by Jeff Somers
“On second thought, I will call you Big Bird,” Mr. Pell says.
I look at Lem. He just looks back at me. I look at Larissa. She isn’t looking at me. So I look back at Pell. He’s wearing a black suit and a bow tie and his white hair is curly.
I nod. “I’m Pitr.”
“It is well that you are so ridiculously large. I will need Bleeders to escape this tiny hell Fallon the Insanely Arrogant has driven me into. I thought I would have to waste this one”—Pell reaches out and grabs Lem by the shoulder, jostling him roughly—“but I am glad to preserve him for the punishments I have planned. You two will do. Come. I must prepare.”
He turns and starts walking toward the kitchen. Lem twists and follows as if he’s connected to the Archmage by an invisible leash. I don’t move. Larissa doesn’t move.
Pell pauses after a few steps and turns back. His face twists into a mask of rage. “Will no one do as they should?” he shouts. “Am I doomed to be surrounded by idiots and contrarians forever? By all means, plant your stupid, thick feet. By all means imagine I cannot compel you. By all means waste my time.”
He moves suddenly, something sliding into his hand from his sleeve as he turns and slashes at Lem. Lem doesn’t flinch or make any noise. He winces a little, and then a thin line of red is on his cheek, and Pell is saying something so fast he’s done by the time I realize he’s casting a spell. I start to rush at him, but then I’m just walking toward him. Larissa is next to me. We walk right up to him and then stop.
“Better,” Pell growls. “Now, you both will be dead shortly. As an act of kindness, I tell you this and advise you to make yourselves ready, whatever that means to you. I am not a cruel man. I have euthanized many in my time, but never cruelly.”
Mr. Pell turns and continues toward the kitchen. Larissa and I follow. I don’t want to. But I can’t not.
“Fallon!” Mr. Pell shouts. “That worm. He will find we are difficult to chase. My people have been chased, Mr. Mageshkumar. My grandfathers, my fathers, my mothers and aunts, my cousins. The Pell family was once a very low family, chattel, moved and sold and used by those who had the luck of money and privilege and history. And then, when we discovered the Great Secret, the Hidden Language, the Invisible Hand, the Pells became a great family. And we have been brought low again. There are no great families anymore. Just puffed-up enustari with delusions, like Evelyn fucking Fallon, who imagines he is our High King, or Mika fucking Renar, who acts as if we have shit on our shoes when we come near her. Archmages who think because they do not practice our ways, old ways, that we are savages and not worthy.”
I keep trying to look at Lem so he can show me what to do, but he keeps his head down. He watches the floor as he follows Mr. Pell.
“Come!” Mr. Pell shouts as we enter the kitchen. “Fallon and his flunky, that loathsome Cullendale woman, Beatrice, will chase us here soon. The spell is complex, but I know that son of a bitch is out there right now, pounding his elegant little hands against it.” Pell whirls and lunges at me. I let out a little yell and I want to turn and run, but I can’t. I am held in place.
“For what?” he hisses. His breath stinks and he gets spittle on me, and I flinch and I hope Larissa didn’t see. “For you?” He turns and gives Lem a terrific shove, sending him sprawling into the sink, ancient cups and plates flying, turning to dust before they hit the ground. “For him? I will leave both of you in this moment, bled white. Bled white!”
He whirls away again. Then he spins back, looking at me. But looking at my belly.
“What is that?”
The machine. I’d forgotten about it, even though it’s heavy. I did that, sometimes. Forgot things that are in my hands. It’s rule number three of why I can’t have a kitten. I feel stupid, because Mr. Fallon told me if he didn’t come to the penthouse, I should use it. But I don’t know how. And now Mr. Pell has noticed it. Maybe he knows how to use it.
Something strange is happening in the room, though. The walls and cabinets, everything, is crumbling. There’s a sizzling noise, and everything is turning into dust that gets swirled up in the air.
“Is that the Gisgudi Huldim?” Mr. Pell asks.
Lem’s eyes flash to the machine and then to me. I raise my eyebrows, willing him to tell me what to do. I can’t go against an Archmage. I need Lem. Lem is good with the Words.
Mr. Pell steps toward me, eyes on the machine. “Fallon is a genius, that’s certain. No one argues that. Intolerant of other ways of life, of course. Narrow-minded and high-handed and greedy with his knowledge. Has never taken an apprentice. Always looking down his nose at me, at us, at my people. Calls us savages and witch doctors and suku, cannibals. Oh, I know my nickname, the Mudsub. Oh, I know it. But this . . . the Gisgudi Huldim is a rumor. Something the great Evelyn Fallon was contracted to design and implement and then refused to deliver. Became suddenly conscience stricken. Fallon! The man who is building Mika Renar’s meat grinder, suffering conscience!”
Barking a laugh, Mr. Pell reaches for the machine and grabs it by the cover, trying to pull it out of my grasp. Nothing happens.
He glares up at me. “Release it, boy!” he snarls. “If Fallon was foolish enough to entrust a Fabrication of this power with an idiot like you, he deserves to lose it! Release it, or I will force you to release it!”
I don’t know what to do. His tugging at the machine doesn’t do much. He’s too weak to do anything. It’s like he’s not even trying to take it from me. But he’s enustari, and the next step is, he will cast a spell. Make me give it up. Or punish me for not giving it up. Or something worse.
Mr. Pell twists away from me, pulling the cover of the machine with him and staggering backward with the sudden shift of momentum. He drops the cover and regains his balance. I look down at the machine. Four keys, red, orange, yellow, blue, just like I remembered it. But I have no idea which one or what combination to press. Mr. Fallon only told me to come up to the penthouse and wait for him. He never—
I see motion in the corner of my eye. Lem lunges toward me, reaching out and slapping one hand down on the machine, hitting the yellow button.
The machine starts to vibrate in my hands.
Mr. Pell shouts, “You fool!”
The worst noise I have ever heard boils out of the machine. It starts off as an annoying squealing. And then it gets . . . not louder, but thicker, somehow. And it keeps getting thicker until it’s too much for your ear, but it’s pouring out of the machine and it has to go somewhere so it starts filling up your head, and it keeps coming.
It’s a yellow noise. It’s the sound of rot sped up a million times. I drop the machine without a second thought and jam my fingers into my ears. Larissa starts screaming. Lem drops to his knees and puts his head between his knees, pressing his forehead against the floor. Mr. Pell has his hands clamped over his ears and is bobbing his head up and down, up and down, his lips moving.
He might be casting, but there’s no gas in the air that I can sense.
I squeeze my eyes shut. There is nothing but the noise, the whole world is the noise, and the noise is horrible so the world is horrible.
I open my eyes. Lem is walking toward the sink. He walks like he’s in a snowstorm. Head down. Each step an effort. My stomach flips and I want to throw up. The sound coming out of the machine is the absolute worst thing I have ever heard in my life, and I want to keep jamming my fingers into my ears deeper and deeper. I watch Lem. I’m excited, because Lem is so smart. Lem is a supergenius. Lem will know what to do.
He reaches the sink, and he tears open one of the drawers. The handle comes off in a cloud of sizzling dust, and he crushes it in his hand as he reaches inside it. He pulls a steak knife from the drawer. I think maybe it’s going to dissolve into dust, too, but it doesn’t.
Lem reaches up to his face. The moment I realize he’s going to cut himself a new mouth, I shut my eyes again. I jam my f
ingers into my ears even deeper.
The noise from Mr. Fallon’s machine pushes into me. And every part of me feels like it is rotting, turning green and black and liquefying, and I can’t think of anything else.
When I open my eyes, Lem has stretched out on the floor and is crawling toward the machine. Blood pours from his face where he’s carved a new mouth, a ragged and uneven gash that shows his teeth. He’s moving superslow, as if a stiff wind was pushing against him, or like he’s in a pool of water.
The extra vibration of the noise has the kitchen—and the rest of the penthouse, and maybe even the whole world outside the windows—crumbling even faster, sizzling off into dust that fills the air. The moment is collapsing, and Mr. Fallon’s machine is speeding that up. I don’t mind. Anything that will stop the terrible sound is welcome.
Mr. Pell cracks open his eyes and sees Lem, and the enustari gets down on his knees like an old man, careful and slow, and starts crawling toward the machine, too. I need to move. I need to help Lem. But it’s like when I was sick when I ate that kebab from the cart on the street when Lem told me not to, when I was so sick I threw up for days and I found if I stayed still, if I stayed perfectly still, I was okay. But if I moved, everything ached and burned and then I had to throw up.
That’s what it was like now. I need to move, to do something. But that would mean I would have to take my fingers out of my ears, and the noise would get just that much louder, and I will almost certainly throw up.
But I close my eyes and run toward Mr. Pell, throwing myself into him and knocking him away. We skid across the crumbling floor, sending up a cloud of dust. Mr. Pell grabs on to me, climbing up on top of me. I try to twist away but I still have my fingers jammed in my ears so I can’t use my arms, and he climbs on top of me. He’s sweating and trembling and as he stares down at me, he opens his mouth and vomits on me.
The floor is shaking like it’s only an inch thick. I realize I’m bouncing on it.
Mr. Pell sits up, vomit dripping from his chin, and with a jerk of his arm has a blade in his hand. It’s spring-loaded or something. He looks down at me and his eyes are scary wide, too wide—
The noise suddenly stops. I want to laugh. The end of the noise is the best thing that has ever happened. Everything is shaking, and a deep rumbling noise is all around us.
Mr. Pell turns and looks over at the machine. With a roar, he launches himself at Lem. He crashes into him, slashing with his blade, and the air fills up with gas. It’s Lem, and I scramble to my feet just as Larissa throws herself, screeching, at Mr. Pell, knocking him off balance. Staggering away from Lem, he grabs her and throws her to one side; she skids across the thinning, bouncing floor and smashes into what’s left of the cabinets under the sink. They burst into a dense cloud of dust.
Voices, then. Mr. Pell and Lem are both speaking spells, fast, superfast, racing each other. Lem’s Words sound off, round and wobbly. Lem is bleeding from his throat where Mr. Pell slashed him. They’re both casting off of Lem’s gas, bleeding him.
I run, but my feet skid on the dusty, twisting floor and I can’t get any traction. Mr. Pell shouts one final Word, his cadence, and I can feel something powerful, something heavy in the air, as he dives forward. The whole place is shaking apart and crumbling to dust, there’s a flash of white light, and as Mr. Pell lands on the machine, he and it both disappear as Lem collapses. He just drops to the floor like his legs forgot how to work.
“Lem!” I shout. I am crying. I know I am crying and I know Larissa can see me but I don’t care. I scramble across the shaking floor and pull myself on top of him. He’s white, pale, and cold. His eyes are open. The deep cut in his throat has sealed up, pink and rubbery.
I say something. I know I do, but I don’t hear myself. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m staring down at Lem.
He’s staring up at me, but he’s not. Because he’s dead.
11.
SINCE I WAS SMALL, everyone told me I was big. Too big. Really big. A freak. I was bigger than most grown-ups as a kid, and I kept getting bigger. I didn’t want to be. When you’re big, you can’t hide. I lost every game of hide-and-seek because I could never find a place that I could fit into. Sometimes people were afraid of me without knowing anything about me, which always made me sad.
I tried real hard to be supernice, so people wouldn’t be afraid.
The only time I tried to be a bully was the first day Lem came to Hiram’s. Some of the kids at Mrs. Lawson’s tried to get me to fight, and some kids told me I should be tough, that I should beat on kids. Not for any reason, even. Just to show them how big I was. But I never did. I didn’t want to beat on anybody. And I wanted kids to like me, not be afraid of me.
But when Lem came to Hiram’s, I was afraid. Hiram was mean. But he was all I had. He was my gasam, although he always got angry when I said that, always told me not to call him that. When he brought Lem home, I was scared Hiram was going to make me leave. So I thought I’d finally take the advice of those kids. I’d be a bully. I’d chase Lem off. I figured it would be easy because people were always afraid of me, even when I was trying to be nice.
I didn’t know Lem was Lem, then, of course. He walked in and he was skinny. His clothes were falling off. He smelled kind of funny. And I thought it would be easy. He’d be scared of me. And when people were scared of me, they called me names. And then I got angry and did things I shouldn’t and usually got into trouble, but if I chased him away, the trouble would be worth it.
I crowded him. I glared at him. I didn’t say anything because when I say things, it ruins the effect. Hiram brought him into the kitchen where I was and then left, and I knew Hiram wouldn’t be back for a while. Hiram always forgot about people. He would leave and come back a day later and blink and stare at me like he just then remembered that I existed.
I crowded Lem. I glared. I didn’t say anything.
He looked at me for a moment, then turned and opened Hiram’s refrigerator. “You want a sandwich?”
I was confused. First of all, I’d never dared open Hiram’s refrigerator. Hiram was short but he was stronger than he looked, and when he hit you in the ear, it hurt, a lot. And he was fast with his spells. Magic was amazing for a while, and then it wasn’t amazing anymore because Hiram cast the same spells over and over. One of his favorites was freezing me in place. When I irritated him or broke his rules or didn’t scrub the tub hard enough, he would freeze me and leave me alone, unable to move. So I’d learned to obey Hiram’s rules. One of those rules was not to open anything. The rule was, if it was closed, it was closed because he didn’t want my fat fingers in it. That, as far as I knew, included the fridge.
Lem rummaged in there and found some basic materials. A stale loaf of bread in plastic. A plate of leftover Chinese takeout. I’d never heard of a General Tso’s sandwich, but that’s what Lem made me and him. We each got half. I tried to eat it slow, but didn’t. Then Lem gave me his half, too, and he held out his hand.
“I’m Lemuel,” he said. “What’s your name?”
That’s when Lem became my new gasam, even though he always says I don’t know what that word actually means.
THE KITCHEN IS the last part of the whole world that’s still here. It’s thin and barely here, though. Everything is like a shaved-down layer. The shaking has gone down because there’s not much left to shake. We’re in something like a bubble, floating in nothing and about to burst.
“Pitr?”
I don’t open my eyes. If I open my eyes, I’ll have to see Lem again. I can feel the tears on my face, but I don’t care. I hug him close to me.
“Pitr, we must do something. You must ask the spell.”
I shake my head. Lem is dead.
“Pitr, you must. We will both die here, burro.”
Larissa puts her hand on my shoulder. Compared to the room itself, even compared to Lem, she is solid, substantial. She
is really here.
“Pitr, I am sorry for your friend. But you must mourn him back . . . back in the world, yes? You must ask the spell. Ask the spell how to escape. I am tired, Pitr, I am very tired, but I am ready. One more time. Ask the spell just once more. I will be okay.”
Ask the spell.
I open my eyes. Lem is staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling is just a hint, an outline. Everything is getting quiet and still. That’s bad. I know it’s bad because it means there’s nothing left to shake, nothing left to turn into dust. I nod. I have to ask the spell.
I wonder how I can save us all. And then I know.
I can’t.
BLEED THEM. YOU HAVE POTENTIAL, Mr. Vonnegan. You just need to get over your . . . phobia.
I remember Lem shaking his head. I remember he wouldn’t look at her, at any of them. Hiram had brought them in to bleed, so that Lem had gas to work with. They were sad. All three of them. But the one in the middle, she was saddest. And when Lem shook his head, I thought Hiram was going to attack him. You could hear Hiram’s breathing, short and fast. When Hiram breathed like that, he usually hit you. This time he didn’t, though. When he spoke it sounded like he was in pain.
Bleed them, Mr. Vonnegan. They will not die. They have been compensated. How much easier can you expect me to make it for you?
Lem shook his head again, then looked up. Looked at me. His eyes were shining. He said, No. When Hiram moved, Lem flinched, but he kept looking at me and smiled a little.
Later, after Hiram had calmed down and paid the girls to leave, after he’d locked us in the bathroom and walked around shouting for a while, Lem said I could sleep in the bathtub. I didn’t want to. I hated bathtubs. He lay on the floor in the dark and said, We don’t do it, Magsie. Let the rest of these vampires bleed people. Let the rest of them suck the life out of people too desperate or too stupid. Not us. We ride our own gas, or we don’t ride at all.
