand him even a little,” Gabe says.

  Skinny Mary smiles at him faintly. “You in love with that boy?”

  Gabe sighs again. He puts his head down in his hands and stares at Skinny Mary. “Does it matter? Now? With me like this? With people knowing about him, and what he can do? What he is?” He scrubs his face with his hands. “We’re fucked. We’re both fucked.”

  She looks at him, tips her jaw up and exhales smoke. “But here you are,” she says. “Got a body scarred up from salt and covered in scripture, but here you are, walking around and breathing.”

  Gabe nods. “He said you might be able to change me back. Can you? Can you fix me?”

  Skinny Mary laughs. “Fix you? No. Change you back to human? No. You’re changed, and there’s always gonna be scars now.”

  “I don’t care about that. I just don’t want to be unseelie. He said you could do it. Three favors and then I get that. So tell me what I have to do.”

  She smiles at him. “Don’t be so quick to take that way out. We’re talking salt and iron, Gabriel Marquez. Salt and iron. And blood. And you have to do it yourself, but at the end, when things hurt so bad you want to die, then you can have a second.”

  He swallows the last bite of the donut. It’s not easy. His mouth is totally dry.

  She shrugs. “I can make it so that you can get
the wings and mouths and the teeth and the claws, get them all to disappear. I’ll set it all up for you. And if you succeed or not, that’s up to you. Sure I can. If you want. If you think you’ll live through it, and if you think you want to try.” She shrugs. “Cost you three favors.”

  He nods once, then again. You don’t make deals with the sidhe. You never make deals with the sidhe. He always used to wonder what the hell kind of an idiot would know that and then enter into a deal anyway. You’d have to be stupid. Or desperate. Maybe a little of both.

  “Okay.”

  She smiles. She looks at the Baron, and he looks back at her. “You’re building your portfolio today, Miss Mary.”

  “Yes, sir, I am,” she answers.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “In good time,” she answers, nodding at Gabe. “I’ll tell you in good time.”

  “Nothing that’ll hurt James.”

  “Not the deal,” she says, but she gives him a heavy-lidded smile. “But you don’t need to wax worried over that. He’s kin. And unlike some of my blood, I don’t take against my own if they’ve never done anything bad to me.”

  He thinks about that. He thinks about that and chews his lip. “The van Helsings…,” Gabe starts, and his voice trails off.

  “Go on, son,” the Baron says. “You’re not cussing in a church.”

  “They did this, didn’t they? All of this.” He wasn’t going to talk at first, but now, now it’s coming tumbling out of his mouth. “They’ve been using James. To fix things for them. Since he was a kid. They knew, and they were letting him destroy himself so they could keep using him.”

  Neither Skinny Mary nor the Baron speak, but they look at each other.

  “They saw the cards,” he says. “James showed them the cards, and they saw my dad and me, and they were scared. So they killed him, and they gave me to the Thing. They wanted to turn me.” One death is an accident, two is a tragedy, but three dead is a problem. But turn him, and if the Firm couldn’t kill him, the sidhe would. “So I’m as good as dead too.”

  He sighs. He’s pretty sure all the grief he can muster came out when he was alone in the motel, but sometimes it catches and gusts at him, like now. His sigh shakes and ends in a little sound. A couple of days ago everything was routine. A couple of witches out at an abandoned house. Rote, by the book, almost boring. Tip, arrest, interrogation. He tries to figure out where it went wrong. Maybe the images on the cards. Maybe. Maybe the interrogation. Lennox called that damn meeting and then wouldn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak after James came in.

  Something clicks into place. He straightens up.

  “He’s thinking,” Skinny Mary says.

  “He’s got something,” the Baron says.

  “How ’bout you share that?” Skinny Mary asks. “You know the mortals best, and whatever they’re doing with the Thing, they’re making unseelie, and no offense, son, but you guys are a fucking handful, and we don’t want any more of your kind.”

  He rubs at his face. He wonders if there’s a mouth on his back too. If there is, he wants to open it. He tests it, and Skinny Mary and the Baron both lean back in their chairs, so that’s probably a yes.

  “They commissioned those cards, didn’t they?” he asks with both mouths, the sound of it a growling chorus. “And set James up to fix them. Then they set Dad up to get killed, and they gave me to the Thing to turn me. Because….” He gets it. He gets it, and he’s angry. He has more mouths on his back, and they’re opening up now too. “Because he told me what he was. So I had to die, because I knew, and he had to kill me, because James is a good man. He’d blame himself. He’d think he’d accidentally fixed it. He’d never tell anyone again.”

  He looks down at his hands. His nails have grown, and they match the porcelain of the coffee cup he’s holding.

  “How did they make contact with the Thing?” he whispers. “How did they make a deal with it?”

  Skinny Mary smiles, faint and nervous. She licks her canine.

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “We wonder that too, us both.”

  He nods. That’s something he wants to know, and he wants to know it now.

  “Now,” Skinny Mary says, sitting forward. “Now I never had an unseelie on the payroll before. You ready to earn your way out?”

  He nods.

  “Good. First, you’re gonna take a message to Abraham van Helsing for me. Second, you’re going to find me the Thing.”

  “Third?”

  She sits back, and she hmmms a little. “Little Jimmy isn’t the only one in the family who’s friendly with time,” she says. “That’s it for now. You get going. You tell van Helsing you’re not dead. And we’re not hunting you. You tell him he still oughta be afraid.”

  He smiles with all his mouths. “Yes, ma’am,” he says quietly.

  HE HAS never flown before, but it is easy to do. It’s dark, he’s a dark thing in a clouded, unlit sky. If anybody did glance up, he’s confident they wouldn’t notice him.

  He lands on the tar-paper roof that adjoins Abraham van Helsing’s office, and even though the angle he’s viewing the world from is different now, it’s easy for him to orient himself. He goes to the door, walking backward, aware that the tar paper is peeling and flaking out from under him when he walks.

  He reaches for the door handle and finds it locked, but he holds it for a moment, and the brass sags as if he’s pulled it hard, and the door sighs open. The curtains billow out and then slip back inside again. He follows them.

  The yellow-wood-paneled office smells like home. Leather and wood polish, ink, coffee, paper. The office is lit softly, the desk lamp the single thing illuminating the room. He goes to the desk. Papers there, and a browning smear, as if someone spilled a little out of an espresso cup. He looks. His fingers yellow whatever papers he touches, so he touches lightly and little.

  The paperwork is the letter about the estate of Uncle Abe, a formal thing, signed by lawyers and addressed to Abraham van Helsing the Younger, and his whole name is written there.

  Something cold and angry and satisfied makes him smile when he sees it. He reads the rest, sees his own name there, and Benecio Marquez. He sees what’s written there and understands.

  TO MY friend Benecio Marc Gabriel Marquez, if he survives me, a fifty percent interest in the Firm, so that he and my nephew shall be joint owners….

  HE GOES to the wall where all the hidden doors are. The wall is flat and plain, no paintings hanging on the wood paneling there. They’d get in the way of the safe, the hidden door that joins up to the library on the other side of the wall, the secret passages he and Abe and Jamie used to play tag through when they were little.

  It’s not easy to find things when he’s facing them, not with his eyes on the wrong side of his body now, and his arms still bend the way they used to, which means he can either see properly or he can touch properly, but not both at the same time.

  He slides his hands across the wood, cool and satiny turning dry, splintered, and peeling under his hand. It’s a canvas of sorts. He reaches so that his arms are extended above him. He lays his palms flat against the wood and recalls the words he’d tried to kill himself with.

  His skin crawls. His fingers ache as if they’re being stretched. His eyes open, and he can see the empty desk, the tufted leather chair, the door standing just behind, sees the crack that forms between door and jamb because someone is pushing into the office. He is already caught in the act, and he doesn’t care. Not even when Abraham van Helsing comes through the door and starts like a boy. Gabe’s hands hurt; his palms ache. He can’t stop the words now, not even if he tried. The words come pouring out of his skin.

  I shall make Jerusalem a heap of ruins….

  Abraham makes a choking noise. His face drains out like someone’s tapped a vein. Gabe can’t blame him. The wings, the eyes, the mouths, the horror of the body standing here, the man they fed to the Thing, the man who’s writing on the wall, and the pull of the writing, natural human c
uriosity that’s screwed them all over at least once, that’s part of why Gabe is such a good reader. That’s part of why Gabe’s had so much practice reading out people who get read-in.

  People who can read, do automatically, and words have power.

  I SHALL make Jerusalem a heap of ruins and a den of jackals.

  I shall make the cities desolate, with no one left alive.

  GABE’S BODY heaves and shakes, the words coming out of him like vomit or blood. Skinny Mary told him to go and be seen and to make Abraham afraid, and that is exactly what he is going to do.

  Abraham staggers against the doorjamb. Gabe pulls his aching hands back from the peeling wooden wall and realizes he’s out of breath, like he’s been holding it since the door opened, maybe for longer. He tries to steady himself. There’s something he wants to say. He turns, so that he can speak with his own mouth, even if he can’t see when he’s facing that direction. He’s not sure what he wants to say. He’s not sure what the words are going to be until he says them, softly, quietly.

  “‘And his name was Death, and Hades followed with him.’ You made me this, Abraham. Are you sure this is what you wanted?”

  Then he moves to the door. He wants out, before Abraham comes back to his strength and calls for help or comes after Gabe himself.

  He walks backward to the door, goes out onto the warm and windy rooftop, lets the wings spread out around him, goes. There’s a weightlessness in his belly where before there was a bar of lead.

  First task done.

  THE SECOND task is to find the Thing. He feels its presence, and it’s no surprise. The nearer he gets to the Thing, the less he feels the loathing that’s settled in his breast. The thing about that is, when he’s flying away from the Firm, the feeling diminishes. He alights on the domed copper roof of the Russian Orthodox church near city hall and rests for a bit. He closes his eyes, perched like a gargoyle and glad of the darkness.