The Bone Triangle

by B. V. Larson

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m talking about the payment for your services. I can return your mind for you—your memories. I can make you whole again.”

  I felt a rush of emotion. My memories. I’d lived without a past for months now, maybe years. I often lay awake at night, missing my past, trying to remember that which had been erased. It was like searching for something you had in your hands a moment ago—and never finding it. Faced with her offer to return my past, I felt the loss more than usual. Meng was the only person I knew of who could possibly fix the part of me that had been broken.

  “What would I have to do?” I heard myself ask.

  “We can transport you into the Beast’s lair. We can get you to the heart of it.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You mean, you can send me to the real Beast? Not just some tunnel full of tentacles and guardians?”

  “Exactly. That’s what we’ve been working on here.”

  I looked around at the parchments, the slack-looking Gilling, and the empty desks. I shook my head. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about all this. Where are the patients I saw here a while ago, scribbling?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “They’re gone. The Beast’s universe is large, and we’ve been probing it.”

  I stared at her, then toward Gilling and the chalkboard. “I think I get it now. You are a bigger monster than the Beast itself. You’ve been using people to open pathways? Then sending them through into the Beast’s lair to find where you are? You used a whole room full of people in a failed experiment? Blindly spending lives to probe the Beast’s world?”

  “I didn’t send them in!” Meng snarled. “We try to avoid its appendages—but we failed in this case. The Beast reached out and consumed them.”

  I looked at the pushed apart desks, the fallen parchments. The Beast had reached into this room and snatched away the scribes? I glanced toward the door. I must have been busy talking to Gutter Jim and working on the sealed doors at the time.

  Meng turned to Gilling, whose eyes fluttered.

  “I can explain,” he said, coming to life.

  It was faintly disgusting to see a man so used, so mistreated. He was a friend, and that only made things worse. Meng handled him with callous disregard, like a puppet or a hand tool.

  “Please do,” I said to Gilling, mastering my emotions.

  “You know that I have, as one of my gifts, the ability to open portals to other places, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, the Beast’s lair isn’t like any other spot you and I have traveled to. It’s not a natural splinter of our world. It seems to be an artificial reality—a place purposefully designed to exist outside all normal universes. This makes it more difficult to navigate. It requires the best fuel, and a lot of focus from a group of participants to reach out to that faraway place.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “I recall you saying that a rip between places is like a fire.”

  He nodded excitedly. “And like all fires, it requires fuel. In this case, organic fuel.”

  “Blood? You’re using blood again?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t see a big puddle of blood here.”

  “Ah-ha!” he said, becoming more animated by the moment. “The blood operates somewhat differently in this case. It functions to focus the minds of the cabal. I have a new methodology, you see.”

  I frowned. “The gloves? The parchments? They were writing with blood?”

  “Their own blood, to be precise,” Gilling said brightly.

  “That explains the small knives,” I said. “What about the gloves?”

  Gilling’s tongue snaked out and snapped back, and he looked a trifle apologetic. “Sometimes, in the throes of the casting, they become overzealous in their seeking of fresh ink.”

  I thought about that for a second. “They cut off their own fingers, don’t they?”

  He nodded. “Occasionally.”

  I looked at Gilling’s own missing digit and felt disgusted. I was in the company of a pair of ghouls. I wondered if perhaps the parchment was made of human skin. I decided not to ask. If it was, and I’d been handling it, I was going to become sick.

  I struggled to see the big picture. These two were engaging in the darkest of rituals, but for a greater good. Their failures had killed a few, but if they succeeded, they might save the lives of thousands. It was difficult to wrap my mind around the morality of the situation.

  Staring at the chalkboard and the odd, five-sided shape there, my eye was captured again by the words written at the top.

  Thias Amasma.

  “Is this thing a demon?” I asked quietly.

  The two frowned uncertainly. Meng spoke up first.

  “Let’s stick to science and facts,” she said. “It is an aggressive, malevolent alien. It’s trapped in a small world, which was possibly built to imprison it, and it occasionally reaches out to molest others and even devour them. That’s what we know for sure.”

  I shrugged. The description seemed to match that of a demon in my book.

  “One last thing,” I said. “What is the meaning of that phrase?”

  I pointed to the scribbling, which was on every scrap of parchment, printed in blood.

  “Thias Amasma?” Gilling asked. “Why, that’s the Beast’s name. We use it like an Internet address, to find its lair with our minds.”

  I nodded, pretending that I understood. I hoped I never would fully comprehend what he was talking about.

  “Will you do it?” Meng asked.

  “You swear to help me do this, and to return my past to me if I do?”

  Meng nodded solemnly.

  “I’ll do it,” I heard myself say. “If only to stop your work here.”

  The scribes began working again behind me. I turned and watched for a moment. They worked with renewed intensity, their long quills scratching on thick parchments.

  While the preparations went on, I mulled over my own motives. Becoming Meng’s ally had been the last thing on my mind when I’d journeyed here. I’d never have believed it possible, and still doubted my sanity in accepting any kind of cooperative arrangement with her. It seemed a long way from planned assassination to reconciliation.

  But the circumstances were complex. I knew what a threat the Beast was to my city. She’d pointed out what I had been ignoring: the attacks were becoming steadily worse. I could not deny that reality.

  When I’d believed Meng was behind it all, my mission had been clear. I would kill her, and the Beast’s attacks would stop. No more assassinations, no more deaths like that of my newly found and lost friend, Cartoon.

  I had to decide whom I hated most—or whom I feared most: Dr. Meng or Thias Amasma, the Beast in its dank lair.

  In the end, I decided I hated the Beast more. After all, Meng had never tried to eat everyone in the Lucky Seven. What’s more, if I did do this, Meng and I could call off the feud between us. If I killed Meng instead, I would still have the Beast to deal with, and I would have solved only half my problems.

  Then there was the matter of my memories. I burned at night sometimes, straining to remember. The glimpses of my past came only at random, however, and were always tantalizingly incomplete. I occasionally remembered a snatch of conversation, a colorful scene, or an unusual scent. Full memories were always phantoms, just beyond my reach, like dreams that once were vivid but faded away the more I tried to recall them.

  To prepare for my mission, Gilling called down a fresh batch of patients. There was indeed a hidden passageway and a stairway behind it. Meng was nothing if not tricky. Even her building was full of secrets.

  These new people, I could see, were victims injured at the Lucky Seven. They had been bandaged and given crutches, but their eyes were glazed over.

  One of them was McKesson. He didn’t look at me as he took his place at a desk. His neck and head leaned to one side, his broken collarbone had been s
et, and his arm was wrapped in supporting bandages. He used his free hand to take up a quill and a tiny knife. I noticed that he was moving more slowly than the other mind-slaves. More deliberately. I was sure that he knew at some level what was happening to him, and he was resisting.

  “What if you fail to find the Beast’s heart again?” I demanded. “I’m not going to stand by and watch all these innocent people die.”

  “Good!” Meng said. “I’d hoped to see you show some spirit. Stand near the chalkboard, please. As you’ve probably figured out by now, that’s where the anomaly begins. If the Beast makes an aggressive move, please feel free to take action.”

  Her eyes were shining, and I wasn’t really sure if she was calling my bluff or actually expecting me to stand physically in the path of the Beast’s wrath. I stepped toward the chalkboard but stood nonchalantly to one side. I had no intention of being in front of the rip when it opened.

  I had the bottle in one hand and slipped the liver into the other. I’d put away McKesson’s gun, having decided it was the weakest weapon I possessed. Besides, I was out of bullets.

  I figured that if the experiment failed again, I would simply sting the tentacles and try not to get caught while they flailed and died.

  Gilling had a fresh light in his eyes while he instructed his new group of weary, injured apprentices on their task. I wasn’t sure if his energy came from the suggestive power of Meng’s artifact or his own excitement about the project. I assumed it was a little of both. He’d always had an explorer’s soul.

  “Firstly, we must clear our minds of extraneous thought. Do not think of food or conflict. Forget about tonight’s startling events. We need the full power of every mind here to find what we seek.”

  A hand went up. I glanced at Meng to see if she would quell this upstart. She frowned briefly but did not do anything to interfere. Perhaps it was all part of the process. Perhaps, even when under a powerful spell of suggestion, people still needed to ask questions to learn what was required of them.

  A middle-aged woman in the third row spoke up. She had heavily freckled shoulders that spoke of too many days in the desert sun. Her left shoulder, the one she used to lift her arm high, had a tattoo on it depicting a heart pierced by an arrow. “What if we don’t write well with these pens?” she asked. “What if our handwriting is—illegible?”

  “Good question,” piped up Gilling. “You don’t have to worry about that! The writing only has to be readable to you. The point of the exercise is to focus your mind. It isn’t really an essay assignment. If you know what you’re writing, that’s good enough.”

  The presence of all these innocents made me feel responsible for them. They had no clue what might befall them in the next few minutes. As far as I could tell, I was the only one on guard duty. Meng and Gilling were moving to safe spots at the far end of the room.

  I waved to Gilling and quickly gained his attention. Meng busied herself by murmuring instructions to each of her thralls in turn. Doubtlessly, she was steeling them for the trials ahead.

  “Why are you doing this, Gilling? Are you completely under her spell?”

  He stared at me for a moment. The right corner of his mouth twitched. “I don’t know what you mean, Draith. You’ve been acting strange, lately.”

  I nodded, agreeing with him gently. He was under her influence, I was sure of that.

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m wondering about some things. Why did she leave you out there on the beach world? Was she trying to kill you or not?”

  He reached up with his hand and pushed back a lock of his long, fine hair. “We weren’t in complete agreement back then,” he said. “I didn’t understand her point of view. I lacked—discipline.”

  “I see,” I said, nodding encouragement. Inside, I was becoming angry again and second-guessing my part in all this. It was hard to watch friends under Meng’s influence. Maybe I was wrong about allying myself with her. Maybe it would be best to kill her by surprise or at least to incapacitate her. Then I could face the Beast on my own, win or lose.

  While I struggled with this choice, I thought of one more question to ask him. “What about the twin books? The twin The Flowers of Evil?”

  “What about them?”

  “There’s been new writing in the one Jacqueline has. She saw the book change, writing a new poem as she watched.”

  Gilling’s eyes lit up. “Impossible. Tantalizing.”

  “Are you doing it somehow? Is it part of all this?”

  He shook his head. His gaze drifted to the board again, to the name at the top. “No, it was the Beast. I’m quite sure of it. I lost the twin book, you see. It was taken from me and sucked away into the Beast’s den. What intrigues me most about your account is the implication that this being can alter an artifact. Could that be a special property of its private world? Many of the worlds seem to break rules that the cosmos applies so faithfully here.”

  I thought about the Beast writing its own poem in my book, and the implications were chilling. Was it trying to communicate? At the very least, that showed intellect on its part. Previously, I’d thought of the Beast as a monster, a creature like a great white shark or maybe a more dangerous relative from shark ancestry, such as a megalodon.

  But to know that a thinking being was behind this…it was frightening. An intelligence that could possess artifacts of power and manipulate them in ways we could not? A creature of such intellect should not be hunting humans in our streets.

  Not unless it was as Gutter Jim had once said: that to the Beast, we were the animals. We were prey, to be hunted and consumed at will. From its point of view, it was a Kodiak bear, and we were a river full of wriggling salmon.

  Somehow, this line of thinking clarified the situation again, helped steel my resolve. The Beast was infinitely worse. At least Meng was human.

  Gilling moved on now to explaining the details of the process. He told the recruits that human blood must be used as ink and that, unfortunately, the supply had run out long ago. I thought of the empty plastic bags I’d seen in the closet and was suddenly certain what had once been contained within them.

  The woman with the heart tattoo on her freckled shoulder raised her hand again. Gilling gave her a fluttering smile and nodded to her.

  “What are we supposed to use, if we are out of blood?”

  Gilling’s eyebrows lifted high. “Ah, now you have brought us to the heart of the matter. If you would all find the small knife on your desks—careful! They are quite sharp, and we mustn’t waste a drop…”

  I grimaced and squinched my eyes as the cutting and scribbling began. At first, the process was quite controlled and almost normal. Like biology students required to examine their own blood under a microscope, they took great care and moved with reluctant slowness.

  Then, however, they began to scribe. They drew the diagram first, then wrote the Beast’s name. The first time was slow and deliberate. The second iteration, however, was more intense. They were engaged now, focused. They worked with silent concentration. Soon, some of them ran out of ink. They did not hesitate when they picked up the knife for more.

  They continued working, sliding up their scrolls to find fresh spots upon which to scratch and bleed. Each time they repeated the process, they became less finicky. They stabbed their own hands without a qualm and dipped their pens into the liquid that ran from their desks to dribble on their hospital gowns and splatter on the concrete floor.

  After the first few minutes, I couldn’t watch. Fortunately, a distraction was provided in the form of a rip that emerged and grew in strength. It was exactly where Gilling and Meng had said it would be: in the center of the chalkboard. I stared at it and readied myself.

  If something did reach through that rip, I told myself it would not get to the innocents who scratched away their life on their scrolls. I would stop it, somehow.

  But the formation of this rip was disturbing and quite unlike anything I’d ever witnessed. Rather than a clean surge o
f light, the room dimmed and filled with a murk that reminded me of the choking atmosphere I’d encountered in the Beast’s world.

  At first, the murky cloud maintained a cohesive form. Then it broke apart, sending tendril-like wisps of self-aware smoke. Each of these vaporous threads reached out toward one of the scribes. When the vapor touched them, each scribe made an odd sound, a sort of death rattle of released breath.

  The scribes, now connected to the central mass on the chalkboard, worked with frantic energy and concentration. Hunched over their scrolls, they bent forward until their faces almost kissed the desks. Their eyes were wide and staring. They sweated and no longer spoke. Occasionally they released guttural sounds.

  What could be going on in their minds? I was glad I couldn’t feel the grip of whatever powerful force held them. I knew now that the force behind this phenomenon wasn’t Meng. Perhaps it was the Beast itself, I thought. Perhaps it wanted the path to be opened. It was a chilling thought.

  “I can’t take much more of this,” I said. “Can I step through now?”

  “Just a moment more, please,” Gilling said in a calm, professional voice.

  I could tell Meng’s grip upon his mind held Gilling in firm self-control. But after this was over, Gilling and I were both going to be treated to a lifetime of night terrors. I only hoped the scribes would be spared these memories.

  Moans and burbling sounds slipped from their lax lips as the spell—or whatever it was—reached its zenith. Even Meng looked worried, her teeth showing in a grimace.

  “Will these tendrils of smoke turn into tentacles?” I asked, wanting to know what I should expect.

  “Quiet, please,” Meng said. “We are about to break through. The barrier—”

  I never heard the rest of the sentence. At that moment a gush of energy was released from the center of the rip. The vaporous region changed, becoming the spinning star pattern of burned-orange light I was familiar with.

  The scribes stopped working all at once. McKesson leaned back in his chair. He was bleary-eyed but looked to me like he was less exhausted than the rest. There was still some fight left in him. Others slumped over their desks and a few fell to the bloody floor, unconscious. All of them looked dazed and spent.