She named the screamy woman Pamela. The A.E. figure was A.E., dressed in robes like the King of Sacramento, seated at a large draftsman’s table off to the side of the stage, with a compass and a straightedge, working out the mathematical calculations and the sigilish architecture of the pieces. There was a drummer named Reg, and it sounded like around seven or eight guitarists: their leader was Jeffy, and his minions had kitten heads and were named Red, Blue, Purple, etc., after the color of their instruments and eyes.
Yes, said Huggy. That is exactly correct.
The other side of the tape was not nearly as good—it could well have been a different group with a different screamy lady singing. But it was a kind of synch anyway because one of the songs went “Six six six the number of the beast.” It was what she would call association ouijanesse—nothing on the tape itself was weedgie to any degree, but it referred to other weedgie things, and by that measure—by sheer volume, anyway—it was certainly among the most weedgie accidentally found things she’d ever happened on. Guillaume de Machaut could actually be legitimately frightening, especially in the quiet parts alone in the dark. The 666 song was fun but silly, though.
St. Steve’s response to her “wtf <3” text came in just as she was flashing the lights to warn the nonexistent patrons that closing time was fifteen minutes away. It ran: “jj8kk!” That wasn’t in the predictionary. Andromeda could imagine no possible meaning. What was he doing, just pressing keys at random to mock her?
Andromeda was already irritated with him, so she saw red and texted back: “you sir are an asshole,” the least friendly thing she had ever sent to him by far in their entire association; and she sent it before she realized that “jj8kk!” looked a lot like a password. He must have been entering a password by mistake. But for what? Voice mail? Her heart jolted with the possibilities of that before realizing that the voice mailbox probably had to be linked to a particular phone. (She knew that from the mom’s bitter disappointment upon learning she couldn’t just tap into Andromeda’s voice mail anytime she felt like it without having the physical phone. For once, she understood something of how the mom must feel.) How could she use it? She probably couldn’t at all, but of course she saved the message on her phone and also wrote it on her upper bicep as neatly as she could in case it seemed like a good idea to tantoon it someday.
She accepted a ride home from Weird Gordon so she could retrieve her robe and other materials and equipment. Sneaking in and out of the house without the mom noticing was by far the trickiest part of the entire operation. She attempted a simple, quick Egyptian invisibility charm and recited a hastily written stealth incantation; whether or not they worked, the mom was, luckily, nowhere to be seen. Dave saw Andromeda, but thankfully his meow was silent.
Waiting for Byron in the shadows near the library’s magnolia tree, she risked calling UNAVAILABLE and left a message saying she was sorry for the text and if he by chance hadn’t read it yet to please delete it without reading it; it had been a mistake. Like that ever worked on anyone. She would have been shocked had there been a response, and there was none.
Byron disappointed her slightly by showing up on time-she had been half hoping he wouldn’t show up, or would be late enough that she could pretend to have given up waiting. But any doubts she had about facing him after realizing what an idiot she had been about telling him about her box and St. Steve and Huggy fell away in the face of his friendly and businesslike bearing as he unloaded bag after bag full of the improbable items she had specified, and picked them all up, balancing the sword on top and shaking his head non chalantly when she offered to help. If he had been repulsed by anything she had told him, he gave no indication. Maybe he just didn’t care.
They couldn’t risk any lights till they got to the basement, and Andromeda had to feel her way to the alarm to enter the code by touch, then push Byron in the right direction toward the door to the storage-basement stairs.
Once safely down there, she lit a long, handheld church taper and by that light set up the seven “lamps”—that is, seven other candles of varying heights to represent each of the seven traditional planets. She used stacks of books from the discard bins to get the right height for each, and a compass to orient them correctly. Byron simply stared, fascinated.
She didn’t have a very good text of the Goetia. A.E. had trusted no one, and the paraphrases in his Ceremonial Magic were so heavily blinded and trapped as to be nearly worthless. But A.E. was all she had, and he would have to do. Andromeda knew she was pretty good at writing and conducting rituals on the fly, improvising when need be.
“Pretty much all that stuff is online,” said Byron. “Why don’t you just download it?”
“We’re not going to be downloading Goetic grimoires off the Internet,” said Andromeda impatiently. There was no telling what manner of Things might be summoned inadvertently by the decrepit IHOB printer if it were allowed to spray ink on pages in sigil shapes. Besides, a printout would just look wrong and would kill the weedgie mood. There was no substitute for a real book.
She had Byron stand on the end of a rope in the center of the room as she drew a series of concentric circles with a large stick of chalk tied to the other end, and then filled in the necessary names and seals, as Byron looked on, wide-eyed.
When everything was as ready as it was ever going to be, she told Byron to strip naked and put on his robe, deliberately averting her eyes from his spidery, rather surprisingly hairy body, but noting that, no, he did not in fact have a male tramp stamp. That was a relief; it would have been even worse than mandals.
She had told him to get a silk robe of some kind, and the best he had been able to come up with was one of his mother’s dressing gowns. He only hesitated a moment. She pinned it up where it was too big and tied it around the middle with some rope. The none-too-weedgie pastel floral pattern was still visible when it was turned inside out, but it was the best he had. “I’ll make you a real one soon,” she said. She put the goggles and headphones on him and tied them tightly to his head with ribbons. Then she undressed and slipped into her white ceremonial Tau robe and Daisy’s coat, gauntlets, shoes, and wig.
“Why do we have to wear the blond wigs?” he asked. He looked rather ridiculous.
The real answer, of course: they’re special hats to turn anchoresses into Popesses.
But to Byron, Andromeda put it this way: “We want the spirits to mistake us for Solomon the King.”
“Solomon the King wore a discount platinum wig from Walgreens?”
“Yes,” she said, “he sure did. So it is written.”
The ceremony began well enough. Because Byron was essentially blinded by the goggles, she tied his leg to the table they were using as an altar so he wouldn’t leave the circle in error. He was especially sensitive to the “perfumes,” and several times said he was feeling dizzy. He described the vivid color effects he saw, and they did sound rather spectacular. The goggles created a dark mirror much more reliably and efficiently than a wine bottle or crystal ever had in Andromeda’s experience, that was for sure.
AMY departed easily and with a kind of courtly flourish, upon merely being asked, with no physical manifestation other than a light breeze. GAAP proved to be a bit more difficult. The room grew icy, Andromeda’s skin crawled with invisible spiders, and the babbling metallic ripping sound was tearing her ears apart. Byron later said he felt sick to his stomach the entire time, and claimed to have actually lost consciousness at a couple of points. He reported seeing eyes and claws. Andromeda’s own vision became patchy as well. She was, as the King of Sacramento had predicted, extremely relieved to have had a nice big sword in hand. If she was unable to command and bind like Solomon, with threats and will, she was certainly able to outlast the spirit’s patience. In the end she had to resort to smacking the spirit’s sigil with the flat of the blade till the babbling and spiders began to subside.
AMY had flitted away cheerfully, GAAP had departed in disgust, but there was little doubt t
hat they had both gone.
Finally, she unblinded Byron and taught him how to pentagram-banish the temple. And this banishment felt unusually wonderful.
“I feel bathed in inner light,” she said.
“So do I,” said Byron, clearly astonished. “And I don’t even know what that is!” Ah, he was kind of funny, this guy. “I can’t believe that ice-cold air thing really happens.” He was still shivering.
“It really does. Almost every time anyone is there. GAAP really froze me out. I can barely feel my feet.”
“Now what do we do?”
“Clean up and go home.”
“Aw.”
“That is the weirdest, scariest thing I have ever done in my life,” he said on the way to dropping her home. She searched his eyes to see if he was joking or exaggerating, or trying to humor her, but he looked sincere.
“Thank you,” she replied.
Byron looked a bit of a wreck, actually. Andromeda advised him to take a long bath when he got home and to drink a lot of water. And she warned him that he might feel a bit depressed for the next few days.
“I’m always depressed,” he said. Now, that was something new. She’d never have guessed that. “And I hate water.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “nobody hates water. But suit yourself. It’ll hurt.”
She bounded out of the car at the spot at the bottom of the hill, as she had done so many times before after seeing St. Steve. If Byron had wanted to kiss her or touch her or anything he gave no indication. He was already looking sad and distant.
“Trust me,” she said. “Water.”
Walking up the hill carrying a sword felt quite a bit better than walking up the hill not carrying a sword. And standing in the alcove being yelled at from the bedroom by the mom while carrying a sword felt absolutely, unbelievably great compared to standing in the alcove being yelled at by the mom from the bedroom with no sword. Even looking forlornly at a cell phone that displayed zero messages while holding a sword was a bit better than the same thing without one.
There really was nothing like a sword.
Magic with a partner kicked ass over solitary magic, that was for sure. Never had Andromeda felt more confident about a practical working, not even with Daisy, even though it had achieved nothing but to correct a previous idiotic error.
Her own post-ceremony bath had the dual purpose of cleansing and giving Huggy an opportunity to reappear and congratulate her through the medium of the running taps. It had been strangely silent during the ritual, and indeed throughout the whole night.
The voice of Huggy emerged from the rushing water soon enough, sounding rather cranky.
Honestly? It said. The new medium works right out of the box and has lots of potential. Good choice, maybe even better than the last one. But I can’t say I care much for your sloppy, postmodern conjuring.
“The new medium. The new medium? Byron?”
Yes, the overeager hairy little man you have somehow managed to ensnare in your web of feminine wiles. You should try scrying the aethyrs with that one sometime. He’s a sponge. AMY was all over him like catnip. Some of the Shemhamphorashers were actually jealous.
“What’s the matter with my conjuring?” It had been completely successful, and with such dramatic effects.
I hate to break it to you, said Huggy, but you’re not really up there to be everybody’s friend and dazzle everyone with your “creativity” and enthusiasm. Believe me, these guys have seen it all, and I guarantee you they’re not going to be impressed with a cutesy pseudo-Solomon act. Yes, the sword is very nice, but sword or no sword, GAAP could have easily torn you up and worn you as a glove. You’re lucky he’s so easily bored.
Andromeda meekly pointed out that the “magic sponge” they were all so excited about had seemed pretty impressed with her technique.
He would have been impressed with a paper towel. You really wish to impress him, wear heels and a miniskirt. There just isn’t any other way to do Goetia than strict traditionalism.
Huggy had more to say, but Andromeda switched off the tap and cut her off.
“Why does my Holy Guardian Angel have to be such a jerk?” she said to the wall, but she knew It had had a point, plus she was impressed with herself for figuring out how to switch It on and off.
She slept that night with the sword in one hand and Daisy’s Little One in the other. There was no encounter with the King of Sacramento, that she could recall, but she was granted, just as she was drifting into her box, another brief glimpse of the dazzling, undulating Tree of Life Universe-jewel. Each time she saw it, it was more beautiful than the last. She had no trouble whatever waking up the next morning: even sleeping was better when you were holding a sword, it turned out.
xix.
The dad was sitting in his van with the door open, talking to a couple of people, when Andromeda rounded the corner on her way back from school the following day. She realized, to her horror, when it was too late to turn around and escape, that they were two of the youngish rock-and-roll people she remembered from the Old Folks Home: Amanda and either Frederick or Sam. Why on earth? she thought as the dad was waving her over.
“This is my daughter, Andi,” he said as she approached, hood pulled as far down her face as it would go. “She’s a big fan. Big fan. Cupcake: meet Choronzon. Sam and Amanda. They’re here to pick up their rough mixes.”
Andromeda mumbled a hi, trying her best to avoid eye contact.
Amanda seemed, as usual, too out of it to notice much of anything, but Sam recognized her, she could tell that. He smiled coolly at her, and winked. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to rat on her about being underage and hanging out in bars with older men, she relaxed a bit.
“I like the Toad Bone Ritual song,” she said.
“Do you?” said Sam, nodding quietly as though he knew something she didn’t.
Creepy, creepy guy.
“I’m trying to save the books for use by my future self,” said Andromeda Klein to Byron the Precious Little Sponge. “But your future self can use them too, of course.”
They were in her room, discussing the Greek Magical Papyri and the IHOB Endangered Books Program. Andromeda was trying to paraphrase Liber K’s treatment of the papyri—it would be so much easier when she had finally written it down and could just hand it to someone anytime they needed to know something.
“So,” she said, “it was a library of magical texts buried in the Egyptian desert in ancient times by an unknown conjuror.”
“He buried a whole library all by himself?” said Byron. “What, with all the librarians inside?”
“No,” Andromeda said. “Not a library building. A library is a collection of books. A bunch of libri. I meant that he hid the papyrus scrolls, not an entire building with fluorescent lights and bathrooms. They were actually buried in clay pots, I think.”
“There you go again,” said Byron. “You and your libers. Do you want me to get out the kitten pin?” But Andromeda waved that away.
And that was, in fact, exactly how Andromeda Klein saw the IHOB’s collection of Eejymjays. Someone had built it up, and for whatever reason, Andromeda was now the only person in a position to preserve it. True magical training could take several lifetimes, and it was only prudent to lay the groundwork so the next self to come along wouldn’t have to start from scratch. She added that she wished she knew who had built up the impressive IHOB Eejymjay Collection, and why.
“You know,” said Byron, after pausing to look at her incredulously and getting out his notebook, “for such a hardcore librarian, you really do suck at knowing about looking things up on the Internets. I’ve been trying to tell you for the last twenty minutes, but you keep interrupting me. The library was donated to the city by a man named”—he checked his notes—“Ernest James Madison Jessup. The EJMJE in your catalog stands for the Ernest James Madison Jessup Estate, I would bet you any money. He was one of the people who established Clearview as a town in 1912. He wro
te two books on aliens. One of his wives was a spiritualist and faith healer who went insane and was convicted of trying to murder him. People were so much more interesting in the olden days.” Eejymjay had, Byron said, lived and stored his private collection of esoteric materials in the building that was now the central churchlike structure of the IHOB, and had willed the library to the city on the condition that it be preserved intact and remain open to the public.
Preserved intact: that was the same phrase Darren Hedge had used to refer to this arrangement.
“So how,” said Andromeda, “can they be selling the books off, then, if it has to be ‘preserved intact’?”
“Maybe,” said Byron, “it’s like you were saying just now, about libraries not being buildings. Maybe they think it means the building has to be preserved and not necessarily the books.”
“Yeah, maybe they’re pretending to think that.” The “Friends” knew what they were doing, of that Andromeda had no doubt. It was tricky. Nefarious, even. “But that’s not fair. They can’t do it then, technically.”
“They’re doing it, though. And what are you gonna do?” said Byron. “Storm City Hall? Bust in on the city council session waving a charter and say ‘Stop the meeting’?” And then the judge will say ‘It’s highly irregular, miss, but you’ve got five minutes’?”
“Yes,” said Andromeda. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” But she remained in position slouched against the bed. She was not about to go busting in on anything. Saving books from the “Friends” by using their own rules and procedures against them was more her style. And at least they had managed to save some of the books that way.
“Anyhow,” said Byron, shrugging and turning back to his notes. Ernest J. M. Jessup had, he continued, died in 1977 at the age of ninety-eight, buried by an earthquake mudslide. “You can see the spot in Hillmont. It’s right next to the junior high. They built a Dairy Queen on it.”
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