Chris Holm - The Big Reap

I squinted in the sudden light, the wick’s green afterimage a dancing ghost at the center of my vision, and then forgot myself once my eyes adjusted.

The back wall of the office was lined with waist-high wooden, glass-doored shelves of the kind one might find at an old-time pharmacy. The shelves were chock-a-block with jars containing peculiar liquids that seemed to amplify the lamplight and reflect back strange, entrancing hues of their own. As I looked at them in turn — dusky purple, vibrant green, soft pink — my mouth was filled with the taste of plum, of sage, of rose petals.

Atop the shelving was a collection of taxidermy the likes of which the world had never seen: a three-headed owl; a piglet’s head with hooked, reddish beaks where its eyes ought to’ve been; a cheetah with the face of a baboon.

The right-hand wall was largely given over to an array of medical equipment — a heart monitor, a respirator, an IV stand ornamented with two bags of fluids — surrounding a luxurious four-post bed done up with a half-dozen thick down pillows and sheets of gleaming silk. The pillows were fluffed up and arranged so the bed’s occupant might comfortably sit; the sheets were turned down in anticipation of said occupant.

I strolled across the mildewed tile toward the desk at the center of the space. My driver watched idly, arms crossed, apparently unconcerned by my curiosity. The desk was piled high with books, papers, and odd artifacts: A glass bell, under which sat a sliver of blood-flecked wood; the broken corner of a stone slab, inscribed with words I could not read; a life-sized bronze bust, its face contorted in pain.

Two high-backed leather club chairs faced the desk on one side. The side the blotter faced contained no chair. The blotter itself was leather as well but paler than the club chairs, and less burnished. I ran a finger along it, wondering idly at its strange matte finish, only to recoil when I realized the seal at its center was not a seal at all, but in fact a Royal Navy man’s tattoo.

An anemometer sat on one corner of the desk, a device like a propeller with four hemispherical cups attached, intended to measure wind-speed. As I approached, it began to rotate slowly. But there was no wind in here, save for that which the instrument itself generated as it spun, and anyways, the cups were arranged such that it should have spun clockwise , not counterclockwise.

It picked up speed, spinning so fast it shook. Papers flew off the desk, scattering across the floor. Something about the device pricked at a distant memory, and unnerved me in a way I could not define. Almost without volition, I raised a hand to stop it.

“I wouldn’t,” said a thin, wizened, aristocratic voice, its vaguely continental singsong accent lending a quiet air of condescension to its words.

“Excuse me?” I said, tearing my attention from the anemometer, and turning it instead to its owner. Who, as it happens, was the ugliest man I’d ever had the displeasure of laying eyes on.

He was a skeletal little wisp of a thing, gliding toward me in a motorized wheelchair that hummed quietly as it cleared the plastic sheeting and rolled into the ersatz office. Twin ribbons of herringboned red trailed behind it, one from each tire, patterned like a printmaker’s stamp, ever fainter as he approached. He wore a silk smoking jacket — bold blue paisley trimmed in brown velvet — and a loose-woven brown lap blanket over his legs. One ashen, liver-spotted hand, its knuckles gnarled as tree roots, gripped the chair’s joystick. His other hand, oddly brown and muscular, rested lightly on his lap.

His face looked like a patchwork quilt assembled by a mad cannibal — an age-creased pale white nose, narrow and aquiline; a left cheek and jaw as soft and unlined as a young woman’s; a patch of skin around his right eye blood-crusted at its borders as if it were a new addition, whose tone and epicanthic folds indicated it was Asian in origin. His right eye was pale green and rheumy. His left eye was vibrant blue, and clear as cloudless day, but it bulged inside its socket as if it didn’t quite fit. The skin on the right side of his face was as thin and brittle as old parchment; it cracked and peeled in the hollow of his cheek.

“It detects your kind, among other things,” he said. “Consider it a warning system. You touching it will only make it spin faster. You’re liable to lose a hand.”

“Why’s it spinning backward?” I asked.

“Because you, Sam Thornton, are no angel.”

He raised the hand in his lap and gestured. The anemometer’s spinning ceased.

“And just who or what are you ?” I asked.

The patchwork man laughed, a steel brush on concrete. “Isn’t that the question,” he replied.

“I’ll settle for a name,” I said. “After all, you apparently know who I am.”

“Ah, but what’s in a name? Particularly for one such as myself, who’s had so many. In Sebaste, they knew me as Atomus. In Samaria, I was Simon Magus. In Cologne, Albertus. In the verdant isles of this fledgling kingdom, they sang my praises as Merlin. And this century past, I was best known for my groundbreaking if misunderstood research, conducted under the name of Doktor Men–”

But then he broke off — mid-name, it seemed — as if deciding he’d already shared too much. “My apologies,” he said. “You care not to hear an old man’s ramblings; you simply wish to know how to address me. At present, my name is Simon Magnusson. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, my last procedure proved more difficult than anticipated.”

I glanced back over the Magnusson’s shoulder at the plastic-sheeted room, and wondered if I even wanted to ask.

I asked. “What kind of a procedure?”

“The unsuccessful kind, I fear. My patient lacked the fortitude necessary to survive the harvest. Now she’s just so much wasted flesh. And as you can see,” he said, tilting his crumpled parchment cheek toward the light for me to see, “I’ve little time to find another suitable donor.”

“I hope that’s not why you brought me here.”

“No,” said Magnusson. “We’ve other business altogether. Could I tempt you with a cup of tea? I suspect your trip to the cemetery has left you chilled.” I shook my head. “A sherry, perhaps?” Again I declined. “Well, then, I hope you don’t begrudge me some myself. Gareth,” he said, addressing the driver, “would you be a dear and fetch me some Amontillado? Then kindly clean up the surgical suite. I fear I left it quite a mess.”

The Welshman nodded once and disappeared up the deep-end’s sole ladder, his footfalls receding into the darkness. Seconds later he returned, expertly navigating the ladder with a sherry glass in one hand. I found myself wondering how he would have managed it with two drinks.

He set the sherry on the desk atop the blotter, and then ducked behind the plastic sheeting, three-thousand-dollar suit and all. Soon, I heard the sound of a hose running, and pink water sluiced across the tiles from beneath the sheeting, headed toward the floor drain at the center of the deep end.

“Please,” he said, gesturing at the leather club chairs opposite the desk. “Sit down. We’ve much to talk about.”

I did as he requested, eyeing awkwardly the desk’s contents while the patchwork man maneuvered his electric wheelchair into place. The breeze generated by the anemometer had shifted the mountain of paper atop the desk, and unearthed treasures that had heretofore been hidden to me. Two in particular caught my eye.

The first was a Maneki Neko figurine — you know, the sort of chintzy ceramic cats that grace the counter of every noodle house and pachinko parlor from here to Hokkaido. They’re meant to bring good fortune to whosoever owns them; I had reason to believe this one did that one better. See, a year or so back, I wound up in a tussle with a demon, a demon I killed with a talisman identical to this one. Far as I knew at the time, that talisman was unique. Now, I suspected, I was looking at another.