Galiana entered, looking vaguely medieval in a long purple coat that nearly hid her jeans. Her hair brushed her shoulders and she wore no make-up, but her eyes glittered in the morning light.
“I’d’ve called,” she said, “but I figured you’d want this done right away.”
“I do,” he said.
The clothing suited her. She looked striking. He wondered how he had ever thought her plain.
She glanced at the woods. Of course, the cats were hiding there. They never gave the floor show when guests were on the property.
“I need you to do a few things before I start,” she said. “You have to shut off the electronics in the house, just in case, and—”
“In case of what?” he asked.
She still hadn’t looked at him. “In case my equipment causes a power surge.”
He didn’t see any equipment. “What are you going to do?”
She folded her hands, and turned toward him, serene and glittery at the same time. “I’m going to convince them to give up this part of their home.”
That woo-woo language irritated him. Odd that the language would bother him here, in Oregon, but not anywhere else in the world. In other places, he would see it as part of the local custom. Here, he found it pretentious.
“How do you plan to do that?” he asked.
“Essentially, I’ll use a field that will convince them to go elsewhere.”
“An electrical field?” he asked. “Like those collars that keep dogs in their yard?”
She shrugged, but it was a European shrug, which made it a voiceless version of I suppose so.
“I thought those things were inhumane.” He’d gotten that from his middle-of-the-night reading, astonished that there were so many animal issues that people in this country got excited about.
“You were willing to kill them,” she said.
And he was. He still was. That screeching the night before still echoed in his ears.
“I just thought you weren’t the kind of person who would harm animals.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her right ear.
“You have no idea what kind of person I am.”
That was true too.
“You said a couple of things,” he said, changing the subject. “What else?”
“After you unplug your valuable electronics, you either have to shut down the house—all the curtains, all the blinds, and stay inside—or leave for a few hours. I recommend leaving. It’s safer.”
“Safer? How much power do you plan to use?” He felt a reluctance to let her even start. He had nothing of real value in the house, but the house itself mattered to him—which surprised him. He hadn’t thought anything mattered.
“Your house will be safe,” she said, as if she had heard his thoughts.
“But I won’t?” he asked.
“You are flesh and blood, just like the cats.”
“So are you,” he said, feeling a little odd now.
“Can’t you get hurt?”
She shook her head.
She seemed very clinical in her approach to this.
He would have thought someone who empathized that much with animals would be passionate about her work. But he recognized the detachment. It was the removal of the personality—the emotions—so that the job could get done.
How many times had he done that?
Only for his entire career.
“Can I watch?” he asked. “If I promise to stay outside your power range?”
“No,” she said. “I would actually prefer it if you left.”
But there was no chance he would leave. None at all.
* * *
She came into the house with him to make sure he shut it down properly. The attic and the third floor had no curtains, so she barred him from that level, actually locking the servants’ door that his grandmother had once claimed she was going to remove.
On the second floor, he had installed blinds in most rooms and shades in his bedroom, not that they had done any good. She helped him secure all of those.
The first floor had only curtains, and as they swooshed closed, clouds of dust rose.
She told him to wait on the second floor and not peek out, no matter what he heard.
“What if you get hurt?” he asked.
“I won’t,” she said, and seemed to believe it. He was beginning to have his doubts.
She left him in the second floor hallway, where there were no windows at all. She recommended that he bring a flashlight and a book—“always better to leave the electric lights off while I do this,” she said— and he pretended to take her advice.
When he heard the front door close, he went into his emergency travel bag, which old habit forced him to keep under the bed, and removed a cell phone, a notepad and pen (because he felt naked without them), and his binoculars.
He snuck downstairs into the library, pulled a chair into the hall, and used the binoculars to find a gap in the thick red curtains.
Then he camped in the chair, and waited.
* * *
At first, not much happened. Galiana moved her car, then came back to the courtyard. There she stood for the longest time, hands raised, as the cats gathered.
She seemed to glow—some kind of trick of the midmorning light reflecting off the Italian tile—and he thought she had never looked more beautiful.
The cats swirled around her. Even though the binoculars gave him a clear view of the courtyard, he couldn’t distinguish individual cats. They seemed to blend and blur, and they seemed content—although he wasn’t sure how he knew that.
Finally, she looked down, as if she were surprised at the number of cats around her, then glanced at the woods. More cats loped forward, leaping over the stone wall and landing near their compatriots.
More cats than he could have imagined. She was right: generations of them, at 10 to 20 kittens per year per female. Most didn’t live long—ferals had an average lifespan of three years—but that was enough to create twenty more cats per to fill the empty acres around his house.
A tiny black and white got stuck on the wall, then tumbled into the mess. Several females carried kittens in their mouths, other kittens following like ducklings.
This alone was worth the price of admission, and he wished he’d taken out his video camera, but he had heeded her advice about electronics and had decided to keep it safe.
She was nodding at the stragglers, as if approving of their arrival. Then she raised her arms again—
—and the entire world exploded.
* * *
Minutes, or maybe hours, later, he pulled himself off the unpolished wooden floor. He was flashing on other places, other explosions that had knocked him back. In Haifa, where shrapnel embedded in his arms, somehow missing arteries. In Mosul, where a lucky position on a deserted road had kept him from serious injury when the men driving the truck ahead had more or less evaporated in a roadside bomb.
Dozens of other memories flooded him, mixing and mingling into one large mess of an aftermath, filled with dust clouds and a pale pink haze of blood. He brushed himself off, then realized he wasn’t covered with dirt. Nothing had changed, except that he had fallen off his chair.
There had been light and a flash-bang—and then the world had gone white.
He picked up the binoculars. They were fine. But his hands were shaking. His entire body was shaking.
He made himself go toward the window, terrified for Galiana—what had she done? What kind of mistake had she made?—and pulled back the curtain, feeling the dust cloud around him as if it were sand disturbed by a landmine.
She stood in the middle of an empty courtyard, smiling.
The cats were gone. There was only Italian tile, broken pottery and the remains of the fountains his grandmother had so loved.
No cat carcasses, no blood. Nothing to show there had been an explosion anywhere in the vicinity.
Had he imagined it? The damn psychiatrists had said that post-tr
aumatic stress did that sometimes— took a trigger and made it replay an event.
But this had replayed hundreds of events for him all at once, and he hadn’t imagined it. He couldn’t imagine it, not like that. His flashbacks—which he’d been unwilling to call flashbacks until now—were just ghosts standing beside him: Stuben’s cameraman as his leg flew off; that child in Beslan who sobbed uncontrollably because he hadn’t been in the school the day of the terrorist attack; the fleeing and burning passengers in King’s Cross that horrible summer he decided to take a vacation in London.
All of them haunted him, all of them came back by sound not by sight, and the light came first here, not the sound. By the time of the flash-bang, he thought the world had already ended.
He pulled open the front door before he even knew he was running, heading hell-bent for the courtyard and Galiana. Running toward danger, as he had every moment of his benighted life.
Only this time, he wasn’t carrying a camera or a microphone or even his notebook. (Had he dropped it? He didn’t remember.) He was running toward her, determined to save her, the first heroic act in his decidedly unheroic life.
And she watched him come, that smile fading from her face. The sunlight was behind her now—it was twilight? He thought it was noon—and it haloed her.
He was asking her if she was all right before he even skidded to a stop beside her, but he knew the answer.
She was fine. She was clearly fine. She had done this before, and it didn’t seem to bother her.
Whatever “this” was. Whatever “it” was.
“You watched,” she said, and that took the heroic impulse out of him.
“For godsake,” he said, “that’s what I do. I watch. I report what I see. Did you think I wouldn’t?”
She shrugged, an American movement this time: I really don’t care.
He felt silly, like a schoolboy being reprimanded.
“What happened to the cats?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You’d be surprised what I can believe,” he said and it was true: he could believe that people who lived side by side would murder each other over a brown patch of land; he could believe that men could slaughter babies because they might be raised in a particularly hated religion; he believed that humans had an infinite capacity for evil and no one seemed shocked by this, no one except maybe him.
“I sent them to another dimension,” she said.
Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that. “What?”
“See? I told you that you wouldn’t believe.”
“Believe?” he said. “I’m not sure I even understand.”
“The world,” she said. “It splits into various realities at each moment of decision. Or each important ones. Parallel universes, your scientists call it.”
Her accent was even more pronounced now, and even more unrecognizable. Your scientists. Why weren’t they hers?
“In several of those universes, you never reclaimed this house. I sent the cats to one of those.”
“How?”
“The only way,” she said, clearly amused. “Magic.”
“Magic,” he repeated.
She shrugged—European again. Believe what you want or don’t.
“How can you do magic?” he asked.
She looked annoyed. “How can you write?”
“It’s not magic,” he said.
“Really?” she asked.
Her eyes still glittered. He finally recognized the appeal. A fanaticism, one that always drew him. He liked interviewing the believers, the ones who carried out the missions, no matter what side they were on.
They seemed so certain. He was never certain, not even now.
He was still shaking, though, and his heart still raced.
He wondered if the psychiatrists would think him cured because he had tried to save someone. He doubted it.
The key was not to lose his composure, not to race toward the danger, but to make sensible decisions.
He doubted he’d ever be sensible.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked.
“Two hundred dollars,” she said. “This was less work than I thought.”
He wondered how much it would cost if it had been more work than she had thought. He grabbed his wallet out of his back pocket—relieved to find the wallet still there, after his fall—and handed her two hundred dollar bills.
She stared at them for a moment, then looked at the now-silent woods.
“They really weren’t harming you,” she said, and he knew she meant the cats, not the woods.
But they were harming him. They were reviving memories, interrupting his sleep, taunting him with relationships he’d never really had—even as wild and casual as the feline relationships were, they still led to families, to futures, to a world he’d long since abandoned.
He thought of the attraction he had felt toward her and wondered if he had felt it because of that fanaticism or because she was the only interesting person he’d met since he’d come home.
Maybe it was a combination of both, but whatever it was, he no longer felt it. He wanted her gone.
“Roxy thinks we’re suited,” Galiana said.
“Roxy thinks a lot of things,” he said.
Galiana’s glitter faded. Her smile became rueful and she nodded, understanding.
“It is hard to stay in one place, isn’t it?” she said softly.
He looked at the now-empty woods, and sighed.
“Actually,” he said, “I think I’ve been in the same place for more than twenty years.”
And, he realized now, that it was time to change.
To move. To be somewhere else. Which meant he had to become someone else. And wasn’t that why he was here? To become a man other than the one who watched and reported and pretended nothing affected him?
“Good luck to you then,” she said, extending her hand.
He took it, expecting some of the attraction to return.
But it didn’t.
He smiled at her. “You helped me in ways you’ll never know.”
Her eyes glittered for a moment, then she slipped her hand away. He had the sense she did know. Just as he had a hunch she had known he was sitting in that hallway, watching her. Had she sent other things away besides the cats? A part of him, maybe?
She turned her back and walked to the gate, heading to her car.
He sat in the empty courtyard, silent for the first time since he had arrived, and knew he would get used to this place. He would make it something real, something important, bring back the beauty and warmth it used to have He could do that. He was sure he could do that.
Now he understood. She hadn’t taken anything from him. She had given him something—she had given him a place away from the wars.
And, for the first time, it felt as if he’d come home.
THE CASE OF THE ALLERGIC LEPRECHAUN
Alan L. Lickiss
“EXCUSE me, can you find me?”
Frank looked up from the case file he was reading. Rather than his cute secretary Rita, Frank saw a short pudgy man. He was maybe five feet tall, and he wore a suit that screamed for a used car lot.
Frank couldn’t help but stare. The criss-crossing lines of brown, orange, and yellow in his jacket actually brought the bright yellow shirt, dark green pants, and matching green tie together into a hypnotic, headache inducing ensemble. Frank wondered how many deals had been signed just to make that suit go away.
“Excuse me?”
The man walked into Frank’s office. “You are a detective, right, not the janitor?” said the man.
Frank took a deep breath and suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. He leaned his elbows on his desk and gave the man his best Jim Rockford no-nonsense look.
It was that look and corresponding attitude that made Frank become a detective.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said. “My secretary is out getting our lunch and I didn’t have any appointments scheduled
for today. What did you want me to find?”
The man sat in the chair across from Frank. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a bright yellow handkerchief. Frank winced at the sound like an air horn of an eighteen wheeler.
“Sorry, I think I’m allergic to something,” said the man as he put the handkerchief away.
A sudden loud sneeze startled Frank and made him drop his pen. He looked for it on his desk but couldn’t see it. He assumed it had rolled off the edge and grabbed another.
“I want you to find me,” said the man.
Frank wondered if this was some new reality television show. The man looked sincere, and a little forlorn to Frank.
“You realize you run the risk of having to pay my one day minimum fee for about three seconds worth of work,” said Frank.
“No, you don’t understand,” said the man. “It’s not where I am. I don’t know who I am.”
“Amnesia,” said Frank as he wrote it down. “How long have you had this condition, and have you been to see a doctor?”
“I sort of came to myself sitting on the curb outside a parking garage downtown as the sun was coming up. I was groggy, and started walking. My head cleared and I started to look for familiar things. Nothing registered. Then I saw your sign.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you drink?” asked Frank The man tilted his head to the side, “I don’t know. But at the same time, I don’t feel opposed to it.”
Frank smiled at the response. “Is it possible you were drinking last night and are suffering from a hangover?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t think so. My head didn’t hurt, I was just groggy. Can you help me find who I am?”
“Have you been to a hospital?” Frank asked.
“No,” said the man, shaking his head, “I can’t go to a hospital or to the police.”
Frank added a note to his pad. “Why not?”
“I can’t explain exactly why, but I think it’s because I’m a leprechaun,” said the man.
Frank put his pen down. This was either a joke, or the man across from him was disturbed. Perhaps it was his small stature that gave the man some sort of complex. Either way, Frank didn’t want to waste any more time. He’d ease the guy out the door, then alert the police.
Something Magic This Way Comes Page 15