by Chuck Wendig
Before going, the god Ea instructed Nergal not to partake of any hospitality—no food, no drink. Don’t even sit in a chair. Just ask for the pardon and go.
But Nergal cared little for rules. His stubbornness was profound; an unending well of resistance. When someone told him to do something, he did its opposite, and so when Ereshkigal offered him her hospitality, he took it.
Hospitality is a tricky thing in the land of the gods. Eat of a place and it binds you to that place. Drink its water, sleep in its beds, it gets its claws into you.
That’s how Nergal became bound to the Underworld.
He went to escape death, and joined it instead.
It was then that Ereshkigal forced him to marry her. He was made to rule the place whose dominion was the very thing he hoped to elude.
At least, that’s how one story goes.
“FIND ANYTHING?”
Frank hovers. He smells of eucalyptus lip balm. His whole scarred-up face is greasy with the stuff. He says it “helps with the tightness,” which it very well may. It also makes him shine in the lights of the university library like a suckling pig hot out of the BBQ pit.
And he smells like an old woman.
Cason sits at the table, a kink in his neck ratcheting tension between his shoulders and head, sending a hard shiv into his brain. Before him, an advanced version of what he has back at the hotel room: books upon books upon books.
“No,” Cason says. Yawning. Rubbing his eyes. Needs more coffee. “I don’t even know what the hell we’re looking for. These books are all filled with... conflicting stories and academic write-ups. Half of them are translations. It makes my damn eyes bleed.”
This really isn’t his... thing. Frankly, Cason just wants to go out and punch something. Anything. He’s starting to feel those old urges—urges that got pushed down during his years with Eros, hidden in such a way that wonders now if it was supernatural. Now he’s starting to feel like a fighter again. Doesn’t hurt that this morning, peeping at himself in the mirror, he looked like he’d lost a stone. Still nowhere near fighting shape—but some of the blubber is gone. Muscle tone isn’t back, not like it used to be, but this morning he took a jog and did a workout in the hotel gym. He’ll get there. One way or another. The Beast, resurgent.
“We’re looking for a way to kill this motherfucker.”
“Yeah. I get that. I just... I don’t know what that is.”
“They all have weaknesses. Like Superman has his—”
“Kryptonite. I know. You told me.” Cason’s head lolls back on his shoulders. He stares up into the lights of the university library. Shelves and shelves of books in his periphery. “That officially falls into an easier-said-than-done category. Eros was, what? Arrowheads. And the Sasquatch Man was—”
“Ohtas. Little Lenii-Lenape dolls.”
“How the hell did you know that it was arrowheads with Eros and dolls for the Sasquatch Man?”
“Meesink. His name was Meesink.” Frank pulls up a chair, drops his cut-up scarecrow’s body upon it and starts poking through books. “I dunno how I knew, I just knew. I mean, Eros was easy. Honestly, seriously easy. His whole schtick is making people love him or love somebody else, and the way he does that in the stories is with a scratch from an arrow. As for your so-called ‘Sasquatch Man,’ well—”
“No, no, hold up one minute. You used bronze arrowheads. Specifically bronze. Why? Why not obsidian or iron or something you bought from Wal-Mart?”
Frank shrugs. “It seemed right. Your old boss is out of the Greek pantheon. Bronze Age stuff. So. Bronze arrows. Seemed stupid to just pick up a six pack of the things from Wal-Mart. You’re gonna murder a god, I figure, you gotta do it up right. A plus for effort.” The man known as Cicatrix scratches his hairless, scar-laced scalp. “Plus, seemed disrespectful, somehow.”
Disrespectful. Irony is alive and well, even if Eros isn’t.
“And the ohtas. Sasquatch Man.”
“Meesink was a, uhh, whaddya call it. A spirit. A Lenape life-spirit. A...” He snaps both his fingers. “A manitowak! Or manitou. And the way the Lenape venerated the manitou was with those little wooden dollies.”
“But how did you know?”
“Oh, I didn’t. With Eros, I was pretty confident. This time, not so much.”
“That’s real comforting.”
Frank cackles. “We’re hunting and killing gods and goddesses, Casey-at-the-Bat, not baking brownies. There’s no recipe. This is jazz, not Beethoven. It’s all improv.” He stabs down with a lobster-red finger onto one of the books. “And this is where we find out how to kill Nergal. It’s always in the myths. The legends. The history. The stories. The stories have secrets. They tell the truth, even when it’s a lie.”
“So, what you’re saying is...”
“Keep reading, buddy. The stories shall lead the way.”
THE HOUSE HAS gone to hell since Mom died. A herd of beer bottles on the coffee table. A spill of something—wine, gravy, who knows—on the living room carpet. Cobwebs in the room corners, and everything else covered with a thick rime of cakey dust.
Plus, Pop’s done up his own décor—like, now that she’s dead, it’s time to make it look less like her and more like him. Ratty taxidermy fox on the mantle—one eye cracked and a little wobbly. Mom’s old knick-knacks are gone, replaced with gaudy tavern junk-and-jumble: beer steins and beer signs, corks and caps, coasters and posters.
Pop sits in the recliner, feet up, bowl and spoon on his belly holding the last melted remnants of chocolate ice cream. Cason sits there for a while as Pop watches a Phillies game.
“You goin’ to church?” Pop asks, breaking the silence between them.
“Not really. You?”
“Nah. That was your mother’s thing.”
And back to silence. The air filled with the sounds of the game. Cracks of the bat and cheers of the crowd and long lulls of nothing because for Cason, that’s baseball—sharp moments of action punctuated by a whole lot of nothing. Pop loves baseball. Pop would kill for the Phils.
Time to get to it, then. Cason says:
“Something I gotta tell you, Pop.”
“Nngh. What’s that?”
“I’m getting married.”
That raises Pop’s flag. He grunts, leans forward in the chair, spoon rattling in the bowl. His legs kick inward, pop the recliner shut. The old man scratches a bristly eyebrow, cocks his head. “Married, you say.”
“Married.”
“Soon, I’m guessing?”
“In the fall. September, we’re thinking.”
“Awful fast.”
“I’d like you to meet her before then.”
Pop picks something off the end of his nose. “Mm-hmm. Mm. Let me ask: she got one in the oven for you?”
On the TV: base hit. Crowd cheers.
“She’s pregnant, yeah.”
“Right. Had to figure.”
Cason sighs. “Pop, it’s not like that.”
“It’s always like that with men and women.”
Pop turns back to the TV, eases back into the recliner—feet up, hands steepled on his belly. He smiles at the game, but Pop’s got this way of scowling at the same time he’s smiling. Something to do with the eyes. And he’s doing it now.
“Like I said, I hope you’ll meet her. Before the wedding.”
The old man doesn’t look at his son when he says, “I won’t be meeting this one.”
“What?”
“You heard me fine, unless one of those thugs in the ring punched your eardrums out. I’m not meeting your bride—now, soon, later, or ever.”
Cason doesn’t know what to say. “You’re going to have a grandson.”
“I’m not gonna have shit. Not unless your brother has a kid.”
“A grandson is a grandson, whether you like it or not. It’s a technical term, not a fucking honorary. Since I’m your son, any child I have will be—”
“Who said you’re my son?”
A c
old slush in Cason’s heart.
“What?”
“You’re not my son. You’re not your mother’s son. You’re fucking adopted. About time you knew. I wanted to tell you years ago, but your mother—well.”
“Pop—”
“I put up with you because she loved you. Make no mistake about that—your mother cared for you very much. I always thought you were a fuckin’ weak-kneed little gobbler, honestly. A goody-two-shoes. A taker, not a maker, clinging to your mother’s pockets like a baby squirrel. I never liked you. Now, Conny, he’s my son. You’re somebody else’s son that just happened to live at my house.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“Go on, get angry. I’ll allow you that. But for Chrissakes, do it somewhere else, will you? The game’s on.”
CASON WAKES UP that night. Sheets drenched. Heart pounding.
Couldn’t be a nightmare about Aphrodite twisting his head off his shoulders like a petulant little girl destroying a dolly. Couldn’t be about Sasquatch Man pulling his stuffing out. Has to be his father that runs him through the wringer?
He thinks, that’s just how we are, isn’t it? Nothing scarier in our own lives than our own lives. No monster is mean enough to beat our own inner demons. Humans, more vulnerable to their own past than to anything—
He gets up out of bed, and a gear turns inside his mind. As one turns, others turn with it, faster and faster. Click, click, click.
To the phone, then. Two calls.
The first, to Frank. Frank’s up. It’s past midnight and of course he’s up. Cason tells him to get over here. “I think I have it figured out.”
The second call, downstairs. To find out if the hotel has a copy machine.
Cason grabs a book and his room key (both near to a bright red apple sitting all proud and shiny on the hotel desk), then heads to the elevator.
CASON STANDS INSIDE the hotel lobby. The guy at the front desk—a small, feminine man with dusky skin and dark eyes—watches Cason without trying to hide his suspicion. It’s then that Cason realizes he came down here in a t-shirt and boxer shorts. It’s not like he didn’t realize it, what with the fact his hotel keycard is tucked in the hem of his underwear. But he didn’t think about it. Not really. And now the front desk guy is staring at him like he’s a mental patient on the loose.
Too late now. The show’s about to get far more interesting, anyway.
Frank walks in the door. Dude at the front desk hasn’t seen Frank before, it seems—he’s physically taken aback, as if a hard wind just gave him a little shove. The guy’s eyes go wide as Frank comes toodling through the lobby with his jigsaw-puzzle skin, unafraid of being seen.
So much so that Frank makes a face for the front desk guy: a leering, toothy, bug-eyed boogeyman stare. He yells: “Booga booga booga!”
The man swiftly turns back to his computer screen. Probably playing solitaire or watching cat videos on the Internet.
“People are so rude,” Frank growls. “Hey, nice boxers, Case-of-the-Mondays. Pinstripe. Simple. Elegant. Understated. You’re about to poke out of them, though.” Frank points toward Cason’s crotch, then whistles.
“Please don’t look at my dick, Frank.” Cason shakes it off. “Here, check this out.” He shakes a paper—a copy of a two-page spread out of a book.
“What’s this?”
“A photocopy. I was thinking. Nergal, right? This god’s got a... history. A complex. He was this one god, and then he fucks up, and suddenly he’s forced to become a different god entirely. And there’s this one passage that keeps coming back again and again...” He didn’t have a highlighter, just a pen, and so he circled a line on the paper.
Frank mumble-reads it aloud. “An adab to Nergal for Shu-ilishu. Lessee. Uhhh. Lord, mighty storm, raging with your great powers, Nergal, who smites the enemy whom he has cursed. Exalted lord, strong one with powerful wrist, whom no one can withstand. Nergal, rising broadly, full of furious might, great one praised for his accomplishment, pre-eminent among the youthful gods. Nergal, angry sea, inspiring fearsome terror, who no one knows how to confront, youth whose advance is a hurricane and a flood battering the lands. Nergal, dragon covered in gore, drinking the blood of living creatures.” Frank sniffs. “He sounds like a peach. The hell’s your point? You dragged me over here for this?”
“There’s a clue in here somewhere. I can feel it.”
“You can feel it? Show me on the doll where the Adab-to-Nergal touched you.”
“At the library, you said you just knew. You follow your gut with stuff like this, and Frank, I’m following my gut, here. Listen. Look at Nergal like a regular person. He’s a guy with a former glory that lost everything. He’s an all-star quarterback taken out of the game with a leg injury and made to coach from the sidelines. He’s a top-shelf detective who gets chained to desk duty for the rest of his cop career. He’s an aging pop-star, a brash young prince made into an ugly old king—”
“Okay, okay. Onward and upward to an actual goddamn point, please.”
“Who he was haunts him. This adab—it’s like a prayer, by the way, a hymn from the original Sumerian—it glorifies who he was, not who he is. This is the yearbook of that old quarterback, the case-notes of the old detective. There’s something here. I can taste it. It doesn’t call to mind any one object, but...”
Frank’s face lights up. Which is not a pretty picture—it looks like a lobster flushing red after getting dunked in boiling water. Still. He gets excited.
“We don’t need an object,” Frank says, his voice a breathy hiss of mad glee.
“What?”
“This!” He shakes the paper. “This is our object. The past is our friend’s weakness, and this adab is his past.”
Cason still isn’t getting it. “A photocopy isn’t a weapon.”
Frank chuckles.
“You ever get a papercut, Cole?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Death By A Thousand Cuts
IT’S A FORTUNE cookie from Hell.
Frank’s bomb. A satchel bomb—just a ratty backpack stuffed with screws, nails, thumbtacks, glass shards, and about a hundred little pieces of paper. Each one containing a line from Nergal’s hymns. They found plenty more than the ones Cason had discovered. Songs sung to Nergal at his temples, when he was still a rage-fueled storm-god, when they called him both lion and dragon in the same breath. Prayers to a god before he got whipped and shackled to the Underworld like a once-scrappy beagle chained to the porch.
Frank finishes the bomb by adding a hunk of homemade plastic explosive. It stinks like someone chucked rotten eggs into a too-clean chlorinated pool. Dueling stenches. Cason blanches.
“The smell,” Frank says. “Yeah. Doesn’t bother me too much. It’s the potassium chlorate. It’s not real stable, so I had to make a fresh batch last night. And it ain’t like baking cookies.” He pauses, shrugs. “Though it is a little like making coffee. High-test horse-kick coffee.”
They stand in Frank’s apartment. Cason still doesn’t see a cat, but smells the animal just the same. Frank explained earlier: “She likes her privacy. She’s around here somewhere. Under the sink. In a toilet. Out in the hallway eating rats.”
“So this’ll work?” Cason asks, tossing a thumb at the bomb.
Frank rolls his eyes—and given the lack of eyelids, it’s a far more profound gesture when he does it. “Will it work? Are you seriously asking me if it’ll work? Please. Case-of-beer, c’mon. You’re talking to the Wolfgang Puck of god-killing bombs.”
“And yet I’m the one carrying the thing. So I want to know.” That was what they agreed upon: Cason doing the deed. “Why am I the one bringing the bomb, again?”
“Revenge. You got a right to it.”
“I’m happy however he gets blown to shit. Whether you’re holding it or I am.”
“Fine. Take a good look at me, then take a good look at you. I’m like a... man made out of tinker-toys and naugahyde. I’m not exactly an all-star athlete. You, though...”
“I’m nowhere near what I was.”
“C’mon. Even over the last couple days you’re looking tighter. Leaner. Meaner than a starving monkey.” Frank’s right. Cason is looking different. Better. He’s barely had time to work out, but it’s like his body remembers the way he used to be. He still needs to tighten up the loose skin, but the flab beneath it has started to disintegrate, as if it was never there in the first place. “See, you got the physicality I don’t. Easy for you to chuck the bomb and run. Me, I’ll trip on a loose wire.”
“You’ve taken out others just fine.”
“Just three. Your boss. The Sasquatch Man. And...” His eyes lose focus. “That’s a story for another time.”
“But you have a reputation. As some kind of bomb-making genius.”
“Your brother may have inflated that story a little.”
Cason cocks an eyebrow. “You said my brother sold me out.”
“Still true.”
“But that means you talked to him before I did.”
“So?”
“You were looking for me.”
“Kinda. I was hoping you’d come looking for me. I wanted to work with you. Like I said, ants, elephants. I didn’t want to do this alone. I figured we were kin.”
“I don’t like people keeping secrets.”
“I’m not! I’m not. I should’ve said something. I’m sorry.” Frank opens his hands and shows his scarred palms in a mea culpa. “Seriously. I’m sorry.”
Cason leans back. Beholds the madness of Frank’s apartment—dusty strings connecting photos to articles to sketches and back to photos. A flow-chart for the insane.
“You really think this’ll work?” he asks Frank. “The bomb.”
“I do. I feel it in my guts.”
“And Nergal. He was involved. In the thing with Alison and Barney.”
“Had to be. He’s local. This is his bag of tricks. It’s him.”
“Is it time?”
“Soon. Nighttime. So nobody sees.”
THE DEATH FACTORY looms. The wind blows and Cason catches a scent that at first he thinks must just be his mind playing tricks on him—the sour pickled smell of something dead. But then as he stalks along the fence, he sees: a rat, dead. Big as a poodle. Ripped into thirds, the red parts almost artificial looking, like a spilled cherry slushie. In the moonlight, he sees the rat’s coat ripple. Maggots beneath the fur?