“Ollard,” Billy says, expending enormous effort to sound very calm. At this point he’s past thinking that this conversation is like an awkward date; he’s instead realized that it’s more like a hostage negotiation. He tries to remember anything he knows about hostage negotiation, any movie where a hostage negotiation situation was handled effectively. He gets a vision of Denzel Washington, stern and commanding, but he can’t come up with any immediate way to put it to use.
“Timothy,” he tries, with his soothing voice still on. “Where is the Neko?”
“I’m so tired,” Ollard says. He presses the heels of his hands into his face, as though he’s stuffing thoughts back into his head. “I’m tired,” he says again.
“We’re all tired,” Billy says. “Take me to the Neko.”
Ollard draws a long, shuddering breath, and then looks back at Billy, his face having regained some of its composure. “You want to see the Neko?” he says.
“Well, yeah,” Billy says. “I mean. Eventually. We can keep talking for a bit if you want.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ollard says, rising. “We can talk on the way.”
“All right then. Let’s go.” Billy claps his hands on his thighs and gets out of the chair, leaving the creepy Americano on the little round table, untouched. They walk behind the counter, weaving between the three workers, who are involved in polishing nonexistent spots off the machines at the bar. Ollard hooks around into the supply room, and just past the big industrial refrigerator and the sinks, right in the spot where labor practices posters should be hanging in mandatory display, the Starbucks abruptly opens into a long corridor, grim and dingy, its walls a sort of dulled avocado, gone rippled from layers upon layers of paint. It has a dusty whiff about it, like a rarely visited back wing of an underfunded natural history museum, like a stuffed bison slowly rotting in an alcove.
“I’ve been alive for a long time,” Ollard says, as the two of them enter the corridor. His voice wavers.
“I’d heard that,” Billy says. They’re passing doors on either side; Billy wonders what he’d find if he opened them. “Lucifer said you’d been alive for like eighty years or something?”
“Oh, longer than that,” Ollard says. “Before that I was just off the radar, I guess. I was … very subtle.”
“It’s a good trick,” Billy says, encouragingly. He looks over his shoulder, back down the hallway, making sure that he can still see the Starbucks supply room. If he can make it back there he can make it back to the door that leads out to the street, and for some reason he believes that if he makes it back out to the street, he’ll be safe.
“A good trick,” Ollard says. “Is it?”
“Sure,” Billy says. “Staying young? You could make a million bucks if you figured out a way to teach people how to do it.”
“I’ll tell you how to do it,” Ollard says.
“Okay,” Billy says. Against his better judgment his interest is piqued.
“You learn how to take,” Ollard says. “That’s all there is to it, really.”
“Uh,” Billy says.
“That was what I wanted,” Ollard says, “as soon as I was old enough to really be aware that I would die. As soon as I became aware that I would die I also became aware that there were people younger than me. They were—further away from death than I was. And I decided that I wanted what they had. Their youth: I wanted to take it. And I had to figure it out. How to take it. You can do it subtly. Small doses. I take a year from someone; I gain a year. It’s only a year. Sometimes you can take a few at once. Young people hardly even notice. Most of them want to grow up faster anyway. You have to be careful, though. You take too many years at once and you create—aberrations.”
Billy doesn’t want to hear about aberrant children. He wants to get the Neko and get the hell out of here. They reach the end of the corridor, which terminates in a heavy metal door. Through a tiny window, crisscrossed with safety wire, Billy can see a stairwell.
“Regardless,” Ollard says. He yanks on the door handle and the door squeals open. “It was, for some years, a satisfying puzzle to work on, the puzzle of getting more life. And as you can see, I’ve gotten very good at it.”
“Too bad about the aberrations, though,” Billy says, uneasily, as they enter the stairwell. Raw brick here, the steps metal grates.
“They’re not the problem,” Ollard says, as he begins to descend. “I mean, yes, they are a problem. An unpleasantness for others to deal with. But they’re not my problem.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What is your problem?”
“My problem, Billy, is with the world. There’s enough in it to be interesting for a lifetime. Maybe a hundred years’ worth of interest in total. Puzzles to solve. Satisfying activities. But after that, something happens. You get bored. You detect the larger patterns, the cycles. The repetition. Everything repeats. You have to eat every day. Three times a day. Can you imagine that? For two hundred years? It becomes oppressive. You begin to recognize that every variation—everything that constitutes human cuisine in total—is just an attempt to use novelty to disguise the repulsive oppression inherent to it.”
Billy thinks of the lamb crepes, of wanting to save the world because they were so damn tasty. He opens his mouth to object, but Ollard just keeps rolling on: “You can amass more knowledge—there’s always more knowledge—but there’s no longer an end to put it toward. Most people bother to amass knowledge for very basic reasons, you know. To convert it into power. To flatter one’s own vanity. To impress a potential sexual partner.” They’ve reached the bottom of the stairwell, and Ollard hauls open another metal door. Billy follows him down a narrow aisle between banks of grey utility shelving heaped with disintegrating wood-grain-print file boxes, and begins to formally worry about the distance between him and the street now.
“But if you live long enough,” Ollard says, “you see that even these ends are worthless.”
“I don’t know,” Billy says. “Sex is pretty good.” Except when it’s not, he thinks, and with this thought comes a jolt of renewed regret at having failed to set up the Nice Evening with Denver; it would be good to have a really memorable recent sexual experience to fall back on in this conversation. It would be one more cause for hope, which seems to be in increasingly short supply as they go deeper and deeper into the tower.
“Sex?” Ollard says. “Are you kidding me? A jumble of thrashing flesh. And an orgasm? What is that? Cheap stimulation of your own mind’s pleasure center. My final orgasm was in 1969.”
Well, Billy thinks, that explains something.
Ollard stops, turns to Billy, beginning to tremble as the strains of outrage and disbelief in his voice redouble. “I even tried being good for a while,” he says. “I thought, well, there’s something I haven’t done. Maybe being good has its own interesting aspects. Intrinsic rewards? I’d heard of them. So. Ten years I spent. I cloaked a couple of acres of mountain valley in China, found a couple of pandas the world didn’t already know about, started up my own little private conservancy. I thought, now here’s a thing that will—just a thing that will make me happy, in this godforsaken world. I even got them to put out a couple of cubs. But you know what? It was boring. Turns out pandas are incredibly boring. I would go there—I had some stupid idea that it would serve as a retreat, a place where I could go to quietly reflect or something equally pointless—and so I would go there and watch these idiot Ailuropods shamble about, and it just got to the point where I felt contempt for them, nothing but the deepest contempt. And so I killed them.”
Billy’s been doing his best, through this monologue, to keep his facial expression neutral, but at this he can feel a look of dismay crack through.
“Oh yes,” Ollard says. “I slit their throats with a ceremonial blade. And then I set the valley ablaze and watched it die. And that? Watching my verdant mountaintop be scoured clean by fire? That, Billy Ridgeway, felt good. And that’s when I knew that there was one last satisfying puzzle for me
. The puzzle of how to make that experience be the only experience. For me, for everyone. The puzzle of how to burn the world.”
They’re both silent for the rest of their progress through the aisle. At the end of the aisle is another large door, this one painted red and lacking the little safety window.
“Every puzzle has its solution,” Ollard says, pausing in front of the door. “And so here we are. The Neko of Infinite Equilibrium. The tiny machine that just gets hotter and hotter. The Little Engine That Could. You wanted to see it? Here it is.”
He pulls open the door and enters the room. It’s about the size of a suburban garage. The floor is ashily chalked with a set of concentric rings, and at the center of those rings sits a pair of sawhorses, and suspended between the sawhorses is the feline form of the Neko. Red ears, red collar, deep and expressive eyes. It beckons benignly. Surrounding the Neko is a kind of iridescent globe, like a huge, perfect soap bubble, only giving off an aura of timeless indestructibility, not exactly what soap bubbles are known for.
Billy squints at the shimmering sphere.
“One seal,” says Ollard. “The only seal that remains between the Neko and this world. The five others have fallen before me. This final one is—interesting. A diabolical intelligence lurks in its architecture. It almost makes me believe that Lucifer and I could have been friends, if circumstances had been different. That might have been nice. I could have used a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” says Billy. He’s not really listening anymore. He’s become distracted by the realization that this is the moment: all he has to do is give Ollard a quick squirt of chemicals in the face, grab the Neko, and tear ass out of here. You can do this, he tells himself. He curls his fingers around the pepper spray in his pocket, flips the flip-top with his sweaty thumb. And he yanks the canister out and aims it—
It turns into a live dove in his hand.
He releases it with an inadvertent flourish, and it flutters out into the room, wheels in a circle, and is out the door and gone. Ollard watches it go.
“Billy,” he says, piteously.
Shit, Billy thinks.
Ollard contorts his left hand into some gnarled position, like he’s throwing a gang sign, and Billy is lifted off the ground, about three feet into the air.
This can’t be good, Billy thinks, although he retains some degree of faith in Lucifer’s ward: he is, after all, not in pain. Not yet.
“See, Billy, this is what I was saying about hard-asses,” Ollard says, calmly. “Hard-asses just charge on ahead, trying only the most obvious methods. You think I would have taken you down here and shown you the Neko if there were any chance, any chance at all, that you could have pulled a cheap snatch-and-grab on me?”
He walks in a half circle around Billy, gets in close to Billy’s ear, and drops his voice. “I am disappointed, actually, a little disappointed,” he says. “You almost had me convinced that you were a person pretending very sophisticatedly to be a person who was pretending very poorly to be a hard-ass. But no. No, it turns out you were a hard-ass after all, just a very very bad one, which at least has the merit of being a strategy I haven’t seen before.”
“You can’t hurt me,” Billy says, with a bravery that he doesn’t actually feel. His facial muscles—all his muscles, actually—have gone slack and jellylike; he feels like he has the physical coordination of an infant. He can’t quite manage to fully close his mouth again after he speaks. A thin string of drool hangs off of his lip; he can’t reach for it to wipe it away. This is starting to suck.
“I noticed that, actually,” Ollard says. “It is curious.”
Billy is about to crow triumphantly about the ward, as triumphantly as he can manage through his rubbery mouth, but then he realizes that the less Ollard knows in this particular situation, the better, and he should just shut up now, thanks very much.
“Let’s run a little diagnostic,” Ollard says. He turns to a rack of gray utility shelving at the wall and busies himself there for a minute, leaving Billy hanging in space. When he returns, he has a kind of leather holster slung at his hip; emerging from the holster are six or seven slender rods. Some are gnarled branchlike things and others are smooth, polished, ebon cylinders. Magic wands?
Ollard draws one out of the holster: it’s about fourteen inches long, mahogany-colored, tapering to a point no larger than the pink eraser on the end of a pencil. He holds it up to Billy’s face.
“Fuck you, Dumbledore,” Billy says, his mouth all slack, drool running down to his chin. Ollard’s eyes narrow and flash with what Billy recognizes as genuine hatred.
“Okay,” Ollard says. “Let’s see.”
He places the tip of the wand just inside the rim of Billy’s nostril. Billy tries to rear back but ends up just squirming in the air, splaying his limbs helplessly. Ollard pushes the wand in maybe another half an inch and something seems to happen to it; it seems to develop distinct segments, points of articulation, and then it begins moving, it begins to goddamn wriggle in his nose, chitinous and feelered, like a centipede, burrowing deeper into his nasal cavity. He suddenly remembers a grubby, friendless kid from his high school years who had to undergo merciless abuse because, as the rumor went, he had once been taken to the hospital to get a cockroach removed from his ear canal. For the first time, he understands that kid as someone who deserved his truest sympathies.
“Ngh,” Billy says. Ollard’s face is fixed with an expression of deep focus, a certain grim contemplation that is not quite perplexity, the sort of expression one might wear if one found a dead bird on one’s doorstep. He holds that expression for a long moment and then finally it gives way to a sly grin.
“Very clever,” says Ollard. “He’s given you a Model Eight Demonic Ward. Not a bad choice, actually. Tough to detect; effective; tricky to get rid of because of its mercurial spin. Tricky, but not impossible. Let’s just get that dispelled—now.”
The wand up Billy’s nose seems to fatten and discharge, and Billy feels a sensation like something intricate exploding in his head, a Christmas ornament shattering in his brain, dusting his consciousness with silvery particles, sharp and toxic. He feels the urge to sneeze, and he simultaneously feels a dawning awareness that he’s about to die.
“Wait,” Ollard says. His face reverts to the nearly-perplexed expression. “There’s something else. Older. Deeper.” The centipede scuttles a bit further in. “A second ward.”
A second ward? That doesn’t make a ton of sense to Billy, but he doesn’t really have the mental real estate to attempt to figure out what it might mean, as he’s too busy thinking about dying. He thinks about the book he’ll never get to see finished. The first box of books he’d get from the publisher. Cutting it open. Inhaling the smell. Seeing his name on the cover. Giving the first copy to Denver. He would have liked to be able to do that.
“It’s strange,” Ollard says, in the slightly absented voice of someone working through a crossword. “It has a signature that I don’t recognize. It’s sophisticated, but it doesn’t resemble most traditional wards. It seems … handcrafted. I don’t quite get what it’s for but I should still be able to remove it—let’s see, here.”
He slowly draws the wand back out of Billy’s nostril, and something distressing happens deep in Billy’s head. The sensation reminds him of how it felt to have his braces pulled off by his orthodontist, back when he was fifteen. The event is happening in his brain instead of his mouth, but otherwise it’s identical: a series of wrenching pops, wired together; a relief of an old restraint; a kind of forceful, violent loosening. Finally the wand is all the way out of his nose. Billy feels completely drained.
“So how about now,” Ollard says, almost murmuring. “Can I hurt you now?”
He draws a longer wand out of the holster, a twisted black number studded with thorns, and gently touches it to Billy’s sternum. Billy’s body jerks as tendrils of pain loop and coil through his chest. It doesn’t quite hurt as much as getting Tased last night—he’s still able
to think—but it still hurts like hell. He makes a mental note to kick Lucifer in the balls if he ever sees him again, for getting him involved in this bullshit. Assuming he survives. Which he probably won’t.
Ollard lifts the wand away from Billy, and Billy sucks air like a flopping fish.
“Please don’t kill me,” Billy says, miserably.
“Oh, Billy,” Ollard says. “I don’t want to kill you. I want to kill everyone.”
Billy whimpers. He’d like to think that the sound he makes is more noble than that; he’d like to think that he’s trying to make a grunt of resistance or something, but he hears it come out of him and he knows it’s a whimper.
“I do intend, though, to make you suffer,” Ollard says. “You see, Billy, I learned something when I was inside your head, a minute ago. I learned that you are a man who is governed by fear.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“I think you are, actually. I looked around in your head just now. So many fears in there. That’s why you were never a great man, Billy; you were scared of the world. So I think it’s fitting that when I send you away I send you to the place that you fear the most.”
The place I fear the most? Billy thinks. He tries to summon it up. Hell? Afghanistan? He has trouble thinking of a place anywhere that scares him more than the bowels of this tower, right now. He wonders for a moment if he can’t get out of this by pulling some Brer Rabbit shit.
“You know what really scares me?” Billy says, slowly. “My apartment. That place—I just never liked it. It just always creeped the fuck out of me. I’d wake up at night, rigid with terror.”
“Very funny,” Ollard says. “But I already know where you’re going. Its coordinates blaze deep in your mind. Buried in your memory: the locus of your most profound fears.”
“Give me a hint,” Billy says. “What kind of place is it?”
“I don’t know,” says Ollard. “I don’t care. I only know it is a place where you once pledged, out of fear, to never return. A fitting place for you to end your days.”
The Weirdness Page 15
