The Blue Blazes (23 page)

The ghost freezes perfectly still – as if someone hit the
pause
button.

There’s an electric snap – the hard smell of ozone followed by a whiff of the grave.

The ghost’s mouth opens even wider. The eye sockets stretch and distort. Limbs stiffen and begin to elongate and then droop like wilting flower stems–

A scream rises from its mouth. This is the scream of a victim, a man about to be murdered, a woman watching her own child die, the sound not just of death but of great suffering and sorrow wedded together in one horrible howl.

Another electric snap.

And then the ghost is gone.

And the vision hits them like lightning.

 

Here, then, is Casimir Zoladski. He’s entering the Boss’s house. Keys on a hook. Jacket on a hanger. Upstairs. Calls, “Dziadzia? You here? Granddad? Haversham?” Shoes echoing in the hallway. Someone behind him: the Boss. His grandfather. The old man is without a scrap of clothing. His white shriveled body sags. Wisps of hair on his chest, arms, thighs. Pubic bush like a wire brush.

The old man coughs. Can’t help it. It’s the cancer.

Casimir spins. He has something
he
can’t help, either: he laughs.

The Boss’s cough subsides.

He stares at the boy with some commingling of hate and pity.

“You’re not ready for this, are you?” the Boss asks.

“Dziadzia. You…” Casimir fails to speak the obvious: “You’re naked.”
Instead he shifts his tone to one of caution and uncertainty: “You’re supposed to be at a meeting with Haversham. Are you OK?”

“I’m OK.”

“I’ll call Haversham–”

“No, you won’t.”

Casimir looks at his watch. His thoughts, broadcast: I’m supposed to meet her
.
Images in his mind: a girl. Tartan skirt. Blue cardigan. Mean eyes and a wicked smile resolving into a softer, happier countenance. A name: Nora Pearl. He’s waiting for her. He loves her. Or thinks he does. Could be little hearts around his head like pink birds.

“Answer the question,” the kid’s grandfather says, sneering.

“What… what question?”

“You’re not ready for this. To take over.”

“N…no. I’m not.”

“That’s disappointing.”

“I know. It’s just–”

“You’re weak. I knew it all along. Your father was weak, too, but in a different way. He was weak in the mind. You’re weak in the heart. You don’t have the stones for this.”

“I don’t.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for–”

The Boss roars, leaps. Hands around the kid’s throat. Casimir backpedals. The Boss begins uttering something, some strange chant or prayer. It sounds like “
Ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
,” and it gets louder and louder as he wrings the boy’s neck–

Casimir tries to turn, but falls–

The Boss is on him. Grabs his grandson’s head with preternatural strength. Smashes it forward. Just once. Once is enough to pulp the kid’s face like an orange shoved into the bell of a juicer. The young man’s body shakes violently. The Boss rides it out like a rodeo cowboy.

And then the body is still.

Blood pools.

The old man walks away. Returns with a brown paper bag.

The objects of ritual. A marigold in each hand. Broken iron chains in the pockets. A smear of chocolate on each fingertip. And then a splash from a bottle of mezcal poured on the blood pooling beneath his smashed-in face.

All the while, that chant–

ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
 

ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
 

ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
 

Then the Boss’s body tightens up as though in a seizure of his own. Fingers stiffening and splaying outward. Jaw creaking as it extends wide, wider, widest. Eyes rolling back.

The floor shudders. Dust falls from a light fixture.

A black shape rises from below. Swirls around him, a tornado of ink and shadow – tentacles, worms, fingers, whirling around and around–

Then entering his wide-open mouth. Squirming like snakes. His cheeks bulging. His abdomen distending like a starving child’s belly.

Thirty seconds of this. Then a minute. Then five.

The last of the shadows – a flicking tail – gulp down and are gone.

The Boss eyes go all black: an oil spill. Then clear again.

Brown irises are now crystalline blue.

The Boss makes a sound like:
Guhhhhh
.

Then: another whipcord of lightning. The world lights up. Goes dark.

 

Burnsy falls on his ass. Yelps as he does. Skelly’s already on the ground. Curled up in a ball. Holding her throat.

The soul cage glows. Faint light. Slow pulse. It makes a sound, too, a sound you can’t
hear
so much as
feel
. Like a television left on in the other room with the volume down, just a faint white-noise whine.

The ghost of Casimir Zoladski is gone. Trapped inside the cage.

“It’s… done,” he says. Then he shivers. He babbles, he can’t help it: “I do this all the time but – never gets easier. The death. How they die. They’re trapped in there. Replaying that moment. As they… march on. Restlessly shambling through the Shallows, through the Tangle, all the way toward… well, toward the end, I guess. Toward whatever waits in the Expanse.”

Skelly sits up. Stares at the soul cage vibrating.

“He killed his own grandson.”

“Yeah. Fuck.”

“Wh… why? What happened?”

“Some kind of summoning. I told Mookie that’s what it might be. But it ain’t in the kid. It’s in him. In the Boss. Bound in his… skin. Or maybe it’s wearing him like a fucking jumpsuit. I don’t know. But it’s something from the deep. From in the Tangle. Or maybe from all the way down.”

Now she’s really shivering. “You ever been… all the way down?”

“Into the Expanse? No way. I don’t know anybody from Daisypusher that has. I mean, I’ve heard the stories. I’ve even heard of maps you can buy that’ll take you there, but I figure they’re a load of unhappy horseshit. Not exactly a short trip, either. The Tangle is hundreds of miles long in every direction. Probably more. And frankly, I dunno why’d you wanna go. If this place really is home to a host of starving and insane subterranean gods, I can’t see the value in walking up to their front door and paying them a visit.” He waves it off, pulls out that blue mister bottle and spritzes himself with water. “Fuck it. We gotta go. Get this soul cage back to Mookie. Give him the ghost. Show him what we saw. You ready to ride?”

Skelly’s about to say something about, uh,
hell no
, she is not ready
at all
to hop atop the Vomit Comet again and would he please be so kind as to drive just a little more slowly so she doesn’t become a ghost herself, OK, thanks, daddy-o?

She doesn’t get those words out.

There’s movement at the far end of the room. And sound: a horrible, discordant sing-songy chant. Like a choir of oinking pigs and snarling wolves.

Gobbos. A dozen of them.

Carrying a pair of corpses.

The goblins don’t see them. Not yet. Too many salt pillars and skeletons are in the way, and they’re a hundred yards distant.

She ducks and hisses, “I thought you said they never come down here!”

“They don’t! But they still bring bodies from time to time. You kill any back at that temple?”

“I dunno. I think maybe.”

“That’s probably them. Nice work.” She’s not sure if he’s being sarcastic or sincere.

“We have to find another way. Go deeper to find another way.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” But he doesn’t move. He’s staring ahead. “See over there?” She follows his pointing finger, and sees two salt columns that have collapsed.

“Yeah, so?”

“Let’s roll.”

She gets on, thinking he’s going to turn this thing around, head the same direction the ghost of Casimir Zoladski was heading.

That’s not what he does.

Burnsy starts the engine.

“Oh, no,” she says.

“Oh, yes,” he answers. Revving the engine.
Grrrrrooom.Vrrrggrrrgrrroom
.

“Oh, no no no no no hell no.”

“Oh, yes yes yes yes
fuck
yes.”

The quad leaps forward like a starving puma. Tires breaking goblin bones. The gobbos ahead see them. They begin to gibber and wail in alarm. Corpses drop. Weapons up. Rusty machetes and glinting shivs. One’s got a slingshot, with something squirming in the slingshot’s pocket. And still Burnsy heads right toward them.

Accelerating.

She figures out what he’s doing two seconds before he does it.

It’s too late–

He cuts the quad left, then right again–

Tires bounce up onto those collapsed salt columns.

Columns that, fallen, form a ramp.

Skelly screams.

The quad races up – and is suddenly airborne.

Gobbos watch from beneath. The slingshot lets loose, but whatever creature serves as ammunition rebounds off the four-wheeler’s undercarriage with a metal
plunk
.

The quad in flight, Skelly experiences an odd moment of bliss – an absurd sensation that all her life has led to this strange and singular moment. Ramping a jacked-up hell-quad over a dirge-singing pack of goblins with a burned-to-death stuntman at the wheel.

I’m flying, she thinks, half-giddy.

The tires hit ground. The flight is over. Her pelvis almost shoots up through her ribcage.

 

23

 

I asked Danny – Cerberus – how he does it, exactly. How does one navigate the Tangle as a living dead man? What is his secret? He explained it to me thusly: he can feel all the ghosts of the Great Below. Always. Together they form a sensation that exists at his margins, a psychic awareness that is hazy, non-specific, and ever-present. He can, with some concentration, explore this formless mass of spirit psyches like a man reaching into a murky pond to feel around in the mud for a snail, or a coin, or a lost key. He can see who they are, can even see through their eyes, and in this way can begin to put together a picture of the spectral movements through the Shallows and into the Tangle – and so, a map, an imperfect map, is formed. Of course, that ends once the ghosts reach the nadir of this place. Once they approach the Ravenous Expanse, he says, they disappear – like a candle flame snuffed beneath an overturned cup.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Mookie lies caught in the grip of a terrible dream, the kind that keeps shifting, worsening – a dream shot through with betrayals from him and against him, a nightmare thick with the feeling of being lost in the dark and without a friend. All the world and what’s beneath it is his foe. Werth cutting his throat. The Boss laughing. Davey, dead in the water tunnels beneath the city, goblins planting eggs in the sockets of his torn-out eyes, his mouth still forming the breathless words necessary to condemn Mookie for his inaction. Grampop, cursing Mookie from the dark, calling him names. Skelly, belly swollen with some half-and-half baby about to be born. Faces of death. A mounting tide of ghostly faces, bulging and spilling on the beach that is Mookie’s mind.

Now he stands at a pig farm. Black-bristled, white-bellied Mangalitsa hogs sniff, snort, and grouse in the green-gray mud. Above his head, a steel sky threatens rain. He smells wild animal musk. Pig piss. Hog shit. Footsteps slapping mud behind him.

Jess. His ex-wife.

“You made a mess of things,” she says.

“I know.”

“You coulda done anything with your life. Coulda stayed a Sandhog.”

“That job wasn’t for me.”

She rolls her eyes. One of her signature moves. Jess always had a little attitude. A little fire at the end of her tongue, a sparked flint in her eyes. That’s why he liked her. She was tough. She needed to be to deal with him. Nora’s got that spark.
Maybe too much of it.
 

“You were just afraid of becoming like your Dad.”

“Who isn’t?”

“You didn’t have to be a Hog. You had choices, Mikey.”

“Mook. Mookie.” A hard wind kicks up. “
Not
Mikey.”

“You were Mikey to me then, you’re Mikey to me now, and nothing can change that. What’s done is done.” She laughs softly. “You had the chance to be lots of things. I almost got you that garbage man job.”

“I don’t want to be a garbage man.”

“You already
are
a garbage man, just without the uniform. But fine, OK, whatever. You didn’t want to be the trash-man. What about that job Bobby Pallotta offered you? Bouncer at the – what was that strip club?”

“The Lady Lair. Didn’t pay enough.”

Above, the sky shifts – sudden clouds move swiftly overhead. Faces appear in the clouds, faces he can’t make out. But all of them are in pain.

“Could’ve been a skip tracer. Deshawn Washington was a–”

“He wasn’t the skip tracer. Deshawn was a repo guy. You’re thinkin’ of his brother, Demarcus, from Queens.”

“To-
may
-to to-
mah
-to, Mookie. Either of those damn jobs would’ve been–”

“Still not enough money!” he roars. “We had a mortgage! You had to have that… that goddamn Chevy Malibu. We sent Nora to that girl’s school.
We needed real cash
, not fucking… Monopoly play money.”

“I told you, I would’ve gotten a job.”

“No! No wife of mine gets a job.”

“Big man with big balls doesn’t want his little wifey to work? You’re smarter than that, Mikey. Everyone says you’re dumb, but I see it in your eyes – you’re
smarter
than that.” Jess walks up, thrusts her finger in his chest. Over her shoulder, he sees a glimpse of something, someone: a tall man in a beige suit. Candlefly. Then he’s gone. Jess keeps talking. “You think because your wife works, what, you’re not a tough guy anymore? Wife brings home some coin your dick will shrink a couple sizes? C’mon, Mikey. I could’ve helped. You never let me help. And then when you left…”

“I kept sending money. You never had to work. I took care of that. All you had to do was handle Nora–”

“She was a good kid. She didn’t need handling. She needed her father.”

“Jess, I know I made mistakes–”

There. Over her shoulder again – Candlefly. Closer this time. Near the red barn with the peeling paint. He starts to push past Jess, but she catches his hand.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Candlefly’s gone. Mookie growls. “There’s… something. I gotta go do something.”
I gotta go kill someone
. He feels for his cleaver but it’s gone. Right. Damn. Stuck in the floor. But wait – is this a dream? Maybe it’s not. Shit.
Shit
.

“You leaving us again.”

“Jess, I gotta–”

“Doesn’t matter. She’s dead. Look.”

Mookie follows Jess’s stare.

There’s Nora. Face up in the mud. Blood pumping from her gut, pooling in divots of greasy mud. The pigs start sniffing at her. Mookie turns, sees Candlefly smoking a cigar in the distance, smiling. The pigs start to bite at Nora’s feet. One pulls her boot off. Starts eating it. Another starts in on her heel.

Candlefly is laughing now. He’s far away, but that deep laugh carries.

Mookie launches himself over the fence. Into the mud. Boots stuck. He can’t pull them out. The mud is sucking at his feet, drawing him down, down to his knees as the pigs move in and begin to eat Nora, chewing off her fingers, moving to the face and eating her nose and ears and working on her chin. One stoops and laps at the blood like a dog–

A whisper in his ear. Candlefly. “How did it feel to watch your daughter die?”

 

“
How did it feel to watch your daughter die?”
 

Candlefly slaps the canned ham that is Mookie Pearl’s head.
Pat, pat, pat
. Harder:
whack
. The man’s eyelids flutter. His face, shot through with dark striations. Bruise-colored arterial fractals. A side effect of the Snakeface’s poison. Sorago’s in particular.

Three doses. Enough to drop an elephant.

And still Mookie Pearl almost cleaved his skull like a cantaloupe.

Impressive. And a shame. If there was a chance to still bring Pearl into the fold, to make him part of the plan…

An option, no longer. This road only ends at one place. Alas.

“I thought you were going to kill me, I really did.” Here in the wine cellar with Mookie Pearl bound to a chair with honest-to-god heavy gauge chain, Candlefly puffs on a cigar: a Honduran, not a Cuban. A far better smoke. A mouth-feel like velvet. The taste and smell of chocolate, cherry, and, if he may wax poetic, old books. Candlefly is not himself a fan of old books, but his cousin, Grigor – well. Grigor is a book-sniffer of the highest order. “You certainly tried. You’ve made quite a mess of things for us, did you know that? You stopped our first attack on the miner, Morgan. Then you thwarted the attack on Daisypusher. But you’re a speedbump, not a wall. Where is the Ochre? You have it. You must. Our… spies no longer detect its presence in the Underworld.”

Mookie’s eyes finally open all the way.

They see Candlefly and go wide.

The thug tries to say something, but it comes out as frustrated gibberish.

“Ah!” Candlefly says. “You’re upset. Probably because my face looks so pretty again.” He showcases his own visage like a game show hostess framing a prize with elegant hands. “It’s been almost twenty-four hours since you pummeled my face into
pâté
and I look good as new, don’t I? I cannot share how or why. Old family secret.”

“You’re…” Mookie starts, his lips drooping, but the words slowly forming. “Not human.” A string of drool oozes from his mouth, pools beneath his chin.

“Do you want a prize for figuring that out? I assumed it obvious by now. Perhaps I overestimated your intelligence.”

“Fuck… off.”

“With such startling wit, how could I ever think you stupid?” A cruel twinkle in the man’s eye. “You are right, Mr Pearl. I am not human. Not entirely. My entire family is… of mixed heritage, you might say. The Candlefly roots go very, very deep, indeed – roots that drink from the oldest bloodlines.”

“You’re a… half-and-half.”

“So crass. Hardly. Do I look like an aberration? Some mutation with dolphin flippers and a monkey’s tail? A cock like a lizard’s tongue? A tongue like a goblin’s cock?
Please
. We are not the stock of some common shadow, not born of some randy gob-folk or from a Naga with his septic seed. Ours is a far more refined heritage. A proud tree. Strong and tall and with many branches.”

“Fucking… monster… either way.”

“Yes. Perhaps. But don’t act like you’re any better. We’re all monsters here, Mr Pearl. Varying only by degree. Now: I come to ask you a question and I ask it again:
where is the Ochre
?”

“Up… your mother’s…
ass
.”

“My mother, Catalina, were she alive still, would slap that vulgarity out of your mouth, Mr Pearl. Such… profanity only makes you seem more foolish. Vulgarity is the crutch of weaker men. Now, you don’t want to tell me where the Ochre is? Fine. I’ll have the Vollrath suck it out of your head and your heart. What you know, we’ll know. I should’ve done that to begin with, but I wanted you to see my pretty face one more time. Just to let you know that you failed.”

“If the… Boss were alive… he’d skin you like a deer.”

“You mean, Konrad Zoladski?” Candlefly steps back, points to the wall behind him where the Boss sits perfectly still, hands folded in his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Then the Boss hops off the chair like an eager child and walks over to the table. It takes a second to register on Pearl’s face. The look of shock is truly precious to Candlefly.

“B… boss.” That word comes out of Mookie’s mouth, and it is the sound of horror.

“Mookie,” the Boss says. “You disappoint me. I thought you were loyal.”

“I… I am. I didn’t–”

Candlefly nods. The Boss hits Mookie.

The old man hits hard. Harder than any old man has a right to hit, especially when punching some thug whose head is harder than a bowling ball. But Pearl’s head rocks back. His nose mashes flat. Blood pours.

Of course, the old man isn’t really the old man. Not entirely. Not anymore. Candlefly wonders if Mookie realizes that his old master is no longer human.

And never will be again.

Times like this, he wishes he were psychic. Cousin Hiram would come in handy in that instance, but Ernesto is not on speaking terms with most – all? – of the Bellbooks.

Mookie blubbers through blood. Hardly words. Just guttural utterances.

“We’re going to go now,” Candlefly says. “Soon as you have your wits about you – and what copious wits they are, as we’ve learned – we’ll be sending someone else downstairs to have a little chat with you. And then it’ll all be over.”

He pats Mookie atop his big bald head.

The Boss chuckles.

Mookie weeps.

 

Werth waits for Candlefly at the top of the cellar steps. Pacing. At the far end of the hall, Sorago watches him with those dead serpent eyes. Werth gives the Snakeface a nervous smile, then turns away.

The door clicks. Candlefly steps out.

Werth starts in: “You said Mookie was on the up-and-up. That he would have a chance. That, that, fuck – that we would all get on the same damn page. Candlefly, are you listening to–”

Werth’s breath lodges in his chest.

Candlefly steps aside and another figure emerges from the cellar.

The Boss.

The Boss
.

White T-shirt, suspenders, suit pants. In his hand is a black plastic comb, which he runs through his white hair.

Werth tries to say something. All that comes out is a squeak of surprise.

The old man looks… healthy.

No
. Not just that – he looks like the Konrad Zoladski from ten years ago. Tighter stomach. A little taller. Broader chest. The wrinkles are not so deep. The eyes are bright and young.

“Werth,” he says, giving a clipped nod and a toothy smile. “Good to see you.”

“B… Boss. You… the cancer…”

The old man winks. “Feeling like a new man. I think I’m gonna beat this thing.”

“How?”

“My friends from the Candlefly family here have some old world medicine. Some real
rarified
stuff, if that’s the word. Knocked me flat. Felt like I was going to die, but now…” He slaps his chest hard, too hard. “I feel like I just rolled off the Detroit assembly line with all new parts.”

“It’s goddamn good to see you again.” Werth looks to Candlefly who stands there in the hallway looking oddly amused. The man in the suit speaks:

“Did you need something, Mr Werth?”

“I just… I wanted to talk about Mookie.”

“Regrettable,” the Boss says. “But we deemed him disloyal. For killing my grandson and all. Him and that demon daughter of his. Shame. A real shame.”

The old man stares him down.

It’s then that it hits Werth: Zoladski’s eyes don’t look right. They’re clear, bright, sure. But they’re also the wrong color.

His eyes are normally dark. A brown so dark they might as well be black.