The Kingdom (Berkeley Blackfriars Book 1)

by J. R. Mabry

  “Ugh, Brian-fart. Glad I’m under here and properly filtered,” came Astrid’s voice.

  “Wait, how did you know that was even me?” Brian asked, pretending to be wounded.

  “Remote viewing of your gaping anus, you voracious bottom whore,” said Astrid.

  “He is pretty voracious,” agreed Terry, smiling up at his partner.

  “Not Play-Doh,” corrected Richard, ignoring the exchange of barbs, “Plato, the philosopher.”

  “Oh, him,” Kat’s features betrayed a faint distaste. “I failed Intro to Philosophy. It was the beginning of the end of my college career.”

  “Well, had you stuck it out, you would have learned about Plato’s World of Forms, the place where the archetypes for all earthly things reside. Plato was being typically grandiose—the Forms don’t require an entire world of their own. A glorified museum obviously suffices to house them.”

  “What are the Forms?” asked Kat.

  “Well, they’re more ideas than anything else, but in Heaven I imagine they must have some visible presence. Let’s say you come across a spider in your yard. How do you know it’s a spider?”

  “Uh, because I know what a spider looks like?”

  “But you’ve never seen this particular spider; how do you know it is a spider at all?”

  “Because all spiders have eight legs?” Kat suddenly felt on thin ice in this conversation.

  “Exactly. You have in your mind a familiarity with the archetypal spider, the perfect spider, from which all earthly spiders draw their form and reality. Because you are acquainted with ‘spiderness’ when you encounter spiderness in an actual being, you recognize it, even though it may look nothing at all like the last spider you encountered.”

  “Okay, but isn’t that just something in my head?”

  “Solipsism alert!” called Dylan, and Terry laughed with him.

  “How could it be just in your head when we all share the same archetypal knowledge?” asked Richard, also enjoying the joke.

  “Okay, he’s in,” Astrid called. “I’m going to try to enter… It’s dim, but I’m still getting something. Pretty hazy…okay, it’s clearing now. He roaming aisles, he’s obviously having an attack of wonder. And I don’t blame him. It’s pretty glorious.”

  “What do you see?” asked Richard.

  “Everything in the hall is in motion, ghostly images, all interacting. It’s pretty chaotic…no, there’s order, but it’s complex. It’s like everything here is participating in an enormous ritual. The forms seem to be arranged in symbolic relationships to one another, and they’re all moving. It’s kind of like being in the middle of a huge clockworks, with everything around you whirring and spinning in a regulated way…wow, it’s really, really trippy.”

  “Did Swedenborg write about this?” Brian asked.

  “He called them ‘correspondences,’” answered Richard.

  “Another fine translation of the Enochian aziazior,” noted Terry.

  “He wrote about them as realities, but not about a hall as such,” Richard said.

  “You have to go to the apocryphal Swedenborgian writings for that,” corrected Astrid, “but it’s there.”

  Richard shrugged, obviously surprised. “Who knew there was a Swedenborgian apocrypha?”

  “How could there not be?” asked Astrid.

  “Good point,” said Dylan. “If you can imagine it, it must exist somewhere.”

  “God, that’s a whole conversation I don’t want to have right now,” Richard shook his head. “What’s the magickian doing now?”

  “‘The Magickian’ has a name,” said Kat defensively.

  “I’m sorry. What’s Randy doing?”

  “He looks like he’s just trying to get his bearings. I can just imagine the vertigo he’s feeling. I feel it, and I’m holding on to a table. He’s standing in free space in an alien body with all these ghostly forms whizzing by him. I’m amazed he’s still standing up.”

  “Stay with him,” Richard said.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Dicky,” said Astrid testily. “I’m not one of your minions.”

  Richard sighed.

  “Minions?” Dylan shot Susan an amused look. “Is we minions?”

  “I’s a womenion,” retorted Susan, kissing him on the nose.

  “Now he’s looking around, like he’s searching for something specific. There’s a whole host of foodstuffs in an orbit around Eva Kadmona—”

  “The archetypal human,” explained Richard. “The Kabbalists posited Adam Kadmon, but they were wrong. Man isn’t the default form of the human; woman is.”

  “We could have told you that,” said Susan, winking at Kat.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” called Astrid.

  “What?” Kat almost screamed.

  “He’s found the orbit of the archetypal avocado. He’s holding the one he brought with him up into its path…”

  “Holy shit!” breathed Dylan. And then they all jumped as a single earthquake jolt shook the house.

  “And it’s gone…”

  “What’s gone?” asked Richard. “What’s gone?!”

  “The avocado is gone. And so is its form. When they collided, they both…disappeared.”

  “Like matter and anti-matter,” breathed Dylan.

  “We just witnessed something huge, gang,” Richard said. “That generated a shockwave. I felt it.”

  “It could have really been an earthquake, you know, a coincidence,” said Dylan.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Richard said.

  Astrid pulled her head out from under the cloth, her hair wild and tangled. “It was worse in Heaven. Knocked Kat’s brother on his ass, and half of Heaven with him.”

  “Well, now we know what he was up to,” Dylan said.

  “Yes, but we don’t know why,” Richard countered.

  “Well, you gents have your work cut out for you. And I have a date.” Astrid began to pack her things.

  Brian eased himself out of Terry’s nervous grasp and headed to the kitchen. Everyone else seemed to be lost in a state of bewildered shock.

  “Uh, guys!?” called Brian. Everyone looked toward the kitchen, and he leaned his head through the doorway. “I’ve got bad news. The guacamole—it’s gone.”

  23

  MIKAEL WAS BEGINNING to fight the midafternoon nods. Watching a house with no activity is not the most stimulating of chores, and he fought against his own internal rhythms to keep himself awake. He was accustomed to an afternoon nap, and his body, like a faithful dog, did not understand being denied.

  He had tried staying awake by girl watching, and indeed, the Lower Haight provided ample opportunity for such an activity. But inexplicably, the appeal of this, enticing as it often was, did not serve to override his body’s horizontal drag. He had taken to bending his fingers at unnatural angles until they threatened to snap, using the pain to jolt him back to a momentary state of full wakefulness.

  Eventually, he noticed that he really needed to shit. Just down the block was a coffee shop. He knew the place well, as he had once spent a good deal of time there several years ago when he had first come out to California and had been couch surfing for nearly a year.

  He opened his kit bag and thought through how to go about this. He could set the burning gall in the planter just to the left of the door. The plant in it was dead, anyway. And he would bring more with him in case someone decided to play good Samaritan and put it out while he was in the can. He could also get a sandwich and a good, tall cup of coffee to help with the afternoon lethargy. It was a plan.

  He blew on the charcoal until it was glowing red and then placed the fish entrails on it. Opening the car door, he jumped out and made for the shop door halfway down the block, a noxious cloud of black smoke trailing behind him.

  He placed the abalone shell in the planter and then stepped through the door, trying to appear nonchalant. He needn’t have worked at it, however. Every eye in the place was glued to the televisio
n set.

  How odd, Mikael thought, and looked around. The place was a little dingy, half coffee shop, half used bookstore, with tattered living room furniture set at odd angles everywhere. Usually, the place was sprinkled with twenty- and thirty- somethings, huddled over laptops or faces buried in textbooks. Occasionally, a lively conversation would emerge from one corner.

  But not today. Today, you could have heard a pin drop were it not for the news commentator’s voice crackling tinnily from the tiny television speaker. Mikael set his bag down on the counter and leaned in to listen.

  “Seems able to explain the sudden disappearance of avocados worldwide. Food and Drug Administration representatives have not yet issued any statements, and agriculture stocks are plummeting in a shocking upset that utterly blindsided the market. Let’s go now to Alison Dana live outside the Tres Marillos Taqueria. Alison?”

  “Thanks, Pete. I’m here with the owner of Tres Marillos, Dolores Wang. Mrs. Wang, how will the sudden disappearance of avocados affect your business?”

  The obviously hysterical Mrs. Wang could not calm herself enough to respond in English and assaulted the reporter with a flurry of Mandarin.

  Mikael furrowed his brow. He remembered Richard and Dylan saying something about Kat’s brother using avocados in a magickal working, and a chill descended his spine. This had the ultimate effect of aggravating the urgency of the bulk in his bowels, and he remembered why he was there and headed to the bathroom, completely unnoticed by anyone else in the place.

  Bowels once voided, he reminded himself that the burning gall at the doorway would not long be an effective deterrent to any demonic nasties, especially since there were windows and a back door to the place. He made for the counter and waved to get the counter-person’s attention. A stocky butch girl behind the counter with a nose ring and a Maori pattern tattooed on her forehead pried her eyes from the screen unwillingly and glanced at him for no more than a split second before returning to the television. “Yeah? What do you want?”

  “Barbecue beef sandwich on a sourdough roll, please. And a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. Oh, and a large coffee.”

  Silently, without looking away from the television, the young woman went into action. Mikael was impressed with how much she was able to do on complete autopilot.

  “What do you think it means?” she said to no one in particular.

  He looked around and realized he was the only person she could reasonably be speaking to. “I…I don’t know.” It wasn’t a lie. He probably knew more than most people in the world about it, but he didn’t know what it meant, philosophically. He hadn’t really thought about it. And probably wouldn’t. “I’ll bet it’s a trick,” he said with a burst of inspiration.

  “What do you mean?” she said, looking at him for the first time.

  “Oh, you know, everyone takes avocados for granted. They’re nothing special, you know?” Mikael posited, warming to his idea. “So, if you’re the National Avocado Board, and you’re smart, you know that people don’t really know what they have until it’s gone. You make all the avocados disappear, and suddenly everyone wonders how they could live without them. You bring them back, and voilà! People love avocados like never before.”

  “So, you think it’s a publicity stunt.” She said it as a statement, not a question and mulled it over, nodding. “You must be right. It’s just the sort of thing those assholes would do.”

  “Yeah, and it’s not hard to see where they got the idea, either,” Mikael said. “Just look at their acronym, National Avocado Board—eh? Eh?”

  “NAB,” she breathed.

  “Nab those motherfucking avocados,” Mikael said with certainty. “I’m just shocked they didn’t try something like this years ago.”

  “You are so right.”

  She put his order in a bag and slid it in front of him. A moment later, she handed him a large cup of coffee. “How much?” he asked.

  “My treat,” she said. “I think you just solved the mystery of the century.” She flipped open her cell phone and began text messaging.

  “Thanks!” Mikael said and gave her a wave that went completely ignored. When he got to the door, he found the charcoal still white and spitting, but the gall gone. He placed some more of the slimy innards in the shell, and as soon as the smoke began to emerge, he made for the car.

  On the way, he glanced at the house. Nothing. He didn’t expect to see any activity. He looked at his watch and realized he was five minutes late checking in with Susan. He set the shell on top of the car’s roof along with his lunch and felt in his pockets for his keys. And that was when he noted, to his horror, that they were still inside the car.

  Panic swept over him, and he felt a wave of vertigo. He clutched at the roof of the car to steady himself and looked around. No sign of baddies, but then, unless you were Terry, there never were. Demons, like most spiritual beings, were usually invisible unless they chose to be otherwise. He looked back at the keys dangling from the ignition and forced himself to be calm, to think rationally. Check the other doors, he told himself, and ran around the car, futilely pulling at all the handles. No good—all were locked.

  He considered breaking a window and wondered if Terry’s warding would still be effective. He decided it was his best option given the circumstances, and cast around for a rock. As on most city streets, rocks were in short supply. Fighting panic, he looked around up and down the street and tried not to think about what would happen if the sigilic backlash caught up with him. If the demon Kat’s brother had employed began to siphon off his own soul, he would be powerless to do anything to stop it.

  The urge to cry came over him, but he recognized it as a manifestation of panic and closed his eyes, forcing himself to do a couple seconds of zazen meditation right where he was standing to focus and calm himself. Opening his eyes, he thought, First things first, and placed the last of his fish gall on the dying coal. Then, carrying it above his head like the lamp of Diogenes, he marched down the street looking for a large heavy object with which to smash a window.

  Suddenly, he saw it. A twisted metal pole about the length of his forearm sticking out of a block of cement that had obviously been recently uprooted from the ground. Perhaps part of a fence that had been knocked over by a car? he wondered, and picked it up with resolve.

  He marched back toward the car, but before he got there he saw, to his great dismay, an obviously homeless man leaning toward the roof of his car, helping himself to Mikael’s lunch. “Goddammit!” Mikael spat. “Hey, you!” he yelled. “Back off my lunch!”

  The homeless guy looked straight at him, and noticing the heavy pole and its obvious aggressive potential, backed off from the car momentarily. But then the man smiled, reached up, and grabbed the sandwich.

  “You little shit!” Mikael screamed and wielded the pole as if to strike the man. He wouldn’t, of course, but he wasn’t above using its potential to scare the man. He had swung it under his left arm, which was still holding the now-dormant abalone shell aloft, readying the bar for a feigned blow when a hard, dull pain caught him at the base of his neck and he faded quickly into darkness. He was unconscious before the abalone shell clattered to the ground.

  24

  EXCEPT FOR ASTRID, they rushed past Brian into the kitchen en masse. On the table was a bowl of chips and beside it a bowl with a little salsa in it. Every bit of the avocado that had been mixed up in it was gone.

  “Brian, you’re sure—” Richard began.

  Brian held up a hand to stop him. “Full of guac. Trust me.”

  “This is tragic,” said Richard.

  “You got that right,” Dylan agreed. “I was really lookin’ forward to Brian’s guacamole.”

  “Dylan, this isn’t just about Brian’s guacamole. If what I’m thinking is right, every avocado on the face of the earth just disappeared.”

  “Holy shit,” said Dylan, staring off into space and contemplating the horror of a world without guacamole. “I need a joint, man.”r />
  “Make it a fatty,” said Brian.

  “Ah heard that,” agreed Dylan. He turned toward Kat. “What did your brother have against ’cadas, anyway?”

  Kat shrugged and then grimaced a little as she said, “He always hated guacamole.”

  “No hatred of foodstuffs runs that deep,” Dylan countered.

  “I don’t think this is really about avocados,” said Richard. “There’s too much we don’t know. Avocados might actually just be a random choice of fruit for whatever Randy was trying to accomplish.”

  “Well, it was certainly one he wouldn’t miss,” offered Kat.

  “So, if he had to pick something, why not pick something he didn’t like?” Richard nodded. “Makes sense. But why obliterate a fruit at all?”

  Brian was studying the salsa left in the bottom of the bowl. Wordlessly, he went to the refrigerator and pulled out a tub of sour cream. Grabbing a spoon, he put several dollops into the bowl, followed by a couple dashes of soy sauce, and stirred the mixture. Then he set the bowl back on the table and tried the mixture on the end of a chip. Apparently satisfied, he turned to the sink and started putting dishes away.

  Dylan grabbed a chip and tried the new mixture. “Huh,” he said, and then tried another, and another.

  “This is big,” said Terry. “We gotta figure out who’s working this side of things, and how to reverse it. Who knows how this might affect the world?”

  “A butterfly effect kind of thing?” asked Susan.

  “Exactly.”

  Tobias’s nose was touching the bowl of Brian’s new dip, sniffing eagerly. Richard pushed it back farther from the edge. “Okay, let’s follow up on those numbers we got off Randy’s phone. Kat, what did you get?”

  “We got about five numbers I don’t recognize in the past two days.”

  “What about calls made around the time of the ritual?” asked Richard, trying the new dip himself. His eyebrows lifted in surprise as the tangy taste registered. He reached for another chip.

  “There was one call, over an hour long, at midnight the evening before Kat found him,” Susan said. “That was the last call received.”