On the Road Again -- Section 01

[Yes, Accidental God has been completely derailed over the last month or so. Honestly, I don't know how to fix it, and I may just push through and write something, but I was not writing and not writing and not writing, so Tuesday I finally started writing something. Just something. I didn't know what it was, or where it was going, but by Thursday I had a pretty complete novel idea sitting in front of me. There's romance, intrigue, a chihuahua.

[Also, the story is looking to be a bit grittier than my others. I know, I'm trying all that again, and it may fail completely, but I guess I just have to keep trying to write it.

[Anyway, as usual, read this blog at your own risk. I may never finish anything that shows up on here, but I'll try to keep writing and I hope you'll enjoy what you do read.]

    There are seven ways into the Long Road. The quickest and most obvious way is to die. That's how most people arrive: car crash, knife in the alley, cancer. They're all a trip to the Long Road, fast or slow.
    The second and third ways involve variations on elaborate rituals, candles, incense, three of the Eight Great Names of Hell, and a goat. Not to worry, the goat is fine when it's all over.
    The fourth and least dangerous way is to find a door. I didn't have time to find a door, considering that they move sideways, slantways, and upside down if a body breathes on them too heavily, making a man as likely as not to send one skittering off like a crab as soon as he’s found it, and I was on a deadline.
    Six and seven are not an option for me, not since my early twenties--at least not if I wanted to keep on living. That's another story.
    So that left me with number five.
    "What would you like?" asked Bela. That's 'Bay-lah,' and it's a boy's name. He's got the kind of hands that wrap around a watermelon and have a little to spare. That night they were wrapped around a order pad.
    “Something with lots of caffeine,” I answered.
    “That stuff will kill you.”
    I shrugged. “Lots of things could do that. Guns, plastic bags, my ex-wife.”
    Bela twisted his mouth, giving my joke more courtesy than it deserved. My ex-wife is actually a very nice woman, much nicer than I am. For example, she would never do what I was about to do.
    “I also need to use your grave,” I said.
    Bela blinked. “Now THAT is something that could kill you.”
    I looked him in the eye. “It might. Probably will one of these days. But I made someone a promise.”
    Bela leaned across the counter in his diner--a classic kind of place, all chrome and soda fountains, a juke box in the corner, the buttons covered over by a piece of paper and the black marker words, Out of order, unless you know how to fix me. Bela ignored his other customers, though they were used to that. At Bela’s you got served when you got served, or you went someplace else where the food is fast and they give a banana-cream-pie about customer service.
    “You’re scaring me, Lance.”
    “Come on. I know what I’m doing. You know that as well as anybody.”
    “That’s the problem. You start walking down that Road again, you can’t be sure what you might wake up.”
    I grimaced, remembering some of the things I had awakened on my trips down the Road--the Weird Road, the Eldritch Path, the Cold Way, and a dozen other names. I’d left my finger behind once--ring finger, along with my wedding ring--all in the mouth of something with five extra mouths, a creature that had been a man once but had become a thing of scales and hunger. Another horror had a piece of my calf, and my hair was white even though I haven’t hit forty yet, thank you very much. I was still a very solid thirty-nine. Thirty-nine and still insane, I guess.
    “Whatever shows up, I can handle it.”
    “I’m not worried about the things on the Road,” said Bela, and he reached out a finger, poking me roughly in my sternum.
    “Ouch,” I said, since it seemed appropriate.
    “I’m worried about what you might wake up inside--”
    “I got it,” I said, pushing his hand away. “You don’t have to be so dramatic. I’ll be careful about that, too.”
    “An alcoholic doesn’t take care by walking into a bar.”
    “And I’m about to drown myself in whisky. Yeah, I understand, but you weren’t listening, Bela. I made someone a promise.”
    He stared at me longer, one of my oldest friends who knew me back when I thought I owned the world. Who knows? Perhaps I could have owned a decent sized piece of it if I hadn’t had a child, if my wife hadn’t left me, if I hadn’t woken up.
    “You’ll be careful?”
    “Come on, Bela. How should I know? I haven’t been back in three years. I don’t know if I’ll come out with the brain power of a zucchini, or if I’ll slip down that long hill back to where I was, or if whatever comes back will look like me but won’t be me--”
    “You’re starting to babble.”
    “This is worth babbling about.”
    “It is, but you shouldn’t worry too much. If it’s not you coming back, I’ve got a shot gun.”
    I stared at him. “I feel comforted.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    “How do I let you know that it IS me?”
    “You think I won’t be able to tell?”
    “Might not.”
    He grunted. “I suppose that’s possible. In that case I’ll have Morzsa come with me.”
    “Sounds smart.” Morzsa is his dog, a little sneeze of a thing that fits in half of his hand. I guess the little hiccup’s name means ‘crumb,’ but Bela told me he didn’t name it because of the size. Apparently every dog he had growing up was named Morzsa. A Hungarian thing, from what Bela said. Also, Morzsa has a talent for being very frightened. Not of everything; just of the right things.
    “If you have Morzsa, I won’t feel too nervous about the shotgun. Of course, if something does manage to come back riding me, the shotgun might not be enough.”
    Bela looked disgusted. “I’m not new to this dance, Lance. I might even be able to teach you a few steps.”
    “MIght,” I agreed and shut my mouth, looking around the diner. “Place needs mopping.”
    “I could use an extra pair of hands,” said Bela, and that was that. He went off to grab me coffee--foul stuff, but a step up from what I used to do to my body--and we stopped talking about what I’d be doing later. That was the nice thing about Bela: he’d beat you over the head to make a point, but he wouldn’t break his bat doing it.
    My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I always keep the thing on vibrate since I can’t seem to find a single ring tone I want to hear more than twice. I pulled it out and answered, not recognizing the number.
    “This is Lance.”
    “Lance Gravel?” asked a woman’s voice, somewhere in her fifties, I figured, or maybe just a smoker. Maybe both.
    “Graywell,” I corrected her, “but yeah, that Lance. Is this the Rabbit?”
    “Sure is, honey. How can I help you?”
    “There’s a girl I need to find.”
    “Daughter?”
    “Yes, but not mine. A friend’s.”
    “And is this friend’s daughter in trouble?”
    Bela slid my coffee in front of me and I nodded my thanks. “Might be. Right now she’s an angry kid, and I want to find her before she does anything stupid.”
    “Typical teenager,” said the Rabbit with a laugh that turned into a hacking cough, so I figured I wasn’t too far off with my smoker guess. “They’re like puppies, have to eat all their food right now, scatter it over the kitchen floor, and it’s the grownups who have to come after with a broom.”
    “Right,” I said, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say. “So you can help?”
    “Of course, hon, but I assume you called me for a particular reason. You don’t find the Rabbit to help with something the police are better suited for, now do you?”
    I thought about two or three ways I could answer that, all of which were sarcastic and none of them helpful. I suppose I was starting to get on edge. I needed to get down to Bela’s grave soon to have the time for what I needed, and the idea of what I was planning was starting to eat at my mind the way bleach eats at your scalp.
    I went with the simple answer. “No,” I said. “You call the Rabbit if you need news about the Twilight World, and that’s what I need. The girl’s name is Annabel Fox.”
    “Oh, honey!” Her voice sounded shocked. “Those Foxes?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What’s that girl doing? She isn’t trying to pick a fight!”
    “I think so.”
    “She’s stepping into a war!”
    “That’s what I hear.”
    There was silence for a while. I didn’t have more to say, and I figured the Rabbit needed a little time to decide if she was interested in helping me or not. I knew I was asking her to start poking at a beehive, but from what I’d heard, if anyone could keep the bees quiet, it was the Rabbit.
    “How old is the girl?” she asked after a while.
    “Nineteen, I think.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Never met her, actually. I know the parents from work. I’d helped them with the gardens around their funeral home.”
    “You do landscaping?”
    “Run a plant nursery and greenhouse. Working with living things is good for me.”
    “Which nursery?”
    “Every Living Thing, on California.”
    “Right. The new place, isn’t it?”
    “I just moved here two years ago,” I admitted. “Following my own daughter.”
    “Huh,” she said, and we sat in silence for a moment more. “Two years is plenty to know what you might be getting into, am I right?”
    “You’re right.”
    “You know that picking a fight with either gang can be bad for your health.”
    “I’ll be prepared.”
    “The girl already killed one of them, didn’t she.”
    “From what I hear, but I’ve stayed out of this war so I don’t know which side she’s picking a fight with.”
    “Well,” said the Rabbit. “Well, well, well. I’ll help you find her. I’ll help that far, but no further. I’ve got a husband, two horses and a cat to take care of, and I’m not sticking my neck out for revenge.”
    “It’s for a girl,” I corrected her. “A frightened, angry girl.”
    “You say it however you like, hon, but I call it like I see it, and I want no part of it. I find her, I tell you where she is, and you take over from there. I wash my hands of all this. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
    I turned my coffee mug in front of me, leaving a small arc of water behind it. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this,” I said, “to visit the fatherless.”
    “Don’t you go quoting scripture at me, necromancer,” said the Rabbit. “Yes, I know who you are. I asked my questions about the new greenhouse, don’t think I didn’t. I find her, and I expect to get paid. I’m not stepping closer to this war without a fat paycheck to go with it.”
    “How much?” I asked.
    “Three-thousand.”
    “What?! Just for information?”
    “Three, or go find yourself another oracle, and there ain’t no other oracle with ears as long as the Rabbit. Besides, I know you’ve been keeping to yourself out on the edge of town. You don’t know the innards of city at all, and so if you want to find little Miss Fox before she does herself a harm, you’d better find another guide and fast--or cough up the three-thousand.”
    Three-thousand. Actually, it was less than I was afraid it might be, but still more than I had sitting around. Maybe a little creative bookwork with the greenhouse would do it.
    “Fine,” I said, “though I might move in with you if I can’t make my mortgage payment.”
    She snorted. “Half in cash by tomorrow. You know where?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get it there.”
    The call cut off and I looked over at Bela who was waiting expectantly. “How did it go?” he asked.
    “She started out friendly then got angry.”
    “Sounds like her,” said Bela. “For all her talk, she scares pretty easily, and it’s not much of a trip to stumble from fear to anger. Not sure why she stays in this business, if it causes her so much anxiety.”
    “She charges enough, just for a bit of information.”
    “Information about a war.”
    I took a sip of my coffee. Terrible stuff, but I hate the flavor of energy drinks even more, and I needed to be a bit wired. Bela was right. It was information about a war. “I never should have moved here,” I said.
    “I thought you were following your ex-wife?”
    “She never should have moved here.”
    “But it’s her home town. Your home town, too, if you remember.”
    I shrugged. “True, but things weren’t like this twenty years ago. The place was safer.”
    Bela made a sound somewhere between a snort and rice shaking in a bucket. “Maybe safer after you left.”
    I bobbed my eyebrows. “Maybe safer for the ladies.”
    Bela looked at me. “Sure. We’ll go with that.”
    I grimaced as I took another swallow of coffee. “I am trying to make up for it, Bela. It’s not much, but I’m trying. I still can’t figure out how Susan managed to stay with me as long as she did.”
    “Some of us can’t figure out why she married you in the first place.”
    I pointed my finger at him, opened my mouth, then closed it. “You’ve got a point.” If I’d been asked, I couldn’t have told you why she’d married me either, though I’d thought I’d known when I was nineteen. I’d been like a god in my own eyes then, Hades just discovering that he had his own kingdom and it was good to be king.
    “Let me know when you’re ready,” said my friend, and he walked off to help someone else. Bela’s place is an all-night diner, so he gets everything from regulars to crazies in there, but that night it was pretty light on the crazies, by which I mean that everyone there looked like they’d had a bath in the last day or so. All as normal as normal gets, except for maybe me. I stared at the last few swallows of my coffee and I couldn’t get myself to drink it. Bela called an order over to his cook--Shauna, a cute thing wandering her way through community college a class or two at a time--and came around the counter to sit on a stool next to me, leaning on his elbows.
    “You don’t like my coffee?” he asked.
    “I hate it.”
    “Then why order it?”
    “You know why.”
    “Because you’re stupid.”
    “Pretty much.”
    “The Foxes’ girl?”
    “Yep.”
    “How were the parents?”
    “As good as could be expected. In shock. We didn’t have much time to talk.”
    Bela wrinkled his nose. “These gang wars are bad business. I’ve even heard that the police are calling the Feds.”
    “Our fair city about to get a visit from the Esoteric Crimes Division, is it? That’ll be lovely. I wonder if there will be anyone I know.”
    “I think you should count on that. Count on it, and be careful. You should avoid any misunderstandings.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind.” I spun my coffee mug around again, wasting time that I really shouldn’t have been wasting. Every minute brought daylight closer.
    “You sure you need to visit the Road?” asked Bela.
    I nodded. “It’s not my first choice, but the way I am right now, I couldn’t protect Annabel from a squirt-gun fight.”
    “Give yourself more credit. You’ve been working with plants quite a bit over the last couple years. I’ve seen what you can do, and it’s not shabby. Your little banzai is particularly impressive. It’s like a little old man that can hold up a mountain.”
    I shook my head. “I inherited that from someone. Did you know that? Takagura.”
    “The Takagura?”
    “Yep. Not entirely my work, that little tree. In fact, not much at all.”
    Bela considered that. “But it’s still with you,” he said finally. “It looks healthy, and that says something.”
    “Sure, but not much. I’m still pretty well clueless when it comes to anything but humans.”
    “A shame. You still positive you need to go?”
    I looked down at my hands, shaking. “Coffee’s kicking in,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t it. “Stop asking me, Bela. I need to go. You didn’t see the Foxes’ place.”
    “I read about it.”
    “It’s not the same. I was there, maybe a half hour after it all happened. I’ll probably have some mental disorder after what I saw.”
    “You?”
    “Me. It was--” I stopped talking, remembering. The smell was what was worst, a greasy overlay of bacon and vomit and fear, and I’d heard that memories get attached to things like smells, which didn’t look good for my ever eating a BLT again. “Bad,” I said finally. “It was bad. Whoever or whatever did all that was angry and strong, and after what they did they’ll be bloated with power like a rotting tomato.”
    “Are tomatoes powerful?”
    “Work with me. I don’t have a better metaphor.”
    “I get your point.”
    We sat in silence and I stared at nothing, then I closed my eyes. “I know I’ve seen worse,” I said, “but it hit me harder this time. I guess I’ve become soft.”
    “I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh,” said Bela.
    “Now you’re the one quoting scripture.” I reflexively took another swallow of coffee--it was in my hand, and I was nervous--and I grimaced. “Terrible. I can’t finish this.”
    “You’re depriving my coffee of its purpose.”
    “Its what?”
    My friend held his hands up, palms out, as if he were painting the universe in front of us. “Everything has a right purpose in this world. Fire’s purpose is to burn and consume. Water’s purpose is to flow, to give life, to make things wet.”
    “Make things wet? That’s a purpose?”
    “Shut up, Lance. I’m making a point. Coffee has a right purpose, too, and that is to be drank. Drunk. Which is it?”
    “I have no idea, and that’s ridiculous. Coffee does not have some kind of cosmic purpose. It’s just coffee.”
    “People have a right purpose, too.”
    “Really? What’s mine?”
    Bela shrugged. “How should I know? I’m not God.”
    I blinked at him. “No. I guess not. Are you Moses?”
    “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
    “Moses held up his arms and stopped the sun in the sky. It gave Israel time to defeat their enemies.”
    “I can’t stop morning from coming, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “Then I guess we’d better head downstairs.”
    “Go ahead,” said Bela. “I’ll just finish up a couple things with Shauna. You know the way.”
    I nodded and stood up. “Sure do. Bathroom break, first, though.”
    “You know the way there, too, don’t you?”
    “Sure do.”