Sounded, in fact, not like a book slapping down at all, but a man’s bare feet on tarmac.
26
While the city sickened in the foul wind, a man was born from a book.
The wizard stepped from the pages of the book onto the road. He was a tiny thing that could have been a model, lovingly crafted and painted by a man with good friends and a patient wife. The kind of model that perhaps fought goblins with fire flicking from his fingertips.
But tiny, yes. Small enough to fit in a book.
And yet, tiny as he was, the wizard’s grin was immense. He breathed in the foul wind, puffed out his chest and grew and grew, bigger, naked, full of color. He grew until he fit his big grin perfectly. A dark face with bright teeth, black eyes and black hair. Entirely naked because he simply didn’t realize that people wore clothes in this world…this world?
I’m free!
No trick played on him by the book that had been his prison, this. Air, wind, sunlight, noise…deviations even he never would have dreamed. A paved road beneath his feet, itself a thing of wonder. Trees, but like none he knew. Grass, iron, stone, shining windows, writing that was different, but understandable as writing. Music in the air that he didn’t recognize, moving on the air, like these people had harnessed the wind and made it sing for them.
He laughed, big baritone chuckles that sent shivers through a man walking home from a really good night with a girl he’d met in a pub. He wouldn’t be seeing her again, but he didn’t know that, as he laughed at the naked man who in turn laughed and twirled in the street.
Look! thought the wizard…not the wind, harnessed at all, but a giant metal beast that sung like angels, coming along the wonderful black path. The wizard laughed and danced at the strange metal beast’s melody right up until the early delivery van hit the naked wizard hard enough for the flying blood to reach the lucky man’s face.
The wizard’s blood was black, like ink.
The blood hit the lucky man’s eyes, swimming over him, swarming (like worms) and sliding into him, through his eyes and nose and mouth, down past the belt of his trousers and into the cheeky hole in his cock that a nice young lady had licked so delicately. Up his ass, into his rectum and his innards.
Choking one end, burning the other. Blind, unable to scream for being full up of black-blood-ink.
Dying, in fact.
On the road, the delivery van thumped over the wizard’s body. The body was utterly unrecognizable. Music played in the van…rotund guitars and thick and dark drums that sounded as out of place in the early morning as the choking cries of the young man.
Braking, the van swerved slightly, and the driver jumped out and saw the mess. Broken ribs jutting and slimy entrails caught in the rear axle; a man unspooled.
The driver saw a young man fall to the ground, covered in (blood…not blood?)…hurt, thrashing.
He didn’t run to help, but turned and got in his van, curiously numb with the deepest of shock, where he puked into his lap and turned the ignition key and drove away.
A young girl, homeless, with terrible dreams, woke to squealing tires and the sound of a man choking. She knew that sound well (hands around her throat) and walked, dazed, schizophrenic voices in her head.
Just one voice this time.
“Come. Come. Carolyn Anne. Carolyn Anne. Rise up and be mine be saved be mine be mine be mine…” said the voice.
The young girl crawled from beneath the park bench that kept her safe while beside the mess in the road those black worms swam beneath and within the lucky young man—quite a handsome man—and were gone when the young girl reached him.
“Serve me,” said the youthful wizard and bade the girl onto her knees. She shuffled toward him.
After a time he roared and filled her mouth with black ink cum. She swallowed the torrent on the street corner of the park. She was his and he was hers and she would serve him.
She wiped her lips as the first police car pulled to a halt beside the body. The wizard, cock hanging forgotten from the garments he now wore, walked with a smile and an outstretched hand toward the police man first out of the car.
“Don’t worry, Sergeant,” he said to the man, knowing all the things the young man had known. “I’m fine. Just fine. Amazing how chipper a man feels after shooting a good load.”
He was also, now, aware that the things upon his legs were called trousers, the uncomfortable things upon his balls were called pants. Knowledge was flooding him while he continued to approach the police car. Of course, the young man did not know everything, but enough that the wizard could see what the man had seen, feel what the man had felt.
The knowledge filled him up. Satisfying. Enjoyable.
The young man had enjoyed television and movies. Violent things, the images burned into the young man’s brain, deep down, where the memories of a man abide.
“What?” said the policeman, his voice weak with shock.
The wizard’s mind was busy, though, absorbing the violence of this world. Casual, pointless, entertaining.
The wizard couldn’t help but smile as he tucked himself away into his pants, his cock dripping black ink into the white cotton. He finally turned his full attention to the policeman, to the new world around him. He bathed in everything. The sensations, the sheer joy of life.
“Just fucked my slave’s mouth,” he said with surprising cheer, considering the mess of his old body on the road. He didn’t even glance at the splayed corpse. “Good teeth. Nibbled a bit, but she’s nuts and I’ll let it slide. I’m going to try out her box and anus in a minute.”
“What?” said the policeman, whose name was Jones. He found himself confronted by a hit-and-run (fatal…no doubt about that) first thing into an early shift, crazy scruffy girl and this grinning young fucking nutcase.
Guts all over the road. Guts…
The policeman, only a young man himself, puked hard over the road and his black shoes. As his head went down between his knees, the wizard wrenched the policeman’s head around, just so, snapping his neck.
Dead. Such a simple thing, yet endlessly pleasing.
His partner (fuck fuck fuck wish I’d called in sick fuck) leapt from the car and pulled his nightstick and the wizard took it away from him with a twist and snap that dislocated the policeman’s shoulder. The wizard jammed the blunt truncheon upward through the screaming mouth with enough force to break through the roof of the man’s mouth, the sinus cavity, and into the brain.
“You’re driving,” he said to his slave without turning around.
She got into the car, still grinning despite the sickly stomach she’d got from his black cum.
“Can’t drive,” she said.
He reached out and smashed her face into the steering wheel. She sat back, blood streaming from her broken nose.
“Learn,” he said.
Grinning still, the young girl did. The pain didn’t matter to her because (hands around her throat…then, that thought was gone for good) she wasn’t home anymore.
27
Ank Holland had been ripped apart.
Her pieces were scattered in a world without end—the storybook of a mad wizard. It was a prison without hope of parole. Her face, corroded by the venom of a creature from out of time, a creature of myth made real in this insane world of sandy corridors and courtyards with magnolia swaying in soft night breezes. Corroded and torn apart and violated by a man who did not exist.
But she did.
She had will, and power untold. Not mage-born, like the wizard, but she was blessed with a certain kind of power. The pieces of her face flipped across the sand that blew along the dark corridors of the wizard’s prison. She could think, still, though, because this was his prison, and here, in his world painted in words of ink, she was spirit-pure. She could feel pain because she was the guardian, the gatekeeper, the ferry-woman…because she was more than just a dead woman lying shattered in some mystic desert-palace.
Some pain transcends mere pain. It beco
mes spiritual, a dizzy high with visions and hallucinations. True pain, complete pain, becomes a doorway to the infinite, to God, perhaps, or the place humanity holds, or maybe ignites that ancient link to the one great fire at the beginning of all things.
Pain is holy. Pain is the window and the door.
Pain is fucking painful, thought Ank. With her force, her will, she pulled the pieces of her sundered face and body together. In this place, she bled ink and not blood, but it did not matter. Here she was made of words…of course she was. She was in the book and so belonged to it…but she was her own, too. A character come to life.
As she pulled her face into the shape she remembered feeling, she wrote herself into the book.
Wrote herself in.
I just wrote myself into a book.
Fuck.
Pain was forgotten and she hadn’t seen any kind of God.
Apparently hurting like a bastard gives me delusions.
She swore again. Not because it hurt—pain was temporary, or waveform, like radiation or sound. Maybe this was a lull or the cessation of pain. It didn’t matter. What really mattered was that she had written herself into a book. Resurrected herself.
Which, with hindsight, was fucking stupid, because what she really needed to do was write herself out.
“Holland…” she said.
Holland was in danger. No…that wasn’t right. It wasn’t just Holland that was in danger. This man, this thing? This thing that killed myths and was born in a book?
He was a danger to everything. To creation itself.
Whole, now, Ank stepped over the petrified remains of the basilisk and the manticore, locked in eternal embrace, and strode along the corridors, lit with torches in sconces that lined the wall. They flickered, as they should.
And while she walked, she thought hard.
A man, insane; a wizard. A thing that could not and should not be. Loose in the world.
A man like a God among mere mortals…
Not the benevolent God of hopeful Christians, but the fucker that was into smiting and making relatives copulate.
If that God was loose in the world? A God that didn’t know his place, like a good God should?
Unhindered?
Unstoppable?
“Shit. Holland…Holland…”
She said his name over and over like some kind of ward, a sigil, a talisman. But she stopped walking, too.
And caught herself just before she stepped over the petrified remains of…
Stop it. Stop it. You are not a character in a book. You are not the book. You are Ank Holland.
Ank looked down at the bodies of the impossible beasts, cast in stone.
Right back where she’d started.
“I’m screwed,” she said to no one at all.
II. THE CHANGELING
Do you go to the movies? Find a friend in a film?
—Hothouse Flowers/Movies
28
Lucas P. Carter grunted as he settled the Olympic bar across his thick trapezius muscles. The muscle was solid and his pulse visible in the telephone wire-veins that ran through the muscle.
He wore black shorts and black cross-trainers with no socks. The floor was covered in a heavy-duty rubber non-slip mat. Across one entire wall were mirrors, like a gymnasium, but this room was his and his alone.
Lucas’ sanctuary.
Bar seated on the big muscle, his biceps and triceps straining against his skin, Lucas began his morning routine. Good mornings first, then, hamstrings warm, into dead lifts with more weight, power lifts.
Power first. Always power first.
Chin-ups with weights hung from a belt and his latissimus dorsi muscles making him look like some kind of flesh-kite tugged in the wind. Slow and steady, up and down, panting and sweating. His heart was strong as his muscles and sinews, his bones thick. Naturally a mesomorph, he was a monster of a man with a great thick trunk like oak.
A fifty-year-old man, 252 pounds of bone and hard flesh, with nearly thirty years of weights invested in his body.
Few scars, and very hairy. Not shaved and lithe like a bodybuilder, but a bear, like some old-school wrestler. Long-bearded but short-haired with a fair widow’s peak.
Dark hair, dark skin.
Like a bear, yes. Or a gorilla, maybe.
After benching massive weights he sat up, arms and shoulders aching—slightly weaker than his chest muscles.
Squats last—his least favorite and thanks to an old injury, his weakest discipline. But he drove through the pain, aware that one day his knee (the right) would just give out completely. But today was not that day.
Today was heavy day. Satisfying.
Tomorrow would be a lighter day; curls and crunches, forearm curls on the forehand and backhand…
The day after, no weights, but calisthenics.
Then, back again. A three-day cycle. No deviation for the last seven years. This worked for him. It was mind-and-body food.
He did not like to listen to music when he trained. He liked to hear himself roar, and look into the mirror and see his muscles fill with blood until they were nearly bursting. No sound but his when he trained, ever.
But sometimes, though, as he cooled from his workout, he liked to watch himself back on tape so he could see the beast inside him tear people to pieces.
29
Lucas walked from his private gym, up a flight of stairs and into his front room. There, he sat on his leather armchair, still wet with sweat and wearing nothing but black trainers and shorts. There were no sofas in his front room, because like his gym, this room was his alone. He had a television hooked up to a PC, a wireless Internet connection, and a wireless keyboard and mouse. The curtains were closed, and he had earphones (also wireless), which he placed over his ears.
He turned the volume up as far as it would go.
The movie didn’t begin until the moment the man was on the floor. Lucas remembered enough of the night he’d murdered the man up until that point. It was afterward, the aftermath, that was hazy.
There was a short moment where the picture wobbled as Lucas placed the camera so that it would overlook his work.
The man on the floor groaned, but so far Lucas had made no noise.
Then came the best bit. Lucas enjoyed himself on film. He seemed somehow more vibrant, larger, on the camera, even more than when he watched himself in his gym mirrors, pumped full of blood from the exertion of heavy weights.
Lucas on the armchair watched the naked Lucas on the TV screen.
Naked worked best, because who wants to walk away from a messy murder with blood and guts all over them?
Lucas admired the way his body, his muscles, looked as he strained over the screaming man, working the man’s right arm loose from the shoulder socket.
This was the point at which he’d blanked out. He remembered placing the camera at the murder scene, remembered stripping off his clothes.
From this point he had no recollection of what he’d done, or who he’d been.
The Lucas on the television screen tossed aside the man’s arm and went to work pulling the other loose. It seemed the man had either died or simply passed out—he wasn’t moving, certainly, unless you counted the movement due to Lucas’ wild ministrations.
Like an animal…something massive, insane.
And so thinking, Lucas wasn’t watching himself tearing the man apart any longer, but a blood-drenched gorilla.
“Oh my…” said Lucas, grinning.
That’s new.
The gorilla was in a frenzy. Tooth and nail, it took the man to pieces.
Then, turned back to the camera, and Lucas was suddenly himself again.
Lucas rewound and watched for the moment of transformation three times. There was none. One frame, a crazed gorilla, fur drenched in blood and flesh hanging from its face. The next, Lucas P. Carter, naked, red, panting.
The movie ended.
Lucas closed the file, then, watched the second, later file.
<
br /> This time, he wasn’t looking for blood. He was looking for ink.
30
Lucas watched a big fat man wrench a PC from its moorings. He couldn’t, from the position of the camera, be sure that the fat man had found anything.
But then the fat man turned, and he was sure.
“Holland,” he said.
He paused the screen and stared for a minute, maybe, until he was satisfied.
“Holland, you fat cunt,” he said to himself as he took off his headphones and closed the computer down. “You shouldn’t have.”
Lucas stood up from the chair, leaving a sheen of sweat behind on the dark leather.
He was thinking about a book with a wizard contained within. But now, too, he was thinking about the fat man.
Holland had some kind of connection. Carter didn’t know with whom, or why, or how far that protection extended, but Jane had been pretty specific.
“Don’t touch Holland,” she’d said.
Carter was happy enough to fuck Holland over and out of a job, but he wasn’t about to go against Jane.
But the fat bastard had the book.
Carter was thinking about what that meant, and if he was going to have to kill Holland to get the book…
Wondering, too, if he might not quite enjoy it.
How far up Jane’s ass are you? Can’t be that far…too fucking fat.
Carter nodded to himself while he walked from room. As he passed yet another large mirror, this time in his hallway, he caught himself wiping at the gossamer filaments of schizophrenia, compulsively rubbing his cheeks and forehead as though he’d just walked through a spider’s web.
He went to shower and dress and quit thinking about Holland. He figured the other him would make the call when the time came.
31
Holland went to bed drunk and angry. He was woken, sober and angry, by the telephone on the coffee table in front of him. The telephone rang and vibrated right off the table and bounced on the tile floor.
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