Damned if he does.

Damned if he doesn’t.

Mookie dips a thumb into the powder and smudges his temples.

The ravening fire takes him, hot and cold all at the same time.

The “teahouse” has a bouncer. Mookie knows him. Trogbody named Gorth, goes by the human name of Gary. Shorter than Mookie, but not by much. Bulky stone body shoved into a black T-shirt and cargo pants. Eyes are glittering quartz deposits tucked into a pair of craggy hollows. Mouth full of stalactite and stalagmite teeth.

“Mookie Pearl,” Gorth says by way of greeting. Whenever he speaks – really, when any Troggo speaks – you hear something in the back of his throat that sounds like a couple loose rocks bouncing down a mountain slope.

“Gorth,” Mookie says. The Cerulean’s starting to wear him down. He feels his neck tendons pulling tight like piano wire. He’s gotta chill out. Focus up. His daughter’s life is at stake here. Mookie takes a deep breath. “I need to see Smiley.”

“We’re shuttin’ down for the night.”

“Hell you are.”

“Almost four in the morning. Sun’ll be up. Smiley doesn’t like the sun.”

“Sun ain’t up yet.”

“I know, but–”

“I’m tired. I’m burning too long and too hard–” Here Mookie taps his temple. “I just need some info. Ten minutes. Tops.”

“I dunno–”

Mookie’s nostrils flare. “Got two ways to do this. First, you move aside, open that door. Second, I gotta find my own way in. And I’m not that smart. So that means I go through you. We’ll fight. It’ll be ugly. But I’m tired. And cranky. And Blazing hard. So I’ll send you home with a couple cracked fingers. An arm broken off at the wrist. Head split like a geode. And I’ll be beaten into mashed potatoes, too. That sound like a good way to end your night? I don’t think it sounds too goddamn good.”

The golem’s quartz eyes flicker and flash. “That sounds bad.”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Go ahead in.”

Gorth steps aside, his rock joints clattering.

The teahouse. The first floor is all dark wood, so dark it might as well be black. Trim the color of matcha powder. Rice paper screens the color of red poppies.

The joint is empty. Except for Mr Smiley, sitting in the middle of the room at a two-top table. Tiny teacup to his left, with a small purple clay teapot just behind it.

This, then, is Mr Smiley:

Were Mookie here Blind, he’d see an Asian man of indiscriminate national origin – long face, big smile, hair black and oily like it’s been shellacked to his scalp, like it’s slick plastic snapped to the head of a LEGO figure.

What he sees instead – what the Blue Blazes show him – is a man whose face is a nearly perfect mix of serpent and human. The head is human-shaped but balanced on a too-long neck, the nose is just a pair of fleshy slits, the eyes are wide coppery diamonds whose irises shift and warp like you’re staring through a child’s kaleidoscope. The mouth – still smiling, for he is always oh-so-very happy – ill-conceals not just a pair of curved fangs, but rather a whole maw of them. A wet pink tongue – not forked, but thin and prehensile – slides over them like a slug over piano keys.