The Hellsblood Bride

by Chuck Wendig

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  The four-wheeler is a fist punching through the tunnels of Hell. Goblin skulls decorate the front. Chains and spikes line the tires. After using his last quad to blow up the god-worm Vithra (in the form of Boss Zoladski), Burnsy ditched the patriotic rah-rah-red-white-and-blue and went for green, purple, and black: Frankenstein colors.

  Mookie feels absurd—big dude clinging to the little man’s back as the quad barrels and bounces over rocks, roots, skulls. Hunched over and trying not to lose his head to some low-hanging stalactite. He’s like a horse riding a donkey.

  The Great Below whips past. Dark stone. Glowing cankerpedes. The occasional torch of some hapless hellbound wanderer. The headlights up front catch other manic, malevolent wonders: a scurrying pair of long-limbed albino gophers (which squawk and dive out of the way), a cascade of slushy, oily rainbow water (which Burnsy narrowly misses), a Mole Man bundled in a half-dozen coats trying to wrench a copper pipe out of the rock (he curses at them in a language that isn’t English, and grabs his puffy, coat-swaddled crotch as they rocket past).

  They bound up out of rock tunnels and into old sewer passages. Mookie hears one of the MTA lines running nearby. And then Burnsy turns sharply right and the quad growls through a breach in the brick and suddenly everything is wind and bright lights and a train about to hit them but then they cross back through another toothy brick hole and they’re back into the dark.

  Mookie feels hot and cold. Sweaty and slick. Queasy and slippery, like all the world’s falling away from him, like the entirety of the Great Below is going to drop out from under them both and they’ll plunge into the roiling Ravenous Expanse.

  He closes his eyes. Focuses on yelling to Burnsy.

  “The 13 Train isn’t real,” he bellows over the growl of the quad.

  “It’s real all right,” Burnsy yells back. “I’ve felt it.”

  And then the quad is skidding sideways, drifting to a stop in the gravel and grit. Above their heads a single bulb swings. And ahead sits a breach in the rock—a straight-walled fissure separated by a series of bent, rusted girders. Girders forming a staircase. A dangerous, wide-gapped, slip-and-you-die staircase.

  A piece of plywood hangs on a pair of chains nearby.

  On it, in drippy paint: YONDER.

  And an arrow pointing down.

  “Ta-da,” Burnsy says, dismounting from the four-wheeler.

  Mookie’s been here before. This will not be his first trip to the Yonder Markets, but the gods help him he hopes it’s his last.

  He steps over to the girders. Plants one boot down. Finds it slippery—not like ice, but as if it’s greased with engine lubricant. Burnsy clears his throat and points up.

  Above their heads, Mookie sees the light of the line bulb caught in a glistening, quivering upside-down carpet. Like a veneer of snot shellacked over the curvature in the old sewer brick. A snotter. Slime mold. Harmless, mostly. Mindless, too. But step underneath and that thing will drop down on your head. Its mucus is caustic. It will start burning your skin, eating through your scalp, working fast on the bone. Not a guaranteed death, but you’d damn sure pray for one if you survive.

  “Good looking out,” Mookie says.

  But then he notices Burnsy hanging back.

  He says to the beet-red blister man, “You coming?”

  “I dunno, Mook. I don’t like this place.”

  “You ever been here?”

  Burnsy hesitates. “Once.”

  “What’d you lose?”

  “Nothing. But almost something real precious.”

  Mookie growls. “So quit your whining. Man up and let’s go.”

  “Man up? Man up. Shut the fuck up, you big asshole. I’m scared of this place because it’s scary and that has nothing to do with men or women or dicks or pussies or anything else. And it’s not me whining. It’s not like I’m afraid to ride a fucking Ferris Wheel or eat sushi for the first time. I almost gave up my memory of my goddamn family, Mook. In exchange for getting healed, in exchange for having a real face again, not this mask of raw beef jerky stuck onto my skull. So, you know what? Fuck you.”

  Mookie’s forgotten how touchy Burnsy can be.

  He holds up the fat, flat palms of his hands. “I surrender. Okay? Just... relax. Jeez. I’m tired and worn thin and I don’t feel so good—” Not a lie. Mookie feels clammy and woozy, like his eyes aren’t attached to his brain and his brain isn’t attached to his body. “And my daughter is down here looking for a hell-train I didn’t know existed to go the gods-know-where. Just help me. Help me find her. Help me convince her to go back. I got a lead on a way out for her, but I just need to get to her and tell her.”

  Burnsy hesitates.

  Clacks his bright white chompers together.

  “Fine,” he says, finally, taking a few steps forward. “Let’s do this. But you see me getting tempted by any bullshit down there, you best slap me hard enough to knock such a bad idea out of my dumb head, okay?”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Let’s walk. And don’t forget about that snotter up there.”

  *

  Down, down, through the fissure. Steam rising up around them like Hell’s own breathing. The girders are unevenly spaced. Mookie has to help Burnsy down over a few of them, and almost loses his own footing in the process. The path is lit—neon bolted to the wall, casting the way down in swimmy, buzzy blues and eye-searing pinks.

  And then: the ladder.

  Like from a fire-escape. Hammered into the wall with staples big enough to suture Godzilla’s wounds. A roach-rat scuttles along the top of it. Antennae-wavering. Shiny wings, dark as cancer, twitching. The rat-face hisses. Mookie backhands it and the screeching thing falls down through the final passage, banging on the rungs as it falls.

  Yonder waits below.

  It’s a vertical market. Not like the Oddments, which is mostly splayed out like a flea market designed by a drunk. Yonder, though, is levels on levels, each crooked, few lining up with the other. It’s one big cage and a maze inside a maze: everything separated by bars and mesh, wires and fence. You see something you want just a few feet away, and it might take you hours, days, to get there—winding through the channels, up, then down, then around and around until maybe you find what you’re looking for.

  It’s like a puzzle box jammed into a bottomless pit. Beneath Yonder is—nothing. Just an empty void. Some say that all the way down there is the Ravenous Expanse, that the god-worms live—or lived—there. Mookie doesn’t buy it. The trip down into that space only opened to him and Nora with Ochre, and he didn’t see anything that looked like a way back up through the Great Below.

  They climb down.

  The noise of the market rises up. Murmurs and shouts and a mad laugh and soul-cutting scream. Smells, too—oil burning. Hair scorching. Something like meat cooking, but meat that’s gone past its date. Flame put to spoiled flesh.

  Mookie lands first.

  The grate beneath his feet bows and rattles. Below him, levels of the market down, down, down. A pair of infection-yellow gobbo eyes watches him from just below, the creature sitting in front of an unfurled blanket. Mookie can’t make out what the gob has on that blanket, and he doesn’t much want to know, either.

  He helps Burnsy down.

  A Trogbody—a golem—sits there on a stool. Big like Mookie. Rock body straining against a dirty denim jacket. A pick-ax sits by his side as the golem crunches on limestone gravel like it’s popcorn.

  Crunch crunch crunch. “You want in?” The Trog asks. He gestures with his misshapen stone head toward the closed—locked—gate behind.

  The golem’s voice sounds like gravestones rubbing together.

  “We do,” Mookie says. “I don’t remember anybody standing guard here.”

  “It’s new,” the Trog says. “I’m new.”

  Crunch crunch crunch.

  “Well, whadda we gotta do?” Burnsy ask
s. “What’s the price to get in?”

  The Trog’s eyes look like amethyst spires sticking out of black stone craters. Those glittering eyes tilt toward Mookie. The craters narrow: a look of scrutiny. He ignores Burnsy and to Mookie says, “You’re big like me. You got Trogbody blood? You some kinda Half-n-Half?”

  Mookie grunts. “Just tell us what we owe to get in. We’re on a clock.”

  “A million bucks,” the golem says. His Pac-Man mouth grinds wide, shows off a set of milky quartz chompers. “No, wait. A billion bucks.”

  The Trog laughs. It sounds like an avalanche starting and stopping.

  “I don’t get it,” Mookie says.

  “He doesn’t want us to come in at any price, Mook,” Burnsy says.

  “See, the talking hot dog gets it,” says the golem.

  Mookie steps forward. The Trog eases off the stool with the grinding of stone bones. Massive earthen knuckles crack and snap as they form fists.

  “Someone pay you to stop us from getting in there?” Mookie growls. That’s what Trogs do—hire themselves out. They don’t have much culture or community, not like the gobs or the Naga.

  “What do you think?”

  “We’re getting in there.”

  “Good luck, meatbag.”

  Mookie isn’t one for finesse. He’s not the duck-and-feint type. No tricks. No fancy moves. When he comes at you, it’s like a tidal wave—big, slow, and in one direction only. And for most folks, the only thing you can really do is hope to get out of the way.

  Thing is, Trogs don’t fight with finesse, either. If Mookie’s the wave, this golem is the shore—and when he slams against the monster, the monster slams against him, too. A rocky hand grabs Mookie’s scalp, threatening to peel the skin right off. Mookie’s own hand comes up under the Trogbody’s jaw and grabs it like he’s a kid swinging on a set of monkeybars. The Trog tries to clamp down and bite through Mookie’s fingers but Pearl isn’t having it. He starts yanking on that jaw—shimmering dust and tiny pebbles raining from the hinges as it starts to come free.

  The golem roars in pain.

  But then—

  Mookie’s body seizes. He feels loose, light, dizzy. His chest goes hot, tight. A deep pain rises behind his eyes, and with it, coruscating white flashes. The fight goes out of him. His knees turn to garden hoses.

  Next thing he knows, he’s on the ground. On his back. Panting.

  The Trog stands over him.

  Two hands grabbing the sides of Mookie’s head.

  Pressing inward. The pressure is terrible. Everything pounds and throbs—a water balloon about to pop. His eyes feel like zits caught between pinching fingers.

  I’m gonna die, he thinks.

  Nora’s somewhere below him. And she’s going to go, get her ticket, get on that train. All while he dies above her head, the life squeezed out of him. Blood from a stone.

  Suddenly: movement.

  Mookie’s own vision is shit now—everything seen in the pauses of those coruscating lights (the lights of his brain cells going bright and then dark like bulbs before they burn out)—and what he sees is a shuddering movement, a red smear, red like chorizo, red like paprika and pepperoni, and there clambers Burnsy up on the back of the golem, a pick-ax held aloft like he’s wielding Excalibur, and that ax comes down hard against the back of the Trogbody’s skull—

  Kachink!

  And then the golem goes still.

  A purple glow shines from the back of its skull.

  Its amethyst eyes go dark.

  And, finally, its massive clay mitts go slack.

  Mookie draws a deep breath. The tightness recedes as the wave goes back to sea.

  Burnsy hops down. The golem stays in that hunched over position. A low groan crawls from the depths of the beast. Steam hisses from its head. It’s not dead. Trogs never die, not really. But this one’s out of commission.

  “Goddamn,” Mookie says, wincing and shimmying his massive body from underneath what is now a statue.

  “You’re getting old,” Burnsy says. He’s grinning. All proud of himself: the fox who caught the biggest rooster in the henhouse. “I saved your lumpy musclebound ass.”

  “Yeah. Getting old.” That’s all it is, Mookie tells himself. He knows it’s a lie but right now isn’t the time to shine a light in that particular corner. “Thanks for...doing the thing. But don’t get too excited. This prick wanted to stop us. Shoulda coulda. Don’t know why or who put him up to it.”

  Burnsy clears his throat. “It coulda been... well. You know.”

  Mookie dusts himself off. “No. I don’t know. Say it.”

  Burnsy clearly doesn’t want to say anything but Mookie gives him a look—the look—and after a sigh, the dead man says, “It coulda been her, Mook. Coulda been Nora. Wouldn’t be the first time she put an obstacle in your way.”

  “It’s not like that anymore.”

  Though suddenly Mookie wonders if that’s a lie, too.

  8

  You ever been to Yonder? It’s like being trapped in a giant metal box with monsters. Half of them want to eat you. The other half want to be you. (You know, so they can wear your skin and go up to the surface and traipse around, la-la-la.) All of them are trying to sell you something, which is a way to say, all of them are trying to take something from you. Because that’s always the cost. This isn’t like, a hundred bucks for some magical tchotchke. This is agreeing to a lifetime of nightmares so you can get the girl of your dreams. This is giving up your left hand to make your right hand powerful. This is a marketplace for monsters, of monsters, by monsters. Normally, I’d stay the hell away from that place. But there’s something I need. And I think these days I’m as much monster as I am girl, so they can fuck right off if they think they can roll over on me.

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  The market is bustling. The floor—half grating, half plywood over grating—bangs beneath Mookie’s fast-tromping feet.

  Here: a pair of goblins sits in front of a table full of organs held fast in jars. Murky formaldehyde water. Bubbles. The gobbos are connected by a band of flesh that looks like gray, corpse-skin taffy.

  There: a Snakeface stands in front of an old phone booth, the windows of the thing spraypainted black. The Snakeface holds a sign—an elegant cursive script, the words burned into wood—that reads: Ring Those Who Cannot Be Rung.

  Beyond: a Half-and-Half (half-woman, half-grasshopper) hawks a tray of strange, glowing rocks; a golem offers hammer and chisel to anybody who wants to tap what appears to be a vein of Cerulean crossing his rock-slab chest; a ratty-looking girl mans a filthy soot-stained food-cart, milking venomous spiders into grungy milkshake cups for a trio of gobbos sitting on rickety bar stools.

  Fucking Yonder.

  Mookie moves past it all. Eyes fall on him but he can’t care.

  His mouth is dry. His hands are wet. So is his shirt. Everything feels chafing, itchy, like he’s got ocean-damp sand crammed up in all his corners. He’s afraid the Blue that Burnsy gave him is going to gutter and go out, so he grabs the last of that bit and with shaky finger rubs a bit on his temples—

  It kicks him like a horse-hoof wrapped in a blanket. The flame inside the lantern of his mind goes bright again, the edges all blue flame and crispy char-skin edges. Buzzing neon. Full moon. House fire.

  And then he’s back.

  Burnsy tugs his elbow. “You just do more Blue?”

  “Nnngh-huh, yeah.”

  “You weren’t about to go dark yet. You had time—”

  Mookie wheels. Thrusts a fat bratwurst finger. “It’s fine. I needed it.”

  “Jesus, Mook. You’re a goddamn Blazehead.”

  “What?” Mookie turns, keeps walking. “Fuck you.”

  “You’re sick. And you got an addiction. I thought you could manage—”

  “I am managing.” He reaches a spiral staircase, the steps lined with human skulls themselves lined with Christmas l
ights. It goes up and down. It kills him, this decision. Nora could be anywhere in this three-dimensional space. And if he goes the wrong way, he misses her. He goes down when she’s up, suddenly she’s got her ticket and she’s back out of the market.

  If she’s even here at all.

  “Mook—”

  “Shut up,” he hisses. He closes his eyes, tries to ignore the headache, the sweating, the hot, the cold, the feeling that his heart has been replaced with a hand squeezing a blood-wet sponge. Where would she have gone?

  Jesus, he’s so dumb. He says as much to Burnsy. “She’s looking for the ticket. And here we are just wandering around like assholes? Where’s the ticket booth?”

  Burnsy gapes and goggles. His tongue plays against his raw, red lips. “Like I know? This place isn’t my jam, pal—”

  Mookie slides past the dead man and shoves himself between the gobbos at the food-cart. One hisses, and its tubule tongue lashes out and flicks the air toward his face—Mookie catches it, wraps it thrice around the creature’s own head, then shoves the gray-faced thing off the stool. It squeaks and weeps.

  The girl behind the cart cocks an eyebrow—an eyebrow ringed with rusty washers piercing the skin. She holds up a container of twitching milk-spiders and gestures toward what looks like an industrial-grade blender. “You want a milked spider-shake, you just gotta ask. And pay. No need to rough up the—”