“Bring it,” Huntley said, punching the nearest one. For a moment, I got excited at the prospect of violence and the sisters lashed about, hissing with delight on my head. But then Huntley dematerialized and the men with baseball caps were left trying to grab on to air.
Ashley sighed into the camera and said, “Every man I date is the same.”
That was when Mercury knocked again.
“I hate to say I told you so,” he said through the door.
“This had better be good,” I groaned, putting up my hair.
“You have no idea,” he said.
I finished my wine in one gulp and turned off the television, ignoring the sisters’ pleas to finish watching the episode. I knew how it would end and it wouldn’t be in blood and fire. I opened the door for Mercury and went into the bedroom to change.
“How is Perseus anyway?” he asked, studying the photos in the hall again.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“He hasn’t been to see you in all this time?”
“Not everyone needs my help,” I said. But that wasn’t true. All the gods and demigods and immortals eventually came to my office for help. I’d never told anyone that was the reason I’d taken the job in the first place. For the day that Percy finally showed up and I could look upon him in the flesh once more.
“Let’s just get back to the office,” I said.
It turned out Cthulhu had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the Canadian north and wound up off the coast of Alaska instead, where he had attacked a cruise ship called the Ice Maiden. He spent several hours tearing the ship apart and using parts of it to smash the nearby glacier the passengers had been photographing. At least he’d let all the passengers and crew abandon ship first. I supposed that was some sort of progress.
While I waited for Mercury to bring Cthulhu back into the office, I made a call to Neptune.
“How’s the deep-sea salvage business working out for you?” I asked him.
“It’s picking up with global warming,” he said. It was hard to understand him because he was speaking underwater, but I’d had a lot of practise with the gods of the depths. They were often the hardest to place, so it took a little more one on one. “The strange storms are sinking more ships. And the rising water levels are claiming more villages. Soon the whole world will be one giant ocean again.”
“Well, until that day comes, you’re going to need to keep working,” I said. “And I’m assuming you’ve already got the Ice Maiden contract?”
“Poseidon tried to underbid me but everyone knows I do the quality work,” Neptune said.
“I’ll be sending some help your way,” I said and hung up as Mercury brought Cthulhu back into the office.
“What were you thinking?” I asked Cthulhu as Mercury went off for coffee again.
“I’m an ice destroyer,” Cthulhu said. He explored my desk with a tentacle, but I’d put the chocolates in a drawer before his visit. I slapped the tentacle away from the photos of Percy. “I destroyed the ice vessel. And the glacier. I multi-tasked.” His body shook and slime oozed from his maw onto the floor. I took this to be laughter.
“We’re lucky no one was killed,” I said.
“They’re lucky,” Cthulhu said. “They mistook me for a giant squid when I first surfaced. In the Old Days, I would have used their skin as sushi wraps for such an insult.”
“You had sushi in the Old Days?”
“We invented sushi. Although what we ate was still alive. Fresher that way.”
I kept my thoughts about the resemblance between Cthulhu and squid to myself. Instead, I said, “Well, you’ve got one chance left. As it turns out, Neptune won the contract for raising the Ice Maiden. As a favour to me, he’s agreed to take you on as his apprentice. You’ll be cleaning up your own mess this time.” I’d work out the details with Neptune later. He still owed me one for the whole Flying Dutchman incident.
Cthulhu crossed his legs and inspected his talons. He slurped a rotting fish off one of them. “Neptune is half my age.”
“He knows the oceans better than anyone else.” Other than Poseidon, of course, but I kept that to myself. I didn’t want to get involved in that rivalry.
“I’ve been in those oceans since before they were even oceans.”
“What were the oceans if not oceans?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Cthulhu said. “Your little mind would melt into goo that even I wouldn’t want to taste.”
“Look, this is an excellent opportunity for you. There’s more work for Neptune than even he can handle. He’s going to need help and I can’t think of anyone more qualified for deep-sea salvage than you.” Other than Poseidon. But I liked the idea of sending Cthulhu back under the ocean for good.
Mercury returned with a tiny espresso mug and a saucer, so I figured he’d gone all the way to Italy. I let him finish the espresso before I had him take Cthulhu back to the sunken Ice Maiden. Then I went to the hospital again to check on Prometheus.
They’d moved him into a private suite. It had four rooms: a living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. All new furniture. Sealed windows. He was sitting on a leather sofa in the living room when I arrived, but the big-screen monitor was turned off. He was just staring into space. Staring with one eye. The other was covered by an eye patch.
“How are the new transplants working out?” I asked.
Prometheus just nodded and smiled. I wondered if he was sedated.
I looked at the blank television. I’d never seen it turned off before. “Is it broken?” I asked. “Do we need to get you a new one?”
Prometheus kept on smiling. “Remember when I said I could still feel everything from the livers they put in other people?” He pointed at his eye. “I can still see from the eyes they’ve put in new people. I can see everything they’re seeing. Everything. It’s a little blurry, but it’s better than the movies.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about until one of the sisters whispered an explanation in my ear. “Ah,” I said.
“Tell them they can take whatever organs they want,” Prometheus said. “I don’t even want a cut anymore. I’ve got all the payment I need.”
I went downstairs and called the CEO from the parking lot. I didn’t tell her everything Prometheus had told me. I just said he was happy with the new arrangement.
“The program is working better than we thought,” she said. “It’s going so smoothly I’m going to get a Prometheus eye for my husband for Christmas. He’s got bad glaucoma.”
I disconnected without saying anything at all.
I went back to the office to finish up the Prometheus paperwork and a few other files. It was a quiet day until a few minutes before quitting time, when I heard a gurgling from my coffee cup. I looked into it and saw Neptune’s face floating in the mug.
“I thought I told you not to do that anymore,” I said.
The coffee swirled around until it formed a miniature Neptune. He climbed out of the mug and began to pace my desk, leaving wet footprints behind. “We need to talk,” he said.
I moved all the loose papers out of his path. “Let me guess, Cthulhu isn’t working out.”
“He’s more interested in playing with the ship than salvaging it,” Neptune said. “He raises the lifeboats to the surface and then sinks them again. He makes squid noises the whole time we work. And he keeps leaving to chase boats the media have chartered. He’s like a little boy in a bathtub.”
I moved the final report on Prometheus out of Neptune’s path and then paused. I had an idea.
“I can’t work with Cthulhu,” Neptune said.
“No, you can’t,” I said. “I’ve got the perfect job for him.” I shooed him back into the mug and then I made some calls.
I placed Cthulhu with the shipbreaking yards closed down by Shiva’s strikes. The strikers had all left now – they’d turned some of the old tankers into floating gardens and sailed off to sea with Shiva in a happy commune – so the owners were e
ager for a replacement.
And what a replacement Cthulhu has turned out to be. I watched him that first day through a livestream. I got the idea from Prometheus. Now anyone in the world can watch Cthulhu work.
The camera showed nothing but a rusting battleship adrift in the harbour when I logged on. But it didn’t take long for Cthulhu to rise up underneath it and roll it over onto its side. Water sprayed everywhere. Cthulhu roared at the battleship and smashed his tentacles down upon it, rupturing its hull. He tore off pieces of the bridge and threw them onto the shore, where salvage crews waited in fortified bunkers made by Thor. He ripped cables from the deck, then tore open the deck itself and smashed his fists down into the ship’s depths. He lifted handfuls of bunk beds and dining tables to the sky and roared again, his tentacles flailing.
Definitely third stage.
I shut down the computer, turned off the lights and went home. I poured myself a glass of wine and let down my hair, then curled up on the couch to finally enjoy Legendary Date.
In this episode a succubus named Glynda and an investment banker named Dylan went on a date to an amusement park. They ate cotton candy and played ring toss, and Glynda won Dylan a pink hippo. They took it on the roller coaster with them, and they screamed together and held hands in the loop.
Dylan drove Glynda back to her lair and they stood in front of the cave for a moment, talking about the good time they’d had. The sun was setting and the sky was as bloody as the night Percy had come for me. The sisters and I held our breath and waited.
“Yog-sothoth!” Glynda said.
Only it wasn’t Glynda, it was Mercury, hammering at my door again. “We have a crisis,” he added.
“The door’s open,” I called. He came in and the sisters rose up out of my head and hissed at him in unison.
“The ancient one has dematerialized –” Mercury said, but that was all he got out before he turned to stone. At least the sisters had been restrained and hit him with only a minor enchantment – he’d just be stone for a few minutes.
Enough time to watch the end of Legendary Date.
Glynda stepped back into her cave with a smile and disappeared into the darkness. Dylan hesitated a moment, looked at the camera, then followed her into her lair. He slipped a knife out of his pocket because you never know with succubi.
The sisters hissed with pleasure and I settled back into the couch to watch the end of the date.
One day.
One day there would be a knock on the door and it wouldn’t be Mercury.
One day Percy would come for me again.
We are
ALL GHOSTS
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but with the silence of the grave.
I don’t bother testing the walls of the tomb you’ve buried me in. I know there’s no way out. After all, you built it to contain not only me, but what’s inside me. I cannot escape. We cannot escape.
But I must tell you, I’m not the villain you think I am. Not any more than I was the hero you once thought I was.
I’m just a man. A man with a curse you don’t understand. Not yet. But you will comprehend it someday. Not that it will do you any good.
I know what the pipes leading into the tomb are for. I would have done the same thing if I were you. But it won’t work any better this time than it did for the inhabitants of the Frozen City.
Instead of looking for a way out after I drop into your trap, this tomb that is no bigger than a jail cell, I kneel by the coffin on the floor and rest my hands on it. Providence’s coffin. I suppose I should thank you for that, even though it’s empty inside. There’s nothing left of her.
Nothing but the memories.
* * *
BY NOW you’ve probably figured out the stories I told you in the mission debriefings were lies. Maybe you knew it even then, in the interrogation rooms after you flew me back home. How could you not suspect there was something different about me when I was the only one who returned from the Frozen City? When I said I had no memory of what happened to the others, no memory of what happened on the mission at all before waking up on the icy floor of that sunken tomb in that forgotten city? When I said I didn’t feel any different than before?
The truth is I remember everything.
I remember the afternoon when I returned from teaching my Intro to Archaeology class to find Smyth sitting in my office, even though my office door was still locked. He said he worked for the government, although not any branch I’d ever heard of because it didn’t have a name. He pulled out a phone and showed me the satellite shot of a dark mass buried in ice. I remember the question he asked.
“What does this look like to you?”
I studied the image. A Rorschach blot.
“Bones,” I said.
He put the phone away and stood. He looked at the door like he’d already forgotten me.
“The bones of a city,” I said. Because why else would he seek out an archaeologist with a picture like that? He thought the ruins of a civilization were buried down there.
Close. It was the ruin of civilization. But we didn’t know any of that back then.
Smyth looked at me again, but his expression didn’t change.
“You’re going to assemble a team,” he told me. “No one who knows anyone else on it beforehand. No one who will talk. No one who can’t leave their life behind the minute I call. If word of this gets out, I’ll never call. And you’ll never have your chance to explore this city.”
And then he left me there, wondering why he’d chosen me. I wasn’t anyone special. I’d done a few digs in Peru and written a few papers on the religious customs of a tribe that had sacrificed themselves to extinction centuries ago. I was a nobody in my field.
I understand now that’s why he came for me.
I was expendable.
We were all expendable.
***
ASCREAM FROM the pipes breaks the silence. You’ve opened something. The security gates or airlocks or whatever it is you’ve put in place to keep me in this tomb. Or rather, to keep what’s inside me in this tomb.
I wish you luck.
I open the coffin and look down at the empty space where Providence should be. I think of the last time I saw her.
The time I killed her and doomed us all.
***
I CHOSE PROVIDENCE to be on the team even though Smyth wanted only people I didn’t know. How could I not invite her, the star student of the department thanks to her work on Aztec transformation rituals as passed down through oral histories? She single-handedly made us rethink everything we knew about their religious sacrifices.
And, of course, we were in love.
I know it’s a cliché. The aging professor and the star graduate student. Maybe Providence was young and naive. Maybe she was just using me to get ahead. Maybe she would have left me after she graduated and secured a job somewhere. But maybe she wouldn’t have.
I’ll never know.
We had dinner with wine and candles and I told her what Smyth told me. Then we made love with more wine and candles. That was the last time we even kissed.
Providence said we had to pretend we didn’t know each other. She said we had to treat each other like the Aztecs treated their sacrifices. So we sat in different parts of the military cargo plane that flew us to Antarctica when Smyth called. We shook hands with everyone else on the team I’d assembled – all strangers to me, I swear, and all nobodies I’d found through their scholarly articles. Providence and I introduced ourselves to each other on the plane like we’d never met before. She was so good at not knowing me that I wondered if she’d been practising it.
When we reached Antarctica, we all ate together in the cafeteria of the base camp that had been built over the Frozen City and talked about what we’d find when the robots finished digging the hole down through the ice. Some of us thought perhaps another Easter Island, monuments dedicated to a race that had wiped itself out. A couple of us
wondered aloud if it was perhaps the lost city of Atlantis. Even though we were all academics, none of us were willing to make disparaging remarks about that. We were all gathered there in Antarctica, after all.
Providence was the only one to voice what we were all secretly thinking. That maybe it was something older than we’d ever dreamed of finding. Something more ancient than Easter Island and even the idea of Atlantis. The city of a forgotten race. That put an end to our speculation, and we spent the rest of our wait in silence.
We held our breath in the control room as we watched the first camera feeds of the Frozen City’s empty streets, of the strange melted buildings lit up by the robots’ lights.
We huddled in groups and tried to make sense of the glyphs inscribed on every surface, of the undulating pathways paved with some glittering substance we couldn’t identify, of the abstract sculptures that looked as if they’d been carved from bone.
We looked for signs of life, for bodies or skeletons, but saw nothing. Whoever or whatever had lived in the city was gone.
I split us into groups for the initial exploration and I teamed up with Providence. Smyth just nodded when I handed him the paperwork outlining the survey plans. He assigned each group a military escort. Men in black uniforms with every weapon I could imagine – assault rifles, handguns, grenades, knives – but no insignia on their uniforms. For all the good they did.
And down we went in the elevator shaft the robots had carved out of the ice, into the Frozen City.
I know you’ve seen the recordings we made with the hand-helds. But the films don’t capture what it was really like. The stillness in the air. The silence except for our steps, and the drips of the ice melting from the buildings under the heat of the lights we set up. The way the twisting shapes of the buildings made you dizzy if you looked at them too long. The shadows that fell where they weren’t supposed to fall.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 15
