Mother grinned. “Well, well, well. For a freebie, all I will say is this — the book should tell you what you need to know, though I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out on your own. Perhaps — you’re not quite as mentally robust as I thought. Anything more, I shan’t say.” She raised her head and called out, “We’re done here, guard.”
As they collected her to take her back to her cell, she blew me an awkward kiss and winked. The fire in her eyes had faded and I see something akin to merriment there.
I don’t have a mirror handy, but I’m certain that my own expression is not nearly as joyful.
I held back my anger until I was secure inside the Itasca. The warden and the guards already thought my mom was nuts — I for sure didn’t want them to start wondering about me. Who knew what sort of trouble they could put me in if they thought mother’s ‘madness’ was somehow hereditary?
“Damn it!” I screamed, punching the padded back of the passenger seat.
What my mother called a ‘book’ should be more properly called a grimoire — a book of spells. The thing made my skin crawl the first time I saw it and didn’t bode well for my life afterward.
Back in the good old days, my mother was an adjunct professor of cuneiform studies at the University of Chicago. Her office at home was just something regarded as the place where all the things Dad and I weren’t supposed to touch were. As Esteban and Kent later discovered, Mother had stolen many of the antiques in her office — either directly through the university itself, or acquired with the school as a front. It took a team of forensic accountants to unravel the web of deception she’d constructed. It seemed she’d scoured the globe far and wide for a weird and idiosyncratic array of items. Some of them she was able to acquire for little more than a promise and a plea, while others she had to simply pay for, under the table. As it turned out, the university had already been looking into funding irregularities in the department before Mother’s indictment for murder.
I imagine it was quite the “a-ha” moment for the dean when he opened the paper to see the detectives shoving Mother into the back of a police car.
The investigative team tracked down the origin of the vast majority of the items. Until they were able to return the purloined goods to their rightful place of ownership — various museums and such — the police stored them as evidence. But there was no record of the grimoire, or at least, none that I ever heard about.
The first time I saw it was the night I woke to see my mother standing at the foot of my bed. She spoke arcane words in a guttural chant with the heavy tome cradled in reverent arms. I almost thought the entire experience a dream until I realized what the push was and where it came from.
I was mother’s experiment, you see. She needed to make sure the spell was survivable before she used it on herself. Of all the betrayals she has lined up against me, that one hurts the most.
The next time I saw the book was the first real opportunity I had to examine it. Even if it weren’t magic, the specifics of its existence were odd, to say the least.
Historically speaking, Sumerian persisted as a written language until the first century, when Akkadian superseded it. Widespread use of paper as a writing medium came around over two centuries later.
Mother’s leather-bound book, inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform on yellowed but flexible paper, shouldn’t have existed. Even if it was some sort of archaic documentation on Chinese-produced paper circa 300 AD, there was no logical reason why it shouldn’t have rotted away to dust centuries ago. I’d like to think that some unknown person transcribed and rebound it in later years, that it’s not an example of an underlying insanity in the order of the world, but I know that’s naive.
I speak to ghosts, after all. A magic book isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility in that regard.
The other aspects of the grimoire made it impossible to deny that there are more mysteries in the world than most of us are willing to admit. When I was a kid, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Chaotic good ranger, in case you’re wondering. Just like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. But I played enough to know the game mechanics for other character classes. While wizards could memorize various spells for casting, they would ‘lose’ them once they used them, and have to spend time in study to recover. In game design, that’s known as a balancing factor. It moderates a character class that could otherwise go around blowing the bad guys away with fireballs, requiring study and rest to regain their power.
I wish it worked that way in real life.
Mother’s grimoire defied logic. At first blush, the anonymous author had written it in thick cuneiform that looked quite a bit like the pictures of old Sumerian clay tablets in mother’s textbooks. But if you held the book long enough and looked at the letters, they wiggled. Given enough time, the letters would turn to easily readable, if stylistic, English lettering — like a creepy, animated word processor font function. Microsoft Office, 300 AD edition.
Much to my mother’s chagrin, I was hardly the best student, though I did enjoy reading for pleasure. But when it came to studying, I had a hard time remembering anything I read that didn’t pertain to my core interests of movies and history. I didn’t read much of the grimoire, but the bits that I did have stuck with me, as though the words themselves made an imprint on the insides of my eyelids. Some of it I’ve tried to forget, or at least bury under images of kittens and stuffed unicorns, but no avail. It’s always there, buzzing around in the back of my head. If I don’t think about the pages, I can ignore them, but anytime I think about them, they pop up in my mind’s eye as though I were reading them anew.
So, while the police kept most of Mother’s things in evidence during the trial, the grimoire escaped notice. Unless you knew what you were looking for, it was just another old-fashioned book on a shelf full of them. Most of them were Dad’s; despite teaching history, he had a love for classic literature — Dumas, de Cervantes, Austen. It was a love he tried to instill in me, but I had little patience for the heavy-handed prose. I have since read them all. I feel that I better understand my father for the effort and regret the impetuousness of youth.
With dad gone and mother in jail, I had plenty of time — too much, perhaps — to search through the grimoire. I never found the spell Mother used to imbue the two of us with the push, but I found others.
The tome seemed to respond to my own, unspoken desires. As I paged through it, the spells I glanced at ranged from illusion to restoration — amusement to utility. The innocuous benevolence presented by the book confused me, however. I found nothing in its pages to explain my Mother’s sudden descent into homicidal madness.
What little I saw when I made the mistake of considering that question while holding the book disgusts me to this day, like a cringe-worthy YouTube video on an unstoppable loop. That, thankfully, was a very small part of what I took away. Much of what I learned has been helpful. I’m thankful every time that I reflect upon the experience that my childish sentiment while reading was so innocent and free of malice.
Who knows what terrors it might have shown me had I looked upon it with a jaundiced eye?
Who knows what it showed my mother?
My curiosity as to the eternal fate of my father is responsible for much of my knowledge regarding ghosts, as well as the ability to discern their presence and communicate with them. And the blemish-clearing healing spell I happened upon helped ensure that my latter teenage years remained acne-free.
I’m kicking myself now, though. If my mother spoke truly, the grimoire held some sort of clue as to the identity of the entity that so terrified Bobby.
Ten years ago, at the height of my mother’s trial for the murder of my father — not long after I got a horrified glimpse of how she’d been using the book — I doused it in diesel fuel and burnt the thing to ashes.
I’ve regretted my knee-jerk reaction countless times since then, but only intermittently. The book was just a tool, like a gun or a hammer. Misused, it could be dan
gerous, but compared to with a firearm, it was like a nuclear-powered Swiss Army knife. In the wrong hands, with the wrong imagination, the consequences were unimaginable. I had a hard enough time trusting myself with what I learned. I couldn’t very well risk someone else getting their hands on it.
The knowledge of the grimoire was lost.
I was going to have to do this the hard way.
Chapter 6
The drive to Rockville and the visit with Mother had burned up much of the day. By the time that I was able to compose myself enough to slip behind the wheel of the Itasca the sun hung fat and swollen on the horizon. With only oblique answers to show for the investment of my time, I had nowhere in particular to go. Of course, even if Mother had pointed me in a direction, I had little time to get anywhere before the full fall of dark. So, I did what any itinerant RV’er does — I headed to the closest Wal-Mart, which was about half an hour away, near the Illinois border.
It wasn’t my first time there. Even with my mother’s special status, it still takes as much time to clear through security as I get to spend with her — going in as well as out. If I show up after lunch, I can usually expect to leave by dinner time. Needless to say, I’ve spent more than a little time in the not-so-bustling metropolis that is Rockville, Indiana.
Nothing against it — it’s standard-issue, small-town America. It may not have the glitz and glamor of the big cities, but it ticks off all the right check marks for me personally. I spend so much time on the road that the consistent mediocrity of chain restaurants is like as comfortable as a broken-in pair of jeans, but I’ve also scoped out a few of the better mom and pop joints for when I don’t feel like having assembly line chow.
Perhaps it’s petulant, but my confrontation with Mother is prodding me toward something greasy and deep-fried. Childish, sure — but it’s the method of rebellion with the least immediate negative effects. Even as a teenager when my friends and acquaintances were getting soused on illicitly-acquired booze on the weekends I abstained. Since I got the push, I’ve had nary a drink. Who’s to say what might happen if I drank enough to loosen my personal inhibitions? Magic and alcohol strike me as a particularly bad mix — drugs even more so.
Say what you will about junk food, it’s the vice least likely to pose a danger to others.
There’s a dynamite Cajun place a few hours down the road, but by the time I’d be able to get there it would be long closed. Even if I didn’t have to drive in the dark to get there, that’d be a non-starter.
It was just shy of full twilight when I pulled into the parking lot and tucked the RV away into a distant corner. A semi and couple of other vehicles were already arrayed in similar fashion for the night. If you don’t need water or power hookups, there’s really no better place to be than the parking lot of a superstore. Some of the locations aren’t cool about it, but there’s an informal list on the Internet of ones that won’t roust you in the middle of the night.
I picked up a few odds and ends, hit the deli, and was back inside the Itasca in under half an hour. I cracked open my laptop and pulled up an episode of ‘The Flash’ to watch while I ate.
When my phone buzzed, I set my half-eaten chicken strip aside and answered it immediately. The caller ID photo was a selfie of a grinning man on a golf course. I didn’t even have to look at the name — I’d handed my phone to Carlos Gallardo so he could take the picture the last time I ran through California and he’d obliged with something memorable and goofy.
“Carlos,” I answered, “give me the good word.”
“It took some doing, but I think I may have something for you in a newspaper article we found. Bobby Gennaro, age 11, of Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Valparaiso, Indiana. Winning science fair entry, proud parents and all that. You get the gist. Picture headed your way.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear and switched over to text messages. The picture was newsprint-grainy, but it was him. The broad, beaming smile was a polar opposite of the dour seriousness of Bobby’s shade, but the two were one and the same. Carlos had found him in less than twelve hours.
I brought the phone back up. “That’s him. Can you hack into the school system, get me an address?”
“You’re kidding, right? This is the 21st century, brother. All that stuff is public information. There are only a few Gennaros in the property tax listings for Valparaiso and the surrounding communities. Only one of those families actually live in the school district. I’ll send you another text with the address.”
“Awesome. You’re the man, Carlos.”
“I know, right? Stay safe, brother.”
After I ended the call I fingered my phone and considered the concept of proximity. It’s over a hundred miles from Rockville Correctional to Valparaiso, but in a country nearly four million square miles in area, that’s too close to be coincidental.
It becomes even more concerning when I considered Shirley Jackson’s home, just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s three cities in a relatively small area. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to hit all three in an easy day’s drive, even in an RV.
I’m starting to get the feeling that someone is leading me by the nose and I don’t like it.
Bobby’s house wasn’t going anywhere, so despite the urgency that I felt at having actual, solid information, I finished my dinner, thought about things for a while, and then did my best to try and get some sleep. It took me longer than usual to nod off. When I woke just before dawn I had the sense that my repose had been an uneasy one, though I couldn’t remember any particular nightmares.
I headed out at first light. The crawling sense of walking into a setup followed me all the way north. I got into Valparaiso around noon and left the Itasca in yet another Wal-Mart parking lot. This area was a bit more bustling and I wasn’t sure how the management would react to a long-term stay. Hopefully this wouldn’t take too long.
The Gennaro house, according to the Internet map searches I’d pulled up on my phone, was in what seemed to be a typical residential area. It was not, thankfully, in a cul de sac, which simplified things for me. A guy riding past a house twice wouldn’t be of immediate concern on a normal avenue in the same that it would be in a more confined area. The last thing I wanted was an over-concerned member of the neighborhood watch bringing the police down around my ears.
I packed a backpack with a few odds and ends, strapped on my helmet and gloves, and brought up the navigation app on my phone. Per the GPS function, Bobby’s house wasn’t far. I set off at a casual, unhurried pace.
You’d think that mid-afternoon in the middle of the week would be a quiet time, but there were more than a few cars in driveways, homeowners cutting grass, or simply lounging on porches. I don’t keep up with the news, much, but it’s inescapable most of the time. Times were tougher now than most, with tens of millions of Americans were out of work. I should have figured that there’d be more than a few people around, but I hadn’t.
Growing up, ‘rich’ was an abstract concept that I never really understood. Though I’m sure it annoyed Mother to no end, dad insisted that I do chores to earn my allowance. As I got older, this transitioned into helping out around the neighborhood — cutting grass, landscaping, that sort of thing. I that knew both my parents had good-paying jobs. We lived in a high-end neighborhood on Lake Michigan, after all, but it wasn’t until everything fell apart that I realized how well off my parents — my dad, in particular — actually were.
It’s hard to dig into your own family history when neither parent is available to fill in the gaps, but from what I can tell, my grandfather was a fairly successful businessman. Dad turned the nest egg he got when his own parents passed away into something much more significant with astute investments and the same frugal lifestyle he tried to instill into me.
Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t what initially attracted mother to him. When they met, she was still a starving grad student working toward her Ph.D. That sort of thought would have been out of my breadth of im
agination before my mother revealed her true self, but everything I’ve been through has twisted and warped my entire concept of my own familial reality. There’s a kernel of truth in my sense of that issue, but it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s gone and she’s locked away.
I spotted the Gennaro house long before I could read the house numbers. It was the only house on the block with calf-high grass. A for sale sign with a ‘foreclosure’ placard attached to it stood at a drunken angle amid yellowing weeds.
Frowning inside my helmet, I pulled to a stop in front of the house before I realized that I’d eased off of the throttle. A stack of newspapers sat in a moldering pile in front of the door, The mailbox under the porch light overflowed with letters.
A muffled voice came to me through the helmet, and I turned and flipped up the visor as I saw a man in khaki shorts and a stained, sleeveless T-shirt standing in the driveway opposite the Gennaro house. He held a socket wrench in one hand. The hood on the mottled primer-and-paint car behind him stood open. I’m not much of a car guy, but it was something from the seventies with a big engine and low gas mileage.
He nodded toward the Gennaro house and repeated himself. “Strangest thing. They just up and took off in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago. Nobody even saw them leave.”
I nodded and tried to think what to say. I didn’t know enough about Bobby and his folks to play as though I knew them, so I went with the next best option. “I’m driving around, looking at bank properties. Did they take care of it, or is it a mess inside?”
The man’s demeanor eased. A smile flashed across his face. “Sure, I got you. Yeah, old Jimmy was always puttering around the place. This neighborhood is old, but we ain’t got no deadbeats around.” He seemed to look me up and down. I wasn’t sure if he approved or disapproved of the Kawasaki’s shabby appearance. I hoped that he’d see a kindred spirit, what with the patchwork appearance of his muscle car.
Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1) Page 4