by Harvey Click
“You can see I’m busy—no?”
“If you want to eat a rat for dinner that’s fine with me,” Burne said. “Or maybe you two just plan to nibble on each other.”
He tried to sneer, but his upper lip twitched. The fact that Radcliff was nice to look at sharpened his jealousy. Broad shoulders, thick black hair, rugged face, but there was something brutal in the eyes that said watch your step. If the old man wanted Radcliff as a lover, he’d better make sure the feeling was mutual.
Grimes went to the foyer and deactivated the iron studs in the front door. For some reason he followed Burne out onto the porch and stood there sniffing the chilly air as if he could smell the Hermesium amulet in the weeds. He glanced at the garage and smiled, front incisor flashing like a silver bullet with Burne’s name on it.
“Liver,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I’m in the mood for liver tonight,” the Great Adept said. “Liver and onions.”
“You and your buddy can eat gall bladder and pig pussy for all I care, I’m buying myself a porterhouse,” Burne said. He tried to sound like his usual bitchy self, but his voice shook.
“And when you get back, I want you to fill that hole you dug in the front yard,” Grimes said. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”
“Whatever you say, boss man.”
Burne hurried to the garage on jerky legs. Dig a grave one day, fill it in the next, whatever you say, boss man, because with any luck I’ll be shoveling the dirt over your face pretty soon and won’t that be nice? He opened the garage and fired up the Mercedes. It always took forever to start and then it chugged like a John Deere tractor for the first five minutes, worn out and ready for the scrap yard just like the old fuck.
He got out while it chugged and peered out the side door of the garage at the weeds. The amulet hung on a thistle just a few feet away, but maybe Grimes was watching, old bastard saw everything even in his sleep. Burne stuck his trembling leg out the door and hooked the necklace with the toe of his shoe. Either the master saw that or he didn’t, either way get the frigging hell out of here fast.
He gave the chugging junker some pedal. First it didn’t want to move, then it leaped backwards and almost scraped the side of Radcliff’s shiny new Explorer. While he pulled out of the driveway, Burne thought about how nice it would be to scrape off one side of Radcliff’s face and leave the other side intact to gaze at the bloody mess in the mirror.
As soon as he was on the road, he put the Hermesium amulet around his neck and felt freer than he had felt for three long years, freer and more frightened. He was pretty sure the metal interfered with the old man’s telehypnopathy, but nothing was certain when you were dealing with Grimes, bastard could be spying with his listening shells right now. Burne turned the radio up loud and banged the steering wheel to the heavy metal beat, as if a wall of noise could hide him.
His fear felt louder than the radio by the time he got to town. He kept telling himself he had no choice. For one thing, Grimes wasn’t a member of a guild. If you operated as an independent you’d better be damn swift, and Grimes’ swift days were over. Internet rumors said the Lost Society had just established a headquarters in Cincinnati, and that could mean only one thing. They were planning to bump the old fuck, and Burne didn’t want to be there cleaning his toilet when it happened.
Rumors said you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the Lost Society. It was the old one, the one founded long before the Unseen Guild or the Vril Society or the Thule Group or the Templars or even the real Rosicrucians, not the phonies who advertised in astrology magazines. Rumors said it had ruled heads of state and the rebels who had made them roll ever since the days of Nero. Today it ruled the cocaine cartel, the heroin syndicates, the pot pipelines, and the politicians who made up drug laws to make drugs expensive, a huge iron hand with fingers reaching around the planet from the FARC cocaine commies of Colombia to the Taliban opium warlords of Afghanistan. No one knew what the members called themselves, if they called themselves anything, but their street name was the Lost Ones. At least that’s what rumors said, and rumors were all any outsider knew about the Lost Society.
Burne didn’t know this part of town well and couldn’t find the street where the art gallery was supposed to be. He didn’t have time to get lost. Grimes might be preoccupied with Radcliff, but the old fuck wasn’t senile yet. Every time you thought you had one over on him, you found out different. He was about to give up and head to the grocery store when he saw the sign.
New Society Gallery.
It looked open. Lost Ones probably didn’t close up shop for church on Sunday. Burne parked and hurried in. The place was so new he could still smell the paint. Not big, just one long well-lit room with paintings on the walls and three people clustered around a desk at the far end. The tall woman in the black dress seemed to be the proprietress, and she seemed to be trying to get the straight rich couple to reach for their money. She glanced at Burne just long enough to see that his money wasn’t as good as theirs.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected, maybe a huge dark place like an old church, maybe three wise old magi with robes and wands, maybe just one serious-looking man in a serious-looking room, but certainly nothing like this. The proprietress obviously didn’t belong to the Lost Society. She was too common, too snotty, too . . . female.
Burne looked at a little sculpture, a crucifix stuffed in a condom filled with white goo. A name tag called it “The Second Coming.” He looked at a row of black and white photographs of a skinny woman. She was armed with a battle-ax and a spiked mace and was naked except for some sort of steel-mesh G-string. He started to read a long framed essay on the wall below the pictures, crap about how women needed weapons and steel chastity belts to protect themselves from the monsters called men.
He kept trying to get the proprietress’s attention, and she kept ignoring him. She was tall and lanky with short brown hair, a pointy chin, thin lips, and nasty green cat-eyes that watched him without ever really looking at him, the kind of face that made Burne glad he was gay. Except for her black dress and dinky little nubs she could be a boy, but even as a boy she wouldn’t look good.
By now he should be done at the grocery store and heading back. He yanked his earring impatiently and stared at the photographs again. The chastity-belted model looked somehow familiar. Yeah, sure, she was the harpy with the green eyes. Anyone that ugly ought to keep her clothes on.
Burne got an idea. Maybe she was wearing her steel crotch protector right now beneath that Puritanical black dress. Maybe it was time to give her a little taste of what he could do to bitches who ignored him. He touched one of the photographs with the ring on his left hand and focused his energy the way Grimes had taught him and made a blue spark dance against the glass.
But the old fuck had taught him wrong. The spark was supposed to give her steel panties a nice hot jingle to make her squeal, but instead it set the photograph on fire. Burne watched smoke leak out of the frame while the picture blistered beneath the glass. Time to split.
“I believe you intend to buy that,” someone said.
He turned and saw the harpy’s green eyes gleaming like jack-o’-lantern slits a foot from his face. Strange, the straight rich couple was gone. They must have sneaked out the rear exit.
“I’m not buying, I’m selling,” Burne said. “Tell your boss I can sell him Michael Grimes if the price is right.”
She lifted the smoldering photograph from the wall and said, “Three hundred dollars. Want it gift wrapped?”
He sneered and said, “Don’t bother with the gift wrap, but I’ll give you three hundred dollars plus tax if you’ll shove that ugly picture up your ass. Then go tell your boss if he wants Grimes I can help him from the inside. Think you can remember all that?”
Her eyes narrowed to nasty green slashes, and her lips did something unpleasant. Maybe she was smiling.
“I hurt people I don’t like,” she said.
“I don’t
waste time hurting my enemies,” he said. “I just kill them real quick. You can tell your boss that too.”
Burne got out of the gallery before she could see how badly his knees were shaking. The Mercedes didn’t want to start, and he kept pumping the peddle and cursing while the green-eyed bitch stared at him through the gallery window with a cell phone against her ear. It finally fired up and scraped a parked car as it roared onto the street. When he got a few blocks away, the full terror hit him.
He had done it. There was no turning back now.
Well, good. So much for Grimes the Great. He was ready for the grave, and the Lost Ones probably already had it dug. Burne sure wouldn’t shed any tears for him. Worst thing about the old bastard was how he knew every damn thing and had been every damn where and made you feel like a kindergarten drop-out. No, the worst thing was that superior smile. Anything was better than his know-it-all smile.
Almost anything.
He ran two red lights on the way to the grocery store. He’d been gone too long, and the master probably had his listening shells on. He grabbed a cart and raced through the aisles. Liver, of all damn things. Next it would be Geritol and gelatin with stewed prunes. At least the old fuck wasn’t going to live long enough to need adult diapers.
Maybe neither of them would.
Burne calmed down a little while he waited in the checkout line. Obviously the Internet rumors were wrong: the gallery and its snotty proprietress had nothing to do with the Lost Society. Nothing was changed. Tonight he would cook liver for the old man and play some computer games and go to sleep in his own comfy bed, the way he always did. The prospect seemed wonderfully appealing. He had made a stupid mistake, and he would never make it again.
He was almost to the car with his arms full of bags when someone kicked him from behind and sent him sprawling face-first on the asphalt. “What the hell?” he grunted as he scrambled to his feet.
Three young punks stood there all gothed out in black leather trench coats, right hands in their pockets like they might be packing heat.
“Be at the gallery 10:00 tomorrow morning,” one of them said.
“Be there or be dead,” another one said.
The third one didn’t say anything. He just kicked Burne backwards into the fallen groceries. The eggs were broken, and so was a jar of pickles.
***
Grimes was panting when they put down their foils, but no harder than Dexter. “Your muscles are quicker than mine, but your brain is slower,” he said. “It’s your mind we need to work on.”
Dexter didn’t argue. The old man had put up a better fight than any fencing instructor he’d ever faced.
“In the heat of battle you must know your foe more intimately than any lover,” Grimes said. “Fathom his heart and see his thrusts before he makes them. Loving your enemy makes it easier to kill him.”
Dexter pulled off his mask and stared at his reflection in a large silver plate on the library wall. He saw Mary walk into his office for the first time and smelled something in the soft rustle of her blue jeans that made him want her.
“My mirror seems to interest you,” Grimes said.
Dexter shook off the memory and wiped his face with a bandanna. “It’s pretty,” he said. “I suppose it does some kind of magic trick?”
“You built your whole career on magic, Dr. Radcliff. Surely you can tell me what it does.”
The rim was embellished with colored stones and four slender silver arms holding candle stubs. “It looks Victorian,” Dexter said. “It was probably used by spiritualists to make their paying customers believe they saw the faces of the dead.”
Grimes smiled and lit the four candles with a cigarette lighter. “You’re only off by a few centuries,” he said. “Now try again.”
Red, green, and blue gems embedded in the rim caught the candlelight and cast gaudy phantoms across the gleaming silver plate. Grimes was right, Dexter thought. He had built his career on magic but knew nothing about it. All he knew was that the Talking Horn had spoken to him when he turned seventeen and had spoken every year since, so he’d spent those years looking for some other talisman that worked and some reasonable way to explain the voice in the Horn, but he’d found nothing except superstition and humbug. Until now.
He glimpsed his mother’s waxen funeral face in the flitting colors and smelled the death-sweet flowers of the viewing room. Mortician’s makeup melted in the candlelight and made his mother resemble Aunt Naomi. Flames fluttered and changed Naomi’s face into Mary’s, but it was bruised and swollen.
“I give up,” he said. “What’s this thing supposed to do?”
“Nothing unless you have talent,” Grimes said.
“Then I guess I don’t have any.”
The colors gathered in a clot that bled slowly down the plate, and Dexter saw a tall pale tower pulsating like churning slime behind a shroud of fog. The image fled, and then he saw nothing but his own face and a reflection of Grimes’ silvery eyes watching intently behind his shoulder.
Grimes blew out the candles. “But you do have talent,” he said. “You have a surprising wealth of skills that you certainly didn’t learn in college.” He opened a teak box and dumped a pile of bright metal chunks on the table. “Perhaps you’ll find this more interesting. It’s called the puzzle that changes its rules.”
Dexter scarcely heard him. He was trying to remember what the image of the tower meant. For one instant a whole encyclopedia of meaning had been laid out for him to read, but now the pages were gone.
“There are 777 pieces, and each one is a unique work of art,” Grimes said as he examined a little silver spider. “They’re composed of an alloy that subtly alters the nature of the space it occupies.”
Dexter remembered a childhood dream. Mr. Grinchin stood in his laboratory in his castle on the moon. He pulled a Tarot card from the sleeve of his wizard’s robe. It was a picture of two men falling from a tower.
“This is your card,” Grinchin said as he handed it to young Dexter. “It’s a very bad card. Keep it under your pillow.”
Grimes joined another piece to the spider and added a third one that resembled a coiled snake. “A medieval alchemist devoted his entire life to crafting this puzzle,” he said. “It was a life well spent.”
His hands moved quickly and soon held a gleaming skull. He removed pieces, and the skull shrank to a ragged bird’s nest. He reached in and carefully tweezed out a small silver egg.
“The puzzle that changes its rules resembles life,” he said. “A single false step in childhood may lead you to a permanent cul-de-sac, endlessly dismantling and rebuilding to the same stumbling block. But a great many false steps may lead to success. It’s said that the alloy is sensitive to the personality of the player—it will thwart some and reward others. The rules aren’t fair, but they change.”
He plucked away pieces and added others. A small fetus grew into a tall troll. Grimes touched the head, and 777 pieces tumbled onto the table.
“There,” he said. “Solve the puzzle.” He got up and went to the door.
“Solve what?” Dexter asked. “What’s the object of the game?”
“It’s not a game,” Grimes said. “We haven’t time to waste on games. This exercise requires a state of prajna, perfect concentration. The solution to the puzzle is to understand what you’re trying to solve.” He left the library and shut the door behind him.
Dexter stared at the pieces. All day Grimes had been giving him impossible tasks, and some of them he had managed to do. Strange state of mind, sudden stabs of memory like dislocations in time, bright white bursts of intuition, long stretches of comfortable stupidity. Maybe he should try to leave now that the old man was in another room, but the puzzle was more interesting than the voider outside or all the things he needed to do back at his ransacked house. The little chunks of sculpted silver fit together easily, and reasons for staying slipped together in his head like puzzle pieces.
Reason number one: Grimes is right
, I’m not ready to kill that thing out there.
He looked through the pile and found a piece shaped like a tiny castle, but he couldn’t add it until he removed a slender silver bone.
Two: thieves and thugs waiting for me. Grimes may be right about them too.
He slipped the tiny castle into its proper place and searched serenely for the next piece.
Three: if I go home, I’ll be back to square one, no pieces fitting together, no idea where to look or what to do. If I stay here, maybe Grimes will let some clue slip.
Another silver chunk slid smoothly into place.
If you’re looking for clues, get up and look for them, he thought. He tried to find another piece that fit but couldn’t.
Four: there’s another reason I’m still here, and it’s the only reason. What is it?
He knew what it was but didn’t want to think about it. He pried himself away from the puzzle, went to a window, and opened the drape. The sun was bright, but the woods behind the house guarded its shadows. He could see nothing moving except two squirrels.
Reason number four: I want to be here. I’ve waited for this my whole life. This is where my dreams have led me. This is where I’ll learn if the universe is made of mind or blind matter.
He let the drape fall and picked up one of the things Grimes had piled on the table last night. Funny, he couldn’t remember what they were called. Obok, kobo, book, koob, okob, every name he could think of sounded absurd.
He opened the thing and stared at a page. Nothing but words and a simple drawing of a pentagram, but it looked like nothing he’d ever seen, black ink blazing from the paper like a strange new world. Five points and five interstices, star of the Magi and star of morning and evening, four limbs and a head like Adonai pinned to the vast microcosm, and the solution to the puzzle was obvious—
“Mmm, what have we here?” someone said.
Dexter turned and saw a woman watching him from the smoke screen. She looked about thirty, younger, older, her age didn’t matter. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, long black hair, olive skin, Grecian nose, a soft bratty smile that went straight to the groin. She wore nothing beneath a sheer white gown, and her nipples were dark like her eyes.