The Wicca-Man: Tongue-Tied

by Emily Veinglory

  She walked away, shuffling in orthopedic shoes, and sat stiffly in the shabby office chair behind her desk, as proudly as if it were a throne, turning her attention to the laptop that sat ready. It was a clear dismissal, and Sean had no desire to prolong the discussion. The discord between her appearance and manner was more than a little disquieting. The note showed an address and a time, ten a.m. He went to the door and let himself out. His cell phone gave the irritating bleep of a battery on the last of its charge, and he could totally relate with that as he headed down the hallway with no clear idea where he was going.

  So the old lady wants you to boogum her house, said a familiar voice. You can do it, boy.

  Sean stepped into the building’s barely used stairwell. “Rat,” he said with more weariness that reverence. “That is easy enough for you to say.”

  I would have had rather more to say if you had called on me, boy. Do you think any of the other spirit guides would appear to a follower who did not even bother to invoke them properly? Would Wolf do that, or Bear or Eagle? No, they get sage smoke, dances, and mandalas. I get a passing thought in an elevator. And after years of your timorous ways, you should be grateful I bother with you at all.

  “I do apologize,” Sean said, seating himself wearily on the stairs. “But I was not entirely sure how you could assist.”

  Let’s see, surviving through a tight spot when every predatory beast wants to kill you. You are aware what a rat’s life is all about, right? We’re vermin -- not as bad as untenured lecturers, I admit, but still subject to some pretty serious persecution.

  “Then do forgive me, great spirit. What would you advise me to do?”

  Have you considered digging a hole and hiding in it?

  Sean sighed and leaned his cheek against the cool metal of the banister. His skin itched, his head ached, and a wet trickle of blood ran from his wound and down over his stomach. There was a soft creaking noise behind him.

  “Dr. Watkin,” Rhea said tentatively. “What are you doing in here?”

  Sean squeezed his eyes shut. Just what I need. “Sitting in a disused stairwell, talking to myself, Rhea. It’s just a little insanity, par for the course with psych lecturers.”

  “So you aren’t talking to the giant glowing rat?”

  Sean craned his neck very carefully to see Rhea standing on the landing, and the translucent form of Rat the spirit guide perched on a slightly higher step about halfway between them. Rhea could quite clearly see the human-sized rat and stared at him with a mixture of fascination and horror.

  Or, Rat added smugly, you can do what any sensible animal does and turn to your friends and allies. Anyone with a reason to stick by you and an interest in seeing you prevail.

  And with that last advice, he softly and suddenly vanished away, leaving Sean wondering just what the hell he was meant to say to explain that.

  He had almost an hour to try, and closeted back in their office he made the attempt. Perhaps it was the strain of trying to fence with Dame Bessie, or a just a failure of imagination, but he opted for the truth. Giving that this encompassed the existence of literal magic, a scientifically explicable form of vampirism, and a deity in the form of a rodent, it took some time. After the hour was up, they went to wait in the foyer, continuing their detente in hushed tones. Almost two hours went by, and Thane still wasn’t there. It was starting to get dark; Sean checked his watch for the hundredth time.

  “Damn. I’m going to have to do something very stupid now,” he said.

  “Opposed to keeping a pet vampire and lying to a profess-orcerer?”

  “It’s nice to see that the ‘Horatio’ conversation hasn’t affected your oh-so-refreshing lack of respect for me.”

  “The what, what?”

  Sean stood with a groan. “The ‘more things on heaven and earth’ talk. It does tend to come up from time to time, not so much for me but for practitioners in general.”

  “And you think I don’t respect you.”

  “If I’d been as dogged in pursuit of you, with so little encouragement, I’d be classified somewhere between lecher and stalker.” Exhaustion was an interesting way to get to honesty, and this was a goddamn stupid time to do it, but there it was. Well, what do you know, now that Rhea had actually given up on chasing him, he’d finally got around to tell her to stop? Well done. Next he should catch the geography department up on the whole earth-being-round thing.

  Rhea raised one sharp little eyebrow. “Well, you didn’t tell me you were gay.”

  “No, I didn’t. Make sure you have them put it on my tombstone. Because now I have to go talk to the elder vampire about what he’s done with Thane. I wouldn’t want the rest of the world to miss my outing.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Sean ignored the innuendo his brain wanted to make of that, but either way: “That would be a very bad idea.”

  “Well, I can’t just get all this dumped on me and then go home to eat ramen noodles and watch Doctor Who. And besides, if it’s a dumb idea for me to go, I’m pretty sure it isn’t brilliant for you, without some kind of plan.”

  Sean leaned back against the wall. “You should go and give my apologies to Laura. I doubt I’m going to make it to her place as I arranged. And if the vampires are really getting this out of control, then she can at least try and get the word out. But I can’t just sit around and hope for the best with Thane missing.”

  “But this is the big elder vampire dude who would have killed you if Thane hadn’t stopped him somehow. And you’re just going to go see him and, what, ask for your boyfriend back nicely? You think you can take something that took Thane? I’ve seen him, you know -- undead or not, the boy is seriously buff.”

  “Okay, so I’ll pick up a few things first. Garlic, cross, Uzi ...”

  “You’ve already explained to me that all that Van Helsing stuff won’t work. So why not drop the wise-ass act and come up with something that will. I mean, shouldn’t you go, like, during the day, when he’s weaker?”

  “Who knows what he will have done to Thane by then. I can’t take the chance.”

  “Okay, so tell me, where does this elder guy hang out?”

  Shit. “I’ll find him by ...” Shit! “I’ll have to talk to Laura.” He patted his pockets. His wallet was still in Thane’s possession, probably in the limo, which for all he knew was burning down by the dock, or funding a little neo-goth-punk shopping spree for the elder’s incarnadine sidekick. “Can you lend me cab fare? It’ll take all night to get to her place on the buses.” Rhea looked pretty damn skeptical as she rifled through her purse. “Oh, and can I borrow your office key again to get to the phone?”

  “Look, Dr. Watkin, like most grown-up people I have a cell phone and you can use it, but I am coming along with you.”

  Sean was beginning to get the feeling Rhea still though he was hopelessly inept, just in more disciplines than she’d realized. He couldn’t be bothered explaining that his cell phone’s battery had expired and he wasn’t quite the great hairy troglodyte she seemed to assume.

  “Great, now I have a sidekick,” he muttered.

  She snatched back the phone. “I am not anyone’s sidekick. Especially because you know those black sidekicks always end up getting killed.”

  “Not in Lethal Weapon,” Sean said, trying to wrest it off her. “Okay, fine, I take it back. And you can head home to those noodles.”

  But there was a look in her eye. Rhea Colecheck had just dealt herself in, and it didn’t seem there was much he could do about it.

  * * * * *

  They all sat around Laura’s kitchen table. Rhea, of course; Sean; and Kevin, who probably had them all under covert surveillance after being left out of the good gossip for so long. That delayed matters somewhat as they went through the Horatio talk again, with footnotes from Rhea.

  “Magic, real magic?” Kevin said, again. From his head to his loafers, he looked the very picture of a skeptic.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Rhea said
. “Show him the glowing rat thing so we can get on with this.”

  “I hardly think --” Sean said, indignant on the spirit’s behalf.

  But Rat, being his contrary self, appeared at the fourth side of the table. That’s a novel dowsing method, he remarked.

  “What was that you were just telling me about sage smoke, invocations, and ritual dances?” Sean snapped. “Or, for that matter, appearing only to the faithful and chosen.”

  We just say that to make you feel special and keep you guys in line.

  “Please, can we just get on with that? Anything could be happening to Thane while we’re pissing around with kitchenware.” Sean fidgeted, feeling almost ready to rush in like a true action man, if only he could find out where to go. He just hoped that Thane was managing to look after himself okay. The very thought that he might be hurt or already ... Sean’s heart lurched.

  “Positive vibrations,” Laura said, preoccupied with her work. “Please. And less just straight-out vibrations. This thing is delicate.” In front of her was a shallow dish made of copper, filled with a shallow pool of sanctified oil -- canola oil, as it happened, and only very recently sanctified -- and upon it floated a single hair Sean had scavenged from his bed. It was the only one he could find that was too dark to be his own. Black and wiry, the hair was definitely Thane’s, and a little too curly to be from his head. But Laura had just said, “All the better; with men, connections are generally stronger at that level than the cerebral.” She’d trimmed the end and dipped it in wax, then attached it lightly to the sharp end of a thumbtack that sat in the centre of the dish.

  “It’s not the easiest thing to carry about,” Laura said as she watched the hair orient itself. “But it is the most accurate method I know. Only works when both parties are magic-workers.”

  “But Thane’s not a witch; he’s a vamp. It’s just a disease. It’s not occult.”

  “It’s not ... Well, I just assumed. It seems to be working.”

  “I hope it is.”

  “Can’t the rat thing, um,” Kevin interjected in a quavering voice. “Just, um, tell you where your guy is?”

  “Honored Rat is a spirit, not a god,” Sean said. “He’s not omniscient.”

  He does, however, know more than all the monkeys in the room put together. Rat sniffed. Enough to know the hair has got it right.

  “You what?” But Rat was gone. “Great, now I’ve offended my guardian spirit. Just when a little protection would have been handy.”

  “Perhaps,” Kevin offered quietly, “you should have asked him for advice.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Sean replied tersely. “But I don’t have time for ritual appeasement right now. What I need is a car and someone to drive it.”

  “You can’t drive?” Rhea exclaimed in tones normally reserved for the diagnosis of a venereal disease.

  “I can’t drive, I can’t keep my guardian spirit happy, I can’t stay in a coven, I can’t get a boyfriend without using black magic, I can’t get tenure, and I can’t get soup crackers out of those little packets without breaking them into a million pieces. But I really don’t have time to talk about all that right now. So who has a car and wants to do a little magical vampire hunting?”

  And to his immense surprise, all they did was get their jackets on and head out back of the house with alacrity.

  “Great,” Sean muttered. “Now I have a posse.”

  Rhea gave him a look that said she wasn’t any more down with that than being a sidekick.

  In return for getting things moving, Sean guessed he would just have to put up with everyone coming along. Laura kept charge of the dowsing bowl. Sean had got hold of a few of his own things as well, in the hope that if he was called on to work a spell, this time he might be a little better prepared. He had a bunch of his PhD files hastily thrown into an old briefcase, most of the workings material from back in his doctoral days, in the hope he could improvise something from that if things got dire.

  Kevin drove, and Laura took the front seat of Kevin’s old Mercury Mystique, leaving Sean and Rhea to share the back with a couple of stacks of unmarked chemistry exams.

  “Those grades are meant to be in by now,” Rhea said in mild reproof.

  “It’s after dark, and we’re looking for a powerful vampire,” Kevin said with a degree of disbelief. “Pissing off the dean isn’t actually my main concern right now.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Sean said.

  “Fuck it,” Kevin replied as he put the car in gear. “I always wanted to be a Scooby.”

  “Gently, please,” Laura said, cradling the bowl in her palms. They headed along the road, following Laura’s directions.

  Sean pawed through his case. The main materials were balls of wool in many colors, markers, and paper. Nothing really amenable to improvisation beyond the base spell. “I don’t suppose anyone has a gun,” he said. “Baseball bat, pocketknife ... sharpened pencil, anything.” Professors in the hood. We’d be lucky to take down a stray dog, let alone a vampire mob.

  “Isn’t there something that works on vampires?” Rhea asked.

  “Not that anyone knows. The mythical stuff has pretty much been tried to no effect. Sunlight is fine because it neutralizes the extra strength and speed, but it just makes them their real age. Unfortunately, most only turned a few years ago. There are a few from twenty years back, but that still isn’t going to make them dust in the light of day.”

  “Left,” Laura interjected.

  “It can’t be left again,” Kevin complained. “It was left the last three times, and we’ve already gone up this street the other way.”

  “Left,” Laura repeated curtly, and Kevin sighed and turned the wheel. “Stop!” she called out, and with a lurch they pulled up to the curb. The oil splashed out of the dish into the dashboard.

  “Gesundheit,” Sean said wearily.

  “Just imagine what forensics would make of that,” Kevin said, peering at the small hair that was clearly visible springing up from the smooth plastic surface of the dash, highlighted by the streetlight. As they watched, it swiveled in the oil, pointing directly at the gateway at the front of the nearest house. A view of the building was blocked by a large rod-metal gate with a freshly painted sign upon it. He couldn’t see it clearly, backlit as it was by the house’s security lights, but the main capitals of B and S could just be seen.

  “Bloody hell.” Sean pulled the crumpled Post-it from his pocket. “It’s the house.”

  “So sayeth the hair,” Kevin intoned.

  “No, I mean it’s the house. The one Bessie wants me to boogum.”

  They all looked at him blankly, Laura wiping her hands on her shirt and Rhea doing her best ‘methinks this man may be an idiot’ eyebrow.

  “The one she wants people not to notice,” Sean said slowly. “It’s this house.”

  “So what do we do?” Kevin asked, apparently getting into the spirit of things. “We could split up. Cause a distraction and break in through the back.”

  Laura’s cell phone went off, and she thrust it to her ear. “This isn’t a -- What?” She held up her hand to shush everyone in the car and listened. “Okay, Jess. Thanks for letting me know. No, I don’t think so. I have another idea.”

  She flipped the phone closed. “Opal is pushing our delisting. It’ll probably be done by tomorrow. And there’s some kind of crazy rumor going around that has some very nasty people interested in both of us.”

  Sean took a deep breath. What the hell did this mean? They’d be off the accord in hours, and Laura hadn’t found another group yet, despite her promise. And here, this house ... the sorcerers had Thane? There was no way he could face them all down, but if they weren’t expecting him ’til tomorrow, then there might be only a few people here, without all their own occult precautions in place yet. They thought he worked alone, and would have no reason to think he could dowse or scry for Thane. He chewed his thumbnail, trying desperately to come up with a plan. Then, looking past K
evin’s and Laura’s pale faces, turned to him from the front seats, he saw a group of dark shapes coming up the road.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Laura said, rather shocked.

  “Catholic upbringing, Laura, and Wicca has no good blasphemies.” He pointed one finger. “And that is certainly a bunch of people who rose from dead. We have to get the hell out of here.”

  The vampires were walking up the road with the pale elder in the lead and his younger cronies close behind. There was something about their movements, graceless and shambling, but almost perfectly synchronized. The girl was there, and her crony, the tall young man, still all in black.

  “Or ... this is my way in. They’re being compelled to come here for some reason. It seems unlikely they just happen to be shambling up this of all streets, so they could well be going into the house. It must be the sorcerers who’ve brought the vampires to town. They have some kind of use for them.”

  Scrabbling in his case, he pulled out a braided length of red and black wool. He opened the case, the inner surface of which was painted with complex occult circuits representing the entire town and pins that string was wound around. “This is a little out of date, but it looks intact and it might still work. It’s meant to make a person -- to make everyone in town -- believe that someone is dead.” He thrust hanks of wool and markers into his pockets and stuffed the rest hastily into the foot well. “And as vampires are physiologically dead and widely believed to be undead, that might just be enough to get me into the house without anyone knowing.”

  “I’d go with you,” Laura said. “But I’ve got an idea. A way to keep us in the accord, but I have to do it right now.”