Andromeda squinted at her, not knowing what to say. She didn’t like thinking of what she looked like under any circumstances if she could help it. The dad sometimes joked around about how she was lucky she hadn’t inherited any Jewish hair genes from him. Not that the Spinach U-turn hair genes would win any awards either.
“Oh, come off it. Dromedary’s a total Jew,” said Rosalie. “Fifty percent at least. My lovely, lovely half-Jewess. I’m skidding.”
“I’m a big old Jew too,” said Bethany. “Two hundred proof. We’re not religious or anything.”
“Neither are we,” said Andromeda. “We’re Nothing.” Couldn’t the dad have raised her as non-Nothing for just a little while so she could have at least learned a little Hebrew? Then she could have changed to Nothing after that, no problem. That was what he had gotten to do. It wasn’t fair. Andromeda sure loved the way Bethany looked when she smiled her little half-smile. It was just nice. It was then that she realized who it was that Bethany reminded her of: Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand writer of short stories who once took drugs with Mr. Crowley at a London party. Andromeda had a photocopy of a 1914 cameo photograph of her on her mirror, right under the picture of the young A.E.; she had always dreamed and wished and prayed that by some miracle she herself could be made to look like Katherine Mansfield. As Katherine Mansfield, she wouldn’t even have minded being flat, which was supposed to have been quite fashionable in the days of Katherine Mansfield and A.E. But if that wasn’t possible, at least it was good to know that someone in this day and age looked like Katherine Mansfield.
Rosalie let Andromeda borrow some of her harem pajamas, which were far too big on her. They would stay up on her hips only if she cinched the drawstring and secured it with the world’s largest bow.
“You can sleep in my bed with me,” Rosalie said, “as long as you don’t slobber on me.”
“Don’t spoon,” said Bethany as she and Amy were leaving.
“Oh, you better believe we’re gonna spoon, Bethlehem,” said Rosalie. “Full-on spoonathon, right here.”
Andromeda was very, very tired. The room began a slow counterclockwise rotation, once it was certain she was safely lying down. She scrunched as far as she could to the edge of the bed, flat on her back, arms folded and eyes closed, determinedly spoon-resistant. She felt cool, reassuring hands draping her with raw silk, wrapping it around her, pulling it tight, and sewing her in. She settled into her box, thinking about St. Steve’s texts, and about Bethany’s easy smile and deep, dark, enormous pupils ringed with gold-flecked green.
“The drummer in Charles’s band is named Mike,” she heard Rosalie say as the lid lowered and the chains fell heavily and scraped as they were wound around. By the time the chains were being locked, she was already drifting, tight, compact, secure, the sound of whatever else Rosalie might have been saying the faintest, unintelligible tremor.
Some time thereafter, she was awakened by the sound of someone loosening the screws around her iron face mask. Daisy’s scent fell on her like a mist. And when the mask had been removed and her blindfold had been taken off, she saw that the one who attended her was the King of Sacramento.
“You’re back,” she managed to croak out, with a great deal of difficulty.
xii.
“That is rather an interesting perspective on the matter,” said the King of Sacramento’s voice, coming from a corner of the room Andromeda couldn’t see. All she could see was the patch of misty ceiling directly above her box. The King of Sacramento was fiddling with some metal objects, from the sound of it, and doing it in a rather workmanlike, routine way, as though he were opening a shop for business. Just another day at the office, thought Andromeda. But she immediately took his point: she was the one who was “back.” The chamber of purple smoke was his, not hers.
The hands that had unscrewed the iron face covering of the Andromeda Box were bright, nearly dazzling white. When they touched anything that was touching her, the wood of her box or the chains that secured her, she felt an electric tingling throughout her body, but mostly on her lips.
She could only catch glimpses of him when he entered her field of vision as he circled the box, and these were fleeting. But she recognized him immediately as the figure who had identified himself as the King of Sacramento in the Daisy dream by his dusk-colored Tau robe and by the motions of his arms, which had looked like dancing from afar in the Pixiescape but now appeared more like ritual gestures. Though she felt wide awake and lucid, she found it difficult to make her lips form words. The King of Sacramento took the hilt of his sword and knocked it on the top of the box, and after several blows, she found she could just barely manage to utter an audible sound.
“How do I know?” was what she said, and the effort of saying even that took a great deal out of her. What she meant was, in the spirit of Solomon’s questioning of his demons, “How do I know what manner of creature thou art, O King of Sacramento?”
She heard the response in her head, like the voice of Altiverse AK, and yet different. It was deep, and if it had been an actual sound rather than pulses of information in her mind, it might have been described as resonant. She wasn’t sure if he had understood her.
“You need to improve your lantern anchors” was what it said.
I don’t think I have any lantern anchors, she tried to say, and it came out: “Don’t think.”
“Yes,” he said. “Nein. Quite so.” Again, if a series of pulses of information could be said to have an accent, he sounded a bit British; or perhaps it was merely his withering, detached headmaster attitude that made her think so.
“Who?” she managed to get out, by concentrating very hard and focusing every bit of her attention on projecting her question from inside to out. She felt limp and faint.
Her box began to shake, because the King of Sacramento had sat down on it and seemed to be trembling with laughter.
“Six,” said the King of Sacramento. “One naught, one five, seven seven one. In the manner of your two one eight. But the stars, like Henry Cornelius’s books, are easier read than carried.”
There was a stick in his hand, and he began making notches in it as he recited his numbers once again. Then he drove the stick into the earth at the foot of her box. He fiddled with it, and when he stepped back there was a piece of cloth attached to it like a flag. There was a pack of cards in his hand, and he fanned them out and waved them at the flag, till a wind was raised and it flew out from its staff. There was an image on the flag—it was two crossed swords. Then he blew it the other way, and on the other side was the design of Pixie’s Three of Swords card, a heart pierced by three blades.
“Two swords?” she managed to get out. That was what she should have been asking from the beginning. The King of Sacramento held an electric finger to her tingling lips and began tying on her blindfold. He was replacing the screws in her iron mask as he said:
“Any anchoress can play the Popess with the proper hat. Have a nice day.”
Then the King of Sacramento, along with everything and most of her recollection of it, was gone. Her box dissolved into the ground, which was strange because she had never managed to see where it went when she woke up.
The next thing Andromeda saw was Rosalie van Genuchten, already dressed for school, holding out a cup of coffee for her and staring down at her saying:
“Why do you sleep like a vampire, Drama-dairy? The world wants to know.”
Clearview High School was not the best place to be when feeling “delicate.”
“Never again?” said Rosalie with air quotes, when she saw Andromeda with her head on the table and a faraway look in her eyes during Nutrition. “Someone up there must like you, Klein, because look: no Lacey today. You’d be easy pickin’s in present condition. You should see Amy: she looks like a used piñata. My work,” she added piously, “is done.”
Rosalie too spent the first half of the day with her head down whenever there was any opportunity to put it down, but this was large
ly to hide her continuous texting, Andromeda saw her surreptitiously checking her phone for replies even when she was leaning into another boy she was playing with. That was when she was caught by Ms. Chang and got her phone taken away for the day. Shortly after that, she went home sick, as much to be able to retrieve her phone, Andromeda suspected, as to recuperate. Rosalie could bounce back from just about anything.
As for Andromeda, she was also secretly riding her phone all day. Having a one-woman Gestapo for a mother had been excellent training for unobtrusive phone checking. She had received four texts all told from UNAVAILABLE since the ones on the previous night. That was far more than the usual per-day average from their original phase of texting, and very satisfying. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was all of a sudden. She even forgave him for having a bit of trouble getting into the swing of messaging again.
She hadn’t been able to resist calling once, on her way back from locking her bike in the woods, even though she knew that was pushing it. It had always displeased him when she called, especially when not specifically invited to. In fact, he had limited her to one message a day at one point, a very difficult rule indeed. She certainly wished she could unleave the messages she had just left on his voice mail. She had modeled the call after a previous message from long ago, about how she hadn’t been expecting him to pick up but had only wanted to hear his voice saying “I’m not available to take your call right now.” But since that time, he had changed his outgoing message to the phone company’s generic robot voice recording, and it wasn’t till she was halfway through her sentence about wanting to hear his voice that she realized how inapt it was. She sputtered a bit and said a couple of frustrated “blahs” and then she was tongue-tied and silent except for sighs long enough that the recording timed out and hung up on her. So she had to call back again (pushing it even more) to say “Okay, I am an idiot. But it is true I would love to hear your voice, and …”
She couldn’t help asking if he was still in New York, which was where he had been during the text-message-only phase of their relationship, the phase culminating in the “hi there.” But it sounded awkward and, though it didn’t seem too much to ask, it still felt like prying. Then she was stumped and got cut off again. She didn’t dare call back. The last thing she wanted to do was to irritate him this early into their reunion. She had already blown her chance at behaving perfectly and making no mistakes from the beginning this time around. She could only hope she hadn’t blown it too badly. He could be very hard to please.
The best she could do in the circumstances was text “poppy,” which was “sorry” in the predictionary. Next time she dared to call to leave a message, she would write out a script, which was what she should have done this time.
By the time school let out and her shift rolled around Andromeda was feeling quite a bit better physically. No new messages from St. Steve, but that was normal. Evenings weren’t his usual messaging times. As long as she hadn’t ruined everything with her awful voice messages. She just had to hope he would find them amusing rather than irritating.
Her cards, when she laid them out in the Children’s Thoth Annex before her shift began, were encouraging. Sub-themes of magic, technology, and reunion intertwined. The return of St. Steve and the return of the King of Sacramento had synched up beautifully; and the discussion of Daisy in Rosalie’s playroom, though difficult at the time, had conjured her presence more strongly than any formal ceremony had succeeded in doing, so that was a reunion of a sort too. And then there was the lovely Bethany, Katherine Mansfield and the night sky rolled into one. It was perhaps the most hopeful, and certainly the least grim, self-reading she could remember.
But what to make of the King of Sacramento? Like an ordinary dream, the memory had dissipated over the course of the day, till it was so diffuse that all she could be certain of was that it had happened. One thing she knew: she would have to get better at asking questions. Perhaps she should write a script ahead of time for him as well as St. Steve.
Rosalie called while Andromeda was on her break, and she was able to take the call in the breezeway.
“Dude,” said Rosalie. “You’re not going to believe this. I talked to Charles. You totally called it. Debby? Check. And not Kim, like you said, but Cam-eron.” Ah, yes, that was possible too. She hadn’t thought of the name Cam. “You totally fucking called it. And Debby did happen the night before, just like you said. Why haven’t we been doing this all along?”
Andromeda said she was surprised he had admitted it. “Isn’t that your philosophy? Deny, deny, deny? How’d you swing that?”
“I told him I had hacked into his phone. And he believed it. But if I hadn’t had the names, I don’t think it would have worked.”
“Oh.” Andromeda paused. “Are you—okay?” Rosalie sounded pretty okay.
“Of course I’m not okay. When has anybody ever been okay? But he has been trying to kiss my ass over the phone for the last four hours. It’s a good time. Plus there are other options in play. How’s your imaginary boyfriend these days? You’ve been working your phone a lot today.”
Rosalie’s real reason for calling was to say she wanted Andromeda to do more readings for her.
“With this power, there will be nothing stopping me. Us, I mean. Nothing stopping us. But especially me. I’m skidding.”
Andromeda said that her cards were a little worse for wear. She had tried to dry them with the hair dryer in the guest vacuum, but the affected cards were stained and kind of wavy.
“I can only say I’m sorry so many times, Andromeda,” said Rosalie. “Don’t worry, though. I have it taken care of. Big surprise for you. Oh—gotta go. That’s Charles on the other line and I have to take it so I can hang up on him. Don’t die.”
xiii.
When Byron the Emogeekian arrived at the hidden Temple of Thoth Hermes Mercurius Termaximus, that is, at the Children’s Annex of the International House of Bookcakes, Andromeda had his Sylvester Mouse books ready for him in three neat stacks of five.
“Check these out, please,” she said.
It was quite a good list, if she did say so herself.
She had started with Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” and Others, and added, also from the fiction section of the Sylvester Mouse list, Zanoni and The Sorry Tale. That was for fun. Then there were True and Faithful, Gems from the Equinox, and Nightside of Eden, to which she had added Euclid’s Elements in one volume and Babylonian Liver Omens. From there she had gone to Crowley’s Book of Thoth, Westcott’s translation of the Sefer Yetzirah, and both of Mrs. John King van Rensselaer’s books on playing cards. She rounded the whole thing out with On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, a mid-nineteenth-century edition of the Rituale Romanum, and, because of his professed interest in chaos, S.S.O.T.B.M.E.
Byron picked up The Sorry Tale, which was on top.
“‘A story of the time of Christ,’” he read aloud, “‘by Patience Worth. Communicated through Mrs. John H. Curran.’” He turned to the first page and read:
“Panda, panda, tellest thou a truth? Panda, thou whose skin is burned to saffron from desert’s blaze …”
“Is it a code?” he said.
“Everything’s a code,” said Altiverse AK, which was true enough. Andromeda was seated in one of the children’s chairs at one of the children’s tables, and the emogeekian was standing across the table from her, staring at her with an unreadable expression. He wasn’t dressed nearly as horribly as he had been the previous day, and actually would have looked relatively okay, other than in the respects in which he resembled a spider monkey, and the irredeemable wispy chin beard.
“It was dictated via Ouija board,” she said, “letter by letter, by a spirit named Patience Worth in 1917.” A mere curiosity, compared to the others, but worthy of being saved from the clutches of the “Friends” of the Library. She wished she could save them all, of course, but she’d had to prioritize, and to stick to a list that would be halfway coherent and defensible in case
her scheme was ever found out. Of course, anyone who checked out Nightside of Eden would naturally also check out Lovecraft and Gems from the Equinox, she could say, if called to take the stand in her own defense at her trial, and it would take a slick lawyer indeed to poke holes in that argument.
“If anybody asks,” she said, “you can tell them you’re doing it for a research project.”
He was giving her the “Huh?” stare again.
Andromeda tried to explain the relation of Liber 231 to the Book of Thoth and Nightside of Eden and why understanding the angel magic of Dee and Kelley required a knowledge of Euclid’s Elements as well as Liber Loagaeth, but she got very confused by the end and wasn’t sure even she understood what she was saying. There was an awkward pause, during which he finally sat down in the chair opposite her.
“You and your libers,” he said. “So if I read these books, I get to be in your coven?”
That creaky shuddering vibration that could be felt faintly but deeply and all over was the sound of the Universe rolling its eyes.
“You don’t have to read them,” she told him, adding that all that was required was that he check them out and keep them for at least a few days before returning them. “But you might want to read the Lovecraft, at least. Just to back up that Shub-Niggurath hobby of yours.” She had even bookmarked the beginning of “The Whisperer in Darkness” for him.
He nodded with a half-frown, pretending he intended to do it. “I’ll tell you one thing right now,” he said. “I am totally changing the name of my band to Babylonian Liver Omens.” Andromeda was getting pretty tired of people making fun of Babylonian Liver Omens around there, but she managed a weak smile in response. “Sot-bm-ee,” he said, pointing to S.S.O.T.B.M.E. “What’s that mean?”
“Sex secrets of the black magicians exposed,” she said. An important text in the Chaos tradition you claim to espouse, she thought, but didn’t say.
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