The Everything Box by Richard Kadrey

Author:Richard Kadrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

LAUREL CANYON PERCHED DIRECTLY ABOVE LOS ANGELES, one of the most expensive collections of winding hills and valleys in the country. Luckily, there were roads that twisted up and down the tortured ridges, or the only things that would have been there were hippies, backpackers, prairie dogs, and the occasional mountain lion dining on the aforementioned hippies, backpackers, and prairie dogs. Unfortunately, because of those roads and the billion-dollar real estate, the most common life-forms were douche bags, plastic surgeons, fading film producers, and labradoodles. Laurel Canyon had a long and colorful history, which is much too complex to go into here, except to say that it’s long and colorful, and that what’s in the history books was almost entirely wrong. The books go on about Indian tribes, the Spanish, the local wildlife, the local fauna, yet somehow leave out the inhabitants of Lemuria completely.

Lemuria was a large and ancient island nation in the Pacific, similar to Atlantis, but with better sushi and Wi-Fi. When Lemuria, also like Atlantis, sank (following a series of explosions from one particularly disastrous experiment aimed at using volcanoes to power Lemurialand, an amusement park that went bankrupt in a year because Lemurians were a dour people who left fun to those Atlantis creeps), the survivors sailed to what would someday be called Los Angeles. Finding the flatlands boring, the Lemurians settled in the canyons, which were much more like their island home. Not a people to leave well enough alone, they immediately began terraforming the land to make it even more like Lemuria. Although they were a scientifically advanced civilization, they weren’t big on seismology. After a few years of shifting hills, diverting underground rivers, and generally screwing around with the surface and substrata of the canyon, one afternoon they became intimately acquainted with a large fault line that cut straight through the canyon and swallowed the Lemurian survivors and most of their sprawling castles.

While almost no physical evidence of their civilization remains, the one thing the Lemurians did leave behind was a psychic imprint on the land, a ghostly desire to build the biggest, gaudiest mansions imaginable. This spirit haunts Laurel Canyon to this day. You won’t find a larger collection of wildly expensive and funny-looking houses outside of parts of Beverly Hills, which was settled by an even dumber ancient race that there isn’t time to go into right now.

It took forty-five minutes of driving, backtracking, cursing, praying to nonexistent travel gods, dumb luck, and pure fury for Coop and Giselle to find the address the sharkskin suit had given them back in Jinx Town. When they found the place—a hulking mansion, part Spanish Revival with smaller Roman temples clinging to the sides, a fever-dream version of San Simeon—they pulled over onto the grassy shoulder of the road a quarter of a mile away and looked the place over.

“Sure is big,” said Coop.

“And ugly,” said Giselle.

“At least Babylon has the biggest house around. That’s lucky.”

“How do you figure?”

“He doesn’t have to go outside and see how ridiculous it is.

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