Slashback can-8

by Rob Thurman

  By the time Goodfellow arrived Niko had finished with me and had rubbed ointment on his neck. The burn looked painful, but not serious. That had me in a slightly better mood when Robin picked our lock, walked in, and dumped a Styrofoam container on the sand-colored kitchen counter. Nice kitchen, big apartment, flat-screen TV, and all the weapons money could buy. We’d moved up in the world since the bad old days. “As requested,” he said. “Why such a request, I don’t want to know.”

  I lifted the lid immediately and grinned. He had brought me a smiley face pancake. “That puts you one up on Nik.” Hell, it even had “Cal” incised across the happy, syrup-drenched forehead.

  “He’s an actual adult?” the puck asked Nik with a large helping of disbelief in his snake-oil smooth voice. “You’re quite sure about that?” It was five in the morning, but as always Goodfellow was dressed like he was heading for a photo shoot at GQ.

  In sweats of his own, although considerably newer and less bleach stained than mine, Niko shrugged. “Some jump developmental hurdles. Some scale them slowly but with determination and success. And then some, like Cal, are laziness incarnate and run around them. I consider it a miracle he doesn’t eat with his hands.” All this was said at the same time he set a bottle of Tylenol on the counter by me and tapped it meaningfully. Lidocaine doesn’t numb forever and he knew it would be wearing off about now.

  I took a closer look at the pancake and scowled. “What exactly is that hanging from the bottom? Right under the smile?”

  “Sausage link,” Robin answered promptly. “Smallest they had for authenticity. I toothpicked it there myself. You can thank me at any time.” I would’ve thanked him by throwing it at his head, but I was hungry. Sometimes pride takes a backseat to an empty stomach.

  While I ate, Niko described the skinned body, showed Robin the pictures, told him about the attack on me and then him, the speed involved, the smell of a lightning strike-my cut and his burn in the shape of a hand. Goodfellow listened, studied the pictures, the handprint, and gave a speculative hum. The entire thing had taken three minutes total. Pucks were not known for being slow or bringing up the rear-unless it was in a sexual context. He knew, I could tell. Already, he knew.

  He’d taken off his suit jacket and now slouched on our beat-up sofa that I refused to give up as it was shaped perfectly over the years to my lazy ass. There was an unhappy look in the usually sly green eyes. He was a fox faced with an empty henhouse. A barn cat who’d already eaten all the mice and had nothing left to entertain him. “It appears to be. . but no, it couldn’t be him. He’s been absent for over a hundred years. The real one anyway. I doubt seriously it could be him.”

  “Who? Who the hell can’t it be?” Finished with breakfast, I sat on the coffee table to face both of them. Robin was a puck. Pucks lived long lives. Thousands of years, hundreds of thousands, some even more. Robin Goodfellow, as far as we knew, was the oldest puck alive. If anyone knew everything about absolutely anything, it was him.

  “Did he say anything about your hair?” he asked abruptly. “Cal, did he say anything about that shaggy mop of yours?”

  Absently, I pushed my hand through the mess. Thick, black, and straight, it hung almost to my shoulders. I could get it into a ponytail, barely, to keep it out of my face for fighting. “How’d you know that? He said he liked the color. That it was black. Something about it meaning I was wicked and he wanted it. Hell, I think he took a good hunk of it with him.” Lucky it was thick. I didn’t care about my hair, not like Robin with his six-hundred-dollar haircuts to keep those Great God Pan brown curls just as they’d been drawn on temple walls. But I didn’t want a bald spot over my ear either.

  “Ah, skata.” He ran a hand over that expensive haircut and turned it into a tumbleweed. “Dark hair. He likes dark hair. More importantly he likes to kill or ‘save’ people with dark hair. He thinks it’s a sign of evil. Wickedness. At least goes the rumor. If it’s him.” He shook his head. “I’m not certain. It could be or it could be other things. This is a diagnosis I do not want to commit to without more information. Truthfully, I’d rather not commit to it at all.”

  He was looking less and less happy by the moment. “Niko? Did he mention your hair? The rumor also goes that he tends to associate blond hair with whores and whores also with wickedness. Red hair too. Whores, whores everywhere. It’s a theme with him. He is a judgmental bastard. He cannot abide wickedness. Odd in a killer, isn’t it?”

  Niko gave a forbidding frown. “You wish to know if he called me a whore? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes, yes. Don’t be so sensitive. There was a time when next to Caesar that was the highest position in the land. I myself had a franchise of fertility temples-” Niko’s expression darkened and Robin returned to the point. “In deference to your prejudicial ways, let me rephrase: did he mention the color of your hair or call you immoral?”

  “We will go with immoral. Yes, he may have mentioned it.” Niko folded his arms. “What of brown hair like yours? Would he consider you free of corruption, as pure as the driven snow?”

  “No, wicked as well, only slightly less so. He’d still kill me, but I wouldn’t be his first choice like the darkly depraved and the wickedly wanton.” He glanced at both of us, but the usual humor was lacking in the barbs. “But with what Cal has said and his victims in the past, apparently it’s only full-blooded humans he’s after-if it’s him. Being me has always had its advantages, even with serial killers.” He gave a grin, but it also wasn’t the same, not his customary con-man special. He made the effort though. Robin was worried, but Robin was also still Robin. If he had but one finger out of the grave he’d still be using it to yank our chains.

  “If this creature is what I think he is, he’s killed before. Paien history says almost forty people, in the eighteen hundreds in England. All human. History rounded down by about a hundred. Someone, no doubt the Vigil, did an excellent job of covering up the murders and the skinnings from the populace. It was passed off as a few high-strung people startled by an obvious prankster leaping about in the manner of a seven-foot-tall frog while spitting blue flames.” He curled his lip. “Intentionally described to be ridiculous. Supposedly nothing damaged but dignities. This monster became a mere idiotic urban myth to them after the fact. Now it seems the lethal truth he’s always been is back for more. It’s too early for news this bad.” The disdain for bad storytelling was gone. He rubbed the heels of his hands over his closed eyes. “Offhand, I know of no way to stop him as he wasn’t stopped. He simply disappeared. Oh, and those slices to the bone of the victim in your cell phone picture? That’s a J. He likes to sign his work.”

  “Who then?” Niko demanded. “Who is he?”

  “Spring-heeled Jack. Spring-hell Jack.” He gave a laugh, but I didn’t hear any amusement in it. “One and the same. Either way if it is Jack, then he has brought Hell to New York. And I don’t know if there is anything we can do about it.”

  4

  Niko

  Twelve Years Ago

  Hell.

  I’d wondered off and on if the monsters came from Hell. But I didn’t believe in Hell. I never had. It seemed too easy. Do whatever you want, say you’re sorry, and then you’re lifted unto Heaven. Do whatever you want, don’t say you’re sorry, and be cast down into Hell. The people in Hell probably didn’t think it was easy, but I had more problems with the Heaven part. If you did wrong, no matter how sorry you were, you still should pay. . not burning in hellfire. That was over the top.

  But you should pay somehow. Learn your lesson and learn it well. That’s why I leaned toward Buddhism. I borrowed books about it from the library. If you did the crime, you still did the time, but you learned from it and in another life you’d be a better person. Then better and better again in each new life-if you were capable of learning. That made sense-the same as physics made sense. There was a balance to it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As energy is never lost, you are never lost. . only
improved.

  Then I saw the Grendel and I didn’t think Hell was that unbelievable after all.

  It was under the car parked in front of the house across the street. The flame-red eyes, skin so transparently pale it almost glowed at night, a fall of white incredibly fine tendrils masquerading as hair and an inconceivably wide stretch of sly smile filled with a thousand metallic needles. If Lovecraft and Clive Barker had collaborated to come up with a soul-eating Cheshire Cat, that was what its smile would be. Not of this world and more effective than a wood chipper at stripping flesh from bone.

  I’d searched every mythology book I could find and hadn’t found a description that came close to matching our pale shadows. As I couldn’t find their real name I’d ended up calling them Grendels from the first time I’d read Beowulf. Grendel, one of literature’s most well-known monsters. It was good enough for our own. And it helped to label your nightmares.

  I pulled the faded curtains and was grateful it was across the street and not peering in the window as they often did. This was the first one I’d seen since we’d moved here two months ago. Sometimes we’d go four months without seeing one. Five months one time. But never longer, not since I’d seen my first one when I was seven. Cal had seen his when he was five.

  They didn’t do anything. They didn’t try to get in the house. They didn’t come up to us if we were outside at night. They only watched. And although I’d been seven when I’d first seen one, I imagine they’d been watching all of Cal’s life. One of them was what Sophia said she’d whored herself to for gold and a child. Sophia had sold herself to a monster-a human monster for a genuine monster. Cal had been the result. Proof that two wrongs could make a right.

  And he was as right as they came.

  Not that Sophia saw it that way. She’d called Cal a monster all his life, an “experiment” that didn’t pay nearly enough, but Sophia was Sophia: a drunken liar on her best day. So Cal took it with a grain of salt. He didn’t believe her then. . not completely. It wasn’t until he saw his first Grendel that he knew for sure.

  What he saw that day, leering through the glass. . that was in him. It was half of him. Sophia didn’t always lie. When it hurt worse, she would tell the truth. Cal lost his innocence at the age of five and for six years I’d been trying to get it back for him. But innocence wasn’t like a lost dog. Once innocence was gone, it wouldn’t find its way back home again.

  “Grendel?”

  Cal was already in his pajamas, lying on his stomach on his mattress, and reading a comic book. He’d lost his innocence, but he’d lost his fear too. For six years he’d seen Grendels watching him. If it doesn’t hurt you, it’s funny how quickly you can get used to anything-no matter how horrific it appears. If you were going to rank them, Sophia was far above the Grendels in the cruelty and caution categories.

  “Just one.” I said it as if it were no big deal because that let Cal believe it was no big deal. At least on the surface. Deep down, he knew the same as I did. Monsters don’t watch you without reason. Monsters don’t make certain that a little boy, half human-half not, was born without a bigger reason. One day they’d let us know what they wanted with Cal. Given a few more years of training, and I’d be ready for that day.

  Whatever they wanted from my little brother, they weren’t going to get.

  I changed into sweats faded and worn thin. Like my coat, they’d come from the Salvation Army, but one state away. I took the second mattress, the one between Cal’s and the bedroom door, just in case. Thieves, Sophia in the mood to spew her spite, monsters who’d changed their minds-it paid to be ready for everything. Sophia didn’t bother to buy us beds, used or not. I could have with money from my part-time jobs, but mattresses were enough when I could save that money for getting Cal and me out of here someday. And no separate rooms. The places Sophia rented didn’t have more than two bedrooms. Sometimes they had only one. It wouldn’t have mattered if there had been five bedrooms. Cal and I always bunked together. Another “just in case.”

  As I was sitting down, I spotted a black plastic handle tucked tightly against the bottom of Cal’s bed, the blade hidden between the mattress and the floor. “Is that the butcher knife from the kitchen under your mattress?”

  I’d taught him knives weren’t for playing, but I’d also taught him how to use them. I’d taught him everything I learned, not that he was the best student. Discipline and hard work were a worse nightmare to him than the monster outside. But I kept trying and pushing to make certain he did pick up some. Where Sophia dragged us, there were predators other than Grendels or movie-style murderers.

  “Uh-huh.” He turned a page in his comic. “For the serial killer. He’s probably not stupid enough to kill people who live right next door, but you don’t know. Lots of people are all kinds of stupid.”

  There was no arguing with that. I didn’t bother trying. But tomorrow, finding proof that this guy scraped roadkill off the asphalt for a living was my number one priority.

  “Enough with the comic book. Lights out.” I waited past the grumble and toss of the comic book to one side before I reached up and flipped off the switch. I pulled up the blankets and it was time for the nightly ritual. “All right, Cal, tell me one good thing that happened to you today.”

  There was an aggravated groan followed by the sound of a pillow being turned over and smacked. They were actually good pillows. New. Most everything we had was used several times over, but I’d learned that with sheets, blankets, and pillows, Cal couldn’t tolerate anything used. It was a fact I hadn’t much thought about, but found to be sadly true, most of those things came to the Salvation Army or Goodwill via family members whose relatives had died on them. And before dying on them they’d been sick on them for months if not longer. No amount of bleaching could get rid of the smell of terminal illness for Cal. With his sense of smell, which had to come from the nonhuman part of his biology, he’d vomit until he dry-heaved at a stench I could only imagine. . not detect myself. I spent my savings on the cheapest they had at the nearest Wal-Mart.

  Of course that didn’t stop him from pretending the pillows were lumpy.

  Kids. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been one, but they were an interesting stew mixed of annoying and amusing. If there was a God, he was playing with fire with these recipes. “I’m listening,” I prompted. “One good thing.”

  He gave a sigh so exaggerated that only an eleven-year-old could’ve pulled it off. “I didn’t get chopped up by the serial killer next door?”

  “Cal.” Despite myself, I smiled in the dark. He was such a smart-ass. I couldn’t imagine the living hell my life would be when he hit his teen years. “Tell.”

  There was more rustling of covers and flopping of the pillow before he finally settled down. Cal was a restless sleeper. In the morning he’d be so wrapped in his blankets he would look like a human burrito. Or the blanket would be hanging from the nonworking ceiling fan. Mornings were not dull.

  “Okay. Okaaay.” There was a moment of silence, then words small and self-conscious. “I saw a mother pushing her little boy on a swing. He was four, I think. One big snot-ball, but he was laughing. It was like when you used to push me when I was little. I’d forgotten about that. Stupid kid stuff, but it was. . fun. You know, then. It was like flying.”

  One good thing a day. It wasn’t much in the face of the monsters inside and outside the house, but it was something. One stone in a protective wall that grew taller every night. “I remember. It was fun. We could still do that, you know,” I needled. “Go to the park. .”

  I wasn’t given a chance to finish. “Nik!” A serial killer next door was worth mentioning, although not worth fearing as long as you had your butcher knife. But having someone see him on a swing at his age, that was horrifying.

  Smiling again, I said, “’Night, little brother.”

  “You’re pure evil.” Another pillow thump, but he still said it because we always did. “’Night, Nik.”

  I slept deep. I did w
hen Sophia was gone. It wasn’t unusual for her to stay up until three or four, shouting at nothing and no one. Throwing glasses to shatter against the walls. I studied those nights and Cal read too many comic books. The quiet was nice.

  When morning came, with the first ray of sun, I was already at the window. I hadn’t seen a Grendel in the daytime yet, but better safe than sorry. There was nothing but rusty cars and houses covered in peeling paint. I looked over at Cal. He was a mound of blankets. You could guess there was a kid under there, but that’s all it would be-a guess. “Cal, up. Time for a shower.”

  The covers were tossed to the side and Cal got up in stages. There was the “five minutes more,” the “no,” the whiny enhanced “nooooooo” with the “go away,” and finally the “you’re rotten” followed by him sitting up with a gloomy huff of outrage and despair. This morning his pajama top was gone. I looked up instinctively at the ceiling fan. There it was. That’s when it hit me. . what I’d seen.

  The bruise.

  It was just below his left collarbone, velvety black, and as big as an orange. “Cal,” I said, using enough care to keep my fingers from breaking when my hands folded into tight fists. “What happened?” Guilt instantly washed over his face and he tried to cover the bruise with his hand. “It’s too late to hide it, little brother. Tell me what happened.”

  I managed to unclench my hands and sat on the mattress beside him. I cautiously moved his hand away and touched the bruise. I examined it gently with fingers as careful as I could make them. With five years of daily different martial arts training, I’d felt a cracked rib after a sparring gone wrong before. I’d know it if I felt it again, but nothing seemed broken. I knew he hadn’t fought at school. Cal had punched a bully’s teeth down his throat when he was in the fourth grade for trying to take his backpack and sneakers. I’d made sure he knew he couldn’t do that again, no matter how much the bully had deserved it. It was one mistake that wasn’t fixable. The school might call in Social Services.