Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

  “Goddammit, lady, I wasn’t calling you,” said Joy, and disconnected. “When are they going to get rid of the ghosts on the lines?” she shouted at Lutrineas, because he was there.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Never mind.” She followed the road as it curved east and south, past an ancient sign that read THE POINT—YOU CAN’T MISS IT. She grasped her crystal again. “Bebe Stapleford,” she said, but there was no response. “Abel Bouchard.” Nothing. “Ken Song.” Nothing.

  “What’s going on?” asked Lutrineas.

  “Maybe something’s blocking the calls,” she said. “Yves Deschamp,” she said.

  “This is Yves,” he said a moment later.

  “Yves, this is Joy; I’ve been trying to reach Bebe. No answer from her or Abel or Ken.”

  “We’ll check it out immediately,” said Yves. “I’ll call you back.”

  “Great.” She let go of the crystal. “Had any ideas about demon handling? Can you change into a giant otter or something?”

  “You realize that there is such a thing as a giant otter, and they only run about five and a half feet long.”

  “Not interested,” said Joy.

  “Perhaps you are interested in the black car that has been following us since we turned onto this road,” said Lutrineas.

  Joy looked in the rearview and saw a stretch limo with a Wisconsin license plate. She grasped her crystal and said, “FBMA, Vehicle ID Division.”

  Instead of an agency switchboard, though, she was answered by a voice that was becoming rapidly familiar. “Oh it’s you again, is it, young lady? You were very rude the last time we spoke.”

  An angry ghost was the last thing she needed clogging up the lines. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m in the middle of an emergency.”

  “Yes, I see that now. But I don’t think you realize that there’s an emergency behind you as well as in front of you. I’m afraid that despite all our best efforts, there is a traitor in the Thirteenth Rib.”

  A ripple of fear played across Joy’s neck. “Who are you?”

  “You’re being rude again,” said the ghost. “Introduce yourself first, and I’ll tell you.”

  You were never supposed to tell ghosts your name, because then they could call you directly. Some people had to stop using crystal communications entirely because their ghosts called continuously and they were impossible to block.

  “My name is Joy Wilkins,” she said.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms. Wilkins,” said the ghost. “My name is Hilda Ruiz. You might be interested to know that Ken Song’s life is in danger.”

  Hilda Ruiz. As in founder-of-the-Thirteenth-Rib Hilda Ruiz. Joy wondered what might have happened differently if she’d known that the first time she’d picked up this particular ghost on her line. “Thank you, Hilda.”

  “No problem, dear. We’ll be in touch.”

  Joy let go of her crystal and put both hands on the wheel. There was no good option here. If she didn’t do something about Prince Stolas, he might trample the town; if she didn’t help Ken Song, an army of Sons of Order might spill into this dimension at any moment. On the other hand, Stolas was enclosed in a summoning circle, and she didn’t know what she was going to do about him anyway. Flood’s conjure-and-capture teams would arrive at any moment, but she couldn’t ask Flood for help with anything concerning the Thirteenth Rib.

  “Who do you suppose that is in the limo behind us?” she asked.

  “Probably the Sons of Order,” said Lutrineas. “If we’re truly unlucky, my sister is with them.”

  “Dammit.” No matter what she did, Flood was going to be upset with her. She could call him in a minute, give him the address Abel had given her, make some excuse. No sense worrying beyond that. But there wasn’t any backup she could send to the McMonigal Arms.

  “Hold on,” she told Lutrineas.

  “What?”

  Joy caressed the brake and then spun the wheel, hard. The ancient pickup’s engine growled in protest as Joy swung it around on the narrow blacktop road. In the back of her mind she started rehearsing her apology to Abel Bouchard.

  Lutrineas clung to the door handle. “They’re not—”

  The limousine slammed into the back of the pickup as Joy was still straightening it out. The pickup shuddered and its right wheels skidded off the road. Joy slammed on the accelerator, brought the truck back onto the blacktop, and left the limousine trying to execute a three-point turn.

  “Not a very practical pursuit vehicle,” she said.

  “That was lovely,” said Lutrineas.

  “Thank you,” said Joy. “I aced the agency driving test.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me that. I liked it better when it felt spontaneous,” said Lutrineas.

  Joy peered into the rearview as the turn back onto the mainland approached; the limousine was nowhere in sight. She redoubled her speed, ignoring the rattling sounds from the back of the truck. “You do like spontaneous, don’t you? I read a story that involved you cutting off your own head so you could sleep better. Do you want to tell me about that?”

  Lutrineas mumbled his response. “Not really.”

  “Then shut up and hold on.”

  The arrow in Prince Stolas’s eye sparked as the demon reeled, shaking its head and stumbling into the bounds of the summoning circle.

  “I bet you thought I was going to aim for a wing that time, or a leg,” said Ingrid. “Since I told you I was going to knock off your crown and then I did. That’s what you call misdirection.”

  YOU WILL SUFFER FOR YOUR ARROGANCE.

  “What you’re not understanding, Prince, is that I don’t care if I suffer. I just want my sister back.” Ingrid nocked her last arrow. “Any requests for my next target?”

  WHAT YOU ASK IS IMPOSSIBLE, YOU MUST REALIZE THAT. WHAT IS IT YOU ARE TRULY ASKING?

  “I’m looking for an exchange,” Ingrid said. “Take the chi that you need from me, and let hers go.”

  THIS IS NOT EASILY ACCOMPLISHED.

  “I agree,” said Ingrid. “It would be easier for me to just shoot you in the other eye. But I would rather have my sister back.”

  Ingrid’s vision had narrowed almost to a point: a tunnel, a kaleidoscope of Stolas and its sparking, ruined eye, a rainbow playing over its feathers. A flare of apprehension impinged on her periphery, a white light of worry—not fear, but worry. Of course Stolas would try to double-cross her, but Ingrid had a double cross of her own in mind. If this worked, she would have her sister back. If this didn’t work, she would still have her sister back, but she would never know it.

  An even exchange.

  “Chi is chi, isn’t it?”

  As teenagers, Ingrid and her sister used to go to a coin arcade in Copenhagen after school and on weekends. They played Centipede and Ms. Pac-Man and Portal Chase—Selma was a master of Ms. Pac-Man, to the point where she got bored and stopped playing it. Ingrid was never very good at any of the games. She liked Joust, but she was so bad at it that she quickly ran out of money and wandered the arcade watching other people play.

  One day she was watching an older girl play Portal Chase. The girl ran out of lives on the Medina level and noticed Ingrid watching. “You out of money, kid?” she had asked.

  Ingrid, in those days, was so shy that she could only nod.

  “You come here all the time, don’t you?”

  Nod.

  “Let me show you something,” said the girl. She held out her hands; they were both empty. Then she snapped her fingers, and a five-krone piece appeared in her palm.

  “Wow,” said Ingrid, although she had seen similar conjuration tricks many times.

  “This is the same coin I just plugged into that game,” said the girl. “It’s a slug. They used to put coins on a string and pull them back up, but you can’t do that anymore. Instead you use a simple find-your-keys spell that you’re not supposed to use on money, but the owners here are too dumb to cast an autodispel on the machines here.”
>
  “Oh, cool,” said Ingrid.

  “You wanna buy it? How much money have you got?”

  Ingrid didn’t have any money left that day, and she didn’t see the girl for a long time after that. So she decided to figure out how to do a find-your-keys spell on her own. It took her months. She mostly stopped going to the arcade to study conjuration on her own. Selma didn’t care, because Selma was discovering girls by that time, and the girls she was interested in didn’t play video games. And by the time Ingrid could do the spell on her own, the owners who were too dumb to cast an autodispel on their machines had wised up.

  The final part of Ingrid’s plan was inspired by this memory. She was giving up a part of her soul, but she was planning to take it back.

  A spirit slug; a soul on a string.

  LOWER YOUR WEAPON, said Stolas. I WILL DO WHAT YOU ASK.

  “I’d rather keep it up and keep you honest.”

  SO BE IT.

  The pain was like a finger prick, at first, and then it was like the flesh of her finger was being dragged out through that finger prick, and then the bone, and then the bones of her arm and her shoulder, her lungs and her heart and her kidneys, all passing through a hole smaller than the eye of a needle. But the string was there behind her, even after all of her had been sucked out of that tiny hole. The string was invisible, undetectable, so beneath notice that it was difficult to trust that it was there. But Ingrid believed in it. She had to believe in it. Facing Stolas had made her feel alive again, made her want to live. She just needed someone to pull that string.

  Selma woke up gasping for breath. She tried to sit up, but her stomach hurt when she tried to move. Everything hurt.

  She rolled onto her side and coughed, a deep, dry hacking cough. The pain from the coughing was sharp. She could focus on it. When it stopped, when she finally began to catch her breath, she saw a handwritten sign set up on a table next to the bed:

  TAKE IT SLOW

  DRINK SOME WATER

  There was a small glass of water next to the sign. Selma’s thirst was far greater than the glass could possibly satisfy, but she sat up, reached for the glass, and drank it down. Every motion was agony.

  She was naked, on a bed, in someone’s basement. There was a TV at the foot of the bed, a wooden chair next to it. There was a walker behind the chair, the sort an elderly person might use. There was also a string tied to the back of the chair, connected to something in the shadows of the basement. There were clothes on the chair—a T-shirt, some underwear, sweatpants, a robe. On the floor there was a pair of Ms. Pac-Man slippers.

  This was Ingrid’s house. She knew this, suddenly, without any memory of ever having been in Ingrid’s basement. But where was Ingrid?

  Selma put on the slippers and the clothes. She did so slowly; the pain was not as sharp now as it had been at first, but it would not be going away soon. Underneath the sweatpants was another note:

  WHEN YOU FEEL UP TO IT, PULL THE STRING

  (IT’S BETTER IF YOU DO THIS SOONER RATHER THAN LATER)

  Selma disliked doing things without knowing the reasons for them. But she knew Ingrid’s handwriting, and she trusted her sister. She moved carefully from the bed to the chair, and then yanked on the string.

  There was resistance at first, and then the string went slack. A small cardboard box appeared on the floor with the end of the string tied around it, and at the same moment there was a sort of a thunder-crackle from outside, like a sonic boom and the scream of a bird of prey all at once.

  Did I do that? Selma wondered. She pulled on the string again, to bring the box to her. It was a little larger than a jewelry box, but there was no ring inside, just another, longer note:

  DEAR SELMA:

  IF YOU’RE READING THIS IT MEANS THAT AT LEAST HALF OF MY PLAN WORKED. WELCOME BACK. YOU PROBABLY DON’T REMEMBER IT, BUT YOU’VE BEEN MOSTLY DEAD FOR ABOUT SIX MONTHS. THE SHORT EXPLANATION IS THAT SOME GROUP OF MYSTERIOUS ASSHOLES DECIDED TO MANIFEST SOME MAJOR DEMONS BY STEALING LIFE FORCE FROM INNOCENT CIVILIANS. THEY DID THIS ON THE ONE DAY IN WHO-KNOWS-HOW-MANY YEARS THAT YOU HAPPENED TO BE AT THE MALL, SPENDING A GIFT CERTIFICATE THAT YOUR THOUGHTLESS SISTER GAVE YOU FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY BECAUSE SHE COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO THINK OF A DECENT GIFT.

  I’M SORRY ABOUT THAT.

  I’M NOT SURE WHEN I’LL SEE YOU AFTER THIS, SO THERE ARE SOME THINGS I WANT TO BE SURE TO TELL YOU. FIRST OF ALL, YOUR BODY IS GOING TO NEED SOME TIME TO REACCLIMATE TO, WELL, LIVING. YOU SHOULD SEE A DOCTOR ASAP. DON’T DRINK OR EAT TOO MUCH. THERE’S A SMOOTHIE IN THE FRIDGE UPSTAIRS, AND MORE WATER, BUT TAKE IT EASY ON BOTH.

  A BUNCH MORE OF YOUR CLOTHES AND STUFF ARE UPSTAIRS IN THE SPARE BEDROOM. YOUR CAR AND YOUR APARTMENT ARE GONE, BUT YOU CAN STAY HERE AND USE MY TRUCK. THE KEYS ARE BY THE DOOR.

  THE MAIN THING I WANTED TO SAY, THOUGH, IS THAT I LOVE YOU AND I’M SORRY THAT I’M SO SHITTY ABOUT SAYING IT OR SHOWING IT. I’VE REALIZED THAT I’M KIND OF FUCKED UP AND DEPRESSED AND I NEED TO WORK ON THAT SO I CAN BE A BETTER SISTER. I’LL DO THAT AS SOON AS I GET BACK.

  WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE PART I’M NOT SURE ABOUT. THE SECOND PART OF MY PLAN IS PRETTY CHANCY, TO BE HONEST, AND IF IT DOESN’T WORK PERFECTLY IT MAY TAKE ME A WHILE TO GET HOME. I WISH I COULD BE MORE DEFINITIVE ABOUT THAT. IF IT COMES DOWN TO IT AND I DON’T COME BACK, I THINK IT’S MORE THAN A FAIR TRADE. YOU WERE ALWAYS THE BEST OF US BOTH.

  YOUR GHOST, THOUGHT, IS A DEEPLY SPITEFUL BITCH.

  LOVE,

  INGRID

  P.S. GO UPSTAIRS, GET SOME MORE WATER, AND CALL AN AMBULANCE.

  Selma reread the note until her eyes refused to focus; then she carefully folded it up and put it in the pocket of her robe. Trust Ingrid to be cryptic, and for her attempts at reassurance to sound worrisome. Selma decided to expect her at any moment.

  Selma was as stubborn as her sister. Clearly Ingrid thought she would need the walker to make it to the stairs, so Selma made up her mind not to use it. But she changed her mind as soon as she tried to stand. Her body was in full protest, every nerve and muscle screaming. She grabbed onto the chair and weakly made her way around to the walker.

  It was about seven feet from the chair to the base of the stairs; Selma was sure it took her at least twenty minutes, and sweat was pouring off her by the time she got there. She found another, taller, glass of water on the bottom step, with another note:

  YOU’RE DOING FINE.

  Episode 10

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  BITS AND PIECES

  Joy drove back up the bluffs. The strange quiet that had followed Prince Stolas’s appearance had been replaced by a convergence of sirens along the riverbank. Whoever had been pursuing her, Joy was confident that they would hang back, or disappear to wherever it was they had appeared from.

  “More authorities, I take it,” said Lutrineas. “This dimension makes me itchy.”

  “I find it hard to believe that there are no police where you come from, or no government,” said Joy.

  “Where I come from, there is no one, period.” The bitterness in Lutrineas’s voice was such that Joy decided not to pursue the topic.

  Abel Bouchard was outside the McMonigal Arms when Joy pulled up. He came running toward the curb.

  “My truck!”

  “Yeah,” said Joy. “I’m really sorry.” The impact had been in the driver’s-side rear, and the truck bed on that side was a dented wreck. Joy didn’t want to mention it, but the steering had been pulling to the left on the way back as well.

  Abel seemed to be stunned into silence.

  “Abel, we’ll get it fixed, but right now I need to know if Ken is OK.”

  “Ken is OK.” He said it in a tone that left Joy unsure whether he was just repeating the last thing she had said. “He’s upstairs,” Abel went on. “The others are with him.”

  Joy offered him his keys, but he just shook his head.

  “No, keep them. The blue one opens the outside door. I think I’m going to stay out here for a minute.”
r />   “I really am sorry,” said Joy. “We were being chased.”

  Abel did not respond. Joy hurried up to the front door of the building and unlocked it with the key Abel had pointed out.

  “Aren’t you going to say something wry about humans?” she asked Lutrineas. “Something about lack of perspective or something?”

  “No,” said the trickster god, still wearing Philip Fitzgerald’s shape. “It was a nice truck, and you really messed it up.”

  Joy rolled her eyes and ran up the stairs to the third floor.

  The window on the landing there gave them a perfect view of Prince Stolas on the river as it twisted its head, sparks flying from one of its eyes. It lurched forward as if to power through the summoning circle…and then it shrieked, there was a bang and a flash of light, and it was gone.

  “Seems like Ingwiersen had it under control all along,” said Lutrineas.

  “Maybe,” said Joy. “Or maybe the conjure-and-capture teams got here fast.”

  Yves Deschamp met them at the door to the library. His orange aura was sweating bright yellow; clearly he was afraid that things were spinning out of control. Joy knew the feeling.

  “Abel said Professor Song is OK?”

  “He is,” said Yves. “Beyond that, I don’t know what to think. We’ve been compromised in a way I never thought possible…” He shook his head and stepped aside. “Perhaps you can get some answers.” He spoke quietly, and nodded toward the back of the room. “The others are down there.”

  Ken Song was sitting on a leather couch, with Simone beside him. Cyril Lanfair was pacing in front of a wooden chair next to the couch.

  Tied to the chair, looking deflated, was Bebe Stapleford.

  “Cyril found her trying to strangle Ken with a belt,” said Yves.

  The way Cyril Lanfair was pacing in front of Bebe was almost protective, but Joy noticed that he wasn’t looking at Bebe even when he turned. “I walked in from downstairs and I found them. She was…she didn’t put up much of a fight. I just pulled her off him. Ken barely seemed to realize it was happening.”