The Weirdness (22 page)

“No, no,” Lucifer says, “I didn’t expect that you would. And if you still had the protections of the older ward, I would require your consent. But now the older ward is gone. And here we are.”

Billy can’t make sense of it. Why did he even have an older ward in the first place? Who put it on him? Who would find him worthy of protecting? He thinks again of his mother: her face, filling his field of vision.

“So,” Lucifer says. He looks around, faint distaste curling his lips. “I’d like to take this elsewhere. Shall we adjourn?”

“No,” Billy says, “I think, for now, we should stay right here.” He eyes the tree line beyond the fence, tries to figure out how far he could get if he loped into it at top speed.

“Billy,” Lucifer says. “I hate to put it this way, but you don’t have a choice.”

Billy opens his mouth to protest.

Lucifer raises his hand and snaps, once, only instead of a snapping sound his fingers make the pungent ashy burst-noise of an old-timey flashbulb, complete with the crinkle of tiny glass collapsing. And, just as if the Devil has popped a flashbulb in his face, everything goes white.

He waits for his vision to clear. Waits for the world to come back. But nothing. Everything stays white.

Oh shit
, he thinks.
I’ve gone blind
.

Except he hasn’t gone blind. He looks down and he sees his hands, his torso, his legs. But there’s nothing beneath his feet. No Ohio mud. Nothing. Whiteness. He suddenly has to fight back the sense that he’s not standing, but falling, plummeting through
empty space. He looks around, helplessly hoping to find a point he can use to orient himself, but there’s nothing.

He clenches his eyes shut and waits there in self-imposed darkness for a second, until the wave of rising nausea passes. A vast silence roars around him.

Eyes still closed, he drops into a crouch, reaches down, touches whatever it is that is supporting his feet, reaffirms the presence of resistance. So, okay, there’s that at least.

He slowly rises to standing again, opens his eyes, lets the whiteness rush in. He turns a full circle, hoping to find something behind him, but there’s just more nothing. He would have thought, when he woke up this morning, that
nothingness
was not really a thing that could be meaningfully modified with terms like
more
or
less
, but there behind him is definitely
more nothingness
, definitely, in fact,
too much nothingness
. It’s like he’s mainlining pure oppression directly into his eyeballs. It’s like all his senses are being smothered to death under a pillow.

And it is then that Billy thinks, with a sickening jolt:
Oh, shit. I’m not blind. I’m dead
.

No
, he tells himself.
No. I can’t be dead
.

Why not? You could die. People do die. Why not you? This could be Hell. The Devil killed you and sent you to Hell
.

Is this Hell? This combination: consciousness plus nothingness? It’s not what he imagined but he feels certain that remaining in this place, alone, will cause him to suffer, as surely as if he were writhing within a lake of fire.

He pats down his pockets, finds the loose change from the Americano, and throws it out into the void, hoping that just seeing something, anything, will help to quell the panic. The coins fall in the arc dictated by Newtonian physics, bounce, scatter out, help to
define a plane that Billy can think of as
the ground
. It’s not much but it helps to orient him a little bit.

He sits and thinks. There has to be a way out of this.

After a few moments pass, his thoughts turn instead to Denver. He allows himself to regret the fact that he died with Denver thinking that he was a flake. A cheating flake. An asshole. A cheating flake asshole. He wishes he could have proven to her that he could be a person who was, what was it,
fully present
. He won’t be getting any more present now, that’s for sure.

He takes a moment to try to envision what his funeral will be like, tries to work up a gratifying image of his friends, griefstricken at his graveside, rending their garments and such. But all he can envision is them at the table at Barometer last night, all together, laughing, having a good time, without him.

Fuck.

He wonders how long it will be before he goes insane. He gives himself maybe an hour.

No
, he thinks, closing his eyes again to block out the nothingness.
It doesn’t make sense. The Devil double-crossed you for some reason. And that reason wasn’t to kill you. He talked about a plan. He talked about a Phase Two
.

A Phase Two is at least something, not nothing, and as such Billy clutches at it with hope.

A Phase Two might not, of course, be anything good.

He recounts the one thing he knows. The older ward—wherever it came from, whoever put it on him—protected him against the Devil, and now it’s gone. The Devil expended some effort—some
trickery
—to get it dispelled. That must mean the Devil intends to harm him. To
modify
him. To modify him
without consent
. That just sounds bad. He wonders whether he’s just
going to have his free will sluiced away, be turned into some kind of foot soldier for Satan.

So, okay, he doesn’t want to get modified, he can pretty much take that as a given. The solution is: run away. Get to safety. But he really has no idea where safety might be, or if any spot in the blank expanse is different from any other. Does it even make sense to run?

It may not make sense, he decides, but at least it’s a course of action. He’s trying to think of himself as a Man of Action today.

He wonders if there’s still any chance that he’s going to get a book published at the end of all this.

He opens his eyes. Whiteness, check. He climbs to his feet. He takes a tentative step forward. And then another.

He turns around to see if the coins are still there. If the coins are still there he can at least feel confident that he can find his way back to where he started, if for some reason he needs to.

The coins are still there. There’s also a door there. It’s an ordinary-looking door, beige, free of adornment, set in a frame. It wasn’t there a minute ago.

Well
, he thinks. He’s pretty sure that the implicit suggestion here is for him to go ahead and go through the door. He’s also pretty sure that doing that will mean that he is playing right into Lucifer’s, whatever, clutches.

This is what Lucifer does
, he thinks, turning away from the door.
He tempts people. And when you have nothing, what’s more tempting than something?

He chooses a random direction and marches off, into the void. He goes for less than a minute before being seized with a certainty that the door is no longer behind him, that by spurning it he’s lost his chance. He whirls to look, terror clawing at the base of his brain. The door, mercifully, is still there.

Fine
, he thinks.
Let’s get this over with
. He advances to the door, puts his hand on the knob, and finds it cool to the touch—this goes a little way toward allaying his unvoiced suspicion that on the other side of the door he’ll find nothing but hellfire.

He turns the knob and the door opens onto a corridor, a corridor within what appears to be a moderately-priced chain hotel.

He steps through, scopes out the scene. The walls are some noncolor, some color positioned midway between peach and beige, a color chosen by a decorator for whom the choice of either peach or beige would have been just too bold. There are doors on both sides, with the usual numerical placards. Room 2001 on the left and 2002 on the right. So Billy’s either on the second floor or the twentieth floor or maybe the two hundredth, for all he knows.

Well
, he thinks,
it could be worse
.

He closes the door behind him, leaving his loose change in the void. All he has to do is find an elevator or one of those fire plan signs and he can beat it out of here. He sees no reason not to go, so he goes, off down the hall. It comes to a T end and he looks to the left and the right. More corridor. No elevator, no helpful signage. He notes that to his left the corridor terminates in some sort of open nook—a lobby, maybe?—so he heads that way. As he gets closer he sees that it’s not a lobby but rather a little institutional lounge, with a few bistro-style tables and chairs, a few sad-looking plants, and a little kitchen station: a coffee service, a Plexiglas case containing an array of baked goods.

He also notices that there’s a woman sitting at one of the tables, her back to him. Maybe she knows the way out of here.

“Hey,” Billy says, hurrying toward her. “Excuse me!”

She turns, and Billy stops where he stands. It’s Elisa Mastic, author of
Sanguinities
, MIA since last night’s reading. She’s not
wearing makeup, and she’s in yoga pants and a Duran Duran
Rio
T-shirt instead of the skirt and coat that Billy remembers her in, but it’s definitely her. He also takes the time to notice that she’s not wearing a bra.

She recognizes him, too: he watches the surprise flood into her face, matched, he’s certain, by the surprise that’s flooding into his own.

“What are
you
doing here?” Billy says.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Elisa says. A pissed-off look wipes away the surprised expression. “Are you friends with that guy?”

“What guy?”

“That guy from the reading last night.”

“Wait a second—you
remember
that guy?”

“
Remember
him? Are you kidding? He’s been
stalking me
for two
weeks
now. When you pointed him out in the audience last night I was like
Oh shit, he’s here
and then I went outside to figure out what the fuck I was going to do, like whether I was going to go through with the reading or just take off or—I don’t know what. And then I could hear shit just start to go crazy in there, like a brawl going down or something, and I was like
Fuck this, I’m out of here
. You said you knew him. That guy’s not your
friend
, is he?”

“No,” Billy says. “I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Elisa says, “because that guy fucking abducted me.”

His brain gives up on trying to make sense of Elisa’s appearance here, opts instead to crumple into a dull headache. He eyes the coffee station warily: he has his doubts about exactly how good this coffee will be, but he feels like his mind would benefit from some sharpening right now, so he pours himself a cup, sits down across from Elisa.

“He abducted you?” Billy repeats. He blows across the top of the coffee hopefully.

“Yeah,” Elisa says. “But I first met him like two weeks ago when he showed up
in my apartment
. I woke up in bed and he’s there
in my bedroom
. Said he had a proposition for me, wanted me to look at something on his computer or some shit.”

“What did you do?” Billy asks.

“What the fuck do you think I did?” Elisa says. “I told him to get out, and I called 911.”

“Oh,” Billy says. “Yeah. That would have been smart.”

Elisa goes on: “It scared him off. I thought. But the guy wouldn’t leave me alone. He’d disappear for a couple of days, then I’d be walking down the street on my way to pick up my mother-fucking laundry and he’d pull up alongside me in this stranger-danger van, leaning out the window, trying to convince me to get in. He kept saying that he could—that he could explain something that was going on with me. I’m like,
Yeah, no thanks, I know what happens to women who get into vans with random guys
. It was freaking me out—but every time I’d tell him to fuck off he’d always leave, and he’d always be like superpolite about it—which actually almost freaked me out more; I mean, if the guy is a raving psycho I at least know how to deal with that. It was almost as if he thought that I might come around eventually, decide on my own to get in the van, which I found—creepy. Like
pro foundly
so.”

Billy takes a sip of the coffee, swallows, and immediately hisses with reflexive, lizard-brain distaste. He notes that the longer this adventure of his goes on, the worse the coffee seems to get. That bodes poorly. He wishes he’d drunk the Americano of Evil back when he had it.

Elisa continues: “But then today—I don’t know, I can’t really explain what happened today. I was doing my yoga DVD and there’s a knock at the door—I remember looking through the peephole and seeing him—I know I didn’t open the door, I wouldn’t, there’s just no way—but then somehow he was talking to me—he must have drugged me, I guess, ’cause the next thing I know I was here? And, I gotta tell you, this place is awfully weird, ’cause I’ve been wandering around for like two hours and I can’t find the way out.”

“I have something to tell you,” Billy says.

He takes another sip of the wretched, brackish coffee, grimaces again, wonders if the powdered whitener would improve it in any demonstrable way. “This is going to sound crazy but—fuck it—I’m just going to put all of the cards on the table. I think that guy is the Devil. Like, I really believe that. I know how that sounds, but—”

To his surprise, Elisa is looking at him straight-facedly, as though she does not find what he has said to be even the slightest bit absurd.

Emboldened, Billy continues: “I think that guy is the Devil, and I think you and I are in Hell. And I think—I think something is going to happen to us. Something maybe—something bad.”

“Let’s figure this shit out,” Elisa says. “You want all the cards on the table? I have a question for you. Is there anything unique about you? Anything that you’ve never told anybody before? Anything that if you said out loud everybody would think you were crazy?”

“I don’t know?” says Billy. “I have a ward on me? Or had? I guess? A—magical thing?”

Elisa peers at him, frowns, and then lets out a little, exasperated
laugh, shaking her head. “Okay, Ridgeway, I gotta hand it to you, that was
not
what I expected that you were going to say.”