Mags was already reloading her pipe, pushing a shotgun shell into the end. She raised it, aimed, and slammed the pipes together to fire.
She was too far away to do much, but the shots did serve to interrupt the man. It proved brief as interruptions went. Even if he hadn’t been immune to death and dying, he was a good distance away, Mags’ aim wasn’t perfect, and the one or two stray particles that happened to find him weren’t enough to do much.
The possessed lawyer continues his march toward them, speaking under his breath as a chain unfurled from his sleeve. The chain smoked, and the smoke began to trace out a form of a hound. The Welder hurled himself forward, stabbing with a spear of iron, but the possessed lawyer didn’t break his verbal stride, uttering a string of guttural words in another language. With lupine yellow eyes and scruff on his cheeks, his hair now in disarray, he looked savage, as much animal as human.
The demon within him was one of the feral choir, it was clear.
There were shouts, orders, a jumble of noises. The Welder and Nurse stepped forward to meet him, while Buttsack cowered, unable to retreat entirely because of the blades that now blocked the stairway.
My focus, however, was shifting to Ms. Lewis, who stood above and away from it all, doing nothing but keeping me bound. I shifted my gaze again, to Rose and the Barber.
Rose was on the edge of her seat, fingers gripping the arms of the throne.
The Barber’s attempts to beat, batter, and wrestle with the Bogeyman were proving largely ineffective. Bristles was a sponge for abuse.
This, naturally, led the Barber to his next option. With one hand occupied, maneuverability proved hard. He let go of the shears with one hand, gripped one of the handles, and let them fall open, the other handle resting against his upper arm, blades pointed down at the bogey-beast.
He stopped, his eye flickering to Rose.
She’d moved, her mouth open, and he’d noticed.
When he’d stopped, so had she.
His eye dropped, to the various tools that were stuck inside Bristles’ body.
“I see,” he said, and his voice still had that rasp to it, not entirely his. “Going to banish it, and have it take my shears with it?”
Rose didn’t react. She was frozen in place.
Shifting the shears to the hand that Bristles was attacking, the Barber reached to the same wrist that Bristles was gnawing on, he pulled the pipes away, then maneuvered them in his fingers, as they were apparently upside down.
With one hand, he raised the pan pipes to his lips, and he played.
Rose, in the meantime, shifted position, sitting straight in the throne. Her eyes closed.
It made for a strange effect. Rose pursuing one plan of attack while the Barber pursued another. The Barber’s melody was haunting, finding an echo in this strange environment that seemed to make them impossible. It reverberated, found an echo, compounded itself. The more drawn out notes were like a wolf’s howl, punctuated by notes that evoked thoughts of yipping, whines, and even sharper notes that suggested something else altogether. Pain, perhaps.
Rose, however, was speaking, and she was putting Conquest into her voice.
“This demesne goes unclaimed, belonging to none by right or establishment…”
Bristles grew more aggressive, savaging the Barber. Stronger though the Barber was, the bogeyman was the equivalent of a squirming child with a pitbull bite. Small as it might have been, in terms of relative strength, it was tenacious enough to be a problem.
Bristles opened its mouth. The Barber shook his arm, and the bogeyman fell free. It found its feet and shook its head.
The music continued.
Again, Bristles shook its head. This time, it lunged, interrupting the music with the force of the impact. The Barber turned his full attention to the bogeyman that still attacked him.
Not a dog? I thought. The Barber seemed just as confused by the fact as I was.
His thought process must have been very similar to mine, as he connected the dots. Bogeymen were a human establishment. He’d argued they were humanity’s eventual destination.
Animals did exist in the Abyss, that was true. So did Others. The dragon-bat-goblin thing I’d seen was such a case. But Others were derived from man. To continue along that journey wasn’t so strange.
For something to become an effective Bogeyman, had it taken on enough elements of humanity to resist the Barber? Or had it never been human in the first place? A human, treated like a dog, abused, finding his way to the Abyss, where it continued a journey to become doglike, but not a true dog?
Rose wasn’t smiling, but I thought I saw a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes.
A gambit, and it was one that had bought her time. Bristles was the sort of thing that was very much worth summoning, here.
“The Abyss has a claim to all places left unowned. As agent of the Abyss, I move to expedite this claim,” Rose said.
The Barber’s head snapped up, looking at her.
“Johannes is finished, and with him go all ties that anchor this demesne to this world.”
The Barber began to haul itself toward Rose, a limping gait. Bristles gripped his leg, paws scrabbling for a grip on the rooftop, pulling in the opposite direction, only stopping to get a better grip and pull in another direction.
“This place can go when Jacob’s Bell goes!” Ms. Lewis called out. “By three points of similarity, this place is anchored! By the vestiges, echoing the people, by location, echoing the place it grew from, and by the bloodlines that are both here and there, knitting this place to that! Inexorable, intertwined, the two cannot be separated. When one falls, so shall the other!”
Ah. She was ready to make a counterattack if Rose tried something.
“By three points of similarity-” Rose paused as the Barber drew nearer. The pan pipes were in one hand, while the shears were in the other.
He slammed the handles together, and the shears became a sickle.
Only a few feet away, now.
The possessed lawyer’s hellhound lunged straight into the midst of the combined group of bogeymen, Mags, Paige, and Peter. Peter had a cut on his back from earlier, when the blades all came flying up from below. I could see ribs, and a whole lot of blood. With the hellhound attacking, the rest of the group was bowled back. The Welder was flung back into Mags, and Mags was sent sprawling.
Buttsack was the only member of the group who wasn’t engaged in a life-or-death struggle. He cowered within the forest of blades beneath the dragon.
“Go, Buttsack, or we all die!” Mags shouted.
“Fuck yourself with a fork!”
“If you get us out of this, I will damn well pay you in porn for as long as I am humanly able!”
Buttsack froze.
“I will give you thumb drives, you sorry excuse for a goblin!” Mags roared the words. The Welder was forced back again, his arms hugging the Hellhound’s muzzle, and he inadvertently kicked Mags in the side. Still, she managed to get out another two words. “Of weird stuff!”
He seemed to make his call, picking up his junkyard shield.
He sprinted for the Barber, and drove the base of the shield into the backs of the Barber’s knees.
Though it had been abstract as a demon, strong, it now had Johannes’ body. It could take on aspects of its old self, but basic mechanics meant the Barber fell onto his back. Bristles let go of his leg to go for the face.
“By three points of similarity,” Rose resumed, no longer holding her breath, caught in the chair, “Justify the connection of the vestiges here to the people there! They’ve been butchered, and any echoes have died!”