The place is on the Wharf, or nearly so. The building looks almost like a funky old movie theatre with one of those ticket booths in front. The glass is pretty much shot — literally. “Wax Museum” is written across the front in fading letters about as tall as my forearm.
Inside, the place is a lot like the back hallways of the Mission — or the crypt, my brain tells me. Which is to say, it is dark, damp, dusty and generally unpleasant in a very claustrophobic sort of way. On top of all that, it smells funny — like a cave, but oily. Ooga-booga, in my book. And on top of all that, are the frozen people. Wax dummies or statues or whatever of just about anything you could imagine. They are posed in little groups behind moldy velvet rope, doing things of historical import.
Turning on the sputtering lights doesn’t help much in my humble estimation. They flicker and fade almost to off in cycles and make Lou’s frozen people look like they’re not so frozen. This is especially creepy as some of them are missing important body parts — like heads and arms and such.
There is a headless Abe Lincoln giving a silent address, his top hat sitting right down on his shoulders. There is a wax Babe Ruth getting ready to swing at a pitch from an armless pitcher. His bat has a spare hand on the end of it in which is the baseball. The Babe looks mighty perplexed.
Further along, in a painted Western saloon around the corner, a one-armed John Wayne with a patch over one glass eyeball is dressed like a cowboy, but is also wearing an army helmet and war medals. Not too far away, leaning crazy-angle against a jeep carcass, is another Duke, who’s got on the rest of the army uni along with a sheriff’s badge. He is wearing the cowboy hat, which has a stuffed prairie dog perched in the crown.
Somebody — and I gotta suspect it’s Lou — has been having a rare old time with these guys.
Everywhere I look there are cobwebs, thick and gauzy. They float in the little puffs of breeze that ooze in from every which where. Creepy Lou is right about all those glass eyeballs — it feels like they’re glued to my back. Even Doug seems to be weirded out by it. His branches flutter and flap so much I can hear the whispering of the needles above the beating of my own heart. The deeper we get into the twisty hallways, the more my skin tries to crawl off my bones. It doesn’t help that Doug’s wagon decides to take this time to beg for oiling.
I want to zhou the hell out of here, let me tell you, but I realize we are getting to the part Creepy Lou wants us to see, ‘cause I am suddenly surrounded by the evidences of Mission life. Most especially, I seem to be surrounded by padres. I see a handless one offering benediction to a group of Ohlone children, another inspecting the catch of shapeless fish being held out by a couple of braves, while two more watch over industrious Ohlone women at crude looms.
Then I see what is supposed to be the Mission Dolores Church. There is a wedding taking place in one corner — the bride is headless, the groom has exchanged heads with the priest. A muy peculiar image.
And then I see what Creepy Lou has brought us here to see: in an alcove lit by a single old lamp that dangles by its cord, swaying, spooky, in the breezes, is the main altar of the Mission Dolores. Shadows creepy-crawl over the figures gathered beneath a painted mural of the wall-o-saints. There are a pack of padres and natives, too, but in the middle of it all are a priest and single Ohlone man.
The priest is holding his hands out to the Ohlone; a cross is in one, the other is empty, though it looks as if something might’ve been there once. The arms of the Ohlone are crossed over his chest. When I get close, I can see that they are not empty. When I am standing face to face with the Ohlone, who I know must be the Tuibun shaman, Paguin, I can see clearly what the padre is demanding of him. A beaded piece of cloth is folded against his chest and a clay pipe is clutched in his fist.
I look into his glass eyes. They are defiant — or at least, I imagine they are. Paguin doesn’t want to give up the shaman’s shirt or the clay pipe. And maybe, in his heart of hearts, he never does give them up. Maybe he just makes room next to them in his heart of hearts for the cross the monk holds.
This Paguin has been holding onto his magics for more years than I been in business. I gotta figure out how to get him to give them up to us. As it turns out, there is no gentle or dignified way to do this. We must bend and break the shaman’s arms and hands, which is terrible, though I keep reminding myself he is not Paguin, but only a wax figure of Paguin. The spirit of the Tuibun shaman is not in him, but somewhere else, presently waiting for some ditzy Embarcaderan merlin to set him free.
Still, I murmur prayers under my breath the whole time we are breaking the wax man apart.
The shirt isn’t so much a shirt as it is a vest, like in the photo-display Fish showed us. The fabric is damp and gritty and smells of mildew, but it’s all there. The pipe has an accidental hole in it, but it looks pretty good otherwise. My hands shake with relief when I finally hold these things. Now, I wonder how I can protect them from Master Chen.
“I thought you said the padre had some of the stuff,” says Hector to Creepy Lou, while I am considering this.
“Uh-huh,” says Lou. “The watchamacallit.”
“Rattle,” says Hector. “So, where is it now?”
When I catch the significance of this question, my breath gets stuck halfway out of my lungs and I choke on it. I been so buzzed just to see this stuff, I have forgotten the spirit rattle. I jerk my head up to the padre’s empty left hand.
“Oh that,” says Lou. “It's in my cozy. Kinda decorative, ni dong.”
Decorative. I unclog my lungs and let loose a sigh of relief. “Let’s get the rattle,” I say and Lou pops up like Jack B. Nimble, pulls his wrinkled old hat our of a pocket, crams it on his head and leads us out of the creep-fest.
Lou’s cozy, it turns out, is up a flight of very windy stairs from the creep-fest. There is no way in God’s Golden Mountain I’m gonna lug the Fabled Tree up that staircase. Once again, Hector comes through, volunteering to stay downstairs with the Tree while I go upstairs with Creepy Lou.
At the bottom of the windy steps, his foot on the bottom-most tread, Lou pauses and scratches around under his hat. “Huh,” he says apropos to nothing and then goes on up.
The cozy is a clutter of stuff, kind of like I imagine the inside of Creepy Lou’s head. I see Abe Lincoln’s noggin. It is home to a collection of dried flowers and bird feathers. It looks right at home next to the head of the Ohlone bride, who is wearing a Spanish helmet over her lace veil. Both are propped up on an old dresser with a shattered mirror. It doesn’t quite cover one of two windows in the cozy. A cold breeze whistles through the gaps around the edges of the mirror.
I see all sorts of other stuff Lou has brought up from the Wax Museum, too. What I don’t see is the spirit rattle.
At almost the precise moment I open my mouth to comment on this fact, I hear a clatter and a scrape and a bump from somewhere, and Creepy Lou says, “Uh-oh,” and leaps to the uncovered window in this jumbly place. It’s not much of a window — all frame and no glass to speak of — and he sticks his head out and then just as quick, pulls it back in.
“What?” I ask, suspecting I will not like the answer much.
Lou gives me this hang-dog look and points at the window, out of which I stick my own head. This is what I see: An old dude with long, scraggy hair is crab-crawling down over the rooftop below Lou’s cozy. His crab-crawl is especially sloppy ‘cause of the hairy gourd-on-a-stick he’s got clutched in one grubby claw.
Squint.
As he reaches the edge of the roof, he cocks his squinty little eyeballs back over his shoulder and grins and shakes the rattle at me. That grin got one message for me (and possibly for th’ Alcaldés new merlin, Hector) which is that revenge is sweet.
I pull my head back in the window.
“He’ll head for Lord E,” I tell Lou. “We gotta zhou.”
We start by zhouing downstairs to rendezvous with Hector. I fill him in while I make up my mind about how to protect the magical stuff while I’m busy chas
ing Squint. I pull off my shirt, put on the shaman’s vest and put my shirt back on top. I tuck the pipe into my belt.
Then I point at Lou, who jumps and just about salutes me. “You get my wife and have her scramble her best knighties to Potrero with eyes out for Squint. You tell her what happened here, you got that?”
Lou is nodding like crazy as I bend down and prayerfully remove from Doug a branch like a three-fingered hand. I stroke his nodding top boughs, ‘cause I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
“Take the Tree with you,” I tell Lou.
“Got it! Got it!” he says, grabs the tongue of Doug’s wagon and zhous most prodigiously. The wagon squeals in protest.
Last I see of Doug, he is waving all his branches at me.
I tuck the three-fingered branchlet into my amulet bag and am out on the street. Hector is right behind me, and together, we are, I hope, right behind Squint.
Twentieth:
Will the Real Demons Please Stand Up?
Even at full-tilt gallop, we cannot seem to gain on Squint. Block after block, I see his coat-tails flapping at me from just around a corner. I am about to wonder if he’s in really great shape for an old wheeze, or if he’s got some truly serious magic, after all, when he scoots across an intersection three blocks ahead of us under full, if flickering, lamp light.
“Aw jeez,” says Hector, eloquently, and I stop dead in my insignificant tracks.
Squint is riding one of those big ten-speed tricycles the Wharfside knighties sometimes use on patrol, and he is pedaling like crazy.
“That sucks,” Hector sums up, panting. “You got any wheels around here?”
“There’s the Royal Mercedes, but that’s at the Presidio with the Majesties. Besides, I don’t know how to drive it.”
“What do you know how to drive?”
“A Vespa,” I say. “The knighties use them as emergency vehicles.”
“I’d say this qualifies as an emergency, wouldn’t you?”
I would. We head over to the Wharfside Squad House. It does not take much splanifying to shake loose a couple of the little motor scooters. Within minutes, Hector and I are mounted up and purring down the road to the Border. I am fuming, because I got not idea one how far ahead our squinty avenger has fled.
As we cross the new bridge over the Trench on Guerrero, I pray to see Squint, though I do not expect to see him. But when we are half a block from the Mission Dolores, heading into a trailing bufandong, I do see him and he is no longer pedaling away from us. Instead, he is pedaling toward us and he is hollering bloody mayhem.
“What the hell?” asks Hector.
We stop our scooters, blocking the street as much as possible. Squint, seeing us, does not flee in the opposite direction, as I expect, or even try to blow by us. He hollers all the louder and skids to a stop, with the result that his trike heels over and dumps his ass on the broken pavement. He rolls halfway to his feet and scrambles toward us, still hollering.
Finally I catch some words: “Banshees and woggles!” he’s wailing. “Ghoulies an ghosties! Save me! Save me!”
“What’s with that?” asks Hector.
In the next second or so, we find out, ‘cause all of a sudden Guerrero is full of ninjas.
“Aagh! Demons!” shrieks Squint.
An understandable mistake. These guys are black on black; their faces are covered up to the eyes, and their eyes — I jink you not — are glowing a sick shade of green. The effect of this in this grimy, foggy darkness is truly awesome.
“Jeez!” says Hector.
My thoughts, exact.
The ninjas don’t introduce themselves. They just head for poor old Squint, leading me to the obvious conclusion that they know he has the rattle. Accordingly, I leap from my Vespa and catch Squint by the lapels of his ratty old reefer coat.
There is a brawl the like of which I have seen only in old baseball videos. I have never been in one of these brawls, naturally, so I do not know the protocol. I quickly decide to let Hector fend for himself. I wrap my arms firmly around Squint, making like an octopus on an oyster.
I am kicked, chopped and pried at, but I do not give in. I incant octopus spells, thinking only of my oyster’s hairy pearl, which I can feel digging into my chest.
My eyes are closed, so I do not see what causes the sudden stoppage of the aforementioned violence to my person, but I hear it. There is the rattle of Vespas, first of all, and their little engines make this 3-D racket, bouncing off every brick, cobble and concrete slab within 50 yards. Then I hear the engines cut out and the shouts of knighties and the patter of hi-tops on asphalt.
I crack open my eyes. The ninjas are suddenly otherwise engaged. That is, except for two that seem to have been left behind with instructions to try to drag me and my oyster into an alley. I resist and incant, throwing out as deft a Chouyan as I have ever incanted.
The ninjas loosen their grip and utter Chinese swear words and then I hear Hector’s voice shout, “Hey, you guys! Over here!” And they are gone.
I am alone with Squint in a grove of Vespas. I tug at his coat. It rattles.
“Uh-uh,” he says, clutching it closed over his chest. “Mine.”
“Not yours,” I say. “This belongs to the Dolores.”
“Who the hell’s that?” He yanks on the coat, but I am still in squid mode, but this oyster’s goin' nowhere if I can help it.
I give him the hairiest eyeball of which I am capable. “The Haunts of the Mission Dolores,” I tell him. “You heard of ‘em, I’m sure. The disembodied spirits of five thousand dead Ohlone Indians. This — “ I shake the coat, making it rattle. “ — belongs to them, and they want it back...Wilbur.” I produce his name (given to me by a certain faux merlin) with a flourish.
His eyes are big as horse chestnuts and I feel his grip on the coat start to slip.
“You know my real and secret name!”
“And I’m not afraid to use it. By the way, what I know, the Dolores know.” (Could be true and therefore, not technically a lie, but merely wishful thinking.)
“Now, now, children. No need to fight over this old relic. The Ohlone no longer need it. It belongs, by divine right, to me.”
I know, before it oozes all the way out, who the Voice belongs to. This is himself, the Red Dragon, in the flesh, as they say. I turn and find him standing so near, I almost back up a step. I don’t though, ‘cause that would be a severe breach of merlinly protocol and would give him the psychological advantage.
He is wearing purple robes, long and priestly, and a strange tall hat with tassels and bells that I realize are now singing — incanting, no doubt, on their master’s behalf. This guy is loaded for magical bear, that much is clear as bluesky.
I force my eyes away from his face and find myself looking at the ninja who has appeared next to him. Before my gaze can beat another hasty retreat, I realize that the ninja’s eyes aren’t glowing at all; they’re smudged underneath with some kind of phosphorescent green stuff. It’s not magic, it’s makeup.
This mundane discovery has a weird effect on me. First, hope springs eternal that I am not deadjim; after all, it is a poor wizard of any stripe who must resort to flim-flam to promote abject awe. Second, I am disappointed.
Huh. Go figure.
Of course, it is about this time that I notice something else about the ninja’s eyes. They got that same, black hole stare I’ve seen on other folks who hang with Master Chen. I begin to suspect he’s got himself an entire army of these ninja-golems. Just as I have this horrendous thought, the ninja smiles. Ooga-booga.
I pull myself as upright as I can without letting loose of Squint, and say, “I’m Taco Del, merlin to — “
“Yes, yes. Merlin to Hismajesty, King of Embarcadero. I know who and what you are, little wizard. And I know what you could be.”
Against my will, my eyes are pulled to his face. He smiles. By Vespa light I see that it is not a pleasant smile and that his face is not the face of an old man; it is the face of
a dragon, ageless and ancient. His eyes are dragon’s eyes — so black they’re purple, so live, they seem to turn like ferris wheels in his head. They got all the colors in the universe and they got no color at all. They are black holes, sucking up all the light on Guerrero street just the way they’ve sucked all the light and life out of his ninjas and monks.
At this moment, I am convinced that they will suck up all the light in my world if I don’t do something quick.
“I seem to have the advantage, merlin,” he says. “I know you, but you do not know me.”
He leans toward me, dragon-eyes glittering, sucking at my face.
“You’re Master Chen,” I say.
“Ah, but that is not my name, merely one of my titles. That knowledge will do you no good. It seems you have some small magic to command. Were you my ally, I might offer you a kingdom of your own to command. But you have placed yourself in opposition to me. So, you will receive only this riddle: I am unity and I am duality. I am one and I am legion. Before the Flood, I sired a nation; after the Flood, the soul of a nation. Because of me, all spirits cried in agony, as the innermost secrets of nature were revealed by my command. Immortals fear me, for I have quested and sought out the elixir of their wealth — and, behold, I shall seize it.”
He pauses for me to admire his little poem, then says, “In the tradition of riddles, I give you three guesses. I expect it will take you an eternity to discover my name and, while I have that kind of time, you do not. For now, Hearer of Whispers, bow to the inevitable: give me the rattle.”
While my pea brain tries to deal with the fact that he knows about the Whisperers, he makes this strange beckoning gesture. His grotesquely overgrown fingernails catch the light like as if they got diamond dust on, and a banner of mist wraps around his arm and wags its tail in my face.
It hits me that he is trying to spell me and my insides almost freeze up. My eyes are glued to those damn fingernails.
Then, I wonder how he changes his underwear.
This makes me giggle, which sort of jinks up Chen’s spell. Just to make sure it stays jinked, I wonder how he does a couple of other homey things. Then, I prepare to let loose some spells of my own.
Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny Page 23
