I nodded toward the empty glass beside him, my face a mask of disbelief. "So you're telling me the nun-soul you traded for that you came by honestly?"
Dumas chuckled. "I'm not sure
honestly
is the right word, but yeah, she arrived via the usual channels. Guess a pious life's no guarantee you'll get measured for your wings and harp once your final bell has tolled." He saw the doubt in my eyes and continued. "Don't look so surprised, Sammy! Hell's fulla decent people who couldn't hack it without a little assistance from the likes of me – you of all people should know that. And believe me, you're better off not knowing what she bargained for; the whole affair would turn your stomach."
I thought a moment about what he'd said, but the math still didn't add up. "The fact remains that Danny works for you, and that he stole the soul I'm looking for. I'm supposed to believe those two things are unconnected?"
"Believe what you want, Sammy – and someday, you'll have to fill me in on how you've come to know so much about who I do and don't associate with – but the truth is, Danny doesn't work here anymore."
"He doesn't." Skeptical.
"No, he
doesn't
. Fact is, the boy got sloppy – unreliable. Became a liability to the organization. So I had to let him go."
"If that's the case, then what the fuck would Danny want with the soul of some drug kingpin that wasn't even his to take?"
"Wait – don't tell me this Varela you're looking for is
Pablo
Varela? As in head of the Varela drug cartel?"
For the life of me, I couldn't tell if he was shining me on, or if his surprise was as genuine as it seemed. "So you
do
know of him," I said.
"Of
course
I know of him," he replied. "I'm a big fan of his work! That bastard is as nasty as they come; well, was, I suppose. A shame that someone of his talent would be struck down in his prime…"
"Yeah, I'm all broken up about it. Only now that I know you're such a fan and all, I'm forced to wonder if maybe you had Danny take his soul as a little keepsake – you know, so you could stick it in a glass case beside the ball from McGwire's go-ahead run or whatever."
"Are you nuts? Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Danny no longer works for me, you know the kind of attention it'd attract to my operation, snagging the soul of a rising talent like Varela? And anyways, if
any
of the Fallen has McGwire's go-ahead run, it'd be Mammon; he's the one who cut McGwire's deal."
"OK, so assuming for a second you're telling the truth–"
"Why, Sam, that
hurts
."
"–and Danny
wasn't
working for you when he stole Varela's soul, what could he possibly want with it? You think he might be trying to score a skim-fix on his own?"
"Doubt it. Even if he's desperate, the kid ain't
stupid
, and to try and process a soul all by his lonesome with those pathetic monkey reflexes of his, he'd hafta be. Besides, Varela was as twisted as they come – there's not much point skimming off a soul as corrupted as his. No, what Danny'd want if he were jonesin' is a soul with a little decent left in it. So either he took Varela just to fuck with you, or…"
Dumas's eyes got a faraway look in them, and he fell silent for a moment. Then he shook his head and muttered, "Well, I'll be damned," more to himself than to me.
"What?" I asked. "What is it?"
"I do believe I figured out what ol' Danny Boy might be up to. And if I'm right, you're not the only one that crazy fucker played."
"I don't understand."
"That's all right," he said, a rueful grin gracing his face. "I'm beginning to."
Dumas got to his feet, clapped me on the shoulder.
"Come with me," he said. "There's something I think you need to see."
24.
The rain beat down on my face and neck, and made treacherous the stone steps that we descended. These steps were narrower than the ones I'd followed up to the main building, and they hugged the craggy canyon wall, making their path unpredictable and the going slow. The warmth and light of Dumas's fireplace were but a distant memory, three stories and a world of wet away. Dumas led me downward through the darkness, looking dry as ever, as though the rain didn't dare to dampen him. It was an illusion, of course; Dumas looked dry for the same reason Dumas looked human – because that's how he
chose
to look.
Me, I looked like a drowned rat, my one shoe-clad foot squishing with every step, and my bare sock soaked clean through and caked thick with mud. Figures I'd wind up coming to the desert on the one fucking night it rains. Next time, I'm bringing a slicker and some rubber boots – provided I survive long enough for there to be a next time.
"Where exactly are we going?"
"Servants' quarters," Dumas replied.
"Yeah, I can see why you'd want to tuck 'em out of sight," I said, glancing back toward the main building behind us – its crumbling façade barely visible through the pounding rain. "You'd hate to ruin the lovely ambience you've got going on back there."
"What, you didn't like the rug? I thought it really tied the room together."
At the base of the slope up to the main building, Dumas jagged right, disappearing from view. I'd been figuring on a left-hand turn toward the constellation of outbuildings I'd seen on my way in. Visibility being what it was, I had no idea where Dumas had gotten off to, so for a moment, I just stood there like an idiot in the rain.
"Hey, Sammy – you comin' or what?"
Turned out Dumas was standing in a natural alcove in the rock maybe eight feet high, and barely wide enough for two men to stand side-by-side. At first, the alcove didn't seem to be that deep, and then I realized that what I'd taken to be the inside wall was in fact a heavy iron door, so thoroughly corroded by the elements that it looked as natural as the rock walls that surrounded it.
At the center of the door was a wheel – a wheel as rust-caked as the door itself. It would've taken a dozen Strong Man competitors and a can of WD-40 to move that thing an inch. Dumas spun it like a pinwheel in a stiff wind. And with a shriek like the cries of the tormented, the door swung inward.
Stepping inside, it was apparent this wasn't so much an alcove as a cave. A well-trodden dirt floor led inward from where we stood, pocked here and there with strange stone outcroppings the color of sun-bleached bone. Torches hung on the walls at regular intervals, casting long shadows of the rock formations, and causing the corridor before me to writhe like a living thing as their flames licked at the stone ceiling above. The air was thick with oily smoke; it burned in my throat and made my eyes water. But beneath its tarry bite was another scent, sour and unpleasant: a sulfurous reek that seemed to emanate from the very walls.
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," I muttered.
"I know, right?" Dumas replied, his eyes dancing with mirth in the torchlight. "I was thinking of having a doormat made special."
We proceeded down the natural corridor. Rooms branched off from it on either side – some sealed with iron doors of their own, some nothing more than bare rock arches leading into darkness. It was warm inside – too warm. Between the fumes, the heat, and the ever-shifting firelight, I felt dizzy, ill, disoriented. But if Dumas noticed, he paid no mind, instead leading me down, down, down toward God knows what.
No, I thought. About this, God has no idea.
Over time I became aware of a peculiar sound, low and rumbling like machinery. It built and built upon itself until it was damn near unbearable, a horrid oscillating pressure in my eardrums that made my eyes blur and my temples throb like the early stages of a migraine. I tried to hide my discomfort from Dumas. It worked about as well as any of my plans thus far.
"You hear that, Sammy? That's the sound of
commerce
. Of product being made. I tell ya, it's music to my ears…"
"Yeah," I said, trying to smile, and winding up with more of a pained grimace. "Catchy."
He nodded toward a door up ahead, another iron job that, if anything, was heavier and better reinforced than the one through which we'd entered. "You wanna see?"
I didn't. I told him so. He showed me anyway.
I really shoulda seen that coming.
When he heaved open the door, the sound doubled in intensity. The pressure in my eardrums seemed to spread. My intestines fluttered like I'd eaten a bad burrito, and the fillings in my meat-suit's teeth began to ache. It was all I could manage to keep my feet. Dumas was mock-oblivious, clapping one arm over my shoulder and ushering me through the doorway, his features ablaze with malignant delight.
The room was small and dark, and the air inside was thick with sulfurous steam; it billowed outward through the open door like hot breath on my face. No torches graced the close stone walls. Aside from the firelight that spilled in through the open door, the only illumination came from somewhere in the center of the room, a ghostly gray light that appeared at first to emanate from the very steam itself. But as the steam dispersed, I caught a glimpse of the machinery behind the awful racket – and the true source of the room's sole light.
It appeared to be some kind of massive lathe, sitting at table height and fastened to the floor with bolts as thick as my arm. A hodge-podge of tarnished brass fixtures – wheels, knobs, cranks, and levers – jutted from its cast-iron shell, and several grime-caked gears transmitted power to the spindle from a thick rubber belt that extended upward to a diesel engine above, running at full bore and fixed to the ceiling by a series of heavy chains. Angling downward from the ceiling, as well as upward from the floor below, were several copper pipes, which snaked their way around the room from a cistern in the corner and converged on the object mounted on the rapidly turning spindle.
The object itself was scarcely larger than an acorn, and obscured from view by the steam that billowed off of it – steam generated by the water jetting toward it from the copper pipes. But as it turned, it flickered with familiar light, and beneath the clamor of machinery, I could just make out the melancholy wail of its song.
It was a soul. A human soul, reduced to a mere commodity by Dumas and his ilk.
The machine's attendant – a hulking mass of demon-flesh clad head-to-cloven-hoof in thick, coarse leather – threw a lever, and the engine chugged to a halt. The spindle slowed and stopped, and, with a squeak of turning valves, the flow of water petered out as well. My head was grateful for the silence. My heart ached to see a soul treated so callously as this.
The machinist shook free of his gloves and stripped off his mask – a grotesque parody of the face beneath rendered in leather and brass, with a lens of ambercolored glass where the demon's sole eye proved to be. Don't get me wrong, the demon beneath was hardly a looker – picture a rabid, mangy, cyclopean Rottweiler, and you're more or less there – but that mask? That mask was the stuff of nightmares.
"Nice getup," I said.
The dog-beast eyed me with the sort of disdain you'd expect from a blue-blood stepping over a puking wino. "Boss," it said with a voice a good octave lower than any human one I've ever heard. "There some kind of problem?" The words seemed unwieldy in the creature's mouth, as if it were unaccustomed to speaking in a human tongue, and though it was speaking to Dumas, its eye never left me. The eye itself was black and glistening and rimmed all around with red. Its corners were crusted with dried mucus, sickly white against the creature's pitch-black face. I could see my reflection in the surface of that eye, smaller and more frightened than I maybe would have liked.
"Problem? Nah – just giving Sammy here the nickel tour!" Then, to me: "You wouldn't know it to look at him, Sam, but old Psoglav here is the best skimmer in the business. A real surgeon with his blade. Ain't that right, Psoglav?"
Psoglav said nothing, instead plucking said blade up from where it lay atop the stilled lathe – so quickly that I scarcely saw him do it – and testing the set of its edge against the ash-gray callus of his thumb. The blade itself was flat-topped like a chisel and very fine, with a tapered stem and a handle fashioned from what appeared to be a human bone. I confess I didn't like the way Psoglav was looking at me while he held it.
Psoglav smiled at my obvious discomfort, flashing what looked to be a set of crude iron teeth jammed willy-nilly into his mottled gray gums, and then his hand flicked out at me, placing the tip of the blade under my chin so fast I didn't even have time to exhale, much less react. Every muscle in the demon's body was tensed, but the blade barely grazed my skin. Still, it was sharp enough to draw blood – I felt it dripping warm down my chin.
I wanted to move. To recoil. Hell, to take a fucking breath. But Psoglav could kill this meat-suit with a lightning flick of his wrist, so I didn't dare. Instead I stood there, bleeding in the darkness.
"This monkey," he said to Dumas, who seemed for all the world not to notice the drama unfolding before him, "he our new Collector?"
I said nothing. Dumas answered, "Perhaps."
The pressure on the blade increased ever-so slightly, and my bleeding quickened. The damned thing was so sharp, though, I barely even felt it.
"I hope for his sake he proves more reliable than his predecessor."
Dumas smiled. "You hope no such thing. I know you're still chomping at the bit to have a go at Daniel, and it looks to me like you'd be more than happy to exact your revenge on Samuel in his stead." He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was full of steel. "Though if I were you, Psoglav, I wouldn't."
Though Dumas's words were conversational enough, Psoglav's eye widened in sudden fear, and faster than my own eyes could even register, he recoiled. The blade gone, I raised a sleeve to my bleeding chin and resisted the urge to collapse into a puddle on the floor.