They’re quiet a few minutes.
“The first time I heard Notes on Her Sleeping,” Sam says. “I’ll never forget it. It broke my heart. I was a first-year grad student sharing an apartment with two other guys. But that day I was alone and enjoying no one else being around. Just sitting on my ratty couch in my shoebox apartment and listening to the radio. You don’t know what paradise is till it’s way too late. So this song comes on and a minute into it I just know it’s you. I had your first two albums, with Perish Blues and Stagger Lee. I liked them but you never got much airplay till that song. It was the first time I heard someone say your name on the radio. I was so proud of you. This was like nothing I ever heard out of you. Really sweet and just so sad. And I just sat there alone and cried. I guess people tell you things like that all the time.”
“Not quite like that.”
“Well. Bridge was one of my favorite albums. It would’ve been even if I didn’t know you. I mean that.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“I just wanted you to know. I’m not just saying it.”
“Thanks.”
“I hope the ending changes this time round. I hope you get her back.”
Niko says nothing. What is there to say?
Pale orange throbs the sky.
Sam says Oh shit.
Niko turns and looks out where Sam is looking but sees nothing. “What?”
Sam’s good hand points toward what he sees with his dark-adapted eye. “Our friends are back.”
“Shit.” Niko puts his coat on and feels the pack of cigarillos in a pocket. He bends to Sam.
Who shakes his head. “Never mind, Niko. Grab your case and haulass over to that block. Stay up against the side and it’ll be harder for them to get you. Their aim’s good but I doubt it’s that good.”
“But—”
“Go on. You won’t make it if you have to carry me. If they miss you, haul back over here. I promise I won’t go anywhere.”
Niko hesitates. He wants to say he knows old phrases and word-keys and charms. But Sam’s right and now is not a time to learn that ancient keys are useless. He picks up his guitar case. “Back in a few.”
“They’ll have to go back for another block after they drop this one. Come back right after they drop.”
“Okay.”
“Luck, Niko.”
Niko runs.
A hundred yards later and with fifty yards to go he hears demoniac laughter above and behind him and he puts on a burst of speed. The guitar case is a liability. He considers dropping it to recover later but suppose they take it? Suppose a seventy ton block lands on it? What good will all his journeying do him then?
Niko reaches the block and presses his back against a side and brings the case in close.
One demon yells Tim-berrrrr! and the other whistles a long descending note like the swan song of a diving bomb. They let go the block they hold impossibly aloft and Niko sees a patch of sky swell toward him like a gaping maw. His face tightens and it’s a great effort not to close his eyes and turn away.
The granite block hits. One edge strikes the top of the block Niko presses against. The bottom edge hits ground and the block tumbles away. The sound is deafening. And more than sound is the concussive push inside his chest. Niko’s knees buckle. Granite shrapnel stings his cheek. By the time his knees touch the plain all is as impossibly still and quiet as it was before the block was dropped. Niko is afraid to move.
“Get him?” Purring voice from on high.
“Think so.” Gruff voice. “Did you see? Monkey son had my poker.”
“We’ll get—” This last fades into incomprehensibility as they fly away.
Niko doesn’t realize he’s been holding his breath until he lets it out. His heart is playing thirtysecond notes. He relaxes against the protective block and relishes the relief he knows is fleeting.
He hears faint noise. A dim and distant screaming coming from behind him. He frowns and turns but there is only solid granite. He sets his ear against it. Yes, faintly through the stone: screaming.
HOW GOOD IT feels to see Sam’s body in the distance on the plain. Niko waves and Sam waves back. Niko picks up his pace. The guitar case feels good in his hand. For the first time since this whole affair began he feels not merely purposeful but confident. He’s gonna beat this thing, he really is. He’s high on epinephrine of course but that’s okay. Believing in yourself is half the battle. Hasn’t he told a couple dozen interviewers that?
Sam’s still waving. Niko grins. Glad to see me back, huh, Sam? Didn’t think I’d make it. Or maybe you thought I wouldn’t come back for you if I did.
Niko frowns. Isn’t that why Sam is waving?
He stops and looks behind him just as they flap overhead, frightening humanoid bats they seem in the dim vast trembling air, holding between them a huge chunk broken from the block that nearly crushed him. Reflexively he ducks and ludicrously clamps his arms around his head as if that will protect him from the piledriver blow of falling granite. But they pass low overhead and shriek and laugh. All in a day’s work. One of them pisses with an armsized penis and the urine scatters in the windless air and splashes Niko’s jacket and his guitar case and his hair, and where it splashes hisses and smokes and burns. Reek of sewage and spoiled milk. Niko runs again, runs fullout, runs for—
“Sam!”
They’re over Sam now, flapping rapidly to hover, stretching out the moment.
“Pilot to bombardier, pilot to bombardier,” one demon calls. “Bomb bay open.”
“Bombardier to pilot, bombardier to pilot, roger that. Bombs away.”
The slab descends like an outcast angel. Niko runs, uselessly runs. Just before the impact he sees something he will not grasp the meaning of till later. Right now he just records it. The slab hurtling down. Sam’s arm up as if to ward it off. Fingers not outspread but in a fist, no not a fist but clenched with just the middle finger out and stabbing upward like a steeple.
HE’S STILL STARING at the chunk of granite flat against the ground when they land in front of him. They’re eight or nine feet tall, muscular and clawed at hand and foot. One has the elongated head of a skinless rat, the other is a grinning nightmare from a parapet of Notre Dame. Both have needle teeth and amber eyes with knife edge pupils. Rat Face has a Buddha’s potbelly. Those absurd Beardsley penises waver clublike as they move.
Rat Face wraps his mottled and membranous wings around himself like a cloak and hunches his head down to peer at Niko with one wide and leering eye. He moves toward Niko in a loopy caricatured sashay. He stops ten feet away and surveys Niko with that cartoonish eye. In a burlesque Hungarian accent he says, “Vee are cheeldren of de night. Donnn’t be afraid.”
Behind him Notre Dame leans on his trident like a Roman centurion on his spear and cracks up laughing.
Rat Face circles Niko, keeping a shoulder toward him and staying hunched into his cape of wings. Niko circles with him. “Vee vant to know how is it you haff come by… mortal things.”
“I’m mortal.”
At this Rat Face straightens and drops the Lugosi act. His wings curl back behind him and then furl to rest there quivering. His claws come up with fingers spread in a gesture of melodramatic surprise. “Mortal?” His ridiculous penis wilts and drools a thin yellowish pus.
“Come on, Maurice,” calls Notre Dame, still laughing. “Gack him and let’s go.”
“He says he’s mortal.”
Notre Dame stops laughing. “What’s he doing in the Park if he ain’t a guest?”
Rat Face draws up to his full towering height. “What you doing in the Park if you ain’t a guest?”
“I want to be taken down.”
“Taken down?”
“I command it.”
“You command it?” Rat Face gives a sawmill grin. “Mortal boy I’m gonna peel you like a roasted pepper.”