Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  A pair of drunks totter out of a pub across the street, the exterior worn but magnificently twee; walls yellow, window frames green; gold font declaring The Old Fox & Hounds. I shrug at the vacant road. No harm in starting there.

  I slip through the door, exchanging nods with a middle-aged white woman smoking furiously at the door, a Bluetooth speaker glowing at her ear. The pub inside is cozy despite the claustrophobic ceilings; a womb of dark wood and antiquated furniture patinaed by the dim light, run ragged by the decades, and softened with alcohol-induced camaraderie. No one glares at the stray Chinese man, although two women seated at a window—city types in skirt suits—stare at me blankly.

  Feeling nonplussed, I stump up to the bartender, a large-figured fellow with a bald pate and overgrown sideburns. He wipes the counter down with a greasy rag and slings it over a broad arm. A walking stereotype if there ever was one, every trope neatly checkmarked. The moment that thought shelves itself in my consciousness, I tense up. Coincidences have never signalled good things in my world.

  “Bit shit out there, innit?” He beams in welcome.

  I shrug, torn between sitting down and getting out. I settle for palming the stool in front of me and keeping at arm’s length, a decision that raises the barkeep’s eyebrows. True to form, however, he does not question my eccentricity, only broadens his smile further.

  “Quiet one. I can respect that.” A calculated twinge of a brogue, lilting his words, precisely enough to make him sound quaint, amenable. No more, no less. “You look like a rum man, I think. Something rough, maybe. An overproof to burn away the blues.”

  Try as I may, I can’t quarantine a snort.

  “Wray and Nephew? Sixty-three percent. Like a house on fire.” And it is the smile that gives it away, the slightest hint of a sneer.

  Foresight, for a change, was as visionary as hindsight. I jolt from the bar, already reaching for a non-existent armament, fingers shutting over nothing. “Hey, man. If this is about—”

  “Relax. I’m just fucking with you.” The accent is gone and in its place: nothing. No impression of a motherland, no identifiable pronunciation, nothing that could tie the bartender to a country or a culture. His eyes glitter pale. “Wasn’t sure you’d come back.”

  “Why the fuck wouldn’t I come back? Also, with all due respect, who the fuck are you?”

  “Sucellus, at your service.” He twirls his paw to indicate the room. The two women decant from their seats and prowl forward. They’re trembling slightly, but move with weird grace and unsettling purpose. One cocks her head like a hound that’d caught a forgotten scent. Now I notice the torn clothes, the blood under the nails, the wild hair. “Gaulish god of wine. And these lovely ladies are, of course, Maenads.”

  I reangle my stance. Crazy, flesh-eating celebrants of meat, mead, and mutilation are required to stay in my field of vision at all times; keep your arms and your legs firmly attached to your torso. “Maenads?” I asked. “Shouldn’t they be with Dionysus?”

  “Funny,” Sucellus says, smile falling short of his eyes. “Funny fucking guy.” He clocks my blank expression and cocks his head. “Wait, you didn’t know about Dionysus?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Vaporized in L.A. by the new outfit. Things have been hotting up recently.” He shrugs. “These poor girls have found themselves without a patron, and I’ve kindly taken them under my wing.” He winks and props an elbow on the counter, chin cradled in palm. “Anyway. Like I said, I wasn’t sure you’d come back to us, what with that terrible run at the Boulder.”

  “What do you mean?” The Maenads fan out, crossing the bar with alarming speed, bare feet making no sound at all on the floorboards.

  “The bet, of course.” Sucellus clucks, expression shading to indulgence. “You lost.”

  “But I never even made the bet—” I mutter, focus bisected by the god and his women, smiles now dressing the latter, vague yet knowing, prophets drunk on the future.

  “No, but Helenus foresaw your answer.”

  “Excuse me”—I wheel on Sucellus, so that I can behold him in his porcine entirety—“but doesn’t anyone else think that it is deeply contradictory to build important decisions on the blubbering of a man who has been proven incapable of producing accurate—ah, shit.”

  No warning before cool metal wedges itself under my chin. A smell of wine, saccharine, slightly sickly. Hair against my skin, a storm of curls, tickling at the nape of my neck and the back of my ears. Close. Too close. I stop breathing. Those Maenads are fast.

  “Just a precaution. You understand.” Sucellus seems borderline embarrassed, waving a hand vaguely.

  “Mm. Easy for you to say.” The flat of an unseen blade presses harder against my throat, instructive of its bearer’s opinion of my sass. “Okay, okay, sorry”—the compression of my Adam’s apple reverses, and I wince as airflow is restored—“can’t a man get a few good non-sequiturs in?”

  No one laughs. No one even rolls their eyes. Cursing inwardly, I realize, too late again, that I’ve lost track of the second Maenad, although it could be argued that there’s nothing that she can do that her counterpart can’t. Still, her disappearance limits my options, and I grit my teeth against the route my life has taken.

  “Anyway,” Sucellus says again, with mounting exasperation. He levers up a section of the counter and glides through, graceful despite his bulk. A smile breaks his face again, while his hair piles up on his head, joined by a huge, bristling beard. “Like I was saying.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I’m surprised you came back. But notdispleased about it. Every goblet of wine demands its accompanying dish, every portion of liquor its partner in veal.”

  “I’d laugh at your joke, but I think she’d cut—ow! Stop it. Ha. Ha. There. Happy? Fuck you.”

  They march me deeper into the interior, past saloon-style doors into a better appointed space, the accoutrements appropriate to the decade. Even the paint job is reflective of the change, seamless, unmarked by gravy stains.

  Not many of the gods remain, and those who do wear guarded expressions, bodies brocaded by the conflagration, injuries weeping pus. Hephaestus is gone, of course, deconstructed into ash. Demeter sits alone at an unattended bar, largely vegetal, skin whorled with bark. Poseidon and Hades conference in a corner, their bravado still intact, the air surrounding them cycling between hallucinatory content; a glimmer of the deep ocean, black, riddled with monsters; a suggestion of the underworld, similarly attended by abominations.

  No sign of the feldgeist or Hildra, no trace of Veles. Despite everything that had happened, grief clenches at my lungs, resolving into a memory of the Cat, drooping like a comma from Sisyphus’ grip. They’d been friends, all of them.

  Ananke, right arm terminating at the elbow, the flesh grown over and smooth, is the only one to acknowledge my arrival. “The prodigal cook returns.”

  “That’s one way to put it.” The empyrean throbbing in the rear of my mind magnifies into obtrusiveness, as though titillated by proximity with the pantheon. “How’s tricks?”

  She doesn’t answer. Sucellus allots another minute of silence, and then gestures me forward, the Maenad releasing her hold. I glance backwards, find her propped against a wall; fingers laced behind the small of her back, foot drawn up, face shadowed by a banner of unruly hair. She winks. I nod.

  Sucellus leads me to a table inhabited by poker players, its axis domed with entrails: kidney, cuts of liver, the plumbings of a heart. Everything is meticulously packed into transparent tupperware.

  “What the—”

  “Helenus.”

  “Oooooooooh.”

  Sisyphus, leading with most of a stomach, peers up at me over the rim of his glasses. “Welcome back.”

  “So I hear I’ve lost big, somehow.”

  “All in.” Sisyphus shovels his cache of viscera into the central pile. “You did.”

  “See, I’d have thought that this was the kind of thing you’d bring up when you
’re visiting someone in the hospital. I mean, you had a lot to say about everything else.”

  “Straights,” mumbles a wan-looking woman with feathers for hair, elbows tufting into vestigial wings, fingers scaled with keratin.

  “Better straights,” counters another woman, similarly plumed but built on a more intimidating scale.

  A rumbling from the minotaur in the third seat. He stretches forward to harvest the assorted offal, a grin dragging horrifically at its bovine face. “Three of a kind.”

  “Hold on, there.” A girl, an elfin thing cobbled from sticks and bone, places her tiny hand on his, head shaken slowly. “I’vegot a flush.”

  “And I have a full house,” Sisyphus clucks, waving both of his adversaries away. Everyone groans, graceless in defeat. The air bristles with profanities, Greek and English, woven between dialects more guttural yet. “What were you talking about? Oh. Yes. That was a social visit. This is business.”

  “Of course. Obviously.”

  Asshole.

  I glance at Sucellus. He looks more himself now, cheeks red and eyes bloodshot. A tunic hugs his colossal bulk. No deity of excessive drinking is complete without alcohol, however, and as such, he’s also inexplicably holding a clay pot of wine. Noticing my attention, he shrugs.

  I grab a chair and spin it around, straddle the seat, one arm flung over the back. With any luck, Sisyphus will believe that some measure of cocksure, don’t-mess-with-me machismo is lodged in my chest—something other than this gnawing, gristly, growing certainty that they’re going to call my ruse, and this will all end in tears.

  Having said that, whole species are built on this model of dominance, ours included. So it might work. I hope it works. More importantly, I hope it works well enough to divert them from the crucial questions. Like ‘Do you have a doorway to the outside of our universe carved onto your arms?’ (Which I do.)

  “Far be it for me to comment on how you run your operation, but is it actually possible to force someone to pay for something that didn’t actually agree to do?”

  “You told the fox you would play.”

  “Yes, but I never actually said what I was betting on.”

  A dismissive flap of the hand. “We have that covered. Helenus informed us of your most likely decision, so we ran with that.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously.” The light slicks gold across his glasses as he grins.

  “Asshole.” I grind the words between my molars, restless, gaze running circuits around the hall. “So what do I owe you?”

  “Everything.”

  At the word, a barb threads itself through my soul; the smallest tug, evaluating defenses, gauging weakness. I spin out a negatory charm, pure reflex, and Nyarlathotep’s blessing, if you can call it that, secures itself about the spell, adding weight, power. We fling Sisyphus’ probe out. He notices immediately, and I wait for him to question me, but he does nothing of the sort, only observes me cautiously.

  “Even though I took down Vanquis?”

  A silence froths across the numinous crowd, and the song of the Outer Gods crests. For all their pretenses at indifference, the Greek divinities have apparently been eavesdropping. I gather my eyebrows into an expression of mock surprise and then waggle them. Got to keep to the spirit of things.

  “What?”

  “Oh, was I mumbling?” I scratch under my jaw, teeth bared in pleasure. “I said I took down Vanquis.”

  Whispers skitter, rat-like, across the room. They merge into low-pitched conversations, every word swollen with urgency. It’s all Greek to me (hah!), but their consternation is unmistakable, rising in pitch, spitting and stammering.

  Chairs move. A glass breaks, and someone laughs, loud and frantic.

  Let us in. Let us in. Let us in. Words, actual words, not the unholy bedlam I’d become accustomed to, but actual words, unstitch from the song pulsating in my skull, a single phrase repeated ad infinitum, growing steadily more urgent.

  “You can’t have taken down Vanquis.” Hades, his voice changed: glass-cut accent withering in the advent of genuine emotion, subsumed by older cadences, likely derived from the dreams of an ancient civilization.

  Let.

  He does not walk towards the table; he floats. Feet skimming the floor, a perfunctory acknowledgment of gravity’s omnipresence. A literal darkness follows close behind: a carpet of tendriling ink, as though someone had seized the shadow of a strangling vine and coerced it into animation. Poseidon takes the more quotidian approach and walks up to me, swaggering behind his brother-god.

  Hades holds out his palm at hip level. The gloom stills.

  “I can and I did.”

  “And what proof do you have of this grandiose claim?” Disdain greases every word. His contempt is magnificent to see, so complete, so thorough that it is practically impregnable, no longer an opinion but a state of being, the idea of something like me succeeding where he has failed so alien to his world view that he cannot allow even for its possibility.

  Us.

  Tough luck, I guess.

  “Don’t need any. Just give it another week and see if any desk monkeys show up to kill you in your sleep.” I shrug again.

  “Hermes, find out if he’s telling the truth.”

  A slender man, with gelled blond hair and wraparound shades, flickers out of the gloam. He snaps a crisp salute, vanishes as quickly as he appears, not so much dematerializing as stuttering away rapidly, a carousel of key frames incorrectly played.

  “And now we wait.”

  I study Sisyphus, endlessly shuffling his cards, their backs frescoed with depictions of infernal torture. On one, a spiky, stained-glass-looking image of a man rolling a boulder up a red mountain. There’s a look on his face that I know too well. He loathes Hades, despises him in that special way that only service staff and the subjugated (I suppose they’re both the same) can muster, and it inspires a pang of short-lived empathy.

  In.

  “How about we talk about what I get out of this?”

  “What you get out of this?” A laugh, choked off when Hades realizes that I’m actually serious, horror briskly supplanting his gaiety. “I wasn’t aware that this was a business transaction.”

  Let.

  “Well, it is.” I grip the back of my chair with both hands. “And I’ve got a long list of things that I want and have had far too little sleep, so let’s just get this started—”

  “I don’t think you understand.” Hades clenches a fist and the darkness corkscrews up from the floor, spooling around his knuckles, laddering into rings. “That was sarcasm. No-one’s actually inviting your input, Rupert.”

  Us.

  Another shrug. “Oh. I know. Similarly, I’m not really giving you a choice in the matter”—I hope this works I hope this works I hope this works I hope this works—“because you are all fucked up pieces of shit.”

  The atmosphere accrues a decidedly hostile tint.

  In.

  “I mean,” I sweep an arm to indicate the celestial masses as they unknot into combative poses, power crackling through the air, salt and sinuous rage. “I guess you’re slightly ahead of the curve, what with Zeus not being around. But the misogyny, and the whole dehumanization-of-the-human race?” I jab a finger at Ananke. “The pet grandmothers. Don’t think I haven’t forgotten your pet grandmothers. That’s just cruel and unusual—”

  Let.

  Poseidon, through his signpost smile, all big teeth. “Rupert, watch yourself.”

  Us.

  “No.” I kick up from my chair, glowering, finger waggled with as much ferocity as I can devote. I’m dizzied from input. Nauseous, almost. There is too much going on, too much sound, too many angles, too many voices.letusinletusinletusinletusin “I will not stop. Least of all for you, because seriously, beating up your wife—”

  In.

  “Hah! I told you, Demeter. Everyone understands our relationship as wonderfully matrimonial.”

  “—and claiming weird thing
s. Stop that. Honestly.” I can hear the hysteria notched into my voice, and it is frankly unflattering. But it achieves its purpose. The manic irreverence seems to have the gods fazed, which is exactly where I need them to be. I chew open my tongue, consecrate the blood to the myriad divinities of Lovecraft, and feel my skin go warm.

  let us in let us in let us in

  The gibbering climaxes into a howl. A sensation of knives, spreading in reticular fashion, tracing the atlas engraved on my back. Anticipation. Pressure beneath my skin, as though of bodies heaving in excitement, thousand-strong, clamoring at the seam of my spine.

  Hades: “I’ve had enough.”

  let us in let us in

  “Me too.” I grin.

  let us in let us—

  The doorway splits opens.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IT ALWAYS COMES down to tentacles, doesn’t it?

  Muscular, omni-directional and impervious to osteological injury, they provide a kind of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree functionality unmatched by rival appendages. As such, it’s unsurprising that tentacles are favored by those capable of restructuring their physiognomy. It’s arguably just good practice.

  Maybe. I might just be trying to justify this cephalopodic nightmare.

  Tentacles. Everywhere. Evanescing between dimensions, so proliferate that I can almost pretend it’s something like foliage: ferns and vines, rapacious shrubbery, the wind scruffing its fronds like the short hairs on the back of an alleycat. Innocent, innocuous.

  A tendril secures itself around a screaming satyr’s waist, whips the unfortunate beast back and forth against the walls, each impact flattening the skull a little more. The air flickers; the young man from earlier—Hermes—is plucked from the air and dragged shrieking through the bar. Gargantuan cilia rise from the floor to grab the minotaur, four to a limb, and rip.