Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One

by M. Scott Carter

  “It has been a while…”

  “Way too long…Don’t you wish it could stay like this?”

  He sighed. “But it’s not real…is it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  There was suddenly a knock on the hotel door.

  “Merde!” she swore. “What’s the point in hanging up a DO NOT DISTURB sign?”

  “Relax. I’ll get it. Maybe it’s room service.”

  “When did either of us have time to order room service?”

  His tall silhouette disappeared into the late afternoon gloom to unlatch the door’s golden chain. “Yes?” she heard him say. She sat up in bed, suddenly sure it wasn’t room service.

  She wasn’t disappointed.

  A man’s voice said something. He answered. The chain rattled and he returned, discarding the hotel’s white towel onto a chair. He pulled on trousers, and his shirt.

  She didn’t have to ask what was going on when she saw the man who had followed Jeff into the bedroom.

  He nodded. It was with such deep respect and humility that the words she had ready to fire at him for this intrusion – this audacity – died on her lips. She nodded back.

  “I suggest you get dressed, Miranda,” came her lover’s voice. “Something has happened. At Scission.”

  She already knew. Otherwise this silent, dark figure wouldn’t be standing in the bedroom doorway. She pulled the sheet off the bed, padded over to her discarded dress, picked up the trail of underwear – like Gretel trying to retrace breadcrumbs. The bathroom door shut behind her.

  10.

  “We must get out of the building, quickly,” the dark figure said. Only his eyes were discernable, as if the shadows had left that part of him alone. The rest was all liquid black. “The hotel is not safe.”

  “What about Scission? The people need help.”

  “We’ve dispatched a unit. We already know who the culprit is. They’ve opened a door.”

  Jeff looked down at Miranda. “One of yours.”

  She stared back defiantly, but said nothing. An apology at this point would have sounded empty. She wasn’t sorry.

  She wasn’t thrilled about it, either.

  As if to underscore her turbulent thoughts, they passed through the lift lobby with the sun setting over the city of gold through a bay window. Above the orange ball of fire, like a spray of diamonds, the long tail of MacNaugh’s comet flew. She turned away from it, and saw that he was looking at it too. Her heart broke a little more at the sadness in his face.

  The time between – a lifetime of lifetimes he had written to her – when? Mesopotamia?

  “The stairs. I don’t trust lifts,” the shadow said, casting a glance over his shoulder. His eyes were the colour of a Bengal tiger.

  All the Israelites saw pass their doors was a dark shape of a man – but the Egyptian’s first born saw those golden eyes in the night…she pulled her shawl tighter as they took the stairs.

  “My Pradas–” she said, bending to take them off.

  “Classical reference?” he asked, eyebrow cocked playfully. She loved him more for trying to make light of everything.

  Once she was barefoot they made good time, taking the stairs quickly. The liquid shadow in front spoke into his wrist in a language she did not understand. Yet it was a language she had once known.

  “Don’t get lost,” came Jeff’s voice, and she realised she had fallen behind. His hand was held out to her as they continued down the flights of stairs. Emergency exit signs and fire escape drill signs passed in a blur.

  “Once was enough,” she panted – panted because that’s what was expected.

  This time he turned his radiant smile full on her, and she stumbled, feeling her knees give way.

  Careful with that smile, Mister. You got a licence for it?

  “Now you’re teasing me. You never pass up an opportunity to have a go at me. Not for one second.”

  “If I did –” she began.

  “If you did...maybe things would be different.”

  “Maybe is the worst teasing of all...can’t hang your coat on a maybe.”

  Both became aware of the shadow at the bottom of the stairs, his eyes shining amber. “It will be nightfall soon.”

  She sighed. “Don’t remind me.”

  They followed, moving quickly through another lobby and outside towards a waiting car, its exhaust burning white smoke in the deep dusk light: the driver a film noir villain with a cigarette.

  11.

  Marleen thought calmly: As chaperones go, we didn’t do a very good job.

  Beneath her sensible shoe (the other had taken a tumble twenty stories down) people continued about their sunset trip home after another long day of making money and driving the economy. The main roads of Sandton were full of gleaming cars.

  She tried to turn to face the creature, whose long, black, serrated, hairy arm held her suspended over the traffic. One of the glass panes was broken in a jagged star roughly the size of a person. The creature’s bulbous head with its many eyes peered indifferently at her through the hole. The rest of the wall of glass reflected the spectacular view of the sunset – strips of a gold and purple sky and Johannesburg – like a cut-out of building silhouettes. She even had a moment to appreciate the effect of her looking like she was standing on top of the city. The long tail of the McNaugh comet curved across the approaching evening sky, reflected in the bulbous purple eyes that peered at her with murderous intent.

  “You cannot destroy me,” she gasped, feeling the furry rope-like texture of its leg tighten its grip around her throat.

  It suddenly pushed its whole head through the glass, breaking the city’s reflection into a million pieces. Shards fell to earth. The half-dead businessman, somehow still alive, groaned, his own human legs hanging over the long drop.

  “I am a Lord of Hell…and it will give me great pleasure to destroy an insect like you,” said the mouth in the dying man’s neck.

  “I think you’re confusing who the insect is here, Azazael.”

  The half-dead man’s throat widened – the tendons stretching, fresh blood trickling as the thing smiled. “Look down.”

  She did. There were four lanes of traffic going east and west, backed up and not moving at all. Their headlights were coming on in the fast-fading light. There was nothing unusual about this scene.

  “I–” she began, but was interrupted by the sound – clear even from up here – of metal screaming as it was tortured into new shapes…mingled with the screams of people. “Don’t hurt them,” she pleaded, as cars’ roofs began to peel back, as if a giant tin opener was working its way through the metal. The destruction continued in a ring around some epicentre as the ground rumbled and shook, and the tiny insect shapes of people scattered from their idling cars in all directions of the compass.

  “Witness the power,” Azazael’s mouth roared.

  The ground beneath the peeled cars spat up dirt and white dust. Pieces of machinery flew like missiles. Marleen had time to realise that these were coming from the underground works of the Gautrain rail system. Cranes with long arms creaked, while a hole grew in the centre of the turmoil, sand and tar and road falling away into the hungry mouth of the earth.

  She saw into that hole, saw the tortured souls, the people in torn business suits that had been flayed from their bodies. Carpetbaggers, travelling medicine men, priests and politicians – familiar faces of con men throughout the ages, all lined the long larynx of a tunnel that spiralled into the earth. Rows upon rows of them, each bound in tangles and snarls of barbed wire, thorn bushes and hooks, and all screaming with one voice.

  “ALL HAIL! AZAZAEL! LORD OF HELL!”

  Marleen looked back into the hateful eyes that reflected their own hell. “You’re not lord of hell.”

  “Save yourself! Show me your pretty wings,” the creature mocked. The grip around her neck loosened. And she was free falling.

  At that precise moment, the sun set – and the comet overhead lit
up the sky. A car with tinted windows, an angel’s wings on the hood, appeared down below.

  The world froze.

  12.

  “Say it. Say it again.”

  “You know–”

  “Say it!”

  “I…” His voice faltered. “Miranda…the world.”

  “Can wait a moment – a moment is all I ask.”

  “A moment we’ve been trying for so long to what? Find? Re-enact? We’ve got to face reality–”

  “Reality is the last thing we need to face…there’s only us…we are reality.”

  “People are dying, Mir…”

  “People will always be dying, just as they will always be born…we, on the other hand…I always think there is hope for us. And then I go away…what is it you said to me once?”

  “A time between – a lifetime of lifetimes.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you long for me? Far away in your kingdom?”

  “Every day of every human life. You know it.”

  “Then that is all I can have…for now. Perhaps next time…will be the last time…and we can be together…no more Scissions. Just us.”

  “I’d like that…Mir…the comet is gone…the sun has set…you need to go.”

  “Your keeper grows anxious…He always made me nervous.”

  “He does what he is supposed to.”

  “…one last kiss?”

  “For now.”

  13.

  “Freakiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Genny said, inhaling and puffing on a cigarette with a shaky hand. Her eyes kept straying to the human-shaped hole in the glass that hugged one side of the restaurant.

  The policewoman nodded in sympathy, writing down everything she said.

  “She just…jumped. One minute she’s got the chef’s salad in front of her…then she just jumped.” Genny’s young eyes stared into the older and more experienced gaze of the policewoman. “She just jumped. Smash, through the glass. How can a person…just jump?” she repeated. “What was so awful about her life?”

  14.

  The paramedics arrived on the scene, the ambulance making its way between cars parked willy-nilly, bystanders and rubber-neckers in the peak hour traffic, bright orange cones and the tricky rubble of a construction site. A fire truck could be heard approaching. Paramedics Thabani Nkosi and Jason Fouche made their way to the body of the old lady.

  “Mind there, please! Medics! Please, can we get through?” Thabani called, his voice seeming to awaken the crowd, which moved in a sluggish, dazed way. Jason had always thought that when people crowded they took on the hypnotic look of holocaust survivors. He planned to write a thesis on it one day.

  The last of the people moved back…revealing a bizarre scene. The blood made the new tar gleam like polished stone. A star-shape of it had splattered from the body at its centre, like an explosion frozen forever. The white-shrouded shape lay like a broken rag doll, of no use to this earth. Shattered glass glinted like eyes reflecting the evening sky. Both medics were young, but had experienced so much death in their short careers that they were already hardened to what they witnessed every day.

  This was different.

  As streetlights started flickering on, and the shadows became artificial, Jason bent next to the old lady, feeling for a pulse, even though there was no evidence as to why a pulse should exist. There was none.

  Thabani was trying his best at crowd control.

  “No, baba, please. We need to do our work!”

  An elderly man in overalls held his Zionist Star badge up like a policeman’s ID. “She should not be touched! She is not of this world!” he cried in a clear, preacher’s voice. His well-travelled face was illuminated with an inner light. “She is an angel of the Lord!”

  At least we know what you do on the weekends, old man, Jason thought.

  His hands slid under the body, feeling along – they caught on something. Jason peered closer…

  What he saw made him oblivious to what was being said:

  “…opened up…I saw. The sun shone on them–”

  “She didn’t even scream–”“

  “The Lord has spoken to us.”

  The fire truck was hooting its way through the crowd. People seemed reluctant to move out of the way.

  Jason continued to stare down at what was underneath the old lady. His eyes darted to her face – serene and pale, with a trickle of blood drying at the corner of her mouth. They moved back to where his hand was. He held a large white feather – a feather that felt like silk, spots of blood on its pristine whiteness, glaringly red. He moved her slightly…there were more of the same snow-white feathers caught in the blood beneath her body. And something else. The tip of what looked like…a large wing…

  15.

  The police report would later rule what had happened on the corner of Grayston and Sandton Drive as nothing more than the suicide of an elderly Caucasian woman. She had no ID on her. No record of her having ever lived in Johannesburg, or indeed South Africa, seemed to exist. All witnesses in the restaurant had put forward that she had sat quietly, eating her salad, though some had agreed that at one point a man had sat down with her. But this could never be confirmed or corroborated, as this man was not in the restaurant. Either he had vanished, or had never existed in the first place.

  16.

  The city was alive. So alive it ached in his bones. He knew humans had deserted its terrible heart in droves over the years, but there were others who flocked to its bosom. The city’s heart was both fascinating and cold. The wall at his back bit into his jacket. The breath gusted out of him in white plumes. The nights were so cold. It was amazing to feel again. He hadn’t felt this... human since Berlin. He was aware of so much – his own fear, the hollow hunger, the sirens, the alleyway with its stink of human waste, biological and material, the moans of people living under rubble not too far off.

  He had been promised a kingdom.

  This was his reward.

  He couldn’t even blame the woman. He huddled, arms folded in front of him. The chill was beginning to creep through his human clothes. He held up his index finger by the light of a flashing blue neon Vodacom signboard high up in the sky. He had only two left. Michael and Gabriel – both buzzing lazily around his head. They may save him yet. In the meantime, he’d save his strength and hate for his master.

  Someone moaned in their sleep nearby. A pile of papers and cardboard shifted on the ground.

  His eyes were large in the semi-dark he found himself in now. Above him, two fire escapes framed a black, cold sky and stars. No comet.

  Then he heard it: a new sound, nothing to make anyone too concerned. Not in this city. He thought of his master’s serrated legs bursting through the body – the doorway – of the businessman. He thought of the sound those large insectile legs had made.

  The sound he was listening to now was that of footsteps – but they had the distinct quality of heels.

  Woman’s heels.

  Prada.

  “Buster Leebs.” Her voice was velvet. He looked up, his heart locked, frozen, his body instantly covered in perspiration. An orange square of light had appeared above one of the fire escapes, and there she stood – a black outline of curves, one arm leaning lazily on the railing, the other bent on her hip. There should be no lights in these buildings…they’re derelict and abandoned, he thought.

  “I can hear you down there…I can hear your fear pumping through your veins. You may as well show yourself…besides, your pets give you away.”

  Despite the assurance in her voice, he remained frozen.

  “Very well…have it your way.” The silhouette turned and the sounds of her descent down the metal staircase matched the sound of coffin nails being pounded with a mallet.

  “What were you promised?” she asked, her voice caressing the shell of his ear as if she were right behind him. “Were the keys held up before your ignorant eyes? Your greed has fo
llowed you beyond death…defecting was your death sentence in life, and now here you find yourself…” She reached the bottom of the staircase, her shoes crunching rubble, gravel, old newspapers, plastic bottles. She walked slowly towards him, a swagger, a hip shot out. A street lamp caught her briefly like a gasp – she was naked, all smooth flesh and planes of seduction. She wore only the shoes.

  “Maybe…” she said, “maybe this is all my fault. In the end, I should never have left such weak minds in charge.”

  He was shivering now as she walked though the bodies of sleeping individuals, a shadow again.

  He reached out his hand – the one with the paper cut – and said only, “Mother.”

  The neon board high in the sky cast a blue light over her. Her dark hair framed a face he couldn’t see. She stood with one leg forward, bent, playing with her shoe. “You must decide, Buster. In Hell, it’s what we all decide. You were wrong…” and now he could almost see her face – see her eyes. “You were wrong to try and take away what you thought was mine. For in the end…it’s not mine to give. It all belongs to Him.”

  He still held his hand out…but now a tingling sensation was beginning in his index finger. And then the most excruciating pain he’d ever felt erupted – it was far worse than anything the Russians had ever done to him in the cell in Czechoslovakia. He tried to scream, but no sound emerged. His eyes looked down at his fingertip…he could see the underside of his nail in the blue light. Even through the pain he knew this made no sense – until the nail travelled up his finger, and the sound of skin ripping reached his ears. The paper cut had expanded out, and was now slowly eating his finger, skin wrinkling backwards over bone and tendons. Tearing itself off of him; a crawling beast of pain moving up his arm. The rest of his fingertips burst as skin and nails and knuckles wrinkled towards his wrist. His teeth gritted in the neon blue light.