Jack said nothing. There wasn’t much he could have said.
He had Barry’s wounds staunched for the most part, and it was a matter of waiting for the last of the bleeding to ebb. In time, Barry sat straighter, his breathing less ragged.
“I didn’t know I had the healer’s touch,” Jack said.
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re okay.” Barry flexed his shoulder and winced, wind-milling the arm in its socket. “There’s more to those claws than sharpness. They don’t just tear flesh. It goes a lot deeper than that.”
“You look all right.”
“If he’d touched you, you’d be in a right state. Your body might survive, but your mind…” He mimed shooting himself between the eyes, flexing his fingers on the other side of his head to represent brain splatter.
“Then why did you get so close?”
“When I came, I knew somebody was screwing around here, but I never expected Harper. He’s a vulture, preys off pain and fear and death that others bring.” He looked sickened. “If he’s got his fingers in this deep, he must have been here a long time. Years. Maybe longer.”
“What happens if we can’t stop him?”
“Our little mission to keep the Web in one piece gets harder. A lot harder.” He was much stronger now, and mettle laced his face, a temerity and fire far more terrifying and radiant than the unreasoning panic he’d showed moments before. “It all pulls apart like wet fucking tissue, and then everyone on it…” He juggled an imaginary handful of dice and threw them into the air. “All bets are off.”
Jack resisted the urge to swallow, but something hard and round had lodged in his throat. “This Harper, this thing, whatever he is, he’s here to end the world. How?”
“Like I said: every man, woman and child you’ve ever known, seen or read about in the tabloids, gone. Poof. Taken. This world will be wiped clean like a slate tablet. One second, they’ll all just be gone.”
“Where?”
“Taken. To a place far from here.”
“Where?”
Barry blinked slowly. “I don’t know.”
Jack jerked. “What?”
“I don’t know. I’m no all-father, mate. I don’t have all the answers. I’m just as much a pawn as you. But I do know what I need to know: somebody’s trying to tip a balance that can’t be, not without destroying everything—and I mean everything, all places, all times, all of All Where.”
“Why?”
Barry shrugged. “Above my pay grade. I’m just a soldier.”
Jack’s second sight piqued, sensing a lie, but he let it go. “If he… Harper… if he’s here, what does that mean? Can you stop him from doing whatever he’s doing?”
“Dunno. Probably not.”
“Then what? That’s it?”
Barry gave a small laugh and rocked forward onto his haunches, whooping at the sight of his own shaking knees. “It’s been a while since I had my arse kicked like that.” He clapped Jack on the shoulder “The Web always gives a way. You’re part of it.” He pulled Jack towards him. “I messed up, Jacky Boy.”
“Jack.” Jack gripped him with all his strength, knowing it was a feather touch to the other-worlder but giving it all he had anyway. “My name is Jack.”
Those eyes, somewhere in all their inky depths, softened a shade. Barry’s lips tightened. “Jack. I made a mistake. By the Brothers of Solstice, I swear I didn’t know what I was getting you into.
“You are a creature of destiny, and I still need your help. I can’t make you do anything. Say the word, and you’re free to go. But All Where is calling on you.” He gave Jack’s shoulder a squeeze, managing a gentle pressure this time, less vice-like. “Will you help me, Jack?”
No. Say no. Spit in the bastard’s face and run.
Jack mashed his teeth together, bunching his fists. Despite himself, a mental film reel flashed before his eyes: his parent’s house in Minnesota, his classmates at college, Manhattan’s skyline at night, all those faceless crowds he passed every day, even Earthsea girl.
He deflated like an old balloon. “Yes.”
That squeeze tightened again, and he cried out with renewed pain. “But you have to quit that!”
Barry wasn’t listening. He grinned, clapping his hands together. “It always gets me. You people live such short lives, so fragile, but you’re always the ones to outshine the rest.” An odd severity invaded his countenance. “Reminds me that I know I’m fighting on the right side.”
Jack hesitated, then said, “How many like me have you used?”
He phrased it deliberately, and it had the effect he’d hoped not to see: Barry flinched.
For the first time, the Scot-but-not seemed unable to meet his eye. “If I told you, you’d never stop running,” he muttered. With a visible paroxysm of will, his eyes lurched up and fixed on Jack’s. “Are you still with me?”
“For my sins. Where to?”
Barry smiled thinly, yet his eyes seemed ever more haunted, and Jack saw his name being added to a list upon parchment that ran away into dark and forgotten ancient times; those who had flung themselves upon an eternal pyre for the chance to do some good in the world.
“Like I said, the Web always gives a way. Let’s give the Man in Purple a call.”
Wondering how Barry managed to make that sound ominous, Jack followed him away from the dumpster, nursing a trembling gut.
Over the edge, then.
10
“Got change, Buddy?” Kitty the Wino grumbled, waggling dirt-stained fingers under the nose of a pinstripe-clad thirty something.
With a disgusted grimace, he fished a dollar from his pocket and waved her past.
Grunting with satisfaction, Kitty moved on, hovering over the seats of middle-class types, using her grubbiness and cultivated stench to secure her dues.
Goddamn heathens, with all their careers and mortgages and stuff. None of them deserve a bit of it.
The hand God had dealt her entitled her to a slice of the money pie more than the rest of these losers put together. So desperate were they to be rid of her, pretend she didn’t exist, that they always paid. The sting of that flavour of rejection dried up long ago. Money was the cure-all.
She was going Karma’s work, anyway. Evening the balance, taking from the rich and giving to the poor (or some other bull crap)—and the poorest person around just happened to be her.
Besides, it never failed to bring her a sliver of pleasure, watching them squirm. To boot, the booze wasn’t going to buy itself. Pangs of conscience were hard to come by when you were on the clock until the shakes came back.
Each of her marks ignored her studiously, sending furtive glances around the subway car in search of escape. But there was nowhere to go except farther down the car. They all coughed up.
Setting her best dead eyed stare, one that promised to stick around unless some green was dropped, Kitty shuffled down the line, stuffing cash into her Vodka-stained pants. Faces flashed by amidst the wads of cash: a work-shorted teen, a snooty hawk-faced woman who Kitty almost slapped across the mouth for the look she gave her, a pretty ginger who had her cash ready before Kitty even got to her.
Kitty reached the end of the car satisfied, and held out her hand out to a man wedged on the last seat. She hadn’t given him much thought until now—in fact she was sure he had just appeared out of damn nowhere—but now that she got a good look at him, a base stirring in her loins accompanied the urge to utter a hearty oof.
He’s a looker. What I wouldn’t give to have that pretty face between my legs for five minutes.
She placed her feet wider and flapped her jacket to loosen some of her stink, getting ready to cackle at her own coarseness—I crack me up—when the man lifted his head and locked eyes with her. His Wall Street air, and suit that looked more like a piece of art, suddenly vanished from her attention; his eyes seemed to take up her entire field of vision.
Kitty had taken her fair shar
e of E, Ket, anything worth having. She knew the feeling of warping unreality and the rending of the basic elements well enough to be on first name terms with the A&E nurses.
What she felt then was like taking every trip of her life at once, like being turned inside out and put through the spin cycle of an industrial washing machine. The world dropped away, replaced by darkness, eternal darkness. She flew, hurtling over a carpet of screaming, filthy, writhing bodies—and she was cold, so cold she knew she must be dead.
And those eyes, hanging in front of her, told tales without form, without a single word or image, but altogether changing, whittling, maddening.
Kitty’s retinas screamed as the subway lights came crashing back, and she uttered a bile laced urgh as though winded by a punch to the gut.
Oh God. Oh God, he’s going to kill us all.
The terrible knowledge. The undeniable visceral truth. It was coming—the end of the freaking world. And right in front of her was the demon sent to bring it upon them.
Mammon, the devil incarnate.
A tiny, insane smile crept into the corners of his mouth, and she heard his voice inside her head, whispering, “Kill? No… no… not that. Death is nothingness.” A pause, and she once again flew over the screaming, stinking, naked things. “Look at them. Look at your fate. Do they look dead to you?”
Kitty tried to scream and fight her way back to her body, but all she managed was internal thrashing. The subway could have been the most distant memory of another life.
That voice continued slithering in her head, an ugly, oily slick upon her mind. “I want at least one of you to know what’s coming. Congratulations, Katherine Genie Bates. You have a choice nobody else has: how to spend your last hours on earth.”
“Dear Lord in heaven, hallowed is thy name,” Kitty muttered, drooling with the horror of it, the nauseating fear and cold—so cold.
He knows my name. I pray thee, Lord, save me.
The subway car crashed back into place around her, but those eyes remained. In desperation she searched her alcohol-obliterated Sunday school memories for more scripture, but came up blank.
She spat, “Christ, help me!”
That voice again, a sigh that brought her out in goose-flesh: “What do you know of God?”
The demon held out his hand. For a moment she glimpsed foot-long claws protruding from the wrist that would have put Freddy Kruger to shame. He waved a hundred dollar bill in the air. “How fast can a person drink themselves to death, I wonder?”
Kitty swayed on her feet, gurgled, and turned to grapple with the door to the next car. Crashing through into the midst of a fresh cigar-tube of marks, she tripped and stumbled her way along until she hit the next car, and the next, and the next, until at last she hit the end of the train, where she pressed herself against the rear door, hyperventilating.
“Dear god, god, god. Help. Help.”
He’s on his way to do it right now. Going to end it all.
The train pulled into a station and she lurched out onto the platform, sucking lungs of air in an attempt to stay conscious. As the train pulled away, she couldn’t help glancing through the glass, and screamed aloud at the sight of him, splayed claws outlined in red tendrils of unearthly light. He waggled his fingers in farewell, and then the train pulled out and vanished into the dark tunnel, heading south towards Queens.
But she knew where he was heading. Somehow she knew. In her mind’s eye she saw something, a long dark hole in the earth that led… somewhere else.
When the tunnel behind her brightened, heralding the arrival of the next train, she stepped up to the platform edge and shook her head. “I’m not going there. Not to that place.”
They were all going to be taken to that frozen darkness to work, to labour, to carry the weight of—what?
Somewhere on the edge of her perception, a swinging shadow, a rhythmic tick-tock. A bob on a string, beyond any scale imaginable. They were being taken to carry the weight of that swinging behemoth, and free something terrible. The source of all the pain, cold and fear ever felt. A winged, shining whiteness, wide eyed and holy and beautiful, underneath all tar and blood and wailing agony.
She tittered as the lights ahead resolved into two headlights, and she bobbed on the balls of her feet.
The vanguard on the train, the demon, had been her saviour. He had given her a choice, an escape.
Oblivion.
“I choose,” she muttered, and cried a silent thank you as she threw herself forwards. She fell towards the tracks amidst wailing horns, screeching brakes, and all consuming, rancorous, black laughter.
All the while she smiled, covered head to toe in flakes of ice.
11
“You’re pretty spry for a guy full of holes,” Jack said.
Barry spared him a glance. “A man with a plan always looks that way… even if he’s blagging every step of the way.”
“What?”
“Keep up, we’re almost there.”
Jack didn’t bother asking where. There seemed to be no reason to Barry’s rapid twisting and turning, between blocks and through underpasses, none he would ever understand.
However, he felt they were going the right way. Somehow they were going forwards despite roundabout turns and re-crossing their own tracks over and over. His inner divining rod flipped and turned in synch with Barry’s ducking and diving.
He hadn’t felt the clawed man’s ugliness for a while. He might have been out of range… or whatever the equivalent limit was on the secret mojo.
Barry stopped so suddenly that Jack collided with him at full speed, receiving a mouthful of oxblood leather. Scowling as he rebounded, he clocked Barry’s grunt of triumph. His divining rod span in circles.
There’s something funky about this spot, whispered a hidden part of his mind.
They stood outside a turn-of-the-century apartment block, cracked and blackened by long years of low maintenance and the rigours of housing generations of tenants. The ground floor, however, was a pleasant and frilly affair, entirely at odds with the grubbiness above, as though it had popped into existence from the ether, spliced into place by some clumsy supernatural craftsman.
It was a teashop, twee and bright, and ramshackle.
The sign read: Laurent’s.
“Well…” Jack couldn’t think of anything pithy to add, and so gestured for Barry to lead on.
Together they passed a row of rickety floral-legged tables outside, at which a dishevelled man in a clichéd Hollywood-bad-guy khaki trench coat nodded to them, adjusting a pair of sunglasses on the bridge of his nose.
“He in?” Barry said over his shoulder.
The man riffled a newspaper up in front of his face, clicking his tongue. His teeth were the colour of stained sandalwood. He picked his nose, looked as though he meant not to answer, but then said under his breath, “Be fast. You shouldn’t be here.”
Barry grunted and pushed his way inside. “There’s a lot of that going around today.”
A high pitched, delicate bell tinkled above their heads, and they left Manhattan behind. Jack followed, feeling a heavy weight press down on him, like a small child being led into an alley meant for scoundrels. Yet what met his eyes was somewhere between fairy tale and middle-class bliss.
Laurent’s was a large oblong room that extended away from him towards a glass-topped delicatessen counter, in which there lay not meats or cheeses, but tea-leaves and cakes and scones, breakfast rolls and buns. There was such a selection of each that they vied for space, stitching a rich patchwork rainbow across the back of the large room.
The air heaved with aroma, laden and weighed down with soupy citrus and spicy undertones, on top of which sat delicate transient whiffs of lavender, coconut, and vanilla. Between the door and the counter lay a spew of the same character of table as those outside, topped with red and white checked tablecloths, made treacherous by heavy compliments of eccentric cutlery and bone china.
>
Only a few customers were seated, murmuring amongst themselves, their faces hidden in private, hunched repose. As one they presented a humble hubbub that, accompanied by the steady tinkling of forks on plates and cups upon saucers, both terrified and charmed.
Jack’s eyes told him it was a delightful scene.
His mind, meanwhile, rang like a bell to a single tone: Fuuuuuccc—
He had seen Chucky once. This was like that, but a thousand times worse: something dressed up as cute and cuddly that, quite simply, wasn’t and would never be; was in fact dripping with something that set the heart racing, and the skin prickling with fear. Things breathing and hungry lurked behind hidden corners, just out of sight.
Barry leaned towards him and spoke from the corner of his mouth. “Keep yer wits about you in here. All’s not as it seems.” He made a noise of satisfaction, and Jack knew he had looked into his mind. “Keep thinking that way. It’ll do you good. Now stay close.”
“The guy out there was right, wasn’t he?” Jack said, grabbing at Barry’s sleeve. “We’re not supposed to be here.”
Barry looked back at him, stony faced. “People don’t usually come to this place, they’re brought here. We’re about to toe a line I’m bound not to cross, so be ready.”
“For what?”
Barry headed away towards the counter.
Jack huddled so close on his heels that he was sure he might rob Barry of a shoe. He tried to keep watch about himself, but the room seemed to loom over him and press his gaze to the tiled floor, as though sensing that it was not for his eyes; an organism rejecting a foreign body.
Barry strode a little too purposefully, like a man whistling in the dark, and pulled out a chair at a table close to the counter. He sat with a deliberate air and pressed Jack down into a seat beside him, folding his hands and looking at the menu.
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