Hard Spell

by Justin Gustainis

  I looked at the corpse one more time. Just punishing myself, I suppose. I didn't need to see it again – that charred mound of gunk and bone was going to have a starring role in my nightmares for a long time to come.

  As I turned away, something glittered in the corner of my vision.

  It came from the corner where Prescott's severed arms and legs were stacked. They hadn't bled much, without a heart to provide pumping action. I walked over, and tilted my head a little. There it was again.

  I squatted next to the pile of flabby, pale flesh, careful not to touch anything. I looked closer.

  A cell phone. Prescott had been holding the phone in his hand when the arm was severed. Not surprising, then, that his big paw was squeezed tight around it.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw that Billy was still taking samples of Prescott's ashes and putting them into small plastic bags.

  "You do these yet?" I asked him. "The arms and legs?"

  "Not yet," he said. "Thought we ought to concentrate on the torso first. We'll get to the rest of him pretty soon. I figure there's no hurry."

  "No. No hurry at all."

  He went back to work. Using my body to hide what I was doing, I slowly leaned forward, got two fingers around the phone, and carefully worked it loose from Prescott's grip.

  I knew I was tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation. But the cause of death wasn't exactly in dispute, even if nobody but me and Karl would ever know for sure what had happened here.

  I slipped Prescott's phone into an inside pocket of my suit coat, then stood up. Walking over near the window for better light, I casually pulled the phone out again. As far as anybody could tell, I was messing around with my own phone, just like millions of people do every day.

  I opened the phone and, with a little work, found the list of outgoing calls. The last one Prescott ever made had been to a number I knew well – it was my phone, at the squad room. Length of call: 11:46.

  Sweet Mother Mary on a motorcycle.

  "Come on," I said to Karl, who'd been staring at the body from another corner of the room.

  "Where we goin'?"

  "Back to the squad, so I can check my voicemail."

  As I drove us out of the hospital parking lot, Karl said, "It's my fault."

  I turned and looked at him, and his face reminded me of a man I'd once seen at the funeral of his three children. They'd been murdered by his wife, before she killed herself.

  "What the fuck are you talking about, Karl?"

  "Prescott. What happened. It's my fault."

  "You're wrong about that, partner. You are totally fucking off base. I'm the one who roped him into all this shit."

  "Doesn't matter. You told me, Stan! You said to get additional warding for his room. I called two witches I know. One's moved out of town, I left a message with the other one's answering service. She didn't call back, and I forgot, Stan. I should have tried somebody else, even looked in the fucking Yellow Pages, if I had to."

  "Karl, listen, you didn't–"

  "But I just forgot. With people dropping dead bodies on us and Internal Affairs and the SWAT raid, and the rest of it..."

  "Listen, man, don't be–"

  "It could've made the difference, Stan! It could. If the protection was stronger, the fucking curse might not have been able to get him. Instead, he went out as hard as any motherfucker I ever saw, or even heard of. The dude was trying to help us, and for that he had his fucking eyes gouged out, and got his arms and legs chopped off, and then he was burned alive..."

  Karl buried his face in his hands and started to cry.

  If I wasn't driving, I just might have joined him.

  • • • •

  Back at the squad, we reported to McGuire what we'd seen, what we knew, and what we suspected.

  He sat back and ran a hand slowly over his big jaw. "All right," he said. "I'll assign a couple of other detectives to it, just so we can say we investigated and filed a report. I'll need you to brief them before they go out, so that they don't waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel."

  Fine. Now I'd have to explain to a couple of other cops just how bad I had fucked up. McGuire was right to do that – I just wasn't looking forward to it.

  "You figure this was Sligo, shutting Prescott's mouth?" McGuire asked. "He's got a copy of the Opus Mago. He'd probably know about the curse, and how to make a murder look like one."

  I thought about that, then shook my head. "No, if it was him, he'd want us to know it – he wouldn't try to hide his work by imitating the curse, the arrogant prick."

  "Besides," Karl said, "it happened in broad daylight. Sligo's a vamp, remember?"

  "Yeah, you got a point there." McGuire looked closely at me, then gave the same scrutiny to Karl. "You guys need some time off?" he asked quietly.

  Considering everything that was going on right now, he was being extremely generous. But there was no way I wanted to spend the next few days sitting around my house thinking – or worse, drinking myself stupid.

  I looked at Karl, who gave me a small headshake. His face had lost a little of the stricken look it had worn at the hospital, but only a little.

  "We'd just as soon keep busy, boss, but thanks," I said.

  McGuire took a case file from a stack sitting on his desk and put it on his blotter. Opening it, he said, "Then get back to work and catch this motherfucker, before he kills anybody else."

  e susiv>

  I'd told Karl I wanted to check my voicemail, and why. He said he'd start going through the files, to see if he could find a connection between Sligo and Jamieson Longworth. Then he reminded me that sunset was about an hour away. "You've got an appointment, in the parking lot," he said.

  "Yeah," I said, "if she shows up."

  "She seemed pretty definite about it this morning. Think she'd change her mind?"

  "No, I'm just hoping that Longworth's threat turns out to be empty bullshit, that's all."

  "Yeah, I know," he said. "Don't forget, I'm going down with you when it's time. Help you wait."

  I nodded my thanks. "I wouldn't have it any other way."

  "To access your voicemail messages, please press 8." The computer's recorded voice was as polite as ever. I touched 8.

  "Please enter your four-digit extension number."

  4294

  "Please enter your security code."

  3475833

  "You have eight new messages. These are your options while listening. To listen to a message, press 5. To go back to the beginning of a message, press 7. To delete a message, press 2 twice. To save a message, press 4. To advance to the next message, press 3. To end this session, press 9 twice. Ready."

  5

  "Going to the first new message."

  "Sergeant, this is Sonia, over in Human Resources. Your leave record for last month hasn't been–"

  22

  3

  "Stanley, this is Father Cebula at St Casimir's. We've got the annual Corpus Christi banquet coming up–"

  22

  3

  "Hey, Stan – Lacey. What do you get when you cross a female ogre with a werewolf? You–"

  4

  3

  "Mr Markowski, this is Rob at Nationwide Insurance. I see you've got a birthday coming up soon, and I'd like to talk–"

  22

  3

  "Sergeant, this is Ben Prescott, calling from my lovely new digs – let's see, it's room 333. The material I asked my assistant at G-town to send me arrived via FedEx early this morning, including the remaining fragments of the Opus Mago that I had yet to translate. I went right to work, and I'm pleased to say that it went faster than I'd anticipated. Maybe my brain is a little sharper from its long rest while I was comatose.

  "I should probably wait until you get over here to fill you in on what I've been able to make of this, but I'm pretty excited – and more than a little disturbed, frankly. Anyway, I thought I would get the gist of it to you now, in case that curse we talked about ear
lier turns out to be real, ha ha.

  "Most of what I've learned about this spell you're interested in deals with the final stage. By the way, the fifth sacrifice, the final vampire killing, is supposed to take place as part of the actual ritual. The other four are prologues, as it were.

  "All right, let's see here. The book specifies that the spell must take place near water. Still water, that is not of the sea. Meaning, not salt water. The other requirement is that the ritual be carried out on the first night of the full moon, at the 'turn of time' – which, given the context, I would say refers to midnight.

  "Um, that's followed by a long incantation the practitioner is supposed to recite, that's probably of little interest to you... Okay, here's something: I expect you'll want to know what all of this is in aid of – the purpose ofthe spell, as it were. Well, that would be, in a word: transformation. If the ritual, which is supposed to be one of extreme difficulty, by the way, is carried out in the proper manner, all the magical I's dotted and T's crossed, and so on, the vampire/wizard conducting–"

  "The disk space allotted for this message has been filled. To listen to the next message, press 3."

  Goddamn motherfucking cocksucker shit!!

  3!

  "Advancing to the next new message."

  "Prescott again, Sergeant. Sorry about that. Longwindedness is an occupational hazard of academe.

  "All right, now, where was – oh, right. Transformation. According to this, the practitioner will be transformed into... this next word is a double compound, and the grammar is confusing, but I've rendered it as 'a creature of both night and day.' The fragment says the one casting the spell will 'walk under the sun without fear.' I suppose if you were a vampire, that would be a pretty desirable thing, wouldn't it?

  "Oh, and it gets better – better, I mean from the perspective of the vampire. It says that, after the transformation, the practitioner will 'fear not holy things, nor fire, nor sharp branches.' Would that be wooden stakes, do you suppose? I guess that would make the guy some sort of 'super-vampire,' wouldn't it?

  "That goes on for a while, then four lines further down it says that this one who 'walks under, or beneath, the sun without fear,' can drink the blood of others and thereby make them 'brothers, or brethren, like himself.'

  "I'm not sure what to make of that one – you're probably a better judge than I, since you deal with this kind of thing all the time. I mean, everybody knows that vampires can reproduce by exchanging blood with one of their victims, presumably willing ones. Nothing new there. Or could it mean that once transformed, this 'super-vampire' can make others like himself, just by biting them? I suppose the blood exchange is assumed there, too.

  "Quite the spell this guy's got here. No wonder it's supposed to be so hard. He turns himself into a vampire without vulnerabilities, then can pass that on to others in the usual vampiric way? Sounds like a bad James Bond movie, if that's not redundant, but with fangs. You could create a whole army of – Jesus Christ, what the fuck? Who are you? How'd you get in here? Stay back! The... the power of Christ compels you! Get away from me, get away get awayyyyy..."

  Then there was nothing but the screaming.

  99

  "Session terminated. Goodbye."

  "How'd you get in here? Stay back! The–"

  "You can stop there and log out," I said to McGuire. "The rest is… just screaming." I tried to keep what I was feeling out of my voice, and off my face. I'm a cop – we're supposed to be good at that.

  I may not have succeeded completely, because McGuire looked at me closely before he disconnected from my voicemail. I'd told him about Prescott's messages, so he'd asked me to retrieve them again but from his phone, to play over the speaker.

  I glanced over at Karl, who was in McGuire's other visitor's chair. He looked like a guy with a bad stomachache – but whether that was from Prescott's discovery or from his screams, I didn't know.

  McGuire was staring at the phone as if it were his worst enemy. He didn't look away from it as he said, "Super-vampire, huh?"

  "It sounds kind of stupid when you call it that," I said. "But, still..."

  "Yeah," McGuire said. "But, still..."

  "And first night of the full moon," Karl said.

  I hadn't had to look it up – none of us had. Everybody in the Supe Squad always knows when the full moon is due.

  "Tonight," I said.

  A good piece of the squad room's west wall is taken up with a map of the city and surrounding area. McGuire, Karl, and I stood looking at it, and what we saw did not make us happy.

  All those lakes.

  "Fuck," Karl said.

  All those ponds.

  "Fuck," McGuire said.

  All those swimming pools.

  "Motherfuck," I said.

  "There's no way we're going to get surveillance of all those bodies of water," McGuire said. "We couldn't do it even if we knew what to look for, which we don't – or even if we had the entire U.S. Air Force at our disposal, which we sure as shit don't."

  "So we can't find him by air," I said. "That's a fact. We'll have to approach it some other way."

  "If you've got any ideas, you'll find me an eager audience," McGuire said.

  I just shook my head, but Karl said, "There is one thing."

  McGuire and I both turned to stare at him.

  "Seems to me that Stan here has an appointment with a certain young lady, in about..." Karl looked out the window, at the setting sun. "...ten minutes or so. She said something just before dawn today, gave us the impression she might know where Sligo's daytime crib is."

  McGuire looked at me with raised eyebrows. "You've got a snitch – somebody who'll give up Sligo?"

  "Not exactly," I said. "But sort of."

  "Who do you–" McGuire started, then I saw the light dawn. "Oh. You mean..." He flipped a glance toward Karl.

  "It's all right," I said. "He's met Christine." There are some secrets you shouldn't hide from your boss, and Christine was one I hadn't kept from McGuire. I'd trusted him to keep his mouth shut about her, and he always had.

  "We were talking to Christine this morning, and it occurred to me to ask her about Sligo. It seemed like she knew something, but then she had to leave, pretty quickly." I made a head gesture toward the window, where a sliver of sun could still be seen.

  "You know," Karl said, "it occurs to me that even if she can give us Sligo's resting place, the motherfucker'll be gone by the time anybody could get there, and we can't wait until he comes back for beddy-bye at dawn. It'll all be over by then, one way or another."

  "But if we know where he's been, maybe we can figure out where he went, if we move fast," I said.

  McGuire nodded. "Then you'd better get your ass downstairs," he said. "Don't you think?"

  Karl and I stood quietly near the fence in the gathering dark, listening to the crickets and trying not to think about the ugly death of Benjamin Prescott, PhD. I don't know about Karl, but my efforts weren't exactly a howling success – more like a screaming failure.

  "So," I said after a while, "how 'bout those Mets, huh?"

  Karl doesn't follow baseball, and neither do I. He likes hockey, and I've been a Knicks fan since I was a kid and got to watch the team hold their pre-season training camp at the U.

  That thing about the Mets is just something I say to fill awkward silences, and Karl knew it. He came back with his standard response: "Get a couple of good trades, and they could go all the way this year."

  We waited some more, not talking to ntil Karl said, "I'd say it's full dark, Stan."

  "Yeah."

  "Probably has been, the last ten minutes or so."

  "Yeah."

  We listened to the crickets for a while longer.

  Karl said, "Could be she's not coming, Stan."

  "Yeah."

  More crickets.

  "Maybe we oughta go back inside, tell McGuire."

  "Okay." I still didn't move.

  "Could be lotsa reasons she didn
't show," Karl said. "Doesn't have to mean she's in trouble."

  I whirled to face him, and my voice was ugly when I said, "Jesus, what do you think, Karl? That maybe she found herself a nice boyfriend? That she couldn't make it because tonight's the junior fucking prom?"

  Karl didn't tell me to go fuck myself. He didn't even turn and walk away. He just stood there, looking at me. It was too dark to see his expression, but his posture didn't look like somebody who's pissed off and ready to fight.