Sunderworld, Volume I, page 2
“I know. I’m really sorry. That’s all I have.” Leopold prayed she would just shrug and wave him through, but she only stared.
Leopold tried again. “Could I come back with it later?”
Richter sighed, leaned roughly across Leopold, and thrust a hundred-dollar bill at the woman. This meant the You’re Never Prepared lecture was now unavoidable. The attendant pursed her lips and pointed to a sign that read No Bills Over $20. Richter Berry retracted his hand with imperial slowness before folding the money carefully into his crocodile-leather wallet. He preferred cash and never carried anything smaller than a hundred, on principle. A principle covered in chapter four of Think Like a Winner.
“You have five days to pay via mail,” the attendant monotoned, “or your debt will be turned over to a collections agency. I’ll give you the address.”
Even in the dark, Leopold could sense his father turning purple.
The attendant swiveled on her stool to grab a slip of paper, and that was when it came to Leopold’s attention that she had a pair of wings sprouting through the back of her vest. They were dull gray, about the size of a backpack, and lay folded against her shoulder blades, the feathers a bit rumpled from long hours of sitting.
Leopold sat blinking, his face going tingly.
He seemed to lose a bit of time: One moment he was staring at the wings and wondering how she’d gotten her clothes on over them, and the next he was jolted by another car horn, the attendant having swiveled back to face him. She gave him a strange look while waving the slip of paper in his direction.
He reached out to take it, his eyes fixed on her vest. He was sure the words stitched above her name badge had changed. With the addition of a single letter, they now read Sunderground Parking Corp.
He whispered the word aloud, his lips forming it involuntarily.
Sunder.
The woman snatched his outstretched wrist. Her hand was icy, and the strength in her arthritic fingers was unbelievable, like talons digging into his skin. She leaned toward him and whispered in a voice that was low and raspy and slightly threatening:
“It ain’t polite to stare.”
The ghost of a smile touched her lips, then vanished just as quickly.
She let him go. He reeled back into his seat. The barrier arm swung upward as another car blasted its horn.
“Drive!” Richter snapped, looking up from something he’d been typing on his phone. “What’s wrong with you?”
Leopold eased the car forward, watching the woman’s reflection shrink in his mirror until sunlight blasted the windshield, erasing her. As Richter wondered aloud whether his son might really be on drugs, Leopold waited for a break in traffic, gripping the wheel tightly so his father wouldn’t see his hands shaking.
Three
Mercifully, Richter hadn’t seemed to notice Leopold’s bizarre interaction with the parking garage attendant, nor had he seen the wings—because, of course, they hadn’t been there.
Leopold knew from experience that his episodes tended to cluster in threes. The raccoon had been the first; what happened in the garage, the second. Given what usually triggered them—and how badly he wanted to be anywhere other than trapped in the car with his father in steadily thickening traffic—it seemed reasonable to expect that a third would be along anytime now.
He couldn’t let it happen.
Not while he was behind the wheel of a moving car, especially with Richter riding shotgun. Telling his dad what was happening to him was not an option, so Leopold focused on the road ahead and pretended Richter wasn’t there, nodding occasionally to simulate listening. Maybe this way he would make it home without seeing any more flame-engulfed fauna or parking-garage angels. Maybe this way he wouldn’t blank out for thirty seconds and crash the car.
“Damn it, Larry, I said take Fountain!”
Richter’s sudden bellow pulled Leopold from his reverie and back into La Cienega Boulevard’s rightmost lane, where he’d just missed a crucial turn. This sparked the Always Take Fountain speech, which he endured with little nods and apologies.
He’d learned early in life that there was no arguing with his dad. That would only prolong the lecture and raise its emotional temperature a few notches on the Richter Scale. You just had to endure, and eventually he’d wear himself out. The lectures could be cool-tempered speeches or angry tirades, but they always fell into one of a few categories, so predictable Leopold had given them names. After they’d left the garage and become enmeshed in traffic, Richter had launched into an impassioned delivery of I’ve Never Been So Embarrassed in My Life, an old favorite. He then veered into You’ve Got No Ambition, downshifted into Aren’t You Ashamed of Yourself, and pirouetted with virtuosic flair into a weirdly self-pitying version of It’s My Fault for Spoiling You—all interspersed with highlights from Larry’s a Shitty Driver, a classic Leopold could’ve recited from memory.
At a red light he felt the Volvo stutter and threaten to stall. He shifted into neutral and feathered the gas so it wouldn’t die in the middle of the road, which would almost certainly trigger a high-volume rendition of I Should Sell This Shitheap for Scrap—which, of all his father’s lectures, was the one Leopold hated most.
The Volvo—Bessie—was Leopold’s dearest possession. She was egg-yolk yellow and speckled with rust and had belonged to his mother. Richter regularly threatened to get rid of it because it was unreliable and ugly and didn’t fit the Berry brand. That he never followed through on his threats seemed a rare proof of kindness in his father, as well as a quiet admission that he, too, missed Leopold’s mom, though they never spoke about it. It was also, Leopold assumed, the only reason Richter allowed the Volvo to remain in their driveway.
Leopold glanced at the trip odometer.
7,261 miles.
It hadn’t been zeroed since she died. Leopold couldn’t bring himself to hit the button, because he marked her death with miles rather than years. Five and a half years ago sounded infinite, an unbridgeable vastness. Somehow, 7,261 miles ago felt closer. That was just a long plane trip.
Sometimes Leopold rode his bike or took the bus because he couldn’t bear to watch the number creep any higher. Sometimes, when he could no longer stand being in his father’s house but had nowhere else to go, he’d slip out and sit in the car for hours, just reading or listening to music. When things got really unbearable, he’d sneak out at night and sleep in the back seat.
Green light.
He shifted into first and the Volvo jerked into motion. At some point the lecture had morphed into a recounting of Leopold’s recent failures, Richter totting them up on his fingers. Cut from the baseball team. Rejected from that internship. Only summer job you could find was in some lousy coffee shop. And now this—
The steady drumbeat of loser, loser, loser threatened to suffocate him.
He willed himself to think of nothing. Instead, watching the odometer tick over another mile, Leopold thought of his mother—and then of Sunder.
One often begat the other.
Four
Shortly after his twelfth birthday, in the unseasonable heat of a Los Angeles December, Leopold’s mother had died. It was cancer, rare and aggressive and swift. Before it took her, Monica Berry had insisted on celebrating her son’s birthday despite the circumstances, and in the grim period following her death, he was haunted by the image of a forgotten balloon slowly deflating in the corner of her hospital room.
That summer, in the gloom of a sunless June, the episodes had begun.
He came to think of them as Seeing into Sunder.
Sunder was a fictional realm from a 1990s fantasy TV series called Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld, which had aired, and gone off the air, over a decade before Leopold was born. It was in the blurry weeks after his mother’s burial, amidst the hectic move from their bungalow in Venice to Richter’s house in Brentwood, that he’d found the seven VHS tapes of its one and only season in a cardboard box bound for the trash. He’d never seen the tapes before and had never heard of the show; he assumed it was one of the many projects his mother had worked on during a youthful stint as a film and TV assistant.
He rescued the tapes and a battered old VCR. It was a few weeks before he bothered figuring out how to hook the VCR up to a TV, and another few before, late at night in his cold new room in Richter’s house, he got around to popping in the first tape.
He engaged with only mild interest at first, because Sunderworld was kind of campy and cheap-looking: wooden acting, flimsy sets, cinematography that sometimes wasn’t even in focus. It followed the adventures of a seemingly unremarkable boy named Max who meets a talking, half-mechanical coyote in the desiccated field behind his apartment complex. The coyote, harried and short on details, gives Max an ornate key before vanishing in a puff of flame. Max locates the corresponding door beneath a freeway overpass, discovers a pleasantly cliché-ridden magical society hidden in the nooks and crannies of Los Angeles, then further discovers he’s not only a spark—as the magically inclined citizens of Sunder are known—but a once-in-a-generation channeler, gifted with great power and tasked with protecting Sunder against Noxum, monstrous invaders from the Ninth Realm. Max learns to wield an Aether focuser and spends the rest of the season kicking Noxum ass up and down the streets of Sunder in ways that were highly creative—and surprisingly gory—for what was ostensibly a kids’ show.
Leopold was aware of Sunderworld’s surface-level crappiness even at age twelve, and yet there was something about the show and its weird LA fantasy world that captured his heart.
It wasn’t long before he was properly obsessed.
He watched Sunderworld so many times his ancient VCR started eating the tapes, unwinding them into tangled black nests that could be extracted from the machine only with chopsticks and surgical precision. Having committed every episode to memory and hungry for more of what was clearly an unfinished story, Leopold set out to make new episodes himself. He wrote scripts longhand on legal pads, assembled costumes and props from thrift store junk, and recruited neighborhood kids as actors. He cast his best friend, Emmet Worthington, as Max, and in rec rooms and backyards across LA they spun out the continuing adventures of Max and his magical companions. They spent weekends shooting and long nights creating mangle-faced monsters that spouted fountains of corn syrup blood. They never finished a single episode, but it didn’t matter. Through the bleakest time he had ever known, Leopold was happy only when immersed in Sunder.
“Forget Fountain,” his father said with a rough sigh. “Take Sunset instead. I need to check on the new billboard.”
Leopold, who’d been trying to circle back to Fountain via a series of painful left-hand turns, felt a loosening in his chest as he signaled and made a comparatively easy right. The emotional temperature in the car began to drop. His father’s publisher had taken out an actual, physical, in-person ad to promote his latest book, Only Losers Don’t Win, and the prospect of seeing his own face, fifty feet wide and glowering across Sunset Boulevard, seemed to improve Richter’s mood almost instantly.
Leopold merged carefully into the six-lane circus that was Sunset at rush hour. Now all he had to do was pilot them home without Seeing into Sunder again.
The first time it happened, over that long-ago summer following his mother’s death, Leopold had been scouting locations for a shoot near the Tar Pits. It was down an alley between Gardner and Detroit, ringed by overflowing dumpsters, that he’d seen a pair of rust fiends feasting on a pile of old computers. They’d looked up, keyboards impaled on their blunt tusks, and spat a volley of steaming green bile in Leopold’s direction.
Terrified, he’d fled straight home.
Leopold assumed it had been some kind of waking dream. Then, a week later, it happened again. He’d been in Hollywood with Emmet and a couple of other friends, waiting on the sidewalk for Emmet’s mom to pick them up after a matinee at the El Capitan. The paladin woman was unmistakable in her long leather coat and boots, a heavy glass Aether focuser dangling from a holster on her belt. She could’ve been another Hollywood impersonator trolling for tips, except that Sunderworld was completely unknown outside his small circle of friends—and because her head had been engulfed by a bright blue glow.
No one else had even noticed her.
By the time Leopold had collected his wits and followed her into the laundromat next door, she was gone. But this time he wasn’t terrified.
Leopold was elated.
In the show, Max had also seen things that didn’t seem to align with reality. They were pre-coyote peeks into Sunder—before he got his key—designed to prepare Max’s mind for what would otherwise be an unalloyed trauma. Naturally, Leopold came to believe his episodes were preparing him for his own adventures, and that soon he’d be meeting a half-mechanical harbinger of his own, getting his own key, finding his own door. He’d felt more certain of this than about anything since his mother died.
Still, Leopold told no one, not even Emmet.
He marked the date on his calendar: Keys were usually granted at the summer solstice. But when the solstice of his twelfth year came and went without a visit from a key-bearing coyote, Leopold was crestfallen. With the rug pulled, the enormity of his mother’s death threatened to crush him. His father, rather than help Leopold mourn the woman from whom he’d been acrimoniously divorced, shuffled Leopold off to a series of grief counselors. The boy sank into a dark place and drifted away from most of his friends.
When another year came and went without a key, Leopold began to wonder if it was because he’d moved away from the house where he’d lived for so long with his mom, and some Sunderian functionary had simply failed to inform the coyote of Leopold’s forwarding address. So he spent the solstice day of his fourteenth year camped out on the sidewalk in front of their old house in Venice, where strangers now lived.
No key was delivered.
He’d gotten badly sunburned from sitting outside for hours, but no coyote had come.
And so at fourteen he’d finally stopped hoping, stopped believing, stopped seeing sparks and magical creatures. With the help of a therapist, Leopold realized he’d been seeing those things only because he’d needed the fantasy to move through the darkest depths of his grief.
In that way, Sunder had saved him, even though it was just a crappy old TV show. He was grateful for that, at least.
He’d thrown away his props and buried the tapes in a closet. These days, Sunder rarely crossed his mind. Unloved and obscure, Sunderworld had never been released on DVD or Blu-ray; no one had even bothered uploading it to YouTube. It had been three years since he’d seen so much as a snippet of it. Three years since he’d Seen into Sunder, too, though he didn’t think of his episodes that way anymore.
Now there’d been two in a day.
And then Richter exploded, and there was another.
Five
It was the billboard that set him off. Perched on the hill above Carney’s—on the north side of the street across from the Sunset Tower hotel—it loomed into view and sent Richter into an instant rage.
The printers had misspelled the name of his website.
Leopold’s adrenaline spiked as his father ranted about suing the printer, demanding that his son look, look at the incompetence he was forced to deal with—
Leopold glanced at the billboard for only a moment, then returned his eyes to the road to discover a red blur filling the better part of the windshield. Some kind of streetcar was crossing in front of them, careening through the intersection—and they were about to slam straight into it.
Leopold shouted and hit the brakes.
Their seat belts locked as a tide of trash from the back seat broke over them, the Volvo fishtailing while cars swerved and honked. The unhinged screaming began even before they’d come to a full stop.
“Are you trying to kill us?! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“We were going to hit that—that red trolley thing—”
“What trolley? What are you talking about? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
Leopold looked again.
There was no streetcar climbing the hill to their left. No trolley tracks in the pavement.
“I should take away your license!” Richer plucked a crumpled hamburger wrapper from his lap and flung it at his son. “This shitheap is getting scrapped first thing tomorrow. And this time I mean it.”
His father got out, slammed the door, and flipped off his own giant face. Then he started speed-walking down Sunset, leaving Leopold to sort out the mess on his own.
Leopold’s hands were shaking and itching. He tried to start the Volvo. It had stalled, of course, and now it refused to start again.
He screamed in pure blind rage, then slammed his hands against the wheel as hard as he could—and a Roman candle’s worth of bright red sparks came flaring out of them, blinding him briefly while filling the car with amber-hued smoke. It was several seconds before it dissipated, leaving ghostly whorls of whitish vapor curling in the air.
Leopold sat there, stunned, as the last traces evaporated. He couldn’t hear the horns anymore, or Sunset Boulevard at all—only the blood pounding in his ears.
He turned his hands over and stared at them. They throbbed a little, but aside from the old, faintly ridged line of moon-shaped calluses that cut across the center of both palms, his hands looked normal.
Only they didn’t itch anymore.
Six
The city’s din filtered back into his ears: honks, brakes, shouting. He was blocking two lanes of Sunset Boulevard at rush hour. He tried to forget what had happened with his hands. Reality was more pressing now: If he didn’t get his car moving soon, it was only a matter of time before he got towed, rear-ended, or shot.
