So, Billy thinks, his interpretation shifting into overdrive, if Anton Cirrus didn’t have his memory wiped, that means—he’s working with the Right-Hand Path? But that doesn’t make sense: Why would Anton Cirrus have preemptively panned the reading if he were working for the very people who set the reading up in the first place?
So if he’s not working with the Right-Hand Path—the so-called good guys—that means that maybe he’s—with the bad guy? With Ollard. Which squares all too nicely with why Anton Cirrus would be here, randomly outside of the magical tower that no one is supposed to know about.
Before Billy can get any further with this line of thought, Anton reaches into his pocket, gets his phone out, and begins working at the screen. Texting again, it seems, which makes anger flare up in Billy. Right at the moment when he’s about to tell Anton to knock it the fuck off Anton pockets the phone and speaks: “It was pretty stupid of you, you know, to point out the Adversary in a room full of Right-Hand Path goons.”
“You call it stupid,” Billy says, groping, a little out of his element. “I call it—unpredictable?”
Anton looks up, as if trying to tell whether or not Billy is for real. “Yes, well,” Anton says. He rocks back on his heels. “We’ll see where your unpredictability gets you. I got twenty bucks that says that in the end it will be indistinguishable from stupidity.”
“You’re on,” Billy says.
“Super,” Anton says.
They stand there, regarding one another silently, in a stalemate. Anton has about five inches on Billy, which gives his gaze a permanent sense of disdain; Billy tries to counter that with a particular jut of his chin that he hopes looks pugnacious. They hold their respective poses until the cabbie, having grown impatient with idling at the curb, leans on the horn. They both jolt. Billy wheels around and holds up a finger—one minute—and returns his attention to Anton, who lets out a long, elaborate sigh.
“What are you doing here, Billy?” he asks, wearily.
“I could ask the same of you,” Billy says.
“You could,” Anton says. “Except there’s an important difference between you and me: I know what I’m doing here. And you clearly don’t.”
“Don’t I?” Billy says.
“No. You don’t. Go home, Billy. Go home and work on your shitty novel or your terrible short stories or whatever it is you’re working on.”
But I’m locked out, Billy thinks, although he doesn’t say this. The cabbie gives a short, curt blast of the horn; Billy ignores it, keeping his eyes on Anton.
“Go home,” Anton says, a note of real entreaty entering his voice, “and be happy with your tiny little life. Because I guarantee you that if you continue with whatever it is you think you’re doing, your life is going to get a whole lot worse.”
“Uh.” Billy turns, the temptation to check on the cab having grown too great, and he watches it pull away from the curb, roll slowly around the corner, and disappear. “That’s what your mom said?” he rejoinders, distracted.
Anton Cirrus gives the long sigh again. Billy didn’t notice, last night, just how sad Anton’s eyes look behind the designer glasses. “I gave you my advice,” he says. “Do what you want; my conscience is clear.” He turns into the chilly wind and continues his brisk departure.
“Hey,” Billy shouts. “Hey, I’m not through with you.” But Anton doesn’t look back, and when Billy looks deep within himself to try to find the winning taunt, he comes up with absolutely nothing at all.
So then Billy is alone, standing on the sidewalk in front of Warlock House, doing the trick that allows him to see the single red door, wreathed in calligraphy. All he has to do is just take three steps, turn the doorknob, and let himself in.
Go home, he thinks to himself, echoing Anton. Just go home.
You know what? Fuck Anton Cirrus.
He takes one step forward.
Your life is going to get a whole lot worse.
But maybe not. Maybe this is the point where his life gets better. He has a ward that protects him. He has a simple plan, unfuckable by design.
One way or another, my life will be different.
He takes another step forward, grips the knob, turns it. The door, not locked, opens out, revealing a tiny, grim vestibule, the size of a closet, with some ordinary street dirt and paper trash collected in its corners. Set into the far wall is another door, this one lacking the ornate trappings of the outer one: no bloodred paint, no crawling glyphs, just a plain metal door. Not so scary.
And if you go through there and never come out? Billy asks himself. He contemplates the prospect for a minute, tries to figure whether anyone would really even miss him. His dad, maybe. Everyone else? Denver? Anil and the Ghoul? Maybe he’s just depressed, but he can’t see them still thinking of him at all after a few weeks, a month or two at best. Springtime will return to the city, and as the snow recedes and drains away so will their memories of him; years from now maybe they’ll have a dim remembrance of a funny guy who maybe showed some signs of talent on occasion but never really pulled it together, who hung out with them for a while and got them to crack a smile every now and then, but not really the type of person who you miss, once he’s gone.
Okay, Billy thinks. You can do this. Something rises inside him. Maybe it’s that animal part of him, the part that likes being bigger and stronger, that likes being powerful. Maybe he’s ready, at long last, for a fight. He takes a final step, into the vestibule. And then he crosses it, without hesitation, opens the metal door, and enters.
CHAPTER NINE
THE LOOSENING
WELCOME TO STARBUCKS • CAHOOTS • THE PROBLEM WITH HARD-ASSES • WHEN NOT TO TIP • NOT OKAY • SOOTHING VOICE: ON • GROWING UP FASTER • HUMAN CUISINE IN TOTAL • NO MORE ORGASMS • PANDAS ARE BORING • CONNOISSEUR OF PAIN
He’s in a Starbucks.
Billy frowns. He double-checks, just for the sake of his sanity, looking back through the metal door he’s just passed through: he can see the dirty vestibule, and then the red door that leads back out to Chelsea. It’s still open a crack; he can still see a little sliver of street. And he looks back at the Starbucks. It looks exactly like every other Starbucks he’s ever seen: a counter with an aproned staff working behind it, busying themselves at various beverage-producing apparatuses. It has the same impulse items flanking the register: mints, CDs, individually wrapped madeleines that Billy has always been pretty sure are only there because someone in Starbucks’s upper echelons thinks that the Proust reference is clever. Soul music sung by a white British person comes out through unobtrusive speakers.
He turns and looks at the tables, to check out whether there’s a clientele in here or what. And sitting there in one of the big overstuffed leather chairs, dressed in a tawny corduroy suit, holding what appears to be a Caramel Macchiato, staring right into Billy, is Timothy Ollard. Billy jumps.
Ollard smiles slightly, places the macchiato on the table, wipes one palm with the other, then rises. He does not advance, a fact for which Billy is incredibly grateful.
“Billy Ridgeway,” Ollard says, rocking back on his heels. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“How is that possible?” Billy blurts, dismayed that he doesn’t even have whatever questionable advantage might be conferred by the element of surprise. “Have you been reading my mind? ’Cause at this point I’d kind of prefer for people to just stay out of there, thank you very much.”
Ollard surveys Billy’s perturbed demeanor. “Billy,” he says. “One thing you should have learned by now. You don’t need to reach for a complicated answer when a simple one will do.” He reaches into the breast pocket of the suit and pulls out a phone, activates it with a finger-swipe. “I got a text,” he says. “FYI,” he reads from the screen, “Ridgeway is here.”
Billy remembers Anton Cirrus, outside, fiddling with his phone while they argued.
“So,” Billy says, trying to add it all up in his mind. “Cirrus.”
“Yes,” Ollard s
ays.
“You and Cirrus.”
“Yes.”
“You’re … in cahoots?”
“Cahoots?” Ollard says, amusement ringing faintly in his voice. Billy feels fury swell within him; language is supposed to be the thing he’s good at. He almost pulls out the spray to give Ollard a good blast of it just on principle. “Not cahoots,” Ollard says, finally. “Think of him as an independent contractor. You could say a gun for hire if you wanted something with a little more pizzazz. With the Right-Hand Path setting up their little literary production it’s useful to know someone like Anton, who can knock it right back down again.”
“Why would he help you?”
“I sought him out. I showed him that partnering with me would provide him with certain advantages. Men like Cirrus enjoy advantages. Maybe to a fault.”
“Does he know,” Billy says, “that you’re planning to burn up the world?”
“He knows that I have the Neko,” Ollard says, showing no surprise that Billy is familiar with his plan. “He knows that it is a source of plentiful energy. He knows it’s unique and valuable and that important people are interested in it, and I think that represents a line beyond which Cirrus cannot see very clearly. The crest of the hill, in a way. See, that’s the thing about men like Cirrus—”
“Look,” Billy says, “I don’t really care about men like Cirrus.” He says this, although if he were being totally honest he would have to admit that something in him seizes greedily at the prospect that Cirrus’s takedown of him on Bladed Hyacinth was maybe less about the merits of his writing, or lack thereof, and more about some kind of chess move against the Right-Hand Path. “I’m here for the Neko. Where is it?”
Ollard looks flatly at Billy for a long moment. “Why don’t you get yourself a drink?” he asks.
“I don’t want a drink.”
“Billy,” says Ollard. “I’ve only just met you, but I can tell that this hard-ass routine doesn’t suit you. It’s fake.”
Billy feels a bit stung by this, and Ollard must notice, because he holds up a finger in a wait-one-moment-before-you-react gesture. “Hard-asses,” he says, “are boring. They see one route toward what they want, and barrel straight at it. It’s embarrassing. They’re easy to sidestep, easy to trip up. They don’t make satisfying opponents. If you’re not a hard-ass it means that there’s some small hope that you’ll be intelligent. And an intelligent opponent gives me at least something to savor.”
“Maybe the most intelligent thing an opponent could do, though,” Billy says, “is to pretend that they’re a hard-ass, to … lull you … into … a false sense of security.”
“You’re not doing a very good job of pretending, if that’s your strategy.”
“Maybe my strategy … is to pretend to be doing a bad job of pretending, so that you’ll think I’m pretending, when in reality I’m actually … smarter than that.”
“Well,” Ollard says, a little wearily, “yes, that would be one strategy. But if you’re such a master strategist, you can sit with me, and drink some coffee, and we can talk. Intelligently.”
Billy considers this. He takes a step backward toward the counter and waits a second to see if Ollard takes this opportunity to spring across the space separating them. He sort of half expects Ollard to sprout giant razored talons or something. But all Ollard does is wave Billy toward the counter with his fingertips, settle back into the armchair, and sip from his macchiato.
Well, Billy thinks, okay. If there’s been one good thing that’s come out of this week it’s been all the coffee. He approaches the counter.
“Welcome to Starbucks,” says the young man stationed there. “May I take your order?” The man’s voice is cheerful but there’s something strangulated in it that startles Billy, gets him to pay a little more attention. He looks the Starbucks Guy in the face. The guy—a blond kid, can’t be a day over twenty-one, wispy hints of a starter goatee around his mouth—is smiling at him expectantly, but something in the smile looks fixed, knocking Billy from alert to on edge.
“Uh, sure,” says Billy, suspiciously. “Can I get a … Grande Americano?”
“Grande Americano!” the kid hollers to one of the other workers back there, a woman, who jerks into motion with the gracelessness of a dusty animatronic figure, a robotic Abe Lincoln in a forgotten Hall of Presidents.
Billy looks into the kid’s puffy, red-rimmed eyes and spots the raw terror in them. They come so close to screaming Call the police that Billy reflexively pats his pockets, looking for his phone, which of course is still in a Dumpster somewhere.
The guy rattles off how much Billy owes, and Billy looks over his shoulder to see if Ollard is going to offer to pick up the tab on this. Billy figures that if you have your own personal Starbucks with the employees held in some kind of terrifying mystic bondage then you might as well make all the coffee complimentary. After all, you can’t exactly be expecting the place to meet a quarterly profit projection. But Ollard is paying no attention: he’s gazing out the windows. Out is perhaps the wrong way to put it: it’s really more at, because the windows are great panes of solid blackness.
Billy pulls the three dollars out of his pocket, unfolds them, and hands them off to the terrorized-looking kid, who returns him a handful of change. Billy considers dropping the coins in the tip jar but he has the sense that no one working here is going to get around to spending their tips anytime soon. He makes eye contact with the cashier for a second in which both of them understand that their transaction has concluded, that there is nothing more that Billy can or will do for this kid right now. Billy’s the one to break the glance, and as he pockets his change he’s scorched by a rising shame.
“Grande Americano at the bar,” shouts the young woman at the other end of the counter, with that same fracturing cheer. Billy makes the mistake of looking in her eyes as she slides his drink across to him, checking in the hope that maybe the kid was a one-off, but no: she has the exact same please-help-me look, the exact same fake frozen smile.
Billy wonders for a moment whether his ward protects him against this kind of enslavement. Tries to remember exactly what Lucifer said. Ollard is unable to harm him—what was it—through magical means or otherwise? The Starbucks workers don’t seem harmed, exactly, but it certainly looks like their experience is sucking. Maybe he should just get out of here while he can?
But when Billy turns to face Ollard again all he sees is a guy, just sitting there in his corduroy suit. He looks placid, really, almost bland. Pasty. Wan. It’s hard for Billy to feel like he’s actually in danger. So Billy goes and sits in the other overstuffed chair, which leaves him positioned at about a forty-five degree angle to Ollard. He puts his Americano on a little round table. Knowing that it was served to him by zomboid slaves makes it seem a little creepy. So instead of drinking it, he just sits there, looking at the black panes, waiting for Ollard to speak. The two of them sit side by side, staring. At blackness. This lasts for about a second before Billy begins to find it disturbing.
“So,” Billy says, groping around for a way to kick-start the conversation. “You must really … like Starbucks, I guess?”
Ollard shows no signs of having heard the question, for a long minute. The song by the British soul singer ends, and then it begins again, a second time.
“I think better when I’m in here,” Ollard says, finally. “I’ve spent most of the last year in one Starbucks or another, thinking. They’re all over the city, now, did you know that?”
“Um,” Billy says. “Yes, I guess I did.”
“I used to alternate between seven different Starbucks,” Ollard says. “A different one for each day of the week. Of course, now that I have the Neko, I haven’t been able to get out. It’s not … safe for me outside any longer. So I decided to set one up here.” He turns toward Billy and smiles weakly.
“Starbucks every day, huh?” Billy says.
“For hours. Hours every day.”
“That’s a lot of think
ing.”
“It is. That’s the thing I’m good at. Thinking. That’s all there is left to do, really.”
“Yeah, um.” Billy’s still trying to find his grounding in this conversation. He feels a bit like he’s on an awkward date. He has begun to detect an odor, like meat left out in the sun, which he assumes is coming from Ollard, and he notices that the corduroy suit, which looked so sharp from a distance, is actually quite dirty, filthy even, going nearly translucent in spots from grease and wear.
“So,” Billy tries. “What do you think about?”
Ollard makes a sucking sound with his mouth before he answers. “What do I think about,” he says. “I think about the world. The world and all that is in it.”
“Okay,” Billy says. “That’s cool.”
“Is it?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think so,” Ollard says. “I don’t think the world is cool.”
“No?”
“No. I think—and I have considered the problem at some length—that the world, ultimately, is repulsive.”
“Okay,” Billy says.
“It’s not okay,” Ollard says. “I am grateful to this place, though. To Starbucks. It helped me to think, during this time. It helped me to focus. It reminded me. Every day. Of the world. Of just how little the world has to offer.”
His expression suddenly cracks. His eyes clench shut; a network of deep lines emerges across his forehead; his mouth tenses, widening into a distorted black hole, rimmed with bad teeth. You’d think if you were an all-powerful magician who’d been alive for a century you’d at least be able to take the time to fix your terrible teeth.
“Hey,” Billy says, in a voice that he hopes is therapeutic. He momentarily considers reaching out, putting a hand on Ollard’s shoulder, although the idea creeps him out too much for him to get far with it.
The Weirdness Page 14
