Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (23 page)

BEING AN ACCOUNT OF CERTAIN ORACULAR VISITATIONS

Dear Mrs. Mason,

As you have repeatedly chastised me for my alleged tendency to “bury the lede” or “beat around the bush,” and in keeping with your frequent suggestion that I “get to the [expletive] point already,” I will begin with the details I believe will interest you most: you should go to West Texas to continue your search for the Eater. Alas, the Eater is not necessarily
in
that location, but we are informed (reliably informed, Rondeau assures me) that you should be able to pick up his trail there.

You will of course be disappointed that we were unable to obtain more precise information regarding the Eater’s location, or, indeed, his nature, abilities, and “threat level,” as the saying goes. In order to explain this failure to acquire more useful intelligence, I beg your indulgence: allow me to describe the events of this morning in some detail.

Rondeau knocked on the door to my bedroom shortly before noon, and I was immediately alarmed, for he seldom rises before “the sun is over the yardarm,” as he says – a vague term, and a peculiar semantic choice given that Rondeau is not and never has been a sailor – but one which seems to corresponded in Rondeau’s mind, at least, to approximately midday. I inquired as to whether anything was wrong, and he said, “No, everything’s fine, but Marla needs me to summon up an oracle and I want you to come along in case I pass out or start choking on my tongue or something.”

Though I found that explanation not at all reassuring, I dressed and accompanied Rondeau downstairs to the garage. He suggested that I drive, so that he might “concentrate on catching the right vibe,” and so I selected my preferred conveyance – a Bentley, not unlike the one you once used as chief sorcerer of Felport, though Rondeau insisted on putting “spinning rims” on it, for reasons which escape my understanding – and followed his directions.

Soon we turned away from the unspeakably gawdy area near the so-called “Strip” – truly, living in this crass place is an affront to my sensibilities; I think I genuinely prefer being in Death Valley with the cultists – and wound our way through residential areas until finally moving south into the desert. I never fail to be astonished at how swiftly the glittering eyesore of an oasis that is Las Vegas gives way to genuine wilderness.

Rondeau complained bitterly about the journey, however. “Why couldn’t I just go summon up the spirit of Lady Luck in a slot machine or something? You’re telling me in all of Vegas there’s not a single useful oracle?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” I replied. You will recall, Mrs. Mason, that though I am familiar with Rondeau’s ability to “call spirits from the vasty deep,” as the bard so memorably put it, I have rarely had occasion to witness such summonings, and as such felt both curiosity and a certain amount of apprehension at the prospect. “Did you feel no, ah, ‘vibes,’ in the city itself?”

“Not a twinge, not a tickle,” Rondeau answered. “But there’s a definite sort of tugging sensation from the desert in the south, and maybe, I want to say,
underground
, too. Hell. I hope there’s a shovel in the trunk.”

I did not answer that, though I was a trifle offended. Of course there was a shovel in the trunk. I would no more set out on such a journey without a shovel than I would without a tire iron and jack, jumper cables, toolbox, rope, pickaxe, burlap sacking, sewing kit, or any other item that a reasonable person might expect to be of use. Working with sorcerers has taught me the value of being prepared, and all of our cars are amply provisioned. (I was very saddened by the limited storage space available on your motorcycle, Mrs. Mason, but even then I found space in your “saddlebags” for a collapsible portable shovel and other essentials.)

After several miles of sitting slumped and staring out the window, Rondeau finally lifted his head and said, “There, take that road.”

The “road” in question was clearly suited more to rugged off-road vehicles than to a luxury vehicle like the Bentley, but the tires and suspension had been suitably enchanted to make travel over such a rutted and potholed ruin of a track relatively easy, so I complied without complaint. (I confess I winced a bit, if only inwardly, at the thought of how dusty and filthy the Bentley would become. I know our business can be a dirty one, but must the dirt so often be
literal
?) Rondeau did not look well – his skin was pale, droplets of sweat forming on his forehead and running down his cheeks, and he developed a twitch in the muscle of his cheek. “Holy fuck, this is a big one,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Sometimes you can conjure up a little oracle, something small, and it doesn’t take too much of a toll. But if the revelation you’re after is a particularly momentous one, it takes a... larger summoning. Usually a steeper price, too.”

“I’m afraid I don’t entirely understand the nature of your power,” I told him, as we slid smoothly across the battered ground, deeper into the desert. “When you summon these creatures, are you
genuinely
locating supernatural creatures and pulling them into our mundane physical reality, as in the old tales of sorcerers summoning demons to do their bidding? Or are the things you summon more like... hand-puppets, merely a way for you to directly interrogate and interact with your
own
psychic powers, which are actually responsible for uncovering the information you receive from the oracles?”

“Better minds than mine have debated that question, Pelly,” he replied. “Whichever it is, I get a bastard of a headache most times, and sometimes nose bleeds, and often bad dreams. Marla thinks it’s just my brain, plucking the information out of the cosmos or whatever, and that when I summon an oracle I’m pretty much talking to myself. But there’s this
transactional
element, you know? The oracle always demands a price, and you have to pay it, and if you don’t, there are consequences – strictly psychic ones, your mind starts to crumble and fold in on itself, but still. The fact that there’s a bargain struck, a price paid, a deal made – that makes me think the creatures I encounter are real, even if they maybe
weren’t
real in the moments before I called them up. If
that
makes any sense – you know I’m not a major philosophical thinker. Marla herself has summoned minor oracles, is the thing. It’s not as easy for her as it is for me, she doesn’t have the natural knack, but there are rituals you can do, and she’s done them. Marla’s about as psychic as a block of wood – there are times I think she doesn’t even have a good understanding of what’s going on deep down in her
own
mind, let alone anybody else’s – so I find it hard to believe that she was just focusing her own energy and unlocking her own psychic perceptions when she, like, called the demon Murmurus into existence in an alleyway to ask it for directions.” He paused. “The world is a lot scarier to contemplate if you believe the things I’m calling up have real, independent existences, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” I said, considering his words, which cast a shadow of apprehension across my mind.

“And there’s some monstrous big desert spirit here for me to call up,” Rondeau said. “Pull over here. About that shovel –”

“I have one.”

“How about a pickaxe?” he said, and I nodded.

We spent the next half an hour or so toiling, some hundred yards from the place where we’d parked the Bentley. The desert has a certain beauty, I will admit, but there are times when it seems quite alien to me, and as I looked around the bleak and, to all appearances, lifeless expanse around us, I felt as if we had been transported to some distant planet, one inimical not just to human life but to any sort of life at all. I used the pick to break up the stony Earth, and Rondeau the shovel to remove the stones, and in this way we dug a hole some three feet deep. (“It’s about a half a grave down,” Rondeau told me.)

Eventually the shovel revealed something quite different from the beige and gray sand and rocks: something black and reflective as volcanic rock, probably spherical (it was actually an ellipsoid, as we found when we dug it up entirely later), the size of a soccer ball, its revealed hemisphere cratered and pitted but nevertheless lustrous. We stood at the bottom of the hole, barely large enough for the two of us together, and looked at the incongruous rock. Even I could sense within it some power – perhaps even malevolence, or worse, a cold curiosity.

Rondeau knelt down, grunting, expression that of a man trying to bear up under considerable pain. “This thing, Pelly... it came from beyond the back of the stars.”

It could have been a meteorite – and I believe, based on what happened next, that it was, at least of a sort – but I found the phrase “beyond the back of the stars” to be a strangely chilling one.

“You be ready to ask the question, Pelly. Sometimes it takes all my attention just to keep a hold on whatever I’ve called up, and this might be one of those times.” I nodded my assent, and he reached out with both hands and clasped the sides of the stone, like a faith healer grasping the head of a worshiper.

He screamed, then, or
keened
, a sound uncannily like the howling of a boiling teapot, but his face remained bizarrely expressionless.

After that, Mrs. Mason... this may be hard to credit. I am painfully aware that I can convey to you only what my senses conveyed to my
mind
, and we both know that senses can be fooled, both by illusions created by others and by our own human tendency to seek patterns and order and reasonable forms of cause-and-effect. But I will report what I remember seeing, acknowledging that memory, by its very nature, is hardly reliable.

The sky turned black. Above us, stars burned, but they were not cool distant pinpoints of whiteness, as they are in our Earthly sky. They were red, and sometimes green, and I call them stars only because it seems that’s what they
must
have been. In truth they looked like nothing so much as welts, wounds, festering sores on the utterly black skin of the sky. They were so numerous that, despite the fact that they glowed only faintly, I could see my surroundings easily.

We remained in our respective positions – Rondeau kneeling, hands on the stone, and I standing beside him – but everything around us was changed. We were no longer in a hole, but standing on a plain, the surface identical to the lustrous black stone we’d unearthed. The place should have been cold, but it was actually warm, and moist, like being in the jungle again. The plain stretched in all directions as far as I could see, but the
horizon
... the horizon was wrong. Have you stood on the beach, Mrs. Mason, and looked out over the water, and perceived the roundness of the earth, a subtle curve on the horizon? I could perceive the curvature of
this
world, too, but the horizon curved
up
at the ends, you see, turning up at the edges like a faint smile, and as I scanned the distance in all directions I perceived that same distortion everywhere I looked.

It makes no sense, of course. Unless we were on the
inside
of a sphere. Unless the sky above was just more interior surface. But if that’s true,
what
were we inside?

It is more likely that my eyes were deceived, or that the place had no literal existence at all.

Before I could worry overmuch about our altered surroundings, Rondeau threw his head back, and his mouth began to work in a terrible fashion. His jaw fell open, mouth distending so widely I was afraid the bones in his face would crack, or the muscles tear, and his tongue writhed in his mouth like a thrashing serpent. Nevertheless, a
voice
emerged, a voice both booming and viscous, the voice of the god of an ocean of blood:

“Little things,” it said. “Why have you called to me?”

Normally, I know, the oracles our friend summons manifest externally – they appear as ghosts, or gods, or monsters. But this one seemed to be using Rondeau as a medium instead, a conduit for its words. Or perhaps the thing he’d summoned was all around us – perhaps we were in its belly, or some other cavity – and we could only hear its voice if it spoke through Rondeau.

I was sorely afraid, but I kept my wits about me as best I could. “We have a question,” I said. “We are trying to find someone – ah, someone on Earth – called the Eater.”

A vast rumbling came from all directions, for just a moment, then ceased. “A piece of me is lodged on that distant lump,” the thing said from Rondeau’s mouth. “A splinter of me, spun away and fallen through a tear in reality, traveling through eons and vastnesses, to land on an unremarkable ball of mud and teeming life... And you touched that part of me. I see, I see. You wish me to turn my gaze upon this ball of mud and rot and find the one you seek?”

“Ah. Yes. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Mmm. But there must be a price, yes? Will you pay the price?”

“We will,” I said, having been briefed on the importance of transactions when dealing with oracles.

“The Eater... ha. Yes, you had to find me, to come all this way, because no Earthly being could help you to find him at all. He can
hide
from them, you see – hide in among all the possibilities, picking and choosing and twitching unwelcome futures aside. But I stand above and outside and away, so I can see the whole... but even so, I cannot tell you precisely
where
he is, or
when
he will be there, because it shifts. I can give you a thread, though, a reliable thread you can find and seize and follow inward, to the center. Will that do? That will have to do.”

“It... will be acceptable,” I said, unsure what else I
could
say.

“Go to... West Texas. Tomorrow. Interstate 27, about halfway between Lubbock and Plainview – do these words mean anything to you? I am... translating, you might say... across several levels of comprehensibility.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “It makes perfect sense.”

“Good. Go there. Search for a thread of chaos, and follow that thread where it leads.”