While I filled her in, “Baron Saturday” began to gesture like a stage magician unveiling his latest illusion. His black magic tugged at invisible superstrings, pushing aside flotillas of the dark matter that makes up the bulk of our reality.
“What are you doing?”
“Hannibal was damned by the Roman gods,” Samedi said. “But since Pluto is très non, I’m the only one who can open the death portal back to Hades.”
“That’s crossing pantheons. Exactly how many of your powers did you keep?”
Samedi clucked like a disapproving mother hen and uttered a creole swear word I won’t repeat. “You were always so naïve, frère. Of course I saved some for a rainy day.”
He shot his hands up, his index fingers pointing skyward, then took three long backward steps. A second later, twin columns of blue flame roared up from the Earth. Samedi had summoned a Hades Portal, a direct link to the Roman Underworld. The air thronged with the bored moans of the Roman dead who had lived, died, and been damned before the coming of Christianity. These days, most eternal damnations consist largely of endless wandering through badly lit hallways searching for someone to unlock the doors.
There was a flash, and the Portal became a bright hole hovering between the two flaming columns. Persi the quarter-mastodon inserted his trunk under Hannibal’s shattered body and lifted it off the ground. The Carthaginian had nearly reconstituted himself. The force that empowered him was working overtime.
“Wait!”
Megan McCool strode forward and stared up at the rapidly reforming features of the man who nearly destroyed Rome twice.
“Bastard looks like Vin Diesel.”
With that completely indecipherable comment, McCool gave Hannibal the finger.
“‘Concubine’ my ass, swordboy.”
Then Persi dropped Hannibal into the Hades Portal.
“Well,” McCool said, “now that that’s over, would one of you handsome Entities kindly provide a lady with a portal back to Boston?”
Behind her, Hannibal’s right hand shot out and grabbed McCool’s belt. McCool was yanked backward and fell, screaming, through the Hades Portal. The columns of fire were sucked after them while the earth rumbled beneath me as if giants were breakdancing in the guts of the world. Then the Portal slammed shut.
“Sweet Christmas.”
“Well,” Samedi sighed. “I’m off.”
“You’re off? Open it!”
“Pourquoi?”
“You just damned the Morrigan, that’s why!”
Samedi shrugged. “I’m all dry, mon petit dieu. It cost me a lot of power to help you today. And besides, the Morrigan’s tough: she be aaahhhiiight.”
“Hey! You also sent her mortal host to Hell!”
“Can’t you get her out?”
“Not now! Only a death god can free a damned soul. You’ve got to open that Portal, Samedi. She’ll think I tricked her!”
Samedi shrugged again, sadly.
“I’ve got just enough couraunt to get back to New York. I’ve incorporated one of those Disney kids into the show. He’s handsome enough, but he dances like Barbara Bush. We have a run through in twenty minutes and I’ll have to seduce fifty dancers just to stay awake. Je vous en prie!”
“Samedi wait!”
He forked a “call me” gesture with his thumb and pinky finger. Then he turned away and vanished in a violent burst of smoke and bongo drums.
Persi nuzzled me the way a dog nuzzles a distracted human.
“That was delightful. What’s next?”
I could already sense my connection strengthening as the subtle fabric settled around me. Hannibal’s rebanishment had removed the psychic interference. However, electronic evidence of divine interference was already circling the globe. I knew what came next.
And it was going to hurt.
“What will you be doing now?”
The Pope was standing a few yards away. In all the chaos I’d forgotten about him.
“Pardon?”
“I said now that you’ll no doubt be appearin’ on YouTube, what will you do?”
The old man leaned forward, his eyes twinkling with glee. “Perhaps, in your wrath, you’ll destroy the Earth… and all who dwell upon her?”
“You know me?”
“Don’t insult me, Lord. I’ve only served you for over fifty years. At least the idea of You, you know… in the grand sense. The zombie mammoth over there keeps bowing to you. And that Puerto Rican with the pigsticker kept calling you ‘God of the Hebrews’.”
The Pope chuckled and scratched his backside. “I may be a thickset old dinosaur, but I’m not blind. Now, will you answer a man who has served for over five decades?”
“I have no intention of destroying the Earth. You people seem capable of that without any help from me.”
“Will you redeem us then? Save us from ourselves?”
“I’m going to push the Reset button.”
“Beg pardon?”
“In a few moments you won’t remember any of this. You’ll all go back to doing… whatever it is you do.”
The Pope nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. “Back to business as usual then?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“I’m comfortable with that, I suppose,” he shrugged. “Well, g’bye to you then.”
The Pope turned and took two steps toward the burning city. Then he turned back. “One last thing?”
“Yes?”
“We don’t really need you anymore, do we? I mean… it’s obvious that you couldn’t be less interested in guiding the river of human destiny. ‘Free will’ apparently being the way o’ things… I gather that’s best for all concerned. And anyway, I’d say we’ve done alright for ourselves: global warming, famine, reality TV and the military industrial complex notwithstanding. I suppose if you were really the God you were cracked up to be… you’d have put a stop to all that.”
“Well… this was fun, but I’ve got a reality to repair, so…”
“Stands to reason then, that we’ve been on our own since Day One. Leaving us none the better or worse fer your occasional indulgence. I s’pose it’s best that you go back to doin’ whatever it is you do, and leave us to work things out fer ourselves.”
“If you’re finished…?”
“I am.” The Pope smiled, his eyes bright and utterly sober. “Having spoken my piece I’ll withdraw and say, simply: thanks fer nothin’.”
With that he turned. Then he turned back. “I take it the redheaded colleen with the big winnebagos was the Morrigan: the pagan Whore of Ireland’s savage pre-Christianity?”
“Yes.”
The old man whistled, and winked. “Wonders within wonders. And none of it to do with us. Goodbye then.”
Gathering his tattered robes, the old Pope walked, whistling, back into the burning city. Sometimes I wonder about people. I really do.
I took it all in. Then I reached out, and up, grasping my way into the Eshuum. Power shimmered there, colder than the blood of icebergs. A small portion of the human thoughtforce awaited my command once more.
“You’ve come back.”
“I could never abandon you.”
“The Other whispers of your betrayal.”
“What other?”
“He that promises. Who speaks truth.”
“Where is it? Who is the Coming?”
“The beginning of your end. And the end of all beginnings.”
Reset.
Nothing happened. With a sinking feeling, I realized that I couldn’t trust the connection any longer. I was just about to summon an Aspect – try to – when the power answered.
Reset.
The world faded as I opened myself to the Eshuum and a billion lives times a billion roads-not-travelled opened themselves to me, stretching toward a multitude of realities both probable and possible, each of them branching out toward an infinity of decreasingly viable outcomes, and all of them anchored to this moment in time, its relation to
the most critical element of all… free will. I expanded, growing godlike again as potentials unspooled beneath my fingertips.
Then I went to work.
CHAPTER VII
PARANOIA MADE BY GOYA
From:[email protected]
To:@LORDOSIRIS, @BLACKSHANGO, @AGNIFLAMER, @JesusChristJR.
Subject: HAS ANYBODY SEEN LUCIFER?
@LORDOSIRIS: Insanely bizzy! Glorious revival happening in Egypt!
@BLACKSHANGO: Not since the last election.
@AGNIFLAMER: Very busy ’n Bollywood. No time for games.
@JesusChristJR: Still not speaking to you.
I shut off the display on my mobile and set the ringer to vibrate. Then I leaned back against the headrest of my seat and imagined welding my eyelids shut against the stomach churning brightness of a midsummer Chicago morning. The sunlight beating against my eyelids threatened to pop my eyeballs out of their sockets. Two days after my battle with Hannibal I was still nauseated, disoriented and depressed. I was in a foul mood as I made my way to work.
But these ailments paled before the doubt that was deepening toward existential crisis with each passing moment.
Zeus had used stolen divinity to attack me, a move which, had he succeeded, would have permanently altered human continuity, something that, all extant deities had acknowledged under the terms of the Covenant, would be a bad thing. I’d stopped him only at the cost of his apparent death, which should have been technically impossible: a god of Zeus’ stature was virtually immortal, even while masquerading as a mortal. Now he was gone.
A few days later, a resurrected Hannibal had used more stolen divinity, power that, under normal circumstances, would have been inaccessible to him. Both had tried to kill me using this borrowed power; both had nearly succeeded; now both were gone. But so was the Morrigan, a powerful goddess in her own right, and one of my few reliable allies: three catastrophic god-related events, occurring within days of each other.
Beware the Coming. It stalks us all.
In my descended state I had limited communications with select active top gods via the waring; a cybertelepathic treasure house composed of what you might call “dark matter memory banks”. It was a sort of psychic world wide web, funneled through and similar to the mortal internet, only without the animal porn. (The Greek Pantheon filed a petition to have that section sealed off when they realized that it was occupied mostly by members of the Greek Pantheon.)
But I didn’t need to mindsurf the web-browser of the gods to know that something was seriously out of pocket. The renunciation of an old, worn out God occurs in different ways, sometimes after weeks of tribal warfare, sometimes after decades of ethnic cleansing, but mostly, quietly, after a gradual shifting of belief, a replacement of old ideas by bright, shiny new ones. The Advent of a new God is always accomplished through an uptick in the intensity of human belief in that god, never through direct action from the ascendant God to be.
You’ve been replaced, by the One who Comes.
I had my fears, and a million questions. Was the Coming, the entity that both Zeus and Hannibal claimed to represent, an avatar of this new God? If so, what were its motives? Who were its worshippers? I had seen no evidence of a widespread new religious movement powerful enough to have stimulated the Collective Unconscious, so where was this Coming getting his or her power? And what did it stand to gain by pitting retired gods against each other? What were its tenets? Its divine selling points? So far, it had displayed nothing more than a penchant for staging godfights.
But my darkest fears were reserved for a more personal subject. I had heard no word from my former counterpart since our mutual descent to the mortal plane. Lucifer had successfully hidden himself among humanity’s teeming masses for nearly thirty years. Was he at the root of the Coming’s takeover attempt? If the Father of Lies was hoarding undeclared powers in contravention of the Covenant, what did he intend to do with them?
More importantly, could I stop the Devil if he was, in some way, at the heart of the problem? Exactly how much power was he hoarding? Who were his allies? Where was he?
I tried to relax as the L train came up out of the underground and onto the elevated tracks near the Loop. Thoughts of the day ahead only made matters worse.
I had experienced headaches after godfights, but never with this kind of intensity. Maybe two major duels occurring so close together was too much for my substandard constitution. My gut insisted, however, that this was different. Something was wrong.
What’s happening to me?
When I dragged myself into the Westside location, two hours late, Herb and his watch were waiting for me in Motor Oils. He’d spent the last three days scouting potential new locations in Milwaukee only to learn that I’d been AWOL. Flaunt capered at Herb’s side like the Wicked Witch of the West’s favorite flying monkey.
“Well, the Mad Zulu returns. I thought you were getting a haircut for your big date with Salome tonight.”
“Something suddenly came up.”
“What? Dammit, man, don’t you have any self-respect? You look like a retarded voodoo doll.”
“Have you seen my Advil? I’m getting a sick headache.”
“I mean I’m as liberal as the next guy when it comes to personal freedoms for my employees. Didn’t I let you grow those gridlocks…?”
“Dredlocks.”
“Your mother wanted me to drop a tranquilizer in your Sunny D, sneak into your room and shave your head. I said ‘Barbara, this is America: let the boy look like a damn bushman if he wants to’.”
“Wrong. You didn’t shave my head because you broke your clippers shaving your name into that alpaca during the Herb vs the Dollar Lama spot.”
“Did I hassle you when you pierced your eyebrows?” Herb droned on. “Did I say a single, solitary word when you grew a Mohawk and dyed it lime green?”
“You said, ‘No son of mine is gonna prance around lookin’ like Chief Sittin’ Pretty and call himself Herb Cooper’s offspring. Not while Herb Cooper’s pullin’ the chuckwagon.’”
“Damn right.”
“Pop…”
But Herb was rolling, and nothing short of a nuclear accident would shut him up.
“Do you know how hard I’ve slaved to create this empire? How much valium I power-slammed just to keep from stabbing your mother long enough to keep this family together?”
“Pop…”
“But what does Dad get in return? Renfield in San Francisco working in a damn headshop…”
“He’s a biochemist. He specializes in alternative therapies and eastern medicine.”
“Western medicine was good enough before I spent two hundred thousand dollars to put him through a Western medical school. Atticus can’t even be bothered to visit on a regular basis…”
“He lives next door.”
“And that other one… my firstborn son. The heir to the Cooper Empire… ashamed of his own name.”
“You named him after a wizard!”
“Gandalf is a seminal character from a beloved piece of Western fiction, smartass. I don’t see people in China naming their kids after Charlie Chan.”
“Or that Cirque du Soleil crap,” Flaunt muttered. He had ditched the Elviswig in favor of his own implausible toupee. “Too much of this globalization goin’ on, Herbie. New World Order time. They want us all speakin’ Spanish, Chinese... Whatever happened to American literary type names like… like…”
While Flaunt struggled to remember the last book he’d burned I staggered behind the customer service counter. Underneath it I’d stored a bottle of Eco Water and the little metal tin in which I kept my stash. I opened the tin, palmed four Advil and downed them dry.
“What’s wrong with you?” Herb said. “You look like crap.”
“He’s probably crankin’ the crystal meth,” Flaunt crowed. “All these idiots are doin’ it.”
“Will… you… shut up?”
My voice echoed a little too loudly. Somewhere
out over Lake Michigan, the echo stroked thunder from the skies. Flaunt flinched, his gaze flicking across the ceiling. He waved a hand in my direction. “See what I mean?”
Then he stomped off to berate a customer.
“Why do you have to antagonize him?” Herb hissed. “You know he gets flashbacks.”
“I’m out.”
“What? It’s only 12.15!”
“I gotta go. My head’s killin’ me.”
I grabbed my satchell and headed toward the door.
“I’ll be taking that loan out of your check!”
I went to see Surabhi.
CHAPTER VIII
SURABHI
My headache abated a little on the train ride up to Rogers Park. By the time I rang Surabhi’s doorbell I was feeling more like myself, anticipating the look on Surabhi’s face later that night when I gave her the ring – and the night of passion sure to follow – when she snatched open the door to her apartment.
“Yo,” I said. “What’s crackin’?”
I moved in for a kiss. Surabhi grabbed my lapels and screamed, “Kiiiiyaaaaaahhh!”
In one fluid movement she shifted her center of gravity downward and backward, pulled me forward onto the balls of my feet, planted her foot in the center of my chest and I was sailing head over heels across her comfortable living room. I landed on my back in the center of a deep mound of sofa cusions, comforters and fluffy pillows.
Surabhi jumped on me and sat on my chest, smashing me back into the pillows, her face alive with martial excitement. Even though she was restricting my airway, I marveled at what time, circumstance and several million years of natural selection had wrought.
Surabhi Moloke was the most beautiful woman since the advent of Homo sapiens. Imagine cinnamon-brown skin, smooth and rich as warm cocoa, wide brown eyes shot through with glints of gold like flecks of borrowed sunlight. Imagine curly, reddish brown hair, and a generous mouth armed with perfect white teeth and a ready smile. Throw in sharp cheekbones, and an aristocratic nose with perfectly arched nostrils , finally, stack all that on top of a body toned by Pilates; thrice weekly Jujitsu/Karate/Muy Thai kickboxing classes; Saturday morning African dance workshops and/or Brazilian capoeira jam sessions and you’ll get the picture. Surabhi had muscle in all the right places, a dancer’s grace, and the lethality of a shaolin monk.
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