by Tad Williams
“Damn weird. Have you mentioned that to anyone?”
“Anyone? Everyone! You forget, I had to talk to the fixer about everything that happened that day. That’s all I know-it wasn’t like one of the fixers from the House was going to tell me what had been going on with the Zippers. But that’s not what’s really bugging me.” He shook his big head. Sam looks about twenty years older than his body’s supposed to look. Part of it is just the way he moves, that kind of unhurried, good-old-boy thing. He talks the same way, and it can drive you crazy. Now he made me wait while he took two more spoonfuls of soup and all but sent them out to the forensic lab for tests, swirling the cabbage around in his mouth for what seemed like minutes. (Just because we’ve been friends for years doesn’t mean I never think about murdering him.) “It was too convenient, the way it all happened,” he finally said. “If the kid hadn’t wanted me to be there, I wouldn’t have been Outside when it all went down-wouldn’t have been stuck. No, there’s definitely something unusual going on with our young Clarence,” he finally said.
“Well, shit, no kidding. I already knew that.” I told him about the odd conversation I’d had with the Mule, how he’d asked me to keep an eye on the new boy.
Sam nodded slowly. “Haraheliel. That’s his angel name, right? You ever heard of him before?”
“Nope. But someone might have. He claims he was in Records-Filing, he says. Maybe we should see if anyone else remembers him.”
“I could do that,” Sam told me, slurping up a little broth. “But you’d have to do me a favor and take him off my hands for a couple of days. I can’t get anything done with him hanging around.”
“Then maybe I should be the one to do the investigating.”
Sam frowned. “Look, B, the kid likes you. He’s been asking about you, so it’d be a natural, and I got a buddy or two working in the Records Halls that I know from the old days. They should have some ideas how the kid wound up here.”
I thought about it. Sam did know a lot of people, but our fellow advocate Walter Sanders knew people in Records, too so I could just as easily ask him. But when a friend asks a favor…“Okay. But I can’t take him off you ’til the day after tomorrow. I’m going to be too busy before that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking into some things of my own. I’ll fill you in if anything interesting comes up.”
Sam considered, then lifted his teacup. It took me a moment, but at last I caught on and raised my beer bottle to clink against the delicate porcelain. “Confusion to our enemies!” he said, our familiar toast.
“Amen to that,” said I.
Once upon a time most of San Judas was agricultural land-numberless small farms, orchards, you name it. Then the city began to grow, and everything that wasn’t city gradually got pushed farther and farther away, until nowadays you can’t find much that resembles real agriculture except backyard wineries and people growing pot in their garages. But there were still a few exceptions, and after I said goodbye to Sam I retrieved my car from the handicapped parking space (yes, angels cheat sometimes, but come on, we’re doing God’s work!) and went back to my apartment to kill some time. A little before eleven I got back behind the wheel and headed up into the hills in search of one particular farm.
It wouldn’t be easy to find Casa de Maldicion in the daytime, but since I always go there at night it’s usually damn near impossible. It’s in the hills off the old Alpine Road, past Skyline and down a long winding rural road in a particularly empty section of unincorporated county. In general it’s the kind of place that rich people and hermits live, and neither of those care much about sidewalks-they attract riffraff-or streetlights (which, presumably, draw more of the same). Casa M. itself is on a hill up a little spur road off the winding one. In the deep darkness of the evening, well beyond city lights, it would have been invisible to most people, but I’d been here before and had the windows rolled down. The stench let me know when I was close.
Ever smelled a pig farm, even a small one? Honestly, if you haven’t, don’t bother. There are many things in life not worth experiencing if you don’t need to-amputation, crab lice-and porcine husbandry is one of them. Trust me.
I often wondered whether Fatback surrounded himself with pigs for company or protection. Certainly the presence of several dozen swine on his property meant that only the very determined (or the completely nostril-deaf) ever ventured up the wandering track to the rather nice house at the top. In the darkness I could just make out the smaller (but still good-sized) pig barn off to one side and hear the gentle grunting of its occupants.
The old man named Javier opened the door. He’d pretty much been born working for Fatback’s family-his father and grandfather had served before him. He never seemed to get much older between the times I saw him, but he sure as hell wasn’t getting any younger either. He looked like something you would find lying in the desert and then waste half an hour trying to decide what it used to be.
He blinked, even though I was the one standing in the dark and what little light there was came from his side of the doorway. “Hello, Mr. Dollar,” he said at last. “Long time, good to see you. If you come to talk to Mr. George, he not quite ready yet.”
“That’s okay. I don’t have much time so just take me in to him, and I’ll wait.”
Javier didn’t really like to do it-he still hung onto some vestige of Old-World pride in his employer and didn’t like to display him at less than his best-but he knew me and knew who my bosses were, so he nodded and beckoned me to follow him into the house. As we went past the kitchen I saw a half-eaten plate of rice and beans and realized I’d interrupted the caretaker’s dinner. A small television on the counter was showing some Mexican game show.
We walked through the house and out the back. He pointed to the big barn, which stood by itself about ten yards away down the hill, connected to the main house by a long stairway. I nodded and thanked him. He went back to his meal.
The smell, which was eye-watering everywhere else on the property, rolled out of the barn door like a full scale chemical weapons attack, so that for a moment I couldn’t even go inside, but had to stand there and try to fan a hole in it with my hand. It didn’t work-it never did-but at last I was able to deal with it enough to walk inside.
Most of the barn was taken up with a central pen about twenty by thirty feet or so, with a chest-high rail and a bottom about a foot or so deep in stinking mud-and I mean stinking. At one end of the enclosure, dim and pale in the flickering overhead light, crouched a huge, naked bald man smeared with mud and worse. He looked up at me and his squinting eyes gleamed.
“Hello, George,” I said. Nobody called him Fatback to his face-it wasn’t polite. Not that he understood me at the moment, anyway.
He let out a squeal of rage at the sound of my voice and hurtled across the pen on his hands and knees, splashing mud and shit and pig slops everywhere, but slipped and skidded head first into the barrier with a grunt of pain and frustration. He sank back in the muck and sat looking at me sullenly, blood now trickling from a cut on his forehead. I sighed and checked my watch; 11:52. Still eight minutes to go.
I moved safely out of splashing range and watched him as the time ticked away. He watched me back. It was unpleasant, being stared at by those narrow eyes. There wasn’t anything human in them as far as I could see, but there was an awful lot of murderous anger. I was glad old Javier seemed to keep the pen in good repair.
Casa de Maldicion is Spanish for “House of the Curse,” but what had happened to George was worse than that. The child of an old Californio family (the Spanish-speaking folks who owned everything before the gringos showed up) George Noceda had inherited not just a lot of family property in the Pulgas Ridge area but the family’s major obligation as well, which happened to be a debt to the dark powers. (Nowadays we call ‘em by more respectable names, like “the Opposition,” but it’s still the same old firm.) In return for unnatural prosperity for the family, for several hundred
years, every oldest male child of the Noceda line had been were-hogs, doomed each night to become a ravening beast between the hours of midnight and sunup. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the family did their best to keep the suffering male heir locked up at night. Mistakes were made (and more than a few local monster legends had been started because of those mistakes) but by and large the family had come to accept the price of the bargain some ancestor had made in return for their good fortune in all other matters.
Then along came George. A creature of the late twentieth century, he had never doubted in the power of dark magic-after all, he had started to smell powerfully of chitterlings when most boys were just growing their first scraggly mustaches, and had changed for the first time soon thereafter. But like most of the people of this modern age, he didn’t think he should have to take the fall for something his great-great-great grandparents had done. So he made a deal with the Opposition: he would sacrifice most of the family fortune, land, wealth, and prestige, and in return Hell’s minions promised they would reverse the curse.
Poor George. Like so many others before him, he underestimated what he was dealing with. He got what he wanted, to the letter of his new contract, and the curse was, in fact, reversed. So from then on, each night at twelve, the same thing happened. In fact, it was happening now.
The fat, naked man suddenly fell face down into the filthy mud, bellowing like he was on fire. He began to thrash, sending gouts of stinking slime everywhere. I stepped back to the front door to protect my coat, which wasn’t all that expensive but was a favorite. The noise went on as the huddled figure in the muddy pen writhed and changed, grew darker and misshapen, until it had taken on an entirely new form, that of an immense, black, bristle-skinned boar hog.
The hog finally stopped squealing. It rolled over and sat up on its haunches, then turned its beady eyes in my direction.
“That hurts like an unholy bitch,” he said. “Every time.”
“Nice to see you, George.”
He wrinkled his snout. “Oh, I’m sure, Bobby. A treat for all ages.” He saw something floating in the muck before him and sucked it up, then began to chew. “Corn cob,” he explained when he saw my horrified look. “Fiber. And oh my sweet and precious God do I need it…!”
I was getting more information than I wanted, and it would only get worse. George was garrulous in this form-pig’s body, man’s mind-and usually had no one to talk to but Javier or one of the old man’s sons, the only other people who still lived on this shrunken remnant of what had once been a grand seigneurial property. Of course, when he was in his other form, his dawn-to-midnight form of a pig’s mind in a man’s body, he wasn’t much for conversation.
They reversed the curse, you see. Just like they promised. Who do you think invented lawyers in the first place?
“So what brings you up to my neck of the woods, Mr. D?” George asked. “What can I do for you?”
“I need information on a citizen named Edward Lynes Walker and also on Grasswax, infernal prosecutor.” Fatback was the only outsider I could safely approach in the current climate. The Opposition had hosed him in a completely legitimate way, but George had never forgiven them, and he made it his life’s work to keep a close eye on their dealings. That was why a large portion of what remained of his family’s once vast fortune went toward funding a small research agency of which George was the only client. The only other thing in the room beside George’s pen was the projection monitor screen he used to view what they sent him, and to troll the net for what he could find himself.
All voice-controlled, of course. He’s a pig.
“Sure, I’ll see what I can find for you, Mr. D.” He cleared his throat and said, “Radiant.” At the code word the screen flicked on, bathing the room in cool light. “Hey, you want to do me a favor while I’m starting the search? Get that rake and scratch my back.”
I did what he asked, holding my breath. George isn’t a bad guy, and it’s not his fault he smells like Death’s diaper.
“Hijole!” he said as the latest gleanings scrolled past. “This Grasswax thing is some crazy shit! Does it have anything to do with the Walker death?”
“I doubt it.” I didn’t want to tell him anything he didn’t need to know, not because I didn’t trust him-his hatred of the Opposition was genuine-but because I didn’t know exactly what I was dealing with. “I don’t know, maybe.”
“Well, there’s a ton of stuff about both of them flying around. It’ll take me a while to pull it together and make sense of it. How do you want it, electronic or hard copy?”
“Electronic. And use my private email address, will you?” I didn’t want it going through Alice, who didn’t even know what the word “private” meant. “Oh, and there’s one other thing. I need to get in touch with someone from the Opposition.”
Fatback turned sour little piggy eyes on me. “Forget it. I’m not doing that for you or anyone else, Mr. D. We’ve always got along well, you and I, but if you want a go-between, find someone else.”
“I’m not asking you to set up a meeting, George, just to tell me where I can find a particular member of the other side. I’ll do the rest.” Now that I was about to say it, the whole thing seemed ludicrous-suicidal, even-but I plunged ahead anyway. “I need to track down a fixer called ‘Countess’, a big shot. I don’t know the rest of her name.” I gave him a quick description of her appearance, at least the time I’d seen her, and told him what little I knew, including that she’d been brought in to clean up after the Walker mess.
“So you are tangled up in the Grasswax thing,” George said cheerfully. “Well, any dead devil is a reason to celebrate as far as I’m concerned. Go tell Javier I’m hungry, and I’ll see what I can find out about her.”
Javier was putting the remains of his own dinner into the kitchen garbage can. When I told him what his boss wanted he lifted out the liner bag and trundled the whole mess out to the pig barn. I decided I didn’t need to watch Fatback getting fed, so I stayed in the kitchen listening idly to Spanish chatter on the television for a while, then when that got boring, I stepped out onto the back porch and was serenaded by the other pigs snorting sleepily in their own barn a short distance down the slope.
Javier finally came back. “He ready for you now, Mr. Dollar.”
“I think I’ve got what you need,” George told me when I approached his pen. He was looking up at the screen on the wall and a whole column of addresses, ears twitching. “I can’t find an address or any hint of home turf for her. The bad guys move around more than you guys do. But I’ve got something that might work just as well. Try a place called The Water Hole on the Camino Real by the university’s north gates.”
“Really? The Water Hole?” I knew of the place and to be honest it seemed a little lightweight for a heavy hitter like the Countess.
“Yeah, really-at least if it’s the Countess of Cold Hands you’re talking about.” He showed me a blurry image that looked like it had been shot from concealment without a sufficient lens, but even so it was impossible to mistake that small, pale, extremely alluring form.
“Yep. That’s her. But The Water Hole? I thought it was a student place.”
“Whatever. It’s the only spot I’ve managed to find a sighting of her that you also might have a chance of getting out of.”
“Don’t you mean ‘into’”?
“Oh, I doubt you’ll have any problems getting in, Bobby.” His snout curled in that sour little smile again.
“Cute.”
“That’s me. I’ll send you the rest of the stuff when it’s ready.”
“Thanks, George. Don’t forget to bill me.”
“No worries there.” He grunted and settled down into the mud. “On your way out will you ask Javier to bring me Meredith? I’m feeling the need of a little company.”
“Meredith?” I didn’t get it. “Who’s Meredith?”
“A very, very nice young lady. Of the four-footed variety.”
; I was glad to hear he’d finally found someone. “A were-hog like you?”
He was silent for a moment, but then he laughed. There are few things odder than hearing a pig laugh in the middle of the night. “No, no, just an ordinary American Landrace sow, but she has a sweet disposition-a certain tenderness-and a lovely shape.” His look became stern. “Don’t judge me, sir. Don’t you dare judge me.”
Not judging, I thanked him, and made my way quickly back to my car. I had my windows open all the way down Alpine but didn’t get rid of the smell until I reached the bottom of the hills.
six
waking up in trouble
It was still dark outside when my bladder woke me. That’s pretty much how it works: use a body, become slave to various unpleasant internal systems. By the way, there are no bathrooms in Heaven, although angels eat and drink there, after a fashion. Which, now that I think of it, is pretty weird.
Generally my earthly bodies are in reasonable working order, thirtyish in appearance but a good bit stronger and more durable than your average human of that age. So the fact that I was trying to find my way to the john in the dark meant one of two things: either my kidneys were failing or I’d had far too much to drink the previous night. The way my head felt suggested that it was the latter.
The suspicion was strengthened when I couldn’t recognize the bathroom floor under my bare feet. My apartment had cheap tiles, but this was carpeted. Misadventure was confirmed when I got back and realized someone else was in the bed.
“You done crashing around like a fucking rhinoceros?” asked Monica, mush-mouthed with sleep. “Shut up already.”
I wanted to ask her what I was doing at her place but I was beginning to remember just enough to guess. I’d got back to The Compasses about half an hour before closing time and had done my best to drink away the smell of pig shit and the memory of Fatback’s eyes, both the sad ones in his pig face and the mindless, nasty ones in his human face. At some point Monica had been sitting in a booth drinking with me, and we had been breathing tipsily in each other’s faces as we talked. Q.E.D.
