by David Finn
She caught herself, and looking down, saw Guard Dog, his body broken, neck snapped. Her hands flicked over his body — huge bite wounds, wet blood.
Alex was nowhere to be seen. It was deep, darkest night. Where the hell was she?
The raging sea held no answers, no clarity or stillness in that chaotic, unforgiving fury. Her blazing eyes searched the night horizon, a thin blanket of stars high above.
For a moment she believed that she hadn’t grown up, and her father and everyone she had ever loved was still close and waiting for her to return.
But the wind was so bitter and she knew she was a lot older than fifteen. Everyone she loved was either a corpse or ashes now, with faces she could no longer recall, no matter how hard she tried.
There was a sudden sharp sound of a pistol echoing through the night, the flash lighting up the bay window of a house on the hill above her. Seven shots in a row, each punctuated by a short measured pause. A good shooter working their way through a clip.
Then silence and darkness. The waves thrashed and screamed.
Demorn started running soundlessly across the hard sand, her eyes blazing, as the bitter wind howled around her.
She approached the house with care. The rough trees came to a well-kept polite lawn. The bay window was shattered, light flooding out onto the grass.
Alex lay spread-eagled across the rug, her pistol still in her enclosed hand. Of course it had been Alex squeezing off those last shots.
A huge red stain spread across her t-shirt. A quick, desperate sadness gripped Demorn, that her beautiful friend-lover-enemy was hurt, too.
Alex opened her eyes and slowly and deliberately winked.
‘I’m not dead yet, Mighty One.’
Demorn brushed her hand through the girl’s blonde hair, feeling how cold she was. ‘Jesus, I came through last.’
Alex smiled, in grim pain. ‘At least we didn’t come through first. Poor Dog, just his luck.’
Demorn’s eyes darted around the room, seeing the bodies scattered and splayed out. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
‘Making every shot count . . . the Ol’ Alex trademark.’ The injured girl’s voice cracked with the joke.
Demorn kicked at the nearest dead body, saw the face, half rotted, crawling with maggots and disease. Sweet Goddess, nothing was alive here. Not even the hired guns.
‘What got you?’
Alex spoke, her voice distant and wavering. ‘Something real fast, barely visible, I felt it . . . same thing that got Dog outside, nicked me.’
She raised her hand. Demorn saw a long red savage scratch across the back of it. Alex moved her lips in a crooked, sweet smile that was the opposite of the pain in her intense blue eyes.
With trembling fingers Alex stroked the golden necklace she wore, touching a small heart locket upon it. Quickly, Demorn opened the locket clasp, letting the last of a noxious green liquid fall into Alex’s open mouth.
The savage scratch faded and color came back to the face of the injured girl. Alex vainly opened her mouth to speak. Her eyes rolled and she fell into sleep, breathing softly.
Demorn closed the locket around Alex’s neck. The best all had a way to survive.
Looking around the room, Demorn’s eyes caught a spectacular painting on one wall. As she moved closer Demorn realized it was an image that had been taken from a photo. She gasped.
She had seen it before, in another life, years ago. It was Kate, levitating above a floor, blood-written symbols upon her pale arms, her face a deathly blue.
A massive golden figure threw an arm around the fallen woman. Demorn recognized the terrible face pasted onto the painted golden figure. It was Duke Pain. The old dimension jumper, the Laughing Guest of the Jade Hotel.
A disconnected, far-away voice called from behind Demorn, chilling her to the bone.
It was Kate’s voice, distorted almost beyond recognition.
‘I’m so excited to show you my painting, Demorn, it means everything to me, I spent SO LONG working on it! It’s just like when you first came to me, in the start, remember I was bleeding and you were like an angel, we’re all angels burning, underneath it all—’
A wild scream echoed through Demorn’s skull, cutting out a half-second after it began.
Demorn turned around. Kate floated through the room, levitating, legs crossed, dressed in a filmy crimson robe, her hair long and blonde, skin tanned like a beach babe. Blood symbols were upon her pale arms, weird quasi-equations that didn’t make sense.
Kate’s eyes opened. They were a livid purple. Her powerful mind blazed out, catching Demorn in the dark undertow, trying to drag her in, trying to consume her.
O my God he is as dark as the pit Demorn I’m drowning in his sickness—
Instinctively, Demorn triggered the mind-shield in her implant. The cacophony of sound was replaced by an icy silence.
Kate kept gazing at her and Demorn could see the hell in her eyes. I keep failing you, I keep failing you, Demorn kept thinking, unable to voice it.
The Spectre Gem light was bouncing around the room, creating complex patterns as it interlaced around Kate. Those haunted eyes were freaking Demorn out.
Demorn said, ‘Are you in there, Pain?’
Kate laughed, cruelly, in a voice that wasn’t her own. ‘Isn’t she dead yet? Silly little hippy, with her crystals and her omens.’
Demorn sneered. ‘Show yourself.’
It said: ‘Certainly. I’m as beautiful as the day they destroyed me.’
With a surge of energy, Kate’s body morphed, and in her place were the terrible features of an emaciated man, his frail body encased in an expensive black suit.
Needles pierced his skin, hooking into his throat like a necklace of thorns, feeding strange energy sources into the brain.
Red wine-stained skin glowed malignantly. His eyes were a stained yellow, glimmering with flecks of purple. He was more automated and sinister than ever.
She felt sickened. ‘Duke Pain. It’s been a long time.’
Duke Pain laughed, sick and bitter. ‘Forever. Never. Tomorrow. I only just met you. I’ve known you for years, I’m watching you die. I’m here now.’
He pressed his hand to his forehead, as if stabilizing himself. He was shockingly half-human, a skeleton with over-ripe, rotten flesh still clinging to the bone.
Things crystallized. He wore an expensive black suit, a crisp white shirt and a beautiful gold watch. The images shifted. Sometimes everything was perfect about him, except the face, with its sunken watery eyes and dying skin.
Magic and science covered him, hurting her eyes. There was nothing to see beneath. He was all surface, a mixture of corruption and a weird, businesslike sharpness beneath the rotting flesh.
Demorn said, ‘Why haunt an innocent like her? You were killed years ago.’
He smiled hideously. ‘One day. Disintegrated and vibrating into nothingness in the void. But not yet.’
In his left hand, Duke Pain held an odd wooden box, carved with intricate symbols, hands set in the middle behind purple glass. It was an old clock.
‘Do you know what this is, my dear Demorn?’
Demorn did. ‘It’s a backwards clock. They were outlawed in Victorian times. Certain people would obliterate your personality for even owning one.’
Pain laughed. ‘It’s funny what Death will do for your respect of archaic laws. Do you remember where we met?’
Demorn kept looking at him for a long time. She didn’t know how to feel.
Finally, she spoke. ‘We’re a long, long way from the Jade Hotel. And you’ve never haunted anyone, or any time, without a reason. Why have you come here, Duke, what treasure do you covet?’
Duke smiled a sick smile, as the needles fed into his white flesh. He said, ‘Only what we all seek.’
‘And what is that?’
Duke Pain sighed. ‘A life where I do not cycle back from a death I only vaguely recall, a life of peace. I would destroy the world for that.’
> He is unbalanced and totally untrustworthy, Demorn thought. But shooting him would not kill him, nor even hurt him. Not while he held a backward clock, flickering through all their pasts and futures, like some deranged demon-ghost of Xmas.
She took her hand from the gun holster. ‘You never killed me years ago, Duke. I don’t know why you would try now.’
He smiled, raising one hand to his throat. She saw five needles slide into his skin, digging deep into his throat from the fabric of his black suit, filled with some vile substance she could not even guess at.
As she watched, the decaying skin healed, and she saw how the Duke looked before, like an old fashioned movie star with tanned perfect features, white teeth and short, dark hair, mixed with salt and pepper grey.
‘I wasn’t always such a monster,’ he said.
She smiled, suddenly tired of fighting. ‘Neither was I. It’s been a long couple of years in The Grave. Friendly faces have been in short supply.’
She slung herself down at the bar stool, idly checking it all out. An old style stereo was laid out by the wet bar, vinyl records and an old-school turntable. The album covers showed a succession of attractive older men in tuxedos, elegant women with big hair and big boobs, haunting dark eye-shadow and glossy red lipstick.
‘Classy set-up.’
He gestured to Alex on the couch, breathing deeply as she slept, and the dead men.
‘I’m sorry about your friend. She shoots first, she doesn’t ask questions.’
Demorn heard a sudden purring in her ear, freezing her blood.
Duke Pain held his finger up, drawing the beast to him.
‘I rescued her last year. I’m sorry for scratching your friend, but my Cat is very protective. She had killed many of my guards.’
Demorn felt it move from her, a slight warmth brushing past her as it went to lie at his feet, a stunning beautiful snow-white Ghost Panther, translucent in the cosy shadows of the room.
She kept her voice calm. ‘It’s all right, Alex is fine now.’
He smiled thinly with utterly desolate eyes and Demorn could tell that the Duke did not care less about what was fine and what wasn’t.
The Spectre Gem on Demorn’s forehead lit up Alex’s beautiful face.
‘You can get her home, can’t you?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘She’s easy, she’s a city gal, Babelzon born and bred. But you? You’re much harder to get home. You like it in these empty, in-between places, you’re more ingrained.’ He gestured upward with a casual finger. ‘Let’s take it upstairs.’
Demorn followed him up a spiral staircase, the house murmuring with the distant sound of waves in the night. It was still cold, but the sun would be coming up soon.
Demorn could hear soft music playing. Controlled, tinned laughter on repeat through it, as if at a party of strangers, or some ancient sitcom on TV.
Demorn said, ‘I know that song, I’ve heard it before—’
And then suddenly she was in a plush hotel lift, surrounded by gold glass. A bored bellboy showed no interest in the young woman in the leather jacket and black combat pants, holding hands loosely with the attractive older man in his expensive suit.
Soft Muzak lulled her.
The lift rose soundlessly. ‘Where are we going?’
His voice was like crushed velvet. ‘Do you really want to leave The Grave, Demorn?’
‘Of course.’
‘So you really want to go back to this?’
He pressed his finger across the golden glass.
Images of the War were everywhere in the glass, violent and bloody without redemption, desert cities burning, soldiers of all sides killing women and children. A mall in LA exploding into shards of glass and metal.
Great metallic drones dropped terrible pulse bombs over green forests, waves of obliteration over and over on rhythmic instant replay, as the jungles lit up and she saw one great billowing cloud of devastation without end, blocking out the sound of everything, all the violence, her own silent screams inside a head which felt like a tomb of memories.
The images winked out, replaced by the glittering gold mirrored walls. The lift was calm and safe.
She realized her hand was upon the golden mirror. ‘The War . . .’
He placed a hand on her shoulder.
Demorn couldn’t even speak for a second. ‘Is it over?’ she said.
‘It’s the world, Demorn. The one you so desperately want to escape back into. Some battles were won and lost, some haven’t happened yet. It’s an exhausting place. It burnt me out. Did it burn you out, too?’
There was no point in lying, not to him, not to his ruined face which nothing could hide. Not to his desolate eyes that displayed only the static indifference of the long-since dead.
She pressed her hand against her eyes. ‘Of course I’m fucking burnt out. For two years, I slept alone, killed alone, watched everything die alone.’
He squeezed her hand. His skin was cool and he smelt good. He wasn’t decayed and half dead anymore. Had he ever been?
‘The Tyrant ads would have run past Dead Day. Did you call him?’
She smiled. ‘You’re so fucking nosy, Duke. What happens if I stay back at your place by the bay?’
He chuckled. ‘You want spoilers?’
‘Sometimes I don’t mind spoilers. At least they’re the brutal truth.’
He laughed richly. She looked into the golden glass and his face seemed to shift. She saw the backwards clock floating in the air, the clock hands sliding backward, then forward and back again.
‘I can tell you. We talk for about half an hour, you drink a Diet Coke while we make small talk about my record collection and the girls with big boobs on the album covers.’
‘That doesn’t sound too tragic.’
He spoke quietly. ‘You like it, it’s peaceful and quiet up there, overlooking the bay. But you like it too much, I can see it in your eyes.’
‘I put my hand on your shoulder, and I told you, “this isn’t victory Demorn, it’s defeat.” You laughed. We go walking by the cliff overlooking the ocean. The water is churning with apparitions of the Dark God.’
Duke Pain sighed. ‘We are both scared. And you are suspicious of me, just as now. The Skull Tower bursts through the dark water, bursting with foul power. We can both feel the Dark God Zaltuth so close to rising, howling for the death of everything with a hunger born of oblivion. You accuse me of being a traitor, we fight, you shoot me with three holy bullets, then plunge that fiery Xalos into my chest and kick me into the churning waters.’
He stopped. She was watching him with wide green eyes. She could see into his soul. He spoke the truth.
‘That’s all I know,’ he said.
‘Jesus, Pain, you know so much.’
He shrugged distantly. ‘It’s something I can do, a trick of the clock. In another version, we kiss. I put my hand upon your forehead and slowly wipe your mind and your memories and you start to die. I . . . don’t like that version, it’s painful. I don’t know what happens then, Demorn. Maybe I die. Maybe I respawn and it all happens again.’
She looked away from his cold, yellow eyes. ‘You make it sound like a video game.’
He smiled his dreadful smile. The backwards clock descended into his hand, miniaturizing as he placed it in an inner suit pocket.
‘It’s more a game than you will ever know.’
The lift glided to a stop. She said, ‘So are you a traitor then, Duke Pain? My Sword only burns for those who require True Justice.’
He sounded dry and amused. ‘I’m not here to judge you, Demorn. If you walk out of this lift and haven’t spawned your Sword, it would seem you aren’t here to judge me either.’
The Spectre gem had burnt low on her forehead, the barest flicker of white.
‘What do you want from me, Duke Pain? What’s outside this lift?’
‘Out there is a place you recognize. Friends. Lovers. A future. I only need the Gem, Princess. Then you’re free to ge
t back to your life.’
She took the Gem from her forehead. It dazzled violently in her fingers, burning brighter as she held it out to him.
‘I don’t even want it.’
Duke Pain gently took it, his lips brushing her hand. ‘Thank you so much, Princess, you are free of The Grave, you have come back to life.’
She watched as the Gem glowed in his fingers. The years fell away and she could see the man he was, not who he had become or would become.
She saw the yellow eyes fade, the white, dead skin come to life, his hair become dark brown, and the total desolation in his gaze became something more human, less naked. He wasn’t a monster, just somebody who had played the Game too long.
Demorn laughed, noticing the amulet hanging around his neck.
‘God, that is one cheesy amulet.’
Duke Pain laughed, holding it up. She saw a Unicorn glowing upon the metal.
‘It’s how I got here, and it’s totally out of juice,’ the Duke said.
He shrugged easily. ‘Probably why I stayed here.’
The lift door opened. She saw a half familiar hotel corridor. Memories stirred. Duke Pain leant in close, right on the threshold, his voice touched with kindness. ‘Remember, Demorn, remember how cold that pre-dawn was. It’s just a bonus level. It’s lonely and cold, and it’s not victory, it’s defeat. He wants to eat everything and everyone. You understand me?’
Demorn understood him absolutely.
We betray everything inside ourselves just to survive, Demorn thought with a sudden clarity. We all do, all of us. It’s probably no better than death, but it’s living.
‘Never go back there unless it is to kill me.’
‘I won’t,’ she replied.
Duke Pain seized her and held her. He whispered, ‘Our world is a terrible place for people who believe in love.’
He smelt of great aftershave and death.
‘Well, it’s lucky I just believe in love songs.’
He smiled. ‘You called the Tyrant over there, didn’t you?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
She gave him a soft kiss on the cheek. ‘Thanks for bringing me home, Duke. Don’t be a stranger.’
His laugh had a bitterness. ‘It was a team effort, Princess. Things will get weird before they get better.’
