I was just a few miles south of the golf course and thinking seriously about turning around when I passed out of the latest sprinkle of rain. As wipers swept the last drops from my windshield, I saw it. It really was a flying horse—not, I hasten to say, a live one, but one of those old gas station signs, although in this case you couldn’t see anything but the red Pegasus, and not much of that because it was leaning against a tree about ten yards off the highway, half covered with underbrush. I couldn’t help wondering why nobody had snatched it and sold it to some collector.
Highway 1, or at least that section, was still a pretty basic old road: you didn’t need to wait until the next exit to get off. I turned in front of the rusting horse and onto a dirt road that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise—really not much more than a two-wheel track. I followed its curving course in the general direction of the Pacific, which sprawled across most of the horizon except for the spit of land I was navigating. I wound through a stand of very old eucalyptus trees; the scent that wafted through my opened windows was like the world’s largest cough drop. Then the road climbed, and I could see that I was approaching the top of the promontory, which was all evergreens, pines, and cypresses tangled together. There was no sign of a house.
But when I got to the edge of the promontory, I found that the road didn’t end there. Instead, it narrowed even more and wound down the front of the tree-covered bluff. After following a bend and finding myself looking down a steep sandstone cliff to the ocean and white-frothing rocks below my passenger-side door, I finally saw the house, tucked into the hill just to my left, and facing the water.
The building didn’t seem strange at first, just a large, three-story white house with a high A-frame roof pressed back into the hillside, totally hidden from the highway by the trees. But as I got closer I saw that there were quite a few other buildings on the property, including a group of perhaps a dozen smaller houses—cabins, really—set out in straight lines on a level further down the hill.
I parked on the gravel drive. No other cars, which I hoped didn’t mean this Gustibus guy had decided to run down to Pescadero for a crate of artichokes or something, and I was going to have to come back another day. It was cold by the front door, with nothing between me and the late autumn wind off the Pacific, so after I banged the heavy iron knocker I pulled up my jacket collar while I waited.
I was beginning to wonder if I’d been right about the emergency artichoke safari when someone finally opened the door. It was a woman, two hundred years old if she was a day, wearing a long, tentlike black dress, like a mourner at a RenFaire funeral. Her black headgear was flat on the top, with a veil hanging down all around that left only her face visible. She looked at me as though she didn’t meet many actual people.
“I’m here to see Dr. Gustibus. My name is Bobby Dollar.”
She nodded. That took so long I thought halfway through I was going to have to oil her like the Tin Woodman. “Come vith me,” she said, then turned and shuffled away. Another one with an Eastern European accent. Was this Act Out Your Favorite Hammer Horror Movie week or something? Had I missed an announcement?
We went through a short hall and the old babe in black knocked and opened a door before stepping aside to let me enter. The room was really something. Not architecturally or anything—it was a big old plain barn of a place on the inside and looked like the last serious work done to it had been a century ago—but because of the books. I’d never seen anything quite like it. All through the main room, which must have been a good forty or fifty feet long and more than half that wide, and whose ceiling was clearly the second floor ceiling in the rest of the house, shelves lined the walls almost to the very top. A huge variety of makeshift ladders stood against the shelves, some nice ones with wheels that had been built to go with the shelves, others crude products that looked like they’d been thrown together for dunking suspected witches. At the center of the room stood a huge refectory table, also covered in books, and various other surfaces had been similarly buried. The few spaces not covered by books were crammed with other things—bones, jars, painted stones. Except for the obvious fact that some of the volumes were extremely old, the whole place looked like a second-rate museum had staggered in here and thrown up.
At the far end of the room, in front of a modest fire burning in a fireplace as big as my bedroom—the kind of fireplace you cooked whole cows in and then fed them to your knights and squires—stood a figure dressed in what I thought at first was a white lab coat (but which on closer inspection was some kind of vaguely Eastern-Guru thing, all loose-fitting linen); a figure that I could only presume was . . .
“Doctor Gustibus? Hi, I’m Bobby Dollar. Edie Parmenter told you I was coming, I think.”
He carefully marked his place before he set the heavy book down, giving me time to look him over. Gustibus was certainly one of the more interesting people I’d seen lately (outside of Hell, of course, where they play a high-stakes version of “interesting”). He was tall and slender, and—speaking of Hammer Horror—he looked a bit like a middle-aged Christopher Lee, with bone structure for days. His long, white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he had a tiny tuft of white beard on his chin.
He looked past me to the doorway where the old woman was still waiting and said, “Thank you, Sister,” in a voice like a veteran actor, all stretched vowels and precise consonants.
“Sister?” I asked. “Your sister?” Because she looked too old to be his grandmother, let alone his sister.
He showed me a wintry smile. “No. Sister Philothea is a nun. Was a nun. It’s complicated. For all of them.” He followed up this confusing explanation by extending a long, pale hand. “I am Doctor Karl Gustibus. And you are Doloriel. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
It was a full second and a half before what he’d said hit me, but when it did it was as though Bald Thug had just slugged me in the breadbasket again. “Dol . . . Doloriel? I’m sorry, but my name is Bobby Dollar.”
“Yes, Mr. Dollar. I know.” He still wore that little half-smile, but his eyes seemed as cold and remote as stars in the night sky. “But I know your other name too. And I suspect I know why you’re here, as well. You’ve been having a little trouble with the folks in Heaven lately, haven’t you? A little . . . unpleasantness.” The smile winked off. “Or, knowing some of the players at least a bit, I’m guessing it’s rather a lot of unpleasantness.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, and that doesn’t happen to me much. So I grabbed for my gun.
eight:
braincramp
I POINTED THE Belgian automatic at his chest. Alarms were going off in my head, telling me I’d walked right into some kind of trap like the greenest rookie angel who was ever sent out to find a halo-stretcher his first night at Camp Zion.
“Pardon me,” I asked, “but exactly who the fuck are you, and how do you know any of that?” I’m afraid I wasn’t as calm and cool as I’d have liked to be, so if you’re my biographer, please fix that part.
Gustibus didn’t jump back or freak out, but he did look like he took the gun seriously, which was a relief: half the bastards I’ve drawn on lately didn’t even seem worried. That’s what happens when you hang out with demons and loonies, I guess. “Please point that somewhere else,” he said. “You don’t need it here.”
“I’m only going to ask one more time. How do you know that name?”
“I know lots of names. It’s what I do.” He gestured to the books that covered every surface and nested along the walls in thousands, like sea birds on the cliffs. “I am a student of sorts, Mr. Dollar. A researcher, like your friend Mr. Noceda, who is always interested in what the infernal powers are up to. The difference is that I have instead devoted my time to a study of Heaven and those who rule there.”