by Levi Black
I snap the fingers on my right hand and my Mark flares and I feel it jolt down the invisible connection between me and the skinhound.
I need to name the damn thing.
He turns his head to look at me over his shoulder and stops growling.
“He’s a friend.”
The skinhound swivels his head toward the man, then back at me. After a long second the skinhound chuffs through the holes he uses for nostrils, turns, and slowly climbs back into the puddle of ichor he left in the chair. He turns in a circle, nails scratching on the man-made material, before dropping back to where he was before the man entered the room. The skinhound squirms down into the cushion, settling back into place.
The man hasn’t moved, wide eyes still locked on the skinhound.
“Hey, Lionel,” I say softly, “it’s okay. Come on in.”
He steps in, eyes moving from the skinhound to me and back; they’re zigging and zagging rapidly. Lionel’s freaking out. He’s a trauma nurse, so his freaking out is internal, not running in terror, but it’s still happening inside him.
But he’s here.
He points at the chair. “Um, pardon my French, Jane, but what the fuck is that?”
“That’s … Winnie.” At the name the skinhound raises his head and pants. I guess he’s okay with it.
Winnie the Skinhound.
That’d make a hell of a children’s book.
I speak to draw Lionel’s attention back to me. “Thanks for coming in.”
His eyes slide my way and focus and I see it when he just files away the weird. That nurse training must be some real shit. “I’m on shift in a few hours anyway.”
“I still appreciate it.”
He nods.
“I’m not going to be here much longer.”
“I’m surprised you’re here now,” he says. “It’s been weeks.”
“I’ve been busy. Things have been weird.”
His eyes go to the skinhound. “No shit, Sherlock.”
Lionel is still a bit of an asshole, but I don’t rise to the bait. “When I leave I’m going to be doing things that, hopefully, will fix this.”
“And you want me to keep watching over John?”
I nod.
“So, this is you saying good-bye to him?”
“I plan on coming back.”
“But you might not?”
“I might not.”
We look at each other for a long time. Finally, he says, “You should come back or don’t go.”
“If I don’t go, he will never wake up.”
His eyes flick to the skinhound sleeping on the chair. “I don’t believe in hinky shit. Not even a little. My whole family is convinced my nana’s ghost lives in my mother’s closet, but not me.”
I shrug. “I don’t believe in hinky shit either.”
“You’re talking about hinky shit now, aren’t you?”
“The hinkiest shit you could ever imagine.”
He thinks for a long moment. “Okay then.”
“Okay? That was quick.”
He shrugs. “Don’t have much choice when the hinky shit is right in front of me. I still don’t think Nana is hanging around in a closet, but maybe this Sunday I’ll open the door and take a peek.”
I nod, but I am tired of this walking around the conversation and the pressure of the mission in front of me is riding my back. I put my hand on Daniel’s chest. His heartbeat is steady under my palm, a sign that his body is not the problem, not what is keeping him in his comatose state.
“His name is Daniel Alexander Langford. He’s twenty-four years old and he was a wrestling champion in high school. That should be enough information for you to find him online and track down his parents.”
Lionel blinks at me. “You really think you might not come back.”
“What I have to do isn’t going to be a walk in the park.”
“How long do you want me to wait before using this information?”
“One week.”
“I’ll wait two.”
I shake my head. It’s generous, but if I don’t make it back the magick that I did to keep Daniel here off the books might stop working.
Probably will stop working.
“One week. It won’t take that long. But if I’m not back by then find his parents and let them take him home.”
Lionel moves to the other side of the bed. It puts the skinhound behind him, but he doesn’t seem worried about it. Lionel really does adapt quickly. He looks down at the bed. “Daniel, huh?”
“Yes.”
He nods. “I can see it. I had him pegged for a Mark in my head, but he does look like a Daniel, now that I know. Not Dan or Danny but Daniel.”
“Never Dan or Danny.” I’m quoting something Daniel said in our first conversation.
The door opens. Javier and Ashtoreth walk in holding armfuls of flowers and balloons. The skinhound raises his head but stays on the chair. Lionel turns. “They with you?”
“Yes.”
The two of them come in and begin putting the things they carry around the room without talking. They quickly have every spare surface covered. The room seems to brighten immediately. My throat feels tight and the skin under my eyes grows warm.
I refuse to cry again.
I lean down and press my lips to Daniel’s forehead.
I’m not crying; you’re crying.
31
MY FINGERTIPS ARE slippery.
Winnie the skinhound is coated in something like mineral oil; it’s light and odorless and absorbs quickly into my skin.
I’m not thinking about that part.
“This is going to work?”
Ashtoreth kneels across from me, Winnie lies between us. Her hands hover above Winnie’s flank. Small crackles of magick jump between her and him. It looks like spatters of bacon grease, near translucent and popping quickly. Winnie doesn’t move or show any sign that what she’s doing is hurting him.
She doesn’t answer me, just keeps with the magick hands, looking vaguely over my left shoulder.
“Well?” I prod again.
I see Javier move from the corner of my eye. “She probably needs to concentrate.”
Ashtoreth doesn’t say anything, but her mouth moves in a twitch of smile.
“It’s not like she’s afraid to talk. She does it. A lot,” Javier says. “Did it the whole way to the gift shop downstairs and the whole way back.”
So I shut up and wait for the whore goddess to work, but it isn’t easy. This is it. I can feel it. This is the key to finally finding the Man in Black. Weeks of looking and I’m going to be able to hunt him down and get back Daniel’s life force.
TO DESTROY THE GODDAMNED MAN IN BLACK WHO DUMPED ME INTO THIS WORLD OF ELDER GOD SHIT.
Whoa.
That was more than anger. That was raw, seething fury. That thought just stabbed me to my core.
Immediately I capture it and push it into a box just like I learned in therapy. I put it there and I look down on it, disconnected from it, studying it, putting it outside of my brain function so it doesn’t interfere. Because I know I’m angry at Nyarlathotep, but emotions like that one cause me to do things that will only wind up hurting myself or someone I love.
Having parsed that feeling out and separating from it, I know exactly what made me react like that.
I love Daniel. Before the Man in Black put him in the coma, he said that he loved me, and I actually believe him.
But it’s been weeks that he’s been stuck in this hospital because I haven’t been able to find Nyarlathotep. Weeks of me tracking down creatures who had any trace of the Man in Black on them. I’ve fought and killed them trying to find him.
I’ve tortured some of them.
I’ve done horrible, bloody things in my pursuit.
For him, for Daniel.
But Daniel is a kind soul. He’s not weak, but one of the things that drew me to him, that made it possible to let him inside, was his gentle soul. Daniel is the guy
next door, the friend who is always there. He’s just … nice, so very nice, and so very, very normal.
Will he see me, learn the things I’ve done, and hate me for them?
He will know. He will sense it, smell it on me like blood I can’t wash off.
And I was fucked up to start with; how fucked up am I now?
Fucked up enough that I’m kneeling on the floor beside Daniel’s bed wrapped in the still-living skin of an archangel with a cursed sword and other magickal objects in its pockets petting my skinless dog while my new friend the whore goddess searches him with magick for a way to track down and kill a chaos god.
And I’m eager to do it.
Deep down in my heart of hearts, that most secret place inside me, I don’t think there is a “normal” that I want to go back to.
Oh gods, I am fucked up.
Ashtoreth rocks back on her heels and lets out a breath forceful enough that I feel it on my face. She’s been holding it awhile. “It can be done.”
“Let’s do it then.”
Her mouth is a hard line for a long moment.
“What?” I ask.
“You should consider what we may be going into.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll go to the ends of the earth to get him.”
“Charlie, please.” Her fingers begin pulling the hair that hangs beside her face. “I know you have dealt with the Crawling Chaos, but—”
“There you go with the ‘buts’ again.”
“I just want you to know that you are dealing with very bloodthirsty gods. Nyarlathotep is the embodiment of chaos and destruction. He is the only begotten son of Azathoth, the Mad God, the Maelstrom of Insanity at the center of Creation.”
“Jesus, laying it on a little thick, aren’t you?”
She blinks at me. “You joke about this?”
I fight to keep the edge of my voice soft. “I’ve not only ‘dealt’ with the Man in Black; I’ve sent his Crawling Chaos ass running.” The coat around me trills at the back of my brain, not loudly, just a small, nagging singsong noise.
Yes, I couldn’t have done it without you.
The coat falls silent again, satisfied.
“But—”
“Stop,” I cut her off. “I don’t know your history with him, but I feel like you’ve known him for a long time.”
Her head nods slowly, down and then up.
“Do you think he has abandoned his plan to free Amazoth—”
“Azathoth.” She says it quickly, like a knife between the ribs, in then out.
“Whatever, not the point, do you think he has quit on his plans and is now going to sit on a beach somewhere drinking mai tais and watching sunsets?”
She giggles. I wasn’t trying to be funny. “No, I do not think that.”
“Then let’s dispense with all this warning crap and get down to business.” I glance over my shoulder. “You still in, Javi?”
He steps forward and sits next to me.
I take that as a yes.
Winnie the skinhound nudges Javier’s leg with his head. Javier reaches out, his fingers hesitating for a long moment before he lets his hand fall and begins stroking Winnie on the back of his neck. His fingers make a soft bahh-loop! sound, like a muffled xylophone across the exposed vertebrae.
“That’s not what I thought he would feel like,” Javier says.
“Yeah, me either.”
Winnie’s whipcord tail thumps the tile.
Ashtoreth puts her hand on Winnie and pets him with us and we share a moment of perfect peace.
We should have enjoyed it more.
32
THE COAT IS afraid.
I can feel it vibrating on my skin as it stretches around the four of us on the outside of the skinhound in the center, binding us all five together.
Javier is afraid.
With him standing to my right, our bodies pressed in a line from hip to shoulder, it rolls off him so strongly I can smell it in the back of my teeth like copper pennies in a hot pan.
Winnie is excited.
He pants, leaning against my legs like a big cat inside the cocoon of the coat.
Ashtoreth has her mouth pressed against mine.
We are not kissing.
I’ve had enough kissing.
But she claims this is the only chaste way for her to guide my wish ability to take us to the Man in Black. She is a goddess of love and sex. Her magick only works one way.
So her lips surround mine, which stay in a hard line. Her magick presses in and my bottom jaw goes numb, tingling from my chin to my earlobes. The front of my brain says to just open up, just let her in, it’s only a kiss. My logic. The Rational.
The back of my brain, the lizard part, screams for me to fight and resist. The intuition. The Primal.
A third part of my mind dispassionately wonders why I didn’t have any triggers when me and Javier did this earlier. I was hesitant, but the lizard voice in my head was quiet. Now it is full-on screaming.
Dissociation.
My head has worked this way since that night at fourteen.
I feel her tongue worm against my lips and I clench my teeth.
My hands move to push her back, landing on her arms, when the magick bursts and floods my skull, shutting down all the voices and thoughts and even concepts in a blast of raw, goddess-level power.
My entire existence goes bitter yellow, so sharp it pricks me to my marrow, and I am drowning in it, not pulled down—that would imply that I have weight and substance—no, I am completely and absolutely overwhelmed.
Washed away.
Snuffed out.
Until the coat digs its way into my mind and snags me just as I am almost swallowed up.
I grab that black tendril and pull myself back to the surface.
And there I find the world opened up to me.
It’s my mindspace, the spot in my magick I use to find things. Here I feel desire like pinpricks that draw my attention. It’s like a map but not like a map at all. It’s mindspace. It’s magick. It’s not reality in a way that is normal.
Hard to describe.
I can see Javier like he’s been smudged, a finger-painted version of himself spattered with water. I don’t study him, letting my mind’s eye slide over him before his desires can be revealed to me.
Besides, Ashtoreth is in front of me, a tower of lustful colour that pulls my mind’s eye as if hooks have embedded in it.
She is a golden shape, hollow and semi-translucent. Magenta desire, chartreuse want, and cerulean need all burst inside her bleeding into one another in a firework rainbow symphony that is less beautiful and far more sinister.
Charlie, her voice skin-slips along the membrane of my thoughts, are you aware?
I am.
Good. I thought this might be overwhelming to you.
Her concern annoys me.
Friends worry about each other, don’t they?
Her knowing my feelings annoys me more.
What do I need to do?
Look to—
The thing she says in my head is like a burst of static. It squelches and buzzes and it hurts like sizzling bacon grease running along the folds and grooves of my brain.
“What the hell was that, Ash?”
Sorry. Look to … what is your name for him?… Winnie.
My mind’s eye shifts down, where my feet would be if I were in my own head instead of being in my own head.
Mindspace is weird.
Winnie is a hard shape. Most things in this part of my head are not static. They pulse and shimmer and shine and wink and mostly look as if they are underwater. The skinhound is the first thing I’ve ever Seen that has hard edges. It appears as if he has been coated in latex so black it shines blue. A hard line of bright crimson, so luminescent it is almost neon, crackles between me and him, our link, my magick, bonding us together.
Do you see it?
“What am I looking for, Ash?”
The connection to … Nyarlathotep.
I focus my attention, narrowing in on Winnie’s representation here. I scan him with my mind’s eye, rolling over his sleek shape.
I don’t see …
Wait.
At the bottom of his left paw I find it. A tiny thread the colour of dead man’s blood. It spools out into mindspace, running on for a long time. I study it closely.
It’s almost nothing, the barest hint of a connection, a true loose end.
But at the other end I can feel him.
The Man in Black.
Gotcha.
I gather us up, make a wish, and shove us down the line, clinging to the thread as our guide.
33
WE TUMBLE OUT onto hard-packed earth like coins turned out of pockets.
I lie on my back and suck in oxygen, fighting away white and red spots that swarm from the corners of my closed eyes. There is no air in wish travel and that was a long trip. The longest I’ve ever jumped. Full of fearsome colours and malignant planets who tracked us as we passed. I don’t know if wish travel is through another dimension or through outer space or something else altogether but it’s so coldly alien that every moment in it causes you to feel as if you are folding in on yourself, that you are so insignificant you should cease to exist, not a suggestion of such but the truth of it irrefutable and absolute, and it makes your humanity feel as if it is a candle flame that has been snuffed by the finger of God.
Something cold and wet licks the side of my face.
I open my eyes to find the skinhound standing over me with his head cocked sideways, looking down at me with his one egg yolk of an eye.
It takes me a few seconds’ concentration to push out, “Hey, Winnie.”
His teeth part and that overlong, blister pink tongue flops from his jaws, lying over the jagged line of teeth embedded in bone. I push his head away before he can lick me again.
A rustling sound to my left makes me look over. Ashtoreth is rising to her feet. She’s changed. Somewhere in the trip she has shifted forms, slipped from the body she was in to a new one. Her hair is still dark as crow feathers, but now it twists and twirls around her face, gorgonesque, a nest of snakes. She’s taller and definitively more … mature, the swells and curves of her body exaggerated against the loose silver shift her clothes have become. She is everything woman: earth mother, seductress, queen, nymph, and sorceress all at once, bathed in three miles of feminine mystique.