Devil in the Wires

by Tim Lees

  “Psycho.”

  “You,” he said, “don’t get to say shit.”

  He turned away from me. He ran a finger up his arm, smearing blood. He licked his hand. Then he looked back and met my eye.

  “An’ just in case you’re wondering—­this ain’t no big hurt. Ain’t serious.” He pushed a grin onto his face. “Just a little . . . chum in the water, see? Fetch the big fish here. Y’know?”

  I had covered half the room, the cables glittering with frost.

  Half the room, and still no power.

  The time was wrong. Woollard should have got back. I should have finished the setup. I should have been able to reach Gotowski—­

  “I knew it,” he was saying. “Always knew it. Knew how it’d go. Way, way back, see, he was whispering into my ear—­the voice of God—­telling me—­letting me know that I was special. Oh, I didn’t get it back then, maybe. But I get it now, oh yeah. I get it now—­”

  “He isn’t interested in you,” I said.

  “No? No?” He made a sweeping gesture, seeming to take in not just the hall but the whole world. “He can reach out, touch me. He was still back in Iraq those days, but I could feel him, even then. He reached out to me. Now, I reach out to him.” He put his head forward, confidingly. “He’s a good dog, Assur. Comes when I call . . .”

  He straightened up, flexed his shoulders.

  “I give him what he wants, see. Rest of you get all loved up, all excited. But that’s just appetizer. I’m the one—­I give him the T-­bone. I give him the meat, you know?”

  I could see the walls of the lobby, I could see where the plug socket had been taken out, I could see the EXIT sign over the doors. But there was somewhere else, too, the place that Benedict had called the old land. It wasn’t like a double exposure. It was more as if they were both there, but it took a shift of focus to move from one to the other. I tried to keep the hospital lobby in mind, but as the shadows darkened, that grew harder and harder. I heard the low moan of the wind, the rustle of the trees . . .

  “Angel. She told you stuff, I bet. Thinks she knows me. Well, she doesn’t. But I know her.”

  I hugged myself. It was summer. I knew that it was summer, the heat of a Chicago summer, I knew what that was like . . .

  Now I was shivering. Shaking, chilled to the bone.

  Woollard should have been back. Someone should have been back.

  “Ever hurt a person, Field Op? Ever do that?”

  “Maybe.” I hooked up another cable, unspooling it across the floor. He watched me. He must have known what I was doing, but he didn’t try to stop me. That worried me even more.

  “When you hurt someone, you feel the power in you. It makes you strong, right? You know that. Every kid knows that. Every kid in every schoolyard, all over the world, huh? The hurter gets the strength, the hurtee just gets weaker, every time. Hurt makes you strong. So we just call down the God of Hurt . . .”

  “Then what?”

  There was snow blowing across the tiled floor. Loose snow, building up around the cables. I brushed at it and it wasn’t there and then it was again.

  Gotowski watched me. He was amused.

  “Hard to make out, huh?” He said, “We buried the whole damn city under snow. Ha!”

  “You caused the blizzard? Or you’re going to tell me that you did.”

  “Snow in June. Yeah. Took some work, that one. That was a kinda two-­for-­one deal, there. Some bitch first, then our man Louis. One of our own. Gave it an edge, I think, that, huh? Pushed it just that one step further. God liked that. Yeah—­licked his lips at that one. And he reached right back into the past. He brought the fucking Ice Age to Chicago! You know what I thought, that day?”

  I could feel it in the air, something coming closer, closer. I remembered Iraq. That same edge. On impulse, I moved the cables out towards the wall.

  “That day—­I was living in this shit-­hole dump in Gauge Park. Felt the temperature go down. And I got myself up, I walked out, T-­shirt, jeans, and the snow fell in my hair and on my face and I thought—­yeah. I did this. I got a message from a god. I did it. A fucking god, you know? He paid attention to me. He sat up and he answered me. You know what that’s like? Huh? You know?”

  “Yeah. Actually, I do.”

  He grunted. He let me work a little longer. Then he said, “And you bottle ’em up and take ’em back to your lords and masters. Your Mr. Shailer, for a start: here you are sir, thank you sir, thank you. Fuck that.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “And Angel. She tell you ’bout me, did she? Huh?”

  “She told me.”

  “Some of it. Not all, I bet.”

  “She told me.”

  “Soon as—­soon as I knew she was Registry, I just thought, sweet! ’Cause the idea was with me even then. I knew, just didn’t know I knew. See what I mean? I’ll—­hey.” A sly smile crossed his face. “Here’s Angel for you, then.” He put his head back, closed his eyes, and in a soft, urgent falsetto, gasped, “Oh! Oh Paul! Oh-­oh-­oh-­oh—­”

  I stared at him. He grinned.

  “Sound familiar, huh?”

  Something rattled in the walls, in the trees, a sound like the world shaking.

  “You’re angry now, Chris! Oh, he sure likes that!”

  I thought about the switchblade, and I looked around for something I could use against him: a metal bar, a piece of wood—­anything. I looked around, suddenly really wanting to do him harm.

  And the air shook, and something roared and boomed deep within the building, and the wind tore at my hair and the cold burned my skin. I no longer knew the time, or the year, or whether it was now or twenty thousand years ago, or some conflation of the two.

  And that was when the god came down.

  Chapter 75

  The Beating

  There was pressure in the room. I felt it in my skull. My cheekbones ached. Little spots of brightness danced across my eyes, and I blinked, trying to clear my sight. I fastened one more cable. By then, an awful sound had started up behind me, at first a rustling, hissing, then a kind of insect drone that grew and grew until it sounded like a landslide, as if the whole building were falling down around me. I shivered and arched my back against the noise.

  It receded suddenly—­not quieting so much as retreating, vanishing into the distance. Stars twinkled in my vision and would not be blinked away. A dozen tiny silver points, wriggling like fish across my sight. I tumbled forwards, and my hands slid on the tiled floor, and the floor itself appeared to bend and melt, then gave way suddenly so that I plunged headlong, the stars exploding all around me, vanishing, swallowed by the dark.

  I can’t have been out long. When I came to, my head was pressed against the floor. I couldn’t lift it. Something was pressing on it, crushing it.

  I waved my arms. I slapped my hand against the tiles. I yelled out.

  Gotowski’s tennis shoe was right in front of me.

  His knee was on my head. I felt the weight change as he slowly shifted position, crushing me, holding me.

  There was noise still—­that dreadful, background susurrus—­but he leaned close, and spoke into my ear.

  “You’re waiting for them, right?”

  “What? What—­” I raised my hand, catching at his clothes, straining to push him off. But he’d planned it well: I couldn’t get the grip, I couldn’t get the leverage. With no trouble at all he seized my arm and pushed it to the floor.

  “Your friends. You’re wondering when they’re coming back. Why they’ve been gone so long. Right?”

  I heard the switchblade flick, a nasty, intimate little sound.

  “Well,” he said. “This is the thing. They’re outside now. They’re right outside. They’re stepping through the shrubbery.”

  He pressed the cold edge of the blade against my ne
ck.

  “There is just one snag.” He stroked the point up, over my chin, across my lips. He drew patterns with it on my cheek, and I remembered the cuts on Dayling’s arms, the curves and crosses carved there. “The way things are, see—­there being a god here, on my side . . . it might take ’em, oh, a day or two to get inside. Time’s flowing different, here and there . . .” The knife point suddenly dug down. I yelled, I jerked. “And by then—­well. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Field Op, I think you’ll be past caring, right? Past saving, anyhow.”

  Again I struggled, pushed at him. I tried to get my head from under his knee. I felt my hair rip. I felt my ear bend backwards. Blood was running down my face now, hot against my skin. He took my arm, the injured one, got a firm grip, almost as if he were choosing firewood. Then he wrenched it, twisted it.

  I screamed.

  I couldn’t help myself. The pain ran through me and it took out everything else. I threshed and bucked in its grip, and there was nothing else in life except that pain, that agony—­

  He let me go.

  I fell back, gasping, my whole arm on fire. I knew I had to get away. With my other hand, I slapped the floor. I scrabbled onto all fours, tried to gain my feet, fell—­

  Gotowski reared over me. He sang, a cracked falsetto:

  Nowhere to run to, baby

  Nowhere to hi-­ide—­

  He snapped his fingers, swung his long, thin body back and forth in time.

  There were others with him now. The big, bald man. The longhair from the butcher’s room. Both of them, stepping up behind him. And the god Assur, who arched up over all of us, swelling and stretching from some point at the rear of the hall.

  The air swam. I could hardly focus. Shadows without objects slipped across the walls, the floor, threatening at any moment to solidify into—­what? Something grotesque, terrifying, beautiful. I cringed. Back in the Beach House I had seen him in intelligible forms: the lion, the scorpion, the throat with teeth. He’d pantomimed for me, he’d mimicked my own fantasies, he’d let me see him in a way that I could understand. Just fragments, fractions of a whole. Here, though, there was no such obligation. Simply to look at him was like having a tidal wave cascade into my brain. It was devastating, utterly disabling. The information was too dense, too strange. I tried to hide my face from it. Again, I caught the stink of cat, but mingled now with other smells, pungent, chemical airs that stung my nose, inflamed my sinuses. A constant chittering and buzzing filled my ears, growing louder as I fixed on it. But noticing it offered it a hold in my mind. A rapid drumming sound, initially dysrhythmic, but soon developing a complex and repeated pulse, a beat as of some huge, alien bloodstream, even now flowing around me, unseen within the air itself . . . He was growing. Growing inside himself, ever more complex, more involved . . . evolving, right before my eyes.

  Snowflakes flurried, caught up in its currents. Waves of air rushed over me, the icy wind pricking my skin, making it burn . . . Blood spattered my shirtsleeve. Whichever way I moved, I hurt. I lay there and the wind passed over me and the god looked down and the man with the shaved head ran up and his boot went thunk into my belly and I doubled over and my guts heaved up and I tasted burning in my throat and puked over the tiles—­

  Gotwski spurred him on.

  “Again!” he said. “Again!”

  The big man kicked. He kicked and kicked. I curled up, turning round and round, struggling to protect my face, my gut, my genitals.

  Then that, too, stopped, just as the assault from Gotowski had.

  I saw the pattern of it then. Brutal beating, brief reprieve, the victim helpless, torturer entranced . . .

  I took a breath and it was like a knife blade dug itself between my ribs. I pressed my hands against the floor. I pushed with my feet. I looked up, and I saw the bald man, and it was like a fire blazed through him, every nerve alight, and even though I knew this must be an illusion, or a trick of perception, I watched the fire racing through him, lighting up his limbs, pulsing in his chest, then slowly fading, sinking back into the flesh, the bone, and softly dying . . .

  Every blow he’d struck against me. Every time I’d screamed or moaned. Every time I suffered, that flame would brighten, burn.

  I pushed myself away. I used my hands, my legs. I rolled. I fell against the wall.

  And the third of them was on me.

  I could smell the bad-­meat stink of him, sour and sick. He came up hard and fast, but now I’d got the wall behind me. I blocked him with my good arm. I didn’t have much time. I knew that. My strength was draining out of me. I folded up. He kicked and caught me just below the knee. My whole leg shook. The pain went jolting through me, almost unbearable. He swung back for a second blow and this time, with my good leg, I pushed myself off the wall. I flung myself at him. I wrapped both arms around his ankle and I rolled, quickly.

  He went down. He smacked against the tiles. I heard the breath go out of him. Gotowski was back. I saw him coming, but now a fury filled me. I was on my feet. The rage gave me strength, determination—­hatred. This sleazy little wife beater, this scum, this no one, elevated by the power of a god. I practically fell on him. We grappled. I hit him. I clung to him, used him to hold myself up. I drove the heel of my hand into his nose and felt the hot blood spurt. We clung, almost like lovers. Then he kicked my feet from under me. Someone punched me in the gut. They were all three at me, coming from every direction. I lashed out. I crumpled, dropped to the floor. They kept hitting me. I folded, I curled in on myself. And something strange began to happen.

  The anger died in me. A great calm came over me. I felt the first few blows, but after that, the pain seemed to recede, and I felt like I was watching from a long way off. Things slowed, the long succession of the moments gradually winding down, until each second, each split second, became a thing all of its own, separate and self-­contained. There was no more urgency. There was no cause, no consequence. There was pain, yes, but I was far removed from it. It was like watching something in the weather, a physical process, the movement of the clouds, ice cracking in a sudden thaw.

  I was dying. I saw this. I could not sustain such punishment and still hope to survive.

  And in that moment, the beating stopped.

  I looked up. I looked around. And I knew that it had always stopped, that there had always been a point in time at which the beating ended, but till now it had been somewhere in the future, up ahead of me, a place I couldn’t reach. The world began to move again. I felt myself sink into it. Everything moved faster. The moments seemed to flow, one into another, fusing at last into a constant stream. I felt the floor beneath me. I felt the pain. I blew out spit and snot and blood onto the tiles. I tried to stand. My muscles flexed at random: shoulder, fingers, leg, arm. I saw Gotowski. His eyes were slits, the flame just pouring through him. The other two, the same. This was what they’d done. One by one, they’d render their victim helpless. Toy with him or her. Spin it out. Use feet, or fists, or implements. They crippled them. Use them up. Catch the energy as it came out.

  A shadow passed across my eyes. And then a new voice, a familiar voice, said, “Well, Chris. This hasn’t gone too well, so far. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Chapter 76

  An Evolving Power

  It was my voice. Not the way I heard it in my head, but the way it sounded on recordings, the way it sounded on my voice mail.

  It was Benedict.

  I saw him against the last light from the hospital doors. Then someone stepped in front of him. She came to me. She knelt.

  It was Angel. I read emotion on her face, but read it like a thing almost forgotten: eyes wide, lips open . . . I was still too distant, too caught in the god-­trance, but in my mind I named what I saw. Fear, concern . . . and anger, too.

  “Angie . . .”

  “Listen, Chris. Listen. There’s only me. The others can’t get through. I’m the o
nly one he brought in. You understand?”

  I tried to hold her. I wanted to comfort her, to make things better for her, somehow.

  My hand flopped loosely, tapping at her shoulder.

  “We’ve got power, Chris. We’ve got the power line—­”

  Benedict said, “A minute, probably less, these three will revive. If you’d still prefer I didn’t touch them—­”

  “Chris.” She frowned then. “What’s happening here? I don’t—­”

  She looked past me. She looked up. And caught her breath.

  I don’t believe she’d seen it until then, not really seen it. The mind blanks things out, deliberately misreads them. Skates over stuff it doesn’t understand.

  Assur coiled and uncoiled, folding inwards on itself, over and over, the folds always smaller and more intricate, and yet, as with fractals, each part seemed to contain the whole, all the multitude of forms the god might have assumed over thousands, millions of years. He reared up, drank in the light, drank in the dark. In places, the structure had become so delicate that it was marked out only by the snow that gathered on it, like a ghost outlined in light.

  I saw her look away, consciously refusing to be drawn in. And then she said something which, even in my weakened state, impressed me.

  She said, “The circuit’s not complete.”

  “Time’s running out,” said Benedict, clicking his tongue like an impatient schoolmaster. “You’re slow. You’re very slow.”

  Gotowski stirred. His gaze lit on Angel; a moment of surprise, and then a twitch of the lip, almost a smile.

  “Are you still,” said Benedict, “determined for me not to get involved?”

  Angel crouched. I saw her calculating, measuring. Judging the distances.

  Benedict said, “I can keep these ­people busy. The Old One, too, I can pacify, for just a little while.”

  Gotowski shook himself. He looked at me, at Benedict. “You’re—­what? His twin brother?”