Sandman Slim

"I don't know if we're going to find anything interesting in here. Mason always hinted that he had a hidden room where he kept all his important stuff, but none of us ever found it."

Much as I don't want to, I lean against a mildewed wall. My head is suddenly spinning. Voices and faces shoot through me, like streaks of lightning. I can even feel echoes of the Circle, all of them, even my younger self, trapped in here. I've heard of dark magicians doing this. Sometime in the past, Mason hermetically sealed the room from the rest of the world with a kind of barrier hex. He didn't want what he was doing to leak out into the aether. It might let other magicians know that he was horse trading with Hellions. A lot of scary things passed through this room. A lot more than the few beasties that dragged me Downtown. Some I can see and feel, but others are just blurs that I can't get a fix on. The inside of their heads is all hunger and knives, like insects. I'm not sorry that I can't get any farther inside. I'd been getting used to sensing other people's thoughts and feelings, but the intensity of this place makes the experience new and weird again. Suddenly I don't want to be here anymore.

"Ha!"

Vidocq is in the corner of the room with one hand pressed up against a the ceiling and the other pressed into a small divot in the wall. The opposite corner of the room scrapes open, dragging on the junk that's accumulated in the door mechanism over the years. "I said that I would show you how a good thief earns his keep!" Vidocq says happily. With his bottled light, he leads the way into the hidden room.

The hidden room is in a lot better shape than the other. There's a lot of power in the hidden room. It's protected by much more powerful spells than any of the rest of the house. Every inch of the walls, floors, and ceiling is covered with multicolored runes, sigils, and angular angelic and Hellion scripts.

Vidocq is studying the place with grim intensity. He runs his fingers over the wall and they come away black. He sniffs the dust on his hand, touches a blackened finger to his tongue.

"What is it?" I ask.

"Ivory black," he says. "Made from burned bones and animal horns."

"Is that bad?"

"It's a traditional pigment. It goes back thousands of years." He moves his light over the walls and holds it up to the ceiling. "This symbol? Painted with cinnabar-a mixture of mercury and sulfur heated together. Cobalt and aluminum chloride, also heated, make this blue. Here is antimony yellow. This particular red comes from boiling the iron oxide found in blood. All these hues, these colors, were made skillfully with chemicals and great heat." He holds up his light and turns three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in the whole room. "Everything in here was born in fire."

"Bring the light over here, will you?"

Vidocq carries the light to where I'm standing. There's strange writing on the wall, but it's not Hellion. It's something I've never seen before, like cuneiform that's been gashed into the wall with a meat cleaver. A symbol painted in bloody iron oxide covers the rest of the wall. It's a circle that wraps around and around its own interior, folding in on itself. It's a labyrinth, an ancient symbol of the deepest, darkest secrets and Final Jeopardy - hard knowledge. Something shimmers at the center of the labyrinth. I dig my fingernails into the soft plaster and pry out the treasure.

It's a Zippo lighter. On the front is a kind of cigar-chomping hot, rod devil's head done by an artist who signs his name "Coop." I turn the lighter over and click open the top, looking for a message, an inscription, or anything that might point us to what Mason was doing down here. There's nothing. I flick the Zippo closed. It's just a lighter.

Vidocq takes it from me and examines it closely under the light. In a minute, he shakes his head and hands it back to me.

"Maybe your friend Mason is a person who enjoys practical jokes?"

"He likes a good 'fuck you,' but I don't remember him being much for jokes."

"Then, we are missing something."

I toss the Zippo up and down in my hand a few times, enjoying the weight of it. "What's a lighter for?"

Vidocq scrapes his feet on the dusty floor. "To give us fire."

I hold the lighter up, click the top open, and strike the flint once. The room fills with light. Way too much light. It leaks from the walls and the floor. We have to wrap our arms over our eyes to keep from going blind.

Something brushes my arm. Dirt swirls from the floor as wind explodes around us, getting stronger by the second. For a minute I wonder if I'm hallucinating, feeling some stranger's memory. Then Vidocq stumbles into me, blown over by a sudden gust, and I know this is all real.

I move my arm down as my eyes adjust to the light. It's pure white and keeps moving, like ripples on the bottom of a swimming pool. The walls look like stretched skin and something is trying to come through them. We can see the silhouettes of faces and arms as they reach for us, straining at the thin wall flesh. The bodies writhe and twist, unable to hold a shape very long as they press in on us.

Arms like roiling packs of snakes. Bodies like the skeletons of fish and birds. Faces that seem to be all teeth, all nails, or screaming from the ends of arms, where the creatures' hands should be.

Vidocq shouts, "Can't you take us out of here?" "We need a shadow, but the light's everywhere." Vidocq flings open his coat. Vials containing his potions, rows and rows of them, are sewn into the lining. He pulls out one after the other and hurls them at the grasping hands. I get the skinhead's Luger from my pocket and fire off a few rounds at the silhouettes. They don't even seem to notice.

I grab Vidocq's sleeve and pull him toward the door, firing the Luger until it's empty. Vidocq keeps throwing his vials. Every now and then, an arm or a monstrous face contorts in pain from our feeble attack, but the wall goblins come roaring back at us a second later.

At the door, Vidocq shoves me away. "Let me go!" he shouts, and tears his arm free. He's back inside the possessed room, with the walls just inches away from him. He reaches into the very bottom of his coat lining and pulls out a bottle the size of his brandy flask. Screaming, "Tas de merde!" he smashes the bottle on the writhing mass of arms and fangs and throws himself back into the room with me, knocking us both to the filthy floor.

The secret room is on fire, but the creatures in the walls are still trying to get at us, only they seem to be trapped behind an invisible barrier. Unfortunately, the fire is not.

The rotten wood in our room ignites the moment flame gets near it. In a few seconds, the place is blazing like Nero's Roman holiday. The good news is that a burning room creates a lot of excellent shadows. I grab Vidocq and drag him down into a deep slash of darkness at the edge of the Circle. We emerge, stumbling into the Room of Thirteen Doors, eyes tearing, lungs burning with smoke. I don't stop moving, but guide Vidocq through the Door of Memory and out onto the cool and silent streets of Beverly Hills. The Porsche is at the other end of the block. We run for it.

By the time we get there, Mason's vacant lot is cracking open and flames are shooting two stories into the air. By the time I get the car started and do a screaming one-eighty, the whole lot has collapsed in on itself, shaking the street like an earthquake and blasting a fat orange fireball into the night sky. I floor the Porsche, taking the first turn out of Beverly Hills on two wheels.

THERE'S AN UNLIT parking lot behind an out-of-business movie multiplex between Hollywood Boulevard and Selma Avenue. I park in a far corner so no one can see us from the street. I'm still rasping. I know it's the smoke in my lungs, but it feels like I've been holding my breath since we got out of the ground. When I kill the Porsche's engine, we can hear the scream of fire trucks echoing off the buildings all the way across town.

"Sounds like a lot of them."

Vidocq snorts. "They always look after the rich. It's the same in all cities in all times, all over the world."

"What was in the last bottle you threw back there?"

"Spiritus Dei oil. A venerable old catholicon, and poisonous to almost any Hellion or Lurker beast. Very hard to find. That was my last bottle."

"Sorry, man."

"Don't worry. The man I said I'd introduce you to will have more."

I take the Zippo out of my pocket. "What am I going do with this thing?"

"Keep it. My exceptional knowledge of magic and the transmutation of elements tells me that it is not an ordinary lighter."

"It's a stupid vessel for such a powerful talisman."

"Perhaps it was created for someone Mason knew would be drawn to it."

"You think Mason left it for me?"

Vidocq shrugs wearily. "I don't know. But it does seem more votre modele than the other members of your Circle."

"Yeah. I walked right off that cliff. But maybe the lighter will tell us something."

"Let us hope."

"So, you think Mason knows I'm back."

"You just blew up his home. He might suspect something."

I open and close my hands on the steering wheel, holding it tight. "I'm not ready yet. I barely have my feet on the ground."

"Opportunity always comes too early or too late. But with what you found tonight, you are one step closer to your heart's desire."

I flip open the top of the lighter and strike it once. Vidocq jerks away, banging his shoulder into the door. The little flame flickers, but nothing else happens. I want a cigarette, but my throat and lungs feel like hot gravel. I close the lighter and put it back in my pocket.

"When we meet this guy with the Spiritus Dei, I'll pay."

"Excellent. I was about to suggest that very thing. You should meet him as soon as possible."

"You think?"

"Absolument. He is a man who knows and possesses many useful things. And I think soon you will need more than your Sundance Kid guns to stay alive."

AFTER I DROP OFF Vidocq, I stop behind a nearby Safeway, wipe the Luger for prints, and stuff it in the bottom of a very full and very smelly Dumpster. I don't want the Luger near me. Who knows what crimes those Nazi freaks committed with it.

The Bamboo House of Dolls will be closed by now, but I need something to drink. I ditch the Porsche a block from Donut Universe, get a large black coffee and a couple of old-fashioneds, and walk the few blocks to Max Overdrive.

I've finished the coffee and one of the doughnuts when I reach the store. The lights are on. The front door is open and the glass shattered. I throw away the food, pull Azazel's knife from my boot, and go inside quietly. The place is a wreck. Racks are turned over and discs and cases are scattered everywhere. The cash register, though, looks untouched, so it wasn't thieves or crackheads who got in.

I kick through the broken glass and discs wondering who would want to just trash the place when I see a shoe sticking out from under one of the upturned racks. I grab the rack and flip it over. Allegra is lying there. She's a mess. Her clothes are torn and her hands and face are bloody. I put my ear against her chest and am relieved to hear a slow and steady heartbeat. She weighs practically nothing, so I pick her up and carry her to my room. The door at the top of the stairs has been kicked in. I set Allegra on the bed and cover her with a blanket. When I go into the bathroom to get a wet cloth, I see something a lot scarier than the ghouls in Mason's basement. The door to Kasabian's closet is ripped off its hinges. He's gone.

I clean the blood off Allegra's face and drape the cool cloth across her forehead. When I push open her eyelids, her pupils are wide and they stay that way. A concussion. Not good. She moves her head and groans a little before pushing my hand away.

"What happened? I'm cold."

She's going into shock. I wrap the sheet around her. "You're hurt."

"Mr. Kasabian left. He looked dead, but he said goodbye."

"I'm taking you to the hospital."

She sits upright. Almost. She gets halfway up and drops back down.

"No hospital."

"You have to. You're hurt."

"No hospital. They might call the cops."

I didn't see that coming. "I'm taking you anyway."

That's exactly the wrong thing to say. Allegra grabs my arm, pulls herself up and tries to slap me. It's pretty impressive for someone who's gasping like a dying goldfish.

"No hospitals! No cops!"

Having finally gotten the point, I help her back down on the bed. Scraps of paper, half-eaten burritos, and ashtrays full of cigarettes are piled on Kasabian's worktable. I paw around the debris until I find the phone. I dial Kinski's number. Someone picks up on the sixth ring.

"Is this Candy? This is Stark."

"Stark? Lovely to hear from you. Tell me, Stark, do the clocks on your planet work like ours? Because the ones here on Earth tell me that it's late for chitchat."

"Shut up. I have a civilian here and I'm pretty sure she's been hurt with magic. I don't know how bad, but I think she's got a concussion. Kinski is the only doctor I know about in L.A., so I'm bringing her to see him. If he isn't there when I get there, I'm going to be extremely unhappy."

"Okay. Do you have the address?"

Fucking brilliant. I'm threatening people I don't know, but need, at an address I don't have.

"Give it to me." She does.

"See you soon," she says.

I carry Allegra downstairs and leave her by the front door. Outside, I scan the street for transportation. I want something big so that Allegra can lie down, but mostly it's Japanese compacts and Detroit Tinker Toys. Down by the corner, I see what I want, a shiny red Escalade. The problem is that two guys are sitting inside. Still, it's worth checking out. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">