Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  Blood.

  He had killed.

  He was about to kill.

  It was a trick. Fake blood.

  It was not a trick. Real blood.

  Gad’s eyes shone in the next crackle of lightning. They were sombre, grave even. They were also, I realised, frightened.

  I knew that look. I’d seen eyes like those a dozen times before. They were the eyes of someone guilty, someone who has done something they wish with all their heart can be revoked, but can’t.

  “Gad,” I said. “What is this? What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Didn’t mean to what?”

  “You gotta help me, Dion. It went too far. I overreacted.”

  “Gad, what the fuck have you done?” I am not normally one who swears, but these were not normal circumstances.

  “She... He... I have to show you. It’s the only way.”

  “Give me the knife first.”

  “Knife?” He sounded genuinely confused, as if he had forgotten about it.

  “The one you’re holding. I’m not going anywhere with you unless you give it to me right now.” I have no idea where the commanding tone in my voice sprang from. I had never been so scared in my life. I just knew somehow that in order to lessen the danger to myself I should be authoritative, take charge.

  “Oh. Yeah.” His dim silhouette moved. The knife came up, point towards me. Gingerly I took it by the handle, plucking it from his limp grip. It was an inch-wide hunting knife, a heavy thing, the wooden handle inlaid with some kind of precious stone, turquoise I thought. The blood on its steel blade gleamed blackly.

  “This way,” said Gad, and I followed him to his room.

  ANANSI HAD NOTHING to say as I surveyed the scene in Gad’s room, and the spider god’s muteness was eloquence itself.

  My eyes adapted to the gloom slowly, so that it took me a while to assess every feature of what I was looking at – a horribly long while.

  There on the floor was the Navajo rug which was the Friendly Inn’s idea of a decorative finishing touch – a bit of threadbare local colour – and there on the rug was the body of Solveig, Loki’s avatar. It may seem heartless to say so, but she looked thoroughly disgruntled to have found herself in such a situation. Her eyes were half-closed and turned to the side, as if she were rolling them, and her mouth hung slack in a position indistinguishable from a pout.

  She was irrefutably, irrevocably deceased. It would have been obvious even if there hadn’t been the prima facie evidence of a deep ragged gash in her chest and all the blood that had flowed out of it to soak her blouse. The absence of life is the absence of all motion. Nothing lies as still as a dead thing. I know this after having walked into Nanabaa Oboshie’s bedroom one morning, aged nine, and discovered her not breathing. I had understood instantly that my grandmother was gone. I hadn’t needed it explained to me, and even as my father tried desperately to revive her, and then prayed out loud to God to give her back to him, I’d realised his efforts were futile. Whatever had animated Nanabaa Oboshie and made her her, it was no longer around. It had flown during the night, and the thing left in her bed was nothing more than a hollow framework, like the husk of a fly after the spider has drained it of all its nutrients.

  So with Solveig. She was a corpse, utterly immobile and lifeless, weirdly beautiful still, but ghastly too, in death.

  The knife in my hand, Gad’s knife, was a murder weapon.

  “Why?” was all I could ask, once I finally regained the power of speech.

  “An accident,” he replied. “Honest. I was just... just trying to scare her off. She was coming on so strong, like she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “She was trying to seduce you?”

  “Hell, yeah. That way of hers, you know, saying all those nice things in that sweet, husky voice. Suggestive. Flicking her tongue round her lips. I kept telling her to go away, no sale, not interested, find some other patsy. She... she was so goddamn insistent. You know? But I knew she was no lady, and I wasn’t going there, no way.” He sobbed the last couple of sentences, his voice breaking up.

  “Had you been drinking?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie. I can smell whisky on your breath.”

  “Okay. Yes. A little bit.” He sniffed wetly. “Guess that might’ve had something to do with it. Made me clumsy. When I pulled my knife I only meant to wave it at her, threaten her, to make a point. But then she just kinda lunged at me and I just kinda stumbled... Christ, this is awful. This is a nightmare. What’m I gonna do, Dion? I go down for murder, they’ll give me the needle for sure.”

  “Do they have the death penalty in California?”

  “Damn straight they have. This ain’t such a liberal state as you’d think. Don’t forget we elected that Nazi-loving actor as governor for a while.”

  “Okay, but it isn’t necessarily as bad as all that. From what you’ve just told me, there were extenuating circumstances. Any halfway decent lawyer could argue legitimate self-defence, along with diminished responsibility through alcohol. Manslaughter, not murder. You’d serve time, but I doubt you’d be sentenced to lethal injection.”

  “Shows how little you understand about America,” he retorted. “An injun killing a white person? They don’t call it lynching any more, but that’s what it’d be.”

  “Look, calm down,” I said. “Panicking’s going to get you nowhere. What’s done is done. Solveig’s dead.”

  “Was that her name? Solveig? Pretty name.”

  “It was the name she chose to go by. What we have to do – and by ‘we,’ I mean you – is summon the police here straight away.”

  “The cops? No way. Nuh-uh.”

  “Listen to me, Gad.” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Yes, the police. It’s the only way. You have to be straight-up right from the start. Play it by the book. Let the system do its thing. There’s no alternative. Anything else will just get you deeper into trouble and make it worse for you further down the line. Man up. Plead guilty. Show the authorities what you’re showing me, remorse and contrition. It’ll all go a long way to helping your case.”

  He swayed his head from side to side. “No. Can’t. Even if they don’t kill me, I can’t go to jail. I’m not a young man. I don’t wanna spend the rest of my days behind bars, having to dodge musclebound Aryan Nation meatheads with a hard-on for me. I won’t.” His eyes met mine, and they were imploring. “There is another way. I can get rid of her. We can get rid of her. No one’d ever have to know. Some white girl from Scandinavia – white man, whatever – disappears on a trip to the US. Some tourist goes astray. These things happen.”

  “I can’t hear this. I’m not listening to you.”

  “I know of a way of disposing of that.” He gestured at the body. “I got it all figured out. Clean gone, so nobody’d ever find it. It’s one tiny corpse, and the Mojave’s a huge damn desert. Sometimes light aircraft go down here, and even with satellites and GPS tracking and who knows what all else, the crash site’s never located. Desert just swallows ’em up. I know what to do.”

  Lightning glimmered. Thunder rolled.

  “And with your help, Dion,” he said, “I can do it.”

  “MY HELP?” I said. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Aw, come on. It’s a two-man job. I need you.”

  “How can I make this any clearer? I am a lawyer back home. I can’t be – won’t be – made an accessory to murder. I will not even consider it.”

  “You’re only an accessory if you’re caught. Otherwise you’re just a guy who helped out another guy when he needed it.”

  “I have principles.”

  Ahem? said Anansi. You do?

  “Shut up,” I murmured. “Stay out of this.”

  “What’s that?” said Gad, raising an eyebrow. “Spider in your head got an opinion on the subject?”

  “None that I’m willing to share,” I said.

  “’Cause I assure you,
the coyote in mine is saying this thing has to be buried and done away with, no question. And he’s convinced my plan for doing it can work.”

  “Well, good for him.”

  “And you wanna know what else? He’s saying he’s ready to make a certain concession if you’ll agree to lend a hand.”

  “Concession?” I said. “I don’t get.”

  Oh, yes you do, said Anansi.

  “Look at us,” said Gad. “We’re the final two, just like I predicted. The contest’s ours to win or lose. What Coyote’s offering is to step down. Victory’s yours – if you’ll just do this one thing.”

  “Victory by default,” I said.

  ...is still victory, Anansi chipped in.

  “Victory by default,” I repeated. “I won’t have won. I’m just getting a bye in the final. I’m a lucky runner-up.”

  “No, no,” said Gad. “You’ll be the winner fair and square, and you know why? Because I’m in your power. You have me at a disadvantage. A material disadvantage. I’m throwing myself on your mercy, Dion. All it takes is for you to dial nine-one-one now, and I’m sunk. You even have my knife, the main piece of evidence. Now that I’ve involved you in this, there’s nothing I can do without your say-so. You may not have outwitted me in the conventional sense, but I have committed a very dumb, a very stupid act, which makes me less smart than you. Therefore you are, in that respect, the cleverer one out of the two of us. Listen to your god. Listen to Anansi. He knows I’m right.”

  He’s right, said Anansi. Profiting from the blunders of others – no trickster worth their salt is going to turn their nose up at that. It’s valid. It’s part of what we do.

  “You have my solemn word,” Gad said. “Save my neck, and you’ll be declared outright winner.”

  And didn’t you say, Dion, that if we enter the contest, we enter to win? That was how you put it, as I recall. No half measures, you said. You don’t take on a challenge unless you fully intend to come out on top. I’m quoting you verbatim.

  “But...” I could feel myself weakening, my resolve crumbling. The prize was so near, so tantalisingly near, just within reach. Surely I hadn’t come all this way, done what I’d done, only to falter at the very last hurdle. Gad was offering me the laurels, in return for abetting him in the commission of a felony. That would make me a criminal too, like him, but at least I wouldn’t be in the same category as him, a killer. And no one need ever know. I was thousands of miles from home, in another country, a faraway land.

  It was as if Gad read my mind. “Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?”

  My rather feeble response to that was: “We’re not in Vegas.”

  “No, but near enough. Ball’s in your end zone, Dion. What you gonna do, my friend? Play or pass?”

  WHAT ELSE COULD I do? It was like taking a deep breath and diving in. I could hear Anansi applauding me – in truth, I could hear little else – as I nodded and told Gad I’d go along with whatever he had in mind. Nothing could dissuade me from the idea that what I was doing was totally wrong. Equally, in the most basic way, it was completely right. It was inevitable. It was necessary.

  We rolled the body up in the rug, lugged it between us through the hotel, and took it to Gad’s pickup truck, which was parked just outside. We loaded it onto the flatbed and Gad secured a tarpaulin over the top, fastening it tightly to the side rails and tailgate with a length of bungee cord. We clambered into the cab, dripping wet from the rain, and Gad fired up the engine.

  Our first port of call was Gad’s home, a static Airstream trailer parked at the mouth of a canyon some way out into the desert. The track that led to it was one of the bumpiest roads I have ever been along, and matters weren’t helped by the storm, which turned earth to mud and reduced tyre traction to nearly zero. We slithered as much as drove, and were half-blind, too, the headlights and windscreen wipers scarcely able to keep up with the incessant pelting rain. It was, in hindsight, a miracle that we got there in one piece. Throughout the journey I was acutely aware that I was with a driver who was not entirely sober nor in his right mind. But Gad was the one familiar with the route and the terrain. I could not have taken the wheel. If I had, it’s fairly certain we wouldn’t have made it at all. After what had happened, Gad’s fate may have been in my hands, but for the duration of that drive, mine was in his.

  We took refuge in the battered old trailer, which had clearly seen better decades, and waited for the storm to abate. For a couple more hours, the thunder shook the ground and the rain battered the trailer’s sides. It was like sitting inside a giant aluminium dustbin that was being beaten by a million mad club-wielding monkeys. Gad and I didn’t have much to say to each other, but if we had, we would have had to yell to say it.

  Finally, around 4AM, the racket began to die down, and soon the thunder was faint, distant, and then hush descended. Gad went outdoors and busied himself hitching a small boat to the back of his pickup. The boat was a Zodiac inflatable, harking back to earlier times when he had earned a living as a fishing guide, chartered by tourists to go out onto Sweetwater Lake and help them land chub and cutthroat trout. He kept the outboard in good working order and still took the boat for a spin occasionally on what was left of the lake, just for the fun of it. Nowadays his main source of income was part-time employment as a front-of-house meet-and-greeter at a casino owned by a cousin of his on a nearby reservation; the job remit was, in his words, “Reeling in the high rollers and rousting out the drunks. Ain’t pretty, but it pays the bills.”

  We set off just as the sun was coming up, revealing a tormented, haggard landscape. Flash floods had torn gouges through the desert. Cacti and Joshua trees lay toppled, ripped up by the roots. Rockslides that had fallen across the roads tested the pickup’s suspension and four-wheel drive almost to destruction. The steam rising thickly off the ground was like smoke after a great fire.

  “Mother of all storms, that one was,” Gad remarked. “The Great Spirit sure was pissed.” He made it sound personal.

  “He and you have never got on, have you? That is, he and Coyote.”

  “No love lost between those two. The Great Spirit had it in for Coyote from the start. When all the animals were choosing their names, right back at the time of creation, the Great Spirit made Coyote fall into a deep sleep so’s he’d wake up late and get last pick. Coyote coveted a cool name like Grizzly Bear or Eagle, but those were already taken when his turn came, so he got stuck with Coyote. The Great Spirit told him, ‘You’re the lowest of the low. You slink around and boast too much and do too little work. That’s why I punished you by forcing you to have the name no one else wanted.’ Since then, Coyote’s always been sly, quick to take offence, looking out for nobody but himself. Know why coyotes have those slanted eyes they do? It’s ’cause they take after their namesake, and Coyote’s eyes are slanted ’cause he props them open with sticks every night so he’ll never be caught out like that by the Great Spirit again.”

  “Anansi and Nyame, the Sky God, have a similar relationship,” I said. “Combative. Anansi tried stealing wisdom from Nyame once. It didn’t work. He dropped the pot he was keeping the wisdom in, and it broke and wisdom ended up scattered in pieces across the world, a little bit of it in everyone. Nyame wasn’t best pleased about that.”

  “Coyote stole fire from the Great Spirit and gave it to mankind. Same outcome: the Great Spirit wasn’t happy. Your god and mine, they’re a lot alike, ain’t they? Out of all the tricksters, they got the most in common. I guess that’s why I felt I could trust you with all of this.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I realised, with a twinge of surprise, that I had all but forgotten there was a dead body in the rear of the pickup. Blame exhaustion – it had been a long, fraught night – and also my own conflictedness. My conscience was doing its best not to dwell on the moral bind I was in, the compromises to my integrity that I was making. It seemed to find it easier to just blank out the corpse that we were even now ferrying to its final, secret resting place.<
br />
  I HAD NO choice but to focus my attention on the corpse once more as we pulled up at the edge of a shallow ravine and Gad jumped out and began untethering the boat. Here in this remote spot, far from human view, was where we would be embarking on a voyage to dump Solveig’s mortal coil where it would never be discovered.

  A broad stream rushed along the ravine bottom, leaping and churning. “Usually it’s as dry as a witch’s tit,” Gad explained. “This is all storm runoff. And it’ll take us straight out there.”

  By “out there,” he meant a distant silvery expanse of lake, which he indicated with a sweep of his arm.

  “That,” he said, “is Sweetwater Lake. That’s how it used to look back in the day – how it oughtta look. They’ll have vented excess water, up at the hydroelectric plant. They have to, during a storm like last night’s, else the reservoir’ll overflow and the dam’ll burst. Water follows the course of the old river, fills the lake up nice and full again. Ain’t gonna stay that way forever, so we’d best make the most of it while we can.”

  He hauled the Zodiac on its little trailer down the ravine bank, floated it out onto the stream and lashed it to a boulder. Then he came back up, and together we carried down Solveig’s rug-wrapped remains and loaded her into the boat.

  Not long after that, we were puttering along on the bounce and surge of the stream.

  THE RAVINE DISGORGED onto the lake and we swapped turbulent, racing water for calm. The sun had risen well above the horizon and was already hot on our heads. Mine more so than Gad’s; he had put on a John Deere cap. The lake surface was laced with flotsam: scraps of wood, strands of vegetation, every now and then the bloated remains of some rodent or other, a jackrabbit or prairie dog, drowned in its own burrow.

  Gad steered us far out onto the shining water to a place he knew, somewhere where, submerged right now but not for long, there was a sinkhole that plunged underground. How far down it went, no one could quite say, but it was deep.