Steel crashed against steel and reverberated between the buildings and down the pre-dawn street. The mechanical steed tossed back and swallowed the contents of a dumpster before lurching and heaving the box back onto the pavement.
“Excellent!” said Zeus. “My pet feeds well today!”
Zeus, god of thunder, overseer of the universe, the lightning hurling King of the Gods himself, sprang easily to grab the handle and land on the running board of the garbage truck. He wore dirty blue overalls and work boots. The back of his overalls read, “Barker Sanitation,” and the front, over his immortal heart, had a patch that said “Zed.”
Zed didn’t command the type of respect afforded to ZEUS: KING OF THE GODS, but it raised fewer questions and eyebrows. Zed had an easier time dealing with the mailman or signing up for a mobile phone contract. Zed blended in; Zeus stuck out like a volcano.
Sacrifices had been made in the name of subtlety. Zeus, for example, had set aside more than his name. While Zeus was a proud and powerful deity, Zed was a humble sanitation worker with little say in the workings of the world around him. He had even shaved his epic beard so that he might lay a little lower. Where there was once a thick and majestic mane impervious to all harm, he now wore a slight, ill-conceived goatee, greying unevenly on the left side.
“Yo, Zed!” called a voice from within the rumbling diesel truck. It was Jack, the truck’s driver, and Zeus’ early-morning colleague. “It’s quittin’ time, Big Poppa.”
Zeus (which we may as well call him here, for what is a god without his immortal moniker?) had worked hard to blend in, but there were some aspects of his demeanor and personality that could not go unnoticed. It was not just his massive bulk and peculiar accent, but his pride and virility that made him conspicuous. One might be able to miss the six-foot-seven hulk in the room, until he gets a little too inebriated and yanks a stubborn door off its hinges, a scenario Zeus had found himself in far too often.
“Yes,” he replied. “It is indeed time to give our earthly bodies some much needed rest.” He spoke with easy gravity, in the manner of a man who has some deep understanding of eternity. “The day is at hand and soon my city will awaken—”
“Cool, Big Poppa,” came the unenthusiastic reply from the cab of the truck.
“—and night will fall. The Darkness will return. Have I told you about The Darkness, young one?”
“I know, I know,” replied the driver. “You tell me about The Darkness every freakin’ Friday. And this ‘young one’ business? Man, I’m sixty-two years old! Only thing young about me is my teeth, and even them is gettin’ to be teenagers!”
“The Darkness,” Zeus went on, undeterred. “Not merely the absence of light, but a wicked foe, an evil, visceral being from beyond the realm of time…”
“Please, Zed. You gotta knock that noise off man. I’m tired and I wanna go home…” The driver paused, thinking, then continued in a sly tone. “You should hurry along, too, y’know, what with The Darkness coming and all.”
Yet, while the old man joked and chided, there was truth in his warning. There was a Darkness that was so much more than the absence of light. It was an evil untold, and Zeus had felt it growing, coming in like the tide, in a way he had not felt in millennia. Each evening, with the dying of the sun, the cold presence of The Darkness cascaded through the city in waves. Mortals were unaware of this presence, but Zeus was not fooled, he knew this Darkness was not merely night.
For nine months, he had experienced a growing and unsettling presence in the hours between dusk and dawn. It was something substantial, tangible. It enveloped him like a snake devouring its prey and played about the edges of his consciousness like a waking dream. It watched him from the blackest shadows, hooded eyes calculating, measuring, waiting. He knew it had a name, and he sensed that he had once spoken that cursed word, though it was lost to him now. He was too proud to admit it, but he was afraid. He knew that this Darkness, whatever it was, would consume him.
*
There was a time, about six hundred years ago, when Zeus had taken it upon himself to be protector of the mortals. It was a short-lived experiment, in part due to the costume he had chosen: the black armor of a knight fallen from grace, a long, red feather emerging jauntily from the crest of the helmet. But medieval armor is cumbersome. Wear it while wielding bolts of lightning, and you have a potentially deadly scenario.
Another reason he had eventually slipped out of a protector role and away from mortal memory was because there was simply no worthy villain to protect the mortals from. They were, themselves, their greatest enemy, and there was nothing Zeus could do to rescue them from their own greed and hatred. Besides, his wife, Hera, had teased him mercilessly about the costume.
More recently, Zeus gave the protector role another go, but he found himself often confused with a Norse god, much to his embarrassment. He may have been a lot of things, but he was certainly not one of those savages. What was worse than being confused for the Norse was being tabbed as an “old cosplay dude,” as he had been called last year by a slovenly youth with a ring through his lip.
He had previously tried the route of understatement. Dark jeans, green plaid shirt, a red ball cap to echo the red cloak of his past adventures. But this ensemble proved to be underwhelming, not heroic. His appearance did not inspire hope or awe or adventure. He blended in when he was not trying to, curiously enough, and the look was less conspicuous than what he had now adopted as his everyday outfit: ripped, acid-washed jeans, a white T-shirt that stretched so tightly across his massive chest and shoulders that it strained at the seams, and the same red ball cap, which he usually carried in his back pocket.
That cap held special significance for Zeus. He had won it at a mortal carnival, calling upon the last of his godly magic in summoning a gust of wind to knock down a stack of battered bowling pins. He had been trying to impress a young woman named Brooke. She was unmoved and he never saw her again, but he kept the cap anyway— Bruce Springsteen had one just like it. If it was good enough for The Boss, it was good enough for the King of the Gods.
*
The house at 12 Mountain View was towering and imposing, yet somehow impressive in its elegant decrepitude. Out front there was a dry pond bed, the shattered remains of a broken, fluted pillar, and a charred fence. The cracked, stained-glass windows glowed yellow, orange, and red, and in the evenings cast an amber glow onto the front lawn, dimly illuminating the wreckage of a chariot in a strange, dystopian tableaux.
It may have looked like an ancient junkyard or a neglected museum of antiquities, but to the residents of 12 Mountain View, this house represented a timeless romanticism. The house was, in itself, a story. It was a story told time and time again in the incoherent and nostalgia-filled ramblings of a man who was never fully aware that he had told it before. The home portrayed eons of history in a single glance. It was a good and solid home in many ways, and it was not easily viewed from any main thoroughfare. Indeed, it was a difficult place to reach, at least, for any mortal soul.
*
Dio was staring out the window of his attic bedroom when his father returned.
Ugh, he thought.
A door slammed somewhere downstairs.
King of the Gods. Murderer of mothers. Father of the year…Oh, wait…a bunch of years. Totally.
“Dio? Are you up here?”
Zeus’ voice boomed through the dimly lit attic as he stuck his head up through a door in the floor that was far too narrow for his massive shoulders.
Of course I am, o’ Usurper of Happiness. Where else would I be? Afflicted with this curse of unending mortality…
“Dionysus?”
“I told you never to call me that!” Dio shouted, leaping to his feet and emerging from his bed near the window. He wore a silk kimono, printed all over with delicate, red flowers. His cheeks were stubbled, and his eyes were dark with traces of old eyeliner.
“Why not?” replied the King of the Gods, jovially, his somewhat Greek/somewhat everywhere accent thicker than before. “Dionysus is a lovely name!”
“Dionysus is dead! Just like my mother, who you killed!”
“My child…” said Zeus, his voice sounding suddenly weary and grieved. He had treaded the waters of this conversation with his son many, many times before.
“I am not your son! I am Dio, the twice born! And I will have my revenge!” Dio had lost control of his pitch during the outburst, and what began as an anguished cry had morphed into a high-pitched shriek by the end of the sentence. Aware of how he sounded, Dio fell silent, his mouth working as though to form words, but no more sound coming forth.
“Semele…your mother…she was such a beautiful woman,” Zeus said, his words full of tenderness and sorrow. “She was the unfortunate victim of a cruel and heinous act. But in her ashes, I found you.”
The atmosphere in the room was heavy, as though the space between the bare rafters was filled with its own, colorless gravity.
“I carried you, as you know…just as though you were in your mother’s womb. I sewed you into my own thigh and I waited for you to be ready for—”
“But you killed her,” Dio interrupted.
There was a long and loaded silence in which the hearts of both men broke, as they had broken time and time again over the centuries.
“I did,” said Zeus.
*
Several hours after Zeus had left the attic, Dio slipped out of his room and made his way across the top floor of the house to the spiral staircase in the back. He descended the steel steps, his shoes clattering on the iron, and walked through the backyard to the small greenhouse.
It was the place he always went when he and his father fought about Semele and her fate, which was often.
Inside, the greenhouse was hot and quiet and pleasant. He would move amongst the orchids and the roses, the exotic and the simple and the impossible plants that he grew and kept here.
The thorn of a rose snagged the sleeve of his kimono. Dio plucked the offending bud and dropped it into a glass. From a drawer below a worktable he pulled an unlabeled bottle half full of a clear spirit. Dio added the liquor to the glass with the rose and sat on a high stool to sip his drink. He caught his own reflection in the greenhouse glass and brushed a lock of dark, disheveled hair away from his face.
It had been thousands of years since his mother’s death, but it was only in the last twenty or so that he had begun to feel the pain of her absence so acutely. It could have been his waning powers or a slowly developing aspect of maturity, but he was beginning to feel as though he were filling up with pain and angst and anger and would soon reach full capacity, and he did not know what would occur once that happened. Perhaps the god of wine and ritual madness was really no more than a divine son unable to cope with the loss of his mortal mother.
And perhaps it was none of those things. Though causation unknown, only one thing could be certain: everything was a mess.
Maybe, just maybe, tonight could change that. It was a thought Dio had most every night, no matter how many times it proved to be wrong. It was with some perverse sense of hope that he ventured out into the night and into the company of mortals, time and time again. He would go out into the artificially lit city, and his memories would become a blur of darkly lit corners, faceless women in designer dresses, and with any luck, the fleeting pleasure of feeling absolutely nothing.
Dio tossed back the last of his drink and left the glass, with the soaked and curling rose bud, beside the bottle on the table. Then he turned out the lights on his way back to his room to get dressed for the evening.
*
“He never closes the door,” complained Apollo, who, as fate would have it, had been able to retain his true name in the time of mortals. There were enough humans named Apollo—whether they were named after the god or the movie boxer, no one could be sure— that the name had become a passable moniker for blending into the world.
Apollo watched Dio’s silhouette dissolve into the darkness as he walked off the house’s grounds. Despite the days of sulking and sleeping, and the nights of drink and debauchery, Dio still had the same figure as always: tall and lean, with muscular, rounded shoulders.
“I mean, I get it, he’s a brooding playboy with a heart of gold, or whatever, but c’mon, it’s October and we aren’t in Greece anymore. We’re not trying to heat the whole neighborhood!”
Zeus, preoccupied with trying on his latest “protector of the mortals” garb, did not reply. He stood before a full-length mirror and frowned at his own reflection, trying to fathom why tights were all the rage when it came to dressing like a hero in the modern age.
Apollo sat down heavily on a lavish and overstuffed sofa in the large living room and picked up his guitar.
“Hello, Ebony,” he said softly, as he strummed lightly on the black Fender Stratocaster. The electric guitar was not plugged into an amplifier, but in Apollo’s divinely talented hands, it did not need to be. The melody that he picked and strummed resonated through the room with a clarity and delicacy that defied reason. His nimble fingers sought the melody as fish find their way through a stream—without effort—and even Zeus paused and turned an ear to listen, with peace and delight on his features.
“You are still a god among us,” Zeus said.
Apollo did not stop playing as he replied, “There is magic in music, a kind that does not expire with the passing of time or the waning of worshipers.”
He paused, sighing with a sadness Zeus had not witnessed in many years, before fishing a cigarette out from the pocket of his wrinkled linen shirt.
“When are you going to give up on this whole superhero business, Dad?”
Zeus turned to face his son directly and looked at him with earnest eyes.
“You have felt it, Apollo. You know something this way comes.”
Apollo set his Strat aside, leaned forward, and tapped the ash from his cigarette into a cut glass tray on the mahogany coffee table.
“Alright, let’s say that there is something wrong, something vile moving out there in the darkness.” Apollo waved his arms around his head, seeming to gesture at the world unseen while simultaneously trying to conjure a spell that might convince his father to drop his nonsensical fears. “Let’s say that The Darkness really is some sort of evil that has somehow survived eons without any of us discovering it. Do you really expect to scare it away by dressing up in lime-green tights?”
Zeus turned to observe himself in the mirror again. “No, I suppose not. But what am I supposed to do? Those copycats at Marvel have taken all the good costume ideas! Did I tell you about the time someone got me confused with Tho—”
“Hold on,” Apollo interrupted. He took one last quick drag from his smoke, crushed it out in the ashtray, and rose from his seat. “Gotta go.”
And just like that, he was gone. Yet, Zeus was not alone in the room.
“Hello, sweet brother,” the god of the underworld spoke, his voice seeming to slither with elongated E’s and S’s that almost hissed. He appeared with a smile on his face so wide that it was as though a crescent moon had found its home in his mouth.
“Hello, Hades,” Zeus said as he wondered how Apollo always managed to leave just in time to avoid having to speak to his uncle. “How’s the insurance business going?”
“Oh, very lucrative.”
Hades was dressed from head to toe in black. But not just black—Armani black. Haute couture black. The deep blue-black of success. The kind of black that comes with a tailor and one hell of a price tag.
“You know what I always say,” Hades said. “Insurance is like a parachute: if it isn’t there the first time, it’s not likely you’ll be needing it again.”
The lord of the dead grinned in a way that made Zeus think of a shark closing in on an unsuspecting swimmer.
“And of course…I get their souls, too.”
As he spoke, Hades conjured an orb atop his open palm, glowing a dark and putrid green. His smile grew ever wider.
“Mind boggling, isn’t it, brother?”
Zeus raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“The world has forgotten you and left you powerless, yet they still fret and worry about a power like mine.”
Zeus grunted and turned back to the mirror once more. “You are not as powerful as you once were, Hades.”
Hades ran his long, pale fingers through his slicked back hair as Zeus went on.
“Aphrodite can still smite you, with barely even the force of her delicate little finger.”
What Zeus said was true. Despite all the other gods having been forgotten millennia before, Aphrodite had continued to be worshiped through the ages. And there was never a time more fitting for a goddess like Aphrodite than the present, the era of social media, where a single selfie could garner legions of followers. Indeed, the cult of Aphrodite had never been so strong.
“Perhaps that is true,” Hades conceded. “It is a shame that she is too busy staring at her own reflection to concern herself with what is upon us now.”
“So you have felt The Darkness as well.” Zeus’ tone was serious. Finally, someone else acknowledged that something was amiss. “What do you know of it?”
Hades raised a finger and waved it playfully in Zeus’ face.
“Nuh-uh-uh,” he chided. “Never without a deal first.”
“And what do you want?”
Hades’ smile turned malevolent, and his eyes narrowed to slits. “Oh, sweet brother, what I want, I’ve already got.”
The landline rang. Zeus moved to answer but Hades made a quick gesture with his hand and Zeus found himself unable to move. In short time, the answering machine picked up.
A shaky and familiar voice came through the speaker.
“Um…hello. H-hello? I’m looking for Big Pop—. Is this thing working? I’m looking for Zed. This is Jack from Barker Sanitation and he’s not been to work in a week. I’m kinda worried about him, ya know? Anyway, I went to the home address he had listed…12 Mountain View…but it was just an old, abandoned building…umm…well…” There was a click, and the machine went silent.
“Hades…what have you done?”
