Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

  The house was sparsely decorated, almost spartan. To the right, a staircase climbed to the second floor; a sitting room to the left held two narrow bookcases, two chairs, and a table next to the window that held about a dozen flowering plants. The kitchen had a central island and two stools but no table. It opened onto a room with a simple white couch, a small television, and a treadmill.

  “My daughter has been missing for nine and a half months, and this is the first time I’ve had the courtesy of a visit from anyone from across the pond. I should offer you some sort of a prize.” Amanda Drake set some water on to boil and scooped leaves into a pot. She turned to face Joy. “Do you know something? Or are you finally admitting that you don’t?”

  “First of all, I want to assure you that we are still working the case. I can’t talk about specifics, but it’s possible that Carla’s disappearance is related to some other activity going on in Gooseberry Bluff. I’ve been brought in as part of a new phase of the investigation.”

  Amanda shrugged. “I noticed that you stopped short of assuring me that you’re going to find her.”

  “We’re going to make every effort.”

  “A platitude which covers many sins. I was in Gooseberry Bluff once, you know. I visited Carla there. It was summer. In some ways it reminded me of Aberystwyth. Small, lots of students, everyone wanting to be next to the water. But I was never a particular fan of America. Demon country, we sometimes call it. Or do you think that’s unfair?”

  “My agency exists in large part to put a stop to that sort of activity.”

  “In other words, your agency is your country’s halfhearted attempt to clean up your own mess.”

  Charming woman. Joy decided to try to push past the subject. “What year did you visit your daughter?”

  Amanda Drake considered the question for a moment before seeming to decide to let Joy off the hook. “Two thousand and eight, I think it was. June. I remember the humidity was beastly. I never understood why she would want to teach at a magic college. I tried to teach her magic when she was a girl, but she had no interest.”

  “Are you a magician?”

  Amanda waved a hand in dismissal. “I work for the Home Office. Records retrieval. Simple spatial distortion. It’s nothing interesting. Carla’s father was a chef, but he died when she was three. She and I have been on each other’s nerves ever since.”

  “She studied history, isn’t that right? What eras was she interested in?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The Romanovs. The French Revolution — there is a Jacobin in our bloodline. But I suppose that American history was her particular favorite as a girl. She found Patrick Henry and Lafayette and that lot all very romantic.” She took the kettle off the stove and poured it into a pot to steep, then set the pot on a tray with two cups and saucers. “Why don’t we talk in the sitting room?”

  Joy followed her to the room near the entry, glancing out the window as she sat. Sunlight splashed over the flowers on the table, drowning out the reds and oranges and purples in a wash of brightness. A silver taxicab rolled down the street.

  “She never lived in this house, you know. Most of her things went with her to America. If you are looking for clues here…” Amanda shrugged and poured the tea.

  “Where did you used to live?”

  “We had a flat closer to the beach. Carla liked to swim. Sometimes I think maybe she went for a swim in that river there, le St. Croix?” She pronounced it in the French manner. “But that would not explain everything, would it?”

  “No,” Joy said, thinking, It wouldn’t explain anything. She sipped at the tea; it was hot and flavorless. “Mrs. Drake, I wonder if you can remember any conversations you had with Carla in the weeks before she disappeared. Any correspondence, anything odd that she may have said that sticks out in your mind.”

  “Carla didn’t like the telephone very much,” Amanda said. “She wrote letters, every week. She wrote them on Sunday and sent them on Monday. I usually got them on Thursdays. It was a Saturday that she went missing, and for five days I kept thinking that she was fine, that I would get another letter from wherever she had gone to.”

  “I wonder if you’d allow me to see those letters.”

  “If you wish. The ministry people here, they made copies.”

  “Did she ever receive mail here?”

  “No. Wait — yes. There was something that arrived a few months ago. Some sort of biblical research she had requested from a colleague. I have no idea why it was sent here. Apparently this man had not heard about her disappearance.”

  “Could I see that?”

  “I’m not certain I kept it,” said Amanda Drake.

  “Could you please check?” Joy said through almost-gritted teeth.

  Amanda Drake had been about to take a sip of tea, but she made a point of lowering the cup to its saucer and placing them both on the table. “Of course. Pardon me.” She left the room, and a moment later Joy heard her climbing the stairs.

  Joy looked over the books on the shelves. Gardening books, fitness books, hardback editions of Dickens and Shakespeare. Amanda Drake struck Joy as being one of those rare persons who was the same underneath as she was on the surface: impatient, humorless, and unimaginative. She didn’t have secrets because she couldn’t imagine being that interested in anyone else’s affairs, so she wouldn’t think to keep any of her own.

  Joy yawned and sipped at her tea. Part of her just wanted to hurry through this interview and get home in time to catch another hour or two of sleep. But she needed a lead. Carla Drake was the part of her investigation that was going nowhere, and Joy was afraid that if she was taken out of Gooseberry Bluff, the FBMA would stop looking for Drake. The demons were a more immediate threat, sure, but despite Amanda Drake’s coldness Joy could tell by the way her aura pulsed that her daughter’s disappearance weighed on her. She deserved to know what had happened, and maybe even to get her daughter back, if she was somehow still alive.

  Amanda Drake came downstairs with a stack of letters and a manila folder. She handed them over without a word, but Joy noticed that her hand trembled as she picked up her teacup. The letters were all addressed by hand, and Joy recognized Carla Drake’s handwriting. She set them aside. The manila folder bore a typed address label and a return address of Toronto, Canada.

  “Did you notify anyone when this arrived?” Joy asked.

  “No, I didn’t think to. It just seemed like a mistake, and I didn’t understand what it referred to at all. Do you think it might be important?”

  “I’m not sure.” Joy pulled out the stapled papers inside. The top page was largely an apology for the fact that the sender hadn’t been able to find more about something called “the Thirteenth Rib.” It wasn’t signed and had no identifying letterhead or any other clues as to its sender. The next seventeen pages contained references from various books and periodicals, going back as far as the 1950s. Joy skimmed over it but gleaned little; clearly it was going to require a closer reading.

  “Would you mind if I took this, Mrs. Drake? I’d like to take a little time with it.”

  Amanda Drake looked out the window. “Do you have a file going or something? Evidence boxes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take it all, then.” Amanda Drake nodded, as if agreeing with herself. “Take it all. If it helps you find her, then I’ll ask for it back. If not, then I think I’d rather not have any of it here at all.”

  “I’m going to do everything I can,” Joy said after a moment, her heart going out to this sour woman.

  “Do.” Drake stood. “Are we finished, then? I have a lunch date.”

  Joy would have liked to ask more, but Amanda Drake had more or less left the interview already. Joy could always follow up once she learned something more.

  “Thank you for the tea,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not properly teatime,” said Drake, and Joy felt sure that she was being rebuked for dropping by off schedule. She gathered up the letters and the manila
folder and took her leave. Amanda Drake shut the door behind her almost before she could say good-bye.

  Joy checked her watch; it wasn’t yet five a.m. back in her bedroom. She paused outside Amanda Drake’s door to check for traffic before crossing the street toward the church. The Thirteenth Rib. It did sound somewhat biblical, but the references were all from the twentieth century. And then there was the fact that Carla Drake had asked for this information in the first place. Had she asked another historian to do research for her? It wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual.

  Joy groaned, realizing that she had found something that was going to keep her awake once she got home. And it would probably come to nothing, in the end.

  She opened the church door, stepped through —

  And someone seized her by the arm and threw her to the side. Joy dropped Carla Drake’s letters and twisted to take the fall, bringing her leg across and rolling over her shoulder. She slapped the ground and felt sand beneath her. The door shut; it was dark.

  She scrambled to her feet, her shoes sliding across the dry sand. She was aware of moonlight above, but before she could get any sort of bearings something slender and cool wrapped around her throat. Her attacker pressed a knee into her back and pulled on the garrote.

  Joy didn’t think; there wasn’t any time. She grabbed hold of the wire with one hand and fell forward, aiming her shoulder at the ground. The pressure around her throat almost caused her to black out, but it threw her attacker off balance, and when he loosened his grip on the garrote Joy held on to it. He rolled off her. She pushed herself up and ran at him, kicking him once — it felt more like ribs than pelvis, but she wasn’t sure — before continuing past him into the dark.

  She only ran for a few seconds, long enough to be sure she was out of reach. She slipped the garrote into her pocket, pulled off her shoes and her socks, and tossed them away from her in different directions. Under the top layer the sand was almost cold against her skin. Desert, probably somewhere in the western United States, where it was still the middle of the night.

  She pushed that away. The details weren’t going to keep her alive, not right now. She dropped into a fighting crouch and went still.

  Her eyes were starting to adjust. The moon was in fact full, and it outlined low shapes all around her: stones, cacti, and a freestanding frame that must be the door they had arrived through. But nothing moved. The assassin was nowhere in sight.

  The moonlight was a small problem. She was glad for the purple of her suit, but the blouse might give her away if she hadn’t already been spotted. Stillness was only an option while they were both night-blind; it was time to move. The door wasn’t a realistic option; she had no way of knowing where it led to now, if anywhere, and no way of redirecting it. Despite Amanda Drake’s self-deprecation, spatial distortion was advanced magic, and Joy had no training in it.

  What she did have training in was transmutation; she had just the spell for this situation, but she would need time. Joy took a deep breath and began reciting in a Berber dialect spoken by fewer than two thousand people. One of the keys to magic was that words that were rarely used had more potential energy; truly dead languages, used correctly, were among the most powerful weapons in the world. Joy kept her voice to a whisper, hoping the man trying to kill her wasn’t one of those two thousand.

  She was in a shallow, bowl-like hollow, with ridges on three sides. She kept reciting as she climbed, still crouched, toward the top of the nearest ridge. Everything but her was still.

  Gather.

  The desert air was warm, even at what must be three in the morning. The reflected light of the moon washed down, casting ghostly shadows, calming her.

  Focus.

  The assassin hit her from the side, but she rolled with the impact, scooping up sand. She continued to chant as she broke his tackle, got up on her knees, and smeared the sand into his eyes. He grunted in pain and kicked at her, but she was already out of reach. He scrambled to his feet, and she swept them out from under him, dragging him down by his jacket. She pressed a knee into his back, placed her hand against the sand, shut her eyes, and finished her chant with a command:

  Execute.

  She shuddered as a flash of light and energy rippled out from her hands. There was a smell of burning sand, and then a blister of illuminated glass rose out of the ground, casting bright light in all directions.

  The assassin cried out. Joy kept her eyes shut as she tied his jacket into a knot around his arms. Then she turned him onto his side, pressed against the muscle of his jaw, and pried his mouth open. The second right premolar was fake, and she plucked it out and away from his struggling tongue.

  “Cyanide?” she asked, and stood. Even now that she could see him, his aura held no sign that he had just been trying to kill her. To him it was just a job, which meant they were a couple of layers away from whoever was really behind this.

  She pocketed the tooth with the garrote. “I was hoping you would come after me. You killed my boss. My friend. But he wasn’t expecting you.”

  “You got lucky,” the man said. He was either American or doing an excellent job of faking the accent. He still squinted in the light.

  “No, I’m just better than you.” Joy pulled her Beretta out of her blazer. Her hands were shaking, as much from adrenaline as from fear. She trained the weapon on the assassin and grasped her crystal. “FBMA emergency,” she said to it.

  “There’ll be others,” the assassin said.

  “There always are,” said Joy. The truth was, no one had ever tried to kill her before, not for real. She had trained for this, yes, a hundred times, but she had always been a little afraid that when it came down to it she would freeze up. Yet she hadn’t. She was buzzing from the exhilaration of not being dead.

  “Why bring me out here to the middle of the desert? You killed AD Shil on camera. You wanted it to be seen. Are you suddenly shy?”

  The assassin laughed. “My employer wanted an audience for Shil because Shil was important.

  “You’re not.”

  The FBMA line picked up. “Pacific Coast division, what’s your emergency?”

  “This is Agent Wilkins, badge number SPA1176490, authorization code Niner Foxtrot Alpha. I need an extraction and prisoner pickup at my location, and I have next to no idea what that is. Can you track this signal?”

  “It’ll take a little time,” said a male voice. “Are you safe?”

  “I can’t say for sure. For the moment, I think so.”

  “Can you describe your location?”

  “Desert. Night. Still warm. There’s a dedicated portal here, but I don’t know what it points back to. Should I disable it?”

  “Hold on.” There was a brief conference at the other end. “Agent, use your discretion. It’s our consensus here that your safety takes precedence over whatever we might learn from the spells on that door.”

  “Hold on.” Joy knelt beside the assassin and checked his pockets. One pocket was empty; one held an orange-topped key for a public locker. Searching his suit jacket was trickier, seeing as how she had just tied it into a knot, but the pockets were empty.

  The light of her sand-lantern was still bright, but it would fade in another twenty minutes or so. She grasped the crystal again.

  “Have you got a trace on me yet?”

  “You’re in the Mojave Desert. There are agents on their way to your location now, but we’ll need you to stay on the line until they arrive. I’ve got portal division on the other line — you were supposed to be in Aber — Aber—”

  “Aberystwyth, Wales. Yes. I arrived just fine, but the portal was redirected. I was supposed to have a security detail, but I haven’t seen them.”

  “Yes, we just heard from them. They’re stranded in Aberystwyth, it sounds like. If the portal is still active on your side, it opens somewhere else. Are you safe?”

  “I was attacked, but my assailant is subdued. I believe it’s the same man that killed AD Shil.”

  “G
ood work, Agent.”

  “Not that I don’t appreciate the kudos, but I’d prefer an evacuation.”

  “Portal division thinks they’ve narrowed down your entrance point. They believe it’s inactive. Requesting confirmation.”

  Joy sighed. The door was a good forty meters away, and she wasn’t about to leave the assassin here alone, hogtied though he might be. He clearly had some camouflaging abilities, and if she lost him she’d never forgive herself.

  “The option to disable it is still open?”

  “Of course. At your discretion.”

  Joy felt sure that AD Flood wasn’t going to let her slide by on her discretion. She took hold of the assassin by one arm. “Stand up.” He did so willingly enough. “I’ll put a bullet in the back of your knee if you try to run,” she said. “We’re going to walk over to that door, and then you’re going to get down on your knees while I check it out. Understood?”

  “Understood,” he said after a moment, and started walking.

  Joy kept her weapon on his back and spoke into the crystal. “Confirming now. Stand by.”

  “Standing by, Agent.”

  Joy was sweating enough that her bare feet were coated with sand now. It wasn’t just that it felt like at least eighty degrees out here; there was something else — a creeping suspicion that this wasn’t over yet.

  “Keep walking,” she said to the assassin, not because he had slowed but to see how he would react. He was utterly calm; he didn’t turn, didn’t make a sound. Joy scanned the ground in front of her and spotted her shoes. “Stop,” she said once he had walked past them. They were about ten meters from the door.

  She bent to pick up one of the shoes. It was filled with sand. She hefted it a couple of times, then set it down again.

  “I thought you wanted to check out the door,” said the assassin.

  “Do I? Or do you want me to?” She spoke into the crystal. “Stand by a moment, please,” she said.

  “Still standing by.”

  “Lie down in the sand,” she told the assassin. “Facedown.”