9 Tales From Elsewhere 4

by 9 Tales From Elsewhere

I shook myself free and answered her.

  “Coop’s fine.”

  I didn’t know how she knew me, but people find me when they need me. That’s always been the way.

  My voice crackled, and despite the five ales I’d consumed my eyes stayed on her. A bad idea, in a place like this anything can happen. Got to keep your peripheries clear.

  “I need your help to find my friend. She’s disappeared.”

  “Easy to get lost in Faerie?”

  “Not from me.”

  She said it with a smile, but she was anything but happy. She may have looked ethereal, but something told me she knew how to handle herself.

  “Her name’s Calypoly, she’s a…”

  “Fairy?”

  “Quite, but she’s also has ability to foresee what has yet to come.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I do say, Mr Cooper.”

  Fairies never got sarcasm, good thing for me too, this one, despite her appearance could have ended me in a flash.

  “Any ideas where I might start? Enemies, yours or hers?”

  She stared straight through me. I couldn’t read her.

  “You might try your handsome friend over there.”

  I knew who she meant. That Ogre hadn’t taken his eyes of me since I came in. Either I was more alluring than most gave me credit for or he wanted to talk. I turned back to her but she was already floating back the way she came, every set of eyes went with her. In the haze of fairy and ale I’d never gotten her name, but something told me I’d find her easy enough, or she’d find me as was more likely.

  The music played behind and all around, then it began to sway. It was either the drink or the chick, but I was getting a little sleepy.

  I awoke on a small chair, hands tied behind me, a shadow looming over. In the distant dim of the pub he looked almost bearable, but up close, with a hangover and a light in the face he was anything but.

  His Ogre’s teeth, spotted black and green, grinned down on me. Then his breath hit me, harder than any punch I’d ever taken.

  I couldn’t help it. I threw-up all over his brown, chewed boots. He got the message and after the dutiful smack, I righted myself and waited for the interrogation to begin, but it didn’t come from him. I heard a floorboard creak and turned to see a Unicorn smoking a cigar. How? Don’t ask, in Faerie you learn not to be surprised, but on this occasion it was impossible not to laugh.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  The Ogre did his duty again and I stifled the laughter, though barely. The Uni…I can’t, I’ll just call him Ralph, though that’s only slightly better. Ralph trotted over; the acrid wisp hit my nose and caused the reflux to kick in once more.

  “Mr Cooper, it may not look like it, but this is a polite request. Please vacate Faerie.”

  “Look fella, I was hired to find a young lady and until I’ve…

  Clank, right in the mush.

  Ordinarily I don’t get to this part in the investigation until I’ve knocked down a few whiskies and doors alike, but Faerie was different and while things look a might odd, they all boil down to the age old – you got it, I want it routine.

  I apologise, my response was less than gentlemanly, but I was beginning to get tired of the mythic freak.

  “Go Fu…” then came the forth, this time a left hook that sent me flying across the room and into a wooden crate. The shattered wood splintered and I made for a piece. I sawed at my ropes and my hands were free just before the great bulk wrenched me off the ground, his right hand clasped around my neck and subsequently, my right foot in his groin.

  Thank heavens for the universal language.

  He felled to the ground and the U…Ralph, galloped off.

  While the Ogre took a nap, I picked my brown, stained jacket and hat up from the floor and had a look around the joint. A barn; old, dank, with a smell of mould mixed with fresh vomit – nothing to give me any clue to the girl’s whereabouts. After a few minutes of that odour I slapped the Ogre awake. I’d decided not to heft him onto the chair and had simply hog-tied him instead.

  “Wh…wha…whot?”

  “Why?” I figured even an Ogre would understand ‘Why’.

  “Money.”

  “Go on.”

  “Mr Ralph, he want the pretty lady business.”

  “Kidnap?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Where?”

  He looked around, everywhere but at me.

  “Ah come-on buddy, you know how this goes. Best to Man/Ogre-up now and tell me, save you a lot of pain.” I gestured at his bits.

  He told me. They always did.

  In the cold light of day, Faerie can be a pretty, no, a beautiful place, filled with flowers and trees and lakes and prancing, dancing creatures, but in the middle of the night it takes a decidedly darker turn. The kind of ‘things’ you read about in Tolkien exist and if you’re not careful, they find you, at the worst possible time.

  Luckily for me, I’m one of the worst ‘things’ you’ll find in the real word and as such I kicked-in Ralph’s door and took a hammer to his knees. Ever see a cigar smoking Unicorn hobbled? It ain’t a pretty sight, but then kidnapping ain’t too nice neither.

  He’d been keeping her in the basement (no points for originality), seems she and the floaty lady from the pub had some kind of ‘relationship’ and blackmail was the name of the game. This whole ‘seeing into the future lark’ could be profitable when exacted the right way and while miss floaty lady and her friend didn’t go in for that, Ralph sure as hell would.

  Calypoly was small. She was also, even with the five layers of mud and filth, the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. It was no wonder the fairy wanted her back.

  “You OK?”

  She rose her eyes to me, slowly and gave a half smile.

  It nearly killed me.

  She never said a word, even when we stepped over Ralph’s writhing, weeping body.

  We rocked up at the lady’s house and I handed the little wisp over. She seemed happy, had a slight smile edging out the corner of her mouth. Guess that’s what counts for thanks in Faerie.

  I took the gold purse she gave me and wandered down the lane. Sitting in the pub a little while later I watched the band play, flicked a smile at the girl behind the bar and then sat in the corner.

  When the Ogre walked through the door I slipped my right leg back and waited for the lunge. It never came. He lumbered over, pushed a few people out of the way and crashed down on the seat across from me.

  “Need wurk.”

  I smiled.

  “Beer?”

  THE END

  HIS GOD IS SOL BLACK by James B. Pepe

  The House Foyer swarmed with a half dozen Paula Romers, and each one wanted my Salamander dead.

  A Paula Romer in a felt hat, strapless chemise, and khaki skirt shouldered a Konark blunderbuss. Its mahogany stock was decorated with ivory, brass, and Sun Temple couplings.

  “Whoa. Wait.” I held up my hands, getting all Luther love and Goatish, like I was trained, because that’s what I am: a Sally Goat, a ginger-haired peacemaker, a Buddha buffer between my Salamander and any homo sapient meat--tube or womb--that might scream, flee, or shoot first.

  But Doss-20, my Salamander, wasn’t wintering down. He was getting speedy, fangish--hot. His breath tickled my neck. His bony hadrosaur crest glowed molten; and his second stomach, the carnivorous one, gurgled, projecting 3D images of tubegirl meat, sliced--wet and red like the gills of a fresh-caught salmon--onto the wall as if animated by a shaky, halting, flip-book Nickelodeon.

  “Hey, wait.” I stepped in-between Doss and the entertainment clones, the Paula Romer tubegirls. “Everyone winter, winter down. Nice and cool. No drama. No fool. We’re customers, here for a show--a show, Doss. Winter, winter down. You promised winter--.”

  “You know what, Sally?” Doss stood to his full seven-foot height, claws extended, tail spikes erect and burning a Sterno blue. His asbestos-blend urban camo smoldered. “You can
be a real fucking nag.” The stench of psychoplasmic Sulphur filled the room, like an emptying gas bag, while an invisible madness poltergeisted down the hall, skittered up the walls, toppling candelabras and Grecian urns, brand-burning a name, his name--Doss, Doss-20, Doss--two-hundred times, one for each solstice since the Krieg, into the marble and teak of the Vancouver House of Fiction.

  “Don’t do this.” I grabbed his sleeve. His gear belt was heavy with Kraut stick grenades, American pineapples, AK banana mags, and tubular SWAT flashbangs--the fruit of Old World violence. He pushed me aside. I fell back on my bony ass. “Doss, stop!”

  Sol Invictus.

  The tubegirls advanced. A second Paula Romer in boots and jodhpurs drew a kris; a third in grey coveralls hefted a doggen wrench; a fourth chewed broken glass like rock candy; and a fifth was naked, but for a spring-driven puzzlepede that Caduceus-spiraled around her torso, revealing and concealing as it clock-crawled, as if her modesty was the price of eternal Jeffersonian vigilance, because it was.

  Sol Deus Invictus.

  A sixth Paula with a disc-hilted tulwar lunged at him, and he Plateaued her right between the eyes--crack, the Sun is Black--with a bolt of psychoplasmic Sulphur, dandelion-puffing her hair; locking up her nervous system, setting her cassock on fire; pouring 145 million years of hardosaur hate into her soul; snuffing her out, out--out.

  Oh, unconquerable Sun.

  And then he waded into the other five Paulas with teeth and tail and seven-round Nagant, killing with double-action contact shots; killing with psychoplasmic Sulphur; killing and killing Paula Romer--the clone movie star--while honking his war cry, a lonely Alp-horn honk that fogged and frosted every gilded mirror in room; and when he was done, on his hands and knees, sucking air, they were done, too.

  I turned away and puked in an empty flower planter. I can’t, can’t, just can’t…

  I can’t do this anymore.

  Doss-20 keeps lying. He keeps killing, and I can’t stop him

  Just as a stable goat soothes a thoroughbred, or a platinum blond winter-downs a Kong, so does a Sally calm a Salamander, or at least that’s what Mom taught me, because the life of a Sally Goat is noble, a service, a calling.

  “Someday a tall Salamander will buy you on the meat market, and you will make him so very happy. You will clap and sing; you will play chess, recite poetry, and pack his bowl with fine, fine Bubblegum Kush. And you’ll keep us safe, because if you don’t, he might gobble up your Mommy and everyone else, and you don’t want that to happen, Sally, do you?”

  No, Mom. That would suck. Hard.

  “That’s a good girl. Such a good girl. Which arm do want it in today?”

  The left, Mom. My right’s still sore (as a whore).

  The chrome needle gun pecked and hissed, injecting a hijack protein cocktail. Only five more treatments and my brunette curls would become king-snake red. Permanently. No one is sure why, but ginger girls named Sally have a natural cooling effect on combat Salamanders, who become slower, more wintry, less likely to kill. It is a behavioral glitch? A DNA-coded failsafe? Hell, I dunno; but during the Krieg, some lunatic set a hundred budding tubes on telepathic autodial. The Black Sun itself answered, and the Salamanders were hatched. Gran says the Old World suicided in fourteen days; but its warbeasts are still here, doing what they do, in the name of their Father, who is the Sun.

  “There you go, hon. Not so bad, was it? So proud of you. We’re getting there. Are you up for some promotion? It’s early, but it’s good to get your name out.” Mom held up an entheogenic hit, a glass vial labeled with the words “Goony Bird: Fin de siècle.” “This is the hard part. I know. You don’t have to if you want to.”

  I looked out the cracked window of our Portland squat, room 10C, of the bomb-gutted Azteca Hotel, and wondered whether to jump and impale myself on licorice-twisted rebar, ten stories down, or to just sit here, like a good girl.

  Two winters ago, Grandma died coughing up blood, and on her last day, it was just me and her in the frigid squat, because Mom was with a Syndicalist who wanted to hang his wang. Gran pulled me close. Her breath smelled of rotting vegetables. “My daughter isn’t worth spit. Get out of here. You hear me? Go. Leave. Whatever calls, you answer. Got it?”

  I had made a promise. That is why I sat for the second needle.

  “Good girl.” The needle gun hissed, and five minutes later, the psychoplasmic diethylamide separated my psyche from my body. My etheric string ghosted through the ceiling, the barren hotel roof garden, and into the overcast sky before curving to the East, as if pulled by a strong current. I covered my ears, but across the continent, I could still hear the static buzz of the Ottawa Axodendritic Forest.

  Forgive me, grandma.

  I covered my mouth, but the Great Saskatchewan Tongue (one hundred miles of lingual flesh, moist taste buds undulating like vast fields of pink wheat) still spoke to me in oscillating gibberish.

  Forgive.

  I covered my eyes, but behind me eyelids and between my fingers, the dead light of the Glastonbury Plateau--the dread of all dread, Ground Zero of the holy Sol Black--burned through. Over the Rockies, across the vast farmlands, through the dead shatter-cities of New York State, the cold gravity of the Black Sun called to me, plucking at my soul, pulling it along my astral tether. I saw visions, prophecies; I saw the bones in my hands; I saw the constellation Draco--the Serpent--writhing, wiggling, like a great sperm cell trapped in tar, while the mammal stars, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, sat frozen, aghast, helpless.

  The Old World called it New England, but now it was the Glastonbury Plateau, an elevated tundra of black glass extending forever like a planet of cracked human skin. As my astral body ghosted over it, I felt the minds of several Goatless Salamanders--Ergel-7, Honal-16, Baco-10--reach out to me, asking me to be their Sally when I was red and ready; and they would pay top price, too, the good stuff; but my soul drifted on, coming to rest between an empty budding tube and a petrified stump of D.H. Lawrence anthologies. Doss-20 was there, waiting.

  When I was a kid, I wouldn’t look East, even during the rainy season, because I was afraid to see the Sun that never sets. Ella Nyguen stared too long, and they found her hanging like a sack of meal from a Burnside I-beam. Her eyes bulged. Her tongue was purple--but she was smiling.

  In the heart of the Plateau, you don’t get a choice: the Black Sun filled the sky. It was the sky. It was God. It was everything, everything, except for a hadrosaur-class Salamander, naked but for a drum-fed .45 Thompson slung across his greenish-yellow chest.

  “Hi, I’m Doss.” His eyes were Sulphuric pits of degenerating Prime Matter. “If you choose any of my hatch-brothers over me, I’ll satchel-kill your whole town and eat your mother alive--feet first--while you watch. Get ready, little Goat. I’ll be seeing you. Soon.”

  Grandma, I kept my promise.

  Something called. I answered.

  Forgive me. It was the Sun.

  When I turned eighteen, Mom braided my flaming hair, trimmed my lacy dress, and sold me to Doss-20 for a crate of 20mm spent uranium and a briefcase turbine. The Salamander kicked in an extra 20 kilos of opium to sweeten the deal. “I bet you think you’re so pretty,” Mom said and cracked me across the face. I was numb. I was morphine high. Everything seemed far away and under water. I tasted salt.

  Who’s crying? I thought. Am I crying?

  In the drizzle, I stumbled after Doss to his flier, a Lockheed Flail, and climbed the rope ladder to the cockpit, where we sat back-to-back, like Rodin bookends without books; and while he was counting, strapped in, facing down-- eins, zwei, drei--I was strapped in, facing up.

  “Kontakt!” He raved in in ecstasy. “Einführung! Up!”

  Hard Gs pushed me. VTOL jets screamed a tea-kettle chorus of Prime Matter conversion, pogo-launching the stub-wing tailsitter from the old Meir and Frank rooftop hard pad. For fifteen seconds, we rose on a heat column until the nose contra-props engaged, pulling the machine sideways over the Willamette River with an
ice skater’s grace.

  My birth name was Magdalene, but Mom started calling me Sally when she heard that Mrs. Houellebecq, the rat hunter’s wife, made good on a red-head daughter.

  “Hey, new Sally.” The Salamander’s voice was distorted, a tin-can echo in my cockpit headphones. “Since the Krieg, I have lived and died twenty times.”

  The pilot and co-pilots seats revolved with a glockenspiel hiss and a thunk as the Flail tipped forward, transitioning to horizontal flight. I faced aft, Doss faced the prow, and the Flail now buzzed the shattered Portland skyline like a fat corkboard dart.

  “And I’ve burned through 77 Sally Goats. Two of them in the last year alone. I like you. Good luck.”

  The Flail banked to the north, showing its white belly to the tiered shanties and tent cities that dotted the West Hills. I saw a long-seat trike with a chassis like an angry puffer fish throttling hard across The Burnside, Portland’s last surviving bridge. The goggled driver was swaddled in red leather with bronze clasps; his leggy chica wore a fluttering slit dress. They were being shot at by Frown Clowns, a bandit crew. Muzzles flashed. Gun smoke mingled with river mist. As we passed overhead, the stranger looked up and saluted, his flooz blew a kiss--and then the fat-bellied trike was gone. The Flail gained altitude, heading East toward a Sun that never sets.

  And so I began my first year as a human Goat.

  The House of Fiction’s fire-warning system, a Dalmatian head mounted over the ticket counter, barked until bronze Architeuthis tentacles emerged from wall panels and hissed CO2 on five dead Paulas. Ever the loyal fig leaf, the scorched puzzlepede still crawled, ticka-tack--prissy, frantic, shielding its nude mistress--even as she lay in a smoldering fetal ball. The white mist cleared, the tentacles curled like fiddleheads, and the dog head sniffed and went back to sleep.

  The last living Paula, the one with the felt hat, was slumped against an overstuffed wingback, clutching her abdomen, with the smoking Konark across her lap. Her shot had gone wide, shredding a framed oil painting--a pastoral rendition of all six Paula Romers, dancing hand-in-hand, a tubegirl Uroboros, à la Chagall, à la the Kermis.