by Harvey Click
It looked like a good book with something worthwhile to say. He read the first page and then the second page and then carried it with him, still reading while he walked, to the sofa in the living room and lay down and kept reading until his bladder forced him to get up. He looked at the clock on the fireplace mantle and was astonished to see it was nearly 5:00 p.m.
***
Conan the Cimmerian was a big guy with blue eyes just like Jason’s and long flowing black hair, though Jason liked to picture him with golden hair instead. Sometimes he wore the robes of a king, but he was more comfortable in a cheap tunic or even a barbarian loincloth, just as Jason could wear a fancy raspberry suit one day but be more comfortable the next in old blue jeans.
Conan seemed to find a different beautiful woman in every story, and if they got killed he didn’t waste his time mourning them, and if they didn’t get killed he left them behind without a second thought once he’d had his fill. Conan certainly wouldn’t allow someone like Holly Hempy to wrap him around her fat finger, and if someone like Rue gave him any guff he’d most likely lop off her head. Conan fought evil sorcerers, hideous monsters, brawny pirates armed with cutlasses, and even vast hordes of warriors coming at him with swords and axes, so for him a skinny witch woman would be child’s play.
Jason had never before enjoyed reading, but now he was enthralled. He no longer cared that he felt sick and was trapped in a smelly little apartment; all that mattered was how Conan was going to get himself out of whatever deadly mess he happened to find himself in at the moment. Drew’s magic seemed paltry compared to this magic, the sort of wizardry that brought strange people and their wild adventures in fantastic places to life in his mind just because some words were printed on paper.
He had never paid much attention in geography classes, so certain place names were unfamiliar to him, such as Cimmeria, Hyrkania, Aquilonia, Vanaheim, or Asgard. Maybe someday he’d look them up on a map, but exactly where they were located didn’t matter much because the writer described them so colorfully that Jason half believed he’d actually seen them himself.
He wasn’t sure when Conan had lived, but clearly it was long ago, probably even before the Civil War, and Jason found it interesting that in those days everyone believed in magic. Maybe some of the dragons and monsters and other marvels the writer described were exaggerations, but clearly in those olden days magic was plainly visible just about anywhere you looked.
“Them was magic times,” Jason said out loud.
He rubbed his eyes, which were starting to feel scratchy like his throat, and peered at the gloomy living room, scarcely able to believe he was here instead of in a castle somewhere in Cimmeria.
But these were magic times too, he realized. Nowadays only a few people seemed to believe in magic, such as Rue and Drew and Mingo, so it stayed hidden in dark corners here and there where only a few people bothered to look. But the fact it was hidden didn’t make it any less real or less dangerous.
And here he was, guarding a precious book of magic against a wicked witch, something Conan himself might do. He got up and danced around the living room for a minute with his right wrist wriggling back and forth, pretending he was fighting off five or six of Rue’s henchmen with a sword, but the effort soon tired him and he sat back down.
He started feeling hungry around 7:00 and went to the kitchen. There was very little food in the refrigerator, and the little that was there was obviously spoiled; even the milk smelled sour. He wondered if Rue had hexed the food or if it had just been in there too long.
In a cupboard he found a few cans of soup, mostly bean soup, so he opened one but then had to wash a saucepan because there were no clean ones. After he heated the soup he ate it out of the pan because there weren’t any clean bowls. It tasted better than he expected, but it seemed to make him hungrier, so he heated another can and ate that too.
Then he went back to the sofa and chewed tobacco and read some more. Conan was in an awful fix at the moment, and Jason had no idea how he’d get out of it.
Around midnight the phone rang, and the sudden noise in the silent apartment startled him terribly. It could be Hatter, or maybe even Drew calling from the hospital, but he didn’t want to answer it. Reason told him there couldn’t be any danger in a phone call, but intuition told him there could. It kept ringing, ring after ring after ring, so at last he picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“You’re thinking of home,” Rue said.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“What is home?” she asked.
“It’s a place where you can put all your weapons aside and unfold yourself like a blanket and trust that no one will ever cause you any harm,” he said.
“You’re thinking that my home is your true home,” she said.
He was about to say yes when a loud noise right above his head jarred him from his trance. Apparently whoever lived upstairs had just come home and dropped something on the floor. He heard someone say, “Shit!” and heard someone else say, “Damn you’re lucky that didn’t break or I’d break your fucking head.”
He stared at the receiver and put it back in its cradle. He couldn’t quite remember just exactly what had been said, but he knew Rue had been talking to him and he knew she had been trying to hex him into leaving Drew’s apartment so she could steal his book.
But he was Jason the Cimmerian, and he’d be damned if he’d let her do it.
He got up and wedged a kitchen chair under the knob of the back door and another chair under the knob of the front door, and then he checked all the window locks again. He wished he had a big sword like Conan’s so he could lop off her head if she stuck it through one of the windows.
“You ain’t getting in here, you wicked hag!” he said out loud.
The people upstairs put on some loud music, and it seemed strange to him that Drew lived beneath young people, probably some crazy drunk students who had come home early on a Friday night because they couldn’t get laid. He wondered how Drew could write a massive book in the midst of this racket.
The music sounded awful, and now Jason couldn’t read or even think straight. He tried to figure out what Rue’s next move might be, but somebody with a voice like jagged scrap metal was screaming insane words:
I got needle-point eyes,
got a glue-sniff mind,
got my teeth filed down
with a coffin-lid grind!
I got a pin through my nose,
got pinhead needs,
got knife-sharp thoughts
and a god that bleeds!
I got bones on my breath,
got strange on the brain,
got lightning-flash nerves
in the black night rain!
I’m a punk, I’m a punk,
I’m a junk-sunk hunk of spunk and funk!
When that song ended, another one began that sounded just like it. Jason spent several minutes searching everywhere for Drew’s bourbon and eventually found a bottle of it hidden in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. He rinsed a glass, poured about three shots in it and went back to the sofa.
The whiskey made him feel a little better, and when the glass was empty he wanted to pour another but didn’t. A night watchman needed to stay sober.
The people upstairs shut off their music a little after 2:00 a.m., and now the apartment sounded way too quiet. The rain seemed to have stopped, and he went to the front window to see. He pulled aside the drape and let out a sudden yip like a hurt dog.
Rue was staring in at him.
Her face was just a few inches from the glass. Her skin looked moon-white in the darkness and her eyes seemed to glow with an eerie green light that held him motionless like an insect pinned to a board.
She smiled.
Conan would have driven his sword right through the glass to pierce her wicked heart, but Jason didn’t have a sword, and besides he didn’t even think he could move his arms. He didn’t know if he was frozen by fear or mag
ic, but he couldn’t make his muscles move. He forced his eyelids shut, and once he could no longer see her green eyes he forced his trembling hand to drop the drape.
He hurried away from the window and shut off the two table lamps in the living room and the ceiling light in the kitchen. He poured a generous amount of bourbon in his glass and gulped it quickly in the darkness.
After the whiskey had strengthened his nerves, he crept back to the front window. Standing well to the side of it so if she was still there, at least her eyes wouldn’t be close to his, he jerked the drape aside and saw nothing out there but the vague glow of a streetlight halfway down the block. He let the drape fall and made sure the edge overlapped the other drape so there’d be no gap for her to peep through.
He sat down on the sofa and poured some more whiskey. He sat there in the dark with his back straight like a sentry’s, his ears alert to any sound, his muscles tense and ready to spring instantly into action. When at last he saw a hint of morning light past the edges of the drapes, he lay back and shut his eyes, but even as he drifted half asleep he was still listening.
Part Seven
A Weariness of the Flesh
Chapter Twenty-One
The phone jarred Jason awake. He sat up instantly but hesitated before picking up the receiver.
“Is my manuscript safe?” Drew asked.
“Just a minute.”
Jason dropped the receiver and hurried to the study. It was there, all four piles of it.
When he picked up the receiver again he heard Drew saying, “Are you there, Jason? Jason! Where are you?”
“I’m here and so’s your book,” he said.
“What happened? Where did you go?”
“I went to your study to make sure your book was okay.”
“What do you mean?” Drew asked. “Do you mean you weren’t sure it was okay? You sound groggy, were you sleeping on the job?”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly 8:00.”
“I mighta dozed off a few minutes, but not much. Rue was here last night. I seen her peeping in through the front window. She looked all strange, like she was glowing or something, and her eyes was shining like nasty green lights. I reckon she was trying to put a spell on me.”
“It might have been an astral projection,” Drew said. “She may be sending phantoms to confuse you while she sneaks in through a different window or door. I don’t know whether she has advanced that far in her studies, but it’s possible.”
“She called here on the phone last night too,” Jason said. “I can’t rightly remember what she said, but I bet my butt she was trying to put a whammy on me so she could bust in here.”
“What do you mean, you can’t remember?”
“I just can’t. All I remember is them idiots living upstairs made some noise, and then I seen I was holding the phone receiver against my ear and I hung it up. I can’t remember picking up the phone or talking on it, but for some reason I knew it was Rue. It’s all like some kinda bad dream.”
“This is very troubling,” Drew said. “I suspect she’s implanted a post-hypnotic trigger in your subconscious mind. The trigger will be a password or, more likely, a pass-phrase, a group of words that will put you under her spell. If she speaks the phrase to you, even over the phone, you’ll immediately be under her power. It’s even possible she has stolen the manuscript already but you’re unaware of the theft. Go into my study and pick a page from one of the piles and read me the first sentence.”
Jason went to the study, picked the top page from one of the piles, returned to the phone and read, with a certain amount of difficulty: “ ‘There is no such thing as nothing. Even quantum vacuum is alive with zero-point energy, and in the seeming void particles burst continuously in and out of existence. This energy is one of the ten Sephirot and therefore an emanation of Ohr Ein Sof, the Atik Yomin, within the created universe.’ ”
“Very well,” Drew said. “So far so good, my boy. Now listen closely. In the top drawer of the filing cabinet in my study, you’ll find some blank tapes. Put one in the recorder, and every time the phone rings turn on the recorder and put the microphone right up against the earpiece of the receiver. If we can find out what her pass-phrase is, we can neutralize it.”
“What do you mean ‘we’? There ain’t nobody here ‘cept me. Look here, Drew, this watchman job ain’t easy. Can’t you send somebody over here to help me?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t,” Drew said. “I regret to say that Rue Anne was pretty much my only friend. My list of regular clients has become, um, rather skimpy of late, and there aren’t any I could trust with the task.”
“I don’t like this,” Jason said. “That phone could ring any minute now, and she might could have me marching ‘round here under her spell like some kinda dumb idiot. Or maybe she’s staring in through a window at me right now with them horrible green eyes. Plus she already put some kinda hex on me and made me sick as a dog.”
“Well, I’m sick too,” Drew said. “Yesterday I had a fatal heart attack, remember? It was brought on by cyanide. Rue Anne tried to murder me with poison. Fortunately I was able to speak when they brought me in—I told them I’d been poisoned, and they found cyanide in my blood. They gave me an antidote, so I’m feeling much better, but now they want to do some tests to see if my heart is damaged.
“Jason, I promise I’ll get out of here tomorrow. I don’t think they’ll allow it today, but tomorrow I’ll demand to be released—and if they say no I’ll leave anyway. The only problem is, I need some clothes. I seem to have arrived in my underwear.”
“I know somebody who might could bring you some.”
“All right, but don’t allow him in my apartment unless you’re absolutely sure he can be trusted,” Drew said.
“He’s okay. His name’s Hatter.”
“I don’t give a damn what his name is, don’t let him near my manuscript!”
“Okay.”
“Very well. In the meantime, you must exercise the utmost vigilance and keep watch for me one more day.”
“I’ll try, but this ain’t easy and I’m thinking maybe when it’s done you could—”
“You must do more than try. My dear boy, this is probably the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life. You have no idea how much power Rue Anne would gain if she got her hands on that manuscript. It’s filled with hermetic secrets she must never know. Well, I have to go. There’s a pretty nurse here wanting to wheel me down the hall so they can poke me with some long needles. Bye.”
***
Jason tried to call Hatter, but there was no answer. He found a blank tape in the study and installed it in the recorder, then went to the kitchen and made coffee. He searched through the cupboards for cereal but couldn’t find any. The little bit of food in the refrigerator looked even slimier and moldier than yesterday, so he ended up heating a can of beef stew for breakfast.
Despite his complaint to Drew, he was feeling much better—maybe it had been a twenty-four-hour flu after all, instead of a hex—but now with his strength more-or-less returned he very badly wanted to get out of the apartment. He stared out the kitchen window at the scruffy little back yard and the alley beyond it. Now that all the rain had been wrung out of the sky, it was clear and blue and chirping with pleasure. Surely Rue wouldn’t risk breaking into the apartment in broad daylight, and just a little walk around the block in the fresh air would feel so good.
But no, he had promised.
He scrubbed the filthy tub, and when he started his bath water he wondered how Drew managed to take baths. There was a wooden chair beside the tub, so probably he eased himself out of his wheelchair onto the chair, lifted his legs over the rim, and used his brawny arms to lower himself into the water. But that wouldn’t be easy, and getting himself out would be even harder, so maybe he just sat on the wooden chair and sponged himself clean. That didn’t sound especially easy either.
He wondered how Drew used the toilet. Probably
he backed his wheelchair against the side of it and reached across to the metal rail screwed to the wall on the other side and pulled on it to scoot his butt off his chair to the toilet. He wondered how many thousands of times Drew had needed to scoot his useless body from his wheelchair to the crapper, day after day, year after year in this gloomy little apartment without friends or money or any reason to be happy.
He felt dizzy, and he sat down on the wooden chair by the tub where Drew’s bare butt must have been planted a thousand times. The figurine he’d broken, the photograph and scrapbook on Drew’s dresser, the sad song and story on the tape recorder, Drew’s shoulders shaking as he sobbed at Mirror Lake, all of this came flooding over him and made him feel even sicker than he had yesterday.
He didn’t understand why he was feeling this way. He had enough problems of his own, why should he care about Drew’s? Let Drew worry about his own screwed-up life.
Drew, who thought of him as his own unborn son. He thought of the many times he’d ridiculed the crippled man in his mind, and somehow this triggered the much worse memory of that terrible night when he’d been too drunk to help his own father.
The tub was nearly full. He shut off the faucet and stared at the ripples. Drew had said something about ripples, and though it hadn’t made much sense the gist seemed to be that whatever you do keeps going on and affecting things forever. Nothing’s ever really forgotten or forgiven—the shit you do just piles up and keeps on stinking till the end of time. One night of fun, and now Holly was going to have a baby that would someday have babies of its own, and the ripples kept rippling, and if nobody took responsibility for them they’d make an awful mess.
He undressed and got in the tub. He couldn’t put off calling Holly any longer, and while he bathed he ran excuses through his head: “I been too sick to get outta bed the past couple days.” She would say, “Then why didn’t you call?” and he’d say, “That flophouse where I been living don’t have no phone. Soon as I could walk I come to Drew’s to use his phone, and then I seen him laying dead on the floor.”