Red Right Hand (10 page)

For now.

We caught up to the Man in Black at the entrance of the hospital. He stood, staring at the doorway, both hands deep in the pockets of his coat. We stopped just behind him.

I hate hospitals. I hate them with the hatred. They suck. I haven't been to one since I got out of one. Just being on the sidewalk I could feel it, on the edge of my mind. A therapist once urged me to go to a hospital, just to try and deal with my phobia. “Face your fears; you'll be stronger for it,” she used to say.

I found a new therapist.

Now I wished I had at least given her advice a chance. Already my chest felt tight, lungs stuffed with cotton like a cheap cigarette filter, hard to drag air through.

My hand clenched and unclenched. Pain twinged along the edges of the symbol cut into my palm, giving me something to focus on, something to help me stay outside my own head. I pushed away from my physical reaction and studied the waiting room on the other side of the doors. Empty.

Totally and completely empty, not one soul in sight.

Hospitals are never empty. Even at that time of night they had people. Patients, family members, nurses, orderlies, doctors all hustling and bustling, doing things and going places. The waiting rooms might not be full in the middle of the night, but they would never be empty.

The creeps climbed my spine.

“Where is everybody?” My voice shook. Just a little.

The Man in Black didn't look at me, still studying the door like a raven studying a carcass. “They have probably been taken.”

“Taken? By what?”

“By the thing we have come here hunting.”

Cryptic much?

“You don't know what we're here to stop?”

“This place is warded. That is why Ashtoreth's gift could only take us this far.” He leaned forward, tilting slightly at the waist. Dark eyes closed as he drew a long sniff through his bladed nose. He held it for a moment then snorted it out. His jaw opened, jagged shark teeth pulling apart in strings of saliva. That long, scabrous tongue rolled out between them, flopping against his chin, forked and too long. A jerk of his head lapped it up against the air.

It crackled black sparks as it brushed a barrier I couldn't see.

That tongue zipped back into his mouth like a kid's party favor. His throat worked, savoring the taste for a long moment. Dark eyes glittered when he looked down at me. “You are in for a treat tonight, Acolyte.”

I don't like the sound of that.

“What does that mean?”

He smiled but didn't answer.

Damn him.

His left hand came out of the pocket of his coat holding something. He held it out to me. “Here, Acolyte.”

It was a stick.

“What is that?”

“It is your weapon.”

I took it from him carefully, keeping my fingers away from his. The stick was twice as long as my hand and made of gnarled, rough-barked wood burned black to hard charcoal on one end. It was heavy, heavier than it looked. Heavier than it should have been.

“Ummm, am I going to be fighting leprechauns or pixies? This is a pretty dainty club.”

The Man in Black pulled his red right hand from his pocket. Reaching over, he touched the end of the stick with a skinless fingertip.

A gout of fire burst from the weapon.

Heat blasted my face, singing my eyebrows and scorching my cheeks.

I dropped the stick with a curse.

The flame guttered out as it clattered to the concrete at my feet. My face felt tight. The scent of burnt hair filled my nostrils, all I could smell.
My
burnt hair.

“What the hell!”

Amusement twitched the Man in Black's eyebrow up. “That is the fire that Prometheus stole. You should be more careful with it.”

Daniel bent and picked up the stick, holding it carefully between his fingertips. He didn't say anything, just held it out to me with a look on his face.

I waved it away. “I don't want that. You keep it.” Heat throbbed under my fingertips where they'd been singed.

“I don't think I can use it, Charlie.”

“He is right, Acolyte.”

I looked between the two of them. “Why not?”

Daniel shrugged. “I'm not magick.”

“Well, I'm not either.” I realized the thing I'd felt inside me earlier had quieted. Did it go away? Had I used it up?

“You just teleported us here from Motel Hell by wishing. If that doesn't qualify you as magick, I don't know what does.”

He had a point.

I took the stick. It wasn't warm or tingly or anything; it just felt dead and heavy in my hand. A thin curl of smoke came off the charcoal end.

Nyarlathotep looked surprised.

“What?” I asked.

“You did not argue with him.”

“He made sense.” I shrugged. “And he's not evil.”

“And you think I am?”

“Aren't you?”

“I am the Crawling Chaos. Evil is a matter of perspective.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

The Crawling Chaos simply smiled, saying nothing.

I didn't think so.

He went back to staring at the air in front of him. It was discolored where his tongue had licked, like breathing fog on a window in winter. I shuddered, the image of his tongue bouncing around my brain.

Daniel spoke up. “How are we going to get inside, Master?”

“It will take a sacrifice of pain to open a way through the wards.”

“I'll make that sacrifice for you.” He stepped up, moving closer to the Man in Black.

Grabbing his arm, I jerked him back. “What are you doing?”

He faced me, but his eyes kept jittering toward the chaos god, who now studied us as if we had done something interesting. “I can't help it. I want to do what he needs so bad. It's worse than I have ever wanted anything before. Food, sex … anything.” His eyes slid completely away from mine. His voice became strangled, like the next words hurt him to say. “Even more than I want you.”

“Do not fear, Acolyte. I will not take the sacrifice from him. He could not withstand it. There is another way.”

I turned. The Man in Black stood in the same place, his arms were wide, red right hand gleaming in the incandescent light of the entranceway. The fingers twisted, wrapping around each other as if they had too many knuckles or no knuckles at all. Watching them move made my head buzz. The tail of his coat shifted, stretching and rolling, becoming longer, long enough to curl and rise in inky tendrils of utter darkness. Its shape changed, transmuting into something with jagged curves and spiky points. A tendril rose in a corkscrew, turning as it lengthened to a needle-thin point in front of Nyarlathotep's face. He nodded once, a sharp up and down, and the needle tendril turned. It hung for a moment, a long moment, before driving itself against the discolored air.

It struck with a sharp
CRACK!
and the air splintered.

Three things happened. One, the air discolored, crackling where the coat stabbed with energy the sickly greenish color of a still-healing bruise. Two, my nose clogged with the stench of spoiled bacon cooking.

And three, my head filled with singing, a weird alien song not made by a human voice. It boomed into my mind, a choir of ill children, frantic, urgent, and desperate.

The coat screamed, and I could hear it.

My hands clamped the side of my head, but it did no good. I could still hear it, still
feel
it ringing in my ears, splinters of sound pricking the membrane of my eardrum. I watched the needle tendril spread, displacing the fogged air, pushing it wide, roiling into a bigger space. The screaming grew louder.

“Stop, you're hurting it!”

The Man in Black's voice was cold. “This is the sacrifice that must be made, Acolyte. Something must take the agony of the wards. It will not be me.”

“I'll do it then. I'll take it if you will just stop hurting the coat.” The screaming broke, crumbling into a desperate, whining mewl. A sound full of anguish and sorrow. A sound of hopelessness. I knew that sound. I'd
made
that sound. Memory rose, a physical thing moving through my body, coating my bones with lead. I knew the kind of pain it took to force those sounds from something. Fighting past it I said, “I'll be the one.”

“You cannot. You are a mere mortal. The wards would burn you to ash.”

His words were callous, uncaring.

The coat changed where it stabbed the air, morphing itself into an opening that kept widening. Curls of smoke lifted off it, and the darkness that made it quivered and shook. Inside my head I could feel the coat weeping in despair. It rang across my mind, sorrow rising up like floodwater. I knew what it felt like to be in pain so unrelenting that all you want is the grace of death, the peace that must come from giving up, lying down, ceasing to be. Pain that convinced you that whatever came on the other side of that door had to be better than what you were going through in that very moment.

Nyarlathotep's indifference cut through that, striking the chord of anger that ran through me, the chord that had been struck after that long-ago night. Rage, the deep and abiding rage that lived inside, boiled up in a conflagration. My hand lashed out, reaching for the coat to pull it free.

Daniel grabbed my arm.

“Charlie, don't. Don't make him angry.”

Angry? Make him angry?

I was so furious that Daniel's words were a buzz. Temples throbbing, blood hot in my veins, I looked at his hand on my wrist. “Let. Go.”

“Calm down. You have to be cool.”

I swung the stick at his head.

He ducked, his high-school wrestler reflexes still intact, and leaned back. His hand came off my arm. Fury boiled behind my eyes, making me headblind, only able to attack without thinking. I lunged, stick heavy in my hand, raised to swing. Daniel stepped in and wrapped his arms around me, crushing me to his chest, trapping me against him.

The anger doused cold with instant panic.

TrappedstuckcantmovecantgetfreeohgodohgodOHGOD …

I froze, my mind melting down. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't escape the feel of his face pressed against mine, the smell of man.

I drowned.

He lifted me, my feet off the ground, and my stomach sickened with the feeling of motion; panic made me blind for a moment, my sight washed black. Forever seemed to pass before he set me on my feet, his arms disappearing from around me. My knees gave out. The ground hit hard on my hip and shoulder, driving out the breath I had been holding, jarring me out of panic with sharp pain. My vision swam clear in time for me to see the Man in Black step toward us through the hole in the air his coat had made. Once he was through, the coat collapsed behind him, falling to the ground as if soaking wet. The end of it lay in tatters, long and limp around his feet.

The coat fell silent inside my head.

 

15

“W
HAT THE HELL
was that?” Daniel asked this time, yelling at the Man in Black. I sat up on the grass, still shaky from my panic attack. We were inside the wards.

“Apparently my coat and my Acolyte are forming some type of bond.”

“What does that mean?”

The Man in Black looked down. His voice was sharp, a scalpel cutting through a clenched jaw. “You forget yourself, minion.”

Daniel thrust out his chest, his hands knotted tightly into fists. “You have to stop hurting her.”

“I have to
what
?” The Man in Black's voice burned hot. “Kneel before me.”

Daniel's spine straightened with a jerk. I couldn't see his face—he stood between me and the Man in Black—but every muscle in his back quivered against his shirt. Narrowing his black eyes, the Dark God continued to stare at Daniel. Coldness seeped around
Daniel's body, brushing over me. My breath curled in white wisps of condensation as the temperature plummeted. My mouth went sour with the taste of dark magick. Daniel took the brunt of it, the focus of Nyarlathotep's attention.

I wanted to grab Daniel and scream at him to stop, just stop, before the Man in Black hurt him. I wanted to cheer him on. I wanted to give him my strength.

I wanted to kiss him for trying to protect me.

The magick rolled off the Man in Black, heavy and oppressive. Bricks stacked on a sheet of glass.

The Man in Black's hand, his red right hand, slipped out of his coat raw and glistening against the inky fabric.

The glass shattered into a million pieces.

Daniel's knees bent, slamming into the ground at the feet of the Midnight Man. His head dropped to his chest. “I am here to serve you, Master. My place is at your feet.” The words came out in a strangled whisper.

“Forget again, and I will have you flayed, salted, and hung in my bedchambers for my entertainment.”

“Yes … Master.”

The Man in Black stepped around Daniel. I scrambled to my feet so he wouldn't loom over me. My knees were still weak, but I dragged myself up. I didn't want him standing over me while I sat on the ground. Horror lay heavy in my stomach.

What are we dealing with?

“Your mind is your own again. Good. We need to seek the elder god who is here.”

I shook my head. “I'm not up for another teleporting act.”

Daniel stood. He caught my eye and shook his head. I took it as a sign to let go of what had happened to him. I didn't know what else to do about it, so I did.

For now.

“Ashtoreth's gift will not be necessary to take us there.” The Man in Black's head tilted slightly. “Now pick up the firebrand and follow me.”

I picked up the burnt stick as he turned and began walking through the empty lobby. Daniel moved beside me. As one we followed the chaos god and his trailing, tattered coat.

I had a very bad feeling in my stomach.

 

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