Drake (16 page)

“The fuck,” I said, staring at the doppelganger.

“The fuck,” the doppelganger said, staring at me.

In Germanic lore, seeing one's own doppelganger is said to be an omen of death. If the way my heart was hammering in my chest was anything to go by, I could well believe it. I honestly felt like I might just have a heart attack right there and then.

“This isn't fucking right, Trixie,” I said.

So did the doppelganger.

“It's
me
!” We both said that at the same time, too.

“Ah,” said Trixie. “Oh dear.”

“You know what, Blondie,” the Burned Man said, “I think we might just have fucked something up here.”

Trixie shook her head. “No, it has to be good,” she said. “Anything less than this good and it won't fool Phoenix for a minute. He'll just have to adjust.”

“Will I fuck as like,” we said, my doppelganger and I. “I don't like this!”

“You don't have to like it, either of you,” Trixie said, “you just have to do it. Come here, Don.”

Predictably, we both took a step towards her.

“Not you,” she said to the doppelganger. “You wait here a minute. You, you come with me.”

She led me out of the workroom and into my office and made me sit down on the sofa. She shut the door firmly behind her.

“Trixie, this… this is weird,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and patted me gently on the shoulder. “It's only for a little while. I just need a convincing decoy for Phoenix and his horrors. We talked about this last night.”

“Yeah I know but… but that's not a fucking decoy, is it? That's actually me
.
”

“Of course it is,” she said. “It wouldn't work otherwise. Phoenix isn't stupid.”

“You did something, I know you did,” I said. “I saw you do it. That's not just a copy of me, it's
me
, isn't it?”

Trixie cleared her throat and started to speak very quietly. “Don,” she said, “you have to trust me here. I gave the Burned Man a hand, that's all. To make it work better.”

“Bullshit,” I whispered back. “What happened to the doppelganger? Because that isn't it. They aren't
that
good. A doppelganger might look like me, but that bloke in there thinks what I'm thinking and says what I say, at exactly the same time. He's an actual different version of me, isn't he? Where did you get that version of me from, Trixie?”

“One dimension over, maybe,” she snapped. “What do you care?”

I stared at her. “What do I care, seriously? What don't you understand here? That's
me
, Trixie.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Look Don, I'm good, but I'm just one soldier. I have my limits, and I don't know exactly what Phoenix is bringing to the fight. You have to understand, I'm going to be busy today. Very busy, if what I've heard about the terrible Wellington Phoenix is right. I'm afraid I won't be able to come and help you if anything nasty finds you, and I probably wouldn't be able to protect you if you were with me either. It's safer this way. If a Don Drake has to die today, do you want it to be you or the doppelganger?”

“Well…” I started. “Well, shit, I mean… I mean, no, I'm not buying it. We're
both
Don Drake, aren't we?”

“Which set of eyes do you see through?” Trixie asked me. “Yours, or his? Whose memories do you have? Whose life have you lived? He isn't you, Don. He's
a
you maybe, but he isn't
you.
”

I shook my head. “Does that make it OK?”

“Does it have to?” she countered. “It makes it him not you, that's all. I can make it the other way around if you'd prefer, but it's one or the other I'm afraid.”

I looked at Trixie and again I found myself wondering just who her friends were, and about what sort of company she was keeping these days. The ends always justify the means, I remembered the Burned Man telling me. That is, if you're the type who feels the need to be justified at all.

I always had been that type, if truth be told, but then it was dog eat dog out there after all. I didn't like it, though. I could almost feel the ground shifting under my feet, the moral quicksand getting ready to swallow me up if I slipped another inch. A diabolist walks a bloody fine line at the best of times, and I couldn't help feeling like I was about to fall off mine for good and all.

“Where are you taking him?” I asked her.

“I've got an empty warehouse by the canal,” she said. “Plenty of room for a fight, plenty of privacy. I'll let Phoenix come after us there. Don't worry, you'll be safe here.”

“Don't let me fall, Trixie,” I whispered. “Not all the way, anyway.”

She squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me. “I've got you,” she said. “Just sit tight Don, I've got you.”

She smiled at me, and her beautiful blue eyes seemed to fill my world. That whole lost week came rushing back on me, the infatuation, the stupor, the sheer
adoration
of her. Whatever she had been doing to me then, she was suddenly doing it again in a big way. I was barely aware of her pushing my sleeve up, and when the needle sank into the vein in my arm I groaned with something like release. It was only when the warm, heavy grey blankets descended over my brain that I realized she had shot me full of pharmaceutical grade heroin.

I
suppose
there was always a chance that it might have gone to plan, but of course it bloody didn't.

When the Burned Man was training me, back in my university days, I'd spent a week mashed out of my brain on heroin. It had insisted. My Crowley phase, it had called it. It told me every young seeker inevitably went through a period of infatuation with Aleister Crowley and his drug fiend methods, and it was determined to get me into and out of that phase as fast as possible to get it over and done with. It had worked, to be fair. I'd never been so fucking ill in my life, and to be honest if that was the junkie lifestyle then you could keep it. Maybe it was preemptive aversion therapy or maybe the Burned Man had just been taking the piss for its own amusement, I never did find out. Either way, it put me off drugs for life.

The world tilted hideously around me as I opened my eyes. There was a vile taste of vinegar acid in the back of my throat and I wanted to throw up. But at the same time, damn, I felt good. I had no idea how long I'd been nodding, but the euphoric warm blanket feeling of the smack was still wrapped around me so it couldn't have been more than a couple of hours. I could hear church bells, somewhere in the distance. A little part of me was telling me that no actually I couldn't, the only thing you ever heard around here were police sirens, but the euphoria drowned it out. I stumbled up off the sofa and into the warm bath of the air in my flat, watching the colours dance at the corners of my vision. There was something… something I was supposed to do. I blundered into the edge of my desk and knocked the telephone onto the floor where it began to buzz like a giant, overturned bumble bee. I could almost see its hairy little telephone-bee legs waving helplessly in the air. That, at the time, struck me as hilarious.

“Oi, are you alive out there?” the Burned Man shouted from the workroom.

I wobbled on my heels, turned, and swam slowly across the office to the workroom door. The Burned Man was swaying back and forth on its altar, leaving traces of muted colour in the air behind it. I smiled at it. I felt so warm, so cosy and comfortable and happy that even the sight of the Burned Man couldn't spoil it.

“Hey little buddy,” I said. I sat down on the floor and smiled at it some more. “Hey there.”

“Oh for fuck's sake,” the Burned Man said. “It's Crowley time again, innit?”

I felt my chin sag down against my chest. I was comfy, but I knew I'd be even more comfy if I curled up on the floor. I wondered why I hadn't thought of that before. There was something, though. I had no idea what, but I knew I was supposed to be doing… something.

“Hey,” I said again. “Hey man, you know what?”

“Oh do tell,” it said.

“We gotta… do something. Y'know?”

“I know you asked for three screamers,” the Burned Man said, “but I can't see you're in any fucking state to do anything about it now.”

“Crowley time…” I said.

I dragged myself back up onto my hands and knees, then pushed myself up into a sort of unsteady crouch. Gnosis was one thing, but doing magic while smacked out of your head was quite another. I grabbed hold of the edge of the altar and pulled myself up until my eyes were level with the Burned Man's.

“Seriously?” it asked me.

I nodded, trying to look as serious as I could. “This is important,” I said. “I need… I need those fucking screamers. Protection. That's all. I just need them to… you know. Sit there and look hard and shit. Fucking whatever, man. Gimme.”

“Can you even focus?” the Burned Man said. “When I put you through this I controlled your dosage to keep you at least sort of functional. Fuck only knows how much Blondie gave you.”

“I'm good,” I lied. “I can fucking do this.”

It took me about a thousand years to mix the iron filings with the goat's blood and mercury for the circle. I kept nodding out, and only the Burned Man shouting abuse at me kept me going at all. When it came to drawing the glyphs I found myself entering some weird sort of Zen state where each manticore spine seemed about a hundred miles long, and moving it the millimetre or so into the right position took every ounce of my concentration. I could feel the Burned Man losing patience with me.

“Toads,” it said. “Don't forget the fucking toads, dickhead. Summoning doesn't run on wishful thinking.”

That was tricky, I have to admit. The toads kept looking at me, and every time they did I burst out laughing and then had to sit down and cry for a bit. I'm really not cut out for drugs.

We got there in the end, though. Well, I say we, but the Burned Man did ninety percent of it to be honest. Eventually I sank into the deep, warm embrace of the sofa with three half-controlled screamers pacing the office around me, and giggled.

“Good fucking deal,” I said.

“Just shut up and try to stay awake,” the Burned Man called from the workroom. “You're fucked if one of Phoenix's minions shows up while you're on the nod.”

“Screamers,” I said. “I got fucking screamers, man.”

I reached out to pet one, and it snarled savagely at me and bounded across the room to take up a sentry position behind the desk. I nodded out again.

I
woke
up sitting at my desk, sweating profusely and with no memory of how I had got there. I was pretty much straight again by then, and the comedown was making its presence felt in a big way. The three screamers in the room with me weren't helping, for all that they were mine. Screamers aren't sane, not even a little bit, and the effort of keeping them under control was giving me a migraine. How the fuck I had been doing it in a heroin dream was a total mystery to me. I guess the Burned Man's Crowley phase training had finally paid off.

As it turned out, they weren't worth the bother. When the door to my office suddenly flew open the screamers reared up as one in a mass of claws and hatred. The door slammed back against the wall and a man walked in. It wasn't Wellington Phoenix. This was a short, nondescript looking bloke wearing a grey suit and carrying a tool box. My screamers went for him like a hurricane of howling fury.

I watched in disbelief as the air split open in front of the little man in a great vertical gash of darkness. An enormous mass of black tentacles burst into the room through the rent in the air and grabbed my screamers, three or four to each one. They yanked hard, bulging with muscle and dripping slime on the floor, and dragged the screamers back through the hole in the air and out of sight. The hole closed with a wet sucking sound and that was the end of that. So much for my protection.

“Good evening,” said the man. His voice was very soft.

I glanced out of the window, and realized that it was. Somehow I had nodded most of the day away.

“Who the fuck are you?” I said.

I was trying to sound tough but it came out in a pathetic little croak of sheer terror. I had absolutely no idea what had just taken my screamers away but it was obviously a whole hell of a lot nastier than anything I had ever messed with. I guess that was what Phoenix's methods could buy you. The fact that this creep was even here at all was enough to tell me just how strong Phoenix must be, strong enough to have detected the miniscule secondary traces at Vincent and Danny's house and followed them back here to the Burned Man. Trixie was out there somewhere, right now, trying to fight him. The thought made my blood run cold.

“They call me Lavender,” he said. “Please, don't get up.”

I realized that I couldn't anyway. Something was holding me tight to my chair, and I couldn't move a muscle below my neck. Lavender looked at me, his smooth, bland face completely expressionless. He switched the office light on and put his tool box down on my desk with a dull thud.

“What happened to my screamers?” I said.

“My employer has provided for my protection,” he said.

He took a small, shiny disk out of his jacket pocket and turned it so that it caught the light. There were glyphs of some sort engraved on the metal.

“Talisman,” I muttered.

The man nodded. “Yes. This will keep you sitting still, and if I need to use it to bring the devourer back again, I can,” he said. “Now, that was the last question that you will ask me. They call me Lavender. I ask questions, and people answer them. Do you understand me?”

I nodded and swallowed in a dry throat. “Yeah,” I said. I had a horrible feeling I knew exactly where this was going.

“You are Don Drake,” he said.

I didn't really see any point in denying it, so I just nodded again.

“Interesting,” he said. “My employer sent me to follow a minor lead, to find your accomplice. And yet here you are. Interesting indeed.” He put the talisman down on the desk and opened up the toolbox. He took something out and held it up where I could see it. “Do you know what this is?”

“It's a power drill,” I said.

He nodded, his face still completely expressionless. “Yes, this is a drill. This is a drill in the same way that a Bugatti is a car. This is a work of art, Mr Drake. A cordless twenty volt work of art. Do you know what I'm going to do with it?”

“I can probably guess,” I said.

“No, I doubt that you can,” he said. “I doubt that quite a bit. What I'm going to do, Don, if I may call you Don, is ask you a question. That question will be ‘who hired you to kill the McRoths?' You can choose to answer that question, and I'll put the drill away again. If you choose not to answer the question, or if you choose to answer it unsatisfactorily, I will drill a hole through your left kneecap. Don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds, although obviously it will hurt a great deal. I imagine it will hurt a lot more than you have ever been hurt before, in fact, but with the proper care and medical attention you'll heal, in time. You'll even walk again, do you understand me?”

I just stared at him, horrified.

“I will then ask you the question again,” he said, and took something else out of his box. It looked like a lump of white putty. “If you choose not to answer the question, or if you choose to answer it unsatisfactorily, I will roll a thin tube of this and insert it into the hole in your kneecap. That will be quite uncomfortable, not to mention messy, but don't worry. I've done it before. This is C-4 explosive, by the way. I will then attach a detonator to the explosive, and ask the question again. If you again choose not to answer the question, or if you choose to answer it unsatisfactorily, I will blow your leg apart. I fully expect you to pass out before you really feel that, but rest assured once we reach that stage you will
not
ever walk again. Are you following me so far?”

I think I'd actually lost the power of speech by then, but I managed to nod again.

“I have a blowtorch with me too. I will use a tourniquet and the blowtorch to seal and cauterize your leg so you don't bleed to death. I will then give you an injection of adrenaline to bring you back to consciousness. You
will
feel it then, believe me. I will then ask you the question again. If you continue to disappoint my employer and me, I will repeat the procedure on your other leg.

“I very much doubt you will have the endurance to continue further, but, to be clear, let me explain that after your right leg I will begin again with your left wrist, and then your right wrist, and then your elbows.

“Only one subject has ever made me go so far, a military gentleman, and it chastens me to admit that he did not survive the explosive removal of the right upper arm. Of course, I can't take credit for the process, I'm afraid. It is a derivative of what the IRA used to call a six pack, although they simply used a handgun. I like to think I have refined the technique in my own way, that's all. Still, gratifying though that is, I'm sure it's all academic to you at this point. Now, shall we begin?”

He held the drill over my left knee and switched it on. There was no expression on his face whatsoever, but his dead eyes seemed to have come to life for the first time. He was going to enjoy this, I could tell. The drill screamed an inch above my kneecap.

“Who hired you to kill the McRoths?”

I broke.

You really want to try and tell me you wouldn't have?

“Wormwood,” I sobbed. “It was Wormwood, he made me do it.”

Lavender nodded slowly, and switched the drill off.

“Interesting,” he said. “The archdemon Wormwood, I see.”

“Yes!” I said. “Yes, that's right, it was Wormwood, he–”

“Oh dear,” Lavender interrupted. “I'm afraid that sounds an awful lot like an unsatisfactory answer. I don't believe you. In fact I don't believe that an archdemon would need the help of a rather seedy diabolist to kill anyone. I will ask you one more time, and then I'm going to start hurting you. Who hired you to kill the McRoths?”

I stared at Lavender. Every instinct I had told me his aura should be a writhing black horror of horns and flames, but it wasn't. It was the same dull, fuzzy blue as yours or mine or the woman at the post office's. He wasn't a demon and he wasn't a monster. He was just a man, and that was probably the most terrifying thing of all.

“Wormwood!” I shouted at him. “It was Wormwood, I swear it was! That's how he works, he's all about money and threats and influence and what he can buy with them, not–”

“Your answer,” said Lavender, “is unsatisfactory.”

He turned the drill on again.

“Help!” I shrieked.

The Burned Man was no use to me now, I knew that much. Trixie couldn't help me either. She had
told
me she wouldn't be able to help me while she was busy with Phoenix and his horrors, but I was pretty much past the point of rational thought by then.

“Trixie please for the love of God fucking help me!”

“I'm afraid she is unable to just at the moment,” a man's voice said from somewhere in the gloomy corner of the office. He had the poshest voice I think I've ever heard. “But
I
can. For a price, of course.”