Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (11 page)

He laughed, and it was a horrible sound. “Immortality? I’m just trying to say
alive
. There is a monster, and it
did
eat my family, and the others who lived here. Or... I don’t know if it ate them, it tore them apart, it seemed to get something out of that, from their pain, or maybe it sucked out their souls or something, I don’t
know
, but I had to bury the pieces, bury what was left of them – can you imagine how hard that was for me?”

“Harder than strapping your friends and family down on this table as sacrifices?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, as well as he could with the lock pressing against his throat.

“Open your eyes, Andrew. We’re not done talking.” I sat on the redwood bench and put my dagger on the table, spinning it around. When it stopped, the point aimed at his cheek. “Did you really crack open a seal and let something out, or was that bullshit?”

“After we found the pit, I... started having these
dreams
. I saw shapes, the shapes I carved into the table later. And I dreamed about coming back here, to this place. I resisted, for a long time, but I came anyway, I’d go to sleep and wake up hours later in my car, parked here. So when I lost my job, I just... gave in. I listened. I came. And the thing, the taker,
it
, spoke to me, and told me it had marked me when I looked down into its pit, when I pointed a light into its darkness, and made it hide. The thing said it was going to consume me... unless I made myself useful, instead. It promised...” He closed his eyes, and tears leaked down his face.

“Fed his wife and kid to a monster to save himself,” Nicolette said. “That’s low.”

“It was in my
mind
,” Andrew whispered. “The... beast. And I was in
its
mind, sometimes, and I knew I couldn’t fight it. The beast is old, older than almost anything, it lived here when this was all underwater, when this desert was an ocean, and it hunted, and it fed. Some people managed to trap it, for a while in the cavern, under the stone, but... I don’t know what those people knew! I couldn’t stop it, I could only –”

“Collaborate?” I said. “Shit, Andrew. You sacrificed your family so you could live. But what the hell are you living
for
? You killed the reason you had to stay alive. I will say this, though. Meeting a piece of shit like you makes me feel better about my own horrible mistakes. I’ve done some bad things, but you’ve got me beat.”

“It will be dark soon,” Andrew said, winning the Stating the Obvious challenge. “There’s fresh blood on the table –
my
blood. That’s what calls it. The beast will come. For me.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole.”

“Are you going to let this beast eat him, Marla?” Nicolette asked.

I sighed. “Of course not. I’ll kill the monster, then call the cops and let them know there’s a guy locked to a table, and they might want to inquire about what happened to his wife and kid, and maybe check the table for lots and lots of DNA.”

“He’d let
you
get eaten,” Nicolette said, joining the state-the-obvious party. “That was the whole point.”

“Yes, Nicolette, but
my
whole point is that I’m better than him.”

“Aw, I wouldn’t go that far,” Nicolette said. “You’re just horrible in a different way.”

“You have to let me go,” Andrew said. “You can’t possibly fight it, you have no idea what –”

A shadow passed over the sun. I looked up as Andrew whimpered. There were no clouds, no birds, no airplanes – the sky was just
dimming
, as if we’d been placed under a smoked glass dome.

I drew my dagger, and after some thought, reached into my coat for the silvery axe. The blade glimmered, like a fragment of moonlight, something I’d noticed it doing before, though I hadn’t yet figured out what it meant.

“Is that an eclipse?” Nicolette demanded. “Damn it, not having a neck sucks, I can’t even tilt my head back.”

I rolled my neck around on my shoulders. “No eclipse, but something’s coming. I guess the beast didn’t want to wait for natural nightfall, so it brought its own.”

Andrew was openly sobbing, but I didn’t have much sympathy for him. He’d made his bloody altar, and now he had to lie on it.

Something approached from the north. I squinted, but that didn’t help my vision much, especially with the still-diminishing brightness. The vestiges of bedbug-potion were no help, either, since it didn’t give off any heat I could detect. The thing seemed to be a bodiless ball of writhing wires or tentacles, limbs crossing and recrossing, the whole moving by some form of locomotion that defied analysis.

I grunted. “Your beast is only a little bit in this world, Andrew. It’s operating in dimensions we can’t see. That explains its ability to turn this neighborhood into a Mobius strip – it’s some kind of dimensional manipulator. Sure makes it hard to tell what we’re dealing with, though. We might as well be in Flatland here, perceiving a bouncing ball as an expanding and contracting circle.”

“Nerd,” Nicolette muttered.

Still, there were parts of the beast projecting into this reality, and I didn’t see any reason I couldn’t chop all those parts off and hope some of them were vital. I rushed around the table and ran toward the thing, silver hatchet in one hand, knife in the other. Within seconds one of the – tentacles? Bones? Appendages? – was in reach, so I lashed out with my dagger.

The supernatural blade sliced cleanly, and the limb – a glossy black thing segmented like a scorpion’s tail – snapped like a wire under tension, one end falling to the dirt, the other recoiling and vanishing into thin air. The creature
did
seem to have a central mass from which the writhing appendages radiated, but that body shifted in and out of sight, as if obscured by a moving curtain.

I did catch a glimpse of its mouth, though. It had a six-foot-long tooth whorl, a lower jaw full of serrated teeth that spiraled inward like the head of a fiddlehead fern crossed with a circular saw. I’d seen tooth whorls in artists’ renditions of the prehistoric sea monster heliocoprion, the only creature known to possess such a weird-ass form of dentata, but this beast was no deep-sea prehistoric predator that had survived into the modern day. For one thing, heliocoprion didn’t have tentacles or the ability to shift through dimensions and manipulate space-time (presumably). But the beast’s curled-up jaw full of fangs did make me wonder if some of the fossilized teeth whorls attributed to heliocoprons had belonged to things like this instead. There really
were
giants in the earth in those days, is the thing.

I lashed out at every appendage that whipped or twisted its way into my sphere of destruction, and hissed when one wrapped around my wrist – it didn’t hurt or burn or anything, but its touch was
foul
, carrying some fundamental contagion that revolted me instantly, broadcasting horror right at my reptile backbrain. When I cut that tentacle loose, and the limb unwrapped from my arm, it left behind an ugly smear that stank like a skunk carcass.

Still the thing advanced, and its appendages didn’t seem to dwindle in number, fresh ones appearing faster than I could sever them. Soon I was slashing with axe and knife both, and managing to hold my own – until its tooth whorl unfurled out of thin air, a muscular curl of jaw studded with triangular fangs, lashing out for my face. I ducked and cursed and fell back behind the picnic table.

“Tactical error, huh, Marla?” Nicolette said.

Truer words. I’d assumed I could kill the thing – I have a lot of experience backing up that assumption – but for all I knew I was just trimming its fingernails and cutting its hair.

“Sorry, Andrew.” I tucked the hatchet back into my coat and grabbed Nicolette’s cage. I headed back to the house, turning for a moment to watch as the creature loomed over the picnic table, appendages scrabbling across the yard toward the man on the makeshift altar. The beast’s tooth whorl unspooled from the dark, and something that might have been a tongue – or rather a cluster of tongues, like a cat-o-nine-tails – appeared and drooped down toward Andrew’s screaming face.

Ah, well, fuck him, the kid-murdering piece of filth.

I got inside and slammed the door, then dove for my bag. I dug out a bag of salt – well, mostly salt – and poured it on the floor in a big circle, enclosing Nicolette and myself.

“Cowering in a warded circle,” Nicolette said. “You’re a strategic
genius
.”

“I just need a minute to try something else,” I said, and that’s when the creature tore the roof off the house.

GHOSTS WITH SHARP TEETH

It was really quite impressive. A crack, a ripping sound, and then the roof was just
gone
, ripped cleanly away as if by a tornado. The creature’s limbs came over the top of the walls and began to tear those too, too, and in a moment we were sitting in an exposed ruin, with a full view of the backyard, and Andrew’s bloody remnants cooling on the picnic table. The appendages probed toward us, but stopped when they reached the salt, questing blindly off in other directions. We were invisible, inaudible, and invincible, more or less, while we were in the circle, but it was a temporary magic. A strong wind breaking the line could undo it.

“What
now
?” Nicolette said.

I reached into my coat and touched the shark’s teeth I’d found. I think I might have smiled. “Now, I do a little necromancy.”

“What, are you going to resurrect Andrew to fight for us? That might work if his legs or arms were still attached. He’s not even intact enough to head butt the beast. Besides, I thought you hated necromancers?”

“A compulsion to play with dead things for a living tends to indicate a pretty fucked-up personality,” I said. “But I’m a pragmatist.” I put the teeth on the ground in front of me, and dug through my bag for the standard components I’d need – a little cup made of bone, a silver dish, a bit of graveyard earth. I cut my palm with my dagger and dripped a little blood into the cup, then poured it into the dish and mixed it with the soil. Necromancy is powered by death. The bigger the effect you’re trying to achieve, the bigger the sacrifice you need – but there was a human sacrifice right in the back yard. I hadn’t killed him, but I’d
bound
him, which meant I bore some responsibility – and that meant I could use his death to fuel my magic. It seemed a shame to let his sacrifice be for nothing.

I smeared my blood on the fossilized shark teeth, watching the blurry tangle of the beast sniff and quest its way all around us.

“That’s ballsy,” Nicolette said. “They’re
sharks
. I’ve never heard of anyone calling up the ghost of a shark.”

“I did a favor for a shark god not that long ago. He taught me a few things. Sacred words in a language older than humankind.” I muttered those words, and then I hurled the shark teeth toward the blurry mass at the center of the forest of writhing limbs.

I’d hoped for a megalodon, the apex predators of the ancient oceans, sixty feet long with jaws that opened as wide as a garage door. But I didn’t get anything
quite
that good. Later on I did a little research, and I’m pretty sure the biggest shark that appeared was a
Kaibabvenator swiftae
, a good twenty feet long, lashing its spectral fins. Two other, smaller sharks were probably
Neosaivodus flagstaffensis
, not so big but vicious little killers all the same. The ghost sharks looked just like living sharks, except they were silvery-gray, and they swam through the waters of an ancient ocean that had receded long ago, gliding with surreal ease through the air above our heads.

I don’t know how ghost sharks see the world, but when they saw the beast they saw
lunch
. Even though I’d only thrown three teeth, other ghosts began to precipitate out of the air, called by the feeding frenzy and their bone and tooth fragments in the soil. Soon there were a dozen prehistoric sharks converging on the monster, and they
dragged
it out of the dimensions where it was mostly hiding. The lower jaw curled and uncurled like a party noisemaker being blown on New Year’s eve, and the whips of its arms contracted before the sharks tore it to pieces.

The sky brightened again, and in the late afternoon light, the ghost sharks became first translucent, then invisible, and at some point I realized they were gone. The ground was littered with bits of scale and armor and greenish blood – don’t squids have green blood, because their blood is copper-based, not iron-based like humans? – and unidentifiable fragments of the beast. The mouth-parts were still more-or-less intact, connected to a twitching mass that might have been a head. Either it wasn’t quite dead yet, or it was experiencing random nerve-twitchings, the way a freshly dead octopus on a plate will wriggle its tentacles if you pour salty soy sauce over it –

A voice spoke in my head. The voice was cold, killingly so, vacuum-of-space cold:
I will be avenged
, it whispered.
The Eater will get you.

I had no idea if the creature could hear my thoughts, but I gave it a try anyway:
With a name like ‘the Eater’ don’t you mean he’ll eat me? I mean, he’s not called ‘the Getter,’ right? But okay. Who or what is the Eater?

The death of your future
, it mind-whispered, pretty articulately for an ancient chthonic horror with a rolled-up buzz saw for a lower lip, but it had a history of manipulating humans, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.

The twitching stopped.
Hello?
I thought.
You still there, Squidward?
There was no response.

“That’s one big mess of ugly,” Nicolette said. “What do you think that thing even was?”

I had no idea. Ancient predator from prehistory, slumbering into modern times, or an alien astronaut stranded on a hostile planet, or an Outsider from another reality who’d wandered into our bubble of the multiverse and just tried to survive. Whatever it was, the beast had made at least one friend: something or someone called the Eater. Or maybe that was its deity or something, and threatening me with the Eater was the equivalent of a dying person telling his murderer that “God will judge you.”