by Rowan Casey
"I’m here," I called out, turning in a circle, counter-clockwise, scanning the landscape of the tar pits looking for the woman. I turned a second circle, shading my eyes from the sun. I thought I’d caught a glimpse of something out in the middle of the tar, but I must have been mistaken. Right? I turned again, three times, three circles, and as I came around to stare straight forward again I saw it, and knew I wasn’t mistaken. As downright weird and urgh to think about, I saw a woman’s hand rising up from within the black stuff, the oily tar peeling away from her fingers as her hand reached up for the sun.
More of the woman’s hand emerged.
Dante had said I’d been here before, that she was expecting me because I’d already done this once, but how utterly fucked up was it? I watched, rooted to the spot, as more of her arm emerged from the tar bed, and realized that she was holding something in her hand. I hadn’t seen it at first because of the tar that still clung to her skin, but there was no mistaking it now.
I was looking at a gun.
And not just any old gun, either, this was a proper piece. A work of art. A 1908 Colt. It was weapon of the original gangster kings. It was the weapon Dillinger had drawn in the bank seconds before he died. They hadn’t made one of those beauties in seventy years.
Oh yeah, I’m a bit of a connoisseur when it comes to ways of killing people. I’ve always been fascinated with guns. Hell, I always figured that was the way I’d go out.
In the thirty seconds I’d stood there like a muppet on the edge of the lake of tar, the woman’s entire arm had emerged, and now I could see her face and all I could think was she was stupidly hot. Like even for LA where everything is nipped and tucked, inflated, buffed and sculpted. There was no way I was moving for fear I’d stop hallucinating and the gorgeous woman would simply evaporate.
I watched as the tar rolled down the nape of her neck revealing that little shadow at the base of the throat I always found so sexy, and across the planes of her shoulders and the swell of her breasts, her brown skin slick with the natural oils of the tar running off her.
She was naked.
But that wasn’t anymore disconcerting than the fact that she’d been living under the tar without, oh, I don’t know, needing the breathe or anything.
"Come," she said to me.
"Not happening," I said from the sidelines, thinking of the mammoth.
"Come," she said again, and this time she held the gun out to me. "It is time for you to take up arms. This is your fight."
I shook my head. I don’t even want to think about what we must have looked like to anyone in the gift shop: a naked black woman holding a gun on a blonde haired, blue eyed All American boy with his sunglasses on and his James Dean rebel without a clue t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a packet of smokes tucked up against his bicep like something out of a different time.
Then again, it was Hollywood, they’d just assume someone was shooting something and they couldn’t see the cameras. That was this place in one easy image.
But, fuck me, seriously, I took a step into the tar. I didn’t want to. No man in their right mind wants to. Even so, I took a second and a third step and kept on walking until I was waist deep in the tar and close enough to the naked woman to reach out and take the Colt from her hand.
"Arondight," she said in a voice that frankly could have sounded sexy reading the yellow pages.
"You what?" I countered, wearing my ignorance on my other sleeve, balancing out the cigarettes.
"Your weapon."
I had no idea what she meant, right up until the second my hand closed around the pistol grip and I understood that Grimm wasn’t asking me to be some sort of socially aware dude who grasped the whole importance of Black Lives Matter and the sheer injustice a black man in my world faces just because of the color of his skin–or black woman with a 1908 Colt for that matter. He meant wake up in a whole different sense of the word.
Deep within me I felt something change.
Snap.
Break.
Tear.
You can pick any synonym you like, something fundamentally shifted inside me and I found myself looking at the world with new eyes. The gun wasn’t a gun at all, it was a sword, a gleaming blade, and its name was Arondight, a French name for a French blade wielded by perhaps the greatest knight to ever leave the homeland of chivalry and venture into the heathen hinterlands of Britain in search of a greater king and master.
I knew it all.
I knew everything I had ever done in the name of valor. I knew every foe I had faced. Every enemy I had slain on the field of battle and every vow I had ever pledged, including the one that brought me here, to La Brea, waist deep in tar, holding a gun that hadn’t been fired in a century.
I held the gun in my hand and it knew me, too.
We were joined.
There was a symbiotic link between us, just as the memories flooded into my head, they poured the other way, too, and Arondight remembered. Though the weapon’s memories were more blood thirsty, it was more than steel. It remembered earning the title Lord of the Joyous Gard, and the quest for the Saint Graal. It was all there in that second, all of the lives I had lived, the names I had owned, and the link they bore to who I was now, in this place, this life, Sam Lake. I caught myself wanting to laugh at that. Lake. It seemed like the lake haunted all of my incarnations.
"Launcelet du Lac," the Lady of the Tar Pit Lake, Nimue, named me, and she wasn’t wrong.
I was awake.
Whatever the fuck that meant.
I presumed I was in the middle of some sort of psychotic break that had happened right around the moment the dead black girl bubbled up in the tar and the rest of it was all my mind trying to wrestle with the implications of being found beside a dead girl with a gun in my hand.
Today was starting to feel like a bad day.
Again.
It shouldn’t have surprised me, I mean, logically everything from this moment on lead to me ending up on the coroner's slab. It was the definition of bad days.
"The Veil is failing, the vow you swore to the druid is all that binds you to this place. Our enemies are at the threshold. They would see the way to the Demimonde open, undoing centuries of sacrifice. That cannot be. You cannot let that happen. That is your curse."
"How?" I asked, stupidly, looking down at the gun in my hand and somehow seeing both the sword it had once been and the gun it now was at the same time.
"You are not alone. Your brothers and sisters have returned. You are the last to wake. They are waiting for you. Seek out Arthur, seek out the Grimm, stand side-by-side with Gawain and Galahad. You will know how to fight. It is in your blood. Let the last traces of magic of this place fill your body. Let the waters lap around you. But know this, agents of the Demimonde are working here. They know you are awake. For them to win, you must die."
Which went a long way towards explaining why today was such a shitty day. Demonic agents from a parallel world wanted me dead. That wasn’t one I would have put top of my guesses about how I died an hour ago.
I holstered the Colt, sliding it beneath my belt and untucking my t-shirt to hide it. I didn’t have a carry permit, but paperwork was the least of my worries.
"Remember this, the bones never forget. Everything they live is written into them. The answer is in the bones. Always."
I thought she meant mine, that I would remember everything about who I really was now that I was awake, and wanted to tell her I already did. I was wrong. She didn’t mean my bones at all. She was talking about the fourteen dead wannabies who’d been lured to Hollywood by the promise of fame.
But that only occurred to me as I clambered back into the seat of my old man’s Mustang and Men Without Hats told me I could dance if I wanted to.
I didn’t feel like dancing, unless it was on a serial killer’s grave. And then it wasn’t so much dancing as unzipping and urinating all over it. You say tomato, I say watersports.
3
Suggs
was busy telling me it must be love, love, love as I pulled up outside the office. Yeah, I didn't mention that, did I? I'm all respectable. I've got a nice little place in Westwood. Got it for a song. Not the one on the summer mix right now. I didn't have the heart to tell dear old Suggsy after all this time it really wasn't love, not for me, at least. I was only ever in it for a good time.
I parked up and went inside.
Sindii was already inside, working the coffee maker. She flashed me her .99 cent smile, all enamel whiteners and fancy Mexican orthodontics. "Hey beautiful," she told me, doing her best to invert the stereotype.
"Sindii," I said. All business. "What have we got on the docket for today?" Which translated to what am I going to have to blow off because someone pretty nasty wants me dead.
"You're going to like this," she promised.
"Tell me, tell me," I said like I cared.
"You got a call about an hour ago from the most infamous woman in town." Which, let's face it, could have been a lot of women in this town. In fact it was probably the one place in the world where more people were famous for doing dumb shit than reaching any great career heights, but then this is the age of the Kardashians. Talent doesn't have to win out when there's a sex tape to be exploited. And, believe me, I should know, because the last time a certain B lister called me was because she wanted exactly that, a supposedly leaked home vid, carefully shot and sympathetically lit to show her best features while she gobbled like a turkey. It was her fifteen minutes of fame. Well, eleven minutes and seventeen seconds. The guy did pretty well lasting that long to be honest. I'm not sure I would have.
"Evienne Nemi."
"Seriously? Madam to the stars Nemi? That, Sindii, is some unexpected twist to my morning routine. I approve."
"Thought you might."
Nemi was something else. She ran a boutique hotel over on Sunset called The Garden Encantada -- the Enchanted Garden -- the place is a hedonist Mecca famous among the right people as an NH hotel, as in it Never Happened, whatever it was.
I'd been there once upon. Well, more accurately I'd staked it out for a shot of one of the fabled NH parties, hoping to get me an A lister doing the dirty in the pool. She'd spent a not so small fortune converting the buildings around the pool into Spanish style villas. There were twenty in total, which meant a lot of Hollywood Royalty could make like a lot of stuff never happened at any given time. The parties went on through the night. Rumor had it a couple of old-timers from the last real Golden Age still rented out rooms there, living out their last days in the excess of sex and drugs they'd been drawn to all those years ago. It was that NH party that never stopped.
Nemi herself was a legit business woman, fingers in every pie imaginable. There'd been plenty of talk about her sorting out sex parties and hook ups for the stars who didn't want their proclivities to come out, but none of it ever got beyond the campaign of whispers and the court of public opinion. There was plenty of dirt, but none of it stuck.
"So what did the lady want from me?" I was assuming a sex tape job, to be honest. Sex and money make the world go 'round.
"She wouldn't say. She'd only talk to you. She was insistent. I told her you'd go to the Garden soon as you got in."
"And you don't keep a woman like her waiting. Got it. Well, I don't mind admitting there are worse ways to start the work day." I'd almost said day, but given mine had started by being told I was basically living the last day of my life again, a one time or bust do-over, and had taken a gun from a naked women in the Tar Pits, my day had already started in a pretty insane fashion. So, what was a trip to the brothel that catered to the A Lister's every kink for a healthy fee, total discretion assured? I figured I'd grab a decent coffee on the way. That was one good thing about LA. The place had been overrun in recent years with hipster douche coffee houses, and let's face it, the one thing those artisanal, bearded barista's are good for was proper coffee.
Sindii, love her to bits, couldn't tell the difference between a pot roast and a Columbian roast.
I didn't even bother going to my desk--where I'd intended to stash the Colt. Instead, I blew right out of there, down the stairs and out onto the street in time to beat the traffic cop's ticket. It was a game we played. They'd write me up, I'd get out of it. The one time they actually got me, it was for bribery. The guy had been writing me up and, being the good soul I am, I'd offered him the tray of Dunkin Donuts, figuring who could resist a Double Chocolate Cake or a Boston Kreme, or my own personal favorite, the Glazed Sourcream? The cop thought I was screwing with him, you know, the whole cops and donuts thing, and he hit me with a $146 ticket, plus the California State surcharge of another $30 for the privilege. I could have contested it, but it would have worked out costing an arm and a leg with legal fees, and no one was going to give me a fair shake with a jury trial, I mean, donuts. What was I thinking?
I was in and away before the traffic cop could lick the tip of his pen, which they always did, and listening to Fish ask if I remembered chalk hearts melting on a playground wall? Honestly, big man, I don't remember much about those days. I was mostly baked, and there were a few times I'd tried shrooming, so yeah, they probably did melt, and turn into crocodiles that talked with a Spanish accent and wanted to gobble me up. Kids, if you're listening, Nancy was right, Just Say No. It's not worth it. Unless you're in a medical marijuana state and can score some primo weed on prescription. Stress and glaucoma are the two most popular illnesses to hit the Doc in a Box this year.
The drive to Nemi's place on Sunset took seven minutes, and that included stopping for coffee across from the Chinese Theatre. It was a little farther than I needed to go, but the Bean House roasted their own blend, and okay, yeah, I admit it, there's a woman who works there that I've been trying to convince I'd be a really great mistake. She always writes Bad Decision on my cup instead of Sam. I kinda like it. It's all part of the cut and thrust of the modern world. And it's much more fun than just swiping right.
From the street, The Garden oozed curb appeal. The Spanish hacienda style walls were covered with colorful climbing flowers and bougainvillea. The garden path was a mosaic of broken red stones, lined with clay bricks. The grass was lush, well-watered despite the perennial irrigation ban, and the vacancy sign proudly displayed No. I parked and followed the red brick road. Before I was halfway to the door, it opened and the madam herself stood in the doorway. She had a whole Morticia Adams thing going on, Angelica Houston style, not Carolyn Jones. "Be still my beating heart," I said, loud enough for my voice to carry. Needless to say, she wasn't impressed.
"Mr. Lake? If you would like to follow me."
She led me though the main house to a poolside cabana, where she slipped out of something comfortable and into the shade.
I didn't know where to look, given in the pool there were two half-naked men I'd watched put themselves through some fairly impossible missions, and right now they appeared intent on redefining the anatomy textbook. Good for them, says I. Nothing like a bit of skin. Touch is underrated. It's one thing you miss when you have no one. Just that simple every day connection, brushing fingertips or hips as you pass each other in the kitchen. Look at me getting all sentimental in the onrushing headlights of doom. I missed my calling as a marriage guidance guru.
"Okay, you got me, Miss Nemi. What can I do for you? Something illegal, I'm guessing?"
"Oh, Samuel, Samuel, Samuel, I'd never ask you to break the law. No, no, no. That's not my style."
"So, what would you ask?"
She leaned back in the shadows, letting them do their shadow dance around her like Venus in her half-shell. "This city has a problem with corpses," she said.
"Hard to deny," I agreed. "Front page news, on top of the fold. Or at least it was, until people started thinking Black Dahlia and Son of Sam. People get jittery and no one wants to be reminded just how screwed up this town is."
"What would you say if I told you I knew who was doing it?"
"I'd say you should talk to the la
w."
"It crossed my mind, but the last thing I want is to bring unwanted attention to my little garden, you understand?"
"I do. The rich and famous pay for anonymity. They want to let their freak flag fly the original It Girl, but they don't want to worry about it ending up in Hello."
"Beautifully put. You have a way with words, Samuel."
"It's Sam," I said.
"Is it really now?" She said, like she knew I was Superman underneath my clever Clark Kent specs.
"So what’s the plan, you tell me who our boy is, send me after him and I deliver him up to the cops in a nice ribbon and everyone lives happily ever after?"
"Something like that. But first, I need you to tell me what you know about the Church of the Dead Stars?"
"The what now?"
"That's what he calls it. It's his faith. He is the Messenger of the Church. That's what he calls himself."
"Sounds like some cheesy B roll horror shit," I said. I'm a regular Siskel and Ebert, me.
"He believes he is fulfilling a destiny that goes back centuries, to the great betrayal that shut off this world from the wonders of the Demimonde," that word brought me up short, I looked at her differently after that. I couldn't help it. What did she know? Was she part of the Circle? "Ah, I see you are familiar with the name of the Shadow World? That will save some time. The man you are looking for has one goal behind his slaughter: he is offering up the blood sacrifices he believes will lead to the tearing of the Veil and allow our world to become whole once more. There are others out there helping him. They are his disciples, hence the Church."
"I love the way you say this shit like it's all just totally normal and not batshit crazy."
"He is marking their bodies with sigils of unbinding, reversing the compact that rose the Veil in the first place."
