The Dirty Streets of Heaven

I frowned. “There’s only one door? You have to come out here each time?”

He shook his head. “Nah, the physics of the thing-if it even is physics and not just some crazy Heaven magic-is weird. There’s not that many spots you can get into this new place we’ve made. One of those spots is here, but it’s not the only one. There used to be another door or whatever you’d call it in the Magian Society office, which is one of the reasons I had to go back that time you saw me. I had to shut it down before you or anyone else found it.”

“And if Clarence was tracking your movements, that’s probably how he figured out about you and Habari,” I said. “I talked to you both about who I’d seen, and if he knew you had gone there about the same time I did-well, if he or his superiors had any suspicions, that would have sure helped confirm them.”

He hesitated. “Do you really want to see this, B? It might…change things for you.”

I stood, trying to figure out what he was really saying. “It might,” I said at last. “But then again, it might not.”

He smiled, and I saw once more the familiar Sam, the Sam I’d known for so long. “Look, I just want to say that it really felt like shit having to lie to you all this time, Bobby. But except for the Third Way stuff, everything else I’ve ever told you-everything else we’ve been through-was real. The truth.”

“I know that, Sam. Or at least I’m willing to believe it.” I gestured with the needle gun. “Now show me your secret. And please don’t do anything stupid.”

He turned on his flashlight and led me into the abandoned funhouse. We didn’t go far, just down some steps to the hall of mirrors. Because they were metal, not glass, most of the mirrors were still in their frames, but the distorted images that had amused so many generations of park visitors were almost completely obliterated by rust and scratches.

“Third mirror from the left,” Sam said.

“And straight on ’til morning. Show me.”

“I’m going to reach into my pocket. Do me a favor and don’t dart me, okay?” He produced a faint shimmer of something. It could have been a tangle of spiderwebs glistening in the moon’s misty glow, but the only light was the dim flashlight in Sam’s other hand. He opened his palm and the shimmer spread over it, then kindled into a light so bright that I blinked and stepped back.

“Don’t!” I said, pointing with the gun.

“No worries.” Sam held up his blazing hand and drew a line with his index finger down the air in front of the mirror. A Zipper appeared, or something that would have been a Zipper had it been more sharply defined; a cloud of radiance, a miniature nebula appearing three feet off the ground in the middle of Crazy Town. “Kephas gave this gauntlet to me,” he explained. “It’s how I could take a living mortal like Edward Walker Outside, through a Zipper, and manage a lot of other stuff. Duplicates the powers of the higher angels, I guess. I don’t know what it is or how it works-I just call it the God Glove.” Sam gestured again, and the misty light dispersed, leaving a soft-focus hole in the center of the mirror. I could see objects and colors there, like one of those little scenes inside a sugary Easter egg. “I’ll step back,” he said. “I swear I won’t try anything. Just look.”

I trusted him, but of course I also didn’t trust him, so as I leaned forward I kept the dart gun pointing in Sam’s general direction. It wasn’t like looking at an image. What I saw had depth, another entire world beyond the scuffed, rusted mirror. I saw oak and willow trees and a stream and, when I bent a little closer, a ramshackle Victorian house perched on a hill in the distance, at the end of a long dirt road. I fancied I could even see a couple of tiny figures standing on the porch, perhaps looking back at me. I wondered if one of them was Edward Lynes Walker. “Is that it?” I said, unexpectedly touched by the modesty of the rustic scene. “That’s your great alternative to Heaven and Hell? The Little House on the Prairie?”

“That’s the beginning,” Sam said. “But it’ll get bigger. It will get more real. There’s only a few hundred souls there now but it will grow, even without me. Kephas recruited lots of other angels. We may even know some of them.”

I filed that thought away for later. “And you really think this is going to be better than what we’ve already got?”

“If we can make it that way, yes.” He sounded sincere-almost stupidly sincere. “You know…you could be there too, Bobby. I know you’ve thought about the same things I have. I know you get tired of all the secrets and the other nasty shit we’ve had to do.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I straightened up. “But I’m not quite ready to drink that Kool-Aid. Not yet.” I was bone- weary, and Clarence would be regaining consciousness soon. “Go on. Get out of here, Sam.”

He stared. “Wait-you mean…?”

“Yes, I mean. Get the hell out of here. Go join your crazy friends and build your little afterlife commune. Better you than me. I’ll tell them you got away.”

“They’ll never believe you.”

“That I screwed up again? They’ll fall over themselves in their hurry to believe that.” I winced a little at the thought of what General Karael was going to make of my newest dazzling failure. “Go on! I’m not going to beg you.”

But instead of stepping through the misty portal, he turned and came toward me. For a moment I was terrified he was going to hug me. I’m not afraid of being hugged, mind you-not too much-but the idea of Sam doing the hugging was like the idea of your parents making love: it might actually happen occasionally, but you didn’t want to be a witness. Luckily he stopped a little out of embracing range. “Hold on,” he said. “I have to give you something before you go. Now, don’t get your undies in a bunch, B, but I have to reach into your pocket.”

“My pocket?” I began, but he had already slipped the glowing, God-Gloved hand into my jacket pocket: I could feel it against me like a hot stone. A moment later he straightened up again and transferred whatever he’d found to his other hand and held it out.

For several seconds I couldn’t do anything but stare. It was an astonishing thing, as amazing in its own way as anything else he had shown me. It was a golden feather-the feather, obviously-but it was just as clearly not of this world. It glowed and sparkled, not like a window display of jewelry, but with an inner light that made it seem more real, more present than anything else around, most definitely including me, Sam, and the Door Into Thirdwaysville.

“What…?” Okay, it wasn’t my sharpest moment. “How did that get there?”

“It’s been there all along-sort of.” He laughed. “You remember that night with the lady who drove into the bay? Clarence’s first night? When you got into a fight with Howlingfell?”

“Some fight,” I said. “I stomped him like a grape.”

“Well, when Grasswax was pulling Howlingfell off you, I saw him slip something into your pocket. I couldn’t imagine what a prosecutor would be planting on you, and I knew Howlingfell worked for Eligor, the other party in-” he indicated the rustic view, “-my little project. I thought it might be some kind of frame-up or something. I only realized when I touched it what it was, so I decided to hide it. With this.” He lifted the God Glove and displayed it like he was modeling a Lady Bulova on a shopping channel. “I made a little piece of Outside right there in your pocket while I was dusting you off, and I put the feather in it. It’s been there all along, but nobody could reach it because it also wasn’t there, if you know what I mean. Sorry if it got you into trouble, but it was a spur of the moment improvisation.”

Which must have been why my weird friend Foxy could smell something that wasn’t there. “So Grasswax was actually telling the truth,” I said. “At least as he knew it. That’s one for the books, huh?” I reached out and carefully took the smoldering golden thing from Sam. It lay in my palm with no weight at all, but it did not waver or move even as I swayed my hand from side to side. It was hard to look at anything else. “And do you know who this belongs to? Who made the deal with Eligor?”

“Kephas, as far as I know-whoever or whatever that is.” He gestured for me to take it. “You can do whatever you want with it. Give it to our bosses, if it will keep you out of trouble.”

“But if Eligor kept it to blackmail this Kephas, our bosses could probably trace it.”

Sam shrugged. “It doesn’t matter-our thing is too big now. It’s already rolling. Me, Kephas, we could lose dozens more and the idea would still go on.”

I thought about it. “Put it back in my pocket. With the God-Glove. I don’t want to have to hide it somewhere ordinary.”

“You sure?” He lifted it in his glowing hand. I felt the warmth through my coat as he put it back.

“Okay. Now go. Get out of here.”