by Chuck Wendig
“Ticket booth,” Mookie rasps. “For the 13 Train.”
She smirks. “13 Train doesn’t exist.”
“Not in the mood. I’ll throw this goddamn cart through the floor of this place, send it all the way to the Great Below’s ground floor. Where. Is. The ticket booth.”
Girl clears her throat and runs her hands through unwashed pink hair. “Go up two levels. You’ll see a tent—the Brothers and Sisters of the Bleak Gazement are up there preaching—and then past that is the booth. Snakeface manning it, name of Srilago.”
Mookie reaches in his pocket, pulls out a couple bills, crumples them and leaves them on the serving ledge.
She barks a laugh. “What good is that down here?”
“You’re human. You’ll find a use for it.”
“Who says I’m human?” she asks, then winks. “Hey, by the way, you don’t look so hot, dude—”
But Mookie, he doesn’t hear her because he doesn’t care.
Only one thing on his mind now.
Nora.
*
Burnsy has other plans.
Well. Not plans, so much.
As Mookie’s acting like a human battering ram and cramming himself between the gobs at the food cart, something catches Burnsy’s eye.
A dead woman—her hair like seaweed, her mouth like a knife-slash in a leather couch, skin hard and dry and dark like someone who died out in the desert—sits on a ratty blanket, a series of Polaroid photos splayed out in front of her. Images on the Polaroids shift and swim, drift from frame to frame like something less on a computer screen and something more in a dream.
Burnsy sees an image of his wife. “Janice,” he croaks. It’s her clipping laundry to the line, looking like she always did in photos: half-irritated someone would think to snap her shot, but half-playful, too, like the irritation is just a ruse, like in reality she likes being on camera but maybe doesn’t want to admit it.
It’s not a photo he remembers ever taking. Or even seeing.
Then: another photo. His daughter. Penny. From years ago. Their best years. Her on a tricycle. Riding on a sidewalk. Pink petunia in her hair.
The desiccated thing that Burnsy calls a heart thumps and twitches like if you hooked a car battery up to a dead bird.
He mumbles, “I’ll be back, Mook,” and drifts toward the leathery zombie.
He drifts like a piece of trash on a slow tide.
His knees buckle. His spine softens. But he doesn’t feel pain in his skin, not like usual—most moments of every day and every night his skin feels like he took a nap on a bed of fire ants. Crawling and biting. Everything tight and swollen like at any moment he might split like a chapped lip. But now—pain’s gone. Soft focus. Everything is cool drink and warm bread.
And the dead woman opens her mouth and roaches spill out and the sound that hits his ears is a chittering clitter-clatter of little legs coupled with a gassy whisper, but the sound that hits his mind are her words:
Mister Lister. I can make you whole again. I can put you in these photos. This can be your world again. Chitter chitter. Roachy tickle. Give me your body and your mind can go free. Give me your horrible, ruined, burned body. Unshackle yourself from the manacles of your ugly skin. Don’t you want to be with them again?
He wants that. He needs that.
But something feels wrong, too. It’s like a drug high—you’re up there flying in the skies and feeling like the Lord of Everything but somewhere in the farthest-flung corner of yourself you know: it’s all fake, it’s all one big lie, a pretend parade, a stage show put on by me and for me. Just an actor in your own drama.
This feels like that.
But just like it is with heroin, he thinks, Damn, who cares?
And so it is that Burnsy sits down and runs his hands over the photos. And he smells the laundry detergent his wife used to use. He feels the texture of his little girl’s denim Osh-Kosh overalls. His lips open slow and start to form the words, words he knows will write and sign the contract all in a single go: You can have my body—
But those words are interrupted.
The entire Yonder Market shudders.
Somewhere above his head he hears a goblin shriek.
The dead woman hisses and gurgles and in his mind he hears, Don’t go away, don’t pay attention to that, sit back down...
Burnsy stands. Again alert.
Behind him, the gobbos have gone from the cart. The Grasshopper Woman is in the midst of packing up her wares, but now stands stiff, antennae searching the air, big bug eyes tilting upward toward the sound of the shriek.
Burnsy thinks, How long have I been sitting here?
Where the hell is Mookie?
The entire place shudders again.
Another scream. This one human.
A third voice in the mix. Nora. It’s Nora’s voice.
“Dad!”
Holy shit.
Burnsy races to the spiral stairs. Soon as he sets one foot down, Yonder really starts to shake, a bang, bang, BANG, BANG, the sound of thunder, the sound of a riot, the sound of a giant running to crush Jack for stealing all his magic beans—
Then the shuddering becomes an earthquake. A tectonic seizure from a highway pileup. All of the market goes wobbly—
And then a massive shape comes crashing down through the metal floor. Like a wrecking ball. With arms. And legs. And covered in skinless, howling freaks.
A grub-white shape pops free of the pawing, clawing bodies. Like a white whale breaching from a sea of writhing muscle and glistening tendon.
“Mookie,” Burnsy gasps.
Except, this isn’t the Mookie he showed up with.
This Mookie has a neck like a tree-trunk. A skull like a shark’s skull. Mouth full of grinding golf ball teeth. Eyes red as wet cherries.
This is Mookie Pearl on Vermilion. This is Red Rage Mookie.
And this Mookie looks fucking pissed.
*
Way it happens is this:
Mookie goes up.
Through the throng of monsters: a pair of gobbos, one standing on the other’s shoulders; an old man with rats for eyes and a mouth that’s naught but a howling spiral; another Trogbody selling Pigment, this time little phials of Red Rage looking like test tubes full of rust flake; Snakeface shifting faces, from red-head to old salt to little boy to gangsta thug, a flip-book of faces, flip, flip, flip.
Mookie moves past the mustard-yellow tent of the Bleak Gazement cult, hears the preaching from within the fabric walls—
“...and the void was empty and alive and we stared into it and it filled us up and became us and that is how we knew truth...”
“Praise Nothing!”
“Praise Nothing!”
“Praise Nothing!”
And then he sees the booth. Which is barely that. A stack of oil drums and barrels lashed together with knotty rope, a sign hanging above in buzzy, flickering neon:
13.
And there, at the counter, is Nora.
Everything rushes up to meet Mookie. Like standing still and moving forward. His daughter. His baby girl. He hasn’t done right by her yet. And today that changes.
Mookie charges toward her. Catches her by the elbow. Spins her around—rough, too rough. He doesn’t mean it to be that way but it’s like his body’s got the accelerator mashed to the mat, like he’s running hot and can’t cool down.
“Dad,” Nora says.
In her hand is a token: several circles of soda can tin and aluminum riveted together. In the middle, cut out, a single obvious number:
13.
Behind the booth, a man watches—conductor hat, face like the cattle catcher on an old locomotive, eyes that are tokens like the one in Nora’s hand. Steam drifts lazily from his nose and ears, and Mookie can smell the cooking coal.
“Nora,” Mookie says. He wraps his daughter up in a big hug. Tries not to crush her.
She pulls away, angrily.
“Hey!” she barks, finger thrusting up u
nder his chin. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’m sorry, Nora. I’ve been working. I got a lead—a real lead. I tried to send you some stuff but time got away from me and—”
She twists her shoulder out of his grip. “You left me down here.”
“I know.”
“I hate this place.”
“Me too, sweetheart, me too.”
And then she says, “I can feel this place, Dad. I don’t need Blue anymore, you understand? I can touch the walls and feel...”
But her words drift away.
Mookie’s a predator. And a good predator knows how to spot others of its ilk. And they’ve got enemies incoming. Movement on all sides. Beyond the booth. To the left, to the right. Behind them. Hoods pulled down, but Mookie can see the way the skin beneath glistens. The way their mouths shift and twitch—like anemone in the ocean current. Can see the wavy serpentine blades, light pooling in the steel.
The Skinless.
Mookie pulls his daughter close. Holds her face between his hands. “You need to run,” he says. “Run for the exit. Do not stop.”
“Dad—”
But then the first Skinless whoops—an ululating sound that isn’t human, isn’t human at all. It’s a cry of attack, because suddenly here they all come, rushing inward, blades up and out, and without warning her Mookie grabs his daughter and lifts her up on top of the crates and barrels around the ticket booth. “Go!” he bellows—
Just as the first Skinless lunges.
He catches the arm, lifts up—snaps the bone at the elbow, the arm forming a hard ninety-degree angle. The knife clatters. Mookie flings the freak into two more running for him. Beyond them: more, more, more. A dozen from one direction, a dozen from another. Jesus what do they want with us? And then Mookie feels that hard twist in his chest like it’s a knob on a locked door somebody keeps rattling in its socket—
No, no, no, not this time, if you fall they’ll go after her—
And then he knows what he needs to do.
He becomes bulldozer, trash truck, tractor fucking trailer—he rushes to meet the clash and clamor of cultists, and they don’t expect that. A few stop. A couple backpedal. He hits them like a Brahma bull, boom. One tries to swipe at him with the knife but he’s already uppercutting a hard fist. Jaw shatters. Black mouth tentacles drop like leeches.
Then Mookie keeps moving.
There—
The golem. With the little glass phials.
The Trog turns toward him late, too late, utterly bewildered—“Whuh?”—and Mookie loses his footing but lands with his hand planted in front of the golem’s wares. He grabs for a phial, fidgets for a half-second with the cork stopper but can’t make his thick callus-crust fingers do shit with it, so he just pops the whole damn thing in his mouth and bites down—
Crinkle-pop.
Glass on his tongue. Stuck in his gums.
And the cold powder of the Vermilion.
The Skinless pile on. A knife sticks in his shoulder meat. Black tentacles reach like oily hands and suction onto his ears and he hears a sound like the tide sucking out to sea as it slurps over sand. His heart beats faster and faster. It feels like someone’s crushing it the way you’d crush a can before tossing it into the trash. But then the Red Rage hits him—
A fire in the void. A waterfall of blood spattering into a lake of magma. Everything is meteors striking dark earth. Mookie feels the change sweep over him. The way his muscles bulge. The way his eyes grow big as softballs in the thick ridges of his cracking, widening skull. Everything swells. Pops. Rips.
Somewhere he hears a voice—“Dad!”—but he doesn’t know who it is or why anyone would think that he was their father, for a monster such as him can have no family. A monster such as him is nothing but rage and death. He is doombringer. He is hell-crusher. His cock feels like a—
The Skinless pile on him. Stabbing. Their knives snap against his thick, gristly cartilage. He grabs a bunch of them. Lifts them up and leaps—
Then comes back down hard.
The floor buckles.
Breaks.
And Mookie plunges downward.
He hears somebody, a voice he recognizes, calling his name—
But he cannot care. Any recognition is lost beneath a sweeping blanket of hunger—hunger for misery and murder. His hands ache to crush bones. His teeth long to eat meat. His throat desires blood, his ears demand screams, his body is an instrument of anarchy and apocalypse.
A backhanding fist spins a head around on its neck.
A hard elbow ruptures another’s skull.
The chorus of breaking bones. The cacophony of gargled tongues.
Mookie picks up the food cart, begins smashing it down. Pulping bodies.
And yet, they keep coming.
Suddenly, the fire within sweeps through, begins burning his soul curtains, catching on all the walls inside his mind. A little voice inside of him panics, runs the strobe-light sirens and kicks up the klaxons—awooga, awooga, awooga—and he knows that it’s eating him up now, and his heart feels like a peach stripped of its flesh with only the gnarled pit behind. Shadow pulses at his edges. He gets up. Runs. Smashes everything out of his way. Picks up Skinless, flings them into wire. Crashes shoulder-first through a plywood barrier. Hits hard against a rock wall, where part of the Yonder Market is anchored through fat, titanic eyebolts—the eyebolt jiggers, the rock splits, the whole thing starts to loosen. Then the floor is out beneath him—
Bang. The whole market shifts, shudders as Mookie lands. The sound of metal scraping rock scraping metal. Ggggggkkkkk. Screams. Motion. Fleeing.
Pinwheeling fists. Daggers grabbed, turned on their foes. Where do they keep coming from? Limbs lopped. Heads rolled.
Another drop—
This time, it’s not Mookie through the floor but the whole market moving.
Again, that spike of panic. A surging fear-signal cranking up in volume as two things happen in near simultaneity:
One, Mookie’s body seizes. The pain shoots through him, a living, arcing thing. A demon made of electricity, a creature who takes dear pleasure in the agony it causes.
Two, Yonder grinds, then shifts, then tilts hard. The market swings—once held fast, now attached only by hinges.
It drops.
Everything falls apart.
Mookie plunges down, down, down.
Skinless all around him.
Pain all inside him.
Nora.
Darkness.
PART TWO
NORA
9
A complete world has been riven in two. Light made separate from dark. Order held at arm’s length away from the snapping jaws of Chaos. The separation is imperfect, of course: when the sun sets, the light is pushed back by the waking dark. Order always give way to chaos, like a man who turns to a wolf under the pregnant moon, like how Jekyll becomes Hyde. The history of our world is a separated, segregated one. The future, however, will be very different.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
This, then, is Nora Pearl.
Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl. Or, in another life not so long ago: Persephone.
Daughter to Michael “Mookie” Pearl: human doomsday bunker, now dead.
Daughter to Jessica “Jess” Pearl: good mother and tough lady, now dead.
She’s small, unlike her father. More her mother’s build. She walks quick, talks quick, a hummingbird moving from flower to flower, hungry for nectar. (Hummingbirds are no Tinker Bells: they’re vicious and competitive when it comes to a taste of the sweet stuff.) Her hair is long, flaxen, a waterfall made golden by the dawn. Her eyes shine like turning pennies. Her mouth is a straight line: not impassive, not emotionless, but fighting a war between a sneer and a smirk.
Nora is a splinter, a staple, a sharpened painted fingernail right under your eyelid. She wants what she wants and she’ll do anything to get it.
What she wants now is to leave the Great Below.
She needs to escape Hell.
Her father saved her life down in the Ravenous Expanse—after she betrayed him. But saving her meant feeding her the Caput Mortuum mushrooms: the Violet Void, the final Pigment. (She’s seen four of the five Mystical Pigments now—Viridian, the Green Grave, remains undiscovered.) The Violet Void filled her with the dead breath of this haunted place. It made her heart into a maze. It bound her to the endless chambers and knotted passageways.
And now it won’t let her leave.
Any time she tries, she gets the shakes. Headaches that turn to nosebleeds. A pressure behind her eyes that feels like her whole face is about to pop like an overfed tick. It’s as if what healed her was the energies of Hell itself—as if the gaps of her wounds, the vents in her ragged soul, were filled with the void. And now to leave this place means ripping that out of her. Reopening the wounds. Inviting death anew.
But she can’t stay.
She’ll go mad down here. Like she tried to tell Mookie, she’s changing. Not physically—though she’s certainly grown paler, lost weight, as if she’s joining the ranks of the wandering specters that now flicker and twitch in the dark absent that downward momentum that grabbed them before. No, these changes are deeper, stranger. Unseen but keenly felt. She’s a part of this place now. She can feel it: plant a hand on the wall and she knows that gobbos are nearby, knows that god-worms twist in their temples, can feel the nearest veins of Cerulean and can even feel, if she concentrates really really hard, the hot matchtip burn of a Vermilion vein a long ways away.
At first she hated it, this change. Hated what it meant for her. Hated that this was what she was becoming. But now she loves it. Because this is how she’s going to get out of this place. Her eyes, wrenched open, saw something down here.
One day she had two hands on the wall, feeling what she could feel about Hell (scuttle-scuff of cankerpedes crawling two gobbos fucking each other’s mouths while rolling around on a cakey lime powder floor a corpse a river a vein of Blue a ghost weeping in the dark with a mouthful of dead orchids) and then just as she was about to stop looking...