The Mythniks Saga

by Paul Neuhaus

  After a moment of listening, Calesius vocalized what I was thinking. “It sounds like the world changed around everything. Civilization’s still there, but the surrounding terrain is different.”

  The thing that stuck in my head right then was how Cal sounded when he talked. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “But when I saw you last, you were, well, you were kinda insane. I mean anyone would be after being the only living thing in Olympus for thousands of years. But now, like a month later, you’re not only completely rehabilitated, you sound pretty hip to the modern world.”

  “I was mostly nocturnal, like I said. I watched a lot of TV. In fact, if you wanna know the truth, when I saw the world had changed back there, I panicked. I panicked about two things and they were, in order of importance, is Keri okay? and is TV okay?”

  Elijah and I both laughed. “It sounds like your priorities are right on the money,” El said.

  It didn’t take us anywhere near as long to get back to L.A. as it did to get to the Conclave. I skirted Westwood and took us right to my trailer in Malibu. When we pulled into the Tonga Lei parking lot, we got a rude surprise. My trailer wasn’t there anymore. It’d been burned to the ground. Everyone but Keri was crestfallen. I parked so the trailer was in full view and said, “Hold on a minute… This happened once before.”

  “People make a habit of burning down your trailer?” El asked.

  “No, they don’t. That’s the point.”

  I got out. From the corner of my eye, I saw Elijah glance at Cal like ‘Do you know what she’s talking about? I don’t know what she’s talking about’. Cal shrugged so El got out of the car and followed me. “What’s going on?”

  “Right before I got involved with you and Keri and Addie, I had another crazy adventure. That one had Medea as the heavy. Medea was a Mistress of Illusion. She made it look like my trailer’d burned down so I’d stay away from it. I was hoping it was that kind of deal all over again.”

  Wiener sniffed the air. “It doesn’t smell like an illusion,” he said.

  I went over to the skeletal remains of my home. Bits of what remained were taller than other bits. I reached out and grabbed a jagged piece of the outer wall. It broke off from its base and came away in my hand, trailing ash. “It doesn’t feel like an illusion either.”

  “No, Dora. What you’ve got on your hands here is a fresh case of arson.”

  “Swell,” I said, dropping the trailer hunk. ” What the fuck’m I gonna do now?”

  He shrugged with his shoulders. “You’ll come with me and Keri to Westwood. The couch in my office folds out into a bed. You’re gonna sleep there until we get this figured out. Besides, I’m sure I’m gonna need your help with Keri. Cal says there’s no Cold Turkey from this thing she’s on, but she’s a fifteen-year-old girl and none-too-stable to start with.”

  I sighed, seeing no alternative. “The couch in your office? Your brony office?”

  He flushed crimson as if that cat wasn’t already out of its bag. “You saw that?”

  “Yeah, how do you think Keri and I found you? Besides, it’s not like you weren’t already out of the closet.”

  We started heading back to the Firebird. “I wish you wouldn’t put it like that,” he said. “I’m not less of a man because I like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.”

  “Yeah? Well, you ain’t exactly John Wayne either.”

  Driving through Santa Monica to Westwood was a surreal experience. It was exactly as we’d left it except the terrain and the colors were all wrong. Everything was bright and vivid, and there were pine trees everywhere. There were very few people on the streets and the sidewalks. I guess, in that sense, the newscasters’d been right: It was like 9/11. I remember that day, and almost everyone was inside, glued to their television set.

  “God, this is crazy,” El said. “I recognize the place, but I don’t recognize the place.”

  Something occurred to me then. “It could be worse,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was inside Pan’s pinecone. Remember: It was his virtual reality sex world. So far, I haven’t seen any cherry-bottomed nymphs or well-hung centaurs running around. Nephus was selective in what he chose to bring from that world into this.”

  “Cherry-bottomed nymphs you say?”

  I smirked at my ex-. “They would eat you alive.”

  “Are you speaking from experience?”

  “No just from hearsay. Apparently, nymphs don’t fuck around when they’re… fucking around.”

  “They don’t,” Cal said from the back. “Trust me.”

  El and I shared a quick glance. Both of us were suddenly a little afraid of Cal.

  I parked the Pontiac on Elijah and Keri’s street and we all got out. As soon as we started walking toward the house, Jack came out of his own little dwelling. He was frantic. “Thank god you’re back,” he said, waving his arms over his head. He was talking to El. “You know those things I think’re happening sometimes, but then they’re really not happening at all?”

  “Yeah,” El said patiently.

  “I thought this was one of them, but then I went outside, and I touched everything, and it never stopped being a figment of my imagination. I figured what I was thinking happened happened. Either that or I’d finally gone around the bend.”

  Elijah checked to make sure Cal had Keri by the hand then he threw his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “You haven’t gone around the bend, but what happened shouldn’t’ve happened. We’re trying to figure out how to fix it.”

  “Was it magic?” Jack said, wild-eyed like a child.

  “You know what: I’m not going to lie to you. I think it is magic.”

  “I knew it,” Jack whispered, nodding to himself.

  “Come on to my house until we get it sorted. I might need your help with Keri.”

  “Is she sick? She looks strange.”

  “No. She’s been drugged. We need to flush it out of her system.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Drugged? By who? Who would drug Keri?”

  “Bad guys,” was all Elijah could say.

  “If you see these bad guys come around here, would you turn me loose on them? Nobody does bad to me and mine.”

  “I know that, Jack.”

  El and I made eye contact. Jack might’ve been impaired, but he was also fiercely loyal.

  Elijah and I could only watch as Calesius got Keri settled in her bed. The girl still wouldn’t let her father or I anywhere near her. Once she was in and the door was closed, Cal stationed himself outside like a Beefeater at the Tower of London. I had only two memories of Cal prior to that day. One from when he and I had stood together making snarky comments about the other guests at Adrestia’s Sweet Sixteen and one from when he’d been an abandoned, feral creature in the stables of Olympus. I decided to take the wild man out of the equation and focus on the before and after. All those thousands of years ago, Cal’d been nothing more than a pleasant guy to stand around and shoot the shit with. Now he was a full-grown, very serious man. I liked what he’d turned into.

  With Keri tucked away, El opened the outer door to his office and ushered me inside. There was an inner door too. I had to open it to get into the room proper. I’m sure the house came that way, but the little vestibule was handy for discouraging people curious about whatever lay inside. That’s how Keri’d remained ignorant about Elijah’s brony-ness. “Well,” I said. “It’s been a trying day. At least it’s cheery in here.” I was referring to the plush ponies tucked into every nook and cranny and the cardboard pony mobiles hanging from the ceiling.

  “That’s the spirit!” my host said to me. “Do you maybe wanna watch My Little Pony with me sometime?”

  “Not even a little bit,” I said honestly.

  He dug his fingers into the seam between the seat of the couch and the back and pulled until the couch folded out to become a bed. “I’ll get you some sheets and blankets in a minute.” He went around the desk. “I
want you to stay here as long as you need to. You’re an old friend in need and I’m a friend indeed.” He opened the desk drawer and drew something out of it. It was a framed photograph and he pressed it against his body because he didn’t want me to see it.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing at all.” Then he turned and walked out as quickly as he could. I knew it was a photo of he and I together. A photo from a long time ago.

  I sat down on the bare bed and picked up the briefcase from where I’d left it on the floor. I turned the top edge toward me and looked at it. Unfortunately, I saw exactly what I was hoping not to see. Two combination locks, one on either side. I called to Calesius in the hallway. “Say… You wouldn’t happen to know the combination to Sebastian’s briefcase, would you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, stepping away from Keri’s door and coming into the office. He took the case from my hands, held it against his body with one hand and dropped his elbow onto it with the other arm. The blow was hard and the top popped open as if it’d been violated. I smiled at him, again impressed with his brutish efficiency. He turned around to resume his post. Before he could go, I said to him, “Can I ask you… Are you and Keri having a romance?”

  He took a deep breath and his eyes shot from side-to-side as he found the right words. “I don’t think it’d be fair to call it that,” he said. “And I’d certainly never say it without Keri there to corroborate. Let me just say I think Keri is the bee’s knees and I hope she feels the same.”

  I burst out laughing. “‘The bee’s knees’?”

  He grinned. “Remember when I said I watched a lot of TV? Turner Classic Movies in my favorite. I’ve seen virtually every black and white movie made between 1930 and 1950.”

  I smiled wider. A smile designed to show my complete approval. “You’ve got excellent taste, Cal. In women and in movies.”

  “Seconded,” Hope said from where I’d placed her on the floor.

  As soon as Cal resumed his position in front of the door, I put Squire’s briefcase in the middle of the bed and began riffling through it. Amongst the office supplies and bits of personal detritus, I found a thick manila folder and a black leather diary. I flipped open the book and found that it was written in Greek, in what I would’ve assumed to be a woman’s hand. Interesting. As you do in that situation, I smelled the pages and put the diary down. The book aside, I opened the folder. Pay-dirt. On top of the stack of papers, were several eight by ten black and white photos of the Parthenon Restaurant. The very photos I’d seen Sebastian try to conceal a month before at Acadine. Under the photos was a stack of papers all of them with a very legal slant. Deeds, contracts, bills of sale. All of them related to the building and maintenance of Squire’s pride and joy, his compound somewhere in the mountains of suburban L.A. All the documents had been funneled through a company called The Fotiá Corporation. “Fotiá” was the Greek word for fire. The folder contained the full paper trail any competent lawyer would need to make a case. The Fotiá Corporation was a shell company, a vestigial limb of the—surprise, surprise—Church of Reciprocity. Given the fact, Squire was at the Conclave—painted-up and playing the bongos—I was not exactly bowled over.

  I tucked the papers and photos neatly back into the folder and picked up the diary. It was very, very old. The pages were yellowed and stained, and it was better-bound than anything you might pick up at Barnes and Noble today. I opened it to page one and began the slog. I’ll be honest with you: My Greek is pretty rusty. You’d think something like that’d stay with you (especially if it’s your first language), but I hadn’t spoken it consistently in thousands of years. I guess speaking a language isn’t like riding a bicycle. Was the book Squire’s? I didn’t think so. He showed no signs of being a Mythnik himself, so I don’t think he was living an especially long life. Though the entries weren’t dated, it looked to me like the writing had begun a good while ago. Also, as I indicated, the handwriting looked feminine to me. Not that that means a whole lot. I could think of at least one man with feminine handwriting and his name rhymed with “Felijah”. I struggled with the first paragraph. Here it is more or less:

  I went from Paris to Marseilles alone. From there it was across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco. I had both money and influence, so I obtained an exit visa. From Lisbon, I went to New York City and set foot for the first time in the so-called New World. I did it alone and in a perpetual state of disgust for my fellow travelers. Foul-smelling and dull-witted creatures, all.

  Right off, I could see my humble narrator was not a good traveler. Nor was she—I was still convinced it was a she—especially fond of other humans. I also knew—not from my knowledge of history, but from my knowledge of the movie Casablanca—that the first entry was made in the early- or middle-1940s. The journaler was relating her experience escaping the Nazis during World War Two. I’d had a similar experience myself, though I’d come by a different route. I flipped through the pages to the back of the book and struggled through the final entry as I had the first. Here’s that last entry:

  I’m still haunted at night. ‘Dreams’ I’d call them, but they seem so tangible. ‘Visitations’, is a better word, I think. Tassos and Cressida come to me and in their left hands they bear fire; in their right, they bear water. I believe these gifts to be symbols of their divided minds—if I may ascribe such a condition upon them now that they are gone. The conflicted nature of these visions gives me some consolation. Were I to meet my children again in the world of flesh, I would expect them to come bearing only fire.

  Wow. Just wow. I had to read the passage twice, but I was fairly certain I knew who was speaking to me from beyond the grave. Who else could it be but Medea? She’d murdered her own children. Twins. A boy and a girl. I couldn’t tell when the entry’d been made, but if it was from Medea’s hand, I’d been there when she met Tassos and Cressida in the word of the flesh. They sure as hell came bearing fire.

  El came back in with sheets, blankets and a pillow. He dropped the items at the foot of the bed since I was busy reading. “Whatcha reading?” he said.

  I was mildly startled. “Oh, I was going through Squire’s briefcase. Turns out the Church of Reciprocity not only owns Acadine, but funds Sebastian’s entire operation.”

  My host’s tone was sarcastic. “The hell you say!”

  “I know it’s hard to believe. There was also a diary in here. I think it might be Medea’s diary.”

  “Refresh my memory again. Which one’s Medea?”

  “Married to Jason of ‘…and the Argonauts’ fame. She helped him get the Golden Fleece. Years later, his eye wandered, and he got some strange. Medea found out about it and murdered their children for revenge.”

  “As you do.”

  “As you do. Right before Keri came to me looking for you, I had a crazy adventure involving Medea. She tried to open the gate to Tartarus in the Underworld and release the Titans.”

  Wiener scratched his head and thought for a moment. “Wait. Don’t tell me. I’m thinking back to my Edith Hamilton. The Titans were the first gods. The parents of Zeus and the others. Daddy Titan ate the kids to avoid an uprising. Zeus cut himself out to lead said revolt.”

  “Correct. And then Zeus banished the Titans to hell’s basement. Place called Tartarus.”

  “Why would Medea want to release the Titans?”

  “To start a new pantheon of gods and set herself up as queen.”

  El smiled. “Wow. Delusions of grandeur much?”

  “I know. But it was barely a delusion. She almost succeeded. If her kids hadn’t come back from the dead due to a weird, temporary loophole in the natural order, she’d have pulled it off.”

  “They talked her out of it?”

  “No, they murdered her. A clear case of ‘turnabout is fair play’.”

  “No shit. What’s special about this diary?”

  I thumbed through the whole book, watc
hing the tight, clean handwriting flash by. “I… don’t know, but I feel compelled to read the whole thing.”

  “Is now a good time for that?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t help thinking it’s significant somehow. Otherwise, what would Sebastian Squire be doing with it in his briefcase? Also, just to deepen the mystery… There’re photos in here of the Parthenon Restaurant. When I was investigating the whole Medea thing, Medea had photos of the Parthenon Restaurant stuck to a mirror in her living room.”

  “Huh. Are you hungry?”

  I stood up and rubbed the blood back into my legs. “I am. I’m starving. What’ve you got to eat around here?”

  “As you probably remember, I am no chef. However, I do keep the kitchen stocked with canned and microwavable meals in dizzying varieties.”

  “A smorgasbord with some assembly required…”

  “Correct.”

  “Good enough.”

  I went out of the office and made for the stairs. El stopped outside his daughter’s bedroom to ask Cal if there’d been any developments. There hadn’t.

  I entered the kitchen and there was Jack. The Wieners had an island with stools around it. Elijah’s damaged twin was sitting on one of the stools eating soup. “Heya, Jack. Whatcha got there?”

  “Soup. Vegetable Beef, but it’s that kind with tiny hamburgers in it instead of pot roast-y meat.”

  “Good?”

  “Really good.”

  I went over to the pantry and a moment’s search produced another can of soup with tiny hamburgers instead of pot roast-y meat. I pulled Jack’s pan out of the sink and poured my meal into it. I set the pan on the stove and sat down across from Jack.