Tad Williams - The Dirty Streets of Heaven

Most of the barn was taken up with a central pen about twenty by thirty feet or so, with a chest-high rail and a bottom about a foot or so deep in stinking mud-and I mean stinking. At one end of the enclosure, dim and pale in the flickering overhead light, crouched a huge, naked bald man smeared with mud and worse. He looked up at me and his squinting eyes gleamed.

“Hello, George,” I said. Nobody called him Fatback to his face-it wasn’t polite. Not that he understood me at the moment, anyway.

He let out a squeal of rage at the sound of my voice and hurtled across the pen on his hands and knees, splashing mud and shit and pig slops everywhere, but slipped and skidded head first into the barrier with a grunt of pain and frustration. He sank back in the muck and sat looking at me sullenly, blood now trickling from a cut on his forehead. I sighed and checked my watch; 11:52. Still eight minutes to go.

I moved safely out of splashing range and watched him as the time ticked away. He watched me back. It was unpleasant, being stared at by those narrow eyes. There wasn’t anything human in them as far as I could see, but there was an awful lot of murderous anger. I was glad old Javier seemed to keep the pen in good repair.

Casa de Maldicion is Spanish for “House of the Curse,” but what had happened to George was worse than that. The child of an old Californio family (the Spanish-speaking folks who owned everything before the gringos showed up) George Noceda had inherited not just a lot of family property in the Pulgas Ridge area but the family’s major obligation as well, which happened to be a debt to the dark powers. (Nowadays we call ‘em by more respectable names, like “the Opposition,” but it’s still the same old firm.) In return for unnatural prosperity for the family, for several hundred years, every oldest male child of the Noceda line had been were-hogs, doomed each night to become a ravening beast between the hours of midnight and sunup. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the family did their best to keep the suffering male heir locked up at night. Mistakes were made (and more than a few local monster legends had been started because of those mistakes) but by and large the family had come to accept the price of the bargain some ancestor had made in return for their good fortune in all other matters.

Then along came George. A creature of the late twentieth century, he had never doubted in the power of dark magic-after all, he had started to smell powerfully of chitterlings when most boys were just growing their first scraggly mustaches, and had changed for the first time soon thereafter. But like most of the people of this modern age, he didn’t think he should have to take the fall for something his great-great-great grandparents had done. So he made a deal with the Opposition: he would sacrifice most of the family fortune, land, wealth, and prestige, and in return Hell’s minions promised they would reverse the curse.

Poor George. Like so many others before him, he underestimated what he was dealing with. He got what he wanted, to the letter of his new contract, and the curse was, in fact, reversed. So from then on, each night at twelve, the same thing happened. In fact, it was happening now.

The fat, naked man suddenly fell face down into the filthy mud, bellowing like he was on fire. He began to thrash, sending gouts of stinking slime everywhere. I stepped back to the front door to protect my coat, which wasn’t all that expensive but was a favorite. The noise went on as the huddled figure in the muddy pen writhed and changed, grew darker and misshapen, until it had taken on an entirely new form, that of an immense, black, bristle-skinned boar hog.

The hog finally stopped squealing. It rolled over and sat up on its haunches, then turned its beady eyes in my direction.

“That hurts like an unholy bitch,” he said. “Every time.”

“Nice to see you, George.”

He wrinkled his snout. “Oh, I’m sure, Bobby. A treat for all ages.” He saw something floating in the muck before him and sucked it up, then began to chew. “Corn cob,” he explained when he saw my horrified look. “Fiber. And oh my sweet and precious God do I need it…!”

I was getting more information than I wanted, and it would only get worse. George was garrulous in this form-pig’s body, man’s mind-and usually had no one to talk to but Javier or one of the old man’s sons, the only other people who still lived on this shrunken remnant of what had once been a grand seigneurial property. Of course, when he was in his other form, his dawn-to-midnight form of a pig’s mind in a man’s body, he wasn’t much for conversation.

They reversed the curse, you see. Just like they promised. Who do you think invented lawyers in the first place?

“So what brings you up to my neck of the woods, Mr. D?” George asked. “What can I do for you?”

“I need information on a citizen named Edward Lynes Walker and also on Grasswax, infernal prosecutor.” Fatback was the only outsider I could safely approach in the current climate. The Opposition had hosed him in a completely legitimate way, but George had never forgiven them, and he made it his life’s work to keep a close eye on their dealings. That was why a large portion of what remained of his family’s once vast fortune went toward funding a small research agency of which George was the only client. The only other thing in the room beside George’s pen was the projection monitor screen he used to view what they sent him, and to troll the net for what he could find himself.

All voice-controlled, of course. He’s a pig.

“Sure, I’ll see what I can find for you, Mr. D.” He cleared his throat and said, “ Radiant .” At the code word the screen flicked on, bathing the room in cool light. “Hey, you want to do me a favor while I’m starting the search? Get that rake and scratch my back.”

I did what he asked, holding my breath. George isn’t a bad guy, and it’s not his fault he smells like Death’s diaper.

“Hijole!” he said as the latest gleanings scrolled past. “This Grasswax thing is some crazy shit! Does it have anything to do with the Walker death?”

“I doubt it.” I didn’t want to tell him anything he didn’t need to know, not because I didn’t trust him-his hatred of the Opposition was genuine-but because I didn’t know exactly what I was dealing with. “I don’t know, maybe.”

“Well, there’s a ton of stuff about both of them flying around. It’ll take me a while to pull it together and make sense of it. How do you want it, electronic or hard copy?”

“Electronic. And use my private email address, will you?” I didn’t want it going through Alice, who didn’t even know what the word “private” meant. “Oh, and there’s one other thing. I need to get in touch with someone from the Opposition.”

Fatback turned sour little piggy eyes on me. “Forget it. I’m not doing that for you or anyone else, Mr. D. We’ve always got along well, you and I, but if you want a go-between, find someone else.”

“I’m not asking you to set up a meeting, George, just to tell me where I can find a particular member of the other side. I’ll do the rest.” Now that I was about to say it, the whole thing seemed ludicrous-suicidal, even-but I plunged ahead anyway. “I need to track down a fixer called ‘Countess’, a big shot. I don’t know the rest of her name.” I gave him a quick description of her appearance, at least the time I’d seen her, and told him what little I knew, including that she’d been brought in to clean up after the Walker mess.

“So you are tangled up in the Grasswax thing,” George said cheerfully. “Well, any dead devil is a reason to celebrate as far as I’m concerned. Go tell Javier I’m hungry, and I’ll see what I can find out about her.”