Her hands are up to her face. She can't see. She's going to die. I stumble for the blasting wand in my jeans. But Bettina, well, it's not possum but she was overselling that wound or recovered eerie quick.
Bowed over like she is, hands to socket, the Hollow goes to behead her. Casual as any headsman. But as he raises up the blade she barrels in. Shoulder to belly. Rams him into the wall.
Where she wants him all along.
She keeps driving her shoulder into him until whatever drives him can't take it anymore. The body has limits. She feels the sag in him. Still bent double she grabs a fistful of his coat at his waist, another of her hands grabs his throat. She lifts him. Throws him. Ten feet. More.
He hits the side of his lair with enough force to shake loose dust.
He takes a moment to stand but stand he does. The Hollow goes to work in him. You can see broken bones snapping into place under the skin. He rises up like a pile of sticks, self-assembling into scarecrow form.
Sinister, slow, he takes a straight razor from the walls.
'I so rarely have pleasures to take. You will be one.'
None of Jon's voice now. Just that other.
Bettina. My voice is dry and almost silent.
She walks in slow, expecting him to dance. He does. Southpaw side. He's taken her left eye. Her fist should have taken him around his throat but, her eye. Depth is gone. Her fingernails, short as they are, scratch him deeply.
But that's alright for him. Because then the Hollow buries the straight razor in her cheek, slicing it open.
The force of it has her off balance. He steps it, slice again but she holds up her forearms to take the blow. More blood. Oh fuck even in the dim light, I can see her white bone underneath.
Too quick, he moves in, slices at the underside of her arm. Something gives, some string broken. Her arm goes limp.
He stops, does that puzzled dog expression. She's got a good arm. She straight catches him in the throat. There's a horrible clicking sound. That's about the third time he's taken a killing wound as his trachea caves in. She head butts him then as he clutches, struggles for breath but the mask doesn't care about that.
Bettina.
Try again.
'Bettina.'
Jesus Christ you pussy you do it now!
'Bettina down!'
She doesn't look back, just drops to a crouch. Then.
I say the word. All the emotions I feel about Jon and the vicious executioner the mask has made of him. Seeing Bettina dressed in blood - all for me. The fact the Devil started all this - that's on me too. I put that into the blasting rod, bring down the Gnosis where it all changes from fear and rage and shame and anger into a shapeless, sightless pulse of information. Rushes out of me like breath.
The Hollow falls backwards. Still.
'We have to go! It won't hold him long!'
I'm shouting. She gets up. Looks back.
The Devil is in our way.
We go still as corpses. Because Jon... no matter how Jon is, no matter his menace... this is the Devil and he's just not playing by our rules. Different kind of man would say 'we're no match for him.' Fairer to say we aren't even playing the same game.
'You tell her to call off the search and this can all go away.'
Then he's gone.
The Hollow stirs, messing with the bones in his throat and making gagging sounds. We go out the way we came sharpish, moving quick through water and rats until we hit the manhole and what counts for clean air.
No cabs in this part of town. Bettina clutches at me as we go to leave the alley, looking for the subway.
I pull at her. We can't stay here. She grabs me by my shirt, bunching it in her fist, pulling me closer.
Gestures to the knife, that fucking saw-toothed thing the Hollow threw into her. She gestures pulling at something.
I want to say Christ no don't make me do it. I don't want to. But I think about seeing her bones come visible in her arms. Think of that razor and look at the slice that's opened her mouth to her back teeth. Because I asked you to come with me.
Hold down the gagging. Reach the hilt.
Saw-toothed. It takes something red and stringy with it as it comes.
Go to throw it when I realise the duffel is still across my body. Drop it in.
Blood pours from the wound but it's not pumping. Just sort of spilling. She stands, picks up the hoodie she threw away before we went down the manhole. Gestures at me to go.
Gestures because she can't talk. Can't help but imagine that was a vocal cord caught in the teeth of that fucking knife.
iii
So you know what I need right now?
You know what I need like a need a hole directly drilled into my head?
I need the Feverfuge trying it on. This cunt. Crazy Legs.
Bettina is on one of the long seats huddled over like a sick or drunk woman. My hand is on her back like a nervous boyfriend. Look close, you probably think she's got the sickness but she ain't shivering.
She's trying to get the blood to pool evenly in her body. She rasped at me a little while ago her heart had stopped beating. She's focussing on getting it to start again, trying to keep her torso flat to the ground. Helps her somehow. Won't lie on her back. Too slow if someone steps.
Tried speaking to her. Stopped. Just sounded like 'there, there' to me. Say thanks at a time like that, the... the paucity of it is too much to take.
Just keep my hand on her back. Let her clutch at my calf when a spasm of pain takes her. I got in close, attentive, the first time that happened hissing what's wrong?
She spread her fingers wide, hand separate, knitted them together. Figure that means she's healing.
Either way, I'm giving her all the attention I have when he sits down across from me.
Clears his throat.
Look up into his face. Recognise the pallid. The cold sweat on it. The boils on his lips. Herpes or something. He's dressed in green and yellow. Looks like a sports team to me but his crew figure it's the colour of disease.
Crazy Legs. Ipsissimus of the Feverfuge.
Cults come together for lots of reasons. Cultural. Say all your mothers were, I dunno, Welsh. You want to walk the Pagan line, you have a connection. Welsh magic it is. Feels more authentic to you, feels greater connections. You have a thing for group sex and no sense of shame, you hit up the Chamber of Sighs. Want to kick it old school with Latin and Greek, join the Trimestigeum or perhaps the Library.
But say you got your own sickness. Or someone you love does. Or say you have that kind of addiction to disease, sees you diagnosing yourself nine times a week with Kuru or Cystic Fibrosis but you also have crave magic. You find the Feverfuge.
They make allies and familiars out of virii. They talk to their warts and their growths. Thing is, for a lot of them, it works. Normally, I'd be fascinated by this shit but they took it too far too soon. You invoke a virus spirit, soon you think, if thinking's the word, like a virus. Convert. Survive. Disease, it kills you in its urge to survive and propagate. Disease ain't smart. Not a parasite, you see. Parasite, some of ‘em help you out. Remoras and sharks and all that.
Disease don't seem to much care about the host body.
I ran across Crazy Legs about five years ago. Shit, no, seven now I think of it. Six? Fuck, who cares.
Crazy Legs wanted to create something fucking disgusting. Gets hold of a local schizo. Poor guy, he thinks his mother got reincarnated as Dostoyevsky. Brothers Karamazov? That's all a message from his mother, who went back to the past. So they find him, give him a library of books, keep him up on a rooftop for summer. No shade. Feed him vodka, ‘cos that's what he likes. He reads his Russian books. Takes ‘em a year or two but they picked him well, based on his medical history, his colouring. 28 months later of living on a roof naked, drunk and passed out half the time, sure enough, some mole gets scaly.
To work. Crazy Legs, he bring his magic. The mole turns cancerous sure enough. They sent him back out. Two more me
lanomas. Perfect. They sing to the cancers. Start the guy smoking. They follow every lead in those six o'clock shows. 'Burnt toast gives you cancer!' says the pretty woman on the telly, they try that. Magic being magic, sure it works.
But they want to keep the tumours alive. They start breaking off, sending fucking... tumour-juice into the rest of his body, the Feverfuge keeps the metastasising under control. Slows down the rate it spreads, shaping it like a sculptor. Get the tumours talking to each other. Explain the poor schizo will die if they go too far and they'll go with it.
So they tend the cancers slowly. Then cut them out. Keep them alive. Like a homunculus. They grow the tumours alive, feeding them what they need. Fresh meat. Start to cut up the schizo. Harvesting more.
I smoke. I don't like this story.
About then someone figures enough is enough, gets a conscience. Can't cope what they've got going on. Leaks information to me.
Jon and I walk in. See the thing about the size of a five year old. Got the shape of a little kid but made up out of ruin. Collation of black moles and sloughed chemo skin. Swimming in lymph. Giving orders to the congregation with Crazy Legs as high priest.
Orders? Find more sick people. Make them worse. Harvest the cancers. Thing about a tumour? Some ways, it's fucking immortal. Grows so aggressive, so fast, so hard, it doesn't die like the likes of you and me.
Thing that only looks like a little kid, it's born aggressive as a pitbull. Born with imperial ambitions, as any cancer is.
Jon slid his blade into the harvested people, gentle as Azrael. The thing itself, kept together with spells. Not that hard to get rid of, modified exorcism, though the body it left behind was hard to look at.
We set fire to the house, destroyed all evidence. Took their books and notes. We could look the other way at their fetish for sickness. When you start using people as fodder, fallow field to grow disease gods from, glad to drop the hammer.
Crazy Legs himself?
We cured that motherfucker. We made sure his whole cult knew, then we marched him into hospital, made him check in. He had thirty-two different infectious diseases. We stripped him of his magic, he nearly died fourteen times in three days.
Doctors. Where's the incompetents when you need them? They kept him alive longer than we figured. Fix what they could, treated where they couldn't. We made sure he got every inoculation you can. Then, we came, checked him out, took him back.
'He's on the cure.' Tell ‘em that and his authority just vanishes. He's apostate.
The majority of them leave the next day. Suddenly, they ain't adventurers into new forms of communication with alien life or finding the tools to survive even the worst the germ world can throw at them. They're just sick people following a man who can't even really share their world anymore.
Later, he catches as many of those illnesses again but Crazy Legs is done as a holy man. Feverfuge was down to three members, one of them terminal. Stopped paying attention then.
Job done.
But Crazy Legs never vanished. He worked as a headbreaker for the little cults. Mainly just debt-collection, security. Nasty but small-time and those little cults, they never came to us. No one calls the cops so we got no reason to stop him.
Here he is, fervid, ill, sweating, fat in the jaws. Looking for payback. Not the first. And me?
I'm not in the mood, friends. I am not in the mood.
iv
He grins.
'Do you remember me? Do you recall the fate you left me to?'
'No.'
Oh look. I upset him.
'You cursed me. Threw me out into darkness. Like a cur. Surely you dream of me and wake in fright.'
Vowels too round. Fake English accent.
'Sorry, pal. You must be thinking of someone else.'
But all the while I'm prepping.
'Oh, I've dreamed of this day, Lark. I've brooded over and savoured a thousand stories of a bloody vengeance.'
Seriously, who’s forgetting a guy talks like this?
'And now I find you forlorn. Is this your woman? Shall I take her, infect her? Make her holy? Fill up her belly with -'
Yeah none of that.
'Crazy Legs, last time we got into it, I took your pets. I took your cult. I took your diseases. I know what you're thinking. Here's a chance to take out Lark, get revenge, rebuild a rep. But, you know, think about it. Last time, the Library just gave me authority to deal with you. Now, you're making it personal. I'm giving you one chance. Make like a tree.'
'Oh no, Lark. Alone and weak and prey for predators. Like me. Diseases are predators you know.'
He takes a rusted old blade from his pocket. 'I am a disease. This makes me predation incarnate.'
Jesus. I just make a jerk off motion at him.
'So you're a disease? I suppose that sets me up for a good line. I'm the cure! You like that? That'd be good on the movie poster, eh? On the trailer.'
'Th -This isn't. Take this seriously! '
This isn't going like he wanted it to go. He wanted me scared.
Nosepicks like this don't scare me. Right now, my fear-circuits are blown out. Because of the Hollow and - wait.
'Some guy tell you where I am? I mean, on a train. Up far north of my usual haunts. You were following me a few nights back but not tonight. Some guy, perhaps in a nice suit. He fill you in? Maybe give you some courage?'
He frowns. 'Indeed. I found an ally in my -'
So fucking bored with this and I have what I need. All this time, I've been staring at him. Drawing images over him in my imagination. At first, they were elaborate targets but I obscured them, broke them away from their context. In my head, there's another layer around him filled with spinning mandalas. Whirling St Catherine's wheels. Glyphs. Try it one day. Alone in your head, fill up your eyes with virtuality. You'll like it. It'll teach you something about how many ways you can see the world.
I fill it up with language. Curse words. I imagine them backwards. EIDOUY EPOHIK CRIRPA ERAOUYK NIHTI all in an elaborate scrolling font. Translate it, is not exactly the kind of verbal acrobatics you expect from any high tone wizard but serves my mood.
See? That's how it works. It's only magic when you shift it around. Mix it up. Remove your desires from your action. Only magic when it gets abstract.
Crazy Legs has wards but they're simple. He's not taken time with them. In his imagination, all he can think of is getting stabbed. Getting shot. Getting punched out. But that's not what I went for. He never even considered me hitting him in how he felt about himself.
He folds his knife. Loses the accent.
'I... oh what's the point? What's the fucking point. Seven years and it's still now how it should be.'
He stands. 'Besides, the - whoever it was tipped me off? I expect he's got worse in mind for you.'
He gets up. Walks between the carriages. Opens one door. Doesn't open another but he still gets off. Find out later he gets caught under the wheels and gets spread down four stops before someone notices.
The Devil? Yeah. That's a problem. The Hollow? Sure he's too tough for me to take.
But I ain't new to this.
Our stop. Bettina wakes. She points at her ear. Her hand opens and closes. I hear talking?
Nah.
Trains starts off without us.
Should have kept him for Bettina. Goddamnit.
Then again, that meat was maggoty. That meat was green.
v
One new hotel. One call to Lionel. Bettina in the bed, for real, dead to the world. Two guys, from some place in the world I never heard of with accents to match, deliver her food. Call that one in as a favour. Worth it. I hold the decanter of blood to her lips. That brings her around. She eat the fingers and the rest all herself. I watch TV, ignoring the chewing. Sucking.
She sleeps. Well, dies.
She'll be out for a day. Cover her up under the sheets. Get an hour or two myself on a chair. Come to.
Only a few smokes left but I burn through them, con
scious of every centimetre. Nothing like hoarding to make you appreciate what you spend.
The Devil.
There's no such thing as the Devil.
But here we are.
Walked in too confident to this whole Devil thing. That's okay. That's alright. Being confident is good. My mistake wasn't taking it seriously enough. You get that with civilian jobs. You just ignore their layman's opinion and move quick to make your own.
All stories about magicians are Faust stories. You open a door, traffic with the other side. Cut deals. Then you pay a price. Knowing there's an undercurrent in the world, flowing fast and deep, it changes you. It separates you from regular Joes. That's the price everyone pays but it tailors for you, eventually.
Looking like part of my price is running. Hiding. Look at Bettina's bandaged face and remember the sight of her bruised socket, the ragged eyelids. Using people up, that's a price too.
But you get what you pay for and I needed knowledge. It's like an addiction.
The Devil, at Ava's hotel, he got through my ward like it was nothing. If that was a function of its power, we'd feel that. But it wasn't. Which means it never ripped through the barrier.
So if someone gets into your house without opening a door, how did they get in?
They were inside all along.
When I first summoned it, the Devil-entity proved itself too big to be mastered by some slapped together summons. Alright. So whatever it is, whatever story it’s running, it's got some chops. But it never killed me. Never hurt me. It just -
Sip on the bourbon I bought from the all-nighter downstairs. They were out of grown-up whisky.
That ritual did something to me. Marked me. Made me something the Devil could summon. Which means that it doesn't have to smash through my work, it can just get to me. Any time. Anywhere.
There's no hiding.
Stare down at Bettina, sleeping. Her face is knitting together fast. I can see it happening I look long enough.
Grab my duffel, go downstairs, use the last of the cash in my wallet to pay for the room next to mine. The clerk never looks up from his magazine, just keeps picking his nose and reading his magazine with girls in it. Shoplift some masking tape and a box of tea candles.
Devil City Page 10