by Tad Williams
It turned out the killer wasn’t even staying in San Judas itself, but in an abandoned junkyard down in Alviso that had been red-tagged by the EPA for toxins and was awaiting Superfund cleanup. What did Smyler care if the place would have killed anyone else? He was already dead. He wasn’t even living in the deserted office; instead, he’d made a burrow for himself in the piles of wrecked autos and discarded appliances, nesting down in the middle like a rat.
The Harps was the first unit to reach him, which was okay with us. Call it the sin of pride, but there wasn’t a CU who didn’t want to be the ones to get the bastard. Smyler wouldn’t come out, even though we had him surrounded. Finally we tossed a couple of incendiaries in after him. That worked. Maybe he didn’t want to die the same way twice, I don’t know. Anyway, when the flames started, he came out quick enough.
Did I say he was like a rat? More like a spider, at least when he came scuttling out of a hidden hole in the mountain of twisted metal and jumped down before we could even lift our guns and aim, his baggy, hooded black sweatshirt flapping and that ugly, long weapon in his hand. Smyler jumped on an angel named Zoniel so quick that he managed to stab him three times before Sam hit him with the butt of his assault rifle and knocked him off. Zoniel was so badly wounded that he had to get a new body, but Smyler got Reheboth even worse, putting that wicked, four-edged blade right through his eye and into his brain. Reb got another body, too, but he also retired from Counterstrike soon afterward and got a job upstairs. Said it wasn’t the getting stabbed so much, but that face-to-face moment with the guy just before the knife went in. Said he’d never seen anyone so happy.
The Highest Himself only knows how many more of us the little shit might have damaged, or how many of us might have gone down from friendly fire, because he was horribly fast and everybody was shooting wildly. But someone got lucky and raked him with an M4 full of silver rounds and took half his leg off. Smyler started trying to crawl away, leaving a trail of blood like a snail’s track, and at first I thought I was hearing his death-gasps, but after a moment I realized he was laughing in a terrible, dry, whispering voice. Laughing.
I was close enough to put a dozen bullets into his head, and I was just about to do that when Leo stopped me.
“No,” he said. “We’re not sending this one back.”
I didn’t really get what he meant, and I was even more confused when he emptied a clip into Smyler’s legs. Blood and bone splinters and ruined flesh flew everywhere, but the horrible thing still wouldn’t stop laughing. Leo stepped up, kicked away the long pointy thing lying near the killer’s hand, and then put his boot under Smyler’s gut and turned him over.
“Good God Almighty,” Sam said. I probably said something similar.
We’d both seen a lot of ugly stuff, but Smyler was worse than anything, somehow. He—it—whatever, his skin was gray and pulled tight over his bones like a shriveled corpse, mottled with dark purple-blue patches too regular to be bruises. His jaw stuck out like a piranha’s, so that even with his mouth closed you could see his bottom teeth, deformed little things like seed pearls, a perfectly straight line of them. But his eyes were the worst. His eyes were all black, except for a little sliver of bloodshot white at the edges when he looked around, like he was doing now. The rest of the Harps, the ones that weren’t tending Reb and Zone, gathered around, and as he looked at us, he opened his mouth and started giggling again. The inside of his mouth . . . well, it looked rotten. That’s all I can tell you. Black and gray and oozing and rotten, except for little bright spots of blood.
“Angels,” he said in his scratchy voice. “It love you! All for you! All for you!”
Sam was ready to shoot him in the head that second, wipe that horror away in a storm of bullets, but Leo yelled, “No! Stand down, soldier!” Leo waved his phone—they were bigger in those days. “I’ve called the bagmen.”
I’d never heard the expression, and at first I thought he meant the medics. He’d called them too, to treat our wounded, but they weren’t the people he was talking about.
“Just keep him here,” Leo said. “But don’t touch him. We’re not sending him back.”
“But Leo,” Sam said quietly, “the Convention—!”
“I don’t give a fuck about the Convention.”
And I suddenly understood, or at least some of it. See, the Tartarean Convention says that in conflicts on Earth we can do anything to the demons’ physical bodies, just like they can to ours, but when their—or our—bodies die, all bets are off, and everything returns to status quo ante. Which means that the souls go back to their respective abodes, Hell or Heaven, and whatever happens next is up to the authorities of those places. Which means you can kill a demon’s body and send its soul back to Hell, but you can’t do anything to prevent its masters from popping it right back into a new demon body. And as far as I knew then, that wasn’t just the Convention’s rules, that was the reality—we couldn’t do anything to a demon’s actual soul any more than they could do anything to ours.
I was about to learn differently.
The bagmen showed up even before the medics did. A sparkling line appeared in the air, just like when we open a Zipper to go Outside and meet the souls of the newly dead. Three guys stepped through. Three angels, I’m assuming, but I couldn’t swear to it because they were wearing something like hazmat suits, though not the kind you buy here on Earth. The faces behind those masks were blurs of shifting light. The bagmen didn’t say a thing, just looked to Leo. He pointed to Smyler where he lay. The little horror was still wheezing and giggling quietly, but you could tell he was bleeding out. One of the bagmen produced something from out of thin air, or at least that’s how it looked, a billowing thing like a parachute made from pulsing light, and then shook it out over the horrible thing on the ground. At first it just lay on him like a sheet, twitching as he moved beneath it, then it began to shrink until Smyler was nothing but a glowing mummy, too tightly wrapped even to struggle.
“Step back, please,” one of the bagmen said, then he and his companions produced the strangest guns I’d ever seen, about the size of Mac-11s but with a shiny bell like a trumpet’s instead of a barrel. When they pulled the triggers, fire vomited out of the ends of their weapons and engulfed Smyler, flame so white and hot it might have come from the inside of a star. We all moved back rapidly—way back—but I still got my eyebrows singed.
In the scant seconds before the bundle on the ground shriveled into smoking ash, I swear I could still hear that awful laugh. Then it was over. The ashes glowed, and a few dark wisps blew up into the air like spiderwebs. The wind carried them away.
The bagmen didn’t say anything else, just reopened their sparkling gash in the air and disappeared. Leo took the four-edged blade, maybe as an ugly souvenir, maybe for some other reason I didn’t and don’t understand. Then we went home.
“I don’t get it,” said Clarence. He looked like I felt—queasy and depressed. “What . . . did they do?”
“To Smyler? I’m not exactly sure. Leo didn’t like to talk about it. But as far as I can tell they bagged him in something that rank-and-file angels like you and me don’t know about, something that kept his soul from returning to Hell when he died. Then they burned him alive.”
“That’s horrible!”
“You wouldn’t think that if you saw him . . . saw it. Whatever he was. But the thing that’s bothering me is that I saw him again last night. It was Smyler who stabbed Walter Sanders. Even though I’m pretty sure it was me he wanted.”
“But how could it have been? You said this demon’s soul was burned. With his body.”
“I don’t know. But I know one thing, and that’s what’s got me worried. No ordinary demon in Hell could have brought Smyler back. I mean, Leo said that thing was gone forever, and I could tell he believed it. I think this must be Eligor’s work.” I paused. Clarence knew about the Grand Duke of Hell and the monstrous ghallu he’d sent after me, although he didn’t know the truth about Caz, or how
personal the quarrel between me and the grand duke had become. “Let’s just say Eligor doesn’t like me. Not at all. And I’m guessing only somebody as powerful as him could bring that nasty thing back from the dead a second time.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
I reached for the rest of my Bloody Mary, distaste overcome by other needs. I drained it and wiped my mouth. “Hell if I know, kid.”
five
hog caller
ACTUALLY, I had one idea, but I couldn’t do anything about it until midnight. To keep my head straight, I sat up listening to Thelonious Monk and his quartet playing at Carnegie Hall, over and over. It didn’t really work, because I kept wondering how perfect music like that could happen in such a fucked-up universe. When the clock finally struck twelve I turned down Coltrane mid-solo and called my favorite hog.
He’s only half a hog, really. My friend Fatback (which I never call him to his face) is a were-hog named George Noceda. During the day, man with pig’s brain; after the witching hour, pig with man’s brain. No, ladies, that doesn’t make him just like all us other guys. Not fair.
“Bobby!” His voice was still gruff from the transformation. I should have given him a few more minutes, but I was desperate. “What can I do you for?”
“Information, fast as you can get it for me. It might keep me from being turned into a human kebab.”
“So what else is new? One of these days you’re going to say, ‘Take your time, George. There’s no hurry,’ and I’ll know it’s truly the End of Days.”
“Don’t make jokes, buddy. Not tonight.” When stuff starts to slide—and the important stuff in my life was sliding like a jackknifed panel truck—Bobby D’s world can turn into a bad horror movie quick, stuff that would make even a were-hog faint. “I need information on a dead guy. Well, a supposedly dead guy.” I ran down what I already knew about my latest worry, both the original charmer and Smyler v.2, plus what little I’d been able to see of v.3. “Can you find me some information fast?”
From the snort you might have thought he was changing back to pigbrain again, but actually it’s a lot louder and less pleasant when it really happens. “Yeah, sure, Mr. Patience. Just let me get some slops down. I’m starving.”
“Doesn’t the . . . the other version of you eat?”
“Yeah, but not enough to keep eight hundred pounds of pork happy after I change. But I’ll be right on it in half an hour or so, man.”
It’s always strange to be talking to a pig in the middle of the night, but as swine go, Fatback is definitely one of the best. “Thanks. Call me if you get anything interesting, otherwise just send it all to my phone.”
“No problem, Mr. B. If you’re trying to find a dead guy, though, maybe you should talk to some other dead people. You know a few, right?”
“Know a few? They’re my bread and butter, Georgie. But I’ve got to get some shut-eye first. I feel like shit.”
“Count your blessings, Bobby. That’s what I sleep in.”
So the next day, when the sun was far enough up the sky that it didn’t give me a headache, I went to see the Sollyhulls.
The Sollyhull Sisters are a pair of middle-aged Englishwomen who died in a fire half a century ago—almost certainly one they’d set to get rid of their parents. Because of this, they didn’t go to Heaven, of course, but for some reason they haven’t gone to Hell, either. Still, the sisters are very nice, if a bit screwloose, so I try not to think too much about the arson part of their bio. I really needed some expert help to find out how Smyler had come back, and the Sollyhulls liked me and were always willing to chat. My world is full of folks like that—in-betweeners who don’t quite belong to one side or the other. (My piggy friend Fatback didn’t really count that way, because he hated Hell so badly for the were-pig thing that he spent all his time getting up in their shit, research-wise.)
I caught up with the sisters at the latest diner they were haunting. They preferred tearooms, but apparently San Judas was short on good ones. I took a table in the back where it wouldn’t be so obvious that I was talking to invisible people—invisible to everyone but me, that is. As always, I had brought the sisters a gift, so after the two ghost-ladies had finished telling me about the fun they’d had teasing some paranormal investigators who had started hanging around their previous diner, I lifted a small, gift-wrapped box onto the table. “Here, I brought you a little something,” I said, and took the lid off the tin.
“What is it?” Doris asked. “Oh, Bobby, you darling—pastilles! Betty, violet pastilles!”
Betty leaned forward for a long sniff. “Ah, lovely. The French kind! Ooh, I loved these! Much better than those Whatsit Brothers ones our gran used to give us.”
I let the sisters enjoy the scent for a while. That was about all they could do, but judging by their noises of rapture, that was plenty. Then I asked them if they knew anything about a revenant named Smyler, and told them what I knew of his history—at least, through his first two deaths.
“Don’t think so, dear,” Betty said after some consideration. “There was a fellow they used to call The Smiler, but that was years ago in England and he was a tall, tall fellow. Lovely teeth, too. Dead since Queen Victoria’s day, everyone said, but he had a set of pearlies you could read by on a dark night. Still, he’d done his victims with arsenic, hadn’t he?”
“Cyanide, dear.”
“Right you are, our Doris. Cyanide. It wouldn’t be him, would it?”
I said I didn’t think so.
“Then there was Moaning Sally, but she was a girl, wasn’t she? She stabbed her lover and some of his family with one of those bayonets. Quite a lot of stabbing, altogether. They said she killed herself in her prison cell, then came back and hung about the street near St. Chad’s in Birmingham, but that’s all part of that awful ring road now, isn’t it, Doris?”
“The Queensway. Dreadful thing.”
“So it probably wouldn’t be her, not all the way over here in America. Wait, you said it was a fella you were looking for, didn’t you?”
I could see they weren’t going to be able to help me much with Smyler himself, so I tried a more general question. “But how would something like that happen at all? Have you ever heard of somebody dying once, then coming back, then being exorcised or whatever you’d call it . . . ?”
“Watch your language, dear,” said Doris primly. “We’ve got feelings, you know.”
“Well, let’s just say ‘dispatched’ a second time and then coming back again. Have you ever heard of anything like that? How could that happen?”
“To be honest, love, I’ve never heard of anything like it. Have you, Betty?”
“No, dear. And I feel terrible after you bought us these lovely pastilles, and we’ve had such a nice visit. But no. I’m afraid you’ll have to find somebody a bit more qualified to answer that. Have you tried the Broken Boy yet?”
I hadn’t, and I didn’t really want to, but I was beginning to think I might not have a choice. That’s the problem with ghosts. Sometimes they’re a lot of help, sometimes worse than useless, but it always takes a long time to find out, because most of them like to talk and they all tend to be a bit loopy.
I thanked the ladies and walked out past other customers and the waitresses, none of whom had come anywhere near me during my entire visit, not even to see if I wanted to order something. Clearly, the Sollyhulls had already begun to freak out the regulars, and I wondered how long it would be until the paranormal fanboys were onto this place as well. I had a worried feeling the sisters might be developing a taste for notoriety.
One of the many problems with visiting the Broken Boy was that, unlike the sisters, he didn’t give out information in return for a cheap box of hard candy. In fact, last time I heard, he was charging two thousand dollars a session, and my bank account was pretty much tapped out. Heaven doesn’t pay us a whole lot. Then again, we don’t have to put anything aside for retirement.
These are the jokes, people. If you ca
me to laugh, you might as well start now.
Anyway, if I wanted to visit the Broken Boy I needed to raise some cash, and I didn’t have much in the way of options. I’d been thinking about putting my Matador in long-term storage and trying to scrape up the money somehow to buy that ’69 Super Sport from Orban, but since I didn’t play the lottery I had trouble imagining a scenario where that could happen without the sudden appearance of Santa Claus. Now I was beginning to think I might have to sell the Matador outright. I loved that car and had spent several years finding parts and getting it refurbished, not to mention putting up with endless shit from Sam and Monica and the rest of my friends because of it. It had to be worth at least twenty thousand—there were only a few of them left. Of course, the money might save my immortal soul, which I was also rather fond of. It was a tough call.
I took a walk along the bay to think it over, and by the time I was finished I was at the Salt Piers where Orban has his gun shop and armory complex. I found him in the big garage, smoking his pipe and watching a bunch of his burly, tattooed henchmen use a chain hoist to lower a massive steel plate into an Escalade, presumably to keep the dumbasses who would eventually ride in the back seat from shooting the driver by accident.
Orban cocked a shaggy eyebrow at me. “What do you want, Dollar?” he growled in that mouth-full-of-rocks accent he’s never shaken in all these years. “You come to pay me finally for warehousing your piece of shit candy car?” Orban’s not a big guy, but there’s something about him that makes me very glad we get along.