“Red, red done did it, he told me, them sparks were the proof in the puddin’. Finally got his claim staked, he said, and ain’t nobody goin’ that deep in the dark to find his light. No sir.”

Sitting, staring at the gleaming, near to glowing sliver in his hands, rolling it over and over, Willie spoke at length to the voices. This particular conversation had been going on for at least an hour, although it was hard to tell deep down underground in the abandoned subway tunnels of New York City. “The trick was wirin’ up the third rail. That’s what he said. If the rail can power a train, it can power the lights down here. What’s more, I got a train, he said. A train and curtains to hide the light. All a man can ask for down here. I miss Red…”

It was almost silent down here, he thought to himself. Silent save for the buzzing. Electricity, open, arcing, sparking, dangerous. The lights were on in the abandoned traincar, all except for the few that burned out before the old girl was decommissioned. But he couldn’t stand to be in it. Down deep in the dark, the summer blaze couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be felt. It was cool outside the train car. No need to go back inside and be reminded.

“You did what was bade you. Take solace for now you serve a higher purpose.” There was that voice again. At first Willie thought that maybe it was Red, but the lifelong Mole Person was strident in his denial. “Come now. Stand. There’s yet more work to do.” Then, after, he thought that, perhaps, the voice was inside the car. Maybe the car itself. He’d seen a talking car in a television show when he was a boy. Of course that was more of a racing car and less of a subway train car.

“So damned loud. Why so loud? Where … wait … no… Quiet.” Willie thought back, thought hard, fighting through the cloud that lingered around him always. He always heard voices, whispers, vague concepts drifting in and out of being. At the Sierra House they’d tell him all the time that those were just his inner voices. They said he needed help, needed pills, needed to try to ignore them because they weren’t people. But, now, they were gone. Thinking back, he was sure of it now; the silence had preceded the first time he heard this new voice. “Where … where are my friends?” he asked, certain that whomever this was had stilled the other voices that had become his state of peace. “Before you came … they talked to me. Now it’s just … just you…”

There was no answer at first. A pregnant pause. Willie felt the tip of the thing he found, immediately aware that it had pricked his thumb at first contact. He sucked the puncture wound, surprised at the taste; more like old pennies than fresh blood. “You don’t need them any more, Willie. They were mere figments, drilled into some lobe deep in this spongy gelatin you call a brain, created by spirits and substances and pain and neglect. They weren’t real. I am…”

The voice echoed. Willie stood and wheeled on one heel, almost falling, and far too near the tracks to be safe. The other voices most certainly did not echo and they didn’t project in this way. They were thoughts, and he knew this on some level, as disjointed and out of control as they were, they were part of him. No part of him could ever dream of speaking this forcefully, this assured of himself. “And … and who are you? I thought you were Red. But you’re not him at all!”

“Oh, Willie, poor little child, abandoned in a crack den when he was only three. The horrors you’ve seen.” There was a throaty rumble to the voice. A malice beneath it all. “I’m the answer to all the questions you’ve been asking for all these years. When do you get yours, Willie? A warm bed, safe, away from all the shadows that stalk you, day and night.”

“Where’s Red!?” wailed Willie, grasping at the shaggy mop of hair atop his head. A matted lock drifted to the concrete, severed by the blade he still clutched. “What did you do to him!?”

“Oh, Willie… Assuredly you know…”

“No! I don’t know nothin’! Know-nothin’ Willie, that’s what they call me…” Willie trailed off, utterly befuddled as he stared down at the hair on the hard floor. For the first time he was truly conscious of what occupied his right hand. Where had this blade come from? Gleaming, white, it caught the light and didn’t let go. When he shielded it from the light in the traincar with his body it remained perfectly defined as if glowing.

“You spoke on your need for safety, denied you so long, pursued to the ends of the earth you’ve been, ghosts in every building, ghouls stalking your every step. We spoke at length when first we met; you, looking for a soft place to lay, me, I was already laying in the breast of an ex-lover.” This voice fairly purred, deeply intoning a hypnotic patter. “We lay there, the three of us, chatting, and then, together you and I departed, leaving behind that piece of old, uncooperative baggage.”

“No. I don’t remember… So dark down here. Most of the tunnels just have … emergency lighting. Didn’t see.”

“We both know that isn’t true, Willie. Let’s not retread what’s already said and done.”

Tears flowed now, dirty streaks of filth washing ash and dust into his matted beard. “Where’s Red?” he sobbed, looking around for the source of the voice. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be one of Willie’s own voices.

“Where does Red live, Willie? Think.”

“No…”

“You said that Red was the smartest man you’ve ever known. That, ‘if anyone at all could make heads or tails of this little trinket, it’d be him’. But you were wrong, weren’t you?”

Willie felt his chest clench painfully and prayed for a heart attack. His stomach lurched and he felt certain he was going to vomit but nothing came. Grasping his stomach he realized he hadn’t eaten in days but couldn’t remember what hunger felt like. “Red?” he called, without hope. There was only one way to know.

Climbing unsteadily the steps of the traincar, Willie saw Red, a jumbled scarecrow on the floor, ginger hair and beard shorn and maintained by the gadget he found in the dumpster. ‘Just needed a fuse’ Red had told him. Above him on the wall, the dirty mirror, the gadget itself nearby, on but with its battery depleted. For a Mole Person Red seemed so well-adjusted, and spoke frequently of returning to the surface. He was gifted with technology, having actually gotten the internet into the tunnels using the line from an abandoned payphone near the traincar. All that had driven him from the surface, all that kept him here, was what he called ‘social anxiety’. But he solved it talking to people online.

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“He … he said he had an interview. Second interview… Going up top…”

“That’s right, Willie. He had no time to look over the shining, pretty thing of copper with the golden hilt. Ancient, yet untouched by time, he suggested you leave it on that table right there. But you had to keep it and there was no time to wait, was there? If he had no time for you then you would make time … for him…”

Lowering down slowly, Willie got to his hands and knees, trying to leave the pretty thing aside for his grisly task but finding that releasing his hold on it was truly impossible. Still, he reached poor Red, and saw clearly a clean hole in the man’s shirt. Gently tugging on the collar, Willie exposed a wound, right over the heart, over and into Red. “No blood. How?” Looking at poor Red’s face, Willie noted that his eyes were sunken, his gums pulled back from his teeth and his lips from his gums. “He’s like … a mummy?”

“For the master to walk the world his two servants must meet. The first servant is ancient, among the first of men. The second, who gathers the blood, makes himself as he does his work. First the blood of three sacrifices must be made, not spilt but drank deeply like wine by the second servant. These are, in order, the sacrifice of a legion, the sacrifice of a loved one, then the sacrifice of oneself. I knew you would be the one to fulfill the prophecy, Willie. After so many have failed … it’s you.”

“Wh-what? Prophecy…?” On his knees, bleary eyes pushing, trying to escape their sockets, Willie lifted his pretty prize up before him. It was a dagger, the blade was gleaming copper, impossibly radiant, the handle was gold. A lion’s roar spat forth the dagger’s blade, his mane becoming the crossguard. The hilt of the dagger was the stabbing horns of a bull. The knife was clean, utterly, even the point that he knew had poked into his fingertip.

“I was born in the aftermath of the fall from innocence, in the infancy of your world’s first city. First wielded by the first man not driven to madness when my master visited them in a dream, beneath the dirt floor of his hovel he found me. He taught the people the worth of war, the natural order of death and how disease and decay are nothing but fertile earth in which to grow something better. Spreading. Mesopotamia. Sumeria. Babylon. The whole of the Akkadian Empire. An endless cycle of sacrifice, loss and rebirth. I have been passed through thousands of hands. Each host makes meat for the master, slaking my thirst, and gathering the life of those sacrificed to bring forth my master, finally, to walk upon this world…”

This time there was no confusion. Willie looked straight into the sculpted eyes of lion and bull when he spoke. “Who are you?”

“Who I am is not important, therefore I shall tell you. I am my master’s fang, called Saggasušulmu, when I walk in the flesh. Carved by my edge the lord of death, disease and war will be birthed, borne into the world by the sacrifice of a god. In your tongue I would be called ‘one who finds great happiness in murder’ or, more simply … ‘Killjoy’.”

A sudden realization. “No! I … I killed Red! It’s true! You made me kill him!” Struggling to rise, Willie found himself unable to straighten his legs. Throwing the dagger seemed impossible, the motion instead seeming to be a series of wicked stabs at the air.

“Yes, Red died. Before him, of course, the others in these tunnels had to go. Easy meals. Practice. Working up to the sacrifice of a loved one. You felt little for them, for they were little more than competitors for what little resources were down here. So thorough you were. I doubt their bodies will be found before being rendered unto dust and bone.”

Terror gripped the poor old hobo. “What!? Why!?”

“Power, Willie. Power, and I had to be sure you would go through with the ritual. We had to bond before my work could complete.”

“No! I won’t do no ritual! I’ll get rid of you! Yes, I will!” protested poor Willie, plucking up his nerve.

“Oh … poor boy, you don’t understand. Red there, he was honest and true to you and, really, was going to make good with his promise to take you up topside when he left the tunnels. Doubtless you’d be wondrous, awkward roommates living sexless, silly lives. Maybe you’d even learn to stop being so scared of your own shadow. When you killed him, the betrayal in his eyes was glorious for you had sacrificed your final loved one. The last living being in all creation that saw you as anything but a burden.”

“No!” It was a long, plaintive wail. Willie was starting to recognize that he was an animal in a trap and his options were dwindling.

“Yes! And when you pricked your finger I likewise drank of you. The sacrifice of oneself.”

“No. No, you … you want to wear me, I see it! Host. You said host! I’ll stop you! I’ll … I’ll…” Clenching his eyes shut, gritting his teeth, Willie did the only thing he thought would stop Saggasušulmu; he plunged the blade of the dagger into his own heart. The pain was immense, electric, expansive, as if he was leaving his body, expanding out to occupy the entirety of his surroundings.

“Foolish child, deceived by such a simple lie. Only now is the sacrifice of oneself complete. Take solace, Willie; Even if you’d known that I caused your compulsion, you couldn’t have stopped the action of your own hands. Now … the final step. You need only speak the name of our Master. You know it now. Call out to him and receive the power of Saggasušulmu, the joy of killing. Walk the Earth as an agent of carnage! Existing only to bring Him here! To ravage! To destroy! To rule!”

Shaking, struggling, Willie looked about himself in an impossible panic. Lights dimmed, the sparks outside bursting time and again, threatening to set the underground aflame. “Nn! Nnnuh…” He struggled. Something else was there on the other side, nothing above, in front, behind above or below but one step over into another realm and it was coming through. He bit his tongue, hard, shaking his head, spitting out the tip, hoping that the wound would prevent the utterance of what he now knew he must not say. What he, nevertheless, would say… “No! Nooo! Nuh—!”

“Speak! His! Name!” commanded Saggasušulmu, voice thundering as power arced explosively from the third rail, his will impacted Willie’s mind with the force of a meteor strike.

“Nir-gal!” he boomed, a blast exploding out this time not from without but from within, shorting out the third rail, shattering every window in the traincar and plunging the world into darkness. For a moment all was still. Spirit fled, entrapped or perhaps destroyed, what was Willie was now, effectively, gone. In its place was a deeper patch of darkness, consuming what little light existed in the underground now that the electricity had been destroyed. There, framed in broken glass, twin pinpoints of baleful blue light grew to form scowling eyes, a third below grew into a hateful grin, the surrounding darkness shone as an aura of light next to this demonic shadow. Finally, spat forth by an ocean of blood drained beneath the streets of New York City, the Killjoy walked the earth again.