by Tad Williams
“He don’t have no friends that old.” Clink.
“Look, you can go ask first if you want. Tell him it’s Bobby Dollar. He knows me.”
The kid gave me a longer look, then scooped up his pennies and stood, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his hoodie, his shoulders up against the wind. March in San Francisco is kind of like December anywhere else. He just stood there, waiting, until I figured out what was going on. I pulled the five out of my pocket and held it out. When he still didn’t come nearer, I set it down on an old plastic paint bucket, put a rock on it to keep it from blowing away, and stepped back. He took it cautiously, watching me the whole time like a cat accepting food from strangers, then turned and disappeared up an incline beside the freeway, leaving me in the cold shadows. I sat on the bucket to wait, but it must have been a slow day at the Broken Boy’s office because the kid was back in less than ten minutes.
“C’mon,” he said, jerking his head to show me which direction we were going. It was a bit of an obstacle course, uphill through dirt and ancient ice plant spiked with plastic bags and food wrappers, then through a culvert. I had to get down on my knees to get through, and couldn’t help but reflect on what a great target for a mugging I was, but there just wasn’t any other way to see the Broken Boy. It’s not like he has a phone and takes reservations.
I followed the kid through this obstacle course long enough that if I’d been trying to figure out where we were, I probably would have given up. We emerged at last in an even darker, bleaker, and more windswept area beneath another part of the freeway, outside what had once been some kind of maintenance door, its little safety cage still intact, although the light bulb it protected had long since disappeared. It looked rusted shut, but swung open surprisingly easily, revealing a set of steps leading down. The kid produced a flashlight from his hoodie and led me into the depths like a midget Virgil.
The maintenance tunnel was cluttered with old rusted breaker boxes jammed with grubby wires, dumped there when their day had ended. A few more turns and then the kid stepped aside and waved for me to walk past him. As soon as I did, he turned his flashlight off and everything went dark.
“Who goes there?” asked a voice that could not possibly have belonged to anyone past puberty. “Friend or foe?”
“What is this, a road company of Peter Pan? It’s me, Bobby Dollar. Tell the Boy I’m here.”
One by one lights began to flick on, each one a flashlight held by a kid no older than the one who had led me. It really looked like they were on a camping trip, getting ready to tell ghost stories. There was even a campfire, of a sort—a hibachi in the middle of the room, full of hot coals. The little barbecue was mostly covered with an iron lid, only little bits of red light leaking out to splash the grimy cement walls. One of the junior soldiers went and kicked the lid off, and all of a sudden I could see properly. Not that there was much to be seen, just the half-dozen kids and the damp, ugly nexus of concrete tunnels.
“I hope there’s enough ventilation here for that barbecue,” I said. “Otherwise you and the Boy are going to wind up dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Don’t worry about us.” The tallest of the kids stepped forward. He was missing an eye, or so I guessed, because he had a bandana tied over one socket, which made it look more than ever like Captain Hook should be making his appearance soon. “How do we know it’s really you?”
“Other than the fact that I found the place? I don’t know. Try asking me my mother’s maiden name.”
One-Eye frowned. “We don’t know that.”
“Neither do I, so we’re even. Look, I brought money, and I’m in a hurry. Can I please see the Boy?”
“Hey,” said one of the other kids in a lazy voice I was meant to hear, “if he’s got money, why don’t we just take it off him?”
“Shut the fuck up,” said One-Eye quickly. “You don’t know what you’re messing with.” He turned back to me. “I’ll see if he’s ready.”
Something whispered through the room then, a scratchy little sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck get up and look around. It took me a moment to make out the words: “No, it’s all right. Bring him in.” It sounded like a ghost, and not the healthy, lively kind like the Sollyhull Sisters, either.
He was sitting in the corner of a room off the main tunnel. I’d actually gone past his door. The only light was from a dry-cell emergency lantern near him, which cast his distorted shadow high across the walls. He barely filled the wheelchair. He’d lost weight since the last time I’d seen him, and although I was certain only that the Boy was somewhere between nine and fourteen years old, I did know that he shouldn’t be getting smaller at his age.
The Broken Boy swung his head to the side so he could see me better. Just the angle at which his neck bent was painful to see. Cross Stephen Hawking with a singed spider and you have some idea. Except for his skin, which is pink and healthy as the hide of a newborn mouse. And his eyes, which are even more alive, alive-oh. “Hi, Bobby. Good to see you.” His voice was softer than I remembered, more air, less weight. “Long time.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ve been out of the Harps for a while now, you know.”
“That didn’t stop you the last time.”
Didn’t really want to get into that. Tell you another time. “Can you help me out, BB?” I suddenly felt bad. “Are you up to it?”
“Me?” The head lolled, the chest heaved. He was laughing. Quiet as it was in that cement tomb under the freeway, I couldn’t actually hear it for a bit. “Never better. Run faster, jump higher. Satisfaction guaranteed.” Then those bright eyes fixed on me again. “You don’t have to worry about me, Bobby.” A sentence that could just as easily have been finished, “because there’s nothing you can do.” Which was true: the gray areas between my team, the other team, and ordinary human folk are full of people like the Broken Boy, growing and dying like weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk.
“Okay, but I’ll have to explain for a bit first . . .”
“Money?”
I dug it out of my pocket, took off the rubber band. “I remember the drill. Nothing bigger than twenties. Your helpers can handle them up to make ’em look less new. They look like they’d be good at it.”
For a moment, as I held out the cash, his Tyrannosaurus arms almost seemed to be trying to reach for it out of old reflex, but then he called One-Eye (who was apparently named Tico) to take it from me and put it in the box. Tico swaggered out as if he’d made all that money himself. The Boy watched him go.
“They’re good kids,” he said from the vast height of the two or three years he had on any of them. “They take care of me.” And for just a moment I could hear the child he might have been if his gifts or his past had been different; the lonely, sick kid who wished he could go out and play with the others. Kind of like getting punched in the stomach, that was.
A moment later Tico returned with two of the other kids and began to get the Broken Boy ready. As they strapped him to his apparatus, which was really not much more than a rusty old home fitness gym they must have dismantled up in the real world and put back together down here, I found myself wondering for a moment about where they had all come from, what strange tangle of stories had brought them here together. Boy was the strangest of all, of course, but I knew almost as little about him as I did about any of his pint-sized minions. Even Fatback hadn’t been able to track down his real name. By the time any of us heard of him, he was already this tiny, messed-up kid with a very strong gift, selling that gift to support himself and a rotating gang of urchins.
Of course, no gift comes without a price tag, and the one the Boy paid was pretty steep.
First the kids wound his limbs and torso in elastic bandages, the kind weekend athletes use on a sprained ankle, until he looked like a joke hospital patient from a comedy sketch. Next they tied him to the exercise machine with surgical tubing. I was pleased to see they did it gently, with the reverence of priests preparing a holy shrine. The
y left slack in each connection except for the one around his forehead. The Boy’s eyes followed them, showing white at the edges, but I could tell he was calm. After all, he’d been through all of this more than a few times already.
“Hey, Bobby,” he said, “Kayshawn, the one who brought you in from the checkpoint?” His voice was so quiet I had to move forward to hear him. “He came to me because he wanted me to teach him how to dance. He heard of me, see, but he thought I was ‘Breakin’ Boy.’”
“Breakin’ Two, Ectoplasmic Boogaloo,” I said, apropos of nothing except the vague anxiety I always felt watching the Boy do his thing.
Tico came in from the other room with a can of Sterno burning on an old china plate. “But you don’t dance so good, huh, boss?”
“You’re tripping,” said the Boy. “I dance really, really good. But none of you can see me doing it.”
Tico squinted his single eye as he poured something powdery from his fist into the Sterno, then set the plate down on the floor in front of the exercise machine, making the Broken Boy look more than ever like some distorted heathen idol. The can began to spark and smoke a little, then the orange flame began to cool into blue. Tico backed away and crouched against the wall with the others, a rapt little congregation.
“Tell me what you want to know, Bobby,” the Boy said. “Then I’ll show you my dance.”
I’d seen it. It was pretty impressive. Two thousand bucks’ worth? That depended on what I walked out of here knowing. So I told him about Smyler and how I’d watched the murderer burned away to carbon in a magical angel net, and how more recently he’d tried several times to stab me.
“Strange one,” said the Boy slowly. The flame was entirely blue now, the room cold to the eye as a 1940s gangster film. “Strange . . .” Other than the flicker above the Sterno can, the only movement was the Boy’s head as it pulled in short jerks against the tubing that held him, as if his body had decided to escape while his brain was busy talking. “Strange to think . . . who’s buying? Who sells . . . ?” He trailed off. His eyes had rolled up beneath his lids. “She makes seashores with a sea shell,” he said then, as calmly as discussing the weather, but the way he spoke made him seem very far away. “She masks. No—he must . . . ? Mastema? Makers with more of the tiny tiger bright light. Paper white light. White when you . . . while you—”
Then the Broken Boy gasped, and everything between his nose and his shoulders torqued violently to one side, as though struck by some huge, invisible fist. I had seen what happened to him when he plied his talent, but this was something different. For a moment afterward he just hung quivering in his harness of tubes like an exhausted butterfly halfway out of the chrysalis. Tico and one of the others actually scuttled forward, but a quiet yet distinct hiss from the Boy sent them back to their places. The blue flame wavered at their approach and retreat. By the time it had settled, the Boy had found his voice again.
“Sorry, Bobby,” he said, each word a dry scrape. “Can’t do it for you. Something . . .” He worked for air. “Something won’t let me. Something stronger. A lot stronger . . . than me.”
Which sucked, because it pretty much proved that Eligor or someone else near the top of the food chain was definitely after me. Could it be someone I hadn’t suspected? That fat demonic bastard Prince Sitri had certainly enjoyed the opportunity to yank my chain and his rival Eligor’s at the same time. But if he was the one who’d sent Smyler after me, this was a lot more complicated than I’d guessed. No, the odds were strong on the grand duke himself, Caz’s former boyfriend and current captor. And if the Boy couldn’t give me any information about Smyler, that meant the undead little fucker was going to keep coming after me, and I’d have to keep improvising. How many times could I get lucky?
If Smyler was off-limits, then I had to concede that the best defense would be a good offense, as sports journalists like to say.
“You still owe me an answer,” I told the Broken Boy.
“Really? After I just got the shit kicked out of me for messing in your business?” He looked like a plucked chicken in a pair of Garanimals jeans and a sweatshirt, but I was out of options. I had to be hard.
“You owe me an answer, kid. I can’t afford to pay you two thousand bucks just to admire your decor.”
He laughed. A little bubble of spit remained on his lower lip. “You’re a nasty man, Bobby.” He craned his head to see me better. I moved to make it easier. “What do you want to know?”
I looked around at the bright eyes and dirty faces of the Boy’s followers. It was like having an audience of raccoons. “Send your friends away. This one’s not for public consumption.”
The Boy must have made some gesture, because Tico got up and led the others out. BB had them well trained, I had to admit it. Pretty good for a sixty-pound bundle of rags that couldn’t stand by itself. When they were gone, I stepped closer. Even under all this concrete I didn’t want to say anything too loudly. I don’t know why—I had talked about it in the park with Sam without worrying. But suddenly I felt something heavy on me, the weight of superstition or just the realization of what I was actually intending.
“I need to know how to get into Hell.”
ten
a mild, gray man
IT WAS taking the Boy longer than it usually did. Maybe I’d tired him out with the first attempt, maybe it was just a hard thing to discover, but he was laboring like a truck going uphill, and I could tell he still wasn’t anywhere near where he needed to be. At first he had simply slipped out of normal conversation like a patient going under anesthetic, flowing seamlessly into what sounded like free-verse nonsense, but that had been the last comfortable thing I’d seen. He very quickly began hitching and writhing within his bonds and now seemed to be deep in some kind of seizure, his wasted limbs rigid, his teeth locked in a skull-like grin, grunts of pain puffing out his cheeks in regular rhythm.
I actually heard the first bone snap, a terrible muffled crack as his contortions put too much stress on his fragile structure. What was worse was that he didn’t even scream, as though such a brutal rupture of tissue and bone barely climbed to his attention, but only shut his eyes, slowly, like someone pulling down the shutters in front of a downtown store.
It had been bad the last time I visited him, and it was bad this time but in a wholly different way. I don’t know where the Boy goes or what he does—his dance is a complete mystery to me—but I can promise you no explorer of jungles or mountaintops works harder or suffers more. I sat and watched him for what must have been half an hour as he slowly twisted and curled into terrible shapes, the rubber tubes stretching with him so that at times they looked like the external arteries and veins of some completely alien creature. During that time I heard three more bones break. There might have been others I didn’t hear. And every moment I watched I felt like a monster.
Like any decent person, when I first met him I had tried to get him off the streets and into some kind of facility, but he wouldn’t do it. “I was in one of those places once, and I’m never going back,” he had told me. “Never.” He told me that if anyone tried to force him, he had just enough control of his arms to be able to jam one of his fists into his mouth and choke himself to death, and that’s what he’d do. I believed him.
But of course, nobody could watch what he was doing to himself, or what I was indirectly doing to him, and feel comfortable. Like I said, there are a lot of people that live in the gray areas, the between areas. And when you go to those places, it’s hard to know what rules apply.
He finally went slack and stayed that way. I went to disconnect him from his apparatus, but he shook his head and whispered something. I couldn’t hear him so I bent close. His breath was surprisingly sweet, like cinnamon.
“Get . . .Tico . . .”
I called to Boy’s helpers, and they trotted in like a pack of efficient ER nurses, gently untangling the tubes and disconnecting him, pushing up his sleeves and pant legs to reach the knots. As they rubbed life back
into his pale pink limbs Tico came forward with a hypodermic, but the Broken Boy waggled his head.
“Bobby . . .” I got down close so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice. “They built a gate . . . just for the emperor . . .”
For a moment I thought he was babbling again, but he kept talking and I began to understand. I crouched by him, straining for whispers deep underground, as he told me about the Neronian Bridge.
When Tico had sedated him, the urchins carefully lifted the Boy down from the exercise station and onto a blanket so they could carry him off to his bed. Tico moved up close behind me, letting me know that it was time for me to leave.
The little kid named Kayshawn was back in the main chamber, waiting to guide me out. I looked back as I reached the corridor. Tico was staring at me, arms crossed, frowning past his piratical bandana. “You made him dance twice,” he said. “Don’t want to see you back for a long time.”
I don’t particularly like being told off by eleven year olds, but he was right. I shrugged and followed Kayshawn back toward the daylight.
On the way back down the peninsula I was no longer in the mood for anything quite so brisk and bustling as Elmore James, so I put on Chet In Paris. Baker’s aching blue notes were about right for the mood of someone who’d just spent a lot of money to learn a complicated and extremely painful way to commit suicide. I rolled up the windows and let “Alone Together” fill the car like a remembered perfume.
So was I really going to try to make a trip into Hell? It was worse than suicide, of course, like sending a belly dancer into a Mujahideen rape camp. And even assuming I could get into the place, how could any disguise possibly hold up long enough to get me close to Eligor . . . and Caz? Because from what I knew of Hell, the high rollers lived in ways that even Jude’s Young Republicans could never hope to match, each one with his own little fiefdom, fortress, private army. A wig and a fake mustache were hardly going to get me through all that.