Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

seven: world’s edge

THE PHONE woke me again about quarter to five. It was a client. Well, to be more precise, it was Alice informing me I had a client. Alice has been working for the main office as long as I’ve been an angel. She’s efficient (in an at-least-the-trains-run-on-time sort of way) but she has a voice that could strip paint and the personality of an itchy Komodo dragon. Choosing her to be our dispatcher, like the Hallelujah Chorus ringtone, shows that somebody in the heavenly hierarchy has a third-grade sense of humor.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked her.

“Can’t. I lie awake feeling bad about having to wake up hungover bums like you.”

See? The milk of angelic kindness positively drips from that woman.

Sam was asleep on top of my bed, sprawled like an elephant seal on the sand and making similar noises. I took a quick shower, doing my best not to scream when the soap got into all the scrapes and cuts, then rang my friend Fatback to see if anything was happening on the research front.

“Morning, Mr. D!” He sounded quite cheery for a man who was going to turn back into a brainless beast in a man’s body at any moment. “I’m just sending out that stuff you asked about.”

“Thanks, George. Anything interesting?”

“Nothing out of your normal range of weirdness. That design’s called the Sonnenrad, the sun wheel. It’s always been big with racial pride groups in Europe, but the occult boys in Hitler’s SS picked it up, too, and it’s associated with some of their black rituals. That means modern neo-Nazis love it, of course, and there’s a pretty nasty group these days named the Black Sun Faction—“Black Sun” is another name for that Sonnenrad design. I can’t find much about them, but they look spooky.”

“Cool, I’ll read it all through when I get a chance. Bill me, yeah?”

“Don’t worry, I already did. I’m saving up to get this new Swedish eye-tracking software. My voice-control stuff is too old and slow, and it makes too many mistakes.”

Just to clear up any confusion, George Noceda—at least the George I talk to—has problems using a keyboard because he doesn’t have hands, he has trotters. That’s because he’s a pig. Pig with a man’s brain by night, man with a pig’s brain by day—pretty much the shittiest kind of were-pig you could be. The reason why is a long story, but basically he got hosed by Hell. “Hope it works out for you, buddy.”

“Very kind, Mr. B. I’d better get off the phone—the sky’s getting light. Vaya con dios.”

“You too, man.” And I meant it. I wouldn’t have wished George’s curse even on Donald Trump, and George is a really nice guy.

The client I’d been called to argue for was a nice old lady named Eileen Chaney who had just died in Sequoia General an hour before I got there. When I stepped Outside she was patiently waiting for me, and seemed completely unsurprised by any of what was going on, except that I didn’t have wings.

“Haven’t earned them yet,” I said, which might not have been the exact truth but was at least simple.

“I’m sure you will, young man.” She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “You have a nice face.” Okay, so death hadn’t improved her vision, but I still resolved to do my best for her. Turns out there wasn’t much to do. Mrs. Chaney had nothing shocking in her background, Hell’s prosecutor was comparatively new and only offered the most perfunctory case against her, and so the whole thing was over in what felt like half an hour.

When Mrs. Chaney and the judge disappeared, I was left alone with the prosecutor for a moment. Except for the whites of his eyes, this demon (who went by the charming moniker “Shitsquelch”) looked like a statue carved out of a giant peeled purple grape. He stared at me with unhidden interest.

“I’ve heard about you, Doloriel,” he said.

“Yeah. People get bored, my name comes up.”

“Seriously. Some of the folks on my side really don’t like you. Like, they’ve got plans. If I were you I’d get into a different line of work.”

“If you were me, your friends would have killed you a long time ago,” I said.

While he was puzzling that out, I split. I was afraid he might ask me for my autograph or something.

It was about seven-thirty in the morning when I got back to the apartment house, an ugly time of the day for any sane person but especially for someone with as many sore parts as I had. I parked across the street and looked around carefully before leaving the car. In the building lobby I ran into some neighbors, two young women who lived down the hall. We’d seen each other a few times but never spoken. I thought they were probably a couple, because I only ever saw them together. One was tall and lithe and dark, the other only a little shorter, red-haired and impressively muscular without being particularly big. They were dressed to go out running. I stepped aside to let them by, and the redhead stared at my face.

“Oh! Z vami vse garazd?” she said. Sounded like Russian. “Are you quite right?”

I assumed she meant, “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay, thanks. I was mugged.”

“Bozhe mii!” She said something else that I couldn’t understand to her dark-haired friend, who shook her head gravely. They walked past me with sympathetic looks on their faces.

“Take careful!” the tall dark one told me as they went out. She too was pretty obviously another non-native speaker.

Sam was gone, off to save the world or buy more ginger ale. I was on my own. I tried to catch up on a little sleep but I was too wired to relax, not to mention my ribs and skull felt like they’d been run through an industrial stamping press, so I got up again, swallowed about eleven ibuprofen, and checked out the directions Edie Parmenter had given me the night before. Her employer, this Doctor Gustibus, lived a good distance out of the city, over on the coast side of the hills, but I didn’t mind a little thinking time.

As I headed toward the freeway on-ramp I called Alice and asked her to take me out of rotation for a couple of hours while I handled some personal business.

“You can call it what you want,” she said. “Me, I’d just be honest and say ‘Staying home to watch game shows and jerk off,’ but I’ll pretend if you want.”

“It’s a complete mystery to me why people so often use the words ‘vicious bitch’ to describe you, Alice.”

She hung up before I’d finished being rude. I hate that.

• • •

I do like driving, especially when I don’t have to worry about a call from work. I followed the Woodside Expressway up and over the hills toward the Pacific, rising from oak scrub to redwood forest. When the sun got high enough it burned off some of the morning mist. It was not what you call a gorgeous November day, at least by Northern California standards, but it was nice enough. This time of year the golden light we get in October turns a bit brassy, and it’s almost silver by December. Today it was still on the buttery side, but there was a distinct nip of winter in the air, that cold twinge of mortality even an angel can feel, the chill that can make you shiver even in direct sun.

As I slalomed through the hills, I took inventory.

Anaita had made some deal with Eligor, and (as best I could tell) they had exchanged Feather and Horn to seal the bargain. Eligor had lost the feather for a while, but now he had it back, thanks to me, Barnum’s favorite angel. (I call myself that because apparently there’s a sucker born every minute even in the afterlife, and I’m the afterliving proof.) The horn, however, the other marker of their bargain, was still hidden.

And now, to add to the fun, some neo-Nazis and local criminal scum had apparently banded together to find the horn—reasons unknown—as well as work in a few beatings for me when their busy schedules allowed. I had no idea how these guys fit into things, but lots of folk had been interested in the feather when I had pretended I was going to sell it. It was possible some of the bidders at the Big Feather Auction had been fronts for the Black Sun or were connected to them some other way. I hoped Edie’s employer could tell me more about those organizations than just their names, which was why I was driving all the way out to the coast. If I didn’t get anything useful out of this Gustibus, I’d be back to square one again. And I didn’t have anything in square one except empty space.

As I crested the hills, the fog began to turn into drizzle. I put on the wipers and turned up the CD player, one of the few additions I’d made to the extremely old Japanese car I was driving. Charlie Patton’s blues took me through the rain and back into the light as I reached the shining, wet expanse of Highway 1 on the far side of the mountains, where I headed north.

The sky was streaked with clouds, although blue was trying to push through. The ocean itself was a steely gray, and there must have been some decent surf because I saw cars parked in several places along the shoulder and people in wetsuits heading down to the shore with boards.

Edie’s directions said, “Before you get to Half Moon Bay, turn left at the flying horse.” I wished I’d double-checked with her before leaving, because she hadn’t specified whether this marvel was a street, a restaurant, or an actual horse with wings. As I got close to Half Moon Bay, I slowed down a little. Luckily it was only a bit past noon, because the visibility gets really bad later in the afternoon as the sun drops toward the ocean and shines straight into your eyes. I passed a few restaurants and bars with picturesque names, but none of them were anything to do with horses, feathered or otherwise.

I was just a few miles south of the golf course and thinking seriously about turning around when I passed out of the latest sprinkle of rain. As wipers swept the last drops from my windshield, I saw it. It really was a flying horse—not, I hasten to say, a live one, but one of those old gas station signs, although in this case you couldn’t see anything but the red Pegasus, and not much of that because it was leaning against a tree about ten yards off the highway, half covered with underbrush. I couldn’t help wondering why nobody had snatched it and sold it to some collector.

Highway 1, or at least that section, was still a pretty basic old road: you didn’t need to wait until the next exit to get off. I turned in front of the rusting horse and onto a dirt road that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise—really not much more than a two-wheel track. I followed its curving course in the general direction of the Pacific, which sprawled across most of the horizon except for the spit of land I was navigating. I wound through a stand of very old eucalyptus trees; the scent that wafted through my opened windows was like the world’s largest cough drop. Then the road climbed, and I could see that I was approaching the top of the promontory, which was all evergreens, pines, and cypresses tangled together. There was no sign of a house.

But when I got to the edge of the promontory, I found that the road didn’t end there. Instead, it narrowed even more and wound down the front of the tree-covered bluff. After following a bend and finding myself looking down a steep sandstone cliff to the ocean and white-frothing rocks below my passenger-side door, I finally saw the house, tucked into the hill just to my left, and facing the water.

The building didn’t seem strange at first, just a large, three-story white house with a high A-frame roof pressed back into the hillside, totally hidden from the highway by the trees. But as I got closer I saw that there were quite a few other buildings on the property, including a group of perhaps a dozen smaller houses—cabins, really—set out in straight lines on a level further down the hill.

I parked on the gravel drive. No other cars, which I hoped didn’t mean this Gustibus guy had decided to run down to Pescadero for a crate of artichokes or something, and I was going to have to come back another day. It was cold by the front door, with nothing between me and the late autumn wind off the Pacific, so after I banged the heavy iron knocker I pulled up my jacket collar while I waited.

I was beginning to wonder if I’d been right about the emergency artichoke safari when someone finally opened the door. It was a woman, two hundred years old if she was a day, wearing a long, tentlike black dress, like a mourner at a RenFaire funeral. Her black headgear was flat on the top, with a veil hanging down all around that left only her face visible. She looked at me as though she didn’t meet many actual people.

“I’m here to see Dr. Gustibus. My name is Bobby Dollar.”

She nodded. That took so long I thought halfway through I was going to have to oil her like the Tin Woodman. “Come vith me,” she said, then turned and shuffled away. Another one with an Eastern European accent. Was this Act Out Your Favorite Hammer Horror Movie week or something? Had I missed an announcement?

We went through a short hall and the old babe in black knocked and opened a door before stepping aside to let me enter. The room was really something. Not architecturally or anything—it was a big old plain barn of a place on the inside and looked like the last serious work done to it had been a century ago—but because of the books. I’d never seen anything quite like it. All through the main room, which must have been a good forty or fifty feet long and more than half that wide, and whose ceiling was clearly the second floor ceiling in the rest of the house, shelves lined the walls almost to the very top. A huge variety of makeshift ladders stood against the shelves, some nice ones with wheels that had been built to go with the shelves, others crude products that looked like they’d been thrown together for dunking suspected witches. At the center of the room stood a huge refectory table, also covered in books, and various other surfaces had been similarly buried. The few spaces not covered by books were crammed with other things—bones, jars, painted stones. Except for the obvious fact that some of the volumes were extremely old, the whole place looked like a second-rate museum had staggered in here and thrown up.

At the far end of the room, in front of a modest fire burning in a fireplace as big as my bedroom—the kind of fireplace you cooked whole cows in and then fed them to your knights and squires—stood a figure dressed in what I thought at first was a white lab coat (but which on closer inspection was some kind of vaguely Eastern-Guru thing, all loose-fitting linen); a figure that I could only presume was . . .

“Doctor Gustibus? Hi, I’m Bobby Dollar. Edie Parmenter told you I was coming, I think.”

He carefully marked his place before he set the heavy book down, giving me time to look him over. Gustibus was certainly one of the more interesting people I’d seen lately (outside of Hell, of course, where they play a high-stakes version of “interesting”). He was tall and slender, and—speaking of Hammer Horror—he looked a bit like a middle-aged Christopher Lee, with bone structure for days. His long, white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he had a tiny tuft of white beard on his chin.

He looked past me to the doorway where the old woman was still waiting and said, “Thank you, Sister,” in a voice like a veteran actor, all stretched vowels and precise consonants.

“Sister?” I asked. “Your sister?” Because she looked too old to be his grandmother, let alone his sister.

He showed me a wintry smile. “No. Sister Philothea is a nun. Was a nun. It’s complicated. For all of them.” He followed up this confusing explanation by extending a long, pale hand. “I am Doctor Karl Gustibus. And you are Doloriel. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”

It was a full second and a half before what he’d said hit me, but when it did it was as though Bald Thug had just slugged me in the breadbasket again. “Dol . . . Doloriel? I’m sorry, but my name is Bobby Dollar.”

“Yes, Mr. Dollar. I know.” He still wore that little half-smile, but his eyes seemed as cold and remote as stars in the night sky. “But I know your other name too. And I suspect I know why you’re here, as well. You’ve been having a little trouble with the folks in Heaven lately, haven’t you? A little . . . unpleasantness.” The smile winked off. “Or, knowing some of the players at least a bit, I’m guessing it’s rather a lot of unpleasantness.”

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, and that doesn’t happen to me much. So I grabbed for my gun.