I open my eyes. That's my first mistake.
The world blooms into an endless meadow of pain and fire. I screw my eyes shut. For a split second, I wonder if I am in Hell. Then I remember that, no, it's nothing like this. This is more like the hangover when you've woken up in a cheap tanning salon. That's exactly what it's like.
I groan and roll over. A strangled yelp as I encounter the new sensation of my ankles blistering, threatening to burst into flame. Open my eyes again, then screw them shut just as quickly as my head erupts in pain.
No more movement, just take the standing eight.
Laying there on cool cement, I try to piece together what came immediately before.
The last thing I remember was being chased down a street by golems made from the same unreinforced concrete as the high rises that surrounded on all sides. Okay, I think, I'm trapped in a nightmare. I can work with that.
But more memories start to seep in. A workshop full of elderly men and women, all toiling in total silence. Behind them, a massive bubbling cauldron being stirred by concrete arms. They're like a colony of prairie dogs, their heads popping up from their work as one when they heard the door slam open.
That's when the golems emerged, hoisting, or maybe secreting, themselves out of the concrete floor. The entire scene, grave silent. Still at least 70% chance of being in a nightmare.
But there was a reason I am here.
Further back, then. Rush of cars by the freeway. The sound of chalk against gravelly asphalt. The tink of a medal against the same. The relief when the tossed medal of Ganesh turns out to work the same as a St. Cristopher one. The cool fall on the Queens four-way replaced by an icy Russian blast billowing to the skies. That eternally vomit-inducing feeling when up becomes down becomes up again and you land there, choking, as the Way disappears into ritual and nothing.
No, further back.
I breathe a sigh of relief as senses emerge one by one and I feel a definite, physical body. Trunk, head, four limbs, all in the normal configuration. Leaping blind and getting it wrong by a few feet can mean years incarnated as a jar of flour.
My fingers crackle as I splay the fused-together plastic digits. Joints pop and squeak as they move in ways they were never meant to. It would have been nice to jump into one of those art school models with the posable joints and fingers that articulate, but I remembered the location of the shuttered warehouse far more immediately. I open the door with little trouble and walk into the night, the cool air dull against my naked plastic body.
That's the how. Try to remember the why, further back.
I remember an old man. He moves unsteadily, like he isn't used to being to being this frail. Behind him, a woman with a tattooed chin sits taking notes and looking bored. The ink looks like blood dripping from her mouth.
The man tells a meandering tale of an enemy, one he bested countless times and whose victories were the result of circumstance and subterfuge. He becomes animated for the first time since he summoned me.
He explains to me that certain objects may own themselves, in a legal and metaphysical way. Oak trees. Book collections. Masted battleships. Carnivorous plants. He pauses. And souls, he says, looking at me. The woman looks up from her notes, looks back down.
All I need to do, he says, is deliver this message. To a friend. To someone who was a friend, who he knew long ago. To someone who need not concern you, just make sure that he receives the message.
I tell him that I need a where, a who, and a what. He nods and says that the where is Wolandsk, a closed research town just outside of Magnitgorsk.
The who is the friend, the bested rival, no one at all. His name is of no concern. You will recognize him from winding tattoos along his fingers and up his neck. They will look crude, as if made from pen ink. The tattooed man, he is working on a device that they created together. That he made by himself, and that the tattooed man stole. It allows one to write past words and through pure Adamic concepts.
The what is three short sentences, whispered to me in a voice that reeks of rot. He covers his mouth, even though the woman seems absorbed in her notes. I note the burn scars plaiding his palms.
And so that more or less is everything. I open my eyes again, slowly and cautiously. Surrounding me is not the dramatic pillar of flames that I had imagined, but rather a circle of candles no more than a few inches high.
A gaggle of severe-looking men and women in cowls and robes encircle me, the flickering candles making their faces even more craggy than I even knew was possible. My eyes scan for any winding tattoos, but they all appear unmarked. Each is carrying a basket filled with what looks like vegetables. Close-cropped hair and identical robes makes it impossible to tell them apart, just one mass of undifferentiated wizened stuff.
In a single motion, I kip from the floor and lunge at the robed onlookers. It would be simple to grab one of them and pummel the information I need out of them. I get as far as the candles before my face smashes into an invisible wall that bounces me backwards, sending me sliding along the concrete floor.
"Cocksuckers!" I yell to the assembled host as I leap up again, "Messengers are inviolable! You can't do this to me! The gods will have your heads! The erinyes will tear out your miserable guts!"
If there's any sort of fear that they feel, they don't show it. They don't seem to react at all. The sort of dead eyed automatons you find in any large-scale organization.
"Take me to whichever of you has tattoos," I shout, turning to the craggiest of them, a woman, I think. "I just need to tell him something. Just real quick. Won't take more than a few seconds!"
Her wizenedness lets out a series of motions with her shriveled talons. All eyes are immediately upon her. Before she has finished signalling, the entire gaggle of robed weirdos begins to shuffle away, vanishing into the wall.
One by one, they disappear without a sound. Each time, I shudder. I've seen things that shouldn't be seen and things that shouldn't be, but it's always the things that lack something basic that are the most dangerous. A woman with no shadow. Kudzu, snaking two stories into the air with nothing to support it. And now a silent vanishing, not even a murmur as the wall swallows them.
Finally, there is only one acolyte left. He looks unsure and is by far the youngest, only appearing to be a hundred or so. If he leaves, I am stuck in this concrete cube, ringed by flames until… well, until the silent monks decide it's time for me to leave, whatever that may entail.
"Hey!" I yell, "Wait! My leg, it's still on fire! I'll burn this place down. We'll all die from smoke inhalation!" I slap at the blistered plastic, putting on a show for the cheap seats.
It's enough to get him to turn. The motion leads of the carrots in his basket to land on the floor and bounce towards the circle. He's still looking at me as the vegetables plops against one of the candles, jostling it ever so slightly. Threatening to break the circle.
At once, his eyes grow wide and he dives towards the carrot . He grabs it, triumphant. But as he lifts it up, he moves the candle just a little bit more. Just a little bit more is all that's needed to turn a circle into not a circle.
He's so caught up in his relief at grabbing the carrot that he doesn't see the knee coming at him.
Plastic is plastic, but the bones of the face are delicate things. He goes down in a spurt of teeth and blood. Before he even hits the ground, I've grabbed him by his robes, hauling all fifty or so pounds of him up before me. I charge the wall with him as my ram, hoping for both our sakes that he doesn't need to be conscious to pass through the wall.
There's no slick thud, no sudden stop. The momentum keeps us going, but it's a wide open corridor. I let the ancient acolyte go and he drops to floor, giving a pained moan as his blood begins to pool on the floor. It seems a shame to let those robes go to waste. It's not until after I put it on that I realize that there's a difference between a five foot nothing Russian monk and a six foot mannequin, with the fabric only reaching down to my calves. It's better than continuing to run around as a sculpted life size Ken doll, at least.
The hallway is white tiled and paneled, but lit by candles every dozen or so feet like some cenobitic accounting firm. Everything is eerily quiet as I make my way down the hall, even the candles lacking the normal hisses and pops. This place is unnatural, in a way that massive cement golems rising from the floor wasn't.
As I move forward, I try to cleave to the walls, doing my best to look inconspicuous. Part of the scenery, if it normally included a six foot plastic mannequin in robes three sizes too small. No one emerges from any of the walls to force the issue.
Eventually, the hallway splits into two identical corridors. I take the left and then, at the next split, a right. A few more turns and I am swallowed up in the endlessly dividing hallway. I'm tempted to leave this body, just drop a bloodied and half-broken doll, ideally in the midst of some obscene gesture. But with each step something begins to feel more and more off, like the way your hand does when it's too close to a TV. Whatever it is, I know that I will find the tattooed man there.
Without warning, another one of robed ancients materializes from the wall. She looks partially mummified like the rest and carries a steaming pot roughly the size of her torso. For a second, she just looks at me, then turns and runs back through the wall. Maybe it was the blood all over the robe that only goes to my thigh. Or the molar still lodged in my knee. Or the scorch mark on my blistered ankle.
I leap after her and the world spins awkwardly as I tumble ass over teakettle into the room. It takes a moment to piece together the scene in front of me. A square cement room. A massive cauldron silently bubbling as it is stirred by a massive cement arm rising from the floor. Two dozen or so of the monks carrying large baskets of vegetables, handing them to other cement arms which then skin them, chop them, throw them into the pot. Above, on what looks like a lifeguard's chair, the old crone, her hands blurring together in movement.
In an instant, the hands have dropped the vegetables and begin mutely gliding through the cement floor. Their fingers are long and sharp. The crone is glaring at me while the acolytes look on dumbly. I scramble backwards on my hands, just barely managing to get to my feet before the grasping cement closes in on me.
I burst into the hallway, cement fingers scraping at my heels. A rasping sound as the tiles on the floor are pushed aside by the cement constructs. Somehow even this is muted.
A left, then a right. The buzzing sensation grows stronger, filling my hollow plastic limbs like a sounding chamber. I want to leave this vessel, just to escape the feeling. I try to remember that I am so, so close. It makes my eyes weep with static.
Finally, I come to a dead end. The wall pulsates with energy. Either this is the door I need, or else I will dash my body against an unyielding wall and be free of this sensation. Either way, I can do nothing else.
I burst through the wall. Before me, an infernal grey metal machine reaching up at least three stories. A seething hive of keys, like some enormous typewriter, clatter and click of their own free will. On each one is etched a single glyph about two feet tall. They hurt to look at in the way that the sun hurts to look at. Even at a distance, I can see each one with perfect clarity. It cuts through space to deliver a meaning that goes beneath words.
Several dozen of the Soviet monks are gathered around the machine, taking measurements of one kind or another. I look at them, scanning to see if there are any tattoos. Less to find the one I need to speak to, more to view something other than the glyphs that hit like nails all over my body.
There, wrestling a glyph into place on the machine, is the man. He looks positively ancient, the ink that flows from his jaw onto his neck and down along his fingers blue from age. As I clatter in, he turns his head, just like all of the acolytes. His face is a mask of blank incomprehension. He signs to a monk who signs back, his face equally blank.
I grab at the keys, hauling myself up to his level. I have gone through all of this, and I will deliver him the message which is the only thing between me and owning myself once more. The old man recoils as the blood spattered mannequin with the crazed look in its plastic eye pulls itself towards him. Half turning, I see behind me the concrete hands pulling themselves up, revealing stout humanoid bodies once more. Part of me wonders if this was a security measure, or if they simply emerged from the cement, called by the machine.
The old man backs away from me, his feet pressing against the glyph for an act where you know it is futile and will leave no mark, but do it anyway, and one for all animals that are trained. The machine rolls its tide of keys along, unheeding.
I lunge at the old man, ready to fill his ears with the words that came to me almost from the grave. Then I hear the snap.
After burning and beating and running, my leg finally breaks. I give a yelp and fall, my vision filled with the purest manifestation of looking at a map for ancient and long-dead kingdoms.
Cement cold hands close around my leg and begin to drag me away, over the clattering keys. I try to grab a key of the taste of sharpest mint, but the hand pulls me hard enough that my fingers snap.
As I am dragged, I shout the three sentences the old man gave me.
The tattooed monk starts, then doubles over. He begins to writhe as the blue ink along his body changes shape and moves up to his eyes and his mouth. The golem hands around my leg loosen as the old man retches and begins to vomit blue ink which sinks into the glyphs. The machine begins to shudder, its pulsating keys spasming at random. Black smoke rising from within. The ink continues to flow from the old man's mouth and eyes, interrupted only by occasional gouts of blood.
The grip on my hand loosens, then dissipates as the typewriter begins to die. The keys sink into the machine, glyphs dissolving into puddles of dead metal.
All at once, I hear sounds. The shrieking of steel tearing itself apart. The screams of monks and nuns, startled out of whatever demonic silence they were holding. The pained, begging vomiting of the old man, now discharging probably more than his body weight in ink or whatever it is. An explosion, then another one as the machine and with it, the building, begin to collapse in on themselves.
I feel myself growing lighter, in a way I haven't in centuries as the terms of the contract the bloody-mouthed woman drew up with her ink kick in. As I drift from the broken mannequin, the last thing I see is the old man staring at me. His body tearing itself apart, but between the blood and ink and viscera, I see a look of confusion mixed with reproach.
Don't blame the messenger.