Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  “Seriously?” he said in an astonished way, and started paging through it. “He’s salivating,” said Altiverse AK, adding: “Let’s see how many times we can make him rename his band.”

  He had brought two things for her, one of which was rather pointless and the other of which was—well, in a perfect, less Andromeda world, it would have amounted to something like the best pickup line ever, though she sincerely hoped he hadn’t meant it that way.

  The first thing was on his iPod.

  “Choronzon,” he said, and he handed her his earbuds, obviously wanting her to listen. “Shub-Niggurath, the song.” She inspected the earphones for wax buildup or anything gross, but they were fairly clean. Her ears did not work very well with earbuds, however. The shape of her ears was all wrong, and the buds just would never stay in. And inside, of course, there was only disorganized collagen, so nothing was ever loud enough. She could barely hear the song, though what she could hear of it sounded like chaos, which was appropriate.

  “Louder,” she said, pushing them in, and closing her eyes tightly to concentrate. “Louder. I can’t hear.”

  “That’s as loud as it goes,” he said. “Boy, you must really be deaf.” She could barely make out what must have been the chorus, which seemed to be: “Shub-Niggurath—the song! Shub-Niggurath—the song! The goat with a thousand young!” So that really was the title; in spite of herself, she found that adorably stupid.

  Byron told her he had made a CD of it for her, and he took it out of his bag. It was in a little sleeve that he had decorated with pentagrams and 666s in what was meant to look like dripping blood. The big mass of spiky blobs at the top, she realized after looking at it for a while, was the band’s name, Choronzon, the most illegible logo imaginable. She had to admit he could draw well, which she envied.

  “There’s a special song at the end,” he said.

  Altiverse AK said, “Oh goody,” and it was possible that that influenced that fact that Andromeda herself sounded way more sarcastic than she intended when she said: “I can’t wait.”

  “You don’t have to take it,” he said, looking hurt, and Andromeda felt bad, and also thought, though she would never say it, You’re cute when you’re hurt. And he was, sort of almost, actually, even in spite of the near-beard. She said she didn’t mean it that way, and thanked him as graciously as she could and said she would listen.

  He perked right up, looking a lot like Dave did when he saw you reaching for the treat drawer.

  “Yes, let me know what you think,” he said. “I mean, if you want. You don’t have to. Only if you feel like it.”

  The next thing he said was the thing she believed would be like the perfect pickup line in a world where pickup lines were ever good and where girls like Andromeda got them from people.

  What he said was:

  “Hey, want to see my Necronomicon?”

  Okay, she thought, in the direction of Altiverse AK, which was saying “Oh brother” in a series of what would have been sputters if Alt AK had had physical lips and tongue and saliva with which to sputter. Okay, so he managed to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable (the cron rather than the nom), something she would have previously thought almost impossible to do. But you have to admit, altithing, that a world where boys pop up and say “Want to see my Necronomicon?” every now and again is a better world than the one we previously thought we had.

  He pulled it out of his backpack. Altiverse AK burst into derisive laughter, but Andromeda shushed it.

  It was, in fact, the Simonomicon. The mass-market paperback was familiar, though not part of the IHOB’s collection. It had been a craze when it was published in the eighties, and it was everywhere: Savers always seemed to have a few ragged copies in the book section. But Andromeda had never seen one of the original limited, leather-bound editions of it in real life. Black with silver-gilt-edge pages, silver decorations, and a black ribbon bookmark, much like her own planned limited edition of Liber K. As she did with all important books, she sniffed it. And she had to admit, in response to a query from Altiverse AK, which had to rely on Primary World Andromeda’s reports to assess such things: it smelled amazing. Dusty, and rather darkly sweet, with an acrid bite around the edges. Hoax or not, it smelled like magic.

  “Wow,” she said. “I’ve never seen one of these. You know it’s a fake, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Byron. “It for sure is. I tried it out and it didn’t work at all.”

  AAK’s laughter began again, nearly drowning out Andromeda’s own response; she was aghast.

  “You’re not supposed to try it out!” she whispered when she had found her voice. “Are you insane?”

  “Running off the rails on a crazy train,” he said enigmatically. “But what does it matter if it’s a fake, anyway?”

  It was hard to explain why, and Andromeda was lost for words. Maybe because the line between hoax and blind could be exceedingly thin when it came to ceremonial magic? Maybe because fooling around with a graded system of imaginary initiatory gateways could still attract mischievous entities? Perhaps she would have to let him into her “coven” just so she could keep an eye on him and confiscate the book and prevent him from accidentally awakening something that could eat the world.

  “Anyway, it’s for you,” he said, as though reading her mind. “Now you have to let me be in your coven.”

  Andromeda was speechless, for a variety of reasons. It was a hoax, but it was a fun hoax, and hoax or not, it was a cool book. And it was worth quite a lot of money. She said “No, I couldn’t” a few times, and asked where he got it.

  “The Internets,” he said. He must have lots of money floating around, she thought. If she had that kind of money, she would bleed the Internet dry of rare books, of course. Maybe she could get him to buy some of the Sylvester Mouse books when the “Friends” of the Library auctioned them.

  As these thoughts were running through her head, the emomageekian picked up the Rituale Romanum and asked, “What’s this one?”

  “The Roman Catholic ritual handbook, circa 1870,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now, that one is real.” She added that, as the weedgie knew quite well, the Catholic Mass and other rituals were extremely powerful and well-developed pieces of ceremonial magic and that it could be very useful to consult them when planning your own ritual practice or studying older writings on high magic.

  “Ha,” he said. “It’s not.”

  “What’s not what?”

  “A powerful magic ritual. No way. The Catholic Mass is—” He paused, then said: “The Catholic Mass is like a gay man smiling at you and telling you you’re wonderful and that everything is going to be all right. And you sing folk songs. I’m Catholic. Trust me. Why, what are you, again?”

  “Half Spinach U-turn, half Jewess,” she said. “And bacon. And Nothing.”

  They argued back and forth about the matter, and he finally said, returning to his habitual question, that he would prove it by taking her to St. Brendan’s this Sunday if she would let him into her “coven.”

  She bowed to the inevitable.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you have to stop saying ‘coven’ and ‘mageek,’ and you have to shave off the lesbian beard.”

  “Ha,” he said. “I shall be reporting you to the library police for that remark. Deal. Consider it shaven offen.”

  So that was how Andromeda Klein ended up with a neophyte disciple, and a date to go to church in the name of magical research. “Wait till the dad gets wind of this,” said Altiverse AK, and it had a point. He must not be told, it said warningly. He must not. The only thing the dad hated more than places of worship was the Pentagon, or maybe McDonald’s.

  Andromeda had been trying to draw a small stylish letter bet, to be printed on a piece of transfer paper so she could tattoo it on her inner upper arm, and it wasn’t going too well. She was only good at drawing geometric shapes. So she handed Byron the paper and pen and her Hebrew book and asked him. With no questions, he picked up the pen and
dashed it off quickly, and it was just about perfect.

  “Ergo, draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica adjuramus te per Deum,” Byron mispronounced, reading from where he had randomly opened the Rituale Romanum. Andromeda hissed and put a finger to her lips, half librarian, half sign-of-Harpocrates, and she put another finger to his lips as well, and then pulled it back quickly because it almost looked like he was going to try to kiss it or something.

  “That’s the Ritual of Exorcism,” she whispered. Best not to recite ancient banishing incantations in a temple consecrated to gods and planetary demons, thank you very much. The last thing she needed was to chase off the King of Sacramento just when he was beginning to show himself. Her disciple had a lot to learn.

  “No way,” said Byron. “Spooky. Someone bookmarked it.”

  It was true: someone had bookmarked the exorcism section long ago with a tiny scrap of paper, now quite yellowed.

  “Why does the library even have that?” said Byron.

  It was a terrific question, in fact, and Andromeda Klein was rather shocked to realize that this was the first time it had occurred to her.

  Just then the overhead lights in the Children’s Annex flickered twice, seemed about to go out, then came back on. Such flickers happened on occasion, but the timing made this an extremely weedgie synch.

  “Daisy?” said Andromeda, sniffing. She could detect no Daisy scent whatsoever. Then she tried: “King of Sacramento?” The lights stayed on, but Andromeda felt, between her shoulder blades, two distinct shivers in quick succession, which certainly seemed like a yes.

  “King of Sacramento,” she said, nodding.

  Byron was staring at her with his head cocked to one side and his eyes narrowed, waiting for an explanation.

  There was no way to explain, so Andromeda simply shrugged.

  “You’re scary,” he said.

  “Who’s your boyfriend?” Marlyne asked, as soon as Byron the Former Emogeekian had checked out his fifteen books and left. Anyone seen talking to anyone was “your boyfriend” or “your girlfriend,” or potentially even “your Latin Loe-ver,” in Marlyne’s vocabulary. “He’s cute,” she added, revealing, for perhaps the first time in recorded history, that there was a way to say that phrase that implied “He’s too short for you.”

  “I’m helping him with his homework,” said Andromeda.

  “Yes, I noticed he had all your spooky books that nobody ever checks out. He majoring in Andromeda Studies?”

  Andromeda had Den’s stack of fifteen books ready for him when he came in, but after the conversation with Marlyne she decided to switch out a few to make it less obvious and more age-appropriate. Some kids’ books wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway. She removed A Wicked Pack of Cards and the Voynich Manuscript and replaced them with Five Children and It and Story of the Amulet-they deserved to be saved too, after all, and they had led quite a few children, including herself, to ouijanesse. The Magical Papyri in Translation would have to be saved too, certainly, but just to be on the safe side she also replaced it and Wright’s History of Caricature and the Grotesque with a couple of the more popular kids’ books about wizards and dragons. There was little chance that Den was going to read any of them, though. He just wasn’t a reader.

  Den was extremely disappointed that there was no bagel worm agony for him, as she had promised. Andromeda had gone to school directly from Rosalie’s house and had come to the library straight afterward, so there had been no time to visit the dad’s sad little magazine box. She tried to interest Den in the illustrations of William Blake’s Book of Urizen, which were rather sexy to her, but Den didn’t have the right kind of imagination for that. He gave her a withering look and accepted with resignation her promise to make it up to him.

  Den had brought her some treasures, though: things he had managed to dig up from around the house. There were four Daisy items: (1) a sock with a heavy object inside that turned out to be a small, smoky crystal ball; (2) Daisy’s old cell phone, which, sadly, looked like it had been smashed beyond repair and would no longer work; (3) a little radio or music player of some kind, with headphones and cord wrapped around it; and (4) one of Daisy’s old, and rather beat-up, teenage vampire books. (Their interest in vampires had been short-lived but intense at its height when Daisy had been diagnosed, sparked by the notion that milky leukemia blood might be rejuvenated by mixing in some regular blood. None of the blood magic they had tried had had any effect, however, and neither, for that matter, had any of the bone magic they had attempted in order to reorganize Andromeda’s collagen.)

  “What’s that? More ninety-three stuff?” he said, noticing the bet Byron had drawn for her.

  “It’s for a tattoo,” she said, explaining how you copy a design onto transfer paper and then to your skin to guide your ink-stabbing. “It’s going to go here,” said added, raising her arm and pointing to the spot. “A nice little bet.” She pulled out her damaged cards and thumbed through them to show the Magician, who hadn’t come out too badly from Rosalie’s hot chocolate and schnapps soaking.

  Den dutifully checked out the fifteen books, but said he’d never be able to carry them all, so Andromeda said he could put the ten she judged the least crucial right back in the bin. At least she had managed to save the Turbo Philosophorum and Giordano Bruno’s Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, if nothing else.

  “Don’t let your mom see,” she said as he left with a whispered-over-the-shoulder “Ninety-three.”

  Fifteen books to Byron and fifteen to Den. Thirty books a go wasn’t bad at all. She would have new ones ready for them on Tuesday, so that would be thirty more. Until then, Andromeda decided to focus on the least crucial sections in pulling the Sylvester Mouse books, leaving the 133s and other important areas on the shelves till she could arrange to have them checked out, and thus saved. Still, it was sad, whatever books they were. Who knows when you might want to look up something about entomology, biophysics, or even knitting or papier-mâché crafts? The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Rewinding Small Motors. What if a small motor ever needed rewinding? How would anybody know what to do?

  Andromeda did notice, however, as she was “working the list,” as Marlyne liked to put it, that there was something different about weeding these sections. She tried to put her finger on it for some time before she realized what it was: these non-Andromeda sections smelled different than “her” sections, like, say, the 133s or 296s. And the reason they smelled different was that the books in the Andromeda sections tended to be older. Older books smell stronger—better, by Andromeda’s lights—and the books in the 133s, along with certain other sections and much of the general fiction section, were older, dustier, and mustier. Andromeda had always known that the International House of Bookcakes had an unusually complete and extensive collection on magic, the occult, and religions, but she had always just counted that her good fortune, that the library happened to match her interests and needs so well. Of course, it had influenced the development of those interests as well, in the long years spent there day after day after school, moving from E. Nesbit to Tolkien, witches, dragons, and vampires, and on up to A.E., Crowley, and Kenneth Grant. But it was only now, confronted with the extremely limited and nonodiferous 700s, that she began to wonder why and how that came to be.

  A search of the online catalog, sorted by call number and subsorted by publication date, confirmed this impression. There were an enormous number of 133s in comparison to the other sections, which she had really known already; the bulk of them had been published prior to 1960, and many of them much, much earlier. It was very different from other sections she sorted by, which seemed to have been built up in the eighties and nineties and later. And sorted by acquisition date, it was even more dramatic: other than True and Faithful, which she had herself donated to the library quite recently, very few 133s had been purchased or added to the collection since 1977. It was a very clear cutoff. So what had happened in 1977? Elvis had died, that was one thing, according t
o a quick Internet search. She couldn’t think what else, though. She would have to look into it.

  There was also a particular notation on many of the individual records that Andromeda didn’t recognize: JE. There was no indication of what it stood for, and it was in the notes rather than a database field, so it couldn’t be sorted for. But she checked several important titles, like Magick Without Tears and Shadows of Life and Thought, and all had the JE notation. Isis Unveiled and On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead had EJMJE, which seemed related. Most nonweedgie titles she tried did not have either notation, though Rewinding Small Motors was an exception. Try as she might, Andromeda could not imagine a weedgie reason to want to rewind a small motor, but perhaps there was one.

  Marlyne had no idea, nor did Eileen Thigpen, the other LA-2. Even Dorothy Glass, the head librarian, said she had no idea. Gordon suggested that it could be the initials of the person who did the data entry when they made the transition from card catalog to electronic cataloging, but if so it was the only such notation, and the enterer had only remembered to do it for the good, older, and most weedgie books. It, like the presence of the Sylvester Mouse list, was a mark of quality and distinction. She didn’t want to probe too obviously on this, because she was in the process of a campaign to sabotage the library’s weeding program and it wouldn’t do to draw attention to her interest in the matter if she could help it. It was an interesting puzzle, though; all the more interesting because it was the first time she had thought of it. How and why had the IHOB acquired its phenomenal 133 collection, and why had there been such a sudden cutoff? The person to ask would be Darren Hedge, of course, but he was the last person whose suspicions she wished to arouse by showing too much interest in what she was already beginning to call the Eejymjay Collection. He had mentioned, in their conversation in the breezeway, that the building had once belonged to a family that had donated it to the city. Perhaps, then, the books had come with the building, collected by an evidently weedgie family. JE could be somebody’s initials; or it could be a shortened form of EJMJE, which sounded more like an organization or something. Jedidiah Easterbrook. Jean Eepertwinkle. The Electric Jesus Maritime Jitterbug Establishment. These were only a few of the possibilities.