Bitter confessions across a table filled with liquid brain-death.
"Priests these days." A disgusted grunt. "No moral fiber whatsoever."
"Yeah?"
"Fuck, yeah. Hijos de putas, all of 'em. One little push-" A suggestive gesture with long-nailed fingers, a sorrow so intense it could be fury simmering in red eyes, "-'n off they pop."
"Shame."
"Yeah." A thoughtful swig. "You'd think they'd last longer, y'know. 'Snot all my fault, halfa them're so fucked up to begin with. Fucking issues."
"Mm."
"'S better to stick to just…people. You know." A scowl. "You know that, that axe-murderer, that Sanchez kid?"
"'Yeah?" Spirals traced through condensation, short-lasting links from one spilled puddle to the next with a pale pink fingertip, nails bitten bloody.
"He was going to be a musician. Nice kid." A low, savagely sorrowful moan and the clink of glass against glass against sharp teeth. "Could play a guitar like nobody's business."
"Shit happens." Flat teeth catch against a faint sliver of another nail, pull, release –tongue nervously dancing over a faint red-on-white stain- close over another shot instead. "Found another ghost in my basement."
"Fuck. Anyone we knew?"
"Thomas Dinkins. Died in that fire,'member? We were eleven... Had to buy a new fan to get the place cleared out."
"Mmm. Burned ghosts'sre the worst. Smell up the place…"
"Yeah..."
"Dinkins…Dinkins." Syllables mouthed thoughtfully with a hint of a strange inflection through an exotic accent, name wandering through a fogged up mind not fogged enough for the name to loose its way. A wince and a hasty pull off a nearly-full bottle. "Fuck. Skuzzy Dinkins. The dad."
"Mmm?"
"Got 'im gooooood." Syllables drawn out not in triumph but simmering self-loathing. "Bullet to 's'head. 'Fter twelve other people. Bastard was a fucking masterpiece."
"Good job." Not a congratulations but a rote response with all the sympathetic gravity of an oft-repeated private joke.
"A-plus." The answer. A nod between them both, red and gray eyes sliding away to the dim corners of the room.
"The Lorrins girl. On the news last week."
"That was a nasty one. Mutilation?"
A sad sigh of terrible regret. "Raped her halfway to kingdom come. Yeah. Guy that did it." A bracing gulp of something gleaming dark and red. "He coulda been the next Ghandi, I think he coulda."
A small murmur of commiseration. "Tough shit. That big?"
A nod. "Jesus-material. You just don't get them like that these days."
"Tough shit…"
"Yeah." Again the unsteady hopscotch of glasses and bottles, four hands and seventeen fingers between them and a miniature graveyard of distorted sand.
"Got abducted again last Tuesday."
"That makes what, seven times this month?"
A thoughtful frown, lips moving slightly with mental math. "No. Six."
"Huh. What'd they want this time?"
A twisted contortion of a grin. "Autographs."
A low whistle, a mockery of admiration. Glass emptied, filled, emptied again.
"Three politicians and the Emperor of Uganda. Yesterday. Getting too easy, I should go after…mmf. Doctors or shit-"
"Uganda has an Emperor?"
"They don't anymore, that's for da- for sure."
"Shmee told me to kill the gardener the other day."
"Yeah? He always says'at."
"This time he was right." A twisted smile. "Guy was hired to bring my head back to some cult…"
"Cult?"
"You know, blood of the high wazoo to summon the demons of wherever. Smiting." A bottle cap rolled thoughtfully across the bridge of a nose. "End of the world and all."
"You kill him?" Mismatched eyebrows perk up over mismatched eyes.
A snort. The bottle cap breaks through the skin briefly and is tossed away with a wince. "Ow. Shoulda, for all the headache Shmee gave me afterwards. Nah. Maced him, drew mystic sigils and shit over his face. Left him tied up by the highway. Permanent marker…guy thinks he'll turn into a mongoose if he doesn't redeem himself."
A wicked, sizzling chuckle. "How's he do that?"
A reluctant smile. "Dunno."
The small flare of amusement gutters, goes out. "Now I just have to carry half a pint of holy water and a stupid dried frog with me everywhere. They keep trying to trick me into agreeing to let the stupid frog go. Guess they can whack my head off no problem if I'm not carrying it."
"Pffff. Least cultists're gullible. Shmee getting jealous?"
"Mmh. Nah. He's not into that sort of thing…" Long scarred fingers –not exactly ten of them- uncurl, reach up to touch a small glass bottle on a knotted thong slung over thin shoulders. Rub the cracked surface, as if searching for the wisp of old stuffing through the glass. Stubs of nails scrabble faintly, compulsively, then drop, leaving a faint red smear caught in the white cracks.
A moody sigh. Thick snaggle-nailed fingers trace a connection between puddles that thins and breaks as dissimilar irises stare through the table. "Cultists. Feh."
Thin black eyebrows raise in sympathy. "New recruits?"
The thick fingers clench, flatten out against the table. Grope for an unemptied bottle. "Don' even have to recruit. Fucking vicious sheep, all'a 'em. Lined up for the place so fucking deep we hadta stop renting out spares to Upstairs just to deal with'a paperwork." Savage clink of glass against teeth, a sloppy gulp. Shudder, hands wrapping around the bony protrusions pushing through a thatch of snaggling dreadlocks. "'S a nightmare. Fucking fads."
A nod. "Fucking fads. Other day I was trying to talk with my illustrator, you know, that cranky DeLynn woman? Always get her for m' stuff." A grimace, and the label of the bottle in the long pale hands is examined more closely. "My stuff. 'Nyway. Publishing house bastard, some dick in a three-piece suit marches in and tells us both… "
"Yeah?"
"Tells us that orange is the new puce, we'd have to have the whole series repainted by this new hotshot shit outta arrrrt skoooool," -the words laced with contempt. "Devi's stuff's always been fucking great and now they try to fire her out from under me."
"Beur- Byer- Fuck. That's the suits for ya." Long nails draw fine etching lines of liquid that sink back to the main mass with frustrating quickness. A moody sigh and another bottle opened. "Won't change anything that could help but some stupid new idea that's gonna cost you yearsa yer life an'…pfff." The sound effect is accompanied by a flapping gesture, and an undignified scramble to catch hold of the table's scarred edge as the chair's occupant overbalances.
"Hell has bureaucracy?"
A snort. "You can p'rnounce that this skunked?"
"I'm a writer, I don't get skunked." This statement is delivered with grave dignity, and is met with a wicked snigger.
"So what do writers get?"
"Ineeeeebriated."
Another snigger, more like a crow's hoarse bark than anything human. "Insufferable little pendijo." The sharp grin fades with the affectionate insult, twists into its previous bitter sneer. "Yeah, Hell's got suits. Too fuckin' many'ff 'em. You shoul' see what happens when you try to explain that one computer equals three hun'red filing cabinets. Lucifer didn't get 'smuch disapproval."
"Mmm. Computers?"
"Yeah. Mi dear ol' padre never did care much about paperwork so there's…ugh, saying fifty times too much is'n understatement. Departments'r a fucking joke, they just sort of cram things in anywhere they'll fit- "
"Well…"
A hopeful glance up. "Got an idea?"
"It's hell, right…?"
"Yeeeeaaahh?"
"Can't you just…burn it all?"
A whoop of black laughter. "Burn the paperwork? Burn the paperwork? Make the Morningstar's shit look like a fucking party!" Half a bottle is drained with a bleakly obscene violence. The rest is swung into a gesture, as the thick fingers use it to jab thin ribs. "Never mess with the suits, amigo. They can make Damnation look cushy."
"Ah…" Twin sighs and the atmosphere of gloomy despair washes back in a gray tide.
"Got another publication." A bottle is lifted, held to the light. The shaken contents studied dispassionately.
"Hnn. That makes what, twenty? Twenny three?"
"Thirty five." Resignation. The bottle's level is lowered, held back up. "Can't sleep anymore without all this… shit. Fucking eatin' me alive, all this, and people still want more, more, more, more-" Rough voice breaks, chewed-up scarred fingers dash a hint of a sparkle out of gray eyes. Long black bangs fall forward again in a greasy, ill-kempt curtain. "-can't stop writing, can't stop it all pouring out or I'll drown, wore my fingerprints off years ago…"
"Thirty five." A glass is brandished. "To success, amigo!"
"To success." It's an angry, bitter, familiar toast and they laugh for a moment at the strange comfort derived from such shared misery.
Thick fingers crush the glass between them, twist sinuously and rain silver dust onto the floor. Thin fingers set their glass down clumsily but carefully. "Some successes we are."
"Halleluja." The syllables twisting like glass shards into something rough and thorny with pain and lewd implications.
"Amen." A wry mockery of piety, long fingers come up and clasp together, brush against the bottle with its stained wisp of stuffing. Spasm briefly and pull the cord off thin shoulders, over overlarge ears and dark greasy hair and a wan exhaustion-stained pale face. Replaced.
Thick fingerpads run lightly over long nails, over singed-brown skin and rough knobs of horns, tangling briefly with rough, snakey ropes of long-unkempt hair. They make no mention of their own pendant, the heavy battered copper padlock that dangles –pointedly unnoticed- from wider shoulders. A hesitation and another pass over a horned skull and they return –smoking faintly- to the thicket of glasses before them.
An old ritual, a twisted mass, flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood and for a moment, for another few hours for another night despair's crushing cold is warmed a little by a frail, ragged wick of mortality and a spark of Sin himself across a table full of liquid brain-death.
Absolution.