Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  "So . . . they were sort of mondo weird, and I'm pretty sure that Miriam had gotten fed up with them and that they were trying to scare her into staying when she called me. They're not exactly lily-white magically, if you know what I mean. So when she died . . . I guess she'd talked about me, and they wanted to find out if she'd talked to me."

  "She wouldn't even talk to me," grumbled Lace.

  "They have a secrecy riff that makes the Gardnerian oath look like the Freedom of Information Act."

  Lace laughed, a little gruffly, and raised her beer can.

  "Well, here's to all goddamn dumb femmes and dykes. Screw 'em all."

  Which seemed, as an epitaph, good enough for anyone, really.

  lO

  SUNDAY, JULY 1, 12:45 a.m.

  Lace invited me to stay the night. It wasn't even a pass, really, but I turned it down all the same. I wanted to go home and pull my covers up over my head and sleep forever or at least until Sunday afternoon, and maybe when I woke up I'd be my old cheerful self again. I had a doom-laden feeling, as if I'd forgotten something terribly important, and I could not imagine what it was. I found out.

  There was no way I could have mundanely known what was waiting for me five flights up when I walked into my home lobby. I told myself stories of imaginary muggers lying in wait in the doorway, but there weren't any. I assured myself that all my neighbors had been smoking crack and fighting, which accounted for the vibes in the air, but that wasn't it either.

  My apartment's down the end of a hall, and of course the hallway lights don't work. I stepped in the blood before I saw it.

  In New York the apartment doors are metal. Someone had thoughtfully affixed a wooden board to mine. It looked as if something might be painted on it, but I couldn't be sure, because somebody had also nailed a cat to the board, and then cut the cat open and nailed its ribs to the board, and then stuck everything that was left inside full of razors.

  I thought I saw it move, but it couldn't have. It could not have —it had been dead for hours and most of the blood on the floor was dry.

  I backed up. And then I was sure that was a dreadful mistake, too, because I felt my back hair prickle the way it does when there's someone behind you.

  But there wasn't. The hall was empty, yet full of presence, and I had the conviction that the moment I'd taken my eyes off it the cat had begun to pull itself free from the board, and once it was free it would come for me, full of razors.

  I looked back at it quickly. Had it moved? Had they done that to it while it was still alive?

  There were big nails through the eye sockets, holding the head to the board.

  "/'[[ put your eyes out. Witch-bitch. " I heard the words from the phone call I'd gotten the day after Miriam died as cleairly as if someone was saying them now. Baba Yoga.

  Reason told me there was no threat, only horror, in the hallway. Intuition assured me the danger was urgent.

  I could not enter my apartment any more than I could have done that to an animal—alive or dead—myself. But someone had done it. And they meant to do it to me. The sense of someone in the hallway with me was strong, and none of the mind-tricks I knew would make it go away.

  But I could make myself go away. I pulled in my perception, my imagination, my intellect—all the things your mind can use against you. I would not think, I would not feel, I would not imagine. When all of that was gone I forced myself back down the stairs.

  I got to the lobby, and instead of going out the front I went down another half-flight and went out the back. There's a sort of a courtyard and a long roofed alleyway leading to the street behind. I went down it without hesitation, even though it was pitch dark. Then 1 was out on the street again, feeling things swirling around inside me like the demons in Pandora's box and over everything the raw sense of someone—somethingf—that had been cheated.

  I wanted to go back up those stairs. I wanted it desperately. I could see myself unlocking the door and going inside. I tried to see myself locking the door again and making myself safe, but I couldn't bring that image into focus. I'd go in, and leave the door unlocked behind me. Then I'd drink—I wanted a drink; I'd been drinking beer all evening and I wanted something to keep me from sobering up.

  And anyone who wanted could come up the stairs and get at me. Anyone who knew I was there to find. Anyone who'd made sure I'd be there.

  116 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I was cold sober now. And I wasn't going back. I pushed back against the insistent images, not letting myself feed them. I was a Child of the Goddess; if the Wicca was for anything, it was for a time like this. I was the Goddess, and She was me, and into that charmed circle of light no blackness could penetrate.

  I reached Broadway and flagged a cab. 1 didn't dare take the subway. There was too much possibility in the subway.

  It was July first, and eighty-five degrees at 1:30 a.m. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

  One of Lace's roommates let me in. I'd banged on the door until somebody answered, and when she finally took the chains off the door and opened it I barged in past her like she was furniture. Everybody was up by then; when Lace saw me she just put her arms around me.

  I must have looked like a rape victim. The other two kept asking if I could identify . . . someone. My perceptions jump-cut with the discontinuity of shock; one minute one of them would be there, and when I tried to answer she'd be gone, coming back with tea or brandy or a wet washcloth.

  It was a reaction way out of proportion to that common urban inconvenience of coming home and finding a dead cat nailed to your door. But it was perfectly in line with a reaction to a murder attempt. Because that was what it had been.

  A deathspell for a Witch.

  One of the charming old European folk customs thankfully not perpetuated in the Community at large today is that of taking a sheep or pig's heart and pricking it full of pins, nails, glass, and anything similar you might have lying about—like razor blades. This is guaranteed to be certain death for the Witches in your neighborhood—once you've got the thing ready, you take it and bury it under the doorstoop of the Witch you most particularly dislike.

  They'd nailed it to mine. Baba Yoga.

  I'd been innocent beyond permission to think Ruslan didn't know exactly who I was. He'd known about Changing's Crossing Circle. He'd known enough to call me and try to stop it. Yet when I went to his circle, not one comment about Changing or my Craft affiliations. I'd assumed he didn't know.

  Now I knew better. He knew. He just didn't care. He'd had me out to Queens to look me over, and like a mindless sacrificial goat I'd gone. Now he'd made up his mind what to do, and he was doing

  it. I was not even bothering to be fair and open-minded and pretend that somebody else in little old New York might be trotting out the old malificarum to torture cats to death and nail them to my door. There wasn't anybody else.

  Just Ruslan—and his Khazar coven that had gotten a taste for blood, murder, and vendetta, and wanted the thrill of hunting down another victim, even if they had to manufacture one themselves.

  Eventually 1 looked around the Real World. The others had gone; it was just Lace and me, and she was holding my hands. Eventually 1 realized I was the one holding her hands, and let go.

  "I didn't tell you quite everything about Baba Yoga, " I said. My throat ached as if I'd been screaming.

  I guess I was lucky; if I'd been in any better shape Lace would've decked me sure. As it was, she heard me out and put me to bed.

  I'd been wrong about Lace. Vendettas weren't her style. She accepted absolutely the idea that Ruslan had murdered Miriam, no question, but she also accepted that there was nothing she could do about it. The great Anti-Pagan and Lesbian Conspiracy would ensure that justice could not be done. She was bitter, but fatalistic.

  She also loaned me the money later that day to go shopping for what I needed and then came back with me to my apartment, on a bright and reasonably sunny morning in the later twentieth century when the id
ea of worshiping gods was as unbelievable as the concept that someone would try to kill someone else with magic.

  The thing was still on the door. In the morning sunlight with Lace at my back it was gross but not terrifying, all its potential for harm leached away.

  Maybe.

  Lace and I levered the board off the door and slid it into the garbage bag we'd brought, and poured a mixture of Lysol and Uncrossing Floorwash over the door ajid the floor and mopped everything up with paper towels until my end of the hall was cleaner than it had been in years. I couldn't get the residue of the carpet tape used to mount the board off the door, but I guessed I was going to have to settle. Only when everything was neat and tidy and I'd blessed the whole door frame with patchouli and blue chalk did I unlock my door.

  Everything inside was serene. The sun illuminated a solid bar

  118 Bell, Book, and Murder

  of dust motes on its way to the sink. I felt like Fd gotten a stay of execution.

  'Tea?" I said to Lace.

  "Beer," said Lace firmly. She picked up the bag full of dead cat and bloody paper towels. "You want I should toss this for you?"

  "No," I said. It went against all of my training and self-preservation instincts to just throw a major spell-component out with the trash to go on wreaking havoc, but I would not take it into the apartment to give it a readly good psychic eradication. "We can't just leave something like that lying around ungrounded."

  So I brought newspapers and tape and a box out into the hall and wrapped what had been on my door in a nice neat package. Later that day I dropped it off at a place that accepts UPS packages even on Sunday.

  I came back from that alone and let myself in to my apartment again. This time it was evening, amd the place had the overbaked scent of someplace that had been shut up for a whole summer's day. I wished Ruslan much joy of his package when he opened it, one to four days from now.

  Miriam's little Goddess of the Games glimmered down at me from her place on my altar. I smiled up at her and lit some incense and paused, like a mirror, for reflection.

  I had been the victim of a magical attack.

  Credulity stretched. Oh, they were a major topic of conversation among newbies and wannabes at Pagain festivals. Everyone was almost certain they'd been the victim of one. It was a good explanation for everything from a case of herpes to being fired, and so flattering to be the center of attention of an emissary from the Unseen World. Even I, once and a long time ago, had Almost Certainly created a magical cluld that haunted me for some weeks knocking books off shelves until I got bored with it.

  Eventually you grow up, find out how the laws of magic actually work, and stop making an ass of yourself in public. Because real gen-u-wine ducks-in-a-row Black Workings are just about as rare as actuad persecution of Witches. Rarer.

  But not, I'd just found out, nonexistent.

  I could not walk away from this now. I could not wring my hands and say that I could not build a temporal case, and so no spiritual measures need be taken. Not anymore.

  I'd been given the chance, on which I'd rather have took a miss,

  of gazing on tJie naked face of capital-E Evil, the thing which, as Hannah Arendt more or less says, does things just because it can. And I could not do nothing.

  Caring is what separates good from evil, not the motions you make with your body. A lot of the motions are identical in the gray area that the modems say proves that there is neither Good nor Evil. Dion Fortune ssiid that Evil is only misapplied Good, which was a brave thing to say in the time where she was living, but she never lived to see the worst aftermath of the War To End War.

  If we have a soul, a better nature, any altruism at all, Evil is its autism. Evil is Evil, proving that even tautologies can be true.

  And now 1 had to do something about it, without doing something Evil myself, because if I looked at it and called it by its True Name and then walked away, it had me. You aren't bom with a soul. You purchase it in installments. And I'd just been handed the bill for the next one.

  Hubris. What a lovely convenient thing a label is. Better than a strait] acket for pulling all your energy into fighting it.

  Ruslan was doing evil. Ruslan had to be stopped. But he had committed no provable crime against the people of the City and State of New York. And there was no central authority in the Community that could or would stop him.

  I was the only one who knew the truth.

  Heady stuff, that. Bast, Lone Ranger of the Wicca. A free ride to megadomaniac paranoia.

  Truth, we aire taught, does not come from consensus, but from knowledge. The knowledge was there, but somehow 1 didn't think Ruslan would hold still while 1 trotted a jury of his peers past his questionable ethicad practices.

  And even if everyone in the Community believed me, what would they do? Anything?

  Ha. I'd already heard Belle's vote. "We are not qualified to sit in judgment. ..."

  Yet I could not do nothing. And that was the bone in the throat—I had to do something. Something legal, and more to the point, moral.

  I curled up in a chair where 1 could see Miriam's little Goddess, pulled out one of my sketchbooks, and began to think.

  It took me a week to get what I wanted, but most of that was because the typesetter was so danm slow—closed for the Fourth, and

  120 Bell, Book, and Murder

  other light holidays. During that period Ruslan was blessedly silent, package or no.

  Lace phoned me a couple of times, but we didn't have much to say to each other. I hung out around the Revel a bit, but I really didn't fit into their feminism-and-granola Paganism any more than I did with the Serpent's Truth's heavy-metal high sorcery.

  Where did 1 belong? My own High Priestess thought I was overreacting, and Belle was pretty much middle-of-the-road as Witches went. If I didn't belong in Wicca, what was left?

  I wouldn't worry about that now. I belonged to the Goddess at least—that's one good thing about ^fnosis. And I thought that what I was doing was right.

  And whether it was right or not, it was still what I was doing.

  I picked up the type Friday noon, and stayed late at the studio mechanicaUng it up. When I was done it was a poster—a handbill, really—8 1/2 x 11, easy to reproduce at any city copy shop, full of big black letters.

  WARNING: There is a Black Coven operating out of Queens. They call themselves Baba Yaga and claim to practice a Khazar (Russian) Wiccan tradition. These people perform black magick and use dangerous (illegal) drugs in their rituals without the consent of the participants. They have already been responsible for the death of one woman who was trying to leave them. If you were a friend of or knew Sunshrike, avoid these people and warn your friends.

  The wording had been what took me the most time to get right. I hadn't mentioned Ruslan's name, or added my own to the poster. I had tried to make it something that would have no effect in the mundane world —I could not imagine these posters causing Ruslan to lose his Real World job or make the police come looking for him. All I wanted was to neutralize Ruslan in the same arena where he and Baba Yaga were trying to kill me, not to raise the stakes.

  And that is the difference between Good and Evil, and the reason Good never wins.

  That night I took the mechanical home and cast a spell of my own—an intention, really—that the poster it made should shine such a bright light that the shadows people needed to work evil would no longer exist. The next day—Saturday—I took it to the Eighth Street Copy Shop and ordered twenty-five hundred copies.

  * * * Saturday night at 8:30 I went down to the Revel, hoping Lace was there. In spite of the weather (hot but clear) I was wearing an extra-extra-large army surplus parka, which I keep for wearing to Pagan Festivals because nothing in its sad shabby life is ever going to make any difference to it again. I had reinforced its immense pockets with duct tape; they contained fifteen-hundred flyers, a staple gun and two boxes of staples, and a dozen glue sticks. 1 looked like a mugger waiting to happen
.

  I waddled into the store. Mischia, having got her brother safely married, was sitting behind the card table finishing up a late customer. A coffee cam full of bills sat at her elbow. Lace looked up from the cash register. The henna was black now, aind so were her fingernails. She looked like a punk vampire whose mother'd had a heavy date with a Mack truck.

  "Hi, Lace —doing anj^thing tonight?" I said in my best Donna Reed voice.

  "Keeping you out of Bellevue, maybe. Shit, Bast, what's with you?"

  I went over to where Mischia wouldn't hear us. "I just joined the Occult Police," I told Lace.

  "I'm telling you because I figured you'd guess."

  It was an hour later; we were outside the Revel and ToUah was locking up inside. She hadn't raised an eyebrow over the arctic parka in July. I wondered how strange people thought I was.

  I handed Lace a flyer. It was hard to stand there while she read it and wait for her to laugh. I was doing this because I had to; the same way you have to move your hand out of a candle flame. I didn't think she'd agree with me.

  "And you're going to put these up all over town?" Lace said, poker-faced.

  "You will have noticed my name's not on them."

  "Yeah, sure. That's reaUy going to confuse the hell out of people. Bast."

  "But they can't prove anything. Just like I can't prove that Baba Yoga poisoned Miriam and nailed a cat to my door."

  Lace laughed then. Maybe the irony of it amused her, or maybe she was just tickled at the thought that I was never going to laugh at her Conspiracy paranoia again.

  "Sure. Okay. Where do we start?"

  122 Bell, Book, and Murder