The Book of Fours

by Nancy Holder

  Or, maybe I was a Slayer, and this is the pain other damned souls suffer.

  But why would I be damned?

  Because I pretty much committed suicide?

  And now I’m being pulled away, or yanked, or shoved; I don’t know how I know that, because I have no sense of space or distance, and I don’t know where I am. I have no body, no surface, no border. Physically, I’m still nothing except for the sense of touch.

  Now I have sight. But there is nothing but formless, vast gray all around me—above, below, on either side. I could be upside down or spinning like a top, and I’d never know it.

  There’s shadow, of a sort: the dimmest of light against the flat, nickel-dull gray stretching before me. Now there is light as well, but indistinct and very distant.

  Wait. Can it be? Yes! Someone or something else is here. Some distance away, I see a shape. It’s a circle. An oval. It’s a face. A human face, floating without a body? If that face means there’s something living present here, then I’m no longer alone.

  Or am I creating what I want, need to see? They say if you go long enough without your five senses, you begin to hallucinate. Is that what’s happening to me? Is my mind feeding me a mirage?

  She’s a young woman. I see her body now, hovering in the gray. Her hair is swept back into a bun, and she’s wearing dark, old-timey clothes. Her dark blouse is high-necked and long-sleeved, and over that she wears an equally dark jacket of some sort. It’s all quite tight. She appears to be wearing a bustle. Her black skirt covers her feet, but I can easily imagine high-button shoes.

  She is holding a bouquet of dead roses, and they, too, are black.

  I’m seeing her in black and white, like an old movie.

  She’s a ghost.

  And I don’t know how I know this, but there’s no doubt in my mind that she’s a Slayer.

  Like me.

  Am I a ghost? Does she see me?

  She must be able to see something. She’s looking straight at me. Her lips are moving. Every so often, she bobs her head. She’s speaking, and yet I can’t hear a word she’s saying.

  She must realize that she’s wasting her breath. If she breathes.

  She’s closing her eyes. Her lips are still moving.

  And now there’s even more pain. Unbelievable pain. Oh, no, stop. It can’t be like this. Pain this bad cannot be real. It can’t actually exist. No. Stop. I can’t suffer like this another second . . .

  Now I can hear her voice. She’s chanting. I can’t understand her.

  Is she doing this to me? Because if she is, I’ll kick her ass—

  I’m washed over with more pain. More, and more. Oh, God! Stop it! Slayer, I’m like you! If you don’t knock it off, I’m going to destroy you. You will not believe what kinda hurt I’ll inflict on you.

  I’ll freakin’ annihilate you.

  She’s speaking.

  She says, “Buffy needs you, desperately. Faith, too.”

  And I think I’m speaking to her. I think I’m saying, “Who’s Buffy?”

  She’s still there. I know her name. Why do I know her name? She is Lucy Hanover, she was a Slayer, too, and she died a hundred years before I did.

  Lucy says, “You are the only one who can stop the Gatherer. The only one. You have to help her, India.”

  My name is India Cohen the Vampire Slayer. I was called in 1993, and I died in San Diego in 1996.

  I say again to her, “Who’s Buffy?

  “And why does she need my faith?”

  Chapter One

  The Arabian Desert, the Past

  There are sacred places in the body of the parched desert, which are bountiful gifts from the One Lord, which is Allah, May He Be Praised for His Unending Mercy and Generosity.

  When a Bedouin is wandering the sands of the ages, and the sky and the earth are parched and dry; and his soul and his body cry out for sanctuary, Allah provides. He gives His faithful nomad a glimpse of the Paradise that is to come, a miniature window, on Earth.

  These tantalizing views are the famed oases, where rounded dunes of velvety sand and the gentle slopes between them promise delights. Sensual and inviting as a houri, luxuriant reeds fan above fresh, sweet water. Succulent fruit dangles from swaying, lacy palms. Cooling shade caresses sunburnt skin.

  There are other places much like this also, but they have nothing to do with Divine Mercy. They are lies. And why they exist, no man knows, save that it is said that the evil djinn feed off men’s despair.

  These lies are the legendary mirages. Where no water ripples, thirsty people on camelback stare at verdant pools. Where no figs hang, miserable nomads trudge hopefully, stretching their arms to pluck sweet fruit.

  The skeletons of these deceived travelers are discovered years later, reaching for what was never there.

  In an oasis in the heart of the Sinai, a mirage was born, so long ago it was before Slayers walked the world. Good and evil had just begun their endless feuding, and the finger of destiny had not touched a single hero, nor crushed an unlucky martyr. At least, so it was in the Arabias.

  The mirage began as a thickness at the bottom of the oasis pool, and where and what it was before then, no one has ever known.

  The thickness had no function, but it had a quality: it was pure and unknowing evil. It existed for no other reason than to express its nature. A dark shard of badness, it remained that way for eons. The sands shifted around the oasis, and its evilness endured. Its essence never altered for what men call centuries. Millennia.

  Then one day, the tiniest of sand fleas bobbled beside the water’s edge. What possessed the nimble creature to venture too close, and fall in? And how did the thickness know it was there, and draw it down, down into the depths, and consume it?

  The flea’s life energy transformed the thickness into something slightly more than it had been before. Previously unknowing and unaware, now it was dimly conscious. At a very primitive level, deep within its matter, bloomed the vaguest, most unformed sense that it was one thing, and everything else was not whatever it was.

  That disturbed it. There should be nothing more than itself. It had always been the center of its universe, though it did not really understand its own assumption, and it should remain so.

  Centuries passed. The first Slayer walked. Evil fought back.

  Then a brown sparrow happened by the water. How it got there, no one could say. The Hand of God decreed that it should be, and it was not for any lesser being, angel or person, to know.

  But when the bird pecked at the sparkling wet diamonds reflected in the surface of the water, the thickness lurking below pulled at the creature, and yanked it in, and sucked it under, and devoured it.

  The sense of “self” and “that not yet consumed” grew. Energy galvanized its impulses: it must have more.

  As endless time unfolded, the thickness grew into a pasty glob, fuller now, like the fanned head of a cobra.

  And then it devoured a cobra, and it knew itself one bit more. It knew itself as a consumer of energy, which made it increase, multiply, thrive. It experienced the sensation of life, and of power.

  As is the natural order imposed upon this world by Allah the Most Wise, the thickness wanted still more.

  It waited to receive more, and the experience of wanting something that was not itself bestowed upon it more self-awareness. It began to understand lack, and that allowed it to make comparisons based on having and not having.

  Ambition was the perfect breeding ground for covetousness, which grew into frustration, which became anger. Anger unanswered: seething rage. And rage allowed it to devise schemes to get what it wanted.

  Goats came next, then an antelope, then a camel.

  Then one desert night, a foreign man rode there to meet a woman he could not, should not have. He had come from far away, and he had the right to travel. She, a veiled concubine of a ruthless and powerful pasha, did not. If her absence from the harem was discovered, she would be boiled in oil.

  If her i
nfidelity was so much as suspected, even worse would befall her.

  Of the man, it was better left unsaid what would happen to him.

  Beneath the scimitar of the moon, their lives hung by a thread. But their love was stronger than their fear, and they embraced. Lips, arms, sighs; perfumed hair, oils, and scents; languor and ecstasy.

  Heartbeats.

  And then hoofbeats shook the desert floor. Fearfully, she looked up, and strained her gaze across the starry night. The pasha’s men! She and he were lost!

  At her lover’s urging, she plunged into the water of the oasis. With the splendid battle-axe at his belt, he cut her a reed to breathe with underwater. She put it to her lips and sank beneath the surface.

  What he never knew, as he held the axe in his hand and stood firm for the fight, was that the thing in the water curled around one slender ankle, and then the other. Inexorably, it pulled her down, swallowing her up as she struggled, screaming beneath the water, unable to be heard.

  The curved tips of her shoes; the jingling coin bracelets around her ankles. Her gossamer pantaloons, her sash, her blouse. Her veil. Her circlet.

  Like the burp of a fat, happy merchant after a feast, the thing disgorged her skull. It had been picked clean.

  It bobbed to the surface and floated for a second, empty eye sockets posed as if watching the massacre of the woman’s lover. Within seconds, the man was hacked to pieces.

  His axe landed at the water’s edge. Evil, which had spread into the water from the killing of a human being, licked the blade, and it was tainted for all time. But the pasha’s guardsman, who plucked up the axe and hid it in the folds of his clothes, did not know that.

  He had three more such axes made, brothers to the weapon he had plundered from the dead man—one for each of his sons. Singly, they were exquisite; as a quartet, their splendor was unmatched. Proud and acquisitive, rather than gift his male children as he had planned, he kept the four axes together in a beautiful wooden box in his quarters in the city. And how the evil transferred from one piece of metal to the others, no one knows.

  That is not the point.

  The point is, that it happened.

  Chapter Two

  Sunnydale, the Present

  Being the Chosen One sucks, Buffy decided, as she fell on her butt and with her hand crushed a poor, innocent snail oozing peacefully along a chunk of scraggly ice plant. Giles goes on and on about how great it is to have a destiny. Me, I’d rather have a future.

  She was fighting for her life on Dead Man’s Point. The highest point in Sunnydale, the summit had been named in honor of one Armando Lewis, who had leaped off the cliff to his death in 1902, after claiming that his wife had risen from the grave and tried to suck his blood. Buffy knew that if she didn’t keep track of the edge of the sandy cliff, the jagged rocks below would slice and dice her before the waves gathered up the pieces and dragged them into the ocean. Self-preservation dictated that she keep track of where she was at all times, even though she also had several other things to keep track of, and they all wanted her dead.

  The abandoned lighthouse was to her right. All the little kids claimed it was haunted by Armando, but Giles had chalked up the reports of clanking chains and ghostly groans to vivid, youthful imaginations. Buffy was fairly certain it was where the Baffles had been sleeping between bouts of eviscerating large dogs, deer, and unfortunate coyotes. As usual, the Sunnydale Police Department had mounted a search for a pack of wild dogs; as usual, a few people made noises about a serial killer or an escaped lunatic from a nearby insane asylum. That there was no nearby insane asylum never seemed to occur to them.

  The clifftop was saturated with fog, more so even than the city itself. Sunnydale in autumn was always foggy, but this had been peculiarly thick. She and Faith had noticed it while on patrol for a missing girl named Holly Johnson. The girl’s mother was frantic, and Giles shared Buffy’s fear that whatever lurked in the fog had finally decided to sample human prey. She hoped they both were wrong.

  So far, on the cliff, the death count was four and rising.

  Which, as Martha Stewart says, is a good thing. However, we’re not quite finished with tonight’s special project.

  We sure could do with a recipe to get rid of pesky fog banks, though.

  Buffy had no idea if the unusual fog had conjured the things that were hiding in it. Or if the creatures had used the fog as a cover to go on a rampage, savaging everything that came their way.

  After all, Sunnydale was originally called Boca del Infierno by its founders. For those who slept through Spanish class or preferred the more amusing torment of learning about French irregular verbs, that translated as “the Mouth of Hell.” So Buffy could never be sure if the fog was real fog or, if it was, well, the devil’s bad breath, spewing out the supernatural versions of plaque, tartar, and the gum disease known as gingivitis.

  The Devil’s bad breath. I gotta remember that line. Xander will love it.

  “Yo, Faith!” Buffy shouted, as she rammed the heel of her boot into the face of her attacker. Or what passed for a face. Or maybe it was its stomach. Her boot sank up to the ankle in the putrescent outer coating, cracking something hard beneath, then continuing through to gelatinous grossness.

  Yuck. This is not your father’s Snickers bar.

  The thing wheezed or started deflating or who knew what, and lurched backward. The smell was sickening and Buffy tried to hold her breath. Not the easiest thing to do when one had been fighting for fifteen minutes or more.

  Maybe it’s shrinking.

  Maybe it’s reproducing.

  Yuck to the power of yuck.

  The fog made it difficult to see anything, not that Buffy particularly wanted to. These creatures—there had been at least six of them when the checkered flag was dropped—were nasty-looking. Vaguely—emphasis there—human-shaped, they were covered with a sort of translucent skin of slime green, beneath which oozy, red and yellow pustules clumped in groups.

  I’ll never eat Jell-O with fruit in it again.

  * * *

  After the tense moments during which Oz took center stage as a suspect in the brutal killings, a homeless man who called himself Carlos New Mexico had provided a description of the monsters to the local news affiliate. Carlos New Mexico had insisted he had seen three ten-foot-tall, hairy upside-down ice cream cones rampaging through a Dumpster with hooked tentacles that sliced cleanly through the metal sides.

  Everyone figured Carlos was on the Sterno again—until Devon, the lead singer for Dingoes Ate My Baby, casually mentioned to Oz that the description matched the ghost story he’d once heard while working as a summer camp counselor.

  “They’re called ‘Baffles,’ ” Oz had reported to the group, and Giles had found a picture in a book. It matched the description one Officer Dickinson had provided in the police report Carlos had insisted be filed, and which Willow Rosenberg, Buffy’s best friend, expertly hacked into.

  “I saw that movie,” Xander Harris had volunteered, when they discussed the sitch in the school library.

  The room was typically murky and the stacks gave off a musty, unused odor, which made sense; hardly anyone at Sunnydale High School ever actually used the school library. That made it the ideal headquarters for Slayer Central. Buffy, and now Faith, trained there with Giles, who kept their weapons stored in the book cage. Xander, Willow, and Oz dropped by at least once or twice a day to see if they could help with anything. Cordelia, though she had officially turned in her Scooby Gang badge, still showed on a frequent basis as well.

  Everyone was seated around the study table after classes, sipping their drinks of choice, and in Xander’s case, munching astonishing amounts of junk food. He popped clusters of Raisinettes and Nacho Doritos in his mouth. “It was incredibly bad cinema, even by my standards.” Xander’s love of bad movies was the stuff of legend, if not a career in the film industry.

  “Also, Frank Zappa wrote a song about it,” Oz had offered.

  Everyo
ne moved their munchies out of harm’s way as Giles staggered toward the table with a tower of his big, weird occult books. “It’s called ‘Cheapness,’ ” the librarian offered.

  Oz looked sadly at Willow. “Zappa. Late. Great,” he murmured.

  “I swear, that new girl at my salon does not know how to shape eyebrows,” Cordelia contributed, as she stared at herself in a hand mirror pulled from a designer purse she did not buy at the “low-rent” Sunnydale Mall, she had already made sure everyone knew.

  Giles moved on. “Now, I’ve expanded upon the description Mr. New Mexico gave the police.”

  “Hairy ice cream cone,” Willow offered helpfully.

  “Quite.”

  “To what, extremely hairy raspberry sorbet in a sugar cone?” Xander suggested.

  “Please.” The Watcher opened a heavy bound volume. Dust rose and Buffy waved her hand in front of her face, coughing.

  “Actually, ‘Cheapness’ was about a giant poodle named Frinobulax,” Oz added.

  “Why is his name ‘Carlos New Mexico,’ anyway?” Cordelia asked. “I mean, what’s up with that?”

  “A man of the streets,” Oz observed. “Has a street life, carries a street name.”

  “Gives him street cred,” Xander added, tearing open a bag of Skittles. He popped a handful in his mouth and chewed. “Not my thing, frankly. Very few people leave bags of candy in the Dumpsters. Just fried chicken and rolled tacos, stuff like that.”

  “Absolutely no ice cream,” Buffy added helpfully.

  “Please,” Giles begged. “All of you, please listen to me.”

  “Aye, captain.” Buffy saluted. “I’m all ears. Which, we have on occasion, found in Dumpsters. Fire away.”

  Giles fired. First the mutilated corpses had been those of small animals—cats, dogs, raccoons—and, as usual, the good—and extremely indifferent—people of Sunnydale chalked it up to packs of wild dogs. Given how often that excuse was used, there were more packs of wild dogs per square inch of Sunnydale than there were movie stars in Los Angeles.

  The grisly deaths had arrived with recurring episodes of heavy coastal fog, and everyone seated around the table of Slayer HQ—the murky, dusty, otherwise unused Sunnydale High School library—had seen that movie before. But when larger animals such as deer started showing up on the outskirts of the forest, disemboweled more thoroughly than a disgraced Japanese samurai warrior, it was time for Buffy—and Faith—to don their Superslayer capes.