The Weirdness (21 page)

“I do intend, though, to make you suffer,” Ollard says. “You see, Billy, I learned something when I was inside your head, a minute ago. I learned that you are a man who is governed by fear.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“I think you are, actually. I looked around in your head just now. So many fears in there. That’s why you were never a great man, Billy; you were scared of the world. So I think it’s fitting that when I send you away I send you to the place that you fear the most.”

The place I fear the most?
Billy thinks. He tries to summon it up. Hell? Afghanistan? He has trouble thinking of a place
anywhere
that scares him more than the bowels of this tower, right now. He wonders for a moment if he can’t get out of this by pulling some Brer Rabbit shit.

“You know what really scares me?” Billy says, slowly. “My apartment. That place—I just never liked it. It just always creeped the fuck out of me. I’d wake up at night, rigid with terror.”

“Very funny,” Ollard says. “But I already know where you’re going. Its coordinates blaze deep in your mind. Buried in your memory: the locus of your most profound fears.”

“Give me a hint,” Billy says. “What
kind
of place is it?”

“I don’t know,” says Ollard. “I don’t care. I only know it is a place where you once pledged, out of fear, to never return. A fitting place for you to end your days.”

“I don’t like you,” Billy says. “Really, no one likes you.”

“Yes,” Ollard says. “That’s true.”

“Fuck you,” Billy tries to say, but he only gets as far as
fuck
and then he’s gone.

THE CAVE OF DENIAL • MUD/SHIT RATIO • NOT KNOWN FOR FOLIAGE • NEVER LIKED GOATS • SQUARE PUPILS • SOMETHING CRACKED • TOTALLY FUCKABLE • FRIENDS VS. ASSOCIATES • TOO MUCH NOTHING • AMONG THE DAMNED • NEEDING AN ANIMAL • WANTING YOUR MOTHER

Billy appears somewhere, still hanging in space, three feet above the ground, only now that he’s away from Ollard there’s no magic holding him in place anymore, so he falls down. He lands in mud, cold mud; he produces the squelch that is produced when a great volume of the stuff is displaced at great speed to accommodate the arrival of a plummeting body. Beneath the mud is something harder, clay maybe, perhaps a layer of rock, but definitely something that stops his fall, firmly, without friendliness.

He groans. He feels broken and sick, his pummeled muscles and guts still shot through with awful magic. He keeps his eyes closed. Unless he’s actively under attack, he doesn’t feel any special need to immediately reacquaint himself with the spot that’s the locus of his most profound fears. Quite the contrary. When he considers all his options, he feels like ultimately he’d maybe be better off lying here, in the mud, with his eyes clenched shut, in a dark little cave of denial.

Despite these wishes, bits of the world gradually trickle in.
He can tell that he’s outside. He can feel chilly wind stream across his face; he can hear the dry shush of that wind shifting masses of nearby autumn leaves. A crow, not far off, caws. He can smell the pungent kick of animal shit. This introduces a gram of worry about the ratio of mud to shit in the immediate area of where he’s fallen. With that said, being covered in shit no longer seems like it will constitute a significant reduction of dignity, given everything that’s happened to him in the last twenty-four hours or so.

He hears the bleat of some nearby mammal. Almost against his will he opens his eyes. He’s in a muddy outdoor pen, three feet from a mottled goat which observes him vacantly.

Beyond the fence at the pen’s perimeter he can see trees, a row of deciduous trees in the full blaze of fall. So he’s probably not in Afghanistan, at least: although he’s not a hundred percent sure what the tree situation is in Afghanistan, he does know that it’s not a place that’s exactly renowned for its scenic foliage. And didn’t Ollard say that this was a place he’d been before? Plus it doesn’t seem all that scary, although it is true that he’s never liked goats.

He cranes his head around, sees a barn of a decidedly North American typology and a huddle of sheep. For one moment he feels the uncharacteristic desire to eat them; he clears it with a vigorous shaking of his head.

He frowns at a few gumball-type vending machines that are loaded up with corn and sunflower seeds. Something about this place does seem familiar. And then he figures it out. It’s the Apple Cheeks Farm Stand and Petting Zoo in Ohio, about an hour from where he grew up.

He laughs. Ollard behaved rashly: sent him someplace harmless. Ollard made a mistake. Fuck, he had Billy hanging in the air like a trussed deer: he could have cut any one of Billy’s prominent
veins and just let him bleed out. Although maybe not: Billy remembers that Lucifer seemed to think that Ollard wouldn’t have killed him, even without the ward. Or wards, plural, whatever that’s about.

He looks at the vending machines and remembers the day he swore never to return here. His smile fades a little.

His parents had brought him. He was maybe six. They purchased a handful of grains out of one of those very vending machines, a quarter’s worth, and Wee Billy toddled off eagerly, ready to find some kindly fauna to feed. What Wee Billy didn’t know was that one handful of grain doesn’t last all that long when you’re up against the single-mindedness of the average farm animal. It all disappeared into the maw of one goat, an animal that Wee Billy experienced not as some harmless Disney critter, all shy smiles and eyelashes, but rather as a kind of frightening machine designed for gnashing. Something in the ballpark of an industrial thresher. Billy remembers looking into its otherworldly eye, with its diabolical-looking square pupil, and in there he found it, the terror, the terror at being up close with something that wasn’t human, that could not be reasoned with, that could not possibly be understood as good or kind.

Billy remembers wanting his mother. As the goat moved on to chewing wetly on the sleeve of Wee Billy’s shirt, he wanted his mother in a way that he had never wanted her before. There had been many times in his infancy and early childhood that he had wanted his mother to pick him up, to hold him, to feed him, to have her face fill his field of vision. Times when he had wanted her to tell him a story, something with mead halls and hunting horns, phrases that he didn’t understand but that she spoke with such delectation that he felt in her thrall, and felt comfortable there. But
this time was different, fundamentally different. This was the first time he had wanted his mother to rescue him from Evil.

The goat had worked its way up Wee Billy’s sleeve until it finally began to nibble at the rim of his ear. His sniveling turned into open shrieking. He had needed his mother to rescue him from Evil and she wasn’t there. No one was there.

She had never been far, of course, nor had his father, and they rescued him a second later and took him home, stopping at an ice cream stand for soft serve vanilla with a sweet orange shell, but something in Billy’s world had cracked a bit. He learned that day that he was not fully under anyone’s protection, that there were bad things out there, things that don’t understand mercy, and ultimately, he would have to face those things by himself, whether equipped for the task or not. And on this cold morning, his mission failed, fucked in more ways than he can count, Billy has, once again, been reminded of precisely how ill-equipped he is, most of the time.

He thinks of Ollard’s rotting teeth, of the stink that bloomed from his mouth.

He sits there, in the mud, trying futilely to come up with a next move. The planet is slated to die and he’s in Ohio, of all places. He’s cold. He’s alone. Apple Cheeks seems to be closed for the season, or something; he doesn’t see anybody else around: no farmers, no members of the public, nothing but goats and sheep. If he could get to his dad’s place—easily forty-five minutes away even if he had a car—then maybe he could … borrow some cash? That would be a good start. But then what?

Billy feels a hot flush of frustration surge into his face, threatening to squirt out into big stupid tears. Ollard didn’t make a
mistake
. He was right not to care where he sent Billy off to because
in the end it doesn’t matter. Ollard didn’t need to kill him, all he needed to do was flick him away and he would no longer count.

He wants his mother.

He lies back down.

He’s been lying there for a few minutes watching clouds scud across the sky when he hears approaching footsteps crunching through the rutted dirt. Billy tries to prepare an explanation for the proprietor of Apple Cheeks, some plausible narrative explaining how and why he came to be lying in this field. He’s a fiction writer, ostensibly; he should be able to come up with something.

But there’s no need. It’s not the proprietor. It’s Lucifer. He looks down at Billy with some admixture of pity and consternation, with the latter seeming more genuine than the former.

“What are you doing?” Lucifer says.

“Just—” Billy says, trying to figure it out, exactly. “Just lying here? Feeling sorry for myself?”

“Well, stop it,” Lucifer says. “We have things to do.”

Billy considers this. He considers the alternative. After a moment of this, he gets up, knocks the biggest clumps of dirt off of his coat with the heel of his hand.

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” Billy says.

“Perhaps.”

“I promised myself I would kick you in the nuts the next time I saw you.”

“But why?”

“Why?” Billy says. “I’ll tell you why. You said your plan was unfuckable by design. But let me tell you: it was fuckable. Totally fuckable.” That sounds wrong.

“Slow down, Billy,” Lucifer says. “Tell me what happened.”

“I’ll tell you what happened. I got
tortured
.”

“But—the ward,” Lucifer says, in a manner that seems to convey exactly no surprise.

“Yeah, the ward didn’t work worth a crap,” Billy says. “You told me it would protect me, but Ollard was just able to, just, dispel it or rip it away or something.”

“Ah,” Lucifer says. “But, you see, that’s good.”

Billy stops knocking mud and shit off of himself. Instead, he gives over all his energies to try to make any sense at all of that utterance. “That’s
good
? How on earth is that
good
?”

“Well,” Lucifer says blandly, “it was what I expected would happen.”

“It was—? Let me get this straight. You
expected
that Ollard would be able to dispel the ward that you put on me to
protect
me?”

“Correct,” says Lucifer.

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“Correct.”

Billy lets this sink in.

“You really are an asshole,” he says.

“Let me ask you something,” Lucifer says, ignoring the invective. “Did Ollard find the second ward? The
older
ward?”

“Yes?” Billy says, not at all certain that he should be answering this question honestly.

“And he dispelled that one, too?”

“Maybe?”

“I was
hoping
that would happen,” Lucifer says. He swells his chest proudly. “I
knew
he wouldn’t be able to resist, once he got into your head; he’s gotten careless in his confidence. I
knew
he’d go through there and just scrape you clean. So, you see, Billy, you see the genius in this? You see the real purpose of the ward I put
on you? Not to
protect
you but to draw Ollard’s attention, to get you free, at last, of that accursed
older
ward. A thing I could not do myself. And now we’re ready. Now we can move into Phase Two.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Billy says. “I don’t get it. This older ward? What the hell was it even
for
?”

Lucifer grins. “The older ward.” He emits a chuckle. “What was it
for
. Well, a couple of things, actually, but in part the older ward was designed to protect you from
me
.”

Something drops in Billy’s stomach. He takes a step back.

“But,” he says. “But, why would I need that? You and I—we’re, we’re, like, friends.”

“Associates,” Lucifer suggests.

“Pals,” Billy insists.

“Coconspirators,” Lucifer tries.

“Yeah, sure, coconspirators. But the point—the
point
is, you don’t want to hurt me. It makes no sense.”

“It makes some sense.”

“What sense? We’re on the same goddamn side!”

“Be honest, Billy,” Lucifer says, quietly. “You’re really on your own side.”

“That’s not true. I want to—I want to save the world and shit, same as you.”

Lucifer weighs this. “Very well. Let’s say that we’re on the same side. But in order for
our side
to be victorious, I need
you
to be—let’s say, more
efficient
as an ally. You require certain—modifications.”

Modifications? Billy remembers Lucifer’s fingers in his brain on Thursday morning, making tweaks, adjusting things. He remembers falling, distressed, into a huddle. He’s not really up for more of that right now, even if Lucifer can rejigger his identity to
make him resemble some kind of Special Forces dude, someone more mentally capable of completing an objective. “I don’t think I like the sound of that,” Billy says.