The Price of Salt (The Grim Arcana)

by Geoffrey Thorne

  But they wouldn’t.

  So I did what I had to.

  My right hand was fine. So was the gun in my pocket. A couple of shots and that ugly left could come off at the wrist. Hell, it was already screwed beyond any hope of fixing. No doctor in the world could make it anything more than the claw it already was.

  I could just imagine what Pris would do if she ever saw it. She couldn’t even take gore when it was on a movie screen.

  “Oh, please,” she’d say. “Like you’re ever touching me with that thing.”

  Then, just like that, I had my mind back again. I could feel the dark in there still, oozing around the edges, but, for now, I was back.

  Aegis, Mr. Sun called it. Protection.

  I had to keep Pris in my head if I wanted to keep the dark out.

  I tried to hold her there– the color of her eyes, the way she tasted, the feel of her hair– but it was so hard. Every time I thought I was getting it the picture would sink down into these oily black fragments and I’d have to start again.

  And, the whole time, there was the dark, whispering, promising, calling me back.

  I struggled for, what, hours? weeks?– building Pris in my head and watching the shadows tear her down. We were like tangoing, me and the darkness, inside my skull, back and forth, back and forth.

  Every time it got a little harder to put her together. Every time the thought of the blackness shredding me and swallowing me down got more tasty.

  Who was I to stop it? Who was anybody? There was a whole world out there, a garden of flesh for it to feast on. So many people they were like a ocean of grass just waiting to be chewed away. Who cared if the shadow didn’t belong, that it wasn’t wanted? Why shouldn’t it chew and chew and–

  I remembered that time Pris bet me she could eat a large pizza and drink a case of beer without chucking it back up. I remembered how, after the tenth one, she tried to stand up and walked right into a–

  The shadow ate the memory. It ate everything. It would, anyway, as soon as I dumped the stupid hunk of timber in my hand. Smashed it. Broke it.

  Burned it.

  Why waste bullets when I just happened to have a nice little impossible bonfire burning about ten steps back?

  What was it Mr. Sun said? Form follows function. Fire plus twig equals bye-bye twig, right? So what if my hand went with it? Where I was going there wouldn’t be any need for hands. Or heads.

  Burn it.

  Right. Absolutely.

  I was back at the bonfire before I realized I’d moved, staring into it, watching the dolls and pinwheels melt and spin.

  My left hand came up, it felt light again, light as an empty matchbook. It came up fast, a little bit faster than I meant it to. It hung between me and the fire for a second and then–

  I was thinking of some girl– hippy, chesty, in black jeans and a black tank, walking my way. Her hair was black. Her skin was black. Her eyes were black, even the whites. She smiled a black-toothed smile that promised me the best. The teeth, I noticed, were sharp as pins and way too many. The teeth parted for a second and I caught a glimpse of the tongue- too long, too thick and moving on its own

  God, what a kiss that would be.

  Maybe I wasn’t just thinking of her. Maybe she was there, coming, for me. Maybe she was my prize for–

  “Not the fire,” the black-in-black eyes seemed to say. “Smash it. Crush it. But not the fire.”

  I would have asked what was the problem with the fire when I heard screaming and realized it was coming from me. My hand, my traitor of a left hand, had gone into the flames before I was ready.

  I was burning. Fire snaked around my arm, tearing the sleeve into charred confetti. You bet I felt the heat then. It rolled up my arm across my skin, stripping away everything in awful searing ribbons.

  Nobody tells you this but the fire only hurts for a second or two, just while it’s eating your nerves. When they’re gone you get this flood of happy brain chemicals and nothing else much matters. Everything slows down and you’re just sort of there, watching, like it’s happening to somebody else. That’s what happened to me anyway.

  The pain came and went and I was standing there watching the fire eat my arm. But it didn’t touch the stick. My hand, my arm, got charred around it but the stick stayed whole. Pristine. If anything it looked better than it had the whole night. It was like it was coming alive, softening, getting greener. The scratched-in symbols, almost rubbed invisible before, had got back their sharp edges. It was like they’d just been cut into the thing.

  My eye traveled up to the top of the wand– that’s what it was, I realized– to where the half carved faces were. Only they weren’t half anymore. They weren’t carved at all, in fact. They were alive. They were just these tiny perfect faces– an old woman, a young woman and a girl– all staring back out of the fire like it was the most normal thing in the world to be attached to that stick in that fire and held by my burning hand.

  Their eyes looked sad.

  There was a moment, probably less than a second, where the child looked at me, right at me, and gave me a quick unhappy smile. The smile opened and music came out of the tiny mouth, the sweetest brightest music that I have heard.

  Then the fire was hot on my cheek and the light was squinting bright and somebody else, somebody that wasn’t me for once, was screaming.

  I turned to the sound, to where the shadow girl had been standing and saw that she was the noisemaker this time. Only she wasn’t so much of a she anymore. She was more of a they.

  Her body, the walls, the floor, the impossibly high ceilings, everything was covered in what had to be millions of tiny black slugs.

  No.

  Not covered in.

  Made of.

  In that new light with that high clear song ringing around I could finally see what it was I’d been not seeing all this time.

  There was no girl, there never was.

  There was no shadow, no dead cathedral, no smiling mouth or teeth.

  There was no It waiting to chew me up and swallow me down. There was only They.

  They writhed and twisted in the growing light, screaming in their billion tiny voices as it burned through them like wildfire over dry brush. They were what had been kept out and called back. They were Hungry.

  The old woman’s face began to sing then, a low steady chant that, for some reason, I thought was the words on the stick put to music.

  The black tide began to slough off the walls in sheets. The brownstone’s plaster ceiling returned in patches as the ocean of slugs dripped down.

  The entire house shook as every shadow in every corner of the place vomited up whole armies of the little writhing things. Just like troops, they marched toward the center, to where they were being attacked.

  They climbed up the shadow girl’s legs, across her belly, becoming part of her, making her bulge and grow. As many of the things as the light destroyed, three times that number attached themselves to the girl. Soon they weren’t even pretending to hold her shape anymore but had devolved into a gigantic looping thing that was sort of like a snake if the snake was made of maggots and cancer.

  The only thing left of the girl-thing was the mouth but now it had lips as wide as stadium benches and teeth as long as swords.

  “No,” it said in a voice like a choir of drowning kittens. “Nodd leaving. Unnngrryyyyy.”

  The only answer was the third head, the woman, adding her voice to the song. The clear airy tone rose out of her and flowed over everything.

  Okay. I’m no poet. I can’t carry a tune. I don’t go to movies where the hero and the girl discuss their feelings over tall lattes.

  This third voice was like Spring. Really. It was like every Spring afternoon where you’re trying to figure out if you should actually go back to class or keep playing ball with your friends.

  It was beautiful, okay. It was just freaking beautiful.

  “No,” said the giant black mouth. Its whole body shuddered. Bits of i
t began to break away. They dropped to the floor and dissolved there, making wet popping noises as they died.

  The song went on.

  “No, please,” The shadow thing swayed violently, caught in the wind of an invisible tornado. It was coming apart in clumps by then. Whole big chunks would fly off, splat against the wall or the floor and dissolve in a haze of sewer smelling steam.

  The song went on. The ceiling beams cracked, the floor split, bricks shot out from the walls like popcorn. The whole place was coming down.

  Then, with a gurgling wail, the last of the shadow thing just fell apart in front of me and the song stopped.

  I had time to register that, without the shadows propping it up, the brownstone really was a giant piece of shit. Then something slapped into my head and another kind of darkness took me away.

  ***

  The sun was up.

  I could tell because it was already burning a tan into my left cheek.

  I opened my eyes.

  There was blue sky up there with somebody’s jet leaving a vapor trail across the middle.

  I was lying on something rough and pointy.

  My arm hurt, my left arm. I rolled over to look at it, expecting a charcoal sculpture. It was fine. The sleeve was burned away and the hand was still a wreck but the rest of the arm was perfect. I could even see half of the tattoo on the forearm– naked brunette with half of Pris’s name across her knees.

  I made it. Without Grim, without anybody, I freaking made it.

  I pushed myself up to elbows and looked around.

  Eris Place never looked better.

  The overflowing garbage bins, the stray dogs chasing rats down the nearest alley, it was like waking up in Heaven.

  The brownstone was in pieces all around me. The whole place really had come down. The last support beams stuck up like dinosaur ribs. They looked like they’d been through a fire. That’s how this thing would be written off by the locals: another junkie-inspired fire in a building that shouldn’t have still been standing anyway.

  In a week nobody would remember anything had happened here at all.

  I groaned, getting to my feet. I’d remember that night anyway. Hell, with that hand to keep it fresh, I’d remember that night forever.

  I fished around in my jacket pocket for the cell. After the weird calls and stupid rambling apology I left her, Pris had to be worried out of her mind.

  “Ow!” I said, whipping the hand out. There was blood on my fingertips but even that was somehow pleasant to me. It was normal, see. There was broken glass in my pocket and it had cut my fingers. Most normal thing in the world.

  I reached back in, carefully this time, feeling for the phone. There was some kind of grainy powder as well as the cracked glass. It was what was left of Mr. Sun’s jar.

  I got the phone out and saw the stuff on it and my fingers– a fine white sand. Some of it got into my new cuts, stinging and I shoved them into my mouth before thinking how stupid that was.

  The powder was salt. Just common everyday salt.

  What the hell?

  Anyway. I called Pris. She was frantic all right, ordering me to come to her place right away for a proper chewing out.

  I smiled. I could hear the relief in her voice.

  I spotted my car at the top of the block. Time to go.

  I took a step and stumbled on something. Looking down I saw that the job wasn’t done.

  Three or four of the black slugs were wriggling up out of the rubble. They moved together, at each other, binding again, getting bigger.

  Tough little bastards. Hungry.

  And– just my luck– I didn’t have Mr. Sun’s magic stick.

  Then I had a thought. I reached back into my pocket and pulled out a pinch of salt. Then I dropped it on the slugs.

  They hissed angrily when the white flakes touched them but, like any other slugs, they dissolved just the same.

  I spent another hour taking care of the stragglers and then, after I watched the last of them steam away, I headed for the car.

  Right at the edge of the mess I saw Mr. Sun’s stick poking up out of the dirt. It wasn’t alive anymore. The heads were the same barely there carvings they’d been when he’d handed it to me. The symbols had faded again to the point of being gone. The heads weren’t singing.

  “Ah, hell,” I said.

  I picked it up with my left hand and shoved it in my jacket. It was mine after all.

  I paid for it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR… Geoffrey Thorne is the author of the bestselling novel, STAR TREK: TITAN: SWORD OF DAMOCLES among many other short stories in various anthologies. He is also a screenwriter and the co-creator of the PRODIGAL comic book series from Ape Entertainment.

  http://redroom.com/author/geoffrey-thorne

  Copyright © 2005 Geoffrey Thorne

  all rights reserved

  Cover art by the author