“No, I’m just messing with you. I don’t know if Brinkman’s bumper is dented or not.”
“Dominic, did we ever—”
“No.” He shook his head. “We never checked Brinkman’s bumper, but that’s something I can do this morning, as well.”
“No, I want Carlos to do that. It’s time to turn up the heat a little. Carlos?”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to set up surveillance on Brinkman. With news of Cohen’s death, I expect plenty of activity. If he’s involved in this mess, then the others will be calling him. See where he goes, who he meets. You know the drill.”
“Got it.”
“Dominic.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep your eyes and ears on Rachel Marx. She and Brinkman are the two wild cards. They’re the only two with a key to the safe. Nothing could have gone down without one of them. This thing with Cohen should force someone’s hand. We need to be on it when that happens.
“You can count on me.”
“I know I can.”
“So, what about you? Are you going back to keep an eye on Shaul?”
“No, I have something more important to do.”
“More important than this case?”
“Yeah, if you ask Lilith, she’ll tell you it is.”
Chapter 22
I left the Justice Center around nine-thirty and headed for the woods to find Jerome. He wasn’t at his campsite, as I expected. Instead, I found him a few hundred feet away, pitching zip balls into a hole in the ground the size of a tanker truck. He seemed unusually excited, and not in a bad way. I called to him before getting too close, so as not to startle him and find myself on the wrong end of one of his zips.
“Jerome!”
He turned his head to look over his shoulder, but did not step away from the hole. “Bossman!”
As I got closer, I noticed something unusual. Unlike the zip balls Lilith and I make, which take time to spin from scratch, Jerome’s zip balls appeared instantly. All he had to do was launch the one in his hand and another immediately appeared in its place. I also noticed the colors of his zips were different. Some were white, some blue, or pink and others a soft yellow-orange like a dim light bulb.
I stepped closer, relaxing my guard. “Jerome, what are you doing?”
“Bossman, look. Bad guy go boom! Ha-ha!”
“What?” I stepped to the edge of the hole and looked down. “Whoa! Jerome, what have you got there?”
He pointed with his left hand before launching another zip ball with his right. “Is malodyte, Bossman. See. Boom!”
“I see that,” I said, and then backed away a couple of steps.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. The little shit had carved a six-by-six meter hole in the earth four meters deep and filled it with malodytes. For sport, he was firing zip balls into the hole and seeing how many he could vaporize at once.
Of course, not all his zip balls were white hot and energized for total vaporization. The cooler ones, the pink and yellow zips, were only hot enough to maim the malodytes, ripping an arm off here, a leg there.
I cupped my hand to Jerome’s shoulder and eased him back from the edge. “Jerome, stop for a minute, please.”
He turned his hand over and let an orange zip roll from his palm onto the ground. It fizzled and dispersed without incident. Down in the pit, the growl of injured and angry malodytes raised the hairs on my arms. It reminded me of times back in the Eighth Sphere when Jerome and I would do pretty much the same thing. We’d dig a pit, cover the top over with branches and leaves and wait for something to come along and fall in. When that happened, we’d pelt it with stones, boulders, whatever it took to kill the thing. And yes, a few times, we even caught ourselves a malodyte. In any case, whatever we caught, it usually ended up as supper. Malodytes were no exception.
“Jerome, why would you fill a pit with malodytes and bombard them with zip balls?”
He looked at me the way Carlos sometimes does when I ask him why he collects the sugar packets from the sweetener basket at The Percolator. In Carlos’ case, it’s always, ‘because it’s free’. I tell him it’s free to use what he needs, not what he wants. I suspected in Jerome’s case, the opposite was true.
“Bossman,” Jerome said, pointing behind him and into the pit. “Malodyte bad. You no see malodytes in hole?”
“Yes, I see them, but that’s because you put them in there.” I looked up and waved my hand to encompass the surrounding woods. “We don’t have malodytes here.”
He pointed to the pit again. “Malodyte in hole. You look. See for self.”
There was no arguing with him. He and Carlos were two peas in a pod, and if I learned anything over the years arguing with Carlos, it was that I could not win. I gestured toward the hole and instructed Jerome to fill it in.”
“Bossman sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
With a simple blink, it was done. The pit was filled in level. Pine needles and ground clutter carpeted the spot as if nothing were ever there.
“That’s good,” I said, but then found myself entertaining a creepy thought. “Jerome? Tell me you got rid of the malodytes before you filled the hole in.”
He shook his head. I thought of asking him if he could do it after the fact, but decided that could open up a whole other can of worms. I decided to let it go, assuming some archeologist would discover their remains eventually, say in another millennium, long after the rest of us had parted this earth.
With the excitement over, I took his hand and started back toward camp. “Time is short, little buddy,” I told him. “Soon, you’re going to have to go back where you came from, back through the portal.”
“Bossman come, too?”
I let that one go for a minute. “You know this thing you did with the malodytes and this dark forest you’ve created here. It’s not normal for you. Even back home in the—”
“Home!”
“Yes, back home you couldn’t do those things. You didn’t have that sort of power.”
“Jerome do magick?”
“Yes,” I said and laughed. “You most certainly did magick. No doubt about it, you are a very powerful witch, my friend.”
He smiled proudly at that. Thumbing his puffed up chest, he said, “Jerome good witch.”
I nodded. “Yes, a good, but powerful witch. That’s why some very special company came to see Lilith and me last night—came to see us about you.”
“They malodytes?”
“No, they weren’t malodytes. They were spirits from the coven. They want to help you.”
“Jerome no need help.”
“Well, they think you do. See, you recently acquired something that belongs to them. They want you to give it back, and to do that, I need you to come with me.”
“No. Jerome stay here.”
“Jerome, please. This is important. I need to take you to Lilith, who’ll then take you through her black mirror, which is nothing more than another portal. There, you’ll meet the spirits of the coven and they’ll help you.”
“Bossman go see spirits?”
“No, I don’t think so. You and Lilith have to make that journey alone. Oh, but it won’t take long, I promise. Before you know it, I’ll have you back here.”
“Then we go home?”
He rolled his eyes skyward, staring into the blackness of his artificial home away from home as though he were already there. I followed his gaze, feeling like a sailor on the deck of his ship, surveying the vastness of the open seas and longing to join him there.
“Would you like that?” I asked, foolishly. “Would you like me to go with you?”
“We go now.”
“No. I told you, Lilith needs to take you to see the spirits first.”
“Then we go home.”
“Then you go home.”
“No! Bossman-Jerome good team. Always team. That is way. You not go home, Jerome not go to see spi
rits.”
“Jerome, listen to me. If you just—”
“You promise now!”
“Promise to go home with you?”
“Yes. Cross heart. Hope to die.”
“What about Lilith?”
“Lilith good witch. She come too.”
“No, this is her home. She can’t go. Would you think it’s fair for me to go back with you and leave her here?”
He tilted his head and gave me one of those looks Carlos gives me when the logic he plucks from the air seems nothing short of genius. “What is fair for Bossman? Is fair you no follow heart? Bossman not happy. Jerome see.” He tapped the side of his head with his fingertip. “All the where I see, many tings I no see before. Bossman’s place home. Follow heart. Make promise now.”
What could I do, kid myself and tell him he was wrong? Ever since returning to my old world five days prior, all I could do was dream of going back. Everything about my world frightened me, saddened me or pissed me off. Dominic, Carlos and Lilith could see it. They even attached a name to it: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Jerome saw it, too. Only, the newest Pentacle Prodigy among us recognized my condition as something else, something simpler: homesickness.
We were back at the campfire when I gave in to Jerome, crossing my heart and offering my other hand so that we could shake on it. “Okay,” I said, feeling a wave of relief wash over me. “We have a deal. I promise. Now, come. Put the fire out and we’ll go see Lilith.”
Jerome snuffed the fire out with the wave of his hand. As I stood, I noticed something lying on the ground across from the fire pit. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.
“Dat malodyte head,” he said, very matter-of-fact.
“I see that. What’s it doing there?”
I circled the pit and toed the thing, rolling it over so that it was looking straight up into the trees. I had almost forgotten how ugly the horned-headed, saber-toothed Cyclops was. The sight of it made me reel back and squirm involuntarily.
“Jerome, will you please bury that thing? It’s making me sick.”
He ran over, dug a quick little hole with his hands, pushed the head inside it and covered it up. “All gone, Bossman. No more head.”
He seemed particularly proud of his miniscule feat. That he did it for me, made me proud, as well. I patted him on the shoulder and smiled approval. “Good job.”
He patted himself on the other shoulder. “Good job.”
I called Lilith from the car on our drive home and told her I had Jerome.
“Is he cooperating?” she asked.
“Lilith, he’s the most powerful living entity in the universe. Do you think he’d be with me if he wasn’t?”
“It’s possible. He doesn’t realize what he has. The things he’s done so far have merely been manifestations of his subconscious desires.”
“Says you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain later. Just have everything ready when we get there.”
When we first left the back road near the woods and entered into real traffic, I worried that someone would see Jerome and take his picture, maybe plaster it all over the internet on Assbook and some other social media web sites. So I told Jerome to make himself disappear, meaning he should camouflage himself with the car’s upholstery. The little stinker did one better. He vanished. I mean completely. At first, I thought he fell out the window, as I had cracked it open about half way so that he could stick his head out and bite the wind like a dog. I reached across the seat to pat it down and found myself rubbing his belly. He screeched like a monkey, scaring the crap out of me and nearly causing the car to fly off the road.
“Jerome! Did you have to do that?” I asked, after regaining control and easing back into the slow lane.
He didn’t reappear. He simply answered, “Bossman hand cold.”
I shut the window and turned on the radio. He behaved well the entire ride home and even stayed invisible until we got into the house. Lilith saw me through the front window, alone, she thought, and nearly pitched a fit when I walked in.
“What happened? You told me you had him.”
“Wow!” I smiled at the sight of her. She looked amazingly beautiful, her eyes sparkling, her hair cascading off her shoulders and down the front. She wore a sheer black robe, floor length, low V-cut and tied at the waist with a black laced sash that dangled down the side of her right leg all the way to her ankle. I recognized it immediately. It was her ceremonial robe, last used in her rite of passage ceremony. I knew then that she wanted this one to go perfectly, which explained the tone of her voice.
“You idiot! You didn’t let him get away again, did you?”
“No. I have him right here.”
I didn’t have to tell Jerome. I’d been holding his hand when we came through the door. The moment I let it go, he made himself visible.
“Ta-da!” he said, and took a bow.
Lilith remained remarkably unimpressed. “Ta-da yourself, you little runt.” She pointed to the chalked circle already drawn on the living room floor. “Step into my office.”
I’d seen the ritual pertaining to the consecrations of the circle a few times, though it never ceased to impress me. Lilith performed the ritual so many times, I believe she could do it in her sleep. That’s not to say she takes it lightly. When it comes to witchcraft, Lilith never takes anything lightly.
The candles, as with the chalked circle, were already in place when we arrived, white ones along the compass points, a brown one aligned with the current position of the moon. Likewise, the water and salt used in the purification of the circle sat out in small finger bowls, proportioned accordingly by weight and volume.
Her athame, the dagger-like instrument used to direct the circle’s energy, lay across the bowls on an altar of sorts constructed directly in front of the black mirror.
“Tony.” She pointed to the sofa. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to sit this one out.”
I waved my hand to dismiss her concerns. “I figured that already. We discussed it. Jerome’s good with it.”
“Okay then.”
Lilith pulled the hem of her robe up and slipped the garment over her head, removing it completely. Beneath that, she was naked, except for her Incubus ring, which I couldn’t remember ever seeing her wear through the mirror before.
Jerome regarded Lilith with a strange curiosity. Apparently, having never seen the nude female human form before. His eyes, normally alabaster orbs of swirling white clouds, turned completely black, straining to use every photon of light in the room to capture her full essence.
Lilith noticed him, too. She reached out and bopped him upside his head with an open palm. “You,” she said. “Stop staring. It’s impolite.”
He turned and looked at me. All I could do was shrug. Lilith began the consecrations ceremony. Jerome watched intently as she purified the circle and then set it ablaze with just a point of her athame. When the time came for her to test the black reflection, Jerome seemed to anticipate it. He reached for Lilith’s hand without instructions and nuzzled up to the side of her leg.
On the third sampling, with the tip of the athame having passed through the mirror twice already, Lilith pushed her hand completely through the void. As her elbow disappeared into the blackness, so too did the rest of her body, along with Jerome’s, all in a single instant.
The few times I participated in the consecrating and lighting of the circle, I also participated in the journey through the black mirror. Consequently, I never witnessed what happened to the circle once we were gone. This time I saw.
The instant Lilith and Jerome disappeared, the circle flashed to life with flames shooting so high, they scorched the ceiling. The heat was incredibly intense, driving me back against the seat cushions and singeing the hairs on my arms. Yet, just as quickly, it died, as if all that spent energy went into facilitating passage through the mirror, rather than to keep it open.
I waited around for over an hour befor
e getting hungry and making myself a sandwich. A half-hour after that, Lilith and Jerome still had not returned. I was getting worried, but not panicky. I began wondering how Jerome was doing, did he freak out going through the passage? In the car, on the way to the house, I told him that traveling through the black mirror was just like going through a portal in the Eighth Sphere. Truth is it’s not.
Once you’re in the black mirror, all you see is black, all around you, in every direction, black. An endless field of absolute nothingness surrounds you. In this nothingness, you’re falling, so at least you know there’s gravity. The sensation of falling only ceases when you arrive at the junction where the coven receives you, at which point you float. Again, there is nothing, nothing holding you up, nothing pushing you down, just black space and you.
When the coven feels you have waited sufficiently long enough, they grace you with their presences. Oh, but they don’t simply appear, no, no. They arrive in grand style, swarming from the depths of emptiness like smoke through a cooling tower. They circle first, checking you out like sharks investigating fresh chum in the water. Then, if they decide your credentials worthy of an audience, they materialize in human form, naked, of course, as clothes are a hindrance of the living.
By contrast, traveling through a portal in the Eighth Sphere is a visceral experience, never the same for two individuals. Nor is it the same twice for any single traveler.
The first thing you notice is the light, strange, because the Eighth Sphere is a dark place. Yet, portals are bright, white and often milky-like.
The second thing you notice is the air, or perhaps the lack of it, for it seems to get thick and gummy, as though you could chew it. A common sensation for most is the feeling of traveling through a medium that’s neither wet nor dry, but viscous nonetheless.
Of course, there’s falling, always the sense of falling, just as when you’re passing through the black mirror. Only through a portal, you know you’re going somewhere. The ride, and that’s what it is, can be a violent one, as you are not only falling, but getting tossed and thrashed about in every direction.
The first few times going through a portal are scary and terrifying propositions. After that, it’s not the ride that’s so scary, but the destination. Unless you’ve run through a particular portal before, you have no idea where you’ll come out. Each new run can be your last. God, is it any wonder I wanted to go back there so badly?
BURY THE WITCH: Book 10 (Detective Marcella Witch's Series) Page 23