The Hollywood Incubus

by Rowan Casey

  THE HOLLYWOOD INCUBUS

  ROWAN CASEY

  CONTENTS

  Series Summary

  Veil Knights Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  In book one of the Veil Knights series, THE CIRCLE GATHERS, stage magician and sorcerer extraordinaire Dante Grimm brings ten strangers together, informing them that they are the living avatars of the original Veil Knights, brave men and women reincarnated many times through the millennia, most recently as the Knights of the Round Table, who pledged their lives to protect mankind from supernatural threats and enemies.

  In the distant past, the Veil Knights had combined the power of several arcane talismans into the Caeg Dimmre, the Key of Wickedness, which was used to construct a mystical barrier between our world and the Demimonde, preventing the supernatural races that inhabited the realms on the other side from continuing to ravage our humanity. The talismans were then split apart and hidden away in the far corners of the earth, there to remain until the time should come when they might be needed once more.

  That time is now.

  The Veil is falling, weakened by age and the machinations of those on the other side. Grimm knows that unless the pieces of the Caeg Dimmre are brought together again, the Veil will fail entirely, releasing the darkness that it has kept locked away for so long.

  In desperation, Grimm convinces the knights to assume their mantles once more, to undertake the quests necessary to bring the pieces of the Key back together so that they can be used to strengthen and reinforce the Veil.

  These are their stories.

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  1

  I died on April Fool's Day and, if I’m being honest, I couldn’t help but think the joke was on me. But do you want to know the funny thing? The real side-splitter? That wasn’t even the worst thing that happened to me that day. That honor goes to waking up again, Groundhog Day style, to see a guy with pretty intense Goth makeup caked on his face, looking down at me and saying, "Oh good, you’re awake," like I’d just nodded off and hadn’t met my maker.

  I knew I was dead, or rather had died, but I had no idea how it had happened. A bullet to the side of the head? A baseball bat? Some lucky lady’s unlucky man? Traffic accident? Terrorist incident? A bad burrito? Just how badly can you die? Let me count the ways. Gunned down in a hail of bullets, mob style? Crucified in the middle of some gangland turf war? That was very LA wasn’t it? A speedball flameout? A case?

  That last one was the most likely, given how I ply my trade in the City of Angels.

  I was disoriented. Parts of my memory were a fog. Like I was trying to stop myself from bringing back the grisly details.

  To live and die in LA, that was some American Dream shit right there, that was. Of course, it didn’t help that at any given time half-a-dozen Angelinos wanted to off me for their own very personal reasons. The question was who had I pissed off now? Well, that was one of the questions, the main one was how the fuck was I back here, in bed, very much alive and well and living in this modern day hell of our own design? And, "Who the fuck are you?"

  The guy smiled this infuriating 'I know something you don’t know' smirk and said, "All in good time. The important thing is you’re awake."

  "It’s my special skill," I said. "I do it every morning."

  "Well, if you don’t work out who tries to kill you before tonight’s out you won’t be doing it tomorrow."

  I stretched, sat up, and realized I was naked. And I wasn’t in my own bed. My brain started to join the dots, decided Makeup Man here was a lover, either mine or my latest trick’s, and he was threatening to kill me because I’d blacked out during our tryst. Not very gentlemanly of me. I should probably apologize.

  I didn’t.

  Sorry isn’t a word I like to admit is in my vocabulary. It isn’t particularly useful in my line of work.

  I should probably tell you a little more about myself before we get into what happened next, right? So, my name’s Sam Lake, Samuel Lakshmi to be more precise, but no one calls me that, not even dear old Mom. Pop hasn’t been in the picture for a decade. Heart attack. I probably drove him to it, to be fair. I wasn’t a good kid. I was too busy having a good time. That meant a little blow, a little girl action, a little boy action, a little more blow and some really fucking bad decisions. I came home one night and found him there, sitting in his chair watching Survivor. That was ironic, given he hadn’t. Survived, that is. Massive coronary. Didn’t know what hit him. Didn’t even get to finish his beer. That probably hurt him the most, knowing he was going out with a perfectly good bottle of Coors on the table beside him that he’d never get to drink.

  I was born and raised in LA. Guess I should start thinking about that differently now, try phrasing it ‘lived all my life in LA,’ or ‘from the cradle to the grave, it was always LA that owned my soul’ or some shit like that. I didn’t do particularly well at school, despite people telling me far too many times that I was gifted, and that I was wasting my gift by skating by on my looks. But, hey, that’s what pretty boys do. We might pretend like we are all deep and worried about the ills of the world, but that’s a crock, you know it and I know it. If the world keeps on turning that’s just fine and dandy, and means we can keep on doing what we’ve always done. Still, somehow, I graduated from high school and wound up going to a halfway decent college, on a pretty boy scholarship. Okay, that’s not true. I probably shouldn’t lie to you as enough weird shit is going to go down between us in the next twenty-four hours, so I owe you the truth as often as I actually know what it is. The scholarship was athletic. I had a gift, like I told you. I was faster than the other kids. I was stronger. I could jump higher and farther. I was what they call a decathlete. Ten disciplines. I prefer to think of it as a jack of all trades, master of exactly none.

  Of course, I flamed out at college. Blew up my knee when I was showing off on a board off Venice. It wasn’t pretty. I was in hospital for a month, pins and plates in my leg. My ex used to call me the bionic man, like they had the power to rebuild me. All it means is I can set off the alarms at airports and drive the TSA mad.

  With the knee blown, options went way down. It looked for a while like I might actually have to do some proper work. Then my mom gave me my old man’s Pentax. It was a proper old-school camera, 35mm film, wonderful Zeiss lens. She thought I might be able to get some use out of it. I thought I could relive Rear Window and totally Hitchcock my way through rehab, keeping myself amused by spying on the neighbors. One thing led to another, by way of another, and I ended up taking photos of people who didn’t want to be photographed for a living. Yep, I sank that low. I was a celeb shooter. A pap. Sometimes I got good tips, but no matter how good they were they were never going to beat ‘that’ photo. I’d made a life’s worth of a living of that one shot. It was the only one in existence. That single frame of someone’s life. It became the iconic image. The guy’s estate paid me a cool two mil for the image rights so they could put it on the cover of his final album. Why they’d want the moment of death up front on the gatefold sl
eeve I couldn’t tell you, but when you’re talking about a multi Grammy Award, MTV cult hero, forty-five million copies sold, and all that pizazz, you have to assume they know their market. But fuck me, seriously, you can see the skin opening up around the bullet, the blur of the cap and the first blood. The guy paid me to shoot him shooting himself. He’d told me it wasn’t loaded. It was a prop. They’d used it in some Hollywood Confidential thing. So, I’d sat there, worrying about the light, firing off shots, and caught the moment Carson Kurtis blew his brains out on film.

  All hail the modern life.

  Of course, loads of people, including the cops down at Hollywood Precinct, thought I was in on it. No one wanted to believe that I was the true victim here. Of course, with two million notes in my back pocket the words innocent and victim didn’t really feature high up in anyone’s thinking, my own included. See, honesty. I’m going to tell you the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

  So when I say a case, it could be I got a lead for another photo of a lifetime, or it could be that I was still hung up on the celebrity deaths that had been haunting Hollywood for the last six months. Oh, yeah, that’s what we in the trade call "burying the lead."

  It’s like this, first it was some B list actress, I don’t even remember her name, that’s how famous she wasn’t–a few guest spots on the daytime soaps, a corpse on a CSI light–what I do remember is that she’d turned up dead, hollowed out actually, so the skin was there, and the bone, but the actual meat of her body was gone. I can’t explain it much better than that. You know the idea that 90% of our body is water, imagine all of that water dehydrated away, and only that other ten percent of gristle and bone or whatever it is left behind. For a while they hadn’t been willing to identify the body, or even call it a body for that matter. They’d thought it was some sort of practical special effect thing left over from a horror movie shoot, that's how screwed up this city is. She was the first, she wasn’t the last. Over the next six months thirteen more starlets and pretty boys turned up in a similar mess, drained. The cops, bless their hearts, were clueless, even when the clues were right there staring them in the face. But it’s not like Hollywood Precinct are going to say, "Right, yeah, those fourteen murders in the city over the last six months, the ones with that weird ritualistic shit, yeah, we think some sort of black magic voodoo bullshit is behind it." They’d be laughed off the front pages.

  Fourteen bodies, and various occult sigils left on the skin of the corpses left behind. Burned in, to be more precise. I’d got a buddy in the morgue. He let me photograph the dead for a little baksheesh. I scratched his back. He scratched mine. So, outside Hollywood Precinct I was the only person apart from the killer who had a clue about the occult link and the curious sigils. I’d done my research, too. I’d Googled the crap out of them. Not much came up that wasn’t linked to a bunch of games and shit like that, but I’d found a link to an esoteric bulletin board, we’re talking retro tech so far from the information super highway it barely counted as online. There was a guy there who’d been helping me decipher the sigils. He seemed to know what he was talking about, though a part of me did wonder if I was talking to the killer. He’d actually sent me a message the night before I died, so, last night, deciphering the last mark. He went by the screen name Dante Grimm, which as far as I was concerned had to be made up, but this was Hollywood, everyone was pretending to be someone they weren’t, so I wasn’t about to make a big thing of it. Hell, my screen name was PeggingLuver because it was linked to an old spam email I used to sign up for dodgy porn. Sometimes, smart people just don’t want you knowing who they are.

  Anyway, Grimm messaged, he’d had a breakthrough. The fourteenth sigil was some sort of binding spell from Sumeria. It was meant to make the victim into a vessel, though what sort of vessel and for what sort of substance he didn’t know yet. But he had a lead. A Sumerian expert. I had no idea such things existed.

  That message from Grimm, I realized, was the last thing I could actually remember.

  I looked up at Make-up Man and tried again. "Who the fuck are you?"

  "You know my name. You know me."

  I shook my head.

  "Grimm. Dante Grimm," he said, like he was doing a James Bond audition, now that Daniel Craig was on the way out. "And I need you to wake up."

  "I told you, I am awake. I’m talking to you. It doesn’t get more awake than that in my world."

  This time he shook his head. "I thought it was going to be easier this time. Sam, listen to me, we don’t have time to go over this again, you need to wake up, and you need to work out who killed you and why. You’ve got no idea the lengths I've gone to bring you back, or, quite frankly the magic involved. It’s draining. I can feel myself coming apart at the seams, and as much as I enjoy our chats, I’m not about to die for you while you dick around not remembering who you are. So, you are going to wake up, even if it kills me."

  "I didn’t think you were prepared to die," I said, and kinda regretted it the minute it was out of my mouth. Sometimes there’s wisdom in silence.

  "There’s a woman. She’s waiting to help you. She knows you are coming because you came yesterday."

  "I did," I said, "twice actually. Second one was much better."

  "I need you to shut up and listen, Sam. Go to the Le Brae Tar Pits. There’s a woman. She knows what you need to wake up. she’s waiting for you. Our lives depend upon it."

  "That’s very melodramatic, Dante."

  "I’m not the one who died.”

  2

  I did as I was told. Eventually.

  I like driving. Even in the city. I inherited my old man’s beat-up Mustang. Never thought once about trading it in or trading up. Every knight needs his trusty steed, though in my case it’s more rusty than trusty.

  I drove, sunglasses and radio on, windows rolled down, wind in my hair, camera on the seat beside me because I never go anywhere without my camera. I’ve traded up from the Pentax a long time ago. I don’t shoot on film much. Most of it is digital these days, like so much else.

  Still, I drove the familiar streets, down Highland, across Sunset, toward Wilshire. These streets were the essence of old LA to me. This was where the industry was founded. This was where the moguls hit on the starlets pre-Weinstein’s very public unravelling. Everyone knew about the casting couch. It was legendary. As were the parties. The stories I grew up listening to about Erol Flynn and Clark Gable, about soon to be president’s and fading stars, they all came alive in this place. One of the first sights my old man took me to see was the hotel room where Marylin had lived when she was entertaining Mr. President. I stood on the balcony inside the old Roosevelt and listened to him tell me how her ghost still roamed those marble halls. Like i said, old, proper Hollywood.

  And while La Brea was one of the sights, it wasn’t the kind of place I ever hung out. I was more of that nightclub/brothel kind than a big bubbling pit of black tar. But Dante had insisted, and to be honest it was just good to get some fresh air and try and figure some shit out. Not that my brain was in any sort of shape to handle the metaphysics of being born again yesterday.

  Even so, I didn’t get the feeling Dante Grimm wanted me to swing by the visitors shop and buy a ticket, which meant being a bit creative. I pulled up outside the chain-link fence on the north side, music still blaring out of my speakers. It was my old man’s summer mix tape, ninety minutes, the ends of two songs sliced off early, nothing more recent than 1989 on it. I regularly treated the canyons of the city to Alphaville and Simple Minds, a bit of the Police, Bryan Adams and Don Henley. Like I said, summer music. The old man was a sucker for it. I inherited the sucker gene.

  It was still early morning. I didn’t see anyone about, not that I figured anyone was actually going to stop me from breaking in. It’s all about looking like you belong, and most of my life is spent sneaking into places I’m not supposed to be. The unwritten rule of the paparazzi was if you die on the job you do so at your own risk. And besides, what was the abs
olute worst that could happen to me? I wind up getting killed? Melting in the tar? Well, what’s a few hours and a different kind of macabre end between friends?

  I scaled the chain-link fence and dropped down onto the other side.

  I could feel the heat, and it wasn’t just the regular LA morning, which, frankly this time of year was hot enough to do your eggs sunny side up on the sidewalk without a griddle.

  Moving fast, I kept low, darting from the fence to the cover of black rocks maybe fifty feet away. Blackbirds circled overhead. They cawed aggressively, like they were trying to tell someone I was down there. Those birds gave me the creeps.

  I scanned the bubbling pits. There was a layer of leaves and dust over everything. I was a fair distance from the display of the mammoth trapped in the tar. This place is famous for that. Well, not the mammoth per se, but the discovery of animal bones from creatures that had become caught within the tar pits, unable to cross them or retreat, and ended up dead and decomposing in natural asphalt.

  I could see the palm trees up ahead.

  What I couldn’t see was the woman I was meant to meet.

  The only other time I’d been here we’d done the whole tour and I’d listened to a well-meaning guide trying to get me excited about the idea that the tar wasn’t actually boiling, and that the bubbles were actually down to bacteria escaping from below, releasing methane. I’d made the expected fart gag. That’s me, always lowering the tone.