The Left-Hand Way

by Tom Doyle

  Without waiting for any sign, Grace again spoke to Madeline. “Please distract them.”

  Madeline disappeared, and instantly reappeared in the woods, putting on her “warrior queen of the damned” show. All eyes, guns, and spells were upon her.

  Grace scrambled down the hill to a point above the bunker entrance, then flipped over with a half twist like a vaulting gymnast to a perfect dismount, well in front of the doorway. The long-violated ground rumbled. Lara, trailing, looked down at her blankly. “Pretty,” she said.

  Grace could see the tantric color primaries of the wards now, within an arm’s reach, at best ready to slam the door in her face for her foreignness. She could probably stealth through them. But stealth wasn’t her current mood, nor was compromise. She spoke a spell in clear Latin, then added another phrase as a prayer: “Permitte amor meus januam patefacere.” Let my love open the door.

  The hostile wards melted into inviting rainbows. “Very pretty,” said Lara, startling Grace from immediately behind her shoulder.

  “You’re following me in?”

  “Yes,” said Lara. She picked up a small stone from the ground and wrapped the bloody cloth around it. “Problem?”

  But Grace Marlow was already running into the tunnel.

  * * *

  Scherie and Dale shot at the door to the main room of the bunker, then pulled and pounded on it, tried to wrench it open, flung spells at it, and swore at it. Nothing. Bits of it blasted away, other parts were hot to the touch, but the door would not open. “It practically begged us … to open it before,” said Scherie between breaths. “Could Roderick be making us think that it’s closed when it’s really blasted wide open?”

  “Like in Star Trek?” asked Dale, also winded with recent efforts. He shook his head. “Roderick has so many more interesting things that he’d make us see if he could. I think he’s just put a lot of energy into sustaining that door.”

  “That’s a good sign,” said Scherie. “He’s still worried about us getting in.” She put her hands on the door to the main room of the bunker. “Maybe this will distract him.” Envisioning the millions of ghosts that Roderick had violated, she began to stoke the anger for a massive dispellation. “Goddamned abomination, release them!” She felt herself on fire.

  Dale reached out and grasped her wrist. “Take what I’ve got too.”

  The force against the door grew, and she and Dale were completely absorbed in their task. Then, a noise of running echoed down the tunnel. They had neglected their perimeter. Belatedly, they ceased their craft and brought their weapons to bear on the new threat.

  “Bloody hell!” said Grace, hands raised. “Hold your fire. I thought you’d hear me from a mile off.”

  Lara came up behind Grace in a rigid sort of race-walk step. She peered at Scherie, then held out her blood-soaked cloth and stone like a child offering to share a doll. “You bleed. Good.”

  Grace and Dale didn’t try to hide their disgust. But Scherie focused on Lara. “That’s your blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want my blood on there too.”

  “Yes.”

  Whatever the risks of Lara’s blood, Scherie liked the sound of that synergy. She took the cloth and wiped her own cuts with it. Dale grimaced.

  “Michael’s behind that door?” asked Grace.

  “It’s barred,” said Dale.

  “Not against me,” said Grace. She ran her hands over it, assessing what it would take. “Say when.”

  As if Lara were a dangerous bit of farm machinery, she snatched the cloth back from Scherie. Lara faced the door and said, “Inside, when friends give word, I give best shot.”

  As Scherie and Dale lined up behind Grace and Lara moved to the rear of them all, Scherie remembered the Morton lore on plans. In craft, sometimes waiting for a plan is a kind of cop-out. Craft is a kind of faith in the necessary. It was necessary to trust this strange woman once more. “When friends give word,” agreed Scherie.

  * * *

  With a gesture and a naked “please,” Roderick elevated Endicott a few inches off the floor and floated him away from the door. Then, he made the Puritan’s arms outstretch wide at his sides. Roderick had enjoyed a mock crucifixion or two in the old days, and here it seemed appropriate enough. Ever since Saint Peter, believers really hated it when this happened.

  Roderick laughed, but like Pagliacci, he wasn’t really enjoying this moment. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he knew he was covering for a delay. The power kept coming, and he used as much of it as he liked, but it flowed through him, never accumulating to those divine levels he desired. So, even as he held the room in isolation and considered his dismemberment of an Endicott, Roderick worked meta-magics and ordered his flesh to transform at the cellular level, changing himself into a more perfect vessel. The delay was frustrating, and he was tense when he should be triumphant. He needed an outlet.

  Oh, right, he had one right here. With demonic speed, Roderick brought his blade down on Endicott’s right foot, slicing half of it clean off, shoe and all.

  The pain in his enemy’s remaining eye was delightful, and that he couldn’t scream was fine. Roderick wanted to see the suffering, but hearing it could be acoustically painful.

  Roderick took the half foot and flung it at the energy portal, but it wasn’t wide enough for gross matter, so it just exploded into a mist of leather, blood, and meat, which drifted back to form a halo around Roderick. Nice.

  The deep red of Roderick’s death engine was fading, its spin slowing, and its size shrinking. Roderick couldn’t tell whether this was because of attrition or whether Rezvani had killed her husband and was now exerting her exorcist powers from outside the room. It didn’t matter—though the gap might eventually close if not maintained, the flow of power was ample for his current purpose.

  Endicott’s eye had recovered some composure. Time already for the other foot? This might go too quickly, but no other amusements were at hand. Roderick lifted his blade …

  With the speed of craft combat, the door to the room crashed hingeless down into the corridor and Dale, Scherie, and Endicott’s woman raced over it, into the room and running at him.

  “Please stop,” he said. They froze, looking absurd.

  He felt Lara lurking about outside, an object lesson against showing mercy even for the perversity of it. “Please don’t come in here, Lara, until I invite you.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “As a new god, I should be careful what I wish for,” he said, addressing all his opponents. “As I secretly wished, you are with me to witness my apotheosis. I’ve been fighting you with both arms and legs tied, but it took all that you are simply to get here. Your end is not in doubt.”

  * * *

  With my mouth useless, I was screaming inside. Maybe it wasn’t the worst physical pain in my life, but it was the worst situation. I was maimed, paralyzed, and desperate.

  I could see everything with my eye. Entering, the Mortons had taken point, while Grace had run toward me. Roderick had stepped back, but only to hold all of us in his field of fire. With murmurs of polite craft, he was probing their vulnerabilities, trying to reopen Scherie’s physical wounds and Dale’s mental ones, considering in what order to torture me and Grace for maximum combined suffering. Unlike me, my friends’ spiritual powers weren’t ended, only contained, but they would soon fail.

  As for Roderick, his flesh was singed, and his head remained like that hideous thing in the heart of Chimera, but his growing, soon limitless strength gave him an infernal majesty in my enhanced sight.

  I am not a tactician; Endicotts lack the subtlety. We prefer to put force on the ground and let the math work for us. But I now saw desperate lines of actions forward, lined up like dominoes, if only I could move the first one. My body was a cage.

  So, only one thing I could do. It was another Left-Hand abomination—the worst one—and the cost might be my soul. I needed to leave my body and enter another one
.

  The Don and all those others using the Left-Hand serum wanted to do this, but couldn’t. But I had certain advantages. I had left my body before—I had died. I had access to power greater than any man should rightfully have; power that had allowed me to fight otherworldly Roderick to a standstill. But after I left my body, I would have to do other things that were more abominable, risky, and terrifying. Maybe God would spare me. I was here only by his will, and surely not just to lose the Earth. I had to trust in him, even in the face of that beast in the other world.

  This act of Left-Hand craft could not require the usual mental or physical actions, or it would not work at the moment of death. It must require only ability and the will. One by one, I let go of my moral, emotional, and instinctual inhibitions. With all my will alone remaining, I leapt out of myself.

  I launched into a black-lit glow world, the world of Left-Hand craft. The spirits of the living were bright like stars, but Roderick’s was a dark and ever-imploding sun. I had only one place to go.

  I set my mind in motion toward Grace. But I did not immediately enter her mind; not even the direst necessity could compel me to that. Instead, at the speed of thought, I spoke to her soul. Grace, will you let me share some of your brain and body for a while?

  Michael, the world’s about to end, and you’re standing on ceremony? Get the hell in here.

  But I could tell she had appreciated—no, loved—that I had asked her. I went in, not as a possessor, but as a guest lodger.

  In a blink, I looked out at the world through her eyes. A thin silver line spun out from Grace to my solar plexus. Grace’s body and mind were free of the Left-Hand taint, while I still hoped to wield my original and new spiritual powers. In a series of words and images, Grace briefed me.

  I asked, What is Lara carrying?

  Grace told me. She’s waiting for the word from you. From us.

  God, every word is a prayer now. “Lara, now!”

  We added, “Hit his face,” both to impel it and perhaps throw off Roderick’s response. Then we dove for my body as Lara was pitching the cloth through the open doorway into the room.

  As we’d hoped, Roderick raised his hands to block Lara’s throw. The cloth hit his left palm, and stuck, smoking from contact with Lara’s antithetical blood.

  We grabbed the needle out of my body’s pocket. My soul felt the pull of its carnal home. Not yet. “Scherie, speak!”

  The weapon that was Scherie Rezvani exploded, but this time like a focused charge, all in one direction. In the austere language she reserved for her worst enemies, she said, “Roderick, you are dead. Go!”

  The blast of Scherie’s craft went through her blood in the cloth directly into Roderick’s damaged hands. “No,” he bellowed. “This is my body. I have never died.”

  But the truth of Scherie’s words manifested in a burning red line of dispellation spreading from the cloth through his hands and slowly up his arms. He was already losing. With all his energy committed to this battle, he lost his hold on the room. Scherie was walking toward Roderick, her own hands outstretched. Adding his power to the fight as he moved forward, Dale yelled an invocation of wind, pushing them both on toward Roderick, and forcing Roderick back toward the table and the gate.

  In a burst of black-lit craft, Roderick’s spirit fled. His body, still tied to the energy of the other world, exploded into blood, ichor, and pieces of burnt meat and bone that futilely snaked about as they fell to the ground. But I felt the sudden cold of his liberated malice, and I could see his spirit coalescing and condensing as he considered whose body to possess. He might go for Dale or Lara.

  We held up the needle high into the air. “Come here.”

  Like a dog strangling itself on a leash, Roderick’s black-lit spirit was pulled sharply into the needle. We dabbed the needle with my blood from my severed foot. “We bind you to this forever.”

  It didn’t take. Maybe Roman had known other lore and could have done it better. Already Roderick’s spirit was struggling out in spinning spiral-armed revolutions.

  This left a last horrible option. Any alternative? I asked Grace.

  No, she said.

  We shouted “Everyone keep back!” and leapt over the table. We stood as close as we could bear to the gate of the dead. Roderick’s dissipated ghost machine was still at work on the hole. I imagined the Earth as one big land, one common home. For just a few minutes, give me all of your magic.

  From somewhere distant and deep, a mother’s voice was speaking reassuring sounds to her infant. The sounds meant Little one, what do you think I’ve been trying to do?

  We cocked the needle up like an American football. “Open wide,” we said.

  From a nearly dimensionless pinprick to a terrifyingly substantial gap, the hole grew. Like children peeking through a serial killer’s keyhole, we saw the world of the dead straight on, without my special sight. The sight alone of what was there nearly killed us.

  In the gap between heartbeats, we threw the needle through to the other world. “Stay on the fucking target,” we said.

  Like called to like, dead world to dead man. The needle went through. I thought I could hear Roderick screaming. With a backburst of black-lit power, one of the greatest and most evil spiritual practitioners who had ever lived passed from this life and this world.

  But now the hole was growing, inviting the greater threat that mad Roderick had thought to tame. In a rush, I went back to my body, just as, with Roderick’s departure, it hit the ground.

  The pain of impact on my half foot sent a convulsion through the rest of me. With no dignity, I fell sideways to the floor. I was light-headed and still losing too much blood. Lord forgive me, but with Roderick gone, the Left-Hand alchemy in my blood was wholly mine to command. I said, “You are mine.” Like my pride and my other sins, mine alone. “Stop the bleeding from my foot.”

  Grace and the Mortons were helping me up. But the thing from the other Earth was at the gate, stretching malefic tendrils of power through, reaching for us. Couldn’t my friends see them?

  With Roderick gone, Lara entered the room. “Scherie,” she said, “send the rest of the dead to me. Now.”

  “Can you handle them?” asked Scherie.

  “Is job like any other,” said Lara.

  “Go to Lara. Now!”

  A tornado of ghosts unraveled and then spun into and around Lara’s body. Lara collapsed, but the gap and the beast were still there.

  “Get out,” I said. “All of you. That’s an order. I need to shut this gate, and you need to report what happened to H-ring and Langley and stop them from blowing this place up.”

  “Why, sir?” asked Scherie.

  “The rubble will only get in their way—it won’t stop what’s coming through. Now go!”

  Dale nodded. He knew the math. If either he or Scherie stayed, they both would, and that was just stupid. The Mortons left, hauling Lara between them.

  But Grace didn’t move. “Not this time,” she said flatly.

  “Not even if I ask really nice?” I said.

  “I’ll help you over.”

  I put an arm over her shoulder, and I hobbled over with her to the gate of Hell. Maybe the thing trying to get through wasn’t a demon, but it was close enough.

  “In God’s name, seal and heal.” This just seemed to make the ravening thing on the other side angrier. Another tendril of greater power burst into our dimension and seemed to taste the air in front of my face.

  Grace and I stood our ground. I tried a more humble prayer, a prayer against the end of the world. “Lord, please, not yet.” I reached out to the other presence, the one that seemed to be giving me this dubious power. Just one more push, Mother Earth.

  The bunker trembled, like an earthquake. I held on to Grace and she held on to me. Were they bombing us? No. The very foundations of the world were shifting.

  Ever so slowly, the hole to the world of death irised shut.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOURr />
  As Scherie and Dale dragged her through the exit tunnel, Lara recovered enough to walk on her own. Scherie was moved by the sad, strange beauty in craftsight of Lara, who glowed with all the failed Ukrainian angels dancing on pinhead-sized portions of her body.

  “Lara,” said Dale, “could you hide us long enough for us to check outside?”

  “Yes.”

  Scherie’s view went fish-eyed. Outside the blast door were the remnants of some small-scale chaos and some cold and wet soldiers with guns. In front of the soldiers, an automated ATV towing a large and heavy-looking bit of armament was moving steadily toward the tunnel entrance. Dale yelled ahead, “We’re coming out. We’re Mortons, and if that means anything to you, please stand down. Oh, and Major Endicott says don’t blow up the bunker; it’ll only make the Left-Hand god hungry.”

  Hands raised behind his head, Dale stepped out of the stealth bubble and into much shouting. But before Scherie could follow him, Lara said, “I go away now.”

  “Where?” said Scherie.

  “My new job,” said Lara. “Guard duty.” For the first time that Scherie had seen, Lara smiled, as if at some secret joke.

  “There could be trouble back in Ukraine. You could stay here, claim craft asylum.”

  “No need,” said Lara, smile broadening. “I already have sanctuary.”

  “Sanctuary?” In one leap, Scherie got it, though she wasn’t sure she believed it. Could Lara be the next guardian of Ukraine’s equivalent to the Appalachian’s Sanctuary for the lost? Up until now, Scherie had trusted her intentions, and Lara had retrieved the spirits of her people, but that didn’t mean that Lara was free from mental malfunction. Scherie would have to confirm this fantastical hypothesis.

  But before Scherie could question, congratulate, or thank her, Lara was gone. Scherie raised her hands, stepped forward toward Dale, and entered the shouting match.

  * * *

  Grace let me lean into her and helped me move on my good leg out of the bunker into the tunnel. With a mock casualness, she asked, “Darling, do you feel like ordering anyone to conquer the world for you?” Meaning, do I have to kill you?