by Jean Rabe
It looked over its warty shoulder, four eyes locked onto her, fifth eye closed with its lid twitching. There was a definite pattern to its prattle, and it repeated something over and over.
Bridget dropped her connection with the rug and placed her hand against the buckle. The disturbing design of it had been frost-branded into her skin and looked shiny, like that part of her palm was wet. It didn’t hurt. In fact, when Bridget pressed on the scar, she didn’t feel anything.
She rubbed her thumbs against the metal like the thing was a worry stone, centered herself, and then concentrated. Sometimes the psychometry came easy. Dipping into the memories of the Turkish rug, for example, had become welcome and effortless, like looking upon the faces of old friends. The brick beneath the subway had not been difficult either; the brick had been thick with memories, the dipping almost effortless. Cool Papa Bell’s baseball had been a simple read, too, even through its plastic case. But the buckle was taking serious work. To connect with the buckle was like jogging to the top of the Empire State Building … with weights strapped to her ankles.
To communicate with the demon, she would first need to discover someone who spoke its language, and despite the difficulty to connect with the buckle, whoever fashioned this piece was Bridget’s best bet to act as a translator.
“C’mon. C’mon.” There was a barrier, something arcane. Serious magic had been involved in the piece’s crafting, and it was acting like a ward, keeping Bridget’s senses out. “C’mon!”
She could only use psychometry on inanimate objects, and so she needed someone from the buckle’s past to mirror the language of the demon. Touching the demon would yield up nothing other than disgust. She couldn’t talk to it that way.
“Give me your secrets,” she urged the odd metal. “Stop fighting me.”
The demon babbled in the background and returned to staring out the window.
After several minutes of effort, Bridget gained an image of a forge and a cloaked figure that was crushing and grinding ore on a stone table. Breaking through and gaining a memory from this piece had a price, it felt like Bridget’s chest was being squeezed by a vice, her breath came in shallow gasps. She forced the connection stronger, and was handed a pounding headache for her success. The cloaked figure was a woman, she guessed, by the delicate thinness of the fingers. Old, judging by the wrinkles and age spots on the back of her hands. The figure, stooped and with rounded shoulders, painstakingly separated valuable bits of metal from the waste. She collected silver, copper, and gold particles as Bridget watched, then brought in lead and shiny grit, melting it all together to form an alloy that she poured into a mold to produce the buckle. Bridget had connected with the base elements of the buckle and was watching the piece being made.
There was someone in the background, but Bridget couldn’t quite make out the figure—tall and with an odd silhouette, maybe just the play of shadows.
All the while the stranger worked, she spoke in a monotonous, flat tone that Bridget could not decipher. But it was tinny, an old woman’s voice. Always Bridget somehow automatically translated words heard during a delving, turning it all into English in her mind. But this confounded her, what the woman was saying. And so she assumed it was a spell the metallurgist wove, the words having the same sense as Adiella’s mumblings, and therefore her mind not able to comprehend. The ache in Bridget’s chest and head intensified, but she didn’t release the image. Instead, she searched for more and accepted the resulting pain.
Bridget didn’t see her toady demon in the vision, though she’d expected it. The metallurgist must have called and bound the beast to the buckle somehow. So where was the demon? Not yet present at this stage in the buckle’s existence and so not yet bound? Would the metallurgist summon it? Would someone else do that for her?
Bridget fought to stay linked with the buckle and continued to send her senses outward from the now-cooling metal, seeing the cave-like alchemist shop with primitive furnishings, and getting no better look at the cloaked figure, the hood keeping the face in shadows. The place smelled of charred wood, smoke, and stale sweat. There were tall shelves covered with broken clay bowls, narrow shelves arrayed with pouches and folded animal skins, more skins on the floor and hanging across the shop’s door and window, a plate of dates on a low table. Bridget could not tell what time of day the buckle was being made, the fire from the forge the only light. Never could she see what was beyond the “line of sight” of the object she probed, and so she had no clue to the country or the year in which the alchemist worked. But she could hear beyond the object. Through a dark doorway voices crept into the workroom. Two voices, men; and they spoke a language that tickled her memories. Bridget had not heard this exact dialect before, though she had heard something like it. If circumstances were different, she would take time to delight in this new discovery. Again, there was that shadowy tall image at the edge of the image, and when it turned sideways, it looked to be wearing a bird’s mask. Odd.
The headache worsened and her nose started to bleed.
Bridget understood the other speakers clearly—the men beyond the doorway, but she couldn’t put a name to the tongue. The words had a similar quality to the demon’s rants, but nothing precisely matched. And with no match, she could not understand the demon. She felt herself drifting off and deliberately bit her tongue, the jolt helping to keep her alert.
“She will bind,” one voice said. “Others can catch. She can bind.”
“This you promise?”
“This I pray. She can make a slave of evil that will in time conquer. That will allow us victory. A slave that she can bind like a mother unto a child. A free and powerful life for us.”
Slave—that word matched with the demon’s chatter.
Free.
Life—that matched too. Bridget had three words in the ancient tongue, and she stashed them in her memory. Slave. Life. Free.
The conversation went on, but turning to markets and the rivers, harvesting a crop called gongai, but Bridget found that uninteresting. She struggled to return her focus to the alchemist when one of the unseen speakers provided another clue. He ascribed a name to a river, and that translated into English as “Euphrates.” One word was repeated three times: “enlil,” and her mind provided no translation. The demon had uttered that—“enlil.” Since in Bridget’s vision the word did not have an English translation, it was therefore meaningless. Unless it was name, maybe a person’s name, Bridget guessed.
Bridget’s nose gushed blood.
“Enlil.” She tried it out, tasting blood on her tongue.
Bridget listened in for a while longer, and then the voices stopped. The alchemist destroyed the mold, curled on a rug on the floor and slept. The forge fire died, plunging the room into darkness. She considered pushing the image forward in time, but she was already spent. She could scarcely breathe. The connection broke, despite her attempts to hang onto it. She would delve again into it later when she was fully rested. Bridget couldn’t remember a piece so difficult and exhausting to “read.” And never had something exacted so much physical pain.
“Euphrates.” Bridget leaned back and tipped her head up, fighting the dizziness from exerting so much to get that brief glimpse. She wiped the blood off her face with a sleeve. A stream had dripped onto her shirt. She pressed her nostrils together and her voice came nasally. “Euphrates. Enlil. What else? Slave, life, and free.” She worked a kink out of her neck and slowly got to her feet, feeling stiff and thinking another exercise session might help to reinvigorate her—that or sleep. Either way replenish her energy so she could send her pounding head into the defiant buckle again. But the demon might not follow her up to the roof or down into the basement for an exercise session. It might disappear and kill someone—Otter, Dustin, Adiella. Again she thought about her exercise session on the roof with Jimmy … that was when the beast had killed Tavio.
She hated the witch who had been her mother-in-law—if only because Adiella had always tried to dr
ive a wedge between her and Tavio. But Bridget actually might need the old woman now. Adiella had managed to destroy the damnable briefcase; maybe she could still prove necessary. And the demon had certainly looked nervous in the pit in the subway tunnels.
“I’m stumped,” Bridget told the demon. She tugged her shirt up, found a clean spot, and wiped more blood off her face. At least it was easy to breathe again, but her temples still throbbed. “I can’t try again, not for a little while, not with the buckle.” She couldn’t stay connected to any one object indefinitely; her gift didn’t work that way. Psychometry taxed her, save for with her beloved oushak, and there was too little inner energy left at the moment to have another round with the buckle. “I should get some sleep.” She knew she desperately needed it, but more than that she needed to keep her eyes on the demon. “Christ on a tricycle. What the hell am I going to do?”
It looked away from the window; still its fifth eye was closed. The thing hissed and a thick line of acidic drool spilled over its lower lip and extended to the floor, sizzling and smoking when it hit the hardwood.
“That’s endearing,” Bridget said.
Its four open eyes narrowed and it raised its incomprehensible voice.
“Slave. Life. Euphrates. Euphrates.” Bridget wiped the sweat off her forehead. “Euphrates.”
The demon cocked its head and parroted the last word. Bridget clearly understood: “Euphrates,” though even in that one word, a guttural-sounding accent was evident.
“Euphrates.” Bridget’s heart sped. “Tigris,” she tried.
Recognition danced on the demon’s hideous face.
“Babylonian,” Bridget pronounced. “I think you’re speaking Babylonian. Dear God you are old. And now I have your language. Babylonian. How much deader of a language could you have spoken? Ugh. And how the hell could a demon from Babylonian times end up in present-day New York? Have you been on a murdering spree for centuries?”
A little more than a year ago Bridget had ventured to an apartment at 740 Park Avenue. Through a trusted contact she’d heard one of the tenants had purchased an intact Babylonian vase from an auction house. The vase was now in a place of honor in Bridget’s study, and she carefully removed it now and brought it to the rug.
“Fuck the Euphrates.” Bridget had delved into this vase several times before, and so was familiar with it. She might find just enough inner spark for it, and reading the vase couldn’t possibly make her headache any worse. “What do you want?” she asked the demon again. “What the bloody blue hell do you want?”
The vase was glazed, hardened clay, and that it was intact made it exceedingly valuable. On one of her forays into it she’d looked outward from the piece, seeing a lithe girl carrying it across a stretch of plain. Pushing her senses, she’d learned that the girl walked across the fertile alluvial ground between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the heartland of Mât Akkadî, the Babylonian Empire. The vase had been fashioned eight hundred years before Christ, and the girl was carrying it to collect silt from a certain spot along the bank that her mother favored as fertilizer for a trough herb garden.
Bridget’s other mental journeys with this vase had taken her through a considerable patch of barley, chickpea, and sesame. And one foray placed the vase in a marketplace, when the girl had become an old woman and had traded it for a sack of dates and fresh fruit. Bridget searched for that particular memory from the vase now, as in the marketplace there were many people chattering, and she could “browse” the various stalls until she could find words to match the demon’s. It would be a far simpler delve than the buckle.
Bridget sensed that she hovered on the edge of collapse, but her fingernails dug into her palm, the competing pain helping her focus.
“Give me just a little,” she begged the vase. “A hint to mollify the beast.” She needed something to start a conversation with the demon, something that she could use to guarantee Otter’s safety. Something more than the name of a damnable river. Her mind settled comfortably into the glazed clay, her senses spiraled out, and she took in the chatter of passersby in the marketplace. Again there were similarities to the words, but not a direct match. Bridget tried out one word after the next, repeating aloud what the Babylonian shoppers said and looking up to see if the demon recognized something.
“Euphrates,” it said. “Tigris. Life. Slaves.”
“Enlil.” Bridget heard that one word again, though she couldn’t see who spoke it, a shopper behind someone else; a disembodied voice. “Enlil,” Bridget repeated. Then louder: “Enlil.” None of the other words matched anything the demon had uttered. Nothing else!
“Enlil,” the demon returned, hawking out a gob of acidic spittle, like the word was a piece of rancid meat.
She browsed the marketplace for several minutes until she felt too lightheaded and the connection with the vase broke. Bridget knew she was too physically and emotionally exhausted to stay linked. “So maybe not Babylonian after all.”
“Euphrates.”
“Not exactly Babylonian. But something close. Something that has to be close to Babylonian, or that at least shares a few of its words. So what language, then? And you know ‘Enlil.’” Maybe that was name of the woman who’d forged the buckle. “But if you don’t speak Babylonian, then what the hell language is it? What? What could—”
Something earlier maybe?
What might be earlier and include references to the Euphrates and Tigris?
This time it was a struggle getting up off the oushak, the muscles in her legs feeble as wet noodles. Bridget stumbled to her desk and leaned on it for support, reached in the top drawer, and pulled out an iPad.
E-U-P-H-R-A-T-E-S.
The first thing to come up was the Wikipedia entry.
Tigris & Euphrates, a board game.
“No. Try something else.”
E-N-I-L, she typed into the search bar. She tapped “enter” and watched the various headers scroll on the small screen.
Enil: an entertainment company based in India.
Enil: an American corporation focused on student reading assessment and teaching.
Enil: European Network Information Literacy
Enil: Dr. Enil Jimenez Blish, a California optometrist.
“Shit.” Bridget typed again. “Missed a letter.”
E-N-L-I-L.
This time something entirely different came up.
Enlil: Solar Wind MHD model of the heliosphere.
Enlil: Enlil-bāni, tenth king of the First Dynasty of Isin who reigned twenty-four years, known for the apocryphal manner of his ascendancy to the throne, 1798–1775 BC. Interesting, but probably not it.
Enlil: Sumerian god. More interesting.
“Sumerian.”
Bridget selected the Wikipedia entry for the Sumerian god and sagged into the desk chair. She never relied on the research of others, but this Internet search was worth a try. Could the demon and the buckle stretch back that far? To Sumerian times? It was the right region of the world.
She scanned the document. Enlil was called the Lord of the Storm and primary deity in the Sumerian pantheon. The name was found in later writings, too: Hittite, Canaanite, Akkadian, and other Mesopotamian cultures. Ellil, a variation. The god of wind, birthed in the exhaled breath of An and Ki—gods of the heavens and earth—after they’d coupled. When Enlil was young, he was banished from the gods’ home for raping the deity called Ninlil. Apparently licentious, Enlil was said to have fathered at least four children in the underworld and was eventually allowed to return to the gods’ home. Later, Enlil schooled his god-offspring in how to capture and slay demons.
Demons.
“Interesting,” Bridget said. “Demon-slaying. So I expect Enlil is a dirty word to you, eh, demon?”
“Enlil,” The demon growled. “Sumer.”
“Great. So if I’ve guessed right and you’re Sumerian, now I have to find something Sumerian so we can share more than a handful of words. Something easier than that damn buckle.�
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“Sumer,” the demon pronounced louder. Its fifth eye opened and gleamed malevolently, the multiple eyes adding to Bridget’s dizziness. “Sumer.”
Shivers shot through Bridget’s spent frame.
“Feckin’ Sumerian it is,” she said.
***
Eighteen
Bridget tossed her shirt away, and changed into a clean sweater, padding through the brownstone quiet like a cat.
She checked just to be certain, but she had nothing Sumerian in her display cases. All the while the creature followed, chattering, drooling, and belching clouds of noxiousness. Bridget feared she would drop from fatigue and the stench, and though it might do her some good to actually give in and sleep for a few hours, she worried what the demon would do during that time. The buckle had found its way into her pocket; she’d not put it there. At least it was easier to deal with than the damnable briefcase.
She glanced at her watch: 4:11 a.m.
She listened, no one was moving around yet. Michael got up early, but not quite this early. Otter should sleep as long as he could; sleep would keep the grief at bay. Jimmy? She could call Jimmy, but to what purpose? She didn’t have time for another sparring session.
Bridget left for her antique shop. She recalled having a couple of Sumerian pieces there, not on display, of course, waiting “under the counter” for the right buyer. It was just a matter of searching her inventory to find something and then sinking her mind inside a piece so she could finally communicate with the demon … beyond the handful of words she already had. Bridget remembered delving into at least one of the pieces when she’d acquired them several months past, and not finding the memories entertaining enough for a return visit. But there had been a man talking, if her memory served. That wasn’t much to go on, but it was something, an avenue to hopefully find more words in common. And trying to reconnect with that piece would not be as physically exerting as the buckle had proved.
A woman bundled in a faux-fur coat walked her dog, letting it piss on a lamppost and leave a steaming gift near a neighbor’s stoop. She didn’t pick it up, just kept going. The sheen of Fort Greene, Bridget mused, wasn’t so terribly bright this morning. She’d walk to her shop; it wasn’t far, and she didn’t fear any criminal element that might be skulking about.