"What?"
"A man," said the Count. He started out of the market and back to the main boulevard. Spyder and Lulu followed.
"Don't feel badly. This is just a chat between friends, not a reprimand. If you feel lost and foolish sometimes, don't worry about that, either. All great men begin as fools. It's one of life's little jokes."
"Spyder, he just called you a joke of the universe. Kick his ass," said Lulu. She put an arm around Spyder's shoulders. Count Non smiled at her.
"Food for thought," said Spyder. "We'll cover more ground if we split up for a while. I'll meet you back at the corner where we started."
"I was just f**king with you, man," said Lulu, but Spyder was already rounding the corner in the other -direction.
Thirty One
The Future
In a street of nightmares, Spyder saw the Black Clerks.
The street had been roofed over, like the souks of Morocco. The sound attracted Spyder to the spot, a strange and deliberate animal wail-screams extracted with mechanical precision.
Inside the dark, cramped street was a gallery of horrors. Men turned over bonfires on huge metal spits. Women were crushed under rolling boulders studded with surgical blades. Children screamed as spiders and over-sized ants tore at their young flesh. Terrified people were tormented up and down the length of the street, shrieking and tearing at the arms of passersby as they were chased by snarling animals or angry mobs. Spyder took a breath and reminded himself that none of this was real. It was just the collective memories of bad dreams, the night terrors these poor saps could never forget. It reminded him of paintings by Bruegel and Goya, and, while he tried to work his way around the thought and not let it invade his consciousness, the memories of the paintings made him think of the underworld. If this is what Hell was going to be like, Spyder wasn't sure he could take it. Of course, he was going to be blindfolded so, unlike here, he wouldn't have to actually look at Hell. It was a small comfort, but Spyder was ready for any comfort he could get.
At the far end of the street, Spyder spotted the Black Clerks. At first, he took them to be part of another nightmare and stopped to watch them pulling the guts out of a cop who had been crucified across a writhing pile of drug-starved junkies, their withered limbs (oozing pus and blood from running sores) strained against the barbed wire that held them together. The head Clerk, the one who always held the reptile-skin ledger, looked at Spyder and beckoned him over.
"You are quite a long way from home?" said the Clerk, in his peculiar singsong cadence.
"You see me. I thought you were someone's bad dream."
"We're as real as you?"
"How about him? Is he real, too?" asked Spyder, inclining his head toward the tormented cop.
"He thought he could escape us," said the Clerk. "Sometimes it is not enough to take what is ours from the body, but to insinuate ourselves in the mind and memory. A warning and object lesson for others? This is our burden."
Spyder started to walk away.
"I hope you aren't running away, trying to cheat providence?"
"No way, José2e I'm true blue," said Spyder.
"You don't wish to stay and watch us work?"
One of the Clerks had placed an elaborate metal brace into the policeman's open mouth and was studiously sawing off his lower jaw.
"Why would I want to see that?"
"Because you're lying. And most people want to know their future."
Spyder backed away and quickly left the street of nightmares.
Thirty Two
Dominions
Before this world, there were other worlds. Before this universe, there were other -universes. Before the gods you know now, there were plenty of other gods.
Gods like to think of themselves as eternal. It's what gets them through the eons, but there are only two true eternals: birth and death. Everything else is junk washed up on the beach. The tide goes out and the pretty pink shells, the gum wrappers and the dead jellyfish are all washed away. Gods and universes come and go this way, too, but a living god knows some tricks. A god can mold energy and matter into anything it wants, or nothing at all. Gods can appear in an instant. Gods can disappear faster than the half-life of Thulium-145.
To save themselves, Gods can scheme and they can hide. Some Gods learned to hold their breath and float like kelp in the elemental chaos that rules the roost when one universe ends and the next hasn't quite kicked in.
Each of these trickster gods thought she or he alone had outwitted Creation by crouching in shadows of the universal attic. Then a young God called Jehovah took a band of rebel angels and tossed them, like week old fish, from his kingdom into the dark between the worlds. As the burning angels fell, the old gods laughed and heard each other. For the first in a long time, knew they weren't alone.
Worlds collapsed as the old gods, called the Dominions, got to know each other and learn one another's favorite games. Galaxies flickered and went out like cheap motel light bulbs. Whole Spheres of existence burned like phosphorous. Though this took a few million years in human terms, it was just something to do over lunch for the Dominions.
But the universe had its own agenda. When the Dominions tried to slip back into our universe from their refuge in chaos, they took a header out of the starry firmament, every bit as violent and humiliating as Lucifer's fall from Heaven. Not coincidentally, the Dominions fell along the same path as the exiled angels, straight into Hell. But unlike the Lucifer's hordes, they didn't stop there. The mass of these beings was so great, that they fell through Hell out the other side, into a dead universe, one whose last echo hadn't yet faded away.
There was no life in this other universe except the Dominions themselves. Nothing to destroy but empty worlds. No one to torment, but each other. And no new games to play. The Dominions loved games. That's why they devoured stars. The best games, to them, were the ones played in the dark where only the sounds of screams and the taste and smell of evanescing lives let you know when you were winning. Their plan was to go from world to world, playing different games until there was no one left to play with. Then, they'd hide in the dark between universes until a new universe came into being, and they'd start all over again. Now, however, there was no one to play with and no way out. They'd fallen out of the living universe and didn't know the way back in.
In some stories, the Dominions have grown even madder in their isolation. They slash their empty worlds. They burn each other. But nothing makes them happy. When the Dominions sleep, they dream about us and how sad they are that we're so far away and not able to play. Sometimes they gnash their planet-size teeth in the dark. They're always looking, scratching at the edges of time and space for a way back into our universe. Sometimes they find a crack and peek through at us. When your skin goes cold and you feel like you're being watched, but no one is there, it's them. We're their drive-in double feature, with a Cherry Coke and free refills on popcorn.
Thirty Three
The Killer Inside Me
The plaza was full of papers, kicked up by sluggish cross-winds. The papers were pages from old books and yellowed newspapers. Spyder stood at the bottom of a mountain of books taller than the highest ziggurat in Berenice.
He picked up a leather-bound volume embossed in gold Cyrillic on the cover. Inside the book were equations, a swamp of calculus problems and diagrams. He tossed the book back on the pile and picked up a paperback copy of The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. It had the same cover as the edition he'd read as a teenager. Spyder hadn't seen a copy in years. He read a page at random and felt the same tingle at the base of his spine that he'd felt when he'd first run across Thompson's spare, hardened-steel prose at fifteen. Spyder wondered what would happen if he put the book in his pocket and just walked away.
"An interesting choice," said a man around the far side of the pile. "Considering the choices available."
Spyder craned his neck to see a short, round man in a kind of leather khaftan. Over the khaftan yards of barbed wire had been looped, encasing the man in spiny metal. On his face, the man wore a wooden mask depicting some grinning Japanese demon. Spyder remembered that Shrike had said something about masks. Some of the humans in Berenice wore masks, she'd said, to keep lost memories from attaching themselves to them and becoming false memories of a life they'd never led.
"I had this book when I was younger," said Spyder, tossing the Thompson back on the pile.
"I knew there was a reason and the reason was emotional, rather than an intellectual attachment. You picked up the book which moved your heart, not some great work of literature meant to impress others."
"I was a junior varsity criminal and had a few run-ins with the cops, so the book was a big deal to me back then."
"Of course it was!" said the round man. "If you enjoyed that, may I show you some other, rarer volumes at my stall nearby?"
"I'm just passing through. I'm not buying."
"No, no. No buying. Just looking. Come. It's a pleasure to meet a man of similar interests. I guarantee you will enjoys my wares. Books never written. Paintings never painted. Films never committed to celluloid. All only ever existed in the minds and hearts of the artists who dreamed them." The man turned and said to Spyder, "I am Bulgarkov."
"Spyder."
"Are you Spider Clan?"
"Whatever." Spyder followed Bulgarkov. "Nice zoot suit. You expecting a stampede?"
"Are you referring to my garments? The streets are full of dreams and men, two equally dangerous organisms. The mask keeps the hungry memories of men at bay and the wire keeps away the men themselves."
"I don't think I'm going to have time to look at anything," said Spyder, intending to leave the man at his stall. Spyder picked up a copy of Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler. He vaguely remembered the book. Chandler had died before finishing it, but left notes and a partial manuscript. His publisher had hired some other hack to finish the novel years later. There was no second name on this Poodle Springs title page. Spyder flipped to the ending. It wasn't what he remembered in the patched-together version he'd read.