“What it want?” Smyler gave a little chortle, as crisply dry as the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail, t-t-t-t-t-t. “It want the feather. Come a long way for the feather. Tell where it is, or it will have the wicked angel’s eye in its pocket and the wicked, bad angel’s heart in its lunch box.” Suddenly the deformed mouth spread in what must have been a grin. “Bad angel is sweetest meat. Bad angel always taste so good.”
twenty-six:
immortalized
EVEN WHEN free and carrying a gun, I had barely survived my encounters with this murderous little bastard, but this time I was tied to a bed after being drained by Lady Zinc for many days. I couldn’t really think of anything to do but stall.
“Why do you want the feather?” I asked, knowing damn well he wanted it for his master, Eligor. “I mean, I don’t have it here. I couldn’t give it to you even if I wanted to. I’d have to get back to Earth. You know what I mean, right? The real world?”
Smyler only poked the blade a little harder into my eyelid. I swear I felt it touch the surface of my cornea. Not good.
“Feather,” he said. “Give it.”
“I don’t have it!” I wondered if he was too stupid or broken to understand, and as my already shaky faith in a negotiated solution began to dwindle, I slowly drew my legs up a little closer to my body. “I can get it for you, though, but you have to get me out of here—”
He leaned in even closer. His breath . . . I won’t even try to tell you. Vermin. Disease. Open grave pits. “Want feather,” it whispered. “Now.”
I jammed my feet against Smyler’s skinny chest and shoved as hard as I could, with particular care to aim him toward the dresser stacked with glassware and other breakables. He weighed practically nothing, as light as a nine-year-old child, and I was able to get enough strength into my surprise shove to send him flying like a badly made kite. He crashed into the dresser and took at least half the objects off the top, a cascade of breakage like Hummel Armageddon. I put my full weight against the strap I had been working on for days and yanked down as hard as I could. I felt it give a little as the remaining leather stretched, but it held. It also hurt like eleven bitches on a bitch-boat.
Smyler still had his long knife in hand as he popped up like a jack-in-the-box. His smile was horrible, but he wasn’t smiling now. His shriveled face was a perfect blank, the expression now as dead as everything else about it. In the middle of my panic I realized that in all the years of horror movies only Boris Karloff had ever got it right, that slack, weirdly sullen look of the animated corpse. Then Smyler came over the footboard of the bed like a wolf spider out of its hole, and it was all I could do to take the first nasty thrust with my calf. Hurt like a screaming motherfucker, and that’s all I have to say about that.
My enemy was so expressionless that I began to wonder if I hadn’t kicked him right out of his wits, such as they were. He seemed to be completely uninterested now in anything but trying to stab me, the blade snapping out like a snake’s tongue. I blocked every thrust with my legs or body, but sometimes I had to take it in something meaty to protect my more valuable stuff. The knife kept darting here and there, and I was still tied to the bed. The whole thing was just shitty, and I knew I couldn’t survive the attack for more than a few more moments.
“Stop! I’ll give you the feather!” I gasped, but Smyler seemed to have forgotten about his original purpose. His attack became less frenzied but more considered. He was moving around now to keep the bedpost between my feet and his midsection.
The light changed suddenly, the shadows all jumping to one side as though something had startled them. A cluster of little flames appeared in the doorway, a candelabrum, and beside it the startled face of Belle. “What’s going on here?”
I was a little crazed at this point, as you can imagine, but I also thought my best chance would be to set Belle or her mistress on the freak that was trying so sincerely to stick holes in me right this minute, so I yelled, “That’s her! Kill her, just like I told you! You can free me later!” (I have no idea if this fooled anybody, or did anything at all except make me look like an idiot, but I’m going to guess it was what saved me.)
Belle slammed the heavy candelabrum down on Smyler’s arm, making him drop his blade, then she shoved the candles into his face and burned his cheek, which made him hiss and strike at her. Staggered, she dropped the candleholder on the floor. The candles bounced out, but enough remained burning to make long, extremely grotesque shadows from the two struggling monsters, the small, skinny one biting and scratching at the big one like an angry ferret.
I got my legs under me and pulled against my right arm strap as hard as I could, shouting in agony despite myself. It felt like I was going to tear my entire arm out of the shoulder socket. I had frayed the strap just enough, because it finally tore, and I was swinging only by the other arm, the good arm with the uncut leather cuff. This was another kind of miserable, but I had work to do, so I started gnawing at it with my sharp demon-teeth. The sounds from the floor were becoming more animal by the moment. I couldn’t tell who was winning, and to be honest, I wasn’t rooting for either of them.
It was hard work, but I finally chewed through the thick restraint. The first seconds of freedom were glorious, but lowering my arms after a week or two of being tied in crucifixion position was kind of like being stabbed in both armpits at the same time. Still, I’d become pretty used to pain at that point. I sort of fell off the bed, grabbed my pants, and ran.
The fact that Vera hadn’t shown up to see what all the fuss was about told me that she was either in another part of the house or, if I was lucky, out altogether. Still, even if Vera really was gone, Belle and Smyler also had to maim each other badly, because there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that I could beat either one in my current condition.
Belle’s long, thick leg lashed at me like a grumpy anaconda, but she was still tangled with Smyler, and I jumped over her and into the hallway. Vera’s bedroom was only a few doors down. If milady was out of hearing range then the room should be empty, and I needed some things from there.
Vera had been careful, in her weird, old-fashioned flirtation with me, to let me see her boudoir several times, either inviting me in for morning tea—she received me in a high-necked dressing gown—or “accidentally” leaving the door open long enough for me to notice the undergarments artistically draped here and there. Because of that, I had no problem finding her room and also had a fairly good idea of where she might keep her jewelry and perhaps some cash. On my way to the suspect dresser, I paused to lift the poker from its spot beside the fireplace. (Yes, they have fireplaces in Hell. In fact, some parts of Pandaemonium are hot enough to use fireplaces as air conditioning.) The poker had a good heft to it; I was pleased to finally have something I could protect myself with, but I also kept my eyes open for more conventional weapons. I knew I could have found some sharp stuff in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to cross the house—there were exits closer to where I was.
I found a few dozen copper handfuls (that’s what they’re called, “handfuls”) hidden in a jewelry box with Vera’s rings and necklaces. As I stuffed my pockets, I noticed a strange shadow at the back of the room. One of Vera’s pictures, a fruit tree whose limbs swarmed with birds, looked as though it was thicker on one side. No, I saw as I stepped closer, the painting itself concealed a door that hadn’t quite shut all the way.
I froze. Did that mean Vera was here? But why the secret door? Was it an escape tunnel? Had she heard the shouting and decided discretion was better than valor?
I opened the door and discovered a passage, walled with brick, that stretched ahead and down, vanishing around a corner. A lit torch hung in a bracket. Someone was almost certainly down there. But just as I was turning away, I heard the Smyler-Belle donnybrook crash out of my bedroom and into the hall behind me, thumps and gasps and the wet slish of knife in flesh. No matter which one of them survived, my route to the rest of the house was blocked. I had nowhere to go but down.