“But gramma won’t like me—”
Kreiger waved the protest into silence. The trouble with dreamers was they sometimes had difficulty accepting reality. “You’re grandmother and I had a talk. She’s fine with you working on the dream flyer. But now we have other work to do.”
Kreiger turned and led the way back to Ellen’s apartment. Behind them, Rose Marie emerged from the bathroom and ambled off towards bed, breaking wind loudly as she went. She mumbled a perfunctory “excuse me,” a remark offered out of habit more than etiquette, not realizing there was no one there to offend. She closed her bedroom door behind her.
* * *
Jasper followed Goose Man into Ellen Monroe’s apartment where two men lay sprawled in the middle of the living room. A breeze through the open windows stirred up odors: a little like Saturday mornings in springtime when Gramma cleaned the apartment, the smell of soap and cleansers and plastic buckets of sudsy water. But there was another smell too, thinly masked by the first, a stench like a public restroom that no one had bothered to clean, toilets clogged and overflowing, tiles slick and black with mildew.
Jasper paused, wrinkling his nose, but Goose Man only snapped his fingers impatiently. “No time to waste, Jubjub Bird.”
The boy nodded, blinking, the smell making his eyes sting, his nose prickle so that he might sneeze. “Who are they?”
“No one of any consequence,” Goose Man answered, nudging one of the corpses with his boot, a detached gesture as if toeing a stray stone from his path. “Tertiary constructs: flat, underdeveloped, poorly fleshed; one of Jack’s many failings. Easy enough to dispose of, though. They’re mostly fluff.”
“What what what happened to ‘em?”
“Has your grandmother ever warned you about running with scissors?”
Jasper nodded.
Goose Man tapped the puddle of blood with the staff. “This is why.”
Then the wizard reached down and hefted one of the bodies up under his arm as if it was nothing more than a sack of groceries. He carried the corpse awkwardly to the open window overlooking the fire escape and the gorge beyond, refusing to set the staff aside though it would have made the task easier. Then he heaved it headfirst through the window.
The derelict’s top half passed through, but the rest—arms akimbo, legs dragging against the floor—did not. The corpse slumped awkwardly over the window frame, half in and half out, a new smear of blood trailing the soles of its shoes.
Goose Man glared at it. “Heavier than expected. Touché, Jack.”
Then he angrily grabbed the dead man’s crotch and hoisted him out the window, tumbling the body awkwardly against the confines of the fire escape. Goose Man stepped out after the corpse, glowered at it, and turned back to Jasper Desmond who had been watching the entire proceeding in silent fascination. “Bring the other one.”
While Jasper did that, wrinkling his nose at the smell, Goose Man stared down the narrow metal steps, rubbing his chin with his thumb and sucking at his teeth. After a moment, he lifted the body and heaved the tangle of limbs up and over, sending it straight to the pavement three stories below where it struck headfirst with a sharp, wet crack.
Jasper stared after the body, its limbs contorted and bent, but it simply lay there, silent as a rag doll. Just like the other body crumpled upon the fire escape, a broken toy, eyes missing. “They ain’t in no pain,” he observed.
Goose Man looked at him sharply, the different colored eyes staring with bright intensity. For a moment, his hands wrung the metal of the lightning rod, and in that moment, Jasper thought Goose Man looked absolutely furious. The metal in the staff emitted a shrill, agonizing screech, and Jasper thought maybe he shouldn’t have said anything at all. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut. Maybe …
Then the fury drained from the white wizard’s eyes. “They’re dead, and death is without feeling,” Goose Man corrected. “No feeling at all … for anything. There’s a difference.”
The second corpse went down to the alley the same way as the first.
“Come on,” Goose Man said, marching down the steps, boots ringing against the steel, staff knocking flatly, metal on metal. They went down to where the two corpses lay sprawled in the darkness behind the apartment building, Goose Man going immediately to the large Dumpster and lifting the lid. “Bring them over here, and dump them inside.”
Jasper did as he was told, careful where he walked, the alley littered with stones and bits of glass; he was still barefoot. He dragged the bodies by their armpits—easier than carrying them—and maneuvered each one into the Dumpster. The bodies were heavier than they looked, heavier than Goose Man claimed. Pushing one out a window was one thing, but lifting it high enough to clear the chest-high container was another matter entirely.
The work made him sweaty, and some of whatever made the corpses stink was on him now.
Now he would probably stink, too.
* * *
“Fine work,” Kreiger said as Marco’s body sagged into the piles of weak, underfilled garbage bags. He brought the lid down, careful not to let it slam and wake up the entire block. A couple bodies fall to the pavement, no one thinks twice, but slam garbage cans late at night, and some busybody will invariably call the cops. And he couldn’t have that. Not yet, anyway.
Besides, Ellen was asleep on the roof, and it wouldn’t do to wake her before morning.
Gusman Kreiger led Jasper back up the fire escape. “That was the hard part. Now I just need you to clean up in here, and you can go back to bed.”
Jasper nodded as Kreiger knew he would. Jasper was a good boy.
“Take that bucket and finish where I left off. Clean the floor with the paper towels and polish the wood with the spray cleaner. Clean up every drop, and leave the windows open so the place will air out. When you finish, take the bucket and the dirty rags down the fire escape to the Dumpster, and throw them in. If there’s any blood on the pavement, dump the wash water on it before you discard the bucket. Put the spray cleaner back under the sink and close Miss Monroe’s door before you leave. But don’t lock it; she doesn’t have her key.”
Jasper nodded emptily, and Kreiger worried he might have said too much, gone too fast. He gently touched the center of Jasper’s forehead with his index finger. “Do you understand, Jubjub Bird?”
This time, the boy nodded. Like with the flyer, he didn’t understand what he was doing, but he knew exactly what to do. And when he was done cleaning, he would go straight to bed, closing the door behind him—but not locking it.
A good little Jubjub Bird.
“I’d stay and help,” Kreiger said, “but I have some things to take care of. And besides that, I don’t want to.”
Then the sorcerer turned and left out the open window to become lost in the darkness.
Nothing else to do, Jasper began sponging blood from the middle of Ellen Monroe’s living room floor.
LOOSE ENDS
The dream would not let him sleep.
Every time Lucas closed his eyes, it was the same. The dream came out of the darkness, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He was standing over a scarecrow that was splayed out on the ground, limbs tied to the ends of a cross. And Lucas was beating the scarecrow. He was smashing the scarecrow’s rag-face, fists punching through until they hit the wooden beam behind, breaking his fingers, shredding his skin. But still he could not stop. He did not know why. And sometimes the scarecrow was not a scarecrow at all, and sometimes the cloth face was not cloth. Sometimes it was a man pinned to the beam, and Lucas was breaking his hands against the man’s face, splitting his skin upon the broken edges of teeth. Sometimes.
But he still did not know why.
And he was screaming, every time screaming: You aren’t supposed to be here!
And he did not know why.
And then Lucas woke up.
Something had gone terribly wrong. He couldn’t put a finger on it—wasn’t even sure what it might be, or where to begin loo
king—but it was there, the distinct sense that every moment of this day from beginning to end was crying out in tongues his soul could not ignore, but which his mind was not equipped to understand.
Before tonight, he’d allowed himself to forget he even had a soul.
This far down, this far gone, you reached for any offer of relief or escape. It didn’t matter what—smoked from a pipe, injected in a vein, needle reused but not yet rusting, drunk from bottles discreetly wrapped in brown paper—the premise, like the results, was always the same. Relief or escape, neither made you richer, or warmed you against the cold, or assuaged your hunger. You were still shit, what the world stepped in then tried to scrape from the bottom of its shoe.
And God lurked down there at the bottom, too, that low rung that was easy to reach and offered similar promises. The holy sisters brayed on about it while they watched to make sure you ate only your share, and didn’t stash anything away for later. The price for a meal was an hour spent listening to the mission volunteers urging you to renounce Satan and the sins he had brought you to; the only true way lay through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. If you got stuck down long enough, messages echoed, repeated, trapped in a rut that defied time, the concentric circles of Hell trapping the damned forever. He sat through a dozen harangues on sloth by rotating priests too lazy to write new material, passing off last February’s sermon as new, the promise of salvation and peace in exchange for unquestioning devotion.
Chains are chains. Willing or no, a slave is still a slave.
Whether you screamed for salvation from a church pew, or screamed for your connection on the afternoon he was late when you needed a fix, you still screamed. The Lord might promise forgiveness, He might not ulcerate your liver or leave you blind or choking on a throat full of blood in a back alley someplace, but neither did He make you any richer, make you any less hungry, make you anything more than scraped-off shit. No, God made no promises save that if you served Him faithfully all your days, He would grant eventual peace.
Or drink a fifth of gin, and your mind would know that same peace for a time. It was all temporary; nothing was meant to last. Getting stoned didn’t last. God didn’t last. His followers claimed otherwise, but two thousand years later, they were still waiting.
After half a lifetime spent in sin of one form or another, forsaking God’s gift of life through self-abuse or the indulgence of self-pity and occasions of arrogance, Lucas Bertram had not suffered unduly. God had not warned him away from his wickedness with threats of hell, not in this life or the next, nor promised him a life any better than what he had for following Him, not in this life or the next. The clergy talked about it in vagaries, but refused to be held accountable, like used-car salesmen or mortgage brokers. It was all empty promises, and for some, that was enough.
Lucas held them in disdain. Belief for the sake of comfort was not true belief, not true faith. You reach out in desperation, and your hand grabs a crucifix instead of a bottle of pills; fate alone decides which is within reach.
Lucas spent his youth in God’s service, faithfully reading the Bible, attending Sunday school and church and youth meetings. For all the good it had done. He was still abandoned. After a time, he began to wonder if perhaps there was never anyone listening there at all. Perhaps he had simply been mistaken, and it had taken this forced-fast of street living, of starving for food and huddling over steam vents for warmth to enlighten him.
There was no God, and it was folly to pray for salvation, or eagerly await his return. One could hardly return when one had never been.
And somewhere in the midst of all that time and bitter space, Lucas lost his soul. Or perhaps he had simply discarded it like an old rabbit’s foot saved over from childhood. Maybe he was better rid of it, his soul a bad penny, and God a stray cat that only seemed to come around to cause trouble.
But that day his soul had found its way home. And it was trying to hear the warning, tell him what it was, and why he should be afraid.
Cho and Marco were missing.
So was the Goose Man.
Lucas followed the drag marks in the dirt to the shade of a rotting fender, found the impression on the ground, blood dried into the dusty earth, brown and small like rat turds. But there was no sign of Goose Man. They’d beaten him nearly to death; Lucas still wasn’t sure why. He didn’t remember now what made him think that Goose Man was evil, an abomination to be destroyed, but there was something in Goose Man that said he was wrong to be here, wrong to be in this junkyard, this city, this world. Lucas could not put a finger on it. It was simply something he felt in his newly rediscovered soul.
As for Matty and Marco, Lucas thought he knew. All morning, Cho wouldn’t shut up about the bookshop girl; the one Goose Man stalked day and night up until today when he and the other three beat the hell out of him. Now Cho was obsessed, and had imposed on Marco’s loyalty and retarded commonsense to accompany him. And that troubled him. He liked the bookshop girl; liked her the way you liked people you didn’t personally know, but thought you knew from a distance, impersonal glimpses and stolen moments. She wore the stare of a perpetual dreamer, her mind always somewhere else, never here. He liked that faraway, dreaming look, her fearlessness with walking the streets alone in the evening. She was an innocent, a unicorn trapped in a world that no longer believed. Lucas could appreciate that. And maybe he could even appreciate a certain degree of obsession. From Matty. From the Goose Man.
But no good would come from it. Goose Man should be dead. Instead, he was missing. He had not shuffled off, dragging a trail of coughed-up blood like an animal hiding itself away to die. He had simply, if miraculously, gotten better and left, presumably returning to his obsession of stalking the girl from the bookstore.
The same girl Cho and Marco were now stalking.
And what do you think will happen when they cross paths, hmm, teacher?
The question taunted him, but he had no answer. It was late and he couldn’t sleep for dreams, and his soul was trying to tell him something he was too ignorant or obstinate to hear.
Maybe God abandoned you for twenty years just so that when you thought you really needed Him, and you were ready to believe again, He could turn away from you as you did from Him, challenge your absence, torment your faithlessness?
Lucas didn’t think that was so. At least, he hoped not.
Why? He told you to believe, and you didn’t. He told you to obey, and you refused. He asked simply for faith, and you doubted. Now you feel alone and afraid and you want God like a child wants his blanket when the thunder rumbles in the night sky. Why should He return? What have you done for Him lately?
Lucas went in search of Johnny. Lucas could always talk to Johnny; Johnny would understand. And if he didn’t, he might at least have a little something stashed away to help forget things that were too hard to comprehend. Lucas didn’t need much, just enough to dim the voices, deafen him to the strange sounds of what might be his soul, numb him to the possibility that he might have been wrong all along: about Goose Man, God, the girl from the bookstore, and everything else you could name. Just a little bit was all he needed to make it go away, to bring on the welcome sheets of gray, the mental cloudscape, the passive drifting apart of the brain.
Anything to make the dreams stop. To just sleep. A little bit of what Johnny kept for a rainy day might make that happen.
“Johnny?” he called across the dead space of the boneyard.
The once-stockbroker and day trader lived in a hut of cardboard and crates near a sectioned oil drum the four kept a small fire in, huddled like night watchmen in a distant and forgotten outpost on the edge of the kingdom, the edge of reality. Johnny did most of the feeding, keeper of the flame in a graveyard of dead ends and derelicts abandoned for parts.
“Hey, Johnny?” Lucas called again, his voice like an old man: a little senile, a little afraid—maybe of the dark, maybe of something concealed in it—a little too close to dying and starting to worry.
> Johnny usually perched on an old tire rim, feeding boards and newspaper logs and whatnot to the fire. But instead of Johnny’s hunched frame, Lucas saw only the soles of Johnny’s shoes propped up on the edge of the drum, the rest hidden in darkness. Sampled some of his stash and passed out probably, the fire forgotten as easily as the day.
Johnny snores when he’s passed out, teacher, and Johnny’s not snoring.
“Johnny, wake up man.”
And if he’s so fucked up that he passed out and fell over, what did he get fucked up on, teacher? There’s no bottle. No latent smell of smoke. No empty needle dropped carelessly in the dirt. There’s nothing. Just Johnny flat on his back like a dead man, taking a nap in the dirt; a dirt nap, teacher.
“Johnny, it’s Lucas,” he called, hating the desperation in his voice. “Get up, man. We need ta talk.”
Nothing. Nothing except for the smell buried beneath the stench of trash and the smoke of burning garbage: urine, like Johnny got lazy and took a piss in the fire before getting so stoned, he passed out. Or worse, Johnny had gotten stoned too fast, and pissed himself.
Johnny’s not stoned, Lucas, and he’s not asleep either; you know that. Johnny snores like a buzz saw when he sleeps. And Johnny shares with you when he’s managed to find anything, no matter what it is. He won’t always share with Marco, and never with Cho, but he always shares with you. He doesn’t fall asleep tending the fire, and he never sleeps through someone calling his name. It’s hardwired into his nervous system, bound up tighter than a watch. Bull markets and basis points might have left him behind years ago, but Johnny still twitches at every sound like a broker at the bell, a slave to his alarm clock and pager and telephone and every noise that seems to matter but really doesn’t. Because nothing really does matter, does it? Not really. Nothing matters and nothing ever did; only you never knew that until you lost it all and found yourself down here. But Johnny still wakes up when he hears a noise; wakes up like a man afraid of being late for work. And if Johnny’s not asleep, then what do you think he’s doing lying there …
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 22