Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  Marla ground her teeth. “Gorgo. He’s hurting people.”

  “Torment was his specialty,” Chum said.

  “I don’t suppose Her Grandiosity had any suggestions for how I’m supposed to stop the most powerful demon to walk the Earth in etc?” Marla said. “I don’t usually go into battle against immortal shapeshifters with nothing but a dull knife and some dead bugs.”

  “I believe you are immune to magic and impervious to death?”

  “I’m not invincible, I cut my thumb—” She looked, and there was no blood, or any sign of a wound. “Huh. Fast healing. Won’t be a lot of help if Gorgo eats me. Fine. Beating him to death with a shovel it is. Maybe I’ll come up with something more clever when I see what the deal is.”

  “Gorgo may have weapons, too,” Chum said. “He escaped with some of his... tools. Perhaps you could turn them against him. They were forged in the underworld, and thus are objects of power.”

  “When you say tools, you mean, torture devices? Pointy things, spiky things, like that? You said he was all claws and scorpion tails, what did he need implements for?”

  “I gather he enjoyed variety.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  They returned to the truck, Marla glancing occasionally northeastward to make sure the light was still blazing—the intensity was fading as the spell wore off, but the marker was still visible. She scrubbed the blood from her ears because she couldn’t drive listening to the wails of the tormented. They echoed in her mind on the drive, though, just the same.

  Navigating country roads by dead reckoning wasn’t easy, but after a few dead ends and turnarounds she found a dirt track that wound through the trees toward the source of light. She parked once she judged she was a couple of hundred yards away, leaving the truck on the side of the road, and set off on foot, moving low on the far side of a wooded ridge, keeping the yellow flame to her right, until it faded completely. She found a good vantage and crawled forward on her belly until she could look down on Gorgo’s lair.

  “You could have sent me down to scout,” Chum said.

  Marla looked over and glared at him. “I doubt you’re invisible to a fellow demon. I don’t want Gorgo knowing we have company, and you’re pretty hard to miss. It’s a good thing it’s daytime, or your stupid flames would give away our position for sure.”

  “My flames are eldritch and majestic,” Chum said with great dignity.

  “Keep your eldritch majesty out of sight, please. I’ll call if I need you.”

  Marla returned her gaze to the space below. There wasn’t much to see: an unremarkable old two-story farm house with a wraparound porch and trellises of dead vines, a weathered barn shut tight, and, parked between them, a white panel van of the sort beloved by creepy fuckers across the nation. There was no sign of life or movement, and she didn’t hear screaming. Had he killed his victims—or was there sound-proofing, practical or magical, in place?

  The front door slammed open and a woman walked out, stood on the porch, and stretched. Marla couldn’t make out details without binoculars or vision-enhancing spells she lacked the components to cast, but the woman’s dirty blonde hair in a no-nonsense bun, and she was wearing a white dress that read to Marla as “nurse’s uniform.” That was.... odd.

  Chum bobbed down beside Marla and hissed, “That’s Gorgo!”

  Marla looked at the floating skull, and saw he was now burning the blue of a natural gas flame. She looked back down. “Posing as a sadistic nurse? It’s got kind of a low-budget horror movie vibe, like the ones who can’t afford monster effects, but I guess demons aren’t famed for their creativity.”

  “Oh, Gorgo was very creative,” Chum said. “He had a game he enjoyed with a needle and waxed thread and a lot of sharp rocks and just a smidge of—”

  “Okay, I get the idea. Stay out of sight, but come if I whistle.” Marla worked her way along the ridge line until Nurse Gorgo was out of sight, then made her way down and around the back of the house. She peered at the windows, but they were all covered over with aluminum foil. Pressing her ear to the glass of one, she heard low sobs, but muffled—there must be some kind of soundproofing. She considered a rescue, but she was in no position to get a prisoner out of here safely, and who knew what injuries they might have. Maybe better to deal with Gorgo first, and then she could get an ambulance out here.

  She needed some kind of weapon, though. Her normal approach was to attack her enemies head on, but a shapechanging sorcerer demon gave even her pause, invulnerability or no. If Gorgo tied her up and dropped her in a well head-first, immortality would cease to become an advantage very quickly. She worked her way around the house, peered around the corner to make sure the coast was clear, and darted over to the barn. In addition to the big double doors in the front, there was a smaller, human sized door in the side. A padlock secured it, and Marla considered.

  The truth was, Marla wasn’t naturally gifted as a sorcerer. Some people could feel the flow of magic around them and manipulate it almost instinctively. Marla didn’t have that knack: she’d studied, and struggled, and ground her teeth, and done the work in endless repetitions to get as much power as some people had the first time they picked up a wand or put on an amulet. The one thing that came naturally to her was enchanting: imbuing an object with magic, slowly over time, so as to access that magic quickly and efficiently later on. Normally she went to war with pockets full of charms prepared in advance against a host of eventualities, but this time, she only had a crappy knife with grub-blood on it. That wasn’t much, but it would do. She did have a handful of cantrips, apprentice-level spells, that she could do with such minimal material.

  She drew the knife and quickly scratched a glyph into the side of the padlock, one that prominently featured a semi-circle and a V: a charm of opening. She smeared the bug blood around on the lines, and the lock got hot in her hand. This charm was low-level stuff, good for getting into your car if you’d locked the keys inside, and that was about it—it wouldn’t be opening any bank vaults. The padlock obediently popped open in her hand, and she went inside.

  The barn smelled of dust, motor oil, old hay, and something else she couldn’t identify: sweet, but rotten, like candied sewage. She muttered a spell to enhance her night vision, so the light filtering in through the cracks in the board walls did the work of candles if not lamps, and looked around. She’d been prepared for the barn to be converted to a torture room or evil medical suite—both cheap horror movie staples, the latter more in keeping with the Nurse Gorgo schtick—but there was no metal table with gutters along the sides and no bloody hooks dangling from the ceiling by chains. There was an old door laid across two wooden sawhorses, and on it, Gorgo’s armaments, objects of blackened metal that radiating a supernatural malevolence that literally blurred the air: a heretic’s fork, an iron spider, a thumbscrew, a handheld sledgehammer, a chain whip, and various edged implements, all forged in the underworld.

  The strange thing was... they were all broken. The fork was in three pieces, the points ground almost flat. The spider, a wicked claw meant to pinch and tear, was useless now, the prongs twisted around until they pointed outward instead of inward. The thumbscrew had been disassembled and the threads of the screw pounded and misshapen, never to twist again. The chain whip was now just a few lengths of chain, none long enough to whip with. The blades were all smashed and bent and hammered to dullness. The hammer, which had probably smashed the other implements—weapons of hell being impervious to destruction, generally, except by their counterparts—was missing its handle, and was just a lump of iron now.

  There was a last thing on the table: a length of flesh as long as Marla’s leg, segmented like a scorpion tail and tipped with an array of long needles, the hacked-off end dripping black ichor onto the straw. That was the source of the sweet stink. The demon she’d come to hunt was supposed to have a tail like that, in his home form.

  Had someone already killed Gorgo? But, no, the nurse was Gorgo, or at least a demon, acco
rding to Chum’s flame. Demon-on-demon violence, maybe? But Gorgo was supposed to be the baddest of the bad, the most majestically maleficent underworld entity at large in the world....

  Marla picked up the head of the sledge and smashed it down on the hinge of the spider, hoping the noise wouldn’t carry. The hinge pin popped loose and Marla picked up one of the twisted pincers. It made a wicked curving knife, albeit all point and no edge. It could hurt a demon, though. She felt a lot better about her prospects now.

  That good feeling lasted until the double doors of the barn swung open, and the nurse walked in, carrying Chum by his glowing blue jawbone.

  Marla ducked down behind the table and scuttled to a dark corner. Did demon eyes need a moment to adjust to the dark? Was the flare of Chum’s brightness blinding enough to hide Marla from sight?

  Apparently so, or else the nurse was toying with her. “Stop biting my fingers,” she said.

  “I ant oo awk!” Chum said.

  The nurse picked up a length of the chain whip with her free hand, shoved it through Gorgo’s mouth and looped it around the bottom of his jaw, and then squeezed the ends together in her hands. The metal flared and fused, and now Chum was on a chain. The nurse a length of rope from a hook on the wall, tied one end to the chain, and looped the other around her wrist. Chum strained away, but just bobbed at the end of the rope like a balloon on a string. “So talk,” the nurse said.

  “I was just passing through.” Chum’s voice was a little choked from the chain looped through his jaw. “I sensed the presence of another demon and thought I’d pop in and say hello, that’s all, it’s so rare to run into another of our kind—”

  “You are not one of the old Death’s host,” the nurse said calmly. “I was a captain of those hosts, charged with punishing any who flagged in their duties, and I am familiar with all those ranks. The old Death was very keen on punishment, you know. You are a new creature, created by the new Death, or his bride. You’ve been sent to find me.”

  “Obviously not,” Chum said. “Who would send me to capture you? It’s like sending a, a songbird to catch a cat.”

  “I sometimes had the head of a lion, and you do fly. I didn’t say you’d been sent to capture me, though. You were sent to find me. I assume your partner is supposed to do the capturing. You can come out now.”

  Marla sighed and stood up. “Gorgo, I presume?”

  “Demi, if you must use a diminutive of Demogorgon. The old Death called me ‘Gorgo’ because he enjoyed making others feel ridiculous. I always thought it sounded like the name of a sadistic clown.”

  “While Demi is more like the name of a sadistic nurse? I can see that. Looks like you had a little accident with your tail, though.”

  “Not an accident. Deliberate.” Demi tied Chum’s rope to a hook on the wall and walked forward, hands behind her back, expression blank. “I didn’t need my tail anymore.” She stopped by the table, and caressed the length of segmented flesh. “Do you see these spines on the end? They were the old Death’s creation. They bore into the flesh, and hide inside the body, and radiate pain. The nature of the pain varies, depending on the soul of the afflicted—some are given addictions to drugs, alcohol, eating clay, eating their own hair. Some are given itches that cannot be scratched, or hiccups that never go away, or visions, or blindness, or simple physical pain—but that’s not so simple when it never goes away, the sensation of ground glass in the joints, ice behind the eyes, fire in the guts. These implements are crude. The true torments, I made from my body, and planted in the bodies of others.”

  Marla stepped forward, the prong in her hand, gripped like a dagger.

  “Hmm. I can normally discern weakness, and fear, and pain, and need, within any soul, living or dead. Either you possess none of those things, or you are protected by magics beyond mine.”

  “Why not both?” Marla said.

  Demi shook her head. You’d think a demon would have gone in for lush, seductive beauty, but her face was middle-aged and plain. “Why not? Because all humans suffer. All thinking beings suffer. I discovered this, in the underworld. I dealt mostly with the dead, but a few humans made their way over the centuries, on quests or missions of hope or madness. They all wanted or needed something. I have found the same to be true of all humans I have encountered since I came to this world and took up my new work.”

  Marla judged the distance. She’d crept closer as Demi talked, and she thought she could leap across the table and jam the prong into the demon’s throat, taking her by surprise—the villains who liked to chat before they got down to murdering could often be taken by surprise. She lifted the knife, and caught sight of the words tattooed on her wrist:

  DO

  BETTER

  Damn it. “What new work?” Marla said.

  “I ease suffering, now,” Demi said.

  “By making them suffer a lot and then killing them? Ending their suffering by putting them beyond it, you mean?”

  “Is death an end to suffering now?” Demi said. “I escaped in the chaos of the regime change, and did not have a good sense of the new Death’s policies. Is he not as focused on retribution as the old Death was?”

  “I’m not here to fill you in on what you’ve missed in the world below,” Marla said. “I’m here to kill you.”

  Demi nodded. “If you are an instrument of the new Death, come to punish me, I cannot deny my crimes. I can only say that those crimes were committed at the command of my creator.”

  Marla snorted. “Just following orders? That’s not an argument that’s historically carried a lot of weight up here.”

  “Yes, but humans have free will. I did not. Demons are instruments of the will of their creators.”

  Marla hesitated. She didn’t know a lot about demons, but she thought that was basically true—demons could have personalities and opinions, but they were created for certain purposes by the gods, and bound and shaped by the will of the gods. “You were made to be a tormentor,” Marla said.

  “To be tormentor, and tormented.” Demi bowed her head. “The old Death liked suffering, I told you. It pleased him to make me the first victim of the spines on my tail. He plucked one on the day of my creation and jammed it into my heart. Do you know the form of suffering the spine gave me?”

  Marla shook her head.

  “Empathy.”

  Marla stared at her.

  Do Better, she thought.

  “Convince me,” Marla said.

  The house belonged to a sixty-five-year-old man named Johan, who, at age twenty-two, had gone on a mission to the underworld to retrieve the soul of his wife, who’d died of cancer. Marla sat on a floral-patterned couch older than she was and drank a cup of tea while she listened to his story: his consultation of old books, his ritual sacrifices, his consorting with spirits, his discovery of the path to the world below, where he’d intended, like Orpheus, to retrieve his lost love, only ideally more successfully.

  “I never made it,” Johan said in German, Chum translating in Marla’s ear, now unbound by the chain. “Instead, on those dark shores, I encountered Demogorgon, a prince of Hell, who pinned me beneath lion’s paws, and then stung me with his horrible tail.” Johan rubbed the side of his neck. “I woke up on a hillside, the crack in the Earth I’d crawled through now filled with rocks, and crept away, sick. I slept three days in a motel. When I woke, I was changed: the spine made me a gambler, addicted to games of chance, and I soon squandered my family’s fortunes. Sometimes I would win, yes, but that only fueled my desire to risk all. I did not know it was the demon’s spine—I thought I had simply lost all reason to live or take care of myself, with Katarina gone. I tried often to stop gambling, to no avail. Finally, fifteen years ago, I moved here, to this remote countryside, away from casinos and card games, with no internet, and locked myself away. But even then I would sometimes drive into town and park outside the library and use their connection to play poker online. Until,” and now tears sprang to the man’s eyes, “until Demi came t
o me, and extracted the spine. She reached into my chest, somehow, and drew it out, and set it aside. Look.” He picked up a glass bottle with a lid sealed in wax, and showed Marla a spine as long as her hand, still stained at the tip with heart’s blood. “All those years, this lodged in my heart, and made me thirst for risk. With it gone, I have no desire to risk all on a roll of the dice anymore. I am finally at peace.”

  “And the others?” Marla said. “Did they have spines in them, too?”

  Demi sat at the other end of the couch, and shook her head. “Mortals were rare in the underworld. Johan was the only one who lived with one of my spines in him. I moved her to help him, to clean his house, to cook for him, to make repairs, thinking to make small amends. But I told you, I can sense need, and in town I found people suffering from addiction to drugs. I did not sting them, so I cannot remove the sting, but for those who wish it....”

  “This is a detox center,” Johan said. “Nurse Demi has helped so many people already. She did the soundproofing herself, too. She is very handy.”

  “We’ve seen to almost everyone in the area who wants to be helped,” Demi said. “I may move on soon. I was used as a weapon for so long. Now that I can direct myself, I want to do as much good as a can.”

  “Going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down on it, helping those in need,” Marla said. She nodded. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. Chum, you’re going to stay with Demi.”

  “What?” Chum said.

  “You want to leave a spy with me, in case I go back to my... old ways?” Demi said.

  Marla shrugged. “True, word will get back to the underworld if you get nasty again, but that’s now why. You don’t know anything about life on Earth. Chum is a guide, and a companion. Plus, the kind of work you’re going to do... it’s easier when you have someone to talk to.”