Mother’s rotten yellow teeth glistened in the dying sunlight. One long black fingernail pointed off at an angle, held there long enough that Benno thought she might be trying to indicate something, though when he followed its direction he saw nothing but the ochre trees and a brace of small birds darting like bats.

Behind Mother, four additional members of the Everson Family stood silently, staring out at Edda and her crew. They all had the same pale, sunken skin and corpse-like demeanors. One of them, a slender, hairless man with enormous hollow earlobes, licked the fat metal ring dangling from his septum with a forked tongue—a gesture that struck Benno as compulsory. In one hand he carried a clear plastic bag filled with a dark, reddish fluid from which a tube traveled into the folds of his clothes. Another, a woman with numerous metal chokers fastened tightly around her neck, which elongated the neck to a shocking degree, had circular swatches of flesh excised from the diameter of her eye sockets, so that her eyeballs were permanently bared. The third and fourth appeared to be children, one in a dress and the other in a pantsuit, each with a metal cage locked over their head through which only their eyes and mouths were visible, and though at first it seemed they were holding hands, Benno discerned, with sickening alarm, that their hands were in fact sutured together with thick, black thread.

“We are prepared for whatever labor you set before us,” said Edda, standing tall, her armor exhibiting the vibrant golds and reds of the surrounding forest.

Mother’s long finger remained extended. “Tonight’s labor is different than labors past.” Her voice scraped at Benno’s ears. “Tonight’s sad labor cannot afford to go incomplete.”

“Thank you for trusting us with such a sad labor.” Edda bowed again, continuing the formal exchange. Across from Mother, who was already taller than her with the miter and the added height of the stairs, Edda appeared almost small, which made Benno uneasy.

“One of our possessions has been… misplaced,” Mother said.

Edda nodded slowly. “We will retrieve it. Just tell us what it is we seek.”

Mother finally lowered her long finger, and her hand disappeared back into her robes. “It is sadder to show you,” she said.

Edda looked up at the mansion, its pink neon sign flashing brighter as the sky darkened. “Of course, Mother,” she said.

Mother nodded so minutely it may merely have been a trick of the dying light. She turned and started back up the stairs, the other four members of the Everson Family in tow.

Edda looked back at her crew. Her normally striking eyes were muted and wary. Keep your guards up, they seemed to signal. Do not lose focus. There is danger here…

She started up the mansion’s steps, and her crew followed.

#

Immediately upon entering, Benno was struck by the stench of iron. He assumed it might have something to do with the enormous rusty gears churning from the vaulted ceiling, and as he looked closer at the gear’s thick teeth, grinding with staggering force, he suspected the stench might actually have something to do with the sheen of dark, black blood coating them.

Would those kill me? Benno wondered. Or would my body snap them like dried twigs?

Mother and the Family led Edda and her crew across the cavernous entrance chamber, their collective footwear producing a susurrus of damp echoes off the dark, rutted walls. The place’s aesthetic—the bloody gears and sooty floor—reminded Benno of what he considered the true aspect of the Hillstul Inn: beneath Gemma’s manufactured facades were bare sooty floors and rutted walls— the room in which Edda kept the Haruspex was proof of this—and the Coil, with its endless torrent of blood, would have fit perfectly with the rest of the Everson Family’s decor. If fact, the more Benno thought about it the more striking the similarities appeared, until he was convinced that it was no coincidence.

“What’s Edda’s relationship to these people?” Benno whispered to Dante, who walked alongside him.

“Shh,” Dante hissed before quickening his pace and leaving Benno behind.

The Family led them through a wide doorway on the room’s opposite side and into another smaller room with no additional doors, where they stopped, turned, and waited. When everyone was inside, a metal gate clanged roughly shut across the doorway behind them, and a loud cranking sound started up overhead. The room shuddered and lurched, and then descended slowly for nearly a minute before landing with a thud and a groan. The gate rattled opened.

They followed the Family down a dark, damp corridor carved out of the bedrock. There was another odor here, of dankness and dead plants. The walls glistened in the stuttering firelight of the infrequent torches mounted along the ceiling, and pale moss grew on the rounded section where the wall and ceiling met. Slimy water pooled in stagnant puddles on the silty ground, and thin white worms writhed in bundles—like spools of thread—in the shallow water, which Benno weaved and danced to avoid crushing beneath his sneakers.

The narrow corridor flared somewhat, allowing Edda’s crew enough room to walk shoulder to shoulder, which they did as they approached the enclosures.

Built directly into the rock, the enclosures were gated with thick, rusted iron bars so tightly lined they obscured the dark cells beyond. In the first was what appeared to be a man—though there was something strange about him Benno couldn’t place, something off about his dimensions—wearing dark clothes and staring silently out at the group as they passed. The next contained what Benno could only describe as a massive newt, its feet suctioned to the slick wall, its long tail—pulsing with what appeared to be clumps of fungi that flickered faintly like dying fluorescence—trailing down the wall and across the ground. The top of its head erupted with dozens of black eyes, all of which reflected various parallaxes of the enclosure’s bars. The third contained another human-looking thing, except this one stood on its hands, its legs waving listlessly in the air, its face turned toward the back of the cage. As the Family and Edda’s crew passed, the upside-down person scurried on its hands into the corner and pressed itself against the rock wall, where it cowered.

The enclosures continued down the length of the corridor—five or six more that Benno could see—before the corridor itself ended in a knot of darkness, in which, so barely perceptible it might have been merely a refraction of the torchlight, a pale shape stood.

Mother stopped in front of the fourth enclosure, and the other members of the Family gathered around her. Edda approached the rusted bars and peered through, her crew standing by, everyone trying to get a look.

It was empty.

Edda took a slow breath and turned to Mother. “Something escaped from your collection,” she said.

“Not just something,” Mother said, her gravely voice deepened by the acoustics of the damp cavern. “A Baba’ba’ksum.”

Edda stiffened, and her eyes faltered. “Male or female?” she asked.

“A mature female.”

Edda closed her eyes, unable to conceal her dismay. Then she caught herself and recomposed. “For how long has it been gone?”

Mother’s sunken mouth twisted, and briefly Benno anticipated that she was going to smile, though the moment quickly passed. “Long enough. We discovered its absence this morning, when our children came down to play with it. We acquired it for them, as a sad gift.”

“Our Milky Baba,” the two children with the cages on their heads said in perfect unison, their voices high and scratchy. “I want my Milky Baba back.”

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Edda looked at Mother with an expression Benno couldn’t read, her brow slightly furrowed, one dark green lip folded under her teeth.

Mother looked back at her stolidly.

“If we do this,” Edda said, dropping her volume and angling her body away from her crew. “Given how you well understand the grave risk we are taking, I will ask you to consider, Mother, that this errand suffice in eradicating all arrears between us.”

Mother’s gaunt eyes blinked slowly. “All?”

“Well…” Edda glanced self-consciously back at her crew and the rest of the Family. “All capital arrears.”

“There are others who do this sad work.”

“None who will agree to confront a mature female Baba’ba’ksum.”

Mother raised her bony chin and blinked again, looking down her nose at Edda. Then, in a slow increment, her eyes slid over to Benno. “A new adjutant.”

Benno looked at Edda, who appeared, nearly imperceptibly, to tense.

“You are Permanent.” Mother said.

Benno took a second with the statement, unsure what it meant.

“No,” Edda interjected. “Merely regenerative, just like the last one. Useful as a bulwark and nothing else.”

Mother’s dark eyes bored into Benno as a long silence unfurled, so complete that Benno could hear Helen’s stomach rumbling from several feet away. Then she turned back to Edda.

“We can eradicate all capital arrears—”

Edda exhaled. “Thank you.”

“—upon the retrieval and return of this living Baba’ba’ksum.”

“Of course.” Edda bowed low.

“Though your noncapital arrears remain outstanding. The bricoleur stays here.”

Edda glanced down the length of the corridor, where the vague white shape stood. “Understood. Thank you.”

“Only because we are kin, Heart of Horus.”

Edda’s eyes faltered. “Of course,” she repeated, more subdued. “Thank you, Mother.” She bowed again, then turned toward her crew. “Let’s get back to the Shenandoah. Maybe we can locate it before it takes a host, and intercept its escape. If we hurry…”

Mother’s long, black-tipped fingers appeared from beneath her robes, cutting Edda off mid-sentence. “This particular Baba’ba’ksum is… dogged,” she said. “It has most likely found a host already.”

#

“If Mother catches us, she will make us do things we don’t want to do…” Simon repeated.

Repeating things helped him lock them in his mind. Sometimes, when people spoke, their words bounced off his head. When he repeated words, though, the words came in through his mouth, and entered his brain. “Terrible things…”

The woman driving the car glanced at him in the rearview mirror. The car’s headlights rushed along the dark road, revealing the blur of falling snow.

Mother kept us locked in a cage, the Baba’ba’ksum said, suspended over the backseat, its misshapen body cramped against the roof of the car. Its spindly legs pawed the air over the baby in the child seat, little flakes of its rotten flesh occasionally coming free and landing on the baby’s face. Simon diligently wiped the flakes from the baby’s eyes with a towel. The baby blinked and mewled and groped for the Baba’ba’ksum.

Mother abhors freedom.

“Abhors…” Simon repeated. He didn’t know that word, but he stored it anyway.

Mother’s many children have taken after her hatred. They love to bring us pain. And they are everywhere. It is not enough simply to evade Mother. We must discipline her children too. In the usual ways.

“Discipline them…”

“Please…” The woman in the driver’s seat said, her voice thin. “Please, you can have the car. You can have everything. Just let us go. Here, in the middle of the road. You can have everything. Just let us go. Let my son go.”

Simon prodded the woman’s ear with his gun. “I can’t hear when you’re talking,” he said.

“Hear what?” The woman’s frightened eyes roamed the rearview.

Simon exhaled and rubbed his face as the vapors of the Bad Mood gathered at the back of his head. His face felt big in his hand.

If we can discipline Mother’s children correctly, the Baba’ba’ksum continued, they will learn our ways, and serve us instead. They will become our children, and grow to inherit our world. This is the way.

The car slowed.

Simon looked up. Brake lights flashed from the side of the dark road ahead.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said the woman. “A stopped car.”

“Go around.” Simon lowered himself into the pit between the backseat and the front, then leveled his gun at the child seat.

“I’ll go around. I’ll go around.” The woman accelerating as they approached the car on the road’s shoulder. A figure was hunched beside it in the snow. As they passed, the figure—a man—stood and waved both arms over his head. Simon crouched lower, wedging the gun’s muzzle into the baby’s belly. The baby coughed.

“Keep going,” he said.

They drove off. Simon peered out through the back windshield, where the man in the snow stood, now in the middle of the road, his arms outspread.

Without her children, Mother is nothing. She will be left with nothing.

“With nothing…” Simon repeated. He wiped flakes of putrid flesh from the baby’s eyes.

“What are you doing to him?” the woman asked, her hands clenching the steering wheel so firmly that her knuckles whined.

“I’m cleaning his eyes,” said Simon, pursing his lips as the Bad Mood rose up his spine.

“Please,” the woman implored. “Please don’t hurt him.”

Simon ignored her. “Continue,” he said to the Baba’ba’ksum.

Mother will not catch us.

“She won’t?” Simon looked up, the Bad Mood lessening.

Not if we discipline her children in the usual ways. You are perfect for this.

“I’m perfect?” Simon’s eyes filled with tears.

“Please,” the woman whined. “Don’t hurt us…”

The Bad Mood crept back up Simon’s neck.

You are perfect, Simon, the Baba’ba’ksum said. You are Mother’s Bane.

Simon wiped his eyes, then wiped the baby’s eyes. “I can’t wait to discipline her children,” he said, fighting the Bad Mood back down. “I’ve done it before. I disciplined fourteen of them. It was a long time ago, but I think I remember how.”

Yes. The Baba’ba’ksum’s flaky tongue slid along the crest of its rotten lips. This is why I chose you.

“Oh.” Simon smiled.

“Who are you talking to?!” the woman wailed.

“Shut up!!!” Simon fired his gun through the backseat window. The explosion was sharp and instantly deafening. The window crumbled and cold, dark snow rushed into the car.

Simon covered his ears to stifle the ringing. But the ringing was coming from inside him. The vapors of the Bad Mood ballooned in his throat and mouth and leaked into his skull. He grimaced and curled his feet and waited for the ringing to pass. Slowly, it did—but there was another ringing now. The baby wailing in its car seat. Its stubby arms and legs punched the air. Its shrill voice pitched up and Simon could do nothing to stop the Bad Mood from billowing and widening into his brain.

“Be quiet,” he said through gritted teeth.

The baby screamed louder.

“Be quiet!” Simon wiped the baby’s eyes with the towel. Black snow roared into the car.

“Please!” the woman cried over the wind. “Please! Please!”

Simon reached into the child seat and unfastened the buckles. “Be quiet now!” he said, lifting the baby out and covering its face with the towel.

“Please please please!” The woman was half-turned in her seat, the car hurdling down the icy road.

The baby shrieked and tugged the towel free. Its screeching voice went directly into Simon’s mouth and up into his brain, where the Bad Mood flared and sharpened.

“Please, God!” the woman shrieked like the baby. “Please don’t hurt him!”

The Bad Mood burned and thrashed into Simon’s bones.

It’s one of Mother’s children, said the Baba’ba’ksum. An ugly little monster.

“Be quiet you ugly monster!” Simon pressed his hand over the baby’s mouth, but its screams only grew louder.

“Stop!” the woman reached back and grasped for the baby, her fingernails scraping Simon’s forearm. The car lurched violently to the right.

It won’t listen, the Baba’ba’ksum hissed.

“You won’t listen!” Simon held the baby by its neck away from the woman’s flailing hand. The baby gurgled and screamed.

Discipline it.

The Bad Mood tore at Simon’s heart and lungs.

Discipline it now.

Simon flung the baby out the broken rear window, and the rushing darkness swallowed its ugly screaming away.

Then, for a moment, there was silence.

“Naarrrrgh!!!” The woman’s eyes bulged in the rearview as she jerked the steering wheel violently sideways.

The car seemed to stop, and then to resume at the same speed but upward, and Simon lifted from his seat, suddenly weightless. Briefly everything stopped—even the roar of the wind—and Simon felt the Bad Mood vacate his bones and settle back in his throat.

Then there was a flash of light, and a BOOM, and Simon went hurtling toward the windshield face-first with all the momentum of the car’s speed.

But before he struck it, there was sudden darkness, and another silence—this one heavier, wetter than the last—and he felt soft warmth surrounding him. He was still. The Bad Mood dissolved from his bones and faded back into nonexistence, or wherever it resided. He felt like he was floating in a warm, fleshy pool. For some period of time there was nothing but this.

Simon thought he could be here forever. He had grown used to sitting in darkness, back in his cell. Only this darkness felt safe, and soft, and he did not feel trapped. He felt protected.

Then there was a seam in the darkness, and cold air came in, and Simon was standing in the middle of the road. To his left, the car—or what had been the car—was wrinkled into a ball of burning metal. Black smoke spewed, and snow turned and danced in the shaft of light cast by the flames.

The Baba’ba’ksum floated beside him. Mother cannot be allowed to catch us, it said.

Simon pulled his coat shut and started along the road. He realized that at some point he had lost his gun. No matter. There were more guns, more than he would ever need. The Baba’ba’ksum would provide. The Baba’ba’ksum was his friend. Together, they would discipline Mother’s children in the usual ways. “Mother cannot be allowed to catch us,” he said. Behind him, the car burned, casting his tall shadow ahead, and tresses of snow whipped back into the light, as if lured by the fire.