Butcher Bird (18 page)

"Don't feel badly. This is just a chat between friends, not a reprimand. If you feel lost and foolish sometimes, don't worry about that, either. All great men begin as fools. It's one of life's little jokes."

"Spyder, he just called you a joke of the universe. Kick his ass," said Lulu. She put an arm around Spyder's shoulders. Count Non smiled at her.

"Food for thought," said Spyder. "We'll cover more ground if we split up for a while. I'll meet you back at the corner where we started."

"I was just fucking with you, man," said Lulu, but Spyder was already rounding the corner in the other direction.

In a street of nightmares, Spyder saw the Black Clerks.

The street had been roofed over, like the souks of Morocco. The sound attracted Spyder to the spot, a strange and deliberate animal wail—screams extracted with mechanical precision.

Inside the dark, cramped street was a gallery of horrors. Men turned over bonfires on huge metal spits. Women crushed under rolling boulders studded with surgical blades. Children screamed as spiders and oversized ants tore at their young flesh. Terrified people were tormented up and down the length of the street, shrieking and tearing at the arms of passersby as they were chased by snarling animals or angry mobs. Spyder took a breath and reminded himself that none of this was real. It was just the collective memories of bad dreams, the night terrors these poor saps could never forget. It reminded him of paintings by Bruegel and Goya, and, while he tried to work his way around the thought and not let it invade his consciousness, the memories of the paintings made him think of the underworld. If this is what Hell was going to be like, Spyder wasn't sure he could take it. Of course, he was going to be blindfolded so, unlike here, he wouldn't have to actually look at Hell. It was a small comfort, but Spyder was ready for any comfort he could get.

At the far end of the street, Spyder spotted the Black Clerks. At first, he took them to be part of another nightmare and stopped to watch them pulling the guts out of a cop who had been crucified across a writhing pile of drug-starved junkies, their withered limbs (oozing pus and blood from running sores) strained against the barbed wire that held them together. The head Clerk, the one who always held the reptile-skin ledger, looked at Spyder and beckoned him over.

"You are quite a long way from home?" said the Clerk, in his peculiar singsong cadence.

"You see me. I thought you were someone's bad dream."

"We're as real as you?"

"How about him? Is he real, too?" asked Spyder, inclining his head toward the tormented cop.

"He thought he could escape us," said the Clerk. "Sometimes it is not enough to take what is ours from the body, but to insinuate ourselves in the mind and memory. A warning and object lesson for others? This is our burden."

Spyder started to walk away.

"I hope you aren't running away, trying to cheat providence?"

"No way, José. I'm true blue," said Spyder.

"You don't wish to stay and watch us work?"

One of the Clerks had placed an elaborate metal brace into the policeman's open mouth and was studiously sawing off his lower jaw.

"Why would I want to see that?"

"Because you're lying. And most people want to know their future."

Spyder backed away and quickly left the street of nightmares.

Before this world, there were other worlds. Before this universe, there were other universes. Before the gods you know now, there were plenty of other gods.

Gods like to think of themselves as eternal. It's what gets them through the eons, but there are only two true eternals: birth and death. Everything else is junk washed up on the beach. The tide goes out and the pretty pink shells, the gum wrappers and the dead jellyfish are all washed away. Gods and universes come and go this way, too, but a living god knows some tricks. A god can mold energy and matter into anything it wants, or nothing at all. Gods can appear in an instant. Gods can disappear faster than the half-life of Thulium-145.

To save themselves, gods can scheme and they can hide. Some gods learned to hold their breath and float like kelp in the elemental chaos that rules the roost when one universe ends and the next hasn't quite kicked in.

Each of these trickster gods thought she or he alone had outwitted Creation by crouching in shadows of the universal attic. Then a young God called Jehovah took a band of rebel angels and tossed them, like week-old fish, from his kingdom into the dark between the worlds. As the burning angels fell, the old gods laughed and heard each other. For the first in a long time, they knew they weren't alone.

Worlds collapsed as the old gods, called the Dominions, got to know each other and learn one another's favorite games. Galaxies flickered and went out like cheap motel light bulbs. Whole Spheres of existence burned like phosphorous. Though this took a few million years in human terms, it was just something to do over lunch for the Dominions.

But the universe had its own agenda. When the Dominions tried to slip back into our universe from their refuge in chaos, they took a header out of the starry firmament, every bit as violent and humiliating as Lucifer's fall from Heaven. Not coincidentally, the Dominions fell along the same path as the exiled angels, straight into Hell. But unlike Lucifer's hordes, they didn't stop there. The mass of these beings was so great, that they fell through Hell out the other side, into a dead universe, one whose last echo hadn't yet faded away.

There was no life in this other universe except the Dominions themselves. Nothing to destroy but empty worlds. No one to torment, but each other. And no new games to play. The Dominions loved games. That's why they devoured stars. The best games, to them, were the ones played in the dark where only the sounds of screams and the taste and smell of evanescing lives let you know when you were winning. Their plan was to go from world to world, playing different games until there was no one left to play with. Then, they'd hide in the dark between universes until a new universe came into being, and they'd start all over again. Now, however, there was no one to play with and no way out. They'd fallen out of the living universe and didn't know the way back in.

In some stories, the Dominions have grown even madder in their isolation. They slash their empty worlds. They burn each other. But nothing makes them happy. When the Dominions sleep, they dream about us and how sad they are that we're so far away and not able to play. Sometimes they gnash their planet-size teeth in the dark. They're always looking, scratching at the edges of time and space for a way back into our universe. Sometimes they find a crack and peek through at us. When your skin goes cold and you feel like you're being watched, but no one is there, it's them. We're their drive-in double feature, with a Cherry Coke and free refills on popcorn.

The plaza was full of papers, kicked up by sluggish crosswinds. The papers were pages from old books and yellowed newspapers. Spyder stood at the bottom of a mountain of books taller than the highest ziggurat in Berenice.

He picked up a leather-bound volume embossed in gold Cyrillic on the cover. Inside the book were equations, a swamp of calculus problems and diagrams. He tossed the book back on the pile and picked up a paperback copy of
The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson. It had the same cover as the edition he'd read as a teenager. Spyder hadn't seen a copy in years. He read a page at random and felt the same tingle at the base of his spine that he'd felt when he'd first run across Thompson's spare, hardened-steel prose at fifteen. Spyder wondered what would happen if he put the book in his pocket and just walked away.

"An interesting choice," said a man around the far side of the pile. "Considering the choices available."

Spyder craned his neck to see a short, round man in a kind of leather kaftan. Over the kaftan yards of barbed wire had been looped, encasing the man in spiny metal. On his face, the man wore a wooden mask depicting some grinning Japanese demon. Spyder remembered that Shrike had said something about masks. Some of the humans in Berenice wore masks, she'd said, to keep lost memories from attaching themselves to them and becoming false memories of a life they'd never led.

"I had this book when I was younger," said Spyder, tossing the Thompson back on the pile.

"I knew there was a reason and the reason was emotional, rather than an intellectual attachment. You picked up the book which moved your heart, not some great work of literature meant to impress others."

"I was a junior varsity criminal and had a few run-ins with the cops, so the book was a big deal to me back then."

"Of course it was!" said the round man. "If you enjoyed that, may I show you some other, rarer volumes at my stall nearby?"

"I'm just passing through. I'm not buying."

"No, no. No buying. Just looking. Come. It's a pleasure to meet a man of similar interests. I guarantee you will enjoy my wares. Books never written. Paintings never painted. Films never committed to celluloid. All only ever existed in the minds and hearts of the artists who dreamed them." The man turned and said to Spyder, "I am Bulgarkov."

"Spyder."

"Are you Spider Clan?"

"Whatever." Spyder followed Bulgarkov. "Nice zoot suit. You expecting a stampede?"

"Are you referring to my garments? The streets are full of dreams and men, two equally dangerous organisms. The mask keeps the hungry memories of men at bay and the wire keeps away the men themselves."

"I don't think I'm going to have time to look at anything," said Spyder, intending to leave the man at his stall. Spyder picked up a copy of
Poodle Springs
by Raymond Chandler. He vaguely remembered the book. Chandler had died before finishing it, but left notes and a partial manuscript. His publisher had hired some other hack to finish the novel years later. There was no second name on this
Poodle Springs
title page. Spyder flipped to the ending. It wasn't what he remembered in the patched-together version he'd read.

The stall was piled high with books. Paintings were stacked against the back wall and 35mm movie film cans were piled on wooden shelves and floor. The title on one caught Spyder's eye.

"This movie doesn't exist," he said.

"Of course it doesn't. If it did, I wouldn't have the thing in my shop."

"This says
Heart of Darkness
, directed by Orson Welles. Welles never directed
Heart of Darkness
. The budget was too big and the studio wouldn't pony up the money. That's why he made
Citizen Kane
."

"And yet you hold that very film in your hands. Do you know why?"

"No."

"Because Mr. Welles made the film in his mind. He saw it in his dreams, and the memories of those dreams have manifested themselves in the ethereal celluloid you see before you. Would you like to buy it?"

"I told you, I'm not here to buy. And I can't play a film like this. You need a movie theater projector. My VCR doesn't even work."

"Would you like to see the film?"

"Of course."

"There is a small cinema nearby. It is for people such as ourselves, the humans who inhabit our quaint little city. I allow all my films to be shown there. It's very good publicity."

"I can't," said Spyder. "I have to meet some friends."

"You'll just go for a little while. Not for the whole thing. When will you have this chance again?"

"You aren't trying to hustle me, are you? Because I'm going through kind of a weird period right now and it's left me cranky. Someone trying to hustle me would definitely go home limping."

"Why would I need to hustle you or anyone? I have the rarest merchandise in all of Berenice—the dreams of great artists. What will you give me to see Mr. Welles' wonderful film?"

"I have a little cash, but that's probably not worth anything here."

"No, no. Money is trash to me." He looked Spyder up and down like Spyder had once seen his uncle size up a neighbor's '57 T-Bird. The uncle came back that night to steal the car, but the neighbor was waiting and shot him in the head with a thirty-ought six.

"That ring," Bulgarkov said. "I'll take that."

"My ex gave me that."

"Even better. The memory of the gesture will still live in the metal."

Spyder looked at the ring on his left hand. It was a half skull that wrapped around the back of his finger. Jenny had given him the ring on their six-month anniversary. It was a cheap thing, but he'd always loved it.

"I don't know," he said.

"Mr. Welles is waiting. I am waiting. You are waiting, too. The girl, obviously, is gone. Let the ring go and get on with your life."

Spyder thought about it. Things hadn't always been bad with Jenny, and the ring was a reminder of a time when things had been close to great. These days, every memory of her felt like five hundred pounds of nails. That wasn't what made the decision for him. In the end, he gave the ring to the merchant for the same reason he'd done so many things in his life: "Why the hell not?" he said, and slid the ring off.

Bulgarkov dropped the ring into a pocket beneath his loops of barbed wire and said, "The cinema is this way." He pointed back toward the plaza and came from his stall to show Spyder, but tripped over the frame of an unknown Francis Bacon self-portrait. The merchant started to fall and Spyder instinctively reached out to grab him. Bulgarkov's barbed wire ripped through the palm of Spyder's right hand.

"Shit!" yelled Spyder.

"Take this," said Bulgarkov, going to the back of his stall and returning with a silk scarf. He wrapped the material tightly around Spyder's wounded hand and stanched the flow, but blood had already splashed on the pavement and the floor of the stall.

"You're a goddam menace in that suit, man," Spyder said.