Unicorn U Read online

  PROLOGUE

  The Four rode down the cold, black street, past the staring fronts of closed shops, past blowing trash and battered cars. They rode as they had always ridden, in silence, the frosty fall air shattered by the jingle of their horses’ iron trappings, the clatter of adamantine-shod hooves.

  War rode first, as was his right. His was the only mount who seemed to relish the journey for the journey’s sake. In all the centuries since the Four had first set boot to stirrup, War had always come first and the rest fell naturally into ordered ranks behind him. Cold steel and the acrid tang of gunpowder blew from the nostrils of his steed, and flames streaked from the unholy creature’s eyes as man and mount raced eagerly on to conquer any crumb of earthly ground not yet consecrated to their rule by bloodshed.

  Famine followed War, though her raddle-boned mare looked ready to drop with every staggering step. The beast’s eyes rolled whitely in its head; its tongue hung dark and bloated from a dry, papery muzzle that showed the shape of the skull beneath. As for the mare’s rider, she rode close-mouthed, shriveled lips pressed tightly together, sunken cheeks caved in more deeply here and there where the teeth had rotted away. She pressed a small, swollen bundle to her hollow chest and sometimes, when the pace (lagged, she would gaze at the awful secret the gray swaddlings held and smile bitterly. War rode at a gallop, Famine at a halting trot, yet the distance between them was never great and seldom varied.

  Next came Pestilence, a welter of boils and running sores, blackly swollen buboes and skin every unhealthy shade and texture. Stench dropped from him like rain, and any mortal thing unlucky enough to be near when that gruesome cavalcade rode by sickened visibly when he passed, though by ancient choice the Four maintained the strictest invisibility. His horse was scabbed and spavined, yet the mottled gray gelding ran at a steady canter, too sick to reach full gallop, too desperate to outrun the thousand ills besetting it to dare slow down.

  Last of all, yet first by right of ultimate victory, Death rode her pale horse after. She was no skeleton, as most simple-minded mortals had limned her, no gaunt and mocking specter. She was a lady, highborn and holy, a virgin whose lips had lighted on every brow but whose body and self maintained their secrets. Proudly she rode, skin all the shifting shades of the world’s populace, face now hawk-nosed and pale, now almond-eyed and golden, now smiling full-lipped and ebon-skinned. Her gown was the stark white of bleached linen cerements, and it flowed from her generously rounded form like a moonlit river that ends in the darkest sea. Slow and stately, the pace of her ghostly stallion, yet even at a walk he could cover all the earth in a single stride if he so chose.

  The Four rode on. They rode through the streets of the sleeping city above the Hudson River as they had ridden through Rome and Paris, London and New York. Always before the road had made no difference, the cities and towns they favored being all the same to them. Before this night, they had ridden because they were the Four, and the Four must ride.

  This night was different. This night they rode with a purpose all their own, towards a goal that would be the death-groan of a world and more than a world.

  War rode first, and so was first to turn his steed sharply from the road, down the dingy alleyway. The others followed, but it was Death who came first to the battered black steel door. War made a stirrup of his hands to help her dismount. Famine, her handmaid, crouched beside the door with a raptor’s eyes, her bundle at her breast, the trail of saliva from her flaking lips slick and shiny in the moonlight. Pestilence laid himself down, a barely living bridge of bones for Death to walk upon. All this Death took with neither pride nor thanks, as her due.

  Death stared at the black door, then raised her iron riding crop and struck it seven times. Each blow was echoless except the last, and that echo of itself contained the rumble of tanks and gun-carriages, the mewl of starving babes, the moans of the death-cheated dying and the final creak and slam of the coffin lid coming down. Then silence.

  Death waited. She was very good at waiting. War chafed, curses bubbling over his lips, Famine keened, Pestilence groaned.

  but Death stood silent, keeping watch out of eyes that were by turns blue and brown, black and green, the color of new violets and the filmy cast of moldering leaves. At last her wait came to an end. The door opened.

  “It’s all right,” Death said to the face only she could see lurking behind the black door. “We’re with the band.”

  The Four tethered their steeds to the Dipsy Dumpster in the alley and went in. For once, Famine came last, shifting her bundle awkwardly from arm to arm. An edge of the gray swaddlings came undone and something metallic clanged on the asphalt. Grumbling, she picked up the rusty kazoo and shoved it back in with the dented cavalry trumpet, the mouse-gnawed tambourine, and the miniature glockenspiel that was missing several keys.

  “Why I always gotta be the fuckin’ roadie,” she muttered as the great door slammed shut behind her.

  1 IVY BELEAGUERED

  They say that your first year of college is something you look back on with fond memories. That’s assuming you’re alive to remember it. By the time Christmas vacation humped itself around during my first year at Princeton, Higher Education and I stood in the following relationship:

  ME = BUTTERFLY

  COLLEGE = WINDSHIELD OF MACK TRUCK GOING NINETY MILES PER HOUR

  Did I mention that the butterfly also had the flu? Stupid me. Maybe if I’d paid more attention to details like that I wouldn’t have been flunking Organic Chemistry. Still, things could be worse. . . .

  “Repent! ”

  A copy of the New York Daily News rattled in my face as I took the last turn on the stairwell leading up to my dorm room. I got a nasty smear of newsprint down the center of my nose. No need to knock the paper aside to see who was lurking in the shadows ready to ram salvation down my throat: I knew.

  “Hi, Willie. Drop dead,” I said, shouldering onward, upward, and past him.

  This turned out to be easier said than done. Wilmot Smoot, boy bigot, had been on my case since September, when he found out who my mother was. Every day, rain or shine, he found a way to remind me that there was a cozy little rent-controlled condo in Hell reserved for Mom and me. Usually a merry greeting and an invitation to pat a piranha were enough to let him feel he’d done his job and could go find some other hapless slob to beat over the head with God.

  Christmas changed all that. The festive holiday season was almost upon us. Something about large quantities of tinsel and mechanical storefront Santas must have affected this yahoo’s glands. Suddenly he had staying power.

  “Turn back!” he shouted, weaseling his way past me up the stairs and again positioning himself between me and my room. He shook his copy of the Daily News like a banner. “While it is still not too late, retreat from the edge of the pit that has been dug for you! The abyss yawns—!”

  “That’s ’cause you probably bored it to death,” said a voice from further up the winding steps. My roommate, Phil Avery, is an O.K. guy, but I never thought I’d be this glad to see him. He’s a shoo-in for the varsity football team next year, if they’ve got a position like Left Godzilla Forward, Official Scare-the-Crap-Out-of-the-Other-Team Center or Prepare-to-Meet-Thy End, provided that he promises not to eat more than two quarterbacks per game. Remember William “the Refrigerator” Perry? Now imagine what he’d look like if he’d been a big fella and you’ve got a pretty good picture of Phil.

  When Phil's hands, each one capable of juicing a coconut, fell on Willie's shoulders, I expected the little twerp to start cheeping like a hamster sucked up into an Electrolux, then to run away, fast. I still wasn’t giving enough credit to Christmas. Any holiday capable of making my mom spend good cash-money sending Deadly Ninja Throwing Fruitcakes to Great-grand
uncle Pondscum and his lovely wife. Rover, is a force with which to reckon.

  Willie twisted out of Phil’s grip and confronted him bravely. “Woe unto ye, ye nation of vipers!” he bawled right up into his face. Pound for pound, Phil does have the heft of some smaller Third World countries, including the livestock, but he doesn't take kindly to being called a nation. He also doesn’t like snakes.

  “What did you say, friend?” Phil’s grip reasserted itself on Willie’s shoulders, this time hard enough to make him drop the Daily News. I thought I saw the poor dweeb’s hands go white as Phil's fingers cut off all blood circulation from the maximus deltoideus on down.

  (We pre-med students know neat stuff like that—you know, fancy names for all the different parts of the body. However, if we pre-meds do not start doing better in Organic Chem, we can kiss our collective gluteus maximus a nice healthy ave atque vale.)

  Willie was pale, but Willie was not shaken. “Save yourself!” he gibbered. "Deliver your soul from the doom that awaits that thrice-lost creature!” He tried to point at me, but his arms were too weak to lift. All he managed was one trembly finger that looked like bad macaroni.

  Phil looked from Willie’s farina-like face to me. “Tim, you thrice-lost?” he asked.

  “Gee, Toto, I don’t think I’m in Brooklyn anymore, but that’s cool with me,” I replied, picking up the News and pretending to read it.

  “O.K. Just checking.” He looked back down at Willie. “We been studying the Defenestration of Prague in my history course. Want me to demonstrate, or should I just throw you out a window instead?”

  I never got to find out how high Willie would’ve bounced. We all heard another set of footsteps on the stairs right then and Phil just let the little moop go, with a gentle shove to encourage him along. Momentum is a wonderful thing. Phil and I were innocently back in our room, with the door shut, by the time we heard Willie impact on whoever was coming up the stairs.

  “Kev D’Oyley,” Phil announced gleefully, cupping his ear to the door to catch the sounds of creative cussing and subsidiary violence. “That dumb geek ran into Kev D’Oyley! Jesus, now he really is dead meat!” Kevin D’Oyley was Phil’s twin, only white and with a temper you could sharpen knives on. I think having a last name that conjures up visions of lacy little things added to it, made it worse. I almost felt sorry for Willie.

  Then I looked over the much-rumpled issue of the Daily News I’d rescued, and all my sympathy went to hell in a handbasket.

  How appropriate.

  “Oh, wow! That got the funnies in there?” Phil yanked the paper from my hands and riffled through eagerly. He settled down on our lone rump-sprung arm chair and commenced guffawing over Garfield, For Better or for Worse, Cathy, and—

  “Hey, Tim! They got your mother’s strip in here! When’d that happen?”

  “I dunno. Couple months ago, I guess.” Funny, as soon as Phil mentioned Mom’s comic strip, the freeze set in. It was weird: He sounded excited and happy and interested about the strip being carried in a new paper, while I talked about it with the same enthusiasm a Victorian lady would show if she had to have a boil lanced in public.

  I don’t need Ingratitude Lecture #306. I know that I owe my presence at Princeton to the sudden income upswing our family’s been enjoying ever since Mom’s strip made it big-time. I’ve still got my reasons for being sour on it.

  My reasons are not Wilmot Smoot’s, need I say. The fact that the main character in Mom’s strip is a devil doesn’t bug me at all, although I do believe that if you play old tapes of Mr. Ed backwards you can hear satanic messages that are straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

  Naaaahhh, just fooling.

  Mister Mephisto is syndicated, merchandised, and soon-to-be-animated. It may not do too well in some of the more tightly cinched Bible Belt towns, but the big city markets can’t get enough of that wacky little demon and the mortal man he’s been trying to capture since the Middle Ages. In the latest installment, Mister Mephisto has been doing his damnedest (of course) to louse up his quarry’s love life. All this makes me go back to my room and play a battered old copy of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil album over and over and over and . . .

  Phil threw down the paper and smacked himself in the forehead. “Shit! I got English in ten minutes.” He dove for the stack of books on his bed and trotted out of our room. Needless to say, I got out of his path. Alone at last, I dug out the pile of mail I’d brought home in my plastic portfolio and settled down to sort through it.

  No letter from T’ing. I was getting used to that. Everyone says how once you get to college, you start to lose all your high-school friends. Only thing was, I believed that T’ing and I were more than just friends. T’ing Hau Kaplan, once the lovely and aloof object of my junior-year crush, she and I had ended our senior year at Glenwood High as an officially recognized “couple.” There weren’t many people who knew all the adventures that linked us up tighter than any swapping of class rings, and some of those who did know weren’t exactly what your man-in-the-street would call “people.” Not unless your man-in-the-street had a nodding acquaintance with banshees, elves, hobs, banniks, gnomes, luchorpans, and the odd barbarian ghost.

  Way odd, but because he was T’ing’s own ancestral spirit, I always made allowances for Yang.

  T’ing and I had the kind of summer they used to make Annette Funicello movies about, only a lot drier. It’s hard to find really bitchen surf when you live in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The number of neighborhood kids named “Moondoggie” is pretty pitiful, too. I thought that summer was going to last forever. When fall came, T’ing went north to Vassar, I headed south to Princeton, but we promised we’d write. We did, for about a couple of months. Then it was just me, sending off one letter after another and getting nothing back but air. Finally I stopped writing, too, but that didn’t mean I had wised up enough to stop hoping. There’s a word for guys like me.

  “Jerk,” I said, which is how we pronounce the word romantic in Brooklynese. I continued to flip through the mail.

  A letter from Mom. I opened it. As usual, more gleeful chirrupings about how happy they were, how they were counting the days until the wedding, how much everyone in the family was crazy about him, how he was the best thing that had ever happened to her . . . and why hadn’t I written or called since October? Why hadn’t I come home for Thanksgiving? Surely I couldn’t have had that much schoolwork? When could they expect me for Christmas?

  I tossed it.

  A letter from him. I didn’t even bother opening it before I tossed it.

  The letter hit the wastebasket and yelled “OW!” then floated up out of the trash and back to my hands. “You could at least read me first,” it said in a sulky voice.

  That’s one of the disadvantages of having a wizard as good as in the family: It’s not junk mail until he says it’s junk mail.

  “Neat trick,” I told the letter. “What if my roommate’d been here?”

  The letter straightened out some of its wrinkles and held itself proudly, for recycled paper. “I would have slipped myself under your pillow and waited until you came to bed to address you.”

  “No, no, you’ve got it backwards: People address letters The letter crinkled itself up at me in a way that just had to be the stationery equivalent of holding one’s nose at a really pewy pun. Okay, if it didn’t have a sense of humor, I could play it that way. “I don’t like being told what I’ve got to read,” I informed it. “I think I’m going to take you downstairs to the bathroom, put you in the sink, and set fire to you. How do you like that?”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “I could always use the urinal instead. ...”

  “Censorship!” the letter shrieked. “Repression! Help, guards ho! My First Amendment rights are about to be grossly violated! To arms, to arms, every Middlesex village and farm!” It was pretty wordy, but letters are like that.

  It began to wiggle around in my hands, finally tearing itself loose a
nd taking to the air. Vip! It folded itself in half the long way. Zim! Zam! Two triangles folded themselves down at one end.

  Unghhhh! Urrrrr! Two more lengthwise folds, made a lot harder to bring off by the extra thicknesses of paper inside the envelope and—ta-daaaahhhh!—a paper airplane hovered between me and the door.

  A killer paper airplane. “Have at thee!” it shouted, and went for my eyes. I threw one arm over them and flailed at it with the other. “So, dog of a swine, you are now at my mercy,” the letter chortled. I peeked, and it made another swoop at my face. Its pointed nose nicked the top of my right ear. I tried backhanding it aside and got a nasty paper-cut across the knuckles. The letter bayed its triumph. It had tasted blood; there would be no reasoning with it now. “A pox on both your Zip Codes!” it snarled, and commenced pummeling me about the ears until I felt as if I were in the middle of a gang war in the Carlsbad Caverns between two bunches of rival bats.

  “All right! All right! I’ll read you!” I cried, swatting away desperately.

  The fluttery assault ceased. “You will?” The letter now sounded more treacly-sweet than an overripe Southern belle. The folds in the paper airplane undid themselves as delicately as a blossoming flower, and Dr. Faustus’ letter settled gently into my hands.

  Yeah, you heard right: Dr. Faustus. As in Faust. That Faust. The Faust. As in he sold his soul pre-rock V roll. As in the reason I don’t find Mister Mephisto as big a laugh-riot as, say, Prince Valiant. As in “I know he’s a four-hundred-year-old wizard whose soul is still waiting to be claimed by a Prince of Hell, Tim, but I love him and we’re going to get married, so don’t use that tone of voice to me, I am still your mother, young man!”

  Never let it be said that my mom had to rely on the Personals column to get a date.

  The letter said about what I’d expected. After all we’d been through, Faustus didn’t see why I was giving him and Mom the silent treatment. For her sake, he was letting her think that I really did have too much school work to write or phone, but he knew there was something more than that afoot. What, exactly? He hadn’t a clue, and after you’ve sold your soul to acquire all worldly knowledge and one snotty kid’s motivations are beyond' you, it rankles. That made him get shirty with me. When you’ve joined forces to save the world from an onslaught of genuine, authentic, honest-to-gorgon monsters, you figure on some little spark of team spirit carrying over into normal life, he said.