The Dirty Streets of Heaven bd-1

by Tad Williams

  Perhaps the Ephorate sensed my thought in some way. All five went quiet, and the fire of their beings grew lower, or seemed to, which I guess meant they had turned away from me to speak among themselves once more. I looked over to Temuel, but he too had retreated into himself, his essential light turned down as if it had a rheostat. It seemed like I waited a very long time in that timeless place before anyone spoke again.

  “Go back, Doloriel, and do what the Highest has given you to do,” said the crystalline blaze of hope and solace that was Terentia. Relief washed through me-something a little less vivid than joy but still very real. “Know, however, that your fitness for that task has been questioned and that our judgement is not yet complete. Walk with caution. God loves you.”

  I bowed my head as the five angels reached out and touched me, one after another, little bursts of joyful fire, and then they were gone, as was the Anaktoron itself. Temuel and I abruptly found ourselves in the middle of the great thoroughfare known as the Singing Way with the sweetly murmuring crowds of Heaven eddying around us like phantoms of light and fog.

  “You’ve had a close brush, Doloriel,” Temuel said. “I don’t think a second gathering of ephors will be so lenient, so try to fly a little closer to the ground from now on, will you?”

  I didn’t really have anything to say to that, but I mumbled some promise. Now that the danger of my personal dissolution was over, at least for the present, I was even more unnerved to realize how close to it I had been.

  “One thing,” Temuel said. “I didn’t hear everything that passed between you and the Ephorate. Did they ask you about the Magians? Or about the name Kephas?”

  Both of these were completely new to me, and I wondered if Temuel was taking the good cop role in some complicated process, working on me after the council had softened me up. “Never heard of either of them,” I told him truthfully.

  “Ah,” he said. “No matter. Just some speculation of my own. You may disregard it.”

  This was all making me extremely nervous. “What’s this all about? And why are they picking on me? I didn’t do anything to cause any of this.”

  Temuel’s light warmed to soothing sunrise pinks and yellows, the archangelic version of someone putting a comradely hand on your shoulder. “No, Doloriel, but sometimes when things go very wrong and even the highest are frightened, innocence is not enough for salvation.”

  I let this cryptic phrase echo for a moment. I was feeling a chill again, and now I really did want to get away as quickly as possible-to escape the place that every living soul on earth wanted to reach. “Are they really that frightened up here? Just because one soul wasn’t where it was supposed to be?”

  For a moment the Mule’s pearly light guttered like a flame in a high wind. It took me a moment to realize he was surprised. “Of course,” he said. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Don’t know what?”

  He spoke slowly, like a grownup breaking bad news to a child. “The soul known on Earth as Edward Walker was only the first to vanish, Doloriel. Others have gone missing since then. More than a few.” His voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. “So, yes-they really are that frightened up here.”

  eleven

  foxy foxy

  “Karael? Karael, General of the Glittering Host-that Karael? Wow, he’s a heavy hitter.” Sam sounded impressed. “You really got the treatment.”

  “Yeah, even I’ve heard of him,” said Clarence. The two of them were helping me clean up the wreckage of my apartment and pack it up for storage-not that I had a lot worth keeping, especially after the place had been ransacked. I’d lived there for a couple of years and a lot of people knew it. It had been the first place the ghallu went looking for me, which meant I was going to have to stay away from it for a while.

  “Everybody knows Karael, kid.” Sam took a swig of his ginger ale. “I’m not surprised they brought in someone like him, though. If that Walker guy was only the first, if other souls are going AWOL-well, shit, no wonder they’re panicking up at the House.”

  I hadn’t said anything about the other two names Temuel had floated, first because I didn’t trust the kid, second because I wanted to check into them myself before muddying the waters. I’d tell Sam when I had a chance.

  Meanwhile, Sam kicked at a bunch of scattered hot rod magazines that someone had dumped on the foor while searching the apartment. “You’re not really keeping all this, are you, B? What are you planning to do, open a Museum of Crap someday?”

  I ignored that and gathered up the magazines. Sam wasn’t exactly Mister House Beautiful himself. He lived in the seedier section of Southport, you could barely see his living room carpet under all the newspapers and pizza boxes, and his bathroom towels had sweat stains on them. “But I still don’t know why someone would send a monster like that after me,” I said. “Look at this place-they were searching for something. And it wasn’t just that hell-beast in here, either.”

  Clarence looked up from where he was picking up tableware that had been scattered across the linoleum. I suppose I should have asked him to put it in the sink to be washed after being Hell-handled, but I hardly ever use any of it except to stir coffee and butter toast, anyway. “What do you mean, Bobby?” the kid asked.

  “What do I mean? Look, this place is a mess, sure, but a ghallu is a spirit of elemental disaster the size of a small car and hot as the inside of a crematory oven. It pursues. It captures. It kills. You don’t summon one of those and tell it, ‘Oh, and take a look in the guy’s kitchen cabinets while you’re there.’ That’s like asking a grizzly bear to audit my tax records.”

  “You don’t pay any taxes,” Sam pointed out.

  “Shut up,” I acknowledged. “You understand, Junior? They want to catch me or kill me, but they also think I know something. Or that I have something they want.”

  Clarence suddenly looked a bit nervous. “You think they’ll come back?”

  “If I stayed here? Probably guaranteed. Which is why I’m going to be kicking it in some rent-by-the-hour motel tonight, and then some different but equally charming spot tomorrow night.”

  “Trust me-he’s slept worse places,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, thanks for making me look good in front of the kid.” With the boxes loaded into my car, the aparment looked sad (and almost tidy.) “Let’s go down the block,” I said. “I’ll buy you boys some lunch before the phone rings and one of us has to go off and mess around with dead people again.”

  Sam got a call to a client in Spanishtown as we were finishing, and Clarence went with him, so I walked back to my car alone. I put my jacket on because the thin February sunshine wasn’t enough to keep me comfortable. I wished the spring would hurry up and arrive. It’s funny, but even regular trips to the permanently glorious weather of Heaven doesn’t change the pure pleasure of walking out your door one day and finding that warm days have arrived, that suddenly wearing a jacket makes you too hot.

  I kept my eyes open as I went through Hoover Park, although I was nearly certain that the demonic beast someone had sicced on me was strictly a nighttime diversion. I told you how much energy it takes to sustain something so scary and unusual, right? It’s a factor of ten more difficult to make one of those manifest in full daylight. Still, something a bit more civilized than the ghallu had tossed my apartment, and the horned monstrosity probably hadn’t done anything as delicate as stringing up Grasswax by his own nerve fibers either, so I tried not to let myself be distracted by the heedless civilians all around me. I saw the guy waiting out in front of my building from almost a block away, which gave me plenty of time to clock him as I approached.

  My car was parked farther down the street, and there was a chance I could have got into it without a confrontation, but he didn’t look too intimidating. He was fairly tall but pale and thin-really thin. That was one of the first things I noticed. He looked like a middle school kid wearing his dad’s suit. He didn’t stand still, either, but jittered and dance-stepped in place, appar
ently not the least self-conscious, although as I watched a woman with a stroller and an old man with a bag of groceries both gave him a wide berth. And his skin was so completely white-bloodlessly white-that for a moment I had the chilling illusion his dark baggy suit might be what he’d been buried in.

  It wasn’t worth the trouble to try to slip past him to my car, and in fact I was a bit curious, so I kept walking toward him. When he finally heard me he spun all the way around to look at me and I realized that he was alive but more than just ordinarily pale. He was some kind of albino, although his eyes were tawny, not the more common pink. To put an interesting twist on it, he wasn’t just albino but Asian, too-a combination you don’t see that often, even in cosmopolitan San Judas. More importantly though, from his first words, it seemed clear that my unpigmented Asian-American friend was not entirely sane.

  “Dollar Bob?” he said in a chirpy voice. “Mr. Bobby D? Dollar Man?” He stopped bouncing for a moment and frowned, his whole face creasing into a sock puppet of the mask of tragedy. “Or am I wrong again? So many people have said no today! No, no, not Dollar!”

  “Who the hell are you?” My choice of words wasn’t entirely random. He did have something of the look of the Opposition, but that might just have been his skin condition.

  “Don’t know me? Everybody knows me! All over downtown!” He giggled and did another little soft-shoe shuffle.

  “Well, I don’t-and I don’t want to, either.” But he didn’t have the smell of serious danger on him, at least as far as I could tell. Still, I kept my hand in my jacket pocket where my.38 was hiding.

  His eyes got big. As I said, the irises were sort of yellow-brown, the irises vertical like a cat’s or a fox’s eyes. Whatever he was, he was definitely in the “other” category. “Oh, but I know you, Mr. Bobby Doll-dollar!” he exclaimed. “And I think you have something you might want to sell. I know lots of people who want to buy. I can arrange! Good business, huh? Good for everyone!”

  “I don’t have anything to sell.” Was this guy with the Noh-mask face some kind of lost spirit who’d seen me and Sammy and the kid cleaning broken furniture out of the house and now was hoping to scam a few bucks? The creatures that fall through the cracks in the great war between Us and Them often wind up homeless, and with his too-roomy suit and his loopy dialogue this pale fellow certainly could have been one of those, but there was something about him that wouldn’t let me dismiss him so easily.

  “Really really truthful true?” The albino leaned way down and then squinted up at me from below. “No little something you might have found? No pretty shiny? A little flippy flappy something that needs a special helper to find a market?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and his presence was beginning to depress me. It was bad enough that the bad guys knew my apartment-was every fairy-tale gutter-rat in Judas going to come hang out there, too? Plus, there was just something about the guy that creeped me out. Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that the folks who had tossed my apartment thought I knew something…or had something that they wanted. And this guy thought I might be trying to sell something.

  “Just out of curiosity, pal,” I said, “how much do you think you could get for a-what did you call it? A ‘pretty shiny’? I mean, if someone knew where to find such a thing?”

  “Oh, he would be a very rich man. Yes indeed!”

  “But how do I know we’re even talking about the same thing?” I was trying to find a way to get him to identify whatever he was looking for without admitting that I didn’t have it and didn’t know what it was. “We need to be a little more specific.”

  He laughed as if genuinely pleased by what I’d said and threw his scarecrow arms in the air, sleeves flapping. “If you have it, Mister B-Doll, I know people who want it. Don’t need to say more than that!” He spun. Jazz hands.

  I wanted to pop him one just to get him to stand still. “Look, I don’t have time to mess around. I don’t know you, and I don’t do business with people I don’t know.”

  He laughed again. “Okay, Bobby! You the boss! But if you change your mind and want to talk about the shiny-shiny-talk for real-just ask around. Any corner downtown! I’ll find out! Fox, that’s me!”

  “Fox?”

  “Or Foxy-boy! Mr. Fox! Foxy Foxy! They are all me and they all know me!” He grinned hugely and I noticed that at least a couple of his upper teeth were gold. An instant later he had whirled away from me and was strutting off, making his way up Stambaugh in the general direction of Main Street like the drum major of the Hiroshima Ghost Parade.

  “Wait? How do I get in touch with you if I do want to talk?”

  “Ask for me on any corner downtown!” A couple of old black guys sitting on the front step of the apartment building next door laughed and pointed as they watched him prance past.

  So-yet one more weird detail to add to a large, dangerous, and very confusing picture.

  I had been thinking I would check my mailbox one last time before I left, but after meeting Fox I didn’t feel like going back inside the building. Not that it would have mattered-I never get anything but junk mail, anyway. I hopped in the car and went hunting for any sanctuary with cable TV and a working ice machine.

  I picked a place on the Camino Real because it had a parking garage-after all, a ‘71 Matador with the full performance package isn’t the most discreet car in the world. In fact, I haven’t even seen another one around Jude with the same copper paint, let alone my checkerboard interior, so no way could I leave it out in plain view. In fact, I would have to think about ditching it entirely until the heat had blown over.

  My phone continued to oblige me by not ringing, so I settled back to catch up on a few details that had been hanging fire the last couple of days. Fatback’s material on the late Grasswax (the real Grasswax, not his earthly “Grazuvac” identity) was interesting; I skimmed it and put it aside to reread later when I had less to do, but the main thing I noticed was that he’d been around longer than most prosecutors of his rank. The material on Edward Lynes Walker was more of the stuff I’d already seen: born in 1928, started first successful company in his San Judas garage in the early 1950s, riches and fame, blah blah, split and founded HoloTech when another company he had started got too corporate, blah blah, space program, contributed lots of money to ecological causes.

  All of this biographical crap reminded me I still hadn’t looked through the pictures I’d taken at the Walker house the afternoon young Garcia Windhover had threatened to bust a cap in my ass. The images were still on my phone, which had somehow managed to survive in my pocket while I was being tossed around by a horned, red-hot whaddayoucallit.

  There were a couple blurry shots of the Walker living room and one of Posie’s shoulder and part of the Mayan calendar, but most of the pictures were of the bookcases. I enlarged the images as much as I could and read down the spines of the books, Googling when I couldn’t get enough information from title and author alone. The late ELW’s collection was pretty much what I would have expected from the rest of the house, lots of coffee-table art books and big, expensive picture books about science, as well as collections of photography of the West, echoing the Ansel Adams prints on the living room walls. Among the ordinary-sized books, science and the arts seemed to dominate, although there were a few novels, some of them science fiction, like Carl Sagan’s Contact, others more mainstream stuff like Updike and John Irving. There was even a section of mysteries, the English village sort. I wondered if those had been his or his late wife’s. After what his granddaughter had told me I wasn’t surprised to see that Walker had no conventional religious books, although there were several volumes by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and even a hoary old copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. All together Walker had over a dozen titles with a pretty clearly antireligious slant. Still, for a scientist that wasn’t much of a surprise. Stubborn bastards, those scientists.

  I was beginning to wish I’d found Walker’s mu
sic collection and taken pictures of that instead. You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)

  As I mentioned, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for on the bookshelves-I didn’t really expect to find anything titled, “Evading Heaven” or “How to Make Your Soul Disappear.” I was mainly trying to get a feeling for Edward Lynes Walker beyond the dry facts that Fatback and the ordinary internet had already provided, something that might help me get a handle on why, of all the deaths in the world, his had been so different. But judging by his books at least, Walker was pretty much like millions of others who had managed to show up for their own afterlives. I had all but given up when something caught my eye.

  I had enlarged a section of magazine-shaped objects that filled most of a shelf. Some of them were magazines, special year-end editions of things like Chemical and Engineering News, but most were stockholder’s reports for HT and some of the other companies in which Walker had been involved. Some of these dated from several years earlier, and the section in general looked like Walker might have stuck things into it but almost never pulled anything back out. But squeezed in right between reports for Littleton Bioscience and Metaware was a slender prospectus or something similar with the words “The Magian Society” printed on its spine in tasteful italics.

  Alarm bells-hell, air-raid sirens-went off in my head. Because I had just heard about Magians, and not from just anyone, either. Somebody had asked me if I had heard anything about Magians-an archangelic somebody named Temuel, my supervisor.

  I did a quick, fruitless online search for Magians. I found a lot of jabber about the Three Wise Kings but nothing about any “society,” so I phoned the Walker house. Posie Walker picked up about the twentieth ring, just when I had resigned myself to the answering machine.