Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (15 page)

Psyche takes the claw. And away they go.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Welcome To The Death Factory

T
HE CAB SITS
double-parked outside the hotel.

Frank raps on the Plexiglas divider separating the front and back seats. He opens the little drawer and yells through it to give his voice some volume.

“Hey! Cason. The hell are you doing up there?”

Tundu turns up the radio: classic rock, Led Zeppelin’s
Whole Lotta Love
. Then he changes the speaker balance so it plays louder in back, quieter up front.

“I no like this guy, man,” Tundu says, indicating the backseat with a dismissive jerk of his thumb.

“Is it because he looks like someone threw him in a wood chipper?”

“No!” Tundu’s face scrunches up. “Well. A little. But he has shifty eyes!”

“Anybody without eyelids ends up having shifty eyes.”

“I do not trust him. Something else is... off. Like a smell in the refrigerator, you know? You look and look but cannot find it until later and you one day see a tiny little nugget of spoiled food making a very bad, very big smell. That’s him.”

“He’s a nugget of spoiled food?”

“Right, man. Right.”

“He’s... okay. Frank’s been through some stuff.”

“You vouch?”

“I vouch.”

Again the little drawer pops. Frank’s voice: “We gonna go or what?”

Tundu drums prodigious fingers on the steering wheel.

Finally, he asks: “Where to, Mister Ugly?”

Frank grins a devil’s grin and gives him the address.

“W
ELCOME TO THE
death factory,” Frank hisses, sweeping his arms across a derelict factory—a block-long complex of soot-black buildings and smoke stacks all ringed in a circumference of warped chain-link fence. Everything is broken windows, rusted pipes, and very long shadows.

They’re not far from the river. The road—Unruh—dead-ends here, with the waters of the Delaware just behind. A red light blinks and bobs out on the water.

Frank had Tundu drive 95 north, to Frankford Avenue, then into Tacony. Not a part of town Cason knows well. Like everywhere else, it’s a depressed area—the mighty thumb of economic erosion pushing down hard on the blue collar neighborhood. As they drove, it was hard not to see the many yellow Sheriff Sale signs on doorways—the symbols of a foreclosed home.

Frank had Tundu drive down toward the river. Past an all-nude strip club.

Then past a graveyard. A big one, too—big as a city block. None of the antiquity or historical value of some of the cemeteries toward the Philly center; just a flat plain of scrubby grass, row upon row of unexceptional headstones. A graveyard of the common man. No founding fathers here. Just cops and plumbers and shopkeepers.

They drove past the graveyard and then—

There, the factory complex.

Longshore Wire Company.

Shut up and closed off for a long time.

“What the hell is this place, chief?” Tundu asks. “Why must we come here?”

Frank holds up a finger. “All will be revealed, my giant cab-driving friend.”

“We are not friends.”

“That hurts my feelings. I was just about to order you one of those bouquets where instead of flowers, it’s all those little pieces of fruit. So yummy.”

Tundu’s about to say something else, but Cason steps in, pulls Frank aside.

“What’s your game, here? T.’s not involved in any of this and wouldn’t believe it if he was.”

“Why not tell him? Hell, we can
show
him.”

“Like you showed me?”

“It worked, didn’t it? Listen, Case-a-dillas. I said the ants weigh more than the elephants and I meant it. And your cabbie friend over there is a
very big ant
. Let him decide what he wants to believe.” Frank pauses. “Oh, I get it. You’re afraid he won’t be your buddy anymore, that it? Listen. Come out of the closet. Put your balls on the table and slap them like bongos. Guy deserves to know what kind of crazy whackaloon shit you’re up to, just in case the cops come to knock on his door and ask him questions about you.”

“Not a fan of plausible deniability, are you?”

“Not so much, no.”

Cason leans in close. “Just keep the... gods and magic bullshit out of it, okay? I don’t care how. Just do it.”

Another demon smile from Frank.

He wanders back to Tundu. Sweeping his arms in a showman’s gesture, he says, “Welcome to the site of one of America’s first mass murders.”

“Ah, man,” Tundu says, shaking his head.

Frank continues. “Fella worked here by the name of Theodore Stapleton. Teddy. Oh, by the way, this is the late 1940s we’re talking, here. Old Teddy, he was a vet of World War II, but not a soldier—he was a, I dunno, a typist or something. And that’s what he did here. He typed. Kept books. He didn’t work the line. Didn’t make the wire, test the wire, fix the machines, none of that. White collar job in a blue collar environment.”

“Just get to the part where he kills people,” Cason says. “It’s late. Or early.”

“Not a fan of stories, are you?” Frank asks, following up with a quick wink.

Cason frowns, and mocks Frank: “Not so much, no.”

“Fine. Teddy was gay. Or people said he was gay, I dunno. Guys on the floor made fun of him night and day, merciless bullying. Called him names, played pranks, whatever. And this was an everyday thing. For Teddy to get to his desk, he had to cross the factory floor—the longest walk of poor Teddy’s life, I bet. Well, Teddy may not have been in the shit during the war, but he still had a few keepsakes. Like, say, a P38 pistol reclaimed from a factory in Spreewerke. Sides all pitted like acne scars from the explosion. Never used to kill a man—but looking like it’d been though hell, right? So Teddy takes this pistol. Loads it up with 9mm ammo. And goes to work one day; but he doesn’t head upstairs, and instead just marches down the line and starts shooting.” Frank mimics the movement, taking measured steps—
one, two, three
—then fake-shooting with a finger pistol. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Seventeen men dead. Another six wounded. First official mass murder in American history.” Frank lowers his voice: “Not counting those on behalf of our own government, of course.”

“Great story,” Tundu says, obviously unimpressed. He brings his big hands together in a booming clap. “I tell it to my nieces and nephews at bedtime.”

“You could’ve told us this in the hotel room,” Cason says.

Frank licks a too-white canine. “Story’s not over,
compadres
. This isn’t the factory’s final brush with death. In 1957? Smallpox outbreak. Just here.
Only here
. Another seven dead, a dozen more disfigured and disabled by the disease. In 1969, one of the wire spoolers goes nutso, breaks off its mooring, the wire lashing about like a horse’s tail trying to chase away a fly. Result? Three dead. Two of them cut in half, the third left without a head. Then, 1980: suicide of factory foreman Ray Redman. Wrote a note, said he saw ghosts and that they wouldn’t leave him alone, so he jumped into the wire-cutting machine and chop-chop-chop, diced him like a salad. Come 1995, explosion on the floor of Factory Building B. Big boom. Ten men dead. Another ten wounded. Press got hold of it. Enough was enough. They shut the place down.”

Tundu throws up his arms. “What’s the point, Mister Ugly? Why you gotta tell us all this nasty business?”

“Because,” Frank says, moving fast, coming up on Tundu like a barracuda. “Because I think a god of death lives here, and I not only aim to prove it—”

“Frank!” Cason yells, incredulous.

“—but I aim to kill the sonofabitch. Kill death. Ain’t that a peach?”

Cason’s about to do some explaining, maybe try to spin this into some kind of juke, but he notices that Tundu doesn’t seem to care. The cabbie isn’t even looking at Frank anymore. He’s staring at up at the factory.

Frank turns, follows his gaze. Cason, too. They see the building with a thousand eyes, all of them blind and dark—broken glass and framed squares of shadow.

“I saw someone,” Tundu says.

“Huh?” Frank asks. “Who?”

“I dunno, I dunno. I just looked up and in one of the windows, a... shadow was there. A man. I could see his eyes. Watching. I… dunno.”

Cason looks. Doesn’t see anything. But a shudder runs across his arms, leaving the flesh looking like plucked chicken-skin.

T
HEY STAND CLOSER
to the river. Just Cason and Frank. Tundu’s back at the cab. Sitting there, staring out, watching the factory from behind the windshield.

The sun’s not up, not yet, but the horizon’s edge is starting to show that creamsicle glow. One thing Cason can say for the sunrise and sunset in Philadelphia—all the chemical plumes make for a spectacular sky-show, day in and day out.

The river itself is quiet. Couple gulls at the edges. Couple more dogfighting out on the water, over what, Cason doesn’t know.

“Way to go, Frank,” Cason says. “Now you got him seeing goblins.”

“Goblins aren’t real,” Frank says. Matter-of-factly.

“I’m just saying, he’s seeing—”

“He saw
something
, not
nothing
. And that’s good. That means he’s in. He may not realize it yet, but he’s been touched. It doesn’t take much. You knew it the first time you met Eros. Don’t lie.”

“Maybe.” Cason clears his throat and Frank gives him a look. “Okay,
yeah
. I knew it. He was different. It wasn’t just what he did—which was unbelievable in and of itself. Stopping time. Bringing my wife and son back from death. E.—Eros—was on a whole other level.”

“That’s the thing, Case. Eros may be, er,
have been
on a whole other level, but these gods, they got rules. Things they can do, things they can’t. Like, a god of war can’t make you fall in love with him. A god of the sea doesn’t fuck with earth or air or fire. The Humbaba only knows the forest, the minotaur only knows the maze. Eros was a... a love god, a deity of
sex
and
beauty
and, and—and
hedonism
.”

“The hell are you saying?”

“I’m saying he didn’t resurrect your wife and kids. He didn’t stop time. He didn’t program their heads to hate you. He could’ve done the opposite. He could’ve made them love you forever and ever, regardless of what you did or what you wanted.”

“If he didn’t do it, then...”

“Other gods, Case. Other gods. This wasn’t just a one god thing. Many hands built the trap that snared you. And, oh, what a trap it was.”

“Trap. What the fuck do you mean, a trap?”

“The SUV that hit you. They ever find the driver?”

“No. They said... whoever he was, he fled the scene.”

“They didn’t even have the right name for him, did they? Car was registered under somebody else. And no fingerprints, either.”

“That’s what they said, yeah.”

“I don’t think anyone was driving, Case. I think it was a setup from the get-go. A conspiracy. The gods had their sights on you and they spun this all out for a reason. No one god can make time stop and people rise from the dead with new brains. Even beyond that boy-slut Eros, you got... three, maybe four others involved.”

Cason feels suddenly hot, though the wind coming off the river is cool. He grinds his back teeth. Anger and confusion spar with one another in his head.

“Why?” A croak. Almost like he doesn’t want to ask.

Worse, he doesn’t want to hear the answer, which is:

“I don’t know.” Frank offers a shrug. “I don’t. But I’m here to help you find out, and I figure that getting your cabbie buddy there in on the parade is a good fucking idea. We need whoever we can get. Especially for this next part. Because I’m not kidding when I say I think a god of death lives in this place. First I thought maybe it was Ereshkigal; I knew she was... up and down the East Coast.”

Cason’s brows scrunch up. The name’s familiar from his reading—but retention isn’t his strong suit. “She’s not Greek pantheon. She’s... Middle Eastern.”

“Old, old Middle Eastern. Sumerian. Real wicked chicky. Likes to trap people down in the dark with her. And that’s the thing, here—the death factory isn’t underground. And then there’s the smallpox thing? Came out of
nowhere
. So I got the idea that it might be her boyfriend, Nergal. Another god of death—he got kinda trapped into it by her way back when, and he’s got a real boner for pestilence and what-not. So I’m thinkin’ that’s him up there in the factory.”

“A death god.” Cason chews on that. Tastes bitter. “Why do we need to go up against him? Seems...”

“Dangerous? Like a bad idea? Yes and yes. But someone had to bring your wife and kid back to life, and I want to know whose hand was the one that pulled those particular puppet strings. Only someone with command over life and death could’ve pulled them out of the fire—not just alive but unharmed.”

“Aren’t there gods of... life? The books said there were.”