A Dark Matter (50 page)

The expression on the boy’s face was that of a ten-year-old barrister listening to the Crown’s arguments.

When Keith lowered his victim to the ground and bent over it, the Eel flicked away.
No more of this
, she thought, but there was much more. She was present for the lurid memory of Uncle Tilly’s crucial slow drip of a small number of words that poured a world of depravity into his young disciple’s willing ear. In Keith’s mind, above the impossibly handsome head and Roman nose of Tillman Hayward the sky blazed blood-red, purple, bruise-blue, gorgeous as an orchid. A dozen dogs and cats fell before Keith, and after the acquisition in high school of a friend/slave named Miller, a dozen more. Miller, two years younger than his friend/master, looked like Pinocchio, and had a good mind and an ingrained despairing passivity that made him, another starving skinny, funny-looking little being, perfect for his role as Keith’s sidekick. The Eel visited Hayward’s memories of his private room, one grotesque animal mutilation after another, and saw that a variety of tenderness and connection, a sick love, did bloom in that awful place.

At last she was obliged to watch, as though on a private screen, Hayward’s memory of the Christmas of his junior year and the wicked exchange of gifts between uncle and nephew. Around Uncle Till wavering lights always played, a cold but brilliant sun always hung in the daytime sky, and nights were always the deepest, richest, most breathing blacks. His smallest gestures threw out immense shadows. Till gifted his nephew with a Sabatier chef’s knife, and informed him that it was going to be his centerpiece, his show pony. Uncle Till accepted his nephew’s gift, that of Miller, with a smile like the glint of steel razors, and his nephew grew faint with loving admiration.

Even before the three of them entered the abandoned building on Sherman Boulevard, Miller clearly felt alarmed and fearful about having been given to Keith’s dangerous uncle. His knees jigged in his blue jeans, and his pores seemed to exhale an odd, metallic smell. After they had gone downstairs into Keith’s secret place, he announced that he would prefer to live through the experience, and Keith’s uncle informed him that he could rest easy, as he had never killed, nor ever would kill, anyone with a dick. (“Unless maybe by accident,” he added.) Then he ordered trembling Miller to undress and asked if he was hung pretty good. When Miller replied that he didn’t know, Uncle Till said that they would find out soon enough. There were a lot of things they were about to learn, he said, all kinds of things. And nephew, he added, if he were to enjoy himself in the deepest possible way, he feared he would have to be left alone with his Christmas present.

Through Keith Hayward seemed to move the wayward spirits of resistance, defiance, regret, and reluctance, a surprising matter given his love for his uncle, but he acted in the spirit of Christmas and remembered aloud the existence down the Boulevard of a certain diner. Try their cherry pie, said Uncle Till. Fit for a king, it was.

Keith’s memory of his hour’s penance in the diner was a nightmare of huge, grotesque faces, the company of men and women enduring a horrible death-in-life, a monumental struggle with a cardboard pie smothered under an excess of poisonous cherries. The world about him had grown seedy and poisoned. Down the counter, a repulsive giant named Antonio with a disfiguring stutter let the waitress know that he had just landed a good job at a mental hospital in Madison. Hayward did not understand why he saw things as he did.

He had given one of the two people he loved permission to kill the other.

Of Miller’s last moments, the Eel knew she could bear to watch none, and dreaded what was to come, only to discover that neither did Hayward wish to keep these moments clear, and had buried them beneath layers of smoke and chiaroscuro, where they existed only as hints of movement polluted throughout by guilt. Reluctantly catching sight of a twitching foot here, a flopping hand there, eventually she glimpsed Hayward squatting behind his carved, beaten, bleeding friend and guiding, under Uncle Till’s instruction, his Sabatier show pony to the side of Miller’s neck. Words came garbled through the visual static:
… use your arm muscles and sink it in … a good hard pull all across then …
On the instant Eel tasted a dark, bitter venom flowing into her, staining her tongue, her palate, and the inside of her throat. Teenaged girl, bird, or a dot of consciousness swimming through another’s mind, she could not bear what was happening to her, and twisted around, eyes clamped shut, and coughed and spat, hoping to retch.

Then her feet met some solid surface, and the unspeakable taste rinsed itself from her mouth and throat. The nature of the space about her had undergone a great change. Eel risked opening one eye halfway and peering out through the slit. From other forms of sensory evidence—primarily the absence of a choked, overheated underlying emotional atmosphere—it was clear that she had been translated out of Keith’s dreamscapes. What was reported by the half-opened eye reassured her: a tufted red-leather sofa against a wall hung with a row of graphics, a tall reading lamp, a neatly crowded bookcase, a Persian rug on a polished hardwood floor.

These impressions and reflections required no more than a second and a half.

Eel opened both eyes fully and observed that the graphics above the handsome sofa depicted the tortures of hell.

In what she did not recognize as an old-time, grade-A New York accent, a voice behind her said, “Hiya, kiddo, how ya doon?”

She whirled around to see a man with a neatly trimmed red-brown beard and a cap of short curly dark hair smiling at her from behind a desk. His cheeks had sunken, and his eyes hid far back beneath hedgerow eyebrows. The man was standing up. Suspended between his hands he held a row of books.

“You still okay?” he asked, and lowered the books into a cardboard box, where they fit exactly, as if measured for the space. The bookcase at his back was half-empty. Stacks of cardboard boxes with folded tops covered the rug beside the desk.

The Eel said that she was okay, yes. She thought.

He smiled, showing teeth as white as dentures. “No prollem, no prollem. Hey, yawanna know ya few-cha?”

She shook her head.

“Smawt. That’s pretty smawt.”

His sunken eyes turned color as he spoke. When she first saw him, they had been as brown as a cigar wrapper, but when he asked if she wanted to learn about her future, they had become an innocent and playful blue. His eyes had turned a glowing golden yellow while he admired her intelligence.

“Most pee-pul wanna know dere few-chas, but dey don’ like it much when dey heah abouddit. You got nuttin ta worry abaht, lemme say dat. Maybe a liddle trubble heah and deah, you’ll get troo it. An in style, ya know? First class, dat’s you.”

From here on out, the Eel was going to stop trying to imitate this pungent accent and just use her own voice. It could have used any accent it wanted to, anyhow. The accent wasn’t important.

She asked where they were, and what sort of being her kindly new companion might happen to be. Eel thought she knew the answers, but she asked anyhow.

“Oh, you’re still inside my boy Hayward,” answered her new friend. “And you know exactly what I am.”

She guessed she did. Did he have a name?

“Doesn’t everybody have a name, sweet thing? I’m Doity Toid.”

Thirty-third? They had numbers instead of names?

“No, kiddo, no, you have to listen up. I’m not Thoity-thoid, I’m Doity Toid. ‘D’ as in demon. Toid as in you know what.”

Was there a whole Toid family, with a Granddad and Grandma Toid?

“It’s not an unusual name for us. We don’t have parents, and we don’t have children. We don’t reproduce because we never die, we just sort of wear out after five or six thousand years. Anyhow, when the world out there changes, all of a sudden one day we find out we have new names. Takes a little while to adjust, natch. Until about six hundred years ago, I was called Sassenfrass. But I don’t care what my name is. My name doesn’t make any difference.”

He turned away, pulled another two feet of books from a shelf behind him, and with the same confidence of having calculated within a tolerance of a millionth of an inch, slid them in them beside the first group of books.

“Gotta get packed up pretty damn quick. It’s all over here, and I have to go. I don’t know where yet, but it doesn’t matter a good goddam. In this line of work, you’re never really out of a J-O-B.”

The Eel supposed they weren’t. Could she get out of here, too, please? And what was going to happen Keith? It looked like—

“What it looks like is what it is. Good-bye, Hayward, and farewell. Too bad, you know, because this kid, he was one in a million. They don’t turn out Keith Haywards every day, you can bet on that. Rare. Very rare. But you got a glimpse of the big guy?”

Unfortunately, yes.

“You said a mouthful. That guy, his name is Badshite, and he doesn’t like anyone to see him. Winds his crank, you know? Means he’s got to dole out some heavy-duty punishment, and Keith just put himself in the way. Sort of volunteered, the damn kid. Pisses me off, he was coming along so well. We could have gone a long way together, him and me.”

He volunteered?

“Sure looked like it to me. Of course, he has no idea what Badshite is going to do to him. People really don’t understand demons at all.” He sighed. “You guys don’t get it, and probably you never will.”

Don’t get what?

Doity Toid’s eyes turned a hot red. He plucked a brass paperweight from the desk, and for a moment Eel feared he was going to peg it at her. An expression of contempt passed over his face and faded into what looked to Eel like a mixture of weariness and acceptance.

“You ready for this? You need us. That’s the deal. That’s why we’re here.”

She wondered—if there were demons, didn’t that mean that angels existed, too?

The demon shuddered with distaste. “What are you, a sap? You don’t need big protective cops with wings, you need
us
. People are angels, get it?
(Pee-pul ah angels, geddit?)
But without us, you got nothing really worth having.”

Eel thought that was completely crazy, sorry.

Doity Toid slid the paperweight into a space exactly its size and came around the desk. He was scratching his curly head and giving her sideways glances. His sudden fit of ill-temper had vanished completely. With him came a whiff of feces, almost too faint to be detected, which dissipated as quickly as it had come. The demon perched himself on the front of the desk, crossed his legs at the ankles, and ran his long fingers through the rufous beard.

It came to her that as frightened as she had been at various moments, she had never been in fear of her life, nor was she now. They—whoever they were—wanted her here because they wanted to teach her something. Her only real fear was that she would not be capable of fully understanding it, seeing it from all sides: she feared that in telling other people about it, she would mess it up.

Doity Toid didn’t sound anything like a college professor of his era, but in his khaki trousers, rumpled blue blazer, and blue shirt, he looked like one. His feet were shod in cordovan Weejuns, like Milstrap’s. His considering, patient air also struck her as professorial.

“You guys, you people, you all run on one big engine, all the same for everybody, the whole world over. Know the name of that engine?”

Love? she speculated.

“Good try, but completely wrong, sorry.
(SAH-ree
.) The name of the engine is story.”

He gestured behind him, where a green chalkboard had appeared in front of the half-emptied shelves. When he rotated an index finger, the word
story
wrote itself in nice cursive letters on the board.

“If you want to get fancy, we could use the word
narrative
.”

He wiggled the finger, and
narrative
wrote itself across the board beneath the first word.

“And what does a narrative need? The presence of evil, that’s what. Think of the first story, the one about Adam and Eve and the Garden. The first human beings decide—they choose, out of their own free will—to do the wrong thing, to commit an evil act. And because of that, they are driven from the sinless Garden into
this
place, the good old gorgeous
(GAW-juss)
fallen world. Turns out, what do you know, this world of ours only came about
because of
an act of evil! The first demon, who appeared in the form of a sexy, sexy snake, more or less
created
your goddam world, you could say. And how do we know this, how is the information given to us? ‘Unto’ us, as the other team likes to put it? In a story, a neat little narrative packed into a few short pages of Genesis.”

Okay, said the Eel. I think I got it.

“Then try this one on.
We
give
you
free will, so we are responsible for your entire moral life. You can’t have a story without including a bad deed or a bad intention, you certainly can’t have redemption without you got some bad behavior to make it juicy, and decent behavior only exists because of the tremendous temptation provided by its opposite.”

Doity Toid hitched himself closer to her on the top of the desk. He leaned forward. Deep in their caves, his eyes shone unsettling amber.

“And here comes a real biggie, little sweetie. When you think about evil, you have to think about love, and vicey-versy. Love love love, you people love to love, you love to talk about love, you even sing about love, over and over, all the time. It gives me gas. It makes me feel nauseous
(NAW-shus)
. It gives me a royal pain in the tuchis. I could puke ground glass and razor blades for a week, all this crapola about love. Because, what is the opposite of love? Come on, tell me, you got a tongue on you, I know that much.”

The opposite of love was hate, said the Eel.

The demon tilted back his head and laughed. The laughter of demons was rich and dark, and contempt invariably honed it to a nasty edge.

“Oh, that’s what you all say. And that’s what all of you actually think, one and all. From presidents and kings to bums in the gutter, who by the way are almost all gone. Used to be, you couldn’t walk down a couple of blocks without seeing some poor ruined jobless homeless clapped-out lush booze-hound glue-sniffing coke-snorting junkie meth head stretched out in the gutter and stinking to high heaven of piss and shit. Even the cops didn’t want to handle these guys, but they had to, it was their job to throw them in the vehicle and drag them off to jail where they could sober up until the next binge. Those guys are almost all gone now, and I can’t figure it out. What happened? Where’d they go? Did they all die of their bad habits, and no new ones got made? Why not? Where are the new down-and-outers, the
new
old guys with bad teeth and stinky breath and bad B.O. and filthy, ripped clothes and bruised, dirty faces and bare footsies all bruised and swollen?”