“You’re one to talk.”
“Excuse me,” the woman said, turning and standing. “I was in the middle of a consultation!”
“All B.S.,” I told her.
“All right, I think you’d better leave,” she said firmly. Tasha smirked.
“We have business with the hoodoo lady,” Stacy said. “You can reschedule.”
Stacy grabbed the client’s arm just as I got an icy sensation and said “Don’t!” but it was too late.
I was seeing things in an overlay, real time blurring into a just-glimpsed future. It was finished by the time I heard the slap and the oath. Stacy crashed down to the floor and the client was forcing fat Stacy’s hand into the most uncomfortable position I can imagine.
“Beatrice here studies the martial arts,” Tasha said, pleased as punch.
“She teach you that thing you did to my throat?” I asked.
“No, that was pure intuition.”
“You think I’m some gullible fool?” Beatrice hissed at Stacy. “Some weak little thing you can push around? SHUT UP!” she shouted, right in Stacy’s ear because Stacy had started to howl and kind of blubber as Beatrice kept pushing her hand.
“Okay, that’ll do,” I said.
“Who the hell are you?” She glared at me and I sighed.
“Lemme guess. You came to Tasha here and she knew stuff about you no one else could have figured out, things you maybe didn’t realize about yourself…”
“Oh no,” she said. “Are you another debunker? What is it with you people? I know all about Barnum statements and playing the odds and…”
“It was cold,” I said, raising my voice and that stopped her. “It was cold, wasn’t it? That first time, that incredible insight? Even if it was the middle of summer you got a chill, maybe even shivered?” I leaned in and my whole front felt like ice, I realized my breath was starting to steam. “That’s the real deal. Some people think when information travels backwards in time, it has to suck out heat to defeat entropy or some damn thing. I don’t know. All I know is, if she’s read your horoscope without a slick of ice on the table, it’s just her telling you what you want to hear. Or what she wants you to hear.”
Stacy had quieted down to sobs. Later she told me Beatrice seemed to just forget about her while I was talking.
“She said…”
“I really don’t care and it really doesn’t matter,” I told her. “You’re going to do fine in your career, you don’t get a raise this year but you make out all right with the Christmas bonus. Your mom’s going to give you a health scare in October, but she survives. You’re going to have to be real patient with her for a while.”
“T… Tasha?” she stammered, but she didn’t look away from me. I was looking right in her face but I was seeing Sideways.
“That’s not what really kept you coming here though, is it? You want guidance? We all do. Don’t trust your judgment? Well, most people with confidence don’t deserve it. I think, though, you have one question you don’t dare ask.”
She half shook her head, but she wouldn’t look away so she couldn’t complete the gesture.
I frowned. I felt bad for her. “Well yeah. You both would have lived. I’m sorry.”
The sound she made right then… it was hardly human. Or maybe it was too human, more human than most of us want to hear.
She hid her face in her hands and ran out the door.
I looked over at Tasha.
“You tarot or ouija?” I asked. Then I looked down and saw the gun.
*
Later, in the caddy, Stacy kept sneaking glances up at me.
“What?”
“What did you mean,” she asked, “when you told her ‘you don’t kill me’?”
“Just what I said. She doesn’t kill me. I know just how I die and she ain’t in the picture.”
“You know… wait, you know how you’re going to die?!?”
“How, when… the whole megilla. It’s not as great as it sounds.”
“It sounds awful!”
“Well then, I guess it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
Now it was my turn to look over at her. She was crying, a little. We’d gotten a cup of ice at a Carl’s Jr. and she was rubbing it all over her wrist.
“What are you and Tasha even trying to do?” Her voice was plaintive, confused, like a little girl who just walked in on her parents doing it.
“All right. You want the metaphysics? Here’sa the metaphysics. Two primal cosmic forces, okay? Some people call ’em progress and decay. Others say stagnation and renewal. Or order and chaos. But if you want a neutral description, say fate and destiny. You with me?”
“You’re talking about the future.”
“Futures, there’s a ton of ’em. Lots of competition to get real, y’know? The forces, the principles… I don’t know if they’re actually intelligent and conscious the way we are, like god and a devil. They may just look that way, or maybe we project… anyhow, they’re always in conflict. One of ’em speaks through the ouija boards, mostly. The other through cards. That’s why I needed to know how Tasha does it. I had to know what side she was on.”
“And Tasha?”
I pointed up at the sky. “Progress, stagnation, ‘order.’ The big cosmic puppeteer, the spider’s web.”
“What about you, Anne? Where do you fit in all this? Whose side are you on?”
“Neither side. I’m just a valve between ’em. A necessary midpoint. I didn’t really look for it, but I didn’t say no.” I shrugged. “Which is why I’m what I am.”
“The cold woman.”
“ Karmic plumber, more like.”
“It’s why you know when you’re going to die,” she said.
“Yep.”
Right at that moment, a vintage mustang pulled up next to us, radio blaring. Stealers Wheel. Stuck in the Middle With You.
Hilarious.
*
I told Tasha that she didn’t kill me and she pointed the gun at Stacy, so I interposed myself between them and then we probably would have had a royal slap fight if her receptionist hadn’t stuck her head in and gasped something about guns being bad karma. Just by instinct, Tasha hid the gun and told the receptionist—whose name, it turns out, is “Lotus”—to call the cops. That’s when I saw the family resemblance between the pair of ’em, too.
Well, I took a peek at Sideways Tasha and saw her doing a tarot reading on top of a human sacrifice, the blood starting to freeze on the cards as the guts and skin-peels steamed. Hard to believe the version I was dealing with was the nice one. Anyhow, that vision was a lucky catch. I knew she was Team Ouija, which meant Bunce had lied to me.
“Get everyone to the Dead Leather Office,” I told her as I helped Stacy to her feet. “Make sure you call Arvil.”
“That piss-ant? Why should I?”
“Because it’s where I’m going at midnight and I know everyone cares.”
*
I was disappointed, but not surprised that Arvil wasn’t waiting. What surprised me was Mr. Lucius Gil Sexknife. He was loitering—no other word for it, really—and he tried to slink into the shadows of the church steps when the caddy’s lights hit him.
“Hey, SEXKNIFE!” I called and he started to run. I floored it and beat him to the cross-street. He wasn’t a fast runner, so I was able to turn without even squealing the tires. He stopped, spun around, and ran for the entrance.
“Don’t be an idiot!” I shouted, pulling a three-point-turn and driving the wrong way back, but he was tugging the door as I stopped at the curb.
He was looking at me as he went in, so he didn’t see how the shadows inside were stretching out for him. Stacy managed to haul herself out by the time I made the sidewalk.
“You don’t have to come,” I told her.
“Isn’t that the one that framed my boy?”
“Um…”
“Yeah.”
She did let me go first though.
Nobody’s 100% clear on the De
ad Leather Office. There’s a hundred rumors, every one plausible if it’s bad enough. Indian burial grounds, Satanism, various stories about octopi. It first turned up in the news in 1952 when a nineteen-year-old congregant came into Easter Sunday service with a rifle and a shotgun, killed the priest and nine others before topping himself on the altar.
It was closed, de-consecrated and vacant for years before Clive Stamwicke moved in and started the foulest-smelling tannery in St. Louis. His gloves and purses fetched luxury prices even as the stench cleared out the neighborhood. It wasn’t until 1982 that the cops bumbled onto an 82-year-old Stamwicke having a seizure while attempting to abduct a teenage runaway. They found human bones, some decades old and some far more recent, in the building’s furnace. No trace of human skin was ever found on the premises except for one bongo drum in Clive’s office.
Murder, madness, foulness and corruption. A few attempts to exorcise or neutralize or cleanse the place of its energies were made, but it was like wood too wet to burn. Nothing could make it right.
Inside, it was too dark, even for midnight. The windows were smashed, work tables overturned, walls spray-paint vandalized. Typical urban wreckage until you noticed that a lot of those graffiti tags were left unfinished, and that despite all the bird, bat and rodent droppings in evidence there was not a single spiderweb. Not one.
“What’re you doing?” Bruce Bunce demanded, turning halfway around as Sexknife’s footsteps flap-flapped up the center aisle. Bunce had a red light, a tiny bright LED, throwing his face into scary relief and failing to show more than the shape of the black pot he’d put on the centermost table.
“Bruce, someone…”
“Shut up,” he said, turning fully as he saw us behind Lucius. Now he was just a dark shape, limned in crimson.
“Sorry Anne,” he said. “I’ll try to keep it off you if I can get it on a leash.”
Then he struck a match and threw it into his bowl. A lot of things happened at once.
First off, there was that “whump” sound you only get when fumes catch fire. A scarlet cloud rose, carrying dollar bills upwards as they flared, igniting. Secondly, a broken window broke further as Tasha cleared her way in with a hammer handle. She couldn’t enter, but she could aim her little gun inside. It didn’t sound as loud as it should have when she fired, because the church itself… convulsed.
It was like an earthquake, only not really. My instincts told me the floor was roiling and tipping, that the ceiling was crumpling in, but there were no cracks, no dust, no splinters and flakes as things fractured because things weren’t fracturing. All of us inside were sucked towards the center, towards the table that only looked like a table while I knew it was an altar. It felt like matter was moving, but maybe it was space itself breaking and folding.
Bunce staggered and screamed as Tasha got a hit. Red red blood spattered the altar and his burning cauldron, and the church started screaming. But just as nothing broke during its spasm of space, this howl was felt more than heard, until it ripped itself out of our four throats.
“Get him out of here!” I shouted at Stacy, shoving Lucius into her arms. The banker was stunned and Stacy wasn’t much better, but she was strong and heavy and there are few things more absolutely real than a 260-pound midwestern mother of three.
“Crimson blood!” Bunce cried. “Midnight black! The red of Tasha’s wrath and the blackness of my heart!”
“It’s eating you, Bruce!” I said, trying to pull him back from the altar. It didn’t have a bowl of burning money on it now, it was something else, something you couldn’t look at directly. Something red and black.
“No,” he said. “I’m eating it.”
He lunged at the hole and I didn’t think, I grabbed him.
We got sucked in.
*
We weren’t bodies in there, just selves. I could feel myself being drawn down, unmade, and I realized this was real danger to me. Lots of bad things can happen without killing you, but I guess my whole déjà memento mori situation had made me complacent about survival. The vortex couldn’t kill me. Nothing could before my time. I knew that.
What I hadn’t known was that I could be unmade. I wouldn’t die, I’d just cease to be, forward and backward in time, edited out like a cosmic typo. The church could do that, or Bunce could, or whatever they were turning into together.
And then there was a book with me.
No eyes to see or hands to grip it, nothing but disembodied consciousness in conflict and peril. Then suddenly a book. Specifically, a copy of Tom Phillips’ A Humument. A copy with a coffee stain on the upper left corner of the cover and I knew that book. It was Cosby’s book.
Cosby’s favorite book and I remembered lying on his bed on a lazy Saturday afternoon paging through the surreal, kludged together image of Bill Toge’s quest for love, or something. I never got it, but I didn’t have to, because then Cosby was there.
You have to get out. He didn’t say it, there weren’t words there any more than there was time, but I could tell it was Cosby. The church might have pulled him in, but it hadn’t quite chewed him to pieces. Not yet.
Help me. I didn’t say it either, and then I knew that he was never getting out, he was too deep and within a year at most he’d not only be gone, he’d never have been and I wouldn’t even remember his kind eyes and stubby hands. I felt the chill down in my bones and knew this was too certainly true. Then I emerged.
I fell backwards onto the crap-dusted floor, Bunce lying beside me, and up by the altar Arvil was stabbing the black pot with a cardboard box, about the size of a Monopoly game.
“Gag on it!” Arvil screamed. The box had a cloaked figure printed on the dark paper, under the white letters “OUIJA.”
The board disappeared with a pop and Bunce cried out in pain and despair. We were just in a dirty, abandoned building with a broken black pot on a table and an angry bookseller stomping out the flames on singed currency.
“You prick,” Arvil said to Bunce, and switched to kicking the prone man in the face for a bit before I said, “Okay, stop that.” Between the two of us we got the sobbing red and black man to his feet and walked him out, one arm over my shoulder and one over Arvil’s.
“What’d you do to it?” Tasha demanded as we came out.
“Choked it,” I said, letting Bunce flop down on the sidewalk.
“With what?” she asked.
“Meaning.”
“That Ouija board was a collector’s item, dammit,” Arvil said. “A William Fuld Mystifying Oracle. I paid sixty bucks for it!”
I felt a weird flash of affection for Arvil. There was something… not noble, almost the polar opposite of noble about his relentless focus on his money, his lusts, his plans. It was honest and human and reliable. You couldn’t admire it, but you could count on it.
“Listen up,” I said, and to my surprise, everyone did.
“Tasha,” I said. “You ain’t gettin’ rid of the Dead Leather Office. Sorry, that’s just so.”
She nodded. I think she saw, finally, how strong it was.
“Lucius,” I said. “You saw that thing, right?”
“Uh huh… kinda…”
“You want more of that?”
He blanched. “No ma’am,” he whispered.
“Then you and Bunce take this back and make it right,” I said, shoving a handful of burned banknotes at him. “That a problem, Bruce?”
When I looked at Bunce, there was a vacancy in his eyes.
“Bunce?”
“I don’t think everything came back,” Arvil whispered, but I couldn’t really pay attention because I was suddenly smothered in Stacy.
“My boy’s coming home?!?” It was half question and half ecstasy.
“I think so.”
“Oh, thank you thank you! If there’s any way I can repay you…”
“There is,” I said. “You’re going to help the church’s new guardian find meaningful stuff to sacrifice to it.”
“Guard
ian?” Arvil asked, but he already knew.
“Anne,” he said, “I hate that place.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s what got you out.”
He looked as lost and sad as a motherless child, just for a moment, and I think it was helpless fear that made him slip back into his tired old seducer routine. “You said you’d be grateful,” he said. “But I know how tricky foretelling is, you probably saw yourself being grateful for my hot lovin’ and plenty of it.”
“Not tonight,” I said. I’d have to wait until Cosby was all the way gone, but I didn’t see any reason to tell him about that. I didn’t bother to tell him how disappointed he’d be. I’d seen that too.
He shook his head. “I thought we were going to fix everything,” he said.
“I never said I’d make things happy,” I replied, “just that I’d make ’em right.
Alms and the Beast
James Wallis
It was Lug Finer who met him first.
It was late in the day and the boy was tilling the hard earth of his father’s strip in the barley field. He was the last person still working, the scrape of his hoe the only sound breaking the early evening tranquillity. The other serfs had gathered up their tools and headed back to the village as soon as the sun had dropped below the trees of Fordham Woods to the west but Lug, with less than half of the strip finished and weeds flourishing between the stalks of the ripening crop, told himself that the risk was worth the reward. If there was blight in the barley it needed to be grubbed out, and there was enough light to spot any telltale black patches on the green ears of the tall stalks. His hands were blistered but the job had to be finished tomorrow: he owed his work on Thursday and Friday to the reeve.
The last of the sun slid below the horizon, and something in the way the light changed made Lug look up. The air was still. All the birds had stopped singing. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling in a sudden chill.
Something was looking at him.
There, in the copse of trees at the edge of the field, something had moved just out of sight. He could sense it. Some thing was staring at him. No shape, no sound, no smell, just an unnameable sense of danger from that patch of shadows.
The New Hero Volume 2 Page 9
