Lucifer sighs loudly, but he stops poking at the ThinkPad’s little pointing stick and trains his attention on Billy.
Billy does not ask How is this going to screw me? What he asks, instead, is “Is there a Hell?”
“Billy,” says Lucifer. He folds his hands in his lap. “I’m going to be frank with you. Just one hundred percent up-front. There is a Hell.”
“Oh,” Billy says. He presses his face into his hands and tries not to envision horrible shit like being on fire. He’s seen a guy on fire before: an accident, at the first kitchen he ever worked in, and it left an impression on him, the impression mostly being: it’s not cool to be on fire.
“But Billy,” Lucifer says. “It’s not like people say. It’s not Hieronymus Bosch creatures and torture chambers. There aren’t saints looking down on you from above, enjoying the perfection of their beatitude by jerking off to the punishment of the damned.”
Billy raises his head out of his hands. “People say that?” he asks.
“Aquinas said that,” Lucifer says. A hitherto unnoticed bass note in his voice seems to subtly double, and his face contorts into an expression of what appears to be genuine anger. “That fat fuck.”
“Aquinas said jerking off?” Billy asks, a little spooked. This is the first time Billy’s seen an expression on Lucifer’s face that doesn’t look like it was learned from some kind of demonic field guide to human emotions, and he finds himself hoping that it’ll go away quickly.
“He didn’t say jerking off,” Lucifer concedes. “But he implied it.” His expression goes blank again.
Billy’s face goes back down into his hands. “So, what?” Billy says. “Is this the part where you tell me how awesome Hell is? That it’s, I don’t know, like I’m going to be getting hot oil massaged by virgins the entire time I’m there?”
“Billy,” says Lucifer. “You still appear to believe that I’m attempting to defraud you. That I am after something ineffable, that I want to lock you into some horrible cosmic payback. It will not be like that. This is simpler. Much simpler. I have a thing that I need to have done, and I can’t do it myself. If you do it for me, I shall ensure that your novel gets published. And then our obligations to one another will be mutually concluded. I don’t get your soul. You don’t burn in eternal torment. You get to be happy, and I get to be happy. That is the extent of the transaction.”
You get to be happy. “Well,” Billy says, considering this. “Okay. What’s the thing you need done?”
“Watch the presentation,” Lucifer says, curtly. He points at the laptop, and Billy looks.
“This,” Lucifer says, “is Timothy Ollard.”
First slide. Billy peers at it through his stoned daze. It depicts a tall, thin man, sitting on an overstuffed ottoman, his knees higher than his hips. Youngish-looking, maybe in his early thirties. Smiling into the camera, a variety of self-confidence around the eyes, a smugness, like he’s quite certain that he’s the brightest person in the room. He’s wearing a very twee suit, and an ascot. It might just be because Billy is high, but he takes an instant dislike to the fellow.
“I don’t like him,” Billy says.
“That’s good,” Lucifer says.
Lucifer clicks again and a name appears over the image in, like, 48-point font:
TIMOTHY OLLARD
“So what’s his deal?” Billy says.
“Timothy Ollard is a warlock,” Lucifer says. “In my estimation he is the key warlock on the eastern seaboard.”
“A warlock?” Billy says. “Like, a wizard?”
“A warlock isn’t a wizard,” Lucifer says. “A warlock is a male witch.”
“Okay …?” Billy says. He frowns. “So, this guy is a witch?”
“A warlock,” says Lucifer.
“This is a real thing?” says Billy. “People go around calling themselves warlocks?”
“You never met anyone who called themselves a witch?” Lucifer says.
Billy thinks. “Well, sure,” he concedes, “but they were mostly chubby girls who liked herbal tea and burning incense in their dorm rooms. I thought it was kind of a thing that most people would give up by senior year. I didn’t think it was exactly a career path.”
“You’re more correct than you know,” Lucifer says. “Most American witches don’t get very far. And most American warlocks get even less far — there are fewer of them to begin with. There are, however, a few witches and warlocks who excel, who remain active for a longer period than most, and at some point they begin to become a problem.”
“So how long has this guy — Ollard — how long has he been, what would you call it, warlocking?”
“I cannot say precisely when he began. But I have known Timothy Ollard to be practicing high-level black arts in New York City for the last eighty years.”
“Eighty years?” Billy says.
“Take a look,” Lucifer says. New slide. An old photo. People at some sort of Jazz Age party: a crowd reveling among streamers and glittering curtains. Lucifer clicks for the caption: 1924. He clicks again and a red circle pops up around the face of a guy standing way off to the edge of the photo, a dour face among the partygoers.
“Is that supposed to be the same guy?” Billy says. He can’t tell for certain: there are shadows on the guy’s face and the hair is differently styled. It could be the guy’s grandfather or even just a random guy with a similar facial structure. The ascot is the same.
“It is him,” Lucifer says. “As near as I can tell, the last time he aged was a single afternoon in 1945, during which he went from age thirty-three to thirty-six.”
“Good trick,” Billy says.
“His current base of operations is here,” Lucifer says.
Slide. A stone tower. Dank, rotting, covered in creepy crenellations and greeble. It’s got these scary bits hanging off it that look like they might be made out of long chains of human ribcages, like something you might dream up after a tour of Cambodian genocide sites. Every available surface has shit spanged onto it: wires or pipes or crumbling gargoyles drooling black autumnal slime.
“Yeesh,” Billy says.
“Don’t be too impressed,” Lucifer says. “The edifice you see is mostly illusory.”
“What even …,” Billy says. “What part of the planet is this on?”
“It’s here,” Lucifer says. “It’s in Manhattan.”
Slide. A Google Maps screenshot with one of those little red bulbs pointing at a corner that looks like it’s somewhere in Chelsea.
“Huh,” Billy says. “You’d think I’d have heard about some freaky-ass black tower being in the middle of Manhattan.”
“People can’t see it,” Lucifer says. “Ollard has cloaked it. Wrapped it in a perceptual blind spot.”
“So, what, eight million people walk past this building and nobody notices it?”
“No cloak is perfect,” Lucifer says. “So it is likely that people notice it all the time. Hence Ollard’s choice to make what lies behind the cloak appear fearsome. When people get a glimpse of something that troubles them, that disturbs, their minds turn off toward it. They unnotice it. Their defensive human psychologies effectively partner with the cloak. In the end, people see what they want to see: a Manhattan without a — how did you put it — a freaky-ass black tower in it.”
Lucifer clicks through to the next slide. It’s a picture of one of those cat statues that Billy has seen in every sushi bar he’s ever been in.
“This is the Neko of Infinite Equilibrium,” Lucifer says.