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This message #103: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Fade to Black was posted by A happy Hallowe'en with seasonal nightmares from... the Hooded Hood on Thursday, October 31, 2002 at 16:30.
#103: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Fade to Black
NOTE: This is part three of the narrative begun in Untold Tales #101 and continued in #102. The story won’t make sense unless you’ve read those first. This is meant to be a horror tale, so don’t read it at all if you get disturbed by that kind of thing.
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***
Long ago in cosmic history the dragon-world of Makluos had been betrayed by one of its own, its location made visible to Galactivac the Living Death that Sucks, its people scattered and destroyed even as the planet was reduced to a lifeless husk. The last living wyrm had endured timeless exile until he too was sick of life, or perhaps of the whispering ghosts of his murdered people that accused him of survival. At last he too had surrendered his existence, bequeathing his body to the spirit of a human boy called Andrew Dean.
The spirits had fallen silent then as the last of their kind passed into eternal darkness; but now they stirred once more. The ghosts of a world shifted as they saw the last of the dragons alive and living, its flesh occupied by a new soul. And they bent their implacable intelligences to drag it to its downfall.
Andrew Dean ran blindly through the snow, knowing even as he fled into the blizzard that he could not outdistance the accusing voices in his head. The bitter wind whipped him through his ice-sodden clothes, but he knew that if he changed into the coldproof form of the Makluan dragon he would surrender up the last gate that kept those restless dead from devouring his mind whole.
And so he sped into the night, leaving behind one trail of human prints that were quickly covered by a host of reptilian tracks that followed close behind.
***
Ziles shuddered from the cold and turned over, trying to cover herself with the sweat-damp sheet. She jerked awake with the special horror of the sleeper who does not know where or who they are. The wind fluttered the cheap curtains of the open motel window as the snow drifted in to wet the threadbare carpet. The mattress was soaked and stained and it smelled of old sins and old fears.
Above Ziles head the ceiling was covered with scrawled words. GREYGREYGREYGREYGREYGREYGREY. The walls pressed in on her and she knew that wherever she was she was far away from home.
She had come here to die.
Ziles wound herself in the thin icy sheet to protect herself from the chill and stumbled to the nearest wall. She cast around for a pencil, but there was nothing there to write with. In desperation she dug her nails into her palm, drawing blood that she could use to leave her message on the misery-grained chalet. GREYGREYGREYGREYGREY.
When the walls were full Ziles stumbled into the dim greasy bathroom where there were more surfaces upon which to bleed. And after that, the ragged sheet twisted round her trembling shape could easily wind into a rope to hang herself from the shower-pipe at the end.
***
The boarding house was in darkness, permeated by a strange smell that it took Whitney a few moments to identify as adhesive. The only light came from the kitchen, where the battered door hung open on a single hinge. Whitney knew that if she went in there she would die.
“Whit? Is that you?” Jay called her from the kitchen.
“Jay? Hat?”
“Come here. There’s something I have to show you.”
The Sorceress moved reluctantly to the door. As she entered the second smell reached her, a compound of urine and faeces and clotted blood and all the other odours that a body can release when it has been ripped apart while it’s still alive.
There, gummed to the kitchen table, were the mortal remains of Edith MacGrath. She had died slowly and terribly.
Before Whitney could do more than gasp she was seized from behind, spun round, and struck across the face. She toppled backwards into something sticky and clinging, but it took a moment for her to realise that this adhesive wad was pinning her to the floor.
Jay Boaz came and stood over her to look down at his victim. In one hand was the carving knife that had destroyed Mrs MacGrath. Her blood still dripped from the gleaming tip, falling onto the Sorceress’ dress and staining it crimson like a promise of the future.
“J-Jay?” she stammered, because her eyes were drawn to the corpse-mask of torn flesh that covered her lover’s own countenance, the rotted remains of face-meat taken from Gluegun the night before. Gluegun, who tortured old ladies for gratification. Gluegun who pinned his victims down with his adhesive abilities before he worked his perverted pleasure on them.
Jay reached down as if to kiss her. Instead he opened his mouth a few inches over her face and allowed more adhesive to dribble from his lips like saliva. It splashed onto her face, sealing her tongue, preventing her from using the incantations that might have saved her or stopped him. He knew her weaknesses. He knew how to make her helpless.
Whitney struggled in vain against the epoxy bonds. She didn’t know whether she was fighting to save herself or Jay. If he harmed her under Gluegun’s possession it would destroy him.
Then her eye was drawn to the gory remains of the landlady. If Jay had done those wicked things to her then he was already destroyed.
“I’ve been doing this all wrong, you know,” Hatman told her as he leaned over his captive. “This stuff in my head, this Strange Matter that gives me my powers, it was never meant to be used on hats. It has far more potent applications. I see that now. I know what Head Case knew, what all the true inheritors of the gift understood. It’s so liberating not to be confined by moral considerations any more.”
Voiceless Whitney couldn’t plead with him. She suddenly knew why Gluegun’s face had been taken from him last night, realised that all of this scenario had been planned out before ever they came to Black’s Crossing. It had been rehearsed with illusions and phantasms walking in their stead, seen by some and remembered by a few. And it was all designed to end here, destroying a good man, the best she had ever known, by having him destroy her.
“Your heart will fit very nicely in the Special Collection,” Jay told Whitney as he began his work. “But first it has to be properly broken.”
***
The 4x4 modified jeeps used by the Lair Legion were specially designed to cover difficult terrain. Nats hammered the one he was driving into the blizzard along uncleared treacherous roads, using his telekinetic abilities to effectively propel the vehicle through the drifting snow and keep the windscreen clear. It was exhausting work and his fingertips were bleeding again.
“You were right,” Dancer told Xander the Improbable who sulked on the back seat. “Something is working against us. I can feel the probability strands struggling and tangling. I’m trying to moderate it but it’s too cramped to dance in a car so my powers are limited.”
“Of course I’m right,” snapped the mage. “This is a fool’s errand.”
Goldeneyed was the one who had forced the master of the mystic crafts along on the rescue mission. He reasoned that if Xander wasn’t motivated enough to save his daughter Whitney then perhaps he would care enough to try and stop the evil force she faced to save himself. “We should have called in more help,” he second-guessed. “At least called Donar and CSFB!, maybe Cressida…”
“Bringing a mythological entity like Donar into this psychic maelstrom would be lethal,” Xander scorned. “They’re creatures made up of belief, and this sinkhole swallows faith. Cressida is a telepath, which makes her very vulnerable to the sort of psychic minefields laid around here…”
“Ziles is telepathic too,” Nats warned miserably.
“That’s why she was chosen,” argued Xander unpleasantly. “And as for CrazySugarFreakBoy!, well I hardly think we need the Agent of Chaos flouncing around when his ancestral enemy the Emissary of Order is feeling shirty.”
“Who?” Dancer puzzled.
“Hatman. He’s meant to be Foxglove’s mortal foe.” Xander looked out into the white maelstrom. “Right now he might be.”
A buffet of wind pushed the car sideways again. Nats concentrated harder, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping his psychostave so hard that his blood trickled down the ancient wood. “How much further can it be,” he pleaded.
“As far as it has to be,” Xander answered sharply. “At least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you might just distract your enemy from his primary quarries for a few moments as he takes the time to snuff us.”
“Look out!” screamed Dancer.
Nats tried to focus on the road as his tired reflexes reacted to the dark shape in front of them. He braked too slowly, gathered his will to change the velocity of the vehicle too late. The 4x4 ploughed into the man who had raced into their path with a sickening thump.
Dancer was out of the vehicle in an instant, rolling across the snow and coming up standing to check on the impact, but Goldeneyed was there before her with an instantaneous teleportational flash.
The car had hit the pedestrian enough to toss him twenty feet from the hood, leaving him crumpled in a bloody pile staining the snow. Bry Kotyk shone his torch down at the broken figure. “Oh crap! Andy?” he recognised.
“It’s Finny?” Dancer gasped. “What was he doing out here in human form? He must be frozen. And how did he get all these hundreds of rips on his clothing and on his skin?”
Xander dragged Nats out of the car. “Ignore them,” he commanded the flying delivery man. “They can watch Foom die without your help. Take that cane of yours and draw a circle in the snow around this entire vehicle. Leave a small gap for the others to get in before you complete it. Hurry.”
Nats would have argued but he heard the undertone of fear in the mystic’s voice.
“Get him back here now,” Xander called to Goldeneyed. “Don’t try to teleport. Carry him.”
“He’s just been hit by a car. He might have internal injuries,” Dancer objected. “We should keep him warm and…”
“He’s dying anyway,” Xander told them. “Drag him here and we might just save his soul. But if you aren’t inside this circle in under a minute then I wash my hands of all of you, and the devil can have his due!”
The wind intensified, slashing at them with ice needles and making it hard to even see the car only a few feet away.
“Take my hand,” Dancer called to Goldeneyed. “Carry Finny carefully, and trust me.”
Something raked its claws across Bry’s cheek.
Sarah struggled against the blizzard, relying upon her probability manipulations to take them in the direction of the 4x4. She and Bry were both tattered and scratched by the time they found the vehicle.
“Seal up the circle,” Xander ordered Nats. “Now! Then plunge your psychostave into the line and keep it there. Concentrate on empowering that ring, let nothing pass.”
Bill Reed felt the cold surge up his cane as he pressed it into the ground, a chilling iciness that was more than physical. He bent his will to holding the line and realised too late that having committed himself he could now only prevail or die.
“Get Finny inside the car,” Dancer told Bry. “Hurry. We need to see how bad it is.”
“I’m awake…” Andy Dean told them.
“Fin, can you change into dragon form to help you survive this?” Goldeneyed suggested.
“No!” Andy gasped, coughing up blood from his punctured lung. “That’s what they want. That’s what this is all about!”
“If Fin Fang Foom takes his true shape then the spirits pursuing him will be able to claim him, no matter what kind of barrier Mr Reed tries to maintain around us,” Xander the Improbable advised. “And then he will be lost.”
“If he doesn’t change then he’ll die,” objected Dancer.
“Yes,” agreed Xander. “That is indeed the case.”
***
Ziles was so far from home that even if the night sky had not been made a remorseless grey by the piling snow she could never have seen the star around which her homeworld spun. If she could have seen it she could never return. She would live and age and die far from her birthplace, away from everybody she had known or loved, and the only ones that would mourn her wouldn’t even know the words of passing to ease her end or to settle her spirit when she was gone.
She squatted naked against the tiled wall smeared with her blood and looked at the clotted torn nails she had used to pick at her skin. The shower was mouldy and clammy, clogged with matted hair and crusted skin. When she moved her flesh stuck for a moment onto the grimy surfaces. She belonged there with the filth.
The bedsheet had been easy to tear into long thin strips. It smelled of old sweat and dried semen. It plaited together into a cord as if it had been meant for this all along, as if it knew what was required of it. The noose was easy.
The sixty-three onlookers pressed forward to get a better view as she reached up to loop her rope around the thick iron waterpipe. Perhaps watching her dying writhings was the nearest thing they got to pleasure these days as her bloody naked carcass kicked and squirmed its last. Perhaps they anticipated the last gasp of breath, the final release of bodily fluids onto the stinking tiles, the dying life-light in bulging eyes.
Ziles saw Frank Curry watching her with a pale sad face. He was stood at the forefront of the spectators, his own nude body wasted and flabby from the years of despair he had lived in Black’s Crossing.
Ziles held up her bloody fingers to show him. “At least you were smart enough to bring a pencil,” she told him.
The onlookers were getting impatient now, crowding forward for a better view, so Ziles dragged the bathroom chair into the shower and climbed up so she could get her head into the noose and tighten it properly.
Frank helped by jerking the chair away and leaving her to dangle.
***
Paulo Yansen laughed at Jay Boaz. He had won. He had overcome the hero, tricked him into wasting his strength on an irrelevant gambit, and now the victory was his.
The hero had struggled so hard to resist the possession, harnessing years of mental discipline in bending the Strange Matter in his mind to work in unconventional ways. He had refused to let his body be used for the torture and rape of Edith MacGrath, using up the rest of his mental strength to veto Gluegun’s desires. In the end the unquiet spirit had been forced to re-manifest in a body of his own and murder the old woman in front of Jay’s sweating immobile form. The hero had retained his precious honour but was not strong enough to save her, for all her feeble pleas to him.
And when Yansen had returned to crawl inside Jay’s shaking form he could tell that the act of resistance had cost the hero the last of his defiance.
The woman Jay loved was too young and firm for Yansen’s taste, and defiance as well as fear shone in her eyes. But he could deal with that. And this time the hero didn’t have the strength to keep his body from obeying Gluegun’s demands.
“Don’t… don’t do this!” Jay begged the cold remorseless creature that occupied him.
“This is just the start, hero-man,” Yansen promised, filling Jay’s mind with images of what he intended to do to Whitney. “We’re going to make a great team, you and I. Your body is much more powerful than my old one. There are so many possibilities.”
“I won’t let you.”
“Bluff and bravado, hero. We both know you can’t stop me now. The tides of evil are too strong.”
“No!” shouted Jay; but his lips were no longer his to control.
Whitney looked up as him as he crawled over her, and for a moment their eyes met. She was frightened, he could tell, trying to face her death-ordeal bravely. But he hadn’t expected that in that moment her eyes would also be filled with her love for him. It punched him like a hammer in the guts, crushed him worse than the vilest oath, sent him screaming into madness as Gluegun adhered his fingers to her flesh and started to peel it off.
***
Bill Reed was as cold as a corpse and he could feel the life draining out of him.
“He can’t last much longer,” worried Dancer, trying to rub some warmth back into Nats’ frostbitten hands. “We have to get out of here.”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Xander warned her. “We couldn’t even teleport now.”
“I don’t understand what Nats is doing anyway,” admitted Bryan. “I thought his telekinesis couldn’t do force fields?”
“It can’t,” the mage answered. “But the psychostave is much more than a psionic amplification device. It was once used to house imprisoned souls, for example. At the moment it’s just drawing on Nats’ lifeforce to harness its soul-wrangling properties and keep at bay the spirits that wish to claim Fin Fang Foom.”
Andy Dean shuddered at his name and stared into the blizzard. “They’re calling…” he whispered with blood-reddened lips. “I have to go to them…”
“He can’t last much longer,” Sarah despaired. “What can we do?”
“Nothing,” Xander told her. “As I explained before you set out, this isn’t your test. It’s between the Five and their chosen victims. They have fed here for a very long time and they have become very strong.”
“Do something, dammit!” Bry demanded. “You must be able to do something! You’re supposed to be a wizard but we’ve never seen you case a single bloody spell! All you do is swan around making cryptic comments and watching us struggle!”
Goldeneyed was losing points here. Xander’s face blackened. “I didn’t choose to bring us here, Bryan Kotyk. I didn’t ignore expert advice and dive into a psychic battlefield where the ancient war was raging once again. I didn’t rush in like a hero and manage to cripple one of the friends I sought to rescue – although that was another of the Five’s black tricks, I imagine.”
“Please,” Sarah pleaded. “We have to help them. Finny and Nats are dying and who knows what’s happening to Whitney, Jay, and Ziles?. Isn’t there anything you can do?”
The sleet continued to pelt the stranded car, piling up over Nats as he slumped over his cane. Finny coughed once, a new trickle of dark red fluid spilling from his mouth. The snow seemed to form patterns of angry faces as it slashed at them. Xander pulled the collar of his faded red robe tighter.
“I’ve already done almost everything I can by supplying more hostages,” he answered. “There’s only one more thing I can do.” He leaned over to the bleeding Makluan and bent down so his lips were just above Andy’s ear. Then he whispered, “You’re not going to let your people down, are you?”
***
It was cold where Andrew Dean was and it wasn’t just the cold of the void of space. This was the soul-cold of death, and the dead things calling to him knew that final chill was creeping into his heart and claiming him. Their call stirred the dragon inside him, demanding change, demanding that he return the alien flesh he had once borrowed to become Fin Fang Foom. Andy wept as he realised that in taking the form of the dragon he had never taken time to properly become Andrew Dean. Both wyrm and man were incomplete, stunted, hybrid. And at last an enemy had discerned how to use that to destroy him.
They weren’t quite upon him yet, these ancient spirits. Something barely held them back, something more ancient and terrible then them, something that had contributed to their doom in the first place and that filled them with fear. It hummed a tone from the brink of creation and crackled with manifest destiny. But it was weakening, and the dead were pressing closer, and every breath was harder to take than the last.
The part of Andrew Dean that welcomed death was getting very strong.
“You’re not going to let your people down, are you?”
Andy had no idea where the voice came from. It just occurred to him in his pain. If he died now, evil would triumph. He tried to link the sequence of events that had brought him here to his death. He had been at Black’s Crossing… at the mansion… Dinner was over, and Mr Black had introduced the Board… the Five…!
“You’re not going to let your people down, are you?”
The primal fear built into every living thing had cut in, washing over him, sending him tumbling from his chair, clawing his way from those terrible sentiences that had come for dinner in their turn. He had run howling into the night, chased by the shreds of memory they had loosed to drag him back to them. They had laughed as they picked his life apart.
“You’re not going to let your people down, are you?”
He had fled, and so had… so had Ziles… and Whitney. Each had raced away into their own special darkness. He had fled and left them to face the Five.
“No,” Andy gasped with his last breath. “I’m not going to let that happen. Evil doesn’t win. It gets fought. It gets beaten. That’s what we do.”
If he became the dragon he would live to fight, but the dead Makluans would surge into him and tear his mind apart. If he hid in mortal flesh it would end the way of all mortals in a few brief moments.
But would he die as victim or champion?
Suddenly Black’s con trick was evident to him. He wasn’t damned, unless he let himself be. He might be killed, but he didn’t have to simply die.
With a shriek of anger he metamorphosed into Fin Fang Foom, the pain of his internal injuries lancing through him as broken bone reformed itself into new shapes. Dancer lurched out of the car with Xander as Foom expanded and burst it apart. The ring was broken as the dragon grew. Nats toppled blue-faced into the snow.
The spirits seethed forwards.
Andy’s shapechange did nothing to heal his wounds. He managed three steps forward before he collapsed and moved no more.
***
As the noose jerked around her neck, flattening her windpipe and tightening around her arteries, Ziles realised her mistake. The terrible despair was supplanted by an even more desperate need for survival. She kicked and struggled against her own weight as the knot tightened about her neck. The onlooking spirits seethed forward to claim has as one of their own.
Ziles felt herself dying. For one moment her telepathic gifts flared and she thought she heard the defiant roar of an angry dragon as it toppled in the snow. Then she was alone, performing a last grotesque dance for her audience of suicides.
Except that Ziles was more than a lonely victim of an uncaring universe. She knew that now. She remembered what and who she was as she hung on the brink of oblivion for the pleasure of the Directors of Black’s Crossing.
She was Ziles, the best escape artist in the galaxy.
With a deft twist she looped her feet up and round the water pipe. Her bloody fingers unpicked the knotted noose with practised ease. She pulled her head free before her strength deserted her and she toppled awkwardly into the slime-rimed shower tray. She heaved in one lungful of air before her stomach rebelled and heaved its contents onto the floor.
The onlookers were not pleased to be cheated of their spectacle. In a silent wave of hopelessness that surged forward to complete the job that Ziles had balked at, their cold hands reaching out like five icy talons to rend her from this world to theirs.
***
Whitney couldn’t speak or move as her lover touched the carving knife to her flesh. The despair overwhelmed her, snuffing out the light in her eyes, preparing her for the torture and death to come. Her sorcerous senses reached out to find some natural force she might manipulate even without voice or movement, but everything around her was under the malefic influence of the Five.
Mockingly, her hosts allowed her to see her friends as they too fell to darkness. Andy choked his final breaths, drowning in his own blood. Sad naked Ziles dangled grotesquely like a dead puppet in a seedy motel bathroom. And now Whitney would be next, and her heart and theirs would be added to the collection, bound here for eternity to be toys of Jubilee Black and his inhuman Board.
And the dragon struggled back in defiance. Andrew Dean opened himself to the spirits that pursued him and despite his weakness he turned to fight.
Across the icy wastes Ziles sensed his determination. A last vestige of survival instinct manifested and she dragged herself free of her suicide trap. The ghosts that awaited her surged forward to take her anyway.
Whitney realised that this wasn’t the inevitable destruction her tormentors wanted her to believe it was. There was hope. There had to be a chance, however small. Perhaps it was a rule imposed by a power greater yet than these Five from darkness, or perhaps without hope their game lost its excitement. But hope there was.
Jay – or Gluegun, - crawled atop her and leered down at her paste-smeared face. Whitney strained her head upwards and kissed him.
That surprised them both, Jay Boaz and Paulo Yansen, she could tell. Her mouth was clogged by the adhesive stuff that Gluegun generated. She pressed her resin-filled mouth hard against the tattered lips of Yansen’s corpse-mask, making sure it was adhered to her before she wrenched her head aside, ripping it from Jay’s head, leaving it gruesomely hanging off her own lips.
“W-what?” Jay gasped as he felt a momentary respite from the horror of possession.
Whitney pressed her head upwards again, just the forehead this time, and brought herself into contact again with Jay. His power was to take on the nature of whatever touched his head. She prayed that under these unique circumstances he might be able to draw upon her training and aptitude and know what to do next.
“Go,” she willed him.
Jay Boaz hurled himself away from the Sorceress, his eyes wild and face streaked with blood from Gluegun’s death-mask. He scrabbled at his belt, dragged on a Rockets cap, and shattered the kitchen window, flying away into the night.
Whitney Darkness lay fastened to the floor, a murder’s face locked onto her lips, the sting of stripped skin and the first cuts of her slow destruction still aching. Then she heard a movement behind her.
The corpse of Paulo Yansen, the one that Hatman had confronted as it murdered Mrs MacGrath, was stumbling to its feet. Denied the flesh of Jay Boaz, Gluegun had gone home.
“It seems your boyfriend has run away and left you,” Gluegun told her with lipless mouth in bubbling rasps, “but you still have something of mine.” He groped for the carving knife and the sewing kit and the cheese grater. “And now I’m going to take it back.”
***
The Board of Directors sat around Black’s dining table, each dressed in an impeccable dinner jacket, each with an empty glass jar in front of them waiting to be filled. Mr Black was the only one without a jar, but that was because he got to keep everything that was left after the heart was gone.
“What shall we do after this?” one asked.
“We could find some town girl and offer her fame and fortune for her virtue and innocence,” suggested another.
“We could visit a widow in the shape of her dead man and let her know the truth of his feelings for her.”
“We could reveal to a weary husband who the true father of his children really was.”
“We might raise the interest rate for despairing tangled debtors.”
“We might remind the priest of all those empty pews.”
“We might foster the suspicion of infidelity where none yet exists.”
“We might show a poor honest man a way to embezzle just a little money to keep his family together.”
Jubilee Black nodded and sipped at his chalice of tears. “All very amusing, I’m sure, but we haven’t quite finished destroying our little heroes yet. They are proving to be wonderful sport. How goes their damnation?”
“Andrew Dean has seen the shallowness of his existence, but has still chosen to wrestle with the accusing Makluan spirits,” the first Director reported. “He has a remarkably strong will, so I shall have to show him how his momentary act of defiance has left his comrades dying in the snow around him, freezing because he chose to fight.”
“Very good,” approved Black. “There is so much to break there. The exile?”
“At the last she chose to struggle, but by then her actions had already put her in the power of the Chalet Five Suicide Club,” the second Director answered. “It will be fascinating to see what they do with her.”
“Our poor little Sorceress has been deserted by her shining knight,” the third Director smirked. “She gave her all to free him, and he fled into the night to escape his fate. Now she is going to learn the price for altruism and be disabused of some of her romantic notions about love.”
“And of course that means Jay will be fertile ground for later torment,” the fourth Director boasted. “When we confront him with what Whitney has become, with what has been done to her, then he will punish himself however we suggest in order to…”
The wall of the Black Mansion shattered inwards as if hit by a mortar. The Five were taken by surprise, scattered in the debris of their dining hall.
Jay Boaz pulled off his blasting cap and strode over the wreckage towards them.
“You ran away!” the fourth Director accused him.
“I came to deal with the cause, not the symptom,” Hatman answered, reaching for Black.
The old man did not resist. “And what hat have you to wear that can possibly harm us, brief human? We are old as sin and powerful beyond mortal telling.”
Jay was bareheaded as he hit him. “This isn’t about powers,” he answered hotly. “It’s about hope.” Smack. “It’s about good and evil.” Smack. “It’s about fighting for what’s right.” Smack!
Jubilee Black turned a bloodied face to the other directors who watched in shock, “Well do something! In these forms we can be hurt, you know. Use the bottle collection. Rend this upstart. Unleash them all!”
In Black’s office, Ziles smashed every container she could find with a chair-leg from the suicide motel.
Gluegun’s corpse slumped down over Whitney. The psychic adhesive faded allowing her to struggle free, gasping and trying not to scream.
The Board of Directors turned pale.
“This can’t be happening…” one of them whispered.
“Of course it can,” Xander told them, picking his way over the rubble, a dark frown on his face. “You imprison and torture spirits and then they get released, you can’t expect them to just fade away without paying their respects. You clothe yourselves in flesh to feast, but that means the banquet can bite back. You choose to play the game, challenge champions of good, then that means you have to admit the possibility of losing.” He looked over to where Jay was still punching the broken form of Mr Black. “You lost.”
***
The morning brought a grim grey light over Black’s Crossing. Jay and Whitney watched the line of worker drones trudging through the slushy streets into the plastics factory. Andy and Bill had been air-lifted for medical attention and Ziles had gone with them, but Bry and Sarah were still there with Xander the Improbable.
“I thought it would be better this morning,” Jay admitted. “Now that Black is gone. Now the mansion’s vanished and the town is free.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Xander told her. “Even creatures as terrible as Black and his board, they’re just… just the acne, the surface symptom of something much deeper. If you want to get this place free of evil you’ll have to work a lot harder than that.”
“He means that there are all sorts of things to be sorted out here,” Dancer understood. “Better jobs and a more prosperous future. People relearning to dream and hope. Bringing colour and life to the town. We can establish a fund, a trust to help out. But mostly it’s up to the people here.”
“There has to be a chance, however small,” remembered Whitney. “We faced a terrible ordeal, Jay, but we all came through. All of us. It only needed one weak link, but they didn’t find it. We’ve bought these people a chance now. After that it’s up to them.”
The Lair Legion splashed through the melting snow and went to find some breakfast.
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