Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  It was the Cruik, only now it resembled a wooden worm, sawing away at her bonds with a splintery tooth. Eyes wide with disbelief, she slowly sat up, rubbing at her wrists. The man posted with guarding her sleep was slumped across a flour sack, head leaning at an unnatural angle.

  The work of freeing its mistress finished, the Cruik wrapped gently around her forearm until it was like a wooden sleeve. The relic shivered like a terrified puppy, and she could not coax it loose. Jenny crept toward the dead guard and prised the shotgun out of his grip. There was nothing in his pockets, no more ammo, nothing but tucker and fleas.

  The cook lay still upon his bench, his bedding scattered, his black tongue protruding. The Cruik had strangled him here, a messier kill than the guard. She mourned the foul-mouthed cook for a moment, a man guilty of nothing more than throwing together plain fare for ruthless men.

  Not that guilt or innocence bothers my pet, she thought, contemplating the alien shape that writhed on her arm. She leaned out from the wagon, but quickly lay down flat on top of the dead cook. There was the silhouette of a man cast against the glass mounds.

  Guards continued their rounds of the camp. She’d half hoped that the Cruik had choked everyone in the Dann’s employ, but from what she’d seen, it couldn’t do much under its own steam. It had wriggled free from its strappings and had just enough life to sniff her out and free her from immediate danger.

  I’ll have to do this myself, she thought. One or two voices began to murmur in the back of her mind, then the whole chorus of dead memories roused itself, ready for her to call upon.

  She saw the birds snoozing along their line, pegged and hooded for the night. The Dann’s huge bird had a peg of its own and slept beneath a warm quilt. Three men watched over the birds, mumbling over a gas lantern, and eyeing the main fire with envy.

  Too tricky. Jenny’s riding skills weren’t too bad, but she always felt awkward in a bird saddle. She bounced around, out-witted by the animal at every turn. In comparison, she’d mastered the lost art of horse riding. Jenny felt the ache of loss in her chest.

  Poor Seph, she thought, wiping away an errant tear. Get it together, Jen, you’ve got no time for this.

  A trio of camels brooded by the fire, slit-eyed and mean. They were as likely to take an arm off as let her ride, and they weren’t fully asleep anyway. One honking cry and the coin-riders would investigate, then she’d be done.

  That left her the lizard, a long bank of rippling scales, just visible at the edge of the glasslight. She hated the creature for eating Seph, but she needed to escape. Survival trumped loyalty.

  She needed to steal this monster, and most of all, she needed the priceless machine-gun on its back. With that, she could take on anything, up to and including a Jesusman.

  Stroking the Cruik, she managed to coax it from her arm. A rope ladder hung from the gunner’s hut, and up above, she saw a faint ember, perhaps a cigarette or someone on the kennelweed. The crew were no doubt over by the fires, boozing and playing cards, but at least one man sat watch over their valuable equipment.

  She touched the tip of the Cruik to the ladder, and watched as the hooked staff ran like damp clay, wriggling up the rope like a serpent.

  Quickly now, she thought, nervously watching for coin-riders. The shotgun was heavy in her grip. She heard movement above, a muffled curse, then the drumming of feet on the floorboards drowned out by a loud grinding sound as the lizard shifted in its sleep, scales rubbing against the chalky ground.

  One hand on the ladder, Jenny made to climb, but she heard a soft footfall. A large shadow fell across her. She barely had time to dance to one side when the Dann was upon her, swinging a bloodstained cricket bat with great velocity.

  She ducked below the haymaker and jammed the shotgun into his gut. She pulled the trigger. Nothing. Cursing the dud shell, she rapidly worked the pump mechanism, trying to eject the faulty round. The Dann brought the cricket bat down again and jarred the gun from her sore wrists. Then he caught her in the stomach with his boot. The wind knocked out of her, she fell onto her backside, gasping for breath.

  “You stupid little shit,” the water baron swore, raising the bat up high. At that moment, a dark shape fell onto his head, a floppy mess that draped down to his shoulders.

  It was the Cruik, but something was wrong with it. Although the staff was pliable, it barely moved, unable to constrict the giant man with any noticeable result. Ignoring the beaten girl, the water baron struggled with this disturbing new attacker, his efforts stretching it out like warm toffee.

  Go, a strident voice urged her off the ground. Adrenaline lent speed to her hands and feet, and she climbed across the ribs of the lizard up into the pagoda.

  The remains of a man hung over the side of the pagoda. It was a broken shape reaching for the open air, for any sort of escape, neck and arms broken, head bent into a strange oblong. The Cruik had done this, at her bidding. She shivered.

  The machine gun lay in its housing, a complicated device with belts of bullets feeding into it and a series of tanks and hoses to cool it down. Jenny barely understood the use of basic firearms, but as she examined the weapon, a nameless gunner from her mind took over her hands to grip the handles with warm familiarity.

  The Dann clutched the side of the pagoda, and as he pulled himself up and over, Jenny Rider swung the gun around and calmly squeezed the triggers. She saw the blank terror in his face as he registered the churning barrels. Suddenly he wasn’t the bully dominating the Moot, the sneering tyrant of the water trade. He was just a scared man facing his own mortality. A split second later, his head evaporated into a bloody mist.

  The chattering thunder of the weapon startled the lizard out of sleep. It leapt forward, snapping the chain tether on its foreleg, confused and darting in all directions. Jenny heard the panicked cries from the main campfire and saw the silhouettes of coin-riders running and reaching for their weapons.

  She swept the gun across them, the belt feeding round after round into that terrifying weapon, water trickling over the hot spinning barrels as they stuttered death. Her lead hornets sawed men in half at the waist, and she did not stop until she had driven the life out of everything that stood.

  Jenny looked down to observe the butchery from somewhere in the back of her mind, and she felt nothing.

  — 12 —

  After she gave the mercy of a bullet to those who needed it, she released all of the coin-riders’ birds. They chattered and shared their pilfered man-words then loped across the gorge and out into the Inland flats to freedom.

  She picked through the belongings of the dead, and for a moment she felt like a cockatoo, like a ghoul. She pushed away the guilt and got on with the business of survival.

  For all that he resembled a mountain on legs, Quentin Dann had pursued the vanities of the newly rich. She found a shaving kit in his bag along with a small folding mirror.

  Jenny settled down by the fire. Every inch of her was in pain. Once more she was the captain of her own mind, but this time, her useful ghosts gave up control with great reluctance.

  “No more,” she mumbled. “I’m not letting you lot take over ever again. No way.”

  The voices chattered defiance but murmured in the background, exhausted from their brief excursion into her body. It might take all of them to bring her down, but she couldn’t hold them off forever.

  You’ve gotta sleep sometime, Jen, she thought. What then?

  The Dann’s mirror was a clean bleedthrough, marred only by a slight scratch in one corner. She peered into her reflection, taking in the horror that was her brutalised face. Instantly, she was through the glass. The sensation was of pushing forward, not being pulled through. She wondered how she’d learnt to do that.

  She was alone in the dark place.

  “Hello?” she cried. There was no answer, no way to get herself out. She panicked and thrashed around, but there was nothing underneath her feet, no purchase to push against.

  Nothing here but a s
illy girl, bobbing around in the dark. For eternity.

  She screamed, then hollered for help. The whispering man appeared at some distance as a glimmer of white in the darkness. He seemed to have trouble approaching.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she heard Papa Lucy say faintly, no longer smiling. The effort seemed to cost him. His face flickered once like a lamp in danger of blowing out.

  “Where were you?” she asked petulantly. “I needed you, but you left me.”

  “There’s been trouble,” Lucy said. The next few words were garbled even though his mouth continued to move. “…can’t even use the Aum. Mirrors aren’t safe.”

  “Please. I don’t know what I’m meant to do.”

  “…the Cruik,” he managed, his words cutting in and out like a badly scratched record. “…glass…Jesusman.”

  Once more the images appeared before her: the wall, the salt flat, the Waking City. The pictures were faint like tissue paper. If she hadn’t seen them already, she doubted she’d make out what they were. Lucy cast aside two of the images like discarding playing cards until only the nightmare metropolis remained.

  She felt him reach out across the distance, a pressure in the middle of her forehead like a fingernail scraping the skin. An alien hieroglyph wormed into her mind, something that felt like a code.

  “…Cruik will make sense of that,” Lucy said. The head looked to one side as if scared of discovery.

  “It’s hurt,” Jenny said. “How do I fix the Cruik?”

  “Blood,” he said. “Now go.”

  “Wait. Is the Cruik safe?”

  Papa Lucy would not answer. She felt him pushing her away and the mirror-world give. Then, she saw an enormous hand swimming through the darkness, reaching out for her. A grey slab of flesh dominated that black sky with fingers like mountains.

  In the centre of that palm was a great bloody hole that seemed to serve as an eye as well as a mouth. Jenny felt it drink in every contour of her face. Beneath this wound, a word in darkness was carved into the skin in letters as tall as her father’s Tower.

  “BEFORE.”

  As the fingers closed around her, she stirred from the mirror-world. She was once more surrounded by dead coin-riders. The shaving mirror splintered into a thousand tiny pieces. Glass shards spilled out of the frame as fine as sand.

  She sat there shaken for many long moments. That hand had come for her like a gigantic squid on the hunt, and even Papa Lucy was afraid of it. There were no more of the sly smiles or insistent whispers that had ruled her dreams for so long.

  Nothing but a scared man alone in the dark.

  “What can frighten a god?” she whispered. It had almost touched her, almost dragged her into that awful ragged hole. She didn’t know what was on the other side, but if it scared Papa Lucy, it terrified her.

  I need blood, she thought. Picking up the Cruik was like lifting an armful of melted toffee as it ran over her arms and drooped to the ground. She fetched a shovel from the supply wagon then scooped up the slimy mess and dumped it onto the nearest dead man.

  “Well go on, eat him,” she told the Cruik, but it burbled as it slid off the dead man’s chest. She experimented with the other corpses, but the Cruik did not appear to feed or recover from its malady.

  “Okay, maybe it needs to be living blood.”

  She guided her captured lizard across the campsite where the cook’s lizard grazed on its dead master. The mini-gun flared in a brief cacophony, tearing open the flank of the giant, startling it into flight.

  Instantly her own lizard jerked forward as its predatory instinct activated at the sight of his cousin’s blood. The two beasts grappled, biting and tearing at each other with their claws. Jenny did her best to hang on.

  “Here you go,” she said, tossing the Cruik to the pagoda’s side and onto the bloodied shoulder of her lizard. But the Cruik would not feed, and she was forced to put the other lizard down by shredding its head into pulp with the mini-gun. Jenny’s lizard feasted long into the afternoon, and she felt a little better. At least I’ll fatten him up for the long trip.

  Her last resort was pricking her own thumb to release a gentle dribble of blood onto the goopy mess. Finally, the Cruik responded favourably. It grew firmer until she could pick it up. One end of the staff gently lapped at her thumb like a lamb on the suckle.

  Only a moment seemed to pass, but when she stirred, the sun was much further across the sky. She felt weak and dizzy. The Cruik was like a serpent’s head, drawing out her blood. A second strand of goop had fastened around her index finger, her flesh tingling and sore where a tooth had pierced the skin. Rather than suckling, it felt like it was pushing something into her.

  “Enough!” she gasped and extricated herself from the Cruik with some difficulty. It reached for her, but she pushed the mass away with her boot.

  “I will give you more tomorrow. But you have to do this for me,” she said and pointed to her forehead. “Your master hid something here and made a mark. Show me his message. And no funny business.”

  The Cruik extended a faint tendril towards her, and she let it touch her on the forehead. The world dropped away, and she was soaring across the Inland like a cockatoo on the wing. She crossed the Range that marked the edge of all claimed land, and then she was over the Waste, looking down upon all manner of strangeness.

  She passed the trio: one biker, one woman on a bird, and Tilly Carpidian, bound and gagged on the back. Then her invisible eye went past them, struggling to keep a straight path as it fought the twisted logic of the Waste.

  Finally, she reached the place where the Waking City was rising. Jenny saw this potential through Papa Lucy’s eyes and felt the enormity of the bleedthrough just waiting to burst. But there was nothing here yet, no Leicester-We-Forget to mark the spot, no riches from Before.

  Alone on the plain, Lanyard Everett stood, naked and bloody. The Jesusman held something in his hand, and as she approached him, he uncurled his fingers and let the light touch what lay on his palm. He smirked at her.

  She saw the glass shard and recognised it from the church at Carmel, the bright offering over a drowned woman. It sparkled brightly as it drank in the sunlight, then it became a sun all by itself, burning away Lanyard’s flesh and the vision. All the while, an alien voice hammered at her, demanding that she submit and that she kneel before Turtwurdigan.

  Then, silence, the only light was the burning orb of the sun baking the Inland. She was back in the campsite, back in the ache of her own body. Jenny stirred from the vision to see that the Cruik was once more stealing her blood and replacing it with something else.

  “You stop that!” she said, fighting her way loose. She decided to leave the relic behind, but even this resolution seemed fuzzy. As she paced the camp, fretting and confused, she still felt the pull of the Waking City no matter where she stood. With eyes closed, she could still point to it in a direction far north and east of here.

  Papa Lucy had found the Waking City and planted the directions in her head. In the Waste, she would find her enemy, save her father, and redeem herself.

  Jen, you are practical to a fault, Horace often said. She decided that she would need everything at her disposal, even the tools that scared her. Gashing her palm with a knife, she let the Cruik lap at her blood. She stopped fighting the ghosts and let them take over whenever she needed help.

  Thus, she crossed from the lands of people into the landscape of the strange, the Waste drawing her on, her journey near its end. There was nothing to the world but herself, the sullen dragon beneath her, and a terrifying monster at her bared breast, now suckling directly from her in the most intimate of ways.

  She had imagined herself at this moment, a noble warrior on the last true horse riding down a villain. Now, poor Seph was dead, and she didn’t even know what she was anymore. There were no more Riders of legend, no heroes, nothing but monsters, and she was fallen and lost. She tried to roll the knucklebone rite, but it felt like a child’s toy now. One b
y one she threw the bones away from the pagoda, cursing the day she’d sworn herself to Lucy’s cause.

  It was only her love for the staff keeping her going now.

  She spent many miles nursing the Cruik, barely remembering to eat or drink. Each time she saw the wash of her own blood slowly leaking out, it seemed more brown than red—the creature was giving back just as much as it took.

  Jenny dreamt.

  Once more she walked in the airy palace. This time the faceless men and women welcomed her into their games and showed her every wonder in the galleries and the gardens. She was almost one of them now. In the bustle, she gleaned that she’d passed a type of probation or a rite of passage.

  Only the mournful man who still scratched his dog gave her pause. He shook his head and pointed towards the sun-framed doors.

  “It’s not too late for you,” he said. “Leave the Cruik.”

  “No,” Jenny said, her mouth little more than a slit, her eyes pinpricks. “It needs me.”

  “Oh, it will tell you that,” the man said. “It pretended to need all of us too. Look.”

  He pointed to his own shadow and those of the guests playing badminton nearby. Each shadow was a skinny length with a hook end, a dancing reflection of the Cruik itself.

  “Not too late for you,” he repeated. He pointed to Jenny’s shadow, which was thinner, but she could still see her arms and legs. Her shadow’s head was starting to pinch and turn, slowly turning into a hook.

  “For now, you are a guest,” the man said. “Soon, you’ll be a prisoner without even knowing it. Then, a whispering voice in the halls, and then you are nothing, just like them.”

  He looked to the colonnades where the almost vanished guests lingered. She shivered and awoke.

  The Cruik still suckled from her, coiled about her ribs like a constricting snake. The tail end poked into the crook of her elbow where it fed its leavings directly into her veins.

  It was strong now, stronger than when she’d ripped it out of the statue’s hands. When she looked upon it, she knew love and regret that she’d ever considered leaving it behind.