by M. R. Forbes
The cabbie started yelling at us in German, motioning to the dashboard. He tried to turn the radio off, but it didn’t respond.
“Baron. Spreepark. You have three hours.” Pause. Static. “Baron. Spreepark. You have three hours.” Pause. Static. Repeat.
“How the hell does she do that?” Frank said.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
The driver was pointing at the door, trying to order us out. I reached up, taking his wrist in my hand and finding the magical fields running below the street. I pulled the death magic up and in, exhaling it into him, just strongly enough that he knew what I could do.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
His lip was quivering with fear. He nodded.
“Do you hear the voice on the radio?”
He nodded again.
“Spree Park. What is it?”
“An abandoned amusement park,” he said with a thick accent. “Eight kilometers from here.”
“Take us.”
“The car doesn’t move.”
“It will when you agree to take us.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, sure. Fine. Fine. I will take you. No charge.”
The radio turned off. The engine started.
49
And I thought I was creepy
I’d been to plenty of creepy places before. Standing in the middle of cemeteries digging up corpses in the middle of the night had numbed me to most of them. The dirt and grime, the potential for blood and gore. It rarely made me sick to my stomach anymore, and I was able to approach it with a neutral shrug almost one hundred percent of the time.
Spreepark made the hair on my neck stand up and sent chills running down my entire body. It wasn’t the visually creepiest place I had been to. It was the most psychologically and emotionally cold as if there was a malignant pall hanging over it, a reminder of the days when the park had been open.
The cabbie had given us what he knew of the park’s history on our way over. It had been shut down a dozen years or so ago after a series of questionable violent incidents had derailed the general populace’s desire to visit. It had started with a stabbing, and within a year had escalated to a full-blown terrorist attack that had claimed the lives of seventy-one people. The park had been closed after that one and never reopened.
I knew it for what it was. Somebody had discovered Black had a door here and had done their best to get in this way. Black had probably tried to counter, and as a result, the innocent had paid with their lives. ghosts weren’t supposed to operate in the open, but some of us did, and when we did innocents died. Most times the offender would meet swift punishment from the Houses, but not if the House was powerful enough to cover it up.
Had Tarakona caused the violence here? I didn’t know and didn’t care. If there were places where this world and the next drew close to one another, it was here. It was as if we were surrounded by real ghosts, real spirits, and the feeling like only bad things would ever happen on these grounds from now until the end of eternity.
“I don’t like this place,” Frank said, stepping from the cab.
The driver didn’t either. The moment we were clear of the doors, he hit the gas and sped away.
“I wouldn’t have picked it either. I wonder why Black did?” There was nothing special about the location. The magical fields were average, and I was sure the service was horrible. What kind of meaning did this place hold for him?
“Where do we go now?”
“We have to find the door. It must be in there somewhere.”
“Really? Because I’m feeling like maybe it was back that way. Or Amsterdam.”
I pointed to the rusted, overgrown front gate. Part of it had been knocked down and sprayed with paint at some point.
“You can wait here,” I said.
“Huh? No way, boss. Birdie and Snuffles are itching for some action.” He patted the two guns on his hips.
“How did you get those onto the plane, anyway?” I asked.
“Slipped them around between my legs and told the agent all of my parts are as big as my head.”
“And that you have two of them?”
He laughed. “They aren’t made of metal, and they come up scrambled a bit in the backscatter. Mr. T’s guy told me they cost a fortune to make.”
“Just like the eye.”
“Yup.”
I was grateful for the backup. My firearm wasn’t high tech, and I had been forced to dump it in a garbage pail.
We reached the downed gate, stepping over it and pushing aside some of the weeds. There was a street right after the gate, lined with shops and other buildings that had long since been looted, torn apart, tagged, or otherwise destroyed. A few had boarded up windows, and I gave them extra attention as we passed, wondering if Black had stationed guards out here.
He had to know I was close and getting closer. If he was worried about it, he wasn’t showing.
“I worked at a carnival when I was a kid,” Frank said as we walked along the path.
There weren’t many doors on the buildings. Most had been torn off by vandals a long time ago. We checked the ones that were intact though I didn’t have high expectations.
“I ran the ferris wheel some of the time,” Frank continued, pointing out at the old wheel, visible from anywhere in the park. It was rusted and decayed. “And worked one of the games the rest. Did you know every game in a carnival is stacked against you?”
I did know that. Of course, I had only learned it after I spent fifty dollars trying to get Karen a stuffed bear, back when fifty bucks was a fortune. “Sounds a lot like life.”
“Or our current predicament.” Frank laughed deep and soft. “Honestly, it’s been the best few days of my life. I feel like I’m making a difference. Or at least trying to stop a maniacal wizard from committing genocide? Awesome.”
“It hasn’t been awesome for me.”
“Yeah, but you’re jaded. You’ve been around too much. Me, I’m too ignorant to know any better.” He laughed again.
“Or too stupid,” I said.
“Yeah, that too.”
We continued past the buildings, following a cracked and weeded concrete path that wrapped around the park’s attractions. The feeling of coldness didn’t diminish as we explored. In fact, it seemed to grow more ominous, as if the stark emptiness of the place was building to a crescendo that was going to crush us underneath.
We made our way past large replica dinosaurs, toppled over onto their sides, looping along to a man-made river where rusted boats lingered untethered near the middle. We crossed the footbridge and headed toward a huge open-mouthed decoration that led into nothing but darkness.
“No doors,” Frank said.
“This is the place,” I replied. “It has to be here somewhere.”
“Conor.”
The voice came from behind me, taking me by surprise. Frank spun on his heel, gun coming to hand impossibly fast. Had Mr. T’s techno augmented his reflexes too? He opened fire, four bullets grouped within centimeters from one another, stopping a few inches from Mr. Black’s forehead.
“Impressive,” the wizard said. “I could kill you with these.”
Frank motioned for Mr. Black to bring it on.
50
Pompous
Black dropped the slugs instead.
“I didn’t come for violence,” he said.
“You could have dropped in for a chat any time,” I said. “Why now?”
“Your friends have been keeping me busy. Attacking me in the open.” I could sense the anger in his words. “I thought I had convinced the dragon to leave me be, but it seems he had a change of heart. Hundreds of innocent people have died already, Conor. Because of him, and because of you.”
“You’re the one trying to kill him,” I replied, finding some of the faith in Tarakona that I had lost the last time we spoke. He was still fighting? “He’s only defending himself. If you would leave things alone, none of this would be necessa
ry.”
“I’m doing what I must, for the world and for myself. We don’t need to rehash the same arguments. I can’t spare a lot of time, Conor. Tarakona is hitting my stronghold in Manhattan. It’s going to be a mess for the Houses to spin as an accident.” He paused, gathering himself before his emotions got the best of him. “The door you’re looking for isn’t here. I know what you and Kirin have been doing. I fed her some bad information.”
Kirin? So Sandman had a real name, and Black had let it slip. Why?
“And I know what you did to her,” I said. “Taking her when she was a newborn, locking her up. Treating her like an animal.”
“I have my reasons. Good reasons. You don’t trust that?”
“No.”
“Why, Conor? I’ve never given you a reason to doubt me.”
“Do you ever listen to yourself anymore, or do you have your head so high up in the clouds you don’t realize how transparent your bullshit is? You’ve given me every reason to doubt you. You condemned your son for going after the dragon’s egg, and then you went after it instead. You told me it was for Mei and Jin, when in truth it was all for you.”
“He wanted to take the power for himself. I want to change the world for the better. There’s a big difference.”
“He locked up ferals and experimented on them. You locked up people like Frank. Criminals? Maybe. That doesn’t mean you had a right to use them for your own gain. Freedom? You lament the loss of your own while you steal everyone else’s. You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
I should probably have been nervous about talking to him that way, but Tarakona’s re-commitment made me bold and stupid.
Black was unfazed by the outburst. He waved his hand as if brushing it aside.
“I’m not here to argue with you. I want to offer you a chance to surrender before I have to kill you.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why would you do that? Why not just kill me? I mean, you let me go back when I had the Hua, and now this is the second time in the last few days you’ve made the same offer, and there’s no good reason for it.”
I said it, but I didn’t believe it. Black had a reason. He always did. I just didn’t know what it was.
“I’m trying to be fair-“
“Seriously? Are you trying to be fair to Kirin, too?”
His eyes narrowed in anger, but he didn’t attack. He shook his head and sighed instead.
“The door isn’t here, Conor. You won’t find it. Go home. Live your life, or whatever it is you call it. My people are close to getting the formula right, and when they do this will all be over for you, and for you.” He glanced at Frank. “You’re right about freedom. Frank isn’t free. Neither are you. Neither am I. The magic binds us. Imprisons us. It is a curse disguised as wonderment, as corruptive as any other weapon.”
“It is what it is. It is the people like you and the other Houses that twist it and abuse it. Like you said, there’s no point in arguing about it. If the door isn’t here, I’m sure you won’t mind if I look around a bit more?”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. Enjoy the park.”
He blinked away, leaving us alone once more.
“Pompous asshole,” Frank said, giving the empty space a meaty finger. “You think he’s telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. Sandman, Kirin, said this was the place. We’re here, we might as well see how it plays out.”
“Okay, boss.” He pointed at the darkness behind the gaping mouth. “You think the door is that way?”
“No. Black didn’t turn up when he did by accident. If he’s lying, he wants me to think we’re close so we waste more time. Tarakona must be pressuring him more than he’s letting on.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Me too. I thought he had abandoned me. I wonder what changed his mind?”
“We’ll probably never know.”
I turned away from the abandoned ride, looking back toward another row of buildings in the distance. Black’s little visit didn’t make any sense to me. Why did he keep trying to dissuade me from following through with this by offering to let me live?
Did he know I couldn’t die, and that he had no other way to stop me?
Was it possible that I could kill him?
I didn’t think highly enough of myself to believe it was the latter. Still, I was certain there was more to Black’s actions than he would ever say.
“Let’s head over to the buildings back there,” I said, pointing at them.
“Okay, boss,” Frank replied.
We only made it two steps when a rustling in the brush to the left drew our attention. Frank pointed either Birdie or Snuffles at the spot, his augmented eye searching for a target.
“Oh crap,” he said a moment later, managing to pull the trigger twice before the manticore pounced.
51
Making it angry
The bullets hit the creature’s side, digging deep and drawing blood.
The damage only made it angry.
It slammed into Frank, four tons of thick muscle barreling into him and knocking him onto his back. He cursed as the manticore dug its front claws into his shoulders, while a scorpion-like tail angled to strike. The poison in the barbed tail was powerful enough to paralyze anything.
Where had the thing come from? Manticore were rare, and I had a hard time believing one had made a home here, or we would have seen more corpses and less graffiti on the way in. My only guess was that Black had brought it, grabbing it from wherever so we could play with it for a while. He was probably hoping it would be enough added incentive to chase us away, especially since it was pissed at being in unfamiliar territory.
The problem was that it was having the opposite effect. If he was going through so much trouble to get rid of us, that meant we had to be close.
“Get off me,” Frank yelled, managing to get a ham-fist up to punch it in the side of it’s bald, almost human face. The force was enough to knock it off-balance, and he punched again, getting it away from him.
I had nothing to fight it with. No gun. No corpses. If I wanted to hurt it, I had to get close.
Damn.
“Over here,” I shouted as best I could, waving my arms. “Hey, shithead.”
It turned its attention to me, but only for a moment before deciding I wasn’t a threat. There was only so much a sub-one-hundred pound man could do to look menacing. It crept in toward Frank instead, a little more careful now even though the trogre had only made it to his knees.
Frank stared at the manticore, using his augmentation to find weak spots. I took the opportunity to reach out with my magic, searching for something, anything that I could use.
I found the body a few hundred meters away. I could tell by the way it responded to the magic that it was relatively fresh, dumped here a month or two earlier. I felt a pang of sadness at whatever fate had befallen it at the same time I pulled the soul back.
“You got a plan, boss?” Frank said. He had gotten to his feet and was circling with the manticore, keeping his eyes on the stinger.
“Sort of,” I replied, sending the signal to the corpse to start moving. It’s legs were in good shape. Most of it seemed to be.
“Could you get it going a little faster?”
The manticore came at him again. Frank sidestepped, using one hand to push its face away and the other to smack away the tail as it lashed out at him. He planted his feet and kicked it in the side, drawing a yelp of pain followed by a roar. It struck at him with the stinger again, and when he ducked aside a claw came up and raked him across the face.
Frank cried out in pain, stumbling back a few steps while the creature went for the kill. I ran toward the action, questioning myself the entire time as I managed to get between the manticore and him.
The stinger stabbed into my gut, sending fiery waves of pain throughout my body. I felt an immediate numbness there, even as the barbs withdrew, tearing at my flesh as they pulled
out. I fell to the ground, losing my legs in an instant.
“Son of a bitch,” Frank said, stepping over me as it came forward once again. He punched it in the face once more, breaking its nose and forcing it to back up.
“Frank,” I said, the poison working its way through me. “Pick me up.”
“What?”
“We need to run. Pick me up.”
Frank reached down and grabbed me, lifting me and cradling me like an infant.
“I can’t fight it like this, boss.”
“You can’t fight it. You don’t have to.”
My corpse arrived, breaking through the growth and onto the scene. It was a female, naked, with bruises around her neck. Most likely raped, strangled, and dumped. No wonder this place had such a malevolent feel.
She went at the manticore, undead muscles stronger than the real thing. Frank retreated, holding me while I sent more magic into it, forcing it to attack. The manticore recognized the new threat, howling and hissing, lashing out with the stinger. It stabbed her and pulled back, confused when she kept coming. It tried a second time, and she grabbed the tail and tried to pull it off. The creature screamed and batted her, knocking her away.
The poison made my entire body feel warm and tingly. It must have had something else in it, because I was becoming relaxed to the point of intoxication.
“Thanks for taking the hit for me,” Frank said. He had blood on his face, though the broken pustules had already healed the wounds. “I’ll patch you up as soon as we stop moving.”
“Okay,” I replied. I was weightless and stupid, every moment becoming a blur. “Run fast,” I said, my connection to the corpse telling me she was getting mauled.
Frank looked back, cursed, and picked up the pace. I heard the manticore scream. I tried to turn my head, but my body wasn’t working anymore.
“I can’t outrun it,” he said. We were too far from the buildings and safety. “I have to put you down and try again.”
