“Cherubic? Like the little angels with the rosy cheeks?”
“Exactly, Christine. Put that in your article. Maybe if you take a picture of me taking a leak in the garden you can get your article published in Better Homes and Gardens too.”
“So… you’re saying you are a cherub?”
“I am.”
“And you were sent down from heaven for some divine purpose, I suppose.”
“More or less.”
“And that purpose is…?”
“I honestly couldn’t tell you. I missed that meeting.”
“But you’re assembling a group of followers here…”
“Followers? Freeloaders, is more like it. I let them stay here in exchange for, you know, favors.”
“What kind of favors?”
“Well, theoretically things like escorting Snap, Crackle and Pop home from the 7-11,” said Mercury. “But I have yet to see how that particular project pans out.”
“So this isn’t a cult?”
“Oh, I suppose it is,” Mercury said, waving his hand vaguely. “I haven’t put that much thought into it.”
“But you teach them things. Indoctrinate them in the faith, as it were.”
“I tell them a few stories now and then. They like hearing about the football games between the Seraphim and the Cherubim. I mean real football, by the way, not the pansy kind where you can’t use your hands. Now there’s a rivalry! I think the Cherubim have a real shot this year. Oh, and the end of the world stuff. They can’t get enough of that. Although I have to say, I’m not sure they’re really paying attention. This generation, you know, they don’t know how to live for the moment.”
“Live for the moment?” asked Christine skeptically.
Mercury nodded, downing the last of his beer. He looked sadly at the empty bottle. “That’s it,” he said. “No more. Pity.”
Here we go, thought Christine. Here comes the Doomsday spiel. She forced herself to ask the obligatory question, like someone peeling open a long-forgotten Tupperware container lurking in the back of the fridge. “So,” she said. “The world is ending?”
“Of course,” replied Mercury, without hesitation. “But you know that. Surely someone in your position has seen the signs. Wars and rumors of wars, famines, plagues, widespread use of steroids in Major League Baseball…. And you’ve heard about the Antichrist, of course.”
“The Antichrist?”
“Yeah, you know, the Charlie Nyx thing.” Mercury was now attempting to balance the beer bottle upside down on his palm, without much success.
Christine sighed, convinced that she had hit a new low in a career that was littered with some pretty impressive lows. Even that flaky cad Jonas Bitters had the good sense not to hinge his eschatological pronouncements on a fictional adolescent warlock.
“I must be the only person on Earth who doesn’t give a shit about Charlie Nyx,” Christine muttered. “Between the books and the movies and these ridiculous publicity stunts….”
“It is a strange way to pick the Antichrist,” Mercury admitted.
Christine raised an eyebrow at him. “You do realize that it’s just a stunt, right? They picked some guy at random and called him the Antichrist. It’s just a stupid, sick joke.”
“Sick, yes. Stupid? That remains to be seen. I’m betting Lucifer has something up his sleeve. Picking that dickweed Karl Grissom to be –”
“Karl?” said Christine dubiously. “The Antichrist’s name is Karl?”
“Yeah, some dumb schmuck in Lodi. South of Sacramento, I think.”
“Lodi? You mean like in the song?”
“What song?” asked Mercury.
“You know,” said Christine. “The Credence Clearwater Revival song.”
“‘Proud Mary?’” offered Mercury.
“No, the other one.”
“‘Bad Moon Rising?’”
“No.”
“‘Born on the Bayou?’”
“‘Lodi,’” said Christine coldly.
“Right,” said Mercury. “South of Sacramento. There’s a song about it.” The beer bottle fell from Mercury’s palm and rolled under Christine’s chair. Mercury looked like he was trying to decide whether it was worth going after it, based on the limited entertainment value the bottle had provided him so far.
Christine pressed on. “So tell me, Mr. Mercury, what is your role in all of this?”
“I thought I covered that,” Mercury said. “I missed the meeting. Maybe I’m supposed to…hold a sign or something? You’ve seen the greeting cards.”
“Uh huh. So what are you doing here?”
“Well, right now I’m savoring a slight buzz and anticipating another mark in the win column against Toby.”
Christine gritted her teeth, regretting ever having listened to the magic talking briefcase.
“Well, Mr. Mercury,” she said. “It’s been a pleasure. I’d love to stick around, but I’ve got lunch with a Leprechaun. I understand he has some information regarding the whereabouts of a certain pot of gold.”
“Leprechaun,” considered Mercury. “Nice. Mythical creature. You do believe in angels, of course?”
“Mr. Mercury….”
“Just Mercury.”
“I seem to have made a mistake. I just got back from an assignment in Israel, and someone mentioned the name ‘Mercury.’ For some reason, I assumed they meant you, but clearly I was mistaken.”
Mercury nodded. “Wow,” he said. “There’s simply no reason for your face to be as attractive as it is. It’s like six different faces that have been welded together.”
Christine sighed again, regretting ever having listened to Pierre Gabrielle and the magic briefcase. What the hell was she thinking? There was no way General Isaakson had meant this Mercury.
“Hey,” said Mercury. “Would you like to see a card trick?”
“I’m sorry?”
“A card trick. Here.”
Mercury produced a deck of cards from his pocket. The backs of the cards were adorned by pairs of cherubim riding bicycles.
“Examine the deck.”
“Mercury, please. I don’t have time for card tricks.”
“Trust me, card tricks are about all you have time for at this point. Examine the deck.”
“Okay, one fast trick and I’m leaving.”
“I bet you say that to all the cult leaders.”
“Funny. The deck looks fine.”
“Pick a card. Don’t show me.”
Christine rolled her eyes. She picked a card. Seven of hearts.
“Okay, now put the card back and shuffle the deck.” He handed her the deck and closed his eyes while she shuffled.
“Hand me the deck,” he said.
She did.
“Now look in your back pocket,” he said with a wry smile.
Christine was dubious. “There’s no way…” she began, as she reached into the back pocket of her slacks. Her fingers touched the smooth edge of something that felt suspiciously like a playing card. She pulled it out and looked down.
“Is that your card?” Mercury said, knowingly.
“No,” Christine said flatly.
It was the ace of spades.
“No?” Mercury asked. He seemed genuinely surprised.
Christine said, “That was fun. Maybe you should stick with ping-pong.”
Mercury turned the card over, examining every detail. When the card continued to stubbornly refuse to admit to being the seven of hearts, he proceeded to examine the rest of the deck. The look on his face reminded her of General Isaakson just before the rocket struck. After a moment of brow-furrowing, he fanned the cards, turning them so she could see.
Every card was the ace of spades.
“Ah,” Christine said. “Toby must have gone to a lot of 7-11s to get you fifty-two of those.”
Mercury dropped the cards. Black aces scattered everywhere.
“This isn’t good,” he said. “We need to go.”
“‘We?’�
� Christine asked.
“Go!” he said more firmly, pointing to the exit. “Now!”
She followed dumbly as he raced out the front door and into the street. He crossed at an angle, darting through the traffic. Car horns blared. Christine followed tentatively, dimly wondering why she was leaving a perfectly amicable Victorian mansion to follow its clearly insane occupant into a busy street.
“What?” she growled as she caught up to him on the sidewalk on the far side of Telegraph. Mercury had stopped and turned to face the direction he had come. At first she thought he was waiting for her, but his eyes were fixed on the house.
“What the hell are we…?”
“Not hell,” said Mercury. “Heaven. Watch.”
Christine tried to follow Mercury’s gaze. “I don’t….”
There was a blinding flash of light. Before her eyes clamped shut, she thought she saw something like a pillar of fire, some twenty feet in diameter, shooting straight down out of the clouds. When she opened her eyes a second later, the entire house was engulfed in flames. Anyone inside must have been incinerated instantly.
“Those people….” She started.
Mercury sighed, shaking his head. “Friggin’ cultists,” he said. “They never learn.”
NINE
The Antichrist, meanwhile, was having a bad day. He had only this morning been dethroned as the reigning BattleCraft champion of Server 7, and now his mother was getting on his case again.
“Karl?” she said in that particularly annoying tone that she used when she spoke. Thankfully his mother lacked both the motivation and the stamina to climb the steep carpeted steps to his dusty brown room in the dusty brown attic of her dusty brown house in a dusty brown neighborhood in the middle of the dusty brown part of Northern California. Unfortunately that hadn’t stopped her from screeching incessantly upstairs at Karl for most of the past 37 years.
Ninety-six percent of the people who had met Karl’s mother had, at one time or other, described her as “unpleasant.” The remaining four percent, who were somewhat more perceptive, tended to describe her as “unpleasant and a little off.” In fact, Karl’s mother was – unbeknownst to anyone – a medical curiosity: She had been born without an appendix, in place of which was a second gall bladder.
“Karl!”
“What?” he howled back. “Jeez, Ma. I’m getting dressed!”
“You’ve been getting dressed for twenty minutes. You’re going to be late!”
“Myah-myah-myah-myah-MYAH-myah!”
“Karl, are you mocking me?!”
“No, Ma.”
“You’d better not! Now get down here!”
“This shit is hard to get on, ma! Give me a second.”
“Don’t you curse at me, young man!”
Karl let out a torrent of profanity.
“Karl!”
Karl Grissom was a 37-year-old film school dropout and part-time pizza delivery guy who was still acclimating to his role as the Antichrist. If it were up to him, he’d have stuck with just the pizza delivery gig, but his Ma wouldn’t have it. “A great opportunity,” she called it. And it was, for her: an opportunity for her to get her hair styled and her toenails painted and her eyebrows plucked. Her eyebrows had been so sparse and uneven that the poor stylist had ended up removing them completely in a futile effort to produce something like a definitive line. Ma had been outraged at first, but she took it as an opportunity to have new eyebrows tattooed just above the originals, so that her face now ironically seemed to be expressing the exact horrified surprise felt by anyone who was unfortunate enough to meet her.
Karl hated his mother, which was one thing he had in common with everyone else, whom he also hated, but not as much as he hated his mother. He hated her first of all because every day for the past nineteen years she had nagged him to stop playing with his “toys” and do the laundry, despite the fact that not once in his life had he ever done the laundry. He couldn’t fathom why she still thought he might some day break down and wash his own clothes. He certainly never gave her any reason to believe that he would. Ten years ago this week, in fact, he had stopped picking up his underwear from the bathroom floor in an attempt to convince her that her nagging was causing him to regress developmentally, but this tactic had had no noticeable effect on her behavior. He was still planning his next escalation in their little power struggle.
Karl had become the Antichrist quite by chance, at least as far as any human being knew.[7] It was very important for legal reasons that his selection appear random. For this purpose, Karl had been a good choice, because anyone looking at him could only assume that he had come into the position through sheer unadulterated luck.
Like most 37-year-olds who lived in their mother’s attic, Karl was a fan of teen warlock Charlie Nyx.
The Charlie Nyx books were extremely popular with those who had read them and extremely unpopular with those who had not. Despite their understandable lack of familiarity with the finer points, it was, surprisingly, the latter group that was able to discern that the true mission of Charlie Nyx was not to defend the great city of Anaheim from troglodytes, nor even to generate truckloads of money for Katie Midford, but rather to promote the diabolical interests of Lucifer himself.
Everybody figured the Antichrist promotion was a joke, of course. Even the Mundane Observation Corps didn’t take it particularly seriously. The applicants were more interested in money or fame than being conscientious servants of the Evil One. The only ones who took the gimmick seriously were the anti-Charlie Nyx activists. And Lucifer, it turns out.
Karl Grissom was not, by most accounts, the ideal Antichrist. Christian fundamentalists would have preferred someone a little more threatening, and the publisher of the Charlie Nyx books would have preferred someone with substantially less neck stubble. For his part, Karl would have preferred someone else had been selected as well, because he felt that he had better things to do.
Karl would bristle at the suggestion, occasionally made by neighbors and his mother’s canasta circle, that he was just an unmotivated loser living in his mother’s attic. Karl had ambitions. Karl was a musician.
This claim would have surprised everyone who had ever met Karl (including his mother), as Karl didn’t play any instruments, had never learned to read music, and didn’t own any albums. He did, however, have a library of 26,923 illegally downloaded songs on his computer, and had thus far incorporated samples from 327 of them into an epic rock opera he was writing entitled Shakkara the Dragonslayer. He had been working on it for seventeen years, although his first real breakthrough hadn’t occurred until the release of Flat Pack’s dance remix of “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”
All of this Antichrist stuff was, in Karl’s opinion, a big distraction from his art. He was getting very close to calling it quits with the whole business. If it weren’t for the free publicity, he’d never have agreed in the first place. His mother was thrilled with the money he had won, but Karl never paid much attention to financial matters. He had never wanted to win the contest; he had been hoping to be one of the runners-up who got ten grand and an autographed copy of the latest Charlie Nyx book.
Karl finally got the costume on, except for the helmet, and plodded downstairs to the kitchen, where his mother waited.
“People are counting on you, Karl.”
“Whatever,” Karl said. Like his mother gave a crap about other people. All she cared about was maintaining the steady stream of checks that Karl signed over to her. He got in his mother’s Saturn and drove to the Charlie’s Grill in Lodi, where the fans of Charlie Nyx waited impatiently for the Antichrist to appear.
TEN
“Natural gas explosion.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what they’ll blame it on. The authorities.”
Christine tried to sigh, but it came out as a series of short huffs. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. They were on the highway, heading east. She was vaguely aware that she was going the wrong dire
ction; she would need to head south at her first opportunity to get on a highway that would take her back to Los Angeles. She wasn’t sure what she’d do when she got back to Southern California; some small part of her was trying to pretend that she could leave all of this insanity behind her in Berkeley. That illusion would be easier to entertain, of course, if the cherubic lunatic weren’t sitting next to her, fiddling with the radio. Mercury had simply gotten into the car, without even bothering to ask for permission. She had been too shaken to make an issue of it.
“You have no idea how much divine retribution is blamed on natural gas explosions,” Mercury was saying. “It’s criminal, really. Natural gas is quite safe, generally speaking.”
“Natural gas explosion…” Christine mumbled, trying to airbrush the image in her mind until that caption fit. But every time she replayed the scene, the fire always started out above the house.
“Should have gotten a Mundanity Enhancement Field. A pillar of fire won’t work in an M.E.F. Disrupts the interplanar energy channels. Of course, my card tricks wouldn’t work either.” He sighed. “The interplanar energy channels are a harsh mistress.” He finally took his hand off the radio’s tuner knob, having settled on Dishwalla’s “Counting Blue Cars.” “Ooh, I love this song,” he said.
“You… blew up… that house…” sputtered Christine. It was a series of unconnected thoughts that had somehow come out as a sentence.
“I blew it up? Hardly. I don’t have the authority to call down a Class Three pillar of fire, even if I wanted to. Which, of course, I didn’t. My ping-pong table was in there.”
“But you knew….”
“The card trick was the tip-off. Ace of spades. Somebody’s idea of a joke.”
“So the house blew up because you screwed up a card trick?”
“No, the card trick got screwed up because the house was going to be blown up. You see, I can’t perform miracles without –”
“Dammit,” Christine spat.
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