by Tad Williams
“I’m kind of parked halfway onto the sidewalk and no one’s noticed it yet, so I guess we should take mine.”
It wasn’t easy getting Sam’s boring, company-issue sedan off the sidewalk—some truck had come along and parked to unload, and by the time we squeezed out we had left more than a little of Sam’s paint on the truck’s bumper. If it had been my ride I would have been screaming, but Sam doesn’t care about cars.
“Where is it?” I asked him as we turned onto Main, one of downtown Jude’s busiest streets, meeting place of commerce, inept street performance, and world-class panhandling. The kid was struggling to pull the long-unused seatbelt out from between the back seats. Most of the well-known skyline was behind us, but the sparkling towers of the Shores stood a short distance to the north and the weird silhouettes of the harbor cranes loomed before us, lit from below, angular as a fleet of alien landing craft.
“The water,” Sam said. “Pier 16, to be exact.”
“Floater?”
“Floater, sorta. Only hit the water a few minutes ago. Probably just crossed over.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Some old broad named Martino. Ring any bells?”
As I shook my head, the kid piped up from the back seat. “That’s a terrible way to talk about a unique human soul.”
Angels, I reminded myself. We’re angels. And angels are patient.
The Port of San Judas covers about ten square miles along the southwestern shore of San Francisco Bay. The car was in the water at the public end, a broken wooden barrier marking where it had gone over into the empty slipway. Spotlights cut through the darkness, splashing the high port office walls and turning the bay water bright as jade.
Down on the ground the harbor police and the regular cops looked like they had arrived in a hurry; a couple of tow trucks and a fire engine were also parked along the pier at odd angles. Below them a harbor diver had just surfaced after attaching cables to something; at his thumbs-up the winches on the tow trucks started turning. The cables went rigid, the motors whined, and after a long moment the back end of a large white vehicle broke the surface, but almost immediately one of the motors stuttered and died. The other strained and coughed for a few more seconds, then it gave up too. The tow truck drivers and several harbor police began to shout back and forth at each other as we climbed out of Sam’s car.
“Why don’t they pull it the rest of the way out?” Clarence asked, eyes wide. “That poor woman!”
“Because it’s probably too heavy—full of water,” I told him. “But the driver’s already dead, or we wouldn’t have got the call, so it doesn’t matter how long she sits there. Do you know about going Outside?”
“Of course!” He was offended.
“Oh, he’s a pistol, this one.” Sam was already walking toward the shimmer in the air, like a vertical mirage, that announced a way out. The official term for them is “egress,” but down here we call them Zippers. We make them when we need them, and we simple Earthbound angels don’t really know how they work, just that they do.
As the kid and I fell in behind Sam, a couple of bystanders looked briefly in our direction but then sort of lost interest. We’re not easy to notice when we’re working, I’ve learned over the years. We’re still there, if you know what I mean—we have real bodies—but if we don’t want you to see us then you probably won’t, or at least you won’t remember it afterward.
Sam and the kid vanished into the shimmering line down the middle of the air and I stepped through after them.
As always, it was the quiet of Outside that struck me first, a great, heavy hush as if we had suddenly dropped into the biggest, most silent library in the universe. But in most ways we were still where we had begun—the docks, with the cop cars and safety vehicles burning the darkness with red and blue lights and the downtown skyline stretching skyward behind them like a mountain range. But the police spotlights weren’t moving, nor were the cops’ mouths, a helicopter over the Intel Tower, a diver floating on green jelly swells, or even the few seagulls who had been startled off the pilings by all the activity and were now frozen in mid air like stuffed displays hung from a museum ceiling. Only one thing was different Outside: a woman with short gray hair and a dark raincoat stood in the midst of the petrified policemen, though none of them could see her.
“That’s her,” Sam said. “You want to walk the kid through meeting the client while I’m waiting for the guardian, B? That way he can learn from the best.”
“Lying bastard,” I said, but I got the facts I needed from him and then led the kid down to the puddle-glazed dock.
“We look the same here,” the kid said, staring at his hands. “I mean, we do, don’t we? Like our earth-bodies?”
“Pretty much.”
“I thought we’d look more…angelic.” He looked embarrassed. “Like in Heaven.”
“This isn’t Heaven—we’re still on the plane of earthly existence, more or less. We just stepped out of Time. But we don’t have to look the same here, it’s just sort of a tradition. The Other Side folk prefer to make themselves more intimidating. You’ll see.”
As we approached our new client, she stared at us with an expression I had seen on a lot of faces in a lot of similar situations—total, utter confusion.
“Silvia Martino,” I said. “God loves you.”
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Who are you?” She flapped her hands at the motionless cops and firefighters. “What’s wrong with these people?”
“They’re alive, Mrs. Martino. I’m afraid you’re not.” I’ve dumbed down my explanations over the years. I used to think breaking it to them slowly was the kindest way, but I learned differently. “You apparently drove your car into the bay. Any reason?”
She was more than a bit beyond sixty but no old lady. In fact, she looked like someone who might get old but would never really get old, if you know what I mean. Then I remembered that she would never get any older than this moment.
“Drove my car…?” She looked at the white bulk of her SUV hanging at the end of the straining tow truck cables like Moby Dick, decorated with fantails of glassy, motionless water. “Oh, dear. That’s my car, isn’t it?” Her eyes widened. She was beginning to do the math. “I was trying to turn around, and I guess I got…confused.” She blinked. “Am I…am I really…?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Then the tears came. This is the part I hate most about my job. Sometimes your clients are so happy to be out of their sick, dying bodies that they practically dance. But those who get caught by surprise, who suddenly come to understand that there’s no more, that’s it, game over…well, those are tough. There’s not much to say while they work it out, but if they need it you can put your arms around them and hold them when you’re Outside, and that’s just what I did. You would have, too.
After a while she was through the worst of it. She was a tough lady—I liked her. She pulled away from me and dried her eyes, then asked, “And who are you?” She looked at me more carefully now, as though I might be about to try some after-death marketing scam on her.
“My name is Doloriel. I’m an advocate angel of the Third House.” I didn’t bother to introduce Clarence because he would have only done something stupid like promised her that everything was going to turn out all right. (I could tell by his disappointed expression that was exactly what he’d planned to do.) Instead I pointed back at Sam, who was now talking to the lady’s guardian, a wispy, half-transparent thing that gleamed in its folds like foxfire. “That fellow is Sammariel, another advocate angel. He’ll speak for you.”
“Speak for me? How? When?”
“At judgement,” I said. “Very soon.”
“Judgement…?” Eyes suddenly wide and fearful.
“Just wait here, please.” I pulled the kid aside and gave him some fairly harsh warnings about what he was allowed to do and say, then left him with the recently departed. He and the dead woman stared at the half-submerged car as though wishing someone would
leap out of it and help the conversation along. I was glad he was keeping his mouth shut. People deal faster (and better, I think) with that terrible, ultimate realization when you let them work it out for themselves. Besides, what are you going to tell them? “Just fooling, you’re not really dead! This is just a wake-up call for you to fix your life!” Because it’s not. It’s the end, at least of their time on Earth, and no cheerful chitchat is going to change that.
The guardian angel had just finished briefing Sam when I joined the party. “Briefing” isn’t as much like the real world as it sounds: The guardians kind of make their knowledge available to us, and for the entirety of the proceedings it’s just there, at our mental fingertips, as though the memories were our own. Thank goodness that ends again after the sentence—it would be overwhelming to carry the details of every life you’ve argued for, all the time. It’s tough enough sometimes just dealing with the stuff that sticks.
Anyway, the guardian gave me what I guess was an interested look, although it’s hard to tell with them because they’re far less human in appearance than we are—a lot less corporeal, too. They don’t use actual meat bodies, of course, otherwise people would be wondering why some kind of shiny human jellyfish was always floating along next to them. “You’re Doloriel,” it said. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Can’t say the same about you until I know your name.”
“Iphaeus.” It stared at me, twinkling a little. “Heard you like to piss people off.”
“Wouldn’t go so far as to say I like it.”
“Look,” interrupted Sam, “if the two of you want to get to know each other better you can always arrange a romantic dinner. Right now…”
The guardian gave a sort of shiver and its glow dwindled. “He’s here.”
Something had just stepped through a red-lit portal from the Other Place (their equivalent of the Zipper was less like a shimmering white line and more like a fiery wound) and now stood brushing imaginary lint from its immaculate, blood-colored suit.
“Grasswax,” said Sam. “Shit. They’re going to make me work for this one.”
I heard Mrs. Martino gasp when she saw the demon, and I was sorry I’d left her with the kid. It’s pretty nasty when a client realizes Hell is real. I hoped she’d make it through the actual trial without breaking down—some judges are real assholes about that. The quality of mercy may droppeth as a gentle rain from Heaven, but sometimes you’d swear there was a drought.
Another shape stepped out of the wound a few moments after Prosecutor Grasswax, a muscular, hairy demon in a cheap suit with a wolfish snout and an attitude to match. I’d seen him before, though I couldn’t remember where—a nasty piece of work named Howlingfell. Bodyguards didn’t usually show up for this kind of routine work on neutral turf. I wondered why the prosecutor felt he needed protection. From the way Howlingfell sniffed the air, he looked like he was working. Didn’t really make much sense. His boss was ignoring him.
From a distance Grasswax the prosecutor looked pretty much like a man, but as he drew closer you could see that the shadows under his cheekbones were actually gaps in the skin like gills that showed the muscle working beneath, and his close-cropped hair was something more like bristles or even scales. Also, nobody would have mistaken those serpentine eyes for human. Like I told the kid, our opponents like to intimidate.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Grasswax, showing his extremely long, extremely even teeth. “Who is against me? Doloriel?” The smile twisted up just a little at one corner. “That will be a treat.”
“It’s me,” Sam said.
“Ah, Sammariel.” He nodded. “Haven’t seen you since Thanksgiving. That was you, wasn’t it? The man with the knife?”
“Electric carving knife,” Sam explained to me and the kid, who had wandered over to see his first real demons, or at least that’s what his wide-eyed stare suggested. “Did his whole family.”
“Very thorough.” Grasswax rubbed his hands together. “Shall we get on with it?”
“Have you been advised yet?” I asked.
“Oh, quite.” The prosecutor reached into his pocket and pulled out something the size of a fat little spider, but much less attractive, which he dangled in the air by one scaly leg—Hell’s version of a guardian angel. “Mrs. Martino’s account executive has filled me in on all the particulars.”
I pulled Clarence to one side while Sam and the prosecutor called for a judge so I could review the rules of engagement for him (mostly to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.) “Okay, stand over here and listen close. This is for this lady’s soul, and that’s our most important job, you understand? If you do anything to compromise that I’m going to tear your halo off and beat you bloody with it. Got it?”
Clarence nodded, still wide-eyed.
“Because this is Hell we’re up against, and they’re going to lie and cheat and stretch every truth to the screaming point. That’s why we have procedures. We can’t afford to get angry, because then we don’t do a good job. Got it?”
Another nod and a hint of impatience. I hate rookies.
“But most importantly, kid, never trust the Opposition.”
“Trust them? Are you kidding…?”
“It’s not always this obvious. Just remember what Uncle Bobby tells you and you’ll be fine.” Because Uncle B. had already made all those rookie mistakes and had been lucky to survive some painful lessons. “When a demon opens his mouth, he’s lying. Period. Assume anything else and your final paycheck will have to be printed on asbestos, because you’ll be somewhere very hot.”
Then Xathanatron the judge appeared like silent lightning.
It’s a bit intense the first time you see a Principality manifest, which is one reason I had moved the kid out of the way. My ears rang for a week after I met my first judge up close, not to mention those floating spots of light. The important angels are…bright. Overwhelming. Beautiful, but with a lot of scary in it. Enough to give even the most devout second thoughts about wanting to see the Highest someday.
You couldn’t really make out a face in that fierce glare or even much of a shape, as if someone had constructed a Christmas tree angel out of burning magnesium wire, but I knew it was Xathanatron because…well, I just knew. When you’re in their presences you perceive whatever the Principalities want you to perceive about them—and nothing more. From my own experience I knew Xathanatron was severe in an old-school kind of way but rigorously fair. Sam wouldn’t get cheated, but he wasn’t going to get any surprise breaks either.
I put myself between Clarence and Howlingfell—the kid looked as if he was going to wet himself if he had to stand next to the demon. Mrs. Martino joined us, eyes dry now and face solemn, making an audience of four for the proceedings, but I could tell she was fighting hard for composure. I couldn’t help admiring her again. I hoped we could help her.
“How come there’s so many of you holy-rollers here?” Howlingfell snarled in my ear. “That ain’t right.”
“We heard a rumor you were going to sing ‘Ave Maria.’”
“A rumor I was gonna eat your face, you mean.” Usually Hell has the best writers—but not always, obviously.
“What’s going to happen now?” our rookie whispered in my other ear.
“What do you think? Prosecutor Grasswax is going to try to convince the judge that Mrs. Martino here should go straight to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Our boy Sam is going to argue that she should be gathered unto the bosom of the Highest instead.” I glanced toward the frightened, quiet soul in question. “That’s how it works. Didn’t they give you any prep at all?”
“I didn’t get much warning.” Clarence stared with the kind of sickened fascination secret Christians must have felt watching their exposed fellows being gobbled by Roman lions. “They just…sent me.”
Sent him to fill what was supposedly Heaven’s most important job—protecting human souls from the Opposition—without much of any training. Odd,
you say? No kidding. I filed this bit of weirdness away for later.
Grasswax was already in full swing, pacing along the dock before the coruscating judge like a goblin dancing in front of a fireplace, jabbing his long, pointy fingers as he described in lurid detail what seemed like every petty thought, unkind word, or social misdemeanor poor old Mrs. Martino had ever made. The prosecutor didn’t seem to have much in the way of ammunition, but he did mention that she had been arrested for driving while intoxicated.
“Her husband left her at a party and took off somewhere,” Sam said. “Probably with a broad, Your Honor. Come on, that’s clearly just a mistake in judgement on her part.”
“Ah, yes. Mistakes in judgement.” Grasswax offered a significant glance to the nearly featureless gleam of Xathanatron. “We’ll talk more about such things.”
“This could go on for hours,” I said quietly to Clarence. “Are you sure you want to be here? We could go get a cup of coffee.” I saw him looking at Mrs. Martino. “Not her, stupid. She’s dead. She’s not getting coffee with us.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “I want to see.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
It did in fact go on for hours. You’d want it to if it was your judgement, wouldn’t you? Your entire life being summed up, your eternal fate settled on the coin-flip of guilty or not guilty?
“It seems like a pretty basic system…” the kid said as he watched Sam work. Grasswax had begun to pull out his bigger ammunition, things like cruel words, religious hypocrisy, even petty theft. (She’d stolen twenty dollars from her church fundraiser once, because she didn’t have the cash to get home otherwise.) Grasswax then added a string of petty sins going back to her childhood. Sam took each allegation as it came and made it clear with a shake of the head or a snort of disgust that he didn’t think much of such small beer. My pal’s always been a bit of a country lawyer, unhurried and deliberate. I honestly think it’s the best approach with a prosecutor like Grasswax, who has been known to overplay his hand.
“Yeah, it’s basic,” I agreed. “Because the problem is pretty basic.” I tugged him a couple of paces away from the deceased. “Only two choices, see? You’re going one way or the other—even Purgatory is a win for our side, because it means you can work your way to Heaven eventually. So each time somebody wins and somebody loses, and it happens thousands and thousands of times a day. The best systems are simple ones—and after all, this one worked for us, right? You, me, Sam—we all wound up on Team Heaven. And if this lady deserves to be there, she’ll be there.”
