Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (17 page)

Heather grabbed her pistol, loaded it, checked the pipe, and put it in the pocket of her jacket.

“Are you sure about this?”

“We have to do it. The psychic well-being of the world is at stake.”

“Well, when you put it that way.”

The salt wind bit into me and I shivered despite myself. The gothic castle on the beach cliff really should have had a full moon behind it, but there was only the tiniest slice of moon left in the sky. The place had a large oblong parking lot, like something outside a rec center, only the asphalt was baby-smooth and had not a single line of paint. As such, the cars were parked somewhat haphazardly. I took a moment to picture the graceful Dance of the Luxury Sedan it would take to get out of this place. And that’s when I noticed the behemoth that would chew up the other cars under tires as merciless as the Northridge Quake of ’94. It was bright yellow, but that apparently had not been enough peacocking for the owner. Purple and blue flames billowed up the front and sides, and for a moment, I was overwhelmed with the urge to set it on fire. It was a Hummer of some kind, but some kind of heretofore-unseen special model, one for a buyer whose penis was so small so as to become an innie, and needed a steel cock of such power and girth that none might doubt his manhood. Just looking at it, I could imagine the geological sound of its engine turning over, smell the factory effluvium belching from the ass end, and the sensation of wonder that such a thing could be driven by someone other than a warlord.

“Jim?”

“Sorry. That’s a big car, is all,” I said, snapping out of it.

“I’ve seen it before,” Heather said.

“Where?”

She shook her head helplessly and tears glittered in the corners of her eyes. “I can’t remember. But I took Memory and the Enlightened Mind!”

That was a class where they would show you a picture of a house, then make you draw it from memory. This was repeated until you could reproduce it perfectly, and if you were bad at art, well, sucks to be you. It was supposed to expand the temporal lobe of the brain and enable race memory. In practice, it just made you unable to ever forget that stupid house. When I took that class, I swapped out the picture of the house with one of an abandoned Rally’s down in Norwalk. My instructor was ready to call it a failure until I showed him the picture he allegedly showed me. He ended up thinking he was the crazy one and I passed the class with flying colors.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told Heather. “It’ll come to you. Just stop thinking about it.”

“You must think I’m a fraud.”

“I don’t think that.”
I think you’re a crazy person, but you’re totally sincere.

She broke into a false and gleaming smile. “You are far more enlightened than your advancement would indicate. You have this way about you.”

“Thank you?”

“No, Jim.” And she got right up into my personal bubble, where really only Mina is allowed on a regular basis, and put a slender arm around me. “Thank you.”

“Don’t we have a Satanist to kidnap?”

“And we won’t fail with your can-do attitude!”

I extricated myself from her curiously strong grip and crept toward the gothic castle, reflecting that I was probably the only person who would regard a Satanist Temple as preferable to the possibly amorous intentions of a fallen starlet.

The front had a heavy double door currently shut against the windy evening. There was a side door, which would have been a terrible design flaw had this castle any intention of repelling Norman invaders. It was perfect for us, though, and even though it was locked, I was through in seconds. I have good hands.

“Regina said you had useful skills.” Heather sounded a little impressed and a little suspicious all at the same time.

“And the sense to only employ them on the Misguided.”

The side door opened up into a kitchen. It was pretty big, roomy enough to prepare food for the entire congregation. I wondered how many pancake breakfasts the Satanists typically held per month. The whole thing was gleaming and new, the appliances still smelling of the packaging. The floors and counters weren’t just polished, they were unused. Other than Heather and me, the kitchen was empty.

We heard voices, turned muddy by distance and barriers, somewhere in the direction of the front door. I wanted to go first, since I had a lot of experience breaking and entering—and yes, I realize this doesn’t make me sound like a very good person, but there you go. But I didn’t want to tip that hand too much to Heather, and I also wasn’t sure how much I wanted her lurking behind me.

She drew her pistol.

I let her go first.

She went to the door to the kitchen, pushing it open a crack, waiting, then pushing it open all the way. The door led into a small hallway, probably the kind of thing intended for servants. The voices grew louder, but didn’t resolve into anything intelligible. Heather and I went out into the hallway and turned toward the front. We went through another door, finding a hallway that finally looked fit for a real Satanist. Coal-black walls and a thick crimson carpet made for a solid base to lay evil down on top of. Gold-framed portraits of some Satanic luminaries, including Aleister Crowley, Gilles de Rais, and Colonel Harlan Sanders, provided some accents. There was even an end table with some black roses, which honestly, was a touch too far.

Of all the conspiracies out there, the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist was the most
nouveau riche
. I wish they’d had a fraction of the aesthetics of the Order of the Morning Star. Those guys at least had decent taste in art. That picture of Colonel Sanders looked like Genghis Khan.

Wait. It
was
Genghis Khan.

Heather pushed open the door at the end of the hall and the voices finally resolved themselves. Two speakers, one with the helium pitch dripping with lust and avarice that could only be Paul Tallutto.

“...the Temple is brand new, constructed entirely by the donations of members in good standing. It is the largest edifice dedicated to his Satanic Majesty on the West Coast.”

“Bitchin’ wainscoting.” That voice sounded familiar as hell. I knew I had heard it before, and shouting for some reason. Deeply pitched but rusty, probably from all that shouting, and definitely male. It had the rounded vowels of a dedicated resident of the San Fernando Valley and the sleepy cadence of a surfer.

Heather moved away from the crack in the doorway.

“We have a guy,” Paul said, explaining the bitchin’ origins of the wainscoting. “We have every amenity you could want. Cells, of course, in the spires, although you would be in the Archdemon Suite. Outdoor pool and hot tub, should you want a change from the ocean.”

I took Heather’s place and while maybe I should have been surprised, I made a little “uh-huh” noise in my throat when I saw the second speaker.

“I swim in the nude. Exclusively,” he said. “Except when I’m wearing my hat.”

Rodrick Rand, who you remember from, oh, every action movie ever. At least in the past couple years. Let’s see, he was the blind gunfighter in
The Last Day
, he was Apocalypse Jackson in
Apocalypse Jackson
, and the cop on the edge with nothing to lose in
Killing Time, Loaded for Bear,
and
Standing Fast
. He has jumped away in slow motion from more explosions than most people will ever see in their lives. He has killed more German terrorists than Mossad and crashed more cars than Dominic Toretto. Supposedly, his commitment to method made him a nightmare on set, and got him kicked off of
Inglourious Basterds
because he wanted to research the role by beating a Nazi to death with a baseball bat. While I’m fine with this in principle, supposedly “German” was close enough to “Nazi” for Rand’s purposes, and no one wanted
that
lawsuit.

Rand was on the wrong side of forty and getting closer to fifty than he or his publicist were willing to admit. What hair he had on the top of his head was there entirely due to willpower and positive thinking. His hangdog face was craggy and ugly, making him a sex symbol only out of the stubbornness of studio executives. In his defense, he fought the inevitable march of time well, considering how much lean muscle he had packed onto his five-and-a-half-foot frame.

Paul’s goons lurked at a respectful distance from the two small men.

“That is no trouble at all,” Paul was saying. “As long as you don’t mind the odd paparazzo.”

“I
love
those guys!
Wooo!
You know, otherwise you gotta pay someone to look at your junk.”

I shut the door gently and turned to Heather. Her eye was twitching.

“Something wrong?” I whispered.

“I know him.”

“So does, like, all of America.”

“No, I
know
him. We did a movie together.”

“You did a movie?”

She did not find that amusing. “We should just shoot them both and dangle Paul out a window until he gives Levitt up.”

I didn’t want her doing anything to Paul until I knew why he was at Mina’s arraignment. “Or,” I said, holding a finger up, “we could take this as a great opportunity to search the place while Paul is otherwise occupied.”

Heather considered. “Okay.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realize I was holding and we crept back towards the center of the house. It took some time, since the place was laid out like a maze, but we found our way to a spiral staircase. This led upwards into what I assumed were the spires. The staircase leveled out every floor, revealing a short hallway lined with doors. The doors opened to small, single rooms. They were nice enough, and large enough to avoid being called “cramped,” but they were less than comfortable. Each had a single window, which was by far the best feature. Malibu stretched out below, the glittering lights stopping at the beach, the delicate wash of the waves at once the cheapest and most expensive lullaby in town.

With each open door, Heather grew crisper in her actions. She was fighting the negative emotions, because that’s what her cult taught her to do. She was getting that tautness unique to mothers who are one tantrum away from murdering their offspring, but know that’s not really an option. “He’s not here!” she snapped at the last room.

“We still have three more of these. And something called the Archdemon Suite.”

She ejected a frustrated sigh. “That’s where Rand is staying.”

“Maybe there’s some overlap,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “Don’t Satanists love orgies?”

“Yes,” she said, and the little quirk fighting to move her lip looked almost genuine.

“Let’s check those other spires, then keep your fingers crossed.”

We went back down the spiral staircase to the ground floor. We turned into the hall to come face to face with Paul, Rodrick Rand, and the two goons.

“Sam Smiley,” Paul said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

THE GOONS WERE HUGE
, and judging by how quickly they had Heather disarmed and both of us in painful jiu-jitsu holds, I’m not sure they understood mass and acceleration very well. They had my arm jacked up high behind my back, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw they had done the same to Heather, who was stubbornly swallowing her fear and anger. Her gun had fallen to the floor, where Rand scooped it up and gazed at it goggle-eyed.

“Sam? Who’s Sam?” I asked.

“I’ll admit, with the haircut and that thing on your face, you’re almost unrecognizable. Almost,” Paul said.

“All right!” Rand crowed. “Let’s take ’em out back and I’ll shoot ’em both. No, wait. Let’s let them go, and then I’ll hunt them. Most dangerous fuckin’ game! Yeah! That’s what we’re doing. Frodo, Yolo,” he said to the goons, “Take them out back. No! Wait, put them in like... bikinis! Banana hammock for the guy, bikini for the chick!”

“We’re not hunting them,” Paul snapped.

“Why the hell not? I want to hunt a person!”

“And we’ll find someone at a soup kitchen for you. But this man is very important. This is Sam Smiley, or, as you might know him better, the Antichrist.”

“Whoa,” Rand said.

Heather’s head snapped around. Well, that got her attention.

“So we’re not hunting him, we’re sacrificing him.”

“Can I hunt the girl, then?”

“Maybe,” Paul allowed. “But if I remember correctly, our Mr. Smiley has the devil’s charm and a weak spot for the ladies. Keeping her around will ensure he doesn’t use his infernal powers against us. Won’t it, Sam?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Another lie. You’re a chip off the old block, aren’t you, Sam? Barnabas, Jeremy, take these two to the dungeon and secure them.” This last was directed at Frodo and Yolo, and was probably their real names, but after Rand christened them, there was no way I was going back.

“I’m going with!” Rand exclaimed.

“The tour was going to the dungeon eventually,” Paul said. “Might as well head there now.”

With one meaty hand clamped on my wrist and the other one encircling the back of my neck, Frodo gave me the bum’s rush. He practically carried me down a flight of carpeted stairs, then a flight of stone ones, each step giving my shoulder a little twinge. The whole time, Paul kept up the tour for Rand, who responded with distinctly Californian noises of amazement.

“Normally, I would show you the first sublevel before getting to the dungeon. I’m certain you’ll find the sex arena and the spawning range to be to your satisfaction. The dungeon can store a combination of willing and unwilling guests, with no need for any alteration in basic accommodations.”

He wasn’t kidding, either. The dungeon was exactly that. It had authentic-looking stone walls with steel rings bolted into them, some equipped with chains and manacles. The lights were electric, the kinds of fake lanterns usually intended for outside use. Not really dungeon-appropriate, but they probably didn’t want to deal with open flame, no matter how much ambience it might have added. The devices scattered throughout the room were decidedly not period-accurate, though. Made the whole place look like David Cronenberg’s gym.