“Patrick, really. I—”
“If you interrupt me again I will break your right hand. The second reason I told you that story is to let you know that I’ve seen some crazy things in my life, so when I tell you this new thing scares the shit out of me, maybe you’ll listen to what the fuck I’m saying.”
He stops there, staring hard at me. After a couple seconds of this, I figure it’s okay to talk.
“You have my full attention. This is from Eugene?”
“You know this is from Eugene. Why else would I drag myself over here?”
“Patrick, I wish you’d relax. I’m sorry I mad you mad. You want another drink? Let me pour you another drink.”
I can see the rage still coiling in his eyes, and I’m starting to think I pushed him too hard. I’m starting to wonder how fast I can run. But then he settles back onto the couch and a smile settles over his face. It doesn’t look natural there. “Jesus, you have a mouth. How does a guy like you get away with having a mouth like that?” He shakes the ice in his glass. “Yeah, go ahead. Pour me another one. Let’s smoke a peace pipe.”
I pour us both some more. He slugs it back in one deep swallow and holds his glass out for more. I give it to him. He seems to be relaxing.
“All right, okay. There’s this guy. Creepy little grifter named Tobias George. He’s one of those little vermin always crawling through the city, getting into shit, fucking up his own life, you don’t even notice these guys. You know how it is.”
“I do.” I also know the name, but I don’t tell him that.
“Only reason we know about him at all is because sometimes he’ll run a little scheme of his own, kick a percentage back to Eugene, it’s all good. Well one day this prick catches a case of ambition. He robs one of Eugene’s poker games, makes off with a lot of money. Suicidal. Who knows what got into the guy. Some big dream climbed up his butt and opened him like an umbrella. We go hunting for him but he disappears. We get word he went further south, disappeared into the bayou. Like, not to Port Fourchon or some shit, but literally on a goddamn boat into the swamp. Eugene is pissed, and you know how he is, he jumps and shouts for a few days, but eventually he says fuck it. We’re not gonna go wrestle alligators for him. After a while we just figured he died out there. You know.”
“But he didn’t.”
“That he did not. We catch wind of him a few months later. He’s in a whole new ballgame. He’s selling artifacts pulled from Hell. And he’s making a lot of money doing it.”
“It’s another scam,” I say, knowing full well it isn’t.
“It’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t worry about it. We know.”
“A guy owes money and won’t pay. That sounds more like your thing than mine, Patrick.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about that either. I got it covered when the time comes.
I won’t go into the details, ‘cause they don’t matter, but what it comes down to is Eugene wants his own way into the game. Once this punk is put in the ground, he wants to keep this market alive. We happen to know Tobias has a book that he uses for this setup. An atlas that tells him how to access this shit. We want it, and we want to know how it works. And that’s your thing, Jack.”
I feel something cold spill through my guts. “That’s not the deal we had.”
“What can I tell you.”
“No. I told …” My throat is dry. My leg is bouncing again. “Eugene told me we were through. He told me that. He’s breaking his promise.”
“That mouth again.” Patrick finishes his drink and stands. “Come on. You can tell him that yourself, see how it goes over.”
“Now? It’s the middle of the night!”
“Don’t worry, you won’t be disturbing him. He don’t sleep too well lately either.”
*
I’ve lived here my whole life. Grew up just a regular fat-white-kid schlub, decent parents, a readymade path to the gray fields of middleclass servitude. But I went off the rails at some point. I was seduced by old books. I wanted to live out my life in a fog of parchment dust and old glue. I apprenticed myself to a bookbinder, a gnarled old Cajun named Rene Aucoin, who turned out to be a fading necromancer with a nice side business refurbishing old grimoires. He found in me an eager student, which eventually led to my tenure as a librarian at the Camouflaged Library at the Ursulines Academy. It was when Eugene and his crew got involved, leading to a bloody confrontation with a death cult obsessed with the Damocles Scroll, that I left the Academy and began my career as a book thief. I worked for Eugene for five years before we had our falling out. When I left, we both knew it was for good.
Eugene has a bar up in Midcity, far away from the t-shirt shops, the fetish dens and goth hangouts of the French Quarter, far away too from the more respectable veneer of the Central Business and the Garden Districts. Midcity is a place where you can do what you want. Patrick drives me up Canal and parks out front. He leads me up the stairs and inside, where the blast of cold air is a relief from a heat which does not relent even at night. A jukebox is playing something stale, and four or five ghostlike figures nest at the bar. They do not turn around as we pass through. Patrick guides me downstairs, to Eugene’s office.
Before I even reach the bottom of the stairs, Eugene starts talking to me.
“Hey fat boy! Here comes the fat boy!”
No cover model himself, he comes around his desk with his arms outstretched, what’s left of his gray hair combed in long, spindly fingers over the expanse of his scalp. Drink has made a red, doughy wreckage of his face. His chest is sunken in, like something inside has collapsed and he’s falling inward. He puts his hands on me in greeting, and I try not to flinch.
“Look at you. Look at you. You look good, Jack.”
“So do you, Eugene.”
The office is clean, uncluttered. There’s a desk and a few padded chairs, a couch on the far wall underneath a huge Michalopoulos painting. Across from the desk is a minibar and a door which leads to the back alley. Mardi Gras masks are arranged behind his desk like a congress of spirits. Eugene is a New Orleans boy right down to his tapping toes, and he buys into every shabby lie the city ever told about itself.
“I hear you got a girl now. What’s her name, Locky? Lick-me?”
“Lakshmi.” This is already going badly. “Come on, Eugene. Let’s not go there.”
“Listen to him now. Calling the shots. All independent, all grown up now. Patrick give you any trouble? Sometimes he gets carried away.”
Patrick doesn’t blink. His role fulfilled, he’s become a tree.
“No. No trouble at all. It was like old times.”
“Hopefully not too much like old times, huh?” He sits behind his desk, gestures for me to take a seat. Patrick pours a couple of drinks and hands one to each of us, then retreats behind me.
“I guess I’m just trying to figure out what I’m doing here, Eugene. Someone’s not paying you. Isn’t that what you have guys like him for?”
Eugene settles back, sips from his drink, and studies me. “Let’s not play coy, Jack. Okay? Don’t pretend you don’t already know about Tobias. Don’t insult my intelligence.”
“I know about Tobias,” I say.
“Tell me what you know.”
I can’t get comfortable in my chair. I feel like there are chains around my chest. I make one last effort. “Eugene. We had a deal.”
“Are you having trouble hearing me? Should I raise my voice?”
“He started selling two months ago. He had a rock. It was about the size of a tennis ball but it was heavy as a television set. Everybody thought he was full of shit. They were laughing at him. It sold for a little bit of money. Not much. But somebody out there liked what they saw. Word got around. He sold a two-inch piece of charred bone next. That went for a lot more.”
“I bought that bone.”
“Oh,” I say. “Shit.”
“Do you know why?”
“No, Eug
ene, of course I don’t.”
“Don’t ‘of course’ me. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t. You’re a slimy piece of filth, Jack. You’re a human cockroach. I can’t trust you. So don’t get smart.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“He had the nerve to contact me directly. He wanted me to know what he was offering before he put it on the market. Give me first chance. Jack, it’s from my son. It’s part of a thigh bone from my son.”
I can’t seem to see straight. The blood has rushed to my head, and I feel dizzy. I clamp my hands on the armrests of the chair so I can feel something solid. “How …how do you know?”
“There’s people for that. Don’t ask dumb questions. I am very much not in the mood for dumb questions.”
“Okay.”
“Your thing is books, so that’s why you’re here. We tracked him to this old shack in the bayou. You’re going to get the book.”
I feel panic skitter through me. “You want me to go there?”
“Patrick’s going with you.”
“That’s not what I do, Eugene!”
“Bullshit! You’re a thief. You do this all the time. Patrick there can barely read a People Magazine without breaking a sweat. You’re going.”
“Just have Patrick bring it back! You don’t need me for this.”
Eugene stares at me.
“Come on,” I say. “You gave me your word.”
I don’t even see Patrick coming. His hand is on the back of my neck and he slams my face onto the desk hard enough to crack an ashtray underneath my cheekbone. My glass falls out of my hand and I hear the ice thump onto the carpet. He keeps me pinned to the desk. He wraps his free hand around my throat. I can’t catch my breath.
Eugene leans in, his hands behind his back, like he’s examining something curious and mildly revolting. “Would you like to see him? Would you like to see my son?”
I pat Patrick’s hand; it’s weirdly intimate. I shake my head. I try to make words. My vision is starting to fry around the edges. Dark loops spool into the world.
Finally, Eugene says, “Let him go.”
Patrick releases me. I slide off the desk and land hard, dragging the broken ashtray with me, covering myself in ash and spent cigarette butts. I roll onto my side, choking.
Eugene puts his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, Jack, you okay? You all right down there? Get up. God damn you’re a drama queen. Get the fuck up already.”
It takes a few minutes. When I’m sitting up again, Patrick hands me a napkin to clean the blood off my face. I don’t look at him. There’s nothing I can do. No point in feeling a goddamn thing about it.
“When do I leave?” I say.
“What the hell,” Eugene says. “How about right now?”
*
We experience dawn as a rising heat and a slow bleed of light through the cypress and the Spanish moss, riding in an airboat through the swamp a good thirty miles south of New Orleans. Patrick and I are riding up front while an old man more leather than flesh guides along some unseeable path. Our progress stirs movement from the local fauna—snakes, turtles, muskrats—and I’m constantly jumping at some heavy splash. I imagine a score of alligators gliding through the water beneath us, tracking our movement with yellow, saurian eyes. The airboat wheels around a copse of trees into a watery clearing, and I half expect to see a brontosaurus wading in the shallows.
Instead I see a row of huge, bobbing purple flowers, each with a bleached human face in the center, mouths gaping and eyes palely blind. The sight of them shocks me into silence; our guide fixes his stare on the horizon, refusing even to acknowledge anything out of the ordinary. Eyes perch along the tops of reeds; great kites of flesh stretch between tree limbs; one catches a mild breeze from our passage and skates serenely through the air, coming at last to a gentle landing on the water, where it folds in on itself and sinks into the murk.
Our guide points, and I see shack: a small, single-room architectural catastrophe, perched on the dubious shore and extending over the water on short stilts. A skiff is tied to a front porch which doubles as a small dock. It seems to be the only method of travel to or from the place. A filthy Rebel flag hangs over the entrance in lieu of a door. At the moment, it’s pulled to the side and a man I assume is Tobias George is standing there, naked but for a pair of shorts that hang precariously from his narrow hips. He’s all bone and gristle. His face tells me nothing as we glide in toward the dock.
Patrick stands before we connect, despite a word of caution from our guide. He has some tough-guy greeting halfway out of his mouth when the airboat’s edge lightly taps the dock, nearly spilling him into the swamp, arms pinwheeling.
Tobias is unaffected by the display, but our guide is easy with a laugh and chooses not to hold back.
Patrick recovers himself and puts both hands on the dock, proceeding to crawl out of the boat like a child learning to walk. I’m grateful to God for the sight of it.
Tobias makes no move to help.
I take my time climbing out. “You wait right here,” I tell the guide.
“Oh, wye,” he says, shutting down the engine and fishing a pack of smokes from his shirt.
“What’re you guys doing here?” Tobias says. He hasn’t looked at me once but he can’t peel his gaze from Patrick. He knows what Patrick’s all about.
“Tobias, you crazy bastard. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Tobias turns around and goes back inside, the rebel flag falling closed behind him. “Come on in I guess.”
We follow him inside, where it’s even hotter. The air doesn’t move in here, probably hasn’t moved in twenty years, and it carries the sharp tang of marijuana. Dust motes hang suspended in spears of light, coming in through a window covered over in ratty, bug-smeared plastic. The room is barely furnished: there’s a single mattress pushed against the wall to our left, a cheap collapsible table with a plastic folding chair, and a chest of drawers. Next to the bed is a camping cooker with a little sauce pot and some cans of Sterno. On the table is a small pile of dull green buds, with some rolling papers and a Zippo.
There’s a door flush against the back wall. I take a few steps in the direction and I can tell right away that there’s some bad news behind it. The air spoils when I get close, coating the back of my throat with a greasy, evil film that feels like it seeps right into the meat. Violent fantasies sprout along my cortex like a little vine of tumors. I try to keep my face still, as I imagine coring the eyeballs out of both these guys with a grapefruit spoon.
“Stay on that side of the room, Patrick,” I say. I don’t need him feeling this.
“What? Why?”
“Trust me. This is why you brought me.”
Tobias casts a glance at me now, finally sensing some purpose behind my presence. He’s good, though: I still can’t figure his reaction.
“Y’all here to kill me?” he says.
Patrick already has his gun in hand. It’s pointed at the floor. His eyes are fixed on Tobias and he seems to be weighing something in his mind. I can tell that whatever is behind that door is already working its influence on him. It has its grubby little fingers in his brain and it’s pulling dark things out of it. “That depends on you,” he says. “Eugene wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”
The violence in this room is alive and crawling. I realize, suddenly, why he stays stoned. I figure it’s time we get to the point. “We want the book, Tobias.”
“What? Who are you?” He looks at Patrick. “What’s he talking about?”
“You know what he’s talking about. Go get the book.”
“There is no book!”
He looks genuinely bewildered, and that worries me. I don’t know if I can go back to Eugene without a book. I’m about to ask him what’s in the back room when I hear a creak in the wood beyond the hanging flag and someone pulls it aside, flooding the shack with light. I spin around an
d Patrick already has his gun raised, looking spooked.
The man standing in the doorway is framed by the sun: a black shape against the sun, a negative space. He’s tall and slender, his hair like a spray of light around his head. I think for a moment that I can smell it burning. He steps into the shack and you can tell there’s something wrong with him, though it’s hard to figure just what. Some malformation of the aura, telegraphing a warning blast straight to the root of my brain. To look at him, as he steps into the shack and trades direct sunlight for the filtered illumination shared by the rest of us, he seems tired and gaunt but ultimately not unlike any other poverty-wracked country boy, and yet my skin ripples at his approach. I feel my lip curl and I have to concentrate to keep the revulsion from my face.
“Toby?” he says. His voice is young and uninflected. Normal. “I think my brother’s on his way back. Who are these guys?”
“Hey, Johnny,” Tobias says, looking at him over my shoulder. He’s plainly nervous now, and although his focus stays on Johnny, his attention seems to radiate in all directions, like a man wondering where the next hit is coming from.
I could have told him that.
Fear turns to meanness in a guy like Patrick, and he reacts according to the dictates of his kind: he shoots.
It’s one shot, quick and clean. Patrick is a professional. The sound of the gun concusses the air in the little shack and the bullet passes through Johnny’s skull before I even have time to wince at the noise.
I blink. I can’t hear anything beyond a high-pitched whine. I see Patrick standing still, looking down the length of his raised arm with a flat, dead expression. It’s his true face. I see Tobias drop to one knee, his hands over his ears and his mouth working as though he’s shouting something; and I see Johnny, too, still standing in the doorway, as unmoved by the bullet’s passage through his skull as though it had been nothing more than a disappointing argument. Dark clots of brain meat are splashed across the flag behind him.
He looks from Patrick to Tobias and when he speaks I can barely hear him above the ringing in my head. “What should I do?” he says.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 2
