Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (13 page)

A root snarls his foot, and he goes down, face first into a flat stone. Moss cushions the blow, but still he’s left reeling.

Up on his hands.

Ahead, he sees:

A shaft of light from above—no moon, and yet there it is, a perfect beam coming through a break in the trees. Crystalline and blue—wavering and shifting as if through water. And in that beam sits a throne.

A throne made of bones and glass. Each skull, each femur and finger and spinal column, encased in bubbles of clear glass—jagged edges made smooth by the encasement.

The throne is empty.

Cason reaches for it—

It remains empty no longer.

A man sits on the throne. He’s reedy and lean, chest bare, the flesh there marked with fresh cuts but the rest of his skin smooth as marble—

“Devil’s in the details,” the man whispers.

The ground shakes again—

The Antlered God is coming.

Suddenly—

Cason shudders. Coughs. Tastes blood.

Cason looks down. Sees the sharp antlers already jutting out from the middle of his chest—feels his own heart go faster and faster until it stops, and it’s then he realizes that the Antlered God is already here.

C
ASON GASPS.
J
ERKS
his head up, sucks in a string of drool, chokes on it, coughs, blinks, looks around.

Books beneath him, a dim desk lamp shining down from above.

The sky beyond the hotel window is dark.

He groans, checks his phone: just past 2:00AM.

The dream again. Same as always. A few details different—last time the Antlered God was giving it to the horned woman against a tree. Cason hit his head on a rock in this dream, but a few nights ago it was a stump. But the gist is the same: the maze-like forest, the Antlered God in pursuit, the dark woman, the ruby-eyed crows, the empty throne, awaiting... something. The man on the throne. Means nothing. Nothing but anxiety.

Thanks to it, Cason’s got a belly full of acid.

It’s been a month since E. blew up. Since Cason met Frank.

Alison and Barney are still at home. So Frank says. But he says the other woman is there, too—though, not really a woman at all, is she? Psyche. That’s what Frank calls her. Apparently she was the wife of a god whose name everybody knows: Cupid. And another name—the Roman name, or maybe it’s the Greek, Cason can’t keep all this shit straight—is Eros. (
E. Rose
.) Eros got dead, blown to bits by one of Frank’s crazy bombs, and now the wife is pissed. Wants revenge. Great.

Thing is, Cason’s been doing some reading. He was never a strong contender in school—he survived okay, did the bare minimum and wasn’t a dummy about it and so he floated by on a string of C-grades. Reading and research back then didn’t do anything for him. None of it seemed relevant. All ideas and problems for adults who had... well, other ideas and other problems. Cason’s problems were how to get to second base with his Homecoming date. Or how to get his Pop’s old Caddy up and running. Or how to not get his ass kicked by one of the gangs who hovered around Kenzo like yellowjackets around a trashcan. Math didn’t help. English didn’t help. Science didn’t help.

None of it had any bearing to his problems at hand.

That is no longer the case.

Now, reading takes on a terrible urgency. He’s poring through myths and legends like a starving man in search of food. What’s doubly troubling is how this stuff no longer sounds like stories from a dead religion. These stories are alive; the gods are real. First he started to look only through the stories of the Greek and Roman pantheons, but Frank told him it goes bigger than that. Way, way bigger. Zeus and Hera. Heaven and Hell. Shiva and Vishnu. All of it.

When he explained it, Frank stood in his hovel apartment, standing on his tippy-toes to pin a printout from the Internet onto the wall—some fuzzy pixelated image of a man whose head was that of a howling monkey, jumping between rooftops somewhere in Bangladesh—and he said to Cason: “No, no, no, you’re thinking too small, Case-o Fresco. It ain’t just Greek and Roman assholes. It’s all of them.” He thumbtacked the printout to the drywall, then got back down to face Cason. “
All of them
. Every scary deity from every freaky myth is here. On Earth. With us, among us, upon us. Like a plague we choose not to see. Hidden in plain sight, if you will. I mean, that bigfoot in Eastwick? He’s not from any Homeric epic I’ve read. He’s a local boy. Lenni-Lenape, like I said.”

At the time, Cason asked, “How is that even possible? That it’s all... true?”

Frank just shrugged. “You’ll have to ask one of them that. Sometimes they stick together—you know, within the same, ehhh, pantheon and all. Other times they mix it up and mingle. City to city. Country to country. Some like to hang out with the people that once worshipped them. Others don’t give a thimble full of rat turds. Some are content to toy with just a few of us at a time and build up little cults of personality. Others like it big. They tank economies. They wipe out crops. They elevate bad men with little mustaches to positions of great prominence and help men fly planes into buildings.”

“You’re saying—”

“That Hitler and Osama bin Fuckhead are pawns in a much greater game? Hitler’s a little outside the range—the gods only came to earth a half-a-century ago. But Osama? Or any of the other human monsters? I dunno, Casey Jones. I’m just talking shit over here.
Speculating
. Human evil’s still a thing, don’t get me wrong. The gods are not responsible for the bad things we do, just like a vulture ain’t at fault for running over the deer. But the vulture’s gonna feed on the fresh carcass just the same.”

So, after Frank told him that, Cason’s been looking deeper.

But sometimes he flips back to one of the books on Greek mythology—it’s a big encyclopedia on myth and religion. Illustrated. He got it out of the library.

Page 14.

Aphrodite.

The art doesn’t do her justice. It’s beautiful, of course—delicate lines, pastel colors. The artist got the blonde hair right. The eyes here are blue, not green. And she’s too thin. She’s rising up out of the ocean, the froth of the sea clinging to her feet.

Mother to Eros. Though the book notes that she’s not his mother in every myth—some have him as a god without parents, a ‘primordial.’

Just proves that the myths don’t have all the facts.

He runs his fingers along the page without meaning to.

The apple—red and lush with its dark twisted stem—sits nearby.

Part of him thinks to walk into the bathroom and conjure her. He thinks about it every night. He could send her to Frank and demand—well,
ask
, probably with weepy eyes and lust-slick mouth—for recompense in the form of his family’s return.

But then...

He thinks about Frank’s story. What she did to him. Did to his
wife
.

The gods are cruel. Men are nothing but their little dollies.

That thought is what stops him from going to the mirror. Because he doesn’t know what the goddess did to him. And he doesn’t want to feel that way again—standing in her presence felt like being on some kind of drug. He’s never done heroin, but after fight injuries (which blessedly never lasted long with him) they gave him the standard regimen of good meds—Percocet, Darvocet, Oxy, Vikes—and he saw how easy it would be to just... keep... taking them. So it is with the gods. All too easy to keep warming your face in their glow.

Aphrodite could gut him like a hog and he’d thank her as she spilled his bowels on the floor.

His phone—sitting near to the lamp atop a stack of dusty books on religion—buzzes and lights up with a text:

WHERE YOU AT MAN – T

Tundu.

Cason’s own personal savior. Not just for rescuing him from the bad situation with Alison and Barney, but rescuing his sanity from all this... insanity. (Was there any other word for it?) Over the last few weeks he’s needed to escape from the madness, decompress, wrench himself loose from Frank’s eye-bulging intensity. Tundu’s been the release valve for that head of steam. And he doesn’t ask shit for it. Cason tried to pay him but Tundu wouldn’t take it. Said Cason was his friend, now. Cason’s never really had many friends, at least not in his adult life—is this how friendships are made? Randomly between two people who just plain get along?

He texts back:
At the hotel.

SHIFT OVER COMIN UP

“I
LOVE THIS
room, man,” Tundu says later, relaxing in one of the hotel room’s armchairs. “You got the microwave. You got the little tiny fridge. I bet the shower’s nice.” A big smile crosses his face. “One of those showerheads like it’s raining on you?”

Cason laughs. “Yeah. It’s all right. Water pressure isn’t so hot—less like raining on me and more like an old diabetic man peeing on me—but everything else is aces.” Over the last several years he’d been working for E., he’d been collecting a paycheck—he just never had much to do with it. He stayed at the brownstone. Didn’t have a car. Any expenses were paid for—and he didn’t have many of those to begin with. Life was boring, and the house had all the amenities he needed. The money accumulated. Time, he figured, to spend it. And so now, here it is. In a suite at the Omni. Nice. Not top-shelf, but nice.

“So, whatchoo got here? Homework?” Tundu indicates the spread of books with a sweep of his arm. “You taking night classes?”

“Something like that.” Cason’s still not told Tundu about... well, any of it. From the bomb at E.’s brownstone to everything that followed.

Tundu picks up a book on symbolism, then another book on Native American mythology. “This some heavy shit, man.”

You have no idea, T.

“It’s not worth talking about. Hey, you want to get—”

He’s about to say
breakfast
, but there’s a knock on the door.

These days, a knock on the door makes him clench up. But this time it’s just Frank. Voice on the other side: “Open up, Cason. I got a lead.”

Tundu raises his eyebrows.

Shit. Two worlds about to collide. Cason doesn’t want this. But what choice does he have? Send Frank packing? Can’t kick Tundu out—the door is the door.

Reluctantly, he goes, opens the door. Frank barrels in like a hard desert wind.

“All right! I figured it out,” he says, “I have the first target—”

Frank stops, mid-room. Frozen like a deer in the lights of an oncoming pickup.

“Psst,” he whispers to Cason, comically loud. “Did you know there’s a big giant black guy sitting by your window?”

“Tundu,” Cason says by way of introduction, “meet Frank. Frank, Tundu.”

“You’re big,” Frank says.

“You ugly,” Tundu says. But then T. stands and offers a hand.

Frank winces as he takes the offered hand. “Eesh, got quite a grip there, Kong.”

“Hey. That’s racist, man.”

“That’s not racist. You’re big and black, King Kong was big and—oh, for Chrissakes, I’m not comparing black people to monkeys.”

“King Kong was an ape.”

“I don’t study primates, and I’m not racist, either. It was like, a, a, you know, a metaphor for—”

“Frank,” Cason interrupts, poorly stifling a yawn. “What do you want?”

“I, ehhh, I got something to show you. About our thing.” His mutilated face gestures unsubtly toward the pile of books on the hotel desk.

Tundu steps forward, towering over Frank—a small frail man in the shadow of a human obelisk. “You in Case’s class?”

“Class?” Frank coughs a laugh. “I’m the teacher.”

“Frank—”

“Cason. C’mon. We gotta hit the bricks. Let’s go grab a cab.”

Cason shrugs. “T., maybe take a raincheck on the breakfast—”

“I drive a cab,” Tundu says specifically to Frank, his mouth a grim, suspicious line. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go. No cost. For free. Free is good, yes?”

“Free
is
good,” Frank says with a whoop. “Free is the best thing since salt and vinegar potato chips.” As an aside, he says, “What? They feel good on my fucked-up lips. C’mon, Casey and the Sunshine Band, let’s take a drive.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Eye Of The Beholder

T
HE WOMAN CRIES.
Sometimes softly, a sound that Alison can hear like a drip in the pipes or a mouse in the walls. Sometimes the cries are loud, her shrill wails echoing through the house, her broken voice like a yowling animal as it tries desperately to claw its way free from its cage. Always in the bathroom. She goes into the room, looks into the mirror, and gently closes the door.

That’s when the weeping begins.

And that’s when Alison gets a small part of herself back.

Psyche’s control is a one-way street. Usually. But when she cries, it’s as if her concentration is shaken, and in those moments the invisible leash and collar around Alison’s neck do more than tug and pull—she feels in them how the woman feels. She feels her grief and rage. She feels her narcissism and her fear. It’s a steady stream of whispers:
love is dead my beauty is fading she was right the bitch was right what am I who am I worthless worthless worm crying weeping look at me listen to me what good am I love is dead my beauty is fading
... and on and on.