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mindpenis · 6 years

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Abyss Chapter Six

Sometime in the pre-dawn, I heard my door being unlocked. I hadn't fully slept, instead dozing in a chair by the window, so I was fully dressed and came to awareness quickly. One of Damaris' servants entered; the woman, in fact, who bore resemblance to Marion, who I had seen returning to the house earlier. Businesslike in her manner, she requested that I accompany her downstairs.Once again I was brought to Damaris' grotesque library. Umaru, the Malay, along with the individual who bore superficial resemblance to Damaris were there, and right behind me came Marion, disheveled, her hair unpinned, apparently having slept more readily than I had. Marion was accompanied by the man who resembled me. Seated in a high-backed, cushioned chair that had been placed near her display-case of heads, sat Damaris herself.With that grisly background she looked as I imagined some barbaric queen in a cheap novel of antediluvian lost-civilization might appear, an impression gainsaid only by her tight-bodiced, modern dress. She wore no bandage at her ravaged throat, but a dark blue satin choker. Her legs were obscured by the fall of her long skirt, but they did not move – I wondered to what degree they had been splinted.I didn't expect her to be able to speak – her vocal cords could not have escaped damage from the throat-slitting – but I was wrong. Her words came in a whisper, but they were easily understood.“Remember,” she said, “I told you not to fear time or violence. Not when you are fully part of us.”I had numberless questions for her. But many I now wished to ask her alone.She quickly went on. “Tonight is New Year's, and soon enough you two will experience your own Depuration. But before that we have some old business to clean up. Earlier Clive, Elizabeth and Miriam,” she indicated the trio we had seen depart before our journey in the Archon underworld, “along with Umaru, spent the evening leading some of my daughter's associates across the city, ultimately to a house I own quite far from here, which they naturally and quite erroneously concluded to be the site of our Depuration. Grace knows that we are uniquely vulnerable after the first night of our rite. She tried to pry its location out of you, doctor...and failing that, put watchers on this house, which we have properly led astray.“The purpose was to in our turn follow those watchers, to see if we could discover where Grace herself is staying tonight. She moves about a great deal, and can be distinctly hard to pin down. She is, at this moment, in a brothel called the Solon, in the Liberty of Clink in Southwark, not far from the prison and Cross Bones graveyard.”“A brothel?”“Yes, James. The Solon is an establishment I know very well. A nest of women that periodically prey on their clientele using Archon life-extending techniques in a bastardized manner.”“And you let them get away with that?” Marion, ever attuned to the pragmatics of revenge, sounded surprised.“I'm not so linear in my thinking,” Damaris answered. “My daughter introduced them to those techniques, of course. Part of her effort to create a counter-force to our network of Archon servants. Crushing them would have been easy, but it's been in fact an interesting study to observe how our methods work while missing several key elements that only true Archons possess. The women of the Solon do indeed remain young, though time only pauses for them, not stops. Also, from time to time I have a wish to remove some servant of our order who has developed loyalties too focused on one of my six elite associates. By surreptitiously exposing that individual's identity to the ladies of the Solon, I can unleash cats upon a canary. Archon servants who have undergone our full rite in Africa are a potent delicacy for thieves of life like my daughter and her followers.”Damaris seemed to choke slightly on the last words. She raised a hand to her throat, massaging it while her breath caught in a ragged manner.“Are you all right, Mistress Ruha?” Marion asked.Damaris, after a moment, controlled the fit. “For a while speaking and swallowing will present a challenge,” she whispered. “Nor will I be able to walk without supports for a number of days. I believe Saklas was particularly irritated with me.”One question, at least, I wanted an open answer to. “Your fingers. One from each of the Archons. Why?”“So I could show you this, my dear James.”She held up her maimed hand. The side where the little finger had been removed was not bandaged. I was amazed enough that the still-open wound had no stitches, but then, looking more intently, I saw a small growth emerging where the finger had been.“You may look closer.”I moved forward and she extended her hand toward me. I examined it closely, scarcely able to believe what I was seeing.“It appears to be...”“Regenerating. Before January is out, my hand will once again have five fingers. The same will be true for my associates. As I said, we wished to demonstrate to you that violence – short of that so extreme even an Archon could not recover from it – need no longer be feared if you become one of us.”Damaris lowered her hand, turning her attention to the trio of mimics.“You three will go out again, this time to one of my other homes in the city. Miriam, as Grace's watchers will have no idea of the extent to which Saklas damaged me, you need not ape my current state in full. The intent is merely to draw away the focus of Grace's agents here in this neighborhood. She is to have no warning, nor any form of reinforcement from this quarter. James, Marion, Umaru, you will be going to the Solon to collect my daughter.”Umaru went to an elaborately-carved cabinet, from which he took two decidedly modern objects. Pistols, one of which he gave to Marion, the other to me.“And what do you propose we do with these?”“You may not need them at all, James. And Umaru, when hunting, dislikes firearms. But my daughter is distinctly dangerous. My expectation is that by the time you arrive she will already be in hand, but one never knows. You three will not be alone at the Solon. I've been sending agents of my own for some time to build up the illusion of being a normal part of their clientele. Regulars by now, purchasing nothing more outre than conventional fucks. The ladies don't kill everyone that utilizes their services, that would make for a short-lived business. When I learned earlier tonight that Grace was there, I sent instructions to a number of London men well known at the Solon. They went to ostensibly do the standard business of enjoying some fornication, but in fact are tasked with killing everyone – except my daughter – in the whorehouse.”My hand tightened involuntarily around the butt of the pistol – a movement that did not go unnoticed by Damaris.“James,” she sighed, “these are people who have murdered for the reward of a pretty face. By contrast, only once, on the second night of the Depuration, do the servants of the Archons kill one another without very great cause. After that, we feast on each other and live. Your response to my actions regarding the Solon lacks perspective.”“So you justify yourself by classing your philosophy as...good God...gentler? Or that it is all right to kill venal people just because you call them that?”“As a conscience you're more irritating than persuasive. Even were the women of the Solon pure innocents, that wouldn't matter. They are sparks floating in a wasteland, to be harvested and re-sown. As beautiful dead as they could ever be alive. But I won't take part in an inevitable argument with you now. We must be quick, or lose the moment.”Miriam, Clive and Elizabeth departed. Umara too moved to the library door, and Marion, after a glance toward me, followed.“James,” came Damaris' whisper. “A moment.”Alone with me, she looked up from her chair, her disturbing grey eyes unreadable as to their emotion.“Ask,” she said.“Wife, mother, father, daughter, lover, wife?”“Ah. James, I know you are a hard-headed man regarding that which is mystic in life. Have you ever considered the existence of reincarnation?”“Hindus are profoundly attached to it. Surprising, considering all that you've gone to such lengths to show me, that it's an interest of yours.”“Yes, superfluous to someone with a body that may well last forever. And we have done many extreme things in a short time to bring you closer to accepting the reality of a life near-eternal. But you have a great difficulty in processing the place – and the future – of those that do die. The spark that I've spoken of, the pneuma, which is the human link to the beginnings...that is also a part of what we use in our work to shape that future. However, we sometimes snuff out lives from necessity or in retribution, and those sparks may replant themselves in ways that are unexpected, but recognizable if you know how to look.”“It strikes me that your esoterics – for all that you've demonstrated some of their basis in reality – are a means to justify whatever cruelty you wish to indulge in.”She smiled, a little ruefully.“You do sound like him,” she looked toward her hideous cabinet of decapitated heads. “James, before Carson Xavier became Grace's husband, he was my husband. Before he was Grace's lover, he was her father. I've told you, life with the potential to stretch across centuries changes our perspectives on the roles of coupling. As to the esoterics you have such a tendency to dismiss, consider this. Umaru was the instrument of Carson's death, but Saklas was present, in fact he officiated over it. And he is a noted devourer of the pneuma of his victims. A short time later, he used for one night a Whitechapel whore – an individual of no consequence, who stirred him to lust based on physical qualities of genetic excellence. He immediately discarded her. She would die within the year. Giving birth to you, dear man. I assure you, he had no interest in prompting a carnal return of my former husband. But sperm is reckless, and quite naturally filled with the residues of the human pneuma.”“There are Bedlamites who consider themselves the return of Julius Caesar, or Jesus Christ, or Henry VIII,” I answered her. “They pass their brilliant returns tied into straightjackets.”“You consider my mind diseased, sweet James?”“Perhaps I'm more surprised that you would embrace so much... romanticism for your delusion.”She laughed...a grating in her ravaged throat that made her cough. “Love, for me, is hardly a swooning boudoir game. And I loved my husband very much.”And what could I say to that? I looked at her in silence.Finally she lowered her eyes. “If you wish to go and rescue the doxies of the Solon, it's certainly too late for that. They are very likely succumbing to their erstwhile clients' attentions as we speak. A fait accompli. But you still have the opportunity, I believe, to bring Grace, alive, to me. I'd like the three of us to talk.”I stalked out, my mind once again roiling. Every conversation with the woman ending up filling me with fury. Her knowledge of my mother – of whom I had known nothing – just added to my anger and frustration, as she had made her disregard for the woman patently obvious. The absurdity of her reincarnation talk would have ordinarily caused me to class her at the level of a follower of nonsense spouted by the likes of Madame Blavatsky, but even that was challenged by the astonishing medical feats of which her Archons were capable. The further revelation of an incestual circle among these people, normally enough to elicit shock, seemed almost normal when compared to all the rest.As I left the library, Marion cocked an eyebrow at me. “May I ask what that was about, doctor?”“No.”“Well. I'm not keen on being summarily dismissed, but I guess we're something short of boon companions. In a way it's almost a comfort to see you being rude, doctor. Saints in general make me uneasy.”Umaru frustrated further talk by taking two overcoats from a hallway stand and holding them out to Marion and me, before shouldering into his own. I surprised myself by the level of anger I felt toward him as well; Damaris and Xaus having been the architects of Carson Xavier's death seemed to fade into the background of my emotions as I stood here before the living instrument of that death. A result of psychological manipulation...hardly the lust of a reincarnated spirit to take revenge on his killer. And yet, it took an effort to push down a surging desire to take out the gun I'd just been given and fill him with bullets.And why would Damaris see fit to arm us, while pointedly alluding to Umaru lacking any such weapon? A test of rebeliousness, backed by absolute confidence in the big man's ability to – do what? Disarm us with ease should we misbehave? Shrug off bullets?I accepted the coat, thinking briefly of my own burned coat and what was likely the smoking ruin of my office and flat. I put the pistol into my belt and closed the coat over it.Marion, instead of putting on her own garment, handed it back and turned around, spreading her arms slightly to encourage Umaru to drape the coat on her, which he did. She turned around again, tilting her head back to look up at his face.“I've yet to hear you utter a word,” she said. “Is that just your manner, or do you lack the equipment in some way? Given all the exciting demonstrations of Archon healing, I expect if Mistress Ruha had your tongue cut out, it would simply grow back.”When Umaru answered, in heavily accented but perfect English, Marion was so startled she jumped.“You would do well,” the big man said, “to learn the meaning of dignity.”“Lord, he's really smart,” her laugh sounded somewhat forced. “And ruder than you are, doctor.”Umaru simply adjusted his gaze until he was looking over the top of Marion's head. His eyes rested on me, with, I thought, a particular intensity. Had he heard some part of what Damaris had said, and did that also carry for him the echoing remembrance of deeds done a half-century before? I knew nothing of the man, beyond the statement by his mistress that he was Congolese, a warrior, and at the command of my father and herself, had killed Carson Xavier. Now he was being sent to capture Xavier's wife...daughter...bizarrely both.He led us back down into the basement, once again taking to the walking-tunnels. This time we did not travel far, no more than leaving the neighborhood of Damaris' house, before we ascended again. A door cleverly melded into a brick pattern opened from pressure applied by Umaru, and we came out into an alley. Soft snow continued to swirl through the darkness.A carriage waited for us there. With a curt wave of his hand Umaru dismissed its driver, climbing himself up to the bench. While the driver departed into the bricked entrance of the tunnels, Marion and I entered the coach. No sooner were we seated than the carriage jolted forward.Marion was examining the pistol she'd been given. Abruptly, she handed it to me.“Will you see if this thing is properly loaded? I rightly confess to having no lack of guns around me in life, but never schooling myself in shooting them.”So she was suspicious about having been given weapons too. I opened the chamber, satisfying myself that it was indeed loaded. I tipped the open chamber toward her, displaying the bullets. “It has no safety,” I said. “Be cautious not to carry it with your finger inside the trigger guard.”“Or I'll shoot myself in the foot?” She laughed, taking the pistol back and putting it in the pocket of her coat.For a moment, she too looked at me very intently.“May I ask how you intend to conduct yourself on this little foray? I presume with no intent to kill anybody, despite the prophecy Mistress Ruha gave that you're to become a great slaughterer of women.”“I don't know,” I answered truthfully.“Well. Look doctor, aside from all the blood and fucking, you and I aren't exactly what I would call intimates. But I've got no one better to talk to. I'll tell you I'm not completely pleased with the way things are shaping up. Your little private tete-a-tete and other rather obvious signals makes the promise by our mistress of no favoritism somewhat shaky to my way of thinking. The lady Ruha is clearly fixated on you. Her interest in me seems to have more to do with money. What she told you about my history is perfectly true. I have cash aplenty from my daddy and granddaddy's enterprises. I've not the slightest doubt that Mistress Ruha would be pleased to suck up a great deal of that for her own endeavors, and I've no objection, if I'm paid off in years of youth. But the claws she wants to sink into you carry a little more weight than cold cash, if I'm any judge of the ways of the world.”“I won't fight you in their monstrous arena, Miss Bama.”“So you say. So where does that leave me? Not much better...the Archons seem a trifle rigid in the way they like things done. Do I get what I want for dispatching a sacrificial lamb?”I had no answer for her. Perturbed as she seemed, she didn't press the matter. The carriage tilted slightly upward, and she opened the side window. Snowflakes drifted in, but I could see the dark, slow-flowing expanse of the Thames. We were crossing one of the river-spanning bridges into Southwark.The district was of course noted for its clandestine and edge-of-society activities – it had the repute of being rife with criminal cliques, which thrived beyond the law maintained north of the Thames. I'd thought the mystique exaggerated – visits of my own to the famous theatres in the area had been picturesque but in no way dangerous – but apparently, if anything the criminality of the Clink had been understated.Marion continued to look out the window, and I also watched, looking past her outlined profile.And how did I intend to comport myself once we reached our destination? I felt myself past my initial urges to call down the authorities on this strange and violent underworld. Marion's Louisiana logic of a man fallen afoul of the Ku Klux Klan was perhaps more apt than I'd originally considered. Given the elaborate infrastructure behind Archon activities, Damaris almost certainly had any number of officials in her pocket. To have ordered multiple murders in a bordello and not expect the newspapers to be crazed with it the next day implied that she had the power to clean it all up afterward and cause all evidence of the act to disappear. Even if I could somehow divine what authorities were not possessions of the Archons, those individuals would doubtless consider me a lunatic.Yet I was riding in the company of two murderers, to a scene that promised mass death, to apprehend a woman who had mutilated me.The carriage came to a stop. We had been traveling through streets without public gaslight since coming into the Liberty of Clink. In somewhat eerie fashion, that actually caused more light to seem present – ambient light reflecting from the city proper into the low clouds of the storm. There was little of the deep light-and-shadow to be found on the gaslit streets of London; a general soft glow permeated everything.The carriage lurched as Umaru climbed down from the bench. Opening the door I alighted, with Marion right behind me.The building before us, presumably housing the Solon, lacked any sign or mark to show its identity. Its windows were curtained, though behind some the uneven light of candles shone. A short flight of steps led up to a stoop before the closed door. The snow had become heavier. It settled on my hair and the shoulders of my coat as we went up.Umaru turned the knob. It was not locked; at his touch, the door opened easily.The foyer, scented with perfume and incense, gave into a reception room furnished with a number of upholstered couches and chairs. A heavy candelabra suspended from the ceiling, but most of the wax tapers in it had burned down, leaving dull, smoking candle-stumps in their sockets. The few that still burned shot a fitful yellow light around the room.The reason for that neglect was clear. At most such establishments the madam greeted clients from a centrally-situated chair or desk; sprawled across the Solon's reception desk was a beautiful woman whose jet-black hair, somewhat prominent nose and dark skin marked her as being of Indian descent. She'd been garroted. The cord used to strangle her cut so deeply into her neck her head had been all but severed.Since the killers sent by Damaris had posed as regular bordello clients, I could only guess that after being conducted one after the other to rooms with the prostitutes, one of the men had finished there, and returned to eliminate the madam. So there could be little hope that any still remained alive.Umaru went to look at her, lingering to examine the ghastly near-decapitation.“Semi-immortal or not, I don't think she's getting up from that,” Marion said.Suddenly a sharp sound rang out from above – a single report, followed by male voices shouting. Umaru raced to the stairs – which presumably led to assignation rooms on the second floor – with unhesitating speed. I took out my pistol and followed, Marion at my heels.The second floor presented a long hallway stretching to right and left, with doors at regular intervals. Candle-sconces along each length of hall had also burned low. Umaru had moved to the left, where five men had gathered at the foot of another stairway, recessed into the wall, which led up to the third story.As Marion and I passed one of the rooms, I looked through its open door to see another dead woman, naked and spread-eagled face down on the room's bed. She too had been strangled; the thin ligature-end trailed from under her hair down her back. Attempting to help her was pointless – the unnatural cant of her head showed that she too had been all but decapitated.My heartbeat pounded in my temples. The sight should have filled me with horror. Or at least driven me to the mind-place I had learned to adopt in battle, where I could detach myself from acts of carnage. But instead, with the force of a wave, I felt as I had in the hallucinatory incident with Grace and also with Damaris and Marion while hypnotized. Hunger, sexual hunger, gripped me. The curve of the dead woman's back and buttocks, the repose of her legs and feet...her arms with limp fingers...all seemed to possess an overpowering eroticism.My thoughts ran like a runaway train, thinking that I could...I had to enter the room, close the door, take her...no one would judge me, these people probably felt exactly the same.What had they done to me? I was under the influence of no drugs. Damaris was not present to work her diabolic mesmerism on me. With an immense effort of will, I stepped past the open door.Several of the men in the hall – some of whom were naked, some partly so – were speaking at once to Umaru, their words falling over one another.“Had the mad-eyed bitch...sleeping like a baby...she's pure hell...she knifed Thomas here and got loose...offices upstairs, she must have had a pistol there...took a pot shot when we tried to go up.”Umaru was looking up the staircase, as if contemplating a rush to the top floor. Long-time servant of the Archons that he was, perhaps he really did believe bullets from Grace would only be a minor hindrance.Before he could decisively move, I shoved past the knot of men. Several steps up I turned and leveled my own pistol at them.“Doctor, what are you doing?” That was Marion; at the sound of a woman speaking the cluster of men turned to look at her, wondering perhaps, if one of the cathouse-women had evaded them.I used the moment of distraction to fire two shots – one into the shoulder of a naked man, the second creasing another's torso. I was not shooting to kill, but to control these maniacs. The man who had taken the shot in his shoulder clutched at it, gasping, “What the bloody Christ...”Whether or not I could have controlled the situation became moot only a second later, as I felt a hard impact in my back and a burning burst of pain. In short order four more shots from above followed. Marion and the men scattered into the hall on each side of the stair-foot. I could not see if any of them had been struck by the bullets.I turned, looking back and up, and saw Grace on the landing at the stair-head. She had a pistol in one hand, a bloody knife in the other. Backlit by a candle-sconce on the landing, I saw she was barefoot, dressed only in a black shift-dress. Her hair was down, her dark glasses absent. As one of the killers had said, they must have caught her in her sleep.“Fucking murderer!” she shouted, continuing to pull the trigger of her pistol several times before fully realizing she had expended its bullets. She hurled the empty gun down the stairs – it went by my head, to abruptly strike Umaru in the chest right below me. I had not realized the warrior had returned from the shelter of the hallway to come charging up the stairs.He paid no attention at all to the pistol bouncing off the front of his coat. He shoved me against the staircase wall, slapping the gun from my hand. It also clattered downward to the foot of the stairs. He bounded past me.I rose, flinching at the pain the movement caused in my back. Difficult to gauge the severity of the wound, but I was able to get my feet under me.Marion was there then, helping to steady me. I looked back down the stairs. “The killers...”“Piss-ants, more like,” she replied. “Brave enough to strangle fuckery-girls from behind. Maybe they'll realize that there are five of them and succeed in screwing up their courage.” She looked up. “The boy went off, though. Do you think he got her?”Both Grace and Umaru were gone from the landing.My legs held, and I went up, Marion staying close to me. In the dimness and amid the mayhem she didn't seem to realize I had taken a bullet. The pain had settled as a throbbing ache in my lower back, but I could move well enough.At the top of the stairs a shorter hallway than the one below led from the landing. A few steps down the hall an open door gaped. I looked in – though no candle burned there, it seemed to be an office. I could make out a map of London pinned to the wall, and beside it was surprised to see a map of Africa. Hard to tell in the dark, but it did not seem nearly as complex as the one Damaris possessed. But clearly the women shared a similar interest in the skull-shaped continent.“Doctor!” Marion called.She had continued along the hall, coming to a door that stood slightly ajar. Inside was a narrow utility staircase, uncarpeted, leading further up. Wet footprints glittered slightly on the worn treads: Umaru's footprints.We went up, emerging a few moments later on the roof of the building. More footprints showed clearly in the snow, leading to the edge.The ebb and flow of the storm had shifted to ebb; the heavy grey sky once again had an opalescence which extended our field of vision. A narrow gap opened at the back of the building, plunging down into an alley. The next building roof, flat also, could be reached by a short jump. I could see the trail of footprints continue on the far side.“I guess she didn't want to fight him with just a knife,” Marion opined. “Barefoot and in her nightie, even. Do we go?”I replied by slightly anchoring my footing and launching myself across the gap. My jarring arrival on the other side sent pain shooting across my back. In a moment Marion was beside me, her boots skidding slightly on the back roof's snow coating.“Reminds me of ragamuffining around the Quarter playing kick the can,” she breathed. “Of course I didn't have to deal with all this damn snow.”The tracks led around several chimney-crests to the side of the building, once again terminating at the edge. Looking over, I saw the sloped roof of a long shed below. The snow there had been disturbed in a slide, which could only have been precipitated by Grace and Umaru dropping down and glissading lower along the slanted surface. Marion and I did the same, gaining speed on the long slippery expanse to the point where we dropped over the lip at its edge without great control. We came down among piles of snow-covered refuse in another alley.Marion landed on her side and got up cursing. As I scrambled to my feet I saw that I was leaving blood drops in my wake. Bleeding in the snow again...Marion did not notice the blood. The tracks led further into the alley, where we had to surmount a wooden fence. Beyond that a more open street leading to a small square, from which more avenues branched like spikes.“Clear as a bell,” Marion said, pointing to the ongoing tracks. “So I'll praise the snow now, and the fact that no one's out and about at this hour to muddle us up.”I looked back – no sign yet of the five men from the Solon having also taken up the chase. But I had no doubt they would follow.The trail dodged along crooked streets, in and out of alleys. At no point did the two sets of prints separate. Had there been more snow or wind Grace might have had some hope of throwing off pursuit, but conditions were exactly wrong for her.Finally we came to a dead end, the way barred by a tall metal barrier of rusted wrought iron. Worked into the pattern of the iron was a row of crosses. Beyond, across a bleak expanse of flat ground, I saw tombstones and monuments.“Mistress Ruha mentioned a Cross Bones Cemetery,” Marion unhesitatingly raised a boot to an iron crossbar. “Looks to be the back side of it.”She climbed up and over. Now I was following her, and slowing down. I got over the iron fence only with difficulty, and on the other side sank to my knees briefly, struggling with dizziness.Marion had crossed the open ground edging the cemetery and passed along a row of headstones. Suddenly she shouted and dashed forward. “There they are!”I saw them too. Umaru had caught up to Grace in front of a mausoleum decorated with a crouching angel, its wings folded and coated with snow. She was struggling fiercely with her old antagonist, slashing at him with the blade she still carried.Umaru tried to control her, succeeding in taking hold of one of her arms, but Grace's knife-hand remained free. She jabbed at him, sinking the blade into his middle-body. This did not slow him at all. Grace pulled the knife free and swiped it at his throat, but he intercepted the blade in mid-arc, so she had both of her arms pinned.Marion, running, was getting close to them. I tried to run as well, stumbled, and struggled painfully back to my feet.Umaru half-spun with Grace in his grasp and flung her with terrible force against the side of the mausoleum. She sank down in the snow, the knife falling from her hand.The big man reached down, grabbed her hair, and vertically lifted her off her feet. He put his other hand around her throat.Marion, breathing hard, came to a stop right behind him. I was close enough to hear her speak.“Going to kill her? I bet you've waited a long time to get your hands on this one.”He glanced over his shoulder and down at Marion. “No. She belongs to Ruha.”“I really can't get over you talking so much.” As Umaru turned back to Grace, Marion pulled the pistol from her pocket, raised it to the base of his skull and fired. Blood sprayed outward, but Marion was not content with a single shot – she fired three more into his head a point blank range.He dropped Grace, who fell, blood-spattered, to the snow at his feet. Umaru toppled, collapsing right on top of her. With a gasping cry, she shoved him off.Marion, her legs braced slightly apart, shifted the aim of her pistol toward Grace. “I believe I could get to like guns. If I was counting right, I still have two bullets left.”Grace stared at her, the roving pupils of her eyes giving what was unquestionably the false impression of being dazed. I finally arrived at Marion's side.Grace, her black shift-dress crusted with snow, her bare feet bluish from the cold, found the knife where it had fallen and picked it up. She then spoke in a low, steady voice. “His head needs to come off.”I looked at the red ruin above Umaru's shoulders.Marion actually smiled. “Think he's going to pop up like a zombie? I tell you, you Archons remind me no end of my voodoo playfellows.”“I'm not an Archon.”“Right. You're the avenging whelp. But let's not get off on the wrong foot, Miss Grace. I can see why you'd enjoy removing his head, given the introduction I had to your dead husband. Go right ahead, if it pleases you.”Grace did not hesitate. Though she had only succeeded in inflicting superficial wounds on Umaru before Marion had interceded with her gun, the knife she held was clearly razor-sharp. She leaned forward, placed it hard against the man's neck, and it sank deep. When she encountered the resistance of Umaru's spine, she adjusted her position, braced her feet against his shoulders, took hold of his hair with his free hand, and pulled as she sawed downward.The grisly spectacle took about a minute. When the head finally came free, she held it up before her, staring into the glassy eyes with her chaotic ones. Then, while Marion and I stood watching, she kissed the dead lips, and placed the severed head down almost gently in the snow.I remembered Damaris' cryptic comments about the living absorbing sparks of primal identity from the dead, and I wondered if that kiss was less to a defeated adversary than to the shadow of a lost husband.“I'm figuring it's not long before the fellows who did for the Solon will be coming along the same trail we did,” Marion, practical as always, had no use for pondering Archon metaphysics. “We'd better settle our business quick.”Grace stood, and despite her appearance and the acts we had just witnessed, the dignity of her bearing could not be denied.I shouldered out of my coat and handed it to her. She accepted it, her face puzzled. “You two are Ruha's candidates for the Depuration.”“That was the original thought,” Marion replied.Her eyes widened somewhat then, seeing the broad bloodstain on the back of my coat. Grace followed her gaze and saw it too. Marion took a step closer to me and looked at my back.“Doctor, you're bleeding somewhat fearful.”“From my bullet?” Grace asked.I nodded.“I was shooting at Umaru. My vision makes me useless with a gun. I'm sorry, doctor. You were holding them at bay on my behalf. And you,” she looked at Marion, then the corpse of Umaru, “did this to him.”“Miss Grace, I don't know you from Eve, but I've got the strong impression that your mama has every intention of using me for a while, at the conclusion of which I'm more likely to be a dead mess like this boy than a happy semi-goddess with eternal life. I've also come to the conclusion that Dr. Wilder here wants nothing to with whatever shit she ultimately intends to pull.”“You've judged my mother well enough.”“Accepting that we're no saints – with the exception perhaps of Dr. Jim – I'm thinking at this point that being your ally might be more conducive to my goals than being Mistress Ruha's disposable fuck-and-kill puppet. I get the impression, despite what happened at the cathouse, that you still have a gang at your disposal?”“You could call it that.”“Then what if I told you exactly where their precious ritual is going to be happening? Think you and your cohorts might be inclined to drop in?”“I already know where it's going to take place.”“So you think. You've been flanked, Miss Grace. Your watchers followed doubles to a false destination. They're following them around again, right now. She used the ploy to spot you at your bordello-roost, and here we are. She's got a literal underworld that she calls Siniavis...that ring a bell for you? At this very moment she's recovering from two broken legs and a slit throat acquired in our little recent visit there. Her associates are a bit the worse for wear too. I'd call them ripe for the taking.”“You're crossing her? That's a very dangerous thing to do.”“I don't doubt it in the least. But like I said, I think our Mistress intends to chew me up and spit me out. I'm banking on the chance that you do right by people who join up with you. So I made you this.”Marion opened the front of her coat and reached inside the bodice of her dress. She withdrew a folded piece of paper, which she handed to Grace.“Drew it up while it was all fresh in my mind. There's a door to Siniavis in the basement of Mistress Ruha's house. She comes and goes under your nose. Now you're going to need to righteously assault her house to get there, but I'm guessing you have the will for that. Resistance won't be quite so stout with her boy here, dead...I haven't seen more than a few other servants around the place. Some have attitude...but then so do you. Come when the lady herself is attending her soiree with us in tow, and you should make short enough work of them.”Grace closed the paper in her fist. “And this wouldn't be an effort to draw me into a trap, would it?”“Missy, you were trapped right well five minutes ago, if I hadn't broken it up.”Listening, I was amazed at Marion's audacity. Her intent to pull the teeth right from the mouth of the Archon cult was absolutely self-interested, but had far more likelihood of success than my own earlier desire to place them all before conventional authorities. My own experience with Grace showed her to be ruthless and driven, but I felt too somehow that she would keep her word if given.“I figure I'll be naked and either fucking or killing someone when you show up,” Marion went on. “Just describe me well to your boys, so they don't slip up while they're chastising Archons. Now we have an immediate problem...a little clutch of piss-ant bully boys are likely to come climbing the Cross Bones fence in a minute or two. Were you just running scared when you ducked in here, or did you have some plan that will cross up their ability to follow your footprints just the way we did?”“The cemetery and the bordello had an arrangement,” Grace answered. “Periodically they would...visit the Solon with a horse-cart, to take away Archon servants when my women were finished with them. The horse is stabled very close – the warder will look the other way when I take it.”“Nice,” Marion nodded. “Go to, then. We'll be expecting you.” She spared a glance at Grace's bare feet. “You aren't going to fall down halfway there with frostbite, are you?”“I'm not an Archon, but just as resilient as one.”Grace took a last look at the bloody heap that had been Umaru, her pupils momentarily re-centering, giving her perhaps the most wistful expression I had seen on her face. Then she blinked, and her troubled eyes once again went askew. But her posture was all strength and determination as she put on my coat and disappeared behind the mausoleum with the crouching angel.Marion and I stood silent for a moment. The snowfall, beginning to increase again, sifted about us with soft whispers.Finally Marion gestured toward the corpse. “This,” she said, “might be a little thorny to explain.”“Give me your gun, then run back along our trail until you encounter Damaris' bravos. After I shot at them in the brothel, they won't have any trouble believing I'm the one who did this to him.”“You never disappoint, doctor.” Marion handed me the pistol.I swayed on my feet somewhat and she looked again at my bloody back, but made no comment. She left me, walking and then jogging back along the path of our footprints, until the curtain of falling snow swallowed her.I took a deep breath and watched the lacy caress of snowflakes settling on Umaru's body, some melting in the pools of his blood, before beginning to coat and obscure the vivid patterns of red.I felt no sense of righteous vengeance having come up out of the past.Then the snow was whirling, and I realized I had fallen onto my back only when I found myself looking up, blinking at white tatters that sought my eyes, before I closed them.

#Doc Talos Sr. and the Abyss

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