Happy Hour in Hell

by Tad Williams

  “Where did he go?”

  “That thing?” Temuel looked troubled. “It ran away from the light. It’s stronger than it looks. You should get away from here. I pointed the police in another direction, but they’ll be back.”

  I should have thanked him, but all I could think of to say was, “Do you know anything about that thing, as you call it?”

  He gave me a look that said nothing, absolutely nothing. “I can’t be here, but I couldn’t leave you to be attacked, either.” He quickly looked me up and down. “I must go now.”

  “We still seem to have a lot to talk about.”

  “Do you know the Museum of Industry?” he asked. Duh. Even tourists knew the place, and I’d been living in Jude for years and years. “Good. Meet me in front of it tomorrow night, by the fountains. Ten o’clock.” He hesitated, looking me over. “And take care, Bobby.” Then he walked away.

  I just watched him go. I was so tired and battered I could barely stand, but I did remember to retrieve my gun. One odd thing had struck me, though, and it was what I kept turning over and over as I limped home. The whole time he’d been here, Temuel had never once called me Doloriel, my true name. My angel name.

  With wounds to tend and all this crazy to deal with, I couldn’t even take the evening off—not yet. I made it back home with a few rest stops, ignoring the comments of strangers who assumed I was drunk. It could be that Temuel’s disco light show had hurt Smyler bad enough to keep him away a long time. Certainly I’d never heard him react to pain before, and that included the time I saw him burned to charcoal. But I couldn’t count on it. The horrible thing had beaten me badly. Only Temuel’s interference had saved my life, maybe even my soul. I couldn’t gamble that Smyler wouldn’t come back.

  Once inside my apartment I threw a few nights’ worth of toiletries and other emergency supplies into an old suitcase with a missing buckle. I left my real luggage in the tiny hall closet, since I didn’t want it to look like I’d moved out if anyone came looking for me, including my own side.

  Just to avoid familiar patterns while searching for a place to crash, I headed up the Woodside Highway and then a few miles south before turning east again toward a part of town I hardly ever visited. The Sand Hill corridor was one of the leading indicators of whether San Jude was in boom or bust mode; you could track the square footage costs like a local stock. And because it was ground zero for venture capital money, it was also ground zero for fairly expensive hotels, many with gorgeous views of the hills, which turned dry gold this time of year before the rains brought back the green. I still had Orban’s money in my pocket, and if I was going to Hell, I wouldn’t be taking any cash with me, so I guessed I might as well spend some on comfort now.

  The hotel I chose was a very chic little businessman’s special, and since I didn’t care about the view I got quite a nice suite for my several hundred dollars. What I really wanted was safety, and I was more likely to get it in a place like this, expenses be hanged. I had stopped at a service station to clean up a bit first, but I’m sure I still looked like someone who’d been mugged. To her credit, though, the young woman behind the counter didn’t even bat an eye and actually smiled when she handed me the change from my wad of bills. Inside, I raided the minibar, then took the longest, hottest bath I’ve ever managed, doing my best to scald away the worst of the aches, along with my compulsive shivering. I steamed long enough to be legally declared chowder, but the tremors wouldn’t entirely go away.

  At last, I climbed out, wrapped myself in a thick terrycloth robe with the hotel’s logo on the pocket, and started another drink. Believe it or not, it was purely for the pain, since it had become obvious to me that I was in one of those dark, miserable moods that even booze wasn’t going to change. I know, that sounds unAmerican, but there you go: I know myself, and I know how these bodies I wear tend to work.

  I was pretty sure who was behind all this, and it made me feel like I had something jagged lodged between my brain and the frontal bone of my skull. If it had been food in my stomach it would have been something indigestible like gravel or glass, but it was an idea, and that was a thousand times worse.

  Eligor. First he had set his horned Sumerian monster to chase me all over creation, long before I had ever touched his ex-girlfriend, just because he thought I had his damned angel feather. Then he had taken Caz away right in front of me, but not before making her tell me she didn’t love me. Now he had started all over, siccing his undead psycho-killer Smyler on me like a cat after a rat, so that I had to hide even from my own employers and friends. And he had Caz! In other words, Eligor owned the game, but he was still going to grind me into the dirt to show me how strong he was and how little I mattered. How could Hell itself be any worse? (Yes, it was a very stupid question, and I was soon going to find out just how stupid, but at the time I was half-lit and hurting.)

  If I had been wavering at all, I was now determined. I wasn’t going to sit around any more waiting for someone else to try to kill me, or frame me, or anything else. If the grand duke wanted to play for those kinds of stakes, I was going to do my best to take the game right to him.

  Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time even after I turned the lights out. I lay with my hands behind my head and watched the jittering light from the television make shadows on the ceiling while I thought about how much I hated Eligor the Horseman and how good it would feel to pull his scorched, worthless heart out of his chest and show it to him.

  When I did finally sleep I didn’t travel anywhere but deeper into that darkness. I woke with the faint taste of blood in my mouth.

  twelve

  an angel in my ear

  WHEN I got up it was past noon, and I could hardly believe any of the previous night had happened. I mean, it just seemed too much like a dream—my boss the archangel telling me he was going to help me get into Hell to save my demon girlfriend. But your pal Bobby Dollar never lets facts or good sense stand in the way of a suicidally foolish course of action, so after I’d caffeinated my body to a functional level, I started thinking through the arrangements I’d have to make if I was actually going to do this thing.

  I was on indefinite leave from work and didn’t need to let Heaven know where I’d be, so that bit was all right. Besides, I was going to trust Temuel to run that interference for me if necessary, since he knew a lot more about Heaven than I did. I didn’t want the folks at the Compasses asking too many questions, though, so I called both Monica and young Clarence to tell them I was going out of town. I hinted I wanted to get lost for a while, just think things through, and that I’d get in touch when I got back.

  While I was on the phone with them I had a look through the latest stuff Fatback had sent me, but it was mostly a rehash of what I already knew, the original murders in the 1970s and then Smyler’s Greatest Hits tour when he came back and we finally (as I’d thought) finished him. There was nothing about him more recent than a year or so old, and the only new information consisted of a few rumors about his first return culled from various spooky internet backwaters. None of it advanced my knowledge one damn bit about why he was now trying to perforate me or why he wouldn’t stay dead.

  There wasn’t any need to pack to go to Hell, since I wasn’t going to be able to carry any actual baggage. Only my soul was going, not my Earth body, though I did have to think of something to do with that body while I wasn’t using it. I’d put the first and last down on my current apartment, but the landlord was a nosy older guy, and I could just imagine him letting himself in to “inspect,” finding my apparently lifeless corpse, and then calling the police. Even if I got back before somebody decided to cremate my remains, it was still going to be hard to explain. What I needed to do was stash my body where it would be safe until I could get back into it.

  Here my options were limited. It wasn’t that the body itself needed any care. It was one of Heaven’s special production numbers, and would stay alive and motionless and perfectly healthy for as lo
ng as I was out of it. Where to leave it, though, was the hard part: I wouldn’t know what was happening to it, and I wouldn’t be able to return to it suddenly even if I did. I needed a protector—a Renfield, if you know what I mean, somebody to protect my physical shell while I wasn’t using it.

  At last, and extremely grudgingly, I came up with a name. As with most of the other ideas I’d been having lately, it was so damn awful that I wanted to kick myself all the way around San Judas, but after wrestling with the problem all afternoon it was still the best I could come up with. Which will, unfortunately, give you an idea of the quality of my options.

  My candidate picked up the phone and dropped it on the floor twice before he managed to say, “Yo. G-Man here.”

  I took a deep breath, still wondering if I should just hang up and leave my body in the middle of the road somewhere—surely it would be safer, because if there was a more annoying, less competent person on the round green Earth than Garcia “G-Man” Windhover, I had yet to meet him. I became acquainted with G-Man while trying to figure out how his girlfriend’s late grandfather had been involved with Sam’s Third Way (although I hadn’t known Sam was part of it at the time). Unfortunately, young Garcia had proved harder to get rid of afterward than a tar baby in a Velcro romper. Believe me, he was literally the last person I wanted to involve, but love and desperation often make for strange bedfellows.

  “Hey, G-Man,” I said. “Bobby Dollar here.”

  “Bobby! Long time no see, brah! Whassup?” He had fantasies that he was my driver or my operative or something. I’d done my best to convince him otherwise, but it was like talking to a crazy person. What the fuck am I talking about? It was talking to a crazy person. But G-Man had access to an otherwise empty house, so pride (and good sense) would have to be swallowed.

  I made an arrangement to drop by Posie’s grandfather’s place that afternoon and ascertained that G-Man would be there and Posie wouldn’t, which was good. She wasn’t any dumber than her boyfriend (I’m not sure that’s scientifically possible) but she wasn’t really a good security risk. I was stuck with G-Man already, since Clarence had dragged him along to the Shootout at Shoreline Park, but there was no reason to add more bodies to this clusterfuck.

  I made a few more arrangements, then called Sam on the number he’d given me and left a message, explaining what I was doing. It never hurts to have one competent person know what’s going on, and I was clearly short-handed in the intelligent accomplices department. It wasn’t that I needed Sam to do anything specific, but I was just sunk so deep in lies, complexities, and other people’s agendas that I wanted someone who’d be on my side when it all went tits up, as things usually did. Sam might have lied to me about a bunch of things, but as far as I could tell, he was still my friend.

  Next I drove down to the Palo Alto district to Edward Walker’s big old house, where his granddaughter and her idiot boyfriend were currently camped out. G-Man opened the door, dressed like Hip-Hop’s Worst Nightmare. I’ve got nothing against white kids who want to dress like black kids—street culture is like that, especially appealing to haves who want to look like have-nots—but Garcia Windhover had a really striking absence of good taste. He was draped in oversized chains and necklaces like he’d ordered “Rap Star” from a novelty costume catalog. He wore a black San Judas Cougars minor league baseball cap turned sideways (I’m sure he pretended the “C” was for “Crips”) and the waistband of his pants was around his thighs.

  I left his fist-bump hanging as I walked into the house. “Is there an upstairs guest room?” I asked him.

  “Whoa. You need a secret hideout?”

  “Something like that. Is there one here?”

  Turned out that G-Man didn’t really know much about the house except for the kitchen, the living room (where the television was) and the downstairs room where he and Posie slept. We finally located an upstairs bedroom that suited my purposes, tricked out for guests but clearly not used in a while. I couldn’t very well tell G-Man that I needed to leave my regular body here while I visited Hell, so I spun him a ridiculous story about how I was going to be testing a top-secret drug, but that I couldn’t do it in the government lab because my employers were afraid there was a spy in the facility. Garcia Windhover flopped back and forth between believing I was a private detective or a government agent, but either way he didn’t seem to think this latest thing was beyond belief, which just goes to show you how scary his ignorance was. I mean, if it was you, wouldn’t you at least want a better reason why somebody was going to hide in your house while deep in an apparent coma? Of course you would. And that’s why you will never be the G-Man.

  His only concern seemed to be that his girlfriend might come in and find me there. “I mean, Posie’s cool, man, you know she’s cool, but she’s like a girl, you know? I mean, dangerous shit just freaks her right out. If I wasn’t here, she might, like, call the police or something.”

  Which, I had to admit, was a genuine concern. “Don’t worry, G-Man,” I said, soothing him with his self-selected nickname. “I can be under the bed. We’ll just drape a sheet over me to keep off the dust and the spiders, and I’ll be good to go.”

  “Whoa. You’re just going to lie under the bed up here for a couple of weeks? Spooky.” But that seemed to have addressed his major concern. “I’ll make sure nobody bothers you, Bobby man.”

  “Just make sure that nobody includes you,” I said. “Remember, this is a heavy-duty government medical experiment. If you mess with my body, or tell anyone I’m here, you’re risking my life and yours . . . as well as the safety of the Free World.”

  Sorry, but I just couldn’t help fucking with him. You’d probably have done it too.

  G-Man’s eyes lit up. “Aye-aye, dude!” he said, saluting so hard he knocked off his sideways baseball cap.

  The Museum of Industry is a big old place in the Belmont neighborhood west of the Camino Real in North Jude. It used to be the Phagan Mansion back in the days when Belmont was on the rural outskirts of San Judas and people like the Phagans made so much money that they could barely spend it fast enough to keep from drowning in it. A later generation realized the mansion was worth more as a taxable donation, I guess, and gave it to the city.

  The museum was made up of what had been the main house, a sprawling three-story structure probably easy to get lost in even when it was a house, and two wings that had been built later. The three parts of the museum were divided into different historical aspects of San Judas and California. One wing focused on the original native inhabitants and the earliest European explorers and settlements; the main house, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when San Judas took off and grew large; then the modern Silicon Valley era in the other wing. It was a popular game among local wags to come up with names for the three sections and their eras—“Ships, Shops, and Chips” was a popular one and, of course, the less politically correct “Injuns, Engines, and Multi-User Dungeons.” (The last is a computer game thing, I think, but if you want to know for sure, you’ll have to ask someone who’s never had sex.)

  The fountain in front had actually been salvaged from a derelict, early twentieth-century office building that had stood on another part of the property. When they tore the office building down, some local artist had rescued the maze of copper piping from the fire sprinkler system, then rebuilt part of it in the open space in front of the museum. It was as if the walls of the office building were still there but invisible; the pipes formed empty geometric shapes and drizzled water from sprinkler heads on every level. (It always reminded me of one of those Visible Man models where you can see the circulatory system through the clear plastic skin.)

  I was looking up at the fountain when someone approached me from behind. I was a little nervous, what with my run-ins with Smyler lately, and I must have spun around quite quickly. The skinny young African-American kid raised his hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Just wanted to know if you could tell me the time.”

 
; I looked at my watch. “Ten o’clock on the dot.” But when I looked back at him he was smiling in a sort of odd way. “Something wrong?”

  “It’s me, Bobby. Temuel.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You don’t get out of Heaven much, do you?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re having too much fun with disguises.”

  He looked a little hurt. “I’m being careful. You want me to be careful, don’t you? You don’t want everyone to know what we’re doing, do you?”

  Why is almost everybody I know so touchy? “No, no, of course not.”

  “Good.” He looked around. We seemed to be the only people in the vicinity. The Mule reached up and made a Zipper appear in the air. (If I haven’t explained recently, these are what we use to step Outside, which means outside of Time itself. That’s where we do our job, at least the part where we defend the souls of recently dead customers from the spin-doctoring of Hell.) He stepped into it, then beckoned for me to follow.

  Unlike most of what I encounter Outside (because I’m usually at deathbeds or accident scenes) the view inside this Zipper wasn’t really any different than the view outside. Temuel and I were still alone, the museum was still closed, and it was still night. The only thing different was that the water from the fountain was frozen, thousands of individual drops arrested in midair. It would have been interesting to look at them up close, but my archangel had other ideas.

  He reached up and plucked something out of nowhere. When he held it out to me, it was only a spark of light on his palm.

  “This is Lameh,” he said. “She’s a guardian.” That was another kind of angel, the kind that spends a lifetime with a human and records everything he or she does and says and thinks, then advocates like me use the information they’ve collected to defend the soul at judgement.