Текст книги "Aloha from Hell"

Автор книги: Richard Kadrey

Соавторы: Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey
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Aloha from Hell

I DRIVE ACROSS town and beach the Bonneville in a no-parking zone in front of the Bradbury Building, that old art deco ziggurat and one of the few truly beautiful constructions in L.A. A group of schoolkids is on a field trip and I let them pass by before stepping into a shadow. I’m pretty sure a couple of the kids saw me. Good. Kids need their minds blown every now and then. It’ll keep them from thinking that managing a McDonald’s is the most they can hope for.

I don’t come straight out into Mr. Muninn’s cavern. I lean against the wall in the Room of Thirteen Doors. This is the still, quiet center of the universe. Even God can’t text me here. In here I’m alone and bulletproof.

I’ve had one ace up my sleeve since this whole circus with Mason, Aelita, and Marshal Wells began. The kill switch. The Mithras. The first fire in the universe and the last. The flame that will burn this universe down to make way for the next. I told Aelita about it but she never believed me. She couldn’t. I’m an Abomination and I could never get anything over on a pure-blood angel like her. So what good does that make the Mithras? A threat only works if people believe in it, which leaves me alone in this eternal echo chamber, not sure what to do. I can get behind Mustang Sally’s beauty-in-darkness idea. That’s half the reason Candy and I have been circling each other all these months. We’re each other’s chance to find some black peace in the deep dark.

Burning the universe was a lot more fun to think about when Alice was somewhere safe. Some puny hopeful part of me imagined that Heaven would still stand even if the rest of the universe turned to ash. But Alice is Downtown now and I know she was right and I have to let go of her, but I can’t let her die down in Mason’s crazy-house hellhole, and that’s what will happen if I throw the kill switch.

I grab a heavy glass decanter from the floor and step out into Muninn’s underground storeroom.

I yell, “Mr. Muninn. It’s Stark.”

He sticks his head out from around a row of shelves overflowing with Tibetan skull bowls and ritual trumpets made of human femurs decorated with silver. He wipes his brow on a black silk handkerchief as he walks over.

“Just doing a bit of inventory. Sometimes I think I should hire a boy like you to put this all on a computer, but then I think that by the time he’s finished, computers will be obsolete and we’ll have to do it all over again with brains in jars or genius goldfish or whatever other wonders scientists come up with next.”

He sighs.

“I suppose in a place like this, the old ways work best. Besides, I know that while it looks like a jumble to other people, I know where each and every item is. I only do inventory as an excuse to revisit doodads and baubles I haven’t handled in a century or two.”

He sees the glass container in my hand.

“Oh my. You’ve brought it back. Let’s sit down and have a drink.”

Muninn’s desk is a worktable covered in the kind of junk that would give the staff at the Smithsonian nuclear hard-ons. An early draft of the Magna Carta that included the emancipation of ghosts. Little floating and whizzing matchbox-size gewgaws from Roswell. Cleopatra’s lucky panties. For all I know, he has Adam and Eve’s fig leaves pressed in their high school ag high s yearbook.

I set the decanter on the table between us. If you look hard enough into the glass, you can see a flickering match head of fire. It doesn’t look like much, but neither do the few micrograms of plutonium it takes to kill you as dead as eight-track tapes and with a lot more open sores.

“You’ve changed your mind, have you? You’re not going to set us all ablaze like the Roman candles on the Fourth of July?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds fun. Giving this back might be a mistake, but I don’t think it’s mine anymore.”

I pick it up and look inside. I’ve had the Mithras all this time, but I’ve hardly ever looked at it. It’s beautiful.

“I don’t want this sitting in the Room in case Mason manages to make a key and can get in there.”

“No. If there was anyone even more unsuitable than you to hold the Mithras, it would be him. No offense, of course. I would never have traded it to you if I thought that you were capable of using it.”

“But I am. I was. I almost pulled that plug a hundred times.”

“But you didn’t. And that’s why I let you have it.”

I push the Mithras across the table in his direction. Muninn picks it up carefully, like a preacher who just found a Gutenberg Bible at a garage sale, and puts it on a nearby shelf where he can keep an eye on it.

He says, “If you see any of my brothers when you get to Hell, please give them my regards.”

“Your brothers are in Hell?”

“One or two, I expect. I’m the only sedentary one. The others are restless sorts. They’re bound to pop up anywhere. Some of them pass through Hell on occasion and send me trinkets for my collection.”

He points to a shelf with Hellion weapons, a cup I recognize from Azazel’s palace, and a chunk of the same kind of black bone that my knife was carved from.

“How will I know if I meet one of your brothers?”

He laughs.

“You’ll know. We’re twins except that there are five of us, so I suppose we’re two and a half twins.”

“I’m going to be moving pretty fast, so hello is about all I’ll have time to say.”

“You won’t even have to say that if you’re busy. Here,” Muninn says.

He pulls a metal strongbox from under the table and takes a set of keys from his pocket. I’ve never seen so many keys in one place at one time. He flips through them, makes a face, and tosses them on the table. He gets out an identical set from his other pocket. A lot of the keys on this ring are bigger and older. He finds one that’s so thick with rust, it’s more like a twig that’s been laying in the water and is covered with barnacles. He jams the thing into the strongbox lock and turns. It scrapes, groans, and whines, but after a minute of really laying into the thing, the box pops open. He reaches inside and pulls out a twelve-sided crystal and hands it to me. I hold it up to the light and look inside. Two pinheads, one white and one black, circle around each other in the center.

“What is it?”

“A Singularity. An infinitely hot, infinitely dense dot. Well, the two halves of it. Apart they’ll circle eternally, but when they come together . . .” He raises his hands and makes the sound of an explosion with his cheeks. “In common parlance, it’s the Big Bang. You gave me the end of the universe, so I’m giving you the beginning. I spirited it away with me when I left the family.”

I heft the thing in my hand. It’s light. Maybe half a pound. It seems kind of light for a universe.

“This was your hedge, wasn’t it? In case you were wrong about me and I did set off the Mithras. If I killed off this universe, you could start it up again.”

He closes the strongbox and puts it back under the table.

“I have a great deal of faith in you, but I’ve learned that it’s always smart to have a backup plan.”

“If you set off the Singularity, would it restart this universe or start another?”

“There’s no way of telling until it happens. And in the end, does it really matter?”

“Not to me. Though I might miss cigarettes.”

He points at the crystal in my hand.

“If you run into one of my brothers down there, give it to him. Do me this favor and I’ll owe you a favor down the line.”

He gets out a bottle of wine. Muninn always likes to seal a deal with a drink. It’s one of the reasons he’s good to do business with.

“In the meantime, keep the crystal safe. There’s only one. Now, is there anything I can give you to help you on your journey?”

He pours us wine in two highball glasses with dancing girls etched into the sides. I feel like I’m in the Rat Pack.

“What have you got? I don’t know what I’m going to be walking into down there.”

Muninn rummages through a box of random junk on the corner of the table and pulls out something the size of an acorn. He sets it on the table and drinks his wine. The thing is small and speckled.

I say, “It looks like an egg.”

Muninn nods.

“It is. The creature it comes from doesn’t live in this dimensional plane, but don’t worry. It’s no more exotic than an archaeopteryx, so the egg is completely edible.”

“Does that mean if I keep it warm, I’ll get a flying lizard?”

Muninn’s eyes brighten.

“Wouldn’t that be lovely? No, the egg has medicinal properties. If you’re hurt, it will help you heal and dull the pain. It has a very tough shell, so don’t feel you have to be delicate with it. Just toss it in a pocket. If you need it, put it between your teeth and bite down hard. I’ve heard they taste rather sweet. Like white chocolate.”

“You’ve never tried one?”

“I’ve never been hurt.”

If I had more time, I’d definitely want to hear more about that, but I don’t.

“By the way. There’s a tasty ’55 or ’56 Bonneville parked outside on Broadway. I don’t need it anymore and the people I took it from don’t deserve it. It would look good in your collection.”

“You’re too good to me,” he says, and comes around the table. “I’ll be sure to collect it before it’s towed away.”

I drop the egg in my coat pocket and get up.

“I have some packing to do, so I should get going.”

Muninn takes my hand and shakes it warmly.

“You keep my crystal safe and I’ll keep the Mithras for you. I hope to see you back here very soon.”

He waves at me as I step into a shadow by the stairs . . .

. . . AND COME OUT in the shadowed and semidiscreet entrance of the Museum of Death across from the hotel. It’s technically getting toward evening, but only technically. The sun won’t go down for another three hours and I’m very tired.

e. r="#000When I step out into the sun, the desert heat slaps me hard. It’s funny. I’ve lived here most of my life, so I hardly ever notice the heat. Maybe I’m feeling it now because I’m coming out of Muninn’s cool cavern. Maybe I’m noticing it the way someone with terminal cancer notices every leaf, every snatch of a song, every breeze from a passing car, and the color of smog over the hills as they wheel him to the hospice.

When I get back to the room, Candy has pushed and kicked most of the broken furniture to one side, leaving a minimalist scattering of chairs and lamps filling the cleared space.

“You got it real homey in here. Like a twister came through, not a full-on hurricane.”

She uses the toe of her sneaker to push a couple of legs from a broken table under the pile of debris.

“I wanted to make a good impression on the hotel so they could admire all the stuff we didn’t break.”

She’s looking at the junk and not at me.

“There’s no reason you have to leave. You heard what Mason said. However this thing turns out it can’t last more than three days.”

She looks at me over her shoulder, kicking splinters and broken glass into the pile.

“You want me to just hang around here like you’ve gone out for cigarettes?”

“I’m coming back,” I say.

She turns and faces me, arms folded and staring at her feet.

“Are you? You’re not going to find something more important to do? Save the whales in Narnia or start a Hellion homeless shelter?”

“If you think I’m going to get back with Alice, you’re wrong. I’m going back to save her. Those are two different things.”

“Easy to say standing here when you can’t see her and aren’t all dewy-eyed. She’s the love of your life and I’m just some girl with fangs you like to fuck.”

I hate shit like this. This is when I want to be Downtown and stay there. This is what regular people call real life and I can’t stand it. Give me a thousand Hellion throats to cut. It’s better than this.

I say, “It’s not like that and you know it.”

There’s a long pause.

“I want to think that.”

“So do it. This is what it’s like being around me. I don’t get a lot of downeft lot oftime.”

I go over to her. She’s still staring at her feet. Her arms are still crossed, but she doesn’t move away. I rest my hands on her shoulders.

“Ever since I got back, people having been getting bloody because of me. Parker almost killed Allegra and Vidocq. A Drifter took a bite out of Brigitte. Doc Kinski is dead. Alice was dragged off to Hell. Now it’s this Hunter kid and you.”

She unfolds her arms and lets them drop to her sides.

I say, “I can’t fix what’s already happened, but I can goddamn well kill it at the source, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not doing this for Alice or you or Doc or anyone else. I’m doing this for me because I’m tired of waiting to see what kind of heinous shit Mason dreams up next and who it’s going to take down.”

I move a hand up behind her head, feeling her shaggy Joan Jett hair.

“Don’t stick around if you don’t want to. Hell, I never even bought you the breakfast I promised. It’d be great if you’re here when I get back, but I won’t blame you if you’re not. I don’t know if I’d stick around this half-assed horse opera. So if I don’t see you again, thanks for playing monster with me for a while. It felt good.”

I turn and head for the door, but stop before I get it open. I don’t turn around.

“You got a taste of blood when you bit that dealer back at Dead Set. Promise me you’ll go to Allegra and get some of the potion that helps you control the craving.”

“I promise.”

I go out onto the balcony, closing the door behind me.

IN THE PARKING lot, foreign exchange students are playing basketball and eating burritos from a taqueria truck parked on the street. A couple have their laptops out and are video-chatting with their families back home.

I head to my room with Kasabian.

Someone taps me on the shoulder.

“Hey.”

Candy comes around in front of me.

She says, “When you’re born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it’s not.”

“What is that?”

“It’s something Doc told me. I didn’t get it at first, but later on it made sense. I thought maybe it could help you.”

“Thanks.”

I nod at the door.

“You coming in?”

She smiles a little and nods.

We go in.

Vidocq, Allegra, and Father Traven are inside talking. Vidocq and Allegra are sitting on the bed and Traven is on a chair across from them. Kasabian is by his computer listening to them and smoking. Candy goes over and sits by Allegra.

There’s a small single bed in the corner. It never gets used, so junk just gets piled there. Magazines. DVDs. Dirty clothes. A few bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I sweep it onto the floor and think about sitting down, but it doesn’t quite happen.

“Is this my going-away party or a wake? ’Cause if it’s supposed to be a party, you’re doing it wrong.”

“We knew that you being you, you would just creep off into the night like a thief,” says Vidocq. “So we decided to force our company upon you for a little while before you left.”

I look at Vidocq.

“Yeah. You’re right. I would have—so you don’t have to watch me twitch until sundown.”

“What happens at sundown?” asks Allegra.

“I make like Robert Johnson and go down to the crossroads.”

Candy says, “Is that what Mustang Sally said?”

“Yes. I can find a back door to Hell there.”

“Who’s Mustang Sally?” Allegra asks.

“The patron saint of road rage.”

Vidocq puts a hand on her arm.

“A significant local spirit. I’ll tell you about her later.”

I’m standing in the middle of the room like an idiot. They’re all gawking at me like I’m made of peanut brittle and might fall apart any second. I want to toss everyone out. I need to get my brain wired tight for Hell. And the Black Dahlia. I’m trying not to think about that. I’ve been nearly killed a hundred ways, but never in a car, and I never had to actually die to pull off any hoodoo before. What if it all goes wrong? What if I end up just another tangle of ground meat and chrome on the side of the freeway? I’d get a great obituary. “A suspect in the murder of his longtime girlfriend Alice, a man who was declared legally dead seven yeredead seears ago, finally turns up really and truly dead in a stolen car wrapped around a freeway support while rushing to have tea with the devil.”

Mason would love to have me stuck in Hell. Just another damned dead asshole. So would all the generals and aristocrats I didn’t get a chance to kill and the friends and families of all the Hellions I did kill. If I end up dead down there, it’ll be one long endless Dante gang bang. Get out the chain saws and pass the mint juleps. It’s party time down south.

“Why don’t you sit down for a while?” says Candy.

Allegra chimes in, “Even Sandman Slim can’t make the sun go down faster.”

“I was going to stamp my feet and hold my breath, but you’re probably right.”

I sit down on the small bed.

“What happens now? Did anyone bring cake? Or is it a sleepover and we’re going to do each other’s nails?”

“Don’t be like that,” says Candy. “Your friends are just worried, is all.”

“I appreciate that, but if you want to help, we should switch beds. I need to get some stuff from under that one.”

Candy, Allegra, and Vidocq come over to the small one and I go around them to the big bed. It’s a clumsy little square dance, but we make it. Candy squeezes my arm as she goes by and whispers, “Don’t be a little bitch,” in my ear.

That’s the best advice anyone’s given me all year.

I take off my coat and throw it on the bed. I pull everything out of the coat and my pockets. I toss the cash aside. It won’t do me any good Downtown. A key to this room and Candy’s. Toss those. My phone. Toss. A pencil-thin piece of lead I sometimes use for drawing magic circles. Another toss. I carry a lot of crap.

I pull a silver coin and a smooth pea-size piece of amber out of my pants pocket. The silver coin is about the size of a quarter and is old. Like ancient old. The kind of thing Doc would have carried. And there’s the amber. It’s not big enough to be worth anything. I’ve never seen either of them before. Someone must have slipped them into my pocket. I get it. Silver is protection from evil. Amber is for healing. I don’t look over at Candy. I just put them back in my pocket.

Vidocq says, “Let me be sure I understand this. Your great plan is to do exactly what Mason told you to do?”

“Pretty much. I sneak in, grab Alice, stab Mason in the head, and I’m back in time to catch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.”

“Mason is a born liar and he hates you. Why would to. Why whe possibly tell you the truth?”

I push the mattress out of the way and start pulling out weapons from where I hid them in the box springs.

“Because the truth is worse than a lie. He took Alice away once when he killed her. Now he wants to show how much better he is than me by doing it again. It’s playground stuff, but that’s all this has ever been.”

It’s funny seeing the guns and other toys all laid out. The old Navy Colt revolver, great-great-granddad Wild Bill Hickok’s gun. The LeMat pistol. Kind of huge and useless, but I like it. There’s a cut-down Clyde Barrow–style “Whippit” gun. There are souvenirs I’ve taken off Lurkers and lowlifes. A farmers’ market of pistols. Tasers. Brass knuckles with valentine hearts on the business side. Chinese butterfly knives and weirdly shaped Lurker daggers shaped for nonhuman hands. A sharpened goat horn. My favorite is a silver stake made by a wannabe high school vampire slayer. She made it by sharpening a flat-head screwdriver and dipping it in a pot of melted dimes. The perfect weapon against shroud eaters. Only the little idiot didn’t know that modern dimes are mostly copper covered in nickel. All she did was ruin a perfectly good screwdriver and prove that L.A. schools truly suck.

“You have nothing but his word. It isn’t possible.”

“Of course it is. Mason has Hell and now he wants Heaven. Aelita wants to murder God. Neither of them wants me stumbling around and maybe getting in their way.”

“Searching for Alice will keep you busy while they carry out their plans.”

“Right.”

Traven says, “I understand how a mortal man might come up with a mad plan to rule the universe, but how does an angel fall so far from grace?”

“You’re the preacher. You tell me.”

He shakes his head.

“I suppose if I knew the answer, I’d still be part of the Church.”

“Come on, Father. Angels have been going crazy since the beginning of time. They’re another one of God’s great fuckups. Look at me. I wouldn’t even be in this world of shit if an angel hadn’t fucked my mother.”

“They didn’t cover any of this at the seminary.”

“It’s comforting to know that God’s schools are as rotten as the regular ones.”

As fun as my weapon collection is, most of it’s useless where I’m going. I have my na’at and the black blade. They kept me alive Downtown for eleven years. They’ll probably do it again. I always feel better with a gunYour with on my belt, but getting shot with any of these would just make a Hellion giggle.

I look at Kasabian.

“You want to jump in here sometime with any new info?”

He looks at the bed and says, “I’m going to have a motherfucker of a garage sale if you don’t come back.”

“Thanks for your support. Is it possible that Mason is armed up enough to attack Heaven in the next three days?”

“Troops are still coming in from all over. There are a lot of deserters, but not enough to make a difference.”

“You said Mason couldn’t attack without Semyazah’s troops. Did he go over?”

Kasabian shakes his head.

“He’s not there, but that doesn’t mean some other general hasn’t been able to turn his troops. Like I said, there’s enough fallen angels in Pandemonium to start a thousand boy bands.”

I get out Muninn’s Singularity and the funny bird egg, Mason’s lighter, and the small white stone Lucifer gave me back at Max Overdrive and set them with the na’at and the knife.

Father Traven says, “If all this is true, then you can’t go down there alone.”

I look at him and then at Kasabian.

“You’re having a weird day, aren’t you?”

Traven’s eyes flicker to Kasabian and away again.

“It’s hard to say. I think I’m becoming immune to weird.”

“Damn. You’re one of us already. Well, welcome to the Grindhouse Rodeo, Father, where it’s monster triple features all the time. The popcorn’s stale and the drinks are watered down, but we’re open all night and deities have to sit in the balcony with the winos and rubber-raincoat types.”

Traven does his half smile.

“Thank you, I suppose.”

“There used to be a secret handshake, but only Kasabian knows it and he’s not talking.”

“Fuck you, Susan Vance,” he calls from across the room.

“One more thing,” I say. “Nobody starts with the you-can’t-go-alone stuff. That subject is dead and buried.”

The angel in my head is telling me to be calm, but it’s not trying very hard. It always wants me to slow down and consider all the angles, but it knows that the clock is ticking on Alice, and now that I’m tying up loose ends on earth, I need to move faster than ever. Momentum is my best strategy. Slowing down and considering the consequences of what I’m doing is doom.

Vidocq and Allegra are holding hands on the small bed. I don’t need to listen to their hearts or breathing. They’re radiating tension like a microwave oven. Kasabian has gone back to his computer, trying to ignore all of this. Traven looks a little lost. Candy’s not much better.

I know carrying a gun is stupid, but I feel naked without one. For sentimental reasons I’d like to take great-great-granddad’s Navy Colt, but it’s too big. I look back at the pile of guns on the bed and find a small-frame .357 revolver. I can’t even hit the ground with the thing if I’m more than ten feet away, but it’s better than nothing. I get a roll of duct tape from a drawer and pull my pants leg up a few inches.

“Want to give me a hand?” I say to Candy.

She comes over and I hand her the tape.

“Wrap it around my ankle a few times to hold the gun. Don’t be shy. Make it tight.”

She squats down in front of me and runs the tape around my leg a few times. Tests to see if the gun is secure and tears off the end with her teeth.

She slaps me on the ankle.

“You’re ready to go, Wild Bill.”

She leans up, puts her hands on my face, and kisses me. It feels good and it’s a relief. I was half expecting a gone-baby gone-death kiss, like the kiss you give a corpse before it rolls into a crematorium. But it’s a normal kiss. A have-a-nice-trip, see-you-soon kiss. For once, even the angel in my head is happy.

“Can you hold on to the stuff in that pile?” I ask her. “The phone and keys and cash and whatever.”

“Sure.”

In the closet there’s a box of Alice’s things that I took from Vidocq’s apartment. I pop the top and start taking things out. What’s the appropriate trinket from a murdered girlfriend to wear to a suicide?

From the bed Candy asks, “What are you looking for?”

“I’m supposed to bring something from a murdered person with me. Alice qualifies there, and I figure if I bring the right thing, it might help convince her it’s really me. I have a feeling they’ll have been messing with her brain by the time I get to her.”

A 000000"01C;I wasn’t murdered, but I’m a girl. Maybe I can help.”

“Okay.”

She sits down beside me as I pile Alice’s things onto the floor. There’s a pair of her favorite shoes. Some dime-store bracelets and necklaces from when she was a kid. An Altoids tin with fortune-cookie fortunes and buds of eleven-year-old pot. I set everything on the floor and Candy examines each object. I don’t know if she’s helping me or trying to figure out who Alice is.

I hear Kasabian putting a DVD into the player by his computer.

“What are you putting on?”

“The Wizard of Oz,” he says. “It’s about a dumb broad who flies off to somewhere weird and dangerous so she can wander like an asshole down a road she doesn’t know and get attacked by monsters and fucked over by a magic man. It sounds strangely familiar.”

I pull out more of Alice’s things. A brush. A Weirdos T-shirt. Photos of a ruined motel by the water, part of Salton City, an abandoned town in the desert. We were going to take a trip there.

From behind me I hear Traven say, “I wanted to thank you for saving me today and taking me to Allegra’s extraordinary clinic.”

“How’s Hunter doing?”

“Much better. He can go home tomorrow.”

“Good for him.”

“Is there anything I can do to help besides tape things?”

I get a pen and paper off Kasabian’s desk and scrawl lines and shapes. My memory isn’t a hundred percent on how the seven symbols Alice was writing looked, but I draw them as well as I can. I hand Traven the paper.

“Do you know what these are?”

He carries the paper over to a lamp and stares at it for a minute.

“This is a very rare script. It’s a kind of cipher combining pictograms and letters. Each letter has a numeric value, but their meaning changes in relation to their position in relation to the other characters. Where did you see this?”

“A friend showed it to me. What is it?”

“It’s the secret language the fallen angels used to plan their rebellion in Heaven.”

“Do you know what it says?”

“May I borrow your pen? I’ll need to do scenneed toome calculations.”

I toss it to him and he starts scribbling on the paper.

I’m on my knees next to Candy with Alice’s life spread around me on the floor. It’s like I’ve fallen into a Hank Williams song. I push the T-shirt, underwear, jewels, and address books around like I’m looking for the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Candy upends a pair of green dress shoes with one broken heel and something falls out. It’s a small toy, a plastic rabbit with beard stubble and a cigarette jammed between its lips. Candy holds it up.

“What’s this?”

“Alice said it was me in a former life.”

Candy smiles.

“I think we have a winner.”

“Eleusis,” says Traven.

I look at him.

“What’s Eleusis?”

He raises his eyebrows.

“I thought you’d be the one to know. It’s a region of Hell.”

“Never heard of it.”

He comes over and hands me the sheet of paper. It’s just chicken scratches and his calculations.

Traven says, “Dante wrote about Eleusis in the Inferno, though he didn’t call it by that name. Some translations described it as the woods given to the virtuous pagans. Dante described it as a green and pleasant place for pre-Christian men and women who weren’t sinners but couldn’t get into Heaven because they weren’t redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.”

“Wait, Heaven is punishing those for being born too early?”

“It’s not punishment. It’s like Limbo. A work-around invented by the Church centuries ago. If humanity can only be redeemed by Christ’s death, what happens to the virtuous prophets of the Old Testament? Eleusis in Greece was the site of ancient mystery rites and therefore a vaguely mystical region as good as any to dispose of the pagans.”

I hand the paper back to him.

“Then Eleusis is where Mason has Alice.”

“From what I recall, it’s a long way from Pandemonium. Halfway across Hell in fact.”

“Does going across Hell get me frequent-flier miles?”

I take my coat off the bed and load in the na’at, the knife, and the other gear.

It’s still two hours until sundown.

“We can sit here and stare at each other or we can have a drink and send for some food.”

“Food,” says Vidocq, and the others agree.

Kasabian turns around. Suddenly we have his attention.

“What kind of food?”

“Chicken and waffles,” says Candy.

“From Roscoe’s?” says Allegra. “I don’t think they deliver.”

“Everyone delivers if you pay them enough,” says Kasabian. He types something into the computer and a phone app opens on the screen. “Watch. I’m the king of overtipping.”

I say, “As long as you’re wasting my money, get Donut Universe to send over a wheelbarrow-ful of whatever’s fresh.”

Traven is staring at the paper with the angelic cipher.

“What’s up, Father? Not a waffle fan?”

He says, “I’m horrified by what you’re about to do, but I’m also a little envious. Hell is waiting for me when I die, but I don’t know what it is, and that scares me. But you can walk its streets without being afraid. I’d give anything for that.”

“If anyone ever makes you that offer, don’t take it. It’s a sucker’s bet. And I told you. I’ll show you around if you end up Downtown.”

Traven taps the pen against the paper nervously. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He’s picturing flames and oceans of boiling blood. If I tell him it’s not like that, he won’t believe me. No one ever really believes what you tell them about Hell.

“You and your friends have shown me more of the universe in the last couple of days than the Church did in years. I wish I could do more to show my gratitude,” he says.