Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (32 page)

Other beasts dance in the margins—yellow eyes, white teeth, growling, hissing, circling, circling. Cason tries to stand, but the rat-chimera pounces, knocks him flat to the ground. The horned fox pounces at his front, little needle teeth coming right for his face—eyes, nose, all the soft bits. He grabs its head, holds it as the teeth
tick
and
tack
in front of him.

The rat-thing bites the back of his neck.

Pain shoots up into his head, across his shoulders and into his arms.

He tries to stay calm, tries to think,
Okay, I’m a tougher guy than I ever figured, I’m not even a guy so much as I am—
Well, he doesn’t know
what
he is. But he can’t worry about that now. Point is, he can survive this. Bloodied and beaten, but alive.

Cason rolls, crushing the rat-thing beneath his back while hoisting the horned fox into the air—it writhes and yowls, bushy fox tail whipping the air.

He hurls it hard against a tree, hears its back break. It lays, twitching.

Up, up, up, go!
Cason lurches, but it feels like his legs want to go out of him, like they’re made of rubber bands dangling from his hip sockets—he feels suddenly sluggish, slushy like a winter puddle, and it’s then the thought strikes him:

The bite was venomous
.

Down, down on his hands and knees. He reaches for his bag, but it seems miles away, now. The world slides into deeper darkness. All around him, shadows encroach. A black blob with a crocodile’s maw. A falcon’s beak with human eyes set above it. A mangy dog with feathers instead of fur. The beasts creep forward. A new wretched thought strikes him—
Nergal. These are Nergal’s pets. Like his seven warriors, his guardians, they are—

But his thoughts die incomplete. They’re suddenly a jumble as the venom seizes, wracking his body with spasms.

He collapses. Hears the ginger tread of the approaching monsters.

His fingers sink into the forest floor. Deep through moss and leaf layer, down through dark earth and into the domain of the earthworms.

And suddenly: a terrifying bloom of awareness. A feeling like falling.

The forest is alive. He can see it. He can see the roots and shoots, the runners and briars, can feel every stone, every mote of dirt. He can feel the beasts, too—he doesn’t see them so much as
discern their shape
in the deep of his mind, and there he sees the crocodile maw drawing open on its leathery hinge, opening wide around his skull, ready to snap closed and take his head clean off its shoulders.

Panic causes his mind to lash out.

He seizes the beast’s jaws, not with his hands but with his mind.

He wrenches the jaw wider, wider, until the bones creak and the tendons snap and suddenly the monster’s head rips in half.

Cason signals to the others:
run
.

And they do. They do just as he asks. They turn tail and flee, whimpering into the shadows as if castigated by their master’s hand.

Their master
, Cason thinks.

They ran like he commanded them.

That’s not normal
.

It’s lights out. He lets the venom take him. Into sleep or death, he’s not sure.

But something stops his descent.

Out there. In the forest. There’s a mind—it evades him like a firefly ducking a child’s swooping jar. He reaches for it, and it moves. A blue mote, flashing, flickering. He expands his mind like a net, drops it down—

Cason
.

A small voice, a scared voice.

Alison.

Alison is here in the missile silo. In the forest maze.

Alison
. His wife. His love.

Cason growls. Feels his forehead burn like two cigars are pressing into his flesh. He growls and shakes his head like a wolf tearing meat off a carcass—the venom inside is part of the beasts, and the beasts are part of the forest, and that means it does what he commands. He screams inward at the poison lancing through his body and suddenly it lurches up out of his mouth and nose in a black, tarry stream.

Clarity rings like a glass bell.

Cason stands. Head no longer burning.

He hears Alison’s voice, now—small, but real. Not in his head.

“Cason...”

He runs. Ducking branches. Leaping roots. Tearing through coils and tangles of pricker bush. Ahead, two of the shadow-beasts gather, but when they see him coming they yelp and whine and flee in opposite directions.

A sign to his left, hanging from a twisting branch. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY:
It is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the Installation Commander
. Next to it, a desk ripped almost in half by a boulder.

“Cason!”

Her voice—calling through the woods.
Echo, echo, echo.

He finds what might be a deer path. Or, at least, the path that the beasts wander—a muddy rut carved through the forest floor. His feet pound, pinwheeling out of control, boots almost slipping time and again on the greasy earth—

The path turns inward, and inward again, tighter and tighter, a terrible spiral—

Another sign. A nuclear trefoil.

A water fountain.

A stone frieze of the Antlered God.

I’m traveling in circles.

Cason leaps the path, runs straight toward the voice without care for the obstacles in his way. Cracked boulder, fallen tree, a rocky furrow—

A broken desk. An AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign.

He growls. Kicks the desk. His boot
gongs
against the metal.

Alison’s voice—indistinct, this time, a cry of pain—

He feels the pain. He feels her out there.

And that’s the secret. Isn’t it? This forest. He’s part of it. Somehow. Or it’s part of him. He reaches down, pulls a clod of earth, and again the awareness rises inside him, like a blush of food coloring inside a glass of water. He can undercut the maze. He can
cheat
.

He feels her out there.

Cason closes his eyes and walks forward.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The Root Cage

H
IS HEART BREAKS
and reforms all in a single moment: there stands Alison. Contained within the exposed roots of a tree, the twisted bark tendrils forming the bars of her cage. The tree itself is a blasted dead thing, rising into the forest ceiling, the bark stripped away and bitten into as if lightning has clawed its way through. The ground inside the cage is an ankle-deep pool of brackish, dirt-flecked water.

Alison is beaten and bloodied—eyes ringed in puffy purple bruises, capillaries burst in her eyes and her cheeks, bottom lip split, the chin crusted with black blood. Someone hurt her, and when he sees that he wants to find whoever that is and break their bones inch by inch until their skin is just a sack for a shattered skeleton.

But then she smiles and it washes away the anger. Like an antiseptic poured on a wound to clean away the infection.

“Al,” he says, almost crying. Cason drops the bag he’s been carrying, slams himself up against the root cage. He reaches through, touches her hand—she pulls herself toward him and touches her forehead to his.

“I... I don’t know how long I’ve been here,” she says. “It feels like forever.”

“I’ll get you out of here.” He draws a deep breath. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” She blinks back tears. “Someone brought me here and... please get me out. Please.”

He grabs at the roots, pulls with all his might. Agony assails the muscles of his arms, his back, his hips and legs—and still the roots remain.

Again, it strikes him, the realization coming faster than before.

You control this place.

The roots are just part of the forest
.

He calms his heart, stills the flutter inside his chest and gut. Zeroes out any of the noise in his mind as he leans up against the cage, feels the craggy dry bark scraping the calluses on his palm and fingers, feels the faint throb of life still living inside this tree.

Then he grabs that tiny pulse and pulls it like a fishing rod.

The bark cracks, splits—

And two of the tendrils pull free of the earth, dirt raining from fine roots at the base. Then those two tendrils curl up into tight spirals, opening the way for Alison’s escape. She gasps, weeping—

Cason feels her wrap her arms around him. It all feels right.

But something smells wrong. Literally. A stink crawls into his nose.

The smell of smoke and burning. Lit match-tips. Charred leaves and ashen bog.

There’s a flash of light—

Cut to his retinas, imprinting a silhouette on the backs of his eyes—

Cason is thrown backward, into the root cage.

The tendrils drop, uncurling and thrusting down deep into the earth.

Alison no longer stands outside the cage.

Instead: it’s a man. Tall, lean, bare-chested, the chest laced with a network of dark scars. Head a mane of salt-and-pepper hair. At a distance he looks older, but his skin is smoother than plastic. Untouched, unmarred. No lines at all.

Cason’s seen him. In his dream. On the glass throne.

The man grins. Cinches up a pair of dirty jeans. Dries his toes on the mossy ground.

“Freedom,” the man says, sucking air between his teeth. He stretches out his arms, spins around in a giddy circle. “Sweet, glorious freedom. I have to tell you, that cage? Not pleasant. I don’t recommend it. And yet—there you are. You’ll see. Sometimes, these bugs come? Chew your skin off? And then other times, it rains, but the rain—you can’t drink it. You’re thirsty, so you’ll try, but it’s bitter as anything and it’ll strip the meat right from your throat-hole.” The man waves a hand. “Ooh, sorry. I’m over here ruining all the good surprises.”

Cason stands. Dusts himself off. “I don’t know who you are, but you just made one hell of a mistake.”

“Hell of a mistake. That’s funny.”

“This forest is mine.”

“Is it, now?”

“That’s how I found you. Because I control this place.”

Cason stalks forward. Puts his hands on the roots. Feels for that pulse and again pulls it taut.

The roots don’t move. Not a quiver. Nary a tremble nor a twitch.

He growls, tries again—reaches deeper, feels his eyes rolling back in his head—

Nothing.

“Now, think about it,” the man says. “What kind of cage would it be if the person inside could get out? You
had
the key. You were the keykeeper, one might say. But not anymore, Cason. This cage is built right. I should know. I’ve been in it for...” He checks his wrist, where no watch exists. “About fifty years, now? Feels like an eternity. And I should know eternity.”

“Who are you?”

The man grins ear-to-ear. “Shoot, you know me, hoss. I’m the Devil. Satan. Lucifer. Sammael, the Thorn of God. But you might want to call me...” He lets that dramatic pause hang in the air like a sword dangling from a tiny string. “
Daddy
.”

The Devil brays with laughter.

T
UNDU SITS.

It’s been about five hours now.

He sits there in the Dodge, drumming his fingers. He wants to listen to the radio, but doesn’t want to burn out the battery. Thing is, it’s quiet out here. Freaky quiet. It’s not like the city. The city is—well, the city
is
noise. Honking, tires, construction work, yelling, laughing, crying, music. Even if you turned all that off there’d still be the sound of the city itself: the wall of white noise. In the ground, in the buildings. The hum of every traffic light, the thrum of subways and sewer gases.

Out here, though, it’s dead still, and that drives Tundu crazy. Makes him feel itchy, like he’s got ants between his ears.

His mind wanders into bad spaces. Spaces where he feels worry and fear over this new world he’s discovered: a world of beings well above the station of man. It makes him feel small, and it makes him worry about his family. He wanted to have kids someday of his own, too—his nieces and nephews are a real pain in the ass, sure, but he still wanted to have a couple himself, raise them up
right
. Now he’s not so sure. What would it be to bring kids into a world like this? A world where he knows that the nightmares really exist?

It’s then he hears a sound.

A scuff of a shoe.

Then—

At the window. A face. Lidless eyes, lipless mouth.

Frank.

He waves, waggling his bright red lobster fingers, and then mimes rolling a window down. Nobody ‘rolls’ them down anymore, but the gesture is universal. Tundu complies.

“What the hell, Frank?” Tundu asks. “How’d you get here?”