III.
Twenty minutes later Hamlet and the ghost lay in relative safety in a chipmunk burrow, sandwiched between the hibernating occupants for warmth. The burrow was dark and more than a little stuffy, but better by far than the exposed lake surface.
“Pity about the Prospero,” Hamlet lamented. “That damn boat took a lot to put together.”
“Boat?” the ghost snorted. “What about my biplane?”
“I always told you you’d wind up crashing it.”
“And I always told you that my parachute would get me out of anything. Lucky for me I was right—surprised myself, how fast I could finish putting it on when I had to. But Hobart . . .”
“Hobart is alive,” Hamlet said. In the darkness he could see how startled the ghost was at this news. “Nobody’s really sure what saved him.”
“Has he told everyone what happened to us?”
“He hasn’t spoken a word of sense since he was found. Brain fever.”
“And Zephyr? Is she all right?”
“Besides being in mourning for a certain undead friend of mine, and worried about Hobart’s health . . . yes, she’s doing well. When she sees you she’ll be even better. Now I figure tomorrow morning, if we try cutting across the lake just before dawn—”
“No,” the ghost told him.
“No?”
“You think I’ve been playing dead this past month just for fun? I’ve been trying to figure out what’s happening. Somebody’s killing sprites, and it looks like that same somebody is gearing up for a major war, but I don’t know who or why yet. If you and I rush out to sound the alarm, it might just force the enemy to attack ahead of schedule, before we even know what we’re up against. Safer to stay dead a while longer, keep our eyes open.”
“If we wait too long . . .”
“We’ll try not to.”
A silence.
“So, Puck,” Hamlet continued. “What were those things back at the ship? That’s the first time I ever met a rat who could fence.”
“Mmm,” Puck agreed. “Sounds like something out of one of Hobart’s stories. About the Great War.”
Hamlet shook his head. “Couldn’t be. Rasferret’s dead, you know that.”
“Mmm. But we’re dead too, aren’t we? Funny thing, I never realized until just recently how much a corpse can do.”
ON THE ROAD
I.
Far west of Ithaca, in the uncharted wasteland of rural Ohio, Luther was talking to the Devil.
A full chronicle of the mongrel’s travels from the Wisconsin outback would make a book in itself. Suffice it to say that the weather, the great distance, and the lack of companionship had made it a much harsher journey than his and Blackjack’s initial Heaven-trek. Not the least of the obstacles in Luther’s path had been Lake Michigan, which had balked him for over a week. Then one night a beautiful woman with a voice like music and a silver whistle on a chain around her throat had led him onto a ship in Milwaukee Harbor; he had crossed to the far shore in a cargo hold laden with case upon case of Meisterbrau, a ready wet dream if only Z.Z. Top could have been there. He had scavenged his way through Michigan and down to the Buckeye State, where this morning a quick-handed dairy farmer had tried to indoctrinate him into the ranks of the domesticated. The fellow had actually got a rope leash around Luther’s neck when the dog broke and ran, charging across frost-covered pasture while a shadowy groundhog looked on in alarm. A quarter mile flew by and then Luther, rope still trailing behind him, leapt through a stand of bushes and discovered—surprise!—a low, steep bank and a slow-moving river beyond. He had plunged toward the water, only to be jerked back when the end of the makeshift leash caught on a bush.
Luther did not know what sort of swimmer he would have made, but at the moment it was the leash that was the greatest threat to him. The river bank turned out to be crumbly and unclimbable; unable to go up or down, Luther perched precariously near the water’s edge and fought to keep his balance. The wind came, cajoling the bush into lifting its branches, drawing the leash noose-tight.
Beginning to choke, Luther gazed into the depths of the river as if he expected it to rise up out of its bed and untie him. The river’s only response was to show him a picture of a silly little dog with a rope around its throat. Luther turned away and tried to scramble up the bank. The bank tumbled him over, slid him right back down; now he was nose to nose with the other dog, and the leash had pulled so tight that neither of them could breathe at all.
As he watched, the image in the water rippled and began to change. It grew; no longer was it a tousled mongrel, but a Purebred, large, white, and sharp of tooth. Luther tried to back away but could not. His old nemesis addressed him in tones of brash fury, bold and triumphant.
Mange! he cried.
“Dragon . . .” Luther’s legs seemed to flow out from under him. “No.”
Did you think I forgot you, mange? I didn’t. You’re all I think about. And I’m coming for you.
“You can’t. The ‘catchers took you . . .”
They took me, Dragon agreed. They took me and put me in a cage, and there was a mange there just like you, and what do you suppose I did to him? I’m in another cage now, but I’ll get out. I’m almost out already.
“No. You’ll never find me, even if you do get out.”
Of course I’ll find you. We’re both going to the same place, but I’m closer. I’ll kill the cat first, and when you get to The Hill I’ll be waiting there with his corpse. . . .
A sudden gust of wind drew the rope so tight that Luther became convinced his head had separated from the rest of his body. Tears filled his eyes, and as darkness drew down around him he found himself facing another apparition, infinitely large, a feral hound composed entirely of light and shadow. Its eyes were the color of mortality.
You know who I am, don’t you, dog child? the Hound thought into him. Terror and wonder warred for Luther’s attention.
“Raaq,” he answered. “You’re Raaq, you’re the Deceiver, you’re the Devil.”
I am Raaq, the Hound agreed. The Ender of Life. When should I end your life, dog child? Today? Now?
“No,” Luther pleaded. “I have to get back—back to Heaven.”
The Hound made a sound like human laughter. Heaven. And what will you do there, when your enemy comes? Will you fight to save your life? Kill, if necessary?
“I’ll never kill another dog. Whatever it costs me. I won’t let you into my heart.”
It’s not your heart I’m after . . . how little you understand me. But as for this place you think of as Heaven, what makes you think you deserve to return there? You were given Questions, I believe. . . .
“Questions?”
Surely you remember. Five Questions they gave you. How many answers have you found, dog child? Do you know the nature of the Divine? The meanings of life and love?
Luther had no answers. His mind, his self, was dwindling down to a point, a candle flame which must soon be snuffed out.
What about the Fourth Question, dog child?
“Fourth . . . ?”
The Fourth Question. Answer me, dog child: Which is the superior breed of canine?
“Superior breed?” Old anger flared, giving Luther a last surge of strength. His reply was swift and indignant: “The superior breed of canine is the breed that admits it can’t answer the Fourth Question, because there is no answer and it’s a bad Question in the first place. Which must make me the superior breed.”
And what breed are you, dog child?
Dwindling: “No breed at all.”
Again, the sound like human laughter.
Live a little longer, then.
Somewhere Else, a rope loosed itself from a branch; Luther plunged head first into the river. For a moment all was struggling and water, and next he was lying on the far bank, the leash gone from around his neck.
The mongrel’s senses came back slowly. When they did, his first thought was not of the Devil, but of the Purebred.
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I’ll kill the cat first.
“Blackjack.”
Luther was back on the Road as soon as he could walk.
II.
Tyson Riddle, a Class Two animal handler at the Adams Research Station, had once dated a vegetarian for a period lasting about two weeks. Actually, he tended to think of it as simple fucking rather than something more fancy, for he was damned if he’d ever held the slightest shred of respect for the woman. Busty, yes, but more than a little too educated for Riddle’s taste, and when she said she wasn’t a meat-cater, she meant it in every way possible. Their fling had ended in a scuffle during lunch one afternoon—he’d been stewing a clam, she slicing a cucumber—when Riddle pointed out testily that the average meat source could at least put up a token defense, scream or whatever when you went to kill it, whereas a typical fruit or vegetable didn’t have such options. Exasperated with the bargain-basement I.Q. she’d been sharing a bed with, the vegetarian set her pacifist ideals aside for a moment and became violent. After a brief exchange of kitchen utensils and other not-nailed-down objects, the two sweethearts slapped each other good-bye and went their separate ways.
Now, sipping coffee in the Research Station’s receiving office and licking his lips over this month’s “lesbian” pictorial in Penthouse, Tyson Riddle was reminded of the long-lost Lady Meatless by a coincidental birthmark, and felt a certain warmth from the knowledge that at this very institution, animals were tortured daily in the name of science, many of them quite unnecessarily.
He leaned back and put his feet up on a desk, kicking a stack of battered paperbacks. On top was a dog-eared edition of Old Yeller (fully illustrated); beneath that, and more to the point, a copy of the helpful AMA booklet, Save the Head: A Guide to Handling Rabid Animals. Riddle was in charge of the Station’s dog kennels. He hated dogs.
A truck had parked out front of receiving and a deliverer named Abby Rasmussen was unloading stock from Boston Surgical Supply. Riddle put down the lesbians for a moment and watched her through the window. Rasmussen did not remind him at all of the vegetarian—she had long blond hair, for one thing, while Meatless had been a coal-hole brunette—and despite a lack of major cleavage, Riddle thought she was pretty damn sexy. When she came in to have him sign for the shipment, he told her as much.
“So how about it, Rasmussen?” he said. “You ever get lonely, out on the road all day?”
Rasmussen, who had spent a summer doing recruitment for the C.I.A. and found Riddle about as attractive as a Sandinista with an anal fixation, sucked reflectively on a Tootsie Pop.
“Well I’ll tell you,” she replied. “The way I see it, there’s three states of being: there’s lonely, there’s desperate, and there’s the point where you might as well save your self-respect and become a nun. Catch my drift, Tyson?”
After she had driven away, Riddle sat back down and got his stiletto out of the bottom drawer of the desk. The weapon sported an eight-inch blade and had come ready to assemble from a mail order company down South. Riddle clicked it open and used the point to doodle on the Penthouse pictorials. He stopped himself after five minutes, though; he was only a lukewarm misogynist.
He was brewing a fresh cup of coffee and considering whether he should notify someone about the delivery—or even get back to work himself—when the phone rang.
“Receiving. What do you want?”
The voice on the other end of the line sounded vaguely foreign.
“There’s a dog loose in the kennels,” it said.
“Huh? Who is this?”
“You’ve been sleeping on the job, Mr. Riddle. The door to one of the dog pens is standing wide open. I’m Looking at it right now. Big dog, too . . .”
“You can’t be looking at it,” responded Riddle, who had no patience for pranks. “There’s no phone over there. Now who the fuck is this?”
“Ah, such sweet language. But do have a sunny day, Mr. Riddle.”
The caller hung up. Riddle slammed the phone down, then went to the window and looked out. The shed housing the kennels was at the far end of the Station complex. It was a small building, relatively; Adams’ main volume was in rabbits and smaller rodents.
“Shit . . .” Well, he had to go out there anyway and clean some of the pens. Foregoing the second cup of coffee, Riddle grabbed his jacket, slipped the stiletto absentmindedly into his back pocket, and started across the compound. He dragged a personal dark cloud of ill temper along with him, and did not care or find it strange when he met not so much as a single coworker on the way to the kennels. On another day, he might have noticed that the Station had suddenly taken on the deserted air of a ghost town.
The kennels weren’t deserted, that was for sure. As he stepped into the shed, Riddle was greeted by a chorus of barks and yaps and the just-trying-to-be-friendly smell of dogshit. He flicked on the lights and yelled at his charges to shut the fuck up, which did very little good.
The shed was long and narrow, divided into two aisles, both lined with pens on either side. Looking down the first aisle Riddle saw nothing out of the ordinary, no dogs wandering around loose. The open pen was in the second aisle, on the left at the far end. The door was indeed standing wide, but still there was no sign of the occupant.
“Well, well,” Riddle muttered. “Guess I owe you one, whoever you are.”
Of course he wasn’t in a good mood to begin with, yet of all the pens that could have been open there was no other that would have displeased him more. Unless his memory was on vacation—and in this instance it wasn’t—the resident of that pen was a fully grown male Irish Wolfhound, acquired just recently from a shelter in Eastern New York State and not yet slated for any experiments. In other words, not injected with anything or operated upon in any way that might slow it down if it decided to go for him. And the Wolfhound was a mean motherfucker, Riddle knew that well enough from having to feed it twice a day.
He went into the maintenance closet and unscrewed a mop handle. Holding it like a spear, Riddle advanced on the Wolfhound’s pen. He was halfway down the aisle when the lights went out.
There was no dying flicker, no flash of a bulb burning out; the light simply shut off. The only remaining illumination came from a high-set window near the peak of the roof that let in a few feeble rays of sunlight. Riddle froze for a good half a minute, and then, ignoring the basic lesson that every horror film tries to teach us, he continued down the aisle.
That the Wolfhound was still in its pen there could be no doubt—the shed had been locked, and dogs have a notoriously hard time with dead-bolts—and Riddle could simply have used the mop handle to shut the open door. Because the Wolfhound’s pen was silent, however, and because all the other dogs persisted in making a racket, Riddle did doubt. Standing directly in front of the pen, he half-crouched, still holding the mop handle at the ready. He saw no movement in the dark interior of the pen. Laying the mop handle aside, he bent down all the way to have a closer look. Somewhere near, the shade of Alfred Hitchcock shook his head in despair.
Riddle was on his hands and knees with his head inside the pen when the growling started. The animal handler’s eyes finally decided to adjust to the dark, and a huge white shape materialized before him as if by magic. The Wolfhound was poised to spring.
“Oh whore,” Riddle said. He remembered the knife in his back pocket and went for it.
Didn’t make it.
“Very nice,” Mr. Sunshine said. “Very graphic.”
FINAL PREPARATIONS: FEBRUARY TO MARCH
I.
February became March, and The Hill entered a period of waiting.
Rasferret the Grub had suffered more than a little over the loss of the Messenger. Not only did it deny him a flying pair of eyes, but his occasional trips to The Boneyard to create more troops had become much more difficult and dangerous without a handy pair of wings. To further keep him in his place Mr. Sunshine put a blind spot in the Grub’s magic Sense, to make sure he wouldn’t go looking for George until he w
as damn well supposed to. Paranoia did the rest; unable to tell where his human opponent was, he became too cautious to make further moves against the sprites, even when his Rat Army grew large enough to have a fair chance warring openly.
Hamlet and Puck, who might also have triggered the War prematurely, kept finding new reasons to play dead. Every time they were on the verge of deciding to come in and warn their fellows, Mr. Sunshine fed them second thoughts. Hobart, meanwhile, slept on in coma, uttering no more prophecies.
Waiting for the Ides to arrive, Mr. Sunshine concentrated his attention in the final week on George, Aurora, Ragnarok, and the brothers of Rho Alpha Tau.
II.
On Monday, the eleventh of March, Aurora Smith woke to the sound of exploding glassware. She rushed out to George’s kitchen and found the storyteller sweeping up the remnants of a McDonaldland drinking glass; bits and pieces of the Hamburglar were everywhere, and fresh coffee puddled on the linoleum.
“My Uncle Erasmus told me never to put hot liquids in anything but a mug,” George commented as she came in. “Now I remember why.”
Two plates of pancakes and plumped Ball Park franks sat unobstrusively on the stove. Aurora raised an eyebrow.
“George,” she admonished him. “You aren’t supposed to cook breakfast.”
“Oh no? What century were you raised in?”
“The Twentieth—the one where people are supposed to take turns. You made breakfast yesterday morning, and the day before. . . .”
“So I’m selfish.” He dumped the glass shards into the kitchen waste-basket and mopped at the spilled coffee with a dishrag. “I like watching you sleep. You’re a beautiful sleeper, you know that? Watched you for half an hour after I woke up, was going to watch you some more if the smell of pancakes didn’t get you.”
George looked up and she was blushing, holding a terrycloth bathrobe closed around her throat with one slender hand. After over two months they were still new enough to each other that Aurora could be shy at times, and her shyness never failed to move him.