Pride's Spell

by Matt Wallace

  Ritter doesn’t reach for another magical weapon. He grabs the butcher knife from a nearby block and throws it with near-ninety-mile-an-hour force at the deranged hare.

  The knife buries four inches of its blade in the Easter Bunny’s chest.

  The Bunny releases the egg it was reaching for.

  It stares down at the knife protruding from its body.

  It looks up at Ritter.

  That damn disturbing smile never leaves its face.

  In one smooth motion the Easter Bunny yanks the butcher knife from its chest cavity and hurls it back at Ritter.

  He ducks a microsecond before it flies overhead, impacting an upper kitchen cabinet like a bomb, destroying it and raining lacquered wood and glass shards down over Ritter.

  He turns and flees the kitchen just before another egg breaks against the refrigerator, this one filled with a searing, sizzling acid that immediately begins melting the hulking subzero and all its contents into a sparking, foul-smelling mass.

  Ritter runs across the house, more eggs flying after him and narrowly missing their target.

  One of them turns a large portion of wall into a patch of tall grass growing large, cartoon-looking pastel purple and yellow daisies.

  Another egg shatters and disperses rusty nails in every direction, several of them catching Ritter in the back of the thigh and hip.

  Ritter stumbles and curses, but he keeps running, his course taking him toward the large hole he’s battered open between apartment unit walls.

  He ducks through it and disappears from the Easter Bunny’s sight.

  The creature is forced to pursue him, holding yet another brightly colored Easter egg at the ready.

  The Bunny approaches the hole in the wall, smiling as it creeps forward slowly and methodically.

  It pauses in front of the jagged-edged maw between rooms.

  The Easter Bunny tosses its egg just past that threshold.

  It breaks open against the floor on the other side of the wall, releasing a large, noxious cloud of purple gas.

  The Easter Bunny waits.

  There’s no sound from the other side of the hole.

  No coughing, no screaming, nor the sound of a body fleeing or hitting the floor.

  Satisfied, the Easter Bunny ducks its giant-eared head to pass through the hole in the wall.

  Which is when Ritter finally bashes the smile from its face with a sledgehammer.

  The force of the blow knocks the Easter Bunny back through the hole and off its feet.

  It sounds like a felled tree hitting the forest floor when the Bunny lands.

  Its lower jaw is now a hanging, lopsided thing speckled with broken teeth and dripping saliva from a permanently gaping mouth that makes the creature look utterly surprised.

  Ritter emerges from the other side, the haft of the sledgehammer clutched in both hands and a faded bandanna tied around his nose and mouth.

  The Easter Bunny immediately sits up, reaching for the interior of its basket, but Ritter swings the hammer into its face again and knocks the creature prone again.

  He uses the head of the sledgehammer like a shuffleboard tang to gingerly slide the basket across the floor, far away from the Bunny, without breaking any of the eggs inside.

  Meanwhile, the Easter Bunny is attempting to sit up once more, but its face being more or less completely caved in seems to be impeding the process.

  Ritter hampers it further by raising the sledgehammer high above his head and bringing it down on the Easter Bunny’s cranium with as much force as he’s capable of imbuing the strike.

  Then he does it again.

  In fact, he does it until there’s nothing above the Easter Bunny’s shoulders but a heap of black goo sprinkled with some fur and a detached set of oversized rabbit ears.

  Finally satisfied, a panting Ritter drops the stained, dripping head of the sledgehammer to the floor and releases his grip on its haft.

  He pulls the bandanna from his face and stands there, naked and sweating and bleeding, breathing deeply the now-untainted air.

  In the last ten minutes he’s been bitten, singed, poisoned, punctured, gassed, chased, and cut up.

  He’s also just killed the Easter Bunny.

  Needless to say, Ritter needs a moment.

  Unfortunately, time is not a luxury he can afford, for several reasons.

  The first of those reasons is that half his home is on fire, melting, growing unnatural shrubbery, or becoming a nest for killer spiders.

  Ritter yanks nails from several parts of his body, grunting and releasing a thin stream of blood each time. He walks across his living room and down a short flight of stairs to a small coat closet in the foyer.

  He opens it, reaching inside and up over the top of the frame to where an ancient serpentine bust of the god Ananke has been bolted directly to the wall.

  Beside it in the darkness, a small, nondescript stone talisman hangs from a hook on a chain.

  Ritter removes the talisman and loops the chain around his neck. He then reaches back up and feels for the tiny rotating sections of the snake god’s stone body and begins turning them in a sequence he knows by heart.

  When he’s finished turning the last one there’s the sudden rush of something that sounds like wind yet feels more like electricity moving through your body.

  Inside the small converted townhouse in Canarsie, time literally stops.

  Everything freezes in place.

  Fire ceases to crackle and spread.

  Acid ceases to melt.

  Spiders cease their scurrying.

  Everything is frozen in place except for Ritter, protected by the talisman around his neck.

  He limps back upstairs, ignoring the damage done by the eggs and the fire elemental for the time being. Ananke’s spell will keep them all in check until he deactivates the bust.

  Ritter finds his phone and calls Cindy.

  It rings four times before she answers.

  “Cin, the Easter Bunny just tried to whack me,” Ritter informs her without preamble. “Clear out of your apartment now and muster with the team at Sin du Jour.”

  “What in the pan-fried hell are you—” Cindy begins to say.

  Then she yells an unintelligible curse and the line goes dead.

  PART II

  THE FALSE IDOLS

  PROLOGUE, TAKE TWO: BRONKO IN HELL

  The microscopic section of his consciousness that is still sane and rational has kept a running tally of how many times Bronko has butchered his own corpse in front of a live studio audience.

  This will mark the seven hundred forty-third consecutive time he’s plunged a knife into his butterflied body cavity.

  “See, folks, you wanna start at the joint here.” Bronko’s voice is hoarse and far beyond weary. His hands, one gripping his large-bladed Kauffman and the other gripping his surrogate’s hip, are numb.

  It never ends. Sometimes he runs, like he did the first time, but he always finds himself back on the set. When he completes the show, turning his own flesh into aromatic party appetizers that are passed among the plastic studio audience to consume like threshing machines, he’s led off the set and then right back onto it to shoot the episode all over again.

  Bronko’s knife hand shakes uncontrollably above the body that is his and yet not his. His other hand digs into that necrotic hip until it leaves bruises.

  “You just wanna . . . you just wanna go ahead and . . . you just take your knife, see . . .”

  The audience waits patiently, happily, their wide, radiant smiles never wavering.

  Don’t look at ’em, Bronko tells himself. Just don’t look at ’em.

  But he does. He raises his head and stares past the ceaselessly rolling cameras at the automatons in their pastel sweaters that might as well be a single, grotesque organism.

  Those goddamn plastic smiles with their teeth as white as insane asylum walls just stare right back.

  It’s that manic sea of fake joy more than anythi
ng that finally collapses Bronko, even more than the macabre task of treating an exact copy of his own body as butchering meat for the grill hundreds upon hundreds of times.

  His mind finally snaps.

  Bronko reverses his grip on the giant kitchen knife, wrapping his other hand around its ergonomic handle and, with a bellowing shriek, plunging the tip of the blade into the center of his forehead.

  He manages to drive almost four inches of the knife through his skull before the dense and murky depths of his brain halt its progress. Bronko continues shrieking, hands relinquishing the knife’s handle and arms falling to his sides. A curtain of blood falls over his eyes, breaking into a dozen thick streams that trickle down to his jawline. The blood is warm on his face while a cool rush spreads through the rest of his body, and in a bizarre way it’s almost comforting.

  He continues shaking and yelling for several more seconds until he finally has to accept that his screeching is manufactured. There’s no pain, none at all. He’s also still utterly conscious and aware. Having four inches of Damascus steel embedded in his brain hasn’t stopped or even slowed its function. Bronko blinks away the blood and his eyes go cross as he stares up at the gargantuan kitchen knife sticking out of his forehead.

  It might as well be a Halloween costume.

  “Cut!” the show’s director yells, exasperated, from behind the cameras. “Bronko, I just don’t think we’re gettin’ it today. I’m calling it. We’ll try again tomorrow, all right?”

  Bronko stares past the searing lights at the man. He’s still breathing heavily, mostly from the exertion of screaming his lungs out and jamming the knife in his skull. He’s covered in his own blood down to his waist.

  Bronko just nods, dumbly.

  “Good deal,” the director calls back. “That’s a wrap, everybody!”

  Everything happens very fast then, and with an antlike efficiency. Twentysomething grips wearing black T-shirts branded with the show’s logo appear from the shadows, breaking the set down wordlessly. The hooded attendants wheel away Bronko’s dressed corpse double on its slab. The island with its gas burners and all of Bronko’s ingredients follows it, while the backdrop is whisked away in the opposite direction. The cameras are carried off. Even the grandstand is pulled apart, those hollow shells of an audience still smiling in their seats, and each section is steered off into the shadowy recesses of the studio.

  A grip runs up and grasps the handle of the knife still buried in Bronko’s skull. The young crewmember yanks it free effortlessly and silently, bringing a towel up with their other hand and wiping down Bronko’s face before disappearing.

  Lastly, those bright, burning stage lights are all extinguished.

  Bronko is left standing alone in the midst of a now empty set in almost total darkness.

  It might be minutes or hours later when he hears the squeaking of small wheels.

  Those same hooded attendants from before push into view the same red door through which Bronko tried in vain to escape so many times. It’s held in a freestanding wooden frame with wheels on the bottom. They halt a few feet in front of them and one of the attendants grips the knob and begins to slowly twist it open.

  Bronko braces himself, ready for anything, for the devil himself.

  Instead what looks like a five-foot-tall accountant steps through from the nothing on the other side of the door.

  Bronko blinks down at the man. He’s wearing a gray suit with a red vest and tie and carrying an old-fashioned gym teacher’s clipboard, a pencil sharpened near to the nub held between two of his fingers like a cigarette. He’s middle-aged, wears wire-rimmed spectacles, and his receding hairline stinks of cheap styling gel.

  “All right, then, Chef Luck,” the nebbishy man begins, touching the tip of his stubby golf pencil to the end of his tongue. “Your time here has officially concluded. We’ll be moving you on to your final venue of reflection and torment. I’ll just need your signature—”

  “What place?” Bronko interjects. “What . . . final? What else is there?”

  The little man shrugs. “I’m just a clerk, really, I’m sure I don’t know. But I will need your signature for processing—”

  “Please, just tell me,” Bronko pleads, tears welling in both of his eyes.

  The clerk sighs, flipping through the pages in his clipboard. “Very well, if it’ll get you to stop interrupting a celestial entity just trying to do their job. You’re going to—”

  The clerk frowns suddenly.

  This time it isn’t Bronko that’s interrupted his train of thought.

  “Oh, now wait just a darn minute here . . .”

  “What?” Bronko demands, on the verge of mania.

  “Well . . . this form should’ve been on top, not on the bottom. That Freda at intake, this is the fourth time this—”

  “What’s happening?” Bronko practically screams.

  “You’re not supposed to be here at all. This is a third-party possession instrument I’m looking at. Your soul has been preempted. Another entity holds the claim on it. This is really darn aggravating for me. I am on a schedule here.”

  Understanding washes over Bronko in a cool, cleansing wave. He leans his head back and closes his eyes, breathing deeply.

  “Boys,” he hears the clerk say, “flush him while I sort this file out. The paperwork this is going to take, I swear—”

  Hands with iron grips seize his arms and Bronko’s attention snaps back to find the hooded attendants forcing him toward the open door with nothing on the other side. He struggles instinctively, but the strength of their hold is inhuman.

  “Wait!” Bronko insists. “What’s going to happen? Where am I—”

  His words turn to unintelligible cries as his body is hurled through the doorway.

  He doesn’t appear on the other side.

  THE PARTY

  “Underwhelmed” is the wrong word to describe Lena’s experience at her first Hollywood party.

  “Bored as monkey fuck” is the phrase that comes more naturally to mind.

  There are the celebrities, of course. That had some initial cachet; occupying the same physical space as people she’s seen so prominently featured on movie and television screens, in magazines, and who always seem so fascinating on talk shows because the show’s host is usually adept at reacting to whatever they say as if it’s the most relevant, entertaining, urgent thing they’ve ever heard.

  It takes fifteen minutes for the amusement of that to wear away for Lena.

  Then she realizes there’s nothing meaningful or particularly interesting about seeing a celebrity in person, or even meeting one briefly.

  They’re not even particularly attractive to look at, she decides.

  They’re just . . . more polished than people who don’t make their living being photographed.

  That’s what makes them look different.

  It’s not that they’re scads more attractive, they’re just all so damn polished and put together and exercised and outfitted by teams of professionals who know how to disguise a regular human being in celebrity camouflage.

  They’re just grossly overgroomed people.

  It’s a disappointing thing to know.

  Lena spends two hours behind a modest buffet table set near the wall of the lavish penthouse space. She staffs several chafing dishes, scooping tofu poached in coconut milk and lemongrass or ginger-and-lime mushrooms and zucchini into lettuce cups and topping it with Thai chile peanut rémoulade at the guests’ requests. There are also ready-to-serve seared ahi tuna medallions, squash fritters, and garlic eggplant skewers.

  It’s not particularly inspired food, but it’s not a crowd of particularly inspiring eaters.

  She recognizes several famous faces from the royal goblin wedding they catered, but none of them seem to recognize her.

  She doubts any of them are even the slightest bit aware it’s the same company catering this event.

  Why the hell would they be?

  Not even regular-
ass, nonfamous people remember who made the food at a party.

  Mr. Mirabel, Pacific, and the servers he hired locally circulate silently and unobtrusively among the guests, ferrying trays of the low-calorie and/or vegan hors d’oeuvres Lena is still ashamed she helped conceive and prepare.

  She watches Pacific, lost in his own world walled by the earbuds tucked deftly into his ears, wearing his perpetual friendly smile. His serving hand seems to operate expertly and independently of the rest of him. Not a single guest reaching for one misses the organic smoked paprika cranberry-glazed turkey mini-sliders on quinoa crisps (the damn grain is its own religion out here, it seems, and baked bread is a sacrilege).

  She begged Bronko to let them do a fried mozzarella slider as the vegetarian option, but he reminded her, mock-haughtily, that the mandate for this event was “vegan.” She realizes now he already had a full menu in mind, but he let them grapple with the problem anyway, probably because it amused him.

  Lena tried her hand at a smoked turnip and kale slider, and while the kale turned out pretty good the turnip was like a sponge no matter how she spiced or cooked it.

  It consoled her little that Darren’s own experiment with leek sliders was worse.

  Way worse.

  They admitted defeat to Bronko, who then, in fifteen minutes, whipped up a vegan slider featuring a patty he made from ground black beans and chickpeas.

  It was impossibly delicious.

  It reminded Lena that their executive chef became famous originally because, past his huge stature and personality, he is a genius at developing deep, amazing flavors in simple foods.

  Lena staffs her station and watches the polished throng mill and circulate and chatter at each other, taking selfies to post to their Instagram accounts so they can Tweet and Facebook the Instagram links.

  The male lead of the movie they’re all celebrating Snapchats in front of her table for five whole minutes.

  He tells her the squash fritters are “sick.”

  Despite the demons and goblins and leprechauns and Hollywood celebrities, working for Sin du Jour has never felt more like an everyday grind to Lena.