“Okay.”
I got into the cab. And he returned to the scene of the crime. Which is how he got involved.
So if I hadn’t called Lopez to come get me out of jail, then Baron Samedi, the Lord of Death, wouldn’t have come looking for him on the dark, windswept night of thunder, terror, and angry spirits that would soon follow.
5
I awoke to the pain of a stiff neck, the irritation of light in my eyes, and the revulsion of a huge canine tongue washing my face.
I opened my mouth to protest against all of these sensations—and immediately had to spit out Nelli’s tongue, which was still sweeping across my face.
“Ugh! Blegh!” I sat bolt upright, wiping my face in disgust and shoving at the dog. “Stop that!”
Nelli panted cheerfully, happy to see me awake. Her long, thick, bony tail wagged back and forth with reckless abandon. Given its size, density, and current speed, it could probably bring down a sapling. Or kill a gargoyle.
“Is she awake, Nelli?” Max called from the back of bookshop.
Nelli gave a little crooning bark, then swiped her paw at me affectionately.
“Ow!” I looked down at the broad red marks she had just made on my forearm. “Your nails need cutting.”
Nelli was Max’s mystical familiar. She had emerged from another dimension in response to his summons for assistance in fighting Evil. Max had been in dire need of help, since (brace yourself for a shock) New York City was proving to be a busy battleground between the forces of light and darkness; and Max’s previous assistant, the apprentice Hieronymus, hadn’t really worked out so well—what with being the maniacal, murderous summoner of a virgin-raping, people-eating demon and all.
I wondered if the daunting size of her mission accounted for Nelli’s own daunting size; because apart from whatever advantage her physique might give her in combating mystical forces, she was an inconveniently large animal to keep in Manhattan. Easily as big as a Shetland pony, Nelli was well-muscled beneath her short, smooth, tan fur. Her massive head was long and square-jawed, and her teeth were so big they might look terrifying if the immense size of her floppy ears wasn’t such a distraction from them. Her paws—which, like her face, were darker in color than the rest of her—were each nearly the size and density of a baseball bat, and the skin of her feet was as rough as coarse sandpaper.
Nelli’s long, pink tongue hung out of her mouth as she gazed at me with uncomplicated good cheer.
“Max?” I croaked sleepily.
“Coming!”
It was morning. I was in Max’s establishment, Zadok’s Rare and Used Books, which was in a townhouse on a side street in Greenwich Village. After coming here in the wee hours, I had fallen asleep in one of the prettily-upholstered chairs in the reading area near the fireplace.
The shop had well-worn hardwood floors, a broad-beamed ceiling, dusky-rose walls, and rows and rows of tall bookcases overflowing with volumes about all aspects of the occult. Some of the books were modern paperbacks, many were old hardback volumes that smelled musty, a few were rare leather-bound books of considerable value, and they were all printed in a wide variety of languages.
The bookstore had a small customer base and got some foot traffic from curious passersby, but it was basically just a modest beard for Max’s real work—protecting New York and its inhabitants from Evil—so he didn’t concentrate on increasing its revenue. Meanwhile, I didn’t know whether he had invested wisely over his long (very long) life or whether the Magnum Collegium, which had sent him here, paid him well. Either way, Max always seemed to have a healthy cash flow.
He thoughtfully kept a small refreshments station in the bookstore, stocked with coffee, tea, cookies, and snuff (yes, snuff) for his customers. It sat near a large, careworn walnut table with books, papers, an abacus, writing implements, and other paraphernalia on it. I was about to haul myself out of that chair—which was comfortable for sitting and reading, but which had not been designed for sleeping—and make a pot of coffee when Max ambled around the corner of a bookcase and greeted me. He was carrying a breakfast tray.
“Good morning! When Nelli and I came downstairs and found you here, sound asleep, I thought perhaps you would like some breakfast when you awoke. You looked rather, er . . .” His gaze moved briefly to the generous amount of cleavage exposed by my tight leopard-print top, shifted awkwardly to my short red skirt, and then moved to my hair—which was probably a rat’s nest by now. He frowned with concern. “Are you all right, Esther?”
“Coffee,” I said in a gravelly voice.
“Of course!” He set down the tray on the end table, within my reach. I saw that he had brought me mini-bagels, cream cheese, and orange juice as well as coffee.
“Thank you,” I said gratefully.
“Delighted!”
Dr. Maximillian Zadok (Oxford University, class of 1678) beamed at me as he sat in the chair near mine. He was a short, slightly chubby, white man with innocent blue eyes, longish white hair, and a tidy beard. Fluent in multiple languages, he spoke English with the faint trace of an accent, reflecting his origins in Eastern Europe centuries ago. Although he didn’t look a day over seventy, Max’s age was closer to three hundred fifty years. In his youth, while apprenticing to a master of alchemy, he had unwittingly drunk a potion that substantially slowed his aging process—a potion which neither he nor his colleagues had ever been able to reproduce. He wasn’t immortal, but he’d be around for a few more generations—unless the Big Apple finished him off sooner than that.
I used the little milk pitcher on the breakfast tray to pour some milk into the large mug of coffee, then lifted the mug gratefully to my lips and took a long, deep swallow. Luckily, it wasn’t too hot.
“I was working last night,” I began, aware of Max’s concerned and curious gaze, “and—”
“Working at . . . ?” He lifted his brows inquisitively, evidently realizing I wouldn’t have worn this outfit to wait tables at Bella Stella in Little Italy.
“The Dirty Thirty.”
“Ah!” His expression cleared as my physical appearance this morning began to make more sense. “This is the costume of the unfortunate woman whom you’re playing in the television drama?”
I nodded. “And I got, er, mugged.”
“Esther!”
“Purse gone, wallet gone, phone gone . . .” I sighed and ran a hand over my matted hair. “Hairbrush gone.” I took another swallow of coffee, hoping I would soon start feeling human. “Anyhow, after a pretty eventful evening”—including two gargoyles, a prison cell, my ex-would-be-boyfriend, and a severed hand, thanks—“I was in a cab on my way home, it was the middle of the night, and I realized that I couldn’t get into my apartment. Keys gone.” And, genius that I was, I kept my spare set of keys inside the apartment. “So I told the cab driver to bring me here.” He had smirked (again) at me when I paid him with Lopez’s twenty dollar bill. “And I let myself in. I hope that’s all right.”
Since Max couldn’t keep track of his keys, he locked the front door by using a spell that kept out strangers when the shop was closed but allowed him access at all times. Since I was a regular visitor, Max had modified the spell so that I, too, could enter the shop at will.
“Of course you came here, my dear,” Max said soothingly. “You should have woken me!”
I shook my head. “It was so late. And all I wanted to do by then was close my eyes.”
“But you could have come upstairs.” Max lived one floor above the bookshop. “Nelli doesn’t mind giving up her bed for a friend.”
Nelli’s bed, which was the couch in Max’s sparsely furnished living room, smelled heavily of Nelli and was liberally coated with her hair.
“I didn’t want to disturb Nelli,” I said tactfully. “Or you.”
“Nonsense! Anyhow, I was barely asleep, I assure you.” He added, “There is also Hieronymus’ bed, in his old quarters on the top floor.”
“No!” I said more sharply than I had intended. Ma
x blinked. I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that . . . Well, after what we did to him—even though he deserved it . . . I mean, since Hieronymus left . . .” Although we had, in fact, killed him, this was the phrase I had asked Max to agree to use whenever we referred to what had happened to the young sorcerer. It seemed safer than carelessly voicing the facts. Especially since we numbered a police detective among our acquaintances. “I just wouldn’t feel comfortable sleeping in his bed,” I concluded. All things considered, even the idea of touching anything that had belonged to Hieronymus repelled me.
Max nodded in understanding. “Well, in any event, I hope the chair was not too incommodious last night.”
“I wouldn’t want to make a habit of sleeping in it.” I rolled my head around as I tried to ease the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. “But it was a blessing to be able to sink into it a few hours ago, believe me.”
“I am most distressed by your misadventure, Esther! Did your assailant harm you?”
“My assail . . . Oh, the mugging.” I paused in mid-stretch to meet his gaze as I recalled things about those gargoyles that disturbed me all over again: the dirty claws, the fierce growling, the rotten breath, the physical strength . . . “Max, the strangest thing happened last night. Lopez thinks it was a prank, and maybe he’s right—but it all seemed so real!”
“Lopez?” Max sat up straighter. “Detective Lopez was present?”
“That was later. After the mugging. He was helping me.”
Max lowered his eyes and absently patted Nelli on the head as she sat beside him, her wistful gaze fixed on the bagels and cream cheese. “And, er, how was Detective Lopez?”
“Fine,” I said, trying to figure out where to start my account of the night’s events.
“Ah. Good. I’m glad to hear it. Good.” Max kept his gaze lowered as he asked, oh-so-casually, “And he was . . . much like his usual self? You observed nothing . . . unexpected?”
I shrugged. “Well, it was about three o’clock in the morning, so he wasn’t quite his usual . . . Oh!” My dry, sleep-deprived eyes flew wide open as I realized what Max meant. “Oh.” Staring at his face, I took another long sip of my coffee. “Oh.”
“Hmm.”
I said, “You mean . . .”
“Yes.” He met my eyes. “Well?”
I thought it over. “No . . .” I shook my head and said more firmly, “No.”
“I see.”
“So you still suspect . . .”
Max and I hadn’t talked about it. Not since the last time we had seen Lopez, when he had told me he couldn’t date me anymore. I had occasionally thought about it since then, of course; but I mostly tried not to think about Lopez at all, and when I did think about him . . . Well, I’m only human, so, in all honesty, that wasn’t what I thought about. But looking at Max now, I realized that . . . “You’ve been thinking about it.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “However, since the young man caused you some heartbreak, it seemed to me that my mentioning his name would be insensitive. And since my thoughts on this matter, in any case, are mere speculation based only on suggestive circumstances . . . Well.” He gave a little shrug. “But since you happened to see him last night, I must admit to some curiosity.”
I again remembered that night, more than two months ago, at the Church of St. Monica in Little Italy. I was in the clutches of a ruthless murderer who was handling me brutally and threatening to kill me unless Lopez allowed him to flee to safety, with me as his hostage. The prospect of stopping the killer was thwarted by the pitch blackness inside the church, where all the lights had been disabled. . . .
I was choking, close to blacking out, with my captor’s hand around my throat as chaos ensued in the darkened church, with Lopez frantic to find me. I heard his voice . . .
“Esther! Goddamn it, where are you? Esther!” And then Lopez screamed, “I want LIGHTS!”
And the lights came on, blazing throughout the church.
That sudden shift from darkness to light may well have saved my life that night.
There was no logical explanation for how or why the deliberately sabotaged electrical system had revived at the very moment that Lopez demanded light. Max, however, thought there might be a mystical explanation for it: The sudden illumination could be the unconscious imposition of Lopez’s will on matter and energy at a moment when he feared for my life.
(He cared about me; he just wouldn’t date me.)
“As I confided to you during the funeral of our enemy at St. Monica’s,” Max said to me now, “I believe we need to keep our minds open to the possibility that Detective Lopez has talents of which he is unaware.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” I admitted. I knew that on a good day, Lopez would be amused and dismissive if I mentioned Max’s vague suspicion to him. And on a bad day? He’d go back to threatening me with remand and a psych evaluation. “But apart from estimating the age of a severed hand, he didn’t evince any unexpected talents last night.”
Max blinked. “A severed hand?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That has a lot to do with why the subject you mention didn’t cross my mind. Other things were claiming my attention.”
“Whose hand was severed?” Max asked, aghast.
“Well . . .” I shrugged. “He told me his name was Darius Phelps.”
I recounted the night’s events to Max. He listened with focused interest, interrupting only to ask for clarification or additional details, a faint frown of concentration on his face. When I was finished, I realized I was hungry, and so I picked up a little bagel and started spreading cream cheese on it. Nelli’s eyes followed my movements as intently if the fate of this dimension depended on what I would do next with that bagel. Avoiding her gaze, I bit into it and chewed while I waited for Max’s reaction to my tale.
“I don’t wish to alarm you . . .” he said slowly.
“Too late now,” I said. “A guy with a sword, an attack by gargoyles, a severed hand, arrest, and imprisonment kind of took care of alarming me.”
“What you experienced may not have been, as Detective Lopez thinks, a mundane prank.”
“Actually, he thinks it was an elaborate prank.”
Max shook his head. “By ‘mundane,’ I mean—”
“Ah. Right. The opposite of mystical.”
“Yes.” He stroked his beard as he pondered the ramifications of my misadventure. “What intrigues me is that the man you met is reputedly dead.”
“That intrigued the police, too.” I paused, recalling the cops’ merriment as they released me last night. “Well, no, I suppose ‘intrigued’ is the wrong word.”
“Your encounter with Darius Phelps may not be unrelated to the thorny problem which has lately been keeping me awake until late at night and making my sleep restless.”
“Oh? Is this problem the reason you say you were ‘barely asleep’ when I got here around four o’clock in the morning?”
“Indeed,” Max said. “There has been a recent change in the normal current of mystical energy here. The familiar flow seems to be . . .” Max made a vague gesture, trying to explain an esoteric sensation in ordinary terms. “. . . Turning in the wrong direction. Or being turned.”
I took another hearty swallow of coffee and thought this over. “Max, I have no idea what you’ve just said.”
“That’s understandable, since I’m finding it difficult to explain it adequately.”
Nelli watched with mournful longing as I finished my bagel.
I said to Max, “Well, I know that you can sense things that mundanes can’t—such as supernatural disturbances in this dimension.”
“Strictly speaking, the word ‘supernatural’ is inaccurate. Virtually all phenomena are natural, but some are mystical and some are not.”
“Yes. Whatever.” We had talked about this before. “What I mean is, I realize that you’re sensitive to phenomena that others don’t even know exist.”
Max’s ability
to sense mystical changes or imbalances in his environment had saved me from a fate worse than bad reviews. We first met when he had prevented me from becoming the next victim in a series of mysterious disappearances. He had sensed a disturbance in the fabric of this dimension when performers began involuntarily vanishing during disappearing acts onstage, and this had led him to me—right before I would have become the next disappearee.
So if Max was again experiencing a sensation that he identified as a disturbance in the mystical energy of this dimension, then I took it seriously. Even more so if he thought it related to what I had seen last night. So I urged him to take another stab at explaining it.
“Picture the energy of life,” he said, “as a river that flows steadily in one direction, ever onward, from its source to the sea. It may become a dangerous torrent in spring, it may dry up during a drought and nearly disappear, it may swell and flood the surrounding landscape after heavy rains, but it always continues flowing in the same direction.”
Unable to withstand the burden of Nelli’s longing gaze, I slipped her a bagel as I said to Max, “Go on.”
“Now imagine that while boating on the river, or fishing in it, or while wading through it at a ford, you notice that certain portions of the river, against all experience and logic, are suddenly moving in the opposite direction. From the sea to the source, as it were.”
Nelli finished gulping down her bagel, wagged her tail, and gazed hopefully at me. “No,” I said to her. And then to Max: “Okay. I get it. If this is happening to the river of life-energy, so to speak, then that means . . . Um, what does that mean?”
“Instead of a consistent flow of energy traveling, as it should, from birth to life to death, some energy lately seems to be moving in the reverse direction.”
I frowned. “From death to life?”
“Yes. I cannot explain it or account for it. But that is what I sense.”
“And then last night . . .” I shuddered as a sudden chill passed over me. “I spoke with a man who has supposedly been dead for three weeks.”
Unsympathetic Magic Page 6