by Tad Williams
“Depends, I guess. How did you find us out here?”
“Hold on,” he said. “Before anybody does any more talking, I just want to mention that this is a needle gun full of some kind of South American plant toxin, Sam, so if you try do something dramatic like kill yourself, I’ll drop you with it, and you’ll be paralyzed for hours. And I can make the shot, too—I’ve been practicing.” He looked down at the titan corpse of the ghallu. “Wow. Did you do that, Bobby? That must have been tough.”
“Hold on, why would Sam want to kill himself?” I demanded.
“Because he’s got access to at least one other body,” Clarence said. “Habari’s.”
Startled, I looked at Sam, who shrugged. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Habari was you?”
“Who did you think it was?” he asked me. “I thought you knew. Fuck’s sake, I thought that’s why you took me to that headstone.”
“I knew you had something to do with all this Magian Society stuff, but I thought Habari might be…well, Leo. Because they both died about the same time.”
“You’re talking about our Leo? From the Harps?” Sam shook his head. “As far as I know, he’s dead and we’re not getting him back. And Habari died a year or so after Leo. But Leo was involved, indirectly….”
“Wait a minute.” I turned back to Junior, who was still trying to perfect his I’m-in-control stance. “This is going too fast for me. How did you find us here?”
Clarence had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Sam’s phone is hacked. I can always find out where he is. I had some help from Upstairs on that.”
“You were tracking Sam all this time, not me?” I looked at Sam. “So you lied to me. It wasn’t me he was spying on.”
“Shit, B,” he said, “I lied to you about a lot of things. Yeah, the kid’s been keeping an eye on me all along. Some of our bosses were getting suspicous.”
Then something else occurred to me, and I turned back to Clarence. “But Sam lost his phone earlier tonight, long before we got here. So how did you track us to Shoreline Park?”
Clarence stared back, but he was hesitating. “I bugged your phone, too,” he admitted at last. “After I got here, I followed the noise.”
If he’d had access to my phone he might know everything, even about Caz. This wasn’t good at all. “So Temuel was just double-bluffing me? You’ve been working for our bosses all this time? That still doesn’t explain how you got here, kid—you can’t drive. Or did you lie about that too?”
Now Clarence looked really guilty. “I…found a ride.”
I laughed despite myself. “And is what’s-her-name, your nice old landlady, sitting out there in her Continental keeping the heater running ’til you get back?”
He scowled. “You don’t know everything, Bobby. I’ve been renting from them because Burt has an indoor shooting range in his basement. They let me practice down there.” He turned to Sam. “Now it’s your turn, Angel Sammariel. Start talking, because once I turn you over to our superiors they’ll clamp down on all this and I’ll never find out what happened. How did the Third Way approach you? What did they offer you?”
“Not they,” Sam said after a moment. “Kephas.”
The other name Temuel had given me, along with the Magians.
“Never heard of him,” said Clarence.
Sam shook his head. “Not a him, necessarily. Just a disguised presence, not male, not female. A high-up angel, though, that’s for sure. Kephas offered me a deal.”
“Kephas means ‘rock,’” I said, remembering what Fatback had told me. “As in, ‘On this rock I will build My church…’”
Sam nodded. “The higher angels, they like that old school stuff.”
Clarence snorted at this. “Betraying Heaven is old school?”
Sam gave the kid a cold look. “You wouldn’t know about it, Junior, but me and Bobby saw a lot of ugly stuff when we were in the Harps. Stuff they don’t teach you in the Records department—”
“Yeah, yeah, it was hell out there,” Clarence interrupted. “Spare me the justifications, Sam. You didn’t like what our superiors gave you to do, so you decided to find some nicer bosses.”
Sam shook his head again, not in negation but in something more like resignation. “It was our old top-kicker Leo who first got me thinking, actually. He was always talking about the politics, the stuff going on behind the scenes, wondering who was really in charge.”
“Another paranoid.” But Clarence sounded like he might be trying to convince himself more than us.
“Said the undercover spy to his ex-partner.” Sam forced a sour grin. “After awhile, what Leo said began to make sense; whoever’s really in charge, they don’t seem to have our interests at the top of their priority list. I couldn’t ignore that any longer. And then Leo died—the real death, the final kind. I didn’t think it was an accident. Still don’t. Maybe I said a few things afterward that drifted around Upstairs, I don’t know. Whatever tipped them off, the Third Way group found me. Kephas was their representative, and he, she, whatever it is, asked me if I wanted to do something to make Heaven better.” Sam then repeated most of the stuff I’d already heard in Walker’s quasi-suicide letter about the Third Way, their belief in the need for an alternative to Heaven and Hell, their willingness to try to do something about it. “They weren’t ready to move yet—this was years ago—but I couldn’t take being in the Harps any longer.” He turned to me. “It was beginning to feel like a lie, Bobby—all that talk about how we were the only bulwark against Hell’s evil on Earth, but there we were doing all that awful shit.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said. “I might have listened, too.” But I wasn’t certain about that. I don’t like chaos. I don’t like secrets. And I sure as hell didn’t like the idea of people as powerful as Karael and his friends being angry at me.
“So I quit the Harps,” Sam went on, “took an informal leave of absence, and for a while I just…well, sort of bummed around. Settled here in San Judas and tried to figure out what I was doing. Made friends—mortal friends, even. One of them was Reverend Habari.” The tone of Sam’s voice said this was important to him. “I really wish you’d known him, Bobby. He was a good man. Truly good. He wasn’t just a community political activist, he would take in homeless folk and feed them and let them stay until he could get them into a shelter. He marched in all the marches, but he also stayed up late supervising the night basketball league in Sierra Park. Visited shut-ins. Read to sick folks. And then he got cancer and died. And all I could think was, ‘And that’s the end of a good man. He’s gone.’”
“What do you mean?” Clarence sounded outraged. “He died. If he was as good as you say, then he went straight to Heaven!”
Sam’s voice rose. “For what? To become what? Our masters have made certain we don’t know anything for sure, kid. The only angels we know are like us—ciphers with their memories wiped, working for the Man down here on Earth or our bosses in Heaven. Is that what happened to Moses Habari? They just erased everything and started him over, like us? Or is he one of those poor fools square-dancing in the Fields of the Blessed with about as much of his personality left as a psychiatric patient pumped full of happy drugs?”
“It’s not like that!” The barrel of Clarence’s needle gun wavered, but he kept it on Sam. “We’re angels! We work for God!”
“Well, see, that’s something I’m not as sure about as you, son. All that stuff you used to ask me, ‘Why this, why that…?’ Well, I asked those questions for real. In fact, I’m not sure if we’re working for God the Highest or for somebody else entirely.”
“That’s enough,” Clarence said. “I don’t need to hear any more blasphemy, Sam. I’m sorry—you’re a good man, I really believe that, but you’re no angel. Not anymore. It’s time for you to come back to Heaven. Maybe you can get some help…”
I had distanced myself from Sam, in part just to make it harder for Clarence to shoot both of us, and as I moved closer to the kid I said, “N
ot yet, please. Not until I find out what happened to the souls they took. Did it work, Sam? Did you find a place to hide them where they’d be safe?”
“That was the hard part,” he admitted. “We couldn’t stash souls on Earth without somebody noticing, but the Tartarean Convention set things up so that at the very least, a high-ranking angel and an equally high-ranking demon had to agree on making any new territory outside the Earthly bounds, no matter how small. My Third Way bosses had other recruits like me, and they were ready to fit us all out with fake identities and fake bodies. I probably should have just invented a name, but I wanted to pay back Dr. Habari, at least in a small way…” He trailed off. “Anyway, apparently the Third Way folk got a tip that Grand Duke Eligor might make a deal—for reasons of his own that I don’t know. And he did.”
As Sam had been talking, I moved a little closer to Clarence, and now I quietly slipped my empty gun out of my belt.
“…so because of that deal, we had our site,” Sam finished. “It exists. It’s real!”
I punctuated this fascinating revelation by hitting Clarence hard on the base of the skull with my gun butt. The kid didn’t even make a noise, just dropped like a sack of apples. I didn’t want to kill him, although I had no doubt that if I did he’d be resurrected again post-haste by our bosses, but I wasn’t going to stand there and see Sam get dragged off either. At least not until I’d heard the rest of the story. I took the smooth little needle gun out of Clarence’s hand, then turned back to my oldest friend.
“Okay, Sammy,” I said. “It’s just the two of us now. Convince me.”
“Convince you of what? That it works? That’s easy. Follow me.”
I stopped to check Clarence’s breathing, then turned him onto his side so if he puked he wouldn’t choke on it. Not a good way to go, even if you’re getting shunted into another body afterward.
“How hard did you hit him?” Sam asked as we made our way out past the outdoor pools.
“He’ll be out for awhile, but I don’t think the damage will be permanent.”
“Glad to hear it. I kind of liked him. At first I thought he was too obvious an outsider to really be a plant.”
“They double-bluffed you,” I said. “Temuel got me that way, too. Does that mean he was in on Clarence?”
“Maybe. Or maybe the Mule didn’t find out that Clarence was actually working for some of the higher-ups until after he asked you to keep an eye on the kid. It’s always wheels within wheels, B.”
“Heaven is one sneaky bastard, all right.”
We fell silent as we made our way up the Grand Promenade toward Merryland and its ruined attractions, as if we were two souls traveling not to some new third destination but floating through good old Limbo, out of time, out of space. I wondered if Sam and I would ever walk side by side this way again. And no more meals at Boxer Rebellion? Really?
I had no idea what I was going to do next. I didn’t really want to think about it.
The moon was still hanging around, silvering the rusted remains of the coiling Super Snake and the collapsed stalls of various attractions. This time, with nothing trying to suck my head off, I was able to appreciate the weirdness of the place. You notice I didn’t say, “the weird beauty of the place.” Shoreline Park might be many things, but beautiful is not one of them. But it smelled better out here at the north end, so either the sea breezes kept the air cleaner on this side of the island or the derelicts couldn’t be bothered to come all this way just to take a dump. Either way it made a pleasant change.
The peeling facade of some kind of game booth grinned as we passed. It might have been a clown’s head once, but now it was only two smears for eyes and a rictus smile of which only lipless teeth remained.
“So if you didn’t know it was me posing as Habari,” Sam said abruptly, “how did you know about the cemetery?”
“I got some help from Fatback. He told me that Habari had died, and when he told me Habari was buried in the very graveyard you used to take me to all the time—well, it seemed like a pretty long coincidence. Plus, I’d already picked up on at least one of the lies you told me.”
“There were a bunch. Which one?”
That made me feel sadder than I would have expected. “When you came to my room at the Ralston last night. You said you called Alice, and she told you the room number.”
“But I did call her. I’m not stupid, Bobby.”
“Yeah, but she gave you the wrong room number. She told me about it. She was feeling bad because she assumed you wouldn’t be able to find me. But of course, you only asked her for show. Kephas or whoever told you where I was, right?”
He only nodded, looking ahead now.
I was putting things together now. I had guessed that the angelic powers Habari had demonstrated to Edward Walker meant that one of the key players in the whole thing was probably local, since Habari the Magian worked out of the storefront on East Charleston. There just aren’t that many folks with haloes in San Judas, so I had begun to think it almost had to be someone I knew, as proved by the way Habari had reacted when we’d passed each other in our cars. He had recognized me immediately, even through my cuts, bruises, and bandages. But I’d gotten too fancy and instead of looking right next to me for Habari’s identity I’d made the leap to wondering whether Leo the Loke might have faked his own death.
“What about the bodies, Sam?”
He turned, startled. “What bodies?”
“The ones you and the other Magians must have worn. After all, you couldn’t ordinarily pass for an African clergyman, Sam.”
“The Third Way gave us those—they’re a little less functional, but a lot easier to enter and leave than the regular, earthbound bodies Heaven hands out. I’ve got the Habari body stashed away in a safehouse, but I can’t give you the location, Bobby, or the body. I’ll need everything I can trade to plead down my sentence with the bosses. Hey, maybe I’ll get off with a couple of million years in the fiery pit.”
Now I felt queasy. He knew as well as I did that it wouldn’t be anything like that simple. How could I have been so badly fooled by my best friend? And what was I going to do about him? “So now, after landing me in the shit, you’re going to sell out the Third Way too?”
“Shit, Bobby, that was supposed to be a joke. No, the truth is, I’m not giving you the safehouse and the Habari body because I want the Third Way to have a chance to clean it up and hide their tracks from the Upstairs boys. I never wanted this to happen to you, but I believe in what they’re doing. I’m not giving the Ephorate anything.”
“What did you think that day you bumped into me in front of the Magian Society office?”
Sam didn’t look around. “Startled the crap out of me.”
“I should have recognized you by your ride.”
Now he did turn. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t driving my own car.”
“Yeah, but no other angel would be seen dead in an old beater like that. You never cared about cars, Sam.”
Crazy Town, the funhouse, stood just in front of us. It actually still had a roof and most of its walls, but that was about it. The plaster of Paris spooks and clowns had eroded from the walls, leaving only spectral outlines and the occasional disembodied foot or hand or ear. What remained had been decorated with Day-Glo spray paints in a variety of runic designs that meant something only to the taggers themselves, but now even the graffiti was fading, rapidly becoming another piece of the past. As we crunched toward the building over a litter of broken bottles, I was glad I hadn’t managed to kick my shoes off while I was in the water with the ghallu. The wounds the creature had given me were beginning to heal thanks to my angelic constitution, but I was still injured, aching, bloody, and very, very depressed.
“It’s in here,” he said. “The door to the Third Way.”
I frowned. “There’s only one door? You have to come out here each time?”
He shook his head. “Nah, the physics of the thing—if it even is physics an
d not just some crazy Heaven magic—is weird. There’s not that many spots you can get into this new place we’ve made. One of those spots is here, but it’s not the only one. There used to be another door or whatever you’d call it in the Magian Society office, which is one of the reasons I had to go back that time you saw me. I had to shut it down before you or anyone else found it.”
“And if Clarence was tracking your movements, that’s probably how he figured out about you and Habari,” I said. “I talked to you both about who I’d seen, and if he knew you had gone there about the same time I did—well, if he or his superiors had any suspicions, that would have sure helped confirm them.”
He hesitated. “Do you really want to see this, B? It might…change things for you.”
I stood, trying to figure out what he was really saying. “It might,” I said at last. “But then again, it might not.”
He smiled, and I saw once more the familiar Sam, the Sam I’d known for so long. “Look, I just want to say that it really felt like shit having to lie to you all this time, Bobby. But except for the Third Way stuff, everything else I’ve ever told you—everything else we’ve been through—was real. The truth.”
“I know that, Sam. Or at least I’m willing to believe it.” I gestured with the needle gun. “Now show me your secret. And please don’t do anything stupid.”
He turned on his flashlight and led me into the abandoned funhouse. We didn’t go far, just down some steps to the hall of mirrors. Because they were metal, not glass, most of the mirrors were still in their frames, but the distorted images that had amused so many generations of park visitors were almost completely obliterated by rust and scratches.
“Third mirror from the left,” Sam said.
“And straight on ’til morning. Show me.”
“I’m going to reach into my pocket. Do me a favor and don’t dart me, okay?” He produced a faint shimmer of something. It could have been a tangle of spiderwebs glistening in the moon’s misty glow, but the only light was the dim flashlight in Sam’s other hand. He opened his palm and the shimmer spread over it, then kindled into a light so bright that I blinked and stepped back.
