Brimstone

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  “Aside from the morning pukeathon, she’s doing great.”

  “And your gran?”

  “Good.” I anticipated his next question. “And Dad, too.”

  He smiled that crooked smile. “And Lisa?”

  “Fine, I guess. She left for Georgetown last week.”

  “Is she still …?” He faltered, maybe because of the busy coffee shop, maybe because of the baggage it brought up.

  “Studying the dark arts?” I tried to hit a droll tone, but missed the mark and landed closer to sour and dejected. “It should make her fit in well in Washington, D.C., I guess. If I wasn’t worried about her moral compass before, living that close to the Capitol would do it.”

  “I don’t know.” Justin had better aim, and he struck the perfect note of comforting humor. “Georgetown University is affiliated with the Jesuits. Maybe it will be good for her.”

  That made me smile. Not because of any renewed hope for Lisa’s ethical education, but because Justin was such a font of eccentric information.

  I left the uncomfortable subject of Lisa for a happier one. “Was the internship everything you’d hoped it would be?”

  “It was great.” His face lit with warmth for his subject. “Hearing their folktales in Gaelic, looking into the weather-beaten faces of those living so close to the land and the legends, and seeing the belief that’s woven into the tales. And the pictures we took of the haunts of the fair folk and the giants … I have enough for a whole book, let alone a thesis.”

  “That’s fantastic.” I had to grin; his enthusiasm was contagious. Justin’s graduate studies were in anthropology, specifically the folklore of magic and the occult. Or as I called it when we met, an advanced degree in “Do You Want Fries with That.” Dad said Justin was hard to classify academically, but they let him hang out with the history folks anyway.

  “After what happened this spring,” I ventured, curious, “how will you write about all this in a scholarly paper? Don’t you question everything now, wonder what’s myth and what’s real?”

  He fiddled with his cell phone on the table. “I still have to record it empirically as folklore and fairy tales. We don’t know which is which, do we?”

  I paused, a little surprised at that noncommittal answer from Justin, the true believer. And there was that ambiguous “we.” I knew he wasn’t talking about me. I had the theoretical advantage of my Spidey Sense to tell me when the boogeyman was real. “No. I guess not.”

  He rose to his feet, dusted his hands on his jeans. “Can I get you something to drink? Vanilla latte, extra shot, right?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled, feeling a melty warmth inside at the fact that he remembered.

  Our friendship had been a brief, intense proving ground, but romance-wise, he’d left before we’d gone out more than twice. We’d kissed—which was a little like saying Mount St. Helens had exploded once. But I suppose I could understand the “just friends” uncertainty of our relationship when he boarded that plane, and why we were starting over now.

  I even understood if he’d gotten too busy, too involved with his work to e-mail me the way he did at first. Three months was a long time. He was across the ocean, building his career, and …

  His phone rang. I glanced toward the counter, where Justin waited for the drinks. Clearly he couldn’t hear his ringtone over the chatter and music. I swam out of the chair and picked up the phone, intending to flag him.

  It was playing that Irish song, the one they use in every movie with a bar fight or a leprechaun. Everyone knows it’s the Irish song, and Justin’s phone was playing it and flashing the name Deirdre on the caller ID.

  A vision popped in my brain—in the space of a held breath, a series of images flickered in front of my mind’s eye like those old film reels where you see the blink between frames: A black-haired, green-eyed, creamy-complexioned woman trekking through a boggy field, sitting with Justin over a couple of pints in a pub with a smoky peat fire. The two of them, heads together in intimate conversation, him inclining to say something, her leaning forward to meet him and …

  The phone clattered to the floor, falling from my nerveless fingers. Maybe I broke it, but I couldn’t care. Head whirling, I tried to bring the room back into focus. My heart slammed against my ribs. What the hell had just happened?

  “Maggie?” Justin had returned, drinks in hand.

  “I dropped your phone.” My own voice sounded flat and cold. I stared stupidly at the phone on the floor, not about to touch it again. Something was wrong with me.

  He set down the drinks. “Are you all right? You look sick.”

  I felt sick. I was seeing things while I was awake. My freakitude had just reached a whole new level.

  “Deirdre called.” The words blurted out, the way the images had blurted into my brain. “I wasn’t spying on you.”

  “What?” He blinked in confusion, brow knit in concern. “Spying? Of course not.”

  “I just picked it up and …”

  “And what, Maggie?” Bending slightly, he searched my face, trying to trap my gaze. “What happened?”

  But I couldn’t tell him. Too many emotions had seized my brain and nailed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t make my lips form the questions that would clear everything up. Who was Deirdre? Was she why you stopped writing? All valid questions, but I couldn’t get past the part where, oh my God, I was even more of a freak than I thought.

  “I need to go.” I grabbed my keys from the table and he snatched them neatly from my shaking fingers.

  “Maggie, what the hell is wrong with you?”

  I pressed my hands to my pounding head. “I have a headache all of a sudden.”

  “Then let me drive you. You look awful.”

  “No.” My latte, all three shots of it, stood on the table. I grabbed it, took a scalding drink, gasped, but felt better. The burn, like a slap in the face, calmed my hysteria. One more deep breath and I squared my shoulders. “I’m fine.”

  “You are not fine.” His voice had a taut edge, from trying to keep it below the general hum of conversation and the music playing in the background.

  “All right. I’m not fine.” Another sip of espresso and I could lift my eyes to his and hold out a steady hand. “But I can drive. Give me my keys.”

  His gaze searched mine, and I wondered what he saw there. I had no clue to his thoughts, though his confusion and worry were clear. Finally he relented. “Will you call me when you get home so I know you made it okay?”

  “Fine.” Anything to get him to give me the keys. He hesitated a moment longer, then dropped them into my palm. I didn’t wait, but fled the coffee shop like the coward I was.

  5

  Parked in my own driveway, I called Justin and told him succinctly that I was safe at home, answering his concern. Yes, I was all right. I’d just had a long, stressful day, and my psyche was wrung out like a dishrag.

  By the time I’d driven home, the warm September wind whipping through the open Jeep and clearing my head, the panic had abated, and these didn’t even feel like lies. My ESP for Dummies book had said emotional state can affect your Sight. Of course, it talked about blocking reception, not suddenly getting an imaginary slide show, but still.

  I’d justified away my intuition for almost eighteen years. I have a talent for denial that puts even my mother to shame.

  When I went inside, the living room was dark, but there was light from both my parents’ bedroom and Dad’s study. I called a greeting, got goodnights in return, and climbed the stairs to what we jokingly call my suite. There’s a study area on one side, and French doors, which I almost never close, mark the bedroom.

  My phone rang as I was dropping my satchel by my desk; warily, I dug it out of my pocket. The caller ID flashed a number with the university’s prefix, and I flipped open the phone and tried to inject some perky into my “Hi. This is Maggie.”

  “Hi, Maggie. This is Cole Bauer.”

  “Hi, Cole.” I sat on the edge
of the desk chair. “Sorry about the phone tag.”

  “It’s all right, as long as you’re working on round two.”

  The words went in, but my spent neurons failed to process them. “What?”

  “I want a report for each round. We’ll carry it through the week, with a blacked-out photo. You don’t mind a pseudonym, do you? You need to preserve your anonymity.”

  Slowly, my brain translated. “I guess you liked the piece?”

  “The way the Greeks dominate this campus, they deserve to be skewered a bit. Plus, it’ll sell papers. Well, the Report is free, but you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.” Beyond my agreement, comment was unnecessary. With contagious excitement, Cole outlined a scheme of James Bond complexity for keeping my identity a secret.

  “So what’s my code name?” I asked, when he gave me the chance. “Can I be Secret Squirrel?”

  I’d been joking, but he answered, “Morocco Mole would be more appropriate.”

  “But too obvious.” I used the same serious tone. We agreed on the details of the rest of the week, and said good-bye.

  I hung up the phone, numb and fatigued, as if the ping-pong bounce of my emotions all day had burnt out my circuits. But I wasn’t quite done yet. As I dug in my dresser for a pair of pajamas, the cell rang again.

  I flipped it open without checking the caller ID. “Hello?”

  “Maggie?” Lisa. I must have at least one emotional circuit left, because my throat closed up at hearing her voice precisely when I needed her.

  “Hey,” I managed.

  “What’s wrong?” Her tone, always brusque, was tinged tonight with concern. “You sound weird.”

  I flung myself onto the ancient love seat in the corner of my study. “I’ve had a very weird day.”

  “Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound particularly surprised.

  “How did you know?” I asked, unable to keep the wariness from my voice.

  “I looked in my crystal ball, what do you think?”

  That was the thing with Lisa. She joked about things like taking over the world or raising an army of zombie minions to do her bidding. Things that, in retrospect of the last year, weren’t funny at all.

  “Seriously, Lisa. You didn’t do a spell or something, did you? Because you know I’m ethically opposed …”

  “Look, I didn’t call for a lecture, all right?”

  Silence, while I weighed how much I desperately wanted to talk to her versus my conviction that her dabbling in—jeez, “sorcery” sounded so melodramatic. Let’s say, my fear that her arcane studies would do nothing to obliterate the enormous blot already on her karmic account book.

  Lisa broke the silence first. “I just called to chat. I didn’t know you were upset until I heard your voice.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m an evil genius, Maggie Quinn. I can add two and two without the benefit of a magic wand.”

  I sighed and slumped deeper into the cushions. “You’re not evil, Lisa. Just … goal oriented.”

  She gave a bitter laugh, and redirected the conversation. “So what’s up?”

  “First I had a piece rejected by the city paper and my journalism professor is kind of a dick. Then the editor of the school paper liked my story, but it means I have to keep going through this Rush business, which is wearing on my nerves. And I finally saw Justin, but I think he might have an Irish girlfriend.”

  “Did you ask him if he had an Irish girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Maggie, you idiot.” She’d said that so many times over the years, I could picture the roll of her eyes, the shake of her head. “You know those books, where the only thing keeping the moronic heroine apart from the hero is the fact that they don’t talk to each other? How you always want to smack the girl?”

  I knew exactly what she meant, but I had new sympathy for those morons. “You don’t even like Justin.”

  “That’s not the point. You do.”

  “And then there’s the way I found out.” Time to turn the subject from what an idiot I was. “I had a vision.”

  “Like one of your dreams?”

  “No. Well, sort of, but different, on fast forward or something. And awake.” I explained picking up Justin’s phone, and the psychic slide show. “Images and impressions, really fast. It was weird.” And scary, but I didn’t tell her that.

  She paused, and like a lot of Lisa’s pauses, it was uninterpretable. “This is a new thing?”

  “Yeah. Maybe it was a fluke.”

  “Maybe some jealous Irish witch zapped you through the phone.”

  “Gee, I’m so glad you called to cheer me up, Lisa.”

  “Don’t mention it.” I heard a squeak, like bedsprings or a chair, the sound of settling in. “How are classes?”

  “All right so far. Mostly jaunting back and forth across campus, collecting syllabuses. Syllabi? How about you?”

  “Georgetown is pretty cool, but expensive. Good thing I didn’t blow through my savings account after I got the scholarship. I’ll need it to keep me in Diet Coke and eye of newt.”

  “Oh, really,” I said, in the same matter-of-fact tone. “Do they have one-stop occult shopping over there?”

  “No, but you wouldn’t believe what you can get on the Inter net.”

  “Don’t scare me more than I already am.” I meant it as a joke, but it fell flat, the way things do when they’re too true.

  A pause. I pictured her in a dorm room, a cramped, drab place transformed with posters and throw pillows and thrift store finds. She’d be sitting cross-legged, her chestnut hair falling around her elegant face. The only thing I couldn’t imagine was her expression. Regretful? Wistful? Stubborn?

  All three laced her voice when she finally spoke. “I wish you’d understand. Studying this stuff … it’s something I have to do.”

  “Why?” I challenged her, not for the first time. “Because it’s there, like Mount Everest? An intellectual challenge you can’t resist?”

  “It isn’t just idle curiosity.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to think you were jeopardizing your soul to satisfy a mental itch.”

  “Jeez, Mags. You make it sound like I’m sacrificing kittens or something. I’m making a scientific and theoretical study of occult folklore. It’s not any different from what Justin is doing.”

  “Justin is studying brownies and green men. You’re practicing spells and potions.”

  “Your point?” She was 100% stubborn now.

  I pressed my hand over my eyes. “It’s harnessing a power that isn’t your own and making things happen. It’s exactly what got us into so much trouble this spring.”

  “Maggie, there are things out there. Real things. Scary things.”

  “Things we shouldn’t be messing with!” I said.

  “Don’t you think it’s better to understand them? How the supernatural works and how to fight it?”

  “No.” I was adamant, but ESP for Dummies mocked me from the floor by the couch. “I think we were lucky the last time, and we should leave that stuff alone.”

  “Says the girl with the Psychic Friends Network in her head.”

  “I can’t help it.” Which seemed truer by the day. “You have a choice.”

  “No.” Her voice was taut with sadness. “No, I really don’t.”

  I wanted desperately to understand why she thought that, when this path could only be dangerous for her, when she knew what awful bloody things that kind of power could lead to.

  “We always have choices, Lisa.”

  “That’s what this boils down to, isn’t it? You don’t trust me.”

  Now it was my turn to pause, condemning her with my reluctance to answer.

  “Right.” She charged on when the silence stretched too long. “Well, you have no reason to, I guess. Except maybe that we’ve been friends since the seventh grade.”

  “I trust your intentions, Lisa, but—”

  She cut me off. “But we all k
now where those lead. I’m sure Azmael is keeping my seat warm for me.”

  “That is not funny.” I felt sick, furious at her, terrified for her, and completely freaked by her saying the demon’s name aloud. “Do not joke about that.”

  “Evil genius sorcerers never joke about Hell, Maggie.” Self-loathing clipped her words. “Later.”

  She hung up. I called her back immediately, but she didn’t answer, had turned the phone off or simply ignored it. For all I knew, she’d blown it up with her magic wand.

  Nothing had been the same between Lisa and me after that night at the prom. Though arguably, neither of us was the same person that we were going in. Facing demons will do that to you. We emerged intrinsically bound by the experience, but in a way, strangers to each other.

  We’d tried to ignore it. But then I’d dreamed about her on Midsummer Night. I’d seen her in a circle of girls I didn’t know, some kind of New Agey ceremony that seemed innocuous. I got a feeling of renewing energy, something like the smell of green spring grass or the heavy, lush scent of ripe berries. No alarm there. But from my mental perspective I could see Lisa’s face, could sense her whip-smart intellect crackling behind a carefully neutral expression. And I knew that was trouble.

  Our confrontation afterward was pretty well recapped in tonight’s argument. I told her what I thought about her playing with fire; she insisted I didn’t understand what she was trying to do. I thought I understood very well. Lisa was trying to control the uncontrollable.

  I picked up the ESP book and it fell open automatically to the pages of exercises, worn and gray on the edges, the spine creased where I’d held the book open while I practiced meditations for clarity, protection, and strength. Hokey, yes. I’d felt ridiculous sitting cross-legged and still on the floor. But I did them anyway, all summer long. Clearly, I was no stranger to the need for control.

  Eventually, I made it to my desk chair and contemplated the blank screen of my laptop. I needed to get my Rush thoughts down while they were still fresh, but my brain churned restlessly. Opening my playlist, I looked for something soothing.

  Nothing in the library appeased my frayed nerves. Bare-naked Ladies—too flippant. Kelly—too power pop. Joss—too blond. Fiona, Sheryl, Sarah—all too Lilith Fair. Where was the “you’ve pissed off all your friends and now you’re all alone” music?