by Tad Williams
Anyway, back to Foxy. I could tell immediately that something wasn’t quite right, because even though it definitely was him—same corpse-white skin, same cat-yellow eyes—he wasn’t dancing. At least, not the way he usually did—constant swirl of motion, bending, spinning, a bit of soft shoe, jazz hands and big finish! That kind of thing. Instead he was staying in one place, and the only consistent movement was a nervous shuffling of his feet.
“Mr. Bob!” He smiled but it wasn’t the most convincing thing I’ve ever seen. “So nice to see you! Too bad can’t talk now!”
“What do you mean?” I looked back in case he’d seen something I hadn’t, but we were well out of the flow of foot traffic, mostly hidden by the construction scaffolds and the plywood wall.
“Oh, you know, Dollar-man—lots of work! Foxy Foxy always on call. But I see you real soon!” He was already backing deeper into the shadows.
“Hold on. I need to ask you a question. About the auction at Islanders Hall. You remember that, right?”
He laughed—a trifle bitterly I thought. “Oh, yes! Very exciting! Many shootings! Completely not bad for business, Mr. Bobby.”
“Look, I’m as sorry about that as you are. You should have seen how I spent the rest of that evening.” That had been the Babylonian Demon Whatsit I referred to earlier, which had not only killed my car, but had destroyed half the Compasses when it followed me and Sam there. “But I need to know who was at that auction. More specifically, I need to know who might be interested in certain kinds of articles. Not the one I was selling that night, but something . . . um . . . similar.”
Now the fidgeting became a full-force tap dance of agitation. “So sorry, Mr. Dollar Bob. Don’t remember any of it! Don’t remember anyone there! Don’t even remember what you are talking about—suddenly it is all oh-so-distant.” Now he really did back away, still jiggling like a man who badly needs to urinate.
“What is this bullshit, Fox? You’re the one who came to me in the first place, remember? You’re the one who said you’d be happy to work with me anytime.”
“Oh, and I would, I tell you true! But right now? No. Simply too hot. Too much bad stuff. Sorry!”
“What do you mean, too hot? What’s too hot?”
“You are. Whole thing. Mister Foxy can’t get involved. Way too big for poor little Fox Man.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Just tell me what you know.”
“Can’t. Talk to you soon, Mr. Dollar Bobby. I’m sure everything will go super swimmy great for you. No problem. Just . . . just . . .”
While I waited for him to finish that sentence, a car horn blared a short distance away. I jumped, but it was only a cab driver honking at an adventurous pedestrian who had decided to explore the zone outside the crosswalk. When I looked back, Foxy Foxy had vanished like a New Year’s resolution in February.
• • •
Did I like this idea of myself as a doomed target that even crazy semi-people would avoid? I did not. Fact is, if I hadn’t been all the way across downtown from my car, I would have sloped right back to the Compasses and had myself a shot or two of tell-Reality-to-shut-up. But I didn’t want to get a work call while I was still a sober fifteen minute walk away from my car, let alone a more lubricated twenty-five minute stumble, so I turned my back on the big bayfront skyscrapers and started back toward the railroad station. I kept an eye open, but this time I didn’t see my friends in the missionary suits, or—and I was even more grateful for this—any giant might-be-spiders lounging under parked cars, either.
We should always be thankful for the small, good things.
Back home to my only-slightly-squalid Tierra Green apartment. Just as I got through the door and reached for the lights, something furry ran across my feet. I admit that, in the mood I was in, I might have been a little wound up, which probably explains the fact that I jumped and bellowed in surprise so loudly that the upstairs neighbor started pounding on his floor. It also explains why I didn’t see more than the last little bit of whatever it was that scuttled out the open window of my second floor walk-up. What it doesn’t explain, though, is why the thing on the windowsill appeared to be a hairy, skinny, gray and black arm with a shriveled little bruise-colored hand at the end of it, like an un-mummified version of the Monkey’s Paw. But before I had a chance to make a foolish wish, or even to start shouting again, the clutching fingers let go, and it dropped out of sight.
I rushed to the window, of course, but saw nothing in the alleyway below but a couple of recycling bins too small to hide even the most modestly sized ape.
Maybe I was catching all the crazy floating around. Maybe it was just post-traumatic shock. I still slept with my gun underneath my pillow that night.
five
haunted
“SERIOUSLY,” I told Clarence the junior angel as we waited to order, “it’s starting to freak me out a little. It’s been going on for days. First, there’s something scratching in the walls. Oh, and an intermittent smell of rotting meat. Love that. Then there’s the Monkey’s Paw or whatever that was.”
“Monkey’s Paw?”
Clarence brushed some lint off his sweater as I explained about the little gray hand on the windowsill. The kid had upped his game a bit lately, clotheswise—more GQ preppie, less Your Dad On His High School Debate Team. He was even rocking some cool wire-rimmed glasses, plus he had let his hair grow out a bit and had the floppy, just got off my sailboat look going on.
He was also, at least at that moment, wearing the facial expression of an astrophysicist who is listening to an anal probe hysteric explain why aliens are real. This pissed me off a bit because pretty much all the stuff I’ve told him has turned out to be true.
“Yes, it was a hand, damn it,” I said. “Don’t look at me like that. With little fingers and a little tiny thumb.”
“Maybe it was a raccoon.”
“Fuck your raccoon. Besides, there’s more. Last night, I start hearing something bump against my window while I’m lying in bed—like a really big fly, you know how they do, but this sounded huge. I kept trying to catch it, but every time I get up, I find nothing. Then, when I checked in the morning, I saw a kind of slimy smear on the outside. Like something really disgusting had been pressing its nose against it.”
The kid was still doing the slow nod. “So, you’re being stalked by Mormons, monkeys, and whatever the thing with the wet nose was—some kind of ghostly Irish Setter?”
“Yeah, see how funny you think it is when your apartment turns out to be haunted. Oh, wait, it is—by old people.” Clarence rented a room in some rich folks’ house. Living rich folks.
“Burt and Sheila are really nice, actually.”
“I’m sure that my visitor is a really nice cursed Monkey’s Paw, too. Kind to children and dogs and shit like that. But I still don’t want it hanging around my apartment when I’m not there, especially since the Mule told me I’m not allowed to move somewhere else, which would be the obvious solution. By the way, thanks for your words of support, Junior.”
“Look, I’m not making fun of you, Bobby, I just don’t know what to say. This is still a bit new to me, all these demons and monsters and stuff.” He stared at his menu, which he had been doing a lot since he’d come in. “Speaking of new to me, I don’t know what any of this stuff is. Seriously, I don’t recognize anything. Do they eat actual food in Indonesia?”
“Kid, kid. If you’re going to start hanging out with the big boys like me and Sam, you have to start eating big boy food. You live in San Judas, one of the best restaurant towns in the world. We’ve got people selling gyros and Vietnamese-Mex and even chicken and waffles out of street trucks! Not to mention a zillion different interesting ethnic restaurants like this one. You’re going to be dead a long time—hey, you might have been dead a long time already, for all I know—so you might as well branch out.”
“Yeah
, but do I have to start with Indonesian? Look at what they’re eating over there. Rocks and bark!”
I shook my head. “First off, this isn’t Indonesian, it’s actually Javanese food. Java is only one of thousands of islands in Indonesia. Like all Boston clam chowder is American food, but not all American food is Boston clam chowder. Second, what those folks are eating is nasi gudeg, and it’s really good. The rock, as you so ignorantly called it, is a marbled, hard-boiled egg. The stuff it’s sitting on is not bark but gudeg, which is made from jackfruit.”
“Yeah? How about the fried washcloth?”
“Buffalo skin. Probably from a cow, actually. No, it’s good. Stop making faces. Just let me order lunch for both of us and try not to hyperventilate.”
While we waited for the food and Clarence watched various menu items go to nearby tables—the kid’s expression was like someone forced to watch ugly people have sex—I brought him the rest of the way up to date. Well, not about Anaita’s involvement: Clarence was still new to this whole disobeying-the-bosses thing, and Anaita was seriously high in the hierarchy. I wasn’t ready to drag him in that deeply. He listened, but he also seemed distracted, like there was something on his mind. He kept saying things like, “You know, Bobby,” and then kind of trailing off as though he’d chickened out on whatever he’d been about to say. Whatever it was, I figured he’d bring it up when he was ready, and besides, I had worries of my own—not just unexplained things-going-bump, but Foxy Foxy and his very obvious case of The Fear.
“Who is that Foxy guy, anyway?” Clarence asked. “How did he find out about your feather in the first place?”
“I don’t know, but once it had been stolen from Eligor I’m sure the word got around, and locating odd items for interested buyers seems to be what dancing Mr. Fox does.”
He frowned. “So the feather means Kephas made a deal with the Grand Duke of Hell.” “Kephas” was the angelic pseudonym Anaita had used setting up the Third Way.
“Eligor is a grand duke,” I told him. “I think there are a few.” But only one whose heart I personally needed to tear out of his immortal chest and squeeze like a ripe tomato, and that was Eligor the Horseman.
“But why would a high angel like Kephas do that?”
“Because no one could open up a new territory like this Third Way place without both a major angel and a major demon signing off. That goes all the way back to the Tartarean Convention.” I saw what looked like our order being lifted onto the pass-through, so I signaled the waiter to bring me another Bintang. (I said I was cutting back and I meant it. Bintang beer doesn’t have a lot of alcohol in it. Honest. But you need something cold and wet to wash down the peppers.)
“Yeah, I get that, but why?” Clarence asked. “The two of them made this big bargain and opened this new territory, I understand that. And I get that . . . Kephas wanted it for this experiment or whatever.” He had hesitated oddly before using Anaita’s pseudonym. Did he have suspicions of his own about the identity of Sam’s mystery angel? “But why would Eligor go along with it?”
“Actually, that’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer. So the angel would owe him a favor, maybe. That’s got to be useful if you’re a major player in Hell. The rivalries those guys have with each other are as bad as anything they feel about us.”
“Still, it seems weird.” His look of dissatisfaction turned into something altogether more perturbed as the waiter thumped a bunch of plates down on the table. “You ordered rocks.”
“Eggs, kid, eggs. And I don’t care if you sit there and starve, but if you keep me from enjoying my food I’m going to skull you with one of them, and it’s going to hurt.”
• • •
As we ate, I thought about what Clarence had said. I was beginning to think he was right: if I was going to find the horn that Eligor had given as a marker on the deal, it might help if I understood the deal better.
“Maybe it’s time I let Sam show me his new place.” I shoveled in a last wiggly fork full of bakmi Jawa. “There might be something about his Third Way that would put the whole thing in a different light. Because right now, I’m stuck.” The Third Way was what they called the alternative to Heaven and Hell that Anaita had put together. Sam had jumped ship to work for them, so he clearly thought it was a good idea, but I still didn’t entirely get the whole premise. I mean, yeah, Heaven and Hell are moribund and old-fashioned—why wouldn’t they be after eleventy-nine gazillion years?—but I wasn’t sure that creating a competitor for the two of them was a smart thing to do. After all, Heaven has a long memory and Hell has lots of lawyers.
“Where is Sam, by the way?” Clarence had tried a few things, but mostly he had been pushing his dinner around like a ten year old pretending to eat enough to earn dessert. “I thought he’d be meeting us.”
“I left him a message and asked him to, but maybe something came up.” At the table behind Clarence a couple of very American-looking teenage girls were sitting with their parents and an older Asian lady who was probably their grandmother. The girls looked about as happy to be here as my guest did, rolling their eyes at every new dish that came to the table. “But one way or another, I’ve got to get hold of that devil horn. It’s my only bargaining chip.”
To get Caz back, I could have said, but didn’t have to. Clarence knew. He’d been in the parking garage with me when it all went sour, when Eligor went home with the angel’s feather and I was left with nothing but a couple of gallons of dissolving fake Caz. Clarence and Sam had basically carried me home that night, then poured me back out of a vodka bottle a couple of weeks later.
The girls at the next table were ignoring their parents completely now. As the adults conversed quietly in what was probably some Indonesian dialect (if you think I know the difference between Balinese and Javanese you’ve definitely got the wrong angel) the girls giggled and squealed in English. “She says she’s getting an after-school job!” pronounced one of them with disdain.
“As a slut!” said the other. They both collapsed into laughter again. The parents and the old woman didn’t even look at them. They may not have understood English very well.
The grown-ups probably don’t know much about what their kids are getting up to here in the Land of the Free, I thought.
This sparked an idea, which distracted me enough that I missed part of what Clarence was saying.
“. . . Because if this Kephas stashed the horn in Heaven somewhere, you’ll never find it, Bobby.”
“No, I don’t think that’s where it is.” But I was focused now on what the girls behind him had said—after-school job. “If you had something that belonged to an important demon, the last place you’d want to stash it would be Upstairs. Talk about something sticking out like a sore thumb! It would be like trying to hide a chunk of uranium in a Geiger counter factory.”
“So you think the horn’s somewhere here on Earth?” He snorted. “Should be easy to find after narrowing it down so far.”
“Sarcasm is like training wheels for the humor-impaired,” I informed him. “You want another beer?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got something to do in a little while.” Suddenly he seemed to go a bit cagey. “But thanks. The buffalo washcloth thing was actually pretty good.”
“You’re a miracle of tolerance, Junior.” I flipped some money onto the tray to cover the bill and the tip. “I just thought of something I have to do, too.”
“Oh.” He looked disappointed. “I thought we might hang out a bit longer.”
“Why?”
“Nothing.” But he looked like it had definitely been something—the kid wore a mild but distinct air of disappointment. “I just wanted to talk to you about—never mind, it doesn’t matter. It can wait.”
“Good. Because I just realized I have another resource besides the fabulous Mr. Fox who can give me some information about auctions—especially auctions for exotic
objects, like angel feathers. And possibly demon horns, too.”
• • •
There are very few activities that are going to make a guy look and feel more like a pervert than driving slowly past a Catholic girls’ academy when school lets out, examining all the young women. (You have to look closely, because the uniforms make them look alike, you see. Honest, there’s a reason I was doing this.)
I finally spotted her and eased up alongside the curb. Luckily for me, she was walking by herself. I had a suspicion she did that a lot. I rolled my window down.
“Hi. Can I buy you a milkshake, young lady?”
She looked up with a slightly unfocused expression, as though she needed to see me before knowing whether she was being teased or actually threatened. She pushed her glasses up her nose, then smiled.
“Mr. Dollar! Hi. What are you doing here?”
“Like I said, Edie, buying you a milkshake—if that’s okay. Can you spare me fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“Sure. Do you want me to get in?”
“Probably give people the wrong idea. The SJ Creamery’s just around the corner and down a block. I’ll meet you there.”
Because of slow traffic from all the people picking up their daughters, Edie actually reached the place before I did. I settled in on the other side of the booth, facing her and her enormous backpack. Despite her youth, Edie Parmenter was one of the most acute sensitives in Northern California, and her after-school job had nothing to do with rolling burritos or stacking jeans at the Gap.