The New York Magician

by Zimmerman, Jacob

  "Ahhhh." Kevin, it seemed, was fond of the almost-pleased sigh as a conversational gambit. I refused to rise to the bait and ask, so we walked in silence save for the faint tapping of keys in Kevin's typewriter as it swung in his grip.

  We emerged into wan daylight. Kevin continued north along the trackway for several miles until the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge was visible, swung east/west to allow water traffic through between the Hudson River and the Harlem River Ship Canal. At the water's edge, just off to the side from the tracks, was a black and gray shape. Kevin headed for it and carefully placed the Royal into it; as I came close, I identified a Zodiac boat with the characteristic safety orange color either painted over or replaced by dark plastic. "Hop in, me boy, I'll give ye a lift downtown."

  "Hang on." I placed a hand to my chest, found the lumpy outline of Bobbi-Bobbi's spearhead, and closed my eyes. There was the now-familiar crackling sense of direction, faded slightly, and I opened my eyes to see Kevin looking at me calmly. I stepped sideways some five feet, repeated the experiment; sure enough, I was looking at him again. "So, Kevin."

  "Michel?"

  "Before I get in that boat, perhaps you could tell me why my small friend here is very, very insistent that you, in fact, called Hapy here."

  "Ah, that's easy."

  "Really."

  "Surely." He reached into his waterproof waders. I stepped back quickly, one hand going to my gun, but he froze and looked at me somewhat mournfully.

  "Sorry."

  Kevin withdrew his hand. In it was a bit of paper; an envelope? I reached for it, but he held up his other hand. "In a moment. Let's try this." He placed it on the boat and then stepped away from it. "Now ask yer friend again."

  I looked at him suspiciously then reached for the spearhead again. Opening my eyes, I found myself staring at the envelope. I looked at him, and he nodded. "Be my guest."

  The envelope was about the size of a greeting card, well-worn, but the photograph inside appeared almost new. I slid it from the paper and flipped it over.

  A picture of my face stared back at me. I looked at Kevin, who shrugged. "I was lookin' for what called him here too, lad."

  "Where'd you get this?"

  "I told you. I knew yer gran. She gave it to me some years ago. When I was searchin', I kept comin' up with that picture. I finally kept it on me person, so it wouldn't interfere with me triangulatin'."

  I handed him back the picture and quietly got into the Zodiac. Kevin untied a small rope that had held it to a sapling and kicked at the shore, powerfully. We slid into the opaque gray waters of the Harlem River. Once we'd moved some dozen yards, he dropped the outboard into the water and pulled on the starter. It caught instantly, and he dropped into the rudimentary pilot's seat. "Righto, boy. Downtown!" And with that, the engine sang out a song of gasoline hunger, and we blared off along the Harlem River and the shores of Manhattan.

  We'd reached Roosevelt Island before I could speak. "Why does everything keep coming up me?"

  Kevin shouted over the roar of the engine, air and water. "Because yer the one called him, boy."

  "I didn't! " My frustration was easily vented, here, where shouting was almost necessary to be heard.

  "Didn't say it was deliberate. Was your power, though."

  "I don't have power! I can't call the Others! I can just talk to them, and see them!"

  "That's not what me boss says, boy."

  "Who, then, is your boss?"

  Kevin took one paw off the wheel to wave generally around us at the mercury and ebony colored waters. "There!"

  "Which?"

  "Where they meet!"

  I thought about that carefully. Accent, location, where the what meet? The rivers? Then it was clear. "Condatis?"

  Kevin nodded cheerfully. "He felt the rivers react when Hapy was called! You don't think you can bring the flood god into Manhattan and have the rivers ignore it, do ya?"

  "I didn't bring him!"

  "Well, however it went. He felt 'em strain their banks, boy, and he knew somethin' was up, and off I was sent."

  We were slowing, pulling to the right and in towards the Manhattan shore. The Manhattan side was curving out into the river ahead of us, the bulge of Alphabet City hidden behind the industrial scarring of the FDR Drive. Kevin's voice was lower, no longer fighting as much engine noise. "Seems pretty sure 'twas you called him, boy. I don't argue with the boss about things like that. Your picture kept answering until I nullified it, then I went walkabout and came up with none other than you yerself."

  I hunched in the front of the boat and thought about it somewhat furiously. I'd never had the power to affect the Others by will; only through my deeds and negotiation had I changed their actions or their courses. What had changed?

  Then it hit me. I opened my bandolier with fumbling fingers, pulled it out and looked at it, really looked.

  The starfield on the Patek Phillipe was glowing, a cloud of unknown origin spread across it. I spun on my seat, holding the watch up in front of me, and saw the starfield rotate behind it as if I was looking through the watch face into empty space. Finally, with some dread, I bent over and held the watch out over the river.

  A face wreathed in greenish grey tentacles looked back at me from what might have been water and might have been cosmic gas. The eyes were closed, but I knew they would be enormous, round and brilliant yellow.

  I snapped the watch closed and slid it back into my bandolier, hands trembling in fear and apprehension. Kevin slid us up to a crumbling concrete step and held the boat so I could disembark. "Thanks for the lift, Kevin."

  "Anytime, boy."

  "Sometime you need to tell me how you knew my grandmother."

  "Only if you buy the beer." He winked, once, then released the rusty railing. "I'll be watchin' in, Michel. The boss likes this island the way it is."

  "Me too, Kevin. Me too." He waved and shot off in a cloud of water spray. I climbed the few steps, crossed a disreputable park, and found myself at the east end of 14th Street. Sighing, I started to trudge across town towards home.

  Why would Cthulhu give me power? Why would I have called Hapy? What the hell was I going to do now?

  I couldn't answer most of those questions. But the last one, well ...

  I needed a drink.

  * * *

  I swerved uptown instead of continuing all the way home and walked a couple blocks north up Broadway. At the corner of 16th and Broadway, where Broadway was just a side street squeezed next to Union Square Park, there was a dingy bank building with scaffolding around it. Checking my watch to make sure it was at least past noon, I pushed inside.

  The building had been a bar for as long as I could remember. I had first ventured in when it was titled the Bank Cafe in a nod to its obvious financial origin. Now it boasted a much hipper name and even more nouvelle cuisine. Young, hip tech and media types jockeyed for bar space under the enormous plant that was placed at the curved end of the drinking platform, half of them the pasty color of true techies and half of them the overblown bulge of strenuous gym workouts.

  I ignored all of them and shouldered my way to a seat at the back of the bar, just before the server's area partition. I flipped my trench coat collar up and hunched my not-inconsiderable shoulders, which didn't prevent me getting several not-quite-nasty who the hell is that guy? looks from the clientele. Rose was there within thirty seconds, though, and from the even dirtier looks I got I figured that she was still enforcing the "one minute wait per poser point" rule she'd once explained to me while closing up the bar one night.

  "Hi, Michel." The greeting came with a dram of Lagavulin, neat, placed on the bar alongside a tumbler of ice water.

  "Thanks, Rose." I dropped a credit card onto the bar top. "Run it." She nodded genially and headed back to run the card. I picked up the wee dram and looked at it consideringly before swigging it hard.

  I paid for it. Lagavulin does not take well to cavalier fucking around.

  Once the burn in my esoph
agus and stomach had settled to a mild teary-eyed tingle of pain, I put the glass back down and pulled out the Patek Phillippe, laying it on the bar, open. I trusted whatever powers it had somehow acquired to prevent any nosy passers-by from peering into its now-depthless surface. Placed as it was parallel to the floor, I could see a portion of greenish-gray hide and a few tentacles. Moving my head closer to the watch somehow moved the point of view upwards towards me; with my eyes almost touching the surface, I could see Cthulhu's full upper body in repose. I lifted my head back and swigged again, thinking hard.

  Another figure slid into the seat next to me. I ignored it until a hand reached across and slid the pocket watch across the bar's surface to the next seat. I turned, pissed, and saw a familiar face looking at the watch, eyes close to the surface.

  "Well, well, well. Graduated to the big leagues, haven't we, monkey."

  "Malsumis, what the fuck are you doing here?"

  The other slid the watch back to me and waved at Rose, who produced a glass of something clear without further elaboration. Malsumis raised the glass to me in salute before downing its contents entire and placing the glass back on the stone surface with a sharp click. "Drinking."

  I did just that, in smaller amounts. "Last time I saw you, I think I threw you off a building."

  "You did. I'm not very happy about that."

  "Still, you look well."

  "Why thank you, Michel. It's my new tailor." Malsumis straightened what I could now see was a steel-grey full Windsor-ed tie over a dark slate-colored shirt with a deep sheen. Waving at Rose again, he turned in his seat to face me. I tensed, but he just cocked his head and looked me up and down. "I have to say, we're all a bit confused."

  "Who the hell is 'we'?"

  "Oh, the boys in the poker game. It's not often a human takes such a jump."

  "Mal, please start making sense, or pick up my bar tab." I waved at Rose too, and she nodded.

  Malsumis indicated the pocket watch without touching it. "Knowing you as I do, Michel, I'm going to take a small bet with myself. I'm going to bet you really have no idea what's just been done to you."

  It hurt, but it was safest. "Okay. I'll have to admit that."

  Malsumis' face brightened. "See? You can converse. I knew you had it in you."

  "Get to the point, Mal."

  "Michel, you've been marked. Your Contract is in that watch. You're under agreement with the talisman's backer - in this case, Old Yellow Orbs - to perform a service. In return, the backer has lent you power, here embodied in that watch, to assist you in your task. So I have to ask: What did you tell the old squid you were willing to do?"

  I thought about that while Rose arrived with more drinks. Malsumis, to my surprise, handed her a credit card of his own and murmured instructions to her which caused her to tear up the tab slip in the cordial glass before me on the bar. "Mal, are we cool at the moment?"

  The other looked surprised. "Of course. We're sitting here drinking. You're being remarkably sociable, compared to your usual. Maybe I should arrange to have you permanently confused?"

  I grimaced sourly at Malsumis, who smirked. "Thanks. I meant, how do we stand over the Empire State?"

  The Abenaki waved a hand. "Done is done. You have the spearhead, and you've charged it, I can tell. It's useless to me now. I could be irritated about that, but life's too damn long to bother. I'm not happy about the shooting me part, but again, I have to admit that it was certainly a novel experience, and you were right - I managed to fully regen before I hit the ground, so no permanent harm done." Teeth glinted momentarily. "Before you consider trying that again, I should give you fair warning that it won't work, now."

  "Noted." I sipped my second whisky. "I have no plans to try unless you make it necessary." Malsumis raised his glass again, silently, and we both drank for a time.

  "So, Mal. May I ask you about this here jump you said I've made? Will you tell me anything?"

  "Sure, kid." Malsumis' speech patterns tended to jump around. He'd seen all of American culture go by around him and had latched onto several archetypes which fought for space in his manifestation. I could never be sure if he was consciously imitating or just not paying attention. "Ask away."

  "I've thought about this pretty hard, and I don't recall either agreeing to perform any service for ... well, you know. I also don't recall him charging me to do anything."

  "That's amusing. What did he say?"

  "Well," I thought about it for a moment, "he acknowledged my presence, and accepted the message I'd been charged to give him, and said that even though he knew what I was going to say, I had to say it to fulfill my charge. I said it, and he stated my charge was complete."

  "Was that all? You're sure? When did he Frankenstein your timepiece?"

  "He said ... " I ran down. Malsumis took another drink, uncharacteristically patient. "Oh, shit."

  "Was that the sound of realization?"

  "Mal, he said 'for your grandmother's sake.' Right before he hit the watch."

  Malsumis actually choked on his drink. I stared at him, but he recovered quickly and placed the glass back down. By the time it hit the bar, he was in perfect control. "For your grandmother's sake?"

  "Yeah. What did he mean?"

  "You tell me, Michel. You're supposed to be good at this talking-to-the-powers routine."

  I scowled at him. "The shrink act, Mal. It's not you."

  The other shrugged. "Doesn't matter. What do you think he meant?"

  "Either he owed my grandmother something ... "

  "Unlikely."

  "Yeah, I think so too. Or somehow ... "

  "You're almost there, Michel. I can tell from the smoke."

  "Suck my monkey dick, Malsumis. Somehow ... he hit the watch because of something my grandmother did. Or didn't do."

  "Yes."

  "Oh, hell." I looked at Malsumis in horror. "Mal, what happens to those talismans you mentioned in the case of the contract holder's death?"

  The Abenaki god grinned at me with extremely sharp canines and eyes burning in his dark-skinned face. His straight black hair fell across his forehead as he answered. "The contract passes down, Michel. Inherited. The obligation traverses the generation, and thus also does any tool or talisman originally granted the contract holder."

  "You're telling me my gran’mere had a contract with fucking Cthulhu? "

  Malsumis finished his drink and waggled his thumb and forefinger at Rose for the check. "That's exactly what I'm saying, boy. And now, of course, that contract has passed to you."

  "But I have no idea what it is!"

  "Well," said the Amerindian Elder, signing some form of his name to the credit card slip without looking at me, "Maybe you'd better swallow some of that annoying French pride and go ask, hadn't you?"

  II

  Gas pressure disqeuilibrium among the urban rejecta

  * * *

  The wraith moved down Broadway, a disturbing ripple in the atmosphere of Manhattan with death on its spiderspun mind. It slipped past pedestrians and vehicles with the elliptical flutters of a windborne leaf's breeze, slowly sliding downtown past 12th Street in the evening lightplay of streetlamps and signage. I almost lost it when the light changed and traffic swung from 12th across the avenue, but the heat-shimmer of its presence outlined the shape of a person in the warble of halogen headlights.

  I didn't know why it was here, but I had a fairly good idea what it was here to do. Wraiths move slowly, patiently; they can be diverted by a cross breeze, but they never stop. Not once. They're implacable, and they'll follow their designated culmination until they reach it and wrap their fields of eldritch energy about it in autonomic ecstasy.

  They wander until they kill. Human nervous systems can't handle the wraith's embrace, but they'll only enfold their target, the person to whom they’ve been attuned.

  The real problem is that I was fairly sure this wasn't just a wraith. It was moving wrong. It looked like one, that much I was sure of; but it just di
dn't slide right. I worried at the thought, a bit of skepticism caught in a tooth, for the past two blocks. I'd seen it upon leaving the bar and turned to follow it automatically. My reluctance to accept it as what it seemed wouldn't leave me, and I wouldn't leave it. It fluttered down towards 11th, huddling close to the building edges on the right side of the sidewalk, as I sauntered after it.

  It took another few moments to settle in. The thing just wasn't fluttering enough. It was holding an almost purposeful path, something wraiths never do. It was slipping sideways once in a while, but always…

  …always to avoid something. Something solid.

  Which meant that even if that was a wraith, denizen of the air and servant of the ether, it wasn't alone. It was hiding something, or someone. I'd never heard of anything that could survive in the clutches of a wraith, and I didn't like the notion - the wraiths themselves came out only at night and only to kill.

  It floated around the corner of Tenth, turning right. I shambled after it, leaning on the corner and lighting a cigar. It was still moving down the block to the west as I stared past my lighter's blue jet, eyes focused halfway on the moving discontinuity. I took my focus off it for just a second, to actually light the cigar, and naturally that's when it vanished.

  I controlled my urge to leap after it and took a drag on the now-glowing stick. It couldn't have dissipated, unless it had killed, which would leave a corpse on the street. It still had to be there, somewhere. Putting my lighter into my inner trench coat pocket, I moved my hand from the pocket to the butt of the Beretta suspended vertically along my coat's inner side, and walked slowly westward.

  There was no traffic on Tenth, car or foot, at least as far as University. A few meters on, I caught a slice of blackness where the wraith had disappeared, and angled out towards the curb by reflex rather than walk close to the alley entrance. I lifted the Beretta from the holster that held it and held it loosely in my right hand along my trouser leg. With my left, I reached to my chest and found the familiar lump of the watch. As I drew even with the alley entrance, I pivoted to the right and pressed, willing a small wave of energy from the watch out into the alley.