by Tad Williams
He seemed less than impressed. He was a big, handsome kid and looked and acted like he usually got his way by one means or another. “You’re shitting me, right? I don’t believe in any of that crap.”
“Well, it believes in you, Brady, so it doesn’t matter much what you think.”
“Fuck that. I’m leaving.” And he turned around and stumbled off into the darkness. Death usually sobered people right up but there were exceptions. I wasn’t too worried about him getting away, though: One thing about being Outside is that it isn’t a place, it’s the timelessness that belongs to a place-an eternal moment, I guess you’d say. It’s tied to the people who are physically in that moment, observing it, so the farther away you get from what you could see during that original moment, the less real it is, until eventually you’re left in the dark with a few familiar sounds. Then, after the sounds go quiet, you usually find yourself hurrying back toward the main bit of the moment again. See, there’s nowhere else to go. Otherwise, all the angels and devils would be popping in and out of Outside like it was a Star Trek beam-me-up device, spying on each other through the Zippers. It doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, what I’m telling you is that Brady Tillotson wasn’t going anywhere.
His guardian showed up a couple of moments later, a fizz of light named Gefen. Rotwood the prosecutor showed up shortly thereafter, a demon so old and gnarled he might have been painting Hell when the Devil himself first moved in. I’d appeared against Rotwood before-he knew his stuff and some of the judges seemed to like his familiarity with the rules, but there were scarier prosecutors out there.
“This won’t be easy,” said Gefen quietly as the prosecutor conferenced with his own infernal version of a guardian angel.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because our client is a shit.”
It was only a short time longer in that timeless place before the judge flared into our presence. It was my old buddy Xathanatron, the Principality who had sent Silvia Martino to Heaven the night Clarence had first tagged along.
Angel Doloriel, it said to me, You Are Again Summoned To The Celestial City. There was a pause, then: It Seems I Must Add “Secretary To The Advocate” To The List Of My Titles.
This was a joke, boss-angel style, and so I laughed in a way I hoped sounded at least slightly sincere. “That’s very funny, Your Honor. Thank you for passing the message along. I hope we won’t keep you long tonight.”
It Is All The Same-The Interruption Of My Contemplation Has Already Occurred. I couldn’t help noticing he still had that charming, democratic touch.
I finished huddling with Gefen just as my dead student stumbled back into our presence, toga flapping like the sails on the Marie Celeste. He looked a little more sober now but just as pissed off. The guardian angel’s full report was longer than his initial remark but came to the same thing: Brady Tillotson was a drunkard, a bully, and as close to being a date-rapist as you can get without actually stepping over the line and using drugs or gross physical force, but certainly the kind of guy who liked his women too drunk to understand the issues of consent properly. He cheated on his studies-he was a starting linebacker on the football team and people were always around to “help” him pass his classes-he stole from friends, and was also one of those people who even years out of high school still got a real kick out of bullying other students. In other words, a shit. What made my job even tougher, though, was that he wasn’t cooperating.
“I don’t think any of this is right,” he kept saying way too loudly. “Who do I complain to? I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t fucking believe in any of it. It’s crap. There aren’t any angels. It’s a lie.”
The judge didn’t say anything about this unending whine of complaint, but it couldn’t have been helping. I did everything I could to come up with mitigating circumstances-Brady Tillotson’s youth, his parents’ divorce, the fact that junior high school and high school coaches and teachers had never disciplined him because he was a star athlete-but I was not at my best because I’d taken a bit of a dislike to the kid myself. He would definitely be getting a long stretch in Purgatory, but I have to admit I thought he deserved it.
Near the end, when we’d summed up and Xathanatron had dropped into a glittering silence to consider the arguments, Brady suddenly turned to me, and for the first time all the anger and resistance had left his face. Post-mortem sobriety had caught up with him
“Oh my God,” he said. “This is real. This is real! I’m dead!”
“I’m afraid so,” I told him. “But things can get better than this….”
“What’s going on here? Why are you…? Oh, Jesus-shit, I’m never going to see my mom again.” His face went slack with grief, and a tear welled up and trembled on his lower lid. “Never…”
Xathanatron spoke. The Sentence Is Damnation, was all the judge said, then vanished.
Rotwood clapped his withered hands together once in pleasure before he also vanished. A vortex began to swirl around Brady Tillotson and although he fought against it, already he was beginning to be pulled apart and sucked downward.
“No!” he cried. His eyes were terrible. “Don’t let them. Please, please, please! This isn’t supposed to happen-you were supposed to save me! Aaah! Huuhhhh! Aaaaaaaah!” Brady’s shrieks kept changing pitch because his face was melting, warping obscenely as he took on the dreadful shape he would wear Down There forever. Then he was gone.
I drove very slowly back across the city, stopping on the way at a bar I didn’t remember ever seeing before and couldn’t have found again if I had to. I downed two fast drinks, then realized I probably shouldn’t push my luck, even though I badly needed to get smashed, and get that way very soon. Too many nasty people were looking for me to risk ending up in a drunk tank or stumbling around in some parking lot in the dark. I got back into my car, stopped at a liquor store on the Camino Real and bought a bottle of vodka and a bag of ice, then headed back to my motel.
Before I got too obliterated I called in to the office and got Alice’s voice mail.
“Tell the bosses that Bobby Dollar isn’t coming into the Celestial City tonight,” I instructed the silence. “Because I don’t want to have to listen to any more lectures about doing my job. Tell them that. And tell them if they really want me they can come get me. Otherwise I’m going to stay here and keep doing what I’m doing, the best way I know how.”
I was halfway through the bottle before I stopped hearing that college kid screaming like a burning child as he tumbled down into the darkness.
seventeen
economical with the truth
I got up the next morning with a head that felt like the ball from some brutal medieval game, the kind where at least a couple of peasants died every time. But even the horrible throbbing couldn’t make me forget the not-very-bright thing I’d done the night before-basically told Heaven to go fuck itself. So why wasn’t I standing up in front of a celestial firing squad or whatever it was that happened to bad angels?
I toyed with the hope that Alice had tried to save me by not passing my message along, but I couldn’t make myself believe it. Another possibility was that up there in the timelessness of Heaven they just hadn’t yet got around to pressing the “Blow Up Bobby Dollar” button, but as far as I’d seen, Heaven didn’t tend to wait around before meting out corrections and general holy vengeance.
So I was left with the two most likely answers: Heaven didn’t care that much what trouble I got into, so Heaven was going to wait and let me hang myself, or Heaven actually approved of what I was doing and, presumably, whatever I was going to do in the near future. Which would have been pretty funny because I didn’t have even a clue as to what I should do next.
I put on a pair of sunglasses so I could hobble to the motel manager’s office and get myself a couple of cups of cheap coffee to take back to the curtained, comfortable darkness of my room. A few aspirin, a few more aspirin, then I was almost ready to face the day and what it might bring. First, t
hough, I had some self-defense business to take care of. I’d lost my Smith amp; Wesson in Five Page Mill, and this didn’t seem like a good time to be walking around unarmed.
Orban the gunsmith picked up on about the tenth ring. “Speak.” He has an eastern European accent and the rasp of a man with a porcupine lodged in his throat. He told me once he was shot in the neck during the First World War and it’s never been right since. I believed him. You would, too.
“Bobby Dollar here. I need some silver.”
“Hmmm.” A noise like someone dragging a stick along a picket fence. “Bullets or something else?”
“Bullets. But I need to talk to you about it. You around today?”
“Two o’clock,” he said, then hung up.
Orban’s factory was out at the end of Pier 22-one of the Salt Piers. Thirty or forty years ago the southern end of the port of San Judas was owned by the Leslie Salt Company. They harvested salt from the bay water and piled it into mountains to dry, a range of miniature Alps looming over the not-quite-Tyrolean splendors of Belle Haven and Ravenswood. The salt-harvesting people changed to a different technique in the nineties that used less space, so they sold off a bunch of the land at the southernmost end. Most of it became a nature preserve, but some of the piers where they used to load the salt onto container ships were repurposed into shops and apartments. The dingiest of them at one end were sold as live/work spaces. A lot of artists got in with grants from the city, but a few small manufacturers like Orban got in too. He wanted somewhere he could make noise at any hour of the day or night.
He made a lot of it, too. Today I could hear his machinery and the clangs of hammers all the way out at the entrance to the cracked asphalt expanse of the parking lot, which was mostly full this time of the day, but would be nearly as empty as the Gobi desert by midnight. Orban had created quite a thriving little concern here at the end of Pier 22, a collection of long, low buildings full of metal-grinding and bending and riveting machinery and God knew what else, manned largely by black and Hispanic workers. At the near end stood another set of benches set up for handwork, where lots of white guys with beards, who looked like they should be out with the anti-government militia on weekends, sat fiddling with various bits of guns-measuring, filing, polishing. Out of sight at the far end was the room full of sand-filled buckets that Orban used as a firing range. Beyond that, outside, was what the gunsmith called his veranda, a metal platform that stuck out over the water. He kept a couple of chairs out there so he could sit and look across the bay all the way to the Newark Ferry Port, atmosphere permitting.
The master gunmaker himself had a short grizzled beard and hair that grew naturally in a thick monk’s tonsure. Just looking at him you’d guess a fit sixty-five years old, but according to him, he’d been around about five centuries longer than that. Orban got on the wrong side of Heaven back in the fifteenth century because of something that happened at the siege of Constantinople, (or so he’d told me one night over a couple of glasses of strong red wine, while we waited for one of his assistants to finishing customizing some weaponry for me). Since Heaven would never take him back, he said, and he didn’t want to go to Hell, he had simply decided not to die.
Don’t bother to ask-I’m just telling you what he told me.
Orban had his back to me but looked up as I reached the makeshift counter, as though he had actually heard me over the clanging, slamming din. He was wearing some special eyepieces that made him look like a robot crab. He slid them back onto his forehead and stood up, which didn’t take long. He’s not very tall.
“What do you want, Dollar? Make it fast-I have real customers to take care of, you know.”
“Yeah, nice to see you too. I need some help and advice. Oh, and bullets. Silver bullets.” I told him what was after me and everything I knew about it, but he shook his head the whole time I was talking like I was saying it all wrong. “What?” I asked. “Silver no good against one of those?”
“Only if it’s special.”
“Special how? Blessed by a priest?”
He made a face like he’d bitten a lemon. “Priests no good. This thing chasing you is older than the Jews, let alone the bloody Christians. Come.”
I kept asking him questions as he led me across the fluorescent-lit expanse of the long, extremely noisy room, but he couldn’t define “special”, except that he couldn’t supply it. That gave me a chill, and I hadn’t been particulary warm before: Orban’s place doesn’t have a secondary ceiling beneath the roof, just a fretwork of beams, so it was cold in there most of the year. Maybe that’s why the gunsmith still looked pretty good for five hundred plus.
He stopped to discuss my order with a swarthy guy in an apron. “How much you want?” Orban asked me. “Going to cost ten dollars per piece just for the silver-it’s high now. Give you a hundred at fifteen a round complete-that’s a good price for custom work.”
Man, I thought, saving my life was going to be expensive, and Heaven didn’t pay us much. “Then give me a hundred of ’em, I guess. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.” Orban always treated me fairly, but I still wasn’t thrilled. The new ammunition was going to blow a large wad of my emergency funds, and I was pretty sure my bosses weren’t going to expense me for the extra motels and silver monster-killers.
Once Orban finished going over the technical specs with his assistant he led me out to his rusty veranda. It was mid-afternoon, and the water was full of working vessels, most of them small since we were a good distance south of the working part of the port, and most of what surrounded us was shallow water and estuaries. “Sit,” he said, pointing to one of the rickety chairs and lifting a bottle of wine off the huge wooden wire spool he used for a table. “You want some Bull’s Blood?”
I usually liked the stuff just fine, but not today. In fact, just the thought after the previous night’s binge made something bulge painfully behind my eyeballs. “No, thanks. But don’t let me stop you.”
He shrugged and poured himself a full tumbler. “So you have got yourself in some serious shit,” he said after he’d taken a swallow. “That’s no good, that horned fellow. I knew a man at Adrianople who saw one take a bad priest. Not a pretty sight. The man who saw it, his hair turned white all over.”
“Do you know anything about it that might help me?”
Orban ran his fingers through his beard. “The horns say it is from India or Mesopotamia-they loved their bulls and buffalo, those old river people, and that’s the kind of dark spirits they call up. But I heard the Egyptians knew this ghallu bastard and thought it was their god Set. They couldn’t kill it either.” He frowned. “Tell you truth, Dollar, I don’t think I ever heard about someone killing one.”
“Thanks. You’re really cheering me up,” I said. “Did you bring me back here just for a pep talk, or did you have some other help to offer? You said the silver bullets needed to be special if there’s going to be any chance-special, but not blessed. Special how?”
“Don’t know.” He shrugged again and took a long swallow of the Egri. “Just know what I read in manuals.” I should mention that manuals of the sort Orban referred to are pretty obscure, since as far as I know, things like where to shoot a chimaera and the best ammunition to use on various sorts of undead don’t make it into the standard Smith amp; Wesson user’s guides. “But I’ll do some thinking, and I’ll tell you if I come up with anything.”
“Great. Okay, here’s a weird one. Anything to be done when facing off against a Grand Duke of Hell?”
“Say your prayers.” He snorted. “You sure don’t kill one of those-not with any weapon I work on, anyway. Just make them angry.” Orban took a long drink. “Do you want to wait for your bullets? It will take most of the day.”
Disappointed, I got up. I hadn’t really counted on Orban having anything useful in the way of advice, but I had still hoped. “Nah. Can’t wait. Too many irons in the fire.” I thought about where I was. “Not literally, of course. I mean I’ve got a lot of th
ings to do.”
He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and gave me a dry look. “I understand metaphor, Dollar.”
“Sorry.” Sometimes it’s hard to forget that even the really old ones have been living in the present as long as the rest of us have, it’s just a smaller percentage of their total experience. I shook his hand, which was as rough as his voice. “Do you want me to give you a deposit?”
He made a face. “Normally, I say no. You are good for the money. But with a ghallu after you…?” He nodded. “Yeah, give me check for half when we go back inside.” But he still wore an odd expression, and it took him a moment to speak again. “I thought you were out of this kind of business, Dollar. It’s been a long time since those days. I thought you were advocate now-nice safe job. Why is something like this after you?”
“Somebody said something that wasn’t true to somebody who isn’t nice. That’s basically it.”
“Keep your eyes open, Dollar,” Orban called after me as I left. “You always were the kind of stupid bastard that attracted trouble.” But he said it in a nice way.
All right, all right, I admit I haven’t been completely honest about everything. I haven’t lied-I’m an angel, remember? — but I have been, in the famous words of a British politician, a bit economical with the truth. Yes, I did have another job before I became a heavenly advocate. That’s where I met Sam. Orban, too. And my old mentor, Leo? That was where he did his mentoring. But to explain I have to go back a bit.
Like most other angels (or at least most of those I’ve talked to) I first woke to the light of the Celestial City. In a way I was born there-not as an infant, knowing nothing, but as something else entirely, an angelic being with the general but non-specific knowledge of a human adult. I wish I could tell you now exactly what I did and didn’t know at first, but those memories have been muddied and confused by all that’s happened since.