to the bedroom but stop at the library to leave red “get your ass over here now” signal cards in front of a couple of peepers for Ipos and Merihim.
In the bedroom I strip off the suit and give it a sniff. The abattoir-fresh aroma all the kids love is deep inside the material. That’s never coming out. I toss the suit over with the dead motorcycle jacket. It’s sort of comforting seeing the growing pile of ruined clothes. I’ve killed off a lot of men’s casual wear while getting shot and stabbed. Now all I have to do is decapitate someone and I’ll feel like I’m home sweet home.
I grab an overcoat from the closet and toss it on the bed. I feel enough like me that I put on the leather bike pants and boots I wore when I came down here. They feel good. A little stiff with dried blood, most of it mine. I put on my hoodie. It’s blood stiff too and one of the sleeves is missing from when the red legger relieved me of my left arm. I sliced him in half like a side of beef with my Gladius, my flaming angelic sword.
I keep the glove on, but leave my prosthetic arm bare since no one is going to see it under the coat.
Back in the library I smack the gyroscope like Merihim, making it spin backward. The monster-movie voice chitters like a groundhog that’s burrowed into a meth lab. I check the peeper images on the movie screen. Brimborion is prowling his office, smiling at his staff. Trying to play it cool. He’s almost pulling it off, but if you look hard enough you can see the wheels whirring in his head. Is one of these fuckers selling me out? Maybe better to kill them all and let God or the Devil or Oprah sort them out.
In other parts of the palace, people do funny little square dances when they come around a corner and find a hellhound. Maintenance guys on break in the basement check out my motorcycle. Staff witches sort through piles of dried bugs and plants. Outside, a couple of officers are kicking the shit out of a low-ranking Hellion while another officer uses his long leather sap to poke the dead bikers in the gibbets. Guess the book club let out early.
Ipos and Merihim show up a few minutes later. I tell them about the secret room while taking out my eye. I drop the other peepers into their saline storage jars so that mine is the only one showing on the screen. They watch the show like a couple at a drive-in movie. Bored during the dark part but starting a little when the lights flick on, giving them a full frontal of Ed Gein’s rumpus room.
“Too bad you can only see the place and not smell it. It’s memorable.”
“You think this is Mason Faim’s work?” says Merihim when we come to the first close-up of a dissected brain.
“Unless this is what Hellions call ‘playing doctor.’ ”
He shoots me a look. I distract him by holding out the Magic 8 Ball.
“Ever seen one of these before?”
Merihim is too smart to grab things the Devil finds weird but Ipos is more impulsive. He grabs the ball, turns it, and immediately gets his hand skewered by a barb.
He curses in lower-class street Hellion, which sounds even worse than regular Hellion. Like a shop vac sucking up sewer sludge.
On the screen I’m moving the soldier’s body around while the pile of body bags forms a pastoral slaughterhouse tableau in the background.
