by T. S. Mann
“Okay, so what do Manichean swordsmen want with me?”
“Well the thing of it is, most Strangers view the Beyond as something to be reasonably afraid of and avoided at all costs, but generally, we just think it’s just a neutral force. It’s no more intrinsically evil than, say, lava or hard radiation. Just stay away from it and it will leave you be, and if you must get near it, treat it with incredible care and you’ll be okay.
“According to the dogma of the Unity Blade, however, the Beyond is referred to as the Adversary, and it is actually an intelligent and evil being with consciousness and intent which is actively plotting the destruction of Reality itself. Consequently, Church members tend to be very paranoid in their dealings with it and with other supernatural beings. The more conservative members tend to see the hand of the Adversary everywhere and in nearly everyone who isn’t a member of their congregation. The Boston congregation is very conservative.”
“Uh-huh. Let me guess. They think me and Luke are nephilim just because we had both our Insights during a pagan ritual performed by a nephilim’s witch coven.”
He blinked twice as he considered his own words.
“Crap. When I say it like that it sounds like they might have a point. So what are we going to do about it?”
“Well, right now, you aren’t doing anything. You’re safe here. MIT and its surrounding neighborhoods are the domain of the Invisible College, and it is magically protected against uninvited intruders. We will spend this morning teaching you the basics of how to safely cast simple magical spells, focusing on defense and basic attacks. Then, we’ll do some exercises designed to improve your connection with the Bodhisattva so that you can start reviewing your own memories and see if there’s something you’ve forgotten that could lead us to Lindsay and Luke.”
“Didn’t you already look through my memories?”
“Just a light surface scan, really. I didn’t internalize the memories completely, but I just have this nagging feeling that there’s something important that you saw or heard that could be helpful to us. Unfortunately, psychically speaking, I’m not at my best, and I can’t focus my full brain power on this matter.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, just bad timing. I have recently begun some ... special personal projects that required me to, well, to be smarter than I normally am. So, I partitioned my brain into several individual sub-brains, with one handling all my day-to-day routine functions and the rest devoting themselves 24-7 to the issues I’ve been researching.
“The part of my brain which is not committed to those projects simply doesn’t have the processing power to sit and review all your memories until it figures out what we’ve both forgotten, and I can’t undo the partition until the sub-brains have finished their work. Later on, I’ll show you some techniques for improving your own intelligence so that you can work on it yourself.”
Matt looked at him in amazement. “Wait, sub ... brains? You divided your brain into separate parts? Is that a normal thing to do?”
The old man shrugged.
“It’s a psychomancer thing to do. I usually keep at least two trains of thought going at a time, but rarely as many as I’m running right now. It’s a high-level psychic effect, but it’s not hard once your psychic attunement is high enough. But for right now, we start with something simpler.”
Doc moved the dishes to the sink and then opened a drawer, from which he pulled several candles and a silver candlestick holder which he brandished with a flourish.
“Great,” Matt sighed. “More freaking candles.”
Moments earlier…
In the drive, Electra put Luke’s coat in the side compartment of her bike and then sat down on the seat, fuming. While she had no emotional attachment to Matt, she had serious issues with Doc’s brand of “this is for your own good” psychic manipulation. Those same issues had caused her to challenge him to a wizard’s duel the first (and last) time he tried that with her, and she had little doubt that he was merely trying to get rid of her in case her obvious displeasure gave the boy a hint that his own mind had been altered.
She glared back at the house, wondering once again whether the Invisible College was so much better than the Church of the Unity Blade after all. She put those thoughts aside as she pulled out her phone to call Ratcliffe.
“Eddie, it’s Electra. How are you doing?”
“You tell me, babe. I’m at my place with a bag packed. Should I be running for my life?”
“Actually, I think the old woman kind of likes you.”
Eddie was silent for a second. “Ya know something? That doesn’t answer the question of whether I should be running for my life at all!”
“Perhaps, but for the moment, let’s assume you’re safe. I need you to set up a meeting between me and a few players. Siobhan and her boys. Wiccanette. The Cowboy. Anyone else you think might be worth talking to.”
He laughed. “All at once?!? You want to gather the Irish werewolf mafia, a sentient pagan computer program, and the world’s most dangerous bounty hunter in the same room?!?”
“Of course not. Schedule them at least an hour apart if possible, and don’t let any of them know I’m talking to the others.”
“Great. I'm playing personal secretary to a crazy woman. And why am I setting you up with the Cowboy? Don’t you and he go way back?”
“We had a falling out a few years ago,” she said somewhat evasively.
“Uh-huh. Is that code for ‘he wants to kill me’?”
“No,” she answered. “Possibly,” she added internally.
“Pfft! You’re playing with fire, babe, ya know that? And your account balance is getting close to zero.”
“Doctor Ellington and the College will cover me. I’m sure they’ll make this worth your while.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Okay, it’s your funeral. I’ll call you when I’ve got something set up.”
She put the phone away, kicked started the bike, and made her way to the nearby MIT campus. Armitage Hall was an older building at the north end of campus that few students ever entered. Few staff either, for that matter – the Invisible College used the building as its research and administrative facility, and several powerful magical veils caused mundanes in the area to ignore it almost completely.
Electra pulled out the coat and put a cloaking spell up over the bike, which she left in a no-parking zone next to the loading bay. Once inside, she walked down two flights of stairs to a sub-basement and stopped at a set of double doors bearing a sign that read “BOILER ROOM. STAFF ONLY.”
To her right was a large Japanese print hung on the wall depicting a traditional samurai warrior. She turned to it and said the pass-code in a clear voice. There was no response, but the samurai did not leap from the print to slice her head off either, so she opened the door and went inside.
Past the door was a small receptionist desk with a young black woman reading a book and listening to an iPod. The book was Conversational Chinese and the music was the White Stripes. Electra knew the girl vaguely: a twenty-something Stranger named Carla from Toronto who was masquerading as an MIT grad student like so many young Collegians before her. The girl looked up at her and pulled out one of her ear buds.
“I’m looking for Bryce and Widget,” Electra inquired.
“They’re in the Panopticon. I think they’re waiting on you.” Carla reached over and passed her left hand over a silver paperweight, clearing Electra to pass through the final layer of magical defenses before returning to her textbook. Electra passed by and made her way down the hall to the nerve center of the order.
The Panopticon was a large room, more than fifty feet on each side, containing a maze of CTV screens and computer monitors that displayed images from all over Boston. The far wall was dominated by a mammoth 200-inch screen taking up most of its area. Presently, the main screen appeared to show a satellite view of the Greater Metropolitan area with an overlay of occult symbols scrolling across the bottom. Per
ched in front of it were two Strangers sharing a ratty green sofa.
Bryce Caulfield was intently studying the symbols as they rolled across while sipping from a bottle of very cheap beer. He looked like a typical frat boy (or as typical of the breed as MIT frat boys got), with a faded t-shirt carrying the logo of a local bar, raggedy shorts, and a sun visor perched on his shaggy mop top.
Widget, his wife, was hunched over laptop as she sat cross-legged on the couch. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she wore a pink sweatshirt with the logo of whichever sorority she currently pretended to be a member. Their laid-back personae were lies, the product of carefully constructed fiction cloaks designed to help them remain undercover within the school’s undergraduate population.
In fact, the married couple had been with the Boston chapterhouse since long before Electra was born, and from the pictures she’d seen, neither had aged noticeably since Nixon was President.
“Bryce, Widget? Any progress?”
The boyish Stranger turned to her with a weary smile. “Not really. We’ve done a pretty thorough search of the whole city for corrupted ley lines and unregistered anomalies. If Lindsay is working magic at all, it’s just low-key stuff and completely outside the presence of any mundanes.”
He reached down and pulled another beer out of an ice chest next to the couch. His biotic shields likely made it impossible for him to get drunk, but the need for beer was part of the cloak he wore. He offered one to Electra who politely declined.
“Widget’s working on a spybot to link up every CCTV camera in the city to try and find her through facial recognition, but it’s slow going. Our eyes and ears inside the Blade say they don’t have any leads either.”
That surprised Electra. She was not aware the Invisible College had informants within the Blade. She held up Luke’s coat.
“Ellington wanted to know if you could get anything off this.”
Widget looked up. “Sure, just gimme a sec.” She finished her coding and then looked up towards the ceiling.
“MARVIN!” she called.
From somewhere above, a deep laconic voice sighed with exaggerated boredom and poorly hidden contempt. “Yes, milady?”
“I’m uploading a search program. Please insert it into all Boston metro law enforcement servers immediately.”
“Sigh. Very well. I suppose it will pass the time.”
Widget jumped up and took the coat from Electra who was still looking up at the ceiling. “You programmed your AI to be obnoxious and surly?”
“It’s not sentient, it just has a really good verbal interface. We thought it would be funny to program it to sound like Marvin.”
“Marvin?”
“The Paranoid Android.” Electra stared at her blankly. “From Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”
Electra crooked an eyebrow. “That would be a book, right?”
Widget shrugged and took the coat over to a nearby work table where she laid it out flat. “I’m guessing you don’t read much for fun.”
“My life leaves me little time for pop culture.”
Widget looked back at her, somewhat sadly. “That’s a shame. Perhaps you should consider trading your life in for one that’s not quite so grim.”
Electra did not respond, so Widget turned back to the coat. From a cluttered toolbox, she pulled what looked like a fluorescent UV light wand, which she plugged into a terminal built into the table. A screen mounted above the table flickered to light.
Widget slowly ran the UV wand over the coat, whistling to herself as she did. Electra did not recognize the tune, which was Monty Python’s Always Look on The Bright Side of Life. Video of the coat appeared on the screen, soon accompanied by scrolling sigils of the same sort that played across the big screen.
“This is the missing brother’s coat, right?” Widget asked. “Luke or something?”
“Apparently.”
“Hmm. Based on this, I’d put good money on Luke being a necrotheurge, which is troubling, considering his current situation. A nephilim could do a lot of damage with even an untrained necrotheurge on the Day of the Dead. Looks like the coat itself is heavily tied to the Reaper. It’s got some powerful stealth magic, and if the wearer is attuned to the Reaper, it might be able to open portals straight into Deadworld.”
She shivered at that. Electra was less impressed – she’d been to the Underworld many times – but Widget was numenologist. Attuned as she was to the creative magic of the Shaman, the cold sterility associated with the lands of the dead ran against her nature.
Once she had completed her initial scan of the coat, she walked over to a nearby storage closet. After puttering around inside for a few moments, she emerged with a life-sized (and anatomically correct) male blow-up doll under one arm and a bundle of clothes under the other. She dropped the clothes onto the table and handed the doll to Electra.
“Here, hold this for a second.”
Electra eyed the doll with distaste. “Is this some kind of joke?!?”
Widget rolled her eyes.
“Honestly, you run around Boston dressed like Catwoman, but you’re offended by a blowup doll? We need a human representation for sympathetic magic. We’ve tried department store mannequins, but they were too stiff, and it was hard to get the clothes on and off in a hurry. Blow-up dolls are easier to dress, and they also usually have open mouths, which are good for holding inscribed sigils. Now would you kindly hold the thing so I can dress it?”
Reluctantly, Electra gingerly grabbed the doll by its waist as Widget stuffed the doll’s legs into a pair of black sweatpants. Then, she put a black sweatshirt over its head before sticking its arms into the trench coat. Finally, she topped the doll off with a short black wig.
“There we go. That sort of matches Doc’s description. Bryce, love, are you about ready?” she called out.
Bryce wandered over from another storage locker nearby. In response to Widget, he merely waved his right hand, which was encased in a jewel-encrusted silver gauntlet that rattled as he wriggled his fingers. Electra thought it looked surprisingly menacing for such a laid-back personality.
“What’s that for?”
Bryce donned a pair of aviator shades and gave a smug grin. “Well, aside from making me look hella-cool, it also shoots spiritual lightning in case our plastic pal here gets frisky.”
Over at the table, Widget took out a notepad and wrote LUKE on it with a felt tip pen. Tearing off that page, she folded it three times and then stuffed the page into the blowup doll’s open mouth.
“You see, Electra," she said as she worked, "there’s a good chance I’m about to stick my hand into the Great Beyond and wriggle my fingers. He’s going to be standing on one side of me ready to shoot anything that follows me back out to bite my arm off. You’re going to be standing on the other side doing the same.”
Widget gestured towards where she wanted the other woman to stand. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t shoot anything valuable, least of all my husband.” With that she leaned the doll against the table, took five steps back, and raised her arms into the air.
"Great Kalfu, you who stand at the crossroads where all roads meet. Hear my call and heed my prayer. Let this effigy be as one with him who we seek. Let its eyes by his eyes. Let its mouth be his mouth. Let its words by his words. Open his eyes. Open his eyes. Open his eyes!”
Nothing seemed to happen. Electra looked from Widget to the doll and back again. She was just about to offer up a cutting remark when Widget held up her hand in a gesture of silence without ever taking her eyes off the effigy.
After a lengthy pause, a tiny sound emerged from the doll’s open mouth. A single, barely audible ... snicker. Then, another. And then, three more in quick succession. Soon, the doll was quite obviously laughing – not a human laugh, but a rasping, unnatural sound, as a creature of plastic and air strove to demonstrate its mirth.
The three Strangers glanced at each other, as the distorted giggling sent soft chills down t
heir backs. Suddenly, the doll jerked and bent over at the waist. It should have fallen to the ground, but it seemed that its inflated legs were now strong enough to bear its weight.
Widget took a step back, and in response, both Electra and Bryce trained their respective weapons on the doll, whose laughter only grew in volume and hysteria. Then, though still bent over, the doll lifted its head to look directly at Widget. Its eyes were green now. They looked like the pleading eyes of a desperate human being.
“Bryce!!!” Widget yelled.
Her husband and fellow Collegian pointed at the monstrosity with his gloved hand and quickly bellowed an incantation. “Leavenbolt! Sex Toy! Burn Notice!”
Electra needed no incantation to activate her weapons of choice. She merely brought one of the Desert Eagles to bear. But before either could open fire, the doll whipped around and crouched. An instant later, a blazing arc of magical electricity and a short round of enchanted bullets each hit the doll but bounced off the enchanted coat it wore.
Widget yelled again. “Chaos magic! It’s boosting the coat’s invulnerability!”
Electra and Bryce each abandoned their attacks and stepped back to assume more defensive positions. Bryce also yelled for Widget to take cover as the doll whipped around to face her again. Its eyes were still brilliant green pupils planted incongruously into the shiny vinyl face of a blowup doll, but its mouth was now a grinning rictus that stretched nearly to its ears.
Still laughing hysterically, the doll opened its mouth wide, revealing multiple rows of spiny, needle-like teeth, and it raised its hands to reveal sharp bony talons where crude vinyl hands once were. It crouched and then leapt towards Widget. At the last possible second, she raised her hands and cried out.
“Aegis!”
The force of the creature’s attack still knocked her to the ground, but its talons were held fast by her shield, its gibbering and giggling mouth inches from biting her face off. Bryce pointed his mailed fist in their direction but did not fire.