by R. E. Vance
“Joseph. Just Joseph. ‘Mister’ was my father.” He laughed at his joke. When I did not join him, he frowned and said, “Oh well, I am very funny in Valhalla.”
“I’m sure you are, Joseph,” I said, writing down his name as I suppressed a chuckle. “I’m sure you are.”
I handed over the room key, and Joseph eyed me suspiciously. “Aren’t you going to ask me more questions?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“My purpose for staying—”
“None of my business,” I said.
“A deposit?”
“You’ll pay when you check out. Or you won’t. I figure those who can afford to pay, do. Those who can’t—well, I’m just happy to offer them a few nights here.”
“Are you really?” he asked.
“No,” I mused, “but I made this promise, and …” I stopped fighting the mojo again.
He nodded like he understood and said, “How about what kind of Other I am?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh,” the Other said, widening his eyes. “Why not? In my short time as a mortal, it seems the question most asked by humans.”
“It’s like asking what your religion is—or was—or how much money you got in your bank account or if you’re straight or gay. Leaves too much room for profiling, and I’d rather judge you on what I see than on what I believe.”
Joseph nodded, slowly eying me up and down. A small smile crept over his face, and he said in a slow and deliberate tone, “When I heard of your little haven, I didn’t believe it. But now … like you said—what you see …” He stood there for a long moment, not moving, like he was trying to unravel something he didn’t understand.
“Well,” I said, breaking the silence, “if that’s it, I’ll be …”
“Your name?”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Your name—you never told me your name.”
“Oh, right. Jean,” I said, straightening my collarless jacket. “Jean-Luc Matthias.”
“Ahh,” he said, smiling, “you’re just missing the ‘Mark.’ ” Again, he chuckled at his own joke.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“John, Luke, Matthew and Mark.”
“Oh yeah—right,” I said. “My mom was a devout Catholic and apparently the day I was born she wanted to spread the good news.” I lifted my hands in a half-hearted gesture of Surprise!
“And did she? Spread the news, that is?”
“No. She died giving birth to me, kind of killing the good-news aspect and any faith I might have had, and …” As the words came out of my mouth, I put down my pen in frustration. His mojo was loosening my lips, and I hated it. “I’ve only told that story to one other person, and she’s dead. Your innate ability, or whatever it is, is throwing me off. I just met you. I don’t even know if I trust you. So what do you say we call it quits on the questions?”
“I am sorry,” he said, his expression momentarily sad. But as quickly as his smile left his face, it returned, and he said, “Would it help if I told you a secret?”
“Not really,” I said, still annoyed at falling under his spell yet again.
“But it would make us even.” He gave me a hopeful look.
I sighed. “OK, fine.” I’d played these kinds of games with Others before. Secrets, riddles, guess-my-name … it always ended the same. They’d say something ridiculous and look at you like they had just laid out the secrets of the Universe.
He produced from his pocket a plain wooden box no bigger than a Rubik’s Cube. He opened it and showed me its hollowed, empty innards. “I stole this three thousand years ago, always planning on giving it back. But then they left, and now there is no one to give it back to.”
See? Told you. I gave him the same expression one gives a cat when presented with a dead bird.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“It’s a box,” I said.
“Yes … and no.” He paused, waiting expectantly.
“OK, fine—what is it?” I said.
“A lot of things, and nothing at all,” he replied with a deadly serious expression. Oh brother, give me a break! A smile crept on his face, and he started laughing. “It’s a box. Just a box. You should have seen your face. ‘A lot of things, and nothing at all …’ Really, Mr. Matthias, lighten up.”
“Oh?” I said, returning his smile.
“But I will tell you this—the box has belonged to some very interesting mortals over the ages. Pharaohs, prophets, would-be gods. And all of them thought that if they could just fill it up with the right kind of—what did you call it?—mojo, they’d change the world. Not always for the better, mind you.” He handed me the box.
I examined the plain wooden thing that looked like it was constructed by the slow kid in wood shop. It hadn’t even been sanded down, and slivers of wood splintered from its edges. Holding it, I felt nothing. I tried to hand it back, but he refused.
“No, you keep it,” he said. “Maybe you will be able to do more good with it than they ever managed to.”
“I can’t accept this,” I said.
“Please, I insist.”
What I didn’t say was But it’s a piece of useless crap, opting for a more cordial, but empty “Thank you.” I opened my top drawer and put it inside.
He smiled. “Think nothing of it. Should the fates smile upon us, maybe we will find time for me to regale you with tales about those who thought they could change the world with a plain wooden box.”
“I’d like that,” I found myself saying. What was strange was that—mojo or not—I meant it. I really wanted to hear this odd creature’s stories.
Damn—it was proving very difficult not to like this Other.
Home Is Where Your Heart Is
The One Spire Hotel was seven rooms, plus an attic and cellar. Currently five guests resided here—six if you included the fairy that lived in Castle Grayskull. In less than twenty-four hours, my world went from crushing debt, a prostitute succubus’s constant orgies, a pissed-off ghost of a mother-in-law and drunk fallen angel, to all of the above plus a Fanatical Other in town, homicidal gangbangers hell-bent on destroying my hotel, a soothing Other that—despite Penemue’s reaction to him—I didn’t fully trust and a pissed-off archangel of a cop.
And I would go on a monthlong trek to the Himalayas with all of them if it meant I didn’t have to bake.
I hated baking.
No matter how hard I mixed, how vigorously I beat or how committed I was to stirring, my batter was still lumpier than the poxes on a Capulet’s ass. Despite carefully measuring, no two cookies were the same size, and in spite of my precise timing, every single batch of the chocolate-chip-and-macadamia-nut cookies came out rock-hard. And what’s more—it took me the whole day to whip up the monstrosity of cookie hell I planned on feeding my guests.
Welcome to mortality. Lesson one: not all cookies were created equal.
↔
After the cookies were baked, I put on my collarless black coat and set about to make the One Spire Hotel’s little dining room suitable for a seminar, which meant covering the three tables with freshly laundered sheets and lining up all the chairs to face the front.
As my pièce de résistance, I displayed my burnt cookies on two silver trays and placed an old metal music stand in front of the room to act as a speaker’s podium.
Then I took a step back and surveyed what “making the most of what I got” meant. Insufficient lighting, a cramped space and burnt cookies.
Way to make them feel wanted, Jean.
“What did you expect me to do?” I found myself saying to a Miral yet to arrive. “Lay out fresh flowers, maybe put on a little Kenny G in the background for musical accompaniment? Remember, I didn’t want to do this in the first place.” I was practicing. If you knew Miral, you would, too.
“Actually, this exceeds all expectation,” Miral said as she walked in, her flawlessly white wings wrapped around her shoulders like a superhero cape. Little
rain droplets ran down her wings like water off a duck’s back. “Not a hard feat when you have none.”
I swear to the GoneGods that I was a man of extreme military training who was always acutely aware of my surroundings. At any given time, I could size up a room, tell you how many exits there were, the number of possible combatants, where the surveillance equipment was hidden, and I had abnormally wide peripheral vision. None of my alarms—internal or otherwise—went off. “How the hell did you do that?”
“Hell,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “is exactly why I learned to do that.”
She surveyed the room while practicing mortal techniques at diplomacy. In other words, compliment the good things, gloss over the bad. She didn’t do a good job. I guess when you had the word of God on your side, tact wasn’t one of the skills you needed to develop. “Not exactly the heavenly halls, but I guess you tried. Given who you are and what you are capable of, I should be happy that you remembered the cookies.” She picked one up, bit into it and spit it out. “Or perhaps not,” she said, scowling.
I looked at my watch. Five minutes until the time on the flyer. Five minutes and so far it was just me and Miral. Not that it meant anything. The concept of time was one of the many things Others struggled with.
“Have faith,” she said, taking her place behind the podium.
“You already said that.”
“Then,” she said, with a smile, “you should listen,” and nodded to someone standing behind me.
I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes, but in walked my mother-in-law and current poltergeist Judith, side by side with Penemue. Judith gave me her requisite scowl but didn’t say anything. Once upon a time she was a staunch Catholic—I guess being in the presence of a couple of angels resulted in best behavior. She held the arm of an unusually sober and well-groomed Penemue, who guided her to seats in the front. He nodded at Miral with an unearthly reverence and sat next to Judith. I got to hand it to the big guy, I don’t know if I could be so cordial with the one who stood at the gates of Heaven while I was being cast down to the pits of Hell. Then again, the gods leaving meant that Miral was an outcast, too, and I suspected his nod carried with it a silent empathy for her.
The front doorbell rang and a familiar hand touched my shoulder. I turned to see a rough-looking woman of about five-foot-nothing, wearing an old Victorian dress with a hat that had lost so much of its vibrant color that it was practically sepia. She looked like an old photo.
She folded her Victorian umbrella that was so filled with holes it was more a showpiece than anything of use and, pulling out a handkerchief, wiped away some of the rain from her brow.
“Sandy,” I said. “Good of you to join us.”
“Jean, there is not much time, and we must dispense with pleasantries,” Sandy barked. But when she saw Miral across the room, her tone became far more affable. She walked over to greet her. “Miral, darling—how are you?”
Once upon a time, when Bella ran the One Spire Hotel with a hell of a lot more success than I did, Miral and Sandy were her first employees. Both had moved on to bigger and brighter things—Miral using her preternatural brain to complete medical school in three years, and Sandy using her cooking skills and former werewolf nature to open the Stalker Steakhouse. As the two conversed, looking over the place, I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. There was no doubt that I was barely holding Bella’s dream together.
When the pleasantries that she apparently did not have time for ended, Sandy returned to me and in a curt voice said, “Is my cell ready?” As a once-upon-a-time werewolf, Sandy had never got used to the fact that she no longer transformed with the Moon. I guess after years of running on all fours for three days a month, she couldn’t let go. So once a month Sandy came to the One Spire Hotel to be locked away in the basement, where she sat, not changing. I had to admire the little woman—she’d been locking herself up every full Moon for over three hundred years because she wanted to make sure she wouldn’t hurt anyone, and she wasn’t going to stop now.
“Everything is ready down there. Even got the combination lock like you asked. But, Sandy, you don’t need to lock yourself up. Not anymore …” I started.
The teeny-tiny woman snarled, “Not a word, Jean, I am here to be locked away. It is, after all, that time of the month.”
“Tell me about it, girl,” Astarte chimed as she shuffled past us into the room.
“Sex slave of Satan!” Sandy barked.
“My, my—we are in a mood,” the succubus said without missing a beat, sending the former werewolf out of the room and down into the cellar. “Give me the Black Death over a Victorian prude any day. At least the dying screw like it’s their last day on Earth,” Astarte said, following Sandy with her eyes.
↔
I watched from behind my makeshift desk as a flight of fairies, a frustration of dwarves and a hodgepodge of goblins walked in, followed by a kitchen of trolls, a charge of ogres, a quarry of gargoyles and a dust of pixies.
There was barely enough space for the nearly three dozen Others. Hell, if it hadn’t been for the fairies and pixies hovering midair and the goblins hanging from the ceiling lamps, the event would have had to turn Others away. The seminar began with the more mundane subjects: the importance of eating regularly, drinking and sleeping enough and shitting daily. Many of the Others nodded in agreement, asking questions like “How do you know when you’re full?” and “Which bodily fluids are acceptable to excrete in public and which aren’t?”
This was followed by the slightly more complex concepts of money and time, how to read time and count money, and the basics of social etiquette, like not cutting in line and why being late is bad. Like I said, pretty straightforward stuff.
This went on for a couple hours—you’d be surprised how many details there were to cover, things I pretty much just did without ever stopping to think about them—and all was drawing to a close when one particularly big-eyed pixie asked Miral what happened to Others when they died.
In the years I had known Miral, I’d never seen her flustered. Not once. Not even close—until that night. “Well, ummm, I suppose … the prevalent theory is that nothing happens,” she floundered. Then, as if needing to clarify herself, she repeated the key word: “Nothing.” Angels suck at tact.
“What do you mean, nothing?” The pixie sparkled, a dark azure and crimson purple dust emanating from her being.
“I mean that when you die it all just kind of goes black,” Miral said. “Like sleeping, except you never wake up.” She forced a smile.
“But I only have a thousand years,” mourned the pixie.
“A thousand years—I only have eight hundred and sixty-three,” cried a gargoyle.
“Sleep is death,” lamented a fairy who vowed never to sleep again.
The frustration of dwarves started jumping up and down in place—their version of public protest—while the goblins flung big mounds of green mucus at one another.
“Calm down,” Miral pleaded, “calm down!” But even her angelic countenance wasn’t enough to soothe this crowd. Death, whether imminent or a ways away, was terrifying. But suddenly needing to face mortality when thirteen years ago you were once-upon-a-time immortal … That was several dozen shades of dark, scary shit.
Things were getting out of control, and I was considering throwing them out, starting with the dwarves, when a soft voice pierced the clamor. “Death is the door through which we must all walk, one by one,” it said in barely a whisper.
As if feeling the words rather than hearing them, everyone immediately calmed down and listened.
“Death is final and forever, and it is the only experience that each and every one of us shall share. The sooner we all accept this, the better we shall respect the time we have,” Joseph said, cool and even.
The crowd not only calmed down, but they also bowed. Even Miral and Penemue lowered their heads in reverence. One of the dilemmas that faced Other unification was that one typ
e did not necessarily respect another. With long memories and tens of thousands of years of history, each type of Other had at one point or another gone to war. It seemed that no two types did not have some kind of historical beef. And yet, everyone in this room regarded Joseph with equal reverence. I’d never seen anything like this before. Innate ability or not, magic or not, this Other had some serious cred.
I wished Bella was here—she would have been floored.
“Death,” Joseph continued, “is the bridge that ties the AlwaysMortal humans and the OnceImmortal Others. Death is what binds us together, our only shared experience. For that reason, if nothing else, death should not be feared, but embraced.”
↔
The rest of the evening wrapped up with each and every Other insisting on meeting Joseph before leaving. The dwarves smiled, the goblins climbed, the pixies sprinkled him with their dust. The fairies sang to him and the trolls offered him rancid meat, which he humbly accepted. Hell, not a single Other left until they got a chance to show their respect. Even Penemue saluted Joseph before leaving, and Judith—well, let’s just say she didn’t scowl at me as she left. She didn’t smile either, but I’ll take whatever little victory I can get. And it was then I realized what it was that I wanted. What it was that all of us want. And I knew I had figured out what EightBall wanted, too. Excited, I ran over to the fairies and asked them for a favor. They listened intently and replied that they were happy to help for seven vials of glitter and two bottles of Elmer’s Glue. A steep price, but one I was willing to pay. They agreed and left.
I turned to my now-empty breakfast room and saw that Astarte, Miral and Joseph still remained. Astarte approached him and, for the first time I knew of, didn’t try to seduce the Other, but rather spoke to him in a quiet voice. I don’t know what they said to each other that night and I suspect I never will, but whatever it was, when Astarte left the room I could sense in her a feeling of hope. Seeing Astarte, I remembered the smiling Other outside the hospital, but tonight was such a wonderful evening that my questions could wait until the morning.
