Red Right Hand (7 page)

“What are they worshiping?”

The Man in Black reached the open doorway. He stepped back, bowed, and gestured inside with a flourish. “They are worshiping her.”

I moved past Daniel, between the chaos god on one side of the door and a saffron-robed Hare Krishna on the other. Crossing the threshold of the room made my head swim. The blood in my veins lit up as the magick simmer became a roiling boil. Ache settled in the Mark on my palm, the lines hot through to the back of my hand. The air inside clotted around us, thick and moist with a fog of humanity. The smell went to spoiled meat and crawled into my nose, coating the insides of my sinuses. The line of people followed the wall, leading to a bed in the center of the small room.

On the bed a man held himself up by his arms, the muscles of his back outlined in the flickering light of the guttering candles. Naked, he hovered over someone hidden by his body and the shadowed light.

The sight of it was a punch in my stomach.

I grabbed the wall, wounded palm flaring in sharp pain. My knees went weak, threatening to kick out from under me. A band of iron clamped around my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs, compressing my heart, and making it beat like an animal trapped in a heated cage.

That's not you. It's not you. It's not them. It's not
then
. Feel the wall, feel the floor under your feet.

You.

Are.

Okay.

I took a step, moving to feel myself move, to remind myself that I was still myself, that I
wasn't
pinned to a filthy mattress. Pushing deep breaths in and out of my lungs, I studied the situation, fighting past the trigger.

I've got this. I can handle this.

I could see most of the man's face as his head jerked up and down with the thrust of his hips, and I latched onto that. All of that was happening outside me, proof that I was in the room, not on the bed. Reality formed a dam against a flood of bad memories, and I held to that desperately. The man's contorted face wasn't over me; it was across the room over someone else. That reality gave me the stability to really look, to see the man and his actions.

I recognized him from a big-network hit dramedy that aired every Thursday.

He thrust violently, jerking spastically as if he'd been plugged into a live wire. The moist sound of skin slapping skin became a staccato rhythm section to the high-pitched gurgling grunts he made with each jerk and gyration. He thrust deep, the muscles in his back trembling like plucked cables as he roared out in climax.

He rolled away as the Man in Black stepped behind me, Daniel in tow.

The actor grabbed his clothes, clutching them to cover himself as he stood and moved away. The woman left on the bed reclined in a valley of soiled cotton; the mattress cupped her sprawled form, beaten into a cradle after countless interchanges. She lay, legs spread without shame, thighs and groin glistening, slick and swollen to deformity, the mattress under her damp and soaked through. Dark eyed and dark haired, her skin golden in the candlelight, she turned and looked at me. A claw of a hand rubbed across pendulous breasts that hung like overfilled wineskins to each side of a pronounced rib cage. A curving nail picked at a scabbed sore, one of hundreds dotting her body in a constellation of infection. She smiled and her lips cracked, chapped into snowflakes of dead skin. Her voice purred from deep in the back of her throat, smoky and seductive as she looked past me.

“Ahhhhhh, Son of Azathoth. To what do I owe the honor of this visit, my long lost friend?” She smiled a black-gummed smile. “And you brought me presents! How thoughtful of you.”

“They are not for you, Ashtoreth.” The Man in Black stepped past me. “Send your worshipers away so that we may talk.”

The woman on the bed smiled a crooked smile. It pulled her round face to the side as though she were a stroke victim. “But if I send them away, who will worship me?” Her crooked smile turned into a crooked pout. “Will you worship me, O Lord of Nightmares?”

“You will gather more. Like flies to spoiled milk they will come.”

The actor had pulled on most of his clothes. He staggered past the Man in Black, leaning away from him. The coat swirled, wrapping the actor's legs and waist, slowing him as it undulated against his body. It stretched as far as it could, holding the contact as long as possible before being pulled away. The next person in line stepped forward, a young Asian man with thick, square glasses. He pulled a distressed-cotton T-shirt over his head to reveal a narrow, hairless chest.

The Man in Black pointed at him. “Stop.”

The Asian man dropped his shirt on the ground. At Nyarlathotep's command his hands bunched into fists. He stepped forward, his voice wavering from deep in his bird chest. “It's my turn.”

The Crawling Chaos slipped his red right hand under the coat, reaching deep inside the dark folds of the skin he wore. With his hand still inside, he looked at the woman on the bed. His eyebrow arched in an unspoken question. She twittered a laugh in response. The Man in Black shrugged.

When his hand came out it held the black-bladed katana.

The curved sword flashed in a circle of silver light, striking as it was drawn. The razor edge caught the Asian man just over his hipbone, shearing through skin, spine, and viscera. Blood splashed with the blade's exit, tumbling through the air, splattering across Ashtoreth's sex.

She writhed and moaned in a way she hadn't under the actor's gyrations.

The Asian man looked down, shock raw on his face. His face rose, looking at me, mouth working silently up and down as he tried to speak. Blood leaked from the red line across his midsection. His hand came up, reaching toward me as if to steady himself. The movement upset his balance, making him top-heavy.

His upper body toppled free in a spill of blood.

That wasn't what made my stomach revolt and empty itself on the floor. No, that part had been too much, too shocking to do anything but strike me numb. What pushed me over the edge into vomiting was the way the next man in line casually stepped through the puddle of gore soaking into the threadbare carpet and began to unbutton his shirt, glassy eyes only focused on the blood-splattered goddess sprawled on the bed.

Face flushed hot and sticky, I turned away.

My ears rang hollow, everything muffled and dulled as I threw up. Nyarlathotep's voice sounded far away even though he stood close enough for me to reach out and touch him.

“Send them away, little goddess, or I will carve them all into decorations.”

My mind babbled, already brittle from what had happened so far. I wanted to go, to get away, to run. My mind felt like crumpled cellophane.

Oh God, oh shit, not more, not now, not blood, what? Nowhere to go. No way to run. Fight. FIGHT.

Breath dragging deep in my lungs, I fought the panic, shoving it away, compartmentalizing my mind the way therapy had taught me to handle panic attacks.

Picture a door with a lock.

A hand touched my back.

My now empty stomach clenched at the thought of the Man in Black touching me with that skinless hand of his. The panic boiled back up. I jerked my head around.

Daniel hovered next to me, forehead creased in concern. His hand lay softly on my back; he was trying to comfort, trying to help. I grabbed the panic and shoved it into the room in my mind, slamming the door, turning the lock.

Daniel whispered, “You okay?”

I nodded.

I will be. To keep my promise, I will be.

Straightening, I turned away from my sick.

Enough of that. Just a physical reaction. Be strong. Be a survivor. Get through this. You can, you have before.

I wiped my mouth without thinking. The rough-edged symbol carved into my palm smeared across my lips, becoming moist with my saliva and my sick.

A spark flared deep in my mind, tearing my vision apart.

 

11

T
HE ROOM SWIRLED,
tilting and then locking into place. In my eyes it looked like two films playing at the same time, overlapping each other.

I could still see the room. All the furniture looked the same, but distorted, my new vision twisting the perspective and opening the space around me, bringing some things closer, pushing some things further away, and melding them all in a funhouse-mirror version of reality. The people in line were all glowing pockets of light, threaded through with tendrils of poison-green energy that twisted around them like mistletoe choking the life from an oak tree.

Nyarlathotep stood next to me, still tall and dark and imposing, but his true form was wrapped around him like a ghost image. I could see it dimly, superimposed over his human guise like a swirling, tentacle-laden illusion.

Movement from the bed made me turn.

The woman still lay there, still sprawled obscenely on the soiled mattress—but now,
now
I could see her true form.

She was grotesquely female, still long limbed, but her flesh was now tinged blue with decomposition, as if she'd been drowned and dead for days. A vertical slash of mouth ran from brow to chin, two wide yellow eyes set deep on each side. They glowed sulfurically, casting shadows down her corpulent form. Her hair writhed across the mattress under her head like a nest of trapped snakes.

My eyes traveled down Ashtoreth's body, taking in the puckered sacks of breasts that ran down her rib cage like infected udders. Horrible fascination made me look, made me see the thatch of wriggling, twisting fibrils above a gnashing, tooth-filled cavity that nested between swaying, blubbery thighs.

I shut my eyes, scrubbing my raw, wounded palm on the front of my hoodie, trying desperately to shut off the Sight.

When I opened them, the world had slid back to normal.

Thank God.

The line of people had turned around and was silently shuffling out of the room. The body of the Asian man was gone, nothing left behind but a dark stain on the carpet. I pushed his death out of my mind.

Get through this. This right here and right now.

The Man in Black stood at the end of the bed, hands in the pockets of his rustling, restless coat. The sword was gone again. Daniel hovered near me, not touching but close enough to. Ashtoreth still lay on the bed. Flame burned blue-bright from her fingertips, touching the end of a broken glass tube held to chapped lips. She sucked hard on the crack pipe, dirty gray smoke billowing out of her mouth and swirling around her face. A sticky-sweet smell crawled through the air, rippling the back of my throat.

I had to ask. I couldn't help myself. “What are you?”

She laughed, more smoke streaming out of her mouth. “Child, I am everything you desire. I am Ashtoreth.” She sucked on the end of the crack pipe, the rock inside flaring the dark orange of a dying sun. Her mouth on the pipe made a wet hissing noise as lip skin sizzled on butane-heated glass, and her right eye shuttered up and down and up and down in a mad twitch as the noxious smoke did its work. She exhaled her next words in a cloud of poison.

“I am the reason men kill each other and women debase themselves. I am the flicker in the night, the moment of comfort. I am the reason to live or the excuse to die. Your kind have named me the Whore of Babylon, the Scarlet Harlot, Aphrodite, Ishtar, and Lilith.” She smiled a haughty, black-gummed smile. “I am everything woman. I
am
the Goddess of Love.”

The arrogance of it struck me like a blow. Everything
I
desire? Everything
woman
? I lashed out. “You look like a two-bit crack whore to me.”

Ashtoreth turned to the Man in Black. “Oh, she has fire in her belly, this one does! There's an anger inside her that will bite like a serpent if poked and prodded too much.” She wriggled, sitting up on the mattress. It squelched underneath her, and my stomach twisted. “You should give her to me. With her Sight, there are so
many
things I could show her.”

“She is
mine
. I will not share.”

Anger flared inside me at the possessive tone used by the Man in Black. Before I could protest, Ashtoreth turned her eyes toward Daniel. The look on her face hit me like a splash of ice water: a look of raw desire, of naked lust.

A look of hunger.

“Give me the boy, then, he's ready to partake of my gifts. Ripe for the plucking, that one is. Never known a woman, and he's long overdue.” Her hand dipped low, slithering over jutting hipbones to move between her thighs. I kept my eyes pinned to the glowing crack pipe still hovering around Ashtoreth's angular, pock-marked face. After what I had Seen, I did not want to watch what she did with her hand.

The Man in Black shook his head. “He is also mine.”

“He's a worshiper.” Ashtoreth's voice was haughty, dismissive. “He can be easily replaced. You took one of mine and sent the others away. The use of yours would place us on even ground.”

Nyarlathotep shook his head. “But we are not equals. I am the Crawling Chaos, and you are a filthy, worn-out receptacle.”

Fury flashed across Ashtoreth's face, spilling out in a snarl. “This is still my lair, still my place of power!”

“Fear drives people further than lust does.”

The Whore Goddess rose to her knees. The mattress suctioned off her back, wet linen peeling slowly from her skin. Bedsores the size of my palm were slapped across her back and buttocks. Heavy breasts swung left and right,
fwap
ping every time they impacted against her waist, punctuating her shrill and venomous voice.

“Love drives humans to overcome fear!”

The Man in Black was beside the bed in a blink, red right hand clamped around Ashtoreth's throat. He pulled her close, lifting her, making her dangle in front of him. Her dark eyes bulged from the pressure of that skinless right hand.

The Man in Black curled his lips into a sneer. “You have not inspired love for a very long time. You have fallen far, O mighty Ashtoreth.” He flung her on the bed. She bounced into her hollow with a wet slap. “And you would do well to remember your place.”