“And yet here you are. Downtown Nowheresville. Like the view?”
Hobaica comes at me.
“You did this.”
He tries to grab me. I sidestep, give him a little shove to throw him off balance, and stomp on the back of his knee. He goes down on his face, hurt but in one piece.
“You got that out of your system and now you’re going to be smart, right? Good. First off, who told you I was following you?”
Hobaica nurses his hurt knee, but manages a smile.
“A little birdie. Der Zorn Götter has friends in many places.”
I’ve heard of them. An upper-crust Angra sect. They have connections in money and politics all over the Sub Rosa and civilian world. Could they have connections to the Vigil?
“You made a mistake asking me to be your witness, genius. First, I’m not exactly mortal, and second, I spent eleven years in Hell. You think a bunch of nitwits sawing their own heads off is going to shatter me? In Hell we called that ‘Wednesday.’ ”
I go over and pull Hobaica to his feet.
“This is a trick,” he says.
“Show me what’s in your head. I want to see what you expected when you died. Show me the Flayed Heart.”
“Never.”
“Listen, man. I know you don’t mind a little pain, but you’re dead now. You don’t need to have to do that anymore. Show me what I want or it’s going to hurt.”
He stands up straight. A moron with scruples.
“I won’t tell you a thing.”
I nod.
“No matter what the old mummy said, I knew I wasn’t getting through this without losing some blood.”
“What?”
“Hold still,” I say, and pull my knife.
Hobaica tries to run, but his gimpy leg collapses and he goes down on his face. I kneel on his chest, pinning his arms to the ground.
“I should probably feel worse about this, but you hack up people to decorate your playpen, so I don’t.”
I grab his chin with my free hand and cut a sigil into his forehead. The mark of Nybbas, the Seer. He stops thrashing for a second when the blood flows into the eyes. I take that moment to run the knife over my own forehead, making a deep gash. Grabbing Hobaica’s face, I push my forehead to his until our wounds touch. As our blood flows together, I get a dirty, low-res image of his mind.
This is what Hobaica expected. What he wanted.
An endless sea of fire and bones, and floating there, as big as the sky, is a lotus made of rotting human teeth. Bodies pour into the flower’s fanged maw and are ripped apart. Zhuyigdanatha swallows some of the bodies, but there’s so much falling into its stinking gob that limbs, heads, torsos, and feet cascade down the side. They crawl together in the fire, forming new, weird creatures. A couple of arms merge at the shoulder with an eye attached under each armpit. Torsos with six, eight, ten legs bob along on the flames, swimming in one direction and then another as the legs compete with each other. A few piles of limbs have pulled together enough pieces to form a complete body. These climb up the sides of the tooth lotus, pushing back bodies that miss the Flayed Heart’s mouth and try to get away. Others swim through the fire into caverns at the base of the lotus.
Since he’s dead, I can’t gauge Hobaica’s mood by the smell of his sweat or the sound of his heartbeat, but being in his head, I can feel his excitement. This is what Hobaica hoped for when he cut his head off. To be one of those bodies falling into Zhuyigdanatha’s mouth, feeding his master.
The old Angra moves as it chews its lunch, twisting this way and that to catch the choicest bodies. If you see it from different angles, Zhuyigdanatha changes. It becomes a slimy lizard, snaring falling bodies with a prehensile tongue a thousand miles long. A baobab tree, with razor foliage and a trunk made of rheumy eyes. A crawling fungal mass plucking bloating corpses from a sea of sewage. At least I know this really is an Angra I’m seeing. Zhuyigdanatha isn’t really changing. It’s a transdimensional being. We ordinary slobs can only see one dimensional aspect of the God at once, so it seems to change as it moves and dreams.
From inside Hobaica’s head, I can feel the man wilt as it finally comes to him that he’ll never be saved by his God. His sacrifice was a joke. The Angras are in another dimension. The other God, the God of this dimension, isn’t wild about people deity shopping. It starts to dawn on Hobaica that he’s not only lost his personal Jesus, but killing himself as a sacrifice to the Flayed Heart means he’s pissed off the other God. With his frequent asshole miles he’s earned himself a window seat on the big coal cart to Hell. He’s not even scared. He’s beyond fear or even despair. He knows he’s lost. That he lost the first day he drew his or anyone else’s blood for Zhuyigdanatha.
There’s a mountain range off to the side of where we lie. I climb off Hobaica and he struggles to his feet.
“Where did those mountains come from? I swear they weren’t here before.”
An opening appears in the side of one mountain. Pale light shines out onto the dim plain.
“That’s for me, isn’t it? I’m going to Hell.”
“Don’t feel so bad. It beats Fresno.”
Hobaica drags his arm over his forehead, wiping away the blood.
“I’m a fool.”
“You bet on the wrong horse, yeah. But you’re not the first one, so don’t beat yourself up.”
I sort of feel bad for the sucker. I mean, his life has been a joke from day one. But Hobaica’s current attitude isn’t a bad way to enter Hell. There’s not much the Hellions can do to him that he isn’t already doing.
He says, “What do I do now?”
“You can stay where you are for the rest of eternity, which, the way things are going, might not be that long. Or you can go inside.”
“To Hell.”
“Yes.”
“So, I can be somewhere awful or nowhere at all.”
“It’s a lousy choice, I know.”
He looks at me. His clothes are speckled with his blood. He looks a little like what he looked like back in the meat locker. It’s pathetic.
“Which would you choose?” he says.
“I didn’t get to make a choice when I went. But if I were you, I’d choose to be someplace. All they can do in Hell is hurt you. Out here with nothing but yourself to talk to, you’re going to destroy your mind. Being alone is worse than being somewhere bad.”
He nods. Even manages the faintest smile in human history.
“Thank you,” he says, and starts for the mountains.
“Vaya con Dios.”
He stops.
“Is that a joke?”
“Yeah. Not one of my best.”
“A bad joke isn’t much of a send-off before an eternity in Hell.”
“I could tell you the one about the one-eyed priest and the bowlegged nun.”
“I’ll be going now.”
He walks to the mountain and goes into the tunnel without looking back. It closes behind him. Alone on the alkali plain, I sit down with my legs crossed. I wipe the blood off my face with my hand and the alkali burns the cut in my forehead. The drunken feeling comes over me again. My shoulders sag. My head falls forward and my mouth opens. Something light drifts out and settles on my leg.
I wake up in the circle across from the severed head. There’s a puddle underneath it where it’s starting to defrost. Candy takes my arm and helps me up. I run my fingers over my forehead. No blood. Score one for the bag of bones. I didn’t have to bleed in real life after all.
I put Hobaica’s head back in the cooler and hand it to Wells.
“I’m done with this. It’s your problem now.”
He sets it on the floor. Goes to a sink and washes his hands.
“Did it work? Did you see anything?”
“Some bad dental work. And fire
. And bodies being ripped apart. The meat locker where I found ice-chest man was feng-shuied with body parts.”
“You think the man cut up the bodies?” says the Shonin.
“Him and his friends, yeah. My guess is those meat piñatas were volunteers. More Angra zealots.”
“They wanted to be cut up like meat?” says Candy.
I nod.
“Yeah, but they didn’t see it that way. The feeling I got from Hobaica—that’s your dead man—is that he and his pals wanted to be hacked up like those bodies. They thought if they sacrificed themselves right they’d be reborn as bouncing baby Angras.”
The Shonin laughs at that.
“They’re even dumber than you.”
“Did he actually tell you he cut up those bodies?” says Wells.
“I wasn’t taking a deposition. These are all just impressions I got from a shell-shocked dead man on his way to Hell.”
“Is that all?”
“Some of the body parts clumped together and made new bodies. There were caves they might have drifted into. Everything was on fire.”
“It sounds like the realm of the Flayed Heart,” says Shonin.
“It was.”
“Zhuyigdanatha likes underground places,” says Shonin to Wells. “If there’s a larger Angra group, you might find them there.”
Wells shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
“What caves are we talking about? Carlsbad Caverns? A salt mine in Louisiana? Lascaux?”
The Shonin pours out the muck he gave me. Puts water and green tea into the pot and places it back on the burner.
“These were California boys, so it will be a California cave that connects, at least on a spirit level, with the Flayed Heart’s dwelling place.”
I start to say something, but don’t. I know some caves nearby, but if the Vigil doesn’t know about them I’m not going to tell them yet. I need to check with someone first.
Candy is slumped on a metal stool on the other of the room, away from everyone. She’s pale and fidgety. I go over to her.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Just let me sit here.”
“I can take you home if you want.”
“I’m fine. Okay?”
I nod.
“Okay.”
“Stark,” says Wells. “You know lowlifes. Any of your pixie friends like to spend their time underground?”
“What makes you think the Sub Rosa or Lurkers have anything to do with this? Angra worshipers are mostly lily-white civilians.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
I look at the Shonin.
“You want to know about underground dwellers? Why don’t you ask the jabber over there?”
Jabbers are ghosts so scared of the afterlife that they won’t even leave their dead bodies. They claw their way through the soil under the city, dried-out bones living in dirt.
“Don’t you dare talk about Ishiro Shonin that way. This is a holy man. Jabbers are cowards. What this man did took years of dedicated training and preparation. Successful self-mummification is incredibly rare.”
I fish around in my coat pocket for a pack of Maledictions. I find them but they’re soggy with rainwater. I crumple up the pack and throw it in a wastebasket.
I look at the Shonin.
“You’re what successful looks like? I’ve met Buddhist monks before. None of them looked like Johann Schmidt’s foreskin.”
“It took a thousand days to purify my body and mind before I could inter myself, preparing to come back when the world needed me. Of course,” he says, looking around, “I didn’t think I was coming back to a world of gaijin, urban yôkai, and whatever it is you are.”
“Angels call me Abomination, but looking at you, I don’t feel so bad about it.”
“What’s ‘urban yôkai’?” says Candy. Her voice is shaky.
“He means Lurkers. Don’t you, muertita?”
The Shonin says, “I knew, for instance, respectable tengu back home. You Los Angeles people—humans, and monsters—you are lost beings.”
“Speaking for all the yôkai in L.A., go fuck yourself,” says Candy.
“Watch the profanity,” says Wells.
I go over to him.
“Exactly what is Mr. Bones doing here?”
“He was a yamabushi back in Japan. A lone mountain monk in Sennizawa. They called them Swamp Wizards. He has a deep background in the mystical arts. He’s going to figure out how to make the Qomrama Om Ya work.”
“I’m supposed to be lab partners with this guy?”
The Vigil has the 8 Ball locked up in a secure clean room all by itself, suspended in a magnetic field. It floats in the air and changes shape as you walk around it.
“Not supposed to,” says Wells. “You are. It’s done and settled. He’ll figure out the Qomrama and you’ll use it.”
“Why don’t you clue me in on these things from time to time so I know what to expect?”
Wells pushes the cooler against the wall with the toe of his highly polished shoe.
“Fine. Here’s your clue for today. I want you to write down everything that happened before the man you brought in died and everything you saw and heard when you went inside his head. Make sure Ishiro Shonin gets a copy and so do I.”
“Now I’m your secretary.”
“For the kind of money we’re paying you, you’re whatever I need. Today you weren’t much of anything at all.”
“Speaking of money, I still don’t have my first check.”
Wells squares his shoulders.
“I wanted a man to question and you bring me back a horror show. This isn’t a good time to complain to management about your salary.”
I look over at Candy. She’s leaning her elbows on the table.
“I’ll write your report, but I’m doing it at home.”
“I want it by nine A.M.”
“Noon, it is.”
Wells is tense. His heart rate is up a little. His pupils are narrow. I head over to Candy.
“Is there something else you have to say? Something you’re not telling me?”
“Yes. Up your game, Stark. These might be the End Times. I don’t want you half-assing your way through them.”
It’s a good party-line statement, but it’s not what he’s thinking about. There’s something else.
“Sure,” I say. Then to the Shonin, “See you around the watercooler, King Tut.”
“Don’t eat too much tonight, fatty. Salads are your friend.”
I grab my coat and Candy and I follow Wells outside. The Shonin stays behind and pours himself some tea.
“What an asshole,” she says.
“He’s just trying to get under my skin. Sounds like he’s getting under yours.”
She shakes her head.
“Maybe. I don’t feel well. I’m going to see Allegra.”
I touch her cheek. It’s cold, but Jades always run a little cool.
“You feel a little colder than usual. Want me to come along?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll see you at home.”
“At least let me take you through a shadow. It’ll take you forever on the street.”
“I’m fine,” she says. For a second she flashes her Jade face. It’s almost subliminal, like she wasn’t in control. “Stop getting all over me.”
I say, “I’ll see you at home.”
Candy doesn’t say anything. Just walks away.
I remember that she still has my gun and I almost go after her. But I don’t. Maybe some space is what she needs right now. Anyway, whatever’s wrong, Allegra’s clinic will fix her up.
I find a good shadow by the lab door and go through, coming out at home. Maximum Overdrive. The vide
o store I run with a not-quite-dead man named Kasabian.
MAX OVERDRIVE IS located on Las Palmas, right off Hollywood Boulevard. It sits midway between Donut Universe and Bamboo House of Dolls, the only junk-food place and bar that matters in L.A.
Kasabian used to run the store. When I came back from Hell I cut off his head. I might have been a little hasty, but he’d just shot me and I wasn’t feeling entirely reasonable at the time.
The trick with the black blade I used on him is that if you hold it just right it cuts, but it doesn’t kill. And that’s what I did to Kasabian. He’s spent most of the last year as a disembodied head and he hasn’t shut up about it.
Lately I started feeling sorry for him, so I had a Tick Tock Man called Manimal Mike attach Kas to a mechanical hellhound. Now he sort of has a body, even if it’s a little wobbly and whirs like a toy train when he moves.
Some Lurkers are in the store. A young Lyph whose denim jacket looks like it was mugged by a Bedazzler. All rhinestones and shiny bits on the back. Jim Morrison’s face in flames. Underneath it says LIGHT MY FIRE. Lyph have horns and hooves and tails just like Halloween devils, but they’re as sweet as peach ice cream when you get to know them.
A couple of Tykho Moon’s boys are in the shop, dressed to the nines in the best leather and latex you can steal off a dead model.
Tykho is the boss of the Dark Eternal, the biggest, baddest vampire clan in L.A. Yeah, Dark Eternal sounds kind of like an eighties Goth band, but Tykho assures me the name is a lot scarier in Latin. The Eternal have been around for a long time. Tykho’s boys are arguing, bumping shoulders like a couple of young pups, and whispering to each other.
Kasabian isn’t anywhere in sight, which isn’t a big deal. It isn’t like anyone is going to shoplift any of what we carry. Max Overdrive used to be a regular video store. We rented movies, sold new and used discs. In other words, a money pit. BitTorrent and movie streaming were killing us. Thanks to Kasabian’s obsessive collecting, our impressive porn and horror collections kept us afloat for a while, but we were going down fast. Now we’re a boutique shop catering to a select clientele of Sub Rosas, Lurkers, and a few civilians with money and a taste for something special. Mainly, movies that don’t exist.