by Jeff Somers
Dinner was nice, too. A lot nicer than I would have expected when Tom the Head Freak had arrived downstairs, politely inviting us to share a meal with Master Gottschalk. As the only edible things we’d found in the basement were water bugs, millipedes, and roaches, we accepted.
It was nice to be invited.
The dining room was nice. Impressive. A long, polished table set with silver and china, candelabras and flowers, light dancing around us in glittery clouds that burst as you moved your head, then re-formed. The white tablecloth gleamed, brighter white than I’d ever seen, the thread count pulsing at me, the weave so fine it danced away from your eyes, bending the light. The smell in the air made me dizzy. It was animal fat and seasoning and butter and a million other things that had me salivating, desperate.
Gottschalk was already seated when we entered. He’d changed into an old-fashioned dinner jacket, complete with bow tie, his soured white hair slicked back. He looked nice. Six of his “followers” waited behind chairs, hands clasped in front of them. They all had twitchy little smiles, like they couldn’t believe their good luck in being chosen.
The room itself was nice. Wood paneling, with oil paintings hung on the walls depicting wildflowers in bloom. The carpet was dark green and thick, swallowing my feet as I floated over to a chair. It was a nice chair. Sturdy but beautiful. With delicate hand-carved reliefs and soft red satin cushions. It was pulled out from under the table by Gottschalk’s Sucker as I approached, and slid under my ass as I sat. All very nice.
Mags was seated to my right, with Gottschalk at the head of the table to my left. Claire drifted around to the other side and sat across from me, right next to Gottschalk. We were all still wearing our grungy clothes, which made me feel stupid and self-conscious, but Claire looked clean and fresh, like she’d steamed herself in some hidden shower, her face pinked up with excitement, her hair soft and bouncy. She looked like she’d shed five years, becoming the Homecoming Queen in some bizarre off-brand high school. She was überClaire. She smiled at me. That was nice.
“Mr. Vonnegan,” Gottschalk said as his white-robed freaks fluttered around us, pouring ruby red wine into silver-rimmed glasses, fruity and tart. The room was too small, I thought, for all these people, yet somehow it didn’t feel like it, even as Gottschalk’s robed minions shoved me this way and that while they struggled around us, serving and clearing. “I am glad you have decided to join me. We should talk, you and I. I have much to teach you. And first we should each raise a glass in honor of your gasam, my student.” He picked up his glass and held it as we followed. “To Hiram Bosch: a middling student, someone we both knew.”
It was nice. I grinned like a monkey as we all raised our glasses and then drank. I met Claire’s eyes and we smiled at each other. That was nice, too. Everything was nice.
The freaks started bringing in dinner. A long stream of them, carrying large plates that they crowded onto the table in front of us. Roasts and soups, chickens and bowls of veggies. Steaming bread and gravy boats joined them, and the room filled with the maddening smell of good food. I turned to check that Mags had not climbed onto the table and thrust his maw into a gravy boat. Based on my lifetime experience with Mags, this was entirely possible.
I started talking about Hiram. It felt like the nice thing to do. Eulogize him a little. Claire, Mags, and Gottschalk smiled at me as I spoke. I told them stories about Hiram’s petty thievery. About how he would cast anti-Charms on himself, walk into department stores, strip naked, walk around, and steal new clothes by putting them on one piece at a time, as things caught his fancy. About how he would go into a restaurant and have dinner, walk out with more money than he’d had coming in, his pockets filled with buns and silverware. Everyone laughed. Claire said she wished she’d known him, which was nice.
Mags told a few stories about the beatings Hiram would give him when he was living with the old man. Keeping house in exchange for sleeping on the floor. He never cleaned properly, and always broke things, and Hiram would box his ears. We all imagined round little Hiram chasing Mags around the tiny apartment with a hairbrush and laughed, including Mags himself, hooting with delight at beatings remembered. All very nice.
Now Claire was telling us about her sister, who she’d abandoned at home with her dreaded adopted father and his string of bar pickups. Who was not her real sister but a fellow adoptee. Who was probably twelve now and defenseless against his evening invasions. We all smiled. It was all very nice. It had been two years since she’d spoken to her sister. She dreamed of her constantly and thought she should go home, save her somehow. Kidnap her or kill her adopted father. But she was afraid to. I smiled and nodded, encouraging her to talk. Talking was good. It felt nice to talk. To unload our secrets.
It was nice.
I looked at Gottschalk. Just let my gaze limp over to him. He was watching Claire as she spoke, hands flat on the table. His posture was imperious, but that wasn’t strange. Gottschalk seemed like the kind of guy who assumed the world was remade for him every morning when he opened his eyes. That people like me faded away when he left the room and were hastily re-created by imps the second before he reentered.
I looked down at my nice glass of wine. It was so dark red, the crystal so brilliant. So nice. I didn’t drink wine. I concentrated on that. Somehow it was important. I never drank wine. So it wasn’t nice. No one had asked me what I wanted. Which wasn’t nice, either.
I grabbed on to the tail of that thought. I didn’t know why. It felt rude, but I wanted to follow it, see where it led.
Gottschalk was telling Claire that her ordeal had touched his heart. That she should stay with him if she liked. He would protect her. He would care for her. Claire stared at him with glassy eyes, nodding. She looked like she might start crying.
I looked back at my wineglass. So beautiful. So red.
I blinked. Something was floating in it.
I leaned forward slowly. I could hear my own ligaments creaking, could feel the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen pushing aside as I moved. A fly. There was a dead fly in my wine.
I kept my eyes on it. Gottschalk’s words were delicious. Persuasive. Something about them was erotic and inviting. They made me want to talk, to unbutton my cuffs and roll up my sleeves, expose some flesh. He was speaking in a continuous, sinuous roll, words overlapping and flowing into each other like cursive script spoken out loud. The dead fly had been dead for some time. The wings had frayed and its body had a blurry, swollen look. Parts of it, I noticed, had broken off and were floating in the liquid. A dead fly in your wine was not nice.
I was being Charmed.
It hit me once, softly, and then a second time like a splash of cold water, and sizzled through my veins, burning away the fog. Gottschalk was a master, a master with a large supply of gas for his projects. I pictured half a dozen of them bleeding somewhere, the next room or above us. And Gottschalk, murmuring his Charm. That seemed like his general modus operandi: Charm them until their brains leaked out of their heads.
I could feel it now. The buzzing in the air like insects on your skin. The gas burning off.
A Glamour, too. A one-two punch. Make us happy, show us bullshit.
The dining room wasn’t so nice.
The floorboards were rotted, sagging with our weight, splinters flaking up, ready to be stepped on. The table had at one time been grand but was scratched and warped, the finish worn and deep gouges marring its surface. The walls were covered in cheap wallpaper that had once almost but not quite resembled pine paneling. The air smelled of mold, a sour stench. The tablecloth was plastic, the cutlery plastic. The wine was wine, I thought, but Gottschalk had gotten change from a dollar for it.
The food was . . . food. Using the most basic definition. The steaming rolls were stale crackers. The roasts and chicken were cold cuts that smelled to the left of fresh. The vegetables were from the frozen section and sat in their packaging, not even heated. We were picking at them from holes torn in the plastic.
I looked at the soup tureens and gravy boats and wished I hadn’t. The gravy was canned stuff, congealed and spooned right from the can into a bowl, spots of green mold on top. The soup was harder to identify. Green, lumpy, furry. I had a sense that Gottschalk had set the table some time ago for another group of suckers and hadn’t bothered clearing it up. After all, there were such a lot of us suckers around.
Claire smiled at me. She had a pretty smile. I thought about the scale of this Charm; people who slid all the way under it would do anything, I thought. They’d fuck you, give you money, build you a house, cut out their own kidneys. This kind of Charm was fucking frightening. And Gottschalk struck me as a man who spent each of his days laying on Charms like this. A man who Charmed people just to make them pass the salt.
Charms were delicate, though, as I knew too well. I was tired and thinned, but I had enough gas to ruin this little party. I picked up my glass as if to make a toast, mimicking Claire’s dopey smile. Then I smashed the glass on the table, plucked up a wine-stained shard, and cut my palm. It was an ugly, jagged wound that bled fast, and I spoke just three words. By the time Gottschalk had hauled his bulk to his feet, smashed his fist on the table, and shouted that I should not cast without his permission, it was done.
I felt the familiar weakness sweeping through me. And I felt Mags and Claire get hit with it, a simple shock that snapped them back to reality.
Claire dropped her wineglass, an expression of disgust crossing her face.
Mags just sagged back, disappointed, as if he had actually been contemplating a dive into one of the gravy boats.
“You,” Gottschalk thundered. His face had gone a dangerous shade of red. He pointed at me. I kept the shard of glass in my hand in case he made any attempt to cast. I didn’t know Gottschalk’s style—whether he was fast and efficient or a plodder who garnished his spells with bullshit—but I was ready to hit him with something fast and nasty. Had it ready, another three-word spell. I liked speed; my spells didn’t take much gas and didn’t do much, really, but I could fire them off one after another. Keep my enemies off-balance. Distracted.
Gottschalk mastered himself. You could see him swallowing anger, though his eyes were blazing, fixed on me. He wasn’t disobeyed often. I wanted to tell him he’d been casting on clueless shitkickers for too long. Enustari, maybe, but he was sloppy and lazy.
“Leave me,” he said sullenly. “I will have a meal sent down to you, yes? I have much work to do. Calls to make. Preparations.” He waved as he sank back into his chair. Behind me, one of the freaks began tugging at my chair, urging me up.
Gottschalk glanced up at me again. “You think I suffer arrogance, boy.”
I chose not to taunt him anymore. I looked over at Claire. She stared at me, tears running down her face. Shaking with it, her whole body quivering. I forced myself to stare back.
I thought, We are not good people—but some of us . . . some of us are fucking bastards.
17. “MAYBE I SHOULD JUST GET used to them. If I’m the only one who can see them.”
“Sure, just you . . . and everyone else who can see them.”
Claire chewed on that.
Mags was prowling the perimeter of the rooms, arms hanging at his sides like a gorilla. We shouldn’t have been surprised that Gottschalk had sealed us in with a Ward on the door, but apparently we were that stupid. I was beginning to get used to being stupid, and that was worrisome.
A Ward was just a glyph, similar to the ones painted on Claire. You drew them in blood and spoke a word or two and they locked doors, kept doors open, hid them—whatever your imagination could craft along those lines. Mags had spent an hour and a half banging his shoulder against this one to no avail. He felt trapped. He didn’t seem to like the feeling.
Two days in Gottschalk’s basement down.
Claire lay on the couch with her legs on my lap. She felt warm and solid, and I liked touching her. She was engrossed in her own breathing, staring moodily down at her chest, and I took the opportunity to study her face. I couldn’t see the glyphs without some gas in the air, but Gottschalk had seen them immediately. Hiram had told me once that sort of skill came with practice and concentration, discipline. Then he’d told me I had none of these and kicked me out of his apartment.
We had one casement window for light and ventilation, too narrow to slip through and boarded up on the outside but allowing us a sliver of view. Cars had been coming and going for hours. Expensive cars with drivers. Gottschalk conferring with his fellow enustari, I guessed, trying to figure out how to safely remove Claire from Renar’s ritual without triggering it, denying her immortality and the end of the world. I didn’t like being penned up in a shitty basement in-law suite, but I knew they couldn’t kill her without risking a completion of the ritual, so I wasn’t too worried.
Daryl hadn’t left.
We could see the rear bumper of his truck between the boards. Either he’d been Charmed into service by Gottschalk and was in the process of shaving his head and marveling over a piece of trash gassed up to sparkle only for him, or Mags and I were better with a Charm than we thought and he was out there jerking off over Claire. She had, after all, asked him to wait outside, and Charmed people did amazing things sometimes.
For example, I had swallowed a quantity of dead fly just the other day.
I watched Mags stalk from one end of the room and back again, spin and repeat. When he frowned, it brought his brow down and made him resemble a lower link on the evolutionary chain.
“Tell me about your father,” Claire said.
“Not much of a story. Not a bad guy. Drank too much. When he drank, he got this fuzzy, weird way about him, and he’d do amazing things, things he wouldn’t remember. Like kidnap me, drive a hundred miles, and pass out at a bar, me in the backseat of the truck.” I looked at her. “Why this sudden interest?”
She looked up at me. Right into my eyes. The most pants-shittingly direct gaze I’d ever seen. “I get the feeling you want to fuck me, so I’m getting to know you a little.”
I felt blood rush to my face. I looked down at her calves. “Be careful. Mags hears words like that, he gets excited.”
“I’ve been seeing that look since I was eleven,” she said, shrugging. “I take steps.”
“Tell me about your father.”
She stared back at me impassively. “He never should have touched me” was all she said, and then silence stretched out between us.
Mags stalked back into what we were generously calling a room. “I see that fat fuck, I’m going to set him on fire.”
I nodded. “You get turned into a fucking toad for your troubles, Magsie, don’t come crying to me.”
He scowled at us. “Fuck.”
He stalked back out of the room.
“I didn’t realize that puppy could get so angry,” Claire said, a thin, evil smile coming to her round pink face. “He ever . . . cast something in anger on you?”
I nodded. I was hungry, and my clothes were scratchy. Waiting for the Illuminati upstairs to decide to clear Claire’s skin and put Renar in her place was tiring work. “Sure. Little things. All Mags knows are little things.”
“But you know bigger.”
“I know bigger. I don’t cast bigger.”
“Just what you can do with your own blood.”
I nodded.
“Why not? You could do some serious damage out there in the world. Jesus, magic.”
I chewed on my cheek. “Even if they say they volunteer, they didn’t. They can’t. They volunteer, but when you . . . tap in to it, you can feel it screaming from them, torn. It’s violent. On the outside, they’re just standing there, getting woozy. On some other level—a level most people don’t have access to, you know?—on that level, it’s fucking rape, every time.”
She started toying with her shirt, plucking at it with her hands, eyes down on herself. I was mesmerized.
“How’d you end up like this? How’d you even find out this shit existed?
The whole world doesn’t know.”
I thought of the old man in the parking lot, floating. “All you have to do is see something and wonder about it. You see amazing things every day and you pay no attention, or you assume there’s a logical explanation. All it takes is one time seeing something you either can’t or don’t want to explain. You start asking questions, looking for things, and you suddenly see it everywhere.” I sighed, digging out my dwindling cigarettes and offering her one. “This shit is ancient. The world doesn’t know because we keep it a fucking secret, and because it’s unbelievable. It’s not rocket science.”
“More cars,” Mags said from the other room.
“You all run this magic shit like the Mafia,” Claire said, lighting her cigarette.
I pushed her legs off my lap and stood up, back popping. I walked into the next flimsy room and then into the bedroom, where Mags was crouched by the narrow window, squinting through the slight gap between the warped boards.
“You’re not gonna like this,” Mags said, stepping back when I tapped him on the shoulder.
I leaned down and oriented myself, lining up the gap. I could see Daryl’s truck still sitting there, rusting away. Behind it was a black Town Car, sleek and shiny. Standing in front of it were four men, three very fat, dressed well, obvious Bleeders. The third was slender, and his shoes, shined to a bright gleam, cost more than everything the Bleeders were wearing put together. He was holding a slender brown cigarette in one hand. He wore familiar black gloves.
I stepped back from the window and looked at Mags. “What the fuck,” I said slowly, a whisper.
“It’s Amir, Lem.”
I spun and gave Mags a shove, sending him stumbling back towards the door. “I know it’s fucking Amir.” My heart was thudding in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. He cowered, his face taking on the hurt expression of a small pet unexpectedly disciplined. I swallowed my terror and tried to modulate my voice. “Work on the door. Give it your shoulder, Mags.”
I crouched down again, but Amir was gone, along with his Bleeders. Behind me, I heard Mags slamming into the flimsy wooden door again, bouncing off and staggering back, like it was made of steel. Then launching himself. Each time he hit, I heard him grind out another “Fuck.”