Yuri’s eyes flicked up slowly. “NOthing. He sends his regards.”
My nose and throat flooded with a scent like rotting sugar, like molasses-drowned bloated bodies left out in the sun. The stench was overwhelming; it filled my head with sudden buzzing hatred. Yuri’s stare was relentless. Dizziness washed over me in a wave, and as my vision contracted, the other man’s eyes deepened, distending inwards. The buzzing turned to gnashing and screeching, and the holes of Yuri’s eyes spread into mouths of fanged black teeth.
And then something hit me from behind. Hit hard enough to send me staggering, and then clung on with four sets of very sharp, very strong little claws. Binah. I shouted in surprise and pain and stumbled forward with the sensory shock, but it broke the trance.
“Banish it!” Kutkha struggled past whatever arcana had been spun around my mind from within and shrieked in a voice that filled my head with white noise. “Now!”
My finger convulsed on the trigger. One bullet went wide and spranged off the counter. The other two hit and took Yuri through the head, spraying black ichor behind him onto the sink and the row of potted plants on the windowsill. They hissed, shriveling, as I pumped another round into his chest. Binah detached herself from my back and scrambled away at the sound of gunfire while I stared ahead, breathing hard through my mouth. It was full of the scent of viscera, reflexively emptied bowels, and the old, half-remembered smell of another kitchen, another death.
“I said banish, not shoot!” Kutkha was panicking. Panicking?
“I don’t exactly have time to go and get my chalk and Lotus Wand, asshole!” The corpse lolled in the chair, arms loose. Yuri’s arms hadn’t finished swinging when he slumped, spilling black fluid onto the tabletop. The goop turned into larval branches of living ooze. I backed away, steps punctuated by the anticlimactic blips of each silenced round. I hit two more times, and on the fourth impact, thin, whiplike tentacles burst forth from each bullet wound and every open orifice. They hauled Yuri to his feet like a marionette, kicking the chair back and the table towards me. I swung around the edge of the doorway. The table hit with a splintering crash, flinging slime across the floor. The worms. I couldn’t let them get to my skin. “Fuck!”
“This is why we don’t shoot the DOG, Alexi!”
I pressed back against the wall, scraping them from my clothes as I tried to aim with one hand. They were burning through my clothes. As I fumbled, half a dozen thick, prehensile tentacles whipped past the shattered doorjamb, and I fired blindly before remembering that the gun was useless. I threw it with a shout and lunged backwards down the hall, only to topple as something struck me around the ankle. The impact of the floor was more immediate than the grip of the lashing thing that wrenched me down. Struggling, twisting around to my back, I had just enough time to see myself being pulled towards a barbed starfish maw, larger than my torso, that blossomed from the ruin of Yuri’s face.
Chapter 12
I caught the doorjamb as I flew past, kicking with my other foot as Yuri dragged me back into the kitchen. More fleshy limbs snapped around my chest, thighs, and calves, forcing my legs together as I fought and clawed and yelled into the darkened corridor ahead. I was hoisted nearly upside down off the ground. My knife tumbled from my pocket, clattering to the floor. The switchblade popped open, and just as the wooden doorjamb creaked and tore under my fingers, I lunged for the knife.
My feet hit something fleshy and wet. More barbed tendrils shot out from the screeching mouth, ripping fabric and flesh and wringing a harsh scream from my throat. I swung up and stabbed frantically at the biting tentacles that were feeding me feet-first into the gaping toothy void. The blade struck home, and the monstrosity shrieked once, then louder as I drove the point in through another tentacle, an eye, a small fanged mouth. The wounds oozed and discolored in the moment before I was flung into the hallway, where only years of horse-riding and training for falls saved me from breaking my neck. I tucked and rolled, skittered out across the floor, and stopped just shy of the front door. My knee went out from under me when I struggled to rise, pitching me down.
Framed by the doorway, Yuri’s limbs ruptured: the black fleshy thing, half-formed, went to the ground like a malformed reptile and charged, umbrella maw agape. It was going to eat me, and if it got me, it would get Binah, and then Vassily when he returned. I rolled up with a snarl and pushed off from my good leg, blade first. Fear turned to rage, then to bloodlust as I leaped on its back. We rolled, tangled across the floor, and I stabbed and stabbed as it tried to twist and skewer me in turn. We crashed into a wall, into the rack of shoes, up against the front door. The knife wounds wracked the black flesh, causing it to shrivel and wrinkle. Teeth and drilling mouthparts flashed in my face in the gloom. Wherever its blood touched me, my skin burned.
The horror screamed and lashed, relenting as the mounting wounds caused it to weaken. I kicked it off with rage-fueled strength. The creature skidded back, the knife embedded in its back, and lurched against a wall as I scrambled up. It blocked the way to the bedroom. I backed into the den, throwing what I could at it as it stalked me into the room, towards the study. The radio. Books. Pillows. The case with my father’s hammer was still open. It was all I had at this end of the house. Tendrils of sick flesh flopped and writhed through the entry, smashing it all to the sides of the room as it careened forward.
I pulled the hammer free and swung it down, straight into the distended snapping jaws that were lunging from the center of the fleshy-lobed flower of its face. The fifteen-pound head sunk straight into the creature’s body; it made a gagging, sucking sound as the air around us throbbed. A wind that penetrated the remains of my clothing, my hair, and skin pulsed out from the haft, through my hands and teeth and spine, and then what had once been Yuri’s head exploded in a wet welter of milk-like slime that drenched me, the shelves, the walls, and the desk. The corpse stumbled forward another step, convulsing, and crashed to the floor.
It began to break apart. The remains of Yuri’s corpse split and divided, evaporating as it frantically tried to cling to unlife. I jabbed the hammer towards it, and the matter flinched back from it.
“How…” Heaving for breath, I answered my own question before I’d even really asked it. I knew how. I should have realized earlier. The hammer was forged in the 40s, taken from the Kolyma goldmines, and it had gone with my father across Siberia, slipped with him through the Iron Curtain in Germany, sailed across the Atlantic, and then become his constant companion in America. He had killed many people with this hammer. He had used it to terrorize his hits, his wife and his son, and the business end of this weapon was the last thing Grigori Sokolsky had ever seen. It was a sacrificial tool… it had built up some kind of charge that was anathema to this thing.
I hefted it over my shoulder and stared coldly at the floor as the last of Yuri’s body disintegrated. Among the scraps of fabric and shriveling jelly lay a silver metal disk the size of a flattened bottle top, inscribed with another sigil I did not recognize. In terms of its workmanship, it was nearly identical to the one we’d found at Dock Number Four. I crouched and turned it over with the point of the slagged knife. On the other side were three familiar Hebrew letters. Amet.
My mouth drew into a one-sided, sloping grimace. A golem. Yuri had been turned into a golem. Someone was having their little joke.