“Look, Bobby, don’t treat me like an idiot, whether you think I am or not.” He was flushed, and I didn’t think it was just windburn. “You’ve been on your farewell tour for days, anybody with any sense could see that. You slow-danced with Monica Naber right in the middle of the Compasses a couple of nights ago. You got drunk and sang “Carrickfergus,” for goodness’ sake, and you’re not even Irish.”
“I might have been.”
“Yeah, but now you’re just a self-important jerk. A jerk who’s planning to sneak off and do something stupidly heroic, or heroically stupid, probably get charred black like Cajun food, and leave the rest of us in the dark.”
I was mildly impressed by the Cajun cooking reference. The kid was working up better material. “And what if I am? I don’t think I’m under any moral obligation to get you and Wendell killed, too.”
“I agree. Wendell doesn’t need to be involved any more deeply, so I didn’t tell him. But I’m a different story, Bobby. Now, are you going to pistol whip me again, or are we going to go see Sam?”
It finally caught up with me. “But how did you know I was coming here?”
He smiled, clearly pleased. “A lucky but educated guess. When Sam told me what really happened here that night with the ghallu, he also told me about the portal or whatever it’s called. He never mentioned another one until you found Anaita’s in the museum, and I thought it was pretty unlikely you were going back there again. Anyway, I was coming over to your place to talk to you about what we should do next when I saw you leave, so I followed. You were being tailed by a white van . . .”
“I know.”
“. . . and I figured you knew and you’d ditch them somewhere, and probably ditch me too without realizing. I took a chance that you were on your way out of town already, and that meant here.” He grinned. “And I was right!”
“Yeah, congratulations. You win an all-expenses-paid trip to see ‘Revenge of the Bitch Goddess’.” I slumped a little. “So I’m going to have to knock you out to get rid of you, is that right?”
“Hey, it could have been worse. I might have brought G-Man.” He produced his phone. “I could still call him.”
I considered it for a moment. “You win,” I said at last. But I would be damned if I was going to thank him.
We turned into the wind and walked out onto the footbridge, the long wooden causeway that led across the bay to the abandoned park. The railing was only about waist high. The wind got colder as we neared the middle. I couldn’t help remembering a night on this same walkway, with a giant, molten-hot thing running after me and Sam, determined to disconnect my important bits from my other important bits. I tried to cheer up by reminding myself (and Clarence, when he asked what I was moping about) that I hadn’t really believed I would make it through that one, either.
“So maybe there’s a greater purpose after all, kid. Maybe there’s a reason all this shit keeps happening to me.”
“There’s nothing sadder,” said Clarence, “than an angel getting religion.”
“Wow, kid, that sounded just like something Sam would say.”
“Thank you.”
We stepped off the bridge and onto the rising ground of the manmade island. The south side of Shoreline Park, which had once been a picnic and hiking spot, and was the original purpose of the landfill island, had gone completely feral in the nearly twenty years since the place had closed. It looked like the Jersey Pines, like the kind of place the Cosa Nostra would dump inconvenient corpses. We cut across the island toward Happy Land, the old amusement park, a collapsing museum of the grotesque that has been involved in more low-budget movies than Roger Corman, usually as the background to some kind of post-apocalyptic zombie/mutant/alien freakout. You could almost hear the screams of overacting extras in the wind.
Crazy Town, the funhouse, was on the far side, looking out over the bay and the ferry lanes. It was amazing to think that just a short time ago, even by California standards, the old Ferris wheel had painted colored circles of light against the sky every night and the place had been full of visitors and music and the excited shrieks of the roller coaster riders. All over now, baby blue.
The funhouse stank like you’d expect with a place that had only been visited in later years by crackheads and the last-stage homeless. We stepped under the pitted aluminum roof, and for a moment I considered hiding my gun there somewhere, since I was pretty sure it wasn’t going with me when I journeyed to Kainos but decided against it just in case something nasty jumped out at me from somewhere at the last second.
“Third mirror from the left,” I said to myself, then finished the joke I’d made to Sam the first time. “And straight on ’til morning.”
“What’s that?”
“From Peter Pan, more or less. The road to Neverland. That’s how Sam taught me to know which mirror.”
“Now what do we do?” Clarence was looking at the place a bit nervously. It’s one thing to brave almost certain death to help a friend, another thing to wade through broken syringes, shattered bottles, and human excrement at the very beginning of the trip.
“Sam gave me instructions.” I picked up a piece of glass, then spit on the tail of my shirt and started to clean it.
“What are you doing?” The kid’s eyes were big.
“I need some blood. Don’t worry, I’ll use my own.”
“And you’re going to do it with that filthy thing?” He was horrified. As I thought about it, I realized it wasn’t too smart, really, not if by some odd chance I ever wound up back in this body again. “Here, use this.” Clarence fumbled in his pocket and brought out a little bottle of hand sanitizer gel. “Use a lot. I can get some more.”
“Not where we’re going.” But I cleaned the sliver of glass and was secretly grateful that the kid was there. Now that I thought about it, I really should have brought a razor blade or a pocketknife or something clean.
Which did not in any way detract from the neat magnificence of my mall-taxicab-switcheroo, of course.
When I was finished scrubbing, I picked a part of my hand that wouldn’t inhibit me too badly, the ball of my left thumb just below my palm, and made a small slice. (“Incision” doesn’t feel like the right word when you’re using a shard of a Southern Comfort bottle as the scalpel.) When the first drops of red appeared along the cut, I put some on my fingertip and wrote “DOLORIEL” on the third mirror from the left, which was a mirror in name only, because the metal surface was so pitted it looked like Freddy Kruger’s backside.
Nothing happened.
After we’d waited a few moments, I had a sudden idea. “It’s a mirror,” I said. “It doesn’t look like it now, but it’s a mirror.”
“So?”
“So maybe I need to write backward.” I dabbed my finger in my blood again, which was beginning to puddle in my palm, and wrote LEIROLOD.
Still nothing.
“Well, this sucks,” I commented.
“What did Sam say? I mean, exactly?”
“He said write my name on the mirror in blood.”
Clarence gave me a look that I swear was full of pity. I rethought the don’t-hit-Junior decision for a moment. “What?”
“Does Sam ever call you Doloriel?”
I looked at him hard for a couple of seconds, just to let him know I could have figured it out without his help, then went to the bloody inkwell one more time and scrawled “BOBBY” on the pitted metal. The place was beginning to look like Jack the Ripper’s washroom, but this time we had only a moment to wait before a glowing line appeared in the air in front of the mirror—a Zipper, or something similar, but foggier and less distinct. I’d seen one like it before.