The Big Reap (6 page)

“Lilith found me at the cemetery, same as you, so she knows that I'm in Jolly Old, but I didn't exactly have time to file a flight plan with her before your goon – excuse me,
driver
– absconded with me.”

At the mention of Lilith's name Magnusson started, but whatever emotion just passed through him, his hodgepodge features were inscrutable. “That is reassuring to hear,” he said. “For it would not do to have her waiting at the gates, once I take my leave of you this night. It's shame enough I had to sacrifice my sanctuary just to neutralize the threat you pose, the last thing I need is to tussle with the likes of
her
.”

At the implied threat behind his words, I tensed. Fear, cold and slithering, coiled itself around my stomach. “You must know I can't be killed,” I told him. “If I were, I'd be reseeded somewhere else.”

“Fear not, Collector, I've no intention of killing you. I simply chose to remove you from the field of play.”

That's when it occurred to me. “The bed…” I said.

“…is yours, of course. And I do hope you find it to your liking. You'll be sleeping in it for centuries to come.”

“The hell I will.”

“Oh, I fear you haven't any choice. And Samuel?”

“Yeah?”

“You really should have accepted my offer of tea.”

And that is when the patchwork man attacked.

 

3.

 

Look, I'm no idiot. This gig of mine, as awful as it is, comes with its share of downtime, much of it passed surfing cable in fleabag motels, or thumbing through whatever tacky airport thriller happens to grace my meat-suit's nightstand. So sure, I'm well aware when a creepy-ass mad scientist transports you to his secret lair unblindfolded and then lays in on the mustache-twirling monologue, you oughta figure your day's about to take a turn for the shark-mounted death-ray. But what I
didn't
expect from this decrepit sack of patchwork skin and bone was that he'd try to take me on himself. Nor did I have the faintest inkling the freaky son of a bitch would be more than equal to the task.

When Magnusson first began to rise from his wheelchair, my brain couldn't make a lick of sense of it. Then his lap-blanket fell away, and my confusion and mounting fear were replaced by revulsion. What I'd taken for spindly old-man legs beneath the woven blanket were in fact the front-most two of four ropy, mismatched arms, which angled elbows-up away from his withered trunk in such a way the knot of mottled scar tissue at their join where his junk should've been was visible as his robe slipped open. The two rear arms, which had been hidden under his robe, folded beneath him, and then pressed palm-down on the wheelchair's seat, lifting him upward. As I watched, they first one and then the other moved from the leather seat to the wheelchair's armrests like a gymnast gripping pommels. I had just long enough to think that suddenly the flurry of activity I'd half-glimpsed through the plastic sheeting on my way in made a lot more sense, when this monster rendered in stolen flesh and bone launched himself at me.

The wheelchair shot backward, slammed into a set of shelves, glass shattering and noxious smells. Magnusson vaulted over the desk, his two proper arms extended toward me as if to throttle me, the palms of his two front leg-hands slapping the mahogany to maintain his momentum, and spilling the desk's contents across the pool tiles. His silk smoking jacket trailed behind him like a paisley cape, its belt tie flailing open on either side. The gas lantern hit the tiles with a wind-chime crash, its fuel igniting as it splashed across the floor and scattered papers and casting long, flickering shadows through the vast, empty space – a storybook hell made real.

I had no time to react. The club chair tipped over backward as he slammed into me – his one dark, beefy proper hand on my throat, pinning me in place; the two hands on his forelegs gripping white-knuckled the leather of the chair wings; his two hind-leg hands digging into my knees. The naked join of his four lower limbs was scant inches above me, scarred and filthy and reeking like an open sewer. With his one withered hand, he reached into an interior pocket of the smoking jacket and withdrew an old, glass syringe filled with a sickly amber liquid, cloudy and flocculent. Attached to the syringe was a heavy-gauge needle three inches long.

I clawed and scratched at the old man's face. Skin sloughed off in patches beneath my fingers, revealing yellow adipose tissue like fresh-plucked chicken and glistening cords of blood-red muscle streaked with purple. Its scent hit my nostrils, earthy and animal and tinged faintly with rot, and the loosed scraps fluttered black and withered to the ground, aging decades in the seconds after they were set free from this monster's horrid form. But the bastard just laughed, and removed the protective sheath from the needle with his crooked, gray-black teeth. Vision growing spotty, I couldn't help but note how long and sharp those teeth were, now that his cracked, parchment-colored lips were pulled back to display them in all their glory. Like an animal's I realized – or maybe several animals'.

A mouth full of stolen canines.

“Do you see now how little chance you stand against me? You who cling to your petty human worldview, your myopic human sense of what is possible?”

But I didn't see. My eyes were clenched tight in concentration. My consciousness probing. Seeking. Reaching for another meat-suit.

I brushed against Magnusson's own consciousness, but recoiled as soon as I made contact. It was too foreign, too alien, too goddamn corrupted for me to work with. I'd barely grazed him, and I hope to God he didn't notice, but God ain't one to listen to me, I guess, because Magnusson roared in sudden rage and backhanded me twice in rapid succession.

Made sense. He had backhands to spare.

I reached my mind toward Gareth's next. When I touched him, I realized the Welshman was frightened. I found him huddled, shaking in the far corner of the plastic-sheeted room, a toppled tray of bloodied surgical equipment scattered all around. The stainless steel mortuary slab was thankfully above his eye level, and harsh white light from the surgical light above cast a corona all around it, so my hazy, impressionistic remote-view afforded me blissfully little detail of its viscera-draped surface. But I saw one bare leg, female, dangling off the nearest edge. The dead woman's toes were painted a glossy coral pink, and her calf was tanned and shapely. Well, the bit of it that was still whole. There was a scalpel-slice below her knee the circumference of her leg, and a perpendicular cut proceeding halfway down her shin. The skin below her knee was folded down over itself like an unzipped leather boot. Fluids dripped from the corners created by the vertical slice onto the floor, the tap-tap-tap echoing dully in the emptiness.

I extended my consciousness toward him, the seconds stretching as I myself stretched across the hollow Nothingness between my waning vessel and the promise of a new one. Mere seconds passed as I thrashed beneath the patchwork madman's grasp, but the flood of images that struck me painted a picture of a lifetime. A simple man, his mind laid bare before me on account of countless violations on the part of his sadistic employer, his whole world shattered by all that he had seen and felt and, yes, been forced to do, as if the front door to his mind had been ripped off its hinges, the path to it worn shiny from constant use – from heavy things both dragged in and removed.

You know what's funny? We all have thoughts, even the stupidest of us. Reams of them, all day long, from sunup to sundown. And yet most folks have no idea how those thoughts are structured, or what makes them tick. They're not some kind of mental home movie, a series of vignettes that traipse from A to B to C with a handy-dandy voiceover narration making sense of the whole thing. They're more like water droplets scattered across a spider web after a spring rain; little pockets of experience, caught at random it seems, each a lens through which distorted images of the world
as we see it
can be viewed, but never,
ever
as it truly is. Those moments that aren't captured by memory's web speak to character every bit as much as are the ones that stick, and the way they're organized is dictated by the many-eyed wooly beast that guards the keep – our basest survival instinct, our truest and most horrible self. Each mind's a pattern, a thousand strands of silk joined in one purpose. Some read as easy as the funny pages. Others read like Joyce – constellations within constellations, thoughts within thoughts within thoughts. And others still are like trying to read a Braille transcript of a bad translation of a foreign lunatic's street-corner rants with your stockinged feet.

Lucky for me, this guy was of the funny-page persuasion, the thread of his life easily unwound. Unfortunately for the both of us, that's where his relationship with funny ended.

I caught a fleeting glimpse of a shoddy housing estate in Cardiff; a single mother – pretty once – wasting away to nothing, as her omnipresent cigarettes were replaced in Gareth's memories by a chipped, green-painted oxygen tank, the narrow tubes too small and delicate in his mind to entrust with so vital a task as conveying her life's breath; a sparsely attended funeral, his heart cold and gray beneath a sky of brilliant blue; a youth spent in and out of juvenile detention centers, his anger both uncontrollable and preferable to his crushing sadness; a boxing gym heavy with the scent of liniment and sweat socks, a heart once more full of hope; the doctor's hand atop his shoulder as he explained how the random squiggles on the CT meant he'd never fight again; and a kindly old man behind the wheel of a stunning '65 Bentley, asking the weeping giant sitting on the chill stone curb if he might be interested in an exciting employment opportunity. And then horrors, half-glimpsed by me before Gareth pushed them aside. Never did he think the old man's offer would come to this, to a young woman, so beautiful and so vibrant – her verbena-scented auburn curls so much like his mother's own – lying dead and mangled on a slab beside him, just another workday mess to be carried to the curb.

The meat-suit I wished to leave was losing consciousness. Copper on my tongue, spots in my eyes, a tinny sound like a corded phone left off its hook in an adjacent room echoing in my ears. Magnusson's needle plunged into my neck. I heaved with all I had toward Gareth.

Magnusson sensed what I was doing – sensed, or guessed. He stretched his mind toward the Welshman's shattered one as well. He was faster than I, and managed Gareth's meager psychic locks with the ease of one maneuvering one's own living room with the lights off. All while I fumbled and struggled to gain hold. But I felt first one arm twitch, and then another, and felt the bile rise in Gareth's throat as his body tried to cast me out. It happens every time my kind possesses a new vessel – more or less the only thing
The Exorcist
managed to get right. The body's way of trying to expel that which does not belong, not that it ever does a lick of good. I thought that meant that I stood a chance, that I might yet best Magnusson as we struggled for control.

I was wrong. I never stood a chance.

Because Magnusson didn't need complete control. Couldn't even use it if he did manage to get it. As he himself had told me, “We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence – and even then, only temporarily.”

But what he could do, I discovered, was plant a seed.

A kernel.

A single, irresistible suggestion.

I felt it bubble up from the depths of the Welshman's psyche as if the thought were his own. But the malice behind the thought was unmistakable.

Through Gareth's mind's eye, I saw a gun – his gun. Not as a threat, or a defensive weapon, but as a choice, a cure, a salve to soothe his aching soul.

I saw it through his mind's eye as salvation.

And from the sudden giddy hope that surged in Gareth's breast, it was clear he saw it that way too.

I pulled back in time, but only barely. In time to hear the bullet-blast tear through the cavernous room, rather than feel it blow off the Welshman's skull. I clenched back tears, at the senseless loss of life, at the lingering notion implanted by Magnusson (but no less achingly authentic-feeling for it) that it was the only answer, the truest answer. A righteous fuck-you ending to so piteous a life.

That's when I decided I was going to make this motherfucker pay.

Magnusson's dead weight sagged atop me, the needle still buried in my neck. Limbs on top of limbs on top of limbs. I heard him grunt with exertion, felt his fingers scrabble ineffectually at the syringe plunger like a drunk too far gone to operate his keys. Saw by the flicker of the firelight that his lids were heavy, his mismatched eyes all whites. Turns out his powers of persuasion didn't come without a price.

I heaved him off of me. He caught himself before his face met tile, one hand a weak protest against gravity, propping him up. He shook his head, and forced himself onto his hands and knees – although in his case, it was hands and elbows. I heard a snarl build in his throat, saw him eye me with a blinding fury as he gathered to pounce at me once more, his eyes twin suns, radiating malevolence so palpable it stung my cheeks. They blistered and peeled beneath his gaze, and my eyes burn-itched like I'd just peeked at an eclipse, which is when I realized it wasn't anger but juju his baleful glare was sending my way. He was channeling the power of the building flames around us.

Figured I ought to stop him. Thought a mirror would make for some quality playground comeuppance of the rubber-and-glue variety. But I didn't see any goddamn mirror, and I was running out of time. My meat-suit's clothes were smoking, and starting to singe at the edges.