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Vinnie De Soth and the Virgin Factory
 The Ghost Taxi shimmered through the curtain of rain and became solid again outside the ruined paper mill in upstate Gothametropolis. It picked its away around the debris surrounding the foreboding plant’s dark silhouette and drew to a halt at the twisted remnants of the main gate.
Vinnie de Soth leaned forward and handed a folded wad of bills to the cab driver. “Thanks Rudge. You mind staying here for a while? Keep the meter running.”
“No problem, Mr De Soth,” agreed the dead young man behind the wheel. “Take care out there.” The Ghost Taxis were just one more strange by-product of the occult and metahuman activities around Paradopolis, a fleet of phantom yellow cabs with limbo-bound drivers seeking a slow and grinding redemption from whatever awaited them beyond the final gates of death. When Rudge folded away the sixty dollars Vinnie had passed him for the ride to the Thompson Paper Mill he’d also pocketed a generous karma note that had helped him towards his final salvation.
Vinnie climbed from the back of the taxi into the heavy downpour. The midnight rain bounced off the broken pavements outside the factory. The torrent had already doused most of the fires that had collapsed the roof over the main block. Only acrid fumes rose from the huge hole in the shattered front wall.
A police line warning ribbon fluttered across the gateway. Vinnie ducked under it and approached the ruin. His left foot found a pothole deeper than he’d expected and he sand up to the ankle in cold muddy water.
And then his foot was dry again.
“Ah. Thank you, Liu Xi Xian,” Vinnie guessed without even turning round. Drying a wet sock was only a tiny part of what the slim oriental elementalist could do with the traditional Chinese elements. “I, um, I hadn’t expected to see you here.”
“Somebody had to wait for the clean up crew to arrive,” answered Liu Xi, stepping out of the shadows perfectly dry despite the driving rain. “I volunteered.”
“Well thank you,” Vinnie said, trying to check whether his collar was straight without the attractive girl noticing he was doing it and managing only to channel cold streams of rainwater down inside his shirt. “It’s nice to see you. And nice that you can dry me and warm me. With your powers I mean. Not any other way. I wasn’t thinking about…”
Liu Xi put the babbling occultist for hire out of his verbal misery again. “This way,” she indicated. “Ebony said you’d need to do a low-grade exorcism over the whole site to be sure.”
As the elementalist had expected, Vinnie unconsciously switched from clumsily gabbling social wreck to quietly focussed professional. She quite liked the change. “What do we have here, then?” the acting sorcerer supreme asked, looking round the wreckage.
“This was a rather nasty place. Under cover of being a paper mill it was actually a factory for breeding and raising children to be sold as sacrificial victims to various cults and vampire clans and so on. The Librarian’s still going through the account books and the Lair Legion’s out visiting those clients he’s already identified.”
Vinnie looked at the collapsed front wall of the building. Some of the steel support beams were folded back on themselves like pretzels. A few were bent through more than three dimensions. “I guess the Shoggoth didn’t like this place very much, then.”
“He was a little tetchy, yes,” agreed Liu Xi. “The people operating this place haven’t stopped screaming yet.”
Vinnie picked his way over the remains of the wall and ventured into the structurally unsafe interior. “Where are the children?” he asked.
“Dancer and Icy got them out. Hatman’s lodging them all with Hagatha Darkness for now until proper arrangements can be made with St Jude’s Orphanage. Nobody’s going to try and snatch them back from the witch of Covenant House.”
Vinnie shuddered. “I do hope they try,” he said maliciously.
“CrazySugarFreakBoy! offered to lodge the older virgins at his place and find ways of curing them but Hatman overruled him,” Liu Xi reported. “Vizh says don’t go lingerie shopping with them.”
“Good tip,” agreed Vinnie. “This isn’t the time for underwear. Um, I mean their underwear. Well, obviously they can have underwear, I didn’t mean… And you. You can have underwear too, Liu Xi. I mean you probably do have. I’ve not been thinking about it or… It’s not like we have to check…”
“Nats said to tell you that he thought there were still some ghosts and stuff active here that Al B.’s ectoplasmic wave disruptor hadn’t got. And also to make clear that he hadn’t accidentally married any of them.”
Vinnie touched a half-melted wall and frowned. “There is some psychic residue left,” he admitted. “Nasty stuff. There was some kind of chymeric guardian summoned but it’s no longer active.”
“I think the Shoggoth ate it,” admitted Liu Xi. “Or possibly mated with it. It’s hard to tell.” She shot Vinnie a mischievous glance. “I’m pretty sure the chymeric guardian wasn’t wearing underwear.”
Vinnie poked his tongue out at her. “You give evil a whole new definition.” His smile faded. “Speaking of evil, here’s an accumulation. What’s this place?”
“The warder’s office,” Liu Xi reported. “What the…”
She was interrupted by Vinnie barrelling her aside and hurling a handful of silver threads into the room ahead of her. The strands flashed and evaporated with a static hiss.
“Sorry,” Vinnie told her. “Saaiitaaii manifestation. Psychic land mine. A trap.” He helped Liu Xi to her feet.
“Thank you,” the elementalist told him, to indicate that she could now stand unaided without being held in his arms. “I didn’t sense anything.”
“It’s not your field,” Vinnie replied. “It’s not elemental at all, not even void. There’s a lot of bad things been done in here over the years and that’s left all kinds of karmic sludge residue. Worse still, there’s been enough people in here with a little occult knowledge to even shape some of the negative emotions and twist them into nasty little memorials. Ebony was right to send for me.”
“Can you exorcise it? Destroy it?”
The occultist pressed further into the factory. The large area beyond the charred offices was a huge compound filled with barred livestock cages. The far end of the roof was stripped away, allowing the rainstorm to flood in.
“I could do a blanket abjuration,” Vinnie considered, “but that’s pretty major. It’s the psychic equivalent of a napalm grenade. And where am I going to get a goat and six hundred pounds of incense at this time of night?” He looked around the gloomy prison block with an unhappy frown. “No, there’s got to be a better way to fix this.”
“What kind of…” began Liu Xi before Vinnie hurled her to the ground again.
“Watch out! Miserygeists!”
Liu Xi felt the air around her growing colder and it was nothing to do with the elements. She had a sense of something vast and terrible reaching out to seize her.
Vinnie locked his lips on hers and jammed his tongue into her mouth. That distraction made the miserygeist attack seem somehow irrelevant.
After five minutes or so Liu Xi ventured to come up for air and say “I think they’re gone.”
Vinnie looked around the darkened warehouse. “So they have,” he confirmed. “Damn. I mean, er, sorry about having to kiss you. It’s one of the traditional ways of fending off minor miserygeists.”
“Do I want to know how major miserygeists are fended off?” Liu Xi wondered.
“Do you?” Vinnie asked hopefully before catching himself. “That is, we’d better press on. With exploring. We’d better keep on with the mission.”
“Yes,” agreed Liu Xi, refastening her jacket and blouse. “Is there any way I could see any of these dangers that are lurking out there before you have to hurl me to the ground and snog me?”
Vinnie looked guilty. “Well, I could share some second sight with you for a while but…”
“But?”
“Well, there’s this traditional way.”
Liu Xi sighed. “Is there a traditional way that only involves the top half of my body?” she checked.
“Kissing,” Vinnie clarified urgently. “It’s a kiss-transferred enchantment. Very old magic. Standard Sleeping Beauty rules.”
Liu Xi’s mouth quirked. “Right then. Enchant me.”
Vinnie enchanted her as thoroughly as he could.
“One question,” Liu Xi asked finally and a little breathlessly. “What if Visionary or Nats had stayed behind on clean-up duty instead of me?”
“Well, there is a kind of handshake version,” confessed Vinnie, “I must have forgotten that one for a minute.”
Liu Xi punched him on the arm. Another thought occurred to her. “Didn’t the sleeping beauty spell require it to be true love’s kiss?”
Vinnie hurried over to one of the cages. “Hey, look at this!”
Liu Xi followed him to examine the wire-meshed box. Unlike most of the crates this one hadn’t been torn open to rescue the occupant. As the elementalist looked inside she could see why.
“That girl is transparent.”
“She’s a ghost,” Vinnie explained. “You can’t see her too clearly because because she’s already fading and because we didn’t go past second base. This place is too full of occult predators and psychic sinkholes for her to last long.”
“She died here?”
“I guess. Why don’t you ask her?”
Liu Xi peered through the bars. “She can see us and talk to us?”
“Not right now,” the occultist admitted, “but if I channel a little life into her ectoplasm I think she could properly manifest. Hold on.” He scratched his palm across a ragged nail on the box frame and squeezed a few drops of blood out. The ghost blinked in confusion as she noticed Liu Xi Xian.
“Hello,” said the elementalist, as kindly as she could.
The ghost shrank away from her. “Who are you?” she asked with wide frightened eyes. “I’ve not seen you before.”
“I’m new. I’m Liu Xi.”
“Are you a guard?” The ghost girl shrank away further. “The guards beat me. When I tried to run away. They beat me very hard. I deserved it.”
“I think they beat her to death,” Vinnie murmured. “She doesn’t understand it yet.”
“I came with some good people,” Liu Xi explained. “The Lair Legion. They’re heroes. We came to rescue you.”
The ghost looked puzzled. “Rescue me? Why?”
“Don’t you want to be free?” asked Vinnie.
“Free?” the ghost blinked. “I’m going to be married!”
Liu Xi felt her stomach turn. “The girls we rescued, the ones that went to Hagatha… they’d been educated from childhood to believe that they we |
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