That was bad news for us, of course, although it made me feel better about not having a gun. (Because it would have been as useless as a cock ring for a Ken doll, I mean.)
But if the battle plan I had begun percolating, back on Earth, was to have any chance of succeeding, we definitely could not afford to get into a shooting war with the Angel of Moisture—a pretty good joke, now that I thought about it, since I was wading through gray dust and black ash as dry as corn starch. We had to outsmart this superior being. Somehow.
Clarence hung back a little as we got near the house, but I had already decided that if Anaita was around she’d know we were here, so I decided on the direct course. I walked up the steps, leaving little ashy outlines of my shoes on the otherwise unblemished wood. The house wasn’t painted, but it didn’t look like it ever had been, and the ruination all around didn’t seem to have touched it: the wood was the color of Philippine mahogany, healthy and solid, with no sign of damage. It gave me a mental picture straight out of The Wizard of Oz, with Anaita as Wicked Witch, standing on the roof and spraying death all around.
“Bobby . . .” Clarence said nervously, but I ignored him. I mean, I know people say I charge into things without thinking, but what difference was that going to make here? Should I have stood on the porch in the middle of that lunar landscape and called, “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?”
I pushed the door open and found myself in the middle of what was clearly the main room, a large, high-ceilinged hall with several doors leading off it, like something that had once been a barn but had been converted into a family room for a very large family. The furniture was beyond rustic, rough and tied together with cords, not nailed, no paint or stain on anything. One wall was mostly taken up by a huge medieval fireplace. At the opposite end of the room stood a closed cabinet, simple but unlike the handmade objects everywhere else. In fact, it looked a bit like something that, in the old days, used to hide a television set, although I doubted they got cable here, or even satellite. There were also lots of tables and rough benches, but no sign of any people. To continue the children’s stories theme, it looked like the Three Bears’ had built a casino in the middle of the forest, and then gone out for one of their long walks before opening it.
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” I called back to Clarence. My voice echoed. A furious, fiery angel made of broken shards of glass and pottery did not appear. I walked over to the big, square cabinet and pulled open its hinged doors. Light leaped out, startling me, but it was not the bright beams of a psychotic angel about to burn me to charcoal but the cool, misty light of Heaven, or at least as much of it as we ever saw outside of the real place, Upstairs.
What was inside the out-of-place cabinet was a cube of solid, shifting light—something I’d seen before. We had one in the advocate’s office downtown, where it was kept under lock, key, and the grumpy, watchful eyes of Alice the dispatcher. The cube looked like it was made from a single piece of crystal, but it was a lot more powerful than even the wildest New Age imagination could grasp. It was used to communicate directly with Heaven. Sam called that, “Going to Mecca.” I’ve never been the reverent type myself, so I only used the one downtown when I absolutely had to.
The problem with this particular cube was that it was almost certainly linked not to Heaven but to Anaita, and only to Anaita. I immediately shut the cabinet doors and moved away from it.
Continuing the investigation, I poked my head briefly into a large side room that appeared to be a kitchen, except the only appliance was a huge, beehive clay oven built into one wall. The ash in front of it was undisturbed. Whatever had destroyed the outside hadn’t even shaken the floor in here. I headed upstairs to the next level. The stairs, like the walls and roof, were very, very solid. I was beginning to think the house had been brought here—or created here—as a whole, and then the cruder furniture had been added by Sam’s Third Way souls as part of their new life.
But where were all those Soul Family Robinsons? And where was Sam? A nasty thought kept whispering that if I went outside and looked carefully, I might find ash outlines of more than just buildings—maybe even of something Sam-shaped—but I kept pushing that thought away.
The upstairs floors seemed to be mostly bedrooms, although that word is stretching it a bit. They were a lot more like the barracks at Camp Zion, with wall-to-wall bunk beds made in the same Tom Sawyer Island style as the rest of the furniture. These, at least, gave some sign of being slept in, the thin wool (and, again, very handmade) blankets tossed in disarray. It had clearly been something less expected than a military reveille that had got this group moving.
I was inspecting the dorms on the next floor up, trying to get a rough idea of how many people had lived here, when I heard Clarence call me from down below. He sounded a bit uptight, but why shouldn’t he be? “Be there in a second.”
“No, I think you should come. Now.”
Oh, shit, was my first thought. He’s found a body. I reached into my pocket out of habit, but there was no gun to be drawn. Usually I hate carrying them, because then I keep having to use them, but I hate it even more when I need one, and I don’t have one. My gun control dilemma in a nutshell.
“Bobby!”
“Coming, Junior.” I clomped down the stairs, making lots of noise so he’d hear me and unclench. “Just take a deep breath and hold your . . .”
I didn’t finish the sentence, because as soon as I saw Clarence standing in the middle of the dining hall I also saw the guy who was aiming a drawn bow at him, a very wicked-looking arrow balanced on the string, pointing right at the kid’s guts.
“Well,” I said in my calmest voice. “What have we here?”
The man with the bow turned to look at me. He was whipcord thin, with a narrow face, somewhere between twenty and thirty years old, and smeared with ash. He also had a healing scar on his forehead that went through one eyebrow like the San Andreas fault, giving him an expression of mild surprise, but his eyes were cold and hard, and his mouth was set in a thin line that said, “Don’t push me, because I’d love to put an arrow into this guy’s chitlins.” The weird thing, though, is that he looked somehow familiar.
“Who are you?” he demanded. It’s always a bit hinky when you change astral planes, since everything sounds like what you’re used to speaking, but I was pretty sure he was speaking actual modern English, despite being dressed like one of those guys in Last of the Mohicans, pseudo-Native-American gear of leather and fur and ragged cloth. (Okay, I didn’t actually read it, but I watched the hell out of that movie.)
“We’re not the ones who burned this place up, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The line of his mouth stayed as taut as his bowstring. “It’s not. I saw what happened here. Who are you?”
I wasn’t quite sure if somebody who’d watched Anaita trash the area was going to be thrilled with more angels, and I didn’t know what the rules here were as far as me and the kid dying painfully with arrows sticking through us. Would we come back? Not that I could afford to trust resurrection these days anyway. “Bobby. My name is Bobby. And this is—”