Bullet Through Your Face (improved format) (12 page)

Gormok appraised the attractive, tight-jeaned student. “Men
have rown leagues for such beauty, priests have scaled ziggurats.”
“Uh huh,” Rudy said. “Mona, how about going to your room to
study, huh? Gormok and I gotta talk.”
Mona made no objection, padding off with her English 311 text,
Pound, Eliot, and Seymour: The Great Poets of Our Age
. “Sit down,
Gor,” Rudy bid. “Make yourself at home.” Gormok did so, his lap
disappearing when he sat down on the frayed couch.
Rudy nudged Beth into the kitchen. “Get him a beer. He seems
to like beer.”
“Rudy, this might be a bad idea. I don’t know if I—”
“Just shut up and get him a beer,” Rudy politely repeated. He
went back to the squalid living room, bearing an ashtray and a shaker
of salt. “So, Gor. Tell me about yourself.”
The lunatic grin roved about. “I am but a lowly salt-diviner, once
blessed by the Ea, now curs’d by Nergal.”
“Uh . . . huh,” Rudy acknowledged.
“I was an Ashipu, a white and goodly acolyte, but, lo, I sold
my soul to Nergal, The Wretched God of the Ebon. Pity me, in my
sin: my repentance was ignored. Banished from heaven, banished
from hell, I am now accursed to trod the earth’s foul crust forever,
inhabiting random bodies as the vessel for my eternal spirit.”
“Uh . . . huh,”
“Jesus,” Beth whispered. Disapproval now fully creased her face
when she gave Gormok a can of Bud.
Yeah, we’ve got a live one
,
Rudy thought. The next fight—Jenkins versus Clipper—was on the
west coast; it would be running late. “That’s pretty, uh, interesting,

Gormok. You think maybe you feel like doing the salt thing again?
Beer foam bubbled at Gormok’s grin. “The alomance!”
“Uh, yeah, Gor. The . . . alomance. I could really use to know
who’ s gonna win the Jenkins-Clipper bout.”

Gormok’s grin never
fluctuated. He knelt on tacky carpet tiles
and went into his arcane ritual of burning salt in a napkin, then
inhaling the smoke which wafted up from the ashtray. He seemed to
wobble on his knees. “The warrior b’named Clipper, dear friend, in
the sixth spell of conflict.” Then he collapsed to the floor.

“Holy shit!” Rudy and Beth rushed to help the alomancer up.
“Gor! Are you all right?” Rudy asked.
“Too much for one day.” Gormok’s voice sounded drugged.
“Put me abed, dear ones. I’ll be better on the morrow.”
“The couch,” Rudy suggested
.
“Let’s get him on the—”
“Deep and down,” Gormok inanely remarked. “I must be deep,
as all damned Nashipus are so cursed. Get me near the cenotes.”
“A cenote is a hole in the ground,” Beth recalled from her
college myth classes. “They’d hold rituals in them, sacrifice virgins
and things like that.”
A hole in the—
“The basement?” Rudy suggested.
Beth opened the ringed trap-door, then they both lugged the
muttering and rubber-kneed Gormok down the wooden steps.
“Better, yes! Sweet, sweet
. . .
dark.”
They lay the bizarre man on an old box-spring next to the washer
and drier. Dust eddied up from the dirt floor. “He’s heavier than a bag
of bricks!” Beth complained.
Rudy draped an old army blanket over him. “There.”
“Ea, I heartily do repent,” Gormok blabbered incoherently.
“Absolve my sins, I beg of Thee!” He began to drool. “And curse
thee, Nergal, unclean despoiler! Haunter! Deceiver of
souls!
”
“Uh . . . huh,” Rudy remarked, staring down.
Yeah, we’ve got a
live one, all right. A real winner.

In bed, they bickered rather than slept. “I can’t believe you invited
that
weirdo
into our house,” Beth bellyached.
“I didn’t hear you complaining,” Rudy refuted.
“Well, you do now. He’s . . . scary.”
“You don’t believe all that mumbo-jumbo, do you? It’s just a
bunch of schizo crap he made up.”
“It’s not made up, Rudy. I majored in ancient history, that
is, before I had to quit school and go to work to keep you out of
cement loafers. Cenotes, ziggurats, alomancy—it’s all straight out
of Babylonian myth. This guy says he’s possessed by the spirit of a
Nashipu salt-diviner. That’s the same as saying he’s a demon.”
Rudy chuckled outright. “Somebody hit you in the head with
a dumb-stick? He’s a flake, Beth. He probably escaped from St.
Elizabeth’s in the back of a garbage truck and read about all that stuff
in some occult paperback. He
thinks
he’s possessed by a demon.
And so what? Let him think what he wants. What’s important to us
is the guy’s
genuinely psychic
. You heard him, he
predicted
that fat
barkeep’s squeeze was cheating on him.”
“That could be just coincidence, Rudy.”
“Coincidence? What about the Tuttle fight? He didn’t just pick
the winner, Beth, he picked the
round
. He picked a KO by a guy who
every bookie in town said was gonna lose.”
“I don’t care,” Beth replied, turning her back to him amid the
covers. “He’s scary. I don’t want him in the house.”
“Beth, the guy’s a gold mine on two legs. We keep him under our
wings, we’ll never have to worry about money again. We’ll be—”
The scream came down like a guillotine blade. Rudy and Beth
went rigid in the bed.
Then another scream tore through the air.
“Thuh-that came from M-Mona’s room, didn’t it?” Rudy stammered.
“Yuh-yeah,” Beth agreed.
“She’s
your
friend.
You
go see what happened.”
“Fuck you!” Beth shouted. “Inconsiderate coward son of a—”
“We’ll both go, then. Here. I’ll protect you.” Rudy boldly

“Aw, Christ,” Rudy muttered when he saw the trap-door to the
basement standing open.
Then they padded down the ball, and peered into Mona’s room...
“Aw, Christ,” Rudy muttered again.
But Beth didn’t mutter. She screamed.
Gormok, his face smeared scarlet, grinned up at them in the
lamplight. And atop the stained bed lay Mona, naked and quite dead.
She was also quite eviscerated.
The student’s trim abdomen had been riven open, and from the
rive an array of organs had been extracted and arranged about her as
if for some macabre inspection. An outline of slowly seeping blood
spread about the corpse like a Kirlian aura.
Gormok was eating something dark and wet out of his hands.
Her liver
, Rudy realized.
He’s eating Mona’s liver.
“Friends! Hello!” Gormok greeted, chewing. “How art?”
Rudy bellowed, “What in God’s name did you do!”
“Not in God’s name,” Gormok lamented. “In Nergal’s. Lo, and
to my eternal shame, behold the freight of my curse. I try to fight
it, on my heart. But the blasted Nergal has condemned me to such
heinous acts wheneverest I breathe on the salt’s divine fumes.”
‘Uh . . . huh.” Rudy shuddered, feebly wielding the nail file.
Should I kill him
? he debated. But he thought about that. He’d never
much liked Mona anyway. Bitchy, arrogant, and always taking cheap
shots. Sure, he’d fucked her a couple times when Beth was at work
(—no great shakes in bed, either. Like fucking a starfish—) and since
then she’d regularly implied that it wouldn’t be a good idea for Rudy to ever raise her rent.
“Gormok, wait here a minute. Beth and I have to talk.”
“0f course! Enjoy your discourse, dear friends,” Gormok invited.

Rudy had to about carry Beth back to their bedroom. She was
going pasty-faced, pale. “Rudy,” she fretted, “we have to get out of
here while we still can! We have to call the police!”

“Harmless!” Beth’s eyes came close to jettisoning from her
head. “He’s eating Mona’s
liver!
You call that harmless?”
Rudy had a plan, but he had to play it out right. “Listen, Beth,” he
said in a consoling, quiet voice. “Mona’s got no relatives or friends—
hell, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She’ll never be missed. And
she wasn’t doing well in school, anyway—”
“Rudy! You call the police right now!”
“All right, all right.” Rudy held up his hands, his hair sticking up.
“I’m calling the police. See?” He picked up the phone and began to
dial.
But not the police. Instead, he dialed 1-900 Sportsline. He
listened a moment, tapping his foot. Then he hung up and smiled.
“Clipper won the bout in the sixth round.”
Beth went into a staccato burst of crying and screaming. “Rudy,
you’re out of your mind! What is
wrong
with you?”
“Baby, it’s only because I love you,” Rudy, well, lied. “I’m
not doing this for me, I’m doing it for
us
. I want us to be married
someday,have kids, and all that.”
Beth sniffled, looking up. “Really?”
“Of course, honey,” he assured her and gave her a hug. “But I
need you to have faith in me, okay? I want you to go to bed now.
Just trust me.” He lovingly touched her cheek. “I’ll take care of
everything.”
Rudy did exactly that. First, he put Gormok back to bed in the
basement. The alomancer, smiling calmly, said, “I’m sated now, dear
Rudy. My curse is relieved, and now I can sleep. And I am heartily
sorry for any inconvenience I have caused you.”