The Book of Fours

by Nancy Holder

  He turned and ran. She ran after him, axe in hand.

  He was fast. She was faster.

  Then the door to the Fish Tank opened and whapped her in the face. At her speed, she let go of the axe, which careened backward over her shoulder, flying into the alley; then the door broke off at the hinges and knocked over the drunk who had stumbled outside. Meanwhile, Faith ricocheted backward onto her butt.

  She hopped back onto her feet and gave chase, but the vampire was long gone. She heard the squeal of brakes and figured that was him, getting the heck out of Dodge.

  The drunk who’d gotten in her way rolled over and groaned up at her.

  It was Johnny Bravo.

  AKA, her biker boytoy.

  “Thank you, thank you very much,” she flung at him.

  “Oh, God,” the guy replied. “Not you.”

  Faith whirled on her heel and stomped back into the alley to retrieve the axe.

  It was gone.

  She looked left, right, and wondered if whoever took it knew what it was for. For the next few minutes, she hunted for it, but no luck. She returned to square one plenty ticked off, and not loving a mystery.

  She stormed back to the biker, whose nose was bleeding, and grabbed his arm, hoisting him to his feet.

  “Get up. We’re dancing some more,” she told the guy.

  “Can I have a cigarette first?” he pleaded, swaying like a corn stalk. He undid his bandana and soaked up his nose blood.

  Faith barked, “No.”

  “Okay.” He shuffled. “My nose hurts. I’m cold.”

  She winked. “Don’t worry, baby. I’ll make you steam.”

  Wide-eyed, he let her push him inside.

  Once through the door, she scanned the place, giving off as much attitude as she felt like. Yeah, like the vampire would be sitting there waiting for me; or some homeless guy was gonna have the axe in his lap, “You drop this, miss?”

  She dropped the dork on a bar stool, figuring he was too drunk to do her any good. Plus, disgusting. She snapped an order to the bartender, who went to work, and started surveying the catch in the Tank.

  So many sharks. Way too many guppies.

  Where have all the mermen gone?

  Just then, a cute guy made a dash for her and said, “Wanna dance?”

  * * *

  After Angel left, Buffy made sure all the doors and windows were locked against the heavy rains and started upstairs. A crash of thunder and lightning made her pause on the step, wondering if, like the fog, the weather was somehow significant.

  She unpeeled her extremely gross clothing and took a hot shower. She was yucky with goo from head to foot; she didn’t know how Angel could stand to kiss her. Smiling faintly, she remembered a time when he’d asked her not to kiss him while he was vamped out, and she hadn’t even noticed that he hadn’t been wearing his human face.

  Love’s like that, I guess.

  Buffy finished her shower and toweled off. She slipped into something fleecy and pink and padded into her room. Willow was asleep, all curled up, and Buffy settled in on the air mattress.

  I’m not going to be able to sleep, she thought anxiously. I’m going to think about Nat all night.

  In less than five minutes, the Slayer was asleep.

  * * *

  Wanna dance?

  Mark Corvalis was having trouble concentrating on the burn. He kept thinking about a certain little hotpants he’d met at the Fish Tank a couple of hours before, name of Faith.

  Sopping wet chick had sauntered in with some drunk with blood on his chin, dumped him, and looked around like she half-expected someone to try something funny—throw her on the pool table, ask her to star in a porno movie; Mark couldn’t exactly figure out what—and she glared at every man who stared at her, not that you could blame them, and hey, way she was dressed, she was insisting on it. All she had on was a sleeveless black leather vest cut halfway down to her hipbones, hip-hugging black leather pants, and boots. Lots of makeup, streaked from the rain, true, but she was the kind of chick who’d look super-excellent without any. Long, dark hair and a native tattoo around her biceps completed her total biker-babe look.

  After she unloaded her previous companion, she’d told the bartender to make her something to drink; the bartender seemed not only to know her, but to be genuinely afraid of her, and he served her right away, no questions asked. The pool balls clacked and the juke went on, almost like she told it to, and she perked right up at Joan Osborne’s “St. Teresa” and started dancing by herself.

  Mark seized the moment, got to her first, asked her to dance. She threw back her head and moved her shoulders as she led the way to the dance floor. The black leather was tight and she knew it; throwing a grin over her shoulder at him, she let him know she loved it that he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She slammed her beer down on some dude’s table without asking for parking privileges and grabbed up her hair as she started to dance, moving like a pro, frankly. She smiled at him, her big brown eyes making all kinds of promises, such as, he was not gonna go to sleep alone tonight. Wake up alone, sure, maybe. But that was hours from now, and he wasn’t looking to get married or anything.

  “Corvalis, do you mind?” asked the captain.

  Mark stirred. The section of fireline he was supposed to be watching was whipping up a little too high, a thick bloom of flames gathering momentum and threatening to jump the ditch he and the other Sunnydale firefighters had dug to contain the blaze on this end of the forest.

  He shoveled some dirt on the fire to cool it down, frowning at what had happened next with Faith. Man, she’d made him burn. Danced with him all night, gave him these looks, let him buy her drinks. And then . . .

  “See ya.” She’d turned to go. Just like that. And if he recalled correctly, she was swigging his beer at the time.

  Fairly drunk and incredibly horny, he grabbed her wrist.

  With a flick of that wrist, she decked him. The guys in the bar hooted as she whirled on her heel and sashayed away, never turning back as he tried to get to his feet. Damn, that had hurt. His knee was still sore.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  Shaking his head, grinning, he shoveled some more dirt onto the fire. The flames were still too concentrated, so he worked on his section of the line for a while, shoveling, getting sweaty, thinking about how after they got the blaze under control and he was back off-duty—this was his night off, and he’d had the bad luck to get paged onto the job while he was still at the Tank—he might go down to the bar again and see if she was still there.

  “Corvalis!” shouted the captain, and Mark jerked and looked up; then he cried out and tried to jump out of the way.

  Not only had the fire grown, but a tongue of flame about twenty feet high was arching upward and curling back down, headed straight for him. As he dodged to the right, the flame actually changed direction with him; he gave a shout of fear and lost his footing; he went down on his right elbow, which made a terrible grinding sound.

  Then, in the middle of the flames, a figure appeared. Taller than a normal man, it was outlined in black flames, like a surreal silhouette. It seemed to hover in space, and its feet slid along on top of the tongues of fire.

  It was completely wrapped in moldy, filthy strips of material. It was a mummy.

  “What?” Mark cried.

  “Get back, you idiot!” his captain shouted.

  The mummy came straight at him. In one hand, it carried a box, the weirdest looking box Mark had ever seen, with skull designs and—oh, my God, they’re not designs, they’re real!—in the other hand, it held a carved axe.

  He grunted in pain, holding up his left hand to ward off the fire. But it dove right at him, like an entity with a mind of its own; as he screamed, it hit him full force in the face.

  He was not aware of pain, not at first; it was more like a strange, white-hot pressure. There was no sound, just a buffeting.

  Then the awful pain rushed in, and he could hear
his own voice screaming as if from very far away; he could feel that he was holding something in his left hand, which he couldn’t see, but he was moving it very quickly.

  Lie down, lie down, so they can smother it out, he told himself. But he couldn’t stop thrashing and screaming. The world was on fire; everything was flames, except that they were black, not orange and red, not hot or cold; and he dimly understood that he was a human torch, and that he was going to die.

  Because nothing hurt anymore; nothing. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe.

  All that was left was dying.

  Chapter Six

  The Slayer slept, and the Slayer dreamed:

  Palms swayed in the hot, dry air. Winds blew the sands across the dune fields, pitting the trunks, scattering the few living creatures that could survive the hostile desert environment.

  The air reeked of death, and the vultures that circled overhead mimicked the flight patterns of the buzzing flies.

  The carcass was that of a girl; mummified by the heat, her body bore no distinguishing marks or characteristics. She could be any girl, or every girl; her skin the color of granite, her features shrunken. Her arms were crossed over her chest; in her brittle, clenched hands, she held four hand axes, two in her right hand, and two in her left.

  The air shimmered with the wailing of invisible mourners as she lay alone beneath the sun, utterly desiccated. Winds rose and fell with the keening of women, a bass backbeat of male voices. Animals howled. Birds screeched.

  Black smoke rose from the sands, thick and evil; then the dunes began to shake. The desert rumbled and shuddered; the winds gathered together like a single, killing breath and blasted the sands, hurtling the dunes one into another. They became concave, their humps thinning until they rose up, up, into the shapes of epic tidal waves, hovering at their crest, shimmying atop the wind as they promised to crash over the palms, and the dead girl.

  Then all at once, the elements froze, in a static tableau of disaster. Earth. Air. Water. Fire.

  Four identical earthen jars appeared at the dead girl’s feet. They were covered with runic symbols and sealed with curses and waxed insignias: who opens these, invites total annihilation.

  Inside one jar lay her heart. Inside another, her brain. The third contained her spinal column. The fourth, her earthly spirit, which was a shimmering rainbow.

  There was a pool of water in the middle of a desert. There was something in the water.

  As the waves hung and the sands hovered; as the earth stopped in midshake, a pool of water formed beneath the girl. It was bottomless; it was the bitter water of the River Styx, the river of death; it was the burning sea the dead suffered in; it was all the despair the drowning feel before their last bitter breath.

  From the water, four gaunt figures swathed in strips of linen gauze rose straight up, unmoving, and perfectly dry. Without so much as glancing at her, they shouldered the body of the dead girl and began to glide across the desert. Their bandaged feet never touched the sand. Silent phantoms, eerily serene, they carried the girl away from the pool.

  Then she began to tremble, and then to shudder. Like sticks rubbed together, she burst into flame. Her body cracked open like hunks of charred corn husks and water spilled out, splashing onto the sand, where it immediately evaporated.

  The winds caught the fragments and hurled them up, higher, until they left the atmosphere to drift endlessly in cold, black space. Stars twinkled, and a voice said, Four stars, four.

  There have to be four.

  The four gaunt figures kept moving. There were no eyes behind their bandaged sockets. Unaware of their surroundings, they pressed forward. The sand beneath them was hot enough to melt glass. The howl of the wind was deafening, but there was no evidence of so much as a gentle breeze. The glassy dunes were undisturbed, even where the figures walked. Beneath the merciless sun, the sands rolled, waves of a forgotten ocean.

  Strips of decayed fabric tightly encased the four, the cloth filthy and frayed, flies buzzing around it, and dozens of tattered ends fluttered in the blistering desert wind. Each figure was bandaged, head, neck, arms, and hands, but the torso and legs were draped with yards of mottled, webby gauze, deteriorated to paper-thinness in some parts, so that they resembled sagging sheets of cobwebs.

  Each figure carried an object, its bandaged elbows at right angles. Long black fingernails protruded from each one’s wrappings, fingers tightly clutching the object. They were boxes, horrible and revolting: made of dead faces, dead bones, dead skin.

  There was a handprint on the lid of each one; as each lid was thrown back, winds roared out, blowing sand and bandages into the air; an axe hurtled out of each and began slicing the sky into shards, which fell in ringing explosions, smashing to earth, to reveal a sphere, then spheres within spheres, then nothing, nothing at all.

  The axes hacked and slashed, tumbling end over end over end over end, sharp and fatal. The sky was falling, the world was ending; and a voice shouted out, “The four!”

  * * *

  On the air mattress in her room, Buffy woke up, gasping. At the exact same moment, in Buffy’s bed, Willow sat up and shouted, “India, come forth!”

  * * *

  Across town, another Slayer dreamed.

  The bandages were on fire. The whole thing was on fire. The figure kept walking, a human torch; and it was carrying something. It was on fire, but it didn’t miss a step, a beat—

  —my heartbeat, Faith dreamed, If it opens that thing, it’s gonna stop my heartbeat—

  It had a box. There were faces of girls on it—Asian, black, deep brown and pinkish white—and they opened their mouths and screamed, many voices weaving into one. Faith covered her ears.

  They kept screaming.

  I know what’s in it. In the warehouse, Tervokian—

  Faith woke up fast, disoriented.

  Damn, she thought, rubbing her aching head. She had a bad hangover. What a wicked-bad dream. What about Tervokian? What was I dreaming about him for?

  She thought a moment. But her head hurt way too much for thinking.

  Yawning, she saw the guy conked out next to her, the one she’d moved on to after Mark the Fireman had had to leave to go do his duty. Her current love interest—ha ha—was the Fish Tank’s bouncer, and not bad in the bod department.

  She took a look around at his ratty apartment with no windows and some very bad comic-book-type sketches of busty babes tacked on the walls, and thought, Oh, well. At least this one had sheets on his bed.

  Maybe the next one will actually wash them now and then.

  She got up and dressed quickly. As she headed for the door, she spotted a book lying next to a battered acoustic bass guitar.

  There was something kind of poetic about the pairing of the guitar with the book, which was The Collected Poems of George Gordon, Lord Byron. She opened it up:

  “So, we’ll go no more a-roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast,

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  Though the night was made for loving,

  And the day returns too soon,

  Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

  By the light of the moon.”

  It moved her.

  So, big dreams, gets lost along the way . . .

  Better dreams than mine, anyway . . .

  Squatting, Faith strummed the guitar. It was horribly out of tune, and dust floated in clouds from the strings. He obviously hadn’t played it in a long, long time.

  “He’s a freakin’ bouncer, moron,” she murmured to herself. “Not a rock star.”

  She tossed the book back onto the floor.

  “Loser,” she flung at him, and let herself out into the alley that was his front yard.

  It wa
s hours before dawn. Between the two-story buildings covered with unpainted aluminum siding, the rain had gotten worse. A strong wind was kicking pages of drenched newspapers and old magazines along the chain-link fence lining the loft structure where her white knight slumbered. It was cold for Sunnydale, especially Sunnydale in autumn. Faith wished she’d brought a jacket.

  This is almost Boston-cold, she thought, frowning, as she rubbed her bare arms and walked along. She huffed, and her breath made a puff of mist in the icy rain. Wrong. This is Boston-cold.

  The wind whistled, gusting, and the trash can to Faith’s right slammed onto its side, releasing the pungent odor of coffee grounds and overripe fruit. A rat emerged, and the wind actually picked it up and skipped it along the gravelly ground like a stone on a river.

  Faith had to brace herself in order not to be hustled along in like fashion. Her teeth chattered. Slayer or not, she was freezing. Her hair whipped around her head. The chain link clanged back and forth against its frame, and the trash can began to roll, slowly at first, then as quickly as a car, barreling along, likely to do some serious damage.

  Faith ran after it, lunging forward with both hands to stop it. Something slammed into her butt and sent her sprawling over the can; instinctively, she tucked her head and turned her fall into a forward roll. The can rolled over her, causing pain but no serious damage, and coasted onward down the alley.

  Gravel smacked the back of her neck and she slapped her hand against it as if she were squashing mosquitoes.

  At the end of the block, she came across three kids a couple of years younger than she. One was a girl in a light black sweater, black belly pants, and Doc Martins. Her two guy friends had on T-shirts with Goth designs on them, and one was pulling a sweatshirt out of a backpack.

  “Man, what’s going on?” he asked Faith. “This is like the end of the world or something.”

  “There’s a Twilight Zone about this,” the girl chimed in. She pulled out a cigarette and a black plastic lighter. “The earth is moving away from the sun, and everyone is freezing to death.” She flicked the lighter which, duh, did not ignite in the strong wind. “In the episode,” she added, “not here. But I am pretty much freezing to death.” She looked meaningfully at the guy who was getting out his sweatshirt.