by Levi Black
“Charlie, I—”
“Shut the fuck up, Javier.”
He stops talking.
The smoke is at my throat.
“You wanted to come along. This is the price. Guard him until I return.”
“You’re going to make it back?” His voice is tight, full of doubt.
“I won’t abandon you here.” Please let me not abandon him here.
“Promise?”
“No matter what it takes.”
The smoke brushes my chin like oily fingers.
It is cold on my lips as it rushes into my mouth and slithers to my lungs like a snake burrowing after warm-blooded prey.
49
THE SMOKE ROLLS down my esophagus, coating the sides of it like cold mineral oil, clinging as it does, and splashes into my lungs in clots of congestion, and I can’t breathe because I am drowning.
My chest is solid, thick with congealed smoke and no room for precious oxygen, so heavy, too heavy to expand and draw in breath. My diaphragm pulls, a rubber seal holding too much pressure, and all I can think is that it wasn’t designed to do this, to be this, to perform under this circumstance, and the world turns dark behind my eyes in a red wet throb and this is what it feels like to drown in a bog, to be sucked under the thick swamp and smothered and drowned and suffocated by things too thick to truly be water anymore, a substance that fills more than just water ever could, some primordial soup that we all came from and now tries to bond back with the flesh of me and turn me into itself and I will be no more I, simply more it.
It’s beyond panic, beyond fear, too solid to be anything but inevitable.
The magick in me flares, boiling the viscosity of it away, clearing my lungs and my brain in a harsh scrub like bleached sunlight killing a mold.
I suck in air and as my hearing returns I realize Ashtoreth is gasping like I am.
The torc around my throat tingles, almost buzzing against my skin. It came from her, the thing that makes my magick able to move me through space and take others with me. She gifted it to me, at the order of the Man in Black, in a dilapidated, abandoned motel room when we first met. It ties me to her.
“You okay?” I ask her.
She nods, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands, and they smear black streaks across her temples. I didn’t know she was wearing mascara. Her face has changed since the last time I looked at her. It has the same crow black hair, but now it bounces in sweeping curls around a squarish jaw. Her features are painted copper and blunt, all the delicacy of her younger version wiped away. It is a face of someone who has seen her loved ones go off to war and now lives with the sure knowledge they will never return. A face of sorrow. Her eyes remind me of Meemaw Moore.
And, suddenly, I don’t want to take her with me. I don’t know where we are going, my magick does, and I have to keep pushing it back, holding it at bay so I can think about her and this and how I don’t want to do this with her or to her. Wherever we go is not going to be easy; it won’t be a simple thing to walk in, pick up the elder goddess mate of the King in Yellow, and skip back with her. I know too well that getting involved with these things always ends in blood and pain and things too thick to be washed off easily. This is going to hurt, in one way or the other, and I want to spare Ashtoreth any more hurt if I can.
“You don’t have a choice.”
Her words jar me.
The protest begins to form and I open my mouth.
She cuts me off.
“You have to take me or leave me here, and please, please, do not leave me here.” Her eyes are wide, unblinking, imploring me as the desperation pours out of them.
Mylendor moves closer. “She can leave you behind, little Ishtar. We will gladly care for you while they are away.”
I step between Ashtoreth and the Hound of Carcosa. “Back the fuck off, Fido.”
Mylendor growls.
I growl in return and my magick is already up and provoked; it climbs my back like a scorpion’s tail wanting to strike.
The King in Yellow speaks softly. “Heel.”
Mylendor draws upright and shakes herself. She turns and slinks to his side.
“Enough,” he says. “Do as we agreed.”
The magick boils in my blood, filling all my ability to perceive, and I am done with all of this. Enough time has been wasted, enough energy has been expended, and I have to bring this to an end. I barely think the thought and the coat obeys, unfurling in streamers from me, wrapping both Ashtoreth and Nyarlathotep in ribbons of itself, binding them to me.
I let the magick inside me loose and the flavor of the smoke fills my mind, sweeping up from my tongue and the insides of my nostrils all bacony-charred flesh and dried wood and charcoal and something sweet and acidic and spicy that coats the inside of my mouth and won’t wash away no matter how much I swallow.
I don’t fucking care where we are going, I just let go and ride the magick away from this goddamned place-that-isn’t-a-place and these goddamned gods.
50
I HIT THE ground knees first, and my stomach tries to crawl its way out of my throat.
Dammit, without Javier, or someone else, to be the battery my magick powered us here with my own life force to fuel it.
I swallow hard to keep the acid out of my mouth.
I’m on my knees.
There is grass under me and the night air is sticky and wet.
I shove back and stand, too fast, try to step quick and right myself, but my heel catches the edge of the coat. It pulls out from under my foot and the motion skews me sideways. I am falling and all I can do is brace for the impact.
Something clamps on my arm, halting my momentum and holding me still enough to untangle my feet.
Ashtoreth’s hand holds me.
I pull free, careful to not jerk away, because I’m thankful she kept me upright.
I smile at her in gratitude and she turns her eyes away.
The Man in Black’s voice is a sneer when it comes. “You should have allowed her to fall, Mother of Prostitutes.”
“I will not do that.” Her voice is steady but small.
“Will you not?” His hands cut through the air in front of him like drunken fish in a barrel of whiskey. “Do you not eventually let everyone fall? Is that not the definition of a whore’s promise, goddess of them or not? Surely you do not think your divinity is more than your nature.”
Ashtoreth doesn’t reply.
I try to speak in her defense, but the sick threatens to come out if I do, pushing against the back of my tongue where it connects to my throat at the esophagus, and so I breathe through my nose with my teeth clenched and growl because I can’t do more yet.
The Man in Black ignores me and stares her down, eyes dripping with dark wanton sensuality, smoldering in their sockets like hot coals. “Ah, Mystery, you are so transparent!” he cries as he sways around her, near capering, the black suit he wears hugging his frame like a second skin.
The coat flutters around me, agitated.
The Man in Black claps, fat droplets of magenta magick spattering off the red right hand, squeezed out by the impact, striking the ground in a rattle like teeth in a tin can. He leans close and his lips pull back as if by wires, exposing triple rows of jagged shark teeth in a smile made of homicide. His voice comes harsh, the rasp of file on steel. “Now why, little harlot, are you acting as if you are not going to put out when we both know that is all you are here for?”
Ashtoreth flinches with every syllable.
Goddamn enough.
I swallow my sick.
Two strides and I’m there. I crunch down and keep moving and ram my shoulder into his chest, swinging my elbows up on contact to drive them deep into his ribs. It’s a body check learned in Greco-Roman class and it uses all my mass against his torso, the goal to drive your opponent away and off their center of gravity.
Nyarlathotep folds like a dirty towel.
My arm hits nothing but the cloth of his shirt and it feels like
a stretched canvas, something pulled tight over a gap, a nothing.
He stumbles away and I watch closely; I can’t believe I moved him so easily.
He stops, hunched over, red right hand pressed deep against his side. It glows a harsh yellow, the colour of mustard left to dry in the sun, the etheric energy highlighting the raw red flesh of his hand in sunset colours.
His wound.
The King in Yellow said that the wound I gave him with the Aqedah hadn’t healed. I didn’t realize it was so severe.
Inside me that thing that lives in my belly, that dark entity that slithers in my guts and makes me want to burn the world one shitheel at a time like a trail of struck match heads all charred and curled and sulfur stained, that thing rolls in a happy way and begins a slow climb up to my brain. If it gets there I don’t know what I will become.
But I don’t try to fight it back down.
Its voice is mine as I say, “Leave her alone. I’ve had enough of you and yours cutting at her with your implications and snide remarks.”
The Man in Black eyes me sideways, hunched around the red right hand pressed to his chest. Under the spoiled butter halo of the magick from his hand is a seeping black that wicks through the fabric of his shirt in an ever-widening stain. His hand moves away, fingers sweeping down to indicate the wound.
“I see in your eyes you think this a weakness.”
“Isn’t it?” I smirk. “It helped nearly knock you on your ass just now.”
He straightens. “Mewling human. You do not know weakness. Even with this”—his hand pulls away from the dark spot on his shirt and it begins to fade as I watch—“I am greater than you can even conceive. My will is resolute and my eye keen.”
“Your eye isn’t as keen as my knife.”
“The knife you stole from me.”
“Won from you.”
“I think not.”
“Ask for it back then.”
“You will not return it to me.”
“Believe me, you son of a bitch, I will return the Aqedah to you one day.” My smile feels wolfish, like my teeth have thickened into bone crackers and I taste the buttery iron of marrow across my tongue. “I’ll return it straight through your cold, black heart.”
He chuckles and it is a slithering thing across the skin of my shoulders. “You are going to aim for the black one this time? The others will be so relieved.”
“You aren’t funny.”
“Humor is everywhere.”
“It’s not.”
“You own my knife, but you own no understanding. The universe is one tremendous joke.” His hands swirl around as he near dances. “What could be funnier than a starving child? A mother watching her child wasting from hunger, belly swollen with the gasses from the juices within as they eat away the lining for lack of even a bite of food, unable to save them? Ah!” A raw red finger juts to the sky. “The truest joke played in this life! A mother watching her child starve to death while she has more food than she could ever eat.”
His words crawl across my brain and I feel the pang of hunger like a knot in my belly that hangs from the back of my throat.
I shake my head and mutter, “Fucking elder gods.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.” I wave him off. “Just leave her alone and stand there while I try to find this Ship Current.”
“Shupnikkurat?”
“Whatever K-I-Y’s wifey-bitch is called.”
“Ishnigarrab, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, Mother Midnight, Ram with a Thousand Eyes, Crimson Blasphemy, Ten-horn, Lilith, Shub Niggurath…” The Man in Black counts off using his red right hand, the fingers gleaming in the moonlight like they are wet, and I realize we are in some kind of pine scrub, the spindly trees spaced far enough apart and stunted enough that weak moonlight falls on us.
Something crawls across my neck, something small with a half-dozen itchy legs.
I swat at it and my fingers come away with a small, hard thing and I realize it’s just a ladybug. It crawls up my fingers, struggling with the oily coating of sweat touching my skin has left behind. I shake it off and quit watching it as it falls toward the ground. The air is thick, humidity wrapping my head like a wet towel, making the heat invasive, crawling under the coat, under my clothes until I am damp from head to toe.
Moist.
I hate that fucking word.
It feels dirty in my mouth, dirtier than fuck or shit or even cunt, and I can never say it without feeling like a pervert.
And I hate feeling like a pervert.
The prickly heat makes me feel strange, like things with too many legs are crawling under the coat, and the thought of using my magick again threatens to make my stomach churn.
I take a deep breath.
What must be done, must be done.
Ashtoreth speaks. “I can find her, Charlie.”
The Man in Black spits and I swear it sizzles in the carpet of pine needles that covers the ground. “Such a familiar.”
His tone makes it sound like an insult.
Ashtoreth ignores him, looking only at me. “With this thing I can help. The Great Mother and I are … close. She is near enough that I can lead us to her.”
I don’t have to use magick? “Okay,” I say.
Ashtoreth leans in and her skin glistens with microdots of sweat. I didn’t know goddesses could sweat. Her voice is close to a whisper. “You can draw from your fetishes for power.”
The word jolts me, shakes me, and my mind rolls it around in growing anger at the intimacy and assumption and I am furious and full of anger at this, this whore goddess labeling me.
Who the hell does she think she is?
Wait.
Wait.
Fetish. A sexual desire.
Also an object of magickal power.
The coat, the torc, my mark, Oathbreaker, the Aqedah, Cthulhu’s gem that remains hidden deep in the folds of the coat.
My fetishes.
She moves away before I can apologize for my thoughts.
The Man in Black stares at me.
“What?” I say.
“Our little goddess is very helpful to you.”
“That’s what friends do.”
He smirks.
“What?”
“Nothing, Charlotte Tristan Moore, but perhaps we should follow your oh, so helpful friend before she disappears.”
Looking around, I find Ashtoreth has moved far enough away that I have a hard time picking her out of the darkness. She is cresting a small hill about thirty feet away, all softly gleaming skin and darkness melding hair. A trail of clothes lies behind her, skirt crumpled on the ground like a shed skin, blouse swaying on a scrawny pine branch that bounces with its weight. Ashtoreth is naked as she drops down the other side of the short bluff and I can’t see her anymore.
As I move after her Nyarlathotep falls in behind me and I wonder if when I catch up to her will she still be naked or will she have manifested some new form with clothes and everything?
“We shall see, Coatbearer,” the Man in Black mutters from nearly beside me. “We shall see.”
51
THE ANSWER IS clothes.
Mostly.
The bluff is troublesome to climb, the pine needles sliding underfoot on a bed of gritty red clay and threatening to knock you on your skull. The coat helps me stay upright by stretching to lash itself to pine scrub or brace me from tilting too far over my center of gravity; if it didn’t then I’d fall and tumble and wind up skull knocked.
The Man in Black walks as if it were a summer afternoon and he had not a care in the world, as if the ground were smooth and paved under his feet, and I hate him for my struggle.
If anyone would be at home in the darkness it’d be him.
The other side of the bluff is a steep ridge that drops away for about fifty feet. The pine needles lie in pockets around rocks like silvery puddles. The exposed dirt is weirdly bright brown, orange tinted in the moonlight.
I look past her and study the building in the gravel lot. The wall toward us is dark from the ground to about halfway up in a strange undulating wave pattern. A handful of smaller shacks lean around the back of the building, standing but not straight, all with very similar metal roofs. In the center of the main building is a black pipe spewing a steady stream of gray smoke that swirls through the air and settles around the building like a shroud of spider silk.
The Man in Black is close and leans closer.
“Traitor,” he whispers.
The coat screams in my head, and even though I don’t understand its language, I know a “fuck you” when I hear it.
The Man in Black mutters something I don’t understand and is suddenly gone from beside me in a swirl of darkness. One moment there, the next gone, and I choke on the rotten egg stench of sulfur. He stutters back into existence down the ridge beside Ashtoreth, looming above her. She takes a quick step away and he leans toward her.
If he hurts her …
The coat trills across the back of my brain and the noise of it calls out Ashtoreth’s words.
You can draw from your fetishes for power.
Okay.
I reach inside the coat and my right hand goes numb and tingly from the cold that envelops it. I think about it and my fingers brush the dry silk of the ribbons around Oathbreaker’s handle. I close them, but I don’t pull it out. I don’t trust it. I don’t know how to do this, to do what Ashtoreth said I could do. I roll magick from the center of me down into my Mark and it grows warm.
There is a tug as Oathbreaker responds. It reminds me of fishing with my father as a small girl, when my world was all innocence and summer days, before that night, before the trial, and way before the Man in Black and this elder-god-end-of-the-world bullshit. I’d sit next to my dad, glad to be there beside the lake, looking out over the water, holding the fishing pole he had baited for me, watching the end of it for movement. Long hours of him and me and the summer heat and the green smells and the soft jazz playing over the small radio he kept in his tackle box until, suddenly, the pole would bend and the line would jerk, as a fish took the bait and ran.