Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel Read online

  “Gloria experimented with Acme’s age-defying cosmetics. She used to store them down there,” he said. “Do I dare believe that it’s safe to bring out workmen, or should I just demolish the place?”

  He sounded rather hopeful about the latter.

  In the kitchen behind us, the voodoo professor and priest were arguing the same thing, while I was worrying about chemicals and thin dimensional veils.

  The argument was interrupted by the doorbell and Hagatha shouting, “Company! The nuns are here.”

  Andre and Dane both looked at me. I shrugged. “You said I could invite them.”

  I grabbed a tray of sandwiches from the still-standing counter and sashayed back to the foyer as if welcoming carolers to a party.

  Andre followed with the punch bowl. Father Morrison carried a tray of cups.

  Since no one else emerged from the kitchen, I assumed the senator had taken the back way upstairs to get dressed, and the professor had escaped through a window rather than face nuns.

  A few minutes later, Hagatha’s VW putt-putted to a rattle and departed, hopefully taking the prof with her.

  The sisters smiled benevolently and with some degree of puzzlement at an empty foyer adorned only with a pentagram burn. Passing it off as a misguided Star of David probably wasn’t a good idea.

  “A slight mishap,” I explained. “Come into the dining room. We had to send the rest of the party home. So sorry we didn’t have time to call you.”

  I’d forgotten the chandelier above the table had torched the ceiling. We had no light to illuminate the snowy gloom. I wasn’t about to see if the fireplace had gas logs.

  The nuns fluttered about the elegant table and hors d’oeuvres as if they were at a true diplomatic party. With an adoring audience, Father Morrison was in his element.

  When Dane entered in all his sartorial glory, the nuns positively beamed.

  In the gloom, it was hard to tell that half his hair had been burned off, and he was hiding a limp as well. Damn, but the man was good.

  Patting to see if more of my own hair had been singed, pulling out a few more clumps, I stepped back next to Andre while the nuns blew on their pitch pipe and began their serenade.

  Andre caught my hand behind my back and held it as the horrible house filled with joyous song.

  I swear I saw angels singing with them. I was in bliss.

  “Want to blow up the Zone next?” Andre whispered in my ear.

  Eighteen

  Andre and I left Max writing big checks to the church and to the hallelujah-singing angels. The nuns were happily recommending contractors to repair the senator’s newly exorcised hellhole. He still looked lonely, but wealthy politicians have lots of options. I couldn’t be one of them, no matter how interesting today had been.

  It was dinnertime. I was bruised, exhausted, and as hungry as if I’d actually just had sex. The chicken sandwiches hadn’t appealed. Andre agreed a Chesty’s run was called for, and we set our mutual vehicles on the road to home.

  To spare my tires from Zone rot, I had intended to park my Miata behind my boarding house and walk down to the Zone. But when I entered the neighborhood, everything was dark except the blue neon glow of the buildings.

  And the red glow of the manhole covers.

  Urgency beat out caution. I parked in front of Chesty’s beside Andre’s Mercedes. Warily, we both climbed out and stared at the restaurant’s blank windows.

  “No electricity?” I suggested. “They all went home?” The utilities had promised me . . .

  It was eerie not hearing the metallic thump of loud music and the shouts of a noisy crowd. They hadn’t even cranked up the manual music. I glanced down the street and elbowed Andre.

  The lights were on at Bill’s Bar.

  In sync, we strolled toward the only lights in town. I kept an eye on alleys, looking for blue blobs and mad utility men. The genuine garden gnome I’d seen before was still bathing in the steaming run-off of the gutter. He kicked his feet and winked at me.

  Inanimate objects had a tendency to develop a life of their own in the Zone. That got me to thinking that I probably should bring the gnome statues back down here, after we halted the fight with MSI. Uniformed Nazis weren’t in my immediate plans for the Zone’s future, but I couldn’t keep them stoned forever.

  The bar blasted heat, light, and raucous noise when Andre opened the door. I almost backed off. But curiosity and hunger forced me inside.

  The complaints began the instant we entered.

  “The harbor exploded!”

  “They shut down all the utilities!”

  “They’re fencing off the harbor!”

  “They threw out the bums!”

  Well, that last didn’t sound like it ought to be a complaint, but I figured it came from one of the Do-Gooders. I elbowed up to the bar where blessed Bill produced beer and pizza.

  It wasn’t Bill’s pizza. He only did burgers and fish fries. I could see carry-out boxes stacked up on the counter behind him. Someone had made a pizza run. The Zone, unfortunately, loved pizza and tried to eat delivery vehicles. We’d been blackballed from all delivery routes.

  I dug into anchovies and let Andre field the questions. Most of the buildings were his. He’d been our ex-officio mayor for years.

  As the list of unanswerable questions stacked up, Andre glanced at me while I dragged out gooey cheese. I finished chewing, then shrugged.

  “This morning, I had everyone agreeing they’d only turn off the utilities between eight and noon tomorrow. I’ll have to go back to my office for messages,” I told him.

  “Technology is your friend,” Andre said dryly. “Ever hear of voice mail? Or on a really elementary basis, you could call Ned.”

  I glared over my pizza. Until I’d been promoted to real lawyer, I’d had only the most rudimentary of cell phones—and few friends to call me. My fancy new phone was still a toy as far as I was concerned. Besides, the Zone seldom ever let me call anyone but bad restaurants in faraway places.

  My leather jacket was only slightly damaged from dousing Dane’s flames. I retrieved my phone and showed it to Andre. No messages.

  I punched in Ned’s number. To my shock, the call not only went through, but he answered on the first ring.

  “The city called and said they have to shut down Edgewater,” he said excitedly. “I didn’t know whether to disturb you. There isn’t a thing we can do.”

  “Did they say why?” I looked questioningly at Bill. How had he kept his lights on?

  As if reading my mind, the big lout lifted an empty fuel can. Generator. Smart move given the Zone’s erratic black-outs.

  “Some kind of explosion opened a huge sinkhole in the harbor this afternoon,” Ned explained. “They fear the entire area is unstable.”

  Explosion. “What time did that happen?” I asked warily.

  “Around three or four, maybe?”

  Just when Gloria had been rocketing trees to the ceiling, the priests had blown her back to hell through the walls of Dane’s kitchen, and I’d damned her again. Scary bad.

  “No one mentioned condemnation,” Ned continued, attempting to inject optimism into my gloom.

  Sinkholes were bad enough. Hellish dimensional explosions . . . Lent a whole new layer to the problem, probably involving Paddy’s quantum physics. I sighed.

  “But we all know what the city wants,” I said. “Did you call the Montoyas?”

  “The lights are out up the hill, too. They called me. I explained all I knew. Do I come in to work tomorrow? Have they barricaded the street?”

  “No barricades yet. If you can get here, come in. I doubt it will be a slow day.” I hung up and contemplated Bill’s fuel can.

  “Generators all around?” Andre suggested before I could.

  “Depends.” I wasn’t hungry any longer. I took a deep slurp of beer.

  “On what?” Andre asked with interest.

  “On whether closing one hell hole opened another, and if Gloria and Dane ca
n ignite generator fuel tanks.”

  The noise continued around us as we sat in our own bubble of pissed-off silence. Andre sipped his beer and pondered the unpleasant possibilities. Paddy had mentioned something about physics and closing holes in one place might blast them open elsewhere. Is that what we’d done?

  I suffered an acceleration of the foreboding that had sent me exploring my cellar last week. I’m not a coward, but I was developing a real fear of dark holes containing potential demons and bats.

  I really didn’t want to venture underground to investigate the “sinkhole,” but at some point, someone had to see what was happening beneath the Zone.

  “Is Acme running on generators?” Andre finally asked.

  “Nope.” Bill refilled our beers. “They’re running normally. And we had surveyors scoping the street.”

  No one in the Zone complained about gutter saunas or roaming gnomes, but they noticed surveyors. I drank to that.

  “You burning off your hair one clump at a time, Clancy?” Bill asked in concern.

  I’d avoided looking in my mirror this morning. I might cover it tonight. “New hairdressing technique,” I told him.

  Rob, the lanky D-Ger, elbowed his way over to our section of the bar. “We’ve almost got the insurance building ready for habitation. We had to start moving in the homeless when the cops burned their camp, though. We’ll help you fight eminent domain. The whole town will be homeless if they condemn it!”

  No kidding, Sherlock. I kept that sentiment to myself and idly asked, “The gnomes don’t bother you?”

  He looked puzzled. “What gnomes? Those little statues your assistant carried off? No, why?”

  Amazing. People really did see only what they could comprehend. “How about blue neon?” I asked.

  Andre and Bill listened with about as much interest as if we were discussing golf. No one in the Zone played golf.

  Rob shrugged. “Neon is bad for the environment, but it’s festive.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes. “You might be crazy or blind enough to belong here. I’ll go after a court order to reinstate our utilities in the morning. Spread the word. We can fill the courthouse with silent protestors.”

  Police action after my college protest had left me painfully crippled. I’d lost a year of my life to hospitals. I wasn’t happy about another protest, but I wasn’t going in there alone. I may be stupid, but I’m not suicidal.

  As Rob shoved a path back to his buddies to spread the news, I heard a male voice shout crudely, “Hey weirdo, didn’t your mama teach you real men don’t wear pink?”

  Just what I needed, a flag-waving bigot looking for a fight. I massaged the bridge of my nose. I didn’t even have to look to know who had just entered. My insatiable Saturn need for justice forced me to check over my shoulder anyway.

  Tim had come in wearing a pink down-filled jacket. Ned was supposed to teach him how to dress better, but Tim had a creative thing happening that Ned didn’t appreciate.

  Neither did the hard hats in the corner, apparently.

  “If this is what it’s going to be like if we let in mundanes, do we really want to keep the Zone?” I muttered.

  “Zap the heckler,” Andre said callously.

  “What if I’m only allowed twenty-five zaps and then the justice juice is gone?” I asked.

  Andre shrugged. Not his problem, I got it.

  Tim disappeared as we watched. Typical. I sighed and held up a plate of pizza, waving it in his direction. A minute later, the plate disappeared.

  Noting that the drunken hardhat did no more than blink and return to his beer, I noticed Sarah sitting in a booth next to Ernesto. They were looking really cozy.

  I wondered if I should warn her about the dangers of hanky panky in our twenty-seventh year, but I hadn’t worked out the dynamics yet. Did babies born only in December—as I had—fall under Saturn’s aegis? If so, we were safe for a few months. But if it included the whole year that Saturn was in sight . . .

  I finished my beer and headed for home and my cat. Andre fell in step beside me.

  “Can a court order really turn the utilities back on?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “For all we know, it truly is dangerous under these streets.” I scuffed my toe on the hot blacktop. Was it hotter than last night? “But I don’t want the bastards thinking we’ll give in.”

  “I’ll try talking to Paddy again,” Andre said with a resigned sigh. “All our troubles always lead to Acme.”

  “Through Gloria,” I pointed out. “Unless MacNeill has gone to the dark side, which is always possible.”

  “Hell exists and we’re sitting on top of it?” he suggested, opening my car door.

  “Some outer dimension of it, I guess. What are the chances that Gloria’s barrels of anti-aging cosmetics contained Acme’s new element and that’s why the mansion exploded?”

  Acme’s mad scientist had been experimenting with a new element that had led to our last gaseous explosion. The stuff was potent if it could cure cancer and cross dimensions. Paddy was supposed to be restraining his new staff, limiting their experiments to cancer cures and not the explosive weapons—and cosmetics—of Gloria’s regime. But the stuff seemed to be mind-altering.

  “Can an element open a portal to hell?” I asked.

  Andre whistled. “Pretty intense. So, if Acme is sitting on vats of the stuff—”

  “And occasionally spilling it or setting it off in puffs of smoke—” I let the suggestion trail off as he had.

  “I want to believe that chemically opening the gates of hell is preposterous,” Andre admitted.

  “And the world is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, and global climate change isn’t happening. G’night, Andre.” I shut the door and powered on the Miata’s motor. Thankfully, the engine still worked, and the tires hadn’t melted into the blacktop.

  I parked behind the boarding house. The utilities had been turned off up here, too, but I noticed flickering light in my landlady’s first floor apartment. I trotted around to the front, let myself in, and called down the hall to my landlady’s apartment that I’d never traversed, “Mrs. Bodine, how are you faring?”

  This first floor was chilly and dark but warmer than outside.

  “Leo lit me a nice fire, dear, and I’m keeping your kitty warm. Come on back.”

  She stole my cat! So much for two locks, a landlady who claimed she couldn’t climb stairs, and a guard cat.

  I sauntered down the long hall to Mrs. Bodine’s Victorian kitchen. She sat in a rocking chair in front of a fireplace, holding a very content Milo in her lap. I studied the flames with worry, but they were from genuine logs and not gas. No Dane or Gloria writhed angrily.

  “It’s a chilly night, but I don’t think we’ll have more snow,” Mrs. Bodine said cheerily. “Isn’t this cozy? Just like the old days.”

  Since her white, fifties appliances were about as ancient as her kitchen, I was thinking she’d never left the old days, but I liked Mrs. Bodine and would never use my sharp tongue on her. “Thank you for looking after Milo. I hadn’t realized they’d shut off our utilities this far up the street. When did the power go out?”

  “After you closed Gloria’s portal, aziz. The pressure exploded through a weak point in the veil under the harbor. The pollution is making the dimensions more permeable.”

  I started, swung from the crackling fire, and stared at the woman in the rocking chair. Was I dreaming and my subconscious was summoning my fears? Mrs. Bodine had her eyes closed and her mouth hung open. A knot formed in my throat. “Themis?”

  “Your friend is a very proficient medium, dear.” The voice came from my landlady, but her lips scarcely moved. “I wanted to warn you that all our actions have consequences. Exorcising Gloria had to be done, but perhaps you went just a little far. Your nice boyfriend should be safe now though. I’m not so sure about your neighbors. There’s more there than you can see. Be careful, aziz.”

  I had ten tho
usand questions to ask my weird grandmother. My mind went blank. I hurriedly gathered my scrambled brains to ask, “Where? Where is the new portal?”

  Mrs. Bodine snored.

  Typical. Themis never lingered once she’d passed on her cheerful admonitions.

  Sighing, I poked the logs to be certain no sparks leapt past the grate. Milo jumped down and trotted off to the stairs. If he’d had a tail, he probably would have flaunted it.

  I had no idea if my grandmother existed in physical form or just went about stealing other people’s bodies. If she could move Mrs. Bodine about, that explained a lot. Locks probably didn’t stop Themis.

  I just wished she’d linger longer. This Saturn’s Daughter business was pretty damned confusing.

  I trudged upstairs to my icy apartment, tried to make coffee on the gas stove, and realized we had no water. We had gas but no water? That was seriously messed up. Crap.

  I glanced across the street at my office, saw lights over there, and remembered Sarah. I thought I’d left her at the bar with Ernesto to keep her warm.

  Why did my office have lights? And did it have water?

  It was early yet. I shrugged my jacket back on, left Milo slurping down his food, and crossed the hall to Leo Schwartz’s door. Caution was me.

  “Leo, you in there?”

  He hollered something incomprehensible and appeared a few minutes later wearing a ragged Aran sweater and baggy cords. He looked good, and I had to quit thinking like that.

  “There’s a light in my office and Sarah is down at Bill’s. Want to investigate?”

  He shrugged and followed me down the stairs.

  Outside, the clouds had cleared off and the stars twinkled frostily.

  I’d heard the same eerie wail in my cellar as we’d heard under Hell’s Mansion. I really didn’t want to believe hell’s portal had opened under my office and demons were sitting at my desk.

  “Light’s in the back,” Schwartz said. “Should we go around that way?”

  “If everyone else’s utilities are off, there shouldn’t be any light at all. I’m not sneaking into my own office.” I unlocked the heavy front door and entered the icy chamber that was my reception area.