Through the Doors of Oblivion

by Michael G. Williams

  Norton’s face rose, and he straightened himself in the seat, and he met Iria’s eyes again. “No, he would not. But Norton I, Emperor of the United States, did.”

  “Exactly.” Iria went in for the kill. “And now your city needs you to do so again.”

  “You spoke of the keys to the city.” The self-proclaimed emperor’s voice was very serious and his face very still. “What is it you need me to retrieve?”

  It was Madge’s turn at the whiteboard. As she drew a circle, she illustrated different points along it. “There are four keys to the city that we need.” She cleared her throat. Madge enjoyed mentorship, but never felt at home lecturing. “They each represent a particular thing we want to conjure and control to protect the city’s soul. First, the original California Republic bear flag.”

  “I would imagine those are easy enough to find.” Norton gave a small shrug. “They were certainly so in my time. The Society of California Pioneers carries many every year in the Admission Day parade.”

  “We mean the original original.” Iria sat cross-legged on the floor, elbows on knees. “The one William Todd painted of a star and a bear on some old canvas and flew from the flagpole in Sonoma in 1846.”

  Norton’s eyes sparkled, and he raised both eyebrows. “Ah, the bear flag. The one they hoisted to declare the California Republic upon driving the Mexicans out of their holdings.”

  Madge nodded. “That one. And the Society of California Pioneers were the last ones to have it.”

  “They display it in Pioneer Hall.” Norton sniffed before going on. “Not that I was allowed to join their society.” Clearly, he considered this a personal slight. “They restricted membership to those citizens who arrived prior to 1850 and to their descendants, which seems a fine means of ensuring one’s little club ceases to be, sooner or later. I imagine they are defunct by this time?”

  “Colonizing assholes,” Madge said before she could stop herself. “But anyway, no, the Society is still around. If it makes you feel better, the building you mean when you refer to Pioneer Hall is gone now.”

  “What became of it?” His eyes lit up just a little. The books said Norton could carry a grudge with the best of them and a part of Madge liked seeing that glint in this thing’s eyes.

  “The earthquake got it.” Madge gestured vaguely at the rest of the city beyond their walls.

  Norton raised an eyebrow. “The earthquake.”

  “Technically, the fire got it.” Iria regarded Norton but nodded their head in Madge’s direction. “But it’s hard to distinguish the two from one another.”

  Norton again repeated a flat statement as though it were a question. “The fire.”

  Iria reached for one of the bookshelves against one wall, withdrew a slim volume, and handed it to him. “Study up,” they said. “You should be familiar with what happened before we send you.”

  5:12 AM, April 18, 1906

  It started with a single, world-rattling boom. That lone blast, a foreshock just a few minutes after 5:00 AM, sounded so powerfully it awakened those sleeping and terrified those already about. The city had long grown accustomed to a seasonal pattern, though: small earthquakes every Spring as far back as anyone could remember.

  Twenty-five seconds later, the ground under the city of San Francisco tried to tear itself apart.

  The city shook with unimaginable fury. Vibrations from the quake threw people across rooms, out of windows, off of ships in the bay, over the railings of balconies and stairs, but later everyone wrote about the noise. For a full minute, the city shook so hard cobblestones were fired out of the street itself, straight up into the air, with a crack like a gunshot. Streetcar lines tore themselves loose and twisted into upright spirals with metallic shrieks. San Francisco smothered under the deafening, roaring cacophony of plates shattering, of bookcases falling over, and of furniture flung about like a rubber ball bouncing inside a box. Grand pianos flew through plate glass windows and smashed in the street, every chord struck with maximum force one final time.

  Above it all, every church bell in the city rang continuously throughout the quake.

  Those unlucky enough to be on the shore or on the water had to contend with a resultant tsunami. Waves lashed at the shoreline and every structure touching it.

  By the time it was over, hundreds - probably thousands – had died. Wooden and poorly-built brick buildings laid in ruins everywhere. Houses collapsed against their neighbors, launching long rows of tumbled structural dominoes. The people of San Francisco searched for survivors. They tried to cook food to get through the day. The fire department began to dynamite buildings to create fire breaks.

  They didn’t know how many gas lines had ruptured, and how much fuel awaited even the smallest fires in open air.

  Thirty separate fires burned for four days and nights, destroying 90% of the city. Crowds all over the city watched colossal walls of smoke and columns of fire wash over streets and buildings behind them as they tried to escape.

  A photographer named George Lawrence used a series of kites to take aerial photographs showing the scale of destruction. In his photos, the city of San Francisco looks like a city planned but not yet constructed: grids of streets and alleys, sidewalks, but every lot empty save for massive stacks of lumber. The “lumber,” of course, was nothing more than the skeletal remains of buildings entirely consumed by flames. The city of San Francisco had been reduced to its component parts.

  H.G. Wells, in New York City on his first visit to America, wrote in his diary how everyone he encountered spoke that very same day of the importance of reconstructing San Francisco. The America of 1906 was one which saw a disaster strike their fellow citizens and leapt to rebuild, no excuses made, no improvement overlooked. Building codes were updated. Seismology became formalized, and its study expanded. A city of 410,000 persons found itself with over a quarter-million of their own homeless and sprang into action providing temporary shelter. Refugee camps stood on the shores on both sides of the Bay for years, but the city of San Francisco - as was also true of the other cities around it equally affected - was never abandoned.

  Modern Day

  Norton closed the book and looked up at Iria and Madge. “The spring earthquakes…” His voice was quiet and still, and Iria’s heart broke just a little at the way tears lined Norton’s eyes. “We… we had no idea.”

  “Funny story,” Iria said, though it wasn’t, “Those were because of the gold rush.”

  Norton looked puzzled. “How do you mean?”

  Madge sighed a little and nodded. “They moved so much dirt doing hydraulic mining, inland from here, that it destabilized the crust around the fault lines.”

  Norton looked puzzled still. “This book speaks of what I take to be a scientific understanding of the cause of earthquakes: tectonics?”

  Iria made a little ah with their mouth. “Okay, so that stuff postdates you. Think of it this way: you’re carrying a tray of drinks in one hand, like a waiter in a restaurant. You have to balance the tray by where you place your hand on the underside when you pick it up, or you won’t be able to carry it with just that one hand. You want to distribute the glasses more or less evenly. Right?”

  Norton fluttered a few fingers to indicate he followed the analogy.

  “But,” Iria said, “What if after you pick up the tray the glasses on it all slide around? There’s lube on the bottoms of all the glasses, and they slide around faster than you can adjust your grip on the tray?”

  Norton nodded, getting it: the tray falls. Crash. He made a little noise with his mouth.

  “That’s what gold mining did. But the waiter’s tray was the ground and the drinks were all the dirt they pulled out of the ground, and it turned into really wet mud. And it jiggled, I guess, for lack of a better word, and then got dragged to the other side of the tray,” Iria said. “They moved enough earth to move the earth.”

  “My gods.” Norton dropped to a whisper, repeating it to himself. “My gods.”

&nb
sp; Madge spoke quietly. “Our theory is that Mammon and his allies were already at work. The gold rush may have ultimately been what caused the earthquake and fire, with a time delay of a few decades.”

  “I would certainly imagine rather a lot of joy dissipates in such an event.” Norton’s voice shrank to a still, small, injured wheeze. Iria reminded themselves this wasn’t an abstract idea for Norton, after all: not the loss of some antique place unknown to anyone still alive today. It was the destruction of a city he could remember, could visualize, had walked around. The Market Street of today, tree-lined, fenced in on all sides by storefronts and office buildings and convenience stores, paved and orderly, looked nothing like the one erased from the earth in 1906. Iria had gotten the local history bug the moment they arrived in the city ten years earlier. The Market Street of a century before had been dirt and stone, wide, unlined, teeming with free-roaming crowds of people and carriages and horse-cars.

  Norton, in contrast, might know the contours and details of the places that were no more: places he had gone, public figures he had known, the daily ways of living and being they supposed Norton recalled from his lifetime of familiarity with them. Iria reminded themself that Norton likely had a gap in the bookshelf of his concept of the world, an empty place where the old San Francisco had sat, and Norton alone among them had the capacity to recognize that volume was missing.

  “No,” Norton said, and he stood up, walked to the door, opened it, looked at Iria and Madge again, and shook his head. “No, not yet.” Norton walked through the door and pulled it shut behind him.

  “Uh,” Madge said.

  “Okay…” Iria paused, then repeated it. “Okay. So. New wrinkle.”

  “Read it, bro.” The young man whispered, but it was the harsh hiss of someone whose patience ran out a long time ago. “Fuckin’ say the words, okay?”

  Riley – white, red hair, not quite tall, not quite bearded, luxury-brand sandals that made little farting sounds with every step, John Lennon glasses, and a tattoo of interlocking dollar signs over his heart – shifted from one foot to the other. He looked back to the shared document on the screen of his phone and drew a breath. The next part of the ritual seemed absurd, but these guys delivered the goods at every prior turn. He had gone from a programmer on a short-term contract to a permanent hire to a team lead to a management trainee in no time at all. They called him “hungry” and invited him to join their real estate sideline. This was an audition of sorts, he realized: one-half job interview, one-half hazing ritual. Riley refused to believe they believed this stuff. This seemed like ridiculous dress-up, like someone had read a religious screed about the dangers of D&D and used it as the blueprint for a pyramid scheme.

  But if this was the cost of getting in on the booming San Francisco real estate market…

  Shaun, Jefferson, Hitesh, and Mutsuyuki glared at him around the edges of their respective cowls.

  “We don’t keep the Big Guy waiting, bro.” Hitesh shook his head as he said it. The others did the same.

  Riley cleared his throat and held the phone up. He spoke the syllables in front of him with no clue what they meant. The invocation sounded like Latin, but only about a third of it got caught in the net of his Catholic school education. Riley had studied in preparation for this night, reading random summoning rituals and black masses on the web, hoping to sound more experienced. He wanted to impress these guys. Even he, intellectually rather dim, with his padded resume and his half-hearted enthusiasm for anything other than getting rich, couldn’t help noticing this ritual was unlike the ones he had found on his own. Those ceremonies always gave the object of the summoning a laundry list of titles and names. In this one, though he parsed only a fraction, Riley could tell Mammon, whatever it was, possessed one name and one name only.

  As Riley read off the last few syllables – intoning that name over and over again – he felt a sensation like someone pinching the air around him. It made him think of someone zipping closed the seal on the sandwich bag of their corner of the universe. Had Riley been of a more descriptive bent, he might have said the garage in the back of an old apartment building where they stood had been walled off from consensual reality.

  The group saw no smoke, heard no chimes, felt nothing change. One moment the five of them stood together, one at each point of the sigil they drew on the floor; the next, a sixth figure stood in the center of that same sigil.

  “Nice robes! Very old-school!” Mammon adjusted the cuff of his emerald sport jacket. “I admire the dedication you gentlemen have shown to the classics. No one appreciates getting the aesthetics right anymore. I mean, cargo shorts? Heavy metal tee shirts? Where has the style gone?” Mammon clucked his tongue, turning in a circle to address the group, then snapped his fingers at Riley. “Lose the sandals, kid.”

  Riley opened his mouth and looked at the others. “But…”

  “But what?” Mammon’s voice thundered. They were not talking to the smooth salesman Mammon. Nor did they enjoy the company of gregarious board chairman Mammon. This being ceded nothing and demanded obedience.

  “I…” Riley’s voice was a child’s whisper. “I didn’t want to get my feet dirty.” He looked around at the room: a visibly filthy cement floor, cobwebs in every corner, black mold fractaling across the ceiling.

  “And what’s this?” Mammon gestured at the occult symbol painted in black-red. It looked like a star melted in the microwave, with two old television antennae growing out of it. All the admiration for the robes was gone, supplanted by a disappointed elder. “Rat blood? Rat blood?” Mammon shook his head. “Very disappointing.”

  “What would you prefer, master?” Mutsuyuki managed to hold his voice steady.

  “Human blood, of course.” Mammon’s voice swung back to the half-serious, half-kidding patter of a used car salesman joking the jalopy in question was driven by a little old lady on Sundays, just kidding, unless you might believe that. “Top shelf every time, friends. Do you sit around your apartments drinking rotgut? No, you go out and pay big bucks for it at a place in North Beach instead!” Mammon scoffed at them, jerking a thumb at Riley. “I bet this kid’s full of the stuff. Probably comes in a plastic jug and they pour it into a decanter to keep kids like you funding their margin.”

  That got a big laugh from everyone except Riley, but Riley noticed Mammon was the first to laugh and the last to finish.

  “But seriously, fellas.” Mammon shifted his tone to that of the older brother about to impart revealed truth, mentoring the next in line. He gestured at the building around them as he spoke. “If you want to flip this place we’re going to have to engage in a little human sacrifice.”

  No one breathed. Riley remembered that for the rest of his life: everyone else in this group was as surprised by that pronouncement as he was. That tiny window of normal human shock allowed Riley to forgive the others and himself for going along. It made agreeing feel like a choice that must have some justification. They weren’t doing this because they loved the idea of blood magic so much. They did it because what they really wanted seemed worth a significant but unknown price.

  “Now, hear me out.” Mammon put his hands up against objections absolutely no one made. “I don’t mean marching upstairs and murdering someone with a protected lease. You just need to evict them.” Mammon produced the smirk of a mischievous child about to slip a spider down a pretty girl’s dress. “You bought this old apartment building, right?” He didn’t wait for confirmation, but a few heads nodded as he went on. “You formed an LLC and got a bunch of loans and bought a place you can’t really afford. And all you want to do is flip the land: sell it to a developer who’ll knock it all down. Then you pay off your loans early and pocket a tidy profit and go do it again next door. That’s great. I like that. The limited liability corporation, my friends, is real magic.” Mammon didn’t quite laugh at his own joke. “You don’t need my help for that.”

  Jefferson opened his mouth to speak, but Mammon held up a finger to shus
h him. “No, kid, first thing: don’t interrupt. Second thing: this is my favorite part. I love the looks on your faces when you realize this is not a new idea and I’ve got it all figured out.” Mammon cupped his elbow with one hand and his chin with the other. “Now. Let me see.” He turned again, studying each of them. “I’m betting you want to run some secondary scheme underneath this one: sell a bunch of worthless shares in your LLC, or do something to collect insurance, or otherwise figure out how to make money on this dump two times in one deal.” Mammon snapped his fingers and made on ‘o’ with his mouth. “I know! Straw buyer. Am I right? You’re going to pay off an appraiser to get an inflated valuation, sell the building to a different LLC you’ve formed at that inflated price, fold the LLC, let the mortgage lapse, and act as your own short-sale broker for a cut of the difference between the actual value and the defaulted mortgage.” Mammon grinned ear to ear. “There are just enough of you to make that work. You can even hold in-person meetings with a banker if you need.” He spread his hands. “I’m right, right?”

  “Something like that,” Jefferson mumbled from inside his cowl. “We need to jumpstart fundraising for our real venture.”

  “Doing what?” Mammon adopted the tone and pose of the interested professor: one part kids these days, one part seen it all before.

  Hitesh’s enthusiasm bubbled over as he blurted out the answer. “We want to disrupt the short-term residential rental property market! There’s a company here called Cuckoo. They’ve grabbed up everything. We’ve got the better app design, though. With the right funding, we can entice renters into exclusive agreements with us, push Cuckoo out of the market, and frame ourselves as the good guys killing off the big bad corporation that wrecks neighborhoods all over the city. And get crazy rich doing it.”