FICTION BY TOM JOYCE

Tom Joyce writes a monthly feature called Nuts & Bolts for the Horror Writers Association’s blog, featuring interviews about the craft and business of writing with some of the most knowledgeable people in the business.

His short fiction has appeared in publications including Space & Time Magazine and Needle: A Magazine of Noir. He is currently at work on a dark fantasy novel set in 1990s New Jersey, featuring historically accurate con artistry, swordplay, fairy lore, and medieval necromancy.

SAINTLY, STAINED-GLASS EYES
by Tom Joyce

Damn, Meataxe. If you could see yourself.

Look through my eyes.

I get it. You don’t have the sensory perception yet. You’ll learn. Seeing through my eyes is like this conversation. Not…quite…congealing into conscious thought. Impressions you can’t process careening through your brain. Shredding your very sanity. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Yeah. There you are.

Metal club bouncer, all size and leather jacket and attitude. Standing in the center aisle of a church while twin galleries of saintly, stained-glass eyes look on like they’re embarrassed for you.

Your face whips back and forth in a futile attempt to spot the shadowy form—a man dressed in rags?—dancing in your peripheral vision, only to vanish when you try to lock eyes on it. From outside, a siren wails in the distance. Or is it a keening chant from somewhere in here, amid the dim light and cloying scent of votive candles?

You need to survive. Get to Cassandra and warn her that Spider summoned something he couldn’t control.

Your breath rasps in your throat. T-shirt soaked and clinging beneath your jacket. Wild-eyed, like one of those dipshits you used to toss out of the club, dropping too much acid and shrieking about invisible terrors.

Here’s a dose of real terror, tough guy.

BEHOLD MY TRUE FORM

You take off. Sprinting up the aisle and across the altar, leaving toppled candle holders and music stands in your wake.

You. Once so proud of your reputation. No matter how ugly it got—the meth head with the screwdriver, the Warlocks M.C. enforcer with the aluminum bat—you were the man who never lost his cool. Now you’re running from the exits like the dumbest of slasher fodder. And you still don’t remember!

This is why I always liked you. Out of the whole crew in…what did Spider call his little club? The Illuminated Order of the 13th Child? You were the only one who was at least fun to watch. Never had any illusions about your role. Thumb breaker.

Spider? He pissed me off.

I get it. The guy could be charismatic, with his Aleister-Crowley-on-a-Harley routine. Impressed women, right? I’ll let you in on a secret. For all their talk about “transcendent knowledge,” “spiritual ascension,” nine times out of 10 that’s why his kind gets in the ceremonial magic game. You figured it worked with Cassandra. That’s why you wanted to be Spider. Never could admit that to yourself, could you? 

I’ve served real arch mages. John Dee. Sister Tamela. Ever hear of her? No, you haven’t. That’s how good she was. A poser like Spider anointing himself with that title? Trying to bind me and make me his servant to give himself some street cred? Insults in need of answering. Nothing personal, Meataxe. Just how it is.

You run into a hallway entrance behind the altar. Clawing at the walls in a frantic search for a light switch as you hear my dancing footsteps approach along carpeted floor.

Shuffle-hop. Shuffle-hop.

Think. How did you get here?

It started when you looked in the bathroom mirror and there I was. A swirling mass of shadow coalescing into form behind you. Terror hit you like an icy wave, because you knew what it meant.

Spider fucked up the ritual! Have to warn Cassandra!

You bolted out of the apartment. Electric lights flickered in the hallway outside, then in the fire exit stairway as your running footsteps echoed off the concrete walls, along with – another set of steps? A strange, arrhythmic cadence, pursuing you.

Shuffle-hop. Shuffle-hop.

In the night’s chill outside, your boots pounding cracked sidewalk, you glimpsed something in the shadows beyond a streetlight. A dark form in motion. A man dressed in rags, arms flapping and feet skipping in a mad drunkard’s dance.

A fortress of brick and stained glass loomed on your right among row homes and closed store fronts, and an impulse stirred deep in the fight-or-flight recesses of your lower brain. A relic of those Sunday mornings when your old man would rise in a haze of whiskey fumes, already shooting poisonous glares that promised the belt for transgressions real and imagined.

But not during Mass. The church was sanctuary. Refuge. Maybe my kind couldn’t follow you there.

Yet here I am.

Boo.

You blunder through darkened church hallways, my hitching step ever closer behind you.

Shuffle-hop. Shuffle-hop.

Is that light ahead? You make a left. A right. In front of you, a lit entrance hallway, double glass doors at the end alongside a steel holy water font. And…

“Hello.”

A crucifix hangs from her neck and a fringe of dark hair shows beneath her veil. A padlock secures the chain holding the exit doors shut behind her. Maybe she’s just locked it for the night, because keys are in her hand. She judges your proximity, gives the chain a look, and turns to face you instead.

“Are you all right?” the nun says as you slowly approach. Her voice soothing, but her widened eyes giving her away. Likely figuring you for a druggie, come wandering in off the streets. She’s got a healthy sense of fear, given her read on the situation. Not losing her head, though.

Professional that you are, you make an assessment. She’s short and wiry. Early thirties. Left palm held out to you, placating but angled to guard her face should you move in. Right hand at her hip, forming a fist around the keys. Poking them out between her fingers in preparation for using them as a weapon should you make it necessary.

Has grit, this one. Looks like she knows a thing or two. Maybe she’s been assigned to some rough areas. Learned to defend herself.

She can handle the situation. She thinks.

Shuffle-hop. Shuffle hop.

“I’m Imelda,” she says, not reacting to my footsteps approaching in the darkened hallway. “You got a name?”

It occurs to you, she can’t hear me. Likely can’t see me, either.

Remember that old joke? Two guys are walking through the forest and see a bear. They have a conversation.

“What are we gonna do?”

“I’m gonna run.”

“You’ll never outrun a bear!”

“Don’t have to outrun the bear. Just have to outrun you.”

Sacrifices have been known to placate my kind. Spider told you that. You need to survive. Warn Cassandra. Yet…you always wanted her to see the best in you. As more than the thug everyone else saw.

Raven-haired Cassandra, hanging out at the club. Holding her own in the mosh pit. Telling anyone at the bar with a cheap come-on to go fuck himself.

Intelligence, danger, and inaccessibility. Got you right in the Madonna-whore complex, didn’t she? Nothing personal, Meataxe, but you former altar boys are so damn predictable.

Cassandra. So exciting and mysterious when she led you to that candle-lit basement with sigils painted on the walls. There waited Spider, with his leather vest and grey-streaked ponytail, his paternal smile and his line of pseudo-mystical bullshit.

“It’s not about serving God or Satan,” Spider told you, around bong hits of something dank and primo. “It’s about evolving spiritually past servitude. Controlling the fundamental forces of the cosmos. Holy? Unholy? Doesn’t concern me. I just want a look at the instruction manual. I want to know how the machine works.”

He flashed that smile. Clamped an approving hand on your shoulder. “Cassandra tells me you have potential. I see that, man. You’re going to be a powerful mage.” Cassandra looked on, so proud of both of you.

Truth is, she saw through Spider’s bullshit from day one. That introduction was your placement on the chess board. She told him about the time you confessed your love, by the way. They got a laugh out of it. Used to call you “Meathead” behind your back.

Heartbreaking. That’s what you are, my friend.

“It’s OK,” the nun says. “You don’t have to tell me. Are you hurt? I can call an ambulance.”

Why would she think you’re hurt, Meataxe?

The bathroom mirror, washing your face and hands.

T-shirt soaked and clinging…

You look down at the front of your shirt, gleaming with fresh blood. From the darkened hallway, my footsteps accelerate. I’m done toying with you. Even if you made it out the door, you’d never get away and you know it.

You look at the nun standing in front of you. She’s small. A man your size? Wouldn’t be hard to pick her up and throw her at me, then make a break for it.

The crucifix gleaming around her neck makes you want to recoil, Bela Lugosi style. Plenty of crosses made their way into the summoning ritual during those weeks at Spider’s remote cabin. Like the ones he carved into your skin with razor blades, along with Latin phrases and strange sigils. One more ordeal during weeks of fasting and sleep deprivation. Ice baths and self-flagellation. Endless repetitions of apocryphal prayers by candlelight.

You’d have bailed after the first day if it hadn’t been for Cassandra. Begging you to make her changes to the ritual and not tell Spider. To add her name to the incantations. Her blood to the tinctures. Her hair and childhood portrait to the burnt offerings.

She wept in front of you, wide-eyed and vulnerable, telling you she had to save Spider from himself. Spider so brilliant yet so arrogant, thinking he could summon and control such a powerful spirit without her help. Without your help.

I’ll let you in on another secret. Cassandra planned to hijack the ritual and make me her servant instead. Figured she’d make a better mage than Spider. She was right, not that being right did her any good. What can I say? She picked herself an unlucky name.

Remember

Ready or not, here I come.

You dive at the nun, hands reaching. Expecting her to swing for your face with the keys.

But she’s smart. She sidesteps and rakes the back of your hand with the keys. Pain makes you pull back. She tries to dart around you as I enter the hall.

Shuffle-hop. Shuffle-hop.

She’s quick, but terror makes you quicker. You dodge a slash at your face. Grab her by the shoulders and…

Oh, Meataxe.

…move her away from me. Put yourself between us, protecting her, as you reach for the holy water font and hurl its remaining contents in my direction. You shout at the top of your lungs, just like you heard Spider do that time.

“Ite in pace ad locatuaper Christum Dominum Nostrum!”

Like I said, man. Heartbreaking. Did you really think that would work?

Truth is, Spider didn’t know who he was fucking with. I’m not one of the Christian demons. Or the pre-Christian daimons, for that matter.

Sure, the different religions, cultures, and eras had their names for me, and some cast me in the role of demon. Peasants made me a trickster devil in their folktales. Medieval poets made me a malevolent fae in their saccharine court romances.

I’m older than all of them. I was worshipped in Paleolithic caverns amid torchlight and narcotic smoke, my name voiced in hypnotic chants and ecstatic howls.

Tell you what, Meataxe. Call me Lord Cutthroat.

I’m not here for the nun. I’m here for you.

You raise your arms to cover your face. Scream as I move in. A scream of recognition. It’s coming back now, isn’t it?

If it’s any consolation, Spider and Cassandra’s next move would have been to kill you. Drug you, draw a ceremonial dagger across your throat, then dispatch your spirit to my realm so you could bring me back.

Those weeks of ritualistic preparation created a sympathetic bond between us. But Spider fucked up. Got so rattled when the summoning actually worked and I stood before him that he forgot entire sections of the binding incantations.

He lost control of me. You didn’t become his envoy in my realm. You became my vessel in his.

Remember.

You found them for me, one by one. Spider’s followers.

The trust fund kid with the pentagram tattooed on his forehead, whose guts you left strewn all over his Main Line penthouse. The bassist for that one-hit-wonder goth metal band, whose skull you smashed into the floor of his barricaded townhome’s panic room until it spilled its contents.

Spider, cowering when you found him in his cabin, until you sank your thumbs into his eye sockets and his pleas turned to screams. 

And finally…the apartment down the street rented under an assumed name. The ceremonial dagger in your hand as you closed in on Cassandra.

She was the last of them, my friend. Which, I must confess, makes me a little sad. It’s been such fun, every time, watching through your eyes. Seeing the awareness, the memories, gradually kick in once I give up the driver’s seat.

The others languish in dark realms, never to return.

You, Meataxe? You entertain me. I’ve decided to take you with me. Maybe I’ll let you return some day.

When you come back from my realm, odds are you come back…changed. Alone. Wandering. Mad. But the wonders you’ll see!

The games we’ll play.