God Laughs When You Die Page 9

  Molo ignored the taunt; he’d endured much worse in the pens of the Goa. He lifted his head and spoke clearly.

  “I am your doom, Eater of dead flesh.”

  Samael scowled, squinting eyelessly, as if Molo were too small to see clearly. Then he laughed. The sound of the bomwodesu’s contempt sucked the air from the room; its force made Molo’s ears bleed.

  “You would challenge me for her?” he said. “Then you will suffer the fate of all who fight for love.”

  It was true. Molo had fallen in love. And though he knew he could never hope to claim the Princess for himself, neither would he countenance her destruction at the hands of Samael Corpse-eater.

  Samael, in the flesh of the su’pasha, whirled his scimitars and attacked.

  Molo vanished.

  A startled gasp rose from the wedding goers. Even the su’pasha halted, snapping its head about in sudden confusion.

  Molo reappeared behind the assassin, reversed his grip on his sekh and launched a hammer blow which struck the back of the su’pasha’s skull with enough force to send the pale creature sprawling.

  Molo flipped the sekh, grasped its hilt and advanced on the assassin. But Samael was prepared for him. As Molo approached, the su’pasha sprang to its feet. The scimitars disappeared as if they’d been absorbed into the assassin’s skin, and a spiked silver ball and chain appeared between its fists.

  The su’pasha whirled the melon sized ball like a fisherman hunting trout with a bolo net. He flung it toward Molo. The power of the silver ball fried the air as it screamed toward the pig tender’s head.

  Molo became a whirring blur of motion; He spun out of the way as the silver ball struck the wooden floor, splintering it.

  The su’pasha struggled to free the weapon; Molo whirled across the room - blade flashing like the claws of a Houngasi sand devil - and slashed its throat; once, twice, thrice. Cuts and gouges appeared as if by magic in the su’pasha’s flesh. Blood flew from Molo’s blade, a shining red pinwheel spewing crimson droplets around the tent.

  Molo stopped spinning. The su’pasha roared and thundered toward him.

  Molo cartwheeled easily out of its path. But at the last instant, the assassin grabbed one of his legs, swung him around in a wide circle and released him. Molo flew across the wedding tent, crashed into the main support pillar, bounced off and landed on the marble wedding dais.

  The Royal Family scattered.

  The su’pasha leapt onto the wedding dais and swept Molo up in its claws.

  “Now, pigsplitter,” Samael snarled. “Learn the price of your devotion.”

  From the scarred flesh of its forearm, the su’pasha withdrew a long, curved dagger and pressed its edge to Molo’s throat. Then it screamed.

  Molo blinked the shadows from his eyes.

  Princess M’kele stood behind the su’pasha, her brown fists clenched around Master Kani’s ceremonial stave. The other end was buried in the top of the su’pasha’s skull.

  The su’pasha lashed out with one massive arm and knocked M’kele from the wedding dais.

  Molo summoned the last dregs of his energy, flattened his right hand, stiffening his fingers until his joints ached. He had studied Consort Leng, observed his mastery of the Slicing Hand until his mind ached. Steeling himself, he summoned his power and struck. His fingers sheared through the meat of the su’pasha’s throat, passed through the creature’s spinal column, and out the back of its neck.

  The su’pasha’s head fell from its shoulders, struck the dais and bounced across the floor of the wedding tent.

  Nothing moved.

  Molo drifted for a while upon a sea of pain and exhaustion. But finally, someone grabbed his hand and tugged him gently toward the shore of awakening. He opened his eyes and looked up into the face of the servant girl who visited him every day.

  “Milane.”

  The Princess smiled, pride and wit sparkling like joy in her eyes. Her plain features lit Molo’s dark places like the light from a warm summer sun: She was the most beautiful woman in Ghoval.

  And she had always been his friend.

  “Have you ever dreamed of another kind of life, Molo Kananda?” she whispered through tears.

  Molo smiled back.

  He understood her perfectly.

  THE LONG, LOST LIFE OF RUFUS BLEAK

  This time it’s the scent of pine that brings him back. He even recognizes the brand: Pine-All; for that deep forest clean. If he still believed in Daddy’s Hell, Rufus Bleak would pray for damnation.

  Different…kinds of…Hell, Bleak thinks. He has to squint to make out the nearest features in a room he doesn’t recognize. A digital alarm holo chimes three feet away, but Bleak can’t discern more than a green glow. He turns his head to the left, toward the pool of sunlight warming his pillow and feels wetness on his cheek. His new host is drooling.

  He turns back; a vague outline of a woman in white stands at the side of his bed.

  “Rise and shine, Kenny,” the figure says.

  “Loretta’s here. Time for potty.”

  Why do they always use pine? Bleak thinks. As if scented chemicals could scrub away the truth of this place.

  ‘Sit up,’ he tells the new body.

  Nothing happens.

  Move the right hand, he thinks. The left?

  Loretta grabs him under the arms, yanks him out of bed and hauls him across the room. She is bigger than Bleak in this body and she smells like milk. For a moment, the artificial pine fades.

  Sour, Bleak thinks. Like Sister Rebecca.

  The sternest member of his lost congregation, Sister Rebecca revived those Brothers and Sisters in Christ who succumbed to the Arkansas heat and their self-induced passions during his sermons. At the height of his powers Bleak could bring the whole congregation thundering to its feet, rocking the chapel with cries of “Hallelujah!” and “Preach, Reverend!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s piss,” the woman says. “Loretta forgot your glasses. You’re as blind as a bat aren’t you, Kenny?”

  Bleak feels her slip something over his nose, and the world jumps into focus.

  A hospice.

  He can see a row of beds lining the walls in front and behind him. The other beds contain men, many of them old, twisted; a rogue’s gallery of the squawking half-dead.

  Some kind of convalescent home.

  “I'm short on chairs, Kenny,” Loretta whispers into his ear. “Gonna get my tai-bo, haulin’ you boys around today.”

  Bleak hears several residents catcalling in anticipation of Loretta’s attentions. Someone squawks like a parrot. And before the CNA can make it to the bathroom door, Bleak’s host voids its bladder.

  “Kenny!” Loretta gasps. “This is a brand new uniform. Ooohh, I could just shake you!”

  As Loretta carries him into the bathroom, the Stalker of Men sighs.

  Nightfall is still a long way off.

  ***

  When it comes, Bleak closes the host’s eyes. Beyond that and the ability to soil himself, he doesn’t have many options. Closing his eyes sharpens his concentration when the Night Mother appears.

  She comes, shimmering like a black diamond; many faceted Atropos, mighty Ereshkigal, Oya, Yoruban avatar of the primal flame; yet none of these. She holds an ancient terror in Her gaze; the power to scourge him with his worst fears burns in Her face. Bleak averts his mind’s eye.

  He has sat beneath Her table far too long; since the August night in 1922, the night when Reverend Rufus Bleak fell, as they say Lucifer Morningstar fell.

  Bleak and Dewey, his most trusted deacon, had taken up with two union men, Northerners, hoping to rouse the local cotton workers to protest the conditions in old Bull Emory’s fields.

  They were on their way to a rally when seven hooded white men in a black Ford ran them off the road. The men dragged Bleak, his wife Marie and three others from Dewey’s old Edsel. They beat Brother Washington to death, stove in the side of his head like a hot loaf of bread and spilled his brains all ove
r that dark country road. The Kluxers grabbed little Jimmy Payson and held him down while they beat Bleak and the others.

  “You go tell the nigger lovers and union organizers at that church that they ain’t welcome down here, boy.”

  Then the men raped Bleak’s wife.

  “Drag her over here! Get her down…down in the dirt!”

  Afterward, they shot the organizers, leaving the nigger preacher to linger with a bullet burning in his guts.

  But Bleak didn’t cross over.

  Because She was there, shining at the boundary of what Bleak would later come to think of as his old life. She was there. And She held salvation in Her hundred hands.

  “Just as I am here now.”

  The Night Mother rears up, hive-queen, black as midnight, deadly as a dying man’s dream. Bleak burns, fired in the crucible of Her dreadful radiance. He is a dead thing – yes - but he is also the memory of a living man and Her power is agony.

  The Night Mother passes a shrieking fragment of that power into Bleak. In response, he rises from his host.

  Bodiless, Bleak hovers. Over in one corner, an orderly is watching the small television mounted in the wall above the bathroom door.

  “That’s the news for this bright and sunny morning, the first day of January 2022. Have a safe and Happy New Year everyone.”

  One hundred years, Bleak thinks.

  Then he fades.

  ***

  When he opens his eyes he is standing in an alley. He’s in a city, a northern city from the looks of it. The body She has made for him is strong. Bleak can feel muscles like steel rods beneath supple skin.

  Bleak looks to his left. A darkened warehouse looms high overhead. He moves, lightning quick into the shadows between the buildings. He inhales; pauses…

  And drives his right fist into the wall. The impact smashes brick to powder. When he steps back, the skin of his hand is unmarked.

  Bleak whistles softly.

  Then he steps into the alley and starts walking. He chooses no particular direction. His steps are guided by a Power far greater than himself. His faith enfolds him as deeply as the shadows She commands. The blessed assurance that once eluded him, embraces him now.

  It’s a modern city. That much he can tell. Bleak tastes the energies generated by millions of electrical devices around him. Luminous advertisements touting soft drinks or holographic entertainments adorn the night sky. Spotlights play among super skyscrapers. The air is foul. Bitter pollutants singe the lining of his nostrils. Overhead, a well lit, private transport drifts toward the HOLLYWOOD sign nestled in the hills.

  Bleak nears a dark intersection; a black sedan cruises by on his left. The driver is concealed behind tinted glass. It’s a well maintained Oldsmobile, gasoline powered but free of excessive exhaust.

  There you are, Bleak thinks.

  The Prize.

  The Oldsmobile slides into the east, toward the barrios of East LA. Bleak steps into the street and follows. He keeps to the shadows, hidden from his prey. Up ahead, the Oldsmobile takes a sudden turn and veers off onto a side street, moving into the hills. Bleak follows; flitting between pools of light cast by intelligent streetlamps.

  Beneath the eye of one of those streetlamps, three masked men rifle a dead man’s pockets. The murderers freeze as a black wind howls past. When it has gone, they return to their work. Later, the men will murder each other, their minds consumed by their darkest fears.

  Bleak shadows the Oldsmobile until a flash of brake light warns him. The car rolls to a halt in front of a chain link fence between two abandoned houses.

  The driver climbs out and runs to the fence. He stops. Turns. His eyes flicker toward the place where Bleak hovers; figment of a dark dreamer. Bleak watches the man’s hands flutter in and out of his pockets. The driver walks with a pronounced limp.

  Nodding to himself, the driver reaches up and bends a section of the fence back and down, forming a makeshift opening. Then he scuttles back to the Oldsmobile, climbs behind the wheel and closes the door.

  The black sedan rolls through the opening in the fence and stops. The driver gets out, closes the opening behind him and hurries back. The Oldsmobile rolls down an embankment and out of sight.

  Bleak glides across the street.

  The embankment leads to a narrow, concrete roadway which winds down and around a corner, probably an access into the reservoir system that honeycombs this part of Southern California. The red glow from the sedan’s taillights has almost faded when Bleak flows up and over the fence. He follows the light down into the darkness.

  The night sounds of the city echo along the river basin walls and grow dim, then distant. The lights of the business district recede into the west. The driver navigates the dry riverbed. He never veers. He’ll choose a place where he feels secure, Bleak thinks. Where no one will hear the screams.

  The Oldsmobile stops beneath an overpass. Bleak melds into the shadows. The driver cuts the engine but leaves the headlights on.

  He’ll need light to work by, Bleak thinks.

  The driver gets out of the sedan and opens the trunk. He whistles as he works. Bleak can hear him muttering to himself.

  “…didn’t think you’d come, but you did. Told you I had the juice, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  As Bleak draws near, the driver produces a battered, red toolbox. He rattles it, like a child trying to guess the contents of his first present on Christmas morning.

  “Merry Christmas, Daddy,” a voice whispers.

  Bleak spins, his fist cocked…

  But he is alone in the darkness.

  “Rufus, the boy’s too young.”

  “Every boy needs a huntin’ rifle, Marie…“

  Bleak snarls at his ghosts until they fade.

  “Gonna see what makes her run, son,” the driver chuckles. “Gonna take her apart and see what’s shakin’.”

  The driver walks around to the front of the Oldsmobile and sets the toolbox down on the hood. He takes a picnic basket and blanket off the back seat. Still humming, he spreads the blanket out on the concrete and opens the toolbox. Bleak sees moonlight dancing along the edge of a bright steel blade.

  The driver opens the basket; removes something that looks like a silver platter and sets it on the blanket.

  “Little picnic,” he says. “Then we’ll see.”

  Despite himself, Bleak holds his breath. He knows without question; he has found the Mother’s choice. Bleak stills his mind and calls upon his faith, so unlike that which abandoned him long ago.

  The driver stands and moves around to the Oldsmobile’s passenger door. He opens the door and stoops down to peer inside.

  “Get out.”

  A woman’s hand reaches out of the darkness of the Oldsmobile. The nails gleam in the car light, so red they look black.

  The driver snorts. Then he giggles.

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me, lady,” the driver says. Nevertheless, he performs a mock bow, takes his passenger’s hand and helps her out of the car. They stand that way for a moment, limned in starlight, her hand in his, a grim pas de deux, this silent ballet.

  The woman is tall.

  She wears an evening gown - black - with high heels to match. Her skin is pale. Her features resemble the aquiline cast adored by European nobility. Her neck supports a face all sharp angles and flat planes; full lips, high forehead beneath light brown hair she has been pacified, pulled up behind her head and tethered with something that sparkles. In the moonlight, the tall woman looks like an empress.

  The driver is dark - his ethnicity uncertain - Latin or Greek. His eyes devour the tall woman. Then he spits in her face.

  “I’m going to gut you like a dirty white fish,” the driver says.

  The Empress nods, seemingly at peace with this news.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he says.

  The Empress reaches out, her hands tracing gently the driver’s brow and cheek, the contour of his jaw. The driver shudders. Then he g
rips her wrists, yanks her hands away from his face.

  “Whore.”

  The Empress laughs; his spittle cooling on her cheek.

  Bleak drifts closer, enough to see a rivulet of blood trickle from her nose. The driver’s back is to him. Bleak could take him now, but he needs to understand.

  Why doesn’t she scream?

  He sees the emptiness in her eyes, the way she caresses her abuser’s cheek, and he knows. The driver is one of them. A Carrier. He has compelled the Empress, probably with no more effort than his focused will. He has used his disease to lure her to her own butchering.

  Just like Reggie Whitehead, Bleak thinks. Whitehead was a defiler and murderer of children. He’d slaughtered a dozen innocents by the time Bleak caught up with him outside Tallahassee.

  Whitehead was a Carrier, one of the creatures the newspapers were calling Magin. Many believed that the Magin were harbingers of the End Times, soldiers in a conflict between Good and Evil that would either redeem humanity or destroy it. Others held that they were simply mankind’s planetary replacements as Cro-Magnon replaced Neanderthal.

  Whitehead too, had possessed the ability to fool the senses. With Bleak’s hands wrapped around his throat, Whitehead assumed the form of old Dewey Washington.

  “Brother Washington and I built this place with our bare hands.”

  “Preach, Reverend!”

  Bleak banishes his memories.

  The driver tests the edge of his cutting implement against his thumb; sucks the blood.

  “Come here,” he says.

  The Empress shudders. Her head shakes back and forth. Bleak hears a whine building in the back of her throat.

  “No…” she says.

  The driver’s eyes narrow to slits. Somewhere from the west, a train whistle pierces the silence. The driver turns his head toward the sound. Bleak senses the tension in the air ease. The Empress blinks once. Twice. She takes a step backward, as if staggered by a sudden wind.

  “What…? What’s happening?” she says. The Empress’s eyes, alert now, dart back and forth.

  “What’s happening?”

  Then her gaze locks on the driver. He stands silhouetted in the glare of the Oldsmobile’s headlights.