California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  But Daniel liked the location. Bobbing offshore in a rigid inflatable boat with his crew, he scoped out the house through binoculars. All visible windows were barred. There was a swiveling security camera on the roof, another on a second-floor balustrade, and a stationary camera over the door. Several alarm company placards were displayed like hexes. A glow in one of the upstairs windows suggested someone was home.

  Daniel maneuvered the boat to avoid the pools of light cast by flood lamps on the roof. He killed the outboard motor, and rode the surf up to the iron mesh skirting the barnacle-encrusted pylons. Cassandra and Jo made quick work of the mesh with bolt cutters, and Moth paddled the boat under the house. Daniel tied off on one of the pylons and took a good sniff. Brine and sphinx-lock and a tinge of cannabis.

  There was just enough space overhead for Daniel to stand. He played his flashlight over the web of support struts and spars, hoping to find an easy entrance—a rubbish chute or something. But no such luck. They’d have to cut through the floor.

  Cassandra lifted an eighteen-inch, four-horsepower chainsaw. Hefting it in one hand, she smiled like a murderer.

  This was going to be noisy. Daniel hated noise. He held up a finger before Cassandra touched the pull cord. With a rubber bladder, he squeezed out a few puffs of fine yellow sand. Ancient Egyptians had constructed myths around the snake personified by the cobra-goddess Meretseger. Her name meant “she who loves silence,” and it made sense to Daniel that pyramid builders revered her, since any moment of silence amid the clang and crack of hammers and chisels must have been a huge relief.

  Daniel gave Cassandra the nod. She yanked the cord of the chainsaw. Muffled by the meretseger dust, the blade cut through wood, no louder than an electric razor. Less than eighty seconds later, Cassandra had sawed a gap in the floor big enough for everyone but Moth to climb through. They donned ski masks, and Daniel and Cassandra and Jo went up.

  They found themselves in a dark hallway hung with framed gold and platinum records. Daniel noticed Jo’s acquisitive gaze, and he shook his head no. Sometimes the hardest part of a job was leaving good treasure behind, and he didn’t want a repeat of the Sylmar job with Punch and the monocerus.

  Without speaking, they moved from room to room, ready for bodyguards. Bryant lived well. Given all the shiny trophy records on the wall, he could afford to. In the living room, a white grand piano rose from thick, soft carpet like a gleaming island. From the panoramic windows, one could look out to sea, and on a clear day, you’d be able to spot Catalina Island. Down the coast, candy-colored lights twinkled from the Santa Monica Pier, where Daniel had found the kraken spine a lifetime ago.

  The house was set up like a museum, with glass display cases stuffing entire rooms. Daniel lost count of the Grammys and Los Angeles Arts Medals and the dozens of other industry awards and civic honors on show. When they came to a room housing Bryant’s comic book collection, Daniel reflexively began to add up values. He stopped before a case containing a crisp, clean first issue of Lord Lightning and swooned. Cassandra had to drag him away.

  There was a room of baseball cards, and two rooms of guitars, and judging by the aromas permeating the carpet and walls, a sizable store of marijuana somewhere. Mostly Daniel smelled a rich miasma of osteomancy, but only recreational magic. Not the seps he was looking for.

  He had to admit he was having fun. This felt good, being with Cassandra and Jo, knowing that Moth was keeping watch outside while they snuck through a place forbidden to them by law and economic status. Even more than using magic, this was when he felt powerful. If he wanted to, he could strip the house of all its gold and platinum and vintage Fender Stratocasters and pristine comics. Bryant was rich, which meant Bryant was powerful. Yet Daniel could take his power.

  He gave a hand signal and the crew crept upstairs. More shiny metal records on the walls and pungent osteomancy. The room with the light was down the end of a corridor, and if Bryant had bodyguards, they’d let Daniel get unforgivably close. Either that, or they were waiting behind the double doors of the lit room. The doors were thick wooden things, carved in high relief with a surfer dude riding a longboard.

  Cassandra counted on her fingers. When she reached three, she and Jo shoved the doors open, poison-tipped needle guns drawn. Daniel came in behind them, electricity on his fingers.

  If the piano downstairs was an island, then the bed in the center of the vast bedroom was a continent. It rose on a mound of beach sand. The headboard was a cabinet towering to the ceiling, the shelves cluttered with more trophies and memorabilia, including photos of Bryant with Hollywood luminaries and members of the Council of Six, and more guitars, and even a surfboard. And propped up on pillows sat Wilson Bryant himself, bearded, huge, and barely contained by a white silk kimono. Yellow legal pads and In-N-Out burger wrappers lay scattered on his lap. Beside him was an acoustic guitar, half covered by a sheet like a sleeping lover.

  He squinted at Daniel with red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, wow,” he said. “You are made of love.”

  Odd reaction to three strangers in ski masks bursting into his room.

  Daniel shrugged at Cassandra and Jo.

  “You know us, Mr. Bryant?”

  “I know you,” Bryant said, a beatific smile lighting his face. “I mean, not you you, but the you you are.”

  “Which is…?”

  “You’re incandescent, man. You’re like the sun. You’re like a firedrake in first bloom.”

  “I like his lyrics about surfing better,” Jo said.

  This was just a weird situation. Daniel decided to roll with it. “That’s sweet of you to say, Mr. Bryant—”

  “Mister? Oh, man, I’m not a ‘mister.’ I’m just me. Just flesh and magic. We’re brothers. Brothers and sisters, all of us.” He laughed a stoner laugh and spread his arms as if he wanted to hug the world.

  “That’s really brilliant,” Daniel said. “You’re such a creative guy—”

  “A genius, actually,” Cassandra said, helpfully. Her gun was still aimed at him. Jo turned her head so Bryant couldn’t see her rolling her eyes.

  “Such a genius,” Daniel went on. “And this room … It’s a really inspiring space.”

  “I used to have to go outside to feel the beach,” Bryant said. “But then I saw the difference between outside and inside was a totally artificial barrier, so I brought that barrier down.”

  “Yeah. That’s good,” Daniel said. “That’s really good.”

  Bryant’s round head bobbed in an enthusiastic nod. The stoner laugh bubbled up, but then abruptly died as he screwed his face into an approximation of focus. “You’re made of love, man. But there’s something off about you. Like you’re the wrong kind of love. Like a false prophet. You know, like in my song ‘Unicorn Tears’?”

  “I’m not familiar with that one.”

  Bryant sniffed, a little bit hurt. “It was a B-side. It’s about making people love you. Do people know about you? How you make them love you?”

  Daniel didn’t like the way Bryant was looking at him now. He wasn’t funny anymore. He didn’t like the way Cassandra was looking at him either.

  A subtle change in Jo’s posture drew Daniel’s attention. He followed her gaze to a shelf in Bryant’s massive headboard. There, inside a two-foot-tall jar, was a snake’s skull the size of a basketball, floating in bluish fluid. No wonder Daniel couldn’t smell any seps. It was sealed in osteomantic preservative.

  “Say, would you mind if we had a look around?” Daniel asked.

  “In order to radiate more,” Jo supplied.

  “Sure, brother, of course. Mi casa es su casa. But, hey, can I sing you a song first? I just wrote it, so it’s still all locked away inside me. Music is light, and you can’t keep light shut in or else it’ll start to burn.” He laughed his stoner laugh.

  “We’d be honored,” Daniel said.

  “Hell, we’d be irradiated,” Jo said.

  The stoner laugh.

  Bryant reached beneath the covers for his gui
tar, and his hand emerged holding a handgun with a bore the size of a golf hole. The goofy, enraptured smile was gone.

  “What the fuck are you fuckers doing in my fucking house? Fucking thieves! Fucking spies! You’re not going to steal my fucking light!” His glassy eyes searched for something to aim at.

  Daniel flicked his index finger in a barely perceptible signal, and Cassandra and Jo pulled the triggers of their guns. There were four puffs of air, and four needles in Bryant’s chest. His gun hand sank to the mattress, and he sagged back into his pillows. He snored and was smiling beatifically once more.

  * * *

  Jo lay in the bathtub, cheeks puffed out, her face three inches under the water, with a clip pinching her nostrils shut. Part of the Ossuary job required underwater work, and Daniel had cooked a mixture of kolowisi, bagil, and panlong to give his crew the powers of aquatic creatures, at least for several minutes. It was Jo’s turn to get used to the sensations of being submerged without having to breathe, and she was doing great. Daniel waved a thumbs-up over the bath, and she returned it with her own thumbs-up, stretching the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. She’d grown webbed fingers and toes as a joke, but Daniel thought they might prove useful.

  “You’re a champ!” he screamed into the water over her face. She beamed happily.

  “No way she’s beating my record,” Moth said from the bathroom doorway.

  “She’s at seven minutes, and your record is officially a sad artifact of your former glory.”

  “I miss my former glory,” said a morose Moth.

  “Keep an eye on her for me while I go check on Emma?”

  Moth sat on the edge of the tub with Daniel’s stopwatch. “Hey, Jo. How’re your lungs feeling? Kind of bursty? Good old oxygen, your gassy friend.”

  Jo’s middle finger emerged from the water like a periscope.

  Daniel found Emma in his workroom, examining a military-surplus folding shovel. An earthy aroma hung on the air. Without putting much muscle into it, she stabbed the blade into the wall, and the concrete flaked away like talc, scattering into motes that vanished before reaching the ground. The shovels were like an all-access backstage pass. With these and the seps venom, the crew would be able to breach walls, dig tunnels, go wherever they wanted.

  “Good job getting the grootslang to adhere without dissolving the metal,” she said, handing him the shovel. “I was worried you might be more of firework than osteomancer.”

  “I can go boom if I need to. But I can also measure stuff out and stir things.”

  “You’re being modest. I’m told you’re actually quite a talented cook.”

  “I know what most of the buttons on the microwave do. It’s been days since I burned popcorn.”

  “You don’t take compliments well. Power and skill don’t always come in the same package. They do in your case. You’re a true osteomancer. And I wish we had time for me to tutor you. It would be a privilege for me, and it might help elevate you closer to your father’s ambitions.”

  “Ambitious and dead are synonymous in my dictionary, Emma. But I’m glad you’re happy with my shovel. I’m going to go back to work now.”

  He left her alone with the gouged wall.

  Things were falling into place. His crew was well equipped and prepared, and he knew they could work together. Except for Emma, they were family.

  There was one last ingredient he required, because they still needed an out from the Ossuary, and for that, Daniel had decided to make an earthquake. So he went alone to Dogtown.

  Tucked between Santa Monica and Venice, Dogtown was a dozen blocks of shops with boarded windows. Frayed wires jutted from decapitated streetlamps, like pistils and stamen from shattered glass globes. The slender moon cast just enough light for Daniel to spot the occasional shadowed figure making a furtive dive into a building. Incoherent mutterings and laughter and moans filled the salt air. Sounds that started as screams faded into silence or quiet weeping.

  Daniel walked along the dry-weed banks of the old canals and tried to decipher the graffiti slathered on the peeling stucco walls of the shops. He spotted some V13 tags, some Venice Shoreline Crips, the fish symbol of the long-gone St. Mark’s Parish, and the skeletal glyphs of the Dogtown Leeches. But this place belonged to no one in particular. He kept kraken electricity at his fingers and held his leather messenger bag close.

  He turned seaward, to the burial grounds of Pacific Ocean Park. Through the roar and rumble of the surf, he thought he heard the grinding sounds of skateboards on concrete, but it was probably just rocks rolling against the stubs of the old pier. He was spooking himself. He crossed a belt of weeds and entered the amusement park.

  The steel arches of Neptune’s Courtyard curved over him like the limbs of a monstrous starfish. A few bathyspheres swayed overhead, creaking on their skyway cables. Rats chittered from the dark recesses of the Davy Jones Locker funhouse.

  Daniel found the man he was looking for at the seal pool, a drained concrete pit filled with tall, yellow grass. Sully chopped mackerel on the wall bordering the pool. He was a handsome man in his seventies, thick silver hair neatly combed, just a few age spots marring his good cheekbones. He had the jaw of the hero in an old war movie. In fact, he had played a bit part as a heroic submarine commander in Siege of the Catalina Island. But his wardrobe was all wrong today: an oil cloth apron over a stained white T-shirt and greasy khaki trousers. He didn’t look up as Daniel approached, just kept on cutting the mackerel into bits.

  Who could the fish possibly be for? Daniel spooked himself again, contemplating ghost seals, but then he heard rustling in the tumbleweed and smelled cat piss. There was a yowl.

  “Don’t mind the bad man,” Sully crooned into the pit. “He’ll be leaving soon. Were you followed?”

  “Come on, it’s me,” Daniel said. “Of course not. You got my message?”

  “Your wraith delivered it last night.”

  “Not my wraith. The wraiths belong to Otis.”

  Sully shrugged, as if the distinction made no difference. “Do you have the thing?”

  Daniel patted his messenger bag.

  “Okay,” Sully said, hurling the fish bits into the pit. “Let’s go to my house.”

  Leaving the sounds of scrabbling cats behind, Daniel followed Sully down the promenade, beneath the dark skeleton of the Sea Serpent roller coaster. On either side of the walkway, gutted and collapsing buildings gave little indication that, for a short time, this had been Southern California’s most popular amusement park. When it opened in 1959, Pacific Ocean Park did better ticket business than Disneyland. And that’s what doomed it. In the fight between Disney and Ocean Park, the Hierarch sided with Disney. Storms, fires, dwindling attendance, and neglect had all done their damage, and now this was a place of rubble and rust. Nobody claimed responsibility. In these latter days of the kingdom, that’s how things went. Disasters and entropy served as the Hierarch’s disciplinary tools.

  Past the buildings housing the Enchanted Forest, the House of Tomorrow, and the Flight to Mars, they came to the oldest structure in the park, the Fox Dome Theatre. In the dark, with mist crawling up the pier, it was easy to imagine that the hundred-foot domed roof was still intact. But Sully cleared a mess of wooden pallets and rusted barrels concealing a doorless back entrance and they went inside. The illusion vanished. A few weak lights revealed the fallen-down palace.

  The collapsed balcony of the two-thousand-seat theater left a jumble of wood and plaster and concrete and rotting velvet seats. The projection booth had come down with it. In its place, Sully had propped a salvaged projector on a ladder.

  He slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves. “Let’s have it.”

  Daniel handed Sully a metal film canister. Like a kid opening his Victory Day present, Sully pried off the lid and carefully removed the film reel inside. He extended a foot of film to the light, squinting, and beamed with movie-star teeth. Biting his lip with concentration, he mounted the reel on the project
or and began threading the film through the puzzle of gates and sprockets.

  “Slow down, Sully. This is a transaction. You know how these things work.”

  Frustrated by the interruption, Sully dug into his apron pocket and tossed a plastic baggie at Daniel. Inside was a small quantity of dark red flakes. Daniel opened the bag and had a sniff of sulfur and molten earth.

  “What’s your source?”

  “Is that your business?” said Sully, returning to the job of threading the film.

  “Yes, it is my business. The time you sold me Etruscan leokampoi? Turned out to be eighty percent catfish.”

  “I let you smell it before you paid for it, didn’t I?”

  “I was thirteen. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Sully looked sad. “I know, kid. I shouldn’t have encouraged your delinquency. But I liked your old man and I figured I was doing you a favor.”

  Daniel faltered. “I didn’t know you did business with my dad.”

  “Oh, sure. The last time I saw him, I sold him eocorn essence, some terratorn coprolite, and some high-quality Panthera atrox. Pure stuff. Your dad could tell the difference.”

  Horn from a Pleistocene unicorn, fossilized condor crap, and American lion essence. That didn’t form any combination Daniel knew about.

  “What was my dad cooking?”

  “Didn’t say. But those are love potion ingredients.”

  “He didn’t do love potions.”

  Sully wasn’t going to argue. “He was a high-level osteomancer. Who knows what he could cook?”

  Daniel shook the baggie at him. “Where’d you get the beetle?”

  “Guy I know who used to work special effects at Universal. You ever see Earthquake?”

  “Charlton Heston. Yeah.”

  “This is what they used for the earthquakes.”