Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  "She push any tracts at you?" She hesitated then, the frivolous tone of her banter vanishing, as though she was deciding whether to pass on bad news. "Grant? I'm not trying to match you weirdness for weirdness but you tell me whether this is stupid or not."

  "I'm not laughing?" He was still smiling, though.

  "Okay." She squared her shoulders, inhaled deeply. "I was, how you say, disrobing awhile ago, in the bedroom. You know how shooting lights make you sweat; I was pretty gummed-up and cranky. Well, when you're near that mirror in the bedroom, you can't help but watch yourself in it. I mean, you really cannot stop yourself - as though something might change if you don't keep an eye on it. And I started freaking out, right there, totally by myself, because I got the idea that it was actually the other way round: I wasn't watching the mirror, the mirror was watching me - I mean personally, as if it was a one-way peep glass with a couple of horny Feds on the flip side. Breathing evenly. Watching me strip. Now, I was taking it off for the Wolf earlier, and I don't get nervous when his eyeballs try to gobble me up at ten thousand RPMs. That kind of self-consciousness you lose when you pose. But I didn't want to stay in the bedroom. Not alone. Not even with Max there. I started shivering, can you believe that? The next step, I'm sure, would have been seeing things in the mirror."

  "Boogey-persons," Grant said.

  "God knows the bathroom mirrors weren't freaking me out." She shook her head in semi-exasperation, a sanity-asserting gesture. "I rolled out of there, toweling off, consciously averting my eyes from the mirror. Crazy, huh?"

  "I can't laugh," he said distantly, "because it gives me the creeps too - just as vaguely. Last night ... I can't really articulate the feeling. But it unnerved me."

  "Hmm. Caveat emptor?" She motioned for a recharge.

  "I didn't buy anything:" he sulked. "I propose you and I confront this dumb phenomenon together and see if our Haunted Mirror has the balls to freak out more than one person at a time. Where's Battling Maxo?"

  "Around. I'm surprised he didn't come out when -"

  She stopped then, because they could both hear the dog growling. "He was camping out by my clothes," she said. "Near the foot of the bed."

  They moved together.

  Max's ghost-white form was easily visible in the dim bedroom. His coffin-shaped head was fixed low, defensively, his black lips skinned back, his tail motionless. He stood aggressively between them and the mirror on the wall. He growled at the mirror, making a steady and thoroughly ominous basso noise of warning. His hindquarters rippled to spring and defend - or attack. In an unsettlingly targeted way, Max's reflected image was growling at them. Directly at both of them.

  When he began barking angrily at the glass it nearly launched them both up to cling from the ceiling light fixtures.

  "Max!" Grant shouted. "Max, goddammit, what is it?"

  It broke the spell. Max turned to them with an almost apologetic little whine, then jogged over for congratulations.

  "Good puppy," Grant said, rolling his eyes at canine dumbness for Jennifer's benefit. In the mirror, he watched his own reflection scratch Max's radar ears. "You show 'em what a badass you are?'

  "Big jerk," muttered Jenny. "You scared the crap out of me." She forced a brutal little smile, said "good dog" with suffocating sarcasm, and then sighed.

  "Tell you what. You sit on the john and drink while I grab a shower. If Max wants to play guard dog, fine?"

  "You mean you're not going to admit how weird that was?" Frank incredulity, now.

  "Not as weird as Mrs. Saks:" he said, trying to move through his bathroom routine nonchalantly. "And not as weird as the rather awesome Dr. Axel Byrd." He yanked a huge bath towel down from the cabinet; all others strung about the bathroom were still damp. His smile toward Jenny and Max was an honest one, but he was aware of consciously forced reassurance. "It's too bloody easy to overinterpret this stuff. You wind up like Mrs. Saks, with her talismans and stacks of old scandal sheets."

  Max padded off to case the kitchen, tail drifting lazily with his stride. Jenny glared after him, then at the large mirror. "He always agrees with you..."

  The mirror did nothing but hang on the wall and reflect their lovemaking. This time the paradox struck him.

  In bed, they should have been preoccupied. The mirror was hanging right there, reminding them, refusing to be ignored, daring their eyes to come back. He had been emptied by a crushing day cruising the smogscape to parley with oddballs like Mrs. Saks and Dr. Axel Byrd; Jenny had done Toby Wolff's. The one such photo session Grant had attended was exhausting simply to watch. Yet the act of boarding the monster bed seemed to flush them both with urgent adrenaline; he could feel it hit Jennifer. Her eyes irised to the dark gray of thunderheads. Perspiration, light, clean, dappled them before they even touched. Grant caught the aromas of musky need, of feral hunger. She not only wanted him - she lusted for him, and his heart rate jumped up from double, and he plundered her, and she drained him. The streamlined chat that so endeared them was discarded in the living room, supplanted by a dangerously new exchange: a sexual echo effect, power given and power received and power amplified; dangerous because it seemed to obliterate the humor and caring that normally accompanied them to bed. She pulled him into her as though she was starving. His body sprang alive to the nerve roots, and in that starting-gun instant he cared about nothing but taking her.

  The mirror watched as they slept, woke, made love again, slept, talked as before. It watched.

  The wine was gone and Max was snoozing before the topic of Dr. Axel Byrd was actually addressed.

  "A big guy, gruff, stout, barrel chested. I expected a sterile Aryan type for my father's doctor. What I got was a bearded Viking in a doctor suit. It was a little surreal." He shifted uncomfortably. Jennifer was entrenched on the mirror side of the bed tonight, and that stood disturbingly at the edge of his thoughts, as though they were aboard a life-raft and a random toss of the boat would flip her, still half-awake, into a sea turbulent with sharks. He watched his own feet in the mirror, abstracted.

  "I suppose he wasn't apologetic?" She yawned, turned her back to the mirror, snaked an arm around him.

  "Terse at first." Actually, Dr. Byrd had somehow divined that Grant's questions about his father's health were standard and perfunctory. He had waited, patiently, for the gist, his replies crisp and dull as he outlined the senior Mantell's assorted minor distresses, shrugging them all equally - a little justifiable high blood pressure, a false-alarm ulcer, a brief problem sleeping.

  It had all seemed a burden of trivia to Dr. Byrd. No big deal. "Your father phoned me once, bursting with questions about narcolepsy. About coma." So get on with it.

  Abruptly Grant's throat felt as if it was trying to swallow a golf ball. "Coma I know about, but..."

  "Ah, you've seen that dreadful film, I suppose?" The huge shoulders rolled, the encompassing hands dangled between his knees in the overburdened desk chair.

  "But narcolepsy - isn't that sleeping sickness?"

  "More properly summed up by the term 'sleep attacks’," said Dr. Byrd. "As in angina attacks, or attacks of intestinal gas. They can occur anytime, anywhere. A person with a case of bonafide narcolepsy is capable of dropping into a very deep sleep state with no warning whatsoever, and during any activity - driving, sex, playing basketball." He swept a clearing between beard and mustache to insert a gray stick of spearmint gum.

  "My father?"

  "Claimed he had been oversleeping. Many questions on what a 'normal' amount of sleeptime was. For him I estimated six to eight hours; that didn't satisfy him. Even at six you're spending nearly a third of your life in bed, semiconscious or unconscious. For a corporate eagle like your father, the idea of too much sleep would've been very frustrating. Less time for work, you see. He would become agitated at the idea, tax himself even harder - more wear and tear on his metabolism."

  "Was he actually sick?"

  "Apart from the development of the tumor, nothing. I'd say it was very easy fo
r him to focus his work stress on his sleeping habits. But psychology isn't my field."

  It's probably nothing, Grant thought. Yeah, that's what they say in the movies, it's probably nothing, right before they get eaten by a giant cockroach.

  Up, down, around, the gentle curve of Jennifer's waist in the mirror, a fold of sheet cutting just below the two indentations in the small of her back, like a toga in a posed picture. Beyond it, his reflection.

  "So then?" she said.

  "So then he booked me for a physical examination next week. I didn't protest; I'm overdue, I guess." He ran his palm along the smooth warmth of her hip. "He seemed privately pleased that he managed to trade one Mantell for another, as though I'd just go into the file in my father's folder or something." He continued to stroke her reflexively. She mumbled and snuggled in tighter.

  "Hey?" he said, realizing she had slipped away. No reaction. He kept caressing her while his treacherous eyes instantly sought the mirror. Its panorama was nominal.

  First there was his father's death and the hints of narcolepsy or some other sleep affliction. Then the mirror; brass encircling a lens, backed by silver ... oh, yes, vaguely malignant somehow. Mrs. Saks, plus her hex signs. Blasphemers. Fornicators. Those were the strings; where in hell was the common knot?

  His morning coffee mug was still on the nightstand, the one closest the mirror. He craned to see and saw the coagulated brown dregs, like a crust of blood. He had to do the dishes more often than once weekly; chances were tomorrow he'd dump fresh-brewed on top of the scum and dust without even rinsing the cup.

  Something moved inside the mirror.

  He fought not to see it from the visual periphery, tried to keep contemplating his stupid coffee mug, stubbornly, until he realized that it was merely Max, bopping back into the bedroom with the arrogant, hipshot stride of a pachuco casing Van Nuys Boulevard.

  And abruptly, comfortingly, he felt that Max would warn them if the mirror was plotting anything weird. Animals knew.

  Sleep came easier, though he kept thinking of sleep as a symptom. No, he was simply bashed from the day.

  Or maybe he was not exhausted. Not technically, not for real.

  He fell asleep and reaped a few hours of peace. Then the grandaddy of all nightmares smashed into his mind, head-on, a freight train vaporizing a prairie dog transfixed by the high-beams. There was no defense, nothing he could do.

  He had nobody's recommendation to use as a quality filter, and did not consult the yellow pages. He merely cut out of traffic, slewing into a curbspace bordering the first shop he saw. Paint peeled in sharp strips from the billboard overhead. It was lit at night by two senile floods hanging from top on ugly pipe armatures wired into place against the weather, orange with rust.

  To Grant, the rust was an indication the place had been in business for awhile, stable in one locale.

  DARKMOON OCCULT SUPPLIES

  TOOLS • LITERATURE • INCUNABULA

  The logo was subdued, as far as Grant's non-knowledge of such things went. It was surrounded by a fresco of stars and planetoids in half-eclipse, with elliptical Saturnian ringwork, fretted with lines (beams? rays?) radiating (force? light? Bosco?) outward.

  Beams of force. Grant felt suddenly idiotic again, and he almost gunned the Pinto away from the witchcraft shoppe in embarrassment. On cue, the memory of the dream stopped him, causing his backbone to horripilate coldly even in the thick heat of urban summer. His teeth were tightly set; his jaw muscles nudged a baby migraine toward maturity. The Pinto idled. He smelled or imagined petrofumes bonking away at his headache, worsening it. Almost as an omen of inevitability, the motor stalled out - committing him.

  He grabbed the fat candle in its paper wrapping from the passenger bucket, along with the graphite-smeared pages of pencil rubbings, and did it.

  He jolted awake, or dreamed he did, staring into the mirror again. The past played back "Monty" Mantell, sweating, furtive, rushed up to his Etruscan marble fireplace, mouthing words Grant could not understand beyond identifying their pattern of repetition. He shot them out anxiously, below his breath, in the desperate cadence of the slightly mad, fumbling for a butane cigarette lighter, grabbing the black candle on the mantle. The fat wick touched the fire and sputtered as though wet, at last catching. Sweat-drops of relief broke freely and Grant's father almost smiled, still muttering the incomprehensible litany. His free hand ditched the lighter and went for his coat pocket, digging, still furtively, for something small within. He appeared more normal, more in control now, the image of resourcefulness Grant usually ascribed to his father.

  The black candle slipped from his grasp and bounced onto the carpet. He grabbed wildly to intercept and missed; the wick was still improbably alight. He forgot whatever was in his pocket and tried to retrieve the candle. He bent, then fell as the hematoma in his brain burst.

  Perhaps he could still see, Grant thought with a shudder. Perhaps his father's wide, unfocused eyes noted, as they fogged over in death, the candle, crisping a brown oval into the new shag carpeting, five inches too far from his outstretched hand. His final breath eased out, in no hurry. The wick extinguished itself A web of gray smoke uncoiled toward the ceiling.

  The inside of Darkmoon Occult Supplies' front door was festooned with tiny brass bells. Grant's eyes quickly dealt with the chaotic junkyard of merchandise and decoration and zeroed in on the store's only occupant.

  "Hey man," said the apparent proprietor, a man with a long ponytail of black hair topped by a French beret. Black leather vest over a neon-red T-shirt overwhelmed by a black image of a bare-chested, love-beaded Jim Morrison, with the Doors logo in blocky letters. Black mustache, waxed at the tips. Black goatee. He cupped his hand over the phone receiver crooked into his shoulder and said, "Welcome to Darkmoon. Browse away; I'll catch up with you in a second?'

  Grant nodded as a tirade from the phone drew the man back. "No, no, no." he interposed. "You're not listening. Cardamom for love spells you can buy at Lucky's. The supermarket. It's the same as - no, just buy Spice Islands; it's the same stuff. Look, Mrs. Fetters -"

  Grant drifted, tuning out the chatter. Darkmoon's ceiling was a good thirty feet from the floor; stout beams of oily wood were hung with stuffed birds and odd mobiles that revolved sluggishly in the eddies of heat. The entire west wall was absorbed by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of stained pine: Numerology, Astrology, Tarot, Wicca, Satanism, Voodoo, more. Grant saw one press tape label that read Blank Books of Art. The library balanced the old of crusted leather bindings with the new of glossy trade paperbacks. The goateed clerk's voice continued to drone, patiently; he had switched topics from cardamom to arrowroot.

  A gray anatomy skeleton guarded the corner of the first display case. Within were hundreds of orderly ranks and files of philtres and potions - spellcasting ingredients in cork-stoppered vials of blown glass, like tiny test tubes; larger, hermetically sealed jars of dull-colored powders. A plastic bag of "dream bones." Joss sticks of consecration incense and bottles of brown oil. The shelves to Grant's right were laden with lanterns, candles, silver knives, small braziers, tools whose purpose was a mystery. Tarot decks carefully wrapped in silk. Beyond the shelves, a rack of tabards - black, white, brown, some silk—and cowled monk's robes with braid. A card near his nose read ChaliceThurible-Athame / Set (Ready to Use). $65.95. There was a "chic shelf" of pop power objects: ankhs, pyramid necklaces, icons so commercial they were the most familiar items to Grant. A hand-calligraphed index card thumb tacked to the shelf informed him that jewelry could be inscribed with his Witchcraft Name free of charge, with a $25 purchase.

  Nearer the counter was a thick wooden shelf bearing tarantulas and scorpions encased in Lucite, and a dead snake in a rubber-lipped bell jar of formaldehyde. Other floating dead things inspected him from their glass coffins. There was a small fireplace hewn from a block of weathered gray stone. Below its mantle, etched as though by centuries of rain, was the word INRUS. From a strategic roost above, a ratty stuffed goat's
head glared with golden eyes. Grant saw it was a ram. Its cornucopian horns had been gilded, its dead teeth looked plastic; beyond them, a tongue that resembled a stale, petrified piece of luncheon meat.

  Across the counter, powerful corporate mojo for Visa, Mastercard, and American Express asserted themselves. Everything surrounding him was priced with those nasty disintegrating pricetags he hated - even the ram's head had one, curling away from the patch of hair it had obviously occupied for years. The cooling fan of the register hummed; the blue digital display glowed. Grant thought abruptly of how the ultrasimplified logos of the Fortune 500, the top corporations in the country, were really modernized mutations of the hex sign Mrs. Saks had sworn by. IBM, Exxon, Randcorp, all used as mastheads a letter or a geometric line design that had undergone decades of refinement and simplification, like a distilling process. Using charge plates in a witchcraft shoppe exemplified the head-on crash of ancient superstition into modern technology. He considered the combination of sorcery and computers and guessed the slant must have been tried a thousand times by now.

  The logo for Calex Corporation was a c inside a c, two letters linked by orthographic projection; two looking like one. Very snazzy industrial fashion. Design of and decision on the logo had encompassed an expenditure (carefully itemized and, of course, wholly deductible) in the neighborhood of $25,000. How valuable might protection and image be if they boiled away to the same thing?

  His imagination jumped ahead to an image of the governing board of Calex chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards; all those constipated execs prancing around in the buff and impaling a stray cat on a spike for sacrifice... it was beautifully obscene.

  "...but that was Mrs. Fetters making her daily call."

  "I'm sorry?" Grant had not noticed the counterman hanging up. You did it again, stupid - he had blanked out, had gone away and not noticed.

  "Mrs. Fetters, jeez." The man in the black vest spread his hands across the fingerprinty glass of the counter. "She has a standing account here. Calls in with her daily order. Has these spellbooks specifying really hard-to-get items, you know? Like clove oil, paprika, A-1 Sauce ... And every day I tell the old broad that in this century we have supermarkets. I'm broadcasting; she's not receiving." He shrugged. A button pinned to the lapel of his vest read So Mote It Be, goddammit.