Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“So how about now,” Ollard says, almost murmuring. “Can I hurt you now?”

He draws a longer wand out of the holster, a twisted black number studded with thorns, and gently touches it to Billy’s sternum. Billy’s body jerks as tendrils of pain loop and coil through his chest. It doesn’t quite hurt as much as getting Tased last night — he’s still able to think — but it still hurts like hell. He makes a mental note to kick Lucifer in the balls if he ever sees him again, for getting him involved in this bullshit. Assuming he survives. Which he probably won’t.

Ollard lifts the wand away from Billy, and Billy sucks air like a flopping fish.

“Please don’t kill me,” Billy says, miserably.

“Oh, Billy,” Ollard says. “I don’t want to kill you. I want to kill everyone.”

Billy whimpers. He’d like to think that the sound he makes is more noble than that; he’d like to think that he’s trying to make a grunt of resistance or something, but he hears it come out of him and he knows it’s a whimper.

“I do intend, though, to make you suffer,” Ollard says. “You see, Billy, I learned something when I was inside your head, a minute ago. I learned that you are a man who is governed by fear.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“I think you are, actually. I looked around in your head just now. So many fears in there. That’s why you were never a great man, Billy; you were scared of the world. So I think it’s fitting that when I send you away I send you to the place that you fear the most.”

The place I fear the most? Billy thinks. He tries to summon it up. Hell? Afghanistan? He has trouble thinking of a place anywhere that scares him more than the bowels of this tower, right now. He wonders for a moment if he can’t get out of this by pulling some Brer Rabbit shit.

“You know what really scares me?” Billy says, slowly. “My apartment. That place — I just never liked it. It just always creeped the fuck out of me. I’d wake up at night, rigid with terror.”

“Very funny,” Ollard says. “But I already know where you’re going. Its coordinates blaze deep in your mind. Buried in your memory: the locus of your most profound fears.”

“Give me a hint,” Billy says. “What kind of place is it?”

“I don’t know,” says Ollard. “I don’t care. I only know it is a place where you once pledged, out of fear, to never return. A fitting place for you to end your days.”

“I don’t like you,” Billy says. “Really, no one likes you.”

“Yes,” Ollard says. “That’s true.”

“Fuck you,” Billy tries to say, but he only gets as far as fuck and then he’s gone.

THE CAVE OF DENIAL MUD/SHIT RATIO • NOT KNOWN FOR FOLIAGE • NEVER LIKED GOATS • SQUARE PUPILS • SOMETHING CRACKED • TOTALLY FUCKABLE • FRIENDS VS. ASSOCIATES • TOO MUCH NOTHING • AMONG THE DAMNED • NEEDING AN ANIMAL • WANTING YOUR MOTHER

Billy appears somewhere, still hanging in space, three feet above the ground, only now that he’s away from Ollard there’s no magic holding him in place anymore, so he falls down. He lands in mud, cold mud; he produces the squelch that is produced when a great volume of the stuff is displaced at great speed to accommodate the arrival of a plummeting body. Beneath the mud is something harder, clay maybe, perhaps a layer of rock, but definitely something that stops his fall, firmly, without friendliness.

He groans. He feels broken and sick, his pummeled muscles and guts still shot through with awful magic. He keeps his eyes closed. Unless he’s actively under attack, he doesn’t feel any special need to immediately reacquaint himself with the spot that’s the locus of his most profound fears. Quite the contrary. When he considers all his options, he feels like ultimately he’d maybe be better off lying here, in the mud, with his eyes clenched shut, in a dark little cave of denial.

Despite these wishes, bits of the world gradually trickle in. He can tell that he’s outside. He can feel chilly wind stream across his face; he can hear the dry shush of that wind shifting masses of nearby autumn leaves. A crow, not far off, caws. He can smell the pungent kick of animal shit. This introduces a gram of worry about the ratio of mud to shit in the immediate area of where he’s fallen. With that said, being covered in shit no longer seems like it will constitute a significant reduction of dignity, given everything that’s happened to him in the last twenty-four hours or so.

He hears the bleat of some nearby mammal. Almost against his will he opens his eyes. He’s in a muddy outdoor pen, three feet from a mottled goat which observes him vacantly.

Beyond the fence at the pen’s perimeter he can see trees, a row of deciduous trees in the full blaze of fall. So he’s probably not in Afghanistan, at least: although he’s not a hundred percent sure what the tree situation is in Afghanistan, he does know that it’s not a place that’s exactly renowned for its scenic foliage. And didn’t Ollard say that this was a place he’d been before? Plus it doesn’t seem all that scary, although it is true that he’s never liked goats.

He cranes his head around, sees a barn of a decidedly North American typology and a huddle of sheep. For one moment he feels the uncharacteristic desire to eat them; he clears it with a vigorous shaking of his head.

He frowns at a few gumball-type vending machines that are loaded up with corn and sunflower seeds. Something about this place does seem familiar. And then he figures it out. It’s the Apple Cheeks Farm Stand and Petting Zoo in Ohio, about an hour from where he grew up.

He laughs. Ollard behaved rashly: sent him someplace harmless. Ollard made a mistake. Fuck, he had Billy hanging in the air like a trussed deer: he could have cut any one of Billy’s prominent veins and just let him bleed out. Although maybe not: Billy remembers that Lucifer seemed to think that Ollard wouldn’t have killed him, even without the ward. Or wards, plural, whatever that’s about.

He looks at the vending machines and remembers the day he swore never to return here. His smile fades a little.

His parents had brought him. He was maybe six. They purchased a handful of grains out of one of those very vending machines, a quarter’s worth, and Wee Billy toddled off eagerly, ready to find some kindly fauna to feed. What Wee Billy didn’t know was that one handful of grain doesn’t last all that long when you’re up against the single-mindedness of the average farm animal. It all disappeared into the maw of one goat, an animal that Wee Billy experienced not as some harmless Disney critter, all shy smiles and eyelashes, but rather as a kind of frightening machine designed for gnashing. Something in the ballpark of an industrial thresher. Billy remembers looking into its otherworldly eye, with its diabolical-looking square pupil, and in there he found it, the terror, the terror at being up close with something that wasn’t human, that could not be reasoned with, that could not possibly be understood as good or kind.

Billy remembers wanting his mother. As the goat moved on to chewing wetly on the sleeve of Wee Billy’s shirt, he wanted his mother in a way that he had never wanted her before. There had been many times in his infancy and early childhood that he had wanted his mother to pick him up, to hold him, to feed him, to have her face fill his field of vision. Times when he had wanted her to tell him a story, something with mead halls and hunting horns, phrases that he didn’t understand but that she spoke with such delectation that he felt in her thrall, and felt comfortable there. But this time was different, fundamentally different. This was the first time he had wanted his mother to rescue him from Evil.