The wheelchair shot backward, slammed into a set of shelves, glass shattering and noxious smells. Magnusson vaulted over the desk, his two proper arms extended toward me as if to throttle me, the palms of his two front leg-hands slapping the mahogany to maintain his momentum, and spilling the desk’s contents across the pool tiles. His silk smoking jacket trailed behind him like a paisley cape, its belt tie flailing open on either side. The gas lantern hit the tiles with a wind-chime crash, its fuel igniting as it splashed across the floor and scattered papers and casting long, flickering shadows through the vast, empty space — a storybook hell made real.
I had no time to react. The club chair tipped over backward as he slammed into me — his one dark, beefy proper hand on my throat, pinning me in place; the two hands on his forelegs gripping white-knuckled the leather of the chair wings; his two hind-leg hands digging into my knees. The naked join of his four lower limbs was scant inches above me, scarred and filthy and reeking like an open sewer. With his one withered hand, he reached into an interior pocket of the smoking jacket and withdrew an old, glass syringe filled with a sickly amber liquid, cloudy and flocculent. Attached to the syringe was a heavy-gauge needle three inches long.
I clawed and scratched at the old man’s face. Skin sloughed off in patches beneath my fingers, revealing yellow adipose tissue like fresh-plucked chicken and glistening cords of blood-red muscle streaked with purple. Its scent hit my nostrils, earthy and animal and tinged faintly with rot, and the loosed scraps fluttered black and withered to the ground, aging decades in the seconds after they were set free from this monster’s horrid form. But the bastard just laughed, and removed the protective sheath from the needle with his crooked, gray-black teeth. Vision growing spotty, I couldn’t help but note how long and sharp those teeth were, now that his cracked, parchment-colored lips were pulled back to display them in all their glory. Like an animal’s I realized — or maybe several animals’.
A mouth full of stolen canines.
“Do you see now how little chance you stand against me? You who cling to your petty human worldview, your myopic human sense of what is possible?”
But I didn’t see. My eyes were clenched tight in concentration. My consciousness probing. Seeking. Reaching for another meat-suit.
I brushed against Magnusson’s own consciousness, but recoiled as soon as I made contact. It was too foreign, too alien, too goddamn corrupted for me to work with. I’d barely grazed him, and I hope to God he didn’t notice, but God ain’t one to listen to me, I guess, because Magnusson roared in sudden rage and backhanded me twice in rapid succession.
Made sense. He had backhands to spare.
I reached my mind toward Gareth’s next. When I touched him, I realized the Welshman was frightened. I found him huddled, shaking in the far corner of the plastic-sheeted room, a toppled tray of bloodied surgical equipment scattered all around. The stainless steel mortuary slab was thankfully above his eye level, and harsh white light from the surgical light above cast a corona all around it, so my hazy, impressionistic remote-view afforded me blissfully little detail of its viscera-draped surface. But I saw one bare leg, female, dangling off the nearest edge. The dead woman’s toes were painted a glossy coral pink, and her calf was tanned and shapely. Well, the bit of it that was still whole. There was a scalpel-slice below her knee the circumference of her leg, and a perpendicular cut proceeding halfway down her shin. The skin below her knee was folded down over itself like an unzipped leather boot. Fluids dripped from the corners created by the vertical slice onto the floor, the tap-tap-tap echoing dully in the emptiness.
I extended my consciousness toward him, the seconds stretching as I myself stretched across the hollow Nothingness between my waning vessel and the promise of a new one. Mere seconds passed as I thrashed beneath the patchwork madman’s grasp, but the flood of images that struck me painted a picture of a lifetime. A simple man, his mind laid bare before me on account of countless violations on the part of his sadistic employer, his whole world shattered by all that he had seen and felt and, yes, been forced to do, as if the front door to his mind had been ripped off its hinges, the path to it worn shiny from constant use — from heavy things both dragged in and removed.
You know what’s funny? We all have thoughts, even the stupidest of us. Reams of them, all day long, from sunup to sundown. And yet most folks have no idea how those thoughts are structured, or what makes them tick. They’re not some kind of mental home movie, a series of vignettes that traipse from A to B to C with a handy-dandy voiceover narration making sense of the whole thing. They’re more like water droplets scattered across a spider web after a spring rain; little pockets of experience, caught at random it seems, each a lens through which distorted images of the world as we see it can be viewed, but never, ever as it truly is. Those moments that aren’t captured by memory’s web speak to character every bit as much as are the ones that stick, and the way they’re organized is dictated by the many-eyed wooly beast that guards the keep — our basest survival instinct, our truest and most horrible self. Each mind’s a pattern, a thousand strands of silk joined in one purpose. Some read as easy as the funny pages. Others read like Joyce — constellations within constellations, thoughts within thoughts within thoughts. And others still are like trying to read a Braille transcript of a bad translation of a foreign lunatic’s street-corner rants with your stockinged feet.
Lucky for me, this guy was of the funny-page persuasion, the thread of his life easily unwound. Unfortunately for the both of us, that’s where his relationship with funny ended.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of a shoddy housing estate in Cardiff; a single mother — pretty once — wasting away to nothing, as her omnipresent cigarettes were replaced in Gareth’s memories by a chipped, green-painted oxygen tank, the narrow tubes too small and delicate in his mind to entrust with so vital a task as conveying her life’s breath; a sparsely attended funeral, his heart cold and gray beneath a sky of brilliant blue; a youth spent in and out of juvenile detention centers, his anger both uncontrollable and preferable to his crushing sadness; a boxing gym heavy with the scent of liniment and sweat socks, a heart once more full of hope; the doctor’s hand atop his shoulder as he explained how the random squiggles on the CT meant he’d never fight again; and a kindly old man behind the wheel of a stunning ’65 Bentley, asking the weeping giant sitting on the chill stone curb if he might be interested in an exciting employment opportunity. And then horrors, half-glimpsed by me before Gareth pushed them aside. Never did he think the old man’s offer would come to this, to a young woman, so beautiful and so vibrant — her verbena-scented auburn curls so much like his mother’s own — lying dead and mangled on a slab beside him, just another workday mess to be carried to the curb.
The meat-suit I wished to leave was losing consciousness. Copper on my tongue, spots in my eyes, a tinny sound like a corded phone left off its hook in an adjacent room echoing in my ears. Magnusson’s needle plunged into my neck. I heaved with all I had toward Gareth.