“Well, leaving out the fact that you’d get put in a nuthouse, let’s not forget that you called in the BPRD, and this is now government jurisdiction. But we’ve got bigger problem, anyway.” I turned back to Grayson Thursday. “Do you want to make up for what you’ve done? End this problem once and for all?”
“Of course, but it cannot be done…”
“Hey, buddy, in our dimension, we never say ‘cannot’. For one thing, we use contractions.” I stood up. “I’ll tell you what you need to do.” I grabbed Albie’s pen and handed it to him. “You’d better write it down, because I’m guessing your dimension goes back out of phase with us at midnight, so we won’t be seeing each other for a week. If you get this wrong, we’re all in trouble. Big trouble.”
“Like what?” Albie Bayless asked.
I would have liked to reassure him, but I wasn’t in a reassuring mood. “Like end-of-the-world trouble.”
It was Tuesday morning when I landed again at the Sonoma County airport. Albie was waiting for me. He was definitely looking old and tired, like maybe he was wishing he’d taken this being-retired thing more seriously. Getting a glimpse of what squirms under the rock of everyday reality can do that for you. I definitely wasn’t going to let him get any closer to the lighthouse than I had to.
“How was your trip?” he asked.
“Connecticut, what’s there to say?” I told him. “The guys at the bureau say hi. A bunch of them still remember you from ’69.”
“That’s nice,” he said. “How was New Orleans?”
“Even freakier than usual. I did get to spend a nice night on the town.” I have more than a few friends in New Orleans, and there are a few places I can go and eat red beans and listen to music where nobody bats an eye at me. I like that.
“And your…shopping?”
“Good, I think — I hope. We’ll see. There’s no recipe book for this stuff — we kind of make it up as we go along.”
It was a pleasant enough trip west through toward the coast and Caldo Bay — you could smell and see Spring on the way — but I wasn’t really looking forward to visiting Monk’s Point. As he drove, Albie filled me in one what had been happening, not that there was much news. The only excitement in town was that Bobby Gentle was spending what he called “his insurance money” like it was water, and there was a permanent 24-hour party going on out at his house, with all the local rummies and freeloaders prominently represented.
“I can’t help thinking about that poor kid — or at least his body,” I said. “You never saw anything so empty and so lost.”
Albie shuddered. “Come on, don’t.”
When we arrived chez Bayless I opened my two suitcases and started spreading stuff out on the table. Albie watched me with wide eyes as I counted and sorted. “What is all that?”
“Fighting gear,” I said as I shoved things into a knapsack. “And some other tricks. It’s how we’re going to take it to the Wednesday boys, basically.”
“How’s that going to work?”
“You mean, how do I hope it’s going to work? I’d rather tell you after I live through it, if I manage. It’ll be less embarrassing that way.” I wasn’t feeling all that confident, to be honest. “You got a beer?”
The afternoon ticked away in small talk and me packing and repacking my knapsack and coat pockets about a hundred times. At one point I was making Albie so nervous I got up and took a walk along the headlands above the ocean. The lighthouse at Monk’s Point stuck up like a warning finger. I turned my back on it and concentrated on the dark-green water, the white chop kicked up by the rising wind. Seagulls banked and keened. It was like standing at the edge of the universe. Which, if I thought about what was going to open up in a few hours just half a mile away, was pretty much the case.
So much for putting my mind at ease.
After dark had come down good and solid, I let Albie drive me up to the bottom of the hill at the edge of the Monk’s Point property. “You go home now,” I said. “Don’t get any stupid ideas about coming to help me, no matter what happens — you’ll wind up doing the “Thriller” dance alongside the Gentle kid. Come back at dawn Thursday.”
“That’s more than twenty-four hours from now!”
“I’m aware. If I’m not waiting for you then, go home and call the bureau.”
Albie shook my hand and tried to smile. “Second time, damn it,” he said.
“Second time what?”
“First Zodiac, then this,” he said. “Second time I’ve been sitting on the story of the century and both times you wouldn’t let me write it.”
“Oh, you can write it,” I told him as I got out and headed for the fence. “Feel free. You just can’t show it to anyone.”
Inside the house I picked a spot just a few yards away from the grandfather clock, which was almost ten feet tall and as ornate as a baroque chapel. Once I’d got my equipment set up, I hunkered down to wait. I might even have drowsed a little. About ten minutes to midnight, with the wind blowing hard outside and the breakers crashing below, I turned on the special lights. They didn’t make the place any brighter, of course — they weren’t that kind of lights. But when I put on the blue quartz goggles the boys at the Bureau had whipped up for me, all of a sudden I could see all kinds of things I couldn’t before, including how the air seethed and glowed around the big clock, and how the thing itself didn’t look much like a clock anymore, but like something a lot less ordinary and a lot more complex.
“We put it there to keep the fabric of the wound in space/time from getting any larger,” Thursday had told me. “We can’t close the hole back up, but the clock-construct will keep it from getting any worse.”
Based on what he could tell me, I’d had the bureau’s tech boys and girls get to work, and so, with my special lights and special goggles, I was actually able to see what was happening as midnight came and the Wednesday dimension opened into our own.
It wasn’t pretty.
The clock began to strike midnight. On the twelfth toll, the space around the clock — there’s no other way to put it — split open. What came pouring out was light like a bad bruise and wisps of something smoky yet as liquid as dripping glue that nevertheless had the shape of living creatures, with limbs and a depressing bump where a head should be. Their eyes were empty black holes, but they were holes that melted and ran like the yolks of soft- boiled eggs. Flapping, ragged mouths gaped beneath them, and I was grateful I couldn’t hear the noise they made, because I could feel it vibrating in my bones and even that was sickening.
I turned on the “brass knuckles”, as the technicians had named them, which looked like a couple of glass and wire watchbands, one of them big enough to stretch over the Hand of Doom. For a moment I felt the vibration they made, then my hands just…weren’t anymore. I couldn’t feel them at all. I hoped that meant that the Wednesday Men would. I stepped toward the clock.
“You’re not going anywhere, Sloppy Face,” I told the nearest of them and swung at him. There wasn’t much in the way of a satisfying impact, but kind of snap and sizzle like an electrical shock, and the thing flailed backward, its nasty mouth all hooty and shocked. I grinned. “Didn’t like that, huh? Well, come and see what we’re serving on Wednesdays around here from now on!”
It was the donnybrook of all donnybrooks and it went on for hours. It was like flying all the way to Asia with in-flight entertainment by the Spanish Inquisition. I could only touch them with my hands, but tey hit, scratched and bit. Sometimes they grabbed me and it burned, burned bad. Then for a little while they’d retreat and huddle in the glowing depths of the clock, just inside the gap into their dimension, and look out at me like eels hiding in the rocks, whispering to each other in a deep, soundless rumble I could feel in my teeth. That would give me a few minutes to rest before they broke out and tried me again. Like I said, hours went by, and I had only one thought: Keep ‘em here. Don’t let ‘em past.
I had a few other weapons from the tech boys, but I knew ultimately I wouldn’t be able to push them all back by myself. I just had to hang in and keep them in the vicinity of the clock until the rest of the plan kicked in. When I absolutely couldn’t make it another moment without rest, Every now I chucked one of my precious supply of vibration-augmented grenades at them, which disrupted them and probably hurt them like hell, too — in any case, each grenade sent them flapping and slurping back into the breach for a bit. Then they’d get back their courage and
