Velveteen (7 page)

She reached for the cord that ran down the center of the ceiling in limp droopy scallops and yanked it. A series of bells started to chime, and moments later the railcar jerked into motion. Swift movement caught Velvet’s eye. Outside, the extricated slacker boys were already hanging limply at the ends of a pair of plump shadowy tentacles that were pulsating and tightening around the boys’ waists. Another, larger appendage slapped against the side of the car with a wet
thwap
. It coiled around the frame of a nearby door before striking, snakelike, at a frail-looking gentleman with a bag on his lap. At the slightest touch, the man went soft in his seat, slipping away from danger and onto the floorboard, loose enough that he could have been deboned. The tentacle reared back, ready to attack again.

Screams rolled through the cabin like a wave.

At that moment, the railcar jerked forward and the tentacle was torn free, and it disappeared into the charcoal night. The screaming calmed into hushed discussion, though the
passengers were noticeably compressed into the center of the bench seats and as far from the glassless window frames as possible.

Velvet leaned over the back of her seat and helped the older soul, now conscious, into his proper place.

“Are you all right?” she asked, patting his shoulder.

He shook his head, glancing back and forth, confused, and then his eyes went wide with memory. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“It showed me …” His voice trailed away and his face, crinkled with ash, dropped into his palms. “It showed me horrible things.”

She patted his shoulder again. She knew she should say something. Something comforting—but the words wouldn’t come. Velvet turned and faced forward as they traveled the hundred or so remaining yards to a track interchange.

A pair of gruff-looking souls in coveralls chained the funicular cars to a massive wedge and then backed away as the car shook violently and began its long trudge farther up the steepening hill. The wedge acted like a stair and kept the train as level as could be expected during a shadowquake. Normally it ran quite smoothly, but now it rocked and the train rattled and squeaked as the entire wedge began to roll underneath them.

Velvet scanned the faces in their car, half expecting their fear to be dissuaded simply by the presence of the Salvage team, but the tendrils of mist were dark, and the shadows still crept in through the arched openings in the doors, reminders of the black tentacles and their dark work. It dawned on
her then, it wasn’t enough that her team would eventually do something about the shadowquake. The fact was, they weren’t doing anything about it currently.

She decided to remedy that and climbed atop the wooden seat, bracing her hands against the ceiling for support.

“Nothing to worry about!” she announced, arms outstretched in what she hoped was a show of strength. She’d seen Madonna do it in some movie about South America or something, also Nixon, though throwing up peace signs didn’t seem to fit the moment. “Your Salvage team is here to protect your afterlife.”

She looked toward Luisa for approval and was met with a grimace and a finger slice across the little girl’s neck, the international symbol for shutting the hell up.

There were some nods among the passengers, and some murmurs of dissent, or encouragement; it was hard to tell amid the grinding of the gears and the moaning of the ropes that pulled the railcar up the steep and treacherous incline. Her money was on the prior, though.

“Smooth,” Luisa pointed out when Velvet sat down. “Really empowering.”

“You think they bought it?” Velvet whispered.

“Absolutely.”

She brightened but noted a smirk at work on Luisa’s lips; they were even quivering. “Really?”

“Not a chance.”

Velvet sank back into the seat and groaned.

Outside, the blurry shadows of rocks and precipices fell away to a solid wall of obsidian as the tram entered the shaft
into the lower depths of the station. The sounds of souls screaming in the distance fell away, and the passengers grew eerily quiet.

Velvet considered the cause of all this, steeling herself for the job at hand, whatever that might be.

Witches, mediums, fortune-tellers.

The blackest kind of magic.

Sure, most of them were harmless, flipping cards, pointing out the obvious, telling people what they wanted to hear. It was almost noble. They actually kind of helped people, like counselors or something. Velvet never gave them much credit, but there were others, the ones that were a bit
too
accurate in their predictions,
too
powerful. In daylight, that magic was seen as a special gift, but the effect it had in purgatory was dangerous. A simple incantation could cause a quiver beneath the cobblestone streets, but shadowquakes rippled from an epicenter of dark intent, black magic stabbing like a sword from the daylight straight through to purgatory, the shredded fabric of the veil transmogrified into tentacles of pure horror.

That was the trouble with the living. They didn’t recognize that actions had consequences. And that was the real issue. It pissed Velvet off, royally. Almost as much as Ron Simanski. He certainly acted without concern for the costs of his behavior.

If only the asshole were dead
, she thought. If only she could manage to do it.

Make him cut his own throat
.

She’d never have to worry about another girl, or seeing his
ass again. He wasn’t likely to have an ambiguous afterlife. His path was certain.

Straight to hell.

Luisa’s hand nudging her thigh shook her from thoughts of homicide. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothin’.” Velvet shrugged.

“I thought you were going to invite me the next time you took a walk?”

She cringed.

Luisa’s eyebrow raised, and Velvet saw a tinge of suspicion spreading over the girl’s normally placid face. This wasn’t the first time this confrontation had played out, and she suspected that her poltergeist friend might be on to her escapades, but Luisa never uttered the words in Velvet’s presence, never made any actual allegation. And she wouldn’t, of course, for the very reason that they were best friends.

To say it aloud …

Haunt
.

To speak that most horrible of syllables was to call the wrath of the station agent and the Council of Station Agents.

No. Luisa would never say it. And that’s why they never discussed it. Velvet lied to protect her friend and herself, of course, no matter how difficult it was to keep the secret, and no matter how much she wanted to confide in Luisa. She wouldn’t place that kind of burden on Luisa’s shoulders. Ever.

“It was just a walk,” she mumbled. “It’s not like I was out committing crimes or anything.”

“What?” Luisa shook her head.

“Nothing. Forget it. Just a walk.”

In the sea of blackness, it was impossible to tell how far into the tunnel the railcar had carried them. The shadowquake’s black fog swirled around them and the rails still shook, but they hadn’t seen another tentacle since the old man had been attacked, so the train fell quiet. Her shoulders hunched with exhaustion, and she could swear she heard Logan’s grumbled snores over the clatter of metal on metal.

The dark mist hung inside the car like oil floating atop a hot cup of coffee. It dotted the air like specks of ink. She held up her finger to poke one, and the droplet seemed to react, skittering away toward the opening in the door as though alive.

Velvet shuddered at the thought and then jumped, ridiculously, as the wedge jolted over the hump into the station proper, a thin stretch of tunnel that ran for at least a mile upward toward the center of the massive structure.

A few feet into the tunnel, the dense mist loosened its grasp and dissipated from the door hinges and the ropes that hung from the ceiling for passengers to steady themselves. It fell away as though the inky tendrils themselves were traveling to the station, though Velvet knew the idea was insane. Mist didn’t think. Neither did shadow.

Ridiculous.

The shadowquake was the strongest yet, and while it shook the Latin Quarter of purgatory like a rag doll, its influence could not penetrate the stoic power of the station. The railcar began to travel smoothly. Gone were the bumps and shimmies, and soon the aura from the globes of gaslight in the tunnel wall broke through the gloom.

Velvet nodded toward the elderly woman in the seat in front of them and smiled at the baby she was holding. “So bright, that one,” Velvet said, leaning over the bench.

“Yes,” the woman responded, her voice crackling like a wood fire. She dropped her chin toward the glowing bundle and smiled. “This soul is so strong. I won’t have him but a moment. He’ll be movin’ on faster than you can jump a live one, I suspect.”

Velvet made a forced attempt to chuckle. The woman had certainly been around long enough to know the cycle. Babies always moved on the quickest. They’d had a few infants in the Retrieval dorms, and they’d passed them around between people for a couple of days before they’d start to fade.

Dimming, they called it.

Their light goes out, flickers and dies, and all that’s left is a dusty husk that crumbles and blows away like the powder in a packet of Sweet’N Low.
Of course, it’s much weirder with adults
, Velvet thought.
And there was way more Sweet’N Low
.

Way more
.

T
he amber glow of gaslight trickled into the train from the tunnel’s mouth, not in steady streams but jagged rivulets, mixing with the dust until the air around the passengers was streaked a muddy sepia. The gruff railmen bolted from the lead car and tossed off the heavy chains that bound the railcar to the giant wedge beneath them. The metal screamed back with a loud echoing clatter. Then the car was lurching forward, rattling across the connecting tracks into the station itself.

The left side of the railcar opened to a vast platform filled with huddled groups of people, haggard and wrapped in blankets or quivering under propped parasols as tiny bits of debris showered from the ceiling. When she was alive, Velvet had done a paper on the immigration of the Irish into New York, and the image of these souls, these refugees, looked
almost exactly like those encyclopedia pictures of Ellis Island, downtrodden people exhausted from their travels and gathering together to hold themselves up. Among them, station guides roamed with handheld signs indicating a stall in departures.

“No departures for the duration of the incident!” they shouted.

The passengers spilled from the railcar doors and onto a gently rumbling cobblestone floor, the clops of their shoes echoing in the hushed space. Then a quiet fell over them. The disembarked stood, faces stunned and staring into the crowd, as though waiting for someone to tell them what to do, where to stand.

Velvet wasn’t that person.

I guess you should have taken my efforts to calm the situation seriously, huh?
she thought smugly.

She, Quentin, and the twins darted past them, weaving through the throng of people, through clouds of dust and ash wafting from their soiled clothing. There was something else in the air, too, a thin striation of the gas that fed the lanterns and globes. Velvet’s eyes darted toward Logan and caught him inhaling deep mouthfuls before noticing her gaze and then shrugging dismissively.

Once an addict, always an addict, she thought, shaking her head.

“There!” she shouted, pointing toward a towering arch topped with a stained-glass transom—in its beveled shards were the silhouettes of four heroes, a Salvage team from some long ago and certainly harrowing event. She wasn’t
aware of the story, and just then, with her nerves firing like a machine gun, she didn’t really care. Her team had their own story to carve out.

Beyond the arch, a stair led up into the vast hub of the station. Single file, they took the risers two at a time, barreling through souls making use of the stairs for seating. They shouted warnings of “Salvage team passing! Make way!” And stepped on only a few hands.

At the top they were met with a daunting vista. Fresh un-ashed souls poured into the station from the primary crack. Their memories burned as though God had dropped a star into the station. Station guides pummeled them with fistfuls of ash and pointed them toward long meandering lines that led to a bank of a hundred or so lecterns. Intake officers bellowed orders and sorted souls as fast as they could, despite the continued quaking beneath them.

A glass dome towered above them all, though the panels themselves seemed made of a shiny boiling tar. The mist of the shadowquake blocked out everything even at that height.

Velvet wondered how far the quake had spread.

Had it passed into Little Cairo? Into Kerouac? Certainly not as far as Vermillion. That would mean the magic they’d be facing was monstrous. Were there at this very moment other Salvage teams speeding to their stations, crossing into the daylight to converge on the source?

It was hard for her to imagine a disturbance so vast.

The last shadowquake hadn’t been nearly this large, and as they had traveled to get to the station, they’d broken free from its clutches about halfway up the mountain. They had been piled on top of each other in the rear seat of the railcar,
and looking behind them, they could make out the shape of the thing, round, or roundish, with flares of darkness exploding from it. The shadowquake was like a reverse image of the sun, and stripping away the heat from everything it touched.

Velvet remembered looking upon the shape, terrified … and that had been at a distance.

It squicked her out to think they were still inside the center of the dark blob, like being in the belly of some gigantic ink-fueled octopus monster or something equally disturbing—Velvet wasn’t really into descriptive metaphor at the moment. She had much more pressing matters to tend to.

Luisa nudged her. “This is a big one. Something really terrible must be happening out there.”

“Thoughts on what it is?” Velvet shouted to her team.

“A sacrifice!” Logan’s hands curled into the claws of some imaginary monster. “A witch or something. Warlock!”