by Heide Goody
Several lights were flashing on the control panel. Junior had no idea what they meant but doubted that any of them had been designed to warn of apocalyptic Venislarn crap.
“Yes, yes,” she said, slapping the console in an attempt to calm them. “The world’s gone crazy. I know.”
The bucket’s swing became an elliptical twirl. It bounced off the wall, smashed one of the router cabinets onto its side and then, with a balletically slow inevitability, slammed the word mage, lectern and Big Bloody Book fragment across the edge of the circle and down into the shaft. The word mage fell like a shot bird, his robes flapping about him like useless wings. The infinite book section fluttered down with him.
Xerxes Mammon-Mammonson either had not seen the word mage fall or no longer cared now that his work was done but several of the company directors gave immediate chase, running down the ragged spiral slope that circled into the pit.
“We have to get that book,” said Vivian.
“And close the gate,” said Kathy.
“Once we’re freed,” Cameron reminded them.
Vivian felt a slackening of the cables across her chest.
“One thing at a time,” said Nina from behind them.
Vivian craned her head round as best she could. Nina was pulling at the mass of cables behind Cameron’s router. Directly behind her, Vivian could hear the regular snip-snip of cables coming loose, one at a time. That would be Rod, a man with a tool for every occasion.
“Are we too late?” he said.
“Let’s pretend we’re not,” said Vivian. “We must go after the book otherwise there’s nothing to stop this happening all over again.”
Nina had her phone out. It was like the thing was glued to the girl’s hand.
“Morag,” she said, raising her voice about the din. “Are you still up there?”
Watts-Mammonson lay dead on the floor of Yo-Morgantus’s audience chamber, blood pooling slowly around his body. Morag Senior was sure someone or something would be along soon to clean up, or just eat.
“With your permission,” said Senior, “we’ll put a stop to Mammon-Mammonson’s ritual, free the human prisoners and everything can go back to business as normal.”
“Stop the ritual?” said Brigit. “Why would we want to do that?”
The reasons were obvious. To stop the arrival of a rival god. To maintain the current status quo.
“To… um.” She frowned at Brigit. “Why wouldn’t you want to stop Yoth Mammon?”
“You think Lord Morgantus is afraid of challengers? Let her come.”
In the space beyond the vents and panels above, something shifted and groaned: a sea of tissue and muscle and fat and gnarly folds of skin, a sucking tar pit of flesh. Senior couldn’t picture Yo-Morgantus in motion, had always thought of him as a bed-bound emperor, covered with bed sores and cankers, imprisoned in his own palace by his corpulence. She could not imagine how he would meet Yoth Mammon in battle. She didn’t want to.
“My lord,” she said, “I implore you, don’t do this.”
“Well then, implore,” said Brigit. “Plead. Beg.”
“I do,” said Senior. “I am. If you would only let us handle this, we would be beyond grateful.”
The beautiful woman stroked her jaw and shifted her hips thoughtfully.
“What is beyond grateful? Here is grateful.” She put a hand out, slicing the air. “What’s on the other side?”
The spreading pool of blood touched Brigit’s feet. She scrunched her toes in it.
“What have you got to offer?” she said.
Nina backed up against a wall and then, with a silent YOLO, she sprinted toward the bucket. She leapt the eight-foot gap, slammed her chest against the rim of the bucket and grabbed on with all the might her body could muster. Moments later she had tipped herself in, whacked her head against the metal bottom and was on the phone again.
“Take me down,” she said.
The line fizzed and crackled but there was definitely some form of affirmation in there.
Morag Junior pushed the stick forward.
The Distance to Ground readout on the control panel flickered between a few metres and a whole row of nines.
“Going down,” she said.
As Cameron shoved the last remaining cables from his feet, Vivian made a snap assessment of the situation. The Mammonites were distracted by the imminent arrival of their mother, the loss of the word mage, Nina’s rash antics on the descending crane bucket and, now, a brewing argument (or possibly fight to the death) with the bloated priests of Nystar coming up the path from below.
“We need to fathom out how to close this gate,” she said to Kathy. “We need to retrieve or destroy that book,” she said Rod.
Cameron looked expectantly at her.
“Freeing the other humans would be a bonus,” she said.
Rod tossed Cameron the pocket wire cutters.
“Don’t lose them,” he said.
Nina looked down over the edge of the bucket. Below her was a world that refused to play by the rules of common sense or physics. Down walls of bubbling rock that bled and swayed, the path descended round and round. Jungle vines and deep-sea plant monsters sprang from the walls and, here and there where leng-space thought Nina wasn’t paying attention, the vertical became the horizontal and plains stretched away into starlit darkness. The scorched air shimmered in front of her and Nina couldn’t discern whether she was looking at weird rock outcrops and campfires or demonic cities and vast sacrificial pyres. Monsters crawled like insects or, possibly, insects strutted like monsters. Her eyes watered simply looking at it.
Directly below, both just out of reach and infinitely far away, was Yoth Mammon. The goddess filled the shaft, a mouth big enough to swallow aircraft carriers stretched wide to greet the world.
“Yeah, you stay down there, bitch,” Nina muttered, though she doubted that was going to happen.
Rod and Vivian ran down the spiral slope.
“Keep close to the wall,” he said, redundantly. The path was a good ten feet wide and Vivian felt no compulsion to get closer to the edge than she absolutely needed to.
She clutched the black pen nib as she ran. It might prove essential in locating the book pages. Its sharpness against her palm was a comforting touchstone of reality.
They stepped over fissures and fallen masonry, maintaining a good pace. Vivian followed in Rod’s footsteps as closely as possible. He was her guide and her shield and she made a mental note to thank him if they survived the day.
Nina’s crane bucket was a considerable distance below them although, as charitable as she tried to be about the young woman, Vivian doubted Nina would be of any use in locating the pages. Of more immediate concern was the crowd of Mammonites and priests of Nystar half a turn ahead. A shoving match between the off-human city traders and the tentacle-headed priests took up the full width of the path.
The priests of Nystar sung with one voice, “Ey un nue ken-daa! Ey un nue ken-daa!”
“What are they saying?” yelled Rod.
“Go back. You’re too early.”
“It’s half-day closing in hell or what?”
“Maybe…” Vivian puffed as the exertion of running began to wind her. “Maybe Xerxes hadn’t considered whether his mother actually wanted to be summoned.”
“Stay close to me!” Rod shouted.
Easier said than done, thought Vivian, who lacked the breath to say it.
Rod ploughed into the rear of the crowding Mammonites and barged on through. He lowered his rugby player shoulder and with a roar, slid between two of the mostly spherical priests, pitching one aside into the abyss. Vivian hurried through behind him before the ranks could close.
A fallen Mammonite lashed out at Rod’s leg and he stumbled. Vivian was past him when he tried to get up, only to fall again as the Mammonite clutched his trouser turn-ups.
“Go!” he shouted at her. She had no intention of doing otherwise.
A dozen turns o
f the path, several storeys in height below her, there was a wide level area and a white shape that might have possibly been the word mage or indeed his book.
The phone line between Nina and Morag in the crane was deteriorating rapidly. Clearly hell didn’t get good phone coverage.
“I’d better not have to pay data roaming charges.” She looked at her phone. “Muda! There’s a wi-fi hotspot here. Hell has wi-fi.”
“kxxx– what?” said Morag.
“Nothing. Swing me left.”
“kxxxk.”
The bucket swung right.
“Left!” Nina said.
“That is left!”
Nina looked up at the small disc of light high above that was the sky of Birmingham and wondered if she’d got turned around in the descent.
“I mean my left!” she said.
“What’s your left?”
“Right!”
“kxxxk’s sake!” said Morag.
The bucket swung left. It was looking good. She was descending in a smooth arc toward the broad ledge where she thought she’d seen the book.
“Slowly now,” she said.
“I’m almost out of line anyway,” said Morag.
Rod rolled onto his back and kicked Truman Lodge-Mammonson in the face. He felt teeth and something more besides crunch under his heel. Lodge-Mammonson spat and elbowed Rod’s stomach, crawling forward to get from under a priest of Nystar’s hoofs.
“Our staff,” he grunted, “have the right to work without” – he jabbed his elbow down again, this time into Rod’s ribs – “abuse or threats of violence.”
Rod caught him cleanly with a left hook but Mammonites were made of strong stuff. Lodge-Mammonson pulled a spiked zombie knife from within his tailored jacket and swung down to impale Rod with it.
Rod grabbed the Mammonite’s wrist to hold him off.
“Strong manly grip you’ve got there, Rod,” Lodge-Mammonson snorted and put his weight on the hilt to force the knife down.
Kathy skirted round the edge of the circle, identifying and translating as she went.
“Outer circle is the summoning, enhanced by the Kal Frexo runes,” she said to herself. “The inner circle…”
She ran her hands over the engraved symbols. They were tacky with congealing blood.
A distance away, Cameron nipped at another captive’s cable bonds with Rod’s wire cutters. Xerxes Mammon-Mammonson loomed over the far edge of the pit, arms raised in an almost Nixonian salute. He didn’t care about the humans now. He only had eyes for the world below.
“She rises!” he cried, not for the first time. The first time it had been in exultation. Now there was a hint of desperate exhortation.
There was another unholy roar from the pit and a newer more profound rumbling echoed up.
“Christ,” muttered Kathy. “Maybe she is rising. The inner circle…”
Vivian ran down the slope. She held out her left hand to the wall for support until something with teeth that looked like claws (or maybe claws that looked like teeth) tried to take an opportunistic bite of her fingers from its crevice home. She watched her feet and the path ahead. Vivian did not hold with casual footwear in the workplace. However, she had a deep sense of the practical and had bought for herself several pairs of stout women’s shoes that also had solid rubber grip soles. People who said you couldn’t have formality and function were just too lazy to find it.
From time to time, her erratic path brought her closer to the edge and she saw down into the pit. It was impossible to gauge how far below Yoth Mammon truly was or indeed how fast she was rising. The sheer scale of the goddess made it impossible to tell. Vivian was sure that the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous, if they had the wherewithal to look up and ponder, would have had no idea how far off that meteor was until it struck them.
The tip of Lodge-Mammonson’s wicked knife cut into Rod’s waistcoat and found the Kevlar lining. It was a temporary reprieve at best. They were called anti-stab vests rather than stab-proof vests for a reason.
Lodge-Mammonson’s weight was entirely bearing down on him, preventing him from reaching his own knife in his trouser pocket. He could, with his marginally freer right hand, reach inside his jacket where it would have been really handy to have a gun right now.
Over them, priests of Nystar jostled. Hoofs stamped heavily on the path around them. Rod’s view from the floor was mostly composed of huge green Nystar butts. Dying here would be a bloody poor way to go.
Rod tried kicking but he couldn’t get the angle with his legs. Lodge-Mammonson smiled at his struggles. Rod saw a glint of gold in Lodge-Mammonson’s breast pocket and reached for it. Made by an artisanal printer in Milan, he remembered.
Rod snagged one of the gold-edged business cards between fore and index fingers and sliced sideways across Lodge-Mammonson’s cheek. They were sharp. Lodge-Mammonson gasped. Rod sliced the other way, taking one of the Mammonite’s eyes. Lodge-Mammonson roared this time and clutched his face.
“Lawsuit!” he yelled as Rod shoved him off and scrambled up the slope and away from the melee.
Rod freed the knife that was embedded in his armoured waistcoat and sought the sanctuary of the nearest wall. Lodge-Mammonson was still rolling on the floor. “I need witnesses! Someone take photos! You all saw it! You all saw what he did! I’m suing!”
A priest of Nystar trod on Lodge-Mammonson and thoughts of litigation (and probably a lot else as well) went from the Mammonite’s head.
In the deeps, a goddess, clearly on the move now, roared.
Leng shook as the bucket was about to touch down. The gentle landing became a graceless thump and the bucket tipped over, dumping Nina. She rolled out like a tiny acrobat and sprang to her feet. “Stuck it!”
She was standing on a table of broken stone, as unbeautiful and as lifeless as factory concrete. Steam and smoke and Venislarn indifference made everything beyond her immediate vicinity an indecipherable nonsense. If this was hell, it was bloody irritating. Overall, she was unimpressed, although the existence of wi-fi was a chink of hope for the place.
She looked at her phone. A Bluetooth device was trying to connect with it.
“What the bhul…”
“Hey!”
From a cavern entrance, two figures shuffled towards her, filthy ripped clothes on their backs, a pained weariness in their stride. Nina prepared to take on these demons with the best she had (a combat method she called “pub car park bitch gone apeshit”) and then stopped. She didn’t reckon many demons wore New York Yankees baseball caps or carried mobile phones.
“I – ggh! – know her!” said the taller one, picking up speed.
Nina peered at them. “Pupfish?”
“It’s Nina!” said the samakha gangsta. “We’re saved.”
Arm in arm, the fish boy and the human woman (who looked as if she’d had the worst possible night on the town) hurried towards her.
“It’s a brace,” said Kathy.
“What?” said Cameron.
She hadn’t even realised he was there with her. She looked up. All the human captives were freed and fled. It was probably too late for them anyway. If Yoth Mammon made it to the surface this would be ground zero and the metaphysical blast radius was going to be huge.
“The inner circle is a brace,” Kathy said, making a ring of her hands. “It’s holding the gateway open.”
“Makes sense,” said Cameron. “So, if we destroy even one of the symbols…”
“Foom! It’s gone. Closed.”
“Right.”
Both of them looked around.
“A sledgehammer?” said Cameron.
“In an office?” said Kathy.
“Or something like one.”
Vivian found the word mage and the remains of the Big Bloody Book beside him. The word mage was dead. He was bent in half, a snapped twig. The Big Bloody Book, pages held together with a spine binder of wood and twine, rested under the elongated fingers of his outstretched hand. She lifted it gently
. The binding weighed more than the book. It was odd that something so light could be so dangerous.
Vivian mentally shook herself. There was no time for such cod-philosophical musings. She’d leave that to the millennials. Clearly the fumes in this place were getting to her.
She looked up at the distance she had run. She looked down to the place where Nina had landed. Going down would be quicker than going up.
One half of Pupfish’s face was solid bruise. The woman with him had a series of lacerations running down her ruined dress and her leg.
“I thought you were dead,” said Nina, “after what happened in the nightclub.”
“After the first week here, we wished we were,” said Pupfish.
“Week? No. It was last night.”
“Time is different here, dog.”
The woman took hold of Nina’s arm like she was the pope come visiting.
“I’m not ever doing E again. It’s nothing like the stuff we took in Magaluf.”
“Allana, babe,” said Pupfish. “It wasn’t no E. Ggh! I told you.”
Allana’s face was a mask of dirt grey, mascara streaks and skin-pink tear tracks. She looked like someone ready for their Goth weekender or possibly someone with an upcoming walk-on role in a Mad Max movie.
“Michael’s been keeping me straight,” she said.
“Michael, huh?”
Nina gave Pupfish a wry look. She didn’t know fish boys could blush.
Allana rooted around in her purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“And they say you never meet good guys in nightclubs,” she said.
“They do, don’t they?”
Allana attempted to light the measliest of dogends.
“You’ve no idea what we’ve been through,” said Pupfish.
“You can tell me when we’re out of here,” said Nina.
“We ain’t had nothing to eat – ggh! – except some nasty-ass paste stuff we found. I need me some Burger King or some KFC.”