The Big Reap

3.

Look, I’m no idiot. This gig of mine, as awful as it is, comes with its share of downtime, much of it passed surfing cable in fleabag motels, or thumbing through whatever tacky airport thriller happens to grace my meat-suit’s nightstand. So sure, I’m well aware when a creepy-ass mad scientist transports you to his secret lair unblindfolded and then lays in on the mustache-twirling monologue, you oughta figure your day’s about to take a turn for the shark-mounted death-ray. But what I didn’t expect from this decrepit sack of patchwork skin and bone was that he’d try to take me on himself. Nor did I have the faintest inkling the freaky son of a bitch would be more than equal to the task.

When Magnusson first began to rise from his wheelchair, my brain couldn’t make a lick of sense of it. Then his lap-blanket fell away, and my confusion and mounting fear were replaced by revulsion. What I’d taken for spindly old-man legs beneath the woven blanket were in fact the front-most two of four ropy, mismatched arms, which angled elbows-up away from his withered trunk in such a way the knot of mottled scar tissue at their join where his junk should’ve been was visible as his robe slipped open. The two rear arms, which had been hidden under his robe, folded beneath him, and then pressed palm-down on the wheelchair’s seat, lifting him upward. As I watched, they first one and then the other moved from the leather seat to the wheelchair’s armrests like a gymnast gripping pommels. I had just long enough to think that suddenly the flurry of activity I’d half-glimpsed through the plastic sheeting on my way in made a lot more sense, when this monster rendered in stolen flesh and bone launched himself at me.

The wheelchair shot backward, slammed into a set of shelves, glass shattering and noxious smells. Magnusson vaulted over the desk, his two proper arms extended toward me as if to throttle me, the palms of his two front leg-hands slapping the mahogany to maintain his momentum, and spilling the desk’s contents across the pool tiles. His silk smoking jacket trailed behind him like a paisley cape, its belt tie flailing open on either side. The gas lantern hit the tiles with a wind-chime crash, its fuel igniting as it splashed across the floor and scattered papers and casting long, flickering shadows through the vast, empty space — a storybook hell made real.

I had no time to react. The club chair tipped over backward as he slammed into me — his one dark, beefy proper hand on my throat, pinning me in place; the two hands on his forelegs gripping white-knuckled the leather of the chair wings; his two hind-leg hands digging into my knees. The naked join of his four lower limbs was scant inches above me, scarred and filthy and reeking like an open sewer. With his one withered hand, he reached into an interior pocket of the smoking jacket and withdrew an old, glass syringe filled with a sickly amber liquid, cloudy and flocculent. Attached to the syringe was a heavy-gauge needle three inches long.

I clawed and scratched at the old man’s face. Skin sloughed off in patches beneath my fingers, revealing yellow adipose tissue like fresh-plucked chicken and glistening cords of blood-red muscle streaked with purple. Its scent hit my nostrils, earthy and animal and tinged faintly with rot, and the loosed scraps fluttered black and withered to the ground, aging decades in the seconds after they were set free from this monster’s horrid form. But the bastard just laughed, and removed the protective sheath from the needle with his crooked, gray-black teeth. Vision growing spotty, I couldn’t help but note how long and sharp those teeth were, now that his cracked, parchment-colored lips were pulled back to display them in all their glory. Like an animal’s I realized — or maybe several animals’.

A mouth full of stolen canines.

“Do you see now how little chance you stand against me? You who cling to your petty human worldview, your myopic human sense of what is possible?”

But I didn’t see. My eyes were clenched tight in concentration. My consciousness probing. Seeking. Reaching for another meat-suit.

I brushed against Magnusson’s own consciousness, but recoiled as soon as I made contact. It was too foreign, too alien, too goddamn corrupted for me to work with. I’d barely grazed him, and I hope to God he didn’t notice, but God ain’t one to listen to me, I guess, because Magnusson roared in sudden rage and backhanded me twice in rapid succession.

Made sense. He had backhands to spare.

I reached my mind toward Gareth’s next. When I touched him, I realized the Welshman was frightened. I found him huddled, shaking in the far corner of the plastic-sheeted room, a toppled tray of bloodied surgical equipment scattered all around. The stainless steel mortuary slab was thankfully above his eye level, and harsh white light from the surgical light above cast a corona all around it, so my hazy, impressionistic remote-view afforded me blissfully little detail of its viscera-draped surface. But I saw one bare leg, female, dangling off the nearest edge. The dead woman’s toes were painted a glossy coral pink, and her calf was tanned and shapely. Well, the bit of it that was still whole. There was a scalpel-slice below her knee the circumference of her leg, and a perpendicular cut proceeding halfway down her shin. The skin below her knee was folded down over itself like an unzipped leather boot. Fluids dripped from the corners created by the vertical slice onto the floor, the tap-tap-tap echoing dully in the emptiness.

I extended my consciousness toward him, the seconds stretching as I myself stretched across the hollow Nothingness between my waning vessel and the promise of a new one. Mere seconds passed as I thrashed beneath the patchwork madman’s grasp, but the flood of images that struck me painted a picture of a lifetime. A simple man, his mind laid bare before me on account of countless violations on the part of his sadistic employer, his whole world shattered by all that he had seen and felt and, yes, been forced to do, as if the front door to his mind had been ripped off its hinges, the path to it worn shiny from constant use — from heavy things both dragged in and removed.

You know what’s funny? We all have thoughts, even the stupidest of us. Reams of them, all day long, from sunup to sundown. And yet most folks have no idea how those thoughts are structured, or what makes them tick. They’re not some kind of mental home movie, a series of vignettes that traipse from A to B to C with a handy-dandy voiceover narration making sense of the whole thing. They’re more like water droplets scattered across a spider web after a spring rain; little pockets of experience, caught at random it seems, each a lens through which distorted images of the world as we see it can be viewed, but never, ever as it truly is. Those moments that aren’t captured by memory’s web speak to character every bit as much as are the ones that stick, and the way they’re organized is dictated by the many-eyed wooly beast that guards the keep — our basest survival instinct, our truest and most horrible self. Each mind’s a pattern, a thousand strands of silk joined in one purpose. Some read as easy as the funny pages. Others read like Joyce — constellations within constellations, thoughts within thoughts within thoughts. And others still are like trying to read a Braille transcript of a bad translation of a foreign lunatic’s street-corner rants with your stockinged feet.

Lucky for me, this guy was of the funny-page persuasion, the thread of his life easily unwound. Unfortunately for the both of us, that’s where his relationship with funny ended.

I caught a fleeting glimpse of a shoddy housing estate in Cardiff; a single mother — pretty once — wasting away to nothing, as her omnipresent cigarettes were replaced in Gareth’s memories by a chipped, green-painted oxygen tank, the narrow tubes too small and delicate in his mind to entrust with so vital a task as conveying her life’s breath; a sparsely attended funeral, his heart cold and gray beneath a sky of brilliant blue; a youth spent in and out of juvenile detention centers, his anger both uncontrollable and preferable to his crushing sadness; a boxing gym heavy with the scent of liniment and sweat socks, a heart once more full of hope; the doctor’s hand atop his shoulder as he explained how the random squiggles on the CT meant he’d never fight again; and a kindly old man behind the wheel of a stunning ’65 Bentley, asking the weeping giant sitting on the chill stone curb if he might be interested in an exciting employment opportunity. And then horrors, half-glimpsed by me before Gareth pushed them aside. Never did he think the old man’s offer would come to this, to a young woman, so beautiful and so vibrant — her verbena-scented auburn curls so much like his mother’s own — lying dead and mangled on a slab beside him, just another workday mess to be carried to the curb.

The meat-suit I wished to leave was losing consciousness. Copper on my tongue, spots in my eyes, a tinny sound like a corded phone left off its hook in an adjacent room echoing in my ears. Magnusson’s needle plunged into my neck. I heaved with all I had toward Gareth.

Magnusson sensed what I was doing — sensed, or guessed. He stretched his mind toward the Welshman’s shattered one as well. He was faster than I, and managed Gareth’s meager psychic locks with the ease of one maneuvering one’s own living room with the lights off. All while I fumbled and struggled to gain hold. But I felt first one arm twitch, and then another, and felt the bile rise in Gareth’s throat as his body tried to cast me out. It happens every time my kind possesses a new vessel — more or less the only thing The Exorcist managed to get right. The body’s way of trying to expel that which does not belong, not that it ever does a lick of good. I thought that meant that I stood a chance, that I might yet best Magnusson as we struggled for control.

I was wrong. I never stood a chance.

Because Magnusson didn’t need complete control. Couldn’t even use it if he did manage to get it. As he himself had told me, “We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence — and even then, only temporarily.”

But what he could do, I discovered, was plant a seed.

A kernel.

A single, irresistible suggestion.

I felt it bubble up from the depths of the Welshman’s psyche as if the thought were his own. But the malice behind the thought was unmistakable.

Through Gareth’s mind’s eye, I saw a gun — his gun. Not as a threat, or a defensive weapon, but as a choice, a cure, a salve to soothe his aching soul.

I saw it through his mind’s eye as salvation.

And from the sudden giddy hope that surged in Gareth’s breast, it was clear he saw it that way too.

I pulled back in time, but only barely. In time to hear the bullet-blast tear through the cavernous room, rather than feel it blow off the Welshman’s skull. I clenched back tears, at the senseless loss of life, at the lingering notion implanted by Magnusson (but no less achingly authentic-feeling for it) that it was the only answer, the truest answer. A righteous fuck-you ending to so piteous a life.

That’s when I decided I was going to make this motherfucker pay.

Magnusson’s dead weight sagged atop me, the needle still buried in my neck. Limbs on top of limbs on top of limbs. I heard him grunt with exertion, felt his fingers scrabble ineffectually at the syringe plunger like a drunk too far gone to operate his keys. Saw by the flicker of the firelight that his lids were heavy, his mismatched eyes all whites. Turns out his powers of persuasion didn’t come without a price.

I heaved him off of me. He caught himself before his face met tile, one hand a weak protest against gravity, propping him up. He shook his head, and forced himself onto his hands and knees — although in his case, it was hands and elbows. I heard a snarl build in his throat, saw him eye me with a blinding fury as he gathered to pounce at me once more, his eyes twin suns, radiating malevolence so palpable it stung my cheeks. They blistered and peeled beneath his gaze, and my eyes burn-itched like I’d just peeked at an eclipse, which is when I realized it wasn’t anger but juju his baleful glare was sending my way. He was channeling the power of the building flames around us.

Figured I ought to stop him. Thought a mirror would make for some quality playground comeuppance of the rubber-and-glue variety. But I didn’t see any goddamn mirror, and I was running out of time. My meat-suit’s clothes were smoking, and starting to singe at the edges.

Then I remembered I had a needle chock full of noxious who-the-fuck-knows-what still sticking out of my neck.

Which I rectified, forcibly, by removing it and driving it as hard as I could into Mr. Angry Eyes’ shoulder, depressing the plunger with my thumb as the needle breeched his leathery flesh.

Magnusson roared then, and smacked me so hard I sailed clear across the pool, shattering a display case containing a fetal cow with two front-ends on my way to cheek-firsting into the tiles. A tinkle of glass and a water-balloon splash accompanied the skin on ceramic slap of my landing, and the bonfire air grew heavy with the dizzy, gag-inducing scent of formaldehyde. The poor dead calf-times-two spun on its side like a top until it skittered to a stop above the floor drain, plugging it and preventing the formaldehyde from draining. Then an ember from the growing fire drifted into the noxious puddle, and, with a sudden, breath-sucking whoosh, fire and fumes were one.

Magnusson and I were separated by a wall of flame, he eyeing me, me eyeing him. My borrowed heart soared as I realized the fire had encircled him, cutting off any hope of egress as it transformed itself from minor emergency to full-blown conflagration. Then the spidery bastard, after crouching low a moment like a snake coiling in preparation to strike, hurled himself straight upward into the air, all six hands and no small amount of magic working in perfect synchronicity to launch him far higher than Newtonian physics could possibly have justified. There, he clung with his hand-feet to the rafters, hanging like a bat and glaring down at me in anger and in challenge.

His freakish hand-feet alternated one over the other down the rafter until he was directly overhead. I moved. He followed suit. I ducked through a growing wall of flame — my sleeve over my face in a vain attempt to avoid the bitter sting of the burning formaldehyde fumes in my throat, my nasal passages, my eyes, trying to escape the rigid line of the rafter to which he was confined. But I underestimated the agility of his monstrous, many-limbed form. He swung on two arm-legs first once, then twice, then thrice, and with the agility of a gymnast , leapt from one rafter to the next, catching it such that he once more hung upside-down above me. Grinning. Taunting.

“Do you really think you can escape me, child? I assure you, you cannot. I am in every way your better, and you’re trapped beneath me in your lake of fire, with no hope of escape, no options left to you except to surrender, or to succumb. I can wait you out all day if need be, but I suspect the flames will take you far sooner than all that. And when they do, I’ll pounce. Perhaps by then this place will be halfway to cinders, and I’ll be forced to find another sanctuary in which to house you during your great slumber. Perhaps this place can yet be saved. Either way, you’ve accomplished nothing but to forestall the inevitable. Well, that, and to force me to take the life of a loyal servant.”

“You sure about that?” I shouted, my voice hoarse and weak from the fumes. I fell to my knees amidst the flames. By choice, I told myself, since the air down low was cooler, clearer, and seared the tender tissues of my eyes, my throat, my lungs less. But, the fact is, the air was so thick I couldn’t keep my feet.

“Excuse me?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard my words.

I stayed low, belly-crawling across the tile in an attempt to change my position relative to his under the cover of the thick, black roiling smoke. My elbow bumped something and bled warm and wet onto the tile. That something skittered off into the darkness. I pressed a palm to the wound, and cast about for whatever it was that just sliced through clothes and skin like so much nothing, spotted it glinting polished gold some feet away. Like hope; like the beginning of a plan.

I picked up the skim blade. The dull throb in my elbow, so subtle and deep a slice it scarcely even hurt, told me the ancient blade was still diamond-sharp, and as my fingers wrapped around it, searing it to my skin like chicken to a grill, I learned all too well it was still blister-hot from its time spent in the flames. But as it bonded to me, and weapon and flesh became one, I did not cry out, so unwilling was I to display weakness to the monster above.

I called to him again, the blade in my hand lending steel to my voice. “I asked you, are you sure?”

“Am I sure of what?”

“That my delaying is nothing more than forestalling the inevitable?”

“I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning,” he said. His tone carried a note of condescension, like an adult indulging a small child in its silly, pointless ramblings.

I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to push said condescension into anger, and said anger into a rash, ill-conceived response.

“Then let me be clearer, you ugly son of a bitch. Whatever the hell that chunky nastiness was you were gonna stick into me to send me off to my big sleep is now coursing through your system. And as creepy as you look, the parts you’re made of are still human. So my guess is, it’ll work on you as surely as it’d work on me. So yeah, I’m stuck down here, but the upside is, there ain’t no further left for me to fall. So the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, how’s that grip-strength of yours doing? Is the scary hand-monster getting sleepy?”

By the time I finished my taunting little soliloquy, the air was so heavy with roiling, thick black smoke, I couldn’t see Magnusson any longer, so I didn’t know whether my words had riled him. But then I heard him roar once more, followed by the slap of six hands meeting tile, and I knew he’d decided to come after me, rather than waiting in the rafters for the sandman to whisk him off to sleep.

The smoke pressed in around me. The pool had become a gas chamber, a killing floor — thick dark poison all around. The world was roaring now, and the billows of smoke tinged at their edges in sunset orange as the fire climbed ceilingward, engulfing everything combustible along the way. I couldn’t hear Magnusson, couldn’t see him. Could barely feel my extremities, I was so dizzy.

Magnusson, despite the dope and smoke, did not seem similarly afflicted. Which is to say, I never even saw him coming.

When he hit me from behind, I went down hard. He made sure of it — two hands on the back of my head, driving it into the tiles as I fell. I felt a snap, and my left eye went dark, my meat-suit’s orbital socket cracked and jutting. The sensation of vitreous fluid sticky against my cheek made me gag.

His lower limbs he used to pin my arms and legs, while he slammed my head into the tiles again and again and again. My nose gouted. My lips split. I was dazed, disoriented, and fading fast — losing blood, losing consciousness, losing hope. Two thoughts, slippery and hard to hold onto, were all that kept me going.

One was that Magnusson was too smart, too scientifically and mystically adept, to let me die. And yeah, even predeceased meat-suits can kick the bucket; possession’s like the magical equivalent of a defibrillator, capable of shocking the newly dead and relatively undamaged back to life. But if that meat-suit sustains enough damage — as this one was on its way to — it’ll give up the ghost all over again. Meaning me. When that happens, the invading consciousness is expelled. If we’re talking demonic possession, their consciousness simply returns to their physical form, possession for them is more projection than anything. But Collectors have no bodies of our own, so what winds up happening in instances of death is we’re reseeded someplace else at random, stuffed forcibly into someone half a world away. These days, the odds were one in six I’d wind up in China. Though I confess, however reseeding works, it never seems to track with expectations. Twice now, for example, I’ve ended up in Guam. The reseeding process sucks, because death for a Collector, while not final, is painful as all get-out, but it’d be a ticket out of here at least, and Magnusson knew it. Since he’d gone to all the trouble to bring me here, he wasn’t about to let me off so easy. He’d bash my meat-suit’s head in until it had barely enough juice left for me to slump drooling on a chair, let alone body-hop away, and then he’d hook me up to all manner of life-saving machines, leaving me trapped and sedated for an eternity, or near enough.

The other thought was that I could feel his grip-strength weakening. And if his drugs were taking hold, they might provide me with the opening I needed.

When he slammed me once more into the tiles, I shuddered and went slack. I knew he’d have to stop playing Gallagher to this meat-suit’s melon long enough to make sure he hadn’t taken things too far, and I was right. He nudged me. I didn’t move. He rolled me over. I flopped wet-noodle against the oven-warm tile, my one good eye half-lidded despite the scorching, toxic air. He recoiled, startled, when he saw the skim blade in my hand, but then he nudged it with a knuckle on one of his lower limbs, laughing when he realized it was attached.

He stepped back a bit, his form hazy from smoke, and suddenly out of my reach. I wondered if something tipped him to my possum act. But then he rose on four of his six hands, and uttered something rapid-fire and guttural in a language I could not understand. I heard an ungodly shriek in the darkness, but in reverse, the kind of noise you might make by sucking in, not blowing out. And then a mighty wind kicked up, the flames that engulfed the baths began to gutter, and the smoke around us to clear.

As I lay there, trying my damndest to see what was going on without moving anything but my eyeball lest I tip my hand, I was puzzled — puzzled and amazed. Amazed because this man was without a doubt the most powerful mage I’d ever come across, and puzzled because all magic, from the smallest of location spells to breaking the bonds of servitude to hell, requires a sacrifice. The former, blood. The latter, a tainted human soul. The through-line between the two being life.

Then, as the smoke cleared as surely as via a fume hood, I saw where it was going, and what that wretched noise was, and I realized what Magnusson had done.

Gareth’s corpse thrashed atop the pool tiles, his limbs contorting and his ruined, gunshot head thrown back as his thick boxer lips parted wide and drew in an impossible, endless breath of soot and flame and swirling smoke. His body — sacrifice and containment vessel both — bloated and rippled as it struggled to contain the conflagration. His clothes rent. His eyes ruptured. His naked flesh, veined black, stretched to the breaking point and beyond, splitting like an overripe tomato, and glistening wet black like campfire coals after a rain. By the time the fire was contained, he was a massive whale of a man, gray-black and oozing, left to slowly deflate as the firestorm inside him subsided.

The fire contained, this self-made monster, Dr. Frankenstein and his unholy progeny both, grabbed a fistful of my shirt and hoisted me upward. He swayed a bit as he did, staggering as he regained his balance, his strength sapped by the drugs and magic. He said to me, short of breath and slurring: “I confess, Mr. Thornton, you had more fight in you than I suspected. If you can hear me in there, I commend you. But as you can see, your efforts, as in Los Angeles, have proven futile. But fear not; you shall slumber soon enough. Perhaps you’ll even come to understand that for the kindness that it is. After all, is an eternity of dream not preferable to one spent in slavery to hell?”

It was a fair point. An angle I’d not considered. So I thought about it for a good half-second before I decided to roll the dice and stick with hell.

Then I stabbed him in the chest.

He released me when I came to life in his hands, but too late to deflect my blow. The skim blade pierced the desiccated flesh of his chest like scissors going through paper, and I felt his sternum beneath it shatter.

And that’s when things got really weird.

Once the blade passed through Magnusson’s chest, it began to thrum in my hand, as if coursing with an electric current. Magnusson’s eyes went wide, and then clenched shut as the blade burst out of his back, shattering his spinal column to dust. At the blade’s end was the shriveled little walnut that passed as Magnusson’s soul — no light left in it, no experiences washing over me as it separated from his body. Removed from its earthly vessel, said vessel began to crumble like a mummy exposed to the humidity of the open air after centuries spent entombed.

We fell to the ground, his flagging strength no longer capable of supporting my weight. As we landed, he slid down the blade, and then my arm. My hand was clean through his chest, blade still extended, the dead husk of his soul impaled upon it.

Brown faded to ash. Firm became fragile became so much dust. Soon, I was lying broken and bloodied but alone in the charred remains of the dead man’s office, a tumorous nodule skewered like morbid fondue-fodder at the edge of my blade, and a bloated, blackened Gareth beside me.

I lowered the blade, raised my free hand to Magnusson’s soul. It crumbled like chalk between my fingers.

My vision dimmed. My meat-suit failing.

I slipped away.

Exquisite. Excruciating. As if some sadistic needle-fingered creature was tearing every nerve out of my meat-suit’s body one by one like a gardener yanking up a particularly pernicious root, and running them across a bed of lemon-juice-soaked sandpaper before lighting them on fire.

It took moments.

It took forever.

And then, next thing I knew, I was in Guam.