by Ira Bloom
“That makes sense, thermodynamically,” she agreed.
“Anyway, demons nurture entropy and harvest decaying energies and bring them to chaos, whereas the other side nurtures creative energies.”
“So they’re the good guys.”
Kasha hissed. “You are so dense, it’s amazing your head doesn’t implode from the gravitational force of your own stupidity. There’s no such thing as good or evil.”
“Somehow, I think that’s a one-sided argument.”
“Well we do lie quite a bit,” Kasha admitted. “Like a little white lie. Only huge, and black.”
“I don’t think I want to turn dark,” Esme said.
“Before you condemn it, why don’t you try it?” The cat cajoled. “I have a quota.”
Normally, Esme would have picked apart every word out of Kasha’s mouth, cross-examined him, deconstructed his reasoning, and dissected his lies. But she found her mind wandering, thinking about Zack, so she just shrugged it off. “Oh, look,” she said, excited, flipping pages. “A beauty potion.”
Katy’s converted attic was very pleasant in the late fall, because the heat in the house always rose. Around the room were various instruments, including an electric keyboard, a classical guitar, and an accordion. Katy was competent in all of these, but she totally rocked the accordion, the dorkiest instrument of all time. She was a fool for zydeco.
There was an easel with a low stool and a half-finished abstract-impressionist landscape in purples and greens. There was a drafting table in the corner with more art supplies, mostly art pastels, and fude brushes with ink stones for Japanese calligraphy. There were colorful Indonesian batik sheets hanging from the sloping ceiling, covering the aluminum joists and the rough, unfinished oak rafters, giving the attic a gypsy tent atmosphere.
Katy was in a foul mood. Her traitorous sister had swooped in and stolen her boyfriend. And the real crime of it was that Katy and Zack had something special. She was the only one who truly got him. He was wasted on Veronica, with her sneaky little allure spells and incantations. He was blinded by her, manipulated.
Nobody understood Zack the way Katy did. Zack loved to laugh, to banter. But under the cheery demeanor he had a dark, poetic soul. There was some terrible tragedy about him that nobody but Katy could see. She and Zack shared the artist’s temperament. They could brood. They were complex, like icebergs, with ninety percent of their angst and pathos below the surface. Esme didn’t truly understand him. And he was too good for a sneak like Veronica, creeping around, taking people’s cell phones, spying, hacking, and manipulating with her little psychodrama flirtations.
Katy swung her legs off her bed. Six muzzles came off the floor. Dervish, the whirling pit bull, rose to meet her, head low, tail wagging. Dervish would rip out someone’s throat for Katy. Kewpie, the bipolar golden retriever, would jump up on them with muddy paws. Socrates, the bearer of kisses, would nip at their hamstrings. Gordon, the lionhearted bulldog, would pee on them. Edna, the lap dog in the body of a Great Dane, would slobber all over them mercilessly. And Kilroy, the mischievous mutt, would knock them on their ass and sniff their crotch until they cried uncle. Katy Silver, leader of the pack, was not someone to be trifled with.
She stood in front of her full-length mirror. Compared to Veronica she was a troll. She wasn’t fat, just curvy. But next to Veronica, she was a tub of lard. Ronnie had the game rigged, with her charms and spells. It made Katy mad. Ronnie should know better than to make Katy mad.
Katy focused her ire, her humiliation, her indignation. She let all the resentment stew and churn. A breeze blew up around her, like a miniature tornado. It blew around her hair, stirring it. Her eyes started to glow, like a dog’s eyes in the headlights of a car at night. Static danced around her, buzzing. She raised her right arm, and the static pooled in her open hand, glowing like tiny lightning dancing over the landscape of her palm. The lights flickered in her electro-phantasmagoric aura. Katy suddenly squeezed her hand to a fist and brought her arm down at a sweeping angle, like a conductor stopping the entire orchestra at once. Everything was silent, the air still. But she still had a trace of the glow in her eyes.
“Come on, guys,” Katy said to her pack, shaking the eerie eldritch energies off. “Time to go outside and poop.”
Second-period AP biology had become a slog for Esme. How had she ever enjoyed the thought of it? It was just something to get through, waiting for world history, and Zack. The material was nearly impossible to keep up with, these last two weeks. Information didn’t go into Esme’s brain the way it always had. Lisa Vaughn was in the same doldrums as everyone else, so Esme figured it was all just the fault of the convoluted, confusing material.
Norman confronted Esme on the way out the door, and followed her to her next class. “Esme, wait up!” Norm’s leg brace had been off for weeks now, he had just had his bolts removed from his neck, and he was barely limping anymore. His long legs were more than a match for Esme’s.
“I’ve gotta go, Norm,” Esme insisted. The last thing she needed was to be seen with the freakiest guy in school, in case she ran across Zack. She couldn’t be tagged ugly by association, not with Veronica looking more spectacular every day.
“Esme, I saw your test score in biology,” he said, steering her with one hand toward a bank of lockers on the wall. “A sixty-five? You’ve never gotten anything less than an A in your life. What’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting like a fool. Why are you avoiding me?”
Esme tried to look around him, to see if anyone had noticed them, but looking around Norman Stein was no easy task. “Leave me alone, Norm. I screwed up, okay? The test is graded on a curve, and I know for a fact Lisa Vaughn got a sixty-one. It was a very hard test; I’ll bet top grade was like seventy or something.”
Norman pulled a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it in front of her—his bio test, with a score of one hundred on it. “I had the top score, Esme. Stephan Reese got a ninety-eight, and Brandon had a ninety-six. It was a piece of cake. Your sixty-five is a D. Have you ever gotten a D before?”
Esme had never even gotten a B before. “So I had a bad test. Look, I need to get to class.”
“I’m really worried about you,” he said. “I think you might have walking pneumonia or something. You look delirious. Why don’t you come over to my house after school and meet my dad? He has an office with a research lab there; he can give you a diagnosis in ten minutes. And I know you wanted to meet him.”
“I’m fine, Norman.” She had to get away. Zack always walked past Main Hall between second and third. She could still bump into him, if she hurried. Otherwise, she’d have to wait until fourth period. “Just back off, okay?”
She scrambled away from the giant, avoiding the hurt look in his mismatched eyes. She walked as quickly as she could without running, striding with determination out the side door. She clipped the corner of the quad on a well-worn path through the grass, rounding the stairs to the landing in front. She noticed Zack, his back to the quad, talking to somebody by a section of wall at the side of the building, obscured by a tall hedge.
The girl with Zack was short and wore jeans and a Middleton Timberwolves hoodie with a silhouette of a gray wolf baying at a gray moon on a background of twilight purple. She had fine reddish hair draped over her face. Her hand was on Zack’s upper arm. Esme slowly backed away. Lisa Vaughn, again. The girl had been a thorn in her side since sixth grade, and here she was, trying to horn in on Zack.
Esme was furious the rest of the day, though when she sat with Zack in history class, she didn’t say anything. The beauty potion could take several weeks, depending on the availability of the ingredients. Kasha had called it the “Irresistible Beauty Potion.” It would do the trick.
That night, Esme tossed and turned over the Lisa thing. It was always Lisa, dogging her, nipping at her heels. She considered a few choice hexes, just to amuse herself. She didn’t know that Lisa would not return to school the next day. Lisa would just di
sappear.
Detective Robert Sharp’s second visit to the old Hampstead Manor to interview Drake Kallas and his son, Zackery, came two weeks after the first. For backup, he brought a uniformed officer, First Sergeant Manuel Hernandez, a nine-year veteran. They arrived in a squad car at dusk, because they knew about the rare skin condition the father and son shared, and Sharp preferred not to interview suspects wearing sunglasses. The eyes were the best tell.
“Do you mind if we come in, Mr. Kallas?” the detective asked at the door. “I want to ask your son a few more questions about those disappearances we’d discussed.”
“Certainly, come in, gentlemen,” Drake allowed.
Zack was on the living room floor in front of the coffee table, his world history homework spread before him.
“Zack, Officer Sharp had a few more questions for you. Of course, he had nothing to do with the disappearances,” Drake insisted in an easy, rhythmic voice. He stared into Officer Martinez’s eyes as he said it, nodding. Martinez was nodding his head in imitation.
“Nothing to do with it?” Martinez repeated, slowly.
“We haven’t charged you with anything,” Sharp noted, blinking his eyes rapidly as if he’d just caught himself nodding off. “As I mentioned last time, an eyewitness saw Sandy Hardesty get out of Zack’s car in the parking lot of the Ace hardware store on the night she disappeared.”
“Zack had nothing to do with the girl’s disappearance,” the Master intoned hypnotically.
Martinez seemed to be on the same page. He nodded his head along with the Master, a slightly glazed look in his eyes. “Nothing to do with it,” he agreed.
“You’ve already said that,” Sharp pointed out. “That’s what I’m here to find out. Martinez!”
The sergeant’s head snapped forward, as if he’d awakened with a start. “Sir?”
“Zack,” Sharp said, returning his attention to the boy. “The eyewitness says you kissed Sandy in that parking lot, on the lips. Is that true?”
“More on the cheek,” Zack said. “But yes. I had nothing to do with her disappearance.”
Martinez agreed, nodding back. “You weren’t even there,” he said.
“Sergeant Martinez, would you please stay out of this!” Sharp said angrily.
“Sorry, sir,” Martinez replied, giggling.
“Zackery, according to the witness, Miss Hardesty got into her car and followed you out of the parking lot. The witness said that where Miss Hardesty should have turned left on Main Street to get home, she turned right and followed your vehicle. The witness is certain she turned left on Hampstead, following your car.” Detective Sharp was reading from a small spiral notepad, which he was flipping from page to page for effect.
“Who was the witness?” Drake asked. “Where is he now?”
“Logan Rehnquist,” Martinez volunteered. He looked like he’d had a few drinks. “He’s inna hospital. On se-day-shun.”
“Martinez, that information was classified,” Sharp said angrily. “Go wait in the car.”
“Hokay,” Martinez volunteered, and headed out on his own. He almost bumped into the doorjamb on his way out of the living room.
“Sandy did follow me,” Zack admitted. “I pulled over to the side of the road when I saw her lights in my rearview mirror.”
“You didn’t mention this in our previous interview.” Sharp flipped back through his notes.
“I didn’t?” Zack scratched his head. “Well, I might have been in shock, it was the first I’d heard she was missing. She thought I liked her. And I did, like her, I do. But I told her I wanted to be just friends. Do you think she might have run away from home because I jilted her?”
“Zack had nothing to do with the girl’s disappearance,” the Master reiterated.
“I have that in my notes already, thank you, you can stop saying that!” Sharp snapped. “Now, I’d like to talk to you for a minute about Miss Edwards … ”
Detective Sharp spent fifteen minutes on Miss Edwards, looking for contradictions while reviewing his notes from their previous interview. They’d admitted she had been by the house, regarding Zack’s special needs. Zack had been the last person to see both Cecilia Edwards and Sandy Hardesty alive, which was too much of a coincidence to ignore. It was suspicious, Sharp mentioned, tapping his teeth with his pen and flipping back and forth through his notes while he examined Drake and Zack for reactions. This technique usually unnerved people. Both father and son were either entirely without guilt or stone-cold liars.
“You know,” Sharp mentioned, “I’ve always wanted to get a look around this mansion. I’m a bit of an architecture buff, and the Hampstead place is one of the oldest structures in the county.”
“I’m afraid it’s getting rather late,” Drake mentioned, looking at his wristwatch.
“I’d heard that you did quite a bit of renovation here,” Detective Sharp continued. “I heard you did some excavation in the cellar. Would you mind if I had a look around down there?”
“I had a wine cellar built,” Drake said, his words slow and rhythmic. “You don’t need to see anything down there.”
“I don’t need to see anything down there?” Sharp repeated, his eyes narrowing to slits.
“No, you don’t,” Drake repeated, soothingly. “We know nothing about those girls.”
Sharp shook his head like a wet dog shaking off water. “Just the same, could we go down and have a look around?”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that,” Drake said, his speech measured.
“I could get a warrant,” Sharp supposed. “Bring a bloodhound, let ’im sniff around a bit.”
“We had nothing to do with those disappearances,” the Master repeated.
“Yeah,” Sharp replied. “You keep saying that. Kinda suspicious, if you ask me.”
Zack and the Master watched the running lights of the patrol car fade down the long gravel driveway. Zack was puzzled. “What was that, Master? It’s like he’s got us sussed.”
The Master backhanded Zack across the face with supernatural power, tumbling him back over the sofa halfway across the room. “Idiot! You were careless when you acquired the blond.”
“I’m sorry, Master,” Zack cowered. “I can make it right, give me a chance!”
“You will make it right, you fool!” The Master strode to where Zack cringed on the floor and kicked him in the ribs, which sent him crashing to the wall across the room. “Do you know what your carelessness has wrought? You’ve killed her.”
“No, Master, please,” he begged.
Drake grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him across the living room, through the hallway to the cellar door in the kitchen. He removed a ring of keys from his pocket and unlatched the heavy door. He threw Zack down the stairs forcibly and pursued him to the foot of the stairs, where he opened a second door and shoved Zack into the wine cellar with his foot.
“Open it,” the Master commanded.
Zack rose and removed a jeroboam of 1961 Margaux from its place on the large-format bottle rack on the middle shelf, and placed it in an empty berth on the shelf below, which set a counter-weighted latch at the back of the rack to release. Zack then pushed the entire rack to the side. The rack weighed over a ton, but it was resting on sliders that slid in undetectable grooves on the floor. Beneath the wine rack, flush with the floor, was a large granite tile. Using his nails, he pried up the trap door. It led to an unlit vertical passageway down, with iron railings on the side, like a ladder. Local contractors had excavated the wine cellar, but Drake’s own workers from Italy had dug the catacombs beneath and finished the lodgings.
On either side of the hallway on the landing below were the rooms, six in all. Presently there were only six brides. Zack had picked up Michelle after work at Starbucks one night. Chang Lee, in the same room with Michelle, was a masseuse the Master had obtained at a sleazy massage parlor in the city. Danielle was a student from the junior college. The police were looking for her upstate. Lisa had met Zack at the c
ove after school. Her parents didn’t even know she was missing yet.
Sandy Hardesty was very glad to see them. “Good evening, Zack, good evening, Father,” she said when they entered. Sandy approached Zack, whom she loved beyond all measure and reason, tucking her hair behind her left ear in anticipation of a kiss. Perhaps Father would also give her a kiss tonight? It was all fine, they were a very close family.
“Finish her,” the Master commanded.
Sandy unbuttoned the top button of her nightie in anticipation. She wanted to be finished. She smiled at Zack, with her glazed, love-struck grin. Zack removed his straight razor from his pocket and approached her from behind. This confused her a little, but in her current state, she was not the least bit frightened. Zack was dry-heaving tears, grieving for her. “But, Father,” he pleaded. “It’s such a waste.”
“Not with the blade,” the Master instructed his protégé. “With your hands. Slowly.”
Veronica let out a scream so piercing, so fraught with anguish, that it roused both her father from his upstairs bedroom and Esme from all the way down in the basement.
“Sweetie, what’s the matter?” her father shouted through the bathroom door, pounding on the wood. His face was half covered in shaving cream. “Unlock the door, honey, I’m coming in!”
“Go away, Daddy!” she yelled.
“What is it?” Esme asked Barry when she arrived, panting, to the hallway outside the bathroom. “Is she okay?”
“Esme, get in here, I need your help!” This cry of desperation came through the door muffled, under Veronica’s sobs of torment.
“Looks like I got this,” Esme told her dad. “Carry on.”
Barry made his way back to his bathroom to finish his shave. It was just another one of those girl things. Best not to get involved, for the sake of his sanity.
“Is he gone?” Veronica asked, unlatching the door. Esme slipped inside. She’d been roused from a sound sleep, and her bed head qualified for FEMA funding as a tri-state disaster area.