The Very Best of Tad Williams (30 page)

“So this guy Bridgewater helped my dad fake his own death? Why?”

“Who knows? A last prank for old time’s sake, maybe? You said your dad was depressed and broke. Maybe it was a way for Giorgio the Mysterious to help a pal get out of a bad situation.” I didn’t want to mention it, but it was also possible that the deal had been a little less friendly—old Charlie, collector of gossip and odd stories, might have had a wee bit of blackmail material on Bridgewater.

Emily stared at the pictures. When she turned back to me, she was calmer, but very grim. “I don’t think you did this to be cruel,” she said, “but this is so much more farfetched than anything I suggested. It’s just crazy.”

I had a sick feeling in my stomach, kind of like something very cold was hibernating there. I knew I’d blown it. “But...”

She cut me off, her voice rising in anger. “I can almost believe my father would do something this wild, this outrageous—heaven knows, he loved a good trick, and he was having a lot of problems. But I can’t for a moment believe that he would make me think he was dead—with not even a hint that he’d survived—and then on top of it send me off to hook up with a bum like you and go on some insane hunt for a nonexistent murderer!” She waved the picture in front of my face. “Look at this! This is his handwriting! If he wanted to tip me off, why didn’t he circle Bridgewater the coroner? Instead, he picks these three totally harmless...”

I was so far into my flinch that at first I didn’t open my eyes. When she had remained silent for a good ten seconds, I peeked. Emily was still frowning, but it was a different kind of frown. “Oh, God,” she said at last.

She flopped the photo down so the back was showing. I had written down the men’s names as I identified them.

“Gerard O’Neill.” Emily’s voice was strained. “Fabrizio Ivone. Sandor Horja Nagy. Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Look at the initials.
G-O-N—F-I—S-H-N
” The tears came for real now. “‘GONE FISHING.’”

There was a good deal more to the story, of course, but we didn’t find out immediately. When we went to see Bridgewater, the coroner blustered at us about foolish accusations and the penalties for slander, but he didn’t seem very fierce about it. (We later discovered that one of Charlie’s Academy-era jokes had yielded photographs of a naked “Giorgio” in bed with a sheep dressed in a garter belt. It had all been perfectly innocent, of course, but still not the kind of thing a local politician wants to see on the wire services.) Still, it was a few more months before we knew for sure.

Apparently Charlie Helton
did
have an agent Emily hadn’t known about—a theatrical agent, but someone who had contacts in publishing. When, at the height of the tabloid fury about the
Murdered Magician Mystery
, the agent announced that he actually had the dead man’s manuscript, it set off a bidding war, and the book sold for a very healthy advance. As Charlie’s only heir, Emily received all but a small part of what was left after the agent took his cut. When the book quickly earned back its advance, she began to receive all but that same small percentage of the royalties that began flowing in. Even after the story lost its tabloid notoriety,
A Magical Life
continued to sell nicely. As it turned out, Charlie had written quite a good book, full of vivid stories about his life and travels, and lots of enjoyable but not-too-scurrilous backstage gossip about the world of stage magicians.

Even Fabrizio Ivone didn’t come out too bad in Charlie’s memoirs, although his inability to take a joke was mentioned several times.

That small portion of the income Emily didn’t get? Well, every month, the agent dispatches a check to a post office box in Florida—no, I won’t tell you where exactly, just in Florida somewhere. Suffice it to say it’s a small town with good fishing. The checks are made out to someone named Booker H. Charlton. Emily decided not to contest this diversion of royalties, and in fact we plan to go visit old Booker as soon as we can get out of town.

Why delay our visit to the mystery fisherman? Well, we’ve been real busy just lately setting up the Charlie Helton Museum of the Magical Arts. It’s turned out to be a full-time job for all of us: Emily took early retirement from the school system to manage the operation, and Tilly answers the phone and handles the finances—which I’m happy to say, are in the black. Tilly’s mom works the ticket booth, flashing her expensive smile at the customers all day long. Me? Well, I’ve got the balloon animal concession pretty much wrapped up, and I’m working on a book of my own.

Oh, and in case anybody’s disappointed that this has been a story about magicians without any real magic in it, I should mention one last thing. You remember how Charlie had scrawled on the back of his photo:
“Trust Pinardo”
? We found out a few months afterward that if Charlie’s handwriting had been a little darker, we would have noticed a hyphen between the two words. See, we were going through some of his papers and found out that he’d stashed away a couple of hundred dollars so Emily wouldn’t get stuck paying for his fake funeral. The deposit was in a trust fund at a small savings institution—“Pinardo Thrift and Loan,” no relation to yours truly.

In other words, the very beautiful woman who I am delighted to say now calls herself Ms. Emily Heltenbocker-Pinnard, the light of my life and (I hope) the warmth of my declining years, walked into my office that day on a completely mistaken assumption. We are an accident—a fluke of fate.

So there you go. Love (as Bogart once said about a black bird, and Shakespeare said about something I don’t quite remember) is definitely the stuff that dreams are made of. It remains the greatest mystery and the only truly reliable magic. Satisfied?

O
nce upon a time there was a cat, a raven, and a man with no ears. They were all friends and lived together in a house by the river.

The cat was a bit lazy and cruel, but in her own way she loved the raven and the man, so one day she decided to provide supper for her two housemates. She went down to the river and caught a silvery, silvery salmon.

“Don’t eat me,” the salmon said. “For I am a magical fish.”

“That’s what they all say,” sneered the cat, and carried it back to the house.

The cat waited a while for her friends to come home, but soon grew bored and restless and left the fish on the table while she went out to see if any mice were rustling in the grassy meadow behind the house.

When she had gone, the man came back from working in the field, wondering what he would have for dinner. As he walked to the table the fish, still alive but gasping in the unfamiliar air, called out, “Sir, sir, I am a magical fish! I will give you three wishes if you spare my life!”

But of course the man had no ears and could not hear the fish’s entreaties. He saw only a handsome silver fish flopping on the table, its mouth opening and closing.

“How lucky I am!” he thought. “It must have jumped a great jump, all the way from the river onto the table.” He went to prepare the oven to cook the fish.

While he was bending over the oven laying the kindling, the raven came into the house.

“Kind bird,” the fish gasped, its voice very faint now, “if you will only save me, I will grant you three wishes, for I am a magical fish.”

“Hmmmm,” said the raven, perching on the table beside it. “Are you, now?” He looked at the fish flopping on the table, then at the man, who was bending over the oven all unaware that the raven had come home. “So if I spare your life, you will grant three wishes?” the raven asked.

“I will, I will,” said the fish. “Gladly!”

“Hmmmm,” said the raven. “Well, I could ask as one wish that you give the man back his ears so he could hear again. But then instead of admiring my black and glossy wings he would mark that my voice was harsh, and would also hear the cruel things that the people in the village say about him for keeping company with only a bird and a cat. Hmmmm.”

The raven thought. The fish flopped.

“And I could wish for the cat to be a little less lazy and a little less cruel, for then she might live a better life and one day go to heaven. But a kind cat might not catch mice, and she would starve and so would I, since there would be no leavings. And the mice would eat the man’s grain and he too would starve. And in any case, I do not believe that cats are welcomed in heaven.”

The raven considered a bit more.

“Now, it is possible that even though I cannot change my friends in a way that will make them happy, I might find a way to use a wish for myself. But what are the things that I need?”

“Quickly,” gasped the fish.

“I would not ask to be more handsome, since as you see I am quite a fine and glossy shade of black. And although we ravens are not known for our fine singing voices, my only friends are a man who cannot hear and a cat who listens to nothing except her own whims, so I do not suffer for my harsh croaking.

“Neither do I wish for gold or silver or gems, for I have no hands in which to carry them, nor anywhere to keep them. Here they would draw robbers like flies to carrion, and we would spend all our time trying to protect these valuables.”

The raven walked across the table and stood over the fish, which rolled its eye piteously.

“In fact,” the bird said, “we three have all that we need here, and all that we lack is a fish dinner, which is you. We might wish for three more such as you, but that would make you a murderer of your own kind, and then you would certainly be denied heaven yourself. I could not do that to you. Everyone knows that we ravens are kindhearted birds.”

So he left the fish thrashing on the table, although the thrashing had almost ceased, and flew to the back of the man’s chair to wait for the meal.

And by the time the cat came back from the meadow, the man had cooked his part of the fish, the raven was chewing happily on the bones, and the cat, as founder of the feast, found the head and tail and a strip of good raw, red flesh laid out for her on the table.

As she purringly devoured the salmon, she said offhandedly, “The fool fish claimed he was magical.”

“Really?” said the raven. “Well, I imagine that’s what they all say.”

“Indeed,” said the cat. “I have never believed one yet.”

And although the man could not hear what his friends were saying, he smiled anyway.

“F
irst God made heaven and earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was
—oh, bother, what now?”

“Sorry? Didn’t get that last bit, Gabriel, sir.”

“That wasn’t supposed to be part of it. Bugger. Now I’ll have to start all over. It doesn’t work right without the proper dramatic rhythm.” He peered down at the new Earth, gleaming like a blue and white pearl. “What
is
going on down there, Metatron?”

“Couldn’t say, sir.” The junior angel squinted. “Looks like someone’s wandered onto the work site.”

“Lovely.” Gabriel shook out his wings with a discontented rattle of plumage. “Just lovely. Schedule already shot to pieces, supposed to be finished already, Himself resting but we’re still building and the overtime is through the roof.
Now
what?” He pushed back his halo, which had begun to sag a little. “Might as well find out. You coming?”

Metatron nodded. “Yes, sir. Just sweeping a little star dust off the firmament, then I’m right with you.”

“We spread the stardust there on purpose,” Gabriel said, frowning. “Atmosphere, you know.”

“Atmosphere? But we don’t have any out here...”

Gabriel sighed. “All right, ‘ambience,’ is that better? We put it there for ambience, so stop sweeping it up. Remember, we want this universe to have that lived-in look. That’s what they’re going for nowadays.”

“Hey, there!” Gabriel said as they entered the Garden. “Who are you and what are you doing here? This area is off-limits to nonessential personnel.” He stopped, blinking. “What are you, anyway?”

“I’m a little girl,” said the little girl. “More specifically, I’m Sophia.”

“Hi, Sophia,” said Metatron, who was one of the friendlier angels, and was constantly bringing home stray comets.

Gabriel sighed. “I’m sure it’s all very nice, you having a name and all—you’re way ahead of all the other Earth-dwellers that way, so good for you—but you really can’t be here, little girl. This is a very, very important project, and God Himself wants us...”

“...To finish everything up in time for when He comes back to work tomorrow. I know.” Even standing straight, she was still only as high as where Metatron’s belly button might be (if such things existed, which of course they didn’t. Not yet). “And I’m going to help you finish it...”

“You most certainly are not...!” Gabriel began.

“...Because God is my daddy.”

Gabriel stared. “What did you just say?”

“That God is my daddy? He is. And He said I could do anything I wanted to help, and that you had to let me, Gabriel, or else He’d put you back on supernova-extinguishing duty, and you know how
that
was. That’s what He said.”

The archangel stared for a long moment at the little girl. She stared back. Gabriel looked away first. “Metatron,” he said, “may I speak to you for a moment in private?”

“It’s your duty to keep her out of trouble, Metatron,” the archangel said when they had moved away from the girl. He peered out from the shadow of the Don’t-Eat-This-Fruit Tree that God had insisted on planting despite there being several more attractive alternatives, including a very nice flowering Tree of Moral Relativity. “Look at her! Why on my shift? Why not when Michael’s on duty? He gets all the breaks. No wonder he’s the Big Guy’s favorite.”

The girl was examining a tiny winged creature that she held in careful hands, her small face solemn. After a moment she tossed it up into the air. It rose, then dropped, and hit the ground with a quiet
thump
. The little creature gave Sophia a mistrustful look as it limped away.

“What do you call those things?” she asked.

“Birds,” Gabriel called. “Some of your father’s favorite creatures.”

“Why do they have wings but they don’t fly?”

“Fly?” Gabriel shuddered. “Do you hear her, Metatron?” he said in a quiet but panicky voice. “She wants the birds to fly! What next? She’ll be yanking the fishes out of the ground and throwing them in the river! Just...just take care of it. And keep her away from me.”

“Ummm,” said Metatron. He watched the girl beginning to unearth frightened carp from their burrows. “Do I have to...?”

But Gabriel had already hurried back to Heaven to finish some important paperwork that he had ignored for several days.

“What is it now, Metatron?”

The angel was wringing his hands in a very guilty way. “I think you’d better come down.”

Gabriel closed his eyes, searching for the patience he was certain he’d had when the morning began. “What is it now? The girl?”

“It’ll be easier if you just come.”

There was a great deal of confusion down in the Garden when they arrived, but no sign of Sophia.

“Where is she? He’ll kill us if we lose His daughter!”

“She’s around somewhere. But to be honest, sir, it’s getting a bit much for me to handle all by my—”

“What in the name of our boss did she do to the
trees
?” Gabriel stared in horror. “She’s turned every one of them upside down!”

“I know, I know! I told her not to, but she insisted. She said that the roots looked...
icky
just sticking up into the air.”

“Icky? What does that mean?”

“I think it means she didn’t like it. Anyway, she said that the leaves and branches would look better in the air and the roots in the ground, then she just, well, turned them all upside down, as you can see.”

“It’s so...green, now.”

“Exactly. But she claims it looks nicer.”

“This is a nightmare, Metatron. And what’s that horrible noise?”

“Another of her little ideas, sir. She thought that the water splashing in the streams and rivers should make a different noise.”

“What’s wrong with growling?” Gabriel hiked up his robe and stepped closer to the stream. “That’s a very strange sound it makes now, kind of...musical. Soft and lyrical, plink, plink, plink—what is that about? Completely spoils the point of warning people not to fall in the water.”

“She says we can use the old, loud noise for something like fast-moving, dangerous water, like waterfalls and rapids. This would be just for shallow streams and dripping snowmelt and things like that.”

“Snowmelt? She wants the snow to
melt
?”

“Sometimes, yes.” Metatron nodded, shamefaced. “You have no idea what she wants, sir. Some of it is just terrifying.”

“Well, wait until I catch up with her,
I’ll
tell her—oh, sweet Employer, what is
that
? That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen! They’re... they’re all
pink
.”

“Sorry, sir, but she said the old gray flamingos were yucky and boring.”

“Yucky?” Gabriel could hear his own voice getting shrill.

“It’s like icky, I think.” Metatron shook his head sorrowfully as the squadron of rose-colored birds suddenly took to the air. Meanwhile, Gabriel was struggling not to scream.

“They
fly
?”

“All the birds do now. And there’s more...”

Metatron broke off because Sophia had appeared at the other side of the Garden, her hands full of small, furry animals. “There you are, Gabriel. I had a really good idea. See these? I call them ‘bunnies.’”

“They’re already called ‘rabbits,’ young lady. We tested it on a focus group and they liked ‘rabbits’ just fine.”

“‘Bunnies’ is better. Anyway, I had another idea. Our bunnies would be a lot cuter if you got rid of these long, naked tails which are really gross and gave them little fluffy tails instead. That would be much cuter.”

Gabriel blinked. “But all the rodents have long, skinny, naked tails, Miss Sophia—the mice, the rats...”

“They can keep them. But the bunnies and the squirrels need fluffy ones. Give the squirrels
long
fluffy ones, though, because they like to jump through the air from branch to branch and it looks pretty.”

“How are they going to jump from branch to branch at the bottom of ponds?”

“Squirrels live in trees now.” She set the rabbits down; they quickly scattered into the grass with little flicks of their tiny new tails. “With the birds.”

It was all Gabriel could do not to fall to his knees, moaning. “My Lord, what have You done to Your servant...?” he muttered.

“I don’t know how you ever got along without me.” The girl walked through the sun-warmed Garden. “A lot of this is really stupid and gross. I mean, look. What’s this?” She bent, then lifted a large, ovoid object from the grass.

“It’s an egg,” said Gabriel, but his confidence was a bit shaken and he turned to Metatron for confirmation. “It’s an egg, isn’t it?”

She frowned. “I
know
it’s an egg. But what kind?”

“That’s a lion egg. Big, fierce creature. Top of the food chain. Has a loud, impressive roar...” Gabriel blanched. “You’re not going to make it go ‘splashy-splashy-splashy’ like you did with the stream, are you?”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m talking about the egg part. Have you even seen a baby lion?” She cracked open the egg and let the tiny bundle of fur roll out into her hand. “Look! It’s adorable! All fuzzy-wuzzy!” She leaned closer. “Yes, who’s fuzzy-wuzzy—is it you? Is it you, little lion? Are you my widdle cutie-wootie?” She stroked the tiny cat’s belly until it wriggled and purred.

“Miss Sophia, I hardly think...”

“Cute little furry guys like this shouldn’t hatch out of
eggs
. Eggs are icky. They’re for lizards and snakes and bugs and gross things like that. Which reminds me, all the bugs and spiders and snakes are going to live in holes and under rocks now. Because they’re gross.”

Gabriel was now wondering whether God would accept his transfer request if he pretended he had suddenly become allergic to Earth.

“So all the fuzzy ones are going to be born without using eggs?” asked Metatron, who seemed to be trying to keep up with this nonsense, and was in fact making a note.

“Yeah.” She lifted up a very strange creature Gabriel had never seen before, an unlikely mix. “Maybe this one could keep using eggs because he’s part bird. See, I put a duck’s bill on a beaver! I call it a platypus!”

“How do you spell that?” asked Metatron, still making notes.

“But if the furry ones can’t have eggs,” Gabriel asked, “then how will they be born? Just...fall out of the sky or something?” The archangel paled and looked upward. “I didn’t mean that...”

“I don’t care.” Sophia dismissed the problem with a wave of her little hand. “
You
think of something. Because now I need to fix something else. It’s super important.”

She beckoned for the angels to follow her, which they did. The Garden really was extremely green now, Gabriel couldn’t help noticing, and the new splashing noise of the stream gave it a peaceful air in the late-afternoon sun. For a few seconds he found himself wondering if maybe one or two of the child’s suggestions might not be acceptable, as long as nobody examined the whole thing too carefully. All the different-colored birds were impossibly garish, of course, and she seemed to have gone out of her way to daub the butterflies with shades never imagined on any angelic drawing-board, but still, as long as she didn’t mess about with any of the Lord’s favorite creations...

“That,” she said, stopping and pointing. “That has got to go.”

Gabriel suddenly went queasy. “You mean...?”

“Yes, that stupid hairless monkey-thing. It’s ugly and it’s stupid and it smells.”

It was Adam, of course, the apple of the Lord’s eye, the only one of the new creatures made more or less in God’s own image.

“But...what’s wrong with it, Miss Sophia?” Gabriel didn’t really want to know, since it was bound to upset him, but he was desperate to stall her. “Your father was very, very specific about wanting...”

“Well,
look
at it.”

“That’s exactly what he’s supposed to do. He’s supposed to have dominion over the beasts of the earth, and use them to feed himself,” Gabriel said.

Adam heard them talking and looked up from where he had been repeatedly spearing a tomato, and waved. “Hi, Gabe! Hi, Metty! What’s up?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s totally stupid,” said Sophia, not hiding the scorn. “He just goes around spearing everything. He’s been killing that tomato for about ten minutes and there’s nothing left of it to eat. He needs someone to tell him how to know which things to stab and which things to harvest. Someone like me.”

Gabriel drew himself to his full angelic height. A line had to be drawn. “I feel quite sure that your father is not going to let you follow His favorite creation around and give him orders all day...”

“Okay, fine, fine. Sheesh.” Sophia rolled her eyes. She watched as Adam climbed a tall tree and began enthusiastically spearing a beehive. A moment later, surrounded now by irritated bees, he began to screech and wave his arms, then fell off the branch and plummeted to the ground. “Look, part of him popped out,” the girl said, interested. “That’s gross...but also kind of cool.”