Read Dinner at Deviant's Palace for Free Online

leaned back and looked out the window at the sunlit but still damp landscape. To the west he could see a green band that was the edge of the south farms, but to the south was nothing but the spread of tumbled, empty buildings, a scene lost somewhere between city scape and landscape, animated by rolling tumble weeds and, once in a while, the ragged figure of a scavenger too weak to venture very far from the city walls. Further to the south he could see the gleam of San Pedro Harbor. And beyond that, he knew, was Long Beach Island and then the open sea, and, way down the coast at the mouth of the Santa Ana River, Irvine.
    I hope I can catch her, he thought, before having to travel too far in that direction. He shuddered, remembering one redemption—one that had not succeeded—that actually brought him within sight of the high white walls of Jaybush’s Holy City at Irvine. I never, he thought firmly, want to be that close to that damned place again. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t more than half suspect he is some kind of messiah. My father used to swear he’d seen the spray of shooting stars that lit the sky on the night of Jaybush’s conception, thirty-some years ago—and even rival religions admit that before he retired from public life he several times did, verifiably, bring dead people back to life… though of course the rival religions claim he had Satan’s help.
    A patch of morning sunlight had been inching its way across the wall, and when Rivas glanced again at the old woman in the corner, he saw that the light had reached her face, and, in her gaping mouth, was glittering on all the bits of metal glued to her teeth. Well, Barrows can’t say he isn’t getting his money’s worth, he thought. There must be half a pound of scrap metal in there. Rivas knew—as Barrows evidently didn’t—that this was just a gaudy prop, that real toothtalking was supposed to be a consequence of having tiny metal fillings in the teeth. In years past a few people with such fillings had reported hearing faint voices in their mouths; but they said it happened very seldom and only on mountain tops, and Rivas hadn’t heard of a verified case of it showing up within at least the last ten years.
    It was, though, a priceless piece of popular superstition for fortunetellers to exploit.
    Rivas yawned audibly—so that for a moment he and the old woman seemed to be yawning in tandem—but he closed his mouth with a snap when Barrows darted an angry glance at him, and he had to make do with just arranging himself more comfortably in his chair. He’d given up trying to sleep last night after a dream about Urania had sent him jack-knifing out of bed just as the one o’clock bell was being rung. He’d spent the remainder of the night on the roof of his building with his pelican, sawing and strumming increasingly fantastic gun improvisations on the tune of Peter and the Wolf .
    Perhaps because Rivas seemed unimpressed with her routine thus far, the old Toothtalker let her jaw relax and hurried to a closet from which, after knocking a few things over, she produced a yellow plastic telephone with a receiver which began buzzing and clicking after she gave it a couple of shakes. She frowned reprovingly at Rivas as she began whispering into it.
    For a few minutes he tried to pay attention, if only to figure out what she was saying about him to the spirit world, but the interrupted dream from last night seemed to cling to him like a faint, disagreeable odor, ignorable most of the time but intruding itself whenever he shifted position. Finally he sighed and gave in, and let the recollection take him.
    In the dream Urania had been one of a row of people kneeling in a typical Jaybird nest, a cramped room out in the ruins somewhere, littered with the sort of relics that aren’t worthy anybody’s time to scavenge. The priest—known as the jaybush, for during administration of the sacrament he was supposed to become an actual, literal extension