Doctor Nine

Chapter 1

They blew into town on a Halloween wind.

The Mulatto drove the big roadster, and the Sage sat beside him, snickering into his yellow beard. Telephone poles whipped by, one after the other, and Zasha made a joke about their looking like crosses waiting for saviors. They all laughed and laughed, except for Doctor Nine who always smiled but never, ever laughed.

The car tore through the veils of shadow that draped like sackcloth between the distant lampposts. The night was in no way larger than the car, though it tried — and failed — to loom around the vehicle. The car was really the darkness of that night; it was far more a part of the night than the shadows. You couldn’t imagine what that car would look like in daylight. It wasn’t that kind of car.

Flocks of shapeless nightbirds flew on before the car and whenever the roadster would stop the birds would wheel and circle beneath the hungry stars. Against the fierce glow of the sneering moon the birds were tatters of feather and bone. Their call was more mocking than plaintive. The birds were always there; as long as Doctor Nine was there, they were there. It was in the manner of things and both the birds and Doctor Nine accepted the arrangement. It suited them all.

The Mulatto never spoke when he drove. He never spoke at all. He could, but he chose not to, and his throat had gone dry and dusty over the years. When he laughed it was the whisper of rat feet over old floorboards. Knuckly hands clutched the wheel and his bare feet pressed gas and brakes and sometimes clawed the carpeted floor. Around his neck he wore a medicine pouch, which he’d taken from a Navajo crystal gazer, and some parts of the crystal gazer were in there, too. He wore jeans and a faded Dead Kennedys t-shirt, a stolen wristwatch, and seven wedding rings, one on almost every finger. He was working on a complete set. Little sparks of light flickered from his fingers as he wheeled hand-over-hand around bends in the highway.

Beside him, the Sage ate chicken from a metal bucket. The bucket was smeared with chicken blood, and feathers drifted lazily to the floor. He offered a wing to Zasha, who declined with a wicked smile, but Spike bent forward from the back seat and plucked the wing out of the Sage’s fingers. In the brief exchange their hands were contrasted in a display-counter spill of light from a passing streetlamp: the yellow, faintly reptilian mottling on the Sage’s fingers, the thin webbing which had begun to grow between his thumb and index finger; and the overly-long, startlingly delicate fingers of Spike, dusted now with a haze of brown hairs, nails as long as a fashion model’s though much sharper. The wing vanished into the back and Spike bent forward to eat it. He shot a quick, inquiring glance at Doctor Nine, who nodded permission and looked away out into the night. Spike ate with as little noise as he could manage, the bones crunching softly between his serrated teeth.

Doctor Nine looked dreamily at the passing cars, imagining lives and hearts and souls contained within those fragile metal shells like tins of caviar. In the hum of the car’s engine he could hear the hum of life itself, the palpable field of human energy. As subtle as chi, as definite as arterial pumping. In the whisk of cars passing one another he heard gasps and soft cries, the stuff of nighttime encounters, expected and unexpected.

“Take the next exit,” he said to the Mulatto and the big roadster followed a line of cars angling toward a big city that glowed like embers under a cloud of carbon smutch.

Doctor Nine smiled and smiled, knowing that something wonderful was about to happen.