The Kill Society (Sandman Slim)(95)

“Good boy. And what’s this?”

She puts her hand around mine and changes the channel.

A skinny guy with freckles is singing the blues. He thinks he’s B. B. King, but he’s more like a coyote with a sore throat.

“It’s a talent show.”

“Right again.”

“Oh God.”

“Welcome home, Mr. Stark.”

“No. It’s a trick. I’m in Hell. No one brings you back from the dead just to make you watch reality TV.”

“Do you believe you’re back from the dead?” say Eva.

“I’m not sure. Why would Wormwood bring me back?”

“As I said, the whole concept of Wormwood, at least on the mortal plane, is a bit of a mess. Factions. Splinter groups. Bankruptcies. A few murders.”

“A lot of murders,” says the man.

“Quite a lot,” says Eva.

“Good. Rip yourselves to shreds. If you brought me back to see it all happen, thanks. This ought to be fun.”

Eva pulls over a chair and sits next to me.

“We didn’t bring you back to watch us come apart. We brought you back to help us put things back together again.”

I’m starting to feel almost like I believe her and that I am alive. That last thing she said got my heart beating fast.

Eva says, “For one thing, you’ll save a lot of lives and a lot of ordinary people’s livelihoods. You know we control a lot of investments. Well, many of them are falling apart and losing value. Innocent, ordinary people are losing everything.”

I hate the way she keeps saying “ordinary people.” Still, I say, “Tough. They shouldn’t have worked for you in the first place.”

“Most don’t know that they are, but let’s forget money for now. Some of our more radical offshoots haven’t been satisfied with merely playing the markets on things such as famines and communicable diseases. They’re beginning to manipulate them. Pneumonic plague outbreaks. Ebola. It’s all very ugly.”

“They’re even manipulating the damnation market,” says the man. “Insider trading on human souls. Imagine it. Doomed to Hell for eternity so that a broker could get a bigger bonus this quarter.”

“You’re lying.”

“You said it yourself,” says Eva. “We’re Wormwood. What wouldn’t we do?”

She’s right. It sounds exactly like something Wormwood would do.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I told you. We need to rein things in. Bring in the outliers. Restore some order to the system.”

“And you want me to help you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Forget it. Kill me. You think Hell scares me? It’s you people that scare me.”

“That’s not all we’re offering,” says the man.

“Eva, who the fuck is this guy?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m Barron Sinclair.”

He says it like it’s supposed to mean something to me. When he holds out his hand to shake, I hold up the remote and turn off the TV instead.

“As Sinclair said, the chance to save lives and livelihoods isn’t all we’re offering,” says Eva.

“What else do you people have that I’d want?”

“How about your old life?” says Sinclair. “All of it.”

Eva says, “When you finish your contract with us, you can go back to your friends. Candy, Kasabian, the others. Even your silly video store is still there.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because as an act of good faith, we can give you something I know you want perhaps more than anything else.”

“What?”

“The Room of Thirteen Doors.”

“Now I know you’re lying. The Room is gone. Occupado. Full of old gods or a new universe. Anyway, it’s off-limits.”

“Not to us. The Room is empty and waiting for you.”

I look around at all the ugly, earnest Wormwood faces. They look more scared than I am angry. And it’s not me they’re scared of. It’s something else. Maybe they’re afraid of each other.

“How can you have possibly gotten control of the Room?”

Eva says, “We don’t have control. Only you can control it. We just swept it out for you.”

“How?”

“Do you really want to discuss transsubstantive metaphysical plane displacement? Or do you want to see the Room?”

“I can go right now? Just walk right out of here?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know I won’t bolt?”

Sinclair leans in.

“Remember when you asked Eva if you were alive and she said ‘more or less’?”

“It’s actually a lot less than it is more,” says Eva. “Without our intervention, there’s a time limit to how long your body will hold together. If we pull the plug, so to speak, you will begin to decay just like any other corpse.”

I touch my face, my left arm. No flesh there. Just a black Kissi prosthetic.

Fuck. I really am alive.

“How did you get my body in the first place?”

“Don’t be stupid. We paid off someone in the coroner’s office.”