Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  "No, Mother. I saw what happened to Joshua, here. He launched a new chapter of the book, just the way the reverend wants me to do. And then he got left behind in the old draft, living the same day over and over again." He said to Melda, "Just like Groundhog Day."

  "Really?" she said.

  "Yeah, but it didn't end. Didn't matter if he changed. He was just stuck forever."

  Melda gave the prophet a sympathetic look. "Poor guy."

  Joshua shrugged. "It's all right now," he said.

  Chesney turned back to Hardacre and his mother. "And that's what would happen to me. The Actionary would go on into the new draft. You'd write the book, Reverend, and the book would become the new reality. But me, this me, I'd be like him, sitting around, waiting for the story to finally end." He looked the preacher in the eye, then did the same with his mother. "Well, I'm not going to do it. I was going to say, 'Get yourself another prophet,' but you won't have to, because," he indicated the bearded man, "I already went and got one for you."

  What came next, of course, was an argument. It wasn't a very cohesive discussion; it tended to wander among a number of different subjects, because the individual disputants each had his or her own slant on what constituted the most important grounds for disagreement. But it was a heated argument, at times very hot.

  Chesney's basic line could be expressed in the words, "No," "No way," and, finally, "Case closed."

  Hardacre's stance was that the young man did not realize what was at stake. He used phrases like, "Unparalleled opportunity," and "Whole new world for the making."

  Letitia's themes were more personal, and revolved around past instances of her son's willful disobedience and her own selfless efforts to bring him up to be a "decent, upstanding Christian," which were negated by his obstinate nature, inherited from his father, along with his tendency to "go chasing after trollops."

  This last was said with the older woman's eye fixed meaningfully on the younger, but Melda ignored the invitation to debate her own character and instead kept the focus on where she believed it belonged: the Billy Lee/Letitia axis that was "just trying to use Chesney to further your own agendas, without a thought as to how it will hurt him."

  The altercation eventually became circular, with the disputants hurling their accusations at each other like weary prizefighters unable to score a knock-out. Throughout, the fifth person in the room sat and watched like a spectator with a front-row seat at the performance of a live drama. Finally, when the ebb and flow of accusation and vituperation had begun to lose energy while conversely gaining bitterness, Joshua stood and raised a hand as well as a voice that had once been accustomed to address multitudes without the benefit of microphones and loudspeakers.

  "Enough!" he said causing a sudden silence in which the arguers could hear the window glass's last rattle in its frame. Then, more quietly, "Enough."

  Four pairs of eyes were now turned his way. "Let me see," he said, more to himself than to the others, "I used to be good at this." He thought for a moment then said, directing his words to Hardacre, "Prophets are called, but not by men. Not even by men of power." He turned to Chesney and said, "Are you called?"

  "No."

  "Be sure," said Joshua. "Many a prophet denied the call, pretended it was just a dream, or that it must have been intended for another."

  "I am sure," said Chesney.

  "Then that settles it. If he is not called, he is a false prophet." He waved a hand to put distance between himself and the notion. "And we all know what trouble they cause. Remind me to tell you sometime about Simon Magus."

  He turned to Letitia. "Mother," he said, "you should count your blessings. My mother wept when I went out onto the roads. She wept even harder when they put me in my tomb."

  Chesney's mother had been readying herself for another run up the hill. Now, for the first time Chesney could recall, she seemed to be unsettled by an opposing view.

  Joshua turned to Chesney. "If you don't want to be a prophet, what do you wish to do?"

  "Fight crime."

  The beard-surrounded lips widened in a smile. "That sounds useful. It also sounds like fun. Do you ever need a helper?"

  Chesney looked to Melda, who gave him back one of her worth-thinking-about looks. "We could talk about it," he told the prophet.

  "Wait a minute," Hardacre said, but the bearded man forestalled him with a raised hand.

  "Our young friend invited me to your… America," he said. "But it was a conditional invitation. He said you needed a prophet, a real one." He locked gazes with the preacher. "Do you?"

  Hardacre paused before answering, but then he said, "I do."

  "Then," said Joshua, "we should talk. In the meantime, these young people probably want to get away together. Why don't we let them? We can sit and you can tell me what is on your mind." He looked over at the drinks cabinet. "Is any of that wine?"

  Xaphan took them home. Increasingly, Chesney's roomy apartment was where Melda spent her non-working hours. Before the young man dismissed the demon he required it to apologize to her.

  "Sure," said the fiend, "sorry." The words were accompanied by a wave of a stub-fingered hand, a gesture so casual that Chesney felt that it undercut the sincerity of the verbal sentiment.

  "Well, of course he doesn't mean it," said Melda when Chesney took his assistant to task. "He's a demon."

  "It," said Chesney. "They don't have gender, just like angels." Then returning to the subject at hand, "Even if it doesn't really feel sorry, it should make a proper effort."

  "One of the things you have to admire about Xaphan," she said, "is that he – it – is not a hypocrite. He's one hundred percent rotten to the core."

  "Thank you," said the demon. The weasel face assumed a reflective aspect. "I'm pretty sure no one has ever defended me before."

  "Don't mention it." To Chesney, she said, "It's its nature. We just have to work around the rough parts."

  "You don't mind that it took you out of the bath, stark naked, and plopped you down in front of everybody?"

  She did that thing with her mouth that he liked, a kind of shrug of the lips. "It was mostly the shock." She pulled the neck of her blouse forward and peered down it. "Truth to tell, I look pretty good in the raw."

  "Yes," said Chesney, "you do. Xaphan, you can go."

  The demon exited with the usual whiff of sulfur.

  Melda was laughing quietly now. "Did you see Jesus's eyes bug out?"

  "Joshua."

  "Joshua, Jesus. He, it," she said. "Did you see your mother's face?"

  At the time, Chesney had not found it funny. Now, under Melda's prompting, he did. At one time, he would have found it disconcerting that a single event could call up two different emotional responses in him. Now he could live with it.

  That thought reminded him of how he had pursued a thought through darkness and emerged into the light. He felt good about that, and even better when he remembered how Melda had responded to the news that he had decided not to be a prophet.

  She was going around the apartment turning off lights. He followed her and put his arms around her from behind, and found that Xaphan, when he had clothed her, had not bothered with a brassiere. He put his nose into her hair; it smelled of vanilla and … her. "So we're betrothed?" he said.

  "Seems that way," she said.

  "What exactly is 'betrothed?' I've never been clear on that."

  "Come in the bedroom," she said. "I'll show you."

  NINE

  A couple of quiet days passed, then came the weekend. It was the end of the month and Melda gave up her apartment and moved in with Chesney. That meant bringing over two big suitcases and a few cartons of odds and ends; her furniture belonged to the landlord. They did the usual things that couples do when they first cohabit: apportioning shelf and closet space, which was not a problem, since Chesney had few possessions and a severely limited wardrobe.

  "We should get you more clothes," she said.

  "Why?"

 
And when she thought about it, she couldn't come up a good reason. "Never mind," she said.

  "It's Saturday," he said, when they had everything settled. "What do you want to do tonight?"

  "I don't know. What do you want to do?"

  "Fight crime."

  Captain Denby had come into the office that afternoon, even though it was Saturday. With the assistance of Madge from the civilian assistants pool, he had gotten the Taxidermist case ready to hand over to the district attorney by end of business on Friday. Now he had spent a couple of hours down in the records room – actually, it was a huge portion of Police Central's sub-basement – looking up some old cases.

  The files he pulled represented not just old cases, but notorious ones; and not just notorious, but unsolved. The "Pillow Case" murders from the 1970s. The Holliman Security bullion heist in the late 1980s. The disappearance of Cathy Bannister in 2003.

  That last file was the one that called to Denby. It was one of the first he'd worked as a young third-grade detective, back before he'd learned it was not wise to take police work so personally. It still itched in the back of his mind that they'd never found her; nor had they even identified a prime suspect.

  Cathy Bannister had been a junior at the state college, studying communications and living in an off-campus apartment that she shared with two other young women. It was a two-bedroom flat – the third girl slept on a foldout couch – and Cathy's bedroom was at the rear of the building, with a fire escape outside the window.

  She wanted to be a television reporter. Classes were finished for the summer and she had landed an internship at the local TV station. She had to be at work at 5am weekday mornings to scan the early papers and the overnight feeds from the wire services so she could identify developing stories that might be interesting enough for the newsroom to follow up when they came in at seven.

  She was talented and detail-oriented and had already received two "good stuff" commendations from the station's news editor. There was serious talk of a part-time job come the fall, with maybe even some on-camera weekend puff stories to give her experience.

  So Cathy Bannister had gone to bed early one night with all her hopes and expectations lined up before her. And no one ever saw her again. No one, that is, but whoever had climbed up the fire escape, come through her window and taken her silently away to whatever awful end – and Denby had no doubt it had been awful – the monster had planned for her.

  He harbored no doubts on that score either. The lack of evidence said this was a planned crime, not some burglary that escalated, spur-of-the-moment, into rape and murder. And the choice of victim could not have been random. Whoever had come for Cathy Bannister, must have come prepared to overpower her and spirit her away. And the bastard had gotten away with it.

  The major crimes squad had looked at everybody in the young woman's life, starting with the roommates, then moving on to her classmates, the people at the TV station, neighbors, known weirdoes residing within a reasonable distance from the apartment. Then they had looked at weirdoes living an unreasonable distance away, because nobody they looked at could be fitted into the picture.

  There was an old boyfriend or two, but they were quickly alibied out of contention. They'd actually tracked down a guy who had tried to pick her up when she was waiting at a bus stop outside the college a couple of weeks before. She noted down three number of his license plate, just in case. But he had been three hundred miles away at a NASCAR event, with a good dozen people to testify that he'd been working as pit crew for a middle-of-the-pack driver.

  "This one," Denby said to himself, centering the Bannister file on his desk. He put the others in a file cabinet. He reached for the phone and called the nerd kid. The girlfriend answered.

  "I've got a case," the detective said. "A murder. But it's an old one."

  "How old?" she said.

  "It's Cathy Bannister."

  It took a moment, but the girlfriend remembered. She'd been a teenager and the idea that someone could steal into her bedroom at night and take her away had terrified her.

  "You and a lot of others," Denby said. "What do you say?"

  "It's not up to me. We'll have to ask the Actionary."

  "When?"

  "Pretty soon, I think."

  "Good. Call me."

  "It's tricky," said Xaphan.

  "Tricky how?" Chesney said.

  "Remember when we discussed the groundrules? Like how I couldn't help you with anything that crosses somebody else's arrangement with…" – the demon pointed at the dining room floor in Chesney's apartment – "the organization I represent."

  "Cathy Bannister was snatched by a demon?" Melda said.

  "No," said the fiend, "not as such. But it's, like I say, tricky."

  "You need to be clearer," Chesney said.

  The weasel lips moved the perpetual cigar around between the sabertooth fangs. "Some things, you don't get a pool of light."

  Melda said, "Don't get smart. Can we solve the crime or not?"

  "I'm gonna have to ask."

  "So ask," said Melda.

  The demon disappeared, then reappeared a moment later. "Interesting," it said.

  "What?" Chesney said. He was all togged up in his Actionary costume, ready to collect the policeman and solve a fifteen year-old murder.

  "This one oughta be a no-can-do," said Xaphan, "but the boss says, 'Hey, what does it matter?'"

  Melda had been sitting at the table, the remains of their supper pushed away. She leaned forward. "You're quoting?" she said.

  "I'm how-you-say, paraphrasin'." The demon wrinkled up its weasel brow, squinted its oversized eyes. "It's a new attitude for him."

  "Never mind," said Chesney. "What about the crime? Who dunnit?"

  "Best you should see for yourself," said his assistant.

  "Me, too?" said Melda.

  Xaphan puffed on his cigar and inspected the bottom of his glass, finding it empty. "Hey, what does it matter?"

  Cathy Bannister's fire escape led down to an alley that ran behind the low-rise apartment buildings that lined the block. On the other side of the alley was the sheer side wall of a supermarket outlet. At just after 10pm on June 7, 2003, it was quiet for a Friday night: not much traffic on the streets of the residential neighborhood; not even any loud music playing from the area's mainly student population. Somebody was blasting out profane rap, but the source of the noise was at least a block away.

  Chesney, in his Actionary guise, led Captain Denby and Melda into the narrow thoroughfare and down the alley to where an emergency exit created an alcove in the supermarket's windowless wall. They were no more than fifty feet from the bottom of the fire escape.

  Chesney thought the policeman seemed more keyed up than a professional ought to be, but he reminded himself that the captain had been very wrapped up in his time traveler theory. Seeing it proved – actually going back into the past himself – was probably a big deal. Plus Denby had told them that his not being able to solve this case had always eaten away at him. The young man wondered what it was like to experience that kind of anguish; he lived, as his boyhood therapists had confirmed, strictly in the present. The past, for good or ill, could not be helped or healed.

  Nor could it be changed. Xaphan had briefed him and Melda: they could watch; they could slow the action down or speed it up, just as on a video player, but nothing they could do would have any impact on the events unfolding before their eyes. The pair had passed on the rules to Denby.

  "What's written is written," said the policeman, "and all your tears cannot wash away a single line."

  There had been a silence after that, and Denby had said into it, "Sorry, the Bannister case always got to me."

  Denby's briefing had taken place in the captain's office, the dead woman's file still open on his desk. Chesney looked at the photo of a young woman, blonde and wide cheekboned, with an incisive intelligence evident in her eyes, looking up at them from the dead past. He thought he knew what Malc Turner woul
d say at this moment, so he said it: "Then let's go get her some justice."

  He spoke to his assistant, present but unseen – and unsmelled, Chesney had made it clear – in a manner that Denby could not overhear. A moment later, having transited through Chesney's room in Hell too quickly for the experience to register as more than a flicker, they were in the alley. The demon had put them in the alcove that housed the supermarket's emergency exit. They instinctively stepped back into the shadows, although they had been told that they were invisible to the denizens of the past.

  "How long?" Chesney said privately to Xaphan.