He picked her up by shimmering jet-black hair.
“It took you long enough.”
“But you were only a dream—”
“You’re an Ethercan, Walter. In your dreams you can leave your physical body and come here, or anywhere in the Netherplanes.”
“What exactly are the Netherplanes?”
“We don’t have time to talk about it. Let’s get out of here before another Mancer Squad pops up.”
Walter, flummoxed, headed down the street, carrying No-name by the hair. “I feel ... unsettled ... carrying a severed head down the street. Especially... a
talking
severed head.”
“Don’t worry about it, Walter. You’re in Hell. Heads talk. But you have to be strong. There’s a lot we have to do.”
“Like what?”
“Time ... will tell.”
Walter could’ve done with a more specific answer. “I know that Lucifer wants me. Are you going to tell me how to find him?”
“No, my purpose is to make you aware of things, to make sure you see what you’re supposed to see. It’s all about free will, Walter, and it’s very important that you understand that. You’re forgetting the details of my curse—my eternal damnation. I know the future but it’s impossible for me to reveal it to anyone.”
This flustered Walter. Women always did. “But what you just said—your
purpose.
That indicates to me that you’re here for a reason, and that reason corresponds to me somehow.”
“Correct,” the pretty severed head replied. “I was waiting for you. I was specifically sent here, to elucidate your options.”
“Great. God sent you?”
“No.”
“Who did then?”
The head sighed. “Intermediary agents representing an antithetical design.”
“Ah, that,” was Walter’s best effort at sarcasm.
“You’re hurting my scalp. Could you please put me under your arm?”
Walter obliged. He felt let down by the whole scene. Etherean? He was walking around with a head. “I thought I was supposed to have powers, like it said in the book.”
“You have powers, Walter. It’ll just take some time before you’re evolved enough to use them. Or that may never happen—I can’t tell you. You have to learn to control your emotions. Self-oriented emotions—like fear, and despair—impede your gift. You’re in a new place that’s strange to you. You have to get used to being here. You must overcome distractions, overcome all mental barricades. You must
de
-obstruct your senses.”
Walter shook his head. “De-obstruct. Fantastic. Is that even a word?”
“If you want the truth, Walter, you’re probably too messed up in the head to ever develop your powers.”
“So I’m a powerless Etherean?”
“Yes.”
Another rip-off. Another kick in the chops. It didn’t matter which world he went to, he was a loser that nobody noticed. He turned another corner, sneakers scuffing. “Wait a minute, if I’m powerless, why does Lucifer want me?”
The head was getting more and more illusory. “You’re Plan B, Walter. Plan A failed.”
“I’m gonna put you back in the garbage can,” he said, disgusted. He could make nothing of what she was saying; it seemed as though she was doing it on purpose, to confuse him, to frustrate him.
Now she sounded sad, or disappointed. “You don’t even have the mettle for that, Walter. The more people hurt you, the less aggressively you defend yourself. You’re a pushover. You’re too nice a guy to make it, here or anywhere. I’m not telling you what you need to know—you should put me back in the garbage. But you don’t have the capacity even for that.”
Only the vaguest impulse flickered, to turn back around and throw her away. But she was right. He couldn’t throw anyone away even though people had been throwing him away his whole life. No-name was his only friend. Granted, she wasn’t much of one—but she was a friend nonetheless.
A metal sign on a brick wall read PDA MANDATORY ZONE. A male and female Imp strolled hand in hand down the lane. The female was holding a flower, and they both looked at each other with the deepest love in their eyes.
“Public displays of affection are mandatory?” Walter asked, miffed.
Suddenly the male Imp was howling over a wet
thwack-thwack-thwack!
sound; Walter was horrified at what he was seeing.
The female Imp was chopping into her mate’s groin with a small hatchet. Green blood shot up as the male thrashed on the pavement. And, next:
thwack-thwack-thwack!
—she was hacking into his chest, right through his ribs. More blood looped up. Her intent was clear: she was chopping out his heart.
“Not affection, Walter.” No-name rolled her eyes. “Public displays of atrocity. Oh, and take a look over there. See her?”
A skinny Human girl wearing canvas rags for clothes lay spread-eagled and bug-eyed in a doorway across the street. She was pregnant yet her swollen belly seemed to deflate in abrupt stages, and out from under her ragged skirt things that looked like tadpoles—but the size of squirrels—scampered away on little hands and feet. The girl was birthing a litter of the creatures, and when Walter got a grim look at one he saw that it had suggestions of a face that mirrored the girl’s own features.
Oh, lord!
Walter thought, winded just by witnessing the scene.
“In Hell, Humans can’t reproduce amongst each other,” No-name explained from under his arm, “because they have souls. But Human women can get pregnant from interspecies sex. That girl’s got it bad, probably got raped by a Troll. Those things coming out of her are called Pollihoppers, the product of the latest STD—
Condylomo Abhorrius.
The infection produces cervical tumors that suck up any semen that enters the vagina, then it mutates each sperm cell with its own DNA and releases it back into the womb.”
“I’m gonna be sick, I’m gonna be sick!” Walter insisted.
“Don’t
be sick again, Walter. You already know, your Etherean vomit glows in the dark. It’ll give you away.”
Walter staggered onward in this hellish urban quagmire. He wanted to cry he was so disheartened. This place was so cruel and disgusting—how could it really exist? Here the psychological cruelties of the Living World were made flesh, the symbols and subtleties becoming physical and real.
All of this, created by one person to punish people for their sins?
“Let me tell you something, Walter,” the head said next. “I understand your confusion, I understand how you feel. You don’t know what purpose this place really serves—you’re a scientist, an academic, and it seems illogical. But illogic is a logic of its own. Do you understand?”
“Not at all. Not one bit,” Walter groaned.
“If you take the impulse behind the conscious desire to be good, and you take the impulse behind the conscious desire to be evil—if you put them both together and look at them very closely, you’ll see... they’re the same.”
More esoteric gobbledygook. Walter just groaned some more, his despair rising. Each step seemed to double his confusion. “What did you mean when you said I was Plan B?”
“Plan A failed.”
“You just told me that!” He was getting testy. “What does it mean?”
“Lucifer has a vast plan. He’s kind of like you, actually—”
“Thanks.”
“I mean in that all he wants is to be loved. But the one he wants to most be loved by cast him out. So now he exists for vengeance. You already know what an Etherean is. What about an Etheress?”
Finally, a linear conversation. “Yes, I read about them in the
Evocations of Lucifuge.
An Etheress is a female Ethercan.”
“Correct. And there’s one living as we speak. She was Plan A. Lucifer needs either an Etheress or an Etherean, for his plan. He tried to capture the Etheress but she got away. Plan A failed. Which leaves Plan B. You are Plan B. Lucifer couldn’t catch the Etheress, so now he’s going to try to catch you. He wants to use
you.”
Walter staggered on.
Lucifer wants to use me,
came the blandest thought. He didn’t want to hear any more; he didn’t want to even try to understand. He scuffed down the road as Caco-Rats chittered.
“Where are we going?” he asked. His voice sounded dead.
“To Candice’s,” No-name said.
(II)
The Mound lay south of the city. That’s what it was called, simply The Mound. It was four hundred feet long and thirty high, just a long grass-covered rise. No one talked about it, but local historians knew exactly what it was: a mass grave for hundreds of Muskogean Indians who were slaughtered by adjutants of Andrew Jackson in the early 1800s. Rumors had it that The Mound was haunted. This rumor was true, but that was beside the point.
The Mound was a powerful Deadpass.
“I can feel it,” Cassie said under her breath.
“Oh, yes,” Angelese replied.
They crossed town on foot, slipping away through darkness from the wreckage of the clinic. After the Merge had ended, and all of Hell’s components had spatially relocated themselves, the clinic and its property lay in shambles, smoldering. The news would report another catastrophic gas leak, but that was beside the point too.
The point was that the forces trying to abduct Cassie had failed in their efforts.
The part of town that surrounded The Mound seemed abandoned, run-down salt-boxes mostly, and dilapidated cars in sun-scorched yards. But as they approached, Cassie could feel something invisible crawl on her skin. Angelese paused as if sensing something.
“Someone’s already been here, through the Deadpass,” she whispered.
Cassie remembered what the angel had told her a few nights ago. “The Etherean,” she guessed.
“Yes. He’s already on the other side.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Bad,” Angelese said.
Cassie couldn’t fathom it. A sudden breeze broke the heat and humidity. As she stared at the top of The Mound, in total silence, she thought she could see something in between blinks.
Lights.
Lights in a very dark city.
A police car was turning down the street. It stopped, shined its spotlight on them.
“Let’s give this guy something to talk about back at the station,” Angelese said. She took Cassie’s hand and led her to the top of The Mound. That’s where they disappeared.
Something rough, something hot and cold at the same time, licked Cassie’s skin. A moment ago the scope of her vision had been filled with stars spread across the night, but when she stepped through the Rive, everything went black. Her legs moved as though she were walking on air, she felt she might plummet. Static glittered in her hair, and then she was through.
Smoke and a stench burned her eyes. The black was gone, replaced by sickly yellow streetlight.
A sudden scream overhead froze her heart, then there was a loud crash off to one side. “JESUS!” Cassie shouted.
“Get out of the way,” Angelese said and pulled her back. “Someone’s throwing people off the top of the building.”
Cassie looked up the side of a crooked skyscraper that must’ve been a hundred stories. In the alley where they stood, a Human woman hauled herself out of the dumpster she’d just landed in. Her face was collapsed, most of her bones broken in the fall, yet she was alive. In Hell, the damned could never die. Another scream, then, and two more bodies hit the pavement just yards away—
SPLAT! SPLAT!
Cassie and Angelese ducked out, the angel perturbed. “Damn it! There’s supposed to be one waiting for us...”
“One what?”
Angelese didn’t answer. She was staring down the street. The ever-present mold-green fog was rising, and in it Cassie could see—
“Are those
faces?”
Half-tangible shapes formed in the fog, suggestions of long-fingered hands, suggestions of eyes and malformed mouths full of teeth.
Suddenly the fog began to move forward very rapidly. Its twisted mouth-shapes began to bellow.
“Shit!” Angelese exclaimed. “Djinn!”
It was coming too fast to react. Two Constabularies brandishing pronged nightsticks stepped unaware into the street. When the fog swooshed over them, first their uniforms, then their skin eroded away.
Cassie tired to project a thought to counter the mass, but her fear was still cresting.
“Damn it!” Angelese spouted again. “Where is it?”
“Where is WHAT?”
Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!
The lit, throbbing orb of a Nectoport appeared just behind them. It shuddered and began to open.
“It’s about fucking time,” Angelese muttered. “Climb in! Hurry!”
The living fog moaned forward, abrading even the pavement, like a sand-blasting. The Nectoport hadn’t fully matured but Cassie and the angel climbed in anyway, their hands slimed green. It was through some mode of enchanted telepathy which enabled Angelese to maneuver the Port; it shuddered and pitched, then took off and upward like a reckless kite. Below them, the swell of fog convulsed, howling its rage at them.