A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (23 page)

He yanked on my shirt until his claws dug into my neck and blood welled.
Did you? Tell me! Did you?

Which side are you on?

On your side, like always
. Then he frowned so hard that the ridge appeared between his eyes, as it did between mine, both of us looking genuinely confused.
But which side are you on? Do you even know?

The land itself had grown hostile with resentment. I sat in front of a church for hours, and then moved off to a mosque and a Muslim shrine and I watched the different flags droop in the unmoving air and couldn't tell them apart. I vomited in alleyways until the bile tore up my guts. Gunshots and the sound of breaking glass echoed in all directions.

Self sniffed, held his nose, and said,
You really stink.

I lay under garbage as the hail stormed down. Even with the sunlight igniting the jewels of blood in the slivers of ice, I enjoyed the cold on my blistered and bitten skin. Helicopters passed overhead, hovering, silhouetted in the sky, hanging against the sun until it became as black as a sackcloth of hair or ashes.

Joseph and Bethany Shiya's corpses might not be found for days. The lust and illness had been purged from me in a sacrifice I did not make. The great whore that had possessed Bethany had fed well on all of us.

Why hadn't my throat been cut?

Bethany's body had been carved open in the exact same manner as Theresa Verfenstein thirty-five years ago on a New Jersey campus. Even my name had been sliced into the flesh with the same decisive, steady strokes. A right-hand curve, sloping low and dragging with a slight flourishing curl. The killer must have had some real strength in order to leave chips in the rib cage and sternum.

I'd fulfilled another prophecy out of Revelation, lying with the mother of whores. I was being used, step by step, but couldn't figure out a way to stop it.

What happened to us in there? What did you see?

I didn't see anything.

You don't sleep. You must've allowed this to happen.

I don't sleep but I'm not always awake
. He scratched his cheek and peered around.
Damn, I could use a latte and some more sugar cookies. I think I'm hypoglycemic
.

A footstep sounded and a bird screeched loudly behind me.

I waited. The footsteps came closer. I could feel the anticipation pulsating all around, but it wasn't mine. Somebody else wanted a piece of me and expected this moment to be important and memorable. He twined between the shadows and finally appeared at the mouth of the alley, where he found me huddled under the strewn rubbish face down in the street.

That was all right. Situations like this could no longer shame me.

His bird tilted its head and whispered in his ear. He nodded and took a step closer, unafraid and indiscreet.

I stared at him for a minute and still couldn't really distinguish him from the rest of the coven. He stood tall, six-three, and had an oily smile that kept his lips sliding. A loosely curled shock of hair hung off his forehead, the kind that girls would love to catch in their fingers and play with for hours. He looked as though he should be in some college English lit program, leaning back in his seat, intense but casual, that greasy grin oozing as he argued with his professor about the subtext metaphor and vagaries of Voltaire's
Candide
.

Twenty-one or twenty-two, maybe, and he'd been killing them for years.

He was another necromancer, somebody in love with the dead. I didn't need to deal with any more trouble today. His eyes gleamed with a heady brew of humor and maleficia. He had beauty and charm and had used them in vile ways. Ghosts clung to him by the dozens—middle-aged women he'd drawn to him with his smile.

"What's your name?" I asked.

The jackdaw Hotfoot Johnson whispered to the kid again, like some lawyer clearing all his answers. "Marcus," he said.

"What do you want, Marcus?"

"To learn from you."

It didn't seem incongruous to either of us that we spoke amongst trash, with the bloody hail coming down. "No," I told him. "Now leave."

"I can't do that."

"Why? Are you under orders to stick close in case I don't plan on showing tomorrow?"

"No, nothing like that. We all know you'll help Jebediah."

"Really."

"Yes, or else why would you be here? You rely too much upon each other. You're the Lord Summoner."

It was true, but that didn't have to mean anything to me. I held my fist open and stared at my variant lifeline again. I wanted it moved back to where it belonged. In which one of my lives had I been safer, and saner?

"I turn the title over to you, kid."

The fluid grin flowed and dipped and finally settled. "What?"

"You heard me. You're boss hog around here now. You can start by bringing back all these ladies you've murdered."

He actually let out a chuckle, and his bottom lip jutted. Some of the dead women wafted closer to him, still wanting to nibble at his boyish pout. He said, "I didn't hurt anyone."

Marcus had a natural talent for sifting through facts and feelings, inspecting each and moving on. I could understand why the women stayed with him. I looked closer and saw that most of them were suicides—the skin flaps and razor gashes trailed up their forearms. No hesitation cuts at all. They couldn't live without him when he left.

"They died because of you."

"We all die because of someone else."

"You might be right."

He had a haughty attitude, like most of the pretentious witches I'd known. He found great calm in certain atrocities, and that intrigued me.

Squatting in the trash he said, "You're foolish for having left him. With your knowledge and skill at the craft you could have had anything you desired—"

"Is that right?"

"—but you left. Why?"

"Get out of here."

"Why did you give up everything for one insignificant woman? Her death was a blessing according to Jebediah, and instead of appreciating it you've wasted a lifetime of power in order to . . ."

I stood and punched him in the jaw.

It barely connected. The jackdaw screeched and flew in circles overhead. Marcus had speed and dexterity and instead of going over backward and hitting the street hard he just sort of glided away. Any other time it would have worked fine, but he slipped on the bleeding ice and went down anyway. It seemed to amuse him and he let loose with a quiet titter.

He ran it out for a couple of seconds, and then with a serious edge he said, "I'm sorry I offended you. Jebediah said—"

"Jebediah lies, but you'll find that out soon enough."

"Everyone lies."

Hotfoot Johnson eyed Self and thrust its open beak at us. We were only ten feet apart. Self crooked his finger and beckoned the bird forward. The jackdaw unfurled its wings, hissed a particularly nasty curse, and came soaring for my eyes. Even Marcus seemed shocked that his familiar would attack.

Self launched himself forward as the blackbird approached. Marcus shouted and reached way too late. Hotfoot Johnson came at me with its tongue hanging, each feather angled like a saber. There wasn't any time for me to move as it covered the space between us at an amazing speed, those talons glittering with ice as they spread now to impale me.

Self took the bird in flight a few inches from my face and wrestled it to the ground in a cloud of feathers.

Any trouble?
I asked.

Not for me.

Marcus wasn't torn by loyalty. He hardly even looked at his squawking familiar being almost crushed in the street. The kid had determination and will but could cast aside his other self in the same fashion he threw off his lovers. I wanted to see what he had inside.

While he sat there rubbing his chin I reached out and clipped the women from him. Not all of them would leave Marcus even when they were free to go on. Several stayed wafting about him, still in love, decaying but no longer lonely.

"Did you think they all hated me?" he asked.

"No, I don't suppose I did."

You couldn't even guess at the dealings of the human heart.

In the back of my mind I could hear the slow, grating chant of his consciousness probing for my secrets. It was a subtle and rather dainty touch, more of a caress designed to impress a forlorn woman riding the crest of middle age.

"You really want into my head?" I asked. "Yes," Marcus said. The agitated smile quivered and danced all over the place.

"Okay. Start the dance."

That sluggish chanting continued as he gathered himself—he had no agenda other than to learn by stealing my hard-earned knowledge. That just wasn't the way it was done. Maybe it even would have been funny if we weren't perched at the apocalypse.

Self said,
Quit playing and lay this little creep to waste.

I kind of like him.

No, you don't.

I could feel my past loosening and rising in me once again, floating to the surface from the bottomless mire of my own forgotten myths. Marcus did not think of God or vision. He didn't even care for the ladies anymore, or his brood. He had something he wanted more desperately than his own soul, and he wouldn't stop until he got it. I'd been there once myself and knew it would only lead to a route of bliss, treachery, and heartbreak. If this kid wasn't already going to fry in hell, he would've been headed there now on a bullet train, embracing each flame in perfect passion.

Marcus's eyes went from pale blue to septic yellow, narrowing in triumph as he swam in the murky depths of my soul.

The hail in our hair slowly melted and left sprinkles of blood on our faces and clothes. He loved the dead and he even loved my dead. His psychic manipulation grew stronger, the spike piercing as he dug in and rutted around. His will parted the layers of my guilt and panic and anguish, pressing deeper but without any pain. He had the touch, I had to give him that. He flipped the pages of every book he found in all the many rooms of my mind. Snatches of songs and the grumbling of my first car's engine made him turn and wander through garages and backyards, watching the church tower and the insane asylum in the distance. He read the names off headstones and pressed his finger into the chiseled letters, feeling the near-electrical smoothness of the polished stone. The kid knew his way around a charnel house of the heart, stroking the drenched walls and stained floors of my life.

Danielle was first on the slab, lying directly beside my mother. They lay dressed in white, absolutely pure and lovely even while surrounded by the bone dust and rusted blades. He picked up scraps of my past from the tables and shelves: candles and chalk, grimoires, mason jars, gris-gris pouches, solar wheels, amulets, the fat fingers of a thief turned into a hand of glory, knotted aguilette cords, my athame, and all the substance and material of our kind. The salamanders ran past his feet throwing fire, but nothing ever burned here.

He walked among rows and rows of the slain, peeking under sheets and trying to commit faces to memory, but they kept changing even as he stared. That always happened. They all became Danielle or my mother.

Marcus's smile finally stopped squirming. "They're so beautiful."

"Yes," I told him, "they are."

"And you did this?"

"More or less."

He bent forward to brush his lips against the cheek of my lost love. He tilted his head back and enjoyed her fragrance, letting a small laugh roll in the back of his throat before stooping over her again. He sniffed softly, murmuring words of tenderness and devotion as the tip of his tongue jutted to take a taste of flesh, and Danielle's eyes opened.

She grinned a mouthful of blood and reached out with animal swiftness, not quite cackling but, Christ, it was close, hugging him to her, despising. My mother rose from a dozen different directions and immediately flung herself onto his back, screaming out my failures and crimes. Then more of the dead broke free from the darkness, overturning furniture and knocking aside the shelves of books and diagrams. My obliterated coven crept from each corner as Marcus cried out and tried to run. They each grabbed a piece of him and held on, as they did to me and forever would, nails and teeth like barbs twisting deep into muscles and tendons. Danielle pointed, accusing as she always did in my nightmares—those long thin fingers stretching, denouncing me or only reaching out for help—hyperextended as the joints in her fingers popped one after the other, elbow and wrist cracking, and still she pointed at my heart.

Marcus kept struggling to get out, trying to escape from something that can never be escaped. It wasn't until he spun completely around now that he saw I'd closed and barred the charnel house door. His jaw dropped to his chest when he realized he was trapped.

"No," he groaned as they covered him, writhing and punishing. "You can't... wait!"

Hotfoot Johnson fought to get free as Marcus tottered a few steps in the street, gurgling like an irritated baby. He finally managed to gulp enough air to let out a scream. It came from the recesses of his soul, and when it finally ran out he kept shrieking without sound. His mouth opened wider and wider until I could hear the hinges of his jaw creaking, but still nothing came out. His women twirled about him, hugging and tugging at his wrists.