CHAPTER 26

 

He assumes that vital organs are not vital in the dead-but-walking, that bleeding to death is not an option. So it all comes down to structural damage.

Simon leads Loki into his basement, and then he punches two scalpels, held between the fingers and knuckles of one hand, into the vampire’s eyes.

I’m fast, but my shadow is faster. No one is faster than his shadow. Eh, Jane?

Loki does not expect this. The scalpels slide in easily, one into each eye. Simon burns the strength Loki put in his belly, concentrates and burns it to move faster. Two more blades of surgical steel snap into his hands as he ducks down.

Structural damage.

The eyes.

The Achilles tendons.

Light the propane torch.

Loki hits the ground at the same moment the torch ignites. Simon shoves it toward his face.

Fangs.

Hiss.

Blur of motion.

Even without his legs, Loki is very fast. He is confused, blind, surprised, and his Beast is riled.

They have a Beast inside them, Jane. I think humans have a Beast, too—just not as big. Not fed on the blood of the dead and grown obscenely large, like an urban legend sewer crocodile fed on sewage till it’s too huge, too hateful to ever die.

Loki’s Beast is scared and angry.

Fight and flight.

With a blur of flopping legs and frantic arms, Loki flies across the basement like a demon crab. He slams into a wall. Darts. Slams, hissing and roaring, into another wall.

Simon keeps the torch in front of him.

“‘If he thought at all . . . it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water; and when they did not he was appalled,’” Simon quotes.

“What—the—fuck?” Loki’s words come out over-enunciated through the bared fangs.

“It’s from Peter Pan,” says the turncoat scarecrow. “I need answers, shadow. I saw the waiting room. I saw what you intended.” Simon holds the torch before him as he talks. He’s moving, too. Constantly moving.

They hunt at night, Jane. I had to assume my shadow could function blind.

Simon keeps moving. There are other, identical torches planted throughout the basement. He lights each one as he passes. Loki twitches at the sound of each new flame, realizes there is dangerous fire all about. He stops darting, lays on the ground with his legs behind him, upper-body propped up on two coiled arms, a frenzied leopard seal crying blood.

“All right, necrophile. Let’s chat.”

Simon puts the torch down, but keeps moving, always staying close to one torch or another.

“You tried to wrap me in a fog,” Simon says. “Make me like one of them, in the waiting room. There are things you’re not telling me. Was that a vampire—?”

“Kindred!”

“Was that a Kindred at the morgue that night, erasing Jane?”

“The Mondays!” the Corbies whisper to one another.

“Yes.”

“Friend of yours?”

“No. Rogue. Did a sloppy job, actually.”

“The two of you don’t work for Dr. Reeves?”

“No! Reeves is just a fucked up little mortal. We don’t work for fucked up little mortals; they usually work for us. Get it? That rogue at the morgue did a cover up. Had things gotten much worse, others would have done it—only better.”

“But he didn’t erase my memories.”

Loki laughs. “No, Simon. You’re the X-factor. While we’re at it, more than one Kindred thought it best to get rid of you. You kept going. You saw too much. There are only a few ways someone like that can end and most of them are dead.”

Simon thrusts a torch forward, “So you’re the vampire sent to get me.”

Loki flops away. “No! You little ingrate. I told them I could keep you under control.” Loki giggles at the absurdity. “I think, under the circumstances, I’ve been good to you, Simon. I think I’ve been mind-ballingly good to—”

“Under control,” Simon says. “That’s what your blood does—correct?” Simon punctuates the sentence with a shove of his torch.

“Yes!” Loki hisses. “All right! Yeah. Back off. Our blood—it creates emotional ties. Three times is the charm, and then you’re a . . . servant. You get to live longer, be stronger. We get a servant. You’d die for us. At least, you’re supposed to feel like that. I’ve never heard of it not working.”

But our hero has an imbalance, a misalignment of humors the doctors never puzzled out. Or maybe Simon’s soul already belonged to Jane Doe.

“So, shadow,” says Simon, “how can I trust what a monster tells me?”

“Monster? Fangs and jonesing for hemoglobin aside, I think you’re the creepiest cat in this room.”

Simon puts down the torch, moves about the room.

“If I am such an X-factor, why use me at all?” Simon says.

Loki, bleeding from the sockets, in a heap, quiets down, considers.

“I told them that you were under control. It was a way to keep you around.”

“Why?”

“I had a use for you. You have special skills. You also have a reason to go after Club Wendigo, Apex Consumers, and all of them. The static you’ll create for them is a way of poking the hornets’ nest without showing our hand.”

Loki crawls closer.

“Some of my superiors, Simon—they’re pretty old, pretty distant. This business with cults and creatures, it’s like a chess game to them. Everything is so carefully balanced. They’ve seen it all before. They can predict it. Most of the time they’re bored by it.”

Loki inches closer.

“But they didn’t predict you. Your intentions are so genuine. They don’t get that. Not anymore. Love? Some of them can’t even remember human mannerisms. At first even I thought it was a ploy, or you were just a pervert. But I watched you. I watched your aura when you do your Dead Water trick with the stiffs. I’ve never seen those colors before. It’s real. You aren’t playing any angle and you aren’t working for anyone else. That makes you invisible on their radar. Someone killing others and risking his life for the love of a cadaver whose name he doesn’t even know—they can’t comprehend that, let alone predict its course or even track it.”

Loki creeps closer.

“You are interesting, Simon—entrail reader, corpse lover. They’re stagnant. I thought I could convince my bosses to keep you on the playing board a while longer. Happy? Maybe I underestimated you. But—” Loki giggles. “Letting me talk this much. It means you underestimated me.”

“What?” Simon asks.

“I can hear the beating of your heart.” The voice does not sound human. Simon does not see the motion. The torch closest to hand is slapped away and Simon is across the room, slammed into the wall, lifted off his feet, staring into what had recently been Loki’s eyes—two scalpel handles. Loki stands tall on repaired legs, mouth open, fangs quivering.

Oh, curse my tattletale heart. Eh, Jane?

Then Simon slides down, slowly. Loki lets him go. The vampire yanks the scalpels out of his eyes. Black blood gushes out in Oedipal spurts.

I could see the blood, Jane, alive, malevolent, slithering about to repair the damage.

“Are you going to kill me?” Simon asks.

Loki licks the blood trailing down his face from the ruined sockets.

“You know, Simon, any sane Kindred would. That’s the only comprehensible solution. A year ago, I would have. But I’ve been dancing in the incomprehensible lately. In my circle, I have a specialized position. I’m—well, here’s my card, sir.”

Loki pulls a card from a pocket, presses it to one of the bloody holes in his face and then presses it to Simon’s forehead, where it is held fast by the gore.

“Besides, lover boy,” Loki purrs. “I’ve got a job for you.”

“I already examined those corpses.”

“That was an audition. I’ve got something else. Something I haven’t told the others about.”

Loki staggers up the steps

“What say we call it a night, eh? Tomorrow we’ll see if we try and kill each other. Chaos is my faith, and I honestly don’t know how this is all going to turn out.”

And Simon’s shadow departs.

Simon pulls the card off his head and looks at it: a bloodstained tarot card.

The Fool.

 

* * * * *

 

Simon hefts the body bag into his backseat, squinting in the daylight.

The call woke him up just before noon.

“I . . . need . . . your . . . help.”

So Simon drove out.

He starts the car, sees the plume of rising smoke in his rearview mirror. Sirens wail. Simon drives. He waits a few minutes.

“Loki?”

Silence.

“Loki?”

“What?” The reply is muffled from inside the body bag—sleepy, slow, and a few octaves lower than his shadow’s normal speech.

“I just . . . I would have thought that, after last night, I’d be the last person you’d want to see you vulnerable.”

“Yeah, well . . . given the circumstances, it’s galling. But it also gives us the chance to . . . kiss and make up.”

“Was it them?”

“Who?”

“Drake. Club Wendigo.”

“Yeah. Bastards torched my place, in the middle of the day. Someone must have . . . told them how to get at me, and where.”

“The rogue Kindred?”

“Yeah.”

“Who is it?”

“Don’t know. Going to find out. You’re going to help me . . . Tonight or tomorrow night . . . after I recover, we’re going to . . . get some answers . . .”

Silence.

“Loki?”

“Hmm? Oh . . . did I snore?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I can snore anymore.”

“No. That takes breathing.”

“Still dream, though. Lot of vampires . . . say they don’t dream . . . but I . . . do . . .”

“I see.”

“This girl. At a club. She had such . . . I drained her. Told myself I was hungry . . . but . . . I think I was passing the time. Wanted to see . . . if I could still . . . feel . . . guilty . . .”

“Loki?”

“Can’t feel it . . . anymore . . . unless . . . I'm . . . dreaming . . .”

 

* * * * *

 

The light in the diner makes the pallor of their skin more garish, bordering on grotesque. Even without that, though, Simon knows he’s in the presence of another vampire. The vibe coming off her says predator; it’s something that makes Simon want to hide in a cave or huddle close to the firelight. The Corbies are uneasy in their tree. The feeling she emanates is similar to the intense aura that had come off Loki when he’d had the two scalpels through his eyes. Otherwise, Loki seemed able to keep it bottled up. Not her, though.

So Simon sits in a booth with two monsters. And yet, if he looks away, he is also in a brightly lit Denny’s, that most mundane of settings. The two realties sharing the same space is dizzying.

Monster or not, she certainly doesn’t look like she belongs in a Denny’s, but some expensive club, straddling the letters V-I-P.

Loki introduces her as Persephone.

She barely spares Simon a glance.

They talk of things for which Simon has no context.

No one else sits on their side of the restaurant.

The Corbies cry and Simon’s animal brain screams: Run. Run now!

To calm himself, he stabs two rolls with two forks and makes them dance.

“God, you look like shit, Trey,” Persephone says.

“Loki,” he says.

“What?”

“These days I prefer Loki. If that’s all right, Linda.”

“Fair enough.”

Loki plays with a deck of cards as he talks. Every card is the Fool, drawn from mismatched tarot decks. Simon notices Loki’s nervous twitch, like a cat’s flipping tail, and the crazed grin.

My shadow had the same smile I had on the night I killed Hector. Eh, Jane?

“My haven got torched,” Loki says.

“Do you know who did it?” Persephone asks.

“I was hoping you’d heard something.”

“Not a thing. Why don’t you take this to Noriss or Maxwell?”

My shadow told me that the vampires of Chicago have a Prince, Jane. And his name is Maxwell.

Loki flips another Fool.

“I don’t feel safe going to the others,” he says to the upturned card. “Not until I know more.”

“But you feel safer telling me?”

“Marginally.”

“What about Moyra?”

“Can’t talk to her. Not yet.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“What’s going on, Loki?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You don’t show yourself at court. You skip out on assignments. You’re flushing any political gains you made under Maxwell. You’ve let yourself go completely to Hell. And, on top if it all, you drag me out to a fucking Denny’s.”

Loki bites his lip.

“To be honest, my dear, I just wanted to see if the world would disintegrate if you stepped in one.”

She smiles for a fraction of a second.

“What are you going to do now?” she asks.

“Gonna see Rowen.”

Simon sees something flash across her features at the mention of the name. It’s like the fear and unease he feels in the presence of these monsters.

“You’re spending a lot of time with her these days,” Persephone says. “Learning lots of bloody hoodoo?”

“Something like that.”

“You never seemed all that devoted to the Circle. I always thought you joined just to be in a covenant.”

“Something like that.”

“But what—you found religion now?”

“Something like that.”

“Loki—” she leans in “—what did she show you? What did you see out there?”

Simon senses this is an unfinished conversation the two of them had recently. Loki puts his cards away, pushes away the uneaten pancakes.

"I have to go," Loki says, standing. "How do I look?"

Persephone licks the tip of her thumb and carefully reaches out to smudge the corner of one of Loki’s eyes, leaving a tiny clean spot in the grime. She drops her hand, fingers lightly brushing his jaw line on the way down. “There. Flawless.”

He smirks. "You take care of yourself, Persephone."

Simon and Loki leave. It is, the pathologist decides, no fun playing third wheel to your shadow.

 

* * * * *

 

Simon drives.

His shadow talks.

Loki explains the Kindred covenants, the social cliques of the damned. Loki talks about the Circle of the Crone—joining seemed like the right thing to do at the time. He talks of the worship of the crone figure, the animistic spirituality, the vampiric blood sorcery, the invocation of underworld gods, the eldritch rites under fat moons.

“I used to just kind of nod along to all that. Lip service, you know?”

The white lines blur by.

He talks about Rowen, the Hierophant and leader of Chicago’s Circle of the Crone.

The odometer shivers.

“She was the first one to call me Loki.”

I caught a glimpse of my shadow’s earlier self when he said that, Jane. Not a shadow of my shadow, but an older stratum of his being. Not yet back to his mortal self, but not the ruin he was when I knew him, either. If I cut Loki open, I’m certain I would have found many strata, living and dead. Even more than most people have.

They stop at a forest preserve and get out. Loki leads the way and Simon follows his shadow into the dark. Chill winds and sighing leaves prophesy full winter’s arrival.

They come upon a large shed, four sturdy walls of cement. Loki unlocks a heavy padlock and they enter. Click. A battery-powered lamp pleads feebly to the dark. There are no windows.

“Rowen is going to meet us here?” Simon asks.

“Yeah,” his shadow replies. “She’ll be along shortly.”

Simon sits on the floor.

His shadow paces, wrestling with something troubling.

“Loki?”

“Before we see her, I need to try to get you to understand something. It started at a movie.” Loki paces more agitatedly. “Not like the one where you see those old silents. Big cineplex. And there are previews and seizure-inducing soft drink ads. I’m more or less bored out of my flaming gourd, when I see it—” Loki waves a hand as if to paint the image on to the dirty, cinderblock wall. “A sparkling vampire.”

Loki slaps the wall, kicking up the dust.

“A sparkling fucking vampire! Twenty feet tall, big as a gilded idol. Angsty, whiny, vegetarian, powder-faced, boy band vampire. And he’s got this wispy emo girl that wants him. And he sparkles! And all the tween girls in the theater go nuts. They’re screaming like they’re going to tear their clothes off and toss them to their moody new god.”

Simon’s shadow barks out a manic laugh.

“Maybe that’s good for us, for my kind. It creates a whole generation of future victims that will grow up begging to jump down our throats. But I found the whole thing depressing. For weeks my whole routine was shot. Still is. I can’t go into the industrial clubs and feed off my usual pool of mascara-smeared girls. I can’t do it and keep a straight face.”

Something falls from the ruins of Loki’s coat and scuttles away.

“So I’m left to wonder: is this eternity? Am I doomed to be an immortal douche bag—night after night, going through the motions; night after night, overused fang-penis-sex metaphors? No growth—stagnation?”

Back to the wall, Simon’s shadow slides to the floor.

“Fuck Anne Rice. Fuck Twilight. Unlife imitates art.”

Simon’s shadow abruptly freezes, still and calm.

“The point is, all this got me thinking about my prospects. The Kindred—we seem supernatural and mysterious. Exciting. And we are supernatural, but it’s so . . . mundane. It’s just blood drinking and the Kiss. That’s it. Everything else—all the grand schemes—that’s just staving off boredom.”

Simon’s shadow takes out his card deck full of Fools.

“Even the Circle—bullshit. There are just fangs and death and taxes. If a little bit of blood magic works, that’s not any more fantastical than lifting a motorcycle over your head, just with names of deities and a little more showmanship thrown in.”

Loki shuffles the Fools.

“There’s no . . . overlying pattern, spiritual destiny, what have you. No beyond. There’s just the things that rot—you, Simon, and the rest of your kind. And there’s the things that stagnate—us. My Embrace wasn’t part of some great plan. A dickhole with fangs, who knows less than me, did the deed as a very ill-advised political maneuver. There’s no answers. Except . . .”

“Rowen?” Simon says.

“Rowen,” his shadow echoes. “Get this: she chose me. She’s not part of my bloodline. She didn’t know my dickhole sire, and he wasn’t even a member of the Circle. Before all of it, she chose me. She stood over my fucking cradle, named me, wrote a bloody symbol on my little forehead.”

Loki draws something, with a finger, on his forehead; it almost shows through smudged dirt.

“And when my time came to take an infant, I knew that symbol. I was never taught it, but I knew it and I knew what to say and it was just right.”

Loki smiles and Simon shivers like his odometer.

“So I go back to Rowen. I was a smart-ass kid turned into a smart-ass vampire. Had no perception. But I follow Rowen so I can feel something. And she shows me things, such things.”

Loki shuffles the Fools more frantically.

“Terrible things. But terror is a feeling, you know? She teaches me more Crúac, more bloody witchcraft. I start to see the patterns in things. I can hear it in the music. I see it in interstate road maps. I can read it on these damn cards.”

Loki tosses the rest of the Fools to the floor.

“Careful what you wish for. Rowen helped me become the Fool. Play my cards right, and I can be the Trickster.”

Loki jumps up, pulls a dirty rug from the wood floor, and tosses it to the side of the room.

“This thing, with Arthur Drake and his cannibal cult and his son’s offshoot cult. These monsters. These—”

“Ghouls,” Simon offers.

“What?”

“They are horrible monsters that eat human flesh. That’s what a ghoul is.”

“No. That will confuse the hell out of me. We have to call them something else.”

“Ghasts?”

“Huh?”

“Ghast is to ghastly as ghoul is to ghoulish.”

“Sure. Ghasts. It’s a sickness, a spiritual disease. But we don’t know how it travels. Cannibalism seems to help, but not all the cannibals turn into . . . ghasts. Rowen thought that the potential was in the person, if they hungered for something enough. I don’t know. But she was all curious about it, about Drake’s purpose, about the Chicago River, and spirits and—well, a lot of stuff that’s, frankly, beyond me.”

A coyote howls outside.

“She’s looking into this bogeyman story with the river. She sends me out to check on something over at the Union Stock Yard Gate. You ever go to there? Weird phenomena happen there all the time. Things like, these two women are walking their dogs—little shit lapdogs, bred to total domestic retardation. They walk these dogs under the arch at the gate and the dogs go insane. These women need stitches and one dog kills the other and then dies choking, trying to swallow it whole.”

Silence.

More coyotes howl.

“I’m under the arch. I draw some glyphs. I open myself up. And I see it.”

Silence.

Howls.

Simon’s shadow is as still as a statue. At first, Simon thinks he imagines what happens next, or that it’s a trick of the fickle light, but his shadow is sweating. Beads of blood flow from the pores, run down Loki’s face. The vampire is very still as the blood-sweat flows slowly, biblically.

And then, Loki comes to, absently wipes the blood beads from his face and into his hair, to join the dirt and ash and the ancient crust of long-decayed gel.

“Well, the important thing is, I saw it.”

Loki searches the floor for a nearly invisible seam. Then he unlatches something and opens a section of the floor.

“I wish I’d never seen it.”

Loki giggles.

“But also, I want more.”

Simon stands up, dusts himself off. “So where is Rowen?”

Simon’s shadow motions for him to step forward. Simon does so. And the boy and his shadow peer down into the hole.

 

* * * * *

 

She was not eight feet tall, Jane.

Simon figures her to be just over six feet, very muscular, very imposing, bestial and beautiful—the Neanderthal Helen of Troy. At least, that is what she was. But then, Simon is so very good at looking at what is and seeing only what was.

Now she looks desiccated and curled in on herself, lying under the now-open trap door.

“I figure they came in the day,” Loki says, nervous twitch breaking the calm of his dirty pallor. “Even so, she was tougher than they anticipated. They were afraid. I could see it in their faces. There were nine or ten bodies. Hard to tell exactly how many with all the pieces.”

Loki looks down in admiration at his fallen mentor. Even lying still, mouth open, fangs bared, she looks frightening.

“Some had weapons. Some were like those other freaks. Your ‘ghasts.’ I figure they laid her low but she visited such an unholy ass-kicking on them that whoever survived fled before verifying the job was done.”

“It’s not done?” Simon asks.

Then he looks down, frozen in monomania, captivated by this rarest of cadavers. And somewhere, Loki explains that this is torpor, the death sleep of the undead. Kindred fall into it if hurt badly enough, or enter it willingly when the centuries are too heavy and the blood needs thinning. Loki explains how the sleep can go on for months, years, decades. He alludes to the bad dreams that are said to envelop the slumbering vampire, even those who claim to never dream—years of twisted, epic nightmares that hammer their minds.

“We don’t have very reliable histories,” Loki says. “All our elders have suspect memories.”

“Mmm,” is all Simon, distracted by the sight before him, can think to offer.

He hops down to the earthen floor below, reaches out to delicately touch the remains of the fearsome vampire blood-witch. He can tell, even now, that she was a proud creature, primal and majestic. Then his hand freezes, an inch away from Rowen. Even in torpor, she commands a level of fearful respect.

Simon keeps staring and Loki keeps talking—something about finding Rowen and freaking out, taking the body and hiding, not telling anyone, not even in the Circle of the Crone, for fear of what rival predators might do while she was weak. He admits that he’s painted himself into a corner. He’s not high up on the Circle’s food chain, doesn’t have the authority to hide the Hierophant when she’s indisposed. Loki explains that he is in trouble and running out of time. But he needs the name of the rogue Kindred, the one who visited Simon’s morgue and helped burn down his haven—and maybe even helped take out Rowen. Loki explains all this and then explains how Simon is going to get him that name.

“W-What?” Simon stammers when Loki is done laying out the plan.

“I’ve watched you, Simon. I’ve been your shadow. I’ve seen you do that thing you do. I’ve been just inches away, hovering close, in your intimate little moments. I’ve stared right through you while you do it. I’ve studied it down to atoms—seen you do it to humans, animals, even those monsters.”

Loki hops down to stand in the dirt beside Simon and Rowen.

“I helped lead you this far to see if you could test my little hypothesis, the one that none of my betters would ever think to let me test. They’d probably stick a stake in my little black heart just for mentioning it.”

Simon swallows. The Corbies perch, all pressing up against the insides of Simon’s eyeballs, to see what will happen next.

“You want me to—?”

“I want an entrail reader to open up an elder vampire and read her guts while she sleeps.”

Simon’s head shakes in the negative, even as his hands open his case and pull out the implements. The Corbies perch, wrapped in silence, anticipating this most unusual meal.

“I don’t know,” Simon says.

“Neither do I. Isn’t it great?”

“Will . . . will I hurt her?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t really know.”

“Will she hurt me?”

“No. Absolutely not. Well, okay, I’m not sure. That’s the fun thing about chaos—you’re always covering new ground. I think what I’m suggesting lacks a precedent.”

Simon nods. He empties his Thermos and tosses it away. He and his shadow both grin madly. He and his shadow both shiver in terror. Outside, a whole pack of coyotes howl. One coyote howling sounds lonesome. A pack sounds like falling insanity.

“Subject: Rowen,” Simon says.

“Oh, I love this part,” says Loki.

The scalpel draws its loving Y over the parchment flesh.

Snip-crunch, say the bone sheers.

Snip-crunch.

Snip-crunch.

The rib cage opens with an audible sigh, opens like a Venus flytrap screaming to the sun. Simon closes his eyes and gasps as his hands vanish inside the yawning chest cavity.

They never reach bottom.

 

* * * * *

 

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

She lies, warm and content, in the light, the joyous, cherub caresses of sun. Warm, beating, palpitating, alive—two hearts beat: her own and the tiny pulse, the promise in her belly.

A pleasant breeze.

Seedpods fall from a tree, spinning, twirling in circles, flying in circles, circling the cycle of life.

The two hearts quicken.

Pleasant tremors wrack her body.

It is time!

Sweat beads, water breaks, tears and happy humor pour. A new life rests on her chest and she gazes into the little face. She exudes the contentment of having a key place in the cycle, the eye of the tropical storm of life. The eye has a name: Mother.

Rowen has the name Mother.

“Can there be a greater joy?” she says to the little one.

The child smiles. He opens his mouth, ready to speak his first words.

“Mother, you’re cold.”

What?

She breathes in to laugh, but her lungs do not fill. Her heart does not beat. Cold. So cold! Tears turn to red-and-black sludge in her eyes. Her skin goes chalky gray.

“No, no, no!”

Rowen, where are we?

Blood, she thinks. Yes, blood. She only needs to pump more blood in order to palpitate. She wills the Vitae through her body.

Nothing.

Still cold.

More blood. Yes. She just needs more blood. She squeezes the liquid dead through her system. It erupts from her eyes, geysers from her ears, seeps through her pores, bursts from every orifice.

Nothing.

Still cold. Heart as cold and still as a mutant fetus floating in a jar.

“No. Please, no . . .”

Her body warps. Her face twists with feral, aching fangs. Hands lengthen to wicked talons. Her caress cuts her baby’s face.

There is no light. There is no sun. There is only a baleful moon full of howling souls that hungrily tugs at the tides.

Rowen, where are we?

She tries again, but there is no more blood. The Beast shrieks from out the mouth of her child. Her child? The babe’s skin pales and yellows in putrid decay. His eyes shrink and his teeth drop through his gums as razors. He glares with dead eyes.

“You just need more death, Mother.”

The infant shambles across her body, toward her face. Flecks of rotten flesh fall away as it moves. She tries to struggle but its dead eyes, the eyes of the Beast, hold her in place. Rancid little fingers enter her mouth, force it open, and the plague baby crawls in, slithers in, wriggles down her throat. More blood explodes from her body.

Still cold.

“More, Mother. You need more,” call out the little voices within. The Beast crawls from her womb and with it, a legion of undead infants in various states of development and decay. They wriggle from between her legs, scuttle up her body, slide on clammy birth-slick. Then, with necrotic hands, they force their way down her throat, umbilical chords still trailing in endless loops—the serpent swallowing its tail—circling the cycle of the damned.

She tries to scream. “What happened to the promise?” she tries to ask the unfaithful sun, but her lungs fill with liquified flesh and spoiled blood.

“One more,” they cry. “There is always room for one more, until the end of days.” They gnaw on her from the inside.

“Rowen, where are you?”

The stillborn devils turn their heads and point at the strange new voice. “Stranger,” they say. “A stranger. There should be no stranger here. Sleep has no place to call its own.” They gnash their little teeth.

Still choking on the writhing dead, she looks up only to see Simon in his black bowler hat, in his threadbare suit—the oneiromantic Charlie Chaplin.

“Rowen, you hurt,” he says.

The dead infants cover her protectively with their rotting-cherub caresses. They hiss threats.

“Begone, little nightmares,” Simon says.

“You don’t belong here,” they reply. “You begone, rogue dreamer. Let us feed our Mother.” Their little mouths distend in rabid coyote laughter.

“No,” Simon says. Then he explodes up into the sky. He grows. His arms and legs lengthen into wormwood limbs. He grows and he grows. And Simon looks gigantically down, a tattie-bogle terror, the scarecrow demigod. Under the brim of his great hat, his eyes gleam as two manhole-sized funeral pennies. His grin is a graveyard of white tombstones. His tree branch hands flex into claws, and his fingers end in scalpels the size of scythes.

“Lucid dreamer!” the undead infants and rot-fetuses squeal.

“A Lucid!” they sputter.

“Lucid!”

Simon, the scarecrow god, slashes with his scalpel hands and a score of the gibbering nightmares fly apart, cut away with surgical steel. Then he opens his great mouth and out fly the Corbies, a dread cloud of carrion birds, a thousand-thousand hungry beaks, a thousand-thousand eyes glowing absinthe green.

“Click-clack-crack!” caw the Corbies.

The revenant babies scream.

“Shriek-shrike-scythe!” caw the Corbies as they descend. Their beaks tear through the rotting meat, and they sing vicious lullabies.

Simon, the scarecrow god, reaches into the sky with a wormwood claw and, through sleight of hand, steals the moon from the sky. He puts it in his great mouth and swallows all the souls. His head ignites in a ghost-fire inferno, face lighting up like a Jack O’Lantern planet. He looks gigantically down at the infants and howls:

“Get thee hence!”

The chattering nightmares flee.

And the Beast flees.

And all is quiet save for the sigh of the Dead Water.

Simon shrinks back down—the oneiromantic Charlie Chaplin once more.

Rowen stands. She flexes her claws and fangs, uncertain, growling.

“Shhh,” Simon says.

He swipes with his scalpel fingers and her cold, bestial skin falls away. He cuts just deep enough that she feels, and the tears, clear tears, stream. The undead skin falls away revealing the palpitating woman who walked into the dark woods, on a “once upon a time” many years ago.

“You cut it all away,” Rowen says.

“Yes,” Simon says. “I can do that here.”

“They took my baby.”

“I know.”

“I was walking in the woods. I enjoyed the woods at night. I held my baby. We gave each other warmth. I stumbled into a clearing full of Acolytes, the blood drinkers, in their Samhain revels. They took my child and they gave me the Embrace. ‘An exchange,’ they said.”

Rowen places Simon’s hand on her stomach.

“My baby boy was so fine.”

Simon nods. He presses on her belly and his hand sinks inside. He twists. He pulls free, pulls out her son.

Rowen hugs the child to her breast, warm and breathing and perfect.

“Thank you,” she says. With her free hand, she strokes Simon’s face.

“But this cannot last,” she says. “It won’t be like this out there. Out there, I have my hunger and my Beast, my grim experience and the Danse Macabre. Out there, I do not have my warmth, my naïveté, or my child.”

“I know,” Simon says. “We always kill our loved ones when we wake up.”

“Out there, I will be a danger to you.”

“It’s all right.”

Together they walk down the shore of the ebony sea. They talk and they stroll and they share, exposed and vulnerable, along the beach that stretches forever.

 

* * * * *

 

Simon comes to with a shudder and a spasm, falling to the floor, next to the spilled, withered guts of Rowen.

“Are you hurt?” Loki asks.

“No,” Simon says. “It’s . . . good . . . oh . . . it’s so good . . .”

“Did you get a name?”

“Yes.” Simon gets off the floor, eyes dilated. “Your rogue Kindred’s name is Mort.”

“The Mondays!” scream the Corbies, flapping their wings in ecstasy.

Loki nods.

“What’s it like?” asks the vampire.

“What?”

“Absinthe. The Dead Water.”

Simon looks about for his Thermos.

“Sorry,” says Loki. “I’m on a strict hemoglobin diet.”

Simon thinks a moment.

Then he offers his wrist.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 27

 

The nights blur by in red and in green.

Simon and Loki.

Night after night in red and green, and both colors mean go.

The odd duo—the Slapstick Macabre, the scarecrow and the shadow—each high off the other’s blood. Everything bends and warps under the dream alchemy. They are on a mission, a horrifying mission, but they can’t keep the smiles off their faces and the giggling is epidemically infectious.

Night after night.

Red and green.

One night, they sit in on an Apex Consumer recruitment meeting at a Holiday Inn. They take the recruitment leader out for drinks after.

Another night, they hunt through the Michigan Avenue Underground for a ghast that’s been eating the homeless down there. It has sharp teeth and claws and doll’s eyes, but it falls to fangs and scalpels.

Another night, they find the hoarded store of meat of a cannibal that was dead or fled. The freezer had been off for days. The smell was horrendous, but Simon was used to that and his friend is not a habitual breather.

The nights blur by in red and green.

Simon and Loki—the Slapstick Macabre—dark mischief in their minds and laughter in their mouths. Strange events spark stranger friendships and gory circumstance can birth weird buddies. The more differences they find, the more they discover they are alike. One has a soul half empty and the other has a soul half full.

The nights blur by in green and red and scalpels and fangs.

 

* * * * *

 

Two hours into the stakeout, Simon has to relieve himself against the alley wall. He’s almost done when he feels the eyes upon him.

“What . . . what are you doing?” Simon says, zipping up.

“Sorry, man,” Loki says, turning away. “I get nostalgic about peeing.”

“Vampire bats urinate a copious amount of black fluids when they feed, to get rid of excess liquid weight.”

“Do they?”

“Do you?”

“No, Simon. I do not.”

 

* * * * *

 

The nights blur together. They hunt down flesh-and-blood metaphors of consumerism gone rampant. Creatures ravenous with hunger—Manifest Destiny hunger.

“Should I feel bad for them?” Simon asks.

“They’re rabid monsters,” says Loki.

It was easy, in the moment, when their teeth gnashed and their claws slashed to forget that they ever were human . . . like Clara. Eh, Jane?



* * * * *

 

“They’re called resurrectionists,” Simon says, sipping from his Thermos.

“Oh yeah?” says Loki.

They wait in the car. They have been there for a while, fighting off occasional fits of manic giggling. Waiting is the hardest part.

“They dug up bodies, illegally, for sale,” continues Simon. “In the nineteenth century, doctors didn’t know how to acquire a steady supply of corpses for autopsy and study, so resurrectionists were in high demand.”

“Growth industry.”

“Yes. These doctors, pillars of the community, were paying men with shovels for illegal corpses. Sir Astley Cooper, a London anatomist and surgeon, publicly denounced resurrectionists. But privately, he hired them and encouraged others to take up the work.”

“Okay, okay, sure,” says Loki. “But tell me again about the thing with the bones and the dogs.”

They both look at the front doors of the all-night emergency animal clinic, viewing it through a fog of wormwood, the pair twisted on a Dead Water trip. They again fall to giggling.

I wonder now, Jane, if Loki had a ghost tree in his head, too, and if there were crows perched there.

“Sir Astley was known for eccentric behavior. He gave out name plates to his friends. He would paint their names on pieces of bone and force lab dogs to swallow them. When he extracted the bone from the stomachs of the dissected dogs, the name would be carved into the bone, the letters raised, the bone around the letters having been partially eaten away by the stomach acids.”

Simon and Loki turn toward the animal clinic doors and break into another fit of giggles.

“You think . . . you think Mitford is doing the cuts?” asks Loki.

“Ray Mitford is exactly the kind of man who would perform the necropsy himself,” says Simon.

“Necropsy?”

“Pet autopsy.”

“Oh.”

It was just one decaying thread, Jane, in all those clues and bodies I dug through in the kitchen of the Palmer House.

Amidst the remains, Simon came across the body parts of one of Ray Mitford’s victims. Then he dove into the Dead Water to learn more. Mitford was a veterinarian, a rich one; he performed expensive pet procedures for those who could afford them. Mitford had two vices: his dogs and cannibalism. The first vice was easy to sate for the talented animal surgeon and breeder. The second vice proved infinitely easier to fill as a member of both the Gastronome Irregulars and of Arthur Drake’s inner circle of friends. Always eager to spoil his dogs, Ray often shared his meals with them. He enjoyed the rush of human meat above all things, but recently discovered the joy in the kill when he murdered his gardener and cleaned and butchered him himself. The dogs shared in the feast.

Simon’s eyes gaze off into other worlds. He found more than clues in that pile of cadaver clay. He saw Jane, again and again. He saw her in the eyes and the hair and the mouths and the hands and the open chest cavities and the livers and the lungs and the ligature marks on a crushed throat. He called her name over and over in the nostalgia echo of the Dead Water. Everything was Jane.

I kept seeing your parts in other people’s parts, Jane.

“You’re thinking about her,” Loki says.

“How do you know?”

“Your soul turns a certain color.”

“What color is—?”

“Shhh. Eyes to the doors. I see movement.”

Simon and Loki stare at the front doors to the animal clinic. The set-up work had been relatively simple. The tranquilizer made inserting the bones and the capsules easy. They can only imagine, eagerly, the cut, the opening, the room full of people, and the human bones—the pieces of his victim’s bones tumbling out, with phrases etched in raised letters:

 

MURDERER!

RAY MITFORD BUTCHERED MIGUEL HERNANDEZ.

THE PROOF IS IN HIS FREEZER.

 

The doors fly open. Loki and Simon snap to attention. A man, still in scrubs, still gloved, still with animal blood on his hands, runs outside—directionless, confused, with crazed eyes, and a look that says the pretty walls of his world have come tumbling down. Ray Mitford runs off into a mad night.

Simon and Loki fill the car with laughter. Loki pops open the door.

“Let’s go get him.”

Outside, Simon looks up. Roiling clouds touch the moon, igniting in ghost fire, and the sky is filled with Jane’s glowing white hair, undulating in the wind. Simon can’t breathe. Her hair moved like that when they played on the swing set in the Dead Water. Her hair probably moved like that as she swayed on the hanging tree. Her hair moves like that now, big as the stratosphere, as she’s hung on a noose that is the skyline, dangling from a dark universe.

“Simon!”

Our lovesick scarecrow breathes and runs after Loki. But a sinister suspicion follows after—that every step he takes actually leads him farther from Jane. Inside his skull, the Corbies cackle and taunt and tease. They peck the osseous cracks, testing the fissures of self-doubt. From their wormwood branches, they chant, “Necrophiles need love too. They just have to dig down deep for it.”

 

* * * * *

 

Simon cannot tell if the figure before him is male or female, but the name is White Chocolate. He or she has skin the color of very light mocha, and is wearing hot pink fishnets. When White Chocolate bared fangs inside the seedy club, in response to one of Loki’s questions, things were getting dangerous enough for the vampires to take it outside.

Loki had called vampires like White Chocolate the Unbound, said they had no covenant and a lot of hard feelings for the Kindred who didn’t share their attitude toward authority.

“Looking a little crusty, Trey,” says White Chocolate. “Sure there’s no misery I can put you out of?”

“It’s Loki. And that would go against the Prince’s Tranquility.”

“Fuck the Prince! And fuck his Tranquility.”

“Wow, how uncompromisingly rebellious of you to say that this far from his ears.”

“How stupid of you to come this far out from under his wing.”

Simon feels the giddiness flee. The back of his neck tingles with a feeling akin to the one you might get when waking up from a refreshing nap, only to discover you’ve somehow fallen into a high-walled bear enclosure. Three other vampires accompany White Chocolate, his or her undead offspring—what Loki calls the childer—all showing fangs. They surround Simon and Loki.

“All right, White Chocolate,” Loki says slowly. “It’s fair to say you’re in the right position to give us a thrashing. But why not tell me about Mort first.”

“The Mondays, Simon,” shriek the Corbies.

“Mort? That fugly beast?” White Chocolate asks.

“Yeah. Heard he ran with you.”

“Nah, Mort don’t run with us anymore. He took his slimy self and went River Snake.”

“River Snake, really?”

“And I hear tell he even managed to wash out of the River Snakes.”

“Huh. I didn’t think there was anywhere lower to fall to.” Loki smiles as if the mirth of the past few nights had not left him in the club. “Well, thanks for the info. We’re in kind of a hurry. Can we reschedule the beating for another time?”

White Chocolate laughs, and the childer laugh, too. They all laugh through their fangs.

“What makes you think your scrawny ass is ambulating out of this alley?”

“Well,” says Loki, stepping forward, still amused. “If you piss me off, I’m going to throw some nasty-bad mojo on you.”

All the other vampires snort their derision.

“Crúac?” says White Chocolate.

“Crúac,” says Loki.

White Chocolate laughs harder

“Everyone knows you ain’t got no Crúac, Trey. You run with the Circle Jerks, but you don’t study no mojo.” White Chocolate struts toward Loki, curling hot pink fingernailed hands into fists with audible knuckle cracks.

“It’s Loki. And what can I say . . . I got religion.” Loki bites his own wrist and then flicks blood on the ground between him and White Chocolate in a rude gesture, muttering strange words under his breath.

The Unbound vampire suddenly falls silent. White Chocolate’s body goes rigid, eyes popping out, mouth grimacing. The other vampires stop snorting and laughing. Their sire, standing stiff, shakes violently, and then, with monumental effort, takes one lurching step toward Loki. Every little movement causes a sickening crackle.

“Rigor mortis!” caw the Corbies, impressed with the trick unleashed by Simon’s shadow.

White Chocolate closes one eye and, with a monumental show of will, raises an arm and slams a fist into a nearby wall, cracking the brick.

“Fucking blood witch!” the Unbound roars, shaking off the last vestiges of the spell. “I’m gonna suck you dry and fuck the fang holes!”

“Well,” says Loki darkly, “while that does answer a few questions I had about your anatomy, that’s not going to happen.” He removes something from a pocket and holds it up in display. It’s a bundle of rags and yarn sewn together in sloppy stitches, but even for all of that, it is obviously a ragdoll effigy of White Chocolate.

“That’s not—?” hisses the Unbound.

“Yup, it’s you,” whispers Loki. Then he bites his tongue, hard, and spits a gobbet of blood on the ragdoll. He chants, “Balla eis kora kas. Balla eis kora kas. Balla eis kora kas . . .”

“Bullshit,” says White Chocolate, retreating a step anyway. “Bullshit!”

The other vampires slink back into the shadows as Loki takes a Zippo out of his pocket.

Clink.

Scratch.

Fire.

Loki brings the flame close to the ragdoll, his chanting building to a crescendo: “Balla eis kora kas. Balla eis kora kas. Balla eis kora kas. Balla eis kora kas!”

In streaks of fangs and hate, the Unbound vampires flee.

Loki grins, closes the Zippo.

“I tell you, Simon,” he says, tossing the bloody ragdoll into a dumpster. “The thing about magic is, it’s not what you can do, but what others think you can do.”

 

* * * * *

 

In Chicago, there is a neighborhood where, with the right set of ears, you can still hear the sledgehammers falling.

Go to the West Loop. To the east, the Chicago River flows like a weeping cloaca; to the west, the horizon swallows the sun. Go to West Fulton Market, go to West Lake Street, North Sangamon Street, and West Randolph Street. Meander down the gritty roads and blood-soaked alleys. Follow the sweet-rancid smell, faint and fathomless. Wander into the fade of afternoon to evening and stand at the apex of incongruity.

A forklift hauls greasy pallets of bacon to the left.

Stiletto heels exit a luxury car to the right.

You don’t even need directions. Follow the sound. Can you hear it, loveling—echoing across the decades—the cow-skull percussion?

A one hundred-year-old business vending wholesale pork rinds and bulk-sized canned tomatoes stands next to an art gallery selling paintings priced in the six digits. This is Chicago’s meatpacking district, neighborhood of ancient gore. It is in metamorphosis. Not planned, not fabricated, it grows organically. It’s evolved with particular speed over the last twenty years. It is alive.

Follow the beat. See nineteenth-century meatpacking warehouses—cold meat lockers and loading docks—turned into trend-setting restaurants. Pass a lounge—exposed brick walls, shag rug, and fifteen-foot ceilings. A once desolate street corner thrums with parking valets and stylish young things in sunglasses. Walk a few doors down. Enter a restaurant where a mad-scientist chef creates postmodern food using liquid nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and lasers. The chili cheese nachos taste like fruit salad. The menu is printed on edible, subtly flavored paper.

“What’s eating you, Kate?” asks Jack.

“Nothing,” she says.

Things unsaid swarm about them in a thick cloud.

He dips the remainder of his menu into the gorgonzola sauce on her rare steak and eats it. He answers a text message on his phone. She does not ask if it’s her sister, but she wonders loudly. A person can scream silently for a long, long time.

“You’re not going to finish that?” he asks.

She does not reply.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

Follow Jack and Kate out onto Lake Street, where galleries and boutiques sprout like coral under the elevated tracks. A train thunders by above.

“What was that?” asks Jack.

“Nothing.”

The ghost of forty million gallons of blood flows, waste high, about them. They do not notice.

They walk by art galleries that thrive among all the meat: a place that specializes in multimedia exhibits, another with soaring walls of brick, wrought-iron chandeliers, antique armor, and framed works by local artists. Organic cotton jeans sell for under two hundred dollars, with champagne served in the dressing room.

The neighborhood mutates—slaughterhouse to art house. Cheap rent served as a honeyed lure. They came. They renovated. Seediness came into vogue, and they gobbled up the grim-grimy backdrop, the illusion of mystery and suspense, the boarded-up windows like set dressing. Neighborhoods have cycles, and it is not uncommon for a Chicago neighborhood to cannibalize itself, to become the eater and the eaten and survive on that paradox for a time.

“What’s eating you?”

She shrugs.

One hundred years ago, a bleeding pig screams at them.

Jack and Kate stop in front of what looks like a fleabag motel. It is a former sausage factory turned fashionable lounge and restaurant. He wants to explore the back streets. The magazine article said to come after sunset and ignore everything your mother ever told you about dark alleys. She hesitates, half-listening to the words of her dying lizard brain. He’s excited by the feel of gritty danger. He takes her hand. They vanish down the black mouth of the alley.

What’s eating you?

Wander northwest now, all the way to the river. On the bank, another nineteenth-century meatpacking warehouse, this one larger than the rest. Enter the iron gate. Pass the security guard as he licks the residue from the inside of a white box, its former contents, supplied to him every night, the sole reason he keeps this job. Walk up the path. The guard’s lapping moans, muffled and echoed in the white box, are still audible over the step-crunchof the white stones.

Engraved in iron, the letters over the door read: The Gastronome Irregulars.

Enter.

Within is much of the decadent, much of the wanton—all shapes and flavors—but not all contained in one grand ballroom. No. This is a compartmentalized club, of many tastes and vices, segregated into many discrete rooms, each with its own unique lighting and decor and delights. There are sounds, innumerable sounds, but they are all variations of that guard’s moans as he licks his box clean. A curious noise resounds in the kitchen. Under all this lurks the phantom beat.

Mingle.

In a room of yellow wallpaper, many people in fancy dress socialize under choleric-colored lights. Silver trays dance about the room on the white-gloved hands of servants.

“What is that?”

“This, sir, is fried Cambodian tarantula skewers, glazed with a sweet sauce.”

Gossiping mouths chew on words, chew on battered octopus testicles, chew the gelatinous flesh of a sea cucumber, chew whole broiled duck embryos, spit out the feathers. Tongues lick spoons clean of the last bits of codfish sperm. Steaming bowls contain soup made from broken bird nests. Wine pours from bottles containing pickled mouse fetuses. Each floats blind, unable to reach its siblings through the glass.

Voices exalt the liver pâté and deify the chef.

“It comes from Briarwood Farm, a little place outside of Philadelphia.”

“How ever did you get it?”

“I know someone.”

Explore.

A room of sable furnishings, lit only by black lights, contains glowing, melancholic art. A local TV hostess and a celebrity chef sit alone. They eat casu marzu, the maggot cheese of Sardinia. The sheep milk pecorino achieves a strong flavor and creamy consistency through advance fermentation and the digestive process of the colony of maggots that live within the wheel. The white cheese and wriggling larva glow under the ultraviolet lights. The celebrity chef scoops some out and spreads it on flatbread.

“Careful,” he says, “they can jump six inches in the air. And make sure you chew thoroughly. Stomach acid doesn’t kill them. They burrow.”

The TV hostess spreads the cheese and maggots. She tears apart a fan letter, places a strip of the paper across the open-face sandwich. She bites. She chews carefully, swallows the cheese and bread and worms and manifested worship. The maggots writhe, and the cheese wheel leaks a liquid called lagrima, which means tears.

“Mmm,” she says.

A translucent maggot leaps from her lower lip, fluorescing all the way down.

Meander.

In a feverish room of crimson illumination and sanguine aesthetics, a decorated box, of the sort one might expect to contain fine chocolates, is passed about.

“What are those?”

“Leaches.”

The hand shies away.

“Really. On what do they feed?”

“Exclusively from the blood of royalty.”

The hand returns, plucks a glistening treat.

Lurk.

In a blue-cast room of phlegmatic sensibility, a fountain dominates the center and glass fixtures cascade constant curtains of water down the walls. An aging beauty, whose body has become a grand mausoleum where that beauty is interred, strokes an ornate pet-carrying case.

“As a little girl, I made a deal with the voice inside the garden wishing well, and it gave me my little puss-puss. He pads off at night, stealing the breath from precious little babies and comes back to feed me, the way mamma birds do. Isn’t he just darling?”

Eyes gleam from behind the small bars.

Snoop.

In a library of green-tinged lights, everything is bathed in ectoplasm. A crowd gathers around one Arthur Drake. The lord of infomercials pontificates. “Epicurus is titled in the modern Greek idiom as the Dark Philosopher,” he says.

Everyone nods. They know.

“Epicureanism emphasizes that the material of gods, both matter and souls, is comprised of atoms. The souls of gods adhere to their bodies without escaping.”

Everyone nods.

“I can’t help but think—if a soul is made of atoms, then it must be a digestible thing.”

The nods become more eager. Drake shares theories and plans, uses terms like “exponential zoophagy.” The murmur builds. He punctuates the oration by miming downward swings with a heavy hammer.

“Do you have it yet?” someone asks.

“I will,” Drake says, looking into his empty hands. Then his eyes devour everything and everyone in the room.

Applause. But not everyone is so taken with Arthur. “Can you imagine—eating someone without substance. Hmph. I apologize, what did you say your name was?”

Leave. Out the back.

A door bumps open. In the kitchen, a chef works on something large and red with a sharp implement. Can you hear it, loveling, over the whisper of the river? That sound, like hammers falling.

What’s eating you, Jack?

What’s eating you?

 

* * * * *

 

There are monsters in the river. Children know this. At 3:00 A.M. you know it, too. At the height of the stockyards’ reign, they slaughtered some twenty-one thousand cows and seventy-five thousand pigs a day, pouring countless gallons of blood and entrails into the Chicago River.

What were they feeding, loveling?

Simon and Loki wait on the shore of the south fork of the river’s south branch.

Always and always water is the medium between waking, dreams, and death. Eh, Jane?

“It was thought that firing a canon over the water would cause drowned cadavers to rise to the surface,” says Simon.

“Does it work?”

“I’ve never tried.”

“If we had a canon, I’d try,” Loki hisses. “Someone’s late.” Simon noticed that his shadow’s mood was fraying at the edges as the nights wore on. Mort’s trail was annoyingly murky.

We chased the Mondays, Jane. Though I believe it was a Wednesday.

The Corbies chatter. A few minutes later, they all go quiet. Simon startles at the sudden silence in his mind just as he notices the full moon reflected, small, on the black water. Yet there is no full moon this night. The pale orb becomes a head silently breaching the dark surface, but only until the eyes, nose, and mouth are revealed, like a frog lying in wait, like a drowning victim seduced by a canon’s call. Her hair floats about her head, a silky halo, as white as Jane Doe’s hair. Simon inches forward. The cold, hard hand of his shadow shoves him back.

“Alexi,” says Loki to the white face floating on the dark.

“Loki, Loki, Prince’s Hound,” she replies.

“Simon, I’d like you to meet Alexi, leader of the River Snakes.”

“Who is this?” asks the floating face.

“My ghoul.”

Simon doesn’t flinch at the word, but he can’t tell whether that’s because he knows it’s not true or knows that, in some ways, it must be.

Alexi rises halfway out of the water, naked skin like wet chalk. Painfully gaunt, but beautiful. The mortified saint in a Renaissance painting, the one whose eyes follow you across the room. Fetid water beads and runs down her small breasts.

She extends dripping arms, hands grasping the November air.

“Bring him to me. I want to see.”

Simon’s breath escapes as fog.

“Sorry, snake queen,” Loki says. “We’re staying on land.”

“Impertinent whelp! I am Regent of the Chicago River, ordained by your Prince. I will examine any property that enters my domain as I see fit.”

“Your domain extends only to the water and the bridges that float over the water. You have no authority over any inch of shoreline.”

“Oh, very well.” Alexi sighs, lowers back into the water and rests her chin on the shore. “You look an absolute shambles, Loki. Too hard out there? Have you come to join us? Say yes.”

“No, I’ve not come to join. I’m just fine.”

“You’re not, you know. Come now—the water’s so fine. You’re cracking apart in front of me.” She smiles lewdly and whispers, “I can see your Beast poking out.”

“How’s Oliver? I haven’t seen him.”

“You’re changing the subject, and poor Oliver fell down.”

“Oh?”

“Went ripper.”

“Ripper? What a waste.”

“Yes. Messy.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t know.”

“That reflects badly on you.”

“Maybe the Prince has him. I hear your boss enslaves rippers.”

“Bullshit. Can’t be done. There’s nothing left to enslave.”

“I hear he locks them away for special occasions. They call them Maxwell’s Seven Grims—or Thirteen Grims—depending upon who you ask.”

“That’s rumor-mill fantasy. Maxwell has no use for rippers. Rabid dogs aren’t good for anything. Now, Alexi—”

“That’s Regent Alexi.”

Simon can see the slight indents in Loki’s lower lip where the fangs press. “Regent Alexi,” he says. “I’ve come to ask about a Haunt you know by the name of Mort.”

“Morton? He went away.”

“Went ripper?”

“No. He went . . . another way.”

Simon gazes into the river. Are those pale faces beneath the dark surface or is he imagining them? Hard to say. Whole other worlds can hide beneath three inches of water. He looks closer. “Loki?” he says. “This place looks so familiar. Are we near Bubbly Creek?”

“Alexi, I need to know what happened to Mort,” says Simon’s shadow.

“Come into the water,” Alexi says, eyes fixed on Simon. “It’s like returning to the womb. You can hear the heartbeat of the city. You can—”

“Simon, do not get any closer to the water!”

Simon backs away. Does the water look disappointed?

“Water is our natural environment,” says Alexi, spinning in the river. “There are places where the water is so opaque, so polluted, that the sun never touches bottom. All the pig’s blood you can drink. Granted, not as much as used to flow, but they’ve gotten better at dumping it. Don’t even have to strain out the shit.”

Loki growls, deep in the throat. “Get the sewage out of your ears. I’m not going Snake. I’m not a bottom feeder.”

“That’s a hurtful thing—a hurtful, hurtful thing to say to a Regent,” Alexi says, wriggling in the water. “And all because the Snakes are not a big bad covenant like the Circle?” She glides toward Simon. Are those white silhouettes swirling about her in schools, just beneath the murk? So hard to see.

“Ghoul,” she says, “has your master told you what he and his friends do for kicks? Oliver was in the Circle, before he came to us. He told us all about the rituals and ceremonies, told us about the one where they bring in a mortal boy, just in the bloom of his manhood, and force him to inhale certain fumes. A blood witch enters the Circle, dressed as a savage fertility goddess. She dances about him, all liquid grace. Even in his terror, he lusts for her. The Circle dances and writhes around the two of them. She kisses the boy on the forehead in such a way that he swoons. She kisses each of his eyes deeply, deeply. He quivers but does not struggle. She kisses each eyeball right out of the socket with a sucking pop. Each eye bursts between her teeth like grapes, and she speaks gory prophecies. Oliver could not tell if the boy screamed or orgasmed.”

The Corbies whisper to Simon. He watches this river siren, and he watches the water. The hungry, hungry water. So very familiar . . .

“Nice story, Alexi,” says Loki. “Tell us another. How about one starring Mort? Please.”

The woman of wet chalk floats back toward the raggedy vampire. Are those multitudes of pale hands caressing her beneath the surface or is it a trick of the light?

“Once upon a time,” she says, “Morton was a Kindred of prominence, a member of the Ordo Dracul. He studied ley lines and other mystic nonsense, but his experiments got too weird, even for the Dragons. They kicked him out. He went to the Unbound, but he got even weirder. They kicked him out. Our doors are always open—well, almost always. But Mort got even weirder. He ranted about bogey-things in the water, ‘the chorus of wyrms’ he called it. We had to let him go. He . . . changed. We still have his effects. You should see what he wrote in that journal of his. He—”

“I’ve been here!” says Simon.

“Simon—” says Loki.

“I was here. I came through the Dead Water, with Toby Reynolds. I swam in it and I saw. The children tried to call for help, but they could only scream bubbles. A cement block and a hook. This is where Meyer Twiss dumped the children.”

Alexi rises out of the water, rises to her lower legs. But what supports her in the deeper water? She looks at Simon, maybe for the first time, and though dirty water runs in rivulets over her eyes, she does not blink.

“Meyer Twiss, Meyer Twiss,” she says. “All the children sing of Meyer Twiss. Twiss-Twiss-Twiss. Was he ever caught?”

“No,” says Simon, head hanging, looking down at the slaughter water.

“He gave us such a pretty little garden, planted with pretty little children. It can get awfully lonely in the flow. Meyer Twiss dropped us some company. A whole grove of them, floating and swaying on their little chains, from their little blocks. I visited the garden every day, until the police took them away. They hit the water alive, and we waited for them, made their passing a little quicker, a little more peaceful. The poor dears had been through enough, and who would miss that blood?”

“You could have helped them,” says Simon. “You could have unhooked their feet.”

Her eyes remain unblinking. They show no transmutation toward comprehension.

Loki crouches at the shore’s edge, eyes burning through his collected grime. “I need you to give me Mort’s things.”

“I’m not done playing,” says the river vampire, smiling, just out of reach.

“Dammit, Alexi. This is important. Mort attacked Rowen. I need to know why.”

“Tell me, Loki: Why, oh why, hasn’t Rowen made a formal complaint?”

“I am an enforcer of the Prince. You will give—”

“No, Hound. I don’t think this investigation is official. In fact, I don’t think you’d want Maxwell to know about it. I ask myself, ‘Why?’ Why didn’t Rowen reduce Morton to a red mist or command the earth to swallow him whole? Unless . . . he got very, very cunning or very, very lucky and killed her.”

Loki’s jaw tightens until it shakes.

“No,” says Alexi. “She’s not dead. She’s torpid. That’s why you’re so twitchy. No one else knows.”

Loki’s eyes narrow to feral slits.

“She is! Then I have a counteroffer for you, raggedy Loki: step into the river right now—follow us into the flow—and I won’t tell everyone about this. Too proud to go Snake? Look at you. You’re two steps from going ripper.”

It is so easy to imagine more pale faces now, in the water. Simon hears a noise, like the mating call of a legion of hideously large amphibians. The croaking taunt sounds like “Draugr, draugr, draugr, draugr, draugr!”

Alexi laughs. It’s a musical sound, like the chime of a cracked bell covered in pond slime.

Loki roars. His hands grasp for Alexi’s mocking face, but it becomes blurred quicksilver and remains just out of reach. Frustrated, he tears at the cold mud around him. “You silly river bitch!” he says, though it sounds like a wild animal holding Loki’s severed tongue in its maw, trying to form human words.

“What made Mort attack Rowen? What had he found out here? Have to know! K-kill you! Rip you!”

The words finally fail and all that remains is the language of the Beast. Loki shudders at impossible speeds like the frenzied characters in the silent movies during a film jam. He forcefully breathes, trying to maintain control, to keep from leaping into the river.

Alexi, siren of sludge, never stops laughing as she drifts farther out from shore.

She was leading him, Jane, to the place where her word is law.

The Corbies come to attention and sound the caw. “Nothing to fear, Simon. They’re all just carrion. We know how to chew carrion.” The Corbies whisper into Simon’s inner ear, and his mouth is their mouth.

“Enough of this,” Simon says. “You know, I’ve seen you before, Alexi.”

The vampires pause, shocked, and turn to regard the forgotten ghoul.

“Of course you have, dear,” says Alexi. “You see me every time you spy your reflection tempting you into the water.”

“No,” Simon says. “I’ve seen you. I know you, Alexi Serbetsnya.”

Her tranquil mask slips, just a little. “What?”

“This little boy—Toby—showed me, in the Dead Water. He took me into the river. He wanted to show me. ‘The hollow mermaid who kissed me,’ he said. I thought he had hallucinated as he asphyxiated. He showed me your face, Alexi Serbetsnya. You are the hollow mermaid I saw swimming in the garden of bobbing child corpses.”

The river vampire’s face contorts into rare wrinkles.

“Some Dead Water trips are difficult,” Simon says. “Sometimes stray dreams wander in, and I forget them on waking, like I forgot this one. But I remember it now. I followed you in the Dead Water. I dissected you. I know you, Alexi Serbetsnya. You always wanted more, even when you were alive: a poor girl on the South Side—a pickpocket, cat burglar, bank robber, train hijacker, a sexual distraction for grifters. More and more. I know the sob story and lies you told on the witness stand, the ones that put your lover in for what should have been your jail sentence. But Eddie got out. Eddie was mad. You ran, but then, you’d always been running. More and more. You found monsters. You forced Valencia to make you one, too. More and more. . . .”

“Stop it,” Alexi growls.

“More and more, but it caught up with you. Valencia and Eddie, only Eddie found his own monster, like you did; that makes three mad monsters who found you. They made you pay. I know what they did. I know how long that punishment lasted. I know what it did to you—where it still tickles you.”

Alexi screams high and shrill. “Conspiracy! Who told you? Who sent you?” She thrashes in the water. “Conspiracy! Conspiracy!” Bloody tears pour down the chalk of her face, spilling into the river, feeding the hungry water.

The Corbies point out her eyes to Simon, show that her outbreak was not of the Beast, but more than shock or revelation. It was an existing madness that Simon’s words had tickled.

Alexi claws up the shore like an angry crayfish, pawing the ground. She stops, on the muddy bank, looking at Simon.

“Loki, what is this thing you have brought to meet me?”

Loki, having regained control, kneels next to her.

“Alexi,” he says. “Mort’s obsession, this ‘chorus of wyrms,’ would he attack Rowen over it?”

“Yes. He would do anything necessary in his pursuit of it.”

“What is it?”

Alexi shrugs.

“You’ve heard it. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

Alexi nods.  “Thousand eyes. Thousand invisible mouths. Always puckered on you. So big . . . planet worms that eat their own corpse.” She takes another look at Loki. “You’ve seen it too. Oh, you have seen things. Tell me, Loki. Tell me you’ve seen things.”

Perhaps this was why my shadow was so raggedy. Eh, Jane?

“Rowen showed me,” Loki says. “She helped me pierce the membrane. I saw.”

Alexi laughs with a sound like someone gargling broken glass. “And it’s making you come undone. In that case, Sir Hound, allow me to help in your investigation. Maybe I’ll even get to see you unravel entirely.” Alexi raises an arm and makes a motion to the water. A pale hand emerges from the liquid dark, presenting a bundle wrapped in plastic bags. It tosses the bundle to Loki, then slips back down into the depths.

“I saw something too,” says Simon. “It was inside the cadavers and the ghasts—just pieces. It was from the river. It was big and hungry and made of rotting meat. The whisper in the river. Has it been haunting the River Snakes?”

“It?” asks Alexi. “There is no it. There is no singular. Do you think what you saw, what Morton worshiped, and what makes Bubbly Creek bubble are the same thing? There are myriad voices in the river. The river is a repository teeming with ten thousand terrible things, all attracted by the slaughter wine, and we River Snakes have learned to swim amongst them. Water is the medium. Water is chaos. One day you are the predator, the next the prey. Only a fool assumes they are at the top of the food chain all the time, or that the chain is even fixed. It all changes. Even the river can change direction. The one thing that doesn’t change is that all things, eventually, come to the river.”

The Regent of the Chicago River finishes speaking and remains, naked, in the mud, eyes unfocused, head tilted down.

Loki waits a long moment and says, “Alexi?”

She looks up with what appear to be a new set of eyes. “What? Who are you? Why are you bothering me? Get back. Who sent you? Who sent you?” She leaps to her feet. “Leave me alone. I’ll never tell. I’ll never tell!” She leaps into the water, white body swallowed by the black. Then the water, in a dozen places, churns like the passing of huge fish.

“Was she right?” Simon asks his shadow when the water quiets again. “Are there thousands of separate voices in the river?”

“No,” says Loki. “She was trying to confuse us or is herself confused. There is only one, and we are going to stop it with some of our own chaos.”

Simon and Loki leave the way they’d come, leaving only the sound of the river behind them.

Can you hear it, loveling? Can you hear the cadence in the river?

What were they feeding?

 

* * * * *

 

Somewhere in Wisconsin, Nyx stares out a window at the moon on a silvery lake. “Thank you,” she says, and hangs up the phone. She stands and walks to a dry erase board containing a list of names. Many of the names are crossed out. She crosses out another.

She sits. Looks out the window. The clouds have crept in and the moon is now gone. The lake is dark.

Clara howls in the basement. Someone would have to feed her soon.

Nyx covers her face with one hand. The tears escape between the finger gaps. She makes no sound, but her body jerks in sobs.

“Hello?” says a deep, grinding voice from inside a cage. Byron bobs his head and puffs out his impressive neck feathers.

“Hello, handsome,” Nyx says, wiping her eyes.

Byron sings:

 

“Though our good ship was haunted

The crew remained undaunted.

We stayed right drunk and sprayed our spunk

Till all the ghouls avaunted.”

 

Tight, quivering purple lips form a smile in defiance of the falling tears. The laughter escapes with the burst of a snot bubble. Then Nyx laughs full on. Byron mimics her laughter, so she laughs harder. She looks out the window and laughs into the dark.

She gets up and ruffles the black feathers on Byron’s head and the white feathers of his chest. She picks up the phone.

“Hey, it’s me. I was thinking: it’s about time we restarted Taco-Waffle-TP Friday . . . yeah . . . right. We just need a place. What’s that. . . ? Why? Jesus, that should be obvious, don’t you think?”

 

 




 

INTERLUDE:

The Priest

 

 

They called the priest on the third day, after they found their daughter hanging upside-down from the ceiling, writing blasphemies on the walls with her own feces. The priest lasted four minutes before running from the house, screaming. There are those who say he sweated blood.

And so, on the seventh night of its occupation, the thing hiding in the flesh of the adolescent girl gave me a look of pleasant surprise—smiling at the promise of more sport, fluids escaping between its host’s teeth—as I, the second man in black, entered the bedroom.

“So, priest, you have come to save the little cunt, my meat, my own,” it says through the girl’s cracked lips in a discordant cacophony of tones and base animal noises. It cocks her head to the side in mock bashfulness and daintily shows me the fingertips it has bitten off.

I do not allow myself to respond. I find my strength and stand stoically in the frame of the door. And stoic I remain as it vomits stringed litanies of obscenity, sings grotesque verses in dead languages, pisses black filth from between her legs. The room, a dominion of shit, quivers.

It finally falls silent when I remove a wet red thing from my coat pocket. I hold the severed animal tongue, arm straight out to the side. I squeeze the fleshy chunk, but no gore drips from between my fingers—rather, it falls as ash as I speak:

“Therefore, He named it Babel, for there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth, and from there the Lord scattered them upon the face of the entire earth.”

It opens the little girl’s mouth to speak ridicules and curses, but only nonsense comes out. It tries again but only shouts babble. It shrieks, pointing an accusatory half-finger at me.

“I grew tired of your puerile tongue,” I say. Now I allow myself to smile, and the doorframe cannot contain the expression. “You were wrong about two things. One: I am not here to save the girl.”

I fill my arms and legs with the sins of man and, in the space between a hummingbird’s heartbeat, I am across the room with her throat in my hand. It shrieks and thrashes her body, so I slam the little head, punching it through the drywall. I smash it again. On the third slam, the tiny spine snaps.

“Two: I am not a priest. I am a bishop.”

This close it can see the savage gashes and self-inflicted scars running up my neck and clean-shaven head. I whisper in that little ear: “When you again fall impotently into the void, tell your siblings that in Chicago there are no more vacancies for the damned.”

And I, Bishop Solomon Birch, crucify the delicate throat with my teeth and drink deep the sacramental wine that is the Life.

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

 

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.