Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods

by Michael R. Underwood

  With my mind racing through possibilities and implications, tracing out a decision tree filled with corrupted branches of terrifying results, I continued to work with Tessane, though poorly, my lack of focus leading me to read the parasympathetic nervous system as the sympathetic nervous system.

  A few minutes later, I reclaimed my focus. I could either help Tessane or I could spin my wheels in worry to no effect. I chose to make a difference.

  “So, you must have had one hell of a biology teacher in high school?” Tessane asked.

  “I was homeschooled. My parents were very thorough,” I said, my mind flashing back to memories of lashings when I took a misstep in logic, beatings each time I misspoke the Enochian incantation for a weekly sacrifice. In the Greene household, failure led to pain, pain led to learning, and learning kept the switch at bay.

  In another joke the universe had at my expense, Carter was not done at eleven, or eleven thirty. With luck, I might have actually been able to make it to the park and back by the time the sock vanished from the door, which left me somewhat glad to have been able to help Tessane but entirely unsettled by the need to resolve this uncertainty.

  I tried to get my own work done, but it was useless. I even resorted to reading the mass-culture magazines left in the common room, but even the vapidity of celebrity life could not distract me. I doubt anything less than a freshly-unearthed ritual text informing me how to cut off the family’s access to the power of the Deeps could have held my attention.

  But when I finally got to my bed, sleep came quickly, as if the darkness were eager to take me once more.

  I knew they would come, but I still was not prepared for the nightmares. Perhaps I will never be.

  It was the night of the senior prom.

  The edges of the world were vague, as if sketched in with a shaky hand. It started, as always, at my friend Thomas’s house, when I arrived in the lamentable feces-brown family truck.

  Thomas Sandusky was my best and only friend back home. On my sixteenth birthday, I was entrusted with the task of securing supplies we could not provide for ourselves. Thomas was the general store owner’s son in the closest town to the family compound. Over the first few months, we progressed from the apathetic invisibility of strangers to the neutral nods of greeting to deeper conversation.

  A year later, we’d become fast friends, the only bit of the real world I’d been allowed. And so, when Thomas asked me to come out to his senior prom so we could hang out as friends, I leapt at the opportunity. That my parents excitedly agreed to an event that would expose me to more of the corrupting influences of the world should have been my first warning sign.

  My tuxedo was rented, and it fit as comfortably as a hair shirt used for torture. The cost of the night nearly wiped out my savings, but Thomas had impressed upon me the need for formality if we were to have a chance of attracting the attention of any of the girls. Thomas opened the door, wearing his own tuxedo, though his looked like it was made for him. Where I was sallow and gaunt, Thomas was built broad, and tanned from working summers on his uncle’s farm.

  “Looking good, man!” he said, thudding down the front steps of the farmhouse and grabbing one hand, wrapping me up in a burly hug. His smile lit up any room he was in, would have lit up an entire town. I cannot imagine how much light he could have brought into the world, if not for me.

  In an instant, a mask of pain was superimposed over his smile, banishing the happy sight as the memories overlapped. I heard him scream, that scream that I will never be able to put out of my mind, no matter how long I live, nor how many other memories I pile into my mind. His pain has been seared into my mind’s eye, a brand of shame to carry always.

  Then I was out front of his house again, listening as he rattled off descriptions of the various gorgeous and single women that would be there at the prom.

  Then we were at dinner, and Thomas told me about the college he was going to in the fall, the college he will never see again, because of me.

  Thomas talked circles around me; he was the sort who could not abide a silence longer than a split second, he’d fill the air with speculations and odd observations and companionable chatter. We went together well, as I was just happy to listen, to take from him morsels of knowledge about the outer world. My parents had raised me to scorn the outer world, to see its inhabitants as lesser beings, ignorant lambs who would come dumbly to the slaughter when the appointed time arrived.

  I’d learned by then what topics outsiders saw differently, which left me tremendously little to speak of that would be of interest, given that outsiders saw little artistry in divinatory vivisection of vermin and did not believe the lore of the gods, their succession, and the Gatekeepers. Until Thomas brought up biology again, leaving me an in to dive into an obscure bit of scientific history.

  Thomas was supposed to become a scientist, discover unknown truths more tightly protected than the Gatekeepers guarding the primordial cage wrought to trap the Younger Gods.

  Every moment built the dread, every word on the drive to his school brought us closer to the end, and there was nothing I could do to change it. I was locked into the memories, a helpless voyeur in my own history, strapped to the chair in room 101, my mental eyes forced open.

  The prom unfolded in snapshots, a montage of moments, from spilling punch on my tux when jostled by a wildly gesticulating classmate of Thomas to the flush of attraction as she dabbed the stain, her hand warm, soft. The supreme self-consciousness of trying to dance with Ilise, the gesticulator, and then fleeing off to the corner, with Thomas trying to drag me back out for another round of socialization.

  But the crowds, they were too much. Too many people, too chaotic, too loud.

  We met halfway with me squatting at a table while Thomas cheerily made his best attempts to impress the girls he’d spoken about all year, trying to create a big moment.

  “Like the movies,” he said. Everything was movies and TV and games for Thomas, like he was speaking a whole different language. He’d learned to stop expecting me to know any of them, but continued to speak of them.

  But life was not a film, and despite his best efforts, no doubt thanks to my discomforting presence, by the end of the night, when the slow dances and barely-constrained groping were finished, coupes and cliques moving off to their after-parties, Thomas and I were left to return to my house, where Father had asked to meet this friend of mine who I spoke so cheerily about.

  Thomas was welcomed by my whole family, everyone dressed in their Saturday best. After a short inquisition about his family background, blood type, and astrological disposition, I managed to escape to my room so we could wind down the night before he headed home.

  We reviewed the night, laughed at our failures, and once more I listened to Thomas and his speculations, his intricate analyses of the tiniest of gestures, the turns of phrase this or that girl had used and what that meant for his chances, who was heading to which college, and so on. He wrapped up the whole night into a story, summarizing the culmination of his life, ready to face the ritual with pride, as my parents said he would. My parents waited outside, preparing for the ritual. I was a fool, but how was I to know?

  Thomas slipped into a light doze in my brother Saul’s bed, and my father crept into the room, his silence a prayer to the Onyx Lord of the Seventh Gate, chief among our Gatekeeper patrons.

  Father bore the ritual dagger, the blade that had been in our family for millennia. It was the symbol of our role in the coming of the Last Age, the centerpiece of every holiday, every blessing, and the crux of our connection to the Gatekeepers.

  Thomas’s eyes were closed, his brow shining after an exerting night of nerves and excitement. My heart beamed with pride, that my friend had so boldly volunteered to be a page to the Onyx Lord, to join the service of our patron.

  But he hadn’t. I just didn’t know. I’d been lied to again, like I’d been
lied to my whole life.

  My father raised the dagger, and Thomas opened his eyes, with the satisfied sigh of a evening well spent. Then he saw the knife, and everything changed.

  He screamed, eyes going wide—bright eyes that were meant for laughter, not terror. Why should he be afraid? There was no reason.

  This was supposed be a happy time. The other sacrifices had come willingly, joyfully, their eyes soft, bodies wavering in turn with the rhythm of creation.

  Thomas reached up and swatted my father’s hand away, screaming, “What the hell!” again and again.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. He was a volunteer, and his heart had to be harvested so he could be delivered to our patron and master. My father had explained everything to me when Thomas asked about the prom.

  “Why the hell does your dad have a knife?!” he said, clawing free of the bed, seeking refuge from my father, who moved without alarm, a serene smile on his face.

  “Do not worry, my child. You’re going to a better place,” Father said.

  Thomas grabbed my arm, moving behind me as I sat up in bed. “What the hell, Jake!”

  “Don’t you know?”

  I looked at my father, scales of self-delusion falling from my eyes, though I didn’t know that at the time. For me, it felt as if the whole world was falling apart.

  “You said he knew!” I shouted, matching Thomas’s panicked tone. “You said that he was volunteering!”

  My father never lied to me. Our sacrifices chose their fate, every one of them. That’s how it worked. They chose it.

  I sat up to interpose myself, looking to my father. He took a long breath, just as he did anytime he had to explain something to me more than he cared to (which was anytime after the first).

  “He has volunteered for the joining. You said as much.”

  Thomas grabbed a lantern and wielded it like a club, trying to keep my father at bay. “The hell I did. I’m getting out of here!”

  It was all wrong.

  I raised my hand toward the knife, trying to stay my father’s hand. “He has to be willing. We need to let him go; it won’t work if he’s not willing!”

  My father looked at me, his eyes empty. “Silence,” he said in Enochian, the First Tongue. He turned his hand and made the signs of communion, tapping into the Deeps. The dagger leveled at my throat, and an unseen force slammed me against my dresser and held me fast. I strained against the binding, but it was useless.

  I tried to close my eyes, to shut it all out, to disbelieve how much my world had disintegrated. But the working held my eyes open. He made me watch.

  My father flicked his hand again and Thomas was caught in the binding. I smelled sulfur as the binding pulled him to the floor and forced him prone.

  The rest of the family came in to witness the ceremony as he screamed. Esther and Joseph; my mother, Joanna; even little Naamah and Saul. They watched with ice-cold faces. Why didn’t they see that this was wrong? That Mother and Father had lied to us all along?

  When we were all in place, he raised the knife and called out to the Onyx Lord.

  “Take this gift, Keeper of the Seventh Gate. Grant us your favor as we watch and await the birth of the Younger Gods.”

  He completed the ritual as I tore at the binding with my will, grasping at the knotting of power that held me back. But Father was the scion of the Greenes, chosen vessel of communion, and I had no more chance of breaking his binding than a cub has of felling a lion.

  When it was over, Father released me, and Mother helped me up and wrapped her arms around me as I cried.

  It was then that I knew I had to leave. They were my family, but I didn’t belong there anymore. These were the people who lied to me, tricked me into bringing Thomas, my only friend, here, who killed him while I watched. He was not a volunteer; he was a victim. And I was their patsy.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  I shot awake, swallowing the scream as best I could.

  Carter woke, his voice groggy. “What the fuck, man? It’s like two thirty.”

  Choking out an apology, I turned to face the wall and shuddered, the memory as fresh as a newly-opened vein.

  Every. Single. Night.

  I couldn’t escape the memory, and now it seemed I couldn’t escape my family.

  Which meant that the only thing left for me was to stop them. But I had nothing with me—no unguents, no ritual tools, no grimoire.

  There were, of course, the Deeps. But those were tools of my family, and I would have nothing to do with them. And as soon as I touched the Deeps, Esther and the others would be able to find me.

  Which meant that at best, I had Carter’s baseball bat and a well-thumbed copy of The Golden Bough. I would have no chance against Esther, even if she was traveling light.

  First, I needed to be sure it was her. And if it was, I needed tools.

  But flunking out of college would do me no good, so before any of that, I had to sleep, and make my way through Abnormal Psychology tomorrow morning.

  It may have been an advanced course, and the academic approach was sometimes odd, but I already knew everything about abnormal psych I’d ever need. Another benefit of growing up as a Greene.

  I peeled myself from a sweat-soaked bed in the morning and shambled through the motions of the morning routine.

  The biting morning wind helped to shake off the nightmare, for all that it also reminded me of home, of endless days locked inside by yards-tall snowdrifts.

  I stifled yawns through class, staying awake thanks to the assistance of food-hall coffee. (Which was all I could afford. The gourmet blends cost as much as my food budget for a day.)

  When Professor Thomlinson was done rambling through the medical establishment’s thoughts on the varieties of Antisocial Personality Disorder, I girded myself against the crowds once more, taking a bus to a train to a train to the park.

  This time, I took the wrong train only once, which was better than normal. I had nearly ventured into Brooklyn on the A train before I realized my folly and changed directions.

  It was nearly noon when I reached Central Park. The sun was high, but it offered precious little relief from the cold. Still, the New York winds were not those of the Dakotas, so I continued as fast as I could, focusing on my objective instead of the press of bodies, the cacophony of thousands of voices, vehicles, and lives of unrelated and disinterested people playing out far too close to one another.

  Luckily, people’s natural predilection for curiosity gave me all the guidance I needed in tracking down the crime scene. The police had cordoned off a large circle around the site, with uniformed officers keeping spectators out of the scene itself.

  But I didn’t need to get close enough to see it, just close enough to feel it.

  Even without ritual tools, I could feel the energy of the universe’s moorings shaken loose where it had been drawn in, bound to the ritual, and released upon its completion.

  The results, of course, were obvious. I nudged and shouldered my way past a variety of onlookers, past older men in the archetypal blue suit coat and golden buttons, joggers wearing elastic excuses for pants, and a clutch of youths who were quite likely truant from school.

  When I reached the cordon, I saw everything I needed to know. Esther, being a traditionalist, had a distinctively old-fashioned flourish in her ritual hand. I’d never seen alephs that curled quite the same way as those I saw at the base of the tree before me. And the touch of the Deeps was upon the park, a thick heaviness, nearly as tactile to me as the summer air in this hotbox of a city.

  Certainty brushed doubt aside, leaving me with nothing but fear and rage.

  It was her and she was here. And it meant that I was not the only one endangered by her presence. Far from it.

  This was just the first step. If I didn’t stop her, the city and its millions woul
dn’t live to see the new year. There could be no mistaking that ritual. She would collect the city’s Hearts, and when she had three, the second circle would tell her where to find the others.

  And the third circle would take her right to the Gate.

  I scanned the crowd, suddenly aware that Esther could be there, could have been waiting for me. This might have all been just a trap. I saw faces colored by shock, heads turned away but eyes angled back in, drawn to the brutality, and more.

  But none that belonged to my sister; none had her smug self-satisfaction when Father praised her perfect calligraphy, nor the haughty anger when she disciplined us in our parents’ absence. Nothing.

  Even so, I’d seen enough. I pushed my way back out of the crowd and stopped several paces out, catching my breath and enjoying my own space.

  The next step was to arm myself. Which was going to be quite a task, since I had fewer than a hundred dollars in my bank account that hadn’t already been allotted for essentials.

  I’d need to be very thoughtful in my selection of vendors. Which left me with only one good choice.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Shortly after coming to the city, I made the rounds at the local occult supply stores and quickly discovered that nine out of any ten of them are run by charlatans and idiots, peddling mistranslated texts written by the metaphysical equivalents of kindergarten teachers.

  There was only one store that met my standards, and so I made my way directly to Threshold Books in Brooklyn Heights. Anger and fear kept me distracted from the press of bodies around me in the subway, but a weight lifted from my shoulders when I emerged from the rank and stale air of the underground into the open. The neighborhood was unbusy, leaving me room to hurry to the store.

  I made my way down the short flight to the basement entrance of Threshold Books, and saw that the door was open. Given that it was late November, that seemed unwise.

  But when I saw dozens of books on the concrete floor, toppled shelves, and scattered papers, I reevaluated my judgment.