by Tad Williams
“Really?” Clarence said, his eyes big. But as he got out both orbs went little and mistrustful again. “Hang on, you just want me to do this in case somebody’s been watching the car, waiting for you to come get it.”
“Exactly.”
“But what if they try to grab me?” He looked like he was about to climb back in through the driver’s side window.
“Then we’ll come and help,” Sam told him. “Go on, don’t be a pussy—you’re an angel of the Lord, remember?”
He went, reluctantly.
“Not really very nice, using the kid,” Sam told me a few moments later. Despite all the things he says he’s a bit of a softy.
“Trust me, they don’t want him. Anything really dangerous probably won’t even react to him.”
We watched Clarence open the door, looking around as if any moment a bunch of paratrooping demons were going to come shrieking down out of the sky, but none appeared. He got in and started the engine. Nothing exploded. He rolled out of the parking lot and headed north. We waited to see if anyone was following, then set out after him.
“Looks like the Lords of Hell refused to believe you were stupid enough to drive your own car,” Sam said, “because I can’t believe they wouldn’t have been able to find that garish piece of shit if they’d bothered looking.”
“Naw, they just knew I’d be coming with backup this time. You know, a couple of local tough guys.”
“Yeah, me and the Tiniest Angel. Oh, and that female demon who’s got a crush on you. By the way, I can’t believe she did all that for you.” He turned down California Avenue, heading for the station. “She must have mistaken you for me.”
“You wish. It’s my natural charm—even Hell itself isn’t immune.” But I didn’t really want to talk about her even with Sam. The Countess was a bit too complicated a subject. “Speaking of Clarence, how’s the kid doing? Any hope for him as an advocate?”
“Well, as you saw, he gets whiny and he’s going through a bit of an existential crisis,” Sam said. “Like we all do. But he’s not all bad. If he really is a snitch for the House, they’ve used worse.” Sam had always been convinced that we were surrounded by our bosses’ spies. He was probably right but I couldn’t really live that way myself. “By the way,” he asked, “what are your ideas for the afternoon? Not planning on storming the gates of Tartarus or anything, are you?”
I frowned. “If nobody dies on my watch today, I thought I’d see if I can talk to the Sollyhulls, get a few more answers. I’m sure not going to figure out this puzzle with the pieces I’ve got so far.”
“Hey, that would be perfect for the kid,” Sam said. “You could take him along, couldn’t you? He’s always asking about the big picture—you know that kind of stuff bores the shit out of me. And I’ve got some other things I’d like to get done without having to answer questions the whole time.” His voice rose to an imitation of his young protegé: “Sam, why don’t the nice Buddhists go to Heaven?”
“Don’t they?”
“Fuck if I know. I’m just telling you: questions, questions, questions. Like someone else I used to know.” He glanced over at me. “That would be you.”
“Yeah, I got it, Mr. Sentimental. Everybody’s like that at first. You probably were, too, Sammy-boy.”
“I have never, for one instant, been a millimeter less than cool. Look, just take him off my hands for the afternoon, will you? Because I swear, B, he ain’t a bad kid, but I’ll go back to drinking if I don’t get some time away from him.”
This from a man who’d previously boozed two bodies to death, so it wasn’t a completely idle threat.
“But doesn’t this stuff bother you, Bobby?” Clarence asked me as we left the drugstore parking lot. I stashed the Thrifty bag in my jacket pocket and took the ramp onto the 84, headed west. In the last decade or so, a lot of tall buildings had sprung up around what had been the old Woodside Expressway, but when the traffic was moving slowly you could still see between them to the flatlands of Spanishtown on either side, block after block of two- and three-story apartment buildings. “I mean, that there are so many questions about what we do—questions without answers?”
“I got enough of those already, Junior, and mine are going to get me killed if I don’t answer ’em, so I don’t really have time for the other kind. Look, like I said, it turned out that there really is a Heaven, there really is a Hell, and this is what happens after we die. What’s so hard about that?”
He scowled. “You don’t get what I’m saying.”
I hit the brakes hard as some moron tried to catch the yellow at Valota Road, missed it by three seconds, and would have t-boned me if I hadn’t seen him coming and waited to start into the intersection. “I hope when you kill yourself they send Young Elvis to plead your case, asshole!” I yelled after him. “No, check this, Clarence—I do get it. Because I had more questions than you when I started, and I still ask questions all the time. But some things we may just never know. As living beings, humans don’t understand completely how the universe works, and as angels there’s still stuff that hasn’t been revealed to us yet. I decided I can live with that.” Which was not entirely true. I was pretty sick of unanswered questions, but you can only bang your head against so many walls before you either rethink your approach or knock your brains out once and for all.
“But what about the religious thing? Why is it that the whole operation is run by Christians and Jews? Were they right about everything all along? Were the Buddhists and—and the Ba’hai, and Muslims and everyone else wrong? That just seems so…American.”
I laughed as I swung into the coffee shop parking lot. “Hold on, kid. Who’s saying everyone else is wrong? Who’s saying the Christians or the Jews are right?”
“What do you mean? It’s obvious that if…”
“Nothing’s obvious,” I said, cutting him off. “Have you bumped into Moses or Jesus hanging around upstairs? You haven’t, have you? We see what we see, and that isn’t much.” I sighed. “Look, kid, for all we know the Highest—the one who gives us all the orders—also calls Himself Allah, or Ahura Mazda, or Jade Emperor or even Brahma. Maybe we’ve been told we’re ‘angels’ because that’s all we can understand, even after we’re dead. We don’t really know anything, and as you should have learned by now, you can’t trust the way things look, either.” I got out of the car. “You’re about to learn that lesson all over again.”
He got out, still frowning like he wanted to argue some more. “Who are these people I’m going to see, anyway?”
I shook my head. “First, you’re just tagging along, a quiet observer. Second of all, they’re not people. Third, you may not see anything at all—unless they decide they like you.”
“Huh?”
“Just shut up for a change, okay? Let’s get some lunch.”
I could understand Walter Sanders’ less than enthusiastic review of the Superior Grill when we got inside. The place was your garden-variety greasy spoon with menus printed in the seventies and waitresses who looked like they had been working there a lot longer than that. Even the pies behind the glass counter had a slightly embalmed look, like the corpses of Communist leaders on public display. Our waitress resembled Wallace Beery in one of his prizefighter movies—definitely the punch-drunk phase of the story. She didn’t seem all that crazy about having to serve anybody, but took our orders without actual argument, hung the slip on the roundy-roundy thing, then went back to talking to the other waitress (who could have passed for Lon Chaney Jr. with a beehive hair-do).
“I don’t get it,” Clarence whispered to me. “We’re the only ones in the place. When are your friends supposed to get here?”
“Why, bab?” asked the cream pitcher, its top opening and closing like a tiny silver mouth. “Are you thinking about asking one of the waitresses out instead?” The chuckle that followed was a little coarser than the silvery-bell variety one usually expects from invisible spirits. Clarence let out a yelp like a dog whose tail has just
found its way under a foot and was halfway to the front door before I could convince him to come back. At the other end of the long room the waitresses looked up without interest, then went back to discussing particle physics or whatever else was keeping them from bringing me a glass of water.
“Who said that?” Clarence asked me, eyes wide.
“I did, bab,” said the cream pitcher in a broad West Midlands dialect. “Didn’t mean to put the wind up you.”
“She did, though,” said the coffee thermos, its own lid also bouncing up and down as it spoke, like a cheap overseas cartoon. “She loves it when they jump.”
I rolled my eyes. Both sisters enjoyed this sort of childishness way more than they should have after all so many years of afterlife. “This is Haraheliel, ladies,” I said. “But we call him Clarence. Clarence, these are the Sollyhull Sisters, Betty and Doris. They know everybody who used to be anybody.”
“He looks like a nice young one,” said the cream pitcher. “Not an old grump like you, Bobby-love.”
“Oh, but our Bob’s got reason to be grumpy, doesn’t he?” said the coffee pot. “Look at his face—the poor dear’s all over cuts and bruises!”
The bell above the door tinkled and a couple of delivery drivers in uniform walked in. They waited a minute for the waitresses to finish up their review of quantum field theory, then when that didn’t happen, they chose a booth not far from ours and sat down.
“Is this a trick?” asked Clarence in a loud whisper, still looking around for the source of the bodiless voices. “Who’s doing this?”
“He’s not thick, is he?” Betty asked. “I mean any more than normal, young-lad thick?”
“Oh, is he one of those unfortunates?” her sister said. “That’s a shame.”
“Just new,” I told the ladies. “Betty and Doris are earthbound spirits,” I explained to Clarence. “They exist both here and the spiritual plane, although it’s more like they’re just visiting here. Where they come from is sort of another part of Outside—through the Zippers, except it’s actually part of Purgatory. I think.” I shrugged. “It’s confusing.”
“What he means is that we’re ghosts,” said Doris proudly. “The real thing, us. ’Cept we’ve got no place of our own to haunt. Once we lost the bungalow where we grew up, we just floated around. Eventually we floated all the way over here!”
“Bloody Norah, she makes it sound easy!” said Betty. “We haunted a second-class stateroom on the Franconia for two whole years before we could get off again! That running water is nasty stuff for ghosts—everyone knows that—but who would have guessed that the ocean counted too?”
“Oh, and then we were in New York for a while,” her sister continued. The two voices seemed very close to the ears, and the ladies loved to jump back and forth from side to side, as though someone was playing with the mixing board of reality. Even for somebody like me who was supposed to try this stuff at home, it could be quite disorienting. “Too cold, that was. That’s why we come out here!”
“Ghosts get cold…?” Clarence sounded like he was not getting the kind of answers about the supernatural world that he had expected.
“Just conceptual-like,” said Doris. “But it still stings a bit when it’s winter.”
“Oh, and you never liked that, our Dor, did you?”
“No, you’re right, bab, I day’n’t.”
“If you ladies are finished with your reminiscences,” I said, “perhaps we could do a little business.”
The coffee pot rattled, bouncing the lid and belching out a little drift of steam. “Ooh, wotcher got?”
I took the bag out of my pocket and set it on the table just as the waitress arrived with our water, a mere fifteen minutes or so after we’d entered the diner. When she was gone again I pulled out the telltale bottle. Now the cream pitcher began quivering too. “Oh, lovely!” said Betty. “Doris, look! Yardley’s English lavender!”
“Have a quick sniff,” I said and took off the cap. The lids of both pot and pitcher popped open as whatever was inside them rose invisibly and, presumably, hovered above the perfume bottle.
“Dunt it just take you back,” said Doris dreamily (and still invisibly.) By this time the delivery guys sitting a couple of tables away had noticed the rather potent smell of lavender drifting over and, by their expressions, were wondering what the hell Clarence and I were doing.
“Reminds me of going down the dance hall on a Saturday night,” crooned Betty, then groaned as I put the cap back on the bottle. “Oh, you cruel sod! What did you do that for?”
“Because I need information, ladies, and I need it badly. Several not very nice people and some even less nice things are trying to kill me. I want to know what you can tell me about any of them.”
“Do we have to keep talking to the pitchers?” asked Clarence. “I mean, where are they now? Can you see them? ’Cause I can’t.”
“He is a strange one, in’t he?” said Doris. “Poor thing.”
“Count yourself lucky, bab,” Betty told him. “If you don’t like us in the cream pitcher, it could be worse. Sometimes we get into the sarnies. That’d make you lose weight, woont it? Your bacon bap talking back to you?”
“Sarnie?” the rookie said helplessly. “Bap?”
“Sandwiches,” I translated. “You ready to listen, ladies?”
“First let us get comfy, like,” Doris said, and suddenly they were both there. Well, not there, not in the three-dimensional sense, but present and visible in a filmy sort of way, two slightly purply-blue, mostly transparent and fairly podgy middle-aged ladies in what I’ve always assumed were outfits from the 1940s: dark dresses, heavy cloth coats, and hats. We were sitting in a four-person booth so one of them was next to each of us, Betty beside Clarence, and Doris next to me. Clarence tried to look like it didn’t bother him at all, but he also kept sliding away until he struck up against the wall of the booth.
“Mardy little bugger, isn’t he?” said Betty. Her hat was festooned with artificial flowers. “Cheer up, lad—it might never happen!”
As the waitress returned with our food, I explained the last few days to them all. I had to trim out some details I wasn’t sure I wanted to share with the kid, but I was able to lay out the most important bits. When I finished, the Sollyhull Sisters seemed to be listening carefully. The first question, though, made me wonder.
“Do you remember that boy from Erdington we were at school with?” asked Doris. “The one who had nasty crawly things in his pocket?”
“That Hamish? I was just thinking of him too,” her sister said.
“He was like that, wasn’t he? Trying to hide things from teacher, but she always sussed it out.”
“You two are not going to get even another sniff of that Yardley if you don’t start helping me,” I said sternly.
“We are, pigeon, we are,” said Betty, rippling a little with impatience. “So just shut it and listen. This Hamish used to have things in his pockets he shouldn’t—snakes, beetles, once he had a live mouse, can you believe it?—but he was his own worst enemy, wasn’t he, our Dor? He truly was, he always made a fuss whenever the teacher looked at him, squirming and looking away from her so she always knew when he was up to no good. It was as good as saying, ‘I’ve got something I shouldn’t!’”
“Am I supposed to understand this?” I asked.
“Don’t be thick, pigeon,” Doris told me. “It dunt become you. She’s saying that you can see things better when you’re face to face with someone. Most folk can’t help showing what they’re thinking if you’re ’round them long enough.”
“Right.” Betty nodded as though that had made sense.
“Meaning what? Look, ladies, I’ve almost had my skin ripped off my body several times in the last couple of days. I may not look it, but I’m scared. Can you just talk plainly for me?”
Doris sighed. “Put it about that you do have this thing. See who shows up to dicker for it. That’ll lead to conversation.”
“Bu
t I don’t care about the people who want to buy it, I want to find the missing thing—the thing itself—because if he doesn’t get his thing back, one of the major lords of Hell is going to remove all my nerves and organs. And there’s no way that can turn out well.”
“We’re just trying to help, love. You don’t even know what it is that got stolen. But if you put it out that you do have it and then see what you get offered for it you might find out. That would make it a lot easier to find the thing, now wouldn’t it? Knowing what kind of a thing it is?”
“Actually,” said Clarence, “that makes sense.”
“Yeah,” I told him, “the kind of sense that will get me killed in new ways I haven’t even imagined yet. And here I was just worrying about the old ways.” I pushed my plate away. Suddenly I didn’t feel much like finishing my Belgian waffle, although usually I can choke down anything with sugar in or on it, no matter how beat up I am. “Speaking of the old ways of me getting killed, ladies, any insights about my horned friend, the ghallu? Because I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of it.”
Doris frowned and nodded sympathetically. “Oh, that’s a bad one, pigeon. We’ve been asking all of our friends on the other side for the last few minutes, but nobody likes to talk about such things, even those old enough to remember. Them ghallu, they’re dead yampy—completely mad. They’ll eat their way through a mountain just to break a rabbit’s neck on other side.”
“Thanks for those words of colloquial wisdom,” I said. “What can I do to stop it?”
“Not much, bab,” said Betty. “A spell of dismissal, but you’d have to get the same fella who summoned it to dismiss it as well.”
“Great. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen, because the fella who summoned it is probably the same Eligor, King Bad Ass of Hell Corners, who wants me so interestingly dead.” I said it a little more emphatically than I should have, perhaps, and I heard one of the delivery drivers drop a spoon.
“Sssshhhh!” Betty wiggled her stubby fingers. “Don’t say the fella’s name out loud.”
