Ossified Angels
J Simon
I
Being a god was so much easier before television. Think about the whole burning bush thing: It’s literally just a talking campfire handing out rules, and people couldn’t get enough of it! Today? Mortals get irritated when it takes three whole seconds for a box of bound and imprisoned lightning to streak around the world and bring them a video of a fainting goat. How can a trivial goddess like me—formerly an Egyptian princess of brief and minor divinity—compete with that?
“Advertising may not be the right way to get the worship I deserve,” I mused. Great mountains rose to the right of us, a craggy coastline crashing down to the sea on our left. In between was a surprisingly bright-green glen liberally dusted with flowers. No buildings—just raw nature smacking us in the face with fists of beauty and stealing the lunch money of our souls. I’ll admit, I’d been dubious about coming to Skirling, an island just off the coast of Scotland. I prefer to hunt supernatural evil in the sort of places where fruity little tropical-drink umbrellas are so common that they show up on laminated guidebooks to the local flora and fauna. This, though—this had possibilities.
“You want worship, eh? Gonna try being blameless and good for a change?” Iggy hazarded. He was about the biggest mortal I’d ever seen, complete with an eyepatch and a bluff grin. Does it say something about me that he just didn’t look right without a crazy number of weird and inexplicable guns?
I poked Iggy in the stomach. “One. I’m God. Be very, very careful before you blaspheme against me.”
Iggy winked. “Gonna smite me with the old ‘pillar-of-salt’ gag again? By which I mean, attacking me with a salt shaker the next time I have breakfast? Yeah, about that. Considering how bland my food generally is, the question isn’t whether I should blaspheme against you—it’s how much.”
“Two, that wedding ring on your finger indicates that you swore a holy oath to obey me.”
“You mean, the ring that looks just like the one on your finger?” he asked jovially.
“Please assume that my vows were an extremely long-term practical joke that will come to fruition in a mere decade or three,” I said wistfully. “Loving a mortal… it’s a bad idea. A moment’s pleasure, followed by an eternity of loss… what part of that sounds like a good deal?” I perked up. “Good thing for you I’m ineffable. I can get away with doing all kinds of crazy things!”
“Yeah. About that. The onions under my pillow are one thing, but the terrified little faces you keep drawing on them…”
“Anyway,” I said hastily, “advertising may not be the right way to get the worship I deserve. Why should I conform to society when society should be the one reshaping itself to fit me?”
“Let me know how that goes,” Iggy said laconically.
“I’m serious! We need to go back to the old days, before the internet and television and all that. In the days before mass communication, people needed small-time gods! A goddess who could make a frog burp the alphabet would be amazing and revered, since there’d be literally no competition. Thus, I have a new approach: Destroy all technology. You’re welcome.” I eyed him sidelong. “On an unrelated note, can I see your cell phone?”
“Let’s maybe see if we can find our contact, first,” Iggy said reasonably. He glanced sidelong at me. “Unless—seeing as you’re god and all—you’re omniscient enough to just KNOW where he is?”
“You jerk! Of course I know everything! But omniscience can be a real drag when we’re playing charades. You could literally bend over and fart at me and I’d know the answer. By omnisciently knowing when it would be more fun to omnipotently force myself to forget all the everything I know, I can make life twice as interesting! Will ice cream and bacon team up to form Ultimate Flavor or a Screaming Horror? Let’s find out!”
A smile tugged at Iggy’s lips. “Just so you know, I’m definitely going to have a new approach the next time we play charades.”
“Bite me.”
“That may or may not be part of my approach.”
A crab scrambled up a nearby rock, dull black and about the size of my outstretched hand. A crab, this far from the sea? I leaned toward it, intrigued. The crab bowed to me as two more clambered up next to it, and then twenty, and then a hundred. They swarmed over each other, their clicking mandibles and scrambling limbs swiftly forming the exaggerated shape of a fifteen-foot-tall merry cartoon crab.
“Everywhere is joy! Everywhere is love!” it cried in a voice woven together from clicks and scrapes and rattling claws. “Hee hee! Why are you not dancing? SUGAR FOR EVERYONE!”
Just like that, a snowstorm of sweet white granules swirled through the air for the most exciting point-three seconds of my life.
“Carcinus,” Iggy said grimly. “Given that your physical god-form is three hundred feet tall and in Japan, I’m going to assume this is your way of communicating at a distance. What’s the matter—never heard of a cell phone?”
“He’s a god!” I said dismissively. “Hey, Happy Dancing Construction Crab-Man, question: I’ve been working my ass off ‘improving’ your cereal, and I’ve gotten to the point where adding sugar to it actually makes it less sweet. My question is, what kind of fireworks should we include as the free prize after we go into business together?”
“What delight!” he cried. “Have you ever stared in wonder at the gleaming stars until your eyes bled with joy? Hee hee! Please, try to be less wonderful so I can stop dancing!”
The crab avatar (crabatar?) began swaying back and forth, clicking its claws to the beat of an upbeat K-pop song that played, somehow, out of thin air. I snapped my fingers and swayed happily along—until I noticed Iggy’s scowl.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” I asked in an undertone. “Worried you won’t have enough Christmas presents for me?”
“Huh?”
“Word of advice: Given the number of dinosaur species I don’t yet own in fuzzy-slipper form, it should be a while before you run out of ideas.”
Iggy shook his head grimly, pulling me back a few steps. “You think Carcinus is fun, and happy, and joyful. You only know him like this—dancing around building stuff. You were still dormant in the museum when he was at his worst. I was there. I hunted him. I know.”
“Perfect score!” the crabatar cried. “Gold star! SWEET MOVES!”
“Oh, wow!” I said breathlessly. “We’re about six pop-and-locks from going multiball, and…” Seeing Iggy’s face, I managed to stop. “I may have played his video game,” I admitted. “A little.”
“You’re one of the good ones,” Iggy said affectionately, patting my shoulder. “I mean, hell, think of all the money we had when we went to Hollywood—”
“My motives were purely selfish,” I said uncomfortably. “Make a movie, become a huge star, finally get the worship I deserve. Simple!”
“Uh-huh. And what happened? You started liking the people we were working with. You helped them with their problems, made their lives better, spent money like water until we didn’t have any left. Pretty soon, we were scraping pennies out of couch cushions and hiring that crazy porno director so we could make our movie on the ultra-cheap.”
“It got into a bunch of film festivals,” I argued. “Physically, at least, after I fired copies out of a cannon at them.”
“But Carcinus, now…” Iggy’s hand grasped for a gun that wasn’t there. “He was mortal, once. A real prick, self-absorbed and certain he deserved so much more than mere billions of dollars. He built a bunch of pray-factories so he could hire millions of people to worship him. He meant to absorb the power of their united belief and become a god.”
“I prefer to earn praise by miraculously manifesting breakfast cereal in the form of my sugary face where only shredded wheat existed before,” I mused.
Iggy nodded. “Take a toxic self-regard the size of Jupiter and pair it with real power: It’s not cute, it’s not funny, and it’s sure as sugar not going to end well. Good thing a rival investor swooped in and modified his factories, making them happy and fun. With all that joyful prayer pouring into him, he became Happy Dancing Construction Crab-Man. Maybe he’s good—now. Maybe he’s trustworthy—now. But forgive me if I refuse to forget where he came from.”
The crabatar finally stopped dancing, a huge grin adorning its cartoon face. “Ah! We are all fuzzy bunnies, are we not? We are careful. Quiet. Motionless. Until! We burst into a frenzy of wild, impassioned (let us assume) dance moves as the hawk carries us away. Dance, my bunnies, dance!”
“You want to maybe tell us what’s going on?” Iggy said gruffly. “After you appeared to me back in the States, I did a quick divination on Skirling. Didn’t find a damn thing, but we came here anyway. Hell, you paid us enough for that. But now that we’re here, now that we’re close, all my devices are telling me there’s something out there. Something big. Something powerful. Something almost infinitely varied. I just can’t tell what.”
“Sorry,” I said contritely. “That’s my fault.”
“Eh?”
“The presence of an actual god is messing with you. It’s only natural for mortals to feel an overwhelming desire to worship me. I’ll try to stop distracting you with my magical swirling ass.”
Iggy glanced at my backside. “I dunno,” he said hopefully. “Seems to me the odds would be better if you tried to distract me more.”
Carcinus danced and grinned, giggled and clicked. “Yes! Yes! Yes! Now that you’re here, you feel it, too! Let’s all enjoy a fun riddle: What’s festering and evil and hides in Sandmore and desperately needs to be cleansed from the universe?”
“Elvis Parsley?” I guessed.
“Jokes are fun!” Carcinus said happily. “You pretend you aren’t dancing. But behold! If I define ‘not dancing’ as a dance move, you’re dancing all the time! And if the absence of movement is the most beautiful dance of all, then isn’t it my aesthetic duty to ensure that you never move again??”
“What the hell?” Iggy said.
“But! What’s even more fun than jokes? What about gifts!” Carcinus cried. “Behold!”
A black crab scurried forward, carrying on its back a small gun—one of Iggy’s, I thought, which had been confiscated from him upon entering Scotland. It was short, fat and stubby and may have held only a single shot, but it was plenty big enough to do its job.
“Hey! The pixie-breaker!” Iggy happily said, snatching it up.
“Iggy, what the hell?” I demanded. “If customs didn’t want you to have your guns…”
“Aw, they didn’t mean the pixie-breaker,” he said, slipping it into his pocket. “I mean, look at it! It’s hardly even a gun. More like a knife that’s enthusiastic about doing its job.”
“Everyone is different,” Carcinus said placidly. “Some are short. Some are tall. Some are soul-devouring embodiments of evil who would willingly infest all life in the universe with their rotting tendrils if it meant seizing more power for themselves. Hooray! Let us celebrate our differences by dancing around and shooting wildly into the air!” Carcinus winked hugely with one cartoon eye. “And if you forget to aim up before you fire, why, I won’t tell!”
“Carcinus…” Iggy said.
“BEHOLD THE JOY THAT IS PERFECT LOVE!” Carcinus screamed. So saying, the crabatar burst apart. The individual crabs tumbled to earth, looked stunned for a few moments, and then shuffled off toward the sea. In moments, we were alone in that lovely green glen between the mountains and the sea.
“So he wants us to kill some bad guys?” Iggy mused. “I’m honestly asking. He’s so poisoned with whimsy, it’s equally likely he was asking me to punch a bee.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I mused. “Did you know that not one of them has tithed me honey? Punch them! Punch them all! Never stop punching bees!”
“Sure thing,” Iggy said, rolling his eyes in (I assume) an extremely brief and concentrated frenzy of me-worship.
We wandered across the glen. I tried extending my senses and feeling for the churn of nonsensical chaos and possibility that accompanies most gods. What I found was a faint haze of power that seemed to be coming from everywhere. It was as though this whole place were very slightly alive. Skirling… Skirling had been inhabited for a long time, and humans had kept it nicely haunted for just as long.
“But then,” I said, taking Iggy’s arm, “you’re good at smashing superstitions, aren’t you?”
“Whack ‘em, smack ‘em, and crack ‘em,” he said amiably. “When some tentacle-faced clown decides it’s a good idea to drown the world in suffering, why, I get a mighty powerful urge to shoot it square in the chelicerae. Not much a flaming supersonic bullet of thrice-excommunicated amber can’t finalize. I might not be able to kill a god, but I can’t see as making it permanently dormant is a whole lot different.”
I glanced sidelong at him. “Thrice-excommunicated?”
“It’s not just humans that have popes. Long story.”
“Ah.”
The ground fell away before us, plunging into a gorge at least three hundred feet deep. At its head, a lazy little stream went over the edge and plummeted into the depths. The falling water turned into a plume of wind-swept mist until it hit a rock, which concentrated and split it into two smaller waterfalls, which turned back into mist until they hit yet more rocks, and so on, and so on. It wasn’t so much one waterfall as an ever-shifting and never-ending tapestry of waterfalls. I tried counting them. I couldn’t. They shifted too fast.
“I’m a god,” I said quietly. “I know everything. Therefore, I’m unmoved by sights like this, since I knew them even before I saw them.”
“Then why are you shivering?” Iggy said, giving my arm a squeeze.
“It’s a crazy new dance move. Chilly mortals can’t seem to get enough of it, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It’s not without its charms,” I said thoughtfully, “but I don’t think it’ll be replacing ‘The Hustle’ in my commandments.”
“‘The Hustle’?” Iggy said, looking as though he already regretted asking.
“Have you ever noticed how boring most church services are? Haven’t you ever wished there was a more with-it way to reach your pew than just walking there?”
“I like walkin’ funny as well as the next man, but that’s nothing a half-keg of beer can’t fix,” he said jovially.
A strange clicking sound drifted across the glade. Not Carcinus. Something more metallic. Turning, we saw a most bizarre little man crossing laboriously toward us. He was sixty or seventy years old, and it looked like he’d been in—and lost—about a thousand fights. Much of him was missing, and had been replaced by whatever random god-stuff would get the job done. There was a hole through his chest where his heart should have been, wires and duct tape holding a rune-inscribed stone in its place. His arm seemed to have been severed cleanly, golden plates of god-forged metal spanning a gap of at least three inches. There were plenty of other haphazardly repaired wounds, too, bristling with gears and ratchets, levers and lenses. One of his hands was little more than a metal claw. For all that, astonishingly enough, I could tell that he was mortal.
“Is he the one Carcinus warned us about?” Iggy muttered.
“Has to be. I dunno,” I said, examining him critically. “Making fashion choices like his, is that evil?”
Iggy stepped forward. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“They’re under my protection! Mine!” the weird little man shouted. “You can go straight to hell—by yourself, if you prefer, or with the subtle encouragement of my foot up your arse!”
“Excuse me?” Iggy said, blinking. It occurred to me that the newcomer had a strong enough Scottish accent that Iggy might not be able to understand him.
“His name—” I concentrated. “—is Hellbreaker Lewis, and he just asked you to give a pudding cup to the suave and sexy goddess on your left.”
“You’re working for him, I can tell!” Hellbreaker Lewis spat, putting his fists up in a fighting stance that even I could tell was highly dubious. “I can feel his presence. I know he’s here. Whatever you’re up to, it ends now. I’ve broken faces uglier than yours, and I’ve kicked arses higher than yours. This is going to be easy.”
“Does he want me to fight him?” Iggy said incredulously. He looked down at Hellbreaker Lewis. He clenched his hand into a fist the size of an opossum’s couch, if that opossum had folded it out for its visiting buddy opossum to sleep on. “Look. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then your fondest wish is about to come true, isn’t it?” Hellbreaker Lewis sneered, hopping from foot to foot and jabbing at the air. “You can’t hurt what you can’t hit!”
“Fine,” Iggy said, amused. “I won’t hurt you. Specifically, I’ll make sure you don’t break your hands by doing something stupid, like hitting me with them. Now, you want to get down off your high horse and tell me what’s going on?”
“Or what? You’re going to punch my horse, too?” Hellbreaker Lewis demanded. “That sounds about right: ‘Crazed idiot goes around punching horses, thinks it makes him a big man’. ‘Depraved moron apologizes to horse, too stupid to realize horses don’t speak English’. ‘Deranged cretin makes whinnying sounds at horse, arrested for failed attempt at practicing the perverted arts’. You really are inadequate, aren’t you? It takes a lot to find a carrot even the hungriest horse’ll laugh at.”
Iggy glowered at the man and raised his fist. I hastily stepped between them. Given my lack of height, I also had to jump up and down a little, but—given my inherent dignity as a god—I’m pretty sure I pulled it off.
“Hold on,” I told Iggy. “There may be an easier way. Given that I’m god, I’ll just stand around looking ineffable until he inevitably decides to start worshiping me!”
Iggy glanced at me. “Yeah, I’m thinking I might want to finish this in less than sixty years.”
“They don’t always die first!” I said, offended.
“Enough of this!” Hellbreaker Lewis snarled. “You’re working for him. I know it. You know it. The sky weeps at your perfidy, or would, if it weren’t a bunch of stupid air and hummingbirds that doesn’t even realize how completely you’ve shamed yourselves. Now comes the part where I re-arrange your face. You don’t have to thank me. Given how you look now, the result can’t help but be an improvement.”
“That’s it,” Iggy snapped, raising his fist. “You’re done.”
My nose twitched as some sort of godly intuition stroked at my spine. I looked down—and my jaw dropped.
“What… hey! Stop that!”
A middle-aged woman was industriously going through Iggy’s pockets. Dull and grey, she was almost supernaturally easy to overlook. In fact, I doubted a mortal would have noticed her at all. I grabbed Iggy’s hand, sharing what I was sensing, forcing him to see her, too.
“Get out of there!” he cried, slapping his pockets. “Is every god on this damn island insane?”
“Depends on whether I was right or wrong.” She pulled the pixie-breaker from his pocket, gazing levelly at him. “I’d say I was right. A man doesn’t carry a gun because normal ways of making friends just aren’t fast enough.”
Iggy grabbed at the woman. She danced away, still holding the pixie-breaker. Hellbreaker Lewis jumped between them, waggling his fists in a ridiculous display of aggression.
“Stay away from her!” he shouted. “They’re under my protection, all of them!”
“All of who?” Iggy asked cogently. “For that matter, who is she?”
I concentrated again. “That’s Mary MacLeod,” I said. “She’s… hmm… a glaistig.”
“A glaistig?” Iggy said blankly. “A household spirit that sneaks into mortal’s houses and does chores for them while they aren’t looking?”
“I know!” I cried. “Could anything be more pathetic? Have some self-respect!” I told Mary. “At least take your payment by raiding the ice cream bin and leaving the kitchen three feet deep in a detritus of cookie-cat wrappers!”
“But how could a glaistig be one of the devouring evils Carcinus warned us about?” Iggy asked, gazing at a steely-eyed Mary and an apoplectic Lewis. “Glaistigs fix things. Mend clothes. Milk cows. They’re about as far from dangerous as you can get, unless you’re a cow-shaped god who gets her power from milk.”
“I’ll give you one day to leave Skirling,” Mary told us, putting the pixie-breaker in her pocket. “Take it or leave it.”
“And if we refuse?” Iggy said pugnaciously.
“Oh, we already know you’re refuse,” Lewis said. “We can smell it. Phew! Worse than a goddamn troll corpse used as a fart farm by the world’s looniest farmer.”
“Lewis,” Mary said quietly. “Lewis. They’ve already seen me. You don’t have to distract them any more.”
“Distraction, my arse! I’m bringing down the holy word of Truth from on high, is what I’m doing!”
“Are you going to leave Skirling?” Mary asked us, her voice steady, her eyes cold.
“Are you going to try having some self-respect?” I demanded. “You’re a god, a force of nature, that which transcends utterly! And what do you use it for? To do chores for mortals? Ew! Talk about feeding into their power fantasies of owning a domestic little god who’ll do whatever they want.” I looked her over critically. “You’re bigger than that—trust me. You could start by gluing on some sparkly wings or a halo or something. What self-respecting god goes around wearing a face that looks like a dumpling with all the air let out?”
Iggy looked at me strangely. “You put air in dumplings?”
“Well, of course! How else are they going to explode in a puff of glitter when you bite into them? Not that they ever do.”
Iggy put a hand to his stomach. “Ugh. I think a few dozen cases of indigestion just got explained.”
“Look,” I said heatedly, “what you mortals do in the bathroom is tragic. And hilarious. And horrifying. But if I feed you enough glitter, it’ll also be fabulous!”
“I guess that explains all the flashing lights and thumpa-thumpa techno music whenever I’m in the bathroom taking a—”
“PETTING KITTIES!” I bellowed, hands over my ears.
Iggy rolled his eyes. “Sure. What the hell. I pet kitties three, four times a week. And fight air-guitar duels against candy unicorns the day after curry night. You betcha. So what’s your deal?” Iggy demanded of Mary and Lewis. “You evil or what?”
“Don’t answer that!” Lewis shouted hoarsely. “It’s a trap!”
“Leave Skirling,” Mary told us. “You’ll be happier. Really.”
“Not gonna happen,” Iggy said. “There’s something big on this island. Something powerful. Something complicated. You want to be telling me what it is.” He smiled languidly. “If I have to ask you again, I might not ask nice.”
“Also, try being a god for a change,” I chimed in, speaking directly to Mary. “Creeping around servilely, well, serving humans is just sick. Grow an animal-head, turn gigantic, and stomp around demanding cupcakes! It’s what all the cool gods do.”
Mary MacLeod looked me up and down, unimpressed. “I have exactly as many cupcakes in my life as I wish. Who are you to demand that I change everything about myself because who I am offends you? Take your unwanted cupcakes and get out of here.”
“Unwanted cupcakes?” I sputtered. “Unwanted cupcakes? Iggy, assemble the giant robot!”
“What?” he said, startled.
“Wishful thinking,” I admitted.
“We’re leaving,” Mary said, flapping her hand at Hellbreaker Lewis. Slowly, reluctantly, he limped off, sparks shooting from his joints with every step. He kept his head turned, scowling at us until he topped a ridge and descended out of sight.
Iggy turned to Mary. “Make this harder if you want,” he said, “but I’m going to find what you’re hiding, and I’m going to look it over real careful-like. If it’s a threat, I’m going to take it out. If you get in my way, I’ll take you out, too.”
“Threats,” she said, unimpressed. “About what I’d expect from a bully.”
“Listen here—” Iggy said heatedly, but the glaistig was quite abruptly gone as if she’d never been.
“Quick!” I shouted. “Fall down a well!”
“Huh?” Iggy asked.
“Well, what do we know about her? She’s totally horny for doing people’s chores. If we want to make her come back, we need to act all helpless and flailing. You know, typical mortal stuff. Ooh! I know! Go get your head stuck in a fireplace!”
“Or we could just follow her,” he said reasonably. “If she’s supernatural, she’ll leave a trail of power and weirdness you can follow.”
“You have a point,” I admitted, “which makes you one-third as clever as a triangle. Oh, come on, that was funny!”
Iggy started to say something but then paused, tracing a stray thought. “If we even want to follow her,” he mused. “I just can’t reconcile Carcinus’ warning with what we actually found. Those two are a deadly, powerful evil?”
“So what should we do?” I wanted to know. “Leave Skirling and head for home, after we’ve cleaned out all the duty-free chocolate in the airport?”
“‘No’ to the former—”
“Uh-huh.”
“—which, necessarily, means ‘no’ to the latter—”
“BLASPHEMER!!!” I cleared my throat. “Sorry. You were saying?”
Iggy rolled his eyes. “There’s something big on this island. Something powerful. Something endlessly varied. We know that. Taking a closer look might not be a bad idea.”
“I don’t suppose it would hurt. But how are we going to find it?”
Iggy took the celestiomachy from his Emergency Kit. It looked a little like a pocketwatch, if a pocketwatch caught a near-fatal case of Mystery and broke out all over in stars and moons. It had seventeen arms pointing in seventeen different directions: Most of them were pointing back toward town, though a few were pointing directly at me.
“Fine,” I said shortly, “we can go back to Sandmore. But you owe me. Specifically, my commandments say that you have to give me a horsey-ride all the way back.”
“If I held your holy book upside-down, would you have to give me a ride?” he asked reasonably.
“Nope. But one or both of us would have to make the trip on our head.”
Iggy snorted. “Then how about you surprise me by doing something ineffable, instead of being a placid, obedient little god and doing exactly what I expect you to do?”
He had me there. I ruefully let him climb up, simply choosing not to notice how heavy he was (have I mentioned that there are advantages to being a god?). For the next four miles, Iggy whooped and hollered and spun his arm like a cowboy. Apparently that’s how mortals react when their very minds are fractured by the sheer, unrelenting horror of a horsey-ride from hell. Who knew?
* * *
The town of Sandmore smashed right up against the sea, each building brightly painted like its own separate candy box. Or, as I preferred to think of them, like squared-off, squashed cakes. The town was built across three hills which reared up like great tree-crested knife-blades. The streets climbed and plunged with breathless fervor, and I’m not sure there was a level place in the entire city. The streets were fairly crowded with pedestrians, but not as many as when we’d arrived. The tourist season was coming to an end, an autumnal chill creeping into the air.
“There,” I said decisively, consulting the celestiomachy. We stopped in front of a boxy building, three stories high, painted bright pink. From what I could see through the great window that occupied most of the first floor, it might have been a book store. The whole place was dark and dusty and—according to the sign—named ‘The Mysterious Little Shop’. I kid you not.
“Could they really be that obvious?” Iggy said, stunned.
“Probably. Not everyone’s as classy as me. Did I tell you about my latest idea for a Halloween costume? It involves sixty bags of marshmallows and a confectioner’s torch.”
Iggy walked back and forth, examining the shop. I’m not sure what he was looking for. Well, unless it was the radiating cracks and bent walls that suggested some enormous force had come close to crushing the place an unknown number of years ago. Iggy finally shrugged, took a baseball cap from his Emergency Kit and pulled it low over his eyes. He thinks this disguises him. Sure. Remember that he’s an enormous, one-eyed man, bulging with muscles in places that are intensely exciting to certain goddesses I could mention. What it actually does is make him look like someone who eats farmers to gain their power, and keeps trophies of his conquests.
A bell jangled as we pushed through the door. The shop didn’t look much more impressive from inside. Dark and dusty? Check. Infested with an ungodly number of books? Well, if I’m the standard of comparison, my diametric opposite would be brussels sprouts, thus making ‘ungodly’ mean ‘small and green’. Which did apply to a certain subset of the books there, so sure, give that a check, too. There were also some appalling, touristy tchotchkes apparently meant to look like the famed Loch Callagan serpent. I wanted one immediately. I walked over to the counter—and stared at the woman behind it. It was Mary MacLeod.
“Iggy!” I hissed. “IGGY!”
Iggy sighed. “I keep telling you, I’m all out of Yum-Flavored Pigglers, so you can just— oh.”
The glaistig glowered at us. “Welcome to Skirling,” she said stiffly. “My name is Mary. I’m a completely ordinary shopkeeper who’s never seen you before.”
“Anthony Eagleton,” Iggy said politely, hand dipping into his Emergency Kit. “You’re mortal, eh? You want I should test that by dusting you with tiny croissants I had some cookie elves make for me? Mortals don’t even notice, but gods? Ah! The contradiction tends to make ‘em speak in tongues and start breakdancing.”
“Iggy,” I whispered, tugging on his arm. “That last bit was just me.”
“Oh, I’m mortal. I have photographic proof that I age,” she said stiffly, tapping a badly photoshopped picture which showed a little girl sullenly staring at the camera with five-hundred-year old eyes.
“Whatever you say,” Iggy shrugged. “Thing is, I know there’s something here in Skirling—something big. You want to tell me what’s really going on?”
Mary MacLeod scowled. “An extremely annoying man came into my shop thinking that asking questions was the same thing as deserving answers,” she said sharply.
Iggy turned to me, holding his hand out for the celestiomachy. I froze, trying to figure out a way of using it to extort more pie from him, whereupon he simply took it from my nerveless hand.
“There’s something here,” he mused, turning the celestiomachy around and around. “But at the same time… there isn’t?”
“Some puzzles are best solved from aboard airplanes at thirty thousand feet,” she suggested.
Shrugging, Iggy walked up and down the aisles, looking for anything weird or out of place. I followed, though there didn’t seem to be much to find but books and dust. After hesitating for a moment, Mary MacLeod came out from behind her counter and followed us suspiciously around the store.
“You could leave,” she said hopefully. “There are plenty of spots around here that stupid people think are beautiful.”
“We’re not leaving without answers,” Iggy told her.
“You want answers, do you? I have some for you. The two of you are bullies. You go where you’re not wanted, throw your weight around, give people orders and expect them to obey.” She snorted. “You want to know what people like you do? They invent washing machines. Before so-called ‘genius’ mortals decided to wreck everything, life used to mean something. People needed me.”
“Yeah, mortals sure suck, don’t they?” I said comfortably. “Although, I have to admit, I do enjoy their tendency to stuff cheese into absolutely everything, whether it belongs there or not.”
“Bah,” Mary said. “You want to know what people like you do? You buy cupcakes from stores. Food used to mean something. It couldn’t exist without someone’s time and effort, love and care. Now it appears out of thin air, and it means about as much.”
“You make your own cupcakes?” I said, starting to get excited.
“Better. I make tattie scones.”
“Is that as filthy as it sounds?” I said hopefully.
“Griddle scones! Made with potatoes! And believe me, when you eat one, you know you’ve eaten one.” Mary shook herself. “Never mind that. You’re working for him. You can leave Skirling now, or you can suffer the consequences.”
“Consequences, eh? I really hate it when people shoot chocolate at me out of slingshots,” I said persuasively.
Mary MacLeod sniffed. “I should have known. Everything in the world has to be about you, doesn’t it?”
“I am god,” I said modestly.
“I’ll bet you didn’t even weep when they invented the milking machine. You, madam, have no soul. You’re an empty space, an overloud tangle of meaningless wants and vain ambition that’s mistaken itself for a person. I don’t need you. None of us—” She stopped herself. “I don’t need you.”
“But have you tried praying to me?” I said persuasively. “Easy and fun! And did I mention rewarding? Look, a me-shaped candy dispenser! The Pez company won’t return my calls, so I whittled it myself out of a dehydrated pickle!”
Iggy shook his head. “I still can’t get used to the expression on her face,” he mused. “Like she’s allergic to air and just can’t stop sneezing.”
I whapped his shoulder. “Whittling is hard! And since you won’t buy me a chainsaw…”
“Chainsaws cost sixty billion dollars,” he said automatically.
Mary MacLeod glanced back and forth between us. “Doom used to come grim-faced and scowling. It had respect for its victims, even as it killed them. But you? You won’t even give us that. You laugh and joke and make light of the murders you commit. You’re despicable.”
“Look—” Iggy began. Mary threw a book past his head. It wasn’t much of a distraction, but it was all she needed. Just like that, the glaistig was gone.
“Iggy… my exits are classier than that, right?” I asked, troubled. “I mean, with the sparklers and the dance moves and all that?”
“And the way you get frustrated when the smoke machines inevitably fail, and you stride off in full view, giving everyone the finger the whole way?”
“Exactly. Classy!”
“I know I always enjoy it,” he admitted. “Let’s look around and see what we can find.”
The two of us crossed and recrossed The Mysterious Little Shop. There were more books than I could shake a stick at (though certain of my eight-armed friends could have managed it). There was dust. There were weird fans of splinters blooming out of the rafters, as if a vast and terrible force had started to crush the place but stopped halfway. If you looked closely, you could see where cracks in the ceiling and walls had been filled in and painted over, radiating from points of near-collapse.
“Hell if I can find anything,” Iggy finally said. “You got anything supernatural?”
“What? Oh!” I closed my eyes and concentrated. “Well, I could follow Mary. Her trail’s still pretty recent.”
Iggy consulted the celestiomachy, looking grim. “There’s something here. I know there is. But since I can’t find it, sure, let’s try that.”
I followed Mary’s trail back to the front counter. Something led me to the cork message board behind it, not that most of the notices meant anything to me. I mean, I’m god, why would I need guitar lessons when I’d presumably be perfect the first time I picked one up? Which, admittedly, doesn’t explain why Iggy thought I was attacking him that time I found a harmonica. Still, something drew me toward one notice in particular. Obviously, Mary had touched it: Her deeply boring taint was all over it.
“I feel something,” I mused.
“Indigestion?” Iggy said politely.
“For the last time, I do not subject food to that particular moral failing. When I selflessly rescue a young couple from having pastry smashed in their respective faces by breaking into the building and eating the entire wedding cake in advance, I do not digest it. I discreetly smite my stomach contents and burp smoke until it’s gone. Anything else would be indescribably gross.”
“Yeah, about that,” Iggy said. “Could you stop taking the little figures at the top of the cake as a trophy? It’s kind of disturbing how many of them I keep finding in my sock drawer.”
“Says the man who looks the other way so long as I bring him the top tier.”
“Well, stopping a god from doing what she wants, that’s tough,” he said reasonably. “If she wants to eat cake with me, I may just have to suffer.”
“I knew there was a reason I loved you. But this—” I squinted at the poster. Hellbreaker Lewis, apparently, was asking for physical or photographic proof that the Loch Callagan serpent existed. “Either Mary went here, or she wants us to think she went here. It could be a trap,” I noted.
Iggy smiled. “The day I can’t spring a trap set by some pastoral little nothing-god is the day I should retire to Transylvania, just me and Dracula sittin’ on the porch complaining about ungrateful mosquitos that never write home.”
I glanced at him. “We go to Loch Callagan, fine. Then what?”
“Then we improvise.”
“Right. Like the time we took out the Vinasthi salt golems.” I fidgeted. “Who I cleverly shoved into a puddle, whereupon they all melted.”
“I still say you just tripped and flung your arms into whatever was closest.”
“I knew what I was doing! Besides, I would’ve had a way more elegant solution if I’d figured out how to order a couple hundred deer via overnight express.” I paused thoughtfully. “If salt licks could talk, do you think they’d giggle… or scream?”
“I hope that’s a hypothetical question,” Iggy said comfortably. “Ready to head out?”
“Hold on.” I jumped up so I could grab Iggy around the neck, pull myself up and kiss him. “Now we can go.”
“You betcha,” he said, smiling crookedly.
* * *
We drove up into the mountains, pulled off in a lot hardly bigger than our rental car, and walked down a winding dirt track even deeper into the soaring, verdant mountains. Loch Callagan was staggeringly beautiful, a perfect mirror reflecting the mountains that surrounded it on all sides. Put simply, it offended me. Not a single castle ruin. For that matter, no witches, either. I don’t need lessons in dancing around naked (as Iggy can attest), and I don’t want to turn people into frogs (I mean, sure, it’s kind of random, but what’s the punchline?). More than anything, what I wanted was the secret of imbuing the inanimate with life. Eating s’mores around the campfire would be about fifty times more fun if they shouted insults at you the whole time.
“Plus, where’s the leprechauns?” I demanded.
Iggy sighed. “You do know that leprechauns are Irish, right?”
“Yeah, but there’s a certain breakfast cereal that—according to the animated mini-documentaries that air on Saturday mornings—leprechauns literally can’t resist, and I’ve got several fistfuls of it in my pockets right now. You’d think a couple of the little green bastards would have leaked into Scotland.”
“Actually, no, I wouldn’t.”
“Now who’s being naive?” I said wisely.
Iggy rolled his eyes. “Anyway, we’re here. Sense anything?”
I walked down to the shore of Loch Callagan. The surface of the lake was incredibly smooth, reflecting back a soaring ring of mountains and—inside them—a patch of cloud-strewn blue. I felt like I could jump in and fall into the sky forever.
“Hmm.” I closed my eyes. “I don’t sense Mary. But far more importantly, I don’t sense the Loch Callagan serpent, either.”
“That’s because it doesn’t exist,” Iggy said drily.
“She does, too!” I said heatedly.
“Wanna bet?”
“I’m god,” I reminded him, poking a finger into his chest. “I like the world to be fun. And a world where the Loch Callagan serpent exists is way more fun than a world where she doesn’t. Start from that simple fact—she exists!—and figure backward to get the rest. You want me to explain it to you?”
“Kind of,” Iggy admitted. “That is, if you can talk and look for Mary at the same time.”
“I’m god! Multitasking is as natural to me as— hey, look, a bee!”
“You were saying?”
“Think about it,” I said. “Imagining that the world is full of fascinating, crazy monsters is fun. But what if we actually found one? It would get photographed and saddled with a latin name and featured in nature documentaries. We’d have to move on, hunting for something even more secret and unknowable. I mean, what’s romantic about trying to find something that’s already been found, and which probably has grad students following it around to analyse the DNA in its poop? So. Assuming that a monster is super-chill and a real stand-up guy, like bigfoot, how can it make our lives better? By remaining mysterious and fun. By not being found!”
“The Loch Callagan serpent hides because it loves us?” Iggy said, amused.
“Not being seen, that’s one approach to remaining hidden, I suppose. The other way would be to murder anyone who did see it, which is functionally the same thing as long as it eats their cameras, too. What a sweetie!”
“So how are you going to find her?” Iggy challenged me. “Are you going to make hugging gestures at the empty air to see if she’ll eagerly fling herself into your waiting arms?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I mean, that works on you, but serpents don’t have arms. What does a hugging gesture even look like to a snake? Do I wink and wave my sock around as seductively as I can? I think we’d better take the more obvious course of figuring out which breakfast cereals they find irresistible.”
“Let’s find Mary,” Iggy suggested. “I bet she knows all kinds of things about the Loch Callagan serpent… breakfast preferences included.”
“Hey, yeah!”
We continued to meander along the shore of the lake. Iggy periodically checked the celestiomachy, and I periodically closed my eyes and felt for Mary, or (in secret) for anything big and benevolent and all squiggly-like. No luck either way. So I amused myself by tripping into Iggy.
“All right, that time you did it on purpose!” Iggy said, aggrieved.
“Did not!”
“So you, a god, were powerless to prevent something you didn’t want to happen?” he demanded.
“Of course not! But, being god, I selflessly gave you the opportunity to prove your devotion by catching me with your face. I’m just that generous!”
Iggy snorted. “I actually can’t refute that.”
“Ha! I win again!”
Loch Callagan went on and on, its shoreline meandering around countless inlets and bays. If I looked up, mountains smashed into my eyes like great gratuitous sledgehammers of beauty. If I looked down, their mirrored doppelgangers hit just as hard. Pathetic. Here I was, an actual god, and who would even notice with so much splendor to stare at?
“SHOW SOME RESPECT!” I shouted, flipping my surroundings the bird with both hands.
“I’m not going to ask,” Iggy sighed.
“There’s got to be something cool around here. That hut up there, does it look like a treasure-infested ruin to you?”
Iggy squinted at the little stone structure. “More like a miniature bunkhouse for hikers to rest in.”
“Well, I’ll rig it with as many traps as I can,” I said generously. “It may not be full of treasure, but whoever follows us will get to enjoy at least one part of the temple-raiding experience!”
“I don’t think…” Iggy paused as a familiar figure emerged from the bunkhouse. “What the hell is he doing here?”
Hellbreaker Lewis limped over to us, clicking and sparking all the way. I couldn’t help but notice that several of his replacement parts were held in by little more than wire and tape.
“I warned you,” he rasped. “For that matter, Mary warned you. What happens to you now is your own damn fault.”
“I’m still only getting about one word in six,” Iggy complained.
“He ordered you NOT to take off your clothes and prance around like a fairy princess,” I said helpfully. “I think you’d better show him who’s boss and disobey. Here—” I reached for him. “—I’ll help you get started!”
“Back, creature!”
Hellbreaker Lewis started tugging on the tape that held in his replacement organs. “So be it. If it has to be done, it has to be done.”
“What’s it gonna be this time?” Iggy asked, sounding bored. “Are you going to insult us again? Or—let me guess!—you’re going to dance around pretending you’re willing to fight me.”
“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Hellbreaker Lewis sneered. “Dismiss me as a shallow, uncomplicated amalgam of anger and rage so you can do whatever you want and pretend I don’t matter. Bah. I’m complicated! I have depths! I paint sad clowns. Did you ever think of that?”
“What did you do to make them sad?” I asked curiously.
“All right, fine. You have depths,” Iggy said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. “Let’s take a moment and just calm down. I know I said some things I didn’t mean—”
“DEMENTED INTRUDER ADMITS TO SPEWING LIES!” Lewis cried.
“Not lies!” Iggy snapped. “It’s just, when I get angry, sometimes I say stuff that isn’t totally accurate—”
“DICTATOR WANNA-BE ADMITS HIS INANE BABBLE IS INACCURATE AND MEANINGLESS!”
“I didn’t say that!” Iggy snapped. “Meet me halfway, will you?”
“CONGENITAL LOSER LOSES, AS ALWAYS, BEGS FOR COMPROMISE TO COVER FOR HIS UTTER FAILURE!”
“That’s it,” Iggy growled. Hellbreaker Lewis didn’t wait to see what Iggy was going to do: He yanked off the claw that formed his left hand and flung it at Iggy’s head. Astonished, Iggy ducked.
“There!” Lewis cried. “I moved you, devil!”
“I’m thinking maybe we should sit down and—”
“ARRRG!”
Hellbreaker Lewis reached behind him and pulled out the stretchy, glitter-imbued cords that served as his calf tendons. He promptly fell flopping to the ground, but still managed to fling the cords at Iggy. Then he threw the metallic ziggurat that covered his left kneecap. Then a trio of deer-antler-carved scrimshaw-covered ribs. Then his right leg. Iggy twisted aside as improvised organs flew past him, unsure what to do about the increasingly incomplete man flopping on the ground in front of us.
“D’you see now?” Hellbreaker Lewis roared. “The devil thinks he’s greater than me. Maybe he’s right. But I’ll never—NEVER!—give up fighting him! I’ll bite his ankles! I’ll blow dust up his nose! I’ll make unflattering comments about his arse until he develops an eating disorder! LEAVE SKIRLING NOW OR KNOW MY WRATH!”
“On the other hand,” I said, crouching down next to Lewis, “now you can’t escape while I tell you about all the great desserts I’ve eaten!”
“So it’s to be torture, is it?” Lewis said bleakly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Iggy mused. “I actually ask for dessert monologue number 367 every now and then. What? I have trouble sleeping.” He winked at me. “And, as you know, I have an extra-special white-noise mantra that sounds a lot like snoring.”
“Do you dream about me?” I said wistfully.
“If there are absolutely no follow-up questions, yes. Yes, I do.”
Hellbreaker Lewis glanced back and forth between us, his expression calculating. “How about you fetch my body parts back for me?” he said.
“You want us to help you?” Iggy demanded. “You threw the damn things. Go get ‘em yourself!”
“Oh, you could prove me right and sin deep as the devil himself by torturing a helpless man,” Hellbreaker Lewis said. “You could prove yourself the worst kind of monster by leaving me lying here, dying and alone. You could do all kinds of things to prove how despicable and wretched you are. Or you could do what’s right.”
“I don’t believe it!” Iggy said. “You might as well ask me to pick up the bullets you just shot at me, tie ‘em up in a nice little bow, and give ‘em back!”
“Trust a pig-headed oaf like you not to consider how expensive bullets are,” Hellbreaker Lewis sneered. “Not everyone can afford fancy name-brand ammunition, you know. I’m on a fixed income!”
“I don’t believe this,” Iggy muttered. Together, we began gathering up Lewis’ parts so we could return them to him. The odd little man accepted them, snapping the pieces back into place one by one.
“Huh. Maybe you’re not so horrible, after all,” Lewis mused as he stood up, tentatively swinging his arms.
“Or we are, and we just want you to be even more shocked when we devour your soul!” I said with gusto.
Hellbreaker Lewis shrugged it off. “The thing is, Mary and I are defending those who can’t defend themselves. Your very presence is a deep existential threat to all of them. Mary and I, we did what we had to do. I don’t expect you’ll get in any real trouble… but even so…”
Iggy looked at me. I looked at Iggy. And now, finally, free from the grand distraction of being pelted with improvised body parts, I saw her. Mary MacLeod took her hands out of Iggy’s pockets and stepped back, as grey and uninteresting as ever, surrounded by such an overwhelming fume of boredom that I almost forgot she was there even as I looked at her.
“Iggy—”
“OVER HERE!” Hellbreaker Lewis shouted, waving both arms over his head.
I turned, hoping beyond hope he was hailing the Loch Callagan serpent. Instead, I saw half a dozen people hiking along the shore of the lake, steadily coming closer. (Should any cryptids be reading this (Hi, Bigfoot!), the ultimate disguise would be to disguise yourself as yourself. I mean, seriously, could a bigfoot dressed in a bigfoot costume pay anyone to take it seriously?). I squinted at the approaching people. They were wearing dark blue, and their caps were embraced by bands of a white checkerboard pattern.
“Cops?” Iggy said blankly.
“Hold it right there!” one of them said, crossing over to us. “We’ve had word of foreigners engaged in smuggling—”
“Smuggling?”
“If you’d turn out your pockets?”
Blankly, Iggy did so. His pockets were full of little packets of white powder. I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t sugar.
“What— this isn’t mine! It’s—” Iggy stopped, his eyes going black as he looked at Hellbreaker Lewis and Mary MacLeod. “Oh, that’s it,” he breathed. “I’m taking your heads for trophies. Trophies!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the cop said, “but I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”