Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  Nicolette wiggled her tongue, frowning.

  I snapped my fingers. “Crap, I forgot to apply the silkworm oil. I’ll have to do it now.” I had forgotten, but I didn’t feel bad about it as I dabbed essence of squished silkworm and other foul substances into Nicolette’s mouth, coating the stud and a good swath of her taste buds in the process. She spat and gagged and cursed when I was done, which put me in a pretty good mood.

  I slipped the uglier pair of earrings, big dangly ones, into her ears, then put the smaller and slightly less hideous earrings in my own lobes, and slipped on my necklace. “Okay. The earrings are always on – the hearing is a passive spell. Speaking is active. If you want to talk to me, click the stud against your teeth, and speak. Click the stud again to deactivate communication. Let’s test it.”

  I went into the bathroom, shut the door, tapped the pendant on my chest, and said, “Watson, come here, I need you.”

  “Suck my balls,” Nicolette replied, her voice clear in my ears.

  “Even if you’d started life with balls, you wouldn’t have them anymore.” I tapped the necklace again to turn it off. Now I’d be able to hear Nicolette even at great distance, or over the roar of the motorcycle on the freeway.

  Oh, joy. I’d rather listen to a gossipy silkworm.

  SUNLIGHT SHORES

  I cruised into Phoenix early the next day, driving slowly up and down assorted streets and hoping Nicolette would get a whiff of something tragic and treacherous within the city limits. Sure, the sky’s still too big and the ground’s too dusty, but at least there are buildings more than two stories high, and the intangible pressure of a million and a half other souls in the immediate vicinity was pretty comforting. “Anything?” I said, rolling through downtown, past palm trees and glass buildings.

  “Just the ordinary sorts of chaos. Collapsing marriages, botched business deals, interpersonal catastrophes. No problems that can be solved by kicking, punching, or stabbing, so you’re useless. Certainly nothing supernatural. Phoenix does have sorcerers, you know, to take care of things like that. You probably think Canadians live in igloos.”

  “Damn it. I’d settle for a serial killer at this point.”

  “I could probably find a mugger for you to beat up, if you hang around until twilight.”

  “Fine. Let’s keep going.” I worked my way back to a highway, and in too short a time I’d left the comfort of the city – such as it was – behind, and it was back to two-lane blacktop, cacti, and scrub. The miles disappeared underneath my wheels. I figured we’d hit New Mexico by afternoon, if we didn’t find anything interesting before that. At least I could get some decent tacos for dinner.

  About an hour past Tucson, Nicolette was annoying the shit out of me by singing to herself, a wordless collection of high-pitched wails and vibratos. “What the hell is that noise you’re making?”

  “I’m not 52 string instruments, so I can’t do it justice, but I’m doing my best to sing ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ by Penderecki. It’s a great piece, full of required improvisations, so no performance is ever the same twice.” She paused. “You goddamn uncultured savage.”

  “Great. Consider me enlightened. Can you keep it down?”

  “I’m in a cage in the dark. I’m just trying to keep myself sane here.”

  “You weren’t sane to start with. You could at least deactivate your tongue stud so I don’t have to hear it.”

  “Yes, but then I wouldn’t annoy you – wait, hold on, stop.”

  I pulled over to the shoulder, but didn’t cut the engine. “Yeah?”

  “Uncover me, would you?”

  I looked around. We had the road to ourselves for the moment, so I lifted the cage cover. Nicolette was facing roughly north. “There’s something in that direction...” She squinted. “Lines of force, converging, but looping back in on themselves, contained, but I can’t tell what they’re containing, but it’s something bad and disruptive...”

  “Hmm. Let’s get a little closer, then.” I pulled up the map on my phone and found a road that cut toward the north, more or less. I re-covered Nicolette and made my way along the winding road, while she muttered unhelpful comments through my earrings: “Spatial distortions,” “Ghost traces,” “Blood and charcoal,” and things like that.

  Finally she shouted, “There!” and nearly startled me into running off the road.

  “There where?”

  “West, west, west –”

  “Hold on, I see a sign.” I pulled the cover off her cage, and we both looked at a dusty, faded sign that said “Come Home to Sunlight Shores!” and depicted a row of neat houses beneath a warm yellow cartoon sun, nothing at all like the baleful hellstar beating down on us from the endless pale blue sky above.

  “Looks like there was going to be a housing development here.” I squinted, and saw a few houses clustered off in the distance, like herd animals huddling together for warmth.

  “Lots of abandoned places, since the economy started nose-diving,” Nicolette said. “I do love a good financial collapse. There are whole ghost suburbs all over the Southwest, with abandoned half-built houses or model homes standing in the middle of a sea of sand. But there’s something different about this one... I think something’s living there. And I don’t mean an off-the-grid squatter. Something that’s not human.”

  “Huh. Not everything inhuman automatically deserves to get knifed-up.”

  “True,” Nicolette says. “I’m pretty sure this one’s been feeding on humans, though. I’m sensing a lot of death, and fairly recent.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Let’s kill it.” I covered the cage and aimed the motorcycle at the nearest sand-drifted street that led into the vestigial neighborhood of Sunlight Shores.

  If I’m honest, I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, and that was definitely one of them.

  •

  The streets were laid out in neat grids, but they were almost all bordering empty lots, spaces bulldozed and then left bare. I parked the bike a couple of streets away from the cluster of houses, preferring to approach potentially dangerous locales on foot. “Bring me with you,” Nicolette said. “I smell disaster.”

  I sighed and picked up the covered cage in my left hand, keeping my right free to grab for my dagger if the need arose. I had the silver hatchet hanging from a loop inside my coat, too, because why not.

  The streets were mostly unpaved, and the churned-up dirt in the lots hadn’t all been graded flat, so there were heaps of spoil and gouged-out, dusty pits full of stony fragments. I knelt when a flash of something pale and sharp caught my eye, and picked up a fossilized tooth, probably from a shark, half as long as my little finger.

  I smiled a little, thinking of a shark god I’d met during my time in Hawaii, who’d had tooth problems of his own until I helped him out. Bits of ancient monsters can be magically potent, and utility aside, fossils are cool, so I slipped the tooth into one of my pockets. After that I divided my attention between watching the ground for more treasures and watching the cluster of seemingly-empty houses, and collected two more fossil teeth, though both were smaller than the first. The desert is full of wonders, even if most of them are dead.

  I paused a block away from the nearest house. There were half a dozen homes completed, clustered around a cul-de-sac with a circular driveway, all the buildings variations on the single-story ranch house with two-car garage. No lawns, though a couple of the houses sported the remnants of vegetation, clinging on in the absence of irrigation. Nice, boring little houses, gradually being eaten by the desert.

  “Well?” I said. “Care to give me some guidance to the source of the chaos?”

  “It’s all around us,” Nicolette said. “It’s... this whole area. I can’t narrow it down any more. It’s like we’re standing in the middle of Times Square and you’re asking me where Manhattan is.”

  I hate to use magic when simple observation will do, but going door-to-door and searching for signs of life struck me as w
ay too tedious, especially since a thorough search of each house would give any persons (or creatures) of interest ample opportunity to notice me and escape, or lay an ambush. I fished in one of my coat pockets for a vial containing a potion made of various things, the most repulsive ingredient being bed bug antennae, and swigged it down. The taste was sugary in the extreme – Pelham always tries to mask the nastiness of the potions he prepares for me with non-reactive flavorings.

  I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust, and my visual spectrum expanded into the infrared. (Bed bugs are equipped by nature to be heat-seeking bloodsuckers.) I glanced at the cage in my hand, and was surprised to see that Nicolette’s head glowed with body heat. I’d expected her to be cold, since she didn’t exactly have blood circulating through her, but whatever magic animated her produced heat of some kind. I scanned the houses, and saw only one heat source of significance, human-sized. The other houses had a few rodents and birds, but nothing worth worrying about. Probably. The houses could have been filled with things that don’t give off heat, of course – animated skeletons or liches or golems or ice elementals – but I wasn’t too worried about stuff like that. They were unlikely, for one thing, and for another, unambiguous monsters are way less tricky to deal with than people, anyway. Monsters mostly want to kill you, eat you, or use you. People can go either way, but sometimes they know stuff.

  “Hello the house!” I shouted as I approached, striding up a flagstone walk to the front door.

  “Way to exploit the element of surprise,” Nicolette muttered.

  The door banged open, and a man lurched out. He was a big guy, reddish hair too long, big bird-nest sort of a beard, wide eyes, generally sloppy-looking, with his shirt half untucked. If I hadn’t seen him literally emerge from a home, I would have assumed he was homeless. “You shouldn’t be here!” he said, his voice cracking with anguish. “Now it’ll get you too!”

  “See, that was an unclear antecedent right there.” I strolled toward him, checking him out for any possible weapons, but if he had a gun or a machete or something he’d concealed it well. “When you say ‘it’ will get me, what do you mean by ‘it’?”

  He shook his head, waved his arms around, then took a deep gulping breath, obviously trying to get himself under control. When he let out a long exhalation, he seemed to deflate a little bit, but he also lost some of his manic over-the-edge energy. “You should come in. I’ll tell you. You... you deserve to know what’s going to happen to you, I guess, though it might be kinder to just let it take you, so you don’t have to worry, or be afraid...” He frowned. “Is that a bird?”

  “No,” I said. “Got anything to drink?”

  ANCIENT OCEANS

  The guy – his name was Andrew Lin – didn’t have anything to offer but water, warm and stale, in those big square stackable bottles people buy in bulk in case there’s an earthquake or civilization collapses, so they won’t get dehydrated while they cower in their homes and wait for the skin-eating mutants to come devour them. The house was fairly clean but not really furnished – his décor was camping gear, pretty much. He sat in a folding chair while I sat on the floor, my back against a wall, where I could see the front door and the windows. Nicolette was beside me, silent so far, but watchful. Living heads in cages are even creepier when they just silently stare, it turns out.

  “There are these deserted housing developments all over now,” Andrew explained. “Arizona was one of the fastest-growing places in the country during the housing boom, and when the economy flatlined, a bunch of projects got abandoned. The banks seized them, mostly, but banks aren’t construction companies or realtors, they can’t do anything with all the property, so the houses mostly just... sit here. I used to work in construction – I helped build this place, right here, where we’re sitting – but then the work dried up, and I had lots of medical bills because my wife was sick, and I lost my house. That’s bullshit, the bank taking a house when there are so many houses sitting empty, but that’s how it goes. I had the bright idea to come move into one of these empty places. Seemed fair, to take something back from the job that dropped me. My wife didn’t like it, but my kid, he’s – he was – ten, he thought it was a big adventure. We stocked up on canned goods and water and stuff before our Costco membership ran out, brought the generator, and moved in.” He stared down at the metal cup in his hands, quiet, for a little longer than I was willing to wait.

  “So what happened?”

  He laughed, hollowly. “Well, we weren’t the first ones to have my bright idea. There was another family living in one of the houses here, nice folks – the wife still had a job, part-time, at a coffee shop, and she actually commuted into town every day, and had two little daughters who played with my son, even though they were younger than him. And there was a survivalist-type guy, a little paranoid, an off-the-grid kind of person, but we gave him a bunch of our canned goods and he decided we were part of his ‘tribe,’ so that was fine. We had... sort of a little community, almost, for a few weeks. I can’t say we ever relaxed, you’re always afraid the cops will come or the bank will send someone to look at the property and they’ll find you, but it’s not like we’re bothering people out here, so sometimes we could even convince ourselves life was normal, apart from cooking over a camp stove and taking baths with a washcloth and a bucket of cold water. My wife and kid and me, we didn’t leave much. It was summer, so there was no school. We were trying to figure out what to do in the fall, whether our son would be able to keep where we lived a secret, if we could pretend we still had our old address, send him to his same school...” He fell silent again. “But it didn’t matter. My son... he was taken. The thing, it took the kids first, because it wasn’t strong enough to take grown-ups, not when it first woke up, I think. Then Pete, the survival guy, he went out hunting the thing, armed with every kind of gun you can imagine, and he never came back, though we heard some shots in the night. Anyway. Next it took the women. Then it took Harry, my neighbor, but he would have killed himself anyway, I think. I’m the only one left... until you got here.” His mouth quirked in something almost like a smile. “Maybe it’ll take you first, and I’ll get to live another couple of weeks. I can’t decide if that makes me happy or not.”

  “Just a couple of questions, Andrew,” I said. “After the first person got taken, why didn’t you call the cops, or at least leave?” Then I caught a glimpse of the tattoo on my inner arm, “Do Better,” and hurriedly added, “Uh, and I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He shook his head. “We can’t leave. You haven’t figured it out yet. Sunlight Shores is like... a tiger pit. A pitcher plant. People can come in – the bank did send a guy, a couple of weeks ago, and he was taken, too, that’s why I’m still alive, I guess the thing hasn’t gotten hungry again yet – but nobody can get out again.”

  “Huh.” That might explain the spatial distortions Nicolette had noticed. “What happens when you try to leave? Do you hit an invisible wall? Or is it like a treadmill, and you never get any farther away from the development, no matter how much you walk? Or do you get confused and lose your train of thought when you walk too far away? Or –”

  “It’s like a loop,” he interrupted. “You start walking in one direction, out the front door, and before long, you see the back door in front of you.”

  “Mobius loop,” I said. “Space folded back on itself. Well, that’s a nasty trick, but nothing I can’t fix. We’ll get you out of here. I guess I’ll have to kill this ‘thing’ of yours, though, whatever the fuck it is. Did you want to help me, to, whatever, avenge your family?”

  “What are you talking about?” It was hard to read his expression underneath all that beard, but he seemed... anxious, maybe. Not incredulous, or hopeful, or surprised, or any of the other emotions I would have expected.

  “I didn’t just happen to wander by here, Andrew. I’m sort of a hunter. But stalking deer and bears and man-eating tigers is a little too dull, so I hunt bigger game. Monsters, mainly. Sounds like you’
ve got a monster problem. And I’m a monster solution. Match made in heaven.”

  “You’re insane. You haven’t seen it. It’s not... it’s not something you can fight.”

  “What is it? Chupacabra that developed a taste for human blood? Some kind of subterranean sand-worm? Feral scorpion god? Give me something to go on here.”

  “We knew we’d uncovered something,” Andrew said, gazing toward one of the windows. “When we broke ground, it was mostly normal, except for a lot of fossils, teeth and stuff, more than we usually found. I picked up a few for my son, he was so excited. But in one of the lots, we dug down, and we uncovered this... I don’t know. Some kind of a seal. Or a lid to a tomb. A big flat stone, almost round, marked with strange designs, these spirals, they hurt your eyes if you looked at them. The backhoe cracked the lid right in half, and underneath there was this cavern. We got a couple of lights, shone them down in the hole, but didn’t see anything, just rock and darkness. We didn’t know how big the cavern was, and the foreman said we should just mark it off with caution tape and leave it for the night, and get the developer out here the next day, let him know we had a potential subsidence situation, that we couldn’t build on that spot unless he wanted to fill the hole with concrete or something.”

  Spirals. They’re often used in order magic, to contain forces of chaos and disorder. “You found some kind of ancient artifact and you didn’t tell anybody?”

  He grimaced. “Archaeologists and housing developments don’t mix. We didn’t want anyone to find out about it, and risk shutting down the whole job site. The boss, he said it was better just to fill it in. So the next day, that’s what we did, dumped in a bunch of dirt and rocks and junk. Honestly, it didn’t take that much, a couple of dump trucks worth. But before we filled it in... something must have gotten away. Maybe it was weak at first, and fed on mice and birds and stuff it found in the desert, but then it got stronger, and after I moved in here, it trapped us, and...” He began to weep.