I was close enough to put a dozen bullets into his head, and I was just about to do that when Leo stopped me.
“No,” he said. “We’re not sending this one back.”
I didn’t really get what he meant, and I was even more confused when he emptied a clip into Smyler’s legs. Blood and bone splinters and ruined flesh flew everywhere, but the horrible thing still wouldn’t stop laughing. Leo stepped up, kicked away the long pointy thing lying near the killer’s hand, and then put his boot under Smyler’s gut and turned him over.
“Good God Almighty,” Sam said. I probably said something similar.
We’d both seen a lot of ugly stuff, but Smyler was worse than anything, somehow. He—it—whatever, his skin was gray and pulled tight over his bones like a shriveled corpse, mottled with dark purple-blue patches too regular to be bruises. His jaw stuck out like a piranha’s, so that even with his mouth closed you could see his bottom teeth, deformed little things like seed pearls, a perfectly straight line of them. But his eyes were the worst. His eyes were all black, except for a little sliver of bloodshot white at the edges when he looked around, like he was doing now. The rest of the Harps, the ones that weren’t tending Reb and Zone, gathered around, and as he looked at us, he opened his mouth and started giggling again. The inside of his mouth . . . well, it looked rotten. That’s all I can tell you. Black and gray and oozing and rotten, except for little bright spots of blood.
“Angels,” he said in his scratchy voice. “It love you! All for you! All for you!”
Sam was ready to shoot him in the head that second, wipe that horror away in a storm of bullets, but Leo yelled, “No! Stand down, soldier!” Leo waved his phone—they were bigger in those days. “I’ve called the bagmen.”
I’d never heard the expression, and at first I thought he meant the medics. He’d called them too, to treat our wounded, but they weren’t the people he was talking about.
“Just keep him here,” Leo said. “But don’t touch him. We’re not sending him back.”
“But Leo,” Sam said quietly, “the Convention—!”
“I don’t give a fuck about the Convention.”
And I suddenly understood, or at least some of it. See, the Tartarean Convention says that in conflicts on Earth we can do anything to the demons’ physical bodies, just like they can to ours, but when their—or our—bodies die, all bets are off, and everything returns to status quo ante. Which means that the souls go back to their respective abodes, Hell or Heaven, and whatever happens next is up to the authorities of those places. Which means you can kill a demon’s body and send its soul back to Hell, but you can’t do anything to prevent its masters from popping it right back into a new demon body. And as far as I knew then, that wasn’t just the Convention’s rules, that was the reality—we couldn’t do anything to a demon’s actual soul any more than they could do anything to ours.
I was about to learn differently.
The bagmen showed up even before the medics did. A sparkling line appeared in the air, just like when we open a Zipper to go Outside and meet the souls of the newly dead. Three guys stepped through. Three angels, I’m assuming, but I couldn’t swear to it because they were wearing something like hazmat suits, though not the kind you buy here on Earth. The faces behind those masks were blurs of shifting light. The bagmen didn’t say a thing, just looked to Leo. He pointed to Smyler where he lay. The little horror was still wheezing and giggling quietly, but you could tell he was bleeding out. One of the bagmen produced something from out of thin air, or at least that’s how it looked, a billowing thing like a parachute made from pulsing light, and then shook it out over the horrible thing on the ground. At first it just lay on him like a sheet, twitching as he moved beneath it, then it began to shrink until Smyler was nothing but a glowing mummy, too tightly wrapped even to struggle.
“Step back, please,” one of the bagmen said, then he and his companions produced the strangest guns I’d ever seen, about the size of Mac-11s but with a shiny bell like a trumpet’s instead of a barrel. When they pulled the triggers, fire vomited out of the ends of their weapons and engulfed Smyler, flame so white and hot it might have come from the inside of a star. We all moved back rapidly—way back—but I still got my eyebrows singed.
In the scant seconds before the bundle on the ground shriveled into smoking ash, I swear I could still hear that awful laugh. Then it was over. The ashes glowed, and a few dark wisps blew up into the air like spiderwebs. The wind carried them away.
The bagmen didn’t say anything else, just reopened their sparkling gash in the air and disappeared. Leo took the four-edged blade, maybe as an ugly souvenir, maybe for some other reason I didn’t and don’t understand. Then we went home.
“I don’t get it,” said Clarence. He looked like I felt—queasy and depressed. “What . . . did they do?”
“To Smyler? I’m not exactly sure. Leo didn’t like to talk about it. But as far as I can tell they bagged him in something that rank-and-file angels like you and me don’t know about, something that kept his soul from returning to Hell when he died. Then they burned him alive.”
“That’s horrible!”
“You wouldn’t think that if you saw him . . . saw it. Whatever he was. But the thing that’s bothering me is that I saw him again last night. It was Smyler who stabbed Walter Sanders. Even though I’m pretty sure it was me he wanted.”
“But how could it have been? You said this demon’s soul was burned. With his body.”
“I don’t know. But I know one thing, and that’s what’s got me worried. No ordinary demon in Hell could have brought Smyler back. I mean, Leo said that thing was gone forever, and I could tell he believed it. I think this must be Eligor’s work.” I paused. Clarence knew about the Grand Duke of Hell and the monstrous ghallu he’d sent after me, although he didn’t know the truth about Caz, or how personal the quarrel between me and the grand duke had become. “Let’s just say Eligor doesn’t like me. Not at all. And I’m guessing only somebody as powerful as him could bring that nasty thing back from the dead a second time.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
I reached for the rest of my Bloody Mary, distaste overcome by other needs. I drained it and wiped my mouth. “Hell if I know, kid.”
five:
hog caller
ACTUALLY, I had one idea, but I couldn’t do anything about it until midnight. To keep my head straight, I sat up listening to Thelonious Monk and his quartet playing at Carnegie Hall, over and over. It didn’t really work, because I kept wondering how perfect music like that could happen in such a fucked-up universe. When the clock finally struck twelve I turned down Coltrane mid-solo and called my favorite hog.
He’s only half a hog, really. My friend Fatback (which I never call him to his face) is a were-hog named George Noceda. During the day, man with pig’s brain; after the witching hour, pig with man’s brain. No, ladies, that doesn’t make him just like all us other guys. Not fair.
“Bobby!” His voice was still gruff from the transformation. I should have given him a few more minutes, but I was desperate. “What can I do you for?”
“Information, fast as you can get it for me. It might keep me from being turned into a human kebab.”
“So what else is new? One of these days you’re going to say, ‘Take your time, George. There’s no hurry,’ and I’ll know it’s truly the End of Days.”
“Don’t make jokes, buddy. Not tonight.” When stuff starts to slide—and the important stuff in my life was sliding like a jackknifed panel truck—Bobby D’s world can turn into a bad horror movie quick, stuff that would make even a were-hog faint. “I need information on a dead guy. Well, a supposedly dead guy.” I ran down what I already knew about my latest worry, both the original charmer and Smyler v.2, plus what little I’d been able to see of v.3. “Can you find me some information fast?”