Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

They’re both silent for the rest of their progress through the aisle. At the end of the aisle is another large door, this one painted red and lacking the little safety window.

“Every puzzle has its solution,” Ollard says, pausing in front of the door. “And so here we are. The Neko of Infinite Equilibrium. The tiny machine that just gets hotter and hotter. The Little Engine That Could. You wanted to see it? Here it is.”

He pulls open the door and enters the room. It’s about the size of a suburban garage. The floor is ashily chalked with a set of concentric rings, and at the center of those rings sits a pair of sawhorses, and suspended between the sawhorses is the feline form of the Neko. Red ears, red collar, deep and expressive eyes. It beckons benignly. Surrounding the Neko is a kind of iridescent globe, like a huge, perfect soap bubble, only giving off an aura of timeless indestructibility, not exactly what soap bubbles are known for.

Billy squints at the shimmering sphere.

“One seal,” says Ollard. “The only seal that remains between the Neko and this world. The five others have fallen before me. This final one is — interesting. A diabolical intelligence lurks in its architecture. It almost makes me believe that Lucifer and I could have been friends, if circumstances had been different. That might have been nice. I could have used a friend.”

“Uh-huh,” says Billy. He’s not really listening anymore. He’s become distracted by the realization that this is the moment: all he has to do is give Ollard a quick squirt of chemicals in the face, grab the Neko, and tear ass out of here. You can do this , he tells himself. He curls his fingers around the pepper spray in his pocket, flips the flip-top with his sweaty thumb. And he yanks the canister out and aims it—

It turns into a live dove in his hand.

He releases it with an inadvertent flourish, and it flutters out into the room, wheels in a circle, and is out the door and gone. Ollard watches it go.

“Billy,” he says, piteously.

Shit , Billy thinks.

Ollard contorts his left hand into some gnarled position, like he’s throwing a gang sign, and Billy is lifted off the ground, about three feet into the air.

This can’t be good , Billy thinks, although he retains some degree of faith in Lucifer’s ward: he is, after all, not in pain. Not yet.

“See, Billy, this is what I was saying about hard-asses,” Ollard says, calmly. “Hard-asses just charge on ahead, trying only the most obvious methods. You think I would have taken you down here and shown you the Neko if there were any chance, any chance at all, that you could have pulled a cheap snatch-and-grab on me?”

He walks in a half circle around Billy, gets in close to Billy’s ear, and drops his voice. “I am disappointed , actually, a little disappointed,” he says. “You almost had me convinced that you were a person pretending very sophisticatedly to be a person who was pretending very poorly to be a hard-ass. But no. No, it turns out you were a hard-ass after all, just a very very bad one, which at least has the merit of being a strategy I haven’t seen before.”

“You can’t hurt me,” Billy says, with a bravery that he doesn’t actually feel. His facial muscles — all his muscles, actually — have gone slack and jellylike; he feels like he has the physical coordination of an infant. He can’t quite manage to fully close his mouth again after he speaks. A thin string of drool hangs off of his lip; he can’t reach for it to wipe it away. This is starting to suck.

“I noticed that, actually,” Ollard says. “It is curious.”

Billy is about to crow triumphantly about the ward, as triumphantly as he can manage through his rubbery mouth, but then he realizes that the less Ollard knows in this particular situation, the better, and he should just shut up now, thanks very much.

“Let’s run a little diagnostic,” Ollard says. He turns to a rack of gray utility shelving at the wall and busies himself there for a minute, leaving Billy hanging in space. When he returns, he has a kind of leather holster slung at his hip; emerging from the holster are six or seven slender rods. Some are gnarled branchlike things and others are smooth, polished, ebon cylinders. Magic wands?

Ollard draws one out of the holster: it’s about fourteen inches long, mahogany-colored, tapering to a point no larger than the pink eraser on the end of a pencil. He holds it up to Billy’s face.

“Fuck you, Dumbledore,” Billy says, his mouth all slack, drool running down to his chin. Ollard’s eyes narrow and flash with what Billy recognizes as genuine hatred.

“Okay,” Ollard says. “Let’s see.”

He places the tip of the wand just inside the rim of Billy’s nostril. Billy tries to rear back but ends up just squirming in the air, splaying his limbs helplessly. Ollard pushes the wand in maybe another half an inch and something seems to happen to it; it seems to develop distinct segments, points of articulation , and then it begins moving , it begins to goddamn wriggle in his nose, chitinous and feelered, like a centipede, burrowing deeper into his nasal cavity. He suddenly remembers a grubby, friendless kid from his high school years who had to undergo merciless abuse because, as the rumor went, he had once been taken to the hospital to get a cockroach removed from his ear canal. For the first time, he understands that kid as someone who deserved his truest sympathies.

“Ngh,” Billy says. Ollard’s face is fixed with an expression of deep focus, a certain grim contemplation that is not quite perplexity, the sort of expression one might wear if one found a dead bird on one’s doorstep. He holds that expression for a long moment and then finally it gives way to a sly grin.

“Very clever,” says Ollard. “He’s given you a Model Eight Demonic Ward. Not a bad choice, actually. Tough to detect; effective; tricky to get rid of because of its mercurial spin. Tricky, but not impossible. Let’s just get that dispelled — now.”

The wand up Billy’s nose seems to fatten and discharge, and Billy feels a sensation like something intricate exploding in his head, a Christmas ornament shattering in his brain, dusting his consciousness with silvery particles, sharp and toxic. He feels the urge to sneeze, and he simultaneously feels a dawning awareness that he’s about to die.

“Wait,” Ollard says. His face reverts to the nearly-perplexed expression. “There’s something else. Older. Deeper.” The centipede scuttles a bit further in. “A second ward.”

A second ward? That doesn’t make a ton of sense to Billy, but he doesn’t really have the mental real estate to attempt to figure out what it might mean, as he’s too busy thinking about dying. He thinks about the book he’ll never get to see finished. The first box of books he’d get from the publisher. Cutting it open. Inhaling the smell. Seeing his name on the cover. Giving the first copy to Denver. He would have liked to be able to do that.

“It’s strange,” Ollard says, in the slightly absented voice of someone working through a crossword. “It has a signature that I don’t recognize. It’s sophisticated, but it doesn’t resemble most traditional wards. It seems … handcrafted. I don’t quite get what it’s for but I should still be able to remove it — let’s see, here.”

He slowly draws the wand back out of Billy’s nostril, and something distressing happens deep in Billy’s head. The sensation reminds him of how it felt to have his braces pulled off by his orthodontist, back when he was fifteen. The event is happening in his brain instead of his mouth, but otherwise it’s identical: a series of wrenching pops, wired together; a relief of an old restraint; a kind of forceful, violent loosening. Finally the wand is all the way out of his nose. Billy feels completely drained.