The clock squirmed out of my jacket pocket and dropped to the floor. "Hope it was okay to tell," it said. The man nodded.
"So, and I repeat, who is this dude?" Deck said.
"I think," I muttered, "that he's God." It wasn't easy to say.
"Well, great, and big respect to the guy and all, but what's his name?"
"No," I said. "He's really God."
Deck looked at me, raised an eyebrow. "Hello?"
"So how come you didn't tell me yesterday?" I asked the man. "Why did you allow me to think you were an alien, and let me find out the truth from a clock?"
"Would you have believed me?"
"Probably not," I admitted.
"I don't believe it now," said Deck, unheeded.
"But you believed a talking alarm clock." The man smiled. "You see what I'm up against?" He winked at the clock. "No offense meant."
"None taken, sir."
I licked my lips. "And so the guys in gray would be?"
"Angels, obviously."
"I see. Shouldn't they be glorifying your name and stuff rather than running around LA with shotguns?"
The man shrugged. "You know how it is with angels."
"No," I said. "Actually I don't."
"Why do they all look the same?" Deck asked.
"What difference do bodies make?"
But Deck wasn't to be thrown off so easily. "Why don't they have trumpets or something instead of guns?"
"Are you kidding?" The man laughed. "Have you seen one of those things go off? You can take out an entire city block with one of those babies. I disallowed them."
"Bullshit," said Deck. "Trumpets are trumpets."
"So what do you think happened at Jericho? Trumpets work on ultrasound, same principle as the masonry cutters used on the pyramids."
"You built those?" I asked.
The man looked sheepish. "I helped out. It would have taken them forever otherwise." He shook his head wonderingly. "It was still a slow job. I must have been really bored."
"I'm going back to sleep," Deck announced. "And when I wake up, I want this nutcase out of here."
"I'm going anyway," the man said, rising to his feet. "Just like to keep an eye on how Hap's getting on."
"Wait a minute," I said. "Last time you left me and Helena with two gun-toting psychos. You're not just vanishing again."
"Actually, you'll discover I did give you some assistance in that matter," he said. "Other than that, I can't get involved. There's limits to what I can do."
"Yeah, we noticed," Deck grunted. "Like over the last couple thousand years or so."
"Not my problem," the man snapped. "You guys have to take responsibility for things once in a while."
"But how come you let—"
"Don't give me that. It's humans who fight wars, humans who pollute rivers, humans who hit little girls with cars after they've had a few too many beers. Nothing's happened until it's happened, and after that I can't undo what's been done. Don't blame me, don't blame the events. Blame yourselves."
"The angels," I said placatingly, "have two of our friends. We want them back."
"Sure you do," the man said, good humor instantly restored.
"Yeah? So? Can't you make them give them to us?"
He shook his head. "I can't make them do anything, most of the time. All I can do is promote situations, and sometimes hide things from them, occlude the solid world. They would have been on you a lot sooner if I hadn't clouded their vision at times. And now I advise you to concentrate on Stratten."
"Fuck Stratten. He can wait. I want Helena back."
"Trust me on this," the man said. "And think about Quat. Divide and rule."
"And why should we trust you?" Deck asked. "I mean, that's a really nice suit and all, but generally on our planet when someone claims he's God, we reach for the Thorazine and strait jacket."
The man sighed, looked down at the clock. The clock shrugged, as if to say "Yeah, I know. I have to deal with this all the time."
Deck and I just stood there belligerently, waiting for a sensible answer. No fucker patronizes us, even if he is a deity. We're tough like that.
"I'll give you a sign, " the man said. "Hell, I'll give you three."
He started moving his hands in an odd way, as if he were juggling without any balls. "Hap, you'll discover you can't find something, and later you'll work out why. Deck, you've already found it, and best of luck. And now, for my last trick ..."
Slowly the air above his hands started to glow, until you could see three distinct balls of light moving in a regular pattern. Within seconds these had grown into balls of orange fire, their centers so hot they were white. He juggled these for a second longer, then abruptly flicked his fingers out.
The balls turned into blue butterflies the size of small birds, which fluttered around the room for a few moments before dissolving into snow that fell slowly through the air to land and melt on the carpet.
"Good-bye," the man said, and vanished.
Deck, the clock, and I stared at the place where he'd been standing. After a while Deck coughed. "Fuckin' weirdo," he said.
AT SEVEN A.M. I was banging on Vent's door. My fists were beginning to hurt before the LCD panel flickered into life, and a rumpled face peered back at me.
"Jesus H.," Vent said with feeling. "You know. I don't do business at this time, man."
"Call it a social visit, then, " I said. "And open up."
"Social I don't do till gone noon." He yawned. "You be plumb out of luck."
"Just open the fucking door!" I shouted. And then, more quietly: "I have money."
The panel blinked off, and I waited, hopping from foot to foot on the ladder. The Dip was sleepily stirring into life down below, but I felt anything but relaxed. The man in the dark suit's advice had given me a fragment of a plan. It was a shit plan, unfortunately, and didn't go very far, but it was all I had and I wanted it started. I was hot and stressed from picking my car up from the LAX parking lot, and from the drive over to Griffith.
My current vow was that if I managed to make it through the day, I was never setting foot in a car again, and would in fact lobby Congress in an attempt to get the damn things banned from the planet for the rest of all time.
Eventually the door opened, to reveal Vent standing in a crumpled robe. "The full amount?"
"Not even close," I said. "I need something new."
"That's a low trick," he grumbled, but stepped aside to let me in.
"Got any crabdaddies?"
"Couple of real beauties," he admitted. "Give you both of them for three hundred."
"I want only one, and what I have is a hundred bucks." I handed him Deck's money. "Nevertheless, you're going to sell it to me. What's more, you are going to let me use your phone, and give me a little more time on the money I owe you."
"And why am I doing this?" he asked, bemused.
"Because God's on my side."
Vent looked at me for a while, then he sighed. He traipsed into the back of his den, where he kept the secured fridge, and started rooting around inside. Meanwhile I grabbed his phone and punched in REMtemps's number.
Sabrina answered the phone on the first ring despite the early hour, a firm believer in the corporate maxim that being first in the office is worthy of some kind of awe. Personally I regard it as worthy of pity, at most. "Sabrina, it's Hap Thompson," I said.
There was a pause. "What do you want?"
"I need you to do something for me."
"I told Mr. Stratten what you said already," she replied, her voice dull. "He didn't seem especially frightened. And no, he's not back in the office, and no, I don't know where he is."
"I need REMtemps's mail code," I said. "Plus the seed key."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Just give it to me."
"Are you going to hurt the company?" Her voice sounded strained.
"No," I answered as gently as I could be bothered. For a split second I had a glimpse into Sabrina's world, where the corporation was your family and you believed in its slogans and lies, and you had the energy to put up prissy signs in the kitchen area ordering people to tidy up after themselves and not to steal other people's milk.
She told me. I wrote them on a piece of paper and set the phone down. Vent was standing behind me, holding a computer disk. I handed him the piece of paper, and he sat down at a computer that was isolated from the others lying around. He stuck the disk in the machine, let it settle, and then typed in the information I'd given him. We watched the screen as the file on the disk absorbed the information, grew fat, and gave birth to another file. Within seconds this was big enough to eat the original, leaving just one crabdaddy again. A four-figure code appeared on the screen, and I scribbled it onto my palm.
Vent stood up, gave me the disk. "Use this wisely and with wiseness," he said. "And here's a present."
He reached into the folds of his robe and pulled out a gun. I took it, stared at him. "What's that for?"
He scratched his head. "Don't know, to be honest. The fridge told me to be nice to you. Never happened before, in fact, the fucking thing's never even spoken to me until now, so . . . jeez, it's early and I can't think straight and I don't know why I'm doing it, okay?"
"Thanks," I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. "I got to go. I'll get you your money."
"Just take care," Vent said. "And remember my interest rate."
I TRIED TO THINK of somewhere safe to park the car, and decided the basement of my building was as good a place as any. On the way I called Travis. He said that five blackmail victims had received phone calls from a man called Quat, and that the whole lot of them were all now under loose police guard. The lieutenant also reminded me he wanted to see me at the station that evening—and that if I wasn't there there'd be an APB out on me within seconds. But he at least gave me one piece of news that was positive, if a little weird. When the cops in Cresota Beach arrived at the school, they'd found no sign of any bodies. Three hours later two REMtemps security men were found in a car in a Jacksonville parking lot—having apparently shot each other.
Another sign, I guess, the man in the dark suit tweaking behind the scenes. At least it meant my situation hadn't gotten any worse. I tried to make another call, but got only an answering machine. So I called Melk, got some information, and noted it down for later.
When I was parked and the doors were locked, I took the disk out of my pocket and stuck it in the drive. Then I flicked over to the Net and drove, taking care not to glance in the rearview mirror.
The main gate to the adult area was snarled up; two Net Nannies were working over a car full of teenage boys, who looked terrified. The Nannies scare me, too, to be honest—beetling old crones, complete with thick, shapeless bodies, red faces, and gray hair done up in buns—and so I backed up and went another way.
As I approached Quat's neighborhood I slowed, not knowing if he might have put up any defenses in case I tried to take revenge on him for stealing my money and screwing me over. I stopped at the end of the street, but I couldn't see anything that looked like it was going to cause trouble. Which pissed me off a little, I've got to admit. What—he thought I didn't have what it took to come cause him a little inconvenience?
Mistake. What I had sitting in the back of my car would do a hell of a lot more than cause a little inconvenience. Crabdaddies are the ultimate meltdown on the Net, the acme of vindictive destructiveness. They make normal computer viruses look like stubbing your virtual toe. Crabdaddies are designed by hackers to fuck up other hackers, and so you have to go the whole hacker mile and deliver them personally. I'd used one only once before, and I hadn't expected to again.
I took a deep breath and got out of the car.
Sitting in the backseat was something that looked like a desiccated skeleton dressed in a moldering black suit. A few fine, dry hairs stuck up out of its skull, but otherwise the bone looked like it had been licked clean in the grave by generations of creeping things. The remnants of bony hands poked out of cobweb-strewn cuffs, and a big, hairy spider sat in the gaping mouth. It smelled of mustiness and shadows, yellow moonlight and rustling winds high up in the branches of ancient gnarled trees.
I opened the back door. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the crabdaddy's head turned slowly to look at me. Its eye sockets were empty, but the scrape of the vertebrae grinding against each other was enough to make my skin crawl. The thing is, something like this in the real world wouldn't be frightening. Well, obviously, it would be if it were real, but not if it were a fake or an animatronic, and that's the point. Crabdaddies are Net things: When you're in there, they're very real. There's no use telling yourself they're actually only a file on a disk. The real world stops being the benchmark, and Halloween comes true.
"Okay," I said quietly. "Before I give you the code, I want you to understand something. You are to enter only that house over there." I pointed, and the head swiveled silently to look at Quat's site. "And the code's going to give you only fifteen seconds, so make the most of it. Also, don't hurt the dog. Understand?"
The head tilted slowly down, then up.
I took a couple of steps back, turned my hand so I could see the number I'd written there. "Eight. One. Seven," I said, and then took another pace back, just in case. "Six."
It didn't even come out the door, just vaulted straight over the front seats and onto the hood. It had barely landed before it was hurtling toward Quat's house, body morphing as it went. As it changed into the true crabdaddy shape—sort of like a decayed elephant turned inside out and painted with blood, but not as cute—it began to scream, the sound like a modem turned up to a billion decibels.
Quat's dog took one look at it, then vanished. I jumped in the car, swung a quick turn, and drove like hell.
I heard the sound of it smashing through the front door, and an explosion as the first internal wall fell down. Then, as a fiery glow started to burn out my rearview mirror, I flipped out of the Net.