"So it was only when you returned to this particular dimension that you began to believe that you didn't exist?"
"I didn't say that I didn't exist. I said that all evidence of my existence had been erased."
"Isn't that the same thing?"
"Only if you take a very Orwellian view of the world."
"Are you angry that you've been erased?"
"I'm not very pleased."
"Do you feel that you're being punished?"
"No, I think something tipped over on its side."
"Or maybe that the world isn't grateful. It took away your fantasy of being a once successful entertainer."
"It wasn't a fantasy."
She'd stay with the same question like a dog worrying at a bone. "Maybe the world isn't grateful enough?"
"Why should the world be grateful to me?"
"For saving the universe,"
"I didn't save the universe. My world has gone."
"Perhaps that's why you're being punished."
When this kind of concentric looping of the subject didn't get anywhere, she had him go over his story in the minutest of details.
"Now, Joe, if I remember correctly, when we finished yesterday, you were about to tell me how you woke up in that house in London."
"The house that doesn't exist anymore."
"Forget about that for the moment and just tell me how you felt when you woke up that first time. You'd briefly felt safe and you'd made love with a woman who'd given you more satisfaction than you'd experienced in a while. Very quickly, though, you began to feel as though it was all slipping away…"
Chapter Five
"GO TO THE window and look out."
Gideon Windemere's drawing room was on the first floor of the house. The big bay windows with their small wrought-iron balcony commanded a perfect view of the street out front. Gibson walked over to the window, pulled aside the heavy blue velvet drapes, and looked out. Windemere was standing behind him.
"Tell me what you see."
A light drizzle was falling on the town. The road surface was slick, and cars hissed by with windshield wipers flicking. Water dripped from the plane trees that lined both sides of Ladbroke Grove. Even in the house, there was a smell of dampness.
Gibson considered the scene in the street below him.
"There's a large black car across the street. An old Hudson, '51 or '52, the one with the small narrow windows that looks like a big turtle."
"Anything else?"
"There's a man leaning against the car. I'd say at a guess that he's watching the house. The funny thing is that he doesn't appear to be getting wet."
"Describe him."
"He's wearing a long raincoat of some kind of dirty off-white material-it's a bit like a duster-and a black cowboy hat with studs around the band."
"Can you see his face?"
Gibson shook his head. "No, it's hidden by the brim of his hat. Who is this guy? Is the Jesse James look big in London this year?"
"When he's in this dimension he calls himself Yancey Slide, and he's nothing to do with London."
Gibson turned and looked at Windemere. "What is he?"
"He's an extremely dangerous entity."
Gibson looked out of the window again.
"This cat in the cowboy hat is a superbeing?"
"No, but he's hardly human."
As O'Neal had told Gibson, everyone had been waiting for him in the drawing room. Christobelle was sitting in a deep leather armchair. She was comfortable in torn and faded Levis and a bulky fisherman's sweater. As Gibson walked into the room, she gave no indication that the previous night had ever happened. There was no quick smile or fast intimate eye contact. Cadiz and O'Neal flanked the door. Smith, Klein, and French sat side by side on the leather couch that was part of the same set as Christobelle's armchair. Windemere presided over the room, leaning on the mantel of the marble fireplace, in which a small log fire was burning.
"Yancey Slide is what was known in Sumerian as idimmu, a minor demon."
Gibson was still staring out of the window with his back to the others. "You're telling me that a minor demon is standing in the rain on a street in London in broad daylight, leaning on a 1951 Hudson? I don't see no horns or tail and certainly don't see no smoke rising or smell any brimstone."
Christobelle rearranged herself in the armchair. "He isn't getting wet, is he?"
"That is a little weird," Gibson conceded. He slowly turned. "At risk of sounding overparanoid and being accused of believing that I'm the center of the universe, does the fact that this guy is lounging around across the street not getting wet have anything to do with the fact that I'm here?"
Windemere half smiled. "It would be pushing coincidence not to recognize that there could well be a relationship between you turning up and then Yancey Slide arriving just twenty-four hours later."
"So what about this character? What do you know about him?"
Windemere scratched his ear and looked a little unhappy. He glanced at Smith.
"You want to field this one?"
Smith shook her head with a quick but very smug smile.
"It's all yours, Gideon. I don't do demons. They're not my field."
Gibson looked slowly from Windemere to Smith and back again. She was calling him Gideon? Had there been something going on between these two last night? What went on between an otherzone cop and a weird-ass, postmodern philosopher?
"So which of you is going to tell me about Yancey Slide? This waltzing around is making me nervous."
Smith looked to Windemere for a response. Windemere stared long and hard at the rattlesnake skeleton that was coiled in a glass dome on the mantelpiece. Finally he straightened up and went and stood beside Gideon. The gray afternoon light in the London drawing room was suddenly detached and alien, and there was a chill in the air despite the fire.
"It's funny that you should mention Jesse James. In many respects, Yancey Slide is the very same kind of morbid, psychotic, ethnopath white trash. Except, of course, that he may be as much as twenty thousand years old. He seems one and the same as Yanex, the servant of Maskim Xul during the first occupation, although it's very hard to know with idimmu. There's one theory that they're immortal, much in the manner of the vampire, while another suggests that they might be a series of entities that consecutively take up residence in the same personality."
"Kind of like renting an apartment?"
Windemere seemed pleased that Gibson was taking it so well.
"Exactly. There's definite evidence that Slide has always had an affinity with the southern part of the United States. He appears to have started a vampire plague in New Orleans around the beginning of the nineteenth century and later roamed the settlements along the Mississippi as a professional witch-finder. He's recorded as hanging seventy-three women and sixteen men in one summer of operations. It's also likely that he may have been present at the burning of Lawrence, Kansas, so the Jesse James connection is more than just sartorial."
"You're going to tell me next that he rode with Attila the Hun."
"Attila the Hun didn't keep records."
Gibson peered at the man in the street, but this time he did it from half behind the curtain. Slide hadn't moved.
"Can he be stopped?"
Windemere spread his hands.
"Stopped? I doubt it. Deflected might be possible."
Gibson turned to Smith, Klein, and French. "Can't you zap him with one of your weapons and send him back to where he came from?"
Smith shook her head, "It's not possible. Slide's much too complicated for that."
"Silver bullets? Stake through the heart? Holy water? Exorcism?"
Windemere was shaking his head. "None of the above."
"So?"
"So I suggest we go and see what he wants."
Smith looked up in amazement. "Have you taken leave of your senses?"