by Chuck Wendig
“Wait. Wait!” Owen gurgles. “I’m here to help.”
“The fuck you mean, help?”
“I want to... I need to...” But Owen’s face is red as a blood blister, and his eyes start to go unfocused. Mookie doesn’t relent. He keeps choking the daemon. The kid squeaks, “Want to help you... escape.”
Escape?
Shit, what? Mookie’s caught. Confused. If he lets go and the little shit is lying, that’s it, he won’t get another chance to squeeze the life out of him. If he doesn’t let go and the daemon is telling the truth, well, whoops.
Mookie relinquishes his grip, but with his other hand grabs a hank of the kid’s stylishly messy hair. Owen gasps like a man pulled up from the bottom of the ocean. “I’ll rip all this pretty hair of yours out at the root if you’re not careful,” Mookie says.
“I want to help Nora.”
“You love her?”
“No. No!” Mookie wrenches the kid’s head against the bars—whonng. The kid starts jabbering. “No, I swear, no, but I could, I really could. And I don’t want it to go like this, I don’t want to force her into something she doesn’t want, I don’t want the world to fall to pieces. I don’t want any of that. I just want it to stop.”
Mookie sneers. “I could stop it right here, right now. I could squeeze your throat like a juice-box and drink whatever comes pouring out.”
“Not so much,” comes a third voice.
A voice Mookie knows.
Burnsy walks up.
And the ground shudders as a big-ass Trogbody follows behind. The swoop of a white cloak. Hood pulled back over shoulders so bulky they look like a series of tortoise-shells stacked atop one another. One arm ends not in a hand, but in a wide-mouthed revolver made of metal that seems to have incorporated with the stone-boned limb.
“I’m stroking out,” Mookie says. “Aren’t I?”
“Not so much, Mook,” Burnsy says. “You’re still with us. And to continue with my, ahhh, explanation, reason you can’t kill this kid is because they’ll just find another daemon to jump in and wear the monkey suit and the ring, you know?”
Mookie growls, and pitches Owen Candlefly away from the bars.
“Fine. And lemme guess—” This, to the daemon. “That’s the reason you can’t just say no, can’t just walk away from this.”
Owen, rubbing his throat, nods.
“Who are you?” Mookie asks of the golem.
“Hrothk,” the Trog says, voice like two millstones grinding someone’s bones.
“So get me the hell outta here already.”
The golem points the gun hand—
Powder-flash and thunder-clap. The metal around the lock blooms like a metal flower and the cell door drifts open.
“Jesus Christ!” Mookie yells over the sound in his own ears. “Why dontcha draw more attention to us?”
Burnsy says, his voice a dull mumble behind the tinnitus din, “We already killed the guards watching this place. We’re all clear. But we’re gonna have to hurry.”
“Hurry?”
It’s the golem who speaks next.
“We have a wedding to kill.”
*
The four of them stand on a bluff—a rock as bulbous and craggy as the golem, Hrothk. To the east, the sun rises over the mountains. To the north, the orange lights of Los Angeles. Between them are the dark waters of the sea, sculpted with white lines topping waves that seem to stand still, like little hills.
Mookie’s cleaver hangs once again at his hip. He picked it up on the way out of the mission, found it downstairs in an unlocked cabinet. Gone was the Maro Mergos, and his Viridian was nowhere in sight. Goddamnit.
“The hell are we?” Mookie asks. The wind whips so hard it feels like a city bus just blasted past him.
“Santa Catalina Island,” Burnsy says. “Candlefly and his maggot family had that little mission up in the hills. That’s where they were keeping you. Away from all the action. Guarded over by humans, not daemons.” Guards who met messy ends, Mookie noted as they left the mission. Necks broken. Heads peeled open. A half-dozen, all dead.
“How’s this all gonna shake out?”
Hrothk points. Following the Trog’s crooked finger, Mookie sees he’s gesturing toward the coast. North of them, south of the city. Another rocky, jagged line where land meets sea. Dotted with dark spots. Caves. “That is a cenote. A low place. Smuggler’s Cove. It is there that the daemons will open the doorway to the Interstitium. The wedding is to take place at noon, when the sun is at its peak and the Equinox is truly upon us.”
Mookie grunts. “I don’t know half of what you’re talking about, and I don’t give a bag of dead rats. What I’m hearing is that we need to go. Snatch her up before she even gets there. Stop the whole thing before it starts.”
It’s here that Owen speaks up. “That’ll be hard. Already there’s been one assassination attempt. Our family is afraid more will come—not every daemon wants this to happen. Some want to usurp the wedding. Some just want Nora out of the equation. They’ll be protecting her. But...”
“What?” Mookie asks.
“We know how they’re bringing her in,” Burnsy says.
“Jesus, people, don’t make me pull it out of you.”
Burnsy says, “Only one way into the cenote. And your girl, she can’t come from overland. She can’t come from the sea. Right now she’s married to Hell itself, so she has to come from Hell to get to the gateway they open.”
“One small passageway leads from the south,” Hrothk notes. “She will be coming through the old sewers. We will have to attack from there. We’ll bring the boat there—” He points, though where he’s pointing seems meaningless to Mookie. “There. Smaller cave. Bring the boat there. Travel through the Shallows to the tunnel breach. Wait for our opportunity. Pray to whatever gods you hold dear or have invented.”
*
The little boat skims the waves. It had been docked just below them, on the bluffs of Santa Catalina, not far from something called Ripper’s Cove where the ocean crashes into the toothy maw of pitted caves like buckets of water thrown into a shark’s mouth. The boat rocks and dips, pitches and yaws, and Mookie holds onto the sides with bloodless knuckles. His memory of the plane crashing is still fresh as a knife cut, and it keeps coming back to him—the plane tearing apart, the Aerie descending, the burn on his scalp, and then it all reversing, rewinding, undoing itself by their mad hand.
Owen isn’t with them. He had a car parked—didn’t want to head back with them, in case they got spotted or caught. Plus, he said, “I have to be at a tuxedo fitting in two hours, so. Wish me luck.” The look on his face was a dim rictus of fear and worry. And maybe something else, too. Mookie thinks, Maybe he does love Nora. Or at least cares for her more than he wants to admit.
That made Mookie angry and pleased in equal measure.
Mookie told the kid, “If you get up there, and they’re gonna marry you, tell her. Tell her I’m free. Don’t let them hold that over her. Tell her I’m alive, and I love her.”
Owen nodded. The two of them shook hands. And then Owen was gone.
Here on the boat, Burnsy turns back towards him. Winces against the spray. “Feels good. The ocean and the salt. Stings a little but it’s cool. On my skin.”
“Happened to your arm?” Mookie asks, gesturing to Burnsy’s limb, which remains swaddled in filthy duct-tape.
“John Atticus Oakes thought I didn’t need my skin anymore.”
“Goddamn.”
“Uh-huh. Hey, ahh. I wanted to say, I thought you were dead. Down there, in Yonder. The whole thing went south and... ahhh, fuck, I shoulda came for you.”
Mookie yells over the motor and the waves, “I was dead. Or close enough to it.” He lifts his shirt, shows off the hole in his chest ringed by iron and closed by a little flap on tiny hinges. “Got fitted with a new heart. Half of one, anyway.”
“Christ in a sidecar. I’m sorry.”
“Piss on that. You did right by
me. You stayed with Nora. I didn’t expect that.”
“Me neither.”
Mookie thinks, but doesn’t say, I’m not gonna make it out of this alive. No promises for you, either. Instead, he offers a hand. Burnsy takes it and shakes it.
“We good?” Burnsy asks. “After all this time?”
“We’re good.”
And the boat keeps cutting waves.
37
Wedding Day. I look beautiful in my dress. And all I want to do is tear it to shreds.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Mookie and the golem stand at the fore of a cracked, crooked passage. Water drips on them from above. Down here, the air is cool, but the walls are warm like beach sand. Ahead of them, by ten feet, is the old sewer: the red brick pocked and pitted like the craters in an acne-scarred face. The floors both there and beneath them are mucky with old grease and filth—some of it dry and hardened, like oily calluses, some of it still wet like glops of soggy toilet paper. All of it forming whipped cream peaks, but this ain’t whipped cream.
Sometimes the muck bubbles and shifts as a roach-rat scurries underneath it to get away from them. Well, Mookie thinks, good to know that the ecology of the Left Coast Hell isn’t all that different from what you get in New York.
Mookie gives an elbow to Burnsy. “Time?” he whispers.
“Eleven-fifteen. They’re cutting it close, but probably looking to make a grand entrance. You know, true wedding style.”
“This ain’t a true wedding.”
“It is in the eyes of the universe.”
“Shhh,” Hrothk says, the sound of a rheumy growl in the back of a lion’s throat. The two shut up.
Mookie listens.
Footsteps.
Then the walls shudder. A faint vibration. Blood-red dust from the brick above whispers down onto the lardy slurry below.
The footsteps get louder and louder until Mookie realizes—
They aren’t just footsteps. It’s a march.
The sounds that come next are hissing, gargling, cackling. Gobbos. He looks to Hrothk, whose quartz-spire eyes flash, the big-barreled gun held up at the ready against his rugged limestone cheek.
Mookie flattens himself against the rock of the passageway. Feels his body burning Viridian. Ghostly spectral flame lights the edges of his vision and a wave of vertigo washes over him—not now, not now, not now—but then it passes as the first of the procession passes by their hiding spot.
It is not a goblin.
The reaper-cloak drifts past, soundless, without disturbing the air.
Then another. And a third after that.
The gobbo parade follows soon after.
Gamboling, spitting creatures. Faces split with mad mouths full of rotten, ruined teeth. Tubule tongues lashing the air—an act of joy and abandon accompanied by damp, mucusy cackles. They lope along, some like apes, others like wolves, others like haughty men surveying their domain. Some wear the clothes of men: ragged T-shirts and board shorts, rumpled suit jackets too big for their chimp-like bodies. The rest are in rough rags, or bound up in stained swaddling. They swipe at the air with stone axes lined with straight-razors while others drag behind cankerpede blunderbusses, the barrels parting the grease foam like a low-rent, gutter-fed Moses. Some bang drums. Or clack together skulls. Or ululate and howl and clap their rubbery, many-fingered hands.
This is a celebration.
And still Mookie thinks, We can take them. He’s seen dozens of gobbos so far, but these passages are narrow, and Mookie and the others can’t be surrounded. They can grab Nora. Fight their way out.
That’s when the Snakefaces slither past. Sliding up along the walls. Tentacle-fingers finding narrow moorings in the brick, dragging themselves past. Yellow-slit eyes staring forward, a cacophony of hisses. One, two, five, ten, another ten, and now Mookie’s certainty of saving his daughter is fast receding out to sea, like a loved one throttled by the undertow and dragged down into the crushing depths.
And then the ground shudders. A tectonic rumble.
Louder and louder, the tunnels quaking. Bricks dropping away and plopping into the slurry. From beyond, goblin hoots and hollers and crass hymns sung in garbled tongues. Then the source of the quake shows itself.
Time seems to slow as Mookie sees her.
Nora.
Lying down. In a beautiful red dress, hemmed with black lace. Her face painted into a white skull with whorls and flourishes over the eyes, the cheekbones, around the nose and around the lips. Flowers in her hair.
She’s draped in the maw of a god-worm.
Her hands bound with wire in front of her.
She looks scared. He’s not used to her looking scared.
Mookie moves fast, stepping toward the tunnel, cleaver up—
But Hrothk catches his wrist. Stone fingers holding tight, threatening to crush. Those quartz eyes flash again and the golem gives a small, solemn shake of his head.
Mookie doesn’t want to believe it. He wants to save his girl. This is his one chance. Snatch her from the jaws of the massive beast, turn and flee down the narrow passage back to the sea, hoping to outrun the god-worm, the goblins, the Snakefaces, and those knife-fingered reaper-cloaks—
But he hesitates. Nora can’t go to the sea. She can only remain here, in Hell.
And with that revelation, the moment is lost.
The massive worm pushes through the tunnel like a fist through a cardboard tube. As it passes, the passage opening is heaped with fallen bricks and crumbling stone. Plumes of dust and humid air are pushed toward them, the god-worm’s slick hide barely seen through the obfuscation as it slides past.
Mookie hears Hrothk in his ear: “There is another way. Come.”
*
Again, the boat, the sea, the wind. This time, the craggy coast is too close for comfort, and Mookie holds on as Hrothk steers the small watercraft around spires of rock thrust up out of the crashing surf like broken teeth.
The plan has changed. They can no longer make hay with their earlier attempt—now it’s time to bring the boat around to the cenote. To the place where the gate should be open. There they’ll have to stop the wedding as it happens—a plan that requires truly threading the needle, catching Nora before the vows are spoken and the marriage made.
With every hit from every wave, another memory of Nora is conjured up out of the dark and troubled deep: her on his knee; the time she stepped on a broken clamshell at the Boardwalk and tracked blood for a quarter-mile before she told them what had happened; a drawing of hers on the fridge that had her and her mother depicted in scribbly crayon but Mookie nowhere nearby; her screaming at him from her room, throwing an off-brand MP3 player (that “fell off a truck”) at his head; the first time he saw her with a smear of Blue at her temples; the two of them falling through a gate that shimmered like light through topaz, tumbling into the deepest chasm where the god-worms roiled and writhed in a lava-lit fissure...
And now this: him trying to stop her wedding.
They round a sharp jutting cliff, and ahead, they see it—
The cenote.
No goblins. No Snakefaces. Not a reaper-cloak in site.
And no Nora.
All that remains is a red wooden door. A door pressed into the rock, like a tile into clay—a door that does not belong, that couldn’t have been here before. The door to the Interstitium. The gateway to the wedding of Nora Pearl and Owen Candlefly.
But one stands between them and the door.
A woman.
Bald. Nude. A spiral of hematite scale winding up both legs, up her torso, under and around her breasts, and finally to her neck.
And around that neck hangs a chain, and upon that chain hangs a key. A jagged, bent key of five colors. Red. Blue. Green. Ochre. Violet.
They pull the boat up and Hrothk throws a rope over a bent claw of porous rock. The tide is coming in, and the waters of the cenote are rising. They get out of t
he boat and the water is up past their knees.
The woman waits as the three of them enter the cove.
“Do you remember me?” she asks, turning her body slightly to the left so as to show the puffy pink scar that runs up her side. The woman is staring at Mookie when she says it. “I remember you.”
He looks down at his cleaver. And suddenly, he does remember her.
“Pelsinade, ain’t it?” he asks. “I forgot to thank you for the ride.”
“I forgot to thank you for letting us all out of our prison. So close to it now. So close to the surface. Above as Below...” She turns her gaze to the others. “And you two. Most excellent to meet again on this joyous occasion. I am afraid the wedding is invitation only and I—” She pauses and smiles. “Don’t see your names on the guest list. Such a shame, but only so much room.”
“You miss your brother? Chithra, Vithra, whatever the fuck his name was?”
“His absence is like a cancer,” she hisses.
“Good,” Mookie says. “Now I’m gonna need that key. You don’t feel like giving me the key, I’m happy to send to you meet your sibling. I’m gracious like that.”
“This key?” she asks, plucking it from her neck.
Then she opens her mouth, jaw snapping, maw opening wider than any human’s mouth could—and she drops it down into the hole.
Mookie wastes no time. He rushes her. Hrothk runs alongside him, too, stone stump feet splashing in the water, gun up, cylinder clicking over and then—
Boom, boom, boom. Three shots in quick succession. But she’s fast, faster than fast, undulating like the serpent that she is, bullets punching craters in the cave wall behind her, and as Mookie leaps for her, cleaver up and out—