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.”