“A friend of mine is still in the asylum. Do you think there’s a chance if she’s still in there that she’s alive?”
“I couldn’t say, but it’s my understanding that whatever inmates remain in the asylum are of a more benign nature. The ones with strength and will escaped long ago.”
Something tickles my hands and legs. Drytts. Hell’s sand flies. They’re not dangerous, just disgusting. If they find you and you stay still too long, others will come and you’ll end up buried in them.
“We can’t stay here. You have one hour to get us to Eleusis.”
“One hour or what?”
He sounds defiant, like I hurt his feelings.
“Or I’m going to think you’ve been fucking me around this whole time. Don’t forget. I’m the one with the knife. Let’s start there and let our imaginations go.”
He nods at the back door.
“The quickest way is that rise a hundred yards off. It’s also the steepest and most dangerous.”
“Lead the way.”
“Is that an order?”
“A polite suggestion.”
THE RISE JACK was talking about is a whole intersection that’s been punched up out of the street at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. A couple of restaurants, a small shopping center, and a gas station hang in the air over our heads. The sinkhole below is so full of wrecked cars and motorcycles that it’s nearly level with the street. The junk stews in the same bloody sewage that was in the sinkhole outside Hollywood Forever.
I start climbing, hanging on to gas pumps at the bottom and moving up to the empty garage. When I make it around there, I pull myself up on metal parking-lot crash posts. I turn around to check, and see Jack slowly following me up. I don’t think he’s happy to be around me anymore. His whole theory about fate having a reason for tossing us into the same salad has evaporated. He looks like all he wants is to get through this without ending up in Tartarus with Mammon.
As Jack climbs, cracks form under his handholds. He’s followed me through the garage and is pulling himself up the crash posts. As he puts his weight on each post, the cracks under it widen. The last two posts wiggle like rotten teeth. My arm is wrapped around the solid base of the shopping-center sign. I move up to a newspaper vending machine that’s anchored in the sidewalk. Jack grabs onto the solid foundation of the shopping-center sign before the posts give way.
When he’s secure I crawl into the entrance of a liquor store. If you cut through the place, the back door will take us to the top of the rise.
The liquor store stinks inside. A thousand broken bottles of wine, vodka, beer, scotch, and soda have soaked through a mountain of junk food and the whole mess is piled against the front counter and front wall. The floor is sticky with dried booze and sugar, which is disgusting but helps me keep traction as I climb to the storeroom in back. Jack is right behind, baby-crawling past the empty shelves.
I’m at the back door when the shaking starts again. It’s so subtle that it’s almost not there. It feels like the muscle memory of a nasty dream. I thought it was an earthquake, but I think our climbing has upset the delicate balance that’s kept this slab of L.A. junk wilderness upright.
The shaking turns into a steady vibration. Two heavy bodies scraping against each other. The bottles beneath us clatter together. Softly and then like a truckload of xylophones being pushed down a long flight of stairs. It’s hard to hold on to the shelves as the tremors deepen. Parts of the ceiling fall down on us. There’s a sick liquid moment when the whole intersection shifts. Up ahead, the rear wall cracks and the rest of the ceiling starts coming down. The whole liquor store is sliding forward.
“Move your ass, Jack.”
I scramble past the shelves and kick off the top one, grabbing onto the door frame at the top. I climb to the back of the storeroom and pull on the door. The twisting building has jammed it shut. I grab the doorknob and shove the black blade into the metal lock. It pops out and clatters against the wall like a bell. The door swings open and I pull myself up onto the rear step.
Jack is stumbling over office furniture. Cracks open at my feet. The store is breaking away from this last anchor of ground.
The building growls and creaks like an iron elephant with the bends. It lurches. Slides left and down. Jack is pulling himself up on the door. I grab his wrist as a subterranean shriek of snapping concrete and sheering metal launches the liquor store down the way we came. It crashes into the garage and both structures shatter like hundred-ton dollhouses before disappearing into the sinkhole below. The slab sways like it’s bobbing in a bathtub and begins to fall. I grab Jack and jump to the roof of a dry cleaner’s beyond the edge of the slab.
I tuck and roll as we hit. Jack flops like a sockful of oatmeal thrown from a speeding car. When the section of road hits, one of the cleaner’s walls collapses and we slide down the roof like worn-out kids at the worst amusement park in the world.
Jack and I lie on the broken pavement until the dust settles. We only slid a floor, so our asses are spanked and bruised but we’re pretty much intact.
Jack was right. Eleusis is right where he said it would be. There’s a twenty-foot stone wall topped with broken glass across the street. It’s exactly how I pictured it. It wouldn’t be Eleusis without the wall, Heaven’s vision of paradise in the abyss. Hell’s only gated community.
JACK IS STILL on his back when I get up and head for the wall. A couple of minutes later I hear him behind me.
“Thank you for saving me back there.”
“Don’t mention it. Really. Don’t.”
“I still think we were brought together to accomplish something bigger.”
“If everything works out, maybe I’ll get a chance to stop a war. That’s pretty big, don’t you think?”
Jack grunts.
“Anyway it’s all, as the big brains say, academic, Jack. I saved you from Mammon and you got me to Eleusis. We’re even-steven.”
Up ahead, a gutted city bus has jumped the curb and plowed into the stone wall. The damage is mostly blocked by the bus’s body, but through the windshield I can see where part of the wall has collapsed. I glance back at Jack. He looks nervous and a little confused. Is that a good look or a bad look for a serial killer? Whichever, I want to cut this freak show loose. I climb into the driver’s-side window and call back to Jack.
“Take it easy, man, and thanks for the memories.”
He yells something after me, but I don’t stop. I kick open the front door and head into the city.
Finally Eleusis.
Fuck me.
I wonder if Kasabian is watching me through the Codex? Is he eating pizza with Candy and giving her a blow-by-blow? He must be laughing his ass off by now.
Eleusis, God’s city in the Inferno, halfway across Hell from Pandemonium, is part of goddamn North Hollywood. Light Bringer, Lucifer’s biopic, was supposed to be shot in a Burbank soundstage just a couple of miles up the freeway. I’m still in L.A. This whole fucking world is L.A.
I’m almost there, Alice. I think. I hope. Who fucking knows anymore? I could walk a block and end up back in Venice or the cemetery. We seem to have come in a big circle from Hollywood back to Hollywood. But it’s not the same Hollywood. And where I am can’t be entirely random. Mammon was taking me somewhere and Jack has been taking me somewhere and I don’t believe Mammon but I do believe Jack. He didn’t have any reason to lie. He thought we were partners, Hope and Crosby on The Road to Zanzibar.
This is what I get for putting my life in the hands of a crazy road spirit. Mustang Sally would love wandering around like I have. More streets, more roads, more crazy-ass tracks in the dirt for her to claim. You’re going to get a lot more salty peanuts than candy the next time we meet, Sally. No more sugar rushes for you.
I hear stones crunch and fall behind me. I’m not scared. I recognize Jack’s footsteps. Don’t get too close, Loony Tune. I really want to punch something right now.
On the other side of the rubble is a
big intersection. Malls and parking on one side. A forties-style apartment house on another. The Scientology Celebrity Center nearby. There are bodies curled up under the dead trees and bushes where they’ve turned the celebrity center into a pagan flophouse. Most are dressed in hospital greens and bathrobes. A few are in straitjackets that look like they’ve been gnawed apart. There are even a few demented hellions with them. Refugees from the asylum. Finally something like good news. I’m getting closer.
There’s faint noise in the distance. Yelling. Gunshots. Maybe even engines revving. Someone is having fun somewhere in Eleusis.
I should probably wait and get the lay of the land but one of these Sleeping Beauties knows where to find the asylum. I step down from the rubble and head across the street to the parking lot.
I don’t get ten steps when Jack grabs me. I spin and come up with the knife under his chin.
“Do not even begin to try your Ripper act on me. I’m not one of your scared Whitechapel girlfriends. I’ll teach you what every slash and cut you gave them feels like. I felt them in the arena and they don’t feel good.”
Jack looks past me, shaking his head. He raises his hand and points.
“Look at the street,” he says.
I look over my shoulder, keeping the knife at his throat.
“I don’t see anything.”
“The sidewalks. The buildings. The windows. There are no proper joins. No right angles anywhere.”
“Why would there be? Downtown is getting shaken to death like Lassie with a rat.”
“It’s not the tremors, sir. Look across the street at where the pavement is falling away.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”
I look to where he’s pointing. The corner by the apartment building is shattered and sinking in the middle. The soil under the street is a mix of black mud and red muck.
“We’re standing on a suicide road,” he says. “The blood tide rises from beneath and eventually everything above drops down into it. This entire street could become a sinkhole at any moment.”
I try to read him to see if he’s bullshitting me. He looks as calm as can be expected with a knife at his throat.
“Then what are all these sleepyheads doing here?”
He looks at me like he’s trying to teach a few first words to a particularly dumb parrot.
“These are the only safe parts of the city. Thieves and raiders won’t come down here.”
“ ‘Safe’ is a pretty loose term around here.”
“Not for this sad lot. It’s hide here or end up skewered.”
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’m not anxious to go any farther.”
“No one asked you to come this far.”
“Have a wander on a suicide road and you could truly die down here.”
“Are you still here, Jack? I didn’t see you there.”
I put the knife away and head to the parking lot across the street. As soon as I step into the intersection, I see that Jack was telling the truth. The pavement crunches under my boots like an eggshell suspended over quicksand. An image of Alice dead down here and stuck in the Limbo between Heaven and Hell flashes in my head. I hear Medea Bava’s voice: Alice was ours.
No. She wasn’t, you old witch. I would have known.
Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?
I push it all into the dark. Let the angel explain it to her. He’s Mr. Sensitive. Medea will like him.
It’s one thing for me to know that Jack was telling the truth and another for Jack to know I know it. I keep going. If I step lightly, the worst that happens is I sink an inch or so into the road at the weak spots. I don’t look back or acknowledge Jack. The last thing I want is to owe him any more favors. Not that ignoring him means anything. Halfway across the street, I hear him behind me. It sounds like he’s trying to crush wine out of cornflakes.
“Stay the hell away from me, Jack. This road won’t hold if we bunch up.”
That was the wrong thing to say. He thinks I’m leaving him on the suicide road. I can hear him hurrying to catch up with me.
The road goes snap, crackle, pop and drops a few inches. Cracks shoot out from under us like black lightning. I run for the sidewalk. I sink lower into the road with each step. The lower I sink, the more the sewage muck tries to suck me backward and down into it. By the time I hit the sidewalk, it’s like I’m doing some kind of hick aerobics, stumbling like a pig farmer through shit while trying to get my knees up high for a real Jane Fonda workout. Feel the burn, Jethro.
The corner of the sidewalk crumbles as I jump from the muck, but a couple of steps in, it holds. I finally turn around and there’s Jack. Up to his knees in blood and mud. It’s where he belongs. Still dreaming of knives and all the women no one knows about because he dumped them like fish food into the drink. Fuck him. Let him go.
But I know the look on his face. It’s what I looked like when I fell from the sky into Pandemonium. It’s a feeling way beyond fear because your brain can’t get hold of it enough to be afraid. You want to be afraid. Afraid would be a hundred times better than this. This is total fucking incomprehension at what’s happening and it’s all happening to you. It’s being sane one second and stark raving spiders-tunneling-their-way-out-from-under-your-skin insane the next.
I kneel by the edge of the corner far enough back so I know the ground is solid and I hold out my hand. It’s the least I can do. Literally the least.
Jack scrambles for it in a panicked stumbling slog, sinking faster now that he sees a lifeline. He’s almost up to his waist by the time he reaches the corner.
“Help me!” he yells. I move my hand half an inch closer.
He’s practically swimming when he reaches the corner. Goddammit. He gets close enough to grab a couple of my fingers. I close my hand around his and pull. It’s the very least I can do. I’m amazed and a little pissed off when he swings a leg onto the sidewalk. I let go and let him get out the rest of the way on his own. I look over at the celebrity-center bushes where the asylum refugees have been passed out. They took off. They’re crazy. Not stupid. The street was sinking. I lean back against the low wall around the mall and look up at the black boiling sky. Are you explaining to Candy for the five-hundredth time what an asshole I am, Kasabian? Is she pissed at me for saving this walking, talking piece of shit? Candy wouldn’t have done it. She’d have put her boot on Jack’s head and helped him down under the muck. And I would have loved her for it.
Panting and stinking like sewage and rotten fish, Jack pulls himself onto the sidewalk and collapses. I light a Malediction.
“Stay over there, Jack. You smell like what comes out of Moby-Dick after a truck-stop burrito.”
He just lies there gasping and trembling like a trout tossed on land by a passing boat.
I smoke for a couple of minutes, until Jack stops shaking.
“You scared off all my crazies, you know. I was going to get them to take me to the asylum. Now they’re gone. Do you know where it is? Be very careful how you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it and I’m going to feed you back into the muck face-first.”
He points to a dome on top of a hill that’s mostly mud and dead grass. Huts and lean-tos made of scrap lumber, flattened aluminum cans, and drywall from the asylum flow from the top of the hill and down the sides like junkyard lava. Looks like a lot of the crazies had it together enough to escape, but not enough to cut the apron strings and leave home.
I shake my head. I smoke.
Maybe this jigsaw-puzzle L.A. is God’s payback for burning Eden. In the old days, when I was killing for Azazel down here, I hardly ever thought about the guy. Now I can’t get him out of my head. He’s like the high school sweetheart you moan about whenever you’ve had a few too many highballs. You don’t want to think about her. In fact, you never think about her until you’ve poisoned your brain with umbrella drinks. Then she’s one big wh
iny question mark in your life. Where did it all go wrong, baby?
Only God and I never went steady. I barely thought of him in the world and only thought of him Downtown because in the brief time Mom sent me to Sunday school, they taught me that he was a God of love and forgiveness. Just what the doctor ordered. Forgive me for all the scams and games and shenanigans and rain down that love on me or at least call me a cab. Even Hitler got to die before climbing into the coal cart. Nothing. Nada. Turns out when I reached into the hat, I didn’t pull out the shiny happy Sunday school God of Love. I got the Old Testament God of wrath. Cities turned to salt. Newborns killed in their cribs. Twin Peaks canceled when it was getting good again. No one came to save my charbroiled ass. Just like Mason. But ever since then I think the big man has had his eye on me, slipping me a rubber cigar every now and then. Like right now.
Where Jack is pointing is the Griffith Park Observatory. James Dean shot part of Rebel Without a Cause there. Any tourist with cab fare can visit the damn place. Back home it would take me an hour to get there and back to the hotel, where Candy and I could break more furniture. But no. I have to dodge sinkholes, earthquakes, Hellions, and serial killers to get somewhere that in any sane universe I could take the bus to. I wish I could say, “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” but the boat sailed on that one a long time ago.
I take a drag on the Malediction.
“Hey, Jack. What were you before you became a monster?”
He pushes himself onto his knees, stands, and tries to wipe the mud and blood off his clothes.
“An upholsterer,” he says.
“Seriously?”
He looks at me.
“Yes.”
“I guess ‘Ripper’ sounds better in the papers than ‘Jack the Ottoman Repairman.’ ”
Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim) Page 26
