Devil in the Wires (28 page)

 

Chapter 72

Mortal Remains

O
nce through the doors, the smell was almost overwhelming: a sour, spoiled odor, hanging in the air, so thick it made me scared I'd swallow it, or breathe it in like a contagion, microscopic pieces rooting in my lungs like spores. I put a hand across my mouth. I fumbled for a handkerchief.

“And that,” said Woollard, “is the smell of death.”

He shone his flashlight. Shadows swung around the room. There was no natural light in here; the place was sealed, hidden. A steel table occupied the center, and a metal cabinet was pushed back against the wall. A metal sink unit stood at my elbow. I shone my own torch, caught the sink in the beam, looked closer, and then wished I hadn't.

There was water in there, one or two inches, and a clutter of tools—­not surgical tools, but kitchen and household implements: knives, scissors, a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a fork, a hacksaw. It had an oddly domestic look to it, like the washing-­up after the day's chores have been done.

Off to the side, on top of this, was something else. It took a second till I realized what it was.

A human hand.

I looked away. I said, “In there—­” and then, not wanting to, looked back.

The thing was pale. It rested on the pile of implements, almost wholly above water. A splintered stick of bone protruded from the wrist. The flesh looked puffy, soft. The index finger had been cut off at the knuckle. Perhaps this was why it seemed so small, almost like a child's hand; this, and the way the other fingers curled up in what struck me as an oddly childish, clinging gesture.

Angel pressed against me. I think without her, I'd have run. Or vomited. Or both. Only the need to look brave in front of her still kept me there, biting my lip and trying not to think.

No one moved or spoke for what seemed like a long time.

Then Woollard stepped forward. He held a light over the table. The metal top was blotched with stains. I'd taken them for rust at first, but they weren't. The floor, too, was mottled, filthy. I let my gaze slide over the rest of the room without really focusing. And then I came back to the sink. Watching it with horrible, insidious fascination.

“Some of this is new,” said Woollard. His voice was thick. “Some of it ain't.”

“We need to go,” said Shailer, quietly.

Woollard fiddled with his phone. He cursed. “Anyone else try this?”

We all took out our phones.

“No signal.”

“Huh. Me neither.”

“We need,” said Shailer, trying to put some strength into his voice, “we need to go.”

“Photos,” said Woollard. “Get some pictures. All of you.”

“We're done here,” Shailer said. “We're out of here, OK? We're gone.”

Woollard looked at him, wrinkled his nose. “Pictures,” he said.

Angel pulled the reader from her belt and ran it around.

“Readings are low, Chris.”

I, too, checked my reader. The place should have been buzzing. Instead, it was drained, empty.

I swung the reader at Benedict. Only then the lights danced. “What's going on?” I said. “Why do I get you, and nothing else?”

He smiled and shrugged.

He had his head on one side, fingers to his chin. It was a pose I'd seen myself take up, in photographs, in mirrors.

Woollard picked his way across the room. I saw things in his flashlight beam. Meat. Debris. Human offal. Stacked in the cupboard, on the cabinets, lying on the floor . . .

“This is a slaughterhouse.”

The light went sliding up the walls, panned across the ceiling—­and stopped.

The light circled a face. It was a man's face, dark and bearded, with long strings of hair hanging about it.

Woollard said, “Hey . . . ?”

The eyes blinked once.

And then the man dropped.

 

Chapter 73

One Last Job

H
e moved before any of us could react. He swung his legs down, crashed onto the metal table. In a single movement he was on the floor. The lights whirled over him. He seemed confused. His eyes moved rapidly. The hair hung in his face.

I think our first thought—­everyone's first thought—­was that he was a victim, the last survivor, miraculously still alive.

When Benedict stepped forward, Angel blocked him. “No,” she told him. “Not again.”

The ceiling here was stripped, just a crisscross of metal joists and beams. The man must have been hanging from them, clinging there the whole time we'd been in the room. Yet we'd heard nothing. Not a sound, not a breath . . .

Now he watched us, warily, keeping the table as a barrier between us.

Shailer asked him, “Can you talk?”

The man pushed hair out of his face.

“Who did this to you?”

The man looked right, left.

Shailer said, “I can help you. I can get you to a hospital, get you treatment. The company will pay for it.”

The man looked straight at Shailer. When he spoke, his voice was very soft, very slow.

“This,” he told him, “is a hospital.”

“A real hospital. With, uh, with doctors . . .”

I pulled Shailer back. Something was bothering me. Something in the way the man looked, the way he faced us. He wasn't scared. He was looking for an opportunity, that was all.

“Shailer. He isn't what you think—­”

The man moved. Sideways, suddenly, out of the torchbeams. Lights flashed. He barreled into me, knocking me aside. He passed Benedict, who merely stepped back and let him go. Then, in the outer room, he turned. Something glistened in his hand. A blade, a knife. He leapt into the air. For a moment he just seemed to hang there, to fold in on himself, and then—­

Then he was gone.

“What? What the fuck?” Woollard ran into the center of the room, looking around.

To me, he said, “What happened? Where'd he go?”

Benedict said, “Forwards. Backwards. A few minutes. An hour. Whatever the Old One advises.”

I said, “Shailer's right. We need to go.”

Shailer said, “Well, thank you, thank you. The voice of fucking reason—­”

Woollard touched my sleeve. “What's happening here?”

“It's . . .” and suddenly, God help me, I wanted to laugh. Perhaps it was the tension, or perhaps I'd lost it, finally. The laughter just came bubbling out of me, like a nervous tic. “It's a nest of time-­traveling serial killers,” I said, “and we're right in the middle of it. OK? Anything else you want to know?”

We passed by Rose's body. The face was gray, the skin powdery-­looking, like old plaster. I think we all took a glance at it. All except Benedict. He walked straight by without looking as if the corpse weren't even there.

There were no more incidents. We took the back stairs, hurrying, not speaking. But by the time we hit the lobby, I'd realized there was one more job to do. A job that wouldn't wait.

“Y
ou're not staying,” she said. It wasn't a question, but I acted like it was.

“I'll be in the lobby,” I said. “That's all. I'll be fine. You go with the others, get the power sorted. I'll be ready.”

“I'm staying with you.”

“No. I said before, that worries me. I need to concentrate. I don't want to be bothering with—­”

“Chris. I can do this. You trained me, right?”

“Not well enough. And years ago.” I put my hands into my pockets. I fidgeted. “We'll talk about it later, OK?”

“If there is a later.”

She turned away from me.
Christ
, I thought.
That's all I need
. If being in the house of horrors wasn't bad enough, I was about to break up with my girlfriend, too. Jesus.

T
hey took the power cable on its big, plastic spindle. Woollard went, ready to badge his way in anywhere that would get us what we wanted. Shailer and Benedict I was glad to be rid of. Angel, too, I wanted gone, only for different reasons.

I watched her walking out the glass doors, hoping she'd look back, one final, reassuring time.

She didn't.

So I tried to calm myself. The hall was big and gloomy. The light was failing now.

I took some long, deep breaths, and walked over to the pile of bags we'd left on the lobby floor. I took a flask and a ­couple of bags of cables. I also found the control box, set it down near the doors, and plugged the first cable into the socket.

I couldn't get a reading on Assur. There was something there, but never quite enough. Not like in Iraq; there, I'd been dealing with a largely dormant force, spread out through the land. Now . . . was he displaced in time, as Benedict suggested? Here spatially, but not quite in the present?

There was something here, or had been. That echo, once again, that shadow of a sound . . .

I couldn't wire up the whole hospital. But I could take a bet. I could guess. The lobby was the biggest open space we'd seen, the temple, the church. A thousand years of worship leaves an impact on you, I suppose; it forms a habit. So it was this place. This, or else the slaughterhouse upstairs. And there was no way I was going back up there.

I moved the cables, trying to judge the distances, the patterns. Remembering what I'd done back in Iraq. That dumbbell shape, but more spread out, more open. Everything was hypothetical. Everything was guesswork. This was not the god of Sumer or Assyria; not the god I'd woken and so quickly trapped. He'd had time to grow now, flex his muscles. He had gained disciples, and the link between a god and his disciples was a two-­way thing, changing them both in ways I couldn't even guess.

I was on my hands and knees. Work swallowed me. I didn't know how much time had elapsed. I was at the back of the hall, still linking cables, still trying to work out what went where.

A voice said, “Hey there. Field Op.”

I looked up, and sat back on my heels.

“I was wondering when you'd get here,” I said. Then, just to be nasty, “Anytime's too soon for me, though. For anybody else, too, I'd imagine.”

He didn't like that. But he laughed, good-­naturedly, to show me he could take a joke.

 

Chapter 74

Disciple

H
e was seated on the pile of bags. One leg stuck out, thin in tight jeans. The other had been folded under him. He wore the Blackhawks sweater with the hood up and his eyes in shadow; but I could see the scrubby blond beard, the lips pressed tight together and then, as by some vast effort of will, twisting up into a grin.

He said, “Hey. Field Op.”

“Hey.”

“So tell me. How's my girl, huh? How's my Angel? Missing me?”

“No.”

He watched me link another set of cables. “You're lying to me, man.”

I went on with my work.

He said, “You're wasting your time, by the way.”

I kept working.

“This here, see, it's his place of power. Where he is, was, and will be. You can't drain him here, can't take his power away. You know why? Do you?”

I was distracted. It was hard to think. I had no sense of where the god would be, or how to snare him. I moved the wire, studied it, then moved it back.

“You're off the grid, man!
No fucking power!
Hey, I know the way this thing works. I dated your girlfriend, remember? She told me all kinds of things.” He dropped his voice, stage-­whispered, “Pillow-­talk, you know?”

He slid to his feet. He kicked one of the bags towards me.

“Hey there. Carry on, man. Carry on.”

Deliberately, he turned away, as if ignoring me. He rolled his left sleeve up. His arm was thin, gnarled-­looking, like an old tree branch.

Then he looked back at me.

“See, here's the thing now. Here's what it's about.”

With his other hand, he took a small, red switchblade, and flicked it open. I saw his mouth tense. The breath hissed through his teeth. Then he dug the knife down hard into his forearm, and wrenched it sideways. He seemed to fold in on himself, grunting horribly. I stared at him, the cable hanging from my hands. He looked back at me, just for a second, and caught my eye; his lips curled in a smile.

He straightened slowly, raising his bare arm. With the knife-­point, he teased the wound. He made the blood flow. It came dark and slow, like oil, falling in drops upon the bags and on the floor. He was breathing heavily. His lips began to move, a rapid fluttering: a prayer, an incantation . . .

I took a step towards him, but my balance failed. It was as if the floor suddenly tilted, and then tilted again. I lurched, I stumbled. I felt like I was pushing through a barrier, an unseen wall. Even the smallest movement now a struggle. The air began to shake. Gotowski put his head back, his mouth twisting, nonsense sounds just pouring from his throat.

Small, white flecks came fluttering around me. Some landed on my shirt, dissolving into damp, dark spots.

Snowflakes.

A cold wind blew across the lobby.

Gotowski shook himself.

There was snow under my feet. Snow and hard, rough earth.

He seemed to wake, to come back to awareness of himself. He raised his bare arm, smeared with blood.

“This whole city. It's his now. He's touched it, he's part of it. He's touched it, but it can't touch him. Not anymore. It's all a one-­way street, from here on in. One way. From you—­to me.”

He paced, rolling his shoulders, swaggering like some great, hulking bully. Only that wasn't what he was; he was gawky, angular—­a weakling play-­acting a monster.

Except it wasn't play-­acting. I'd seen the slaughterhouse upstairs. This man was dangerous.

Blood fell sluggishly onto the floor: one drop, two drops, a trail of it, back and forth, back and forth.

“Hurt, Chris. You know hurt.”

He brandished his forearm at me like a weapon.

“A little bit of hurt. Hurt you, hurt me. 'Cause he's the God of Hurt, Chris. Ain't that right? Tell your friends, huh? Tell 'em what you brought here. Tell 'em what it's really all about. The God of Hurt. Why not? Why the fuck not?”

“He's . . .” I could see the doors behind him, glass doors with the hospital name stenciled on them. A dark wall rose above, and up there, high over his head, it seemed that I saw treetops swaying, snow spinning down . . . I could see the lobby, only more and more, it felt like I was out of doors, somewhere cold and far from shelter. “He's a god of lots of things. Whatever's in you. However you react to him.” I gave a short, dismissive shrug, feigned nonchalance. “Course,” I said, “if you're some psycho bastard who likes hurting ­people, that's what he'll do for you. Whatever's on your mind—­”

“Uh-­uh.” He wagged a finger at me. “You don't get to say that to me. I'm in charge here. You say what I want, understand? Got that?”

“Psycho.”

“
You
,” he said, “don't get to say shit.”

He turned away from me. He ran a finger up his arm, smearing blood. He licked his hand. Then he looked back and met my eye.

“An' just in case you're wondering—­this ain't no big hurt. Ain't serious.” He pushed a grin onto his face. “Just a little . . . chum in the water, see? Fetch the big fish here. Y'know?”

I had covered half the room, the cables glittering with frost.

Half the room, and still no power.

The time was wrong. Woollard should have got back. I should have finished the setup. I should have been able to reach Gotowski—­

“I knew it,” he was saying. “Always knew it. Knew how it'd go. Way, way back, see, he was whispering into my ear—­the voice of God—­telling me—­letting me know that I was special. Oh, I didn't get it back then, maybe. But I get it now, oh yeah. I get it now—­”

“He isn't interested in you,” I said.

“No? No?” He made a sweeping gesture, seeming to take in not just the hall but the whole world. “He can reach out, touch me. He was still back in Iraq those days, but I could feel him, even then. He reached out to me. Now, I reach out to him.” He put his head forward, confidingly. “He's a good dog, Assur. Comes when I call . . .”

He straightened up, flexed his shoulders.

“I give him what he wants, see. Rest of you get all loved up, all excited. But that's just appetizer. I'm the one—­I give him the T-­bone. I give him the meat, you know?”

I could see the walls of the lobby, I could see where the plug socket had been taken out, I could see the
EXIT
sign over the doors. But there was somewhere else, too, the place that Benedict had called the old land. It wasn't like a double exposure. It was more as if they were both there, but it took a shift of focus to move from one to the other. I tried to keep the hospital lobby in mind, but as the shadows darkened, that grew harder and harder. I heard the low moan of the wind, the rustle of the trees . . .

“Angel. She told you stuff, I bet. Thinks she knows me. Well, she doesn't. But I know her.”

I hugged myself. It was summer. I knew that it was summer, the heat of a Chicago summer, I knew what that was like . . .

Now I was shivering. Shaking, chilled to the bone.

Woollard should have been back. Someone should have been back.

“Ever hurt a person, Field Op? Ever do that?”

“Maybe.” I hooked up another cable, unspooling it across the floor. He watched me. He must have known what I was doing, but he didn't try to stop me. That worried me even more.

“When you hurt someone, you feel the power in you. It makes you strong, right? You know that. Every kid knows that. Every kid in every schoolyard, all over the world, huh? The hurter gets the strength, the hurtee just gets weaker, every time. Hurt makes you strong. So we just call down the God of Hurt . . .”

“Then what?”

There was snow blowing across the tiled floor. Loose snow, building up around the cables. I brushed at it and it wasn't there and then it was again.

Gotowski watched me. He was amused.

“Hard to make out, huh?” He said, “We buried the whole damn city under snow. Ha!”

“You caused the blizzard? Or you're going to tell me that you did.”

“Snow in June. Yeah. Took some work, that one. That was a kinda two-­for-­one deal, there. Some bitch first, then our man Louis. One of our own. Gave it an edge, I think, that, huh? Pushed it just that one step further. God liked that. Yeah—­licked his lips at that one. And he reached right back into the past. He brought the fucking Ice Age to Chicago! You know what I thought, that day?”

I could feel it in the air, something coming closer, closer. I remembered Iraq. That same edge. On impulse, I moved the cables out towards the wall.

“That day—­I was living in this shit-­hole dump in Gauge Park. Felt the temperature go down. And I got myself up, I walked out, T-­shirt, jeans, and the snow fell in my hair and on my face and I thought—­yeah. I did this. I got a message from a god. I did it. A fucking god, you know? He paid attention to me. He sat up and he answered me. You know what that's like? Huh? You know?”

“Yeah. Actually, I do.”

He grunted. He let me work a little longer. Then he said, “And you bottle 'em up and take 'em back to your lords and masters. Your Mr. Shailer, for a start: here you are sir, thank you sir, thank you. Fuck that.”

“Fuck that.”

“And Angel. She tell you 'bout me, did she? Huh?”

“She told me.”

“Some of it. Not all, I bet.”

“She told me.”

“Soon as—­soon as I knew she was Registry, I just thought, sweet! 'Cause the idea was with me even then. I knew, just didn't know I knew. See what I mean? I'll—­hey.” A sly smile crossed his face. “Here's Angel for you, then.” He put his head back, closed his eyes, and in a soft, urgent falsetto, gasped, “
Oh! Oh Paul! Oh-­oh-­oh-­oh
—­”

I stared at him. He grinned.

“Sound familiar, huh?”

Something rattled in the walls, in the trees, a sound like the world shaking.

“You're angry now, Chris! Oh, he sure likes that!”

I thought about the switchblade, and I looked around for something I could use against him: a metal bar, a piece of wood—­anything. I looked around, suddenly really wanting to do him harm.

And the air shook, and something roared and boomed deep within the building, and the wind tore at my hair and the cold burned my skin. I no longer knew the time, or the year, or whether it was now or twenty thousand years ago, or some conflation of the two.

And that was when the god came down.