Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Niko’s mind rejects the impossible thing before him. Demons he has been able to accept. Intimidating and disgusting as they are, they’re still humanoid. Convincing costumes. But this. This conflation of gluttony cannot possibly exist. It should suffocate under its own pestilent obesity. The sagging acres of inky skin, the runnels and valleys and craters and folds, look more like lavaflow than flesh. This is not a creature. It is geologic, tectonic, it should have its own gravity and perhaps a moon or two.

And indeed it does have satellites, for demons wheel about it like lured moths around a spotlight that absorbs illumination rather than emits it. They rend their flesh and cry out and abase themselves, their wings spasmodic as they offer gouged or torn and dripping offerings of themselves to this alien deity.

The black cathedral of glut has eyes for none of them. Rearing monolithic above Niko it inclines its baldmountain head and looks down on him with eyes as black as any sunless cavern underneath the ocean floor. What face there is below those seacave eyes is half eclipsed by the black planet of its pulsing belly.

An irontree hand swings up to point at Niko. YOU.The pronoun is a booming surf.

Niko cowers and his sphincter clutches. The rotting mistral of the titan’s breath breaks over him. Reek of sewage and spoiled milk. “Muh, me?” His voice ridiculously small and ineffectual.

YOU ARE THE MUSICIAN.

“I, uh, yeah, I—”

WHO HAS ALLOWED YOU TO DEFILE THIS PLACE?

“Defile?” Niko feels stupid and afraid. Supernatural cars and sadistic demons and giant threeheaded dogs he’s dealt with pretty okay considering. But this continent of menace has caught him by surprise and it’s huge and powerful and really pissed off.

WHO HAS ALLOWED YOU TO DEFILE THIS PLACE?

“Who let me play?”

WHO HAS ALLOWED YOU—

“To defile the place, okay.” Niko glances at prostrate demons everywhere, faces shielded from the dread black light of titan gaze, wings tight to their bodies and claws opened above their heads in abject supplication. The bonfire coruscates upon the ripped and bleeding figures of the nazis staring walleyed at this gargantuan apparition. “Uhhh.” Niko feels an odd pang of guilt as he spies her, midnight black among the cowering demons. He begins to raise a traitorous finger to single her out but checks himself. Onyx has done him no harm and in fact was going to help him in exchange for the diversion of his playing several songs. Niko rests his hands upon the metal body of his guitar. The slide still on his finger glimmers firelight. “No one. I was only—”

“Me!” Onyx rises trembling to her spiky knees. As the black spotlight of the giant’s attention turns to her the demons cowering around her scatter like fish darting from a stone dropped in their midst. “Great Moloch it was me!” Her obsidian claws clutch her naked scalp and dig in deep. “This mortal man was moving among us, I am not worthy to speak to you, he was moving among us and I only sought a new torment, I worship you, this mortal and I struck a deal—”

Faster than Niko would have believed possible the giant’s hand plummets like a crashing jet to pulp the demon Onyx under his massive thumb and swab her across the ground like a bilefilled bug.

Niko feels his bladder let go.

The giant straightens and licks gore off his thumb with a thousand pounds of mottled gray tongue. He cocks his head at Niko with an expression absurdly reminiscent of Victor the RCA dog.

MORTAL MAN WHAT BRINGS YOU HERE BEFORE YOUR FINAL DAY?

This is more familiar ground at least. “Up there in the mortal life,” recites Niko, “my wife of common law was taken from me before she reached the fullness of her days.”

AND YOU HAVE STRUCK A DEAL WITH THIS.The giant indicates the jellied smear of Onyx on the ground.

“I have.” Niko’s teeth are chattering from pure fear. “In exchange for two songs I have just played she was to tell me how to get to—” Niko hesitates over the euphemism “—to the, the head office.” His knees are shaking.

IN THIS PLACE A DEAL WITH SUCH A ONE IS BINDING AND IS LAW. THOUGH SHE IS NO MORE THE BURDEN OF HER TELLING FALLS ON ME AND I MUST HONOR IT. BUT KNOW BEFORE I TELL YOU THAT I HAVE HEARD YOUR MUSIC AND RECOGNIZE YOU FOR WHAT YOU ARE. YOU HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

“Me?” Niko shakes his head. “Oh no no. No. Much here is strangely familiar to me but—”

BENEATH YOUR MORTAL GUISE YOU WEAR A SPIRIT OLDER STILL. THE MASK OF CRAWLING MEAT DENIES THE TRUE ETERNAL FACE BENEATH. I SPEAK NOW PAST YOUR MASK TO TELL YOU THAT YOUR QUEST IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE FOR NOUGHT.

“I don’t understand.”

I DO NOT SPEAK TO YOU. FROM MY MASTER I AM COME TO TELL THE WEARER OF YOUR FLESH THAT HE IS WEARY OF THIS REENACTMENT. I REMIND THE HOST OF YOUR FACADE THAT IN THIS PLACE WHERE WORD IS LAW AND BLOODSIGNED DEALS ARE GRAVEN ON CREATION’S BONE, YOU HAVE GIVEN US YOUR WORD AND SIGNED YOUR NAME. IN THIS YOU AND MY MASTER ARE WED, FOR YOU MUST HONOR AND OBEY.

“These are your words?”

THEY ARE MY MASTER’S.

Niko bites his lip and thinks. “You haven’t come to stop me?”

I AM COME TO STOP YOUR DESECRATION OF THIS HOLY PLACE.

“But not my—my quest.”

I AM BOUND BY YOUR BARGAIN WITH SHE WHOM I DESTROYED.He wipes his thumb on his obscene and dimpling hip. I MUST TELL YOU THE WAY TO… THE HEAD OFFICE.At this last the titan smiles for the first time and a shrieking horror of vertiginous death assails all Niko’s being with the writhing soil of the rotting grave that is not oblivion or peace or even surcease from our earthly pain and sorrow for in every cell there is evolved revolt against the undeniable corrupt majesty of inimical death, a horror of annihilation shaped not by the senses but from deep within the gene, a viper nestled in twined strands of DNA. What corruption awaits us all.

Niko forces his gaze from that graveyard smile and the allconsuming feeling slowly fades. The titan raises a huge flabby arm to point across the endless plain. THE BATTLEMENTS OF APATHY ARE THE SOURCE OF THE LIGHTS THAT BURN ACROSS THE PLAIN. THERE FIND THE MONSTER GERYON AND CALL HIM BY HIS NAME. ORDER HIM TO TAKE YOU DOWN, SAYING TO HIM THIS HAS BEEN WILLED WHERE WHAT IS WILLED MUST BE. THEN MAKE YOUR LIGHTWARD WAY ACROSS THE REACH ON WHICH HE LEAVES YOU.

“That’s all?”

NOTHING MORE.That vast entropic grin again. and nothing less. Niko suspects for all his pending wrath the titan is amused by him and enjoying all this drama greatly.

He stands with his guitar and feels the rising bravado that strikes him at the oddest times. “Well. I’ll just be on my way then. Thanks.” He waves. “See you.”

EACH AND EVERY TIME.And in Greek the titan says GOOD TRAVELING, ORFEO.

“And you Moloch.”

The titan pauses. IT’S A HORDE.

“Excuse me?”

A GROUP OF DEMONS. COLLECTIVELY A HORDE.

Then the titan simply is no longer there and Niko is knocked off his feet by air that rushes in to fill the space the vast abomination occupied. He picks himself up and absurdly dusts himself off. His hand brushes the damp patch on the crotch of his jeans and shame heats his face.

He stops in the midst of putting the Dobro back in the case as he remembers the titan’s parting wish in Greek and his own unthinking reply. As he had understood Onyx’s German. He frowns. Old locked doors are opening in his mind and in his heart this long and godforsaken day. BENEATH YOUR MORTAL GUISE YOU WEAR A SPIRIT OLDER STILL.