Mortality Bridge (37 page)

XXII.

RAMBLING ON MY MIND

THE WIZENED DEMON behind the counter gapes at the scribbled card. “You gotta be kidding me.” His voice is keening and unpleasant. His “k’s” cause a repulsive shudder down Niko’s spine and conjure teeth sliding on aluminum. Behind the wideset bars the wrinkled demon squints beneath his darkgreen banker’s visor and shakes his head. He taps the shoulder of the demon beside him who is sorting teeth exchanged for playing chips. “Hey Clarence.”

“Thirty, thirtyone, thirty—shit.” Clarence looks over. “This better be good.”

The visored demon waves the card. “You ever see one of these?”

“What, a piece of paper?” He shakes his floppy eared head in disgust and rakes the bloodrooted teeth into a pile again. “One, two, three—”

“Not a piece of paper. A Property Requisition Slip.”

“A who?”

“Property Requisition Slip.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?”

Niko presses his lips and grips the edge of the counter. “They’re for retrieving guest arrivals set aside for processing.”

“Since when do guests get anything retrieved?”

“That’s my point.” Visor flutters the card. “They don’t. Not that I ever heard anyway. But here’s a form.”

“Let me see that.” Clarence takes the card from Visor and examines it. He frowns and clucks and tuts and shakes his wattled head. He looks up to see Niko standing on their side of the counter and his frown deepens. “That side, meat pie.” He points a gnawed claw at the other side of the bars.

Niko grabs the demon’s turtlehide neck and bends close to one scabby flaccid ear and ignores the awful odor steaming from the hairy waxy pit of it. “You’ve got the form. It’s signed. Now get my item or the guy who signed it will be signing you with a rusty churchkey.”

Clarence wrests himself away. “All right, okay, criminy.” He hands the card back to Visor. “Here. He brought it to you.”

Visor blinks owlishly. He looks as if he’s going to protest but then looks at Niko and changes his fledgling mind. He furrows his mottled brow and huffs away.

Niko leans against the counter’s edge and hopes it doesn’t show that he feels he’s about to pass out. He has truly shot his wad. He watches in blackrimmed detachment as Clarence goes back to sorting moist teeth gobbets.

“Thirtyone, thirtytwo.” Clarence beams and scoops the bloody teeth into a drawstring bag and tosses the bag onto a heap of similar bags and then licks the edge of his palm clean. The green felt blotter on the counter before him dark with fluids. Clarence lowers his hand and looks at Niko. “What’s a churchkey?”

Niko ignores him and the demon shrugs and returns to his work. Niko shuts his eyes and draws a deep and ragged breath.

THE JOURNEY BACK to the casino had been strange but uneventful. The Black Taxi had ferried Niko out of the silent hills and onto the southbound Golden State freeway where it sped along the empty lanes toward a downtown abandoned as if a swift and purely fatal plague had swept across the world. The city so familiar and so alien.

At the East L.A. Interchange they got on the eastbound 10 and headed inland toward San Bernardino. Niko stared at the back of the Driver’s head and wondered what kind of ride he was being taken on. But Phil had spoken the agreement and it was binding and irrevocable.

At one point he had bolted upright. The guitar. Where was the guitar?

Then he remembered and settled back down on the spacious seat, heart hammering. He’d carried the Dobro so long that its absence was more conspicuous than its presence. Poor guitar. Niko felt as if he’d mistreated a faithful pet.

When he glanced out the window again not five minutes later the Black Taxi was exiting the 10 and curving round the fishhook ramp onto the northbound 15 toward Las Vegas. They could not have come this far this fast. That exit was forty or fifty miles from L.A. But to the left was the sprawling consumer mecca of the Ontario Mills Mall. They were headed toward Vegas all right.

A few minutes later daylight began to ebb. Niko looked left but saw no sign of sun. It had been bright afternoon at the Greek ten minutes ago. When he looked forward again the Black Taxi was coming down out of a long mountain pass and an island of multicolored light lay scattered on a dark and empty plain ahead. The air turned hot and dry and redolent with rotting meat and shit and an iron tinge of blood. Niko rolled the window up. He was back all right.

As the casino hove into view once more Niko thought of Van, whose dismissal of Las Vegas had been the last words he ever spoke. Is that where you come from, Niko asked the lighted structure as the big sedan pulled up against the curb. Did they pull you from my head? Was this whole mess tailormade for me? In his mind Phil shrugged and said What difference does it make?

The suicide door opened and Niko stared a moment before getting out. He patted himself down and glanced around the huge interior of the Franklin one more time. The Driver staring like a mannequin with the opened door between them. Niko searched for some smartassed or provocative comment but finally he just turned and walked toward the casino and pulled Phil’s scribbled card from his ragged coat pocket as the doors opened for him and he was swallowed again by light and sound and pain.

NOW THE DEMON Clarence hums as he sorts bloody gobbets. Somehow the demon’s throat produces two separate notes at once. The top note slurs and wavers over the lower octave and in the dissonance of their modulated harmonic a third note is produced, birdlike and warbling, something like a cricket and something like a didgeridoo and beautiful.

Niko fidgets. From some vague where Jemma is being brought to him and soon he will take her back into his arms. Together they will flee this vale of tears and hold each other in the daylit world. He drums his fingers and rocks from foot to foot and paces the tiny space behind the counter. The demon Clarence hums his ethereal polyphony as his ivory claws sort teeth scored with plier marks and in the sight before him Niko sees embodied all the sad and absurd horror and awful epic beauty he has seen and felt and heard and even made since he went down beneath the earth.

Now the demon with the visor gimps back toward him, and held in Visor’s claw is a mason jar with a blacktipped feather softly glowing inside.

“What the fuck is this?”

Visor draws up short. “It’s the item on your Property Requisition Slip. I doublechecked, there’s no mistake.”

Niko advances on the demon. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Visor is claws and angles and spikes and teeth but he shrinks before Niko’s advance and holds out the slip of paper like a shield. “Read it. Read it. Here.”

The humming has broken off and Clarence watches now.

“Jemma.” Niko’s shouting now, not at the demon but generally to wherever Phil must still be laughing to himself. “Give me Jemma you fucking shit.”

“Sir. Sir. Sir.” Visor holds up the jar. “This is her, really.” Niko realizes the demons are afraid of him because of that slip of paper. Because of Phil’s handwriting on it. “There’s a Property Identification Number listed here and I matched it to the storage coordinate on the temporary storage shelves for Property Assessment and it’s impossible to confuse it with any others because they never get removed. This is very irregular, and—”

He stops at Niko’s inarticulate shout. Niko stands there red-faced and panting like some confused and angry bear. His fists clench until his hands are completely white. He looks at the ceiling. You just won’t give me a fucking break will you? I mean I didn’t expect Jemma with pompoms and a whistle but goddamn.

The demons glance at one another as Niko forces himself to calm down. Clarence makes a small questioning gesture and Visor shrugs back. Finally Niko holds a hand out and Visor hands the jar to him like a runner in a nitroglycerin relay.

Niko’s Grail is just a glass jar with a metal lid. The feather within just looks like a feather, white with black edges along the top third and flecked with black specks. Its faint glow gives off no heat. Jemma. You couldn’t even read by its light. The glass is cool in his rough palms.

Visor and Clarence trade glances again as the meat pie holds the jar up like a priest blessing the Host. They watch him slowly lower it and run a hand over it and smell it and then press it against his cheek and squeeze his eyes shut. Visor twirls a hookclawed index finger by his temple. Clarence gets a knowing look and nods. Finally the meat pie opens his eyes and lowers the jar. He nods and then mutters something and then turns away. Visor clears his throat. “Uh excuse me but umm.”

The meat pie turns back cradling the jar. Visor hesitantly holds out the Property Requisition Slip and a pin. “Could you just sign this? Sir?”

The meat pie takes the paper and the pin and cocks his head at it. He shuts his eyes and begins to tremble. The demons glance at one another and Clarence casually reaches for a marble paperweight to whang the meat pie on the skull if he gets violent. But the meat pie laughs. It’s a weird laugh because it seems almost as if he’s crying. “I thought,” the meat pie says but can’t get out what it is he thought. He sets the jar on the counter and sets an elbow on the jar as if he’s afraid the jar will disappear if he loses contact with it.

“I thought. I thought you.” And he pricks a finger with the pin and squeezes. “I thought you recognized me. I thought you wanted my autograph.” He scrawls something that might be his initials across the back of the Property Requisition Slip.

Visor snatches it away and waves the signature dry. “It’s just a release sir.”

The meat pie nods and wipes his eyes. “Okay. A release. So I’m released now.”

“You may leave with your property, yes sir.”

The meat pie does exactly that.

Visor and Clarence watch him thread his way through the mutilated assemblage. “And don’t let the knob hit you on the ass on the way out,” says Clarence. Then one of the hunchbacks dumps another cartful of teeth in his bin and he has to sort doubletime because he’s gotten so far behind.

BEFORE HE LEAVES the casino Niko makes a final stop.

The Sports Book is pandemonium. Cavernous and crammed with demons and canopied by sickly green cigar smoke and cacophonous as demons cheer and jeer team contests played out in the air above their heads. Irate fans shit into their palms and hurl it toward the losing teams. Where it hits it hisses and steams and melts to bone.

A wake of silence spreads from Niko’s entrance like a gunslinger movie cliché. Demons nudge each other and point toward the mortal man with the glowing mason jar heading toward the huge row of betting windows along one wall. As Niko moves among them they draw back to form an aisle. As if he is on his way to receive a medal from some alien ambassador. The vast room enstilled.

Niko approaches a barred window and the demon behind it looks up from biting someone else’s fingernails and squawks and sits upright and waves his rubbery hands. “Oh no no not this window no no no—”

Niko sets the jar on the counter and pulls out his wallet and removes all his cash. Amazingly still there. Then again what would anyone have done with it? He says Popoudopolos to win and does not look back at the murmur behind him.

The demon glances warily at a wager board. “Eight fifty to one.”

Niko pushes the money through the space beneath the grille. The demon flaps his hands and slaps himself hard and glances over his shoulder at his supervisor, who lifts one flaccid breast and squeezes it like a winesack to spray a puslike milk into his own mouth and all over his own face. He licks his lipless dripping mouth with a thick reptilian tongue and grins at Niko and nods at his underling who scoops the cash and calls out Popoudopolos to win.

The murmuring grows louder. The cashier pushes a ticket across the counter and Niko puts it in a coat pocket.

“How you gonna collect if you win?” the supervisor calls.

Niko stares at the obese obscenity fingering itself before him. “It’s more fun if everyone knows you owe me.” He picks up the mason jar and shoulders through the silent restless hordes soon to pursue him.

EXIT.
THE INSTANT he crosses that threshold they’ll do everything in their considerable power to waylay stop or ruin him. To make him look back. All the hosts of Hell will nip at Niko’s heels. You think the dogs and walls and gates and spears are there to guard the way in? Getting here’s the easy part.

Reflections in the glass before him wink and slide and wobble and distort. Thresholds, portals, demarcations. Ye who exit here.

He feels the stares on his back and takes one last look behind him. For an instant just beneath articulation Niko glimpses formless chaos churning there. A fearsome primal mindless maw feeding on decay and terror and the slow uncoiling of the cosmos itself. A universe of evershifting laws and fanged indifference that would smear him across its fabric like a bloated mosquito were it not amused by him. As any hero out of myth was easily defeated who did not amuse or charm the gods. In that instant beneath thought or language Niko glimpses the world caught offguard, the face behind the mask, the true shape of things.

But Niko turns. And as he turns that horrible glimpse reverts to the casino and its enslaved patrons, not staring at him as he had presumed but going about their neverending business, eternal commerce of punishment and penitence.

Again he heads toward the exit and again he stops.

Beyond the carnival-lighted glass the Black Taxi is still parked against the curb. The Driver is nowhere in sight. And a plastic case in Niko’s pocket holds the key.

XXIII.

TERRAPLANE BLUES

NIKO LEAVES THE casino without ceremony and pulls the keyholder from his pocket as he heads directly for the Black Taxi. He opens the keyholder with one hand and shakes the key out of the box. At the driver’s door he extends the key like a man making an offering to a blind man’s cup. His arm feels guided as the key finds the slot without jostle or fumble as if it had eyes. Niko turns the key and pulls the handle and opens the suicide door. Son of a bitch. His heart is yammering. He ducks into the car and through the flatpaned windshield sees stalking toward him the uniformed valet whose elbow he dislocated. Quickly but carefully Niko sets the mason jar on the leather bench seat. He starts to get out but stops suddenly. Don’t turn around. Don’t look back.