Close to the Ground

by Jeff Mariotte

  Kate remembered him saying that his friend — probably Chuey himself, she knew, but one had to leave informants their dignity — had encountered a man with a gun when he’d tried to go through those boards. She had no illusions about what would happen if they were made as cops.

  Newberry, ever the gentleman, let her go first.

  Up close, she could see that a flat piece of plywood, about four feet wide, was simply laid over the other boards. This was the doorway, then—they slid this out of the way to go in and out, then placed it over the opening. There were several small nails driven into it, probably where they tacked it into place if they were going to be gone for a while. But none of the nails were driven home now. It was just loose.

  Newberry stood to one side, his weapon pointed past Kate at the opening. She touched the plywood with her left hand — her right held her weapon — closed her fingers around its edge, and tugged it back an inch. The inside was dark. She pulled it wider, trying to let some of the light from a nearby streetlamp inside. There was nothing from within, no sound, no motion. Wider.

  Now a single shaft of light stretched from ceiling to floor. Kate blew out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. The service bay seemed empty. She pushed the plywood the rest of the way over, drew a flashlight from a pocket, and shined it inside.

  Newberry came in with her, playing a light of his own across the bay. His beam came to rest on a shovel with a broken handle abandoned in a corner.

  “Looks like the place,” he said.

  “Could be,” she agreed softly. She inched closer to a well where mechanics once stood to work on the undersides of cars, shone her light inside.

  And found the beginning of the tunnel.

  “This is it,” she said quietly, looking at the black, gaping mouth. “They dug from that bay into the storage tank, then across to — somewhere. Some bank.”

  “This isn’t a big neighborhood for banks,” Newberry said.

  “Even the poor are allowed to have bank accounts, and some of them do,” Kate said, knowing as she did that this was no time to argue sociology with the agent. “I’ll go back out, find whatever bank is nearby, and call for backup. You stay here and keep an eye on this end. I’ll have the backup meet us at both places as soon as I know where I’ll be.”

  “You go find the bank,” Newberry agreed. “I’ll call for backup, though. Keeping in mind that this is a Federal operation.”

  Kate opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again. It wasn’t worth arguing. The Feds would know that they couldn’t bring this crew down on L.A. streets without bringing in the LAPD as well.

  “See you later,” she said. She left him alone in the gas station and went back into the street, looking in every direction for a building that wasn’t a rundown apartment or a vacant lot or a corner market.

  Backup, Special Agent Newberry thought. For an operation like this? Any agent who couldn’t bring in punks like these didn’t deserve to carry the shield. He climbed down into the bay and entered the tunnel.

  The city of Los Angeles contains incredible diversity, and nowhere is that more evident than in the range of wealth to be found there, from incredibly rich to heartbreakingly poor.

  In one of the poorest neighborhoods of all, there was a corner building, made of brick painted white across the sides and top, left natural underneath the tall, iron-barred windows. A neon OPEN sign glowed in a lower corner, but the place looked anything but welcoming. Another sign, higher up on the window, said something in Korean and LOTUS SPA — KOREAN MINERAL BATHS in English.

  Just what Doyle was looking for.

  The streets were a fine place to seek information about what L.A.’s criminal element was up to. But the races of demons had their own hangouts, and the Lotus Spa was one of them. He tugged open the barred door and went inside. The waiting room was empty, but a young Korean man stood behind the cheap pressboard counter.

  Soon, the desk clerk, said something to him in Korean. Doyle didn’t speak a word of it, and Soon, if he spoke any English at all, would never admit to it. Doyle tried a couple of lines of Ano-Movic — as a group, these demons were highly assimilated into human culture, which made their language a natural bridge between the two worlds. Doyle thought he remembered Soon responding to Ano-Movic in the past.

  “Hi, Soon,” he said. “I’m looking for Angel. You heard anything about him today?”

  Soon responded with a swift barrage in Korean. Again, Doyle didn’t catch any of it, but he under-stood the intent. Suppressing a groan, he reached into his pocket and drew out a twenty-dollar bill, which he smoothed flat and placed on the counter.

  “Anything at all?” he asked.

  “About Angel?” Soon replied in fluent Ano-Movic, scraping the bill smoothly into his palm. “Not a word.”

  “But something else? What do you mean?”

  “I might have heard a couple of guys talking while they were taking some steam,” Soon said.

  “Talking about what?” Doyle demanded, growing angry at Soon’s obfuscation. “Damn it, Angel’s been missing all day. He’s never done you any harm. If you know anything, I want to hear it now.”

  Soon put up his hands defensively. “Don’t make threats. If you want cooperation, that is not the way to go about it.”

  “Spare me the philosophy,” Doyle grunted, dragging another bill from his pocket. “This is it. I’m broke after this, so you can’t squeeze any more outta me.” He dropped the bill onto the counter.

  It vanished into Soon’s palm. “A couple of sensitives,” he said. “They were tense. One of them was griping about the level of mystical activity flowing down this way from the hills. Put him on edge. He compared it to being in a dentist’s chair having his teeth drilled for twelve hours straight — said he wished it would go away, but it just kept building.”

  “That’s fine, but what’s it got to do with Angel?”

  “I don’t know if it has anything to do with Angel. You asked if I had heard anything out of the ordinary. You know this place, lot of things most people would consider out of the ordinary walk through these doors. But that’s the only thing I’ve heard today that sounded especially strange.”

  “What hills? What do you think is causing this?”

  “Hollywood Hills, the guy said. I heard there used to be some strange stuff going on up there, long time before I was born, though. Some movie star magician lived up there, used to practice his craft. But it hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of magical activity, last few decades. Too much nouveau riche, day traders, and brat actors buying up property. No respect for tradition.”

  “You remember his name?” Doyle asked. “This magician?”

  Soon thought a moment, until Doyle became convinced he was fishing for another payoff. But there was nothing left to give. He was ready to turn and go when Soon slapped his own forehead a couple of times. “It’s there but it won’t come out,” he said. “Pembroke. Pemberton. Something like that.”

  “I’ll look it up,” Doyle said. “Thanks for your help, Soon.”

  “I never saw you,” Soon replied, followed by a couple of staccato bursts in Korean. Doyle slipped out through the barred door.

  And ran straight into the arms of a demon named Koffliss.

  “Doyle, buddy,” Koffliss said when he saw who he had bumped into. Koffliss stood almost seven feet tall, as broad as a doorway and as muscular as a weightlifter. Three short purple horns protruded from his orange-skinned forehead, and patches of the same color purple spotted the back of his bald head and down his thick neck. He smiled a toothy grin with absolutely no genuine humor in it. “Been looking for you.”

  “I been looking for you, too,” Doyle bluffed, thinking, just what I do not need. Tell me again why I gamble? “All over town. I thought sure you said you were gonna be at that Sports Bar on Sunset, waited there all night.”

  “Well, I’m here now,” Koffliss said.

  “So you are,” Doyle agreed. “Damndest thing. I had your dough,
not ten minutes ago — you were right about those Padres, I’ll never bet on them again — but I was lookin’ for some information, real important, you know. And that guy Soon squeezed me for every dime. So I’m a little financially embarrassed at this exact moment. I’ll, uh, liquidate some assets and come find you when I have more coin in my pockets. Where you gonna be, say, three hours from now?”

  “I’m thinking I’ll stick close to you,” Koffliss told him, giving his arm a crushing squeeze. “Protect my investment, right?”

  “That’d be great, really,” Doyle said. “But these people I have to go see about, you know, liquidatin’ those assets? Humans. You don’t exactly pass, if you know what I mean. They might get a little freaked, and then where’d we be?”

  “Yeah, but —”

  “Listen, you got a pager, bud? ’Cause I can just beep you when I got the dough, we’ll set up a place to meet, how’s that?”

  Koffliss considered this proposal for a moment. “You got anything to write with?”

  Doyle patted his pockets. “Fresh out. Just tell me the number. I got a real head for numbers.”

  Koffliss recited a number to which Doyle didn’t even bother to listen.

  “I don’t wanna keep you,” he told the big orange demon. “Go on in, get a rubdown. I’ll be in touch soon.”

  “You better be,” Koffliss warned.

  “You can count on me, bud,” Doyle said. By the time Koffliss was inside the spa, Doyle was a block away.

  Some demons, he thought as he hurried away, are just too dumb to be allowed to exist in civilized society.

  “The Magnificent Pennington,” Cordelia read off the computer screen.

  “That’s gotta be it,” Doyle agreed. He sat in one of the guest chairs, watching Cordy search online.

  “‘Arthur Pennington took Hollywood by storm in 1939, turning a background shrouded in mystery into a calling card into the homes of the rich and famous,’” she read. “‘Rumors abounded about his early days, some saying that he had been a stage magician in Kansas City, others that he had performed primarily at high society children’s parties in Philadelphia, before moving to Hollywood in the mid-twenties. Pennington himself never revealed anything about his early life, apparently preferring to let the rumor mills run rampant and imbue him with the stuff of legend. Persistent stories had him traveling and studying extensively in Europe, even at the times that he was supposedly in various parts of the U.S. making his name as a prestidigitator of only moderate talent. Whatever his background, when he suddenly hit in Hollywood, it was in a big way. He performed in several hit motion pictures, including the Big Broadcast series, before being offered a star turn in his own Saturday afternoon serial. . . .’ That’s really it. The rest just tells about the movies he was in, then a TV show in the fifties, and then he died.”

  “Does it say where he lived?” Doyle asked.

  “No, not this article.”

  “Can you cross-reference him or something? Isn’t that what the Internet is supposed to be good for?”

  “I thought it was good for making sure everyone knew the same set of bad jokes,” Cordelia said. “And I know a site with some good skin care advice. Maybe if we had Willow here — she was great with this online stuff.”

  “I don’t know who Willow is,” Doyle said, “but she ain’t here and we don’t have time to find her. Keep lookin’. We gotta find out where this Pennington guy is. If he’s come back to life or some-thin’, it might explain where Angel is.”

  “I’m looking,” Cordelia said. “Give me a break. I mean, I took a computer class in high school, but it wasn’t my life or anything. You think I’m some kind of closet geek?”

  Doyle turned his head away, hiding a smile. “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think that.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Angel had, finally, dozed.

  It had taken awhile. Hanging there by his wrists wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep. The pain was excruciating — pain in his arms, his shoulders, his back, his legs. But he had let his mind drift, eventually reaching a place where the pain was pushed aside and his thoughts floated free. Images came to him, unbidden, rushing as swiftly as a roaring river. Doyle and Cordelia and Kate Lockley, his best friends in Los Angeles, and the City of Angels herself, sprawling across the hills and flats of the Los Angeles basin. At night the city’s glow lit the sky, and looking down from a high point, a turnoff on Mulholland Drive, say, or Coldwater Canyon, it looked like the sky turned upside down, glittering stars as far as the eye could see.

  Then L.A. faded away and Sunnydale replaced it. The town was far smaller, but its residents were precious. The beautiful face of Buffy Summers, the Slayer, and still the only girl Angel had ever truly loved, came to him. In his mind he heard her voice, but couldn’t quite make out her words. Then she was gone, and her friends were there, the ones she called the Scooby Gang. Willow, Xander, Giles, the werewolf Oz.

  And still his mind floated, as if untethered to any reality. Friends and enemies mixed together in a blur of mental pictures. Spike and Dru, Darla, Heinrich Josef Nest, Angel’s father, mother, and sister. The landscape changed and changed again, from Southern California’s coastline to Manhattan’s jumbled skyline to the dark and eerie forests of eastern Europe to the rolling green hills of Ireland.

  A sound brought Angel back to consciousness — and to the pain.

  Mordractus had returned.

  He looked ancient.

  He was dressed, once again, in raw white linens, a knee-length tunic and trousers. This was not the same outfit, though, or since he had been here before he had inscribed bizarre symbols on his clothes in a purplish ink. This time he wore slippers of what looked like soft white leather, and a cap of the same covered his skull. A few strands of wispy white hair issued from beneath the cap.

  His face was a map of lines and crevices. Even his blue eyes looked cloudy now, half-hidden behind folds of skin. Liver spots mottled his hands and bony wrists. He looked to Angel as if his age had doubled in the hours since Angel had seen him — and though he had no way of knowing how many hours had passed, he was sure it hadn’t been decades.

  The noise that had awakened Angel was caused by Mordractus scraping the plain wooden table across the floor. The old magician dragged it to a certain spot, near the circles he had painted earlier. He stepped back from it, looked at it, carefully eyeing its position in the room. Then he returned to it and shoved it a couple of inches to the left. Once again, he stood back, then pulled it forward ever so slightly.

  When he seemed at last satisfied, Angel spoke up. “I think it’d look better by the window,” he said. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t have a window.”

  Mordractus scowled at him. “Keep telling your jokes as long as you can,” he said. “Not much time left now. It’s midnight, Angelus. You know what that means.”

  “I’m worried,” Angel said. “See me shaking? Oh, wait, that’s you, trembling with age. You sure you’ll live long enough for this?”

  “Don’t you worry about me, Angelus,” Mordractus said. “You’ve your own skin to fear for.”

  “I’m a worrier,” Angel said. “It’s what I do. What happens to you if you don’t bring Balor through on time?”

  “Let’s just say that, should I end up in the Otherworld myself at some point thereafter, there would be many who would be glad to see me come. And they wouldn’t be my friends.”

  He padded across the stone floor, carefully avoiding walking across any of the lines he’d previously painted, and went back to his rough wooden cabinet. From this, he withdrew several items wrapped in black fabric. He carried them back to the wooden table, where he carefully undraped each one in turn and set them in a line on a bolt of rich purple silk which had been spread on the tabletop. As he unwrapped them and set them out, he muttered words that Angel couldn’t understand. From the tones he used, though, the rising and falling of the words, they sounded like prayers in some language that was old when the
world was young. When he was finished, he took the lengths of black cloth back to the cabinet and put them inside.

  Angel had encountered many aspects of the supernatural in his long life, and though his experience with the rituals of black magic was limited to hearsay, he recognized the objects that had been so carefully placed on the table.

  A long wooden stick, carefully sanded and polished and oiled: the Rod. A knife, sharp-edged and gleaming, with a handle of chipped black rock: the Dagger. A goblet, of hand-blown glass: the Cup.

  Mordractus returned to the table, which Angel had come to recognize was to fulfill the function of an altar, bearing two fat candles of a grayish-pink substance. They looked unclean, and Angel was not eager to smell them when they burned. Mordractus stood these on the ends of his altar and went back once again to the cabinet.

  “You know, candles are on sale at Wal-Mart,” Angel said. “You could replace those old things for a song.”

  Mordractus gave no indication that he had heard. He went about his business, totally focused on what he was doing. Angel knew that concentration was mandatory in these rites, was, in fact, largely responsible for the success or failure of the ritual. It was said that the “magic” was often nothing more than the magician’s mental power, focused so powerfully that he was causing his own intended result through sheer will.

  From the cabinet Mordractus — by now continually speaking — brought a brazier and an earthen jar. He set it down near one of the points of his five-pointed star and poured what looked like an assortment of herbs from the jar into the dish. He returned the jar to the cabinet and brought out several long wooden matches. He struck one against the floor and dropped it into the brazier. A ball of flame burst up from it, then lowered to a soft crackle. The herbs smoked, releasing a sharp tang of incense into the room. That was where his brain was to be pureed, Angel figured. Mordractus took another match, struck it on the underside of his altar, and touched it to both candles. They spat and caught fire, casting a flickering light into the room.