All the Bells on Earth

by James P. Blaylock

  “Stay where you are,” the first officer said. “You’re going to be late, wherever you’ve got to be.”

  “This,” Goldfarb said, showing them a second paper, “is from the court of the County of Orange. There’s no record of Darla Schwenk having been divorced at all from her first husband. I put through a call to a Mr. Bill Schwenk, the children’s biological father, and he sent back this notarized letter stating that there had been no divorce. The papers were never filed. He’s still the children’s legal guardian. In the letter he gives his permission to Walt and Ivy Stebbins to care for the children until their mother returns to claim them. The letter’s a fax, too, I’m afraid, but as you can see, the original was notarized.” He handed all the documentation to the police, who looked it over hastily.

  The front door opened then, and Walt looked out through the screen.

  “Hi,” he said, coming out onto the porch. “Jack! How are you? Is all this cleared up? I sure hope so.” He smiled brightly at Jack. “I’m Walt Stebbins, Nora and Eddie’s uncle,” he said to the two officers. “If I can help … ?” He gestured with both hands.

  “You can help by fucking off,” Jack said to him.

  “Now, Jack,” Walt said, “that kind of language won’t do. You haven’t been drinking again, have you?”

  “You going to let them talk to me that way?” Jack said to his lawyer. “After what I paid you? I want these people arrested. Kidnapping and assault.”

  “You didn’t pay me half enough as it is, Jack,” the lawyer said.

  “Well, then, why don’t you go to Hell, you shyster bastard?”

  “Try to calm down, sir,” the first officer said.

  “I know my rights, asshole. I can say anything I want, and you can’t touch me, and you know it. To hell with you, man, and your friend too.”

  “Have you been drinking, sir?”

  “Shove it up your ass.”

  “Oh, no!” Walt muttered, and Ivy elbowed him in the ribs.

  “I’d like your cooperation here, sir. I believe there’s reason for you to take a field sobriety test. If you’re unwilling to submit to a test here, we can take you to the station and draw blood. The choice is yours.”

  “The hell if you’ll do anything like that. You know I’m not drunk. I haven’t had a drink since last night. There’s no damn way you’d take me in and risk my being sober. I’d ream you both out, and you know it damn well.” His voice rose, and the veins stood out in his neck. He looked furiously at Walt, who smiled like a Cheshire cat, and Jack threw his arm back to take a punch at him.

  “Don’t do it,” the second cop said. “Don’t even think about it. So far no …”

  ”Shut the hell up,” Jack said, swiveling around toward the cop and poking him in the chest with his index finger. He tried to step past him then, to storm away, but quicker than Ivy could see exactly what happened, the second cop’s arm shot out, spun Jack around, and Jack was on his knees on the porch with his arm bent around behind him. The other officer already had his handcuffs out. There was a double click of the cuff latches, and then Jack was hauled to his feet.

  “Where are the kids?” Ivy asked Walt.

  “With Jinx. In the shed.”

  The police read Jack his rights as they led him through the drizzle toward the patrol car, taking his lawyer along with them.

  “Assaulting a police officer,” Goldfarb said clicking his tongue. “I’m afraid Mr. Douglas made a rather grievous mistake. He must have wanted those kids very badly.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with the kids,” Walt said. “Believe me, I know. This had to do with getting mad, which is pretty much the same as getting drunk, as I see it. You lose your mind either way.”

  “Write that down,” Ivy said to Henry. “Let’s post it on the refrigerator.”

  “Let’s order a pizza,” Walt said. “Drink, Mr. Goldfarb?”

  “Thanks,” the lawyer said. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  They opened the door and went in. “Darla called this afternoon,” Ivy said, looking at Walt.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She got a job working for that chiropractor. She’s putting her life back together, she said, one piece at a time. I told her we were happy to keep the kids for a while, for however long she needs.”

  ‘Good,” Walt said. “And good for her.” He could see Nora and Eddie coming in through the back door, and he heard Nora’s laughter. He was happy to see them. “I hope Darla finds herself,” he said. “I honestly do.

  69

  IT WAS DARK when Argyle parked in front of the alley next to Nelson and Whidley and shut the car off. The unlit alley where LeRoy and Nelson had burned to death stretched away into the darkness, wet with rainwater. On the front wall of the architects’ offices that formed the south wall of the alley, a long strand of pinlights spelled out the words “Merry Christmas,” blinking on and off and casting a feeble light down onto the hood of his car. He was swept with the sudden urge to tear the lights down, to climb up onto the hood of his car and leap for them, to beat them to pieces against the bricks….

  He found that the door was open and he was standing in gutter water. A wet wind gusted out of the alley and into his face. Hurriedly he climbed back into the car. It was a weeknight, so there were only a few diners at the Continental Cafe, and all of them sat inside, out of the weather. The sidewalks were deserted, the streets virtually empty. No one had seen him. He hadn’t called attention to himself.

  The golem sat in the seat beside him. It looked as if Bentley had knocked the living sense out of the thing with the poker—whatever sense it ever had—and it stared out the window now as if it was drugged.

  Since being blinded by the weird lamplight in the Stebbinses’ shed, Argyle’s vision had flickered in and out, and he wondered if he were working up to have a stroke, if that’s what would get him. Was the alley as black as it seemed? The dead end couldn’t be more than forty feet distant, but it was hidden in a shadow as black as ink. His ears rang with a leaden clanging sound, and very faintly he could hear what sounded like voices, weak and far away.

  He opened a leather satchel on the seat and took out the tin box with the bird in it. It was a hell of an unlikely basket to have put all his eggs into, so to speak, and there was a solid chance that when he sent the golem down the alley, bird or no bird, it would do nothing but bump into the wall and fall over, which is pretty much what it had been doing for the past few hours.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk, and he looked up to see a man and woman walking arm and arm, heading toward the cafe. For a quick moment the woman looked just like Ivy, and he was full of a sudden shame, of the urge to hide the golem somehow, yank a sack over its head, ditch the bird in the jar, deny who and what he was and what had brought him to the mouth of this dark alley on a rainy winter night.

  But it wasn’t Ivy, and the two passed on by without even seeing him there. He closed his eyes for a moment, settling himself down again, clearing his mind. Then, seeing that the sidewalks were empty again, he unscrewed the jar lid, dipped two fingers into the liquid, and pulled the bird out by the tail, letting it drip onto the floor. The car was instantly full of the juniper smell of gin. The golem twitched, swiveling its head, looking out the side window at a passing car as if the creature had suddenly woken up. Good, Argyle thought. Something was stirring in it, some sense of purpose.

  “It’s time,” he said. It was anybody’s guess whether the creature understood anything at all, but he had fallen into the habit of speaking to it, like a person might speak to a goldfish in a bowl. He reached across, grasped its chin between his thumb and forefinger, yanked its mouth open so that its ivory teeth separated, and shoved the bird’s head down its mouth.

  “Eat it, goddamn it!” he said. Then he pushed the golem’s head back with the palm of his hand in order to open its throat. He knelt on the seat and pried its jaws open even wider, corkscrewing the bird, pinning the golem to the upholstery w
here it jerked and twitched, mumbling blue feathers out of its mouth, its eyes shifting back and forth like clockwork.

  * * *

  THE GOLEM STOOD in front of the car now, its face turned half toward him, illuminated in the light of the Merry Christmas sign. Its clothes were disheveled from the tussle over the bird, its hair wild, its eyes demented. He could barely stand to look at it, standing there stupidly, like some kind of horrible alter ego, the wreck he might have become if his life had gone differently, if he hadn’t managed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, if he had allowed himself to become like Murray LeRoy….

  A shudder ran through him, and he forced the thought away. “Go,” he said out loud. “Go now.”

  Its jaw hung open, unhinged in the struggle, so that it looked as if it were gagging. There was a lump in its throat where the bird had lodged. Argyle had tried to massage it down, but the flesh of the thing’s neck had started to tear like soft rubber, and he’d left it, unable to go on with the process. The golem took a step down the sidewalk, heading toward the cafe. Argyle started the car, shifting into drive, and looked around wildly. He couldn’t let it wander off alone. It would have to meet its fate in the alley, whatever that fate might be. If he had to, he’d run the golem down, pin it against the wall, cripple it and drag it into the alley himself….

  It stopped suddenly, staggered, and turned around, looking up the alley now as if it had suddenly heard something there, a whispered command. Argyle fancied that he heard it too. The voices in his mind grew louder, and he clamped his hands over his ears. But the sound was simply magnified, rising like a chorus. He squinted, rubbing his eyes to clear them. Shapes like the shadows of bats seemed to flutter in front of the window, and he thought he could hear the sound of their rushing wings. A wind sprang up, sweeping dead sycamore leaves from the alley floor, and a sheet of newspaper tumbled out of the darkness and burst into flames, falling on the hood of the car. There was a scattering of raindrops then, and Argyle switched on the wipers, hunching forward to watch as the golem slouched away into the darkness and was swallowed up by shadow. He waited for it to turn around, to come wandering back out again, and he put both hands on the steering wheel, ready to slam forward and knock it to Hell himself if he had to.

  Then, with a startling suddenness, there was a flash of dazzling yellow light and what sounded like a human cry. The golem turned in slow circles, flapping its arms slowly, caroming off either wall of the alley, engulfed in flame. The fire was white, like a chemical fire, and Argyle could feel its heat, incredibly intense. The golem fell to its knees, then straight over onto its face, curling up on the ground like burning paper. It was over. The thing was dead. The voices in Argyle’s head were silenced. He looked up at the Merry Christmas sign, but he felt nothing, no dark desires, no compulsions. He climbed out of the car and hurried back to the trunk, throwing it open and hauling out a fire extinguisher.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw people coming out of the cafe, hurrying forward. “Here!” he shouted stupidly, and ran to the mouth of the alley, squeezing the lever of the extinguisher. The rain beat down now, harder by the second, and he had the incredible urge to laugh out loud, to turn around and hose everyone down with the extinguisher. The golem was a heap on the ground, like a burning pile of trash, and the flames flickered lower, running up and down like witch fire across what had been the thing’s back. There was a sighing noise, like wind through a grate, and the rain whirled around the burning corpse in a wild little vortex.

  Argyle forced back his laughter, his joy. By God, he had done it!—deceived the Father of Lies, swindled the master swindler and got off scot-free. The Devil had taken it, lock, stock, and barrel.

  70

  “SOME KIND OF windfall,” Lyle Boyd said, dipping cake doughnuts into pans of frosting. “About a quarter of a million from what I heard. Her and her boyfriend headed straight for Honolulu, booked a room at the Royal Hawaiian. I don’t guess she’ll ever be back.”

  “What was it,” Walt asked, “inheritance?”

  “Something like that.”

  “How about her house over on Olive? She just lock the doors and go?”

  “Realtor’s selling it for her.” Boyd scraped frosting off the big wooden breadboard with a spatula. “She’ll make a couple of bucks there too. She owned that, you know.”

  “She owned it?” Walt said incredulously. “I had the idea she was just about broke, living on macaroni and cheese.”

  “Hell,” Boyd said. “That’s what she let on. She sold that place of hers in the Islands and outright bought the house here in town. Then she started to regret it right off. She was always pining away for the tropics. Anyway, I imagine she’ll clear another hundred thousand on it, all told. She’s a rich woman, at least by my standards.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Walt said, looking out the window at the cloudy afternoon sky. “I guess you never know.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  A man and four kids came in the door just then, and Walt nodded at the man, then winked at one of the boys, who had to be about Nora’s age. The boy’s eyes shot open and he ducked behind his father, looking out at Walt from behind the man’s leg.

  Walt turned around and grinned at Henry, who tried to grin back, but couldn’t. His face was full of trouble.

  “What’s wrong?” Walt asked. “You’re not thinking about Maggie Biggs, are you? It’s almost funny, the way she took us to the cleaners. And now she’s dancing the hula with Don Ho. Bentley’s going to drop dead when he hears about it.”

  Henry waved his hand. “I guess so,” he said.

  “What I wonder is where she got the money. I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that she shook somebody down, and I’ll bet you it was Argyle, too. She had something on him, her and Peetenpaul.”

  Henry nodded weakly. “I don’t …” He stopped, gesturing helplessly.

  “What’s up?” Walt asked.

  “I think I know how she got the money out of Argyle.”

  “How? She blackmailed him?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “What gives, then? She didn’t involve you in it, did she? She didn’t leave you holding the bag and skip town?”

  “No, not like that. Worse, I guess. She threatened to go to Jinx again. And more. I … I couldn’t let her. I was afraid.”

  “So … ?”

  “So I stole that damned bird of yours. You look in the tackle box and it won’t be there.”

  Walt blinked at him. So that was it. “I guess you figured out that I’d gotten it back out of the Dumpster?”

  “Next day. Maggie told me all about these men who wanted the bird—what they’d do to get it. To tell you the truth, I thought it was in the can anyway, so I played along. Then when it was gone, when I knew you’d gotten it out of the bin, I figured it had this … this hold over you, and somehow that gave me the right to steal it. That was wrong. None of us has any right to another man’s possessions. We can make up whys and wherefores till the cows come home, but all of it’s lies we tell ourselves to justify our sins. That’s what I think. Anyway, I gave the bird to Maggie, and Maggie cut a deal with these men.”

  Walt nodded at him, thinking about this. As usual, Henry was right. “It was the wrong bird,” Walt said to him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You gave her a fake. The bird in the tackle box was a dead parakeet in a Mason jar. It was a dummy. The real bird’s … I took care of the real one.”

  Henry sat there silently for a moment, thinking this out. “It hardly matters, morally speaking,” he said finally. “I thought I was stealing the real McCoy. This doesn’t make it right.”

  “Maybe not,” Walt said, “but the way I see it, you tried to do the right thing, and more than once, too. I wish you had stolen the real one.”

  There was laughter behind them, and the man with the kids was pushing out through the door again. “I’d stay out of that alley, anyway,” he said over his shoulder to Boyd
, “unless you’ve got an asbestos suit.” He laughed again, and the door swung shut behind them.

  Boyd shook his head and squirted Windex on the top of the glass doughnut case. “How do you like that?” he said. “What?” Walt waited.

  “That guy that burned up in the alley last night? It was an effigy.”

  “A Fiji?” Henry asked, picking up his coffee cup. “Well, I’ll be go to Hell. That’s tough on an immigrant. They come over here looking for the American dream….” He shook his head sadly. “Wasn’t there a Samoan family over on Harwood Street? Big people, I seem to remember. I wonder if they knew this man, poor devil.”

  “I said an effigy,” Boyd told him. “A dummy. Fire department got there and apparently this thing was made up out of dirt and sticks and melted wax and crap like that. Patrick just told me it had a goddamn bird in its mouth. Some kind of prank, I guess.”

  “Sure sounds like it,” Walt said. “Heading home?” he asked Henry.

  “I think I’ll sit for a while. I told Jinx I’d go Christmas shopping downtown. I’ll have another cup of coffee first.”

  “I’ll drop you.”

  “I can use the walk.”

  Walt stood up and drained his coffee cup. “I guess I better roll, then. I’ve got some unfinished business.” He couldn’t help thinking about what Argyle had said about rising out of the ashes like a phoenix. There was something unlikely in the picture. They didn’t let just anybody be a phoenix. You had to qualify.

  71

  WALT FORCED THE spade down into the wet dirt with his heel, digging out a wide hole. He didn’t want to cut the bluebird in half. It wasn’t his to cut. He shook the heavy clods off the shovel and knocked them apart, but there was no sign of the bird, so he dug out another shovelful. Still there was nothing. Maybe the bird was so dirty it didn’t look like a bird any more…. He moved the loose dirt around in the hole. The bird couldn’t be deeper. He was already down into soil that hadn’t been turned over in years.