Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (21 page)

“How should I know? You created me.”

I glanced at Nicolette, hoping the sight of two Marlas would sufficiently enrage her to prompt a comment, but she barely seemed to notice. “Huh. This is a little bit new to me, too. So are you, like, an independent entity, or a reflection of me, or...”

The smoke-creature looked amused, I thought, but it was hard to tell with its shifting face. “Whatever I am, I’ll run the controls, if you’re sure you want to go through with this.”

“Why not?” I said. “It’s worth a try.”

I climbed up into the car crusher, the part of my brain that had not yet internalized the fact of my immortality screaming at me that this was a
bad bad bad
idea, a transgression against good sense and self interest. But I fought those feelings down, walked across the rug, and sat down in the armchair. I glanced up at the immense, rust-pocked metal plate above my head. “Here goes,” I said. “You might want to watch this, Nicolette.”

“Wait, what?” Nicolette’s flickered from me to the plate above my head, her face alive with interest and confusion at last.

Then the squealing roar of the hydraulics started up.

•

Look, I got crushed. I don’t know how much detail I really want to go into here. I was terrified, deep in my backbrain, despite my intellectual knowledge that I’d be fine. I was terrified in my forebrain, too, when I thought about the pain, because I knew being crushed was going to hurt, a sort of hurt almost no one has ever experienced and lived through.

I thought of stories I’d heard of thieves and mobsters hiding out in the trunks of cars, waiting for the heat to die down, only for the cars to be crushed with them inside. At least those poor bastards hadn’t seen it coming. I had to deal with the
suspense
. I hunched down as the plate descended, tried to pull in my neck like a turtle, a totally involuntary action, but it happened, inevitably, the rusty plate touching the top of my head, the pressure, the slowly mounting
pressure
–

I heard the jangling sound of the piano being crushed, its strings snapping and setting off a last discordant symphony, the kind of chaotic, irreproducible music that Nicolette most enjoyed. I heard the vases shatter and pop and the curio cabinet crunch. The chair I was sitting in broke and squeezed to splinters and fragments around me, adding stabbing and scratching to the crushing.

The last thing I heard before I lost consciousness was Nicolette’s howling laughter.

•

I opened my eyes and then wiped the blood out of them. The enormity of the pain – I mean the classic sense of “enormity” here, of something bad on a vast scale – was already fading from my mind. I stood up, looking around at the pulped and smashed remains of the antiques, and at all my blood – drying puddles of apparently very magically potent blood. My clothes were torn to pieces, ground and scraped into shreds by the armchair I’d been sitting in, but basically I felt fine. I stepped out, wobbly, and nodded to my smoke ghost twin standing by the controls.

“How in the
fuck
,” Nicolette said. “You could do this trick on stage in Vegas. You were sitting there, I
know
it was you, I can sense your reality, throbbing like a rotten tooth in my jaw. I saw you get squashed, I thought you’d lost your mind and decided to end it all in the crazy painfulest way ever, I was so
happy
– and now here you are, looking like you really
did
get crushed, clothes ripped to shit, but not a mark on your body.
How
?”

I coughed, shrugged, cracked my neck. “A magician never reveals her secrets. You know I’m good with illusions.”

“And that chatty smoke golem over there, how’d you manage – Wait, that’s it, isn’t it? You disguised yourself as the golem and switched places, so it was the golem who got squished and you who ran the controls, then you swapped back. That has to be it. All smoke and mirrors.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I figured seeing me in agony might perk you up, so I wanted to make it convincing.”

“The screams were very authentic,” Nicolette said. “And knowing it was all bullshit, that you didn’t get crushed at all, sort of spoils the thrill, retroactively – but I admit, in the moment, seeing you get pulped, gods, yeah, that made me happy. And all those nice antiques getting smashed, too, like the olive in a martini or a cherry on a sundae, not necessary really, but a nice addition. Good trick. Feel free to stage shows like that for me nightly.”

Nicolette would never know how I
had
suffered in my attempt to do penance. It crossed my mind that this atonement stuff was arguably a little crazy – I was basically a monk whipping himself to ribbons with a thorny branch and then putting on the old hairshirt for good measure – but I felt a little better, too. I’d fucked up by handing Nicolette over to Sarlat, and I’d paid a price for that mistake. The only books being balanced were the ones in my head, but it still mattered.

The crusher kind of put things in perspective, too. I wasn’t likely to moan over a stubbed toe any time soon, not after experiencing that kind of pain.

My smoke ghost started to walk toward me. “Marla,” it said, producing ribbons of gas like a fog machine at a metal show. “Your heart’s in the right place, but it’s not a competition, this whole self-improvement thing. Don’t get obsessive or become an overachiever, you know how we can be –”

Then a gust of wind blew through, spinning my ghost into shreds of nothingness, leaving behind a smell of burned chemicals and blood.

I looked at the car crusher. Shit, yeah, blood. The manager of the yard would wake up soon, and he’d find a crusher full of weird stuff and lots of blood, and there would be panic and cops and even though it was unlikely any of it would trace back to me, it’d be better if this place looked like less of a crime scene.

Without thinking about it, I gestured, and flames appeared in the crusher, casting an invisible shadow of heat so powerful I stumbled back a few steps. The flames burned blue and white, seeming brighter for a moment than the sun, and when they abruptly winked out of existence there was nothing in the crusher at all but ash. Even the bits of metal were gone, flashed to toxic steam.

“Since when did you become a master pyromancer?” Nicolette demanded.

“I’ve been taking night classes at the community college.” I kept my voice light. I’m capable of making big fires, but I do it in the usual ways: pull heat from the atmosphere, or strike a match and use amplification and sympathetic magic, or splash some gasoline around and flip open a Zippo. I don’t just wave my hand and summon... hellfire.

Covering up mass graves and calling up flames that burned with the contained heat of stars. Okay. It seemed I’d learned a few tricks during my month in the underworld. A shame I couldn’t make this stuff happen at will. The battle in Tolerance would have been over a lot faster if I’d been able to intentionally summon a fire so intense it turned metal into gas. Then again, I was known to lose my temper and do destructive things without sufficient forethought, and the idea of having that kind of power at my command was a little worrisome even for
me
–

Suddenly it seemed a lot more plausible that my goddess-self would decide to limit access to my memories, if they included the knowledge of how to wield power like that. I could recognize my own thought processes at work: never trust anybody else to do anything right. Even when that “anybody else” encompasses another, arguably lesser, version of yourself.

“I guess you’re stuffed with chaos, but I could use something to eat, and some sleep,” I said. “I’m going to change clothes, then let’s ditch the truck and find a place to hole up for the night.”

“And tomorrow we going looking for this Eater thing?” Nicolette said.

“That’s the idea.”

“Good. Maybe he can kill you for real.”

“Hope springs eternal, with feathers on,” I said.

GETTING CLEAN

We were in yet another crappy motel – there were no shortage of those in the Southwest – but the water pressure was good and hot and I spent a long time filling the bathroom with steam while Nicolette watched TV in the other room.

I’d killed a bunch of monsters, and caused a bunch of other monsters to be killed. Filthy work – literally, not figuratively – and getting squished in a hydraulic press hadn’t helped my cleanliness. Hence the endless hot scouring torrents of water. The curtain was a flimsy thing, and I knew someone else was in the bathroom with me the moment he appeared. I knew who, too.

“Peeping Tom,” I said.

“I look upon mortal bodies with disinterest,” Death replied, sitting down on the closed toilet next to the shower. “All flesh is grass. Though admittedly yours is very tender and delectable grass.”

“Are you planning to check up on me every week?”

“Just on days you cheat death,” he said mildly. I peeked around the edge of the shower, though I could barely see him in the swirling steam. “I assumed some enemy of yours loaded you into a car crusher, but, no, it was self-inflicted. May I ask why?”

“I screwed up, and something unpleasant happened to Nicolette – something I didn’t
mean
to happen. She was pretty upset about it, and I felt bad, so I figured I’d make her feel better. There’s nothing she likes more than the idea of me dying horribly, so.”

Death clucked his tongue. “You couldn’t have taken her out for an ice cream cone or something less violent instead?”

“She says eating real food isn’t satisfying anymore, since it just falls out of her neck-hole. Don’t worry. I’m fine. Unless, what, do I only have nine lives or something?”

“No, death is withdrawn from you during the time you dwell on the Earth, until you’ve achieved a reasonable human old age, or until you decide you don’t want to bother with being alive anymore. You could drown yourself for breakfast every morning and you’d be spitting up water and breathing fine mere moments later. Granted, if you were incinerated utterly by the blast of a hydrogen bomb, putting you back together again would prove difficult and time-consuming, so try to use
some
discretion in your choice of deaths, all right?”

“So you’re saying, don’t piss off anybody with access to nukes. That’s pretty good advice in general.”

“If you’d let me, I could take away the pain when you –”

“Life is pain,” I said. Then winced. “Sorry. That came out way too emo. But pain is an important part of life, and I want to
be
alive, really alive, during the six months of the year I’m here on Earth.”

“Dying is
also
an important part of life,” he said, his tone only a little bit insufferable. “Or at least, awareness of the possibility of death. You don’t seem too bothered about giving that part up.”

“I make exceptions when it comes to survival. I’m pragmatic that way.”

“I just worry that you’re hurting yourself because you think you deserve to be hurt.”

“Maybe I do. More than most people do, anyway. Sure, there could be a streak of mortification-of-the-flesh going on here. I won’t deny it. But crushing myself... that sucked. I think I’m going to get out of the physically masochistic self-punishment business.”

“And the psychological punishment? Like traveling with that horrible head-in-a-cage woman?”

I adjusted the water temperature a little, inching it a bit closer to boiling. “Part of that’s self-punishment, sure. But part of it’s also, like, a
test
. I want to be a better person than I used to be – more thoughtful, more compassionate, less selfish. Except, it’s easy to be a good person when your life doesn’t have any obstacles or complications. So I stack the deck against myself a little – travel with a companion who hates me, instead of Rondeau, who loves me, or Pelham, who almost worships me. Go to territory I don’t know and pick fights with nasty bastards who are bigger than me. Eat shitty food, and sleep rough. Save people who’ll never know I saved them, who’ll never be grateful or owe me a favor. If I can be a better person under
those
circumstances, then, damn – that means something. Maybe I really can change.”

“You do like to make things more difficult for yourself than they need to be,” Death said.

“What’s life without a challenge? Hard mode or go home, motherfucker.”

“I suppose this enforced misery means you would refuse the comfort of your husband’s touch.”

“In theory. But maybe, for today, I’ve suffered enough. This time I’ll make exceptions for survival
and
sex. Come on in. The water’s fine.

“And you’re even better.”

“Damn right,” I said.

•

That cheered me up a little.

•

Now that Nicolette was no longer half catatonic, she became irritatingly chatty again. After my long and quite refreshing shower, I was sitting in the armchair of the motel room, reading more about Zen and motorcycle maintenance, when she said, “Are we really going to team up with this Squat guy?”

I closed the book and squinted at her, where she sat on the table in her cage. “I don’t know. Maybe? I feel like I killed a bunch of gangsters and then an ugly puppy came wobbling out of the bullet-ridden house, looking around all confused, wondering what those loud noises were and where his master went. Like I have some obligation toward him now, maybe. The poor bastard’s cursed.”

“Speaking as an undying head stuck in a bird cage and forced to serve the will of a woman I repeatedly tried to kill, let me tell you about all the vast bucketloads of sympathy I have for him.”

I thought about that. Making Nicolette be my bloodhound and oracle had seemed to serve two purposes: punishing her for her numerous crimes, and punishing
me
for mine. But now I began to wonder: was it also another kind of test, from my more enlightened goddess-self? Maybe I was supposed to learn something about forgiveness or the folly of revenge for revenge’s sake or simply about using people like they were tools and nothing more. Was I supposed to
stop
hating Nicolette?