The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [149]
The Light That Never Shines could sense the aura of death when she entered, but couldn't be sure if this was the result of a mathematical or sensory deduction. She was sure, however, about her plan.
"We split up," she said, ignoring the uneasy looks of her companions.
She was reckoning on implementing an increased number of distractions by instructing the Psychomatics to wander separately through the Gutter's hunting ground. If they remained as a group, the Gutter would monitor them and trap them too easily. By multiplying the targets, she would improve the ratio of possibilities as regards turning the hunter into the hunted.
It was all about odds; and, from the point of view of saving her skins, her plan was absolutely necessary.
Toran Finniff was a specialist in pyrotechnics who had joined the Psychomatics over a year ago. He wasn't adept at stealth missions like this one. He was usually a behind-the-scenes man who preferred operating from afar.
Which made him easy meat for the Gutter, who leapt out from behind a garish figurine fashioned in the likeness of fuck knows what.
The Gutter plunged the Gutting Knife into the man's abdomen and dragged it sidewise with a vicious twist that tore a gash across his belly. The Gutter felt the warmth of entrails spilling over his hand, and it was good.
Toran Finniff didn't scream when he was riffed, but merely exhaled like a punctured bladder. When he hit the ground, he groaned in despair at his sudden demise. The groan wafted like one of the Gutter's smells through the gloomy halls and corridors of the Museum.
The Gutter was pleased by this effect.
It would scare the living shit out of them.
The Jiggler was an assassin who specialised in the use of a blow pipe loaded with poison darts. The environmental drawbacks of the Museum of Darkest Arts displeased him.
He had found himself emerging from a staircase onto a causeway suspended over a space of darkness which he took to be some kind of architectural feature.
He leaned over the railing and peered.
Nothing.
He leaned back and flinched when he heard the lingering groan of someone dying. He froze and listened.
The noise of the groan was coming from everywhere.
The Jiggler hastened across the causeway and entered a meandering corridor where the Gutter was waiting for him with a grin on his lips that writhed like worms.
A blow pipe was useless under such circumstances.
Even as the Jiggler backed off from his attacker, the blows were reigning down on his chest, splitting his ribs like bits of kindling and bursting the organs underneath.
The Jiggler neither screamed nor groaned. He spluttered.
And the splutters resonated like an underground stream across the awkward vaults of the Museum.
And, once again, the Gutter was pleased.
Mattosis was drawn by the sound of the splutter ― first one way, then the next.
He didn't like it. Not one bit at all. He was a big man who carried a war hammer under his cloak. But there was no room to swing his mighty weapon in this musty confusion of thwarted pits and warped passages.
He drifted into a stairwell that took him deeper into the murk of a lower level of display chambers. A single torch-light blazed in one of them. Like a moth to the flame, Mattosis was drawn.
The restricted illuminations revealed a multitude of obscure paintings screwed to the walls; and, for a moment, Mattosis lost himself in the fantastical array of artistic fiascos of bygone epochs.
He smiled when he recognised a post-Apocalyptic landscape created by Meral of Skitten, a pioneer of the Catastrophist Movement whose works were later diminished by the greater accomplishments of his successor, Potriech of Skow. While Potriech's masterpieces took pride of place in the city's galleries, Meral, it seems, had been demoted to the Museum of Darkest Arts, which appeared to Mattosis