The Hellsblood Bride

by Chuck Wendig

  “I can’t let you do that,” Mookie says.

  “I know. And you won’t have to because I’m not gonna help Oakes.”

  The old goat’s throat starts really fluttering now—pulsing, twitching, like his heart is there in his esophagus, pounding fast, erratic. He winces. Bites down hard and swallows with a whimpering growl.

  “Werth—”

  “Mook. Oakes counted on me being a selfish fuckin’ prick, which has admittedly been my primary mode of existence through this ramshackle shit-box I call a life. But death is clarifying. He thinks I’ll do anything to save myself, keep walking around in the snow and the sunlight, but truth is, I did you wrong way back when and I’m here telling you all this now—” He staggers off the stool, clutching at his throat with one hand, his words gone to a gurgle. “—to make up for what I done, to warn you that bad things are coming, that if you don’t fix all this, everything we have will be done for. That wedding happens, the oldest, worst gods will slither up out of Hell and find this place is a playground for them and—” He grabs his throat and speaks past it, eyes bugging. “It’s your job to stop it. You’re not just saving your daughter, or the city. You’re saving everything. The whole world and then some—”

  Grrrk.

  Something comes up out of his throat. A black, slick thing. Like a hand, or a squid—and inky ropes splay from his lips and coil around his throat.

  Mookie grabs the cleaver, runs toward him.

  But Werth tilts the gun, shoves it in his mouth, and—

  Bang.

  *

  The dead squid thing looks like road tar given shape. Its tendrils wind through the body of James Werth, wrapping around his bones and into their marrow. He’s not much now—just a sagging sack, the skeleton jutting out, the flesh rent. No blood, not really. He was never alive, not truly.

  Mookie stands there for a long time. Skelly holds him as he tells her what happened. She gets him some coffee. Pours a little Owenon’s in it.

  Over time he steps away from the body.

  “I’m not a hero,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “You can’t trust me to make the right decisions.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to.”

  “He asked me. He told me.” Mookie guzzles the hot, whiskey-tinged coffee. “I saved the city and it was a fluke. I got lucky. Things are bigger now.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “I won’t. I can’t.”

  “You have a plan,” she says. As he starts to pace she catches up to him, stands in front, reaches up with her one good hand (the other has already healed over, though she says it remains tender) and cups his stubbled chin and cheek. “Listen. Listen. You got this, sugar. You’re not the man anybody would’ve asked for but you’re the man the world is gonna get. Nora needs you.”

  He hesitates. “Do you need me?”

  She smiles, and he can’t tell if it’s sad or not. “I don’t, sugar. I don’t need anyone but me. But I want you. I want you to come back to me. So, go. Get out there. Find the translator. Get to your daughter. Do what ever daddy wishes he could: stop his baby-girl from marrying some skeevy little twerp before she ruins his world.”

  He nods.

  “That’s a pretty good pep talk.”

  “It just came to me.”

  He bends to her. They kiss. He’s the world and she’s the sky and that kiss is where they meet—everything in that moment is beautiful, shining horizon.

  “Go,” she says, pulling away.

  He grabs his parka from the hook by the door, and he’s gone.

  31

  Every girl is supposed to lose her mind when she finally picks a wedding dress. Isn’t that the thing? My mom always used to say, “Men always go on and on about their retirement. Women always go on and on about their wedding, or their daughter’s wedding, or their granddaughter’s wedding...” And I joked and was like, “Durr, white people be like, and black people be like, and what’s the deal with men and women, anyway?” And she laughed and then bonked me on the head with a wooden spoon. (Relax, like, in a funny way.) Thing is, I was never the type to care about my wedding. I never wanted to get married. Never wanted to have kids. And today? I saw my wedding dress. I walked into that room and there it sat in a glass case like it was some kind of precious museum artifact and... nah, nope, nothing. It’s cool. It’s not like your everyday dress. It’s red—like red as blood, red as crushed grape. The middle is a corset—whalebone, I’m told. Black lace at the bottom. The shoes have heel spikes I could use to impale a cat. Silver skulls on the front. Classy. Ernesto says it was his mother’s wedding dress. Which is either really sweet or really gross or something in between. It’s a nice dress. I’m going to look awesome in it. But I still don’t give a fuck about weddings.

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  A few inches? Bullshit. The snow is already starting to pile up. It’s morning now, and the fat flakes keep falling—like little snowballs flung from the heavens. The wind kicks up, lets it all turn and whirl in the air. The sun is a smeary glow behind the clouds and the blizzard, and everything is bright and Mookie has to squint against it.

  The train is late. Commuters are starting to pile up. Give him looks as he stands out there on the platform, lower jaw jutting out, twin trails of steam-breath blowing out his nose. Snow mounding on his shorn scalp.

  The book—the Maro Mergos—hangs heavy in the bag hanging off his shoulder. Everything feels heavy, though. The book. The cleaver. Life. Death.

  Time feels like an inverted mountain, its peak pressing down between his shoulder blades. Everything pushing hard on him. Nora getting married (five days, a voice reminds). Skelly getting beaten up. Werth eating a bullet—dead once more, really dead, double dead. Working for Oakes, too. Oakes? The insane cartographer has gone and got himself a cult. The Skinless. Was that why they had the book to begin with? Was he looking for a way out of Hell? Did he find that way through Nora instead?

  Will the world really end if all this comes true?

  Nora marrying a Candlefly.

  Jesus.

  Mookie’s world will sure as hell end, even if the rest of it wakes up with the sunrise like any other day. Alonzo told him she was marrying a daemon named Owen. Said he was an artist. Ugh. Who the hell marries artists?

  His paternal instinct is to forget the translator, say fuck it and go and get on a plane while they’re still flying and find this Owen Candlefly and wad up his trachea like it’s a paper coffee cup and then kick him down into Hell where the gobbos can plant eggs in his asshole. But he has to do this right. He beats on this Owen character, Nora will only want the little artist more. He has to give her something. He has to offer her the book and its translation—has to show her that there’s another way.

  He has to be her hero.

  Her hero. Not the world’s hero.

  Fuck the world. This is for her.

  Finally, the train horn blasts in the distance.

  *

  The city’s still the city. School buses and taxi horns and someone yelling. Crowds pushing to work, school, home. A cab hits the brakes at one intersection, screeches, slams into a black sedan. Suddenly, two men erupt into the street, into the mess, screaming and flinging snowballs at each other, and as Mookie keeps walking, they start throwing fists.

  Nobody wants to admit it’s snowing like a sonofabitch, that it’s piling up. Gone beyond slush and slog, now it’s a proper precipitation.

  He doesn’t want to admit it, either.

  Snow is a hindrance. An obstacle. He needs fewer of those.

  He catches a cab, spends some of his last money on the ride. His chest itches. His mouth is dry like he’s got cotton balls under his tongue.

  Mookie knows the feeling. He’ll need Viridian soon. Which means after this it’s off to see the wizard: Bellbook and Woodwine. They’ll be wanting an update, anyway.

  The cabbie looks back. The
driver’s a unicorn: a white, female cabbie.

  “Hey, how about this snow?” she asks.

  Jesus. Small talk. “It’s white,” he says. “And it’s cold.”

  “They’re saying it’s gonna be a bad one.”

  “What? Thought it was a few inches, tops.”

  She laughs, still gunning the cab through the muck. “Sorry, man. That’s old news. Something about a cold front off the coast is keeping this storm stuck here. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a blizzard out there.” Clumps of snow smack against the windshield; the wipers squeak and push it off. “Won’t be long before this city’s a ghost-town. Worse than this, though, is that another storm is coming in tomorrow. One-two punch, man. Bad winter, bad winter. It’s like spring don’t wanna get sprung.”

  “Just get me to where I need to go.”

  “Not a chatty guy?”

  “Not a chatty guy.”

  “No prob, man, no prob.”

  *

  Way Mookie sees it, those who know about the Hell beneath their feet fall into two camps: the doers, and the thinkers. Doers do. They get their hands dirty. They go Below, they get shit done. They chip Blue out of the walls. They know what gobbo traps look like. They got boltholes and backdoors—or at least know someone who does. They carry maps not because they’re fascinating artifacts but because maps tell you how to get places, plain and simple.

  Thinkers? They’re spectators. Tourists. Intellectual types who want to talk about Hell without ever going deep. Maybe they’ve visited the Oddments Market to pick up a trinket. Maybe they’ve scurried around the Shallows, some book-read “urban spelunker” who wants to glimpse the glowing fungus and the goblin markings without ever being in real danger. A lot of things probably break out this way: some folks climb the mountain, others hang around at base-camp and talk about climbing the mountain. Some folks climb that mountain because it makes a good story. Others do it because they have a goal, a task, something that needs doing: finding a treasure, hunting a yeti, recovering the body of a loved one near the summit.

  Mookie’s a doer.

  This person he’s about to meet? She’s a thinker.

  Her name’s Ginger Singh, a professor at Columbia. Knows a lot about the Great Below without ever having set foot there. Mookie doesn’t understand these people. She’s like one of those people who loves baseball stats but has never been to a goddamn game.

  Christ. Mookie hasn’t been to a game in forever. He used to take Nora to Shea to see the Mets play. But now both NY teams have new stadiums and he hasn’t been to a single one of them. Suddenly, he wants to make that a new goal. Get Nora out of this wedding. Get her out of Hell. Go to a Mets game together. Eat popcorn. Drink beer. That can’t be a fantasy. He won’t let that be a fantasy.

  That’s one thing he feels for the thinkers, the tourists, the spectators: envy. They get to splash around in the shallow end and then go back to their normal lives. Sure, some of them go bugfuck moonbat nuts—but for most, it’s a hobby of curious oddities.

  Mookie walks between two lion statues—frosted with the white stuff—and heads to Fayerweather Hall. Takes him a while—he has to look at some of the standing maps now and again to figure out where the history building is—but somehow he navigates through the falling flakes (and the college students, all of whom look at him like, who let this gorilla out?) to the building.

  Singh’s a history professor. Basement office.

  He heads down two flights of steps.

  Fluorescent lights hang here in the basement hallways. They buzz and click. Bright, garish light punctuated by moments of darkness.

  Everything smells musty.

  But there’s something else, too.

  Oh, no. No, no, no.

  The door at the end of the hall is her door. Room 107.

  That door is half open. The inside of the room is dark.

  A pair of flies buzzes in the air in front of that door. Each chasing the other.

  Mookie feels detached. Disconnected. Drifting through open space knowing that something awaits, something terrible—he’s not sure what, but he feels hot and cold all at the same time, and the snow from his shoulders and scalp melt down his neck.

  He pushes the door open.

  Basement level means no windows in the room. Everything is just shapes: bookshelves, a table, some chairs, a globe, file cabinets.

  A desk.

  Behind the desk is a human shape, slumped forward.

  His soul sinks. She’s dead.

  But then: “Mr. Pearl?”

  Her voice is wet, broken, crackling. A flywing buzz vibrating behind each word.

  What light comes in from the hallway is trapped, glistening, along the margins of her shape. It’s then he realizes: she has no skin.

  “They got to you,” he says.

  “They awakened me,” she says. “I feel everything now. All pain. All pleasure. The breath of the world. The vibrations of the Great Below rising up through the floor and singing in the strings of my tendons.”

  “Fuck. Fuck.”

  The shape stands. The movement has a sound like bandages peeled off a clotting wound—slick, mealy, glutinous. Flies take flight.

  “I want the book,” she says.

  “Not a chance.”

  “We want the book. We are all awake now.”

  He hears doorknobs click behind him.

  All the office doors have drifted open.

  And into the flickering lights walk the Skinless.

  A short, fleshless man in a houndstooth jacket, but no pants. Another woman in a blood-soaked frock and scarf, skinned breasts hanging fat like ruined grapefruits. A third man—reedy, bent, skinless and naked but for the thick-lensed glasses held fast to his noseless face with X’s of scotch tape.

  They hiss and giggle. And begin to plod slowly toward him. A trail of red, glistening footprints trailing behind them. The flies land. The insects feed.

  “The Skinless King sends a message,” Singh hisses. “He wants you to know that your daughter is in good hands. She is favored. Her wedding vows will be the song that sings the world to sleep. The great inversion is coming. Below as Above. Above as Below.” She laughs, a discordant melody.

  Mookie reaches down for his cleaver.

  “I have a message for Oakes, too,” he says.

  They leap for him.

  And he swings the blade.

  *

  The lights of the office show that they did it to her on the desk. They skinned her there. All the blood. And hair. Bits of fingernails and a swatch of flesh with some kind of mandala tattoo on it. All of it stuck to a desktop calendar, the pages gluey with her leavings. Behind him, by the door of the office, lie the wet, red bodies. Heaped in a tangled pile of limbs. Their lives dispatched because, somehow, they were made into servitors for John Atticus Oakes, the self-proclaimed Skinless King.

  When he killed them, those black, tentacled things tried to rise up out of their mouths—little inky fingers flailing about. He chopped into those, too.

  He holds one up. A limb, oil-black creature. More shadow than flesh. It almost feels insubstantial in his grip, its body a dark void like—

  Like the Vollrath. The reaper-cloaks.

  Those things—matte black sheets haunting the labyrinth. Knives like fingers. Plunging those blades into his head, plumbing the depths of who he was and what he knew. He wonders: could these things be related? He hasn’t seen any Vollrath since that day down in the third water tunnel. When he and the others dispatched the beast that Zoladski had become: Vithra, a god-worm merged with his human form.

  The tentacle-thing drops from his hand—his fingers go slack, soft, a cold numbness shooting from his wrist to his shoulder. His knees go wobbly.

  Mookie hurries to find his little tin of Viridian. He scoops a spoonful into the furnace that is his heart. The world locks into place. His heart calms.

  Inside the tin, not much green stuff left. Three doses. Maybe four.

  He grinds
his teeth. Everything feels dire.

  The translator is dead. But he has the book. That may be enough: the promise of what it can do for Nora. Maybe out there, on the West Coast, he can find somebody—maybe one of the Bellbooks can translate. Minerva has to know somebody.

  Which means it’s time to see the daemons.

  32

  I’m getting married in five days. What the hell is wrong with me?

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  He stumbles out into the cold with his jacket turned inside out—he can’t have folks seeing the bright red blood, so easy to spot against the white snow, even in a goddamn blizzard. This is not a good day for the cops to stop him and ask him what he’s been doing. (“Shit, not much, just chopping up a four-pack of skinless professors at Columbia University. You?”) He’s got to minimize that problem, stat.

  But other problems mount.

  No cab will pick him up. He took a little extra time to look through her stuff, see if she had anything at all on the subject of the Maro Mergos. (Spoiler alert: she didn’t.) In the short while that he was in there, the snow started to mount up, and the city did what the city rarely does. It closed schools. And once the schools close, it’s only a few short dominoes to fall before the whole city shuts down. Already they’ve announced that in an hour they’ll suspend subway service—and oh, lo and behold, there’s a delay. By the time a train gets to him, service will probably be done anyway.

  Fuck it. He can walk.

  Cross north of Central Park. Then down through the Upper East Side.

  But an hour walk turns into two pretty fast. Everything is hidden behind a bright curtain of whirling white. The walk is a slog—he’s already tired, and moving his boots through the piling snow takes more effort than he’d like. The wind whips. Stings his cheeks pink. Ice crusts on his eyebrows. Lips go dry, cracking like freezer-burned meat.