A Natural History of Hell: Stories (18 page)

Benett looked to Lady Smith and bowed slightly, for the first time noticing the platter she held in her arms. The aroma struck him, and he felt the saliva coursing to the corners of his mouth. He knew he dared not look, but he did. Slices of gray meat in what appeared a dishwater sauce. Breathing deeply, he managed to regain a modicum of composure.

“Orange goose,” she said. Her outfit, to Benett, made her look like some kind of circus performer. The sparkle of her diamonds prevented him from seeing any more of her. She stabbed a slice of goose with a long thin silver fork and held it up to his mouth.

Lord Smith looked on, smiling. Thrashner suddenly appeared behind the lord and gave a quick hand motion and a wink to convey the message, “Eat it and like it.” Benett closed his eyes and opened his mouth. He couldn’t help a slight gag when it touched his tongue. Slowly he chewed it as it seemed every guest looked on. The goose was tough as gristle. It became evident during that eternity of chewing that he’d need a visit to the crapper post haste. Through clenched teeth, he announced, “Delicious,” and then excused himself for a moment.

He could have thrashed Thrashner with his stick, he was so angry with him. “No wonder Lord Smith’s smile had no sign of pleasure,” he grumbled, scuttling down a long hallway. One thing he could say for his business partner, though, he had the state of the art in toilets. Benett locked the door, hung up his jacket, undid his trousers and settled onto the bowl. He was breathing heavily and his heart was racing. There were periods where the dizziness swirled toward a blackout and then pulled back. He leaned forward and strained to free the beast. Trickles of sweat fell from his forehead. As they tumbled through the air, they became tiny blue women, who landed in a crouch on his bare knees and then sprang away onto the floor.

He cried, and his tears became fairies that he brushed away into flight. A belch became a will-o’-the-wisp, glowing as it issued from the cave of his open mouth. He felt them crawling from his ears, down his cheeks to his shoulders. Then turmoil below, and a riotous gang of goblins clawed their way out of his quivering hindquarters with a cumulative birth shriek. He heard them laughing and swimming in the water beneath him.

Jennings was sitting on the driver’s box when Benett appeared from behind a hedge. One quick glance and the boy leaped down and caught his tipping employer by the sleeve of his jacket.

“What’s wrong, sir? You look horrible.”

“I shat a populace.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get me home, lad.”

As soon as Jennings managed to get him in the carriage and start on the way, Benett felt their pointy heads poking up through the pores of his skin like a living, writhing beard. He whimpered as they bored and poured out of him from every conceivable egress. It was like his body was turning inside out, and the agony of it was mythic. He beat himself all over and clawed at his own face. Then he felt the spades dig in at the corners of his eyes, and the light failed.

Back at Whitethorn, when young Jennings opened the door of the carriage, he saw no fairies, though in the course of the ride Benett had manufactured thousands. A strong, sulfurous breeze blew out of the box, and behind it sat the master’s corpse, desiccated, full of holes, the sockets empty. The boy ran to the house to get his father.

It’s said that Benett’s fairies spread out around the city and multiplied. They weren’t the good ones that he’d intended to produce but were ones who thrived in soot and took energy from iron. They found homes in all of the myriad factories and worked their enchantment to cause accidents, sabotage machinery, create explosions, set fires, and generally gum up the works. They were responsible for more than one industrialist, of his own volition, leaping into a smokestack.

As for Benett, Jennings and his son found an old whisky barrel and rolled it into the courtyard. They didn’t spare the kerosene. When the elder threw the three matches, a pillar of fire shot up into the night. Eventually the flames settled down and the skull popped in due course. Jennings retired just past midnight, but the boy sat alone by the barrel and waited for the libban until the dawn revealed a smoking heap of ashes and bones.

The Last Triangle

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker, in Fishmere, part suburb/part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, laid down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.

You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that T
wilight Zone
where you make your own Hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

I told her I was sick.

“I’ve seen you around town,” she said, “you’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”

And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away, and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here, and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like, I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.

What could I say. I took the money and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was I laughed. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.

I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high but still feeling shitty, downtown, and I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The manikin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.

I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but, when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later, when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”

Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. I definitely remember a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground. Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for, suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp that was right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.

One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died, and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”

Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something. “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”

“No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was 99 percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.

Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m 6-4, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head, and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”

Just past the library, we cut down an alley, crossed a vacant lot, snow still on the ground, and then hit a dirt road that led back to this abandoned factory. One story, white stucco, all the windows empty, glass on the ground, part of the roof caved in. She led me through a stand of trees around to the left side of the old building. From where we stood, I could see a lake through the woods. She pointed at the wall and said, “Do you see that symbol in red there?” I looked but all I saw was a couple of
fucks
.

“I don’t see it,” I told her.

“Pay attention,” she said and took a step closer to the wall. Then I saw it. About the size of two fists. It was like a capital
E
tipped over on its three points, and sitting on its back, right in the middle, was an
o
. “Take a good look at it,” she told me. “I want you to remember it.”

I stared for a few seconds and told her, “OK, I got it.”

“I walk to the lake almost every day,” she said. “This wasn’t here a couple of days ago.” She looked at me like that was supposed to mean something to me. I shrugged; she scowled. As we walked home, it started to snow.

Before I could even take off the dead man’s jacket, she called me into her office. She was sitting at her desk, still in her coat and hat, with a book open in front of her. I came over to the desk, and she pointed at the book. “What do you see there?” she asked. And there it was, the red, knocked over
E
with the
o
on top.

I said, “Yeah, the thing from before. What is it?”

“The Last Triangle,” she said.

“Where’s the triangle come in?” I asked.

“The three points of the capital
E,
stand for the three points of a triangle.”

“So what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I want you to take a pad and a pen, and I want you to walk all around the town, everywhere you can think of, and look to see if that symbol appears on any other walls. If you find one, write down the address for it—street and number. Look for places that are abandoned, run down, burned out.”

I didn’t want to believe she was crazy, but . . . I said to her, “Don’t you have any real work for me to do—heavy lifting, digging, painting, you know?”

She shook her head. “Just do what I ask you to do.”

Ms. Berkley gave me a few bucks and sent me on my way. First things first, I went downtown, scored a couple of joints, bought a 40 of Colt. Then I did the grand tour. It was fucking freezing, of course. The sky was brown, and the dead man’s jacket wasn’t cutting it. I found the first of the symbols on the wall of a closed-down bar. The place had a pink plastic sign that said
Here It Is
with a silhouette of a woman with an afro sitting in a martini glass. The
E
was there in red on the plywood of a boarded front window. I had to walk a block each way to figure out the address, but I got it. After that I kept looking. I walked myself sober and then some and didn’t get back to the house till nightfall.

When I told Ms. Berkeley that I’d found one, she smiled and clapped her hands together. She asked for the address, and I delivered. She set me up with spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table. I was tired, but seriously, I felt like a prince. She went down the hall to her office. A few minutes later, she came back with a piece of paper in her hand. As I pushed the plate away, she set the paper down in front of me and then took a seat.

“That’s a map of town,” she said. I looked it over. There were two dots in red pen and a straight line connecting them. “You see the dots?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Those are two points of the Last Triangle.”

“OK,” I said and thought, “Here we go. . . .”

“The Last Triangle is an equilateral triangle. All the sides are equal,” she said.

I failed math every year in high school, so I just nodded.

“Since we know these two points, we know that the last point is in one of two places on the map, either east or west.” She reached across the table and slid the map toward her. With the red pen, she made two dots and then made two triangles sharing a line down the center. She pushed the map toward me again. “Tomorrow you have to look either here or here,” she said, pointing with the tip of the pen.

The next day I found the third one, to the east, just before it got dark. A tall old house, on the edge of an abandoned industrial park. It looked like there’d been a fire. There was an old rusted Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. The
E
and
o
thing was spray painted on the trunk.

When I brought her that info, she gave me the lowdown on the triangle. “I read a lot of books about history,” she said, “and I have this ability to remember things I’ve seen or read. If I saw a phone number once, I’d remember it correctly. It’s not a photographic memory; it doesn’t work automatically or with everything. Maybe five years ago I read this book on ancient magic,
The Spells of Abriel the Magus
, and I remembered the symbol from that book when I saw it on the wall of the old factory last week. I came home, found the book, and reread the part about the last triangle. It’s also known as Abriel’s Escape or Abriel’s Prison.

“Abriel was a thirteenth century magus . . . magician. He wandered around Europe and created six powerful spells. The triangle, once marked out, denotes a protective zone in which its creator cannot be harmed. There are limitations to the size it can be, each leg no more than a mile. At the same time that zone is a sanctuary, it’s a trap. The magus can’t leave its boundary, ever. To cross it is certain death. For this reason, the spell was used only once, by Abriel, in Dresden, to escape a number of people he’d harmed with his dark arts who had sent their own wizards to kill him. He lived out the rest of his life there, within the last triangle, and died at one hundred years of age.”

“That’s a doozy.”

“Pay attention,” she said. “For the last triangle to be activated, the creator of the triangle must take a life at its geographical center between the time of the three symbols being marked in the world and the next full moon. Legend has it, Abriel killed the baker Ellot Haber to induce the spell.”

It took me almost a minute and a half to grasp what she was saying. “You mean, someone’s gonna get iced?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Come on, a kid just happened to make that symbol. Coincidence.”

She shook her head. “No. Remember, a perfect equilateral triangle, each one of the symbols exactly where it should be.” She laughed, and, for a second, looked a lot younger.

“I don’t believe in magic,” I told her. “There’s no magic out there.”

“You don’t have to believe it,” she said. “But maybe someone out there does. Someone desperate for protection, willing to believe even in magic.”

“That’s pretty farfetched,” I said, “but if you think there’s a chance, call the cops. Just leave me out of it.”

“The cops,” she said and shook her head. “They’d lock me up with that story.”

“Glad we agree on that.”

“The center of the triangle on my map,” she said, “is the train station parking lot. And in five nights there’ll be a full moon. No one’s gotten killed at the station yet, not that I’ve heard of.”

After breakfast she called a cab and went out, leaving me to fix the garbage disposal and wonder about the craziness. I tried to see it her way. She’d told me it was our civic duty to do something, but I wasn’t buying any of it. Later that afternoon, I saw her sitting at the computer in her office. Her glasses near the end of her nose, she was reading off the internet and loading bullets into the magazine clip of the pistol. Eventually she looked up and saw me. “You can find just about anything on the internet,” she said.

“What are you doing with that gun?”

“We’re going out tonight.”

“Not with that.”

She stopped loading. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.

After dinner, around dusk, we set out for the train station. Before we left, she handed me the gun. I made sure the safety was on and stuck it in the side pocket of the brown jacket. While she was out getting the bullets, she’d bought two chairs that folded down and fit in small plastic tubes. I carried them. Ms. Berkley held a flashlight and in her ski parka had stashed a pint of blackberry brandy. The night was clear and cold, and a big waxing moon hung over town.