Red Right Hand (16 page)

Diseased flesh began to run, stretching like obscene Silly Putty in Mason's fingers.

I scrambled, my feet slipping on the wet floor. I wasn't going to make it in time.

Mason's hand fell like judgment, slapping the molten tumor across Daniel's face.

“NO!”
I screamed
.

The liquefied flesh became a caul, covering Daniel from hairline to neck, blocking his mouth and nose. His hands scrabbled, clawing furrows in the thing on his face, trying to get it off. It molded like wet clay, slipping around his fingers, keeping him smothered.

I screamed in rage as my feet got traction and I started running. Mason turned toward me, smiling widely. His mouth opened, and a word fell out that I couldn't hear but made my eardrums itch like centipedes were inside my ear canals nestling against my eardrums with their trilling, frilled legs. He leapt, crashing against me and driving me to the floor again.

His hands clamped my wrists and I screamed out the only thing I could.

“Master!”

The Man in Black whirled, red right hand still swinging the black-bladed sword at the Cancer God. Chunks of living meat littered the floor, quivering and crawling at his feet. The coat swept around him, pushing them away from their host, keeping them at bay. It was tattered and torn, pieces bitten from it by mouths in the flesh it battled. As my eyes fell on it, I could hear its cries of pain inside my head. The Man in Black had whittled the Cancer God down to his height, but it still stretched around him, trying to fence him in, to capture him, lunging and grasping and biting with masticating protrusions.

Nyarlathotep paused for a blink, a moment, watching as Mason pinned my hands to the floor, his chest pressed across mine in a crushing weight. Panic rose, pounding inside my breast. The Crawling Chaos snarled, face unholy with rage. He would come for me. He would rescue me. I could feel it.

“No!” I shouted as loud as I could, twisting against Mason's grip. “Not me—save Daniel! I hold you to our bargain, Midnight Man! You keep him safe!”

His voice carried across the room even though his mouth did not move. “Damn you, Acolyte.”

“Save him first, or I won't fight! I'll die, and you'll have to finish this without me!” I meant it. He had to save Daniel.

“Fight and live, Charlotte Tristan Moore; I will keep our bargain.”

He turned, lifting the sword over his head. A roar that shook the room tore from him, and he struck the Cancer God, cleaving the mass to the tile beneath it.

That was all I saw before Mason lunged, trapping me completely underneath him.

 

26

P
ANIC RAN LIKE
wildfire inside my head. My body froze as Mason loomed over me, pressed against the length of me. He was between my legs. He was against my chest. His face was near mine. My hands were crushed in his grip against the floor.

OhGodohGodohGod …

His teeth were too white as he smiled over me, his voice hushed and intimate. “Why, hello, Charlie. I am so very happy to find you here beneath me.”

His hips ground, and I felt him against me, hard and dangerous. Things writhed against my most intimate part, squirming alien and horrible. My eyesight stuttered as my heart lurched and seized, short-circuiting with fear.

It's happening again oh God why is it happening again I can't I can't I can't …

The amulet jabbed me, trapped between us, thorns piercing my skin in snakebite-sharp pricks. It swung
as he ground himself against me. A small, dissociated corner of my brain saw the ivory thing in the center of the bramble and recognized it.

A child's jawbone.

Mason's face dropped next to mine, features shifting, rearranging themselves until it became tight, like a skin drum stretched over the bones of his skull. His eyes turned to black pits that each sank around something tiny and white, wriggling like a maggot in a grave. His breath exhaled cold, washing my face with the stale, dead smell of my grandmother's hospital room.

He thrust against me. “Do you like the gift my god has granted me? I saw you looking earlier.” He ground into me, battering my clothing. “It's much grander than what I had before. I discovered Yar Shogura when I clung to the bitter end of my human life, wasted to nothing by the cancer in my balls. Do you know what it's like to lose the part of you that makes you who you are? To have it cut off to save your miserable life and then find that this effort wasn't enough and you are going to die anyway?”

He chuckled. “I guess you do.”

I lay there, trapped.

He kept talking. “Cancer took my manhood. It almost took my life. I prayed to God to be healed.” He snarled. “That fucking asshole never answered. I had
days
left when I discovered Yar Shogura lurking in an ancient book bound in diseased skin with pages fashioned from pressed tumors. I called to
him,
and
he
answered.” Mason lunged, trying to drive me into the floor. Trying to crush my pelvis. “He replaced my worthless manhood with a piece of himself.” That thing squirmed against me.

Terror pinned me to the floor more surely than his hands on my arms.

He leaned closer, dipping his face toward mine.

“I know about you, Charlie.” His lips were stretched like worms over his teeth. They moved above mine, shiny and tight, barely an inch away from brushing against my own. “I know what happened to you all those years ago.”

The words broke through my panic, turning the boil of my thoughts to a simmer.

He knows? How does he know?

He pushed again, thrusting against me hard enough to bruise. “I know how you lay there and took it like the worthless whore you are.”

No, no, I had no choice … I wasn't conscious.

His lips touched mine. “Did you think it would ever happen again? I know you want it to.”

No.

He whispered, “Did you think you would ever be fucked by a god?”

His mouth dropped against mine, tongue worming its way into my mouth, driving, forcing, pushing its way past my teeth and my tongue. It tasted of black mold and rot, squirming inside my mouth, brushing the back of my throat. My gag reflex kicked and I choked. I couldn't breathe; pain throbbed in my jaw as my throat spasmed.

He pulled his tongue out of my mouth with a harsh jerk.

Air rushed in. I gasped around the pain and burning humiliation.

Mason purred, and it vibrated my chest. “You're a good kisser, Charlie. I think I'll have some more of that.”

My mind shut down.

The panic inside me went silent and white and empty.

My body fell limp as my mind closed up, turning into itself for safety. If I wasn't there, it couldn't happen again. I couldn't survive it happening again. I would be destroyed.

I pulled away.

My brain snatched at a word I'd heard in therapy.

Dissociation.

I was inside my body, but it had become a cave I hid in. My body wasn't part of me anymore. It was now something else but not me, something outside of me, something that could take what was about to happen while I hid from it, locked away inside.

Mason gave a sinister smile. “That's more like it. Just lie back and take it. That's what you're here for.”

The body didn't move as he pressed against it. It didn't fight as he started to push up the sweatshirt it wore, his hands sliding across its skin, moving up the rib cage.

It wasn't me.

I wasn't there.

I'd gone deep into my mindspace where I would be safe, no matter what happened to the body.

Part of me knew I wouldn't make it back this time.

I would be trapped inside my mind for the rest of my life.
That
I could survive. The body was on its own.
I
would be safe.

A noise rippled across my mindspace. It vibrated the whiteness around me.

I would be alone forever, but I would be safe.

The noise, louder, like distant thunder, rolled through again.

Safe.

The noise cracked, a lightning strike that shook the blank whiteness around me. It became a word.

It became a name.

The noise rumbled toward me. My mindspace shook under my feet.

ACOLYTE.

I turned.

I AM KEEPING OUR BARGAIN. DO THE SAME AND
FIGHT
.

My eye cracked open to the real world.

The Man in Black crouched over Daniel. The caul of diseased flesh had been ripped away and lay shivering on the floor. Daniel leaned on his elbow, gasping air into his lungs. The coat loomed over them like a shield. The Cancer God reabsorbed its pieces, growing in throbs and pulses. It lapped over the edge of the tattered coat, which cried in pain in its alien, singsong voice as it fought.

Mason had pushed my shirt and bra up to my chin. Cold air ran across my breasts. Panic bubbled at the hard ache the chill brought to my exposed nipples, but I fought it down. The doctor-priest knelt between my legs, jerking at the snap of my jeans.

Nyarlathotep's voice jolted inside my head.

Mason is the anchor. He is the key to this manifestation. As long as he is alive, we will lose this battle. Take this.

I nodded, just barely, willing myself not to fight, not yet. The Man in Black's left hand flicked out, and something long and sharp spun across the floor toward me. It skittered in a dance of reflected light.

The Aqedah.

The Knife of Abraham.

Mason's head jerked up, black-hole eyes narrowing as they flicked over to the spinning knife. It stopped. Too far for me to reach.

He chuckled and went back to pulling at my waistband.

He was a priest to an elder god. He had magick power and inhuman strength.

But in his arrogance he didn't notice that I had come back.

And I brought every ounce of rage I carried in my soul with me.

I jerked to the left, my leg coming up and over his head. It was a move I'd learned in mixed martial arts class, a way to get free from a mounted position. It only worked if your opponent was sloppy, untrained, and not paying attention. Using all the power in my leg, I drove my heel down against Mason's temple, torquing my hips, using the leverage to smash his skull into the floor.

Pushing off with my foot against his shoulder slid me almost a foot away. I rolled over and scrambled toward the knife. My feet slipped on the slick tile. I lunged.

Mason's hand closed on my ankle.

My hand closed on the knife.

His roar of anger shook me as he jerked my leg, pulling me against him. I rolled, and his hand grabbed my shirt, yanking me off the ground. I swung up in his grip, pulled against him.

His fist swung back, ready to fall on me like the hand of doom when I shoved the knife into his chest.

The blade sank deep, slicing through Mason's sternum and skin as though they were air. Dark blood bubbled out, spilling over my hand. Magick sparked and dark energy leaked from the gash in his chest. It ran in streamers of bruise-black, twittering upward, pooling against the ceiling, and rolling into wisps that pulled and thinned and dissipated into the ether. His golden perfection dulled as the dark energy left, his skin turning the color of iron. Blue eyes swam back from the black pits they had become, their eyelids fluttering as his mouth went slack.

I knelt over him as his life drained away, and I watched as he slipped, loose and limp, off the end of the ancient knife in my hand.

 

27

S
OMEONE TOUCHED MY
arm, and I jerked. I looked over and found Daniel kneeling beside me. He smiled. His hand stayed on my arm.

He said something to me that I couldn't hear, but I watched his mouth move.

I blinked at him, my eyelids shuttering down and then up again. His voice sounded muffled, hazy. The whole room sounded that way, as if it had been filled with a light fog. The gap between me and reality was still there, open and raw.

My eyes slid sideways, landing on the corpse cooling in front of me.

I fell back. Scrambled away.

Daniel looked concerned. His mouth moved again. He sounded as if he were underwater.

He didn't get it. He didn't understand. It wasn't the image, the memory, of killing Mason that clawed and
scrabbled at the inside of my skull. It wasn't his death that horrified me.

That wasn't it at all.

Back in my body, my mind had to deal with what he'd tried to do. What he'd threatened me with. What he'd almost accomplished. His hands had been on me. He'd
touched
me.

Like
they
had touched me.

The world was too bright. Everything was too close. Too sharp. Too harsh.

Too real.

Daniel reached toward me again.

I jerked away, frantically climbing to my feet.

The Man in Black finished chopping up the leftovers of the Cancer God. He walked up behind Daniel, wiping his sword clean with the end of his coat.

Daniel said my name.

I turned and ran with every ounce of strength I had left.

 

28

T
HE NIGHT WAS
as bright and clean and sharp as broken glass when I burst through the door and spilled out onto the grass. My lungs hurt as I bellowed air between sobs. A high moon swung bright and full in the velvet sky, ringed in indigo that melted into the pure dark of the void. Stars flared, uncountable eyes watching my frail humanity. Unblinking. Uncaring.

I pulled my legs to my chest and rocked. They hurt from pounding down the stairs. I hadn't been able to wait for the elevator, couldn't be trapped in a box. The pain was good. The pain was clear. The pain was in my legs, not in my head or my heart or my guts.

I still held the bloody knife. I'd tried to fling it away, but my hand had locked down, fused to the handle by a crust of blood dried into glue. Holding the back of the blade, the heavy spine thick in my fingers, I pulled it free from my grip. I wanted to throw it far and wide, to get it away from me.