Fantasmagoria (21 page)

Marcy broke the silence. “An Imperial Inquisitor is here.”

“I saw.” Gilbert’s shoulder slumped. His arm throbbed.

“Do you have any idea what they’re going to do?”

Gilbert shook his head.

“I’m old, Mr. Tubers. I’ve told you as much. But when I was a young girl, my family lived across the sea in Westheria, in the city of Fut. There were still some aminals inside the Empire at the time. The Inquisitors rounded them up, ripped them screaming from their homes, always in the middle of the night. I guess they figured that’s the best time to find everyone, catch them by surprise. They threw them all, families with children, into these horrible camps.

“I had a friend, a panda. She thought she was fat but she was soooo beautiful. We’d take turns tying bows in each other’s hair. I was so jealous of her gorgeous fur. I was never a pretty girl.” Marcelline took another drag, exhaled, and snuffed her cigarette. “I really only have one regret, though.”

Gilbert waited as she lit another.

“You should have seen him, Gilbert. You should have seen him in his prime.” Her eyes sparkled.

“Who?”

Marcelline looked at him. The desire in her drained. “It doesn’t matter. Lean forward.”

“What?”

She urged with her hand, and Gilbert leaned with a grimace. Marcelline ripped the hood from his frozen arm. Gilbert yelped.

“Here.” She inverted the hood, tore a corner, and plucked a small transmitter from the inside lining. She snapped it and threw the pieces at his face. “I warned you this was a dangerous game.”

Gilbert closed his eyes as the pieces hit. “Iku.”

Marcelline nodded. “She has so many arms.”

That’s why they hadn’t let him rest. It was a test. “You didn’t trust me.”

“It smelled like a setup, especially after that little performance at Hoosegow. The Hand is so dramatic. We had to know for sure.” Marcelline leaned in. “He heard everything, Gilbert. Everything you said to Pugs. We all did.”

Gilbert began to sob in earnest. The corners of his mouth turned. “I’m sorry,” he whined. He could taste salt on his lips.

“So am I, Mr. Tubers. So am I.”

The pair were silent for a moment.

“Are you going to kill me?” He had no more energy to fight or try to escape.

Marcelline raised her gun and Gilbert shut his eyes. She shot the driver in the head. Metal bits bounced off the windshield as his skull hit the steering wheel with a thud.

“Shit!” Gilbert jumped. Then he yelled from the pain in his arm.

Marcelline made sure the barrel was clean and the gun was still loaded. “All of your possessions, your fairies, your notes, your tools, everything, is locked in one of the old ovens underneath Hoosegow. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding it.”

“Wha . . .” Gilbert was speechless. He looked between Marcelline and the dead mechanoid in the driver’s seat. He panted and kept himself pressed to the door of the car. “Why did you do that?”

“A couple months ago, a man stole something from Erasmus, a key.” Marcelline raised her eyebrows. “A very important key, in fact. Erasmus tortured him for three days. He had a whole team of doctors keeping the man alive so that he could relish the pain.” She took a drag and exhaled through her nose.

Gilbert swallowed and wiped his watering eyes with the back of his hand.

“I told you in Hoosegow . . . that would be the day from which you counted the rest of your life, however long it was.” Marcelline lifted and removed her eye patch. Her entire eye socket, her sinuses, and part of the interior of her skull were hollow. She looked like Lady Death. “I made a mistake once, like you, but I got lucky. Erasmus decided it would be better to keep me around as an example, and I got another chance. But he left me with this.” She pointed and let Gilbert get a good look. “It took the venom wasps eight days to burrow out that much flesh.”

Gilbert tried not to turn away. It seemed disrespectful. The cavern looked like the storage room for a soul that had been sucked clean. She was empty.

“The pain was excruciating. But it’s the wiggling that I remember most. Thousands of tiny larvae nipping away at me from the inside. That and the constant fear that they’d eat something . . . vital.”

Gilbert glanced at the floor—he couldn’t look anymore—and Marcelline replaced the patch.

“Erasmus Pimpernel’s power rests on abject terror. He will pursue you, Gilbert, to the end of time if necessary. And he is so very cruel. Have you ever heard of the Dark Red?”

“Just rumors.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

“What is it, really?”

“Hell,” she sighed. “A factory of sorrow, designed and built by Erasmus to make money off the suffering of children.” She paused. “There is only one way you can live, and that’s if he is dead. Do you understand?”

Gilbert nodded.

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “And there’s only one man in this entire godforsaken world who can accomplish that.”

Gilbert waited.

“And he was just seen. On TV. Going to the one place in this town where Pimpernel can’t reach him.”

Gilbert ran his mind through the city. “The Old Arcade.”

Marcelline nodded.

“But the Arcade is a labyrinth. How will I find him?”

Marcelline smiled from the side of her mouth. “Just follow the trail of bodies.”

Gilbert frowned.

“You can get there through the old sewers. There’s an entrance at the end of this alley.”

“Right.” Gilbert thought. “Aren’t there . . . ?”

“What?”

“Things . . .you know, down there?” He’d read stories about the old sewers. Sanitation crews went in only with guns and flamethrowers. In grade school, everyone in his class had been handed a pamphlet by a nice man from the Mayor’s Office who told them not to buy illegal animals as pets, and certainly never to dispose of a baby basilisk down the toilet.

“It’s probably best to stay off the streets for awhile.”

“Right.” The old sewers then.

She looked at his arm. “There’s a small first aid kit in the trunk. There are some painkillers.”

He nodded.

Marcelline sat back and took a deep breath. “Good luck, Mr. Tubers. I hope you make it, for your sake. And Jack’s.”

“Why are you doing this?”

She ignored the question. “Can I ask you for a favor?”

Gilbert nodded.

“I would like you to give him a message for me. Will you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Your word?”

“I promise.”

“Tell him . . . tell him I never forgot. Ever.” Marcelline put the barrel to her lips like a cigarette and pulled the trigger.

Gilbert twitched as the back of her head erupted against the rear windshield. He stared as her blood slid down the glass, carried along by shattered bits of brain.

Gilbert sat there for several minutes looking at the still body of his mentor in crime. He had been right about her. She was the Harlequin. He doubted anyone knew the real her, except maybe the last man on her mind. Gilbert wondered what had happened between them. He was certain she deserved better than this, but he wasn’t in a position to give it. At least he could deliver the message.

The sun was setting, and Gilbert grabbed the kit from the trunk and snuck one-armed into the night.

Several miles upwind, Lette caught a whiff of sweat and lead.

(TWENTY-THREE) The Stink of a Nine-Fingered Asshole

Jack struggled against the straps. “Why do I have to be tied down?”

The skinshear, Elsa, looked up through her magnifying glasses. She was gray-haired with a pert nose and wizened eyes. “So you stay still.”

“I’m not sur--”

“Bah,” Vernal scoffed. “Have you seen what you look like? The Hand knows we’re here for sure, what with all the stares you got. You look like the devil’s valet, you creepy bastard.”

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with crashing into the place with a car. Or that you’re covered in dinosaur blood.”

“Oh, stop it,” Elsa interrupted. “Both of you.”

Jack relaxed in the old heavy dentist’s chair that was bolted to the floor of the shop and stared at the ceiling. Odd-shaped strips of tattooed pseudoskin hung from the plywood walls like macabre trophies from a murderous rampage—a flayed hand, a neck and back, a pair of crisscrossed legs—all stretched flat and inked.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

“By Goyen, Jack. You’d think you’d never gotten a skin job before.”

Elsa scraped gummy charcoal with a screwdriver. “From the looks of it, he hasn’t. This resin has been on here awhile.” She squinted at Vernal. “This is going to be expensive.”

Vernal pulled out a roll of cash from under his blood-soaked dress.

Jack stared at it. He didn’t want to know where it had been.

Vernal threw half on the little work table next to the monster chair. “That enough?”

Elsa looked but didn’t touch. “For now. But I don’t see how we’re going to get this done in a couple hours.”

“It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

“It’s not going to be. I’m using scraps, whatever I have in the shop. And I’m stitching it with wire. He’ll look like a monster, like he was sewn together from ten corpses.”

“Just get the face right. We can’t afford to get stopped by the Empire. Clothes can cover the rest. Speaking of . . .” Vernal flapped his soiled dress and turned toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Jack asked. He didn’t want to let the key out of his sight.

“I need to get cleaned up, too, asshole.”

“Four turns isn’t going to last long.”

Vernal groaned and produced the ancient brass key. Its staccato teeth poked out in random directions as they spiraled up the metal shaft. He inserted it into the keyhole and Jack gasped. It was orgasmic self-completion. The key clicked as Vernal turned it once. Then he pulled out and slipped into the throngs of the promenade.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Don’t worry,” Elsa consoled. “He’ll be back. He’s being extra nice to you. He must need you for something.”

“What’s he like when he’s mean?” Jack scowled and watched Vernal disappear into the crowd.

The Old Arcade was a gash, an open wound in the city. It ran zigzag across the border between the ghettos of the working poor, mostly controlled by Pimpernel, and everything else, mostly controlled by the LaMana gang. Neither dared enter, nor would the municipal police except to make token appearances on the central promenade. The Arcade was and always had been the home of the assassin cult of the Black Hand.

It was named for the copper and glass archway that covered the main street. Once lined with marble, the promenade had served as the city’s central market in the days before grocery stores. But the marble had long since disappeared, and the copper was faded to a bilious green that bled from the frame and obscured the glass. Now the arch both created and sheltered the thriving market behind which pulsed a much darker life, a life that oozed from the waste-filled labyrinth that curled off it like veins. There were stories, lots of stories, about the Hand and their technocrat-priests and what they birthed in those blind alleys.

It was easy to get lost, a fact Jack discovered as he followed Vernal into the maze that coiled around their abandoned car. Passages twisted up and down in three dimensions, formed from layer upon layer of self-made housing that reached across the gaps of a crumbling concrete spine. Wires stretched across open spaces and snaked over every flat surface. The Arcade was not part of the city’s power grid, and electricity was pilfered through extension cords connected to power strips connected to recycled cable that tapped the buried veins of the city like intravenous needles. All that wiring was a great place to hang laundry or lamps or cooking utensils, anything that needed to be kept off the trash-strewn floors. It was a forest of detritus that jingled and flapped and hid the shallow cruelty of the life behind.

And the promenade was the center. Jack looked out over it from the mezzanine-level skin shop where Vernal had left him. Everywhere ragged figures loitered between hawker stalls and under neon signs. Homeless and broken, most would have given themselves away for a bite to eat. Everything else was for sale: used appliances, jewelry, cheap purses, fruits and vegetables, bicycles, clothes, forged documents, knives and surgical equipment, power tools, televisions, ancient reliquaries, liniment and snake oil, everything. Saurus meat, both dried and fresh, hung from hooks and smiled from under glass. Creatures without description quarreled with each other inside wicker cages.

The desperate cacophony was too much, and Jack turned to watch Elsa peel strips of flesh. “Where’d you learn to skinshear?”

“Prison.” She was unapologetic.

“Been doing it long?”

“Why? Are you nervous?”

“I just don’t want to walk out of here looking like some nine-fingered asshole.”

She smiled. “I don’t think anyone will confuse you with Vernal.”