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There’s nothing here. No doors. No rabbit holes. No hoodoo portals or sci-fi transporters. I’m stuck in a feed-store calendar and I’m getting just a little pissed off.
Fuck you, angel, and everyone who’s been spewing cryptic crap at me. The way you did the first time. “Be a rock.” “Click your heels three times and think of flying monkeys.” The next thing that quotes me a fortune cookie gets turned into a novelty paperweight.
Time is passing. Tick tock. Tick tock.
There’s nothing left to do. Hey, Heaven. I let your angel live, but you don’t understand the concept of cutting someone slack, huh? Fine by me. When this is over, just remember that you set the rules. Not me.
There’s only one thing to do with a garden if it won’t give you what you want. Get rid of it.
I drag the flaming Gladius along the ground as I stroll through the winding path that curves from the entrance through the orchards, the redwoods, the pines, the thorny jungle foliage, and the crayon-colored flower beds, cutting a flaming red scar behind me. God must have yanked all the animals out of here when he gave Adam and Eve the boot. Good. The life of one flea-bitten squirrel means more than one inch of this pussy-willow paradise.
Fuck this place and fuck your games. This is where you first failed us. You gave us minds and told us not to think. You gave us curiosity and put a booby-trapped tree right in front of us. You gave us sex and told us not to do it. You played three-c">
Whatever your reasons, you won’t have Paisley Park much longer. All you gave us here was daisies and fairy tales and you acted like that was enough. How were we supposed to resist evil when you didn’t even tell us about it? You wanted us innocent. But when Lucifer found a way around your rules and we weren’t innocent anymore, you blamed us and tossed us out into the wasteland like garbage.
You lounge upstairs on your golden throne like you’re the greatest thing since “Johnny Be Good,” but to me you’re just another deadbeat dad.
I hope you can smell Eden burning. I hope you choke on it.
Alice wasn’t a spy. She wasn’t part of the big lie. She was real and she was mine.
Eden is an inferno. Some of it went up so fast the foliage is already gone. I kick through the cinders, looking for a way Downtown, but I don’t find anything. Stay calm. This is important. It’s worth waiting for.
I follow the course of the fire as it eats up the plants. I kick through the dirt behind every burned hedge and blackened bush. I don’t find anything. There’s nothing here.
I go to the big tree at the center of the garden. The one that started all the trouble. It’s the only thing that hasn’t burned. I’ve been saving it for last. I reach up to the lowest branch and snap off an apple. Shine it against my coat and bite into it.
It’s good. It’s sweet and juicy, but it’s not worth losing paradise over. For that, you’d think the man upstairs would make the fruit taste like the greatest thing ever. Your tongue should have an orgasm and drunk-dial old girlfriends to tell them about it. Still, the juice is refreshing. It clears the smoke and sand from my throat. I toss the core into the fire and reach for another apple but can’t reach one. They’re all on the higher branches. I swing up the Gladius and slice off a limb. The wood collapses when I pull off the apple. I push at the cracked bark with the toe of my boot. The branch is hollow. I cut another branch. It’s hollow, too. I hack off more. They’re all the same. The branches are like props in a high school play. The tree is a fake.
I concentrate and it calms the angel in my head. He’s been quiet since we entered Eden, and now that he’s seen what I’ve seen, for once he’s on my side.
I swing up the Gladius, concentrating. It burns bigger and hotter than it’s ever burned. The tree trunk is big. I have to start the cut way back, like I’m batting in the World Series. I swing the blade and it goes through the tree like a bullet through a chocolate sundae. The tree creaks, cracks, and falls over.
I was right. Just like the branches, the tree is hollow. Inside, the two halves of the tree are different. Inside the top d side thehalf is a winding silver staircase that winds up to Heaven. In the stump is what looks like a grimy diamond-plate-metal staircase going into an industrial subbasement.
The angel told the truth. I get to Hell the way we did the first time. At the tree. You could have just said that, Tweety Bird. Then I wouldn’t have had to burn Dad’s prize marigolds. But I probably would have anyway.
I climb into the stump and walk down the rusty stairs.
IT ISN’T A long walk to Hell. Shorter than the walk to Eden. No surprise there.
The stairs lead to a long passage that looks like an abandoned maintenance tunnel. Someone needs to sweep up down here. Here and there whole sections of the ceiling have crashed onto the cement floor. I have to half walk, half hopscotch around it to keep from tripping. In the flickering fluorescent light, I swear some of the rusted rebar looks like bones.
After an hour of wandering I come to another set of metal stairs. It’s not the best feeling being this close to Hell again. But it’s what I signed up for. If Mason has a Hellion bike gang with chains and knuckle-dusters stationed at the top of these stairs, I’m going to be pissed. I could have stayed home and let Medea Bava kill me while eating hundred-dollar chicken and waffles with Candy.
There are double doors at the top of the stairs, the kind you see in front of old buildings for deliveries. I push with my arms, but can’t budge them. I go up a few more steps, brace my back against the doors, and push.
The doors feel hot against my back. I can’t tell if it’s the metal or if I still hurt from where Rizoel tagged me. I ignore the pain and keep pushing. Nothing seems to be happening, but then light shines down through a space between the doors. I bend my knees and spring straight up, knocking both doors open.
And I’m instantly on fire. I roll off the pile of burning trash and keep rolling until all the flames are out. I get to my feet and look around.
Fuck me.
I’m back in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and it’s on fire. All of L.A. is on fire.
EVERYTHING IS WRONG. This is exactly where I was when I crawled out of Hell eight months ago. Now I’m back. Only I’m not. Everything is wrong, from the smells to the sounds to the light.
The cemetery looks like it was worked over by drunk bikers with garbage trucks for feet. Tombstones are knocked over or snapped in two. A lot of them are just dust. Some of the graves are open and spouting fountains of blue flames, like a gas line exploded beneath them. Clothes are strewn across the blackened lawn from bodies nearby that were blown out of the ground when the line broke.
