The Dirty Streets of Heaven bd-1

by Tad Williams

  “It’s not like that!” The barrel of Clarence’s needle gun wavered, but he kept it on Sam. “We’re angels! We work for God!”

  “Well, see, that’s something I’m not as sure about as you, son. All that stuff you used to ask me, ‘Why this, why that…?’ Well, I asked those questions for real. In fact, I’m not sure if we’re working for God the Highest or for somebody else entirely.”

  “That’s enough,” Clarence said. “I don’t need to hear any more blasphemy, Sam. I’m sorry-you’re a good man, I really believe that, but you’re no angel. Not anymore. It’s time for you to come back to Heaven. Maybe you can get some help…”

  I had distanced myself from Sam, in part just to make it harder for Clarence to shoot both of us, and as I moved closer to the kid I said, “Not yet, please. Not until I find out what happened to the souls they took. Did it work, Sam? Did you find a place to hide them where they’d be safe?”

  “That was the hard part,” he admitted. “We couldn’t stash souls on Earth without somebody noticing, but the Tartarean Convention set things up so that at the very least, a high-ranking angel and an equally high-ranking demon had to agree on making any new territory outside the Earthly bounds, no matter how small. My Third Way bosses had other recruits like me, and they were ready to fit us all out with fake identities and fake bodies. I probably should have just invented a name, but I wanted to pay back Dr. Habari, at least in a small way…” He trailed off. “Anyway, apparently the Third Way folk got a tip that Grand Duke Eligor might make a deal-for reasons of his own that I don’t know. And he did.”

  As Sam had been talking, I moved a little closer to Clarence, and now I quietly slipped my empty gun out of my belt.

  “…so because of that deal, we had our site,” Sam finished. “It exists. It’s real!”

  I punctuated this fascinating revelation by hitting Clarence hard on the base of the skull with my gun butt. The kid didn’t even make a noise, just dropped like a sack of apples. I didn’t want to kill him, although I had no doubt that if I did he’d be resurrected again post-haste by our bosses, but I wasn’t going to stand there and see Sam get dragged off either. At least not until I’d heard the rest of the story. I took the smooth little needle gun out of Clarence’s hand, then turned back to my oldest friend.

  “Okay, Sammy,” I said. “It’s just the two of us now. Convince me.”

  “Convince you of what? That it works? That’s easy. Follow me.”

  I stopped to check Clarence’s breathing, then turned him onto his side so if he puked he wouldn’t choke on it. Not a good way to go, even if you’re getting shunted into another body afterward.

  “How hard did you hit him?” Sam asked as we made our way out past the outdoor pools.

  “He’ll be out for awhile, but I don’t think the damage will be permanent.”

  “Glad to hear it. I kind of liked him. At first I thought he was too obvious an outsider to really be a plant.”

  “They double-bluffed you,” I said. “Temuel got me that way, too. Does that mean he was in on Clarence?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the Mule didn’t find out that Clarence was actually working for some of the higher-ups until after he asked you to keep an eye on the kid. It’s always wheels within wheels, B.”

  “Heaven is one sneaky bastard, all right.”

  We fell silent as we made our way up the Grand Promenade toward Merryland and its ruined attractions, as if we were two souls traveling not to some new third destination but floating through good old Limbo, out of time, out of space. I wondered if Sam and I would ever walk side by side this way again. And no more meals at Boxer Rebellion? Really?

  I had no idea what I was going to do next. I didn’t really want to think about it.

  The moon was still hanging around, silvering the rusted remains of the coiling Super Snake and the collapsed stalls of various attractions. This time, with nothing trying to suck my head off, I was able to appreciate the weirdness of the place. You notice I didn’t say, “the weird beauty of the place.” Shoreline Park might be many things, but beautiful is not one of them. But it smelled better out here at the north end, so either the sea breezes kept the air cleaner on this side of the island or the derelicts couldn’t be bothered to come all this way just to take a dump. Either way it made a pleasant change.

  The peeling facade of some kind of game booth grinned as we passed. It might have been a clown’s head once, but now it was only two smears for eyes and a rictus smile of which only lipless teeth remained.

  “So if you didn’t know it was me posing as Habari,” Sam said abruptly, “how did you know about the cemetery?”

  “I got some help from Fatback. He told me that Habari had died, and when he told me Habari was buried in the very graveyard you used to take me to all the time-well, it seemed like a pretty long coincidence. Plus, I’d already picked up on at least one of the lies you told me.”

  “There were a bunch. Which one?”

  That made me feel sadder than I would have expected. “When you came to my room at the Ralston last night. You said you called Alice, and she told you the room number.”

  “But I did call her. I’m not stupid, Bobby.”

  “Yeah, but she gave you the wrong room number. She told me about it. She was feeling bad because she assumed you wouldn’t be able to find me. But of course, you only asked her for show. Kephas or whoever told you where I was, right?”

  He only nodded, looking ahead now.

  I was putting things together now. I had guessed that the angelic powers Habari had demonstrated to Edward Walker meant that one of the key players in the whole thing was probably local, since Habari the Magian worked out of the storefront on East Charleston. There just aren’t that many folks with haloes in San Judas, so I had begun to think it almost had to be someone I knew, as proved by the way Habari had reacted when we’d passed each other in our cars. He had recognized me immediately, even through my cuts, bruises, and bandages. But I’d gotten too fancy and instead of looking right next to me for Habari’s identity I’d made the leap to wondering whether Leo the Loke might have faked his own death.

  “What about the bodies, Sam?”

  He turned, startled. “What bodies?”

  “The ones you and the other Magians must have worn. After all, you couldn’t ordinarily pass for an African clergyman, Sam.”

  “The Third Way gave us those-they’re a little less functional, but a lot easier to enter and leave than the regular, earthbound bodies Heaven hands out. I’ve got the Habari body stashed away in a safehouse, but I can’t give you the location, Bobby, or the body. I’ll need everything I can trade to plead down my sentence with the bosses. Hey, maybe I’ll get off with a couple of million years in the fiery pit.”

  Now I felt queasy. He knew as well as I did that it wouldn’t be anything like that simple. How could I have been so badly fooled by my best friend? And what was I going to do about him? “So now, after landing me in the shit, you’re going to sell out the Third Way too?”

  “Shit, Bobby, that was supposed to be a joke. No, the truth is, I’m not giving you the safehouse and the Habari body because I want the Third Way to have a chance to clean it up and hide their tracks from the Upstairs boys. I never wanted this to happen to you, but I believe in what they’re doing. I’m not giving the Ephorate anything.”

  “What did you think that day you bumped into me in front of the Magian Society office?”

  Sam didn’t look around. “Startled the crap out of me.”

  “I should have recognized you by your ride.”

  Now he did turn. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t driving my own car.”

  “Yeah, but no other angel would be seen dead in an old beater like that. You never cared about cars, Sam.”

  Crazy Town, the funhouse, stood just in front of us. It actually still had a roof and most of its walls, but that was about it. The plaster of Paris spooks and clowns had eroded from the walls, leaving only spectral outli
nes and the occasional disembodied foot or hand or ear. What remained had been decorated with Day-Glo spray paints in a variety of runic designs that meant something only to the taggers themselves, but now even the graffiti was fading, rapidly becoming another piece of the past. As we crunched toward the building over a litter of broken bottles, I was glad I hadn’t managed to kick my shoes off while I was in the water with the ghallu. The wounds the creature had given me were beginning to heal thanks to my angelic constitution, but I was still injured, aching, bloody, and very, very depressed.

  “It’s in here,” he said. “The door to the Third Way.”

  I frowned. “There’s only one door? You have to come out here each time?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, the physics of the thing-if it even is physics and not just some crazy Heaven magic-is weird. There’s not that many spots you can get into this new place we’ve made. One of those spots is here, but it’s not the only one. There used to be another door or whatever you’d call it in the Magian Society office, which is one of the reasons I had to go back that time you saw me. I had to shut it down before you or anyone else found it.”

  “And if Clarence was tracking your movements, that’s probably how he figured out about you and Habari,” I said. “I talked to you both about who I’d seen, and if he knew you had gone there about the same time I did-well, if he or his superiors had any suspicions, that would have sure helped confirm them.”

  He hesitated. “Do you really want to see this, B? It might…change things for you.”

  I stood, trying to figure out what he was really saying. “It might,” I said at last. “But then again, it might not.”

  He smiled, and I saw once more the familiar Sam, the Sam I’d known for so long. “Look, I just want to say that it really felt like shit having to lie to you all this time, Bobby. But except for the Third Way stuff, everything else I’ve ever told you-everything else we’ve been through-was real. The truth.”

  “I know that, Sam. Or at least I’m willing to believe it.” I gestured with the needle gun. “Now show me your secret. And please don’t do anything stupid.”

  He turned on his flashlight and led me into the abandoned funhouse. We didn’t go far, just down some steps to the hall of mirrors. Because they were metal, not glass, most of the mirrors were still in their frames, but the distorted images that had amused so many generations of park visitors were almost completely obliterated by rust and scratches.

  “Third mirror from the left,” Sam said.

  “And straight on ’til morning. Show me.”

  “I’m going to reach into my pocket. Do me a favor and don’t dart me, okay?” He produced a faint shimmer of something. It could have been a tangle of spiderwebs glistening in the moon’s misty glow, but the only light was the dim flashlight in Sam’s other hand. He opened his palm and the shimmer spread over it, then kindled into a light so bright that I blinked and stepped back.

  “Don’t!” I said, pointing with the gun.

  “No worries.” Sam held up his blazing hand and drew a line with his index finger down the air in front of the mirror. A Zipper appeared, or something that would have been a Zipper had it been more sharply defined; a cloud of radiance, a miniature nebula appearing three feet off the ground in the middle of Crazy Town. “Kephas gave this gauntlet to me,” he explained. “It’s how I could take a living mortal like Edward Walker Outside, through a Zipper, and manage a lot of other stuff. Duplicates the powers of the higher angels, I guess. I don’t know what it is or how it works-I just call it the God Glove.” Sam gestured again, and the misty light dispersed, leaving a soft-focus hole in the center of the mirror. I could see objects and colors there, like one of those little scenes inside a sugary Easter egg. “I’ll step back,” he said. “I swear I won’t try anything. Just look.”

  I trusted him, but of course I also didn’t trust him, so as I leaned forward I kept the dart gun pointing in Sam’s general direction. It wasn’t like looking at an image. What I saw had depth, another entire world beyond the scuffed, rusted mirror. I saw oak and willow trees and a stream and, when I bent a little closer, a ramshackle Victorian house perched on a hill in the distance, at the end of a long dirt road. I fancied I could even see a couple of tiny figures standing on the porch, perhaps looking back at me. I wondered if one of them was Edward Lynes Walker. “Is that it?” I said, unexpectedly touched by the modesty of the rustic scene. “That’s your great alternative to Heaven and Hell? The Little House on the Prairie?”

  “That’s the beginning,” Sam said. “But it’ll get bigger. It will get more real. There’s only a few hundred souls there now but it will grow, even without me. Kephas recruited lots of other angels. We may even know some of them.”

  I filed that thought away for later. “And you really think this is going to be better than what we’ve already got?”

  “If we can make it that way, yes.” He sounded sincere-almost stupidly sincere. “You know…you could be there too, Bobby. I know you’ve thought about the same things I have. I know you get tired of all the secrets and the other nasty shit we’ve had to do.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I straightened up. “But I’m not quite ready to drink that Kool-Aid. Not yet.” I was bone-weary, and Clarence would be regaining consciousness soon. “Go on. Get out of here, Sam.”

  He stared. “Wait-you mean…?”

  “Yes, I mean. Get the hell out of here. Go join your crazy friends and build your little afterlife commune. Better you than me. I’ll tell them you got away.”

  “They’ll never believe you.”

  “That I screwed up again? They’ll fall over themselves in their hurry to believe that.” I winced a little at the thought of what General Karael was going to make of my newest dazzling failure. “Go on! I’m not going to beg you.”

  But instead of stepping through the misty portal, he turned and came toward me. For a moment I was terrified he was going to hug me. I’m not afraid of being hugged, mind you-not too much-but the idea of Sam doing the hugging was like the idea of your parents making love: it might actually happen occasionally, but you didn’t want to be a witness. Luckily he stopped a little out of embracing range. “Hold on,” he said. “I have to give you something before you go. Now, don’t get your undies in a bunch, B, but I have to reach into your pocket.”

  “My pocket?” I began, but he had already slipped the glowing, God-Gloved hand into my jacket pocket: I could feel it against me like a hot stone. A moment later he straightened up again and transferred whatever he’d found to his other hand and held it out.

  For several seconds I couldn’t do anything but stare. It was an astonishing thing, as amazing in its own way as anything else he had shown me. It was a golden feather-the feather, obviously-but it was just as clearly not of this world. It glowed and sparkled, not like a window display of jewelry, but with an inner light that made it seem more real, more present than anything else around, most definitely including me, Sam, and the Door Into Thirdwaysville.

  “What…?” Okay, it wasn’t my sharpest moment. “How did that get there?”

  “It’s been there all along-sort of.” He laughed. “You remember that night with the lady who drove into the bay? Clarence’s first night? When you got into a fight with Howlingfell?”

  “Some fight,” I said. “I stomped him like a grape.”

  “Well, when Grasswax was pulling Howlingfell off you, I saw him slip something into your pocket. I couldn’t imagine what a prosecutor would be planting on you, and I knew Howlingfell worked for Eligor, the other party in-” he indicated the rustic view, “-my little project. I thought it might be some kind of frame-up or something. I only realized when I touched it what it was, so I decided to hide it. With this.” He lifted the God Glove and displayed it like he was modeling a Lady Bulova on a shopping channel. “I made a little piece of Outside right there in your pocket while I was dusting you off, and I put the feather in it. It’s been there all along, but nobody could reach it because it al
so wasn’t there, if you know what I mean. Sorry if it got you into trouble, but it was a spur of the moment improvisation.”

  Which must have been why my weird friend Foxy could smell something that wasn’t there. “So Grasswax was actually telling the truth,” I said. “At least as he knew it. That’s one for the books, huh?” I reached out and carefully took the smoldering golden thing from Sam. It lay in my palm with no weight at all, but it did not waver or move even as I swayed my hand from side to side. It was hard to look at anything else. “And do you know who this belongs to? Who made the deal with Eligor?”

  “Kephas, as far as I know-whoever or whatever that is.” He gestured for me to take it. “You can do whatever you want with it. Give it to our bosses, if it will keep you out of trouble.”

  “But if Eligor kept it to blackmail this Kephas, our bosses could probably trace it.”

  Sam shrugged. “It doesn’t matter-our thing is too big now. It’s already rolling. Me, Kephas, we could lose dozens more and the idea would still go on.”

  I thought about it. “Put it back in my pocket. With the God-Glove. I don’t want to have to hide it somewhere ordinary.”

  “You sure?” He lifted it in his glowing hand. I felt the warmth through my coat as he put it back.

  “Okay. Now go. Get out of here.”

  He turned toward the funhouse mirror, then paused, looking at me over his shoulder. I couldn’t read his expression. “Stay in touch, Bobby.”

  “How?” I’d almost said “Why?” but although I still didn’t quite know how I felt about him and what he’d done, I knew I’d miss him.

  “We’ll figure something out.” And then he stepped into the mirror. The hole closed behind him, so I didn’t get a chance to watch him go, but I’m guessing he walked up that long road like a man finally going home.