Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  And somewhere, in or under or above or running through this town, there was something that might as well be called evil. My thread, I hoped – the one that would lead me to the Eater. We’d driven all damn day, Nicolette sniffing for chaos, and finding nothing noticeable, and I’d almost started to despair. The oracle had said my lead on the Eater would be located somewhere in the fifty miles between Plainview and Lubbock “tomorrow,” but “tomorrow” was a long ass day, in practice, and fifty miles of highway was a lot of territory to check over and over again. Nicolette and I had both gotten pissy and impatient and I was starting to think I’d missed the lead entirely, or that the oracle was full of shit, when she said, “Wait, there, something, it’s moving, no, wait, it’s slowing down, it stopped, there! Here!”

  So here we were. Nicolette said the evil was in this vicinity, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) narrow it down except to say it was somewhere near the truck stop, motel, or wasteland environs. Alas, there were no sixty-foot-high goat-headed demons or enormous carnivorous blobs with visibly entropic auras in the area, so we’d have to wander around and play hot-and-cold until Nicolette’s chaos-sense could get a better fix on whatever we were looking for.

  I checked into the motel, paying with some cash Pelly had messengered to me. My room was surprisingly clean, though old and worn. At least, I thought so until I saw a roach scurry from beneath the bed and into the bathroom. Yuck. If a place had roaches, it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that it would have bedbugs, too. I set the birdcage on the table, then opened my bag and fished out a napkin wrapped around a chicken bone I’d saved from a hasty roadside lunch. I muttered an incantation, snapped the bone in half, and send a low-level pulse of death through the room, enough to kill any six-legged vampire bedbugs, shit-footed roaches, or other vermin.

  The birdcage rocked on the table, and I sighed and pulled off the dirty brown cover. “So,” I said. “You got a better fix on our mystery monster yet? North, south, east, west? Up, down?”

  Nicolette bared her teeth at me. “Hungry.”

  I sat down in the chair and glared right back at her. “There’ll be plenty of time to eat after I deal with –”

  “Not if you get killed. And I’m hungry now.”

  “You don’t get to make ultimatums, Nicolette. You’re a head in a cage. You don’t even have the classical dignity of being a head in a jar. Do your job, and speak.”

  “Oh, I’ll speak, but you won’t like what I have to say, unless you’ve got fetish for humiliating insults. You rode up and down a highway with me for ten fucking hours today, a linear path cut through the desert, so orderly it made my follicles ache. I need chaos if you want me to do any fine work, pinpointing locations – so feed me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Hungry!” Nicolette shouted.

  Shit. I hated being in thrall to her moods, but this lead on the Eater was obviously mobile somehow, so I couldn’t waste time arguing – it might move on, and I wasn’t about to ask Rondeau to summon up an oracle that big again. I went to my bags and pulled out a messily taped-up, bubble-wrapped package. Unwrapping the plastic, I removed several antique blue glass bottles, ranging in size from beer bottle to test tube, and then dug out a small ball-peen hammer. I’d purchased the glassware for the crusher trick, and decided to hold them back in case Nicolette got peckish later.

  I lined up the bottles in front of Nicolette’s cage and smashed them, one by one, with the hammer. Nicolette’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she gasped and shuddered, less like someone eating a meal and more like someone having an orgasm. I really hoped she was exaggerating her response just to make me uncomfortable. Otherwise I hated to think of the ecstasy she’d experienced watching me get crushed to death.

  “Mmm, delicious entropy,” she said, once I’d swept all the broken fragments into a trash can. “Nothing tastes as good as destroying something beautiful.”

  “Chocolate’s not bad, either, sicko,” I said. “So speak. Where’s this evil?”

  “Hmm? Oh, that. It’s in the room right next door.”

  •

  I have been criticized for being too direct in my approach to problem solving, but many of the subtle, tricky, deceitful people who made those criticisms are dead, and I’m still alive, so I see no reason to change my ways.

  I turned on the TV, both so the noise would make the room seem occupied and to keep Nicolette more-or-less entertained. She was a lot less dangerous than she used to be, but she was still capable of making trouble, and I wouldn’t put it past her to try and fuck me up at any given moment.

  I opened my bathroom window and climbed out, dropping down to the weedy ground in back of the motel. Then I crept over to the next room, listening at the bathroom window – frosted glass, so I couldn’t spy more directly. I couldn’t hear anything, except the low murmur of the TV, so I tested the window. Locked.

  I took a tarnished old key out of my pocket and gently drew the outline of a rune on the window. The key dissolved into powder in my hand – four hours spent enchanting it, and only seconds to use up the magic. Isn’t that always the way? This time when I pressed my palms against the window and pushed upward, it moved.

  I stared through the open window at the astonished face of a man sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles. He had thinning wisps of brown hair, big brown eyes, and a generally fishlike aspect. “Wha –” he began

  I reached into my coat and drew my most mundane weapon – just a little .22 target pistol, but a gun is a gun – and aimed it through the window. “Don’t speak, and don’t move.” I preferred to use my knife or axe, of course, but they weren’t much of a threat when I was standing outside the room. I never used to carry firearms at all, since blades were fine for close work and magic seemed sufficient for all other purposes, but I’d had a run-in with an anti-mancer capable of nullifying magic not long ago, and Pelly had convinced me to carry something with a little more range and intimidation factor for certain eventualities.

  Have you ever tried to climb through a chest-high window without taking your eyes or your gun off a prisoner? It’s not easy, but I managed – it helped that he had his pants around his ankles and his hands in the air. Once I was upright in the bathroom I slid the window shut behind me with one hand. I was no more than three feet away from the man on the toilet, my gun pointed straight at the center of his chest.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name’s Marla Mason. I hear you’re a bad person. Tell me about the Eater.” I looked him over carefully, but there wasn’t much to see – he looked like a middle-aged guy who’d spent a long time on the road and was now experiencing a totally reasonable moment of terror in the face of a stranger with a gun interrupting his bowel movement.

  His face was slick with sweat, his adam’s apple bobbing, his eyes fixed and wide. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t have much, but you’re welcome to it, my wallet’s in the other room, just –”

  “Let’s not do this. It’s so tedious, the part where you pretend you don’t know why I’m here. You’re a monster. I’m a monster-hunter. Today, you’re lucky, because I don’t so much want you as the guy you can lead me to – the Eater. Cooperate, and I might let you scuttle off into the night alive.”

  “Lady, I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about –”

  “The fuck you don’t.” But I didn’t shoot, or kick, or draw my blade to make him a little more talkative... because this just looked like a guy. Sure, lots of monsters were indistinguishable from humans – lots of monsters were humans, though I was focusing on the inhuman sort these days – but confirmation was nice. He could be a mind-controlled slave, or even just a dupe unwittingly in the Eater’s employ – the oracle had promised me a thread, something I could follow to the Eater, but it didn’t necessarily mean that thread was going to be another bad guy. If I’d found him eating a baby or wearing a hat made of human eyeballs, I would have been more comfortable bringing some enhanced interrogation techniques – fuck it, I mean tort
ure – to bear, but he just looked like an idiot taking a crap. It was always possible Nicolette had misread the cues, too, or –

  “Shit,” the man said. “Did you say Marla Mason? Did Nicolette send you?”

  I didn’t quite lower my gun, but I confess my hand wavered. “What do you know about Nicolette?”

  He ran a hand through what was left of his hair. “Ah, hell, we used to date in high school, before she got into all that witchy shit. Things between us never worked out, in fact we had a nasty breakup, but a few years back I was passing through Felport and she somehow knew – magic, I guess – and she invited me out for dinner. I thought, you know, she wanted to rekindle an old flame, but it was all a trick. She poisoned my food – just a little, enough to make me puke and shit myself all night long. The whole time I was sick she stayed in my hotel room, laughing at me, and she never stopped talking, and mostly she bitched about you, Marla Mason, how much she hated you and wanted to get rid of you. I passed out eventually and woke up in a cornfield wearing nothing but a pair of pink lace panties, and one of my kidneys was missing. Crap. And now she’s told you some bullshit about how I’m a monster?”

  I gritted my teeth. That was all alarmingly plausible. Nicolette was nothing if not whimsically vindictive, and we had been ruinously bored tooling up and down the highway. I could easily believe she’d scented an old lover and decided to have some fun at both of our expenses. A guy she knew being in the same part of the country where we were was kind of a big coincidence, I’ll grant you, but I’ve noticed that bizarre coincidences seem way more likely when you’re in the company of a chaos witch.

  I lowered the gun, but I didn’t put it away, because, well. Like I said. Better safe.

  The guy was a little less terrified-looking, now, and he went on with renewed energy. “I don’t know what Nicolette told you, Marla, but I’m just a guy, I drive a truck for a living, you know? She’s just fucking with both of us. I think ever since she got her head cut off she’s gone even crazier –”

  And the gun went back up. The man – if he was a man – winced. “Damn it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have known she got her head cut off, huh? Must have happened too recently. But it was such a strong image in your mind... I’m a decent telepath, but I can only skim the surface. Oh, well. I guess we’ll do this the other way, then. At least I can read enough of your mind to know you don’t have any idea what the fuck you’re dealing with here.”

  He started to stand, and I shot him in the shoulder, just by way of discouraging him. I would have gone for the face, but I wanted answers before I took him apart.

  A .22 doesn’t make a very big noise, but in the confined space it was loud enough to make my ears ring. It didn’t do much except make a big noise, though. The bullet passed through his shoulder like a rock dropping into a pond, his flesh rippling for a moment and then smoothing out again. He went “Ouch,” but I clearly hadn’t hurt him a bit.

  I realized he was cloaked in an illusion, just wearing the semblance of humanity. That was confirmed when he finished standing, and I saw his crotch was entirely bare, smooth as a doll’s. He hadn’t bothered to make the illusion complete. I wondered why he’d been sitting on the toilet at all. Did he even shit? Or maybe he kept his real mouth down there and he’d been drinking the water out of the toilet bowl. Who the fuck knew?

  The monster grinned at me, his jaws and lips contorting, at least half a dozen mandibles – they looked like crab legs – unfolding from within his mouth and wriggling at me, dripping what I could only assume were assorted toxins. He reached out with an arm that was rapidly mutating into something multi-clawed and hard-shelled.

  I kicked him right between his hairless legs. The inertial charms in my boot gave my kick the impact of a battering ram, and I hit something solid that crunched with a sound like a stomped eggshell. His body flew upward hard enough to hit the ceiling, then crashed back down on the toilet. The illusion draping him wavered and vanished, revealing his true form. Man-sized crab-spider-octopus, more or less, with a thin veneer of slime eel. I’d seen worse, though it was certainly nothing you’d want to share a bathroom with.

  “Doesn’t matter,” it slurred, human voice emerging from the grinding nightmare of its mouthparts. “My hive-mates are legion, and they gather at the house of the Eater. The work will go on.”

  “The work always does,” I said. “So about this house of the Eater. Where can I find it?”

  The thing chuckled, I think, or maybe it was just choking on fluids, but then it spoke: “You have attacked one of the Eater’s tribe. That will not go unpunished. You will see his house soon enough: when you are brought there, laid bare before him, all your possible futures flayed away. “

  “Huh. Hurting you will make him track me down, huh? Would killing you accelerate the process? I only ask because I’ve got an immovable deadline coming up, there’s someplace I’ve got to be next month, so I don’t have a lot of time for cat-and-mouse back-and-forth.”

  “To kill me would earn you nothing but a lifetime of servitude and suffering –”

  “Good enough,” I said, and stomped down on its head. There was no reason to assume a thing like that kept its brains in its head, so I stomped the rest too, until all the bits stopped wriggling, and they were no longer recognizable as parts of a coherent whole. Dismemberment-by-stomping is pretty tedious work – this guy’s carapace was a lot tougher than the spore-lord’s spongy form had been – and my legs got tired, but it was easier than ruling an entire city or being an occult detective, at least.

  I didn’t envy the maid who’d have to clean that bathroom. It didn’t look like a murder scene, exactly. More like a dozen people had used the contents of a sushi bar for a mosh pit.

  I climbed back out the window and returned to my room, washing off my boots in the sink, making the little embroidered skulls and scythes shine.

  “Well?” Nicolette said. “Are they okay?”

  I frowned, poking my head out of the bathroom. “Are who okay?”

  “The monster’s captives,” she said. “Or didn’t I mention there were captives? I’m totally getting a captives vibe.”

  “You bitch,” I replied.

  •

  I went back to the monster’s room, doing my best to jump over the nastiness in the bathroom, and searched his belongings. I found a set of keys and took the risk of slipping out his front door – it was dark, and as far as I could tell we were the only two guests on that side of the motel anyway. I made my way through the parking lot, to the far end where the big rigs were. There were two: one gleaming black with a shiny refrigerated trailer, and one smeared with mud and muck, with a dirty white trailer. I took a wild guess and tried the keys on the dirty truck. The door opened right up.

  The trailer in back was locked, of course, but flipping through the keys I soon found the right one to open it. I tugged the trailer door up and open, and found... Nothing. Empty trailer, just a big dark echoing space.

  Remembering the illusion the monster had cloaked itself in, I grimaced. I’m capable of seeing through illusions, but it gives me a nasty headache if I overdo it. Oh well. Some things can’t be avoided. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, the truth inside the trailer was revealed.

  It looked like a child’s bedroom. Giant fluffy stuffed animals, mostly bears of various kinds; a child-sized pretend kitchen, complete with stove and oven and sink and cabinets and little dishes and fake food; a miniature table and chairs, with a plastic tea set; three sets of bunk beds with brightly-colored sheets all done up in superheroes and princesses; and the whole scene lit by whimsical lights in the shape of ladybugs and smiling suns and flowers stuck on the walls and the ceiling.

  Half a dozen children sat in a circle on the colorful rug, eating candy bars, faces smeared with chocolate, a litter of discarded juice boxes all around them. I’m no good when it comes to guessing ages – kids all look like lumps of uncooked dough to me – but the oldest couldn’t have been more than si
x or eight. They had dirty hair and wrinkled clothes, ranging from footie pajamas to Sunday dresses. One little girl stood up and waved at me, tentatively. “Is this the farm?”

  “Farm?” I said, wondering if I sounded as stupid and stunned as I felt.

  “The farm where mommy and daddy are waiting for me,” a little boy said. “The man said it was a surprise.”

  “We will ride ponies,” the girl said solemnly.

  One of the younger kids wailed. “No farm! Want mama!”

  I swallowed. Some things you couldn’t fix with guns or knives or magic boots. “This man – did he hurt you?”

  The oldest boy and girl shook their heads; the others were too young or distracted to notice my question, but I took their two responses as a good sign.

  “Did this man... take you?” I asked.

  “He said it was okay to come with him,” the boy said.

  “He’s my mommy’s friend,” the girl added. “He knew the secret code, so it was okay to go with him.”

  I closed my eyes, this time because it hurt to look at them. Secret code. Right. I’d heard about that sort of thing – you teach your children a secret family pass phrase, and they know they shouldn’t go with anyone who doesn’t know the magic words. As far as security precautions went, it had a few flaws, especially when you were dealing with a telepathic monster who could pluck the words right out of your head. He’d probably skimmed all their minds and come up with whatever info he needed to lure them in. But why take all these children?

  Then again, who cared why. There weren’t a ton of non-horrifying reasons to steal children, especially when the kidnapper was a monster in the employ of something called the Eater. “Come on, kids,” I said. “You’ll see your parents soon.”

  •

  Getting them across the parking lot was a little like herding a bunch of lizards on meth, but I got the kids settled into my room – after nipping in real quick first to cover up Nicolette, because the little ones didn’t need more trauma. Once they were happily ensconced in front of the TV (little kids maybe shouldn’t watch Godzilla movies, but it was the best I could do), I said, “Be right back.” I left, and took my saddlebags and the birdcage with me.