This was not the time for such diversions, however.
He had sought out a bar because bars sometimes have a thing. The druids, a group the Devil found particularly annoying – along with vegetarians who eat fish, and people who style themselves as ‘opinion-formers’ or ‘growth-hackers’ – used to believe in ‘edges’: corners of the planet where the division between this world and the next is less rigid. They’d been right about this, though not much else. There are places where the wall between the mundus and other realms is thinner, and these areas are often associated with legends concerning ghosts or aliens, or feelings of nausea and dread (though these can also be the effects of an invisible stop imp, or eating too large a burrito). Some edge zones find their way into local lore, and are avoided – subconsciously – by people in their vicinity. Others have been long forgotten, and find themselves accidentally enclosed within houses or other buildings, which may subsequently change hands frequently, and attract rumours of hauntings.
And sometimes these buildings are bars.
Not the regular type, a location that could as easily be a restaurant or shoe store, where the waitresses are perky and children are welcome and there are crayons and an espresso machine. The kind of bars that wind up on edges are more hardcore. You don’t go there to watch sporting events, celebrate birthdays, or hold impromptu brain-storming sessions about how to get Facebook to notice your pointless social-media app and buy it for a gazillion dollars. These are the kind of bars where you go to talk lonely bullshit to people who aren’t listening, to slip your hand under the table to hold that of a married friend, or to simply be by yourself, in low lighting and with a line of stiff drinks, with no one around to engage with or love you, because being engaged with or loved can be very, very tiring.
Edges attract people for whom the constraints of their lives and reality are chafing, whose stories have stopped making sense; and over time many edges have wound up housing bars where the beer is cheap and the barman tattooed and pierced like a pincushion and the carpet reeks of despair.
That was the kind of place the Devil was looking for.
The first two weren’t right. Though evidently establishments for committed drinkers, featureless oblongs near the highway with nothing but broken neon signs to attract passers-by, neither was truly grim enough.
The third was the real deal.
The Dragnet sat squarely on an edge, and the act of walking off the street into the dank interior felt like a journey of far greater distance than a single step – or would have, if its patrons hadn’t been too inebriated or preoccupied to notice or care. A counter ran along one wall, solitary figures dotted along it on stools. Other individuals, predominantly male, held defensive positions in booths along the opposite wall and at the far end. The lights were low, a few red-shaded bulbs. The music was the kind you put on to show people how pissed off you are at the world, played 20 per cent too loud.
While the Devil waited for the attention of the barman he turned to the man on the nearest stool. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
The man looked up at him blearily. He was twenty-nine and worked nights stocking shelves at the Best Buy on the other side of town. He was extremely, albeit quietly, drunk, though the scatter of bills on the counter in front of him was supposed to be in an envelope on their way to his ex-wife in Watsonville to pay for clothes for her/their infant child, the name of which he presently, in all honesty, couldn’t bring to mind, his former wife having changed it at least twice since she threw him out. Kyle, probably. Or Kylon? Some shit like that. Kryton?
‘In what possible way?’ he asked.
The Devil inclined his head, as if conceding the point. He bought a large vodka and left the counter, trailing his finger along the man’s shoulder as he walked off. The man was too drunk to notice. Later that afternoon, however, he finally realized how much his room-mate’s aged cat was getting on his nerves, and killed it, losing consciousness on the sofa with the animal’s neck still gripped in his hands. Around midnight the room-mate returned, worked out what had happened (not a tough piece of deduction, profoundly stoned though the room-mate was), and stabbed him in the heart with a dirty ten-inch chef’s knife. He died quickly, a faster resolution to his pain than the Devil would have preferred, but it was not an exact science. You put stuff out there, and you got what you got. It’s a journey.
But before that happened, back in the present moment, the Devil selected a booth near the door, and waited.
A little before six o’clock a man came in by himself, and the Devil sat up and took notice. The man was in his forties, heavy-set, wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He drank a beer at the counter while talking to the barman. They did not look as though they were merely passing the time of day, nor as if they were friends, exactly.
The Devil watched their reflection in the mirror behind the bar, though he already knew this was the kind of man he was looking for. He could smell it. The odour was hard to describe, but you might say it was kind of like brimstone. It’s the scent of men and women who are the wrong kind of verbs, and always have been. After ten minutes the man at the bar finished his beer in a single swallow and left. The barman – himself not someone you’d want to meet down a dark alley at night, or even in a brightly lit library on a Tuesday morning – looked somewhat relieved that he’d gone.
The Devil followed.
He could have accosted the man on the street but he preferred it to be somewhere more private, and so he let the guy climb into his battered truck, quickly made arrangements for his own transportation, and followed.
The truck left town heading north on Highway 9, a winding two-lane up into the mountains. Fifteen minutes north of Santa Cruz it would be hard to believe there was anything in the world but miles of silent redwoods and pines clinging to craggy slopes, the San Lorenzo River snaking far below. The vehicle continued up through small old logging towns called Felton and Ben Lomond, and nearly as far as Boulder Creek, before taking a side road. Ten minutes after that it took another turn, this time on to a one-lane county road whose surface had started to come apart long ago.
The Devil allowed himself to fall some distance behind to avoid detection. He was driving a cute little pink Fiat he’d stolen off the street. He didn’t know that the vehicle was the pride and joy of a young woman called Luanne, who’d recently been making strides towards getting control of her life after a very shaky start, and who would likely react to the car’s loss by sliding back into depression and substance abuse.
But, had he known, he would have been pleased.
Ten minutes later the Devil parked behind the truck, which had been left in front of the rusted metal gate that barred the way. Beyond this point the lane was impassable by motor vehicle. It could be that the man simply lived a long way off-grid, peaceably eating kale salads and living at one with nature, but the Devil didn’t think so.
He walked into the forest, taking his time, pacing himself against the persistent slope. He felt tired. Physical bodies require energy, and he had neglected to eat, but that wasn’t it. Without the constant redirection of millions of beats of black energy from the deeds and sacrifices of the world’s dark ones, he did not feel himself. There was a potential source of back-up, a temporary ally, in pursuit of whom he had dispatched the idiot imp. Even that would only help a little, however.
He needed the Sacrifice Machine working properly again, directing the world’s blacknesses through Hell and back into his soul. To determine the problem he needed access to Hell once more – the hell of people. Once that business was concluded he would be able to turn his attention to the broader question of what on earth was going on.
In the meantime he walked, steadily and implacably, up the slope between the trees.
It was forty minutes before he started to smell it. Not the odour of other worlds this time, but one born of chemical processes and cheap ingredients. It had something of stale cat urine, a touch of rotten eggs, an undercurrent of sickly sweetness. It was n
ot strong, but it was persistent.
The Devil adjusted his course, and kept walking.
After a further half-mile he caught a glimpse of a rotting cabin in the trees ahead. He headed towards it, passing several dead patches of vegetation where spent chemicals had been discarded. As he got closer, he saw two men standing talking at a safe distance from the cabin.
Soon after that, they saw him. Both quickly put out the cigarettes they’d been smoking and came to attention.
‘You want to turn around, buddy,’ the first said. He was skinny and had an unappealing beard. His cheeks were dotted with small scabs, as were his knuckles. ‘Now.’
‘Really?’ the Devil said mildly. ‘But it’s so beautiful up here as the light fades.’
The other man was the one the Devil had followed from Santa Cruz. He did not have the first guy’s jittery energy, nor did he appear concerned at the arrival of a stranger. ‘Seen you before,’ he said.
‘In nightmares, perhaps.’
‘No. I’m thinking more likely the Dragnet. About an hour ago. Sitting in a booth. That was you, right?’
‘You’re observant.’
‘You a cop?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ The man smiled. ‘Kenny – kill him.’
The skinny guy did a double take. ‘Huh?’
‘Two words, Kenny. Kill. Him. You understand both.’
‘But … he’s just some old dude.’
‘Then he’s got nothing to lose. Make it so. Now. We got a cook to finish.’
The thickset man walked towards the cabin. Kenny reached reluctantly behind his back for the handgun lodged in his jeans. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said to the Devil as the other man went inside. ‘But you heard what the boss said.’
‘You don’t want to do this?’
‘I actually don’t, to be honest with you. I only killed one other guy before. And he was really an asshole. Seems like we could all walk away from this one, though, right?’
‘Kenny …’ The other man’s voice came from inside the cabin. ‘Just do the thing, will you?’
Kenny made an apologetic face and raised the gun, pointing it at the old man’s head. ‘I gotta do this,’ he said.
‘You’ve done enough already,’ the Devil said. ‘Your ticket’s booked. Comfort yourself that I’m merely saving you the next few years of turning into something unrecognizable.’
‘Whatever, dude,’ Kenny said, and pulled the trigger.
He didn’t notice that some unconscious impulse had caused him to alter his hold on the gun, so the barrel pointed towards his own face rather than the old man’s.
The laws of physics noticed, though. There was a loud clapping sound, and then a thud as Kenny’s near-headless body fell to the ground.
‘Good job,’ the other man called from inside the cabin. ‘Free treats for you later.’
The Devil waited.
After a couple of minutes, the man called out again. ‘Kenny, you coming back in, or what?’
‘Doesn’t seem likely,’ the Devil said.
The other man emerged quickly from the cabin. He looked at the Devil, at Kenny’s body on the ground – still holding the gun – and then back at the Devil. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I love it when people ask that,’ the Devil said. ‘It’s so ironic.’
Chapter 22
First, Hannah led them to coffee shops. Her dad liked coffee. A lot. Coffee was non-negotiable. She’d seen her dad tolerate stunningly dull shopping expeditions (during some of which she’d personally nearly lapsed into a coma), and even children’s parties – which she was gradually getting weren’t the fun explosion for him that they were for her – purely because he was holding a cardboard cup of well-made coffee. It was one of those weird grown-up things like wanting the kitchen to be tidy, needing a little damned peace and quiet once in a while, and watching the TV news. You didn’t have to understand these strange urges in the elderly, merely accept they were real and tolerate them as best you could.
So when Aunt Zo had driven them downtown, the first places they looked were Starbucks, Lulu Carpenter’s, Verve, the Cruz Brewz, Peet’s and two other places Hannah could recall being in with him on one of their Saturday-morning walks. She was methodical, leading Granddad and Aunt Zo to the coffee shops in order of probability, not merely because they sold those weapons-grade caramel shortbreads which Hannah loved but which even she had to admit gave her a sugar rush that was not pretty to watch.
No sign of Dad in any of them. Next they tried the bookstores. Hannah liked books. Her mom sort of did too, especially if they had a photo of a serious-looking businesswoman on the front. But Dad? That was some whole other thing. It was as well that none of the bookstores downtown housed a coffee shop, or you’d need a tractor to haul him out.
They went to Bookshop Santa Cruz. They went to Logos, which featured a second-hand basement into which Hannah’s father had been known to vanish for half-days at a stretch. They even went to a small place down a side street that took her a while to find by herself and which only had books for smart people at the university, where Dad went when he was researching. The guy there always glared at Hannah as though he was afraid she was going to knock stuff over. He did it again this time.
While they were searching all these places it felt OK. They had a mission, and because Hannah knew downtown better than Granddad or Aunt Zo, she was the leader. Being in charge suggested there must be something that she was in charge of, which proved they were doing something and it made sense.
But they’d gone to all the places and still there had been no sign of Dad. She’d even asked, after insisting on a second look in Starbucks, if the people working there had seen him. Hannah recognized the barista, and he recognized her and knew who her dad was, but said he hadn’t been in.
That news came as the tolling of a bad, cracked bell. Dad shared his love of coffee around, but she knew if he’d come down to the town the first thing he’d do was grab a double-tall two-pump vanilla latté from a major multinational beverage corporation. It was like walking fuel to him. If he hadn’t come into Starbucks it was unlikely he’d come at all.
Afterwards they stood outside, Aunt Zo looking pointlessly up and down the street. ‘So where now?’
Hannah realized she didn’t understand what her dad did, what he wanted, where he might go: that she’d somehow lived with him for nearly twelve years without gaining any idea of what he was about. If he wasn’t working or buying coffee or books or cooking dinner, what would he do? She knew these couldn’t be the sum of him, but Santa Cruz was a different town for her dad. She didn’t know where his streets led, except for the few points where they intersected with hers – places like home.
‘It’s OK,’ Granddad said, sensing she was beginning to panic. ‘Let’s think laterally. Where else does he like to go? Where else have you seen him looking happy?’
The question scared her. She knew her dad was content sometimes, or had been. He laughed. He said silly things. He looked at her occasionally in a bemused and affectionate way, as if he was unsure how they’d come to be grouped into a family unit, but felt OK with the arrangement.
She didn’t know what made him happy, though … and she couldn’t remember him doing any of those things – laughing, smiling or being silly – for quite a while. From some time before Mom left, in fact. Was that why she’d gone? Because he hadn’t laughed any more? Would you leave someone because of something like that? Did you have to keep laughing and smiling and seeming happy or else people would leave you?
‘Twin Lakes,’ she said suddenly.
And so they tried Twin Lakes, which – as Hannah realized in the ten-minute car journey over there – had to be where he was, as not only was it his favourite beach but it also had a coffee shop. Ha! She felt dumb for not having thought of it before. He liked the walk up to Black Rock, where the pelicans lurked during their season. He liked the Crow’s Nest restaurant (though that was a family place, somewhere they al
l used to go together, and she and Dad hadn’t been there since everything changed, and seeing it now gave her a cutting twist of sadness in the stomach) and he liked the Kind Grind coffee shop (specialty of the house, notably awesome oatmeal toffee cookies). So, duh.
Except, no.
They walked the length of the beach, though the light was starting to fade. It was almost deserted. At the far end, near Pelican Rock, there was no one at all. The sand was strewn with driftwood, large and small.
But no Dad.
‘This isn’t working,’ Aunt Zo said.
And so later Hannah was back at the kitchen table in her house. Sitting where she’d sat earlier. Her place. Hannah didn’t know that humankind has a deep-set belief in the idea that we create and maintain reality through ritual, that repeated actions are what keep the spheres in alignment. She also didn’t know that it doesn’t work, and that there are far older, more complex, and much darker designs in motion, ones that override ours as effortlessly as a crack of thunder blotting out birdsong.
And so she sat at her place in the kitchen, becoming more and more terrified that the fact she was there didn’t seem to be magically putting the world to rights.
Meanwhile Granddad and Aunt Zo were talking in the backyard. They looked serious. Aunt Zo was even smoking a cigarette, which is one short step from genocidal lunacy. Hannah had only seen her aunt perform this dread act twice before. Once at a party her parents held a year ago, late in the evening, when everyone had been very cheerful indeed and the usual laws of the universe seemed to have been suspended (including the one that said Hannah should have been in bed); and then once in the last few months when Zo had been at the house babysitting for the afternoon and hadn’t realized that – instead of sitting indoors reading, as advertised – Hannah had come to see what her aunt was up to. Zo had looked guilty when discovered, sad, and compromised. Like a grown-up Hannah didn’t know.
Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Page 13