by Tad Williams
“Thanks for those words of colloquial wisdom,” I said. “What can I do to stop it?”
“Not much, bab,” said Betty. “A spell of dismissal, but you’d have to get the same fella who summoned it to dismiss it as well.”
“Great. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen, because the fella who summoned it is probably the same Eligor, King Bad Ass of Hell Corners, who wants me so interestingly dead.” I said it a little more emphatically than I should have, perhaps, and I heard one of the delivery drivers drop a spoon.
“Sssshhhh!” Betty wiggled her stubby fingers. “Don’t say the fella’s name out loud.”
The two delivery drivers finally got up to go. They’d been watching Clarence and me talking for several minutes, and of course we had only occasionally been talking to each other, the rest of the time to empty spaces in the booth. It seemed to have disconcerted the drivers; they left a pile of money on their table and inched past us wearing unconvincing smiles.
“Ooh, I fancy that second one a bit,” Betty said. “He’s got a nice bum.”
Doris hooted with laughter. “You old slapper!”
“Focus, ladies, please.” My head was beginning to hurt. The Sollyhulls are decent enough for dead people, but trying to get anything out of them requires the patience of a saint. “Ghallu, remember? As in, how do I kill it?”
“We don’t know, love,” said Doris. “Silver works on some demons, but on these big, old ones, well…” She trailed off.
“Maybe if you popped it one right in the heart with a silver bullet,” said Betty—trying to sound like Jimmy Cagney, I guessed, but it didn’t make it any more convincing. “Or popped it four or five, more likely, and it wasn’t well…”
“Believe me, I’ll try silver, but judging by past experience it’s a bit like trying to aim a rubber band at a tiger while it’s busy trying to knock your head off.” I moved around in my seat to unkink my bruised and aching back, then took a last swallow of my coffee. “Anything else, ladies? About the ghallu or any other subject?”
“Oh, yes, one,” Doris said. “Your Grasswax fella? That prosecutor?”
“I remember him well—his outside and his insides.”
“We used to hear a bit of him,” said Betty as if she’d started the sentence. Sometimes it seemed like they were one person, the way they finished each other’s thoughts, but I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been living together (or living and dead together) for over a hundred years. “He had a gambling problem. That’s what we heard.”
I waited. “That’s all? He was from Hell, ladies—of course he had vices. I don’t think you’re allowed to live there unless you do. Not having vices would be a vice, if you get what I mean. So what of it?”
Betty frowned, a thin, nearly transparent line on her even more transparent face. “We told you, Bobby love, don’t get stroppy. People who have the gambling fever tend to owe people things. Money. Favors. We just thought we’d mention it.”
I stared at them for a moment, and they looked back at me expectantly. “Right,” I said. It wasn’t like I’d come up with anything better on my own. “Thank you, ladies. I’ll think it all over. Come on, Clarence.”
As the kid sat wondering how to get out of his seat without sliding through the ghost of Betty Sollyhull, I took the bag back out of my pocket, removed the bottle of English Lavender, and discreetly poured it on the floor. As the almost asphyxiating smell of the stuff rose around me I dropped an extra twenty on top of our bill. As we reached the door I called to the waitress.
“I’m afraid I’ve spilled one of my perfume samples on the floor. Sorry to make work for you, but I’ve got to run. I’ve left some extra money.”
The Sollyhull sisters had risen up like clouds of steam in sensible shoes, becoming less and less substantial as they flew back and forth above the table until at last I could no longer see them. But as I led the kid to the door we could still hear them, giggling like schoolgirls.
“Oh, that’s lovely. Lovely! Takes me right back!”
“Do you remember that boy Tom Kippers who used to take you to the pictures? The one who always carried barley sugar?”
“Barley sugar! What I wouldn’t give for some of that right now! Oh, Doris, what a lovely thought!”
As we headed for the car Clarence asked me, “How did they die?”
“I think they set their house on fire. Something like that. Killed their parents, too, but I don’t think they meant to die themselves—just didn’t get out fast enough or something. Pretty famous case in Birmingham.”
“What? Did they do it on purpose?” the kid asked, horrified.
I closed my door and buckled myself in. “They died a long time ago—like I said, it was a famous case. You only haunt things when you’re working off certain very severe Purgatorial deals, the kind that keep souls from going straight to hell.” I shrugged. “They probably wouldn’t still be hanging around if it had been an accident, would they?”
The rookie didn’t say much on the way back into downtown.
sixteen
brady doesn’t believe
ANOTHER NIGHT, another cheap motel. So far, I was staying ahead of trouble, both from the Opposition and from my own people, but I couldn’t figure out how my little adventure in Eligor’s office tower hadn’t come to the attention of my superiors. I didn’t expect the Grand Duke himself to report it, even though it was a ridiculously indiscreet breach of every convention there was, right back to Tartarus, but the whole Magian Society connection to Vald Credit suggested Eligor did have something to hide. He was quite high up, after all, so I supposed one of his underlings could have been the one sheltering the Magians, but I was fairly certain that the connections between a Hell-founded megacorporation, the slippery Reverend Doctor Habari, and Grasswax’s former bodyguard couldn’t all be accidental. For one thing, why would Howlingfell take time off from working for Eligor to pull a low-level duty protecting a mere prosecutor unless the Grand Duke wanted it that way? But the odds were that folks on both sides would eventually hear about my trip to Five Page Mill, and my bosses would find out soon after that. I could only imagine what the Ephorate would think of my little adventure, but my educated guess was ‘not much.’
So when I got woken up at the ComfortRest Inn at four in the morning with a client call, summoned to an accident scene on the freeway up near Mission Shores, I suspected I might hear from the Celestial City while I was Outside. And I did.
The client wasn’t anything unusual, a woman on her way to her job, driving all the way in from Morgan Hill. She’d fallen asleep at the wheel, drifted, hit the center divider, and flipped over. Luckily it had been early enough in the morning that the freeway was largely empty and no one else had been killed. Her guardian angel explained that the deceased was a nice, hard-working sort, a fifty-something grandmother whose defense wouldn’t provide much of a challenge, but I didn’t have long to enjoy that before the judge appeared in a glare of inscrutability and informed me that my superiors were requesting my presence in Heaven after we finished.
The last thing I wanted to do was face those five shiny, powerful beings across a table again, this time trying to explain why my idea of a low profile included shooting up somebody’s office, but I didn’t bother to tell that to the Principality who delivered the message. Firstly, it wouldn’t have done any good, and second, it might have spoiled poor Gloria Dubose’s chance at Heaven. I may be crazy, but I’m not a bastard. Not most of the time, anyway.
So I did my duty for God and Choir and then headed back toward the unevenly disinfected premises of the ComfortRest, but when I reached the motel I didn’t feel like trying to go back to sleep, and I certainly wasn’t in a hurry to visit my front office. As I’ve said before, Time is different in Heaven, so I didn’t think they’d care too much if I waited until night came around when I would sleep again. Until then, I’d just keep myself caffeinated and vertical. So I went and downed about four cups of dishwater-strength coffee at
a 24-hour coffee shop and tried to decide what I was going to do next.
The more I thought about it the more I liked the Sollyhull Sisters’ advice about pretending to put Eligor’s whatever-it-might-be up for auction. I mean, it was a spectacularly stupid, spectacularly dangerous thing to do, but it wasn’t as if I had a lot of time to come up with something more subtle. My superiors were probably about to rip off my halo and drum me out of the corps, and a certain red-hot monstrosity with horns was out there somewhere looking for me—along with the rest of Eligor’s minions, probably—slowed only by the fact that I was moving around a lot and sleeping in motels. (It’s times like this when I wonder what the higher angels who organized all this were thinking when they gave us earthbound underlings bodies that needed to be fed and watered and rested just as if we were real people.)
So it seemed like I might as well poke things along. If I was going to wind up demoted (or worse) then I intended to go out like a crazy man, kicking and screaming and setting shit on fire all the way.
I parked downtown, not too far from Beeger Square. It was getting into the morning now, and I was beginning to think about a late breakfast to ease the headachy buzz of too much coffee, so I tried Sam but got no reply. On the off chance he was sitting in The Compasses and had turned his phone off, I called the bar phone. Chico said he hadn’t been in but that Monica had just walked in and wanted the phone. I didn’t even have a chance to react to that before she was in my ear.
“Don’t come in, Bobby.”
“Huh?” was what I replied, or something equally dazzling.
“If you were going to come to The Compasses, don’t,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to, but is this some weird way of saying you’re still pissed off at me?”
“How could anyone ever be pissed off at a sweetheart like you?” The sarcasm was so thick it actually made the phone heavy in my hand. “No, seriously, B, it’s weird around here. There are people lounging around outside the building, homeless folks, street crazies…”
“And this is new?”
“Shut up. I know the regulars, and these aren’t them. They’re watching the place—they take turns so it’s not too obvious. Someone’s definitely got an eye on The Compasses, so how much would you be willing to bet it’s not you they’re watching for?”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t touch that action. That’s why I wasn’t planning to come in anytime soon.” I sighed. Eligor must have found out that after the arrest I’d walked right out the back door of County. Was I going to be living on the run indefinitely? Permanently? Because you don’t outlast one of the Lords of Hell in a grudge-match.
“And there’s more,” she said. “We’ve had a couple of more no-show clients, if you know what I mean. Like your Walker guy.”
“Hang on—you mean here in San Judas?”
“One for Sanders, one for Jimmy the Table. I’ll send you some information about those clients when I can, but basically it was the same as with yours—everybody present except the guest of honor.”
I cursed silently. If there were already more vanishing souls just in San Judas that might mean more everywhere. It was beginning to look like an epidemic. “Thanks for the information, beautiful. I owe you.”
“More than you’ll ever know, Dollar. Dinner and drinks might pay back a little of it. Let me know when there’s a break in your schedule of being attacked.” She paused when she normally would have hung up, then added: “Be careful, Bobby. Really. This stuff is getting scary-weird.”
If the bad guys were keeping watch for me at The Compasses then obviously Beeger Square was out, but I still needed a corner somewhere in the middle of downtown, because that’s where Foxy the White-Nosed Reindeer had told me to ask for him. I headed back down Broadway until I got to Beech, where the pedestrian traffic was still thick, then popped over to Marshall, not far from the Kaiser Health tower. Only a couple of days to Carnival now and the decorations were all up, streetlights and traffic lights swathed in tinsel. They’d have finished erecting the stage and the reviewing stands in Beeger Square and hung the special colored lights, but God only knew when I’d get to see them.
I watched the nearest corner for a few minutes but nobody seemed to be lingering except the guy crouched against the base of the traffic light with the cardboard “HOMLESS NEED HELP GOD BLESS YOU” sign. I gave him twenty dollars to get something to eat and he thanked me and ambled off toward the coffee shop on the far corner. As soon as he was gone I took a breath, feeling increasingly stupid, and said, “Fox.”
Nothing happened. I tried again, ”Mister Fox” this time, and over the next few minutes even worked my way up to “Foxy Foxy,” but still without luck. I was about to give up, deciding I had been too tricky trying to summon him that way, that he really had meant I should ask for him like an ordinary street person, among people hanging around on corners, but I had one more idea and was determined to try it before packing it in. In a lull after the pedestrian green light emptied my corner, I opened a Zipper—just a small one—put my mouth against it, and whispered “Fox” into the timeless spaces of Outside.
“Dollar Man!” someone cried from just behind my right ear, startling me badly. I spun around, and there he was in all his pale glory, his baggy dark suit augmented by a truly ghastly knit scarf of alternating pink and black stripes. With his untanned skin and his continual prancing he looked like the sacrificial lamb the goth kids might send out first to distract the school bullies while the rest made a run for it. “You call for Foxy!” he said cheerfully. “Is it love, true love?”
Another group of pedestrians was assembling on the corner, waiting for the light to change, but none of them paid us any attention. I couldn’t tell whether that was angelic glamour protecting us or just the fact that downtown Jude has plenty of residents who looked and acted like Mr. Fox. Did I mention that we closed the state mental hospital a few years ago and threw most of the patients out into the streets?
“So you come to do business, Mr. Bob Dollar?” He spread his long white fingers. “You decide to sell, or you interested in some of Foxy Foxy’s other products? I have the best, all sizes, all smells, all the time!”
I really wanted to get this over with quickly: Every moment I spent standing on a downtown corner I felt like I had a big target painted on my back. Or maybe a price tag. “You said you had…buyers,” I said quietly. “For that…thing. I’ve decided I’d like to have a little auction. Do it all at once. Get my price and then get rid of it.”
“Ah.” Fox smiled broadly, showing some gold. He looked like a live-action anime character. “Getting a little hot in Bobby-town, yes? Is it, yes? Perhaps the grand duke’s moo-cow going clip-clop in your china shop?”
I smiled back, but it wasn’t a happy one. “Just tell me, can you arrange it?” So my pale new friend knew about the ghallu. He clearly knew a few things. Who was this guy? I couldn’t figure out if he was one of Hell’s banished—you run into them—or an undead hanger-on like the Sollyhulls, or something else equally weird that I just hadn’t heard of yet. “Can you?”
“Can do, flyboy!” he said cheerfully. He grinned like the host of one of those Japanese game shows where they make the contestants eat centipedes. “Can do! I’ll set it up, you bring the thing, and we’ll all swing, swing, swing.”
“Okay. But one more thing—no demons, got it? Nobody from Hell. I smell any horns, I walk.”
“Heard and obeyed, Dollar Bob!”
“Okay. When should I get hold of you again?” I turned sharply at a noise, but it had nothing to do with me—a car had almost run over a late-breaking pedestrian in the crosswalk, and the driver was now venting his rage through his open window.
“No need, my new friend,” Fox said cheerfully. “I’ll find you and let you know when the big meet and greet will be!”
“I’m not sure you’ll be able to find me that easy,” I began, but when I turned back to him there was no longer anybody on the corner with me except the homeless gu
y, who was just returning with a cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee, his sign tucked under his arm.
“Gotta go back to work,” he said as if apologizing.
“Did you see where that guy went? Pale-skinned Asian guy in a dumb-ass scarf?”
The man only shook his head. “No offense, man, but you weren’t talking to anyone when I got here…just yourself.”
I had a choice of errands to occupy me while I waited however long it would take for Fox to set up the auction. As I drove back to the motel I called Fatback and left a voicemail adding Foxy Foxy and Grand Duke Eligor to the list of things I wanted to know more about. I was giving George so much work I was going to need to top up his retainer out of my motel-shrunk bank account. I also left a message with my friend Orban the gunsmith telling him what I was going to need from him, then ducked into a drug store and bought myself more shaving stuff and toiletries because it looked like I was going to be staying in motels for a while, and I was beginning to get a little lackluster in the grooming department. I mean, if you died, you wouldn’t want a heavenly advocate who looked like he’d just tried to use his six months’ sobriety chip to buy a drink, would you?
The small stuff dealt with, I headed down toward Southport with the car windows open, hoping the bay air would blow a little life back into me. I only had until tonight to get more answers, then I’d have to go in and face my masters—and that was really what they were, weren’t they? I called them bosses or employers, but unless you’re in the mob or an army under fire your bosses can’t usually kill you when they get pissed at you, and no other bosses but mine and my opponents’ can have your soul jerked out of your body and sent to the deepest fiery pits to suffer for eternity. Unless you work for Walmart.
Anyway, I did my best to enjoy the cool but not too cool air, since I didn’t know when I might get to appreciate it again. I followed Charleston Road out to the little office park I’d already visited, the place where the Magian Society had rented their storefront. This time I had my breaking and entering tools in the trunk because I was going to toss the place, if there was anything left to toss.
