“We should go,” said Jørgen, as a third cop car arrived. This one parked itself lengthwise, blocking the lot’s wide gate, and Billy had been about to panic when Jørgen touched him on the shoulder and said “This way,” and hustled them back through a hole in the perimeter fence that was hidden by a heaped pile of pallets. On the other side of the fence was a van, what Billy would soon come to forever think of as Jørgen’s Trusty Econoline Van, and they piled in and peeled out, and Billy didn’t have to go to jail, and his friendship with Jørgen was pretty much locked at that point.
He wonders where Jørgen is, anyway, and he feels a sudden, sharp regret at not having been more concerned at Jørgen’s long disappearance. Not that there’s anything he can do about that now, not from jail.
He can’t really do anything about anything. He can maybe, at best, take a piss. He looks again at the combination sink/toilet thing.
He has his pants unbuttoned and is about to get down to it when he feels a sudden concern about privacy. He looks back at the bars and the darkness beyond. Can people see into his cell? When he’s facing the toilet his back is to the door, so it’s not exactly like people can see his junk straight-on, but what is going to happen when he has to take a shit? He tries to imagine sitting there, trying to do his business while some Aryan Nations dude is staring him in the face. He knew prison was supposed to be tough but he didn’t quite realize that every crap he’d take would be within view of prying eyes.
He approaches the bars and peers into the darkness. It’s hard to tell what’s going on out there. He doesn’t see another cell or even a hallway. All he can sense behind the bars is a large, open space of undefined dimensions. He can see shapes and forms but he can’t quite make out what they are. When he moves his head he catches something gleaming glassily. Where the fuck is he?
He presses his face up to the bars, shields his eyes with cupped hands, willing them to adjust to the darkness. Eventually he begins to make out the shapes with greater distinction. He sees cameras. Not surveillance-style cameras but movie cameras, on big dollies.
The cell is a set.
And then he realizes why it seems familiar. It’s a set from Argentium Astrum, the supernatural police procedural. It’s the cell of Gorbok the Mad, the tongueless cultist that the team brings into custody in the first episode, hoping to get him to spill his terrible secrets!
Okay, he wasn’t expecting that.
He tries the door. The lock is real enough. Verisimilitude, he notes, vaguely impressed. But this has to be an improvement. It’s better to be locked into a film set than into a prison; he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he finds that he can at least believe that. He looks at the walls, wondering if he could break them down if he shouldered them hard enough.
Instead he just calls to the darkness: “Hello?”
He hears a voice, somewhere out in the dark studio space, say “He’s up,” followed by an electronic bleep that he recognizes as being the sign-off call of a walkie-talkie.
Interesting, Billy thinks. But not interesting in a good way. He has a sudden feeling that he’s going to be interrogated before the morning is out, aggressively interrogated. His testicles shrink a little.
Before long, he sees a figure walking briskly toward him, through the gloom. He recognizes the spray of curly hair. It’s Laurent, the editor in chief of The Ingot.
Okay, he wasn’t expecting that, either.
“Billy,” Laurent says, warmly. “Good to see you. Good to have you on board.” He sticks his hand through the bars of the cell for Billy to shake. Billy shakes it, a little uncertainly.
“So,” Billy says. “You’re still alive.” One fact at a time seems to be the order of the day here.
“I am,” Laurent says, beaming a bit. “That got a little rough last night, there, a little rough.”
“You’re telling me,” Billy says. “Who got hurt? Anybody?”
“Audience members are all okay,” Laurent says. “We had to do a bit of, what would you call it, cleanup on them, but they’re none the worse for wear. As for the readers: well, there’s you: you got a little zap, not too much fun there, but you’re okay, we’ve got you now, and that’s good. Elisa, the poet: less happy story, frankly, we lost tabs on her, but we’re guessing she’ll turn up. It’s not good for her to be off radar right now, though, not good at all. Of course, the one who took the brunt of the damage dealt out last night was the Adversarial Manifestation, can’t say he came out too well at the end of all the excitement.”
“Lucifer?” Billy asks.
“The Manifestation,” Laurent says.
“He’s dead?” Billy feels an unexpected pang of loss.
“It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Laurent says. “The Adversary isn’t alive or dead as you and I think about it. His manifestation was dispelled last night, though. And if you stick with us, he won’t be contacting you again.”
Billy frowns. He’s not sure why, but he feels bummed by this. It’s not exactly like he lost a friend, but more like he embarrassed himself in front of someone he thought might make a good contact.
He looks at Laurent. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “I thought you were the editor of a literary magazine. But you know about all this stuff and somehow you’re involved with Argentium Astrum and—”
Suddenly it clicks. “You’re a warlock,” he says.
Laurent smiles broadly. “Yes!” he exclaims. Billy, for his part, has to restrain a sigh. He’s starting to get sick of warlocks.
“In fact,” Laurent says, “I serve as the Executive Director of Cultural Production for the Northeast Regional Office of the Right-Hand Path, an international organization of witches and warlocks.”
“Wait,” Billy says. “So—is Ollard one of you?”
“Ollard?”
“Timothy Ollard? Guy who wants to burn up the world?”
“Timothy Ollard,” Laurent says, “is someone who you should not even know about. But, to answer your question: No. He is not one of us. He is—well, he is a problem, a problem we are actively engaged with and working on. Let me put it to you this way, Billy. Ollard is a bad guy. And we’re the good guys.”
“The good guys,” Billy repeats.
“Yes!” Laurent says.
For some reason this puts Billy in mind of the Office of Homeland Security, which he actually always thought of as a group of extralegal thugs. He narrows his eyes.
“Last night,” he asks, “did you Tase me?”
Laurent glances down to the floor and presses a knuckle into his upper lip for a long second, apparently contemplating how to phrase the answer.
“You did!” Billy says. “You fucking Tased me!”
“Yes,” Laurent says, looking up with an expression of pity. “I Tased you. If it’s any consolation, I did it with great reservation, a really strong, profound reservation. But the important point is not that. That’s behind us. That’s in the past. The important point is that you’re with us now.”
“It really fucking hurt, you know,” Billy says. “It’s not in the past until I stop fucking hurting.”
Billy glares at Laurent while Laurent maintains a hopeful smile.
“Did you say you had to do cleanup on my friends?” Billy says, eventually.
“Yes.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Well,” Laurent says, “surely you understand that we can’t have people running around talking about having witnessed the dispersal of an Adversarial Manifestation. The results would be—a mess. Just a mess. So we had our team psychic—Gloria, we’ll introduce you to her in a bit—we had Gloria go in and make a couple of tweaks to their memories of the event.”
“Tweaks?”
“Yep,” Laurent says, proudly. “Just a couple of tweaks.”
“Without their consent?” Billy says.
A tiny line creases Laurent’s brow. “It’s not the kind of thing for which one typically asks consent,” he says.
“I dunno,
” Billy says. “Lucifer asked for my consent before he started messing with my brain.”
“That may be,” Laurent says. “But—”
“So wait a second,” Billy says. “What exactly do my friends think went down last night?”
Laurent gives him a look, as though this entire line of conversation is somewhat distasteful. “You remember you told a joke? About shoes?”
“Who could forget that,” Billy says, in a low and rueful voice.
“Well,” Laurent continues, “in their recollection, you finish the joke, thank the audience, and head backstage. And then the reading ends and everyone heads home.”
Billy’s ears begin to burn with shame. “Elisa doesn’t read?”
“We lost track of her,” Laurent says.
“I don’t return to hanging out with my friends?” Billy says. “I freaking disappear?”
“It’s just a tweak,” Laurent says, a little defensively. “Our aim is minimal effective alteration: M.E.A. It’s not our aim to, you know, write fiction in which you emerge as the star. We’re the good guys.”
“So I hear,” Billy says. He tries to think about how it might have appeared to everyone. He gets up there, he bombs in front of his small band of supporters. In front of Anton Cirrus. He winces to think of it. After bombing, he disappears backstage, doesn’t return. Elisa Mastic, the poet who he conspicuously arrived with, disappears. It’s not hard to imagine how this might have appeared to Denver. By now she either thinks he’s dead, or she thinks he’s an asshole, or she thinks he’s fucking someone else. He winces again: really at this stage it turns into a full-blown grimace.
“I need my phone,” Billy says. “I gotta sort this shit out right now.”
“Oh, no,” Laurent says. “That’s not possible. We had to dispose of your phone.”
“Yeah but—what?” Billy says, dismayed.
“Your phone, your wallet, your keys—anything connected to your former identity—all of it, for our purposes, has to be treated as compromised.”
“Former identity?” Billy repeats.
“Forgive me,” Laurent says, spreading his hands apologetically. “I fear that I haven’t done the best job in this conversation of explaining the exact details of the protocol we follow in cases like yours. You know how it is, when you’re so involved with something, you kind of forget that people on the outside might not intuitively grasp all the nuance of a situation?”
“Look,” Billy says. “I’m starting not to give so much of a fuck about the nuance of the situation. You say you’re the good guys, and I want to believe you. I really do. But so far what I know about you is that you wiped my friends’ brains, you got me in trouble with my girlfriend, you trashed my stuff, and you’re keeping me in a cage against my will. You don’t seem like the good guys. Frankly, you seem like a bunch of douchebags.”
Laurent steeples his fingers and brings them to his lips, and appears to be considering this.
“If I let you out of the cell,” he says. “You have to promise that you’ll hear me out. You’re right that we can’t hold you here against your will—”
“Because it would be wrong,” Billy says.
“Absolutely!” Laurent says. “One hundred percent wrong. But if I let you out, you must give me your word that you will hear what I have to say. We believe that you are in great danger, and we believe that the Right-Hand Path is the organization that can best protect you from that danger.”
“Check,” Billy says. “You got my word.”
“Okay,” Laurent says. He turns and hollers into the darkness: “Barry! Keys!”
Billy can hear the shuffle of someone’s approach, and the janitorial clinking of keys. He squints into the darkness, then starts back when he lays eyes on the massive lumbering form of Gorbok the Mad. Hulking, broad, heavy-browed: a scary square ton of man. On the show he wears a kind of elaborate leather diaper and has a terrifying serpent tattooed across his face. In real life, Billy sees now, he’s wearing a broad violet button-down shirt and a rather stylish porkpie hat. He still has the serpent facial tattoo though. Maybe this is what happens to you, if you get a tattoo on your face, Billy thinks. Once you’ve pushed yourself out of polite society, beyond the point where you could still get a job at, say, Whole Foods. You end up having to work for the occult underground. “Hi,” says Barry, his voice high-pitched and soft. “I’m Barry.”
“I’m Billy,” says Billy. He wonders for a second whether Barry was someone else, once upon a time, someone whose former identity got compromised. Note to self, Billy thinks, don’t let identity get compromised. Or is it already too late?
“I know who you are,” says Barry, and he opens the door.
“Let’s walk,” says Laurent, clasping his hands behind him. “Could you hit the lights, Barry?”
“Sure,” says Barry, slouching off into the darkness again.
Billy steps out of the cage, enjoys a brief shiver of relief, and then instantly remembers that he never took a piss. He looks lingeringly back at the sink/toilet combination unit until he’s interrupted by the loud chung of an industrial breaker being thrown. Banks of heavy overhead lights begin to stutter on. Billy marvels briefly at the size of the space. It’s only about half the size of a suburban supermarket, but to someone like Billy, who spends most of his time in a cramped kitchen with Anil, anything larger than a squash court qualifies as cavernous.
Laurent starts off, and Billy hurries to catch up. The two of them move through a gangway lined densely on both sides with film production equipment: cameras on dollies, complicated rigs of theatrical lighting. Billy has to be careful to not snare his ankles on the big bundles of cables that run through the gangway like fat river snakes.
Laurent is talking. “As you correctly discerned, this is where we produce Argentium Astrum. It’s our first foray into televisual cultural production, and we’re very pleased with the results, very pleased.”
“It’s a … good show?” Billy says. He’s a little at sea in this conversation, but he means the praise honestly. “I gotta tell you, though, the last couple of times I tried to watch it, it just kind of degenerated into, like, weird symbols and blocks of color and stuff.”
“Yes!” Laurent says. They’re crossing in front of the main set now, a hemispherical mock-up of an open-plan police station. Billy recognizes all the different desks in their familiar arrangement; he enjoys a little fanboyish frisson which distracts him, for a moment, from the oddity of Laurent’s answer.
“Yes?” Billy says, finally.
“Yes,” Laurent confirms. He turns and grips Billy’s deltoid muscle in a way that is probably designed to generate a pleasant fellow feeling, although in actuality all it does is make Billy want to squirm free. “See, Billy, one of the things we do here is we maintain a device we call the Board. The Board provides us with a very large, very thorough listing of people who have some degree of supernatural attention circulating around them. Persons who are, for one reason or another, of interest to figures in the occult community.”
“So, what, it’s like a magical No Fly List?”
“Ha ha!” Laurent barks. “Very good, Billy, very good.” He wipes at the corner of his eye with a finger. “But, no, not like that. Our use of the Board is benign. Our intentions are not to interfere but rather simply to monitor, to observe. A sort of process of keeping tabs on.”
“Okay,” Billy says, tentatively.
“Needless to say,” Laurent continues, “you are on the Board.”
“I am?”
“You are. You have been on the Board for some time now. Many years.”
“But why?” Billy says.
The tiny crease in Laurent’s forehead appears again. “I don’t know,” he says. “The Board only indicates that someone with some degree of magical power has taken an interest in you. It doesn’t indicate who, or why.”
“Huh,” says Billy.
“What the Board does indicate is when attention begins to shift,” Laurent continues
. “When someone begins to attract a lot more attention than they’d attracted in the past, they kind of light up on the Board. And two weeks ago you started to light up, quite dramatically.”
Laurent releases Billy’s shoulder. Billy rubs at it, absently.
“We were fortunate,” Laurent says, “in that, at that time, we already knew a few things about you. We knew, for instance, that you were already a consumer of some of our programming, specifically Argentium Astrum here.”
Laurent gestures around the set. He concludes the gesture by clamping both hands on the back of one of the fancy office chairs and kind of inspecting the mesh with his fingers.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” he asks Billy. “Take a load off, as they say?”
“Uh, sure,” Billy says. He’s a little disturbed that Laurent somehow knew that he was watching the show. He wonders what else from his search history is known to these dudes. He remembers looking at porn the other night, remembers the names of the sites he visited: ultimately they are not units of language that he would prefer to be publicly associated with. He settles into the chair that on the show belongs to Detective Greco, the pallid cop with the haunted look, the one whose wife is lost in some kind of shadowy nether dimension. Billy notices that Laurent has his hands on the chair that belongs to Chief Boudreaux, the show’s gruff but lovable patriarch.
“So,” Laurent says, his fingers digging rhythmically into mesh, “we waited for you to log in and watch the show, and when you did, you opened an attention conduit, which we were able to use to probe you.”
The Weirdness Page 11
