Pride's Spell

by Matt Wallace

  Lena just nods, glad the matter seems to be settled.

  However, Bronko isn’t done: “Thing is, Sin du Jour ain’t that. It’s not like any other line in any other kitchen in any overpriced, overhyped piles of potato hay and squirts of tomato water horseshit nouveau eatin’ house. We’re different. We have to be. We’re cooks, yeah. That’s our job. But our world isn’t the restaurant world. It’s dangerous. It’s real. And the chef on the line next to you is more than a cook, they’re watching your back and you’re watching theirs in that big, bad, dangerous world. We’re all each other has. And that means there’s no room for petty squabbles. Having been a soldier, Tarr, I’d expect you of all people to understand that.”

  Bronko says all of this without much emotion in his voice, and the bizarre matter-of-factness somehow makes it more powerful for Lena and Darren.

  Their executive chef takes his current pan off its heat and picks up a kitchen towel. He wipes off his hands, moving away from his station and momentarily exiting the kitchen.

  “He’s right, you know,” Darren says a little while later as he mixes up batches of savory and sweet creams for the smoothies bar.

  “Of course he’s right,” Lena shoots back at him, also not taking her eyes off her work. “Doesn’t make me any less pissed.”

  Darren’s lips tighten. “Fine. Let me know when you’re over it.”

  Lena expertly flips the vegetables in one of her pans through the air in a perfect arc, the flames beneath the pan rising for one brief, incendiary moment.

  “Will do,” she says.

  OSTER

  How Ritter ends up bashing in the Easter Bunny’s skull with a sledgehammer is a funny story.

  He bought the converted brick townhouse on East 105th Street a year ago. Ritter chose central Canarsie in Brooklyn because it remains one of the least gentrified neighborhoods in the entire city. Ritter wasn’t born a New Yorker, but it hasn’t left him any less disgusted as he bears witness to one of the most unique, rooted, and diverse collectives in America devoured by the rich and steadily conforming to some grotesquely overpriced hipster Disneyland ideal.

  The townhouse had been divided into two rental units long ago and was falling apart when Ritter bought the place for a song. He’s spent the majority of his downtime since then fixing it up, and it is finally coming into focus as a home; for Ritter, the first real home he’s ever known.

  The night of the premiere party, Ritter, like the rest of the Stocking & Receiving Department, is enjoying some much needed rest and relaxation in the sanctuary of their separate domiciles around the city. Ritter spends several hours lounging on the Stressless Ambassador recliner in his living room, sipping Puerto Rican rum and half-watching The Man from Nowhere on his modest television.

  Earlier in the day he finally began knocking down the wall between rental units with the end goal of turning the first floor into a single space. There’s an eight-by-six gap smashed through the raw brick. Ritter laid down plastic sheeting on both sides of it. From his chair he can glimpse the edge of the wheelbarrow in the other unit filled with the resulting rubble, a dust-covered sledgehammer resting atop the pile. It was backbreaking work, and he’s still feeling the effects.

  Ritter takes down his third finger of rum, ingesting the climactic fight scene of the South Korean noir thriller like other people listen to an inspiring poetry recital. The chief henchman character, played by Thai actor Thana-yong Wongtrakul, charges at the movie’s hero with a karambit. The titular man from nowhere, played by Bin Won, defends with a short, straight blade. The ensuing knife duel is one of Ritter’s favorite action scenes. Like most great movie fights, he finds, it’s grounded in solid real-world principal and theory while being too fluid and cooperative to ever be a real fight.

  Still, the quick, expert motions are hypnotic and charged to watch.

  As the action on-screen wanes, Ritter’s gaze falls to one side of the TV screen. Ritter has populated his home with few personal touches and many expensive amenities to help him recoup after dangerous, physically taxing work. The only real decoration in the space is an expansive framed movie poster on the wall behind him. It’s an original bus stop advertisement for the 1971 film Billy Jack, the movie that introduced Ritter to the martial art hapkido.

  The most personal touches in the townhouse, however, are the framed photographs arranged on the television stand. Ritter is in each one with the same three men. They’re all in their twenties, as physically fit as they’d ever be.

  In one of the photographs they’re all clad in jungle camo BDUs, posing at the base of a mountain in Michoacan. There’s Migs, cradling an experimental thermite grenade launcher, face plastered with a shit-eating grin. Banquo stands in the background, more serious, a machete sheathed on either hip. The man next to Ritter is a slightly younger version of him, his brother, Marcus. Ritter always appears the nondescript, everyman version standing beside his brother, who always had an edge about him, a darkness that radiated mostly in his eyes.

  They were freelancing off the books for the DEA at the time, exterminating the powerful brujos working for the drug cartels. In their downtime they’d hunt harpies in the mountain ranges and raze the odd illegal logging camp, enjoying the favor of the local villages and towns the loggers terrorized either for kicks or for the sake of their operation.

  In the photograph beside it they’re all piled into a natural hot springs in Vilcabamba, holding bottles of the pilsner beer brewed in Ecuador and roughhousing with each other, their very real laughter frozen in time on celluloid.

  That was the last good time, before they were all loaned out to Allensworth’s Witchcraft Enforcement Team initiative and they went from hunting monsters to becoming monsters.

  Ritter feels the easy tears of drunkenness prick his eyes, sniffs deeply to head them off at the pass.

  He decides he’s drunk more than he meant to and needs to sweat it out.

  He kills the TV, sets his empty tumbler aside, and stands from the recliner with a mock-groan of protest.

  He built a walk-in sauna in one of the spare rooms for which he has no other use. Ten minutes later he sits naked on the lone bench, head hung with an ice-cold towel draped over it, breathing deeply and evenly.

  There’s a heating element filled with natural stones beside him, along with a bucket of water and a traditional ladle.

  Ritter glances briefly through the clear pane of the sauna’s small door at the blank wall beyond, thinking maybe he should hang something there, a painting or a poster or something.

  He turns his attention to the heater, taking up the ladle and pouring water over the stones, relishing the spirits of steam that rise anew from them.

  The next time he glances up the glass door in front of him has been completely overtaken by a thick veneer of steam.

  However, he can still read the outline of the towering figure now standing on the other side of the glass.

  Ritter blinks away the sweat running around the corners of his eyes and shakes his head, squinting at the impossibly tall outline.

  It’s definitely a body.

  For a brief moment he thinks it must be Hara; no other human being he’s ever met is that tall. However, the frame is far too slender and its shoulders too narrow.

  More than that, however, is the fact this figure also has two large, protruding, distinctly rabbitlike ears hanging from its massive cranium.

  Ritter immediately reaches over the pile of hot stones at his side. There are two rocks resting on the very top, one on each side of the pile that are slightly different in color and inexplicably cool to the touch.

  He picks them up, one in each hand, and abruptly slams them together in front of him with a loud, grating “clack.”

  The effect is immediate and energetic.

  An all-encompassing deep blue pall immediately overtakes the lights in the room and the rooms beyond.

  It’s far more than just a change in lighting, however. The air ripples, and even after it settles e
verything seems slightly askew, as if reality itself has just been shifted the scantest millimeter from the norm to something else.

  Ritter drops the stones back in the heater and pulls the wet towel from over his head.

  He rolls it up and wraps one end around his right fist, his other hand twisting its remaining length into something like a crude whip.

  He stares into the glass door. The blue pall has made the outline of the figure standing on the other side much harder to make out past the steam.

  “You can walk out of here right now,” Ritter calls out in a casual, but hard-edged voice. “That’d be my preference. If you stay, I don’t like your odds of success. This is unfamiliar terrain for you, and if you’re wondering what these floodlights indicate, any magicks you may have brought along in aid of your purpose have just been rendered inert.”

  There’s no response from beyond the glass.

  Ritter sighs, slowly rising from the bench, towel-wrapped fist cocked at his hip.

  He walks forward three steps and reaches out to the door handle with his other hand, gripping it firmly.

  His stance spreads, feet squared back and aligned with his shoulders.

  “A guy can’t even have a night to himself anymore,” he mutters.

  Ritter yanks open the door, towel hand raised.

  There’s nothing waiting on the other side.

  He peers cautiously into the room beyond.

  Nothing.

  Ritter walks out of the sauna, opening the door to the room with equal caution and still encountering no one.

  He clears the hallway beyond with the precision and skill of a military assault team member, armed with a towel instead of a rifle.

  Still nothing.

  He reaches the end of the hallway that opens into the main living area.

  The space looks barren, everything in its place.

  Ritter rests his fists against his bare hips and furrows his brow, truly considering for the first time in his life that every unnatural thing he’s seen and done are coming together to fuck with his perception of a perfectly normal, harmless world.

  Then an Easter egg filled with spiders hits him in the face.

  It breaks open on impact, releasing a skittering battalion of eight-legged arachnids that all seem to double and then triple in size once freed from the confines of the otherwise ordinary-seeming chicken egg.

  Ritter immediately swipes several times at his own face with the towel whip he fashioned to fight intruders. It hurts, but it prevents the creatures from biting into his skull.

  It doesn’t, however, prevent the ones that have skittered down his torso from clamping their tiny fangs into his flesh half a dozen times.

  The pain is sharp and localized. Ritter ignores it, his attention solely on sweeping spiders from him to the floor and stomping them with his bare feet. He kills almost a dozen within seconds, and the rest take the hint and scurry off into the corners of the room or under the welcoming darkness of the furniture.

  Ritter grasps at the phantom feeling that lingers after having the surface of one’s skin invaded by an insect, but there’s nothing there. He’s shed them all.

  The damage, however, has been done.

  The several bites he’s sustained now feel as though he’s been injected with hardening cement. It’s painful, but it’s nothing compared to the feeling of the venom with which he’s been injected coursing through his body. In seconds he’s lost feeling below his waist, and he drops to his knees before falling to his side.

  Ritter manages to roll onto his back. It feels as though a splintered tree is growing inside him, its branches pushing into his every organ and appendage.

  The pain is excruciating and very nearly paralyzing now.

  Through its thickening haze over his vision, Ritter looks up and sees the Easter Bunny standing over him.

  Oh, it’s the real deal. There’s no question. It’s not a human being in a furry bunny costume, it is a literal anthropomorphic rabbit, and as such, rather than being cute and welcoming, it’s horrifying to look at. Even more so because it’s smiling down at him. As Ritter lies there, incapacitated, the corners of his eyes catch the skittering of dozens and dozens of spider legs carrying the creatures back to their master. They crawl up the rabbit’s legs, idling there menacingly.

  The Easter Bunny’s right arm is crooked under the handle of a basket filled to a peak with brightly painted eggs, just like the one that’s about to kill Ritter.

  It raises its other arm and waves at him with one fingerless paw.

  All things considered, it’s pretty much living the worst nightmare anyone ever had as a child.

  Ritter uses his shoulders, rolling them back in succession to inch himself across the floor of the living room.

  The Easter Bunny doesn’t pursue him, it merely watches with head-cocked curiosity, the smile never leaving its warped face.

  Ritter rolls his eyes back to find his recliner.

  It’s seven feet away, which might as well be a mile.

  He’s managed to close the gap by half when his shoulders finally give out.

  He’ll go no further.

  Ritter focuses every ounce of will and physical strength he has left into his right arm, the one with the wet towel still clotted around his fist.

  He swings his arm and by proxy the twisted length of towel at the handle on the recliner.

  It’s not the factory handle, however.

  It’s the handle he installed himself.

  It takes three swings, but the third knocks it firmly 180 degrees to the right.

  The seat of the recliner flips up like a lid.

  Several spring-loaded objects fly up and out from the darkness beneath.

  They land, scattered, on the floor near Ritter.

  He sheds the towel from his hand with great effort and gropes for one of them, an ornate athame dagger, bringing it, trembling, to his chest and laying it there.

  The next object he gropes for on the floor is, coincidentally, an egg-shaped container. It’s bright green and emblazoned with the image of Fènghuáng, the Chinese phoenix.

  Ritter forms a loose fist, the best fist he can make at the moment, around it and quickly smashes it on the floor.

  An iridescent jade liquid bleeds out from inside, forming a thick pool.

  Ritter retrieves the athame and presses the flat of the blade into the liquid, flipping it to the other side and repeating the action.

  He can’t feel his hand anymore, but it’s obeying his commands nonetheless.

  He spares a look across the room at the Easter Bunny.

  It’s still watching him with that curious body language, perhaps thinking he’s about to mount some futile last-gasp counterattack.

  Instead, Ritter very deliberately stabs himself in the chest with the dagger.

  A knife severing his aorta should render him unconscious instantly and kill him seconds later.

  Instead Ritter suddenly exhales and inhales as if he’s a drowning man who’s just broken above the surface of the ocean.

  The effects of the spiders’ venom in his system immediately slow. Sensation spreads from his heart to the rest of his body. The pain and stiffness subside, and even the spider bites release their vicelike grip on his flesh and shrink.

  Ritter pulls the dagger’s blade from his chest cavity.

  The wound doesn’t close because the blade doesn’t seem to have left any wound at all.

  He casts away the dagger and sits up on the floor, panting, his entire body soaked in sweat.

  He stares at the Easter Bunny with hate-filled eyes that expose an inferno within him few of his team and none of their Sin du Jour coworkers have ever seen.

  “I am going to kill the fuck out of you now,” he informs the Easter Bunny.

  In response, the creature reaches in its basket and removes an egg painted in horizontal stripes of orange and yellow.

  The Easter Bunny winds up his throwing arm and chucks it at Ritter.

&nb
sp; Ritter rolls hard to his right, moving from its path. He’s back to his feet by the time the egg breaks apart against the floor, unleashing a magical burst of flame.

  The flame takes immediate shape. It looks like a mandrake root made of fire, complete with a tiny mouth that immediately cackles at him in a high-pitched tone.

  Then the small, grotesque elemental hurls a tangerine-sized ball of flame at him.

  Ritter dives into his kitchen, behind the granite-topped island.

  The fireball whizzes past the spot where Ritter was standing and lights up the curtains of a far window.

  The elemental skitters from the living room toward the kitchen, hurling more fireballs as it runs past the cover of the island where Ritter is hiding.

  Ritter presses himself against the lower cabinets beside the refrigerator, match-head-sized flame flittering all around him. He looks over and sees the elemental bound into sight.

  Ritter reaches up and flings open the refrigerator door, its stainless-steel surface repelling the next volley of fireballs the thing unleashes.

  At the same time, Ritter reaches inside the fridge past an ordinary plastic milk container from the corner store and grasps another, half-full old-fashioned glass milk bottle that belongs in a Norman Rockwell rendering.

  He immediately chugs its contents, holding the liquid in his cheeks and waiting for the sound of the next crackling fireball.

  After it’s hurled at the refrigerator door, Ritter slams the door shut, looking down on the elemental as it winds up another incendiary pitch.

  What Ritter spits at the magical pyromaniac isn’t milk.

  It looks more like a miniature snowstorm.

  The effect blasts the elemental, freezing it solid in less than two seconds.

  Ritter rises, smacking his lips compulsively, his features twisted in distaste.

  He punts the sudden ice sculpture across the room with his bare foot.

  It shatters against the far wall.

  Ritter looks over at the Easter Bunny.

  The creature is reaching into his basket for another egg.