Up against something bad.
Think of a friend who I turn to when I work this kind of fear. Probably can't help but I want her.
The cab takes me to the cemetery.
Bettina.
Five
i
During the war, the fascist never took the City but he came damn close. Mully, my mentor, said he could hear the guns when he was in East Star Square. The place prepared to surrender, eager to make a buck off occupation when the big allies got involved and the invaders pulled out before they could roll in with tanks.
For most in the City, it was no big thing. New markets, coming to them. Some citizens though, some took it hard. Some got scared in ways normal types don't.
Gunther Gunzelmann was one of those types. He's lost family in bad ways to the fascists. He was scared. He was angry. He was a sorcerer. He'd had enough of humans. Hold it against him? He wanted out. No apocalypse. No suicide. Something better for him and his. End of that long bad war, some got lost to drink and some to industry.
Gunzelmann got lost to a vision.
Dreams of a new way, a new type of person who'd never fight against each other but could survive when the human species finally ate itself. Took those naked mole rat things as his model. Blind, hairless creature that live down in the darkness, eating each other's filth, never wasting, just tough and sly and surviving where the lions and the elephants get poached. They don't feel pain and they serve powerful queens. Mammalian termites, thinking only of the hive, not the individual. Awful things, weak, easy prey if you can get them. But survivors still.
Which is all that counts for anything.
So Herr Doktor Gunzelmann rounded up those who wanted to see the brave new human, who wanted to be a part of it. They went underground. Into the cemeteries where the tunnels and tombs already waited. In the darkness, they bred children who never saw sunlight. Who learned vile ways to be healthy.
Then the surgeries began.
Ran into them about five years ago and it took a lot not to order every fucked up one of them dug out and ended. But it was too late. Four generations. The Gas Mask Macquillage was born. Cthonic magic had forced their evolution so that the kids would die unless the damn wartime gasmask was stitched to their face.
It kept them alive in the toxic environments they moved down into and became their symbol and fetish. That mask.
Hell, even the anthropagy was okay. They'd become immune to the diseases a rotting uncooked body can give you over time. They took to thinking a dead human was a holy banquet. Better than worms and grave moss and the mould they evolved themselves to eat. In turn, they fetishised the dead. They worshipped their own transformation into something no longer strictly human and became darkly fascinated with decay. After all, a fundamental change in their bodies.
Death became a transformation they strove not to follow but they considered absolutely a miracle. You walk and talk and then you're gone and, sooner or later, you get stripped to bones, then to powder. There's a change - from human to nothingness in a few short months. Death itself, and they were surrounded by it, is a philosophical marvel to the Macquillage.
They never killed people. I checked. They'd never killed a single living person. Hardcore taboo. Oh, sometimes they grabbed a wino and convinced him to undergo the Macquillage but what's a little pain compared to a new, evolved life? Sometimes they came across a suicidal mourner. Gave ‘em the pitch and bought ‘em into the family. Weird as they are, they never crossed that murder line when I was running the show.
After the Old Man deal, Bettina, my heavy, took a lot of hits. She's dead. Walking around kind. There's a few ways those cats get better from the kind of bodyshots she took. First, she can feed. Blood. Meat. Pain. She's not like that. Not yet.
There's prayer but she's not the kind for that either. The kinds of gods who answer dead women's prayers - he's not ready to dance with that breed.
Then there's dying again, sort of like the resets. See, she can't ever really die all the way but she can go down into the dark and lay down there, in the deep silence. The death fills her up and strengthens her. But everyone knows she works with me and if she's in the ground, even if I ward her up, there's more than worms can get to her.
I can't have that.
Took her down to Grundig, who heads up the Macquillage, explained the situation. Dead and incorruptible. They think she's an icon. A living saint. Venerated. They'd die before they let the kind of scum like the Feverfuge or that psycho Clip Clip or Crazy Legs get to her. Left her with a gym bag full of clothes and my phone number but I'm here early, gun-jumping.
Wait till dark to go in. They hate the light. Four generations in, it sickens the new breed. Hit the crypt in then lowest night. In the quiet of a closed down boneyard, standing in the right place, you can hear them chitter and weep to each other. Hear the new language they're building out of gas mask exhalations. I can hear the whistle that's my name. Coming up from the ground.
Wind in the grass makes it looks like it's shaking for me. Trees are bending, branches writhing like hurt things. Stillness while I wait. Tension sphygmus.
Whistle gets louder.
Hissing through the mask from underfoot. Lark. Drybone hollow. Click as the mask locks off respiration.
Creepy.
ii
A stack of old televisions, set to dead channels, stacked up six high. A scarecrow totem made of old leather overcoats and headed by a dog's skull and child's umbrella with a leering face drawn on it. Rows and rows of horticultured fungi. Mushrooms, big as a child's stomach and sick seeming. Fruiting bodies. Fungus, hanging down from shelves like an ill man's beard.
Newspapers on the walls. Scraps of holy books. Old LPs smashed and designed into sortilege patterns. Lamps lit low. Gas, electric, candles, all throwing shapes like hardcore ravers. Photographs of wounds and mushroom clouds.
Portraits of mustard gas victims, eyes cut out of the pics, those lanterns shining through them like the gouges were glowing. Vintage pornography, genitals and breasts neatly cut out or outlined with rusted pins. Those dancing teeth toys, on legs, some still wound and working. Fungus everywhere. Some more fungus. Some spore in the air brings on allergies but I've been here before. I drop the pills and in a minute, my throat isn't spasming.
Want to know something about how penicillin works? Fungus is aggressive shit. It terraforms. It changes its prey into itself. Penicillin finds invading agents and transforms it into something useable to itself. Be thankful it's something a human can use. Mycotoxicology. Fungi can't often kill people but down on the microscale, fungus is top bastard. Meets its opposite, transforms it into itself.
That's what the Macquillage is up to. They reckon fungus is a totem, some sign from a God or power that if the world is festering pile of garbage, that humanity is comfortable in trash, ruin, wreckage, and we should get with the programme.
Which is why we pass through the nursery where skinny babies are fed gruel and conditioned to grow immune systems soaked in, sharpened with, sickness.
I know.
But I can't fix everything in the damn world and you know what? These kids don't die. I don't get sentimental about babies. Everyone knows there's no more pure a sociopath than a six month old. Keep that thought in my head as I pass through the cribs and the infants laying on beds of mould. These kids don't die. They change.
Protective wards around me wake up. Garbage spirits in the air try me. Move on.
Alyssa and Friedrich (they're second or so generation. They still have names,) lead me through their communal tombs, over sleeping nests, through living areas and past creepy figures rutting in alcoves. They have no concept of private property or ownership down here. They are in stormcoats, my guides, in old tightly laced docs. All in dark shades, blacks, browns and navy blues. Bodies twisted with rickets but possessed of some muscaria vitality. Not supposed to show flesh but at neck, wrist, it sometimes teases itself out. They glow, faint blue, or green.
Only their Macqui
llage is coloured. Their gasmasks are the one thing they get individual say over. Lurid psychedelic swirls of colour. The... woman by her name but there's no biological markers to back that up and I doubt they hang up on gendered language, Alyssa anyways, has decorated hers with a mournival. Friedrich has splashed his with glitter and beetle shells.
'Laaaark,'they hiss at me and open the doors to the tomb, lead me down the stairs they dug from dirt and into their autochthonous kingdom. Walk through a room empty but for an old toy monkey, the kind that bashes cymbals and walks but they replaced percussion with dead cockroaches.
'Hierarch... to seeeee.'
Grundig. Boss of the operation.
They take me down further and its getting cold, even though I dressed for it in pea coat, gloves and scarf. I hate gloves. Hard to smoke in them. As if they hear me thinking, they turn and ask for tribute. I pay out five darts each and they ritualistically put them in old coffee cans before they open the last door, the bottom of a packing crate built in the tomb floor. I jump down, land and pain shoots through my leg to my hip.
No time to care about that.
Grundig.
Behind him, in her resting place, safe and comatose as a fucked up storybook princess, is Bettina.
Grundig... this motherfucker is a horror.
Fat. Crazy fat. His radiant belly pokes out from his clothes. Chin hangs down beneath the mask. How the fuck do you get crazy fat on fungus? His mask is done up in canary yellow with and old fashioned spiral TV antenna on either side, above his ears. It would look sci-fi deco retro if he didn't radiate a gross green lambency. If he didn't stink.
'We doooon't wwwwant to leeeet hhher goooo.'
He talks like that, right. All cobweb creepy and bleeding-out slow. His mouth is covered. All their mouths are covered. They drink fungus through straws they plug in but he's got some little mic or something built in, which adds the inhuman. I ain't gonna do the voice each time. Just remember he's talking spooky. Fucker isn't normal.
He's 41 years old. Elder of the Macquillage.
And he's looking to cause me a problem.
iii
'She's not yours to have.'
'Incorruptible. Beyond death. Through death. The Holy Mycology is in awe of her.'
I step up to the bier they keep her on. Stack of bricks covered in something that probably isn't algae. Mushrooms grow in some damp soil all around her. They stink and I cough. Tie a bandana around my face. Should have done that first but I don't like them to see their atmosphere getting the better of me. Under a fire blanket she's pale and still. Condemned building vibe like any corpse.
Toadstools thick around her. But they can't grow on her. They'd die. Bettina is dead and still walking around. That means something.
'She's a dead woman, Grundig. She's not overcome death. She died. Some scumbag killed her. She just didn't go the whole way.'
'Holy.'
'Not in any way you mean.'
'Even the little eaters won't touch her.'
Little eaters? I turn to him, raise an eyebrow.
'Roaches.'
'You let roaches at her?'
'Yes.'
'She's a person. Don't do that.'
Don't like the idea of them doing their experiments on her. But they won't hurt her and that's something.
'We must test her holiness. There are rites.'
'I understand.' And I do. I had some icon, some relic precious to me, I'd play with the thing too. Some people pick scabs. Me. 'But she’s different. And she's coming with me.'
'No'.
Is he bluffing or is this going to break wild?
A thought strikes me, triggered. Not about this. About the hotel room. What if someone is running a game? What if someone wants to warn me off and the sense of strength I felt was a bluff?
Can't call that one now. Should I call this?
The Macquillage aren't fighters. They're looking to survive some eschaton. Grunding probably never got into it with anyone except to punish some of the new blood.
'You want to keep her down here with you forever?'
'She is holy. What if we are like her? What if there is a secret to our future in her imperishable body?'
'Tell you what.' I step up to him. 'You need to die, you need to rise? There's no guarantee you'll come back and there's no telling what you'll be, after. How deep you guys dig down here?'
These are secrets of the colony. He gets cagey.
'Deep.' Long, hissed.
'You probably heard things down there, right? Deep things, deeper than you dare to go.'
His body language isn't regular but I can read it. Some nerve hit.
'Those are the Dead. You ready to join them?'
He shakes his head.
I have no idea what they found deep in the earth but down there in cold dark, stands to reason there's something creeping or burrowing. I'm afraid of everything. Anticipating underearth terrors is just part of that fear. Swing and a hit.
'Do you want to let them in here? The Ancient Dead...'
No. 'Then leave me for a minute. Let me take her. I won't let them in.'
There's a minute or two of dithering and then he leaves. Distracted by the notion he's sharing the darkness with something else.
Alright. To work.
There's voodoo rites to wake her up. There's Lazarene rites. There's The Hour of Coming Forth. There's all sort of ways to talk to the Dead, you got a will for it and you really want to hear what they have to say.
There's other ways too. I been on the magic trip for a long time. Take her hand out from beneath the blanket. Her palm is hard calloused. Even her fingers are strong. Before she died, Bettina lifted. Getting ready for what she had to do, matching body to will. Death snap froze her. She had muscle before and now there's no fatigue toxins or pain to keep that in check.
She's just in her underpants under there and I carefully replace the cover. No copping an eyeful. Hit the magical consciousness and just say 'Bettina. Wake up. Please wake up.'
The Dead are good servants. Slaves. But it ain't like that between us. I helped her. She helped me. The Dead stay around because they have unfinished business. Everyone knows that. But I helped her finish that a while back. I think she helps me because it gives her something to do. No percentage in analysing her motives. I'm just glad she's around. Because she's tough, because she's scary, because she doesn't ask questions. Because I like her and because we don't have to talk.
She's just my friend, ok? Fucking hell. Let's not go sentimental.
I don't want to stir her from that lock-in with a command. So I just ask.
'Hey.'
She comes too, not like a sleeper but someone just back from the shop. No need to get dramatic about it.
I reach into my doctor's bag. Bring out two Mexican beers. 'Hey. Got time to help me with a job?'
'Best check my busy social schedule.'
Bust open the beers and we drink. She bums a smoke. She grins sly at me.
'Man, you take me to the best places. Where am I this time?'
Tell it and she looks at me unconvinced. 'You couldn't just, you know, put me in an attic?'
'Not this time.'
She looks around like she's distracted by some buzzing.
'What's that sound?'
Can't hear anything. 'What?'
'There's something down in the dark. Outside. Something rotten. Something damp. Let's get the fuck out of here.'
The fear starts creeping. 'Grundig! I left a gym bag here!'
We move quick. I don't want to be down here with whatever it is only the Dead can hear. Don't want to see my lucky guess.
iv
Lazlo has a gig so we spend the night playing catch up at his. I fill her in on the Devil tip.
'So, only an amateur would put all those signs up on her hotel?'
'Yeah. It was just... cliché. The kind of thing you'd draw if all you knew about this stuff come from Dennis Wheatley novels.'
'What?'
> 'Yeah. Amateur hour. Some smart playing dumb.'
'Could someone make it look like they didn't know what they were doing?'
'Nah. Something genuine got raised up in that hotel room. The client says it wasn't her. Here's the tricky bit. You can't fake magic. So unless someone broke in, did a for-real rite, then hid it under the bullshit. I can't figure it.'
We drink more beer and wait. She's eating beef raw, tearing at it. Not the same as human but it'll keep her around. We'll go see Lionel, chef-magician, later. He'll have something for her and I think he's sweet on her. Maybe get mate's rates.
'Got a lead on helping Jon, too.'
They never met, her and Jon, but she knows we worked together for ten years and we were friends for longer.
'Figured you'd be right on that tip. Instead of taking this gig.'
'Really need the money. Hate to say it but Jon can wait a few nights. Besides, I'm curious now. Something malicious and powerful, calling itself the Devil. Got to peek under its skirts, find out what it really is.'
Truth to tell, I'm burning to help Jon but this Devil business is distracting me. It's up in my grill. When I get into it with the Hollow, I won't have time for any other damn thing. I'll come at that clean and hard. Get rid of this distraction first.
'So why not talk to the Devil himself?' she asks.
'Messing with the Devil is serious stuff Bettina. Not sure I want to tip him off I'm looking. '
'I thought you said there was no such thing as the Devil.'
'There's not. But I tried to do a quick and dirty summoning and whatever it is, it's for real.'
'So whatever this thing is, it's ain't the Devil. You can talk to it. It's probably just, I dunno... I dunno about this stuff... I just figure it's something coasting on the Devil's rep, you know?'
She's right.
Every magician's story is the Faust story. Devil will be there if I call. Chancers like me are his stock-in-trade and I'm exactly the right kind of sucker to make a bad bargain if there's something to be learned.
Devil City Page 4