Strangers In Boston: Tales from a Strange World Book 1 (The Strange World Series)

by T. S. Mann

  “Yes, Matt, that's it! Look at her face! Say her name! SAY HER NAME!”

  If Matt heard Lindsay's commandments, he gave no sign. In his mind, the figure came closer, and he could clearly see that it had no face to look upon. Its head was just a skull decorated with smears of fresh blood, and its skin was charred and blackened.

  Slowly, the monster reached out with its hand, extending two bony claws towards Matt's face. At the end of each was a talon, like that of an eagle or maybe a great cat, dripping with blood, and as the boy began to hyperventilate, the talons moved towards his eyes as if to pluck them out of their sockets.

  In the real world, Lindsay shook Matt roughly. “Come on, Matt! You're almost there! SAY HER NAME!”

  Matt's gibbering stopped for a moment, and with trembling lips, he tried to speak. “It … It ....”

  “Come on, Matt, finish it JUST SAY HER NAME!”

  “Itz … Itzpapalotl!”

  Lindsay's face lit up, and she gave a squeal of triumph … that was choked off as a loop of metal chain slipped around her neck and cut off her air. Instinctively, she reached up to pull it loose, and then she screamed in agony. But even over her scream, she could hear Luke hiss cruelly in her ear:

  “Nobody picks on my brother but me!”

  At once, the terrible metallic droning that accompanied her assault on Matt ended, as did the magic that held him aloft. Matt slumped to the ground, his body still twitching. Lindsay only dropped to her knees, as Luke continued to hold her tightly by the chain around her neck while he struggled to tie it back together in a tight knot. He managed to complete the knot before she recovered enough to fight back, and then he kicked her away.

  Still on the ground, Lindsay turned to her attacker and gestured towards him, but no magic was cast. Luke looked down at her hatefully. His eyes were red, swollen and bloodshot. His whole body still felt as though it was on fire, and his head ached with the worst migraine of his life. But he was free of the medallion, the one he had just tied around Lindsay's neck, and for the first time, he could feel the flow of magic into his body and observe the patterns of death in the air around him.

  Without even looking, he could feel the stiffening carcass of the dead goat in the corner, and he could smell the decay that permeated the entire abandoned building. As he looked down at his former captor, he could even see the magic that maintained Lindsay's immortality, a strange and unnatural spell that somehow rejected death in whatever form it took. It didn't heal her per se. It just meant that she simply couldn't die.

  Of course, had Luke not been near collapse himself – he had almost killed himself in pulling the medallion off -- he might have remembered one detail: The medallion might stop a Stranger from using magic, but it didn't provide any sort of restraint. He was reminded of this as Lindsay, with a shriek of fury, leaped up off the floor and wrapped her fingers around his throat.

  The force of her attack knocked them both to the ground, but Lindsay landed on top, where she tried her best to choke the life out of Luke, screaming hysterical expletives at him the whole time He struggled to pry her fingers off, and when he couldn't, he reached out for anything he could use as a weapon. Out of the corner of his eye, about ten feet away, he saw what he needed. He was a necrotheurge now. Anything that could bring death was his to command.

  The boy thrust out his hand and gasped a word: “Knife!”

  In response, Lindsay's sacrificial blade, the one that never needed sharpening, slide across the floor, twisting as it flew so that Luke could catch it by the handle. With a vengeful roar, he brought the knife up and stabbed it directly into his attacker's heart. Lindsay screamed, and then looked down at him in amazement, astonished that he could form the magical intent needed to kill her as his very first act of spellcraft.

  “Wow, Luke,” she said as if amused by the development. “You must really hate me, huh?”

  She giggled, one final time. Then, her fingers slid free of Luke's throat, and she went down. Luke pushed her off to his side and climbed to his feet. He took a moment to look at her with the eyes of a necrotheurge and realized intuitively that her soul still had not left her body. Her heart and breath had stopped, but if either the knife or the medallion were removed, she would revive almost immediately.

  Still, for the moment at least, Lindsay was as dead as she was going to get. Luke raced over to where Matt lay quivering on the floor. His eyes were wide open and unblinking, and he was speaking a frantic gibberish just barely audible enough to hear. His face was drenched with sweat from the high fever he was now running. Luke shook him, gently at first but then with more force when he didn't respond.

  “Matt! Matt! Come on, man, snap out of it! Matt!!”

  Finally, Matt blinked a few times and looked up at his twin. “L..Luke? Izzat you?”

  “Yeah, Matt, it's me. I'm here for you.”

  “Lin … Lindsay. She did … She put something ….” He suddenly clutched his brother's arms tightly and whispered with a fierce urgency. “There's something in my head!”

  “Shh. It's okay. Lindsay's dead... sort of. I stabbed her through the heart.”

  At that, Matt seemed to swoon for a second. Then, he blinked his eyes and gave his brother a peculiar look.

  “Stabbed?!? You don't stab the heart, Luke! You gotta cut it out while it’s still beating, or the gods won't accept it!”

  “What?” Luke said with a shocked expression. Matt stared at him in confusion for a second and then squeezed his eyes shut as he began to whimper.

  “Oh … oh God, Luke. You don't … know what I'm seeing. There's … there's just … so much … blood. Just blood. Everywhere. All the time.... never stops flowing.”

  Then, he opened his eyes wide and stared up at his brother. “She's coming now. You can't let her take me, Luke. Promise me, you won't let her take me.”

  “Who, Matt? Who's coming?”

  Matt spoke almost in a delirium. “The Queen of Tamoanchan. The Mother of Dead Children. She's coming to eat my soul and steal my body so she can drown the world in blood. Don't let her take me, Luke. Kill me if you have to! Please, just kill me!”

  With that last begging remark, Matt collapsed and curled up into a fetal position as he tried to block out the denizen of the Beyond that was burrowing in his mind. Luke looked around helplessly with no idea of what to do next. He put his hand on his brother's shoulder and tried to console him. Without realizing it, he whispered same desperate prayer his brother had made the night before.

  “God, somebody please help me!”

  Then, the door to the basement burst open, and in walked John Sullivan, still wearing the same baseball cap he wore when Luke saw him die. In his right hand, he was holding what appeared to be a heavy-duty stapler that he was brandishing like a gun, or possibly a phaser from Star Trek. Luke stared at his father for a long moment, and then he looked over at the clock on the floor. It read 12:14. Clearly, the Day of the Dead had already begun.

  CHAPTER 14:

  ASSAULT ON FISHER COLLEGE

  A Conference Room at the Invisible College

  Thirty minutes earlier

  Mickey looked around the small conference room. It was rather small and looked like a seldom used college lecture hall save that information was being projected onto a screen via magic instead of PowerPoint. Aside from Doc and himself, there were eight other Strangers on hand. He knew two of them: a deceptively young-looking couple named Bryce and Widget. The other six were new and seemed to be truly as young as they appeared.

  From what he remembered, young Strangers came from all over to study mind magic with Doc, but they seldom stayed for more than a few years. Boston was home to too many sword-carrying fundamentalists who got pissy when you suggested that magic was the product of testable scientific principles instead of some cryptic pantheon, so the city seldom stayed attractive to the College's occult rationalists for very long.

  Doc was in his element, giving a lecture on an obscure occult topic to rapt college kids.
Mickey thought it might have been an interesting topic if the older Stranger weren't talking about his son like he was just another interesting case study.

  As he listened, he slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and caressed the Birmingham Stapler, silently willing it to remain dormant until he was desperate enough to risk using it. According to the reports, it could kill anything with one shot, but roughly once in every ten to twelve uses, it would also kill the wielder. He had no idea when it was last used, but he suspected it might get a workout tonight.

  “The phenomenon was first documented by the College in 1783 in one of Comte St. Germaine's case studies, but it has, thankfully, been rare," said Doc to the assembly. "The clinical name for the condition is Rache’s Syndrome. You can research it under that name in the College's database if we have time. More colloquial names include chaos-sleepers or Manchurians, after the 1968 film The Manchurian Candidate.

  “Simply stated, we are talking about a Stranger who interfaces with the Great Beyond during insight but is completely unable to process the experience in any conscious way. Whether this is because he interfaces with a particularly awful bit of chaos or because the chaos facet actively chooses to attack subconsciously is unknown.

  “Regardless, a Manchurian neither falls directly to chaos nor learns how to resist it. Instead, some discrete chaos-borne concept infiltrates the Stranger's subconscious, manipulating him indirectly while feeding him access to extremely high levels of magic. The intruder's goal is to force its host into a situation where it can take over completely and actualize whatever chaos principle it represents into the fabric of the Infrastructure.”

  Doc snapped his fingers, and the image on the wall behind him, which had been depicting an overhead satellite photo of the grounds of Fisher College, changed to a black-and-white photograph of a young man in an American military uniform.

  “This is, or rather was, Private Louis Culpepper of Knoxville, Tennessee, taken in 1950 shortly after the Battle of Hwangpan in the Korean War. Private Culpepper's unit took heavy fire, and he watched as most of his unit was mowed down before his eyes. The stress of that caused him to go strange.

  “Unfortunately, he also attuned directly to the Beyond – specifically, an aberrant principle of thermal dynamics known as 'anti-heat.' The anti-heat principle lay dormant in his subconscious, manipulating him into adversely affecting local weather conditions.”

  Doc snapped his fingers again, and the image changed to two climatological maps of the Korean peninsula labeled “before” and “after.”

  “Prior to this incursion, the Korean peninsula was warmed by a thermal belt that connected it with the South Pacific, giving it mild winters comparable to Florida. Within a few weeks of Culpepper's Insight, the Korean climate had retroactively changed to produce bitterly cold winters with prolonged freezing temperatures. And the effect was poised to spread rapidly. It is believed now that if Culpepper had not been put down as quickly as he was, the whole planet would have been in a new ice age within a year.”

  He paused for emphasis.

  “And I wish to reiterate my use of the word 'retroactively' – not only would the planet be gripped by an ice age, but climate history would have changed so that the planet would have always been gripped in an ice age for the past several thousand years, with all the changes in human history that would have accompanied such revision. And except for a relative handful of Strangers and other anomalies, none of the surviving humans would have realized that it had ever been any other way.”

  Doc snapped his fingers once more, and the image changed to an artist's rendering of Matt and Luke. Mickey folded his arms and studied the faces of his two boys, neither of whom he had seen in eight years. Doc noted his body language but continued without pause.

  “Which brings us to our current situation. Our analysis indicates that at least one of these two Strangers is probably suffering from Rache's Syndrome and is playing host to a chaos fragment lodged in his subconscious. We don't know anything about this fragment, only that it is present and that it is augmenting Matt Sullivan's magical potential to an extraordinary degree. He thinks he is attuned to four or more Axioms. In fact, he's attuned to only one or two, but he is subconsciously drawing upon pure chaos magic and using it to duplicate the effects of other Axioms. At this point, we should be prepared for him to do … well, anything.

  “We also don't know whether his brother, Luke, is similar afflicted. Luke may be okay, he may be a chaos-sleeper, he may be nephilim. All we know is that Luke has been a captive of a powerful nephilim for just over 24 hours, and we have reason to believe that he has been subjected to magical torture for at least some of that time.

  “We do have one other piece of intelligence, however. Not long ago, we were contacted by this young man,” Doc pointed at a rather nervous young spiky-haired Stranger in a purple shirt. sitting off to one side, “who identifies himself as Ethan, a defector from the Unity Blade. I have psychically verified his story, which is that he helped Matt evade a group of paladins and then delivered him to Fisher College. Focusing our full resources on the College, we believe we have tracked the nephilim to an abandoned dormitory.”

  Doc coughed discretely and spared a glance at Ethan.

  “Now, no disrespect to young Ethan, here, but we realize this might be a trap and are taking every precaution. However, at present, the stakes right now are too high to just ignore this lead.”

  Ethan shrugged. “No offense taken. Just so long as you remember our deal. I tell you what I know about where Matt went, and after this is all over, you get me out of Boston. Assuming the world doesn't end tonight or something.”

  “Er, yes, quite so,” said Doc dryly. “As I was saying, Bryce Caulfield is presently resetting the portal to link with a location near the target building. Once that is done, we will go through and, with as much haste and caution as is possible, we will investigate the area and hopefully neutralize the nephilim and take custody of the two boys so that we can determine their infection status and act accordingly.”

  Doc finally seemed to notice Mickey's glower, and he hastened to reassure the group.

  “I do want to assure you that I have experience with Rache’s Syndrome. While it is frightening and, worst case scenario, a global threat, this boy has only been strange for about a day. Louis Culpepper had been a Stranger for nearly a week when the chaos shard he carried began to affect localized reality. If we can catch this boy early, we can contain and hopefully remove whatever is lurking in his subconscious without any risk of Reality degradation. Now, are there any questions?”

  The hand of a young Asian male in hipster clothes shot up.

  “Yeah, a big one: what exactly are you expecting out of us, Doctor Ellington? Except for you and Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield, we're all inexperienced. None of us have any combat training, and none of us have ever been anywhere near a nephilim.”

  Doc glanced over at Mickey before speaking.

  “Primarily, Kenny, you and the others will be providing tactical support and possibly numbers for any mass rituals we need to throw together on the fly. There will be ten of us in all, and that's a very auspicious number, though, of course, thirteen would be better.”

  “As for magical combat, we are very fortunate to be joined in this venture by an associate of mine, Mickey St. Angel, who is a highly accomplished magical combatant. Although he is now a freelancer, he has worked in the past with the Ministry of Continuity in Los Angeles, as well as the Unity Blade congregation in Denver, which I’m happy to say is a bit more ... ecumenical than the one here in Boston.”

  Mickey stood and moved to the front of the room to stand next to Doc and address the room.

  “And since Doc here has given me that nice introduction, I just wanted to say how grateful I am for all the help your chapter has given me over the years. I don't know how much you've heard about … my situation, so I'd like to get a few things out into the open.”

  “First, I have dealt with nephilim and beyonde
rs on many occasions over the last several years. While they are highly dangerous, they are ultimately no more powerful than any competent Stranger of similar experience. They cast spells the same way we do, and you can take out one of them the same way you can take out each other – one hex at a time.”

  Mickey then took a deep breath.

  “Second, you should also know that the two boys who are at the center of this drama are, well, they're my sons. I haven't seen them in nearly a decade, ever since just after I went strange. I want to promise you all, however, that my connection to them will not deter me from doing what needs to be done. If I make the determination that one or both has fallen to chaos or represents a threat to Reality, I will put them down without hesitation and grieve for them later.”

  With that, Mickey turned to look directly at Doc with a hard expression before turning back to the assembly.

  “That said, I want to emphasize that I will make that determination. While I won't hesitate to take them down if it's necessary, I will make damn sure that it is necessary first. That, along with my greater tactical experience, is why I am taking point. Like I said, I'm grateful for all you folks have done for me and for my sons. But if any of you get anywhere near them before I've decided whether they can be saved or not, I will burn you to ash without missing a beat. Understood?”

  None of the younger Collegians said anything, but their wide nervous eyes made it clear that they'd gotten the point. In the corner, Ethan swallowed and adjusted the collar of his shirt. Just then, Bryce poked his head through the door. His face was flushed, and he was slightly out of breath.

  “Doc? Mickey? We're set.”

  With that, the assembled group rose as one and headed for the portal door, with Mickey and Doc in the lead. Doc spoke just loud enough for the other Stranger to hear.

  “Was it really necessary to threaten my students? We're trying to help.”

  “They're my flesh and blood, and they're my responsibility. I'll live with it if I have to kill them to save the world. But I can’t live with letting someone else do it and wondering for the rest of my life whether it was necessary.”