Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  Denby said, "So what do you say?"

  "As little as possible," said Melda.

  "But I'm close?"

  Melda gave him an eyebrow shrug and said, "We can't tell you. We decided to bring you in because you were getting to be a problem and because we thought you could help." She gave him a sympathetic smile. "And also because you didn't deserve to wreck your career."

  "I get it," the captain said, "you can't tell me too much because what I know could change the future. That's why you destroyed the book."

  "I'm not saying we did," said Melda, "and I'm not saying we didn't. But work with us and we'll do what we have to do, and you'll get to bust a lot of bad guys."

  "You won't hurt innocent people?"

  "We haven't yet," she said, while Chesney chimed in, saying, "Never."

  Denby nodded. "And the future?"

  "It'll take care of itself," Melda said. "Any other questions?"

  "Yeah," said the captain. "Where do we go from here?"

  "The Actionary," said Melda, "sets his own timetable. So don't call us. We'll call you."

  Denby showed them the smile of a man who was not entirely sure what he was getting into, but was willing to give it a try. "Okay," he said, "but one question: I don't have to dress up in spandex, right?"

  "It's not–" Chesney began, but Melda cut him off.

  "It really isn't spandex," Melda said, "and, no, a costume is not included in the deal."

  "I'm not sure about him," Chesney said as they walked along the river bank. Chesney liked to be able to put people into definite categories. As a policeman, Captain Denby ought to be in the general category of "good guy," but he had stolen the Book of Chesney from Billy Lee Hardacre's house, and burglary was unavoidably a "bad guy" action.

  "You ever hear the line about how, with some guys, it's better to have them inside the tent pissing out," Melda said, "instead of outside the tent pissing in?"

  Chesney was not good with metaphors. They never occurred to him and he never remembered them. "I don't think so," he said.

  She took his arm and hugged it against the side of her breast. "We've just arranged to have a dry tent," she said. "Besides, he's a good cop, and he knows the city. He'll be better at picking good targets than your other assistant."

  "If he's really on our side."

  "He will be," Melda said, "because we'll be on his."

  Just before quitting time, Chesney received another summons to Seth Baccala's office.

  "What do you know about time travel?" the executive assistant asked.

  "Wouldn't work," Chesney said. "Too many possible futures."

  "What?"

  "That's what I've heard."

  "What about travel into the past?"

  "I think that's possible."

  Baccala stared at him. Chesney didn't read the prolonged scrutiny as hostile – just puzzled, with an undercurrent of worry. After a while, the other man said, "That's all."

  Chesney went to the door. As he opened it, Baccala said, "Arnstruther?"

  He turned. "Yes?"

  But the executive assistant shook his head again. "Never mind."

  Melda phoned Billy Lee Hardacre from Chesney's apartment after supper. "You don't have to worry about the book," she said. "It got turned into ashes."

  "He didn't read it?"

  "He couldn't. It kept changing from one language to another."

  "Is he going to continue to be a problem?" the preacher said.

  "No. He's going to work with us on the crimefighting."

  "You're not going to introduce him to Chesney's little helper?"

  "No," said Melda. "Although, actually, they've already met. Captain Denby just doesn't remember it."

  "Captain?"

  "He's moving up."

  There was a pause. Melda thought it was a sign that

  Hardacre was about to switch tracks, and she was not surprised when the next thing he said was, "So, what about your young friend? Has he made up his mind?"

  "You mean about becoming the prophet Chesney? What's that word you lawyers use, abey-something?"

  "Abeyance?"

  "That's sort of like Limbo, right?"

  "Sort of."

  "Well," she said, "that's where it is."

  And so was Chesney.

  The Devil had not sent Xaphan to summon Chesney this time. Instead, when the young man rode the elevator down from his office on the fourth floor of the Paxton Building and the doors opened, he stepped out not into the lobby but into that amorphous region of mists that had once been the resting place of innocent souls who had died in utero or in infancy before baptism.

  Lucifer was waiting for him, arms folded, foot tapping. "I didn't hear back from you," the Devil said.

  "I didn't have anything to say to you. I still don't." Chesney was hungry and his mind was still trying to work out the meaning of the expression he had seen on Seth Baccala's face when they had parted. "I agreed to nothing," he said. "Besides, you went ahead and had Denby steal the book."

  "You reasoned that out? Well done," said Satan.

  "It was obvious."

  "Lit by a pool of light."

  "Never mind that," Chesney said. "I take it you couldn't read the book. Denby said it kept changing languages."

  "I speak and read all languages," the Devil said.

  "Actually, I speak and read the one true language, which all beings hear and understand as their mother tongue. But, the book had played its part. Things had moved on."

  "Moved on where?"

  Satan didn't answer. Instead he asked a question of his own. "Have you decided whether to take up Hardacre's offer?"

  "Melda and I have agreed that she will make the decision as to what I do about it. I can tell you now I have no interest in being a prophet. Nor will I do the things the book says I did."

  "You'll let the woman decide?" said Lucifer. "Interesting."

  Chesney, graduate of umpteen childhood hours spent in his mother's Sunday school, caught the association. "If you try to tempt her…" he said.

  "Under our agreement, I'm not allowed to tempt her in any manner that involves you. Even if I were, Melda McCann is no Eve. I'm happy to let her nature run its course."

  "What do you mean, her nature?"

  "That's for you to discover. What I'm telling you is that I will leave her alone."

  "And that's the truth?" Chesney said.

  "What is truth," said the Devil, "if Himself keeps rewriting it?"

  And then he was gone, along with the mists. Chesney was standing in the lobby of the Paxton Building.

  "You all right?" said the guard at the security desk.

  "Too early to say," Chesney said.

  The Taxidermist created a lot of work for Captain Denby. To begin with, the victims had to be identified, which meant combing through missing persons files for the past several years. The perpetrator's name was Wendell Throop and he had been a truck driver most of his life; for the past twenty-one years he had driven for a major supermarket chain. The assumption was that he had picked up his victims along the highways he had driven between the company's central warehouse here in the city and its larger distribution centers in the surrounding states.

  Throop himself wasn't saying anything. The shock of the Lexus bursting into his private world had snapped some link in his already fragile mind, and he was spending most of his time sitting in a cell and staring at the wall. A court-ordered lawyer had had no more luck getting a response than Denby.

  But the pieces were falling into place. The captain had now tentatively identified six of the victims – five males and one female – and was arranging for DNA samples from the families to corroborate his suppositions. While he plowed through the grunt work that made up most of a policeman's day, his mind kept turning to the other mystery that now occupied center stage in his life.

  We'll call you, Melda McCann had said. Denby's eye kept slipping from the paperwork on his desk to the multi-line phone off to one side. Every tim
e he saw one of the button-lights start to flash, he felt a little tension draw his shoulder blades together. But then the buzzer in his phone wouldn't sound, or if it did, the call would have something to do with the Taxidermist.

  Mustn't be greedy, he told himself, and went back to comparing the crime scene photos of the stuffed bodies with the photos and descriptions of missing persons that were still coming in by the hundreds.

  • • • •

  "I'm leaning toward you should maybe try it," Melda said to Chesney.

  The young man moved his shoulders in a silent display of discomfort. "I'm not a prophet," he said.

  "You don't have to wear a white robe and grow a beard," she said. "Cause, after all, it's not you who would be the one up there on the stage. It would be the Actionary."

  Chesney put that thought in the middle of the screen in his mind and looked at it. It was less disturbing than the prospect of having to meet with world leaders or give speeches and sermons. "So it would be the Book of the Actionary?"

  "That's what I'm thinking. You'd be in costume, in your crimefighting identity. You'd come on the reverend's show, say a few words–"

  "What words?" Chesney had never cared for the idea of public speaking. It was just about the darkest, murkiest shadowland he could envision.

  "We'll work that out with the reverend," Melda said. They were sitting on the couch in his apartment, and she put a hand over his two, which were clasped together on his thighs. The warmth of her palm soothed him.

  "The thing is," she went on, "right now you're doing good work catching bad guys like that awful man who killed the hitchhikers. But how many people are you reaching?"

  "How many do I need to reach?"

  "Well, imagine if you could stop people – young people, especially – from becoming criminals in the first place. Think of all the crimes you could prevent, and all the victims who wouldn't suffer, because they'd never be victims." She squeezed both his hands in hers. "Because of you."

  It sounded less frightening. "Oh," he said.

  "Every week, you could solve some big crime," she said. "Then you come on the TV and talk about the lessons learned."

  "Like crime does not pay."

  "Yeah. Or how so many of the big bad guys started out doing little bad stuff. So you tell them, don't steal candy, Johnny, because it will only get you twenty-to-life in the slammer."

  "That doesn't sound too bad," Chesney said. He remembered the episode where Malc Turner busted up a ring of fur thieves. He described to Melda how some kids had watched him throw the perps into the back of his truck. And he stopped to tell them, "This is where the road of crime leads to."

  Melda squeezed his hands again. "You could have a fan club, send out autographed pictures." The idea did not appeal; he saw himself sitting at a desk, signing hundreds of photographs, hour after hour, addressing envelopes, licking and sealing. It reminded him of all the years he had been his mother's helper, as she deluged newspaper editors, politicians and errant celebrities with her scathing epistles.

  Melda must have sensed something, because she said, "You'd only have to sign one, then Xaphan could do all the rest."

  Chesney still didn't like the idea, but he wanted to please her. "I suppose that would be okay. It would be part of being a crimefighter. Preventive crimefighting."

  "So, what do you think?" she said, putting a hand on his cheek to turn his face to hers. "I know we said I would make the decision, but it has to be something you're comfortable with."

  Chesney put his mind to the question. As he expected, prophethood still refused to become the center of a pool of pure light. It was like peering through a smeared window at a storm-darkened landscape, where the wind was preventing anything from staying still and holding a clearly defined shape. He was reminded of the outer circle of Hell, where he had faced down Nat Blowdell, a memory that reminded him of Lucifer, which led him to their last meeting. And that brought a new thought.

  "Limbo," he said.

  "What about it?"

  "There used to be a place called Limbo, where the souls of unbaptized children went," he said, following the thought. "It existed because it was written into an earlier draft of the big book, but now it has been written out. But it's still there – empty, but still there."

  Melda was looking at him with concern. "So?"

  "So what happened to all the souls?"

  Her face took on the expression she wore when she was trying to decide which movie to rent: thoughtful, but not too worked up about the issue. "I'm sure they were looked after," she said.

  Normally, when Chesney came to a murky question, he let it slide. But he couldn't just shuffle this one aside. "Were they?" he said. "Or did they just get edited out?"

  "Either way," she said, "it's nothing to do with us, sweetie." Her hand covered his again, and squeezed reassuringly.

  But he wasn't reassured. He was following his thought through the shifting darkness. "No," he said, "Limbo isn't. But what about this world?"

  "What about it?"

  He was driving his mind forward, like he'd never done before outside a pool of light. "If I become a prophet, if I make a new book, then it becomes the latest draft of the book."

  "Yes," she said, "and it's a better world."

  "But what happens to the old one? And all the people in it?" He pushed himself on now. "What happened to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden? It was supposed to have a wall around it and an angel with a sword at the gate. So where is it? Where's the world it was in? Because it isn't in this one."

  "There's no need to get upset," Melda said.

  He realized his voice had risen. He brought it down. "Okay, but what about the Tower of Babel? It used to reach all the way up to Heaven, and people from all over the world came to build it. Then it got smashed and toppled, and then it got written out of the draft. What happened to all those people?"

  "It was all a long time ago, sweetie."

  "Yes, but now is now! Say I'm responsible for making a new part of the big book, and the old one gets put aside while the new story goes forward. Does that mean that all these lives…" he gestured at the city outside the apartment window, the winding snakes of traffic lights moving along the streets, "do they all get canceled, dumped in the wastebasket?"

  Her brows drew down and a vertical line formed between them. "It's a good question," she said.

  He had already hit the speed-dial on the phone. When he heard it answered, he said without preamble, "What happens to the other drafts?"

  Billy Lee Hardacre said, "What are you talking about?"

  "The discarded drafts, the worlds that used to be but aren't there anymore. What happens to them? And the people in them?"

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then Hardacre said, "I don't know."

  Chesney had made up his mind, had followed the thought all the way along its dark, twisting trail to where it inevitably led. But wherever he had arrived, it was still not a pool of light. "I need to know," he said. "Or I can't do it."

  They met in the preacher's study. Chesney had thought they might have to drive out to the estate, but when he'd summoned Xaphan, the demon made no bones about whisking them there – via the usual stop in Hell – even though the matter had nothing to do with crimefighting.

  "Truth to tell," it said, "the boss sez I should just do whatever you want me to do – that is, if it don't interfere with some other contractual obligation."

  The unexpected concession raised Melda's suspicions. "Why the change? And what does he want in return?"

  The demon puffed on its cigar. "First," it said, "he don't tell me why, and I long ago learned not to ask. Second, this is service with no charge." It took another drag and blew a thoughtful cloud of smoke that formed a question mark in the air. "Way I figure it, and don't quote me, but this whole book bizness has got him rattled. He wants to see where it goes and he can do that by watchin' where you take it."

  And so they transited through Chesney's room in He
ll, Chesney's assistant pausing briefly to pick up a refill of its tumbler of rum, then they appeared in the foyer of the preacher's mansion.

  "I'm gonna fade," Xaphan said. "Call me if you need somethin'."

  Hardacre wanted to talk about the Book of Chesney, but Chesney was firm on the evening's agenda. "None of that matters if I decide I'm not doing any of it," he said. "And that decision is going to depend on what we're here to talk about."