by Chuck Wendig
He gets to the road. Looks right. Nothing. Left? Nothing.
Knows there’s a crossroads back the way they came. Not far. So he heads that way.
Crows fly overhead, chased by a pair of smaller birds. Swifts or sparrows or swallows, he doesn’t know. They dog-fight above his head, and as he walks, he looks up and watches.
His heart jumps in his chest.
It can’t be.
Another illusion.
It’s Alison.
Dead ahead. A hundred feet before the intersection. Marching toward him with eerie purpose and grim determination.
“Al,” he says. Again not sure if this is a trick. “Alison. Is that really you?”
She just stares. Continuing her dread march.
Something glints in her hand.
A knife. It’s a knife.
Cason’s not sure what to do. Run? Hug her? Try to dispel the illusion somehow?
He stands at the ready. Defensive position. Hands up, palms out. “Alison, stop right there. Okay? I’m going to need you to—”
He feels it even before he registers what happens. Her hand moves, and with a flick of her wrist the knife leaves her grip and... he paws at his throat, finds the hilt sticking out. His words dissolve into a gassy gurgle.
She picks up speed. Crashes into him.
Alison wrenches the knife free and brings it down again. And again. And again. The blade perforating his chest. Lungs. Heart. Everything else.
Something Psyche said scratches at his mind:
But if someone takes out your heart or your head, you’re still deader than a pocket of dust...
Heart or head.
Pocket of dust.
All goes black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Eschatology
CASON FINDS HIMSELF standing in a dimly lit tunnel. Walls of wet rock. Flickering green torchlight. He gasps. Feels his chest. His face. His throat.
No wounds. No injuries.
Ahead—the tunnel splits into two. The right tunnel heads up, the left down. A swimmy orange glow pulses in the left-most tunnel, like someone way down there is tending a forge. The right path offers a bright light—like looking into the spotlight from a helicopter flying overhead, a winking starburst of white.
A man sits between the two.
No. Not a man.
Men don’t have wings.
This man is naked. Though, given the appearance of what’s between his legs, he might not be a man at all—it’s a puckered, leathery pouch, a ruined coinpurse of flesh
The wings are white of feather, but patchy. Feathers gone, showing empty circles of gooseflesh skin—the skin white. Not Caucasian, but white. Like alabaster.
The man’s shriveled face looks up.
“How… interesting,” he says.
“Interesting. I don’t understand.”
“No. I suppose you wouldn’t.” The winged man’s voice is almost monotone. Little inflection. “I am the Archangel Michael.”
Blink, blink.
“Oh,” Cason says. He’s not really sure what else to say. “I’m Cason.”
“Are you.” The angel stands. Bones creaking and popping. He looks Cason up and down at a distance. “You’re blooded.” Suddenly, the angel’s lip twists into a sneer. “You have his blood. The Betrayer. The Thorn.”
Lucifer. The Devil.
“I do. But I’m not... him.”
“You’ll be wanting the Hell path, then.” The angel cocks his head toward the leftmost tunnel. “Though you won’t find much down there anymore. An empty palace. Dead furnaces. Forgotten pits and eyeless worms squirming in the deep dark, hungry for something—souls, company, amusement, but nothing there for them, nothing at all.” The angel squints. “Unless you’ve come to take the throne. One supposes that is an option.”
“The throne. Heaven’s throne.”
“Yes. Is that why you’re here? I knew someone would come eventually. It’s empty up there, too. The angels are still home, but we shrivel without our maker. We’re nothing without the Master. We’re like dried bugs now—curled up on our backs, feathers fallen, our swords gone dark. Kick one and he’ll crumble to ash. I’m the only one left standing, and I don’t know how long I’ve got left.” The angel watches Cason. “You’re still shocked from the passing. You have died. You see that, don’t you? You’re dead.”
“I can’t be dead.”
“You can, and are.” Michael waves him on. “Come. Let’s go see the chair.”
THERE COMES A noise inside her head like a hard burst of radio static—a sharp dagger of noise. And then it all comes flooding back. Her husband. His face. Their wedding. Their honeymoon. Their fights. Their son—not her son, but theirs.
She remembers burning alive in a car.
Then, once it all snaps in place, she sees.
The knife in her hand. So wet. So red.
It clatters to the ground.
Her husband is beneath her. Bloodslick. Empty eyes. Mouth open in frozen horror.
She wails and falls upon him, sobbing.
COYOTE WATCHES HER from the corn. Bending over the corpse, blubbering and shrieking. Grief makes him uncomfortable. It’s so real, so strong. And such a boner-killer.
He’s not sure if the golden thread is still intact. He has no sense of it. It’s so thin, so frail—it may have already snapped. And if it did, this world is in dire straits.
At least he’s got his penis back.
He whispers “sorry,” because he knows he helped bring this moment to bear, whatever it means. Then he turns around and pads away on his four paws.
THERE. THE CHURCH.
The steeple rises out of the corn like a stalk taller than the rest.
Tundu, blank-eyed and shuffle-footed, carries the boy while the Devil saunters ahead. He’s close, now. It took him too long to walk here—five miles, what a bear—but the delay will be for naught. Because what could’ve happened in that time?
It matters little.
Hopefully Frank did his one last job and called ahead.
Because the Devil needs a Holy Man if he’s to enter Heaven.
FRANK ROLLS OVER.
The clouds above him shift and part. One cloud is three clouds. His vision, ruined. He’s got a concussion. He knows that. Doesn’t know what it means, but he knows he’s got one.
Skull, dented like a can. Cracked like an egg.
Should’ve made sure the big fucker was dead. He didn’t.
And now here he is.
He can barely feel his legs. His heels scratch the ground, mostly for naught.
Then the smell reaches him, and it’s here he knows he’s going crazy. Because he’s in the middle of Kansas, not the beach, and he’s smelling beach sands and ocean wind and—
Oh. Oh.
Aphrodite appears above him.
He smiles. Laughs. “I love you,” he tells her.
“I know you do.”
“It’s why I did it all. To get close to you. To get away from you. To spite you. All out of love. Love I can’t control. You made me love you.”
“I did. But you are who you are and were who you were, even before I got to you.”
“Can you make me handsome again? The Devil said he’d make me handsome again. Please. Please.”
She sighs. He hears the ocean surf coming on, fading out.
Her hand waves over his face.
Then she moves her face closer.
Her eyes, like pools of water. Green, blue, shimmering. He can see himself in that gaze. He’s beautiful. It’s returned to him. The scars are gone. His heart dances. He blinks. He blinks. He can blink!
“Goodbye, Frank,” she says.
Then she closes her eyes.
His skin splits, like a sausage casing too long on the grill. Like window blinds retracted. Everything is hot. All is pain. He feels like a boiled lobster.
Frank Polcyn dies.
THE SKINLESS MAN writhes once, yelps like a kicked puppy, then expires.
> Psyche finds it all rather grotesque. Her mother-in-law is cruel. She knows that. And her last kindness to him somehow makes it all the crueler.
But he deserved it. She takes no joy in what happened, but she finds no grief for him, either. What she did find, however, was in his mind. In his last hour.
She sees what happened to Tundu.
Sees the Devil. Sees the boy.
She knows where they’re going.
She tells this all to Aphrodite.
“I want to fix things,” Psyche says. “I want to go and help.”
“We should just go home.”
“The Devil is free. Doesn’t that concern you?”
“Yes, and that’s why I want to stay out of his way. I’ll call the others. We’ll make a plan. We have time.”
Psyche sees what harm the Devil can do. She knows why he’s going. It was in Frank’s mind and now it’s in hers. The Throne of Heaven is empty. Open to be claimed.
Which means there’s no time at all.
But she dare not tell Aphrodite.
A world with her as the One True Goddess...
It would be a beautiful world, and so wretched.
“Please. Let me fix this. I’ll come home with you then.”
Aphrodite seems to ponder, then nods. “Go.”
Psyche lets her wings unfurl. She takes flight, catches a heat vector, and moves fast as the wind.
THE MINISTER STAMMERS: “Please, don’t hurt me.”
He says that because, of course, he’s scared. Lucifer can see the fear in the fat man’s eyes. Big black dude, gut-shot. Comatose child.
But really, it’s his own presence. The presence of the Devil.
God’s zealots can smell it on him. They know when they’re in the midst of God’s Own Scourge. Their stomachs curdle. Their pubes curl. They know.
This poor idiot thought he was going to consult on a marriage. That’s what Frank told him. And here he is, swayed by the stupidest of lies so as to meet the shirtless Infernal Lord face-to-face.
“I have to,” Lucifer says, shrugging.
Then: Lightbringer’s flickering glass blade is in his hand and he beheads the poor fool. The head bounces away like a soccer ball.
The Devil drags the body, one-handed, up onto the dais of this little church. Then he tells Tundu what to do.
The big bastard lays the child down on one of the empty pews, then walks over to the headless, twitching corpse and stomps on it, again and again.
Blood pumping. Squirting, even. Pooling.
It’s enough.
The Devil goes and picks up the boy. He steps into the pool of blood, does a little tapdance and says a little evil prayer—Babelian tongue, a string of heretical glossolalia. Then both he and the child sink into the blood and are gone.
Heavenbound, they go.
MICHAEL AND CASON stand on a mirrored black floor, like hematite pounded flat.
All around lie the carcasses of angels.
Hundreds, thousands of them. Desiccated, shriveled. Mouths stretched wide, eyes like raisins placed delicately in puckered sockets. Hands still clutching sword hilts without blades. “My brothers,” Michael says. “This way.”
He points ahead—the gleaming floor drops off into nothing, down into the infinity of clouds and storms. Ahead, the throne floats.
It’s a throne of glass. Like in his dreams, but in the glass he sees no skulls—it’s just smooth, no sharp edges, all curves. It shifts. Like it’s liquid, almost.
Maybe not glass at all.
The throne rests on a golden disc, and beneath that golden disc are draped thousands upon thousands of wires—golden, gleaming, some red like copper, others burnished like bronze, some thick, others thin, but all some shade of gold. The filaments go as far as the eye can see and then some. They bundle here but then splay out, separating and sinking through a layer of clouds far, far below.
Cason sees no way to reach the throne.
Michael senses his confusion. The angel waves a lazy hand—
And a walkway forms out of smaller golden discs. One after the other.
“Go ahead,” Michael says. “It’s yours. You merely need to sit upon it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want that kind of power. Or that responsibility.”
“But you would become God.”
“I don’t want that.”
Michael looks disappointed. And confused. “Oh.”
“I’m... sorry.”
“It appears as if I won’t have a new M—”
He is split in twain by a glass blade, cutting his sentence short.
The two halves of the Archangel Michael flop to each side. The angel’s innards are dry, like burned paper; bits of him flutter up in a non-existent wind.
“I always hated him,” the Devil says. “So pompous. So righteous. He’s the prick who threw me down, down, down. When there wasn’t yet a Hell path to walk.”
Cason gapes. Staggers backward.
“Hello, oh, fruit of the fruit of my loins.” The Devil gives a curt wave. “Hey, look. I have something of yours.”
From behind him steps Barney.
“Hello, Daddy,” Barney says.
Cason can’t contain it. He hurries to the child, throws his arms around him. He picks up the boy and backpedals. “Shh, it’s okay, Barney. It’s okay.”
But the boy doesn’t hug him back. He hangs there. Almost limp.
Cason rubs the boy’s back just the same. To the Devil, he says:
“You shouldn’t have taken my son.”
“I wanted a prince at my side. He’ll do. Unless you want the role?” The Devil slaps a knee. “Hey! I could have my own divine Trinity. The Devil, the Great-Grandson and the Unholy Ghost. Works for me. You in?”
“Go to Hell.”
“Cute. A joke. Though a joke is only a joke if it’s funny, and I’m not really all that amused right now. So, if you don’t want the job, fine. Stand down and let me have the boy. I’ll take good care of him up here. I promise.”
“You’ll not touch him again.”
Lucifer shrugs. “Pity you think so.”
Then the glass sword is again in his hand—he crosses the distance in the bat of a fly’s wing and there’s the blade, and it’s coming down on Cason’s head.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Musical Chairs
THE BLADE DOESN’T make it to his skull.
It cracks hard against something.
Lucifer stands there, wincing. “Antlers. Really.”
Cason flicks his gaze upward. Sure enough, he sees the shadowy tangle of antlers rising from his brow. His head feels hot. He smells an animal musk.
He growls. With a twist of his head, he sends the blade spiraling away. It falls as just a hilt against the earth.
“A gift from your Daddy,” the Devil says with a snort.
Cason lunges forward, impaling the Devil on his antler spires. He roars—a sound in no way human but in all ways his own—and braces himself as he puts his back and neck into it, lifting Lucifer up off the ground.
“You know—” Lucifer says, voice hitching as he sinks down deeper on the horns. “You can’t—kill me—nnngh—like this.”
“I can keep you from the throne,” Cason snarls.
“Can you? Have you—urrrk—seen your son lately?”
Cason looks.
Barney.
Where is Barney?
Suddenly the child is on him. Crawling up his side like a bear cub scampering up a tree, the Devil’s blade in his hand. Cason pivots, tries to grab for his son—the child shrieks, that too an inhuman sound, and above them both the Devil coughs and cackles: “He’s my boy now—” Cough, hack. “I’ve got his mind. I’ve got his soul!”
The glass blade extends, swipe, swipe.
Pain lances down through Cason’s head like a jet of hot lava.
The Devil tumbles free, the horns still stuck inside him. Barney’s cut of
f the antlers at the base.
The child leaps free of his father.
It’s all going sideways.
The Devil laughs, staggers onto the first of the golden discs leading to the throne—
Cason moves to follow, but his own son stands in his way, the glass blade weaving in the air—
He can’t attack his own son.
Can’t do it.
He does that, the boy will fall. Maybe him, too. Down, down into the emptiness, into the golden wires, through the clouds and—where? Cason doesn’t know.
He can do only what he can do. Which is fall to his knees as the Devil takes the throne.
PSYCHE KNEELS IN the blood of the minister and pounds the earth; red flecks her cheeks and shirt as she does so.
Tundu sits against the pew, wheezing, rasping.
“I can’t do anything for you now,” she tells him.
“Help the boy,” he says, then spits blood in his hand.
She presses her forehead against the wet red puddle. Sticky. Warm.
She can feel him out there. Down through the closing channel. She can’t make it through, but maybe, just maybe—
Her mind can.
THE DEVIL SITS.
The glass throne roils. Dark plumes like ink fill the glass. The golden wires dangling beneath the glass throne turn red, then black, as white pulses of light travel their lengths, forming the wisps of glowing skulls. The Devil grins, begins picking antler and bone out of his bare chest.
He sees the boy keeping Cason at bay. Good child. Good little prince.
But then the boy’s head snaps up, and he wheels toward the Devil.
The young prince walks along the golden discs toward the throne.
Cason calls after his son. “Barney, noooo.” Bit of a whiner, that one.
Lucifer spins his finger in the air. “Little Prince. Turn back around and go cut off your Daddy’s head, will you? I’m tired of hearing his mewling.”
