Dead Reign

by T. A. Pratt

  “Um, sure. That’s…sure.”

  “I imagine you’re a terrible chief sorcerer.” Somerset turned away. “But I do still respect the office, you know. Good luck regaining your place.” He jumped off the roof and flew away, disappearing into his cloud of pigeons again.

  “That was not what I expected,” Marla said. “This place is fucked up.”

  “There’s a ladder here, Marla,” Pelham said from the edge of the building. “Leading down.”

  “Good. Down is good.”

  “We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”

  “Nearly somewhere, Pelham. Though I’m worried this place has saved the worst for last.”

  “What do you think we’ll find down there, Ms. Mason? You said something about when you were younger….”

  Marla glanced back. Somerset had taken his flying horde off into the distance, so maybe they could linger unmolested for a few minutes. She was not eager to head down this ladder if she was going to find a facsimile of rural Indiana at the bottom, and the remains of the man—the boy—she’d killed there. “I grew up in the country, in Indiana. We had a trailer on a big dusty lot, backed by some trees, and there wasn’t much around but farms and a garbage dump.”

  “I’m surprised, Ms. Mason. You seem so firmly a creature of the city.”

  “By choice, Pelly. Because I didn’t much like being a creature of the country. Back then, in junior high, I only had a few friends, mainly two girls, Amy and Carol. We all three liked climbing trees and playing kickball more than wearing makeup and hanging out in the mall, which made us sort of outcasts, but we were outcasts together, so it wasn’t so bad. We hung around together, caught a lot of hell, people talked about us, called us dykes, whatever.” Was that a little Hoosier accent creeping into her voice, overpowering the carefully neutral accent she’d cultivated after she ran away? “I think Carol might have actually been a lesbian, though back then, around there, she’d never have said so, not even to her best friends.” Marla looked over the ledge, wondering if she’d see stubbly cornfields below, but it was only a guano-spattered street. For now. “Carol got attacked,” she said flatly. “And then Amy got attacked. They were both too ashamed to say anything about it—Amy actually went out on a date with the guy, though it wasn’t really a date, just a walk after a school dance, but anyway, she blamed herself, said she had it coming. Bullshit, but young girls, in situations like that, don’t necessarily understand where blame belongs. Dwayne. His name was Dwayne Sullivan. Older kid, by a couple of years, so maybe sixteen? In our grade still, more because he was lazy than stupid, I think. Always had a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and had a little fuzz of a mustache, and sometimes his voice cracked. He hung around with the kind of guys who think the height of comedy is snapping a girl’s bra strap, but there was always something different about Dwayne, more intense, more patient, more serious. But kind of alluring, too, in that way dangerous older guys can be alluring when you’re young and inexperienced.”

  She glanced at Pelham, who seemed rapt, and she supposed a story like this, all sordid and messy, was as alien to his experience as walking on the moon, or windsurfing off the Great Barrier Reef, or choking to death on poisonous gas in a coal mine. “Carol didn’t even go out with Dwayne, didn’t go near him. But her walk home from school was along kind of a back way. Mostly we walked with her, since we lived farther down in the same direction, but after Amy got hurt she was out of school for a week, and me…I just wasn’t there one day. Something stupid. My mom wanted me to pick up a loaf of bread before I came home or some crap. Next day Carol wasn’t in school, and the story was someone hit her on the back of her head and tore off her clothes and left her in a ditch. Carol went to the hospital. They thought she was going to die. Everybody—everybody—in school knew Dwayne had done it. He didn’t brag, exactly, he was too serious for that, too careful in his own way, but he must have told one of his cronies, because word got around. Suddenly I was alone. I didn’t have my friends with me. I didn’t have anybody. I was just another poor white-trash kid, nobody and nothing. My brother was only two years older than me, but he’d dropped out of school by then, so he wasn’t there to protect me. One day Dwayne came along and pressed up close to me when I was standing by my locker. He whispered in my ear. He said, ‘Two out of three.’ And then he just walked off. I stood there, Pelly, shivering, and terrified. Amy, he raped. Carol, he raped and beat. Me, I was no great shakes in math class, but I figured there was an exponential progression there: come my turn, he would kill me.

  “So I told my brother.” She went silent. She didn’t think about her brother much—though, in a way, he’d helped make her who she was now. He’d taught her to fight, and to fight dirty if that was the only way you could possibly win.

  “You mentioned him, when I asked you about your family,” Pelham prompted. “Your brother.”

  “Yeah. Back then, I could still ask him for help. Back before he was a bad guy—or at least when he was a bad guy who happened to be on my side. I told him what Dwayne had done, and what he’d threatened to do, and my brother said, ‘Do you want me to take care of it, Marlita?’ He always called me that. I thought about it, and I said, ‘Can you teach me to take care of it?’ So my brother taught me what to do. I still don’t know where he learned it all. Some of it was just bar fighting, and sure, there were bars in the county that would serve a sixteen-year-old, if it was the right sixteen-year-old. Some of it was dirty tricks. The spots to hit to inflict maximum pain, and the other spots to hit to do maximum damage. How to make speed count more than strength. How to forget everything I’d ever heard about playing fair or fighting honorably. I wondered back then if my brother had ever killed anyone, or if it was just bravado.” If he were down here, how many ghosts would he have to confront? Maybe none. Maybe you didn’t have to see the ghosts if you didn’t have any guilt, and her brother had never suffered from an excess of conscience. “But after he taught me that fancy shit, pressure points and nerve clusters, he told me it was better if the other guy never got a chance to throw a punch at all. If you wanted to take somebody out, there was no percentage in giving them a sporting chance. Ambushing, he said. Bushwhacking. Sucker-punching. So anyway, before Dwayne could get me, I got him instead.” A cold wind blew, and the great pigeon tornado began to drift their way again. “We’d better go down, Pelham.”

  “I am sorry for what you went through, Ms. Mason.”

  “It could have been worse.” She swung over the ledge and started climbing down the ladder. “Hell, I’m young. It still could be.”

  14

  T he morning of the Founders’ Ball, Rondeau strolled from his safe house under the bandstand in Fludd Park—there was a whole apartment down there, totally unknown to Granger, the sorcerer who ran the park—toward the Wolf Bay Café. Beadle had undone the bindings on the wardrobe in just a few hours. They were hastily, sloppily done, unlike Marla’s original safeguards. The cloak was now rolled up and wrapped in a paper sack under Rondeau’s arm. They’d make their final battle-plan arrangements today; it was going to be quite an evening.

  As he started down the alley that led to the café, he noticed a larger-than-usual crowd milling around on the sidewalk, every street-side table occupied, even though it was only just dawn. Odd. Maybe they were having a two-for-one croissant special or something. The people didn’t look like tourists, exactly, more like working stiffs with that zombified look ordinaries with day jobs sometimes got at the end of a hard week. They were all black, which wasn’t so odd for this neighborhood.

  Except for that one white guy, sitting alone at a little round table. The tall one, with the beard. He looked…exactly like Abraham Lincoln.

  Rondeau veered off, pulling out his cell phone and dialing Beadle’s number. It went straight to voicemail. He tried calling Partridge, and got only line static, but that didn’t mean much—sometimes Partridge accidentally melted his cell phones. The pyromancer was a little unreliable, which was why they hadn’t told him ab
out the cloak, or the full extent of their plans—as far as Partridge knew, they were just planning on breaking up the Founders’ Ball with a stink bomb. Rondeau dialed Langford, who answered and said “You’re an idiot. Position 5A.” The line went dead, and when Rondeau dialed it again, frustrated, he got the hum of a dead line. Shit. Position 5A. That was from one of the contingency plans Beadle made up, right? Which one was it?

  Oh, right. The we’re-fucked contingency plan. And when you were fucked, where else should you go, but the erotic bookshop Marla—or one of her shell companies—owned? Rondeau ducked into an alley and took out a Polaroid photograph of a blandly smiling white guy in a sports jacket. He chanted the words Langford had taught him and took out his metal butane lighter, the kind rich potheads at the college used, which looked like a miniature blowtorch and burned at 1,300 degrees centigrade. He flicked on the flame and burned the photograph, inhaling the smoke, though the chemical odor made him gag. Probably poisoning himself and shortening his body’s life, but it was worth it if it got him through the streets safely. The photo had been enchanted, and Rondeau brushed a boyish lock of blond hair out of his eyes—he was now draped in illusion, and looked just like the man in the photo, a male model from another state who’d had no idea what he’d been posing for. The illusion would protect Rondeau from casual discovery. Death would probably see through it, but if Rondeau ran into him, he was double extra fucked anyway.

  Their little gang had apparently been found out. If Rondeau hadn’t heard the stories about the one zombie Ayres made look like Abraham Lincoln, he would have been screwed. Good thing Death wasn’t conversant enough with American history to know how conspicuous that particular zombie was, and Ayres wasn’t around to warn him.

  Rondeau hopped on a bus and rode downtown. On the way he passed his nightclub and felt a pang for the place, and for lost income, though it was good to see Death hadn’t made good on his threat to torch the place. After he disembarked, Rondeau strolled into the bookstore and into the back room, where Langford waited, disguised as a drag queen with an elaborate wig and a sheath dress. It would have been funny if they hadn’t been in fear for their lives. Langford flipped open a pocket compass and set it on a rickety desk heaped with porn movies and glossy smut magazines. “We were found out,” Langford said, then gestured at the compass. “Dampens surveillance. We can speak freely.”

  “It can’t have been Beadle,” Rondeau said. “Partridge must have fucked up.”

  Langford nodded. “He was very excited about the stink bombs we were building. I think he must have said something to someone, and word got back to Death….”

  He shrugged. “Partridge must have given up Beadle. Some of Ayres’s zombies came to my laboratory this morning. I slipped out through an escape tunnel. They didn’t know where to find you.”

  “They were waiting at the café. Almost scooped me up.” Rondeau sighed. “So. What now?”

  Langford frowned. His pancake makeup made him look ghastly, almost like a dead thing himself. “Well, that’s up to you. The stink bombs are made. I presume that’s the cloak under your arm. We can assume that Partridge gave up what he knows of our plan. Beadle may be holding out. He told me that he’s resistant to interrogation.”

  “So the cloak could still be a surprise,” Rondeau said. “Huh. The stink bombs, though…”

  Langford shrugged. “They’re already hidden in the ducts in the Chamberlain’s house. She’s a Marlista sympathizer, but she’d never go along with a plan to disrupt the Founders’ Ball. Fortunately, one of her apprentices was less scrupulous. I gather she’s been forced to scrub the ballroom floor one too many times. I doubt Death will cancel the party over the chance of stink bombs. Besides, he probably thinks he stopped us. So, leader—do we proceed, or abort?”

  Rondeau chewed his lip. Beadle was the planner. He was supposed to arrange for Rondeau to get onto the grounds of the mansion, to slip in unnoticed, to time things just right so he could pounce on Death by surprise. Without him, Rondeau would have to improvise. He’d always considered his improvisational skills one of his strong points, but Marla said his main skill was devising new and unheard of ways to fuck up.

  But Marla wasn’t here, either.

  “We’re on,” Rondeau said.

  “Good. Because if we don’t win, I’m a dead man. I don’t have the luxury of your immortality. So what’s the plan?”

  Marla descended into a harvest moon evening in familiar farm country. She walked with Pelham down a wooded trail, keeping her eyes and ears open, wary of a possible ambush. If something jumped her from concealment, that would be poetic justice, after all. It was the way she’d attacked Dwayne.

  “There,” she said, pointing.

  Pelham squinted up. “Is that a tree house?”

  “Deer stand. Hunter hides up there and waits for a deer, then, pop. But during the off-season, teenagers used to go up there, get drunk, have sex sometimes. That’s where Dwayne took Amy.” Marla walked beneath the deer stand and gazed up at the weathered wooden boards. “When I asked my brother’s advice, he told me about leverage, how even a girl as small as I was could break a man’s arms and legs using some rope and a good solid stick. But as much as I hated Dwayne, I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to torture him.” Though later in life, she’d been less scrupulous about using such techniques. “I mean, if there’s a rat loose in your house, you don’t torture it, you just kill it. Dwayne was…vermin. So one night I made a sort of basket from an old burlap sack tied to a rope, and I hauled the biggest, most jagged rock I could lift up into the tree. The next day I came here and waited for Dwayne. I cut class early so I could get here before him. I was up in the deer stand, and I called down to him, told him I was waiting, that I’d always liked him. I let him get about halfway up the ladder, and then…whoosh, I dropped the rock. It hit him right in the face. Knocked him down. Messed him up bad.” Thinking back, remembering, Marla saw herself hurting Dwayne from the outside, as if it was an act she’d observed, not committed. “I climbed down and looked at him. He was still breathing for a while, though not very well, because I’d messed up his nose and his face, and there was a lot of blood in his mouth. He was conscious, I think, in terrible pain. I talked to him. Told him I’d done it for my friends. I didn’t say I was really doing it because I was afraid for myself. I waited with him until he died. The first man I killed.

  “My brother tidied things up for me. Nobody suspected us. Everyone assumed Dwayne just ran off. Poor kids did that. But after that, I couldn’t look at the world the same way. Even when Amy came back to school and Carol got out of the hospital, I couldn’t talk to them. What I’d done—what I’d made myself capable of doing—set me apart too much. Even my brother looked at me differently. And though I didn’t like killing Dwayne, the knowledge that I could defend myself was comforting. And the next time one of my mom’s asshole boyfriends tried to press his body up against me in the hallway of our trailer, I thought, very clearly, ‘I could kill him.’ I knew just how. I could think of half a dozen ways how. So I packed my shit and I left town, Pelham, and went to make a new life for myself. But this is where it all began. This is where I became the woman I am today. The woman who does what’s necessary.”

  Something mewled then, up in the deer stand, a whistling, pitiful sound. “He’s up there now,” Marla said. “That’s him, trying to breathe through the mess I made of his face. I could have covered his airways and suffocated him, let him die more quickly, but I didn’t show him mercy. For a long time after that, I lost all capacity for mercy, and thought the whole world deserved to be punished for what I’d gone through, for what I’d been forced to become. Sometimes, when I let my self-control slip, I still feel that way.”

  “Should we go up and see him?”

  “No,” Marla said. “This was the beginning of something, a long time ago, but I know what’s up there. I can see it every time I close my eyes. A thing I made. Two wrongs failing to make a right, but at least putting an end to s
ome few future wrongs. Let’s go, Pelham. Keep following this trail, and see where it takes us.”

  They set off, and up in the tree, behind them, the shade of a dead boy wept in relief at Marla’s departure.

  They found an old storm cellar, all that was left of a house that burned to the foundations. “Down again,” Marla said, pulling open the door, and leading Pelham into the dark.

  They entered a long dim corridor lined with little alcoves holding bits of statuary and bas-reliefs, with dusty skylights overhead providing a sort of tentative illumination. “Where’s this?” Pelham said.

  “Nowhere I’ve ever seen before. So maybe we’re finally getting somewhere.” She set a brisk pace down the corridor, glancing left and right occasionally. Apart from the alcoves, there were a few open archways, but none led to anything like a throne room, just catacombs, pools of black water, mausoleums, looted treasure chambers. Up ahead, at the faraway end of the corridor, torchlight flickered, and as it grew nearer, Marla broke into a trot. She’d been down here too long, stirred up too many old ghosts, but she was finally back on mission, and the throne room was there, ahead of her, she was sure of it.

  Behind her, Pelham gasped, and Marla paused, turning, half expecting the corpse of the man she’d knocked from the roof to be there, pulling himself along, or for Bethany to slither out of a side corridor.

  But instead it was the mummy of John Wilkes Booth, pointing a gun at her, an expression of terrible smugness on his face. She could reach for a weapon in her bag, or just throw the bag itself at his face, but not fast enough.