The Sandman Slim Series Books 1-4. Richard Kadrey

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СКАЧАТЬ This is what Heaven must have looked like after Lucifer’s war.

      When I start walking, the wall of Kissi bodies parts like the Red Sea, then closes in behind me.

      I’m moving just to move. Standing still feels like asking for trouble. But every direction looks exactly the same to me. I can’t tell if I’m walking on something solid or just the idea of something. One minute, it feels like I’m on hard-packed dirt, then the next, I’m sinking into sponge cake. I don’t stop or slow down. I keep walking, like I know exactly where I’m going.

      A Kissi puts its glowing hand on my arm. I look at it like I talk to zombie angels every day. Its face is half-baked dough. I can’t quite bring it into focus.

      “I told you we’d meet again.”

      The Kissi’s face rearranges itself for a second. Turns into Josef’s Aryan poster-boy mug. “He’s waiting for you. Straight ahead. We’ve all been so looking forward to this.”

      “Hang around, ugly. When I’m done with Mason, the two of us can get some dim sum before I kill you again.”

      Josef laughs, turns his sluglike head, and dissolves into the writhing mass of Kissi bodies. They pick up his laugh and it spreads out across the colony, so that in just a few seconds the sound surrounds me. Thunders down on me from a billion throats like a storm. It rattles every molecule in my body. I’m being mugged with sound. I turn and shove the lighter straight into the heart of the closest group of Kissi. They shriek and scatter. Shove the lighter in another group. And another. They still surround me, but they’re not laughing anymore. And they keep their distance.

      Straight ahead is the Faim family’s Beverly Hills mansion, a Tudor playhouse standing in a universe of nothing. I don’t bother knocking.

      Head straight downstairs to the basement. Mason’s magic room. The room where he sent me to Hell and where I found the lighter.

      I open the door at the bottom of the stairs and, like that, it’s eleven years ago.

      The room is exactly the way I remember it. Even the circle drawn on the floor in lead is the same. I never figured Mason for the nostalgic type.

      “I know you’re not going to believe me, but it’s really good to see you, Jimmy.”

      Mason sounds exactly the same. He looks the same, too. I can’t tell if he’s keeping himself young with magic or if time works differently here.

      “When you’ve spent as many years as I have with no one to talk to but Parker or the Kissi, it’s a real thrill to run into someone with some brains. Who isn’t here to kiss my ass or be my Renfield.”

      “That’s funny. I always thought you and Parker were best buds. Not Vlad and Renfield.”

      “You used to call him my attack dog. Maybe that’s a better way of putting it. A dog is man’s best friend, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to talk to it about anything important. You pet a dog. You feed a dog. You put it out back to guard the henhouse. Reward it when it’s been good. Punish it when it’s been bad. That’s pretty much it.”

      “Your plan is working out great, if your plan was to sit out here in an empty house in the middle of fuck-all, surrounded by talking army ants. Wow. You really are a genius. I never saw that one coming.”

      “You see? Anyone else, I’d want to strangle by now. But noise like that. Criticism. It’s all right coming from you. Because I respect you. You really are the only other Sub Rosa I thought had any real talent and style.”

      “That’s why you had to kill me.”

      “I didn’t kill you, did I? I could have and you wouldn’t have seen it coming any more than the other thing.”

      “You can’t even say it? You sent me to Hell. Say it.”

      “I don’t want to reopen old wounds. That’s not why I brought you here. And before you tell me that you found me on your own, we both know that I made sure that Kasabian knew just enough about where we were to help you finally figure it out.”

      “If you wanted me here so bad, why didn’t you just send up a flare or have one of your Kissi forward me a Google map link?”

      “Because I had to know that you could do it. I haven’t seen you in eleven years. Maybe the air in Hell or all those knocks on the head in the arena turned your brains to butterscotch pudding. I had to see you work it out and here you are. And since you got rid of Parker, I have a staff opening right now. A nice midlevel executive job. Good hours. Terrific benefits. Possible deification. Interested?”

      “Keep talking. The more you yammer, the more I want to kill you. That’s the only reason I’m here, in case you forgot about what you did to me and Alice.”

      “Alice was Parker’s thing. I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to make too much of a fuss after you were gone. He took it too far.”

      “He was your dog. You sent him out to hunt. Your responsibility.”

      “What if I told you that you could get her back? Exactly as she was. And the two of you could live together forever. What would you say?”

      I’m not at all surprised by his arrogance and bullshit. What’s so strange about Mason is how young he seems. Like he’s exactly the same little show-off he was all those years ago. Has he really been sitting here alone for eleven years? That’s worse than what happened to me. I’m the old man now, but I saw and did a few things. I didn’t just crawl up my own teenybopper ass for a decade. Imagine eleven years, sitting in a dollhouse version of your childhood home, reading magic books and not talking to anyone but your pet thug and talking roaches. If Mason wasn’t crazy before, he’s definitely joined the banana army now.

      “What are you talking about? How could I get back Alice?”

      “That’s why I had to make you solve a puzzle to get here. I had to know if you could keep up once the project got rolling. Stage one is why I formed an alliance with the Kissi. To take control of the world.”

      He smiles at me like he just got all A’s on his report card.

      “Why would anyone want to run the world?” I ask. “It sounds like a huge pain in the ass.”

      “That’s just stage one. If all I wanted was to take over the world, believe me, the Kissi and I could have done it already.”

      “What do you want the world for?”

      “In any military campaign, you need a few basic things. Troops. Equipment. Support staff. Supply lines, that kind of thing. Earth is the perfect staging area for that.”

      “When I knew you, all you wanted was to prove that you were the best little magician in Candyland. Now you want to be Patton, too? What is wrong with you?”

      He goes to a large ebony desk, piled high with books, writing paper, and maps of the universe like Aelita had, from Heaven looking down and from Hell looking up. Mason grabs an old book about the size and weight of a bag of cement and shows me the pages he’s been studying. A single word crosses the two pages of the spread: L’Infernus. Below that is a detailed map of Hell’s topography.

      “We’re invading Hell. I have СКАЧАТЬ