Nightmares, p.45
Nightmares, page 45
“No no no!” Tobias holds out his hands, as if he could ward off the very idea of it. “I mean, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that’s only because the other one never went away. I think it’s the proximity of the skull that does it. There was one other courier, the girl who brought me the rock. I sent her away.”
“Jesus. Where?”
“Just…” He waves, vaguely. “Away. Into the bayou.”
“You’re a real sweetheart, Tobias.”
“Well come on, I didn’t know what to do! She was just—there! I didn’t know anybody was going to be coming with it! I freaked out and told her to get out! But the important thing is I never saw any sign that she changed into anything. I haven’t seen or heard anything from her since. You notice how the plants get weird as you get close to this place? It’s gotta be the skull’s influence.”
“That’s not exactly airtight logic, Tobias,” I say. “What if it’s not just from the skull? What if it comes from them too? I could tell something was fucked up about Johnny as soon as I saw him.”
“Well I’m taking the fucking chance! If there are going to be people coming out, they need to have a chance at a better life. That’s why I got Johnny here a job. He’ll be far away from that skull, so maybe he won’t change into anything.” He looks at his friend and at the lively fire that’s crackling inside his head. “Well, he wouldn’t have if you guys hadn’t fucked it all up. I’ve got this all worked out. I’m going to find them jobs in little places, in little towns. I got money now, so I can afford to get them set up. Buy them some clothes, rent them out a place until they can start earning some money of their own. A second chance, you know? They deserve a second chance.”
He’s getting all worked up again, like he’s going to break down into tears, and I’m struck with a revelation: Tobias is using this skull as a chance to redeem himself. He’s going to funnel of people out of Hell and back into the world of sunlight and cheeseburgers.
Tobias George may be the only good man in a fifty-mile radius. Too bad it’s the most doomed idea I’ve ever heard in a life rich with them. But there are several possibilities for salvaging this situation. One thing is clear: Eugene cannot have the atlas. The level of catastrophe he might cause is incalculable. I need to get it back to my bookstore and to the back room. There are books there that will provide protections; at least I hope so.
All I need is something to carry it in.
I know just where to get it.
“Patrick. You still want to bring this thing to Eugene?”
“He’s the boss. You change your mind about coming?”
“I think so, yeah. Tobias, we’re going into the room.”
He goes in gratefully. I think he feels in control in this room in way that he doesn’t out there with Patrick. It’s almost funny.
The skull sits on the moss-blackened stool, greasy smoke seeping from its fissures and polluting the air. The broken language of Hell is a physical pressure. A blood vessel ruptures in my right eye and my vision goes cloudy and pink. Time fractures again. Tobias moves next to me, approaching the skull, but I can’t tell what it’s doing to him: he skips in time like I’m watching him through strobe lights, even though the light in here remains a constant, sizzling glare. I try not to vomit. Things are moving around in my brain like maggots in old meat.
The air seems to bend into the skull. I see it on the stool, blackening the world around it, and I try to imagine who it once belonged to: the chained Black Iron Monk, shielded by a metal box from the burning horrors of the world he moved through. Until something came along and opened the box like a tin can, and Hell poured inside.
Who was it? What order would undertake such a pilgrimage? And to what end?
Tobias is saying something to me. I have to study him to figure out what.
The poor scrawny bastard is blistering all over his body. His lips peel back from his bloody teeth.
“Tell it what you want,” he says.
So I do.
The boy is streaked with mud and gore. He is twelve, maybe thirteen. Steam rises from his body like wind-struck flags. I don’t know where he appears from, or how; he’s just there, two iron boxes dangling like huge lanterns from a chain in his hand. I wonder, briefly, what a child his age had done to be consigned to Hell. But then, it doesn’t really matter.
I open one of the boxes and tell the boy to put the skull inside. He does. The skin bubbles on his hands where he touches it, but he makes no sign of pain.
I close the door on it, and it’s like a light going out. Time slips back into its groove. The light recedes to a natural level. My skin stops burning, the desire to commit violence dissipates like smoke. I can feel where I’ve been scratching my own arms again. My eye is gummed shut with blood.
When we stumble back into the main room, Patrick is on his feet with the gun in his hand. Johnny is sitting on the bed, the bony rim of his open skull grown further upward, elongating his head and giving him an alien grace. The fire in the bowl of his head burns briskly, crackling and shedding a warm light. Patrick looks at me, then at the boy with the iron boxes. “You got them,” he says. “Where’s the skull?”
I take the chain from the boy. The boxes are heavy together; the boy must be stronger than he looks. Something to remember. “In one of these. If it can keep that shit out, I’m betting it can keep it locked in, too. I think it’s safe to move.”
“And those’ll get us past the thing outside?”
“If what Johnny said is true.”
“It is,” Johnny says. “But now there’s only one extra box.”
“That’s right,” I say, and swing them with every vestige of my failing strength at Patrick’s head, where they land with a wet crunch. He staggers to his right a few steps, the left side of his face broken like crockery, and he puts a hand into the rancid scramble of his own brain. “I’ll go get it,” he says, “I’ll go.”
“You’re dead,” I tell him gently. “You stupid bastard.”
He accepts this gracefully and collapses to his knees, and then onto his face. Dark blood pours from his head as though from a spilled glass. I scoop up the gun, which feels clumsy in my hand. I never got the hang of guns.
Tobias stands in shock. “I can’t believe you did that,” he says.
“Shut up. Are there any clothes in that dresser? Put something on the kid. We’re going back to the city.” While he’s doing that, I look at Johnny. “I’m not going to be able to see. Will you be able to guide me out?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” I say, and shoot Tobias in the back of the head.
For once, somebody dies without an argument.
I don’t know much about the trip back. I open a slot on the base of the box and fit it over my head. I am consumed in darkness. I’m led out to the skiff by Johnny and the boy. The boy rides with me, and Johnny gets into the water, dragging us behind him. Fire unfurls from his head, the sides of which are developing baroque flourishes. His personality is diminished, and I can’t tell if it’s because he mourns Tobias, or because that is changing too, developing into something cold and barren.
The journey takes several hours. I know we pass the corpse flowers, the staring eyes and bloodless faces pressing from the foliage. I am sure that the creature unleashes its earth-breaking cry, and that any living thing that hears it hemorrhages its life away, into the still waters. I know that night falls. I know the flame of our new guide lights the undersides of the cypress, runs out before us across the water, fills the dark like the final lantern in a fallen world.
I make a quiet and steady passage there.
Eugene is in his office. The bar is closed upstairs and the man at the door lets us in without a word. He makes no comment about my companions, or the iron boxes hanging from a chain. The world he lives in is already breaking from its old shape. The new one has space for wonders.
Eugene is sitting behind his desk in the dark. I can tell he’s drunk. It smells like he’s been here since we left, almost twenty-four hours ago now. The only light comes from the fire rising from Johnny’s empty skull. It illuminates a pale structure on Eugene’s desk: a huge antler, or a tree made of bone. There are human teeth protruding along some of its tines, and a long crack near the wider base of it reveals a raw, red meat, where a mouth opens and closes.
“Where’s Patrick?” he says.
“Dead,” I say. “Tobias, too.”
“And the atlas?”
“I burned it.”
He nods, as though he’d been expecting that very thing. After a moment he gestures at the bone tree. “This is my son,” he says. “Say hi, Max.”
The mouth shrieks. It stops to draw in a gasping breath, then repeats the sound. The cry is sustained for several seconds before stuttering into a sob, and then going silent again.
“He keeps growing. He’s going to be a big boy before it’s all over.”
“Yeah. I can see that.”
“Who’re your friends, Jack?”
I have to think about that before I answer. “I really don’t know,” I say, finally.
“So what do you want? You want me to tell you you’re off the hook? You want me to tell you you’re free to go?”
“You told me that before. It turned out to be bullshit.”
“Yeah, well. That’s the world we live in, right?”
“You’re on notice, Eugene. Leave me alone. Don’t come to my door anymore. I’m sorry things didn’t work out here. I’m sorry about your son. But you have to stay away. I’m only going to say it once.”
He smiles at me. He must have to summon it from far away, but he smiles at me. “I’ll take that under advisement, Jack. Now get the fuck out of here.”
We turn and walk back up the stairs. It’s a long walk back to my bookstore, where I’m anxious to get to work on the atlas. But I have a light to guide me, and I know this place well.
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir books. The eighth book in the series, The Perdition Score, has recently been published. His other books include The Everything Box, Metrophage, Butcher Bird, Dead Set, and the graphic novel ACCELERATE. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime” and is in development as a feature film.
Ambitious Boys Like You
Richard Kadrey
Witt pulled his father’s ’71 Malibu to a stop down the block from the derelict house. The car coughed a couple of times. It wasn’t vintage. It was just old.
Sonny was riding shotgun. He said, “There it is.”
“I’ve been driving by this place my whole life,” said Witt. “Didn’t ever think I’d have a reason to go inside. Didn’t ever want to.”
“Why’s that?”
“When we was young, we figured it was haunted.”
“Haunted? How come?” asked Sonny.
“Well, look.”
“At what?”
“The bodies.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
Sonny, his cousin, was from Houston, but being from the city isn’t why Witt found him interesting. It was that while Witt believed in everything—God, the Devil, spooks, not spilling salt without throwing some over your shoulder—Sonny believed in absolutely nothing. Not 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination, not Heaven or Hell. The way he talked, Witt sometimes wondered if Sonny believed in him.
“Those are dolls, you psycho hillbilly.”
“They don’t look it at night,” said Witt. “At night it looks like a whole cemetery in those trees.”
Sonny had to give him that. There were at least a hundred small dolls nailed to the apple trees around the old man’s yard. There were even a few on the porch and the low picket fence that surrounded the property.
“It’s called hoarding,” said Sonny. “These old assholes, their dog or their wife dies and their brains turn to Swiss cheese. They can’t let go of anything. That’s why we’re here, right?”
Witt nodded.
“I know. I’m just all of a sudden amused that after all these years, I’ll finally see inside the place for real. You know, we wouldn’t ride our bikes by here at night. We’d go clear around the block to avoid it.”
“What a great story. Promise me you’ll write a memoir. You ready to go?”
“Hell yeah,” said Witt, trying to sound more ready than he was.
It was just after 2 a.m. Witt had set the interior light on the Malibu to not come on when they opened the doors. Sonny carried the bag with their tools. They wore sneakers and latex gloves from the Walmart by the freeway. Sonny pulled on his ski mask. Witt kept his in his windbreaker’s pocket. The night was hot and humid and the mask itched like a son of a bitch when he tried it on in the store. He’d put it on once they got inside.
Sonny was the first through the picket fence. He held the gate open for Witt, not because he was polite, but because he didn’t want it to slam shut. That’s the other thing Witt liked about Sonny. He was a thinker.
It was only about thirty feet from the fence to the porch, and even though it was night and he was wearing a mask, Sonny kept his head down. Witt followed him, covering the side of his face with his hand. Witt stepped onto the front porch gently. He didn’t want the old boards to squeak. Sonny turned and looked at him.
“Where’s your fucking mask?”
“In my pocket.”
“Put it on.”
“There’s no one here.”
“What if he has automatic lights or security cameras?”
“Cameras? You think this old son of a bitch is James Bond?”
Sonny sighed.
“Just put the damned mask on.”
While Sonny got out his lock pick tools, Witt took the mask from his pocket and pulled it down over his face. He was sweating and itching in seconds. There better be something inside worth stealing, he thought. Gold coins or silver candlesticks or a goddamn treasure map from back when the hovel had been the nicest house in town, eighty some odd years ago. The old man had lived there by himself for as long as Witt could remember. No one had ever seen him take anything but the trash out, and even that was a rare thing. Witt hoped it was cash inside. He wasn’t a pirate. He wouldn’t know what the hell to do with a bunch of gold. When it was over, maybe he could buy his dad’s Malibu and get it fixed up. That would be sweet. He was about to ask Sonny what he thought about the idea when Sonny said, “Well, damn.”
“What?”
“You were right. The old man isn’t exactly security-minded.”
Sonny put the picks back in the bag and turned the knob on the door. It opened.
“The hayseed doesn’t even lock the place.”
“I told you,” said Witt. “Folks don’t like it here. There’s no reason they’d want to go inside.”
“But we’re not just folks, are we?”
Witt smiled. Sonny reached up and pulled down a doll held with wire over the door frame. He handed it to Witt. The doll was about eight inches long. Its body was straw and the head was made of rough, untanned leather, with button eyes.
“Toss it,” said Sonny. “Time to grow up. This is no cemetery. It’s a flophouse.”
Witt threw the doll into the yard and it felt like a hundred pounds of bullshit lifted off his back. He’d been afraid of the house for so long, he took it for granted that he’d be spooked forever. And now he wasn’t. The old wreck, with its rotten gables and broken windows covered with cardboard, wasn’t Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. It was just a prison for a pathetic old man. Witt all of a sudden sort of felt kind of sorry for him, but sorry didn’t mean that he and Sonny weren’t down for business.
Sonny pushed the front door open and Witt followed him inside.
The stink hit Witt hard, an overpowering combination of mildew, spoiled meat, and something like copper, with a sour sting that bought tears to his eyes.
“Jesus. Does this old fuck ever flush his toilet?” said Sonny.
“Sometimes in these old places, rats or raccoons will get in the walls and die there.”
“Smells like it was Noah’s whole goddamn ark.”
Sonny flicked on a small LED flashlight and Witt did the same as they went deeper into the place.
They were in a wide foyer. The floor was covered with a carpet turned black with grime and mold. To the left was a parlor. Wallpaper peeled from the walls like burned skin. To the right was a dining room. A hallway led off from the foyer. A door to the kitchen in the distance. A closet. Another door under the stairs that Witt thought led to a basement. The place was even worse than he’d imagined.
“You sure there’s anything left in here worth taking?” he said. “I mean, it smells like the damned dump.”
“Spend a lot of time out there, do you?” said Sonny. “You said the family were bankers. People like that, they know what to squirrel away for a rainy day.”
“I suppose.”
“Damn right you do. Now, let’s get to work. Don’t forget what I told you. Slow and steady wins the race. Take your time, but don’t get lazy. Don’t make noise, but don’t go so fast you’re going to miss valuables.”
Witt nodded. He wanted to breathe through his mouth, but he didn’t want to look like a pussy in front of Sonny. He swung his light into the parlor.
“As good a place to start as any,” Sonny said and they went inside.
They went to opposite ends of the room. The plan was to work their way in and meet in the middle. It sounded good when they’d talked it over, but now Witt wasn’t so sure. What the hell was he looking for exactly? He was sure they weren’t going to find a pile of hundreds just lying around the place.
He looked at the dusty paintings. Generations of the old man’s family, each more mean and joyless than the last. It eased Witt’s conscience a little.
Witt checked the bookcase and drawers on rickety old end tables. Picking up some old books, he wondered if they were worth something. Or one of the lamps. His grandma had an old gilt lamp from France that she swore was worth more than his granddad’s soul. Witt shook his head. No. They weren’t there for lamps or shit like that. He checked around the cushions on a sofa that kicked up enough dust that it looked like a west Texas sandstorm.
