The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (37 page)

“If you’re a Kingsman, you’re a stupid one.”
Stewwwwped one.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

He laid the flat of the razor against the hole in my shoulder and a lance of hot iron rocketed down my arm. The room pixelated for an instant.

“You must’ve taught I was a dumbass, boy,” he said, and came around in front of me. He braced his hands on the chair’s arms and tapped the blade on my face.

Brains was not a pretty man. He was balding on top, with long greasy wrestler hair and a face like Pete Postlethwaite, thuggish-thick, with beady, twitchy eyes. “You mighta took out me friends, but tey were just kids, like you. Tey ain’t been playin ta game as long as I have.”

The man gave my face a couple of light slaps and smiled. “You doon’t remember me, do you? I remember you.”

“What?”

He pointed to a fiddle lying on a table in the corner.

“Does that jog your memory, ya greasy miser?”

The fiddler from Salt Point that asked me for money at the bazaar. He sucked the drool out of the corner of his mouth and shook something in my face. It was the leather satchel.

“At first, after I knocked your ass out with that rock where I was sittin on the roof, when you came back to loot Mr. Rennell, I was like,
Ain’t no way this dumb shit is a gunslinger,
but then I saw this bag, and look what I found in it!” Brains plunged his hand into the satchel and shook it off onto the floor.

In his hand was the weird gray fungus, which he jammed against my upper lip. I expected a musty smell, but all I could catch was the penny-scent of my own blood.

“If you ain’t a Kingsman, what are you doing with the Acolouthis?” he asked.

He drew the twisted thing under his own nose, taking in the aroma of it like a fine Cuban cigar. It looked like a mummified penis, a stretched and withered finger with a knob on the end.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said, truthfully. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a shitty liar?” he asked, and punched me in the stomach. I bellowed in his face, my lungs emptying of air.

I answered him with a miserable grunt.
“Yeaaaaahhhhnnnnnn.”

He made a face and laughed. “Smells like that tin o ruint food didn’t agree with you, did it?”

All I could do was fight to breathe, sweat loosening the blood on my forehead. It trickled down my face. I tried to spit on him, but all I could do was a weak
pfuh
that misted my bare chest with red. I glared at him, trying to brush off the burning knot in my guts. I wanted to puke again, but there was nothing left in me.

“I’ve never had any of this,” said the fiddler. “The slingers and the Grievers keep it pretty locked up. Tey all say it’s too dangerous for most people. That only a few people have the intestinal farditude that it takes to survive eatin it. Is tat true?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Actually, it’s a funny ting. I might believe you. I don’t tink yer a Kingsman gunslinger tall. You’re just some stupid spoilt kid. I kinda want to see what I can get out of yer parents for ye. How old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty.”

“Tearty yares? Are ye serious? You look twenteh, at t’most.”

“I hear that a lot.”

“Is tat so? Clean livin, I guess. Why, I ain’t got but a few yares on ye.”

“Clean living, yes. My body is a temple—that’s why I leave my shoes on the outside.”

The fiddler threw his head back and laughed at that, great cawing laughs that filled the room.

“My parents are dead, anyway,” I said, once his braying had tapered off. It was only half the truth, of course, but hopefully enough to put him off of that idea, at least. “So that’s a no-go.”

“A
no-go,”
said Brains. “Never haerd that befare. I like it. Do you mind if I steal it?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Very kind of ye. I like to expand my vocabulary when I can.”

“Glad I could help,” I said, and spat in his face.

He flinched, closed his eyes, was completely unprepared for it. I’d saved it up while he was talking to me, rolled a blob of saliva at the tip of my tongue and blew it out like a sneeze, shotgunned it all over him in a fine mist.

The fiddler stepped off of my lap and wiped the moisture out of his rheumy eyes, spat my saliva on the floor, and punched me in the jaw as hard as he could. My head dipped down and whipped backwards at the same time. I developed a headache, a dull, twisting agony at the base of my skull.

Surprisingly, my jawbone didn’t break. Must’ve been all the milk I drank growing up. The room swam for a moment, a sea of crawling stars.

He held up the Acolouthis.

“You look like a haingry man,” he said, shaking it. He snapped off the fungal cap and held it in his thumb and forefinger like a numismatist inspecting a silver dollar. “I bet yer starvin, aintcha? After pukin up that tin a soup, I bet yer just cavin in at the middle! I bet your arsehole is rubbin a sore on the back o yer navel! Well,
guess what!”

I looked away from him, but he grabbed my aching jaw and whipped my head back around.

“I’m gonna feed you dinner,” he said, and tried to open my mouth like a purse, using my chin and forehead as handles. That made it hard to put the cap against my lips, so he went around behind me and tried to brace my forehead with his armpit and hold my head like a football. He smelled like pickles.

“My treat. I want to see what tis ting does to a man befare I make a decision. Do I want to try it myself and maybe die? Or do I wanna sell it?”

I kept my mouth shut, even as he pulled my right eyebrow up with the heel of his hand, holding my eye open. His breath was the fetid, shitty, cesspool swampiness of a man who’d never brushed his teeth. Ever.

He came back around in front of me, took out his revolver, and put the barrel against my temple.

“Eat it, shit-arse!”
he screamed, flinging spittle.
“Eat it or I’ll cheese yer thinkin-meat!”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed at that like I used to laugh at
Full Metal Jacket
, but I did it through clenched teeth.

The fiddler aimed his pistol straight-armed to the side and fired all seven cartridges into the wall. One of them hit the mirror and shattered it all to pieces.

My ears were ringing when he finally pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. He showed me the gun like he was giving me the A-OK sign, and then put the piping-hot muzzle against the filthy, ragged hole in my shoulder. The nerves in my arm instantly transformed into concertina-wire being dragged through my veins.

The pain sent me into an atavistic, reptilian place I had no idea existed, a raw and crazy corner of my head where the air was purple and up was wet. A night sky of stars exploded in my eyes. I lost myself, reared my head back, and loosed a howl from the depths of everything I had ever been.

The fiddler dropped the Acolouthis cap onto my tongue, tossed the pistol, and clamped my jaw shut.

Walkin on the Moon

I
T WASN’T THAT BAD, ACTUALLY
—a bit like having a fishing bobber in my mouth, a bland little ball. The fiddler gazed into my eyes expectantly, like an idiotic lover. I don’t know what he wanted.

Did he think I was going to start convulsing underneath him? Explode out of my restraints and start whirling around the room like the Tazmanian Devil, or blow the chair to pieces like Popeye?

“Chew it,” he said. I glared at him over the edge of his hand. “Chew it! Swallow it!”

I shook my head, thought about biting him, but then I remembered the extra bullets in his belt. He raised a hand and threatened to slap me in my wound, eliciting a preparatory wince. The memory of the pain of being burned was, of course, still fresh in my mind, so I obeyed without delay.

It was very fibrous, like chewing a styrofoam ball full of hair. Once I started, the bitterness came out, mixed with the saliva, trickled down my throat. I choked a bit, coughed through my nose. My sinuses burned.

He waited until I’d given it a good work-over, then told me to swallow it.

“Hmm-mmph,” I said, shaking my head.

He answered that by putting his hand against my throat and pushing my neck against the chair, his thumb and index finger pressed deeply into the flesh under my jawbone. He was cutting off my carotid and jugular. I could feel my heart beating under his grip, and my face began to feel swollen, my eyes bulging.

“Swallow it or choke. Your choice.”

I forced it down, gagging at the coppery, acrid feel of the mush on the back of my tongue. He tilted my chin down so that my mouth opened and he could see inside. “Say
ahhhhhhh!”

“Ahhhhhhhgo fuck yourself.”

“You tink you’re funny, do ya?” asked the fiddler, getting off of me. He picked up the revolver and tilted the cylinder open, then started loading more rounds into it. “You’ll tink you’re hilarious once that Acolouthis kicks in. I wonder what it really does.”

“Like I told you, I have no idea. I’m as ignorant as you are. Well—not
quite
as ignorant as you, that’d be a feat.”

He patted me on the wound with the back of his hand, a friendly gesture that would have been genial in more positive circumstance. A shock of pain rippled from my deltoid.

“I guess we’ll just see what happens,” he said, smiling. “I hear tat some of the people tat take t’Sacrament, tey come back from the desert with the smarts to
outwit time itself.
Too remarkable, innit?”

The concept evaded me, but I didn’t say anything, just sat and watched Brains play jaw music.

“But den some of the people tat take it, tey go out into the wilds and never come back. I hear tey go out tere and der brains just can’t take it, tey can’t handle the visions and epiphanies. Dey go mad and die, der skulls just crack open from the pressure of the madness. Tey find em out in t’dunes, bled out from t’eyes and nose, chewed up by d’animals. Annatsa looky ones.”

“Epiphany?” I asked. “That’s a nice big word from your
vo-cab-u-lary,
isn’t it?”

“Aye, I told you! I got lots of words up here,” he said, tapping his head with the end of the pistol’s barrel. The rounds inside it clicked appreciatively. “It’s too bad here in about a half an hour you’ll forget all of yours.”

He laughed uproariously at that. He slapped the cylinder back into the gun, and sat in a nearby chair. He tossed one foot up on his knee, leaned back, and tucked a hand into his armpit. The other dangled across his legs, tapping the revolver against his thigh.

Several minutes passed. My headache got worse. I sniffed and winced at the lamplight, squinting. It felt like my heart was pumping molasses.

“Do you know how long this is supposed to take?” I asked.

The fiddler didn’t say anything.

I looked up at the oil lamp on the counter and noticed something odd. Instead of softly flickering as it had been, now it seemed to be licking up from the wick in slow, tidal movements, curling up like solar prominence loops and evaporating in the glass bell. The steady hiss had become the low, muffled exhalation of a distant jet engine. It felt like staring into hell.

I cut back to Brains, and he was staring right at me.

He opened his mouth, gradually, and his eyelids slid downwards, covering his baby blues. Then a sound came out of his mouth that reminded me of the Tyrannosaurs from
Jurassic Park
, a deep, warbling-trumpeting vocalization from some Cthulean place deep in his throat that sent thrills of amazed horror through me.

“WWWWAAAAAAAA—”

His eyes slid open again. His eyeballs had been rolled back in his head while they were shut, and now they were falling back into place, great glassy orbs rivered with red veins.

The effect was an ordeal of terrific proportions.

I couldn’t handle his face. He was a living nightmare, and his weird roaring was intolerable.

My heart contracted like a fist and sent a slow wave of pressure across my body. I realized it seemed to be beating every ten seconds, a languid, tidal metronome that made my circulatory system vacillate between turgid cold and feverish emptiness.