The Big Reap

2.

“The fuck was that?” I asked, crossing my arms and rubbing at my borrowed shoulders in a vain attempt to dispel the dread that had settled upon me as I’d forced open the door.

“Security,” he said. His gun was still drawn but no longer trained on me, instead hanging relaxed at his side in one gloved hand. “The whole fence is like that. Protects the would-be squatters and nosey bloody parkers.”

“Don’t you mean protects you from the would-be squatters and nosey bloody parkers?”

“No. Although in the Bentley’s case, that’s true enough. Its bodywork is hexed to match. Even with the gloves on, I don’t like touching it.”

“It’s a cute trick,” I said. “You’ll have to teach me.”

He shook his head. “Not mine to teach.”

“The boss?” I hazarded.

“The boss.”

Inside the perimeter of the site the air was somehow darker, closer. It took me a moment to realize why. The sky above was a formless gray far deeper than it had been a moment before, and oddly distorted, as if seen through dirty leaded windows. And though outside the gate the rain continued unabated, I neither saw nor felt any trace of it in here, and the sidewalk beneath my feet was dry. I smelled not moisture, nor exhaust, nor simmering spice, just a still alkaline nothing, like the air inside a fallout bunker. Here, as outside, the sidewalk buckled under countless weeds’ persistence, but while outside they were thriving, the weeds inside were withered, black, and dead. And inside the plywood perimeter, it was dead silent as well. I heard no city sounds, no song, not so much as the quiet patter of the rain. Just me and this mook breathing in the silence. It set my teeth on edge.

“Well then,” I said. “What say we two go meet him?”

Muffled footfalls against concrete. Massive front steps looming. Now that we were inside the barrier, the building no longer resisted being seen. It was an imposing structure in the Edwardian style with hard lines and thick columns, faced in weather-beaten limestone that gathered in heavy geometric pediments above every window. As we approached the outsized arch of the entryway, I noted the lettering carved into the rectangular cartouche atop the keystone, which read, Pemberton Baths.

“We going for a swim?” I asked.

“Something like that,” he replied.

We scaled the broad stone stairs. My gaze lighted on something on the topmost step that seemed incongruous with our surroundings, a brush-stroke of stark white against the gray. I crouched over it, and found to my surprise it was a good-sized bird, or what was left of one. I’d never seen one like it, or so I thought. When I said as much to my fair foreign companion, he snorted and said, “You never see a crow before?”

With a start, I realized he was right. It was a crow. Emphasis on the was.

The crow lay on its side, wings splayed as if felled in mid-flight, though it showed no signs of trauma from whatever felled it or from the fall itself. And every inch of it, from beak to wing to three-pronged feet, was as pale as sun-bleached bone. Save for its eyes, I realized. The one that I could see was a blackened crater with a corona of charcoal all around. It looked as if it had been burned out of the poor creature’s head.

Suddenly, the driver’s comment about protecting would-be squatters and looky-loos made a whole lot more sense.

I reached down to turn the bird over, to try to understand what sort of magic it had fallen victim to, but when I touched it, it crumbled to ash.

“Your boss has quite the bag of tricks.”

“He does, at that.”

“And he doesn’t seem too fond of visitors.”

He shrugged. “He’s a very private man, isn’t he?”

“So how come you and me could pass?”

He looked at me like I was dense. “We were invited.”

“That didn’t seem to stop the fence. Or the mojo on the Bentley.”

At that, the big man hesitated, a pained look on his face as if worried what came next might be perceived by his employer as speaking out of turn. “We weren’t harmed because the boss wishes us no harm. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s less concerned whether he hurts our feelings. And if I were you, I’d get a move on. He’s not a man who takes kindly to being kept waiting.”

The front door was unlocked. We stepped inside. Our footfalls echoed through the broad expanse of the room. The interior of the building was dark, lit only by the faint light that trickled through the dirt-crusted panes of the skylight that stretched the length of the ceiling, and the soft glow of two gas lamps at the far end of the room. All the windows save for the skylight were boarded up.

Situated beneath the skylight was a vast, white-tiled swimming pool. Circling it was a narrow walkway no doubt once dotted with low-slung lounge chairs, but now piled here and there with detritus — nail-studded boards; hunks of masonry run through with metal rebar; a pile of public restroom sinks. The pool itself was free of such detritus. A set of stairs in either corner nearest us — one crumbling, one intact — invited would-be swimmers into the shallow end a scant three feet below the walkway, and from there the pool’s bottom sloped gradually downward toward the far end.

The driver gestured toward the undamaged stairs, so I took them, he trailing just behind. Together we descended toward the gas-lit glow of the deep end. Though the pool had long been drained, I couldn’t help but feel as my sightline passed below the walkway that surrounded it that I was in over my head.

The deep end featured on its right-hand side a cluttered office. A gas lamp turned down to barely burning rested on an elegant mahogany desk, but afforded too little light to make out anything but black shapes surrounding it. The deep-end’s left-hand side was taken up by a makeshift room framed in two-by-fours and shielded from view by hanging sheets of plastic of the type I’d seen outside. Another lamp burned inside the makeshift room, this one brighter, projecting shadows of the activity therein against the walls like some nightmare paper lantern. I saw a table’s distorted shadow, its flat plane broken by a sleeping body — or a cadaver. The vague shape of a man’s head and shoulders were visible hunching over it, his hands an impossible blur of activity. He was humming, I realized — a Wagner opera. And, though the table’s supports were stick-skinny, light showing underneath, the man appeared to have no legs.

Beside me, the Welshman stiffened for a moment as though receiving an electric shock, and then he nodded. “The boss is just finishing up,” he said, dress shoes clattering against the tile as he crossed into the office and adjusted the gas lamp. It flared white-hot a moment as the first rush of air hit the wick, and then settled into a pleasant, amber glow. “He said to make yourself at home.”

I squinted in the sudden light, the wick’s green afterimage a dancing ghost at the center of my vision, and then forgot myself once my eyes adjusted.

The back wall of the office was lined with waist-high wooden, glass-doored shelves of the kind one might find at an old-time pharmacy. The shelves were chock-a-block with jars containing peculiar liquids that seemed to amplify the lamplight and reflect back strange, entrancing hues of their own. As I looked at them in turn — dusky purple, vibrant green, soft pink — my mouth was filled with the taste of plum, of sage, of rose petals.

Atop the shelving was a collection of taxidermy the likes of which the world had never seen: a three-headed owl; a piglet’s head with hooked, reddish beaks where its eyes ought to’ve been; a cheetah with the face of a baboon.

The right-hand wall was largely given over to an array of medical equipment — a heart monitor, a respirator, an IV stand ornamented with two bags of fluids — surrounding a luxurious four-post bed done up with a half-dozen thick down pillows and sheets of gleaming silk. The pillows were fluffed up and arranged so the bed’s occupant might comfortably sit; the sheets were turned down in anticipation of said occupant.

I strolled across the mildewed tile toward the desk at the center of the space. My driver watched idly, arms crossed, apparently unconcerned by my curiosity. The desk was piled high with books, papers, and odd artifacts: A glass bell, under which sat a sliver of blood-flecked wood; the broken corner of a stone slab, inscribed with words I could not read; a life-sized bronze bust, its face contorted in pain.

Two high-backed leather club chairs faced the desk on one side. The side the blotter faced contained no chair. The blotter itself was leather as well but paler than the club chairs, and less burnished. I ran a finger along it, wondering idly at its strange matte finish, only to recoil when I realized the seal at its center was not a seal at all, but in fact a Royal Navy man’s tattoo.

An anemometer sat on one corner of the desk, a device like a propeller with four hemispherical cups attached, intended to measure wind-speed. As I approached, it began to rotate slowly. But there was no wind in here, save for that which the instrument itself generated as it spun, and anyways, the cups were arranged such that it should have spun clockwise, not counterclockwise.

It picked up speed, spinning so fast it shook. Papers flew off the desk, scattering across the floor. Something about the device pricked at a distant memory, and unnerved me in a way I could not define. Almost without volition, I raised a hand to stop it.

“I wouldn’t,” said a thin, wizened, aristocratic voice, its vaguely continental singsong accent lending a quiet air of condescension to its words.

“Excuse me?” I said, tearing my attention from the anemometer, and turning it instead to its owner. Who, as it happens, was the ugliest man I’d ever had the displeasure of laying eyes on.

He was a skeletal little wisp of a thing, gliding toward me in a motorized wheelchair that hummed quietly as it cleared the plastic sheeting and rolled into the ersatz office. Twin ribbons of herringboned red trailed behind it, one from each tire, patterned like a printmaker’s stamp, ever fainter as he approached. He wore a silk smoking jacket — bold blue paisley trimmed in brown velvet — and a loose-woven brown lap blanket over his legs. One ashen, liver-spotted hand, its knuckles gnarled as tree roots, gripped the chair’s joystick. His other hand, oddly brown and muscular, rested lightly on his lap.

His face looked like a patchwork quilt assembled by a mad cannibal — an age-creased pale white nose, narrow and aquiline; a left cheek and jaw as soft and unlined as a young woman’s; a patch of skin around his right eye blood-crusted at its borders as if it were a new addition, whose tone and epicanthic folds indicated it was Asian in origin. His right eye was pale green and rheumy. His left eye was vibrant blue, and clear as cloudless day, but it bulged inside its socket as if it didn’t quite fit. The skin on the right side of his face was as thin and brittle as old parchment; it cracked and peeled in the hollow of his cheek.

“It detects your kind, among other things,” he said. “Consider it a warning system. You touching it will only make it spin faster. You’re liable to lose a hand.”

“Why’s it spinning backward?” I asked.

“Because you, Sam Thornton, are no angel.”

He raised the hand in his lap and gestured. The anemometer’s spinning ceased.

“And just who or what are you?” I asked.

The patchwork man laughed, a steel brush on concrete. “Isn’t that the question,” he replied.

“I’ll settle for a name,” I said. “After all, you apparently know who I am.”

“Ah, but what’s in a name? Particularly for one such as myself, who’s had so many. In Sebaste, they knew me as Atomus. In Samaria, I was Simon Magus. In Cologne, Albertus. In the verdant isles of this fledgling kingdom, they sang my praises as Merlin. And this century past, I was best known for my groundbreaking if misunderstood research, conducted under the name of Doktor Men–”

But then he broke off — mid-name, it seemed — as if deciding he’d already shared too much. “My apologies,” he said. “You care not to hear an old man’s ramblings; you simply wish to know how to address me. At present, my name is Simon Magnusson. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, my last procedure proved more difficult than anticipated.”

I glanced back over the Magnusson’s shoulder at the plastic-sheeted room, and wondered if I even wanted to ask.

I asked. “What kind of a procedure?”

“The unsuccessful kind, I fear. My patient lacked the fortitude necessary to survive the harvest. Now she’s just so much wasted flesh. And as you can see,” he said, tilting his crumpled parchment cheek toward the light for me to see, “I’ve little time to find another suitable donor.”

“I hope that’s not why you brought me here.”

“No,” said Magnusson. “We’ve other business altogether. Could I tempt you with a cup of tea? I suspect your trip to the cemetery has left you chilled.” I shook my head. “A sherry, perhaps?” Again I declined. “Well, then, I hope you don’t begrudge me some myself. Gareth,” he said, addressing the driver, “would you be a dear and fetch me some Amontillado? Then kindly clean up the surgical suite. I fear I left it quite a mess.”

The Welshman nodded once and disappeared up the deep-end’s sole ladder, his footfalls receding into the darkness. Seconds later he returned, expertly navigating the ladder with a sherry glass in one hand. I found myself wondering how he would have managed it with two drinks.

He set the sherry on the desk atop the blotter, and then ducked behind the plastic sheeting, three-thousand-dollar suit and all. Soon, I heard the sound of a hose running, and pink water sluiced across the tiles from beneath the sheeting, headed toward the floor drain at the center of the deep end.

“Please,” he said, gesturing at the leather club chairs opposite the desk. “Sit down. We’ve much to talk about.”

I did as he requested, eyeing awkwardly the desk’s contents while the patchwork man maneuvered his electric wheelchair into place. The breeze generated by the anemometer had shifted the mountain of paper atop the desk, and unearthed treasures that had heretofore been hidden to me. Two in particular caught my eye.

The first was a Maneki Neko figurine — you know, the sort of chintzy ceramic cats that grace the counter of every noodle house and pachinko parlor from here to Hokkaido. They’re meant to bring good fortune to whosoever owns them; I had reason to believe this one did that one better. See, a year or so back, I wound up in a tussle with a demon, a demon I killed with a talisman identical to this one. Far as I knew at the time, that talisman was unique. Now, I suspected, I was looking at another.

The other item that caught my eye, mounted as it was on two narrow arms such that it ran parallel to the far edge of the desk, was an ornate, filigreed skim blade, its beveled cutting edge gleaming in the lamplight. The base on which it was displayed read:

A skim blade is demon-forged, and as hard and sharp as the fury of the Adversary himself, but it is no weapon. It’s used in the manufacture of skim, a demon drug of sorts made by shaving fragments of life experience from souls recently collected.

But skim blades have another function, too. They can be used to cleave a human soul entirely, a sacrifice so great and terrible it’s only used to fuel the most violent and desperate of magical rituals. A skim blade is what Ana used when she destroyed Danny’s soul as part of her rite to escape hell’s bonds. A rite she learned of through decades of painstaking research into what I’d thought to be an old wives’ tale — of a group of Collectors some three thousand years ago who called themselves the Brethren, and who, through a ritual in which they tore a soul asunder and brought forth the Great Flood, broke free of hell’s orbit forever.

I was pretty sure I was now in the presence of one of them.

“Quite the collection you’ve got here,” I said, plucking up the Maneki Neko all casual-like, as if I were inspecting it, rather than weighing the odds of bashing it into this dude’s skull if our little tête-à-tête went sideways.

He smiled. “I understand you’re something of a Collector yourself.”

“Cute.”

“It won’t do you any good, you know.”

“What’s that?”

“The lucky cat. I assume that’s why you’re holding it, no? In case this meeting comes to blows. And I’m telling you, it’s no use against the likes of me.”

“You sure about that?” I asked, remembering the havoc the last one wreaked on beings doubtless more powerful than this poor wretch.

“Of course I’m sure,” he snapped. “I made it. Originally, I enchanted a case of twelve, dimestore trinkets bought wholesale from a manufacturer in Taiwan. Stashed them wherever I thought they might prove useful. But objects of such power have a way of walking off. Much as my brazen head once did, when that bastard Pope Sylvester decided he had to have it, and stole it from me.”

I eyed the bust he indicated — bronze, tarnished, and unremarkable. “The fuck’s it do?” I asked.

“It’s an oracle of sorts. It’s said that it can answer any question truthfully, provided that question is phrased such that it may answer yes or no.”

“Does it work?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied the head, damn near causing me to jump out of my chair.

“No,” replied Magnusson.

“B-but it just said–”

“Oh, I didn’t say it couldn’t speak. Just that it no more knows the secrets of the universe than you or I. Well, more you than I. I assure you, the human mind that I encased inside it was quite infirm to begin with, and has only grown madder as the centuries have passed. The only thing keeping it from gibbering like an idiot all day long is it’s mystically forbidden from saying anything but ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

The old man gave me the stare-down for a moment, and then, more serious now, continued. “Tell me,” he said, “do you know why you are here?”

“I’m starting to get an inkling,” I replied. “You’re Brethren, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t you the clever one,” he said. “For over three thousand years we Nine lived unmolested, protected by the same Great Truce that stemmed the tide of war between the heavens and the realms below. And then you and your idiot friends ginned up delusions of grandeur, and decided to recreate our ritual to free yourselves from servitude as we once did.”

“That ain’t exactly how it all went down,” I said, but Magnusson raised his good hand to silence me.

“Spare me your frayed yarns and tired excuses,” he said. “I assure you, I’m interested in neither. Do you know why we Nine were successful in our endeavor?”

“I have a feeling you’re about to enlighten me.”

“Oh, I doubt very much your capacity for enlightenment, though I shall try. We succeeded because we had vision. Creativity. We escaped the bonds of slavery because not a being in the universe but us believed that it could work. You and your friends had no such advantage, which is why you were doomed to fail, and fools to even attempt it.”

“And here I figured you got by on your rakish good looks.”

His face twisted momentarily into a gruesome mask of fury, quickly mastered. “You mock what you cannot understand. When you look upon me, you see something to be reviled, yes? Pitied, perhaps?”

“I wouldn’t expect much of a line at your kissing booth, if that’s what you mean,” I replied.

“Again with the juvenile humor. A pointless act of childish rebellion. But your words hurt me not a bit. You see, when I look upon my own reflection, I see not a monstrous visage worthy of your scorn. I see the culmination of fifty lifetimes spent in the service of science and magic both; the great triumph of human ingenuity — my ingenuity — in besting death. For you see, the eternal life my siblings and I fought so hard for is not without its drawbacks. Unlike you, we cannot simply flit from vessel to vessel. Our flesh and soul are fused. We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence,” he said, eyes swiveling toward the plastic-sheeted surgical suite, where Gareth — still hosing down the effluvia left behind by Magnusson’s procedure — suddenly began to whistle the selfsame Wagner opera Magnusson was whistling upon our entry. A few notes in, he fell silent once more.

“And even then,” Magnusson continued, looking drained, “only temporarily. Since we are condemned to our fleshly prisons for all eternity, we require constant replenishment to push back against the ravages of time. In our early days, we bathed in the blood of innocents — stoking the flames of war and of distrust, even drumming up an Inquisition or two if need be — to ensure our cups ever runneth over. A few of my kind still do, in fact, so entrenched are they in the old ways they refuse to acknowledge the world has moved on without them. Others found the unpleasant necessities of our lifestyle so distasteful, they broke from the pack to form another, taking refuge on a wooded continent as far from civilization as they could manage, so as to not be tempted to feast on the life-sustaining flesh and blood of the living. Their efforts proved shortsighted, as that vast, sparsely populated continent they chose to make their home was discovered not long after by our standards. Turns out the poor, misled bastards starved themselves just long enough, subsisting for centuries on the scant life-force of wild game, to drive themselves quite mad. Now they’re nothing more than feral beasts, feasting on the very species they sought to spare. Through rigorous application of the scientific method to the so-called arcane art of magic, I alone have happened upon our true path, our true future; one to which I hope my dear siblings will one day come around. Thanks to the great strides I’ve made in my own nascent field of molecumancy, muscles, bones, and organs — and yes, even skin — may be replaced as they each in turn fail. Vitality may be replenished through regular transfusions. Immune responses can be managed mystically to avoid rejection, and ensure a perfect join between old and new, regardless of the source. Which means our bodies can even be augmented, transformed into something greater than human; what Nietzsche called the Übermensch. A true self-made man.”

“Christ,” I said. “You give that speech to every mother whose baby starts wailing when it catches a glimpse of you? You’re no fucking superman, you’re a decrepit mess with delusions of grandeur, and you look like the goddamned Crypt Keeper. I fail to see how that makes you better than the people you prey upon.”

Magnusson waved a hand dismissively in my direction. “Your choice of words, though no doubt borne of carelessness, is apt. You do, indeed, fail to see. My outward appearance I manage by employing a simple glamour — one which projects an image of a kindly old man to anyone who looks my way. I can even, for short stretches in controlled environments, force that glamour to imprint itself onto film — a discovery that proved a revelation to one so long relegated to the shadows. Now I’m known the world over as a great pillar of the international business community, one whose holdings in the fields of technology and biosciences have improved humankind’s understanding of themselves and quality of life in ways none but me had the vision to imagine. My false face graces billboards, and speaks to thousands of Magnusson Industries employees every year via my very own dedicated satellite network. But I refuse to wear it here. Here, I am my truest self.”

“Here, where you slaughter innocents, you mean. Your methods may differ from those of your fellow Brethren, but it seems to me you pillage the living just the same.”

“For now, yes, but only by necessity. I derive no pleasure from it. One day soon, I shall possess the means to cultivate my own replacement parts, at which point I’ll no longer have any need to pester the living. And I assure you, those from whom I borrow are hardly innocent. I own a number of institutions both penal and mental from which I draw as needed — once the potential donor has met my rigorous screening requirements, of course. Borrow portions of an undiagnosed schizophrenic’s frontal lobe just once, and you too will become a stickler for prescreening, although the dreams, I confess, were quite engaging. I removed it a week later to stop the voices, opening my skull with hammer and chisel by my reflection in the washroom mirror and scooping it out with a soup spoon in my desperation. But sometimes, they taunt me still.”

“Least you’re never lonely,” I replied. “Speaking of, maybe you and they could finish this conversation without me. I mean, thanks for having me and all, and really,” I said, looking around the dank, echoey space of the abandoned public bath, “it’s a lovely home you’ve got here, but I’ve had about as much hospitality as I can stand for one day. So, if you don’t mind…”

The old man laughed once more. “My home? You think this is my home? Oh, no, dear boy. I’ve a penthouse not far from here on Piccadilly, a country estate some hours north, a small island in the Caribbean, the top five floors of a high-rise in Hong Kong that bears my name. This place is merely a refuge of sorts, where I can carry out my more… esoteric experiments away from the prying eyes of those who might wish to put a stop to them.”

I pictured a bleached white crow, its eyes burned out of its head. And a man made of crows three stories high; an old god named Charon, whose dominion was the vast nothing separating life and death known as the In-Between, and the Collectors who routinely passed through it as they traveled from vessel to vessel. It was he who absorbed the energy released by Danny’s riven soul during Ana’s recreation of the Brethren escape-ritual, thereby sparing the living world a horrid fate. I had it on good authority he was none too fond of the Brethren. He didn’t cotton much to folks who took advantage of his beneficence.

“You’re hiding from Charon,” I said.

“Amongst others,” said the old man. “Unaffiliated deities such as he can prove as volatile as they are unpredictable, and he’s no great fan of me or mine. But there’s value in staying off heaven and hell’s respective radars as well, particularly as they descend once more toward all-out war. Ours are dangerous times, Mr. Thornton — for the living and the dead both. For the first time in three thousand years, I wonder just how long any of us on this spinning rock have left. And speaking of hell’s radar, where does your handler think you are right now?”

“Lilith found me at the cemetery, same as you, so she knows that I’m in Jolly Old, but I didn’t exactly have time to file a flight plan with her before your goon — excuse me, driver — absconded with me.”

At the mention of Lilith’s name Magnusson started, but whatever emotion just passed through him, his hodgepodge features were inscrutable. “That is reassuring to hear,” he said. “For it would not do to have her waiting at the gates, once I take my leave of you this night. It’s shame enough I had to sacrifice my sanctuary just to neutralize the threat you pose, the last thing I need is to tussle with the likes of her.”

At the implied threat behind his words, I tensed. Fear, cold and slithering, coiled itself around my stomach. “You must know I can’t be killed,” I told him. “If I were, I’d be reseeded somewhere else.”

“Fear not, Collector, I’ve no intention of killing you. I simply chose to remove you from the field of play.”

That’s when it occurred to me. “The bed…” I said.

“…is yours, of course. And I do hope you find it to your liking. You’ll be sleeping in it for centuries to come.”

“The hell I will.”

“Oh, I fear you haven’t any choice. And Samuel?”

“Yeah?”

“You really should have accepted my offer of tea.”

And that is when the patchwork man attacked.