The Weirdness (17 page)

“That’s right,” says Lucifer.

Billy remembers the draft of an early first novel that he wrote on that typewriter, his senior year of high school and first year of college, this thing about the murder of a young man in a quiet rural town. He still has it in a box somewhere, terrible, probably, but he finished it, three hundred pages hammered out on that Olivetti, and he remembers the feeling of confidence and authority that came from using that machine to make marks on paper. It’s been a long time since he’s been able to produce those feelings so sustainably.

“You envisioned a future for yourself, then, didn’t you?” Lucifer says.

Billy had. That senior year of high school was when he first started drinking coffee, and he remembers hooking up a Mr. Coffee in his room at home, up on the third floor, and he would wake on cold mornings before the sun was up, before he’d need to trudge to where the school bus would pick him up, and he would sit at his desk, in a ratty plum-colored bathrobe, drinking coffee and smoking his first-ever cigarettes and clacking out pages, and he would feel certain that, in some important way, he was making a template for the rest of his life.

He also remembers selling that typewriter, five years ago, on eBay, a hard month, between jobs, remembers the good feeling of an extra hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, even though it disappeared quickly into a few overdue bills, a new shirt for a job interview, groceries, beer, condoms, smokes, a couple of books.

Lucifer goes on: “You aren’t allowing yourself to feel that hope again, that ambition, Billy. I promise you the kind of future you
really want and you throw it away in favor of
take me back to three days ago
? What did you have three days ago that you won’t have in the future that I’m offering you? A job? Another shitty job? Your
wallet
? Your
keys
? These things are all replaceable: a few days’ hassle, nothing more. Your friends? You’re thirty years old, Billy Ridgeway, you don’t get to be thirty years old without passing through times when your friends are mad at you. It’s passed before and it’ll pass now. A girlfriend? Denver? You think she won’t
come back to you
when your novel gets published?”

“Maybe not,” Billy says.

“Maybe not,” Lucifer says, his voice down to a soft hiss, almost drowned out by the rumbling traffic nearby. “But don’t you think you would be able to find someone
better
? Do you think you don’t
deserve
someone better?”

“I like Denver,” Billy says. He does not say
love
.

“Think, though, Billy, think about other women. Think about the women you didn’t pursue in the past because you thought they were
out of your league
. Think about being in the league that they’re in.”

“That’s—” Billy says. “That seems creepy and wrong.”

“Wrong? You deserve it, Billy. You deserve to be
up a notch
by now.”

“I don’t,” Billy says. “I don’t deserve it. I didn’t do the work.” He remembers the speech he gave himself yesterday. “If I want that? The future you’re describing? With the book, and the—the women and stuff? If I want that future, I have to get there on my own.”

“No one gets there on their own, Billy,” Lucifer says, his normal tone of voice returning. He draws back from Billy, hooks his thumbs into the heavy lapels of the peacoat. “That’s not how it works.”

Billy considers this.

“Besides,” Lucifer says. “If you do this, you’ll have saved the world. I would hope that you could categorize whatever ancillary benefits might emerge as things you had
earned
.”

“Maybe,” Billy says. “But what exactly would I be doing? I still don’t get that part. How exactly would I be getting the thing from the dude?”

“Let’s get off the street,” Lucifer says. An expression of deep appetite spreads across his features. “Have you had breakfast? I know a place.”

They end up taking a quick cab to an Algerian creperie. They settle in on tufted ottomans and a lean man with the most impeccably groomed mustache Billy has ever seen brings them an octagonal tin samovar of what Billy can immediately tell is really good coffee. After his first sip, Lucifer begins speaking with more animation than Billy’s ever seen in him.

“Until Ollard dispels all the seals,” Lucifer says, “the Neko still, in some real sense,
belongs
to me. I can
sense
it. I can’t tell you exactly where it is, but I can tell you that it is likely underground.”

“Like buried?” Billy says.

“Not buried,” Lucifer says. “More like in a basement. So you won’t need to waste time going through the upper levels of the tower. You get in, you go down.”

“How am I even going to
get in
in the first place? If I were, in fact, to actually agree to go in.”

“What do you mean?” Lucifer says. “You’ve seen through the cloak. You go in through the door.”

“Okay, but, seriously, am I crazy to think that Ollard might
just not, you know, be a hundred percent cool with me just walking in there and taking his cat?”

“My cat,” Lucifer says. “But no, he probably won’t be.”

“So what do I do? When he tries to stop me?”

Lucifer shrugs. “You fight him.”

“I
fight
him?”

“You fight him like the fate of the world depended on it.”

“You have the wrong guy,” Billy says. “I haven’t thrown a punch in, like, ever.”

“This might help,” Lucifer says. He reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a little cylinder of self-defense spray, which he slides across the table. It has a key ring on it.

“This?” Billy says. “Is it magical?”

“No,” Lucifer says.

“So, really? That’s the entire plan? Walk in the front door, pepper-spray Ollard, grab the cat and run?”

“Billy,” Lucifer says. “It is dangerous to overplan. Plans, by definition, are rigid, and it is to our advantage to remain as fluid as possible. Thus, as you said: you walk in the front door. You find the Neko. If you need to, you fight Ollard. If you encounter any difficulties, simply retreat, and you and I will make a new plan that accounts for whatever difficulty we have encountered. That is the plan. Simplicity, Billy. The great virtue of a simple plan is that it leaves one with fewer, far fewer, things to fuck up. You can do this. Now: eat.”

Billy’s savory lamb crepes hit the table, and he wolfs them down. They are the best thing he’s eaten in days, weeks maybe, and he feels a sudden swell of gratitude. He remembers Anil’s gag from the other night:
a small, good thing in a time like this
. But there’s something to that. Good food: that alone maybe makes the world
worth saving. His mood picks up a little. Maybe the Devil is right; maybe he can do this. He stifles a belch with his napkin.

“Okay. Okay,” he says, in a very small voice. “I have to tell you, though: I’m
scared
. I saw that tower. It’s scary.”

“Well,” says Lucifer. He takes a sip of coffee. “It’s designed to look scary. It’s an illusion.”

“It’s a really fucking good illusion,” Billy says.

“Yes,” Lucifer says, “because Timothy Ollard is a really fucking good illusionist.”

Billy frowns, tries out an alternate wording, frowns again. He takes the tiny pepper-spray canister into his hand.

“You’re afraid,” Lucifer says, after watching this for a minute, “that Ollard is going to kill you.”

“Yes,” Billy says, a little relieved to have it out there, on the table.

“The You Getting Killed part,” Lucifer says. “You see? I remembered that.”

“Awesome?” Billy says.

“Ollard will not attempt to kill you. It’s a delicate time for him; while he works on the Neko he needs to lie as low as possible. Using magic to take a human life is—attention-getting. Disruptive. Sloppy.”

“But what if he doesn’t use magic? What if he uses, like, a shotgun?”

“Even sloppier,” Lucifer says.

“Sloppy but possible.”

“Not possible,” Lucifer says. “You have forgotten the details of our arrangement. You will be provided with a ward that will leave Ollard unable to harm you, by magical means or otherwise. Speaking of which.”

Lucifer downs the last of his coffee, and then reaches into the inside pocket of his peacoat and draws out a cigar tube.

“Here,” Lucifer says, unscrewing the end of the tube. He draws out the cigar and steers it firmly into Billy’s mouth. Billy sputters a bit around it, pulls it out and weighs it in his hand. It’s hefty, like something a billionaire might light with a bundle of money. It has no band or other identifying mark.

“You’ll want to smoke that,” Lucifer says, rising, using the edge of his hand to smooth the front of his shirt.

“What, why?” Billy says, looking from the cigar to Lucifer and back again.

“The ward requires a variety of herbs and other assorted components to be transmuted by fire, the ceremonial smoke entering the body of the individual to be warded. The traditional swinging thurible is a little conspicuous, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

“A giant
cigar
is conspicuous. It’s
illegal
for me to smoke that in a restaurant; maybe you didn’t get the memo.”

“This place has a back room we can use,” Lucifer says. “That’s part of why I wanted to come here.” He drops some bills on the table and calls to the proprietor: “Hadadj! Back room?”

“For you,” the lean man replies drily from the front counter, “anything.” He is punching numbers into a calculator. He does not look up.

“Follow me,” Lucifer says to Billy. Billy pushes himself off the ottoman clumsily and follows Lucifer through a beaded curtain. They pass the restrooms and open a door bearing an
EMPLOYEES ONLY
placard. Behind it is a small, harshly-lit office almost entirely taken up by a steel desk and a filing cabinet, both of which are obscured under the burden of slumping piles of three-ringed notebooks. A portly man wearing a gold chain and white earbuds
sits at the desk, leafing through what appears to be a catalog of men’s shoes. He looks up at Lucifer and glares with contempt and distaste. Lucifer ignores him, doesn’t even spare him a look, and instead crosses the room and opens another door.

Billy follows briskly. The back room is a cramped, dim space, smelling strongly of lentils. Two overstuffed recliners marred with what Billy hopes are soup spillages squat on a dingy Persian rug, with an elaborate brass hookah placed between them. The chairs face a flat-screen TV, which has a stack of Algerian-market VHS cassettes and Xbox games heaped in front of it like an offering. Lucifer takes up one of the hoses from the hookah, sniffs it, makes an assessing face, and then replaces it.

“Sit,” Lucifer says. Billy sits, the cigar still in his hand. Lucifer takes the cigar, lops one end off it with a handheld cutter that he’s produced from somewhere, and directs it back into Billy’s mouth, whereupon Billy promptly takes it out again.

“I still haven’t said that I’m doing this,” Billy says.

“I understand,” Lucifer says. “Nonetheless, I see no reason to postpone your preparation. It is my sincerest belief that once the pieces are all in place you will act with no further hesitation. Regardless, it is probably a good idea for you to receive the ward: now that more people know that you and I are … affiliated, word may get to Ollard before too long, which will put you at risk, risk that this ward will mitigate.”

“Affiliated?” Billy says. “We’re not affiliated.”

“Shall we commence?” Lucifer says.

He points at the cigar with a tiny, steel lighter which has somehow surreptitiously replaced his handheld cutter, and then he points the lighter at his own face, encouraging Billy to mirror the gesture by lifting the cigar to his mouth. Which he does.

“Very good,” says Lucifer, in a tone one might use to speak to a dog. He leans in and presses a button on the lighter, which emits a blue flame with no perceptible sound. Billy awkwardly angles the cigar into the flame, and takes a long pull, which immediately dispels whatever goodwill toward the world the lamb crepes and coffee had helped him to muster.

“Oh,” Billy says, a huge cloud of rank smoke rolling out of his mouth. “That’s bad.”

“My apologies,” says Lucifer.

“It’s like smoking compost.”

Lucifer regards him.

“It’s like smoking compost through a raccoon,” Billy says. He sticks out his tongue, scrapes it against his upper row of teeth in an attempt to scour off the dank, fungal taste. “It’s like you put a fur-lined shit in my mouth.”

“It will keep you alive,” Lucifer says.

And with that, he struggles his way through the rest of the cigar. He doesn’t feel like a billionaire. He doesn’t feel like some badass toughening up before a combat mission. He feels like a kid who got caught smoking a cigarette and was forced to finish the whole pack. The decorative pattern in the rug begins to swim and waver disorientingly. Billy stares through watering eyes behind the TV at a poster that he hadn’t noticed when they first came in, depicting the full roster of the New York Mets. Their faces appear sallow, dead-eyed, cheerless. Billy blinks repeatedly, as though if he exerts enough willpower he can make them resolve instead into happy Yankees. Another long suck on the cigar and some violet form begins to bloom in his head, like ink blossoming in water. He hears a voice, distant, drowned in buzzing, as though reaching him only through a thick curtain of flies: he turns his head and
sees Lucifer talking on the phone, saying words, words that sound somehow familiar, that Billy feels like he should be able to parse. After a minute of turning them over in his mind, Billy manages to make the syllables resolve into an address, the address of the tower, in Chelsea.

“I’ve arranged for a cab,” Lucifer says to Billy, placing the phone back in his pocket. The words wind their way through Billy’s consciousness, only slowly, fighting through the thicket of noise. Less flies now. More like the massed baying of wolves.

Before Billy’s head fully clears, Lucifer has marched him out of the tiny room, back through the office and corridor and restaurant, past Hadadj and out onto the street again. The cab arrives and Lucifer pops the door open, steers Billy into the seat.