“You’re not bad, toaster,” he said finally, turning off the video. “Reminds me of myself in the old days.” He raised an admonishing finger. “But no screwing tonight. Go find me the bag lady.”
Modular Man’s voice was muffled as he stood with his face to the wall. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Neon cast its glow upon the frosted breath of the nat gang members standing beneath the pastel sign that marked the Run Run Club. Detective Third Grade John F. X. Black, driving his unmarked unit and waiting for the light to change so he could make a turn onto Schiff Parkway, automatically ran his eyes over the crowd, registering faces, names, possibilities.… He had just gotten off duty, and had signed out an unmarked car because he was due to spend the next day freezing his ass off at a plant, what on TV they’d call a stakeout. Ricky Santillanes, a petty thief out on bond since yesterday, grinned at Black with a mouthful of steel-capped teeth and gave Black the finger. Let him get his rocks off, Black thought. The nat gangs were being trashed by the Demon Princes of Jokertown every time they met.
Black observed from a poster that the band playing tonight was called the Swarm Mother—no one could say hardcore groups were slow in their perception of the zeitgeist. It was pure chance that Black happened to be looking at the poster at the moment Officer Frank Carroll staggered into the light. Carroll looked wild—he had his cap in his hand, his hair was mussed, and his overcoat was splattered with something that glowed a fluorescent chrome yellow under the glimmering sign. He looked as if he were making for the cop shop a couple blocks away. The nats laughed as they made way for him. Black knew that Carroll’s assigned sector was blocks away and didn’t take him anywhere near this corner.
Carroll had been on the force for two years, joining just out of high school. He was a white man with dark red hair, a clipped mustache, medium build beefed slightly by irregular weight training. He seemed serious about police work, was diligent and methodical, and worked a lot of overtime he didn’t have to. Black had pegged him as being dedicated but unimaginative. He wasn’t the kind to run about wild-eyed at twelve o’clock on a winter night.
Black opened his door, stood, and called Carroll’s name. The officer turned, glaring wildly, and then an expression of relief came onto his face. He ran for Black’s car and jerked at the passenger door as Black unlocked it.
“Jesus Christ!” Carroll said. “I just got thrown in a trash heap by a bag lady!”
Black smiled inwardly. The traffic light had changed, and Black made his turn. “She catch you by surprise?” he asked.
“Damn right. She was down in an alley off Forsyth. She had a book of matches and a bunch of wadded-up paper, and was trying to set a whole dumpster on fire to keep warm. I told her to quit, and I was trying to get her into my unit so I could take her to the shelter down in Rutger Park. And then wham! The bag got me.” He looked at Black and gnawed his lip. “You think she could have been some kind of joker, Lou?”
“Lou” was NYPD for lieutenant.
“What do you mean? She hit you with the bag, right?”
“No. I mean the bag—” The wild look was in Carroll’s eyes again. “The bag ate me, Lou. Something reached right up out of the bag and swallowed me. It was…” He groped for words. “Definitely paranormal.” He glanced down at his uniform. “Look at this, Lou.” His shield had been twisted in a strange way, like a timepiece in a Dali print. So had two of his buttons. He touched them in a kind of awe.
Black pulled into a loading zone and set the parking brake. “Tell me about this.”
Carroll looked confused. He rubbed his forehead. “I felt something grab me, Lou. And then … I got sucked right into the bag. I saw the bag just getting bigger and … and the next thing I knew I was in this trash heap off Ludlow north of Stanton. I was running for the cop shop when you stopped me.”
“You were teleported from Forsyth to Ludlow north of Stanton.”
“Teleported. Yeah. That’s the word.” Carroll looked relieved. “You believe me, then. Jesus, Lou, I thought I’d get written up for sure.”
“I’ve been in Jokertown a long time, seen a lot of strange things.” Black put the car in gear again. “Let’s go find your bag lady,” he said. “This was just a few minutes ago, right?”
“Yeah. And my unit’s still up there. Shit. The jokers’ve probably stripped it by now.”
The glow from the burning dumpster, orange on the brownstone alley walls, was visible from Forsyth. Black pulled into a loading zone. “Let’s go on foot.”
“Don’t you think we should call the fire department?”
“Not yet. It might not be safe for them.”
Black in the lead, they walked to the end of the alley. The dumpster was burning bright, the flames shooting up fifteen feet or more amid a cloud of rising ashes. Carroll’s unit was magically untouched, even with its rear door open. Standing in front of the dumpster, shifting from one foot to the other, was a small white woman with a full shopping bag in each hand. She wore several layers of shabby clothing. She seemed to be muttering to herself.
“That’s her, Lieutenant!”
Black contemplated the woman and said nothing. He wondered how to approach her.
The flames gushed up higher, snapping, and suddenly strange bright flickering lights, like Saint Elmo’s fire, played about the woman and her bags. Then something in one bag seemed to rise up, a dark shadow, and the fire bent like a candle flame in a strong wind and was sucked into the bag. In an instant fire and shadow were gone. The strange colored lights played gently about the woman’s form. Greasy ashes drifted to the pavement.
“Holy shit,” murmured Carroll. Black reached a decision. He dug into his pocket and got his billfold and the keys to his unmarked unit. He gave Carroll a ten.
“Take my unit. Go to the Burger King on West Broadway and get two double cheeseburgers, two big fries, and a jumbo coffee to go.” Carroll stared at him.
“Regular or black, Lou?”
“Move!” Black snapped. Carroll took off.
It took both burgers, the coffee, and one set of fries to lure the bag lady into Black’s unmarked car. Black thought she probably would never have gotten into a blue-and-white like Carroll’s. He’d had Carroll lock his uniform coat and weapon in the trunk so as not to alarm the woman, and Carroll was shivering as he got in the passenger seat.
Behind, the bag lady was mumbling to herself and devouring fries. She smelled terrible.
“Where to now?” Carroll asked. “One of the refugee centers? The clinic?”
Black put the car into gear. “Someplace special. Uptown. There are things about this woman you don’t know.”
Carroll put most of his energy into shivering as Black sped out of Jokertown. The bag lady went to sleep in the backseat. Her snores whistled through missing teeth. Black pulled up in front of a brownstone on East 57th.
“Wait here,” he said. He went down the stairs to a basement apartment entrance and pressed the buzzer. A plastic Christmas wreath was on the front door. Someone looked out through a spyhole in the door. The door opened.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” said Coleman Hubbard.
“I’ve got someone with … powers … in the backseat. She’s not in her right mind. I thought we could put her in the back bedroom. And there’s an officer with me who can’t know what’s going on.”
Hubbard’s eyes flicked to the car. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him to stay in the car. He’s a good boy, and that’s what he’ll do.”
“Okay. Let me get my coat.”
While Carroll watched curiously, Hubbard and Black coaxed the bag lady into Hubbard’s apartment, using the food from Hubbard’s refrigerator. Black wondered what Carroll would say if he could see the decor in the special locked apartment next door, the dark soundproofed room with its candles, its altar, the pentagram painted on the floor, the inlaid alloy gutters, the bright chains fixed to staples.… It wasn’t as elaborate as the temple the Order had downtown before it
blew up, but then it was only a temporary headquarters anyway, until the new temple uptown could be finished.
In Hubbard’s apartment there were two rooms ready for guests, and the bag lady was put into one of these.
“Put a lock on the door,” Black said. “And call the Astronomer.”
“Lord Amun has already been called,” Hubbard said, and tapped his head.
Black returned to his car and started driving back to Jokertown again. “We’ll get your unit,” Black said. “Then we’ll get you to the cop shop for your report.”
Carroll looked at him. “Who was that guy, Lieutenant?”
“A specialist in mental cases and jokers.”
“That lady might do him some harm.”
“He’ll be safer than either of us.”
Black pulled up behind Carroll’s cruiser. He got out and opened the trunk, taking out Carroll’s coat and hat. He gave them to the young officer. Then he took out a flute—NYPD for an innocent-looking soda bottle filled with liquor—which he’d been planning on using to keep himself warm during the plant tomorrow. He offered the flute to Carroll. The patrolman took the bottle gratefully. Black reached for Carroll’s gunbelt.
“It was lucky you were around, Lou.”
“Yeah. It sure was.”
Black shot Carroll four times in the chest with his own gun, then, after the officer was on the ground, shot him twice more in the head. He wiped his prints off the gun and tossed it to the ground, then took the Coke bottle and got back in his car. Maybe, with the spilled rum, it would look as if Carroll had stopped to hassle a wino and the drunk had gotten the drop on him.
The car smelled like cheeseburgers. Black was reminded he hadn’t had supper.
The bag lady had ignored the bed and gone to sleep in a corner of the room. Her bags were piled in front and atop her like a bulwark. Hubbard sat on a stool, watching her intently. His crooked smile had frozen into an unpleasant parody of itself. Pain throbbed in his brain. The effort of reading her mind was costing him.
No turning back, he thought. He had to see this through. His failure with Captain McPherson had cost him in the Order and in Amun’s esteem; and when Black had shown up with the bag lady, Hubbard realized this was the chance to win back his place. Hubbard had lied to Black when he told the detective he had alerted Amun.
There was power here. Perhaps enough to power the Shakti device. And if the Shakti device were powered by the bag thing, then Amun was no longer necessary.
The bag thing could eat people, Hubbard knew. Perhaps it could eat even Amun. Hubbard thought of the fire at the old temple, Amun striding through the flames with his disciples at his back, ignoring Hubbard’s screams.
Yes, Hubbard thought. This would be worth the risk.
Detective Second Grade Harry Matthias, known in the Order as Judas, sat on the bed, his chin in his hands. He shrugged.
“She’s not an ace. Neither is whatever she’s got in the bag.”
Hubbard spoke to him mentally. I sense two minds. One is hers—it is disordered. I can’t touch it. The other is in the bag—it’s in touch with her, somehow … there’s an empathic binding. The other mind also seems to be damaged. It’s as if it’s adapted to her.
Judas stood. He was flushed with anger. “Why in God’s name don’t we just take the damn bag?” He went for the bag lady with his hands clawed.
Hubbard felt an electric snap of awareness in his mind. The bag lady was awake. Through his mental link with Judas he felt the man hesitate at the sudden malevolence in the old woman’s eyes. Judas reached for the bag.
The bag reached for Judas.
A blackness faster than thought rose into the room. Judas vanished into it. Hubbard stared at the empty space. In his mind, the woman’s honed madness danced.
Judas shivered and his lips were blue. Christmas tinsel hung in his hair. A piece of sticky cardboard was stuck to the bottom of one shoe. His gun had been twisted into a sine wave. He shivered and his lips were blue. He’d been transported to a dumpster on Christopher Street and had ceased to exist for about twenty minutes. He’d taken a cab back.
Power, Hubbard thought. Incredible power. The bag thing warps space-time somehow.
“Why garbage?” Judas said. “Why shitpiles? And look at my gun.…” He became aware of the cardboard, and tried to pull it off his shoe. It came free with a sticky noise.
“She’s fixated on garbage, I guess,” Hubbard said. “And it seems to twist inanimated objects, sometimes. I could sense that it’s broken—maybe that’s a problem with it.”
He had to figure out some way to subdue the bag lady. Waiting till she’d gone to sleep didn’t work—she’d woken up at the first threatening move from Judas. He wondered vaguely about poison gas, and then an idea struck him.
“Do you have access to a tranquilizer gun at the precinct house?”
Judas shook his head. “No. I think maybe the fire department has some, in case they have to deal with escaped animals.”
The idea crystallized in Hubbard’s mind. “I want you and Black to steal me one.”
He’d have Black actually do the shooting—if the bag thing retaliated, it would attack Black. And then with the bag lady put to sleep, Hubbard would take the device.…
And then it would be Hubbard’s turn. He could take all the time he needed, playing with the bag lady’s mind, and she would have enough in her brain left to know what was happening to her. Oh, yes.
He could test the power of the captured device on people he grabbed right off the street. And after that, maybe it would be Amun’s turn.
He licked his lips. He could hardly wait.
The legions of the night seemed endless in number. The android’s abstract knowledge of the New York underclass, the fact that there were thousands of people who drifted among the glass towers and solid brownstones in an existence almost as remote from the buildings’ inhabitants as that of denizens of Mars … The abstract, digitized facts were not, somehow, adequate to describe the reality, the clusters of men who passed bottles around ash-can fires, the dispossessed whose eyes reflected flashing Christmas lights while they lived behind walls of cardboard, the insane who hugged themselves in alleyways or subway entrances, chanting the litany of the mad. It was as if a spell of evil had fallen on the city, that part of the population had been subjected to war or devastation, made homeless refugees, while the others had been enchanted so as not to see them.
The android found two dead, the last of their warmth gone from them. He left these in their newspaper coffins and went on. He found others who were dying or ill and took them to hospitals. Others ran from him. Some pretended to gaze at the bag lady’s picture, cocking the Polaroid up to look at the picture in the light of a trash-can fire, and then asked for money in return for relating a sighting that was obviously false.
The task, he thought, was almost hopeless.
He kept on.
Black and Hubbard waited outside the bag lady’s locked room. Black was sucking on his rum-and-Coke flute. “Dreams, man. Incredible dreams. Jesus. Monsters like you wouldn’t believe—lion bodies, human faces, eagle wings, every damn thing you could think of—and they were all hungry, and they all wanted to eat me. And then there was this giant thing behind them, just a shadow, like, and then … Jesus.” He gave a nervous grin and wiped his forehead. “I still break out into a sweat thinking about it. And then I realized that all the monsters were connected somehow, that they were all a part of this thing. That’s when I’d wake up screaming. It happened over and over again. I was almost ready to see the department shrinks.”
“Your dreaming mind had touched TIAMAT.”
“Yeah. That’s what Matthias—Judas—told me when he recruited me. Somehow he sensed TIAMAT was getting to me.”
Hubbard grinned his crooked grin. Black still didn’t know that Revenant had entered Black’s mind every night, putting the dreams into his mind, had made him wake screaming night after night, and driven him almost to the brink of p
sychosis so that when Judas explained what had happened to him and how the Order could make the dreams go away, the Masons would seem the only possible answer. All because the Order needed someone higher in the NYPD than Matthias, and Black was a stand-up cop who was marked for advancement.…
“And then I got blackballed.” The detective shook his head. “Balsam and the others, the old-line Masons, didn’t want a guy who’d been raised Catholic. Motherfuckers. And TIAMAT was already on its way. I still can’t believe it.”
“Being named after Francis Xavier didn’t help, I suppose.”
“At least they never found out my sister’s a nun. That would have trashed me for sure.” He finished the flute and walked toward the living room to toss the bottle in the trash. “And I got in on the second try.”
You’ll never know why, Hubbard thought. You’ll never know that Amun was using your membership as a tool against Balsam, that he wanted the former Master, with his irrational prejudices and old man’s ways and inherited mystical mumbo jumbo, out of the way entirely. How he used the decision against Black to convince Kim Toy, Red, and Revenant that Balsam had to go. And then there was the fire at the old temple, stage-managed by Amun somehow, and Amun had saved his own people from the flames, and Balsam and all his followers had died.
Hubbard remembered the explosion, the fire, the pain, the way his flesh blackened in the blowtorch flame. He’d screamed for help, seeing the giant astral figure of Amun leading his own disciples out, and if Kim Toy hadn’t insisted on going back for him he would have died then and there. Amun hadn’t trusted him fully, not then. Hubbard had just joined the Order, and Amun hadn’t had the chance to play with him yet, to enter into his brain and make him cringe, to play the endless mind games and twist him into knots with a long series of humiliations.… Yes, he thought, that’s what Amun is like. I know, because I’m that way, too.
There was a knock on the door. Hubbard admitted Judas, who was carrying the stolen tranquilizer gun in its red metal case with its OFFICIAL USE ONLY stickers. “Whew. What a bitch. I thought Captain McPherson would never let me outta there.”