“Ah. I see. Well, right-ho then. Cheerio, Cutie old boy. Busy tonight, but tomorrow I’m off to buy a bomb.”
I pull the headset off my ear. I gaze down the escalators into the maw of my Metro stop, a cement gullet with two rows of grinding metal teeth, waiting to swallow me. Sorry about that – I tend to get a bit poetical when I’m on the verge of losing my rag.
I stand. I ponder. Something grabs the back of my left thigh, and I jump a bloody mile. “Great fucking Scott!” I scream at the little girl with the undead cat, who has apparently followed me all the way from Little Oblivion. “What the deuce are you doing here? Go home, before the House of Voices decides I’ve kidnapped you!”
She narrows her big Valrhona-chocolate eyes at me. She scratches Kittystein’s rump with one hand while she waggles a finger at me with the other. “That is not a word you say to a culandera,” she scolds.
Not much to say to that, of course. In any case, she doesn’t give me the chance. She sets dearly departed Mr. Tom down on the sidewalk, reaches up to grab my shirt, and pulls my face down to her level. “I am not a real culandera yet,” she whispers, “but I can do the cards, and the knotty strings, and the eyes in the smoke. I can do the spider that laughs, and I can do the holes in the sky. Thank you for making Rosa bring back Guapo for me. Mamacita says I may not play with souls until I am ten.”
She looks petulant at this last bit. I feel for her – Pater never let me drive the Rolls until I was eighteen.
The little girl gives my shirt an extra tug. She presses her lips to my cheek, and suddenly my bally face is on fire. “Fuck!” I shriek, leaping up and backward and nearly going arse-over-teakettle down the Metro escalator.
She shakes her head sadly, and makes a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you sound. “I cannot make you not be dead if you become dead,” she says. “But I have given you a kissing-ghost. He will love you. Goodbye.”
With that she giggles, scoops up the yawning feline Lazarus, and skips off back down the street. I shrug. I shake my head and jog down the escalator.
My cheek is still tingling as I wait for my train. Shouldering my way onto the car, the little witch’s lip-prints flicker through a range of temperatures as I race an old lady for the last empty seat. Leaning back, I look up at the ceiling of the tin can that’s dragging me homewards.
I am in a little, brightly-lit, nicely air-conditioned bubble hurtling through darkness. As usual. What worries me is what will happen when it stops hurtling. I’m very concerned about what may be waiting to get on at the next stop.
I sigh, and stand to get off at Dupont Circle. No sense in giving up on a metaphor that’s still got some use in it: what old Spex needs to do is talk to the driver, or one of the drivers. Even if he is a smug, insufferable bastard.
I head back to the flat and change into the suit I got from Rosa. It just goes to show the state this whole affair has put me in – I barely even notice the luscious weave of the fabric, the effortlessly superb way in which the jacket hangs, the understated elegance of the waistcoat buttons. The lip-prints are still chilly on my cheek.
I pull Rosa’s blood-black rose from my discarded shirt and slide it into my buttonhole. I have to go meet somebody who is somebody.
Picardie is usually jam-packed of an evening, but the place is empty when I arrive. Empty, that is, except for one waiter and a chap in a pearl-gray morning coat and ivory cravat. This chap’s hair is black and careless – not careless the way mine is, but careless in a way that takes forty-five minutes and a trained specialist to pull off. Those aren’t rubies in the chap’s cufflinks. You can tell scarlet diamonds by the refractive index of the gleam, or if you know the prick who’s wearing them.
Fucking Adrian. Should have known he wouldn’t meet me in a place he didn’t own.
17.7.09
7.7.09
I-I-XII
“I’ve got twenty dollars and a dead cat that’s not dead anymore. Who’s interested?”
My little mob of bodyguards is dancing as I cross the street. I’m careful not to glance back; inside Rosa’s little emporium of delights and horrors it’s easy to forget that the real horror is right next door. A patter of hammers and a buzz of power tools mingles with the creaking groan of the House of Voices as the natives of Little Oblivion work to build the vast, mad, rambling mansion that shrinks ever in upon itself.
The whispers are distant in my mind. I’m leaving now, I did no harm. The House sees no need to talk about me. Nevertheless, I don’t look back.
“Thanks for waiting, you lot, but your services won’t be needed.” I hand a twenty dollar bill to the oldest boy. “Go buy yourselves something dangerous. And here you go, little one.”
I hold out the feline Lazarus to the dark-eyed girl who’d been mourning it when I arrived. It yawns, hooks its claws into her dress, and clambers into her arms. Being thanked makes me blush, so I turn and head off down the street that will lead me out of Little Oblivion and eventually to my Metro stop. While I walk, I want to talk. I pull my headset out of my messenger bag.
“Hullo, Cutie?” I say. “I need advice. Give me advice.”
The translation takes a few moments in both directions.
“Do not become dead at the wrong time,” Cutie replies at length. “It will make you unhappy.”
This is, indeed, good advice. “Alright then, ta for that. Now-”
“Tell me a story, please.”
I sigh, but it’s fair enough. I’ve been leaning on old Cutie quite a bit lately, and even eternal beings deserve a break once in a while. He likes it when I tell him stories. His particular race of transplanars are unable to perceive the passage of time, and this has resulted in a body of literature that tends to be poorly paced and lack dramatic tension.
“Right-ho, Cutie old boy. As you say.” I try to think of a story I haven’t told him yet. “What sort?”
“A scary story.” Cutie is terribly excited. Scary stories are his favorites – the important thing to understand being that to him, stories with a lot of mayhem and slaughter are funny. People who go out of their way to make their infinitesimally short lives even shorter make him giggle, while love stories – stories about people who want to be together forever, and clearly won’t be allowed to - make him sad. What Cutie really likes, though, is comedy. Jokes send shivers up what would be his spine if he had what we normally think of as a body. Because as we all know, the essence of comedy is…
…
…wait for it…
…
…
…
…timing.
I try hard to think of a funny story to scare Cutie. He likes the classics, but I’ve already gone through most of what I know. “Right. This is a story about King Arthur, what? He’s our hero. And he’s out adventuring with his squire, don’t you know, but he’s not got a horse. So his squire’s got two halves of a coconut, and he’s banging them together…”
The hellish-hot afternoon is shaping up into rather a nice evening. “…and they all say ‘Ni!’ again. Yes. No, I told you, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s a joke. Don’t cry now, Cutie old boy, it’s just a story...” I stroll past the petunia-infested Cadillacs and leave Little Oblivion behind me.
“…and so that’s it. The police show up, and everybody goes to prison. Now, Cutie, I need you to answer my questions. Are you ready?”
He is silent for a long time. Finally: “That story frightened me very much. Can you tell me a funny one now? Perhaps the one about the man who stabs the lady in the shower?”
“Another time,” I say. “Focus now, Cutie. I’m in trouble, I think, and I want to not be.”
I bring him up to speed on current events, starting with Rosa and my reading. “Be a good fellow and give me your thoughts. I know you don’t set much store by the Tarot, but three Major Arcana – that can’t be a good thing, what? There’s something big stirring in the waters, and I don’t understand what it’s got to do with me and this dinner date with dear brother Adrian. What really beats me is why Goo cared so much about it.”
I tell him about my kidnapping by old squid-face. He says something that my headset translates as an indignant sniff. Cutie and Goo don’t much approve of each other.
“I am apologetic that you were put into a van. We…” the headset clicks in perplexity for a few moments. “…Spectators are encouraged not to involve themselves in the lower realities.”
My headset always has difficulty with that descriptor by which Cutie just referred to himself. ‘Spectator’ is probably the most common translation, but ‘Juggler’ and ‘Choreographer’ pop up from time to time. I’ve also heard ‘Landscape Gardener’ and ‘Jigsaw Enthusiast’ – for the sake of my headset’s sanity I’ve never enquired further, but I’ve often wondered what exactly it implies. I used to think it was the equivalent of ‘human being’, and then for a while I thought it was the name of a religion. Now I’m inclined to think that it’s more like some sort of fraternity or trade organization. Evidently Goo’s gangster ways are violating the charter.
“Oh, no harm done,” I say graciously. “I rather like Goo – he’s an interesting chap. He even seems to have found a Novi Dei somewhere; if I can find out where, I may be able to turn a tidy…”
I realize that my headset is clicking up a storm. Cutie’s talking a mile a minute, about something that’s apparently very difficult to say in human terms. I wait for the clicking to find its way into speech.
“One of the New Gods?” Cutie says at last.
“What? Oh, yes.” I hadn’t mentioned my little encounter with the transplanar tourist whom I’d found myself obliged to kill this morning. “Dashed peculiar – I’d heard of them, of course, but never met one before. What do you think it was doing here?”
Cutie says nothing for a long time. I’ve taught him about suspenseful pauses. At last, he says: “I do not know what the ones you call New Gods are doing. I find them very difficult to understand. They are not Spectators.”
“Ah,” I say. “Not in the club, then.”
“No,” Cutie replies. “They are…” My headset clicks and clicks. And clicks. Eventually, it beeps – the sad little beep of a universal translator giving up.
“Sorry, Cutie, didn’t catch that,”
Cutie tries again. “It is complicated. They care very much about people and places, in a certain way. They are…” Click, click, click, clickitty-click … beep.
“Sorry Cutie. Once more?”
He says something that comes through my headset as a grave humming sound. “It is like the story,” he says at last.
It’s my turn to hum gravely. “Is it? Like ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’?” I ask. “How so?”
“Not that story,” Cutie says. “The funny sad one, where the people are in love, but they can not be together, and then the man kills the other man. And it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“What’s that? You mean ‘Casablanca?’” How odd. Can it be that I’m really that lucky? My worst-case fate card was The Lovers, and it seemed impossible that this absurd situation was really only as bad as a broken heart. Is fate setting me up to fall in love with some bally Novi Dei, who will then bugger off back to dimensions unknown and leave me to join la Resistance? If that’s my doom, I’ll take it. At least it will keep me breathing. “That’s not so bad,” I say. “’Tis better to have loved and lost, what?”
“You are not understanding.” Cutie throws in another suspenseful pause. “The New Gods are not the Rick and the Ilsa and the Sam. They are the Nazis.”
My little mob of bodyguards is dancing as I cross the street. I’m careful not to glance back; inside Rosa’s little emporium of delights and horrors it’s easy to forget that the real horror is right next door. A patter of hammers and a buzz of power tools mingles with the creaking groan of the House of Voices as the natives of Little Oblivion work to build the vast, mad, rambling mansion that shrinks ever in upon itself.
The whispers are distant in my mind. I’m leaving now, I did no harm. The House sees no need to talk about me. Nevertheless, I don’t look back.
“Thanks for waiting, you lot, but your services won’t be needed.” I hand a twenty dollar bill to the oldest boy. “Go buy yourselves something dangerous. And here you go, little one.”
I hold out the feline Lazarus to the dark-eyed girl who’d been mourning it when I arrived. It yawns, hooks its claws into her dress, and clambers into her arms. Being thanked makes me blush, so I turn and head off down the street that will lead me out of Little Oblivion and eventually to my Metro stop. While I walk, I want to talk. I pull my headset out of my messenger bag.
“Hullo, Cutie?” I say. “I need advice. Give me advice.”
The translation takes a few moments in both directions.
“Do not become dead at the wrong time,” Cutie replies at length. “It will make you unhappy.”
This is, indeed, good advice. “Alright then, ta for that. Now-”
“Tell me a story, please.”
I sigh, but it’s fair enough. I’ve been leaning on old Cutie quite a bit lately, and even eternal beings deserve a break once in a while. He likes it when I tell him stories. His particular race of transplanars are unable to perceive the passage of time, and this has resulted in a body of literature that tends to be poorly paced and lack dramatic tension.
“Right-ho, Cutie old boy. As you say.” I try to think of a story I haven’t told him yet. “What sort?”
“A scary story.” Cutie is terribly excited. Scary stories are his favorites – the important thing to understand being that to him, stories with a lot of mayhem and slaughter are funny. People who go out of their way to make their infinitesimally short lives even shorter make him giggle, while love stories – stories about people who want to be together forever, and clearly won’t be allowed to - make him sad. What Cutie really likes, though, is comedy. Jokes send shivers up what would be his spine if he had what we normally think of as a body. Because as we all know, the essence of comedy is…
…
…wait for it…
…
…
…
…timing.
I try hard to think of a funny story to scare Cutie. He likes the classics, but I’ve already gone through most of what I know. “Right. This is a story about King Arthur, what? He’s our hero. And he’s out adventuring with his squire, don’t you know, but he’s not got a horse. So his squire’s got two halves of a coconut, and he’s banging them together…”
The hellish-hot afternoon is shaping up into rather a nice evening. “…and they all say ‘Ni!’ again. Yes. No, I told you, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s a joke. Don’t cry now, Cutie old boy, it’s just a story...” I stroll past the petunia-infested Cadillacs and leave Little Oblivion behind me.
“…and so that’s it. The police show up, and everybody goes to prison. Now, Cutie, I need you to answer my questions. Are you ready?”
He is silent for a long time. Finally: “That story frightened me very much. Can you tell me a funny one now? Perhaps the one about the man who stabs the lady in the shower?”
“Another time,” I say. “Focus now, Cutie. I’m in trouble, I think, and I want to not be.”
I bring him up to speed on current events, starting with Rosa and my reading. “Be a good fellow and give me your thoughts. I know you don’t set much store by the Tarot, but three Major Arcana – that can’t be a good thing, what? There’s something big stirring in the waters, and I don’t understand what it’s got to do with me and this dinner date with dear brother Adrian. What really beats me is why Goo cared so much about it.”
I tell him about my kidnapping by old squid-face. He says something that my headset translates as an indignant sniff. Cutie and Goo don’t much approve of each other.
“I am apologetic that you were put into a van. We…” the headset clicks in perplexity for a few moments. “…Spectators are encouraged not to involve themselves in the lower realities.”
My headset always has difficulty with that descriptor by which Cutie just referred to himself. ‘Spectator’ is probably the most common translation, but ‘Juggler’ and ‘Choreographer’ pop up from time to time. I’ve also heard ‘Landscape Gardener’ and ‘Jigsaw Enthusiast’ – for the sake of my headset’s sanity I’ve never enquired further, but I’ve often wondered what exactly it implies. I used to think it was the equivalent of ‘human being’, and then for a while I thought it was the name of a religion. Now I’m inclined to think that it’s more like some sort of fraternity or trade organization. Evidently Goo’s gangster ways are violating the charter.
“Oh, no harm done,” I say graciously. “I rather like Goo – he’s an interesting chap. He even seems to have found a Novi Dei somewhere; if I can find out where, I may be able to turn a tidy…”
I realize that my headset is clicking up a storm. Cutie’s talking a mile a minute, about something that’s apparently very difficult to say in human terms. I wait for the clicking to find its way into speech.
“One of the New Gods?” Cutie says at last.
“What? Oh, yes.” I hadn’t mentioned my little encounter with the transplanar tourist whom I’d found myself obliged to kill this morning. “Dashed peculiar – I’d heard of them, of course, but never met one before. What do you think it was doing here?”
Cutie says nothing for a long time. I’ve taught him about suspenseful pauses. At last, he says: “I do not know what the ones you call New Gods are doing. I find them very difficult to understand. They are not Spectators.”
“Ah,” I say. “Not in the club, then.”
“No,” Cutie replies. “They are…” My headset clicks and clicks. And clicks. Eventually, it beeps – the sad little beep of a universal translator giving up.
“Sorry, Cutie, didn’t catch that,”
Cutie tries again. “It is complicated. They care very much about people and places, in a certain way. They are…” Click, click, click, clickitty-click … beep.
“Sorry Cutie. Once more?”
He says something that comes through my headset as a grave humming sound. “It is like the story,” he says at last.
It’s my turn to hum gravely. “Is it? Like ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’?” I ask. “How so?”
“Not that story,” Cutie says. “The funny sad one, where the people are in love, but they can not be together, and then the man kills the other man. And it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“What’s that? You mean ‘Casablanca?’” How odd. Can it be that I’m really that lucky? My worst-case fate card was The Lovers, and it seemed impossible that this absurd situation was really only as bad as a broken heart. Is fate setting me up to fall in love with some bally Novi Dei, who will then bugger off back to dimensions unknown and leave me to join la Resistance? If that’s my doom, I’ll take it. At least it will keep me breathing. “That’s not so bad,” I say. “’Tis better to have loved and lost, what?”
“You are not understanding.” Cutie throws in another suspenseful pause. “The New Gods are not the Rick and the Ilsa and the Sam. They are the Nazis.”
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