Mortality Bridge (15 page)

Several demons sit on thickframed chairs and read thick books by the glow of tall white candelabra oddly necessary in the angry shifting light. The bonfire’s constant crackle an enormous beast charging through a dry and brittle forest. Even a hundred yards away Niko’s forehead grows wet from the heat.

He means to give the bonfire a wide berth but a voice behind him stops him in his tracks. “Guten Abend, Herr Doktor. Sind Sie deutsch?”

Niko turns to see a demon standing near him, black and saillike wings outspread and drumming in the bonfire’s wind. She would look carved from onyx if not for her pendulous breasts.

“£um Beide, nein,” he replies. “Kein doktor bin ich, auch kein deutscher.”

The demon looks surprised. “Nein? Sind sie nicht Herr Doktor Faust aus Heidelberg?”

“Nope,” says Niko, “I’m a musician. An American.”

“Ah, the mortal. We heard about you.”

“News travels fast.”

She grins. “You know what they say about idle hands.” Her dagger teeth are obsidian as the rest of her. Her eyes are black and have no color but what they reflect.

“Why did you think—” and realizes as he says the next three words that he has just spoken that language “—I was German?”

“Most everybody in this section is.” She indicates men staked beside their drumhead skins. “The guests, I mean.”

“Why are these men here?”

“Well. They were bad.”

“But why this torture? What was their crime?”

“I’ll show you.” She indicates the bonfire.

Niko hesitates. “I’m really trying to get to the center. Can you tell me—”

“It’s an infinite plain, bucko. Ain’t no center.”

“There’s a head office I’m sure. Somewhere the boss parks his ass.”

“Hey hey.” She lowers her trident meaningfully. “Do I show up where you work and piss on the french fry cooker?”

“Never mind. Sorry I asked. Have a nice day.” He starts away. Onyx frowns, one long claw laconically scratching a breast. “Make you a deal.”

“I’ve had it down to here with deals.”

She cocks her head uncertainly. “A trade then. Play some music for us and I’ll tell you how to reach the—” she grins frighteningly “—head office.”

Niko considers. “One song.”

She grins. “You have dealt with us before.” She holds up three knobby dangerous fingers. “Three.”

“Two.”

She claps her hands. “Done.” Her dark wings flap and furl and rustle when she moves toward the bonfire. “Ahh. Nothing like hot air under your wings. How you mortals stand not being able to fly is beyond me.”

“We fly.”

“What, in airplanes?” Her wings convulse. “Never get me up in one of those things.” She shoves three inches of clawed finger into her fierce broad nose and swabs it and yanks it out and then examines the lump that quivers there. She flicks it away and it hits the ground and squacks and scampers off. She puts her finger in her mouth and turns toward the bonfire. “Walk this way, mortal man.”

“If I could walk that way.”

“Don’t start with me.”

THE CHAIRS ON which the clustered demons sit are made of bones removed from the staked men, who cry out every time a demon sits or stands or shifts about. The demons make a point of sitting or standing or shifting about a lot. Onxy tells him that the men staked here are nazis. “They feel everything we do to them, even after we take them apart.” She pulls a wad of green mucus from her catslit eye and stretches it like taffy and loops it round her palms. “We have a lot of latitude with the guests. And we’re very efficient you know. No part of the nazi is wasted.” She forms the band of mucus into a catscradle. “Thumbsies?”

Niko ignores her and sets his guitar case on the shadowcrawling ground.

A demon reading on a thighbone chair uses a strip of blond scalp to mark his place in the skinbound bloodlettered volume of Mein Kampf he peruses by the light of humanfat candles glowing in an armbone candelabrum. The demon tosses the book into the crackling bonfire and in the distance someone screams in pleading German.

Another demon kicking spiked heels against the legs of his bonechair offers Niko a deepfried pork rind from an upended skull cookie jar with clacking jaws.

Niko fights to ignore the pure dementia of his surroundings as he thumbs the latches on the hardcase. The demons stare as he draws the Dobro from the plush like some implement of ritual. The rounded body of the steel guitar throws firelight back upon the curious gazes of the gathered demons as he shrugs into the strap and bends to the case and opens the storage compartment and takes out a three inch length of burnished steel pipe that he slides onto his bare ringfinger.

The demon munching pork rinds stills his kicking legs and crunching teeth. “Oooh. Pretty.”

Niko realizes the pork rinds aren’t made of pork.

Onyx touches Niko’s arm. Her deadly fingers feverish hot. “Chair?”

Surprised by the hospitality Niko starts toward the proffered thighbone chair, then stops. The demons grin and wait. The skinless nazis beyond the bonfire struggle and moan.

Niko nods toward a flattish rock a few feet away. “I’ll just sit there.”

“Aww,” says Pork Rind. “He no fun.”

Niko sits upon the rock and strums an open chord. He twists the Dobro’s E-string key while he tunes it against the D. He frowns and adjusts the D. Around him grotesque figures gather waiting. The bonfire pops as Niko studies metal lines and curves distorting flames and nightmare faces.

Demons nudge each other as the mortal bends to play. Waylaid deep within the old world’s bones he strums his steelbodied guitar on a warm flat rock before flensed genocides and congregated demons, and he plays slow somber blues and thinks about life’s shitty sense of humor. The area around the bonfire oddly quiet as he slowly rocks with his eyes shut and his mouth a little open and his voice emerging as the everbending cry of metal slide against the Dobro’s strings. The fire’s crackle loud. The demons still and silent as they listen. The staked and skinless Germans given brief and miraculous surcease from their affliction, the only such reprieve they will receive for all of time to come.

Niko bends a final trio of a slow atonal upswing stranger by far than any cry ever released in this forsaken place and aching to resolve. But resolve it finally does, a tight harmonic fit that fades into the heated air.

He mutes the strings and opens his eyes. And starts at the disfigured assemblage before him. In shifting monochrome chiaroscuro they stand eager and quiet and staring. Firelight on leather and fur and scales. Drumhead wings rustle like sheets hung in a gale. They have flocked from all around in the short time of Niko’s playing and now they stand or sit or squat or perch attentive and oddly respectful as Niko looks up from the Dobro and sees them hearing him. He has been so lost in the familiar world of his music that he has in the brief span of his fretting forgotten the ruined world he’s really in and what he is rehearsing for. That lostness, that going away, that letting go is why he’s always played in the first place. Because even more than drinking whiskey or shooting smack or making love, music is the only place where he can go and not be there anymore. With those other means of going away forbidden to him ever since the Deal, music really has become his one permitted drug.

“Fuck,” says a demon near the front, a shortbeaked nightmare with an ornate silverhandled florentine dagger in its human-leather belt.

Onyx elbows Florentine in the head without looking. Her thornlike elbow spike impales the demon’s skull. The demon doesn’t even flinch as Onyx yanks her elbow from his head and wipes a blood tear from her glossy marble cheek upon a sculpted talon. Contoured in the bonfire’s light she looks like something made of space itself. The wells of her eyes find Niko’s. “Uno mas.”

Hubbub among her colleagues. “We could get in trouble,” one of them says.

Onyx jerks her head and two demons detach themselves from the boneless and eviscerated soul they’re doubleteaming. They grab the trepidant protester by his feathered arms and naked chicken legs and swing him in big arcs while the others call out Ooone twooo threeee. At which they let him go to arc high up and crash headfirst atop the bonfire. Sparking ashes lead brief escaping lives and a brighter patch of glowering heat within the burning hill is exposed. The nazis resume their wails as the pitched demon claws through their charring ember parts to the bottom of the bonfire and scampers from the halloween coals and brushes embers from his smoking feathers without another word.

“Song,” a demon orders from the rear.

A castanet clattering of clapped beaks sounds approval. Other demons stamp their tridents on the hard ground. Birdand batlike wings spread wide and fan. Near the fire two demons caper and cavort. One uses a found fingerbone to play a rack of whitepicked ribs like a washboard. The other has a line of half a dozen silent screaming skulls thrust onto his priapic cock.

Niko looks back down at the guitar and wipes filthy hands on grimy jeans. Come on, son, you’ve played worse gigs than this. That Kiwanis dance when you were hurting bad.

Niko noodles and tunes and gazes at the twisted assemblage. What do you call a group of demons? A gaggle? A herd? A murder? If they were angels they would be a host.

Of their own accord his arms embrace the Dobro and he strums a big fat wall of texas shuffle with a strong and syncopated upstroke, brazen and uptempo. Niko’s playing has caught a whiff of the demons’ bacchanalia and handed it back to them and they obligingly stomp and cavort and whirl in one big feedback loop.

And like a feedback loop the music starts to howl. Something dark has always lived in Niko’s music, something he’s spent decades mastering if not overcoming. But down here darkness is a force of nature and the demon he has nurtured and despised within himself might very well be given flesh. Might tap him on the shoulder and address him by his name.

These demons have a nose for Niko’s darkness and they make it all their own. As he plays they dance and jump and shudder and convulse and shriek. One screams in abhorrent and inhuman languages and yanks his forked and footlong tongue with both reptilian hands. One sprays crackling acid semen on a row of screaming skinless nazis as he’s masturbated by a giggling other. One claws at her own face with razor talons. Seeing her two others leave behind the pile of gutted corpses they are rolling in like happy puppies and hurry to her so that they can lick the flowing ichor from her pitted cheeks. Whooping demons wrestle in the bonfire like children in a sandbox. Their wingbeats fan the smolder to a burnished gold. The music’s beat is taken up with thighbones rapping everstartled skulls and fingerbones scratch rib accompaniment.

The hub of this debauchery sits rooted on his pedestal with his right foot tapping and his right hand doing most of the work. He senses the circus of depravity that gyres and shudders about him to the beat of his own music and yet is apart from it. But Niko does share one thing with these dancing demons and these suffering genocides: all of them are lost, they are lost, they are lost.

So lost are they are now within their saturnalia that none notices the small shadow cast by no light against no figure, a long thin shadow that pools into their midst like oil. That swells and rises and shapes itself like a djinn from a bottle into a corpulent mass of ebon flesh that towers quivering above the manic congregation until it is a vast and naked carnival of bloat that clenches carsized fists above its round and hairless boulder of a head that shakes from side to side and swings huge jowls like turkey wattles above the hillocks of its breasts. This black flesh mountain bellows like a warhead’s detonation and abruptly now the revels cease.

Niko’s mind rejects the impossible thing before him. Demons he has been able to accept. Intimidating and disgusting as they are, they’re still humanoid. Convincing costumes. But this. This conflation of gluttony cannot possibly exist. It should suffocate under its own pestilent obesity. The sagging acres of inky skin, the runnels and valleys and craters and folds, look more like lavaflow than flesh. This is not a creature. It is geologic, tectonic, it should have its own gravity and perhaps a moon or two.

And indeed it does have satellites, for demons wheel about it like lured moths around a spotlight that absorbs illumination rather than emits it. They rend their flesh and cry out and abase themselves, their wings spasmodic as they offer gouged or torn and dripping offerings of themselves to this alien deity.

The black cathedral of glut has eyes for none of them. Rearing monolithic above Niko it inclines its baldmountain head and looks down on him with eyes as black as any sunless cavern underneath the ocean floor. What face there is below those seacave eyes is half eclipsed by the black planet of its pulsing belly.

An irontree hand swings up to point at Niko.
YOU.
The pronoun is a booming surf.

Niko cowers and his sphincter clutches. The rotting mistral of the titan’s breath breaks over him. Reek of sewage and spoiled milk. “Muh, me?” His voice ridiculously small and ineffectual.

YOU ARE THE MUSICIAN.

“I, uh, yeah, I—”

WHO HAS ALLOWED YOU TO DEFILE THIS PLACE?

“Defile?” Niko feels stupid and afraid. Supernatural cars and sadistic demons and giant threeheaded dogs he’s dealt with pretty okay considering. But this continent of menace has caught him by surprise and it’s huge and powerful and really pissed off.

WHO HAS ALLOWED YOU TO DEFILE THIS PLACE?

“Who let me play?”

WHO HAS ALLOWED YOU—

“To defile the place, okay.” Niko glances at prostrate demons everywhere, faces shielded from the dread black light of titan gaze, wings tight to their bodies and claws opened above their heads in abject supplication. The bonfire coruscates upon the ripped and bleeding figures of the nazis staring walleyed at this gargantuan apparition. “Uhhh.” Niko feels an odd pang of guilt as he spies her, midnight black among the cowering demons. He begins to raise a traitorous finger to single her out but checks himself. Onyx has done him no harm and in fact was going to help him in exchange for the diversion of his playing several songs. Niko rests his hands upon the metal body of his guitar. The slide still on his finger glimmers firelight. “No one. I was only—”