Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  Kyle’s parents entered the room, no longer crying, but instead humming with the stilted, painful buzz of wasps. They ran their hands along Kyle’s back, the gesture not loving but obedient. Sensuous. Perverse.

  They continued past the bed and kneeled in front of Johnny Jacks, opening their mouths wide—wider than their jaws were meant to—and Jen heard something first click then crack wetly. Their lower jaws hung loose and wagged as they took turns breathing on Johnny, a sick, urine-stenched haze that wafted over him, making him choke.

  Johnny, still on his knees, turned to her. He’d stopped singing, but his lips formed a single word.

  “Run.”

  #

  The urge to flee was overwhelming. Jen was alone in a room of human bodies driven by something not at all human. They looked at her and grinned, reaching out with sickly white limbs, the skin riddled with veins gone black and green as if the blood itself had been replaced with bile.

  Johnny Jacks flailed, trying to shove away the mother and father. They dodged his feeble blows effortlessly.

  “Don’t go givin’ it up,” he said—no, sang. It was weak and pathetic, not in any real key, but still it made the parents snarl at him. Their upper lips curled even as their broken jaws shuddered.

  How he could manage even that much, Jen couldn’t fathom. Everything in the room stank. Everything was too hot and slick, and sweat dripped all over her, the salt burning her eyes. The right leg of her jeans was soaked, and her own piss dripped into her sock. Every time she tried to touch the strings her fingers felt like sausages left out in the sun, so hot and bloated, as if the skin would break apart and rotten meat would ooze out.

  “Give ’em the shit,” Johnny sang feebly. “Give ’em the shit like ya never gave it before.”

  Give ’em the shit? Like she had any shit to give. She’d never known real fear, the certainty that everything you believed about yourself belonged to someone else, and that all was left was an empty vessel, waiting—no, begging—to be filled.

  “Yeah, baby,” Kyle said, crawling on the floor towards her, more like a spider than a rat now. “Gonna fill you up just right.”

  She looked around, panic shaking her loose. There had to be a weapon here somewhere. The crucifix above the kid’s bed was out of reach. She doubted it would do any good even if she could reach it.

  Only one cross I’ve ever needed, a small, rebellious part of her whispered. The cross I’m wearing. Her gaze fell to the Stratocaster—not some religious symbol to pray to, but her true cross waiting to be played. She’d never really thought of her guitars that way. It had always just been her instrument. Such a dull, lifeless word. The guitar had always been more of an enemy she had to force to her will than a partner. Now, it was all she had.

  Kyle slithered past his parents and Johnny, and past Lucy and Levon, who genuflected before him. The boy floated up until he was eye to eye with Jen.

  “Gig’s over, baby.”

  Jen squeezed her hand into a fist, cracking the knuckles, daring the swollen digits to split at the seams. They didn’t.

  “Not yet,” she whispered, then slammed her fist down, opening the fingers at the last instant so they struck all six of the strings and sent a blast of distortion that blew through the room like a bomb exploding the inside of a doll’s house.

  “Haven’t gotten to my solo yet.”

  #

  There was a part of playing the guitar that wasn’t about holding the right notes on the fretboard or plucking the right strings, that wasn’t about rhythm or tempo or precision. It was that mixture of easing into the music, of being loose and reckless and abandoning oneself to the guitar. It was the…playing.

  Jen had never been good at that part. Her whole career, she’d had to prove she was a professional to bandmates who seemed to know instinctively there was something wrong with her. In a desperate effort to be good enough she’d foregone any hopes of being great.

  How great a player would you have to be to fend off a demon that was already creeping his way inside you?

  Pretty fucking great.

  With no drums to give her time, no bass to offer a chord structure to hold her up, she propelled herself headlong into a solo. It was just noise at first, hitting strings like a caveman who’d just discovered a guitar amidst the rocks and rubble.

  “Whatcha doin’, little girl?” Kyle asked.

  She heard him inside her head where he was taking up residence, pushing at the bits of her brain with probing fingers, licking them to get a taste for the place.

  She ignored him, finding the straight rhythm first, just letting the notes ring out. She’d forgotten that the guitar didn’t really need finesse or elegance to sound good. It was all right there: the steel strings, the maple neck, the thick, solid body and the wound pickups, coiled like snakes just waiting to be let loose. She reveled in the dumb simplicity of it.

  “That all you got, Axe Girl?” Johnny Jacks asked, looking up at her with blind eyes.

  Her middle finger pressed the A string on the second fret. The note rang out true, going on forever to that infinity where every note goes when you think you’re done with them.

  “Ain’t gonna work,” Kyle’s voice churned inside her skull. “I’m too deep inside you now.”

  Jen kept playing, her fingers lazily tracing a pentatonic scale up and down in almost random patterns, not hurrying, not worrying.

  “Are you really, baby?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah. So deep you’ll never shake me.”

  “Shake you?” She stopped moving her fingers, holding one note for a full measure, then another, letting it slowly fade out almost to that point of oblivion where she knew she’d be lost. “Who says I’m trying to shake you?”

  There was time to hear the odd silence within her mind, like a sudden intake of breath. She felt him scratching at the inside of her skull like an animal that’s just discovered it’s been caged. Every clawing attack filled her with pain and misery—a migraine mixed with suicidal depression.

  Kyle, or whatever had taken his place, understood what she was doing.

  She disregarded everything except the guitar, sliding her hand farther up the neck, her fingers moving faster and faster, recklessly picking out a solo that was neither blues nor jazz nor classical but something more primal. The grunting of teenagers fucking for the first time, in the back of a car with the radio up loud. Awkward. Painful. Stupid. But full of whatever rock ’n’ roll was when you took away the chords and melody.

  She played that on her Strat, reveling in it, the sounds from the amp both sweet and salty. Inside her, the demon struggled to get away.

  “Don’t run off now, baby,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”

  #

  Somewhere in there, in the space between two notes on the guitar, between her fingers holding down one fret and another as her pick hand prepared to come down hard on the string, Jen got lost.

  It was perfect.

  She didn’t care anymore. She was halfway to hell, dragged by the weight of either a demon in her soul or a psychotic break in her fragile mind, yet she was flying. The essence of a great solo—the essence of being the guitar player she was meant to be—was in not giving a shit. Whatever came out of her amp right at that moment, for good or ill, sweet or stale, perfect or messy as all hell…was her.

  It was Jen.

  Let the demon take her soul if he wanted, because she had the music and the music was all the soul she cared about. The feel of her hands on the guitar and the sounds in her ears and nothing else.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  A beat came out of nowhere. She let it carry her upwards.

  Bah-duhn-duhn.

  Bah-duhn-duhn.

  Lucy Bottom’s bass came up alongside.

  “Stop,” Kyle commanded, no longer with the voice of a nine-year-old, but something deeper and darker—something incongruously full of both malice and pleading.

  She paid it no heed. The playing was al
l that mattered—and she was playing, not practicing, not trying to live up to anyone else. Just playing her guitar the way she wanted. The more she did, the freer she became, and the more terrified the thing that had been living inside Kyle grew.

  “Jen,” Johnny Jacks said, his voice hoarse and wrecked but with a tinge of joy like the subtle half bend of the note she was playing.

  “Yeah?”

  “Levon and Lucy can hold it for a few seconds.”

  “And?” What did he want from her?

  “And it’s time,” he bellowed, like an old-time preacher standing at the front of a tent before a thousand hand-clutching congregants. “Bring. Forth. The. Rickenbacker!”

  Jen glanced at the battered old guitar. Its fireglo paint job shimmered, already aflame as if with hellfire, demanding to face down the horrors around her. The strings hummed a defiant counter to the demon’s hideous buzzing.

  She popped the patch cable out of the jack on the Strat and plugged in the Ricky. All the while Lucy and Levon pounded away at a rhythm that was nothing but straight eighths and pissed-off determination.

  The Ricky let out a vicious twang, a belligerent melodic relic from another time. Jen kicked her amp around, so it faced the windows. It shouldn’t have been able to do more than rattle them, but as she played a run up the neck, the scornful dissonance of shattering glass added itself to the music. When she glanced at her guitar, there was blood on the strings. Her blood. She didn’t care.

  Night air flooded into the room, and she breathed in the sweetness, not even minding the other stenches that still lingered in the room. Lucy had blood dripping from a cut on her forehead. Levon played using only one arm, his left twisted at an odd angle. Johnny’s face was pale, hair matted, his skin cracked and bleeding at the sides of his mouth. They all looked happy as pigs in shit.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Johnny sang. “Gotta get it up, get it out, send it down.”

  Kyle floated before her, head hanging back, and arms spread wide in a Jesus pose while his parents hung onto his legs. Jen eyed the tendrils of black and green haze that filled the room and trailed back to the boy’s mouth. His stomach and throat convulsed, vomiting out whatever thing had made its home inside him.

  Johnny sang something at her, but she didn’t hear, she was too busy playing the notes that would pull the last remnants of the demon out of Kyle’s mouth.

  The filthy mist coalesced, taking on its own shape—a man with black wings and a face so beautiful it made her want to cry. He smiled at her, but she used his beauty against him, translating it into an aching melody that came from her guitar, from her guts, from her lust. The smile faded as the thing discovered that all its best weapons had been turned against it, that all the power in the universe is nothing but vibration, and music shaped vibrations according to the player’s needs.

  “You’ve got him now!” Johnny said. He wasn’t singing anymore, just issuing commands like a general. “Hold him. Hold him tight!”

  “I’ve got him,” she said, irritated. “Just tell me what to do with him.”

  “Send him down, Axe Girl. Send him all the way down.”

  Jen had no idea what that meant but knew exactly how to play it. She slid her fingers up the neck to the seventh fret, held down the same sweet E-9 chord she’d started with, and slammed all six strings.

  Then she let go of the pick and twisted the tuning heads loose one after another. The chord dropped and dropped and dropped, passing through discordance back to proper chords and then into discordance again. By the time she stopped, she’d tuned the entire guitar down so far, the strings were slack and wobbling.

  The creature, the demon, the…whatever, shattered into a thousand bad memories.

  Jen slumped, her knees banging hard against the bedroom floor. Kyle’s parents, their jaws still broken and no doubt in terrible pain, hugged their son between them. The boy turned to Jen, eyes blinking away the salt and sweat. He said something, but no words came out at first, as if he’d misjudged how used-up his vocal cords were.

  The second time she heard him.

  “I like that song,” he said. “Could you play it again?”

  The Shard

  By Ian Irvine

  I sensed him before he spoke. Sensed trouble, too.

  “Why aren’t you at the party, Sulien?” said a gravelly voice I hadn’t heard since I was a kid and didn’t want to hear now. Too many memories. Most of them bad.

  “Xervish Flydd,” I said, without turning around. I was in my studio, trying to take a print from one of my copper etching plates, and it wasn’t going well. “And older and uglier than ever, I’ll bet.”

  “I was an ugly young man, even before that unfortunate episode in the scrutators’ torture chambers,” he said cheerily. “Hardly likely I’d improve with age. Turn around.”

  “Why?” I snapped.

  “I want to see how you’ve turned out.”

  I sighed and wiped my inky hands on a rag. I hadn’t seen Flydd since I was nine, sixteen years ago. He hadn’t changed. Still a little, skinny man. Still grotesquely ugly, even when smiling, as now. But charming, nonetheless. It was hard not to smile at him, but I managed it.

  “You didn’t grow much,” he said, gaunt head cocked to one side.

  “Neither did you.” Feeble!

  “What happened to your beautiful hair?”

  “Gets in the way.” I raked my fingers through the loose curls, doubtless smearing black ink everywhere. It was thick and sticky and I was covered in it to the elbows. “What do you want?”

  “We’re missing you at the reunion.”

  “What’s to celebrate?” I muttered. “We live in a blighted world. Nothing’s gone right since the day we won.”

  “There’s plenty to celebrate. We defeated an invasion by the bloodiest race ever to come rampaging out of the void. We saved a world from genocide at their hands. And we delivered Skald and his Merdrun nation to justice, something they never gave any of their victims. Especially poor Uletta.”

  We had buried her on a mound by the stream, not far away. I hadn’t known her well, but the ghastly way she had been killed would never leave me. “Well, yes, but—”

  “We paid a high price, Sulien. It’s important that we get together occasionally, acknowledge our dead and their sacrifices, and support our old friends.”

  “I don’t want to relive that time—the nightmares do it for me.” I turned back to my bench.

  “Well, I’m afraid you have to come with me,” said Flydd.

  “Am I under arrest? Are you going to drag me to the damned reunion?”

  “No.” The good cheer was gone. He sounded uneasy, and that was troubling, because Flydd had seen everything, and survived what few others had. “Something’s happened and we need you.”

  I dropped the copper plate, which rang on my marble-topped workbench. “Is it Dad? Is he all right? He hasn’t been well—”

  “Llian’s fine…apart from an excess of wine and good cheer. Everyone at the reunion is fine—or would be if you were there.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Your kinswoman, Malien, mind-called from Aachan a few minutes ago. I’ve got to make a portal there right away, and I need you to come with me.”

  Now he had my attention. “We have to go to another world? How?”

  Flydd held up a small, irregularly shaped black stone that I recognized at once, because it glowed crimson in the center. “Lirriam lent me her Waystone.”

  “Why do you want me?”

  “You knew the Merdrun—and Skald— better than anyone.”

  “I was only nine. I didn’t know anything.”

  “You discovered the enemy’s fatal weakness and it helped to defeat them. We need your aid.”

  “What for?”

  “To solve a mystery that Malien’s people are unable, or unwilling, to investigate.”

  “Am I allowed to clean myself up first?”

  “The dead don’t care how you look.”


  What was that supposed to mean? “But I do.”

  I wiped the worst of the ink off my hands and arms, went into the back room and put on a green shirt, baggy black trews and brown boots. The mirror showed ink smears on my face, which I scrubbed off, and black clots in my dark red hair. Nothing I could do about that.

  “Let’s get it over with,” I said when I came out. “Got work to do.”

  We went outside. Flydd closed a fist around the Waystone, extended his right hand and I took hold. The bones were twisted and lumpy; they had been broken in the torture chamber and had not healed straight. He tapped the Waystone on a platinum ring, inscribed with black glyphs, that gleamed on his middle finger.

  I’d been through a number of gates and portals in my time, and none of them were pleasant. There was no visible manifestation of this one—no hole in the air or dimensional opening of any kind—but I began to shudder so violently that I thought my teeth were going to vibrate out of my gums, and my stomach tried to explosively eject its contents.

  I clamped down hard and clung onto his hand. Portals sometimes went wrong and people using them ended up between, wherever that was. Nowhere one could come back from.

  We fell through an airless nothingness lit by pulses of orange light. My chest heaved, wanting air. Don’t breathe out, you’ll never get it back. Then we were falling in the real world, about six feet through frigid air. I bent my knees and landed on black rock crusted with snow the color of sulfur. The top of a ridge. A small red sun glowed in a mauve sky. Aachan.

  I gagged but managed to prevent myself from throwing up.

  Flydd, a few yards away, clutched his belly and grimaced. “Doesn’t get any easier.”

  “You took your time,” said a very old woman seated in the middle of a platform twenty yards away.

  I barely recognized Malien. Her back was bent and her hair, once almost as red as my own, was so thin and colorless that I could see her scalp through it. The voice was the same, though, and the sharp tongue. And the very long Aachim fingers, twice the length of her palm.