by D. J. Butler
“This is sick and wrong,” he muttered, and pushed himself into the vent.
It felt like being swallowed. He almost threw up from the strange, all-embracing fleshiness of the experience.
Ahead of him he heard breathing and the tussling sound of flesh kneading flesh. Adrian dragged himself upward and forward as fast as he could, the passage bending around him and carrying him horizontally, it felt, between floors.
Behind him he heard the scuffling sounds of Eddie climbing—he hoped it was Eddie—and then a creak. Adrian froze, the sounds before and behind him stopped, and yellowish light trickled into the meaty, esophagus-like crawlspace behind him. Adrian looked back between his knees and saw Eddie, jammed into an elbow of the passageway, lit from below. The guitarist looked coiled and ready to spring.
Adrian decided he’d better follow Eddie’s example. He was without tools, but given his native wit, his ka and the ability to speak, no wizard was ever completely defenseless. He reached inside himself to tap into his ka, preparing to cast a spell if he needed it—
and his ka wasn’t there.
His heart stopped. What was this place? What had happened to him?
“They’re not here!” He felt numb and stunned, but Adrian still recognized the throaty bellow—it belonged to the bull Yamayol. But gigantic Yamayol couldn’t get down the stairs into the basement, unless he was crawling. Even then, Adrian couldn’t imagine how he’d be maneuvering in the tight spaces.
Unless he’d shrunk. Or Adrian and the others had grown.
“No girl, either!” This was Semyaz the pig.
Of course, this wasn’t normal physical space at all.
What had happened? What was this place? Adrian forced his mind to think back and tried to remember the moments before he had blacked out and entered this dream state. He’d been trying to divert power from the wards on the restaurant, he remembered. He’d been battling his own shadow, struggling to stay awake, and trying to modify the wards in which the Fallen had trapped them. His shadow had seized Jim—
He shook his head. That wasn’t right; Semyaz had seized Jim, and it had only seemed to Adrian that his own shadow was involved.
Slam!
They were all plunged into darkness again.
Without his ka, Adrian couldn’t see how he’d ever get out.
Unless maybe he just woke up. But this didn’t feel like a dream anymore. It didn’t even feel like a nightmare. It felt like the jaws of death, clamping down.
“We have a problem,” he said.
“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “The problem is that if you guys don’t move forward, I’m going to lose my grip and fall down.”
The line ahead of Adrian dutifully began shuffling forward again, and he followed.
“I can’t find my ka.”
“I’m going to pass on the easy joke here,” Eddie grunted behind him in the darkness. “What are you talking about?”
“I can’t do any magic in here,” Adrian explained.
“Have you figured out where in here is, exactly?” Twitch called back from ahead of him.
“No,” Adrian admitted. His chest felt tight and he really wished he had a fistful of nicotine patches. “I’m back to hoping that you’re all just dream-figments, and I’m about to wake up.”
“No such luck,” Eddie grumbled.
“Maybe the Fallen can’t do sorcery, either,” Adrian said. “That would sort of level the playing field for us.”
“Also, they appear to be a lot shorter than usual,” Eddie agreed. “On the other hand, I don’t know where Jim and the hoof are, and I seem to be trapped inside a house made of cold cuts.”
“I didn’t say it was all good news,” Adrian grumbled.
He heard a soft thump ahead of him. “I’m out,” Mike called back in a whisper.
In short order Mouser and Twitch followed him, and then Adrian tumbled through an opening that looking uncomfortably like rows of teeth above and below an open mouth—he half expected to get bitten in two—and fell to the floor.
Immediately, he could breathe a little easier. He much preferred being regurgitated to being swallowed.
He looked around. Ribs rose to the ceiling like the fleshy groined supports of a cathedral’s vault, with teetering rows of books sloping back and forth across the pink walls. Beneath the shelves stretched a broad desk with a luminescent toad squatting on one corner of its surface.
Welcome, welcome, Adrian thought he heard the books hissing inside his head. He tried to ignore them.
Eddie scraped out of the vent and hit the ground behind him.
“So now my torture will be to read,” Elaine Canning snorted. “How very like nuns you devils are.”
Adrian just stared. This was it, the belly of the whale. They were in his uncle’s study.
***
Chapter Five
The doorknob to the study’s only door turned—
Adrian slapped for his gun, which wasn’t there, and then his taser, and then his Third Eye. Snapping his teeth together in frustration at the fact that he was unarmed, he jumped for a corner of the room.
The rest of the band had performed the identical St. Vitus’ dance, and they all squeezed into the same space behind the door as it opened, a knot of elbows and knees. Elaine Canning joined them last, a puzzled look on her face.
“Like Scooby-Frickin’-Doo,” Mike whispered.
“I do not know that devil,” Elaine whispered back.
Eddie bared his teeth and they both shut up.
Adrian was shorter than most of the band, and much shorter than the door, so he found himself staring through a forest of people. Looking up, he saw just ceiling, and a tiny space over the top of the door, and he shivered slightly as he saw the cartoon wolf’s ears flip up under the lintel and pass the door.
Uncle-wolf shut the door behind himself. He hung a long wool coat, patched at the elbows, on a coat rack in another corner. Then he turned, all without seeing the crowd hiding in the corner of his office, and sat at his desk with his back to them.
The band looked at each other and shrugged. Elaine Canning opened her mouth to say something and this time Eddie clapped a hand over the lower half of her face, silencing her.
We’ll tell, we’ll tell, Adrian thought he heard the books say. He refused to look at them.
By gestures the band coordinated movements. The books trembled like living things, so they steered away from them. Twitch took the coat and balled her fists into the sleeves, holding the garment like a fighting net. Mike picked up the coat rack like a quarterstaff, hefting it and twisting his face into a menacing grimace. Eddie held up his hands with fingers curled back into knife-hand posture.
Adrian … looked around, trying to find something that wasn’t a book, trembling in anticipation of more whispered slogans of despair. He felt helpless, and the sound of his uncle’s pen scratching away at papers on his desk scraped enormous in his ears. It wasn’t quite loud enough, though, to overwhelm a faint and rising noise that sounded like gurgling water.
Knock, knock, knock.
Adrian recognized the three polite taps at the door. They were the ones he had always made, hoping not to be heard, not to be admitted into the chamber of his shame.
“Come in,” Uncle-wolf said, not turning around or putting down his pen. His words were slow, his voice was heavy with menace and lust.
Mike and Twitch tip-toe-jumped into the corner, assembling themselves as a spread coat and crouching coat rack once more.
Adrian found himself swept behind the door with Elaine Canning and Eddie again. Eddie held a finger to his lips and glared a silent hush order at the woman in Mouser’s dream-shape.
The newcomer left the door open and only came in a step.
“I’m here.” Adrian shivered. It was his own voice, in a child’s piping tones.
No! Adrian screamed silently, as he had done to his dream-self a thousand times before, to no avail then or now.
“Come in and close the do
or, Ade,” Uncle-wolf growled. “Your friends don’t need to see the secrets of wizardry.”
What friends?
Ade shut the door.
“Now!” Eddie barked, and jumped to the attack.
But they had already lost the element of surprise. More than that, Adrian thought as he stumbled forward in Eddie’s wake and saw the scene in the center of the office; he himself might already have lost his mind.
His uncle sat in his office’s swivel chair, patting his knee like he’d patted it a thousand times in Adrian’s life and a million in his memory. He wore a red smoking jacket and black silk pants over his soft leather slippers. The wolf’s head was gone, and his uncle had his own face back, thin and deeply lined, almost ax-like, with tawny eyes that were brown but streaked with gold. He wore the expression Adrian remembered seeing most on his face, a mixture of sadness and excitement that looked like nothing so much as a man enjoying a guilty pleasure. Young Ade, dream-Adrian, shuffled forward with leaden limbs and sat on the offered lap. The two of them carried out their actions like they couldn’t do anything else, oblivious to the rest of the movement in the room.
Behind and above and in front of Adrian’s uncle loomed the wolf. It sprang up with its long jaws open and teeth glittering like ice, ready for its unwelcome visitors and leaping to the attack. Its body was man-like, covered in short gray hair and rippling with long, smooth muscles.
The wolf and Adrian’s uncle shared the same brown and gold eyes. They had another feature in common, too. Each had a long, wet, pink tongue dangling from his mouth, long enough to touch his own chest, bouncing like marionettes as their owners moved.
Eddie hit the monster first, pounding a barrage of knuckles into its flank that didn’t faze it in the least. It pushed him away with a quick paw to the forehead, making his head snap back viciously and sending him tumbling like a child rebuffed by an adult in horseplay. Eddie hit the wall with a thud and a small shower of books rained on top of him, the trembling pages and covers gumming him lasciviously like a toothless hooker.
Then Twitch leaped forward, jumping high in the air and swinging her improvised net down with both hands. A hit might have covered the wolf’s head and blinded it, even pulled it to the floor. But with its other paw the wolf snatched the coat in mid-air and spun, hurling Twitch—
crack!—
into the door. She bounced off it and fell heavily to the ground.
“Oberon’s teeth!” Twitch groaned, rolling over. She still had blood in her hair from her earlier beating—though that been in the physical world, and not in this weird dream-space—still, any way you sliced it, Adrian thought, Twitch was having a bad, bad day.
He wanted to charge and attack. It wasn’t his lack of weapons that held him back, it was the fact that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the other scene that was playing out in the room.
Young Ade sat on his uncle’s lap, and then big hands went where big hands shouldn’t ever go. Adrian couldn’t look away and he couldn’t quite watch it, either, so he was grateful for the tears that stung his eyes and partially blinded him.
The crisp crunch of splintering wood brought Adrian’s attention back to the wolf. With its long jaws it had bitten the coat rack in half, but big Mike still managed to land the first blow on the beast, jamming the jagged end of the wood into the monster’s chest.
Roooooooaaaaarrrrrr!
The wolf howled in rage, but it seemed like an overreaction—the coat rack had sunk into its ribs, but Adrian didn’t even see blood. The creature lunged forward, bounding on all fours and slamming its body into the bass player, hurling him into the corner and pouncing on him.
“Get off, dammit!” Eddie roared, and threw himself onto the beast’s back.
With his vision still focused on the space the wolf had vacated, Adrian’s eye landed on something else—his uncle’s desk.
And he thought of the secret shelf.
Did the Eye exist in this strange place? And might he be able to cobble together some kind of spell, if he had it? The Eye wasn’t a power source, but if there were ka-energy here, the Eye would help him find and use it.
Though … wasn’t that what had brought him here in the first place?
He lurched forward. His limbs moved slowly and he felt like he was swimming through water, but he pushed ahead. Behind him he heard snarling and snapping noises, and the dull thumps of punches connecting with their targets.
He turned to look and saw a tangle of wrestling flesh.
And Elaine Canning. The woman who talked like a crazy person about Roundheads and theology stood unmoving, looking at young Ade and his uncle, and wept.
Adrian stopped sluggishly, turning himself to look forward again. His uncle still sat on his chair with young Ade on his knee. He had one hand inside young Ade’s clothing, but he patted his other knee with his free hand and smiled without humor or pity at Adrian, his tawny eyes cold.
“Sit down, Adrian,” he uncle said in a withered voice.
This was wrong. This was all wrong. He’d been inside his dreams of this moment many times before, and he’d never been a separate person from young Ade. The boy version of himself stared at him now with horror in his eyes, and pity.
“You son of a bitch,” Adrian said. He wanted to bellow, but his voice came out like a strangled squeak. “I should have killed you.”
“You did.” His uncle’s tongue slipped further out of his mouth as he spoke, becoming longer and thicker.
“Not soon enough.” The chair was in his way, but there was something else, too. Something he couldn’t see, but that felt as solid as a brick wall, stopped Adrian from getting closer to the desk.
“Don’t be bitter,” his uncle said. “It’s just the way of the wizard.”
“Like hell it is.” With an exertion of his will like a push, Adrian threw himself forward. He banged his knee on the arm of the chair, under his kneecap, and then stubbed his toes, so when he tumbled to the floor in front of the desk his leg hurt with a pain that also made him want to laugh.
He didn’t like the fact that his back was turned to his dream-uncle and the wolf, but so be it. Kneeling, he fumbled his way forward.
“Chingón!” Mike yelled.
Whack!
Adrian yanked open the top left drawer and shoved his arm under the desk. His fingers found the shelf, but where he thought he would feel the cool sliver of volcanic glass that his uncle called the Eye of Agamotto, instead there was a warm meatball.
He’d been a sorcerer too long to be easily disgusted. Adrian wrapped his fingers gently around the object and pulled it out.
It was an eye. An actual eyeball, moist and spherical, and it lay in his palm and stared up at him. Its iris was brown, but colored with streaks of gold. It was so wet and lifelike, Adrian half expected it to blink or say something.
“Son of a bitch,” Adrian said.
“Don’t resist,” his uncle answered, and Adrian felt a hand on his lower back.
Adrian bucked. He kicked and thrashed his way out from under the desk, like a dog finding a hornets’ nest in its bowl. He smacked his own shoulder and cheek on the desk, and when he had rattled to his feet and turned around, it was to see a changing scene.
Young dream-Adrian was opening the door to leave. His clothing was disheveled and he stared at the floor as he moved, tears coursing down his face. Elaine Canning in the shape of Mouser stood to one side, weeping into the balled fingers of one hand and reaching out in the boy’s direction with the other, but rooted to where she stood.
Against one wall of the room, the wolf sank its teeth into Eddie’s arm. Twitch and Mike banged on its back with fists and sticks, but it ignored them and Eddie screamed. Where were Yamayol and Semyaz? Adrian wondered. Why weren’t they hearing all this commotion? Or were they?
In front of it all, Adrian’s uncle stood up. His brown eyes flashed fire and he held out his hand, palm up.
“Isn’t it time you joined me?” he asked. His tone of voice mock
ed Adrian, and a tiny smiled curled up one corner of his mouth. Impossibly, and not even knowing what his uncle could mean, Adrian felt tempted. His uncle was powerful—had been powerful, and power was what Adrian wanted.
He ripped his gaze away.
Adrian looked down at the eye he held in his hand. Idiot, he thought, you’re looking at it for a facial expression or some other message, hoping it will tell you what to do. But an eye all by itself won’t tell you anything. It can’t even cry.
Not all by itself.
Adrian reached up and popped the disembodied eye into his own eye socket. It shouldn’t have fit, since he already had an eyeball there, but Adrian felt his own eyelids reach out like hungry lips to wrap about the fleshy orb, sucking it into place.
And then he saw the scene differently again.
Uncle-wolf stood tall and tongue-waggingly before him, paw out and ears perked at the ceiling. A pool of shadow trailed out behind him, melting upwards and coalescing into another Uncle-wolf shape, pounding sharp-nailed fists into the other members of the band. The band had all changed. They wore their usual jackets and leather, like they would anytime they went on stage, but he saw them now split into multiple images, like he’d see them in physical space through his Third Eye, but with fewer parts.
Adrian squinted. He saw their bas, he thought, and pools of darkness around each of them that must be their shadows. Each wore a tag on his chest that must bear his name—in physical space, that would have been very hard to read, or would have appeared as just a glow, but with the body and the ka out of the way, Adrian thought if he looked close enough he could see each of the band member’s true name. Only they were moving too fast.
They moved too fast because they were fighting. Twitch dove left and right to avoid blows, and Eddie managed to catch a lot of them on his forearms, but Mike was taking a beating.
Adrian’s ankles felt cold and wet—looking down, he saw that two inches of water flooded the floor of the study. It sluiced in sluggishly from the vent from which he and the rest of the band had emerged only a few minutes earlier.
On the other side of the room, someone slipped out and the door closed. Adrian couldn’t quite make out the figure, but it wasn’t young dreamself-Ade, it was taller than that, and it had been wearing rider’s boots. Elaine Canning sank to the floor sobbing, and she was totally changed. Mouser was gone entirely; Elaine’s ba wore a hoop skirt and a blouse with bell-shaped sleeves, she had her hair wrapped in what appeared to be wire and there were chains wrapped around her body. Chains that glowed red-hot.