"What's wrong with the ending?" Wanda asked.
"Well, the book is about the Apocalypse, but the Apocalypse doesn't actually occur. On some level, people might be disappointed."
"But you could have it happen in the sequel, right?"
"I suppose," said Eddie. "I wasn't really planning on another book."
"Oh, we have to do another book. Actually, a trilogy would be even better."
"Hmmm," replied Eddie. "You don't think that the readers will feel like I'm stringing them along?"
Wanda laughed. "Oh, Eddie," she said. "It's so sweet of you to be concerned. Now about this book..."
"Yes?" asked Eddie.
"How many explosions does it have?"
FORTY-FOUR
Horace Finch sat alone in the control room of the CCD, holding an icepack on his head. Somehow things had gone horribly wrong. Was it all a dream, or had a group of bickering angels really stolen the magic glass apple and ruined his experiment? The broken plastic tube hanging from the ceiling attested to the veracity of his memory, but still he found it hard to believe.
The Order of the Pillars of Babylon had believed in him, had given him their backing and entrusted him with sacred teachings that had been passed down for thousands of years. He, Horace Finch, was supposed to have been the gatekeeper standing between the end of human history and the beginning of a glorious new age in which the genius of humanity was constrained by neither space nor time. But he had failed.
He wanted to curse the angels and demons who had meddled with his destiny, but he knew that was a cop-out. When one aspired to tear down the veil that concealed the ultimate reality, one had to be prepared to deal with angels, demons, and whoever else showed up to the party. It was all part of the deal. The Babylonians had known that. The OPB had taught him that the gods themselves were not to be trusted, and they were right.
But it was not, in the end, the gods who had stolen his destiny from him: it was that annoying little cipher, Jacob Slater. "Jacob Slater," he hissed to himself, the words becoming a curse as they left his lips. "Jacob Slater, you will pay."
While he fantasized about the myriad horrific tortures to which he would subject Jacob, his finger absently pressed a button on the console and a robotic arm slid out. At the end of the arm was an empty container where the glass apple should be.
"Empty," he hissed. There had been one magical glass apple on the planet, and it had been wasted---tossed at the moon like just another fifty-cent golf ball.
Wait a minute, he thought, looking in the receptacle. What's this?
The cup wasn't quite empty after all. Something very small glittered in the bottom. He reached in and gingerly pulled it out. Holding it between his fingertips, he appraised the item in the dim light. It was the most beautiful thing Horace Finch had ever seen.
There was no doubt about it: the thing was made of the same substance as the apple itself. In the anti-bomb's death throes, it had shed a small piece of itself---a teardrop of rosy glass.
Horace Finch tossed his head back and laughed. Perhaps his plans hadn't been foiled after all; just delayed. For in his hand he held the key to the secrets underlying all of reality: a glass apple seed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Julia Kroese
Robert Kroese's sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan---home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, as well as the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it.
In 2006 he started his blog, www.mattresspolice.com, as an outlet for his absurdist wit. Around the same time, he was appointed to be a deacon in his church, and this juxtaposition of roles prompted him to create the character Mercury, the star of Mercury Falls. Kroese (pronounced KROO-zee) currently lives in Ripon, California, with his wife and two children.
1 He had in fact been trying to summon a thunderstorm for several weeks, but the dry air and a lingering high-pressure zone were making it difficult to say the least.
2 The Christians had then struck back with a decal of a larger fish, labeled "TRUTH," eating the Darwin fish, which distilled Christianity to its core principle: the ultimate devouring of Science by the giant, horrific Jesus-fish.
3 All angels can fly, of course, but as flight is simply a matter of using interplanar energy to warp gravity, wings are hardly necessary. In the Pre--Comic Book (PCB) era, it was not uncommon for angels to sport wings on the Mundane Plane to establish their Heavenly credentials and to offer a visible explanation to the plane's primitive inhabitants of their ability to defy gravity. Mercury himself briefly experimented with wings on his shoes and on his hat, the former making walking difficult and the latter inevitably prompting the question, "OK, but how does the hat stay on?"
4 Eternal Harvest was not, in fact, Canadian. Crispin had made this erroneous assumption based on the fact that at the bottom of all their posters appeared the word EH?
5 Some angels have, through a combination of natural ability and practice, achieved the ability to assume various forms at will, but even these angels tend to specialize within a narrow range. Angels that can switch between genders at will, for example, are rare. This narrative uses male pronouns to refer to angels in general, because although technically angels have no gender, most of those who have chosen to take human form tend to favor one gender over another. For roughly eighty percent of angels, this form is male, probably because the complexities of the female human psyche are beyond the understanding of most angels.
6 Angelic identity discs are not to be confused with the "identity discs" used by programs in the movie TRON. The identity discs in TRON served as a combination of personal identification, recreational aid, and weapon, sort of like taping your Social Security card to a razor-edged Day-Glo Frisbee.
7 Pheidippides was the Greek soldier who was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC to announce that the Persians had been defeated. It is said that he ran the entire distance (26.2 miles) without stopping, burst into the assembly exclaiming, "We have won!" and then died. A complete transcript of this incident follows:
Pheidippides: We have won!
Assembly: Wow, that's great. So do you guys need reinforcements or anything?
Pheidippides: No. [gasps for breath] Didn't you hear what I said? [gasps for breath] We won already.
Assembly: Oh, OK. So, um, what's the big hurry? Do you need something from us?
Pheidippides: No. [gasps for breath] Just really [gasps for breath] excited. [gasps for breath] About the victory.
Assembly: Got it. Well, good show and all that. Anyway, we're a little busy discussing taxation and whatnot, so if you don't mind waiting in the lobby for a bit...
Pheidippides: Oh. [gasps for breath] Sure. I'm pretty much [gasps for breath] done anyway. [gasps for breath] Do you think I could [gasps for breath] have a drink of...[collapses]
Assembly: What a remarkable man! I move that we start a series of footraces in honor of this brave soldier. Did anyone get his name?
8 Tuwambo, they claimed, occasionally worked in concert with Mawtaba, god of night sweats, and Buwandanta, god of that thing where you are half awake and can feel yourself lying in bed but you can't move.
9 Sand is recommended over more permanent media such as spray paint, because you run the risk of irritating the demon by not adequately "hanging up" after the call if you are unable to completely erase the sigil. The demon may hear a faint buzzing sound for days after the summoning, and in extreme cases may wreak vengeance upon you for this annoyance to the ninth generation. Also, sand is generally cheaper.
10 The SCSP
charter granted her influence over the Eastern wing of the Fertile Crescent, a narrow but highly desirable strip of land in between the Arabian Desert and the Zagros Mountains, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the terminus of the Euphrates, a few hundred miles from the Mediterranean.
11 Mercury had shielded her from the three-hundred-mile-per-hour winds as best he could, but a cherub flying at top speed can't fully compensate for variations in air pressure. The effect is equivalent to riding in a convertible sports car on the Autobahn.
12 Contrary to popular belief, the gelatin in foodstuffs such as Jell-O does not come from horse hooves. Horse hooves are made of keratin. Gelatin is made from collagen that is derived from cattle bones, cattle hides, and pigskins. Now you are THAT much closer to understanding the Universe.
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