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“And there’s no blood?”
“Not a drop. There’s only one weird part.”
He rolls his eyes.
“Here it comes.”
“The only time I used it was when I was following a dead man into the Tenebrae. This time I’ll be on my own.”
Kasabian finishes his beer and opens another.
“And you might not be able to make it back this time—I get it. You’re doing this upstairs. If something goes wrong, I don’t want your bony ass cluttering up my sales floor.”
“That’s fair.”
So I head upstairs and he follows me, a little wobbly on his feet. He bangs off the
walls a couple of times, but makes it into the apartment without too much damage. He drops down onto the couch.
“So what do we do?”
I pour some water into a mug.
“Like I said, I haven’t done it this way before. But think of it like pizza delivery. I guarantee to have the peeper out and back in your head in thirty minutes or less.”
He shakes his head.
“I don’t want to have to pry my eye out of your dead body.”
“You won’t.”
He thinks creaky booze thoughts for a minute.
“I’m getting a bucket of water. If I think you’ve been gone too long, I’m dumping it on you.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“Wait here,” he says, and staggers downstairs. While he bangs around down there I get the Dream Tea out of an old suitcase full of other stolen goodies that I keep under the bed.
Kasabian comes in with the filthy bucket we use to clean up downstairs. He fills it at the kitchen sink and carries it back to the sofa.
I put the mug of water in the microwave for a minute. When it’s finished, I dump in some of the tea and let it brew or steep or whatever it is tea is supposed to do. When it looks done, I swallow the whole cup. It tastes like Swamp Thing’s bathwater.
“If you die, try not to piss yourself,” Kasabian says. “The smell is hard to get out.”
“Love you too,” I tell him, carrying a glass of clean water over to the sofa. “Now give me your eye.”
“I hate this part,” he says.
“You’ll get a lollipop if you’re a big boy.”
First, I whisper a little hoodoo, pluck out one of my eyes, and drop it in the glass. It floats there like a deflated egg. Carefully, I pop out Kasabian’s peeper and put it in my socket. Kas flinches a little when it comes out, but doesn’t whine, and I’m grateful for that at least.
With the eye in, I get up and walk around, trying to get it to settle into place. It doesn’t take long. As my vision grows clearer, I feel the familiar drunk sensation I had when I first used the tea. I stumble in the direction of the sofa, but don’t make it and have to sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the counter. Closing my eyes, I feel like I’m sinking into a bath of warm Jell-O.
When I open my eyes I’m on a wide plain of dry packed earth. I know that if I walk in one direction I’ll get to Tenebrae Station and the ruins of a kind of ghost L.A. where restless souls too afraid to even haunt the crumbling streets hang out. In the other direction is a range of low mountains. I stumble in their direction, and before I’m halfway there, a door opens in the rock face. This is the door to Hell. Souls get a choice at this point. They can go inside, to a freak show designed to torture and torment them for eternity, or they can stay out here in the Tenebrae, with nothing but their shell-shocked brains and other hungry ghosts for company. In their shoes, I’d go inside. I’d rather be someplace than nowhere at all. But that’s me.
I want to run for the door, get Downtown as soon as possible, and spend as much time as I can there, but my legs won’t cooperate. I feel like I’m drunk, and that didn’t happen last time. It might be the effect of coming through here with no one waiting on the other side. Whatever it is, I’m not feeling springtime fresh by the time I step through the door. I throw on another glamour as soon as I get inside. The last thing I want is for anyone to recognize Sandman Slim when he can barely stand and definitely can’t defend himself.
