Red Right Hand (20 page)

Daniel, on the other hand, looked terrible.

He slouched over in his chair, hair hanging lank across his forehead. I'd sat and talked with him a lot over the last few months, and I'd watched him carefully. Daniel didn't slouch. He had almost impeccable posture, sitting with his spine straight and his shoulders wide every time. Even once our talks moved to his apartment, he would slide down, head on the back of the couch and legs stretched out before him as we discussed everything under the sun; even then he still didn't slouch. I'm a sloucher. I always have been, but being around him made me sit straighter, made me pay attention to my posture.

To see him bent nearly double over a bowl of soup drove home how hard a night he'd had.

I walked over to him. He smiled, reaching for me. His hand stopped before touching, and his eyes went to the knife on my hip. Its edge gleamed wickedly in the kitchen light. He wasn't sure where to put his hand now. I took it to solve his problem. His skin was clammy against mine, so cold his fingers felt wet. His face was pale, purple-black smudges crouched under his eyes, and his lips were colorless. His oh-so-green eyes were bright and glassy, over-shining with something like a fever. He looked like someone who should be in a hospital receiving fluids.

“Are you okay?” I didn't know why I whispered it.

He nodded, turned in his chair. “I'm fine. The soup helped.”

“Where'd the soup come from?”

His head tilted toward the Man in Black. “He found it in the pantry.”

I looked over. “You made him soup?”

A dark smile twitched Nyarlathotep's face. He raised his mug. “He did not want coffee.”

Daniel didn't drink coffee. Whenever we'd gone to the coffee shop he'd always ordered juice or green tea. The thought of the Crawling Chaos opening a can of soup and working the microwave with his red right hand flashed in my head.

It was weird.

And damn creepy.

Daniel shifted. “I know now isn't the time, but you smell really good.”

I laughed, and it caught me by surprise. “Thank you.” My fingers found his hair, the wayward cowlick behind his ear that he couldn't control. I'd always wanted to touch it. “It's called soap, and there's more upstairs in the shower if you want to use it.”

He was just as filthy as I'd been. When I'd taken off my clothes to get in the shower and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, the grime had been like a mask and gloves, my body pale and near gleaming where my clothes had covered it.

His eyes slid sideways. “Are you okay being left alone here?”

The concern touched me, breaking loose something inside. I felt a surge of … love, it
was
love, for Daniel. It trilled through me, a delicious, dreadful ache. I touched his face with my other hand. “I'm good. Go take a shower, it'll make you feel better.”

He nodded and stood slowly, using the table and the chair to push himself up. I moved to help him, but he held up his hand in a STOP motion. “I got it. I can do this. If I can't, I'm no good to you.”

I stepped back and watched him find his balance. He took a second, swaying on his feet, before straightening and walking out of the room. The Man in Black and I watched him leave. I kept looking at the doorway until I heard him go up the stairs. When I turned, the Man in Black set his coffee cup on the table. Amusement twinkled deep in his obsidian eyes.

“Well, Acolyte, have a seat and tell me what is on your mind. I cannot wait to hear what you are so eager to say.”

I sat, sliding the chair close to the table. The leftovers of Daniel's soup sat in front of me. Chicken noodle. I pushed it aside so I wouldn't have to watch it congeal. My fingers slid across the checkered tablecloth as I worked up the courage to talk. A soft whispering sounded under the table and something brushed the fronts of my shins. I didn't look down, sure it was the coat. For some reason its caress reassured me. The Man in Black spoke before I got the nerve.

“Would you like some coffee?”

The question surprised me. I shook my head. “What is it with you and the coffee?”

“It is one of the things I enjoy about your world. Nothing like it exists anywhere else in the universe.”

A chaos god on a caffeine bender. Excellent. My eyes found the spot on the tablecloth where his finger had burned a hole through it earlier. It looked like someone had put out a cigar, the charred wood of the table visible beneath the marred checkered print.

Shasta's going to be pissed about that.

He leaned forward, the skinless fingertips of his red right hand gently stroking the rim of his coffee cup. Something twinkled in the shadow of his chest, drawing my eye. A gemstone the size of my fist hung around his neck. Its surface gleamed, faceted like a piece of quartz, long straight planes and sharp creased angles that formed a strange geometric shape. Color pulsed, shifting inside the gem, transitioning from harsh magenta to an indigo that almost disappeared against the darkness of the chaos god, then bursting with putrescent yellow and chartreuse chasing into crimson.

“Where'd you get the necklace?”

“It is the essence of Yar Shogura imprisoned.” The raw-muscled fingers of his red right hand stroked across the surface of the gem. The colors ran from his touch, roiling back and pushing against the other side of their gem prison. The movement of it caused a weird ripple inside me, as if some tiny creature with too many legs had run across my small intestine. “I collected it while you were … reconnecting with past acquaintances.”

“What are you going to do with that?”

His fingers slipped away from the gem. “Stop playing games, Charlotte Tristan Moore. I do not believe you want to discuss the remains or fate of the Unholy Masticate.”

“You're right.” I wasn't quite ready though. “Answer one more thing.”

He nodded.

“What is it with you and all the titles and full names? Why can't you just call me Charlie?”

His fingers tapped the table. “Names have power. They define a thing. If you know a thing's name, you can own that aspect of them. There are…” He held up his finger, dark eyes sliding up and to the left. “… 866,578 humans named Charlotte on this continent, but only one Charlotte Tristan Moore. Only one who can be my Acolyte.”

“Was that flattery?”

“You may take it as such.”

I rolled it around in my mind. Since I'd met him, he'd mostly been the Man in Black to me. That name defined him in my head, but at different times I'd thought of him as the Crawling Chaos, the Midnight Man, and even Nyarlathotep, all of them at times when those names applied. It wasn't intentional on my part, but it held true to what he just told me.

I filed the information away.

Time to get to it.

I took a deep breath. “I want you to let Daniel go.”

His lips twitched. He said nothing.

I pushed on. “You've got me with the magick wishing collar and the Mark, so you don't need him anymore.”

“Oh, but we do need him. He is a key part of what is occurring.”

“How?”

“That does not matter. All you need know is that it is necessary for him to remain near us.”

I looked at him through narrow eyes. “That's not a reason.”

He took a sip of coffee.

I leaned forward. “We did enough tonight. We helped you kill the Cancer God.”

“There is another. You Saw it with your gift.” He placed the coffee mug on the table. “I must imprison it also.”

“Yar shogun-what's-his-name isn't dead?”

He shook his head. “We merely destroyed his avatar here in this reality. It will be a long time, possibly centuries, before the Whoremonger of the Flesh gathers the strength to try again.”

“And we have to do this to the next one?”

He nodded.

“Then let Daniel go, or you can find it on your own.” I sat back and crossed my arms. “And good luck with that.”

“It is your world that will be destroyed, Acolyte.”

“You know what? I thought about it while I was in the shower, and I don't believe you.”

A sculpted eyebrow arched sharply over an obsidian eye. “What do you mean?”

“I think you've underestimated the human race.” I put my elbows on the table. “I saw that thing we killed, imprisoned, whatever. It was scary.” An image of the Cancer God rising over me in all his tumor-ridden horribleness sent a shiver across my spine. “But I think the military or even the local police could have handled it. They've got heavy firepower. And you”—I shifted, pointing my finger to indicate him—“you're scary, but I don't think you could destroy the world.”

He gave a long, slow blink. “Do you not?”

I shook my head.

The Man in Black leaned forward.

Black-pit eyes stared into mine, starless light sucking voids set deep in their sockets. A minuscule comet cut its fiery trail across their depths, racing and rushing and flying to decimate some microscopic planet that lay in those pitch-black vacuums. His hand, his terrible red right hand, lifted delicately, the fingers hanging lackadaisically from loose joints of raw meat. Slowly, deliberately, he slipped the middle one, the longest one, over the rim of the cup before him. It looked obscene, and something deep inside me squirmed in reaction. The digit caressed up and then down, stirring the coffee, troubling the caffinated water as if it were an elixir being mixed, measured, and tested. The finger lifted, glistening with fresh alchemy, droplets slipping from the tip, transmogrified by the insertion of that skinless digit. It became the seed of Onan or the blood of Eliezer indebted to the Sodomite.

Either.

Neither.

Both.

Laden with magick, it was more, so much more than coffee now.

I couldn't look away. The Midnight Man coughed up a word not meant to be formed by a human throat. It crackled in my eardrums, brittle glass rubbing edge to edge. The finger turned, then curled, then flicked, becoming an unholy aspergillum.

The transformed liquid arced across the table, an echo of the comet in his eyes. I watched it, unable to move, unable to dodge, unable to avoid the splash. It struck me across the chin and lips and cheek as though baptizing me. The not-coffee brushed my mouth. The magick inside me convulsed to life.

Then it tried to rip me apart.

 

35

T
HE WORLD TILTED,
sliding sideways in a languid twirl. Everything washed across my eyes like the hand of God wiping the condensation of the world away from His mirror. I blinked and found myself standing in the center of a field of ash and embers.

I could still feel my body. Distant, disconnected, still sitting in the chair in my kitchen while my … mind?… soul?… stood on the edge of hell itself.

A night sky stretched over my head. All the stars had been ripped down and flung to earth in spiraling trails of poisonous cinder. The firmament sat empty and void except for the moon, which hung low and full, the color of fresh-shed blood, casting ruddy light like arterial spray. I looked around, the place where I stood both alien and familiar. The ground was hot under my feet, baking up through the soles of my boots.

A fence ran to my left, ash covering the chain links like gray, used snow. The fence followed a road beside
a drainage ditch clogged with soot-stained corpses. I stepped over, looking. The bodies were jumbled, discarded and jigsawed together, some whole and some in pieces. Their blood had turned to grime, mixed with ash and black in the ruddy moonlight. One of the dead lay face up. Eyes that had been struck open in death stared at me upside down, and realization dawned in the midst of growing horror.

I knew her.

Mrs. Mickelson.

Mrs. Mickelson, my senior-year Lit teacher. Mrs. Mickelson, who always smiled when she talked about the classics and smelled like sugar cookies when she leaned over me to discuss my work. Mrs. Mickelson, who lived down the street from my parents in a bright-yellow split-level and drove a Hyundai Accent the color of a ripe tomato.

Her plump face snarled now, contorted and locked by death in a grimace that looked like a mask. The skin had been cut and peeled from her throat down to her chest, a wallpaper of flesh whose glue had failed. I pulled my eyes from her death stare, looking down the fence line.

I saw the small house on fire in the distance and realized where I was.

That was my parents' house. The house we moved to after I got out of the hospital. The house where they still lived.

I started running.

Smoke curled, rising to disappear into the empty sky. I ran harder, screaming, just screaming out to the world. The house had become a blackened stick skeleton skinned over with lurid red flames.

In front of the inferno, strung by tendons ripped out of his calves from the lowest branch of the great shady oak tree where we once had a tire swing, I found my father.

He'd been split and splayed like prepared game, everything inside spilled out on the wet ground, and his ribs stuck out like narrow teeth in a raw mouth. His hair, worn too long since his midlife crisis, was a wet sheet that hung down, pointing at hell. The fire roared hot, throwing his shadow far out into the yard and roasting my face. The noise of it cracked open my blocked ears, letting in the chaotic choir of screaming that filled the air around me.

A sob lodged in my throat, choking me. I turned. Other houses were on fire, crackling against the blackness. Shapes moved in front of them. Inhuman shapes. Multi-jointed legs swung from bulbous bodies and contorted carapaces. Monstrous demons and things undreamed that had not walked the earth in a millennia danced and wheeled, scooping up smaller, human shapes.

The things the creatures were doing to them …

I turned away.

My mother. My brother.

They were here somewhere.

I had to find them.

I stumbled away, my foot slipping in the red mud that stretched under my father's hanging form. I moved toward the house, skirting around the wall of heat radiating off the inferno. It beat against my skin, pulling it tight against my face like jerky, blasting away moisture. I ran with my head turned away lest my eyes shrivel like raisins.