Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Another demon kicking spiked heels against the legs of his bonechair offers Niko a deepfried pork rind from an upended skull cookie jar with clacking jaws.

Niko fights to ignore the pure dementia of his surroundings as he thumbs the latches on the hardcase. The demons stare as he draws the Dobro from the plush like some implement of ritual. The rounded body of the steel guitar throws firelight back upon the curious gazes of the gathered demons as he shrugs into the strap and bends to the case and opens the storage compartment and takes out a three inch length of burnished steel pipe that he slides onto his bare ringfinger.

The demon munching pork rinds stills his kicking legs and crunching teeth. “Oooh. Pretty.”

Niko realizes the pork rinds aren’t made of pork.

Onyx touches Niko’s arm. Her deadly fingers feverish hot. “Chair?”

Surprised by the hospitality Niko starts toward the proffered thighbone chair, then stops. The demons grin and wait. The skinless nazis beyond the bonfire struggle and moan.

Niko nods toward a flattish rock a few feet away. “I’ll just sit there.”

“Aww,” says Pork Rind. “He no fun.”

Niko sits upon the rock and strums an open chord. He twists the Dobro’s E-string key while he tunes it against the D. He frowns and adjusts the D. Around him grotesque figures gather waiting. The bonfire pops as Niko studies metal lines and curves distorting flames and nightmare faces.

Demons nudge each other as the mortal bends to play. Waylaid deep within the old world’s bones he strums his steelbodied guitar on a warm flat rock before flensed genocides and congregated demons, and he plays slow somber blues and thinks about life’s shitty sense of humor. The area around the bonfire oddly quiet as he slowly rocks with his eyes shut and his mouth a little open and his voice emerging as the everbending cry of metal slide against the Dobro’s strings. The fire’s crackle loud. The demons still and silent as they listen. The staked and skinless Germans given brief and miraculous surcease from their affliction, the only such reprieve they will receive for all of time to come.

Niko bends a final trio of a slow atonal upswing stranger by far than any cry ever released in this forsaken place and aching to resolve. But resolve it finally does, a tight harmonic fit that fades into the heated air.

He mutes the strings and opens his eyes. And starts at the disfigured assemblage before him. In shifting monochrome chiaroscuro they stand eager and quiet and staring. Firelight on leather and fur and scales. Drumhead wings rustle like sheets hung in a gale. They have flocked from all around in the short time of Niko’s playing and now they stand or sit or squat or perch attentive and oddly respectful as Niko looks up from the Dobro and sees them hearing him. He has been so lost in the familiar world of his music that he has in the brief span of his fretting forgotten the ruined world he’s really in and what he is rehearsing for. That lostness, that going away, that letting go is why he’s always played in the first place. Because even more than drinking whiskey or shooting smack or making love, music is the only place where he can go and not be there anymore. With those other means of going away forbidden to him ever since the Deal, music really has become his one permitted drug.

“Fuck,” says a demon near the front, a shortbeaked nightmare with an ornate silverhandled florentine dagger in its human-leather belt.

Onyx elbows Florentine in the head without looking. Her thornlike elbow spike impales the demon’s skull. The demon doesn’t even flinch as Onyx yanks her elbow from his head and wipes a blood tear from her glossy marble cheek upon a sculpted talon. Contoured in the bonfire’s light she looks like something made of space itself. The wells of her eyes find Niko’s. “Uno mas.”

Hubbub among her colleagues. “We could get in trouble,” one of them says.

Onyx jerks her head and two demons detach themselves from the boneless and eviscerated soul they’re doubleteaming. They grab the trepidant protester by his feathered arms and naked chicken legs and swing him in big arcs while the others call out Ooone twooo threeee. At which they let him go to arc high up and crash headfirst atop the bonfire. Sparking ashes lead brief escaping lives and a brighter patch of glowering heat within the burning hill is exposed. The nazis resume their wails as the pitched demon claws through their charring ember parts to the bottom of the bonfire and scampers from the halloween coals and brushes embers from his smoking feathers without another word.

“Song,” a demon orders from the rear.

A castanet clattering of clapped beaks sounds approval. Other demons stamp their tridents on the hard ground. Birdand batlike wings spread wide and fan. Near the fire two demons caper and cavort. One uses a found fingerbone to play a rack of whitepicked ribs like a washboard. The other has a line of half a dozen silent screaming skulls thrust onto his priapic cock.

Niko looks back down at the guitar and wipes filthy hands on grimy jeans. Come on, son, you’ve played worse gigs than this. That Kiwanis dance when you were hurting bad.

Niko noodles and tunes and gazes at the twisted assemblage. What do you call a group of demons? A gaggle? A herd? A murder? If they were angels they would be a host.

Of their own accord his arms embrace the Dobro and he strums a big fat wall of texas shuffle with a strong and syncopated upstroke, brazen and uptempo. Niko’s playing has caught a whiff of the demons’ bacchanalia and handed it back to them and they obligingly stomp and cavort and whirl in one big feedback loop.

And like a feedback loop the music starts to howl. Something dark has always lived in Niko’s music, something he’s spent decades mastering if not overcoming. But down here darkness is a force of nature and the demon he has nurtured and despised within himself might very well be given flesh. Might tap him on the shoulder and address him by his name.

These demons have a nose for Niko’s darkness and they make it all their own. As he plays they dance and jump and shudder and convulse and shriek. One screams in abhorrent and inhuman languages and yanks his forked and footlong tongue with both reptilian hands. One sprays crackling acid semen on a row of screaming skinless nazis as he’s masturbated by a giggling other. One claws at her own face with razor talons. Seeing her two others leave behind the pile of gutted corpses they are rolling in like happy puppies and hurry to her so that they can lick the flowing ichor from her pitted cheeks. Whooping demons wrestle in the bonfire like children in a sandbox. Their wingbeats fan the smolder to a burnished gold. The music’s beat is taken up with thighbones rapping everstartled skulls and fingerbones scratch rib accompaniment.

The hub of this debauchery sits rooted on his pedestal with his right foot tapping and his right hand doing most of the work. He senses the circus of depravity that gyres and shudders about him to the beat of his own music and yet is apart from it. But Niko does share one thing with these dancing demons and these suffering genocides: all of them are lost, they are lost, they are lost.

So lost are they are now within their saturnalia that none notices the small shadow cast by no light against no figure, a long thin shadow that pools into their midst like oil. That swells and rises and shapes itself like a djinn from a bottle into a corpulent mass of ebon flesh that towers quivering above the manic congregation until it is a vast and naked carnival of bloat that clenches carsized fists above its round and hairless boulder of a head that shakes from side to side and swings huge jowls like turkey wattles above the hillocks of its breasts. This black flesh mountain bellows like a warhead’s detonation and abruptly now the revels cease.