boy thing. He talks the same way, and it can drive you crazy. Now he made me wait while he took two more spoonfuls of soup and all but sent them out to the forensic lab for tests, swirling the cabbage around in his mouth for what seemed like minutes. (Just because we’ve been friends for years doesn’t mean I never think about murdering him.) “It was too convenient, the way it all happened,” he finally said. “If the kid hadn’t wanted me to be there, I wouldn’t have been Outside when it all went down-wouldn’t have been stuck. No, there’s definitely something unusual going on with our young Clarence,” he finally said.
“Well, shit, no kidding. I already knew that.” I told him about the odd conversation I’d had with the Mule, how he’d asked me to keep an eye on the new boy.
Sam nodded slowly. “Haraheliel. That’s his angel name, right? You ever heard of him before?”
“Nope. But someone might have. He claims he was in Records-Filing, he says. Maybe we should see if anyone else remembers him.”
“I could do that,” Sam told me, slurping up a little broth. “But you’d have to do me a favor and take him off my hands for a couple of days. I can’t get anything done with him hanging around.”
“Then maybe I should be the one to do the investigating.”
Sam frowned. “Look, B, the kid likes you. He’s been asking about you, so it’d be a natural, and I got a buddy or two working in the Records Halls that I know from the old days. They should have some ideas how the kid wound up here.”
I thought about it. Sam did know a lot of people, but our fellow advocate Walter Sanders knew people in Records, too so I could just as easily ask him. But when a friend asks a favor…“Okay. But I can’t take him off you ’til the day after tomorrow. I’m going to be too busy before that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking into some things of my own. I’ll fill you in if anything interesting comes up.”
Sam considered, then lifted his teacup. It took me a moment, but at last I caught on and raised my beer bottle to clink against the delicate porcelain. “Confusion to our enemies!” he said, our familiar toast.
“Amen to that,” said I.
Once upon a time most of San Judas was agricultural land-numberless small farms, orchards, you name it. Then the city began to grow, and everything that wasn’t city gradually got pushed farther and farther away, until nowadays you can’t find much that resembles real agriculture except backyard wineries and people growing pot in their garages. But there were still a few exceptions, and after I said goodbye to Sam I retrieved my car from the handicapped parking space (yes, angels cheat sometimes, but come on, we’re doing God’s work!) and went back to my apartment to kill some time. A little before eleven I got back behind the wheel and headed up into the hills in search of one particular farm.
It wouldn’t be easy to find Casa de Maldicion in the daytime, but since I always go there at night it’s usually damn near impossible. It’s in the hills off the old Alpine Road, past Skyline and down a long winding rural road in a particularly empty section of unincorporated county. In general it’s the kind of place that rich people and hermits live, and neither of those care much about sidewalks-they attract riffraff-or streetlights (which, presumably, draw more of the same). Casa M. itself is on a hill up a little spur road off the winding one. In the deep darkness of the evening, well beyond city lights, it would have been invisible to most people, but I’d been here before and had the windows rolled down. The stench let me know when I was close.
Ever smelled a pig farm, even a small one? Honestly, if you haven’t, don’t bother. There are many things in life not worth experiencing if you don’t need to-amputation, crab lice-and porcine husbandry is one of them. Trust me.
I often wondered whether Fatback surrounded himself with pigs for company or protection. Certainly the presence of several dozen swine on his property meant that only the very determined (or the completely nostril- deaf) ever ventured up the wandering track to the rather nice house at the top. In the darkness I could just make out the smaller (but still good-sized) pig barn off to one side and hear the gentle grunting of its occupants.
The old man named Javier opened the door. He’d pretty much been born working for Fatback’s family-his father and grandfather had served before him. He never seemed to get much older between the times I saw him, but he sure as hell wasn’t getting any younger either. He looked like something you would find lying in the desert and then waste half an hour trying to decide what it used to be.
He blinked, even though I was the one standing in the dark and what little light there was came from his side of the doorway. “Hello, Mr. Dollar,” he said at last. “Long time, good to see you. If you come to talk to Mr. George, he not quite ready yet.”
“That’s okay. I don’t have much time so just take me in to him, and I’ll wait.”
Javier didn’t really like to do it-he still hung onto some vestige of Old-World pride in his employer and didn’t like to display him at less than his best-but he knew me and knew who my bosses were, so he nodded and beckoned me to follow him into the house. As we went past the kitchen I saw a half-eaten plate of rice and beans and realized I’d interrupted the caretaker’s dinner. A small television on the counter was showing some Mexican game show.
We walked through the house and out the back. He pointed to the big barn, which stood by itself about ten yards away down the hill, connected to the main house by a long stairway. I nodded and thanked him. He went back to his meal.
The smell, which was eye-watering everywhere else on the property, rolled out of the barn door like a full scale chemical weapons attack, so that for a moment I couldn’t even go inside, but had to stand there and try to fan a hole in it with my hand. It didn’t work-it never did-but at last I was able to deal with it enough to walk inside.
Most of the barn was taken up with a central pen about twenty by thirty feet or so, with a chest-high rail and a bottom about a foot or so deep in stinking mud-and I mean stinking. At one end of the enclosure, dim and pale in the flickering overhead light, crouched a huge, naked bald man smeared with mud and worse. He looked up at me and his squinting eyes gleamed.
“Hello, George,” I said. Nobody called him Fatback to his face-it wasn’t polite. Not that he understood me at the moment, anyway.
He let out a squeal of rage at the sound of my voice and hurtled across the pen on his hands and knees, splashing mud and shit and pig slops everywhere, but slipped and skidded head first into the barrier with a grunt of pain and frustration. He sank back in the muck and sat looking at me sullenly, blood now trickling from a cut on his forehead. I sighed and checked my watch; 11:52. Still eight minutes to go.
I moved safely out of splashing range and watched him as the time ticked away. He watched me back. It was unpleasant, being stared at by those narrow eyes. There wasn’t anything human in them as far as I could see, but there was an awful lot of murderous anger. I was glad old Javier seemed to keep the pen in good repair.
Casa de Maldicion is Spanish for “House of the Curse,” but what had happened to George was worse than that. The child of an old Californio family (the Spanish-speaking folks who owned everything before the gringos showed up) George Noceda had inherited not just a lot of family property in the Pulgas Ridge area but the family’s major obligation as well, which happened to be a debt to the dark powers. (Nowadays we call ‘em by more respectable names, like “the Opposition,” but it’s still the same old firm.) In return for unnatural prosperity for the family, for several hundred years, every oldest male child of the Noceda line had been were-hogs, doomed each night to become a ravening beast between the hours of midnight and sunup. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the family did their best to keep the suffering male heir locked up at night. Mistakes were made (and more than a few local monster legends had been started because of those mistakes) but by and large the family had come to accept the price of the bargain some ancestor had made in return for their good fortune in all other matters.
Then along came George. A creature of the late twentieth century, he had never doubted in the power of dark magic-after all, he had started to smell powerfully of chitterlings when most boys were just growing their first scraggly mustaches, and had changed for the first time soon thereafter. But like most of the people of this modern age, he didn’t think
Poor George. Like so many others before him, he underestimated what he was dealing with. He got what he wanted, to the letter of his new contract, and the curse was, in fact, reversed. So from then on, each night at twelve, the same thing happened. In fact, it was happening now.
