Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Dead silence, while both of us listened to the conversational ball roll under the sofa. Columbo never has this problem.

  "Well, I Knew you were trying to reach us. I was meditating, and I just . . . Heard you. I can always tell when someone's ready to Find us. So I called."

  It was pure snake oil, delivered in the hushed pluralistic undertone of a mortician with a tapeworm. The next thing he'd do would be to remind me that my number was unlisted, so I could marvel at how he'd called anyway.

  "Karen? Don't be afraid," he said reverently.

  Pathetically Grateful took the bit in her teeth, which was a good thing, as left to my own personality I'd simply have hung up.

  "Oh, no!" I agreed. "It's just that this ..." I trailed off. I hoped he knew what I meant. I didn't.

  78 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "Miriam told me about you and how much you were into things like this —and I bet she told you a little about us, too."

  It was a minute before I recognized the tone: Rogueishly Playful, with Just a hint of "We're all boys / girls / little - green - furry -things - from - Alpha-Centauri here together."

  I hated him. It was pure, primad, instinctive. It was also getting in my way.

  "Miriam?" I said blankly.

  There was a pause. It was a lot harder to string total strangers along into making Damning Confessions on the telephone than it looked in the books. "I mean, I knew Miriam. ..." I added.

  "Life and Death are in the Hands of the Gods," Ruslan intoned, tabling the question of what Miriam had or hadn't told me.

  "I don't know what Miriam could have told you about me. I know she's been with a lot of groups. I'm in a group now, but I'm really looking for someone to study with who's more shamanic," I babbled on. And may Goddess have mercy on me if Belle ever found out what thumping lies I was telling.

  "Perhaps Miriam mentioned the sort of things we do," Ruslan said. Fishing again, I realized.

  "I'm really into northern things," I said, ignoring the hint. "Look, do you think it would be possible for me to visit your group? Are you open?"

  Language is a wonderful thing. A translation into English of what I'd said so far in Paganspeak would go like this: Fm interested in working with a magical group that uses drugs and rekited physical discipline to produce altered states of consciousness, but Fm not interested in anything Native American or related to Ceremonial Magic. Is your group currently accepting new members, and do I sound interesting/safe enough to you for you to let me come and see if I want to Join you?

  "Some people think we're a little hierarchical," Ruslan said. (If you aren't willing to follow orders, forget it.)

  "I think I'm ready for that. It's important to me to be with a group that's serious." (Just try me.) "I think I was meant to find you." (Remember who called whom.)

  "I think you're right, Karen. Why don't you come over on Wednesday, around seven? You know where it is, don't you?"

  Subtle as a truck.

  "Well," I said coyly, "I don't know exactly . . . Somebody told me you were in Queens?" (You and I are both creatures of great occult

  power, of course, and I will admit I could find you by following your psychic emanations as long as you don't ask me to prove it.)

  Finsdly Ruslan gave up trying to get me to admit Miriam had told me anything and reeled off a set of directions that sounded just like the ones she'd written down. Probably he did this a lot.

  "We'll go out to dinner, and afterward maybe you can stay for the Circle." (Providing we like what we see, of course.)

  "I'm looking forward to it," I said.

  I hung up and stared at the phone for a long time.

  My name is Bast.

  That was the name Miriam had known me by. As far as 1 knew, she'd never heard of Karen.

  Just who had supplied the information about Karen Hightower to Ruslan?

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 7:00 p.m.

  Seventy percent of all reported UFO sightings occur on a Wednesday. This particular Wednesday I was sitting on an uptown subway with no air-conditioning getting ready to meet Baba Yaga. I was being careful—at least I thought I was.

  There was a letter in my apartment. I'd debated between addressing it to Belle or to Miriam's sister—neither of whom would do anything, I realized, so I addressed it to Belle, she should live and be well. At least I wouldn't have to tell her what all the words meant.

  First impressions count for as much in the Community as anywhere. I didn't know if Ruslan knew anything at all about me (then why had he called?), but I didn't want to look either too amateurish or too professional. I left off all my funky in-group "kick me" jewelry and wore silver rings in the holes in my ears and my lesbian clusterfuck necklace around my neck—the one that you have to stare at for quite a long time before you realize it's entirely made up of women being nude and naughty. Black silk T. Black dress pants that (I fondly believed) made me look like a slumming runway model. My one set of really upscale footwear—a pair of black suede boots I'd blown an entire freelance commission's pay on at Bloomie's on sale.

  I'd brought cash and tokens to cover the evening and left my purse at home, along with everything else that would tell Ruslan who I was and how much money I made. Was I a slumming yup-

  pie? An upscaling waitress? Did I spend more time in the New York Public Library than he did? He wouldn't be able to tell by looking. Never tell me the early Christians did not have these problems. After all, they used to worship naked, too.

  Ruslan met me at the subway stop.

  "Karen, " he said. "So good to see you. Ruslan." This last in case I hadn't noticed the immense aura of magical power around him.

  Ruslan was about average height, maybe an inch shorter, say five-ten. My boots had two-inch heels, which made me about as tadl as he was. He didn't like it. He had that light hair that's neither brown nor blond, and pale blue eyes, and the kind of build that isn't quite fat but makes you think of something prize and pamipered and well fed with ribbons on its halter. He was wearing an open-collared white dress shirt with jeans; he had a sterling silver belt buckle of a wolf biting the moon with a lot of Cyrillic around it. The buckle looked expensive and custom.

  His hands were short and blunt, almost like paws. I shook one of them.

  "And this is my lady, Ludmilla."

  "We're so pleased to meet you, Karen."

  Ludmilla looked like someone had jammed her head between two books and squeezed—a piranha caught halfway through a transformation into a guppy. Pale bulging eyes and hair barely dark enough to be called brown. She wore it parted ruler-straight down the middle of her head and hanging down. She couldn't be old enough to have worn it that way as a teenager. Or maybe she could. It was hard to tell.

  Ludmilla was wearing one of those expensive organic dresses — Laura Ashley or something like it—makeup, nylons, heels, and a suspicious lump on her left breast that might be a chicken foot stuffed into her bra. Her voice had a nasal out-of-town rasp I couldn't immediately place.

  "I'm happy to be here," I said. Ruslan clapped me on the shoulder. I felt like I'd joined Rotary.

  "I know this great restaurant," Ruslan said.

  The restauraint turned out to be Turkish, or Armenian, or at least dark. The waiters all knew my hosts, which was how I found out that Ludmilla was Mrs. Ruslan, which implied that Ruslan had a first name somewhere. He kept calling me "Karen" at frequent in-

  82 Bell, Book, and Murder

  tervals, like someone who has been too long in the thrall of Norman Vincent Peale.

  Ruslan ordered for all three of us in the tone that's all smiles until you contradict it.

  The food was good.

  And I realized I was going to have to confess. Everyone confesses when they meet someone new. The story of their life. When they knew they were different. Trying to find God in all the places the approved sources say to, and finally deciding the sources are cruel or crazy because they tell you to go stand in this building where a bunch of men reel off ce
nturies of rote words and they tell you this is God, this is religion, this is all there is of the not-human that interests itself in Man.

  The Firesign Theatre had an album once: Everything You Know Is Wrong. Once you've found that out, been lied to that comprehensively, you look at everything a little more closely, trying to find out what other lies all the blind ones around you are accepting. And there're lots of blind ones and they're all happy and content and you're not and it gets damned lonely.

  So when you find someone else who maybe, maybe, knows what it's like to wake up one day and realize everyone else is playing Let's Pretend, you talk.

  I couldn't quite bring myself to do that. I fenced in the inarticulate patois of the nineties, that dialect where if the other person doesn't already know what you're sajring he'll never find out by listening.

  "Well, I came to New York a few years ago, you know, searching? I don't know if you know. And I never was really comfortable with a lot of the stuff people were into, you know, when Ifowid out. They seemed, well, like they weren't taking what they were into seriously?" I poked at my something-with-lamb-and-lemon.

  "Most people don't," Ruslan intoned. I'd learned by now that he had two speeds—jovial and oracular. Jovial was like being French-kissed by a bulldozer. Oracular made me want to turn atheist. "Even those who should know better don't realize that they are meddling with living archetypes of immense power."

  And there are things that man was not meant to know, I finished silently. And I thought about being someone with that desperate need for belonging and validation and knowing I wasn't just alone and making things up —and finding Ruslan.

  "I didn't think anyone else understood," I said.

  "It isn't especially easy," he admitted. "A great man once said

  that the first thing one must give up in order to study magic is the fear of insamity."

  "Dessert?" said our waiter.

  Apparently I could be trusted to order that by myself. I had the baklava and Ludmilla had the galactobourkia. The waiter looked at Ruslan.

  "Now, Love," Ludmilla said. Ruslan shook his head. The waiter departed.

  "I have to watch what 1 eat," he said. A little defensively, 1 thought.

  "Ruslan has these shamanic trances," Ludmilla explained proudly.

  A fact that you may have forgotten if you live in one of the major population centers is that women's liberation. The Revolution, has not yet been universal. It seemed that Ludmilla Ruslan adhered to the older, purer doctrine—that of full-time cheering section for the man of her choice.

  This is not a good way to be. If it's unilateral, it's degrading. If it's reciprocal, it's nauseating.

  Think about it. If you had "shamanic trances," would you tell the world?

  I turned back to Ruslan. "You go into trance?" I said, hoping I looked fascinated.

  He smiled. Of course he'd wanted to be asked. Another thing an old-fashioned girl is good for is providing a straight line.

  "Started when I was a boy. I was pretty severely diabetic, so I used to be sick a lot of the time. And when I'd go into coma I'd have these experiences. Nothing like them in the literature. And strange things would happen when I woke up. So I started trying to understand them, and I realized that the shock to my system was actually projecting my astral self into the shamanic dream-time."

  I looked politely impressed. It might even be true. I'd heard weirder things from people who were perfectly sincere about it. The religious urge itself is bizarre enough; after that it's all quibbling. The question was not "Is the story intrinsically unbelievable?" but, "Does Ruslan believe it?"

  Or was he lying, and if so, why?

  "I realized it was importaint for me to learn all that I could about the dream time, so I could learn to guide others." Ruslan smiled. Ludmilla looked proud.

  I had a sudden snapshot image, vivid as a cliche: the Russian

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  steppes, flat as the plains of Kansas and a thousand times wider, salt-white with ice under a sky as blue as midnight. Chiaroscuro moon and fat white stars unwinking in the airless vault.

  Ruslan's dream time, as offered to his acolytes.

  "Yes," I said.

  On the walk back from the restaurant to the house I delivered to myself a stem mental lecture on not being a self-abnegating romantic jackass. Ruslan had a good line of patter, and he wasn't exactly the first to decide that post-Bomb America is a culture romancing oblivion. People have always worshiped what scared them, on the plausible theory that if they were nice enough to it, it would go away. The gods of agriculture and husbandry are the gods of famine. The gods of love are the gods of rejection.

  What was it Julian had called Ruslan's theme? Ecological nihilism? The flirtation with the ultimate terror—extinction.

  So Ruslan had a good line of patter. Fine. If that was all he had, that was fine, too. Miriam hadn't killed herself; I wasn't here because I thought he'd talked her into suicide.

  I was here because Miriam had asked me to help. And because if she were still alive, I'd be here, gathering my own facts in order to be fair.

  We went back to the apartment, so I guessed I'd passed the initial interview and would get to see an actual episode of Russian Shamanic Wicca. Even though I was nine-tenths certain that Nothing Was Going To Happen I had damp palms and a dry mouth standing there in front of the door while Ruslan dragged out his keys. Suppose they dragged me inside and cut me up with a chain saw? Suppose his whole group was waiting inside with sterling silver icepicks? Suppose —

  I'm sure the Lone Ranger never felt this way.

  Ruslan opened the door, and the only thing waiting for me was a cloud of stale Russian Church incense. Ruslan's apartment smelled just like Miriam's apartment. Ludmilla turned on the lights.

  "Why don't I just go and make some tea—people ought to be arriving in about half an hour."

  Ludmilla bustled off across the living room. I looked around.

  I don't know every practicing Neopagan in America, but I've been in a lot of living rooms, in New York and out. Rich, poor, and

  in between, they all have a certain family resemblance that comes of being decorated by a bunch of people coming from the same mi-croculture, with the same assumptions about the world.

  Ruslan's didn't.

  It wasn't just that there weren't Sierra Club posters on the wall, or that there were large pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was something subtler. A sense of priority.

  It was a big apartment—big by New York standards, meaning that it had a separate kitchen, through the doorway to which I could hear Ludmilla bashing the tea things about. There were doors leading off both sides of the living room; two bedrooms, probably.

  The living room furniture was stylish and modem and new-but-not-good. Vinyl couch, glass-and-brass tables — Monkey Ward's copies of Architectural Digest originals. Abstract geometric rugs in earth tones, from the same source. No books in sight. The only honest things in the room were the paintings.

  There were twelve of them, about eighteen by twenty-four, done on wood in Russian lacquerwork style and hung without frames. They were done by the same artist who had done Miriam's missal.

  They were not nice. But I wondered, as 1 looked at them, if I would have disliked them so much if I didn't already dislike Ruslan.

  "What do you think?"

  'They're very well done."

  'Thank you. My own work." That much was an honest reaction. "Of course, I'm not a professional. A number of people have said I should do more, and of course I've exhibited, but it would take too much time away from my real work." A line of patter so standard I could parse it in my sleep.

  'They're beautiful." 1 felt something warmer was called for, even if I do always get irritated with myself when I lie. They weren't beautiful—not even with the romantic Gothic "terrible beauty" of an advancing lava flow. They were just there, inimical as a beaker of cyanide.

  I stepped closer to the pictures.


  "I paint in blood," Ruslan said behind me. I turned around and caught the sadistic good-ol'-boy gleaim in his eye. He expected me to be freaked out. That was why he'd told me. To watch me squirm and then apologize for squirming.

  "Yours?" I asked politely.

  86 Bell, Book, and Murder

  His face went completely blank for a moment; then he laughed and I saw him abandon his cat-and-mouse game for the moment. When he spoke again it was almost a non sequitur.

  **rm very drawn to the Russian archetypes. The Khazar people were a vital and important Pagan culture that flourished in the Black Sea area around the second millennium B.C.E. When Christianity was introduced by the ruling classes as a means of disenfranchising the indigenous Pagan tribes, they embedded the vital images of Khazar religion in their own mythology. I'm trying to reclaim them so that the eastern Slavic peoples can once again practice their native tradition," Ruslan orated.

  We were back on track with Pagan Indoctrination Lecture #4-B. Nobody wants to be the one to start something, especially a religion. There are two ways of handling this: Either say you are actually reviving a religion that fell into disuse longer ago than anybody can remember (that's how Judaism started; read your Bible), or say you are reforming the one that's already there (Christianity, which started as Reform Judaism; and Protestantism, which began as Reform Catholicism).

  Even in Wicca someone is always unearthing a Book of Shadows that belonged to his great-grandmother, which is always exactly like most of the others that have been published, the first of which can be documented as having been written circa 1953.

  "I've always been fascinated with Old Russia," I said, turning my back on the pictures painted in blood. I was saved from parading my ignorance by Ludmilla's arrival with a big tolework tray: tall glasses full of black tea; sugar lumps and cherry preserves; right out of Chekhov. The folklorico-manqae clashed just a trifle with the Levittown modeme.

  "Sugar or Jam?" chirped Ludmilla brightly, dropping a big glop of cherries into her glass. The glass rested in a little brass bas-ketwork holder with a ring-shaped handle down near the bottom. It looked more like a candleholder than anything else, and like a perfect way for Bast to slop boiling tea on herself.