Apocalypse to Go

  I got the general impression that the information in question had originally been part of a book. Nothing gave me so much as a clue of what it was or where Dad had found it.

  “Well?” Michael said.

  “It’s going to take me a long time to work this stuff over.” I laid the papers down on the coffee table. “But I think they might have something to do with the gates and worlds. Dad made notes about a passage concerning keys to the doors guarded by angels.”

  “How long?” Michael popped the last bit of the sandwich into his mouth and mumbled. “Will it take you to translate it, I mean?”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said. “A couple of days, maybe. This stuff is dense.”

  Michael groaned with dire drama and wiped his greasy hand on his jeans.

  I was about to suggest he use a napkin when I heard the front door open. I went to the top of the stairs to check: Ari, still damp from his shower. He smiled at me as he ran up the entire flight.

  “I can’t believe you’ve got the energy to do that,” I said.

  “Working out builds energy,” he said. “You’d find that out if—”

  “No! I’m not going to some smelly icky gym.”

  He rolled his eyes skyward and strode into the living room.

  “Mike!” Ari said. “You came by?”

  “Nola had some stuff to show me from Dad’s desk. So she called me, yeah.”

  Ari nodded and trotted off down the hall to put his sweaty workout clothes into the washing machine. I felt a pang of conscience at just how quickly we’d shifted his status to “outside the family.” I followed Ari down the hall.

  “Well, actually,” I told him, “I discovered something weird about Dad’s desk. It’s got a drawer that’s in another world. Sort of like Spare14’s briefcase.”

  Ari stopped pouring liquid detergent into the dispenser and turned to give me one of his reproachful stares. He set the bottle of detergent down.

  “You must have noticed the way Belial’s box fit into the briefcase,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Ari said. “I’ve been trying to forget it ever since. I take it Mike can open the drawer.”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t. There were some papers in it that might be important.”

  “Might be?”

  “I don’t know yet. They’re really peculiar.”

  “Nothing new about that, then.”

  I returned to the living room to find Michael eating my recently purchased vegan peanut cookies right out of the bag. He was looking through the stack of Dad’s papers and scattering the occasional crumb or nut fragment onto the floor.

  “What is this?” I said. “Aunt Eileen’s stopped feeding you?”

  “I jogged over here on the beach,” Michael said. “The sea air, y’know?”

  “Okay. Can you understand anything in those papers?”

  “No. I’m just kind of studying Dad’s handwriting. In case I have to, like, forge it on something.”

  “You’re going to be a real credit to the Agency one day.”

  “Yeah?” He gave me a brilliant smile. “Thanks!”

  Before I could explain the meaning of the term “sarcasm,” his cell phone let fly with a heavy metal guitar riff. Michael took it from his pocket with the cookie-free hand and stared at the text.

  “It’s from Sophie,” he told me. “I guess I better go.”

  “How are you getting home?”

  “Muni.” Michael handed me the bag with the last two cookies in it. “It’s kind of a walk between buses, but that’s okay.”

  “Ari and I could drive you.”

  “No, he just got home and stuff. It’s no problem. Honest.”

  I considered offering to drive him by myself, but the memory of the false image attack stopped me. Michael grabbed his jacket and headed off downstairs. I put the bag on the coffee table, then followed Michael down to let him out. By the time I came back upstairs, Ari was sitting on the couch with my Irish dictionary, and the last cookies had disappeared. So much for my adding extra calories to my diet. Ari looked up from the dictionary and frowned.

  “I have never seen a language before,” he said, “that requires twenty pages of small print for the pronunciation guide.”

  “And what’s more,” I said, “the guide’s unreliable. When it comes to pronouncing proper names, you’ve really got to ask someone who already knows.”

  Ari shut the book and laid it on the coffee table. He was about to make a remark when my cell phone rang. Aunt Eileen, I thought. It was.

  “Has Michael left yet?” she said.

  “Yeah, he has. Why?”

  “He needs to start his homework. His English teacher’s given him one last chance to pass if he can revise one essay and finish another. Oh, wait… Here he is now. I’ll let you go.”

  Aunt Eileen hung up before I could tell her that Michael had left my flat a bare five minutes earlier. I stood holding my cell phone and staring at it like an idiot. I could hear Michael’s voice in my memory, saying, “It’s no problem.”

  “What’s wrong?” Ari said.

  “Michael’s learned how to shorten the journey, that’s what,” I said. “Keffir fizz hat rack.”

  “You mean kefitzat haderach.”

  “Whatever. I don’t know if he’s found gates or if he’s imitating Walking Stewart, but he’s already across town.”

  Ari spoke a few quiet words in Hebrew.

  “Say what?” I said.

  “Never mind. They’re not the sort of words I want you to know.” He stood up and brushed a few cookie crumbs off his shirt. “I’ve been thinking. If I had decided to become an insurance adjustor, my life would have been a lot simpler, but then, I never would have met you.” He considered for a moment. “I suppose that’s a fair tradeoff.”

  He moved out of range before I could kick him and picked up the pile of Dad’s papers from on the coffee table. “Do you mind if I look at these?”

  “Not at all,” I said, “but good luck in trying to read them.”

  Ari sat back down on the couch and frowned at the first page. “This is very odd,” he said. “These Latin passages? They’re filled with transliterated Hebrew words.”

  “Crud,” I said. “That means they’re Hisperic.”

  “What?”

  “Early Irish monks thought it was cool to interlard their Latin with Hebrew. A little Greek, too, because those were the Biblical languages. Very holy, therefore. The resulting mess is called Hisperic, but I don’t know why.”

  “I can help you with the Hebrew at least.”

  “I’d really appreciate that. But the worst thing is, it means the Irish parts aren’t Middle Irish. They’re Old Irish, one of the most obscure ancient languages ever.”

  Ari sighed and put the sheaf of papers back onto the coffee table. “Let me know what I can do to help,” he said. “And good luck.”

  Since by then it was past six o’clock in DC, and the Agency home staff would have closed down for the day, I left filing a report on Spare14 to the morrow. After we ate a scrappy dinner of leftovers, Ari started working, web surfing on his laptop with the Arabic keyboard attached.

  Part of his job was keeping a watch on chat, news, and political sites in Arabic and Farsi, looking for clues that might lead him to people or groups with terrorist ties. Since he knew three different dialects of Arabic as well as Farsi, he could post comments and leading questions. It was too bad, I thought, that he’d never considered a university education, though an academic life teaching languages and linguistics probably would have bored him to despair. No guns, for one thing.

  I picked up the stack of Dad’s printout. Although I had OCR available, the computer probably would have blown a RAM chip if I’d tried to scan that mix of handwriting and a font of yesteryear. The thought of typing it all over again in Gael AX Unicode did not appeal, but it needed to be done. I moaned piteously but briefly and got to work.

  I set the page to double-space to leave room for Ari t
o annotate the Hebrew on the printout and transferred Dad’s handwritten notes to proper footnotes. Working with the material helped clarify the meaning to a small degree. By the time we went to bed, my mind had gotten itself tangled from trying to think in four languages at once. I had, however, deciphered enough to know that I needed to understand the entire thing.

  About 4 AM I woke in our dark bedroom. Ari had gotten out of bed. I could hear him moving and cloth rustling.

  “Say what?” I said.

  “Hush,” he said. “Stay in bed. I don’t want to shoot you by mistake.”

  I stayed. I could guess that the alarm had gone off and indicated a breach in the security system. I heard Ari walk barefoot to the bedroom door and open it. Since we left a nightlight on in the bathroom down the hall, I saw by his silhouette that he was wearing his jeans, a sweatshirt, and a gun. He stepped out of the room and shut the door behind him.

  Since I was naked, I risked rolling out of bed. If I ended up having to ensorcell an intruder, I preferred to do it clothed. I stumbled over one of Ari’s T-shirts on the floor and picked that up. It fit like a baggy tunic and smelled like witch hazel, an oddly reassuring scent given the circumstances. I did get back onto the bed, though. Getting shot by mistake wasn’t high on my to-do list.

  I sat cross-legged on the mattress and did an SM:L for the building. Ari’s presence I picked up as he went down the front stairs. We’d shared so much Qi that his aura registered almost as strongly on my mind as my own aura would have. I felt him pause by the front door, then open it.

  I held my breath. Nothing happened, except for Ari going outside and shutting the door. I breathed. Another SM:L put him in the downstairs flat. I could sense him moving from room to room in the front of the flat and actually hear him once he went into the empty bedroom directly below me. Eventually he left the lower flat and returned to the porch. I heard him coming upstairs.

  “Nola,” he called out. “Turn on the bedroom light.”

  I leaned over and pulled the chain on the antique brass lamp on my nightstand. Ari came down the hall and opened the bedroom door with his left hand. He had his laptop tucked into his armpit and clamped to his side by his left elbow. He was carrying the Beretta in his right hand but pointed at the floor.

  “What’s all this about?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” Ari let the laptop slip free onto the bed. Before he said anything more, he squatted down and put the gun away in its holster in the dresser drawer. He locked the drawer and stood up.

  “The alarm went off.” He gestured at his nightstand and the small gray box lying on top of it. “I take it you didn’t hear it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I thought we might have a prowler, but everything seemed secure.” He picked up the laptop and put it on top of the dresser. “Let me check the system records.”

  He booted up the machine, then worked a few keys. In a couple of minutes he glanced my way with a frown. “Nothing. The alarm sounded, but the only thing in the record is an unidentified energy flux.”

  “That’s not a good sign, is it?” I said.

  “No, it certainly isn’t.”

  My memory nipped me. “Those records,” I said, “they show you where the flux happened, right?”

  “Well, they indicate the closest security node.”

  “Okay. Do you remember when Jack brought Dad’s desk over? You guys put it in the lower flat, and then there was one of those energy discharges—”

  “—in the same room.” Ari finished the sentence for me. “Yes, I do remember. Hang on a minute.” He hit a few keys. “It’s the same node.”

  “I wonder if it was the ghost I saw there?”

  Ari spun around to look at me. “What ghost?” he said.

  “The one I saw the day Jack brought Dad’s old desk over. I told you about her. I thought she was the ghost of the woman who’d committed suicide in the kitchen.”

  “Right. I do remember now.”

  Ari shut down the laptop and left it on the dresser. He sat on the edge of the bed and turned to face me.

  “The thing is,” I said, “I doubt if she really was a ghost. The apparition looked like a blue figure of a woman, pretty much transparent. She told me that there was another drawer in the desk.” My turn for the ripple of shock. “God, she was right!”

  “Are you thinking she knew about that secret drawer?”

  “Exactly that. So it couldn’t have been the suicide’s ghost. That poor woman wouldn’t have known zip about Dad’s desk.”

  “True. In the usual crazed way of these things, that makes sense. What about that other apparition, the one on Saturday?”

  “That one didn’t look human, but both images must have come from a deviant world level, or maybe from two different ones. Huh, that first one was plain old blue, but the one on Saturday, blue-violet. I wonder if that means something?”

  Ari shrugged. “I’ll contact Itzak about the alarms. I wonder if he can sensitize the pickup points to Qi. Well, if you’re willing to tell him what Qi is.”

  “It depends. You can’t do it yourself?”

  “I don’t want to faff around with it. I might break something.”

  “He’s good at this kind of stuff, huh?”

  “Yes, too good to be doing the sort of work he does for that sodding bank.” Ari looked annoyed. “I don’t know why he won’t listen to me. I keep telling him.”

  I made a noncommittal noise, which Ari ignored. He yawned, stretched, and pulled off the sweatshirt, then slithered out of his jeans. He dropped the clothes onto the floor and got back under the covers. I took off the T-shirt, but I tossed it over the bed to join the rest of his recent outfit. Neither of us were demon housekeepers. When I lay down, Ari slid over next to me.

  “Just leave the light on,” he said.

  “Say what?” I said. “I want to go back to sleep.”

  “It’s the adrenaline from the alarm and all that. I’ll never get back to sleep now unless we—”

  “Oh, great! Now I’m a sleeping pill.”

  “A bit more than that, as you well know.”

  And because I did know, I let him kiss me. It didn’t take long for me to decide that he’d had a perfectly good idea.

  In the morning, after I picked up our mail, I went outside to check for graffiti. Ari insisted on going with me. Sure enough, the unbalanced Chaos symbol with its seven arrows had returned. Although Ari wanted to go question the neighbors again, I told him not to bother them.

  “It must take a lot of Qi to transfer the symbol from his world to ours,” I said. “That unidentified energy the system picked up? It might be his mode of transfer. Could this be what triggered the alarm last night?”

  “No,” Ari said. “That thing’s appeared here a number of times. It never set off the alarm before.” He set his hands on his hips and glared at the symbol. “Sodding bastard! I’ll go get the hose.”

  While I waited for Ari to come back, I decided to see how close I had to get before Cryptic Creep could sense my presence. I walked to the edge of the sidewalk, then turned and slowly, one step at a time, I approached the symbol. The shaved head with the familiar face finally appeared when I stood a mere two feet away.

  I got in first. “Tell me something,” I said, “are you really human or another squid?”

  “As human as you are.” His smile was almost pleasant. “Neither more nor less. If you can take my meaning.”

  “A riddle, huh? I am a child of earth, but my race is from the starry heavens.”

  “Very good,” he said. “What about this one? What has existed from the beginning?”

  “The limitless light.”

  “And Chaos is?”

  “The shadow that some call darkness.”

  “And who created the world as we know it?”

  “Yaldaboath out of an abortion produced by the longing of Pistis for herself.”

  He froze, staring at me, started to speak, choked, and disappeared. I tossed
a ward at the symbol, which made no response at all. Apparently, he’d taken his Qi and gone home, just because of a line from my old college notes.

  Ari came around the corner of the building with the coil of hose over one shoulder and his hands full of rags. He dropped the rags on the sidewalk in front of the graffiti, then attached the hose to the outside spigot.

  “Did your cryptic friend appear?” Ari said.

  “Oh, yeah, but he didn’t stay long. I scared him off with a line from some Roman guy.”

  “Some Roman guy? Nola—”

  “Okay, okay, an imperial era Gnostic dude named Valentinus. Huh. I wonder if that’s significant.”

  As soon as I said it, I knew that, of course, it was. Ari quirked an eyebrow and waited for me to go on.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “I forgot that Cryptic Creep worships the Peacock Angel. The Angel was God’s foreman, kind of, and created the world according to God’s plan. Right?”

  “So we’ve been told, yes, by the occasional nutter.”

  “Well, I just branded myself as a heretic, and probably of the absolute worst kind.”

  Ari sighed. “When my father decided to leave the kibbutz, I thought we were going to leave all the nutters behind. Apparently, I was wrong.”

  “They’re following you, yeah, if you mean Cryptic Creep and the Chaos masters.”

  “Them, too.”

  “You don’t mean me, do you?”

  Ari considered me with sorrowful eyes. “I’ll just wash this mess off the wall,” was all he said.

  I was tempted to say something nasty, but he had the hose ready to go. I prefer my showers warm. I marched up the stairs in a steely silence.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHEN ARI CAME BACK UPSTAIRS, he took off his jacket to reveal the Beretta in the shoulder holster. “Perhaps I should spend some time in the lower flat,” he said. “I might catch our graffito artist at work.”