The Bone Triangle (36 page)

“That’ll be a nice change.”

“I don’t like you,” Jim continued. “I don’t like you at all. You’re an uppity rogue with delusions of grandeur. I’ve seen your kind before, and they always die young.”

“So why are you talking to me, the lowly, ungrateful rogue?”

“Your kind
can
be useful. You’re like a rusty dagger—flawed but still deadly if thrust at precisely the right moment.”

“You want me to kill Meng?” I asked.

“I didn’t say that,” he said quickly. “I never said that.”

“Okay, fine. I’m going in to find out if she is aiding the Beast. I want to know if she started all this and why. How do I get in?”

The pipe chuckled. It sounded to me like a burbling drain. “What if she is behind it?”

“If she can control it, maybe she can force it to back off—or kill it. If I can get rid of it, you can have its lair, if you want it.”

“I accept your bargain. Look on the wall to the north, toward the sanatorium. There’s a passage there. You can’t see it easily. This place was once Meng’s secret way out of the sanatorium into the streets. She doesn’t go out anymore—due to your attack. She stays inside, more paranoid than ever.”

“I don’t see anything,” Cartoon said, feeling along the wall in question.

“There’s a rusty gauge nearby. Twist it like you’re trying to remove it.”

Cartoon did as the thing in the sewer said. A moment later part of the wall opened, revealing a dark passage. By the angle of it, I estimated it indeed led under the streets to the sanatorium. It looked like a tunnel, rather than a sewer. Still, I was suspicious.

“I’m not going to enter your domain. No pipes or liquid water.”

“You don’t have to,” Gutter Jim said. “This route is dry enough. Meng had it built for her own use, and she didn’t want to enter my domain any more than you do. One more
thing: taking your trained ape with you is a mistake. You know that, don’t you? She’ll turn him on you in seconds.”

“Fuck you, toilet Jim,” Cartoon said.

The pipe burbled with amusement.

“You might be able to help us further,” I said. “Two locals are trying to get down here to stop us. Could you stop them?”

“You’re afraid of a hooker?”

I felt myself getting angry again. “Are you going to help or not?”

“They are part of Meng’s militia. She’s got them conditioned to watch out for anyone dangerous—apparently, you’ve triggered their protective instincts. They probably won’t do much more than warn her.”

Great
, I thought. Not all of Meng’s servants were mindless zombies. It seemed to depend on the individual, and how open her instructions were. If a person had been ordered to kill someone in particular who was in close proximity, it seemed to turn them into single-minded machines. But if they had more general orders, such as the police we’d encountered, they were almost normal, with only slight gaps in their behavior. To me, this flexibility made her all the more dangerous to deal with.

Gutter Jim left us alone after we found the passage. The hooker was being quiet upstairs, so we decided now was a good time to try it. I entered the passage first, with Cartoon behind me.

“This is some kind of trap,” Cartoon whispered. “That gutter dude is tricking us.”

I’d already considered the possibility but was determined to try this anyway. Meng had attempted to kill me on a number of occasions already, and she had no incentive to stop. She also had too many people under her
control. It was alarming and it was
wrong
to twist people’s minds that way.

McKesson was just one of many, but he’d been in my care after he was hurt, and I felt responsible for him. He was kind of an ass, but he always came down on the right side when there was a fight at hand. I felt I should get him out of Sunset, if for no other reason than to keep him out of Meng’s clutches. I especially didn’t want to see him as the next assassin, brainwashed and gunning for me. I had a feeling he’d be more effective than the others had been.

“If we have to enter the sewers, I’ll turn back,” I said. “We’ve got to give this a try. It’s our best shot.”

The passage smelled of earth and old rotten things that had gone past the point of fermentation and begun crumbling to dust. Watching closely for puddles and avoiding direct contact with them, I pressed ahead.

The world was different down here. The walls felt close and tight. Every sound was muffled. We left the last gleam of light from the bulb in the basement behind. In the darkness, I saw the words everywhere I looked. It was as if the darkness made the afterimage in my mind clearer:

Thias Amasma.

I wondered what the words meant and why they had made such an impression upon me.

We traveled no more than a hundred feet before the tunnel came up against a blank wall. At first, I felt a touch of panic. Could Cartoon have been right? Was this all an elaborate trap, a cul-de-sac formed to lure us into Gutter Jim’s domain?

Remembering the entrance, I took out my bottle and lit it up with a ghostly beam of radiance. It shone like a radioactive flashlight—which was about what it was, in my estimation.

Cartoon tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to him. Around us, the dark passage seemed close and hot. The only light we had was the green glow of the bottle in my hand. I had willed it to shine but not burn. The resulting glimmer was just enough to see by.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s something behind us,” he hissed.

I listened. I heard rubble shifting; a moment later a stream of muffled curses reached my ears.

“It’s that idiot pimp,” I said. I pushed past Cartoon, who didn’t move.

“I don’t know, Quentin. I’m getting scared—and we got nowhere to run.”

I made my way back toward the entrance to the passage. Cartoon had a point: we were in what appeared to be a dead-end passage. If this guy cut off our retreat, things could get nasty. I wrapped my bottle in the cloth of my shirt and tried to dampen its greenish glow, and aimed it at the ground. It had been a welcome source of light, but in a gunfight I didn’t need to give away my position so clearly.

“I cut myself; damn this shitty elevator,” said a now-familiar voice. It was the hooker. She must have somehow convinced her partner to venture with her into the dark cellar.

I crouched in the dark, waiting to see what they would do. If they retreated, there was no reason to take this confrontation to the next level.

They gave me their answer soon enough: they were not retreating. The pimp’s gun cracked, and the muzzle flash gave me a glimpse of his face. I saw metal rings and hooks—lots of them. I heard the bullet crash into the ceiling of the tunnel just above my head. Something sharp stung my scalp.

I realized several things all at once: that I was in a firefight, that the first shot had been a close thing, and that my green glowing bottle had screwed me.

The pimp took aim again. I twitched up the bottle and let it blaze. I had an advantage, in that the area affected by my weapon was broader than a bullet—much broader. It could burn a man’s face off in a single second.

The pimp howled and pulled back out of sight. The passage walls, which seeped water, hissed and sent out a roiling puff of steam. I heard him cursing and growling.

“Quentin?” Cartoon whispered behind me. “Let’s
go
, man!”

“We can’t leave them behind us. Meng has set them up as watchdogs. They won’t give up.”

We sat there for a minute or so. Both sides were whispering, cursing in the dark. Then I saw a flare of rippling light coming down the passage from their end. I frowned and pressed myself up against the walls. I wasn’t sure what was happening.

Suddenly, I heard the hooker approach us. She was screeching and struggling. She pushed past the pimp, despite the narrow confines, and rushed toward me. I lifted the bottle and let it shine light in her face. The light was as intense as a diving light, but not enough to burn the skin.

I thought I knew what was happening. She was under Meng’s spell, just like the other assassins I’d met up with. Mad with her compulsion to attack me, she’d finally decided to charge unarmed. I braced myself for a kicking, biting, scratching fight. I didn’t want to burn an unarmed woman, so I would have to knock her unconscious.

But when she had almost reached me, I caught her expression in my bright beam. I didn’t see fanatical aggression there. Instead, I saw terror. Her mouth was open and puffing. She had blood running down her arms and her left cheek. Her hair crinkled against the roof of the tunnel as she came heedlessly toward me, and her eyes were white circles.

I saw no weapons, so I didn’t stop her. I let her come toward us. I heard a cry behind her; it must have been the
pimp. He made a bubbling sound, like that of someone drowning. Had Gutter Jim stepped in and attacked him?

The girl halted her charge as suddenly as it had begun. The look on her face had changed to one of shock. I turned the beam back to her eyes, and they pleaded with me. Her glossed lips tried to form words.

“Help me,” she said.

She reached out her hand. Each nail was an inch long and painted a different shade of pink. I took her hand, and almost immediately I was yanked forward. Something had her by the legs and was pulling her back down the tunnel. I didn’t let go, but I found myself being dragged as well. Then I saw what had her.

Tentacles. Three of them, gray with brown spots. They had wrapped themselves around her lower body. Each pink sucker had broken the skin and the blood ran. I lost my grip on her, and she screamed.

I got to my feet and rushed after her, running in a crouch back toward the cellar. There it was: a rip in the middle of the enclosed space. This was the source of glimmering light I’d seen. It had the same unusual configuration as the other rips from the Triangle. It was shaped like a tear in fabric.

Behind the tentacles, inside the rip itself, was a huge eye. It swept forward and regarded me. There was no sign of the pimp, and I assumed he’d already been eaten. The girl had stopped struggling and appeared to be dead. The tentacles, in their eagerness, had pulled her apart.

I burned everything. The eye was inside the rip and unaffected, but the tentacles withered and turned a toasty brown. After a few moments, they dropped the girl’s corpse and retreated into the safety of the rip. At that point, I turned back into the passage and fled.

I met Cartoon a dozen paces in.

“It’s the Beast, isn’t it?” he said, breathing in gasps. “I felt it. I always feel it, and I always run. But this time, we got nowhere to go.”

I handed him McKesson’s pistol and pushed past him. I moved to the end of the tunnel and searched for a way out. I put the bottle down, and it glowed with green luminescence at my feet.

I called for Gutter Jim, but he was AWOL. I wasn’t sure if he had run from the Beast or had sold us out. I supposed it didn’t matter either way. What I did know was we were trapped and on our own.

I saw a glimmer behind us. Cartoon began a wild stream of foul language and emptied the gun in the direction we’d come. I didn’t see what he was shooting at, as I was too busy feeling for a way out with both hands. The booming sounds of gunfire were deafening in the enclosed space. The sharp stink of gunpowder filled the tunnel, drowning out the fetid smell of the Beast.

I heard Cartoon shout in pain, and I turned. He was wrapped in thin tentacles, so many I couldn’t count them. He had a good grip on the walls, and he was a strong man, but it didn’t matter, I knew no human could withstand the Beast’s strength.

I moved forward to help. Deciding I couldn’t burn the Beast without killing Cartoon, I used the liver. I stung the tentacles one at a time. They trembled, convulsed, and fell to the ground, writhing. Cartoon’s breath became labored, and I heard his ribs cracking one at a time. I worked faster, touching each tentacle in turn and trying not to let my artifact graze his skin.

In the end, the tentacles lay twitching on the tunnel floor. They didn’t even have the strength to withdraw back into their own world. I hoped some of the poison would
make it back to the root and sicken the Beast itself, but it was a faint hope.

I talked to Cartoon, and saw in his eyes that he understood me. He could not answer, however; his body was too broken. The tentacles had convulsed and crushed him in their death throes. The venom was a powerful weapon, but it wasn’t easy to use, and it didn’t work as quickly as I would have liked.

I grieved with him, and lied to him about his state until the end. He seemed to appreciate it. I knew I would miss him. I’d come to consider him a friend in our short relationship. I’d seen so many friends die, I wasn’t able to turn the stinging in my eyes into real, honest tears.

Some minutes later, when I was sure the Beast was gone and everyone but me was dead, I began a methodical, determined search of the tunnel. I finally found what the problem had been. The exit wasn’t at the end; it was in the ceiling, about halfway down.

A catch on the roof clicked when tugged upon. It was ripped from my fingers as the catch released a counterweight, which in turn threw the door open. I had to yank back my hand to prevent injury. I swore and counted my fingers…I still had ten.