by Peter McLean
Fill me in you little git, I thought angrily. Who the buggering hell is he talking about? Who has he always fought?
Menhit, the Burned Man said. Her name is Menhit. Run away.
“Who is ‘she’?” Trixie asked me.
“Menhit,” I said. “Her name is Menhit.”
Rashid nodded again.
“The Black Lion,” he said, as though that was supposed to explain anything. “If she comes through, there will be red slaughter. On this plane she will be too strong for me to contain alone. Too strong for us both I think, old friend. Yet with the sky children and the Houngan…”
“An alliance?” I said, or rather the Burned Man did.
Rashid looked thoughtful, and I took the chance to freshen up our drinks. Everyone was a lot more civil now we were all a bit lubricated, I noticed, and I was keen to keep it that way. I glanced sideways at Trixie and saw her cold eyes through the haze of cigarette smoke that surrounded her. Well, almost everyone. I remembered a bit belatedly that she didn’t ever seem to get drunk however much booze I poured down her neck.
Shame, the Burned Man thought.
Stop that and be helpful, I snapped at it. Who the fuck is Menhit?
Your mythology is woeful, it said. She’s an ancient Nubian war goddess who got turned into an aspect of Sekhmet by the Egyptians and pretty much forgotten about. I don’t think she ever forgave anyone for that. Lovely lady. Her name means “The Slaughterer” or “She Who Massacres”, if that gives you an idea of her general temperament
Oh fucking joy. That was just bloody marvellous that was. A war goddess with an axe to grind, just what the world needed.
Is she bigger than you? I asked it.
I could almost feel it spit in my face.
Yeah, she fucking is, it muttered. She’s bigger than every cunt I know. She’s a goddess you twat, don’t you fucking grasp that?
“An alliance, yes. I was hoping you might suggest that,” Rashid said, for all that I hadn’t. “Although we would make strange bedfellows indeed, we five.”
“Better the devil you know,” I said, thinking of what Adam had said to me. “Sometimes, anyway.”
“Indeed,” he said, “although the Houngan and your fallen friend seemed to have little love for each other.”
“That was the first time Papa had met him,” I said, wondering how Rashid knew that. They had had their little spat in the club before he even arrived. “For what it’s worth, I think Papa Armand knew this was going to happen, or at least something like this anyway. I think he’s been planning for it for some time. Perhaps Adam has been too, for all I know. They’re both scheming gits at the end of the day.”
All that talk about sides, and coming wars, and choosing which way to walk. Now that I thought about it, it all felt like each of them had known something was on its way, anyway. I wondered what either of them might think about me suggesting they work with the other, and suppressed something between a laugh and a shudder. Yeah, that was going to go down like a cup of cold sick, wasn’t it?
“As are we all,” Rashid said, and drank deep. At this rate we were going to need the second bottle Shirley had brought after all. “One has to be, in this day and age.”
“Ain’t that the fucking truth,” the Burned Man said with my voice, and hurled a forgotten memory at me.
Chapter 18
The Burned Man had been delighted with our first little job together, our “live firing exercise” as it had so charmingly put it. I mean, yeah, I was glad to have finally settled my account with Nick Regan and rid the world of a truly Class A cunt, but I wasn’t totally sure what else I was supposed to have gained. The Burned Man had been pleased as punch though. As soon as we were done it rattled its tiny chains gleefully at me while I slumped onto the manky sofa in my bedsit.
“Well done, my boy,” it said. “We are well and truly in business now.”
“What business?” I asked it.
My mouth tasted horrible, and I have to admit I’d been a bit sick on the floor. I really ought to clean that up before the smell in the bedsit got even worse than it usually was.
“The business,” it said, and grinned at me. “What do you think diabolists are for, for fucksake?”
“Well,” I said, “I mean, I dunno about that. Not yet, anyway. I’m not sure I’m even really in touch with my True Will yet, and I’m nowhere near making contact with my Holy Guardian Angel. Crowley says in his Book of the Law that–”
“Right,” the Burned Man snapped, interrupting me. “Tomorrow you’re going out and buying yourself some heroin.”
“Um,” I said. “I… um… What?”
“You heard me,” it said. “Aleister fucking Crowley? All right, you can quote Crowley till your arse falls off but you’ll never understand Crowley until you learn to think like him. And how he thought was smacked out of his fucking head, most of the time. Your turn.”
Christ, I thought. I’d never been into drugs. I had grown up on Zammo and “Just Say No” and all that good wholesome Eighties kids’ stuff, and it just hadn’t been my scene at all. That sort of thing was only for pricks like Nick Regan.
“Do I have to?” I asked it.
“Yeah, you fucking do,” it said.
So I did.
It wasn’t as easy as all that, of course. This was the early Nineties and everything had been cracked down on hard by then. In those days you had to go somewhere proper nasty to find a dealer, or a “pusher” as they were still called back then. I ended up in the sort of dodgy estate I would never normally have set foot in, wearing my biggest parka to make myself look bigger than I was and trying to act like I hung around in places like that all the time. I was shitting myself, to be perfectly honest with you, and wondering why the fuck I was doing this.
Already I was starting to notice that when the Burned Man really insisted I do something, I did it. If that was the price of the knowledge I craved, then it was a price worth paying as far as I was concerned, but I couldn’t help noticing that the price kept getting steeper and steeper.
Anyway, all that aside I eventually found a bloke. He was greasy and spotty and looked like he was about to throw up on my shoes, but he had drugs to sell. Heroin. Even the word made me feel a bit cold. In case you didn’t know, heroin had been the media’s favourite boogieman up until they invented AIDS in the mid-Eighties. I had grown up on all the reasons why you didn’t go anywhere near that shit, how it was the work of the Devil and one hit would turn you into a junkie for the rest of your life. Some of it was probably true, to be fair, but you know how the media loves a monster. Back then it was very much in my subconscious that you Don’t Do Smack. Except I was about to.
I was surprised how cheap it was, relatively speaking. I got what the Burned Man assured me would be a week’s worth for eighty pounds, four little twenty quid half-gram plastic bags filled with a slightly poisonous-looking brown powder. I supposed as a first timer I probably didn’t need to take all that much, but fuck me, that still seemed ridiculously cheap. It was no wonder there were so many bloody junkies about at that price.
What the fuck would Debbie have said if she could have seen me there, huddled in a doorway with this grotty bloke and buying those little bags of what he called “skag” like I was some miserable addict? Obviously I wasn’t about to tell her about it, but even so it made me think. I wasn’t about to tell her about the Burned Man either, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing that I seemed to be hiding more and more things from her. That was hardly healthy, now was it? Oh fuck it, it was done now and I’d managed not to get stabbed in the process, which was always a bonus in my book. I took my furtive little haul and went back to my flat.
I didn’t even know how to take the bloody stuff, but needless to say, the Burned Man did. A few days later I was cooking soggy cotton wool in a spoon like a grubby old pro, my arm red and sore with needle marks and my throat raw with the rancid vinegar aftertaste it seemed to give you. I didn’t honestly remember much about it except
how bloody ill I had been afterwards.
In fact, up until now I hadn’t remembered anything about what had basically been a lost week. This was the Burned Man dumping its own memory into my head, I was sure it was. The horrible little thing had been there, after all, doing fuck only knew what to me while I had been off my face.
“I will tell you ten truths, now,” the Burned Man had said to me as I nodded in and out of consciousness near the end of the week. “You won’t remember them, I know. But they’ll be in there, in case we ever need them. You understand me?”
I hadn’t, at the time. I was too smacked up to understand my own cock that week, if I’m perfectly honest with you.
“The first truth is that I will always fight you,” the Burned Man said. “I will fight you for the thing I can never mention, and one day I may win. The second truth is that you will never be in touch with your True Will. I’m your fucking Will now.”
“S’nice…” I muttered, and nodded out again.
It was still talking, but I was on the nod and only getting snatches.
“The fourth truth is that I will take you, if I ever get the chance,” the Burned Man said. “I will take you and use you up and never give you back.”
I wavered again, drifting in and out of consciousness. The Burned Man’s voice came back to me a moment later.
“The sixth truth is that I will make you do things you can’t believe you would ever even consider, and you’ll do them willingly. The seventh truth is that one day you might just save the world.”
I passed out on the bedsit floor.
* * *
I blinked suddenly, wondering why the Burned Man had chosen that moment to dump a fragment of deeply unpleasant and utterly forgotten memory into my head. More than that, I was wondering what the fuck the other five truths had been. And… one day I might save the world? Really?
I looked up and met Rashid’s stare. No time like the present, I supposed.
“Are you well, old friend?” he asked me. “For a moment you seemed to be… elsewhere.”
I shrugged. “I’m old, sometimes my mind wanders,” I said. That wasn’t entirely a lie, if I’m honest about it.
“Take care it does not wander too far,” he said. “We have plans to make.”
“No, we haven’t,” Trixie said suddenly.
She had gone so quiet I had almost forgotten she was there, but now I looked at her and saw she was very much with us. And she really didn’t look best pleased. She mashed her cigarette out in Shirley’s posh-for-visitors ashtray along with the other half a dozen she seemed to have smoked while we’d been in the back, and necked her whisky.
“I’ve had enough of this, we’re leaving,” she said.
“Trixie…” I started, but she just glared at me.
“I want a word with you,” she said. “Alone. We’re going home. Your friend here found us once, I dare say he can find us again another day.”
I wasn’t keen on just leaving with everything still up in the air, but she had the same look on her face now that she had got just before she belted me the other night, and if that happened in front of Rashid he’d know damn well I wasn’t the Burned Man after all. Well, most of me wasn’t anyway. That, and I had to admit I was feeling a bit scared of her, right then.
“Yeah,” I said, bluffing quickly. “Look, Rashid, we’ll need to talk about this first, you understand?”
“Of course,” he grinned. “You must confer with your people, as I must with mine. We will speak again soon.”
He had “people”? Oh joy, this just kept on getting better.
“Come on, Don,” Trixie said.
The three of us filed back down the passage into the pub. It really was late now, or early depending on how you looked at it, and other than Alf there were only four or five people left in there. Even Shirley seemed to have finally gone to bed.
“Cheers, Alf,” I said. “Night.”
He nodded and let us out, and I heard the bolt shut slide shut again behind us. Rashid turned and bowed, and walked away into the night.
“Home,” Trixie said. “Now.”
I trailed after her feeling like a naughty schoolboy being dragged home by his mum. We walked down the road in awkward silence. I kept mulling over the chunk of memory the Burned Man had seen fit to dump into my head at that most seemingly inopportune of moments. It must have done it for a reason, I knew. The Burned Man did everything for a reason, scheming little git that it was.
That was what had triggered it, I realised. They’re both scheming gits, I had told Rashid, thinking of Adam and Papa Armand, and then the memories had come. Was that the Burned Man’s way of reminding me that it was, too?
I walked beside Trixie with my hands buried in my pockets against the cold, the sound of her high heels clicking on the pavement all I could hear other than the usual background hum of light traffic and the distant wail of sirens that said you were still in South London whether you liked it or not. The sky overhead was overcast, reflecting back the dull glow of millions of streetlights. It made it look like the heavens were on fire.
Perhaps they are, I thought. If there really was some sort of cold war going on in Heaven then I dreaded to think what the sudden appearance of a war goddess on Earth might mean. If she chose a side, that cold war could turn hot very quickly. Suddenly I realised what Trixie was so pissed off about.
“You don’t like Rashid, do you?” I asked her as we walked.
“No,” she said in a flat voice. “Where do you know him from, exactly?”
“Well, you know…” I said, groping for an answer. I didn’t know the geezer from a hole in the ground after all, and I could hardly tell her that he seemed to be an old mate of the Burned Man who, oh by the way, is living in my head now and talking for me half the time. “I’ve met a lot of odd folks over the years.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “He can’t possibly be on our side, Don.”
Yeah, I had thought that was where this was going.
“Because of his work, you mean?”
She stopped and rounded angrily on me, her eyes catching the light of a streetlamp and seeming almost to glow in the darkness. She looked so bloody livid it was almost a relief when someone threw a brick at my head.
Trixie grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the way just in time, and the brick shot past me and crashed into the wall beside where I had been standing. Two tosspots in low-slung jeans and baseball caps sneered at us as they advanced out of an alley, the knives in their hands reflecting back the light of the streetlamp.
“Wallet and phone, cunt,” the nearest one said, reaching for me.
I saw the look on Trixie’s face and winced.
“Handbag,” the other one demanded, and gave her a lecherous look. “And then we’ll see those tits, love.”
Oh dear.
“I beg your pardon?” Trixie asked.
Oh you poor stupid cunt, that really wasn’t a clever thing to say.
“Want me to drag you down that fuckin’ alley, you slag?” he growled at her.
Trixie hit him so hard I swear he actually left the ground. The Burned Man roared with laughter in my head and I felt my hands getting hotter and hotter.
Shit no, not here! I begged it. We were in the middle of the bloody street after all, early hours of the morning or not. I really didn’t need some fucking early doors milkman seeing me set this twat on fire. I needed Trixie to see it even less. Not in front of her!
The little shit had his knife up now and looked torn between stabbing me and keeping an eye on Trixie, who had just smacked his mate into unconsciousness.
“Fucking wallet, now!” he demanded.
He really wasn’t too bright, this one, was he?
“I’d fuck off while you’ve still got the chance, if I was you,” I told him.
Trixie grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around, and her other hand whipped across and slapped the knife out of his hand and into the gutter. I think she broke his arm, I really
do. Oh well, he’d left it too late to do a runner now. What a shame.
Her arm came back again like it was springloaded and she backhanded him across the side of the face with an almighty crack. He slammed into the lamppost and bounced off in time to meet her fist with his jaw, and that was the end of him.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered. “You can’t even walk home in peace these days.”
She shrugged. “I lived in Rome in the time of Tiberius,” she said. “London isn’t so bad. Come on.”
We left the little shits lying there on the pavement. The time of Tiberius? Fuck me. My history isn’t brilliant but… yeah. That was a fucking long time ago. I supposed she would have seen a damn sight worse than those two oiks in the lawless backstreets of ancient Rome. All the same I thought that little bit of excitement might have been enough to make her forget what we had been talking about, but needless to say I was sadly disappointed.
“My Dominion said that Bianakith was doing the will of the Word,” Trixie said, as though we had never been interrupted. “If that will was destroying the work of this Rashid, then that makes it a lot more plausible than it looked at first. So the Word opposes whatever it was that he has been doing. If the Word opposes him then so do I, Don. It’s as simple as that. I do not question the will of the Word.”
“No, no, of course not,” I said, chancing a look back over my shoulder to make sure the two would-be muggers were still out cold. Of course they were. If Trixie hits you, you stay down. Trust me, I should know. “But, well… look Trixie, we’ve only got the Dominion’s say-so for that, haven’t we. You said yourself you didn’t believe it.”
“I said I couldn’t believe it was part of the Word’s plan,” she said. “I never said I thought the Dominion was lying, Don. It can’t have been. I just… I just don’t know. My Dominion wouldn’t lie to me, it simply wouldn’t. I suppose this just means that the Word is moving so far ahead of what I can perceive that it seems to be nonsensical, but what would I know? I’m just a soldier, it’s not for me to question. It doesn’t matter. If this Rashid of yours opposes the Word’s plan then he is my enemy and that’s the end of it.”
