by Morgan Blade
His thin voice rasped. “You have business with me?”
“You are?” I asked.
“Occultus. King of Nightmare, Lord of Shadows…and…” He paused to cough blood. It splattered his lips and chin, and the tabletop in front of him. He groaned and used his handkerchief to wipe his face and then the table. A smear of blood remained when he was done. “Damn, I hate getting old.”
On the side of the chair opposite the oxygen tank, a brass stand reached up to form a hook that held a wire birdcage. Inside the cage, a hill mynah bird gripped a swing with orange claws, his orange beak and crest feathers bright in contrast to a black, feathered body. Squawk. “Getting old. Getting old.”
The old geezer cackled to himself and drew another wheezy breathy. “It’s what all fey fear the most. Though they’ve had hundreds of years of life, it’s never enough.”
I thought of the Pretender I’d left chained in Queen Kellyn’s dungeon. I thought of all the times I’d put a bullet in his head and he’d just bounced back. He’s never fear age, but he sure might get tired of life, eventually, unless we killed him enough times to turn his brain to oatmeal. Then he’d just happily drool into eternity.
I shrugged. “There are worse things.”
“Really?” The old man waved me to a nearby chair. “Sit. Tell me about them.” He coughed up a little more blood.
NINETEEN
“A scary threat is like a ten-year
blended scotch; good when needed.”
—Caine Deathwalker
The old man wiped blood off his lips.
Colt took a chair and stared. “Have you seen a doctor about that?”
Occultus stared back. “You don’t find this horrifying?”
Squawk! “Horrifying. Horrifying!” the mynah bird echoed.
I answered. “Sad, really. Makes me want to club you like a baby seal to end your suffering.” I pulled out a chair and sat, bringing my Raider AR pistol and backpack around to my front to get comfortable. Carrying the pack with the mega-tie in it on this mission was risky, but it was too valuable to leave behind. That would have made me vulnerable to a thief—like myself.
I addressed my host. “Say, you got any whiskey around this place?”
The old man raised a hand in the air and fluttered it for attention.
Clacking sounds came out of the thick darkness. Moments later, fleshless skeletons in loose butler uniforms ambled into view. They carried three silver trays to the table and set them down. One had crumbly crackers with globs of processed cheese spread squirted on top. Another tray had raw veggies: broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, and tomato, and bell pepper with a non-fat yogurt dip. The third tray had a shot glass, a bowl of ice, and a bottle of Knobby Creek Smoked Maple Whiskey. It had about half-a-cup of tequila worms mixed in. They floated dead in an amber-brown sea. Someone had made a serious mistake.
“Good stuff,” the old man said. “Aged three weeks.”
There aren’t many whiskies I’d have refused to drink, but this one came close. I glowered at Occultus. “Smoked maple? Really?”
You couldn’t find the raspberry humus flavored?
Squawk! “Really? Really?” Squawk!
The old man shrugged. “This is Nightmare. We have to maintain our standards.”
Selene sat and pulled the tray of cheesy crackers over to her. She produced her own bottle of red wine, materializing it in a bucket loaded with ice. The bucket sat on the tabletop near her.
“How can you eat that?” I asked.
“I started life in the dungeons of Atlantis when I first met you, my love. I trained for centuries to get strong enough so no one could ever cage me again. I made myself a goddess to be worthy of you and to help you fight for your future. You don’t do all that by being a fussy eater.”
Colt stared at her like he’d never seen his mom in this light before. “Explains a lot.”
As the others left, another skeleton approached carrying a dusty glass jar with long-handled, silver tongs poking out of it. Using the tongs, he garnished the dip with a couple of dead flies and left, his bare feet clacking.
“Let’s just cut to the chase,” I said. “By now, you ought to know why we’re here.”
“Your desire is to piece the soul of the land back together. A worthy goal. It would put a little Nightmare in everything. The problem is, Nightmare is a realm of thought as well as magic. I could give you the tie, but it would only destroy your mind. There are reasons humans develop secondary personalities and hysterical amnesia; there is a limit to the horror and darkness a mind can endure. I am lord precisely because of my flexibility.”
In the back of my mind, Jack Nicholson said, “You can’t handle the truth!”
I smiled. “That sounds like a challenge.”
Squawk! “A challenge. A challenge.”
I suddenly realized a scent as missing. I pushed forward and turned to see past Colt. Selene smiled vacuously, eyes open, but no one home. Unlike Colt, she had no scent. She was illusion. A glamour.
I stood, pushing back my chair, and turned toward Occultus. “Where’s the real Selene?”
“Dad?” Colt looked confused. “She’s right there.”
“Never use just your eyes,” I told him. I returned my glare to the old man, but he wasn’t old any longer. The air tank and tubing were gone. The years had fallen away along with the leper spots. His hair was solid black and a spectral green light shone in his eyes. Occultus looked thirty-five. His business suit had been replaced with robes of darkness and, as I watched, he stood. His body swelled ever higher so he dwarfed us and the table. And still he grew until I felt like a mouse needing to scurry to safety.
Perhaps that was the point. He was showing me the difference between us, hoping I’d just go away. What had he said? Nightmare is as much a state of mind as magic. Maybe here, they were actually the same thing and he needed us to give him the fear that he used against us.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
Squawk! “Question. Question.”
I still had the Raider AR pistol at my side, hanging from a strap. Seizing the raptor grip, I swung the pistol out to full extension and fired one-handed. My dragon strength kept the muzzle unwavering as I squeezed off several .300 rounds into the birdcage.
The wires twisted and ripped. The mynah bird shredded. The whole cage slammed away into the wall. Feathers drifted in the air. The cage bounced off the wall, hit the floor, and rolled. Scraps of bird flopped out and pulled together, fusing into a new, zombie version.
It screeched somewhat raggedly at me, a little ticked.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
“Don’t teach my bird bad words,” Occultus chided, his boomy voice falling from high above. “I might have to step on you,”
“Colt,” I said, “go find your mother. If this idiot does something stupid like convincing her I’m dead, she’ll destroy the world in her grief. Us included.”
“On it!” He ran off into the darkness, leaving Occultus to me.
I looked up at him. Big, but then most everyone I fight is bigger. That’s never stopped me from kicking ass. “I think your horror is a paper tiger. Looks good on paper, but no bite when you know it’s just for show. You don’t have the power to scare me. I’ve lived my life with a Villager’s magic seal on my mind, put there when I was a child, so my full strength wouldn’t emerge and destroy everything I’d one day want to own. I have more horror in my little toe than you have in your whole realm. I know you sense this, vaguely, or you’d have seriously attacked me already. And now, you’re wondering if all that is true, or if I’m trying to baffle you with bullshit. Better guess right.”
I shifted the backpack back in place behind me, and let the Raider AR pistol hang loosely in my hand. The coming test of power wasn’t going to happen in the physical world. I knew this.
“You really want to do this?” Occultus asked. “Go one on one, mind to mind, and see who can survi
ve a feast of terror?”
“You’ve never seen terror until you’ve been to the deepest, darkest crevasse of my mind. You’ve never seen the shadows I hide from the world for its own protection. Not even Selene knows that side of me. It’s the one force strong enough to break her obsessive compulsions to own me.”
Even goddesses have survival instincts, places they won’t go.
Occultus laughed. “Oh, now I am intrigued. Let’s do this.”
“Put your tie on the line. You already have home court advantage. And you’re used to fighting this way. Even if you lose, you’re taking my horror into yourself, the richest gift ever made. I deserve an equal chance to get ahead.”
“You make a convincing point. If I am allowed to continue as lord of my land under your reign as Overlord, I don’t think I’ll mind. Fine. For the tie, then. Let’s take this duel to the astral plains.”
I nodded. It was always going to come down to this one day. No darkness can hide forever.
The living Darkness of Nightmare crashed in, obliterating light, and I felt my mind grasped and ripped away…
People think there is just one astral plain. There are many, each shaped by its traveler. Each plain has levels, like in a sea, not always clearly defined. They are co-continuums where entities can travel past each other and never know it. A man and a microbe share the same dimension but are forever invisible to one another due to simple scale. The part of the electromagnetic spectrum a man sees isn’t the same for a spider or wolf, so all their universes are different.
On the astral plains, where the mind alone sees, scope is proportional to the strength of the mind, and a mind strong enough can bend the weave of the plains and imposing its own reality. Occultus did this, creating a private pocket universe cut off from the usual laws of the physical universe and the rest of the plains. After all, we didn’t need outsiders interfering in our game.
We stood in our little venue on a glass pane glazed with blueish dust. I could see through to swimming shadows, knobby, twisted, tentacled things with hate-red eyes. On the glass surface, we occupied the main street of an Old West ghost town. Abandoned store fronts with dusty, dark windows were on either side. The boardwalks were weathered gray wood with broken and missing boards here and there. Between buildings were anemone-like trees with lime and ginger bands. They waved tentacle fronds at us as if to say “Hi.”
A sorghum scented wind gusted through, rolling a tumbleweed past us in a haze of blue-gray dust. The sun sank low in a red sky. Gaslights came on, a pale green-white light. Somewhere, a crow cawed. My gaze slid past a saloon with batwing doors. A saddled skeleton horse was tied up at a dry water trough. It swung its head my way, staring, then looked away again.
“Nice atmosphere,” I said. “Gravity feels a little light, but that’s fine.” To myself, I looked the same as always. “Wait, what is this?” I touched a Bluetooth attached to one ear.
“Your wireless link back to your body,” Occultus said. Soul umbilicals are so passé.”
Occultus wore all-black western wear with a big silver buckle, boots, spurs, hat, and strapped on guns. He speed-drew his right gun and fired from the hip without taking aim.
Seeing the beginning of his draw, reflexively, I took a step forward and angled my body to make a smaller target so that his bullet zipped by my head, a clean miss. While his slug missed, the image that rode it gob-smacked me; for a moment, all I saw was Selene, my precious goddess, naked, demanding sex, all three-hundred pounds of her. A shudder of revulsion went through me. The horror nearly dropped me to my knees, but I endured, shaking away the vision.
“You fight dirty.” My Raider AR pistol went up, extended. I pulled the trigger and a flatulent sound emerged.
Oh, potty humor, how precious.
He was trying to impose an empty magazine on me. I willed the magazine to be full, at least a hundred thousand rounds, and for the gun to buck and thunder. It did.
He tucked and rolled, returning fire.
I made myself a ghost to his bullets. They went through me harmlessly. Not so his images of horror. Each shot infused me with concepts, sensory input, scenes—all meant to break my mind.
I’m tied to my bed as Selene covers me with…mutant snails? I look into the face of Apaches…stretched out over an anthill… crucified on a Roman cross, gasping for breath, my heart melting in the Palestine heat…as I bail out of a burning biplane with a black backpack, no parachute, and the ground rushing up…because I’m a suicide, dropping on top of a taxi, caving in the roof…staring at an overcast sky…as Tyrannosaurus Rex lunges out of the jungle, toothy maw clamping down on my head and shoulders…his hot, fetid breath scalding my skin…and I’m on fire…drowning in a bathtub full of cheap gin…clawing out of a shallow grave with a mouthful of centipedes…spitting out…teeth, I bounce off the alley way wall…my bookie hits me again…and again…until…I’m at the daycare center…feeding razor blades to teething babies…because I lost my dream job at Planned Parent…Hoodlums beating my Mustang to death…shattering the windshield…knifing the tires…cutting the crust of a tofu and peach preserve pizza which Colt hates. He spits out the bite…screaming…You’re not my father…I hate you! And my harem is laughing because I can’t open the bottle and get the little blue pills out…can’t get hard because…I’m a grass-eating male…and no one loves a killer…who can’t love himself…
The scenes flashed too fast to develop their full potential.
Needing to regain control of my mind, I pulled up a memory of true horror: I was seventeen, in Austin, Texas, at a strip club, getting hammered on bad booze. Why? I don’t remember. The other patrons have been ripped apart, chewed up, broken. They’re dead, sprawled across the tables and red carpet of the club. I’d put bullets in the heads of the zombie strippers, wondering what demented fuck had infected or cursed them. Then I remembered an Army research facility nearby that worked with pathogens.
I’m in the middle of a bad horror movie.
The last striper stood on stage, her D-cup tits sliding, fucking the dance pole. She moved up and down, the action programed deep in what was left of her mind. She drooled, bit her plump, red lips, and moaned. She looked like she still had some body temperature. I think she was mostly dead, but not all the way there yet. It was a shame this had happened to her; her platinum hair was a mess, but her body looked still exquisitely beautiful. Give her a few weeks, she’d have maggots falling out of her eyes. Now was the time to strike. It shocked me that I wasn’t put off by the thought of fucking her into submission, then putting a bullet in the back of her brain.
I jumped onto the stage. All the killing had me hard as a brick. I came around behind her, grabbed her hair, and pulled, intending to slam her to the stage and get a little relief.
The hair came off her, a wig.
She turned and clawed at me. I snapped in a punch that broke her teeth. They fell out of her bloody mouth as she slumped to her knees. Unzipping, I let my massive cock out to look around.
She saw my package and her stripper instincts took over.
Best blow job I ever got.
Oddly, it was after that youthful indiscretion that my dick started talking to me.
Another tumble weed rolled by.
I smiled at Occultus. “That the best you can do?”
Maybe, it’s been too long since he’s fought any one this hard. He seemed out of practice. He’s overplayed his hand, mistaking shock for horror.
I stopped trying to shoot him and concentrated on simply busting through the ancient ward in my subconscious mind that acted as a limiter. I stirred my own dark depths: “Come out and play!”
Somewhere, a zombie mana bird squawked. “Come out and play. Come out and play.”
I heard the slow cracking sound glass makes when its about to shatter under pressure. I looked down at my feet. Where each boot touched the dusty glass, a single, deep crack connected them, running to each side of the street. The mysterious shadow beasts circling in the lower dar
kness sped up, dodging left and right in sudden agitation.
Occultus laughed. “It is as I hoped. You have lived with your darkest self walled off for so long, you don’t truly want it free. Part of you is resisting. That means I win.”
Wait.
I thought he had entirely crafted this location. Apparently, part of it was a resonation of my true self. That meant that the swimming shadows were the fractured parts of me that I’d spent my life protecting the world from. Here was every dark, starved impulse I had never dared express, the buried strength I needed to beat Occultus.
I lifted a foot and stomped with dragon strength.
A little fan of cracks webbed out from under that foot. I lifted the other foot and stomped. The cracking sound grew. A second webbing of cracks weakened the glass. What my mind couldn’t do alone, could be accomplished by my astral form.
I lifted my head to Occultus and gave him my scariest smile, the one people only see before I kill them.
Going bloodless, the fey lord paled under his cowboy hat. He raised his guns and began emptying them both. A slug ripped through my left shoulder. There was a flare of pain, a rip of cloth, and an oozing wound. The impact shifted my shoulder back. I brought it forward again, keeping my feet. More bullets hit. The pain clarified my animal nature, feeding its bloodlust. I laughed and pointed my carbine pistol at the glass underfoot. I squeezed off shot after shot at this barrier to my subconscious mind.
The glass gave off a string of pops. The white cracks thickened and extended. A thick line ran from me to Occultus.
He stared down at the crack.
Off between the buildings, the tree-animal things pulled up roots and ran, tentacles flailing in fear. The zombie mynah bird shrieked and flew away. “Oh Fuck! Oh Fuck!”
I see…shattered glass shards slicing down into the cold, oily waters of my aquarium…as the Elder Gods rise…hungry because I never feed them…
Tentacles speared up around Occultus, holding him in a knot over the water. The lumpy head of a nameless one rose behind him. The light of a huge, alien eye burned with indecipherable emotions born out of time. Its maw hinged open. Needle teeth, row upon row, descend and pierced. Blood sprayed. Bones crunched.
