Dragon Tears (38 page)

“
What
chance? How?”

“We have a chance,” he insisted stubbornly.

“Yeah? Well, I think this guy can squash us like bugs any time he wants, and he’s just been stalling because he enjoys watching bugs suffer.”

“You don’t sound like the Connie Gulliver I know,” Harry said more sharply than he had intended.

“Well, maybe I’m not.” She put one thumb to her mouth and used her teeth to trim off a full crescent of the nail.

He had never seen her bite her nails before, and he was almost as astonished by that revelation of nervousness as he would have been if she had broken down and cried.

She said, “Maybe I tried to ride a wave too big for me, got dumped bad, lost my nerve.”

It was inconceivable to Harry that Connie Gulliver could lose her nerve over anything at all, not even over
something as strange and frightening as what was happening to them. How could she lose her nerve when she was
all
nerve, one hundred and fifteen pounds or so of solid
nerve?

She turned away from him, swept the street with her gaze again, walked to some azalea bushes and parted them with one hand, revealing the hiding dog. “These don’t feel quite like leaves. Stiffer. More like thin cardboard.”

He joined her, stooped, and petted the dog, which was as frozen by the Pause as were the bar patrons. “His fur feels like fine wire.”

“I think he was trying to tell us something.”

“So do I. Now.”

“Because he sure knew something was about to happen when he hid in these bushes.”

Harry remembered the thought he’d had in the men’s room of The Green House:
The only indication that I
haven’t
become imprisoned in a fairy tale is the absence of a talking animal.

Funny, how hard it was to break a man’s grasp on his sanity. After a hundred years of Freudian analysis, people were conditioned to believe that sanity was a fragile possession, that everyone was a potential victim of neuroses or psychoses caused by abuse, neglect, or even by the ordinary stresses of daily life. If he had seen the events of the past thirteen hours as the plot of a movie, he’d have found it unbelievable, smugly certain that the male lead—himself—would have cracked from the strain of so many supernatural events and encounters combined with so much physical abuse. Yet here he was, with aches in most of his muscles and pains in half his joints, but with his wits intact.

Then he realized that perhaps he could not assume his wits were intact. Unlikely as it was, he might already be strapped down on a bed in a psychiatric ward, with a rubber wedge in his mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue in a mad frenzy. The silent and unmoving world might be only a delusion.

Sweet thought.

When Connie let go of the azalea branches that she had moved, they did not fall back into place. Harry had to press gently on them to force them to drape the dog once more.

They rose to their feet and scrutinized the visible length of Pacific Coast Highway, the shoulder-to-shoulder businesses on both sides, the narrow dark gaps between buildings.

The world was a huge clockwork mechanism with a bent key, broken springs, and rust-locked gears. Harry tried to tell himself that he was growing accustomed to this weird state of affairs, but he was not convincing. If he’d gotten so mellow about it, why was there a cold sweat on his brow, under his arms, and down the small of his back? The totally becalmed night exerted no tranquilizing influence, for there was spring-taut violence and sudden death under its peaceful facade; instead, it was deeply eerie and growing more so with the passage of each non-second.

“Enchantment,” Harry said.

“What?”

“Like in a fairy tale. The whole world has fallen under an evil enchantment, a spell.”

“So where the hell is the witch who did it? That’s what I want to know.”

“Not witch,” Harry corrected. “That’s female. A male witch is a warlock. Or sorcerer.”

She was fuming. “Whatever. Damn it, where is he, why is he toying with us like this, taking so long to show his face?”

Glancing at his wristwatch, Harry confirmed that the red second indicator had not resumed blinking and that the time on the readout was still 1:29. “Actually, how much time he’s taking depends on how you look at it. I guess you could say that he hasn’t taken any time at all.”

She noted the 1:29 on her watch. “Come on, come on, let’s get this over with. Or do you think he’s waiting for us to go looking for him?”

Elsewhere in the night, there arose the first sound, since the Pause, that they had not made themselves. Laughter. The low, gravelly laughter of the golem-vagrant who had burned like a tallow candle in Harry’s condo and later reappeared to hammer on them in Ordegard’s house.

Again, out of habit, they reached for their revolvers. Then both remembered the uselessness of guns against this adversary, and left their weapons holstered.

South of them, at the uphill end of the block, on the other side of the street, Ticktock turned the corner, wearing his all-too-familiar vagrant identity. If anything, the golem seemed bigger than before, well over seven feet tall instead of six and a half, with a greater tangle of hair and wildness of beard than when they’d last seen him. Leonine head. Tree-trunk neck. Massive shoulders. Impossibly broad chest. Hands as big as tennis rackets. His black raincoat was as voluminous as a tent.

“Why the hell was I so impatient for him?” Connie wondered, voicing Harry’s identical thought.

His troll-mean laughter fading, Ticktock stepped off the far curb and started to cross the street diagonally, coming straight toward them.

“What’s the plan?” Connie asked.

“What plan?”

“There’s always a plan, damn it.”

Indeed, Harry was surprised to realize they had stood waiting for the golem without giving a thought to a course of action. They had been cops for so many years, and had worked as partners long enough, that they knew how best to respond in every situation, to virtually any threat. Usually they didn’t actually have to put their heads together on strategy; they just acted instinctively, each of them confident that the other would make all the right moves as well. On the rare occasions when they needed to talk out a plan of action, a few one-word sentences sufficed, the shortspeak of partners in sync. However, confronted by a nearly invulnerable adversary made of bloodless mud and stones and worms and God-knew-what-else, by a fierce
and relentless fighter who was but one of an endless army that their
real
enemy could create, they seemed bereft of both instinct and brains, able only to stand paralyzed and watch him approach.

Run
, Harry thought, and was about to take his own advice when the towering golem stopped in the middle of the street, about fifty feet away.

The golem’s eyes were different from anything Harry had seen before. Not just luminous but blazing. Blue. The hot blue of gas flames. Dancing brightly in his sockets. His eyes cast images of flickering blue fire on his cheekbones and made the frizzy ends of his beard look like thin filaments of blue neon.

Ticktock spread his arms and raised his enormous hands above his head in the manner of an Old Testament prophet standing on a mountain and addressing his followers below, relaying messages from beyond. Tablets of stone containing a
hundred
commandments could have been concealed within his generous raincoat.

“In one hour of real time the world starts up again,” Ticktock said. “I’ll count to fifty. A headstart. Survive one hour, and I’ll let you live, never torment you again.”

“Dear sweet Jesus,” Connie whispered, “he really
is
a child playing nasty games.”

That made him at least as dangerous as any other sociopath. More so. Some young children, in their innocence of empathy, had the capacity to be extremely cruel.

Ticktock said, “I’ll hunt you fair and square, use none of my tricks, just my eyes,” and he pointed to his blazing blue sockets, “my ears,” and he pointed to one of those, “and my wits.” He tapped the side of his skull with one thick forefinger. “No tricks. No special powers. More fun that way. One…two…better run, don’t you think? Three…four…five…”

“This can’t be happening,” Connie said, but she turned and ran anyway.

Harry followed her. They sprinted to the alley and around the side of The Green House, almost colliding with
the bony hobo who had called himself Sammy and who was now frozen precariously on one foot in mid-stride. Their feet made curious, hollow slapping sounds on the blacktop as they exploded past Sammy and raced deeper into the dark backstreet, almost the sound of running footsteps but not quite. The echoes, too, were not precisely like echoes in the real world, less reverberant and too short-lived.

As he ran, wincing at a hundred separate pains that flared with each footfall, Harry struggled to devise some strategy by which they might survive the hour. But, like Alice, they had crossed through the looking glass, into the kingdom of the Red Queen, and no plans or logic would work in that land of the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat, where reason was despised and chaos embraced.

“Eleven…twelve…you’re dead if I find you…thirteen…”

Bryan was having so much fun.

He sprawled naked on the black silk sheets, busily creating and gloriously Becoming, while the votive eyes adored him from their glass reliquaries.

Yet a part of him was in the golem, which was also exhilarating. He had constructed the creature bigger this time, made it a fierce and unstoppable killing machine, the better to terrorize the bigshot hero and his bitch. Its immense shoulders were
his
shoulders, too, and its powerful arms were his to use. Curling those arms, feeling the inhuman muscles flex and contract and flex, was so thrilling that he could barely contain his excitement over the hunt before him.

“…sixteen…seventeen…eighteen…”

He had made this giant from dirt and clay and sand, given its body the appearance of flesh, and animated it—just as the first god had created Adam from lifeless mud. Although his destiny was to be a more merciless divinity than any who had come before him, he could create as
well as destroy; no one could say that he was less a god than others who had ruled, no one. No one.

Standing in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway,
towering
there, he gazed out upon the still and silent world, and was pleased with what he had wrought. This was his Greatest and Most Secret Power—the ability to stop everything as easily as a watchmaker could stop a ticking timepiece merely by opening the casing and applying the proper tool to the key point in the mechanism.

“…twenty-four…twenty-five…”

This power had arisen within him during one of his psychic growth surges when he was sixteen, though he had been eighteen before he had learned to use it well. That was to be expected. Jesus, too, had needed time to learn how to turn water into wine, how to multiply a few loaves and fishes to feed multitudes.

Will. The power of the will. That was the proper tool with which to remake reality. Before the beginning of time and the birth of this universe, there had been one will that had brought it all into existence, a consciousness that people called God, though God was no doubt utterly different from all the ways that humankind had pictured Him—perhaps only a child at play who, as a game, created galaxies like grains of sand. If the universe was a perpetual-motion machine created as an act of will, it also could be altered by sheer will, remade or destroyed. All that was needed to manipulate and edit the first god’s creation was power and understanding; both had been given to Bryan. The power of the atom was a dim light when compared to the blindingly brilliant power of the mind. By applying his will, by intently focusing thought and desire, he found that he could make fundamental changes in the very foundations of existence.

“…thirty-one…thirty-two…thirty-three…”

Because he was still earnestly Becoming and was not yet the new god, Bryan was able to sustain these changes only for short periods, usually no more than one hour of real time. Occasionally he grew impatient with his limits,
but he was certain the day would arrive when he could alter current reality in ways that would be permanent if he so wished. In the meantime, as he continued to Become, he satisfied himself with amusing alterations that temporarily negated all the laws of physics and, at least for a short while, tailored reality to his desire.

Although it would appear to Lyon and Gulliver that time had ground to a halt, the truth was more complicated than that. By the application of his extraordinary will, almost like
wishing
before blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, he had re-conceived the nature of time. If it had been an ever-flowing river of dependable effect, he transformed it into a series of streams, large placid lakes, and geysers with a
variety
of effects. This world now lay in one of the lakes where time advanced at such an excruciatingly slow rate that it appeared to have stopped flowing—yet, also at his wish, he and the two cops interacted with this new reality much as they had with the old, experiencing only minor changes in most of the laws of matter, energy, motion, and force.

“…forty…forty-one…”

As if making a birthday wish, as if wishing on a star, as if wishing to a fairy godmother, wishing, wishing, wishing with all his considerable might, he had created the perfect playground for a spirited game of hide-and-seek. And so what if he had bent the universe to make a toy of it?

He was aware that he was two people of widely disparate natures. On the one hand he was a god Becoming, exalted, with incalculable authority and responsibility. On the other hand, he was a reckless and selfish child, cruel and prideful.

In that respect he fancied that he was like humankind itself—only more so.

“…forty-five…”

In fact, he believed he had been anointed precisely because of the kind of child he had been. Selfishness and pride were merely reflections of ego, and without a strong ego, no man could have the confidence to create.
A certain amount of recklessness was required if one hoped to explore the limits of one’s creative powers; taking chances, without regard for consequences, could be liberating and a virtue. And, as he was to be the god who would chasten humankind for its pollution of the earth, cruelty was a requirement of Becoming. His ability to remain a child, to avoid spending his creative energy in the senseless breeding of more animals for the herd, made him the perfect candidate for divinity.