Mercury Rests

by Robert Kroese

  Eventually he came upon a bus stop and was able to take a bus most of the way to his hotel. He took a cab the last few blocks and then made his way to his room on the sixth floor of the Wilshire. He was so tired and defeated that he nearly flopped onto the bed without doing his customary miraculous sterilization of the bedspread. Being a fastidious cherub with a preternatural sense of smell, Eddie was well aware that the bedspread was typically the filthiest part of a hotel room. Eddie had heard of people who slept on top of hotel beds rather than exposing themselves to the sheets, but to Eddie this was madness. Even at a classy joint like the Wilshire, the sheets were the only thing in the room that could be relied upon to be reasonably clean. The bedspread probably had more DNA samples in it than the Mayo Clinic.

  Eddie had, of course, disinfected his bedspread before, but he didn’t trust the hotel’s cleaning personnel not to replace his sterile cover with one that was teeming with the germs of prostitutes and television producers. Being an angel, Eddie wasn’t worried about getting sick, but the idea of bacteria crawling about the fibers of his blankets violated his angelic sense of propriety. In short, it creeped him out. So he raised his hands, preparing to transform a minute amount of interplanar energy into ultraviolet light, which would kill any microscopic organisms clinging to the fabric.

  And that’s when he saw it: a business card lying on the corner of the bed.

  He picked it up using only his fingernails, careful not to touch the unclean bedspread. The card read:

  Cody Lang,

  Actress and Private Investigator

  Specializing in:

  Infidelity

  Bail Bonds

  Polygraphs

  Body Double

  Thigh Model

  Crying on Command

  He turned the card over. On it was written, in aggressively angular and yet unmistakably feminine handwriting:

  Eddie: I’ve figured out EVERYTHING. Meet me at Dad’s at noon.

  Fantastic, thought Eddie. Now I have to deal with that dingbat detective Cody Lang on top of everything else. Cody was easy on the eyes, he’d give her that much, but her off-the-wall theories put her just this side of the tinfoil-hat crowd. He wondered what she thought she had figured out now. Something about General Motors adding hallucinogens to the Los Angeles water supply, maybe, or supernatural artifacts hidden by ancient astronauts in the La Brea tar pits. Just trying to have a conversation with Cody was exhausting. In her mind, every aspect of reality was somehow connected in a complex web of causality that centered on Los Angeles.

  On the other hand, Cody did have a knack for piecing together disparate and seemingly incongruous bits of information into a compelling narrative. It was Cody, after all, who had figured out that the supposed author of the Charlie Nyx books, Katie Midford, was actually the demoness Tiamat. She had also deduced that Eddie was himself a fallen angel.

  Meet me at Dad’s at noon.

  It was almost eleven o’clock now. Without a car, it would be difficult to...wait, what the hell did she mean by “meet me at Dad’s”? Her father was the man who claimed to be Cain. Eddie had no idea where he lived. In fact, if his story was to be believed, he didn’t live anywhere: Cain was the perpetual itinerant, a man with no home. Even his own grave couldn’t hold him.

  A light went on in Eddie’s mind. So that was it: “Dad’s” was the gravesite behind the strip mall in Yerba Buena. That was where Eddie had met Jacob had Slater, the FBI guy. He wondered what Jacob was up to. Jacob had seemed like an awfully nice chap, from the little opportunity that Eddie had to chat with him before Jacob was abducted by demons. He hoped the demons hadn’t hurt him too badly.

  So. Cody wanted him to meet her at noon at the Yerba Buena mall. He sighed, concluding that he probably owed her that much. He had the front desk call him a cab and went downstairs, leaving the unclean bedspread untouched.

  Eddie still wasn’t quite clear on why there was a gravesite hidden behind a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb. That is, he understood that the cemetery had been moved except for this one plot, and that the mall had since been built around it. That much he got. What he didn’t get was why Colin Lang had a gravesite in the first place. Eddie wasn’t sure he bought the story about Lang actually being the immortal Cain, cursed to wander the Earth for eternity, but it was fairly clear that he was not dead. Eddie had spoken to the man himself. So why did he have a gravesite? And why had the owner of the land gone to such lengths to make sure that this one plot of land was undisturbed?

  The only answer was that the “gravesite” was actually a secret entrance to the tunnels that ran beneath Los Angeles. That explained how Jacob had emerged from the gravesite during Eddie’s first visit here: he must have been doing something in the tunnels, probably related to an FBI investigation of some kind. Jacob himself had seemed a little confused about what the tunnels were for exactly. Eddie knew that the demoness Tiamat had once used them as an underground hideout, but he was never completely clear on who had built them, or why. He didn’t think even a formidable demoness like Tiamat had the resources to pull off something like that. For all her grand schemes, Tiamat was a bit of a parasite, leeching off the efforts of the more industrious. Her stint as the figurehead “author” of the Charlie Nyx books was only the latest example. No, Tiamat couldn’t have built the tunnels. But then who did?

  Cody’s note said that she had figured out “everything.” He wondered what that meant. What the tunnels were for? Who her father really was? What Tiamat was up to? Or had Cody fallen victim to her own obsession with the “secret history of Los Angeles”?

  As the cab sped away, he walked to the metal door that led to the hidden courtyard. The door was locked and covered with “tamper-proof” police tape. A notice indicated that the premises had been designated as a crime scene. Eddie wondered what sort of crime they had decided had happened here. At the very least, constructing a vast complex of tunnels under a strip mall was probably a fairly serious zoning violation.

  Upon close examination, Eddie saw that the tamper-proof tape had in fact been tampered with. A very fine blade, a razor blade perhaps, had sliced through the tape to allow the door to be opened. The door remained locked, but this presented no difficulty for Eddie. There was a click! as the door miraculously unlocked itself and swung open. Eddie stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  He stood in a small grassy courtyard, an eerie oasis of green between the Burger Giant and the Bed Bath & Beyond. A metal box the size of a small room—an elevator, Eddie now realized—lay on its side near the remains of the gazebo that had once stood over the supposed grave. Yellow CAUTION tape hung from metal stakes ringing the scene. Where the floor of the gazebo had been, there was now a gaping hole in the ground, ringed by the concrete base of the gazebo. Engraved on the front of the base were the words:

  COLIN LANG

  LAID TO REST APRIL 29, 1993

  PANTON IN SUUS VICIS

  Stepping forward, Eddie expected to see the sheer blackness of the shaft descending hundreds of feet to the tunnels below, but he was surprised to see a layer of granite only about twenty feet down. Was he wrong about the shaft connecting to the tunnels? Or had the shaft been rigged to collapse and fill with gravel, concealing its true depth? He decided it was the latter. Whoever had built the tunnels had built them so that they could be destroyed, leaving almost no trace.

  As Eddie’s eyes adjusted to the dim of the pit, he realized that there was something moving in the dark. An animal of some sort, with a shiny golden pelt. A cat, maybe?

  Suddenly the animal seemed to disappear. “Eddie!” called a voice from inside the pit. “You wanna give me a hand?”

  “Gaaahhh!” yelled Eddie, nearly slipping and falling into the pit in a panic.

  “You OK up there?” asked the voice again. It was Cody, he now realized. He had been looking at the top of her head. Now she was peering at him with a confused look on her face. “Give me a hand?” she asked again.

  “Oh!” sai
d Eddie. “Sure.” He held out his hand to harness a stream of interplanar energy, causing it to reverse gravity around Cody. She floated upward until her feet were just above the lip of the pit. He gave her a little nudge and she alighted gently on the ground. For a moment Eddie stood and stared at her. The grace with which she moved, the way her blonde locks floated just above her shoulders, she looked, Eddie thought, like...well, like an angel.

  I’ve been on this plane too long, thought Eddie. I’m thinking in human terms. Specifically, male human terms. Cody was wearing a sleeveless brown T-shirt and a denim skirt with knee-high brown suede boots. Two words kept popping into Eddie’s consciousness: thigh model.

  “Eddie? Do you mind?”

  “Sorry!” Eddie exclaimed, suddenly embarrassed. Not only had he been staring; he had actually forgotten to fully restore Cody’s gravity. She had been standing with only her toes touching the ground, her hair and...other parts floating in near-zero gravity. It was a good look for her.

  He reluctantly allowed her to regain her full weight, and she settled back into a more human form. Eddie shook his head. He had heard of this happening: angels who spent too much time on the Mundane Plane gradually came to think and act like human beings. It only made sense. There was essentially no difference between human and angel biology; the advantage that angels possessed was their connection with the source of the mystical energy that flowed in invisible channels throughout every plane, known as the Eye of Providence. The Eye was a vast pyramidal structure located smack in the center of Heaven. It was where the angels came from originally and it was what sustained them over the millennia. Without the Eye, angels would gradually lose their supernatural abilities and become mortal. The Eye could sustain an angel even on a faraway plane for long periods of time, but an angel who hadn’t been back to Heaven for several centuries would begin to lose his angel-ness. Eddie hadn’t seen Heaven for five hundred years.

  “Thanks for the help,” Cody said. “You know, you could have just pulled the rope up.”

  Eddie noticed that there was a knotted rope that had been tied to a piece of rebar jutting out of the gazebo and let down into the pit.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Quite all right,” said Cody. “A girl could get used to levitating.”

  Eddie nodded. “What were you doing down there?”

  “Investigating,” said Cody. “Unfortunately there isn’t much to see down there. Seems like the tunnels were rigged to collapse and fill with gravel, concealing their true depth. The OPB left nothing to chance. They built the tunnels so that they could be destroyed, leaving almost no trace of the CCD.”

  Eddie nodded thoughtfully. “The OPB would want to keep the CCD on the DL.”

  “Oh, sorry!” Cody exclaimed. “I’ve got so much to tell you! Eddie, I’ve figured it out. All of it!”

  “Yeah, that’s what your note said,” Eddie replied dubiously.

  “It turns out I’ve been thinking far too small,” Cody said excitedly. “Los Angeles really is the center of a grand conspiracy, but it’s so much bigger than I thought. I was focusing on General Motors and Streetcars when I should have been focusing on the Apocalypse! I mean, it’s all related, but my sense of scope was off. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

  “Uh-hmm,” said Eddie.

  “First of all, my dad? He really is Cain. Like, from the Bible. Once I admitted that to myself, the rest all fell into place. There’s this ancient Sumerian manuscript that he’s been working on translating. Well, not translating so much as retelling. The original has only survived in fragments, and they’re out of order, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory. Anyway, he turned them into the Charlie Nyx books. That’s right, Eddie! Scriptor Carolingus, the true author of the Charlie Nyx books is my father, who is Cain, not to mention Shakespeare and God knows who else. But that’s not even the most amazing part!”

  “No?” Eddie asked. He didn’t want to rain on Cody’s parade, but he had heard most of this before. Cody’s father, the man claiming to be Cain, had told her all about how he had come to write the Charlie Nyx books. It was all part of Lucifer’s scheme to destroy the world. With every Charlie Nyx book that was published, the world crept closer to the Apocalypse. Supposedly the manuscript that Wanda Kwan had rejected was the seventh and final book, the one that would herald the End of Days. But obviously that had not panned out.

  “It comes down to you, Eddie!” Cody exclaimed. “You’re the author of the seventh book!”

  Eddie smiled grimly. “I know,” he said. “That is, your father, Cain, he told me. But Cody, it’s not true. I’ve already written the book. And the publisher has rejected it. In any case, none of this makes any sense. My book isn’t a Charlie Nyx book. It doesn’t fit in with the rest of the series. Cain is just going to have to find someone else to write the final Charlie Nyx book. As much as he wants me to fill that role for him, I’m simply not able.”

  Cody shook her head. “No, don’t you see? There can’t be a final Charlie Nyx book. At least not in the sense that people are expecting. The tunnels under Anaheim have been destroyed. And the authorities aren’t going to admit it, but they know that the tunnels were real. There’s no way they can keep this secret much longer. They may never be able to fully excavate the shafts under Anaheim Stadium, but they know there is something down there. Something huge. And it’s too big to keep covered up, Eddie. Rumors are already circulating about the ACHOO people finding something under the site.”

  “ACHOO people?” asked Eddie, confused. “Can you help me out here?”

  “Anaheim Command Headquarters, Onsite Operations. ACHOO.”

  “Bless you,” replied Eddie.

  Cody continued, undeterred by the interruption. “Everybody is conjecturing about what ACHOO found down there. I mean, there are anti–Charlie Nyx fanatics protesting the site because they think that Charlie Nyx, this fictional warlock, somehow created a network of tunnels underneath Anaheim!”

  “OK...” said Eddie, “but I still don’t see what this has to do with my book.”

  “Think, Eddie!” snapped Cody. “A book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every story has an audience. And who is the audience for the Charlie Nyx books? What would be a satisfactory conclusion, from their point of view?”

  “Um,” replied Eddie. Where was Cody going with this?

  “Man, you are dense,” said Cody. “Don’t you see? Everybody who was once transfixed by the plight of Charlie Nyx, teen warlock, is now obsessed with what’s really under Anaheim Stadium and what happened at the Anaheim Event. If you wrote a Charlie Nyx book that just continued where the sixth book left off, without addressing the elephant in the tent, nobody would want to read it. The final book, the book that explains everything, is your book.”

  Eddie frowned. That did make a twisted sort of sense. Except for one thing.

  “But my book doesn’t explain anything,” said Eddie. “I mean, it mentions the tunnels, but any Charlie Nyx reader expecting a satisfying conclusion is going to be disappointed.”

  “That’s because it’s not done yet.”

  “Not done? It’s three hundred pages long already! Although I suppose I could cut out a few dozen pages of dialogue if it came down to it.”

  “What does that matter? The story ends when it ends.”

  “But it could go on forever! How do I know when I’m done?”

  Cody studied Eddie somberly for a moment. “I know how it ends, Eddie. That’s why I wanted to meet with you. I know my father has probably told you much of this already, but there’s something he hasn’t told you. Something very important. Does the word Wormwood mean anything to you?”

  “Wormwood? You mean like in Revelation? The star that falls from the sky?”

  Cody nodded. “It also appears in the Sumerian manuscript that my father was working on. Except, in the manuscript, it’s not a star but a sort of evil talisman. It brings about the end of the world. It’s the crux of everything. It’s where all the
different layers of reality intersect—the book of Revelation, the Charlie Nyx story, and our story. When I figured out what Wormwood was, that’s when everything fell into place. When I figured out how the story ends.”

  “OK,” Eddie said. “So what is Wormwood?”

  “Wormwood is...” Cody started, but then stopped and made a sort of snorting sound, as if Eddie had done something to offend her. She looked at him with shock and horror in her eyes. Then she fell backward onto the grass. A dark stain spread across the center of her shirt.

  “Cody!” Eddie cried, crouching down beside her. Cody had been shot. Judging from the fountain of blood pouring from her chest, she had been hit directly in her heart. This was beyond Eddie’s ability to fix.

  “Oh God,” said Eddie. “Cody, you’ve been shot!” He glanced around, but the shooter was not visible. Of course, from his standpoint on the ground next to Cody, roofs of the nearby buildings were concealed by the brick wall of the courtyard.

  The color had been flushed from Cody’s face, and her body was contorted with pain. Still, she leaned toward Eddie as if trying to tell him something. “Eddie...” she gasped. “Wormwood...” Her eyes rolled back and her head fell to the grass. Her lips were still moving. Eddie put his ear to her mouth and she whispered something that sounded like “Pull the switch.” Then her body went limp. Just like that, Cody Lang was dead.

  SIX

  Circa 1800 BC