Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  And then, of course, there were Penemue and EightBall, and the bills of this place, and the ruined carpet, and my ugly mug that could be recognized by the past that I’d been hiding from for the last six years.

  My head spun. I walked over to my table and sat down, thinking about how all I really wanted to do was to go upstairs and stage a reenactment of Gulliver’s Travels with the Smurfs and Grendizer.

  I was so consumed with everything that was going on that I didn’t notice a snake popping out from under the table until it was almost eye level with me. “Holy moly!” I jerked to my feet.

  “Marty! Be nice,” a voice admonished. Medusa’s mocha-colored face peered out from under the tablecloth. She looked worried. “Is it over?”

  I lifted the tablecloth and saw her sitting there, petting a few of her snakes. She had a bottle of wine and two glasses. But this wasn’t some kind of seduction. She wasn’t luring me under the table for some alone time. She was worried. “Hey, Jean. I was wondering when you’d show up,” she started, and I got the sense that she wanted to say something else but was holding back.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I should’ve gotten you right away. It’s safe to come out.”

  Medusa chuckled. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.” I looked back at what the Others interpreted as dance and shook my head. “Then again …”

  “Come down here. It’s peaceful.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me under.

  Beneath the canopy the barrage of noises dulled, if only slightly, and I was grateful for the reprieve. The carpet beneath us was comfortable enough, and the table under which we sat had been designed for Others, which meant that it was larger than your average banquet hall table, and we had a lot of space to move around under there. Soft light filtering through the white silk tablecloth illuminated the table’s underbelly, and even though we could hear the bumping and the thumping of the music outside, we were somehow shielded from it. It was like when I was a kid and I’d build forts where PopPop wasn’t allowed unless invited.

  I liked it here. And I liked not being alone. Especially when my company was wearing such a tantalizing low-cut dress and had a smile that could make puppies swoon.

  “That was very brave,” she said, her eyes gleaming with more than just a crush.

  “Stupid,” I reassured her. “Very, very stupid.”

  “But you saved a lot of Others from getting hurt. That was brave …” Her voice trailed off and her look of concern returned. It was more than concern. She looked afraid.

  “More stupid than brave,” I assured her.

  “True,” she said, her voice distracted. Distant. She gave Marty a pat on the head. She handed me her glass of wine and gestured for me to take a sip. “Tell me what it tastes like to you.”

  I tasted it. It was bitter. Not just bitter—it tasted like acid. I spat it out. “It’s sour.”

  Her eyes widened like she hadn’t wanted me to confirm that the wine was sour, like she had wanted me to tell her that the wine was fine and that it was her Other taste buds that made it sour. She shook her head and a trembling lip accompanied her worried expression. “Exactly. I believe we’re all in grave danger.”

  “That’s a bit of an overreaction for one bad bottle of wine.”

  “Is it?” she said, and Marty stretched out from under the tablecloth and came back with another bottle of wine. “Try this one.”

  I put the bottle to my lips. The wine tasted like battery acid fermented in spoiled grapes. “Yuck … it’s awful.”

  “Exactly!” Medusa said. “It absolutely is. Think about it, Jean. That earthquake was unnatural. It lasted far too long.” Medusa paused. “And that’s not all. The sky fell, Jean.” She pointed up past the table’s ceiling and to the spot where the chandelier no longer hung.

  “OK—fine. Stars fell. So what?”

  “So the sky literally fell right after the earthquake. And now the wine is sour …” Medusa shuddered. “The last time I drank sour wine after an earthquake, a city was leveled by hellfire.”

  “Oh, come on—don’t tell me that there was sour wine in Atlantis.”

  “Not Atlantis … Sodom.”

  “Oh,” I said, and followed it up by a decisive and firm, “Crap.”

  “You’ve got to believe me, Jean,” Medusa said. “These are signs. I’m sure of it.”

  “OK. Let’s say I buy into your signs theory. What are these signs for?”

  “What do you think? The end of the world.”

  ↔

  Medusa’s somber expression told me that she wasn’t joking. She believed that the earthquake, the fallen chandelier and the sour wine all pointed to the end of the world. I looked over at the Queen of the Gorgons as she absently petted Marty. Her lower lip was cutely caught between her teeth, and she had a pouting expression as she worried about the world ending. Again.

  But that was just the problem. Others had lost their homes. And I don’t care what kind of creature you are—suddenly losing everything you own is one of the most traumatic experiences you could ever live through. It isn’t just about living in a new place. It’s about losing the place that had once made you feel safe. Lose that, and it won’t matter where you end up—you’ll never feel safe again. There was never a study done to confirm this, but I suspect that most of the Others had some form of posttraumatic stress disorder, being constantly worried about the next tragedy and when it was going to strike them.

  When you live in constant fear, it’s easy to see signs that aren’t there. And when you are a creature born of magic, it’s even easier to see earthquakes, chandeliers and sour wine as signs of bad things to come …

  I took Medusa’s hand in mine and said, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” she said, her voice immediate and full of dread.

  “OK—let’s rationalize this. You said these are signs, but I’m sure there is a natural explanation to every one of them. Let’s take it step by step. The wine—The BisMark ordered all food from one source. It stands to reason that we didn’t just get a bad bottle, but a bad batch. Also, do we even know that the wine is sour? Maybe this is some weird troll wine that’s meant to taste like sulfuric acid mixed in brimstone.”

  “Brimstone doesn’t taste like this,” she said in all seriousness.

  “It was a joke. But can we at least entertain the theory that the wine was either meant to taste like that, or that the supplier sent us a bad case of it?”

  Medusa hesitated before nodding.

  “OK—now the earthquake. You know how much The BisMark wants to make his party a big deal. He even told me that the world would be watching. Have you seen how many cameras are out there? Exactly two. The world doesn’t care about his party, and it must drive him crazy. So why not add a little oomph by making the world shake? He’s this all-powerful Other, right? He can afford to spend a year or two shaking things up.”

  “You think it was magic?”

  I nodded. “I think it was The BisMark’s magic. Or one of his gargoyles was trying to please its master. I mean, it could be that, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And as for the chandelier actually being stars … I figure that he’s just boasting. What if it is just really, really expensive crystals imbued with a ton of time?”

  Medusa shook her head. “That’s where you’re wrong. They really are stars.”

  “No way can that be true.”

  “Yes, they are … How do you think the gods paid The BisMark? With gold? No. A guy like that was paid with the most valuable commodity the gods traded in. Stars.”

  I narrowed my eyes, skeptical. “Not actual stars.”

  “Yes—actual stars.”

  I shook my head. “You’re serious, aren’t you? OK—but what did they pay him for?”

  “For organizing the world. Think about it … Do you know how many gods, demigods and AlmostGods there are? And they all have dominion over the same things—fertility, crops, sun, war,
life, death … the list goes on. Can you imagine the pandemonium that would’ve happened if God A chose winter for the crops to grow, and God B chose summer? And what about the gods who wanted perpetual winter or summer, or a planet where it rained frogs all the time? Nothing would get done, and the world would be torn apart. Hence the definitions—fertility meant the same thing to all the gods because The BisMark defined it so.”

  “Do you mean the Laws of Nature?”

  Medusa nodded. “Yes. And someone had to negotiate the parameters under which they could operate. Hence The BisMark. But the Laws of Nature are only one aspect of it all. You have the other, less tangible stuff …” She let the word “stuff” hang in the air like it was self-explanatory. It was not self-explanatory.

  “Like what?”

  “Miracles. Holy symbols. Stuff like that.”

  I stared blankly at Medusa.

  “The gods get their power from worshippers. They get worshiped by providing. If there are limits to how much they can give the mortals when constricted by the Laws of Nature, then they are left to obtain them through other means.”

  “Like impressing us. Hence, miracles.”

  She snapped her fingers and pointed at me. “Exactly! But if the gods flooded the world with miracles, then all sorts of unnatural stuff would occur, and the world would once again be thrust into chaos. So The BisMark defined the parameters of miracles. How many? How long? How powerful? Who could be the avatars? Could the gods appear in person, or did they have to use agents? You know … parameters.”

  “Regulating miracles, huh? Like the Trade Commission.”

  “Oh, no. The BisMark did not concern himself with trade. The gods could do as they pleased.”

  “Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. “OK, so The BisMark was the Master of Logistics, and he was paid in stars. Fast forward to now—what did this BisMark fellow do? Accidentally set off an apocalypse?”

  Medusa shrugged. “Maybe? It’s not like the gods took their apocalypses with them.”

  The magnitude of what she said hit me. It was one thing to have an all-powerful being attack you, but it was an altogether other thing to be faced with what these so-called responsible gods might have left behind without first dismantling it—their weapons of mass destruction, or rather, “apocalypses of total destruction.” I looked over at a clearly concerned Medusa. “How do you accidentally set off a world-ending event?”

  “Who knows? There are literally thousands of ways to annoy the gods. It has to be something big, though. Something the gods would have taken as a personal offense.”

  “Like what? Making fun of Zeus’s beard?”

  Medusa’s eyes widened. “Zeus would have struck you down, but no—he wouldn’t have ended the world over that. It would have to be something else, like desecrating holy ground, or—”

  “Oh, come on … if it were that simple, the world would’ve ended a hundred times already.”

  “True. But you have to distinguish between actually ending the world and only threatening to. Gods used to threaten that all the time, only to turn around and stop the calamity before it destroyed everything. Think about it … the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Black Death, the numerous famines that wiped out millions. All calamities that could’ve ended the world were it not for divine intervention. The way they saw it, a near-apocalypse once a century or so kept you mortals in line.”

  “Except there hasn’t been one in like a thousand years.”

  “Really?” Medusa eyed me as if questioning how intelligent I was. “What about the Great Plague? The Irish Potato Famine? The World Wars? Global warming?”

  “Those aren’t apocalypses!”

  “Plague, Pestilence, Famine, War … sounds like the four horsemen to me. But the reason why you see it differently is because human ingenuity got you out of it. No divine intervention needed to avert the end-of-the-world stuff when you had science to counteract the effects. I’m sure that’s part of the reason the gods left—they could no longer threaten humans with apocalypses—” Medusa started when razor-sharp talons appeared under the tablecloth’s hem. “Jean?” a voice said.

  Miral.

  “Under here,” I said.

  Miral lifted the tablecloth and peered under, letting in a draft. Then, completely ignoring home fort protocol, she crouched down and got under the table. “Cozy,” Miral said.

  “Medusa is scared that an apocalypse is about to happen,” I said way too defensively.

  Medusa handed Miral a glass. “The wine is sour.”

  The angel sucked in her breath. She took a sip. “This is bad … It tastes like Sodom,” she muttered under her breath.

  “Guys,” I said. “It’s just wine.”

  Miral ignored me and looked at Medusa. “Which pantheons have these signs?”

  “Oh, it’s been a long time since I studied these … Judeo-Christian traditions, Nordic …” Medusa’s eyes widened as some realization dawned on her.

  “Please don’t say it …” Miral said.

  “Assyrian.”

  “No,” Miral said, and crossed herself.

  Another hand came down on the tablecloth and drew it back. This time it was Conner’s face that appeared. “Ahhh, Miral. Are you guys OK?”

  “Just enjoying our fort,” I said.

  “OK. Well, then. I understand that you guys have different approaches to parties … but I’m pretty sure we’re meant to dance.” He looked behind him. “At least I think that’s dancing.”

  “Not now, John,” Miral said, pulling the tablecloth down.

  “ ‘John’?” I asked. “Not ‘Officer Conner,’ or ‘Human John’—just plain ‘John,’ huh?”

  “Oh, shush,” Miral admonished. “If you must know, I plan on using this human to better understand your culture.”

  “So you’re using him?”

  “Yes,” Miral said, without sarcasm or guile. “I doubt he minds.” And she was right. I couldn’t imagine a soul in this world or any other that would mind being used by Miral.

  “You know, I can hear you,” John said.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said with a devilish smile. “Come on in. I’ve officially invited you into our fort.”

  “Jean, don’t—” Miral started, but it was too late. In a flash John crawled under.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked, his blue-gray eyes catching the soft light underneath.

  “The girls were just about to tell me how the world is going to end.”

  “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” The Hollow Men—nice! I liked this guy.

  Miral sighed. “Silly mortals. It will not end in a bang or a whimper. It will end in screams, as we are all devoured by the beast from beneath.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Not a T.S. Eliot fan? Besides, last I heard, signs went out of fashion when the gods left.”

  “Jean,” Medusa said. “Signs of the end of the world are universal. Earthquakes, plagues, meteor showers, volcanic eruptions, floods, locusts. Those are the overt ones. Then there are the more subtle ones—things like a man born with two different-colored eyes or the perfect Red Heifer. Signs, big or small, are just as deadly. And there are only seven signs to the end of the world. We’ve just had three.”

  “Earthquake, sky falling, sour wine,” I confirmed.

  “Good job.” Miral’s expression was completely devoid of sarcasm, which somehow made her compliment worse.

  “So … what? We wait for the other signs?” Conner asked. He was either taking this way too seriously or trying to impress his date.

  “There are two ways to avert an apocalypse,” Miral said. “Beg the gods for forgiveness or stop the other signs from happening.”

  “I guess we should focus on the latter,” I said.

  Miral rolled her eyes at me. “This is serious, Jean. First of all, we need to know what set this off … We must figure out which tradition has been offended, so that we can counter the—”

  And as if in answer to Miral’s question, we heard a c
ry. “Get off me, you ungrateful whelps!”

  We all popped out from under the table to see Atargatis being attacked by her seven children. Their faces were no longer human, their eyes widening as their jaws opened to reveal row after row of sharklike teeth.

  “Oh, no,” Medusa said. “Another sign. Matricide.”

  Momma’s Gotta Die

  Atargatis’ scream was somewhere between the utter terror of being eaten by monsters and the complete frustration with your child for just drawing all over your expensive ottoman. “Get off me, you ungrateful whelps,” she cried out again as she pried off the youngest girl and threw her across the room. The child hit the opposite wall with a thud, dropped to her knees and then stood up like she had just fallen off her tricycle. Turning to the other six, Atargatis yelled, “What are you doing? It is forbidden for us to fight one another.”

  “Mater-what?” I asked Medusa.

  “Matricide—children turning on their parents.”

  “That’s a sign?”

  Medusa and Miral nodded, and seeing the little girl attack her mom, I understood that we weren’t talking about teenagers acting out.

  The girl—who looked like she was four—jumped onto a table, pointed at her mother and in a toddler’s tiny voice said, “But, Mommy, you ate our brother. That was naughty.” She wagged her finger and immediately the other six did the same. “Naughty,” she repeated.

  “Naughty,” the children chanted through their shark teeth, “naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY!”

  “But Maggie! I didn’t know,” Atargatis pleaded. “I was tricked. Mommy would never hurt one of her children. Mommy would never hurt one from the Pool of Urfa.”