by Faith Hunter
“Where are you goin’?”
“Just do yer job and stay the hell outta my way.”
~*~
“I don’t think I should let your kind in here.”
Truett looked at the man in the roman collar. “Open the goddamn door.”
The preacher blinked at him.
There was a sore on the corner of the man’s eye that cracked with each flutter of the lids, weeping thin yellow lymphatic fluid that trickled over skeletal cheekbones, drying in a broken crust along his jaw. Under his black suit the preacher was knobby, lumped over with tumors you could see in clusters. A pattern of sunken scars traced his slick brow, up over his cranium, and over one ear. He was a slag miner found religion.
Found spreading that religion was a helluva lot easier than digging radioactive ore from the leavings of Wormwood.
From the look of the sores and the tumors that distorted the fit of his clothes he found it too late.
“This is a house of the Lord of Light. We don’t recognize the authority of spellslingers.”
Truett hitched his shoulders, settling his coat around them. “I ain’t here for your lord or your bullshit. I’m going inside this room to see if there’s a reason something ate one a’ your tenants innards. You ain’t gotta like it, you just gotta open the door.”
The preacher looked up at him, trying to read his eyes. Down the hall one of the other doors opened and a young man looked out. He saw Truett and pulled back inside, shutting the door with a slam. The sound of locks being turned clicked and clacked down the hall toward them.
The preacher stuck the key in the lock and turned it. He opened the door a crack, turned, and walked back toward the stairs they’d both come down, leaving Truett alone in the hallway of doors.
The spellslinger pushed the door open and stepped inside.
~*~
He wasn’t alone.
He could feel someone else with him the moment he crossed the threshold. The dim light from the hallway streamed around him, breaking apart against the solid dark of the windowless room. The shadows were impenetrable.
Truett’s hand was on his six-gun.
A match flared.
The small guttering of yellow light cut a giant of a man from the darkness.
Truett’s hand slid off the pistol, closing on the handle of the hook-knife. The man in the dark’s brow jutted forward over a nose like a fist, jaw spreading beneath like a shovel. Truett couldn’t see his eyes, in the almost-nothing light they were just pits of black set deep in the overhang of that forehead. A scar ran down one side of his jaw and onto his neck, thin and delicate like it had been drawn there by a deft hand. When he spoke his voice was rich and deep, the voice of a politician or even a preacher.
“Shut the door. We should talk.”
~*~
The lamp on the bedside table brightened the room. The fuel was some weird gray brack, probably some form of run-off from the slag mine nearby. It burned hard orange and sputtered soot in black swirls that drifted around the room, dimming the air to near dark again, but Truett could see the giant in front of him.
“You shoulda known Lucille. She was the air and the light.”
“Why’d she get dead then?”
The man looked as if he’d been slapped. “She didn’t deserve it if that’s what you’re implying.”
“Sometimes there’s no reason someone gets hit by the supernatural. Most times there is, inadvertent or not.” He leaned forward. “What the hell are you?”
“What...”
“Don’t lie. I ain’t new at this and you ain’t normal.”
“I’m just...big.”
“Bullshit. You ain’t human, quit playing like you are.”
The man shifted on the bed. His size and weight made it groan, wood slats grinding along wood rails. One of them broke with a sharp CRACK! but he didn’t notice.
“I’m human, every part of me. My father gave me the best of everything, including life. When I wasn’t everything he’d dreamed he abandoned me, left me to my own devices. Things got...dark. I did things I never meant to. Things that would have put me in your path at the time.”
“Did you kill Lucille?”
“No!” the big man cried, face twisting at the horror of the thought. “I loved her. In my time on this earth I have loved exactly two women and she was one of them.”
Truett weighed the man’s words. Studying his face. The anguish there was raw, an open wound.
“What’s your name?”
“Adam. Just Adam.”
“Truett McCall.” He stuck his hand out, the dull lamplight flickered over the dozens of thin scar strips across the back.
Slowly, Adam reached out, his palm bigger than Truett’s entire hand. Wide knuckles closed iron fingers. The moment their skin touched Truett dug deep into a hangnail on the thumb of his other hand. The thin strip of skin tore downward in a raw little jolt of pain. He didn’t feel it start to bleed but he felt the magick inside him kick to life at the sacrifice, just a small pop of the eldritch energy that lived coiled in his guts. Quick as lightning, it climbed his arm and crossed his chest. He pushed it down into the other hand, the one holding onto Adam’s, and used his mind to turn the little jolt into something that could read Adam’s intentions.
It bounced back into his skin, crackle-burning a blister there.
Adam looked him in the eye. “Magick has almost no effect on me.”
Truett pulled his hand free and shook it, small droplets of energy rolling down his fingers and sputtering to nothing against the floor.
Adam sat up on the bed, another board broke, lowering him a few inches down in the mattress. “Certain spells and hexes hurt, and I can be knocked around by major arcana, but petty magicks roll off me like water.”
“You’re a null.”
Adam nodded.
“Never met one before.”
“Me either.”
“Don’t like it.”
“Tough shit, cowboy.”
Truett nodded. “Still got my six-gun.”
Adam looked at his hands. “Never found one my fingers could fit.”
Truett looked also. The hands hung on wrists the size of fence posts, each palm wide as his own face and slabbed with thick, hard muscle. The fingers were blunt, articulated with knuckles swollen like walnuts and edged with barnacles of callous that looked like horn. Raw destructive power radiated under the waxy yellow skin that covered the digits. They were blunt; indelicate and cumbersome.
Adam pulled them into his lap. “What?”
“Those hands couldn’t have done to Lucille what was done to her.”
“I wouldn’t have hurt her at all.”
“Did you see her last night?”
“No. She’d worked that day. She never wanted company those nights. The work at that damn plant was too much for her, the chemicals and radiation and all take their toll. We parted ways after our shift.”
“You work there?”
“It’s where we met. The slag run-off don’t bother me.”
“So she was fine when you parted ways.”
“She planned to read the night away. She’d been paid in this oil,” a giant hand swung toward the lamp on the nightstand, “and had borrowed this book from Dietrich, the man that runs the purification plant.” He pulled a small canvas-wrapped square from under the stand. He held it out toward Truett. “He’s a little sweet on Lucille.”
Truett didn’t correct Adam on the tense. His fingers tingled as they closed on the book.
“Damnation.” he muttered.
“What?”
Truett didn’t answer, just carefully began flipping through the book. The pages were thin as onionskin, sewn together, and covered with black scrawl. It appeared to be an old story about a woman and man looking for each other. A story writ’ from the memory of someone from when books were plentiful, before Crowley broke the fucking world.
In the middle of the book he found what he knew would be there.
Stitched into the center was one folded piece of parchment, thicker than the others and made from some old pressed papyrus. The surface of the papyrus left his fingers coated in a thin oil that burned as it lay against his skin. One long sentence crossed the middle of that page. Written in a flame-script, it scrawled across, slanting and looping back on itself. He didn’t know the language, something long dead and worth staying that way, but his mind read it the second it passed in front of his eyes.
From the outer darkness to the utter deep, I hunger.
The lamp sputtered out.
~*~
“What the hell did you do?”
The room had gone pitch black leaving Truett blind as a bat. The second the lamp had gone dark he’d jumped off the chair and crouched, leather coat pulled tight around him like a second skin, collar up, and his hat pulled low over his eyes. The bed cracked and crashed as Adam stood.
“Shut the hell up and be still,” Truett hissed.
Adam stopped moving.
The air grew thick, hard to breathe.
A clacking sound started, a tiny sound, the enamel on enamel click-click of mandibles chewing, snapping and tapping as the sound grew and grew, filling the darkness.
Truett huddled lower in the protection of his coat, hands sunk deep in the pockets. The potential of something about to happen pressed against him.
Adam grunted and it sounded close, near his ear, loud enough to carry over the steadily growing clacks. He grunted again. After a second he cried, “Something’s biting me!”
Something hit his coat like the fists of children, beating through the radiation-shedding leather. It climbed his body, battering at the coat as it did. He tensed, waiting, the edge of his collar touching the brim of his hat. When the battering was at his shoulder, he held his wrist out from under the coat.
Something bit deep, it was small, the size of the tip of his finger but it scissored into the scar tissue on the side of his wrist and snipped out a chunk like a plug of tobacco.
He jerked the wrist back into the coat.
The battering became a frenzy against the closed leather.
The bite throbbed, pulsing out a bead of blood that ran down his arm. He used it to kick his magick to life. It boiled inside him, churning as the blood trickled down his sleeve. The battering pushed him back, making him shift to stay upright. Adam growled a curse and Truett felt him move, his bulk displacing the air in the room. The edge of Truett’s coat lifted from the floor.
The thing in the darkness rushed underneath.
Sharp pinches of pain through his pants as something swarmed toward his midsection. He stood and threw his coat open, ramming the magick in his guts out, shoving it in a focused blast.
He felt it strike the thing and shred through it. Felt it wash around Adam having no impact. Felt it strike the dead lamp and the weird liquid inside.
The lamp exploded in a ball of ectoplasm.
The dense liquid swirled in the air, tossing greenish light from floor to ceiling. In front of Truett hung a cloud of pure dark, broken by dozens of coin-sized mouths made of curved beaks like a swarm of cuttlefish, the edges of the bills gleamed like razored enamel. They snapped, clipping the air in front of him.
Looking into the dark, a chill soaked Truett to the bone. The hunger of it rolled across him and he knew this thing would devour every soft morsel inside him and when it finished it would still hunger and the loss of him would have no impact at all; the utter dark would move on seeking more flesh for consumption.
As the ectoplasm burned itself out the darkness broke apart, shredding to thin tendrils that failed to hold the mouths aloft. One by one they tumbled to the rough plank floor, clattering like tossed dice.
The ectoplasm sputtered out, leaving the room dark again, but now the soft darkness of normalcy.
Adam struck a match. Dozens of small wounds dotted his exposed skin.
Truett swayed, energy crashing. He’d tapped too much magick without enough flesh given. He put his hand on the wall, steadying himself.
“Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.”
~*~
The whiskey was rotgut, so harsh it had the texture of goat hair as he swallowed, but when it hit the bottom of his stomach it spread quick, lubricating his nerves and smoothing him out. He leaned forward over the table, offering the bottle to Adam. The giant held up one wide hand to decline.
Out in the light Adam was even bigger than Truett originally thought. Nearly two feet taller than himself and wide as a barn door. He moved with a solid weight, moccasined feet sinking into the muddy street as they made their way to the saloon front of the Velvet Tiger.
“You okay, cowboy?”
Truett swallowed again. “I’ve seen a lot of fucked up shit in this line of work.”
“I’d imagine.”
“Not many things scare me.”
“You’re scared of tiny mouths?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Ta hell with that.” another swallow. “You sure that damned book came from the foreman of the slag mine?”
“Dietrich.”
“Whatever.”
“Every other book she borrowed has.” Adam rubbed his face. “You think Dietrich did this?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Fucking hell.” he reached for the bottle and drank it down. The bottle made a brittle sound in his hand, thin fractures shooting through the glass. “I’ll kill him.”
“Well, let’s get to it then.”
~*~
The purification plant loomed into the bruise-colored sky. It was tin-roofed over clapboard and gypsum block walls. A train rail ran into the side of the building, iron ore buckets pushed up against each other, full of strange colored rock shot through with iridescent threads. Some of them glowed with dull light and the air above them shimmered with radiation. The back of the building hung over a deep pool of gray, brackish water that churned as if alive. More of it ran out of a flume of pitted steel, tumbling into large wire-mesh strainers on swiveling poles. It ran out and dripped into the pool. The strainers collected bits of ore and once they were full they were pushed aside and replaced by sallow-faced workers. People moved around the building, pushing ore buckets, carrying bundles, all with the trudging determination of pack animals. A cold, thin wind pushed a smell of rotten paper, mildew, and mold that smelled somewhere between a planted field and a corpse.
“I do that.” Adam pointed to the strainers. “I work the entire shift by myself.”
Truett grunted. “What is that shit they’re straining?”
“Run-off. They boil the slag inside then shoot it with pressurized water, knocking out the loose dirt and mud from impact and leaving behind the clean ore. Bits of it come off so we catch it and strain it to make sure all the good stuff is brought in.”
“Hard job?”
Adam shrugged.
“Looks like it would suck almighty.”
“The water stings me, burns the others.” another shrug. “Stinks.”
“I can smell that.”
Adam pointed. “Not many people around on third shift, but Dietrich is always here. He’ll be up in that room.”
The wind changed direction, ruffling up the back of Truett’s neck. He looked past Adam. “Dietrich a lanky fucker? Walks like he’s been ridin’ bareback over a hundred miles of bad trail?”
“Yeah, why?”
Truett nodded his head toward the source of the wind. In the middle of the whistling gale ambled a long, dark man. His feet kicked out with each step, the long toes of his boots pointing to the night sky, followed by the firm planting of the heel before the entire foot rolled down to the silica sanded earth, carrying the man forward. He walked up and nodded to the spellslinger and the giant.
“Evening. Help you two?” He craned his neck so he could look up at Adam. “I know you ain’t on shift til dawn.”
Adam moved, his body so tight with rage he vibrat
ed in his stitched-together skin. Wide hands reached toward the foreman, fingers curled in anticipation of soft flesh and jointed vertebrae under them.
Dietrich didn’t even blink.
Truett spoke. “Hold up, Adam...”
Before he could say this don’t feel right, the wind turned cold as the devil’s conscience, spiking into them as the salted hum of magick rose in the air.
Truett’s hand was on the hook-knife at his belt when Dietrich opened his mouth and hacked, the loose skin of his jowls swaying as he clutched thin arms around himself and retched. The scrawny man dry-heaved, shoulders lurching with it.
A split-second passed. Adam was one lumbering step closer to Dietrich. The hook-knife hovered over the back of Truett’s empty hand.
Dietrich staggered, coughing again and his body rolled, chest expanding as something came up his esophagus. The skin of his throat swelled like a frog’s air bladder, stretching thin, hardened arteries and veins standing like mooring ropes. Truett heard the pop! of the man’s jaw dislocating as something filled his mouth from out his guts.
Adam took another step, just a few strides away from his intended victim.
The hook-knife hovered still as Truett watched, trying to suss out what would happen next. His stomach had gone greasy slick with dread and he almost dropped the knife for the six-gun to just put a bullet in Dietrich’s forehead.
Dietrich opened his mouth and let the thing inside it fall out.
A wet ball of spines landed on the ground in front of Adam. It lay in the irradiated sand, quivering and steaming. It was a knot of dark swirls, dozens of them all made from hundreds of thin strands. A word jolted in Truett’s head.
Trichobezoar.
A hairball.
Dead human matter ingested by a sorcerer, lain in his belly for gods knew how long, soaking up bits of magick with every spell, every incantation, every ritual, every working, the strands of hair that made its mass acting as tiny razor wire, making thin incisions in the lining of Dietrich’s stomach, letting slips of blood trickle in until it was infused with the very essence of black magick and blood sorcery.
