Dead Jack and the Pandemonium Device

by James Aquilone

  “I gave Gandall the Tinkerer the dust, and he fixed me up with these canvas wings.”

  “Are they as good as the real things?”

  Camazotz laughed and flapped his wings, sending a blast of air in our direction almost as powerful as Zara’s sledgehammer.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “We get the point.”

  “I am reborn,” Camazotz said, standing straighter than an arrow. “Camazotz the Thief is back!”

  “Listen, Zotzy,” I said. “How would you like more dust?”

  18. Flying the Fiendish Skies

  The bat god had no problem carrying the three of us. He was so jacked up on good vibes, I think he could have circumnavigated Pandemonium with three pregnant krakens on his back.

  We worked out the matter of the stolen Jupiter Stone before we boarded Air Camazotz. He swore he knew nothing about the dead fairies before he took the job to steal the stone. When he did find out, he tried to return the stone. But the Duke caught him and, as punishment, used the stone to burn his wings and other parts of his body. Zara corroborated the story.

  Oswald the diva, on the other hand, had big problems. I keep the obnoxious homunculus around because he occasionally comes in handy, and this time he came in extremely handy.

  I had Oswald stretch himself into a hammock, which we tied to Camazotz’s tail on one end and around his neck on the other. Zara and I got in the hammock, and we all flew toward Monster Island. It was quite comfortable, I have to admit. Bat god first class.

  There was a lovely view, which I might have enjoyed if Oswald had stopped complaining.

  “A ghost ship would have been better than this,” he chirped. “You two are much heavier than I thought. I may never get my shape back.”

  I pulled my hat over my eyes and tried to rest. I was beat. “Stop whining,” I said. “We’re making incredible time, and look at the Broken Sea. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “What’s your plan once we get on the island?” Zara asked as she tucked her arms under her head.

  Oswald let out a shriek of laughter. “Plan?” he said. “Plan? Don’t ask about plans. Jack and plans don’t mix.”

  I pinched the homunculus hammock. He shrieked in pain. “Of course I have a plan,” I said. “I always have a plan.”

  “You have plans. They just aren’t any good.”

  “I have a simple and effective plan.”

  “Simple? They’re all simple. Effective? Nope. Never.”

  “The best plans—”

  “—are the simplest plans.”

  “I’m glad I taught you something, Oswald. The plan is to find the interdimensional baby before the Duke, destroy the Pandemonium Device, rescue the cats, and receive the reward.”

  “That’s not a plan. That’s a wish list. How are we supposed to find the baby before they do? Tell us that!”

  “You’re a stupid thing, Oswald. The baby will understand that we are there to help him and that the Duke is there to kill him. Therefore, he will make himself known to us and not them. It’s so logical it’s ridiculous. If the baby can’t see that, he deserves to die.”

  “If the baby dies,” Zara said, “we all die, genius.”

  “There’s one or a million things wrong with that idea,” Oswald said. “So, the baby is going to magically appear in front of us once we get to Monster Island? That’s a bit too easy, don’t you think? And maybe, if we ask the Duke to destroy the Pandemonium Device, he’ll help us out?”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous, Oswald. There’s no logic to that. Stop worrying. It’ll work out. It always does.”

  “And I’m sure it will work out in harming me.”

  “Probably. But you’re indestructible, so stop being a baby.”

  I listened to the beating of Camazotz’s wings as we sliced through the Pandemonium sky. Black clouds scudded by and the stars burned as bright as dragon’s eyes. Every now and then, Zotzy would dip or bolt upwards in his excitement, and I’d have to remind the bat god that he had passengers aboard. If we went crashing into the Broken Sea, we wouldn’t have to worry about rescuing any demon baby. There was a sex-crazed shark woman below waiting to literally bang my brains out, and if she didn’t get me, there was at least one kraken who’d take a stab at it.

  Zara remained quiet for most of the trip, but then, out of nowhere, she said, “The Duke killed my father.”

  Maybe she was bored or just wanted to get it off her chest. I don’t know.

  “Your father?” I said.

  “I’m pretty sure he did. Almost positive.” She remained on her back with her hands under her head. She looked into the sky as she spoke. “I haven’t told you guys everything. I met the Duke through my father. The Duke recruited him to build that stupid device. I didn’t know at the time the wacko had no magical powers. Neither did my father. But it makes sense now. He needed him to handle the Jupiter Stone.”

  Camazotz slowed down at the mention of the Jupiter Stone. I feared he’d dump us into the ocean, but he kept on flying. I noticed he sped up quite a bit, though.

  “I was so stupid,” Zara said. “I had barely been out of Witch End, so I went along with my father to the palace. This was several years ago. And I fell in further and further with the Duke. I thought he was intriguing. What did I know?”

  “He can be a real charmer,” I said.

  “No kidding. As my father spent every waking moment putting that machine together from the Duke’s plans, I went off with the dirty liar. He wined and dined the hell out of me. But we knew nothing about the IDBs at the time. I don’t know if my father would have cared either way. He wanted out of Pandemonium just as badly as the Duke. Maybe that’s why I liked him. He reminded me of my dad.”

  “How did your father die?”

  “In a freak accident with the device. Conveniently right after it was finished. The Duke said he had come into contact with the Jupiter Stone without protection, but my father was always careful. He had handled that stone for years without so much as getting a burn.” I waited for Camazotz to say something, but he only huffed. “When I began snooping around and discovered the IDBs, that’s when our relationship fell apart. When I tried to destroy the device, he locked me up.”

  “Why didn’t he kill you?”

  “First he tried to wipe my mind, then he tried to persuade me to join him. He promised to make me his queen or duchess or whatever when he gets to the Other World. But the Other World never held much interest for me. I was born here. I’m a Pandemonium gal.”

  “What about your mother?” Oswald asked. I thought it was an inappropriate question and was about to say so, but Zara said, “She’s still alive, but she skipped out on us when I was still a baby.”

  “Was she really a pixie?”

  “Yeah. Can you believe it?”

  I said, “So your father was a normal-sized human? And your mother was a wee pixie?”

  “I don’t know how it worked,” Zara said, “and I don’t want to know. How were you made? Your mother fook a corpse?”

  Oswald chortled. “I like her, Jack.”

  “Let’s not talk about mothers, Oswald,” I said. “For all we know, yours was a can of fluff.”

  “Come on, Jack, you know my parentage is a sore point.”

  “Same here,” Zara said. “Mom didn’t appreciate my non-pixieness and disowned me. If anyone tells me how cute and sweet pixies are, I’ll scream. Last I heard, my mother was shacking up with a werewolf in the Red Garden.”

  Before things could get any more awkward, the mountains of Monster Island rose over the horizon. Jagged peaks pointed at the sky like the fingers of an arthritic giant. Shadows lurked among the obsidian rock, which reflected the red sky of Pandemonium. In the center of the island stood Pandemonium’s tallest landform, Skull Mountain. A jumble of obsidian rock fifteen thousand feet high. Some say if you climb it, you can see the Other World from its peak. Others say you’ll be eaten before you get ten feet off the ground. Sounds of night and hunger howled across the B
roken Sea. If I wasn’t already dead, I might have been terrified.

  19. Monster Island Mash

  If the Broken Lands are Pandemonium’s hell, Monster Island is its psych ward.

  Wild and mountainous and shrouded in mystery, Monster Island was a no-man’s land filled with Pandemonium’s misfits, rejects, castoffs, and just plain weirdos. Chupacabras and cyclopes roam the hills, wendigos and bigfoots stalk the forests, sphinxes and gargoyles fly the skies, and headless horsemen and unicorns ride the roads. Then there are the monsters with no names. Them you don’t want to run into.

  I’ve had my suspicions that Oswald was born or created or spontaneously came into existence here. He’s about as much of a reject as Pandemonium ever created.

  Like most rational citizens of Pandemonium, I had never stepped foot on Monster Island. It wasn’t a place you visited unless you had no choice or were looking for something. Like trouble.

  Dark, frothing water crashed against the red-chalk cliff face at the shoreline. The Red Cliffs reached at least five hundred feet straight up.

  The coastal area looked as if it was once home to a lush forest. But everything there was dead now. Ash and dust. Burnt tree stumps with gnarled, withered branches. Rock and deadfall. Nothing stirred on the ground. I should have been happy about that, but it only made me feel uneasy.

  As we approached the island, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ratzinger. The bastard was on Pandemonium somehow. And he had found me. I could feel him. I never minded being trapped in Pandemonium because I thought I was a dimension away from Ratzinger’s corpse and the terrible things I had done in the Other World. But now the creep wasn’t a corpse, at least not a dead one, and the horrors I thought were long buried had followed me here. Ukobach’s words echoed in my head. “You are damned! Ratzinger is coming for you! Then you will know hell!”

  Camazotz brought us down, none too gracefully, in a small clearing about a hundred yards from the cliff’s edge.

  Oswald immediately complained. “That was the worst hour of my life and I spent six months inside Jack’s head.”

  “That wasn’t a great six months for me either,” I said and stretched my legs.

  After a bit of doing, Oswald formed back into his annoying self. “Have you figured out how we’re going to find this baby?”

  The place gave me the creeps. The dead trees seemed to lean towards us and thick, misshapen roots stuck up from the ground like the back of a crippled snake. The ground had a soft consistency, like sponge. It felt almost alive.

  Camazotz still hadn’t spoken. He’d been acting funny ever since Zara mentioned the Jupiter Stone. I thought maybe it had freaked him out. It certainly put a damper on his buzz. “Zotzy,” I said, “I owe you some dust.” I hoped that would cheer him up. Dust always cheers me up.

  The bat god looked around and smiled.

  “Can you guide us?” Zara asked.

  He ignored her and said, “Keep the dust, Jack. I have what I wanted. I am home.” And with that, he shot into the sky and disappeared.

  “We just lost our ride,” Zara said.

  “But I just gained a baggie of dust,” I said. I checked my pockets just in case Camazotz had stolen it. Thank Lucifer, it was all there.

  “We could have used his help,” Oswald said. “We’re going up against an army of infernal creatures.”

  “You’re such a woman, Oswald,” I said, and Zara punched me in the arm.

  “Remember, a woman saved both your arses,” she said. “We should head toward Skull Mountain. It’s the most likely place for them to set up shop. It’s supposedly the closest you can get to the Other World. They may have been planning to kill the IDBs there the whole time.”

  I didn’t like that idea. “We could be walking into a trap,” I said.

  “We’ve been on the island a whole five minutes,” Oswald said, “and the baby hasn’t appeared. Out of ideas, Jack?”

  I was about to punt Oswald when I was proved wrong about the ground. It wasn’t almost alive. It was most definitely alive. And it had decided we were for lunch.

  Long, gray hands extended out from the roots and tree stumps and deadfall, wrapping around each of us. They dragged us along the ground toward a vast, exposed root system, where faces, ghostly and tormented, appeared along its surface. They stared out at us with desperate, wild eyes. But their faces weren’t as terrifying as their screams and howls. A crying from deep inside the abyss. Full of despair and longing. And hunger. A terrible, insatiable hunger. Something even I couldn’t fathom.

  “Welcome to Monster Island,” Zara said and then began thrashing at the branches that had wrapped around her legs and arms and throat. The haunted trees had a hard time holding onto Oswald, though. Every time they grabbed him, he either flattened himself or puffed himself up and broke their grip. I was wrapped up pretty tight, my arms pinned to my sides. I tried to bite the damn things, but I couldn’t reach them.

  “Anyone know what this thing is?” I yelled, fighting to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “Hecatoncheires,” Zara said. “If they pull us in, we’ll join the other trapped souls.”

  Zara had freed one of her hands and went for her sledgehammer, but a root smacked it away and three more wrapped around her.

  “Oswald, stop messing around and do something!” I shouted. I had sunk to my waist into the deadfall. I couldn’t feel my legs.

  Oswald was now eluding the reaching arms by bouncing like a ball. “I’m kinda busy here,” he said.

  I fell deeper into the haunted roots.

  Zara closed her eyes as she mumbled to herself.

  Did Camazotz know about this heca-whatever it was? And double-cross us? If I see him again I’m going to rip his new wings off.

  Oswald bounded toward me. “Hurry, Oswald!”

  The homunculus was too late. A hundred hands grabbed me from below and pulled me into the root system.

  Though I heard the souls’ cries outside, inside was perfect silence. And darkness. I swam in empty space, cut off from the world. Was this the absolute death?

  A warm calmness filled me. I felt sleepy and at peace.

  It didn’t last long.

  The darkness shrank and the souls of the damned surrounded me. With open mouths, they spun in a circle.

  “Jack. You are so close now. I can almost smell your rot.” That smooth, thick voice. Ratzinger. “We are going to be reunited soon, my son. Remember the fun we had in Krakow? You never ate so well.”

  I tried to curse the Nazi bastard, but no words left my mouth. I moved in the slow motion of a dream.

  “Your soul will be mine again, and again you will lead my army. You were never much good at anything else.”

  The damned souls closed in, their mouths widening.

  I shook in the dark void.

  “Stupid Jack.” Ratzinger laughed. “You don’t have a soul. You have no place here.”

  The trapped spirits stopped spinning. Their mouths closed and then they began to shriek like banshees who lost their favorite toy. The darkness quaked and shimmered. I rose.

  Light burned my eyes. I looked down. I was flying high above Monster Island. I caught a glimpse of Zara and Oswald looking up at me in disbelief. The roots lay limp on the ground around them. Apparently the heca-whatever had vomited me out and died. I guess it couldn’t handle my soulless arse.

  I soared over the wood like a clown shot out of a circus cannon and kept going until gravity remembered me. I tried flapping my wings but no dice. Zombies can’t fly. Luckily, I fell into a river. Unluckily, it led to a waterfall.

  I dropped fifty feet into raging rapids and took a little water ride. I came to a stop when a jagged boulder body-slammed me.

  It was the second time in two days I had a traumatizing experience in water, but I still couldn’t swim worth a damn. I doggy-paddled to shore, vowing to buy a life jacket as soon as I got back to ShadowShade.

  A sharp pang of hunger tightened my guts. After my latest foray in hellish w
aters, not to mention Ratzinger’s head games, I figured I was entitled to a hit of dust. I reached into my coat pocket. Crap on a stick! It was all gone. No dust. No hellfire sticks. This really wasn’t my week.

  20. Interdimensional Baby Got Back

  I had bigger problems than being dustless. I was lost and had no idea where Oswald and Zara were. That probably didn’t matter. The success of the mission was going to fall to me anyway.

  Instead of looking for them, I set out to find the baby myself. How hard could it be on an island where everything was trying to eat me?

  The forest was thick here, but fortunately I saw no exposed roots. I took a narrow path leading away from the river.

  If I were an interdimensional baby, where would I go? What would I do if I were an itty-bitty interdimensional being with an attitude problem who was being hunted by two stupid leprechauns and a crazy human?

  I’m a baby, so I would look for my interdimensional mama. No. He’s not a baby. He’s immortal, probably as old as or older than Pandemonium itself. Still, he’d look for something, a proverbial mama whose teat he could suckle after his ordeal with the heartless leps. Back to the womb, so to speak.

  The leps are tracking him and bound him from leaving Pandemonium with some sort of magic. So…the baby would look for a way to unbind himself.

  Where could he do that?

  Where would the most powerful place on the island be? The nexus of power? The heart? The center? What’s at the center?

  Skull Mountain.

  Didn’t Zara say something about Skull Mountain? It didn’t matter. She hadn’t worked it out like me. She most likely took a blind guess.

  I needed to find higher ground so I could triangulate the location of Skull Mountain.

  Things—monsters I presumed—rustled in the underbrush and snarled. Every now and then something would bound through the bushes, unseen, snapping branches and making a racket. Then a three-headed dog loped across my path, no more than fifty yards ahead of me. It didn’t even turn around. A second later I knew why. A hieracosphinx—a creature with the body of an enormous winged lion and the head of a hawk—broke out of the brush in pursuit. It, too, had no interest in me. Moments later, I heard a pitiful whelp followed by the wet lip-smacking of a carnivore eating al fresco.