Eva raced after him, a powerful sensation of being watched pouring over her on a wave of cold chills. She didn't want to lose control of the situation, but the surroundings were closing in on her. Cops were persona non grata down here, and there were plenty of amateur sorcerers lurking in the alleys, only too happy to hurl a spell at a white patroller. Eva flipped down her visor as she ran.
Up ahead, Lydon was stumbling around a corner, digging in his charm-tunic pocket. Eva's scalp prickled with alarm. The junkie was about to throw something back at her, cast something at her to throw her off.
Eva reached down to her right hip and unsnapped the safety on her elemental. The workhorse defensive weapon for the white patrollers, the elemental was a small flare gun with a large circular template at the end of the barrel suspended in mercury and calibrated like a compass. Specially designed rounds loaded with the four Elements — oxygen, inflammable magnesium, water, and granulated obsidian — were propelled through the muzzle at extreme velocities, the projectile expanding according to the corresponding Cardinal Directions. East for air, south for fire, west for water, north for earth. It was like shooting someone with denatured magic. Eva didn't like to use the elemental on the run. It weighed nearly ten pounds, and was awkward and bulky in her slender hands. It required a high level of concentration, but in certain situations it was unavoidable.
Like this one.
Ahead of her, the junkie had vanished around the corner of a building. Raising the elemental with both hands, clenching her teeth, preparing for the worse, Eva approached the intersection. The edge of the sky rise was a jagged pillar of decaying bricks, ruined by pollution and black-residue, shaded by layers of torn awnings. Eva thumbed the hammer back, then quickly lurched around the corner.
A wendigo was waiting for her.
"Abraca-fucking-dabra," Eva uttered through clenched teeth, stumbling to a halt, raising the gun at the monster. Thirty-feet away, the wendigo tossed its head and roared, the sound like nothing Eva had ever heard, a million claws on broken slate. Three stories high, yellow-eyed, its scaly flesh the color of dead fish, the wendigo was a nightmare made flesh, and Eva's righteous war cry seemed to align its filthy molecules.
"AGLA!"
The wendigo pounced at her, and for one frantic, frozen moment, Eva was looking straight down the jaws of hell, the rows of giant uneven incisors dripping with pus, the festering pit of its throat, something pink and bulbous throbbing down there. Then Eva fired off a single round of concentrated magic, the scarlet flash blooming from the muzzle.
The round struck the projection dead-center and cocooned its body. It was as though an antique photographer's powder-flash had popped in Eva's face. She jerked back, startled by the smell and the heat as a massive shriek rose up and decayed in the air. The wendigo imploded like a giant wine bladder collapsing, its leprous flesh sinking inward, its head shrinking in a convulsion of sparks and blue flames.
Eva blinked and slammed another round in the elemental's breach.
In the ensuing haze she simultaneously noticed two things: First, Lydon was fifty meters away, wide-eyed and panicky, backing away from the purple cloud of witchcraft. Second, a tiny object had materialized within the bowels of the dying wendigo, falling to the ground as though a string had been cut, clattering across the sidewalk.
Eva reacted instinctively, her cop-reflexes kicking in. She called out at the top of her lungs, raising the elemental at the junkie: "ONE MORE STEP, LYDON, AND YOU'RE AN OILY SPOT ON THE PAVEMENT!"
Half a block away, the junkie froze.
Eva kept the gun trained on Lydon as she cautiously strode toward the tiny object on the cracked cement. It was some kind of totem or icon. Probably Shambler, maybe even Destroyer. She knelt down by it, keeping her gun-sight beaded on the skinny man ahead of her. She glanced at the object. It was another miniature.
Eva picked it up and took a closer look, the chills stitching up her spine.
"What the hell is going on?" she said, looking up at the junkie, who was paralyzed at the end of the block, his bony fingers splayed in the air above his head.
"You got the wrong guy, Seven!" Lydon hollered in a broken voice.
Eva rose to her feet with her elemental locked and loaded in one hand, the miniature in the other. She started toward the junkie. "It wasn't a rhetorical question, Lydon!"
"What?!"
Eva approached, waving the miniature. "This! This! What's the idea?"
"I found it, I swear on the gods-head, I found it!"
Eva reached the skinny man and shoved the elemental in his face. "What are you talking about?!"
Under the flying ace helmet, Lydon's sallow face trembled, his eyes shifted nervously. "I found it on my doorstep last night, on the — whattyacallit? — the stoop! The stoop! There were two of 'em, I swear, look in my pocket! The other one's in my pocket! I swear!"
Eva patted him down and found the second miniature lodged in his pocket.
It was a perfect miniature of Lydon himself, right down to the ludicrous little leather helmet. About three inches long, it even had Lydon's buggy eyes — a pair of petrified, bleached salamander eggs. The resemblance was uncanny. But it was the other one, the one that had fallen from the guts of the wendigo, that most disturbed Eva.
"Why don't I believe you?" Eva growled at the skinny addict, shoving the second doll into her pocket with the first.
"Go ahead and spell me, shank me, do whatever you want! You ain't gonna get anything else!"
Eva stared at him for a moment. From the dark canyons above them came the scream of another crow. Eva grabbed the junkie by the collar, then shoved him into an adjacent alley, out of the view of the shadows.
"What do you know about this Disciple character?" Eva hissed at him. "The one that bought it last night!"
"I— I don't—"
"Think hard!" Eva barked, pressing the elemental's muzzle against Lydon's carotid.
"Okay, look, look, you didn't get this from me, okay, but I remember from when I was running with Kenny, this Disciple guy was one of the big thinkers with the Shambler's."
"What do you mean, big thinkers?"
"Big ideas, you know, deep thoughts, deep thoughts about things and shit."
"What things?"
"I don't know, Shambler shit, you know, the Big Invite, some shit like that."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"The Big Invite, the Invite, you know, the Summoning. This guy was part of the team working on tapping the other side, getting through to some other fuckin' dimension, some crazy shit like that."
Eva's gut tightened. "What happened?"
Lydon swallowed hard. "What do I know? The guy got cold feet, saw something in the tarots he didn't like, tried to pull out, I don't know, I swear, that's it, that's all I know, I swear!"
Eva drilled her gaze into the junkie's sickly egg-yolk eyes. "Where's Anger?"
The junkie blinked and trembled. "What?"
"You heard me. Where's Kenny Anger?"
"I have no idea."
Eva pressed the muzzle against his forehead, grabbing him by the neck. "You better get an idea— quick!"
"I haven't seen the guy in ages, I swear, all I can remember was the place he used to go to, the warehouse, used to call it his studio!"
Eva stared at him. "I'm listening."
The junkie swallowed hard, trembling. "I remember it was over on Razorfield, near the piers."
Eva thought about it for a moment. "Try again."
"What? — what do you mean? — that's where it was! — on Razorfield down by the docks!"
Eva tightened her grip, Lydon's face turning a livid shade of purple. "That's impossible, asshole."
"What do you —?!"
"Razorfield stops at Avenue Z."
"I'm telling ya —!"
"Does he live underwater?!" she yelled. "Because that's where it would be! Under fucking water!"
"I don't —"
"IDIOT!"
She s
hoved him hard against the alley wall, and the back of his head tagged the brick with an audible thump. His eyes showed the whites and he folded like a rag doll, sliding down the wall and collapsing in a heap.
The silence fell on the alley like a funeral shroud, and Eva stood there for a moment, listening to her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. What was she going to do now? The ratchet was tightening. She pulled the first miniature out of her pocket — the one that had materialized within the Wendigo — and took a closer look.
It was another replica of Eva Strange herself, this one even more detailed and anatomically correct than the other. She was posed in a tripod position, both hands clutching a miniature elemental — just as she had been in real life only moments ago — the doll's tiny oval face carved into one of Eva's trademark expressions of controlled rage. What was going on? Was Eva being woven into some elaborate, byzantine tapestry of events? Was she being used in some obscure ritual? She had seen magic miniaturism like this before — most often in onyx labs and underground shrines and temples — but never a doll carved in her own image. It was exceedingly unnerving, like hearing a monstrous voice in the dark, whispering her name.
She let out a pained sigh, put the figurine back in her pocket, and walked away, leaving the junkie to slumber fitfully in the dark.
It took her ten minutes to walk back to the Mongoose; another half an hour to get home.
By the time she got to the Quadrangle, it was dark. Eva's place was in a tightly packed warren of middle class apartment buildings, their chokablok towers rising up against the night sky like carbon-black adobes, their windowless bulwarks reflecting the salmon glow of pulsing sulfa-light and neon signs advertising spiritual security systems, extra strength smudge sticks and discounted off-world fares. The city was closing down for the night like a poisonous flower, encapsulating itself in lead canisters and womb-like tunnels filled with amniotic holy water.
Eva's underground garage was lucky number thirteen.
She rode the lift in sullen, thoughtful silence, ruminating on the dolls.
Her apartment was a modest one-bedroom job with nightshade- impregnated walls the color of turning leaves, soft light from mission-style lamps, and antique Stickley furniture. Eva loved antiques — especially old-paper books — and had collected quite a few of them. There were volumes by Bettleheim, Bly, C.S. Lewis, Machen, Borges, Bloch, even H.P. Lovecraft. All tucked into handmade cases. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century visionaries were illuminating these days; there was no such thing as magical realism anymore, it was all real.
Eva ate alone in her narrow, stainless steel kitchen, sitting at the service bar in a pool of colored halogen, chewing but not tasting her food, thinking about the miniatures, and the Rip in the fabric of reason, and the scrambling of the physical universe, and her own destiny swimming beneath her days and nights like a shark. And she was thinking about Razorfield Road terminating at the ancient sea walls down by the bay.
The dolls were sitting there on the gleaming metal counter in front of Eva, next to the artificial salt and genetic honey, their tiny faces staring emptily. Eva needed to cry. She needed to laugh. Most of all, she needed to relax. But once again, her job was consuming her, devouring her, and she found herself fixating on the dolls. She picked one up. She looked underneath the base for any sign of a maker's mark. She took out a magnifying lens, clipped it over her eye.
There was a tiny band of words etched in the clay pedestal of the doll. "Tetragrammaton," Eva recited softly, under her breath, the word seeming to ripple across the still air of the apartment. "Sothoth, Elohim... ."
Litanies. Incantations. Obscure blackstuff meant to scare Eva into submission. None of it frightened Eva any more. She was impervious to most of it— emotionally, at least. Perhaps it was the rage, perhaps the loneliness. She had formed a sort of spiritual shell around herself, at once both a shield and a prison.
She put the doll down and walked over to the window, gazing out at the toxic night. The blue-green flames were blooming on the dark horizon, the smudges of yellow vehicle lamps moving down in the dark canyons like diseased cells coursing through a dying bloodstream. Eva let out a long, weary sigh. She had been alone most of her life, and she had grown accustomed to it. But like the man says, familiarity is by no means tranquility. Eva harbored secret wishes. Desires that she could tell no one. For most of her adult life, for instance, she had longed for a child. But she also knew it was too dangerous. Eva was a target for every crackpot blackstuffer from here to the Warlock Range, and she refused to put a child through that kind of jeopardy. No matter how lonely she became...
She lowered the visors, went into her bedroom, took a Restrex and went to bed.
Sometime later, she dreamed of her own birth. Maybe it was due to all the thoughts of having a baby, or the pangs of loneliness, or the leftovers she had had for dinner. But whatever the source, the dream was vivid, poignant and disturbing. Up until now, in fact, she had never dreamt — or even thought of, for that matter — her own birth. But there she was: Naked and bloody and shrieking, and pushing her way into the world. It was back at her mother's cottage in the pine barrens outside Painesville, Ohio, and through the membrane of the blood-soaked placenta, Eva could see the weathered log walls, the ratty braided rugs and the Amish furniture. She couldn't breathe, the thick, transparent tissue covering her face. Folk legends claim that babies born "in the caul" are "touched" with second sight. Now Eva could see the blurry shapes of the midwife, her grey hair pulled away from her sweaty face, and her mother's legs spread open like a pathway into the light. Eva pushed and pushed and pushed, and she began to chew through the caul, and the blood and water were flowing across her face, and gushing across the hardwood beneath the bed, and then Eva gazed up at the lantern hovering above the midwife, and she saw something so horrifying it took her young, unformed breath away: Six decrepit figures gathered around the foot of her mother's bed, their hoods drawn over their wrinkled faces, their toothless mouths uttering esoteric prayers. The six old men! Presiding at Eva's own birth! And then the water engulfed her and smothered her and pressed down on her tiny lungs —
— and Eva woke up with a start.
Back pressed against the cold steel headboard, her heart hammering in her chest, her body covered with a sheen of clammy sweat, Eva sat there for a moment, gasping for breath. She was tangled in blankets, and her legs were cramping from the tension. Her mind was swimming with a vague sort of panic. But there was something else reverberating in her brain like a metronome clicking under all the noise.
— water —
She glanced at the clock on the bedside table, the amethyst liquid crystal vibrating: 3:49 a.m. She had only been asleep for a couple of hours, but it felt like an eternity. She got out of bed and got dressed. Her hands were trembling as she slipped a benzine flak vest over her bra, then buttoned the scorpion snaps. Trembling, trembling, trembling, not because of fear, but because of the realization pounding like a migraine behind her temple.
— water! — water! — water! —
Her weapons and equipment were out in the front closet. She lit a pastel cigarette, grabbed a cup of vitamax, and drank it while she suited up, all the while marveling at how stupid she had been, how absent minded. When Lydon had given her the address, she had naturally assumed it was a fake, but now, her head spinning from the nightmare, her belly burning with rage, she realized it was the answer.
(WATER)
She tossed the butt in a vacu-can, threw on her duster and strode out the door.
The outer corridor was cold and tomb-like, the halogens buzzing softly, and Eva padded as lightly as possible down the hall. She took the elevator down to the garage, fists clenching and clenching, nostrils flaring, deep-breathing exercises, tantric movements, anything to control the anger. She was a heat-seeking missile now.
She reached the lower level, crossed the garage and found the Mongoose. She got in, fired it up, and cranked out of her spot in a flurry of noise and noxious ex
haust. A minute later the car emerged from the building, then turned south and plunged into the dark, flickering, cancerous city. Roaring toward the bay. Toward the old piers.
Toward the place where the water wasn't water anymore.
5.
Steel Blue Purgatory
To make a Hand of Glory: Sever the right hand of a murderer during an eclipse of the moon, wrap it in part of a funeral shroud and squeeze it well. Electroplate it with silver nitrate and cobra venom, then put it in a centrifuge and separate its subatomic structure until the alloy turns black. Its possessor will have the power of telepathy and communicating with the dead.
A potent mixture of fury and sorrow coursed through Eva as she pulled the Mongoose off the highway, then started down the narrow corridor of shadows called Razorfield Road. Her hands were fused to the steering wheel, knuckles the color of milkstone as the scanner light refracted off her gaunt, sculpted face. Her weapons were heavy inside the duster linings, tugging at her, her collar tight around her neck. Her eyes were burning with nervous tension. She was about to take an enormous gamble, and she never ever gambled. But beneath all the seething rage, there was a hunch stirring inside her. A hunch that Kenneth Anger was involved in something apocalyptic, and it was up to Eva to stop it. And wasn't that just like Kenneth? Always the high-maintenance boyfriend.
It had been five years since Eva and Kenneth Anger had been a couple. Eva had been lonely and vulnerable back then, walking around like a zombie, lost in her detective work, when the young sculptor had stumbled into her life. Thin as a scarecrow, with deep-set dark eyes and a luxurious thatch of black hair, Anger was just what Eva needed at the time. A mad romantic, a passionate lover, and a worthy foil. He reawakened her body and her spirit, and for a while they were good together. But the world around them continued to rot, and before long they were evolving in opposite directions: Eva toward her police work, Anger toward oblivion. His theories got stranger and stranger, and he started snorting onyx, and soon he was mixed up in the cults and ranting about the end of the world.
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