This Revolting Graveyard
Wes didn’t say a word in Theo’s car. It was nearly midnight already. He tried not to think about his part in the abduction of his cousin, who had walked straight into the trap in the darkened field. He tried not to think about Ricky now, ointment-greased and bound, in the car boot. The remnants of the same grease lingered on his lips. In wiping it into his skin, Ricky had done his job for him, even better than Wes had anticipated.
He tried not to think about the destruction of the family, about what the three of them had done. He couldn’t face his surviving siblings now. They’d never forgive him for this. After the nightclub massacre, he didn’t even know if they were all still alive. He didn’t want to know. And once he’d done this, if Katy ever found out his part in it… even if she didn’t eat him, he’d lose her too. But if he didn’t go through with it, he’d be nothing for the rest of his life.
If only Grandad could restore him fully, so be it.
It was too late now to wrestle with himself. It would happen the way it happened. The only thing Wes regretted was the kiss, because he’d wanted Ricky not to fight. Now the moment of his visions was drawing near, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
They got out at the warehouse and Wes stayed put until the remaining cultists had unloaded the Soothsayer’s shackled form. He hadn’t been able to Change and resist them, but they’d used the rest of the ointment on him anyway, just in case.
“Everything all right?” he asked as they bundled Ricky off into a large warehouse through the heavy fire door.
Theo nodded. “Can’t you open the portal for us?”
“Not with this mojo wearing off,” Wes said, sliding out and stretching. “But he can.”
Theo nodded vigorously, eyes glazed.
The dose was evidently still working, although Wes could feel it starting to fade.
“No more questions?”
Theo shook his head.
“Perfect. Let’s get this over with.”
Theo led the way into the belly of the warehouse, a graveyard of machinery lit by large LED torches throwing wide, straight beams of light in zig-zag paths across the floor.
Ricky was dragged into the middle and chained to a chair, dripping mucus and ointment along the concrete.
This was exactly how he’d seen it.
It was weird, like stepping into a dream.
Wes could feel his grip on his glory slipping. Tonight’s dose, made with a smaller part of Ricky’s glory, was wearing off. He wouldn’t be able to tell the cult what to do, and the True Face in them was separating from him, taking on a life of its own.
He could feel it now he was in close proximity with so many people who were inhabited by shards of himself. He swore under his breath as he counted them. There were a lot more than he’d thought.
“What good’s the Soothsayer to us?” Cousin Tally asked. Half her face had been clawed away in some nasty altercation, and she limped forwards with a toothy snarl. Wes decided he didn’t want to know what his cult had been up to while unsupervised.
Tally peered at Ricky, lifting his chin and dropping it.
“Why is he here?”
“He can open the portal,” Theo supplied. “Look, I brought the Faceless Man, too. But he’s weak.”
“We’ve no room for weakness,” Tally snapped, but then she saw Wes’s face and stopped, mouth slackening into silence.
“Do you feel me?” Wes asked, stepping into the crossbeams of torchlight. “Do you know who I am?”
There was enough glory in him to drop them to their knees. The connection was still there, even though Wes didn’t think they had much time.
“I need to enter the Stone Circle, to regain my strength. You all know me. I live within you. You have a shrine, is that right?”
Theo pointed.
Wes’s heart skipped. It was hardly a shrine – they had scraped together some antique splinters, the heart was too fresh and too small, the rocks were smashed and fractured. But it was a shrine, and it might still work.
“Is that it?”
“We did our best,” someone said from their prostrate position at his feet.
Wes sighed. “And is this all of you?”
Theo nodded. “Everyone.”
“And you are all committed to this cause of yours? Opening the portal, bringing chaos to the world, all that jazz?”
This was a terrible moment to fidget, but his trousers were chaffing despite the talc on his legs. Standing in front of open flames for ages and then sitting down in the car had been an exceptionally bad combination, and he really needed to get them off. The sooner this was over with the sooner he could change – in more ways than one.
“All of us,” Tally said, and this was echoed by the rest.
This was it. A robed figure approached, a saw in his hand. It was the saw from the vision where Ricky had his neck broken first. Had they done something to get to this one? Had some steps led them here, some tiny moments, something big? Wes’s head swam with the intricacies of a web he couldn’t fathom.
“Told you I’d deliver him,” he said. “Now open it, and give me what I want.”
Torchlight glinted off the saw in the man’s hand, and Wes knew he couldn’t stop this even if he wanted to. It would play out the way he’d seen whether he liked it or not.
The Foreman grabbed the escaping tendrils at the back of Ricky’s head, yanking his head up. “How does it feel, to be a god?”
Ricky grunted, chalky pale but conscious. “Better’n being you.”
The Foreman headbutted him, and Wes heard Ricky’s nose crunch. The sound got him hard. He knew that was fucked up, but it was a sound he’d missed, and Ricky didn’t react like he’d felt it.
Blood oozed down his lips in rusty dribbles.
“Fucking useless piece of shit.” The Foreman spat on him for good measure. “When we Ascend, there’ll be no place for you. The True Face speaks to us now, and so does our Grandsire.”
“As long as they stay the fuck out my head, they c’n tell you whatever they want,” Ricky muttered thickly. “S’all lies.”
“Open the portal.” The Foreman didn’t let the tendrils go, and there wasn’t much Ricky could do.
“And then what?” Ricky snarled. “You really think there’s a reward for you?”
A cousin Wes didn’t recognise spoke up from the shadows. “The True Face will reign supreme, filling us all with freedom.”
This was it.
Ricky eyeballed the Foreman like a vicious dog. He struggled with his chains but there was no chance of escape. He snorted, giving up, and closed his eyes. “Fuck you.”
Wes gently pushed Theo behind him, not releasing his grip.
The Foreman Changed, extra eyes bulging out of his face and neck, amphibious and egg-shaped, white as pustules.
“If he rejects the Ascension and won’t open it for us, I say we sacrifice him and open it ourselves. Last chance, Soothsayer. What d’you say?”
“So let it be,” Ricky said, not even looking at him.
Wes appreciated the drama, even as the tension grew.
The Foreman’s glory whipped out of his robes and wrapped around Ricky’s neck. It squeezed and wrenched.
Wes balled his hands into tight fists, flinching.
Ricky’s neck was crooked at an unnatural angle, and his whole body slumped.
There was a long, horrible pause.
Wes willed Ricky to breathe, willed him to have a plan, but nothing happened.
Just tell me when the vision stops, Ricky had muttered, blindfolding Wes behind the bonfire and giving him to Uncle Ralph for the elders’ Head of the Family blessing behind the sheep sheds. As soon as we get to the part where it cuts out, and you don’t remember anything after.
Wes had thought Ricky came with him for the blessing, but Ricky had re-joined him from behind some farm machinery once the blindfold was off.
Wes didn’t see the point when Ricky clearly couldn’t hear him, but he hoped something was going to happen.
The Foreman raised his handsaw and tilted the drooping chin up with the blade, but no breath misted on the metal. He waited a while in silence, then let the head drop.
“Accept our sacrifice, enter our world, and give the True Face its full power!”
He readied the saw at the base of Ricky’s neck, below the fat pale scar of his closed back lips.
This was the moment Wes had seen in his vision, the exact second, and after that the future went dark, but it had been fulfilled.
Wes found his voice. “Now.”
Ricky opened his eyes and they were clear as glass, like windows reflecting a cloudy grey sky.
Wes breathed out with acute relief.
The perfectly shaped form of his cousin grinned with a mouth full of metal and broken glass.
Before anyone could react, he burst the chains wrapped around his body and links flew across the room. The giggle was the Soothsayer’s, but the dark aura around him was not. It repelled them with sizzling agony as the elders rushed him, and Ricky threw one straight through the wall.
“Easy boys,” he said, in a rich, feminine voice that definitely wasn’t his. Tendrils whipped out, but they were copper wire, flexing and crackling with electricity. Over the dust and asbestos fibres there was a distinct smell of warm stone and wood, cloves and a summer garden after rain.
Ricky Porter grew in height, shifted dimensions, but kept the pipe-coils.
Tally rushed at him and fell back, yowling in agony and skin audibly sizzling before she got within three feet.
“Nice try,” the Soothsayer said in Carrie’s voice.
Wes had never heard or seen anything sexier in his life.
Theo bolted for cover as the living-dead thing in his cousin’s shape picked up the last Foreman, broke him in half with a wet meaty crack and hurled him at the shrine, demolishing it.
Wes focused, drawing on the last of his strength and reaching deep into himself. He couldn’t overpower the avatar, the curse aura was too strong, and this was not the time to be on its bad side.
As he focused, his cultists didn’t attempt to flee. He drew them closer, trying to keep them corralled in an invisible circular radius away from the exits.
“His face,” they whispered, and Wes grew drunk on their intoxicating adoration. “His beautiful face.”
All around him, family members were giving up the idea of escape, turning around and facing the thing that was not the Soothsayer.
Wes was aware of Theo staggering away, not sure what was happening. He tried to keep Theo separate, to make him watch, but he had no way of knowing if this was going to save him or not.
“I can see his face…”
The chant was picked up like a ripple.
Those who had managed to get out of the open door when the Foreman was torn in half came back. They returned in a dazed shuffle, like something out of a zombie film.
Wes was the only one left standing as the entire gathering formed a semi-circle around whatever was wearing the Soothsayer’s appearance and got on their knees. Theo was hiding away behind the hollowed-out carcass of a machine.
The chant changed.
“We give ourselves to see his face, we give ourselves to see his face, we give ourselves…”
Blades of silver and steel flashed through the air in place of Cousin Ricky’s tendrils.
Wes choked on brick dust and bile, entranced and aching with want.
It moved as if it had always had that body and was intimately acquainted with it, although muscles didn’t bulge and flex when they should have done – the whole form was stuck in one shape, as if carved that way. Wes couldn’t stop staring, although his eyes stung and watered. He stood stock still as the carnage ensued around him, the coughing screams and thick thwacks of metal pipe on flesh echoing in his ears.
He was reminded of a foam party in Ibiza, where the scything whirl of coloured lights dissected flailing limbs and slippery, wet body parts. The worshippers, blind to everything but the images Wes placed in their heads, raved in ecstatic death throes.
Everything was red.
He could only see the fresh crimson spurts, the darker maroon jets, the showers of stomach contents and thick smell of shitty meat that came with it.
Behind him, Theo gagged and retched and threw up.
When it was over, he barely noticed – his ears went on ringing. He throbbed with raw lust.
“I don’t suppose there is any chance…” He trailed off as the avatar turned to arch an eyebrow at him but rallied. “Is that like, a hard no, or a hard maybe? ’Cos I’m pretty fucking hard either way.”
The avatar curled its lips in a private smile and didn’t answer. Wes grinned.
“Oh, all right. Not a no. I’ll take that to the bank.”
“I do feel you overcomplicated this just a bit,” the avatar said, ignoring his lusty overtures. “You can be a right cunt, you know that, don’t you?”
Wes brushed this off. “Well – we did it, right? We engineered it exactly how I saw it, and now he’s going to be fine. But they had to believe it was real.”
The avatar was somewhere between Ricky and Carrie now, and that was even hotter. It wouldn’t matter whose name he shouted in the heat of it, and he licked his lips, taking it in.
He checked his phone and spotted a text from Katy.
“What?” The avatar saw his grin.
“‘You had me, you pair of pricks,’” Wes read out. He bit his lower lip and cocked his head, hoping the avatar thought this was something he and Ricky had thought of together. Clearly Ricky hadn’t disabused Katy of that notion yet.
“I knew it would work when she couldn’t tell the difference,” the avatar said, sucking in the pipe-tendrils completely. “So that’s that. Cultists all dead. We got your vision to work itself out just like you saw it, and Ricky’s still alive unless Katy’s killed him.”
“I’ll check,” Wes said, poker-faced. He texted her back and she replied nearly immediately.
“She says, ‘He snuck up on me in the field and I jumped out of my skin and nearly impaled him, but he’s fine.’”
“Thank God for that.” The avatar looked around. “Hey, is that one I missed?”
Wes spotted Theo, cowering by the machinery. “Oh, he’s harmless, leave him alone. Thinking he’ll make me a lovely acolyte, or something.”
The avatar gave him a stern look.
Wes raised his hands. “What? He’s also our ride home.”
“You think of everything, don’t you?”
Wes was dying to lie across the back seat of the car and finally get those damn trousers off. “Most things.” He snapped his fingers at Theo and the poor boy flinched. “Come on. Drive us back, and I’ll try and fix whatever it is I’ve done to you.”
Theo scuttled out of his hiding place, and the avatar sighed heavily.
“As long as this is over.”
Wes pulled a face. “Home stretch.” He shooed Theo out of the warehouse like a domesticated chicken, and turned at the door to cast an eye over the carnage. “I guess I should call the cleaners. If we’ve got any left.”
The avatar slid by him, contorting its dimensions so they didn’t touch as it passed him. The inch of space between them tingled with promise. Wes couldn’t help inhaling its scent, the smell of a cared-for wood-beamed building with abattoir violence soaking into its grain, tainting the dancing dust motes.
He ran his tongue over his teeth, grin spreading.
“So. How about dinner?”
The avatar was settling back into a more Carrie-like figure, just squarer-shouldered and shorter, and the exasperated look she shot over her shoulder made him stifle a laugh.
Her reply knocked the amusement out of him.
“How about you concentrate on sorting things out with the partners you already have?”
Wes winced at the gut-punch. “I don’t think they’ll want me back after this. I’m not… I’m not the man they wanted me to be. And honestly, I don’t think I can go back to trying anymore.”
“Maybe not, but maybe they can deal with it, if you let them.” The avatar picked its way across the potholes and weeds to Theo’s car, unphased by the darkness. “Maybe, before you take anyone new out, you pick up the phone and talk to the people who’ve dedicated years to you already? I don’t know, it might turn out that they know you better than you think.” It turned and shrugged, opening the front passenger door. “Just a thought.”
Wes forced himself to relax, realising he’d gone rigid.
He shook this off, not looking forward to hearing their final goodbyes, or final ultimatums, or the lies that would come tripping off his own tongue to keep them around.
Calling the cleaners and dropping the coordinates of the warehouse-turned-revolting-graveyard was his first priority, and after that, the last part of their frankly batshit plan, and after that… Well, after that, he’d just have to see.
He stripped his sodding trousers off before he got back in the car and lounged in the back seat, not giving a shit about decorum, and grinning fit to split his cheeks up to his ears every time the avatar stared at him in the mirrors then pretended it wasn’t looking.