by John Hook
"Mr. Case. Do we really need to do this?” He moved towards me, but without any great haste. I grabbed a hammer and threw it at him. It just bounced off him. He didn't even react. I knew now what I had only suspected. This was entirely his world. He controlled it. Unless I found some vulnerability in this ultimate glamour, as I had in Rockvale, I would not be able to stop him, whatever it was he wanted.
I decided to try shifting the conversation. "What have you done to Rox? You have me. Let her go."
"Rox?" It was almost as if he had actually forgotten. Then a wide smile that radiated evil in its most essential form. "Oh, you mean Katrina. Yes, well, I had to remind her who she serves. But don't worry, Rox will be here soon."
I couldn't help myself. I took another swing at him. It solved nothing and probably would have done more damage to me if I had connected. He shot arcs of purple energy into me, which spun me around and slammed me into the boiler. I crumpled to the floor and he slammed his boot into my head, pressing it against the boiler. Making sure I was watching, he punched Rox—Katrina—in the stomach and let crackling bands of purple light envelop her as she screamed, every muscle in her body twitching painfully. I yelled with all the fury in me and struggled but his boot held me fast. Then he stopped. he withdrew his boot only to swiftly kick me in the side, breaking a rib or two as I crumpled on the floor. The expression of almost carnal pleasure on his face was frightening.
"I have to hand it to you, Janovic. All this magical kung fu and you still prefer a good old fashioned beating."
Janovic moved off to a shelf behind the workbench and began rummaging around amongst stained boxes and bottles of rusty bolts and screws. Along the same wall, lined up with the shelves, was a row of ugly, rusty hooks. It didn't occur to me just then to wonder what they were for. He took down a dirty vodka bottle, opened it and took a swig. He motioned to me with the bottle.
"Would you like a drink, Mr. Case?"
I was pulling myself up painfully. "I'm good," I said without much conviction.
"What kind of a writer are you, Mr. Case? You don't even drink."
Great. Now he was going to get personal. I let it go. My only hope was to learn something about what he wanted before I became a proto. I knew it had to have something to do with this “use your power” stuff the little girl had been trying to get me into, but I still didn't understand it.
"What do you want?”
"Would you give it to me if I told you?"
"Probably not."
"You'd let me turn you into a proto before you would give me anything."
"I did pretty well last time, if I recall.” I smiled, but it's hard to look confident when you can barely stand.
"I don't understand you, Mr. Case.” He came up to me, sweeping me along with him by putting his arm over my shoulder and spinning me around as we walked towards the back. He smelled like that hadn’t been his first swig of vodka. It was darker back here. There was a door ahead of us and something made me very apprehensive about that door. "You, like me, have been afforded great power and patronage. Unlike me, you have no idea how to use it."
"A good thing for you, I would say."
"Why are you trying to save anyone in this world? This is Hell.” He dragged me into a dark back room. A grisly tableau awaited me. Gurney carts piled with young women and young men—apparently he wasn’t always choosy. All were wrapped in gauze, which ran red with blood from many cuts, all gagged and blindfolded with the same gauze.
"Look at these. These are souls. Those that run Hell let me do this. They want me to do this. These souls never die, they never become protos." His face had a sick expression, like a great connoisseur standing in his wine cellar talking about rare clarets. He returned to the here and now. "This is Hell. You've only seen the sham they show new arrivals. There is nothing good here, nothing to save, only power and pain. Look!"
Janovic turned and gestured. His purple light lit up one wall and then the room appeared to fade away. We were standing on the edge of a cliff. Below was a half destroyed city, the streets filled with demons herding, beating and sexually assaulting human souls. I had no idea whether it was something real he was showing me or some conjured sick fantasy from deep in his diseased mind. Like the urban King Kong in the shadow of the Empire State Building, it was too over the top to buy completely, but that didn't keep it from being disturbing.
"You and I are alike, Case. We don't submit to this world.” He was in full-tilt psycho rapture, his eyes lit, spittle flying as he spoke. The weird thing was, it was both creepy and funny.
"You psycho fuck! We aren't anything alike." I swung my leg around and kicked him off the cliff.
Unfortunately, it really was an illusion, conjured for my benefit. The whole back room thing may have been. The kick had no effect, and we were back in the boiler room. He held me hard by the arm, pressing his face close to mine. His eyes shone darkly and he whispered.
"You think we are any different, Case? Look at you. Your head is filled with these idiotic notions of honor and good from your ridiculous stories. But what did you do when you had the chance?"
I should have, but I still wasn't sure where he was going with this. I did find it odd that he kept making references to my writing. Back when he had first killed me he had mentioned my stories. While he must have known I was a writer, he knew more about my writing than I would have expected. Did he let himself in and get into my stuff when I was out? There was a creepy thought.
Janovic slapped me, my face stung. "Pay attention!"
He moved his face closer to me again and whispered: "What did you do?"
“Janovic, maybe you should just kill me. It's got to be better than your breath.”
"You slaughtered an entire town to get what you wanted. What you thought was right."
I stopped fighting for a moment. He could feel it and smiled, standing back a bit, lessening the pressure. He knew he had hit a nerve that was deeply buried.
"They were slaves,” I said feebly, hearing the unwanted defensiveness in my voice.
"You had no idea what they were. It was just that they would not help you. So you turned them into monsters to fight your battle for you."
"And in the end, I freed them."
"The end justifies the means? Is that your heroic code after all, Mr. Case?"
"No, but this is not a heroic place. This is a place of many bad choices, and I made one for what I felt was a greater good. It doesn't matter if it was heroic or ethical, it still doesn't put me anywhere near your league."
"Then do this for a greater good. How long will your friends last once I kill you—and this time I will entomb you here. Join me, and I will free Rox and let the others go."
"Join you?"
"Combine our power. We will be unstoppable in this world. You are stuck here. There is nothing you can do about that. I'm offering you an opportunity to at least be in charge of your fate."
“You can’t take it from me, can you?”
“You don’t know how to use your power. It is wasted. I can give you power and position.”
"And you are offering this to me because…?"
"Because it gives us both what we want."
"You are saying you will give me what I want?"
He stepped back confidently, letting me walk away from the wall. He thought he was getting through to me, which just showed how delusional he was. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to handle him. He was too powerful. I spotted the iron bar from the police lock lying askew against one of the cabinets and decided to go for a symbolic but useless victory.
"So maybe we can save time and you can just become a proto now." I swung hard with the bar. He just repelled it ineffectively into another corner of the basement. He was unhurt, as I expected, but was nonetheless angry. I had expected that too. I found myself suddenly flying across the boiler room, crashing into the shelves behind the workbench. When you came right down to it, Janovic was a craftsman. His medium was pain.
My head was
still ringing and I was having trouble catching my breath. I felt myself grabbed and thrown to the wall. I fell in an arc and hit hard, but at first I was confused by the degree of agony shooting through me. Then I realized what Janovic had done. I was held to the wall by one of those rusty wall hooks which sliced in between my shoulder blades. I wasn't up that high, but my feet were an inch or two above the floor.
In the corner, a blue glow suddenly appeared from where the platform had landed. Janovic noticed it and then turned to me with a smile.
"That? That's what you want?"
Without speaking he grabbed a broken length of rusty pipe and rammed it through my thigh. The pain was so great there were white flashes in front of my eyes. Even so, I noticed the blue light grow a bit. I felt something, I didn't know quite what, like something calling to me. Janovic went quiet, casually stroking the iron pipe that pinned my leg like there was nothing unusual about it.
"This isn't going to be like last time, Mr. Case. I'm not going to turn you into a proto." There was no emotion in Janovic's voice, no anger, no gloating. He could have been explaining the part B rider on my insurance policy. "In this place, I can keep you in pain pretty much forever if I choose. Not even the manitor can interfere. You are mine and you will be in pain until I get what I want. There is no hurry. We have eternity."
I felt it again. Something stirred inside me. Something that was new. But I couldn't make sense of it, not even enough to know if it was helpful.
I looked over at Rox. Katrina? No, she really was Katrina, fully now, in pain and withdrawn as I had first encountered her. In the days that had followed the battle of Rockvale, more of Rox had shone through, especially those last days working with Saripha. I would catch it in her eyes and a stray expression, here and there. As more of Rox peeked through, I found more of our old connection renewing in spite of my resistance. On that last journey to the manitor, it was almost as it had been before. For the first time, I had almost forgotten the betrayal for a brief period.
Now, however, there was none of that.
Janovic followed my eyes and his face twisted into sick satisfaction.
I knew it was stupid even to ask, but I had to. "Let her go. She has nothing to do with this."
"You are right. I no longer need Katrina. It is time to let her go. Rox has waited too long to be free again.” He turned back to me, enjoying my confusion. "You are, after all, her charge."
He gestured. Purple light, like flames, enveloped her. The chains dropped away, melting into nothing. Katrina's flesh fell away, leaving Rox, totally and completely, body unblemished, as I remembered her from just before I died. The dark, sinister eyes, the twisted smile, her glamour wrapping her in black silk with red peonies, like fresh blood. She floated easily to the ground.
"You see, I control Rox. I always have. Including making her go away, buried deep in Katrina. She is mine, always under my control."
Janovic backed away.
I felt a rush of emotions all at once. Fear, hopelessness and, well, arousal. That was the confusing part, and it had always been there. This was Rox, this was fully Rox. For all the anger and all the betrayal, this was the person I had fallen in love with. It made no sense and I only now realized this bizarre conflict. I'm slow sometimes.
Rox walked up to me, a teasing delight dancing in her face. I almost wished for the proto's sense of smell to remind me what she was, because to me she smelled sweet. She ripped open my shirt. I winced as the force of it agitated the hook in my back.
"Try not to let him die this time, my dear." Janovic leaned against the opposite wall.
"Men have such bad memories. As I recall, it was your enthusiasm that killed him last time, before I even got there."
She rolled her tongue over her lips as she brought her polished black nails up and ran them down my chest, digging them in just enough to draw blood. I winced, but discovered that in fact it was pleasurable. So even in Hell, guys can't control their bodies. She let her hand run over my groin and smiled at what she felt. I was lost to a chaotic bundle of feelings running in all directions.
"Hmmm. You like a little taste of the dark side."
"I don't mind your playing with your new toy, but I need to make this as painful as we can. He must give it to us."
"We won’t have a repeat of last time. Saripha was able to reach in and find me."
Janovic looked up, a little puzzled.
"Oh, don't worry. I'm still a naughty girl. The difference is, Saripha gave me tools to maintain control when you waken me.” In a single remarkably smooth and strong movement, Rox had the iron pipe out of my leg and had launched it straight at Janovic. He had his defenses down, energy withdrawn for now, apparently leaving him vulnerable. Then again, maybe Rox knew an enchantment of her own. Whatever it was, the pipe sank into Janovic's shoulder and pinned him to the wall.
“I’m no longer your naughty girl!”
I would have loved to have had a camera for the expression on his face. It wasn't the pain. It was the fact that he was no longer in control of someone he had previously controlled.
Purple flames exploded around him, melting the pipe away. The markings on his body and the rage made him look like a tiger demon. He sprang, grabbing Rox and, in blast of light more like a lightning arc than anything else, shot her to the back of the boiler room. She hit the pipe work hard crashing to the floor and sliding just past the platform.
The platform was glowing and a swirling funnel of blue-white light was rising up out of it.
I could feel the calling. I knew where it came from.
Janovic turned back towards me, but I was faster. I swung my newly freed legs up hard. I was not trying to kick Janovic. In fact that would have interfered, stopping my already painful momentum. I let the force of the upward thrust of my legs actually pull me off the hook. As my feet arced, pulling me into a curl, they hit the wall and I launched myself over Janovic towards the blue light.
Rox had blood running down her face as she reached to the platform enveloped in blue light. She had that same half smile she had had the first time I died. Her eyes had a curious mixture of excitement and determination.
"This is yours now. Saripha prepared me for this. It's up to you to figure out how to use this."
The calling. I felt the calling so completely. It was a hunger waiting to devour me.
Rox touched the platform. I could hear Janovic shout. There was a geyser of blue light that shot from the platform. The shining sigils appeared, unrolling like a blanket. I put my arms through and they folded over my skin like gold-lined blue tattoos. I landed on my feet, a man burning up with blue flames. I turned and faced Janovic.
Janovic looked completely lost for a moment. It was as if he had never even considered this possibility. I was piecing things together quickly in my mind, but I realized that his intent had been to take the power that now coursed through me for himself. There must have been a way it could have transferred to him instead of me, though I didn't even understand how it transferred to me.
Suddenly rage filled his face and he unleashed purple flames with criss-crossing energy bolts. The display looked dangerous, but all that happened is that the blue energy that covered my skin glowed a bit brighter. His energy flowed past me like a river. I checked on Rox. She was sitting back against a wall, smiling, but was in no danger.
I realized I could likely create the same bombast, though I wasn't sure how, and direct it back. I didn't. First, it probably would have had no more effect than his had had on me. Second, I wasn't sure whether using my power too much would allow him to steal it. I didn't think so anymore. He had been trying to get me to use the power, but that was before I absorbed it. I suspected, ultimately, keeping me from absorbing it had probably been a major objective.
The last consideration was that, now that the power had equalized us, I didn't need the power. And, frankly, I didn’t trust magic. Like Janovic, I preferred old-fashioned physical effort. I stepped up to Janovic, finding my center of gr
avity, and gave him a right cross to the face. He crashed back into some shelves, cracking his head on a pipe. He fell to the floor, reeling. That had been a bell ringer.
The look he gave me was momentarily haunting. My doing that had been so completely contrary to his idea of how the world—the world inside his crucible, at least—worked, that he almost couldn't comprehend that I could do that. Then the rage flooded in like a mask and twisted his features.
His skin disappeared and he became a being of purple light, energy arcing over his whole body. He grew, towering above us, punching a hole in the low basement ceiling. He rose up and up. As he grew and more of the building collapsed, the debris was held spinning over his head. Energy arced from his hands. It was a fearsome sight.
I wasn't afraid. I was pretty certain it was a bluff. In fact, I got a funny image in my head from an old cartoon where a cat and a dog were taking turns drinking PlantGro stuff and getting alternately bigger than the other. I thought of a pissing contest between Janovic and me like that and I started laughing. I did let the blue glow radiate out so that it included Rox.
The laughing, of course, infuriated Janovic and he sent a steel beam at me. I couldn't help the reflex to duck, but it bounced off me as harmlessly as Izzy's arrow had shattered on Janovic's head.
