The Black Tattoo (19 page)

Charlie thought about it.

He looked down at Hell, far below him, laid out under his feet as if just for him.
 
He looked at the palace and the surrounding fantastical landscape that spread to the horizon in every direction.
 
No one on Earth had been where he was.
 
No one on Earth had seen what he was seeing.
 
Looking around, Charlie suddenly had a very powerful impression that the whole world — the whole universe, maybe — revolved around where he was standing (or floating, to be strictly accurate).

Then he thought about a Chinese restaurant in London's West End and the last time that he'd seen his father.
 
He thought about the abandoned meal and the things that they'd said to each other — things, in his opinion, that could never be taken back.
 
He thought about his mother, who was probably still waiting for him at home and wondering already where he was.
 
He thought about the hateful mess his father had made of their lives by leaving them the way he had — and he briefly considered whether, frankly, he could really be bothered with any of it.

Stay or go back.
 
Those were his choices.

No contest.

"Okay," said Charlie.
 
"Show me."

FRESH MEAT

Jack woke with a jolt, looked up — and stared.

He was in a throne room of some kind — that was the first thing he noticed:
 
an immense, cavernous, dome-shaped space with a raised circular dais at its center.
 
Jack was kneeling on a narrow strip of bloodred carpet, and to either side, forming the rest of the floor of the room, was a huge and glittering gray-blue expanse of... what?
 
Jack frowned as he realized that the floor was
moving
— bulging and rippling like an oily sea.
 
But then he looked up and found himself staring even harder.

Just next to the throne, dipping slightly in the air as it made a small movement of its tail, was what appeared to be... a shark.

The shark was very big — thirty feet long at least.
 
Its torpedo-like body was crisscrossed with a network of horrible puckered scars; its blank gray eyes glinted at Jack like gun barrels — and it was floating in the air, just hovering there, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

The shark — and the throne room — were already, frankly, just a little bit more than Jack felt able to cope with at this point..
 
But as if these things weren't enough on their own, there was the throne itself and the strange figure that sat on it.

He looked like a man — or most of him did.
 
His gleaming white three-piece suit was immaculate and well cut; his jet-black hair was elegantly tousled, and his goatee beard and narrow sideburns were so neat they looked like they had actually been sharpened.
 
But there were also, Jack noticed, several weird things about him, too.
 
The skin of the man (if
man
was the right word) was unmistakably red.
 
His hands, which were folded in his lap, were actually more like hooves, with stubby black spur things instead of thumbs.
 
And the worst thing — the thing that made Jack actually shiver as he looked at him — was his eyes.

They were golden, with black vertical slits in them instead of pupils.
 
They were not human eyes, and the look they were giving him was not a friendly look:
 
the expression on the man's face was the kind you might give to a really large spider that you've just found in your bath.
 
"Who are you?" he said.

"J—" said Jack, then found his voice.
 
"Jack Farrell," he said.
 
"Sir."

The man arched his perfect black eyebrows.
 
"That's not much of a name."

Jack found he didn't really have anything to say to that, so there was a pause.

"Are you... the Devil?" Jack asked finally.

The man frowned.
 
"I've never heard that word before.
 
Say it again."

"The Devil."

"No.
 
The name means nothing to me.
 
I may add it to my collection, though."
 
The man sat up straight on his throne, and his chest swelled as he prepared to speak.

"I am Ebisu Eller-Kong Hacha'Fravashi," he said.
 
"God of Rulers, God of the Dead, God of Darkness, God of Gods.
 
I am the Voice of the Void, whose breath is the wind and whose rage makes all worlds tremble.
 
I am Lord of Crossing-Places, King of all Tears, and the Suzerain Absolute of the Dominions of Hell."

"Er... pleased to meet you," said Jack.

"You will address me as 'Emperor'," said the man on the throne.
 
Beside him, the shark's mouth hinged open in a wide and meaningful grin — and Jack decided that now wasn't a good time to argue.

"Pleased to meet you," Jack repeated, "Emperor."

"This," said the Emperor, gesturing at the giant flying shark with one cloven red hand, "is Lord Slint.
 
You find his presence... off-putting?"

"A little bit," Jack admitted, "yes."

The Emperor smiled.
 
"You may leave us, Slint," he said.
 
And as soon as the words were spoken, the shark lunged.

Jack ducked — he couldn't help himself — but the shark, all thirty feet of it, had already passed over him and away, making for the giant doors that stood behind where Jack was kneeling.
 
They were a hundred meters off, maybe more.
 
In the second or two it took to cross the distance, Jack watched the shark's easy, undulating movement and the sinuous way it slipped through the doors and out of sight.

"Now," said the Emperor, leaning forward on his throne.
 
"We have a rather pressing matter to discuss, do we not?"

"We do," queried Jack.
 
"Er, Emperor?" he added.

"Indeed we do."

There was another pause.

"Come now," said the Emperor, when Jack continued to stare at him.
 
"You have just made use of the same crossing-place that the Scourge employed to return from your world.
 
It may interest you to know that the Scourge's reappearance has come as something of a surprise to me.
 
Khentimentu's banishment was long ago considered purely a matter of myth among my people:
 
the Scourge's very existence was cause for conjecture, right up until its return.
 
And the discovery that its incarceration took place in a world of which all records appear to have been lost is of no small interest to me also."

Jack just kept looking at the Emperor, waiting for whatever he was going to say next.

The Emperor sighed.
 
"It appears I must be blunt."
 
The golden stare narrowed and sharpened.
 
"Why are you here?"

"Oh," said Jack.
 
"I'm, ah, her for my friend, Emperor," he added, as the man on the throne continued to stare at him.

"You don't mean the Scourge's
vessel
," said the Emperor, with an expression of distaste.
 
"Do you?"

"His name's Charlie," said Jack.
 
"Emperor," he added again (getting a bit tired of doing it, to be honest).

"And what, may I ask, do you propose to do when you find this 'Charlie'?"

"Well, I want to rescue him," said Jack, feeling his ability to deal with this whole situation finally begin to leak out of his ears.
 
"You know, take him back home."

"Let me get this quite clear," said the Emperor, sitting back.
 
"You've come, alone, unaided, into my kingdom, to find your... 'friend,' release him from the Scourge's influence, and bring him back with you to wherever you came from?"

"That's about the size of it," said Jack.
 
"Yeah."

For another long moment, Jack and the Emperor just looked at each other.

"Your story is ridiculous," said the Emperor finally.
 
"And this encounter has already taken up more of my time than I am prepared to waste."

He drew himself up, staring down at Jack.

"You will be taken to Slint's gladiator pits," he announced.
 
"There you will be pitted against the finest fighters of all my dominions, and we shall see how well you fare.
 
If your performance proves diverting, I may perhaps grant you a boon, such as a privileged position from which to watch the invasion and conquest of your world.
 
But it is my suspicion," the Emperor added, "that you will fail and die.
 
Goodbye."

Like most of the rest of the conversation, this last bit had pretty much gone over Jack's head.
 
At any rate, the Emperor sat back on his throne, and Jack suddenly found that he did not have time to think about it any further.

The surrounding stuff from the floor of the throne room — the stuff he'd noticed moving earlier — was now flooding out over the sides of the carpet and
running up Jack's legs
.
 
In another second, Jack's whole body was covered in a weird, clammy, grayish-blue jellylike substance that clung to him all over, locking him in position:
 
any effort to struggle produced no result whatsoever.
 
He was helpless as the jelly stuff ran up his neck, quickly spreading all over his head and then — revoltingly — his face.
 
There was a squeezing sensation.
 
A moment of unbelievable tension, then—

Darkness.

Presently, Jack opened his eyes again and sat up.

The room he was in now looked very small after the throne room:
 
more like a cell, really.
 
The floor was bare earth, reddish and dusty.
 
The walls were smooth yellow stone, forming the room into a perfect square of maybe fifteen feet by fifteen, with no door, no apparent way in or out, except through the ceiling, which, Jack suddenly realized, wasn't there.
 
The walls simply stopped, some thirty feet above him.
 
Obviously his cell was only a part of some much larger room — and that, for the time being, was all Jack really cared about in that direction.

Not wanting to stand up just yet, Jack crawled over to one of the walls and sat there, with his back to it, his arms huddled round his legs.

He was frightened.
 
Terrified, in fact.
 
Large parts of his brain were wibbling and gibbering to themselves, quietly yet with gusto.
 
Single words like
Hell
and
shark
played leapfrog in his head, amongst the more prosaic ones like
Help!, No! or AAAAAAAAAAARRGH!

There were, he decided after a moment, two main approaches to this thing.

The first, the obvious one, was to give up:
 
to burst into tears, scream himself hoarse, or start banging his head against the wall.
 
All these options were certainly tempting.
 
There was a strong swelling sensation in his chest and stomach and a hot wetness behind his eyes that wouldn't need a lot of encouragement.
 
He was alone, in Hell.
 
Approach one was very attractive indeed.

But then there was approach two, which went something like this.

Whatever was going to happen was obviously going to happen whether he liked it or not.
 
(
Easy
, he himself, as he started to panic again.
 
Easy.
 
Come on, think it through.
)
 
Well, if that were true, there was a
possibility
, however remote it might turn out to be, that he might — at some future moment — find some way of making things
less
unremittingly awful for himself.
 
Opportunities might come (he told himself):
 
chances might present themselves — and it would be a lot easier to spot these and take advantage of them if he
didn't
let himself go completely off his chump and start gurning like a man whose nostril hairs were on fire.
 
He was in Hell, he told himself.
 
All right, that much was obvious.
 
But what that meant, what that would actually involve, was yet to become clear.
 
Besides, there was something else about this situation, he saw:
 
something familiar and, oddly, rather comforting.

Here he was, on his own in, apparently, an ultimately horrible position.
 
And why was that?

Because, simply, that was the way things always seemed to turn out for him.

It was an extreme example, the scenery was different and so forth, but the fact was that, really, when it came to the sort of luck Jack had come to expect in his life, this was nothing more or less than
business as usual
.

What this
was
, in fact, he thought, as he flexed his legs and (using the wall for support) pushed himself upright, was absolutely, devastatingly...

"Typical," he finished aloud.

"Hello?" said a voice, making Jack nearly jump out of his skin.
 
"You awake in there?
 
You hear me?"
 
The voice was high and scratchy, like sharp stones grating against each other.

"Y-yes," croaked Jack.
 
Then he tried again.
 
"Yes!"

"Shhh!
 
Not so loud!" hissed the voice.
 
"What's your name?"

"Jack," said Jack.

For a moment, there was silence.
 
Then, "Hur," said the voice.