Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“Scott. ” Cody said. Not much spin on it, but apparently enough to get the little tyke back in his cage. He drove off, and I watched him exit through the big wrought-iron gates. Neck tattoo, five-foot-six, name of Scott. Should be enough. And it’s always nice to have something to look forward to.

“Long walk back,” I said to Cody. “But at least it’s downhill.”

“I got a ride,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of a late model Cadillac parked outside a separate Carriage House. “And you’re not going to need one.”

“Ominous,” I said. “I’m all a-tremble.”

“Comedienne,” he said — yeah, four syllables, gender-specific and everything, who knew? — and waved me toward the front door of the main house with his gun.

Quite a place. And it sure as hell didn’t belong to Cody. Nor did it belong to a pissant junior agent like Andy Velasco — to whom I should perhaps have paid more attention when he told me that he was just a middleman and that his client was not going to be happy — because this place was money. Real money.

The three rooms and a hallway we walked through to get where we were going were high-end SoCal class. Impressive and imposing, but nothing you haven’t seen in the glossies. The room we ended up in, though, was something quite different. Black marble and red lacquer and display cases full of books, artefacts, and impedimenta of a very specific nature.

Shit.

Magic. I hate magic.

LA’s just full of Satanists. Always has been. I don’t know if it’s some kind of yin — yang natural balance thing — all that sun, surf, and simplicity needing to be contrasted by some really dark shit — but it certainly seems that way. Into every Brian Wilson’s life, a little Charlie Manson must fall.

Most of the Golden State’s followers of the left-hand path are of course idiot dilettantes chasing tail and money, but every now and then something real fucking ugly breaks surface. Something that knows what it’s doing.

It was hard to think of the seventy-year-old guy who’d been waiting for us in the room as someone who knew what he was doing, though, at least when it came to raising demons and the like. Getting into pickles with pretty sitcom moms, sure, or raising exasperated eyebrows at the antics of adorable juvenile leads maybe. I recognised him immediately, and you would’ve too. I doubt you could watch four hours of TV Land without seeing him at least twice. Never had his own show, but from the late sixties through the mid-eighties he was very solidly employed. You’d have as hard a time as I did remembering the name — Frankie Metcalfe, I eventually recalled — but you’d know the face in a heartbeat. Still worked now and then; he did one of those standard Emmy-baiting loveable-old-curmudgeon-with-Cancer bits on Grey’s Anatomy couple of seasons back.

“Really?” I said. “ There Goes the Neighborhood residuals can get you a place like this?”

“Hardly,” he said. “Bequest from an acolyte. So you’re the interfering little cunt who decided she’d piss on my parade?”

Whoa. Quite a mouth. And from this guy? It was like hearing Howie Cunningham tell you to go fuck your mother.

“Why didn’t you just make Anna an offer?” I said. “You probably could have got the damn single for less than a month’s worth of property tax.”

“Not an option,” he said. “The ritual has its rules.”

Christ almighty. Always with the rules and rituals, these dickheads. Flying the flag for transgression and the dark arts, but as prissy about it as a chapter of the fucking DAR.

“Esoteric as all get out, I’m sure,” I said. “Can I give you a piece of friendly advice? Payback for all those hours of televisual pleasure? If you have a gun handy, you might want to get it now.”

“Because?”

“Because sometime in the next five or ten minutes I’m going to relieve Cody of his and blow the top of his fucking head off, and I’d hate for you to be caught at a disadvantage.”

Cody bristled at that — big fucking deal, I’ve been bristled at before — but Frankie laughed. I think he was starting to like me.

I wondered why he’d sent his boys to grab me instead of just having them snatch the single again, and asked him.

“Your friend was apparently so moved by its safe return that she’s keeping it about her person,” Frankie said. “Which wouldn’t be a problem, but her group is currently travelling.” He looked to Cody for details.

“They got a gig in Bakersfield tonight,” Cody said.

“Bakersfield?” I said. “Seriously, the Barbies? Buck Owens must be turning over in his grave.”

Frankie ignored the sidebar. “So, no memento mori of the unfortunate Mister Eagleton,” he said. “Still, not to worry. We’ve got you instead.”

“I’m a girl of many talents,” I said. “But singing isn’t one of them.”

“Then how lucky we are that all you’ll be required to do is die. Let’s move the party down below, shall we?”

We were on the ground floor, in case I haven’t made that clear. “Down below,” I said. “That’s quite unusual for Los Angeles.” Look at me, being all up on my building codes and shit.

“What’s unusual?” Frankie asked.

“Having a basement.”

“Oh, I don’t have a basement,” he said.

He was right. He didn’t have a basement. What he had was a cavern. I’d have made the requisite Bruce Wayne jokes, except the sight of it didn’t really inspire humour.

It was huge, for starters, like the hill beneath his house and those of his neighbours lower down on the slope was absolutely hollow. And the hollowness was new. I don’t mean man-made new — there’d been no excavation here, at least not by natural means — but alarmingly, preternaturally new, like the hill was eating itself hollow in preparation for something. The hill was being rewritten, I thought, though I’d have preferred not to.

The cavern walls weren’t of rock, but of whatever primordial clay once hardened into rock. They were pale brown, and wet. Oozing wet, like the whole thing was sweating feverishly. The floor was the same, sucking at our feet with every step. That I could handle. It was the breathing that freaked me the fuck out.

It was slow and laboured and, apart from being a hundred times as loud and coming from everywhere at once, sounded like the melancholy and heartbreaking sound of someone on their deathbed. But this wasn’t the sound of something dying. It was the sound of something being born. And it bothered me. A lot.

But not as much as it bothered Cody.

We’d descended by rope ladder from a trapdoor in Frankie’ souvenir shop — the descent being, too bad for me, textbook smart; guy with gun first, unarmed chick second, creepy old guy third — and ever since we’d got here, Cody’d evidenced increasing signs of having got himself into something that wasn’t what he thought he’d signed up for.

Yeah, well too damn bad, Gangsta.

Once his awestruck and unhappy glances at his surroundings started to occupy more of each of his last minutes on earth than his glances at me did, I figured it was time to put him out of his misery.

I couldn’t even feel smug about it, guy was so out of his comfort zone. A slight hesitation, as if I was mesmerised by one of the clay-like excrescences that bloomed from the dripping walls like attempts at imitating local flora, a misdirecting glance back behind him, and then a well-placed heel and elbow, and he was on his knees, gasping for breath, and his gun was in my unforgiving hand.

“Say goodnight, Cody,” I said, and put one through the centre of his forehead.

I was swinging back towards where I’d last seen Frankie when I heard the click of his safety and felt his barrel at the back of my neck. Cargo pants don’t look that great on guys his age, but they do have a lot of pocket space.