Somewhere in the twelve year gap between their meetings she had lost him, he had turned a corner in her memory and disappeared from view. Now he had made another right, and another, and in the labyrinth their paths had crossed again. Her age—his condition—none of it was particularly important. They were just a father and a daughter, he was still the man who had taken her to meet the Bedouins and let her pet their camels, she was still the child who loved butter pecan ice cream and Arabic-language cartoons from Egypt on Saturday morning.
The scuttling bug-like skull crawled up the wall behind her father, into her field of view, but she just shut her eyes and went back to the place where they were family, a family again, and all the walls between them shifted and rearranged to make paths and routes for them to reach each other.
There was someone else in that maze, someone neither of them could see, and of course it was Helen. Her mother, his wife. Helen who had turned and who was maybe still locked in a bathroom in Nairobi, beating against the door, trying to get out to find something to eat. She was a wispy kind of ghost, a distant presence even in memory, however, and it was easy enough to ignore her rattling her chains.
She had her father back. After twelve years. It wasn’t the kind of world where such things happened. She was so glad. So glad.
“Sarah,” he breathed, his voice a rustling of old mildew-spotted paper. “You weren’t supposed to see me like this. Ever.” His body convulsed against hers. He was trying to push her away. She let him go, let him slip out from her hug like a piece of ratty cloth falling away. “This is my spider hole. You weren’t supposed to see me this weak.” His eyes flicked away from her for a split second, just as long as it takes the sun to hide behind a cloud. She saw where he looked and shook her head. His shame had made him look at the dead slack on the platform. The one he’d been feeding from when she came in. “I held out for so long. I just went hungry—I thought I could do it.”
The skull moved behind him but they both ignored it. He stared at her. She could hear the word in his mind, as clearly as if she had a telepathic link to him, though she didn’t. The word was “cannibal,” and it made her shake her head again. “He was already dead, and—”
“And I didn’t so much eat him as drain him,” he agreed, a little too quickly. Dekalb lifted one hand creakily and put it against his cheek as if to hide a blush. The color of his face, which was the color of a white concrete sidewalk after a summer rain, did not change. “You can... you can just take their darkness. You can absorb their energy and they fall down. I saw Gary do it, drain an entire crowd of them once. I only ever take one at a time. Sometimes I think they want it, that peace.” He shook his head and she saw his neck was as thin as a length of pipe. “It makes you strong again but it doesn’t diminish the hunger. Nothing ever does. I’m so hungry, pumpkin, you can’t know.”
He kept looking at the corpse. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that she didn’t care. She remembered the lich in Cyprus and how Osman had needed more than words. She needed to show him. With all her strength she grabbed the corpse’s thin ankles and pulled it, shoved it, heaved it over the edge of the platform. It fell into the dark shaft below with a long-lived series of clanks and bangs and thrumming impacts. Dekalb moved his hand to cover his mouth. He had grown so weak, so thin since she’d last seen him. So used up. Death wasn’t all of it, though, it wasn’t just undeath that made him so pale and attenuated. She heard a narrow scuttling sound behind her and spun on her heel.
The insectile skull with the blue eyes looked up at her from the platform. It sprang into the air, rising a few inches off the floor, and fell back. It wanted her attention.
“It’s Gary, isn’t it?” she said, just a hunch. She couldn’t imagine who else it might be. The two of them were linked so tightly in the story, at least the way Ayaan always told it—Dekalb and Gary, good and evil locked in epic struggle, and Dekalb had only won that battle by sacrificing his own life. Of course in the story Dekalb didn’t come back as a lich and Gary was an enormous and deadly monster who burned away to nothing but ashes. This creature, this human skull was like nothing she’d ever seen before and it worried her. She knew Ayaan would have asked a million questions. You never turned your back on the new or unusual, that was one of her rules. As much as Sarah wanted to talk to her father she knew this mystery had to be cleared up first. Sarah turned the crawling skull over with one boot and saw the segmented limbs underneath, hidden like the legs of a horseshoe crab. The legs pedaled madly and she drew her foot back squeamishly, wondering if she should kick the evil thing into the darkness of the shaft. It twitched over onto its tiny jointed feet again and skittered away from her. She looked back at her father.
He nodded. “He’s not human anymore. Not even a semblance of a human. I’ve killed him so many times—I think he’s been dead so many times over he’s forgotten what a living human body is like. He’s healing, and he’s growing, in ways I can’t anticipate. He doesn’t seem to be able to just die. I’ve tried everything, I even had the mummies smash him to bits with a sledgehammer. The next day he had put himself back together the way we used to put broken vases back together with superglue. I locked myself in here, sealed away from the world because I needed to watch him. To make sure he didn’t get loose.” He stared at the skull bug then as if it had changed colors. “No, I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said, and she frowned at him until he looked back at her face. “He and I can communicate, sort of. He wants to talk to you, he—Gary, don’t make me crush you again, or maybe we could boil you in a pot—no. Never. You will never get near her, do you hear me? Never!”
“I’d like to hear what he has to say,” Sarah told Dekalb.
“Oh, alright,” the lich said, his hands at his throat. “I’ll have to translate, though. He doesn’t have any lungs or vocal cords or a tongue or anything, and—”
She stopped him in mid-sentence. “I know a trick,” she told him, thinking of the soapstone in her pocket. She’d speculated often on how it linked her to Ptolemy. “I just need something of his, something close to him. Like a piece of jewelry he always wore, a wedding ring, or a favorite shirt, or—”
One of the mummies—silent and invisible until that moment—glided forward and picked the skull up off the ground. With a casual snap it tore one of the teeth out of Gary’s upper jaw and then dumped the rest of him on the platform. The mummy handed her the long yellow tooth, complete with spiky roots, and stepped back into the shadows.
Sarah bit her lip. “I don’t know if this will work,” she said. She made a fist around the tooth and frowned.
That fucking hurt, you prick, Gary said, using her own internal voice. He wasn’t talking to her but still she heard him. The words blasted through her mind and made her ears ring in sympathy. Come back here and I’ll bite your goddamned prick off! Or did they already put it in one of those fucking jars? She squinted her eyes and tried to turn down her own mental volume.
It didn’t work. So you’re Sarah, huh? You’re skinnier than I expected. I also thought you’d be white, like your old man. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no racist. I’d gladly take a bite out of you if I just had a mandible to call my own.
She could feel him grinning in her head, his tongue lapping at her grey matter, at the convolutions of her brain. She nearly let go of the tooth. Then she realized she couldn’t, that the buzzing, stinging energy in the tooth had actually paralyzed her hand. She couldn’t let go. She tried to open her mouth to speak and found she couldn’t do that, either.
8
The open door beckoned her. She fought its pull—she was not ready to go in.
She was not quite ready to kill again, so soon.
Baraka tugged at Ayaan’s calcified veins. It had saved her life and now it wanted to be repaid. The power itched inside her, burnt her guts. It needed refueling. It needed meat. She knew exactly what it wanted. She also knew it would never be satisfied, never again, no matter how much meat she ate. N
o matter how much living human meat.
Nausea ballooned in her stomach, filling it like hot rocks. She dropped to one knee and spat on the boardwalk. When she wiped her mouth and looked up the naked man was there. The one with the blue tattoos and the noose around his neck.
“I know what your next move is, lass,” he told her.
“Then you’re one ahead of me,” Ayaan said. She lowered her other knee, knelt and touched her forehead to the eroded wood. She was pointed out towards the sea—as close to being oriented toward Mecca as she could hope for. Silently she began to pray. She stopped in mid-dua. “You,” she said to the man. She lifted her head. “You must know something of evil. Am I a monster now? If I speak God’s name, will He smite me?”
The ghost closed his eyes and a look of blessed relief came over his face. “Finally,” he sighed, “one of them believes!” which didn’t answer her question. When she stared at him long enough he shifted on his feet and actually addressed her problem, though he provided more of an opinion than any hard facts. “Are you a monster, now? Oh, aye. But your god made you so, didn’t he, lass? He made you what you are and he did it for good reason, you can be sure of that. Pray all you want. I’ll wait here.”
The urge had left her, however. She stood and looked at him, truly looked at him. He wasn’t there. He looked real enough, she could even feel the heat of his hands when she grasped them, but there was nothing behind the image. No energy, neither living or dead.
“I know what your next move is,” he said again, once she had stopped touching him. “You’re going to go on a bit of a tear. You’ll run inside there,” he said, pointing at the open door, “with your death ray blasting and you’ll ask questions later. Hopefully you’ll get the Tsarevich, but even if you just get the green phantom fellow, well, that’ll be a good day’s killing. They’ll slaughter you, of course. But who mourns a pawn when its loss takes a bishop?”
“You can read my mind.” Ayaan let her hands fall at her sides.
He didn’t bother assenting. “Is a little bit of good worth it when so much potential goes to waste?” he demanded. “There’s a deeper game, here, if you’re willing to be a little patient, lass, and there’s more to win than you think. You play nice for now. Don’t go in there pretending to be one of them. They’re too smart for that. Act like you’ve been broken, though, broken like a wild horse, and they may want to believe it so bad they don’t ask so many questions. Then you just do as they say. Bide your time. Wait for the real opportunity to come along.”
What he said smacked of prudence. She didn’t like it—she wanted vengeance—but she had not lived so long by being foolhardy. She nodded. “Alright,” she began, intending to ask further questions, but he was gone, without so much as a fare-thee-well. Ghosts were supposed to be like that, she knew, but it was still unsettling.
She shook her head and walked through the open door. She stepped into a cavernous, dark space, and then squinted in pain as brilliant red light attacked her eyes. A sign—a neon sign in English that read “MAD-O-RAMA” buzzed into life in the dim space, showing her its corners and casting everything in a hellish glow. To enter MAD-O-RAMA she had to pass through the mouth of an enormous sculptural head, complete with giant triangular fangs.
Beyond this opening lay a serpentine length of small-gauge railroad track and piles of mannequins painted in glowing yellow-green. Some looked like witches, some like maniacs with knives. Skeletons were well-represented, as were vultures and bats. A spiderweb made of fishing line hung from the ceiling and brushed the top of her hair. MAD-O-RAMA must have been a carnival ride once, she decided. A dark ride.
At the back of the room stood the liches, gathered in dark conference. The green phantom, the lipless wonder, the werewolf. They waited for her, she could tell—their attention, their energy, was directed at her. One of the ride’s cars stood at the end of the track, its high back turned toward her and shielding its occupants from her view. With the vision of the dead she could see right through the wood and metal, however. She could see two figures there, their energy bright with excitement, their auras intertwined. One was dead, a lich. The other was alive but hurt.
Ayaan’s stomach rumbled experimentally. Hurt... living... flesh. Desire tried to bend her double but she fought it down.
Cicatrix stood up, untangled her limbs from the car’s dead occupant. The scarred woman looked almost bashful as her eyes met Ayaan’s. Or perhaps she was flushed for other reasons. An open wound on her chest oozed blood that ran down in clots to stain the plunging neckline of her white linen dress.
The living woman stepped down from the car and walked at her leisure toward the exit. As she passed Ayaan she reached out to touch the Somali’s arm. She whispered, “Is fun, can be good life, if you can make you to like it.” It sounded like some kind of apology. Without further explanation she left the way Ayaan had come in.
Ayaan moved forward to meet the car’s occupant. It was the Tsarevich, she was sure of it. She would get around in front of the car, see what he really was. Then she would fry him with her death beam, put everything she had into it until the green phantom came for her. She had heard the ghost and its cautions but she was sorely tempted.
Before she could reach the car, however, the beautiful little boy in his filigreed armor appeared out of thin air, directly in her path. “You come too close. Stay there, yes?” he said, and she could only nod in agreement. She could see now that it was just a projection, just as Sarah had back at the beginning. There was no energy in the boy, no darkness or light. He might as well have been hollowed out like a pumpkin. He was just as the ghost outside.
The boy gestured with his skull wand and the werewolf moved forward. He had a strange little machine in his hands, a ball studded with vacuum tubes and black bakelite dials. A long telescoping antenna emerged from its center. Its purpose was not immediately clear.
Ayaan remembered the ghost and his words. Don’t pretend to be one of them. They won’t believe it. The device the werewolf held must be a weapon. Ayaan knew one when she saw it.
“Semyon Iurevich,” the Tsarevich said. “Is she trustable?”
The lipless wonder came forward. The dry skin of his face had drawn away from his smallish features, making his eyes very wide. His nose turned up like a pig’s. He wore a stained white bathrobe and a pair of slippers. He came up to her and ran his hands over Ayaan’s arms and hips. She wanted to kick him away but she controlled herself. Like a broken horse, she thought. She let her shoulders slump, let her neck bow. Let them think it was too much, that she was overwhelmed, dazzled by their evil.
“He sees future, knows all,” the Tsarevich announced. “Can read you like book.”
The lich’s bony hands stole across her belly, grabbed at her buttocks. She leapt away but knew better than to attack him. He reached out again and she let him touch her. She closed her eyes and thought of Sarah, of just how far she would let this go if it meant keeping her promise to Dekalb, if it meant seeing Sarah again.
The lich’s touch grew more clinical, less intrusive. He focused on one small patch of her left arm as if the information he sought was written there, as if he’d found the right page of her book. Finally he looked up. Long wispy white hair swung away from his face. The top of his head was completely bald and it glistened where it wasn’t red with sores.
Energy passed between them. Ayaan’s soul lurched in her body. Her heart would have gone wild with palpitations if it still could beat—this evil thing, this lich was really looking into her, his power was real. She knew he would see in a moment her dissembling, her game. He would give her away.
“Is not one of us,” the lich told his master. “Not as yet. But is safe, with precautions.”
Only the fact that she was dead and no longer needed to breathe kept Ayaan from sighing with relief. She didn’t know how—maybe the naked ghost had come to her aid—but she had fooled them. “I don’t want anything but to rest,” she said. “And mayb
e get something to eat. I can see now that there’s no beating you.”
The Tsarevich nodded and stepped even closer to her. Another step and his nose would be in her navel. At least the projection of his nose would touch the leather covering her belly. He looked up at her like a toddler addressing his mother. “No rest for wicked,” he told her, “but maybe is not so bad. I have mission here. I have great work to complete. So many things to do, and not so many hands. I take a chance, yes? Is work for you, if you will have it, and it proves you. Otherwise, you stay here, you be like new Least. You interested?”
“I... I guess so,” Ayaan said. She bit her lip and looked away. She had never tried to look coy before and she thought she must be overdoing it ridiculously.
“Is good!” The boy nodded happily and his smile lit up the whole room. “You do good, now. You do good, come back, you see man behind the curtain.” He pointed at the car at the end of the tracks where his real body still sat out of view. “You do bad, we have provision for this as well.” He pointed again, this time at the device the werewolf held. The hairy lich touched one of the black knobs and the vacuum tubes lit up with a dull orange glow.
Ayaan felt something tickling her neck. She put a hand on her throat and felt the silver tattoo there. It felt warm, though the rest of her skin was disturbingly cool. The tickling turned to a tingle, and then a sensation of uncomfortable heat. It only took a few seconds to become painful. She clawed at the tattoo but that only made it worse.
The Tsarevich waved his wand and the searing stopped instantly. Ayaan rubbed at her neck but the warmth was gone.
“Is called ward, and is very strong magic. No way to undo it now without cutting off at neck. Be good now, or he turns it up all way.” The little boy looked as if this was the last thing he ever wanted to happen in the whole wide world. “He turns it up, and your head is to catch fire, yes?”
She nodded. Bide your time, the ghost had told her. Wait for the right opportunity.
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