by Tad Williams
“Well, we will complete ours now, in any case,” said Gustibus. “Honor demands it. I said you needed to take a bigger view, and now I will explain. Eligor has been here and active for more than a hundred years. Anaita needed him or someone like him so she could accomplish her aims, namely opening a new haven for human souls after death. The whys and wherefores of it still remain to be understood, but we do know one thing—if she needed Eligor, the former goddess is likely to have been the one who made the approach. We also know that something about San Judas appeals to Eligor, and it is his main base of operations.”
I finally grabbed the thread. “So she probably came to him here. On Earth. Most likely in San Judas.”
“I think it likely,” he said, nodding. “And it would not necessarily have been recently—remember, these beings play a long game.”
“But even if I know how they met, that doesn’t tell me anything about where the horn might be.”
“Perhaps not. But don’t be too sure until you actually learn the truth about the first meeting. I can tell you as a scholar that you must follow the questions rather than try to jump straight to the answers. How long has Anaita had a presence here? And what is that presence? That is the next thing you must find, I feel certain. With luck, it will lead you to further answers.”
“It’ll lead me to lots of further questions, I can pretty much bet on that.”
“Then if you’re at all like me, you will be a very happy man.”
Clearly I wasn’t much like him—I didn’t want another damn question to answer, let alone thirty or forty of them—but I had to take what I could get. Some of the things Gustibus said had definitely set me thinking in new ways. Of course, if Sam had been there, he would have said, “And thinking is what always gets you in trouble.” But he always said that about me not thinking, too.
“Why do I get the feeling,” I asked Gustibus, “that you could figure out the rest of this in about half an hour?”
He smiled. “I’m honored you think so, but I’ve just presented you with the results of a great deal of consideration backed by years of study. Don’t overestimate me. I am only, as I said, a researcher. A scholar, to give it an old and honorable title. I have no urge or ability to travel in some of the places you’ve visited.”
An oblique reference to my trip to Hell, perhaps. I could tell he either knew or had guessed something about it, but I also figured it might buy me some other useful stuff from him later on, so I wasn’t giving that story away for free.
Another of the little old nuns, or maybe the previous one, stuck her head in.
“Supper is almost ready, Dr. Gustibus,” she said.
“Ah. Would you like to join me, Mr. Dollar?” he asked. “We are having kale from our own garden tonight, and some lovely carrots and steamed, late-season cauliflower from a local farm. I do not eat meat.”
“No, thanks. One more question, though—where does your name come from?”
“Gustibus?” He nodded again, slowly, as if this was another deep philosophical question. “It was not my given name, but when I was younger and first involved in my field of scholarship, I chose a Latin name, since Latin was the primary language we used in our studies. My given name meant both “taste” and “tongue” in my original country, and since I did not think “Doctor Tongue” suitable, I used the Latin translation for “taste.” And of course—” he paused before the punch line, “—it allowed me to remind my friends and fellow scholars, There’s no disputing Gustibus!”
He waited for me to laugh. I smiled weakly.
“De gustibus non est disputandum, you see,” he said.
“Ah,” I said.
He looked disappointed. “I admit it is a somewhat dry joke, but it is my own.”
He didn’t come out to see me off, maybe because I hadn’t gotten his joke. The last I saw of him, he was standing at the window again, staring out at the dying light and the throbbing Pacific Ocean. Outside, I found the fog had come in to lie across the roads. I almost drove off the edge once, but I eventually got back to Highway 1, and soon was sliding through the misty evening hills, Dexter Gordon’s A Swingin’ Affair playing quietly on the stereo.
The more I thought of what Gustibus had said about Eligor and Anaita, the more I began to feel how hopeless it all was. As if being an angel wasn’t complicated enough, I had somehow managed to fall in with gods and monsters.
And seriously piss them off.
ten
four arms, no waiting
I FULLY EXPECTED to find an eviction notice on my apartment door when I got home, or even a couple of police officers wanting to talk to me about guns being fired, but to my surprise I found neither.
I should have moved out right then, I guess. After being haunted, then getting my shit all beat up in my own living room, I sure didn’t feel quite the same cozy way about the Tierra Green apartment (in fact I’d never felt cozy about it to begin with) but I was under standing orders from Heaven not to move again. Plus, I was sick and tired of people (and non-people) just waltzing in and out whenever they wanted to. Instead of throwing all my stuff in the trunk of my car and heading for the nearest Econo Lodge like a sensible person, I stopped at a hardware store and got a chain to put on the door and a couple of window locks. At home I busted out my screwdriver and installed them all. I was doing it mostly to slow down my new friends from the Black Sun. The nastier things I come into contact with from time to time weren’t going to be kept away by chains or locks, but at least I’d hear them getting in.
When I was done and had eaten the last of Sam’s Chinese food order directly out of the fridge, I called George, aka Fatback. Javier, the old family retainer and pig-keeper, picked up the phone because at that time of the evening George was still a human with a pig brain wallowing naked in mud. (I never call George “Fatback” to his face, by the way. It’s not my nickname for him, but I didn’t know his real name until I actually met him, so it still slips out from time to time.) I asked Javier to let me ring through to his boss’s answering machine, then I updated my list of things I wanted George to find out.
After that I called Sam and left a message for him as well. It was strange, not automatically trusting Sam the way I used to, but even after all the secrecy and weirdness about his new allegiance, he was still my closest friend, and he’d risked getting shot at my side a few times recently when he hadn’t needed to. Also, I’d decided that whatever my personal reservations were, I really did need to see this Third Way place of his. If one of Anaita’s pet projects was trying to murder my soul, it probably behooved me to know a little more about her other hobbies.
Oh, and I stashed my sofa gun again. Not in the sofa this time, of course, in case the Black Sun Faction came back. Despite the locks I’d put in, I wasn’t that opposed to seeing them again. After all, I still owed Bald Thug a serious beating, and I’m not really a forgiving kind of guy.
• • •
I must have fallen asleep on the couch because that’s where I was when the noise at the window woke me up. It wasn’t anything ordinary like a branch scratching at the glass, or leaves being blown against it by a stiff breeze, but what was truly strange was that it didn’t really sound like anyone trying to break in, either. It was the same bumping I’d heard before, over and over but with no discernible rhythm, like your drunk cousin dancing at a family wedding. I got up but didn’t turn on any lights, and I took my automatic with me.
Whatever was outside the window, it wasn’t trying very hard: the awkward thumping barely made the glass shiver. Then, just as I had almost crawled close enough to see what it was, it stopped. I put my face close to the window, but I couldn’t see anything beyond it except the dim, shadowy outlines of buildings and the street.
My first impulse was simply to crawl back to the couch, because whatever it had been was probably a brain-damaged bird, and didn’t seem big enough to do any harm anyway.
Also, I was back on the heavenly job clock—I could get a call any time. But things had been freaky enough lately to make me more careful than usual, so I got a flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and returned to the window for another look.
Whatever had bumped the window had left little smeary marks on the outside, like the track of a snail on his first acid trip, but the largest part of them were translucent blots, as if someone had pressed a small round thing like a ping pong ball, sticky with slime, over and over against the glass. I had no idea what it meant, and I didn’t like it.
Of course, true to the infamous Dollar Luck, as soon as I’d stretched myself out on the couch again and covered myself with my jacket (because who wanted to walk all the way across the apartment to the bed?) my phone rang.
It was Alice, dear sweet Alice, of the dulcet tones and liquid nitrogen blood. After she’d expressed disappointment at not waking me up, she told me I had a case in Spanishtown. It wasn’t a nice one either, some kind of domestic dispute that had ended in a killing.
Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, and it was off to work I went.
Unluckily for the victim (but luckily for me) my dead client was the brother-in-law of the shooter, a nice guy who had tried to interfere with the beating of his sister, the killer’s wife. The lucky-for-me part was that I didn’t have to plead the case of the killer, a guy who’d shoot his own brother-in-law so he could get on with smacking the shit out of his spouse. The brother-in-law had been a perfectly nice, hard-working guy named Mejia, a construction worker, and I had no trouble getting him accepted into the Big Happy, but he had real trouble going, still worried about his sister. I’d seen police cars at the residence when I got there and could tell him, without breaking any rules, that I was pretty sure his brother-in-law had already been arrested and was on his way to jail. This was enough to convince Mr. Mejia to step into the light.
As I came back through the Zipper into the blinking blue and red glare from the cop cars that were currently turning Macdonald Street into a carnival midway, my phone rang again.
“Bobby?”
“George!” I looked at the time out of habit. A bit after one in the morning. “So you got my message . . .”
“Look, uh, I just wanted to let you know that there’s some pretty weird stuff going on around here, Bobby. Weird stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Noises. I thought it might be rats up in the attic of the barn, but they’re too damn big, Bobby. It’s been going on for a couple of days, but Javier sent his son up and there’s no droppings, nothing. And Javier said he’s seen some stuff around the property, too. Something pretty big, in the bushes, and something running under the main house, all hairy.”
So whoever they were, my enemies were watching Casa Fatback, too. I felt pretty guilty about that, since I was willing to bet it hadn’t started until I first asked him to check up on the Black Sun stuff.
“Yeah, that was when,” he confirmed. “That night. You think it’s those guys? But they’re just a bunch of Nazi punks!”
I didn’t want to tell him exactly what Gustibus had said about them also being murdering robbing arsonists—no point in worrying him more, because he already sounded pretty freaked out—so I said, “Yeah, well, you know I run in some strange circles. Have Javier hang out with you for the night. If it’s still happening tomorrow, I’ll come up and have a look around.” Not that I was going to accomplish much when I couldn’t even keep the whatever-they-were away from my own apartment.
My promise seemed to make George feel a little better. We were getting ready to hang up when I remembered something that had come to me while driving through Spanishtown, one of my favorite districts, and thinking idly about how the past shaped the present. Gustibus had said that in her goddess days, Anaita had been worshipped by the Persians. Maybe that was a starting point for some of the questions I needed to answer.
“Hey, is there some kind of Persian cultural center in San Jude, George?” I asked.
“Persian? Like Iranian?”
“I guess. But the people I’m thinking about—the person I’m thinking about in particular—would look a bit farther back in history. So I’m particularly interested in Persian stuff. Libraries, archives, historical stuff. Newspaper and magazine articles, too, I guess.”
“Don’t know—that’s a big search area. I’ll check. Anything else?”
“Just the stuff on your voicemail. Have Javier make sure all your doors and windows are secure, okay? And call me again if anything else happens.”
“You’re a good man, Mr. D, even if you aren’t really a man.”
“That’s what she said, George my friend. That’s what she said.”
At least I could make him laugh. That had to be some help on a bad night, right? Because otherwise I felt pretty fucking useless.
• • •
I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, because subconsciously I was probably listening for that weird noise at the window again. When I came very sharply awake at 4:19 in the morning I heard noises, all right, but they definitely weren’t the same as the muffled thumps I’d investigated earlier. No, this was the scraping noise again, the one from the earliest days of my “haunting”, but this time it sounded like it was inside my apartment. My heart was beating pretty darn fast.
Barefoot, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, I went looking for my nighttime visitor. At first I thought the sound was coming from my bedroom because it seemed to get louder as I got nearer, but by the time I reached the bedroom door it sounded like it was behind me. But once I had crept back to the living room the noise was behind me again.
The hall closet. Mine was a shallow affair, just about big enough to hang a few coats and pile up other stuff that was only needed every now and then, umbrellas and gloves and hats. A healthier guy than me could probably have hung his expensive mountain bike on the wall in there.
I paused beside the pocket doors and held my breath as the scraping noise started up again. It had been bad enough as a mysterious noise in the wall; up close it was much creepier. For a moment something primal in me, something that must have predated angelhood and almost everything else, told me very urgently don’t open that door. But whatever version of me that might have been, some child frightened by a bedtime story or by a stern sermon about what happens to sinners, it didn’t have anything to do with who I was now. Scared by noises in the closet or not, it was my job to open that door. So I did.
As soon as the door started to slide I heard a scrabbling, then a thump and quiet clatter, as if something had fallen into my pile of umbrellas and cold-weather gear. I yanked the door the rest of the way open and shined my flashlight inside.
Nothing.
Well, not quite nothing, I saw a moment later. At the top of the closet, on the side wall over the shelf above the coat rack, a board had been dislodged and pushed to one side. It was far too small an opening for an ordinary human to get through, but I had been in the business long enough to realize ordinary humans weren’t usually my biggest worry.
Well, I thought, at least I know how the fuckers are getting in.
A movement that might have been coats and other junk settling at the bottom of the closet caught my attention, and almost without thinking I flicked some of the clutter out of the way with my foot. I had about a half-second to see something crouched in the corner, something the size of a small dog but with long, hairy legs. Then it leaped past me and skittered off toward the living room. I probably made some noise when it jumped. Might have even shouted a bit.
Since it was running from me, I decided I had the advantage and went after it. It stayed just out of my reach and mostly out of my sight, a gray-black shadow with spidery legs, dashing from hiding place to hiding place while I scrambled after it, always keeping my gun in front of me. We made a lot of noise—at one point I tipped over the couch in a failed attempt to
trap it in a corner—but nobody pounded on the ceiling, or the floor either, for that matter. The neighbors were either deeply asleep or had moved out, or just given up.
Or maybe they hadn’t: just about then, someone started knocking on my apartment door, firm and loud.
I had a moment of indecision, as you can probably guess. If I ignored whoever was at the door, it might be the police, and they’d kick it in. Then again, it might be the neo-Nazis, and if I opened the door the party might really get going. Or it might just be some of my suffering neighbors.
The thing had disappeared into the living room again, but the hall closet was now closed, so it wasn’t getting out that way. I decided to chance a quick trip to the door.
To my surprise, what I saw on the other side of the spy hole was not anyone I’d expected but one of the two young women from down the hall, the taller one with short dark hair. She looked very intent. I opened the door a crack.
“Excuse,” she said, trying to see me through the narrow opening, “but so loud noise! Just come home and . . .” She spread her hands. “Worried.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “It was a mouse—squeak squeak, right? It surprised me, and I tried to catch it.” I faked a laugh. “You know . . . chasing it, knocking things over, bang, bang, bang!”
“You are sure?” She bent and took something from her pocket, scribbled something on a small piece of paper. “Here, phone to call. I am good with mouses. Call if I and Halyna will help you.”
Yeah, I thought, you’ll just love helping me exterminate a nest of devil-spiders. But I opened the door a little wider to accept her number. It was, even for me, a pretty weird way to meet women.
I heard the slightest whisper of movement behind me, then suddenly a knot of hair and legs pushed between my ankles and shoved itself into the space between door and frame. I tried to lean on the door to close it, but the young woman’s arm was still there, and I didn’t want her to have to make her way in a big bad foreign city minus a limb. While I hesitated, the thing I’d been chasing squeezed out at the bottom. Like a cat, it was clearly able to go through much smaller openings than it appeared to need.
