by Tad Williams
Eligor held her by the collar at arm’s reach, as if she weighed no more than a polo sweater. Her kicking feet hung six full inches above the ground. “Take the bitch,” he said. “All she ever does is complain, anyway.”
“And this is really her, this time? You swear by the authority of the Highest?”
He rolled his eyes like a bored teenager. “Yes, just like I told you back in Flesh Horse. I showed her to you, and you said you’d give me the feather, remember? This is her, I promise. No, as you wish, I swear by the Tartarean Convention, the authority of the Highest, and my own existence. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To hear one of the lords of Hell give his solemn word? Then listen—I swear by all those things that this is the same woman.”
Sam was slowly moving the God Glove over her head and above her breast. “This one is real, B.”
Eligor set her down. She almost fell, but Sam caught her elbow and helped her find her balance. She ran to me, still gagged, arms still tied, and threw herself against me. I wrapped an arm around her, thrilled beyond anything I can say by the feeling of her heartbeat so close to mine.
“Give him the feather,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Sam was looking at Eligor, who stood with arms folded. Fiddlescrape still had his shotgun pointed at us, but didn’t look quite as eager to pull the trigger as he had a few moments earlier.
“Yeah. Give it to him.”
Sam held it out, but being Sam he stayed where he was and made Eligor take a step toward him to get it. The grand duke took the feather between his fingers, then lifted it up to the weak yellow glow of the garage’s ceiling lights. “It’s a beautiful thing, really,” the Horseman said. “Rather special, too, when you think about what it represents: Heaven and Hell working together. It’s a pity you and the other small-minded folk can’t think of anything better to do with that symbol than blackmail me.”
I wasn’t going to dignify this kind of bullshit with a reply. I kept my temper, concentrating instead on the slender, shivering woman pressed against me. She looked up, eyes pleading. I undid the gag, then bent and kissed her cheek, just a touch, before turning back to Eligor. She tasted of salt. I thought it was because she was crying.
“Oh, Bobby . . . !” she said. She definitely did not sound happy.
“Anything else? Last pithy oneliner? No? Well, you and your friends enjoy your evening, Dollar.” The grand duke sauntered to his big car and climbed into the back. Fiddlescrape closed the door behind him. As the big freak got into the driver’s seat and revved the engine, I realized it had been running quietly the whole time. Why should Eligor be ready for a quick getaway? He couldn’t have believed that I was going to fall for his doppelganger, could he?
Eligor rolled down the backseat window. “I suspect we’ll see each other again,” he said as the car backed up and then turned to face the exit. “That’s the way it is with annoying people, you just keep running into them over and over and over . . .”
And then the big car bumped down the ramp. Clarence let out a little breath of relief—it sounded like someone stepping on a hamster—and sat down on the oily cement floor of the parking garage. Obviously it had all been a bit much for him. But it had all been worth it, because I was holding Caz again.
I had been waiting until that bastard was gone to kiss her properly, but before I could lower my face to hers I realized that my arm felt wet where I was holding her. For an irrational moment I thought she’d been shot, even though no gun had been fired, and I was terrified.
She was crying, harder than I’d ever seen anyone cry, the tears just sheeting down her cheeks. Then her face began to waver, as if I was seeing it through deep water. A moment later everything that was Caz about her just washed away, like wet paint hosed off a wall, and I was staring down into the haunted, filmy eyes of Marmora, the drowned social secretary of Flesh House.
“I’m . . . I’m so sorry . . . Bobby . . . Dollar.” Her voice was her own now, her body her own too, long and thin and weedy. The puddle around her feet was growing by the second as I stared in helpless terror. “She cares . . . so much.” She coughed, bubbled a little. “I’m sorry. He made me . . . trick you,” she murmured, her words fast becoming a gurgle. “And sorry . . . for me, too. I could have . . . lived here . . . and been happy, I think.” Her head lolled on her long, pale neck and her poached-egg eyes took in the parking garage, the skid marks on the ground and the exhaust stains on the concrete walls. Her mouth twitched in an unsteady but radiant smile. “Here is . . . so . . . beautiful . . .”
And then she simply collapsed into liquid and color, running out of my arms and onto the hard floor in splashing rivulets. The water ran in all directions until one edge found the exit ramp, and then it all flowed that way, down into the lower level.
forty-eight
accessories after the fact
SOMEBODY WAS pounding on my door in a very determined manner. Really thumping away. Every impact seemed to crash through my head like one of those super-slow-mo videos of someone shooting an apple to pieces. I groaned and fumbled around on the floor next to my bed for my automatic and clutched it against my chest. If the pounding didn’t stop soon, I was going to use it, either on the idiot at the door or on myself, whichever would end the suffering quickest. I didn’t feel that way because I was hung over, either. I mean I was, like a motherfucker, but the drinking and the aftereffects were just byproducts of how little I gave a shit about anything.
Thump, thump, thump. “Bobby! Open the door or I’ll kick it in!” It was Sam.
“Fuck you a hundred times for making so much noise,” I shouted, but that made my head hurt as much as the pounding had. I swear, even for someone who’d recently dug into his own brainbox to remove an angry intracubus, this was bad. “Go away, or I’ll shoot you in the dick.”
“What’s-his-name was right—you are a whiny little putz. Come on, get up and let me in.”
I realized that if I pulled the trigger in my present, rather impaired condition, my aim might not be good enough to get off a fatal shot. It would, however, go BLAM really loud right next to my ear. Then Sam would kick in the door, BANG BANG CRUNCH. Might as well set my own nervous system on fire and try to put it out with a tenderizing mallet. I started to crawl toward the door, got stuck behind the cheap sofa, then finally levered myself onto my feet and staggered to where I could let the noisy, heartless bastard in.
I still had the gun in my hand. Sam looked down, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Happy to see me?”
“Shut up. Never speak again. Come in if you have to.”
“Can’t. I’m waiting for Clarence. He’s parking the car.”
“Clarence?” I groaned and stumbled to the couch. “You brought him here? Et fucking tu, Brute?” Just thinking about the rookie’s cheerful, boyish questions made me want to throw up inside my skull. “Just go away. Both of you.” I closed my eyes and wished I would die faster.
“Not going to happen.” I smelled something and opened them again. Sam was waving some kind of huge venti-trenti-giganti coffee under my nose. “Drink this. You’ve been locked in here for six days, B. It’s bad, I know, but you can’t just give up.”
I laughed, but even I didn’t like the way it sounded. “I can’t? Just watch me, baby, and you’ll get a master class in total surrender.”
Clarence came stomping into the room like a mastodon in steel-toed boots. “Man, it stinks in here!” was the first thing he said.
“Nice to see you too, kid.” I swirled a little of the hot coffee around in my mouth. I knew if I swallowed I was agreeing to live for at least a few more hours, and I wasn’t in any hurry to sign that deal. Still, it tasted good. Well, it tasted hot and it tasted like coffee. Same thing. “Now why don’t you both just fuck on off?”
“Because we’re not going to let you drink yourself to death, Bobby,” Clarence explained.
“Then you’re too late. Because I’m already dead, remember? Now that that’s solved, it really is fucking-off t
ime for both of you. Drop by again soon. Early twenty-second century would be good.”
Sam stood looking around the room. “And this, Clarence my young friend, is a perfect example of the power of self-pity. You can see it, you can hear it in his voice, and the Highest knows, you can smell it.”
“Bite me, Sam. Seriously.”
“Honestly, we know you’re upset. We completely understand.” Clarence came closer, stepping through the empties and the food bags as carefully as a minesweeper. I was terrified that he might sit near me and try to be helpful, but he stopped a few feet away so I didn’t have to shoot him in the foot or anything. “But don’t give up, Bobby. You know what they say—it’s better . . .”
“If any of the next words out of your mouth are ‘loved and lost,’ kid,” I told him, “I will hit you in the face so hard that your eyes and ears and all your other facial features will run around to the back of your head to hide and never come back. Never ever. You’ll spend the rest of your angel life looking like a Mister Potato Head someone dropped from a tall building.”
“See! You’re still funny.”
I closed my eyes again. “I’ve been to Hell already. Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because we want to get you out of here,” said Clarence. “You need to get cleaned up. You need some air.”
“What I really need—well, you’ll know it’s happening about the time you realize that screaming isn’t helping you any.”
Clarence sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sam, can you get through to him?”
Sam laughed. “Shit, he never listens to me. He wouldn’t be in this situation if he did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” But I was still keeping my eyes closed. I hadn’t entirely given up hope that these people talking so loudly in my apartment were just another nightmare of the kind I’d been having plenty of. “Seriously, you give the worst advice since someone suggested Lincoln take in a play on his night off.”
“That’s an old one, you pathetic lush.” He turned to the kid. “You can tell he’s perking up when he starts thinking he’s amusing again. Don’t tell him the truth or he might panic. Let’s get him into the shower.”
It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d remembered to pay my utilities. There would have been hot water.
We went to Oyster Bill’s, on the waterfront.
I wasn’t really going to be revived that easily, but I’d run out of mixers a couple of days earlier and the combination of straight booze and leftover bits of congealed fast food was killing me. Since I’d been in no condition to find my car, I’d started cutting the vodka with things like maraschino cherry juice. I made White Russians with little tubs of coffee creamer. After all that, I was more than ready to have a few drinks mixed by a professional. (Actually, this is slightly overstating the skills of the bartender at Oyster Bill’s. Both he and the cook are obviously either relatives of Bill’s or his old prison buddies, and both know just enough not to kill any of their customers. But on the plus side, the place also has a jukebox full of agonizingly horrible seventies and eighties pop music.)
Getting clean and leaving the house had definitely been a step forward, but if I was going to live, I’d need to find something worth living for, which meant finding something about myself worth living for. The failure side of the ledger was pretty impressive, and all I could come up with on the other side was Gob. I hadn’t managed anything a real hero should have, like getting the poor kid out of Hell, but I’d at least helped him out of a terrible situation and into a slightly better one, with Riprash. That might count for something. Yeah, Bobby Dollar, demi-mini-quasi-hero.
Every time I tried to think of good things I’d accomplished, the rest of my failures wailed out at me like cartoon ghosts. The latest and biggest failure of all was Caz, of course. Even the idea of her was a scorched, radioactive hole in the middle of my thoughts—I couldn’t ignore it, but I had to stay as far away as possible or I’d go crazy. But not thinking about her was really just another way of thinking about her, and then it all started over again.
Like I said, the failure side of the ledger was pretty impressive, maybe even spectacular. Case in point: I’d gone through everything Hell could throw at me and somehow managed to survive, but I’d lost the one thing I should have held onto at any cost—lost her because I was arrogant and careless, because I trusted my own ability to anticipate Eligor’s tricks. Orpheus went all the way to Hades for his girlfriend, then lost her when he looked at her too soon. I lost my love because I hadn’t looked carefully enough.
“I should have known,” I said for what must have been the three hundredth time since the parking garage. “I should have never left Hell without her. He was setting me up way back in Flesh Horse—showing me a fake Caz and telling me he’d release her. He was already planning it then! He hands the fake over, and he’s not breaking his word. He didn’t even need to, but he had one last chance to torture me, and he took it.”
My stomach felt curdled. I looked down at my Bloody Mary. Now that I was drinking one—well, my second, to be completely honest—I wondered if I really wanted any more alcohol. Oblivion was the only thing that had allowed me to survive the first few days, but even drinking wasn’t helping much anymore. Unless I seriously intended to nosedive into the big black, I had to start thinking about other strategies. Tomorrow. I decided I would definitely start being alive again tomorrow. Or the next day. No, maybe I could do tomorrow.
Trying to care sucked.
“The thing is,” said Clarence, “I still don’t get what was so important about that feather. I mean, even if it was from one of our bosses, why should Eligor care? Is there something he can use it for? And why would he want it so much he’d give up the demon woman? Well, I guess not give her up, but at least pretend he was going to.” He saw my face. “Sorry, Bobby.”
Even with all the crazy stuff that had happened to me since I went to Hell, I’d continued to be selective about what information I’d share. Even Sam didn’t know everything, because I’d kept from him what Walter Sanders had remembered. Even if Sam’s Kephas really was Anaita, and she had sent Smyler to extort the whereabouts of the feather from me to protect her secrets, I didn’t want to put Sam in the position of having to choose loyalties before I had better evidence. I didn’t think he’d sell me out, but our friendship had changed in ways I didn’t entirely understand yet, and I wanted to be fair to both of us. I could only hope I wasn’t putting him in danger by holding out.
And Clarence knew even less, of course. He knew a lot more now than I would have liked, but he still didn’t suspect how crazy this stuff really was, that a power as important as Anaita, a Heavenly Principality, could be revivifying serial killers and sending innocent angels like Walter to Hell. If I didn’t completely trust Sam on the subject, I sure as holy harmony wasn’t going to open it all up for the kid.
“The simplest version,” I said, “is that Eligor made a deal with someone in Heaven, someone pretty important. The deal was about creating Sam’s Third Way, a spot outside Heaven, Hell, and Earth. But Eligor wanted protection, especially against his own side’s finding out, so he took the feather from the Heavenly Someone to use as—what? Blackmail fodder, I guess. The idea being that if the Heavenly Someone didn’t uphold their end of the bargain, or things went bad, Eligor would have that feather to keep the angel honest, because it’s basically a signed confession that says, ‘I made an unauthorized deal with Hell.’ Both of them had to keep their bargain secret. They couldn’t let either side find out.” I was suddenly, and rather surprisingly, hit with a hunger pang. Probably because I hadn’t eaten in a day or so. “And now the bastard has the angel’s marker back.”
“So what does the important angel have?” Clarence asked.
“I don’t know. Regrets, probably. Like all of us.” Maybe I would get a little food, I decided. Nothing too dramatic, because my stomach wasn’t up to it.
“Are you going to order something, B?” asked Sam. “Good
plan. Get a stack of big old pancakes. Soak up some of that booze.” He leaned back and sipped on his ginger ale. “Maybe I’ll get some calamari. Even Bill’s cook can’t fuck something up too badly if it’s deep-fried.”
“You forget that time you found a double A battery in your fish and chips,” I said, squinting at the menu. I waved for the waitress and sat back. Then, as if a fuse had been burning and finally reached the barrel of gunpowder, something went “boom!” in my brain. “Hang on a second—what did you say?”
“Calamari.”
“Not you, you big asshole. Clarence.”
The kid had to think for a moment. “I asked what the angel has.”
“What the angel has . . . ?”
“Well, if the feather was a marker for a deal they had, what was the other marker? If the demon gets the feather, what does the angel get in case Grand Duke Eligor needs to be blackmailed some day?”
The waitress finally arrived, but I was too stunned to speak. At last Sam took pity and ordered pancakes and more coffee for me, as well as some crispy artery-clog for himself.
After the waitress wandered off, I was still thinking hard. I must have looked like I’d had a stroke, because Clarence leaned forward and said, “Are you all right, Bobby?”
“Kid, if I wasn’t slightly insecure about my masculinity, and if I didn’t know for a fact that Sam would never let me forget it, I’d kiss you right now.”
“Huh?”
“You’re right, you’re right, you’re so fucking right.” I shook my head, amazed by my own epic stupidity. “I’ve been obsessing over this feather for months, but I never stopped to wonder what Eligor had to trade for it. But, of course, he must have swapped something. You don’t swear blood brotherhood without both sides bleeding! And I know what it was.”
“Can you summarize this shit before my calamari gets here?” Sam asked.
“Simple. I noticed something the other night.”
“The other night, and several on either side of it, you were drinking heavily, listening to blues records, crying, and vomiting into your wastebasket,” said Sam. “Occasionally all at the same time. Are you talking about last week, in the parking garage?”
