“Still got a little hitch in my giddy-up,” I said, filling my body with Manipura energy. “Unless you want what your boys on the beach got, Big Kahuna, you call off your monster. Leave the boy be.”
“Wow,” Glide said, smiling and shaking his head. I wanted to kick in his perfect teeth. “I have to tell you, you got style, I’ll give you points for that. Bleeding out, exhausted, and beat to hell and you still act like you’re going to win this. God, it’s a shame you didn’t join us.”
“You wouldn’t have liked it if I had,” I said. “I would have gotten rid of you and your bat-shit crazy-ass stepdad day one.” Glide chuckled. “Runs in the blood, I guess. He’s as fucked-up as his old man. I had a nice long chat with step-granddad in the joint.”
“My grandfather is a prophet, a messiah,” Glide said, some of the fake Hollywood smile sliding off his face. “You don’t deserve to breathe the same air as he.”
“To be honest, Brett, I didn’t want to. Manson could’ve used a shower, or some patchouli—the hippie stuff—maybe a little Febreze, at least.”
“Shut your fucking sewer of a mouth, you old fucking relic!” Glide shouted, the facade gone. He was red-faced with rage and his voice made Garland jump. Crash Cart’s “arms” slid more tightly around the boy, like snakes covered in blood clots. I held up a hand to Glide.
“Mellow, dude, mellow,” I said. “Your karma is already fucked up pretty good, no need to push it to eleven.” Glide got a grip on himself. I could feel his defenses wavering a bit as he attempted to chill. If Garland wasn’t in the line of fire, I would have gone for it then. Glide patted down his hair and put his smiling mask back on.
“Garland?” Glide said to the boy in his best hippie Mr. Rogers voice. “My name is Brett and you’re going to come with Crash Cart and me now. It will all be okay, son. I promise. We’re going to take you somewhere safe where you will be loved and cared for and in time all these nightmares from before will fade away.”
“Damn you, Glide,” Joey said, forcing himself to stand. He was soaked in blood, sweating, fighting to say conscious. It was pure love, pure desire to save his son, that was keeping him from dropping. “You leave him alone, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you!” He took a step away from the blood-painted wall, toward the Dugpa. “Garland…” He collapsed, unmoving.
“Do you like Xbox?” Glide said to the boy. “You can have every Xbox game they ever made and some special ones too, just for you, programmed by some of my family.”
Garland looked to me. “Bad man,” the boy said, nodding at Glide.
“Yep,” I said. “Very, very bad. He’s talking about you forgetting your mom and dad, kid.” I grunted as I knelt to look Garland eye to eye. I sat on the floor, cross-legged in a full lotus position, ignoring the screaming pain in my chest as I folded my legs. I almost passed out but I didn’t. “Don’t worry, Garland, you and your dad are going to walk out of here and I’m going to make the bad man and the monster go away, and you’re going to help me.”
Glide chuckled. “You really need to rein in that ego, Ballard. It’s over. You’ve got nothing left. Garland, if you come with me right now, we’ll get your daddy some help, get him to a hospital, to a doctor. You don’t want Daddy to die like Mommy did, do you? It would be your fault if you didn’t come along willingly right now. You don’t want to kill Daddy, do you buddy?”
“Look at me,” I said. My fingers were already beginning to make the motions, the complex new mudras I hadn’t had much of a chance to practice. They had to be perfect for this to work, my form had to be perfect. No goddamn D.T. shakes, no fear, no pain, perfect, or the boy was gone. Just once, just goddamned once, don’t fuck it up. “Ignore him, kid, he’s the fucking boogeyman. He can’t hurt you or your dad, neither can that ugly, gross thing holding you. See, the hollow man wants you to give in to him yourself. It gives him more power, and old Crash Cart there, well, he really is just a bad dream. We can take ’em, kid. Look at me, listen to me.”
“I’m sorry to say you’re killing your daddy, Garland,” Glide said. I could feel him building a working aimed right at me. “This old bum, he’s lying to you. He doesn’t want to help you. He got your mommy killed.”
Garland looked at me and I saw the doubt enter those young-old eyes. I completed the first key and my fingers began the second series of mudras; the twisting and the shaping of my fingers was even more difficult than the first. I kept working and I matched the little boy’s gaze. It was harder than I thought it would be.
I thought about my grandmother, how she used to talk to me when I wasn’t much older than Garland, her gentle voice, her kindness, and most of all, her honesty. I tried to think what Granny would say. “I messed up,” I said. “I got scared and I did something bad because I was scared. Your mom got hurt, got killed, because I messed up, Garland. I’m sorry.”
“Mamma said you were her friend, that it was okay that you’re sad inside,” the child with Caern Ankou’s eyes said to me as sagely as any guru, as any mystic master I had ever met. “Mamma told me it’s okay. She told me we all get scared and we all mess up sometimes. We just got to try again to do good. Mamma was sad inside too, for a long time.
