looks like a giant golf ball dropped to the earth by aliens, but it’s on the wrong side of the street. Some of the side streets that used to cut across Sunset have twisted around like asphalt taffy and now run parallel.
That is not good news. It means that even if someone tells me where Eleusis is, I might not be able to find it in these deranged goddamn streets. And I can’t even use maps. Lucifer was such a control freak that most of the maps you find Downtown are wrong. He didn’t want the riffraff knowing exactly which roads led where or which were wide enough to hold rebel troops. That means I’m going to need a tracker who can walk and take me to the doorstep of Alice’s asylum.
A hell of a quake must have hit the concrete island ahead of me. An entire block of gleaming new office buildings has fallen in on itself and half disappeared down a massive sinkhole. The acres of broken glass and steel reflect the burning street like the last ice floe at the end of the world.
I check out Hollywood Boulevard at the next corner. It looks clear and there’s no noise that way. I run the whole way.
Seeing the Boulevard here, it’s easy to understand why the crowd is tearing things up down the street. The place is picked clean. The ground floor of every building is gutted and burned. Bloody Hellions with broken limbs wander through the rubble looking for food, potions, or pills to make the world stop hurting. Damned souls are scattered all over the street staring into space like shell-shocked children. Finding themselves free but still in Hell was too much for their already tortured minds. They don’t react when I walk by, but the Hellions see me and scatter like roaches into the empty buildings. The universe has entered a new level of weirdness when Hellions are the ones afraid to be caught out after dark.
Half a block ahead is the only intact, well-lit building on the whole street. When I get closer I understand why.
Praise God and pass the ammunition. Now I understand. Now I know everything.
Peter Murphy was wrong when he said Bela Lugosi’s dead. He’s not. I just found his retirement home.
It stands where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre should be. I mean it’s still the Chinese Theatre—all supersaturated reds and golds—but it’s a different version. It’s twice as big as it should be. It’s r fIt so wide that it takes up half the block and the golden pagoda roof looks like it’s high enough to rip open stray blimps. A fifty-foot metal electrified fence marked every few yards with lightning-bolt warning signs surrounds the place.
I know this place. It doesn’t look anything like it looked like in my Downtown. There it was a kind of King Arthur’s castle, but with soft and twisted, almost organic lines, like it hadn’t been carved from the rock but had grown there. This place might not be General Mammon’s palace the way I’m used to seeing it, but his standard is suspended between the pagoda spires so everyone in Hell or L.A. or Mordor or wherever the fuck I am can see it.
This is what I’ve been looking for. The answer to all of life’s little questions.
When Mustang Sally said that using the Black Dahlia to cross over was easy but hard, I thought she was talking about the dying part. Now I think she was really talking about this. It’s why I woke up under that strange version of the freeway. Crossing over with the Black Dahlia isn’t a true one-hundred-percent-normal crossing. It’s a Convergence. A psychic melding of the place the traveler left and the place where the traveler is going. It’s a smart work-around to keep Mason from noticing me tiptoeing Downtown, because even though I’m truly in Hell, it’s not exactly the one where he’s expecting me. Yeah, I know. These metaphysical states and dimensions of being give me a headache, too.
If you know the Convergence is coming, it can be pretty useful. Say you want to travel fast through another city or parallel dimension. You do a Convergence and you can find your way around the new place by following the layout of the city you left. Unless the new place has decided to sprout fault lines, rearrange its streets, and generally fall the fuck apart.
Right this second I don’t know if being in a Convergence is a help or more bullshit in my way, but I’m sure of one thing. Someone inside knows where Eleusis is and I’ll kill them one by one until someone tells me.
I get out the na’at and eye a nice shadow at the corner of the palace. Chances are that Mason is expecting me to use the Room to get into Hell and not move around inside it. I’ll know in a minute. I step into the shadow and come out just inside Mammon’s palace.
No alarms go off. I’m alone in a giant movie-theater lobby. They must buy carpet by the mile to cover this floor. The concession stand is the size of Vegas. I bet the screen is as big as the Rockies. Wish I had time to catch a feature.
It hits me right about now that even though my old slave master Azazel brought me to Mammon’s tree fort plenty of times, this mutant version might not be laid out exactly the same way. Only one way to find out. This new version is too weird to navigate normally and I don’t feel like going on walkabout. I step back into a shadow. I’ll take my chances with the Room and open the Door of Fire, the door that always leads to chaos and violence.
I come out behind a pillar in a circular room that looks like what I imagine the Oval Office is like, onlycols like, bigger and with meaner monsters. Across from me are floor-to-ceiling windows with a Cadillac-size wooden desk between them. There’s a fireplace to the right and expensive-looking couches and coffee tables scattered around the place. I halfway expect Remington cowboy sculptures and a giant flat-screen playing football or wrestling or some other macho backslapping good old boy to inject just a little more testosterone into the place. I don’t know if I’m in Hell or the CEO’s office at Halliburton.
Mammon and five of his officers are clustered around a worktable in the middle of the room. All of them are in sharp suits, but none of the officers is stupid enough to have a suit sharper than Mammon’s. The general wears a large gold inverted cross on a chain around his neck. It’s probably a war medal, but it makes him look like Sammy Davis Jr. in his late Rat Pack period.
The worktable in front of them projects a floating 3-D map laying out different routes around the universe from Downtown to Heaven. It looks like a schematic of the coolest ride since Space Mountain.
I want to go right at them, but I need to lay out a little hoodoo first. Unfortunately, a good hex needs to be spoken out loud. Black juju likes to be mixed in with a little sputter and spit. However, it’s easy to toss off white magic inside your head. Instead of wishing Mammon’s backup band ill will, I do the opposite and throw a protective shield up around the entire room. Aside from saving them from torch-carrying peasants, it’ll soundproof the place and keep any nosy guards from getting in.
Quiet as I can, I get out the na’at, snap out the business end like a bullwhip, and give it a little twist so it goes rigid. It hits the closest Hellion at the base of his skull and comes out his extremely surprised mouth. The officer next to him goes for his shoulder holster. Bad idea. He’s left his front exposed. I bounce the sharp end of the na’at off the worktable and flick it up, catching him just above his crotch, slicing him open to his chest. He has an excellent view of his Hellion guts spilling onto the floor before he follows them down. I step back into a shadow as
