Hell is no place for a wool suit.
A few minutes ago, passing through pergatory, I was glad for the extra layers. Neutrality is chilly.
Now I'm sweating right through the brown fabric. My tie feels like a noose around my neck. I take the uncharacteristic step of unbuttoning the top button and loosening the knot.
I hate hell. But you go where the facts take you.
It takes me forever to get to the house. Actually "house" is a stretch. It's more of a hollowed out mound covered in bear skulls. Ten thousand bear heads, at least, frozen mid-roar.
Two freaky bear-men, some custom demonology, stand guard beside the entrance. Human from the waist down, grizzly from the waist up. They step up to me and snarl.
Got to keep your cool with these things. "Hey boys." I flash my badge real quick, don't want to burn them up, but they recoil from the pure white light. "Where's Erlik?"
The bear on the right bares his teeth and keeps close, while the bear on the left steps back and puts his paw up to his right ear, like a secret service agent. The putrid breath of the bear close to my face keeps fogging up my glasses. I take a single step back.
Finally the right bear grunts and waves me through. The left bear-man seems disappointed he can't eviscerate me. "Thanks." I say, and walk in.
It's dark inside. No surprise. And it smells like rotting meat. Torches line the hallway at random, casting small, ineffective circles of light. The floor is mushy. There are no doorways in the hall. Just a straight line in and out.
Finally I arrive at the center of the mound. The hallway ends in a doorless archway dripping an endless stream of fresh blood.
"Great." I look around for something to use as a blood umbrella. There's a fairly large femur bone, not human, on the floor near the left wall. I pick it up, hold it over my shoulders and hop through the blood waterfall.
Beyond the veil of blood is another, smaller but still gigantic, interior mound, all bones, better lit than the hallway by a grand bone chandelier. A giant human looking man is laying langourously in the center of the bone pile, completely naked, covered in tufts of black hair.
I toss the femur and examine my shoulders. Only a couple of drops of blood got through. But i would still need to bring it to the dry cleaners. Too bad. "Elrik." I call up to the giant.
Elrik makes a real show of stirring from his slumber. That was always the way with these ancient evil types. They love their own melodrama.
"Detective. To what do I owe the visit?" Elrik loosed a yawn that sounded more like a bear's roar. I remember my first days on the job, centuries ago. This sort of thing would have terrified me then. Nowadays, he's gonna have to do better than that.
"We've had some unauthorized resurrections recently. I spoke to some folks - and your name came up." I took out the small notepad and pen I kept in my jacket pocket. "This ringing any bells."
Elrik sat up in his bone pile and stared down at me with his dead animal eyes. "Who'd you speak to? Osiris? Fucking Cherno?"
I gave a little smirk. "You know I can't give away my sources."
Elrik's upper lip upturned and his giant incisors appeared threateningly. One giant step at a time, he stepped down from the bone pile. It took three giant steps before he towered over me. He was at least five meters tall, which put me face to face with his gargantuan testicles. He bent way over, got his angry, ugly bear face real close to mine and growled at me. "Fuck you cop."
I don't condone police brutality as a rule. But man do I hate these demon types. Plus he ruined my suit.
With a smile I swing my right arm up and under Elrik's chin and uppercut his right testicle as hard as I can. The God's warm scrotum molds around my knuckles, wrist deep, before spitting my hand back out. Elrik's face contorts in pain and he falls with a rumble to his knees. Now we're face to face.
"That's better. I think you were about to say something."
Elrik coughed and spat onto the bloody floor. "You come into my house, and make demands, who the fu..."
I punch Elrik, Hungarian God of the dead, hard across the face. "What was that?"
"Baszd meg seggfej." Elrik swallowed hard. I was pushing my luck. The badge was a shield, but it didn't make me invulnerable or anything. If Elrik really lost his temper he could tear me into pieces and deal with the higher authorities later.
But he would catch a hell of a hard time for it. Pun unintended, but not inaccurate.
Elrik started to laugh. One of those cascading evil villain laughs. I interrupted. "Get to it already."
So he did. "You think I could pull off a ressurection, pig? It's been millenia since I've had that kind of clout."
True. Folks weren't thinking much of mighty Elrik these days. "But you know who does?"
Elrik stopped laughing. "I've heard some stories. We all have. Whispers in the astral wind man."
"Illuminate me."
Elrik stood up, gingerly cupping his giant testes, and plopped backward into the bone pile. "Word is somethings coming down the tubes, maybe already here. Something big. Something new."
I took down something new. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What might that be?"
Now Elrik got nervous, and it showed. He peered around like a scared cartoon character. Then he leaned forward and whispered two letters like they were runic curses. "AC."
They hit me like a bullet train to the pre-frontal cortex. "What? Where did you..."
But my question was cut off when Elrik exploded. Just like that. No scream, not another word. Just his hairy, giant bear head spread all over the room, all over me, like splatter from a deep fryer.
I pulled my weapon from its holster and ducked, looking around. No one, nothing. I looked back at Elrik. He wasn't healing. Dead. Someone had killed a God from a distance without revealing themselves in any way.
I wrote down "AC" in my notebook as the two bear-guard-men things came in through the blood waterfall and moaned sadly.
"Sorry boys." I said, and walked out, through the blood, covering my head with a piece of Elrik's skull.
AC. If that stood for what I thought it did, this case had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated. Pun intended.
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