Free Bullet Through Your Face (improved format) by Edward Lee Page A

get him a beer,” Rudy politely repeated. He
went back to the squalid living room, bearing an ashtray and a shaker
of salt. “So, Gor. Tell me about yourself.”
The lunatic grin roved about. “I am but a lowly salt-diviner, once
blessed by the Ea, now curs’d by Nergal.”
“Uh . . . huh,” Rudy acknowledged.
“I was an Ashipu, a white and goodly acolyte, but, lo, I sold
my soul to Nergal, The Wretched God of the Ebon. Pity me, in my
sin: my repentance was ignored. Banished from heaven, banished
from hell, I am now accursed to trod the earth’s foul crust forever,
inhabiting random bodies as the vessel for my eternal spirit.”
“Uh . . . huh,”
“Jesus,” Beth whispered. Disapproval now fully creased her face
when she gave Gormok a can of Bud. Yeah, we’ve got a live one ,
Rudy thought. The next fight—Jenkins versus Clipper—was on the west coast; it would be running late. “That’s pretty, uh, interesting,
    Gormok. You think maybe you feel like doing the salt thing again?
Beer foam bubbled at Gormok’s grin. “The alomance!”
“Uh, yeah, Gor. The . . . alomance. I could really use to know who’ s gonna win the Jenkins-Clipper bout.”
    Gormok’s grin never
fluctuated. He knelt on tacky carpet tiles
and went into his arcane ritual of burning salt in a napkin, then
inhaling the smoke which wafted up from the ashtray. He seemed to
wobble on his knees. “The warrior b’named Clipper, dear friend, in
the sixth spell of conflict.” Then he collapsed to the floor.
    “Holy shit!” Rudy and Beth rushed to help the alomancer up.
“Gor! Are you all right?” Rudy asked.
“Too much for one day.” Gormok’s voice sounded drugged.
“Put me abed, dear ones. I’ll be better on the morrow.”
“The couch,” Rudy suggested . “Let’s get him on the—”
“Deep and down,” Gormok inanely remarked. “I must be deep,
as all damned Nashipus are so cursed. Get me near the cenotes.”
“A cenote is a hole in the ground,” Beth recalled from her
college myth classes. “They’d hold rituals in them, sacrifice virgins
and things like that.”
A hole in the— “The basement?” Rudy suggested.
Beth opened the ringed trap-door, then they both lugged the
muttering and rubber-kneed Gormok down the wooden steps.
“Better, yes! Sweet, sweet . . . dark.”
They lay the bizarre man on an old box-spring next to the washer
and drier. Dust eddied up from the dirt floor. “He’s heavier than a bag
of bricks!” Beth complained.
Rudy draped an old army blanket over him. “There.”
“Ea, I heartily do repent,” Gormok blabbered incoherently.
“Absolve my sins, I beg of Thee!” He began to drool. “And curse
thee, Nergal, unclean despoiler! Haunter! Deceiver of souls! ”
“Uh . . . huh,” Rudy remarked, staring down. Yeah, we’ve got a
live one, all right. A real winner.
III
    In bed, they bickered rather than slept. “I can’t believe you invited
that weirdo into our house,” Beth bellyached.
“I didn’t hear you complaining,” Rudy refuted.
“Well, you do now. He’s . . . scary.”
“You don’t believe all that mumbo-jumbo, do you? It’s just a
bunch of schizo crap he made up.”
“It’s not made up, Rudy. I majored in ancient history, that
is, before I had to quit school and go to work to keep you out of
cement loafers. Cenotes, ziggurats, alomancy—it’s all straight out
of Babylonian myth. This guy says he’s possessed by the spirit of a
Nashipu salt-diviner. That’s the same as saying he’s a demon.”
Rudy chuckled outright. “Somebody hit you in the head with
a dumb-stick? He’s a flake, Beth. He probably escaped from St.
Elizabeth’s in the back of a garbage truck and read about all that stuff
in some occult paperback. He thinks he’s possessed by a demon.
And so what? Let him think what he wants. What’s important to us
is the guy’s genuinely psychic . You heard him, he predicted that fat
barkeep’s squeeze was cheating on him.”
“That could be just coincidence,