Run the Day (12 page)

We finally ended up in some kind of junction area, the pipe emptying out into a great whirling pool of sewage in the center of a large room. The whirlpool was loud, I couldn't hear Hack or Swift behind me anymore, and my candle's light guttered feebly before giving up all together. The only light left came from the twin blue spotlights of Hack's eyes as he swiveled his head around the chamber and the dimly glowing ancient script spread randomly across the walls.

"You see anything?" I asked.

"Yeah there's a door just across the way, looks open," Hack said.

He stared and pointed his eyes straight across the chamber, revealing the door in question. It was set into brick work that looked old, really damn old, faded and crumbling, probably the first generation of sewer in the city. Framed by thick steel was the rectangular slab of the door itself, made of a flat grey metal with a heavy-duty wheel and latch in the center. It was currently slightly ajar, revealing a sliver of black behind it.

Swift took the lead and edged around the walkway to the door. He peeked in, pushed the door open, and disappeared inside. Hack went in after him and lit up the situation before I followed. It looked like the small room used to be a maintenance closet; shelves of rotted and dusty tools and cabinets lined the walls. The rear wall was raw stone, the naked earth the tunnel itself was running through, and it had another, smaller, roughly hewn tunnel cutting into it.

"A tunnel that leads, shockingly, to another tunnel. That's original. Hack stick your head in there, tell me what you see." I gave Hack a gentle shove in the direction of the dark and totally not creepy tunnel.

"You go stick your head in it."

I was about to say something clever when a noise came from the hole, a scraping and wheezing. Hack moved closer and looked down the tunnel, illuminating the outline of a figure. It was a misshapen lump on the ground, inching itself forward. It carried with it a terrible stench like a weaponized version of the sewer's own stink, concentrated and thick. There was a heaviness to it, and a hint of burning. It came into the light, lifting its head, and I recognized the pale, lumpy creature.

Flesh-Thing.

"Dear god what happened to it?" Swift said.

Its head wobbled around unsteadily on its neck, and where its eyes used to be were now two burned out holes that still had wisps of smoke curling out of them. Flesh-Thing's mouth was opened inhumanly wide in a soundless scream as it continued to drag itself closer to us. It was pathetic, really. And infuriating. Whoever got here before us ruined any chance we had of finding the damn Libro Nihil.

"Should just put the damn thing out of its misery," I said and stormed over to where Flesh-Thing was making its way across the dirt, like a pale and lumpy worm.

When I got closer, I began to notice a number of wounds on its body, angry burns scorched across its skin that looked like something had tried to burn its way out. I was only a few feet away when it turned its blind head straight at me and made a noise that started as a choking rasp before escalating into a tea-kettle scream that bounced around the tunnel walls.

"God-Spear!"

I reeled back and almost collapsed when my wonky hip tried to give in. I caught myself, and looked to see Flesh-Thing scrabbling across the dirt and trying to dig itself into the stone of the wall. It was terrified. Hack locked his eyes on it, framing it against the wall in blue light, and Swift went forward with a disgusted look on his face to make a grab at it.

"The God-Spear rises; it seeks the heart of the Sleeper! The Neverborn dethroned!" Flesh-Thing continued to scream even when Swift managed to wrestle it into a chokehold.

"What does a guy have to do for a straight answer around here?" Anger and frustration combined to lend me a kind of bravery, and I hauled off and punched Flesh-Thing square in its disfigured face.

It went limp, deflated and sagged in Swift's arms. I know I didn't hit it that hard; it must have been in even worse shape than I thought. Then it lifted its head and turned two empty, black pits on me.

"See," Flesh-Thing said in a dry whisper.

The word hit like a cinder block to the face and reality caved in on itself. Flesh-Thing's eyes and the wounds covering its body began to smolder and smoke and Swift dropped it to the ground where it curled in on itself and began to blacken. I hardly noticed the charnel stink that rose up from it; I was too busy trying to hold the bursting pieces of my skull together as that word exploded inside of it. Memories that weren't mine flashed behind my eyes, strobing one after the other and burning into my brain like shadows burned onto walls after a nuclear explosion.

I was in Flesh-Thing's head.

No, it was in mine. It had a name once, a real name, so long ago that the world had forgotten it even existed. Knows-Secrets. That was it...That was his name. He was ancient, beyond ancient, thousands and thousands of years an immeasurable weight. The things he knew, the things that were whirling around my mind, it would've been easy to get lost and disappear in them. He was the bearer of a curse, one that he put upon himself as…penance?

I saw images of a large group of people, familiar. Friends and family, my tribe. I'd led them to the valley that was paradise, following the Sleeper's whispers. I saw those same people, their bodies now broken and twisted and flayed, stacked like wood. Myself, I mean Knows-Secrets, standing at the center of the massacre laughing, screaming, crying. He created a terrible curse that tied his life force to the Sleeper itself to grant him a twisted kind of immortality, to give him the time to have his revenge. It was the curse that twisted his mind and body and stole away his magic. All his will and power went to controlling the curse, even tenuously.

The scenes zoomed forward like an insane time-lapsed video, years turned to decades turned to centuries and long millennia. Sights, thoughts, and feelings kept coming, cramming into my head.

And then it stopped.

I was looking at a scene that was oddly familiar; it finally dawned on me I was looking at Abel Grannok's farm. It was night, and Grannok was outside speaking with Knows-Secrets.

"You stole Devlin's book? He'll skin you alive," Grannok said in a hushed voice.

"Not if you use it. Become more powerful than Devlin, destroy him. He took away your family's land, you could take it back." Knows-Secrets passed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle over to Grannok.

Grannok held the little package, running his hands over it. He looked like a starving man who'd just been handed a free pass to a buffet. He looked about nervously, as if someone were watching them, and then turned back to Knows-Secrets with grim determination on his face.

"I'll do it."

Time shot forward again and I was in the middle of an underground cavern. Light came from patches of mold and fungus that clung to the walls and cast a weak, sickly green glow. In my hands, Knows-Secrets' hands, was a tiny book. It was about the size of a pocket bible and had a simple, tattered, black leather cover. The Libro Nihil, so much power inside such a little thing. And then the whole world turned into pain. Burning, searing, relentless heat slammed into me and stars flared before my eyes. It happened again, and again, and again. Screaming, Knows-Secrets was screaming. We were screaming. The pain stretched on forever, and through it rose a blurry face.

"Don't worry, it'll stop hurting soon. I'll be taking the book now," the face said. It was becoming clearer, I started to make out features, a feeling of absolute dread taking hold of me when it spoke again and I recognized it, "I've been waiting a long, long time for this."

And then Hack was standing over me and shaking me like a rag doll. He was yelling my name over and over, and he looked scared. Someone was screaming. I was screaming, and must have been for a while because my throat felt like I'd just got done gargling sand. I was lying on the ground; I could still feel the memory of the vicious beating Knows-Secrets had been handed as if it had been done to me. The attacker's face, his voice, solidified in my mind and I felt like screaming all over again.

"Damn it Tommy, snap out of it," Hack said loudly and hauled a hand back, about to slap me.

"Stop, wait, I'm…its okay. I'm okay." I feebly tried to push him away but just didn't have the strength for it, so I let him haul me up to my feet. The whole world spun around, and memories that weren't mine bounced around inside my head. It took a while for them to recede into a haze of static and background noise.

"What was that all about?" Swift asked.

He was still standing next to the charred remains of the creature formerly known as Flesh-Thing, and before that Knows-Secrets. It wasn't even recognizable as anything remotely human anymore; it had been consumed by a fire that burned it from the inside out.

"Answers. Lots and lots of answers. Finally. Knows…Flesh-Thing was never the enemy. He spent his entire miserable life trying to find a way to destroy the Sleeper, and he found it when he got the book. Devlin's book," I said.

Swift and Hack traded looks of shock and disbelief.

"Yeah well that's not nearly the most ridiculous or freakishly terrifying part. I know who took the book," I said. I'd been trying to resolve it, somehow, but there was no way around it.

It was enough to make me want to break down into a full-blown panic attack.

"Well damn it boy, who the hell is it? Who has the book?" Hack said.

"My great-grandfather," I almost choked on the words and they left a taste of bile in my mouth, "Henry."

Chapter Twelve

"That's insane, not to mention impossible. Henry's been dead for…for a damn long time," Hack said, scowling.

"Shocking news, I wasn't aware," I snapped.

My brain was still refusing to process what I had seen in Flesh-Thing's memories.

"You're completely sure that's what you saw?" Swift spoke to me slowly, like he was talking someone away from a ledge.

I glared at him. If I didn't already know it would be like hitting a brick wall bare-handed, I would've punched him. It wouldn't help anything, but it might make me feel better. I looked over at the blackened husk of Flesh-Thing again and for just a moment felt a twinge of sympathy for the creature. Thousands of years it spent trying to make up for a terrible, terrible mistake all for nothing. Thousands of years of existence, only to have it abruptly ended in a moment of blazing agony.

"We have to move. Even if what I saw was just some Other bastard, no offense, wearing my great-grandfather's face, they have the book and I'm pretty sure they know how to use it." I started making my way out of the tunnel when a sudden random thought slammed into my grey matter. I spun and looked at Hack, "God-Spear."

"Say what?"

"God-Spear. Flesh-Thing kept saying it."

"Along with a lot of other madness, if I remember right."

"But the God-Spear, he was terrified of it. I think…don't quote me on this but, I think he was talking about Henry, or Henry's doppelganger." My brain was moving a hundred miles a minute. Things were trying to click together. "When I saw it speaking to Grannok, it said the God-Spear was coming and the ritual had to be done. That was right before you and Henry showed up. Just now it was screaming about the God-Spear, right after it got the living hell beaten out of it."

"That makes a kind of sense," Swift said from somewhere back down the tunnel, "But if your great-grandfather is the God-Spear, what's a Neverborn?"

"A what now?"

"Neverborn. Flesh-Thing said something about a Neverborn."

"Ah. Yes, Neverborn," I nodded sagely, "I have no clue."

Son of a bitch.

Figure one thing out, the world goes and sees how many other things it can throw at you to try and ruin your day. One thing was for certain, I was going to have to break out old Henry's journals. He was a prolific observer of the Others; he had compiled multiple volumes on all the different kinds he had encountered over his illustrious career. And, the more I thought about it, the more Neverborn stuck out in my mind. I'd seen it somewhere before.