Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

* * * If you take a map of New York and turn it so that Battery Park is at the bottom and Spuyten Duyvil is at the top (the name has nothing to do with the devil; it's Dutch for whirlpool). Chanter's Revel is the occult shop nearest the bottom. So we started there and worked our way uptown.

  1 stapled flyers to fences and glued them to lampposts. I slid them through the mail slots of the stores we visited. 1 hit up bookstores, bars, botanicas, and any other likely looking funky New Age place I saw. I think there are "Post No Bills" regulations still on the books in Manhattan; Lace kept lookout and we were careful to make sure nobody saw me actually doing anything. It was a clear night; eventually Goddess Luna made it up over the buildings to shine down on the Batman and Robin of the Neopagan Cormnunity.

  I glued several flyers to the windows of The Snake. I didn't do that anywhere else, because glue stick is hell to remove and I had no grudge against the owners of the walls I was decorating, but I suspected Julian of knowing more about Ruslan than he'd told me. Petty, I know.

  When I'd done a street, I could look back down and see my handbills: lemon yellow, orange orange, and raspberry red. The fluorescent copier paper had cost extra, but it'd been weU worth it. Nobody could miss them.

  Eventually we ran out. I had another thousand at home, and the original, so I could make more any time I wanted to, but what I'd been carrying had pretty well plastered the Village. The only occult shop I'd missed was Mirror Mirror, which is pretty chichi and New Age —and way over on the West Side, besides.

  The full moon was sliding off toward the east—that made it a little after midnight. I felt an incredible sense of euphoria; whether it was the presence of the Goddess or the rush that comes from making mischief, I didn't bother to examine.

  "Buy you a midnight snack?" I said to Lace.

  "I figure you owe me, Gaped Grusader."

  I avoided my usual haunts on Sunday, so as not to be seen too obviously smirking. The sense of well-being I'd lucked into on Saturday continued; it's wonderful to bask in approval, even if it's only yours.

  I coasted uptown and spent the day window-shopping on the

  Upper East Side and thinking that if I got my hands on enough of the right pieces of Ari: Nouveau I could convince Neopagans everywhere that the Victoriains were a Goddess-worshiping matriarchy. I entertained once more the unlikely dream of Ov^niing My Own Occult Shop, which I never will because more than fifty percent of all businesses go bankrupt in the first year and I'm too smart to get into things with a failure factor that high.

  I tell myself.

  I splurged on a sushi dinner—one last time, since with taxis and cleaning supplies and all (not to mention the book I'd bought at The Snake in the middle of all this) I was going to have to put in serious hours at the Bookie Joint to stay on the profits side of the ledger. But that gnawing feeling of being a helpless consentor to what Baba Yoga had done to Miriam was gone.

  I felt up enough to make a pass by Cindy's on the way home, but the salon had closed up shop. I saw a couple of my posters on the buildings nearby. They looked like I felt. Cheery.

  My answering machine was taking a message as I walked in. Belle wanted me to call her. She'd wanted me to call her, I found, at eleven, one, and three p.m. also.

  And her sdl the way up at the top of the island, and this such a secret between us. I tried to wipe the smirk off my face and failed.

  There was adso a message from Lace to tell me she'd gotten Tol-lah to post a copy of the flyer inside the shop. I looked at the pile I had left. Maybe she'd like some to hand out, too.

  MONDAY, JULY 9, VARIOUS TIMES

  You would think that Martin Luther had never nailed ninety-five theses to anything—or that there weren't handbills all over the city telling people everything from the date of the Apocalj^se to the Queen of England's sexual habits. Why should they make such a fuss about one more?

  Belle nailed me at the studio Monday.

  "Bast? 1 really think we ought to talk about this," she said as soon as I picked up the phone.

  "I'm not really somewhere I can talk," I said, not even bothering to deny I knew what "this" was.

  I was safe because it was true: Ray doesn't object to my religion (if he's noticed it), but he does object to tying up Houston Graphics' one phone line for anything other than Houston Graphics business.

  "I had no idea you were so upset about Miriam," she said. "I know you can't talk now, but will you come over tonight? I really feel bad about not having been more there for you."

  "If I can," I hedged. "Look, I'll call you later."

  But I didn't go to Belle's later. I went down to The Snake.

  The Snake opens every day at noon and remains open until ten or midnight, depending on the will of Tris, Julian, and the gods. When I got there around seven, the usual house-party atmosphere prevailed. There were leather boys with rosy crosses tattooed on their

  pecs hobnobbing with bnijas wearing every piece of jewelry known to medical science and enough mascara to equip a Tammy Faye Bakker impersonator. There were people for whom the sixties hadn't ended and those who were already living in the Age of Horus. It was pure sleaze. I felt instantly at home and wondered why.

  There was a copy of my flyer on the bulletin board, and I definitely hadn't put it there. Lace hadn't either—she'll cross the threshold of The Snake about the same time she goes into St. Pat's. I slithered past the bulletin board and down one of the aisles, where I picked up a book by a Brit anthropologist who got herself inducted into an English coven. She concluded that belief in magic causes belief in magic, provided the believer wants to believe.

  Well, hell, / knew that. Belief is what makes it work. In theory unbelief should work the same way, but the mind is a divided camp at the best of times. You can eradicate reason from your mind much easier than you can banish superstition. In the end, the reality of magic has to be decided by each person for himself, with full knowledge of the consequences.

  Magical theory has never been popular with the masses.

  I worked my way around past Atlantis and the Rosicrucians to the front desk. Julian was behind the cash register, presiding over his little kingdom. When he saw me he blinked, as if he couldn't believe his eyes.

  "Bast—I was hoping you'd come by."

  Not convincing. And Julian was always convincing. Right then little warning bells started to go off in my head.

  "You've got a book for me, Julian?" What was it really? He couldn't be picking this inopportune a time to discover an interest in girls.

  I was standing between the bulletin board and the cash register; behind me two gays were discussing the Baba Yaga flyer in the patented New York Gay Male Accent.

  "Remember how a couple weeks ago you were in with that Russian thing?" Julian said, ignoring what I'd just said. Behind me the conversation turned on the imperialistic judgmentalism of whoever had prepared the flyer. "Do you still have it?"

  That was the moment at which I knew what I hadn't even suspected, but I shoved the knowledge down in order to concentrate on what I was saying. I tried desperately to remember what I'd told Julian about the Khazar missal. "Maybe," I said.

  "Bum it," Julian said flatiy.

  126 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I stared at him, looking like a moron and for once not even caring. Because I'd been right when I pasted all those flyers on The Snake's windows—Julian did know more than he was telling.

  Julian was the one who'd sold me out to Ruslan.

  What was the sum total of my relationship with Julian? Charge slips. And what was on those charge slips? Nothing much: just my (mundane) name, address, and phone number. And Julian knew me as Bast.

  Julian was the link.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but then someone came up to the register and Julian turned away as if he'd never spoken.

  "Oh, hey, Jadis!" 1 turned around and stared straight at Star-fawn.

  Know that your sins will find you out an astute student of human nature said once. Starfawn was
standing right in front of the sign and could hardly fafl to notice it—assuming she could read.

  "It's so neat to see you again. I guess you're feeling okay?" She was good, but she couldn't quite suppress her smirk when she said that. Starfawn of Baba Yoga had every reason to hope I wasn't feeling okay.

  "I was hoping you'd maybe come back, 'cause you left so fast the last time I really didn't get a chance to talk to you, but Rus said he hadn't heard from you." Her eyes were flat and innocent and brown, completely untroubled. I revised my opinion. Not a Trilby. A little lamprey, hungry for blood.

  She looked up at my flyer and dismissed it with a shrug of one bare shoulder. "Somebody's in real trouble for that—but hey, whoever isn't for us is against us, you know?"

  I'd heard that somewhere before. Maybe Starfawn thought it was original.

  "Who do you suppose could have done something like that?" I said with an increasing sense of unreality.

  She smiled; a blinding set of full dental caps. "Well, you know. Bast, honey, Rus is going to find out."

  She sashayed right out the door before I realized she'd called me by name. I looked at Julian. He was staring down at me with the blank expression usually worn by the better class of Puritan Witch-burners.

  "Bye," he said.

  I spent the rest of the evening bludgeoning my feelings about Julian into something 1 could live with. Every time I started to rationalize his involvement 1 couldn't decide whether I was being transactional and open-minded or selling out for a pretty face.

  He'd given Ruslan my legal name and unlisted phone number. Good guess: He was the only one who could make the connection between Karen and Bast who also might know Ruslan.

  On the other hand, he'd advised me to bum the missal. Unsolicited advice, and one of the very few non-mercantile-based conversations I'd ever had with Julian.

  Did that mean he repented his wicked ways and thought I was cute, or just that he was playing both ends against the middle to achieve balance, like a good Ceremonial Magician?

  By the time I woke up Tuesday morning I decided it probably didn't matter.

  But I resolved to make future transactions at The Snake cash only.

  Of course the (rumored) authorship of the "Trumpet's Blast Against the Monstrous Regiment of Khazar Wiccans" (to coin a title) didn't stay a secret. For one thing, I had to talk to Belle eventually, even though she had to come all the way down to my apartment to catch me. She asked me point-blank if I'd done it, and then I got a long lecture on tolerance, responsibility, understanding, and Not Making Waves.

  She kept reminding me that I didn't have any proof Ruslan was involved in Miriam's death—a confession was apparently no more proof than it would have been in a mundane criminal case.

  I hadn't mentioned the cat. I think I was afraid of what I'd do if I did and heard what I thought I would.

  "You really don't have amy right to go publicizing something like that in that fashion. It isn't constructive, you know, and we all have to tolerate each other, not condemn. If you want to invite Ruslan to a Circle in order to talk things over ..."

  "I am going to Circle with that sonovabitch motherfuck about the time hell freezes over," I interrupted. "Are you listening to me. Belle? Are you listening to yourself? For ten years you've told me that magic works — changes in environment in conformation with will, remember? Well, I believed you, and now when 1 tell you that there is someone out there using his will like an AK-47, you tell me I'm not being constructive! If it works, it can kill —and that's

  128 Bell, Book, and Murder

  against all the ethics you taught me, too! Ethics, Belle! Ruslan used black magic against Miriam—he used it against me—he admitted it—"

  "Oh, Bast, I think you're taking things way out of context," Belle said, exasperated.

  I took a deep breath. "All I want to know is, do you believe adl this stuff about ethics and love and magic that you've been pushing at me all these years, or are you just another fucking mundane?"

  "I don't think you're being terribly reasonable about this," Belle said in a tight little voice.

  "I don't think I'm going to be reasonable about this," I said, which pretty well killed that conversation. I didn't offer to walk her to the subway when she left.

  Some of the other members of Changing called too, once they'd seen the flyer and heard my name attached to it. The Cat took it as a personal affront that I'd used print media instead of an electronic BBS. Glitter thought I should have hired some of her clients to beat Ruslan up. Everyone was bewildered at my introduction of a real toad into their imaginary garden.

  Okay, so magic-with-a-K is a crock of shit. Mental masturbation for the masses. Self-delusion. This is not the point. The point is that Ruslan, under the guise of practicing Wicca, violated a number of its central tenets—the Rules. No more enforceable or admirable than the rules in a game of Monopoly, if you like, but start breaking them aind soon what you've got left isn't ciny kind of gaime at all.

  Whether Ruslan was more than a little responsible for the real live death of an actual human being probably doesn't matter either. He'd tried to be. And unless my flyer drove him out of the Community, he was going to go on being responsible, until he made a big enough mess to interest the temporal authorities, because nobody in the Community was going to say a word against him.

  A central regulating authority is not the answer. There have always been con men and charlatans in the religion business, bilking their followers to build their Towers of Power and their Crystal Cathedrals. There always will be. The only answer is to eliminate followers, but it's lonely when you don't follow the herd.

  Maybe there isn't any answer.

  Changing's first July meeting was on Friday the 13th. I didn't go. I had my own ritual to conduct.

  I'd snagged a nice sturdy box from a trash heap and covered it with wrapping paper. Now I dumped in some potpourri and frankincense and a protection amulet or two, a procedure that always reminds me vaguely of kindergarten arts and crafts time, although I've managed to come to terms with it. And when I had the box looking pretty and inviting and strong in a way that made sense to my unconscious mind, I dumped in all that was left in the world of Miriam Seabrook, including the tapes of the phone messages I'd had from her and Ruslan. Eventually someone would be having a bonfire somewhere and I could bum the lot.

  I hesitated a long time over the Khazar missal. Bum it, Julian had said—and while a part of me thought that was a good idea, £ind something I could manage right now, I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. So I wrapped it in red silk and tucked it into the box along with all the rest.

  Then it was all hidden away under my bed. Over and done with, I thought. All that was left was for me to try and make sense of what had happened.

  I'd managed to construct a sort of timetable.

  Sometime in March of this year: Miriam meets Ruslan and joins Baba Yoga, taking their oaths of secrecy. At first she's pleased with it. She drops old friends and separates the ones she can't drop completely (like Lace) from her new friends. She starts making her very own Khazar missal, and Ruslan paints her portrait into the icon inside the front cover—with her own blood—just as he has for every new Khazar.

  But then things go sour. Maybe it's common sense asserting itself. Maybe the things they're asking her to do finally outweigh the sense of being part of a glorious conspiracy. At any rate, sometime around the beginning of June she tells them she's through with them—or maybe just hints that she's dissatisfied. And Ruslan tells her "once in, never out." He has her athame. He tells the coven to do a deathspell. Maybe he tells Miriam. Maybe he doesn't. But Miriam, very conveniently, dies.

  I didn't know Ruslan well enough to know if he expected his magic to work. Whether he got what he expected or not, the results frightened him — especially when he realized that Miriam had died with all her Khazar material in her possession.

  Miriam's missal was the thing that bound her into Baba Yaga. Maybe it was an occult funn
el, like Julian said. Or maybe Ruslan only thought it was. But the thought of losing control over it made

  130 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Ruslan crazy enough to commit an actual crime: tossing Miriam's apartment to look for it. He probably didn't have to break in —Ruslan struck me as the kind of power-tripper who ended up with keys to his coveners' apartments.

  Was that how he'd gotten Miriam's athame? Or had he made her give it to him? I couldn't imagine her doing that—but I could imagine her fear on coming home and finding it gone. Was that the thing that had finally made her call me?

  I'd never know.

  But I did know that three days after he trashed her apartment Ruslan phoned me to invite me over to his place. Miriam might have mentioned me —or Julian might have told him I'd showed up at The Snake brandishing the missal. I tried to imagine Julian as a member of Baba Yaga and failed, fortunately for my sense of amour propre. No matter how much ceremony Baba Yaga layered on, they'd still be too Pagan for him.

  Which was beside the point. The point was Ruslan, and his telephone soliciting of Yours Truly, part-time moron. Ruslan was still looking for the missal and hoped I had it—in fact, he'd made some pretty heavy-handed threats about what would happen to me if I didn't hand it over. But I didn't, amd so, not having gotten it, he summoned up Baba Yaga to . . .

  Kill me? Scare me? Search my apartment? Make me go running back to him with it clutched in my hot Uttle hand, begging him to make the bogeyman go away?

  I didn't know. And I hadn't done any of those things, which was more to the point. Instead, I'd turned the full glare of Community attention on him and made him the current hot topic of gossip. A sensible person would pull in his horns and walk away, but I wasn't sure if Ruslan was one.

  And the worst of it was, Ruslan might not be sure either.

  ^•^^ FRIDAY, JULY 20 ^'^i^

  New York headed into the depths of July. Not as bad as August, when the streets melt, but enough to make me wish I had the money and the organization to afford an air conditioner at home.