大象传媒

Not really, of course, but on this night she had chosen to play that role. When patrolling as the Slayer consisted of spending all her time trawling cemeteries for the latest accountant or high school student to rise from the grave as a vampire - just so she could put them back there again - Buffy could wear whatever she liked. Comfortable clothes: sweats, jeans, boots, even sneakers. Some nights she grew bored with the practical look and attempted to be a bit more fashionable in her war against the forces of darkness.

But tonight was different.

She wore torn low-rider jeans that showed her hip bones and felt as though they might slip that last precious, strategic inch at any moment. Her half shirt revealed a fake navel ring and Celtic patterns henna-tattooed around her belly button. Black fingernail polish, too much makeup, and hair in a wild tangle that fell across her face finished the picture.

More than anything, she looked as though she had raided Faith's closet.

But if she was going to go unnoticed in Docktown, get people to talk to her, she was going to have to fit in. As a rule, Buffy’s detective work generally consisted of pummelling secrets out of demons and their disciples. Woman of a thousand faces she was not. Yet three nights of patrolling Docktown in the usual fashion had yielded no leads on the trio of violent murders that had taken place there in the last three weeks and so she had been forced to endure two extremely difficult trials. The first was to disguise herself in this fashion - she felt like an advertisement for Sluts 'R' Us - but the second trial was even more challenging.

In order for her to discover what was killing people in Docktown, Buffy was going to have to be patient.

"Hey, darlin'," drawled a stout, brutish man with shaggy hair and thick, dark sideburns. He had moved up next to her at the bar with elephantine stealth and waited for her to notice his Popeye-size biceps, complete with anchor tattoo.

The music of The Black Crowes poured out of the throbbing sound system, and at the other end of the bar a pair of stringy-haired girls danced suggestively with one another, to the whooping delight of the men around them. In the back sailors and fishermen played pool and swore loudly each time money was lost or won. Tables were jammed full of people drinking beer and eating fried clams and the catch of the day.

It was a typical night in the Fish Tank. If you lived in Docktown, chances were your family made its living on or from the sea, on a fishing boat or a merchant ship or at one of the transport companies or warehouses that lined the waterfront. And for young people in Docktown, filled with blue-collar pride but not yet old enough to be worn down by their work, the Fish Tank was what passed for clubbing.

There had been three mutilation murders in the past three weeks in Docktown, all between the Fish Tank and the wharf. It was possible that human beings had done the killing, but not likely. Not here in Sunnydale, where the Hellmouth - a place where the barrier between Earth and the demon dimensions had worn thin — drew monsters like moths to the flame. That meant Buffy had to look into it. It wasn’t her job exactly, but it was her responsibility. She was the Slayer, the one girl in all the world Chosen to receive a gift of power, power with which she must combat the forces of darkness.

Not fun. Of course if it had been fun, the Powers wouldn’t have had to choose someone to foist the duty on,would they? There'd have been a line around the corner. But no line. Nobody actually wanted the job.

So it was down to her.

Tonight that meant making herself fit in at the Fish Tank, trying to overhear some conversation that would give her a clue as to what was killing people down here, or better yet, chancing to see some behaviour that was even more suspicious than the usual. Sherlock Holmes she was not, but she hadn’t been getting anywhere by skulking in the shadows.

Instead, here she was, humiliating herself by putting on a costume many months before Halloween and dealing with morons like this stumpy little muscle head in need of a shave, a shower, and a lesson in manners.

"Snap out of it, babe. I’m talkin’ to you."

Buffy flashed him her best faux cheerleader smile. "Oh,I'm sorry, did you not realise I was ignoring you? Wait, is this better?" She tossed her blonde hair back and spun away from him so that her back was to him completely.

Stumpy sputtered, rendered incapable of human speech by the depth of his offence. Buffy figured he was used to being rejected by women, but that the average girl in the Fish Tank would have spent more energy on that rejection. Her focus was elsewhere. She tipped back her virgin screwdriver - a glass of orange juice - and scanned the bar again over the rim of her glass. Under normal circumstances she would have been watching for someone a little shady, perhaps somewhat edgy and suspicious looking. At the Fish Tank, that description covered all of the regular clientele.

Yet there was one patron there in the bar that had drawn Buffy’s attention. He was a slim, well-tanned man in a business suit and bright green tie. In every way he was ordinary looking. There were many women who might have thought him mildly handsome, but few who would later be able to recall his face. The greying hair at his temples perhaps, and the verdant brightness of that tie, but not his face.

Not for the first time he caught Buffy looking at him. Rather than smiling uncertainly, intrigued by the attentions of a woman - skanky barfly chick or not - he glanced away and loosened his tie. This guy wasn’t a dockworker and he wasn’t a sailor. He wasn’t skipper of some fishing trawler and he wasn’t a factory worker or warehouse security guard. And it wasn’t only the suit that gave him away; he might have been any of those things and just come from a funeral or a day in court. No, it was everything in his presence, in his carriage, that cried out to those around him that he was out of place. He was jittery, his forehead slick with sweat, and he glanced nervously around as though terrified to be noticed but somehow yearning for attention as well.

At first Buffy had wondered if he was waiting for someone, some rendezvous with a secret lover in this place where they could be sure no one they knew might see them. But an hour and a half had passed since he had walked in - ninety minutes in which she had fended off enough unwanted advances to begin drawing more attention that she wanted - and it seemed clear now that the jittery man with the bright green tie was not expecting company.

But those eyes seemed to pale as the minutes passed, and they opened wider as he looked around again. A smile flickered at the edges of his mouth as though he held some secret he was certain the others in the Fish Tank would wish to share. The smile was replaced by a pained look, and the man's eyes narrowed confusedly. He clutched at his stomach and it seemed to Buffy that his suit jacket fluttered slightly, as if in some unseen breeze.

"Hey."

Buffy felt a finger poke the base of her spine.

"I'm talkin’ to you, honey. Maybe you better think about your attitude."

Slowly she turned to regard Stumpy again. His nostrils had begun to flare almost like an animal’s, and he seemed to stand a little taller. There was a dangerous light in his eye and menace in his stance; his muscles tensed as though he might strike her.

Now that he had her attention once more, Stumpy leered at her. "Not so uppity now, are you, sweets? Gotta learn some manners if you want to come round here. Startin’ with an apology. Right now."

Buffy glared at him, uncertain if she'd heard him right over the music and laughter and the clinking of beer mugs.

"An apology?"

The smile went away and only the danger and cruelty in the man's gaze remained. "I'm not walkin’ away from here without one."

Buffy tossed her hair back but there was no flirtation in it. Slowly, very purposefully, she stepped in closer to Stumpy, holding her breath so that she would not have to inhale the reeking stench of him. He was barely taller than she was, and Buffy nearly bumped against him now, the two nearly nose to nose.

"Then maybe," she said slowly, carefully enunciating every syllable, "you're not walking away."

His arrogance had been roiling off him as though part of his body odour, but he hesitated now beneath her furious stare. Uncertainty flitted across his eyes, but for nearly a full minute he withstood the intensity of her nearness and her anger. At last, though, he faltered and lowered his eyes. He paused as though he might have some final word, but then slipped away along the line of patrons at the bar in silence, sparing her only a single, anxious, backward glance.

Several women who seemed to know him snickered and hid sly smiles as he passed. One of them raised a beer mug toward Buffy, toasting her. Buffy nodded at her and flashed a small wave, both pleased by the other woman's gesture and self-conscious, as though she had let slip the mask of normalcy she had worn into this place. It made her wonder as well, this brief contact, if she was not more than a little prejudiced about the people she had found in this place. Most of them, she was sure, were honest and hardworking. But there could be no denying that the Fish Tank was an establishment where things regularly spun out of control.

Now, she thought, about the guy with the ferret.

As she turned, however, she bumped into a tall, slender figure who stood so close she could not at first see his face. Wraith-like, he had somehow managed to sneak up behind her and must have been standing only inches away.

"Hey!" Buffy protested, brow furrowing as she took a backward step and glared up into blue-green eyes, eyes like the ocean. "Not big on personal space invasion."

The man’s face was weathered and sallow and his hair cloud-white, so that only those bright eyes provided colour to his overall appearance. The rest of him from head to toe, including his grey pea coat and dark pants, seemed bleached and faded.

When he bent and spoke to her it was in a hoarse whisper as though he’d shouted his throat raw. The look upon his face was that of utmost gravity and it seemed to Buffy that he was about to impart to her all the dark secrets of the universe, or at least he thought so.

"They're coming back," the old sailor rasped, for certainly his dress and complexion spoke of many years at sea.

"Sorry? Who’s coming back?"

Ocean-green eyes twinkled even as salt-and-pepper brows knitted together.

"The Children of the Sea," he whispered grimly, and she could barely hear his words above the music. Then he glanced around as though suspicious others might be trying to listen in. "The shadow of Leviathan surges up from the depths, and the spawn of Kyaltha'yan - the lords of the endless fathoms, the orphans left behind by the Old Onesn - they're coming back. I hear them in the crash of the surf on the sand. They whisper to me." Buffy arched an eyebrow. "Uh-huh."

"The Children of the Sea return."

"This wouldn’t have anything to do with the Sunnydale High swim team, would it?"she asked, regarding him carefully. Freaky, to be certain, but she'd dealt with wigged-out old men spouting gibberish before. There was no reason to believe it had anything to do with the mutilation murders that had brought her here tonight. In another town it would have demanded her attention, but this was Sunnydale. The town was a hotbed of evil and weirdness, and that meant it was possible that mutilation murders in the same neighbourhood with strange old guys babbling about monsters might be just a coincidence.

Might be.

But it bore looking into.

"I’ll hate myself for this later, but maybe you could be a little more specific?" Buffy suggested.

Bright eyes narrowing almost sternly, the old man nodded. "You hear them as well."

"Sorry," she replied. "But no. Maybe if I put a seashell to my ear?"

"They rise and they must feed."

"Don't they always?"

Yet even as she said it, Buffy’s attention was drawn elsewhere. It was as though the music grew louder, volume increasing to an almost deafening pitch. The rhythm of motion as people moved around the bar changed as well - people stumbling into one another, getting up from tables so quickly that chairs toppled, waitresses dropping trays - and soon she saw that they flowed in a steady current of surprise away from one spot.

The ferret guy, she thought.

And it was. The people in the Fish Tank scrambled to get away from him, bottles and mugs shattering. Men cursed loudly. The old man with the cloud-white hair did not even turn around to seek out the source of the shouts and the chaos, but instead continued to stare expectantly at Buffy.

"Hold that thought," she told him, and then she shoved past him.

The rush of people away from the man in the bright green tie was like some mad exodus. Even as she shouldered and elbowed her way through, Buffy knew that she would really have to hurt someone to reach the man, whom she could only make out through the crowd now by the top of his head.

Adrenaline rushed through her and she leaped up on top of the bar. One of the waitresses actually yelled at her to get down but Buffy ignored her. She ran swiftly along the wooden bar but had not gone three steps before she saw what had sent the people scurrying. Her stomach churned with nausea and she hesitated.

That slender man in the business suit had not been carrying a ferret.

In one of his hands he held the ragged corpse of a redheaded waitress in a black apron. Her body had been torn and mutilated in seconds, but what had been done to her was clearly only the beginning of what would have happened. The man was no longer a man. His hands were scaly and green, and thick leathery webs connected his fingers, each of which ended in a long claw. His eyes were wide black things too large for his face, and they appeared to have burst out from within, so that his human eyes still hung on ropy muscle tendrils from their sockets. His face was sloughing off, revealing grey-green scales behind, and fins had torn out of the side of his neck, protruding through the skin.

But the worst were the thin, spiny vines that had erupted from his upper chest and now wavered in the air like tentacles, like some horrid combination of ravenous sea creature and deadly plant life. Even in the heartbeat that Buffy had paused, one of those thin, deadly appendages lashed out and wrapped itself around the throat of a man who brandished a table leg and dared to step nearer.

The snap of his neck resounded loudly in the bar. When the tentacle came away, its spines tore the flesh from the man's throat.

Then no other sound could be heard from the horrible creature as the room was awash in screams. People stampeded toward the doors at front and back. An alarm went off as someone crashed out the back door into the alley beyond. Windows shattered.

The tentacles lashed out at those nearest, and the thing began to follow after them.

"I don't think so." Buffy ran down the bar and, crouched on the countertop, snapped a kick out that connected solidly and wetly with its head.

"Let me guess," she said."Ate a bad piece of fish?"

More bits of that ordinary face it had once worn sloughed off, and the creature turned, hissing, toward Buffy. Its thin tentacles were faster than she expected and they lashed out at her.One tore through her pants and ripped a gash in her left leg. The Slayer swore loudly,but when the tentacles swept toward her again, she jumped over them. The thing's spines gouged the wooden bar. The last thing Buffy wanted to do was get any closer to this thing. The people had scattered and were shoving and shouting at either end of the Fish Tank now. When the tentacles lashed out again and the thing rushed at her, mouth now a circular, repulsive maw, she flipped backward off the bar and landed behind it, where she nearly stumbled over the corpse of the bartender. There was a large hole in his forehead where the creature had apparently driven one of its tentacles through his skull.

"Sorry," she muttered, though the word was lost in the roar of the music.

The Slayer turned to the row of liquor bottles beneath the mirror behind the bar. Her few flirtations with alcohol had ended badly, but she knew the difference between eighty-proof whiskey and one-hundred-fifty-proof rum - mainly that the former was just sticky while the latter was, more importantly, flammable.

Out of the corner of her eye Buffy saw a tentacle lashing at her. She ducked as the appendage tore the air just beside her and shattered liquor bottles and the huge mirror. But she had not moved quite fast enough and the needle-spines on the sides of that ropy tendril gashed her shoulder. As the shards of mirror and bottles showered around her, she swore, snatched the unbroken bottle of rum from the rack, and launched it at the creature.

It lashed out at the bottle, which shattered on impact, spraying this thing that used to be a man with alcohol. It shrieked as if the spattering rum had stung it, and the cry of pain seemed to come from somewhere within it, rather than from the last remnants of human face that hung from its bulbous-eyed, scaly brow.

Buffy’s gaze ticked along the bar. Ashtray, ashtray, peanuts, ashtray. No matches. Ropy tendrils sliced the air toward her again, and she leaped over the dead bartender and started back, deeper into the Fish Tank. She saw what she needed at the end of the bar, an abandoned pack of Camel Lights and a little cardboard box of wooden matches from someplace with more class than this.

She got the box of matches open, took one out to strike, and then looked up in alarm as the creature lunged for her again. So intent had she been upon her goal, Buffy had trapped herself in the corner. The thing stank of the ocean and rotting fish and something like hot tar, and when she saw the gleaming wetness off those huge eyes there was a malign intelligence in them that she had not noticed before. This wasn’t just a mindless monster. It was a thinking, contemplative beast, and it wanted her dead.

Its grotesque, round mouth gaped as it lashed at her with all of the appendages that jerked and swayed from its abdomen. Buffy leaped onto the bar and then into the air - tendrils just missing her as she somersaulted above the creature.

In midair she lit a match and let it drop.

Fire roared up behind her as she landed in a crouch and then tumbled away across the floor, the heat from the sudden blaze searing her arms and exposed midriff. Buffy sprang to her feet and grabbed a chair, raising it to ward off the scaly beast even as she turned to face it.

The creature shrieked loudly, an ear-piercing cry that seemed a combination of squeaking dolphins and grinding metal gears. It had turned on her and shambled toward her, engulfed in flames that spread to consume it as though the thing were made of oil. Fiery tendrils grasped for Buffy, but she batted them away with the chair.

"Fall down!" she shouted.

And it did.

Whatever had worn the body of that man with the bright green tie, it stumbled and collapsed in a heap of burning, acrid, stinking black flesh and pooling grey fluid. It twitched once, twice,and then was still. Flames licked up from the dead, charred thing and Buffy felt her stomach churn with nausea.

The overhead sprinklers erupted in a shower of cold rain that doused the flames and kept them from spreading any farther. Buffy strode across the now empty bar and went out the back way, hoping to avoid answering any questions from the people who had run from the place and spectators who were sure to have gathered.

She had found what she was looking for, but there was no satisfaction in that. Buffy only hoped she never met another one.

© 2002 Christopher Golden. Taken from The Wisdom of War, published in the UK by Pocket Books on August 5th 2002. Reproduced with kind permission of Pocket Books.