Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  “Take a look up there,” Faust said, pointing to a distant tower. It blazed cherry in the dark, lighting up the desert from half a mile away. “You see that billboard taking up the entire side of the hotel? About twenty stories high?”

  “How could I miss it?”

  “Those two guys in the gray suits? They’re magicians. They’ve got a whole custom-built theater, just for their act. I think they cleared around twenty million dollars last year.”

  “I assume that is a lot of money even in this new world?”

  “It really is. And up there.” Faust pointed to a closer billboard, almost as big, on the side of a tower lit in emerald green. “That guy in the poet shirt? Also a magician. Not a particularly skilled one, if you ask me, but he owns his own private island, so what do I know? Across the boulevard; the douchebag with the open vest and the gold chains? Him too, unfortunately.”

  He threw his arm around Damiola’s shoulder and took in the chaos of the Strip with a slow sweep of his hand. “We’re in the entertainment capital of the world, my new friend,” he said. “A man-made town where you can get anything you want. And do you know what people want? Magic. To answer your question, the art is most certainly not dead, Cadmus. People might not remember your name, but your legacy is very much alive and kicking and that’s what counts, right? But here’s the thing,” Faust added, “this might all be going away. Soon. I need something from you, to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s why you’re here. This whole happy accident isn’t exactly accidental.”

  Damiola turned to face him. “What do you need?”

  “Okay, don’t say no, just hear me out, I know what magicians are like with their tricks. I’ve been looking for the Opticron, but it’s been a pretty joyless quest. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t survived the ninety years since you made it, but given that was pretty much yesterday for you, I’m hoping you’ll show me how to build a new one.”

  By way of answer, Damiola gazed up at the billboards.

  “Are you quite sure that’s what you want?” After a moment’s thought Faust nodded. “Well, then, with the caveat of being careful what you wish for, I think that I can help you.”

  They headed back to Eddie’s place. Faust expected to find him stretched out on the couch, belt fastened around his bicep, on the nod again.

  He wasn’t.

  Eddie—eyes every bit as feverish as when he was wasted—stood at the temple door, back pressed to the wood as it thumped against him. Each blow forcing it an inch wider, but mercifully not wide enough for whatever was in there to escape.

  “What’s back there?” Faust said, striding across the room to lend his weight to Eddie’s struggle.

  “He is.” Eddie nodded at Damiola. His hands stretched out across the door, clawing at the varnish for purchase. “Or something like him, dressed in his skin. It came out of one of the mirrors.”

  “Open it up.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Faust sighed. A handful of playing cards leaped from his hip pocket, riffling into his open palm.

  “Sound mind and body,” he said. “Now get out of the way and let the big boys play.”

  Eddie did as he was told. He stepped away from the door, only for it to slam into his back as he tried to get out of the way. The thing that emerged from the temple was Cadmus Damiola, there was no mistaking the similarities, but it was a Cadmus Damiola handcrafted by a blind and idiot god. Its features were crude, misshapen in all the wrong ways, everything a half inch off the mark or skewed on an angle as though the magician had suffered a stroke. The big difference was its runny-egg eyes. There was nothing back there but a mindless, animal rage as it charged from the doorway, hungry for the blood of the Damiola it might have been.

  Two cards shot from Faust’s hand, carving into the creature’s chest and neck, and biting deep. The cards drew spurts of yellow ichor, but the beast didn’t slow down. There was a weird moment as the creature put one foot in front of the other and seemed to step out of their reality, the air around it sizzling and stinking of burning celluloid, and then it was back in the here and now and barreling into Faust like a freight train. The impact slammed him, the beast’s weight and momentum sending Faust sprawling across the floorboards, and then it was on him, drooling spittle from jagged teeth as it went for his throat.

  Faust fought for his life, fingers digging into the deformed Damiola’s face as he tried to gouge its eyes out. “A little help,” he said. He might just as easily have been asking if anyone had a spare cigarette.

  “I’ll save you!” Eddie shouted, like a kid playing superheroes. He took a swing, giving it his best shot, which in this case was a heroin needle to the back of the neck. The needle dangled uselessly.

  “Maybe something a little sharper, like a fucking knife, Eddie,” Faust grunted. “You’re not trying to get the bastard addicted.”

  “Right, right, yeah.” Eddie rushed out of sight. Faust could hear him rattling around in the kitchen looking for something sharp, turning drawers out desperately. Faust’s arms burned with pain as he pushed back against the creature’s impossible strength. The teeth inched closer to his skin. There was no way he could hold it off much longer.

  Damiola—the real Damiola—kicked over Eddie’s armchair, wrenching against one of the wooden legs until it came away in his hands, all the while mumbling to himself. “Time echoes. Some lesser part of me, caught up in the timestream in my wake. Echoes all the way down through ninety years of possibilities. Ninety years of almost me’s. Which likely means . . .” He didn’t need to say what it meant, Faust got it. He was a quick learner when he needed to be. It meant bad shit.

  In the temple, beyond the open doorway, a slick black arm glistening with the mucus of some weird afterbirth slowly pushed its way out of another mirror as another deformed alternative Damiola that had never been clawed its way into their world.

  Faust twisted around under the beast, looking to his left as Eddie ran back from the kitchen nook, brandishing a pizza cutter like it was Excalibur.

  “Eddie,” he said through gritted teeth, “you . . . are . . . an . . . asshole.”

  Eddie looked at the pizza cutter, winced, and ran back into the kitchen in search of a bigger, sharper blade.

  Damiola stumbled over to the mêlée, raising the wooden chair leg high, and swung for the fences. It crashed down on his double’s head, crunching bone. A second blow every bit as brutal as the first sprayed the floor with more of that yellow ichor that passed for the doppelgänger’s blood.

  Faust shoved the twitching creature off of him, wiping his drenched face with his sleeve.

  “I owe you,” he said, grabbing a chair leg of his own just in time to see the second doppelgänger come slathering and sliding from the doorway, and behind it the shadows of a third, starting to emerge from the mirror. There were more black spots in the distance, clawing their way toward the glass that divided the worlds.

  The two men stood side by side, chair legs in their hands, looking at the stuff of the pit crawling toward them.

  “Stupid question: how many of these things are there?” Faust grunted, taking the moment’s respite to catch his breath.

  Damiola’s answer wasn’t exactly comforting. “The echoes of time are recursive.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Our enemy is infinite.”

  “Oh, just fucking great! So we stand here forever with our sticks in our hands, beating off these fucked-up versions of you until we’re overrun or die of old age?”

  “There’s an alternative,” Eddie said, coming back into the room. “We break the mirrors, we get rid of every reflective surface in the temple where the summoning happened, and hope they can’t find a way through.”

  “You were doing great right up until the word hope,” Faust said. “But given the lack of alternatives, I say what the hell, let’s pretend we’re the Rolling Stones and smash this place up.”

  “There’s a problem, though
.”

  “Of course there is,” Faust said. “Go on, what is it?”

  “Without the original mirrors there’s no way we can send him back. He’s stuck here.”

  “And if we did send him back, he’d go right back to that second we snatched him from, right?”

  “Right,” Eddie agreed, fingers twitching like they were playing out a concerto on some invisible piano. Admittedly, it was probably heavy with the minor keys, filled with menace, like the theme from Jaws.

  “So that’s your choice, big guy.” Faust turned to Damiola. “We shatter the mirrors to stop an infinite number of fucked-up versions of you swarming out and overwhelming Las Vegas, eventually the whole West Coast, then the world, or we don’t, and we send you back to the split second before you got your brains blown out back there in 1924. What do you say? Ready to live in the brave new world?”

  The third Damiola dragged itself into the room. The muscles of its twisted body were so deteriorated it couldn’t stand. The fourth was halfway out of the mirror by now, the glyphs that Eddie had drawn into the floor glittering as the slime of its birth into the Prime Material splashed on them.

  “There is no choice,” the real Damiola said. “I have spoken with the dead and they all tell me the same thing, this life is a fine place to be compared to the alternatives.”

  “Amen to that,” Faust said. “Okay, let’s do this thing.”

  Side by side the three of them charged the doppelgängers, but as Faust and Eddie hurled themselves at the flesh-and-blood monstrosities, Damiola went for the glass, shattering the first mirror with a huge clubbing blow that fractured the glass into a spider’s web of cracks where each crack offered a glimpse of the little black spot that was his time echo clawing its way toward ungodly life. If there’d been a single moment when he’d feared he was making a mistake, that he should have welcomed death instead of fighting grimly to stay alive, those thousands of tiny reflections of Hell crawling toward him banished it. Behind him he heard the sickly wet smack of Faust beating a version of himself to a bloody pulp, the wooden chair leg slamming into the meat of the doppelgänger’s limp form until all that remained of its unnatural life was an autonomous muscular twitch.

  Damiola shattered the second mirror and the third, closing the circle. He faced himself in the last one. The entire left side of his reflection’s face was a mess of corruption, maggots worming away beneath the skin to make it ripple with revolting fluidity. Damiola reached out, laying his palm flat against the glass. He didn’t shatter it, not at first. First he said a prayer for all of those versions of himself that would never, could never, be.

  Then he destroyed the final mirror.

  Two months later. Christmas Eve in Sin City. It was hard to be holiday-festive in a town that was always festive, but they gave it their best shot. You could find the occasional drunken Santa Claus cavorting with showgirls, and strands of Day-Glo lights dripping from the fronds of palm trees. Faust wasn’t in a holiday mood. For a start he was down the price of a plane ticket to London, along with a bogus passport and a little pocket money to make sure Damiola got wherever he was going. He couldn’t understand why the guy would want to leave the land of opportunity, but he figured that if he was in Damiola’s shoes, he’d want to check out his old neighborhood, too.

  When Faust arrived at Eddie Sunday’s door, he wasn’t carrying a Christmas present. He had a gun, though, holstered under his jacket, with a round in the chamber and the safety off.

  He knocked, for the third time, and was weighing his options when a door up the hall creaked open. An elderly woman, her hair done up in plastic curlers, poked her head out.

  “Are you the police?”

  Faust tilted his head at her. “Just a friend. Why?”

  “I called those jerks an hour ago. You’d think they’d show up by now, but no. Your ‘friend’ was screamin’ his head off in there, so loud I couldn’t hear my shows. This is a decent building, with decent people. I should be able to watch my shows without junkies bothering me.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Faust said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  She wagged a finger at him. “See that you do! I pay good money to live a quiet life here, I don’t need no stupid addicts ruining my shows . . .”

  She slammed the door. He dipped his fingers into his inside breast pocket, and fished out his lock picks.

  He’d lost count of the amount of times he’d faked out a set of tumblers—better ones than these—who better to break in than a magician? The answer, three seconds later as the lock rolled over and clicked, was no one.

  Eddie’s door groaned open.

  No lights in the room beyond save for the glow from the three-foot neon cross. Faust stepped into the gloom, silhouetted in pumpkin orange. He gently shut the door behind him.

  “Eddie?” he called out, edging toward the temple door on the far side of the room.

  He expected the worst. It was in the air, thick, heavy, cloying. He wasn’t big on portents or premonitions and stuff, but he really didn’t want to open that door. There were some doors, once opened, you could never close again. That temple door felt like one of them.

  Faust pulled his gun, holding it easy at his side.

  He could hear something, a faint ticking noise. For one sickening second he remembered that third grotesque Damiola that had come crawling out of Eddie’s mirror, and the way it had moved, lurching and phasing in and out of this dimension into whatever parallel world they’d opened dragging the magician here. That sound, that flicker, like a projector at the end of a reel, celluloid slapping metal in an endless droning whir, was unmistakable. It was like the wings of a cockroach, right next to your ear.

  Faust braced himself, ready to face whatever hellion waited on the other side of the temple door.

  “Eddie?” Faust said, a little louder this time. “Stop dicking around, man. Are you here?”

  Aside from the slap-slap-slap of the film reel, the rasp of his own breath was the only other sound in the apartment. It wasn’t exactly a reassuring symphony.

  The door to the temple swung open.

  It was all he could do not to pull the trigger and put a bullet into the wood.

  Eddie stood in the doorway, white light at his back, orange neon washing over him from the cross on the wall, the mingled colors turning his tear-stained face into a ghoulish mask of pain.

  He looked like shit.

  He had a pistol, too, a fat .45 automatic hanging limp in his hand. The way he glared at Faust, anger cutting through the tears, made Faust wonder if Eddie might be crazy enough to pull the trigger.

  “Why did you make me do it?” Eddie asked.

  “Do what?” Faust said, even though he already knew.

  They leveled their guns in unison, neither man pulling the trigger, dropping a dead aim as they squared off from ten feet away. The neon cross, at Eddie’s side, flickered and hummed.

  “Why did you make me build it?” Eddie said. “You knew. You knew what would happen if I built it. You knew, Faust, you fucker. You knew.”

  “Sure I did. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Eddie. You don’t let them pass you by. You just don’t. Even when you know the risks. That’s what makes them worthwhile. Put the gun down, Eddie. I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Bullshit, Faust. You already did,” Eddie spat. “Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you save me?”

  The gun dropped, limp in Eddie’s fingertips as he clawed at his tangled hair with his other hand. There would be no more killing here, natural or supernatural. Faust lowered his own weapon.

  “Simple,” Faust told him. “I didn’t want to. In case you haven’t heard, the Vegas underworld’s been blowing up these last couple of months. Literally. I couldn’t go toe-to-toe with the mob, protect my investments, and build the Opticron at the same time. Sometimes in this life you have to use people to get what you want. I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Eddie.”

  Eddie laughed. A hysterical bark, tinged with grief. “
This was supposed to be my redemption,” he said. “My comeback: Eddie Sunday, two-point-oh! I could do it just like Damiola did. Couldn’t you imagine it? Me, back in my white three-piece suit and hundred-dollar haircut, touring the country with my very own Opticron? I used to pack tents with fire and brimstone; just imagine what I could do with that thing. They’d come from miles around, and they’d pay. Not to see wonders, but to know. To know what’s coming. Because we’re all afraid of the future, Faust. That’s the human condition. And that’s the Opticron’s power. Certainty. Sweet, blissful certainty. Even bad news is better than the fear of not knowing.”

  Eddie paused a moment. He shook his head. “That’s what I thought, before tonight. Stupid. Fucking stupid. All I wanted was my old life back. Was that so wrong?”

  “You can’t go back in time, Eddie. Only forward. Time’s an arrow.”

  Eddie’s lips twisted in a grimace.

  “So you came here to kill me and take the Opticron?” Eddie nodded at Faust’s gun.

  “I was just going to take it from you. I don’t think I need to get violent, do I?”

  Eddie swept his arm back toward the temple door like a carnival barker.

  “Go ahead. Take it. You’re more than fucking welcome, Faust. Gaze into the abyss. No one deserves that shit more than you.”

  Faust took a step forward. “You finished it? It really works?”

  “It works. I wish it didn’t. But it works. I saw the future, Faust. Just . . . just a couple of years from now. I wanted to know . . . just a couple of years into the future, not much could change, but maybe I could? Maybe I could fix myself.”

  The orange neon hummed and popped, filling the sudden gulf of silence between them. “Eddie,” Faust said, “what did you see?”

  “I’ve been wondering something, tonight. Do you think I’m going to Hell when I die?”

  Faust shrugged. “Man, not my place to even guess. You’re no angel, sure, but if you look at some of the shit we’re supposed to go to Hell for, then pretty much everyone in this place is going down. Believe what you want to believe, worry about what you want to worry about, but mainly save that shit for your deathbed. Don’t let it fuck with the here and now.”