I don’t say good-bye to Candy this time. I already did that. I just hold her face in my mind as I fade away. And it’s okay.
I’m in the dark for a million years. Or maybe just a second. I don’t wear a watch, so I’m just guessing.
Then there’s light. It’s so bright it’s like a knife through my brain. Then my chest spasms and I cough. It’s not pretty. Garbage comes up from my lungs. The more I cough, the more my eyes water. The more my eyes water, the more my nose runs. I’m blind and in pain and probably a disgusting mess—nothing new there. But I can’t stop. Wherever I am, whatever is happening, it goes on for a long time.
When I can finally catch my breath and my eyes stop watering, someone hands me a towel.
I must look like a wino who just won the Most Bodily Fluids Leaked in One Sitting prize.
I wipe myself down and then someone takes the towel away.
A man says, “Open your eyes. What do you see?”
I can’t quite make out the voice. “Light. Just bright light.”
A shadow moves across me.
“Can you see that?”
“A little.”
“Good.”
“Alice?”
“What did he say?”
It’s a woman.
“Alice?”
“That name I know,” the woman says. “It’s his lover.”
“The old one?” says the man.
“Yes. The new one’s name is Candy. Or Chihiro, depending on who you ask.”
I reach out for them.
“What the fuck is going on?”
I try to stand, but my legs are string cheese and I fall on my face. It’s not so bad, really. There’s less light down here. I can see furniture. It’s nice stuff. Maybe antiques. They probably have good yard sales in Heaven. I can also see feet. Around a dozen of them.
Hands grab me and help me up.
I’m wearing some kind of gown. Great. Mr. Muninn put me in a fucking choir. I’m definitely not in the mood for that. I don’t even do karaoke.
“Is this Heaven?”
Whatever bunch owns the twelve feet laughs. Someone helps me sit down. It’s goddamn hard and uncomfortable.
“We like to think so,” says the woman. “You keep closing your eyes. You have to open them so they get used to the light.”
I do what she says and this time I can make out faces. They’re not distinct, but I can see enough to know that there are four men and two women.
“How are you feeling? You already look better. You’re getting some color back,” says one of the women.
“Can I have some water?”
“Of course.”
A few seconds later someone presses a paper cup into my hand. I down the whole thing. My throat spasms a little. It’s very dry.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah. That helped. Where am I?”
“You said it yourself. Heaven.”
“Then why do I feel like such shit?”
“You’ve been dead a long time.”
“How long?
“Eleven months, two days, and three hours,” says one of the men.
“That’s not so long in Heaven.”
“It depends on how you define Heaven,” says the woman. “We’ve always felt that Los Angeles is as close to Heaven as you can find in this funny old world.”
I open my eyes and look around the room a lot harder. Faces come into focus. One in particular.
“You’re Eva Sandoval.”
“Very good. I see death didn’t scramble your brains completely.”
I look around the room. There’s the nice furniture. Old, pricy-looking paintings on the walls. White lilies in a crystal vase on a side table. I’m lying on a pool table covered in plastic sheets.
I look at Eva.
“You’re fucking Wormwood.”
“That’s a complicated notion these days, but you’re not entirely wrong.”
I swing out an arm to grab her, but my body doesn’t want to cooperate. She steps back and I almost fall off the table. Again.
“Where am I? What’s happening?”
“I already told you. You’re in Los Angeles.”
“I’m alive?”
“More or less.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll explain later. See if you can walk.”
A couple of the men help me up and I take a few feeble steps to a chair. It’s as far as I can go, so I give up and flop down.
I look around for Eva again.
“Nice chair.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Never felt better. A second ago I was in Heaven with my friends and now I’m here with you creeps. What, did you bring me back so you can kill me again? Hurry up. I have places to go.”
“In Hell?”
“Don’t sell me short, Eva. I made it all the way Upstairs. Right to the pearly gates. Only they’re not pearly. They’re gold and really ugly.”
“Heaven,” she says. She speaks to the others. “That makes sense. We completely lost track of him in Hell. He must have found his way to Heaven somehow.”
“I just said that.”
“Ask him how,” says the man, ignoring me.
“My sparkling personality, you Wormwood prick. All of you can fuck off. If this is the world, prove it.”
“Of course,” says Eva. She goes away and comes back with the little box in her hand.
“What’s your greatest fear?” she says.
“Flan.”
She presses a TV remote into my hand. There’s a flat panel the size of Raziel’s motor home on the wall. I hit the power button. A crisp hi-def picture of some women appears. They’re all wearing too much makeup and lots of ugly jewelry and most have had mediocre plastic surgery. They’re arguing, all shrill and fake and over-the-top. I have to watch for a couple of minutes for it to make sense. Then it does and I feel as cold as when Michael’s Gladius was burning me up.
“This is one of those angry-housewife shows.”
“Good boy. And what’s this?”
She puts her hand around mine and changes the channel.
A skinny guy with freckles is singing the blues. He thinks he’s B. B. King, but he’s more like a coyote with a sore throat.
“It’s a talent show.”
“Right again.”
“Oh God.”
“Welcome home, Mr. Stark.”
“No. It’s a trick. I’m in Hell. No one brings you back from the dead just to make you watch reality TV.”
“Do you believe you’re back from the dead?” say Eva.
“I’m not sure. Why would Wormwood bring me back?”
“As I said, the whole concept of Wormwood, at least on the mortal plane, is a bit of a mess. Factions. Splinter groups. Bankruptcies. A few murders.”
“A lot of murders,” says the man.
“Quite a lot,” says Eva.
“Good. Rip yourselves to shreds. If you brought me back to see it all happen, thanks. This ought to be fun.”
Eva pulls over a chair and sits next to me.
“We didn’t bring you back to watch us come apart. We brought you back to help us put things back together again.”
I’m starting to feel almost like I believe her and that I am alive. That last thing she said got my heart beating fast.
Eva says, “For one thing, you’ll save a lot of lives and a lot of ordinary people’s livelihoods. You know we control a lot of investments. Well, many of them are falling apart and losing value. Innocent, ordinary people are losing everything.”
I hate the way she keeps saying “ordinary people.” Still, I say, “Tough. They shouldn’t have worked for you in the first place.”
“Most don’t know that they are, but let’s forget money for now. Some of our more radical offshoots haven’t been satisfied with merely playing the markets on things such as famines and communicable diseases. They’re beginning to manipulate them. Pneumonic plague outbreaks.
Ebola. It’s all very ugly.”
“They’re even manipulating the damnation market,” says the man. “Insider trading on human souls. Imagine it. Doomed to Hell for eternity so that a broker could get a bigger bonus this quarter.”
“You’re lying.”
“You said it yourself,” says Eva. “We’re Wormwood. What wouldn’t we do?”
She’s right. It sounds exactly like something Wormwood would do.
“What does this have to do with me?”
“I told you. We need to rein things in. Bring in the outliers. Restore some order to the system.”
“And you want me to help you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Forget it. Kill me. You think Hell scares me? It’s you people that scare me.”
“That’s not all we’re offering,” says the man.
“Eva, who the fuck is this guy?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m Barron Sinclair.”
He says it like it’s supposed to mean something to me. When he holds out his hand to shake, I hold up the remote and turn off the TV instead.
“As Sinclair said, the chance to save lives and livelihoods isn’t all we’re offering,” says Eva.
“What else do you people have that I’d want?”
“How about your old life?” says Sinclair. “All of it.”
Eva says, “When you finish your contract with us, you can go back to your friends. Candy, Kasabian, the others. Even your silly video store is still there.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because as an act of good faith, we can give you something I know you want perhaps more than anything else.”
“What?”
“The Room of Thirteen Doors.”
“Now I know you’re lying. The Room is gone. Occupado. Full of old gods or a new universe. Anyway, it’s off-limits.”
“Not to us. The Room is empty and waiting for you.”
I look around at all the ugly, earnest Wormwood faces. They look more scared than I am angry. And it’s not me they’re scared of. It’s something else. Maybe they’re afraid of each other.
“How can you have possibly gotten control of the Room?”
Eva says, “We don’t have control. Only you can control it. We just swept it out for you.”
“How?”
“Do you really want to discuss transsubstantive metaphysical plane displacement? Or do you want to see the Room?”
“I can go right now? Just walk right out of here?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know I won’t bolt?”
Sinclair leans in.
“Remember when you asked Eva if you were alive and she said ‘more or less’?”
“It’s actually a lot less than it is more,” says Eva. “Without our intervention, there’s a time limit to how long your body will hold together. If we pull the plug, so to speak, you will begin to decay just like any other corpse.”
I touch my face, my left arm. No flesh there. Just a black Kissi prosthetic.
Fuck. I really am alive.
“How did you get my body in the first place?”
“Don’t be stupid. We paid off someone in the coroner’s office.”
“And you’ve kept me on ice ever since. For how long?”
“We told you: eleven months, two days, and three hours.”
“It’s getting closer to four hours now,” says Sinclair.
Almost a year. I was in the Tenebrae with Raziel and his sick crusade for almost a year. It’s not as bad as eleven years the last time I was Downtown, but it’s bad. It’s long enough that people begin to forget about you and move on with their lives.
Bad enough that coming back could be another kind of Hell. But, if there’s a chance . . .
“I want to see the Room.”
Eva says, “Of course. You’ll notice that we’ve arranged the lights so that there is a nice shadow in the corner near the lilies.”
When I get up this time, I can stand on my own. Eva gets behind me and unties my filthy hospital gown. I’m naked as a baby bird. Sinclair hands me black pants and a shirt. They’re silk. It takes me a while to get them on. My motor skills aren’t quite there yet. When I look down, there’s a pair of black loafers by my feet. If I have to wear loafers forever, then I really am back in Hell.
I put on the shoes and head for the shadow.
“Don’t forget to come back, Mr. Stark. Without our help, your body won’t last more than an hour.”
I don’t look back. I just step into the shadow.
And there I am. The Room. It’s real. It’s cool and clean and I can feel the old sensations of being here. That I’m in the still, silent center of the universe where nothing, not even Mr. Muninn, can get me.
I walk around, trailing my hand over the walls and each door. The thirteenth door is still nailed shut. The others don’t look like they’ve changed at all. I take a few deep breaths, just getting used to the feeling of real air, not Tenebrae or Hellion stink, in my lungs. My heart is racing a hundred miles an hour. I’m actually afraid these Wormwood geniuses brought me back just so I can have a heart attack and die all over again. I lean against the cool stone. Breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. After a few minutes, my heart begins to slow and I can relax. I want to try all of the doors at once, but the one that interests me the most, I’m afraid to open.
I walk to it and grip the ring sealing it shut. One turn of my wrist and it opens. I step through.
It’s night and I’m in Hollywood. On Las Palmas Avenue, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. Across the street is Maximum Overdrive, the video store where I live with Candy and Kasabian. There’s a music practice area in the storage room. Kasabian has a little apartment on the first floor. Candy and I live upstairs.
I want to go across the street and bang on the door, but my feet won’t move. I could go in through a shadow and surprise them, but then I remember something.
Eleven months, two days, and four hours. Dead almost a year, maybe strolling in while they’re having burritos isn’t the best strategy. And Eva said I only have an hour. An hour won’t be enough inside, whether they’re happy to see me or not, but I hope to hell they’d be happy.
Instead of rushing over, I just take it all in. I’m home and it’s real and I don’t have to rush. I can think about it and figure out my best move.
But is that the right thing to do? It’s been almost a year. For the first time in a long time, I’m genuinely, to-the-bone scared. It’s too much. I can’t take it all in.
My heart starts racing again. I rub my chest. It hurts in more ways than one.
What am I fucking doing here? Wormwood is blackmailing me with the one thing they know I want. If I ever said yes to them about anything, I’d never be able to get out. I’d be just like them and deserve Hell more than I ever have before.
That’s it, then. I can stand here and rot or I can go back and tell them no to their faces.
I’m about to step into a shadow by a scraggly palm tree when the front door to Max Overdrive opens and Candy walks out. She’s with Allegra and Brigitte. They talk for a minute. Laugh. It’s simple and normal. A dumb little snapshot of friends going out, probably heading to Bamboo House of Dolls for a drink. I’m jealous and afraid and I want to run over to her and let her know I’m alive. But only for one more hour.
A cloud that was blocking the moon moves and the street lights up. Candy turns in my direction and for a second I think she sees me, but she’s just watching a moth dive-bombing a streetlamp.
I can see her face, but there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it.
I walk into the palm tree’s shadow and out again into Eva Sandoval’s house. All six of Wormwood’s finest gasp when they see me.
Eva says, “That’s quite a startling trick, Mr. Stark.”
She’s holding a drink in her hand. I take it and gulp it down. It’s bourbon. Very good stuff. It burns just right.
“My name isn’t Mist
er Stark. It’s just Stark.
“And you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent, Ginger Clark, and my editor, David Pomerico. Thanks also to Pamela Spengler-Jaffe, Jennifer Brehl, Caroline Perny, Shawn Nicholls, Angela Craft, Priyanka Krishnan, Owen Corrigan, and the rest of the team at Harper Voyager. Thanks also to Jonathan Lyons, Sarah Perillo, Holly Frederick, Nicholas J.L. Beudert, and Tess Callero. Thanks also to Genie Casillas for Latin advice. As always, thanks to Nicola for everything else.
The Devil in the Dollhouse
Being Lucifer is an inherently heinous job. But some things done in Hell are so bad, even the Devil himself needs to forget. So while Stark cannot remember what happened at Henoch Breach, he was there.
And he was responsible . . .
The Devil in the Dollhouse
A Sandman Slim Story
The Unimog bounces down a shattered freeway that looks like a set from Crackhead Godzilla Goes on a Bender and Fucks up Everything. Exit signs and overhead lights are melted to slag. Buildings along the edges of the road look more like the stone skeletons of giant fish than settlements. We have to inch our way down and then back up collapsed overpasses like arthritic grasshoppers.
And it gets worse. This thousand-mile-long ribbon of shit? Technically, I own all of it. All of Hell is falling apart and one of my jobs is to put it back together. But not today.
Let’s back up and get a look at the big picture.
There are just as many assholes in Heaven as there are in Hell. The only difference is the ones in Hell aren’t slick enough to hide it. Therefore Hell is a kingdom of assholes, and thus the Devil is the king of the assholes.
Hi. I’m the Devil. No, seriously. I used to be James Stark or sometimes Sandman Slim, but then the Lucifer 1.0 pissed off back to Heaven and stuck me running Hell. I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. That was three days ago. Today things got worse. Today I’m in a truck convoy heading somewhere I never heard of to find some place that scares even these evil fallen-angel pricks. Plus, I can’t eat the lunch they packed for me. I never could stand unicorn salad.
The Kill Society Page 28