On the other hand, I didn’t feel overly fond dying either quickly or slowly, and was thinking of voting for a third-party candidate in this election. The Creep was bleeding more profusely than before, an appalling torrent of crimson, so much blood I felt sure that if he survived he’d lose the red in his neck. Looking at my own chains, I saw that they were fastened to the lord of all padlocks. Did Chubb have the key? How could I possibly wrest it from him if I was all chained up?
The door opened again. Chubb emerged, carrying a gutterwood revolver that looked as if the forebears of religious zealots had used it to fight robot dinosaurs. He laboriously opened the chamber and started loading it. “Chubb, Ima glad yuh gon’ do us yuhself. I woodn’t wan’ e’en a lousy turnacoat to hafa go though hi’ life a-no balls.” The Creep’s speech was slurred six ways to the Sun festival. Chubb really could just wait for him to bleed out. If he knew this, it could mean I’d get a bullet first.
In all my eternal and demented time, I had never been as close to the end as this. I had heard stories of a terrible afterlife all through my childhood, first from Aunty and then from Reverend Burstin. They had told me of a tiny, tiny gate that led to Paradise. It was as small as a gap between two bricks in the wall of the Great Dam. Those who had souls small enough at the end of their life could squeeze through into an endless bliss. Everyone else had to spend the rest of time questing through ever-expanding circles of hell, suffering every agony for a perpetually elusive salvation. And every sin made your soul bigger and fatter, so you had less chance of getting through the gate.
I had never put much stock in this as a child, but I had seen much more of the world since then. I found myself contemplating two lousy possibilities: utter annihilation or perpetual torment. The barrel of Chubb’s lethal relic was levelled at me. People who live to tell you of this kind of situation always say that the barrel of the executioner’s piece looks like a tunnel, or like a well that you’re about to fall into. But, as is so often the case, people lie. What it really looks like is—
“Chubb, the Dry Men al’ways gon’ have a bettah deal.” The Creep said. “Jus’ let us go, and we kin help yuh. We kin git yuh double that sweet blue ab-sinthe. I don’ blame yuh, boy, fo’ what yuh did. Jus’ play it smart now. Let us go.”
Chubb seemed momentarily tempted by this offer. His hand went to one of the pockets of his coat. Then he shook his head, and again levelled the gun at my head. My eyes were closed, mostly because I didn’t want Chubb to be the last thing I saw before I went. Time seemed to stretch for too long. I opened an eye experimentally.
Chubb’s gun was not pointed at me anymore. He was staggering back, his unblinking and glaucomal eyes full of terror. I opened my other eye and startled. A plump red sea slug was on the railing, right next to my ear. I moved my head as far away from it as the chains would allow.
“She-it!” Mission Creep exclaimed, though his voice was getting weaker all the time. “It’s here-in! I knew it wouldn’t let us’n down! Quick a-now, Chubb! Unchain us! We kin help yuh fight it!” I was completely unclear on what was happening. This was only marginally better than being a trigger twitch away from a watery grave. Out of the corner of my eye, the red slug seemed to be dancing, struggling to make itself bigger and bigger on the rail.
“Do it!” I shouted. “Do what he says! There’s no blue absinthe when you’re in a slug’s gut!” This was weak improvising, but it seemed to work. Chubb was fishing around again in that same pocket. The thing on the rail had moved, and I got a better look at it. What had seemed a slug was actually a bloated and terrible tentacle, as big around as my waist. Chubb was fiddling with my lock.
“Do you say…true? If I help…you have a deal…for me?” The chains loosened and I crawled and scuttled away from the rail. I was not done discovering the horrors of that day, however. As I put more distance between myself and the sea monster, I realized that I had not even seen the tentacle yet: I had only seen a sort of sub-tentacle. Five suctioned appendages were rooted to something as big around as a redwood. That was the true tentacle. It was closer to being a sea-titan than a sea monster. Its tentacles had tentacles.
“Hurry up and free the Creep! We say true! We say true!” After futzing far too long with the lock, Chubb freed the Creep, who rewarded him with a punch to the solar plexus and a headbutt that would have shattered Chubb’s nose if he still had one. I took the hint and bulled Chubb overboard. Mission Creep grabbed the outmoded revolver. “Life boat,” he said. “Shoul’ be side a the cabin. Go’an find it.”
This sounded like a good idea. I heard a loud cracking sound, and felt sure that Mission Creep was already firing on the next wave of smugglers. But my footing was uncertain, and I saw that the monster was already snapping the ragged boards of the smuggler rig under its tentacles. A small wooden life boat was mounted where the Creep said it would be. I could barely lift it from its hooks, I was so weak. Mission Creep appeared next to me, his camouflage red with blood. “We gots to hoist it o’board and jump after it. On’y chance.” Somehow we got the boat over the side. The Creep fired off a few shots at the Smugglers who had appeared to fight the creature. I jumped before I could think about it.
It felt like I hung in the night air for too long, and then I watched as the Sea of Bleak rushed up to me. The impact of the water punished me for the poor dive, bruising my ribs if not breaking them outright. The water was freezing and the salt burned my cuts; I could feel it eroding my bark. I was thankful that it was too dark to see any more of the tentacles. I swam for the little boat and forced myself over the side, gasping. Mission Creep had already climbed in by the time I realized that the boat had no oars. The monster had gotten his tentacles all over the smugglers’ rig, snapping the mast, buckling the deck in a thousand places.
As more of the boat was pulled into the sea, more of the monster became visible. It had a single eye in the center of its network of tentacles and sub-tentacles, an eye that seemed as big as the freakish harvest moon. A feverish and elongated iris was electrified by bloodshot veins that I could see even from this distance. With no other choice, we paddled with our hands. The oil rig exploded, raining fire on the indifferent creature, igniting the ship. As more of the boat was pulled into the brine, waves of water were pushed towards us to aid our weak paddling. We could hear distant screams as we approached the shore. “Good ol’ Eye-Jaw-Kull,” the Creep said fondly. “Still loves him his blood an’ fire. Boy, I’s in no shape tuh drive. Yuh gots to radio for ‘straction. Dial 11988 on the tranny-sponder.”
“What about you?”
“Gotta finish the mission. This a warnin’ to other smugglas. They caint think it was a ‘splosion or a random monster ‘tack. They gotta know it was us.” He had crawled to a part of the beach where the sand gave way to hardpan beyond the reach of the waves. He was scrawling a message in his own blood.
I did what he said. I sent in the message for extraction. I was all shakes; I felt nothing but painful incredulity about my survival. It was like when you narrowly avoid a fatal accident hanging a hairpin turn going ninety on the TJSH, or when you’ve been stratospherically high on Think Ink and you come down and realize that those things you were fighting weren’t hallucinations. I felt the adrenaline ultra-reality that always comes when death misses you by a micron, and that is the opposite of narcotic pleasure. There was nothing to do but limp my way back to Mission Creep. He was lying still, barely breathing. “That thing is Eye-Jaw-Kull?” I asked. “I heard stories about it in the orphanage, but I never paid them mind.” Mission Creep was silent. “I worked a scene about Eye-Jaw-Kull into my novel, but I always pegged it to be more legend than real.” I was babbling, trying to keep Mission Creep talking. I knew from my war correspondent days that you can’t allow someone as gravely injured as the Creep was to fall asleep.
“S’part o’ an old plan.” The Creep said. “Old plan from before th’ Dry Men and th’ Ignobles were fightin’ each other. ‘Magine a whole army of them things crawling on land, swimmi
n’ on the sea. Yuh’d go to anyone who could save yuh.” It occurred to me then that I had never once seen Mission Creep’s eyes. They were still behind his sunglasses. I had been too preoccupied with everything that had happened to realize that he wore them even in darkness. “We done grew Eye-Jaw-Kull inna vat.” He said. “I knowed him when he was justa pod.”
I could hear the chopping of the black helicopter, and soon we were swaddled in blankets and rising into the sky. Two commandoes were next to us, invisible under black body armor and flight gear. As we rose higher, I was able to read Mission Creep’s bloody message in the light from the helicopter’s search beam.
The moneychangers are still in the temple.
The rig was still burning and smoking on the water, as Eye-Jaw-Kull pulled it under, toying with it. The uncomfortable realism of my perception faded; my consciousness was like a lantern smothered by a damp cloth. Hard living and mischief had toughened me, but this was my limit. I blacked out.
“TALES FROM THE SNUFFBOX”
1
I came to enmeshed in a labyrinth of intravenous tubes. An inept machine was trying to breathe for me, and I ripped its funneled snake off of my face. Everything in the room was white, illuminated by sunlight. I knew without looking outside that I was somewhere in Plenty Burrows. Provisia has its share of poor and gritty pockets, and I’ve learned to detect their absence. Plenty Burrows emits its contented affluence and banal evil like radiation from a nuclear plant.
I pushed myself to a sitting position and waited for the wave of dizziness to pass. A cluster of roses was perched on the nightstand in a vase. I fished for the attached card. My fingers felt as wooden as they looked. My dexterity and motor skills were shot, and I mouthed a weak prayer to the Gods that this appalling weakness wasn’t permanent. The Gods didn’t answer, they only mocked me. (Hey, Gramiphonius! Check this out—look who comes crawling back!) I finally had to reach out with both hands and grab it like a kid catching a filch parasite to put in a girl’s hair. The whole saga left me short of breath from the exertion. I could feel bandages and wraps straining under my hospital gown. The card bore the now familiar seal of the Dry Men: a compass dripping sand and blood with an inverted pentagram between the needles, held aloft by a gnarled tree with the letters ‘WYG’ on its trunk. Inside it said. “You’ve earned your fourth degree. Get well soon—next mission on its way.”
Swell.
It seemed to me that I was rising through the ranks of their Order a little too quickly. Was it usual for someone to take more than one degree in a single week? For that matter, how many degrees were there? Mission Creep had mentioned that he was Nth Degree. What the fuck did that mean? I could only guess that at some point the numbers gave way to variables. Yet Mission Creep could not himself be at the top of the heap. The terrifying puppet men we had met at the lodge certainly outranked him. It wouldn’t make sense if they didn’t—someone had to be high enough to give Mission Creep missions to creep his way through. For that matter, was Mission Creep receiving promotions for the work that we were doing jointly?
I was more bored and confused by this line of thought than I was frustrated, and I soon fell asleep again. I’d never been much for doctors and hospitals. I had gotten the sense over the course of my professional weirdness that my body healed differently than other people’s because of my enchantment. They were mainlining some solution of water and fertilizer into my blood. For the next week, it was like someone had jammed a stick in the spokes of my sleep cycle, and I slept all through the day and was awake and listless most of the night. The homely little nurses who shuffled in from time to time ignored me when I yelled and screamed at them and demanded drugs and alcohol. They didn’t seem to be proper nurses at all, but rather a strange order of witches in somber habits, probably some female auxiliary coven controlled by the Dry Men.
I was getting better, though the boredom was itself becoming lethal. It was a relief when one of the silent witches dropped off the dossier with the mission. You know you’re bored when you want to read the instructions in full. Still, I found myself drawn into the reading. This was some morbid shit, even for the Dry Men.
2
The job was codenamed ‘Operation Snuffbox.’ The clearance level was Degree 4 and above, but parts of it still seemed to be above my paygrade. Bits and pieces were redacted, most appearing to be names. The formal, intelligence community language couldn’t hide the lurid depravity of the whole thing, and I found myself at once fascinated and thoroughly repulsed.
The briefing revealed that the Motel 6.16 off of Trash Junction was owned by the Dry Men and operated as an illegal brothel. They were running all sorts of sidelines out of the place: weapons, porn, girls, and high-level blackmail. My job seemed to be at the unholy apex where it all came together.
Elephantine Waste Disposal Solutions is one of the corporations that has remained in the neutral zone between the Ignobles and the Dry Men, with neither able to bring the powerful conglomerate into their fold. For unspecified reasons, leverage was needed. Reliable sources had disclosed that members of the board were into ‘snuff films,’ a phenomenon I had come across in my past life, but only from far downwind. This was where the posh world of GM caviar eggs as big as your fist and the black pearls of the vilest sadism became indistinguishable. In a nutshell, the oligarchs pay some creeping bottom-feeder to murder someone in cold blood on film. They get some sort of vicarious high from watching the bloodshed, from knowing that the blood and brains are the real deal and not special effects.
The call girl was to be seduced into the room by an offer to appear in an adult film. For many prostitutes this is a tantalizing offer; there’s money in it, and it’s not even illegal. But this was no pay day. They were going to off her and film it. The Dry Men knew about this, but they had no intention of stopping it. In fact, part of my job was making sure that the film was completed. And then to steal it.
Aside from logistics on equipment and schematics for the motel room involved, there was nothing else. There didn’t have to be. I knew the play. Power can be its own kind of trap. It’s like an electrical current that boosts your energy and vitality, but begins to shock and burn as it increases. Soon you can’t let go of the conduit that’s pumping volts through your withering hands. The men on the corporate board had grown deaf and blind to almost all of Provisia’s carnal delights. Inundated with money and the pleasures it could buy, the oceans of paradise had degenerated into a bland sea of sameness. They needed to watch people murdered to feel any spark of arousal.
Could such men be bought or reasoned with? No, certainly not. Money was valueless to them. The only thing that could move them one way or another was the sheer, terrifying fear of exposure, of unmasking before a world that would tear them to shreds if their true colors were known. Then there wouldn’t be a panic room fortified enough to protect them, and even the stupidity and apathy and obliviousness of ordinary Provisians would be cut through by a tabloid cry for vengeance and justice.
I have a high level of ethical elasticity, but this job was so grotesque it sent my bark crawling. For the first time, I began to wish that I had never thrown in with the Dry Men. So what if the bureaucracy had made me into a nonperson without them? I might have been at the end of my stretch writing for magazines, but I’m a fellow of many skills. Hell, in truth there were sure to be countless perks involved in nonexistence. Otherwise, no one would jump off buildings or fake their own deaths. I could have even tried my lot with the Ignobles. They had to have a need for people like me.
But this line of thinking wasn’t going to be of any help. The fact was that the die had been cast, and I could do the dirty deed or they’d turn me into firewood and find somebody else. Once you were a Dry Man there was no way to re-hydrate yourself. Looked at in the right way, everything I had done up until now would be without purpose if I stopped, and that would only make things even worse.
I startled when I noticed one of the little witches at my bedside. Gods knew how long sh
e had been there. She could have read the whole mission over my shoulder for all I knew. Of course, if her weird little nursing coven was linked to the Dry Men, her sisters would probably turn her into a marsh newt or something if she put her nose where it didn’t belong. She was injecting a fluid into one of my intravenous tubes with a syringe. I soon sank into the deepest sleep of my entire life. I was discharged from the hospital the next morning.
3
Looked at in a certain light, it was a very simple job. There was a stakeout room in a grim, windowless little box where they used to hang the keys before everything was electronic. Nothing in there except for me, the empty key cubbies, and a tiny black and white television. Someone had tacked up a picture of a tropical scene with a palm tree on the bare wall opposite the door. At least, it was bare except for the graphite smudgings of graffiti and crude sex organs and filthy words.
Who worked here? What had happened to this place? It was hard to believe that even a cheap motel could be this cheap. All the lights were harsh, flickering fluorescents that gave you that shaved-eyeball feeling you get when you’ve been up for two or three days without a wink of sleep. The carpets in the hallways were ragged and threadbare. You knew the hallways had their painful lights on at all hours, but that at some point the rats crawled from their holes and tore and chewed up the threads to build their metropolis nests in the walls. You saw almost no one in the motel, and yet you knew that people were there, in the rooms…hiding from the law or indulging in a secret shame or contemplating some terrible end.
There was a time window on the job, so I was stuck in that tiny room until the hooker was dead. I was watching the pornographer set up and wait for her through a tiny camera that appeared to be nestled in an upper corner of his room. Here was a musclebound galoot with ridiculous hair, high on the sides and shaved down the middle, like a human plug. Everything that happened in the room I saw and heard.
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