“I don’t like you,” Billy says. “Really, no one likes you.”
“Yes,” Ollard says. “That’s true.”
“Fuck you,” Billy tries to say, but he only gets as far as fuck and then he’s gone.
CHAPTER TEN
AWAY
THE CAVE OF DENIAL • MUD/SHIT RATIO • NOT KNOWN FOR FOLIAGE • NEVER LIKED GOATS • SQUARE PUPILS • SOMETHING CRACKED • TOTALLY FUCKABLE • FRIENDS VS. ASSOCIATES • TOO MUCH NOTHING • AMONG THE DAMNED • NEEDING AN ANIMAL • WANTING YOUR MOTHER
Billy appears somewhere, still hanging in space, three feet above the ground, only now that he’s away from Ollard there’s no magic holding him in place anymore, so he falls down. He lands in mud, cold mud; he produces the squelch that is produced when a great volume of the stuff is displaced at great speed to accommodate the arrival of a plummeting body. Beneath the mud is something harder, clay maybe, perhaps a layer of rock, but definitely something that stops his fall, firmly, without friendliness.
He groans. He feels broken and sick, his pummeled muscles and guts still shot through with awful magic. He keeps his eyes closed. Unless he’s actively under attack, he doesn’t feel any special need to immediately reacquaint himself with the spot that’s the locus of his most profound fears. Quite the contrary. When he considers all his options, he feels like ultimately he’d maybe be better off lying here, in the mud, with his eyes clenched shut, in a dark little cave of denial.
Despite these wishes, bits of the world gradually trickle in. He can tell that he’s outside. He can feel chilly wind stream across his face; he can hear the dry shush of that wind shifting masses of nearby autumn leaves. A crow, not far off, caws. He can smell the pungent kick of animal shit. This introduces a gram of worry about the ratio of mud to shit in the immediate area of where he’s fallen. With that said, being covered in shit no longer seems like it will constitute a significant reduction of dignity, given everything that’s happened to him in the last twenty-four hours or so.
He hears the bleat of some nearby mammal. Almost against his will he opens his eyes. He’s in a muddy outdoor pen, three feet from a mottled goat which observes him vacantly.
Beyond the fence at the pen’s perimeter he can see trees, a row of deciduous trees in the full blaze of fall. So he’s probably not in Afghanistan, at least: although he’s not a hundred percent sure what the tree situation is in Afghanistan, he does know that it’s not a place that’s exactly renowned for its scenic foliage. And didn’t Ollard say that this was a place he’d been before? Plus it doesn’t seem all that scary, although it is true that he’s never liked goats.
He cranes his head around, sees a barn of a decidedly North American typology and a huddle of sheep. For one moment he feels the uncharacteristic desire to eat them; he clears it with a vigorous shaking of his head.
He frowns at a few gumball-type vending machines that are loaded up with corn and sunflower seeds. Something about this place does seem familiar. And then he figures it out. It’s the Apple Cheeks Farm Stand and Petting Zoo in Ohio, about an hour from where he grew up.
He laughs. Ollard behaved rashly: sent him someplace harmless. Ollard made a mistake. Fuck, he had Billy hanging in the air like a trussed deer: he could have cut any one of Billy’s prominent veins and just let him bleed out. Although maybe not: Billy remembers that Lucifer seemed to think that Ollard wouldn’t have killed him, even without the ward. Or wards, plural, whatever that’s about.
He looks at the vending machines and remembers the day he swore never to return here. His smile fades a little.
His parents had brought him. He was maybe six. They purchased a handful of grains out of one of those very vending machines, a quarter’s worth, and Wee Billy toddled off eagerly, ready to find some kindly fauna to feed. What Wee Billy didn’t know was that one handful of grain doesn’t last all that long when you’re up against the single-mindedness of the average farm animal. It all disappeared into the maw of one goat, an animal that Wee Billy experienced not as some harmless Disney critter, all shy smiles and eyelashes, but rather as a kind of frightening machine designed for gnashing. Something in the ballpark of an industrial thresher. Billy remembers looking into its otherworldly eye, with its diabolical-looking square pupil, and in there he found it, the terror, the terror at being up close with something that wasn’t human, that could not be reasoned with, that could not possibly be understood as good or kind.
Billy remembers wanting his mother. As the goat moved on to chewing wetly on the sleeve of Wee Billy’s shirt, he wanted his mother in a way that he had never wanted her before. There had been many times in his infancy and early childhood that he had wanted his mother to pick him up, to hold him, to feed him, to have her face fill his field of vision. Times when he had wanted her to tell him a story, something with mead halls and hunting horns, phrases that he didn’t understand but that she spoke with such delectation that he felt in her thrall, and felt comfortable there. But this time was different, fundamentally different. This was the first time he had wanted his mother to rescue him from Evil.
The goat had worked its way up Wee Billy’s sleeve until it finally began to nibble at the rim of his ear. His sniveling turned into open shrieking. He had needed his mother to rescue him from Evil and she wasn’t there. No one was there.
She had never been far, of course, nor had his father, and they rescued him a second later and took him home, stopping at an ice cream stand for soft serve vanilla with a sweet orange shell, but something in Billy’s world had cracked a bit. He learned that day that he was not fully under anyone’s protection, that there were bad things out there, things that don’t understand mercy, and ultimately, he would have to face those things by himself, whether equipped for the task or not. And on this cold morning, his mission failed, fucked in more ways than he can count, Billy has, once again, been reminded of precisely how ill-equipped he is, most of the time.
He thinks of Ollard’s rotting teeth, of the stink that bloomed from his mouth.
He sits there, in the mud, trying futilely to come up with a next move. The planet is slated to die and he’s in Ohio, of all places. He’s cold. He’s alone. Apple Cheeks seems to be closed for the season, or something; he doesn’t see anybody else around: no farmers, no members of the public, nothing but goats and sheep. If he could get to his dad’s place—easily forty-five minutes away even if he had a car—then maybe he could … borrow some cash? That would be a good start. But then what?
Billy feels a hot flush of frustration surge into his face, threatening to squirt out into big stupid tears. Ollard didn’t make a mistake. He was right not to care where he sent Billy off to because in the end it doesn’t matter. Ollard didn’t need to kill him, all he needed to do was flick him away and he would no longer count.
He wants his mother.
He lies back down.
He’s been lying there for a few minutes watching clouds scud across the sky when he hears approaching footsteps crunching through the rutted dirt. Billy tries to prepare an explanation for the proprietor of Apple Cheeks, some plausible narrative explaining how and why he came to be lying in this field. He’s a fiction writer, ostensibly; he should be able to come up with something.
But there’s no need. It’s not the proprietor. It’s Lucifer. He looks down at Billy with some admixture of pity and consternation, with the latter seeming more genuine than the former.
“What are you doing?” Lucifer says.
“Just—” Billy says, trying to figure it out, exactly. “Just lying here? Feeling sorry for myself?”
“Well, stop it,” Lucifer says. “We have things to do.”
Billy considers this. He considers the alternative. After a moment of this, he gets up, knocks the biggest clumps of dirt off of his coat with the heel of his hand.
“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” Billy says.
“Perhaps.”
“I promised myself I would kick you in the nuts the next time I saw you.�
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“But why?”
“Why?” Billy says. “I’ll tell you why. You said your plan was unfuckable by design. But let me tell you: it was fuckable. Totally fuckable.” That sounds wrong.
“Slow down, Billy,” Lucifer says. “Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what happened. I got tortured.”
“But—the ward,” Lucifer says, in a manner that seems to convey exactly no surprise.
“Yeah, the ward didn’t work worth a crap,” Billy says. “You told me it would protect me, but Ollard was just able to, just, dispel it or rip it away or something.”
“Ah,” Lucifer says. “But, you see, that’s good.”
Billy stops knocking mud and shit off of himself. Instead, he gives over all his energies to try to make any sense at all of that utterance. “That’s good? How on earth is that good?”
“Well,” Lucifer says blandly, “it was what I expected would happen.”
“It was—? Let me get this straight. You expected that Ollard would be able to dispel the ward that you put on me to protect me?”
“Correct,” says Lucifer.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Correct.”
Billy lets this sink in.
“You really are an asshole,” he says.
“Let me ask you something,” Lucifer says, ignoring the invective. “Did Ollard find the second ward? The older ward?”
“Yes?” Billy says, not at all certain that he should be answering this question honestly.
“And he dispelled that one, too?”
“Maybe?”
“I was hoping that would happen,” Lucifer says. He swells his chest proudly. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist, once he got into your head; he’s gotten careless in his confidence. I knew he’d go through there and just scrape you clean. So, you see, Billy, you see the genius in this? You see the real purpose of the ward I put on you? Not to protect you but to draw Ollard’s attention, to get you free, at last, of that accursed older ward. A thing I could not do myself. And now we’re ready. Now we can move into Phase Two.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Billy says. “I don’t get it. This older ward? What the hell was it even for?”
Lucifer grins. “The older ward.” He emits a chuckle. “What was it for. Well, a couple of things, actually, but in part the older ward was designed to protect you from me.”
Something drops in Billy’s stomach. He takes a step back.
“But,” he says. “But, why would I need that? You and I—we’re, we’re, like, friends.”
“Associates,” Lucifer suggests.
“Pals,” Billy insists.
“Coconspirators,” Lucifer tries.
“Yeah, sure, coconspirators. But the point—the point is, you don’t want to hurt me. It makes no sense.”
“It makes some sense.”
“What sense? We’re on the same goddamn side!”
“Be honest, Billy,” Lucifer says, quietly. “You’re really on your own side.”
“That’s not true. I want to—I want to save the world and shit, same as you.”
Lucifer weighs this. “Very well. Let’s say that we’re on the same side. But in order for our side to be victorious, I need you to be—let’s say, more efficient as an ally. You require certain—modifications.”
Modifications? Billy remembers Lucifer’s fingers in his brain on Thursday morning, making tweaks, adjusting things. He remembers falling, distressed, into a huddle. He’s not really up for more of that right now, even if Lucifer can rejigger his identity to make him resemble some kind of Special Forces dude, someone more mentally capable of completing an objective. “I don’t think I like the sound of that,” Billy says.
“No, no,” Lucifer says, “I didn’t expect that you would. And if you still had the protections of the older ward, I would require your consent. But now the older ward is gone. And here we are.”
Billy can’t make sense of it. Why did he even have an older ward in the first place? Who put it on him? Who would find him worthy of protecting? He thinks again of his mother: her face, filling his field of vision.
“So,” Lucifer says. He looks around, faint distaste curling his lips. “I’d like to take this elsewhere. Shall we adjourn?”
“No,” Billy says, “I think, for now, we should stay right here.” He eyes the tree line beyond the fence, tries to figure out how far he could get if he loped into it at top speed.
“Billy,” Lucifer says. “I hate to put it this way, but you don’t have a choice.”
Billy opens his mouth to protest.
Lucifer raises his hand and snaps, once, only instead of a snapping sound his fingers make the pungent ashy burst-noise of an old-timey flashbulb, complete with the crinkle of tiny glass collapsing. And, just as if the Devil has popped a flashbulb in his face, everything goes white.
He waits for his vision to clear. Waits for the world to come back. But nothing. Everything stays white.
Oh shit, he thinks. I’ve gone blind.
Except he hasn’t gone blind. He looks down and he sees his hands, his torso, his legs. But there’s nothing beneath his feet. No Ohio mud. Nothing. Whiteness. He suddenly has to fight back the sense that he’s not standing, but falling, plummeting through empty space. He looks around, helplessly hoping to find a point he can use to orient himself, but there’s nothing.
He clenches his eyes shut and waits there in self-imposed darkness for a second, until the wave of rising nausea passes. A vast silence roars around him.
Eyes still closed, he drops into a crouch, reaches down, touches whatever it is that is supporting his feet, reaffirms the presence of resistance. So, okay, there’s that at least.
He slowly rises to standing again, opens his eyes, lets the whiteness rush in. He turns a full circle, hoping to find something behind him, but there’s just more nothing. He would have thought, when he woke up this morning, that nothingness was not really a thing that could be meaningfully modified with terms like more or less, but there behind him is definitely more nothingness, definitely, in fact, too much nothingness. It’s like he’s mainlining pure oppression directly into his eyeballs. It’s like all his senses are being smothered to death under a pillow.
And it is then that Billy thinks, with a sickening jolt: Oh, shit. I’m not blind. I’m dead.
No, he tells himself. No. I can’t be dead.
Why not? You could die. People do die. Why not you? This could be Hell. The Devil killed you and sent you to Hell.
Is this Hell? This combination: consciousness plus nothingness? It’s not what he imagined but he feels certain that remaining in this place, alone, will cause him to suffer, as surely as if he were writhing within a lake of fire.
He pats down his pockets, finds the loose change from the Americano, and throws it out into the void, hoping that just seeing something, anything, will help to quell the panic. The coins fall in the arc dictated by Newtonian physics, bounce, scatter out, help to define a plane that Billy can think of as the ground. It’s not much but it helps to orient him a little bit.
He sits and thinks. There has to be a way out of this.
After a few moments pass, his thoughts turn instead to Denver. He allows himself to regret the fact that he died with Denver thinking that he was a flake. A cheating flake. An asshole. A cheating flake asshole. He wishes he could have proven to her that he could be a person who was, what was it, fully present. He won’t be getting any more present now, that’s for sure.
He takes a moment to try to envision what his funeral will be like, tries to work up a gratifying image of his friends, griefstricken at his graveside, rending their garments and such. But all he can envision is them at the table at Barometer last night, all together, laughing, having a good time, without him.
Fuck.
He wonders how long it will be before he goes insane. He gives himself maybe an hour.
No, he thinks, closing his eyes again to block out the nothingnes
s. It doesn’t make sense. The Devil double-crossed you for some reason. And that reason wasn’t to kill you. He talked about a plan. He talked about a Phase Two.
A Phase Two is at least something, not nothing, and as such Billy clutches at it with hope.
A Phase Two might not, of course, be anything good.
He recounts the one thing he knows. The older ward—wherever it came from, whoever put it on him—protected him against the Devil, and now it’s gone. The Devil expended some effort—some trickery—to get it dispelled. That must mean the Devil intends to harm him. To modify him. To modify him without consent. That just sounds bad. He wonders whether he’s just going to have his free will sluiced away, be turned into some kind of foot soldier for Satan.
So, okay, he doesn’t want to get modified, he can pretty much take that as a given. The solution is: run away. Get to safety. But he really has no idea where safety might be, or if any spot in the blank expanse is different from any other. Does it even make sense to run?
It may not make sense, he decides, but at least it’s a course of action. He’s trying to think of himself as a Man of Action today.
He wonders if there’s still any chance that he’s going to get a book published at the end of all this.
He opens his eyes. Whiteness, check. He climbs to his feet. He takes a tentative step forward. And then another.
He turns around to see if the coins are still there. If the coins are still there he can at least feel confident that he can find his way back to where he started, if for some reason he needs to.
The coins are still there. There’s also a door there. It’s an ordinary-looking door, beige, free of adornment, set in a frame. It wasn’t there a minute ago.
Well, he thinks. He’s pretty sure that the implicit suggestion here is for him to go ahead and go through the door. He’s also pretty sure that doing that will mean that he is playing right into Lucifer’s, whatever, clutches.
This is what Lucifer does, he thinks, turning away from the door. He tempts people. And when you have nothing, what’s more tempting than something?
The Weirdness Page 16
