Zod Wallop (20 page)

“I have a key,” Raymond said. He took it from his pocket and inserted it in the lock. It turned. The elevator hummed, shook, and rose. Raymond bowed.

“
That old guy!
” Rene said. “That weird thousand-year-old janitor with the dirty hair and the crazy snow boots. That’s why you were always talking to him. You swiped his fucking key! Hey, Raymond. You are sharper than you look.”

“My Lady, your conclusion is cruel. I did not steal his key. A miracle has occurred,” Raymond said.

“Yeah, a miracle,” Rene said.

“I call it a miracle when a despised and much abused old man whose lot has inured him to the suffering of others suddenly shakes off his chains and strikes a blow for freedom and decency and with no incentive other than compassion gives us his key to freedom.”

Raymond smiled grandly.

“Okay,” Rene said. “Let’s haul ass, Saint Story.”

They came out on the roof, into sunlight, and Raymond lifted Emily from the wheelchair. “There is a fire escape—I’ve seen it from the rec room—that will take us within debarking distance of the roof of a building which, I believe, will furnish us egress to the street.”

They followed Raymond to the side of the building and, at his urging, eased over the ledge and dropped to the stairs. Raymond lowered Emily to Harry. He must have seen some anxiety in Harry’s eyes, for he paused and said, “Fear not, Lord Gainesborough. Blodkin watches over us. We shall navigate these stairs with ease, and yonder building’s office workers will offer no hindrance to our progress.”

Raymond was absolutely correct.

On the street, they hailed a cab.

Andrew Blaine sat on the carpet, his back propped against his desk, his eyes closed. He held the mouthpiece firmly over his nose and mouth, breathing the oxygen methodically, as though the action of his lungs had ceased to be an involuntary function. A devout man, he thanked God for his emphysema.

He could not judge how much time had passed, perhaps half an hour, perhaps longer. He had fumbled under the desk, found the red button, and pressed it. Help should have arrived immediately, and its absence suggested that things were very wrong at GroMel. Help would come, though, eventually. The button would summon off-site aid. He had only to wait. He was glad that Gloria Gill hadn’t been with him during this attack. He was fond of her and would have been saddened by her death. He thought of her sweet roundness, the toothpaste whiteness of her flesh as he peeled the black garments from her, the pocked scars of other love bites, and he was amused at how desire could stir in the midst of danger.

Surely the gas was dispersed by now. He supposed he could open his eyes and remove the mouthpiece with impunity. He wasn’t, however, 100 percent sure on this count, and it did no harm to simply wait. Patience, he had learned, was a great virtue.

He passed the time by imagining the slow, painful death he would inflict on the man responsible for this. There was no doubt in his mind as to the identity of this person.

When the door was finally opened and Blaine’s rescuers poured in, he was, for a moment, unaware of their arrival, so lost was he in reverie, so involved in his own powers of invention, so pleased by the imaginary screams of Dr. Roald Peake.

H
ARRY
C
ALLED
F
ROM
a pay phone. “Helen,” he said when she answered, “I don’t know if they have tapped your phone or not. I want you to meet me where we celebrated after Sneeze was sold.”

“Harry, are you—”

“Leave right now, Helen. We’ll talk then.”

Harry watched her enter the restaurant, obviously disoriented by the interior’s gloom, older and frailer in her confusion.

Raymond was outside, watching to see if anyone were following her. No clear plan had been formulated if Helen were, indeed, being followed, but Harry thought that such surveillance was unlikely.

Harry watched her enter from where he sat at a far table in the gloom of Benny’s Continental Club with Emily and Rene. Emily was sleeping, her head back, her mouth open. Rene was in a sulk, having argued with Raymond over Allan who, she felt, was in need of immediate rescuing. Raymond had vetoed this.

“The Frozen Princess is waking!” he had shouted, causing the cabdriver to turn his head sharply and glare at Raymond.

“The Frozen Princess is waking,” Raymond had repeated, with no discernible lessening of volume. “We must get the Duchess and head south immediately. I am sorry about Allan, but if we fail to find the Duke and our destination, Allan’s sacrifice will have been for nothing. Our fortunes can only be decided at the Ocean of Responsibility, and if it all unravels too soon, it will be meaningless in this unmagical realm.”

Rene was not satisfied with this reasoning, and took particular umbrage with the word
sacrifice
, which suggested that Allan had already been written off, abandoned as it were.

“Allan will be all right,” Raymond said. Rene was not convinced.

Now Harry watched Helen turn myopically in the dark restaurant and move slowly toward them. Harry got up, went to her, and embraced her.

“Harry, are you all right?” she asked. Her eyes studied his own anxiously. She wore a tan suit, and the scent of roses that met him conjured images of their shared past (other celebrations, Jeanne with him, laughing, saying, “Call me Zelda.”).

“I’m okay, Helen. I’m fine, actually. But we’ve got to go to Florida. I need you to come with me.”

In the end, she agreed to go, but it was not the eloquence of his arguments that made her acquiesce. It was, he knew, concern, pity, a conviction that he had lost his mind and needed a caretaker.

And perhaps he did. Certainly, when he heard himself speak, he sounded less than rational. He sounded, in fact, crazy, and this was with some serious editing, without mentioning Gorelords, levitating princesses, or Ralewings.

“Raymond says we have to go to Florida. There is someone there we have to meet, and Raymond is convinced we’ll need you when we do.”

She had leaned forward then, caught his hand. “Harry, you said yourself that Raymond was…well, deluded. Why would you listen to him now?”

That had been hard to explain. He had refused to look at it straight on. Saying it might kill it, somehow. Nonetheless: “Helen, things are different.” He produced the postcard of Amy on the beach, let Helen study it at length without speaking, then tapped the pink hotel with his forefinger and said, “This is the St. Petersburg Arms. It’s where this Duke is. It’s where Raymond says we must go.”

Helen looked up, blinked without comprehension.

“Helen, Amy was never in St. Petersburg.”

“I don’t understand.”

He had let it out then, showed her the hope. Raymond had told him that there might be a way to change it back.

“Change what back?”

“Amy,” he had whispered, his daughter’s name a small, pink rose in his mouth.

“Oh, Harry,” Helen said, squeezing his hand. “Harry.” He could not look at her face.

“She was never in Florida,” Harry insisted, still looking away. “And things are happening that I can’t explain, things…” It was a sickly thing, this hope, and Harry felt it dying in the air, unable to survive even his own poor scrutiny, and he pulled his arm away from Helen’s hand and stood up.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” she said.

She had brought Arbus with her—he was waiting in the car—and when Raymond saw the monkey, he whooped loudly.

“This is a good omen, my Lord,” he said, bouncing the monkey in his arms. “This reunion suggests that Blodkin smiles upon our cause.”

“Just what is our cause?” Harry asked.

Raymond had raised his eyebrows. “Why Lord Gainesborough, you jest. Our cause is to Return the Light, of course. We are to stop the Freeze, overthrow the Encroaching Darkness, and Return the Light.”

“That’s a tall order,” Harry said.

“We are tall-hearted,” Raymond said, and Harry thought he saw the bright stars and happy faces of a wizard’s robes.

They drove south into the night, stopping finally a little north of Richmond (the exit sign off 95 said Ashland) and getting two rooms in a red brick motel called The Pines.

Harry and Raymond stayed in one room while Helen, Rene, and Emily occupied an adjacent room. The bedspreads were dark green, the walls only slightly lighter. In Harry and Raymond’s room, a slowly rotating ceiling fan—Harry could find no way of disabling it—made the light in the room shimmer unpleasantly. Sitting on one of the twin beds, Harry felt as though he had been dropped into an immense neglected aquarium. Raymond, still dressed and already snoring on the other bed, seemed to rise and fall as though lifted by watery currents—an illusion produced, Harry was certain, by the choppy light, the long hours of driving, and whatever drugs still rode his bloodstream.

On the drive down, Harry had filled Helen in. He found that he could not tell this story without including its fantastic elements, and at first he hesitated. “Some of this will sound crazy,” he said.

Helen said, “Maybe I should tell you that I have seen one of your Ralewings—the size of a house, it was—destroy a helicopter. And I saw the corpse of another impossible creature, a Politer, that Raymond’s mother showed me. I’m… I’m acquiring some tolerance for the fantastic. Do you want the details?”

Harry did, so Helen talked first, speaking of the arrival of Gabriel, the Storys, and finally Roald Peake and his men. She spoke of Peake’s phony concern for Harry and his companions who were, in Peake’s words, “at grave risk” thanks to an unauthorized drug experiment. She spoke in great detail of the Ralewing, reliving her horror, the fear its black shape had engendered even before, consciously, she had identified it as an impossible creature, hideously magnified. She told how Ada Story produced the mummified Politer from the trunk of her car, and the story of Raymond’s summoning it.

When she was done, Harry nodded. “You see,” he said, “anything is possible.”

“Amy’s dead,” she said.

For a moment, he hated her, this old woman with her own losses, resigned to every awful thing.

“I know that,” he said. He let his anger go and talked, telling her everything, hallucination and truth, not bothering with disclaimers.

When he finished, she was silent.

“Well?” he had finally asked. It was dark by then, and he could tell nothing from her profile in the passenger’s seat.

“I don’t know, Harry,” she said. “I don’t know what any of it means.”

Who did? Every journey was a strange one. Hadn’t Chesterton argued that strangeness suggested some comparison, something more normal and reassuring? Some alternate world.

Outside, Harry could hear the hiss of long-distance trucks, sporadic at this late hour, a sound that would have been soothing had he been less keyed up, less primed for sinister fancies. Now every sibilant passing brought with it the image of a monstrous Swamp Grendel, rubbing its scaled hide against the motel’s brick, its gray-green eyes glowing faintly from the luminous microscopic organisms within.

Harry lay back on the pillow but found that closing his eyes brought with it instant panic, vertigo, nausea. He reached over to the end table and clicked on the bedside lamp. A steady circle of light appeared, comfortable, unwavering.

All comfy at the bottom of the aquarium
, he thought. He smiled, thinking of
Scoundrel Flowers
, a children’s book that had been singularly unsuccessful, perhaps because he had tackled a big theme, the nature of evil, and discovered that neither he nor his art had anything happy and certain to say. Happiness and certainty were essential qualities in a successful children’s book.

Here in the underwater motel
, Scoundrel Flowers
had come to his mind naturally—for there was a scene in the book in which two goldfish, Ed and Alice, fight.

Alice says, “I’m out of here,” and she proceeds to jump higher and higher until she has cleared the side of the aquarium and landed on the table where, of course, she begins to experience extreme discomfort.

“I can’t breathe!” she screams. “I’m dying.”

Ed rescues her by elaborate means and, repentant, she tells Ed that she has discovered she cannot live without him.

Ed, honest to a fault, tells her that it is the absence of water, and not his presence, that nearly did her in.

Alice, angry again, declares that Ed is the most unromantic lout she has ever known and again leaps out of the aquarium. This time Ed resolves to let her dry out and wither away—unless a small girl or boy, reading the story, feels that Alice is still worth saving. A list of Alice’s good qualities follows, in which her beautiful orange coloring and large blue eyes are featured, and most little boys and girls (Amy, for instance) vote to give Alice another chance, and so the story continues with an even more elaborate rescue mission from the daring and passionate (if unromantic) Ed.

Harry had dedicated
Scoundrel Flowers
to Jeanne who had said, “It’s about time I got a dedication. I mean, first your parents, then your sister, then I think it was your friend in North Carolina, and then even your agent, and I was about to say something.”