by SM Reine
Take hold of yourself, said a voice in my mind.
The voice caused me to swim up from some dark and horrible void. The voice came down from above, as if through an opening into a well.
Calm down. You will be fine.
The voice pushed through the crazed thoughts, through the madness that threatened to scramble my brain. In fact, I could see the words materialize in my head: CALM DOWN. YOU WILL BE FINE. The words were scrawled in something yellow, against a fleeting and hectic background. I read the words over and over, graffiti on my turbulent mind.
They’re just a bunch of mice, pal.
But I hate mice.
Obviously.
I knew the voice. It was the old man. He was in my head. Simultaneously stripping my life and saving it as well.
Of course I’m saving your life. Wouldn’t do me any good to have you turn into mice food now. I need all the years I can get.
How old are you? I asked.
Old enough to forget, he said. Now come back, Albert Shipway. I’m right here. Open your eyes.
I can’t find my eyes. I can’t find myself. I’m...so...freaked. What about the mice?
The mice are gone. I’ve fixed that for you. They will never come back again.
Where are you?
Right in front of you, Albert.
I was spinning, turning and twisting, like a kite out of control. I didn’t know which way was up, which way was down. I couldn’t control my body and could barely control my thoughts. It was like drunken bed-spins without the drunk or the bed.
This was madness. Or maybe just another detour on the road to madness I’d been on for the last couple of days. An off ramp to Coo-Coo Land, fuel up and grab a Big Gulp, miles and miles to go.
You are not going mad. Take my hand.
Where is it?
I have you, Albert. Do you feel my hand?
No.
Panic set in again. I couldn’t feel my body. Hell, I’d rather feel scrabbling, skittering rodent feet than nothing at all.
A mighty tug yanked me forward through the void, focusing my thoughts and aligning my body.
Another tug. A light was coming toward me. I was able to orient myself. The spinning stopped.
Oh, God. I must be dead.
Another tug, and I flopped forward, and when I opened my eyes, I was looking up into the smiling face of the old man.
“Welcome back, Albert,” he said softly.
I looked around me, lying in a pool of my own sweat. Scuttling along the floor, drifting and swirling slowly, were hundreds upon hundreds of dust bunnies.
Or perhaps dust mice.
Tabby nodded encouragement at me from across the room. I had survived my worst fear.
But the day was young.
28
Tabby scrambled down from the desk. The sweat on her brow and upper lip was the only indication that her cop cool had heated a little. She gripped me under my arm and helped me to my feet.
“Quit your blubbering,” she said. “We have a kid to save and a murderer to stop.” She paused, and her face softened considerably, reminding me so much of Amanda. “But first, let’s get some food in you.”
“What, like some toadstools and bat livers?” My voice didn’t sound my own. In fact, it seemed better suited to a bullfrog. Maybe I’d been changed from the Prince Charming I’d once been. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I wonder why.”
“No,” she said, steadying me. “It’s from lack of energy. You’ve been sapped dry.”
“You know a lot about this shit,” I said.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the first person Nana’s cursed.”
And probably not the last. Even though she’s dead.
“Seems like a good gig,” I said. “Your grandmother curses, and your great grandad undoes the curse for a price.”
“The cursor and the cursee consume each other. She died cursing the two of you. In magic, what goes around comes around threefold. That’s one of the reasons I never took up the family trade.”
I almost feel bad for the crazy old bat.
I immediately regretted the thought. Could the old man still read mind? He hadn’t seemed all that worked up over his daughter’s death. I paused a moment, cocking my head, but there was no voice there. Guess the connection had been broken.
“Still,” I said, “look at him. The only one who benefits is him.”
The old man was standing next to the massive floor-to-ceiling window, smoking contentedly on a pipe. Piled outside the windowsill like gray snow were mounds of dust. The dust was quickly evaporating, blowing away in the Pacific breeze until it was easy to forget it had once been a million mice.
Unlike the dust, the old man looked positively vibrant. His skin was touched with a rosy pink. Hell, even the lines on his face seemed less defined. He looked a decade or two younger, and he whistled cheerfully around the stem of his pipe as if he’d just scored a date with Betty White.
I staggered to a nice long sideboard that bore a fancy crystal decanter full of amber liquid. “Just how much of my essence did he take?” I asked, yanking the plug with a moist bloop.
He turned to me, his hearing apparently strengthened by my stolen spirit juice. I think he chuckled a little under his robust response. “Just a few years. Tops.”
“The deal was for a year,” I exclaimed. “I told you this bastard wins.”
“No,” said Tabby. “He’s not the only one. You benefit as well. Do you see any mice?”
“Perhaps they were all in my head,” I countered.
She shrugged. “Perhaps. Then again, you are the one that must live in your head.”
She was right. I would have gone mad with fear. Or at least close to the edge. The old man had helped me deal with my fear, helped me come out on the other side.
Yes, I did.
You’re still here?
Not for long. The connection is fading.
You look great, I thought. You’re welcome. See what happens when I do THIS.
I took three big, painful slugs of the stuff. It must have been cognac, but it may have been as old as Napolean. I coughed and wheezed, but my blood warmed a little.
His laughter rippled through my head like from a pebble dropped in a puddle, but it was already fading. Au contraire. YOU are welcome. Look at your arms.
I did. They were covered in tiny half-moon bite marks, each welling red and tender. Some had broken flesh.
They were real, I thought.
Real enough.
Thank you. Just hope I don’t get rabies.
He turned to me from the massive window and smiled kindly. His voice had faded to a whisper in my head. And you are right, she was a crazy, old bat. Wherever she is, I think she’s going to find great comfort in that.
He’d used the future tense, I noticed. Which made me wonder if he was secretly working on some sort of resurrection spell.
“Now go find my grandnephew,” he said. “He will be, I think, with my niece’s murderer.” He paused. “Find them both before the killer’s greatest fear finds her first.”
Her father. The back-from-the-dead, mountain-of-mud serial killer. A ghost with a bucket list.
He’s not a ghost. He’s a golem. I could now barely make out the old man’s voice in my head, and so I spoke aloud.
“Um, great. A dead serial killer gets an upgrade. So, any thoughts on how to stop a golem?”
I reached for the decanter again but Tabby grabbed my hand. “Even I know that one.” She pulled me through the library, leaving behind swirling gray dust clouds. She called over her shoulder, “Thank you, Dada. I owe you one.”
“This gentleman has fared better than many of your other dates,” he said, his voice even stronger now.
“This isn’t a date,” Tabby and I said in unison.
Outside, in the light of the setting sun, surrounded by a low mist of swirling gray dust, dust that had once formed the bodies of thousands of
black-and-white mice, I asked Tabby, “How do you stop a golem?”
She cradled a sack she’d taken from the house, which I imagined was filled with shrunken heads, monkey paws, and other wacky talismans. “You remove its head.”
“Ah,” I said. “Piece of cake.”
“Now let’s get to that cabin.”
“I’m too drained to hang on a bike right now.”
She gave me a look, tossed a key ring in the air, and snatched it with a dramatic flourish. “Dada said we could borrow his Jag.”
“Wow. He’s a nice guy for a creepy old soul stealer.”
29
While I wheeled out of the driveway and away from the mansion where I’d left God-only-knew-how-many years of my life, she rummaged in her mystery sack. I was relieved when she came out with a couple of sandwiches. She unwrapped one and handed it to me.
“Here,” she said. “You need to get your strength back. We don’t know what we’ll run into up there.”
Keeping one eye on the street, I peered suspiciously at the sandwich. “Is it earthly?”
“Peanut butter and jelly,” she said.
“Heavenly,” I said, taking a big bite.
We drove in silence for a while, chewing and ruminating. The Jag was smooth and powerful and a little out of my league, but I held it steady. When we got to the main road, she gave me directions back onto the freeway. Now we were heading north on the 57 freeway.
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“Crestline. In the mountains.”
“You really think this ‘Louise Sanderson’ is Gerda?”
“It’s all we’ve got right now.”
“Can’t you dial up some of that Mead magic and read some tea leaves or something?”
“Don’t be a child, Al. You didn’t lose that many years. And why do you sound funny?”
“My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. Shouldn’t we alert the airports and train stations in case she’s trying to flee?”
“Ideally. But to do that, I would have to convince my commander that we have enough evidence to warrant that scale of search. And that would open us up to a number of questions, such as why we fled from Nana’s death scene and why we didn’t report a crime.”
“The nurse saw Max Richter. She can back us up.”
“You think the night nurse of a home for retired witches hasn’t learned the risks of breaching confidentiality?”
“Yeah, right. Her tongue might get turned into a possum or something.”
“Besides that, all we have are all those squashed mice at your place, assuming they haven’t turned to dust. That’s hardly cause to alert every airport and train station and taxi service and bus service in Southern California.”
“But the golem—”
“Yes, the golem,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a banana. “Another thing we can’t explain to the police. Along with real proof that your wife was involved in the murder of my sister.”
“But your grandmother must surely have some proof. How else would she have known that Louise and Gerda were the same person, and linked it all back to me?”
“We’ll never know, but she obviously figured it out. If they were playing paranormal paddycakes together, who knows?”
“If she had some proof, why didn’t she go to the police?”
“Why go to the police when you can handle things your own way?”
I shuddered again. “But why?”
“Tradition. To exact her own justice.”
“Then why would she involve me if she knew Gerda was the killer?”
Tabby looked at me sideways, munching her sandwich and smacking her lips as she talked. “Think about it. You can’t really be this dense.”
“I’m having a hard time thinking, let alone thinking logically. I just had my mind read and I’m not sure if I’m all the way back yet.”
“You had an affair with Amanda. You cheated on your wife. You cheated on a serial killer waiting to happen. You took a frail, barren woman and hit her right where it hurt the most—in her ovaries.”
“But—”
“Keep your ‘but’ out of my face, Shipway. That’s the facts. It doesn’t matter that your wife is a crazy psycho. Thanks to your uncanny inability to hide simple letters, Gerda discovered the depth of your affair. You told her it had been a one-time deal. Wrong. She saw in those letters your true feelings for my sister, and it put her over the edge. You put a serial killer-in-waiting over the edge. Do you get it? She no doubt stalked Amanda for some time, watched her closely, became increasingly interested in her life, and did the whole ‘fake identity’ thing. And the jealousy had time to build while she must have been playing with the black magic she’d learned from her father and Nana. All those recovered memories must have come in handy for that.
“And then little Petey slides out into the world and looks exactly like you. That must have been what pushed her fully over the edge. She killed my sister, kidnapped the baby she could never have, and now we have no idea what games she’s playing. Had you kept your own mouse zipped and taken care of your failing marriage responsibly, then you would have been divorced and you and Amanda could have had a healthy relationship.”
We were silent for a while as I digested all of this. The freeway was busy, but not yet crowded enough to keep us from going at a decent clip.
“Okay,” I said. “I made a lot of mistakes. But Gerda was just crazy enough to make a run at either me or Amanda and the baby, even had I done everything right.”
“Chances are good that your wife was crazy enough to stalk you after the divorce no matter what, true. But, at least the pregnancy would have been legit and most likely everyone would have lived happily ever after.”
“Okay, we established why your grandmother cursed me, established that I single-handedly doomed your sister to a heinous death, and that I had a hand in the kidnapping of my own child. Not to mention, some of these actions led to the death of your grandmother and the actual loss of some of my own life. I can pretty well say that I am one royal fuck-up.” I turned to Tabby, who was stuffing the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. “Why don’t you just put a gun to my head and blow my brains out? That would solve pretty much everybody’s problem.”
“Okay, Martyr Boy. On some level, I do hate the fact that you ever came into our lives. You have caused so much harm. But...”
“But what?”
“Amanda loved you. She loved you with all her heart. You were very good to her, except for that one big lie, and even though it broke her heart to give you up, she was blessed with a beautiful baby. A baby that gave her love and joy every single day.” She paused. “You’re just a human. Just a man.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you lost your sister. I loved her very much.”
“I know you did.”
“And if I had any magic within my power, I would have surrounded her with a protective spell or something. I would have given my soul to save her and our baby.”
The traffic was thinning. Soon we were on the 210, which would eventually take us up to the San Bernardino Mountains. And Crestline.
“We can’t go to the police and we can’t rely solely on magic,” Tabby said. “Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.”
“We know Gerda is unstable. So how do we make sure things don’t get out of control?”
Tabitha reached into her purse and showed me her pistol. I wasn’t up on guns but this one looked mean enough to punch a hole in a tank. “Top shooting marks the last four years.”
The peanut butter went as solid as stone in my belly. “Please don’t kill her.”
“I don’t plan on it.”
“Do you mean that?”
“She killed my sister. Slit her throat and watched her bleed. Of course I want to blow her brains out. But I pledged to uphold the law, and that runs deeper than my craving for revenge.”
I believed her. I believed she would be a police officer first
and a distraught sister second. But much of that would depend on Gerda. And whether or not she was in the cabin. And what she had done to Petey. And whether she really was dabbling in witchcraft. And whether there were any residual curses flying around. And whether Max Richter showed up. And—
“We have to be ready for anything,” she said.
That could have been in the running for “Understatement of the Year,” along with “I’m a little bit thirsty.” I was tempted to turn the wheel and go back to the relative safety of my normal life, where the worst I had to worry about was a stray rodent or two. Or two thousand. But I kept driving. “If she’s up there, what do you think she’s doing?”
“If she’d been planning the murder and kidnapping for some time, she probably has quite an elaborate plan worked out. More than likely she has fake passports, for both her and Petey. She’s probably going to cut and dye his hair, and she’s smart enough to ditch the Louise Sanderson identity, too.”
The craving for a drink kited out of the blue as the cognac wore off. The sun was sinking in the west now, and it threw gorgeous streaks of purple and pink across the high clouds. The view was so vivid that it deserved a toast. A whole evening’s worth of toasts.
“Remember,” said Tabitha. “Our goal here is to get Petey safely away from Gerda. Once we confirm she has the child, then we can call for back-ups. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said. “What happens when your commander finds out you’ve been moonlighting on this case?”
“Let me worry about that,” she said. “Let’s go get our boy.”
Our boy.
30
It was something I’d been putting off, and my excuse was that I was too busy staying alive to ask. But the truth is that I’d been afraid, because seeing him would make it all real.
We were still on the 210 freeway. Traffic was picking up, and we were moving at an agonizingly slow pace. I checked the speedometer. Thirty-three miles per hour, slow enough that I could see the faces of oncoming motorists peering at the tinted window, wondering what sort of rich asshole was driving the Jag while they were stuck inside Hyundais.