by Heide Goody
“Steve…” she said.
“No, that one! That one!”
“Um, I think I’m going to need you to be my eyes and ears out there.”
“Out where?”
“Out there,” she said and pointed along the seventy-metre jib. “To tell me when I’m in position.”
“I am not your lookout, meatsack!”
Junior slid the window open a crack.
“Here,” she said and thrust a spare communication headset at the creature. The headset encircled the doll like a hula hoop. “Get out there and tell me when we’re over the Mammonite’s building.”
She lifted him over to the gap in the window and gave him a little prod as he struggled to squeeze his pudgy stuffed body through.
“You do not give me orders, creature!” he protested but went anyway, trotting along the upper bars of the jib, leaning this way and then that against the wind.
“Good,” said Junior to the now silent cab. “Let’s see.”
She reached for the controls. The two main joysticks were helpfully labelled and the readouts of trolley height and jib direction were very clear. She remembered the one key lesson Uncle Ramsay had taught her about crane operation when she was younger (she liked hearing him talk about cranes far more than about the sexual proclivities of Dutchmen). He told her to hold out her arm and gave her an unwound yo-yo to hold and demonstrated what happened if you moved your arm too quickly. He'd set up an obstacle course of empty beer cans and watched her try to navigate the yo-yo through. Slow and steady was the key.
The jib began to rotate, slewing clockwise over the roofs of the nearby council house and museum.
“Slow and steady,” she told herself.
The whole city was below her gaze and beneath her reach. Millennium Point, Town Hall, the Bullring, New Street, the Rotunda and, further out, one of the football stadiums (she couldn’t say which), the tower blocks of distant estates, the streets of Digbeth, Aston, Moseley and beyond. Junior had seen prettier cities but she was damned sure this one wouldn’t be made any better by the addition of an enormous interdimensional demon-goddess.
Black candles!
Vivian stared in furious amazement at the thick candles each of the Mammonite executives now held in their hands as they stared intently at the circle, chanting with the word mage.
“Where the hell did they come from?” she hissed in furious surprise.
“I think it’s just… magic,” said Kathy from the router cabinet next to her. The young doctor seemed to be in considerable discomfort, all the life and energy had gone from her usually oh-so-expressive eyebrows. Blood had soaked through her clothes all down her shoulder and arm although the bleeding might finally have stopped.
“I mean, it’s not even a natural colour for wax!” said Vivian and, twisting against her bonds, looked in the other direction at Cameron, seeking confirmation of her righteous indignation. “What do you…” She stopped. “Are you chanting along, Mr Barnes?”
“What?” he said, guiltily. “No, I was just… Okay, maybe. It’s fairly meaningless feskir stuff and I’m not actually contributing to the ritual incantation.”
Vivian stared at him.
“It’s catchy,” he said, unrepentant. “It clears the mind. We’re all going to die in the next few minutes and I think I would like to spend that time sharing in a Carcosan cultural activity, thank you.”
Vivian turned back to Kathy.
“Welcome to the team, Dr Kaur. We’d like to offer you a position.”
“Oh, yay,” said Kathy, deadpan.
The funnel-shaped bucket touched down hard in Chamberlain Square, cracking several paving bricks as it landed.
“In,” said Rod.
“Just texting Morag. The other Morag,” she said and then grabbed the high lip and swung her legs up. Rod followed. He might have been taller but he had more bulk to get over the six-foot-high edge. He rolled in and narrowly avoided squashing Nina. They stood. Rod waved his arms for Morag to take them up.
“You need to clear the area,” Nina said to Ricky Lee.
“I’m not phoning in a terrorist threat,” he said.
“Think of something else then.”
The slack crane line tightened and slowly began to pull them up.
“Say they found an old World War Two bomb while they were clearing rubble,” shouted Rod.
“Yeah,” added Nina enthusiastically. “We used that one when the Krysill was uncovered in Aston. We closed the expressway for three days and no one complained.”
Ricky reluctantly began to make the call.
Rod watched their progress carefully as they rose. There were plenty of buildings immediately around them and the rooftop of Mammon-Mammonson Investments was one street over. There was a lot they could bump into on their way. He realised that he had automatically braced his arms for any unexpected impact.
“Nina,” he said.
“Yep.”
“This is definitely one of them ‘keep your hands and legs inside the carriage at all times’ situations, okay?”
“Sure,” she said, mildly put out that he felt it needed saying.
“We don’t want a repeat of the big wheel incident, do we?”
“No. No, we don’t.”
Watts-Mammonson approached Morag Senior, knife at the ready.
“There will be no killing without my say so,” said Brigit.
“The life of one member of the consular mission will be the least of our demands,” said the Mammonite.
“Demands?” said Brigit, intrigued.
“Which I am sure you will be granting.” Watts-Mammonson gave Brigit a smile which sat at the wrong end of the charming-creepy spectrum. “In your infinite wisdom.”
Senior’s phone buzzed again. She took it out.
“I’m sorry,” said Watts-Mammonson. “Am I distracting you from something?”
“Ooh,” said Senior. “This is actually quite interesting.” She held the phone out. “Just heard that Mammon-Mammonson are planning to open a doorway to Kal-Frexo leng-space and bring Yoth Mammon back to Birmingham. How would Lord Morgantus feel about that?”
“Is this true?” said Brigit.
Watts-Mammonson re-attempted the smile but rather than sliding over into charming it took a tangential swing into desperate.
“Planning,” he said. “My lord, you have always known that we would ultimately – ultimately – desire the return of our mother. This would be within the strategic framework of –”
Watts-Mammonson froze mid-speech as a strand of Yo-Morgantus reached down and tapped into his consciousness. He was still for several seconds and then he gave a little strangled squeak and pushed himself away.
“It’s not like that!” he said to Brigit. “We have broken no commands! We have acted entirely within the letter of the law!”
Brigit was shaking her head.
“You think I will allow this?” she said.
“It’s a big city,” said Watts-Mammonson. “We can share.”
Seeing no leniency in Brigit, Watts-Mammonson changed his grip on the knife and ran at Morag Senior. He got barely a dozen feet before a tendril found him again and he stopped. Blank-eyed, he took the knife in both hands and calmly and slowly turned it to point at his own throat.
“Share?” said Brigit.
A crack had appeared in the large mosaic in the centre of the floor, a ragged line along the nuggets of stone in the image of Yoth Mammon. A couple of pieces fell away – fell through – admitting a powerful pink light from the space beneath.
“It’s opening!” declared Cameron, sounding far more excited that Vivian thought appropriate.
He was, nonetheless, right.
Accompanied by the muffled screams of the human blood donors, a pit yawned open in the middle of the room. Initially, chunks of mosaic and masonry fell into the void, but as the opening expanded, the floor began to pull away in large, connected sections: wide circular strips, the unpeeling of one world by another.<
br />
The hole before Vivian’s feet did not open into the ground floor of the building or the bedrock beneath but into a whole other space. At the fringes of the circle, the floor fell away in a rough helix and the pit became a spiral bore shaft.
The word mage intoned a final syllable and, trick of the eldritch light or not, the blood-soaked circle of sigils flashed fixedly in response.
“Behold!” declared Xerxes Mammon-Mammonson.
Vivian beheld. A doorway, flung wide to Kal Frexo leng-space.
“Hell,” said Kathy softly, not as an expletive but as an acknowledgement.
“Down a bit, you useless snackling! Down!”
“What do you think I’m doing?” said Morag Junior.
The Mammon-Mammonson Investments building was behind a section of what Junior took to be the museum. Getting the bucket over the top without taking out a gallery was a minor achievement. Now, with her eyes on the trolley position and the height of the bucket, she lowered away.
As the bucket settled onto the flat, tarmacked roof of the MMI building, Rod remembered footage of the Lunar Excursion Module touching down on the Sea of Tranquillity. He might have shared the thought with Nina but, given her ignorance of everything that had happened before the millennium, such sharing would require a detailed preamble about the Apollo programme, the space race and, inevitably, the Cold War, Operation Paperclip and the Second World War. Nina would then ask Rod if he had fought in the Second World War and he would get snippy – partly because he wouldn’t be able to tell if she was joking.
“The Eagle has landed,” he murmured as the bucket made solid contact with the roof.
Nina gave him a funny look. “Really?”
“What?” he said.
“My dad always used to say that after his morning dump.”
“I haven’t crapped myself, Nina. I was…” He growled and gave up.
The link chain on the bucket slackened and the crane cable began to spool down the side of the bucket and onto the rooftop.
Rod heaved himself over the side and onto the roof. The cable was still coming down in rough loops on the tarmac. Rod turned towards the distant crane and waved with both hands.
“Get her on the phone, will you?” he said to Nina.
The roof shook: a brief but sharp vibration, as though a truck had run into the side of the building. They put out their arms to steady themselves.
“Earthquake?” said Rod optimistically.
“Nah,” said Nina. “Shit just got real.”
Rod straightened up.
“We’ve had words about that, Nina. You are not to use that line every time something really bad is about the happen. I’m not right happy with the prospect of dying with a line from Bad Boys as one of the last things I ever hear.”
“Bad Boys 2.”
“I don’t care! Come on.” He made for the roof access door.
“Sure,” he could hear her muttering. “I can’t say ‘shit got real’ but you can use my dad’s dump-line. That’s fine, apparently.”
Yellow lightning flashed in the pit. Questing fingers of wild electricity crept up the sides of the shaft and earthed themselves against the walls of the trading office. Vivian felt an unpleasant sensation in her ears and her sinuses as though the air pressure was rapidly changing. Below the howls of distant, interdimensional winds, she heard the stone building about her creak. That didn’t bode well, for the city in general and her in particular.
A flat section of plaster fell from the ceiling above and into the pit, tumbling apart in the hot rising wind.
“Floor four, floor three… wait.”
Rod stopped on the landing. Nina smacked into his back with a tiny oof.
“Why are we stopping?”
He ignored her, got his bearings and ran through a door.
“Aren’t we looking for the evil business dudes?” said Nina.
“Not until we rescue these chaps.”
They were in the Mammonites’ storage area: the recess-lined corridor where human acquisitions were held in trances behind glass. Rod put his hand on the nearest pane.
“Tell me we can just smash these open.”
Nina looked it up and down.
“It’s just glass.” She peered at the bloke in the hi-vis tabard behind the glass. “But they’re under some charm.”
“But you can break it?” said Rod hopefully.
“Me?”
Rod looked down at his diminutive colleague. “Nina. I’m good at a number of things. I can hit things very hard. I can shoot better than ninety-nine percent of the population” – he slapped his side where a gun should have hung but where he now had only a pocketful of claims forms – “Drop me in a desert, a warzone or a burning building and I can probably get myself and everyone with me out alive. What I can’t do is this alien magic stuff.”
“Yes,” she said patiently, “but I’m going to need to know what ‘alien magic stuff’ was cast over them.”
Rod grimaced. He knew it. The oily one, Lodge-Mammonson, had told them. It was…
“Wisteria Farm,” he hazarded.
“That’s not a thing.”
“Interior bar?”
“Still not a thing.”
“Malaria tar? No, it’s definitely ‘bar’.”
“Malaria bar?”
“No, no.” He closed his eyes. “It’s… mmm… cap, cup, car… cartoon. Cartoo-oo-oo bar.”
“Ka’teriah Ba?” she suggested.
“Yes!” he shouted. “That’s it!”
“Oh, fine. Not a problem. You smash these in. I’ll warm up my mad hot skills,” she said and cracked her knuckles.
Rod went to fetch the fire extinguisher he’d seen on the landing.
Vivian stood less than a metre from the edge but she could not see to the bottom of the long shaft into leng-space. Shadows moved in the deep. Voices clamoured. On the lowest visible level of the helical ramp, creatures marched. Through hot mist Vivian glimpsed waving tentacles, fat bodies and misshapen, hoofed feet. Climbing.
“Priests of Nystar!” said Cameron, fascinated.
“Too late to impress us with your knowledge, Mr Barnes,” said Vivian. “My decision is final. What you could both put your minds to is how we close this opening.”
“While we’re tied up?”
“Let us be optimistic and assume that we also manage to free ourselves.”
Xerxes stood at the very lip of the pit and gazed down. Rising air toyed with his sculpted coiffure.
Yoth Mammon, meh skirr’ish,” he called down to his mother goddess. “Shan-shan prui. Sogho fer juriska, te made. Vashan! Vashan!”
There was a cry in reply from below: a vocal assault of foghorn roars, throaty bellows and electric screams. It was a cry that could have brought down the walls of Jericho. Perhaps it had. The world shook and a supersonic nimbus of energy blasted upward from the pit, smashing through the ceiling above.
Nina smacked the last captive human on his forehead with the palm of her hand.
“And you’re back,” she said.
“Who are you?” said the pyjama-wearing young man suspiciously.
“Questions later,” said Nina. “Follow my mate, Rod. Watch out for broken glass on the floor.”
The man did as he was told, stepping cautiously along the corridor.
The background hum of distant chanting abruptly rose in pitch and volume. There was a scream, like God had dropped a brick on his toe, and the floor beneath Nina’s feet buckled upwards. She fell – she ran – down a corridor that was now a rapidly breaking wave of shattered marble. She shoved pyjama boy hard in the back and he slammed into lollipop man, who stood frozen at the door to the stairs. Momentum carried them through to the landing, where they would have slid to a stop had Rod not caught all three in a bear hug and jumped.
Morag Junior saw the ripple of energy from leng-space as a momentary glow on the roof of Mammon-Mammonson, an equally momentary flash of Barbie-pink light and then a plume of dust and f
ire that tossed the crane bucket into the sky and buffeted the jib arm of the crane itself. The crane shook like a car racing down a potholed road. She grabbed for something secure but there was nothing; either she was safe or she was dead.
In her earpiece, she heard a squeaky voice swearing for all it was worth.
As quickly as it had come, the geyser of energy collapsed and, for a second, the cab was still.
And then she saw the crane bucket: a hundred feet or more above where it had just been, tumbling end over end, falling like a carelessly tossed yo-yo. But those weren’t beer cans down there.
Every time one of the recently-woken humans slowed or stopped on the stairs, Rod urged them on with quiet words and the occasional flat of his hand.
“Just keeping going down,” he said.
“How far, mate?” said one bloke.
“To the bottom. The basement. The garage, whatever. Find a door. Get far away.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
Rod’s reply didn’t get beyond the first syllable.
From on high, something crashed noisily through the floors above.
Amid the dazzle of unearthly lights, transdimensional pressures and the accompanying cataclysmic rumbles, Vivian almost missed the sudden entrance of a giant steel bucket through the ceiling. When she did see it, she was unsurprised; the human brain had a fixed capacity for astonishment, beyond which everything took on a dream-like normality, no matter how insane.
The bucket plummeted down, snagged on the end of its cable tether and swung erratically to the side, a wild pendulum. A Mammonite executive screamed briefly as he was mashed into the wall plaster. Then the bucket swung back and his flattened remains fell wordlessly through the gateway to leng.
The crane jib shuddered and, for a sickening second, Morag Junior could feel the cab pull forward – maybe only a degree or two off vertical, but forward nonetheless – towards the glowing ruin of Mammon-Mammonson’s roof.
Steve was still shrieking on the line although she was not certain whether it was a shriek of fear or the exhilarated shriek of a demon enjoying a skydive into hell.
