Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  And then remembered him saying something else: last resort.

  She knew that her grandfather had used these words, too – back in Kalaloch. When he’d said there was something that should not be touched, least of all by her.

  Nash’s voice echoed from inside the machine. ‘I see it,’ he said. He sounded excited, triumphant, as if all the small, narrow dreams he’d dedicated his life to had fallen away, and he’d realized there were dooms that were so much bigger … terrible, world-ending, but magnificent.

  But he also sounded like a child, the person he’d once been long ago, before all the bad things had happened in his life. ‘I see it.’

  Hannah saw the reflection of his arm as he reached out for something, his switch, deep in the interior of the machine.

  And before he could touch it she darted forwards, got her fingers around the pin with the dark red jewel, and pulled.

  It slid smoothly out of the mechanism.

  And the Sacrifice Machine fell apart.

  It happened all at once, as if some force field had been holding it together instead of mechanics, and the device’s ten million parts suddenly no longer had any connection or relationship to each another. One moment it was an eight-foot-tall cabinet, deep enough for two grown men to stand inside. The next it was a shower of cogs and wheels and screws and levers and switches, like a rain of tiny piece of precious metal. They dropped to the ground in a circle twenty feet wide.

  And the machine was gone.

  Nash was nowhere to be seen. Nor the old guy in the suit. Jesse blinked. ‘Where the hell did they go?’

  ‘Precisely there,’ Granddad said. ‘And what happens now is up to you. You can either follow them or not.’

  Jesse tightened his finger on the trigger. He knew what Nash had said. That if anything happened, he should shoot.

  But Nash wasn’t here any more. Nash had gone to where part of his soul had always lived, the place where his path led. Nash had found Hell. That didn’t mean Jesse had to join him.

  He dropped the gun and ran. Eduardo and Chex followed.

  They fled the promenade just as the cops arrived from the other direction, having finally decided they’d given the weird old spook in the suit enough leeway and it was time to start banging heads and taking names.

  They were confused to find no sign of him, but instead a bunch of completely different people – they didn’t seem to be able to see the dark shapes still roosting above – but Granddad gave them a long and detailed non-explanation of the events they’d witnessed earlier, involving an entirely fictional clandestine task force of rollercoaster troubleshooters.

  Officer Ray looked dubiously down at the bazillion or so glinting pieces of finely worked metal strewn over the ground. ‘So what are these things?’

  ‘Spare parts.’

  ‘And who are these other people?’

  ‘Interns.’

  Ray peered suspiciously at Hannah. ‘She’s, like, ten.’

  ‘Eleven,’ Hannah said indignantly.

  Officer Rick assessed the situation, decided it would take at least a cubic yard of paperwork to encompass and that life was too damned short. He encouraged Officer Ray to return to the car with him and to forget any of it ever happened. Ray eventually agreed to go along with this and so on the way back into town Rick pulled over near an abandoned garage on a quiet back street and let Ray kick its door down. After a while, Rick got out and joined in. Then they went to Ferrell’s and had donuts.

  Next morning while on patrol Officer Rick came across three men huddled together in a doorway. All were wide-eyed, intensely scared by something they refused to describe, and evidently hadn’t slept all night. Officer Rick dealt with them gently, shared coffee out of his flask, and encouraged them to be on their way. Jesse, Eduardo and Chex never stole another thing in their lives. They wound up as waiters in a beach restaurant in Los Angeles, and – so far as I’m aware – are there to this day.

  By an odd coincidence (or perhaps not), Nash is also engaged in kitchen work. He is washing pots and pans for the restaurant in the Behind, his hands blistered from constant plunges into water that is hotter than the sun as he tries to keep up with an infinite amount of dishwashing while a chef with a cleaver stands behind him whispering about the meals he would like to prepare from his liver. But don’t feel too bad for Nash. He will be allowed to progress to other things.

  In about a hundred million years.

  In the meantime, after the cops left, Hannah and her parents and grandfather remained on the promenade. They, and the things still standing up on the roofs of the boardwalk structures.

  All was still for a moment, and then a wind started to pick up. It gathered fast, like a gale – coming not from the sky but the angels. This was their fury, Hannah knew, the terrible vacuum of their lack. Their anger at being thwarted, their need to damage and hurt. She looked up at the nearest.

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘You’re not wanted here. You’re not wanted anywhere. You’re nothing.’

  The wind rattled and screamed down the promenade, like a whirlwind, blowing all the parts of the machine away.

  And then they were gone.

  Leaving only the humans, and Vaneclaw. Hannah turned to her grandfather. ‘I’m sorry about your machine,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not.’ He smiled, putting his arm around her shoulders. ‘And I’m more proud of you than you’ll ever know.’

  She handed him the pin she’d plucked out of the inside. ‘At least there’s one bit left. Is this what the man gave you? The man you heard playing the organ in Leipzig?’

  ‘Yes.’ Granddad put the pin back into the palm of her hand, and gently folded her fingers over it. It felt warm, then hot, and then she couldn’t feel it any more.

  When she opened her fingers, it had gone.

  Granddad winked. ‘It’s yours now.’

  Now

  Hannah’s mom and dad did not get back together, I’m afraid. This is a story, but that doesn’t mean it can’t stay true – and some things can’t be reversed. Two months later they sold the house, and Hannah and her father went to live in a smaller one on the East Side. It was a wooden cottage close to Twin Lakes Beach, with a guest room for when Granddad came to visit. He dropped by on the first weekend and gave Hannah a new sculpture for her room. It looked rather like the insides of an owl but she put it in a prominent position nonetheless.

  Granddad was coming to town regularly at the time to covertly assist in the repair of the Giant Dipper, which people in Santa Cruz believed had fallen victim to vandals in the pay of rival seaside destinations. He waited until the crews went home every night and slipped in through the service door, achieving more in eight hours than teams of workmen could in a week. As part of this he disabled the hidden dial which allowed the machinery’s speed to be increased. No one will get into the Behind from the Dipper’s carriages again, though if you know where to look, there is now a way to charge your iPhone.

  Hannah’s mom returned to London to tell her bosses she didn’t want to work there any more, said goodbye to the man she had known, and finally answered her cousin’s email. She stopped hiding. She still had to travel for work sometimes but she came back to live in Santa Cruz, renting a house on the West Side where Hannah stays every weekend, and some evenings too.

  In time she started cautiously seeing a man from Los Gatos, a development of which her daughter took a dim view because she knew Dad still thought about her mom a lot. Kristen explained that occasionally girls had to be the bad guys, because bad guys are often just normal guys doing things that happen to hurt someone else’s feelings; that life is short, and all you can do is take it page by page or even line by line; and that, as Steve had put it to Kristen recently, in their least shouty lunch so far, you are only bound in the same book as those you love, not always and forever on the same page.

  Her dad didn’t start seeing anybody else for a while. He seemed OK with this, though, especially after – to everybody’s baffle
ment – someone at the network decided it might be fun to remake that funky cult classic, Undertoe. Thus it came to pass that Hannah’s dad and Frankie the actor were reunited, and ‘Fiasco!’ became once more something of a catchphrase. The show was cancelled again after a (second) second season, when everyone realized it was still basically a crappy idea, but Hannah’s dad earned enough for them to get by for another year – which, when you make things up for a living, is about as much as you can hope for.

  Frank caught some lucky breaks and went on to enjoy a wildly successful career as an A-list action movie hero, finally scoring the Malibu beach house he’d always dreamed off.

  On the deck of which he now sits, on some perfect moonlit evenings, vaguely wishing he was a cook.

  Hannah went up to the city to visit Aunt Zo. They spent most of their time out doing stuff, as Aunt Zo’s apartment was so tiny it reminded Hannah uncomfortably of what had happened to her old bedroom when it slipped into the Behind.

  It was Aunt Zo who – over sushi in a restaurant where the food was delivered on little boats, which Hannah felt was absolutely the most sophisticated thing in the universe – managed to steer Hannah towards a place where she didn’t glare suspiciously at her mother’s boyfriend every time they met, and almost completely stopped muttering things at him that were supposed to sound like spells. It helped that by then Hannah’s father had begun to be visited quite often by a lady he was working with down in Los Angeles. For a wolverine she had a very nice laugh, and was remarkably adept at juggling fruit.

  Having discovered – through facing down a Fallen Angel, even if it turned into a squirrel – a depth of courage she didn’t realize she possessed, Zoë is going from strength to strength. She is currently starring in a piece of performance art at a very small basement venue, during which she shouts at light bulbs. It’s being received surprisingly well.

  Vaneclaw the imp decided that, exciting though all the excitement had been, it was high time for him to return to what he was best at. He lurked around downtown for a few days, limbering up by causing a few minor traffic accidents, the permanent malfunction of two public toilets and the accidental dropping of a number of recently purchased coffees, before spotting a total and utter bastard who he believed would make an excellent target for a long run of disappointing luck, and launching himself at him.

  He missed, and ended up splatted on to the roof of a passing car. He managed to cling on all the way up to the city, where he was drawn to revisit Madame Chang’s grocery store. There in the stinking basement he encountered once more the angel that takes the form of a feisty squirrel with black fur and tufty ears, now released from servitude by his infernal master in recognition of recent services in the Behind.

  A dark and intriguing deal was struck, the union of two entities weird and strange, both possessed of the power to affect destinies and shape lives.

  Unfortunately Vaneclaw lost the notes from the meeting and so no one’s sure what the deal was. He thinks it’s either something to do with opening a pizzeria, or fighting crime.

  But before any of that happened, three days after the adventure ended and when Hannah’s mom had flown back to London and Aunt Zo had driven back to the city, on Saturday morning Hannah walked downtown with her dad.

  When they approached Starbucks to buy his walking-around coffee, they saw an old man in a crumpled black suit sitting at a table in the courtyard.

  ‘He’s back,’ Hannah’s father said.

  ‘I don’t think he can ever really go away.’

  A woman was in the chair opposite the Devil. She had long grey hair and a kind, lined face and was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and looked familiar, though to be honest Santa Cruz is home to quite a lot of women who present that way.

  ‘This is … a friend,’ the Devil muttered. He looked as though he would have preferred not to have said anything.

  ‘Hello, Hannah,’ the old lady said. Her voice had the rich, friendly rasp of a woman who has been no stranger to good times.

  Hannah glanced up at her dad. ‘I’ll get in line,’ he said, and she realized her dad had the same gift as his father, and could hear things that hadn’t been said.

  ‘What happens about the machine?’ she asked when he’d gone inside.

  ‘Nothing, for now,’ the Devil said. ‘The Engineer says he is too old to build a replacement, though I’m confident I shall change his mind. For the time being, the bad that is done on Earth will simply have to remain here. It’s been that way for some years now, and you’ve all survived so far.’

  ‘But what can we do to stop the world getting worse?’

  ‘Good,’ the old lady said. ‘You do good. The machine should never have been built. It is humankind’s responsibility to make up for what they do – day by day and deed by deed – not give the power of restitution and redemption away to the gods.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ the old lady said. ‘It’s usually better that way. Comprehension so often confuses the issue.’

  There was a quiet thud on the pavement behind Hannah, but she ignored it, having realized where she’d seen the woman before. ‘You were in the airport when I went to Granddad,’ she said. ‘And in the restaurant, in the Behind.’

  She was also, though Hannah didn’t know about the event, the woman who’d spoken to her mother in a hotel bar in London.

  ‘One does like to keep an eye on what’s going on.’

  ‘Interfere, you mean,’ said the Devil.

  ‘Why me, though?’ Hannah asked. ‘And why now?’

  ‘Is any time, or any person, more important?’

  ‘I guess not. Not to me, anyway.’

  ‘But also – what makes you think this has been your story, and not your mother, or father’s, or grandfather’s, or that aunt of yours with the extraordinary hair?’

  ‘I rather like her hair,’ the old woman said.

  ‘How do you guys even know each other?’ Hannah asked. ‘You don’t seem like people who would hang out. At all.’

  The old woman raised an eyebrow at the Devil, as if relishing his embarrassment. ‘Would you care to explain, dear?’

  ‘We were … together,’ the Devil admitted.

  The old lady laughed. ‘For a very long time.’

  ‘It didn’t work out.’

  ‘Irreconcilable differences.’

  ‘And an infernal amount of bickering.’

  ‘I kept the nice house. I made it, after all.’

  ‘And I got this instead.’ The Devil gestured balefully at the street, the people, the buildings, the world. ‘Bad-tempered chaos, increasingly dire music, and a brood of turbulent angels that won’t do a damned thing they’re told.’

  ‘They’ll find their feet. Children always do.’

  ‘What,’ Hannah asked, ‘are you two talking about?’

  The old lady laughed raucously, and stood up. ‘You know what the words “Santa Cruz” mean, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s my home.’

  ‘True. But it’s also the Spanish for “Holy Cross”.’ She held her hands up in an X-shape. ‘A cross is two things in perfect opposition, which yet form a whole.’

  ‘I’m not sure they ever really understood that,’ the Devil muttered. ‘As I predicted at the time.’

  ‘No, dear,’ the old woman sighed, ‘you were right. A circle might have been a better logo. Ah well. We stumble on. The truth is neither of us are real, Hannah. Not in the way that trees are real. We’re what happens between you and other people, the ups and downs on the swing, the sunny days and dark nights. He’s the blank page, I’m the words – or perhaps it’s the other way around. I’ll forgive your trespasses, but he understands them. I’m yes, he’s no – but the wheel of yin and yang spins so fast that cold black and white blur into a living grey. There is never only this, or that. There are all the things in between. Humans will always charge where angels fear to tread. And life goes on.’

  She walked away down the street, ste
pping around a dead bird lying on the sidewalk.

  The line in Starbucks was even more epic than usual and so Hannah and the Devil talked a while longer, though nothing even started to make any more sense. Hannah decided it didn’t matter. Somewhere between all the stories that have been told lies the truth – or ‘a’ truth, at least, as there are always several in play at any given moment. All we have in the meantime are hints and hopes, secrets and reveals, maybe-this and maybe-that. Best, then, to concentrate on keeping track of your own tales, and weave them as cheerfully as you are able.

  As the conversation continued there were further quiet thuds, and by the end eleven dead birds were lying on the ground around the courtyard. Nobody but Hannah seemed to have noticed. The other coffee drinkers sat chatting about start-ups or consulting their smartphones, oblivious.

  Hannah looked crossly at the Devil. ‘Why do you do that? All the bad things? It’s mean.’

  ‘There is an echo after every footstep. When you take a cookie from the jar, a space is left behind. There must always be at least two paths – or there would be no what-ifs, no choices. No life. My job is very like your father’s. The only difference is that in my tales, people really die.’

  ‘So why did you help me?’

  ‘I wasn’t helping.’

  ‘You were. You were inside the chef. And I think you were that wolf. And you kept looking at me when the machine was being opened … you were helping me remember what I could do.’

  ‘I was a circumstance, Hannah, that’s all. Good or bad – and I assure you that I remain extremely and appallingly bad – there are many angels because there were once many gods, pushing, pulling, hiding, guiding. Once we get through the fog and find a place that feels comfortable we look back and call their influence fate, and the destination our destiny. That’s all.’

  ‘Nuts. Admit it. You were helping.’

  The Devil looked away, so she couldn’t see him smile.

  ‘Well. It’s all been extremely interesting,’ Hannah declared, standing to leave. ‘But if I’m honest, I’d prefer my life to be a lot more mundane from now on.’