The Last Guardian of Everness

by John C. Wright

  A pool of red and spurting blood rippled out from the boy, the spurts beating in time with his heart. After a few moments, the pulsing flow ebbed, and the blood crept sluggishly across the floor. Raven was somehow dimly surprised to recognize the stink; it was the same as when he killed an animal in the forest, a deer or grizzly. That seemed to him, in some obscure way, wrong and unfair.

  Peter drew out the knife, wiped it on the boy’s jacket, and folded it. It folded up into the shape of a belt buckle, which Peter returned to his belt.

  Now Peter sighed, muttering to himself. “Carrying concealed weapons, my ass. What kind of crime is that? If they weren’t concealed, someone could see where they were. . .” Peter painfully began to claw his way across the floor to the nearest dropped machine-gun.

  Raven shook himself out of his reverie. “Peter,” he said softly, not wanting to startle the man.

  “Eh? Raven? I’m in bad shape, pal.”

  “Selkie are nearby. Come, I carry you.”

  “Dad? Is that my dad? What the hell is he doing here?” Raven came forward, saying nothing. The wheelchair was wrecked beyond repair, and Peter looked bruised and bloody. It was not clear whose blood it was. Raven knew from his first-aid courses that one should not move a wounded man, but Raven could hear some barking voices nearby beginning to sing a sea chantey.

  He picked up Peter with one hand and threw him over his right shoulder.

  Peter, now hanging upside down, muttered, “Say. Dad, I wanted to tell you I was wrong about the House, you know, and that, well, this is kind of hard to say, but that I’m sorry about. . .”

  Raven whispered, “He is asleep, under spell; his soul has been stolen to Acheron.”

  “Bloody hell. . . We’re just dropping like flies, this family, ain’t we?” Peter’s voice trailed off, exhausted, perhaps overcome by wounds, or grief.

  II

  Raven remembered that there was a small spiral staircase leading from the Chamber of Middle Dreaming up to the corridor outside the master bedroom. When he went into the corridor of masks, however, some small groan from Peter made the seal-men in the library stiffen and turn.

  But by then, Raven was in the Chamber, whose moons and many- pointed stars were blackened and charred. He found the small door leading to the spiral stairs and was closing it behind him even as he heard two seal- men, drawing their cutlasses, walk out from the corridor of masks. Through the crack in the closing door, Raven saw them; one was carrying a burning book, using it as a torch. He also saw there was a taller seal-man behind them, this one dressed in lace and powdered wig, a long red coat and knickers, with square buckles on his shoes.

  The two seal-men in the front pulled white leather hoods over their black and fuzzy faces, and suddenly they looked like normal men, one with a mustache, the other with grizzled red hair and a squint. The seal-man in the long red coat pointed, barked an order. They came toward the door, approaching Raven.

  Raven bounded silently up the spiral stairs, carrying one man on either shoulder. There was a creak behind him as the door opened, then the noise of bare feet on wooden stairs.

  There were no openings or landings in this stairway, no place to turn off. The bare footsteps came behind him, joined by a clatter of heavy shoes.

  Then, up beyond another turn, he saw a crack of light. Here was the door before him, not closed, which, he saw, could be bolted from the other side.

  Raven stepped through the door.

  The dozens of seal-men in the corridor turned to look at him. There was a moment of silence. Soft black eyes were looking at him. Whiskered faces peered out from underneath tricorn hats, or from under powdered wigs, or bandannas. Some held flintlocks, others held truncheons or cutlasses or belaying pins.

  Raven opened his mouth.

  “Ar, may-tees! Mannannan the Seal-King be here, and I be he!” Raven shouted in his thick Russian accent. “I said we selkie-folk would trick ourselves inside the wards and be feasting in the Great Hall here while the Wizard still was scratching at the windows, begging to be let in, and so it is!”

  He stepped forward boldly.

  One or two selkie-folk looked each other eye to eye uncertainly and stepped aside. A large seal-man in a black coat and tricorn hat stepped up, though, and drew his flintlock from his sash.

  “Who says ye are Mannannan, then? Where’s yer witnesses?”

  Raven said, “All are innocent when no evidence can be trusted; that be our law, I am thinking, you know? Where are your witnesses that I am not, eh?” Without waiting for a reply, Raven shouldered the seal-man aside roughly, shoving him back toward the wall.

  Raven shouted, “Step aside! Gangway! Whoever bars my way, why, I’ll have them be walking the plank, you know!” With two men over his shoulders, Raven still was able to balance on one foot and raise his boot to the nearest seal-man’s chest and thrust him violently aside.

  The seal-man who fell slid against the carpet and struck a bust off a pedestal. “Garn! That be Mannannan, I’ll warrant, all right. He’s a strong one, he is.”

  Another seal-man pointed at the necklace of brown leaves that Raven had taken from the fallen gunman in uniform and had forgotten he wore. “He’s got the sign. ‘Tis a friend.”

  Many more seal-men now stepped aside. There was an open corridor between him and the door flanked by tridents. Raven could see that two burly seal-man had been trying to batter down the heavy door with a pedestal. The wood was marred; but Wendy had evidently barred the door from the other side, and it was thick oak planks.

  Raven took one step, then another, then a third.

  A voice cried out, “Ho ha! What fools ye be! He is not Mannannan, I’ll warrant, nor any other who has ever been at sea! I’ll wager ye he cannot say how to raise the stern jibsail!”

  Raven said, “There is no jib in the stern in any ship I’ve ever sailed, ye lubber! To raise a jib on a proper boat, hank it to the stay, shackle the jib halyard to the sailhead, and attach the jib sheets. I’ll say nothing about the boats you’ve served on, but if your jibs are in the stern, I am thinking, you know, that explains a lot.”

  The seal-men laughed.

  Raven made it to the door. He looked down at the scars and scratches where it’d been battered.

  He groped for something to say or to do. He could hear his heart beating. The weight of the two men he was carrying on his shoulders seemed to get heavier as he stood there, weary, mind blank, trying to think.

  The seal-men behind him looked on.

  Someone coughed. There was a nervous shuffle. Raven turned around slowly. “Whose . . . idea . . . was . . . this . . . ?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Raven said, “Are we not selkie-folk? Do we batter and barge in like fools? You amateurs stand back! Get back! Now!”

  They shuffled reluctantly backwards.

  Raven raised his voice: “Wendy! My little bird! It’s me, Raven!”

  Wendy shouted, “I don’t believe you! You’re a selkie! Go away!”

  There was a nervous murmur behind Raven. He heard one seal-man whisper uncertainly to another (“That’s not Mannannan”), heard the noise of a cutlass coming out of its sheath.

  Raven turned and winked at the seal-man. “Watch this!” The one with the cutlass, who had been coming forward, stepped back.

  Raven turned again. “You’re right! My name is Var Varovitch, which means, Raven, son of Raven in your language. Let me tell you the story about how I came by this name . . .”

  The door opened, and Wendy yanked him inside, her lips hot on his lips as she slammed the door behind him. Raven fell to the floor, overburdened by the weight of Peter and Lemuel.

  There came a rush and a banging on the door, but the empty suit of armor next to the door had lifted the bar and fitted it into its staples.

  The heavy door did not even rock under the blows.

  Raven kicked his foot against the door, shouting and swearing. The seal- men fell silent. Raven bellowed, “Go away! I want to speak to my litt
le wife alone, you know! And if she squeals a bit, you know, I nip them now and again, and I can be a little rough at love play!”

  There was good-natured laughter on the other side of the door. One voice barked, “Hoy, mates, that must be Mannannan. Who else would say such things about him, eh?”

  There came a cheer, “Hurrah for Mannannan! Let’s have a song, lads!” And voices moved a little ways down the hall.

  Strange, inhuman voices rang out:

  I am a man upon the land,

  I am a selkie in the sea;

  and when I’m far from every strand,

  my dwelling is in Skule Skerry!

  III

  Three men stood on a small hill to the north of the mansion. As they had been instructed, they had left their automobiles outside the grounds. Stars were overhead, but the approaching dawn painted the cloudy sky above the sea with mingled black and blood-red. Before them, a little wood stood between them and the mansion. The hill was tall enough that the view of the mansion clinging to the sea cliff was unobstructed: in the gloom before the dawn, the wood was a murmuring mass of shadows. Columns of smoke from the burning gardens rose up behind the house.

  Behind them, at the foot of the hill, the wounded were gathered. Moans and curses came from where bleeding men were laid out on blankets and tarps in the gloom. Lanterns blazed here and there on the grass, and two medical technicians in black MORS uniforms had erected an emergency tent. They were preparing to amputate the crushed leg of an unshaven man in a leather jacket, who struggled and screamed. A little to the left, a circle of priestesses in purple robes were standing watch over several still-warm corpses, who lay with their faces covered by their robes.

  One of the three, a gray-haired, hard-faced man, who wore a black blazer over his business suit, held a field telephone in his hand. On the back of his blazer were the letters MORS. He said to the others, “Azrael fell into the sea. We’ve taken heavy casualties. I am going to pull back my men and start shipping some of the wounded to the nearest hospital. I can leave enough men here to encircle the place . . .”

  “Wentworth,” said the second fellow in a soft whisper, an old, bald man with a squint and a harelip, whose pockmarked face always seemed contorted with a sneer. He wore a purple robe, rich with trimmings, and on a chain around his neck, an upside down cross inside an upside down star. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this. You are so proud of your soldiers and their guns, but what use are guns against the creatures of the Night World? Why don’t you run away, then? I’m the one who should have been the Master’s right-hand man, not you. When he comes back . . .”

  “Mr. Coldgrave,” said Wentworth curtly. “Azrael just fell hundreds of meters into the ocean. I know he is a ghost, but the body he is inhabiting is no doubt dead. Unless the two of you are willing to turn command of your contingents over to me, right now, we do not have a leader. Azrael may be alive—if that word has any meaning for him—but we have no instructions.

  We will have to go to find him again. I still have my researchers manning the sensory deprivation tanks in the lab in Denver, and the committee still has not found out what I am doing with the operational funds. Also, I have another subject from the asylum to experiment on, and I can force her to make contact with Azrael again in the dream-world.”

  Coldgrave said, “You mock me. My name is Father Malignus now: I am the heir of Paracelsus. Your experimental drugs and sleep tanks are mere trash. My followers can reach into the dream-world merely by the force of their faith, by their meditations, by the alchemic secrets unlocked in ancient manuscripts. We will stay to loot the mansion of Everness. Whoever possesses the Silver Key can lock and unlock the Gate of Slumber. The Dark Messiah, the Master, he cannot die. He will rise again and reward us for our patience and faithfulness.”

  The third man was lying on the grass at their feet, his eyes glassy. His head was shaven and blotchy with tattoos of screaming faces, so that extra mouths were inked onto his cheeks, extra eyes on his forehead. A dozen earrings dangled from his ears. He was shaking slightly, petting and fondling the large-bore revolver he held. “N-no man. You’re both assholes. We’re not getting anything outta this. We’re not getting outta here alive. It’s coming. It’s coming up from the black, from the cold, from the sleepy black waters at the bottom of the sea. The gates will open up, will come open just like a mouth, all hungrylike, see? Like teeth. And then HE will come out. Come out. Come out and play with the world. And what do you do with a toy when you’re done? Break it. Break it, and your mom tosses it in the trash. That’s what happened to me. My life got broken and tossed. That’s what is going happen to you. And, shit, I will laugh and laugh when it happens to you. And it is going to happen to the Master, to the Nightmare-Man, to Azrael the Gray. Because HIM is all-powerful. And even Azrael is afraid of HIM.”

  Coldgrave squinted at the young tattooed man, “Angello, you drug- soaked punk, what are your animals going to do? Stay with me, or run away with Wentworth? You can’t even think straight, can you?”

  Angello rose to his feet, brandishing his revolver. “My thinking is straight! The world’s bent. You two don’t know what’s going to happen with your men, do you? They’ve seen too much. They’ve seen the statues come to life, and they’ve been walking shoulder to shoulder with man-eating seals who dress up as men. Yeah, yeah: too much, too much. You don’t know what happens to people who see too much. Why do you think we forget what we did in our dreams when we wake up? You don’t know about the mist. The mist is coming. And there are people in the mists; people who don’t like us much.”

  Coldgrave said, “You mean Pendrake? The Amnesia took him.”

  Angello said, “He came back. I saw it when I was high. My brain can be in two places at once. It’s called drug lucidity. That’s why my gang is going to remember what happens here today, when your people, your soldier boys, and your people, your devil-worshipping nut-balls, are going to be carted off to the loony bin. Heh. You can use my old cell.”

  Coldgrave’s face twitched with worry. He said, “Two of my people vanished, night before last. This was just before the dream came telling us to meet at the boy’s house. Pendrake might be alive. He might be following us.”

  Wentworth said, “He is just one man.”

  Coldgrave said, “You are a blabbering fool. Don’t you know who Pen- drake is? Don’t you know whose blood flows in his veins? Don’t you know what woman he stole from the fairy-king to be his wife? Some of my people had visions of Inquanok, where the basalt dome of the veiled king rises, and they knew who Oberon had imprisoned in that impregnable dome, guarded by Shantak birds. You and your equipment, your sensory deprivation tanks, your funded dream-research lab. You know nothing.”

  Wentworth ignored him and spoke to Angello. He said, “Your gang is going to be cut to bits. Are you going to fall back when my men do and form a siege? We cannot take the mansion by direct assault. Not without Azrael.”

  Angello sniffed, and sat back down on the grass. He shrugged nonchalantly. “They’re animals, man. Like he said. I can’t call ‘em back once their blood is up. I stoked them up before they went in. Amazing thing you can do to people, if they trust you, with the right combination of chemicals. They feel no pain.”

  Coldgrave said, “Then take your men, Wentworth, and go. The Dark Messiah will hear of your faithlessness when he returns in triumph.”

  Wentworth frowned. “We need to contact the Necromancer. I can make a phone call to Nevada, and tell the dream-team at my base to go under . . .”

  Angello laughed up at him. “You’re an idiot. Don’t you know where you are? This is Everness. This place is like me. Awake and asleep, asleep and awake, and you don’t need to be a half-breed half-human to see things here! Do you need to talk to Koschei? The Bone Man? Look! Look! There he is!”

  When Angello pointed, the other two men saw, below them at the foot of the hill, where Coldgrave’s priestesses were watching the dead, a figure made of black mist, armored all in human bones,
and wearing a crown of dead men’s fingernails. The apparition was walking slowly, silently around the priestesses, as if seeking a way within their circle. The being was huge and thin and black, with trailing robes of darkness slithering behind, and it should have been impossible, even in the dim light, not to see so huge and thin and black a figure: and yet, somehow, until the moment when the drug- addled Angello pointed his finger, neither Wentworth nor Coldgrave had seen the specter.

  The creature turned its narrow-skulled head slowly toward them, and its eyesockets held two tiny points of cold light, like stars. It raised its thin, long-fingered hand, palm inward: a gesture to beckon them.

  Wentworth said to Coldgrave, “We have to give him some of your men.” He indicated the corpses lying on the grass. “Otherwise he will not talk to us.”

  Coldgrave sneered at him. “No matter what the Necromancer says, we continue the assault. It cannot be so hard to find another empty body for the Master to possess, can it?”

  And he moved downhill to go bow and speak to Koschei.

  IV

  Angello’s teeth were chattering, and he hugged himself as if trying to hold back some internal pain or hunger that was gnawing at him.

  Angello focused one eye on Wentworth. To distract himself from the shakes, he spoke. Slowly, he said, “Him, I understand. Father Ma-ligament. He needs someone to tell him how everything he does, all his sick, sick little habits, are all okay. And no real religion will tell him that, so he worships the devil instead, and the Warlock told him what he wants to hear. Me, I understand. I got nothing, I got nothing to lose. When I dream that a man in a bloody cage made of hooks tells me to go somewhere, do something, why not? I go and I do, and the dreams tell me how to get money and drugs and guns. But you. You got everything. Rich, good job. People salute you. You, I don’t understand.”