Burning the universe was a lot more fun to think about when Alice was somewhere safe. Some puny hopeful part of me imagined that Heaven would still stand even if the rest of the universe turned to ash. But Alice is Downtown now and I know she was right and I have to let go of her, but I can’t let her die down in Mason’s crazy-house hellhole, and that’s what will happen if I throw the kill switch.
I grab a heavy glass decanter from the floor and step out into Muninn’s underground storeroom.
I yell, “Mr. Muninn. It’s Stark.”
He sticks his head out from around a row of shelves overflowing with Tibetan skull bowls and ritual trumpets made of human femurs decorated with silver. He wipes his brow on a black silk handkerchief as he walks over.
“Just doing a bit of inventory. Sometimes I think I should hire a boy like you to put this all on a computer, but then I think that by the time he’s finished, computers will be obsolete and we’ll have to do it all over again with brains in jars or genius goldfish or whatever other wonders scientists come up with next.”
He sighs.
“I suppose in a place like this, the old ways work best. Besides, I know that while it looks like a jumble to other people, I know where each and every item is. I only do inventory as an excuse to revisit doodads and baubles I haven’t handled in a century or two.”
He sees the glass container in my hand.
“Oh my. You’ve brought it back. Let’s sit down and have a drink.”
Muninn’s desk is a worktable covered in the kind of junk that would give the staff at the Smithsonian nuclear hard-ons. An early draft of the Magna Carta that included the emancipation of ghosts. Little floating and whizzing matchbox-size gewgaws from Roswell. Cleopatra’s lucky panties. For all I know, he has Adam and Eve’s fig leaves pressed in their high school ag high s yearbook.
I set the decanter on the table between us. If you look hard enough into the glass, you can see a flickering match head of fire. It doesn’t look like much, but neither do the few micrograms of plutonium it takes to kill you as dead as eight-track tapes and with a lot more open sores.
“You’ve changed your mind, have you? You’re not going to set us all ablaze like the Roman candles on the Fourth of July?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds fun. Giving this back might be a mistake, but I don’t think it’s mine anymore.”
I pick it up and look inside. I’ve had the Mithras all this time, but I’ve hardly ever looked at it. It’s beautiful.
“I don’t want this sitting in the Room in case Mason manages to make a key and can get in there.”
“No. If there was anyone even more unsuitable than you to hold the Mithras, it would be him. No offense, of course. I would never have traded it to you if I thought that you were capable of using it.”
“But I am. I was. I almost pulled that plug a hundred times.”
“But you didn’t. And that’s why I let you have it.”
I push the Mithras across the table in his direction. Muninn picks it up carefully, like a preacher who just found a Gutenberg Bible at a garage sale, and puts it on a nearby shelf where he can keep an eye on it.
He says, “If you see any of my brothers when you get to Hell, please give them my regards.”
“Your brothers are in Hell?”
“One or two, I expect. I’m the only sedentary one. The others are restless sorts. They’re bound to pop up anywhere. Some of them pass through Hell on occasion and send me trinkets for my collection.”
He points to a shelf with Hellion weapons, a cup I recognize from Azazel’s palace, and a chunk of the same kind of black bone that my knife was carved from.
“How will I know if I meet one of your brothers?”
He laughs.
“You’ll know. We’re twins except that there are five of us, so I suppose we’re two and a half twins.”
“I’m going to be moving pretty fast, so hello is about all I’ll have time to say.”
“You won’t even have to say that if you’re busy. Here,” Muninn says.
He pulls a metal strongbox from under the table and takes a set of keys from his pocket. I’ve never seen so many keys in one place at one time. He flips through them, makes a face, and tosses them on the table. He gets out an identical set from his other pocket. A lot of the keys on this ring are bigger and older. He finds one that’s so thick with rust, it’s more like a twig that’s been laying in the water and is covered with barnacles. He jams the thing into the strongbox lock and turns. It scrapes, groans, and whines, but after a minute of really laying into the thing, the box pops open. He reaches inside and pulls out a twelve-sided crystal and hands it to me. I hold it up to the light and look inside. Two pinheads, one white and one black, circle around each other in the center.
“What is it?”
“A Singularity. An infinitely hot, infinitely dense dot. Well, the two halves of it. Apart they’ll circle eternally, but when they come together . . .” He raises his hands and makes the sound of an explosion with his cheeks. “In common parlance, it’s the Big Bang. You gave me the end of the universe, so I’m giving you the beginning. I spirited it away with me when I left the family.”
I heft the thing in my hand. It’s light. Maybe half a pound. It seems kind of light for a universe.
“This was your hedge, wasn’t it? In case you were wrong about me and I did set off the Mithras. If I killed off this universe, you could start it up again.”
He closes the strongbox and puts it back under the table.
“I have a great deal of faith in you, but I’ve learned that it’s always smart to have a backup plan.”
“If you set off the Singularity, would it restart this universe or start another?”
“There’s no way of telling until it happens. And in the end, does it really matter?”
“Not to me. Though I might miss cigarettes.”
He points at the crystal in my hand.
“If you run into one of my brothers down there, give it to him. Do me this favor and I’ll owe you a favor down the line.”
He gets out a bottle of wine. Muninn always likes to seal a deal with a drink. It’s one of the reasons he’s good to do business with.
“In the meantime, keep the crystal safe. There’s only one. Now, is there anything I can give you to help you on your journey?”
He pours us wine in two highball glasses with dancing girls etched into the sides. I feel like I’m in the Rat Pack.
“What have you got? I don’t know what I’m going to be walking into down there.”
Muninn rummages through a box of random junk on the corner of the table and pulls out something the size of an acorn. He sets it on the table and drinks his wine. The thing is small and speckled.
I say, “It looks like an egg.”
Muninn nods.
“It is. The creature it comes from doesn’t live in this dimensional plane, but don’t worry. It’s no more exotic than an archaeopteryx, so the egg is completely edible.”
“Does that mean if I keep it warm, I’ll get a flying lizard?”
Muninn’s eyes brighten.
“Wouldn’t that be lovely? No, the egg has medicinal properties. If you’re hurt, it will help you heal and dull the pain. It has a very tough shell, so don’t feel you have to be delicate with it. Just toss it in a pocket. If you need it, put it between your teeth and bite down hard. I’ve heard they taste rather sweet. Like white chocolate.”
“You’ve never tried one?”
“I’ve never been hurt.”
If I had more time, I’d definitely want to hear more about that, but I don’t.
“By the way. There’s a tasty ’55 or ’56 Bonneville parked outside on Broadway. I don’t need it anymore and the people I took it from don’t deserve it. It would look good in your collection.”
“You’re too good to me,” he says, and comes around the table. “I’ll be sure to collect it before it’s towed away.”
I drop the egg in my coat pocket and get up.
“I have some packing to do, so I should get going.”
Muninn takes my hand and shakes it warmly.
“You keep my crystal safe and I’ll keep the Mithras for you. I hope to see you back here very soon.”
He waves at me as I step into a shadow by the stairs . . .
. . . AND COME OUT in the shadowed and semidiscreet entrance of the Museum of Death across from the hotel. It’s technically getting toward evening, but only technically. The sun won’t go down for another three hours and I’m very tired.
e. r="#000When I step out into the sun, the desert heat slaps me hard. It’s funny. I’ve lived here most of my life, so I hardly ever notice the heat. Maybe I’m feeling it now because I’m coming out of Muninn’s cool cavern. Maybe I’m noticing it the way someone with terminal cancer notices every leaf, every snatch of a song, every breeze from a passing car, and the color of smog over the hills as they wheel him to the hospice.
When I get back to the room, Candy has pushed and kicked most of the broken furniture to one side, leaving a minimalist scattering of chairs and lamps filling the cleared space.
“You got it real homey in here. Like a twister came through, not a full-on hurricane.”
She uses the toe of her sneaker to push a couple of legs from a broken table under the pile of debris.
“I wanted to make a good impression on the hotel so they could admire all the stuff we didn’t break.”
She’s looking at the junk and not at me.
“There’s no reason you have to leave. You heard what Mason said. However this thing turns out it can’t last more than three days.”
She looks at me over her shoulder, kicking splinters and broken glass into the pile.
“You want me to just hang around here like you’ve gone out for cigarettes?”
“I’m coming back,” I say.
She turns and faces me, arms folded and staring at her feet.
“Are you? You’re not going to find something more important to do? Save the whales in Narnia or start a Hellion homeless shelter?”
“If you think I’m going to get back with Alice, you’re wrong. I’m going back to save her. Those are two different things.”
“Easy to say standing here when you can’t see her and aren’t all dewy-eyed. She’s the love of your life and I’m just some girl with fangs you like to fuck.”
I hate shit like this. This is when I want to be Downtown and stay there. This is what regular people call real life and I can’t stand it. Give me a thousand Hellion throats to cut. It’s better than this.
I say, “It’s not like that and you know it.”
There’s a long pause.
“I want to think that.”
“So do it. This is what it’s like being around me. I don’t get a lot of downeft lot oftime.”
I go over to her. She’s still staring at her feet. Her arms are still crossed, but she doesn’t move away. I rest my hands on her shoulders.
“Ever since I got back, people having been getting bloody because of me. Parker almost killed Allegra and Vidocq. A Drifter took a bite out of Brigitte. Doc Kinski is dead. Alice was dragged off to Hell. Now it’s this Hunter kid and you.”
She unfolds her arms and lets them drop to her sides.
I say, “I can’t fix what’s already happened, but I can goddamn well kill it at the source, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not doing this for Alice or you or Doc or anyone else. I’m doing this for me because I’m tired of waiting to see what kind of heinous shit Mason dreams up next and who it’s going to take down.”
I move a hand up behind her head, feeling her shaggy Joan Jett hair.
“Don’t stick around if you don’t want to. Hell, I never even bought you the breakfast I promised. It’d be great if you’re here when I get back, but I won’t blame you if you’re not. I don’t know if I’d stick around this half-assed horse opera. So if I don’t see you again, thanks for playing monster with me for a while. It felt good.”
I turn and head for the door, but stop before I get it open. I don’t turn around.
“You got a taste of blood when you bit that dealer back at Dead Set. Promise me you’ll go to Allegra and get some of the potion that helps you control the craving.”
“I promise.”
I go out onto the balcony, closing the door behind me.
IN THE PARKING lot, foreign exchange students are playing basketball and eating burritos from a taqueria truck parked on the street. A couple have their laptops out and are video-chatting with their families back home.
I head to my room with Kasabian.
Someone taps me on the shoulder.
“Hey.”
Candy comes around in front of me.
She says, “When you’re born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it’s not.”
“What is that?”
“It’s something Doc told me. I didn’t get it at first, but later on it made sense. I thought maybe it could help you.”
“Thanks.”
I nod at the door.
“You coming in?”
She smiles a little and nods.
We go in.
Vidocq, Allegra, and Father Traven are inside talking. Vidocq and Allegra are sitting on the bed and Traven is on a chair across from them. Kasabian is by his computer listening to them and smoking. Candy goes over and sits by Allegra.
There’s a small single bed in the corner. It never gets used, so junk just gets piled there. Magazines. DVDs. Dirty clothes. A few bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I sweep it onto the floor and think about sitting down, but it doesn’t quite happen.
