Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  The enforcer lashed out with an open hand in a tiger claw strike to the jaw. The guard’s head snapped back and the bandana came away, revealing a face with no nose and a mouth turned completely sideways. The maw trailed off into the scar that bisected his forehead, a scar that strained in time with the guard’s gibbering laugh, as if it were trying to open. The enforcer gasped and retreated a step.

  The loud clack of the Tommy gun’s bolt was the only warning the hatchetman had before the Corpse opened fire from the foot of the stairs with the guard’s own lost weapon. The enforcer dropped flat onto the weathered wooden porch; it was a similar move to the one that had saved him from the Corpse a year earlier. The machine gun barrage slashed the air above him and sent the monstrous thug, axe still buried in his forearm, reeling through the door. Picking himself up, the enforcer drew a knife and rushed into the house.

  The Corpse marched up the steps and into the entry hall. Inside the house at the corner of Vine and Vedder, all was chaos. Opium smoke swirled in the cold draft that hissed from the upper floors and snaked through the halls. Shouts of alarm and confusion mingled with the groans and sighs and laughter from the hopheads too lost in a drugged stupor to recognize what was going on around them. A few of the more lucid patrons thought to escape, but retreated back into the warren of filthy rooms when they saw the Corpse standing sentry at the front door. The remains of the guard lay scattered and beheaded at his feet. The tong enforcer was nowhere to be seen.

  From the second floor landing came the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood, then a frantic, frightened plea in Chinese. The enforcer’s silver hatchet sailed over the balcony rail and spun down into the entry hall a moment before the thing appeared. It was the next stage of the metamorphosis that had twisted Sean Halloran and the hop house guard: a huge, shaggy creature with a nightmarish head gaping from crown to chin with a vertical, snaggle-fanged mouth. Its bulging forearms ended in hands spiked with claws. In one of these it held the limp form of the tong enforcer. It turned its head to regard the Corpse with one eye, like a bird sizing up an insect, then contorted its mouth in a noiseless snarl.

  The Corpse opened up with the Tommy gun, filling the night with Chicago lightning. The thing staggered back from the rail. Quickly the Corpse drew a gas mask from his satchel. He fitted it with practiced speed, a legacy of his time in the trenches of France, then took a small bomb and lobbed it onto the second-floor landing. A yellow-green cloud mushroomed up before being warped into flowing, fantastic shapes by the wind. Wreathed in the searing gas, the thing screamed silently. It clutched at its throat and eyes before collapsing on the stairs. The Corpse emptied the machine gun into its twitching form.

  After locking the front door and jamming the security bolts as best he could, the Corpse made his way through the lower floor of the opium den, lobbing bombs as he went. The rooms had been parlors and libraries at one time, with bright wallpaper, ornate cornices, and gaudily patterned tin ceilings. Now all was stained and grubby. Filthy cots lined the walls. Lamps and pipes and other junkie debris littered the floors. The Corpse didn’t encounter any more of the larger creatures here, just addicts and small-time hoods choking on the opium smoke and chlorine gas. Pain contorted their faces, though whether from the poison or the transformation taking hold of the silver key holders as their dreams fled, the crimefighter could not tell.

  Wraithlike in the deadly, shifting fog, the Corpse moved from room to room. He ran out of maggots to mark the bodies long before his grim work was done.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Strange Geometries

  The wind grew colder and more insistent as the Corpse climbed the stairs to the second floor and then the third. By the time he reached the steep stairwell that led to the tower, its drone drowned out the thud of his shoes on the wooden steps and the rasp of his breath in the gas mask. The wind tugged at the peeling wallpaper, making the edges flap like fingers gesturing for the intruder to retreat. The motion drew his eye, but his gaze lingered on something else on the wall: the vine pattern on the paper. The leaves and stems tangled with numbers and arcane symbols, then became them. The design expanded to show the equations they’d found on the keys, the components of Pharos’s “complicated formulae.”

  When he looked away from the wall, the Corpse was no longer on the stairway to the tower room. He stood upon the steps leading into a massive stone structure. The air was clear here, swept clean of smoke and poison by the winds, so he tore off his mask and gazed up. Ancient, cyclopean blocks towered above him to form something like a monastery, the only feature on a vast and cold desert plateau that stretched for miles in every direction. The sands whirled and trembled beneath a sky filled with stars by which no human sailor would ever navigate. The Corpse felt the draw of the vastness overhead. It promised oblivion, if only he would retreat into its embrace, while the stone path ahead beckoned him to a very different sort of doom: equally certain, but finite and particular.

  He took a step forward.

  The Corpse stood once more on the tower stairs. With his next step the prehistoric monastery and the high desert wastes returned. They were, in turn, replaced by the wooden treads and the papered walls with their expansive grid of equations. It continued like this with mystifying irregularity, his surroundings stuttering in and out of reality, ghostly one moment, solid the next. Eventually, the distinctions between the places blurred until the crimefighter pushed ahead through both worlds and neither.

  At last the Corpse came to the heart of the monastery-tower. There, upon a simple limestone throne, sat a tall, thin man garbed in tattered robes of state. The room around him wavered between cavernous hall and cramped attic, sometimes mixing the two in strange configurations. The figure remained more fixed; he was phantasmal, but he never completely vanished. A mask of pallid yellow silk covered his face. Now and then the Corpse could glimpse features behind it—piercing brown eyes, a forehead creased in intense concentration. At other times the mask hung on empty air. The silk did not cling to the wearer, but it shifted with the movement of his lips, even when there seemed to be no lips behind it.

  “This faltering between places is maddening, I know,” the man said. A wisp of blue light streaked in from somewhere. It zigzagged, changing directions to counter the buffeting wind, then struck him in the chest. He gasped appreciatively. “Ah! The turmoil will end soon enough, though. That’s your purpose here. It’s why I have allowed you to reach me.”

  The Corpse drew his twin automatics. Five shots rang out, but the bullets never reached their target. They passed through the robed figure and ricocheted off the limestone throne.

  “You’re only wasting ammunition,” said the man. “Controlling where I am not was the first skill I mastered when I took the throne. Controlling where I am has been more of a challenge. So I am not yet fully manifested here. By the by, you should be kneeling. You’re in the presence of a king.”

  “That’s the bunk,” the Corpse said. “You’re a professor who wrote a book about geometry.”

  “Actually, the mathematical truths derived from the interplay of geometry and geography, especially the geography of—well, of things and places you won’t understand. If that is the work to which you are referring, I am indeed its author.” Robert Eddison Beckford, Doctor of Philosophy, leaned forward on the throne. His head wove from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion as he studied the Corpse. “I must admit that your apparent astuteness is something of a surprise, given your costume and the way you blundered in here. The formula on the keys led you to my identity, I suppose. You’re a marginally skilled detective—or you had help figuring everything out.”

  “All that matters is that I’m here to end this.”

  “Yes, yes. I said as much earlier.” Another blue wisp pierced Beckford’s chest and he paused, shuddering with pleasure. In that moment, he appeared more solid. “I also said you should kneel. I know that royalty ‘consists not in vain pomp,’ but there is a point to it th
is time, I assure you.”

  He gestured and a massive paw, nearly three feet in width, emerged from an unseen angle in the room, a corner that should not have been there. It slammed down on the Corpse, crushing him to his knees. The pressure diminished as the thing phased out, and the crimefighter looked back to see its ghostly form standing above him, merged with the walls and ceiling joists of the tower room. It was a giant, stoop-shouldered beast with a shaggy coat and bifurcated forearms, each branch ending in a paw. Its head resembled nothing so much as a Venus flytrap; it was split almost from front to back by a wickedly fanged mouth. Bulbous, unblinking eyes protruded on stalks from either side of the maw. They were fixed on the Corpse with hungry intensity.

  “It’s called a gug,” Beckford said. “You encountered their warped reflections downstairs, imitations created when I use the keys to appropriate enough of someone’s dreams. Like those imitations, the originals do my bidding. They have done so ever since I came upon this mask and robe abandoned on the throne, and dared put them on.”

  The Corpse flexed his shoulders, pushing up against the gug’s bulk. The thing was not pressing down. Rather, it had one barrel-sized paw poised over him as a precaution. It wouldn’t be much of a challenge for the monstrous creature to keep him in check, at least when it was substantial. The experiments perpetrated upon the Corpse by Drucci’s doctors had left him physically weaker than most men. He was, however, confident that he could outsmart or outmaneuver the beast—and its master. “You’re supposed to be dead,” the Corpse said to Beckford, then flexed again and began counting off the time before the pressure on his shoulders faded.

  “Death, as you understand the concept, was never my fate, no matter what that butcher Holmes intended when he assaulted me inside that labyrinthine ‘castle’ of his. After the attack I found myself on this plateau. A less learned man might mistake the place for one of the more desolate corners of the Christian afterlife.” Beckford’s voice took on a smug, pedantic tone. “But I recognized its true nature instantly. It is nowhere less than the destination for which I had prepared myself. The one I had predicted in my book, if you read it carefully enough and grasp its more subtle truths. What occurred may appear supernatural to someone ignorant of higher mathematics, but I assure you: it was through reason and science that I escaped my supposed doom, and it is through reason and science that I will make my way back to the world. Back to the house my father built.”

  The Corpse cursed under his breath. The way the gug appeared and disappeared was random; he couldn’t plot anything based on the pattern. There had to be something else, though, some vulnerability he could exploit. The mask, perhaps. Beckford had said something about it giving him control over the monsters. He’d just need time to figure a way to get his hands on it—if it ever became solid enough for him to get his hands on.

  “Hopheads and sharpsters?” the crimefighter spat. “They’re the foundation for your scheme?”

  “Not them. It is their hopes and aspirations, and then their unconscious cerebrations that I claim to complete the equation that will stabilize the lattice and fully bridge the worlds. Your dreams, too. You were carrying the keys attuned to me, so I took that little fantasy you had of destroying the Chinaman after you abandoned it. True, it had a bitterness the opium reveries lack, but it was vivid and I could tell you had many more like it. Soon, I’ll claim those dreams, too.”

  Bowing his head to hide his movement, the Corpse slipped his hand into his jacket pocket. He pushed aside the folded playing card and withdrew the two silver keys. He gripped them so the pins protruded between the closed fingers of his left fist, the spikes of a makeshift knuckleduster. There was no expression on his dead man’s face to suggest his self-satisfaction as he looked back up. He knew if he’d kept Beckford talking long enough he would get something to work with, and now he had it.

  “If you think you’re taking anything from me, you’re the one who’s dreaming,” the Corpse growled.

  The crimefighter surged forward, away from the momentarily non-corporeal gug. He would have preferred to time the attack so it coincided with a stolen dream striking Beckford, so his target might be more solid, but the unpredictable state of his monstrous guardian made that all but impossible. The keys, though, were weapons he could use even if Beckford were still a phantom. They were attuned to him; Beckford had said so himself. As the Corpse scrambled toward the man on the throne, he visualized how it would play out: drive the keys into Beckford’s eyes, gouge them out, then snatch the mask off his face, breaking his hold over the creatures—

  Beckford swiped a hand through the air. The Corpse collapsed like a cow brained with a slaughterhouse sledgehammer.

  “Quite satisfactory,” Beckford said as he stood over the stunned and gasping vigilante. He studied the blue ember in his palm. The light from the stolen aspiration painted the pallid yellow silk of the mask a sickly hue. He absorbed the ember into his hand, and the mask smiled. “Yes, quite satisfactory. I inferred that humbling you might inspire visions of revenge, ones even fresher than your desire to kill the Chinaman. I must say, newly minted hopes are far more satisfying than the stale old things I have been consuming up to this point. I am glad I tested the hypothesis. But now it’s time to complete the equation.”

  Beckford inscribed an arcane sign into the air with his fingertips. His movements were unlike Pharos’s exaggerated stage magic pantomime. Rather, they resembled the subtle gestures of Samantha van Ayers when she cast a spell, if colder and more precise, as if the professor were writing a formula on a chalkboard. Another hope tore free from the Corpse, then another. Each theft was a scalpel slash.

  The vigilante gritted his teeth and tried to push himself to his feet. He managed to struggle only to his knees. As more and more blue light bled from him, he forced himself to open his left hand. The two keys he had thought to wield as weapons dropped to the floor, one thudding on wood, the other pinging off stone. Ridding himself of them did nothing to slow the assault. He was so deep in the matrix of equations and mystical symbols inscribed on the tower walls, so close to the ancient limestone throne, the keys were no longer necessary. Beckford could plunder the dreams directly from his psyche.

  The first to be taken were conscious hopes, like the casual plans he’d imagined for killing the tong soldiers guarding Kang Hai at his office or the petty hoods who’d conspired with Sean Halloran. As these left him, the Corpse’s face grew even more gaunt. His flesh, already pale and tinged blue like a drowned man’s, lost whatever traces of living color had clung to it. His bones twisted, and when he opened his mouth to scream, he felt something splinter in his skull. Despite the pain, the Corpse resisted. Each dream had to be pulled from him as if it were his last.

  It was a losing battle. The stolen wisps made Beckford stronger and more substantial. “Interesting,” he said and cocked his head. “These dreams have an odd—” He paused as a spasm shot through his form, stiffening his arms and making his head jerk back. “They have an odd texture,” he said when he’d recovered. “A harshness I’ve not encountered elsewhere.” A sly smile spread across the yellow silk mask.

  The Corpse could feel Beckford digging relentlessly for deeper desires. The vigilante fought to save the aspirations of Tristram Holt, the man he’d been before the nightmare experiments, but it was like trying to catch smoke with frozen hands. Fleeting images of the happy life he’d hoped to share with his fiancée, Angela Burton, and the noble career he’d envisioned for himself as a lawyer flickered between the white flashes of torment searing his brain. He clutched at them but they slipped away, to be replaced by other secret desires flitting in his mind’s eye—to return from the war a decorated hero, to turn the acting he’d done in college into a life on the stage, to save Samantha from the dark lure of magic he knew would destroy her one day. Then they, too, vanished.

  Beckford could feel the weight of each dream and taste its value as he gathered them. The personal aspirations were less fully formed
than he’d expected, little more than vivid fragments. By the time he’d got to this level with the thugs who carried the silver keys, he’d uncovered elaborate, if predictable fantasies of riches and women. Not so with the vigilante. The only dreams that were wholly realized in him were visions of justice. And these had uncomfortably sharp edges. Beckford could not help but flinch as he took them in.

  Though the Corpse could scarcely recognize himself, mentally or physically, he sensed that discomfort. It reached him on the dreams streaming from him to Beckford like an impulse traveling along a nerve. He stopped resisting.

  The Corpse’s remaining conscious hopes poured into Beckford, and when they were gone, the gates of his unconscious slammed open. The visions of justice that surged forth now were not just bloody, but terrifying. No mercy tempered them. They were grand and vibrant, magnificent nightscapes of unyielding, ruthless order, all the more substantive because they had been forged in the fires of a will strong enough to transform them into actions. The piles of bodies in his deepest dreams were not different from the ones he’d actually created in Chicago, only larger. Upon the savaged remains of Drucci’s doctors and the other foes he’d destroyed, from armored simian assassins and demon-ridden cartoonists to a rogues gallery of more mundane thieves and murderers, were heaped those of the adversaries he had not yet destroyed: Al Capone and “Bugs” Moran, Kang Hai and Robert Beckford. His enemies were legion, and the details of their deaths were stunning and grotesque. With each new butchery, each new shocking masterpiece of carnage, maggots pooled to mark the Corpse’s triumph, until the writhing mass spread beyond Chicago to blanket the country and then the globe.