Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  The Devil forbade them from leaving. He demanded that the Engineer be on hand to recheck the machine once it had eventually been delivered, via the actions of a more reliable tier of demon. (If you want to wreak havoc, especially on a subconscious level, a snackular is ideal. They are volatile, however, and do not take instruction easily, especially in juvenile form.) Locating a demon of sufficient acuity took a while, because – for reasons that lie outside the remit of this present story – most demons are unable to cross large bodies of water, and nearly all of the ones that can had recently been sent back to the doom-nurseries in a sector-wide recall that saw the member of the Wakeful in charge banished to the Outer Reaches of Appalling Voidiness for eternity and a day.

  Eventually the Devil was able to repurpose a demon that had been enthusiastically creating sadness in the Middle East for decades. This demon was on the brink of triggering an especially juicy atrocity, however, and dragged its feet for a while until it finally dawned upon it that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make the Devil more irritable than he already was.

  As the entirety of this negotiation was conducted by the Devil sitting silently in a chair and reaching out with the slick, dread tentacles of his mind, it looked like nothing was happening for ages, and Hannah – who’d barely slept with worry – was on the brink of explosion by the time a thick fog blew up from the bay, providing cover for the demon to deposit the machine retrieved from Brazil in the backyard, before flicking back whence it had come at a speed so great that it caused a sonic boom that rattled windows all the way to Los Gatos and scared the living crap out of a cat who had been dozing on the porch next door.

  Later that day, the event the demon had been growing came to pass, when a grieving man carried a bomb into a crowded market square and detonated it, to avenge the death of an older brother during an Israeli military action. He killed himself and forty-two others, but the demon went into something of a decline for months afterwards, feeling that, had he been there to guide the final hours, the toll could have been so much higher.

  Granddad meanwhile briefly inspected the Sacrifice Machine and pronounced it to be still in working order. Then he and Hannah, together with Aunt Zo – who had watched the morning’s events in a quiet way, and clearly now had a growing list of questions to ask, not the least of which being who the old dude in the black linen suit was, and why everyone was doing whatever he said the whole time – carried the machine through to Hannah’s room and slid it under the bed.

  In an afterthought, Granddad went to Hannah’s bookcase. He took down the odd sculpture he’d given her when he last came to stay, and pulled a tiny screwdriver out of his waistcoat. He flipped the object over and made an adjustment.

  Hannah watched. ‘That’s not just a sculpture, is it?’

  Granddad looked sheepish. ‘Well, I hope it has some aesthetic appeal, but … no.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘It, ah, repels.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bad things.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Soulcutters and dreamspiders, mainly. And other banes.’

  ‘Like … an invisible nightlight.’

  He smiled. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What did you just do to it?’

  ‘I turned it up. A lot.’

  ‘What about the ones that Mom keeps in the garage?’

  ‘Ah. I wondered where they’d gone.’

  ‘Do they do the same? Keep the bad things away?’

  He nodded, a little sadly, and put the sculpture back on the bookcase. ‘But evidently not well enough.’

  Hannah noticed Aunt Zo watching this exchange with one eyebrow raised – adding yet another question to the list in her head – and so, instead of saying more, she hugged her grandfather around his stomach as tightly as she could.

  ‘Thank you for trying,’ she whispered.

  So it wasn’t until nearly four in the afternoon that they were all finally in Aunt Zo’s car. Her vehicle was almost exactly the opposite of Granddad’s. It was a nameable colour – ‘Oh my God, that’s red’ – and the interior was spookily tidy.

  Granddad went in the passenger seat. Hannah and the Devil sat in the back. Vaneclaw, who’d been keeping a low profile since the debacle with the Sacrifice Machine’s delivery, offered to spend the journey in the trunk. Granddad opened it discreetly for him so that Zo didn’t see, and gently shut it again once he was inside.

  It doesn’t take long to get down to Big Sur from Santa Cruz, and it was a route that Hannah knew well. At least once a year since she’d been born, usually two or three times, she’d watched out of the window as Dad drove Highway 1 south out of town and then around the flat, sweeping expanse of Monterey Bay, listening to the comforting murmur of quotidian parental conversation. She knew all the landmarks, including the large ruined wooden house a hundred yards back from the highway near Watsonville. Her father was fascinated by it, and every time they passed said he’d try to find some information about the house for her, but never got around to it. Once it had been quite something, a huge Victorian building with wraparound decks and an Italianate tower. It was as fancy as the most impressive old houses in Santa Cruz, and it seemed odd that it had been built out here. Though it was very dirty now and clearly long-abandoned, and boards had slipped, and it had been raised up on bricks, it still caught the eye. It looked somehow larger than it should, perhaps because it stuck up all by itself in the middle of flat farming land. It was strange to drive past and not hear her father’s voice reminding her to watch out for it, and the lack made her stomach ache.

  The Devil seemed very interested, even leaning into her side of the car to get a better look through her window.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘I sense that good work was done in that house, long ago. I can hear the echo of screams.’

  He turned back to face the front with a distant, gloating look on his horrid old face. Hannah decided that when (not if) she saw her dad, she’d find a way of suggesting there wasn’t anything to know about the house – a teacher or something had told her so – and he shouldn’t bother to try to find out.

  Forty minutes later they skirted Monterey and then Carmel. They didn’t stop, another thing that made the drive out of kilter. Mom loved Carmel, and at this stage there would always be a short discussion about whether they had time to take a break for lunch. Hannah estimated that her mother won this discussion on approximately 107 per cent of the occasions when it took place, concerned though her father always was to ‘make time’. Hannah had never got to the bottom of what ‘making time’ meant. Her mother evidently didn’t know either, or judged it of little account. Probably it was something that only boys were interested in, like farts.

  By now the sky was starting to soften and darken around the edges. Aunt Zo kept driving down through the Carmel Highlands, where the coastline became craggier. The cliffs got steeper, too, and the trees thicker, yielding glimpses of increasingly vertiginous drops to the ocean.

  Usually this was an exciting part of the journey because you knew you were getting close. Mom and Dad stopped talking and looked out of the window. The atmosphere started to seep into the car, carried on the smell of pines and birch and sea. It felt different today. Hannah knew this was partly because she was in a different car with different people (and with a talking mushroom in the trunk, instead of an overnight bag). But that wasn’t the real difference. As she stared glumly through the windshield at the hulking mountains ahead, forbidding fist-shaped masses that reared up in knotted clusters and then dropped into the ocean as if someone had summarily severed the land with a rusty axe, it felt not as if anything had changed, but as though her eyes had been opened a little wider, enabling her to perceive something that had been there all along.

  Big Sur was different to what she’d thought.

  It was beautiful, but the austerity of its poise took it to a place beyond the normal. Large chunks of the Californian coast – and Hannah had seen pretty much all
of it, from the Oregon border right down to Tijuana – had the same basic things going on. Jagged rocks, ocean, trees.

  The place they were driving into, however, was more than the sum of those parts, with added mountains. As they drove over Bixby Bridge, the graceful arch that soars over the first of the big canyons that fall right into the sea, she realized the bridge did the opposite of what she’d thought. It didn’t link Big Sur with what lay north.

  It was a dividing line. A gate.

  It said things were different on the other side.

  Hannah shivered. She’d been the one who’d said they should come here, but now she wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be at home. She …

  She should call her mom.

  The thought popped into her head with a panicky certainty. Why hadn’t she done it before? Why hadn’t she done it in all the time they’d spent kicking around the house that morning? Why hadn’t a grown-up suggested it?

  ‘We should call Mom,’ she said urgently.

  ‘And we will,’ Granddad replied immediately, as if he’d been waiting for the suggestion.

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘We don’t want to worry her,’ Aunt Zo said brightly, as if this response had also been prepared ahead of time and stored in the fridge, ready to be put in the microwave when needed.

  Hannah didn’t want to worry Mom either, but hadn’t Aunt Zo said something about Mom calling the house, when they first got home? Surely that meant her mother was already worried? ‘But—’

  ‘Stop here,’ the Devil commanded suddenly.

  Aunt Zo laughed. ‘Excuse me?’

  He leaned forwards so his mouth was disconcertingly close to Zo’s ear. ‘I wish this car to no longer be in motion, effective immediately. Is that more clear?’

  Aunt Zo yanked the car to the side of the road. She turned crossly to give the Devil a piece of her mind, but he’d already opened his door and was climbing out.

  ‘Unlock the trunk,’ he said. ‘Now.’

  ‘Look, Mr—’

  ‘It would be best if you did as he asked,’ Granddad said, mildly.

  ‘But—’

  ‘It really kinda would,’ Hannah agreed. ‘Seriously.’

  Aunt Zo muttered, but pressed the switch that unlocked the trunk. Hannah and her grandfather watched her as she watched the Devil go to the back of the car, open it, wait a moment – almost as if letting something out – and then close it again. Without, of course, having any visible reason for doing so.

  The Devil marched away across the road, paying no attention to a large truck that came rocketing around the bend. The truck’s horn blared, but the old man in the linen suit didn’t even turn his head. Instead he continued to the other side and then, without breaking stride, set off up the steep, wooded hillside, walking in an exact straight line. Within moments he’d disappeared into shadow.

  ‘OK,’ Aunt Zo said with the air of someone whose list of questions would wait not a second longer. ‘Who the screaming blue nutsacks is that guy?’

  ‘It’s … a long story,’ Granddad said.

  ‘Excellent,’ she replied. ‘It’s a good forty minutes from here to the motels. A nice long story will fill the time.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure—’

  ‘Spill it,’ Aunt Zo said. ‘Or we’re going nowhere.’

  Granddad looked at Hannah, as if unsure. Hannah was struck by the fact that Aunt Zo was Granddad’s daughter – that he was to Aunt Zo what her dad was to her. With this came the realization that some stories might be tough for people to tell to certain other people. That stories could be hard to frame in one person’s mouth, and easier to tell in a different voice.

  ‘Once there was a boy,’ Hannah said. She glanced at Granddad, to check he was OK with what she was doing.

  He nodded, looking small and old.

  Her aunt started the car. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.

  Chapter 27

  Hiking the thickest parts of Big Sur, far from trails and in the growing dark, is not for the faint of heart. At the lower levels the mountainsides are choked with knots of trees. On steeper inclines there’s nothing but scrubby grasses and chaparral, which might sound easier to negotiate, but these are dotted with rocks and boulders that lurk above you in ways suggesting they’ve spent the last several million years mulling over this new-fangled ‘gravity’ idea and have decided this could be the night finally to check it out. The slopes vary from ‘really very slopey’ to ‘am I seeing that right?’ and the way is constantly blocked by jagged canyons, forcing the Devil into diversions.

  After an hour of this Vaneclaw was badly out of breath and making frequent observations that now might be a good time to take a breather. Or now.

  Or now?

  Or now?

  Eventually the Devil turned and stared at him.

  ‘Just to be clear,’ the imp said, ‘the last thing I want to do at this point in time is take a break. No way. The best thing, definitely, is to keep walking forever.’ He broke off to do a few air-punches and some running on the spot. ‘I’m loving it. In fact – shouldn’t we go a bit faster?’

  Then he had to cough for a while.

  To his surprise, when he’d finished, the Devil had not recommenced walking. Instead he seemed to be listening.

  ‘Can you feel it?’

  The imp felt the air with his gills, and looked around. There was nothing to see except the tree/rocks/encroaching darkness combo they’d been working for the last several hours, but … ‘I can,’ he said. ‘Not just one, either, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘I had reason to believe they had clustered together, and that these mountains were a possible location. That’s why I instructed you to head down here yesterday.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But this is … more than I was expecting. It’s as well that you did not encounter this conclave alone. I would not have wanted them to harm you.’

  ‘Thanks, boss.’

  ‘When the time comes for you to be shredded into howls of blackened despair, it will be at my hand.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘The question is … where they are.’

  Happy to change the subject, the imp rubbed his little hands together. ‘Definitely. Where. That’s the biggie, eh? And why? Plus also when? Or what, and how much are the hotdogs?’

  The Devil was staring at him in a bad way now.

  ‘But where, mainly,’ the imp said hurriedly. ‘Bingo. That’s the one. And … what’s the answer?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Vaneclaw blinked. The Devil knew things. It was what he did: the Knowing of Things. That plus all the evil, of course. The Devil played the endless ebb and wash of evil like a man standing in the ocean, sculpting the currents around him like a conductor. One movement of his hands was enough to reverse the direction of the waves, and hell followed after. There was no escape, no defence. Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses.

  Yet now it seemed as though he was standing outside them all, unsure how to gain entry.

  ‘Are we close, at least?’

  ‘I believe so,’ the Devil said. ‘But we need a blind spot. They are choosy about their locales. We need virgin ground.’

  The imp nodded sagely. ‘Aha.’

  Despite his justifiably renowned dimness, this was an area in which he could genuinely contribute. The reason Vaneclaw was invisible to most people is that imps are skilled at avoiding the eye. They’re not actually invisible – if an imp is behind you and you happen to turn at exactly the right moment you’ll catch sight of it. If you have a camera and fast reflexes you may even get a photo, though film has a way of clouding, and iPhones and digital devices often seem to crash, or get dropped and broken, at the instant the shutter is released. Accidents happen. As you might expect.

  The chances are that you wouldn’t turn at the right moment, however. That�
�s the skill. Keeping out of everyone’s vision like this is a heck of a dance, and a useful additional trick when you need a rest is being to locate virgin ground.

  Wherever they roam, humans leave residue. Not just litter and pollution, or rusted old cars, or cigarette butts, but stuff that leaks out of their minds. Hopes, needs, memories. Once a human has stood in a place or passed through it, it’s never the same again. This is our way of leaving a scent, marking new territory, bringing the chaos of the unknown into our ken and under our control. It’s not a bad smell – it’s a bit like nutmeg, apparently, with a hint of old newspaper – but it never goes away. Vaneclaw, for all his legendary faults, had a nose for it. And thus also for the lack of it.

  ‘Follow me, boss,’ he said.

  The imp did a decent job, getting to within half a mile, but then seemed to lose focus – unnerved, perhaps, by the increasing weight of the air, an intangible thrumming that seemed to issue from deep in the rock beneath their feet, and the inaudible echoes of centuries of frowns and sighs. By these, and the occasional half-glimpse of figures, barely discernible in the gloom, high up on a far slope, and also possibly – though not definitely – there amidst a tangle of trees.

  It was nearly dark by the time the Devil finally motioned to let him lead the way, and Vaneclaw was happy to hand over the reins. It was getting cold, and the silence was hurting his ears. He’d never felt the world this heavy, this bleak and lonely. The situation was getting further and further beyond his discomfort zone, and he wished he was back in North Dakota, hassling that bloke Ron. That had been a sensible, imp-relevant job, with prospects. It made sense. Even exhaustingly unsmart imps know when they’re straying into areas where they’re badly out of their depth.

  Eventually the Devil slowed. He raised his nose and sniffed once. ‘Close,’ he said.

  He walked another fifty yards, and then stopped. He cocked his head as if listening – the scent’s not really a smell, and so it’s not the nose that detects it, though it’s not a sound either – and changed direction. Then he stopped, mouth half-open as if tasting the air, his old yellow teeth glowing in the tired end of twilight. ‘Yes.’