Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

by Tad Williams

  Part of me wanted to thank him for his time, another part wanted to pick him up and kick out his window and hold him over the rocks and the foaming waves until he told me why he was always being such a mysterious dick. I don’t handle the Socratic method well, I guess.

  I got back in my car instead and drove home through the wet, green hills, listening to the monotonous percussion of the December rain.

  thirty-seven

  cleaning house

  I’D PLOTTED, I’d planned, I’d wriggled like a worm on a hook, but my enemies were simply stronger than I was, and Anaita had outmaneuvered me all down the line. All I’d bought myself with all my tricks was this final chance to pull off a miracle, or it was going to be an express ticket to Hell for me, where more than a few folks would be thrilled to have me back in soul-biting range. I had no idea where to find a miracle in San Judas and didn’t know where else to look. Most of my allies were out of the game, and one of them was dead. Since the odds for my future didn’t look good, I decided I might as well take care of some unfulfilled obligations.

  I still had about two thousand bucks left, give or take a hundred, from the money I’d earned selling my late, lamented Matador Machine. A whole lot of the rest I’d given back to Orban to buy weapons, which kept some of us alive but hadn’t done a damn bit of good when it came to either saving Halyna or to getting my hands on the horn. I wasn’t going to solve my current problems by chucking money at them, anyway, so I’d have to do what I could with what I had and hope that good, old-fashioned stubbornness counted for something.

  Step one—in many ways the worst of all, since it was an admission of guilt and massive failure—was to get Oxana out of Jude. My struggle with Anaita was only going to get more desperate as the clock on my suspended sentence ticked down, and I’d already got Oxana’s lover killed. I couldn’t even think about what it would be like to have both of them on my overloaded conscience.

  She fought me, of course.

  “No. How I go when Halyna is killed by that . . . Persian blyat?”

  I wasn’t sure what a blyat was, but I could tell by the curl of Oxana’s mouth that it probably wasn’t “sweetie-pie.”

  “I go when the koorva is dead.”

  “You don’t understand. That whatever-you-called-her used to be a goddess, but now she’s an angel. She’s connected. Do you understand that, Oxana? Like the Russian Mafia. Even if we could kill her, which we can’t, someone else would come after us instead, and then another, and then more and more. You can’t just attack Heaven, even if it’s only one important angel, and not expect Heaven to hit back.”

  “I not care.” She threw herself down on the couch and gave me a fierce look that only made me feel more responsible. This young bad-ass, for all her weapons training and soldierly determination to right ancient wrongs, was an innocent. If I had known things would get this serious this fast I would never have involved either of them. I’d expected that Anaita would have some defenses set up at the museum, not that the Angel of Moisture would make an appearance herself. That was a miscalculation I would live with the rest of my angelic life (although that was beginning to look like a very short-term problem).

  Still, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. “I don’t care if you don’t care, Oxana, because you’re going. I can either get you a plane ticket to Kiev and drive you to the airport, or I can call U. S. Immigration. What’s Ukrainian for “La Migra”? Because the government will definitely deport you, but only after you spend a couple of months in those fucked-up cells of theirs, plus probably get de-loused and go through about nine or ten body cavity searches. Wouldn’t you rather just skip that and go straight to the Diet Coke and a package of peanuts while you watch some horrible Adam Sandler movie on a nice, fairly clean plane?”

  Well, it was like telling your teenager that she absolutely, positively wasn’t going to go to that party, of course. Tears, shouting, the whole ball of wax. I’m not making light of it, it was the result of a tragic situation, one that I was personally responsible for, but I was at a point where I didn’t have much patience left. In fact, I didn’t have much of anything left.

  Eventually Oxana locked herself in Caz’s bedroom, and I took advantage of the calm to track down a ticket online for about eleven hundred bucks, a one-way flight leaving in two days. I left my angry Amazon a note to explain what was going to happen and, in an attempt at repairing the relationship, suggested that she and I stay home that evening, and I’d bring some burgers from Junior’s. Honestly, it really was almost exactly like having a grieving, trained-killer teenage daughter. Well, at least how I imagine that would be.

  Still, getting Oxana the hell out of a war zone was only Item One on my ambitious schedule, so after I finished the note I hopped in my Yellow Bobmarine and headed downtown. Yeah, I just can’t stay away from that part of San Judas. The Bible says, “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” (By the way, thanks for sticking that image in my head, King James and friends.) And I had more than a few follies to deal with.

  • • •

  It was definitely a Delta blues kind of day, I decided as I drove across gray San Jude in a pelting rain. Son House was singing “John the Revelator” as I reached my old neighborhood, scene of so many interesting events. “Singing” isn’t quite the right word for Son House, because that’s kind of like calling what Jimi Hendrix did “strumming” or saying that Michael Phelps was “pretty good at not drowning.” I’ve been to Heaven, and I’ve been to the other place, and listening to Son calling on the blues to keep him sane can give you a genuine a taste of both.

  Anyway, the rain was still thumping on the car roof as I parked on a nearby street. The song was just ending.

  Who’s that writin’?—John the Revelator.

  Tell me who’s that writin’?—John the Revelator

  Tell me who’s that writin’?—John the Revelator

  Wrote the book of the seven seals.

  Most of the time when you listen to a song like that, even if you know that the “book of the seven seals” is from Revelations, they’re just words. The seals themselves are seals that, when they finally get opened at the End Times, release the Four Horsemen, and eventually lead to the trumpets blowing and the world going pfffft. Hey, I’m actually an angel, and most of the times I’ve heard the song, I was only thinking about what an amazing artist Son House was. But today it all seemed a bit different, and it wasn’t just because my personal End Times seemed closer than they’d ever been. I’d been in tight spots before, but things seemed different this time. Maybe it was because I’d seen the rock of Heaven lifted a little, and had seen some of the things that had scuttled out. It’s one thing to know that there’s a lot you’re not being told, it’s another when it starts crawling all over you.

  But even though I was doing a potentially very stupid thing coming back to the Tierra Green apartment at all, there was no sense in making it even more stupid by lingering in the area. I shut off the engine, made sure my gun was loaded, and then pulled up my collar and headed for my old digs.

  Just opening the door of that apartment was like walking into a museum of the last nights I’d spent there—some of the furniture was still lying on its side from my attempts to capture the four-legged horror I’d found in the closet, and I had never washed the dishes in the sink after I’d got the first message from Caz, because then Sam and I had our argument, and the next day I moved out. Only a couple of weeks had passed since all that, but it already had the feel of ancient history. Not the good kind, either, more the Curse of the Pharaohs kind where you immediately wish you’d just left the damn tomb alone. But I had things to do. I intended to clean house, literally as well as emotionally, but I didn’t want to take all day about it. I was pretty certain nothing significant was left of the Black Sun Faction, at least in San Judas, but it still wasn’t a good idea for me to linger around any of my known han
gouts.

  The first thing I did was retrieve my stereo. Caz’s computer was adequate for playing music, but the stereo was the only nice thing I owned other than some guns and knives, now that the Matador was gone. It was compact, and it had a very nice subwoofer I’d spent some serious money on and never really got to use because I was always living in apartments and motels. I might be in danger every moment I lingered in my old place, but I was damned if I was going to leave my subwoofer there for some punks to steal.

  The stereo equipment just about filled up the front seat and floor of the cab. I put three boxes of CDs in the trunk, then cleared my meager wardrobe out of my closet and draped it across the cab’s back seat, trying not to add wrinkles to the wrinkles that were already there. I looked at the boxes of car magazines I had been dragging around from place to place and felt a huge tide of weariness roll over me at the thought of lugging them down the stairs too, so I left them for anyone who wanted them. I threw the rest of my toiletries into a bag, bundled up my blankets and sheets (such as they were) and, once I’d thrown all of that into the trunk, went back upstairs for a final look around the scene of so few happy times.

  As I was examining the living room one last time, noting the bullet hole in the wall and various bloodstains on the carpet (it was looking pretty certain I wouldn’t be getting my cleaning deposit back) I remembered that I had a small stash of weapons in the hall closet. You know, just some fun-size stuff—blades, a cosh, some spiked knuckles. I hadn’t ever had to use them in this place, although I’d been tempted by some people trying to get me to accept copies of The Watchtower, but that was no reason to leave weapons behind for some kid to find and brutalize his little sister with.

  The board that covered the hole where the Nightmare Child got in was still nailed in place and covered with duct tape. As I stood remembering that strange night, I heard something skitter across the floor of the closet. I stepped back and saw movement in a pile of old t-shirts I used for oil rags, so I kicked them out of the way. Something low and hairy scuttled out and darted past me.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Again?”

  I followed it toward the living room. “Darted” may not have been the most accurate word to describe the thing’s movement; now that it was out of the dark closet, and I could see it better in the gray afternoon light, I think “hobbling” might have been closer. It was one of the Nightmare Children, all right, but it didn’t look well. In fact, it looked terrible.

  My sense of alarm, whose needles had all redlined when I first saw it, began to ease back into more normal territory, because this thing wasn’t much of a threat at all. One of its legs was shrunken like a deflated balloon, and its baby fingers were no more than shriveled curls, as if the creature was slowly collapsing in on itself. I didn’t know how long the little horrors could live out of whatever netherworld or parallel dimension they came from, but this one clearly was nearing that limit.

  The Nightmare Child wobbled from closed door to closed window like a broken toy, then scuttled under the couch, but I wasn’t having that. The nasty little thing might have been all but dead, but I still didn’t relish the thought of getting down on the floor to try to yank it out with my bare hands or poke it out with a broom, so I hefted the couch up on end. The thing made another limping break for it, but wound up in a corner with nowhere else to go. As I walked toward it, it waved its useless leg at me as if asking for mercy, and it was so clearly not a threat that I almost felt sorry for it. Almost. Then I thought about the little bones burned in the fire upstairs, the innocent lives snuffed out so Baldur von Demonfucked and his SS fanboys could summon this thing into our world, and instead of finding something silver to dispatch it quickly, I lifted my foot and ground it into the carpet. Crunch. Pop. Splurt. Imagine crushing about five or six hamsters tied together like sausages, plus add the little whistling noises it made as it died. The Nightmare Child may have been scientifically and even theologically impossible, but it went out like regular old disgusting.

  When I was finished I took off my shoe off and sprayed the sole clean under the kitchen faucet, then wrote a note for the landlord and left it next to the splatter-with-three-and-a-half-legs.

  Dear Mr. Avilsi,

  I’ve moved out. Conditions were not optimum. You also might want to call an exterminator. This apartment appears to have nightmares.

  Yours,

  B. Dollar

  I finished up at the apartment, then drove down near Shoreline Park and hiked out across the wooden walkway to the ruined amusement area in the middle of the windblown bay. Sam hadn’t answered his phone or returned my messages since Heaven had let me walk, which I assumed meant he was stuck in Third-Way-Land, so I left a note for him on the funhouse mirror in the abandoned park. I didn’t want to make it too obvious, so I just wrote “Showtime, tomorrow. At your last stiff one.” I hoped he’d figure it out.

  Then I headed back downtown to the Compasses to buy a final drink for any friends who were there. Or maybe two. After all, my customized Matador was gone, Caz was still a prisoner, Halyna was dead, Oxana was flying back to Far Amazonia, and I almost certainly had a seat reserved on the next shuttle down to Hell’s intake ward. I honestly couldn’t think of a single reason not to spend my last few dollars and perhaps my final earthly hours on a potentially suicidal evening of getting blasted and telling lies with the old gang. Can you?

  Right. I didn’t think you could, either.

  thirty-eight

  showtime

  YOU MAY be wondering about the message I left for Sam on the Crazy Town mirror. “Showtime” was breakfast—a joke on “fast break,” as in basketball, and specifically the Lakers teams with Magic Johnson that had earned the “Showtime” nickname. “At your last stiff one” meant “at the site of your last drink,” and in Sam’s case it had been a bit spectacular, since it had killed him.

  I could spend a lot of time telling stories about Sam and drinking. Most of the stories are pretty funny, even some of the horrifying ones, but Sam wouldn’t approve. Not because it would embarrass him, but because he hates drinking stories. “It’s a kind of bragging,” I remember him saying once. “‘Oh, I’m such a badass because I turned myself into an animal and lived through it.’ It’s bullshit.” I think he also never wanted to listen to other people’s drinking stories because they just didn’t match up to his, and he didn’t want to repeat his own because he’d decided that whole part of his afterlife had been stupid and was best ignored.

  I didn’t know back then, but part of what was going on was his growing disgust with what he was expected to do as part of Heaven’s Counterstrike force. All I could see was a guy who meant the world to me systematically turning into someone I couldn’t even recognize. Don’t get me wrong—Sam wasn’t one of those angry drunks who becomes a monster, at least not the ordinary sort. He didn’t pick fights, which was good because he’s a big, strong dude. He didn’t rage at people, although there were definitely rages. But knowing him then was like watching somebody drown in slow motion. Every time I looked at him, the Sam I knew so well—the guy with the sense of humor like a prison shank, honed and sharpened until you could hardly even see it—seemed more unfamiliar. He looked like Sam Riley on the outside, but the real Sam, my friend, was slipping further and further away. Sometimes I thought I could still see the real one staring out from behind those bloodshot eyes like a prisoner.

  These were the days before we became heavenly advocates—I joined up because of Sam.

  We didn’t hang out at the Compasses in those days. We spent our time at another angel bar, a place called Barnstorm over in the Mayfield District. It wasn’t much like the Compasses at all: the owner was one of us, but most of the clientele were ordinary mortals. It was a big, loud place, and Sam and I drank there for a couple of years, continuing even after I left the Harps. We might have kept doing it for years more if it hadn’t been for Carlene. She was a waitress, and although quit
e astoundingly pretty, tall and red-haired, she was a human woman. The problem with her wasn’t that she was a waitress, either, but that she was a waitress at some other joint who only came to Barnstorm to drink. That was the problem: Carlene liked to drink, just like Sam did.

  Sam and Carlene hooked up, and for a long time things seemed to be going in the right direction. He didn’t tell her at first what he was, and after he fell hard for her he was scared to do it. He might have been right. She was a strange girl, country-raised somewhere out in the Central Valley, a trailer-park Baptist with a crazy mom who’d fed her kids Oreos for breakfast and potato chips with ketchup for dinner. Carlene had a history of falling for big cowboy-type guys—she said Sam was the first one who didn’t hit her. She also had a terrible self-image, because pretty as she was, what I found out later (and Sam found out sooner, of course) was that she was so pale as to be nearly albino. Her hair was so light that she dyed it red, and she even painted on eyebrows; otherwise, as she put it, “I’m just a ghost.” She was always referring to herself as a freak, and it didn’t make anyone smile indulgently when she said it, because you could tell she was serious. And all the drinking didn’t help. No, that’s bullshit. The drinking made everything much, much worse.

  I still don’t know exactly what happened on the night they broke up, but judging by how much booze Sam was putting down afterward, it must have been ugly, because in those days he had already become little more than a method for alcohol to move itself out of bottles and onto the sides of various roadways.

  Then Carlene went home and killed herself.

  And Sam got the case.

  Any sane angel would have asked to be let off—would have demanded it. At that point, however, my friend Sam was lots of things, but sane wasn’t one of them. Again, I don’t know what happened, because Sam would never talk about it, but it can’t have been good. When it was over, he came back to Barnstorm and started drinking again. It was something like what they say about Dylan Thomas’s last binge, I guess—Sam just called for Rudy the bartender to set up a stack of rye whiskeys on the bar, then he poured them down his throat, one after another. He’d been drinking since sundown, and it was one in the morning.