He reached up and tugged the cable above his head experimentally. It was solid, rock hard. Straining his neck against the noose, he looked up, tracing the course of the wire as it vanished upward into the dark ceiling.
Bob looked back at Benny and felt his stomach roll. Benny may have played host to an ancient god, but while Tangun was absent she was mortal. Her death had been violent, sickening. Here, swinging so close to Benny’s body, Bob could feel the urges rise, the hunger stir inside. There was power in blood, in death. Bob knew it – it was part of him – and clearly the killer knew it too. He was using that same power to wake the Thing Beneath. The brutality, the savagery of the Hang Wire murders had a purpose.
Zanaar had power. Real power, enough to overpower both him and Benny. The Cold Dark – Bob didn’t know what that was, but Zanaar seemed to be connected to both that and the amorphous evil stirring beneath the city. The Thing Beneath.
Bob cleared his head and began to swing his legs. The steel cable squeaked as it took his weight without strain. This amount of cable could hold up a bus. High above there was a very low groaning sound, virtually inaudible, as the rafters around which the cable was tied sighed with the strain.
As Bob moved in the air, he analyzed the strength of the cable, the tension, the flexibility. He pushed a little with his mind and understood the weft and the weave of the fibers bound inside the cable with the clarity and accuracy of an electron microscope.
Then he pushed a lot with his mind, and the steel cable around his neck broke down into its constituent atoms and fell to the warehouse floor in a cloud of glittering silver dust.
Bob floated in the air next to Benny. Above him the remains of the cable whipped back up into the darkness as the weight on it suddenly evaporated. The end of the cable snickered past one of the hanging light bulbs, then it whipped back and shattered the globe. Without thinking, Bob reduced the falling glass shards to individual molecules of silica. Then he looked up, realized what he’d done, and refocused his mind. Once he started exercising his long-dormant powers, they’d started to take over. The glass had been no danger to him, but part of him was starting to enjoy the freedom, the power to manipulate the world around him. He had to focus, concentrate, do only what was necessary.
Bob drifted down. He and Benny had been hanged ten feet from the floor, in the open space between the crates, opposite the main warehouse door. He looked up at Benny’s lifeless, blood-soaked corpse, swinging on the cable, and blinked.
The cable holding Benny disintegrated into powder. He held Benny’s body in the air, then gently lowered her to the warehouse floor and the great pool of blood that had collected underneath her body.
Bob shook his head. It was a waste, senseless and unnecessary, another example of what went wrong when the gods meddled in the lives of people. Benny was dead, as were five other innocents, killed by someone wielding a power with no control.
Bob could bring Benny back to life. It was easy enough, as easy as a simple command, a push at the fabric of the world. But it might be enough to push Bob over the edge. He was afraid of what the power he wielded might do to him if he decided to use it.
He had been both a god and a devil, and he wasn’t sure which side was stronger.
Benny was dead, but Bob knew that Tangun the Founder could not be killed, at least not like this. But when Tangun visited Earth, he needed a host mind and body. Benny’s family tree stretched back to the Three Kingdoms of Korea, nearly two thousand years of history, destined to be the host line. Tangun was wound within her DNA.
Another of the god’s mistakes.
Bob stood over the body. No – Benny deserved better. He wouldn’t let her just be another victim of the games gods play.
“Benny, ho’olu komo la kaua.”
There was a gentle splash as two golden boots settled in the pool of blood. Tangun’s golden mask smiled at Bob. Bob stepped back in surprise.
“Kanaloa, my friend,” said Tangun. Behind the smiling gold mask, Bob could see Benny’s eyes were bright and alive. Her chin and neck were clean, with no blood, no injury. He’d resurrected Benny, who had brought Tangun straight back to Earth.
Bob bowed. “Tangun, King and Founder. We must act quickly.”
The golden mask was suddenly a scowling visage of rage and terror, the frozen, screaming face of hell. Bob flinched. There was something different about his friend now. Tangun was ready for war.
“We dally,” said Tangun, his voice booming like thunder in the warehouse. He rose two feet in the air, his golden armor sparking with energy. “Come, the chase is on.”
— INTERLUDE —
CONEY ISLAND, NEW YORK
1977
The city was burning. Not Manhattan, not down where people sat on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in the warm July night, drinking and talking and gazing in wonder at the empty, black glass towering over them on all sides. Not in Midtown, where cops were busy freeing the old and the wealthy from dead elevators. Farther up, where the decay of New York had really taken hold, where buildings were empty shells and where graffiti covered every surface and the gangs had control. Up there, in the Bronx, in the war zone, where the creeping failure of the city was at its most severe, where people were desperate.
There, the city burned.
The power went out at 7:23 p.m., and just like that, the largest city in the United States became impotent, floundering in the sudden darkness. It was inevitable, perhaps, the final embarrassment of a city so deep in debt that even the President had told it to go to hell.
Maybe that’s where they were now, in a hell of darkness and chaos, of utter confusion, paralyzing fear. For some there was opportunity in the darkness. Fear and anxiety and hopelessness bred anger and hate and desperation. Bred crime, lawlessness.
The looting began, coupled with rioting and fighting and then, in the darkness, a light flared.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx was burning.
Joel watched from shadows under the eaves of a closed restaurant as the emergency services worked, and worked hard. The power was out at Coney Island. On a hot summer’s night the place should have been burning bright, nothing but lights and the smell of hot dogs and popcorn and the screams of the happy and the happily terrified.
With the power out, the shadow under the eaves was an almost impenetrable blackness, not even the strobe of the cop cars and ambulances across the street were able to penetrate. Joel was out of sight, invisible in the night.
The street in front of him was packed with people. Getting everybody out of the amusement park was a big task, and there were people still stuck inside, in a rocket-shaped car at the high point of its orbit or swinging at the top of the Ferris wheel, with nothing to see but the dark city from horizon to horizon.
There was fear here, Joel could feel it – the electric charge in the air, the cold burning in his waistcoat pocket. The fabric of the place was thick with it. But the firemen and the fairground operators were hand-cranking the Ferris wheel’s gears, and people were being helped out of the swinging seats as each reached ground level. Out on the street, hotdog stands were doing a flying trade, their cookers operating on gas, the owners not needing electricity to count the dollar bills accumulating in their apron pockets.
Joel took the coin from his pocket and squeezed it in the middle of his fist. The cold hurt, like a knife plunged through his palm. Joel concentrated, focused on the screaming in his head.
Joel opened his eyes and looked to his left. There, in the darkness of the park, where the rides were black shapes jagged against the moonlit sky. Where there was no one, not anymore. Where, farther down the street, by a side entrance, sat two police cars, their lights off.
There was fear and there was death, and near too. In the dark fairground, something terrible.
The next piece.
“We need to see if we can get any of this stuff shifted tomorrow, after maybe taking down the – hey, excuse me!”
Joel walked past the cop, ignoring h
im, heading toward the body on the grass. The cop flipped his notebook shut and pulled the flashlight out from under his arm.
“Hey!”
Joel looked down at the body. It was a girl, face down, in a long dress. The grass was gray in the night, covered by irregular patches of something dark, nearly black. Joel smiled as he adjusted his footing. Blood, and lots of it.
“That’s enough, buddy!”
Joel glanced up. One of the cops pulled his gun and walked toward him, his colleague quickly pocketing the notebook and reaching for his own weapon. Joel raised his hands and turned around on the spot, face to face with the gun. The other cop hesitated; the first seemed to sense this and called to him over his shoulder.
“Get on the radio, get Mackenzie over here, pronto.” He turned to Joel. “On the ground, pal. Now!”
Joel glanced at the ground, and back at the cop.
“Well, friend, there’s a lot of blood on this here grass. I’m sure you don’t want me disturbing the scene of a crime, now do you?”
The cop did nothing for a couple of seconds. Then he gestured with his gun. Joel smiled and crabbed sideways until he felt the grass underfoot was dry.
The other cop turned on his heel.
The pearl-handled gun was in Joel’s hand in the blink of an eye. Even as the first cop gasped in surprise and raised his own weapon up, Joel brought the base of his revolver’s grip down on the man’s face. There was a crack and cop’s nose sank into his face, blood erupting in a thick spurt. The cop dropped his weapon but his cry was choked off as Joel’s free hand found the man’s throat. Joel pushed down; the cop didn’t resist and hit the ground on his knees. Joel raised his gun hand up again and hit the cop on the crown of his head just once. The cop gurgled as Joel released him, then fell sideways onto the grass.
The cop with the notebook was a rookie, had to be. He turned back around in time to see his colleague topple to the ground, but then stood for a second, frozen, his eyes wide. Then he drew breath to shout and finally pulled his own gun from its holster.
Too late. Joel was faster, his speed preternatural, assisted. He grabbed the rookie’s wrist and yanked upwards, breaking bone and causing the gun to fall from his grip. Holding the pearl-handled revolver in his other hand, he sideswiped the rookie’s jaw. There was a crunch, like someone biting into a crisp apple, and something liquid and black in the low light flew from the cop’s mouth. The rookie staggered, his head bowed. Joel took the invitation and cracked his skull as he had done with the first cop. The rookie sighed and fell to the ground, face-first.
Joel stepped over to the first cop’s body, feeling the power swell around him as the two lives drained away in the blacked-out night. The first cop gurgled and one leg twitched; Joel fell onto his back on one knee, reached down, and twisted the man’s head. Another crack, and the gurgling stopped.
Joel had dispatched the police as quietly as he could, but people would be coming soon. Joel glanced over and up; there were still people on the Ferris wheel, high up in the air with a view over Coney Island. If anyone had been looking in his direction, they would have seen the flashlight and dark shapes moving, surely.
No matter. He’d find the piece, collect it and go, off to follow the light to the next part, then the next, then the next.
Joel moved over to the rookie and took the flashlight from his cooling hand. He turned it on the body of the girl, murdered in the dark night of July 13th, 1977.
No, not murdered, at least not by human hand. The death was unnatural in more ways than one. This was why Joel had been brought here, he could feel it.
Holstering the pearl-handled revolver, Joel took the coin from his pocket, his fingers afire. He rolled it into his palm and squeezed and held his hand out as he slowly walked in a circle.
The girl’s body – and now the bodies of the two cops – was lying in a clearing near the north side of the amusement park, an area behind a series of dark fairground attractions. A water dunk, the back of two closed-up concession stands, and…
Joel walked around the front of the structure, into the park proper.
It was a shooting range. Ornate and colorful, a huge construction of wood and metal enameled in bright and elaborate drawings of stars and a great comet arching over the whole of the front. On each side, carved out of wood, stood a pair of life-sized soldiers in red coats, tall hats, each holding a rifle and bayonet. There were more at the back of the range, framing the empty target area where paper boards would spring up for the players to try to hit with their own toy rifles.
The coin pulled, pulled, pulled. Joel raised the flashlight at each solider, standing boldly to attention, rifle shouldered, shiny bayonet pointed to the starless sky.
The bayonet of the solider nearest did not shine. It was dark, and when Joel shone the flashlight on it, it didn’t shine but glistened.
Blood.
Joel shone the light over the soldier’s face, chest. The carved figure was covered in it. In the flashlight’s beam the soldier’s red cheeks glowed and it grinned with a mouth of straight white teeth. The thing was immobile, interlocked wooden segments assembled into the form of a giant toy soldier.
Immobile, but not lifeless.
Joel flicked the light off, counted two, and turned it on again.
The soldier’s carved wooden features were twisted now in anger, the mouth snarling, the cheeks still glowing red but the heavy black eyebrows dipped into a V over the eyes. Eyes now fixed firmly on Joel.
“I follow the light, and the light it shines for thee,” said Joel, pocketing the flashlight and getting to work.
— XXXIII —
SAN FRANCISCO
TODAY
There was something wrong with Tangun.
Kanaloa, god of death and of life, floated high about Chinatown, surveying the city below, Tangun hovering beside him. Bob had bent the light around them, so if anyone looked up they’d see nothing at all, least of all a man with long blond hair wearing only a pair of jeans and a man clad in antique Korean royal armor. Bob had to be careful. They could defy gravity, and Bob could play with photons so they wouldn’t be seen. But any more, and who knew what might happen. Bob supposed, if he thought about it, that he could turn the gravity off over the entire city, or separate San Francisco into its constituent elements. That would stop the killer and the power that drove him. Stop the thing beneath. And so the city would be destroyed and everyone in it would die in the process. But was that a bad thing, really?
What was worse? That the city was destroyed as the thing below awoke? Or that the entire world be ruled over by Kanaloa, the devil-god? Power. Power was dangerous.
Bob closed his eyes and shivered, and jolted like he’d come out of a deep sleep. There was a soft, metallic moan from beside him. That’s when he noticed the problem.
He turned to look at his warrior friend, but Tangun was no longer beside him. Instead, he had floated downward to land with a thud on the roof of the warehouse.
“Kanaloa…” His voice was quiet, merely an echo of the defiant roar that usually sounded from the golden mask.
Tangun fell onto his knees, the scalloped helmet dipped toward the ground as Bob landed beside him.
“Tangun?”
Tangun pressed his hands into the roof, like he was trying to keep himself from falling over completely.
Bob took a step closer. “What’s wrong?”
Tangun straightened up, and looked at Bob. Bob recoiled. He couldn’t stop himself. He took one involuntary step backward, too quickly, and his heel twisted under him. He fell heavily onto his backside.
Tangun’s golden mask was a frozen visage of despair and pain. The expression was horrific, the face of the devil from Korean mythology. Blood ran in two thick courses from the eye holes, streaking the gold with bright red.
Bob watched, fascinated, as the blood trickled to the bottom edge of the mask, collecting on the lip before dripping in heavy splotches onto the roof.
Bob stood, and stepped
up to his fellow god. He peered closely at the mask, through the gaps at the face of Benny underneath. Benny’s face was clean and there was no blood, but her eyes were glassy and she didn’t blink.
“Tangun?” Bob reached out to touch the mask, the blood dripping from it, but drew his hand back.
Tangun sat back on his haunches. “The line is broken,” he said, gasping. “The line is broken. My time on the Earth draws to a close.”
Bob dropped down so he was at the same level as Tangun. His eyes searched the mask. “I don’t understand.”
“The Golden Child. The host,” said Tangun. “She passed from this realm. Without the Golden Child I am but a memory doomed to fade from this world.”
“Hold on,” said Bob. Tangun tipped forward and Bob grabbed his shoulders, steadying him. The armor was ice cold. “Benny died but I brought her back.” He peered closer at the mask, through the slots. Benny’s glassy eyes stared back. “She’s in there, inside the armor.”
Tangun shook his head. “Benny lives again, but her death and return has broken the line. Without the Golden Child, I soon will leave and return to the Heavenly Ones. My grip on the world becomes ever more delicate.”
Bob shook his head. “I need you here, Tangun. How long can you hold on?”
“I know not,” said the warrior king. “The longer I cling to the life of the Golden Child, so her time, too, becomes short.”
Bob rubbed his chin. “So if you stay, Benny dies. Doesn’t matter. I can bring her back again.”
Tangun laughed weakly, his wide, ornate helmet wobbling, but the mask was still frozen in the expression of pain and terror.
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