Costume Not Included (18 page)

  "Limbo," he said.

  "What about it?"

  "There used to be a place called Limbo, where the souls of unbaptized children went," he said, following the thought. "It existed because it was written into an earlier draft of the big book, but now it has been written out. But it's still there – empty, but still there."

  Melda was looking at him with concern. "So?"

  "So what happened to all the souls?"

  Her face took on the expression she wore when she was trying to decide which movie to rent: thoughtful, but not too worked up about the issue. "I'm sure they were looked after," she said.

  Normally, when Chesney came to a murky question, he let it slide. But he couldn't just shuffle this one aside. "Were they?" he said. "Or did they just get edited out?"

  "Either way," she said, "it's nothing to do with us, sweetie." Her hand covered his again, and squeezed reassuringly.

  But he wasn't reassured. He was following his thought through the shifting darkness. "No," he said, "Limbo isn't. But what about this world?"

  "What about it?"

  He was driving his mind forward, like he'd never done before outside a pool of light. "If I become a prophet, if I make a new book, then it becomes the latest draft of
the
book."

  "Yes," she said, "and it's a better world."

  "But what happens to the old one? And all the people in it?" He pushed himself on now. "What happened to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden? It was supposed to have a wall around it and an angel with a sword at the gate. So where is it? Where's the world it was in? Because it isn't in this one."

  "There's no need to get upset," Melda said.

  He realized his voice had risen. He brought it down. "Okay, but what about the Tower of Babel? It used to reach all the way up to Heaven, and people from all over the world came to build it. Then it got smashed and toppled, and then it got written out of the draft. What happened to all those people?"

  "It was all a long time ago, sweetie."

  "Yes, but now is now! Say I'm responsible for making a new part of the big book, and the old one gets put aside while the new story goes forward. Does that mean that all these lives…" he gestured at the city outside the apartment window, the winding snakes of traffic lights moving along the streets, "do they all get canceled, dumped in the wastebasket?"

  Her brows drew down and a vertical line formed between them. "It's a good question," she said.

  He had already hit the speed-dial on the phone. When he heard it answered, he said without preamble, "What happens to the other drafts?"

  Billy Lee Hardacre said, "What are you talking about?"

  "The discarded drafts, the worlds that used to be but aren't there anymore. What happens to them? And the people in them?"

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then Hardacre said, "I don't know."

  Chesney had made up his mind, had followed the thought all the way along its dark, twisting trail to where it inevitably led. But wherever he had arrived, it was still not a pool of light. "I need to know," he said. "Or I can't do it."

 

They met in the preacher's study. Chesney had thought they might have to drive out to the estate, but when he'd summoned Xaphan, the demon made no bones about whisking them there – via the usual stop in Hell – even though the matter had nothing to do with crimefighting.

  "Truth to tell," it said, "the boss sez I should just do whatever you want me to do – that is, if it don't interfere with some other contractual obligation."

  The unexpected concession raised Melda's suspicions. "Why the change? And what does he want in return?"

  The demon puffed on its cigar. "First," it said, "he don't tell me why, and I long ago learned not to ask. Second, this is service with no charge." It took another drag and blew a thoughtful cloud of smoke that formed a question mark in the air. "Way I figure it, and don't quote me, but this whole book bizness has got him rattled. He wants to see where it goes and he can do that by watchin' where you take it."

  And so they transited through Chesney's room in Hell, Chesney's assistant pausing briefly to pick up a refill of its tumbler of rum, then they appeared in the foyer of the preacher's mansion.

  "I'm gonna fade," Xaphan said. "Call me if you need somethin'."

  Hardacre wanted to talk about the
Book of Chesney
, but Chesney was firm on the evening's agenda. "None of that matters if I decide I'm not doing any of it," he said. "And that decision is going to depend on what we're here to talk about."

  The preacher looked a question at Melda. She said, "Looks like it's not just my decision after all."

  Chesney restated the questions he had asked on the phone. Hardacre said, "Short answer is: I don't know. With me, I keep all my drafts – first, second, third. Maybe they'll be of interest to somebody doing my literary autobiography fifty years from now, though I doubt it." He shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just a sentimental pack rat."

  "So the old worlds, they might be around somewhere," Melda said. "Limbo is. Chesney was there."

  "Really?" said Hardacre.

  "But it's empty," said Chesney.

  The preacher quirked his lips. "Interesting."

  "I have to know what happened."

  "We could ask the angel."

  "He might not know," Chesney said. "He didn't even know about the great book until you told him."

  Chesney's mother had been sitting in a corner of the study, her face a portrait in disapproval. "Take your questions to the Lord," she said, "and he will answer them."

  "Please, Letty," Hardacre said, "I think He wants us to work this out for ourselves."

  "No," said Chesney, "I think Mother's right." He didn't know which of the three faces looking back at him was more surprised. But he had just seen a new path through the darkness. "Xaphan," he called, "we're going somewhere."

  The demon appeared over by the drinks cabinet. "Gimme a minute," it said, reaching for a decanter. As it poured, it said, "Where?"

  Chesney's answer made it spill several drops.

 

First they had to go back to Chesney's room in Hell. Then the demon said, "Wait a minute. A thing like this, I gotta ask."

  "You just told me that the Devil said you should do whatever I want," Chesney said.

  "That ain't it. I gotta get directions."

  "You don't know where it is?"

  The demon elevated its padded shoulders and let them drop. It counted on its stubby fingers. "Hell, I know. Anywhere on Earth, I know. Probably, I could still find my way around Heaven – it don't change. Even Limbo, now that I been there. So, wait here, while I go ask."

  Xaphan disappeared. Chesney expected him to be right back, but as the seconds swelled into a minute with no sign of his assistant, he took a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs with which the demon had furnished the room and sat listening to the faint sound of cold, stinking winds rushing past the thick stone walls of his waystation. His mind returned to the discussion at Hardacre's – but then his thoughts slid to the topic of his own behavior there.

  Chesney was not prone to introspection. He knew who he was and accepted himself as given. In his boyhood, the therapists who had labored to make him aware of the behaviors that made him different from other children, so he could moderate them – at least in public – had eventually settled for achieving some essential modifications. They had never really gotten their patient to turn the spotlight of his unusual intellect inward, to examine his own motivations and mental mechanisms.

  Chesney always knew what he thought; he did not actually know how he came to his conclusions. Presented with a problem in math, for example, he first recognized its parameters, then the answer appeared, as if from behind some dark curtain at the back of his mind. Occasionally, a math problem might be so complex as to require him to break it down into two or three steps, but even so, the process meant only that he had to make two or three appeals to the obscuring curtain – he still knew nothing of what went on behind it.

  Pools of light, surrounded by acres of dimness and murk – that was how he saw the world. For what went on within his own head, he had not even those simple images. "You don't think," one of the consultants had said to him, after an exhaustive month of tests and experiments. "You either know or you don't know, and you've no idea how you get from one state of mind to the other."

  But now he had at least an inkling of what it might be like to have a normal mental apparatus. He had actually pursued a line of thought through the darkness, managed at least to keep an eye on it as it followed some invisible, twisting trail, always threatening to disappear into the shadows. And he had come to a conclusion. Even if the conclusion was only that he needed more information, he had, for the first time in his life, genuinely worked something out.

  He didn't know whether to feel proud or worried. And even that ambiguity was another source of concern.

  Xaphan reappeared, reloaded its tumbler of rum and took a couple of Havanas from the humidor. It tucked the cigars into its breast pocket, drained the glass and said, "Okay, here we go."

  Chesney stood up as the room disappeared. For a long moment they were… nowhere. Gray nothingness lay in every direction, with not the slightest evidence – not so much as a dust mote – to show scale. He might have been looking out into infinity, or the no-place might have ended an inch beyond his reach. He might have been hanging in the emptiness or traveling at the speed of light.

  "What–" he began, but no sound emerged. He looked at his assistant, saw Xaphan's furred brows draw down in what appeared to be a weasel's version of disorientation. The demon tentatively reached out one short arm, stubby fingers spread, as if patting fog for something that might be hidden. Then it seemed to push.

  A moment later, Chesney sensed gentle pressure against his face and the front of his body, as if he had drifted up against a pliable barrier. Then the resistance abruptly ceased and he burst through nothingness into bright sunshine.

  Xaphan and he were standing on a hillside under a blue sky. The ground beneath their feet was dry and sparsely thatched with stalks of even drier grass and some dusty-leafed ground-hugging plant. A few inches from the young man's right big toe was a heap of small, brown, pebbly objects, like a handful of glossette raisins, only darker. It took a moment for Chesney to realize that the reason why he was seeing them near to his toe was that he was no longer wearing the pair of loafers he had put on when they went out to Billy Lee Hardacre's. His naked toes protruded from under a strap of coarse, woven fiber.

  Sandals, he thought, I'm wearing sandals. And when he stretched out his arms, his first thought was of a striped blanket, none too clean. Then he realized he was wearing some kind of woolen robe, belted at the waist with a rope. He took a step back from the glossettes, having suddenly made a connection between them and the half-dozen raggedy-fleeced sheep he saw farther down the hill, down where the slope leveled off to flatter land. There were mud-walled houses, a scattering of them, with the ends of wooden poles sticking out of the walls just beneath the flat roofs. At the door to one of the hovels, a swarthy bearded man with dark, curly hair and a ten-year beard was shading his eyes from the sun, looking up at them.

  No, Chesney thought, at me. The sight of a fanged weasel in a pinstriped suit would surely have wrung more of a reaction out of the observer. The young man raised an arm and hand in greeting. The man in the doorway continued to regard him for a few more seconds, then replicated the gesture and followed it with a beckoning of one brown hand.

  "You're not from around here," said the man when they arrived in the dusty yard.

  Chesney was scraping the edge of his sandal against the ground. It had turned out to be impossible to walk a straight line without stepping in sheep's leavings. "No," he said, when he'd cleaned as much as possible and coated the remnant in dust.

  "That's what I thought," said the other. He looked straight at Xaphan and Chesney realized he could see the demon. "Didn't I cast you out once?"

  "Not me," said the fiend.

  "You're sure?"

  "It's the kinda thing you'd remember."

  "I suppose," said the man, then turned to Chesney. "I can rid you of that if you want. At least, I think I can. Used to do a lot of it, but of course there's no call for it anymore."

  "No, thank you," said the young man. "Xaphan is on special assignment."

  The bearded man looked at the demon again, then more carefully at Chesney, shrugged and said, "I suppose he must be. You don't have the earmarks."

  "The earmarks?"

  "Not literally," said the other, touching a hand to one of his ears, half-buried in curls. "It's just a kind of look the demon-haunted get. I can usually spot it."

  "I'm more demon-assisted," Chesney said. "It's a long story."

  The man rubbed his beard. "And you've come to tell it to me?" He shrugged again. Chesney thought it might be a characteristic gesture. "I suppose it makes a change."

  "I haven't really come to tell it to you," said the young man. "I've mostly come to ask you some questions."

  The bearded man looked them over again and said, "Well, then, you might as well come in."

  Inside, the house was dim, lit mostly by the light from the open door and a square hole in the roof, positioned to let out the smoke that rose from a brick hearth set against the wall opposite the door. There was only one room, with an archway in one of the side walls, half-covered by a hanging blanket. Beyond it was an alcove just big enough for a man to sleep in; on its floor of beaten earth was a rolled-up leather pallet and a clay pot.