Summer, 2016
He'd had a fight with Monica.
A big fight. Usually, he couldn't remember the whats or whys of a fight. But he was sober for this one, so he remembered.
Three days into their vacation, after seeing all the campy touristy shit that she'd wanted to see, he'd wanted to check out the nightlife. Monica thought that might be fun, but they'd disagreed on what constituted "nightlife".
She didn't want to go anywhere that would be considered slumming. Monica never did like reminding herself where she came from. And, in general, Buddy didn't like thinking about where he'd come from either.
He didn't like the overpriced, gauche, nouveau places that Monica liked. And the dives that she'd found so charming when they'd started dating? Like the one he'd discovered her in a few years ago?
Best to just say she wasn't interested. So, he left her at the hotel, her screaming insults at his turned back, and him letting her do it.
Why not? The make-up sex would be epic. It always was.
London was Monica's idea, unsurprisingly. She thought it would be posh and cultured. Buddy knew better. Every port city on the planet was the same. A thin veneer of high society over a great mush of poverty and suffering.
So, after a bit of wandering and a few (probably poorly chosen) bus rides, he'd ended up in a part of London that contained a string of the worst kind of bars. He'd chosen the sickest, saddest one.
It was dim inside, all charred wood and tarnished brass. The walls were smoky brick, and the gloamy light came from five florid red glass pendant lamps. These lamps hung over the five round tables. The bar was in near darkness, and that's where Buddy sat, on a bar stool so old that the wood was satiny from all the jean-clad butts that had slid over it, shifted on it, and slipped away.
The mirror over the bar was not silvered in silver, but in brass. The reflections looked jaundiced, sickly.
Still, the place was clean. Remarkably clean. It smelled like smoke and soap and wood and booze. The music was not what he expected, either.
It was dark, atmospheric classical. Not bombastic, and not any piece that Buddy recognized. If you could render the blood of a murdered child-the prince and hope of an entire kingdom, whose death was perhaps the final curse of some forest witch-into piano and cello, that's what was playing from unseen speakers. It laid a deep, bleak miasma over an already dark place.
The barkeep (a tall, black-eyed albino in a stained leather apron) waited until Buddy had settled himself at the bar before asking what he'd have. The albino had a soft, currying voice-strangely alluring in pitch and cadence. Unexpected from a fellow that ugly.
Buddy asked for the strongest thing they served and got a shot of gutrot whiskey with a cartoon devil smiling on the label. He swallowed it, and the alcohol lit a fire all the way down. He asked the barkeep to leave the bottle.
The brand was "Old Scratch". Buddy had never heard of it, but he was a new fan.
Besides himself and the barkeep, there were three other people in this Penny Dreadful of a bar. One was a woman of about fifty, whose face was spackled with enough makeup that it cracked a bit when she smiled. She flirted with the barkeep, who seemed game enough for the attention, but never stopped polishing the tumbler in his hand.
A younger couple necked in the single booth in the place. Buddy watched them from the bar, glimmering and golden in the brassy mirror. The man was a businessman with a long, auburn ponytail. He wore an off-the-rack suit and smiled too much, showing off very even and very sharp-looking teeth. The woman was not a woman at all. She was a beautiful boy in a sequined dress. Buddy wondered if the businessman knew, but doubted that Mr. Cheap Suit would care as the boy slipped under the table. As the businessman leaned his head back and half-closed his eyes.
He watched the boy's blonde wig bob under the table. Since the dawn of time, it's been this way. Every city on Earth. Spiders and flies. Was the boy a spider, or a fly?
The barkeep was watching Buddy, now. With interest.
"You like to watch?" he asked, with the same gentle, coaxing voice he used to ask Buddy his order.
The bleary eyed spinster snored gently, leaving a smear of foundation on the black marble bar.
"Guess so," Buddy replied.
"Want to see more?"
Buddy decided to bite. "Alright, sure."
"Down yonder hall, past the Gents'," the barkeep said, pointing. "Just push the wall."
Buddy slid off the stool, really feeling the alcohol as he stumbled in the direction that the barkeep indicated. There was an arched alcove. A sign pointed left for "Gents" and right for "Ladies". Buddy put a hand on the wall as he walked past the heavy, dark oak door with the brass plaque that said "GENTS."
The wall at the end of the hall looked solid enough. Another red pendant lamp flared over his head as he looked at the bricks. The glass, vulvar petals cast bloody shadows across the wall, the door, and Buddy himself.
Fuck it, he thought, and gave the wall a shove.
It pivoted, opening to a landing. The flooring was dark, scorched wood and the walls a half-circle of smoked brick. In front of him, an archway beckoned. It was flanked on both sides by red roses, blooming on the bricks and glowing incandescent.
He could hear it now, muffled. The crunching grind of music. And the smell was still smoke and soap, but beneath that, sex. Musk and rutting. Hot, wet pleasure and, very faintly, a whiff of coppery blood.
Stairs slunk down from archway in front of him. A spiral, it looked to be. Buddy could see light, crimson, the light of a darkroom, rising up in the dark of the staircase.
When he stepped forward, committing himself completely to whatever folly awaited him at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the door spun the rest of the way and shut behind him.
Sensors, Buddy guessed.
He placed an unsure hand on the brass railing and followed the stairs down and down. There were lights, red glass roses blooming at regular intervals between the bricks. The lights flared and swam past his vision, and Buddy began to wonder if there was more to the Old Scratch than whisky.
His boots scuffing the bottom landing sounded loud in his ears. The doors waited in front of him, heavy wooden doors banded in heavy brass, double doors in a carved archway. The doors had no knobs, just a ring on each, waiting in the mouth of a leonine, twisted-flesh gargoyle.
Buddy ran his hand over the carvings that surrounded the door, pausing at a particularly well-rendered breast, and swirling his thumb there. Demons frolicked with mortals, and angels looked on with serene concern. Had Hieronymus Bosch done an illuminated Bible, this might be the result. At his feet, on the left, a snake wrapped around Adam and Eve, who kissed in the snake's scaly embrace. He followed the carving up, where winged demons stole mortals away-fucking them or ripping into them with teeth and claws.
Up and up, many depictions of human misery and inhuman pleasure. Eventually, a carved plaque warned him to abandon hope, all ye who enter.
The music changed to a track that Buddy half-recognized, from his workout mix from his executive days, and his hands went to the brass rings that waited in the mouths of gargoyles.
It took the slightest touch, the barest amount of pressure. It was as if the doors wished to open.
They parted, opening without so much as a groan, showing a long, rectangular room with a very high ceiling. The ceiling was supported with carved black wooden beams. Heavy things, carved with flowers, demons, and insects. Lacquered black and shiny in the low light.
It was quite warm down here.
The light was red, from rose lamps set into the beams. Unlike the stairwell, these were not flush against the walls, but instead bloomed on vines of wrought iron. Attached to the swoops of thorny metal vine, a man or a woman dangled from shackles.
Hanging by wrists, they were not exactly nude. But the black vinyl or leather that bound their flesh (offered it up, it seemed to Buddy) didn't cover anything important. The one closest to the door turned dark eyes on Buddy and strained against her bonds. A moan escaped her, slipping easily between the heavy metal ring that held her mouth open.
It was an animal sound, rich with her need.
She was offering herself, as she undoubtedly offered herself to any who came. He could smell her sex, and could see it, wet and leaking the seed of every man who had stopped here before him.
She was an alluring creature, but Buddy wanted to make the full circuit. To examine all of his options before he chose. He was a careful shopper. Besides which, the unbound occupants of this forgotten circle of Hell were watching...something...on a stage at the other end of the chamber.
There were more round tables here, clothed in black and red, with tealights flickering in red glass roses at the center of each. A young man in black, a near copy of the beautiful boy upstairs, ignored Buddy as he bussed the tables.
Twins. Fucking delightful.
Buddy passed an impossibly pretty young man with long, yellow hair and gold rings driven through both of his nipples. This one was gagged on a leather thong. Ruddy lash marks and whelps bloomed across his milk-white skin. He was sticky at cock and rear, both of which he offered to Buddy as he passed.
Buddy waved him off, and continued on. Still shopping. Not yet decided if he was going to sample anything in this strange place. Now he passed a girl with skin like polished jet. This one had been pulled down from her rose lamp and was being spit-roasted by two fat, white men. They looked like hairless grubs, assaulting a rose. The girl, for her part, was blindfolded. A kindness.
Between the next set of captives, the bar glimmered in the low, red light. Buddy took a seat on a barstool, and ordered more Old Scratch. The barkeep, a short man with skin that glowed a very dark ochre in the red light, obliged. Though he looked nothing like the fellow above, he reminded Buddy of the other bartender. It might be the feral gleam in his golden eyes, or (more likely) the way he kept wiping the clean glass in his hands.
Lady Macbeth in a leather apron.
Buddy drank and fire ran from his lips to his stomach. A low heat spread from there, warming him in an already warm room.
From the bar, he could see the spectacle on the raised stage.
An ornate metal cage hung over the stage. The base was octagonal in shape, and the eight wall panels (wrought in flowers and insects) rose from the base and tapered to a ring, which hung from a short length of very heavy chain. This cage captured maybe twenty lovely youths of both sexes. Below the cage, dangling from the base, three nude young men were bound. Their feet were flat on the ground, separated by spreader bars. All three were blindfolded, and all three were in the process of being pegged in the shadow of the cage. Their riders looked female, but in the shadow of the cage, who could tell?
Another woman stood beside each boy, silent and still in their black latex unitards, holding up a a dry-erase board with a number written on it.
The boy on the left, tanned and lithe, was shorn from head to toe. Not a speck of hair remained on him. A shiny silver bar connected his nipples, and his sign read "1". The boy on the right, a russet haired boy flecked with rosy freckles from his shoulders to his heels, groaned over the bit and bridle that gagged him as his woman drove into him. His placard read "2". The middle boy, a hulking black-haired lad, well-muscled and well-oiled, grunted as his cock exploded. The girl holding his sign erased the "0" on it, and wrote in a "1".
It was a contest. A group of well-dressed (or well-undressed) people were laying bets with an elegant man in a suit, who lounged at one of the round tables with a stack of cash at his left elbow and a ledger in front of him.
Buddy swept the room again, appraising, missing Monica. But that was unsurprising. Much as she hated dives, this kind of place was wet enough and hot enough and just the right classy touches to appeal to both of them.
Her fucking loss. She started the damned fight, anyways.
The ginger boy was crying now, leaking slowly from a cock that was incapable of rising. The placard beside him read "3", and the woman behind him pounded hard, like a jockey whose horse was in the lead in the final stretch.
Buddy was not the only patron interested in the alcohol. At the other end of the bar, closer to the action onstage, a shadow amongst shadows watched the proceedings with an air of casual boredom. Buddy made this man (woman?) for a cop nearly immediately. Not of this place, but in this place. A detail, he decided. They must have those in England. This one wasn't chosen for his or her intimidation ability. The cop was slight, maybe a hair above five and a half feet tall, clad in a black suit. Short black shag haircut, and baby-faced. Not an intimidating specimen. But definitely a cop. Buddy had never seen anybody who was NOT a cop watch a spectacle like the one on the stage with that much disinterest.
The cop looked back to the barkeep and shook her (his?) empty glass at the man, who refilled it with a taste of something pale.
Buddy had always thought of double-takes as being the sole province of fiction, having never seen one in the wild. Cartoonish overreaction, unnecessary whipping of head and neck and eyes.
But when the cop swept a pair of placid blue eyes over Buddy and past him, their head swiveled their gaze right back on him. There was recognition in those blue eyes, and wonder. The cop left the drink, untouched, and walked over to Buddy.
This could get messy, he thought, his right hand tracing his jacket, reassuring himself that he had all of his knives.
"What are you doing here, angel?"
Inasmuch as Buddy had any expectations on what voice would come out of this small person, this was not what he was expecting. He was not expecting the measured, commanding voice of a twenty-year-veteran acting teacher at RADA to come from this very petite, very agitated creature.
The displeased tone and the addition of the endearment could mean only one thing. He knew this person, or at very least, they knew him. An ex, but which one? Buddy tried to place the voice and form, but came up with nothing. And this tiny, suddenly quite intimidating person was now deep in his personal space and waiting for him to answer them.
"Oh, you know," he said, "seeing the sights."
Their blue eyes narrowed, and (probably a trick of the light) seemed to flash red, but that was gone very quickly. Somehow, though Buddy would swear that they'd left their drink on the bar, they were sipping from their tumbler. Their casualness was affected. This person radiated their distaste for him.
Oh, honey, what did I do to you? he wondered as he took another shot of Old Scratch.
"This...is a new look for you. Thought you preferred suits. And pastels."
Oh, shit. They know me from work, Buddy thought. Well, that's one mystery solved.
"New job," he said.
"They reassigned you?"
"Manner of speaking," he said. "More like I reassigned myself."
Their eyes narrowed at that statement. Wrong answer, Buddy thought.
"Just came down here to look in on us, then?"
"I suppose I did."
"And?" they asked. "Like what you see?"
They leaned in even deeper, their eyes suddenly flickering with mischief in the low light. This was someone that knew him and knew him badly. He'd originally thought they were a cop, but now? Maybe some sort of corporate spy. He couldn't remember boning any English chicks (nor boys), but there had been so many. Especially towards the end. Maybe someone he met at a conference? Someone he'd lied to, made promises to? He didn't know, and the whisky was not making it any easier to think.
Those blue eyes missed nothing. They waited for his reply, so Buddy decided to keep things neutral until he established who this person was and how he'd fucked them over so badly.
"It's...different," Buddy replied with a half-smile.
This seemed to satisfy them. They smirked with something like triumph, and leaned against the bar beside him. They were a tight little ball of unfriendliness, arms crossed, and still very (obviously) displeased with his presence.
"Are you...drinking?" they asked, incredulously. "Since when do you sully your celestial temple?"
Okay, well, that means they know me from when I got deep into the juice cleanses...so 2010 or so?
It was not Buddy's best time. It was, actually, when things just started to go bad. He'd gambled on a few rotten stocks in a recovering economy and they were showing the first signs of tanking. The cleanses and compulsive Crossfit had been such a transparent attempt to regain some kind of control over his life.
In the end, cocaine and crime just worked better.
"I think an exception could be made for this," he said, waving the bottle gently towards the nose of the not-a-cop.
"Seven Hells, are you actually drunk?"
"Not as drunk as I'm planning on getting."
This revelation silenced them. They actually looked...concerned?
So he might know this one from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He remembered the basement meeting room at Saint Whoever's. AA had been required by Vicky and their marriage counselor. For all the good that it did. He'd kicked his growing dependence on alcohol, not by swilling shitty coffee and listening to the bunch of losers in that church basement, but by discovering that alcohol leavened him in ways that cocaine did not. He'd learned that from his fucking sponsor, of all people.
He did not recall a tiny ball of black-suited rage from his time in that basement. He would have remembered something like them.
"I am not usually in the habit of asking after the opposition," they said, finally, "but, in this case, I will make an exception. Angel, are you quite alright?"
"Better than ever," he replied, effervescently. Someone that would consider themselves his opposition. Maybe from another firm? "I never did ask, what are YOU doing here?"
"Me?" they asked. "Well, Az invited me."
They indicated the elegant man near the stage, who was now dispensing money to the winners as the russet boy and the hairless boy were being lashed by their angry mistresses. The middle boy, the slow starter, had won.
"This is his project, of course," they explained. "I loaned him some personnel. Hastur and Ligur helped Az a great deal, but this kind of thing plays to their strengths. I'm sure you saw Dagon upstairs with Erik, drumming up business."
A bunch of names, and Buddy didn't know any of them. Surely, he should. So, this tiny not-a-cop was some kind of vicelord (vicelady?)
Buddy nodded like the words that they told him made sense.
"I'm surprised that Hastur didn't recognize you, but the light upstairs is quite bad. Besides which, this is most definitely not your usual look."
They sniffed, and the accent and profile almost reminded him of one of Jessica's drama teachers at Julliard. After he'd left, Vicky had been able to leverage her sob story (and very fancy maiden name) to keep Jess in school. The last time Buddy had seen Jess, she was performing her senior work. It was a pithy and cliché one-act play about a very rich girl whose father left the family, and her ensuing struggles with being a less-rich girl.
In her monologue, she spoke with fake passion about how the loss of her father felt like losing God. He remembered the teacher standing in the shadows, just offstage. A vaguely dykey woman with a black pixie cut, mouthing Jess' lines as she spoke them, and looking very pleased when that particular bit of melodrama brought the house to their feet.
Jason Van Horne, sitting in the back with Monica, had left in the waves of voyeuristic applause. In the false dawn of fake sympathy that glowed around his first-born.
But no, this wasn't the drama teacher. That wasn't quite right. He'd been up close on the drama teacher before he'd left New York, and she had brown eyes.
Brown eyes, he was sure of it.
Time to dig deeper. To lean in, like the corporate workshops taught him to.
"Sure doesn't seem like you're enjoying yourself," he said, drinking the Old Scratch from the bottle.
"Lust was never my sin," they said, with a shrug. "You know that."
"Do I?" he asked.
Buddy set the bottle down and stepped in front of the little vicelady (vicelord?). He looked deep in those blue eyes, and sought answers. He felt unsteady on his feet, so his hands found the bar on either side of their chest. They didn't move, did not yield a single inch.
A hundred lovers flickered in his mental eye. The corporate bitches that he'd fucked for fun, and the street kids that he'd brought home after Vicky kicked him out. His twin sons' third grade teacher, the woman who ran the sandwich shop that he frequented in Manhattan, and the girls he'd known before Vicky. The boys from his very prestigious boys' academy.
Not one matched this creature.
Buddy realized that he didn't give one wet shit how he did or did not know this person. Maybe he'd never fucked them.
No time like the present, then.
The frown on their face had only deepened. "I think you've had too much, angel."
"I think I just got started," Buddy replied. "D'you get off on this stuff? I mean, d'you get off at all?"
They blinked. He'd breached something.
Shit, maybe he had known this person in a strictly platonic sense. No clue, then, why they kept calling him "angel".
"This. This is why you don't drink," they said, flatly.
"Hey, I'm a lot of fun."
"I'm sure," they replied, in a tone that suggested that they did not believe that Buddy was any fun at all. "You need to sober up."
"I do not," he replied. "You need to get drunker."
"I can't. You know that," they said, with an eyeroll that rolled their entire head. Their nostrils flared, not with anger, but with surprise. "You smell different."
"New cologne," he said with a shrug. "A whole new me."
"I'm positive that you are the same lickspittle toadie that you've always been," they said, regarding Buddy the way that he would have looked at birdshit on his freshly washed BMW. "Alcohol does not change nature. The real question here is why you suddenly think that you have access to ME."
"Look, obviously we've known each other for a long time," Buddy began.
"No argument, there."
Alright...if I could just remember where from. "I'd like to know you better."
"That's fairly obvious as well," they said, bland and bored, but with a pointed look at Buddy's bulging crotch. "This is probably the first time you've ever made an Effort. You don't have to make it that big, you know?"
"Make an effort?" That's cute. That's fucking adorable.
"What can I say? I'm gifted," he said, with as winning a smile as he was capable of. "Don't tell me you're not at least a little curious?"
"Not one bit."
They glared up at him, and the defiance in their eyes was so damned sexy. Buddy leaned down, faster than he intended, and kissed them.
The fist in his gut was like steel. Doubled-over, wind knocked out of him, he fell to his knees. Buddy could see the bottle of Old Scratch. The alcohol level inside was, impossibly, rising.
"Baby, why?" he asked.
An unyielding hand gripped his hair and yanked his head back. "Gabriel, what is wrong with you?"
"Gabriel?" he mumbled as he felt the alcohol leaving his system. "Who's Gabriel?"
Their mouth opened slightly, then closed. "What is your name?"
"Buddy," he said. "Well, Jason, actually."
They turned his head left and right, examining him. Something changed in their countenance. They seemed less threatening, now. A bit softer. Only a bit. But that bit was the difference between his life and his death. This chick (dude?) was obviously Mafia, and Buddy had zero backup. Nobody knew where he was.
Buddy had no idea why he hadn't recognized the danger that he had been in until now. Probably the whisky.
"It's past time for you to go home, I think."
"Boss?" the bartender asked. "You alright? Wait...is that...?"
"Absolutely not. A doppelganger, I think. Some kind of joke from God, and I'm sure She's laughing," they said, before turning back to Buddy. "You. Jason. Why did you act like you knew me?"
"I've known a lot of people, okay? I was trying to figure out how you knew me." He paused. "Damn, you're strong."
"I don't know you. You don't know me. You happen to strongly resemble...a professional rival of mine," they explained. "I'm going to take you back up to the street, and you will never come here again."
"It's a nice place, though," he said. "I'd like to bring my lady back here. She'd like it."
"We're leaving."
Things got smeary after that. Foggy in a way that he'd never experienced, no matter how much booze he'd drunk. No matter how many white lines he'd snorted. No matter what other mischief he'd been up to.
This was an entirely new kind of fucked up.
Buddy didn't remember how he got back to his hotel. He didn't even remember getting up those spiral stairs. Buddy certainly didn't remember how he'd ended up with a bottle of very fine champagne and two dozen blood-red roses. But Monica had accepted both, and they'd balled until dawn.
The next day, after dropping Monica off at a sufficiently posh spa for the afternoon, he'd tried to find the place again. He'd found the string of shitty bars, but couldn't find the right one. He did, however, find a liquor store. He asked the clerk, even described the label, but he'd never heard of Old Scratch Whisky.
At this point, Buddy was not surprised.
Life goes on, and he was back in Atlanta and hitting Doc up for a job when the kitty from the last job was spent. His life continued. Monica's life continued.
London stayed with him. Cold blue eyes flickered red in his dreams, and Buddy wondered if he'd had an encounter with the wee folk.
Time passed, and he eventually took the last job. Buddy didn't know it was the last job, of course. He had no ill-will towards the driver. Not until Monica bled out on the pavement.
Then, he just saw red. Nothing would do until Baby lost something as precious as Monica. Something that he'd loved.
After the fall and the explosion, Buddy rolled off of the burning car, surprised that he was okay.
There was a shadow there, in front of him. A shadow's shadow.
The shadow stepped into the flickering light of the burning car.
"Hello, Jason," they said, evenly. "After the misunderstanding at the bar, I thought I should collect you myself."
The flames danced in their blue eyes.
"Wha-?" Buddy started. Realization dawned. "I died, didn't I?"
"Unfortunately," they said. "Lucky for you, I could use a man with your skills. There's a war coming, you see? Us versus the opposition. Winner takes all."
"Who are you?" Buddy asked.
"My name is Beelzebub," they said, and smiled a sly half-smile at Buddy. "I'm one of the Princes of Hell. After your unfortunate accident, I'll be your new boss."
"No shit?" Buddy said. "Alright, then."
The pavement underneath Buddy began to soften, and he felt himself sinking down. The creature in front of him sank down, as well.
A war, huh?
That could be fun.
"You got anymore of that whisky?" he asked, as the pavement rose around his torso.
Beelzebub laughed, their laughter a wild and untamed thing, bounding off the concrete and metal and mixing with the roar of the fire.
"I'll see what I can do," they said, as the pavement enclosed them both.