by A. Attanasio
Mind racing, wild for escape, he reached inward, trying to see again Lara and his old partner Dogbrick. The image of that auburn face had jolted him awake and won his freedom from Duppy Hob—but now the vision had passed. In its place, he remembered what he beheld when he was Duppy Hob's antenna: Lara's ghost in a hospital across the river. He could only surmise now that the crystal prism had been taken from her and moved somewhere out there on its own—a piece of the cosmic child's soul.
Using the intuition he had honed as a thief in Saxar, Ripcat prowled the grim perimeters of Canal Street, sliding along the lee of old stone walls, slipping into doorways when anyone approached.
After a short while, he found a heavy cellar grating and forced it open with his inhuman strength, lifting aside the thick iron bars just enough to squirm through a cellar window into the back room of a garment thrift store.
Inside, he found crowded racks of clothing. Moving quickly, he donned a long winter coat, a slouch hat that obscured his face, and sturdy construction shoes to protect his numb feet from the icy pavement.
Thus attired, he crawled out the way he had come in. An old ragpicker with whiskered chops watched with disinterest as Ripcat carefully replaced the heavy grating and strode away, his head bowed low beneath his hat.
In Duppy Hob's trance, where he had served as an antenna, Ripcat's mind had incandesced for a brief but critical moment with awareness of the crystal prism—the devil worshipper's prize.
He knew its location. He could still feel it, thrumming distantly, beyond the river's gray slag.
Into a subway hole he descended, holding the long coat snug about him. He scrutinized a subway map set into the tile wall, the words speaking quietly to him, though he could not have read them aloud. After leaping the turnstile, he gazed down the track and heard rumbling vibrations before he noticed the rails shining.
A metallic voice called, "Gate-jumper on the uptown platform."
The exit gate swung open before a uniformed transit officer, who approached with nightstick in hand. "Stay where you are."
Ripcat waited until the officer nudged him with the stick before he turned and showed his beastmarks with a fang-fierce grimace.
A silent shout gaped from the officer as he frantically backed away.
In one bound, Ripcat plunged into the dark tunnel, and when the cry of fear finally came from the platform, more like a barking of shouted obscenities, he had already melded with the shadows. He continued on his way until train lights bobbed out of the darkness.
The engineer of the uptown express glimpsed a furred devil with long cold eyes and slender fangs bounding to the side of the track before the oncoming train. Even as the engineer whooped, the apparition vanished, if it had ever been there at all.
Ripcat leaped onto the silver, corrugated side of the rushing train, claws hooking the soft metal. His shoulders groaned, the speed of the roaring subway wrestling with his grip.
Passengers with their backs to the windows did not see him. One straphanger did. Her mouth gagged open around a cry, and she stood momentarily paralyzed by the bestial visage from the pit gazing out of the shuttling dark.
When the other commuters responded to her horror and looked over their shoulders, Ripcat grinned, trying to assuage their fright. And the sight of his fangs elicited terrified howls. Gracefully, Ripcat slunk away, climbing onto the roof of the hurtling train.
At Madison Square Garden, the express rolled to a stop, and he crawled out between the cars. Wrapped in his long coat, his smashed hat pulled low, he stepped onto the subway platform and moved with the disembarking crowd into the main concourse. He stopped under a departures monitor and the glyphs made sense to him, as they had at the subway map, their meaning remembered from some older dream of himself.
He identified the train that would carry him to New Jersey and the ramp where he could board. Just as he spotted the concourse exit that he wanted, a child eyed his beastmarks and bawled in terror.
Everyone stopped to look at him.
Jacket flapping, hat clutched in hand, Ripcat bounded over a long bench of cowering commuters. Screams and echoes of screams collided. Police whistles shrilled.
He dived through a tall portal onto the dim rampway that led down to the trains. People threw themselves against the walls to get out of his way. With a single roar, he cleared the stairway to the train platform and leaped flights of stairs, sending commuters scurrying.
A cacophony of whistles, shouts, and terrified screams exploded down the rampway, and cringing citizens pointed the police to the chrome passenger cars with their doors open at the platform. An intercom voice urged calm as police charged onto the train, while under it Ripcat crept away.
He crawled unseen beneath flapping beams of flashlights, over cinders and soot-blacked ties. Minutes later, he rolled under a westbound train and latched himself by claws and wedged boots onto the rocking underframe. The clamor of the tracks shook his bones, and his beaststrength held him firm even through the deafening uproar of the tunnel.
In Weehawken, as the train slowed through a steeper grade past ancient tool-and-die shops, he climbed from under a passenger car and leaped from its side. He hit the ground with big, powerful strides, and his shoes dug deep gashes in the gritty soil of the abutment.
Passengers smashed themselves against windows to watch him dashing between the iron stanchions, great coat filled with wind, blue fur streaked back from diabolic green eyes and razorous teeth.
He leaped a chain-link fence and slid on his heels down a gravel-siding toward narrow and desolate factory buildings. Standing in a rainworn gutter on Hauxhurst Street, gasping for breath, he felt the crystal prism nearby. This thrumming sense led him past storefronts on Highwood to the stolid brownstone building that housed police headquarters.
The cold day helped him, for no one lingered in the salt-stained parking lot, and he came up from the back, among three squad cars and a riot wagon. He listened at a locked back door, then ripped the door open, the cold wood yielding to his brute tug with loud crackling.
He slipped into warm amber shadows in a storage room of drawn blinds. Metal shelves stood the length of the crepuscular storage room. The singing of Lara's soul led to a vault set in the building's cinder wall. His fingers listened to the tumblers, spun them quickly to their homes, and opened the thick door.
As soon as he tore the prism from its plastic bag, Lara stood beside him.
Spun from tiny rainbows, her shape shifted with the light, more vague than she had appeared on Irth, where she had stood closer to the Abiding Star. She looked haggard. Her eyes had sunk to sockets.
"Reece—" She touched him with fingers of cold wind. "Reece—is it you?"
"Come with me." He removed his hat and slipped the gold cord that held the crystal prism over his head. Out the splintered door he slid and jogged across the parking lot, to the slate pavements that led toward river piers and the concrete karnak beneath the turnpike.
Dockside lanes flew by. He sprinted across a cemetery under the freeway viaduct and turned up JFK Boulevard, loping through tall gray grass. Startled drivers swerved, distracted by the sight of the blue-furred man. Several times, squealing tires drove him into the roadside thickets, until he moved out of sight of the road entirely, clawing his way through a wicker field of bramble.
"Duppy Hob is using you." Lara tramped ahead through the nettles, garbed in mist, then fading from sight.
"I know. I'm his antenna." Ripcat slowed his run to a stroll and shoved icy branches out of his way. "He wants all the crystal prisms. In them he has caught the soul of the nameless lady's child."
"He's using you even now." Lara pushed along beside him to where the verge of wild growth ended. North Hudson Park sprawled before them, a frieze of tree-lumped hummocks. Skaters grainy with distance spun paltry motes of color on a glazed lake. "Don't you see? Duppy Hob has sent you to retrieve the crystal prism for him."
"No, I don't see." Ripcat strode onto the parkland sward un
der the gray troweled sky. "I saw Dogbrick in my trance. He's shackled in a sea cave on the cliffs of Zul. The sight of him and you loosened the trance enough for me to escape."
"Duppy Hob showed you Dogbrick. He used that image to release you, so that you would rush to me and collect the crystal for him." She disappeared in the gelid air, fading before him like the smoke of his breath. Her voice continued invisibly, "He showed you Dogbrick, because he holds him prisoner. I am with your partner now—even as I am here with you."
"The prism holds you." He lowered the brim of his hat when he sauntered onto the asphalt path. Distant barking rippled through the cold air.
"Yes, young master. I feel strong near you. The Charm that radiates from your skin of light gives me strength." Glitters of snowflakes twirled in the wind, shaping her phantom briefly: her ashen flesh, smudged with bruises, one eye agog, healed under his gaze to the sable-tressed woman of his dreams. "But I am also held by the sea cavern where last my wraith lingered on Irth. I am there, too."
Ripcat turned his back toward a bundled jogger, and whispered, "Then you can communicate with Dogbrick?"
The reply came from behind, "He is very weak. Dying."
Ripcat knew this. He had seen the Dog in chains without his harness of amulets, his famished and bedraggled aspect listless. "Do not let him die! Not charmless. That is too cruel a death. Dance power for him, Lara. Save him!"
"You can save him! You are the magus, Reece." Lara formed on the path ahead, her hair sodden, her body robed in mud. A bicyclist slashed through her. "Tell me, how do we leave the Dark Shore? How do we climb back to Irth?"
"I—I don't know." He clutched the crystal prism at his throat, hoping for remembrance of magic. His senses glowed brightly, but his memory remained dark. "I don’t know. I am only a thief—Ripcat."
"Stop it, Reece." The battered woman stared urgently at him and screeched as though he had struck her. "Stop it!"
He moved toward her and opened his coat to expose the crysal prism, hoping its Charm would calm her. "Lara!"
Skateboards trundled by, and kids yelped with alarm. They stared hard at his claws and furred face, not moving at first, not trusting their frightened instincts, until his fiendish eyes set on them. Then, they burst away, scooping up their skateboards.
Startled to find himself revealed, Ripcat pulled his coat tighter and hurried across the sward. Voices shouted after him, and he ignored them. His gaze rummaged among the cold trees for the ghost.
"You are Reece Morgan, the man who gave me myself," Lara persisted, suddenly beside him again, so healed and whole in her loveliness, her eyes starblown and twinkling with emotion. "You are the man I love. Put aside these beastmarks."
He bowed his head before the woman of his dreams. "I can't."
"You can!" she insisted. Her hands swiped at him, bodiless. "You put them on yourself. Take them off. Be Reece again for me."
Shielded by an elm, he paused and opened his coat to look at the crystal prism. Molten rainbows quaked. He fixed his attention deep in these spectral turnings, yet no visions coalesced. "If I strip away this skin of light and become Reece again—what then?"
Her transparency stained the bark of the elm. "Reece will know what to do."
The prismatic shine of the crystal sharpened her lineaments, and he caught the childlike conviction in her face, the certainty that Reece knew best. His heart sank before her nearly mindless obsession with her past, with the magus. She was not human enough to recognize him in his new shape. She was, after all, just a ghost, not really Lara, only her shade.
Pity for this echo of a life moved him to nod his head in agreement. "Reece does know what to do. He created these beastmarks with his magic."
Her lonely features shone so vividly he had to remind himself before he continued that she was merely an arc of reflexes sparking in the ether that carried ghosts and demons. "These beastmarks serve Reece, and so they serve us. I won't change, Lara. Not yet."
Her grave stare held him. "Then how will we get away?"
"Hush." Sweet woe softened his voice. "There is no getting away. You were right all along. Duppy Hob is using me. This moment, his dwarves are closing in."
He heard their shrill whistles in the hazy distance, where dogs yapped. The high-pitched chanting seemed to come from the stony tunnels underfoot, layered in echoes of muffled earth, resounding through brachial sewage pipes and emerging from gutter drains.
"Do not despair yet." He put his back to the elm and plunged his alertness into the parkland. "I have a plan. There's a charmway in the marshes that I recognized in trance, when the crystal prism came through from Irth. It's not far from here. I'm taking us there."
The phantom approved and drifted across the lawn. "On Irth we can warn the wizards. And perhaps with their help we can find the old master—Caval. He will know how to thwart Duppy Hob. It was his voice called me out of the Abiding Star to find and warn you. Yet I've sensed nothing of him since then. Perhaps he was a dream, an intuition of your peril that my love shaped with the memory of his voice..."
"Lara—" He waited till she turned, and he could see the familiar dark edge of her stare, her face pooled in black hair. "You have been in my dreams every night on Irth. Why?"
She smiled slightly. "You know."
"Were we lovers?"
Her smile deepened. "Is that what your dreams reveal of us?"
"I loved you—and you died." His voice faded in his throat, unworthy of voicing what he did not remember, what he had seen only in dreams.
"Yes, you loved me." Her image sharpened against the soot-stained sky, and the park with its shelves of rock and bare trees embraced them as a couple.
Screams from the lake broke this gentle interlude, and the ghost blurred away. Ripcat noticed joggers and skaters fleeing before he saw what pursued them. Dwarves, white and clad in dull metal, wavered in and out of sight among gray snowdrifts that banked the lake.
Full out, Ripcat bounded across the park. He flung his instincts ahead of him, feeling out the contours of paths, hedged hills, and copses. Hoping to deflect people from the charging dwarves, he made no effort to disguise himself. His hat flew off, and his jacket billowed open. Mothers wailed and huddled over their children. Dog walkers leaned back, holding taut leashes. Some dogs broke free and chased, but none could pace Ripcat.
He sped uphill off the paths, wanting to lead the dwarves away from innocents. Across a hogback bristling with beeches, he flung himself, before a hatchet tangled with his ankles and sent him sprawling over the rooty ground.
Dwarves hacked through shrubs and seized him with their big hands. Hissing violently, he twisted and thrashed and met the hard wooden helve of a hatchet between the eyes.
Duppy Hob’s Trap
Duppy Hob held the crystal prism between two fingers and lifted it to the overcast sky. The sleazy winter sun nested in the facets.
What is a soul? he pondered.
He sat on the roof ledge above Reade Street and angled the prism so that it cast splinters of wan light across the tar paper behind him. One splinter touched Ripcat where he lay sprawled backward on the cowl of a ventilator fan, and he roused.
"What is a soul but a shape that is its own shaper?" Duppy Hob said aloud and tipped a smile over his shoulder at his prisoner.
Ripcat sat up, holding his aching head.
"In pain?" The young man lifted the prism higher and walked it between his fingers. "Aren't you lucky I eat pain?"
The throbbing of Ripcat's head calmed. He stood, and his body felt light and airy. "Where is Lara?"
"Dead." Duppy Hob spoke distractedly as he held the crystal prism close to one eye. "She was murdered by settlers in the forests of the Snow Range on Papua New Guinea. You were there, Reece. You should recall."
Anger coiled tightly in the pit of Ripcat's stomach. "What have you done with her ghost?"
"Ghosts come and go." Thin rainbows painted Dubby Hob's blond face. "You know how it is with the dead. First you see them, the
n you don't."
With a harsh growl, Ripcat pounced, claws flashing, fangs bared.
Duppy Hob did not stir. He merely said, "Stop."
Pain exploded in Ripcat and cast him writhing onto the tar-papered roof. He convulsed like a candleflame in a wind, stuttering toward blackout. Then, the pain disappeared.
"It can go on," Duppy Hob said, still not disengaging his attention from the dazzled core of the prism. "On and on and on. You know that. On Gabagalus, I revealed myself to you. That was not a hallucination. Do you remember? Or have you forgotten? I'm the demon that haunts this planet, and I've been haunting it for more than six thousand years. You're in my realm now, Reece Morgan. Forget anything else but do not forget that again."
"Kill me." Ripcat gnashed his teeth, tautening his whole body for a desperate lunge. Tar paper ripped under him as he jumped forward and slashed with his claws.
The image of Duppy Hob sitting on the roof ledge scattered like smoke, and the leaping Ripcat dived through the illusion and over the edge. He plummeted without a cry, down the heights of Tribeca toward unyielding concrete. Blind windows blurred past. An oil-stained puddle reflected his expanding beastmarks, bleared with the rush of falling.
Impact smashed him to bright blood and grots of skull.
A painful jolt twisted him free of the falling dream, and he woke on the tar paper within claw strike of Dubby Hob's indifferent back.
"On and on," the demon warned.
Ripcat flexed his claws futilely and lifted himself to his knees. His fur lay matted on his round skull and beads of sweat trickled along his blunt snout. "I won't serve you," he swore through gritted teeth. "You'll have to break me first."
"I've told you before, Reece, you already serve me." Duppy Hob scrutinized the crystal prism with the avidity of a suspicious jeweler. "In fact, look here. I've found what I've been searching for, thanks to this hex-gem you've returned to me—not to mention yet again your usefulness as an antenna. Without you, we'd never be able to view the Bright Worlds so clearly. Here—see for yourself."
