Urban Nordica: Chainbreaker
Halfway Between the Sewer and the Moon
The manhole opening hung above Miriah like a tarnished moon, grayish mist closing over to the point that she grew increasingly uncertain as to whether it was still the open manhole. Whether the silvery wisps around the edges were the ghostly light reflecting off bricks and concrete, or off the edges of thin clouds in an otherwise clear black sky. She was hanging from one slimy metal rung – bolted to a concrete wall or perhaps into the sky itself – and an eternity more seemed to stretch out below her. Far, far down the bottom, she could almost see water.
“Great,” she muttered. “Water and holes; why is it always water and holes?”
She got no answer bar the sound of laughter-like splashes and the giggling eddies below. Perhaps most perturbing, no noise followed her down from the moonish manhole. No snapping jaws or Sigmund’s sing-song mad voice. No screams or yells or sound of fighting; nothing. Nervous, she began to slowly climb – and going up the slimy bars was much harder than coming down had been. Longer, too, she thought, and the further she climbed the more and more removed the manhole
(moon)
seemed to get.
“Jump down the wrong rabbit-hole, Alice?”
The voice nearly made her lose her grip, and she turned sharply as best she could; a hole had appeared in the wall – in the sky – slightly to her left and a little above. Inside, nonchalant and unconcerned, sat the cross-legged form of Nekro. Except it wasn’t; the lips were too black, the eyes too green, skin too corpse-flesh purple.
“Do you think my tits look big like this?” Nekro-Loki jiggled them experimentally with her hands.
“Oh god…”
“A-ha, yes!”
Swallowing hard, Miriah looked up; the manhole-moon seemed further away than ever. Downwards – not a few rungs beneath her – icy black water lapped. Desperately trying to ignore the figure next to her, Miriah began once more to climb. A blood-nailed hand caught her wrist.
“Hey hey, ma chère, might not wanna do that just yet.”
Miriah tried to yank her hand away, but the grip was like iron, and it burned; though hot or cold she couldn’t quite tell. “Let go of me,” she hissed, jamming her eyes shut against the vision. “You’re not real.”
“Oh I know, luv. But do you think it matters, I mean really? When you’re hanging halfway between the sewer and the moon, as it were. Does it matter at night when you think of people who’ve died? Think of how things might have gone differently? Maybe if you’d just gone with her that night… maybe if you’d never picked up a gun… maybe if you weren’t such a freak, if daddy still loved you… maybe you’d all be lying on your bed right now, chatting to your normal friends about normal things. Maybe you’d still be able to watch a vampire movie and not nitpick the details. Maybe, maybe, maybe in all the thousand and one little scenarios you’ve played over and over in your head. Maybe none of them are real, either. Or… maybe they are. Somewhere, somehow; and all you need to do it find the right button to press, right demon to kill–”
Something fell past Miriah’s ear, heavy and hard and fast and far, far too big for the cramped space. It hit the water below with a sickening crash, and she felt the icy spray against her heels.
Above her, the moon waxed into a cheshire-cat grin. “Miriah! What are you doing down there?” Impossibly far and dangerously close, a hand appeared inches above her head. Lien’s hand, Lien’s voice.
Except…
“It’s not her.” She did turn to the Nekro-Loki then, and it grinned at her happily.
“No shit, ma chère,” it said, the weird mixing of accents grating. “It’s not, but it could be. Isn’t that what they’ve been trying to tell you; thoughts have power. Why, here you can make anything real. Anything at all.”
Miriah head shook fiercely. “No. It’s not real.”
“What is real?”
The answer was automatic, fired off with the finality of a shotgun round. “Me, I’m real.”
All she got in reply was a laugh. “And me?” the voice had shifted once more, settling into the deep, rich not-quite American accent Miriah had grown used to over the last few days. When she next looked up, it was just Loki. “Am I real?”
Miriah frowned, sensing the trap before it came.
“Am I real because I’m here? You can touch me”– he did so, caressing the side of her face, and this time his fingers were warm and gentle –”can hear taste smell see me. I think, I’m here, and I’m a dream. An illusion created by the minds of drunk Vikings a thousand years ago who just never really went away.” He pointed to Lien’s still-outstretched hand; Miriah could see her eyes and smile shining in the moonlight, warm and inviting and confused. “Touch her. She’s real because you made her real, just like they made me real. Do you understand?”
Hesitantly, Miriah obeyed, stretching her hand just far enough to brush Lien’s outstretched fingers. A girl’s fingers; manicured and bitten, all at the same time. They were warm when she touched them, and closed around hers in a friendly grasp. Miriah jerked away as if burnt.
“No!” she cried.
“Miriah, what–” Lien’s face had gone from gently confused to outright concern.
“No, damn you! It’s not real.”
Lien’s face softened, and she giggled. “Oh, don’t be silly. Come on, everyone’s waiting for you. You’re going to miss my big debut! After everything your father’s done; don’t tell me you’re getting stage fright now.”
Dimly, Miriah caught the memory; how she had bothered her father for weeks to give Lien a chance – just a tiny chance – at his network. Nothing big, just an outlet for her beautiful, smiling face; a small part, but seen by enough people that maybe – just maybe – it would launch her…
“It didn’t happen like that,” Miriah felt the words almost choke her, pushed the thoughts of happy families and infinite possibilities down and away.
“No? But it could.”
She shook her head again. “It doesn’t work like that, it doesn’t, you can’t…”
“… rewrite the past?” The voice had changed again, back to the weird mis-mash of the Nekro-Loki. “Oh but you can, ma chère, you can. People do it all the time, and nobody notices. The world was made by God in six days, the world was licked by a cow from primordial ice, the world was created in a giant gas explosion millions of years ago.”
“But they’re not all right.”
“Why not? Says who?”
“That’s just not how things work!”
“Oh, you know that for a fact, do you? Like how vampires and demons and angels don’t exist?”
“That’s… different. They do exist.”
“Ah, obviously. And yet how many people believe they don’t? All those people, all being so wrong; doesn’t it just make you doubt? Just a teensy, tiny bit. That maybe, maybe…” Nekro-Loki leant in close, so close Miriah could feel her fetid corpse-breath against the delicate shell of her ear. “… maybe you might be wrong about something, too? Oh, luv, why won’t you just let yourself be happy?”
“Happy…” Miriah mouthed the word, looking up at Lien and the moon and dreams made real. “It will be like… like a dream. Like none of this ever existed.”
“Time to wake you from your nightmare, ma chère. Just say yes.”
The feeling at the back of her throat was sudden, hard and cold and unexpected, and Miriah found herself gagging, choking, as something cold and slimy tried to worm its way out of her mouth. With a final gag and a spit she hacked it out onto her hand; at first the small black ball confused her, sitting in the middle of her palm in a pile of sweet-smelling spit. It took her a few moments to place it, but when she did it was unmistakable; the round black ball of tapioca from the bottom of a cup of pearl tea.
She looked up into the upside-down face of Lain, hanging off the metal rungs above her like a kid on monkey bars. He was grinning like he knew the punch line to a particularly funny joke, Miriah returned his expression, and she wasn’t sure whether the next words were his or hers or both or it really didn’t matter.
“‘That’s what scares people about us, Miriah, we live our whole lives saying no, and we will always have people trying to bully us into saying yes.’”
Still grinning, she turned to the Loki-Nekro. “Sorry, ‘ma chère’, but it’s not about being happy. It’s about being – no doing – right.”
Surprisingly, Miriah-Loki just sighed. Instead, it was Lain’s face that contorted into the wickedly vicious grin. “Good choice, luv,” he said.
When his fist came down on her hand with the unforgiving force of a bowling ball, Miriah had only a few seconds in mid air to scream before she plunged into the icy water below, and her lungs were filled.
The doors to the Drif bang open with enough force that I’m surprised they don’t simply fall off. Then again, they are nine foot of solid oak, so perhaps they run to a slightly different standard of construction than your garden variety house door. After the slam come footfalls, heavy and long and crossing the length of the nave, stopping at the crossing – what passes for the dance floor at the Drif.
I sigh. “Follow the Red Velvet Lynch movie,” I yell, and a moment later a very harassed-looking Lucifer pokes his sulphurous head into the wishroom. He stops short, looking down nervously at the arcs and jags of chalk on the floor. “Don’t step on them,” I say, more for his benefit than my own.
His first question somewhat surprises me, though I guess in the long run I shouldn’t be. “Are you real?”
“No,” I say, honestly, “but then again, I never was.”
“Outside, outside I saw–”
I wave him off. “Can it. I don’t give a rat’s arse about your mental trauma.”
He seems to calm himself at that, closing his eyes and I can all-but see him pull himself together. When he next opens them, he’s back to his usual grin, but it’s strained, and his skin has taken on an off-putting waxy sheen.
“Can that shit, too,” I say. “Sit down, shut up, or leave. And don’t touch the chalk.” I don’t know why I’m reiterating the point. Or maybe I do; maybe I’m playing the game as well.
Luce seems to think my offer over for a while, before carefully inching his way into the room, making a big show of not stepping on any of my impromptu formulae. I add a few more lines, but it’s mostly just doodling in the margins; I’m more-or-less done here, now simply waiting for the one last ingredient to arrive. Doing his very best to pretend he’s not curious, Luce sits himself down on top of the cold, unused furnace.
“It’s messed up out there, man,” he says, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. “Smoke?”
“Please. Lit,” I specify. He lights them with his finger – too fucking flashy for me – and throws me one. I almost don’t catch it, and he notices.
“Blue fucked you up pretty bad, eh?”
It takes me a while to realize he’s talking about Joseph, not Blue Blue, whom I suppose he doesn’t know.
I shake my head. “No, I’m dying.” There doesn’t really seem much point in lying now. I’m backed up against the far wall in the wishroom, chalk lines sprawled out all around and above me as far as I could stretch my arms. Back when I could.
For his own part, Luce raises an eyebrow at my admission. “Dying?”
I nod. “No belief here,” I say. “At least, not like at home. Things are… different; burnt myself too bright too long and now there’s no oil left for the lamp.”
“So, what, you crawled off to some goth bar to draw pretty patterns on the floor and send yourself to the big Old God’s Home in the sky?”
“No,” I say. “I came here to win. Shame about Joseph, but… lost causes you know.”
Luce sighs. “Do I ever,” he says, and for a moment there looks like there might be something else there. It’s gone in a flash, though, and maybe my mind is just back to playing tricks on me again. Suddenly, he grins. “So is this the part where you reveal the ‘Big Plan tee-em’.” He wiggles his fingers in the air for emphasis.
I bark laughter. “Don’t flatter yourself,” I tell him. “If I was going to reveal my ‘Big Plan tee-em’”– I imitate his voice almost perfectly, that at least I can still do –“it wouldn’t be to a sack of shit nobody like you.”
He huffs. “Who’s the one dying in a corner here?”
I grin, eyes closing; behind them, all I can see is Sigmund. And a big, big bed. And ice cream. No clothes, however, are also involved. “I’m a Dying God,” I say, dreamlike, focusing more on the nice scenes on the inside of my eyelids than the room’s other occupant. “I die all the goddamn time; it’s my best quality.”
“Nice life.”
“It’s not too bad. What with all the being a god, lording over realms, money, armies, sex, fast cars, devoted worshippers, whatever floats your boat,” I grin, Luce frowns. Almost… I can almost see the cogs spinning behind his beady little eyeballs.
In the end, he just shrugs, gesturing at the floor. “What’s all this rubbish?”
“Spell,” I say. “Gonna fuck this shit right over. Spring the whole damn lotta us.”
“How does it work?”
Oh fuck me, it’s like swatting flies with bushfires. “No trick, just need some mistletoe.”
He does his best surprised face. Or maybe he really is surprised; it’s hard to tell. “Mistletoe?”
“Yeah. Conducts souls, transports them to higher states of being, that kind of crap. Gonna cast a spell on some.” I make a vague stabbing motion in the air.
Luce picks up the dreamy gesture. “And then what, stab Azaza’el?”
I nod. “Yeah. Inna eye. Won’t kill him, but hopefully it’ll shake this place up enough to burst its bubble and send us all home.”
“That simple, huh.”
“Not really,” I laugh, gesturing at the floor. “But it looks simple. Any idiot could do it, just gotta sit here and hold the stick, say ‘lok’tar ogar, maza lok’.”
Lucifer, predictably, jumps down off the incinerator. I don’t even open my eyes, know exactly where he’s going, where he thinks he’s found a clear path through the chalk-marks. Trapped and wounded; what am I going to do?
He barely gets to the outer edge of the chalk before there’s a loud metallic zap, then a huge crash as he goes flying across the room, smashing full-force into the industrial ladder-rack shelving on the walls, bringing steel and black velvet and hundreds of little trinkets down on top of him.
When the last thing has hit the floor, I give a rueful grin. “I told you not to touch the chalk.”
The bad guys are always so easy.
Miriah fell for an eternity in an instant, or perhaps an instant in eternity; it was hard to tell, sometimes. It was not, however, hard to tell the water when she fell into it, dank and slimy and foul-smelling. It was no deeper than her ankles, and she hit it hard, the jarring force sending shockwaves through her butt and spine.
“Ow!” she inadvertently cried. It was drowned out by the impotent roar of the not-beast above her, as its jaws closed around nothing but air. A moment later, its eye appeared at the hole, big and round and sickly. Pustules and boils formed around the corners, rotten and seeping.
Ignoring the pain in her legs and lower back, Miriah stood. The tunnel wasn’t terribly high, and she could all-but see her reflection in the mad round eye not a foot above her. “You always get into such a mess,” she sighed, climbing the rungs of the ladder, gently pushing her hand against the sickly wet head of the not-beast. It moved aside at her urging, and when she emerged back out on the street, Sigmund was there waiting for her. Madness shone bright in his eyes, but she no longer feared it.
“Do you understand?” he asked, and the not-godbeast gently nuzzled her shoulder. Absent-mindedly, she scratched the underside of its chin; when she pulled her fingers away, they were coated with flakey purple-black skin. The underside of the godbeast’s jaw where the skin had been removed shone with a rich, silky mauve fur.
“No,” she told Sigmund, looking straight into his eyes as she did so. “I have no fucking clue. It’s all hard and pointless and painful and I’ve got no idea why I’m doing any of it. I want to believe that there’s a point, that there’s something good and pure beneath the grime; and maybe that’s just an illusion, too, but at least it’s something new. You can’t go back, anyway.”
“No excuses,” Sigmund told her.
“No excuses,” Miriah agreed. “I’m a killer.”
“No,” Sigmund shook his head. “A killer makes excuses; a killer has a history, some sob story. Abusive parents. Dead spouses. Bad fucking day.”
“If not a killer…?”
“A warrior. Kill with honor. Kill if you must, to survive. No excuses, no regrets, no looking back.”
“No good or evil?”
Sigmund gave her a rueful grin, the not-godbeast echoed it with a mournful-sounding whine. “As an excuse?” he asked.
“No. Not an excuse; killing is the worst violation, no matter who dies or why.” Somehow it made sense, finally, staring into Sigmund’s mad eyes – one brown one ice. She could not know the higher purpose, could not know its path or direction; but she could know of its existence, and she did. “I will fight evil, so others don’t have to. I will suffer it, so others are spared. Because I believe it to be good; believe it is what I exist to do.”
“And if it isn’t?”
She shrugged. “So be it.”
“If innocents die?”
“Human or not, many things die. It is a risk I take.”
“To do Good?”
“To do what I believe is Good.”
“Is that hubris?”
“I don’t know.”
“What have you learnt?”
“Everything.”
“What do you understand?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“A guide. You but not you, something in this place but not of it. You let it take you over, maybe intentionally, maybe not. It’s hard to tell, with gods, I’ve found.”
“And him?” He pointed behind her to the godbeast, still not Loki but now standing proud and tall; unwounded and wild.
“The eater-of-souls, He Who Guards the Way.” It was her turn to smirk. “It’s a metaphor. Like you.”
“Are you ready for what comes next?”
Miriah shook her head. “No, I can never be ready. But I am always willing.”
“And the others?”
Miriah didn’t look, knew they were already far and away beyond that. “They will come, when they are ready. I can’t help them in this.”
“Good. Then take my hand.”
She did so, unafraid, willing for the light and the sensation of it. For the glimpse of… of maybe nothing beyond. When it was gone, Sigmund collapsed into her arms, and she caught his deadweight awkwardly. They were in the middle of a street, outside the Empire Motel. It was empty, but the sun shone strong and good in the sky. At the feel of it, Sigmund’s eyes fluttered open weakly.
“Did we win?” he rasped, pulling himself painfully to his feet. He looked tired, she thought, washed out and bleary-eyed, but sane. She wondered how long he’d been carrying within him whatever it was she had met; whether it had existed at all, or was merely another illusion of this place. She realized it probably didn’t really matter, in the long run. She knew what she needed to know, and that was enough.
“We won,” she replied. “Fought the good fight.”
Sigmund scoffed, but it was good natured. “For the record, I still think you’re a dangerous sociopath.”
“That’s okay, you fucking masochist psycho.”
They both grinned.
“Let’s go end this thing, shall we?”