Mr. Real

by Carolyn Crane

  “What are you saying?”

  “Think about it—we know Aunt Veronica was into black magic in some way, all those crazy books, and her jewelry tastes, those symbols we scrubbed off the basement floor. What if she was really onto something?”

  “You think it’s magic?”

  “If it defies explanation…” Alix said.

  “Then that just means you look harder. Jumping to a magical explanation—”

  “I’m not jumping to it. I’m going to run a scientific test. I’m going to repeat exactly what I did with the necklace with something different, and use my web cam to record the whole thing. And then we’ll see.”

  “Stop. Think it through. You could be dealing with somebody dangerous.”

  “I am thinking it through. Sure, maybe it’s a bauble-leaving freak, I’m not ruling that out. But maybe, just maybe, I could discover something mind-blowingly awesome. The guy at the computer store asked if I’d downloaded anything suspicious. Well, I did. Remember when I got that old floppy converted? All that crazy code? What if it did something to my computer?”

  “Oh my god,” Karen said.

  “What?”

  “A magical computer? Is that where you’re going with this?”

  “What were my aunt’s two main hobbies? Witchy stuff and computers. It’s exciting! Think through this with me, Karen. I mean, what if it’s real? It would be beyond winning the lottery. We could literally have anything we wanted. But first we’ll do this test. What should I order for it? We should think of something really challenging for the next task.”

  “I know it seems cool, but you have to be smart. This is not all fun and games here, Alix.”

  Alix frowned. “Thanks a lot, Hardass Paul. Are you going to kick me off our phone call now?”

  “I can’t believe you just called me Hardass Paul,” Karen snapped. “I’m not a Hardass Paul for wanting you to be safe.”

  “This is not all fun and games? That is so Hardass Paul.”

  “Not at all!”

  They bickered back and forth until Alix apologized. “But I’m going to solve this. I don’t care.”

  In the four years since Hardass Paul had kicked Alix out of class—four years and hundreds of miles away—he’d grown in significance, becoming the poster boy for all the people who thought Alix was screwed-up and irresponsible. In the years since, whenever Alix got Karen into some crazy situation—drunkenly trapped in a phone booth in rabbit costumes with the police on their way, for example—one of them would turn to the other and ask, I wonder what Hardass Paul would have to say about this? It was always good for a laugh.

  Hardass Paul. So much hotness wasted on a humorless jerk.

  Alix passed through tiny downtown Malcolmsberg, all four super-quaint blocks of it, nestled along the banks of the Mississippi River. She should’ve never called Karen a Hardass Paul.

  Once she was through town she turned left, up the wooded bluff, and headed toward the house.

  Her house.

  For being a supposedly witchy, black-magic-dabbling person, Aunt Veronica had lived in quite the cheerful house, all red brick and white wood trim. And massive, too—the old Victorian was a small hotel in an earlier incarnation, the estate people had said.

  It still seemed weird to Alix that she owned a house, even after four months. But thank goodness for it. For what Aunt Veronica had done for her.

  The week before Alix learned of the inheritance, she’d been evicted from her apartment and fired from her tenth cocktail waitress job. It was this whole mess stemming from her arrest on charges of trespassing, burglary, destruction of property, arson, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. She got probation and community service—by a hair—but her legal fees were insane, and she’d become an object of scorn of all her friends but Karen.

  If she could turn back time, she’d do the same damn thing all over again.

  Well, okay, she’d still break into Manuel’s apartment to erase the sex-with-Karen videos he was threatening to put on the Internet, but maybe she wouldn’t have been so drunk that she knocked over his seven-day candle and started a small fire. Or trashed the place putting it out. Or stolen that bag of Butterfinger candy bars after erasing the files. That, too, had been ill-advised.

  Naturally, most everyone took Manuel’s side, because he was the victim of Crazy Alix breaking into his place and trashing it. It wasn’t like she could say why she was there. Nobody but Karen and Manuel knew that.

  And she’d do it again in a second. She’d fight like a rabid coyote to protect her best friend any day of the week. Maybe she was a screw-up, but she was a loyal screw-up who fought fiercely for the people who were good to her.

  Also, Alix knew a thing or two from her life of mishaps and underachievement: once you messed up enough times, scandals and arrests didn’t hurt you as badly as they hurt somebody with a clean slate, somebody people thought well of. Like Karen. Alix could absorb things. Karen couldn’t. Though even Alix was challenged by the twin losses of home and job.

  It was at that point that the inheritance letter had arrived.

  Why had Aunt Veronica left it all to her? Alix was the only one in the family too young to remember meeting the woman. Was it because they were both black sheep?

  She and Karen had driven out to see the house the following weekend and Alix had instantly decided to turn it into a bed and breakfast. Two hours away from Minneapolis and an hour or so up from La Crosse—it was the perfect location. A new start. And she would name it Veronica’s, in honor of her aunt.

  Alix’s parents were horrified about the inheritance due to the black magic bit. Alix’s older sisters seemed hurt and dismayed that they’d been overlooked for the house and the little pile of cash, which Alix had promptly shared with her sisters, leaving her just enough to fix up the place.

  Everybody thought she’d make a mess of it—nobody said it directly, but it was obvious from their advice: When you own a bed & breakfast, you can’t go out dancing all night, Alix…You have to be up early, Alix…You have to follow safety regulations, Alix…It’s not as easy as it looks on TV, Alix…People will be counting on you with their vacation plans, Alix.

  Alix just flipped her pink hair at them and laughed. They thought she wasn’t listening, but in truth, she was terrified. Terrified by the responsibility. She hoped the place would be good enough to live up to her mysterious aunt’s generosity. And that people would like it.

  Karen was all for it. Karen drove out over many weekends to help clean and scrape and paint. And at night they drank wine on the porch and played Scrabble and sometimes dined semi-ironically at the old-timey Malcolmsberg supperclub.

  But now it was August, and there was still tons to do to be ready for her first guests by Christmas, as she’d brashly announced. Mostly, she needed to get the rooms nice and the kitchen licensed for food prep. And then there was the carriage house, which was presently full of junk. Every time she felt dispirited, she’d say to herself, It’s not Christmas yet.

  Now there was a mystery to solve.

  As soon as she got home, Alix got started on her plan. First, she needed to find a new jpeg image to save to her laptop and click a bunch of times. That’s what she’d done with the necklace image, and a day later it was there, as if the repeated clicking had alerted the powers that be—or the stalker that be—to the significance of it.

  She considered going for an image of a bag of her favorite spicy jalapeño potato chips—none of the Malcolmsberg stores carried them—but she decided against that. If whoever or whatever was capable of producing something as complicated as a copy of Xing’s necklace—in one day—why the hell go for potato chips? It should be something desirable and slightly challenging. She briefly considered a huge pile of cash, but that was practical and boring, and not much of a challenge. After some deliberation, Alix settled on white vinyl majorette boots with swingy tassels from Marley’s of New York, size 9. At the last minute, she added a white vinyl clutch and a belt. Click.
Click. Hah! Good luck getting stuff overnighted from Marley’s.

  She created the file and clicked it like crazy. Then she sat back, staring at the fabulous ensemble and scratching at her sparkly blue nail polish.

  After that, just to cover all her bases, she made a professional-looking “No Trespassing” sign and hammered it to the wooden railing of her front porch, her bracelets jingling. According to Sheriff Deacon, leaving gifts on doorsteps wasn’t illegal—unless the property was “posted.”

  Finally she set up the web cam. What would she see on it? If the outfit arrived, would it be an exact duplicate of the image? The necklace looked a lot like the picture. She’d assumed it was crystal, because that’s what that jewelry guy, Xing, said, but maybe she should have it appraised.

  As night fell, she started feeling nervous. What if it was just some stalker freak? Had her desire for this thing to turn out magical made her stupid?

  She took the sledgehammer, the shotgun, her phone, and her computer to bed and texted back and forth with Karen, who was at some convention app-startup bash.

  She and Karen were opposites in many ways. Karen was calm and smart and sarcastic with dark hair and glasses, whereas Alix was bold, big-boned, and boisterous, with bright hair. Different as they were, Alix considered their friendship to be deep and ancient and forever, and one of the luckiest things in her life.

  After Karen finally had to go, Alix lay awake for a long time, wishing she had somebody close by to talk to—like on the phone with actual human voices, not just tweeting or texting.

  She’d had a few local flings. One with a hunky carpenter she’d hired for the kitchen had lasted a month, but that had fizzled badly; she’d blown him off twice, though the second time wasn’t her fault. Anyway, it wouldn’t be cool to call him. During the month they were together, she’d pressed him for information about Aunt Veronica. He hadn’t grown up in the area, but he’d told her about the witch rumors, and the crows and clouds of smoke that reportedly hovered over the house way back when. From the photos Alix had found, Aunt Veronica had been a bright-eyed, button-nosed old woman with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore thick scientist-looking glasses too big for her face and walked with a cane. It was hard to imagine her commanding clouds of crows and marking up the basement floor with symbols.

  There were drawings, too. Alix’s favorite was a framed nude of her aunt done in blue pencil. The piece wasn’t large—the size of a placemat maybe. It answered the question of why she walked with a cane: her leg was deformed and fitted with a brace. The artist had depicted her as beautiful in spite of it, or even because of it, like the leg had a fun and outrageous personality. Alix loved that drawing on every level. The picture was simply signed ‘Max’—the name of her longtime companion. Max had loved Veronica very, very much, Alix decided.

  It made her mad that the townspeople had such a low opinion of Veronica. Had her elderly aunt felt lonely for female companionship? Did she feel weird shopping at the Red Owl, knowing people were whispering about her? Was she reluctant to get her hair done at the town salon? Sometimes when Alix thought along these lines, it inspired her to work harder to make the place beautiful, like every inch of woodwork she sanded was a blow in the name of women who were seen as lacking in some way. Women who were seen as less than other people.

  Still, she couldn’t help but think that if either one of her sisters had inherited the place, they would’ve made friends by now. Jackie would’ve joined the church choir and Jennie would be busy teaching Sunday school and meeting other moms. And they would wear proper outfits for errands into town. And never make spectacles of themselves at the townie bar, drinking beers and dancing wildly by the jukebox. Sure, Alix had made acquaintances, like Benji the barista at Bean Central, Malcolmsberg’s lone coffee shop, the Lings, who owned the Chinese restaurant, and Ginny, the nice Red Owl cashier. But there was nobody Alix could call on the phone.

  No way would she phone her parents—they’d tell her to come home and invest in a church choir robe and a book of tater tot casserole recipes.

  And no way would she leave.

  Except now she felt scared, lying there all alone.

  She turned over and scratched Lindy’s head. People had given up on poor three-legged Lindy—she was about to be gassed when Alix rescued her from the pound. Alix loved Lindy so much, it scared her to even think about her dying. Sometimes she joked about Lindy being the dog version of a loser to soften the fierce, sharp edges of her love for her.

  “Good girl,” she whispered.

  Alix lay there, alone in the darkness in her occult aunt’s house with her sledgehammer, her under-confident 1950s rifle, her computer, and her phone.

  She stroked a finger along Lindy’s ear, which was just long enough to flop over. “I wonder what Hardass Paul would say about this?”

  She snickered softly.

  What the hell, it was still a good joke.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The porch stood empty the next morning. Alix felt vaguely disappointed, but she reminded herself that the necklace had taken about a day.

  She could barely concentrate on sanding the woodwork in the kitchen; she kept popping out to the living room to check the porch and make sure the web cam’s record light was on.

  And then, that afternoon, when Alix looked out the window for the umpteenth time, there they were. The boots, the belt, and the clutch. Right there on the porch.

  Like magic.

  Slowly, Alix opened the door. Lindy ran out and sniffed the boots, then sauntered down the steps and out to pee on the grass.

  Lindy hadn’t even barked! Lindy always barked like crazy when the mailman or delivery people came. Even a squirrel setting a paw onto the clearing around the gravelly circle drive was occasion for a bark-fest. Which also suggested a magical cause, rather than a human one.

  Heart racing, Alix grabbed the stuff and called Lindy back in. She raced to her computer and checked the web cam footage. At 02:41:06, the porch was empty, at 02:41:07, the belt, boots, and clutch were there. They seemed to materialize, but you couldn’t tell for sure—the porch was white, and the accessories were white. Somebody could have flung the stuff up there really fast. Why hadn’t she taped at a lower speed? Karen would never accept this as evidence.

  Alix checked the jpeg; the outfit was knocked out of the image, with only pure white nothingness where the stuff had been. Alix couldn’t even find the things on the Marley’s site anymore. Maybe they’d taken down the page.

  A shiver rushed through her. What other explanation could there be?

  Then she realized something else: the items appeared exactly 24 hours from when she’d saved and clicked on them—to the second. She could tell from her computer history. She checked the timing on the necklace thing, and as far as she could tell, it was the same deal.

  Twenty-four hours. That seemed very magical!

  A new test: she selected an old wooden barrel. It was so giant that it would be easy to see what was going on. She put it on her desktop and clicked on it a bunch of times at 2:58 pm.

  The next day was a Thursday.

  At 2:40 pm, she was in position, peering out the window behind a camouflage screen of plants, with a perfect spy-view of the porch. And the sledgehammer. And the cam running on time lapse.

  At 2:58, she saw a pulse of brown. In the next instant, the brown spot expanded out from the middle, practically exploding out.

  Exploding out into a barrel.

  And there it sat. A big, old, weathered, wooden barrel.

  She stayed there, staring, not breathing. A barrel had just materialized before her eyes. She crept to the door and opened it slowly.

  Lindy went out and casually sniffed it, and then bounded down the steps and into the yard.

  The barrel was cool to the touch, much cooler than the muggy August air. Alix recalled that the majorette boots ensemble and the necklace had felt cool, too.

  Her heart pounded.

  Back inside, she reviewed
the footage, which showed it all: a brown dot exploding outwards into a barrel. She forwarded the clip to Karen, and got her on the phone.

  “This is just…whoa,” Karen said.

  “I know! Whoa!” Alix said.

  “Maybe I was wrong. Could this be magic? I mean, assuming you’re not messing with me here. ‘Cause April Fool’s day is past—”

  “I swear,” Alix interrupted breathlessly. “I watched it with my own eyes. Out of thin air.”

  “Wow. What if it really was those floppies you converted?”

  “I think it was. What other connection does my laptop have to Aunt Veronica?”

  Karen hissed out a breath. “Maybe she found some way to computerize occult commands. The computer as we know it today is based on everything being either one or zero, and look what we’ve made from that—the whole Internet. Maybe your aunt developed some voodoo interface with reality. Some kind of conversion. Those 1980s computer geeks got into some weird stuff.”

  “An occult computer program,” Alix whispered.

  “And then you come along and dump all that freak code into your modern laptop and fire up some kind of magic. Oh, now I’m dying to look at that code again. But wait! Don’t email it.”

  “Oh my god—the smashed machines in her computer room!” Alix said. “And the padlock on the door? And the writing on the floor? And remember how it smelled in there? Like it hadn’t been opened for years?”

  “She didn’t want that stuff getting out.”

  “Because she knew it was powerful,” Alix said. “I have a magic computer. I can have anything in the world.”

  “Okay, hold on. Let’s think and not act.”

  “But the magic needs one more test, just to be sure,” Alix said. “For the next thing, I have to choose something that doesn’t technically exist. Or something that would be impossible to get, to make sure it’s really magic. Like, a unicorn. That would be the ultimate test to prove it’s magic.”