Mercury Rises (35 page)

As Mercury approached the drum, the group's members shuffled aside, making room for him.

"It's cold here," said Mercury.

"Ha!" said the toothless man who had spoken first. "This is the warmest it's been for a long time. My name's Ernie. This is Thelma, Edith, Ronald, Neal, Agnes, and Lester."

"Nice to meet you all," said Mercury. "I'm Mercury. So seriously, where am I? Who are you people?"

Suddenly the fire flared brightly, flooding them with a wave of warmth. The assembled group moaned appreciatively.

"That was a Charlie Nyx burning," said Ernie, and the others nodded in agreement. "Gotta love those. Stir it up a bit with your stick and see if you can get another one, Ronald."

Ronald grumbled something and poked a long wooden stick into the drum.

Mercury leaned over the drum to get a look at the source of the fire.

"Wait, don't!" Ernie yelled, pulling Mercury away from the drum.

Mercury staggered backward, falling onto the cold concrete. His eyes had been blinded by the glare, but his mind was assailed by a thousand images---and not just images, but slices of time, complete with sounds, smells, and tastes: ancient peoples tearing down temples, barbarians sacking Rome, Inquisitors burning heretical texts, Reformers throwing rocks through stained-glass windows, Fundamentalists chanting over piles of flaming Charlie Nyx books.

"What is this place?" Mercury gasped. "What are you burning?"

"
We're
not burning anything," said Ernie. "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."

"We just poke at it once in a while," said Thelma. "Sometimes it gets really cold here."

Now black smoke was pouring from the drum, and the odor of burning hair filled the air.

"Ugh," said Ernie. "Damn Tawani, burning goats again." He leaned over the drum. "Enough with the goats already!"

"Hey, what's that?" asked Lester, pointing at something in the drum. "Are they building ziggurats again?"

"You want me to knock it over?" asked Ronald.

"Hang on," said Ernie. "That's just a hotel in Las Vegas. No danger there."

"Sorry," said Lester. "I guess I'm a little overly cautious since that thing with the Babylonians."

"Yeah, that was a close one," said Ronald. "We almost ended up putting out the fire completely that time."

There were nods and murmurs around the group.

Suddenly the fire popped and showered them with sparks.

"Uh-oh," said Agnes.

"Yeah," said Ronald.

"What?" asked Mercury. "What is it?"

"Well," said Ernie. "The good news is that it's going to get a lot warmer for a little while."

"And the bad news?" asked Mercury.

"Then it's going to get very, very cold."

FORTY-THREE

Eddie spent the night in his hotel room, trying to put Culain's fatalistic nonsense out of his head. By the time the sun rose, he felt somewhat better, and he decided to drive to the Beacon Building and level with Wanda Kwan about the missing Charlie Nyx book. Rehearsing his speech on the drive over, he was so preoccupied that he barely noticed the series of earthquakes that were rocking Los Angeles. L.A. did seem a little crazier than usual; he had to put the top up on the BMW and turn up the radio to drown out the sounds of pedestrians who were panicking about whatever it was that pedestrians panicked about.

The
Beacon
's valet wasn't at his post, so Eddie parked the car himself in a spot that seemed to promise that he would be transported to his destination from the parking lot in a sort of wheeled chair. This hope also proved disappointing, and after several minutes of waiting in vain for the wheeled chair to appear, he decided to simply walk to the elevator. Adding to the inconvenience was the fact that he had to dodge several pedestrians who were fleeing the building in terror. Say what you will about Cork, thought Eddie; at least it wasn't packed with panicked pedestrians. L.A. was becoming downright unsafe. He found himself hoping that Cody was OK, which was silly: one thing Cody was good at was taking care of herself.

Eddie managed to make his way to Wanda Kwan's office, finding her sitting at her desk, a worried expression on her face.

"Eddie!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"

"Hello, Wanda," Eddie said, in practiced tones. "I've come to talk to you about the final Charlie Nyx book. You see, Wanda..."

"Eddie, this is no time to be talking about Charlie Nyx books!" Wanda said.

"It isn't?" Eddie asked.

"Haven't you seen the news, Eddie? There are earthquakes and tidal waves and hurricanes all over the world! A third of the moon has fallen out of the sky!"

Eddie frowned. "Really?" he asked. "So you don't want the final Charlie Nyx book anymore?"

"Of course not, Eddie. This isn't the time for silly children's fantasies. The world may be ending!"

Eddie rubbed his chin, deep in thought. "So no more Charlie Nyx books? Ever?"

"Eddie," Wanda said. "I understand that you writers can be a bit self-absorbed, but look around you. The world isn't the same place as it was yesterday. The Middle East has erupted in war. Massive earthquakes have rocked Rio Di Janeiro, Beijing, San Francisco, and Mumbai. Japan's been hit by a tsunami. Paris is in flames. The military has been called out to handle riots in London, Warsaw, New York, and Chicago. It's the end of the world, Eddie. This isn't the time for a book about a teenage warlock fighting monsters underneath Los Angeles!"

Eddie sank into the chair across from Wanda. The seriousness of the situation was finally beginning to sink in. While he had been scurrying around, trying to find the manuscript that was going to jumpstart his writing career, literally earth-shaking events had been occurring. Wanda was right: if this wasn't the end of the world, it was a damn good trial run. There was a time and a place for books about teenage warlocks, and this wasn't it.

Eddie met Wanda's worried gaze. He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves. "OK," he said. "How about a story about a rogue angel at the brink of the Apocalypse?"

Wanda's eyes met his. "I'm listening," she said.

"It's a riveting story," Eddie said. "Based on actual events. The only concern I have is with the ending."

"What's wrong with the ending?" Wanda asked.

"Well, the book is about the Apocalypse, but the Apocalypse doesn't actually occur. On some level, people might be disappointed."

"But you could have it happen in the sequel, right?"

"I suppose," said Eddie. "I wasn't really planning on another book."

"Oh, we have to do another book. Actually, a trilogy would be even better."

"Hmmm," replied Eddie. "You don't think that the readers will feel like I'm stringing them along?"

Wanda laughed. "Oh, Eddie," she said. "It's so sweet of you to be concerned. Now about this book..."

"Yes?" asked Eddie.

"How many explosions does it have?"

FORTY-FOUR

Horace Finch sat alone in the control room of the CCD, holding an icepack on his head. Somehow things had gone horribly wrong. Was it all a dream, or had a group of bickering angels really stolen the magic glass apple and ruined his experiment? The broken plastic tube hanging from the ceiling attested to the veracity of his memory, but still he found it hard to believe.

The Order of the Pillars of Babylon had believed in him, had given him their backing and entrusted him with sacred teachings that had been passed down for thousands of years. He, Horace Finch, was supposed to have been the gatekeeper standing between the end of human history and the beginning of a glorious new age in which the genius of humanity was constrained by neither space nor time. But he had failed.

He wanted to curse the angels and demons who had meddled with his destiny, but he knew that was a cop-out. When one aspired to tear down the veil that concealed the ultimate reality, one had to be prepared to deal with angels, demons, and whoever else showed up to the party. It was all part of the deal. The Babylonians had known that. The OPB had taught him that the gods themselves were not to be trusted, and they were right.

But it was not, in the end, the gods who had stolen his destiny from him: it was that annoying little cipher, Jacob Slater. "Jacob Slater," he hissed to himself, the words becoming a curse as they left his lips. "Jacob Slater, you will
pay
."

While he fantasized about the myriad horrific tortures to which he would subject Jacob, his finger absently pressed a button on the console and a robotic arm slid out. At the end of the arm was an empty container where the glass apple should be.

"Empty," he hissed. There had been one magical glass apple on the planet, and it had been wasted---tossed at the moon like just another fifty-cent golf ball.

Wait a minute, he thought, looking in the receptacle. What's this?

The cup wasn't quite empty after all. Something very small glittered in the bottom. He reached in and gingerly pulled it out. Holding it between his fingertips, he appraised the item in the dim light. It was the most beautiful thing Horace Finch had ever seen.

There was no doubt about it: the thing was made of the same substance as the apple itself. In the anti-bomb's death throes, it had shed a small piece of itself---a teardrop of rosy glass.

Horace Finch tossed his head back and laughed. Perhaps his plans hadn't been foiled after all; just delayed. For in his hand he held the key to the secrets underlying all of reality: a glass apple seed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photograph by Julia Kroese

Robert Kroese's sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan---home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, as well as the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship
Thee Eagle
. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it.

In 2006 he started his blog,
www.mattresspolice.com
, as an outlet for his absurdist wit. Around the same time, he was appointed to be a deacon in his church, and this juxtaposition of roles prompted him to create the character Mercury, the star of
Mercury Falls.
Kroese (pronounced KROO-zee) currently lives in Ripon, California, with his wife and two children.

1
He had in fact been trying to summon a thunderstorm for several weeks, but the dry air and a lingering high-pressure zone were making it difficult to say the least.

2
The Christians had then struck back with a decal of a larger fish, labeled "TRUTH," eating the Darwin fish, which distilled Christianity to its core principle: the ultimate devouring of Science by the giant, horrific Jesus-fish.

3
All angels can fly, of course, but as flight is simply a matter of using interplanar energy to warp gravity, wings are hardly necessary. In the Pre--Comic Book (PCB) era, it was not uncommon for angels to sport wings on the Mundane Plane to establish their Heavenly credentials and to offer a visible explanation to the plane's primitive inhabitants of their ability to defy gravity. Mercury himself briefly experimented with wings on his shoes and on his hat, the former making walking difficult and the latter inevitably prompting the question, "OK, but how does the hat stay on?"

4
Eternal Harvest was not, in fact, Canadian. Crispin had made this erroneous assumption based on the fact that at the bottom of all their posters appeared the word
EH?

5
Some angels have, through a combination of natural ability and practice, achieved the ability to assume various forms at will, but even these angels tend to specialize within a narrow range. Angels that can switch between genders at will, for example, are rare. This narrative uses male pronouns to refer to angels in general, because although technically angels have no gender, most of those who have chosen to take human form tend to favor one gender over another. For roughly eighty percent of angels, this form is male, probably because the complexities of the female human psyche are beyond the understanding of most angels.

6
Angelic identity discs are not to be confused with the "identity discs" used by programs in the movie
TRON
. The identity discs in
TRON
served as a combination of personal identification, recreational aid, and weapon, sort of like taping your Social Security card to a razor-edged Day-Glo Frisbee.