by Scott Hale
Helena took a curved dagger out of her robes and said to Hex, “How badly you need that creature?”
“Mr. Haemo?” She glanced at Atticus, and said begrudgingly, “Pretty badly.”
Helena’s eyes went shark-black. She put the dagger away. “Next time, bug.”
Mr. Haemo smiled until the sides of his mouth split. “I’m sure.”
“Look up,” the largest witch said.
And they did.
Above them, a pentagram had been seared into the barn’s ceiling. The intricate details inside it writhed, as though each line and cut had been packed with maggots.
“Don’t take your eyes off it,” the smallest witch added.
“We need to have a talk, Hex,” Helena said. “About the company you keep.”
“That means we’d have to talk about you three,” Hex snapped back.
“You ladies going to weave us away?” Gary asked.
“Hold on,” James said. “What’s going on here?”
“Don’t take your eyes off it,” the smallest witch repeated. “Or they’ll be picking up pieces of you from here to the Divide.”
The witches closed in on the Marrow Cabal. They wrangled them into a small a circle and stood at their sides, forming a triangle around them.
“Don’t see how you’re going to get much done in Nyxis nowadays,” the largest witch said. She put her hands together as though she were praying.
“Soldiers have a stranglehold on the people. Can’t imagine many will fight,” the smallest witch said. She went to her knees and put her palms to the ground.
“Might be some merit in letting Eldrus do what they’re trying to do,” Helena chimed in finally. She grabbed her breasts and tipped back her head. “Already the world feels different, more alive. Your kind may not like it, but ours are flourishing. But no matter.” She sighed and made a clicking noise. “Even to monsters, money is money.”
James’ hand closed around Atticus’, then trembled beside him. They’d seen so many strange and terrible things of late and this was what made him sweat? At this point, Atticus himself would walk through a den of werewolves just to be through with this cursed campaign. Maybe that was selfish of him—he didn’t think of life like they thought of life—but all the traveling and the speaking and lonely nights spent thinking of his loved ones was getting mighty old.
“Keep your eyes on the sign,” Helena reminded. “It has a sister in one of Nyxis’ row houses.” She smiled. “Quite the dedicated bunch you’ve got there, Hex. You’ve even managed to make Warren fall in line.”
Warren cleared his throat. “Don’t think I’m not still a little bit sore about you dumping me.”
“You were beautiful, for a time,” Helena said, voice gone dreamy. “You’ve all been good sports, but the Disciples of the Deep have been better. Bye now.”
From the lines of the pentagram, pale, writhing maggots fell and landed on each of their faces. Insects touching his skin, Atticus’ face went completely numb. The maggots crawled over his lips, into his ears, over his eyes. He tried to stop them from getting inside him, but they got in all the same. When they touched his tongue, they turned to garbage-flavored water. When they hit his nose, they smelled of flowers and the grave. And when they wriggled into his ears, they sounded of distant horns droning in the deep of a storm.
“Ah’ka’bukal. Ah’ba’kubal. Ei’ha. Ei’ha.”
Mr. Haemo leaned into Atticus and said, “Sound familiar? I’m not the only thing that sucks life out of the world.”
Atticus could only manage a confused hum.
“G’ba. N’ta. Agulafpa.”
The mosquito spat out something. “See how long it takes to wake when we’ve landed. You think this trip is free?”
Atticus’ chest tightened. His eyes glazed over, leaving the world blurry and smeared. His heart beat slowed down, stopped altogether.
“N’ta. A’ta.”
The barn dimmed to an apocalyptic dark.
“Ah’ka’bukal.”
His feet left the ground.
“Ei’ha navul!”
And then there was a line of light dividing the dark. When it opened, it took them all.
Atticus lay in bed hours later, staring up at the sister pentagram that had brought them to this row house in Nyxis. Outside, soldiers marched past, but they never stopped to enter. Hex had told him the houses were abandoned, boarded up. And since they hadn’t entered the row house through any window or door, those passing by would be none-the-wiser to their presence here.
Atticus had been the second to wake from the witches’ spell, with Mr. Haemo being the first.
“Took a little life from us,” the mosquito had said, in his original form, as he stared out a window. “From Hex and them, mostly. Shaved off a few minutes to get us here. They won’t notice. Won’t never know unless you tell them.”
“Guess that’s fair.” Atticus went to the window. “How do you know the witches?”
“They’ve always wanted to kill me. Get at my power. We’ve all been around awhile.”
“How long?”
“Too long to be sure anymore.”
“Since the Old World?”
Mr. Haemo hummed. “They all get old after a while.”
“You still think you can get me into the Membrane?”
“Going to try.”
Atticus tilted his head. “How much blood you need?”
Mr. Haemo deliberated for a moment. “Hard to say. That blood well wasn’t of the finest stock, but I’d been cultivating it for years. The fresher, the better.” He pointed to his chest. “I keep it here.” It started to glow, become translucent. A liquid coursed behind the insect’s carapace. “I keep it close and listen to what it has to say.”
Atticus nodded. He didn’t want to know any more about that. “How do you think Hex knows them? The Witches?”
Through the window, he noted several skulls painted across the street on a nearby wall. Beneath them, it read “Gravedigger.”
The giant mosquito shrugged its slender shoulders. Lumbering over Atticus, he said, “Woman like that… she gets around. And I don’t mean no disrespect when I say that.”
Behind them, he heard Hex start to wake.
“You trust her?” Atticus asked.
“Doesn’t matter.” Mr. Haemo backed away from the window and headed for one of the doors that led out of the room. “I can kill you all whenever I feel like it. Don’t need to trust no one.”
“Kill me? Wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
The mosquito ducked through the doorway. “You hear the witches mention the Disciples of the Deep?”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“A new religious movement in Eldrus. Wouldn’t be surprised if the witches fell in with them.”
“What do you think that means?”
Mr. Haemo shrugged. “Witches are already untrustworthy, so could be nothing. Or could be a good idea not to sleep tonight. We’ll see, won’t we?”
Atticus was still in bed, except now he was staring up at the sister pentagram that had brought them to this row house in Nyxis. His recollection of the conversation with Mr. Haemo began to fade as his eyelids started to flutter. Maybe it was the residual effects of the witches’ transportation spell, but god damn did he feel, for the first time since Gallows, absolutely exhausted.
The row house was large enough that each of them had a room to themselves, so they took advantage of their lodgings and split up. Maybe not the smartest thing to do, he thought, feeling fuzzy. But it’s nice to have a breather from them mouth-breathers.
“Hey, you awake?”
Atticus’ body gave a jerk. He tilted his head. Gary stood at the end of the room.
The ghoul came in, went to his bedside. “Sorry man.”
“It’s fine. It’s not like I haven’t had a good sleep in half a year.” He folded his hands across his chest but didn’t sit up. “Do you want me to read you a bedtime story?”
The ghoul�
�s ghastly face lit up the best it could. His skull shone with the dusk coming through the window. “Yeah, I want to hear the one about the asshole farmer who united the continent and, in the end, got the glory and the babe.”
“You find someone’s stash in this dump?” Atticus snorted. “Your breath’s getting me buzzed.”
With little grace, Gary sat on the edge of the bed.
Atticus scooted his head back. Wrinkling his nose, he said, “When’s the last time you took a bath?”
Gary touched his chest. “You’re going to make me blush.” He laughed, looked out the window. “The day I died, believe it or not.”
Atticus coughed and covered his face. “I believe it.”
“I ever tell you how it happened?”
Still he stared out the window, but Atticus knew what he was looking at no one else could see.
“I was naked as the day I was born. Kids were out back on the swing sets. Wife was in the garage, tinkering with something or other.”
Now, Atticus did sit up. “You were alive in the Old World? Didn’t think to mention that in all the years I’ve known you?”
“It’s not a memory I like to come back to.”
The ghoul finally pulled away from the window. He lifted up his shirt. There was almost no flesh left on his ribcage.
“You’ll be a skeleton soon,” Atticus said.
“Already am. We both are, in a way.” Gary groaned. “The Trauma is what did my family in.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
“Kind of. Not really. I don’t know. It’s a blank. Like, when you go to write a sentence, except half the words are missing. They’re in your head, but you can’t remember what they were?
“It was Sunday; I do remember that. Church day. The girls were playing outside. Wife was fixing up the car. I was getting all pruney in the tub, trying to shake off a hangover. Now it’s coming back to me.
“I remember hearing someone knocking on the door. Odd, but not that odd. We lived in a big neighborhood with a lot of nosey nobodies. I didn’t think much of it. Then the house started shaking. Felt like an earthquake.
“I burst out of the bath and ran butt naked outside to my kids. There was a cloud over the city, like a demolition crew had taken down a building. I guess seeing their dad naked was worse than that, because my kids forgot about the shaking right away and ran inside. Embarrassed them pretty good.” Gary stopped for a moment, closed his eyes, and held that memory a little longer.
“I forgot about the knock on the door. That was my mistake. If I hadn’t, who knows. Might not be here talking to you.”
Atticus whispered, “What happened, Gary?”
“She screamed. I had never heard my wife scream like that before. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever… I ran inside. My wife had beaten me to the front door. She was there, on the floor. Half her head was gone. Gone. Just, there was nothing left. And there were these people standing over her, with guns. They’d come in from outside. Thing is, I recognized them. They were our neighbors. And they were in their church clothes. Like, they were going to do this and then go to mass, like it was nothing.
“I thought about my kids. And the neighbors must have read my thoughts, because when I did, they shot me in the stomach. My kids were crying, then. Could hear them running down the hall. They wanted to know what was going on.” Gary dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. “I tried to tell them to go away. Not to come in.
“They shot my little girls, too. I crawled to them, to see if they were okay. At first, I was happy. Their faces, it didn’t look like them. The… I wasn’t thinking right. I thought, maybe, they were someone else’s kids. That mine were okay. That they had got away. But it was them. They hadn’t gotten away. There was just nothing left of their beautiful f-faces. N-nothing to touch or kiss. Everything just felt apart when I tried to hold them. Right in my hands. My little girls. Delicate as we always said they were.”
Atticus put his arm around Gary and brought him close.
“I couldn’t figure out what the fuck they were babbling about, my neighbors. Now, I know, of course, a million years later. They were Lillians. They were part of the fucking Holy Order of Penance before Penance even existed. I went to church with these people. These… god-fearing Christians. And here they were, door-to-door death dealers, going on and on about some cult and God.”
Gary sighed. Atticus rubbed his back the way he used to rub Will’s when he had a bad day. As he did that, he noticed the ghoul’s flesh had begun to change, taking on the tone of someone he’d eaten earlier.
“They said some words. One of them cut his hand and bled it in my mouth. Then they shot me again on their way out. I didn’t die. I should have. But I didn’t. The blood was infected with ghoulism. I don’t know if that person did it on purpose, but it kept me hanging on. Hey, maybe that mother fucker was the first ghoul, Deacon Wake. I don’t… I don’t know.
“For a while, it was like I was hibernating. I knew things were going on around me. I was aware, but I couldn’t see anything. I felt people around me. Police officers, paramedics. I could tell when they moved me. Buried me. Or maybe it was rubble that fell on me. It was dark, like I said. And in that dark, all I could do was think about my wife and little girls, and what I was going to do to the people who had killed them.
“Then, there were these awful sounds. After weeks of it, I could finally move, see again. And things were all wrong. There was smoke everywhere. Barely any sun. People were screaming, killing each other. There were explosions, and, again, that awful noise, all the time. Never stopped. It was like everything in the world was falling apart, all at once. It’s hard to describe. Hurts to think about. Like my brain doesn’t want to. I missed what started the Trauma, but what came afterwards was hell. No doubt in my mind. Can’t relive that for you, not now, I’m sorry.”
Atticus didn’t know what to say, so he played it safe and just said nothing.
Gary continued. “I was ‘hibernating’ for years. It’s part of the process, I guess. That’s why you don’t run into many ghouls.” Gary exhaled and got up. “I couldn’t save my family, even if I wanted to. But you can. And… if you can, then I think I’ll feel like I’ve finally saved mine, too. Atticus.” He laughed. “Atticus, oh Atticus. That’s why I put you through this, instead of putting you out of your misery. Selfish, I know. My wife always said I was, too.”
“I’m glad that you are,” Atticus said. “Though it may not always seem like it, I’m grateful.”
Gary nodded. “I hope so. Who would have thought we’d have gotten this far?”
“I’d go further, still,” Atticus said.
“I know.” Gary started to shamble out of the room. “I think Hex really lucked out when she hired you to speak for the Marrow Cabal. When you love something, you’ll give everything for it. You’re the only person I’ve met who I believe would actually do that.”
“I’m not sure I love this rebellion of theirs. Just using it like they’ve used me.” Atticus thought of something and then said it: “When I go into the Membrane, you think I could find them? Your wife and kids?”
Gary stopped in the doorway, his hand already pulling the door shut. “I hope not. And don’t tell me if you do. Get some rest, my man. Hex’s contact will be here in the morning.”
Atticus didn’t even realize he’d fallen asleep until someone stabbed a sword through his stomach. With a choking gasp, his eyes snapped open to the soldier of Eldrus who stood over him, impaling him.
“Atticus! Atticus,” Hex screamed from outside his room. “Get, god damn it! They’ve found us!”
Atticus grabbed the soldier’s arms and pulled him downward, onto him. The blade ran through Atticus’ body, out his back and through the bed. With the soldier up close and personal, Atticus plunged his thumbs into his eyes, and worked them over until they were white jelly. He spat blood in the soldier’s eyes, for good measure, and died.
Then, rebounding from the Membrane in rec
ord time, he ripped the sword out of himself and plummeted onto the floor.
“Take this,” Hex shouted.
Atticus turned his head. Hex and the rest of the Marrow Cabal were in the other room. There were more dead soldiers in there, too, and a few others in the grasps of Warren and the Deadly Beauties that were about to be added to the pile.
Hex threw something at him. He barely snatched it out of the air. It was a large, blue, slimy snail shell. The heir.
“Hide it! In case we get split up. I’ll take care of the others.” She went sideways and showed that everyone was okay. “They only want—”
The pounding of boots cut her off. Vibrations rocked the row house, from the other soldiers inside it. He could hear them, the reinforcements, heading their way. He took the heir, looked at his stomach wound. Holding his breath, he rammed it through the slit and lodged it inside himself.
“There’s too many. Fifty, at least,” James said, shouldering past Hex. “But we’ll stay if you want.”
Atticus shook his head, coughed up more blood. “Can you get away if they take me?”
Hex nodded. “Probably.”
He heard voices outside the other door to his room. “Where’s Mr. Haemo?”
“Gone,” Gary said, voice shaking. “There’s a secret passage out of here. Guessing he went out of it.”
“Don’t let them get the heir,” Hex said. She slammed the door on him and, behind it, shouted, “Listen for me. I’ll find a way to get you out of this! I promise.”
The other door cracked open. Tens of Eldrus’ soldiers flooded the room. Atticus reached for his machete, but he was quickly pinned down.
“Fuck you,” he screamed, grabbing at their ankles, clawing at their legs. He bit the hands that held him down. The bigger the scene, the better the chance he’d have for the others to get away. “You fucking bitches. You fucking Eldrusian whores!”
Someone punched the back of his head into the ground. His nose broke on the floor. Glancing up, the room was packed to the brim with soldiers. Each one seemed to be waiting for him to do something.
“Shackle him!”
Chains were passed around the room, as though someone had brought them out for show-and-tell. Atticus’ arms and legs were yanked back. With the bindings, he was shackled at the ankles, wrists, and neck. They finished it off by hog-tying him with the chains and kicked him on his side.
