Cookbook from Hell Reheated

by M. L. Buchman

  Deities Anonymous

  Cookbook

  from Hell:

  reheated

  by

  M. L. Buchman

  Dedication

  To the love of my life.

  We met because of this book

  and she has borne with me through all of

  the trials, tribulations, and the joys ever since.

  Especially the joys.

  All my love.

  DAY ONE

  Darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

  And God saw the light, that it was good:

  and God divided the light from the darkness.

  Chapter 1

  Eric Erikson answered his cell phone without looking up from his computer screen at work. His desk was a shambles of a half-eaten vending-machine sandwich and too many bags of Fritos.

  What blocked number would be calling him at two in the morning on a Friday night? He was just getting down to the second level of tonight’s guilty pleasure, indulging in a new Internet role-playing game. He’d gotten in on the beta release of a new project with the weird name of Chraze that looked cool, but he wasn’t very far into the world yet.

  “E-Squared!”

  Well, that told him who the caller was. Only his boss, Valerie McKenzie called him that. Everyone else still called him Eric-Squared, for Eric Erikson but she had edited his name down a year ago, before his job interview with Ms. Incredibly Erudite had even ended.

  “Hi, Mac.” That was the nickname he’d tagged her with during his first week at McKenzie Book Publishers. It had started as “Mac hold the cheese” because one thing about Valerie McKenzie, she wanted it her way. And she got it. She hated New York, so had convinced a major publisher to let her run her own imprint from Seattle. And then, against all projections, she had turned it into a very successful concern.

  Now, everyone called her Mac, and “McHell” was a whispered warning that permeated down the halls just moments before she swooped in and touched down like a personalized whirlwind at some poor fool’s desk.

  “You’ve got to help me.”

  Boss in distress. Her voice sounded really wound up, even more than usual. Eyes still glued to the screen, Eric shoved the mouse around to avoid a can of root beer and an upopened bag of peanuts on his desk, barely saving his on-screen avatar from being skewered by a black knight riding a Harley in full armor across a grassy plain in Spain where, according to the stats bar down the side, it hardly ever rained.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “You know that cookbook?”

  No one in the office could avoid “that cookbook.” The Mac had torn through the office on a rampage just three days earlier. Mathilda Reeves had finally delivered her latest cookbook manuscript, six weeks late and in miserable shape. The layout team had tried to put it together, but it was a total train wreck. On Wednesday morning, The Mac had grabbed the manuscript, a laptop, and stormed out in order to work from home.

  “I know that cookbook.” Eric kept his tone carefully neutral. No one had heard from Valerie for three days. Which had made the office calm and peaceful for a pleasant change of pace. Though he did kind of miss her tornadoing around the thirtieth floor of the Two Union Square building, she certainly kept things interesting.

  He whacked the black knight’s helmet with a handy caveman cudgel, which he’d bought cheap from an on-screen dealer in Neanderthal artifacts. It made the knight’s helmet ring like a church bell. Very satisfying.

  “Well, the cookbook now insists that it’s looking for God.”

  That froze his hand on the mouse, at just the wrong moment. The knight gunned the Harley’s engine and ran over Eric’s figure, flattening him into the sod. Then he circled back and rolled over Eric again crosswise. That sucked. This game handed out some serious retributions when your avatar died.

  The Mac took his silence as rapt attention rather than cursing to himself.

  “I was working on editing and laying out one of the very last recipes, a typical Mathilda dessert, Flan with Lingonberries. What the Hell is a lingonberry anyway, it’s not as if any normal grocery in Hell-and-gone Missouri is going to have them in stock, and suddenly the laptop made a gagging sound, like a loud retching. Next thing I know I’m looking at a recipe titled ‘Flogging with Lingonberries’ and there’s an embedded video of some giant red berry wielding a cat o’ nine tails on an apple pie holding up its crust to defend itself. When I tried to hit Undo, the berry turned to me and asked me, by name, if I knew where to find God? The thing called me Valerie McKenzie for crying out loud. I’m totally creeped out. You’ve gotta help me. I was almost done and I haven’t backed up in days.”

  It was impressive. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t taken a single breath in all that.

  “Uh, I can try to fix it.” He was still trying to piece together the image of a lingonberry knowing its editor’s name. And that she’d used words like “totally” as an adverb and “gotta.” And contractions. She was rarely desperate enough to use contractions.

  “Good, thanks! Can you… Oh God— No! Wait, I didn’t mean to say that. Good thing the software can’t hear me or it might start asking me more questions.”

  Eric wondered if she’d been drinking.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice the time. Could you come by as soon as you can in the morning? I don’t care what time. Pretty please, E-Squared?”

  Eric had never heard The Mac apologize, let alone beg. He agreed and instantly she was gone.

  He looked back at the screen where the black knight had broken into song, singing harmony on a Norse drinking song with the thudding reverberations coming from the Harley’s big exhaust pipes, about how he’d been born to be wild. All the while he kept circling around in different directions to run over Eric’s figure that foolishly kept trying to get up from his body-shaped hole in the sod. The wheel patterns over the sod were making the shape of an infinity symbol. Eric shut down the game.

  One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to wait for the morning. He’d never heard The Mac so flustered. Angry? Often. Perhaps too often, though not usually at him. But genuine distress? That was new.

  He grabbed his bicycle helmet. He’d ridden in this morning and then stayed at the office to take advantage of the high-speed connection, and the big screen, to beta test the new game. From McKenzie Book Publishers’ Westlake Avenue office to Ravenna was only a couple miles and the Seattle streets would be quiet in the middle of the night.

  He hit the street and was already moving before he noticed that the pavement was wet. Eric considered going back to get his rain slicks, but it wasn’t raining at the moment, so he just downshifted and hurried north along Westlake, past all of the sailboats and houseboats, up to the Fremont Bridge.

  He hit the draw bridge and rolled past the sign, “Welcome to Fremont, the center of the Universe. Set your watch back five minutes.” The problem he had was that he didn’t wear a watch any more. Instead, he used his cell phone that stayed in perfect sync with the cell provider’s signal all on its own. Fremont had, through no fault of its own, gone from arcane to archaic and he felt bad on its behalf.

  He cut across town on Thirty-Fourth so he could wave at the concrete troll squatting under the Aurora Bridge. The troll had the remains of a VW Beetle clutched in one mighty fist. As usual, he didn’t wave back at Eric.

  The neighborhoods were all quiet as he sped through. He’d always liked this time of night in Seattle. Most people only saw the bustling city that had doubled in size over the last few decades. But in
the middle of the night, there was a silence so deep that he could hear the quiet spatter of his bike tires on the rain-wet streets and the ticking clunks as relay boxes flipped streetlights from red to green just for his passage.

  He’d never actually been to The Mac’s new apartment. He’d been to the estate she used to have out on Bainbridge Island for last year’s Christmas party. A big place filled with canapés and ostentation, that both had and hadn’t fit its occupant. Super-editor, The Fearsome Mac, the Woman of Steel, would of course have a sweeping view of Liberty Bay and the Olympic Mountains isolated by large stands of timber along the shore of Port Orchard Bay. And of course she’d be married to some useless guy like Landau McKenzie. He’d been a weird Scottish guy, who looked like a laird and acted like a dweeb. And no sense of humor at all. Not that Mac had one either.

  But The Mac had this other side to her, one he spotted only rarely, the human Valerie McKenzie. Sometimes, when exhausted but pleased with herself at shipping off another soon-to-be bestseller, she’d drop by his desk. The woman would collapse in his guest chair and chat for a few minutes. Still perfectly coifed, chestnut-dark hair in a tight French chignon, power suit sharp and expensive, but a smile would emerge and light up her face. Eric had to admit to feeling secretly superior to the rest of the world, as he suspected he was the only one who got to see that life-altering smile.

  Everyone else told him he was fantasizing, The Mac never smiled except the way a shark might. So he’d learned to keep his mouth shut, but he’d become more and more intrigued by the Valerie he glimpsed behind The Mac.

  Then six months ago she’d divorced Landau Fucking McKenzie, as she now unfailingly referred to him, and life around the office had really become Hell. Her mood swings had gone from lethal, to chaotic and lethal.

  Her current gripe was that changing back to her maiden name wouldn’t do any good because she’d “for reasons unknown” thought it cute that she and Landau Fucking McKenzie had the same last name before she was dumb enough to marry him and how in the world could she have ever thought that was charming? Then she’d launch into yet another diatribe on Landau’s character.

  Eric considered riding north around Green Lake and getting his car, but he was already so close, he just rode to her house on Ravenna. She’d gotten a place just past the shop that had custom-built his road bike, costing him most of a month’s pay, over the crest and down toward the park. She lived in a giant Victorian house from Seattle’s heyday, now cut up into six or eight apartments.

  # # #

  Eric Erikson hit the buzzer for Valerie’s apartment and got no response.

  He considered that it was awfully late, she’d probably gone to bed. Maybe he should go. But she’d sounded so desperate.

  He hit the buzzer again, longer and harder.

  No voice squawked out of the speaker. But there was click, then a groan, like someone in deep pain. Like someone who’d been stabbed, or worse. When the door release buzzed, he went in fast. He shouldered his bike and bolted up the two flights. He dropped his bike in the hall, leaning it against the sturdy mahogany railing that overlooked the stairwell, and knocked on her door with a fast rat-a-tat.

  No response.

  He was preparing to test his shoulder against her door locks when he heard the chain drop and the deadbolt being thrown back. The door cracked open and The Mac looked out at him. At least a version of her did. Someone had taken the sharp-edged senior editor and run her through the Photoshop blur tool. Several times.

  She blinked at him like a sleepy cat. Rather than pulled back into an immaculate French Roll, her dark dark-red hair, half dry from a shower, snarled about her face and cascaded well past her shoulders. Half of it was caught inside a faded Smith College sweatshirt that might have once been white and gold. It was that oversized thing that women bought for sleeping in. Right now, the too big collar had slipped down to one side and revealed a vast expanse of splendid right shoulder. The sweatpants matched, equally oversized. Her bare feet danced back and forth a bit, the floor was probably cold this time of year, just like at his place.

  “Valerie?” This wasn’t tougher-than-any-man, The Mac McKenzie.

  She blinked those sleep-fogged eyes at him again. He’d never been close enough before to really see them. He knew they were blue, but had never noticed the little flecks of gold. It made him think of calico cats, not super editors. Not of a woman powerful enough to build her own imprint on the West Coast much to the New York publisher’s shock.

  The Fearsome Mac, tousled. He had to take a steadying breath. It was like having the universe change on you unexpectedly. The fiercest, most driven, and most successful editor in the conglomerate’s most profitable imprint never had a single thing out of place. Not a fold of her jacket, not a hair on her head, not a comma in a thousand pages.

  Also, he was looking down at her. Normally in serious heels and power suits, she was completely intimidating. Towering over people, even taller ones by sheer intimidation if necessary. Now, barefoot, she stood five-six, five-seven tops. Weird.

  “Uh… Hi.” She blinked once more and came a little more into focus. “Thanks for coming.” She looked at one bare wrist. Then the other. Then she turned slowly in place, stopping when she faced a grandfather clock opposite the door.

  “You came fast. I’ve only slept about twenty minutes. I appreciate it, E-Squared.”

  Like he’d wait until morning when receiving a panic call from The Mac.

  “It’s over there.” She swung open the door and pointed toward the table.

  Most of the apartment was about what he’d expected. Beautiful art on the wall, but rather than investment art, it was mostly soft, Impressionist-style scenes of Italian coasts and French lavender fields that invited you in. Some comfortable chairs, clearly intended for a larger room, but crowded together companionably enough to host a small circle of friends. Light curtains of gold and gray which masked the much heavier curtains of midnight blue needed to cover old apartment windows during the wet Seattle winters. Hardwood that probably dated back a century, complemented by the rosewood-hued pillows on the dusky-aubergine couch.

  All very cozy except, taking up a third of the space, an oaken table that would seat eight or ten if it weren’t shoved into a corner. Nor was there room to pull it out.

  This table, he decided, was all Valerie and very little Mac. It was a disaster worse than his apartment, covered in leftover food wrappers, a delivery pizza box, manuscript pages, and an impressive array of soda cans. He wanted a photograph of this, something to keep in his mind’s eye the next time she was busy scaring the shit out of him and everyone else in the office, but he didn’t think reaching for his smartphone would be a wise choice.

  A trail of clothes led from the chair in front of the computer, past the kitchen and down the hall toward the bathroom. A very intriguing trail. Nice slacks and a simple cashmere sweater that belonged to Mac. A “Come to the Dark Side, We Have Cookies!” t-shirt he wasn’t so sure about, since it would imply that The Mac had a sense of humor. And very feminine underwear and bra in pale blue satin that certainly didn’t belong in the same time zone as the Woman of Steel.

  He did his best to simply take it all in with a single glance then look away. Wouldn’t do to be caught staring at his boss’ underwear, even if it wasn’t on her body.

  He edged over to the table and sat, not even removing his jacket. The Mac morphed into a tousled woman who owned sheer, blue satin underwear was giving him problems. And if her underwear was strewn across the oak flooring, what was under the sweats…

  He shook his head to clear it.

  She’d moved up close behind him, kicking her slacks over to stand on and insulate herself from the cold floor.

  “Mathilda Reeves’ cookbook is a disaster. I was close, so close. Another ten or twelve hours and I’d have had it ready for the printer, and then it crashed. You have to save me, E-Squ
ared. I hadn’t saved in a couple of hours, but I’ll deal with that if I have to. I don’t have a backup at all, and I’ll just completely lose it if I have to redo three days of work. I don’t think I can face that. And that lingonberry scared the shit out of me.”

  He knew that The Mac swore, but he didn’t know she had limits. That was news as well.

  “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” He didn’t give voice to his next thought, that he’d be a lot less nervous if she’d move back a few steps and didn’t sound so human-woman-in-distress rather than demanding-boss-on-a-tear.

  He flipped open the laptop.

  An apple-green screen faced him. He hadn’t seen one of those in years. It was a normal laptop, but instead of some GUI applications all made for point and click, there was a black screen covered with apple-green question marks in a font like the early DOS days, like in the old mainframes. He wiggled the mouse, but there was no cursor to move around, just the blinking underscore character inviting him to type.

  He tapped an enter key.

  Nothing.

  He typed “exit,” but it didn’t return to its modern, windowed interface.

  He hit control-alt-delete.

  The computer flashed a solid screen of bright green at him.

  When he’d blinked and could focus on the screen again, he saw a new message there.

  Don’t do that! I already told her not to do that, but does she listen? Nooo! She just slaps me up the side of my screen, like that’s going to jar some electrons loose.

  Eric glanced up at Valerie.

  She shrugged and whispered, “I was pissed and out of other ideas.”

  He turned back to the screen.

  And now I’ve got you to deal with? Go away Homo sapien. I’ve got no more use for you than her…

  Unless you happen to know where God is?

  “I don’t.” Eric was so surprised that he typed his response before he’d even thought about it. “In Heaven?”

  Nope! Already checked. Not there. Now go away, I’m thinking.