by Paul Neuhaus
He took a deep breath and his eyes shot from side-to-side as he found the right words. “I don’t think it’d be fair to call it that,” he said. “And I’d certainly never say it without Keri there to corroborate. Let me just say I think Keri is the bee’s knees and I hope she feels the same.”
I burst out laughing. “‘The bee’s knees’?”
He grinned. “Remember when I said I watched a lot of TV? Turner Classic Movies in my favorite. I’ve seen virtually every black and white movie made between 1930 and 1950.”
I smiled wider. A smile designed to show my complete approval. “You’ve got excellent taste, Cal. In women and in movies.”
“Seconded,” Hope said from where I’d placed her on the floor.
As soon as Cal resumed his position in front of the door, I put Squire’s briefcase in the middle of the bed and began riffling through it. Amongst the office supplies and bits of personal detritus, I found a thick manila folder and a black leather diary. I flipped open the book and found that it was written in Greek, in what I would’ve assumed to be a woman’s hand. Interesting. As you do in that situation, I smelled the pages and put the diary down. The book aside, I opened the folder. Pay-dirt. On top of the stack of papers, were several eight by ten black and white photos of the Parthenon Restaurant. The very photos I’d seen Sebastian try to conceal a month before at Acadine. Under the photos was a stack of papers all of them with a very legal slant. Deeds, contracts, bills of sale. All of them related to the building and maintenance of Squire’s pride and joy, his compound somewhere in the mountains of suburban L.A. All the documents had been funneled through a company called The Fotiá Corporation. “Fotiá” was the Greek word for fire. The folder contained the full paper trail any competent lawyer would need to make a case. The Fotiá Corporation was a shell company, a vestigial limb of the—surprise, surprise—Church of Reciprocity. Given the fact, Squire was at the Conclave—painted-up and playing the bongos—I was not exactly bowled over.
I tucked the papers and photos neatly back into the folder and picked up the diary. It was very, very old. The pages were yellowed and stained, and it was better-bound than anything you might pick up at Barnes and Noble today. I opened it to page one and began the slog. I’ll be honest with you: My Greek is pretty rusty. You’d think something like that’d stay with you (especially if it’s your first language), but I hadn’t spoken it consistently in thousands of years. I guess speaking a language isn’t like riding a bicycle. Was the book Squire’s? I didn’t think so. He showed no signs of being a Mythnik himself, so I don’t think he was living an especially long life. Though the entries weren’t dated, it looked to me like the writing had begun a good while ago. Also, as I indicated, the handwriting looked feminine to me. Not that that means a whole lot. I could think of at least one man with feminine handwriting and his name rhymed with “Felijah”. I struggled with the first paragraph. Here it is more or less:
I went from Paris to Marseilles alone. From there it was across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco. I had both money and influence, so I obtained an exit visa. From Lisbon, I went to New York City and set foot for the first time in the so-called New World. I did it alone and in a perpetual state of disgust for my fellow travelers. Foul-smelling and dull-witted creatures, all.
Right off, I could see my humble narrator was not a good traveler. Nor was she—I was still convinced it was a she—especially fond of other humans. I also knew—not from my knowledge of history, but from my knowledge of the movie Casablanca—that the first entry was made in the early- or middle-1940s. The journaler was relating her experience escaping the Nazis during World War Two. I’d had a similar experience myself, though I’d come by a different route. I flipped through the pages to the back of the book and struggled through the final entry as I had the first. Here’s that last entry:
I’m still haunted at night. ‘Dreams’ I’d call them, but they seem so tangible. ‘Visitations’, is a better word, I think. Tassos and Cressida come to me and in their left hands they bear fire; in their right, they bear water. I believe these gifts to be symbols of their divided minds—if I may ascribe such a condition upon them now that they are gone. The conflicted nature of these visions gives me some consolation. Were I to meet my children again in the world of flesh, I would expect them to come bearing only fire.
Wow. Just wow. I had to read the passage twice, but I was fairly certain I knew who was speaking to me from beyond the grave. Who else could it be but Medea? She’d murdered her own children. Twins. A boy and a girl. I couldn’t tell when the entry’d been made, but if it was from Medea’s hand, I’d been there when she met Tassos and Cressida in the word of the flesh. They sure as hell came bearing fire.
El came back in with sheets, blankets and a pillow. He dropped the items at the foot of the bed since I was busy reading. “Whatcha reading?” he said.
I was mildly startled. “Oh, I was going through Squire’s briefcase. Turns out the Church of Reciprocity not only owns Acadine, but funds Sebastian’s entire operation.”
My host’s tone was sarcastic. “The hell you say!”
“I know it’s hard to believe. There was also a diary in here. I think it might be Medea’s diary.”
“Refresh my memory again. Which one’s Medea?”
“Married to Jason of ‘…and the Argonauts’ fame. She helped him get the Golden Fleece. Years later, his eye wandered, and he got some strange. Medea found out about it and murdered their children for revenge.”
“As you do.”
“As you do. Right before Keri came to me looking for you, I had a crazy adventure involving Medea. She tried to open the gate to Tartarus in the Underworld and release the Titans.”
Wiener scratched his head and thought for a moment. “Wait. Don’t tell me. I’m thinking back to my Edith Hamilton. The Titans were the first gods. The parents of Zeus and the others. Daddy Titan ate the kids to avoid an uprising. Zeus cut himself out to lead said revolt.”
“Correct. And then Zeus banished the Titans to hell’s basement. Place called Tartarus.”
“Why would Medea want to release the Titans?”
“To start a new pantheon of gods and set herself up as queen.”
El smiled. “Wow. Delusions of grandeur much?”
“I know. But it was barely a delusion. She almost succeeded. If her kids hadn’t come back from the dead due to a weird, temporary loophole in the natural order, she’d have pulled it off.”
“They talked her out of it?”
“No, they murdered her. A clear case of ‘turnabout is fair play’.”
“No shit. What’s special about this diary?”
I thumbed through the whole book, watching the tight, clean handwriting flash by. “I… don’t know, but I feel compelled to read the whole thing.”
“Is now a good time for that?”
I shrugged. “I can’t help thinking it’s significant somehow. Otherwise, what would Sebastian Squire be doing with it in his briefcase? Also, just to deepen the mystery… There’re photos in here of the Parthenon Restaurant. When I was investigating the whole Medea thing, Medea had photos of the Parthenon Restaurant stuck to a mirror in her living room.”
“Huh. Are you hungry?”
I stood up and rubbed the blood back into my legs. “I am. I’m starving. What’ve you got to eat around here?”
“As you probably remember, I am no chef. However, I do keep the kitchen stocked with canned and microwavable meals in dizzying varieties.”
“A smorgasbord with some assembly required…”
“Correct.”
“Good enough.”
I went out of the office and made for the stairs. El stopped outside his daughter’s bedroom to ask Cal if there’d been any developments. There hadn’t.
I entered the kitchen and there was Jack. The Wieners had an island with stools around it. Elijah’s damaged twin was sitting on one of the stools eating s
oup. “Heya, Jack. Whatcha got there?”
“Soup. Vegetable Beef, but it’s that kind with tiny hamburgers in it instead of pot roast-y meat.”
“Good?”
“Really good.”
I went over to the pantry and a moment’s search produced another can of soup with tiny hamburgers instead of pot roast-y meat. I pulled Jack’s pan out of the sink and poured my meal into it. I set the pan on the stove and sat down across from Jack.
For a long time, Jack didn’t look up, so I just watched him eat. Finally, he said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Might as well.”
“Has El been asking you to get back together with him?”
I sighed. Out of all the conversations I didn’t want to have, that one was high on the list. “Why?”
He pointed with his spoon. “That’s a ‘yes’,” he replied.
“So, what if it’s a ‘yes’? Should it change your opinion of your brother?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically. “You’re damn right it should. He had his shot with you, and he fucked it up. Did you ever see that movie The Last American Virgin?”
I told him I hadn’t.
“It’s a fucking horror show. Long story short, this kid loves this girl from afar and her abusive boyfriend gets her pregnant and abandons her. The kid—our hero—does everything he can to help the girl. He bends over backwards. In the last scene of the movie, he discovers that she’s gotten back together with her abusive boyfriend. ‘The End! Have a good night!’. It’s a gut-punch.”
“Oof. Sounds like a downer.”
“It is. Plus, there’s a moral.”
“There’s a moral?”
“Yeah, and it’s this: don’t be the girl who goes back with her abusive boyfriend after getting tons of help from the last American virgin.”
I crossed then uncrossed my eyes. “Okay. You know what? We’re getting into a whole weird area here. “
El came in right at that moment, oblivious to our conversation. Jack did something that really struck me funny. Not only did he pretend not to be in strange discussion with me, he brightened and made it about Elijah. “How you doing, Tiger? You holding up okay?”
To hide my amusement, I took my hamburger soup off the stove and poured it into a bowl.
The rest of the afternoon was quiet, so I retired back to the office, made the bed and planted myself there with Medea’s diary. After just a few more entries from the latter part of the book, I realized it was definitely hers. There were passages about how she planned to unleash the Titans and set herself up as their leader. After she did that, she planned on completely destroying both the Church of Reciprocity and Acadine. Those entries certainly explained why she had pictures of the Parthenon Restaurant.
Elijah came in and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do you have everything you need in here?”
“I think so. A place to sleep. Ready access to a bathroom. Did you make sure Cal ate something?”
El smiled and nodded. “If I hadn’t taken matters into my own hands, I think he would’ve stood there all night without even peeing. I gave him a sandwich.”
“He thinks the world of Keri.”
“I would say that I’m worried about that, but it’s pretty far down the priority ladder right now. And the truth is she could do a lot worse in the boyfriend department.”
I looked around him to make sure Calesius couldn’t overhear what I said next. “I agree. Provisionally. When I found Cal in Olympus, he wasn’t in good shape. In fact, he was positively feral. He seems much better now, but let’s watch him for relapses.”
“Oy,” he said with a heavy exhale. He pointed at Medea’s diary. “How’s the research coming?”
“It’s fascinating,” I replied honestly. “Medea was a contemporary of mine, and it’s interesting to see how she lived her life. Especially since I think she and I were diametrically opposed temperament-wise.”
“Not to mention insanity-wise. Do you think it’ll help us at all with our current situation?”
I tried to think of a reassuring answer, but I couldn’t. “As far as our current situation goes, it begins and ends with getting the lotus out of Keri’s system. In terms of anything more than that, I don’t have any answers—and, so far, neither does Medea. Can we make the world back the way it was? I don’t know.”
He folded his arms in front of his chest. “Do you even want to make the world back the way it was?”
“What do you mean?”
“Back when we were together, I lost track of the number of times you said you missed the old world. The world from when you were a little girl. Well, now it’s back.”
I had to ponder that for a moment. I surprised myself with my own surety. “Yeah, this is wrong. This was forcing the return of something who’s time has passed. Remember in Jurassic Park when they brought the dinosaurs back? That seemed like an awesome idea but then, to the surprise of no one, the dinosaurs started eating people. I feel like this might be the same level of bad decision, but we won’t know for sure for a while. I— “
A sound cut me off. The sound of scratching. I knew what it was right away, and I threw my head back and sighed. Elijah was a little behind the curve, but he caught up quickly. “Is that our visitor from Barstow?”
By way of answering him, I got up and went around to the other side of the desk. I opened the curtains and there, hovering and clawing at the glass, was the smiling Arae. I raised my right hand and flipped her a sustained bird. She didn’t react.
“Should we be worried about that thing?”
“No. I don’t guess so. I mean obviously no one should go outside right now, but I don’t think we were planning on that anyway. If I need to do any field work, I’ll confine it to the daylight hours. If she pops up consistently like this, I’ll have to deal with her.”
“Can you take on something like that?”
I closed the curtains and said matter-of-factly, “You’ve seen me fight.”
“I have, yes,” he conceded. “It’s frightening.”
“There’s something we haven’t been thinking about with everything else that’s going on…” I almost hesitated to tell him since I knew he was especially close to the issue.
“What’s that?”
“We left Pegasus at Acadine.”
His reaction surprised me. He flushed. “Yeah. About that…”
I narrowed my eyes, suspicious. “What?”
“I talked to my buddies a while ago. As you do when there’s been a world-changing catastrophe.”
“And?”
“They’re headed up there. They’re gonna try and liberate Pegasus.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay. Well. Now I have to go outside.”
He smiled. “No, you don’t.”
“What do mean ‘no I don’t’? They’ll all be killed. Petey will probably be fine, but Chad Kroeger isn’t exactly a man of action.”
He shrugged with his hands still on me. “Maybe not, but, for some reason, I feel like they’re gonna be fine.”
“They’re not gonna be fine. There’re men up there. With weapons. Men that’re a lot more sinister than we used to think they were.”
“Okay, sure, but you know what?”
“What?”
“You can’t put out every single fire there is. I appreciate you feel you need to, but sometimes you have to let things take their course.”
I scowled at him. “You’re remarkably blasé about your friends’ impending demise.”
“Like I say, for some reason, I’m not worried about it. Just promise me you’re not gonna sneak off of the middle of the night.”
“Oh, I’m not gonna sneak off. But if they get themselves killed, it’s on your head.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s on their head. They’re big boys and I trust them. Anyway, I’m gonna leave you to it. I’m tired as fuck. If anything gets weird, wake me instantly. Plus, Jack’s on the couch downstairs.”
I sighed. �
��There’s not much going on at the moment—except for the Revenge Bird outside my window. I’m a light sleeper. If any bad guys show up, I’ll be up in a flash.”
“Don’t be too quick about it. They have to get to get through Jack first.”
“Gods protect them.”
He nodded and left, shutting the first of the office doors behind him. Once he was gone, I got back into bed and grabbed the diary. I was tired too, but I was compelled to keep reading.
I confined myself to the end of the diary since I figured that material was the most likely to be relevant. In fact, I was kind of working backward from the last page. I got into the part of Medea’s story from right before she’d met me. She was planning her release of the Titans and talked about her alliance with Orpheus—of whom she had a very low opinion. But she needed him. When he finally consummated his relationship with Eurydice, it'd unleash giant magical energies. She talked about how she planned to kill he and his wife after she had what she needed from them. The only thing that kept her from following through was the fact Amanda, Connie and I followed her into the magic pinecone.
Going back still further, I read a few entries that knocked me for a loop. Medea ingratiated herself to Medusa while Orpheus was still living in Medusa’s pool-house. She gave Medusa a sexual lubricant to enhance her lovemaking—and make Orpheus more open to suggestion when he was exposed to it. Medusa, freak that she is, was only too happy to give the stuff a try. I had to hand it to Medea. She was ruthless and efficient. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to get a job done.
Or mostly done, in the case of Medusa. There was something she wanted from the gorgon she never got around to getting. Something she called “The Hierophant”. I’m not gonna lie and tell you I knew what a hierophant was—even though the word is Greek. I had to go to Elijah’s computer to look it up. Turns out a hierophant is, according to Wikipedia, “a person who brings religious congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy”. One of the cards in the tarot deck is the hierophant. None of that helped me particularly since it didn’t translate into a thing that someone would own. Still, it was more than worth checking out. In fact, with the clock rolling over into the AM and the persistent scratching still at my window, I decided to call it a night and see what I could turn up the next day.