City of Corpses

by John C. Wright

  She dropped lightly to the ground and twisted the ring to its white setting. The cold sensation receded. Her nape hairs stopped tickling.

  On her belly, with her left shoulder brushing the wall, she crawled down the slope. The upper edge of the lower entrance to the ramp seemed to creep upward, revealing more and more of the room the lower her head came.

  It was far larger than the garage vaults above. Lines of cast iron support beams ran from floor to ceiling, naked and ugly and showing their rivets. Yumiko could not see the far end of it. It was as if Wilcolac had purchased the basements of all his neighbors in this whole city block and then knocked down all the walls between.

  At the foot of every pillar, and piled along the nearer walls, were owl pellets, the heaped bones of mice and rats, and pools of putrid decay. Perhaps the flocks of owls that made such a mess were gone by night to hunt.

  On the cracked and mud-stained floor she saw a curved line painted in dull brown. Her nose told her this was dried blood. She inched further down the ramp so that more of the chamber was in view. The bloodstained line ran in a wide circle, perhaps twenty paces across, with a five-pointed star, also drawn in dried blood, inscribed within. Dozens upon dozens of candles were arranged in five clusters inside the star, some on candle stands, and some standing on the floor held upright by puddles of their own wax.

  All the flames were blowing and jumping wildly even though none was extinguished. The shadows of the chamber jerked so vehemently that it was hard to focus an eye on any object without a slight feeling of seasickness. And yet the air was motionless and chilly, with no noise of wind.

  Down she wormed. Lying on the ramp, her feet were higher than her head. The candlelight was only brushing against Yumiko’s head and shoulders. The rest of her prone body was still in darkness.

  In the wide vault was a bed or leather couch, filthy and stained, to which a portly man was strapped down. Broad belts circled his arms, legs, and body. He was naked, and his pink flesh was glistening in the erratic candlelight.

  Yumiko clicked her goggles between infrared, ultraviolet, and light-amplification. She recognized the man by his overbite, his red side whiskers, and ungainly, huge moustache.

  It was the lecherous customer who had poked her so rudely that Licho had led him away to mollify with a free drink.

  Her bewilderment was absolute. Was this what was done to patrons who were fresh with the girls? They were abducted to his horrible vault?

  Another inch. Now Yumiko could see above the couch what she least expected to see. Hanging from tall candlestands were an oscilloscope, a heart monitor, and bags of saline solution. It was all gear she recognized from her stay at the hospital. Tubes and wires ran from the monitoring gear to the bound man, his face, his arms, and so on.

  The man stirred slightly on the bed, straining against the straps, and moaned in pain.

  She thought her confusion could grow no greater, but, somehow, it grew. Was he being tortured? Or cured? But if this were a medical treatment, it was taking place in the most unsanitary environment imaginable. It was the polar opposite of the meticulously sterile hospital room where Yumiko had first awoken.

  Yumiko now saw the legs and hips of a woman in a white nurse’s uniform. From Yumiko’s angle of view, the nurse’s face was blocked by the upper lip of the entrance arch. The nurse bent over the body, and something in her hand glinted metallically in the cold and strobe-flickering candlelight, a knife or a needle.

  Yumiko recognized her even before she spoke. The emotionless, aristocratic Russian accents of Polednitsa Cobweb came softly. “Your nerves are changing from a natural to a supernatural regime, so the pain centers of your brain are registering the signals as agony and death.” Polednitsa made a sudden, savage motion with her hand. The man on the table screamed. It was a horrible, breathless, gargling scream, as if there were blood in his lungs.

  In one impossibly smooth and rapid motion, Yumiko rose to one knee, drew the baton from her belt, and unfolded it into her longbow before she knew she had moved. Yumiko nocked an arrow and drew back the string. The Japanese longbow had a short lower haft to allow it to be used from horseback or from a kneeling position.

  Polednitsa, all save her legs, could now not be seen. Yumiko’s vision was blocked by the lip of the lower chamber’s roof. But in the next moment, the white-clad nurse was walking around the table, moving closer. Yumiko saw her hips and then her waist and upper torso. In one more footfall, Yumiko would have a clear shot at her heart.

  Yumiko regretted the fate. Killing the nurse would expose everything, ruin everything, and spoil any hope of rescuing Elfine. But she could not stand idly by and watch a man tortured to death.

  Then, the man spoke in a half-strangled, gargling voice, “But it will still work, won’t it? The change–”

  Polednitsa said coolly, “That remains to be seen.” Now all her form below her shoulders was visible. She crossed before the foot of the bed, and her back was to Yumiko. At this range, Yumiko could not miss. But she held her hand, listening.

  The man said, “You have dug out my eyes and replaced them with wolf eyes, and pulled my teeth and given me fangs. The pain, the terrible pain! It was all worth it! But my skin! Why is my skin burning? I killed her, just like you said. I killed her, just like you told me to!”

  Polednitsa said, “Evidently not. You were unmarried? Killing a paramour does not count. She was not your wife even if you were living with her. If you crave the unholy power, you must perform an unholy act. What about your child? Your bastard child?”

  “Lives with her grandmother. Yes.”

  “Do you love her? Do you love the babe? That is the important thing.”

  “No longer! Give me the wolf-pelt. You said I could have Phelan’s pelt. I will kill her.” The portly man strained at the straps, yowling.

  Yumiko’s confusion broke like a chain breaking. This was no torture. This was some sort of reward, an initiation. He wanted to be a wolf. He craved it.

  Yumiko now aimed that arrow at the man. Strapped to the table, at this angle, she could kill him in one shot. For a second time, she regretted hard fate. But if she did not shoot, it was the same as allowing a child to be murdered.

  Polednitsa said, “Your flesh is not reacting as expected. I dare not inject more morphine. I have sent for the Magician.”

  Yumiko folded her bow into a baton and holstered it. She realized two things. First, this man was dying and likely to murder no one. Second, she was trapped. The ramp was flat and wide, with no possible place to hide, and the Cheyenne and the Magician would be coming down this way any moment.

  Chapter Six: The Voice of Darkness

  1. Flay the Beast

  Before she fled, Yumiko took a bugging device, balanced on her thumb, and flicked it down the slope. It bounced, rolled, skipped along the cracked and muddy floor, and came to land right next to the legs of one of the standing candlesticks.

  Yumiko retreated up the ramp. She was quietly and quickly crossing the floor between the empty werewolf cages when she saw the feet and the legs of two men descending. Their upper bodies were still hidden behind the upper entrance lip. She glanced left and right. The walk-in freezer door was shut and would make a noise if she opened it. The office door was open. She twisted the ring on her finger, became weightless, and threw herself like a slender black-clad torpedo. She snatched the edge of lintel with her hands and her momentum tossed her in a tight circle around the corner. There was a slight rustling noise as she landed feet first, bending her knees to absorb the shock, against the stacked cardboard boxes filled with invoices.

  “What was that?” came the deep voice of the Cheyenne.

  “Your ears are sharper than mine,” answered the voice of Wilcolac. He sounded slightly out of breath, as if his chubby body could not keep pace with the young, athletic man leading him. “But let us—(whew!)—not dilly-dally. We, ah, do not want to lose—(puff!)—a paying customer.”

  “I heard something. Before.” />
  “Take a moment. I will go on ahead.” And she heard the noise of the postern door opening and shutting.

  Yumiko was sure the vault below this was crowded with ghosts or supernatural presences, certain to see her if she stepped into their misty realm. But here? She twisted the ring to black. The room seem to distort in her vision, as if it were larger than it should be, and the angles at the corners and walls no longer seemed like right angles. The ceiling and floor no longer seemed parallel.

  The Cheyenne stepped into the office. He had a handsomely decorated hatchet in his hand, whose sharpened blade gleamed wickedly. He snapped on the lights. The glare seemed freakishly bright, distorted. His eyes passed over her and did not see her. He looked behind the piled boxes, under the desk, and in the closet. As he walked, she carefully stepped behind him, silent as a doe, trying desperately not to brush against him, not to step on any scrap of paper, and not to breathe.

  His nostrils flared. “I can smell you,” he said. “But I cannot see you.”

  She touched the spot at the throat of her mask which clamped her suit airtight. Oxy-nitrogen hissed into her mask from a hidden air supply. She tiptoed slowly backward out of the room.

  He got down on his knees and sniffed again. But now he looked puzzled.

  A scream came from below. Then came Wilcolac’s voice, calling the Cheyenne by name, “Kuckunniwi! If you please!”

  The Cheyenne stood, looking indecisive, and returned the hatchet to a sheath hidden under the lower back of his leather jacket. He stepped out of the office. He had neglected to douse the desk lamp, so his shadow was spread within a triangle of light stretching along the concrete floor and across the empty cages. To Yumiko, hidden in the mist, the light seemed like a blurred and burning river.

  The Cheyenne glanced up at the ramp leading out, made a small, tense grimace, which might have been his smile, and passed through the postern door. He paused to close it. Yumiko heard a key scrape in the lock and the bolt shut.

  With a sense of relief, she untwisted the ring. It turned pewter. The angles of the room returned to normal, as did the distorted glare of the light. At one-sixth her normal weight, she skipped up the ramp like a stone skipping on the water. She returned her weight to normal at the last skip and slid to a halt before the postern door. Now she understood the small smile of the Cheyenne. In his hurry to get Wilcolac, he had forgotten to lock the doors behind him, but after he heard her moving around in the utility room, he had not.

  She tuned her ear receivers to the bug she’d left behind, listening to their conversation, hoping to hear some warning if one of them started moving back toward her. She knelt, tossed her head to open her mask, held her flashlight in her teeth, and brought out her tension wrench and a three-pronged Bogata rake. Both were the size and shape of dental instruments. She carefully applied tension to the bottom of the keyhole with the wrench and tickled the pins with the rake to test the tension on each pin. The pin most firmly in place was the first one to prod back, and then the next…

  Her hands remembered how to do this, but her brain did not, so she could not estimate how long it should take. She had no experience, no basis of comparison. How long would it take? How long?

  The uncertainty made her nervous, and this made her hands unsteady, so the pins slid back into place. She had to start over again.

  She could hear the voices of Wilcolac and Polednitsa through her earphones and an occasional sound of the Cheyenne shifting his feet. He was evidently standing very close to the bug, perhaps only inches away.

  “…rejection of the tissue?” Polednitsa was asking.

  Wilcolac said something the bug did not pick up. And then, either he turned his head or stepped closer to the bug. “…he deceived us, or was deceived himself, about the strength of elfish blood in his heritage. Mr. McDuffy here is less than a quadroon.”

  The Cheyenne said, “No. We checked. His grandfather was the keeper of the Eddystone Light, and so his father was a half-breed at least.”

  “Then the elfin blood itself is growing weak, and the old strength is leaving the world.”

  Polednitsa said, “The triannulus shows drops of divine blood in his bloodstream. He has taken the communion wafer.”

  Wilcolac said, “Fool! You were warned what would happen! When men eat bread, it turns into them; when men eat the bastard son of Mary, when he looks like bread to trick them, they turn into him.”

  The gobbling, gargling voice of the portly red-whiskered man now spoke. “Nay. Nay! Not since I was a child of seven. I had forgotten… so long ago…”

  Polednitsa muttered, “How could even the smallest particle of the material still exist from years ago? It should have been digested in eight hours.”

  Wilcolac growled, “Heaven not only tyrannizes, but it deceives. The divine power could will anything, do anything. Instead, it tricks and toys with us, tempting us with victory to snatch it out from between our very teeth! Who can fight a foe who can change the laws of nature or raise the dead? How is that fair?”

  “Sir?”

  “These sneaking sacraments can spring up again, full of force, years after they should have been flushed out of body and soul. They wait like a coiled snake to bite the conscience, and even hardened killers weep like girls.” He raised his voice, “Dark and adored Lady! Can anything be done?”

  No voice answered him, but a coldness touched Yumiko in the ear, and a fear trembled in her heart, and she knew Wilcolac addressed whatever power it was that set all the candle flames to tremble in that dark chamber below.

  Polednitsa said, “We cannot start flaying now. It will kill the subject. The skin is not soaked through. McDuffy is still awake, and the morphine has no effect. The phase of the moon is not correct! The laws of magic say…”

  But Wilcolac answered, “Do not question the voice of Hell. What I know of magic, I see through the narrow bars of a gate. Lady Empousa is from beyond that gate.”

  This time, Yumiko did hear the voice. “Flay him. Flay the beast.” But she heard the words silently in her mind, not through her ears.

  This horror was only one floor below her. At that moment, the last tumbler clicked into place under Yumiko’s fingers. In her impatience to escape, Yumiko flung open the postern door.

  A shrill electronic shrieking answered her. She had neglected to check for alarms to disarm. Through the door to the second vault, the clamor of barking from enraged dogs, startled awake by the alarm, filled the air.

  Wilcolac’s voice in her ear said, “Cheyenne? If you would, please?”

  The Cheyenne answered, “The upper door is locked. It is the Foxmaiden. She cannot get out. Phone Licho. Have him meet me.” His voice was very loud, as if he were standing atop the bug’s mike. Loud, swift footsteps thundered her ear, coming closer. Then, there came an abrupt silence in her earphones. He had stepped on the bug and crushed it.

  2. Empousa

  Yumiko took a step into the second vault. It was dark here, with only small yellow lights burning near the door to the utility room and the kennel master’s cubbyhole. A brighter light was shining from below and behind her, reflected from the concrete. The light behind her flickered.

  Through the bug left behind in the third vault office, Yumiko could hear someone or something moving through the vault toward the ramp behind her. But it was a woman’s footsteps, not the Cheyenne’s. One foot clopped like a horse’s hoof. The other clashed like a boot made of brass. And the footfalls were spaced too far apart: it was a giantess.

  A touch of cold caressed her spine. An overwhelming fear overcame her, making her chest tighten as if she had breathed a poisonous gas into her lungs.

  She twisted the ring to white, which she hoped would render her invisible to whatever titanic spirit being was coming for her. Her full weight returned.

  Yumiko looked toward her escape route. A steep, concrete semicircular ramp led up out of sight. But the door at the top was sure to be locked.

  It was difficult to tell with the
alarm ringing and the dogs barking, but she thought she heard the noise of men and dogs also coming from overhead. Licho, and the other dogs on guard duty, must have been in the loading dock or somewhere equally near at hand. There was no escape that way.

  At that moment, she also heard downstairs the Cheyenne’s running footfalls trot past the shipping office door. The sound changed when his boots struck the curving concrete ramp leading up from the lower level. She could not go back.

  A shadow solidified in the middle of the vault. One moment, nothing was there. The next, a twelve-foot-tall being stood there, radiating a dark majesty. The barks of the dogs all turned to howls and terror.

  Here was a dark-eyed lady of regal demeanor. A hood, a veil, and sweeping black robes, which seemed to be woven of, or into, or through her living hair, draped her tall form. Her crown was a writhing circle of intertwined snakes brighter than jewels. Beneath the hem of the robe, Yumiko could see that one leg of the apparition was made of bronze; the other ended in a donkey’s hoof.

  This was not a mere ghost, nor even an elf, but something infinitely older, greater, more malign; something pagan men of old worshiped and adored and called a goddess, sacrificing cattle, or horses, or maidservants, or daughters.

  The veiled and pallid face turned toward her. The dark, unblinking eyes swept toward the spot where she stood.

  Yumiko was pinned in place by terror. Her limbs would not move. She could hear the Cheyenne’s rapid footfalls approaching, and yet still she was frozen.

  “Empousa of Tartarus, I am.” She could hear it clearly in her mind, and the terrified yowling of the hounds did not smother or impede the sound. The cold and malicious voice was not real, not made of air vibrations like those yowls were. “To hide from me, I who am of the darkness beyond night, no elf dares. Show yourself!”