Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

“May all the good you do turn to bad; may all your help turn to hurt.” It had been twenty-two years, but Zelda could still hear the woman’s voice; she could still see her mouth curled down with rage, her eyes glistening, her tears unshed. In those two decades Zelda had thought of a million responses, and she had learned a dozen counterspells that could have prevented the curse from taking hold. Too late. Too late to change any of it, now. When she tried to take in a stray cat, it drowned in her toilet. She sent money to a wildlife charity, and two months later it was investigated for ivory trafficking. In her first years of teaching, she had tried to mentor certain students, but invariably they ended up dropping out, being arrested, and in one case committing suicide. She was terrified, now, of even being friendly to her students.

  Zelda had gone into alchemy because there was no real academic track for cursing; it was a felony, a crime of passion: the kind of magic that you got worse at the more you studied it. She knew, of course, that the only person who could lift a curse was the one who had laid it, but she had no way to find the woman who had done this to her, so she tried to focus on dulling the curse’s effects. Luck — in the form of a powder, potion, or ointment — was her Philosopher’s Stone.

  Her current case of severe eczema — she felt like the bones of her elbows were trying to emerge from her flaking skin — was the result of a lotion that she had synthesized from powdered amethyst, rose petals, and rabbit saliva. She’d been using it for nearly a month, and she was sure that it was working. She’d let herself get giddy, and the result was the coffee, doughnut, and floor wax concoction that Greg the janitor had mopped out from under Andy’s desk this morning.

  Then there was Hector. As if her thoughts had summoned him, she realized that he was walking down the hall in front of her, wearing those tight jeans that she told herself were ridiculous but which she always looked at anyway. There was a jaunty quality to his walk that just about broke her heart, because she knew what she was going to have to do.

  Rather than risk him glancing back and spotting her, she turned off toward the main lobby and found herself walking past the library. Without really thinking about it, she went inside. She took a deep breath of books — she was always surprised that the air in the library never smelled even a little bit of cat pee — and was relieved not to see Freddy Larch anywhere.

  Zelda walked down the stacks to the point where the natural light disappeared entirely. Her favorite cat, Moose, was curled up on the alchemy shelves, and Zelda stopped to whisper to him and scratch his neck. Moose lifted his black-and-white head but he didn’t open his eyes.

  Zelda stopped herself from scratching him too long. Her curse wasn’t terribly discriminating about what was helpful or good; she wasn’t going to let Moose develop feline leukemia just because she made him purr.

  She moved on, looking over the shelves of books on philters and unguents and incenses. Many of them were elementary-level stuff, and some were frankly quackery. Most of the rest she had been through, back to front, with mixed results. Newton’s Third Law meant that you didn’t get luck without side effects, and eczema was actually fairly mild compared to some of the things Zelda had managed to do to herself. Like the potion she had taken in June that made her body hair grow thick and luxurious. Luckily it had been during summer intercession, when she didn’t have to teach. Unluckily it had been during a stretch of ninety-degree days, and she had spent three of those days sprawled naked but furry on her kitchen floor, getting up every hour or so to shave her stomach. For weeks afterward she kept finding tufts of hair in hard-to-reach places.

  In fact she had been terrified that Hector might find evidence of her brief life as a wolf-woman, but then again, she had been terrified of everything that night. At least, she was terrified once she sobered up enough to realize that she had brought him home, and that he was on her couch, and that clothes were starting to come off. She had been very close to throwing him out, but the apparent success of her luck lotion and the four glasses of malbec she’d had at the faculty reception had made her giddy. Zelda wasn’t beautiful in her own eyes — she was short and stocky, and she’d had a mustache since before she’d been cursed — but Hector told her she was, and Zelda had admired Hector from afar since he had first come to Gooseberry Bluff.

  And now she was going to have to tell him that she could never see him again.

  She picked out a few books — Barzak’s Healing Powders to Smoke and Snort, Rickert’s Skin Magic, and Samatar’s Treatise on Alchemical Counter-Agents. She was considering whether Rosenbaum’s The Precision Principle: Seventeen Reasons Your Potions Aren't Potent was worth another look when something big and black slunk down the adjacent aisle of bookshelves.

  Zelda gasped, but whatever it was had already passed out of sight. She inched to the end of the stack and glanced in the direction where it had gone, but there was nothing there, and only the smell of books in the air.

  “Do you have a really big cousin living here, Moose?” Moose didn’t even glance at her, and after a moment Zelda gathered up the books she had picked out and carried them back to the circulation desk.

  Freddy Larch was there, looking as if he had never left. His ridiculous outfit today was a camouflage blazer over a red T-shirt and pajama pants. Zelda spotted a cow with swollen udders jumping over a sleepy moon on them. “Good afternoon, Professor Akbulut,” he said.

  “Afternoon.” Zelda set the books on the desk so he could scan them. She hesitated to say any more. Freddy was a terrible flirt — in every sense of the word “terrible.” He had hit on Zelda any number of times, and she had no reason not to think that he was hitting on students as well. Any attempt at conversation might be an opening, and so normally she tried her best to not engage with him. But this time her curiosity got the better of her.

  “Mr. Larch, you don’t happen to have any…larger cats here in the library, do you? I mean really big cats. Like a panther?”

  He gave her an oily smile. “A panther? In my library? How would such a creature get in here?”

  Zelda opened her mouth to offer a guess, but changed her mind. “That’s a good question. Never mind. I’m just tired, I suppose.”

  Joy Wilkins managed about four hours of sleep and a slice and a half of toast before she walked over to the campus. Her legs were stiff and she was struggling to focus. She had skipped her morning jog for the first time in…long enough that she couldn’t remember. Her sister always accused her of being addicted to exercise, and maybe it was true, but there were worse things.

  It was a little after one when she made it into the office. One of the alchemy professors was having office hours, and there were three students crowded onto the pale-green couch, with another on the floor. Andy was wearing a cream-colored sleeveless blouse with a ruffled front over a pair of houndstooth slacks. His heels clicked on the tile as he followed Joy to her office.

  “Good afternoon,” Andy said, and handed her a couple of phone messages from students. “I wanted to let you know that I spoke to Edith about getting you in to see the president. She was not receptive.”

  “Oh. I hope I didn’t get you in any trouble.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. Edith is my aunt, actually. I started out here working as one of her student assistants.”

  “I didn’t know you studied here.”

  Andy laughed. Joy couldn’t stop studying Andy’s aura. Gender was something that tended to show up in auras as texture — lines for maleness, waves for femaleness. Andy’s aura was the most dynamic she’d ever seen in this respect: waves bisected by lines, lines oscillating into waves, waves collapsing into spheres and shimmering off like heat mirage. She had to focus to listen to what he was saying.

  “I don’t know if I would call it studying,” Andy said. “You know, my grandmother was one of the people who founded this school.”

  “Really?”

  “Hilda Ruiz. She was a doctor of—”

  “Recovery magic. Right. I’ve heard of her.”

 
“Yes. She was a very talented woman, but the sorcery gene is pretty much on or off in my family. You’re either a whiz or a washout. Edith and I are both washouts. I can’t even start a fire without a match.”

  “Well, you seem to be doing all right.”

  “I am, thank you. And that reminds me. There may be another way to approach the president. I don’t know if you’ve met Professor Song yet, but he and Philip are very close. You might be able to work on him.”

  “He teaches divination, right? Do you know if he’s in today?”

  “I’ll find out. Be right back.”

  Joy picked up the phone and reached for the campus directory. She needed to look into Ingrid Ingwiersen and Hector Ay, and she thought she had hit on just the right approach. Since she was teaching a survey course, she could approach a wide variety of professors under the guise of having them do a guest lecture.

  Ingwiersen wasn’t in, so Joy left a message with the conjuration department. She managed to get a hold of Hector Ay, and after some back-and-forth about scheduling she arranged to meet him for a drink the following evening. She hung up just in time to see Andy return.

  “Professor Song is in his office and says that if you can get there in the next three minutes — and promise not to waste more than five minutes of his time — he’ll see you.”

  The divination department was on the south end of the fourth floor. Joy took the stairs at a run. The windows at each landing showed views of the front lawn of the college, green clouded with crows and students lying out in the sun. Joy had forgotten, in her seven years with the FBMA, what it was like to be around undergraduates. Most of them had no idea how good they had it, and part of her wanted to explain it to them. They still had so many possibilities open to them. On the other hand, Gooseberry Bluff was not the same as Kentucky State; the student body as a whole was older, for one thing, and some of them had already run out of those possibilities that were open to most undergrads.

  Ken Song’s office was spartan in appearance, not at all what she would have expected from someone who had been teaching at the college for thirty years. There was a narrow bookshelf next to the window, neatly filled with hardcover books; an oval-framed mirror hung beside the desk, beside his diplomas; and a dozen or so framed photographs cascaded across two walls, most of them black and white. An expensive bicycle, not more than three years old, hung from a hook on the ceiling beside the door. It looked well taken care of, but there were more than a few scratches on the paint. The desk was not the standard gray steel cage that Joy had, but a simple table of blond, smooth wood, with only a computer terminal and a half dozen coffee cups on it.

  Ken Song was taller than Joy had expected. His glasses had stylish rectangular frames and his long gray hair was swept back into a ponytail. He wore a baggy smock-like thing that might have concealed a paunch, but his legs were slim under his skinny jeans. Joy would not have taken him for the fifty-eight she knew he was from his faculty bio.

  “Ms. Wilkins.” He took her hand in his right and covered it with his left, bowing slightly. “Please sit.” He shut the door behind her. “You are wondering whether I will be able to come and talk to your class this semester; the answer is yes. October 17th would be ideal for me, if you haven’t already scheduled someone for that.” He stood behind his desk and sipped from a coffee cup. Joy realized that she was sitting in the only chair in the office.

  “I’ll have to check to confirm, but that should work.”

  “Good.” When he spoke, Joy noticed that his teeth had dark stains on them. She glanced at the nearest coffee cup and saw that there was liquid still in it and mold growing on top of it.

  “I was also wondering—”

  “Yes, I know. Philip is unreachable, unfortunately. He had to leave to deal with a crisis, but he should be back in a week or two.”

  “Did he leave a phone number?”

  “Mm. Where he’s gone to, the phone service is not very reliable. If there’s a—” Professor Song flinched and set his coffee cup down, sloshing liquid onto the desk. He leaned forward, one hand on the desk, the other on his chest.

  “Professor Song?” Joy stood and guided him back to the chair. “Here, sit down. Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

  “No, no, no.” He straightened up, moving away from the chair as though it were made of nails. “I simply…my doctor is after me to get more potassium in my diet, but I’m stubborn or forgetful or both. Listen, Ms. Wilkins—”

  “You can call me Joy, if you don’t mind.”

  “Joy.” He smiled. “Philip and I are close, and he did ask me to look after you, but I’m afraid that the…semester has already gotten away from me a bit. If you have a message for the president, I should be able to get it to him. If you have questions about how things work here, either Edith or Andy should be able to answer them.” He stepped past her and picked up his coffee cup. “Beyond that, I’m afraid that I’m a bit overextended already.” He took a long sip. His aura was a bright royal blue streaked with green; his eyes were bloodshot. “Do you understand?”

  “I think so.” Joy was almost certain that he was saying that he knew why she was really here but that he couldn’t help her. She was also sure that he was drinking red wine; she could smell it, and his teeth were stained with it.

  “Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lecture in about an hour, and I have to hunt down something to eat in the meantime. Good luck to you.”

  That night Joy couldn’t sleep. She reread the textbook chapters she had assigned. She drank some calming tea. She meditated. She opened her window to listen to the night breezes. Nothing worked. She couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she had nothing: nothing on Carla Drake, nothing on the demon trafficking, nothing. Finally she got out of bed and sat down at her kitchen table to reread Carla Drake’s file.

  Carla Drake was thirty-seven, born in Wales, and had read history at Cambridge. She met an American there, moved to Ohio with him, and divorced him three years later. She got a master’s in divination from CalWiz and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan. She was an expert in medieval magic and had been working on the definitive biography of Agrippa when she vanished.

  One thing Joy didn’t understand was how Drake had ended up at Gooseberry Bluff. She was single, young, and driven, and yet as far as Joy could determine she hadn’t seriously pursued positions at any of the more prestigious four-year colleges. Gooseberry Bluff was well regarded, but it wasn’t a stepping-stone to Harvard. It was almost as if Drake had just run out of ambition. If there had been a man, Joy could understand. Or a woman, or a child, or even a dog. But every person they had interviewed insisted that Drake lived alone and had never dated anyone as far as they knew.

  Then, on November 12 of the previous year, Drake had taught a Saturday morning seminar, driven out of the campus parking lot, and disappeared. Her car was found in Rochester three days later, but Carla Drake had not been seen since.

  Joy sat back in her chair. The reason that the FBMA investigated cases like this was that people rarely just disappeared anymore. Modern divination meant that things like abductions were rare; most people were easy to find. Cases like the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance, which the FBMA had cracked in a matter of hours, had proved that. People who didn’t want to be found could cover their tracks and frustrate a diviner, but there would always be some sign that the tracks had been covered. And yet all attempts to divine Carla Drake’s location, alive or dead, had been unsuccessful. It wasn’t as if she had gone into hiding or someone was hiding her.

  It was as if she had never existed.

  Joy had been trained never to discount the impossible, so she ran with that for a bit. What if Carla Drake had never existed? What if the woman who had disappeared was not Carla Drake? Except that didn’t track. Carla Drake had parents, cousins, and an ex-husband. If someone had replaced her at some point along the line, the diviners would have found the remains of the real Carla Drake.

  There were places a p
erson could go, at least theoretically, where divination couldn’t track them: wizard-locked sanctuaries, other dimensions, that sort of thing. The kind of thing that people who weren’t practitioners liked to believe existed but probably didn’t.

  Which brought her back to nothing. This case just went in circles. Joy sat in the kitchen until she realized she was falling asleep, put the file away, and went back to bed.

  Joy woke up not knowing where she was. It was still dark, and it took her a minute to understand that she was in her own bed, and that her crystal was ringing. She squeezed it in her fist.

  “Hello?” Her eyes were having trouble focusing on the clock. 4:17 a.m. “Hello?” she said again, louder this time.

  “Agent Wilkins? It’s going down right now. The blips picked up on it seven minutes ago.”

  “What?”

  “Wake up, Agent. This is Martin Shil. Someone is moving demons through the college right now.”

  Joy shut her eyes tight and then opened them. “I’m on my way.”

  It took her three minutes to put on jogging clothes. She put on her shoulder holster under her hoodie, locked the door behind her, and took off running toward the college. It was raining softly, and there was no one on the streets. She gathered speed as she ran, as her blood began to flow and the import of the call finally sank in. They were ahead of schedule; previous to this, the traffickers had only moved every six months or so. They had been sure that they would have until November, maybe December, to set up additional surveillance on the college and bring in more undercover agents. Instead it was just her, her Beretta, and no backup.

  The squirrel trap hulked against the starless sky, lit at the arched entrance and by the exterior lights that ran along the outside of the second floor. Joy drew her weapon and kept to the trees as she approached, avoiding the lighted walk. Something fluttered amid the branches as she passed, and she looked up into the faintly glowing eyes of a crow.