by Chuck Wendig
But, finally, the daemon’s domicile. Bellbook’s place. He pounds on the door. Stabs the doorbell a few times. Inside he can hear the doorbell start. Then he interrupts it with another push, and another push, so that the ding never quite gets to the dong.
Finally: footsteps.
The door opens an inch. Woodwine looks out. Eyes bloodshot, half-lidded.
Mookie smells whiskey.
“Oh,” Woodwine says. “You.”
“Lemme in. It’s a fuckin’ blizzard out here.”
“Bellbook’s gone,” Woodwine mutters.
“What?”
“You lost your shot. The game is over. Other plans are in place. Go away.”
Woodwine moves to close the door.
Mookie has little interest in closed doors. He kicks a hard boot between the door and the frame, opening it wider. The daemon, John Wesley, lifts his lip in a fish-hook sneer and tries harder to slam the door shut—
And he catches the door right to the face as Mookie gives it a shove.
Mookie enters, bringing the wind and the snow with him. Woodwine sits on the floor, blood streaming down out of his nose in twin rivers.
“Well,” Woodwine snarls, “why don’t you come on in, stay a while?”
*
The lights in the library are dim. A fire hisses in a small propane fireplace at the far end of the room. Mookie paces. Woodwine spins around, half-drunk, on a wheeled desk chair, a white towel made red against his face.
“You keep hitting me in the face,” Woodwine says, “and I’m going to need plastic surgery. Know any doctors who can fix the Mookie Pearl special?”
“Shut up. What the hell do you mean Bellbook is gone?”
“I mean what I mean, which is that she took her things and left. When I inquired about our dear friend Mookie Pearl, she shrugged like you were someone of little consequence. A crisp our time with that man has run its course, and then she was out the door, off to the Left Coast, La-La-Land, the City of Broken Angels.”
“Why? Why did she leave? I still have time. I still have time.”
“Time is never fixed. The time you had was the day we gave you when you woke up out of your stupor. Any additional time you took was you burning the rope we were using to save you.” Woodwine’s face suddenly goes slack. Like he’s tired of propping up his vinegar tongue. “Mookie: someone attacked the Shifting Prison. It’s where the Bellbooks manufacture their Viridian. Everyone decided that this had gone on too long. So it’s... being handled, now.”
“Being handled. Being handled. Fuck does that mean? Nora—”
“They’re going to kill her.”
Mookie feels woozy. He leans against one of the shelves. Books wobble, though none fall. “I gotta get out there. I have the book.”
“And a translation?”
“None yet.”
“It’s something.” Woodwine spins, juggling his heels along the ground to give him a bit of momentum. “But it won’t matter. You’re stuck here, I’m afraid.”
Mookie bumrushes Woodwine. Boots stomping, then skidding. He grabs Woodwine by the rumbled collar of his red flannel, stilling the spinning chair and bringing the man’s nose to within an inch of his own. “How am I stuck here?”
“She canceled the open ticket.”
“I can still fly.”
“There’s a blizzard outside, in case you’ve already forgotten.”
“Some planes might fly. It’s mid-day. Maybe by tonight—”
“There’s one more thing.”
“Tell me.”
“You’re on the...”
“Tell me.”
“She put you on the no-fly list.”
“The what?”
“The TSA? The people who govern the flying of the planes and airports and all that? Since 9/11 they’ve kept a pretty robust no-fly list. Most of them are false-positives, just bullshit names that got on there accidentally. But it takes moving mountains of paperwork and red tape to get your name off that list. Meanwhile, if you’re on it, they won’t let you get to your gate much less on an airplane.”
Mookie’s fist unclenches.
The daemon drops back into the chair. It rolls back a few inches before Woodwine stops it with a heel.
“I...” But Mookie can’t manufacture any words. His head is just noise. It’s not thought. It’s not a pot brimming with solutions. It’s just wordless, high-volume vibration. Anger and fear. Sadness and anxiety. Doing a shrieking do-se-do on the dance floor of his mind. Mini-movies play out: his daughter in a wedding dress. Her throat slit. The world ending. All of it happening in reverse. Then replaying. Again and again.
He has to get there.
He has to save her.
You’re her hero.
Every father should be his daughter’s hero. No matter what. No matter how it shakes out. That’s the job. That’s the dream. A job he’s failed, a dream he’s made into a nightmare. He has to get to Los Angeles. He has to.
He paces. Woodwine is saying something, but he can’t hear. Won’t hear. He runs through idea after idea: thoughts cutting through the noise now, each notion a machete. Dull at first but sharpening quickly: Criminals need to fly. Criminals can’t always fly on the record. TSA. No-fly. How to bypass? Zoladski did it. Flew to Philly. Chicago. Poland, sometimes. He had a—
And that’s it.
“My old boss had a guy,” Mookie says. “He’d fly out of... ehhh, White Plains. Westchester Airport. He lives up there. That’s how I’ll do it.”
“For free?” Woodwine snorts. “I hardly see that happening.”
Mookie pauses. Grins a mean grin. “You got money, I bet.”
“You’re serious.”
“Give it to me. All you got.”
“You’re shaking me down.”
“And you’re gonna pay up.”
Woodwine stands—moving with speed Mookie doesn’t expect. For someone half-drunk and face-punched, he’s lickety-quick. “You think you can take me, Mookie?”
“You really think I can’t?”
It comes over the daemon quickly: like a pebble thrown into a pond, silver waters rippling and shivering. His face warps, and then it’s no longer human. His cheeks and mouth bulge with sharp teeth. His ears are longer now, pointed at the tip, drooping at first but then standing tall like flowers that just saw the sun. Eyes gone yellow and rheumy—like a jar of formaldehyde. Woodwine’s visage is gone. The face of a beast stares back, lips peeling, showing stained teeth jutting from raw, red gums.
“The fuck?” Mookie asks.
Woodwine snarls. “The Woodwines have the blood of the wild in us. The knotty heart of all the old trees, the blood-bait breath of hoary beasts. This is who we are and who we have been.” He extends his hands—still human, but now tipped with inch-long nails, black, curved, clicking together. “You still think you can take me?”
Mookie answers honestly. “Yeah.”
“Really?”
“I’m willing to give it a shot if you are.”
John Wesley laughs: something closer to the sound of a hound barking in its sleep, yip-grr, yip-grr, but it’s easy enough to hear the amusement there. One blink later, and the human countenance has returned. Woodwine looks once more like the scruffy man that Mookie knows him to be.
“Fine,” Woodwine says. He goes to a leather backpack by the glass desk at the other end of the room, pulls out a wad of money. The daemon thrusts it at Mookie, waves it about. “Five hundred bucks there. Won’t be enough, probably.”
“It’ll have to be.”
“Uh-huh.”
“One more thing I need.”
Woodwine winces. “I know what you’re gonna ask for, and it’s gone.”
“It can’t be. Jesus, I only got a few more teaspoons left—”
“Minerva took the Green, Mookie. Wasn’t much here, just a few tins, but she scooped them all up and they left with her yesterday. I’m sorry.”
“That’s my life.”
“You mak
e it to the West Coast alive, maybe you’ll find some there.”
“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.” He nods, not sure if any of this will happen or can happen. He’s waltzing on thin ice here. Dark water deep underneath the fragile surface.
On the way out, Mookie asks, “Why now?”
“Why now what, Mookie Pearl?”
“Why you go all wolf-man on me here, today? You had a chance before when I busted your face. And earlier, too.”
He shrugs. “It takes a lot out of me. Bringing something like that to the surface.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“I’d tell you to travel safe, but I don’t think that’s really in your wheelhouse.”
“Safe ain’t the point, so no.”
“Hope you save your daughter.”
“Me too.”
Mookie exits, back out into the blizzard. The first thing he does is call Skelly and tell her she needs to go to the pile of papers and business cards on the rickety card table he calls a desk. He needs a phone number, and he needs it now.
*
John Wesley Woodwine looks out the front as Mookie pulls a phone out of his pocket—little phone, big hand, almost comical. Then the big thug walks and ten feet later the blizzard seems to swallow him whole. He’s there, and then he’s gone.
The daemon sighs.
Then he goes and pours himself another two fingers of really good whiskey. His mouth still tastes of blood and meat. The ghost of gristle between teeth that were just fangs—the memory of fear-stink, of chasing prey through tall grass. He uses the whiskey to wash that out of his mouth.
Woodwine pulls out his phone and makes a call.
Minerva Bellbook answers promptly.
He tells her, “Our friend came by.”
“Pearl.”
“He was not thrilled.”
“His time has passed. I kept the door open as long as I could.”
“I tried telling him that.”
Bellbook is quiet. Then, “He’s still coming out here, isn’t he?”
“He sure thinks so.”
“Isn’t it a blizzard there?”
“Mm-hmm,” he says with a mouth of whiskey, tongue burning, cheeks scorched.
“He is determined. The thick-skulled usually are.”
Woodwine coughs. “He’s smarter than you think.”
“You’re right. But little of this matters because the girl will be dead by the time he arrives. We’ve found our assassin—a funny confluence of events, that.” He hears her sip something: coffee, or tea, maybe. “Besides, I’m wondering if Pearl will even survive the flight. More and more I’m thinking it was a mistake to ever think he wouldn’t encounter...” She lets her voice trail off, a balloon with the air leaking out.
She won’t say it. Few will, so as not to draw their attention. The Aerie.
“I don’t think they’ll care about him,” Woodwine says.
“They may. He has the stink of Hell all over him. Inside him, even.”
“They didn’t stop you.”
“They did once. But I passed their test.”
He shudders. “Well. Here’s hoping they leave him be.”
“It’s of no consequence whether they do or do not. Pearl is no longer a concern.”
“You’re a cold cucumber, Minerva.”
“We must be cold to persevere. Warmth and sympathy are weaknesses. I will not let the world die because I was weak. You. Me. We are all expendable.”
“Good to know,” he says. Then he ends the call.
The whiskey tastes suddenly bitter.
33
Really, brain? I’m getting cold feet? This couldn’t be a less conventional marriage—daemons and magical keys and mysterious in-between realms. And yet, here I am with conventional anxiety over the whole thing. It doesn’t help, I guess, that I keep wondering if what Hrothk and Burnsy said is true. Grand inversion. Hell breaking open. The skies falling. Awesome. Never mind the fact that Ernesto hasn’t even found a source of Viridian yet—no way to make the key, no way to enter the interstitium. Do I really want this? Yeah. But am I really willing to go through with it? That’s a whole different question, and I don’t have the answer to it yet.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Headlights cut through the dying blizzard.
A black SUV pulls up out front.
Door opens, a little man steps out. Older fellow. Mid-sixties, maybe. Withered and reduced—a shrunken-head quality to him. He pulls a baseball cap over his head and cinches closed an old barn jacket and totters over to the hangar door, steps inside.
Mookie watches him from the window of the hangar office and turns to meet the man as he comes in.
The older fellow dusts snow off his shoulders, sleeves, pants.
“You Zoladski’s man?” the older fellow asks.
“Nngh,” Mookie grunts, leans against the desk. “You Alfie, the pilot?”
“Sure am.” Alfie looks around. “Where’s Konrad?”
Mookie hesitates. “He’s dead.”
“I know he’s dead,” Alfie Komarski makes air quotes as his lips twist into a surly scowl. “But you said—”
“I said what I said to get you up here.” Mookie called, told the man that Konrad faked his death to avoid a whole RICO investigation. And that he now needed a way out of the city for good. Not tomorrow. Tonight. “I need to fly somewhere.”
It looks like someone just cut the older fellow’s puppet strings. He slumps against the wall, almost knocks a corkboard over. “I thought Konnie... it sounded like him, faking it. God. Jeez. He and I came up together. Abington. Philly.” Then he narrows his eyes. “You lied to me, young man. We ain’t flying anywhere. It’s a blizzard out there.”
“It’s dying down. Weather says it’ll be over soon.” Outside, the curtain of snow has pulled back. Now it’s just a handful of fat flakes swirling and spiraling.
“It’s risky.”
“They have the runways plowed.”
“I know, because they have to do that. FAA. And it doesn’t matter because it’s still risky. Still gotta de-ice the wings and—you know, who cares? I don’t care if it’s a goddamn tropical day out there, all sunshine and calm winds, not a cloud or a pigeon in sight. Because I don’t know you. And I don’t wanna know you. I had loyalty to someone, and you ain’t that someone, young man.”
Alfie Komarski turns back toward the door, waving Mookie off.
Back out into the snow. The SUV lights blink as Alfie thumb-punches the key-fob. Grousing and grumbling all the way.
Mookie isn’t fast, but he’s faster than this guy, and by the time Alfie gets to the car door, there’s Mookie. Blocking it. With his cleaver out.
“It’s gonna be like that, huh?” Alfie asks.
“I got a daughter. She’s in danger. I need to fly.”
Alfie sniffs, squints against the cold and the snow. “I got a daughter, too.”
“Paula, I know. Paula Thompson, married to Gary Thompson. Living in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Address is 544 Covered Bridge Road—”
Alfie’s eyes are little shining dimes—flashing with anger. “Lemme guess. It’d be a real shame if something happened to them.”
Truth is, Mookie hates this part. He has nothing against this old man. But this is it. This is the last shot he has. “I got a role to play here. I wanna save my daughter, that means I do what I gotta do even if I don’t wanna do it. So, yeah. It’d be a shame.”
The old man hesitates. “Where you need to go?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Jeez, that’s a helluva flight you’re asking me to make. In a snowstorm.”
“Ain’t snowing at 30,000 feet.” Mookie’s not actually sure about that—he’s never been on a plane, to be honest. But it seems right, so he runs with it. “You got a—a what, a jet? Fuel up. We can make it.”
“You better hope we can.”
“So you’ll fly?”
“Do I have a choice?
”
Mookie shrugs. “We all got a choice. It’s either the rock or the hard place every time.”
“And which one are you?”
“I’m both.”
*
Takes time to prep the flight. Mookie hides on board—Alfie’s gotta do some kinda pilot voodoo to get clearance to fly. Flight manifest and a quick inspection and all that. Meanwhile, they hose down the wings with a spray—deicing juice or something.
The plane is a private jet. Alfie runs a business—mostly defunct now, since his biggest client was the Organization. An SJ30, Alfie called it. Mookie doesn’t know an SJ30 from a school bus, not really—what he knows is that the jet is sleek, like a shark. Sharp wings, tall fin, couple of... what are they? Turbines? Couple of turbines at the tail.
Inside, it’s all laminated woods and plush beige leather. Smells faintly of cigars and cologne—and behind that, a creeping mold. The armrests are dusty. Alfie hasn’t been flying this bird much lately.
Eventually, Alfie comes back. Again peppered with snow atop his Yankees cap. His mustache twitches when he speaks. “You ready to fly? Maybe die?”
“Just get us up there.”
“I could call the cops, you know. Maybe I already did.”
“Maybe you didn’t. You used to pilot the biggest crime boss New York has seen in fifty years. You don’t want them dicing you up, picking through your pieces.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Alfie turns, heads back up the aisle to the cockpit. But then he turns around. “You ever fly before?”
“No.”
“You sure picked a fun night for your first flight. Buckle in, young man, because this is gonna be one bumpy goddamn flight.”
*
On takeoff the plane skids and slides, the engines roaring, the wings grinding and making sounds like an angry robot. Mookie thinks that’s bad, but it only gets worse once they lift off. The plane dips and ducks. Wings wobble. This iron bird is flying drunk, and suddenly Mookie’s wondering if the man at the wheel behind the cockpit door is young enough to do this right. He’s old. Hasn’t flown in a while. Does he have all his faculties? Mookie should have waited. Maybe taken a train. Amtrak. Or The 13 Train. Or goddamn, he has four days—he could’ve driven to the West Coast. Sure, yeah, that would be cutting it close but any speed he gains by flying doesn’t make a whip-lick of difference if they plunge to the earth and end up a burning, smoldering blood-smear across the snowy nowhere.