The stereo equipment just about filled up the front seat and floor of the cab. I put three boxes of CDs in the trunk, then cleared my meager wardrobe out of my closet and draped it across the cab’s back seat, trying not to add wrinkles to the wrinkles that were already there. I looked at the boxes of car magazines I had been dragging around from place to place and felt a huge tide of weariness roll over me at the thought of lugging them down the stairs too, so I left them for anyone who wanted them. I threw the rest of my toiletries into a bag, bundled up my blankets and sheets (such as they were) and, once I’d thrown all of that into the trunk, went back upstairs for a final look around the scene of so few happy times.
As I was examining the living room one last time, noting the bullet hole in the wall and various bloodstains on the carpet (it was looking pretty certain I wouldn’t be getting my cleaning deposit back) I remembered that I had a small stash of weapons in the hall closet. You know, just some fun-size stuff—blades, a cosh, some spiked knuckles. I hadn’t ever had to use them in this place, although I’d been tempted by some people trying to get me to accept copies of The Watchtower, but that was no reason to leave weapons behind for some kid to find and brutalize his little sister with.
The board that covered the hole where the Nightmare Child got in was still nailed in place and covered with duct tape. As I stood remembering that strange night, I heard something skitter across the floor of the closet. I stepped back and saw movement in a pile of old t-shirts I used for oil rags, so I kicked them out of the way. Something low and hairy scuttled out and darted past me.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Again?”
I followed it toward the living room. “Darted” may not have been the most accurate word to describe the thing’s movement; now that it was out of the dark closet, and I could see it better in the gray afternoon light, I think “hobbling” might have been closer. It was one of the Nightmare Children, all right, but it didn’t look well. In fact, it looked terrible.
My sense of alarm, whose needles had all redlined when I first saw it, began to ease back into more normal territory, because this thing wasn’t much of a threat at all. One of its legs was shrunken like a deflated balloon, and its baby fingers were no more than shriveled curls, as if the creature was slowly collapsing in on itself. I didn’t know how long the little horrors could live out of whatever netherworld or parallel dimension they came from, but this one clearly was nearing that limit.
The Nightmare Child wobbled from closed door to closed window like a broken toy, then scuttled under the couch, but I wasn’t having that. The nasty little thing might have been all but dead, but I still didn’t relish the thought of getting down on the floor to try to yank it out with my bare hands or poke it out with a broom, so I hefted the couch up on end. The thing made another limping break for it, but wound up in a corner with nowhere else to go. As I walked toward it, it waved its useless leg at me as if asking for mercy, and it was so clearly not a threat that I almost felt sorry for it. Almost. Then I thought about the little bones burned in the fire upstairs, the innocent lives snuffed out so Baldur von Demonfucked and his SS fanboys could summon this thing into our world, and instead of finding something silver to dispatch it quickly, I lifted my foot and ground it into the carpet. Crunch. Pop. Splurt. Imagine crushing about five or six hamsters tied together like sausages, plus add the little whistling noises it made as it died. The Nightmare Child may have been scientifically and even theologically impossible, but it went out like regular old disgusting.
When I was finished I took off my shoe off and sprayed the sole clean under the kitchen faucet, then wrote a note for the landlord and left it next to the splatter-with-three-and-a-half-legs.
Dear Mr. Avilsi,
I’ve moved out. Conditions were not optimum. You also might want to call an exterminator. This apartment appears to have nightmares.
Yours,
B. Dollar
I finished up at the apartment, then drove down near Shoreline Park and hiked out across the wooden walkway to the ruined amusement area in the middle of the windblown bay. Sam hadn’t answered his phone or returned my messages since Heaven had let me walk, which I assumed meant he was stuck in Third-Way-Land, so I left a note for him on the funhouse mirror in the abandoned park. I didn’t want to make it too obvious, so I just wrote “Showtime, tomorrow. At your last stiff one.” I hoped he’d figure it out.
Then I headed back downtown to the Compasses to buy a final drink for any friends who were there. Or maybe two. After all, my customized Matador was gone, Caz was still a prisoner, Halyna was dead, Oxana was flying back to Far Amazonia, and I almost certainly had a seat reserved on the next shuttle down to Hell’s intake ward. I honestly couldn’t think of a single reason not to spend my last few dollars and perhaps my final earthly hours on a potentially suicidal evening of getting blasted and telling lies with the old gang. Can you?
Right. I didn’t think you could, either.
thirty-eight:
showtime
YOU MAY be wondering about the message I left for Sam on the Crazy Town mirror. “Showtime” was breakfast—a joke on “fast break,” as in basketball, and specifically the Lakers teams with Magic Johnson that had earned the “Showtime” nickname. “At your last stiff one” meant “at the site of your last drink,” and in Sam’s case it had been a bit spectacular, since it had killed him.
I could spend a lot of time telling stories about Sam and drinking. Most of the stories are pretty funny, even some of the horrifying ones, but Sam wouldn’t approve. Not because it would embarrass him, but because he hates drinking stories. “It’s a kind of bragging,” I remember him saying once. “‘Oh, I’m such a badass because I turned myself into an animal and lived through it.’ It’s bullshit.” I think he also never wanted to listen to other people’s drinking stories because they just didn’t match up to his, and he didn’t want to repeat his own because he’d decided that whole part of his afterlife had been stupid and was best ignored.
I didn’t know back then, but part of what was going on was his growing disgust with what he was expected to do as part of Heaven’s Counterstrike force. All I could see was a guy who meant the world to me systematically turning into someone I couldn’t even recognize. Don’t get me wrong—Sam wasn’t one of those angry drunks who becomes a monster, at least not the ordinary sort. He didn’t pick fights, which was good because he’s a big, strong dude. He didn’t rage at people, although there were definitely rages. But knowing him then was like watching somebody drown in slow motion. Every time I looked at him, the Sam I knew so well—the guy with the sense of humor like a prison shank, honed and sharpened until you could hardly even see it—seemed more unfamiliar. He looked like Sam Riley on the outside, but the real Sam, my friend, was slipping further and further away. Sometimes I thought I could still see the real one staring out from behind those bloodshot eyes like a prisoner.
These were the days before we became heavenly advocates—I joined up because of Sam.
We didn’t hang out at the Compasses in those days. We spent our time at another angel bar, a place called Barnstorm over in the Mayfield District. It wasn’t much like the Compasses at alclass="underline" the owner was one of us, but most of the clientele were ordinary mortals. It was a big, loud place, and Sam and I drank there for a couple of years, continuing even after I left the Harps. We might have kept doing it for years more if it hadn’t been for Carlene. She was a waitress, and although quite astoundingly pretty, tall and red-haired, she was a human woman. The problem with her wasn’t that she was a waitress, either, but that she was a waitress at some other joint who only came to Barnstorm to drink. That was the problem: Carlene liked to drink, just like Sam did.