A Book Of Tongues (29 page)

She put her hand almost
in
Chess’s grievous central wound,
hovering right above his open rib-cage, only to have it close with
a sticky Venus Flytrap snap, trying for the fingers themselves.
Startled, she tried to yank back, but seemed unable to move — was
caught, squirming, that same meat-to-fluid
slide
of hex-on-hex
drawing hard at her, the way a five-year drunk inhales his night’s
first jolt.

And all the while mould grew over Chess, flourishing with each
wave of her stolen juice — a cocoon of green, a husk that turned gold,
then brown. Then peeled away, in its turn to reveal a fresh new
Chess, naked, re-skinned once again. Perfect as ever.

Perhaps more so, even . . . seeing how they all of them — even
Pinkerton, even Songbird — gave out a collective hungry gasp at the
sight of him, like it’d reached down into their privates and
twisted
.

“Aw, shit,” was all Morrow found he had left to say, on the subject,
before slumping backwards into similar unconsciousness.

The sunlight had angled and deepened only to afternoon, but
Morrow felt he could sleep for days. “And everything after that . . .
you know.” He massaged at his forehead, fighting not to yawn.

Pinkerton stroked his beard. “You deserve a medal, Agent
Morrow,” he said gravely. “And were there any way to cast you one
this minute, I’d do so.” One side of his mouth lifted. “Though I’d
dearly love to see the faces of the men, when we tell them how ’twas
earned.”

Morrow stared at the table-top. “Thank you, sir,” he replied, in a
mutter so low he could only hope Pinkerton would put its distinct
lack of enthusiasm down to a state of impolite but understandable
exhaustion. After all, he hadn’t found out until waking — in one of
a convoy of stagecoaches thundering back to the Pinks’ unofficial
headquarters in Tampico port — that the pile of rubble they’d dug
him from had actually been a too-damn-large part of Mexico City
itself. The quake he’d kicked off down in that dreadful world below
had wreaked sympathetic damage on a monumentally destructive
scale.

This sort of thing starts wars
, Morrow thought.
If anyone ever
reckons just what exactly happened. . . .

Once out of the debriefing, however, the air smelled suddenly
clearer. He’d forgotten just how bad the incense-and-gunpowder
stink produced by Songbird’s opening ritual, when she’d stripped
Rook’s mojo-bag geas from him, must have clung. Still, a bath might
be in order, before he bedded down.

Upstairs, he came on Hosteen conferring with a Mexican
sawbones in front of Chess’s chamber door — authority writ large in
every limb of him, like he’d negotiated on the Agency’s behalf his
entire life. “Pinkerton says he needs Mister Pargeter fit to travel,
Doc.”

“
Señor
, he may not live out the night. That man is down in Mictlan
again, I think. By tomorrow, he’ll either be better or dead.”

Hosteen clicked his tongue impatiently, and turned away — past
Morrow, who he seemed intent on ignoring outright. But Morrow
wasn’t having any.

“Good to see you made it here all right, Kees,” he said.

“Uh huh,” Hosteen flung back, over his shoulder. “Too bad
Chess
didn’t.”

Morrow shut the door of his room, leaned back against it and let
himself hang there, boneless. Felt how every part of him ached with
roughly the same intensity, an all-over throb.

Sleep,
he thought.
Sleep.
Until —

He heard it rise, slowly, softly — that shuttery click-clack again,
wooden-soft, hollow as a rotted log. Blue sparks appearing at the
very edges of his vision, sizzling.

Aw,
hell
no, damn it. Just — NO.

Morrow half-ran to the wash-basin, splashed his face and shook
his head, as though he could throw the last three-days-that-were-thirty off just by willing it. Kept his eyes shut throughout, black
shading to red, ’til the sound receded and there was nothing but his
own pulse to hammer at the world’s edges, his own breath to hiss in
his ears like the sea.

But when he opened them once more, it was no dice: Rook’s face
hung inside the mirror, staring right into his own. Like they were
contemplating each other through a damn window.

Ed.

“Reverend.”

I see you got that spell of mine took off you, in the interim — she’s a
good one ’bout her business, that Miss Songbird. Ain’t she?

“Sure is, yeah,” Morrow agreed.

And you’ve told your tale by now, I’m certain — must’ve gotten quite
the reaction from your boss. But you didn’t tell them the absolute whole
of it, though, did you?

“No, Reverend. I did not.”

And now it was Rook’s turn to smile, finally, awful as ever.
Awfuller.

Good man,
he “said.”

Hardly,
Morrow thought. And bowed his painful head against
the cool tin surface, eyes shutting once more, to await further
instructions.

In the room next door, meanwhile, Chess Pargeter’s body lay in bed,
while his lost soul loped nameless against the Sunken Ball-Court’s
sluggish currents headlong, black water breaking in stagnant waves
to his knees — stinking of old death, no part left of him that didn’t
hurt. Off in the distance, he saw a blue and smoking light sizzling
beneath that constant rain of knives which fell, blade-first, all
around him: a torch, maybe? Lantern? Something to anchor him in
the endless darkness’s midst, anyhow. Something maybe worth the
following.

Skinless, he stumbled on, thanking the God he didn’t believe in
there were no mirrors handy. Because even without one, he knew
himself horrific: nose’s bone gleaming cuttlefish-white from a red
mess of face, exposed eyes clicking dryer with every useless blink.
And the pain, Jesus,
pain
everywhere, so much it faded to nothing
whenever he tried to concentrate on reckoning it exactly. Like flies
buzzing on exposed nerve.

At least he had his guns yet, as the belt’s further torment
proved, tenderizing the laid-open meat of his waist with every
step. He didn’t even want to think about what must hang, nude and
knocking, beneath it.

At his chest’s centre a gaping hole sat open, mouthing the awful
wind.

The tunnels narrowed as he went, closing ’til all he could see was
skulls, flowers, skulls. Eventually, he turned a sharp corner, and
fetched up against a skeleton twenty feet high, leaning quizzical
over the wall of bony brainpans, which set up a great wailing.
Ixchel,
this said, inexplicably.
You . . . are hers.

No, I damn well ain’t,
the dreamer snapped back, fast enough —
though he couldn’t quite recall, himself, why he was so insulted by
the implication.

At that very moment, though, another figure leapt up out of
nowhere, squatted atop the wall, leering down at him. Wrapped in a
mantle of feathers worked with skulls and crossed bones, this new
phantom had a small disk set where its foot should be — pitch-black,
yet still shiny enough to reflect the dreamer’s current haggard lack
of face, in horrid detail: all nude eyes, his scalp askew ’round his
shoulders with the rest of his head-hide split wide in two rotten
peels, turned inside-out.

Ah,
this figure said, undressing him further with its awful gaze.
So you are not sweet Sister Ixchel’s ixiptla, after all. Who does
that make you, then, little king? Little sweetmeat?

And oh, he
should
be able to answer that one, he thought, cursing
himself for straining after what was once so uncommon clear. But
there was only the pain, worse than ever, everywhere at once. A
white-hot eraser. A salt-lick scrape.

Then a chorus of voices entered his head, in fragment.

Reverend Rook . . . everyone knows you’re his bitch.

You Engarish Oo-nah’s boy,
wei?

So there you are, at long last. Such a
big
man, wiv your guns. . . .

With the most important voice of all saved for last, rumbling low
as thought up through hot flesh, gentle and terrible all at once:
What
wouldn’t I do, for you? Damn my own soul, gladly.

And . . . that was it, right there. That was enough.

“Name’s Chess Pargeter, you skinny motherfucker,” he managed,
at last, through lipless teeth. “I mean, seein’ how you’re prob’ly the
Devil himself . . . you really ought t’ve heard of me.”

And before the spooky bastard could tell him any different, he
gave him both barrels, right in his damn fleshless skull.

Then he woke, but didn’t. Saw himself on the hotel-room bed, gyved
at wrist and ankle — hung above his own empty body and watched it
glow, a flesh candle.

The smell of the place — burnt wood cut with garbage, plus
a chamber-pot whiff of sex’s unmistakable long-stood stink —
reminded Chess fiercely of the last time he’d been fever-caught,
when small.
Inflammation of the appendices
, the whorehouse’s live-in barber-cum-abortionist’d called it — a churn of pain, pushing out
the side of Chess’s stomach in a sore, swollen curve.

How he’d kicked and raved! They’d had to hold him down,
English Oona getting him briskly lit on smoke and cradling his head
as the “doctor” cut into him without benefit of alcohol, let alone
ether. Now and then, she’d turn Chess’s head so he could puke in a
blue porcelain basin with a chipped rim. It came in endless racking
waves of pain and nausea, nausea and pain, eventually blotting him
out entirely.

And much later, resurfacing to the agony of his wound — black
stitches through seeping red skin, rucked like a bad seam — he’d
been soothed back to sleep by the regular creak and heave of her
fucking the Doc a bare hand’s-breadth away, for payment.

But this was now — the agonies of Mictlan-Xibalba were gone at
last. His body lay right there in front of him, intact as ever . . . aside
from one little missing part, of course. For fine as it might look from
the outside, it lay doubly empty — pithed, a shucked husk.

You took my heart, you son-of-a-bitch,
he thought, “to” Rook —
whose very absence, he found, hurt him almost as much.
Reached
down inside and took it, and then . . . you gave it away to that evil whore
from Hell, right in front of me. Let
her
take the damn thing, and
eat
it.

Yet that wasn’t entirely so, either: he’d
given
his heart away,
gladly. Like the fool Oona always called him.

Yet here a voice intruded, neither thought nor conjuration, so
much, as . . . simply
there
. And said:
Aw, quit foolin’ yerself, you great
pansy. You never even ’ad no ’eart worth the losin’, to begin with.

Yet forget that, pelirrojo, conquistador. Forget it all, and
listen.

And gradually — Chess became aware of voices filtering through
the chamber-walls, muttering and indefinite. Without making any
sort of decision to do so, he sent his consciousness drifting that-a-way, random and thoughtless as any eavesdropping bird. After a
moment, the wall itself grew porous, seeping away in foggy sections,
revealing — not another room, but the memory of another room,
another place.

Outside Splitfoot’s, the moon hung heavy, bright as the devil’s
coin. Under it stood Ed Morrow, looking north — ’til Reverend Rook
flickered into being beside him, and offered him an already-lit cigar,
which Morrow waved away. And as Rook pulled deep, blew out, the
smoke rose up languid into the night sky, catching light from the
window Chess knew he himself had lain behind that same night,
trapped in that bitch Ixchel’s toils, having his rebellious body put
through its paces.

You should’ve saved me that, you bastard,
he thought,
with all the
crap you’d spewed hitherto concerning love, and loyalty. Would’ve, for
sure, you’d ever really cared for me at all.

“Well, listen to you — big man wiv ’is guns, whinin’ away at lost
love like a baby whore. Ain’t too proud
now
, are ya?”

She was sitting on the bed, behind him. Or — above him? Beside
him.
Inside
him.

That same smell as ever, pussy-wash and opium-cookings, acrid
on the tongue. Her hair fell rust-red around him, and as she grinned
down, he could see the holes where her teeth had once held gold.

“You . . . you’re damn well dead.”

“’Cause your fancy-man says I am? Well, ’e’d know, of course.”

“You wanna get the fuck away from me, old woman. . . .”

“’Ow old you think I
was
? ’Ad
you
when I was only fourteen, and
damn if that didn’t knock all the other kids I might’ve borne right
out of me. So thanks for that,
son
, if for bloody nothin’ else.”

“That what you’re here for? To thank me?”

“Oh, lovey . . .” She made a moue possibly intended as endearing,
which might’ve even looked so, if it hadn’t pulled her face skullishly
gaunt. “Ain’t you never thought maybe I went somewheres
better
—
that I might finally be ’appy enough t’say all the things I never ’ad no
inclination to, back there? ’Ow I might pray it ain’t far too late to tell
my son just ’ow much I always
loved
’im?”

Chess stared — then finally burst out laughing. Insulting, and
frankly meant to be — yet Oona’s face didn’t change. Over and over
Chess tried to recover himself, then looked on that awful smile, and
was helplessly swept up once more. It was only the sight of his own
body on the bed below — so passive and still — that finally cooled the
hysteria again.

Voice still shaky: “Oh thank Christ, you ain’t her at all. Can’t be.”

“Can’t I?” Smile still unchanging, more and more maskish by the
moment. “Didn’t I never make a joke, then?”

“Not when it was on yourself. So if you ain’t her, then . . . just who
the fuck
are
you?”