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Sinister

Walker Manning Hughes

    I found Gina and Bone right where I guessed they would be, lying head to toe on the roll-along conveyor near the loading dock of the abandoned Nu-Fizz plant. They were about three days gray and as flyblown as midday road kill seasoned under a blazing summer sun. Their eyes were open and found me as I came in. You’re next, those eyes said, and a fetid stench stifled any argument I may have had. There were eight other bodies lined up but they were all strangers, and it was the first time in seven days that there weren’t at least five of my friends in that hell-bent convoy of death.
    “Steven, my favorite customer,” the man I was looking for said to me. My stomach instantly seized. The voice was eerily sibilant and flowed as a snake slithered. Sssteven.. Cussstomer.. I turned towards the sound, feeling I had to keep an eye on its owner.
    “I need a fix,” I said as my eyes found my host in the shadows, where he always was, near a door leading deeper into the dead, chill building. The unnatural white sheen of a well preserved but unmade-up corpse. Piercing, reflective eyes, purplish-blue. Ivory teeth, slightly elongated and pointed. A spook. My heart raced as it always did in his presence until the sound filled my head. Fump-fump. Fump-fump.
    “Steven needs a fix. Is Steven sick?” the monster taunted. Sssick? I didn’t know his name. It wasn’t the sort of thing that came up during the type of business we conducted. I had also never offered mine, yet this fiend had always known it.
    “Yes. Sick,” I said.
    “And is Steven willing to pay my price? Will Steven make the wager?”
    I knew I had no choice. Any small, fleeting chance to avoid this nightmare had fled the instant I set foot in that undercover mausoleum. After twelve times it was almost guaranteed odds that this would be the crusher, a surety that I would lose the bet, and with it my life.

    A week earlier I could never have dreamed of being in such a situation.
    “Free shit over at the bottling plant,” somebody had said, and no way was I going to believe it. I mean, I’d heard it all before. It was one of those things, a legend, that people spouted to watch the junkies twitch and twitter and to see if the freaks would fall for it. And we freaks passed it on because some cat had pulled it on us, and it was something to say other than what we were always thinking. I need. I need.. But after a day of roaming, earnestly panhandling, scrounging for scrap metals and cruising for a score, any score, my feet were just headed that way. Because, after all, I was only half human anymore, the other half full-up of the devil I had sold out to long before, and he’d been thinking free shit the whole time and was willing to find out if maybe this time it could be true. And it really was, only it was way crazier than just someone handing out sample smack like welfare gone cool.
    The trickiest part was that it turned out to be the best dope in the whole city, maybe the best anywhere. The kind that only takes a bump and no heat. You just cold shake it right in the rig and when you land it you know right away and you just smile. You know God. Hell, you might even be Him.
    Standing there in that rot factory, with the maggots wriggling through a guy who had let me hold a dollar on my fix two Thursdays ago, with that lavender-eyed specter of death licking his lips and grinning his all knowing grin, I had to have it. And I absolutely knew I could win the bet one more time. Lucky thirteen.
    “Yeah, I’ll make the wager,” I said.

    “Excellent,” the fiend said and made it sound creepier than anything he had ever said to me. I watched him carefully as he moved towards an old ratty couch that had been dragged in, probably from the dump. There was a decrepit coffee table standing there, somehow managing to hold itself together. I knew the routine. I went over and took a seat. The demon loomed over me.
    “You bet your life,” he said.
    I could only nod.
    “In one of these,” he said, laying out two syringes, “is what you want. What you live for.” The two rigs were worked up already, both holding about a half cc of yellowish liquid. As usual I could tell no difference between them. “In the other is what you don’t want. What you die for. Dope in one. Poison in the other.” My hands poured sweat and trembled erratically, not from a fear of dying but from a consuming need to be high.
    “I can do this,” I said, mostly to myself. I studied the offerings on the table. I had done this twelve times before. No problem.
    “Only this time there is a third choice.” A third identical syringe appeared before me. “I’ve been watching you. A dozen times you’ve made the wager. A dozen times you’ve won. You show little fear. And while I detest junkie filth like you, I also see something else in you. A spark. A potential. I’ve decided to offer you something very special. A part of myself that I’ve never shared before, mixed into a dose of your precious drug.”
    The pale demon, my tormentor, my savior, swelled as he spoke. I saw a sincerity that I did not expect, and an intensity that went beyond anything he had shown me before. I somehow knew he had said all he was going to say and I asked no questions. Maybe I was unable. Maybe I already knew what he was and what he meant by offering me a piece of himself. I bent to my task. I had two chances of getting right, I knew, and everything else was smoke and mirrors. Before me, ghostly hands shuffled three-card-Monty style. Faster, faster they went. Unnatural speed. Here and there a playful flourish showed me a brief glimpse of a glistening needle amidst the haze of the dope, death, and don’t know. And then they were still and my choices lay there, each calling to me in some small perverse way.
    On all the other occasions I had done this, I had tortured myself with questions of left and right. His left? My right? I had agonized for long minutes and told myself I was using clear logic. It had always been the need for the heroin that made me stop and choose, that stopped me from procrastinating.
    This time I felt peaceful and confident. I sensed there was something more at stake than satisfying an urge, something more than even losing my life. Time slowed. It occurred to me that there was one fundamental difference. There was not only a left and right, there was now a middle. I reached for the middle syringe and grasped it. It was an impulse decision, but Fate demanded I make it and I did.
    There was a rubber tourniquet and it was around my arm and I pumped my favorite vein. The half-inch needle settled in snugly and an urgent puff of pinkish blood clouded the watery tube – where, where, gimme, gimme – searching for the medicine it longed for. It formed into tendrils, grabbing for the fix, and I trusted it and let it have its prize and dropped the plunger.
    A single heartbeat and it was there, everywhere. That old ecstasy, my best friend, and one that could never come too often or ever outstay its welcome. I sank into the couch and that evil ghast drifted closer.
    “Thirteen,” I said as the train running through my head began to fade.
    “No, Steven. Infinity.” The spook laughed and at that moment I knew what was about to happen to me and how he had done it. The knowledge burned through me, leaving no memories behind, only a smoky sureness that it had been there. I studied the fiend’s thin features and felt the first hint of a chill.
    It started in my feet and hands and moved steadily inwards. A deep, complete cold so numbing it brought on a weightless feeling and I was sick between my feet. There was no prickliness, no needles. Only a freezing wave that choked my senses until I couldn’t tell pleasure from pain. The last thing I saw was my impossibly pale hands clutched in some unknowable sensation and a dark, black-red ooze seeping through my skin. My lifeblood left me, pushed out by whatever dark chemistry came mixed with the third choice. I slipped away and died, my eyes still open and staring but seeing only darkness.

    When I woke I was dressed in a black, flowing robe and lying in an ancient stone sarcophagus. I felt ... everything. I knew so much more than I should have. Strength pooled deep inside me. I was remade and saw my surroundings through new eyes. The tiniest details were there at a glance, the most mundane things now beautiful beyond imagining. I was aware of my master and longed to be near him. I knew where to find him, but also knew to stay away until summoned. Soon I was called and rushed to him and fell on my face before him as he rose from his ornate coffin.
    “Thank you, master. Thank you, master,” I repeated in worship until he tired of it. He placed his hand on my head and I saw him much clearer even than the blindingly beautiful image my new eyes gave me. I witnessed his birth and death and remanifestation, the centuries of wanderings, the loves, the wars, the triumphs and defeats. I saw the boredom and hopelessness that had driven him to close dealings with the junkies. I saw the price he had paid to make me and the joy he felt that it had worked.
    “You will have a new name,” he said, his voice a celestial chime to my ears. “I will call you Sinister.”
    My master has taught me to kill quickly, and to sometimes drink sparingly. Those that have the sweetest blood are kept alive to make more for the master. They always give out and die after a time. We move often and I go out for the junkies and bring them in. “Free shit,” I say and they run to lay down their lives, grasping futile hopes that they can make the choice that will spare them. It amuses the master to see them squirm.
    I was one of them. Steven. What a hollow sound it makes in my mind now. It was a pitiful little life I put on the line that fateful day. Did I win or lose? The answer seems more than obvious. But I am on the threshold of forever. I need not be hasty in deciding. For now I will serve my master. I will pace myself and not burn through my desires leaving myself bored and in despair. I will search out ways to live up to my new name until it rings in the night.
    Sssinisster.



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