“Now what?” Peeve asked.
“The chalice,” Boukai whispered. “Get the goblets.”
Eddie scooted over to where the man lay motionless. His arms were at his sides, all the color gone from the tattoos. The skin beneath them was as white as porcelain. Eddie looked closer, saw the lines etched in Boukai’s face. His breathing was shallow. Peeve came back with a goblet in each hand.
“The rings,” Boukai breathed. “Put one in each cup.” Peeve dropped them in. “Now hold the tops together.” Peeve tipped them against each other. Boukai’s hand came up and grasped Eddie’s wrist weakly. “Now, seer. See the words inside.”
Eddie looked at the goblets, squinted. He saw many goblets, one after the other. Where there had been three before there were ten, twenty, a hundred. He concentrated on the center. He saw inside, saw the rings swirling in a vortex of light. He saw the words flare to life on the inside of the cup. He spoke the words.
There was a great tearing sound, a flash of light and pain, and then cold.
“Ow!” Peeve cried, dropping the goblets. “They’re frozen.”
“It is done,” Boukai breathed, letting his head roll to the side. Tears leaked down the side of his face. “Mariel, it is done.” He looked back at Eddie, smiling. It seemed some of his strength was returning. “Look,” he said.
The fakir was gone. Eddie picked up the goblets, looked inside. The rings were gone. Behind them, Kim moaned. Peeve looked over at him and then stood. “I’m calling the cops,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Eddie said. “They’ll never believe it.”
Boukai shuddered and laughed. “You are right,” he said. “But it does not matter. Without his fakir Kim is nothing.” He rolled onto his side and reached toward his coat. “We must be going, Eddie,” he said.
“Where?”
Boukai sat up. “You’ve learned much tonight,” he said. “Think of what I can teach you tomorrow.” He chuckled and jerked the coat down from where it had lain across the counter. He dug in the folds until he produced the flask. A swig seemed to give him the strength to sit up and start rolling his sleeves down.
“What else can I learn?” Eddie asked, standing. He looked down at the exhausted man sitting beside him.
“You can See,” Boukai said, extended a hand. “Now you must Do.”
After a moment, Eddie took the proffered hand.
Faith’s Curse by Randall N. Bills
They say a body isn’t dead until it’s at your feet. And warm.
Adrian Khol’s eyes traced the outline of the victim, trying to find recognizably human features. No clothing was apparent; the ash that coated everything within arm’s reach? Stranger still, no marks marred the concrete of the connecting tunnel between the Red and Blue lines at the Jackson stop. No signs of a struggle-unusual scuff marks, high velocity blood spatter or scorching, in this case. Even odder, despite the apparent ash, the body didn’t appear burned so much as… melted. As though someone took one of those exquisite wax figures from Madame Tussaud’s and put it to a blow torch. The arms fused to the chest and legs in a single, long stump, body devoid of hair. And the face? The noseless, eyeless mask runneled and pulled, like taffy, a true horror in the dim, florescent lighting.
“Yeah, that’s warm enough, alright.”
“Uh?” Martinez ’ response barely came through the donut filling his mouth to bursting. His smacking lips echoed in the starkly lit tunnel, the grimy tiles amplifying the sound as though taunting the man’s slovenly habits.
Adrian managed to keep his lips sealed around his reaction to his assistant’s inability to take four steps before tearing off a wrapper from some chemical-packed sugary bar and slamming it past bleeding gums. A look at his aura almost a year ago during the first interview had been painful, his body tainted with such vileness. How could he ingest such filth? After a year, he knew it wouldn’t do any good to voice such questions.
This is the best I can get? Adrian sighed heavily as he pushed fists deeper into his long overcoat’s pockets against the cold-with only his assistant around, it wasn’t worth the expenditure of energy to alleviate the discomfort-and moved around the body to get different perspectives. He carefully stepped to avoid placing his imported leather shoes in the strange ash.
“You say something, boss man?” Martinez managed to speak again, this time without an accompanying crumb shower, though the yawn at the early morning hour ruined the effort.
“Nothing that need worry you,” he replied. Through dozens of assistants across the years he’d learned that nice or curt, it never mattered. What mattered was what their brains could handle. After that prerequisite, his manners were irrelevant. And abrasiveness was so much easier. So much more the natural human state. With everything else he fought with in his life, being nice to people when he didn’t need to be…
The other man shrugged the snappish response away easily.
… point.
Martinez shoveled in the last of the donut and pulled out a liter of Mountain Dew he’d somehow managed to fit into a pocket of his oversized, thread-bare coat. He started to untwist the cap before he spoke again. “Man, what the hell. Dude’s like a human stick of butter.”
Early, even for you, Martinez… been asleep yet?
“So, what we got here, boss man? Spectral phantasm? Werecreature?”
Adrian glanced toward one end of the tunnel and then the other, noting the uniformed officers keeping anyone from entering. Lips sardonically stretched. Facing away, as ever, well out of earshot. They can head into the squalor of Cabrini-Green and face the worst horrors that humans can inflict on each other, yet they flinch like schoolgirls watching their first horror film whenever I walk by. They use me to get what they need when it comes to the darkness and the places they won’t tread, but they won’t even look me in the eye. Won’t even shake my hand. But who am I to complain? I use them equally as well. Mutual parasitic whores. The image swelled the bitter smile further.
“Maybe it’s an undead,” Martinez continued yammering. Always yammering. “I keep asking, and you’re never telling. But yeah, could be undead. That’d be cool. Wait, wait,” Martinez said, his mangy beard quivering with excitement, glasses above his blotchy cheeks almost fogging with exhalations. “An unbound spirit?” he softly breathed, as if it were a holy prayer over rosaries at a pew on Sunday.
Adrian shook his head slowly. Where in the world did Martinez obtain such information? He knew to the word exactly what he said around his assistants, especially once they’d been around long enough for him to start mentally referring to them by their names (though he never deigned to voice them). And something as dangerous as an unbound spirit? Never. “Too many movies,” he finally said.
“Huh,” Martinez responded, eyes blinking as he mentally stumbled to a halt, his childish glee fading under confusion.
“Too many movies. Such creatures do not exist.”
A knowing look replaced confusion, a child convinced he’d caught an adult in a lie. “Right. Sure. What ever you say, boss man.” He took another giant swig of his teeth-killing sugar water and then waved the bottle like a laser pointer, his voice a cable infomercial salesman at three in the morning, deep into the hundreds. “But I’m looking at a corpse that died in no human way. Explain it.”
Adrian stood perfectly still, his smooth, angular face a pale slate statue to house his dual-colored eyes. Martinez ’ arrogant smile slowly faded, and he gulped several times under Adrian ’s piercing blue/brown gaze before his eyes fell to the floor.
“I explain to no one,” Adrian spoke, voice never wavering off its even keel-all the more powerful.
“Didn’t mean anything by it, boss man. Just, well, something killed this guy. And it ain’t normal.” The last almost a mumble.