Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2

by Nancy Holder

  Not Willow, though. Such trivial issues were clearly long miles from the other girl’s mind as she warmed to her subject. “Now, according to his notes, that’s what Giles was researching,” Willow said. “Or it’s what the missing books were about. Ectoplasm and its practical applications.” She held up another book, presenting its cover. The words read: Psychic Humours and Their Uses.

  “A joke book?” Xander asked, then coughed as Cordelia elbowed him again.

  “It’s another word for ‘fluid,’” Willow said. “There’s bunches of terms for this stuff. Psycho-etheric fluxes, psycho-matter, ectoplasm, and more.”

  “None of that sounds like magick, Will,” Buffy said.

  Willow nodded, looking genuinely and completely pleased for the first time in a while. Her happiness at Buffy’s question pushed aside her worries about Giles, at least for the moment. “Very good, Buffy!” she said. “A gold—”

  Buffy executed a short, emphatic shake of her head. Between that and the serious expression the Slayer wore, her message was clear. This was no time for role-playing or banter.

  “It doesn’t sound like magick because it’s not,” Willow said. She indicated once more the books that Giles had left behind. “Most of this stuff is what you’d call proto-science.”

  “Proto-science?” Cordelia asked. She gave voice to the question without conscious thought. Willow’s term sounded so odd that it demanded explanation.

  “Yeah,” Willow said. She set the book aside and raised something else. It was some sort of plastic envelope, thick and rigid but transparent, so that its contents were revealed. Those contents seemed much more typical of Giles’s Watcher archives. They were sheets of something that might have been paper, but which Cordelia knew intuitively was not. It seemed to wiggle slightly in the envelope, as if alive. Whatever the stuff was, it was browned and tattered by age, and covered with diagrams and runes that Cordelia knew she never could have read, not even if her life depended on it. That kind of stuff was Greek to her, and was likely Greek to the Greeks, too. Of course, if it was Greek to Greeks that would mean . . .

  Cordelia tried to focus on Willow’s mini-lecture.

  “This is magick,” Willow said. She tapped her finger on the envelope, making a popping noise, then set it down. She gestured at the books. “These are proto-sciences. Alchemy, spiritualism, mesmerism, phrenology—well, that last one’s more of a pseudo-science, really.”

  She went on to explain in more detail. According to Willow, magick was primarily an art, one that relied heavily on an individual’s aptitudes and the invocation of superhuman entities such as gods and demons. Science worked differently. Scientists gathered data and built hypotheses that could be tested by experimentation, and relied on known physical forces and circumstances. Magick was as old as or older than mankind, depending on the definition. Science and the scientific method were much younger, dating back to about the Renaissance, filtering out into the general culture in the ensuing decades and centuries.

  “That’s the Cliff’s Notes version, at least,” she said. “It’s messier than that.”

  “Science good, magick bad,” Xander said, boiling it down further.

  “No,” Willow said. She picked up the plastic-clad document and shook her head. “No, not at all. They’re different ways of dealing with the universe, and they overlapped for a while. They still have a lot in common. Why, some assembler language commands are an awful lot like incantations, and—”

  “Cut to the chase, Willow, please,” Buffy said. “What does any of this have to do with our kidnapping cowboy?”

  “Cowboy?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” the Slayer promised. “You said you think you found something. Tell us what.”

  “Two somethings, really,” Willow said. She pointed at Giles’s legal pad, the canary yellow sheets covered with notes in the Englishman’s neat handwriting. “Giles uses a lot of abbreviations here and he wrote around a lot of stuff instead of about it, but as near as I can tell, he was zeroing in on the proto-sciences. Those were early mixtures of science and magic. Stuff like alchemy. That’s the old version of chemistry, all mixed up with astrology and spiritualism and other stuff. Alchemists were heavy into the eternal mysteries—how to live forever, how to turn lead to gold, that kind of thing.”

  “I know about alchemy,” Buffy said darkly. She’d seen a lot of things in her tenure as the Slayer. “It’s not good stuff.”

  “Maybe not . . . but it’s what Giles was looking into,” Willow said.

  She flipped through the notepad and found a particularly busy page, dense with occult-looking symbols and diagrams. Giles had made abbreviated sketches of the twelve signs of the zodiac, with arrows leading from one to another. Some lines of text were so small that even Cordelia’s vision, excellent for distance, couldn’t make them out completely. There were exceptions, though. Giles had made lists of terms. At their heads, in larger lettering, were words like “Ectoplasm,” “Psycho-Etherics,” “Astral Projection,” and “Elemental Phases.”

  “So we’re looking for an alchemist,” Xander said.

  “Maybe,” Willow said.

  Without asking permission, Xander half-stood and claimed one of the books, then settled back into his seat. He opened the volume and flipped through its pages. “Hey,” he said, pleased. “This is in English! I can read this!” He paused. “Sort of.”

  Cordelia craned her neck and snuck a peek. She could see what he meant. Even setting issues of language aside, many of Giles’s books were physically difficult to read, with ornate lettering and time-faded inks. This one, presumably because it was a much younger work, was a different matter. Its pages were worn and marked from handling, but only slightly yellowed with age. The text that adorned them was typeset rather than hand-illuminated, but the lines of type were uneven and had ragged margins. Worse, the text was in English, but only sort of. It seemed to Cordelia that every fifth word was misspelled or improperly capitalized.

  “Jeezy-peezy,” she said. “Didn’t they ever hear of spell-check?”

  Xander shrugged. Despite the urgency of the situation, he seemed oddly preoccupied, or even bored. He flipped though the pages more quickly, pausing only to eye illustrations, of which there were many. With each turned page, the musty aroma of old paper scented the air.

  “You said you found two somethings, Willow,” Buffy said. Her words were less a reminder than they were a prompt to continue, and her voice held a note of command that Cordelia had heard before. Willow might think that she was running the improvised lecture session, but it was the Slayer who was boss.

  “Yeah,” Willow said. She lifted the plastic-clad document she’d toyed with earlier. “These are excursuses,” she said.

  “Curses?!” Cordelia nearly yelped the word and pulled back the hand she’d reflexively extended.

  “No, excursuses,” Willow said. Without waiting to be asked, she provided the definition. “Detailed discussions of topics addressed in an academic work.”

  “Sort of a super-footnote, Cordy,” Buffy said. “Giles and I talked about them earlier.”

  “What do they say, then?” Cordelia asked, still not accepting the proffered item. Something about the way the thing looked made her feel all squirmy.

  “Well, as near as I can tell, this one’s mostly about astral projection,” Willow said. “I can’t be sure, though, because it’s in a dead language, and all I can puzzle out are some symbols. The second one’s in some kind of debased Latin, and it’s some kind of treatise on ectoplasm and spiritual regeneration. I can’t make any sense out of the others, but none of them looks like good news.”

  Cordelia didn’t like the sound of that. It was another thing she’d never admit to anyone who mattered, but she didn’t like it at all when Willow expressed ignorance about things pertaining to slayage. Such comments were bad signs in the best of times, and made worse now by the absence of Giles. Her earlier boredom was completely gone now, and she waited to see what came next.


  “Hey!” Xander said sharply. “Hey! I know this guy!”

  He’d opened the alchemy book to an illustration. It was printed on paper better than the pages that flanked it, and looked to be some kind of steel-plate engraving, like the faces on currency. It showed an aristocratic-looking man in old-fashioned breeches and jacket. He had broad features, mutton-chop whiskers, and a powdered wig, resembling someone who might have stepped off a dollar bill. Cordelia took all of that in with a glance, but took little real notice. Her attention was drawn by the man’s eyes.

  Whoever the anonymous artist had been, he’d known his craft. The man’s eyes were deep-set and shadowed, but, paradoxically, they seemed lit by an inner intensity. Even across the gulf of years, even filtered through an artist’s sensibilities and the process of book production, Cordelia found them oddly compelling. They had magnetism that drew her attention and held it.

  A caption identified the image as being of one Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.

  “You don’t know him,” Willow said. “He’s been dead for two hundred years.”

  “Oh, like that’s a problem,” Xander said. They’d met plenty of dead people in the previous year or so. “I’m sure of it. Here, I’ll show you,” he said, and drew a ballpoint from his pocket to amend the illustration.

  There came a yelping sound as Willow protested. Rather than let him deface the book, she rooted though Giles’s desk drawers and found a piece of tracing paper. Xander shook his head but complied. Positioning the sheet, he used quick, short pen strokes to add a beard to Cagliostro.

  “There,” Xander said. “Mr. Balsamo. You could put that on his driver’s license.”

  “Balsamo?” Cordelia asked. She’d never heard the name before.

  “Balsamo?” Willow said. “Are you serious, Xander?”

  “Boss-man at the drive-in,” Xander said. He closed the book angrily and turned to Buffy. “See?” he said. “I told you I got Jonathan into this. I told you it’s my fault.”

  “Now, hold on,” Buffy started. “There’s more to this than—”

  “Who’s Balsamo?” Cordelia asked.

  “Giuseppe Balsamo,” Willow said, as if that explained everything.

  It didn’t, of course.

  “Dammit, I know what I did,” Xander said. His voice was thick, and the usual joking quality in his words was missing entirely. “I did it to him, and to Aura, and to all the rest. I was part of this, somehow.”

  “Aura?” Cordelia asked. She liked to think of herself as quick on her feet, conversation-wise, but the questions and answers were coming entirely too fast. She was getting lost. It seemed like everyone was talking at once, and about different things.

  “Aura’s in the hospital, Cordy,” Buffy said with a sidelong glance. “So are a lot of people. Some kind of sleeping sickness.”

  “Cagliostro was some kind of supermojo alchemist back in the eighteenth century,” Willow said. “Depending on who you talk to, Balsamo might have been his real name.”

  “Aura wasn’t at the drive-in, was she?” Buffy asked Xander.

  “Does the drive-in sound like Aura?” Xander responded.

  “STOP IT! ALL OF YOU, STOP TALKING RIGHT NOW!” Cordelia shouted, as loud as the loudest cheer in the most contested football game. Her words were like thunder in the living room’s confines.

  The others were stunned, but complied. They fell silent and looked at her blankly. While they waited, she took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts. Finally, she continued. “You,” she said, pointing at Xander. “Tell me what happened to Aura.” She paused. “And Jonathan, I guess.” She pointed at Buffy. “You tell me about this sleeping sickness,” she said. “Willow gets Cagliostro.”

  Surprisingly, all three of them nodded obediently. Perhaps less surprisingly, they all began to speak at precisely the same time. Cordelia had to do some more shouting and issue some more orders before they fell into line and filled her in on their respective areas of (relative) expertise. When they finished, she took another deep breath and sorted through the flood of information.

  “Okay,” she said. “Aura’s in the hospital and no one thought to tell me, thank you very much. There’s, like, a whole bunch of people in town who won’t wake up.”

  Buffy and Xander nodded again. Buffy, especially, seemed bemused by the demands for information, but that was fine with Cordelia. It was about time someone started thinking about this stuff clearly.

  “Most of those thirty were at the drive-in last night,” Cordelia continued, “which is being run by some Penn and Teller type who died three hundred years ago. That doesn’t sound very likely, does it?”

  “Alchemist,” Willow said meekly. “Those guys are illusionists, and he was an alchemist. And he only died about two hundred years ago. If it’s him.” She explained that Count Cagliostro was actually quite a shadowy figure, historically speaking. He’d used many names, and his death had been reported more than once. Even the identification of his real name as Giuseppe Balsamo seemed not to be certain.

  “Close enough,” Cordelia said. “Now, what do we do next?”

  “We?” Buffy asked. “I’m heading out to the drive-in, and I’m going to turn this guy inside out and mail him to Antarctica.”

  Xander shook his head. He looked worried, worried enough that Cordelia felt concern. Certainly, even in her experience, Xander had involved himself in some pretty outrageous situations, but he rarely involved others. She knew that Xander was a lot more compassionate than most people realized, even if he didn’t show it very often.

  “That won’t work,” he said. “There’s nothing out there in daylight. I don’t know where the boss—where this guy hangs out in the daytime, but it’s not there.”

  “Maybe we could find him,” Willow said slowly. “Giles made some notes about tracking spells, and there’s something about crystals—”

  “Magick?” Buffy asked.

  Willow nodded.

  Buffy shook her head. “You’ve been a big help already,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re ready to actually try a spell. Let’s consider other options.”

  “There’s always more research,” Willow said. She looked thoughtful. “In fact, I’d like to look into this drive-in thing a bit more.”

  “Angel checked the place out,” Buffy said. “So did you, for that matter.”

  “I don’t think I asked the right questions, though,” Willow said slowly. “This sleeping sickness business gives me an idea.”

  Buffy gestured at the crowded bookcases that lined much of Giles’s living room. “Go wild,” she said. “I’m sure Giles won’t mind.

  “Actually, the idea I have, I don’t think these can help me with.”

  “There’s more upstairs, and I might be able to figure out a way to get us into the school.”

  “No,” Willow said. “I was thinking more like the public library. They have bound newspapers there.”

  “Okay, then,” Buffy said. She stood. “Let’s go.”

  “Not me, Buff,” Xander said. His words were surprising. “I’m not going with you. Not right now, at least.”

  “Why not?” Buffy asked. Her tone was sharp, but she looked puzzled. Cordelia knew why. Given his head, Xander would spend most of his waking hours as Buffy’s shadow. “You’ve got better plans? We really need your help, Xander.”

  He shrugged. “Not for this part. Willow can research rings around me,” he said. “I want to go to the hospital and check up on Jonathan.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  For Giles the world came back into focus very slowly. It was a far less pleasant world than the one he’d left behind. Gone were the cradling support of his desk chair and the welcome, musty scent of old books. Instead, he felt hard ceramic, cool and slick against his skin, and his nostrils flared with the astringent scent of cleaning compounds. Bright lights shone down on him from above, and the first thing he could see as his vision cleared was a network of white grout lines, separating squares of bright c
olor that had been buffed to a high gloss.

  He was on a foreign floor. His last memories were of opening his front door to a stranger.

  With some effort he struggled to his feet. Reality resolved itself a bit more, and he realized that he was in a washroom. He tottered to the sink and ran water to splash on his face. The cold wetness felt good. Above the sink was a mirror. His glasses lay on the washstand. He donned them and returned his attention to the mirror, inspecting himself for damage.

  He didn’t find any. That in itself was worth noting. Giles had lived an interesting life—rather more interesting than most Watchers, actually—and he’d been knocked unconscious more than a few times over the years.

  There was no blood, no bruising. Now that he was awake, he realized that there was no headache, either. Even the sour taste that usually accompanied knockout gas or chemical tranquilizers was lacking. The world had gone away, and then it had come back, without injury or incident between. He felt more as if he’d been turned off, like an electrical appliance, and then turned back on again.

  It wasn’t a good feeling. He didn’t care for the idea that someone could do something like that.

  Suddenly there came a gritting mechanical sound as a key entered a lock and turned, and then a thunk as a bolt slid back. Giles turned just in time to see the washroom door open.

  “Awake, I see,” said the man who stood framed in the doorway. “Good.”

  He looked vaguely familiar, enough so that Giles was certain he’d seen him before. The man was of average height and build, but his stance and posture suggested that he was very physically fit. His hair and beard were both neatly trimmed and styled, both the color of old iron, dark gray verging on black. In one hand was a paper sack that bore a familiar logo, and in the other was a glittering disk of crystal. He’d left the keys dangling in the lock.

  “‘Good’ is not the word I would use,” Giles said drily. He eyed the open doorway. “Who are you, and why have you done this?”