A Stark And Wormy Knight (21 page)

It was pretty much like the Spartans at Thermopylae. I had to stop them and keep them here. As long as they were busy trying to kill me, or occupying the various stuffed animal corpses, we had a chance. If they got beyond the perimeter, we were in trouble.

And, yeah, they used everything – stag and boar heads jumping off the walls, gouging and biting, stuffed ferrets breaking loose from their pedestals to run snapping up my trouser legs. Even the giant Kodiak bear made a re-appearance about six in the morning, at a moment when I was feeling particularly exhausted. I was ready for it this time, though and after about half an hour rolling around with it I broke off its arms, then let out all its stuffing with a Gurkha knife.

Things got a little quieter as the sun rose – the Wednesday Men didn’t seem to like the light very much – but I couldn’t afford to turn my back on them and I certainly didn’t dare sleep. I popped a few amphetamine tablets I’d brought with me and did my best to pay attention. I walked around the place beating the random crap out of anything alive that shouldn’t have been, trying to keep all activity confined to the area around the clock. I did have time to eat a sandwich in the middle of the day, which was nice. I’d brought a sack lunch, including two packages of Twinkies. It’s the little things that make fighting for the survival of our dimension worthwhile.

Damn, I was tired, though. Things began to ramp up again as the sun set on Wednesday night – the things might not have understood who I was or what I was doing, but they were clearly getting frustrated as hell. As soon as the dark came they were all over me again in earnest, and I can’t really tell you what happened for the next several hours. I just fought to stay alive, using my vibration-enhanced hands and weapons on the things themselves, using the clubs and knives I’d brought with me to beat the unholy bejabbers out any of the stuffed corpses they hid themselves in the way hermit crabs used seashells.

The last hour before midnight was the worst. I think they’d begun to get an inkling that I meant to do more than deprive them of their fun for a single week, and if I thought they’d fought hard before, I hadn’t seen anything. I wished for about the hundredth time I’d brought more help from the Bureau, but I hadn’t wanted to risk anyone else. I still had no idea what was going to happen at the end – for all I knew, we’d wind up with a scorched hole a mile wide where the town had been, or something even worse, like a blackened rip in the space/time continuum. itself

At the end, they finally got me. I was boneless as a flatworm, exhausted, battered, sucking air but not catching my breath, and to be honest, I couldn’t even remember why I was fighting. A bunch of them charged and pulled me down, then they swarmed over me like giant moaning jellyfish. That was it, I knew. All over. I was too tired to care.

Then, from what seemed like a hundred miles away I heard the grandfather clock begin to chime, a surprisingly deep, slow sound, and suddenly the light around me changed color, from purple-blue to a bright reddish-orange. The things on top of me rolled off, buzzing in surprise, as a host of new shapes burst from the clock. They didn’t look a thing like human beings, but they didn’t look like the Wednesday Men either, and I knew that Grayson Thursday had kept his word and brought his friends. The cavalry had come.

“Pull them back in!” I shouted, although the Thursday folk probably couldn’t understand me or perhaps even hear me. Nevetheless, they knew what to do. The orange, glowing shapes grabbed my attackers and the other Wednesday Men and began to drag them back toward the shimmering lights of the big clock. Not that the moaning jellyfish-things went without a fight – people were dying, that was clear, even if they didn’t look like people.

It seemed to go on for an hour, but it must have happened during the twelve times the clock struck. At the end, the last of the glowering Wednesday shapes had been pulled back into the breach, and one of the Thursday Men looked back at me with his face that wasn’t a face.

“Thanks, buddy!” I shouted. “Now I suggest you all duck!” I pulled out the egg grenade. I’d saved it for last, saved it carefully. Not only was it set to the same vibrational field as the Wednesday Men – and that of their entire dimension – but I’d had one of my friends down in New Orleans prepare it for me, so the grenade itself was taped to a black hen’s egg full of serious hoodoo powder. See, hoodoo magic is crossroads magic, and if a place where one world runs into another isn’t a crossroad, I don’t know what is. I ‘d gone to see some folks who knew how to deal with such things.

One of the Wednesday Men had got away and was oozing back toward the breach, mouth wide in an unheard roar of frustration. “Hey, Soupy,” I shouted. “Regards from Baron Saturday!” I pulled the pin and threw the hoodoo egg grenade.

I’ve never seen half the colors that explosion made, and I hope I never see them again – they hurt my eyes something fierce and made my brain all itchy. Not only did the blast seem to close the breach, it blew the clock itself to fragments and started big pieces of roof beam falling down as well. It was all I could do to crawl out into the post-midnight darkness before the walls themselves started to collapse. The last thing I saw before I passed out was the lighthouse tower shiver and then crumble, falling down into the ocean in big white chunks.

* * *

Albie Bayless found me in the morning. He stared at the ruins like a kid who’s not only seen Santa Claus but been given a supersonic ride to the North Pole strapped onto the runners of the fat man’s sleigh.

“What happened?”

“I held the pass,” I told him. “It’s closed now.”

“For good?”

I groaned as I sat up. “I’m not sure. That’s why I’ve got one more thing to do.” I limped over to the spot at the edge of the property where I’d left my last little surprise. I ached all over, and judging by the worried expression on Albie Bayless’ face, I must have looked pretty bad, too. It hurt even to lift the lead box, which was about the size of a tool chest. Normally I could have picked it up with a finger and thumb.

“What’s that?”

“Something we’re going to leave behind.” I led him back to the wreckage of the Monk’s Point house and picked a patch of open ground. I dug a hole and put the lead box in it. I tried not to read the stuff scratched on it. My friend in New Orleans had said it would work and that’s all I needed to know. She’s a smart lady.

“But what is it?” Albie asked as I kicked dirt over it.

“That box contains the mortal remains of a man named Albert Dupage,” I said. “Killed half a dozen men because he claimed they were cheating him at cards. Killed his family too, wife and kids, but that was another time. Killed a sheriff and a deputy, and the local circuit preacher as well. Meanest, craziest man in all of St. Bernard Parish, everyone says. When a posse finally tracked him in the swamp down and shot him down like a mad dog, he was buried at the crossroads just to keep his evil spirit from finding its way back home.” I smiled. Even that hurt. “I figure we’ll leave him here to guard this crossroad, just in case those Wednesday boys get an idea about coming back. They’ll have to get through Albert, and I don’t think it’ll be easy.”

There was one more part of the Monk’s Point story. As I was recuperating the next afternoon in the sunshine of the front yard at Albie Bayless’ place – Albie himself was in the house, putting raisins in his chili – I heard a rustling in the bushes and looked up. The figure standing there wasn’t naked any more. It was wearing somebody’s pink bathrobe, but the new garment was a little too small to conceal the Y-shaped autopsy scar. This time, though, he was looking right at me, and there was an intelligence to his face that hadn’t been there last time.

“Rufino?” I asked. “That you?” I asked calmly, but I was a little worried in case it was one of the Wednesday Men who’d got out before the breach was shut.

“Roof,” he said. “That’s what everyone calls me.” The boy shook his head slowly. “Used to call me. ‘Cause I’m dead now.”

“So I heard.” I beckoned him over. “Sit down. How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad. I don’t like the sun much, though, so I think I’ll stay here. It makes my skin feel bad – makes it smell, too. Kinda like bad bologna. You know what that smells like?”

“Yeah, ‘fraid so. What brings you here?”

He shrugged. He was still a teenager, just a dead one. “I don’t know. You saved me, kind of. I mean, I got out of that place when you blew up the door. Found my way back into my body, I guess.”

“Ah. So they were sort of – holding you prisoner?”

“I guess. It’s all kind of confusing. One minute I was looking at the old haunted lighthouse, the next minute I’m in some kind of dark, windy place listening to these weird noises. It was like going to a really, really slow Day on the Green concert. On bad acid. Then a bunch of really weird stuff happened, and there was you, and an explosion, and…and I was back in here again.” He frowned and shook his lank hair out of his face. “But look what those doctors did to my body! I don’t even have blood any more.”

“Yeah, that can’t be fun.”

“Thing is, you’re leaving, right? You’re not from around here. I want to go with you. I already hated this place when I was alive. Can you imagine how messed up it’s going to be for me now I’m dead?”

I thought about it for a moment. “You know, I think the folks at the Bureau would be willing give you a place to stay, Rufi…Roof.” I nodded. “Just hang around for a little while, then Bayless can drive both of us. I’ve got a private Bureau plane waiting in Sonoma.” I smiled. “It’s not like you’ve got a lot of stuff to pack.”

“No,” he said seriously. “But there is one thing I gotta do first. Can you come along?”

“Where?”

“I need to say goodbye to my dad.”

* * *

You haven’t heard a houseful of drunken rummies scream until you’ve heard how these guys sounded when Roof showed up at his dad’s house in mid-party — bloodless, scalpless, and very obviously dead. The few who could keep their legs (and bladders, and sphincters) under control long enough to run outside all ran into me, which probably didn’t help their state of mind, either. Albie told me later that about half of of Bobby Gentle’s friends ran straight into to town after this life-changing experience and threw themselves on the mercy of Jesus, care of the nearby Monk’s Point Presbyterian Church.

“I told him he ought to get his act together,” Roof said as he rejoined me. I could see his dad lying slumped in the doorway of the house where he’d fainted, a beer still clutched in his fist. “I don’t think he’ll listen, though.”

“Don’t underestimate your powers of persuasion,” I said as I led him up (*) the driveway. I could hear some of the guests still shrieking inside. “You may have a future on the religious circuit, kid.”

I took him back to Albie’s place, and found him some duct tape so he could stick the top of his head back on until we could fix him properly back at the Bureau.

* * *

“Wow,” said Ted. He looked a little pale himself. “I mean…Jeez. That’s pretty… So what happened to the kid?

“He stayed with us for a couple of years. Worked a few missions for BPRD, but his heart wasn’t in it.” I smiled as I thought of Roof. He had been a slacker before the word existed – he had just happened to be a dead one. The last thing he wanted to do was spend his afterlife working an office job. “Last I heard, he was in Yakutata, Alaska, surfing year-round. He likes it ‘cause it’s real cold there, and nobody ever asks why he always wears a wetsuit.”

“And the Thursday Men?” asked Liz.

“Haven’t heard from them — or their woeful buddies. But I can’t help but worrying about it sometimes.”

“Why’s that?” Liz smiled at me. She thinks I think too much. She’s probably right.

“Well, if those two dimensions just happened to run smack into ours, what about the others? What about the rest of the days of the week? Why haven’t we heard anything yet from the Monday Men or the Tuesday Men?” I re-lit my cigar. “They’re probably here already, and we don’t even know yet. In fact, you could be one of them, Ted. It would explain your singing voice.” I slapped my hand on the table. “Now, who’s playing cards?”

The Tenth Muse

W
HEN
I
FIRST GOT TO KNOW
Balcescu, I didn’t like him much. A snob, that’s what I thought he was, and way too stuck on himself. I was right, too. One of the things that drove me crazy is that he talked like George Sanders, all upper-crust, but I didn’t believe for a moment he actually knew who George Sanders
was
. Old Earth movies wouldn’t have been highbrow enough for him.

He also loved the sound of his own voice, whether the person he was talking to had time to listen or not.

“There you are, Mr. Jatt,” he said one day, stopping me as I was crossing the observation deck. “I’ve been looking for you. I have a question.”

I sighed, but not so he could tell. “What can I do for you, Mr. Balcescu?” Like I didn’t have anything better to do coming up on twelve hours ‘til Rainwater Hub than answer questions from seat-meat. Sorry, that’s what we call passengers sometimes. Bad habit. But I hate it when people think they’re on some kind of a pleasure cruise, and that just because I’m four feet tall and my voice hasn’t broken yet I’m the best choice to find them a comfy pillow or have a long chat about the business they’re going to be doing planetside. What a lot of civilians don’t get is that this is the Confederation Starship
Lakshmi
, and when you’re on my ship, it’s serious business. A cabin boy is part of the crew like anyone else and I’ve got real work to do. Ask Captain Watanabe if you think I’m lying.