Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (2 page)

Same goes for the waaaay-beyond-hallucinatory “Atwater,” the hilarious gambling saga “His Station and Four Aces” (named after Cody’s favorite poker-playing dog painting), and “In His Wake,” which finally takes psychotic post-rockstar deathwish cult worship precisely as far as it has always needed to go.

The rest of the stories just expand the staggering range of what a crazed mind can conceive, when it pumps itself up beyond ordinary mortal comprehension.

Consider this a Bizarro workout regimen, designed to push your own deepest threshold of weirdness, pumping molten iron with one eye on Dali’s clock, the other watching unexpected muscles burst through your own exploding brainscape.

Getting smarter.

And laughing all the way.

As David Mueller crossed the dead lawn to his father’s house, he thought the white, withered face in the upstairs bedroom window—his window—was a leftover Halloween decoration, and it struck him as strange that his father would have put up such a thing in April, but then people do weird things right before they die, and Dad was weirder than most.

He looked under the big terracotta garden gnome on the porch, but found only a key-shaped patch of rust among the hills of insect husks. A car horn blared “La Cucaracha” somewhere nearby, and a salvo of pops that might have been the low-rider’s exhaust or the driver silencing a critic. God, the neighborhood had changed…

The door wasn’t even shut.

The family must have been here. Nobody had called him about Dad being sick. He’d found out from the lawyers, and he knew his cousins and aunts and uncles would not hesitate to loot the place. Anything of value would be long gone, and they were welcome to it, if it meant he didn’t have to see them. He hadn’t come to steal. He wanted only what was his, whatever relics of his childhood were still entombed in this house.

The stink of moldy bread and formaldehyde rolled out on the porch. He left the door open and went inside, skin knitting in goosebumps at the unseasonable chill, eyes aching to see in the dark.

From the atrium, forking fire-trails wended back into a shadowy hinterland of piled junk; household cast-offs and garbage rubbing against odd treasures of pure distilled memory, like the faces of celebrities peeking out of a concentration camp body-pit. A cocktail dress of Mother’s, still bagged from a long-extinct dry cleaner; a tattered periodic table from Dad’s high school, to which someone had added, then erased, over a dozen new elements; David’s old board games,
Risk
,
Mouse Trap
,
Go To The Head Of The Class…

He thought coming back might rekindle something ugly inside him, and sighed with relief that he felt nothing he couldn’t handle. The rooms were too dark, too deep in the trash of a life he’d escaped, to haunt him.

So what about the mask?

The phantom he thought he’d seen in the window, as any therapist worth his billing would have told him, was to be expected. He must be feeling some anxiety, somewhere deep down, and if it wore his old mummy mask from Halloween, 1974, so be it.

Mom took him trick-or-treating, the new rubber mask flapping around on his face so he couldn’t see, and a hundred yards of coffee-stained Ace bandages tightly wound over his pajamas. When the sadist at the first house answered the door in a werewolf mask and howled in his face, David ran home screaming with only hot chocolate to show for his labors, and all of it in his shorts. Mom took his mask and the bag and went out to fill it, and in the morning it was discovered that someone had dealt the sadist’s house and car a stiff Grade AA egging.

That was Mom. The cancer that took her away erased her bit by bit, but the last thing it took was her smile. With her gone, the house was as good as empty. There was only Dad…

He threaded a path through the boxes and bags and ziggurats of newspapers, going to the stairs. Best get this over with before dark, before he choked up—

And there it was on the floor, at the foot of the stairs, flat and bereft of menace, like a spent condom. He picked it up. The brittle rubber cracked and coated his hands. Well, why not? Dad never threw anything away.

“Your mask sucks,” said a little voice. “Mine is better.”

David looked around as a kid-sized figure jumped down the stairs and alighted atop a pile of junk. The boy—it looked and sounded and dressed like a boy—had an oily brown paper bag on his head, with crude eyeholes and a jagged shark-mouth torn rather than cut out of the front.

Crap, he thought, when his pulse settled back down. His cousins were still here. But then he noticed something odd about the boy’s clothes. They were old—thrift store old, and not well cared-for. The red corduroy overalls were cut off and sloppily hemmed at the knees, and the ugly striped velour sweater he wore underneath bore the unmistakable color-blindness of the Seventies.

A Garanimals outfit; Mom bought it for David at Sears when he was eight, for school picture day. He almost laughed. Were his cousins so destitute that they dressed their kids in the trash from his attic?

“OK, you scared me. Now, who are you, and what are you doing here? Are you one of Aunt Mimi’s grandkids?”

The bag rustled on the boy’s head as he bobbed up and down in a pantomime laughing fit, then turned to face him. Through the crude eyehole in the mask, David saw a cornflower blue eye pinned by the light. “Those assholes left. They took the TV.”

“Yeah, they’re real assho—” David started to agree, but then who the hell was this, anyway? “Take the mask off,” he said, but the boy sprang off and scuttled behind a bureau and into the dining room.

David followed, feeling idiotic. He was not, had never been, able to talk to children. He froze in the doorway, unhinged by the sight of the dining room.

The dinner table was the site of a derelict city of glass, all manner of retorts, alembics, glass and rubber tubes, burners and ventilator hoods gerry-rigged to accordion tents over the window. He looked under the table, but a pile of books and magazines filled every inch of space. When Dad retired from teaching, he cleaned out his old lab with the school’s blessing. All of it had been junk, but Dad had been able to part with none of it.
Things
were what he’d lived for—

The buffet cupboards flew open and the boy uncoiled out of the impossibly small space, but David had him cornered. He ducked to field him like a line drive, but the boy squirmed through his hands, leaving the torn paper bag in his grip. David stumbled into the table, toppling a domino-array of glass beakers into each other, musical shards everywhere.

The boy glowered at him over the ruined experiment.

His hair was every color, a ragpile wig made of barbershop sweepings—brown and black and blonde, shot through with ball-lightning streaks of silver and white. The face underneath was soap carved with shadows, whiter and more artificial than the mummy mask he’d been wearing at the window. The sunken, dour slash of mouth puckered in a cruel, tight-lipped smile. “What do you think you’re doing here?”

“Me? Who the hell are you? What’s your name?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, David.”

The boy ducked through a beaded curtain into the living room, and David followed. The little asshole had to be some neighborhood crackpot who moved in after Dad died. Kids never did anything this bold alone, though. “Where do you live?”

“Here, stupid.”

“Who are your friends?”

“Don’t have any. Dad was my best friend.”

“Where’s your Dad?”

“He’s dead, dummy. He always said you would be too chicken to come back until he was gone.”

“Boy, you have until I count three to get out of my father’s house.” David felt as threatening to the boy as a squirt gun on a hot summer day.

“So, are you queer? Dad always said he thought you’d turn out queer.”

“Get out!”

The boy went over to the mantel, stretched and took the lid off the tarnished golden urn that held pride of place in the center. Mom’s ashes. “Get away from there…”

The boy reached up and his little white hand dipped into the urn. David charged him, stumbled over a mound of papers stuffed into old shopping bags. The boy jumped away just as David closed in. “Get away from my mother!” He grabbed the urn and looked inside. If one mote of ash was spilled—

But there were no ashes. The urn was brimming with Brach’s grape candies and peppermints, bloated and half-burst with rot. The boy noisily unwrapped one and popped it in his mouth, swirled his purple tongue at David and bounded up the stairs.

David went to the foot of the stairs, far enough. This wasn’t his problem. Dad had taken in a crazy runaway in his declining years. It was a job for the men with the butterfly nets, but he was so angry, he couldn’t just put it down. “Where are your real parents?

The boy whooped, hopped down to the first landing. “My Dad is Dr. Warren Mueller.”

“Wrong, kid.
My
Dad was Warren Mueller, and he wasn’t a doctor. He was a high school chemistry teacher.”

“You’re half-right, David,” the boy sneered, stinging him with the dismissive remark Dad always mumbled when David tried to impress him. “
My
Dad was a Sixth Degree Doctor of the Great Work. Jeez, you didn’t really know him at all.”

Oh
, David thought acidly,
I guess I didn’t, at that
. He’d tried, of course, calls and cards at Christmas, even offering to fly out to visit, but Dad had sounded like he always did—indifferent, irritable to be taken away from his pet obsessions, so David had left him to it. “How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.”

David edged a step closer to the boy, hands fluttering behind his back. “How old are you?”

The boy leaned closer, almost within reach. “How old do you think?”

“About eleven.”

“Ha! Shows what you know! I’ve been eleven for six years!”

Enough of this. “Where’s the phone?”

“Aunt Mimi took it.”

“You can’t stay here. You have to leave.”
Closer…

“Why don’t you make me?”

David fought the urge to jump at the boy. “My Dad is dead, and you’re going to have to go back to wherever you came from.”

The boy thought this terribly funny, even if no one had taught him to laugh properly. “I came from a Philosopher’s Egg. I can’t go back.”

“What kind of bullshit has he been feeding you?”

“I am a stone, but not a stone. Don’t you know anything?”

David tried to look slow, stupid. It came all too naturally. “About what?”

“About alchemy, stupid! Base metal into gold. Dad was right about you.”

Alchemy? Dad studied that old junk for a hobby, when other dads were studying parenting. “What did he say?”

“He said you were lead.”

David sprang. His legs betrayed him instantly; he knew it even as he sprawled out on the risers, his hands tangling with the boy’s bony ankles, as he leapt away like a kite.

“He said you were the necessary accident.” The boy kicked teasingly at David’s head, the toe of his moldy Keds sneaker parting his hair. “The raw ore that he had to refine for the Great Work.”

David wheezed, his chest a rat-infested accordion. “What’s the Great Work?”

The boy’s face smacked into his, cold, stale breath like a compost heap. “IT’S ME!”

He easily eluded David’s blind hands as he ran to the top of the stairs and, again, stopped.

This had gone too far. He had to get out and call the police from a neighbor’s; maybe the trigger-happy lowrider down the street would let him use his phone.

Why didn’t he have a cellular phone? Everyone else in the world did, but everyone else in the world wasn’t phobic about cancer like David.
How many premalignant freckles have you had frozen off in the last year?
He wasn’t phobic, just cautious. The studies waffled back and forth about the phones and brain cancer, and he had to be careful, cancer ran in his family—

“Did you ever see it?”

David blinked and crawled to his feet on the landing. The boy dangled off the railing, just in reach. “See what?”

“The cancer, dummy. The cancer that killed your mom. They cut it out of her, but it metastasized, and got her anyway. He used to show it to his class, so they wouldn’t smoke.”

David backed away, one step too many off the landing and he stumbled. He felt like throwing up. “My mom never smoked. She had ovarian cancer.”

“I know. He said
you
killed her. You know, when you grew up in there? He said that’s why you were spoiled. That’s why he made me.”

“Get out of my house!”

The boy chuckled and rubbed his hands together, skin sloughing off and floating on the dank, dead air. “You’re pretty old, too, huh? Dad said your mom’s family gets cancer a lot, so you probably have it by now, huh?”

David lost the power to speak. Finally, rage made him fast enough to catch the boy.

But not strong enough to hold him. The arm in his grasp seemed to deflate and slip free like a wet silk stocking. “Dad said you have too much of your mom in you.”

He squirted up the stairs and down the hall, but David was right behind him, and there was nowhere to lose him. This was his goddamned childhood home! The hall was narrower than he remembered, lined with bookshelves jammed and spilling out notebooks onto the floor. The boy danced through it, but David kicked up a storm of books and papers in his wake, still gaining on the little bastard, when his left foot snagged a tripwire and the shelves caved in on him.