The House of Nameless Read online

  Raoul found an empty shoe-box somewhere under all the junk, and jammed the hat into it. He wrapped it up with an entire roll of sticky tape and tied an extension cord around the whole mess. It went deep into his pocket.

  ‘Why did you come for me? I thought you’d arranged to hide me on the boat for exactly one century. What’s going on, Raoul?’

  ‘I need you, Imogen. Not for that,’ he snorted as she rolled her eyes. ‘I need your help with something.’

  He pulled the rumpled year-book page out of his pocket, flattened it out in front of her. He pointed at the class photo.

  ‘One of these people invaded my home. Found where it was for starters, and got past everything I’ve thought of to keep people out. No doubting in my mind, he knows the old ways.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Imogen stared at the photo. With free will restored she’d already changed her hair from ratty to natty, and her outfit flickered between a slinky dress and a power-suit.

  ‘You have to try harder,’ Raoul said, and gently licking her forehead he passed over the thread of thought that he took from Nameless. ‘You were one of the last ones to leave the One-Way-World. Can you feel anything in this photo?’

  ‘Quick, gimme a pen,’ she said, finally settling for khaki pants, Docs and a Rolling Stones t-shirt. She drew a biro outline around one of the boys.

  ‘Oh. It’s just Nameless,’ she said.

  ‘As always, he thinks of nothing but himself, his past. What a waste of time.’

  #

  There was a letter in the mail-box, marked “RAOUL MITHRAS”. The envelope was marked “card only”, and Raoul sniffed it cautiously. Deciding it was safe he slit it open with a thumbnail.

  “SHH, IT’S A SPEAKEASY!” the card cried out loud, a cut-out in the shape of a wine barrel. A muted jazz riot could be heard blasting out of the card when he opened it. Imogen could see the reflections of a turning mirror ball on the minotaur’s face.

  ‘“You and a friend are invited to Madam Lune’s top secret party,”’ Raoul read. ‘“Don’t tell the law.”’

  ‘Fun!’ Imogen said.

  ‘I don’t know. Lune and I are having – problems.’

  ‘What have you done now?’ Imogen said, exasperated. Raoul scowled but didn’t answer.

  ‘I leave you alone for five minutes. Sheesh. Well, I’m going. I’ve been stuck on that boat for ages.’

  ‘This is a bad idea,’ Raoul rumbled, but he stepped into a zoot suit, with a trilby that sat nicely in between his horns. Imogen wolf-whistled.

  ‘You look snappy.’

  She dreamt up a flapper outfit, with her make-up caked on and a bob hair-cut to match her laddish physique. She had a cigarette holder and a fur stole.

  ‘Well aren’t we the cat’s pyjamas?’ she purred, and they leapt into the card.

  Lune was famous for her parties. The last one she threw was the Egyptian Extravaganza, and it went for two hundred years. The Cheerful Misogynist turned up and forced its passengers to build her a scale model of the Great Pyramid. By hand.

  This one was an amazing replica of a speakeasy, if the entire city of prohibition-era Chicago had been a boozy party held openly. It was an art deco nightmare, and Raoul shook his head at Lune’s twisted take on history. There was an army of federal agents splitting barrels of moonshine over the gutters, but only so that the guests could dip their cups into a ready supply of booze.

  ‘Let’s boogie,’ Raoul said, over the music of the nearest big band. They did the Lindy Hop, the Bunny Hug, the Charleston. For a man-bull hybrid, Raoul was light on his feet and Imogen floated around him like a butterfly.

  ‘Raoul! Darling!’ and Lune was there, draped all over the surprised minotaur. Even though she was Aphrodite and Gaia and everything else femme, Lune managed to look cheap. She had too many feather boas and a carafe of gin clenched in one hand, with one of her stockings unstuck and sagging around her ankle. She bumped Imogen aside, covering Raoul’s snout with sloppy kisses.

  ‘Lune, it’s good to see you,’ he lied, gently peeling her off. ‘You remember my ward, Imogen?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said, turning from Imogen’s death-stare. ‘So, who was your visitor?’

  ‘No-one. A friend,’ Raoul started, but Lune laughed, a short sharp bark. There was something of her Durga aspect in the sound and he knew he needed to tread carefully. For all their sakes.

  ‘Bullshit from the bullman. Here I thought you were a gentleman. No, I’ve had to invent a chevalier, all on my ownsome.’

  Lune stuck two fingers in her mouth and let rip with a world-shaking whistle, so loud that her costumed guests clutched their heads in pain. A man came trotting to her side, and for a moment Raoul tensed up, nostrils flaring. He could swear that the man had a blurry face, until he realised that the man has no face at all. In fact it was a mannequin given motion, with a judge’s wig sliding around on its head. She’d dressed it in robes befitting the judiciary, and Raoul understood the irony. The only guest likely enough to obey the prohibition should symbolise the “law”.

  ‘This is King James,’ Lune said. ‘Say hello.’

  ‘Open your hearts to us,’ the dummy said, in a rumbling baritone. Where its mouth should be, the moulded lips tried to move. ‘We have wronged no one; we have corrupted no one, we have cheated no one.’

  ‘Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians,’ Lune said, a drunk’s grin plastered across her face. ‘I made him and he always knows what to say.’

  ‘It’s madness is what it is,’ Imogen said. ‘Don’t tell me you fed a bloody Bible into that thing.’

  ‘Let us walk honestly,’ King James said, ‘as in the day – not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife or envying.’

  ‘Well, he’s got your measure,’ Raoul said. ‘Maybe you should have fed it some Henry Miller or something.’

  Everything shifted, and Raoul was knocked onto his side. A couple of the faux buildings toppled, and screaming and terror from those who shouldn’t fear anything.

  It was the blurry man. He’d busted into Lune’s party, taking gate-crashing to a new level. He was walking towards Raoul, then running, and with every step great cracks opened in Lune’s pocket-world. People were falling into the holes and Raoul knew that they would fall forever.

  ‘Foul little cow,’ the blur yelled, and they met with a crash, grappling and rolling through the wreckage. Raoul was strong even back in the One-Way-World, but this stranger matched him. A blurry hand gripped one horn, shaking his head back and forth till he feared his mighty neck would snap.

  Then the intruder gasped and froze up with pain, so Raoul picked him up, threw him as far as he could. It felt like he was hurling a mountain. The blurry man landed just shy of a nothing-hole, curled up and screaming. A bright silver arrow pierced his side.

  Lune wore her Diana aspect and stood as tall as a tree, her bow held steady. She was pulling back on the second arrow when the man made a run for it.

  ‘Where’s your bloody invite?’ she laughed, but her joviality was short-lived when the man slipped through the only door and took it with him.

  #

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Lune said, and Imogen mimicked her silently. Like everyone else they were crowded to the very edge of the pocket-world; everything in the middle being eaten up by the spreading doughnut-hole of nothing. Every minute or so another building collapsed, and the roads and sidewalks were being drawn in like strands of spaghetti.

  ‘Well, this is some party,’ Raoul said, and got grief from all directions. ‘What?’

  Lune was shifting in between Diana and Durga aspects, which had the minotaur quite nervous. She even had a bit of Bast going on, and her cat tail flicked angrily underneath her chiffon dress.

  ‘All I’m saying is that it’s always a bad idea to suspend free will.’ Raoul raised his hands, tempting fate.

  ‘It was for authenticity,’
Lune sulked. ‘I didn’t want people changing into robots and dragons when they got bored.’

  She was the only one who could change in any way, but all she could do was flick through her aspects, impotent and furious. Everyone else was stuck in their period clothing, and there was no reaching outside.

  Lune padded over to the edge of the abyss, to where the blurry man fell. There was a spot of blood there, and kneeling she dabbed at it with Bast’s cat tongue.

  ‘I know this one,’ she said. ‘Yon gate-crasher has the taint of YHWH upon him.’

  ‘Yahweh,’ Raoul said. He’d brought her up to speed with the events of late. ‘It makes sense I guess. He had the most to lose from the closing of the One-Way-World.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lune nodded sagely. ‘He was most bitter, where everyone else was eager.’

  The pocket-world gave a great shudder. There wasn’t much time left before the bottom fell out completely.

  ‘Raoul, the hat,’ Imogen said. ‘What about Luca’s hat?’

  He dug the box out of his pocket, squashed flat and wrapped tightly. It fluttered around in his hands, and he unwrapped in nervously.

  The hat made a leap for his head, and he snatched it out of the air. It twitched and shook with frustration, and Raoul was tempted to lob the thing into the nearest pit.

  ‘It’s a really, really bad idea to wear this hat,’ he said. ‘But if anything can break into this place, it’s The Cheerful Misogynist.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Imogen said. ‘I’ll do it. It’ll hurt you, Raoul.’ She made to take the peaked cap but he lifted his hands up so high that she couldn’t reach.

  ‘No bloody way, josé,’ he said, taking off his trilby. ‘You are not going back on that ship and that’s final. I’ll become the Captain.’

  ‘I believe I have a better suggestion, much as it pains me to dream it up,’ Lune said. ‘What about King James?’

  They all looked at the mannequin, puttering around in the rubble and soliloquising about meekness and inheriting the earth. Raoul jammed the hat onto James’ head.

  ‘Remember Sodom and Gomorrah,’ King James rumbled, and a moment later the prow of The Cheerful Misogynist breached the pocket-world.

  #

  ‘What crime is Nameless being punished for?’ Imogen asked. Raoul brought her in close, wary of the passengers and crew. The Cheerful Misogynist was tolerating them as a necessary evil, but only for now.

  ‘We’re not exactly sure,’ the bull-god said. ‘Nameless hasn’t done it yet, and all we know is it’s going to be big. Made sense to punish him straight away.’

  ‘But you made him a no-one. That’s a bit harsh.’ Imogen went as if to say more but sat down on the deck, spinning a badminton racquet in her hands. She’d shifted into a goth get-up, a nightmare of black and lace.

  Aurora Luca was onboard and very much alive, a mess of stitches, bruises and cuts. There was a loop of intestine hanging loose from a wound, and he picked and worried at it. Luca shied away from Raoul, only to continue moaning about “being replaced by a bloody bible-bashing robot.”

  Captain King James had been thoroughly infested by the ship. The captain’s hat had become a tricorne, and he paced the deck in finery that would make Napoleon jealous. He still had no features, but now sported a moulded plastic moustache.

  ‘Render unto Caesar,’ he said again, pointing at Raoul’s horns. The ship just wouldn’t give up, even if its only mouthpiece could do nothing but quote the Bible.

  ‘No deal,’ Raoul said. ‘You cheated me.’

  ‘But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear,’ the ship said through the new Captain, and Raoul remembered the damage he saw on boarding. His previous escape had left a puckering wound in the side of The Cheerful Misogynist that would take years to close.

  They’d convinced the boat to take them to the house of Nameless. There was no love lost between Yahweh and this, the most sinful of boats, and it had some score to settle that not even Captain King James would speak of.

  The ship grew a trio of great zeppelins, each a rubber moon fastened to the deck by cables thicker than a man. The landscape passed in a blur but the wait was agonising, Raoul deciding that the rumours of the ship possessing an FTL-drive were just that. Still, it was quicker than far-travel.

  ‘Mighty son of Minos, what brings you to this pervert’s boat?’ Lune purred from beside him. She’d sidled up to the prow where he gripped the railing, and gently entwined his arm. Raoul blinked and then she was holding air, he a few steps away. The best his magick could do while onboard.

  ‘Don’t, Lune. We’ve spoken on this.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’ve broken every heart but hers,’ Lune said, pointing at Imogen who was now playing quoits with a leather-bound gimp.

  ‘I’m not for mazes or any who build them,’ Raoul said. ‘Be my friend if you will, but you’ll not bind me.’

  For a long minute they looked at the yawning distance ahead of them. The Cheerful Misogynist was about to blast through lands which were a mad blend of downtown Chicago, the Katherine Gorge and parts of an arctic tundra.

  ‘How do you posit that YHWH and Nameless are in cahoots?’ Lune said.

  ‘Only Nameless kept the Old Ways in his head, hoarded every scrap of the One-Way-World he ever had. Yahweh could use that poor fool as a gateway, a focus.’

  ‘We expected war from the Lord of Hosts,’ Lune said. ‘I helped to guard the waypoints when we closed the One-Way-World, but while we marked his mob of hang-tailed bullies none of us saw him enter.’

  ‘So it’s to be Yahweh, again,’ Raoul said. ‘We crossed paths long ago, back when he took the Romans from me. From Mithras,’ he corrected.

  ‘I thought he was meant to be the jealous god,’ Lune laughed.

  ‘If I were Yahweh, I’d be heading to the house of Nameless. He thinks us trapped in the pocket-world, which gives him time to act.’

  ‘Yahweh won’t be able to bring it all forth,’ Lune said, but Raoul could smell her uncertainty, the bitter beginnings of a strong fear. ‘Without a name, he’s nothing to bind it to.’

  #

  They saw the house of Nameless, slumped across the cliffs like the broken man who lived there. Some time back they caught the far-travel wake of Yahweh, and through a sticky field-glass that King James offered Raoul he could spot the broken god entering the front door.

  ‘Curse your sluggard of a boat!’ Raoul said, snapping the glass closed. ‘Ram it! Bring the whole place down!’

  But there was enough vinegar left in the old god to keep the ship at bay. Try as it might, The Cheerful Misogynist was grounded, straining against Yahweh’s invisible hand.

  Raoul and the others were out, rappelling down ropes or gliding on dreamt-up wings. There were enough holes in Yahweh’s fence that they could slip through on foot.

  Imogen was back to khaki’s and a t-shirt, and for some reason had the remote control for Raoul’s entertainment centre in her hand. Lune was passive, reining her aspects in till she needed one of them. Captain King James hobbled along, a plastic fop with nothing but a bunch of scripture in his head.

  They were through the open front door, and the cat/s bombarded them, a hundred toms from the size of a kitten to tiger size. They snarled and hissed and scratched until Lune brought forth Bast in all her awful glory. The cat/s disappeared into whatever shadows they could, slipping from the anger of their lady.

  ‘Puss is an Egyptian word,’ Lune/Bast said. ‘They’ve never been allowed to forget me.’

  It would take hours to search the house, but Yahweh left a sour funk that Raoul could easily follow, a smell that spoke to his delicate nostrils of loss and lust, of spilled seed and dust.

  ‘The stairs of course,’ and they were up and running, Raoul running his horns along the banister when the house itself sought to delay them. Then they were up in the den, and Raoul saw Nameless kneeling on the ground, his box of momentos
tipped over and spread on the floor around him.

  ‘Be wary, Nameless,’ Raoul said. ‘Your old master walks in your halls.’

  Nameless looked up at the minotaur, and Raoul saw the ripple, the signs of a limitless being that has hidden in flesh for too long.

  ‘Mute him!’ he instructed Imogen, who thumbed the appropriate button on the remote control, but she was too slow. Yahweh spoke through the mouth of Nameless, and returned his name to him.

  The One-Way-World began to slowly erupt from his mouth, an obscene bubble of galaxies and sparkling nebula. Every muscle straining against that impossible weight, Raoul lifted Nameless, a floppy doll with eyes rolling, oblivious to the intrusion.

  ‘Call your boat,’ he told King James. ‘Do it!’

  He could see the plastic mouth moving, but the words coming out were like treacle, mere sounds against a greater darkness. Raoul was being drawn into the maelstrom, the One-Way-World that was growing by inches.

  He dimly noted that Lune brought out the feared Durga aspect, and the trendy flapper outfit peeled away to reveal a three-eyed ten-armed killer, bristling with weapons. She was hacking away at the walls and one hand was contorted into a little-known mudrā, negating the very house beneath them. She wanted to put a blade through Yahweh’s throat but Raoul kept her at horn’s length, circling him protectively with his enormous arms. Injuring Yahweh at this point could mean the undoing of all things. No second chances, not even a One-Way-World to fester in. Nothing but oblivion.

  ‘The boat,’ he cried through the treacle darkness, and when he saw Imogen it all made sense. Imogen had the remote held level, and was thumbing a button over and over. Raoul guessed it to be “pause” or “slow-tracking” or similar. Either way, Raoul hadn’t replaced the batteries for a thousand years, and they were only held in with duct-tape anyways. This wouldn’t work for long.

  Lune/Durga cancelled a wall of Nameless’s house into shivers of nothing, and slipping into her Diana skin she launched arrows at something in the distance. Each shot was an eternity as she nocked the arrow and drew it to her cheek, the same cheek that Raoul had kissed and nuzzled and made false promises to. She blinked as she was aiming, and set her tongue just so. Release, and the arrow slowly glided forward.