Blood Samples

by Bonansinga, Jay

  Then, one day, Kenneth Anger simply ceased to exist. Vanished as abruptly as he had come into Eva's life. Since then, Eva had heard rumors that he was involved with the Destroyer cult, but she had never paid them much mind.

  Until tonight.

  Until all this ancient history started clicking together like pieces of a cubic puzzle.

  By the time Eva reached the old commercial pier, it was nearing dawn. The sky was still a canopy of black gloom, but there was a suggestion of luminance in the air, a vague hint of the coming day in the dirty sheen on the water, and the dull moon-glow of the pavement. Eva pulled over next to a dry-dock barge and parked. She checked her elemental, made sure the gourd was stocked with rounds, then got out.

  The wind tossed her duster tails, the air smelling of burning salt and mercury.

  She walked along the docks, the sound of her footsteps like a clock ticking in the eerie silence, a counterpoint rhythm against the huge, breathy darkness. In the distance to the north, the city slumbered, scattered green-fires dotting the dark skyline. Somewhere nearby: the sound of polluted water lapping against a breakfront. Eva glanced at a faded number on the pavement, stenciled against the charm-line. She was reaching the end of the twelve hundred block.

  Ahead of her the road terminated at a decaying row of pilings. There was once a dock here, but age and weather had eaten away at the timbers, leaving only a skeleton of rusted iron between the pilings like prison bars. The ground was an outcropping of jagged granite, just a couple of meters from the water's edge. It was deathly silent except for the rhythmic snoring of currents against the rocks, and an occasional errant wave crashing against the boulders.

  Eva drew her elemental, thumbed the safety off, aimed at the water and fired —

  — and there was a thunderous boom, as blood red flame leapt out of the muzzle, striking an invisible membrane around the pilings.

  The elemental flame mushroomed into a vertical wall, turning a brilliant shade of yellow and climbing forty feet into the night sky, as the water itself seemed to curl away from the towering maelstrom, an invisible Moses parting the sea, the sound of white magic crackling and popping like a fireworks display. Eva shielded her eyes for a moment as the light seemed to implode in on itself.

  Then the noise dwindled, and Eva gazed up at the ancient pilings.

  In a veil of sparks and luminous smoke, the beachfront facade had transformed. The timbers were gone, as were the fossilized iron struts, and the granite boulder field, and a huge section of the water. In its place rose an old, crumbling, sand-blasted, three-story brick building covered with cult graffiti scrawled in goat's blood. Its doors and windows were boarded with makeshift lead shields, and it sat on a concrete platform that jutted out over the real water fifty meters away.

  Kenneth Anger's studio.

  "You son of a bitch," Eva murmured, slamming another round into the elemental without even looking. She was buzzing with rage. Ethan's Cup was strapped to the back of her belt for easy access, the Sword riding one thigh, the Rod sheathed on the other. She took a breath, steadying herself, focusing, then started toward the building.

  It was a pile of bricks from the late twentieth century that had been re-habbed in the 2050s, its doors retro-fitted with charm panels, esoteric symbols carved in the brick, magical litanies written across the lintels. Tangles of conduits and antennae cascading off the roof. Eva approached the side door, her heart beating, her mouth dry. She could feel the blackstuff radiating off the edifice. She found a side entrance — an unmarked iron door.

  She raised the elemental, kicked the door in, and staggered inside a dark foyer.

  The first thing that struck her was the smell. Back when she was working homicide, she had encountered odors that were comparable. Usually the stench of a victim turned over to the maggots. The police called them "lunchers," and they gave off a stench that was indescribable, a smell like a punch in the face. Morgue attendants were compelled to stick cotton balls soaked in after shave into their nostrils. But this. This was worse. This was a black, infectious, acrid stench, rising out of the shadows like the innards of a sick animal festering in this horrible stewpot for years.

  There was a faint, electronic beeping noise coming from inside Eva's duster, but she didn't even bother to look. She knew exactly what it was. Her tiny, matchbook-sized ionization counter was going berserk, reading all the malevolence as though Eva were standing inside a black mass.

  Eva tried to breathe through her mouth as she swung the weapon across the darkness. Why was it so dark in here? Was there no power? Eva blinked at the shadows, trying to register something in her field of vision. He knows I'm here, she thought, he's watching me.

  "Kenneth?!"

  No answer. Eva reached for her flashlight, a tiny halogen unit tucked behind her belt. She brought it up, then flipped it on.

  The narrow beam of light fell on a chandelier of bones. It hung from the center of the twenty-foot high ceiling, a massive bleached bundle of femurs, tibias, clavicles, carpals, and phalanges — all of them gleaming dully in the light-beam. There were other artifacts dangling from the obscene cluster, long braids of human hair, exotic animal paws stitched together like sausages, and luminous threads of fiber-optics like liquid light falling to the floor. Something extraordinary and awful was being fomented here. Eva dragged the light-beam down the walls, across the blood-smeared magic words: Jod, Tetragrammaton, Yog-Sothoth, Elohim...

  Eva's gut went cold.

  "GODDAMN YOU KENNETH!!"

  Her voice echoed, swallowed by the tomb-like silence of the foyer.

  She started toward the center of the room when her foot stubbed against something soft, and she nearly fell down. She shone the flashlight down at the floor, and her breath stuck in her throat for a second, and her heart seemed to seize up inside her.

  Kenneth Anger's mutilated corpse was partially visible in the narrow beam of light. Slumped against the wall, dressed in bloody tatters, he looked as though he had been dead for quite a long time. And this was no shanking. This was a much less merciful demise: The result of a ritual flaying, most likely at the hands of his fellow cultists. Half his face was gone — his hair torn from his head in bloody tufts, his eyes gouged out, his nose ripped off like a piece of gristle. Someone — or some thing — had removed his lips, and it wasn't exactly done with surgical precision. His gaping mouth was a ragged, pulpy divot.

  Repulsed, shaking, breathing quickly, Eva decided to head for the exit. She had to get some air, and catch her breath, and maybe call in the body to the precinct house, maybe even get some back-up.

  She was half way across the foyer when her foot crunched on something brittle.

  Again she shone her flashlight at the floor.

  At first she thought it was a toy, a part of a doll house or antique train set, a few of the tiny lamp posts crushed by her foot-fall, but then she realized it was a fairly detailed rendering of a Hundred and Eleventh Street and Avenue X. The intersection appeared to be fashioned out of toadstone and vulture's clay, the tiny streetlamps made from the delicate bones of rats. The tiny police vehicles were made from wax. The little crossroads were so familiar: The place where they found the Disciple's body.

  Icy current jolted through Eva as she shone the flashlight across the bloodstained checkerboard of the massive parquet-tiled floor.

  The beam of light played across a miniature city, across intricate railways made of snakeskin and bear claws, across meticulously modeled housing blocks made of obsidian bricks. There were office buildings carved out of volcanic pumice, and cars whittled out of hangman's wood, and tiny parking meters made of hemlock stalks, and even high-tension wires constructed out of dried human veins. The whole star-shaped metro area was there— from the monolithic central district, to the residential communities, to the druid span across the east bay area, to the ruins of the three outlying ghettos. But the worst parts weren't the frightening details, or the perfect positioning of every last grain of miniature rubble.
The worst parts were the tiny figurines scattered here and there across the miniature

  Cityscape — the charred body of the Disciple over by Avenue X, the slumped, unconscious figure of Lydon in Ghetto 3 — and the realization currently stabbing through Eva's midbrain like an icicle: This is not merely a scale model of a city, or even a diabolical magical effigy, it is more than that, much more than that —

  She holstered the elemental and reached into her duster pocket with a trembling hand, fishing around for her digi-cam. She had brought along the tiny instrument — about the size of a deck of cards, normally used for gathering evidence — just in case she needed to record some aspect of Anger's world. Now she was shakily bringing it to her eye and aiming it down at the model. She snapped a shot of the southeast sector, the dry-light flashing in the darkness. Then the northeast, the light strobing, leaving ghost-streaks on Eva's retinas. Finally, she was looking through the lens at the far corner of the floor, the distant bay area organized on the black and white grid of tiles — the locale of this very building — when she realized exactly what she was photographing.

  A game board.

  An enormous black talisman of a game board: that's what Anger had constructed here, and that's what he was using to summon the unspeakable from the dark. The entire city was transformed into a game, and the Disciple, and Lydon — and probably Eva herself — were all game pieces, with different values, different ranks, different functions. Eva lowered the camera from her eye and glanced at the Avenue X area. The Disciple had been vanquished by — what? — a knight? She glanced over at the Ghetto 3 sector. Lydon had been taken by... what? Whom? What was Eva's function? Was she part of the game? Eva stepped over rows of housing blocks and buildings, and stood near the old pier. She put the camera to her eye and snapped another shot, the dry-light blooming in the darkness. Again she looked through the lens, and she saw a little scale model of Anger's building, complete with perfectly rendered bloodstains. The roof was cutaway, and Eva could see through the lens, down into Anger's building, into the very foyer she was standing in —

  — and her breath froze suddenly in her lungs, and her skin turned to ice as she saw another miniature of herself. Standing in the miniature foyer. Standing in the tiny scale model of the city. Which was a scale model of a scale model. Eva's tiny likeness was hunched down there, taking pictures with a teeny-tiny digi-cam.

  Eva swallowed needles. Upon closer scrutiny she could see the miniature figurine of herself looking down at an even tinier version of herself. Who was looking down at an even tinier version. Who was looking down at —

  — Nnnnneeeeebirrrossss!

  A sudden, tremendous whisper exhaled through the air above her, stiffening her spine, making her scalp crawl. She ducked reflexively down in the dark, nearly dropping her camera, her flesh rashing with goose bumps. What in Heaven or Hell could have made a whisper that loud? It sounded like an unearthly turbine filling the dark studio, the sigh of a monolith gusting through the darkness.

  Sargannnnnatannnaaassssss!!

  The second gasp of noise drove Eva to the floor, the camera spinning off into the wreckage of the malevolent miniature city. She crawled through shattered bits of obsidian and shards of hangman's wood, scanning the shadows around her, searching for the source of the infernal whispering. Her traumatized brain was sparking connections, identifying the tsunami of sound whirling through the dark space overhead.

  Fleurrrrrrrrrrreteeeeeeee!

  Eva froze stiffly against a pile of broken pumice stone, her chest seizing up with cold panic. She recognized the words now, the magical significance of the names. Nebiros, Sarganatanas, Fleurety — the hierarchy of demons. The unspeakable names which formed the BlackStuffer's nuclear arsenal. Forbidden utterances meant only for apocalyptic rites. Summonings of unimaginable evil.

  Such as the Rip.

  Agaaaaaallllllliarrrrrept!!

  Eva sprang to her feet, suddenly drawing her elemental like a gunslinger.

  Then several things were happening at once.

  Eva swung the muzzle up at the ceiling just as the entire upper portion of the building seemed to metamorphose into a shimmering blanket of shadows, unfurling like smoke, revealing incredible heights of darkness that seemed to reach up into the vacuum of space. And it happened so suddenly that Eva acted on instinct and squeezed off a shot, and there was an audible POP! as the crimson flame bloomed out of the elemental's muzzle and shot up into the terrible nothingness —

  — Ssssssaaatannnnaaaacheeeeeeaaaa!!! —

  — and then Eva was spinning toward the east wall in one lurching movement, fleeing through miniature allies, around tiny street corners, reaching inside her flapping duster, pulling the blessed Sword from its scabbard. The eighteen-inch metal stun-blade was buzzing softly with white energy as Eva stumbled over delicate, little buildings, locking her gaze onto the brick wall five meters ahead of her. Something enormous was moving above her.

  Eva's whisper was a faint prayer, almost inaudible, a secret invocation: "I love you, Grandma Miersol, I love you, Mom —"

  She drove the tip of the Sword through the leprous bricks as though shoving a spike through butter.

  There was a sub-sonic WHHHUMMMP! — the wall puckering suddenly around the Sword — and Eva felt a capsule of cold air engulfing her arm as the bricks melted away like a strip of celluloid film burning in the center. On the other side was darkness. Eva plunged into the shadows, then ran for all she was worth, her frantic steps crunching through something brittle beneath her.

  Her stride faltered suddenly, and she slowed down, her lungs heaving. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, she began to see the telltale outlines of tiny objects strewn across the floor beneath her, some of them glistening like broken glass, some of them rising up several feet like tiny stalagmites. Her heart clenched suddenly as though an icy dagger had pierced her chest with a terrible realization.

  LLLLLOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSIIIIFERRRRR!!

  The last gigantic whisper crashed above her, stealing her breath away, and she stopped. She tried to catch her breath. Glancing around the shadowy interior, she realized she was still in Kenneth Anger's studio, still walking amid the miniature city! She was trapped, and now she knew it didn't matter how hard she fought, she would never leave this room. She would never leave it. Because she was the object of the game. She was the final piece. She recognized the sixth and final name: Lucifer.

  She glanced up, mouth gaping open, the Sword slipping from her grasp.

  If it is possible to see the opposite of light, then that is what Eva Strange saw illuminating the vast Escher-like world rising above her in the infinite darkness. The ceiling was gone, and in its place were elaborate buildings vaulting up into the black heavens, their blank windows shimmering in the anti-light, their spires vanishing into empty space. The same buildings as those of the miniature! And situated throughout the impossible sky line, perched on balconies like recalcitrant owls, their black cowls obscuring their faces as they gazed down upon Eva, were six gargantuan figures. The six old men. The puppeteers. The wizards of this broken world: Nebiros, Sarganatanas, Fleurety, Agaliarept, Satanachia, and Lucifer. They were there at Eva's birth, and they were there at her induction into the white patrol, and they were here, at the unraveling of her destiny.

  A massive weight pressed down on Eva as she reached down to her Cup and grasped the last round of ammunition. Sadness, rage, helplessness, regret and bitterness all swirled at once through her brain as she gaped up at the impossible black riddle of a world above her. She was staring at a vast version of Anger's miniature city rising above her, and above it, an even larger version, and above it, an even larger one, and on and on, into forever. This was the manifestation of the end that Eva had dreaded all her life, the unraveling of Logic, the Rip in the delicate balance of reality. This was her inexorable Fate. This was what destiny held for the last virgin witch, the last of her bloodline.

  She slammed the last round into the elemental— Click-chucka-clang! —
then gazed up in terrible wonder at the pale figure towering above her. It was a middle-aged woman in a satiny dark duster and a flowing mane of iron grey hair, standing alone, gazing up at the black cathedrals. It was Eva's 'Sylpha'— her doppelganger — gazing up at an even greater version of herself, who was gazing up at an even greater version, and on and on as far as Eva's tearful, traumatized gaze could reach.

  One shot left.

  The Old Ones were chanting now, incantations that Eva did not recognize. She couldn't move. She realized they were going to absorb her. She was the sacrificial virgin, the spring lamb on the slaughtering block, and she felt the anguish weighing down on her. And the pressure was tremendous, an elephant standing on her heart. She realized her life had been a foregone conclusion, and all her struggles were mere prelude to this awful conclusion. She was holding her elemental with both hands now, and somehow she managed to aim it up at the Old Ones. She had one last shot and she wanted to make it count.

  No second chances.

  The chanting rose to excruciating levels, and Eva felt a cold, hideous finger entering her.

  She began to weep, the ripples of sound and movement echoing throughout the giant versions of herself above her. The elemental was shaking in Eva's trembling hands. She knew what she had to do. Her true destiny was borne out of generations of suffering, generations of white witches protecting life, protecting love and nature and humanity.

  One shot!

  "GOD HELP ME!"

  Her scream was razor of pure white energy slicing through the endless worlds, and somehow, through all her convulsive terror, she managed one last burst of stubborn, righteous goodness, and with her right thumb she made an instantaneous adjustment to the elemental's firing pin, closing off three out of the four natural elements — earth, air, and water — leaving only fire, the harbinger of destruction for her loved ones, fire, the cleansing flames that had brought a cruel end to her ancestors, Nettie and Mary and Helen and Miersol and Sarah — FIRE ALONE! — the missing puzzle piece to Eva Strange's fate.