Resurrecting Ravana

by Ray Garton

  Buffy walked on, closer now, close enough to see that the figure beside Rayne was a woman, to see that she was —

  “Mom?” Buffy cried as she broke into a run. Stopped when she got close enough to see the barrel of pistol pressed to the side of her mother’s face.

  Joyce was soaking wet, dirty, and there was terror in her eyes. Rayne had his left arm wrapped around her waist and held her in front of him. A shield.

  “Mom, just don’t move, don’t do anything,” Buffy shouted.

  Joyce said nothing. Did nothing.

  “Tell us what you want, Ethan!” Giles yelled.

  “I want you to wait.”

  Buffy shouted, “We don’t have time to wait!”

  “Just wait . . . until the process is finished. After that, anything you choose to do will not matter.”

  “If it won’t matter,” Buffy said, “then let my mother go!”

  Rayne grinned. “And let you do something I might regret?”

  “Think what you’re doing, Ethan!” Giles shouted angrily.

  “I’ve thought it through, Ripper.”

  “Nothing is ever enough for you, is it, Ethan? Not only must you win, everyone else must die!”

  “Not everyone, Giles. I’ll need to enslave a staff.”

  Buffy’s nerves burned. Emotions gushed through her: anger, fear, and horror at the sight of her mother at gunpoint. Ravana had to be near completion. It could happen any second.

  “Let Joyce go,” Giles demanded. “She has nothing to do with this!”

  “It would be tragic if something were to happen to me just as the process is finished, don’t you think?” Rayne asked with a laugh. “She is my insurance, Ripper. I’m not worried about that.” He nodded his head toward the spinning funnel in the corner. “There’s nothing you can do about Ravana.”

  The voices continued to grow. Cordelia put her hands over her ears and Xander and Oz winced at the sound.

  “Rama stopped him!” Willow shouted.

  “Rama had an arrow with a bladed point made by a god, by Vishnu. Those are hard to come by these days, young lady.”

  Buffy trembled, wanting to take him down with her sword. But not while her mother was there. She watched . . . and noticed something. Her mother was wearing . . . something dirty . . . something wet . . . something familiar but wrong.

  She was wearing Buffy’s long “South Park” nightshirt.

  “Rakshasa,” Buffy said with relieved realization, but it came out a croak and was buried by the skull-crushing cries coming from behind her. She pulled her right arm back, about to run the creature through with the arrow-tipped blade, but she couldn’t. It was her mother to her eyes, even though her brain knew differently. Her arm was paralyzed.

  A ghostly white face wearing reflective sunglasses oozed out of the darkness behind Ethan Rayne. A black-gloved hand cupped the Joyce-thing’s chin and pulled her head back. Another held a shiny black metal cylinder above her head. A sliver spike snapped out from the end of the device with a sharp ching, and smaller curved spikes protruded from that. With an exquisite whir, the silver spike spun like a hellish drill bit and drove into the top of the Joyce-thing’s head. A spray of gelatinous green fanned from the head, and the body collapsed into a heavy splash of it that scattered and disappeared when it hit the floor.

  For an instant, after seeing her mother’s double killed, Buffy’s heart was maimed, crippled . . . but just a moment.

  Rayne tried to turn the gun on the man behind him, the same man Buffy had seen in her house. The albino punched Rayne in the face and Rayne dropped like an empty suit.

  Buffy rushed forward, swung the heavy metal flashlight and cracked it against the side of the albino’s head. He staggered backward, fell.

  Buffy let go of the flashlight and dropped to one knee beside Rayne. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him a few inches off the floor. Pressing the tip of her sword to his throat, she asked, yelling to be heard over the clamor of voices, “How do we stop it?”

  He was conscious, but cloudy. His eyes half-open, he managed a smile. “You can’t stop it,” he said. “No point in killing me . . . I’m the only one who will be able to communicate with him. And if you do kill me, the Rakshasa will eat you alive within seconds.”

  She would get nothing out of him. He was a waste of time. Buffy stood, took the chain from her jacket pocket. “But Vishnu’s arrow worked, didn’t it?” She began to loop the chain around the arrow-shaped tip of her sword. “I bet there was a lot of faith behind that arrow, too, y’think, Ethan?” She made sure it was snug and would stay on the blade. “The faith of a devout believer? Was Rama like that? He had strong belief in Vishnu, didn’t he? And he was human, and the only thing Ravana didn’t ask for protection from was humans, right?”

  Buffy turned and ran toward the color. The fire was spreading out on each side as if it hadn’t even noticed how wet it was all around, but there was still a narrowing path between the pools of fire.

  Up ahead, the vortex spinning around Ravana stopped. The deafening cries stopped. For a moment, the loudest sound was that of Buffy’s running feet.

  The red shimmering glow remained around the still, silent Ravana, then began to spin its way downward. Fast.

  The heads were revealed . . . the shoulders . . . flesh and bone . . . alive and ready to rule.

  Ethan shouted in a strange foreign language.

  Buffy didn’t think her heart would stay in her chest. She pumped her legs harder.

  The Rakshasa shrieked overhead as Buffy shot between the flames.

  The twenty arms were revealed, the chest, abdomen . . .

  An explosion of Rakshasa hitting the floor sounded behind her as she held the blade out, the tiny figure of Rama attached to the arrow tip. She threw herself into a storm of heat. Perspiration stung her skin immediately.

  The eyes glared directly at her. The mouths grinned maliciously, lewdly, with anticipation. The red glow lowered past the thighs and knees, the calves, toward the ankles of the crossed feet.

  Metal met flesh, hard muscle. The tip pierced them and Buffy twisted the blade as it went in, taking the innocent-looking trinket with it.

  Ravana’s body stiffened as the remainder of the red vortex surrounding it glowed brightly. Maybe he underestimated the power of humans. The movement and screaming of the Rakshasa behind Buffy ceased. The vortex slowed. Buffy struggled to keep the blade and trinket in Ravana as he tried to push her out in his effort to survive. The vortex stopped spinning and slowly sank down into Ravana’s feet and deepened to a rich ruby color, which then turned a malignant black, and engulfed the Ravana statuette again.

  Ravana’s ten mouths yawned impossibly wide and black lips stretched back to reveal black-and-red gums equipped with fine, needle-like fangs. When Ravana cried out, the Rakshasa cried with him. New cracks opened in the walls and a front corner of the bus station collapsed; no one heard it.

  There was an explosion, powerful but silent, that punched Buffy back so hard, her lungs stopped working. She heard nothing, saw nothing; she felt her brain shrink to the size of a scale on a minnow, enlarge again, shrink again . . . in and out of consciousness rapidly.

  Her heart started beating again. Had it stopped? Or had she just awakened and heard it pounding in her ringing ears? She rolled slowly over, onto her back; her muscles told her how they despised her at that moment, how they’d all talked it over and decided she needed to be punished for a few days. Her vision was a bit blurry, but she looked around, slowly got to her feet. She heard the rustle of others doing the same.

  Giles called, “Are you all right, Buffy?”

  “Yeah. In one piece.”

  “Doubtless more than can be said for Ravana,” he said with the quiet satisfaction that softened his clipped words when he was especially impressed with her work. Looking around he said, “Phyllis and Rayne seem to have gotten out of danger’s way.”

  The corner where Ravana had materialized was black. The candles we
re gone, and there was no fire. Buffy went to the corner, looking over the floor. She turned her head up; no red eyes glowing in the darkness up there. There was no sign of Ravana or the Rakshasa. Even the Ravana statuette and its accompanying pieces had not been left behind.

  Buffy walked toward the others as Xander asked, “Can we go now?”

  “One of those things bit me,” Cordelia said, sounding angry and still afraid. “Would somebody please, please tell me this isn’t gonna make me turn into something! Because I probably don’t get to pick what, do I?”

  Giles straightened his glasses. “You’ll be fine, Cordelia. We’ll just need to treat the wound back at the library. There are, after all, bacterial concerns.”

  The albino man was gone. But another absence stabbed Buffy.

  “Where’s Angel?” she asked.

  The rain had stopped, but the air was cloyingly moist.

  Buffy was not surprised to see the white limousine outside, or the old man in the wheelchair beside it. Nor was she surprised to see Angel fighting with the tall albino guy with the sunglasses and the nasty lump on his head. What caught her off guard was the fact that Angel was really working the guy over . . . and he was coming back for more. With the others following, Buffy ran to the man in the wheelchair.

  There was a square black pack attached to the back of the chair. From it extended four tubes that curled around to the front of the seat and disappeared into the man who could only be Benson Lovecraft. A tube provided oxygen for his nose and thick glasses sat on his nose, which was narrow, a little too long, and ended in a lumpy, fleshy bulb.

  A shattered Phyllis and wounded Rayne slumped against the car.

  “Is that man a vampire?” Buffy asked.

  “Man? What man?” Benson looked around, his voice soft, low, and gravelly, wheezing.

  “The albino guy! Is he a vampire?”

  “Oh, no. He’s my chauffeur. But apparently the other one is. A young one . . . preoccupied, it seems.”

  “Well, don’t you think you should stop your chauffeur before he gets himself killed?”

  “He’s holding up well, I think. But . . . you’re right. Otto!” When raised, his voice still held power, even at his extremely advanced age. But the shout seemed to drain him, make him shrink in his chair.

  The ghost-faced man immediately turned away from Angel and hurried to Lovecraft’s side.

  “Put Phyllis in the car,” Lovecraft said. “In the back with me.”

  Otto went to Phyllis’s side, put a hand to the small of her back, and led her to the car.

  “You lying bastard!” Phyllis spat at Rayne over her shoulder. “The things I did for you . . .” Then she was invisible inside the car, lost in the darkness, though her sobs could be heard, stifled and painful.

  Angel moved to Buffy, put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her intensely. “Are you all right?”

  She smiled up at him. “Dirty and wet, but fine.”

  “I came out here after” — he jerked his head toward Otto and Rayne — “them. To keep them from getting away. Guess I was wasting my time. What happened in there?”

  “They destroyed my Ravana statuette, that’s what happened,” Lovecraft said with a particularly unattractive cough.

  Heat flared in Buffy’s throat and her knuckles whitened as she clutched the sword’s handle. She turned to man in the wheelchair and said, “Well, I’m sorry if I broke your precious little statue, but if you wanna know the truth, it was uglier than you, and it was about to —”

  “If all you did was break it, dear, then we’re all up to our necks in raw sewage, if you get my meaning.” Lovecraft smirked up at her as he reached over and patted her arm with genuine warmth. “It had to be done, and I’m glad you did it. But I wouldn’t recommend interrupting a process like that before completion. You could potentially rip the fabric of time and space and next thing you know, you’re an enzyme in the stomach of a warthog at the bottom of an ocean. And none of us wants that, do we? You have too much to contribute. Where is your Watcher?”

  Buffy raised her eyebrows, blinked. How could he know?

  Giles stepped forward. His face was thoughtful but alert, neither smiling nor frowning, but in his eyes, he was a little boy approaching Santa Claus on Christmas Eve at the mall.

  “Rupert Giles,” he said, offering his hand uncertainly. They shook, and Giles was surprised by the strength remaining in the man’s grip.

  “Benson Lovecraft. But you can call me Mr. Lovecraft.”

  “How . . . how did you know?” Buffy asked.

  “At my age, everything is in shorthand. Even me . . . whatever that means.” He smiled approvingly at Giles. He still had his own teeth, though they hadn’t fared as well as he. “You’ve done a good job.” He turned to Buffy again. “She’s got a lot of life in her. Not the usual rigid look in the eyes, with all the individuality beaten out of her by the council’s endless rules and edicts.”

  Giles’s face registered surprise. “You know the council?”

  Lovecraft’s wrinkles deepened and his rubbery lips curled up in distaste. “Yes. But don’t tell anyone. I seldom admit to it myself.” He coughed again. “We’re in different branches of the same business, Mr. Giles. My approach differs considerably.”

  “In what way would that be, Mr. Lovecraft?” Giles asked.

  “They do it their way, I do it mine.” He waved a hand. “Otto, kindly show Mr. Rayne to his seat in the front of our limousine.”

  Otto moved toward Rayne, who produced his gun.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Rayne snapped, aiming the gun at Otto.

  The tall albino casually slapped the gun from Rayne’s hand and twisted his arm behind his back in a single motion. Rayne cried out in pain.

  Lovecraft said, “Mr. Rayne, I once had my head trapped in the mouth of an enormous Egyptian cat demon that was hungrier than a Texas cattle rancher after finishing a meal in a French restaurant, and I’m still here to tell about it. So you can imagine how little patience I have for the likes of you. Your way or mine, you’re leaving in the limousine. We have some accounts to settle. I’ve found that most people prefer doing things their own way, especially considering how the opportunity seldom arises. So if I were you, I’d get my ass in the car before my fair friend here kicks it up and down the street like a crushed can.”

  When Otto escorted Rayne to the limousine, the Englishman was clearly unhappy, but he did not resist. Otto closed the door after him with a sound of finality.

  “I, uh . . . there, um . . . there are laws, Mr. Lovecraft, and as troublesome as Ethan is, perhaps it would be best if you left him —”

  “Mr. Giles, your friend here —”

  “He’s hardly my friend!”

  “My granddaughter is very special to me. She’s a sensitive, delicate creature who . . . well, let’s just say she’s not really equipped to make some of life’s more challenging decisions. That’s why she lives with me. I take care of her because no one else in the family wanted to, which was fine with me, because I love her. But somehow” — he pointed at the front of the limousine — “that piece of work got over the back fence, took advantage of my granddaughter, seduced her, gained her trust, and used her to get to something else of mine, so he could steal it and use it for his own imbecilic purposes. Now, if you’re concerned about that man’s welfare, don’t bother. After a brief stay on my lovely island, he will leave unblemished and pain-free, I promise. But I can also promise you that at some point during that stay” — his voice lowered — “he will beg me to kill him.”

  Lovecraft fingered a toggle on the armrest of his chair and wheeled over to the limousine. Otto accompanied him, detached the pack from the back of the chair, and gently lifted the old man out and into the backseat of the limousine.

  As Otto folded up the wheelchair, Lovecraft said, “Don’t forget to call ahead and have somebody waiting to wash off my wheels.” Once his door was shut, the darkened window eased down with a vague hum, and Love
craft smiled at them, turned his gaze to Buffy. “Good job, young lady. Remember, be true to yourself and to those who are true to you and all the rest of life’s junk pretty much takes care of itself, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But . . . I suspect you already know that.”

  Otto got behind the wheel and started the engine.

  Turning to Giles, Lovecraft said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Giles. Don’t take any rubber pentagrams.”

  The window slid up as the limousine drove away, bright white in the night’s darkness, glaring back at them with two large, red eyes.

  “Is that what we’ll be like in ninety years?” Willow asked nobody in particular.

  “Not if we’re lucky,” Buffy replied, sheathing her sword.

  Chapter 23

  ONCE THEY RETURNED TO THE LIBRARY, THERE WAS A good deal of bandaging to do. Along with the contents of the first-aid kit, Giles kept some back shelves stocked with enough gauze, tape, disinfectants, and aspirin to keep a small clinic functioning for a week.

  “So, it was magic,” Buffy said. “Right?”

  “I’m not sure,” Willow replied. “Maybe. Sort of.”

  Xander said, “You’ve gotta stop being so specific, Will. It’s gonna give you a tumor.”

  “Giles says magic isn’t something we do, but something we harness,” Willow went on. “Right, Giles?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, what if magic isn’t the only way to harness that . . . thing . . . that power? What if simple, perfect belief in something can harness a little of that power? I mean, you were right, Buffy, when you said Rama had to really believe that arrow was going to work when he fired it into Ravana, he had to have absolute and total faith in Vishnu about that arrowhead. Because if it didn’t work, you know, like, he wasn’t gonna take it back to Target and exchange it for one that works. Well, Mila’s brother is a very devout Hindu, he has that kind of belief, and he carved that stone into the shape of something he believed in that strongly. Maybe . . . maybe he left a little of that belief behind in his work.”

  Buffy said, “Or it was because we were human, and Ravana never thought enough of us to cover his butt from us in the first place.”