“Oh, no, your pet get away!” she said, and ran after it.
This was rapidly becoming a very bad scene. I chased after her, but she was already following whatever-it-was down the dark stairwell and into the entryway where all the recycling bins had been piled to go out to the curb. The outer door was shut, though, so the thing had nowhere to go. The neighbor woman stopped and looked around, but it was pretty clear to both of us there was only one place it could be.
“Behind,” she said, and before I could stop her she leaned over and dragged the plastic bin out of the way, exposing my uninvited visitor as it froze in the glare of the flashlight.
It was horrible.
The resemblance to a spider was obvious, because the thing had four long, hairy, black and gray limbs that joined in the middle as if they had a single common joint. It had no eyes I could see, or mouth either, but the worst thing about it was that each of those legs—arms, I guess you’d have to say—ended in a small, mottled human hand. A child’s hand.
As I stared in shock, it scurried behind one of the remaining cans.
“It go nowhere,” said the young woman. She sounded astonishingly calm, under the circumstances. “Now you move other.” She pointed to the can. I must have looked at her as if she were insane, because she said, “Really. You move it.”
I pointed my gun, then reached out with the flashlight hand and grabbed the handle of the recycling bin. When I yanked it away, the thing cowered back from the light again, but my neighbor had been right—it had nowhere else to go. It backed against the wall, then climbed slowly upward a few feet, clinging like the spider it resembled. It flexed in the cradle of its long, jointed arms, ready to run again or perhaps this time to attack.
Now I knew why there had been a swastika on my wall. And why I’d thought I saw it run away. I pointed my gun at it, trying to keep my hand steady. It had been a very, very long day.
“No,” said the woman. “Not that—no loud.”
Then, in almost a single movement, she pulled a gleaming combat knife out of her sleeve, one of those nasty little ones that look like plastic-handled toys but will cut through a lead pipe, and shoved it right into the place where the four legs came together in a knot of muscle. The blade made a wet, cracking noise going in, like someone disjointing a roast chicken. The thing hissed and the arms thrashed, but she had pinned it against the wall.
As if all this wasn’t surprising enough, the writhing monstrosity began to smoke. The young woman pulled her knife out and let it fall to the floor. Within moments nothing was left of my four-legged visitor but a greasy smear on the old linoleum and a stink in the air like extremely rotten fish.
“Silver work good,” she said, wiping the blade of her knife on the side of the recycling bin. “And for neighbors, better too. More quiet. Oxana I am. You come to our apartment, drink tea and talk, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. I mean, it was 4:30 in the morning, and we had just killed a hairy swastika in my apartment lobby. What else could I say?
eleven
tea and shurikens
HALYNA, OXANA’S redheaded roommate with the muscles, was already up and heating the kettle in their studio apartment. She had pulled her hair back into a tight braid, but was still apparently wearing what she slept in, a man’s long t-shirt with the arms cut off so high that I had to keep looking away when she bent over, because the bottom of the armholes reached down to the base of her rib cage. Just in the interest of fair reportage, Halyna had very neighborly-looking breasts and an athlete’s extremely muscular stomach.
Oxana went off to do something in the bathroom, so I sat on a rolled-up karate mat on the floor. The place didn’t really have much other furniture, just a low table and a pair of military-style bunk beds standing against the wall. If these women were a couple, they were a slightly odd one, but it was easier to examine furnishings than to keep looking away from Halyna’s armholes, so I went on with my observations. Only the walls of the apartment showed any sign of personality but, other than several pictures of young women with weapons, most of the things my neighbors had taped to their walls were posters and newspaper headlines in what looked like Russian, so I didn’t learn a lot. There were, however, lots of weapons around—a fuckload of weapons, to be more precise—and not just in the pictures. Some leaned against the wall like farm tools in a barn; some, as with the throwing stars, had been hung on stick-up hooks from the hardware store. A few more rolled mats and many more sharp things lay strewn around the room. I saw long throwing axes and machete-length knives and even baling hooks, as if these nice young women sometimes liked to load and unload hay. More mats stood rolled up along the walls, and I realized that they probably kept the floor clear for sparring.
Halyna came out with three glasses of milky tea and set them down on the table along with a plate that contained what I swear was a McDonald’s apple pie cut into three pieces. They were rolling out the red carpet for me.
Oxana came back. She was at least as attractive as Halyna, but I thanked the Highest that she was still in the baggy tracksuit she’d worn to my door. A guy can only take so much before his mind starts wandering into non-helpful avenues.
“Okay,” said Oxana as Halyna set out the tea glasses. “You are probably with questions.”
“Yes, I am probably with questions. What was that thing, how did you know silver would kill it, and who the hell are you two?”
Oxana took a piece of the apple pie and ate it quickly enough to suggest she was actually hungry, which—after finally meeting the thing that had apparently been crawling around my apartment lately, was not so true of me. She licked her fingers carefully before answering. “It called Nightmare Children. Silver not kill it, but does back-sending it.”
“Back sending?”
“Send it back,” explained Halyna. “To the place it is coming from.” She had better English than her roommate. “To the dark place.”
“Keep going,” I said. “Who are you?” I swept my hand around the room, indicating the mini-armory they had assembled. “What’s all this for?”
“Protect,” said Oxana. “We protect.”
“Who? From what?”
“From enemies. Protect what they would destruct.”
“We are Scythians, you see,” said Halyna, more than a little proudly, as if that explained everything. I didn’t even recognize the word at first—she pronounced it Skeet-ee-ahns. “Also some are calling us Amazons. They were our ancestors.”
Click! Finally, something made sense.
“Amazons—Scythians.” I nodded. Foxy Foxy had said something about that, I remembered. “You were at the auction for the feather, weren’t you? At Islanders Hall?”
Halyna shook her head and blew on her tea. “No. Those were sisters of ours, but they have gone back to Ukraine. Now our turn to be watchers. To be protectors.”
I tried my own tea. It was a little sweeter than I liked, but after the night and morning I’d had it was quite acceptable, thank you. “Begin from the beginning,” I said. “Why are you Amazons, exactly?”
It took a while to get the story, because Oxana’s English was a bit confusing and both women were prone to introducing bits of Scythian philosophy whenever possible. The upshot was that a group of Ukrainian women, including these two, traced their history back to the Amazons of the Greek myths, who—they told me—had been one of the Scythian tribes of Asia Minor back before Christ became Flavor of the Millennium. The ancient Amazons, Halyna and Oxana assured me, had been women warriors who rode beside the men into battle, and were buried with their weapons when they fell. Halyna and Oxana’s Amazons, however, were a modern day cult of sorts (my word, not theirs) who had developed an entire code of life, were obsessive about self-defense and martial arts, and whose Amazon-ism was all wrapped up with Ukrainian nationalism and religion and a complicated dislike of Russia—and to my surprise, an even more profound disl
ike of Persia. Not Iran, the present-day version—it’s pretty damn easy to find people who don’t like Iran—but Persia, like the Persian Empire. Like, way more than two thousand years ago.
“But it doesn’t exist anymore,” I pointed out.
“Not true,” said Halyna. “Some bad parts is . . . are very much alive.”
They told me about the Scythian way of life—compounds in the forests of the Carpathian Mountains south of Lviv that were half summer camp, half bunker, with no men to distract from the intensive schooling and training.
“Training for what?” I asked. “And how did you know about the whatever-it-was, that swasti-kid?” My nickname for the hairy horror with children’s hands puzzled them. “Sorry, what did you call it? Nightmare . . . ?”
“Nightmare Children,” said Halyna. “We know because we have fought with them before. They are favorite tool for work of the Black Sun.”
Click! Click! Second thing that made sense. “And how do you know the Black Sun? They’re not Ukrainian, are they? I thought they were American.”
“They are from many places,” said Halyna. “And they are wanting Anahita’s treasure. We want to take it for us instead. They will use it for bad things. We will not.”
Anaita. Click, click, click. The whole thing now actually began to come together, at least in a welcome-to-my-world sort of way. Unfortunately, since Anaita’s treasure was Eligor’s horn, these Amazons and I wanted to get hold of the same thing. And apparently so did the Black Sun Faction and their thugs and their unpleasant, faceless hand-spiders. But I needed that horn to get Caz back. I couldn’t let anyone get in the way of that. “Really? Anahita’s treasure, huh?” So these Amazons knew about it, too. Had I been the last to figure it out, or had my initial guess somehow tipped off everyone else? “And what will you use it for?”
“For destroy her,” said Oxana. She didn’t sound like she was kidding.
“Okay,” I said. “We do have a few things to talk about, don’t we?”
• • •
Later, after they had given me a bit more background about themselves and what they knew about the Black Sun, I asked them, “So how long have you two been living here in this building? Have you been watching me long?”
“Watching you?” said Halyna. She frowned. “No, watching for you. To make sure they did not take the treasure from you.”
“But I don’t have it.”
“Now we know,” said Oxana. She was eyeing the last, uneaten piece of the apple pie. “Not know when we start.”
“Four weeks ago,” Halyna explained. “Some people move out, apartment is open. We come in then, tell manager of apartment we are waitresses. Waitresses come in and out, all time, late hours all normal, you see? Nobody notice.”
I waved to Oxana to eat my share of the pie. She did, quickly, as if worried I might change my mind. “I noticed you two,” I said, “but I certainly wouldn’t have guessed you were anything more unusual than foreign. But if you were throwing this stuff around in here, all these weapons and weights, sparring and spear-fighting and whatnot, I’m surprised your neighbors didn’t have a fit. The people in the apartment above me bang on the floor every time I make a noise.” Although they hadn’t made a peep today while I was chasing the swastikid all around the place, knocking over furniture, which was a bit odd.
Halyna looked puzzled. “Nobody is above you.”
“What do you mean? Jeez, I’ve heard them pounding away up there like Max Roach having a seizure.”
She shook her head. “Nobody. We ask manager because we think it will be best place to listen, maybe.” Here she actually blushed a little, only visible because her skin was so pale. “Maybe put a listening machine. Device. You know. But manager say empty, yes, but going to be painted soon, nobody rent.”
“Nobody come in since then,” Oxana said. “We watch everything so close.”
“We’re talking about the same apartment? The one directly above mine?”
They both nodded. I wondered for a moment if painters, who in my experience usually had loud boomboxes playing Lynyrd Skynyrd and liked to play catch with aluminum ladders, would knock on the floor to complain about noise below. I suddenly had a bad feeling.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’m going to my apartment to get something. Back in a minute.”
I went home and picked up my lock-picking tools, my gun, and of course my phone, because in my business an obscenely early hour of the morning is no defense against the call of duty, or more specifically, the call of Alice. Then I invited the Amazons to come upstairs with me. Halyna clothed herself in jeans and a jacket, which made it a lot easier for me to concentrate. We went quietly up the stairs—nobody else seemed to be awake yet—and I put my ear to the door of the apartment just above mine, third floor, second apartment from the stairwell. Nothing. I knocked, and we waited. Still nothing, but I thought the echo had a slightly hollow sound. So I went to work.
Twenty-five seconds later or so—most apartment locks are absolute shit—I carefully pushed open the door while standing with the Amazons to one side in case somebody started shooting. Still nothing but silence, so I ducked my head and went in, gun in hand.
It was silent but for the buzzing of flies, and it smelled like death—not the recent kind, salty with spilled human fluids, but like an unplugged refrigerator someone forgot to empty. It was also dark. The light switch didn’t work, but there was enough gray dawn light leaking in through the blinds to show that the apartment was indeed empty. I could, however, see a few signs of recent occupation. Apparently the last tenants had been a family. Either the Mansons or the Addamses, to be specific.
The beige walls were scrawled with painted symbols—I hoped it was paint, but a lot of it looked like dried blood. None were in any language or alphabet I recognized. The carpet had been cut to ribbons and folded back, and someone had made a kind of campfire out of an iron pot set in the middle of the room. Ashes and pieces of burnt wood still half-filled it, and the pot itself sat at the middle of a crude version of the Black Sun symbol, drawn on the wooden floor with what looked like smears of gleaming fat. The flies that had risen into the air at our entrance now settled back down onto the sticky scrawl and continued with the business of being flies.
Oxana was holding her nose. Halyna had pulled the neck of her t-shirt up over hers. “Foo!” said Oxana. “Very bad!”
“You damn bet this is very bad. These fuckers have been living right over me, probably since before you moved in. No wonder my apartment is haunted!”
As we stared at the ghastly scene something vibrated my pocket. I looked at my phone. It was Alice. “I have to take this,” I said and stepped into the hall.
It was a client, of course. Heart attack at a gym over in Mayfield.
“Sorry,” I told the women. “I have to go. Business. We’ll talk later, right? Tonight?”
Halyna and Oxana nodded. They were looking at the wall inscriptions with carefully noncommittal expressions, but Oxana was still holding her nose.
“Just close this apartment up and stay away. And please don’t move out of your place before I get back, okay? We still have a lot to talk about.”
“This was meant to send death,” said Halyna, frowning. She kneeled beside the iron pot, then lifted out one of the chunks of pale, burnt wood. “This not wood. This is a bone. Children’s bone. They try to kill you.”
“Then they’re going to have to send more than one inky-dinky spider,” I said. But I wished she hadn’t told me. Because I was pretty sure she was right.
On the way out I called somebody I knew to send over a cleanup crew, the kind of angels who make unpleasant messes disappear. There was no way I was coming back to my apartment knowing all of that was still spoiling in an empty room upstairs.
• • •
It’s pretty depressing dealing with a forty-something guy who just keeled over
dead on the elliptical machine, leaving behind a wife and kids he loves, even if he gets a heavenly invitation at the end of it. I mean, I know that’s good, but even if his family believes in an afterlife, they’re still going to miss him. Anyway, the job kept me occupied until later in the morning, at which point I grabbed some breakfast at a coffee shop and drove around for a while, trying to figure out what to do now. This new stuff was crazier than the old stuff, and the old stuff had already been pretty crazy. Neo-Nazis sending headless spiders with children’s hands after me. Angels who were ancient goddesses and still the subject of grudges thousands of years old. Real live Amazons. I mean, if weird was money, I’d be Bobby Million Bucks, not just plain old Dollar.
The Black Sun wouldn’t come back, of course, at least not to that room, especially since the cleanup crew had been and gone while I was out. I took a brief, nose-clamped look just to check, but the place looked clean and ready for occupation. I unclamped. It smelled like it had just been painted. Yes, some of Heaven’s employees are a lot faster and more efficient than Yours Truly. Still, when I let myself into my own place, I couldn’t help feeling like I could still smell decay from upstairs wafting through my air vents. I also knew there were going to be questions from Heaven about what the cleaners had been getting rid of, and why I knew about it.
But I couldn’t deal with any of that stuff right at that moment, because I was stressed and completely exhausted from lack of sleep. I righted the upended furniture and cleared away some old socks and empty cans and bottles at the same time—a frenzy of cleaning that lasted at least a minute and a half. Then I stretched out on the couch, put on some quiet music to cover the midday noises from the street, and let myself get tugged down into unconsciousness.
And yes, the chain was on the front door again, the panel in the closet had been nailed back into place, and my gun was very, very close to my hand.