Black Lotus Kiss

by Jason Ridler

  “Hobo. Road kid. Itinerant worker and former JD, that’s—” “Juvenile delinquent.”

  I laughed quietly, not wanting to wake the kids, especially Austen, for any reason. “You’ve been through the system, huh?”

  For the first time, Kevin wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t confident. His face was tight, like the good emotions had vacated the building and he’d locked up the doors so the bad ones couldn’t kick themselves in.

  “Sorry. I’m actually a pretty lousy detective, but I got a lot of respect for those who survive the system. Didn’t mean to pry.” “You didn’t,” he said, and I clearly had. “What case are you on?”

  “A friend of mine got hurt. The people who did it want folks to pin it on the hippies and heads, but it’s a front, a cover and a wild goose chase. The people who hurt my friend? They’re bad mojo. Big time.”

  “They killed those two guys back there?” I nodded. The confident Kevin of two minutes ago was still absent, the house still locked and vigilant. “Why?”

  The screw gave way and I kept my screams of delight inside as I switched to my fingers and gently removed it from its hole. “Truth? I’m getting closer to their identity. They’ve also got their fingers in the wrestling business. Truth be told, junior, I’m something of a tar baby.” I reached into my boot and yanked out my wallet. “If you want to drop me off at any corner, I’ll be fine.” I plucked out a twenty along with the credit-card sleeve of Black Lotus. “You can take this for gas and snacks as a thank-you for taking command of the chaos I tossed you into.” I stuck it on the dashboard, palming the cards and keeping them in my closed fist while my fingers squirmed a single petal out.

  “Keep your charity,” Kevin said. “You’ve earned a place at Tumbledown for a night.”

  I wasn’t sure if Kevin’s vehemence reflected his disdain for the past that I’d dredged up, or part of Tumbledown’s doctrine, which sounded downright libertarian. I hoped to high hell that I wouldn’t be introduced to their leader, just to discover he was a science fiction author with a bad back and worse pencil mustache who thought Ayn Rand was smarter than Einstein.

  Ahead were the sparkling lights of the Santa Monica Pier; alongside us were art deco buildings with dim lights and sidewalks of increasingly ragged stragglers.

  While Kevin stewed in silence during a hard-left turn, I’d lifted the lid of the compass and slid the petal into the needle holder, which looked like a brass chicken foot. I slid down the top and replaced the screw as we turned again. Dead ahead was a gray mansion that looked straight out of a Universal Horror film—or perhaps it was the Munster’s summer home.

  He flashed the headlights twice while my fingers searched for some kind of “on” switch.

  Once I’d found it, I brought the Watkins Contraption to my eye . . . and stopped breathing.

  Through the encoder’s eyepiece the house was bathed in milky blue light that emanated across the ground and led straight to the car. But there was more. Inside the house were darker, slithering figures; the dim auras of the shadowy creatures showed only suffering and pain.

  The edge of my taste buds recoiled.

  Black Lotus. Fetid with rot.

  “We’re here.” I placed the encoder in my lap. Kevin grabbed the twenty and handed it back to me with contempt. “You need to meet Sonny Ray.”

  “He the boss?”

  Kevin’s face soured. “We don’t have a boss. This isn’t a work camp. We’re free to come and go. He’s just the founder. He’s a friend. If you can’t groove that, perhaps you should split.” He tossed me the keys, then clapped twice and everyone woke up and filed out, yawning, sneezing, or wiping the goo from their mouths.

  I dropped the keys in a clumsy fashion, and while fishing for them between my thighs, I twisted a knob near the eyepiece. A brass cover dilated over the eyepiece, closing it.

  I opened the car door, leaving far less dramatically than I entered. The night winds lashed wounds new and old and the kids walked, single file, toward the creepy house, itself looking blue in the moonlight. Kevin was in the lead, leaving me and the car behind. “Hey,” I said. The kids stopped, but not Kevin. He just shot a glance behind.

  I ran. “Slow down, kiddos. Uncle James ain’t as fast as he once was.” Kevin’s face was caught between hope and protection. He’d reached out to an old man—old enough to be his old man—and new daddy had turned out to be a creature of the road, bound to leave and not stick around. Didn’t have a house like Tumbledown.

  We walked the crooked stone path up the short hill that Tumbledown sat atop. I knew where we were now. It looked like Tumbledown had once been part of the grand old world of the Pacific Ocean Park. Hard times and creditors had shut the place down two years ago. Most of the rides and games had been auctioned off and the rest had been left to decay. A sun-bleached brown and blue wood sign proclaimed: TUMBLEDOWN: THE HOUSE BUILT TO DEFY GRAVITY!

  It wasn’t that it was forsaken amusement park housing. It wasn’t even the eerie glowing sadness that thrummed in its belly. With night vision, I could tell the lawn was immaculately cared for, shaved down to a Marine’s jarhead cut, not a hair out of place. Kids working to keep a place that was no more than junk look clean?

  Ever meet a Marine barber? Ever met one who was also a dope-smoking skateboarder? Tumbledown was a host of contradictions—notwithstanding the monsters in its guts—so I tried to be as relaxed as possible for a man wearing wrestling trunks and a stained referee’s shirt and bearing a compass for Black Lotus that seemed to be screaming HERE BE DRAGONS WHO SMOKE THE DAMN STUFF.

  I looked back. A fistful of homeless were eying the car, but everyone was five yards from it and not moving. It was if the house cast a spell of “don’t you fucking dare” over the surrounding area, keeping the desperate from taking a chance. We wound up at the door, and I half expected Scooby-Doo to jump out with a monster mask and scare us.

  Kevin pressed the door open. It wasn’t locked. That that made me more nervous than if it had been covered in a dozen Schlage deadbolts. He walked into the darkness, which I could see was a hallway leading to a weakly lit bathroom at the end of the hall. “Everyone, catch some z’s,” Kevin said. “James, you need to meet Sonny.”

  Need? The free-loving hippie commune had a military edge underneath the hair, tans, and attitude.

  And I’d been a lousy soldier.

  I was amazed at the smell of Tumbledown when I cut across the threshold: bleach. Sure, weed and roses and assorted scents. But bleach most of all. The smell of cleaning the diseased. The smell of covering horrors. The smell that drowned out the stench of life.

  The kids took a left. I followed Kevin as he turned right and we entered what was once a dining room.

  Kids, judging by the mass, were spooned, snoring, and satisfied on the floor beneath blankets. The bleach smell was stronger here. This must be the cleaning crew. Younger, smaller, perhaps less agile on their boards. Such was the division of labor at Tumbledown. As we stepped over kids who were almost as young as me when I hit the road, I wondered what other divisions there would be. Cooking crew? Harem?

  My fists tightened around the encoder. Whoever Sonny was, he’d made a cult of kids who were making him the King of Dogtown. I thought it was time he had a talk with a grownup.

  Despite an army’s worth of effort to plug up holes in the cheaply built walls, the stench of wood rot lingered beneath the bleach and wind. Tumbledown was breezy. One good storm, and it would earn its name. The place was a death shack that hadn’t yet rolled over in the grave.

  I’d slept in worse digs, but that didn’t make me see this structure as anything but temporary.

  More troubling: there was no taste of magic. Beneath my soles, there was burning proof to the contrary. That meant deeper magic than kids play with.

  Kevin stepped around shaggy heads with practiced ease, as if he had night eyes like me, the dark just a different kind of light in the world. He looked back. I nodded in deference, following his lead. His face pursed, a
s if he didn’t believe me, but he had given his word to introduce me to Sonny. He turned a corner and took another creaky step, no attempt to quiet it.

  We started up a staircase, walking solemnly upwards, thin wafers of wood creaking on the treads. I swear you could feel the house sway with the Pacific’s breeze, echoing the tide. The stairway walls featured cartoon rabbits and dolphins, painted upside down. Then I looked up.

  Sure enough—defying gravity as promised—chairs, a sofa, a chinoiserie bureau, and a small writing desk were stuck to the ceiling, hanging like a half-dozen swords of Damocles, all being held up with god knows what beyond nails, prayer, and industrial adhesive.

  But the second floor made my shit itch.

  It was a barren room, and parts of the walls had fallen—or been ripped—out, leaving the spare ribs of the house’s inner skeleton peering through gaps in the thin flaps of old plaster: the ugly interior beneath the veneer.

  There were holes in the floor as well. We stayed clear, knowing that any foot pressure on those weak boards would crush the kids beneath and maybe release whatever monsters lived in the basement.

  “Come on,” Kevin said. “His room is upstairs.”

  “He gets his own room,” I said, matter of fact. “Probably for the best.” It was even worse to think this creep was sleeping with these kids.

  The encoder rattled in my angry fist and I had to release the tension before I dropped the only thing keeping me on track to find the makers of Black Lotus.

  Up the last flight to a large landing. A single door lay on the far wall. It appeared to be new, with a decent frame and clean knob. Kevin opened the door to reveal a dark room. Perhaps fifteen feet away sat a chair containing a single figure cocooned in a blanket, book to his nose, weak candle glowing on a table to his side. “Just listen, don’t judge, okay?” Kevin said, holding the door open for me. I walked in.

  Then I caught scent. Litholine grease. Fresh. Not covered in bleach. A part of this damn ride was still alive—

  “Sorry, man,” Kevin said, then closed the door.

  “Shit!” The floor slipped away from under my boots. I dropped into darkness, stealing a glance at the figure in the chair. It stood as I fell, a bleached white dummy pointing skeletal fingers at me and screaming with cadaverous recorded laughter.

  33

  THE CHUTE SLIPPED AWAY INTO AN 85-DEGREE ANgle, sending me spinning, grunting, and fearing every bounce would shatter the encoder—or me. Zooming down the chute, I banged into its metal sides a thousand times.

  I shoved my left hand out to stop my momentum, but my right was holding the encoder. Trying to brace myself hand-to-shoulder failed spectacularly.

  Bonking my skull three times, I saw stars come out of the dark while gravity dug its claws into every single cell of my being, pulling me down to where the blue shadows glowed. The star-sparks snuffed out before I could hit the—

  THE SKY WAS MADE OF DRIED BLOOD AND THE SAND WAS CRUSHED TEETH. Fingerbones outlined a pathway and pointed toward an onyx tower, surrounded on all sides by a sea of churning mercury. The tower was made of scales that breathed. I’d seen this place before in flashes of agony: a place in the nethers where nightmares were spawned—a living structure, a prison, a place that I apparently could access when I was knocked for a loop in the mortal world.

  “NOOOO!” boomed a voice in the thralls of anguish.

  I recognized the scream: it came from Cactus.

  I ran down the path, kicking up the guiding bones as I followed them to a silver door polished to reflect the distorted horror of my own visage like a funhouse mirror, though I had to admit my hair looked great. I shouldered the door but passed through the silver membrane into the living tower—

  —and snorted.

  “Oh, for the love of Glycon and P.T. Barnum.”

  The blood- and sweat-spattered ring from the Olympic was recreated with the twisted limbs of the grapplers who had wanted to tear me a thousand new assholes, faces mashed and melded with arms and boots and legs and tights. Each of the ring’s turnbuckles bore the skull of a fan, mouth distorted with screaming insults.

  “Die already, you faggot!”

  “Rot in hell, Brimstone!Don’t care which one.”

  “Go back to being Edgar’s fuckrat!”

  The wind that roared within was not from the crowd, it was Cactus, screaming—no—refusing death, fighting for life.

  “This is your choice for a champion, warrior?”

  The voice. It was white cold. Fear distilled. My bones rumbled. Neither female nor male, animal or human, it was something other. The crushing voice of birth and murder.

  “No!” Cactus screamed. “But he’s the only one who answered!”

  I sighed. “I deserve that. All right, who am I fighting?”

  Black smoke sparked from the center of the ring, wispy tendrils of smoke rolled out overwhelming the ring and forming an eyeless face bigger than an L.A. city bus, then bigger than Izzy’s storefront. Its snout was best fit for Godzilla’s death mask.

  “Who?” said the creature. “Legions. Legions of foes await you, James Brimstone.”

  “You mean cowards who throw grenades at old people?” I said, mouth finding courage that had utterly drained from my heart. “Bring them, one by one, or in a schmozzle.”

  Below the cavernous mouth a neck grew, then another extended from the top. Tentacles, I corrected myself, not necks. The tentacles begat more tentacles until the maw was the center of some monstrous nervous system. “For every one you face, more will grow. You will fall, James Brimstone. You will fall.”

  I blinked. “Oh. I get it. You’re Tiamat. Or what’s left of Tiamat, the great goddess of oceans and creation. Living near the beach. Kinda cute.”

  The maw smiled. “And you are no Marduk.”

  “That Babylonian demi-god who crushed you with fire and a magic blanket? Uh, no. I’m barely able to be a good version of me on a bad day.” I stepped forward, the oppressive presence of this old god calling me. “But if you’re mucking about with mortals of no account like me, then I must be on to something big, something scary. I saw your home when I was saving the world a couple of months ago.”

  The maw snarled. “You toyed with a girl who had little knowledge of power.”

  “And now the life of one Apache warrior is worthy of your attention? Why?”

  “Mysteries can kill, Brimstone.”

  “So can soap and a shower to a Hells Angel.” I stepped closer. I could see the ring again through Tiamat’s smoke. “I remember asking Edgar where all the old gods had gone.” I pulled myself up on the apron. “They couldn’t all be sleeping or frozen in lost dimensions. Some had to have presence. Impacts. Little fingers back in the world.”

  I gripped the ring ropes made of twisted sinew. “Figments, he called them. The barest flicker of great powers . . . but you’re not a great power. Tiamat was about the baddest mother of all, and here you are, playing chess with Apaches and road kids for street drugs. How the mighty have fallen.”

  The limbs thrashed toward me and the mouth hissed, but I stayed put. Because things were clicking. “Tiamat created worlds. Drugs

  create illusions. Worshippers of false gods. That’s what you want. You thought Tabitha could do that with her porn sorcery. Now? You’re helping some mortals make a drug that was best known for murder and rapine.”

  Each writhing appendage now had a mouth and they all hovered around me.

  “But I’ve tasted Black Lotus. Notice how I don’t want another hit?”

  The mouths shook. “Tell us.”

  I raised my hands. “Easy. I can’t be charmed. Not by magic, not drugs. Sure, it turned me into the first-class asshole that I used to be. But when it’s gone, it’s gone. I’m immune to your worship, Tia.”

  “DO NOT CALL US THAT!”

  “And I know what you’re wanting me to do: get in this ring where you will taunt me with images of who you’ll ruin or who I’ll lose if I fail. But here’s a secret: no one k
nows how to kick my ass more than me. I know that if I don’t stop you, Cactus’s ghost will never leave me.”

  “NEVER!” Cactus screamed from the shadows of consciousness.

  “Thanks, buddy. And I know who’s doing your dirty work.”

  The smoke maws smiled. “Doubtful.”

  I stepped between the ropes and some of the smoke heaved away. I cracked my knuckles. “I definitely know that I’m tired. Of being afraid. Of losing. Of wasting time with the likes of you. It’s time for James to wake up.”

  I ran through the smoke in the ring, moving at the ghost speed of whatever netherworld rules of nature existed, and heard the hollow screams of the maws, and an older, deeper one.

  “You will regret not serving me, Brimstone. Now feed my people!”

  Tia’s many mouthless visages pulled back, then dove for my face, drowning me in the smoke of hells so foul they burned my magic taste buds so everything tasted like embers covered in piss. I gasped, swinging my hands wildly and touching nothing but acrid mist—

  —that hardened into flesh as my hands punched gaunt faces that were screaming all around me. My night eyes brought them into full relief in the dark: creatures that were once human and now something fit for hell’s sanatorium.

  “He’s got it! I can smell it!”

  “Give it!”

  “Mine!”

  Without thinking, I shoved the encoder into my trunks. I stood, a lonely island amid a sea of human misery. Weathered bodies and gray limbs of what you’d guess were junkies but I could taste were something far, far worse. Here were the victims of Black Lotus, modern day zombies minus the voodoo, eyes as hungry as eyeless Tia’s mouths; her little head cases, smelling like fecal putrescence and a craving deeper than addiction. A legion of the damned, weak in body but strong in need, thanks to a rotting cosmic sweet tooth.

  I spun my arms in wushu moves just to create space, and their various outstretched limbs dropped back. A ragged crew of homeless faces and beach-bum bodies, muscled and hard but withered to poor imitations of their once-mighty selves, now forced into action because they knew I was carrying their only chance for peace outside a long dark night of the soul.