by A. D. Folmer
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“Excellent. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get some cleaning equipment.” She turned and walked back into the forest. My school of goldfish came back to me, swimming around my head as if they hadn’t just abandoned me.
“Well,” Cecilia said, “Fiona has a harder job than I thought.”
“Was that lightning?”
“Yes. She’s a wizard, remember? Wizards can do that.”
“Yes,” I agreed. Let’s get in our cars and get out of here before anything else crawls out of the woods.”
“Right. And I’ll still meet you at the hotel?” I looked into the car. Cassandra was collapsed in her seat, seeming oblivious to everything that had just happened.
“Yes please,” I said. “If that didn’t wake her up I’ll need help getting her up the steps.”
Cecilia followed me back to the hotel without further trouble and helped me get Cassandra to her room.
“Is this a kidnapping in progress?” Agent Steiner asked from behind us.
“No, just someone working too hard,” Cecilia said. “What’s it to you?”
“I am an FBI agent,” he reminded her.
“And have you solved any crimes lately?” I asked.
“I’m getting there,” he said. “Is that Dr. Cassidy?”
“Yes, but she’s not in any shape to answer questions,” I told him. Her head rolled against my shoulder. “She’s pretty out of it.”
“I see,” he said. “When she’s awake, would you let her know I need to interview her?” He moved closer.
“Sure,” I said.
Agent Steiner leaned over to check out her eyes.
“Do you really think she’s just tired?” He asked.
“We know she hasn’t been sleeping,” I said.
“And she was talking right up until she collapsed,” Cecilia added. “She woke up a little when Jaspar shook her, so it wasn’t a seizure.” Agent Steiner continued staring at her face.
“Maybe we should take her to a doctor just to be safe,” I said. Now that someone else was involved leaving her alone didn’t seem like such a good idea.
“Oh, I can stay with her,” Cecilia said. “I have my new magazines to read. You go have dinner.”
“If you’re sure. . .”
“I’m positive,” Cecilia said. I helped her put Cassandra in bed and left. Agent Steiner was still standing outside the room.
“Have you known Miss Bishop long?” he asked me.
“For almost three weeks now,” I said. “Why?”
“You seem awfully close.”
“She’s easy to get along with.”
“Hmm.” He stared at the fish circling my head.
“One of these was staring in my window last night.” I looked up at them.
“It’s better than cockroaches,” I said. “At least goldfish are nice to look at.”
“Sure, but flying goldfish are different. What are they up to?”
“Not much, I would imagine. They’re not really there. See?” I took a swipe at Barry, and after an instant of resistance my hand passed through. “Besides, they’re goldfish. It’s not like they can bite.”
“I suppose not. The first hotel we tried to stay in had red food coloring in their drinking water.”
“You went in? I didn’t have the guts after looking at their signs.”
“Lucky thinks the fish are the greatest thing ever.”
“The greatest? He’s easily impressed.”
“He’s been trying to figure out how they’re doing it since he saw them.”
“Oh, you think it’s a gimmick, like at the other hotels?” Agent Steiner raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t?” I looked at my school of fish roaming the halls and sighed.
“I’ve decided not to think about it as long as I’m still getting a good night’s sleep.”
“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve slept better in my life. It’s odd. The mattresses don’t seem different from standard hotel mattresses.”
***
I’d been getting some grief over the phantom goldfish, but not nearly as much as Fiona gave me the next day.
“How long have you been walking the earth?” she asked. “Yet here you are, being bested by a bunch of dead fish.”
“They’re trickier than they look,” I protested. It seemed we were going to ignore the events of last night. She hadn’t brought it up, and I couldn’t think of a graceful way of mentioning it. She was rolling out pastry while I ‘helped’ by eating the fragments of pie crust she deemed not good enough. She was making blueberry, blackberry, and pumpkin pies. I’d wondered how she was planning to make food for hundreds of people in one day, but her oven turned out to be wider on the inside than the outside. Every time she opened it I had to look away, or my eyes started to hurt.
“They’re fish,” she said, “you should be able to trick them with your eyes closed.”
“Gregory’s a squid, and he can get the best of you.” Gregory seemed to be in heaven. Every time Fiona looked away he ate another berry. He was already almost as fat as he’d been after eating the chupacabra.
“Squid are highly intelligent for their size,” she said, “goldfish are not.”
“So, how’s the investigation going?” I asked her.
“As well as it could be,” she said. “After I deliver all this I’m going to go to the cave myself and see what I can do about the portal.”
“How are you going to get down that hill?” I asked.
“I’m not going alone,” she said. “Zebulon and Mordecai are coming with me.”
“Not Earl?” They seemed close, and he was a good person to have around if things got violent. Which seemed likely if she was going to head down that hill. If the cultists figured out what was going on it would be a piece of cake for them to set up an ambush for anyone leaving the tunnel.
“Zebulon insisted on coming and I think those federal agents would notice if both men who recently shot somebody disappeared at the same time.”
“Is there going to be trouble over that?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Fiona said. “They both have witnesses swearing that it was self-defense.”
“What about the man Earl shot in the swamp?” I asked. “I was the only other person there, and I haven’t given a statement.”
“They don’t know about that one,” Fiona said. “After he saw what was in that book, the sheriff made Mr. Smith disappear.”
“Do I want to know?”
“You definitely don’t want to be in the hands of anyone who owns that type of thing, let alone carries it around with them.” She started putting more pies in the oven. “It’s full of nasty stuff for the sake of being nasty.”
“Who has it now?”
“I cut out the text and burned it,” she said. “The cover is going to the Arkham Society of Cultural Anachronism.”
“The what?”
“They do a different kind of historical reenactment. They can fill it with blank pages and use it in their games.”
It seemed like as good a plan as any, but I had to ask,
“Didn’t you think of donating the whole thing to a library or a museum?” She gave me a scathing look.
“So some other sicko can learn how to make origami cranes out of living human skin? This is the twenty-first century Jaspar. We don’t need to save trash just because it was written on high-quality paper. It can go in the garbage where it belongs. Or in the case of that book, in seven separate bodies of water, each blessed by seven holy men from different religions.”
“When you destroy a book you really destroy a book.”
“I like to think I can learn a lesson occasionally. If I’d been as thorough with the psychic cheese wasps, we both could have avoided a great deal of aggravation.”
“That’s true.”
“Are you going to the reenactment?” she asked with deliberate casualness.
“Since I’m here I thought I might as w
ell see what the fuss is about.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Why are you going down to the cave right after the reenactment?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to wait a day and get an early start?”
“It will be safest immediately after the reenactment.”
“We didn’t worry about timing the last time,” I said. “Should we have?” Fiona seemed to search for the right words to say.
“Whatever is in Bishop’s Corner follows cycles. A few weeks ago it didn’t matter if you went down there and had a picnic. Right now, it would be very dangerous even if there weren’t cultists to worry about.”
And yet multiple people had told me that no one knew what was down there. It was so hard to tell when the people in this place were acting on secret information when they were being superstitious, and when they were just being odd.
“By the way,” she said as she started rolling out more pie crusts,” I heard about the conversation between you and the sheriff the other day.”
“The one where he told me to keep quiet if I knew what was good for me?”
“That’s the one,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you.”
“Why not,” I asked somewhat sharply. I’d been worrying about it every time I passed the agents in the hotel lobby. It didn’t help that Agent Starr liked making small talk.
“Mordecai told them everything when he was questioned,” she said. “And by everything I mean he told them that our town is full of witches and cultists, that the hotel is haunted, and that the woods are crawling with monsters. From what I heard they didn’t take it well. As a Whateley and the mayor, there’s no way Sheriff Warren can bury him out in the woods, and you couldn’t possibly do more damage than he did.”
I was stunned. Mordecai hadn’t struck me as naïve or stupid enough to do something like that.
“How’d the sheriff take it?” I asked. Fiona sighed.
“I said there’s no way, but I’m afraid my cousin came very close to earning himself a shallow grave. I expect things to be tense tomorrow. Not nearly as tense as they would have been if my boyfriend had killed you to keep you from talking though.”
I felt very cold. It was one thing to suspect people had been thinking about killing me, another to know.
“You’re talking about Earl right?”
She nodded.
“That was before Mordecai marched into the police station yesterday afternoon and gave his interview.”
“He did that yesterday?” I asked. Agent Steiner hadn’t shown any sign of having a truckload of crazy dumped on him earlier in the day. Come to think of it, Mordecai didn’t seem different either. “He seemed his usual self at dinner.”
“Mordecai’s always been the quiet, determined one,” Fiona said. “If you want to know why he did it you’ll have to ask him yourself. He refused to explain himself to me.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” I said.
I spent the rest of the day surrounded by the smell of baking, talking about nothing in particular and feeding Gregory blackberries whenever Fiona’s back was turned. Earl stopped by for a while and told stories about his alleged antics as a train robber. I didn’t bring up the plan to kill me. It seemed petty, and he was an excellent storyteller. I left looking forward to the reenactment.
Chapter 18: So, fire is a major theme?
The next morning I woke up early. The hotel lobby was crowded with people.
“When does this thing start?” I asked Jeremiah.
“Eleven,” he said. “We’re having unusually good weather for it, too.”
He might say that, but I was glad I’d bought a pirate coat and a turtleneck. I could see my breath and I wasn’t even outside yet. I found the FBI agents in the dining room. Agent Starr was cradling his head in his hands.
“It’s stalking me,” he was saying. “And what’s going on today?”
“The Battle of Jericho,” I told him.
“There it is!” He said, pointing at me. “It was there again last night, too!” I realized he was pointing at Barry. “Your fishy minions are stalking me!”
“They’re not my minions,” I said. “They won’t do a thing I want them to.” I got extra coffee and made myself some toast. Mrs. Whateley wasn’t making breakfast this morning. She was too busy with the reenactment.
The agents left eventually, Agent Starr staring at the fish as he went. He seemed afraid to turn his back on them. Perhaps he’d taken some of Mordecai’s interview to heart. After breakfast, I moved down to the library. I wasn’t concerned with a good seat nearly as much as I was with not freezing.
Thanks to it housing the central heating unit the basement was warmer than the lobby. The library wasn’t much to write home about. There was a selection of books about Washington State and a bunch of thrillers and romance novels. There was an encyclopedia set, and the dictionary I’d been looking for earlier. I opened it and looked up interstitial. The first definition was the usual non-definition; pertaining to, situated in, or forming interstices. Talk about unhelpful. The next definition was something about cell membranes. The most likely definition seemed to be the last one; an imperfection in a crystal caused by an extra atom. I didn’t know what significance that had when it came to cryptogeology, and I still didn’t know what cryptogeology was. Maybe they’d picked it because it sounded impressive.
The dictionary had taken me as far as I cared to go, so I turned my attention to the local interest books. The ones covering geography concentrated on the active volcanoes in the area. The repeated references to the Cascades as a volcanic mountain range reinforced my feeling that a limestone cavern was not only unusual, but unlikely. Perhaps interdimensional portals could change the composition of rock? If so, alchemy might be worth looking into as well.
Steve found me while I was still reading. It was the first time I’d seen him in a week. He looked tired.
“I see you’ve made progress on the house,” he said after we’d greeted each other. “I stopped by on my way here.” Fiona must have done a bang-up job cleaning up after herself if that was all he had to say.
“It might even be clean in a decade or so,” I told him. “What have you been up to?”
“Jesticorps is going to undergo some organizational changes,” he said, “and they’ll have to be complete before the company can go forward with the mall.” It was news to me that it was back on. I said as much.
“It’s the view of the people in charge that the problems we’ve encountered are not insurmountable,” he said, frowning. “They’ve gone for an angle I think you’ll appreciate; since chupacabras are not native to the United States they should be viewed as an invasive species. In other words, not only can we kill them in order to build the mall, we’re obligated to.”
“Wow,” I said. “Do you work for an enormous set of brass balls?” Steve laughed.
“It seems that way, doesn’t it?” He said. “I’m sure there will be several more rounds of investigations and arguments. It shouldn’t be that hard to find a biologist who’s willing to officially name our hostile natives chupacabras in exchange for a pile of money.” I shook my head at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
“And the fact that chupacabras don’t really exist isn’t going to interfere with this plan in any way?”
“I don’t know where the logic is,” he said, “so don’t ask me. I’m the one who said we should give up on the location because of the monsters in the first place, remember.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Did you find out who was behind the cover-ups?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “The entire legal team was embroiled in a cult. None of them are wizards themselves. Sadly for the value of our stock, they were more than open to taking suggestions from one.”
“Were they open to a suggestion from you that they cut it out?”
“Of course not, but I believe I can get them to see the light.” He took a seat next to me. “I�
��ve taken care of all the cultists I could identify. There’s not much I can do about the office politics, so for now I’m going to relax and watch the wrath of God descend on Jericho.” I decided to bring up something I’d been wondering about for a while.
“You’ve been so caught up in the mall, have you thought about the portal at all? I heard it might be something you can use.” He smiled and ruffled my hair.
“Nope. How could I travel the world if I was tied to a fixed power source? You can’t just drain the power into a bucket and carry it with you. Nor can you hook yourself up to multiple sources. If you could, every nation on Earth would be ruled by a wizard masquerading as a God Emperor. Once you drain energy away from a source, your life force is tied to that power source and won’t come untied without a great deal of tedious work on your part. The tying also ties you to the location, which is probably the real reason why Fiona rarely leaves her house. It is, literally, draining. My power source isn’t as strong as hers, or the portal under the mall, but I can carry it around with me like Iron Man carries around the battery for his robot suit.” I stared at him.
“That is the dorkiest thing I have ever heard you say.”
He laughed.
“Anyway, it’s fine to say something is powerful, but that power appears to be summoning chupacabras. Not terribly useful to a land developer. What about you? You could do something with all the ghosts at the site.”
“What?” I asked. “Sure my ghost animal army would be frightening until someone realized it was impotent. Then I’d be locked up to rot somewhere the ghosts wouldn’t bother anyone.”
“It seems like necromancy should be more useful,” he said. “By the way, why are you surrounded by dead goldfish?” I looked at my watch.
“Oh look, the reenactment will start soon. We’d better go get seats.” Steve chuckled and let it go.
***
As far as I could tell the entire town came to the reenactment. I couldn’t see the field of battle from where I was sitting. It didn’t matter; the wall towered over the crowd. Plywood or not, I was impressed by how big it was. It stretched all the way across the marsh and curved slightly to give the illusion that it was surrounding a city. Torches guttered along the top. They must have been gas powered or electric because real torches could never have stood up to the wind that was sweeping across the field. There were even guards. I knew from watching it be assembled that most of the guards were dummies, but it was an impressive effect. There were two sturdier platforms behind the wall where actors could stand, and a raised stage in front of our seats where the rest of the acting part of the event took place.