Triple Toil and Trouble

by Constance Barker

  She nodded “Harvest Hutchinson. My mother is a Twih witch. I live in Russel.”

  Dardompre laughed, brows rising. “A half-witch? Interesting.”

  “Tell me about the circumstances.”

  The old doctor nodded, his eyes losing focus. “It was a long time ago now. Without going into the gristly details, a man of my color obtaining a medical degree was a struggle in this country. I assumed I would return to Port au Prince to practice, when I was offered a position from the state hospital. It was quite prestigious back then, and I happily, perhaps zealously, threw myself into my work.

  “From the start, I noted a large number of patients diagnosed paranoid. It was practically an epidemic. This was a pure paranoia, with the accompanying delusions. As I worked with patients, I discovered that many of those delusions were shared: encounters with strange and powerful creatures, mysterious bright lights, abduction to a world other than ours.

  “I was not the only one who noted this. Dr. Smith, my colleague, shared her thoughts on these cases with me. We formed a half-joking hypothesis: the patients were not paranoid, but in shock from encountering the unknown. I believe it was one of our nurses who suggested we investigate the potential cause of the epidemic. I won’t bore you with the details of our seeking out little green men, fairies, ghosts and wildmen in the woods, but after many investigations, we came to call ourselves the Jade Coven. Jade, because according to Dr. Ping, jade provided protection from evil spirits.”

  “Winston Ping?”

  Dardompre nodded. “He was less enthusiastic about spending his free time traipsing through the woods looking for flying saucers and man-beasts. Ping was the one to lead us to Alan McGooby, who worked in the electroshock therapy unit. We call it electroconvulsive therapy now, ECT, and, as in the past, it was used to treat depressive disorder, catatonia, mania, but Alan employed a different kind of therapy. Instead of anesthetizing the patient and shocking the entire body, he introduced lower frequency electromagnetic fields into a patient’s head while they were fully conscious. He was having marvelous results with the paranoia victims.”

  “Dr. Pye called it the God Helmet,” Harvest said.

  Dardompre nodded. “Later researchers developed similar apparatuses, possibly with similar results. But as with us, Alan theorized that the patients were in a kind of shock state, and that his treatment allowed them to revisit their trauma. Parapsychology was not a dirty word back then. Dr. McGooby likened his machine to a gateway between realms of existence. He confided to me that he had tried it on himself, and gazed into a world filled with impossible creatures, that defied physics, a parallel universe.”

  “He tried it on himself?”

  “Eventually, we wormed it out of him, that he had a private lab in the woods, off the grid as they say nowadays. He could never have gotten away with testing his device on himself in the hospital. But Alan McGooby was obsessed. Unfortunately, this laboratory was his downfall. His research was government-funded. They had an interest in the paranormal back then. Hiding findings from the HEW ended with his funding being cut, his loss of a position on the hospital staff. If you want to be paranoid about it,” Henri smiled a little, “You could say the government was so disturbed by Alan’s outside findings that they flooded the whole town where he worked in secret.”

  Chapter 9

  QUINN RETURNED TO THE office after visiting one of her at-risk clients, Danny Reichert, Jr. Danny senior was doing time for cooking meth in the national forest. Mrs. Reichert was in rehab. DJ was now living with his grandmother in Scandia. The boy was developing the standard arrogant and entitled personality of most boys his age. This was quite a shift from the cowering, mumbling kid she’d first met. It seemed that, out of his strung-out parent’s care, he was blossoming. Sort of.

  She headed to her office to write a report. When she opened the door, a forest primeval stood beyond. Quinn stopped short of the threshold. “I’m not wasting an entire day in the Twih, Uncle Nick. If you want to talk, you can make an appointment like everybody else.” She closed the door.

  When she turned, she nearly collided with Rae Devon. “Who are you talking to?”

  It took Quinn a second. “I—myself.”

  “You’re eleven-thirty is here.” Rae fanned herself with her hand. “Woo! A little vintage, but smoking hot! I put him in the conference room.”

  Nick lounged in a chair, chunky Air Jordan high tops crossed on the table top. He wore gray acid washed jeans, a striped golf shirt with collar popped, and Ray Bans. “We seriously need to have a talk, but for your sake, I’ll work with your clock.”

  Quinn fumbled in her purse, donned the headphones. “You know, rhyming at people isn’t going to get you far.”

  “Will it preclude me from custody of my daughter?”

  She sighed. “Probably not. But it would make for an interesting psych eval. What do you want, Uncle Nick?”

  “When can I see Zurina?”

  “Look, legally, there isn’t much anyone can do to stop you from seeing Zuri. However, with no place to live, no background, people are going to ask a lot of questions. You need to establish an identity, a human identity. A judge will want to see a legal residence, a source of income, at least some form of ID. And, by the way, no one dresses like that anymore.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What part?”

  Nick leaned forward. “‘Anymore.’”

  “This is going to be so much work...” Quinn sighed. “I talked to Cora. She’s scared to death of you. She’ll fight this, and the way things are now, she might succeed.”

  “Perhaps I should forgo the legal path.”

  Quinn nodded. “Might be a good idea. Why don’t you try to talk to Cora? Reconcile with her, or at least put her at ease. You say she’s going to have two more of your babies. I’m assuming some kind of... biology...”

  Nick smiled, but said nothing.

  This flustered her, but she remained on point. “Look, if you want to be a good father, you’d probably better fix your relationship with the mother. And if you want to get anything accomplished in this reality, you need to appear more human.”

  He took off his shades, blinked rapidly, pinched the bridge of his nose and reset the sunglasses. “It is difficult enough just to exist here. Without these glasses, without your Walkman, without potions and protections and spells, I would probably very quickly go mad. This is why I’m relying on you, Quinn, and your sisters. Even meetings such as this are taxing me to the limit. Tell Cora I would speak with her. You must help me in this.”

  Quinn tossed up her hands. “And then what? If it takes so much out of you to exist here, why do you want to torture your child with infrequent and probably very weird visits? What’s the point, Uncle Nick?”

  “My children will balance me. They will allow a foothold in this realm, despite the hostility of the climate.”

  “Our being here doesn’t help Mom cross over.”

  “You were born in the Twih. My girls will be born in the mundane realm.”

  Quinn felt her jaw clench. “I’m not buying it.”

  Nick stretched, and then hugged himself. His breathing sounded labored. “Maybe I’m grasping at straws. It’s so uncomfortable here. The truth is, I need to enter this realm much like your mother. My heart is dying from the separation. Maybe my plots will lead to nowhere, but I have to try.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at her over his shades, then quickly set them back in place with a grimace. “Why do you think, Quinn? I’m in love with Cora. I’m in love with my little girl. There isn’t a choice in the matter.”

  AS A NEW STUDENT OF scuba, Echo didn’t know many dive signs. She held out her fist to Ryker: danger. Then she made a blade of her hand and held it to her forehead: shark. Ryker twisted around. The huge fish moved with such force, Echo could feel the pressure in the water. In an instant, Ryker swam to her, and dragged her to the bottom. In the mysterious glow, she could see his eyes, wide and shifting.
The monster disappeared into the green gloom.

  Echo scanned the water. She could see no other divers’ lights. Ryker motioned toward the glow. When she swam, he grabbed her arm and pulled her down. He made his hand flat, motioning the palm toward the bottom. She nodded her understanding—stay low.

  Together, they slowly progressed toward the glow, heads swiveling for a sign of the big predator. Echo had done a fair amount of fishing in the reservoir. The biggest thing she’d ever caught was a catfish. Could catfish get that huge? As they neared, the illumination separated into two rectangles. They looked for all the world like a window and a door. But the submerged town lay at least a half mile north, and had been dead for more than half a century. There couldn’t be lights down here.

  Yet lights flickered, a blueish color, as if a TV had been left on. A cinderblock building revealed itself, lit from the inside. It was probably a bad idea to enter. It might be a worse idea not to take shelter.

  Ryker writhed around, pulling her by the wrist. In the low light, the fish was revealed. Well, not a fish, really. Not anything anyone had ever seen before. It resembled an alligator, except for the six legs ending in clawed and webbed feet. A flat tail propelled it toward them with alarming speed.

  Echo kicked her swim fins as hard as she could. In a moment, she swam inside the low building. Inside were the rusted springs of a mattress, some tumbled rusty shelves, another door that yawned on blackness, and a strange hemisphere that rose from the floor. It was like a bubble filled with blue light. Inside, the sapphire light swirled. Echo did her best to stop short. But a panicked Ryker swam into her from behind. The light became blinding as they fell into it.

  And fell and fell and fell...

  FROM THE MISSING PERSON files and a quick database search, Harvest found that DA Mudge’s mother, Lisa McGooby-Mudge, worked as a psychiatric nurse at St. Vincent Health Center in Erie. She lived in a little house in nearby borough of Wesleyville.

  “This again?” Lisa wore white pants and a colorful blouse, bandage scissors and a hemostat in her pouch pockets, a stethoscope around her neck. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m on my way to work.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to your father.”

  Lisa sighed. “I never knew my father. I have no memory of him. He abandoned us when I was a baby. I’ve told all this to the police, the FBI, to my son.” She leaned on the last word as if it were a curse.

  Harvest shrugged. “I guess your son doesn’t like a mystery.”

  “Mystery, my ass. My mother never had a good word to say about Alan McGooby. They had a tryst, he knocked her up, they got married, they hated each other, he took off, end of story.”

  But it wasn’t the end of the story. Alan McGooby didn’t take off, he got transformed. That meant, at least as far as Harvest knew, that he hadn’t gone anywhere. She couldn’t say to Lisa that her father was now a goat-man who stalked the Allegheny National Forest. If it were that easy, she’d already have the DA investigator job.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stir up any bad feelings. But is there anything you remember? Anything he left behind?”

  “Not a damn thing. Oh, there is one thing. Kind of a bitter joke, but my mother hung onto it. Hang on a sec.” Lisa disappeared into a bedroom and after the sound of some drawers opening and closing, reappeared, hand held out. “This. Mom’s wedding ring. Cheesy, right?”

  Harvest reached out to take it, but stopped short. Her fingers itched like crazy. Looking closely, she saw that the large green stone was jade.

  “Could he have found a cheaper ring? Maybe out of a gumball machine. I need to go now.”

  “Jade meant something to Alan,” Harvest said. “It had sentimental value to him, I guess.”

  Lisa put the ring on the coffee table. “I guess so. Mom said his was a matching ring. Not that rings and vows meant a whole lot to my father.”

  Seeing no way through the woman’s bitterness, Harvest shrugged. “Sorry to take up your time.”

  “I’m sure you won’t be the last. I love my boy, but he really needs to let this go.”

  Harvest sat in the Constable-Mobile looking over the files. Marge McGooby was not one of the nurses in the photos. It could well be that she knew nothing about the Jade Coven. Yet the ring, the jade ring, she knew it had meaning for Alan McGooby. Just what that meaning was, Harvest couldn’t say.

  Chapter 10

  “NO FREAKIN WAY AM I sitting down with Nick.”

  Cora’s day at the Chandlery was ending. She had to pick up Zuri at day camp. Quinn followed her as she marched to her car.

  “Do you really want this to go to family court? Because that’s where it’s heading.”

  “Fine. Bring it on. Let’s see how a spooky man who earns a living from the state lotto does in front of a judge.”

  “Cora, you must have some feelings for Nick.”

  Cora whirled on her. “What does it matter if I do? That horrible, smoking demon in my little girl’s room, her dreams about murderers, that’s Nick. That’s all Nick. I don’t want that around her. I can’t have it around her. Don’t you see, I have to protect Zuri.”

  Quinn couldn’t argue. At the same time, if either of her parents were around when Quinn was growing up, she would probably be more grounded with all the magic stuff that now pervaded her life. Nick could provide that guidance to Zuri, and the girls yet to be born. How could she relate this to Cora?

  “We helped you in the past,” Quinn said. “I’m pretty sure Nick could do a better job of it.”

  “Why, because he’s a man?”

  Quinn was a little dumbfounded. “Well, no...”

  Cora folded her arms. “Go on.”

  Mentally scrambling, she came up with, “If you say you don’t want Nick around, you can’t prove willful abandonment.”

  She shook her head. “What aren’t you telling me, Quinn? Is it the same thing that Nicholas never told me? I’m guessing, since you manage to get in the middle of all the horrible things my daughter experiences, that it is the same thing. You tell Nick he’d better have a really good lawyer.”

  Cora got in the car, slammed the door, and drove off leaving Quinn standing there. Yes, Cora should be told that she was the mother of a half-Twih witch, that the magic wasn’t going to stop, that Nick could make it better. Quinn, however, was not the one to do that. It had to come from Uncle Nick. In the end, would it ease Cora’s mind, or freak her out even more? A year ago, Quinn was freaking out. She had a lot more understanding of the Twih now, but still more questions, more mystery, than knowledge. Even her own abilities, and those of her sisters, were mostly unknown to her.

  Nick knew much better.

  An idea stuck her. She reached into her briefcase purse and found the Walkman knock-off.

  “Nick, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I don’t want to be stuck in the middle of this anymore. If you want custody of Zuri, you’re going to have to find a way to reconcile this yourself.”

  She heard only the hiss of the headphones.

  ECHO HEARD THE SOUND of her respirator wheezing. They were no longer underwater. Through her mask, she took in the lavender sky, the azure clouds scudding over a canopy of roots. Leaves flatted against the ground, a bank of gold mud, the river below moving in odd whirlpools. She shut off her tanks. The Twih. They had fallen into the Twih, but not a part of it she had ever seen before.

  Facing the way they had come, she saw that two trees larger than any on her Earth formed a rooty arch. Beyond that, it looked like an aquarium, the dark green gloom of the Kinzua Reservoir held in check by some unknown force.

  A muffled scream sounded, and she turned to see Ryker scrambling in the golden mud. Spitting out his mouthpiece, he got to his knees, eyes locked on the river. Echo followed his shocked gaze. Dozens of thirty-foot creatures basked in the weird light, the same species as the one in the reservoir. Alligator heads on snake bodies, three legs on each flank, vertical paddle tails, the purple black monsters stirred
at the presence of the intruders. Some dipped below the river surface, others moved toward them with a rolling hexapedal gait.

  The neoprene suit pressed the animal amulet tight to her skin where it beat like an insistent second heart. Echo had been able to do more with it than just keep creatures at bay. She had once made a squirrel do a little dance. But these twisted beasts—were they even animals?

  “Where the hell are we?” Ryker shouted again and again. “Where the hell are we?”

  Seeing the approach of the alligator-things, Ryker struggled to his feet. He picked up a stout branch from the mud. At his touch, the stick curled up, like a fern frond growing in reverse. Thorny spikes jutted from the wood. Hands bleeding, he tossed it aside. He stood paralyzed, the alien world seeping into his consciousness like a poison.

  She had to get him out of there. Echo put her hand over the lump of the amulet and focused. Any sense of direction, of north and south, even up and down, was skewed. Keeping her thoughts on the alligator-things, she gazed at a distant curve in the river. That way, she thought, go that way.

  Three monsters on the bank slowed their approach. It seemed that long moments passed. They then turned on their tubular bodies and shuffled away. Echo’s heart soared. She was doing it.

  Overhead, the roots in the sky clattered together. Sparks flew from them like pink fireworks. The wind chuckled. Ryker stared around, his mouth moving, but no sounds coming out. Echo had to keep her thoughts on the predators, though her heart went out to Ryker. To her, this was a nightmare locale, bizarre and twisted. Ryker’s fully human brain was already succumbing to the off-kilter physics, the impossible ecology. How long before his mind was broken?

  With the alligator-monsters heading off, she tried to turn Ryker toward the portal. At first, he batted her hands away in panic before coving his face mask. She gently pulled his hands away. His eyes flicked back and forth, but Echo knew he saw her.