Sandman Slim

Who the hell are all these people on the Boulevard the day after Christmas? How am I supposed to blend in with them? There’s a nice guy at a bar a few blocks from here. He was just doing his job, but he had a knife in his hand and all I could do was count all the ways I knew to kill him.

It hits me then how unprepared I am for being back, how everything that made sense in Downtown is strange here, wrong and ridiculous. All the skills I developed—how to draw an enemy in and how to kill, all the magic I’d learned or stolen—suddenly feels feeble and foolish in this bright and alien place. I’m steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.

I finish off the first cigarette and light another. The world is a much louder and stranger place than I remember. I need to start doing and stop running around screaming inside my own head. Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.

I need to concentrate on what’s important, like my sure and certain plans to find and kill, in as painful a way as possible, the six traitorous snakes who stole my life. And something worse. It makes me weak inside to think about it. It’s a woman’s face.

Her name is Alice. She’s the only bright thing I ever loved, the only person I ever met worth giving a damn about. If Heaven ever meant anything, she should be married, probably now to some skinny leather-pants guitarist she has to support with temp jobs in those fluorescent-tube high-rise dungeons along Wilshire. Or she’d have gone straight, married a dentist, squeezed out a minivan full of crib lizards, and gotten fat. That would be okay, too. But none of those things are going to happen for her. Nothing nice happens to murdered women, except that maybe someone cares about how they got that way.

If Alice was still around, would she even recognize me under all these scars? There was a mirror inside the entrance to the Bamboo House of Dolls, but I’d been careful not to look at it. Walking along the Boulevard, I take quick glances at my reflection in the dim glass of dead storefronts. I’m bigger than I was when I went down, heavier with muscle and scar tissue, but still thin by human standards. I can still recognize the rough outline of my face, but it looks more like stone than flesh. My cheeks and chin are chiseled out of concrete; my eyes are dark, shining marbles above lips the color of dirty snow. I’m a George Romero zombie, except I’ve never been dead. Just vacationing in the land of the dead. Suddenly I want to get my hands around the throat of fat Alice’s imaginary husband and squeeze him till he pops like a balloon.

That stops me cold.

It’s the first time I’ve fantasized about killing anyone outside the Circle. What a stupid and dangerous thought. Exactly the kind of thing that will steer me away from the real job and maybe get me killed. Then I’d be right back in Hell with nothing to show for it and wouldn’t that be a lot of laughs?

That leads me back to the $64,000 question: Why did the Veritas send me this way? It’s interesting being back on familiar turf, but I could have brooded back at the cemetery. That’s why it’s called a “cemetery.” And I didn’t need a bartender to offer me a job or give me free smokes. With a pocketful of Brad Pitt’s hundreds, I’m Richie Rich with a knife in his boot. So, why am I here?

I’m walking and smoking on a block that’s two open liquor stores, an empty secondhand bookstore, a dead record store, and a shuttered sex shop. As I’m speculating on how fucked up a town has to be when it can’t even keep a dildo-and-porn shop open, the inside of my skull lights up like God’s own pinball machine.

I have my answer. I know why I’m here.

He’s turning off the Boulevard onto Las Palmas, waddling on his little legs a short way up the block to a place called Max Overdrive Video. At the front door, he has to juggle things for a minute—transfer a cup of coffee to one hand, grip the top of a bag of doughnuts in his teeth, and do a little ass dance so he can work the keys out of his pocket and let himself into the store.

I watch him from across the street, just to make sure that I’m not imagining things. As he enters the place, I get a nice backlit shot of his face.

It’s Kasabian, one of my friends from the old magic circle. One of the six on my list.

Santa brought me something, after all.

Max Overdrive Video occupies both floors of an old Hollywood town house, the kind of weekend getaway kept by the gentry back in the forties and fifties, when this area was the most glamorous place in the known universe. Kasabian is moving around inside Max Overdrive like he owns the place. I think I should go and ask him if he does.

It’s full-on night now and I’m surrounded by fat, ripe shadows. I cross the street and pick a plump, dark one around the side of Max Overload, next to a health food restaurant. I glance over my shoulder to make sure the street is clear, and when I’m sure I’m alone, I slip into the shadow. The key tickles inside my chest and I emerge into the Room of Thirteen Doors.

I cross to the Door of Ice and quietly step out of the shadow on the other side.

I’m in the far back of the store, in the porn section. The lights are off back here, so I get a good look at the rest of the place.

There’s a door to an employee restroom on my right, tucked back behind the porn. Just beyond this section is a chained-off stairway leading upstairs. Neat racks of DVDs and bins of VHS tapes fill the rest of the store. I guess that’s something that’s changed in the last eleven years. Even the porn in the back is all discs. The only tapes I can find are piled carelessly in the sale bins. VHS is dead. This is something good to remember since I don’t want to sound like the Beverly Hillbillies when I’m talking to regular people. I should sit down and make a list of everything I missed while I was gone. If you can’t smoke in bars anymore, what other atrocities has the world committed?

Kasabian is up front, behind the counter, going over the day’s receipts. He lost some hair while I was away, but he’s made up for it by getting fat. He’d always been a little chubby, but now he’d taken on a truly odd shape. Not like one of those guys who grows a big belly and man boobs. He just seems to have expanded horizontally, like a balloon filled with too much air. It’s admirable in its own weird way. His chin and gut are defiant in the face of gravity, making him look more like Frosty the Snowman than Orson Welles.

I walk slowly down the main aisle toward the counter, checking the corners of the room, making sure we’re alone. Kasabian is deep in thought, crunching numbers. When I’m halfway to the counter, I take Brad Pitt’s stun gun from my jacket pocket and hold it behind my back.

“Evening, Kas. Long time no see.”

He starts and knocks a pile of receipts to the floor. I stop where I know he can see me, but also where the lighting is weak enough that I’m pretty sure he can’t see my face.

“Who the fuck are you? Get out of my store. I don’t want any trouble.”

“It’s right after Christmas, Kas. Don’t you ever take a day off?”

“Everybody’s on vacation. Who are you?”

“Did you have a merry Christmas this year? Did you sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to baby Jesus? Maybe pick up something at Baby Gap?”

“What do you want?”

“Know what I did for Christmas? I cut a monster’s head off. Then I did the same thing to the guy who owned the monster.”

“You want money? Take it. It was a lousy day and I’ve already deposited all the Christmas money, so you’re shit out of luck there.”

Kasabian has been a drama queen from the first day I met him, so I can’t resist hitting him with a Vincent Price moment.

“I don’t want your money, Kas. I want your soul,” I say, stepping into better light to give him a clear full frontal.

It gets exactly the reaction I was hoping for. His mouth opens, but he doesn’t make a sound. One of his hands comes up to cover his open yap, stifling a silent scream. He steps back from the counter, his eyes wide.

Forgive me, God and Lucifer and all you angels high and low, but this is fun. This is an e-ticket roller coaster.

“Shut your mouth, Kas. You look like one of those blow-up sheep in the back of porn zines.” I stop about ten feet from the counter, just letting him feast on me. “What did you get me for Christmas? Right, you gave it to me eleven years ago. Damnation. The gift that keeps on giving.”

His hands are down now and he’s leaning on the counter like a drunk trying to decide whether to fall on his face or his back. I thumb on the stun gun.

“It’s okay. I know you don’t have anything for me. But I sure as hell have something for you, Kas. Climb up on Santa’s lap and I’ll show you.”

I take a baby step closer to the counter and Kasabian takes one back. Then he does the funniest thing. He raises his hands and there’s a gun there—a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker. Wyatt Earp’s favorite gun. He gives me five of the six slugs in the chest and belly, completely ruining my moment.

I drop to my knees, vision going black. The stun gun falls to the floor and I follow it down. I can feeling my lungs drawing in air. I can feel my heart beating. Both organs seem more than a little confused by what’s happening. Death is settling over me, soft and warm, like a down comforter fresh from the dryer. My heart stops.

SOMETHING FUNNY HAPPENED to me when I was Downtown. I got hard to kill. When I first arrived there, I was the first and only living human to ever set foot in Hell. I was a sideshow freak. Pay a dollar and see Jimmy, the dog-faced boy. Later, when they got tired of slapping me around, examining me, and displaying me like a pedigreed poodle, they thought it might be fun to watch me die. They made me fight in the arena and they made a big deal out of it. Imagine the Super Bowl every week or two.

Naturally, the location being Hell and the setting being an arena, there was a lot of cheating going on. Hellions don’t like losing bets any more than humans. Before almost every fight, a bribed trainer or attendant would show up with a sneaky little gift. They slipped me special weapons. They gave me diabolical drugs. They whispered fiendish spells into my ears. It all helped, though it didn’t make me Superman. I was knifed and speared. I was burned. I was almost torn in half by a giant crab-thing that bled fire and screamed in the anguished voices of all the souls it had devoured. My ribs and skull were beaten to Silly Putty.

But I didn’t die.

I don’t know if it was the spells, the drugs, the Aqua Regia, or just clean living, but I was changing. Every time I should have died but didn’t, I got stronger. That meant that the next attack had to be harder, faster, even more ferocious than the one before. After a while, I actually looked forward to the beat-downs. Each one changed me and that change meant that I was immune from a similar attack next time. By the end, I was a flesh-and-bone, armor-plated Dirty Harry.

By the time the ruling-class, old-school Hellions and nouveau celebutante fiends decided it was time to get rid of me, it was too late. I was too strong and by then I was doing more interesting things than killing in the arena. I was freelance-killing Hellions out of the arena, and that meant I was protected from on high by forces far darker than your run-of-the-mill tail-and-pitchfork type.

On the other hand, I’d never been shot before.

“Stark?” says Kasabian from a million miles away. “Is that really you?” He laughs quietly, nervously. “Mason is going to shit himself.”

My left hand shoots to the side, grabbing the .45’s still-warm barrel and driving it into the floor. Kasabian’s fat finger is still looped in the trigger guard, so he comes down with the gun. Meanwhile, my right hand flickers to my boot and tears free the black bone knife. I twist my body toward Kasabian and bring down the knife in a smooth arc. Kasabian’s head tumbles to the floor and rolls away like a pumpkin. His body flops to the floor.

From beneath the Disney new-releases rack, Kasabian’s head begins to wail.

“Oh God! Oh Jesus, fuck! I’m dead!” It’s quality wailing. Downtown, I became kind of a connoisseur of wailing and this is prime stuff.

“I’m dead! I’m dead!”

Crawling shakily to my feet, I pick up Kasabian’s shrieking melon by the hair, tuck the .45 in the back of my jeans, and grab his leg by the ankle with my free hand. In a situation like this, when you want to clear away the evidence, you want to drag the body. You might think it’s faster to toss it over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but lifting a limp body is like wrestling with two hundred pounds of Jell-O. It wiggles, shifts, and refuses to stay still. Dragging is slower, but much less aggravating.

I carry Kasabian upstairs, his head still screaming blue murder and his heavy torso bumping along behind us.

The second floor is one big room. It’s large, with a nice big window on one wall, but sparsely furnished. There’s a bed, a couple of desk chairs, and a table piled high with tape decks, DVD burners, and a big color printer—a mini video-bootlegging factory. I drop the body by the door and set his head on the worktable. The gun I toss on the bed. Kasabian is still shrieking like a banshee, which is pretty good for a guy with no lungs.

I grab a chair and drop down in front of him. Digging the cigarettes out of Brad Pitt’s now-bloody jacket, I light one up and blow smoke in Kasabian’s face.

“Smell that? That means you’re not dead.”

He stops screaming and looks at me. Then he spots his body on the floor and starts caterwauling again. I take a slow drag and blow an extra-long cancer cloud right in his face.

He gets quiet and finally seems to focus on me.

“Stark? You’re dead.”

“Tell me, Kas, how does it feel to wake up in the worst place you can imagine? Of course, you’re luckier than me because you know why you’re there.”

“Fuck you! You think you’re sneaky? You used magic. The whole Sub Rosa will know you’re here. Mason will know you’re here. He’ll kill you.”

I make a game-show-buzzer noise.

“Guess again, fat man. This knife doesn’t disturb the aether and doesn’t leave any magical traces. Pure stealth tech, which is sort of its point. That, and not killing its victims unless I tell it to.”

“Oh God, look what you did.”

“God’s away on business, Kas. Talk to me.”

He looks up at me with big moon eyes. “I thought you were dead. When you disappeared, we all thought you were dead. I mean, what Mason did, it worked?”

“I was alive and in Hell for eleven years, so, yeah, you could say it worked.”

“How could you live through something like that? Mason was right about you.”

“What did he say?”

“That you were the only other really great natural magician he’d ever met.”

I have to smile at that.

“Sounds like Mason. I mean, it comes off like a compliment. But he calls me a great magician so he can call himself an even greater one.”

I turn away like I’m checking out the room, but really my gut is killing me. I’m burned and bruised where the slugs went in and I’m pretty sure I have a couple of cracked ribs. They’ll probably be all right by morning, but I’m not going to do much more walking around tonight. And I’m not about to give Kasabian the satisfaction of knowing I’m in pain.

“It must be true, though. You survived all those Hellions and you came back.”

“Wringing your neck is what brought me back. Yours and the others’.” The old anger comes boiling up, but I don’t want to lose control. It’ll scare Kasabian too much and he’ll be useless for information. I need to catch my breath. I can’t plan anything running around barking like a mad dog.

“For your information, I didn’t use any magic Downtown. Our magic is a joke down there. It doesn’t work. You might as well be shouting brownie recipes.” I take a calming drag off the cigarette. “I don’t even remember much of the magic we did in the Circle, but I did learn a trick or two down under. Hellion magic, and every bit of it is designed to make you cry all the way home.”

“Are you gonna kill me?”

“Did you happen to notice me cutting off your head? If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

“Why did you come after me? Is it about the girl?”

“I don’t want to talk about her yet.”

I can’t talk about her yet.

“What do you want, man?”

“I want all of you. You were all in on it when Mason sent me down.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Right. You just stood there. You knew what was coming and you just stood there.”

“We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“But you knew Mason was going to off me.”

Kasabian starts to say something, but he looks away.

“What did Mason promise you?”

“The sun and the moon. All our dreams come true, if we stayed out of the way and zipped our lips. It was hard stuff to refuse.”

“So, you said yes, then Mason screwed you and dumped you here. What a surprise. That’s why you’re about the last one in the Circle I need to kill.”

“Why?”

He frowns, like me not killing him first hurts his feelings.

“Because you’re a fuckup. You’re a third-rate magician and a second-rate human being. That’s why Mason and the others left you at the altar. You’re excess baggage.”

“You want to find the others from the Circle and you want me to help you.”

“I want a lot of things, but let’s start with that.” I shift around on the chair, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt my ribs. I don’t find one. “Where are the cool kids hanging out these days?”

“Are you crazy? Do you know what any of them would do to me if I told you?”

When I was Downtown, I learned a lot about making threats. Make them big. Make them outrageous. You’re never going to kick someone’s ass. You’re going to pull out their tongue and pour liquid nitrogen down their throat, chip out their guts with an ice pick, slide in a pane of glass, and turn them into an aquarium. But you have to be careful with threats. Some Hellions and humans don’t know when to back down, and you might have to actually follow through. It didn’t happen often, but it was always a possibility.

“You know what I’m going to do to you?” I ask quietly and evenly. “You see that body over there? I’m going to drag it to the deepest, darkest part of Griffith Park and leave it for the coyotes.”

“Please don’t do that!”

“Then talk to me about the others. Where’s Mason?”

Mason had been the leader of our magic circle, which made me Mr. Green Jeans to his Captain Kangaroo. He was a talented magician and never passed up a chance to remind you of it. He came from money. At least he acted like he did. The truth is, none of us really knew much about his life outside the Circle. Parker did, though. They were tight. Parker was a thug with a boxer’s build and just enough magical ability to make him really dangerous. Mason saw the possibilities in someone like that and made the guy into his pet pit bull. Mason never got blood on his hands because Parker was only too happy to do it for him.

Mason also made a point of calling me Jimmy, James being my given first name. No one else ever called me Jimmy because I wouldn’t let them. I’ve always gone by Stark because the rest of my name had always been an issue in the family. I don’t know how Mason found out the rest of my name.

“Are you kidding? Does it look like I hang out with Mason anymore? I rent porn and Schwarzenegger to halfwits,” Kasabian says. “I’ve hardly seen him since that night and, to tell you the truth, I’m glad. After you were gone, those demons, or whatever they were, charged him up with power. Superman stuff. No, more like the Hulk. He changed, right in front of us. His skin, his bones, his whole body turned weird. It kind of glowed and it looked like there were things crawling around under his skin.”

“Sounds like they gave him an assload of nebiros.”

“What’s a nebiro?”

“A parasite. They live off the energy of whatever they infest. The only reason the host doesn’t drop dead immediately is that the nebiros excrete supernatural energy. They shit magic. It supercharges the host, keeping him and the parasite alive. Hellions eat those things like popcorn. I didn’t know they worked on humans.”

“Whatever happened, he wasn’t just Mason anymore. He was Mason and something else. Like God’s older brother, who takes God’s money, steals his car, and fucks his girlfriend. That’s Mason now. A guy who isn’t afraid to pants God. He took off and took Parker with him.”

I know that he’s telling the truth. In the same weird way that Carlos’s name popped into my head back at the Bamboo House of Dolls, I know that Kasabian is telling me the truth. It’s not reassuring to know something without understanding why you know it, but I’ll figure that out later.

I flick ashes off the cigarette and place it between Kasabian’s lips. He puffs on it a few times and that seems to calm him down. When he’s done, I set the cigarette down in an ashtray on the table. I don’t want to finish it after he’s touched it.

“I’m going to have a lot more questions for you over the next few days. Maybe weeks. However long it takes to settle this. Be straight with me, keep telling me the truth, and I might just give you your body back.”

“Sit here and wait for Mason to get me. What a sweet deal.”

“Work with me and he won’t be around to get you.”

Kasabian’s expression goes blank, like he’s staring off into the distance at something I can’t see.

“You’re right, you know. I am a fuckup,” he says. “All the rest of them, they got power, money, and cushy jobs. But they cut me out. I got nothing.”

“Then you have every reason to want some payback, too.”

“Don’t you think I would have if I could? Look at me! I even had to steal this stupid store just to earn a living. Then a dead guy comes in and cuts off my head. Yeah, I’m the one who’s going to put down Mason Faim.”

“No, I am. You just point me at him.”

“I told you, I don’t know where he is. He’s gone. He’s Kesyer Sözer.”

“What about the others?’

“You’re asking a lot, man.”

“No. I’m asking for exactly what I’m owed.” I take a smoke again. I don’t want to get into the next thing. “Tell me, Kas, like your life depended on it. Who killed Alice?”

Kasabian’s eyes dart back and forth in his head like they’re looking for the eject button. I recognize the look of panic. It almost feels like I can hear his heart speed up. But he doesn’t have a body, though maybe he’s still somehow connected to it.

“You know about that? All the way down there and you know about that?”

“Talk to me, Kas. The coyotes are calling.”

I look at the floor, but I don’t move. If I move, I’m going to break like glass. I can’t stand talking about her. I raise my gaze to meet Kasabian’s. If he had a body, he would have bolted.

“I don’t know much. It’s not like Mason or anyone stops by to talk over old times. I get the same rumors as everybody else. I heard Parker did it.”

“Mason sent him?”

“Parker doesn’t shit unless Mason tells him it’s okay, so yeah, Mason must have told him to do it.”

“Why? After all these years, why would he do that?”

“I don’t known, man. Seriously.”

I stare into Kasabian’s eyes and know he isn’t lying. He’s absolutely panicked as I come over to him. When I take the burning cigarette out of the ashtray and let him finish it, he looks so relieved I think he’s going to cry.

My Alice is dead and I’m alone.

“Tell me about the store,” I say. “How many employees are there?”

“Four or five. College kids. They come and go. It changes with classes and holidays. Allegra is the only one with any brains.”

“Who’s she?”

“She manages the place. I don’t like being down there with the customers.”

“She runs the place so you can stay up here and bootleg movies.”

“We do what we have to do to get by. I bet you did some dirty trick or two when you were in Hell.”