Chapter 58: Angel Eyes
Nocome, I have a penny for you.”
I had left Elder Mother’s avatar in the Lambton Country Golf Course as the last hour of daylight fought through the low dishwater-grey clouds, jumping the fence at the property’s edge and landing without a slip on a patch of spongy melted snow. I marched down the sidewalk on Scarlet Road toward the bridge where the trains go in Lambton and Dundas Street beyond, listening for that knight, almost hoping to hear him or an ohdow. I passed through the childhood landmarks in Lambton – the long march of power lines that buzzed my ears painfully now, the Chinese food place, the convenience store – without incident. The anger over my stolen berry and the doctor in his coma might have kept the tutelaries from noticing me so quickly.
The snowfall these last two weeks had been a light dusting partly melted, half the ground still showing grass and mud. I would be able to change that soon – or someone who looked a bit like me would.
I was going to go downtown again, but some preparation was needed. The penny was lying in the gutter near a drain on Dundas Street, in a patch of old newspapers and brown leaves. I plucked it up like it was precious gold nugget and eyed it greedily, turning to look away from the lights switching on to illuminate giant billboards for tropical vacations and credit cards.
“I do hope you weren’t lying.”
Gulp.
I think a kid in the bus stop I passed noticed something odd about me. I was a vampire with a wendigo running around in my head – but maybe he had just seen me pick something up from the gutter and eat it.
“Yes … I can use this.” The awful churning in my guts began.
“Good. You can also change the thunderbird’s blood if it will make things harder for the hospital bastards to see me – but no collateral this time. A girl of nine and a man on life support gets you two strikes already. If I get a third strike of collateral you get cut out from the rest of the operation. And I am not eating an ohdow.”
“You will regret giving me orders. And that last tulpa sent to kill me.” Rather than angry, it sounded like she was enjoying herself, like a chess player who feels the end coming.
I smiled savagely in the night at no one, walking back across Humber River – if anyone was getting suspicious over here, let them notice me cross this river and move along, not knowing about the water cure. On the other side I stopped in a small park, finding a bench and waiting for my guts to finish with the copper.
“Tell me about it.”
There was something strange that the new people did with their stories, something that Nocome and Daphe Laframbois and John Goose didn’t understand very well. It was almost a desecration itself, but it had power that they didn’t anticipate.
These new things were called ‘sequels’.
Nocome had terminated Arnold, and drowned Mr. Voorhees in ice. I had expected Dr. Starling to make one last try of it – but I had not expected the separate pieces of Arnold to crawl back together to make a tulpa resembling the villain of second Terminator movie, and I had not expected Mr. Voorhees to rise from his watery grave to slash and tear yet again. And neither had Nocome.
Dr. Starling had known, of course. He knew that tulpas could be hard to control, being a rather independent tulpa himself. He had settled comfortably in Nocome’s lair, breaking into her prison and going unbothered since the guards thought he was trapped in there. Sneaking out carefully, he had begun an examination of his fellow-guests while Nocome was busy trying to take over my body when we arrived in Toronto. It was a thorough examination: logistical, social, technical … and surgical.
It took him a little less time than Nocome provided for him to work out the bindings that she used to control the minds she had consumed over the years. Dr. Starling wasn’t so stupid as to release them all – of course not, you didn’t waste such a move so early. He couldn’t hope to control them either, just as he couldn’t hope to control his fellow-tulpas slowly resurrecting and waiting for a second try at their target. But he did release a special group of three: two siblings of Deer Woman, witches with the power of skinwalking sent to wander far during the 1864 Long Walk of the Navajo. The third he released to give some advice was a young female thunderbird chick that a host long before Nocome had devoured sometime between Leif Erikson and Columbus. She had to solve the problem of what Nocome was building in her deepest lair, the problem of her superweapon, with Dr. Starling giving cryptic and unhelpful advice.
So it seemed he wasn’t completely free from his programming after all.
The two Navajo witches were left free, though not given the secret to free others. Dr. Starling asked them to coordinate with the other two assassin tulpas, deferring to their personal combat experience in such a matter.
When Nocome came home, rebuffed when I raced against the Lambton knight to find my grandmother’s house, she had been very, very surprised. That she was still alive to tell me about all this was a frustrating bit of spoilers, but her victory didn’t sound like much of a victory at all.
The skinwalker shades had herded the lust tulpas into a tight pen and released them in a stampede when Nocome came through the gates. She destroyed them with ease, eating them in her frenzy and frustration – and then she got quite a stomach ache. There had been two lust-tulpas in the shape of a skinny blonde girl I had desired in high school, and one of them was an impostor. The liquid metal Terminator tulpa poked her a bit from inside, making her slow and distracted enough for a proper external beating from Mr. Voorhees and the two freed skinwalker spirits. If I hadn’t been knocked out cold by Elder Mother at the time this fight would have caused a tremendous racket in my skull.
Killing Nocome wasn’t really an option – something so permanent was virtually impossible in the mindscape. But the two skinwalkers each had their ‘collars’ or ‘knots’ or whatever the mindscape presented as the psychic manacles needed for one mind to control another, the bindings that Nocome had clamped on their necks for more than century. And though they failed to pin and bind her with either, they did force Nocome to chew off her right hand and her left foot, and when she broke the bindings so that they couldn’t control anyone the skinwalkers had been able to flee into the wilderness, cursing her and vowing to join my army. I looked forward to meeting them.
Meanwhile, Dr. Starling and the thunderbird chick he was treating like Jodie Foster had reverse-engineered what Nocome had been working on for all these months, with the old spirit doing most of the actual work. Needing a little more time to make the desired changes, Dr. Starling flipped a couple of switches he had installed around the lair, opening every prison cell, releasing every shackle.
More than a thousand years-worth of souls were suddenly free (or at least up one level in the Matryoshka doll of possession). And they hated Nocome’s wendigo guts. Some fled, wishing to resist in my forces. Others fled just to become independent predators in the unstructured mindspace, a new problem for me to worry about. Others were so crazed and furious that they simply bashed themselves against Nocome over and over again, even as she struggled to re-bind and re-consume them. She got a few, but lost most.
Then she took a shot from her superweapon, right in the face.
Daphne’s rescuers had suggested that it might be some kind of stealth bomber or death ray or generic Glowing Bad Thing, but that was probably the tulpas’ genre affecting their perception. I don’t think I’ll ever know what it was exactly, since the weapon was never intended for me. It was incomplete and intended for far grander spirits, middle-management or thunderbirds or water cats, to be used once she’d assumed full command of my body. Perhaps it was a gargantuan spell like a dark ichthys, something she added to one day at a time as I tried to add to my strength with exercise. It didn’t matter now – it was completely unloaded and spent, right in her face.
At the present moment, Dr. Starling (and his thunderbird chick) were unaccounted for. Maybe they had built themselves a little house somewhere in the subconscious. The weapon’s discharge had covered their escape perfectly.
“It did not kill me … but, kavdlunait, you are the first foe who has ever made me want to be dead. You will not be a slave when I take you. I think you must be given a higher position. You are careless with power, but creative. When given slaves you made a fort that slowed me down. An ‘engineer’, yes, that seems the word for you. ‘Engineer’ and ‘general’, those will be your words when you serve me.”
“Then let’s be two logical souls, Nocome. We’re obligated to get that berry and that best-of-the-best doctor, if he wants to go. Any other business comes after.”
“Yes.”
“I will hurt you and others if I have to. But I will not waste time with it. Feeding time, fighting time, fleeing time. Those are more important things than our little sadism tug-of-war.”
“The hunger is the foe we both must fight. It fed me to you when the days were long and I attacked you anyway. It might feed you to the Mountain hospital tonight. Your hunger is rooted in unsatisfied lust. Mine was in the jealousy of a wife who shares her man with other wives. I hungered to bear his favorite child, and I dreamed of murdering those other infants. I dreamed of leading the heavier woman over thin ice, or leaving her tied to a tree while she slept for a bear to find. Dreaming of eating him at the very end was not enough to confess. Every awful desire must be presented in my hands – when it is in my hands and before my eyes it is no longer in my heart. You must confess every sick longing in your heart to escape your hunger. Confess not to the missing-corpse god, but to yourself, with not one lie. You will never finish, never remove every last evil part of the hunger – but this will help you see through the hunger, the hunger that all souls have.”
“Self-awareness,” I summarized, not meaning to sound glib. I was amazed to get so much out of Nocome that wasn’t threats or sneaky offers of help. “Very important, I agree. Now what can we do with that copper?”
Copper in wires, copper in alloys, copper in amulets and jewelry, copper in the pipes that carried their water, in the symbols that tutelaries and their select living allies still clung too.
“None of it will serve them. It will serve us. I learned from afar more of what the glass eyes do – you can make the glass eyes not see you, and see you where you are not.”
“Cloaking and doppelgangers,” I summarized, this time intentionally glib. “Fine. I’m about to go downtown on the subway, so let’s send the false alarm north to the highway from Lambton, riding on a nice fast truck.”
Night had fallen and the last of the park’s visitors were gone, even the determined joggers with lights on their shoes and heads. Nocome asked me to find a streetlight, and when I touched the lamp’s pole the bulb overhead went dark.
Alarms screamed … but to the north. Psychic cries from the tutelaries, with traffic cameras and dashboard cameras all agreeing with each other to report the existence of something that was not there. How many would know that the copper could be used with this? Surely few – Nocome herself was new to the spell. It was one of her rare harmless ones.
“Good. Now we ghost downtown. But let me check this out first.”
A convenience store on Bloor Street, east of the Humber River, looked public enough to give me no challenge in entering. I lurked in the parking lot under another light that died with a touch, waiting only a little while for a pair of Arab men to come along and get some cigarettes from the store. The doorbell’s electronic chime sounded when they entered, working fine – but it was silent when I came in, smelling the artificial flavoring in a hundred products now even more repellent to me, and when I looked to the television screen behind the cash register fed by the camera pointing over the store’s entrance it did not show me standing there – it did not even see the door close. Fantastic editing skills. Opening and closing doors, my footprints, and my self – all erased.
“We’re in business.” I got outside and focused hard on the flurry of tutelary whispers in the aether around me, a Twitter storm rushing north. They were arguing about which truck I was on, but they all seemed to think that I was on a truck. I recognized the vocal Movember man’s voice, the tutelary who had resembled an evil gunslinger, telling others to get over there because he was busy at the moment. So November wasn’t the limit on all of those guys – important to know!
With that doppelganger having a limited lifespan I had to travel directly with the subway. From the Old Mill station I rode to Bay Station, listening hard, wondering if listening made me trackable so far, deciding to stop the flying head business after Spadina. There probably were ways to catch that thing in a net, and then what an asshole I’d feel like.
The scream of air down the subway tunnel as the train left the Bay Station didn’t end – the screaming continued on the surface, where the wind was howling with rising winter fury.
“Nocome?” I stood at the base of the stairs leading up to the street, away from a cluster of bums that were huddled deeper in the station under a tiled wall splattered with graffiti. I don’t think any of the symbols were mystic, but it was hard to tell.
“I do not always … control when I control the weather.” She was almost apologetic.
“Well, that’s suggestive to anyone who knows. Let’s run.”
The moaning wind grew voices to make a choir as it sliced between the buildings in Toronto’s Discovery District, pulling suddenly at drooped flags and ripping some of them away, tearing away posters and pamphlets on construction site plywood. The front wheel of a parked bike was spinning and ringing in my ear in the eerie pauses between the bouts of cutting, hunting wind, wind that seemed to search for and dive upon people, driving them away.
Looking down the length of University Avenue after Queen’s Park and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, I saw billboards flickering and dying. My ears could hear glass breaking in windows here and there across the city like many tinkling bells. Two hundred meters away, on the right side, was the front entrance of Mount Sinai Hospital.
Anger. I needed to summon it now, all the righteous anger for Dr. Pawel Fidyka I had to get through the hospital’s front door. There were still a few pedestrians caught outside that were rushing to get indoors, if only for a few minutes that they could wait out in a coffee shop or an office building’s lobby – or the hospital’s lobby. Students, many of them around my age, many of them with backpacks like me. If I had the anger up there would be nothing unusual about me running in. There might be something unusual in the security guys coming out to tell this one student to scram.
A large mass of students interrupted in their post-class mingling was crossing the street when I arrived, laughing and shouting at the wind and a taxi that came to a sudden stop just short of their knees. I was among them by the time the taxi drove along with its angry driver, trying to act as cold and pained by the wind as the others. My protective school of students split up on the other side of the road tantalizingly close, with the hospital’s front sign bearing a ring of colorful blocks to make a negative-image Star of David looking down at me. I didn’t feel anything unusual just yet.
I was keeping up a steady internal chant:
Jim Henson just like Jim Henson those assholes …
Nocome helped the both of us. Tendrils of lacerating wind armed with grit and small beads of ice regathered my students from up and down the street with unnatural focus, and them tried to slam them against the hospital’s front door. That was it – they poured inside in a rush, more shouting than laughing now, a few just pale and quiet. Many foreign faces, probably a bunch experiencing their first winter and snow.
Usually the tallest in a group, I was able to look ahead and see a very familiar face
Movember man! It’s the Movember – no no Jim Henson focus on Jim Henson!
On the very threshold of the front doors I paused, feeling myself to be caught in a sheet of thin plastic. The student behind me – a frail Indian boy who needed some insulation in this winter – bumped into my backpack.
NO they will NOT catch me they don’t deserve to catch me using human bait a man who could save many more lives they deserve to made INTO FOOLS!!!
With fist and teeth clenched, I slipped into the front lobby – a clean modern space with deep blue floors and white walls. To be almost caught had made me scared – but also even angrier.
The Movember man who looked like Clint Eastwood’s nemesis had staked out the hospital’s front lobby as if it were a dingy saloon picking up rift-raft from the dusty desert. He sat in an unzipped red parka and had rubber boots on – because the forecast had called for rain, I gathered, not gusts of polar wind that were now pelting the windows with tiny ice shards as a perpetual background noise that sounded very much like scratching claws.
His hands were on his lap, and his eyes were gazing into every pair of eyes coming through the front doors before they could split up between the various visitor chairs or the information desk or the admissions desk or the hall leading on to a large flight up winding stairs.
Cowardice would not do. When my time came I beamed right back into his eyes a single thought
(Jim Henson motherfucker)
and I made him blind. I was getting better at spells.
(so, how does this feel Angel Eyes?)
I walked closer, noticing now that although there was no gun in his hands there was a red strand held tight between the palms, as if in preparation for choking me. It was a dog leash – of course that’s why he’d been so determined to nail my ass to the wall. Nocome had made him kill his best friend.
No! Sympathy would corrupt the protective anger! He had still allowed harm to an innocent man!
I stopped right in front of him, looking down at those two dead orbs in his skull.
“What was the dog’s name?” I asked clearly.
The tutelary had seemed stunned – now his blind face darted up in a vague glare that almost caught me.
“He was Blondie,” the Movember man hissed quietly.
“Oh, so you deliberately look like that.” I leaned closer at his slightly embarrassed face. “You want me out of your city without more blood? Lead me to the elderberry, and the man you left to linger here as bait. And keep your little mind-voice quiet. Lots of people around to go missing.”
That mustache twitched – a grimace, or a suppressed smile. “You’re full sick, like they all said. You have to try and eat him, no matter how obvious the trap.”
“For the right reasons, and with his permission. If I do it that way none of their eyes looking for evil night-kin may see me, and no barriers may stop me.” I reached and dug my fingers into the Movember man’s bicep, goon-arming him onto his feet. “If I’m wrong, I hit a barrier and fry, so why struggle? Let’s just see what happens – hear, in your case.” I was masking my uneasiness pretty well so far – he was right that I was forced to try and eat the doctor, in a building sure to be festooned with well-wishings and prayers going back generations.
We got to the elevator, and got in by ourselves. I could have looked merely supportive at a distance to the living in the hospital’s lobby. The Movember man with a dead dog named Blondie told me to hit level fourteen.
“Interesting. This building skips dreaded thirteen.”
“I can hear my friends,” Movember man hissed suddenly, savagely. “They found out your little camera trick, and the winds are a clear sign of your sickness taking hold!”
The elevator doors opened on the mislabelled level thirteen. I calmly asked, “Left or right?”
Chapter 59: Apollyon
Image credits: Peter Balcerzak, BrandonBigHeart, Billie Grace Ward,