There’s no small talk. Lissa leads us up onto a flat rooftop above Vulture Street, a major tributary to the M1, the motorway that feeds into and out of the city. The traffic is building rapidly.
The Stirrers below us move with a confidence that only comes from inhabiting a body for weeks. They’re sitting on the front verandah of the house, drinking what look like stubbies of beer. The house could be like any other in the suburb, or Brisbane, for that matter. It’s a classic Queenslander, verandahs all around, tin roof. Very much like my parents’ place. But this one has known better days; the paint’s peeling so badly that we can see it from here. There’s a pile of rubbish in the backyard, but that’s common enough. The only odd thing about it is the roof—it’s crammed with aerials, peculiar prickly bunches of them. What the hell do they need those for?
We’re across the river from the city center. I can feel Number Four, and just down the road is the Gabba cricket stadium. It offends me that this is happening so close to where we are based, and even more that it’s almost next door to one of the greatest cricket pitches in the world. How could Stirrers have grown so brazen? But I guess if I had a god hurtling through the ether toward earth, I’d be brazen, too, and perhaps pressured to perform. To make good, and ensure that my god was pleased.
What worries me more is that I can’t taste them in the air. There’s nothing. If anything, the space they occupy is too neutral. It’s neither living nor dead. Are those aerials responsible for that?
The air is still and humid. Sweat sheens Lissa’s forehead. Oscar and Travis are feeling it, too.
“What is this?” I ask. “The aerials. The house being so near the heart of the city. Why?”
“Yeah, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lissa says. “And we still wouldn’t have, except for Alex.”
“Alex?” I look over at him. “You found this?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I tried to get in touch with you. When I couldn’t, I called Lissa. Should have known she’d be able to get onto you.”
“I’ve been a little busy today. Sorry,” I say, guilt pangy and all.
Alex nods; looks like we’ve all been busy. “I’ve been looking into the Closers and this address came up several times. Something about a safe house, or being locked into the grid. I came and had a look, didn’t get too close. You can tell why.”
“How’d you come by the information?”
“Slightly illegally,” Alex mumbles, not quite able to meet my eye. It’s not the way he likes to work at all. “Been digging around emails in the Closers’ server.”
“Seems he has quite a knack for the cyber-espionage,” Lissa says approvingly.
“Yes, well.” He blushes. “That’s just between you and me. I really shouldn’t be here, but I want to see this done properly.” Alex is about as straitlaced as they come. For him to do any digging would have been painful indeed.
“You did good.” I paint a brace symbol on Oscar’s wrist, Travis is already done: the paint is simply red acrylic mixed with my blood. The brace symbol is a potent guard against our “problem.” It used to be, at any rate. “You have to wonder how long this has been going on.” I nod at Stirrer House down below. The implications are some-what frightening to consider. How many other Stirrer houses are there out in the ’burbs and country towns? Places where we don’t keep as much of a presence?
Lissa grimaces. “A while, at best guess. I’d say three weeks, maybe four.”
Solstice knew about this and he didn’t tell us. Just what game is he playing? I’m going to have to give that bastard a call. Looks like the war may be building up again.
“That Stirrer god of yours is getting closer, isn’t it?” Alex says.
“It’s always drawing closer, but distance is a weird thing, in the Deepest Dark.” If only he could see it as up close as I have.
I look around at the assembled group. “Oscar, Travis: you two call this through if we have a problem. I don’t expect one, but then again, I didn’t expect to come across a Stirrer safe house in the middle of Brisbane. Alex—do you want to come down with us?” I tap the brace paint. Alex nods grimly and submits to being painted.
Oscar and Travis don’t look happy, but they’re not going to be any good to us down there. In fact they could be a liability, even with the brace paint.
“So, how are we going to do this?” Lissa asks.
“Frontal assault will work best,” I say.
“Do you want to wait for some backup?”
“Don’t be silly, we’ve handled worse. And besides, this needs a subtle touch, I think.”
“You think you can manage that?” Alex snorts, trying to tough it out. He’s seen me battle hundreds of Stirrers on George Street, even saved my life with a few well-placed shots himself. But this is different.
“Do you think you can? We were having this sort of fun when we were five,” I say, giving Lissa a bit of a hug.
Alex grimaces. “You weren’t the only ones with Pomp parents. I know what I’m doing.”
There are two dozen sparrows gathered around me, pecking and hopping, looking innocent as all hell. You wouldn’t know that they’ve all pecked my hand and supped a bit on my blood. Two blocks away wait eight crows. The heavy guns don’t require my blood; they’re less traditional than the sparrows on that front.
When I’d first become RM I’d managed to stall several hundred Stirrers in one go, but that had just been a flare-up of my new powers—apparently that’s the way it works. Since then, in the few times I’d done this, I’d returned to the original method, blood and touch. Keeps me honest, I suppose.
A sparrow jumps on my finger and chirps at me impatiently. I feel like I should be singing some sort of Disneyesque musical number.
Lissa runs her blade down her hand. It’s a swift, sharp movement, and then she kisses me on the cheek.
“Be careful,” I say.
“You too.”
“Let’s go.”
We split up: approach the house from opposite sides. Half my sparrows shoot around the back, the rest follow me, a mad battering of tiny wings. Alex isn’t far behind them, his gun out. I signal for him to approach the back door. He nods. He’ll be safer out there, I hope.
I’m almost at the house when the first Stirrer sees me. He drops his beer. I leap over the fence, catch my foot, nearly fall flat on my face. Lissa is already past me. She swings a hand at the Stirrer. He catches it. The bastard’s wearing gloves. Lissa swings around with her other hand, slaps a bloody handprint against his head.
I’m on top of the other one now. Its being scrambles and scrapes through me, and into the Deepest Dark. The body’s just a body again.
The front door’s unlocked. I go in first, cautious but quick.
Lissa’s behind me. Every time I blink, I catch a glimpse of what my sparrows can see. Nothing has tried to use the back door yet. Alex is waiting there, gun at the ready, not that it would do much good. My crows are tearing through the air toward the building, their cries and caws growing louder with every wing beat.
I’m through to the living room, and gagging with the stench of rotten flesh. It’s the first time in a while that it isn’t alcohol or shift induced. And I can’t quite believe what I see: two twitching bodies, tied to the ceiling, flies coating their flesh. Maggots carpet the floor beneath, a squelching, writhing mass. The spaces of the Stirrers’ skin not fly-coated or maggot-bubbling are marked with symbols I don’t recognize, but which none the less drive icy nails of dread through me. It doesn’t stop there, though, there’s something not right with the geometry of these ceilings, the way their corners meet—or don’t—something that baffles my vision like the seeds of a migraine. I can smell stale smoke, too. The ceiling above, near the edges of its warped geometry, is black with scorch marks.
The bodies jerk and spasm. Eyes flick open. Lips curl with the most cunning of smiles. “You’ll all be screaming by the end,” their mouths, bearded with flies, whisper simultaneously. “It’s coming.”
<
br /> The air is charged with a wild electricity. All over my body, hairs lift. My mobile phone crackles in my pocket. In the far corner of the room, a webwork of electricity sighs and hisses in the air. A living, shivering net. It slides toward me; maggots pop and bubble on the floor beneath it. My first instinct is to run. Instead, I slap the nearest body hard. The Stirrer’s soul passes through me like a ball of barbed wire. And the electricity fizzles out, as though I’ve broken the circuit.
The second Stirrer snaps at my hand, ducks my strike, and somehow manages to scuttle across the ceiling. The length of the ropes that bind it limits the creature’s movement. It blows me a kiss. “She’ll be dead, they all will, and you’ll know what’s coming. And you won’t care,” it hisses. It starts to chew on the ropes. But we both know it doesn’t stand a chance.
I swing a bloody fist at its face, and it’s just a body again. It’s another rough stall, though. I drop to a crouch with the pain of it. They have been in these bodies for weeks. Their souls have grown thorns and tangles. My sparrows are hard at work, too. Their pomps are quick on the tail of mine.
Lissa stumbles into the living room. She looks exhausted. “Now, I stayed in some dives back in my uni days, but none as bad as this. Even when I ignored the cleaning roster.” She nods at the bodies. “There’s a Stirrer in every room.”
“You got them all?”
“The ones that your sparrows didn’t get to before me.”
“What the fuck is going on here?” I do my best to ignore the flashes of my Avian Pomps devouring the corpses, tugging out beakfuls of flesh.
“Something ceremonial,” Lissa says, distracting me from their feast. “Maybe the Stirrers were trying to create a life-unlife interface.”
“Ah, one of those.” I can almost hide the sarcasm in my voice and the annoyance at another gap in my knowledge.
Lissa shakes her head, as she binds her palm. “You haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about.”
I kiss her forehead. I’m just happy that she’s all right. “Not really. Hey, at least I’m being honest.”
She submits to the kiss. There’s a line of blood across her cheek. I brush it away as best as I can, but really just turn it into a smudge.
“I know. Look, Steve,” she says, “I’ve been doing some research. If we weren’t so distracted, so damn busy, I’d have told you by now. A life-unlife interface would draw the living to Hell, and the unliving here. Sort of like a door, more like a carousel, and the more Stirrers there are the faster it’d spin.”
“So this would let someone enter Hell?”
“Yeah, if they were crazy, and protected somehow.” I think of those arcane tattoos on my failed assassin’s chest and arms. “They’d have to be a Pomp though. It’s a neat way of avoiding the use of one of the Recognized Entities. I mean, you couldn’t imagine Aunt Neti or Charon allowing this sort of thing.”
Maybe this explains just how Rillman came back from the dead. It would certainly explain how my shooter managed to be hanging outside my office with a squeegee and a pistol.
“Well, that’s one interface destroyed at least,” says Lissa.
“Yeah, but they’re great at hiding them. Could you feel it before you walked inside?”
“Not at all.”
“What’s Solstice playing at keeping this secret?”
“Maybe he doesn’t trust us. Maybe he was curious to see what we’d do about it,” Lissa says.
“We’re going to have to be particularly rigorous then.”
We walk through the house, checking that each Stirrer is still. Then I start opening cupboards, Lissa behind me. There’s nothing in the kitchen, just ancient pizza boxes, and more maggots. I’ll have to hose down my boots. The bedrooms are empty too, but for the corpses above us.
“Do we call and have this cleared?” Lissa asks. Each city has a team set up for removing Stirrers caught out of morgues.
“No,” I say. “Solstice and his team were aware of the house. Let them clean up the mess.”
In the hallway ceiling there’s a trapdoor to the roof. I drag a chair over to it, push it open and peer into the ceiling recess. Something crashes at my head. I throw up my hands. And then it is gone, whatever it is, and the ceiling’s all wooden beams, dust and heat.
“Are you all right?” Lissa asks.
“Yeah, just jumpy. Must have been a trapped bird.” I look into the ceiling recess again. Here I can see the rough welds that hold the aerials to the roof. There’s no wiring. They’re attached to nothing but corrugated iron. And yet, I’d seen lightning dance toward me across the living room floor. I climb back down, scratch my head.
“What I want to know is how they managed to get into the living world without us feeling them,” Lissa says.
“Thunderstorms,” I say. “We’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms. The electrical activity can shield almost anything. And look where they set up house.” I point out a window at the transformer station nearby. “That and the aerials have gotta pump out a lot of distortion. What did Alex say they called it? A grid? Suggests to me there are more of them.”
Lissa leans over and pecks my cheek.
“What’s that for?”
“You seem to be learning things at last.” Then Lissa’s eyes widen. “Where is Alex?”
A dog’s barking somewhere, and then it stops. A shot rings out from the backyard.
We both spring to the back door. It’s bolted shut.
I try and fix on my Avian Pomps, but they’re gone. The three crows and dozen sparrows I had out there aren’t watching Alex anymore. I realize, then, that they’re dead. I try and catch their memories, but there’s nothing. In the confusion of battle I’d not noticed I’d lost track of them.
The door might be dead bolted but it doesn’t look too sturdy. I kick it hard. On the third leg-jarring belt with my boot the door bangs open.
Two Stirrers have cornered Alex in the backyard. My Avian Pomps are bloody lumps of feathers around him. A Stirrer has Alex by the wrist with one hand and it’s swinging out at him with a knife. Alex is doing his best to keep his distance, but the Stirrer’s pulling him in. The other Stirrer reaches out a hand to grab him. This one must be newer; its movements are clumsy, its hair and neck draped in spiderwebs.
Lissa and I race down the stairs from the back door toward Alex. I take the one with the knife, slap a bloody hand around its neck, another around its waist, and jerk it backward in some mad parody of a dance.
The other Stirrer gets a moment’s notice and it swings its head toward Lissa. Alex punches out with his now free hand, and as it stumbles, Lissa stalls it. The Stirrer falls.
Mine shudders in my grip. I hold on as its rough soul scrapes through me. It’s a dreadful sensation; this Stirrer’s been around for a long time. Once it’s hurled back to the Deepest Dark, I drop to my knees.
“You OK?” I demand, looking at Alex.
“You took your bloody time.” Alex is shaking, but he manages an unsteady smile.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t expect the strongest Stirrer to be out here. There’s been more than a few surprises today.”
“The bastard just dropped from the roof and took out your birds. They tried to protect me, but it was too fast. And then the other one appeared, stumbling out from under the house. Shit, I thought I was dead.”
There’s no point in brooding, in being too scared. Alex is a mate, I have to kill this fear right away. I wish I was better at this.
“So, Alex. You doing anything on Christmas Day?”
“No.” Well, that’s surprised him. “Mom’s whooping it up on a cruise ship in the Pacific, and—”
Yeah, his dad’s dead, I don’t want him going there. “Well, you are now. Our place. Ten-thirty.”
Alex’s grin broadens. “You bloody Pomps. Just like my dad. Nothing unsettles you.”
I only wish that was true.
22
If someone is opening and closing the doorway to Hell then I need to kn
ow just how that might be done. I’m sick and tired of being in the dark about this stuff. I try calling Charon, but he’s out of the office. So instead I decided to visit Aunt Neti.
Tim stops me at the opening to her hallway. “I heard you had some trouble in the field today.”
“If you call Stirrers generating lightning, and nearly stabbing Alex to death, then yes.” I give him a rundown on the house, and what we found there. “Lissa thinks they were building a gateway between the lands of the living and the dead, and I figure that gateway may have been open for a while. And who has been using one lately? Rillman, and whoever the hell it is who’s been tailing me.”
“You think they’re connected?”
“They have to be, don’t they?”
Tim shuffles me a little deeper into the hallway and lights up. There are no smoke detectors here.
“If Alex hadn’t found out about the house it would still be there. And it would still be doing whatever the hell it was doing.” I jerk a thumb down the hallway. “If anyone can tell me about that it will be her.”
Tim takes it in. “You want me to come with you?”
“Only if you don’t have a Death Moot to help me plan.”
He nods, relieved. “The Caterers are coming tomorrow. That should be interesting.”
Tim walks back the way he came, and I take a deep breath and head toward Aunt Neti’s residence. Wal starts to stir on my biceps. Wings flutter. With every step he takes a more 3D form.
Even down this end of the hall I can smell the cooking. It’s a delightful and homely sort of smell—scones again, at a guess.
I close a fist to knock on the door, and the door swings open. I don’t know why I bother.
“Is that you smoking, Mr. de Selby?” Aunt Neti’s broad, many-eyed face peers down. She squints past my shoulder, checks up the hallway.
“No, I quit smoking a while back. It never stuck with me.”
“Well, it stinks on you.” She jabs a thumb at Wal. “Smoking cherubs, you’re all class.”
Wal shakes his head furiously. “Whoa, it wasn’t me. I don’t even smoke cigars, well, hardly …”
The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy Page 42