by Rowan Casey
We went in.
This place always gave me the creeps. I mean you’re quite literally down amongst the dead. The tiled walls of the corridor reeked of ammoniac. There was no one down here. I knocked on Milos’ door, and was greeted by his mole-man face a couple of seconds later. "She’s through here," he said, "But you know the deal, photos first."
I handed over the memory card. "Knock yourself out. Or, you know, knock one out, whatever floats your boat, Milos."
He pocketed the card with sleight of hand skills worthy of David Blaine himself, and led us through more tiled corridors to a room filled with cold storage lockers. "She’s in here," he said, breaking the seal on one of the middle drawers and pulling the tray out.
She, in this instance, was Sasha Palmetti. I’d seen photos of her. She had been beautiful once upon a time. Now, without meat between skin and bone she looked like a Halloween mask. I looked at Grimm.
"Could you leave us alone for a moment?" the magician without any magic left asked the coroner. Milos nodded.
"Just promise not to, oh, I don’t know, make a handbag out of her or anything, okay?"
"I think I can safely promise that," I said.
He left us alone with the dead girl.
I started at the sigil where it had been inked under her left breast. It was weird seeing the sag of excess skin. "You know what this means?" I asked.
Milos and I had been trading photos and theories about the murders on an internet bulletin board over the last few weeks, but I was kinda testing him. I wanted to see if I’d get the same answer. Given he had a one in fourteen chance if he was making it up, I expected him to trip up on it. Not that I thought he was lying. But hey…
"It is the mark of Nergal, the Sumerian god of the Underworld. His essence is one of fire. He promises fever and destruction. He is a shadow demon. A creature of the Demimonde. It is a summoning sigil. The skin and bone is empty, waiting for Nergal to claim it for his own once the Veil between worlds is torn."
It was more than he’d ever said in his mails. And suddenly I understood part of what was happening here. Holm was fashioning empty vessels for the demons of that other place. He was creating hosts, binding the demons to their flesh with his sigils.
"So, what do we do? Burn it? We can’t leave it for some demon to simply slip into, that’s warfare 101. You never leave an enemy at your back."
"Try," he suggested. which surprised me.
I wasn’t sure how I was meant to set fire to the poor girl, but there were plenty of chemicals down here, not least formaldehyde, which was going to burn, and I had my lighter, so I tried it. I splashed some of the liquid across her skin, and set the small flame to it. The chemical burned up fast, creating a shroud of fire around the skin and bone on the tray, but the flames burned out inside thirty seconds, and I was left looking down at an unblemished Sasha. The fire hadn’t touched her.
I looked at Grimm for an explanation.
"She’s bound to a demon. They’re a link forged across the planes, and the Veil is so weak now that Nergal is protecting his vessel now. We can’t destroy it. Not as long as the sigil binds her to the demon."
"Well, ain’t that just peachy?" I said. "So, how do we get a look at the bones, because that’s why we are here, right, to see if there’s something special about the bones that have been left behind, a second magic?"
Dante Grimm had an answer I wasn’t expecting. He reached down through the dead girl’s mouth, feeling around inside the cavities where the meat should have been and pulled out a chunk of her spine. Without any of the soft stuff inside, he was able to feel out each and every bone until he found the one he was looking for.
And Evienne had been right, the secret of the dead was two-fold. It was written on the skin and hidden in the bone.
Grimm held the vertebrae up to the light, turning it until the ethereal blue light that emanated from a second mark seared into the bone.
"What does it mean?" I asked.
"It means we are in more trouble than I dared imagine. I need to see the others."
The problem was that several of the dead had been released back into the custody of their loved ones for burial. Given what I’d just witnessed with the whole burning thing, cremation wasn’t an option, at least.
8
You know how they always tell you to dress for the job you want, not the job you have? We walked into the most famous cemetery in California dressed as gravediggers. Not my finest hour, but given the fact that we couldn’t wait until sundown to exhume Victim Number Six, Ariel Laveaux, we had no option but to try and look like we belonged, set up a cordon and a plastic tent and set to digging like there was nothing weird about it.
We walked past the graves of Mel Blanc, Bugsey Siegel, Fay Wray, and Judy Garland on the way to Ariel’s unmarked grave. There was a small wooden cross with no epitaph engraved. It would be months before her headstone turned up. We pegged out the area and set up the tent. There were a few sightseers, which, frankly, I thought was pretty macabre. I mean, who wants to see the final resting place of Fay Wray, except for maybe Frankenfurter?
No one challenged us. We couldn’t see anyone else being buried. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that gravediggers tend to do their work after dark the night before the hole is going to be needed, so we were a good few hours before business hours. I set to work–I say I, because Grimm seemed to be there in a much more supervisory role, watching me do the back-breaking stuff while he waited for the less savory stuff that happened after we opened the box. It took me almost an hour to dig down deep enough to strike wood, and another twenty minutes to clear out the dirt so that we could get the lid open.
I stepped out of the hole, allowing Grimm to do the honors.
I expected to be hit by a rancid stench of decay, but there was nothing. It was immediately and obviously wrong. You didn’t spend the best part of a month in the ground and not begin to reek.
Grimm didn’t seem surprised. The coffin lid split in two like a stable door, allowing him to open the gold clasps and reach inside, doing that same hand down the throat trick that turned my stomach. It took him longer this time to find the bone he was looking for, but just like in the morgue, he pulled out his hand and brought a small section of vertebrae out with it, and in the shadows of the grave I could just see the shimmering blue aura around the sigil carved into the bone.
"Please tell me you got it?" I called down.
Grimm held it up like some offering to the gods of the dark side. I took it off of him. I had zero idea what I was looking at. I mean zero. There was script, but it was like nothing I’d ever seen. I assumed Sumerian or Mesopotamian or some lost civilization. I mean, why not, right? Things were already way off the chart into the realm of batshit crazy.
"What is it?"
Dante Grimm held out a hand for me to help him out of the grave. "It is the worst possible outcome," he said, cryptically. I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. So, I pushed a little harder.
"So, what kind of dead god are we looking at?" I said it as joke, but it looked like I hit the nail on the head, because Grimm just shook his head as though to say I didn’t want to know. Which of course I did. I mean, I was down to maybe twelve hours now, give or take, and we’d already discerned that one Sumerian deity was waiting to claim a bag of bones the moment the Veil came down. So what was another dead god between friends? "I’m not going to stop asking until you tell me," I said. And when he still didn’t give up the goods I took a leaf out of dear old dad’s book and started singing. I don’t mind admitting it was a shit song, and even my dulcet tones couldn’t turn it into a Billboard topper.
I walked back to the Mustang singing, "I know a song that’ll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that’ll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. This is a song that’ll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves," and kept on signing it, even as we get inside and Jim Kerr begged me not to forge
t about him. The mix of my maddening singing and the radio did it. Dante Grimm begged, "Turn the damned thing off, or stop singing, or both."
"You know what you need to do," I told him, and on the drive back to Avalon he confessed.
"Her name is Namtara. She was the messenger of Nergal."
"Okay, so what, we’re talking the UPS of demons?"
"She was the daughter of rape, her mother Ninlil. After she was murdered she became the Scourge. She is the grip of disease, the blight of the land. She is pestilence given form. She is death."
"So more like USPS then," I said. He didn’t bite.
"She commands sixty lesser demons capable of penetrating the human body, and is the cancer of the flesh. She is the foundation for our image of the Grim Reaper," he said, "And the binding on this bone is active. It is calling out to Namtara, telling her to come, that the way is ready, that the flesh is riddled with every pestilence imaginable, just waiting to be let loose upon the cities of our world."
"I’m not loving the sound of Namtara," I admitted. "But you know what? I’m loving the idea that all of those other bodies are out there, prepared for some hideous otherworld monstrosity to take up residence and there’s fuck all we can do about it a lot less. We can’t dig them all up, there just isn’t time. So how do we fight back? How do we stop the Veil from being torn apart and the world going to hell?"
"We stop Holm from finishing his rituals. We save his last victim. And we hope to Christ it is enough."
"And if it isn’t?"
"Then I shall see you in Hell in the morning, my old friend, because I will not be long behind you."
9
"Do you know what I did next?"
"I’m not going to answer that, you know that," Grimm said.
"Okay, fine, but you’ve got to give me something. If I’m just heading down the same path how is anything supposed to play out differently? There needs to be a break in the chain," I totally Fleetwood Mac’d him. "Or we’re just running in the shadows."
"I’m still not going to tell you. You have to do this alone."
"So much for the whole Circle thing."
"Each of your brotherhood is on a quest of their own. Trust them to succeed, focus on your own success. Do you know where you need to be?"
"If I did I wouldn’t tell you," I said petulantly. "Annoying isn’t it?"
I left him outside Avalon, intending to drive down to Studio City. Tackle Holm head on, on his own turf. Give him something else to think about. To be honest, for the last half-hour or so I’d been nagged by the same stupid question we used to ask each other when we were younger, normally when blow was involved and we called it a party: if you knew you were going to die in an hour what would you do with your last sixty minutes? It was the nuclear holocaust game. The answer was invariably the same, a variant on I’d go and get laid. And yet here I was, clock ticking down, in the valley of the impossibly hot dolls, and what was the one thing I wasn’t doing with my final hours? My younger me would have been absolutely disgusted with my betrayal.
I promised him if it really was the end I’d give him a decent send off in Evienne’s enchanted garden.
John Farnham desperately needed me to understand that I was the voice and shouldn’t sit in silence as I pulled up outside Studio City. There was a map of the huge lot beside the security booth. I looked for Holm’s production company, then looked for companies that had neighboring places on the lot. I was looking for something small, an indie that hired an office here to give it some sort of credibility. Hollywood was full of those not-quite failures. The one I needed was called Laughing Boy Pictures. If the map was to scale it was the smallest operation on the entire lot, unit 227.
I called Sindii. "Hey you, need a favor. Find out whatever you can about an outfit called Laughing Boy Productions, unit 227 Studio City, the kind of stuff they make, annual turnover, investment, that kind of thing. And set up an appointment with the head honcho."
"Can do."
"Great. I’m outside the gate right now. Give me a call as soon as you’ve got it sorted. Tell the guy whatever you need to get me in through the door."
"Millionaire investor looking to lose some of those millions in a tax write off, that’s easy enough." She rang off before I could tell her not to make the lie too elaborate.
I sat back and listened to Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook pull a muscle for Michelle. Or at least that’s what I liked to think they got up to on the beach they sang about.
Sindii called back before the song was over. "You’re all set. The guy's name is Benedict Merchant. He won a couple of awards thirty years ago and is very much yesterday’s man. He’s struggling to get financing for a dream project he’s had on the books for almost seven years, and frankly is a bit of a joke around the place. I told his secretary you’d got a couple of mil you were looking to lose and she promised me you’ve come to the right place. They will have a pass waiting for you at the gate in a couple minutes. Merchant is excited to meet you. I could almost hear the greed sweating through the phone from here. Have fun, Sam."
"You’re an angel," I told her. "Okay, let’s go and have some fun." That last one was for me.
I wasn’t too worried about breaking his greedy little heart. All I wanted out of our little exchange was access, but I figured the least I could do was pretend to think about it, take the meeting for five minutes, maybe even amuse myself by making promises I had no intention of keeping. I told you, I’m a bastard. Sometimes I just need to amuse myself.
I picked up my pass from the gate man, who gave me that 'I know a scam when I see it' look reserved for these guys. He gave me directions to Merchant’s office, or rather the parking bays I needed to stow the Mustang in, and then the walk I needed to take, which he promised with a cruel smile was a good fifteen minutes in the baking California sun. "Couldn’t I just park outside Laughing Boy?"
"You could try it," he said. "It’s been a while since we got to have some fun."
I decided not to find out what his definition of fun entailed, parked when I was told to–beside a couple of cock extensions, and god help me I walked. Something you need to know about Californians, we do not walk. Like ever. If god had intended us to walk he wouldn’t have invented those little golf cart thingies. So, I did what every enterprising make investor worth his salt would do. I commandeered one of the studio’s little gold cart thingies, told the driver where I needed to go, post haste, and settled in for the ride through fake New York, around the fountain of fake Central Park, and then weirdly across a slice of what was either meant to be some sort of Somme or maybe a Dodge. It was hard to say for sure, there was a lot of mud, and plenty of stage blood. They were in the middle of breaking down another set, which was a bit like watching the tailors work on the Emperor’s special new threads. You saw all of the magic that wasn’t there.
I saw a couple of actors, one of which I’d had the pleasure of, one of which, assuming I didn’t die again tonight, I’d be happy to enjoy. Mostly it was just suits, set dressers, prop crews, and liars.
We pulled up outside a cinder block building, two stories high, with a flat roof and a fire escape that had already been administered last rites. "This is it," my ride said. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tip him. Who knows the etiquette in these situations? So I gave him my loyal card from the Bean House and told him to knock himself out.
I know, I’m a generous soul. I like to give the gift of coffee.
I went inside.
There’s Hollywood - red carpets, Kodak Theater, stars on the grubby street, and meals in fancy restaurants that think kale is a legitimate dining option - and there’s Hollywood - beaten down by rejection, worn beyond the point of desperation, reeking a bit of sweat and mold and mothballs, but mainly wrapped up in the all-pervading stench of failure. You can guess which one of the two Laughing Boy Productions was.
I felt like I needed to wear a condom for protection.
There were three names listed on the buzzer, two were
smudged out, the third was Merchant’s so I tried my luck. It didn’t sound like the buzzer was hooked up, but a moment later a too-perky receptionist who probably did the same 'ii' thing with her name that Sindii did because she thought it made her more interesting, told me to come up.
The stairs reeked of failure. It was the pure pheromone ooze of one award twenty years ago and nothing since. I opened the door into the land that success forgot and saw Merchant standing in the doorway of the one small offices beyond the reception. There were posters for loads of 80s direct-to-video movies on the walls. Merchant’s name was on all of them.
I did a double take, recognizing the receptionist from one of the posters behind her desk. Life had not been kind to her.
"Mr. Lake?" Merchant said, cutting across the poor woman before she could do her job. I’m pretty sure my visit marked the high point of her day. "This way, please. Velma, get our guest a drink, would you? Sam, what do you fancy, coffee, tea? Something stronger?"
"Coffee’s good," I said. I couldn’t see a machine, so assumed she’d have to call out, or maybe there was a shared kitchen in the cinder block of the damned.
We went into Merchant’s office, and even before I sat down he launched into his spiel, trying to sell me on his unshot masterpiece. "You need to understand this industry, Sam," he told me. "One day you are hot, you’re nominated for an award, maybe you win it and you’re hot for a year, but there are always new nominees and new winners coming through. It’s a conveyor belt that has got zip to do with talent. It’s all about the next hot thing." I nodded, like sure, it was just the same in my life. "No one cares what you’ve done. Honestly, no one gives a shit if you’ve even got it in you to do something great. It’s all about the investor turning a profit, and then hiding the fact there’s actually money to be made in them there hills," he said those last three words like some cotton picking varmint, "And then you have someone like me. I’ve played the game. I’ve got the award. I’ve got the talent. And right now I’ve got the script. I’ll tell you this for nothing, Sam, I’m sitting on a gold mine here. With the right investor and the right talent–and I’ve got some serious names lined up. We’re talking proper marquee names–there’s a killing to be made. Now Velma tells me you’re looking to put down some serious money?" He didn’t give me time to answer. I assumed it was a coke rush. Good for him. Business wasn’t so bad he couldn’t afford to splash out on a little blow for special occasions. "What are we talking, twenty, thirty mil? You won’t get much for anything less these days. But, thirty can be turned into three hundred with the just the right amount of special source, if you know what I mean? The right team. The right talent. The right vision. So you want to be in the movies? You look like a movie man, you don’t mind me saying. You’ve got the look."