Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  “What I don’t know,” I concluded, “is how I feel about me. As soon as I’ve decided if I’m scared as shit or pissed as hell or both, I’ll tell you.”

  I could’ve been Grimm and I could still be—someday. The first I accepted. The second…it was harder to deal with when it was in my face and not the occasional nasty thought whispering in my ear. The mental prodding was a potential. Seeing myself in Grimm was the reality, and I wasn’t ready for it.

  Liar.

  Niko started to open his mouth. He was going to tell me it wasn’t true. That the other half Auphe and I were nothing alike. If worse had come to worst in the past, caged or not, I wouldn’t have grown to be him. The things brothers are supposed to say. I shook my head again. “Later,” I repeated, “okay?” The “okay” was my version of “please.” Nik would recognize it, but no one else would. Goodfellow already had a picture of me beating a man with a frigging loafer. He didn’t need soppy dialogue to put on his planned Web site to go with it.

  “All right,” he agreed, bumping my shoulder with his. “But the clock is ticking.” That small push meant that he needed to know what Grimm was going to do to my head as much as I did. Because he was my brother, but also because he needed to know how I’d handle the next battle with Grimm. It didn’t matter how ready your body was for the fight. It was a given: If your head was up your ass and your brain didn’t know up from down or what that smell was, you were dead.

  We came to the end of the hall; the weak light from the room beyond was all that had helped us pick our way through jagged pieces of metal and garbage littering the floor. Stepping out into it, I saw it wasn’t a room; it was almost the twin of the echoing space we’d left behind. Open all the way up to the roof, it contained rusted beams and a floor where every step would have to be cautious or you’d step on a shard of metal, flip it up, and slice your leg open or off completely.

  Robin’s list of his heroic traits finally came to a pause; there was never an end. “We’re here. The foundry,” he said quietly. “I told you Hephaestus was a fraud and could hardly build anything when you compare his work to Janus. Tinkertoys would practically puzzle him.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?” I asked. “I hear a ‘but.’ Why is there always a ‘but’?”

  “I hear a ‘yet’ or a ‘however,’” Niko corrected, “but I’m more gifted in the vocabulary skills than you. Goodfellow?”

  “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t make something that could kill you,” the puck answered grimly. “A sword is simple compared to the inner workings of a gun, but it can be equally as deadly. Don’t underestimate whatever he might throw at us. As they say, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts; it’s how many arms and legs something’s inside tells its outside to remove from our bodies.”

  “I don’t remember the saying going like that and I think I would’ve remembered that version. Nik?” I said.

  “It might not be accurate, but I’d argue it has merit.” He took several impossibly silent steps to the side. There wasn’t a single sliver of metal that rang out. Kalakos, as impossibly silent, followed his lead but in the opposite direction.

  Goodfellow had one more piece of advice for us. “Besides toys he might have an employee or several hanging about. I’d tell you that the eye is the best place to hit them, but if that’s not self-explanatory on sight then you need to go back to preschool.”

  Then he raised his voice in a shout that rang all of the metal in the room. It was like standing in a Buddhist temple while every monk gathered around to smack you in the head with four-foot-long wind chimes. Despite that I heard Robin’s voice plain as day over it all. “Hephaestus! You humpbacked bastard! Wake up! You have a visitor—it’s Goodfellow and I’ve come to apologize!”

  When he quit shouting, the metal slowly fell into silence and I heard him mutter quietly, “Although I shouldn’t have to. It was the best thing to happen to him. The woman was so empty-headed that if your ear was close enough to hers, she would literally suck thoughts out of your head to fill hers. Where most have minds, she had a miniature black hole inside her skull. What she could do with her tongue, which was absolutely unbelievable, wasn’t worth having to listen to her go on and on about butterflies and flowers and how she wanted to spend a month doing nothing but smelling the milk breath of puppies…”

  Hephaestus woke up.

  I was thankful. I’d already pissed off Robin once today. I didn’t want to do it again by pistol-whipping him into blissfully silent unconsciousness. Hephaestus made that unnecessary by shoving himself to the front of the line.

  “Puck.”

  Hey, he’d picked up English from the long-dead workers that had toiled over and around him nearly a hundred years before the factory was abandoned. That was convenient. I wouldn’t have to listen to Goodfellow and him insult each other in the seven-thousand-plus past and present languages Robin claimed to know. I had picked up some good Greek curse words from him, though, for the times I was craving a gyro from the shortchanging jackass street vendor who set his food truck up on the sidewalk ten blocks down from our place.

  “That’s me,” Robin said with a manic and reckless cheer that didn’t bode of good things to come. “I’ve come to apologize for soiling your wife. I was in the wrong. I’m deeply sorry. I now can admit to my illness and am seeking help through Sex Addicts Anonymous. I am here to make amends, offer you a stale doughnut from one of the meetings if you’d like, and, oh, coincidentally”—as if it were the most casual of thoughts to pop up—“I have a question for you about Janus. You must remember Janus. I’ll bet you sold it for more gold than you could carry. An incredible piece of work. Staggering in its brilliance. Unparalleled in its mixture of art and efficiency.” Giving credit and flattery where it wasn’t due—it was a trickster’s best weapon, according to Robin. “Now, how do we turn it off?”

  “Puck…”

  The rumble faded into nothing. He wasn’t a morning person, was slow to wake. I related. And he was dead, deadish, whatever. The combination could make no time a good time to wake up. I was thinking we should’ve brought several gallons of caffeine when he spoke again. This time he almost brought a few of the beams far above us down. I dodged a rain of smaller pieces of falling metal while avoiding impaling a foot on those already on the floor around me.

  “Aphrodite. Where is Aphrodite? Virgin to my bed, petals of the rose, she who owns my loins and heart. Come home. Come home. Come home. You …Puck…Goodfellow, good—fellow. Good…But where is the good? Where? Nowherenowherenowhere. Wife stealer. Life stealer. Liar. Wretched thief in the night, tainter of all that is pure, death awaiting its day. This day. This day. This day. My day. Puckpuckpuckpuckpuck.”

  I didn’t think Aphrodite, named as the goddess of love and sexuality, had been any kind of virgin on her honeymoon. But I did think Robin had been right: Hephaestus was bat-shit crazy, and getting anything out of him on Janus wasn’t looking promising. His voice shook the entire building. It was the sound of an earthquake that brought down cities, islands, nations. The grate and thunder of the earth losing its patience and shifting to throw anything living off its skin or bury it deep beneath itself.

  I shouted at Goodfellow, “Where is he?” From the ear-bleeding echo, he could be anywhere in here, but the puck didn’t hesitate. He headed straight for what squatted in the center. It was a vat about twelve feet tall and wide enough around to mimic a giant swimming pool. Robin said some paien knew other paien sometimes, some knew most of the time, and some always knew. Goodfellow always knew.

  Following him, I saw him start up the ladder mounted to the side. I circled to the other side in hopes of finding another one and bingo, there one was. I holstered my gun, but held on to the xiphos as I climbed. The rungs were filthy under my hand and carried the strong smell of stone. It was the same smell as the rock in a deep cave. Rock under the sun and sky didn’t smell that way. They had the scent of life to them, although they weren’t alive. A cave had
the same scent/taint of an underground tomb of someone buried alive and chained to a forge: despair, exile, and death.

  At the top I hooked my arm around one curved handhold on the ladder and leaned over the edge to see. I didn’t have to lean far. What had once been eight feet high and who knew how many gallons of molten metal almost a century ago was now a cold, frozen pool of steel. Robin pointed at the mass with his sword.

  The guy was right. If Hephaestus was embedded in that somewhere, drowned in metal, melted fragments at one with his executioner, he’d have to be deadish at the very least.

  I leaned further and tapped the metal with my sword. “Goodfellow’s a bastard and a son of a bitch. Everybody knows it. And his ‘sorry’s aren’t worth a fart in the wind.” In the past I’d found out the easiest way to reach someone as crazy as a shithouse rat and prone to removing visitors’ arms and legs frequently enough to warrant only a casual verbal warning label.

  And that method was to agree with them totally.

  “Tell us about Janus, and what the hell, we’ll kill the puck for you,” I promised.

  Opposite me, Robin grimaced and lowered his face into the palm of his hand. He hadn’t said anything, but he hadn’t needed to. Before it was covered, his face had said it all: We are beyond fucked now.

  That was my reward for thinking like the human I wasn’t. Would I, Caliban—not Cal—want someone to kill my worst enemy for me, or would I want to do that wet work myself?

  Stupid question. Stupid attempt. Stupid me.

  “No! Mine! Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.”

  That’s when everyone else woke up.

  It was also when I wished for one of the few times in my life that I’d kept my mouth shut. But those that came from beneath, they were willing to shut it for me. Or remove it altogether.

  So many pieces of flesh to be devoured.

  And all the time in the world.

  12

  From below the floor they were reborn.

  The floor was concrete, but they broke through it with as little effort as if it had been a bar napkin, the cheap kind that disintegrates if one drop of liquid is spilled on it. They swarmed loose of earth and man-made rock and opened mouths filled with large, square, thick teeth, each one a different size, each mouth a child’s drawing. Crooked and slanting inward, outward, large and some larger—made for chewing stone to mine the metal needed for Hephaestus’s forge. The teeth reminded us we weren’t as solid as stone, and the mouths stretched wide to roar at us.

  But didn’t.

  There was no roaring. There was worse. It was the sound of thousands of years of crackling, white-hot flame and the hiss of steam hot enough to boil your flesh from your bones. They were crouched until they were almost doubled over, backs curved into sharp, unnatural peaks. That didn’t keep them from moving fast, scuttling sideways like crabs. Their hands matched—a thumb and a thick extension of flesh, four fingers fused into one. Each, thumb and the rest, had a single talon each. Longer than the hand itself and of a gleaming metal that would score rock as easily as the bulldozer teeth.

  The single eye was fire. Red, orange, yellow, white, it burned. Every single eye burned and the pale flesh around it was scorched and blackened. But fire could see, or Hephaestus could see through the fire. I wondered if the fire burned in their brains too. Were the roars not roars but screams of long years of agony? Was the sound of flames and corrosive steam their way of screaming?

  Burn.

  I burn.

  We burn.

  I didn’t know and I didn’t have the luxury of caring. They were here to butcher us, and whether putting them down was self-defense or a mercy killing, the end was the same. “Cyclops,” I heard Kalakos say, incredulous. He said he hunted the unclean, but he hadn’t hunted anything close to this. With the Auphe-bae, these, and Janus all in two days, he might hang up his sword.

  “Welcome to the big time.” I slid down the ladder to stop at the last rung and step carefully into the minefield of metal and broken concrete. At this level I could see that the hunched backs of the Cyclops stood about five feet tall. If they could’ve stood upright, they would’ve been tall. NBA recruitment material, but not literal giants, as Niko had taught in mythology when I was a kid. I told Goodfellow so.

  “Work twenty-four/seven in a small cave and smaller tunnels mining ore and it will take barely a hundred years to take you from giant to this.” Robin had gone down his ladder simultaneous with me, but I heard him from the other side of the vat over the Cyclops venting Hephaestus’s rage. “But they’re no less dangerous for it. They are wholly pissed and they do not care who they take it out on.”

  The one closest to me moved sideways a step, head rocking back and forth, soot stains coloring its misshapen chin, but with the eye always on me. It had moved less than a foot, but that was enough for me to see in the cloudy, weak light that it had silver painted in swirls all over its sunless body. I thought it was a tattoo. I was wrong. It wasn’t a tattoo and it wasn’t silver; it was more like mercury. It flowed. And it wasn’t on its body; it was in it—channels eaten into its moon-slug flesh. But where mercury was poisonous, it didn’t burn. These coiled channels were lined on each side with thin ribbons of black. I could smell the flesh burning. I could see the wisps of smoke rising. If there was pain, that I didn’t see.

  I did see the scuttle and lunge through the air, the madly grinding teeth aimed at my heart, the mechanically thrashing hands and claws aimed at my gut. Not good. I put two rounds directly in the furnace of an eye.

  I hadn’t been solely tattoo watching after I reached the bottom of the ladder. I’d switched the xiphos to my other hand and drawn my Glock. As Goodfellow had said, if you’re going after a Cyclops, guessing where to start isn’t a problem. If they couldn’t play “I spy with my one Cyclopian eye” because I sent a bullet through it, that put them at a disadvantage. If it passed through to their brain and killed them as well as blinded them, that was a bonus.

  If bullets worked on an eye made of fire. If their brain was high-functioning enough to be bothered by losing half out of the hole blown in the back of their skulls.

  This one did have a problem with it. He threw back his head and the hiss and crackle became a real scream, deep and hoarse and full of fury. The eye flickered but didn’t go out, not until he staggered backward, with each step impaling or slicing his legs with metal, and finally fell. His crushing hands grasping nothing but air, he screamed one last time. No fear, no despair, only unfulfilled rage.

  Then he was still, his eye a dead black socket and the quicksilver running out of the curving, carved canals that covered him to disappear into the concrete and metal beneath the body. I studied my gun, the body again, and shrugged.

  Okay. Cyclops. Not that big a deal.

  I kept thinking that as I saw Nik with his back to the wall strike, his sword in the eye of another Cyclops. I thought it right up until I was gauging who was the nearest and next in line. I was looking in the wrong direction. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nik disappear, the ground opening up beneath him. He was swallowed, the teeth of broken concrete and discarded metal chewing at him as he went. I knew it because I smelled it: the too familiar tang of his blood, bright and healthy as it came—when it was inside his body instead of out.

  I ran. I wasn’t as agile as Nik at dodging the minefield of a floor, but I didn’t care and I could move close to as fast as a purebred and faster than any half-breed except Grimm. Who didn’t matter now. As the pain didn’t matter. There was no pain. There was the empty space where my brother had stood. That was all.

  I reached it a second behind Kalakos. He’d been closer to Niko, close enough that he reached down and yanked him up and out, hands to wrists, before the Cyclops below Nik had a chance to turn him into the flesh-and-blood version of ore, a crushed pulp of bleeding tissue and shattered bone. I came to a stop between the hole in the floor and Nik and Kalakos. Seeing the eye, a miniature sun, below in the dark, I fired. The scream, madden
ed, was the same—as was the eye extinguished to the darkness of death.

  Feeling my first Vayash impulse—to spit on the body packed tightly in the earth below—I instead growled and turned to look Nik up and down. He was bloody from being pulled through the floor, an inanimate monster all its own, but aside from scrapes, cuts, and abrasions, he’d live. He’d be sore for a while, but he wasn’t going to bleed out.

  Kalakos had come to the same conclusion and had his sword back up for the next charge. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said, “either of you.”

  “You think I would?” I snapped, and fired at another Cyclops across the foundry.

  “No, because I know now it’s something a father must do instead of supposed to do and should’ve been doing since the day his son was born. I see now.” The rushing Cyclops came low, his eye down. Kalakos half removed his head from the thick neck, slammed it backward with the flat of his sword to bring the target in view, and quenched the flame. “Gratitude for that would be no different from gratitude for breathing. The Vayash have a duty. I’ve learned I have more than one.”