Her: “There’s a spot.”
Me: “It’s too small.”
Her: “No it’s not. This is a small car.”
Me: “It’s not made by Hot Wheels.”
I finally did park, right under a sign that told me I needed a permit. I glanced into the window of the car in front of me, copied what I saw on a scrap of paper, and stuck it on my dashboard. It would have to do.
Getting back to the Candidate’s house was a longer walk than I would have liked.
“That’s the house,” Mina said.
Me is Murder was already gone, which was probably for the best.
I walked up the driveway to have a look around. The house seemed quiet from out here. Mina followed, walking like she had seen Elmer Fudd do when he was huntin’ wabbit. I thought about trying to give her a crash course, but I quickly dismissed that as soon as I had a vision of us stage-whispering back and forth about the finer points of being inconspicuous. At that point, I should probably just have t-shirts made up with “BREAKING AND ENTERING, Crime for Some, Hobby for Others” emblazoned on the fronts. I checked around the back of the house and found a wooden door. I tried it.
“What are you doing?” Mina stage-whispered.
I shook my head. The lockpicks were out and I already had the lock open. That’s one thing—I do actually have good hands. I catch whatever is tossed my way, and I can lift a wallet without too much trouble. Cheap locks like this one were less than a challenge.
I clicked on my penlight. The door opened into a small laundry room that led into a kitchen.
“I guess after you told me you were in the Russian mob, B and E shouldn’t surprise me too much.”
“You make me sound like a one-man psycho crime spree.”
Impressively deadpan, she said, “Right, I keep forgetting that the Russian mob is like the March of Dimes.”
“Well. Um. Just keep your voice down when you’re haranguing me.”
The guy’s fridge was depressing, and coming from me that means the contents of the icebox would make a domestic seriously consider that life itself had no meaning.
To wit: “What does this guy eat, ketchup?” Mina was hovering over my shoulder, shaking her head sadly.
It didn’t get any better in the cupboards. Lots of things in cans and boxes, nothing that looked even vaguely natural. The guy’s diet made mine look like a model of the food pyramid in comparison. I was a better eater than a mind-controlled super-killer: gold star for me.
I moved into the living room, passed my light over the lumpy gray couch, over the mountain of window-envelopes that was the coffee table, over the expensive TV and cheap lounger covered in duct-tape hieroglyphs. The floors were hardwood, crunchy with crumbs or slick with magazines. Mina picked up a piece of mail.
She said, “Shine the light over here.”
The guy’s name was Raul Diaz. It was kind of nice to put a name to the attempted murder.
I glanced around for his weird-ass flail, even opened a closet. He probably took it with him. I mean, I would have.
I moved into the bathroom, and immediately backed out again. I really hoped the guy owned about a dozen cats, because otherwise… best not to think about it.
Then, the bedroom. It was more of a den, and not in a man-cave sort of way. It was a den better suited for the hibernation of a predator. It had the perfect amount dankness in the air. The bed was really just a mattress on the floor, and it wasn’t made so much as it had some blankets piled in the center in a crusty hillock.
“So we know he’s single,” Mina said.
“I think that’s a safe assumption.”
I read the look on her face: she was picturing trying to live in this place, existing entirely on tiptoes and fingertips. The entire house was a toilet seat in a gas station bathroom.
He had shelves, or at least egg crates and cinderblocks repurposed. In a way, it looked like an apartment out of time, before cheap furniture made everyone’s place look at once expensive, sterile, and rickety. Really, his place made good sense in earthquake country. I looked the shelves over and froze.
“What?” Mina asked.
I shined the light on what I’d seen. It was a pistol, 9mm. Who owns a gun, gets activated for an assassination attempt, then thinks to himself, “Ah, the gun’s so boring. You know what, I think I’m gonna go with the rock on the chain.”
She murmured, “Oh.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”
I left the gun where it was. On the shelves, otherwise, it was what you’d expect. Catcher in the Rye, a whole lot of Vonnegut, a few peeling-laminate manuals with some vaguely occult stamps on the spines, and then the blue books. As the beam of my flashlight splashed over them, I blinked. I sent it back. There were little blue spines, upwards of thirty.
“Are those…” Mina trailed off.
I took the last one off the shelf. Blue book, the same kind I’d used in college. I remember being glad that I’d never have to clamp eyes on another one of those again. I supposed that if I was going to see them again, it might as well be here.
“Yep,” she said. “Is he a college professor or something?”
“What?”
“These guys, they have, like secret identities, right?”
“As long as ‘drifter’ is secret.”
“This is a decent neighborhood. He has some source of income, and I really doubt we’re going to find a W-2 with ‘assassin’ on the occupation line.”
“Probably true.”
“Deep Throat said to follow the money.”
I chuckled. “I thought Deep Throat said…”
“Don’t. Whatever blowjob joke you were about to make, skip it.”
“Suit yourself.” I opened up the blue book. I kind of wished I hadn’t, because the damn thing gave me the creeps. Didn’t help that I was crouched in a room that stank of sleep sweat and reading it by flashlight with a gun somewhere above the back of my neck. I checked the last page. I found:
AE
1078 + 333 = 1
Demonstrate
Arithmetic
Then, a drawing of two stick figures on a horse.
Charles. Charles. Charles.
Charles the
Master’s voice.
Time to go time to go time to go time to go time to go
Locus est terribles
I skipped back. I found:
AL AMOUT
Shub shub shub shub shub
Then, three triangles.
Those
Seers.
About how much? It will cost.
Mount
De Molay.
Then, crosses. The crosses connected, forming a cross-hatching that looked like it could comfortably crucify a centipede.
All of the writing was in a childlike cursive.
Mina, reading over my shoulder, said, “What the hell?”
I cracked up.
“What?”
I said, “That tone… it’s the one you use on the commercial. ‘It’s so easy!’” She smacked my arm. “Ow!”
“What do you… have you ever seen anything like this?”
I collected my brain. “Automatic writing. Repeated hypnosis has a way of short-circuiting the way the mind should work. It shuts down the subconscious, so the hypnotized person can’t sort through what they experience the way a normal person does, in dreams. They need an outlet. A lot of times, one of these lone nuts will compulsively write or paint. What they produce actually makes sense, but only in a sort of dream-logic way.” I flipped through the journal. There were lots of symbols implicating half a dozen societies, but one kept rearing its holier-than-thou head. I checked a few other blue books just to be sure.
I stood up, flashing the light around. “Come on.”
“You found something?”
“I think so. I want to check his mail.”
She followed me back into the living room. I passed the sofa and looked down on the coffee table. Most of it was credit card applications. I
remember hearing that there were two credit cards per person in the United States. It’s a shame that most people didn’t know why that was, but they were probably happier not knowing just how real certain gods were. Other than that, there were a few bills. Right near the top, an opened letter. He had been reading it, and not too long ago. It could have been what activated him. I scanned it. Probably not.
One look told me it wasn’t his handwriting—it looked nothing like the blue book scrawls. It was block-printed with a precision to the letters that bordered on artificial. It was on a grid; the writer obviously valued the margin and wanted to keep as inviolate as a nun’s panties.
“What is it?” she said.
“Love letter, I think. Listen to this: ‘Dearest One. Your beauty keeps me both near and far. Near because I can’t bear to be without it. Far because I fear if I approach, it will burn me up. I love you madly. Anon.’”
“That’s kind of sweet.”
“I saw the guy. He’s not really much to look at.”
Mina retorted, “There’s no accounting for taste. I mean, back in school, my roommate…” and she trailed off.
Because that’s when the sofa stood up and opened two giant red eyes.
I stumbled backward. Mina screamed. I would have liked to join her, but I couldn’t find my tongue. All I could see were those two red eyes, big as the sun and the moon in the sky at once. They were getting closer.
I felt something grab me. I didn’t fight it. Couldn’t.
I was being dragged away. The thing in the living room lumbered toward me, but I was moving too fast for it to catch. Then, suddenly I was in the fresh air. The scent of jasmine brought me right back.
“Jonah! Jonah!”
Mina slapped me hard across the face. Her pinkie hit the footprint on my face.
“Son of a…!”
“Run!” She pulled me down the driveway. Some morbid impulse made me look back. I could see that dim shape in there, standing back from the window, watching us go. Mina never looked. She was smarter.
Then again, I was the one in sensible shoes.
By now, we were halfway down the block. Whatever it was wasn’t following. Mina was trying to catch her breath. “What… what the hell was that thing?”
“I... I don’t know.”
“What? I thought you knew everything!”
“It was some kind of cryptid.” I could think a little, now that I was no longer looking into those twin hellpits that thing called eyes. Actually, for all I knew, it called them soul cages, but thinking like that wasn’t going to calm me down.
“That was a monster!”
“Monster and cryptid mean the same thing. One’s more... polite, I guess.” I was trying to find some solid ground, thought maybe there was some in a pedantic lecture.
“I don’t care what they’re called! That was a thing! Unnatural!”
“Supernatural.”
“That’s not helping!”
I had started to calm down. Yes, what had happened was weird. Yes, what had happened was scary. But it was something I knew about, at least vaguely. I mean, on one level, it was like looking at the teeth marks in your shredded leg and being like, “Oh, it was a tiger shark that got me, not a great white!” But I had seen cryptids before—just never in the living room of a guy who had tried to kill me.
Mina craned her neck back toward Diaz’s house, probably having the same sensation I did, that the big bastard would be shambling for us like Jason Voorhees. “I feel like it should be there,” she said.
“It’s not, right? It’s not. We’re okay.”
“We’re okay?”
“Well, you know, relatively.”
I shuddered. Focus. A Candidate had a large and as yet unidentified cryptid in his living room. That added a wrinkle to the situation. We made our way back to the car, Mina looking over shoulder every couple of steps, me stubbornly refusing to, but grateful she was doing it. As we got in, one of my phones started ringing. One look at which one it was made me want to laugh. That the ringtone was “O Fortuna” was a dead giveaway.
“Hello,” I said.
“Squire Max,” said the voice on the other end in a shaky Brit accent. It belonged to a guy named Richard Colby. “I need you to come here, now.”
“Sire, I’m on sort of a…” I glanced at Mina. “A date.”
“Bring her, but tell her nothing.”
I said, “Sure.” Didn’t feel the need to tell him I was coming anyway. He hung up without saying goodbye.
“Where are we going now?” she said.
“Medieval Castle.”
There was a long pause as she processed it. Then, finally: “That tourist trap?”
-EIGHT-
There’s a scene in Alien that always bothered me. It’s not the one where the chest-burster jumps out of John Hurt, either. It’s the part toward the end, right after they behead Ash. Parker and Lambert go off to stock up while Ripley sets the self-destruct and looks for her cat. Eventually, she gets in the escape pod, gets undressed, and finally defeats the alien.
What bugs me about this scene is that Ripley seems like she’s trying to get herself killed. First she goes off alone, then she looks for her cat, then she strips down to her underwear. It’s ridiculous. She did everything but have a meth-fueled threesome with Johnny Depp and Kevin Bacon. She only acted this way because she had no idea what kind of movie she was in. Had she known it was a horror movie, she probably would have put on a parka, joined a convent, and spent more of that movie gazing soulfully into the middle distance.
It’s just that movies before 1996 seem to exist in this parallel world in which movies don’t actually exist, or if they do, it’s only the cheap public domain ones. Then again, most good movies were made before 1996, so maybe there’s something to that.
I glanced at Mina out of the corner of my eye. I’d seen Maltese Falcon. I knew what happened to world-weary schlubs who ran into drop-dead redheads. There was only one way our relationship could end: a betrayal in the third act. We’d be on a train, or someplace high up. Somewhere suitably dramatic, where I could have a showdown with whoever had set me up. It would all be going fine—then, bam. Mina springs her trap. One way or another, her knife was going between my shoulder blades.
It would probably make more sense to cut her loose sooner rather than later. Stab her in the back before she could do the same to me.
The problem was, every time I thought about betraying her, I got sick to my stomach.
Maybe Ripley knew what kind of movie she was in, but she just had to push on ahead, find her cat, and get naked because that’s just who she was. I was born a cat-loving nudist, and I supposed I might as well die that way.
“What?” Mina said.
“What?” I said.
“You keep looking at me out of the corner of your eye. It’s making me nervous.”
“Sorry.”
Our attempted assassinations were beginning to look like the edge of something big. Still, the problem at the center of it all was: who wanted both Mina and me dead? What did we both know that had to die with us?
I asked, “How much do you deal with the Anas?”
“Not much. Why?”
“Has the peace been holding?”
“As far as I know, yes. None of us have died. That…that sort of worries me, actually. I mean, I’m just coming out as a symbol, you know? So if the peace was going to collapse, I’d probably be the one on the block.”
“You knew that going in?”
“Sure.”
“And yet you did it anyway?”
“Someone has to.”
I let that one go. Instead, “So, listen, they might call me ‘Max,’ or ‘Gross’ down there.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because I told them my name was Max Gross.”
“Oh. Hell of a name.”
“I read it on the side of a cargo container.”
“Spend a lot of time down at the harbor?”
/> “More than I’d like.”
We drove a little while in silence.
Then: “Your real name isn’t Jonah, is it?”
“Based on the way you said that, it sounds like you know the answer to that one.”
“Yeah,” she said. I kept waiting for her to ask me my real name. I had half a dozen responses prepared for that one, and they all sounded really cool in my head. I sounded like a hard-boiled spy. I would have liked to punctuate them with a tug on some bourbon, but I was driving, and we were hitting Orange County traffic.
She didn’t ask. Mina seemed to have a sixth sense about those things.
Instead, she said, “What should I call you?”
“Well, while we’re down at Medieval Castle, you call me Max. When we’re with your superiors at V.E.N.U.S., I’d appreciate you calling me Jonah.”
“You think I’m not going to tell them about this?”
“Why would you?”
“Because you’re a mercenary! You’re working for the enemy.”
“To be fair, the Anas could say the same thing.”
“I’m not interested in being fair. There’s a war going on, and, frankly, you have a penis.”
“Um… yeah, I do. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Because I’m fighting for the body image of women everywhere. You’re a man. You don’t get a vote.”
“Do the bearded castrati get a vote? Because last I checked, they were members in good standing.”
She glared at the road. “Yeah, I don’t like them either,” she muttered.
“If my being a mercenary really bugs you, you might want to take a look around. We’re all mercenaries when you get right down to it. Oh, I know, you have a higher calling to help the needy. I’m not sure when women with giant racks became a downtrodden minority, but I’ll take your word on that. I’m willing to lay good odds that you don’t work for free. No, you get paid for your shows, for your commercials. Every time you cram your ass into jeans two sizes too small, you’re cashing a check. I just took that successful business model and applied it on a wide-ranging scale. And sure, maybe I’m not a true believer in much of anything, but let’s get something crystal clear. The world could use a few more people who don’t believe in anything, because of one simple fact: it’s not people like me that become terrorists or mass murderers.”
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