The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 3
“I keep forgettin’ I’m hanging around with the spirit of the World Wide Web.” His expression sharpens and he returns to me. “Seriously, though.”
“I’m a doorway.”
Instantly, the pair freeze.
“To where?”
Hell, I almost say. Except that it isn’t remotely true. Even given ‘hell’ isn’t strictly an Abrahamic invention, I would be lying. It isn’t hell that opens on my skin like a mouth, but something arguably worse or perhaps, better, if you consider the atrocities visited upon us by these pantheons of feral numina. “The spaces outside of existence. Where the Elder Gods live.”
“Like, Isis?”
I twirl a hand encouragingly. “Older.”
“Inana?”
“No. Older.”
“Christ on a heathen trampoline. Fine. I’ll let Miss Wikipedia take point.”
“Happy to be of service, asshole. It must be Dyēus. There are a number of conflicting records, but he is believed to be a chief deity in prehistoric—”
“Older.” I pause. “Also more fictional than that. And popular. Board game popular. Parody, YouTube satire, RPG-game-on-Steam popular.”
“What?”
“What’s Steam?”
Epiphany flashes incandescent in Amanda’s eyes. “Oh, fuck me. You’re talking about Cthulhu.”
“Back up. That squid-head is real?” Fitz arrows a look at his yoghurt cup, lifts it up to inspect the underside of the container, a single white drop pearling on the lip as he tilts it. “They put acid in this?”
“The Lovecraftian mythos is beloved by pop culture. Since its conception, numerous people have made the mistake of believing that certain articles belonging to the canon are real. The Necronomicon, for example. And as we know, what humanity believes becomes true.” The light blinks out of Amanda’s face, dims to ash. She squeezes her yoghurt cup until it crumples, spilling white goo over her hands. She doesn’t seem to care: her expression is abstracted, eyes full of loss, palms curved and turned up to the light like a penitent in search of a blessing. “But it should take longer than that. More than that.”
I glance at the girl in the fro-yo station, unused to this much open discussion, unused to airports in general: she’s slouched against the machine, thumbing boredly at her phone. Too familiar, maybe, with the scrutiny of men who should know better, she looks up and bobs eyebrows at me, expression pointed. What? It demands. I look away, embarrassed. “Is this a new—?”
“No.” Amanda presses her mouth to a line. “Sadly. This isn’t… a new development. I’ve been monitoring the situation. The problem is embryonic, but it is present—”
“I’m concerned about your use of the word ‘problem.’” Fitz says.
“I’m concerned about your use of the word ‘embryonic.’” I knuckle at my eyes, suddenly hollowed of adrenaline, and I’m tired like I’ve never been, tired to the gnawed-down tatters of whatever is keeping me upright and awake and cogent enough to speak instead of bleat. “It makes it sound like—”
“Don’t interrupt me.” Amanda shoots me a cool look.
“Sorry,” Fitz and I mumble in tandem.
“But you’re on the right track. There have been… incidents across the world.” Her lashes, I realize, are improbably long, adorning eyesockets deeper than bruises. I can’t tell the colour of her irises anymore, not if they’re gold or brown or hazel; but as I stare, they become datapoints in CRT green, matrices of numbers too small to read, so many of them that they transform her corneal tissues into glowing static. The air twitches and I feel the small hairs on the back of my neck climb. “...pods and nurseries, slick as saliva, eggs in the attic, in the bottom of flooded basements, on the bellies of dogs in Chernobyl, everywhere.”
“What are you talking about?” Fitz’s voice is cigarette-coarse.
“The things from the chain letters, the cryptids, the false-news messiahs. Creepypasta godlings, taking sustenance from the fact that this world is so afraid.” She breathes out. “The divide between then and now has thinned to a fracture. When the first gods were dreamt up, it was by men afraid of the dark, men who needed something, anything to lord over the fire and the stars and to tell them that the sun would rise tomorrow.”
“First, there was nothing, and God looked upon that nothing and he said, ‘fear,’” Fitz whispers, and the phrase blues the halogen glare. In that new light, Amanda doesn’t look quite real, edges smeared, as though of a child’s thumb dragged over a fresh Rembrandt. The sensation of static builds, and my ears engorge with noise. “But they’re not our problem, though. Right now, Amanda and I are tryin’ to find the father gods—”
“Actually, they are.”
“What?” Fitz’s expression stumbles and he turns to her, a little nonplussed in that way men are, sometimes, when we come home to a house that’s been spooned clean of every reason to call it a home. He rakes fingers through dark, lank hair. “I thought—”
Amanda makes a seesaw motion with her hand. “Yes, but only technically. We are trying to find the father gods. We are trying to see if we can control the pantheons by taking hold of their piths. None of these motivations exclude an intention to weaponise them against these new gods if necessary.”
“What do you mean ‘weaponise’ them?” Fitz’ face closes on itself and he leans back, an infinitesimal tilting of the spine, his chin jutted at the sky,
“Belief is a resource.” Her voice keeps a firm grip on its calm. There is nothing to read in those milk-mild features, lineless save for the rare indentations: a few wrinkles bracketing her mouth, her high forehead, not too many or she’d be merely ragged, depreciated by time. Just enough to be human, approachable, appealingly imperfect. If it weren’t for the eyes, that is. Glowing, the effluvia of power bleeding from the corners, dripping radium-green onto her lap. “A power source, if you prefer a more hyperbolic assessment. And much like any power source, coal plant or nuclear reactor, it can be tampered with.”
“What happens if you do that?”
Amanda shrugs. “Everything dies, I imagine. And if I am right, it’d also cause a chain reaction—”
Images of Demeter and her daughter, faces haloed by the sun, Persephone still learning how to tie freedom around her name like it was her first pair of shoelaces; the Furies and their impartial kindnesses; Houyi and her beloved wife; Veles in his little restaurant, radiant in service, holy again in his joy, they surface and I push up from my seat so quick the chair clatters over.
“I refuse to be a part of this.”
“He’s not the only one,” says Fitz, fists clenched.
“There are two options.” Amanda plows on, inexorable, monstrous in her placidity, her certainty, that look on her face that is halfway between pity and impatience. It would have been better if she’d shouted, if she’d tried hot-wiring my will to her command. Violence is as easy as a broken nose. After the first time, you learn the crunch and the yaw, how to keep your head up, keep ahead of the pain banging like a second heart in the dome of your mouth. “You help me or you don’t.”
“Seems like a really obvious choice to me,” says Fitz. “I choose going home, where I’m not at the risk of being murdered by fucking Jeff the—”
“But he’ll kill you, anyway, once he pours into the brains of your species, a species so terrified of its own end that it’d do anything to ignore the fact it is coming. He is going to get into the politicians, the ministers, the pastors, the popes, the people who shape your stupid simian society. And at some point, one of them is going to go ‘why not?’ when he gives them a little nudge, and that will set off a chain reaction—”
“Stop.”
“—and it will all come falling down like dominos, and people will kill in the name of whatever polled better on social media, and there will be nothing you can do because all this new pantheon wants is for you to self-destruct, singing praises of the shotgun shell.”
I crack my jaw to object again, louder this time, because Guan Yin knows the first attempt didn’t work. Then the universe ripples. Think of creation as a kuih lapis, or an onion, or the stratums of skin, each of which contains entire macrocosms of blasphemies and miracles. Our reality sits shivering at the pith with its hands over its eyes, but there is always something happening in the adjacent layers and if you know how to look the right way, tilt your head so the light bends into myth, you can see straight through them.
And sometimes, you can see the things on the other side looking right back.
“Fuck.” I swallow around a lungful of sudden terror.
“That’s the thing about gods,” Amanda continues, softly, not making eye contact with either of us, an entire cosmology of unborn deities curled embryonic in the air around her, waiting, nascent, nacreous, a caul of verdigris over faces that are still suggestions. And from each of them extends umbilical cords that spindle around the axis of Amanda’s spine. There has always been a mother goddess in every culture. Makes sense that the Internet is ours. “Humanity likes to pretend that gods are above them, calved from animal desires. But the truth is that they’re not, we’re nothing but the apparatus your species uses to examine its fears.”
She breathes out and in the hinge between seconds, something abandons Amanda, the enormity of presence that scaffolded her person. She shrinks. She becomes human, husked of that indifferent glory, so much ache threaded through her expression that I can’t hold her tired eyes with mine.
“If you’re not going to help me save the world,” she says, “you can at least help me save me.”
“Goddamnit,” Fitz pushes a finger up the bridge of his nose. “How the fuck do you expect anyone to say ‘no’ to something like that?”
THREE
“PASSPORT?”
I study the man sitting straight-backed at the counter, glaring at me through the bullet-proof glass separating us, his bald head bulbous with veins. There’s something distinctively martial about both his appearance and the aggression bunched behind his expression, the machinery of his vocation barely adequate to contain the latter. I get the feeling he’d leap over the barrier to strangle me if he could. I don’t blame him; given the circumstances, I’d throttle me too.
“You saying what ah? I got passport? Got.” The Malaysian accent is not one of those easily categorisable as ‘attractive,’ not least because it is distinctively Asian in timbre, a regional lilt which only ever fills the West with laughter. Frequently, it is associated with stupidity, a lack of education, although I’ve always had trouble understanding that. Incompetent bilingualism is sexy in any accent, but you’re an idiot if you speak perfect English like a Chinaman. Still, there’s value in prejudice: people rarely think to keep their guards up around those they see as their lessers. “Got passport.”
He glares.
“Give me your passport.” He spits each word in staccato succession, anger simmering in the delivery.
“Got give already at last airport.”
The trouble with a sudden exodus from your country precipitated by the assault of a dragon, the advent of a prophecy, and the promise to save a goddess from an unwanted litter of nightmares, is that these things seldom include practicalities like luggage, appropriate wardrobes, and a stop home to pick up your passport. In fairness, Amanda had been more than excellent at defanging some of those issues, but the Malaysian immigrant is much easier to cow than the vanguard of American paranoia.
Also, she’s at least seven families behind me in the queue and there’s no way the TSA will allow her and Fitz to fumble to the front.
“Fucking...” he swears under his breath. His eyes flit to my wrists, where my sleeves had ridden up, revealing my tattoos, the banged-up knuckles, and the scars torquing down along the bones of my hand, at least three quarters of which were inflicted by drunk cooking. “That isn’t how the system works. If you want to come into the country, you show me your passport. So, give me your fucking passport.”
I ransack my pockets, making a show of it. “Have to give you meh?”
“Yes.”
“You sure ah?”
Still no telltale commotion behind me, no indication that Amanda and Fitz might have liberated themselves from courtesy to save me from being incarcerated. My pockets reveal nothing but lint, a few dust bunnies lolling around in the dark. This won’t end well. I suppose, if I wanted to review my predicament in a positive light, I at least get to go home.
But if I have one vice, it is commitment to making the world a more decent place for other people.
“Pass. Port.” You know an official representative of the state is pissed when they can separate a word into a paragraph, the gap between two syllables as ponderous as a police record.
“Shit.” I straighten.
Gong Tau, in my opinion, suffers an unnecessarily atrocious reputation, as do many genuses of so-called black magic. But despite my personal biases, I don’t blame people for their suspicion. Holy miracles, for example, rarely demand more than the presence of a neat wooden cross and a splash of consecrated water. The dark arts, by contrast, are invariably messy.
Before the TSA employee—Bob, a bronze badge on his broad chest declares—can demand my documentation again, I gash my thumb open with my teeth. Blood slops onto the counter, causing Bob to recoil out of his seat, his stool toppling over. I think I can hear Amanda, shouting over the panic flexing through the crowd. I can definitely hear airport security.
But they’re not here yet, which is the part that matters.
I slap the glass with my bloodied palm and utter, at a machine-gun cadence, the words of a spell, an invitation, a summoning. Nothing especially formal, but the advantages of ‘evil’—and do note the quotation marks there—magic is that it operates on nuance, not inviolate scripture. The demon that peels itself from my shadow, shucking the dark like a layer of unwanted skin, is unsettlingly tall, utterly bereft of hair, and possesses a head that is nothing but a prism of rotting infant faces.
“Hey.”
It narrows its myriad eyes. “Hi.”
“So, you remember that card game we had?”
“Yeah?”
“The one where I said you could defer your payment, because you were broke, and it was seven weeks to the Hungry Ghost Festival, and there was no way in, haha, hell that you could pay me back right then?”
“No.”
“I’m calling that favour in.” Time is deterministic. It banks on an arbour of rules, mechanisms that many have likened to clockwork, with interlocking parts and a certain bull-headed intransigence when it comes to barrelling from point A to point B. But that is the mortal perspective. In the presence of the supernatural, time becomes iffy.
Or more accurately, rather like taffy.
“I said no.”
I stare at the encroaching security detail, the world a wash of amber. “Please?”
“No.”
“Look at how nicely I’m asking.”
Exasperation colours the demon’s faces puce. “No.”
“I’m going to point out that you technically have no choice here, because of the whole rules-of-engagement thing, but I am absolutely willing to throw in an extra packet of Gudang Garam, if you’d just do this for me.” Even magic cannot stop the law, only impede its approach. For an airport, Orlando possesses some phenomenally well-built muscle, hulking quarterbacks that could easily audition for the role of God’s Wrath in a Broadway take on the Old Testament. “Please?”
Cigarettes are currency. Take it from me. In prison, in the Ten Hells, in any environment where people of dubious morals are coerced into cohabitation. I don’t know why specifically; my vices, as a rule, are more epicurean in nature. But cigarettes, ang moh. If you’re ever in doubt, put a crumpled pack of smokes on the table, and chances are you’ll be in a better position than you were before.
At the very least, what follows will probably hurt infinitesimally less.
“Fine.”
He steps into me, a single loose-jointed motion. I ricochet out of my body, feeling, for an instant, bone and brain deform, warping around a will separate from mine.
To explain: the process of duplicating a human isn’t easy. Hollywood makes it stylish, but like everything else, it’s not so much a flourish as a science brined in effluvia. To make a human, you must first understand the human, a process that simultaneously involves deciphering the atoms of the unfortunate simian and a visual effect that, I am told, resembles making cotton candy out of meat floss. As with everything infernal in origin, it’s an unpleasant process, both for the perpetrator and the victim. It’s why demons mostly take possession. It’s a lot less work.
But then it is over.
I stagger upright, wiping the back of my hand over my mouth. I am three feet away from where I had previously stood, standing in a tenebrous slope of shadow and solidly on American soil. Behind me, grinning at Bob, both palms bleeding and pressed to the glass, is the demon borrowing my face, a perfect replica, down to the dwindling cover on his pate. You know what they say: nothing is certain save for death, taxes, and male pattern baldness.
Time accelerates. The burly guards rubberband forward, leaping through the air, and hit my doppelganger together. It is a comedic moment. I’m not a big man: five-eight, when I care enough to not slouch; rounder than I was when I cracked skulls for the Triads, closer in appearance to a well-compensated chef than a criminally underpaid thug, but still disproportionately lanky. The security detail, conversely, are not those things.
The demon flails my arms. By and large, it is the only part of him that you can see under a homoerotic snarl of spectacularly ripped bodies. I move away before anyone thinks to look in my direction. Optimistically, this is where they book him and discover, hours after the fact, a slurry of meat in wherever they’d chosen to detain him and decide, to a man, that no one is ever to speak of this moment again.
When in doubt, use demons.
“WHAT THE FUCK, Rupert?”
“Come on, they were going to take me in.”
