Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial)

by Schwartz, David J.

  Something called out across the water, some chattering thing, perhaps a muskrat. As the call faded Ingrid became aware of the sounds she had tuned out—the slow susurration of the river, the somnolent orchestra of the crickets and other insect noisemakers, the faint noises of traffic from the I-94 bridge to the south.

  Then something else called out, a loud, emphatic series of hoots. Ingrid’s heart drummed against her ribs. She was not a great believer in omens, but here she was, about to summon a terrifying owl-demon, and one of its animal kingdom cousins was calling out—a warning?

  She was nearly to the spot. She suspended the propulsion charm and stepped out into the shallows; the water was cold, but it gave her focus.

  One more pillar to place.

  One more step complete.

  One more day.

  ***

  Joy slept hard. Sometimes sleep was like that, for her; she went down and came up with no memory of dreams, her eyes bleary, her body aching. She had a vague memory of someone, undoubtedly Lawrence, tiptoeing past her in the middle of the night, watching her as if she were an alarm about to go off. She had thought about saying something, but then she was asleep again, and he was gone.

  When she opened her eyes again it was bright in the room, and Zen was shaking her. “Auntie Joy, get up! Daddy’s making pancakes!”

  “They’re crêpes,” Lawrence called from the other room.

  “Daddy, that’s gross! Say pancakes.” Zen peered into Joy’s face. “Do you want some juice?”

  “Coffee.” Zen jumped; Joy’s voice was a feral rasp. “I’ll get it.” She sat up on the couch, feeling rusty and mechanical. “Sit by me, Zen-Zen.”

  Zen sat next to Joy and threw her arms around her. Joy’s chest did that thing it did whenever her niece let her know that she loved her: something inside her expanded so much that it ached and felt like it couldn’t possibly fit inside her. This smart, adorable, funny, fierce little girl—she had to keep her safe any way she could. The world the Emissary had described would be safe for Zen and her brother, for Rosemary. But she thought she knew what Trevor would think of it.

  Joy hugged Zen, kissed the top of her curls, and hoisted her up over her shoulder to carry her into the kitchen; Zen shrieked and laughed. Lawrence smiled at them but looked quickly away. He was a shy man who occasionally covered it by being blustery and loud. This morning he wasn’t bothering, and Joy appreciated it.

  “Is there coffee?” She set Zen down; the girl was getting too large for such favorite-aunt shenanigans.

  “Already poured you a cup,” he said.

  “Thank you, Lawrence.” Joy warmed her hands on the cup. “I’m surprised the baby isn’t up yet.”

  “He was up three hours ago,” said Lawrence. “He’s already down for his midmorning nap. Rosemary went back to bed too.”

  “Oh.” Joy was amazed that she had slept through all of that. Maybe she’d have made a good parent after all. Or, actually, a terrible one.

  She sat down next to Zen. “How are you?”

  “Daddy’s busy,” said Zen. Her tone was sad and resigned.

  To Lawrence’s credit, Joy saw the shock of dark blue flash over his predominantly violet aura. He didn’t want to lose his daughter.

  “I’m busy today,” Lawrence said. “But I’m taking tomorrow afternoon off to hang out with my best girl. How would you like to go to the zoo?”

  “Yay!” Zen started listing off the animals she would see at the zoo. Joy quizzed her on some of them. The seven-year-old knew far more about animals than her aunt did; Joy wondered if the little girl would remember these facts in five or ten years.

  “Are there black panthers at the zoo?” Joy asked, thinking of Frederick Larch.

  “Black panthers are just leopards, really,” said Zen. “Or jaguars.” She pronounced this last “jag-yars.” “Their spots are just all on top of each other. They’re like one big spot! Mostly they live in zoos, because the zoo people like them, I guess. They breed them.” She made a face at the concept of breeding, then stuffed a forkful of crêpes and syrup into her mouth.

  “Really.” Joy sipped her coffee and had some crêpe herself. The bureau’s shape-shifting experts seemed convinced that Larch had been born a panther; perhaps he had been born in captivity? She needed to interrogate him at some point, as soon as gods stopped dropping in to chat with her and hidden, secret manuscripts stopped coming to light.

  After Lawrence took Zen off to school, Joy sat down with Carla Drake’s manuscript. The introduction was so long and confusing that Joy ended up skipping over most of it—it read mostly as a sort of biography of the author, for reasons that weren’t clear to Joy. She saw that it mentioned Carla’s mother, Amanda, as a woman of “vague yet unattained ambition” and someone “more suited to running a sailing club than raising a child.” She would have to go back and read it more carefully when there was time.

  For the moment, she focused on the main argument of the book, which seemed to be that Crowley’s death hoax—perpetrated in 1930 with the help of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa—had not been a hoax at all. That Crowley had, in fact, been replaced by another version of himself. This had been done, Drake argued, because a mysterious group that she referred to as “the Order” had attempted to recruit Crowley to their cause and had failed. She cited obscure and confusing evidence that indicated—to her, at least—that Crowley had been contacted by the Order three times: once in 1900 at his estate, Boleskine House on Loch Ness; again in 1910 at his Victoria Street flat in London; and finally at the so-called Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, in 1920.

  The replacement Crowley, Drake argued, was not the trickster and seeker after divine truth that the first had been. He had moved away from his experiments with sex magic, put aside his former goal of personal encounters with the divine, and turned his energies toward rehabilitating his image. This was all just history to Joy, but Drake argued that the Crowley who became a vocal critic of the Third Reich and went on to work for the United States war effort was some sort of historical aberration. She cited a book that she claimed had come to her from another reality, one that described a Crowley who had never turned his powers to profit or volunteered to help the Allied cause. Drake even went so far as to claim that Crowley should have died in 1947, not 1955 as he in fact had. And the last few chapters presented evidence that the FBMA, the agency Crowley had founded, was engaged in all sorts of suppressive and oppressive behavior, a list that would make conspiracy theorists roll their eyes and sigh.

  When Joy finished skimming the manuscript she was more confused than ever. The Order might well be what the members of the Thirteenth Rib were talking about when they discussed order and chaos—but replacing people with their own doubles? What kind of a long game was order playing? Drake’s evidence for her claims was shaky at best, considering it rested in large part on a book that none of her readers would be able to get their hands on. Joy put the book back together and set her head down, considering.

  “A Domesticated Beast: How Aleister Crowley Became Uncorrupted and Founded the Most Dangerous Agency on Earth, the Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs,” Rosemary read. “My goodness, what a mouthful.” She sat down across from Joy, baby Kenshō already happily sucking away at her breast. “Is that what you’re not sure you should give to your boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “You feeling any better today? Figured out which way is up?”

  “Not really. I guess whichever direction keeps my head above water.” As soon as she said it, Joy realized it was true. There was plenty about the manuscript that wasn’t clear to her, but it did seem to point to a reason that order might want Carla Drake out of the way. She had that much of her answer, and if she wanted to find any more she had to keep working. To keep working, she had to keep Flood happy.

  “I need to call my boss,” she said, but before she could her crystal chimed. “This is Joy,” she said as she grasped it.

  “Agent Wilkins, this is Yves Deschamp. W
e need your help.”

  “You do?”

  “Would it be possible for you to come by the McMonigal Arms this evening? Around six o’clock?”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’d prefer to do that in person,” said Yves.

  “All right.” Joy wasn’t happy about being summoned like this, but she was convinced that the Thirteenth Rib knew more than she had been told. Any opportunity to get more information from them was a good one.

  “Good,” said Yves. “We will look to your arrival this evening, then.”

  “Was that him?” Rosemary asked after Joy disconnected.

  “My boss? No. Just another on a long list of people who make unreasonable demands of me.” Joy stood. “I need to get going. Where are my clothes?”

  “On the counter in the bathroom. Take a shower first.”

  “No time,” said Joy. “When this case is over, I’ll come and spend a weekend.”

  “Who says you’re invited?” Rosemary grinned and turned her head up for a kiss. “I’d hug you, but his majesty here would scream bloody murder if I took the nipple out of his mouth.”

  “Good-bye, little Kenshō,” said Joy, shaking the baby’s tiny hand. “Are you going to call him Ken?”

  “I’m not going to call him ‘Awakening,’” said Rosemary. “Oh, Joy, my kids are going to hate me for their names in ten years, aren’t they?”

  “Hey, Mom and Dad named me after an ideal state of being, and I turned out fabulous. So don’t knock it.”

  Joy packed the manuscript in her bag, dressed in two minutes flat, and was out the door before Kenshō finished his meal. It was a humid Atlanta day; all the rain of the night before seemed to hover in the air. On her way to the Globe Gate office she put in a call to Flood.

  “What is it, Wilkins?”

  “I found something that you need to see. I’m in a hurry; can I send it to your office?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s what Carla Drake was working on when she disappeared.”

  Flood sighed. “All right. Get it to me today and I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to look at it. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m still pulling you out of there on Monday.”

  Joy gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir.”

  The Globe Gate office was located in a strip mall near the 285 on-ramp. As Joy approached it she realized that there was a Kinko’s next door to it. She went in and asked how long it would take them to make a duplicate of Carla Drake’s manuscript. The long-haired young man at the counter sized up the stack of paper and shrugged. Behind him, the other duplicators spun pages through the air, dots of ink marching across blank paper, tiny blades punching holes in sheets as they settled into their bindings. The work was mesmerizing, but the workers looked bored.

  “Gimme ten minutes,” said the duplicator. “You want it laminated? Bound?”

  “Just like it is.”

  “Run you about thirty bucks. I’ll give you the exact total when it’s done.”

  Joy took a seat in the waiting area. What she was doing was illegal, but she thought she had a way to keep Flood from finding out about it. Which didn’t mean that she wasn’t shaking like a leaf at the thought that he might. The geases were not her fault—well, on second thought Flood would think that they were, that she hadn’t been careful enough. Maybe he was even right. But she hadn’t chosen to withhold the information the geases were censoring. Right now she was making a choice to defy Flood’s orders, bureau policy, and federal law. Sweat broke out on her forehead at the thought. This was stupid. She should take back the manuscript, walk into Flood’s office, hand it over, and tell him she’d been compromised. He’d pull her out, he’d discipline her…but she didn’t know what would happen after that, and she didn’t dare trust him to do the right thing. No. The night at her sister’s hadn’t brought clarity, exactly, but it had been a good reminder that right and wrong weren’t found in the bureau handbook.

  ***

  Ingrid wrote two words on the board, with a slash between them:

  Abstinence/Indulgence

  “Two schools of thought on preparing for a summoning, or indeed any sort of ritual magic,” she said. “What do they have in common?”

  No one in the lecture hall answered. They were afraid of her, Ingrid knew. It almost made her laugh. She was feeling liberated today, freed by knowing that there was no turning back from her purpose.

  “Focus,” she said. “Abstinence: sexual, of course, is the most popular, but fasting and other purifying strategies are often used. Abstinence is meant to provoke a manifestation of the practitioner’s will in a physical form. The practitioner denies the body, the body’s cravings intensify, the practitioner’s focus on the ritual intensifies as a distraction or denial of those cravings. After a certain point the practitioner reaches an altered state: ecstasy, a transcendent state of openness and receptiveness to the spiritual or otherworldly.

  “Indulgence has the exact same goal, but one might argue that it’s a shortcut. Where an abstinent practitioner might fast—nine days is the classic period of time, though we no longer recommend that—and then meditate or chant in order to reach ecstasy, the indulgent practitioner goes to an excess. Hallucinogen-fueled orgies, for example, while still considered shocking, can bring an uninhibited practitioner to the right state of mind for a ritual evocation.

  “We won’t be doing any demonstrations of that in the lab, I’m afraid.”

  Someone near the back tittered, but the rest of the room just avoided her eyes. At least they were taking notes.

  “Once you’re experienced enough, you can combine the two approaches. For example, you might fast for twenty-four hours before the ritual and ingest some mild hallucinogens six to twelve hours before.” Like the twelve grams of psilocybin mushrooms that were the only food Ingrid had eaten today. “The sexual magic approach is a little different. If you want to learn about the practice and politics of that, you should sign up for one of Professor Olson’s seminars. The point is focus. When you conjure something, you’re removing an entity from a place where it wants to be to someplace it doesn’t, and you’re usually asking something of it that it doesn’t want to do. If your focus isn’t impenetrable, you’ll be in danger.

  “Focus trumps everything. We’ve read about incantations, we’ve read about casting circles, we’ve read about—or we will read about—different schools of thought on incense and other ceremonial combustibles. But to some extent these things are all trappings, and none of them are strictly necessary for most conjuring. With a sharp enough focus, you can babble nonsense and it will work as well as the most practiced incantation. I don’t recommend you try it, at this point. But when you reach that point of ecstatic focus, it won’t seem like nonsense. You won’t be able to control the utterances that pour out of you. They may be a language you never knew, or they may be glossolalia, commonly referred to as speaking in tongues. What they are isn’t really important. The point is that all ritual, all ceremony, is about reaching a state of mind and a state of being in which your will is the only instrument necessary.”

  She found herself staring out at the class. There was more to her lecture, but there was a color and quality to the echo of her voice in the room, of the words she had already spoken, that she didn’t want to disturb. The message in them washed through some of the students, passed over others, but in some there was a brilliant collision of light as what she had said sank in. She watched and waited, hoping for the ripples and waves to penetrate all of them, but the echo began to fade, and sadness welled up in her.

  “That’s it,” she whispered. There were fifteen minutes left in the hour, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t continue. “That’s it for today,” she said, and began to pack up.

  ***

  Joy met Abel Bouchard outside the McMonigal Arms. He was wearing jeans, a faded 1991 World Series T-shirt, and a cap with the Gooseberry Bluff seal on it.

  “Hey there,” he said, stepping
out of an antique powder-blue pickup.

  “Nice truck,” said Joy.

  “Thanks; 1950 Chevy.” He patted the hood. “That’s my baby. I see I’m not the only one running late.”

  “I just walked over from home.”

  They walked together up the path. “I was out in the garden and I lost track of time,” said Abel.

  Joy wasn’t a gardener, but a day outside sounded nice. She had spent hers poring over Carla Drake’s manuscript again, without managing to make much more sense of it than before. “Do you know what this is about?”

  “No,” he said. “Just that we’re supposed to meet up in the library.” He sorted through a large key chain as they approached the front door. “Sounded serious, though.”

  “You have keys? I thought you didn’t live here.”

  “We all have access to the library.” He opened the door and smiled. “You haven’t been yet, have you? It’s quite something.” He waved her ahead and followed her inside. “All the way to the top.”

  Joy walked up to the first floor landing and climbed toward the second floor. “Can I ask you something? What did you used to teach?”

  “Location magic,” said Abel. “You’ve heard of Hilda Ruiz?”

  “One of the founders of Gooseberry Bluff, and creator of this secret society. Yes, I've heard of her.”

  “She was sort of a mentor to me,” said Abel. “To all of us, I suppose. When she recruited the first generation of this group, she had a lot of antiestablishment types to choose from. Some of the people she ended up with weren’t very good at working with others.”