We Will All Go Down Together Read online

  “Might be I could melt you inside-out, if nothing else,” Ygerna reminds the former Euwphaim Glouwer, who nods once more, in turn. Agreeing, as she does—

  “Oh, cert. But only if I let ye catch hold of me . . . and to do so, ye would have tae break that circle o’ yuirs, beyond doubt. Which puts us at cross-purpose yet, wi’ nae end in sight.”

  A pause ensues, and Ygerna shivers as the almost unseen angel’s black amusement-ripple breaks across her, pricking her all over. The witch studies Gaheris with muddy eyes, and smiles, secretly, pricking him in turn, sharp as any witchfinder’s needle.

  “You do owe us something, though, I’d think,” he maintains. “For saving you from the Fire.”

  “Mmm. And did ye do so all on yuir own, little man, or had ye help?” Raising her voice: “What say you, my laird? Have these two a claim tae my good-will?”

  :One might believe so, given what they have sacrificed to make your escape come true.:

  “Aye, one might. Yet will ye make me honour it, all the same?”

  :No. You will do only as you please, Euwphaim, as always—my lovely one, best of all supplicants. You will do as you see fit, and I will watch, happily.:

  Trust no angels, Ygerna thinks, neither inside heaven, nor out-. She can’t remember if it’s something she was taught, or just an instinct, a connection made under duress. Perhaps something Ganconer might have told her, back when she still listened to him—when she was young enough to want to marry him when she grew up, but not yet old enough to understand his handsome face would stay always the same no matter what, while she simply withered away. . . .

  Which won’t happen, now. Not that it makes facing the alternative any easier.

  Beside her, Gaheris still argues with Ashreel Maskim, for all the good that will do. “We took your mark, though, didn’t we? That gives us some rights! Now make her—”

  But before he can continue—from one in-breath to the next—Ygerna sees him stiffen, jerked upright puppet-style, suddenly filled. Hears the Terrible Seventh’s voice answer, from out of his own mouth.

  :Do what, Gaheris Sidderstane? I have said already what will happen: she will take her revenge, hers, at what time and place she chooses. As I will wear you at my own convenience, taking that for my payment—your sister too, when I choose to. You cannot prevent it.:

  “Then you lied.”

  :Not entirely.:

  “But . . . angels can’t. They’re not capable. All the texts I’ve ever studied, they all agreed—”

  :Why would they tell you otherwise? Yet even the Elohim do not speak the whole truth, always, if He instructs them differently.:

  Such a painful force of presence, grating on all Ygerna’s exposed nerves at once—and she only feels it from the outside, not the in-; Gaheris must be close to fainting. Yet he drags himself upright, nonetheless, and spits out: “You’ve cheated me, then. The both of you.”

  Euwphaim laughs, sketching a mocking little curtsey. “Aye, wi’out doubt. I stand unbound now, freed from time’s tethers by yuir gullibility; my recompense on the Lady shall proceed at my ane convenience, for the which I thank ye and yuir good sister, both.”

  “But we could still help you, surely. . . .”

  “Oh, that I doubt. Nay, ’twill be my Two Betrayed I turn to, from now on. For we maun keep tae our own in future, as the Druirs do, if we hope tae dance on their grave.”

  Behind her, as though summoned by their own mention, Ygerna dimly perceives two more figures taking shape, recognizable mainly in context. One, perhaps Alizoun Rusk, is all over blood, naked as a butcher’s shop and far more rude; a single pulled breast hangs by a flap of meat, the other torn away entirely, her crippled hands crossed high over a swollen belly. The other, presumably Jonet Devize, wavers like a peeling grey doll made from ash, threatening to shiver apart at the slightest touch. Her remaining grey eye beams dull as boiled lead, its matching empty socket rimmed in gore.

  And: Welcome, sisters, Ygerna hears Euwphaim greet them, in her mind. I ha’ missed ye, grieving I could not save you yuir pain. Yet we will make our mark upon this world nonetheless, if in far smaller scope than originally intended.

  Behind them, more phantoms stand, not so easily identified. A woman in spectacles, unsuitable clothes layered black on black on black, with a girl’s quizzical face and Jonet Devize’s lost wealth of moonlit hair hung massed to her waist, along whose bared arms words crawl like worms. Another woman with hair cut short as a soldier’s, strong-set and shadowed beneath the eyes, the bones of her face echoing Dolores Trench’s; around her, a halo of gleaming, ghostly fragments forms a cage within which one particular red-headed shade floats caught, smoking a cigarette. A gorgeous mulatto in a nun’s wimple, arms crossed and frowning. A dark-browed, saturnine man with Cousin Saracen’s peacock eyes, hair prematurely grey, hands dug deep in his cardigan’s pockets.

  Do you know them? Ygerna can’t restrain herself from asking. Euwphaim shakes her head.

  Not yet, she answers. But I will, in time.

  (For: ye see it too, do ye not, Druir’s gillie-girl? All such shall come tae pass once these four be brought together, the very vengeance ye and he do seek—though ne’er before, nor ever but at my will.)

  :I take my leave of you, Euwphaim,: Ashreel Maskim tells her, through Gaheris’s unwilling lips. :You know it must be so, do you not?:

  “I do, my good laird. Yet tell me true, if ye can—might I see ye one time more?”

  :All things are possible, in the dark backward, the great abyss.:

  “Then I must count myself satisfied.”

  They bow to each other then, Gaheris’s head bobbing sharply, as if slapped. And then he is released at last, as the angel takes its leave—gutters over everything, tainting it all. Ygerna lunges to break her brother’s fall, and does, though not quite in time to keep one foot from kicking out like a hanged man’s, scattering salt in all directions.

  They both freeze, paralyzed, in the movement’s wake. Staring up at Euwphaim Glouwer wearing Dolores Trench’s stolen skin, hands clenched as if in contemplation of attack and beaming down, drinking in their fear like wine.

  “So, stane’s son,” she says, at last. “No boundaries stand between us, for that ye ha’ broke yuir own circle. What would ye do, I wonder, in my place?”

  Ygerna knows as well as Gaheris, though neither of them want to say it. For you must never trust an angel, or one of the Fae, or a witch; trust none whose blood bears a closer touch of God than that He gave to Adam’s sons and Eve’s daughters. They are monsters, in the end, all of them, even to those they love . . . to those, most of all. But to everyone else, just as surely.

  A breathless pause, one great squeeze of two shared hearts—then Euwphaim’s hands flutter outwards, fingers emptying of flame. She shakes her head a final time, amusement dimming.

  “Nay,” she tells the Sidderstane twins, with a fine contempt. “Y’are no’ worth my while. Yet I will see ye both again, ne’er fear, in future times. We will have our meeting, be it merry or sad, tae wait, and whistle, and dance all us three together.”

  ’Til then, children.

  Gone, after that. Slipped sidelong through time, whether bodily or by simple misdirection, a trance sown to cover her tracks, as she steers her new flesh back downstairs.

  Ygerna hugs her brother close, feels Gaheris sob into her shoulder, and fights to ignore how sweet his tears smell. To not be the predator she knows herself becoming—to say not here, not now, not him, never. Not ever.

  Or simply, when all’s said and done. . . .

  . . . not yet.

  | nine: the crust

  Locking the door behind her, Keck paused by the window to watch the odd little Scotswoman set slowly off along the road, gait hesitant-loping, as if she feared her ankles might turn with every step. Pausing on the corner, she raised one hand to wipe at her mouth, and he was surprised to glimpse something on the p
alm—a tattoo? A brand?

  Young people, Keck thought, with a disapproving sniff. Their fault entirely, how this world is a deepening hole; best leave them to the mess they’ve made of it, just like them upstairs. Be all over soon enough, one way or t’other.

  Thus settled, he pulled the blind, fading back into the Sidderstane house’s many shadows. And mere moments later, as he began to clear away the mess their guest had made in Old Master’s office, the bell from Miss Ygerna’s room began to ring.

  In that uncertain area now known as Dourvale, Ontario—just outside of Overdeere, near the Lake of the North—they still tell the story of how, in 1968, a newlywed couple taking their eight-month-old baby camping passed by a woman squatting shoeless at the side of the road, her left hand pressed to the ground. She was bent nearly double, so far her disordered dark hair trailed in the dust, and smiled wide as she did so, whispering—

  “Do ye hear me, Lady? I come tae the very edge of yuir domains so that ye maun know me once mair free, and remind ye of all that’s owing. So think on’t, ye great Fae harlot, and know the time is coming when I will rob ye of all ye threw my sisters an’ me Fire-wards tae gain: yuir home, yuir lands, yuir children, all. When I take from ye every thing ye love, e’en pitifully as such a thing can manage, and leave ye to weep in the ashes.”

  The husband, unable to hear, pulled their vehicle up on the shoulder of the road to park beside her and leaned across his wife, to call out through the window: “Hey, man. You all right? Goin’ far?”

  “Aye, I ha’ travelled far, and farther still maun go.”

  “Want a lift?”

  “I thank ye for yuir kindness.” And she let him hand her up, climbing to perch in back, next to the baby’s basket. Inquiring of his wife, as they pulled away: “Be yuir baby baptized, mistress?”

  The car the authorities found abandoned three days after, with the man’s hag-ridden body buried some feet distant, beneath a shallow coat of leaves; the mother was never found at all, though the search extended several miles in every direction. But a pile of rocks eventually disclosed the remains of their child’s corpse, which had been placed under an upturned pan to make a haphazard oven, then heaped in charcoal and ash. The infant, thus roasted, had been pulled apart at the joints and picked over efficiently, at least partially eaten—as meat-dense scat collected nearby proved.

  Meanwhile, a farmer in his field saw a strange, lone cloud pass overhead the next day, heading east—towards the Maritimes, and the Atlantic Ocean. And when its shadow fell on him he suffered a stroke that left the side of his face paralyzed, contorted in terrible mirth for the rest of his natural days.

  In Newfoundland, the Edward Teach—a trawler bound for Scotland, hauling as much fish as it could catch along the way to sell, before picking up freight for the journey home—took on an extra passenger off the books because she charmed both captain and first mate, promising to pay her way by splitting her favours equally between them. That vessel was found adrift six months later off the coast of Yell, one of the Shetland Islands, abandoned and forlorn, except for a few waterlogged corpses snagged in its nets.

  A full year after her trip to Canada, meanwhile, a man named Hector Protheroe was happily surprised to discover the woman he’d fallen so hard for at university waiting for him on the stoop of his Edinburgh apartment. “My God, Dolores!” he was heard to exclaim, by passersby. “Wherever have you been, hen?”

  Three months on, they were married, she pregnant. Her daughter was born, and Hector died. Dolores Trench Protheroe left town, after which a woman named Euwphaim Glouwer moved into a notoriously hard area of Glasgow along with her little girl, Eunice. This child would eventually grow into a mopey young woman, share drugs with an equally mopey young man named Joe, and enjoy them so much she neglected to do anything about her ensuing pregnancy until Euwphaim’s granddaughter, Jodice, slid out, already in withdrawal.

  Their overdoses came quickly, with Euwphaim granted custody, after. And thus the seed of the Glouwers took hold again into a fine new century, with eyes on a finer one still, once the Millennium be achieved.

  Revenge yourself or die, my bonny love, Nana Euwphaim would sing over little Jo’s cot, when the ghosts she saw finally allowed the poor chit to sleep. Two angels, foot and head . . . seven angels, less no more . . . revenge yourself, or die.

  For thus it has been, thus it is, and thus it will be once more. An endless chain of misfortunes, coming three by three by three, for so long as one miserable soul yet bears a Maskim-sigil on their body, as sign of their mutual covenant to remake—or destroy—this sad and terrible world.

  Which is why. . . .

  . . . Being that Heaven and Hell be each the reflection of each, and that above apes that which lies below—as the Grimoire of Pope Honorius does say—

  —forbye, since history’s crust be thin, ye maun look ever careful where ye step.

  THE NARROW WORLD (1999)

  It’s always the same, always different. The moment you make that first cut, even before you open the . . . item . . . in question up, there’s this faint, red-tinged exhalation: cotton-soft, indefinite, almost indefinable. Even more than the shudder or the jerk, the last stifled attempt at drawn breath, this is what marks a severance—what proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something which once considered itself alive has been physically deleted from this tangle of contradictory image and sensation we choose to call “reality.”

  Cut away from, cut loose. Or maybe—cut free.

  And this is the first operating rule of magic, whether black, white, or red all over: for every incision, an excision. No question without its answer. No action without its price.

  Some people fast before a ritual. I don’t. Some people wear all white. I wear all black, except for the purple fun-fur trim on my winter coat (which I took so long to find in the first place that I really just couldn’t bear to part with it). Some people still say you have to be a psychopath to be able to draw a perfect circle—so I hedge my bets, and carry a surveyor’s compass. But I also don’t drink, don’t smoke, haven’t done any drugs but Tylenol since I was a Ryerson undergraduate, getting so bent out of shape I could barely talk straight and practising Crowleyan “sex magick” with a similarly inclined posse of curricular acquaintances every other weekend.

  Effective hierarchical magicians like me are the Flauberts of the Narrow World—neat and orderly in our lives, comme un bourgeois, so that we may be violent and creative in our work. We’re not fanatics. There’s no particular principle involved, except maybe the principle of Free Enterprise. So we can afford to stay safe . . . and for what they’re paying us to do so, our customers kind of prefer it that way.

  Three thousand dollars down, tax-free, for a simple supernatural Q & A session, from U of T Business pregrad Doug Whatever to me, Hark Chiu-Wai—Jude Hark, as I’m known down here in Toronto the Good-for-nothing. That’s what brought me where I was when all this began: under the vaulted cathedral arch of the St. Clair Ravine Bridge, shivering against the cool air of early September as I gutted a sedated German Shepherd in preparation for invoking the obsolete Sumerian god of divination by entrails.

  The dog was a bit on the small side, but it was a definite improvement on Doug and his girlfriend’s first try—a week back, when they’d actually tried to fob me off with some store-bought puppy. Through long and clever argument, however, I’d finally gotten them to cave in: if you’re looking to evoke a deity who speaks through a face made of guts—one who goes by the slightly risible name of Humbaba, to be exact—you’d probably better make sure his mouth is big enough to tell you what you want to hear.

  Since I hate dogs anyway—tongue-wagging little affection-junkies—treating one like a Christmas chicken was not exactly a traumatic prospect. So I completed the down-stroke, shearing straight through its breastbone, and pushed down hard on either side of its ribcage ’til I heard something crack.

  Behind me, the no-doubt-
soon-to-be-Mrs. Doug made a hacking noise and shifted her attention to a patch of graffiti on the nearest wall. Doug just kept on staring, maintaining the kind of physical fixity that probably passed for thought in his circles.

  “So what, those the . . . innards?” he asked, delicately.

  “Those are they,” I said, not looking up. Flaying away the membrane between heart and lungs, lifting and separating the subsections of fat between abdomen and bowels. . . .

  He nodded. “What’cha gonna do with ’em?”

  “Watch.”

  I twisted, cut, twisted again, cut again. Heart on one side, lungs (a riven grey tissue butterfly, torn wing from wing) on the other. Pulled forth the gall bladder and squeezed it empty, using it to smear binding sigils at my north, south, east, west. Shook out another cleansing handful of rock salt, and wrung the bile from my palms.

  Doug’s girlfriend, having exhausted the wall’s literary possibilities, had turned back toward the real action. Hand over mouth, she ventured:

  “Um—is that like a hat you can buy, or is that a religion?”

  “What?”

  “Your hat. Is it, like, religious?”

  (The headgear in question being a black brocade cap, close-fitting, topped with a round, greyish satin appliqué of a Chinese embroidery pattern: bats and dragons entwined, signifying long life and good luck. The kind of thing my Ma might’ve picked out for me, were she inclined to do so.)

  “Oh, yes,” I replied, keeping my eyes firmly on the prize, as I started to unreel the dog’s intestines. “Very religious. Has its own church, actually. All hail Jude’s hat—bow down, bow down. Happy holiness to the headgear.”

  She sniffed, mildly aggrieved at my lack of interest in her respect for my fashion sense. Said: “Well, excuse me for trying to be polite.”

  I shot her a small, amused glance. Thinking: Oh, was that what you were trying to do?