13 – Taking Responsibility Takes Integrity

The first Wednesday of December was a particularly cold and unpleasant day. Winter in Chicago was never pleasant, but a moist, westward wind dragged down what should have been a relatively mild day as it swept over the top of the lake. Cold air wasn’t supposed to carry much moisture, and yet, Erika still felt like she was being lightly glazed over with a layer of ice.

Driving her pickup in these circumstances was among her least favorite activities. It was an old junker with rear-wheel drive and next to no weight in the back unless she deliberately weighed it down with a few sandbags. The slightest hint of a slick road would have her fishtailing if she wasn’t careful. At least when there was proper snow, she had a real excuse to drive slowly.

For all her usual confidence, for all her strange powers that nobody else possessed, Erika did not like to drive in the winter.

Thankfully, the weather wasn’t that poor just yet. She pulled into the rear parking lot behind Varn’s without any trouble. Leslie King’s overly large truck—which probably had none of the problems Erika’s pickup had—was parked in the next place over, and Rick’s van had been out front along the streetside. She hopped out, pulling the high collar of her wool coat around her cheeks, as Daniel got out of the passenger side of her pickup.

“All I’m saying is that Mister Langleey has an incredibly biased outlook on history that bleeds into every class,” Daniel said, rounding the truck as Erika fumbled with her gloves and keys. “He claimed the only reason the American Revolution succeeded was because the British were too polite to fight properly, taking too many tea breaks. He spent the rest of the hour complaining about all the bland food we would have had to eat if ‘the damn Brits’ were in charge.”

Erika shot him a look, shaking her head sadly as she fitted the key into Varn’s backdoor. “You might be exaggerating a little. I had Langleey last year and he wasn’t that bad.”

Varn’s interior had changed once again. This time, it was more in the ambiance than any additions of tables or cleanliness. There was music playing, some warbly eighties synthwave that felt as appropriate for an arcade as it was unpleasant against Erika’s ears.

Rick stood at one of the arcade cabinets, a cardboard tube hanging off his back. It was a game featuring some Godzilla and King Kong-style monsters smashing down buildings. He seemed overly absorbed in it. Normally, he jumped and jolted and tensed up the moment anyone touched the door. While Erika wasn’t much of a gamer, she had fun with phone games on occasion. That said, she couldn’t see herself getting so invested that she forget about some deeply ingrained paranoia.

Leslie was nowhere to be seen. He was presumably in the back room. Unlike her passing, casual gaming, she couldn’t see Leslie having even the slightest interest.

“You got it working?” Daniel said, shrugging off his backpack onto the table as he hurried over to Rick’s side.

Rick jumped a good two feet in the air. There was that tension and paranoia. It only lasted a moment. He calmed down quickly enough after looking from Daniel to Erika. He knew they were coming, so he didn’t have to be that surprised.

“Plenty of them work,” Rick said, scowling as his giant monster shrank down into a little naked person that waddled off the screen. The surprise made him lose his game, poor guy. “I was going to sell a bunch of them off, see if some collectors would pay for them, but I can’t exactly afford this place.” He waved his hand vaguely around the arcade. “A quick sell would help, but wouldn’t sustain. So I was thinking about reopening and getting some cash flow in. You want a job behind the counter?”

Daniel’s excitement over the arcade cabinet turned to folded-armed skepticism. “You can’t afford this place, what makes you think you can afford to pay me?”

“Who said you’d be getting paid?”

“The government.”

“Bah,” Rick waved a hand. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“Besides, do people even go to arcades anymore? Even ignoring the economy, which is not good at the moment, I can’t imagine people in my generation hanging out at places like this, and I certainly don’t see your generation having disposable income. Then there is quarters. All these machines want physical coins. I can’t even remember the last time I paid for something with cash—”

Erika slipped into the back of the arcade, leaving them to their discussion.

As expected, Leslie was in the back. He sat at Rick’s laptop, squinting at the screen. Every few seconds, he plucked at the keyboard, tapping a single key with a single finger at a time. It was like he thought it might jump up and bite him.

“Yo,” Erika said. “Hard at work?”

Leslie didn’t look up, though he did hum something of an acknowledgement. He kept tapping away, squinting at the screen, and shooting glares at the mouse.

Erika rounded the table and, after sneaking a quick glimpse to be sure he wasn’t working on something private, peered over his shoulder. It was a social media site, something similar to Twitter, though not one Erika recognized. From what little context she could gather, the particular thread he was looking over was someone asking people to share their ghost-haunting stories—videos were appreciated.

He paused at some black and white footage from an interior security camera and clicked play. It was a regular kitchen with some pots and pans sitting out on the stove. All of a sudden, one of the pots jumped off to the side, clattering into the others, before falling out of frame.

Leslie shook his head. He reached up and clicked the reply button. FAKE, he typed, caps lock engaged, CAN SEE THE GLINT OF STRING.

“That slow of a day, huh?” Erika said.

It had been almost a full month since their misadventures in the subway system. There hadn’t been a single ‘gas leak’ throughout Chicago since. There were no leads on The Mummy or their cultists and no hint that anything strange was going on. The Fixer said that such things were normal. The Mummy was a hider, not an actor—the story of a generations-spanning plot in some remote village was The Mummy’s normal. All the maggot stuff was, The Fixer admitted, strange and out of the ordinary, but now that it had all stopped, they would wait until they found a new opportunity to strike.

Left unsaid was that they would likely strike at her, since she was the one who could break those chains.

It made her uneasy. Not them coming after her—Erika almost would have preferred that; she could break down anyone who attacked her with ease—but rather, it was the way the maggots just disappeared.

Erika was certain that it was her fault those maggots were free. She broke the chains; she freed the Mother of Maggots. Yet she hadn’t put them back into that cave they crawled out from. Either someone else had done so, cleaning up her mess, or The Mummy’s cult finally got their minions under control.

Either option felt bad. If it was the former, someone else doing the work, she didn’t know if or when it would fail. If it was the latter, they had a proper weapon with which to attack her. In either case, she didn’t know what had happened.

Granted, Erika had no real plan of her own. She and Anna had done a fair amount of research on cults and the Mother of Maggots in particular, but none of the books they came across had a magic spell to put that barrier back into place. The most plan she had amounted to basically finding another portal thing, going through, and taking her bat to everything in sight.

When all she had was a hammer…

“There isn’t much more to do than this,” Leslie said after pointing out the inaccuracies in another video. “Normally, we only meet once, maybe twice a month. Even more infrequently do we actually deal with something. All the excitement since you showed up is rare.” He leaned away from the laptop, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “If ghosts really were crawling out of the woodwork every other day, a lot more than just us would be aware of them.”

“I suppose that makes sense. But now we know about all this other stuff. The Church and The Eclipse and so on.”

“And it’s put us in a right pickle,” Leslie said. “For years, Rick’s been insisting he found some group of vampires lurking about. Now we might have to take him seriously. Vampires? Really?” Leslie shook his head, rolling his eyes at the same time.

Erika chose not to comment on the oddity of a man who believed in every conspiracy theory on the internet and knew that ghosts existed, yet did not believe in vampires. She had thought the apple fell a fair way from the tree, but maybe that was where Daniel got his overly healthy sense of skepticism. Selective skepticism.

“Ah, well…” Leslie muttered as he went back to scrolling down the internet. “Rick seems happier than usual, ever since you brought all this to our attention. Got himself a bit of hope.”

“The sword?” Erika asked.

“Aye. It’s some kind of curse. Can’t get rid of it without it just popping back. Takes over a bit too, but not fully? Haven’t experienced it myself, and Rick doesn’t like to talk about what it is like. Won’t go back in its sheath until it’s slick with blood.”

One of the first spells The Banker tried to cast on her was Suspend Curse. Presumably, he thought the bat was a cursed object like Rick’s sword. Which made sense; normal bats couldn’t shatter iron fences. Would he be able to help Rick? Very possibly. And if he couldn’t, he could surely point Rick in the right direction.

“I’m on The Church’s shitlist right now, but Rick could probably go knocking and see if they’d help. As long as he doesn’t do what I did and break into the place and snoop about, I don’t think they would hurt him.” She paused, considering what she knew about The Church. “They’re information brokers, though. I doubt they would hand over help or information for free. No idea what they might charge. Information, maybe—they seem to like collecting every scrap of info they can get—but might be something else entirely.”

“More than we can afford, I bet,” Leslie grumbled. At Erika’s raised eyebrows, he shrugged. “Not that I wouldn’t chip in to help out, mind you. It’s just, they ain’t human, are they? Can’t deal with a devil and expect to have a soul in the morning, can you?”

“I don’t think they’re devils,” Erika said. “Jerks, yeah, but I didn’t see them have any interest in my soul.”

Then again, Erika wasn’t human. The Stalker confirmed that, as had The Fixer. She was some half-Outsider cambion. It was entirely possible that she didn’t have a soul. Rather, there was a problem before all that. Were souls even real?

It was a purely academic consideration. True or not, it wouldn’t change much of how she acted. Not unless she figured out a way to interact with souls or if someone asked for hers. Best to shut that down right away.

But the topic did get her thinking for a moment. She had likened The Fixer to a demon when she first really talked with them after the museum. The situation at the time had been hectic, to say the least, with a lot to think about and then some. Some things slipped her mind, that was just natural—there were so many things to ask The Fixer about, and she had been too pissed off for a while to really talk, and all that other stuff had been going on—but this was kind of a big one.

Could she make devil deals? The Fixer had done so with Leah, allegedly healing her from her deathbed in exchange for their eventual merging. They also said that the Mister Dice persona was cobbled together from bits and pieces taken from other people, presumably lesser deals for a head of hair or a nice suit or whatever.

How did they work? Was taking bits and pieces of other people just an inherent ability The Fixer had? Something like The Stalker’s ability to locate people? Or was there some magic inherent in making a deal that Erika could tap into by virtue of being the daughter of an Outsider?

“It is the principle of the matter,” Leslie said, carrying on in ignorance of Erika’s sudden thoughts. “Whether it is a devil or an escaped government super robot, it won’t have the same desires and motivation as a human. Can’t be too careful.”

Erika was pretty sure that was racist, but she was pretty sure it also wasn’t wrong.

“Has Rick tried destroying the sword?” Erika asked, shifting the topic back to Rick. “Throwing it into a furnace or just taking a hammer to it?”

Magic deals aside, there was one thing Erika was good at, and it was breaking things. Breaking a curse was some kind of strange esoteric concept which, while she was sure it was possible, she wasn’t sure how she might go about enacting that possibility.

Breaking a sword, on the other hand, Erika had zero doubts about. She could snap that thing in two like it was a twig.

“He has considered it many times,” Leslie said, nodding his head. He turned fully away from the computer, giving Erika his attention. “As far as I know, his only attempt was to put the hilt underneath a hydraulic press. Maxed it out without even denting the metal.”

“Just the hilt? Not the blade?”

“Ah. And there is the problem. If he draws the blade, he gets possessed, doesn’t he? You saw it at that maggot place, didn’t you? He can guide it, attack those monsters instead of us, but it puts him right out of it.”

“So just shove the whole thing in a steel kiln.”

Leslie chuckled, shaking his head. “Doubt most steel mills would want us contaminating a batch. Might spread the curse to whatever they’re making. Besides, what if the sword survives but the sheath doesn’t?”

That… was a good point. The situation was a little more complicated than she initially thought. If Rick drew the sword for her to break, he—or it—would probably attack her. Self-defense, fair enough. She could try breaking it with the sheath still on, but that had its own problems. If she could break the sheath but couldn’t break the sword or the curse, if some magic overpowered her ability, then she and Rick would be screwed. Erika was fairly certain she could break it—The Strategist had obviously handed her some magically enchanted gold, and she broke that and its spell, presumably—but it wasn’t like she had a great deal of experience breaking magical things.

Rick could end up permanently possessed by a bloodthirsty, cursed sword.

A chill ran down Erika’s spine. She had been just about ready to march out there and try her hand at it.

If she got it wrong…

“It’s not all bad,” Leslie said. “That sword can cut some kinds of ghosts where other stuff sails harmlessly through. Saved us in the past once. ’Course, ghosts don’t bleed. That’s a bit of a problem. Ended up having to stab a chicken.”

“I guess that’s practical. You don’t carry chickens everywhere, though.”

It was a good thing those maggots bled.

“He has some blood packs in his van. We aren’t sure it will work—me less so than him—but it’s worth a shot if something happens.”

“Seems like something to test in controlled circumstances. Like a large empty field with a bunch of chickens and no people around.”

“Rick doesn’t like testing the thing. Too volatile.”

Erika nodded, figuring that was the case before she even made her suggestion. While Leslie tried to reassure her with his one positive side of the situation, Erika doubted that Rick felt it was worth it. His jumpy nature, sleepless bags under his eyes, and general demeanor made a lot more sense now, knowing the finer details.

If she could find another cursed object, something to test breaking the curse—or the object—that would be for the best. A little trial run on something with less severe consequences should she fail.

“Where did he find the thing?” Erika asked.

Rick didn’t strike her as the type to go on wild adventures or globe-trotting escapades to uncover the sword in some long-forgotten tomb. He was a Hawaiian shirt-wearing nerdy type who spent more time on computers than with other people. At the same time, Erika doubted people just stumbled across cursed swords.

Leslie’s expression grew darker for a moment as he glanced at the door. He waved Erika a little closer before speaking in a hushed tone of voice. “He’d been helping a friend clear out the basement of an old, decommissioned data center. The kind of place with big mainframe computers installed in the eighties that were out of date before the paint dried. They were hoping to scavenge some junk to sell online.”

Leslie paused a moment, patting down his beard with another almost nervous glance toward the door. “According to Rick, one of the racks was blocking off some narrow cubby where they found an old trunk. He expected some old backup tapes or spare parts. Instead, he found the sword, wrapped in layers of stained cloth…

“His friend did not survive.”

Erika winced. She supposed she should have expected that. A magic sword that possessed its wielder and couldn’t be sheathed until it was slick with blood? Something like that didn’t come with an instruction manual letting its user know about its peculiarities. He would have had to learn the rules the hard way.

Leslie leaned back, looked to the door one last time, then turned back to his computer.

Erika let him get back to yelling at strangers online. He had given her a fair amount to think over.

The sudden disappearance of both maggot and Mummy was frustrating. Neither The Butler nor anyone else from The Castle had contacted her in the last month. She had already written off The Castle as willing to work together despite The Butler’s words at the time. The Stalker couldn’t stalk apropos of nothing, so unless she had someone from The Mummy handy for her to look at, there wasn’t much they could do on that subject. Even The Fixer seemed more focused on getting the Walker family situated in their new rental house and all that.

This was something she could investigate a little more. Erika even knew a starting point. She didn’t know about any cursed items, and rummaging through old data centers didn’t sound reliable, but she did know an odd library with several old, archaic books.

It was no archive of The Church, but the library hadn’t put a bounty on her head either.

Heading back out to Varn’s main room, Erika paused a moment, watching Rick and Daniel playing together on that same machine from earlier. She waited a few moments, occupying herself with a box of mildly stale donuts on the front counter, until she heard the telltale warbles of a Game Over.

“Hey, Danny,” Erika called as she walked up to them. “You’re a nerd, right? You know anything about the Dewey Decimal System?”