by Tad Williams
“Renting a room? From real people?” I laughed. “You’re nuts, kid. Why in the hell would you want to do that? What about when you have your own advocate practice, and you have to go in and out at weird times of the night?”
“I don’t know. I’ll worry about it then. They’re easy to get along with and it saves me some money.”
Now I knew he was insane. “Saves you money? What, you planning on buying a little place of your own someday? With a lawn and a picket fence?”
“You don’t have to be rude about it. I just…I just believe in being thrifty.” The way he said it I could tell I’d hurt his feelings somehow. I didn’t much care. The whole thing was preposterous. We’re not people. We don’t get to be people. It’s not our job.
We didn’t talk the rest of the drive. I put on Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and listened to “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” as we wound our way up through the neat, expansive houses. Clarence told me to pull over in front of a big Spanish-style house near Crestview Park.
“Nice place,” I said as he got out.
He shrugged. “They’re nice people. Thanks for the ride.”
It’s true, I thought the kid was a sentimental idiot, but as I drove back down Brittan toward the glowing lights of the city I had an unexpected moment of envy. It must be nice to come home to something or someone occasionally—a house with other people living in it, even a pet. I’ve never had that, never wanted to get encumbered. I knew I wouldn’t still want it by the time I reached the flats, but for that particular moment I felt a touch of something that a less self-sufficient angel might call loneliness.
The moment I walked through the door of my motel room I could feel the baking heat, as if I had left the thermostat set at a hundred and twenty-five when I went out. Then the smell hit me, so savage and so wrong that I took a couple of stumbling steps backward through the doorway, waving my hand in front of my face, and that was what saved me. The thing waiting in the room smashed into the half-open door, and the impact tore the top hinge out of the wall so that the door sagged crookedly in its frame. An instant later my visitor stepped on the broken door and crushed it into a splintering mess as it forced its way out onto the concrete walkway like an octopus flowing out of a tiny crevice in the rocks.
But this was no octopus, or anything else I’d ever seen. It was vaguely man-shaped but huge, almost eight feet tall, and so dark that even by the parking lot lights I could barely make it out except for spreading horns on its head and a sloping, complicated muzzle that made it look a bit like some abstract sculpture of a minotaur. Even from a few feet away the heat it threw off was painfully intense.
There was no question of trying to stand up to something like this. I turned and sprinted across the motel parking lot. I could hear it galloping right behind me, shedding bits of splintered door as it came, so I dove under somebody’s sport wagon and desperately tried to claw my gun out of my waistband holster, which is no easy trick while you’re lying on your belly crammed under a greasy SUV. The thing still wasn’t making a noise except for its deep grunting breaths—That’s good, I thought, if it’s breathing maybe it can be hurt—but it knew exactly where I was, and it was very interested. It circled the wagon, then a big, hot hand suddenly swept underneath and missed my head by only by a few inches, and I swear I felt my eyebrows crisping as if someone had tried to close a waffle iron on my face.
An instant later the thing simply bent down and heaved the whole car up in the air, lifting it so that only two wheels still touched the ground. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if it dropped it again with me underneath, so I rolled to one side and finally was able to pull my revolver. I emptied it into the middle of the thing, all five slugs. I can’t believe I missed from that close but as far as I could tell, it did nothing but stagger the creature a bit and startle it into dropping the wagon, which bounced on its big tires as I took the opportunity to scramble farther away. We were making a lot of noise: as the echoes of my shots died, lights were coming on all over the building. I had no idea what was after me, but I didn’t want any ordinary people getting mixed up in this. From what I had seen, my assailant would go through them like they were made of butter.
My decision was hastened by the huge horned shadow scrambling over the wagon toward me. Later on, the police who investigated the scene would decide that the car had been vandalized with a blowtorch and a pick-ax, but I was there—those marks were made by fingers and toes, or hooves, or whatever it ran around on. The screech of punctured metal was enough to tell me what would happen if it ever grabbed me, so I jumped up and sprinted across the parking lot and out into the lights of the busy Camino Real, fumbling for my speed loader as I dodged startled, honking motorists.
This is why I hate carrying a gun, by the way. As soon as I’ve got it, I suddenly keep needing it.
Most witness reports afterward described something like a gigantic black bear in a Halloween wig chasing a man through traffic and at one point leaping over an entire cab, which had fishtailed to a stop behind a clutch of startled drivers. A lone dissenter insisted that not only had the man also jumped over the cab, he was being chased not by a bear but “a giant gorilla in some kind of Viking hat.” Other than that guy nobody but me seemed to have noticed the impressive sweep of horns.
I reached the other side of the Camino Real about a second and a half in front of the burning black shape. I was almost weeping with anger at my own stupidity in having stayed in the same place two nights in a row, and I was gasping for air as well, but I didn’t dare stop. I was pretty certain my aim hadn’t been the problem with my shoot-the-fucking-thing idea, and I didn’t have a new idea yet, so I kept running until I reached the used car lot across the street. Instead of diving under another vehicle (I didn’t trust the clearance on any of the economy models sitting there) I ran right toward the showroom window, feeling the thing closing on me from behind as if it were a rolling ball of lightning. A set of talons as wide across as a garden rake whooshed over my head. As I felt my hair sizzle I reflected that at least I had a pretty good idea now what had marked my door. At the last moment I juked sideways and by some miracle kept my feet, but the monstrous whatever-it-was had too much mass to turn that quickly and crashed full on into the ten-by-thirty plate glass window with a noise like a bomb going off in Chartres Cathedral.
By the time the thing dug its way out of the wreckage I was crouching on the bumper of the N 35 bus on the other side of the Camino Real, heading south. I could dimly see the shadow snorting and sniffing in the ruins of the showroom, but apparently it didn’t see me clinging to the bus’s rear quarter panel, struggling for breath while I bled gently down the CalTrans logo and onto the asphalt that was sliding away beneath me.
It doesn’t really count as riding because I didn’t buy a ticket.
ten
that frightened
I JUMPED OFF the bus in the Miramonte district at the southern end of the city. After a long conversation with the nervous desk clerk of a chain motel (and a bribe with one of the emergency twenties out of my money belt) I finally had a place to stay—“hide out” might be a better term, but I had no idea whether hiding from the thing that had just attacked me was even possible. Still, angels, demons, and even powerful malign spirits can’t flaunt the rules of cosmic order—it’s just that some of the rules are different for us folks than they are for you folks. If the monstrosity had a physical body, and it most definitely had (very hot, very strong, very mean—remember?) then it was operating on the physical plane. It might be able to track me by scent or something else, but in a city of a million plus it would have to get reasonably close to me first. The thing had almost certainly been pointed in my direction by some guiding intelligence, but that probably just meant it would be haunting my familiar spots. As long as I kept moving I should be all right, at least for a while. All the same (and not that it would slow something like that down for more than a couple of seconds) I put the chain on the motel room
door and jammed a chair under the knob.
I had stopped at a nearby pharmacy for first-aid stuff, so after I took care of my wounds, which were fairly minor under the circumstances, I could finally leave my bandaged, Bactine-smeared body asleep on the motel bed to answer the summons from my superiors.
I wasn’t really looking forward to whatever was going to happen to me upstairs and wanted to put it off as long as possible, so I took the long way in to the Celestial City. I could do this without getting in trouble because there’s really no time in Heaven: when you’re there is when you’re there. It’s all Now. Yeah, it’s kind of hard to explain unless you’ve done it.
Anyway, since it wasn’t going to make a difference to anyone but me, I took the long, slow way through the Fields, breathing the sweet airs and letting the sight of the contented faithful dancing and singing on those infinite meadows comfort me. There’s a reason we angels do what we do, I sometimes tell myself (especially when the doing part has been particularly unpleasant, frightening, or painful) and in my case it’s to bring deserving souls to this happy rest. Every success means another person gets to leave all misery, sickness, and old age behind and come to live here, forever young in the gardens of the Lord.
Thinking that way helped—it always does—but it didn’t make all my problems go away. Didn’t make the whole mess easier to understand, either.
What was this horned abomination that seemed so interested in ripping my head off? It had the stink of the deeper pits of Hell all over it, but it’s very hard to manifest something like that in the real world—that’s one of the reasons angels and demons look pretty much like regular folk when they reside on earth: it’s just a lot easier to maintain something ordinary. So someone had been exerting a hideous amount of power to make that monstrous thing appear in the first place and keep it hunting me, which it had obviously been doing for at least a few days. Who wanted to hurt me that bad?
I wondered if finding out what exactly that monstrosity had been would give me a clue about who sent it. It was big and nasty, that was all I knew for sure, and it sure felt like a demon, but there was something unusual about it that kept me from being certain. It seemed old, somehow—primitive. Even the Opposition’s meanest, most monstrous fetches can usually communicate, or give you the impression they could if they wanted to. The horned thing had seemed empty of any thought but violence, more like an idea brought to life than a thinking being. I’d never seen or heard of anything quite like it, but it was definitely out there and definitely interested in killing the crap out of me.
By the way, you may be wondering why I fought so hard not to get murdered when death isn’t permanent for my kind. You’re probably thinking, Big deal, angel-guy, so something ugly chews up your body—you can always get another body, right? But what you’re missing is a few key facts. First of all—and this is always an important point, especially to me—painful death really hurts. Nobody I know wants to get eviscerated by a monster with claws like red-hot gaff hooks, even if they felt sure it was just a brief detour on their journey through eternity. Secondly, there are occasional cases where angels (or demons, for that matter) aren’t or can’t be resurrected. That had happened to my first mentor, Leo, and Grasswax the prosecutor had just provided another unpleasant example of the phenomenon. Nobody talks about it much, at least in Heaven, but everybody knows it happens. Every now and then an angel is destroyed and can’t be brought back. The bosses always say that kind of “unsupported death” (charming euphemisms they’ve got, huh?) is due to the evil workings of the Opposition, but some of my colleagues over the years have whispered that it often seems to happen to the troublemakers—the kind of angels Heaven won’t really miss. Sacrilege, I know, but I’m just reporting what others tell me. I will say, however, that most of those others mentioned it to me because they were worried I might turn out to be one of those “difficult” angels.
So many questions. One that had just occurred to me was, why send a monster, a massive power-drain even for a strong Hell-minion? Why not just send a couple of lowbrow demons or human familiars with Uzis? If you bring in enough firepower you can pretty much kill any earthbound angel.
That gave me a very disturbing thought. Why was I so certain the thing had been sent to kill me? An even more frightening possibility was that it was meant to capture me.
I say this because although Grasswax the prosecutor had eventually died, he had clearly been tortured first, and even when you’re talking about Hell the motive for that is usually one of a very short list of things—plain old sadistic revenge, or wanting to set an example, or simply to extract information. When I considered that my current plight seemed to be tied to the Walker mystery and the subsequent fate of Grasswax (a fate which he had likely suffered because someone wanted to hear what he knew about it) I was pretty certain I didn’t want that thing to take me alive even more than I didn’t want it to kill me—and I really don’t like things killing me.
Restored a little by a soothing journey through the Fields, my angelic substance no longer stretched quite to the breaking point, I let myself be drawn the rest of the way to the Celestial City without any subjective experience of time. The journey’s not quite instantaneous—well, actually, it’s more than instantaneous, I guess, like one of those particles that can be in more than one place. You sort of flicker in one place until you’re flickering in another, and I can’t say it better than that. Anyway, when I entered Temuel’s office it was exactly when I was expected, but even so he seemed agitated and impatient.
“Come, Doloriel,” he said. My supervisor was definitely worked up about something: his light was uneven, smeary as a Christmas tree behind a wet window. “They’re waiting for us.”
A moment later we were out of the maze of light known as the California Building and just as quickly out of the North American complex altogether. The Mule and I found ourselves standing before the solemn gate of a palace I’ve never seen, or at least that I didn’t remember. (Another strange thing about Heaven is how hard it is to recall details when you’re back in a mortal body: each time you visit the place it’s sort of new all over again.) The vast edifice was made of pure adamant, which is a Heavenly way of saying “slabs of diamond as big as a mountain.” It did indeed tower high into the heavenly sky, which is a beautiful but more transparent blue than that of earth, with stars showing through. The gleam of animate souls moving around inside could be seen through the substance of the tower’s walls.
“The Anaktoron of the Third Sphere,” Temuel said, and the hushed tension in his voice told me everything I didn’t already know about the seat of government for the whole of Earthly matters.
“What are we supposed to do here?” I asked, but didn’t get a reply. A moment later we were inside—clearly expected, too, since we didn’t even have to engage with the impressively terrifying angels guarding the palace door. We appeared on one side of a great stone table in a room that looked as large as Pasadena, with windows a hundred feet high letting in heaven’s pearly light. A river, an actual river, wound its way through the substance of the polished floor, bending widely around the table, and the music of the moving water was the only sound in that massive space. A quintet of brilliant shapes hovered across from us on the far side of the table—five important angels. Five very important angels, in fact, two who were male (in aspect), two female, and one that was neither.
“This is your Ephorate,” Temuel said, then named the waiting angels from left to right. “Karael, Chamuel, Terentia, Anaita, and Raziel.” Some of the names were more than familiar. I had never had the slightest urge to be called in front of any of them, much less all of them at the same time. An Ephorate is a judgement council, convened to deal with one issue. Nobody knew exactly how high angels got chosen to be ephors, but it meant that this was top-level, official business. Was I really worth that much attention? Had they summoned an Ephorate because I was going to be condemned? I didn’t know, but I sure hoped not. Whatever it was, though, I had defi
nitely been called on the carpet bigtime.
“Welcome, Doloriel,” said the awesomely beautiful, merciful, and loving coruscation of light that was Terentia. She was all colors submerged in a brilliant sheen of whiteness and seemed to be the leader of this little gathering. “God loves you.”
I bowed my head. It was impossible to be in a room full of so much angelic fire and not feel overwhelmed, like a child in the presence of respected elders. It was even more impossible not to be afraid. “Thank you, Mistress.”
“We are concerned about events on Earth,” said the astonishing youth named Karael in his armor of glittering electrum, and just the touch of his mighty thoughts almost made me swoon. His colors were darker than Terentia’s, ripples of black and red gleaming through his brightness like stones in the bed of a fast-flowing stream. Karael was known all over the Celestial City. He was one of the militant angels, a veteran of the Fall, and in person he oozed power. I couldn’t help wondering what complicated heavenly protocols made him take a place behind Terentia in this gathering. “We wish to hear everything that you know about the soul known as Edward Lynes Walker.”
Hearing that, I felt a tiny bit less worried: Apparently this Ephorate was investigating the Walker case, not me personally. It wouldn’t save me if they decided I’d screwed up, of course, but at least the focus wasn’t just on Bobby D.
I told them everything I knew. Well, not every single dubious thought that had ever kindled in my secret heart, but everything else—Fatback, The Water Hole, Walker’s granddaughter and her idiot boyfriend, even my meeting with the Countess of Cold Hands. I won’t go so far as to say the higher angels can read minds, but I will say this: It would have taken a stronger soul than your narrator to hold anything important back while facing a group of them gathered as sworn ephors. I was damned frightened. You would be too if your immortal soul was literally on the line.