“Let me guess. Are hunkering down because the sky is plaid and Godzilla is fighting with Paul Bunyan in the Scientology building parking lot.”
“I’ll drive and you’ll see.”
“Hi, Father,” says Candy.
He smiles to her in the rearview mirror.
“It’s good to see you.”
Traven drives west on Sunset and I do see. The sky isn’t a bad color but the light pulses like a slow strobe. It’s the kind of thing that could give you a migraine if you stared at it long enough. Farther down Sunset, it gets more interesting. Sometime during the night, cars, mailboxes, stoplights, and telephone poles sank a foot into the roadbed like someone turned on a hot plate below the street. Traven’s Geo Metro bounces over asphalt frozen into low waves. Cop cars block side streets that have collapsed into sinkholes. A few look like they’re floating several feet in the air. The PTSD Hell flashbacks are coming on strong. At least there’s not much traffic.
“Do you still want to go all the way to Malibu?”
“I have to but you don’t,” I say. “Drop us off and I can steal something.”
He shakes his head.
“No. I want to tell you a story and I’d like to tell it now. It has to do with the Qomrama Om Ya and it ties into all this madness.”
“The ghost girl too. She’s scared to death of it.”
“You showed it to her?”
“I hit her with it. It’s the only thing that stopped her. And she has a name. Lamia.”
“Are you absolutely sure about that?”
Traven sounds about like someone just read him the winning Lotto numbers and he thinks he hit the Mega Millions.
“It’s two syllables. Even I can remember that.”
“So what is the Qomrama?” asks Candy.
Traven looks at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Remember you once asked me where I thought the old gods, the Angra Om Ya, had gone?”
“Yeah. You said you thought they hadn’t left but you didn’t say what that meant.”
“Well, I was wrong. They are gone. But not for much longer.”
“How soon is longer? I mean the world is coming apart.”
Traven picks up a book from the dashboard. It’s an old one I once saw in his apartment. There are rust-colored stains on the front that are probably blood.
“Lamia is the name of an avatar of one of the Angra Om Ya.”
“I pistol-whipped a goddess?”
He shakes his head.
“I think what you encountered was a kind of demon. An incomplete piece of one of the Angra.”
“But she’s the ghost of a real little girl. She was born in Spain.”
“How will lost deities enter our universe from the outside? They’re creatures without form. Maybe they have to do it through the mortal bodies to gain substance. What kind of a girl was she? Was she considered holy? Did she perform miracles?”
“She was a monster. Her own village killed her and buried her in an unconsecrated cemetery.”