Then her mouth, beyond her control, formed the words she heard in her head:
“Hekas hekas este bebeloi …”
The swirling stopped, and the throbbing ebbed and died and the cube and tunnel collapsed and her mind spiraled back to the size of a human girl’s brain and with it the expanded world.
She realized she’d had her eyes closed tightly, because they hurt when she suddenly opened them and because the light was so bright; there were people staring at her, so she must have been doing something to attract their attention; and her throat hurt, so she must have been shrieking the incantation amidst all the other shrieking.
There were six or seven people staring, puzzled, seemingly frozen in time, until she spoke.
“Someone took my bike,” she said. The frozen people began to move again, as though they were paused on video and someone had pushed Play. No one was the least bit interested in her or her missing bike, now that the spectacle was over. They were whispering, laughing, cackling amongst themselves.
“A.E.,” she said dejectedly. “Resh.” She was worn out.
When she looked toward the spot where the sun ought to have been, around twenty degrees from the western horizon, she noticed something hanging a bit higher, so she looked up and saw the bike. How had they gotten it up there? It was dangling precariously from its front wheel, which had been lodged in a fork of an oak branch. The rest of it was swaying in the wind. If it fell, it would be wrecked.
A couple of boys from the basketball courts helped her. You could never tell whether people were going to be nice or not, whether they were going to ridicule you or sympathize or just walk by. And boys could be incredibly mean and harsh, especially to people who didn’t look like models. But these ones were all smiles, and seemed to enjoy showing off their tree-climbing and bike-rescue talents.
“Someone must really hate you,” said the one who had scrambled up the tree. He detached the wheel from the branch and carefully lowered the bike down to the other one, who held it by the back wheel and caught the rest of it when it swiveled down. He presented it to her and bowed, which was cute. It seemed in decent shape, though the front wheel looked slightly out of true. At least they hadn’t vandalized it.
The other boy hung from the lower branch and dropped down heavily.
“Like ’em hunky,” he said.
“What?” she said. “Oh right, yes, like a monkey.”
They were being so nice, she didn’t know how to react. These boys were not her sort, to the degree that she had a sort. They were like aliens.
“Thanks,” she finally said, and did her best to smile back at them. The smile wouldn’t, it just couldn’t, come. Back at home, and with Daisy, appreciation or greeting was sometimes expressed with a Dave salute, the hand held up as a claw and then closed. She instinctively did this in lieu of a smile and realized how stupid it looked only after she had already done it. They were confused but still smiling at her. How could any non-insane people smile that much?
One of them seemed to be staring at her nonexistent chest.
“Teenage Head,” said one, “what’s that?” Andromeda’s sweatshirt zipper was undone and she was wearing one of the dad’s old T-shirts that she had rescued when the mom had packed them up to give to Goodwill. Most of them were very old and far too small for him to wear, but he had seemed really sad when he’d noticed them missing. Not least of the reasons she liked wearing them was that it irritated the mom so much. This one said TEENAGE HEAD, which would have to be a band, or a software company, or a restaurant.
“It’s my dad’s,” she said. One of the boys raised an eyebrow at that.
This was perhaps why it was so often said that practical magic of any kind can be dangerous for the neophyte. Not so much because of what you can do or manifest, but because whatever it is, is hard to control when you lack understanding, and because true understanding is so hard to achieve. What had happened by the bike rack under the trees was a kind of magic, if anything was. Now that Andromeda had recovered from her shock and had her bike back, she was certain that, though she would very much enjoy it if Lacey were to feel her wrath in some manner, she did not actually want Lacey dead. And that if she were to discover that her spell actually had killed Lacey somehow, she would be dismayed. Not overwhelmingly dismayed, perhaps; but it would add greatly to her worries, which were already too heavy. All she needed was two angry dead people on her back instead of only one. And she disliked the idea of tainting her magic by association with Lacey. She should attempt, at least, to preserve such magic for higher things. How to do it, though, when everything is so utterly beyond your control? The answer must lie in training and discipline, of course, as all experts said, though till now she had not perhaps fully realized why they said that.
Lacey had left a note wedged in her bicycle basket, which was why the monkey boy had said that someone must really hate her: fucken bitch constantration camp, it read. Not good, as the dad might say. “Learn to spell, at least,” said Altiverse AK, fortunate at that moment that there was not an Altiverse Lacey around to clobber it or sit on it or something.
The magic appeared to have been set off inadvertently by her agitated mood. Had she been in control, and with the proper protection and weapons, she might have entered the cube and passed through the tunnel, learned what she was meant to learn, and conducted a ceremony or operation astrally while in the alternate plane. Skilled magicians did this all the time, but in the event, she had only caught a brief glimpse of it and moreover had had no idea what sort of world or plane it might have led to.
The hekas hekas incantation was not one she usually used, but it was Golden Dawn, she was pretty sure. Why had she intoned it? Or shrieked it, rather. It seemed like she had shrieked it. Her throat still hurt.
Andromeda Klein stopped by the bike shop to get a new lock, one they told her would be very difficult to cut or crack. Ness was a good guy who often fixed her bike for free. If Andromeda had been the kind of girl who could pick and choose which guys to attract, and if she had been in the market for another impossible, unattainable boyfriend, he was one she might have chosen. He was tall and not bad-looking, and dressed reasonably well, and often wore decent rather nice clunky leather shoes even in the shop, in sharp contrast to the slovenly ragamuffin guys who worked for him. There was nothing fiery or deep about him, but he was kind and well groomed, two incredibly rare qualities.
“Your front whale’s spit out,” said Ness, meaning the wheel in front was a bit out of true, and he offered to fix it when she had more time. He also gave her a great deal on the heavy-duty U-shaped lock.
Despite the day’s trouble and the extra stop, Andromeda Klein arrived at the International House of Bookcakes with twenty minutes to spare before her shift began. She locked her bike to one of the breezeway poles and rushed straight past Marlyne to the 133s without pausing to hear today’s review of her appearance.
“Her” section was looking a little ragged. It had been several days since she had tidied it up. There were quite a few empty spaces, familiar colors and shapes missing from the shelves. Of course, the Sylvester Mouse list, that was it. Someone must have pulled more while she was off. True and Faithful was still up there on the top shelf with the oversizeds, but a quick inspection revealed that the library’s edition of Dee’s Five Books of Mystical Experience was now missing. It must have been added to the list—it was certainly unlikely that anyone had checked it out.
She pulled a few books and retreated to a semiprivate table behind Reference to study them. There were several things she wanted to check.
Dr. Regardie confirmed that hekas hekas este bebeloi was Golden Dawn, a banishing formula known as the Cry of the Watcher Within, adapted from the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries; it means “away, away, profane spirits,” the equivalent of the more familiar apo pantos kakodaimonos or the procol, O procul este profani of the Star Ruby, for example.
As best she could analyze it, then: the magic by the bike rack had begun, spark
ed spontaneously by her action-populated state of mind, and a wave of hate had somehow formed itself into a directed force; a gateway to somewhere had opened; she had heard the voices of the entities or agents or spirits from within and beyond the gate. And then, for some reason and by some means, she had uttered the Greek banishing formula, which had in fact banished the voices, the gateway, and the directed magical wave of ill will, leaving everything deflated and inert. So had the magical state itself been caused by profane spirits? If so, what a successful use of banishing, and far simpler than that of an entire formal ritual. Or had it been something inside her, some buried part of her will, that had called the magic into being, had opened the gateway, had constructed a kind of magical bomb, only to deactivate it at the last moment, as though two parts of herself were at war with one another, canceling each other out in the end?
It was confusing. She had never opened a gateway before. It was hard to know what to think.
Crowley, Regardie, Dion Fortune, and Agrippa had nothing to say regarding any King of Sacramento.
She had put away the books and scanned herself in before it struck her that the unintentional magic under the oak tree might well have arisen from, or been instigated by, her sigil magic of that morning. If so, it had been one hell of a powerful sigil, to manifest a dreamworld in the waking world; and if so, the King of Sacramento might well have been involved, though she had not seen him.
He couldn’t possibly be the state’s governor somehow, could he? That would really make no sense.
Gordon was leaving, thank gods. It had been a hard day. She didn’t have the strength to smile weakly at him all through the shift. She just didn’t.
It occurred to Andromeda that she hadn’t thought to turn her phones on since the morning school switch-off. She turned on the red mom phone and saw that there were zero voice mails and seven text messages. Menu-Up-Select-Txts-down-down-down-Select-down-down-Select-Delete-Yes. That was the formula for Delete Unread, and she could do it with her eyes closed and without thinking, which was pretty much how she did it just then. Then she realized what she had done on automatic pilot and undeleted the unread messages to check, just to make sure the house hadn’t burned down or anything. No messages from St. Steve (UNAVAILABLE) on the other phone, as usual. She redeleted the mom messages, sighed, and cursed herself for being an idiot.
Gordon was pulling his jacket on as she came back into the back room.
“There you go,” he said. “That’s not so hard, is it?”
It took Andromeda nearly a second to realize that these condescending, encouraging words were not directed at her to congratulate her on a successful entrance into the break room. He was talking to his sleeve, praising it for its success in going all the way up his arm to his shoulder, leaving the hand exposed at the other end.
He looked up at Andromeda, and the next thing he said was to her, not his own clothing. At least, she was pretty sure it was to her.
“You look nice today.”
She smiled weakly. Okay, he’s on drugs again, she thought. Maybe he had been talking to his jacket after all. No way on earth could she look nice, by any measure. Marlyne said if Andromeda would give him the time of day he’d be over the moon and all over her. It was really a shame he was such an unappealing goofball who wore mandals. Even if he were to clean himself up a little, or a lot, she’d never be able to forget them.
“Where are the Sylvester Mouse carts?” she asked. She was returning the rather rare first issue of S.S.O.T.B.M.E.; Euclid’s Elements, books one and two; and Shadows of Life and Thought, A. E. Waite’s memoirs, all of which had been on the list, and had them out of her bag ready to file them amongst the others. For all her admiration for A.E., she had never gotten around to reading Shadows all the way through. She had studied only the pages on the tarot, which were difficult and obscure enough. She felt she owed it to his memory to wade through the entire book, and she was sure there were great truths hiding in the convoluted, cranky, scolding language, as there always were; but now it was needed by Sylvester Mouse, for some as-yet-unspecified reason.
Gordon was staring at her, trying to reverse-engineer Sylvester Mouse to trace it to its misheard original form. He got them sometimes.
“The whatie whats?” said Gordon, finally.
“The, you know, the carts. We’re pulling books from the list?” The three Sylvester Mouse carts were no longer tucked along the wall in the break room with DO NOT SHELVE signs taped to them.
“Well, the carts are over there,” said Gordon, breaking into a song, “but the books are gone. The carts are over there, but the books are gone….” He stopped the chant when he noticed Andromeda’s mouth beginning to form itself into one exceedingly thin line. “They packed them up this morning, I think. But there’s still more list to go. Lots more.” He pointed and she saw it, a new chunk of list in her mail slot with her time sheet. So that was what she’d be doing tonight. She was looking forward to it. It sure beat shelf reading.
“So they packed up the books,” she said. And then, before he could burst into song again, she quickly added: “Lots of good books there. What are they for, do you know? No one seems to know.” Some important Foundation or other wanted them for a class on the World’s Great Works of Esoterica, maybe, or there was going to be a display at Central of Wonderful and Unusual Featured Finds from the County Collection—something like that.
“They’re for reading,” said Gordon.
“What?” she said. “Oh.” Humorous.
“Damned witty,” said Altiverse AK.
“Yeah, of course they’re for reading….” Andromeda paused. Then it dawned on her what he had meant to say. A tiny droplet of disquiet opened into a limitlessly wide and deep ocean of pain. “Weeding? Weeding?” she said. “Weeding?”
“Yes,” said Gordon, more befuddled even than usual. “Weeding. What did you think it was? Don’t you read your e-mails?”
“Weeding?” she whimpered.
In fact, Andromeda rarely read any of her e-mail, figuring what was the point now that Daisy and St. Steve were gone. She had deleted most of her accounts and all of her Web sites, too, when she had realized there was a strong chance that her mother had been reading them. There was a library account, and a library staff Web site you were supposed to check, but it wasn’t something Andromeda was in the habit of doing and she hadn’t, she now realized, done it for some time.
She stood motionless in front of Gordon with a look of horror on her face as he explained.
“They’re weeding the collection to make room for more multimedia,” he said. “It’s never been done at this branch.”
“Yes,” she said, and Altiverse AK added: “Of course it hasn’t. That’s why it’s such a good collection!”
There was a lump in her throat, which was the only thing that prevented her from shouting those words. “Don’t melt down,” said Altiverse AK quietly, “just don’t.” She was trying not to. At this rate, there would be a gateway opening any moment, she could feel it.
It was a small building, Gordon went on, quoting the e-mail from memory, and an underutilized branch. The system regarded it as superfluous, and there had been talk of closing it down entirely, but the current plan was to “modernize” the collection and refocus on more popular titles and items like DVDs and magazines and workstations for accessing the Internet and digital files.
The resulting plan, explained in the staff newsletter and sent to everyone’s mailbox: Every book that hadn’t been checked out in the last eighteen months was to be pulled, discarded, and sold by the Friends of the Library. They were updating their usual sales methods by holding an online auction instead of the usual rummage sale for the more valuable titles.
“Friends!” was all she could say, thinking of three carts full of excellent, hard-to-come-by titles that had already gone, never to return, and the sinister “Friends” of the Library who were collaborating in the book purge. Many of the books already pulled were quite rare, and some nearl
y unique, and would fetch high, high prices—the real reason, certainly, that the “Friends” of the Library were so eager to sell them. Magick Without Tears! It was priceless. She would never be able to afford many of them, and perhaps not any, if it came to that. Obviously, staff-checking didn’t count as a checkout in the eighteen months; otherwise, a great many of the books would have been spared, as she’d staff-checked them many times.
She allowed herself a rueful snort. She had been so impressed by the list. What a wonderful choice of titles! Well, of course they were great titles: they were the ones no one ever checked out! The popular dreck, the wicker, the self-help, the sleazy novels were there to stay, of course. On that basis, the collection weeded itself. If they left it up to the patrons of this branch, all they’d have left would be romance novels and Civil War alternative histories and self-help and large-type and books on tape. Wasn’t the library supposed to be better than that, better than the lowest and most geriatric common denominator?
It was Altiverse AK who said that, but Andromeda herself asked a form of this final question aloud in a kind of despairing hiss, and Gordon finally seemed to realize that she was not pleased with the situation, though he appeared to have no idea why.
“Are you okay?” he was saying, but she had already snatched the list from her mailbox and zombied out of the room to find Darren Hedge.
“It’s beyond our control,” said Darren Hedge wearily. “No need to get hysterical.” He had the look of a man who devoutly wished someone else had his shift that day.
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