Gormok’s grin never fluctuated. He knelt on tacky carpet tiles and went into his arcane ritual of burning salt in a napkin, then inhaling the smoke that wafted up from the ashtray. He seemed to wobble on his knees. “The warrior b’named Clipper, dear friend, in the sixth spell of conflict.” Then he collapsed to the floor.
“Holy shit!” Rudy and Beth rushed to help the alomancer up. “Gor! Are you all right?” Rudy asked.
“Too much for one day.” Gormok’s voice sounded drugged. “Put me abed, dear ones. I’ll be better on the morrow.”
“The couch,” Rudy suggested. “Let’s get him on the—”
“Deep and down,” Gormok inanely remarked. “I must be deep, as all damned Nashipus are so cursed. Get me near the cenotes.”
“A cenote is a hole in the ground,” Beth recalled from her college myth classes. “They’d hold rituals in them, sacrifice virgins and things like that.”
A hole in the— “The basement?” Rudy suggested.
Beth opened the ringed trap-door, then they both lugged the muttering and rubber-kneed Gormok down the wooden steps.
“Better, yes! Sweet, sweet… dark.”
They lay the bizarre man on an old box-spring next to the washer and drier. Dust eddied up from the dirt floor. “He’s heavier than a bag of bricks!” Beth complained.
Rudy draped an old army blanket over him. “There.”
“Ea, I heartily do repent,” Gormok blabbered incoherently. “Absolve my sins, I beg of Thee!” He began to drool. “And curse thee, Nergal, unclean despoiler! Haunter! Deceiver of souls!”
“Uh… huh,” Rudy remarked, staring down. Yeah, we’ve got a live one, all right. A real winner.
III
In bed, they bickered rather than slept. “I can’t believe you invited that weirdo into our house,” Beth bellyached.
“I didn’t hear you complaining,” Rudy refuted.
“Well, you do now. He’s… scary.”
“You don’t believe all that mumbo-jumbo, do you? It’s just a bunch of schizo crap be made up.”
“It’s not made up, Rudy. I majored in ancient history, that is, before I had to quit school and go to work to keep you out of cement loafers. Cenotes, ziggurats, alomancy—it’s all straight out of Babylonian myth. This guy says he’s possessed by the spirit of a Nashipu salt-diviner. That’s the same as saying he’s a demon.”
Rudy chuckled outright. “Somebody hit you in the head with a dumb-stick? He’s a flake, Beth. He probably escaped from St. Elizabeth’s in the back of a garbage truck and read about all that stuff in some occult paperback. He thinks he’s possessed by a demon. And so what? Let him think what he wants. What’s important to us is the guy’s genuinely psychic. You heard him, he predicted that fat barkeep’s squeeze was cheating on him.”
“That could be just coincidence, Rudy.”
“Coincidence? What about the Tuttle fight? He didn’t just pick the winner, Beth, he picked the round. He picked a KO by a guy who every bookie in town said was gonna lose.”
“I don’t care,” Beth replied, turning her back to him amid the covers. “He’s scary. I don’t want him in the house.”
“Beth, the guy’s a gold mine on two legs. We keep him under our wings, we’ll never have to worry about money again. We’ll be—”
The scream came down like a guillotine blade. Rudy and Beth went rigid in the bed.
Then another scream tore through the air.
“Thuh-that came from M-Mona’s room, didn’t it?” Rudy stammered.
“Yuh-yeah,” Beth agreed.
“She’s your friend. You go see what happened.”
“Fuck you!” Beth shouted. “Inconsiderate coward son of a—”
“We’ll both go, then. Here. I’ll protect you.” Rudy boldly brandished one of Beth’s nail files. Then, disheveled in their underwear, they crept out of the bedroom.
“Aw, Christ,” Rudy muttered when he saw the trap-door to the basement standing open.
Then they padded down the ball, and peered into Mona’s room…
“Aw, Christ,” Rudy muttered again.
But Beth didn’t mutter. She screamed.
Gormok, his face smeared scarlet, grinned up at them in the lamplight. And atop the stained bed lay Mona, naked and quite dead.
She was also quite eviscerated.
The student’s trim abdomen had been riven open, and from the rive an array of organs had been extracted and arranged about her as if for some macabre inspection. An outline of slowly seeping blood spread about the corpse like a Kirlian aura.
Gormok was eating something dark and wet out of his hands. Her liver, Rudy realized. He’s eating Mona’s liver.
“Friends! Hello!” Gormok greeted, chewing. “How art?”
Rudy bellowed, “What in God’s name did you do!”
“Not in God’s name,” Gormok lamented. “In Nergal’s. Lo, and to my eternal shame, behold the freight of my curse. I try to fight it, on my heart. But the blasted Nergal has condemned me to such heinous acts wheneverest I breathe on the salt’s divine fumes.”
“Uh… huh.” Rudy shuddered, feebly wielding the nail file. Should I kill him? he debated. But he thought about that. He’d never much liked Mona anyway. Bitchy, arrogant, and always taking cheap shots. Sure, he’d fucked her a couple times when Beth was at work (—no great shakes in bed, either. Like fucking a starfish—) and since then she’d regularly implied that it wouldn’t be a good idea for Rudy to ever raise her rent.
“Gormok, wait here a minute. Beth and I have to talk.”
“Of course! Enjoy your discourse, dear friends,” Gormok invited. “Whilst I enjoy my meal.”
Rudy had to about carry Beth back to their bedroom. She was going pasty-faced, pale. “Rudy,” she fretted, “we have to get out of here while we still can! We have to call the police!”
“Don’t overreact, honey. He’s harmless.”
“Harmless!” Beth’s eyes came close to jettisoning from her head. “He’s eating Mona’s liver! You call that harmless?”
Rudy had a plan, but he had to play it out right. “Listen, Beth,” he said in a consoling, quiet voice. “Mona’s got no relatives or friends—hell, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She’ll never be missed. And she wasn’t doing well in school, anyway—”
“Rudy! You call the police right now!”
“All right, all right.” Rudy held up his hands, his hair sticking up. “I’m calling the police. See?” He picked up the phone and began to dial.
But not the police. Instead, he dialed 1-900 Sportsline. He listened a moment, tapping his foo. Then he hung up and smiled.
“Clipper won the bout in the sixth round.”
Beth went into a staccato burst of crying and screaming. “Rudy, you’re out of your mind! What is wrong with you?”
“Baby, it’s only because I love you,” Rudy, well, lied. “I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for us. I want us to be married someday, have kids, and all that.”
Beth sniffled, looking up. “Really?”
“Of course, honey,” he assured her and gave her a hug. “But I need you to have faith in me, okay? I want you to go to bed now. Just trust me.” He lovingly touched her cheek. “I’ll take care of everything.”
Rudy did exactly that. First, he put Gormok back to bed in the basement. The alomancer, smiling calmly, said, “I’m sated now, dear Rudy. My curse is relieved, and now I can sleep. And I am heartily sorry for any inconvenience i have caused you.”