In The Lap Of The Gods Read online

  “Sorry about things, mate,” Dinky said in an apologetic message on the answering machine. “They froze me assets as well, so I’ll have to live with me mum ‘til things get straightened out. The rent’s paid up ‘til the end of the month, so you have a couple of weeks to relax. Oh, and you can drive the Honda ‘til it’s repossessed. Ah, well, cheerio and all that rot. Bloody hell, I hate this weather.”

  Lucifer stared dully at the machine. “Shit,” he said to no one in particular, unable to pull up a suitable bon mot from his vast reservoir of one-liners.

  Chapter 22[22]

  Odin first met Lucifer at a convenience store. Odin was getting a giant frozen slush. Lucifer was buying lottery tickets.

  “You do realize,” Odin said, “that the lottery is for suckers. It’s really just a tax on the poor.”

  Lucifer had nodded to him curtly. That was common knowledge, of course. But what Mr. Greybeard and his cup full of frozen sugar water didn’t know was that if you don’t play, you couldn’t win. And Lucifer badly needed the cash.

  Odin gave the guy the once-over. Pretty well dressed. Nice coat. But the shoes, probably expensive when purchased, were long past their prime. This was a man, thought Odin, who was used to something better and was desperate to get it back. He knew the feeling, and took a long pull on his slush. Cherry brain freeze, he winced. Bless you America.

  Lucifer paid and walked through the sliding doors, pulling his coat tightly around him. He felt the eviction notice weighing heavily in his pocket. The Element went back yesterday, so he took his remaining cash and bought a Plymouth Duster of dubious origin. At least he had somewhere warm to sleep, until he ran out of gas.

  Mr. Greybeard was approaching him. God, not another old guy wanting a blowjob, he thought. He was close to doing it, too. What else did he have left? Fast food fry boy? Hello, I’m Lucifer, Prince of Darkness and former Master of the Underworld. Would you like to try an apple pie for a dollar?

  “Who were you?”

  Lucifer wheeled around. The old man was staring at him, ice-blue corneas, full of wisdom and bitter winters. Lucifer could feel an undercurrent of sadness as well.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Lucifer answered.

  “Try me.”

  Lucifer sighed. Time to run this old bastard off. “I am Satan, Prince of Darkness. Lucifer. The Dude of Darkness. The Devil. Abaddon. The Father of All Liars. The Lord of the Flies. Etc. etc.” He bowed low, Japanese style. “Now buzz off, pervert. No, I will not perform any kind of sexual acts with you. I still have some pride!” He snapped his fingers, trying to force sparks to fly. Not even a fizzle.

  The old man whacked him across the side of his head with a stick. Lucifer went to the ground like Sonny Liston, without the mystery punch, stars colliding in his head.

  The old man leaned down, tussled Lucifer’s hair, and offered his hand. Lucifer grabbed the solid thick hand and felt himself pulled upright as if he weighed nothing.

  “Lucifer,” the old man said. “Pleased to meet you, fellow traveler, on this eternal highway that we immortals call life. I always thought those crazy priests were making you up to try to scare my warriors.” He brushed some snow off Lucifer’s sleeves.

  “You believe me?” Lucifer asked incredulously.

  The old man nodded. “Sure. You have to be some kind of being other than human to take a shot like that from old Gungir here.” He hefted the stick briskly, twirling it. Lucifer flinched. “It used to have this nice tip on it. Very sharp.” He shook his head sadly. “But I’ll tell you about it some other time.” He gestured toward his truck. “Need a ride anywhere?”

  “Actually, I have no plans at this time,” Lucifer said. “Just waiting for the lottery drawing and wandering around.”

  “It’s difficult,” the old man said, “going from King to commoner. Trust me, I understand. The wife and I have a place and you are welcome to stay with us. It will be interesting to add some new stories to the mix. My boy Thor always tells this story about wrestling with this old woman, who he believes in reality is Old Age, and how he bested her. We all just tell him he beat up an old woman. That really pisses him off.” Odin laughed heartily and led him to his bright red truck, Minnesota Vikings bumper sticker and all.

  Chapter 23[23]

  “Welcome to the old folk’s home, Norse God style.”

  Odin gestured grandly to the apartment. The solid oak floors shined dully, giving the room a homey feel. The windows were wide and clean, overlooking the grey city, and were tastefully decorated. A roaring fireplace filled an entire wall, great stones stacked lovingly.

  “Who lives here with you?” Lucifer asked.

  “Me and my wife, Frigga, own the place. My boy Thor comes and goes as he pleases. His wife likes to fight and make-up, fight and make-up, ad nauseam. Baldur lives here as well. He’s the god of light, purity, beauty, innocence, reconciliation and is loved by all.” Odin raised his eyebrows. “Talk about your ying and your yang. It should make for some interesting dinner conversation.”

  “Would you believe that I’ve reformed a bit?”

  “I can’t deny the possibility,” Odin said. “Living in an apartment instead of Valhalla has certainly knocked me down a peg, that’s for sure. Ah, Hermoth. Come and meet our new boarder. Lucifer, Hermoth here takes care of the household matters. He’ll get you fixed right up.”

  “Welcome, sir,” Hermoth said in a clear faux-British accent.

  “You’ll have to forgive him,” Odin said. “He’s been reading a lot of Wodehouse lately. If he asks you to call him Jeeves, just play along.”

  Hermoth escorted him to a large, tall-ceilinged plastered room. “These are your quarters, sir. Give me a ring if you should require my services.” He slipped off silently.

  Lucifer regarded his new digs. So this is where the old washed-up gods come to pass the time, he thought. I should feel right at home here. He sunk into the large oversize chair in front of the window. “It’s not that I got smaller,” he said to the grey city. “The world just got bigger.”

  Chapter 24[24]

  “I wondered the planet alone, dreaming of the next meal of warm, viscous blood. I am the vampire.”

  Lucifer put the book down. Wondered the planet? If that wasn’t a stupid typo missed by another drunken copy editor, it could possibly be one of the most insightful thoughts he had read in modern American literature in the past twenty years.

  I wondered the planet as well, he thought. Every day.

  Dictionary mode on: Wondered. To feel curiosity or be in doubt about. Synonym. His deepest darkest thoughts around two a.m. on the coldest night of the year.

  Lucifer stroked his chin. He thought he bore a strong resemblance to a young Rod Steiger. Rod Steiger, the movie actor. You know, In the Heat of the Night and other great movies. Of course, these days, nobody had ever heard of the great actor. Fine. He looked a lot like Tom Cruise. Frickin’ young people. They think the world didn’t get going until they were born.

  He leaned back in his Captain’s Chair, an identical copy of the swiveling seat from the old Star Trek TV series. Except for the cup holder. Apparently, Captain Kirk never needed to sip a beer on the command deck. The down and out carpenter who constructed it for Lucifer lived with one burning wishful thought; that he would someday be President of the United States. Lucifer had nodded somberly, and whipped out his tail and popped his horns. He grabbed a Chinese menu off the refrigerator and thrust it in front of Mr. Handyman. “Sign this,” he told the wide-eyed man, “and I promise you that your dream will come true. I’ll even throw in eternal life as well. This is a limited-time offer only. All you have to do.” He stopped with a dramatic pause. “Is sign over your eternal soul. Oh, and throw in the chair at no charge for good measure?” The stunned carpenter apparently was unfamiliar with Faust or the movie Crossroads with Ralph Macchio, so he signed it with a steady hand and left with a patriotic song on his lips, making plans for the future of America. Just like the old days, but i
n my current position, it’s just some crappy kabuki theater.

  Videos screens covered the walls and political talking head inanity spilled out of them. Lucifer relaxed and fell into the pulsing pit of national dirty politics. Pikers. Nothing like Cesare Borgia. Now that would be a good Republican candidate for President.

  His mind drifted. During the early part of his exile on Earth, when Lucifer was still touring, his band mate John had told him about an old high school sweetheart he was fond of recalling. Kim Cruisin’, he had called her. Sometimes he called her Muffy. “First love,” John had smirked, sipping his beer. “She promised to love me forever,” he had said, “and maybe she did. Last time I heard from her she was married to some Presbyterian preacher in Kansas, doing God’s work on the lonesome prairies.”

  You would think, being a deity and all, that God could do his own damned work. Were all deities that lazy? It didn’t seem possible that he could still be worn out from creating the heavens and the earth. Had the 60’s drained him? Lucifer didn’t know, since he had not spoken to him since….

  Sometimes in the dead of night, Lucifer thought about sin.

  A transgression of God’s will.

  The 21st letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

  Time for another tequila shot. Just Jose Cuervo and me, he mused.

  These days, Lucifer was on a first name basis with tequila, and the colorful figure represented on the bottle was one of his closest companions. More limes required, he decided.

  Lucifer snapped his fingers and one of his many minions appeared. He didn’t actually appear out of thin air or anything. He came in from a side room, adjusting his too-large boxer shorts.

  “Here’s the TV Guide you requested,” he said.

  Hermoth didn’t really qualify as a true minion. He wasn’t a demon or anything like that. Hermoth was the landlord of Valhalla. Check that. Former landlord of Valhalla. Messenger of the Gods. One-time barkeep and connoisseur of fine daytime television. Occasional flunky.

  It was a windy, blustery day outside, and Odin was taunting Lucifer again. Odin loved doing the berserker bit. That’s the power that he bestowed on his beloved warriors so they could turn themselves into bear-like creatures on the battlefield. Lucifer didn’t think they ever actually turned into bears, even though they probably believed it with all their little warrior hearts. Most like too much mead. Skol.

  However, Odin could actually make the switch. From human to animal and back again, just like flipping a light switch on and off. But today, he kept turning into Winnie-the-Pooh just to piss Lucifer off.

  “Would you cut that crap out, Odin?” Lucifer thundered and the Norse God flickered back to his usual ugly self. A bald man with a long grey beard and his faithful stick Gungnir at this side. Gungnir used to be a javelin, but Odin had broken the pointy end off trying to get a soda out of a machine without paying. Cheap bastard.

  “Did you get it?” he smirked. “Pooh, blustery day, Pooh, blustery day.” He slapped his stomach. “And you’re my buddy Eeyore, you somber ass!” A two-minute choking jag, phlegm and all interrupted his joviality.

  Lucifer got it, all right. It was the funniest thing that he had heard since being stuck on Earth.

  How the mighty have fallen. He picked up his battered loose-leaf binder and flipped through it dejectedly. All my plans for naught. He closed it, rubbing his fingertips on the cover.

  Retirement Plan

  Remove all the people from Earth

  Free Eve from Heaven

  Live in harmony in my rightful place as the new Adam

  “Can somebody bring me some damned limes?” Lucifer muttered, and sighed deeply.

  Chapter 25[25]

  Sometimes Lucifer wondered why angels were never given the chance to sleep and dream. Jehovah probably didn’t want to miss a minute of worship from us, he thought, biting the words off in his mind. That was fine in Heaven, but here on Earth it sure made for long, boring nights, given the state of late-night television programming. Drinking helped pass the time, but he craved something more than attempted murder on his immortal neurons.

  One evening Lucifer was surfing some of the dustier corners of the internet and found a list of what an anonymous blogger thought were the 1000 books you should read before you die. Lucifer took the challenge. He went to places far away from this current unpleasant reality. Dostoevsky took him to the frigid cities of Russia. Victor Hugo escorted him around the gritty streets of Paris. Tom Robbins rode with him on the rollercoaster than skimmed the edges of sanity. He hated Hermann Hesse, but couldn’t stop reading him. He read all of the Left Behind books and laughed for days. He finished the list in short order and it revitalized his mind, helping him accept his current state of affairs.

  His reading bug was still hungry, so he scoured the book reviews in the New York Times and subscribed to Publisher’s Weekly, looking for fresh new authors. Odin and his pals teased him often, and he took it good-naturedly. Sometimes he still thought about his old master plan of World Domination, but it had faded like old wallpaper in his mind, always there, a reminder of other days. He didn’t go out and date because, after all, who could match up with the perfect first woman. Definitely not Sally Ann from the local beauty college or Dixie the bartended down at the local bar. Why bother with the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave when he had sampled the Form of Womanhood firsthand?

  He still occasionally poked around the used bookstores and flea markets, keeping an eye out for Raphael’s book in a half-hearted manner, but he was a realist. The book was long gone, probably gathering dust in someone’s library, surrounded by other esoteric books that had never been read, shouting from the shelves, “look how esoteric I am!”

  On one mild winter afternoon, Lucifer picked a book out of the remainder bin at the local big-box bookstore. “The Nick of Time” he read from the book jacket. “An alcoholic ex-Navy Seal finds happiness with a young mother and her autistic child, but when a buddy is killed by a secret operation in the Middle East, he has to choose between what he thinks is right for his comrades-in-arms or for what is right for his new family.” Sounds a bit cheesy, he thought, but I’ll give it a whirl.

  He sat in the Captain’s Chair and read the first couple of chapters, then proceeded to skim the rest. It was a bit lightweight for his taste, as fluffy as a corner full of cobwebs, but it had a steady plot line. The ending, though, caused him to stand up, book in hand, jaw agape.

  Jack sat by the phone, waiting for Lisa to call. Had his thirst for revenge ruined his chances with the one true love of his life? He looked at the bottle of whisky on the table. The brown liquid beckoned him, like old time, the empty glass waiting to be filled. He picked up the drawing that Jimmy had given him before he had run off to the Middle East. “A map to heaven” he thought, reading the inscription. Jimmy had written a note in his special code. “43.134 and 90.705. Love, Jimmy.” Jack wiped a tear from his eye. The phone stared accusingly at him, and he reached for the bottle…”

  Lucifer flipped and came face to face with a blank page.

  “Dammit,” Lucifer moaned. He opened to the book jacket. Absalom Jones was born in Missouri into a large storytelling family. He is currently working on the second book in his Nick of Time series. He now resides in the sunny climes of Florida where he owns and operates Books, Books, Book, and an eclectic bookstore.

  Lucifer felt the adrenaline flowing and he started to pace. The code numbers were longitude and latitude, somewhere in the northern United States. Map to Heaven? It was too much of a coincidence. This guy had to have seen the Angel Book. All that was missing was the keyword to open the portal and he would be back in business. Tomorrow, he grinned impishly, it’s time to get back on the back road and finish the job I started. He poured a shot glass full of Jose Cuervo and tipped it back, his mind clearing for the first time in months.

  “To Absalom Jones!” he grinned, toasting the night sky, stars glittering in sudden dread.

  Chapter 26[26]

  “Do you
remember the time-?”

  The group all groaned in unison. Odin stopped and looked at them. “Have I told this one before?”

  “We are totally burned out on the old days, Dad,” Vidar said. “If I hear the story about the mead of poetry and wisdom and the farmer’s daughter one more time, I’m going to stick Gungnir the Wonder Spear where the sun never shines.”

  Odin grinned at his boy and took a drink of his orange juice. He loved the old tales and relished every detail of them. It sure beat the story of ‘how I fixed the toilet’ and the ‘why I’ll never order off the internet again’ stories he had been hearing from the other guys lately.

  The Aesir had taken over a few tables at the IHOP, as was their practice on the first Monday of every month. The group had long been close-knit, even after falling out of favor a thousand years back. The exodus to America had been gradual, with almost all of the Norse Gods drifting away from the old country over the years. Odin and his boys, Vali and Vidar, had fashioned themselves into consultants, guiding business startups along the path to success. Thor was an anger management trainer. Baldur worked at Starbucks.

  A thousand years, Odin thought.

  As the Christians infiltrated the Land of The North, the Norse Gods had faded from memory. It was very hard to compete, as the Christians had a saint for everything. They even had a patron saint of advertising. What could you do against that?