Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “Maybe if the whole natural order exists due to some design an order of magnitude higher than our current understanding,” Tommo said, “but it’s operating by rubber stamp these days, the Angels get popped out according to the wider natural order but Demons are popped out according to some opposing force, which makes it more difficult for them.”

  Barry raised his eyebrows. “Not bad, Tommo,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

  “You’ve been paying attention,” Seam congratulated him.

  Tommo shifted uncomfortably. “I guess this whole thing has hit me harder than I would have thought,” he said, and chuckled. “Not that I ever would have thought something like this would happen … but you know, my mum’s a bit of a God-botherer and I had a lot of stuff drummed into me at home and at school,” Seam and Barry both nodded – they remembered childhood visits to Tommo’s place all too well. “I still don’t know what I should believe here.”

  “Don’t believe anything more or less than you already did,” Barry suggested. “I’m not here to tell you there is or isn’t a God, or that any of the religions – organised or otherwise – are right or wrong. I’m just saying that the atheists have a point too. The laws of physics and the facts of the physical world around us don’t cancel out stuff like faith, any more than scripture cancels out something like evolution or gravity.”

  “Plenty of religious people reckon it does, though,” Tommo commented darkly.

  Barry shrugged. “I’m not responsible for what a bunch of wilfully ignorant idiots choose to believe,” he said, “and I’m not responsible for the greedy people in power who choose to encourage them and profit from their ignorance. It’s easy to forget how much humanity has actually improved, in terms of violence and superstition and fear, since it’s always the negative stuff that gets the most attention, for various reasons.”

  “Fuck one goat,” Seam said.

  Barry grinned and sat back. “Fuck one goat,” he agreed.

  “Um, so Nails…” Little Phil said, and gestured inquiringly at the pints.

  “Wait,” Barry said, and closed his eyes for a moment, passing his hands slowly over the collection of glasses. Then he opened his eyes and smiled again. “Okay,” he said, “go.”

  Hesitantly, several of the Sheepbreezers leaned forward and picked up glasses of what still looked like water. Seam picked one up as well, and – as most of his teammates did – sniffed it cautiously. It didn’t have any discernible smell.

  He took a sip. Opposite him, Little Phil did the same – and spluttered indignantly.

  “It’s still bloody water!”

  “I told you,” Barry said, visibly struggling to hold back his laughter, “I’m not responsible for what people believe.”

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  From the desk of Alf Haussman

  The Law Firm of Kettmer, Haussman and La Searle

  XXXXXXX, California XXXXX

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

  Thursday 6.7.’90

  To whom it may concern

  Troy ripped the page out, scrunched it into a ball and threw it over his shoulder. He wasn’t going to go out sounding like a lawyer, even if the letterhead on the company stationery made avoiding sounding like a lawyer much more challenging.

  He had a plentiful supply of the notepads, at least. His father brought boxes of them home with him every other month for personal use, provided the contact details were obscured. Alf Haussman ensured that this was the case, fastidiously and manually, on every page of every pad he deigned to let his only son use. Sometimes Troy wondered if his father did anything else at work. Anything besides his secretary, of course.

  Besides, opening with To whom it may concern suggested this would concern anybody – which of course it didn’t. That was the whole problem.

  Thursday 6.7.’90

  By the time you read this, I will be dead

  Troy sneered, scrunched and threw. He glanced at the fountain pen in his hand. They would have to lift his body up to read the note, if all went according to plan – of course he would be dead. His not being dead at the end of all this hardly bore thinking about.

  He put nib to paper again. His father’s shiny gold commemorative pen flashed under the desk-light as he wrote.

  Alf Haussman, read the engraving on the outrageously expensive pen. Unlike the company notepad, Troy had stolen the pen from his father’s study that very afternoon, while Alf was over at her house. It crossed Troy’s mind that he could have lifted an uncensored pad at the same time. What could happen? He’d be dead already, and the note might be that much more effective on paper with the full company letterhead.

  Oh well.

  Thursday 6.7.’90

  I hope you and Candy will be very happy

  Troy growled and hurled the ball of paper into the wastepaper basket with the others. No, no, no. How was he going to make them realise? What could he write to make them see what they’d done?

  There were times when he wished he was older than seventeen.

  And besides, he suddenly realised as he looked up at the clock through a haze of mingled fury, frustrated tears, and weariness, it was approaching two in the morning. Which meant not only that he’d been working on this – and putting off working on it – for almost three hours, but also that it was Friday, not Thursday.

  Friday 6.8.’90

  I’ve had enough, he scribbled. Jus’ git ‘er done, as his grampa used to say. I ca’nt live with what you’ve done to mom, I ca’nt go on ignoring how much you hate us. This is the only way. I’m going to a better place, and your stuck here in Hell.

  Troy Haussman sat back and admired his handiwork, especially that bit about Hell. He smiled, one of the few times he had done so since he’d left childhood behind for the cold and dizzying currents of teenagerhood. Words weren’t enough, they really weren’t, but this would have to do. He couldn’t go on working at it all night.

  All it needed was the right ending. What did Mr. Barnaby, his eleventh grade English Literature teacher call it? A conclusion.

  With trembling fingers, Troy placed the gold fountain pen nib-first into his nostril, angled the implement sharply inwards, and banged his head down on the desk. The solid craftsmanship that was the commemorative fountain pen slid through Troy Haussman’s nasal cavity like a nail through a piece of cheese, pierced his central nervous system and ever so gently caressed the lower extremity of his brain, shutting it down for repairs that simply didn’t get funding in time.

  The desk-light jumped, as if to say ‘gosh’ in response to the anguished teen’s disproportionate solution. The aforementioned teen’s bright blood pumped out over the desk, powered by his exuberant, not-in-possession-of-all-the-facts, seventeen-year-old heart that did not falter in its task for a solid ten minutes. His brain, doing its job as enthusiastically as his heart, made sure that those ten minutes were a howling nightmare of surging, hammering pain signals the likes of which it had never generated before.

  By the time his body was found later that morning, Troy Haussman’s blood had completely destroyed his artfully contrived note, blurring and slurring it to an unrecognisable mess. That’s fountain pens for you. Fortunately, the authorities were able to piece together any number of notes, fully explaining the circumstances of the boy’s death, using the evidence left behind in Troy’s brimming wastepaper basket.

  Troy had gone to a better place, while everybody else was stuck in Hell. Irony was lost on someone as young as Troy, even an irony as delicious as this:

  Troy Haussman had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the wrong mood. Killing himself just as the wrong elevator was crashing into its own basement on the other side of the world.

  And so it was that for years numbering one thousand, nine hundred and ninety, give or take a few decades, the Demons at work upon the Earth had been but two.

  And so it was that in the early hours of Thursday the 21st of June, in the Year of Our Lord 1990
, thirteen days after his untimely death and in accordance with the unforgiving and immutable strictures of Stormburg’s Theorem, lo, Troy Haussman was diabolised – an accidental byproduct in undeath as he had been in life – and did become the third.

  LAETITIA’S LAST NIGHT IN PARIS FOR REALLY QUITE A WHILE

  Canon had spent the past hour or so walking the sophisticated streets, following the DeVaneys as they shopped and browsed and had coffee at one of the chic little roadside cafés.

  Canon loved Paris. He had watched it grow out of the mud like a metal Triffid. He had watched the very species that inhabited it change into the charming flowers of humanity they now were. It made him feel like a drunken adolescent again, every time he visited.

  Smiling, he returned his attention to the DeVaneys. Mother and father had seated themselves on either side of Laetitia, who looked bored and petulant in a way that made Canon’s massive fangs itch to slide from their sheaths inside his cheekbones and extend past his chin. The structure of a Vampire’s skull was sufficiently altered that they could hide their fangs if so inclined. Very few – a tiny lucky or strong-willed percentage9 – actually went to the trouble of sliding their fangs up into their heads. Most of them shambled around with the massive weapons fully extended, jaws dislocated like those of a snake, eyes vacant and bodies twisted … Canon shuddered, even after all this time, at the thought of turning into such a thing.

  He straightened and smoothed the lapel of his suit with a cleansing sort of gesture, shedding contemplation of his unfortunate lessers. He did not often stoop to associating with the walking carcasses that most Vampires became. He did not even consider himself of the same species. It was because of gluttony, and sloth, and a lack of conviction, that those creatures became the way they did.

  Gluttony and sloth were two sins Canon could not abide. The other five, they were acceptable. They made the world go round.

  Some of these sins, in varying proportions, stirred within Canon as he watched Laetitia DeVaney pout. It had been years since Felice had stirred any of the same feelings in him, even though the one-hundred-and-twelve year-old Vampire still looked and occasionally behaved like a girl of seventeen. It was time for him to create a new companion. Felice was mad now, mad and broken. She had been mad from the very first weeks of her new life – a regrettable side-effect of weakness of character – but now it was getting too much to bear. Her blood boiled to be free, her body ached to revert to that of one of Canon’s unfortunate, practically non-sentient cousins. He would let it. She was becoming a liability.

  Smiling, his fangs sliding down by an insignificant millimetre or two, Canon followed the DeVaneys and their doomed girl-child as they finished their coffee and moved towards their hotel, where they were staying for the week in their nation’s capital, to celebrate the early days of a political and cultural event about which Laetitia cared not a jot. What did she care about the end of a spy-war, the dismantling of a wall, the march of history? She lacked perspective. Canon could provide her with perspective.

  Canon thanked a God he no longer believed in for the fact that the DeVaneys had decided to stay in a hotel the Vampire had purchased for a song during the Depression. It would make his task all the easier.

  One block before reaching the hotel, Canon turned off and headed towards his own quiet little place of rest, where Felice waited with her twitching frame and suspicious animal grunts as company. She was unaware that her time as companion to the world’s greatest Vampire was coming to an end, unaware that sulking, fur-coat-clad, diamond-earring-sporting Laetitia was waiting in the wings.

  In fact, the things of which Felice is unaware could fill a warehouse, thought Canon in the parlance of the times, and chuckled.

  ONE OF THOSE SORTS OF VAMPIRES

  “He was born in the Year of Our Lord 874, which places him well over a thousand years old.”

  Barry looked – rather wistfully, Seam thought – towards the window of Preston Point Anglican, in which he was holed up for the day as usual. Seam was sitting at the other end of the pew at which Barry was sitting, and Tommo was walking uncomfortably up and down the aisle. Barry was dressed in casual shirt and jeans and jacket he’d picked up from an op shop, his wings sticking out through the shredded material.

  It wasn’t exactly incognito. Anyone who came in and noticed him – and even noticing him was by no means a given, apparently – would see a man of extraordinary, nay impossible, beauty and grace. A man who simply could not be human. A man, possibly, with … wingy-type things sticking out the back. But he was shaped like a human, and humans were the human-shaped thing you found on Earth, so what else could he be? And thus the brain protected itself and assumed that a human was what it had seen. He really was extremely noticeable … but so far, he had avoided attention.

  The sun was bright, but Seam’s old friend appeared resigned to watching it shine through stained glass for the rest of eternity.

  Barry had thought to approach Preston Point Anglican, Seam had learned in the weeks following the Angel’s return to Earth, because the vicar – more or less the only regular inhabitant of the forgotten little church – was a vague acquaintance of his Auntie Carol. The Archangel Gabriel had already known this, too, which was why he’d laid the groundwork for Barry’s appearance there following his resurrection. As for Father Bryant10 himself, he was rightly dazed and duly impressed by the arrival of Angels and Archangels in his church and the accompanying shift, minor yet fundamental, it necessitated in his worldview.

  “So,” Seam said, after looking around to make sure their affable host hadn’t returned to the church unexpectedly, “he’s not one of the shambling-zombie Vampires, then.”

  Barry had told Seam that he wanted to keep any more big surprises – surprises of the Vampiric variety, for example – out of Father Bryant’s path. The old boy’s veins weren’t quite what they had been, and Gabriel hadn’t exactly sugar-coated his unveiling. Another foundation-shake might send the vicar’s already bat-littered belfry crashing into his basement once and for all.

  At the moment, Father Bryant was out buying cigarettes or pornography or something, but he had departed secure in the cast-iron certainty that he could depend on Barry to hold the fort until he came back. The vicar’s deep and abiding trust in the Angel was obviously the result of Father Bryant’s quite literal indoctrination, and of Barry’s own calming, reassuring effect on human beings in general. Seam had been told over and over again that it was a sort of a fallacy to call that effect supernatural, but what else could you call it?

  Tommo stopped awkwardly by Seam’s side in the aisle, watching their lifelong friend as he filled them in on the latest developments in the world of immortals. This was only about their third time in Preston Point Anglican – Nails preferred to meet with his old mates in the Bad Cow opposite, except for Seam who had won the privilege to pop in by dint of having been the one who drove him here that first time. Tommo got similar dispensation for being his other school-age friend, but like most of the others he was ill-at-ease on holy ground and so didn’t really mind the mild proscription. Come to that, Tommo was ill-at-ease on most kinds of ground that didn’t have stumps at either end or a bar somewhere in it.

  “Yeah,” Barry went on with his explanation. “He’s lived in different countries in Europe for most of his life, but he occasionally wanders when he gets bored. You get a good radar for things like that once you’ve been around for a few centuries, apparently – and it’s easy to get bored. Even with some of the elaborate pastimes he enjoys,” the Angel shuddered. He made the motion look like he was the world’s greatest movie star, Seam thought, shuddering at the sight of the most despicable thing in all of God’s creation. Seam resisted the urge to applaud loudly at the very sight of the gesture, and he could tell Tommo felt the same.

  “How did you find out about him?” Seam asked.

  “I got the Helpful Angel Talk,” Barry said, and rolled his eyes. Another transcendent performance. “Apparently there are s
ome things we can do, and some things we can’t, because humans will get all worked up about it and make things worse. There’s only so much seven Angels can do.”

  “And the Helpful Angel Talk included something about this Vampire bloke?” Tommo asked.

  “Yes,” Barry said, “and how I should leave him alone.”

  “Leave him alone?” Seam echoed. “Why?”

  Barry waved this off, looking frustrated. “It doesn’t matter. Canon isn’t just not a zombie-type. He’s probably one of the richest people in the world – he’s eccentric, and he’s so old he can get away with just about anything. He hangs out in nightclubs, wearing sunglasses,” he smiled. “He arrived in Sydney about a week ago, on a private jet with his coffin and the coffins of about five other cronies … and Laetitia’s coffin,” the look that crossed Barry Dell’s face then could have won the Academy Award for Fury, Outrage and Hatred. “So yeah. Bollocks to the Helpful Angel Talk. If you don’t see me for a while, it’s because I’m going to Sydney to kill a really cool Vampire.”

  CRIME FIGHTING ANGEL

  “What did I tell you? It can’t have been more than forty-eight hours since I told you, so you must remember.”

  Barry, feeling like he’d been brought up to the front of the class for a mortifying transgression, did his best not to shuffle his feet. “I know,” he said. “No superhero stuff. No flying around saving people from conveniently-unsympathetic muggers.”

  “But…?”

  Barry looked up, wary. Gabriel’s ancient deep-amber eyes bored into him. “But what?”

  “There’s always a ‘but’. ‘But nobody saw me’. ‘But it was a really conveniently unsympathetic mugger’. ‘But it was on my way home from the pub across the street’.”