Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  “Wow,” Nicolette said after a moment’s silence. “Guess he’s not used to people talking amongst themselves in this town. Or maybe he’s just a sexist asshole who doesn’t want to see two women talking to each other about anything, even a man.”

  “I definitely don’t get a progressive vibe off him,” I said.

  “Eh, fuck him, then,” Nicolette said. “Take him out.”

  Chaos witches are so fickle. “Last chance,” I said. “Free your people, Eater.”

  He licked his lips. “If I release their futures, give up the source of my power, they will be lost, confused – some of them have been here for years. Some have been here since they were babies, they don’t know any other life –”

  “They’ll learn. So will you. I know a nice hospital for sorcerers who get out of control, and need to be locked up for their own protection. You can rest there, for however long you’ve got left.”

  He lowered his head for a moment, and when he lifted it again, I knew he wasn’t going to be reasonable.

  “Suicide by goddess,” I muttered.

  The Eater raised the axe and launched himself at me.

  That axe is a powerful artifact. Somehow I knew, maybe through one of the cracks in the vault of my mind, that it had once belonged to a moon goddess – no doubt she’ll come calling for it someday, when she notices it’s gone – but it couldn’t hurt me. In the hands of another god? Absolutely. Then we’d have been on equal footing, just like a couple of humans hacking away at each other. But despite the power filling the Eater from all those futures he’d devoured, he was sure as hell no god.

  I twitched the wand, and his magical protections – layers and layers of armor, built up over years of rituals – flashed away like water turning to steam. Another twitch, and his flesh turned bluish-gray, every bit of fluid in his body transformed to ice. He went still, tottered, and then fell over, shattering like a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen and struck with a hammer.

  “That’s going to be nasty when it thaws,” Nicolette said. “Where the hell did you get that wand? What kind of magic is that?”

  “I called in a big favor.” I started to put the wand away... but it dissolved in my hand, turning into smoke that smelled faintly of night-scented jasmine. Somewhere I heard the small click of a partially-opened door closing deep in my mind.

  I was human again, and I suddenly felt every ache I hadn’t noticed in the prior hours. I walked over to Nicolette’s throne and looked down at her. “I’ll pick you up, if you promise not to bite.”

  “Bite my ass,” she said, and really, there was no sensible response to that, so I tucked her under my arm and went to look for my stuff.

  BRIDE OF SOCIAL WORK

  Oh, how I wanted to get on my motorcycle and ride off into the sunset, leaving people to say, “Who was that mysterious woman who saved us all?”

  But I couldn’t, because I am Doing Better, and there were several hundred profoundly confused and traumatized people in the wreckage of a town, and they all needed help. It wasn’t like they’d lost their memories, either – they knew exactly what they’d done, they just couldn’t figure out why on Earth it had seemed like the right thing to do. So I had to quit being an avenging angel and start being a social worker.

  That first night was rough. Squat is not a comforting presence, and Nicolette is Nicolette, so it mostly fell to me. It was tempting to call the local cops and let them deal with everything, but I’d exploded these people’s lives, so they were my responsibility. (Sure, I’d given them their lives back, but that upside to their situation tended to get lost in the hysteria.) I am obviously not a people person, but I did run a city for years, so it’s not like I’m incapable of managing things like this.

  I got everyone gathered together in the central park and announced that the Master had died in an accident that could be deemed either tragic or fortuitous. I told them they’d been under the influence of psychotropic drugs and brainwashing – which also served to explain their “hallucinations” about me taking bullets without falling and ripping up the earth and them stabbing themselves in the neck and so on. Not all of them bought my story, but people want to believe some kind of narrative that makes sense, and I offered them one.

  I explained that I’d come to Moros to rescue my friend Squat, and that I didn’t want to call the police because I’d broken laws along the way, and because many of the cultists had been accessories to crimes during their time with the Master. I just wanted to get them all on their way back to whatever lives they’d had before. We ended up having a sort of giant campout-slash-cookout in the park. It was actually pleasant, for a party where all the guests had PTSD.

  Pelly and Rondeau arrived in the RV the following morning. They brought Riegel the dune-buggy-riding psychic with him, and he and Rondeau helped do some direct-to-mind counseling for some of the more messed-up victims of the Eater’s attentions. Some memories were discreetly wiped when necessary, and Pelly handled contacting family members, especially for the minors who’d been kidnapped.

  Squat helped when he could, but people naturally found him offputting, even when he was disguised, because of the curse – and because he reminded them, if only subconsciously, of the half-remembered monsters the cultists had seen attending and assisting the Eater. Squat seemed pretty shaken up by the whole experience, too – being mind-slaved, twisting my head around backwards, all that. I guess when your life is already fucked-up with a curse, having your sense of agency entirely removed, too, must be horrifying. Talk about a loss of control. Squat started spending most of his time with Nicolette in the remains of the House of the Eater, the one place the lapsed Eat-arians could be counted on to avoid totally, and so the safest place for a talking head and a repulsive monster-man to hang without fear of freaking out the normals.

  I took some comfort in the fact that Squat’s presence, by definition, must be making Nicolette miserable, but I felt bad that she was the only one Squat could really hang out with. I could handle his company okay – I hate most people anyway, so the fact that I find his presence profoundly offputting is no barrier to our friendship – but I was just too busy dealing with the human consequences of my rampage.

  It took about two weeks to get everyone squared away, back to their families when possible, or sent away with some cash (courtesy of Rondeau) to help them start new lives. I wasn’t too optimistic about the long-term prospects for some of those people, but we’d repaired the psychic damage when we could, and when the last of the Eater’s people left with a bus ticket in her hand and a money belt around her waist and a set of plausible invented memories in her head, I felt a great weight lift from me.

  I went into the RV and tried to sleep, and when I couldn’t, I wrote about what happened. And here I am. I think, now that I’ve written it down, I’ll be able to rest. That’s worked before. I seem to have created a ritual for myself, with this pen, this page, these outpouring thoughts. This is like confession, maybe, if only confession to myself. Well, whatever. Rituals are worthwhile as long as they work. It doesn’t matter why they work, not to me. I’m a pragmatist.

  There are just a few days left until I return to the underworld. I suppose it’s possible I could do some more good in that time... but I’m only human. For the rest of the week, anyway. I’m tired. We’re going back to Vegas. I’m going to sleep a lot and eat steak and play checkers with Pelly and shoot the breeze with Rondeau and stick Nicolette in a closet and see if there’s enough money in the world to get Squat laid. Then I can go back to my other job feeling somewhat refreshed, and ready to look at the big picture again.

  For my first time walking the Earth and Doing Good (or at least Better), I’ll admit there’s room for improvement, but I think I Did Okay.

  VALLEY OF DEATH

  Fuck. I didn’t expect to be writing here again. Didn’t that last bit of diary end on a nice triumphant rah-rah-rah note?

  All good things must come to an end, and things have gone to crap in an alarming fashi
on, and I’m going to be leaving the world in less than an hour so I don’t have time to do a damn thing about it. I’m writing about it here instead, because I do have time for that, and maybe it’ll help me get my mind right to take up arms again when I return to life in a month’s time.

  I’m not going to lie. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the cult of the Bride of Death. They were probably all profoundly broken people – the truly well-adjusted don’t dedicate themselves to death goddesses – and I probably should have tried to do something to help them, but I was focused more on problems I could fix with violence when I first woke up from my dirt nap in Death Valley. So instead of hiring a psychic to soothe their messed-up brains, or even giving them a mission to go forth and do some good in the world, I’d sent them on the equivalent of a snipe hunt, or on a run to the hardware store to buy a left-handed screwdriver. Busywork for fanatics.

  At least, that’s what I’d intended when I told them to look for the remnants of an ancient imaginary civilization in the caves below Death Valley. But it turned out it was more like I’d sent them to go play in traffic.

  We returned to Death Valley this morning, in preparation for apotheosis. I was willing to go to bed in Vegas and just vanish from sight, but one way Pelham had kept the cultists from chasing me all over the Southwest was by promising them there’d be a ritual farewell for me. I gathered they were going to put me in a hole in the ground and cover it with a stone and then remove the stone to show that I had vanished from sight – no uncomfortable symbolism there.

  Pelly drove the RV and I rode shotgun, with Rondeau snoozing and boozing in the back. Squat and Nicolette didn’t know about my goddess-related condition so we didn’t bring them with us, leaving them back in Vegas. As far as they knew, I was just “going away for a few weeks” to deal with some personal business.

  Rondeau had promised to hook Squat up with some of the local sorcerers who might be in need of muscle and get him back on his feet, but hadn’t decided what to do with Nicolette during my absence. He was leaning toward locking her in a soundproof safe for a month, but I told him that was cruel – soundproof closet with a TV to watch was more humane. Either way, she wasn’t going to be my problem for a month. Halle-fuckin-lujah.

  We pulled in to the camp, hidden in the cave where I’d come crawling out of the dirt a month ago. The cultists had made the cave their own, and when I walked inside I winced. The cave was lit with camping lanterns, mainly, but there were a couple of burned-out torches jammed into cracks in the wall too. They’d carved niches in the walls, and filled them with the skulls of various animals. “What the hell, Pelly?”

  He sighed. “There’s a website that sells both genuine and replica animal skulls. They insisted on purchasing these, saying they gave the room the proper ‘ambiance.”’

  “At least there aren’t stuffed ravens and fake spiderwebs everywhere.”

  “I’ll see if I can find the cultists,” Pelly said. “They might be off exploring. They have come back with some disturbing reports of odd artifacts in the deep caves, but the examples they’ve brought me just look like twisted bits of stone, rendered magical by the power of wishful thinking and nothing more. They claim there are strange carvings in the walls, too, but...” He shrugged. “Your cultists are a very imaginative lot, Mrs. Mason.”

  “Lucky me.” I wandered around their living quarters while Pelly went in search of my followers. They had a makeshift kitchen of the camp-stove and canned-beans variety – the farts in here must be monstrous, I thought, and felt bad about thinking it later – and they had sleeping bags and camping pads all heaped together in one room. At least my cultists were a friendly and cozy bunch. They certainly weren’t emulating their goddess in that respect.

  Pelly said my worshipers were happy enough here, fulfilled and content to be serving their goddess. I felt so weird about that. The Eater’s devotees had been happy too, maybe, or at least thought they were. Sure, I wasn’t compelling anyone, not intentionally, but maybe there was some kind of goddess-aura I put out – certainly something drew those people to me, and maybe it was no more their “choice” to serve me, in any meaningful sense, than it was the choice of those who served the Eater. But since they did choose to serve, maybe I could help them out a bit. Buy them a couple of couches, or even just cast a keep-away spell around their camp so they wouldn’t get rousted by park rangers, which was, otherwise, an inevitability. Make some gesture, beyond this dumb ritual of letting them bury me in a hole, to show that I appreciated them. Even though I really didn’t. Faking it is part of doing better, right?

  Turns out it was all pretty moot, because they were dead. I was yelling at Rondeau for eating the cultist’s marshmallows and graham crackers when Pelham reappeared, face pale. “Mrs. Mason, you... You should come and see this.”

  “Fuck. What? I’m really not in the market for surprises.”

  “I think the cultists must have found something in the caves beneath the valley after all,” Pelham said. “Or, at least, something found them.”

  Turns out they’d found an entrance to the rumored cave complex below Death Valley, accessible from my own cavern. They’d widened what must have been a fairly small hole into a shaft big enough to descend, and lowered a twelve-foot metal ladder down there. I slid down the ladder after Pelly – Rondeau stayed upstairs – and followed a claustrophobic corridor, lit periodically with clusters of low-energy LEDs that would burn for ages before the batteries ran out. The passageway meandered for a hundred yards or so before opening out into a conference-room-sized cavern lit by big industrial Klieg lights. Various tunnels led away from the space at random intervals, and there was a whiteboard propped against one wall with a hand-drawn map, presumably of the cave system, in blue and red marker, scribbled with incomprehensible notations. A wooden table held a heap of broken bits of stone, which might have passed for hand-carved idols of some kind if you had the right kind of fevered imagination and had read too much Lovecraft lately. But I didn’t notice any of that right away.

  I noticed the blood, and I noticed the hole.

  There were no bodies, no meat, no bones, but there were plenty of blood-soaked rags of robes and streaks of blood. Not puddles, but smears, as if a great tongue had licked up as much of the human spillage as possible before taking off. A few twinkling objects were scattered amid the blood. I knelt and looked them over, feeling cold inside. “This is a gold tooth,” I said. “And here are several fillings, and that’s a titanium screw – a surgical screw.”

  “There is a glass eye, here, Mrs. Mason,” Pelly said. “One of the cultists, a Tara Yoshikawa of Dearborn Michigan, had it in her head when last I saw her. And here there is a pacemaker. Mrs. Carroway of Stowe Vermont had one of those. And, ah...” He flushed, and I glanced over, and winced. It looked like a little letter “T” – somebody’s IUD.

  “Something ate these people,” I said. “Their bones, their organs, their skin, their hair...”

  “But it spat out all foreign objects, it seems.”

  “That’s even creepier than just devouring someone whole. What the hell could have done this?”

  “Whatever it was, it seems to have departed.”

  We both looked at the hole, then. It was about ten feet across, punched straight through the rock ceiling above us, and at the top, there was a glimmer of blue sky. Whatever had killed the cultists had bored or burned or dissolved or simply punched right through several yards of earth and stone, and now it was out there in the world somewhere.

  I’d killed one Eater, and inadvertently unleashed another, more literal Eater, it seemed.

  “Perhaps we should investigate the tunnels, Mrs. Mason,” he said. “And search for survivors.”

  “Perhaps we should get up above ground and track this thing –”

  “You don’t have time, Mrs. Mason,” he said gently. “Your allotted period of mortality is almost up. In just a few hours, you must return to your throne.”

  “Maybe I could
get Death to give me an extension, or...” I trailed off. Death and I had made a bargain, but it wasn’t like a handshake agreement – more like a geas. Or a natural law. You can’t negotiate the timing of the coming of winter. Our agreement was binding in all kinds of ways, and Death couldn’t have changed it even if he’d wanted to.

  Pelham consulted the map – it made more sense to him than it did to me – and then we set off into one of the tunnels, armed with flashlights the cultists had left behind. This tunnel was smaller, tighter, and a pain in the ass to squeeze through, and Pelham said the cultists had probably avoided it until recently in favor of checking out simpler routes. Eventually we reached a round, low-ceilinged room, with a deep black hole in the center, about ten feet across. Our flashlights couldn’t begin to penetrate those depths. There were cracked bits of stone around the hole, as if there’d been a lid or cap on top of it, and something had shattered the seal. Pelham and I took that in grimly and without comment.

  The walls were indeed decorated with crude images, of twisting serpents and stylized whorls that might have been wind or waves, and human figures.

  “What’s that next to the people?” Pelham said. “A bush?”

  I squinted, shining my flashlight, then whistled. “No. I think that’s a tree.”

  “But, if that’s drawn to scale...”

  “Then the person is taller than the tree,” I said. “Damn it. There really were giants in the earth, hidden away in caves under Death Valley? What the hell? That’s like sending someone on a snipe hunt and they come back with the body of a dead snipe.”

  “These giants are considerably taller than nine feet,” he said. “If this drawing is to be believed, at least.”

  “Could be very small trees. So you think the cultists found a giant and woke it up, somehow?”

  “It is a hypothesis,” he said. “Or perhaps the lost race of giants imprisoned something here, long ago, and that is what the cultists released.”