Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran (20 page)

Thanatos grated a command, and from the burning doorway behind him came seven bats as big as vultures, with camera-lens eyes and sawing electric knives for teeth and wings of paper-thin aluminum.

Max threw himself to the roof, coughing in the smoke of the growing fire; the bats whipped close over his head and climbed, keening, to attack Our Lady of the Plastics.

Two dog-sized spiders made of high-tension rubbery synthetics, their clashing mandibles forged of the best Solingen steel, raced on whirring copper legs across the roof to intercept the angel with television eyes. The angel alighted and turned to gesture urgently to Max. The spiders clutched at the angel’s legs and dragged him down, slashed bloody hunks from his ivory arms.

Max saw Lord Thanatos catch a passing griffin by the tail and slam it onto the roof; he clamped the griffin in his white-hot hands. It shrieked and began to melt.

Two metal bats collided head-on with a copter dragon and all three disintegrated in a shower of blue sparks. Our Lady of the Plastics struck dents into the aluminum ribs of the vinyl harpies who darted at her, slashed and boomed, “GO IMMEDIATELY,” bellowing it in triumph as she burst open – but they recoiled in dismay, flapping clumsily out of reach, when she re-formed, gathering her fragments together, making herself anew in mid-air.

Max sensed that the real battle was fought in some other dimension of subatomic physicality, with a subtler weaponry; he was seeing only the distorted visual echoes of the actual struggle.

The spiders were wrapping the angel’s legs with cords of optical fiber. He gave a mighty wrench and threw them off, levitating out of their reach, shouting at Max: “Take your life! You—”

“SILENCE HIM!” Thanatos bellowed, stabbing a hot finger at the angel. And instantly two of the harpies plummeted to sink their talons in the throat of the angel with television eyes. They tore at him, made a gouting, ragged wreckage of his white throat – and Max blinked, seeing a phosphorescent mist, the color of translucent turquoise, issuing from the angel’s slack mouth as he fell to the ground.

I’m seeing his plasma body escape, Max thought. I’m realizing my talent.

He saw the blue phosphorescence, vaguely man-shaped, drift to hang in the air over the body of the dead Hispanic. It settled, enfolding the corpse. Possessing it.

Sans its right arm, half its face clawed away, the corpse stood. It swayed, shuddered, spoke with shredded lips. “Max, kill yourself and lib—”

Thanatos lunged at the wavering corpse, closed hot metal fingers around its throat, burned its voice box into char. The body slumped.

But Max stood. His dreams were coming back to him, or was someone sending them back? Someone mindsending.
You were of the Concealed.

Thanatos turned from the battle, scowling, commanding: “Take him! Bind him, carry him to safety!” The spiders, gnawing on the corpse of the angel with television eyes, moved reluctantly away from their feeding and crept toward Max. A thrill of revulsion went through him. He forced himself forward. He knelt, within the spiders’ reach. “Don’t hurt him!” Thanatos bellowed. “Take care that he does not—”

But he did. He embraced a spider, clasping it to him as if it were something dear, and used its razor-sharp mandibles to slash his own throat. He fell, spasming, and knew inexpressible pain and numbness, and grayness. And a shattering white light.

He was dead. He was alive. He was standing over his own body, liberated. He reached out and, with his plasma-field, extinguished the fire on the outbuilding. Instantly.

The battle noises softened, then muted – the combatants drew apart. They stood or crouched or hovered silently, watching him and waiting. They knew him for Prince Red Mark, a sleeping Lord of the Plasmagnomes, one of seven Concealed among humanity years before, awaiting the day of awakening, the hour when they must emerge to protect those the kin of Thanatos would slaughter for the eating.

He was arisen, the first of the Concealed. He would awaken the others, those hidden, sleeping in the hearts of the humble and the unknown. In old women and tired, middle-aged soldiers and . . . and there was one, hidden in a young sepia-skinned girl, not far away.

Thanatos shuddered and squared himself for the battle of wills.

Max, Lord Red Mark, scanned the other figures on the rooftop.

Now he could see past their semblances, recognize them as interlacing networks of rippling wavelength, motion that is thought, energy equal to will. He reached out, reached past the semblance of Lord Thanatos.

A small girl, one Hazel Johnson, watched the battle from a rooftop across the street. She was the only one who saw it; she had the only suitable vantage.

Hazel Johnson was just eight years old, but she was old enough to know that the scene should have surprised her, should have sent her yelling for Momma. But she had seen it in a dream, and she’d always believed that dreams were real.

And now she saw that the man who’d thrown himself on the spider had died, and his body had given off a kind of blue glow; and the blue cloud had formed into something solid, a gigantic shape that towered over the nasty-looking wire-head of hot metal. All the flying things had stopped flying. They were watching the newcomer.

The newcomer looked, to Hazel, like one of the astronauts you saw on TV coming home from the space station; he wore one of those spacesuits they wore, and he even had the US flag stitched on one of his sleeves. But he was a whole lot bigger than any astronaut, or any man she’d ever seen. He must have been four meters tall. And now she saw that he didn’t have a helmet like a regular astronaut had. He had one of those helmets that the Knights of the Round Table wore, like she saw in the movie on TV. The knight in the spacesuit was reaching out to the man of hot metal ...

*    *    *   

Lord Red Mark was distantly aware that one of his own was watching from the rooftop across the street. Possibly Lady Day asleep in the body of a small human being; a small person who didn’t know, yet, that she wasn’t really human after all.

Now he reached out and closed one of his gloved hands around Lord Thanatos’s barbed-wire neck (that’s how it looked to the little girl watching from across the street) and held him fast, though the metal of that glove began to melt in the heat. Red Mark held him, and with the other hand opened the incinerator door, and reached his hand into the fire that burned in the bosom of his enemy . . .

And snuffed out the flame, like a man snuffing a candle with his thumb and forefinger.

The metal body remained standing, cooling, forever inert. The minions of Lord Thanatos fled squalling into the sky, pursued by the Protectionists, abandoning their visible physicality, becoming once more unseeable. And so the battle was carried into another realm of being.

Soon the rooftop was empty of all but the two corpses, and a few broken harpies, and the shell of Thanatos, and Lord Red Mark.

Red Mark turned to look directly at the little girl on the opposite roof. He levitated, rose evenly into the air, and drifted to her. He alighted beside her and took off his helmet. Beneath was a light that smiled. He was beautiful. He said, “Let’s go find the others.”

She nodded, slowly, beginning to wake. But the little-girl part of her, the human shell, said, “Do I have to die too? Like you did?”

“No. That was for an emergency. There are other ways.”

“I don’t have to die now?”

“Not now and . . .” The light that was a smile grew brighter. “Not ever. You’ll never die, my Lady Day.”

Lost Souls

Clive Barker

Clive Barker wrote of his occult detective Harry D’Amour in one other short story (“The Last Illusion”) and two novels,
The Great and Secret Show
and
Everville.
He’s also the protagonist of film
The Lords of Illusion.
According to his creator, D’Amour is a reluctant demon hunter, not someone “defiantly facing off against some implacable evil with faith and holy water. His antecedents are the troubled, weary and often lovelorn heroes of film noir . . .” Similar hunters now abound in fantasy, but exorcists are the more traditional foes of demons. Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism have religious rituals of exorcism. Some Protestant denominations use prayer to get rid of demons; Buddhists use prayer and meditation to persuade an evil spirit to leave. Taoists employ chanting, prayer and physical movements to combat possession. Many New Age religions employ exorcism. Self-appointed exorcists abound.

Everything the blind woman had told Harry she’d seen was undeniably real. Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed – that extraordinary skill that allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on Seventy-fifth – that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler’s. Here was the derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the brick. Here was the dead dog that she’d described, lying on the sidewalk as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the shy and sublimely malignant Cha’Chat.

The house was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of Cha’Chat’s elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda that sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than concealing itself amongst such wretchedness.

But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed to locate Cha’Chat by any means conventionally available to a private eye such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact that the demon was loose at all. It seemed he’d never learned, in his all too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that had tottered into view just as he’d leveled his gun at Cha’Chat? – a child, of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape.

Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha’Chat’s despite could scarcely be imagined. Harry had to find the demon quickly, before it did serious damage; find it and return it to the pit from which it had come. In extremis he would even use the binding syllables which the late Father Hesse had vouchsafed to him once, accompanying them with such dire warnings that Harry had never even written them down. Whatever it took. Just as long as Cha’Chat didn’t see Christmas Day this side of the Schism.

It seemed to be colder inside the house on Ridge Street than out. Harry could feel the chill creep through both pairs of socks and start to numb his feet. He was making his way along the second landing when he heard the sigh. He turned, fully expecting to see Cha’Chat standing there, its eye cluster looking a dozen ways at once, its cropped fur rippling. But no. Instead, a young woman stood at the end of the corridor. Her undernourished features suggested Puerto Rican extraction, but that – and the fact that she was heavily pregnant – was all Harry had time to grasp before she hurried away down the stairs.

Listening to the girl descend, Harry knew that Norma had been wrong. If Cha’Chat had been here, such a perfect victim would not have been allowed to escape with her eyes in her head. The demon wasn’t here.

Which left the rest of Manhattan to search.

The night before, something very peculiar had happened to Eddie Axel. It had begun with his staggering out of his favorite bar, which was six blocks from the grocery store he owned on Third Avenue. He was drunk, and happy, and with reason. Today he had reached the age of fifty-five. He had married three times in those years; he had sired four legitimate children and a handful of bastards; and – perhaps most significantly – he’d made Axel’s Superette a highly lucrative business. All was well with the world.

But Jesus, it was chilly! No chance, on a night threatening a second Ice Age, of finding a cab. He would have to walk home.

He’d got maybe half a block, however, when – miracle of miracles – a cab did indeed cruise by. He’d flagged it down, eased himself in, and the weird times had begun.

For one, the driver knew his name.

“Home, Mr Axel?” he’d said. Eddie hadn’t questioned the godsend. Merely mumbled, “Yes,” and assumed this was a birthday treat, courtesy of someone back at the bar. Perhaps his eyes had flickered closed; perhaps he’d even slept. Whatever, the next thing he knew the cab was driving at some speed through streets he didn’t recognize. He stirred himself from his doze. This was the Village, surely; an area Eddie kept clear of. His neighborhood was the high Nineties, close to the store. Not for him the decadence of the Village, where a shop sign offered EAR PIERCING. WITH OR WITHOUT PAIN and young men with suspicious hips lingered in doorways.

“This isn’t the right direction,” he said, rapping on the Perspex between him and the driver. There was no word of apology or explanation forthcoming, however, until the cab made a turn toward the river, drawing up in a street of warehouses, and the ride was over.

“This is your stop,” said the chauffeur. Eddie didn’t need a more explicit invitation to disembark.

As he hauled himself out the cabbie pointed to the murk of an empty lot between two benighted warehouses. “She’s been waiting for you,” he said, and drove away. Eddie was left alone on the sidewalk.

Common sense counseled a swift retreat, but what now caught his eye glued him to the spot. There she stood – the woman of whom the cabbie had spoken – and she was the most obese creature Eddie had ever set his sight upon. She had more chins than fingers, and her fat, which threatened at every place to spill from the light summer dress she wore, gleamed with either oil or sweat.