Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

The moon was still hanging around, silvering the rusted remains of the coiling Super Snake and the collapsed stalls of various attractions. This time, with nothing trying to suck my head off, I was able to appreciate the weirdness of the place. You notice I didn’t say, “the weird beauty of the place.” Shoreline Park might be many things, but beautiful is not one of them. But it smelled better out here at the north end, so either the sea breezes kept the air cleaner on this side of the island or the derelicts couldn’t be bothered to come all this way just to take a dump. Either way it made a pleasant change.

The peeling facade of some kind of game booth grinned as we passed. It might have been a clown’s head once, but now it was only two smears for eyes and a rictus smile of which only lipless teeth remained.

“So if you didn’t know it was me posing as Habari,” Sam said abruptly, “how did you know about the cemetery?”

“I got some help from Fatback. He told me that Habari had died, and when he told me Habari was buried in the very graveyard you used to take me to all the time-well, it seemed like a pretty long coincidence. Plus, I’d already picked up on at least one of the lies you told me.”

“There were a bunch. Which one?”

That made me feel sadder than I would have expected. “When you came to my room at the Ralston last night. You said you called Alice, and she told you the room number.”

“But I did call her. I’m not stupid, Bobby.”

“Yeah, but she gave you the wrong room number. She told me about it. She was feeling bad because she assumed you wouldn’t be able to find me. But of course, you only asked her for show. Kephas or whoever told you where I was, right?”

He only nodded, looking ahead now.

I was putting things together now. I had guessed that the angelic powers Habari had demonstrated to Edward Walker meant that one of the key players in the whole thing was probably local, since Habari the Magian worked out of the storefront on East Charleston. There just aren’t that many folks with haloes in San Judas, so I had begun to think it almost had to be someone I knew, as proved by the way Habari had reacted when we’d passed each other in our cars. He had recognized me immediately, even through my cuts, bruises, and bandages. But I’d gotten too fancy and instead of looking right next to me for Habari’s identity I’d made the leap to wondering whether Leo the Loke might have faked his own death.

“What about the bodies, Sam?”

He turned, startled. “What bodies?”

“The ones you and the other Magians must have worn. After all, you couldn’t ordinarily pass for an African clergyman, Sam.”

“The Third Way gave us those-they’re a little less functional, but a lot easier to enter and leave than the regular, earthbound bodies Heaven hands out. I’ve got the Habari body stashed away in a safehouse, but I can’t give you the location, Bobby, or the body. I’ll need everything I can trade to plead down my sentence with the bosses. Hey, maybe I’ll get off with a couple of million years in the fiery pit.”

Now I felt queasy. He knew as well as I did that it wouldn’t be anything like that simple. How could I have been so badly fooled by my best friend? And what was I going to do about him? “So now, after landing me in the shit, you’re going to sell out the Third Way too?”

“Shit, Bobby, that was supposed to be a joke. No, the truth is, I’m not giving you the safehouse and the Habari body because I want the Third Way to have a chance to clean it up and hide their tracks from the Upstairs boys. I never wanted this to happen to you, but I believe in what they’re doing. I’m not giving the Ephorate anything.”

“What did you think that day you bumped into me in front of the Magian Society office?”

Sam didn’t look around. “Startled the crap out of me.”

“I should have recognized you by your ride.”

Now he did turn. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t driving my own car.”

“Yeah, but no other angel would be seen dead in an old beater like that. You never cared about cars, Sam.”

Crazy Town, the funhouse, stood just in front of us. It actually still had a roof and most of its walls, but that was about it. The plaster of Paris spooks and clowns had eroded from the walls, leaving only spectral outlines and the occasional disembodied foot or hand or ear. What remained had been decorated with Day-Glo spray paints in a variety of runic designs that meant something only to the taggers themselves, but now even the graffiti was fading, rapidly becoming another piece of the past. As we crunched toward the building over a litter of broken bottles, I was glad I hadn’t managed to kick my shoes off while I was in the water with the ghallu . The wounds the creature had given me were beginning to heal thanks to my angelic constitution, but I was still injured, aching, bloody, and very, very depressed.

“It’s in here,” he said. “The door to the Third Way.”

I frowned. “There’s only one door? You have to come out here each time?”

He shook his head. “Nah, the physics of the thing-if it even is physics and not just some crazy Heaven magic-is weird. There’s not that many spots you can get into this new place we’ve made. One of those spots is here, but it’s not the only one. There used to be another door or whatever you’d call it in the Magian Society office, which is one of the reasons I had to go back that time you saw me. I had to shut it down before you or anyone else found it.”

“And if Clarence was tracking your movements, that’s probably how he figured out about you and Habari,” I said. “I talked to you both about who I’d seen, and if he knew you had gone there about the same time I did-well, if he or his superiors had any suspicions, that would have sure helped confirm them.”

He hesitated. “Do you really want to see this, B? It might…change things for you.”

I stood, trying to figure out what he was really saying. “It might,” I said at last. “But then again, it might not.”

He smiled, and I saw once more the familiar Sam, the Sam I’d known for so long. “Look, I just want to say that it really felt like shit having to lie to you all this time, Bobby. But except for the Third Way stuff, everything else I’ve ever told you-everything else we’ve been through-was real. The truth.”

“I know that, Sam. Or at least I’m willing to believe it.” I gestured with the needle gun. “Now show me your secret. And please don’t do anything stupid.”

He turned on his flashlight and led me into the abandoned funhouse. We didn’t go far, just down some steps to the hall of mirrors. Because they were metal, not glass, most of the mirrors were still in their frames, but the distorted images that had amused so many generations of park visitors were almost completely obliterated by rust and scratches.

“Third mirror from the left,” Sam said.

“And straight on ’til morning. Show me.”

“I’m going to reach into my pocket. Do me a favor and don’t dart me, okay?” He produced a faint shimmer of something. It could have been a tangle of spiderwebs glistening in the moon’s misty glow, but the only light was the dim flashlight in Sam’s other hand. He opened his palm and the shimmer spread over it, then kindled into a light so bright that I blinked and stepped back.

“Don’t!” I said, pointing with the gun.

“No worries.” Sam held up his blazing hand and drew a line with his index finger down the air in front of the mirror. A Zipper appeared, or something that would have been a Zipper had it been more sharply defined; a cloud of radiance, a miniature nebula appearing three feet off the ground in the middle of Crazy Town. “Kephas gave this gauntlet to me,” he explained. “It’s how I could take a living mortal like Edward Walker Outside, through a Zipper, and manage a lot of other stuff. Duplicates the powers of the higher angels, I guess. I don’t know what it is or how it works-I just call it the God Glove.” Sam gestured again, and the misty light dispersed, leaving a soft-focus hole in the center of the mirror. I could see objects and colors there, like one of those little scenes inside a sugary Easter egg. “I’ll step back,” he said. “I swear I won’t try anything. Just look.”