I take a blanket off the back of the couch and wrap it around Candy and we watch the rest of the movie. After that, I write the report I promised Wells, and e-mail it to him. I still can’t figure out what the mess in Hobaica’s demented head meant. Tooth flowers. Seas of fire. Hacked-up bodies. It’s like a Texas Chain Saw wet dream. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all. Maybe I just left him on ice too long and Hobaica’s soul was all screwed up from his brain getting frozen and oxygen deprived. Anyway, it’s not my job to figure out. That’s for the bag of Shonin bones.
Later, Candy reheats the burritos and we eat them while watching Hausu, a funny Japanese haunted-house flick. Candy cackles the whole way through it. I don’t pay much attention. She goes downstairs when we’re done eating.
I’m still wondering if I should take a chance and go see Mr. Muninn in Hell. Maybe it would be smarter to check in with Samael first. He’s living in the palace with Muninn and would know if it’s all right for me to go down. Your holy roller types are talking about God sending a new flood to cleanse the world. I’ve got news for them. God’s got his hands full right now. The parts of him that aren’t already dead.
A rhythmic thumping and buzz comes up through the floor, from the storeroom we soundproofed with egg cartons and blankets. Candy and Fairuza are thrashing through a ragged version of “Rock ’n’ Roll High School” because what else is there to do at the end of the world?
A FEW GLASSES of Aqua Regia later, I remember something I promised to do. I put on a hoodie and one of my frock coats and dig around under the bed for a dusty sack of bones that I took out of Kill City, a cursed shopping mall at the beach in Santa Monica. There was a pack of ghosts in the basement that wanted me dead, but we cut a deal. They let me go and I promised I’d bury their bones in the ground outside the mall. With fixing up Max Overdrive and starting back with the Vigil, I’d put it off a dozen times. All this talk of the apocalypse, I think maybe I should do it now just in case. I don’t want to die having lied to a bunch of poor slobs buried under a thousand tons of concrete, corn dogs, and panty hose.
I put a little LED flashlight in my pocket and step through a shadow. Go through the Room of Thirteen Doors and come out under the Hollywood sign in the hills overlooking L.A. From up here, through the air that’s been washed clean by the rain, the city is beautiful. L.A. always looks best in the dark, when it’s just lights and the ugly hulks of the buildings have been softened to vague night shapes. Even from up here, I can see the traffic snarling the main streets and spilling out onto the Hollywood Freeway. People are leaving town and they don’t even know why. They’re running just to run. Some animal part of their brain knows something bad is coming and they want to get as far from it as possible. Who can blame them? But if the Angra come stomping back to the world, there won’t be anywhere too remote to hide. In the meantime, they run like lemmings.
Idiot that I am, I didn’t bring a shovel, so I have to dig with my hands. I put the bones in the ground between the H and the O in HOLLYWOOD. I don’t know if being in soil will help those ghosts rest easier, but I’ll sleep better knowing I’m not just another liar in a city built on slick pitchmen who’d sell you their mother’s kidneys if it got them salesman of the month.
It’s dark up here and there isn’t a shadow in sight. I turn on the LED flashlight and bury one end in the ground. I get in front of the beam and step into my own shadow, soaked and cold, heading home.
Later, Candy comes upstairs. Her T-shirt is soaked through with sweat.
“Having a little drink?”
“I went out. I’m trying to get the chill out of my bones.”
She takes off her shirt and tosses it on the back of a chair. She comes over and straddles me on the couch, presses her warm body into mine.
“Better?” she says.
“Much.”
She leans down and kisses me. I set my glass on the floor. She pushes me down on my back and starts pulling my pants off.
I should have insisted we get a sturdier couch. We break one of the legs and have to prop up the end on a pile of ancient VHS tapes from the bargain bin downstairs. Broken furniture rescued by forgotten movies. The place is starting to feel like home after all.
THE FLAYED HEART is all over my dreams. Grinding teeth. Pulped bodies in flames. Zhuyigdanatha is in the freezing locker where I found Hobaica. Fire licks the meat-hooked body parts in the flesh cathedral. Chars the sides of beef. Fills the locker with a dense, oily smoke that settles on the walls and floor like a slick skin. Hot blood bubbles from the broiling meat. It pools on the locker floor like wounds. I double up in pain, maybe just in my dream or maybe for real.
I’m stuck somewhere dark. Bound to a wall underground in Kill City. Besides ghosts, the place is full of addled Lurkers and Sub Rosa families so far down the food chain they haven’t seen daylight in years. Ferox, the head of the Shoggot clan, is there with his giggling relatives. They’ve filed their teeth to points and let maggots clean the places where they’ve carved up their own bodies. Ferox wants to see what makes a being like me tick. He shoves a scalpel low into my belly and drags the blade north. He wants to open me up. Pull me apart like those bodies falling into the abyss of the Flayed Heart’s gullet. I’ve never felt anything like this, even in Hell. It’s not just the pain. It’s the idea of being gutted like a trout and left a hollow husk. After all I’ve been through, here I am, dying at the hands of a freak in the basement of a goddamn department store. I cramp again. This time I’m sure it’s real.
The dream changes. I’m back in Vigil headquarters. Their first one, down south of L.A. Aelita is there. She’s an angel. One of God’s most hard-core. Pure Old Testament rage. She runs the Vigil with Wells. Only she’s crazy, or maybe I make her crazy. The knowledge of my existence does. I’m Abomination. Nephilim. I shouldn’t exist and yet God lets me live. She does Ferox’s trick. Pig-sticks me with a flaming angelic sword. Kills me good. My first death. But I got over it and stabbed her right back. Still, I can feel her sticking me more than I can feel any satisfaction in getting revenge.
My stomach burns like it’s filled with fire and metal.
All these scars. The road map of my life. My armor. Sometimes being hard to kill isn’t exactly a blessing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s my punishment for being born a freak. I don’t think even God knows at this point. He’s broken up enough these days I don’t know if I’d trust any answers he gave me.
Aelita declared war on God before she died. Wanted nothing more than to murder him. Here I am with her former friends trying to do the same thing to the Angra Om Ya. Who’s right and who’s wrong doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe God did trick the old gods out of this universe and steal it for himself. But here’s the scary question: which God is worse? The Angra, who might be competent, but want to wipe us out, or our God, who isn’t good at his job, but if not benign, is at least indifferent to us? Parental neglect is starting to look pretty good right now, isn’t it?
Maybe the Angra are entirely in the right to want back in, but if they’re coming back means wiping us out, then fuck ’em. This isn’t Metaphysics 101. This is self-defense. Anyway, what else am I going to do? Where else am I going to go? Hell is boring and Heaven sounds like a Disneyland fireworks parade forever.
My Shoggot scar burns and I feel mountain-size teeth crunching my bones.