Crashing Paradise

by Christopher Golden

  “It’s not as impressive as I thought it would be,” Squire said, idly scratching the side of his face.

  The ghost of Dr. Graves looked askance at the hobgoblin.

  “Not impressive?”

  “Yeah, had a buddy back in the twenties, did a lot of work for the old-time Hollywood types, y’know, fences, walls, gates the whole shebang. He could put up something that would really blow your socks off.”

  Graves cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe you could put the Creator in touch with him. Your friend could help Him with future designs.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Squire agreed, the sarcasm lost on him.

  “But Vito died of the ass cancer in ’52.” The goblin shook his head sadly. “Poor bastard. I think he might’ve owed me money.”

  Ceridwen approached the Garden Gate, her silken robes blowing in the gentle breeze. She looked at home here, among the green grass that carpeted the ground outside Paradise. As if she belonged.

  “Approach with caution,” Conan Doyle warned her.

  She crouched in front of the Gate and laid a pale hand upon the ground, communing with the nature of this place.

  “They were here,” the Princess of Faerie said after a moment.

  “Evil has come to Eden.”

  “How many?” Conan Doyle asked.

  Ceridwen ran her hands through the blades of grass.

  “Many feet,” she said, head cocked to one side as she listened to the voice of the green. “A small army by the sounds.”

  Clay strode away from the group, moving toward the Gate. “If they were able to get inside, we shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  He stopped just in front of the beautifully polished wood, studying its surface before raising his hands to place them on the door. Clay pushed, the muscles in his arms and back rippling with effort.

  The Gate did not open, but it did push back.

  Clay was hurled away from the obstruction, narrowly missing Ceridwen, who still knelt in the grass. The shapeshifter scrambled to his feet, a combination of rage and embarrassment in his dark eyes.

  “Holy crap!” Squire shouted.

  Conan Doyle saw Jelena cover her mouth, masking her amusement.

  Clay strode back to the Gate as if to challenge it again.

  But he paused before them and cocked his head, studying its construction. “If I can’t get inside, how did they?”

  Dr. Graves looked at Conan Doyle. “There must be some sort of key. Something we’re not aware of.”

  Squire trotted over to the gates. “No problems there, chief,” he said. “Let me take a look.” The goblin got very close to the door, searching for some clue.

  “Could we not scale it?” the she-wolf asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Conan Doyle replied. “Look carefully, you can see the shimmer of something powerful in the air. To avoid that, I imagine we must pass through the open Gate unimpeded. Also, I imagine that even if we did climb over it, we would find the other side little different from this spot. It is traveling through the Gate that gives entrance to Eden.”

  Squire turned away from the Gate. “Don’t see shit,” he said. “No runes, no keyholes. Nothing.”

  Conan Doyle nodded thoughtfully. None of this came as any surprise to him. It would not be something so simple as an ordinary key. And yet Abaddon and his allies had entered somehow. He had missed something important. As he wondered what that was, he glanced over at Ceridwen, who seemed to be conversing with the grass intently.

  “Ceri,” he said. “What is it?”

  She looked up at him. “The blood of the first,” she said.

  “The blades say the invaders spilled the blood of the first before the gate.”

  Jelena responded instinctively, dropping to all fours, nose pressed to the ground, her fur cloak falling like a curtain around her. She crawled along on hands and knees, sniffing the grass and the earth beneath.

  “She’s right,” the she-wolf said. “There was blood spilled here recently.” Jelena stopped suddenly, her muscles taut.

  “Here,” she said. Her features had become more lupine, her teeth more pronounced, sharper.

  They all approached the spot she had found. Graves kept shimmering, his translucent form becoming by turns more and less distinct. The ghost ignored their new discovery, still focused on the Gate.

  Where Jelena crouched, the grass had withered to a sickly yellow. The ground looked damp, as if refusing to absorb what had been spilled there. Clay knelt beside her on the dying grass. He put his fingers into the dark, damp ground and brought them to his nose, breathing in the scent.

  “Eve’s blood,” he said, glancing up at Conan Doyle.

  “Aw, shit!” Squire grumbled. They looked over to see the hobgoblin standing on one foot, examining the other.

  Something black and foul smelling dripped from the sole of his boot.

  “No pooper-scooper law here, evidently,” he muttered.

  The she-wolf approached the goblin, leaning down to sniff the foul substance. “This is not what you think, little gob. Not offal.”

  “Smells pretty fucking awful,” Squire replied, his upper lip curling.

  Jelena nodded, wrinkling her nose. “Yes. I mean it is not . . . droppings. Not shit. It stinks of corruption.”

  Blood and corruption, Conan Doyle thought, wishing that he’d brought a pipe with him. The answers were here; all he had to do was place them in their correct order.

  “Clay,” he said, and pointed to the blood. “If you would be so kind as to assume the shape of whoever it was that lost that.”

  The shape changer rubbed the blood between his fingers.

  His flesh began to ripple, becoming almost fluid. The sound of shifting bone and mass filled the air as he assumed the exquisitely naked form of Eve.

  “Sweet,” Squire said with a grotesque grin. “I could get used to these new uniforms.”

  The ghost of Dr. Graves studied the shapeshifter. “When she hears about this, we’re all going to have some explaining to do.”

  Squire shrugged. “I’ll happily take a beating in exchange for the view.”

  Conan Doyle studied the woman’s lithe and muscular form. Eve was the mother of all vampires, but also the mother of humanity.

  The blood of the first, Ceridwen had been told by the green. Conan Doyle looked back to the Gate, to Clay wearing the guise of Eve, then to Squire. The substance Squire had stepped in reeked of blood and corruption. It reeked of sin.

  Discarded sin.

  “Of course,” Conan Doyle muttered, feeling the familiar, intoxicating twinge of revelation pass through him.

  “What is it, Arthur?” Ceridwen asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “To pass through the Gate of Eden, one must be of the Garden,” he started to explain. “Eve was part of this place before her fall, but in order to enter it would require her in the purest of states.”

  Squire scratched his large, gourd-shaped head. “I’m following you, boss, but I’m not getting how she could get them inside. Eve’s blood hasn’t been pure in a long, long time, and I doubt they had the time to give her a transfusion.”

  Conan Doyle smiled. “Yes, but if our adversaries had with them a shapeshifter, as we have started to believe, then it could have done the same as Clay here, becoming Eve by coming in contact with her blood, and purging that form of its corruption. Original sin.”

  He pointed at Squire’s shoe, and the black, stinking substance on the ground.

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” Squire grumbled, rubbing his foot on the grass. “Tell ya the truth, I’d rather’ve stepped in shit.”

  Dr. Graves stared at Clay, who still wore Eve’s form. “Can you feel it in her blood, the sin?”

  Clay concentrated, bending over slightly as if in sudden pain. “Yes. It’s like a cancer.”

  Conan Doyle nodded his appreciation to the ghost and turned to Clay. “Isolate, and expel it from your system. Purify her form, and we’ll have our key.”

&
nbsp; The duplicated Eve dropped to her knees, clutching at her stomach as she bent over. A stream of putrid, stinking fluid was spewed up onto the grass, and she became wracked with dry heaves.

  “Isn’t that special,” Squire chided.

  Jelena moved away from the wretched black fluid, her bestial senses tormented by the stench of sin in its purest state.

  “That should do it,” Conan Doyle said, reaching down to help Clay rise. “Now if you would be so kind as to verify my suspicions.”

  He directed Clay toward the Gate. They all followed close behind Eve’s naked form. “Casper’s right. When she hears about this, she’s gonna be pissed,” Squire said with a chuckle, as he hefted the weapon-filled golf bag over one shoulder.

  Clay raised his hands again and placed them upon the door. The wooden Gate swung inward to expose the beauty of Eden.

  The Menagerie crossed the threshold and entered the Garden, the Gate shutting behind them with a ghostly silence.

  They stood in awe, gazing about at the primordial wilderness that sprawled around them.

  Clay resumed his inhuman guise, shedding the form of Eve now that they had found their way inside.

  “Nice place,” Squire said.

  The she-wolf was the first to sense it, her body stiffening beneath her fur cloak as she looked down to the ground beneath them.

  “There’s movement beneath the earth,” she warned, lifting her feet and jumping back.

  Before Conan Doyle could react Squire had taken a spear from within his bag and plunged it deep into the ground with a savage grunt. The hobgoblin gripped the shaft of the spear and pulled, withdrawing the head of a Drow soldier from beneath the rich, black soil, its eyes wide in the surprise of death, fat tongue lolling disgustingly from his large, open mouth.

  “Drow,” Squire spit as he wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I hate these guys.”

  Raised lines bulged up from the ground, then Drow warriors exploded up from the earth, carrying maces, axes, and clubs.

  Conan Doyle cast a defensive ward about him and murmured an incantation, magic churning up around his fists.

  Ceridwen raised her elemental staff, icy wind and fire swirling around the sphere at its tip. Clay dropped into a combat stance, his earthen form radiating a formidable strength, and Jelena pulled her wolf skin tightly around her and fell to all fours, revealing her true form, that of the enormous, ravenous wolf.

  Squire looked at Conan Doyle, clutching the hilt of another large sword.

  “Got a plan?” the hobgoblin asked.

  “Kill as many as you can,” the mage said, lifting his hands and setting free a wave of destructive magic. His spell melted the bones of the nearest Drow.

  “Works for me,” Squire replied, charging toward an axewielding Drow, his sword raised.

  The Menagerie swept into battle.

  12

  THE angel was dead.

  Abaddon pulled his leathery wings tightly around his body, peering out into the dark tangles of vegetation, and knew the messenger of Heaven’s fate. Eve had found him and seen to his end.

  The demon tilted his horned head back, raising his nose to the air. The blood of an angel had a most distinctive aroma, and he could smell it now, dancing on the gentle exhalations of the Garden.

  He couldn’t say that he would miss Jophiel. Abaddon didn’t have the capacity to care for anything other than himself.

  But he certainly had enjoyed watching the Lord’s servant sink to ever-increasing depths of depravity.

  What selfish beings He had created, and how easy it was to drag them down.

  Abaddon detected motion to his left and turned to find Duergar slipping up beside him. The half-blood warrior had stealth that belied his size. His cooperation in this endeavor had been quite welcome. Here was a beast with voracious hungers and desires, and a penchant for cruelty that rivaled his own. Duergar had proven a valuable ally.

  “Conan Doyle and his zoo have arrived,” Duergar growled.

  Abaddon nodded. This was to be expected. He turned to gaze at the most recent arrivals, the legions of demons and monstrosities from a hundred dimensions that had answered his invitation.

  “The Menagerie?” a gigantic, maggotlike nether beast asked, having overhead. It was supported on the backs of smaller, pale-skinned creatures that cried and moaned, their skin eaten away by the acidic ooze that sweated from their master’s pustulant flesh.

  “Yes,” Abaddon replied, watching anxious looks spread through the gathering of horrors.

  “No need for concern,” he reassured them.

  A beautifully feathered bird soared down from a nearby tree, its shape starting to change and grow before it alighted upon the ground. Legion grew to his full, ominous height, a frightening smile upon his face.

  “Is he with them?” the shapeshifter asked Duergar.

  The Fey-Drow monster nodded.

  “Excellent,” Legion said, his black, marble eyes glinting excitedly as a ripple pulsed through his malleable flesh.

  But Legion seemed the only one among them pleased at Conan Doyle’s arrival. It seemed that his reputation spread far and wide throughout dimensions, though Abaddon suspected it was based more on his association with Sweetblood than the exploits of the Menagerie themselves. Unless he had underestimated them, which he quite doubted.

  Still, that anxiety swept through the gathering like fire.

  Abaddon listened to the squeaks and burps of unearthly tongues as they nervously muttered among themselves.

  He unfurled his wings, raising his arms to silence the otherworldly gathering. “Is that the stink of fear I smell?” the demon asked, wrinkling his nose as he bared his yellow fangs. “For if so, perhaps it would behoove you all to return to whence you came. There is no place in my new Kingdom for those who know fear.”

  The demon fixed them all in his unflinching gaze. “If we are to survive what is to come, all hesitation must be purged from our beings. Conan Doyle and his agents . . .”

  Abaddon pointed out into the deepest part of the Garden, a jungle of wild growth, toward the Gate.

  “They are the least of our concerns. The Devourer draws nearer.”

  A pack of Coinn Iotair, their thick black fur matted with old mud and blood that could have been there since the Twilight Wars, forced their way from the back of the crowd to glare at him.

  “And how will you deal with this threat, demon brother?” the pack leader asked, as the other doglike beasts nodded in agreement. “Will you send others to do the filthy work?”

  Abaddon glared at the pack’s leader, then at the others.

  “I will do what is expected of me as the orchestrator of this gathering, and as a Lord of Hell,” the demon said as he spread his arms and flapped his wings.

  Ancient spells of devastation procured from many an unwilling source danced upon his lips. Black markings that seemed as deep as the ocean depths, and which screamed in the voices of the mages from whom he had stolen those magics, appeared upon his flesh. Abaddon made sure that the monstrous rabble saw each and every one—heard each of those despairing voices.

  “I will make them cry out for mercy.”

  He spun on his cloven hooves and strode away from the gathering. He marched into the jungle with Legion and Duergar flanking him, off to combat the enemies that had followed them into Eden. There wasn’t room in Paradise for all of them. In the air there still wafted the smell of an angel’s blood.

  Eve’s scent carried on the breeze as well. She could be a problem, Abaddon thought. First they would deal with Conan Doyle and his followers. And then he would deal with the temptress.

  Personally.

  SOMETHING is wrong with this picture.

  Squire charged at the first wave of Drow soldiers, hacking and slashing through them, but something wasn’t right.

  The bad guys aren’t dying.

  The hobgoblin spun around after killing—or at least he thought he had killed—a particularly fat Drow. The lumbering monster’s
armor barely covered his protruding gut, and the thing had called him something in the Drow language that translated to fucker of shadows just before Squire ran him through with his sword. Now the hobgoblin turned around to discover that all the Drows he had believed slain were getting up from where they had fallen, minus limbs and showing off some pretty major wounds.

  The way they moved, the vacant look in their beady eyes said one thing: reanimation.

  “Fucking zombie Drow,” Squire spit, as he hacked and slashed. He couldn’t really think of much worse.

  Until the vampires began to emerge from the shadows of the jungle.

  SO much evil in such a beautiful place, Ceridwen thought as she summoned twin spirals of wind that danced upon the palm of each delicate hand.

  The sorceress had felt awareness from Eden, as though the Garden itself was alive, as though it had a soul. She felt fear.

  Now she unleashed the swirling winds, letting them leap from her palms to the ground, where they began to grow. In their bloodlust, the dull-witted Drow attempted to attack her magic, stabbing the twin maelstroms with their axes and clubs, and were sucked into the growing vortexes. The breath was pulled from their lungs, and their bodies were savagely discarded by the whirlwinds, shattered on the ground or against the trunks of trees.

  The earth behind her began to roil, and Duergar exploded from the ground as if vomited up by the holy Garden. The princess barely had time to react, spinning around even as she felt a psychic cry of warning that seemed to come from Eden itself.

  If only she had been quicker.

  THE vampires’ flesh tasted of rot.

  Jelena attacked with blinding speed, never giving them the opportunity to attack her en masse. The she-wolf in her natural state was an efficient killing machine, but the killing of the undead was another matter.

  No matter how savagely she struck them, or tore the flesh from their bones, they were still alive, and murderous. She pushed herself, constantly in motion, swifter than she had ever been before. Jelena darted between and behind them, lunging for attack, then quickly moving on to the next. She tried to cripple as many as possible, ripping out the delicate tendons at the back of their legs, hobbling them so that they fell to the ground.