The New Weird (24 page)

And while he waited for Edgar to turn around with his tea, Jones stripped off his ski hat and lowered his fiery brow onto one arm on the table. Closed his eyes to rest.

Yes, he would just rest a little while...until his friend finally turned around.

The Lizard of Ooze

IT’S A CITY IN A GREAT, DEEP HOLE, Ooze is, a pit black as any mine. Roads, buildings and towers cling to the walls like children trapped at the bottom of a well. Sunlight leaks in at the top, a little, a few hours a day, and darkness fills the rest, down to the monster-haunted depths.

I live between the light and darkness. I hunt what doesn't belong on our laddered stairs and narrow, pit-girdling streets. I am a Shadow of the Shadow stirps, a quiet brotherhood no better defined than smoke, no easier caught than steam.

Ooze is among the darkest of the Dark Towns, those cities hidden within the blank spaces of the map. For all that good Kentucky blue-grass grows far above our heads we may as well be worms in a cave.

Which suits me fine, pale as I am.

I was sidling along one of the streets of the Mycotic Level one night, leaning past the outflung beams of the growing trays, when I heard shouting from somewhere above me, perhaps the fifth or sixth ladderway descending from the Seats of Ease, which are the next higher level.

Quickly I scuttled up a side-ladder. Shouting is not common in Ooze ― echoes have a way of reaching far into the inky depths and returning in the mouths of strange creatures that then must be Shadow-hunted. Lives can be lost, and the bounties due to my stirps are never cheap.

The Seats of Ease are great banks of limestone panels set in ells, a high back and a narrower bench, with polished oval voids carved out of them, where the folk of Ooze meet to relieve their bowels and discuss politics, sex, and dancing. There are usually chattering groups there, or young folk with their robes hitched around their waists holding hands and kissing.

Tonight there was a mob, a group of Fine-Icers and some several folk from smaller stirpes, and even a few limerocks, those sad neutrals who hold no real place in the pageant of our city's life. They were crowded around the base of the fifth ladderway, shouting and shoving. They were mobbing someone to death.

And to sunlight with that,
I thought. If anyone's to be killed here, it's me going to do the killing. I stroked my shadow suit into noctilucence and drew the Blades Sinister and Truth. Roaring with the voice ofwinds all Shadows know, I stormed the crowd from behind. "Stand free, there, or I'll cut you open and charge by the slice!"

The crowd parted as crowds will at such sound and fury, though I was smaller than almost all of them. I let the Blades dance, my hands spinning, so that the bright blur of my shadow suit would catch their eyes ― and turn their knives ― while the Blades held their fear.

Their parting pushed back further, making a kind of lane through to a little man, even smaller than I, crouched on the splintered decking of the ladderway's landing. His hands were folded over his head in anticipation of the kicking he had been about to receive and spilled around him was ―

"Ah," I said.

No wonder they were ready to kill. This was one of the perverted folk from above, twisted by their sneering little civilization and regimented, line-scarred maps, and he'd brought his
food
with him.

Eating in public was a capital offence here in Ooze. The mob was certainly within the bounds of propriety. Our visitor was already dead, though his sentence had not yet been carried out.

"It's my business now," I announced to the crowd, Blades still dancing. "Get on."

"I'm fetching the Reliables," someone shouted, safely hidden behind several departing Fine-Icers.

"Fetch away, friend," I said with a smile in my voice. The Reliables were our police stirps, never interested in extra trouble. "They'll certainly stand aside for a Shadow in this matter."

Then I crouched beside the dead man, whose cowering head was pointed away from me, and sheathed the Blade Truth. The truth was already known. I steeled my resolve, then sniffed deeply, scenting for his sin.

Something light and earthy...corn meal, perhaps, baked in a cake. A pungent scent, with undertones of sugars and something sharp...beans, in a rich sauce. And finally the rich smell of protein with salty, sweaty overtones. Fish.

I poked the dead man with the Blade Sinister, its tip sliding perhaps a quarter inch into his buttock.

"Hey!" he screeched, jerking his head up from his crouch.

"Hello, dead man," I said. "What brings you here in your perversions?"

"I...I...fish. I am a fisheater. You cannot touch me." He looked wildly around, lank, pale hair slapping against his shoulders. Even past the food, I could smell the sour reek of his sweat and the musk of his fear.

"We have no fisheaters here. You mistake us for the drug-crazed visionaries of Cui-ui." Cui-ui was a Dark Town in distant Nevada whose neutrals assiduously consumed fish, careful to keep the watery reek on their breath at all times for a casual inspection too disgusting to contemplate.

"Cui-ui," he whispered. "I
am
of Cui-ui. What is this place?"

I studied him carefully. Narrow face, dark protuberant eyes glinting in my city's dim shadows. No body hair at all, skin slick as skimmed fat. And he was dressed in lumpy gray robes no more attractive than his person. His breath certainly stank of fish.

"Perhaps you are of Cui-ui," I said, "but that buys you no right of passage in Ooze. If your story is worthy, I might listen to it, but first you must rid yourself of perversion."

At Sinister's point, I forced him to clean up the disgusting but strangely alluring food ― the smells tempted me toward his sweet filth ― dumping it back into a little box that had broken open in a tumble he seemed to have taken down the fifth ladderway. When he was done I dimmed my shadow suit's noctilucence, sheathed the Blade Sinister, and nudged my little Cui-ui dead man into motion. We would go talk awhile, in a place where my eventual slitting of his throat would be less work for me or the Blade Sinister.

He was a pervert ― I would take him to a comestitorium.

"We were sent to Paducah," said the little dead man huddled on the bench. "Something there was wanted by Silver-scales stirps back in Cui-ui. They chose fisheaters for the journey."

He shivered, hunched even smaller in the tight, curtained confines of the comestitorium stall. We shared the space, he and I, a tiny hard bench with a little hinged shelf, hung with heavy curtains designed to block both smell and sound.

Some acts, like eating and murder, are best committed alone.

"I have been Above," I said, surprising myself with a twinge of sympathy. "The world of the map is.challenging."

"Inside a little truck alone among ourselves it was not so bad," he admitted, looking up at me. "Until we stopped to ea ― " He caught his words.

"You learn fast." An easy lie. He was a fool.

"Ooze is not unknown in Cui-ui."

"The rest of the world takes a different view than we do here of certain bodily functions," I said, "but I am of a progressive bent, and traveled besides. You have nothing more to fear for your words."

"Just my life," the fisheater said, hunching tighter. "A clown attacked us in the parking lot of Denny's, killed two of my fellows, then dropped me down here. As I fell I thought I would die, wondered why I already hadn't. Then I bounced through nets and webbing, which finally stopped my fall. It took a while, but I struggled through that tangled mess to the streets. You know the rest." He paused, then shivered. "I just want to go home."

No wonder those Fine-Icers wanted to kill him at the Seats of Ease,
I thought. His story reeks of their negligence. No one should have escaped the capture nets unobserved. "Tell me more about this clown."

"He was terrible, pale and fat, and he moved like an eel. Teeth like one, too."

"Did he say anything?"

The little dead man actually smiled there, his teeth gleaming slightly in the dark of the booth. "'Aaaarrgh,' mostly. But he said it a lot. Until he threw me down this hole. As he did it, he yelled, 'Tell the Lizard I'm coming.'"

"Hmm." My left hand drifted to the hilt of the Blade Sinister. This would be the time to kill my visitor, and sluice the resultant mess through the cloaca in the floor of our comestitorial stall.

But why would a clown threaten our Lizard? The greatest monster of our Stygian depths, within whose jaws we all dwell, the Lizard of Ooze is older than the rocks around it and more terrible than the fires of the sun.

His story bore further investigation. As a result, it bought him some more life. "We must go to the Gillikins," I announced.

"Does this mean I live?" Hope crept into the little dead man's voice.

"Doubtful," I said. "The Gillikins are the stirps charged with propitiating the depths." The same depths in which we Shadows hunted monsters. We of Ooze are ever practical, ready to rely on one solution when another fails.

He gathered his little food box and followed me.

In my grandfather's time an itinerant window dresser found his way to Ooze from the Cities of the Map. Such a thing is rare but not unknown, though Ooze gets fewer visits than more accessible Dark Towns. Being somewhat more persuasive of the value of his life than most outsiders, he was interrogated by the West Witches in lieu of being killed, then lived among the Gillikin priests for a while. Finally he made a spirit journey to see the Lizard, from which he never returned to us.

Our names, though, have come back to us from above in other books and stories. Grandfather always held that somehow this mouthy little man with a talent for words had talked his way past even our greatest guardian-monster and on into the outside world.

I have stood upon one of the Lizard's crystalline teeth and smelled the slow, planetary cycle of its breath, scented as it is with cold granite, hot rock, and the nostalgic odor of time. I even saw the blink of one eye, lid crashing like a landslide down a glistening curved wall riven with more colors than even the flowers of the sunlit earth might know.

And still it took all my skill, wit, weaponry and luck to escape with my life, to become a Shadow of the Shadow stirps. I do not believe any single man unaided and unprepared can stand before the Lizard, least of all some bobble-headed wordsmith who got lost on his long, slow way to Kansas.

Nor some little fisheater from Cui-ui in distant Nevada.

I grinned at the thought of seeing the dead man try.

The Gillikin priests lived in a daub-and-wattle temple clinging to the base of one of Ooze's deepest towers, far down in permanent shadow. It was a great messy affair, most resembling a giant agglomeration of bug spit and bird shit, constantly maintained by slaves and limerocks who climb about it unharnessed. If one falls, and damages the wall on the way down, their family is fined the cost of repairs.

Other than the temple itself, the fungal glow of the lower walls of Ooze and the very faint stirrings of sun and moonlight from high above are the only illumination permitted within the temple precincts.

The temple entrance was a triangular gate of bones, thin and graceful, relics of some ice-age teratornis that had once flown proud over the glaciers of Kentucky in the early days of Ooze. Small rivets were set into the rising legs of the gate, each tiny metal head looped back to support silver chains interlinked with black opals and bluish amber, which in turn glittered from the flickering light of oil lamps within, so the Gillikin temple was warded by a curtain of stars.

We passed through the silver-chained curtain, my little dead man and I, and presented ourselves to Brother Porter. He was a wrinkled man, longer in body than I by a head and more, but bent beneath age and long service so we saw eye to eye, his bristly, rheumy-eyed head swinging on the bone-knobbed crane of his neck. His rough linen robe matched the dried-mud interior of the antechamber, which was lit by flickering oil lamps.

"Here there then, little Shadow man," he said to me, his voice raddled as his face and body. "The Lizard's writ runs here more than its blood." One quavering hand poked toward my Blades. "What would you be having of us, Mister Two-Knives? None enters here without price."

I bowed, brushing my hands across the Blades Sinister and Truth before presenting empty palms. "A stranger is come among us, with a message for Its Scaliness. I thought to present him to the priesthood rather than sending the wretch straight down the hole on his own. He is my blood price."

"Kindness in generosity, Shadow," muttered Brother Porter. He swung to face the Cui-ui fisheater, whose face had grown blank with a whole new layer of terror. "And you are wanting to die slow or fast, in glory or in peace?"

"Please, sir," said the little dead man. "I'd prefer not to die at all."

"Coward," said Brother Porter.

"Easily said at your age," I told him. "Please ring up WallEye or Thintail. Not one of the scalebrains."

Scalebrains were Gillikin priests so far descended into contemplation of the Lizard of Ooze that they had achieved permanent communion with the great old reptile, and were not much good anymore for conversation, let alone enlightenment. For one, they often tried to bite people who spoke to them.

"Aye, and before ya I'll place them." Brother Porter shuffled off behind a leather curtain, speaking in some gravelly place deep within his throat that produced no more words, only a sense of pained finality. There followed a muffled echoing of bells, different pitches and tempi, part of the secret language of the Gillikin priests of which I knew only a little.

I understood him to warn someone of visitors, then made a request I could not follow ― sending for one of the priests, I presumed. Bells answered, Brother Porter coughed, the antechamber fell silent except for the whimpered breathing of the little dead man.

After a while the leather curtain stirred, and WallEye stepped into the antechamber. WallEye was my favorite Gillikin priest, a man with whom I could almost have a normal conversation, a man who seemed to understand more of the world than what lay before his eyes.