The Weirdness(21)

“So how long has this guy—Ollard—how long has he been, what would you call it, warlocking?”

“I cannot say precisely when he began. But I have known Timothy Ollard to be practicing high-level black arts in New York City for the last eighty years.”

“Eighty years?” Billy says.

“Take a look,” Lucifer says. New slide. An old photo. People at some sort of Jazz Age party: a crowd reveling among streamers and glittering curtains. Lucifer clicks for the caption: 1924. He clicks again and a red circle pops up around the face of a guy standing way off to the edge of the photo, a dour face among the partygoers.

“Is that supposed to be the same guy?” Billy says. He can’t tell for certain: there are shadows on the guy’s face and the hair is differently styled. It could be the guy’s grandfather or even just a random guy with a similar facial structure. The ascot is the same.

“It is him,” Lucifer says. “As near as I can tell, the last time he aged was a single afternoon in 1945, during which he went from age thirty-three to thirty-six.”

“Good trick,” Billy says.

“His current base of operations is here,” Lucifer says.

Slide. A stone tower. Dank, rotting, covered in creepy crenellations and greeble. It’s got these scary bits hanging off it that look like they might be made out of long chains of human ribcages, like something you might dream up after a tour of Cambodian genocide sites. Every available surface has shit spanged onto it: wires or pipes or crumbling gargoyles drooling black autumnal slime.

“Yeesh,” Billy says.

“Don’t be too impressed,” Lucifer says. “The edifice you see is mostly illusory.”

“What even …,” Billy says. “What part of the planet is this on?”

“It’s here,” Lucifer says. “It’s in Manhattan.”

Slide. A Google Maps screenshot with one of those little red bulbs pointing at a corner that looks like it’s somewhere in Chelsea.

“Huh,” Billy says. “You’d think I’d have heard about some freaky-ass black tower being in the middle of Manhattan.”

“People can’t see it,” Lucifer says. “Ollard has cloaked it. Wrapped it in a perceptual blind spot.”

“So, what, eight million people walk past this building and nobody notices it?”

“No cloak is perfect,” Lucifer says. “So it is likely that people notice it all the time. Hence Ollard’s choice to make what lies behind the cloak appear fearsome. When people get a glimpse of something that troubles them, that disturbs, their minds turn off toward it. They unnotice it. Their defensive human psychologies effectively partner with the cloak. In the end, people see what they want to see: a Manhattan without a—how did you put it—a freaky-ass black tower in it.”

Lucifer clicks through to the next slide. It’s a picture of one of those cat statues that Billy has seen in every sushi bar he’s ever been in.

“This is the Neko of Infinite Equilibrium,” Lucifer says.

“That’s a lucky cat statue,” Billy says.

“Neko means cat,” Lucifer says. “And don’t be confused. This particular lucky cat statue is unique.”

“What does it do?”

“It waves.”

“Well,” Billy says, “sure.”

“Technically the gesture is supposed to represent a form of beckoning.”

“Huh,” Billy says.

“Ideally, it does not do anything else. Ideally, the Neko sits on a shelf in Hell, doing nothing. Beckoning. This was the state of affairs until two weeks ago, when Ollard saw fit to divest me of it.”

“He … divested you of it?”

“He stole it. He stole the Neko and placed it in his tower. It is crucial that it be retrieved. Part of my function is to retain possession of certain items that would have unfortunate effects if they were used by human beings.”

“Uh. Define unfortunate effects.”

“The Neko beckons,” Lucifer says. “It beckons endlessly. It does not require a source of energy. This makes it”—he pauses to contemplate—“abhorrent to this world’s thermodynamic laws. Once fully in this world the Neko’s surplus energy will be given off as heat. Since the Neko has, effectively, an infinite amount of surplus energy, it has the potential to produce an infinite amount of heat.”

“Infinite heat is bad?” Billy asks.

“Infinite heat means that you are starting a fire which can be neither extinguished nor contained.”

“That sounds bad.”

“Nothing could stop such a fire,” Lucifer says. “It will burn until it has consumed the entire atmosphere. It will burn until it has consumed the combustible matter that constitutes this planet and the life on it.”