Shut up, Medea. We’re having a moment. And I know you were lying now, so can it.
Getting staked isn’t going to kill me, but it hurts like a rhino giving you a flu shot with its horn. I sit down on a wooden chair Alice didn’t break and push the hoodie back from my head with my new bug arm. My boots are slick with the dead guards’ innards. My coat is covered in blood and smells like the sewer. And then there’s my face. For those few seconds when I first saw her, it felt like I wasn’t Sandman Slim anymore. I was plain old boring James Stark. With the pain the truth comes back. I’m in a Hellion asylum, rank, mangled, and horrible. I’m finally the monster I always said I was.
I have to laugh. There isn’t much else left to do. Go down into the deepest darkest parts of Hell, and you’ll see what I mean. They laugh all the time down there.
I reach into my coat pocket and feel around. For a second I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for. I pull out what Mustang Sally told me to bring through the Black Dahlia. My hands are bloody from my chest wound and I’ve left sticky red fingerprints all over the small plastic rabbit. I wipe it on my coat, but that just smears the blood. Fuck it.
I toss the rabbit over to where Alice is hiding in the corner.
“I was going to bring you a turkey dinner since we missed Christmas, but it wouldn’t fit in my coat, so you’ll have to settle for that.”
I see a hand dart from the blackness and disappear back inside. My chest burns, but the wound is already closing up. My legs are cramping. I want to stand, but I don’t want to spook her. I wish God hadn’t made me put out my cigarette.
Soon I hear, “Jim?”
I can’t see her, but the angel in my head can. He shows her to me outlined in the deep dark. The atoms that hold her together are the same as the air around her, her clothes, the walls and floor. And me. There’s no difference.
“Jim?”
“Hi, Lucy. I’m home.”
She comes over to me slowly, still afraid it’s a trick. I know the feeling.
“Jim. Are you . . . ?”
“I’m not dead and I’m not a Hellion. I just needed to borrow a face to get here. Trust me. This isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve done since we last saw each other.”
She kneels down and looks into my eyes but keeps some distance between us.
Alice was always the smart one. She read books and thought about what she was going to say before she said it. Sometimes she said the most important things without talking. It was all little physical reactions.
She shakes her head a tiny bit, an almost subliminal m">&sublimiovement.
“Is that really you in there?”
“You tell me.”
She looks down at my human hand. I turn it over so she can see the back. It’s like she’s trying to read a secret in the lines. But the hand is so scarred I doubt she’ll find anything familiar about it.
“Whoever you are, you really need to do something about those cuticles,” she says.
“All the beauty parlors down here are closed or on fire.”
She gets up and looks down at me.
“Say something only Jim would say.”
“Oh shit.”
“Nice start. Keep going.”
I try to think, but my brain is freezer-burned.
“Vidocq has our old apartment. He uses a potion that makes it invisible and makes everyone else forget it’s there so he doesn’t have to pay rent. He lives there with a nice girl who’s a hoodoo doctor but originally worked in my video store. Oh yeah. I own a video store. Remember Kasabian? The store used to belong to him, but I cut off his head, so now the store’s mine. Kasabian’s head is my roommate. He steals my cigarettes and drinks my beer. We usually live over the store, but it’s being fixed up, so now we’re in a hotel. I finally met my real father. He was an archangel, but now he’s dead. I really missed you.”
She crosses her arms. Nods at me.
“What happened to your face?”