“This is not of California, not of America,” Maryam said. “I was born in Mosul. This is from not far from there. From Nineveh or from Asshur. From Asshur, I think. It feels more ancient than Nineveh, and yes, darker.”

  We stepped up onto the sidewalk on the factory side of the street. “Can we do what we want to do?” I asked. “Or do we start yelling for a Special Wizardry Assault Team or for the Army?”

  “How long will that take? How much money will US Rubber spend to convince important people we’re talking nonsense? How many lawyers will they throw at us, either on their own or because those things still have hold of them?” Dr. Berkowitz said.

  Those were all good questions. But so was mine. What happened if the Assyrian things got us, not the other way around? I’d asked myself questions like that as we ground our way up the Italian boot. The best answer I’d found was Somebody else will take care of it if I can’t. It wasn’t great, but it kept me going. My guess is, the fylfot boys felt the same way while we were grinding them down. They sure didn’t show much quit, not till the very end.

  “Let’s give it a shot,” Rob Grau said. Nobody told him he was nuts, so we went forward instead of turning around and driving home.

  Streetlights and factory lights shone on us bright as the sun. Those winged, bearded figures on the walls would’ve known we were there any which way. But I didn’t want us to be so obvious to anybody going in or just passing by. I longed for something like the tarncapes the Lightning Rune soldiers had used to hide themselves in plain sight.

  When I said so, Rob’s laugh was as harsh as a fiddle bow scraping strings instead of playing. “Jack, it won’t matter much,” he said. “If we can’t do this fast, we can’t do it at all.” I remembered that from Italy, too, much too well.

  Maryam Tuama was already chanting in a harsh language full of odd vowels and guttural consonants. Dr. Berkowitz looked intensely interested. “I feel like somebody who speaks Spanish hearing Latin for the first time,” he said. “Every now and then a word makes sense, but most of it just zips over my head.”

  Rob pointed at one of the things on the factory wall. “Come forth!” he cried, and made the kind of pass a bullfighter would have envied.

  “Is this a good idea?” Dora Urban asked. I didn’t think she was reading my mind, but I sure had the same thought.

  Whether it was a good idea or not, our sorcerer got what he wanted and then some. All the things on the walls—not just the one he’d pointed at—stepped off them and went from low reliefs to full three-dimensional beings. Only ghost images of where they’d been were left. They all started coming towards us, too. Since they were three or four times as tall as we were, they came mighty goddamn fast.

  They weren’t reliefs any more, no. Me, I wasn’t what you’d call relieved, either.

  But the curator from the County Museum was ready for them, even if I wasn’t. She and Rob must have been practicing together, because she shouted in that fierce language at the same time as he made another virtuoso pass. And then the creatures with the beards and the wings and the commanding features had more things than us to worry about.

  The narrow lawn in front of the factory wasn’t made for the sudden apparition of supernatural beings. Believe me, it wasn’t. The creatures that had escaped from the walls or been turned loose by Rob Grau’s first spell left the biggest, deepest damn footprints I’d ever seen. So did the heroes and lions Rob and Maryam summoned to oppose them.

  I think the heroes were holding on to the lions when they all first appeared together. Holding them the way I’d hold Old Man Mose, I mean—they were as overgrown as their opponents. I’m not sure, though. Things were happening fast, the way they do in combat. The heroes had the same curly beards and the same strong-prowed features as the god-things, too. This wasn’t a new enmity, is what I’m saying. Maryam might be able to tell you exactly how far back it went. I can’t even begin to guess.

  If the lions had gone for us, I wouldn’t be here to spin out this yarn. They were the heroes’ hunting hounds, though. They attacked the winged things off the wall as if there were no tomorrow. Faster than I know how to tell you, almost all the winged creatures were down, with the lions snacking on their carcasses and the heroes sticking swords into them to make sure they were carcasses.

  One, though, one ran along Scrying Crystal Road with a hero and a couple of lions in hot pursuit. He squashed a couple of parked cars and made power lines spark when he plowed through them. I wondered what the hell the Sheriff’s Department would do if he got away.

  Dora touched my arm. “Look,” she said, and pointed toward the factory.

  I looked. The ghost images of the winged, bearded creatures had disappeared as they perished, leaving the stonework as flat and blank as if it had never been carved at all. I wondered what old photographs of the place would show, and whether brochures and magazine articles from bygone days were rewriting themselves to reflect revised reality.

  Those ghost images had disappeared, yes—all save one. The one who was still on his enormous feet and trying to get away? No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than Maryam Tuama scampered across the torn-up lawn toward that image. She took from her handbag something I couldn’t make out. Later, Dora told me it was an old-fashioned lady’s hatpin. Whatever it was, Maryam jabbed it into the ghost image’s left foot.

  The creature with wings and beard that was still trying to get away let out a shriek of pain that almost deafened me, even though it had run a hell of a long way down the street. It grabbed at its left foot as if something had stabbed it. Then the hero and the lions caught it, and that was the end of that.

  That was the end of that in more ways than one, in fact. The last ghost image still on the wall gave up the ghost and vanished.

  A bell started clanging inside the factory building. Or maybe it had been going for a while, and I only noticed it just then because so much other stuff was happening at the same time.

  Maryam bit her lip. “Now we see how many so-called modern men, modern but long steeped in Assyrian savagery and blood lust, will come forth to seek their vengeance against us.”

  “We do what we can,” Rob Grau said. “That’s all we can do.”

  But nobody came out of the factory. Instead, over five minutes or so, half a dozen ambulances with flashing lights and screaming sirens pulled up in front of the place. People jumped out of them and rushed into the buildings. Some were carrying doctors’ bags, some wizards’ carpetbags, and some—the enlisted men, you might say—had stretchers.

  I’d thought about tarncapes not long before. We might as well have been wearing them after all. None of the people from the ambulances seemed to notice we were there. Nobody looked at us. Nobody paid us the least attention. Even stranger, nobody seemed to see the carnage on the lawn. I’d thought that would draw a double take from a zombie, but no.

  Before long, they started bringing people out. One of those people looked familiar, not least because his hair was as red as Dr. Berkowitz’s. Where had I seen him before? In the diner across the street while I was trying to find out what happened to Frank Jethroe?

  Then I remembered who he was. Pat Brannegan, that was his name. Babs had called him out to the reception hall for me. He’d been Frank’s boss. Was he somehow involved with how the guy who’d worked on his line had wound up a mindless, soulless laborer building a freeway for O’Flannery and Muldoon? That was how it looked to me.

  The doctors and sorcerers and medics made two or three trips in and out. They didn’t spot us or the chaos we’d caused on any of them. Maybe that had to do with the way the factory walls didn’t show the winged, bearded creatures any more. Or maybe I didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on.

  They brought out enough people to stuff the ambulances the way you stuff sausage meat into skins: till they bulged. One of the last men they hauled out, a bald guy with a gray fringe who was wearing what to my eye looked like a Savile Row suit, kept groaning, “Vepratoga! For God’s sake give me vepratoga!”

  That was interesting. I wondered if it would fetch the LAPD, or if everybody monitoring that net of sorcerous snoopery was either behind bars or out on bail. With luck, we’d be gone before I could find out.

  I asked Dora, “You all right?” Vampires and the Lord’s name can mix like water and sodium.

  But she gave me a nod, if a shaky one. “Yes, thank you, for the most part. It was not aimed at me.”

  One after another, the ambulances sped off into the night. Their sirens dopplered off into the distance. Then I realized those weren’t the only sirens I was hearing. The others sounded more like fire engines. They didn’t seem to be heading straight for the US Rubber factory. They weren’t that far away, though. I pointed southwest. “Is something burning over there?”

  “Yes.” Dora sounded certain.

  I believed her. She saw better at night than I did, or than any live person could. A couple of heartbeats later, something else occurred to me. “Isn’t that about where …?”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  If everything went well at the plant, we’d planned on visiting PERSONAL ASSISTANCE, PERSONAL ASSISTANTS next. Now maybe we wouldn’t have to. Was that a coincidence? Was there any such thing as a coincidence? The deeper I got into this whole knotted-up business, the more I doubted it.

  Since we didn’t know for sure, we all piled into Rob’s Buick to find out. He’d turned on to Jellison when Dora and I said the same thing at the same time: “That is the place.”

  Rob parked the car. We got out and walked toward the blaze as if we were a handful of ordinary rubberneckers.

  “It burns very hard,” Maryam Tuama said.

  It did. It had the kind of red, red, red glare I’d seen a few times during the war and then again, not so long ago, when my apartment building went up in flames. Dora recognized it, too. As we had a minute or two before, we spoke together: “Salamander.”

  Izzy Berkowitz whistled softly. “Somebody doesn’t like those people.”

  He wasn’t wrong. All the same, I said, “Somebody doesn’t give a damn about all the zombies they had in their storeroom there. And somebody is probably real happy all their files are gone for good.”

  Dora made a small, stricken sound. “Rudolf’s records! If he was made into a zombie there, how will we ever find out what became of him?”

  Chances were, we wouldn’t. From everything I’d heard, she was the only one in the whole wide world who cared at all about the vampire she called her half brother. From everything I’d heard, Sebestyen didn’t deserve to have even one person caring about him even a little bit.

  A red car with a flashing light on top shot past us, heading toward the blaze. The door had crossed torches on it, painted in gold. If the County Fire Department used the same heraldry as the Army, that was the mark of their Pyromancy Squad. They didn’t think the zombie dealership was going up in smoke by accident, either.

  Nothing we could do there, so we went back to the Buick. Rob drove up to Scrying Crystal Road, then turned left to take us back to our own part of the urban sprawl. When we went past the US Rubber factory, we all exclaimed. The walls had lost their reliefs, yes, but every trace of the wild rumpus that went with that had also disappeared. I wondered how long we’d be able to go on remembering it.

  Almost every trace, I should say. The cars that last fleeing creature had stomped on were still squished, even though the creature itself was as one with Nineveh and Asshur. What would their owners think when they saw them? What would their auto-insurance companies think?

  When Rob stopped in front of my office, I said, “I’ve got most of a bottle in one of my desk drawers, if anybody’s interested. Matter of fact, I’ve got it even if nobody’s interested.”

  Nobody said no. The office was jammed with all of us in there. I sat in my chair. Dora, Maryam, and Rob sat on the sofa. Izzy perched on my desk. “Only a little bit,” he said when I passed him the bottle. “I have to make it home in one piece.” And the nip he took was a small one.

  “Same here,” Grau said. “Doggone it.” He went easy, too.

  So did my undead lady friend. Bourbon wasn’t her tipple of choice, as who had better reason to know than I did? That left more for Maryam and me. No matter what I drank, it didn’t hit me very hard. I’d seen that after bad times in Italy, too. Fear and excitement burn away the booze before it can bite.

  “We did it. We really did it,” I said. Even in my own ears, I sounded as if I had trouble believing it, mostly because I did.

  Among us, we killed the bottle. Izzy Berkowitz took off. So did Rob and the museum curator. After they left, Old Man Mose came out from under the couch. “You people are crazy. I almost got squashed under there,” he said.

  “We’ll do better next time,” I told him. He could take that any way he pleased.

  When Dora and I walked back to her place, I had to pay attention to where I put my feet, so maybe the Wild Turkey got to me after all. It didn’t bother her. We were almost there when she said, “I wonder what the newspapers will make of what happened at the factory.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “We’ll find out,” I said brilliantly. The bourbon must have been helping me think, too.

  I had breakfast about two that afternoon: coffee and canned corned-beef hash. The hash was quick and easy and cheap. It didn’t taste too bad, even without a sunny-side-up egg on top. And it spackled over the empty I woke up with.

  That done, I headed for the office. On my way, I gave a short-pants kid a dime for a Mirror. I sold papers when I was a kid. There weren’t so many machines then. And he was browner than I am, so the odds against him were steeper. The Mirror cost a nickel, but I didn’t wait for change.

  “Thanks, Mister!” he squeaked after me. I waved and kept on.

  The story I wanted didn’t make the front page, so I had to wait till I was at my desk to find it. It was on page four, and I had to start reading it before I could be sure it was the right one. The headline read “Food Poisoning Sickens 13 at Tire Plant.” Food poisoning? Was that what they were calling it?

  That’s what the story said. If you believed what you read in the newspaper, that was why those ambulances showed up there. Floor supervisor Patrick Brannegan and senior vice president Wilbert Swindell were said to be in especially serious condition. Was Swindell the fellow who’d been groaning for vepratoga? Not a word about their trying to swallow a big dose of ancient Assyrian wizardry.

  The story did note, “Two cars in the area were also mysteriously vandalized. Both seem to have been crushed from above. A sheriff’s spokesperson declined to speculate on how this might have happened.” No hint that that might be connected to the food poisoning that wasn’t food poisoning.

  For that matter, no hint that it was related to the fire at the zombie dealership. The fire got its own little story, on page seven: “Arson Suspected in Business Blaze.” The squib mentioned arson, yeah, but said nary a word about a salamander. And it talked around what kind of business had burned, the way it would have with a cathouse.

  If you don’t look at the horrid thing, it isn’t really there, right? Right.

  Nobody had looked at us, which was good. I thought so, anyhow, till the phone rang a few minutes later. When I answered it, the woman on the other end of the line said, “I have Mister Victor Howe here. He wishes to speak with you, Mister Mitchell.”

  “Put him through,” I said, even though I was a long way from sure I wanted to talk to US Rubber’s boss lawyer.

  “That you, Mitchell?” Howe growled after a couple of telephone clicks.

  “Yes, unless your secretary dialed the wrong number,” I answered.

  He paused. He grunted. “That’s right. You’re a funny man. Heh. I don’t know what you did last night, Mitchell, but it opened some eyes.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you mean US Rubber?”

  “I’m not likely to mean anything else.”

  “I just saw the story in the paper a little while ago,” I said, which was true. “If you think I can arrange food poisoning on cue, you’re crazier than I gave you credit for.” That was also true. Put ’em all together, though, and they spelled misleading.

  Except Howe wasn’t misled. The way he said “Food poisoning!” told me my friends and I weren’t the only ones who remembered what the US Rubber factory used to look like. He went on, “You know damn well that isn’t what was going on.”

  “Who told you? Was it—what did the newspaper say his name was?—Swindell? Uh, Wilbert Swindell?” I did my best to show him I was looking at the Mirror story. I was, too, but I remembered the name without checking.

  “Funny man,” Howe said again. “You aren’t half so funny as you think you are, funny man. Will Swindell and I have been friends for more than twenty years.”

  You deserve each other. I thought it, but I didn’t say it. Was that before or after he started messing around with Assyrian demons? I swallowed that, too. I was a good boy … till all of a sudden I wasn’t. I couldn’t help asking, “Did he find the stuff he wanted so much?”

  A short silence stretched into a long one. At last, Howe said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I know he was a lawyer, but I’ve sure heard lawyers who made better liars.

  “Okay, fine. Ask him next time you talk, then.” I know I sounded tired. Hell, I was tired. I added, “Oh, by the way, the guy I was looking for who worked for US Rubber, I found him. Somebody there drugged him and had him made into a zombie. In case you hadn’t heard, I mean.”

  “I am aware of the allegation, yes,” Howe answered. “Naturally, as the legal representative of the company and of the fine, upstanding men and women it employs, I deny that the claim has any basis in fact.”