Hotel of Madness Read online

  I walk up the hill past the innocent tourist shops and toward the main restaurants and the hotel. This trip feels familiar because my car is parked in one of the parking garages adjacent to the Windham. I can feel the pull of the Gaylord from here, the nerd beacon that everyone who comes here during convention season feels as they march up the hill. But this isn’t a friendly, welcoming warmth up ahead. No, the streets are quiet save for me and my own thoughts, which are becoming increasingly unfriendly. Gloom hangs over me, not knowing what to expect, well, not wanting to know. I should run.

  “Yes, good idea.”

  I jump, startled, not knowing who or what said that. Then a part of my hazy memory directs me to my knife.

  “Not a knife.”

  “I’m not the winter soldier. I don’t know the technical term for big sharp thing. And I figure dagger would be too edgy.”

  Sharky grumbles, Sharky being the adopted name for the pet combat knife that may or may not own large portions of my soul. Well, not own, more like we cohabitate, though I get a distinct impression that it would rather own.

  “I have a name that you wouldn’t be able to pronounce, so I suffer your indignity.”

  “So, how is this better than being an inanimate object?”

  The shark tooth blade grumbles, its mind already going back to scanning for threats beyond my awareness. I know the deal, soul-bound if you will. We share thoughts, feelings, abilities, and awareness. It's as close to an equal partnership as a woman gets with her kitchen knife. Oh, and because I call him Sharky he has gone back to referring to me as Child.

  “Up ahead,” the knife warns.

  I see it just fine, but… well damn. The tree, which I still haven’t figured out how to burn, has grown through, past, and basically destroyed the Gaylord. The hotel is a crater under a red sky that is red not because of the moon's reflection but because it's boiling. Every so often, light flashes over it, bright and superheated, and I hear unmistakable thunder. Occasionally a bolt of raw energy and hate in the shape of lightning strikes the giant tree. Occasional some of these bolts miss entirely.

  “Cover your eyes!” Sharky warns, and though curious, I quickly obey.

  A great light, almost blinding despite my attempts to shield myself, fills the sky and berates the earth. As the light intensifies, I feel the world around me invert, as if the left is suddenly right and up is down. I know my body is being lifted up as gravity adjusts to this new norm before the light disappears, and I go crashing down hard.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “Your world ending,” Sharky says soberly. But I’m in his thoughts, and I know he sees more, though he tries not to because even watching it from this distance makes him shiver uncontrollably.

  I can see her, the bitch that stabbed me, but… that’s not really what she is. In the sense of being human. From Sharky’s perspective, which is beyond simple 3d but seeing in multiple dimensions that I’ve never even heard of, she is a monster. An unknowable, unthinking monster with six arms and three heads, surrounded by otherworldly ice and fire that glow in colors unnamed and which shouldn’t be named.

  A demon from Hindu myth, no, the goddess herself, the Vishnu, the destruction and calamity of man and heaven. I can feel my knees buckling. No, I am falling on my knees just seeing her, a fraction of a fraction of the real her that can be represented in what the blade calls real space. And the image is diluted further because she is battling...insanity. The blade desperately keeps the focus on her because anything else is madness.

  At least the woman that was once a regular con-goer is still within the realm of comprehension. What she is fighting, with her six arms, carrying a sword in each hand like delicate whips, cutting and stabbing, each blade a representation of a dimension being shattered with each stroke… is beyond that. It is a centipede but composed of arms and legs fashioned from the raw likeliness of sickly children from every race and gender. Its segmented flesh pulsates with new life growing and uncontrollably underneath. Squirming and seeking nourishment until it pushes against the old to make room for the new. A squirming, raw mess of pink and purple wrong swimming in the sky around and around the goddess as she cuts and cuts and cuts. And no head. There is no head to discern, but my question draws my attention upward, even as my dagger screams for me to not see it. I don’t listen, and the only thing I can do was scream.

  The Trident

  “It wouldn’t work, wouldn’t it?” I’m thinking out loud, but even if I wasn’t, the book would hear me.

  We found the Trident, and I’m staring at it in both awe and dread. Normally, finding something in the Multiverse is hard due to the infinite nature of the Multiverse, creating infinite parallels. Only trans-dimensional objects and beings are finite, but only to an extent. Conditions that forge and birth these exceptions can arise multiple times across the infinite Multiverse, drawing parallel instances of the same thing or divergent copies. The Trident, on the other hand, is the only one of its kind. The living ghost of the one and only Atlantis, and despite the myth and stories about it and surrounding it, Atlantis never existed more than once. Everything else is an echo interpreted in the dreams of poets and madmen. It was a true necromantic kingdom, so mighty that its own king sacrificed it and every version of it out of existence in one final attempt to save his world.

  And now it lies at the bottom of a dead ocean, on a lifeless rock with only enough atmosphere to keep what water remains from boiling away. It is but one of many worlds buried beneath the Blood Mist.

  Which means I fought Vapoura before and lost.

  “Did I fight her before? With the Trident?” I’m addressing the book directly now, though I don’t think it needs the attention. I know it's been watching me, waiting patiently for my attention to slip before it pounces. A simple thing, the Necronomicon. Very simple.

  “.....”

  “I know you can find it.” To put it simply, I can at most see glimpses of my past lives. I need deep meditation and many painkillers to go back and purposely sift through my previous self. Or I can ask the book to do it, seeing as my consciousness is sharing a living space, it can read me like a book. Also, since we started this journey across the Multiverse, it's been able to focus on me and not the torturous pain of its current existence. Partially because it still wants to eat me but also getting revenge on the bitch that betrayed it seems like a better use of its time.

  “You fought the Avatar.”

  “And did I lose?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the Trident.”

  “Yes.”

  I see my weapon of mass destruction in its dulled glory, lying in wait for the time when I truly need it. I can call it to me, but to do so would be to invite whatever is waiting in the water with it. And that I can see as well, things that appear dead but are merely dreaming. Things that are birthing young too horrid to walk under the sun. I can pull it toward me, drag it across time, space, and whole dimensions, and shut the door before they come through. And maybe just maybe have enough strength left to give Vapoura one last round.

  “Can I win?”

  The book eyes with pity, “As you are now? No.”

  “Is that gloom I hear?”

  “Even in this state, I could devour you, Hero. What would an Avatar do?”

  Fair point. Brute force has always been my method of last resort. Mainly because for me to be good at the brute force solution would require me to eat people regularly. And it's bad enough I’m willing to rip a man's spine out to make a flesh-bound book. Oh yes, my status as Eater of Souls; it's not a title so much as an ability one gets if at some point you started off human and then something went terribly wrong. Like for example, being the reincarnation of a necromantic King of Atlantis. And it may sound like a good thing, removing the limitation of being unable to process Other, but it really isn’t. The comic books lied to people; the streets aren’t littered with gun thugs and rapists. You really want to know who I end up eating? The homeless, the elderly, tha
t guy who lives with his parents and hasn't left his basement for something other than a comic book convention or late pizza delivery.

  I’ve seen people play that kind of Hero (and fall off the wagon), and I’ve put them down myself. I’d rather not make my own list unless absolutely necessary, or I’m in desperate need of vacation money. Oh yes, I know perfectly well I don’t hold any moral high ground, “that far from a Daemon,” said the daughter of an undead God of blood and water.

  So I instead use guile and cunning; applied knowledge here, take advantage of a stress point there. I manage. Or at least this version of me did, other variations... Well, I guess that’s one more reason why I don’t remember every past life perfectly. My own actions were probably slightly less terrible than what I was fighting.

  “Vapoura is doing battle. If the Avatar wins—”

  “Then you're dead. I know.”

  “You have no plan.”

  “Grab the trident was a good plan.”

  The Necronomicon isn’t a forward thinker. Intelligent? Yes, but planning ahead is beyond its programming, which is to say, something we have in common.

  “Wait, what is Vapoura fighting?”

  The book pauses, letting me know that either I’d rather not know or it would prefer not to tell me.

  “DURA’G.”

  I resist the urge to ask how. To ask is to draw my attention to it, and to do that is to actually see it from the vantage point of my unwarded consciousness inside of a book that is waiting for a chance to kill me. Oh fuck. Oh fuckety fuck fuck fuck.

  The Trident seems feet away, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch, though doing that would literally send me hurtling toward a dead planet at a speed fast enough to roast my body on reentry. And that is assuming that my body comes with me. Fuck. FUCK. F—Wait.

  “I have a plan.” I smile.

  “Hero—”

  The Necronomicon has about .001th of a second to respond to what I’m doing. That’s not enough time. I don’t give myself enough time to reconsider trying to drag my physical body into the subspace inside the Necronomicon while at the same time summoning the Trident. Any pause, any consideration to at least account for the timing necessary for this plan to work, would have gotten me torn apart by the book before I cast the spell. Not saying that won’t happen anyway. The subspace only exists as a consequence of me using the book to find something. It is not designed to hold a physical body, which is a problem for both of us.

  But mainly it, as the book lunges for me in an attempt to correct the second act of betrayal it has experienced today. As the Necronomicon closes in, I simultaneously make one last-ditch play and pull the Trident from the depths with everything I have. The Trident hums its answer as it zips through the dimensions as my body and mind merge. With the shock of the Trident touching my hand, my consciousness is pulled, nearly making me forget to hold my breath. But I do, desperately as if my life depends upon it, which it does as I just dumped my naked human body into a hypothetical vacuum devoid of air and heat. It takes all I have to grasp the Trident with both hands in an attempt to hold on to the only thing radiating heat. While my entire body freezes from the exposure, my mind fails as the oxygen deprivation sets in quicker than I imagined. One second, three seconds, and then—

  Boom. The blind world is joined by hitchhikers from the dead world beyond our concept of space-time. Their presence fills my mind with images of death and torture and the pleasure of carnal unions too unholy not to scream in pain. I clench my jaw even tighter against all impulses as their lust and hunger fill the void, thrashing and twisting in rage and glee. I can feel them around me, and I can feel the subspace expanding, straining, and the book screaming in pain from the torture inside and out. I can take an educated guess how long this situation will last, but I’m reduced to counting seconds because 15 is my magic number.

  So 10 seconds, 11 seconds, and then…. another BOOM. A bigger explosion, like getting front row seats to a collapsing star with me as a nameless particle being compressed into oblivion before being jetted out into the world in a rush of heat and eldritch fury. A world composed of a sustained fusion reaction held together by the will of an undead God of bones and conquest. Languid in nature, that will is too slow to meet the energy released by the exploding Necronom icon. An explosion further enhanced by the entities that rush to invade the micro-verse created inside that dead book, prompting that horrid will to shake in terrible agony as it cries out for Vapoura.

  But she can't answer. Too occupied with the growing manifestation of DURA’G in our reality, she can only watch in frustration as her God, her World Tree, her Blood Mist, destined to cover this world in blind despair, lights up like a Christmas tree in colors beyond any human eyes should see. As it tries desperately to maintain its structural integrity. As the glow from the Tree becomes blinding, the ground shakes from the withering of its roots as roads for miles sink and buildings shift from their concrete foundations. As light builds and the tremors intensify, geysers of blood shoot from the various cracks and fissures surrounding the national harbor. While the adjacent bay turns red with blood, then green, and then purple before other more foul colorations take over in a putrid rainbow as the sky turns mucus green.

  And in that final moment, before everything turns to shit, even the principality known as DURA’G notices the incoming event on the horizon. It attempts to pull away from its war with the Avatar before it's too late. But it is already too late. Though I wouldn’t know, I die when the book explodes.

  Interlude

  I’m looting an abandoned convenience store in Denver, Colorado, when I feel them step out of the shadows. I reason they could have popped into the store instead of apparating into the parking lot, but I have a reputation of responding very poorly to being surprised, so they wisely keep their distance.

  “Feds or League,” I shout over my shoulder.

  “We’re here to talk to Susan.”

  I turn away from my looting to give the two men waiting for me my full attention, “This store isn’t going to rob itself. Feds or League?”

  Though I already know the answer to that question, the Feds have been on a permanent casual Friday the last three times we spoke. These guys are in tailored Armani suits, complete with black ties, cufflinks, and designer dress shoes from the last bond movie. The cufflinks have symbols etched into them that would hurt normal people if they stare too long, and the ties have flecks of silver woven seamlessly along the edges, barely noticeable if you're not paying attention. The suit is its own ward.

  “League of Shadows, Ma’am.” says the man on my right who looks like Captain America if Captain America spent his mornings writing memos. His partner is dark-haired, slightly shorter, and seems determined not to speak, which is good because this feels rather awkward considering this is where normal people shake hands or show a badge.

  “League, huh.” I pretend to mull over the significance of dealing with a global occult agency. “Don’t you have better things to do during the Apocalypse?”

  “You're the last known associate of Arthur Curry,” speaks the tall blond. “We would like to know what happened at the national harbor.”

  I shake my head and go back to trying to find canned goods or maybe a few more candy bars. I hear them walk toward me, so I make a show of placing my hand very deliberately on Sharky. He glows mucus green when I touch him, and I know they stopped at the door. I keep looting.

  “Getting your detailed account would be of great assistance,” says the blonde, but I can also hear the dark-haired one snort in frustration.

  “Zombies, Yygradisil, and oh yeah, all of DC and most of Maryland, and a quarter of Virginia is either underwater or doesn’t exist.” I shudder thinking about it. Sharky was the only reason I survived that… that… whatever it was, and the bits and pieces I do remember, give me waking nightmares, mostly about me swimming in a river of blood and other less savory substances too disgusting to think about.

  Sharky ha
sn’t said a word since, and though I fear he is dead, I know he simply just doesn’t have enough juice to remain conscious since saving my life twice so far. I know he is still in there because beyond the waking nightmares that are my memories, his dreams are my nightmares. “So besides that, I don’t know anything. If you think me and Arthur were friends, then you know more about what happened than I do.”

  “This is a waste of time!” exclaims the dark hair one, but before he can take a step toward me, the blonde checks him.

  “Susan, your information may be the key to stopping this once and for all.”

  I turn to face them and stare daggers at the big blonde. “You see that right there is the reason why I don’t like you Necromancers. Always needing to know crap. Shoot or stab. Very simple.” Ever since that black hole opened and closed in Maryland, the zombies seem to be behaving more like, well… zombies. Slow, stupid, and much easier for normal people to kill. Having someone else explain it to me, it seems as if the universe got a chance to auto-correct itself once the primary rule breakers were banished from our reality. Or something like that. I still don’t understand this Multiverse, beyond the veil stuff completely. I just know not everyone is taking the zombie apocalypse very well. Since Europe and Africa got their first outbreak a week ago, the whole global economy effectively shut down.

  “And besides, I don’t do this cloak and dagger shit. You want my help? Pay me in either food or water. And it doesn’t look like you have either, so please leave.”

  * * *