The Weirdness(59)

He laughs. Ollard behaved rashly: sent him someplace harmless. Ollard made a mistake. Fuck, he had Billy hanging in the air like a trussed deer: he could have cut any one of Billy’s prominent veins and just let him bleed out. Although maybe not: Billy remembers that Lucifer seemed to think that Ollard wouldn’t have killed him, even without the ward. Or wards, plural, whatever that’s about.

He looks at the vending machines and remembers the day he swore never to return here. His smile fades a little.

His parents had brought him. He was maybe six. They purchased a handful of grains out of one of those very vending machines, a quarter’s worth, and Wee Billy toddled off eagerly, ready to find some kindly fauna to feed. What Wee Billy didn’t know was that one handful of grain doesn’t last all that long when you’re up against the single-mindedness of the average farm animal. It all disappeared into the maw of one goat, an animal that Wee Billy experienced not as some harmless Disney critter, all shy smiles and eyelashes, but rather as a kind of frightening machine designed for gnashing. Something in the ballpark of an industrial thresher. Billy remembers looking into its otherworldly eye, with its diabolical-looking square pupil, and in there he found it, the terror, the terror at being up close with something that wasn’t human, that could not be reasoned with, that could not possibly be understood as good or kind.

Billy remembers wanting his mother. As the goat moved on to chewing wetly on the sleeve of Wee Billy’s shirt, he wanted his mother in a way that he had never wanted her before. There had been many times in his infancy and early childhood that he had wanted his mother to pick him up, to hold him, to feed him, to have her face fill his field of vision. Times when he had wanted her to tell him a story, something with mead halls and hunting horns, phrases that he didn’t understand but that she spoke with such delectation that he felt in her thrall, and felt comfortable there. But this time was different, fundamentally different. This was the first time he had wanted his mother to rescue him from Evil.

The goat had worked its way up Wee Billy’s sleeve until it finally began to nibble at the rim of his ear. His sniveling turned into open shrieking. He had needed his mother to rescue him from Evil and she wasn’t there. No one was there.

She had never been far, of course, nor had his father, and they rescued him a second later and took him home, stopping at an ice cream stand for soft serve vanilla with a sweet orange shell, but something in Billy’s world had cracked a bit. He learned that day that he was not fully under anyone’s protection, that there were bad things out there, things that don’t understand mercy, and ultimately, he would have to face those things by himself, whether equipped for the task or not. And on this cold morning, his mission failed, fucked in more ways than he can count, Billy has, once again, been reminded of precisely how ill-equipped he is, most of the time.

He thinks of Ollard’s rotting teeth, of the stink that bloomed from his mouth.

He sits there, in the mud, trying futilely to come up with a next move. The planet is slated to die and he’s in Ohio, of all places. He’s cold. He’s alone. Apple Cheeks seems to be closed for the season, or something; he doesn’t see anybody else around: no farmers, no members of the public, nothing but goats and sheep. If he could get to his dad’s place—easily forty-five minutes away even if he had a car—then maybe he could … borrow some cash? That would be a good start. But then what?

Billy feels a hot flush of frustration surge into his face, threatening to squirt out into big stupid tears. Ollard didn’t make a mistake. He was right not to care where he sent Billy off to because in the end it doesn’t matter. Ollard didn’t need to kill him, all he needed to do was flick him away and he would no longer count.

He wants his mother.

He lies back down.

He’s been lying there for a few minutes watching clouds scud across the sky when he hears approaching footsteps crunching through the rutted dirt. Billy tries to prepare an explanation for the proprietor of Apple Cheeks, some plausible narrative explaining how and why he came to be lying in this field. He’s a fiction writer, ostensibly; he should be able to come up with something.

But there’s no need. It’s not the proprietor. It’s Lucifer. He looks down at Billy with some admixture of pity and consternation, with the latter seeming more genuine than the former.

“What are you doing?” Lucifer says.

“Just—” Billy says, trying to figure it out, exactly. “Just lying here? Feeling sorry for myself?”

“Well, stop it,” Lucifer says. “We have things to do.”