Authors: Richard Kadrey
“You don’t have to justify anything to me.”
“I know. That’s why I’ll tell you this. Normal people, Simon’s sort of people, wouldn’t understand.”
“You definitely win the deep-dark-secrets competition. I never hid anything that good.”
“What about your magic? You must have kept that secret.”
“I didn’t know any better when I was a kid, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late.”
“Poor Jimmy. Full of magic and happy to use it. Doomed to beat the boys at all their games and do tricks for the girls to make them kiss you.”
“I didn’t have a car. I had to do something.”
“I’ll light a candle for you.”
“Don’t waste the wax. They don’t take my calls anymore.”
I get Brigitte to hold the wheel while I tap out a cigarette, light up, and take a big puff. Instantly, I’m Doc Holliday trying to cough up a lung.
“God. They’re menthols.”
I toss the rest of the pack, including the one I’m smoking, out the window. I’m doing the Lexus owner a favor ditching those nerve-gas sticks. He’ll whine when he realizes they’re gone, but sometimes tough love is the only answer.
The street across from the vacant lot on East Sixth is empty. I kill the engine and the lights and we sit for a minute watching the place. In the moonlight the Springheels’ hovel looks like a cardboard cutout left out in the rain. I don’t see anyone standing guard.
Brigitte leans across me and looks out the window.
“That’s the house of an important family?”
“The most important once upon a time.”
“I think you Sub Rosa have a different sense of beauty than other people.”
“You get used to it. Like herpes or a missing leg.”
“I want to see inside.”
“Not yet. I need to do something first.”
I grab a bag from the backseat, get out of the Lexus, and go around to the passenger side. Brigitte watches as I dump a pile of powders, plants, and the piece of lead I use for certain kinds of circles.
“Lovely. I get to see magic?”
“You get to see magic. I hope these ingredients are still good. They’re Kasabian’s. My roomie’s. He hasn’t done this kind of hoodoo in a long time.”
“What kind does he do?”
“He shits out of his neck.”
Brigitte stares.
“I’ll explain later.”
There’s a mortar and pestle in the bag. I pass them to Brigitte along with a bag of ingredients.
“Take these leaves and seeds and grind them up into a powder. I need to go be da Vinci.”
I take the lead and draw a circle in the car’s shadow so it will be hard to see if someone wanders by. The image isn’t complicated. A pentagram facing north inside a double circle. Outside the circle I scribble words in Latin, Hebrew, and Hellion. Not a spell. More a friendly “hi and thanks for stopping by” kind of stuff. It’s pretty random, but better hoodoo than it sounds. If you think it’s easy saying anything in Hellion that doesn’t come off as a veiled threat, you’d be
wrong. I suck at milk-and-cookies magic, but I need to attract as much wildlife as possible without blowing it up.
“Your powder is ready. What kind of magic are we doing?”
“The Vigil will have left an alarm on the house. Probably angelic, and those detect conscious life. That’s animals, insects, and us. Anything can go inside or be magically controlled to go inside. We can’t turn the alarm off, but we can give it a migraine.”
The powder goes into the center of the circle and I lean over it to whisper some bits of greeting magic I sort of halfway remember. Brigitte is smiling, trying not to laugh. I look like I’m whispering sweet nothings to a pile of dirt, not exactly the two-fisted hoodoo she was counting on.
When I get tired of cooing to the pavement, I dump powdered sulfur onto the pile and mix it all together with my hands. Get out Mason’s lighter, spark it, and throw the mess up into the air as hard as I can. I touch the flame to the tail end of the cloud and the sulfur catches, igniting a twenty-foot pillar of fire.
The fire is gone as quickly as it came, but by the time the last powder embers hit the ground, I can already hear what I was hoping for.
Around us and above us there’s a rustling sound. The birds arrive first, settling into the vacant lot by the house, chirping, cawing, and pecking at the ground. Rats and mice swarm out of the sewers and warehouses, followed by insects. The crawlers cover the ground like a massive undulating carpet and the fliers drop from the sky like a black, glittering fist. Cats and dogs, the smartest animals of the
bunch, so the hardest to convince, get there last. They head right for the house, circle it, mark the boards, and climb onto the roof. The birds and insects finally get the idea and head in that direction. As soon as they’re moving, I grab Brigitte’s hand and we start to run. The animals know we’re coming. Yeah, they’re dumb, but this is hoodoo and it would be a pretty shit spell if you ended up crushing all the wildlife you’d just called.
The bugs and mice and rats part like the Red Sea and Brigitte and I run through the field to the house. By the time we’re there, the walls and roof are a solid mass of feathers, fur, and shiny carapaces. There’s no way the alarm can read and separate this much life at once. I pull out the na’at as we go up the steps and slash the lock. The door swings open on its own. It’s dark inside. Brigitte gets out her flashlight. I take her back to the kitchen and out through the missing porch. She gasps when she finds herself in the Springheels’ sprawling California ranch house.
“This is beautiful.”
“If you’re Ronald Reagan, I guess.”
“The idea of it, I mean. The beauty hidden within the rot.”
“Sure. That’s what I meant, too.”
I find the lights as Brigitte wanders around the living room touching the furniture, then going to the big windows that open out over the desert.
“I’d like to see the desert.”
“It’s not hard to get to from L.A. Maybe I’ll show you sometime.”
“Maybe.”
There’s a big side table against the wall across from the windows. I go through all the drawers. I’m not looking for clues. I’m looking for the half pack of stale Marlboro Lights I find in the middle drawer. I take a long sniff and I’m in love.
“Junkie,” says Brigitte.
“I’m not addicted. I just want to be able to inject these directly into my brain.”
“We didn’t come to the house so you can loot it, did we?”
“No. I did a demon reading where Springheel died. I just want to make sure I was right.”
“Why wouldn’t you be?”
“It was crowded and noisy. Good distractions if you want to keep someone from finding something.”
“Why would you be invited and asked to examine something if you weren’t supposed to find the truth?”
“I’ve been wondering about that. Maybe it was a test to see if a crime scene was covered up well enough. Maybe I’m being set up to be the fall guy if it wasn’t demons back there.”
“I have tools with me that will tell us if revenants were present.”
We go to the room where Enoch Springheel was chewed up like human jerky. I keep an eye on Brigitte when I flip on the light. The Vigil tidied up a bit, but Springheel’s sex magic altar is still there and the bloodstain on the floor is as wide as a king-size bed. Brigitte doesn’t flinch. Her heart and breathing are rock steady. She’s walked into a lot bigger messes than this. That means she’s been telling the truth. Also it means that whatever we find, I won’t have to babysit her.
“What sort of demons do this damage?”
“Eaters.”
She nods.
“This wouldn’t be the first time someone has confused demons and revenants. Or used one to cover up the other.”
“It would be a first for me and it better be the last.”
Brigitte sees Springheel’s altar and heads right for it.
“These things are for very dark magic. Do what you are going to do. I want to watch.”
“It’s not hard, but it’s messy. You might want to step back.”
She goes and stands by the door. I get out a plastic bag of dry skin I scraped off Kasabian’s Hand of Glory and use the black blade to cut my palm and let a few drops of blood fall into the bag. I squeeze the bag to work the blood into the skin, pour the mess into my hand, and then scatter it over the magic hexagon. I take the bottle of whiskey off Springheel’s altar, get a mouthful, and spit it onto the Hand of Glory dust and wait. In a few seconds green and black smoke curls up from the floor like miniature prairie fires.
I look over at Brigitte and shrug. “I wasted your time. I was right. There were demons here.”
Brigitte takes a glass vial about the size of a lipstick container from her pocket. She shakes it and says, “Turn off the light.”
She throws the container as I hit the switch. The vial crashes somewhere on the other side of the room and something begins to glow. Pale blue spots glimmer on the floor like blood spatter. They’re all over the hexagon and extend away into the dark room.
“What is that?”
“The essence left behind by a revenant.”
“Demons and Drifters were both in here? Can you tell how long ago it was?”
Brigitte kneels beside the glowing pattern and smudges some onto her fingers.
“A few days. Less than a week. That’s as close as I can judge.”
“Same thing with the demon marks.”
I flip the light on.
“I’d like to know which was here first and who came after.”
“Does it matter? You have proof now that you were right,” says Brigitte.
I take a shot of the smoke with my phone.
“But I was wrong, too. Demons fade to the immaterial world when they’re not summoned, but if Drifters were in here, where are they?”
“They could have wandered out or been led away.”
“What the hell is going on? None of this makes any damned sense.”
“Let’s discuss it somewhere else.”
“Like where?”
“Somewhere more comfortable. We’re done here, but Simon won’t be up for hours. Take me home. I want to see where you live.”
She reaches down and grabs my cock through my jeans, gets up on her toes, and kisses me. I lean down to her, slip my hand around her ass, and pull her into me.
I see Kasabian’s beer bottle crashing into the wall and me yelling, “Don’t say her name.”
No. I’m not going to feel bad every time I touch another human being. I’m the one who’s still alive on this rock. I won’t apologize for wanting to feel like a person every now and then.
But this is pretty fucked up even for me, making out in the room where someone was ripped to pieces and eaten a few days ago. We’re standing where his blood was pooled like black custard.
“I can’t do this here.”
“Are you sure you’re the man who lived in Hell for all those years? You’re awfully delicate sometimes.”
“And you’re pretty hard core. Does anything get to you?”
“Not this. I was helping my father hunt when I was seven. I’ve seen bodies in every state imaginable.”
“Well, I’ve been the guy torn up on the floor. I don’t want to kiss you here. Let’s get out. I’ll get Kasabian some beer and smokes and he can spend the night in the closet.”
I loop my arm around Brigitte’s shoulder and steer her toward the door. We’re just about clear when she stops.
“What?”
“I want to see something on the wall.”
She swings the door half closed and doesn’t move for a moment.
“This is a very old sigil. A revenant clan. People who took revenants into their families with dreams of immortality.”
“Let me see.”
I step around and there’s the sigil. The writing is different,
but the design looks a lot like Eleanor’s belt buckle. But the paint job isn’t right. Everything else in the room, as screwy as it might be, is put together well. The big, toothy monster face on the wall was spray-painted fast and sloppy, like a kid tagging his school at lunch.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Definitely.”
I push the door closed to get a better look. When it shuts, there’s a sharp metallic click. Brigitte gives me a funny look. A thin metal strand leads from the top of the door frame across the ceiling. A tripwire rigged to go off when the village idiot closed the door to look at the wall. This is why I hate working with other people. They see things. I don’t look, so I don’t set off traps. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Other people did.
There’s a grinding and the floor vibrates as a section of the far wall slides away. Fluorescent lights blink on in the deep black. It’s just a basement. Springheel’s secret room. The walls look like they’re carved out of solid rock. Someone’s been working down there. A wall is open and fresh dirt and rocks are scattered on the floor.
I hold up my phone to get a shot of the room, but someone gets in the way and it’s not Brigitte.
I don’t have to look to know who. I can smell them.
Zeds pour out of the basement like army ants protecting their territory. There’s just enough time to get out the na’at and collapse it to a couple of feet, leaving the thorns exposed so that when I swing it, it’s like a morningstar.
I catch the first one on an upstroke, crushing its face and jamming its jaw up into the bones around its eyes. The
second gets it on a downstroke. One of the barbs catches his skull just above his forehead, his head opens up, and everything inside spills out. After that, I don’t notice individual blows anymore. I’m swinging the na’at like a street sweeper, trying to clear some room on the floor so that I can actually fight. With each swing, the na’at sends bone and meat flying.
“Get the door open,” I tell Brigitte.
“It is.”
There are just too many of them and more pour from the room. I could slash and smash all day and I’d end up right where I am.
I yell, “Get down!” and bark some Hellion arena hoodoo.
All the air in the room gets sucked into a central point above our heads, pulling the Drifters back with it. I knew it was coming, so I leaned the other way, and when the vacuum lets up, I drop to the floor. Brigitte is already down.
“Cover your eyes and hold your breath.”
Above us, all the oxygen sucked up to the top of the room explodes. A fireball blows down from the ceiling, frying everything that’s more than a couple of feet off the ground.