|
|
Chapter 27
Bad to the Bone
Buffy slammed on the brakes and the car slewed almost ninety degrees amid a cloud of acrid tire smoke. She snapped the radio off irritably and glowered at the man sitting next to her. Not having driven a stick in almost eighty years, it took her a moment to get the vehicle into first and move it off to the side of the road.“That was fun. Can we do it again?” said the man beside her. She knew who it was even though he wore a different face again. This time he looked like Whistler, right down to the hat and leather coat in the midst of the shimmering desert heat.
“What the hell are you trying to do? Get me killed?” snapped Buffy.
“Now there’s a thought,” said Lucifer.
Buffy looked around at the stark landscape, at the inside of the car, down at the clothes she wore, and she felt a cold dread. She knew the car, this place. She knew the time. And she knew what had happened just a few days earlier in the small town of Roselawn, Arizona. She felt her palms go damp. No, it wasn’t real. Couldn’t be.
“Nice illusion. I didn’t know you were an artist as well as an asshole,” she said.
“Moi, an artist? Not I. I didn’t create any of this. This is all in your head, locked away with all the other nightmares and personal demons.”
He inhaled deeply, as if the dry desert air and the faint pine scent from the car’s old, evergreen-shaped cardboard air freshener were a bracing sensory tonic.
“Ah, the open road,” he said. “Getting your kicks on Route 66. In a classic piece of Detroit iron, too. How very Jack Kerouac of you. I like the fact that it’s stolen, too. It does my heart good whenever you cross the line from misdemeanors to felonies. Gives me a warm glow, a real sense of pride and accomplishment.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Hmm. No, I don’t think I’ll do that,” said Lucifer. He tapped the dashboard. “Do you remember this? This overpowered iron monument to the male ego, these beautifully barren surroundings? Of course you do. We wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Buffy tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “It’s a long story.”
“No, it’s not. This is where it all started, isn’t it? Where you passed that silly line in the sand the Watchers had drawn for you. It was a long time ago. No Dark Hunter to blame for leading you astray back then. It was all you.”
Buffy swallowed hard and nodded.
“Don’t look so dyspeptic, Buffy. Just because a bunch of sorry-ass old fossils say something is wrong or evil doesn’t make it so. Last time I checked, no one ever granted the Board or the Council omniscience in these matters.”
She didn’t answer, just sat staring fixedly ahead, trying to will the vision away. But it wouldn’t go away.
Lucifer sighed. “Oh, all right. I can see we’re going to have to do this the hard way. I hate the ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ routine. It’s become a terrible cliché, but if I must then I suppose I must. So let’s back up a bit. Let’s, as they say, take it from the top …”
Suddenly, they were standing outside a high school. The words “Roselawn High” arched in stark white letters across the brick facade.
School was letting out for the day and students were departing with a sense of freedom that Buffy envied. Even when she herself was one of them in L.A. and Sunnydale, she hadn’t known that freedom, that lightness of soul. Not since her destiny had embraced her.
But this scene was spoiled for Buffy by something else, too, by an oppressive and ominous shadow that had fallen over the school and its students like a suffocating fog. There was nothing supernatural about the evil that charged the air around her, that darkened her mind and sharpened the rage that had always lurked in the corners of her subconscious. No, this evil was all too human.
Buffy watched the man lurking in the shadowed interior of the black Camaro across the street and felt revulsion rise in her. Revulsion and something worse. Hate. White hot and all-consuming. She tried to squelch the feeling but it was hopeless. It embraced her mind like a lethal lover, clouding sense and overriding rational thought with a primal instinct to violence.
“It was your second year on the road after leaving Sunnydale, if I recall,” said Lucifer conversationally. “Ah, yes. Mr. Bobby Beaugard Tippet. Sexual sadist and serial murderer of women. Old, young, rich, poor — it didn’t matter to Bobby. He was an equal opportunity psychopath. Sixteen women in two years. That was a better score than even your friend Kurtz. Such a precocious student of mine! Bobby would have gone far if he hadn’t run into you … oh, here we go. The show’s about to begin. Let’s watch, shall we? It’s going to be good. All the critics say so.”
Buffy was distracted from Tippet by a bag of popcorn being shoved under her nose. She grimaced at Lucifer and he withdrew it.
“No? More for me then,” he said as he popped a handful of exploded kernels into his mouth.
Tippet’s dead, psychotic gaze came to rest on a young blonde girl, probably no older than fifteen. Even from a distance, Buffy could see the insane, lifeless spark in his eyes, the fevered hunger for death and pain that consumed his every waking thought. She felt her stomach churn.
“Ooh, look,” said Lucifer. “Here’s the part where he picks out number seventeen. Look at the joy in his eyes, the feral instinct for the kill. A beautiful thing to behold, isn’t it? You know what he’s thinking right now? He’s thinking about all the things he wants to do to her. And what an imagination! Why, if my torturers had but a tenth of his creativity and sadism, I’d have been much better served all these years, let me tell you.”
The girl began walking home and Buffy heard the guttural rumble of the small block Chevy as Tippet pulled out into the street to follow her.
Then she and Lucifer were standing on an empty side street, a dry wind sweeping dust and sere grass clippings into little dervishes on the hot, shimmering pavement.
The girl rounded the corner and started up the walkway to a neat, white split-level with a picket fence and a welcome mat on the porch.
As she turned the key in the lock, the Camaro rounded the corner …
“I hate this part,” said Lucifer. “All this suspense is simply terrible for my heart. I fear I shall develop an arrhythmia if I allow so much stress in my life. Let’s fast forward a bit. Twizzler?”
He tried to hand Buffy a red strand of licorice and she waved him off irritably. Then they were inside the house, in the living room, watching as the girl dropped her school books on the couch and turned on the television with a remote control. She wandered into the kitchen to pour herself some orange juice from the refrigerator, and with the television on, she never heard the door open.
“Uh, oh. Doesn’t she know better than to leave the front door unlocked? In these troubled times? Why, anyone could come waltzing right in!” said Lucifer.
Bobby Beaugard Tippet was ugly in the way that only psychopaths seemed to be. It was the eyes, thought Buffy. They weren’t so much dead as they were invested with the twisted gleam of anti-life, as if evil and madness had been welded in a forge into a seamless, soulless fusion of white-hot, monomaniacal darkness. The eyes were sunken into a cadaverous head, the sockets dark-ringed and the oily cheeks sunken. The nostrils of Tippet’s nose alternately flared and collapsed like those of an animal. He was dressed in a torn army-surplus fatigue jacket, torn blue jeans, and dirty, disintegrating tennis shoes.
He carried with him the tools of his trade: duct tape, electrical cord, a hunting knife and a scalpel. Buffy knew he liked the scalpel the best.
Bobby Beaugard Tippet moved toward the kitchen …
Buffy found herself near the screen door at the rear of the house, watching as the girl put the orange juice carton back into the refrigerator and shut the door. She turned.
The glass in her hand seemed to fall very slowly to the floor as she saw Tippet framed in the entrance from the living room. It tumbled slightly as it fell, the orange liquid sloshing out over the rim, the liquid contorting in the zero gravity dance of freefall. The glass struck the linoleum at the edge of its base. The impact created a small fracture that inexorably propagated through the rest of the glass’ structure. Then the whole glass seemed to come apart simultaneously, collapsing into a broken and shattered debris field on the bright colors of the floor and settling amid the spreading puddle of juice.
Tippet started forward, knife drawn.
The screen door opened and Buffy saw herself enter the house, saw herself close the distance to Tippet in two smooth steps, saw the look of shock on his face at the unexpected development. The look of surprise was replaced by one of pain as the Slayer broke the wrist with an aikido locking move, sending the knife clattering to the floor.
He was so surprised that he never saw the martial arts knife-hand strike that flashed toward his throat to crush his windpipe. But Buffy saw it. She knew it was coming. She remembered that moment, had it etched into her brain. It was the moment she had finally crossed the line from mostly light into mostly shadow and then on into darkness. She saw Tippet’s insane eyes grow large as he fell to the floor, writhing, unable to breathe. She saw the terror and incomprehension in the young girl’s eyes. And she saw herself, saw the rage and the undercurrent of sadistic satisfaction in her face.
She turned away.
“Ooh, you enjoyed that. I could tell,” said Lucifer.
“It was wrong. I was wrong.”
“Really? That’s odd. Bobby killed more people more cruelly than many of the vampires you slew over the years. And he would have kept doing it if you hadn’t stopped him. If killing him was an immoral act, maybe I don’t have this universe figured correctly.”
“I should have gone to the police, the FBI,” said Buffy.
“Ah, yes. The authorities. And by the time you did that, he would have drifted on, slipped through the cracks. Oh, I suppose he would have been caught eventually. But how many more victims before then, I wonder?”
“I was judge, jury, and executioner. That’s not what I was ever supposed to be.”
“That’s always exactly what you were, Buffy,” said Lucifer. “Let me ask you something. You never killed Whistler. Why? He was a demon. Slayers are supposed to kill demons, aren’t they?”
“I didn’t kill him because he wasn’t evil, as far as I could tell,” said Buffy.
“So, you judged him not guilty. Just as you judged all those others guilty. You judged them, sentenced them, and executed them. And you were right to do it, too.”
“They were evil. Killers.”
“Yes! Of course they were. Just like Bobby Beaugard Tippet.”
“It’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same,” said Lucifer.
“He had a soul.”
“Oh, big whoop. He had a soul. So did Angel when you ran him through the heart with a broadsword, if I recall.”
“I had to do that to save the world. I didn’t have a choice,” said Buffy. She knew where the trap was headed. It wasn’t subtle, but she didn’t have the energy to avoid it.
“Yes, to save the lives of others you had to kill Angel. You sent his immortal soul to my world because one tarnished soul is a good trade when set against many innocent ones. So you had to kill him, just as you had to kill Bobby Beaugard Tippet to save others. Buffy, not killing Bobby would have been to commit evil through omission. You’re not stupid. You can see that much, surely.”
“Just what is your point?” asked Buffy irritably.
“My point is to get you to think outside that damn Slayer box you’ve been trapped in all these years. Giles and the Watchers have got your head so turned around you can’t even tell black from white anymore. In killing Bobby Tippet you deprived me of a valuable, finely crafted tool of evil. It’s very difficult for me to create a Bobby Tippet. It takes care and effort and time. And yet you’re guilt-ridden for having killed a man who tortured sixteen women to death. What kind of perverse sense is there in that? Because the Watchers say it’s a good thing, you help me by sending my wayward disciples back to me and you’re proud of it. But because they tell you it’s morally wrong to kill a human being, when the day comes that you finally really do strike a blow for the forces of light, you kick yourself for it and tear yourself apart with guilt. You’ve been living your life backwards for a hundred and seven years, Buffy. You’ve always been mine and you never even knew it. Time to just admit it to yourself and come on over to my side officially.”
Buffy looked down at the floor, at the corpse of Bobby Beaugard Tippet, through the bay window at her younger self making her escape from Roselawn in the stolen Camaro. She looked inside herself and saw all the layers of good and bad, light and dark, nobility and weakness she had seen before, whether in the nightmares of troubled sleep or in the harsh glare of waking self-examination. But there was nothing new there, no great revelation. It was all just the old morality play running out its inevitable, depressing acts, a personal drama that never ended with either catharsis or climax, just with an uncertain and directionless dissolution into a haze of conflicting moral imperatives. A maze. It had always been just a maze, a twisted ethical puzzle that set her up for failure again and again. Maybe Lucifer was right. Maybe, probably, he was lying. Maybe the truth was somewhere in between. Maybe it didn’t even matter, if she couldn’t recognize truth and right to begin with. And maybe all along the truth had never resided with the Watchers or with the Dark Hunter or with some simplified pop-up book model of the ethical universe. Maybe it had always been inside her, deep down in the part that was, after so very long, still human.
She stepped closer to Lucifer and placed her lips near his ear.
“News flash, you sociopathic bastard. I’m not your bitch. Get the hell out of my head,” she whispered.
With a snarl, Lucifer pushed her away so hard that she lost her balance and fell.
“You stupid girl! Don’t you see what’s been going on for the past hundred years? Don’t you? You’ve been duped. Your entire life’s been a con perpetrated by the almighty sons of bitches that run the multiverse. There’s never been any need for a Slayer. It’s all been a performance piece.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Buffy, getting unsteadily to her feet.
“Do you honestly think that things like vampires and demons could roam your world if entities like Flynn didn’t want them to? You, me, hell, earth — it’s all a giant game to them. They set the board with us and let us fight it out to the last pawn. We live and we fight and we die so those bastards can find the army they need to fight some mythical final battle against the Abstract.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care anymore, Buffy. I really don’t. It’s over,” said Lucifer as the kitchen faded into a landscape of fire and desolation. He swept his arm in an arc to encompass it. “It’s all gone. Check and mate. You’ve won. Passed all their tests. More’s the pity for you and the universe. So long, kid. We could’ve been great together …”
Something seemed to distract the archdemon momentarily, then his face twisted into an angry snarl.
“BITCH!” he yelled, but not, it seemed, at Buffy.
Suddenly, the artificial reality surrounding her shattered like a mirror struck by a baseball bat, the shards spinning away into a deep, utter darkness and leaving her back where she started — standing at the railing of the gallery, looking out at the towering double helix. A sound caught her attention and she looked downward to find its source. There, at the base of the amalgamated manifestation, was Lillith with her disjunction sledge, and she didn’t seem the least bit happy.
* * *
“Lay the hell off her or I swear I’ll break every last Seal in the Sanctuary and let the Abstract bleed you dry,” snarled Lillith.
No.
Lillith swung the improvised disjunction sledge in a broad arc that shattered the second of the black and red seals. It broke easily, much more easily than Buffy thought it should have. As it shattered, a sound like a hundred thousand screams carried from a vast distance on a winter wind echoed through the Sanctuary. A swirl of gauzy light shot upward like a vast, incandescent phantom.
“The Chaos Storms and First Ones have done a real job of weakening your protection wards, Lucifer. The Necrotic Lattices have started to lose cohesion. They’re not much of a challenge for me, even trapped in this body,” said Lillith.
The Summers bitch is mine. She’s always been mine.
“Are you suicidal? You always were guilty of foolish pride, Lucifer,” said Lillith. “She’ll never be yours. Just live with it. Or die with it. I don’t care which.”
She raised the disjunction sledge and a third seal was reduced to rubble.
Enough, Lillith.
“Enough? I’m just getting started, you fucking pathological prick.”
A fourth seal joined the two others.
“These two have issues, don’t they?” Xander asked Buffy as he and Angel joined her at the railing.
“I’m getting that impression,” said the Slayer.
“Lillith, chill! I’m free now,” she yelled down to the Elder power.
Lillith took a deep breath. “I’m cool.”
The Elder Power turned her gaze on the demonic double helix. “So, what’s it going to be? Three more Seals and you’re a dead demon.”
Suddenly, she swung the sledge again.
“Oops. Two.”
“Lillith!” snapped Buffy.
You’ve made your point.
“I’m just getting started making my point, asshole,” Lillith snarled.
“Lillith!” Buffy yelled again
“Let us go, Lucifer. You can stay in here and rot for all eternity if you’re too much of a coward to fight, but you let us go,” said Lillith to the manifestation.
Fine. Get out. You’re all dead anyway. You just haven’t admitted it to yourselves yet. Good riddance.
“Buffy, try for the exit now,” Lillith called up to her.
Buffy motioned the others to follow and she covered the short distance to the nearest exit without difficulty — no lengthening or foreshortening galleries, no mind games, no supernatural tricks. She ushered the others out into the corridor and shouted, “We’re clear, Lillith! Thanks.”
She followed the others outside and leaned against the curving wall with a sigh.
“Wow. That was a head trip,” she said.
“You okay?” asked Angel, worry darkening his face.
“What happened in there?” asked Elisa.
“I’m fine. I just got the grand tour of the inside of my mind, that’s all. It’s a scary place,” said Buffy, trying hard to keep her tone up to her usual standards of casual disregard for personal danger. But it wasn’t how she felt inside, not by a long shot. Quite to the contrary, she found herself profoundly unsettled by the entire incident. It would be so easy to just dismiss everything Lucifer had said as a lie, and most of it probably was, but what if some of it wasn’t? What if … what if she really had been working for his benefit her entire life? What did that mean for her, for who she thought she was, for what her whole life had been predicated on?
Her ruminations were interrupted by Lillith coming up the corridor and playfully swinging the disjunction sledge in one hand.
One look at the ice in Buffy’s eyes, though, and the Elder Power stopped dead in her tracks.
“What? What now? Jeez, is there nothing I can ever do to please you people?” asked Lillith.
“Well, actually there is,” said Buffy. “Lillith, you and I need to have a long talk about a few things.”