Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-three: rabbit hole

I DON’T KNOW about you, but when I’ve spent weeks planning something and then it crashes and burns, bringing futility, horror, and death, I like to start planning something else right away. You know, so I don’t lose that winning momentum.

Of course I was gutted, and would rather have been drinking and trying to forget the terrible mistakes I’d made, but I didn’t have that option. I had to figure out what I was going to do next, because “next” was going to happen whether I wanted it or not.

The morning news, at least in the San Judas area, was full of the results of our expedition (Attack At Stanford Museum—Vandalism Or Political Protest? in the Courier was pretty typical) but to my immense relief, I saw no mention of bodies. Apparently the guard who’d been downed was going to survive, and the absence of other victims in the reports suggested the Black Sun had taken their wounded with them when they fled. I was pretty sure some of those wounded had been the kind we would label “dead, actually,” but I was relieved that their impulse toward tidiness meant it wasn’t going to turn into a murder investigation. It’s always about ten times harder to stay out of trouble when it’s a capital crime, I tell you with the sad voice of experience. How I longed for the days when I was still in good with my bosses, and I could have just called the cleanup crew from Heaven Central like I did for the Black Sun mess in that upstairs apartment. Still, I suppose even the heavenly cleaners would have had trouble trying to cover up the fact of neo-Nazis breaking in and tying up all the museum employees.

Still, the blowback from the museum disaster was going to be quite enough to destroy me anyway. Not only had I made my beef against Anaita very clear to her, I’d slapped her in the face about as hard as it was possible to do, but I still hadn’t found the horn. In other words, I’d made her angry without hurting her a bit.

When I finished with the newspapers, Oxana was still asleep and looked as though she might be for hours, which was fine with me. It’s one of the only things the truly bereaved can do, and I didn’t know how much support I could give her in my current situation. In fact, I was thinking pretty seriously about taking her out to the airport immediately and putting her on a plane to somewhere, just so I didn’t have to protect her from the shit that was going to go down. Actually, considering how much of my budget I’d already blown on the disastrous museum venture, I’d probably have to take her down to the County Transit hub and put her on a bus. Budget-wise, I could probably get her to Salinas.

Failure? Me? Only in this space/time continuum, bub. There must be tons of alternative realities out there where Bobby D is still The Man.

I went out to the courtyard to make some calls, but was distracted by something thrashing around loudly in the bushes beside the path, like a cat trying to upchuck not just a hairball, but an entire other cat. After some investigation I found a nizzic—the nizzic, the new batwinged, read/write model—tangled deep in a juniper bush. I guessed it had gone looking for shade when the sun came up. Hell-creatures like it hot, but they also like it dark. I unhooked it from the clinging branches as carefully as I could, then took it inside, but it was still trembling and making little barfy noises, so I put it under a bowl on a cookie sheet and set the over for about 250 degrees.

After ten minutes or so I put on the potholders and brought it out. The little demon-creature looked happier now and was already reciting its message. I turned off the kitchen lights and listened to the rest of it, then let the winged messenger cycle through the whole thing again.

• • •

“I suppose this is one of the reasons I fell for you instead of just destroying you in the first place, like I should have—your psychotic inability to compromise or do the smart thing. I’m so used to people who only care what’s best for them that there was a certain charm in someone who couldn’t take the sensible way out even under threat of torture and death.

“You were right about the gypsy story I told you our first time together—you wouldn’t have done what Korkoro did. You would have charged up that mountain to attack the Fog King, and the whole thing would have been even worse for everyone, and all for a principle you’re not even sure of yourself.

“Oh, Bobby, I can’t tell you how much I want to fuck you right now. I want you all over me, pressing me down with your weight, holding me like I was trying to get away. But I wouldn’t be. Because I know about being held against my will, and I also know about being held because it’s exactly what I want, and I definitely know the difference between the two. What a ridiculous, nightmare world this is, my lover, where two people who just want to be together would have to turn the whole universe upside down to do it.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk any more, at least for a while. I thought I could handle it, but I don’t think I can. All those years I lived in London, I should have learned from the English, because they have the right idea. The only way to deal with people, living or dead, is at arm’s length.

“Don’t tell me anything that will make me cry, Bobby. If you send a message back, just be funny. Be sweet. Otherwise I can’t do this.”

• • •

I wasn’t ready to answer her, not just that moment. Too much stuff boiling in my brain. You know when you’re a kid and you’re so sad and angry that you just start crying? Like that. Instead of crying, though, I tucked the nizzic back into the warm bowl, blanketed it with a couple of my dirty socks (which I thought should make a little demon feel right at home) and stashed it in the back of one of the pantry closets so it wouldn’t startle Oxana if she got up. Then I made a cup of coffee so strong it violated several workplace safety laws and took it back out to the courtyard to make some calls. The first was to Clarence.

“Bobby!” he said when he picked up. “Thank God, you’re alive.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So’s Sam and so’s Oxana. But Halyna, she didn’t make it.”

The kid was genuinely sad and outraged, which shows you that someone picked the right person to be an angel. In fact, he seemed to take it harder than I had, not that I didn’t feel sick about it. But in my case it seemed like it wasn’t the loss of Halyna herself that burned as badly as my failure to keep her safe. Clarence the Rookie Angel, like any decent person, reacted first to the loss of the woman herself and its effect on Oxana.

After I’d given him the full battlefield report, the kid told me that he and Wendell had gone back to work as though everything were normal and that, so far, they seemed to be pulling it off.

“But what are we going to do now, Bobby?”

“No ‘we’ this time. So far, you’re still clear, or you seem to be. Let’s keep it that way, especially since I don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m going to do next, short of complete surrender. You and Wendell just keep on keeping on. I’ll contact you if anything changes.”

“But, Bobby—!”

“No buts. I appreciate what you’ve done. You’re a good man, and I was wrong about you, but I don’t want to take anyone else down with me.”

I hung up then. I wasn’t being dramatic or selfless, it was just becoming clear to me that I was running out of options, that maybe this was not going to be a story that ended happily, no matter how much I’d hoped it would. After all the death and destruction, I couldn’t quite imagine a way it could end well. Even Caz was beginning to seem like a phantom. She had been my dream once, but now she was only a voice, farther from my reach than ever.

I had only one piece of good news for anyone, so I passed that along next via a message on Fatback’s voicemail, letting him know his days of being haunted and burgled were probably over, at least at the hands of the Black Sun Faction. Baldur von Reinmann was messily, monstrously dead, and Timon, Pumbaa, and any remainder of the local troop must be running for the hills by now. Or Argentina.

As I considered my next step, I nursed my coffee and tried to keep thoughts of Caz at arm’s length. The sun rose higher in the sky, turning the dank, gray December morning into something almost cheerful. Birds scuffled through the leaves that littered the concrete patio all around me, then leaped into the air whenever I set my cup down or re-crossed my legs.

Why had I been so certain that I’d find what I wanted in the museum? I’d thought I was going at the problem in a systematic way, but the more I looked at it now, the more I saw what I felt sure was the real Bobby Dollar—a creature of reflexes and reactions, following whatever the most recent stimulus had been, half the time getting it completely wrong, the other half getting things right mostly by accident. But when you were fighting out of your weight class—way out of my weight class, with Eligor and now Anaita—hoping for dumb luck was not a viable strategy.

The feather, the horn, everything in the whole grim mess came down to the bargain Anaita had made with Eligor to create a place outside of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, a home for Kainos, her pet project. But why had Anaita been so interested in creating a Third Way? And why had Eligor taken a huge risk just to help a powerful angel, one of his sworn enemies?

I had a sudden urge to talk to Gustibus again about Eligor’s possible motivations, but his phone only rang and rang—no answering machine this time, no semi-helpful nun. What could he have told me, anyway? Follow the money? There was no money, or at least the money was never the point with beings as powerful as Anaita and the Grand Duke. “Powerful”—yeah, that was the word, that was all that type cared about. I didn’t need to follow the money here, only the power.

Something clicked. It wasn’t a very loud click, but it was enough. That was what I’d been missing. Who gained from all this? And what did they gain?

I felt I had grasped something important, but I needed more coffee to shake the sense out of it. I went back inside and found the kettle still hot: Oxana was up and had made herself a cup of tea. She was wrapped so completely in a blanket she looked like a Bedouin tradesman, and she glanced up from the ghastly daytime show on the television only long enough to meet my gaze with a very dull, miserable one of her own. I gave her an awkward, one-armed hug, then took my coffee and went back outside. At the moment I felt pretty sure she didn’t want to do anything except stare like a zombie at people that she didn’t know on a screen.

The thing was, although it had almost taken over my life in the last year, I had no idea what Kainos was for, why it even existed. The official version handed out by Kephas/Anaita had been that it was an alternative to the present either/or of Heaven and Hell, which could be true for all I knew. But why would the Angel of Moisture want to create such a thing, and why would Eligor help her? It was hard to imagine either one of them getting misty-eyed over the rights of souls, and from everything Sam had said, an incredible amount of work had gone into making the Third Way real. Could I square the idea of Anaita as a sincere reformer with the creature who had now tried several times over to destroy me and the people I cared about?

Actually, I thought it was entirely possible. Maybe she really did think of herself as a do-gooder. Nearly every revolution, even the necessary ones, spawns a great deal of pointless bloodshed, revenge killings, and show trials of the insufficiently committed. Most of what Anaita had done to me had been in order to cover her own tracks, so I could accept, at least for now, the possibility that she’d set out to do exactly what was claimed, then panicked when the feather went missing—the feather that proved her guilt in conspiring against Heaven’s order.

But Eligor was another story, of course. Whatever Anaita’s motives might have been at the beginning, I found it impossible to believe that the Horseman had any interest in reforming the system or changing anything that didn’t benefit him personally. So why would he play along, and even take a huge risk, by giving his horn—which wasn’t really a horn, but a token of his essence—to Anaita to keep as potential blackmail fodder?

Trying to figure out the motivations of Hellfolk was like going down Alice’s rabbit-hole. I put it aside to concentrate on things that I had a better chance of answering.

Don’t worry about anything else, I told myself. Follow the power. I couldn’t yet answer the questions about who benefited and why, but there were still plenty of other things to consider. I’d been fairly sure that the horn was hidden at the museum because Anaita had gone to a lot of trouble to conceal something there. If it hadn’t been the horn, if it was only the entrance to Kainos, why? Why hadn’t she just built the doorway into one of the many rooms in her giant, fuck-off mansion?

Because she needed to hide it, had to be the answer. Anaita wanted ready access to it, but not in a place obviously associated with her. Heaven didn’t like the Third Way. Not at all. And it probably took a great deal of power to get there and back, or at least enough to be noticed by Heaven’s higher-ups. That might be why the doorway to Kainos was hidden far from Anaita’s own house. Perhaps that was also why she hadn’t followed Sam and I through it when we got away from her—she’d expended as much angelic might as she could manage to disguise.

If so, then the only real weapon I had against her was her fear of discovery. But that still didn’t tell me where Eligor’s horn was, and without that, everything else was pretty academic, because eventually Anaita was going to catch me and blot me out like an unwanted spill on the kitchen counter. She had more resources than I did—a lot more. “Oops! I seemed to have crushed a Doloriel,” she’d say, and everyone would say, “Tsk, tsk, too bad!” Then they’d go on as though it had never happened.

My new cell phone rang, startling the bejabbers out of me. The ringtone was some horrible European disco crap, and I throttled it into silence as quickly as I could.

“What?” I said into the phone, a little sharply. I assumed it was Clarence.

It wasn’t. “Bobby,” a male voice said. “I need to speak to you. In person.”

My heart got a little jumpy. Nobody had one of these phones except Clarence, Wendell, Oxana, and Halyna, and Halyna was dead. “Who is this?”

“The person who took you for a nice drive in the Baylands. Remember?”

Temuel. But since he hadn’t used his name, I wasn’t going to, either. “Yeah, I remember. In person where?”

“How about the place we met before you went on your sabbatical? Do you remember that?”

By “sabbatical” I guessed he meant “trip to Hell,” so he was talking about the Museum of Industry up in the Belmont district. I was a bit tired of museums, as you might imagine, but I also knew that the Mule wouldn’t have called me unless it was important. “Same spot? Give me half an hour.”

“Take the Camino Real. Traffic isn’t too bad today.”

I suppressed a smile. Some angels can’t stop angel-ing. It’s like an addiction. Or a reflex. “I’ll be there.”

I retrieved the nizzic from the pantry, listened to the message from Caz one more time, then burned some white camphor in a spoon and blew the smoke at the little monstrosity. The nizzic slumped a bit, and its head wagged slowly from side to side, like a cruise ship passenger who’d had one mai tai too many.

“Pay attention,” I told it. “Otherwise it’ll be silver salts instead of camphor, and you won’t like that.”

• • •

“I can’t just be funny and sweet, my beautiful Caz, even to make you happy. You told me once you didn’t do tender very well. I don’t do friendly chitchat very well, because I usually only use it on people who worry me or bore me. Right away I get out the sharp stuff and start looking for a weakness.

“The fact that it’s my own weaknesses I usually find is beside the point.

“So I can’t do that shallow stuff with you, not after where we’ve been and what we’ve done. I want you so badly, Caz. I dream of you. I replay our one night together over and over in my head like I was some sad little film fan watching Casablanca for the tenth time, hoping against sanity that this time Rick actually gets on the plane with Ilsa. I can still taste the salt of you, the sweat, the tang of your juices. I can still hear the sounds we made together like they were happening in the next room. You want to fuck me? I want to fuck you so much that if someone opened a door to Hell right now, I’d walk right in and start the whole thing over again, just for the chance to get near you.

“I’m never giving up. I’m never giving up. Have you got that straight yet?

“Never. Giving. Up.”

• • •

I put the re-messaged nizzic outside under a bush to wait for dark, then I gave Oxana some money in case she needed to go out and get anything. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t. She’d found a bottle of wine and was systematically polishing it off while she watched people argue on TV about paternity tests and other unimportant things. Just as I was leaving she called me back, then raised her eyes from the screen long enough to kiss me carefully on the cheek, like I was Dad and she was my college-age daughter home for the holidays or something. It was weird but not entirely bad.

I took Temuel up on his suggestion and went by the Camino Real instead of surface streets. I had to change lanes frequently to keep moving, but otherwise the traffic wasn’t too bad. The cab handled like a speedboat in tapioca even at the best of times, but I didn’t mind. I was in no hurry. Even with all the stuff thrashing around in my brain just now, and a strong urge to look closely at every driver I could see in case they were planning to kill me on Anaita’s behalf, something else had begun to bother me, though it took me most of the drive to put a finger on the problem.

My boss Temuel had called me on my Serbo-Croat Spinksphone. But Temuel wasn’t supposed to know about the Spinksphones. That’s why I’d bought them from Cubby Spinks before the museum break-in, so that the Amazons, Clarence, and I would have a private method of contact that neither Heaven nor Hell knew about. This was the second time Temuel had done something like this to me lately, and neither made sense. He’d known when I called out for a cab, too—the very cab I was now driving. He hadn’t told me how he’d done that trick, and now he’d pulled another one. He really was keeping tabs on me, probably tapping these new phones too. But why? Was he really so concerned for my health? Or was it just his own ass he was covering? That made more sense, but it meant that things would change very quickly if our interests ceased to coincide.

Another thought struck me as I approached the museum. Why tell me to take the Camino Real unless he knew exactly where I was driving from in the first place? If I was hiding out in the hills or down by the Bayshore, the Camino would be a pointless detour. But that meant he didn’t know only about my new phone but also suggested he knew where I was staying, and I had made sure none of my associates ever, ever talked about Caz’s apartment on the phone. Even the Amazons had known and respected that rule.

For a moment real fear rose up inside me. I almost pulled over to the curb, ditched the cab, and made a run for it, but a moment’s consideration showed me that even if he knew a lot more about my life than he was letting on, Temuel certainly wasn’t trying to keep it secret from me, or he would have kept his mouth shut about the Camino Real. No, something else was going on. In fact, it almost seemed like he was trying to tell me something, give me a warning. But why not just wait and do it in person, since he was meeting me anyway? Would it actually be Temuel waiting to meet me, or had someone else made him call?

Thinking about Heaven and its ways really made my head hurt sometimes.

The Museum of Industry is a crazy place that used to be a rich family’s mansion in the Belmont neighborhood of North Jude. The centerpiece is an odd fountain made of the plumbing from an old building that once stood on the property, but minus the building itself; a phantom edifice of pipes that sprinkled water from every joint during the warm months.

I could see a figure I was pretty sure was Temuel as I walked onto the museum plaza, a small figure huddled by itself on the bench. That made me feel better. The sun had given up an hour ago and sloped off behind some clouds, leaving a cold, gray afternoon. Nobody else was in the area except a couple of women in business clothes just departing on the opposite side.

I waited another minute, watching from the shadows of one of the museum’s wings, but Temuel only sat. He didn’t talk on the phone. He didn’t look around. (“He” is perhaps a little misleading, because this time, he was a she: Temuel appeared to be wearing the older-Hispanic-woman body I’d seen once before. The archangel liked disguising himself, but this time he hadn’t bothered to fashion a new one.)

At last I took a deep, calming breath and started across the open plaza. Temuel looked up as I approached. It was indeed the same body he’d worn once before, the one Young Elvis had so charmingly referred to as a “cleaning lady.”

“Doloriel,” he said as I got near. “I’m glad you made it.”

For some reason, this plunged me right back into paranoia again. Because we’d met several times outside of Heaven, and during all those visits Temuel had never, never, never called me by my angel name—only “Bobby.” I slid my hand into my pocket, so I could feel my gun.

He gave me a look of mild disappointment. “Don’t do that, please. It’s not going to help anything. Look, I’m putting my hands up.” And he did, lifting them slowly into the air, those brown, hard-callused, working woman’s hands. Then he slowly dropped them again, but this time they left trails of burning fire down the air.

Two angels stepped out of the Zipper on one side of him. Three more stepped out of the Zipper on the other. All five had the cold, serious look of Counterstrike veterans, and all of them were pointing serious-looking weapons right at me. They had been there all along. Temuel must have hidden them Outside before I arrived.

“Please, don’t do anything foolish, Advocate Angel Doloriel,” my boss said. “Just let them do what they have to do.”

I could barely talk, I was so angry, so miserable. “And what if I don’t?”

“Then they’ll shoot your body to pieces, I expect—but your soul will still be going with them.” He gave me a look that I could not read for the life of me, flat and emotionless. “Please, don’t, Doloriel. It’s a waste of materials, and you know our department is always up against budget constraints.”

Before I could think of any reply to this amazing statement, someone grabbed my arms from behind and someone else stuck something sharp into my neck. I had time to open my mouth, the words “Fuck you!” forming on my lips, but I never got to say it before nothingness came and swallowed me.