Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  It was Brand's ace-in-the-hole. Intended to be activated after Ravne had weakened the rift, its pulse potential had been recalibrated to maximum, designed to release a massive burst of EK energy that should collapse the rift like a popped balloon.

  Everything prepared, all that had been left for him and the others to do was wait. And, as it turned out, wait. Brand flicked a glance at his watch. Midnight. It was beginning to look as if the rift might have been a one-off after all. He yawned and plucked a book from his pocket that Hannah Chapter had given him to look after in case things turned messy. It was a dog-eared paperback by some writer called Jack Yeovil. Naked Ninja Necromancer Nympho Nuns. He read the first page, blushed, and put it away.

  On the wheel, Ness continued to circle on the roof of the pod, still singing badly to himself, though he had now given up on the dynamite and Semtex, or anything else standing on a wall. That particular ditty, if the truth were known, he had sung just to annoy the other po-faced bastards, and he had since progressed to amusing himself with snatches of songs he felt more appropriate to his current circumstances. In actuality, they sounded scarcely different to the previous ones but so it was that any tone-deaf passing pigeons had, in the past few minutes, enjoyed broken versions of - and the occasional even worse burst of Jagger-lipped dad-dancing to - such enduring classics as "Urban Spaceman", "Wheels On Fire" and, of course, "Walking In The Air". The last never failed to bring a tear to his eye. But that was only because it was such absolutely abominable shite.

  Fact was, what was really makin' 'im weep was sheer fookin' boredom. An' if summat didnae happen soon, he was away to the pub. How many more bollockin' times was he gonna have to watch the Globe Theatre loom on the horizon? That, or the Tate, or Big bong-bleedin'-bong Ben? Worst o' the lot was Saint Paul's Cathedral. He was gettin' to hate that place. There it was again, peekin' over the rooftops like some soddin' great moonlit tit.

  Och, he'd had enough. "Brand," he said, tapping his mic. "Oy, Brand..." Bollocks.

  He waved to the distant figure of the academic, who he could just make out idly twiddling dials. Brand appeared to sit up suddenly and, as he did, a little further along the roof, he caught a flash of moonlight from Verse's sniper sight as it suddenly tensed in the direction of the Eye. Oh, fer Christ's sake...

  "Do you have something, Mr. Ness?" Brand came back in his earphone, urgently. "I repeat, do you have something?"

  "Aye, an overwhelmin' desire ta top meself," the Scotsman said. "Can ye no' speed this thing up?"

  He heard a very long sigh. "Stand down, Mister Verse, stand down everybody. Mr. Ness, if you're referring to the reappearance of the phenomenon, there is really very little I can do. If you're referring to the Eye itself, it is designed to rotate at a constant speed of zero-point-nine kilometres per hour, with each full rotation therefore taking thirty minutes. By my calculations, this places you only on your sixth rotation, hardly enough time to-"

  "Listen, Briney-Neck, or Boney-Cock or wha'ever it is the dyke calls yer, if ah wanted a soddin' lecture ah'd a - yaraaargh!"

  On the rooftop, Brand jolted with alarm, tapped his earpiece urgently. "Ness? Mr. Ness, can you hear me?" he shouted. He grabbed for his binoculars, but in his haste knocked them off the edge of the roof. "Shit!"

  "What the hell just happened?" Hannah demanded over the crossfeed, simultaneously.

  "No idea," Jenny Simmons replied, sounding quite unconcerned. "But do you know, I think that's the first time I've actually ever heard anyone say yaraaargh!"

  "I believe that in my scope I just saw Mr. Ness disappear from the roof of the pod," Verse said matter-of-factly. "This is most likely an indication that we're in business."

  "Oh, I'd say pretty much, yeah," Jenny Simmons concurred. She was staring up at the wheel and, unusually for her, looking rather impressed by what she saw. "Whatever the hell that thing is, it's got my vote."

  Brand and the others snapped their attention in the same direction. What they had missed while they had been distracted by Ness's moaning was that for a fraction of a second the entire outer circumference of the giant wheel had pulsed as if it were the sac of some monstrous jellyfish riding the currents of a deep ocean bed, and the waters that this beast had disturbed in doing so were murky indeed. The Eye was obscured in a sea of pulsating greyness, and exactly where Michael Ness had disappeared to was a question momentarily forgotten by all as the space within the wheel darkened, quaked, and then blurted out a churning, roiling bubble of otherness just like the earlier eye-witnesses had described. But the way that the eyewitnesses had described the scale of it did not do the supposed Rorschach Rift any justice at all.

  Brand physically staggered back as the bubble punched through the air towards him and then actually seemed to impact with, even spill over, the walls of County Hall, and although it receded as quickly as it came - presumably having reached critical mass - it continued to envelop the square below in a strange grey pall. Brand found himself trembling deeply, but in a way that he was convinced was only half to do with his jangled nerves. It was as if in that brief moment whatever the bubble was had infused itself with him and the building, and left a lingering instability behind, an instability that he could feel continuing in the very air around him.

  He stared over at Lawrence Verse, who seemed to be similarly shaken, and then down at the tiny figures of Hannah, Jenny Simmons and Ravne in their assigned positions on the ground. Ravne was moving around the inside of the pentagram nest as if checking its integrity, while both women - human and demon - were picking themselves up from a desperate duck-and-cover crouch that even at this distance seemed as tremulous as he was.

  "Okay, ya got me," Hannah shouted up the commlink. "What the buggerin' bollockin' bejeezus was that?"

  "I don't know," Brand responded, confused. The only thing that he did know was that it was no Rorschach Rift. Bloody hell, how could he have got it so wrong? He returned to his monitors and tried to make sense of the chaotic telemetry pouring off the screen. "All spectrums off the scale," he reported to the others. "Black light, infra-red and Wyrd Light, off the scale. Psycho-spheric auras, off the scale. Jesus Christ, what's going on - everything's off the sodding scale!"

  "Ness?" Jenny Simmons asked simply, and Brand wasn't sure whether her follow-up question was born of concern or wishful thinking. "Do you think he's-?"

  The question became suddenly academic as Ness shot out - fast, backward and rolling - from the side of the pod he'd been guarding, which was luckily now at the lowest point of its rotation. The Scotsman seemed in some pain but he didn't allow that to affect his cursing, and he was firing so many bullets from his twin Uzis back in his wake that he could have been using the guns as propulsion rockets. It was a pity, then, that he didn't have retro rockets to complement them, because otherwise he wouldn't have landed so hard on his back, flipped, and bounced across the ground.

  "Way to go, Bullet Boy," Verse commented dryly. "Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was-"

  He stopped, suddenly aware that Ness had picked himself up and was weaving away from the wheel like a dying man, which was not only unlike Ness, but was entirely disproportionate to the fall he'd seen him take. And then he realised, as did Brand and the others, that he had not seen Ness emerge from the door of the pod ,but actually through its side. This was presumably how he had also disappeared - through its roof - because something seemed to be altering the molecular structure of the pod in the same way that the molecular structure of the victims had been altered earlier. It suddenly became clear to all that what had occurred - was occurring - wasn't the result of some devilish high jinks by infernal plane demons, but something else, something much, much more dangerous.

  "Brand, the Matheson Machine. Fire it up - now!"

  "Trying," Brand shouted back, hitting keys on his laptop. "No response." He tried a second time. "Still no response... Nothing!" This time, the academic checked his remote readings. "And I think I know why," he said ominously.

  "Why, for
Christ's sake?"

  "It isn't there. The Matheson Machine's gone."

  "What the hell are you talking abou-" Verse began, and stopped dead. He had attempted to drop his sniper rifle on the ledge of the roof but it wouldn't leave his hand. And as he tried to pull his hand away from the stock, both skin and plastic coating stretched away from each other like tacky toffee, only this particular confection was intermingled with Verse's blood. "Oh Christ, Brand."

  "It's the rift," Brand said, horrified. "It's released something... something that's beginning to change things, pervert things."

  From below they heard a roaring scream. At the same time Hannah Chapter's voice yelled over the commlink. "Brand, it's Ness. I've never seen anything like this. Brainiac, it's his legs, his face, they... no, wait... what the hell's this?... oh God, I'm sinking... I'm actually freakin' SINKING down here... "

  "Hannah?" Verse yelled back. "Hannah?"

  "Whatever this thing is, it's somehow changing everything," Brand said. "Flesh, bone, stone, metal... it's all of it somehow being remapped."

  "We have to help them, Brand," Verse said urgently. He set his jaw and ripped the sniper rifle away from his flesh, discarding it like a newly discovered horror. "Move, man!"

  The two of them raced for the roof exit, down the stairs, and out into the square. But the sight that met their eyes made them falter in their determined steps. Hannah and Jenny Simmons were dragging an almost unrecognisable Mikey Ness towards Ravne's pentagram nest, and the two women's feet were struggling to drag themselves through concrete that had now, as if in a bad dream, the consistency of thick glue. The agonised Ness's features were warping as they watched - his scarred face twisting, elongating, shifting, as if lost in some invisible hall of mirrors - and his legs stretched into jointless, snaked appendages that seemed to be sucking at the ground, reluctant to break free. The contact with Ness seemed to be affecting Hannah and Jenny Simmons, too, and as they pulled him along their own arms and faces pulsed and undulated, distorting them in waves of obvious pain. They were nowhere near as bad as Ness yet, though Brand reckoned that was only because the Scot had received maximum exposure in the first moments of this unknown phenomenon's appearance. But this was only the beginning, he sensed. This... change was coming to them all.

  "Get inside the nest!" Ravne cried out. "The wards seem to offer some shielding from-" He stopped and shook his head, even the consultant in arcane affairs was at a loss to describe what was happening all around.

  Brand and Verse grabbed onto Ness and helped the women heave his deforming bulk inside the pentagrammic perimeter, and the five of them simply collapsed there, staring with varying degrees of stunned disbelief beyond its protective influence.

  Not that there was much to see, Brand thought. It had become dark, much darker than it should be in the centre of London. In fact, London itself seemed to have faded from view, so that they seemed to be stranded on a small and isolated, star-shaped island in the middle of some slowly churning and increasingly alien sea. It was also silent but, if he listened carefully, sibilant whispers, indecipherable, could be heard echoing in the air.

  "Brand, what the hell...?" someone asked, but the academic had no idea who. He stared blankly at the others as their eyes searched for a way out, but what could they do?

  This had all been so sudden. So wrong.

  The edges of the pentagram nest began to warp before his eyes, its protection compromised, then gone. Brand felt something awful touch his inner being, and began to shake.

  The last thing he heard was Jenny Simmons, the disguised demoness who was apparently afraid of nothing, begin to roar uncontrollably in the face of her imminent death.

  "NOOOOOOooooooo..."

  Then everything changed.

  Chapter Three

  As Jenny Simmons roared, sunrise came five hours early, though it was a sunrise as might be seen on the surface of Mercury, searing and deadly and blindingly bright. It was also a sunrise that came suddenly and shockingly, flaring from above the horizon, not below, as if creation itself had been flipped upside down.

  This was no gentle awakening. The sunrise was a harsh and unforgiving glare from which nothing could flee, nothing could hide, and in which nothing dark could hope to survive.

  The sunrise itself roared.

  It cleansed the place on which it shone, burned away everything bad that was there.

  It would have burned away Brand and the others, too, had the pentagram nest not protected them. But as it did, they survived.

  And they were all normal again, even Ness. The phenomenon was completely gone, the Eye clear.

  Night returned, and Baarish-Shammon, the smoke and fire-licked demoniacal form of Jenny Simmons, dropped to her knees, utterly drained.

  Hannah picked herself up from the floor and double-checked that everything was where it should be. "Please don't tell me that Brimstone Britches just saved all our lives."

  Verse flexed his hand and stared down at Baarish-Shammon's panting form. "Probably just interested in saving herself, but yeah, I guess she did."

  "Christ. We'll never hear the last of it."

  Ness stirred, groaning. "Hoolly shite, ah feel like ah bin shagged by The Vicar o' Dibley. Wha' was that?"

  "I believe Miss Simmons employed-"

  "No' the fookin' fireworks, ye wazzock. The other thing."

  "Oh," Brand said. The academic swallowed hard, remembering. "Mr. Ness, I just don't know."

  "But it's over, reet?"

  "I think so, yes."

  "Thas good," Ness said. "'Cause ah were jus' wonderin'... who are those guys?"

  "What?" Brand asked, and turned. Although the area had been deserted apart from themselves, he now saw that a number of tall, dark, figures had appeared apparently out of nowhere, and were standing absolutely still around the edge of the pentagram nest, silently staring in at them. They rang vague alarm bells in his head, and he felt his skin begin to prickle. It can't be, he thought, and then when he spotted the fog that, despite the clear night, seemed to swirl slowly around them, no, it can't be.

  Ravne stared at the figures with equal unease. "What did you use?" he quietly asked Baarish-Shammon.

  [What?] she said breathlessly, head hanging.

  "To dispel the phenomenon. What did you use?"

  [Does it matter, little man? It's gone.]

  Unexpectedly, Ravne leapt at her and grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking hard. The demoness was evidently still very weak because she slipped back into the form of Jenny Simmons, looking at him dazed. "Tell me!" Ravne shouted. "WHAT DID YOU USE?"

  Jenny broke away from him and flapped her arms. "Jesus, I don't know! I've learned quite a few tricks in my time! It was instinctive, okay?"

  "WHAT?"

  "Yog-shonna," Jenny said quickly. "Scarillion, maybe."

  Ravne spun away angrily and stared at Brand, eyes dark. "Scarillion is a Deus invocation," he said heavily. "Apocalypse magic."

  "Oh good Christ," Brand said, still staring at the strange figures. "The Accord. She breached the bloody Accord." Now he spun on the thing that had once been his fiancée. "You couldn't help yourself, could you? You had to push the bounds."

  "Brainiac, I don't think she had much choice," Hannah interjected. She was as shocked as anyone to be defending the she-demon, but what she'd said earlier was true... they'd every one of them be dead without her.

  "Yeah?" Brand said. He pointed at the figures. "Well, whether she did or not, she's brought rippers breathing down our necks."

  "Rippers?" Ness asked, scowling. "Wha' the fook is a ripper?"

  Brand almost laughed. What's a ripper, he thought?

  Imagine Death. Capital letter. Not the state of death but the eternal deliverer itself, the figure at the sour-smelling bedside, in the bloodstained emergency room, on the glass-flecked edge of the rain slicked road. The Grim Reaper manifest, and come now for you. And imagine it then not as the cloaked and scyth carrying, ponderously patient Death of art, of literature o
r of film - that almost comfortable Death - but instead a screeching and flailing-bladed banshee horror, aiming itself towards you in a hungry shroud of blackness, unstoppable and inevitable in its deliverance because it had been decreed that your time had come and that time was now.

  Imagine Death as it might arrive in the darkest and most storm-ridden, and most paranoid of nightmares.

  That was what a ripper was.

  Brand's ears rang agonisingly as the figures suddenly emitted a shriek of bloodlust, of soul-lust. His heart pounded as he heard the clack of razored knives that gave the things their name.

  There was only one Death, he thought.

  And there were at least twenty rippers.

  "Run," he said to Ness. "Everbody run."

  "Ah asked yer a question, man-"

  "JUST RUN, YOU STUPID SCOTTISH BASTARD!"

  Maybe it was because it was the first time that Brand had ever spoken to him like that, or maybe it was because the rippers started to spin slowly into the pentagram then, but Ness ran. And urged on by Ravne, the others did the same.

  "Stay out of their fog," Brand advised numbly.

  "It twists time, slows things down."

  He turned, fully intending to follow, but for a second couldn't move, staring at the encroaching rippers as frozen as roadkill in headlights, lost in the sheer enormity of what he faced. He had known previous breaches of the Accord where two rippers had manifested to deal with a breach - and only one case ever where there had been four - but this many?

  It was utter overkill, and it felt as wrong as what had happened with the Eye.

  They had been set up. They had to have been.

  But who in hell would have such power?

  Brand snapped to his senses at last, turned, and ran for his life. Bullets whizzed by his head, already slowing as they hit outer tendrils of the fog he had allowed to get too close, and Brand could actually make out the bullets trajectory trails rippling through the cold night air. Verse and Chapter, and Ness stood in a defensive line a little way ahead of him, pumping shot after shot in his wake while he made his escape, and though he was gratified to find that they had waited, he couldn't help but think that they were wasting their ammo. As bullets were simply dodged or absorbed into the things that followed, it seemed, in fact, that Ravne and Jenny Simmons were the only sensible ones amongst them, the two of them already a hundred metres away across the gardens and showing no intention of turning back.