Terminal Two: Sixth Episode - What The Deuce?

What am I looking for? Well, the story goes like this:

Once upon a time I was a guy who knew who he was. Then one day I wasn't. And that's the long and short of it.

Fucked of the matter is, in Maranaloka Solicitors are about as popular as false teeth in a wedding cake, so it'd be less than astonishing if someone wanted me dead. However, seems their need for vengeance ran considerably deeper than a mere exploded cranium and bystanders all going ewwww. Evidently one of my multitudinous foes (or more likely some goon acting on their behalf and bristling with pain-augmentation) tracked me down and went for a full-on possession attempt. Please note this account is a smashed relic repaired with the tricky glue of half-memories and circumstantial evidence ' all I recall of the showdown is coming round on hands and knees bleeding from the eye sockets and hollering something about a bastard. But I can feel the half-thing wriggling rat-scatty in the back of my skull cavity ' the damn critter hasn't even got the common courtesy to stay subliminal and only crop up in my dreams, chewing secret neuroses like they were spitwads. It speaks to me, doggerel verse about the sexual misadventures of cabin boys mainly, chucks chunks of info into quarantine where I can't get at them, skews my vision and a whole host of other vicious tricky mindfuck shenanigans I probably don't even know about.

Penniless and with my identity a scorched husk I managed to drag myself to a backstreet neurosurgeon-cum-abortionist-cum-orthodontist-cum-cartographer located ' somewhat confusingly ' not in a backstreet but in the city's main shopping esplanade, Rococo Walk, his window plastered with six-by-ten glossy photographs of floridly illustrated sea charts, gapless grins, pickled foetuses and boiled-egg heads with the tops sliced off, brains all fat and shiny like a bucket of jelly worms. Unlicensed medical practitioners rarely get busted for the simple reason that their negligence kills off more neurocrooks and fritzing datamules per week than the Peace manage in a year. It gets so bad that some of the most infamous braindocs are rumoured to be agents planted by the City. Hogwash, says I ' subtlety ain't the Governor's strong suit. Besides, transphase neurosurgery's an intricate business ' without the requisite training and apparatus you might as well be digging around in there with a rusty spoon.

I lay back in the clammy grip of a converted barber's chair while Dr Mooch Crampon had a poke around, muttering in the choked glottal tongue of Maranaloka's criminal underworld. With a pair of ice tongs he twanged out a fused brass cube that stank of burnt hair. I later found out it was a kind of crude mental circuit breaker, designed to go off should anyone try hijacking my mind. Clearly the psychic attack had been of such amplitude that the whole caboodle had blown ' over hot chocolate and electro-chequers a syrup-faced expert assured me between strokes of his greasy purple moustache that whoever had attempted the possession would now be blank as a fresh cassette, their brain quite, quite wiped of any persona it might have stored. Problem was, it seemed that whoever was behind the dirty deed hadn't been completely foiled ' some part of them lived on inside my loaf's brittle casing, making mischief and ardent for release.

Why possess instead of kill? I can only grope blindly but there's no shortage of especially spiteful motives spring to mind. Slam a mark's face under the lid of a grand piano and you just send them scudding from this plain of existence to the next ' an inconvenience maybe, but no biggie. Possess them, however, and you've got them by the soul ' their vast and tender Underspace goolies, if you will. Contracts signed under possession are no less binding ' the poor afflicted victim might wake up to find he's been gifted thirty kilos of prime salami in exchange for spending the next twenty millennia as some Outer Planes daemon's sentient arse-brush. And that, of course, is if he's lucky. The possibilities are abundant, the potential depth of cruelty fathomless. Someone must've really, really hated me. And I'd escaped, albeit temporarily.

Upshot was, I got a lead. After months of pinballing round bars, getting drunk, meeting Teeb, racing platypuses through lethal and elaborate amphibious courses and once hurling a joss stick so hard it pinned a hen to a waiter's thigh I won an audience with a Kismet-Shaman called W, blubbery guy with a single big eye that some go-go dancer chick had to constantly squirt with water from a soda spritzer. I paid through the nose and he told me in the standard vague mystical slang that I'd find a guy locked up in the Maranaloka Phase Vault who could give me all the answers. There was some bullshit caveat tacked onto the end but I was already out the door ' predictions and portents are dime-a-dozen in this city, but something in what he said chimed just right like a crystal glass struck with an index finger. I'd heard tell of the Phase Vault before ' and when W named it, I felt the half-thing inside my head writhe, like it was being electrocuted. It didn't want me to go. I knew I had to.

* * *

If you think the city's bad, just imagine the stuff it craps out.

Once we'd popped loose of the Jackpots' HexNet and a suitable gap in our retching occurred, me and Two Blade stopped while I summoned some lowly daemonic mook and demanded a whole host of stuff that he, bound by the strictures of law-loving damnation, had to provide, grousing and gnashing his fangs like a cantankerous kitten. We got respirators several generations newer than the Twins' defunct affectations, proper boots, safety flashlights that wouldn't catch a gas pocket and roast us like poultry, then I said what the hell, how about piping in some jazz, and the piqued blighter had to comply.

So it was that we waded knee-deep through swampy steaming desolation to the strains of a swinging five piece, double-bass thumping out such crazy runs I swear I would have danced if it weren't for the incredible suction slurping at my boots each time I took a step. In the sewers' yellow-green light, I was almost happy.

Two Blade was beguiled by detrivores, calling them 'little gods' and praising their 'natural rhythm'. He gawped at a million species of stinkbug as they charged like locomotives across the ceiling and walls, snapping their bullwhip antennae and scimitar mandibles. Strange golden serpentine things squidged from cracks in the brickwork then wriggled and inched down to the scum-cuffed sewage-line, where they snorted up bellyfuls of grey-brown liquid crap through greedy dilated nostrils. Every so often, a bobbing turd hinged at the centre to reveal a fuchsia maw knifey with incisors; a bootlace-thin tongue would shoot out, throttle a bright slurry-snake then snatch it from the wall to crunch and splurt in the canny predator's camouflaged gob. Swarms of psyche-psyche flies reacted to our torch beams by bunching together in black glistening facsimiles of our most heart-rending traumas; for T-Blade, it was his mother, thick arms folded in mute disapproval of what he would later tell me was his teenaged attempt to resuscitate grandma by bestowing 'the precious blessing of his loins' upon the urn containing her ashes; for me, it was simply blank faces, black swirls, blinks of lucid madness. We were far too stupid to take fright. The flies cottoned on, returned to their crap-feast.

Occasionally we encountered a T-junction, even a crossroads, with all routes but one blocked by sluice gates of riveted iron. 'As good as their word,' I declared when we reached the first, imagining frothing gallons of sewage heaped up on the opposite side, drowned City Peace adrift in its murk like cocktail olives. The Jackpots were steering us to the Palladium.

Stomping through the gunk of an ancient and narrow tunnel, I lost myself to the bliss-kissed treble of the high-hat, trumpet smooching each of my vertebrae in turn like I was creation's only son and this was its way of saying happy birthday, kiddo. We were doing it, we were closing in, Two Blade had Prenderghast's code-arm tucked inside his jacket and pretty soon we'd be at the Phase Vault, where everything 'd come up roses. Even if it turned out that W was misguided as a steak and laxative pasty, Brahmini Jones looked like a solid Plan B, providing I could furnish him with a certain box, doubtless host to unimaginable powers he'd declined to mention yada yada yada. Maybe I'd just auction it off to the highest bidder, or even keep it for myself. I was six steps ahead of the pack of 'em.

'Chief?' Voice strained through his respirator grille, Two Blade's sounded like a drive-thru speaker.

I walked on eyes closed, snapping my fingers and muttering crazy scat licks under my breath. Sure, I was dimly aware of the strong current tugging at the backs of my calves, urging me onwards in stinky oozing shoves.

'Chief!'

This time Two Blade caught hold of my collar and yanked. My windpipe snapped shut, cutting off my inspired vocal stylings mid-skeebopadoobay. I opened my eyes and found myself teetering over an abyss.

All around me sewage sloughed off a precipice and became a heavy ochre cascade, plummeting like putrescent porridge some three, maybe four, hundred metres into a colossal spiralling vortex of cyan, fluorescent green, magenta ' a voidgate, the biggest I'd ever seen. Chucking up sheets of mist, the etheric whirlpool spun like a slick vase on a potter's wheel; its hollow eye was the sour maroon of a pig's heart. It churned at the base of a vast rectangular chamber that was all oversized mudbricks and atavistic temple chic. The walls were lined with gargoyles the size of buses, underlit with the voidgate's aqueous glow, their sculpted maws locked wide in screams as they vomited gallons upon gallons upon giddy gallons of viscous flyblown slurry. Torrents of shitpiss runoff from all over the city surged down tunnels and poured out here, thundering into a hungry twisting rift, hissing as it bridged dimensions and vanished.

Two Blade dragged me back against the excrement tide till I could grab hold of a bent rebar jutting from the masonry just inside the tunnel.

'Man alive, Chief!' he gasped, eyes bulgy as he tugged his respirator from his gob. 'Did you miss the memo? Only turds and tampons go with the flow!'

As I regained my balance a thousand puns flickered and died before my eyes. 'I've got no stomach-'

'What?! Zeus on the loose, Chief! When did that happen?'

I doubled over with one big-ass sigh. 'Ah Teeb. Are you familiar with the work of Remington Zeigler, Maranaloka's late great Poet Laureate?'

Two Blade rubbed his chin. 'If by familiar you mean unfamiliar¦'

'O sweet patience! 'Tis a virtue!
So cram it, silage-breath ' don't make me hurt you.
That's Couplet 53 from "Blench And Spit Cracker Shards ' started life as a letter to his publisher, apparently.'

'To be honest, Chief,
I never really got past
haikus, poem-wise.'

'That's dandy,' I said. 'Screw the verse. What I was trying to say-'

'Before you were so rudely interrupted.'

My eyebrows rose like a crow's wings. 'What I was trying to say was, I've got no stomach for toilet humour.' Two Blade stared at me, pebble-blank. 'Forget it. The moment's passed.'

'They've got a nasty habit of doing that,' said Teeb, nodding like a toy dog. 'Isn't that the door to the Phase Vault?'

I turned and bishop in a bag, the kid was right.

Steeple-still above the gnarling tumult stood a lone steel-panelled door, suspended by nothing. It had a black ten-digit keypad in place of a handle. My heart ballooned. In amongst all the seething faecal rivers it was like God Himself had squatted down and dropped the perfect celestial deuce right there in the middle of the chamber.

Two Blade wiped his watering eyes, squinted. 'But how do we get to it?'

'Hey,' I flexed my fingers in anticipation of some classy mid-range intraphase prestidigitation, 'any Solicitor can't handle a little levitation ought to be disbarred, then peeled and dunked in lemon juice ' am I wrong?'

'No HexNet?'

'Not this close to a voidgate. Too much interference. Besides ' it's a capital hiding place. This is the nexus of all the city's waste. What kind of warped imbeciles would come here by choice?'

'I can feel my knees trembling with anticipation.'

I pulled an awful grin. 'Me too, Teeb. Me too.'

Two Blade glanced down at his legs. 'Still going.' His expression melted to one of waxy concern.

'I've got the shakes all over.' Tremors thrummed through the rust-caked rebar into my damp fist. A hunch stuck its tongue in my ear. 'Teeb ' some timeless advice, now more apposite than ever.'

'What?'

'Shut your mouth.'

Behind us the tunnel boomed as a slurry-flood pummelled the wall then surged forward, beardy with foam and roaring like five hundred dogs bearing down on a hunk of beef. I made a couple of desperate sweeps, fudged a quick etheric barrier but it was like raising an umbrella against the stamping heel of a T-Rex. Stinkwater and streaks of green effluvia split round the invisible shield, and for a few moments we were dry in a bubble's weird curve shaped with fast liquid tongues, then my nerve broke and a wet blast knocked my lungs empty, a hug of putrid liquid and me and Two Blade swept out the leering gargoyle's mouth, a freefall, the voidgate's hypnotic core, and somebody calling my name.