Summon the Keeper

by Tanya Huff

  One of the reasons.

  What they’d do in the movie, indeed.

  “If she does get woken up,” Dean wondered, frowning slightly, “is she able for you?”

  “Say what?”

  He hurriedly translated his question into something a mainlander could understand. “Is she stronger than you?”

  “No!”

  Austin snorted.

  “All right. I don’t know.” Claire glared at the cat. “She’s a powerful Keeper, or she wouldn’t have been able to seal the hole, not to mention attempting to use it. But…” Her eyes narrowed. “I am also a powerful Keeper, or I wouldn’t have been summoned here. Waking her would be the only way to find out which of us is stronger, and I’m not willing to risk the destruction of this immediate area on a point of ego.”

  “So she’s still sealing the hole? Like a cork in a bottle?”

  “Essentially.”

  “You’re here to pop her out and close the hole?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “And that’s why you called your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath, and laid both hands flat on the table. “The woman in room six is an evil Keeper.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re a good Keeper?”

  Claire leaned back and pulled a vinyl business card case out of her blazer pocket. “My sister made these for me. She meant them as a joke, but they’re accurate enough.”

  Aunt Claire, Keeper

  your Accident is my Opportunity

  (abilities dependent on situation)

  The card stock felt handmade and the words had the smudgy edges of rubber stamp printing. “Should I call you Aunt Claire?”

  “No.”

  He’d never heard such a definitive no before. There were no shades of maybe, no possibility of compromise. When she indicated he could keep the card, he slipped it into the pocket of his T-shirt. “I’ve always wanted to see real magic.”

  Claire leaned forward, eyes half lidded, palms flat on the table. “You should hope you don’t get the chance.”

  It would’ve been more dramatic as a warning had she not placed one palm squarely on a bit of spilled jam.

  Dean handed her a napkin and managed not to laugh although he couldn’t quite control a slight twitch in the outer corners of his mouth. “So was Mr. Smythe a Keeper, too?”

  Claire showed her teeth in what wasn’t quite a smile. “Augustus Smythe was, and is, a despicable little worm who walked out and left me holding the bag. He’s also a Cousin.”

  “Did he put her to sleep?”

  “No, a Cousin can’t manipulate that kind of power.” As much as it irritated her to admit it, Dean’s little synopsis had to have been essentially correct. “At some point, there was another Keeper involved.”

  “But Mr. Smythe is a Cousin, and you said Cousins monitor unsealed sites.”

  “Your point?”

  “You said this site is sealed, that she was sealing it like a cork in a bottle…”

  “No, you said like a cork in a bottle.”

  “Okay. But if the hole is sealed, what was Mr. Smythe doing here?”

  “Probably monitoring the seal since she can’t and monitoring her since the power that’s keeping her asleep is coming from the site.”

  “Evil power is keeping her asleep?”

  “Trust me…” She tossed the napkin down onto her plate. “It’s not likely to corrupt her.”

  “But if it was a temporary solution, why has Mr. Smythe been here since 1945?”

  “Has he?”

  “Sure. He complained about it all the time.” With a flick of two fingers, Dean began spinning the knife again. “Why did Mr. Smythe sneak out like he did?”

  “I have no idea.” The handle of her mug creaked slightly in her grip. “But I’d certainly like to ask him.”

  “What are you after doing now?”

  “Nothing hasty. Nothing at all until I get that second opinion. When I have more information, I’ll get to work closing things up but as long as the hole remains sealed, it’s perfectly safe. We’re in no immediate danger.”

  “No immediate danger?” Dean repeated. When she nodded, he leaned back in his chair, continuing to spin the knife. “That’s, um, interesting phrasing. What about long-term danger?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what, then?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “There’s a whole lot you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”

  “There’s a whole lot I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Smythe was supposed to leave you more information?”

  Claire snorted, sounding remarkable like Austin at his most sardonic. “At the very least.”

  “Which is why we need you,” the cat told him, looking up from a damp patch of fur. “Smythe’s not here, and you are.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” Dean protested.

  “You should make a good pair, then. She thinks she knows everythi…Hey!” he protested as Claire picked him up and dropped him onto the floor. “It was a joke! Keepers,” he muttered, leaping back up onto the chair, “no sense of humor.”

  The wisest course, Dean decided, would be to ignore that observation altogether. Stilling the knife, he looked up from her elongated reflection in the blade. “If you don’t mind me asking, where do Keepers and Cousins come from?”

  “Just outside Wappakenetta.” When both Dean and Austin stared at her blankly, she sighed. “We have a sense of humor, it’s just no one appreciates it. If you’re asking historically, Keepers and Cousins are descendants of Lilith, Adam’s first wife.”

  Dean started to grin.

  “I’m not joking.”

  “You’re not serious! Adam’s first wife?”

  Enjoying his reaction, she waved off his question with a dismissive gesture borrowed from Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “I only know what I’m told, but some of our people are very into genealogy.”

  “But you’re talking about Adam and Eve!”

  “No, I’m talking about Adam and Lilith.”

  “The Bible, the Christian Bible, as literal truth?” Dean suspected that his granddad, who held some fairly radical views for an Anglican minister, would be appalled.

  “No. Not truth as such. The lineage—that is, Cousins and Keepers—consider all religions are attempts to explain their energy. Think of them as containing capital T Truths as opposed to merely being true.”

  “But you said Adam and Lilith,” Dean reminded her. “Twice.”

  Were all bystanders so literal, she wondered, or was it just this one? “Forget them. Forget them twice. If you prefer, there had to have been, at some point, a breeding pair of what was essentially the first humans. Postulate, a second female, with genetic coding to handle magic that the other didn’t have. It’s the same story in a different language.”

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath, followed that theory out to its logical conclusion, and half prepared to duck. “So essentially, you’re not—that is, not entirely—human?”

  She took it better than he’d thought she would and seemed more intrigued than insulted, as though the idea had never occurred to her before. “I suppose that depends on where you set your parameters. If you’re speaking biologically…”

  “I wasn’t,” Dean interrupted before she could add details. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop her.

  “…we’re, certainly able to interbreed, but that doesn’t really mean anything because so could the old Greek gods.”

  “They were real?”

  “How should I know?” One painted fingernail tapped against the side of her mug as she thought it over. “Under those parameters, I suppose you could say, we’re…” She smiled suddenly and taken totally by surprise, he found himself lost in it. “…semi-mythical.”

  Austin snorted. “Spare me. Semi-mythical indeed.”

  “It does cover all the bases,” Claire protested
.

  “You want to cover the bases? Play shortstop for the Yankees.” Swiveling his head around, Austin stared up at Dean. “She’s human. The Keepers are human. The Cousins are human. I barely know you, but I’m assuming you’re human. I’m not saying this is a good thing, it’s just the way it is.”

  “Okay.” Dean held up both hands in surrender. “So, if Mr. Smythe is a Cousin, and she’s a Keeper, what are you?”

  Austin drew himself up to his full height, his entire bearing from ears to tail suggesting he’d been mortally insulted. “I am a cat.”

  “A cat. Okay.”

  While Dean did the breakfast dishes and slotted the morning’s experiences into previously empty places in his worldview, Claire went through the papers Augustus Smythe had left in the hotel office in the hope of discovering some answers. If the registration books were complete, the hotel had never been a popular destination and bookings had fallen off considerably after Smythe had changed the name from Brewster’s Hotel to The Elysian Fields Guest House in 1952.

  “Might as well call it The Vestibule of Hell,” she muttered mockingly, turning yellowed pages and not at all impressed by her earlier flash of prescience. It appeared that windowless room four had been popular throughout the existence of the hotel, and the guests who stayed in it seemed to have had uniformly bad handwriting.

  She had to call Dean out of the kitchen to open the safe.

  “The very least Augustus Smythe could’ve done,” she grumbled, arms folded and brows drawn into a deep vee over her nose, “was leave me the combination.”

  “He left you Dean,” Austin observed from the desk. “Something he probably figured you’d get more use out of.”

  Ears red, Dean cranked the handle around and got up off his knees as the safe door swung open. “Anything else, Boss?”

  Having chased Austin halfway up the first flight of stairs before being forced to acknowledge that four old legs sufficiently motivated were still faster than two, Claire ducked back under the counter. “Not right now.”

  As she straightened, their eyes locked. “What?”

  Dean felt a sudden and inexplicable urge to stammer. He managed to control it by keeping conversation to a minimum. “The combination?”

  “Good point. Write it down. Use the back of that old bill on the desk,” she added, walking over to the safe. Squatting, she heard pencil move against paper then the combination appeared over her shoulder. “Six left, six right, seven left?”

  “That’s right. I should, uh, finish the dishes now.”

  “Good idea.” As he returned to the kitchen, Claire grinned. He really did turn a very charming color at the slightest opportunity. Then she looked back down at the piece of paper and shook her head. Six sixty-seven. Cute. Hell was in the basement; the safe was on the first floor, one up from the Number of the Beast. First the Elysian Fields, now this. Augustus Smythe seemed to delight in throwing about obscure hints. A cry for help or sheer bloody-mindedness?

  In the safe, she found a heavy linen envelope marked with the sigil for expenses. On the back, Taxes, Victuals, Maintenance, and Staff had been written in an elegant copperplate. Another, later hand had added, Electricity and Telephone. The envelope was empty.

  No outstanding bills. Claire put the envelope back in the safe and closed the door. Great. When the seal goes and something calling itself Beelzebub leads a demonic army out of the furnace room, the lights’ll stay on and a well-fed staff can call 911 as they’re disemboweled.

  As she sat back on her heels, a flash of brilliant blue racing along the inside edge of a lower shelf caught her eye. Thumb and first two fingers of her right hand raised, just in case, she leaned over and with her left hand yanked a dusty pile of ledgers onto the floor. The hole in the corner was unmistakably mouse.

  Which didn’t mean that only mice were using it.

  Mice weren’t usually a brilliant blue.

  She moved closer and sent down a cautious probe.

  “Problem?”

  “OW!” Rubbing her head, she crawled back from the shelf and glared up at Dean. “Try and make a little more noise when you sneak up on people!”

  “Sorry. I’ve finished the dishes and I was wondering if you want me to put a new padlock on room six.”

  “Definitely.” It was an emotional not a rational response. Sara wouldn’t be leaving the room any time soon and—should she decide to—a padlock wouldn’t stop her, but for peace of mind there had to be a perception of security. “I’ll have a locksmith repair the door plate.”

  “But he’ll see her.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  It was another one of those statements, like “rearrange your memories,” that Dean had no intention of arguing with. “Okay.” He squatted beside her and peered at the hole. “Looks like a new one. I’ll set out some more traps.”

  “Mousetraps?”

  The sideways look he shot her seemed mildly concerned. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Have you caught anything?”

  “Not yet.” Rising, he held out his hand. “They’re smart. They take the bait and avoid springing the trap.”

  Claire debated with herself for a moment, then put her hand in his. “They might not be mice,” she said as he lifted her effortlessly to her feet. “All I’m reading is the residual signature of the seepage, but this place could easily be infested with imps.” Which would explain why her running shoes had still been wet this morning.

  “Imps?”

  “I saw something and it was bright blue.” A little surprised that he hadn’t released her, Claire pulled her fingers free of his grip.

  “Imps.” Dean sighed. “Okay. Is there anything I can do about it now?”

  “Not now, no.”

  “In that case, I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

  “Don’t go into the room.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I was thinking about dusting her.”

  “Don’t.”

  “But she’s covered in…”

  “No.”

  According to the site journal, found tucked under a stack of early seventies skin magazines in the middle left-hand drawer of the desk, three Keepers had sealed the hole before Sara; Uncle Gregory, Uncle Arthur, and Aunt Fiona. Aunt Fiona had died rather suddenly which explained why Sara had been summoned off active service at such a relatively young age—she’d been the closest Keeper strong enough to hold the seal when the need had gone out.

  “Relatively young age,” Claire snorted, rubbing her eyes. The yellowing papers she studied seemed to soak up the puddle of illumination spilled by the old-fashioned desk lamp without the faded handwriting becoming any more legible. “She was forty-two.”

  Sara had made it very clear in her first entry in the site journal that she hated the hotel and everything to do with it. It was also her one and only entry.

  “Oh, this is a lot of help. A considerate villain would’ve had the courtesy to keep complete notes.”

  Confident of her abilities, Claire had no doubt that she’d been summoned to the hotel to finally close the site. It was the only logical explanation. Unfortunately, sealing the hole would cut the power that kept Aunt Sara asleep, and Claire had meant it when she’d told Dean she didn’t want to find out which of them was more powerful.

  Keepers capable of abusing the power granted by the lineage were rare. Claire had only heard of it happening twice before in their entire history. The battles, Keeper vs Keeper, good vs evil, had been won but both times at a terrible cost. The first had resulted in the eruption of Vesuvius and the loss of Pompeii. The second, in disco. Claire had only a child’s memories of the seventies, but she wouldn’t be responsible for putting the world through that again.

  Augustus Smythe’s entry, which should have, and possibly did describe how he’d come to monitor the site, was unreadable. Ink had been spilled on the last third of the ledger, had soaked through the pages, and dried to create what could most accurately be described as an indigo blue brick. The skin magaz
ines would’ve been as helpful.

  “Coincidence?” Claire asked the silence. “I don’t think so.” The sound of something scuttling merrily away inside the wall only confirmed her suspicions.

  She was searching through yet another pile of paid bills in the top drawer of the desk when, for the first time that day, the phone rang. Used to the polite interruptive chirp of modern electronics, Claire had forgotten how loud and demanding the old black rotary models could be.

  Coughing and choking, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Claire?”

  “Mom…”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Startled by the intensity of the question, Claire jerked around but could neither see nor hear anything moving up on her. “What do you mean? What do you know?”

  “You were choking.”

  “Oh, that.” Wiping her chin with her free hand, Claire relaxed. “The phone startled me, and I tried to breathe spit. It’s nothing.” Breath back, she explained the problem.

  “Oh, my.”

  “Exactly. Do you think you could come and have a look at it? At them. Tell me what you think.”

  “I’d like to help you, Claire, but I don’t know. If I were needed, I’d have been summoned.”

  “I need you. Who says a summons can’t use the phone?” She could feel her mother weakening. “This is huge. I’d hate to screw it up.”

  “Under the circumstances, that wouldn’t make anyone very happy.” She paused. Claire waited, poking her finger through the black coils of the cord. “It would be nice to spend some time with you. Would you like me to bring your sister?”

  “I don’t think so, Mom.”

  “You haven’t seen her for almost a year.”

  “We talk on the phone.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Yes, I know. But, please, leave her home anyway.” The thought of Diana within a hundred miles of an open access to Hell brought up an image of the Four Horsemen trampling the world under their hooves as they fled in terror.