The Perpendiculars, Pt 3

Continuing for your delectation a work in progress. Part one is here, part two is here.

Adastra Morales is beautiful when she’s sleeping. I mean, she’s pretty cute when she’s awake, but when sleep hides the trouble in her eyes, when her mouth goes slack and those tight lines fade, when her dark curls frame her baby-doll face… yeah. I saw her mind moving behind her flickering eyelids, moving through dreams. She was beautiful in there, too. Too beautiful.

I could have stood a long time watching her through the dirty window of the Bunny, drooling gently onto her Bay blanket, driver’s seat reclined as far back as it could go and still be counted on to return to an upright position, but I really wanted to get as far away from that farm as I could, as fast as four German cylinders could carry me. Plenty of time to moon over sleepy sorta-ex-girlfriends back in town, away from angry mummies and their primordial punishments. One of the boons Sekhemkhet had granted me in gratitude for winning his arm race was that he would deign to delay his vengeance for “one solar hour,” just long enough to hustle fragile Addy out of the psychic blast radius. Plus, you know, I needed a drink. This action-adventure shit is thirsty work.

Addy started awake at my knock, brown eyes shedding panicky sparks. I had a brief vision of her as a tough-as-nails, pistol-packin’ mama, pulling a piece from under that drool-damp wool wrap and me flinching back, hands quick into the air, and she sighs out a big breath, letting in the hammer with her thumb and saying something like “Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again!”

Where did that come from? Addy hates guns. In every personal interaction I’d seen her have with a firearm, she’d picked the gun up between thumb and forefinger, like garbage, dangling it at arm’s length only long enough to pass it to me. Instead of a six-gun popping up from under the blanket, I got a sleepy scowl and a fuzzy-mittened hand popping the broken passenger-side door open from the inside. I slid onto the chilly seat.

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The Perpendiculars, excerpt cont'd

Work in progress, etc. Part one is HERE

As sanctums go, Sekhemkhet’s prairie pad had never been much to look at on the surface, but now it was a full-on dump, human trash mixed in with the garbage. Breathing shallow through my mouth and damping down other senses I couldn't lose if I tried, I still gagged on the flophouse stench, the corruption of decayed and eroded enchantments.

The place was filled with people and the shells of people, a wall-to-wall, room-to-room carpet of bodies in various states of narcosis, drunkenness, withdrawal, unconsciousness. In dim light refracted between heavy curtains I counted six people leaning against the stained walls of the dining-room, in the centre of which a big table buried in reeking food containers tilted on two legs. Nobody cared, was able to care, that I was there. Another morning after in three years of mornings after, thralls rocking a sick and stolen party. How could they know Daddy was coming home?

On the livingroom loveseat, under an obscenely daubed diagram that made my sloppy glyphwork look like the Seventh Seal, a jaundiced teenager lay passed out with her mouth slack around her scabby lover’s limp dick. Beyond this charming tableau, a greasy dude in ancient Ocean Pacific surfer shorts lay with his head propped up against a charred Ottoman, playing Grand Theft Auto with the sound off, bashing a virtual bag-lady with a golf club over and over again, digital bloodspatter replacing itself as fast as it faded from the screen. I knew that if I opened up I’d see the sick loops circling around his head; dude was in the zone.

Honestly? I was disappointed. I mean, what a waste – an ancient archbeing’s undying power usurped, a treasure trove of physical and mystic power free for the fucking around with, and all you can come up with is drink, drugs and whoring? I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of angry jealousy at this failure of imagination, knowing that if my buddies and I had dared to run a grift like this we’d have done so much better. Just thinking like that must’ve been the taint of the place getting to me, but... seriously. Even if we hedged fully half the money and mojo on spooky insurance and cosmic bribes we’d still manage a hundred years of wonder, maybe a millennium of might and majesty, before that inevitable, inexorable somebody showed up at our door to do exactly what I was about to do.

I hoped Shafiq had something more interesting set up downstairs in the vault. If a man might be judged by the caliber of his opponents, I was coming out of this operation looking pretty low-rent. Stepping over a pasty jerk with PRAIZE SATAN 666 branded on his distended belly, I clickety-clacked through an unbelievably tacky chicken-bone bead curtain and headed down down down into the dirty earth.


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The Perpendiculars, Book one, Part one -- excerpt

“Char me the trunk of a giant redwood, give me pages of white cliffs to write upon, magnify me thousands of times and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania… then I might write large enough for our subjects.”

-- Charles Hoy Fort, the Book of the Damned

1 - THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY’S HAND

A late October morning, see-your-breath cold. Frost on the ground and the dirt track feeling stiff underfoot. A morning for quiet contemplation of the coming winter, for watching the pinking east through a cloud of coffee-steam… or for staying in bed, cozy, until the sun softened things, chased off the frost.

Without coffee and without a bed – I’d rolled up my rim about twenty kilometers back on the highway, and my blankets were two chilly hours behind that – all I had on that country morning was a mission and a message, a bagful of mojo dynamite. I fingered the battered satchel at my side, feeling my own flimsy hocus-pocus over and around the dark and ancient secrets within. It felt transparent; only a lazy idiot could fall for this gimmick. Lucky for me, I guess, that laziness and idiocy are powerful constants in this unpredictable world. What else can you count on?

The house itself was unremarkable. Hardly the pulp-novel image of a wretched hive or a royal refuge, which was of course the whole point, since it was both. Vinyl siding, cedar deck, tar shingles… just another ranch-style farmhouse on a medium-sized acreage in a typically pretty chunk of some run-of-the-mill geography. A retirement plot, exactly.

Except this particular piece of Freedom 55 – Freedom 5,500, if you want to get cute – was a long way from country-kitchen fantasies of thanksgiving with the grandkids. I could smell it from the foot of the drive, mystic stink overpowering the molecular diesel aroma of Addy’s idling Rabbit, the Brave Bunny. Scent of decay, mouldering mansion… something majestic gone sick and wrong. Piss in the corner of a palace, a cathedral repurposed as a dungheap, and through it all a whiff of incense, of camphor, of clean reeds from my bag. I pumped as much will as I dared into my metaphysical odor-eater; I didn’t want the shitdwellers scenting the disinfectant. Not yet.


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