The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “Already on it,” says the other commando, Jean, who has slung his weapon over his shoulder and is poking at some kind of gadget that looks a little like a plastic model of a thighbone. Like Billy’s dad, this guy is all done up in paramilitary gear, and he looks like a soldier, his face grease-smeared and sooty, but Billy can’t help but wonder whether he has a double identity as a high school principal or a pastry chef or something normal.

  The gadget in Jean’s hand is flashing red.

  “They’ve been changed,” Jean says. “It’s hard to tell how recently. We’re glitching hard here—this tech was not really cleared for cross-planar function—”

  “Are you talking about the wolf thing?” Billy says. “ ’Cause you could just, you know, ask us.”

  At the word wolf, a look of deep remorse settles into Keith’s face. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “This is not the way that I’d hoped you’d learn about your unfortunate circumstance—”

  “My unfortunate circumstance?” Billy shouts, finally having had enough. “Missing your bus is an unfortunate circumstance. Throwing up in a cab is an unfortunate circumstance. Being a goddamn sex-demon wolf thing whose whole life is a lie is a fucking existential nightmare.”

  “You know, Billy,” Keith snaps, his voice suddenly flinty with annoyance, “maybe you’d have a little bit more information about this situation if you’d just picked up your phone sometime in the last month.”

  “If I’d picked up my—You’re really going to put this on me? You knew about all this wolf shit for thirty years and you never told me; I go a couple of weeks without calling you back and it’s my fault that everything goes to Hell?”

  Elisa jumps in. “Listen,” she says. “You two. Watching you bicker is very illuminating—every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as we know?—but I could have sworn that somebody mentioned something about getting out of here, and it seems to me that if we can do that—? Then maybe we should do that.” She taps a finger on the doorframe once, firmly.

  Jean looks at Billy. “She’s right,” he says. “Get your clothes on. Your dad will explain everything when we’re all back safe.”

  Billy, kind of past caring who sees his ass, drops the sheet, kicks off his shoes, and grudgingly works his legs into the orange jumpsuit. “Safe,” he says, as he struggles with the zipper. “Can we really even be safe? We’re talking about going on the run from the Devil. I kinda doubt that bullets kill him. He’s going to come back, and he’s going to be pissed. Where can we run?”

  “We’re going to go to the Manhattan headquarters of a group that can help us,” Keith says. “They call themselves the Right-Hand Path.”

  “No way,” Billy says, shaking his head in vigorous denial. “Not those guys.”

  “Not those guys?”

  “Yeah,” Billy says. “I met them, they’re assholes.” He feels a cold wave of dread swell in his gut. “Oh my God, are you one of them?”

  “Not formally, no,” Keith says. “But they’re—allies. They have the resources that we’ll need, and they’re open to our using them. From their HQ we should be able to hide you from Lucifer, and once he’s lost your trail I’ll take you all with me back to Ohio; I can reestablish your wards there. That should effectively mean the end of your collective wolf problem. So. Come on.”

  Billy looks at the ring of faces. Maybe they’re right. Maybe he should just go. Maybe he just got off on the wrong foot with the Right-Hand Path; maybe they really are decent guys. He thinks for a moment about how it would feel to have his life back, to be safely removed from the grand design of Lucifer’s plan, the full extent of which he still may not know. It sounds good, and yet he balks. He wonders, though, how much of his resistance is just willful perversity. He doesn’t want to do what his dad is telling him to do: But how much of that is just because he’s being told to do it by his dad? Has he just straight-up backslid to being a sulky adolescent?

  He looks down at the bloody ruin of Lucifer’s most recent manifestation, just a foot from his bare feet, leaking ichor. And he thinks, for just a second, about Lucifer’s promise to him. The promise of a book. And he thinks about his mission, and the Neko in the tower, and the world, and the threat that the world would burn. And some impulse in him stirs.

  “I hate to be the guy who’s going to say this,” he says. “But—what about Ollard? I mean, do you think Lucifer could have been right? Maybe Timothy Ollard is a dude we should be worrying about. You know he’s gotten past five seals of six, right?”

  “Who’s Ollard?” Elisa asks.

  “Billy,” says Keith. “Listen to me. The important thing at the moment is that we get out of here. The Right-Hand Path has people working on the Ollard problem. It’s not a thing that you need to worry about.”

  He envisions Laurent and Barry, tries to imagine them up against Ollard. Tries to imagine them triumphant. It’s not an image that coalesces easily.

  “I just don’t—” Billy begins.

  “Billy,” everyone in the room says at once.

  “Fine,” Billy says, and he gets his shoes back on and takes his spot at the end of the line, following the rest of them through the doorframe and out into the hallway, leaving Lucifer behind.

  “Whoa,” Billy can hear Elisa say. And when he gets out there he can see why.

  The air in the hallway is split. A great seam open in space, spilling incandescent torrents of light out over them. It gives off a low sound that’s half children’s choir and half roaring vacuum cleaner. Little susurrating vortices spume off of its edges. Something fascinating is happening inside it, like a set of geometry problems solving themselves very rapidly. Elisa, Jørgen, and Billy all stop in their tracks and just peer into it for a second, transfixed like deer on a rural road, deer who are about to be plowed into by some sportsutility vehicle.

  “Don’t look at it directly,” Keith says to them all, and Billy averts his eyes, opting to honor this recommendation. Despite everything, he does feel humbled by this whirling, thrumming piece of magic; he does feel a little in awe of his father for ripping this magnificent hole into Hell. For the first time, Billy thinks Maybe it would be cool to learn some magic. He wonders what was in all those books his dad used to try to get him to read.

  “Okay,” says Jean, drawing them all into a loose huddle. “This is a Class A Fiat Gate. Basically, it’s a portal that will take you more or less anywhere you command it to take you. This works fantastically—catch is, you have to maintain an image of the place in your mind. You have to be already familiar with the place where you’re going.”

  “This presents us with a problem,” Keith says, regret in his voice.

  “What problem?” Billy says.

  “The problem is that we want to go to the Right-Hand Path HQ, and unless you’ve been there before, you’ll have to go with a guide. Jean and I can serve as guides, but only for one person apiece, and there’re three of you.”

  “We had bad intel,” Jean says, remorsefully. “We thought there were only two.”

  “Everybody always forgets about the girl,” says Elisa.

  “So,” Keith says, “one of you will have to wait. Then we’ll have to reopen the Gate and come back for whoever stayed behind.”

  “That’ll take time,” says Jean, “and the person left behind will be at risk during the time the Gate is closed.”

  “Well, wait a sec,” Billy says, popping up his hand. “I’ve been to the Right-Hand Path HQ.”

  Billy’s dad frowns at him. “What? When?”

  “I told you, I met them. I was with them this morning,” Billy says. “So the picture of their HQ in my mind or whatever is pretty fresh.”

  Keith and Jean exchange looks.

  “You can visualize it well enough to manifest yourself there?” Keith says.

  “Yeah, sure,” Billy says, although he doesn’t try to do it. “I even have their address.” He fishes Laurent’s business card out of his pocket and holds it up. It is bent and moist but still in one
piece.

  “Yeah, but, Billy, the address isn’t going to help you,” Keith says. “It’s not like you’re putting it into a GPS. You have to concentrate on—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Billy says, waving him off. “Maintain an image of it in your mind. I got this.”

  Billy’s dad fixes him with a familiar skeptical look.

  “Keith,” says Jean. “It’s time. Let’s go. Doing it in one trip makes sense; it’s safer.”

  Keith frowns, looks at Billy, looks at the portal. His frown deepens.

  “It’ll be fine,” Billy says. A desperation to please that he remembers all too well creeps into him. “Hold an image of the place in your mind. How hard could it be? Is there another, more complicated step, that you’re leaving out? Do I have to release the clutch at some point?”

  “Not really,” Keith says, a little grimly.

  “Okay, then,” Billy says.

  “Okay, then,” says Jean. “It sounds decided.” He reaches out toward Elisa. “We’re going.”

  “Great,” Elisa says. She takes Jean’s hand. She turns to Billy and offers him an uncertain smile. It’s intended to be reassuring, he guesses, but Billy can see the fear in it. It’s maybe the most readable expression he’s ever seen on her.

  “It’ll be all right,” he says, as Elisa and Jean run into the light. He’s not sure if she hears him. They whirl apart into blobs and little flaring squibs and then they’re gone.

  “Listen to me,” says Keith, taking Billy by the shoulders. “A Fiat Gate is serious magic. It can be confusing. Just stay focused on the mental image of the Right-Hand Path headquarters.”

  “Check,” Billy says.

  Billy’s dad takes Jørgen’s hand, makes sure Jørgen is ready, and then the two of them enter the portal, boil away into vectors.

  “Don’t let them wipe your memory,” Billy says, to the empty hallway.

  Billy looks at the portal or gate or whatever, remembers he’s not supposed to look directly at it, looks away, looks at it again. He takes a step forward. Okay, he thinks. Let’s do this.

  And then he passes through and his mind becomes a mirrored disco ball, glassy and faceted, refracting brilliance in a thousand different directions.

  Yikes! Billy thinks.

  But even thinking that is a good sign: it means that Billy can at least maintain a thought among the dazzling optics and shrieking noise. Which means—presto—he can visualize the Right-Hand Path headquarters.

  The image that comes to mind is the cell he woke up in this morning, which causes him to remember, just for a second, what manipulative dicks they were. This causes him to frown, or it would, if he had a body at the moment, which he doesn’t. A frown of the mind. This makes him remember joking about being immanent when Denver said that he hadn’t been present. Now he’s not even immanent: ha ha.

  It occurs to him that he could use the warping luminescent matrix that he’s falling through to fling himself straight to Denver’s apartment, just show up, as he’s been longing to do all day. Show up, apologize for everything. He tries to remember her schedule, tries to remember if today is one of the days when she goes in to work at the video archive.

  Today’s Saturday: she doesn’t work; Billy does. Except he probably got fired today. He feels a momentary pang for his life as it was, wishes, for just a single self-pitying second, that none of this had ever happened, and that he was just at work, with Anil, making sandwiches, the same way he’s done every Saturday for the past year and a half.

  And the light assembles itself into an image, like a melting film in reverse. Only it’s not the image of the cell in the basement of the Right-Hand Path headquarters. It’s the image of the kitchen at the sandwich shop. Anil is there, working, his hands dipping deftly into steel bins of cut onions and shredded lettuce. And Billy is there. He can kind of see himself from the outside for a second before he realizes that, no, really: he’s actually, physically there. Not in the light. In his body. In this kitchen.

  “Son of a bitch!” Billy says, presented with one more piece of conclusive evidence about his inability to focus on a goddamn thing for more than one goddamn second. He pounds his fists against his temples, once, solidly, as though attempting to physically drive some sense into his skull.

  Anil jumps.

  “Billy?” he says, blinking. “What the fuck? Where have you been? Everyone has been freaking out worried about you.”

  “Really?” Billy says, a little flattered at this unexpected piece of news.

  “Yes!” Anil says. “Well, everyone except Giorgos, he’s pissed at you and he says you’re fired. But everyone else! You seemed so out of it at the reading, and then you fucking wandered off—we thought you might have gone into some kind of fugue state. I expected to hear from you in six months, saying I live in Wisconsin now. I run a dairy farm with my wife, who is kind, and simple. You can imagine our dismay.”

  Billy tries it. “Dismay?” he asks, seeking confirmation.

  “Sure,” Anil says.

  “Even Denver? Would you characterize her reaction as—dismayed?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Anil says. “Denver thought we should call the cops and get them looking for you. I’m happy to say that saner heads prevailed, but, yes, dismay; I would say that that describes it.”

  Billy takes a moment to enjoy this, but only a moment, and then panic pulls the rug out from under it.

  “I fucked up, Anil,” he says. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “News flash, Billy,” Anil says, “you are supposed to be here. You were supposed to be here five and a half hours ago. I’ve been doing this fucking shift by myself. In conclusion: I’m glad you’re alive, but you remain a major-league asshole. Put some fucking gloves on and help me with these tickets.”

  Not certain exactly what else to do, Billy puts on a pair of gloves, and takes his station. He’s sliced exactly one baguette in half before he pauses.

  “I can’t stay here, Anil. He can find me here. He found me in the fucking middle-of-nowhere Ohio; he can find me here.”

  “Oh, Billy,” Anil says, arranging roasted red peppers on top of a slice of Gorgonzola, “I have missed you. You make no fucking sense whatsoever. Bread. Slice it. While you’re doing that, you can explain what it is you’re on about.”

  The extra adrenaline pinging around in his bloodstream makes him a little spasmodic, but Billy picks up his knife again and does his best, mangling a ciabatta roll. “I’m talking about the Devil,” he tries.

  “Still?” Anil says. “Didn’t we decide that was a joke?”

  “It’s no joke,” says Billy, plaintively.

  Anil claps the top on the sandwich he’s making, plates it, puts it on the counter, slaps the bell.

  “This may be one of those begin-at-the-beginning type of situations,” he says, finally.

  “I’ll explain it,” Billy says. “But quickly. And then I have to get out of here. I’m supposed to meet some people and they’re going to be pissed that I’m here instead of there.”

  “Well,” Anil says, “yes, that sounds like a situation you might find yourself in.”

  “Ugh,” says Billy, trying to review what Anil knows and what he doesn’t. “I guess one important thing for you to know is that—that reading last night? It didn’t just end with me wandering off. It ended up in like—a riot.”

  “A riot?”

  “A scrum. A stampede. You don’t remember because some asshole fucked with your memory.”

  “I did wake up this morning with a wicked bruise that I couldn’t explain,” Anil says, although he seems unconvinced.

  “But at least you didn’t get Tased,” Billy says, and then he just launches in, explaining about the Tasing, about the Right-Hand Path, about Ollard’s tower, about the Neko, about the wards, about being a wolf, about his dad. It takes him fifteen minutes and the whole time he is assembling and plating sandwiches at ferocious speed, even though he probably isn’t getting paid. Somehow he also manages t
o gobble down half a pound of roast beef.

  “Well, congratulations,” Anil says, finally, when he’s through. “You and I have been friends for a long time, but that is, without exception, the most batshit insane line of batshit insanity that I’ve ever heard fall out of your mouth.”

  “It sounds bad, I know.”

  “Well, the good news is that it makes a good story. I think you found your second act.”

  “Yeah, but—what happens in the third act? I think it might be that we all burn and die.”

  “Burning and dying is bad,” says Anil, blithely.

  “Yeah, I know,” Billy says.

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy says. “I’m totally confused. I mean—I look at my dad, and I’m like, You’re my dad, I love you, right? I trust you, you seem to know what’s going on, I should just throw in with you and maybe it’ll all be okay. But then I think about it and I’m like Well wait a second, you’re not really my dad at all. Plus you lied to me for a long time—remind me why I should be trusting you now? But I sure as shit don’t trust the Devil either—I mean, he’s the Devil. He’s evil. Right?”

  “Um,” Anil says. “Not my particular mythic system, remember?”

  “Come on, Anil. Tell me what you think.”

  “What do I think? I think you’ve had a psychotic break,” Anil says, and then there’s a fire in the kitchen.

  It’s Lucifer, manifesting himself. For all the times he’s popped up, this is the first time Billy’s actually seen him appear out of nowhere. Turns out that when it happens, it’s accompanied by a huge burst of hellfire. Towering blue plumes fwump into existence like someone’s fired up a gas burner the size of Venus’s half shell. That has ramifications in the space of a tiny New York City kitchen. Fist-sized whorls of flame peel off from the edge of the efflorescent bloom and spin toward Anil. They land on his black work shirt, send tendrils out into the blend of fibers, seeking whatever can be consumed.

  “Ahh, fuck—” Anil says. He swats at his sleeves but the flames course away, greedily surge across the back of his shirt, transforming it, in the span of a second, into a curtain of fire.