Mr Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  I directed Mina to drive back downtown. Track down Statler and then what? If it was him behind all this, what exactly did I have to hold over the man? Blackmail, probably. If he really wanted me dead just for being, there probably wasn’t much I could do.

  Then again, I could just ask him for a job. He knew I was out there. He might not know that I didn’t really have any loyalties. A person like that could be useful. I’d managed to talk myself into it, and it hadn’t taken any time. I felt a little better after that.

  I picked up the Shub-Internet phone and hit Fabian’s number. When he answered, it sounded like the phone was being held under a faucet. “It’s Adam. We need to meet.” The phone disconnected. That was normal. After a moment, the phone buzzed with a text. “@ temple lolsacrifice.”

  Mina said, “What’s it say?”

  “It says we’re going downtown.”

  Downtown Los Angeles is a collection of skyscrapers. Go watch any movie set here and you’ll see them, usually silhouetted against a brown sky. Next to the skyscrapers were the warehouses and factories, some of which were being reclaimed as expensive lofts for hipsters, and others that remained the kind of place that was really only good for shooting a snuff film. The one I was looking for was in the center of this industrialized John Carpenter hell. Go through a maze of trash-strewn alleys, past an army of dead-eyed homeless people, and follow the path of increasingly terrifying graffiti, and that was where the Temple of Shub-Internet could be found. From outside, the building looked burned out. Nearly every window was broken. The walls had gibberish scrawled on them, a weird combination of code and hermeticism. Mina pulled the car over.

  She said, “This is good. I was looking forward to being raped and killed tonight.”

  Silhouettes lingered at the mouth of the alley.

  “Stay close.”

  “Wait, you don’t have a joke here?”

  “Can’t think of one.”

  Now she was getting nervous. I wasn’t sure how to calm her down. I said, “I could try a knock-knock joke?”

  She gave me a weak smile. “Let’s go.”

  We got out of the car. The silhouettes were still milling around. They either hadn’t decided to descend on us and devour our brains, or they were regular homeless people who couldn’t tell if we were worth hitting up for change.

  The door was open. This wasn’t surprising, since there was no lock. Inside, it did not smell like urine, which was never a good thing downtown. It meant that whatever was in there was too scary to piss on, which was a very short list around this area, a list that didn’t always include the cops. There was a stairwell that went down.

  I led the way. It was three full flights down. Around the second one, I started hearing a whine, sort of like a dot matrix printer. It kept getting louder. I opened another door into a dark hall, and the sound stopped.

  Mina whispered, “Okay, I really want to go now.”

  Fluorescent lights flickered. The hall stretched off past boiler rooms. Nothing there. The door at the end of the hall spat out light of a different kind, tinged slimy green. I could hear the sounds of expensive sheets being evenly torn.

  I said, “You’re safer with me.”

  I forced myself to walk down that hall. It’s not every day one meets a god, but on the upside, I knew this one at least slightly.

  There’s a great fallacy about prayer. Prayer is an attempt to get a message to a deity, which sounds fine and dandy. But really, there’s no guarantee that the god wants a prayer, and all you’ve done is successfully attract the attention of an omnipotent being. It’s sort of like fishing for Humboldt squid using your face as bait.

  I entered the temple. The eye only goes one place upon entering, and that would be to the Avatar. Gods can be in many places at once, but Fabian had decided to build his god a body to inhabit. This was the first reason I disliked Fabian. What kind of idiot does that?

  The Avatar of Shub-Internet was a machine, but what was actually inside that machine was a mystery. It eclipsed the far wall of the temple, a mass of steel and rubber tentacles in constant writhing motion. This was the sound of ripping I had heard: metal slithering across metal. Sometimes the tentacles would part, revealing a speaker or a screen, seldom the same ones twice in a row. The tentacles extended across the room, crawling up the walls, snaking across the floors, tipped in plugs and pincers. The mass stank, like it was rotting, but there was no flesh in it.

  The mass was speaking, low and uneven. It had different voices, some male, some female. It was hard to track the conversations, but they were filled with non sequiturs:

  “First!”

  “I smell synergy.”

  “They deleted my comment.”

  “Mmm creepy man on fish undertones.”

  “Aye and you tell the kids of today and they won’t believe you.”

  “Hey! Relax the sphincter.”

  The temple was the size of a large school auditorium. Its walls were covered in monitors of all shapes and sizes. Some new, some old, some cracked. All were on, and all were displaying some of the strangest porn the ’net had to offer. It was hard to look anywhere and not see something that threatened the future of my bloodline by making sure that I would never be able to achieve an erection again. On every wall, there were ladders between the monitors and tentacles, going up to little balconies with keyboards where robed men tapped away, finding more horrible porn.

  By the time I saw Fabian, he was already lurching toward us. Fabian was the kind of guy that made you question the existence of any sort of god. That might have been why he decided to build one, just so when the subject inevitably arose, he could point to the horrible writhing mass of metal and say, “There, see?” He had a lisp and some kind of bowel problem that led to near-constant farting, and not funny loud ones, either. I kind of wanted to club him with a shovel.

  He said, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I have to ask a question.” I indicated the Avatar.

  He ignored me. “You bring an angel, but you don’t introduce me.” He turned to Mina and held out his hand. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Fabian Strudwick, high priest.”

  “Uh… hi. Maxine. Gross.” I made a mental note to tease her.

  “Perhaps there are pictures of you, my dear? Ones that we could sacrifice to His hunger?”

  “No. There aren’t.”

  “A shame. Seeing you nude would be an experience. There’s so much of you.”

  Mina looked at me. “Can I hit him?”

  I shrugged. “Shub-Internet won’t care. It barely knows he’s here.”

  She cocked a fist. He held up his hands. “I can only assume that Adam brought you as a convert to our cause, and that your connection to our Lord had to be because you were naked online somewhere.”

  She hit him. Hard. He hit the ground, eyes fluttering.

  None of the acolytes reacted. They’d probably punched Fabian out a couple times themselves.

  I walked forward. The tentacles started growing thick on the ground. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought they might be massing around me. I hoped that wasn’t the case. The central mass shifted, uncovering a monitor that was showing some black-and-white zombie movie that was quickly covered again.

  I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned: the tentacles were rising up on all sides, curving toward me like question marks. It had noticed me.

  It whispered in three different voices: “Grammar and punctuation aren’t important in thread hijacking. Not drunk enough, her clothes are still on. It’s really closer to a ratatouille.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Around me, the screens had all sprouted blue status bars counting up. They were the worst censor bars I’d ever seen. Above each bar, the word “deleting.” The sacrifice. Had to keep the internet running somehow, and after all, the damn thing did eat porn. Why else would there be so much of it?

  It hissed. I couldn’t tell if it was a happy hiss or not. The tentacles around
me didn’t move. I knelt down and looked at the tentacles on the floor. They were wet.

  Suddenly, one was on me, wrapped around my body and dragging me into the air. Mina screamed. I found myself being yanked toward the central mass and closed my eyes for the impact.

  I stopped. I opened my eyes and found myself looking into another eye. Actually, a screen with the image of an eye from a contact lens commercial. The eye changed: this one was from a Korean horror movie. Then it was Janet Leigh’s dead eye.

  It whispered, “Should have gone with the short version: the freakier you are, the more time you get.”

  The upside was, it had just eaten. The downside was that it was still a god, and gods weren’t known for impulse control.

  The screen disappeared under a mass of tentacles. Another appeared and cycled through, I thought, every single lolcat that had ever been produced. It stopped on the goddamn walrus. I was its bucket, apparently. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, but I erred on the side of bad. My arms were free. I searched through my pockets. There was the Shub-Internet phone, Adam Roth’s phone. Useless. Then I found it: Colin Reznick’s phone.

  It wasn’t squeezing, but it started showing a surveillance video of a 7-Eleven in which the clerk was furiously masturbating into the Slurpee machine.

  I scrolled through the phone’s memory. I found the picture. I reached out, and Shub-Internet grabbed my hand. I could feel the pressure on my wrist. Damnit, I really didn’t need any broken bones. I thought about asking nicely, maybe even promising it some freaky German porn in payment, but it tore the phone from my hand, and rammed a tentacle into its ass-end. I winced. Even watching an appliance get anally violated was unpleasant.

  The image of Statler popped up on the screen.

  It whispered, “Any movie with J.T. Walsh as a sleazy son of a bitch is automatically awesome.”

  The image flickered so quickly as to almost be subliminal as more pictures of Statler popped up. I saw him, much younger, on an airstrip in the jungle, talking with men in uniforms and mirror shades. Smiling in a professional portrait. In the background of a news broadcast.

  Then files went by, too fast to read. I saw names, redacted sections, words like Condor, Zapata, MK-Ultra. Statler was CIA, that much was clear, or he used to be, and linked with every single bad call they had made since the ’60s. Condor meant he was tied to the Allende hit, Zapata to the Bay of Pigs, MK-Ultra to the manufacture of Manchurian Candidates. This was a man, that if he wanted you dead, you ended up dead.

  The files slowed down. A name started appearing again and again: Irving Quackenbush, Hasim’s “retired security consultant,” the man Tariq Suliman was supposed to kill. Statler was Quackenbush’s man in LA, the guy that got things done when no one else could.

  Then, finally another name: Burt Shaw.

  The tentacle unraveled into smaller fiber-optic tendrils, dropping the phone and retracting into the wall. The large screen disappeared under a mass of other tentacles. A new one appeared as more tentacles shifted aside, showing a team picture of a New York Knicks lineup from the ’70s. It whispered, “Technically that’s known as a Havana Jackoff.”

  I backed away. The tentacles shifted, writhed. I felt a hand on me, yanking me back. I turned—Mina. She pulled me away from the seething mass and I let her lead me up the stairs and out. It wasn’t until we were in the night air that she said something: “Was that normal?”

  “Normal for me?”

  “Good point. Let’s go.”

  I looked down at my shirt. I was covered in a thin layer of grease that looked and smelled like KY. She saw what I was looking at. “It’s okay. You can pay for the carwash.”

  “Fair enough.” I got in the car.

  She said, “What now?”

  “I arrange a meeting with Mr. Blank.”

  -TWENTY-TWO-

  “I need to pick up my car.”

  Mina said, “Okay, let’s fast forward. Assume I’m going to say ‘But won’t the Satanists be waiting for you?’ And I’ll assume you’ll give me that smile you think is smooth and say back, ‘That’s what I’m counting on.’ Then you assume that I hit you or something and make you explain yourself.”

  “Got that all mapped out in your head, huh? The way I figure it, I’m about to have a meeting with a fairly dangerous guy. Sure, I get to pick the venue, but that’s not going to save our asses if things go south. What I need to do is confuse the situation, which means adding more people.”

  “More people that want you dead?”

  “In point of fact, they want to sacrifice me, so it’s possible, even probable, that they would rather not see me get the Bugsy Special.”

  She thought about that. “The mob killed him, right?”

  “Little Green Men. They’ve been running Nevada for years.”

  The street was quiet, my car waiting for me. I spotted the Satanist tail by the cherry from his smoke. I tried to make him call his buddies, but my Antichrist powers were on the fritz. Mina parked and got out of the car.

  “You can stay here. Not here, exactly. I mean, you don’t have to come to the meeting.”

  She sighed. “Look, we can have this conversation if you want. We both know how it ends.”

  “I don’t want to be a killjoy, but you are aware that I’m about to call a former CIA agent who probably quit because the agency was getting too sissy for him, right?”

  “Yeah, and you’re going to need backup you can trust.”

  “You’re backup?”

  “I beat you up one time.”

  “I wasn’t ready. And you sucker-punched me. And I hadn’t slept well the night before.”

  “Any more excuses? No? Good. Right now, Rabbit, all you have is me, and I’m not going to drive away and leave you twisting. Besides, I want to see how this ends. You’re going to sum up the whole thing, right?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “You have to. You have to tell him all the stuff he already knows and how you figured out what he’s up to. It’s how these things are done.”

  “Good to know.”

  She wasn’t saying anything else. She was just looking at me expectantly. Maybe she thought I was going to stick to my guns. She had a point. Sure, Mr. Blank—Shaw— probably wouldn’t respond to what I had, but chances are he was just as vulnerable to face kicks. I nodded to her. “Let’s go.”

  She got into the car looking smug. “Where are we going?”

  I thought about it. “Griffith Observatory.” Seemed like a good location. Suitably remote, and if things went bad, hiding in Griffith Park was slightly easier than losing a fistfight with the Hulk. Plus, if it was good enough for the Terminator, it was good enough for me, and I had wanted this thing to end somewhere high up.

  “I haven’t been there in awhile.”

  “Yeah, me neither. I wonder if they still have that laser show?”

  Griffith Observatory reminded me of an egg laid by an alien chicken. Mostly white and mostly spherical, it was nestled in the brown hills overlooking LA. Long, winding roads took us up there, climbing past dark trees until we could see the city. From this distance, there was some beauty to it, but there was always a part of me that concentrated on what I knew was down there. Lipstick on a pig wasn’t severe enough. It was more like glitter on the implants of a forty-year-old former starlet sleeping in the thin paste formed from vomiting up desperation and pills.

  I parked near the entrance to the parking lot. Farther to run, but easier to get out once I made it there. I wasn’t sure it was the right call.

  The parking lot ended at a curb, and beyond that, there was a lawn divided into two sections by some walkways. The building itself was beyond that: three domes connected by an Art Deco façade. Golden lights shined upward across it, like the observatory was telling a scary story around the campfire. Up this high, the sky was divided into two parts: the low haze, where the lights of the city reflected purple, and up higher, which was closer to the sky in the desert.


  This was a good place to finish it.

  I opened the trunk. First, the rock and chain. The Genesis Stone had taken root. A rock garden had bloomed across some comics and the nose of my stuffed gator. I hoped the thing had one more apocalypse in it, but I wasn’t that optimistic. I picked up my case of phones. Half had the batteries in them, waiting for calls. I put batteries back in the rest, just in case.

  I started toward the observatory and dialed from memory. I wasn’t even sure which phone I was using. The girl with the sexy voice answered. Suddenly, she had Mina’s face. I shook it off. The girl said, “Yes?”

  “It’s Levitt. Tell Burt Shaw that I need to meet him.”

  “There’s no such person here.”

  “Tell him I have Brian—” shit, didn’t know his last name, “and Brian is ready to talk all about Raul Diaz and the others.”

  There was a pause. “I can send the message through the usual channels, if you like. No guarantees.”

  “Tell him to meet me at Griffith Observatory in half an hour.” I hung up on her. I opened the case and went about the second part of my plan.

  When I was finished setting up, Mina and I waited around the right corner of the building. They’d have to drive, unless, of course, he took a helicopter. I wasn’t sure what I’d do in the event of a helicopter. I tried to think about examples of people who dealt well with helicopters, your McClanes, Yuens, or Chelioses. There was a common thread there, and it involved guns.

  “Mina?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be an undercover cop with a dark past, would you?”

  I don’t think my questions surprised her at all anymore, because she simply said, “Nope.”