Butcher Bird Read online

  The last realm was left to the most glorious and dangerous inhabitants of the planet: angels and demons.

  So it was that each of these groups lived and grew old and died in its own Sphere, inhabiting the same time and space as all the other Spheres, but rarely touching—unless a creature was powerful or clever enough to learn the spells of crossing over. Because the town meeting that divided the world had taken place in a human city, cities became the places where the creatures who moved from Sphere to Sphere would meet up to talk, joke, eat, exchange spells and news, make love or commit the occasional genocide.

  Over the next few thousand centuries, the creatures who dwelled in the second and Third Spheres struck a kind of détente. Unfortunately for the beasts in the First Sphere (which included ninety-nine percent of humanity), they forgot about the other Spheres completely and only glimpsed them in their dreams.

  Or so they thought.

  THREE

  STRANGE ATTRACTORS

  Later, Spyder went out the back and into the alley behind the Bardo Lounge for a quick piss.

  It wasn’t Spyder’s habit to urinate in public, but at the best of times the Lounge’s toilets were questionable. Sometime during the day, Rubi told him, they had committed hara-kiri. “One summer during college I was trekking in Nepal,” Rubi said. “First night out we came to this little village and I asked this lady who ran the local teahouse where the toilets were. In Nepali she said, essentially, ‘Anywhere but here,’ and pointed to an open field.”

  As Spyder unzipped in the alley, he considered the club’s name and wondered if the real afterlife would be at all like this. A tab at your favorite bar. Pretty girls to chat up. The occasional piss in an alley next to God’s own dumpster. It didn’t seem like the afterlife would be too bad a place. Spyder wondered who the bouncer in the Bardo Realm would be. The Black Bhairab, he decided. Shiva’s most wrathful form. The six-armed, crown-of-skulls-wearing Mad Max of the afterlife.

  Spyder zipped up and turned to reenter the club. Like a bad dream, the Black Bhairab was right there beside him. Something big enough, strong enough and wild enough to be the Black Bhairab, though Spyder knew that these qualities were also present in many of your dedicated crackheads. This particular crackhead grabbed Spyder by the front of his shirt and lifted him off him feet, tossing him into the trashcans and empty liquor boxes at the back of the alley.

  Stunned, Spyder reached for his cash, hoping this would get the guy to back off. The mugger came up and slammed his boot into Spyder’s midsection, then kept kicking, even after he’d snatched the money from Spyder’s hand. Spyder didn’t even get a decent look at the guy and that really bothered him. He wanted to see the face of the man who was about to kill him.

  As if the mugger had heard Spyder’s thoughts, he felt himself being pulled up by his collar until he was standing upright. Then Spyder’s feet lifted from the dirty alley floor and he hung limp in the air at the end of the mugger’s arm. “You know how to whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow,” Spyder croaked as he hung there. He punched the crackhead as hard as he could. The guy’s face gave as if there were no bones in there, just a lot of flesh-colored pudding.

  The mugger’s face began to change. His skin crawled in the jittery sodium light from a streetlamp. The mugger’s eyes swelled and burst from their sockets, black and glittering with facets. His lips seemed to melt, drawing down into a long, twitching tube. Cracked, curved horns burst from the sides of his head. The mugger exhaled a fetid cloud of steaming breath. Spyder’s brain was on overload. The adrenaline rush and oxygen deprivation had him flashing on a frantic stream of schizophrenic data. Snakes. Insects. Wolves. Angels. The mugger had a smell. Overwhelmingly sweet. Vanilla roses. Rotting fish. The perfume of dead schoolgirls. Spyder thought of his room in high school. He’d had a poster on the wall, a parody of the kind of out-of-date Civil Defense instructions they used to give kids in case of nuclear attack. The last line had read: Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

  Spyder vomited on the mugger’s arm. The puke seemed to have some kind of mysterious juju power because at that moment the mugger’s head sheered off and rolled to the alley floor. His body, which still had a solid grip on Spyder’s collar, followed a second or two later.

  When he could open his eyes, Spyder saw a pair of shiny vinyl boots in front of his face. He closed his eyes again, ready for this new intruder to finish him off.

  “Get up,” came a woman’s voice.

  Spyder looked up and saw the blind dancer he and Lulu had spoken to in the bar earlier that night. She was holding a long and bloody sword in her hands.

  “I’m tapped out. The dead guy got all my money,” said Spyder.

  “I’m not mugging you, fool. I’m saving you. Not that you deserve it.” The blind woman reached down for Spyder’s arm and helped him to his feet.

  “Thanks. What the fuck just happened?”

  “A Bitru demon attacked you. I killed it.”

  “I don’t believe in demons.”

  The woman nodded. “All right. It was a junkie with the head of an insect and possessing superhuman strength.”

  “Okay,” Spyder croaked.

  Spyder looked at the body at his feet. He hadn’t been hallucinating. The body wasn’t even vaguely human.

  “What the fuck… Why would a demon want me?”

  “A Bitru doesn’t just drop by for blood and crumpets. He doesn’t come unless he’s called.”

  “I did not call any goddam bug monster thing to kick my ass. I wouldn’t even know how.”

  “You must have his mark on your body. Near your heart,” said the woman. She ran both sides of her sword across the demon’s body, cleaning the blood from the blade. Planting the tip of the sword on the ground, she gave it a hard shake. The sword blurred and when she stopped shaking, it had transformed into the white cane she’d had earlier.

  “Damn.” Spyder opened his shirt and looked at his chest. “I have a lot of ink on me. Geometrics. Tribal work. Religious geegaws.”

  “Any runes or symbols?”

  “A shitload.”

  “And do you know the meanings of all those runes?”

  “’Course. Some. In a Trivial Pursuit kind of way. They’re just designs.”

  “So says the man covered in demon blood.” The woman moved closer to Spyder. “Did it ever occur to you that those symbols have meaning and power?”

  “Where? How? I’ve done a thousand tattoos like that on people.”

  “Some of them are probably going to have a dream date like the one you just had.” She laid her hand over his heart. “You don’t believe in demons, but you believe in magnetism, right? These symbols you put on your body, like the Bitru’s sigil, these are a kind of magnetism. You don’t have to understand how they work. The demons do.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Take it off. Change it. All the signs and symbols that you don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Spyder.

  The woman took her hand from his chest. “Most people just call me Shrike.”

  “Thank you, Shrike.”

  She ran a hand lightly over Spyder’s cheeks and jaw. “Good thing you’re pretty. You’re not the quickest little pony on the track, are you?”

  “You underestimate me,” said Spyder. “This was all my clever plan to meet you. I think it went pretty well.”

  “Take care of yourself,” Shrike said, moving back toward the mouth of the alley.

  “My name is Spyder,” he called to her.

  “Take care of yourself, Spyder.” She waved without turning around.

  “Wait. Do you have a phone number or email or something? I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “But I’m madly in love with you and stuff.”

  She turned gracefully and continued walking backwards, never breaking stride. “Not the quickest pony at all.”

  She was gone. Spyder started after her
, but when he tried to take a step, his legs shook so much that he fell against the alley wall. A few minutes later, Lulu came outside looking for him and helped him back into the Bardo Lounge. Spyder noticed that Lulu didn’t seem to see the large dead demon lying nearby in the alley. Together, Spyder and Lulu got very, very drunk.

  FOUR

  TRAFFIC JAM

  It was light out when Spyder woke up, but his eyes refused to focus, so he couldn’t read the time on the Badtz-Maru clock radio near the bed.

  His head felt as if someone had scooped out his brains and filled his skull with broken glass and thumbtacks. When he tried to sit up, every part of his body ached. He rose slowly to his feet and walked stiffly to the bathroom. Spyder’s shoulder throbbed and when he switched on the bathroom light he saw why.

  There was a long gash running across his shoulder and down his chest. He had a black eye, a swollen lip and his arms and ribs were spotted in livid purple bruises. Spyder remembered the scene in the alley. It wasn’t a dream. He had been mugged.

  Blood from the gash had dried on his skin, gluing part of his white wife-beater to his chest. Spyder stood under the hot shower until the blood softened and the water soothed his knotted muscles.

  When he stepped out of the shower, he left the wet shirt draped across the towel rack beneath the framed Lady from Shanghai poster that Jenny hated. The gash on his shoulder burned and his headache was coming on strong behind his eyes. Spyder slapped on some gauze squares and taped them down with white medical tape.

  Christ, he thought, I was supposed to call Jenny last night and tell her I was going to be late. She must be pissed. Then it hit him, as it had hit him almost every morning for weeks: Jenny was gone. She’d packed up and moved the last of her stuff to LA. That’s why he’d gotten so drunk with Lulu. It was the one-month anniversary of her desertion.

  No fucking way I can put ink on anyone today, he thought. It was already after one in the afternoon. Spyder didn’t want to go to the studio, but he needed to call his clients and reschedule. He dressed quickly into battered black jeans, steel-toed Docs and the largest, loosest gray Dickies shirt he could find in his closet. A pile of Jenny’s abandoned textbooks were stacked at the back, The Gnostic Gospels, Heaven and Hell in the Western Tradition, An Encyclopedia of Fallen Angels. Spyder slammed the closet door.

  The warehouse Spyder rented was across town from the tattoo studio. He usually rode the Dead Man’s Ducati—the bike he’d bought cheap from a meth dealer he knew down in Tijuana; the previous owner had gone missing and did Spyder want first dibs?—but he felt too shaky for two wheels today. He called a cab and waited by the curb in the warm afternoon sun.

  “Do you have the time?”

  Spyder was so out of it, he hadn’t seen the tall man in the gray business suit approach him. The man was bald, but tanned and healthy-looking, with deep wind and sunburn creases on his cheeks. It took Spyder a second to answer.

  “Uh, no. Sorry.”

  “No worries,” the man said with a slight shrimp-on-the-barbie accent. “Lovely day.”

  “Yeah. Great,” said Spyder

  “You all right, mate?”

  “Just a little hungover’s all.”

  The businessman laughed. “That’s how you know you had a good time,” he said, and clapped Spyder on his sore shoulder. “Cheers.”

  As the man walked away, Spyder saw something attached to his back. It was sort of apelike, but its head was soft, like a slug’s. It had its teeth sunk into the man’s neck and was clinging onto his back by its twisted childlike limbs. Spyder wanted to call out to the man, but his throat was locked tight in fear and disgust. The parasite’s head throbbed as it slurped something from the businessman’s spine.

  Spyder took a step back and his shoulder touched a rough wooden pole planted in the ground through a section of shattered pavement. Pigeons and gray doves were nailed up and down the pole. Animal heads were staked around the top. An alligator. A Rottweiler. A horse. Other more freakish animals Spyder couldn’t identify. Each head was decorated with flower garlands and its eye sockets and mouth stuffed with incense and gold coins, like offerings.

  Across the street, a griffin, its leathery wings twitching, was lazily chewing on the carcass of a fat, gray sewer rat. Emerald spiders the size of a child’s hand ran around the griffin’s legs, grabbing stray scraps of meat that fell from the beast’s jaws. The spiders scrambled up and down the griffin’s hindquarters. Gray stingray-like things flapped overhead, like a flock of knurled vultures. A coral snake lazily wrapping itself around the sacrifice pole stopped its climb long enough to call Spyder by name.

  Spyder’s head spun. He stepped into the street, flashing on the demon in the alley the night before. The mugging had been real. Had the monster part been real, too? He leaned his head back. Spinning in the sky overhead were angels with the wings of eagles. Higher still crawled vast airships. Their soft balloon bodies glowed in the bright sun, presenting Spyder with profiles of fierce mythological birds of prey and gigantic lotuses.

  A cab turned the corner onto Harrison Street and Spyder frantically flagged it down. “Haight and Masonic,” he said to the driver, trying not to sound as deranged as he felt. Spyder slid into the backseat and as the driver pulled away, he peered out the cab’s rear window. The businessman was on the corner, talking to three pale men in matching black suits. Their clothes and general formality reminded Spyder of bankers in an old movie.

  One of the bankers stepped forward, reached into the businessman’s chest and pulled out his heart. Turning stiffly, he dropped the organ into an attaché case held up by another of the trio. That done, the third banker used a knife to carefully peel the businessman’s face off. The cab turned the corner and Spyder lost sight of them.

  FIVE

  COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

  “How you voting on Prop 18?”

  Spyder looked up. The cabbie looked exhausted, Spyder thought. One of those guys in his forties with eyes that make him look ten years older. His skin hung loosely on a gray, unshaven face.

  “The companies make it sound like it’ll put more cabs on the street, but really it’s just going to screw up the medallion system even worse and give all the power to the big cab companies. We aren’t employees, you know. All us cabbies are freelance. I owe money the moment I take my cab out. The moment I touch it. A cab driver has the job security of a crack whore. Worse than slaves, even. We’re up at the big house begging the master for more cotton to pick.”

  “I’m sorry, said Spyder. “I don’t know anything about Prop 18. I don’t vote…ever.”

  The driver shook his head. His black hair stuck out at odd angles, as if he’d been sleeping on it just a few minutes earlier. “Voting’s not a right, you know. It’s not a privilege. It’s your duty. My daddy died in the war so you could vote.”

  “Hey driver, uh,” Spyder looked at the name on the man’s taxi license, “Barry. Do you want to play a game?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There’s a $20 tip in it for you. “

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Fag?”

  “No.”

  “You from the cab company?”

  “No, Barry.”

  “What kind of game?”

  “Don’t rush getting me to the Haight,” Spyder said. He leaned his head against the window. It was cool on his forehead. “Take your time. Let the meter run. As we hit each corner, you’re going to tell me what you see.

  “What’s on the corners you mean? Like buildings and people?”

  “Exactly. Big or small. Whatever strikes your fancy.”

  “Give me a for instance,” said Barry. “Like this corner.”

  “Okay,” said Spyder leaning forward to peer out the windshield. “That semi up ahead. The blonde eating a taco in front of a bodega. The mailbox painted like a Mexican flag. That blimp shaped like Garuda.”

  “What’s a Garuda?”

  “A bird-beaked
messenger deity from Thailand.”

  “I don’t see nothing like that.”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Barry breathed deeply and craned his head on the end of his long, doughy neck. “Some bums with shopping carts. Some hookers. Mexican or Asian, maybe. Can’t tell from here. They got on high heels and the littlest goddam skirts. You can see all the way to Bangkok when they bend over.”

  “Keep going,” said Spyder.

  “Just stuff?”

  “Just stuff.”

  “A Goodwill. A closed down porn theater. Cholos drinking forty-ouncers by a low-rider. A cop car stopping near ’em…” Barry fell into a singsong pattern, reciting as they drove. “A mom with her kid in a stroller. A couple a dogs fucking. Get some, boy! Some dope dealers. Bunch of teenyboppers cutting school. Little shits. Don’t learn to read and we end up paying their welfare so they can have babies.” Barry glanced into the rearview mirror at Spyder. “This is kind of a stupid game, buddy. When is it your turn?”

  “My turn?” Spyder lit a cigarette, his first of the morning. “Everything you saw, I saw. But there were other things, too.

  “Dazzle me.”

  “A winged horse. A lion turning into a golden bird, then into smoke. An angel sharing a cigarette with a horned girl whose skin’s blue and hard, like topaz.”

  “Jesus fuck, man,” said Barry. Spyder saw the driver’s eyes widen in the mirror. “Are you on drugs or do you need drugs?”

  “There’s a naked, burned man walking down the street. No, not burned. Cooked. Glazed and cooked like a ham. There’s a swarm of little sort of bat things flying around him taking bites. He doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “I’m letting you out at the corner, guy.”

  “Keep going or you don’t get your tip.”

  Barry shook his head. “Keep it. Getting stabbed by some psycho fuck isn’t worth twenty dollars.”

  “Do I seem like a psycho to you, Barry?” asked Spyder.

  “I dunno. Sure talk like one.”

  “I understand. This is weird for me, too.”