Lost Angels Page 10

  Past tense operative, he thought. Was, not is. He had broken the mirror yesterday morning. Maybe.

  His rioting metabolism was in hard contrast to the mundane view inside his door. He was over cranked, attack-ready, flushed full of fresh adrenaline, and everything looked damnably regular. The rickrack he'd spilled off the desk was still in the same position he'd abandoned it on the floor. Yet something else, a calm resonant mental tone, quietly contradicted the apartment's masque of normalcy.

  Perhaps it was the set of air in the room that told him the apartment had been entered and changes unobtrusively worked.

  There was no need to cautiously ease the bedroom door open with an extended foot (the sound of its slam the day before rolled back to him now, full volume). He had begun to twist the knob when Max nosed blithely through ahead of him.

  In just a few days of ownership, he had become accustomed to the way the big mirror beamed light around the bedroom, formerly the dimmest box in the place. That light was gone now. The scrolled brass frame hung dark, like the pit of an empty eye socket, or a television with a kicked-in tube. Tiny motes of brass-yellow glinted feebly. The mirror glass was salted all over the bed, the carpet, the nightstand, in glittering splinters, shiny and slim and pointed like the fangs from a burnished mechanical rattlesnake. They broadcast a galaxy of light points across the ceiling, sharp white. It was broken, all right, shattered into a million million polished smithereens. He waded into the densest spill of broken glass, his shoes imbedding needled fragments into the carpet. He bent and retrieved a cup handle snapped open to porous tooth-white on each end, a curve like a skeleton's knuckle joint. Chunkier, triangular wedges of the dead coffee mug were plainly mingled with the obliterated mirror's metallic remains.

  "Don't walk on the glass, Max," he said, lacking anything else.

  His decision was already made. If he was crazy enough to hallucinate the mirror whole, the cup vanished, then one more spurt of lunacy could not curse him any more before calling the medics - or finding himself a razor blade.

  "Come on, Max, we gotta visit the car again." The tallow candle and the spellbook from Darkmoon were still in the Pinto. He had left them behind, thinking that to tote them up to the apartment before seeing might jinx what he was to discover. He felt sure that deep inside he did not want to believe, no. Now it made no difference to go through the motions, complete the dance as a matter of style, neutrally, since sillier things had already been done.

  On his way out it occurred to him to case the kitchen.

  He knew what he had. Between the dust of the cabinets and the grease of the sink, he owned three large dinner plates, two salad plates, two mismatched short-stem wine goblets, a few plastic baseball trading cups from 7-11, a Pyrex bowl for all purposes, some Melmac plates he never used, and four coffee cups - one bowl-shaped Shafford cup with no saucer and three identical dark brown mugs. The unbroken pair would be in the kitchen.

  He looked and found one mug, dirty. He looked twice. He began to search. After inventing unlikely hiding places - in the refrigerator, under the sofa cushions - he stopped and still had exactly one mug accounted for.

  Yes, there was a chance Jenny might have busted it and slipped it into the trash and forgotten it. There also seemed to be a chance that she had broken it on purpose, more recently, in the bedroom. She had a key to his apartment; he'd been gone all day yesterday.

  Jenny. Jennifer. Preternaturally beautiful and obviously well off. Why would she have anything to do with him unless - Mrs. Saks had told him you'd best destroy whatever's left.

  The tallow candle was yielding now to the dashboard and windshield, no longer even remotely a cylinder so much as an amorphous mass inside the paper. It smelled like stale bacon. Max chased Grant happily down the service stairs. Avoiding the elevator forced him to fry off loose blood sugar. As he shut his door, his phone began ringing. He ignored it.

  Let her come on her own.

  Her presence could render him vertiginous, almost always had. She wobbled him. Could make him just a touch weak in the knees. A barely noticeable form of control ... or mere proof of the intensity with which he realized he wanted her?

  Sure.

  "What about you, old pal?" he said to Max. "How real are you?"

  Max sneezed explosively, as if to vindicate his actuality. Certainly nothing metaphysical could sneeze or fart with Max's style.

  Maybe the dog merely served the purpose of helping to snare him in the first place. Let's be thorough now, not reluctant, he thought; let's run this little extrapolation to earth. Dogs were a soft spot of his. The current apartment (like all the others) was too small to keep one, and his list of second-string wants perpetually included a canine buddy. But if Jenny was something other than ... if she was different in some way, wouldn't Max sense it, and react as he had to the authentically bad vibes of the mirror? Didn't animals know?

  Grant camped out on the brass bed with his souvenirs until Jennifer's form filled up the bedroom doorway. He heard his door close and imagined the number of paces across the living room, and there she was, having obviously rolled out of bed and into jeans and a loose, billowy work shirt. Her hair was free, mussed from the rush.

  "I'm conducting an experiment in pop craziness, the kind we generally ascribe to the Boulevard loons," he said to her silhouette. "And if nothing comes of it, I'm entitled to feel supremely stupid. Should that happen, you may not want to be everything for me anymore. But if something does happen ... god, then I've got a whole additional set of problems, don't I?"

  Now she did not talk of doctors, or urge calm, or coo reassurance, or protect her innocence with a flood of examples. She had helped him with the chain of conjecture that led here. Motives could be dealt with after the fact. She said what she had said earlier, and now the word chilled him.

  "Don't?"

  Her breath was labored, he noticed. What would've happened if he'd answered the phone instead?

  "I can't stop you, can I?" she said.

  "I'm afraid not, Jenny. I mean afraid. Not knowing scares me witless. I don't know that I've ever loved anything, either —maybe I never spent enough time contemplating it - but I'd apply that word, love, for whatever value it's worth with you. But my brain can't just disengage or ignore things. And that means if not today, I'd do this next week, assuming my days weren't numbered." The words came out shakily.

  "I understand," she said. "I mean, I know. It's the way you are."

  "What the hell else can I do?"

  Max, put off by their sloth, sought his place beneath the stereo shelf. Grant abruptly felt like a general abandoned in a trench during a banzai charge, his heart racing because Jenny had not budged from the doorway. She would not come near the bed now. He gained some engine of protection, Mrs. Saks' reedy voice said inside his head. But he was taken anyway.

  "You can let me tell you a story," she said finally, the hurt plainly clogging her speech.

  "I'm listening." No concessions. You're committed, boy.

  "Once upon a time there were some no-talent Hollywood leeches." There was no sarcasm in her tone.

  "They got off by claiming to be attendants of Cybele; whether they actually believed in such a nature goddess doesn't matter. It was just a thin license for fucking their brains out at ritual orgies. They managed to attract the attention of some jaded business mavens, ledger hacks who wanted to cop a feel on the Hollywood action they'd always coveted, and become part of the big, glittery Movie Machine. They got to bare their butts and indulge their wet dreams in exchange for bankrolling this erstwhile Bad Actor's Glut. Eventually, the financial grease permitted a few of these no-talents to slide through into the filmmaking mainstream. The Business Administration dropouts formed a big, bad corporation. And their Olympian sexual repertoire began to get eccentric."

  Grant wondered if Aleister Crowley had fancied himself a corybantic. Or if Jennifer knew how sharp her teeth could look to someone else, in the dark.

  "Blood got spilled," she said. "
Then imbibed. Some of these worthies got 'accidentally' killed. The group began to study, delving into ways to make their orgies more radical, once they'd passed beyond mere torture and murder. Cybele had nothing to do with the kind of special assistance they eventually fomented. Their custom-made patron. It whistled up all manner of brand new sexual diversions. But it was a newly-born thing, hungry, and not a little bit insane. It was like a nuclear pile. The group discovered that in order to keep going, they would require protection against the benefactor they'd created ... or it would consume them when it tired of sacrifices. In due course they contrived a way to keep from getting gobbled up. Everything stayed copacetic. The smarmy occult rumors helped the film careers along. Jase Spilsbury became a minor star; his was the orgy mansion, the demon spa. Colette Nichols, Bryan Thorne, Davis T.J. Stone, Julia Cushing-Jones - all prospered. And the new corporation that spawned them broke ground in plastics and petroleum at the right time and became a mega-monolith. That part I think you already know about."

  She had not moved. Grant could not even make out her lips in the bad light, telling the tale.

  Blasphemers. Fornicators.

  "The club, however, would not countenance splitters, and when one man wanted to pay accounts and leave, they voted no. Easy. He was a resourceful man, with a facile mind that had elevated him greatly inside the Corporation. He arranged to quite audaciously steal away their hallowed protection, at night, practically from under their muzzles, and without it they were lost. Their pet monster scooped them up on the night of May first, 1959. Walpurgisnacht, coincidentally - a night when witches and demons and so forth are supposed to swarm forth to revel amidst unwary humans. That's pop occult stuff, though, too fairytale. They sure didn't believe in it. It was clearly a cult murder; one of Hollywood's first.

  "The beast they'd created, however, did not evaporate at their passing. There was still the rogue member of the Club."

  "Say it," Grant said dully. "My father."

  "He shut away the protection where it could shield him and occasionally availed himself of the pleasures the Beast could offer. After a decade, forgetting became easy - he never truly liked his ex-cohorts. And soon he got around to the homework they had all neglected. The existence of the Beast was threatened and subtle combat was engaged. As he looked for ways to vanquish the nuisance he'd helped to call up, the Beast tried beguiling him into giving up his protection."

  "He was baited with a beautiful woman," said Grant. "One he kept to himself. Outsiders shrugged her off as some mystery bimbo; no big deal." He did not have to ask why his mother had divorced his father; why the money had flowed in but the contact had been sparse all these years.

  "An alternate avenue of attack, a gradual blood clot growing quietly in the brain, finally had the desired effect. Stupid Beast. With the death of the last believer, it dwindled away to nothing. The bait it had abandoned survived it by flowing naturally toward the only outlet possible - the son."

  "The son." You're of his blood. I can smell it!

  "I'm perfect for you, Grant. I can't help but be - emotionally, sexually. There's nothing malign involved with actually becoming corporeal, being real unexpectedly. Accidentally. And there you were, with your simple emotional stresses, the answers to which were so easy for me. There you were. Your existence helped make me a fact. I'm real. And you looked so helpless when we met, I ...," A trace of her customary humor seeped into her recollection. "The more real I became, the more I fell in love with you. I couldn't help that, either. And I never wanted to leave you. Don't ask me, but ... the mirror somehow stockpiled everything it witnessed. And the bed was the charmed circle. Surely you've noticed how sex on it is. But now you're dabbling in things that could erase me. I wasn't lying when I said I was scared."

  Her voice quavered now. It was too convincing, Grant thought, hating it. "I saw the Beast in the mirror; it still exists."

  "No. That's the past; it was only showing you the past."

  "Then why did you sneak back here and break it?"

  He heard a sigh come out in the dark. "You seemed so convinced you were seeing things I thought I could solidify your problems into reality. Without the glass the visions would stop, and you'd eventually believe the disappearance of your coffee cup into it was a hallucination. An overwrought mental state I could nurse you out of; magic mirrors, no. For the same reason I tried to get to Mrs. Saks' house ahead of you."

  "You killed her?"

  "No." He thought he could feel her sheer frustration. "I went to her house. That's why all you got on the phone was my machine. I knew about her but never suspected she was tangled up in the occultism and had gotten the Beast after her ass, as well. She was obviously inside when I knocked. When I wouldn't leave, she started screeching things about smelling what I was in God's eye, and how she had been tempted with the figure of her dead husband. Just screaming— totally out of it. So I left. I could only hope you wouldn't take her too seriously if she told you some embellished riff about the Spilsbury Murders."

  "Sounds like she might've wailed loud and hard enough to make her heart explode," Grant ventured. "It also sounds, therefore, like the Beast is still with us. A hematoma, a coronary, my nightmares, hallucinations and -"

  "Don't you grasp?!" She was angered but perfectly in character as Grant knew her and exasperated by what seemed his congenital male thick headedness. "It's not me you have to be afraid of, it's that Dr. Byrd, it's your father's Calex buddies - they're the ones interested in starting the whole stinking cycle up again! That's why they're so anxious to buy that property out from under you —you haven't heard from them, but you will. Why Byrd wants to poke and prod you. They're holding off now because of death protocol, a grace period between you and your father. If there's one thing they respect, it's protocol. And they'll be the death of you, when they find they can't groom you!"

  "What about you?" Again, it sounded too logical to Grant. Diversions, successful ones, always sounded good, were well planned, like battle strategy.

  "I don't know. And I don't care about any of them. You have the savvy to steer around the greedy ones, the incompetent ones, the ladder-climbers that started all the bad things. I just want to leave. I need to know if you have enough faith in me to throw the junk away, get it clear of them. No hocus-pocus, no candles, no visions. Melt the goddamned bed down and sell it as lamp chains. But let's leave it behind."

  "Toss away my supposed protection, Jenny? Sounds like something the old Beast would cotton to real fast."

  "Oh, god, I know how I must sound!" Her voice cracked with tears, hopelessness.

  His thumb was marking the page Jade Wing had recommended in the book. "Let's try an alternate scenario," he said, "just for argument's sake. Devil's advocate time, right? Let's propose that the bed, being a huge protective amulet (bless you, Jade Wing, for the jargon, at least), is the only roadblock in the Beast's way. Its power is already diminished, and the bed retards it from getting more serious, more real. So Mister Beast, while it can't get physical, can still harass me with visions, nightmares. Grant suspects a relationship between the bed and the Beast he sees in the mirror. Bad news. The Beast needs to eighty-six the bed before Grant can investigate and maybe find a way to rub it out. Little Jenny trots along and smashes the mirror, strictly to help Grant with his head problem, but coincidentally helping the Beast - since Grant will now not see any more disturbing revelations. Little Jenny beats Grant back to Mrs. Saks, again strictly to help Grant, and Mrs. Saks' heart bursts before I can grill her about my father. And then little Jenny finally gets around to spinning this tale for Grant - when were you planning to let me in on all this? And her closing remark is 'Gee, Grant, get rid of the bed, huh?’" He let the book drop open to the place Jade Wing had marked. "Little Jenny begins to look like the Beast's hole card against oblivion. I think that going through with the candle trick, all the way, since my father never got a chance at the finale, might make everyone here honest, for good. Or not so good."

  "And it migh
t destroy me. If your father had managed to complete the recitation, I wouldn't be here."

  "But according to your own story, you might have ended up as a participant in my father's demise. Bait for Mister Beast. No? Then how about this, Jenny: If you've been absolutely straight with me, this little spellbreaker might not do a damned thing to you."

  "You're gambling." She did not approve.

  "I don't really think so. Your presence, just standing there, constitutes a fair argument for you're being a good guy. Max - whom I am convinced is a real dog - likes you. And if you're not lying, then you gambled, by breaking the mirror without knowing the consequences in advance. You gambled on saving me the most painless way and my nosiness botched the plan. You weren't sure what would happen. Some thing, like the Beast, would be sure, I think. And - also if you're not lying - you went to Mrs. Saks and stood right underneath a protective hex sign. If you were a bad guy and could do that, Mrs. Saks would've died a long time ago. Yeah, I'm gambling now. I'm betting that you've become real enough, strong enough for the bed or the words in here not to matter."

  "Assuming you just haven't lost your mind," she said, her tone acknowledging the small hope he'd made implicit.

  "If I am crazy, you've got a lot of explaining to do for that story about Spilsbury and the Beast" he said, almost smiling. "Let's get this over with."

  "Wait," she said, hands coming up. "No. I guess not." She shook her head wonderingly, sniffed. "You have to do it, don't you? If I'm lying, I'm a threat, and the only way you'll really know if I'm lying is to..." Her extended hands dropped to her sides. "I can't even kiss you, before, just in case." She wiped away tears. "I can't even cry, because it might be a con."

  A surge inside him insisted this was real. She was real, and her love for him was chewing up her insides. I can't not do this. His fingers snapped the butane lighter to life, and the wick of the lumpy tallow stump sputtered and caught.