Blaine stood up and stepped toward the bar. Tom was still holding the chess piece, but hastily replaced it when Blaine gave him a crooked grin and said, “You up for a game, Tommy? Shall I spot you that rook? Hmm? No?”
Blaine played chess a lot at the Los Angeles Chess Club and frequently pointed out that he was rated a Class A player, which was apparently the best.
Tom’s hands were shaking, and he had set the castle piece on the edge of the board; it fell over and rolled off the bar and hit the floor, and Tom bumped his head bending to pick it up.
Blaine shook his head and turned toward the table. “If we can find the talisman, and get custody, get him contained,” he said, “we can threaten him with its destruction, if need be. And we can probably keep him quiescent by telling him we’re looking for a body he can move into. We’ll use a Ouija board—have him list what characteristics he’d like, how we should prepare the person—and then we could tell him we’re searching high and low for somebody. We could string it out for years!”
An old man with a long white beard stirred at the far end of the table. It was William, who Tom was pretty sure was Benjamin’s eldest son, probably over ninety by now. He was always frowning and dignified, but Lucy said he looked like a sidekick in a western movie, who would at some point do a comical dance in the dusty street outside the saloon. “How will you contain him?” he asked in a gravelly voice.
“Uh,” said Blaine, “Colin?”
Colin frowned. “Sink his talisman in some non-conductive fluid like glycerine so he won’t arc and get one of us. And in some solidly moored container, so he can’t shake it over. We’ve got to—”
“Glycerine’s hygroscopic,” objected Alan. “It attracts water, which would have minerals in it, so before long it would be a conductor. Transformer oil is what you want.”
“What if it’s a houseplant?” demanded William testily. “A bonsai tree?”
“Lucy, did he have a bonsai?” asked Blaine.
Lucy just shook her head and shrugged.
“Then we can make a Faraday cage out of coathangers and tinfoil or something,” said Colin impatiently. “But we have to find it.”
Evelyn leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “It’s a big house,” she said, “the wizard’s castle. Cluttered up with a hundred years’ worth of junk.”
“And he might have it off-site,” added Alan. “God knows who might touch it.”
A woman Tom didn’t even recognize shoved her chair back and stood up. “Oh, why did he think he could still drive, at his age?” she wailed. “Damned old fool.”
Beside Tom, Lucy clenched her fists. “The Highway Patrol says the other car cut him off!” she burst out. “And he was smarter than any of you!”
That was certainly true. Tom himself was barely able to read and write, but though many of the other siblings were MENSA members, they had little to show in the way of accomplishments, while old Benjamin had read Greek and Latin and could do math that was all parentheses and Greek letters, and had written books on philosophy and physics, and had even written several volumes of poetry. When Tom had still lived here, he had often wandered through the old man’s top-floor library, pulling down books and trying to understand them. He had always been chagrined, and vaguely surprised, to find that he could not.
“Said the Madwoman of Chaillot,” muttered Imogene.
“We need to search the house, top to bottom,” said Alan. “Lucy, are there rubber gloves somewhere? A lot of them?”
“Search in pairs,” interjected Skipper, “and not ones who are friendly with each other, like Colin and Imogene.”
Colin and Imogene looked at each other with mutual disdain. “Friendly?” whispered Imogene, shaking her head.
“Or Tom and Lucy,” said Evelyn. “In fact, Tom shouldn’t—”
Abruptly an old rotary-dial telephone on a bookshelf beside the bar began ringing. Several people at the table jumped, and Blaine slapped Lucy’s hand away when she reached for the receiver.
“That’s him!” exclaimed Evelyn. “He’s been listening to us! You and your…transformer oil!”
“Shut up!” said Blaine. “I’ll get it.”
“Put it on speaker!” called Colin.
“You don’t trust me? Anyway, this doesn’t have a speaker.” Blaine picked up the receiver. “Hello?” After a few seconds he shook his head and hung up. “Nothing, nobody there.”
“Oh, he was there all right,” said old William. “And as soon as he gets another body, he’ll be here. Displeased.”
“Shut up!” said Blaine again, more loudly. “What if it was him? He hasn’t got a body yet. So let’s find his damned talisman before he gets one. Pair up, everybody, and no allies together.”
“Tommy should leave,” said Evelyn. “Gertrude said he was bad luck or something. No offense, Tommy! And Lucy should just wait here in the dining room.”
Gertrude had been Tom’s mother, Benjamin’s wife before Vivian. All Tom knew about her was that she had been some sort of fortune-teller, and had killed herself in 2005. He had been a small child at the time, and he had no recollection of her, though in old photographs she was beautiful. He had never heard that she’d said he was bad luck, but he was far too intimidated in this crowd to ask about it.
“Yes,” said Imogene, “he couldn’t understand what sort of thing to look for anyway. Tom, it’s been lovely seeing you, but you might as well scram.”
Tom had been enjoying the air-conditioned draft on his face, but he took one last sip of his Coke and set the can down on the bar. “Okay.”
“I’ll drive you back to your apartment,” said Lucy. “And I should go see to things at Forest Lawn. You and I are the ones who knew him best, but they don’t want our help here.”
The woman who had called Benjamin an old fool bared her teeth and made pushing-away gestures. “Oh, Lucy, don’t say that. It’s just that you might be on his side.”
“We’re all on his side,” protested Blaine. “We want what’s best for him, which is…”
“To step down,” suggested Colin. “Wizard emeritus.”
“Give somebody else a chance,” agreed Skipper, narrowly eyeing his siblings.
Tom and Lucy crossed to the stairs leading down, and behind him Tom heard Imogene laugh and say, “Who will bell the cat?”
The floor below the dining room was a maze of tiny interconnected rooms, all fretted from floor to ceiling with shelves, and no room big enough for more than one chair. The inner ones were lit by dim yellow lamps attached to the ceiling, and all of them were permeated with the vanilla smell of old book paper and, faintly, the tarry reek of the old man’s pipe tobacco. As Tom and Lucy threaded their way along the shortest path through the rooms to the bottom door and the stairs down to the parking lot, Tom glanced wistfully at all the book spines facing him on the shelves.
“What are all these about?” he asked Lucy, waving at a shelf they were passing.
“Down here are all the books that lost their charm for him,” said Lucy. “Religion, mostly—Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald. He decided they weren’t good for his psyche, but lately I seem to spend most of my time down here.”
Tom reflected that he knew no more now than he had before he’d asked. “My—” he began; then he started again: “Do you know why my mother would have said I was bad luck?”
Lucy paused in one of the doorways to look back at him. “No, I never heard anything like that. Evelyn’s head is just full of old gossip and superstitions jumbled together anyway.” She gave him a troubled look, and the air was a few degrees cooler. “You want to come along with me to Forest Lawn?”
“I— No, not yet. I’m sorry. I just—”
She nodded. “Never mind; I know.” She led the way through another tiny room. “I think you and I were the only ones who loved him.”
“What happens if they don’t find his…talisman? If nobody finds it?”
“I don’t know.” They had reached the back door, and she pulled it open. Sunlight spilled across the worn wooden floor, and they could hear the breezes moving across the hills. Lucy’s plaid skirt fluttered around her thin legs. “Maybe he’d just be—you know, dead.”
Tom was squinting in the sudden glare. “Is that maybe the best thing?”
“The way they all talk—maybe.”
Tom followed her down the cement steps.
“They’ve got me blocked in,” Lucy said crossly. “I’m going to have to drive over the flower bed to get out.”
“That’s okay, I can walk back down to Westshire.”
“No, I couldn’t stand staying in the house with them. The flowers are all dead anyway.”
* * *
—
Tom’s apartment was in an old building on Franklin, and when he had waved goodbye to Lucy as she drove away in her Buick, he trudged up the dozen red-painted steps to the front door. His rooms were on the second floor at the back, with windows overlooking a parking lot and garage and the back windows of another apartment building.
As he trudged down the dim corridor toward his door—tired, and glad Lucy had saved him the walk back to the bus stop—he saw a streak of daylight across the carpet. His door was partly open, and he caught the scent of cigarette smoke.
He stopped, then slowly stepped forward and pushed the door open.
The kitchen was straight ahead, with its view of palm trees and roofs and other people’s windows, and the living room was to the left, but a curl of smoke hung in the air to the right, in his bedroom doorway.
He swallowed. “Who’s there?”
“Come in, Tommy,” said a woman’s voice, and when he took the two steps to the doorway and looked in, he saw by the glow through the venetian blinds that Vivian was sitting on his narrow bed. Half a dozen tobacco pipes were laid out on the bedspread next to her purse, and a cigarette smoldered in a saucer on the bedside table.
“Did Benjamin give you these?” she asked him.
Tom hadn’t seen Vivian since she and Benjamin had got divorced five years earlier; she was wearing a white pantsuit and a fur cape today, with a crescent of pearls around her corded neck, and white kid gloves made her long fingers look like crab legs.
He gathered that she was referring to the pipes. “Yes. He thought I might like to smoke them.”
She stood up and retrieved her cigarette and tucked it between her lips, and the coal glowed in the dim room. “Uh huh,” she said, each syllable a puff of smoke. “Did you?”
Tom shrugged and shook his head. “I can’t keep them lit.”
Vivian leaned down and picked up one of the pipes. She stared at it, then said, “Dunhill. And you’ve got a Castello, and a Sasieni Four Dot—these are expensive pipes.”
“He’s generous. Was.”
She cocked her head. “To you?”
“Sure. To us all. This apartment, the allowance…He gave me those books there…”
“Fragments shored against your ruin,” Vivian muttered. Tom noticed that her breath smelled of liquor. She stepped past him to the dresser, on the top of which stood an uneven row of books, hardcover and paperback.
“Turn on the light, Tommy,” she said, and when he had reluctantly flicked the switch on the wall, she ran her gloved hand up and down over the top edges of the books.
“Andre Norton, Heinlein, Brackett,” she noted, and her fingers paused on a tall black hardcover book. “Lovecraft, The Outsider. That one’s worth some money, even banged up like this.” She pulled it out and flipped it open to look at the endpapers; the cover, attached now only by threads, nearly fell off. The page edges were marbled, and she held the book up in both hands and stared at the pattern of red and blue swirls on the block of pages for nearly half a minute, before shaking her head and turning it over to look at the endpapers in the back. Finally she gripped the book by the spine and shook it. A bus pass fell out and fluttered to the floor.
“My bookmark,” said Tom ruefully. “I guess I never would have got very far.”
“I’d sell it if I were you. I don’t know if the allowances are going to continue now.” She slid the book back in its place on the dresser. “Why these books?”
“I liked that movie Star Wars. He thought I might like science fiction books. But,” he added miserably, “I’m too dumb.”
She was riffling through the other books, shaking them and peering at the covers. “No Libra,” she muttered, “picture or constellation.” She put the last one back and turned to face him.
“When you were about five,” she said, “he spent a week playing checkers with you—just talking to you and moving the pieces back and forth, over and over again, while you watched.”
Tom blinked. “Oh.”
“My Jaguar won’t go faster than a hundred and forty-nine miles per hour,” she went on, “not that I’d ever want to go near that fast. But it’s got a limiter, a governor, installed by the manufacturer. James Watt invented governors for engines in the eighteenth century. When an engine gets close to going faster than somebody wants it to, the governor chokes off the fuel.”
Tom had no idea what to say, and simply stared at her.
She looked down and grimaced. “It’s contemptible of me to feel virtuous for trying to explain it to you. I’m taking two of the pipes, Tommy. You don’t smoke them, and the bird’s-eye grain on them could arguably look like the five brightest stars in Libra.”
“Don’t take him!” exclaimed Tom; and now the close air was rich with the malty smell of Ovaltine.
Vivian sniffed, and smiled crookedly. “He said he used to bring you Ovaltine, when you were sick. I’m sorry you’re upset, Tommy. I am taking them.”
His shoulders slumped. He couldn’t prevail against his stepmother. “What will you do with him?” he asked dejectedly.
“Keep him from you kids, mainly. It was hell being married to him, but I don’t want them having custody of him.” She grinned, but Tom could tell it wasn’t a happy expression. “I loved him, you see. All of us did.”
Tom knew she meant Benjamin’s wives. “My mother killed herself.”
Vivian ground out her cigarette in the saucer. “Because she loved him and she loved you too. Hah! What’s a mother to do, eh?” She dropped two of the pipes into her purse and snapped it shut, then pushed him aside and walked into the short hall.
Tom followed her. “Was I bad luck for him?” He hadn’t been out of breath after climbing the stairs, but he was panting now. “Evelyn says my mother said I was. She was a fortune-teller, right?”
Vivian turned around and leaned against the door. “Oh, Tommy! Damn it, you loved him too, didn’t you? You and Lucy. You were his last kids; I never gave him any. And I think you were the first ones he paid attention to, took some responsibility for. He used to play that Sinatra song, ‘Soliloquy,’ from Carousel—it’s about a guy wondering if he’ll be a good father to a son or a daughter. He— But your mother wasn’t a fortune-teller, she was an oracle.” She looked past him at the kitchen. “You don’t have any liquor, I suppose.”
“No, I— Coffee, Coke—”
“Never mind. I’m driving and I don’t need another DUI.” She opened her purse, fished out a flat silver box, and opened it. Six cigarettes were lined up inside, and she took one out and lit it with a blocky silver lighter.
“You weren’t any child of mine,” she said, exhaling smoke, “but Benjamin felt he had to explain. Your mother apparently used to burn leaves and go into trances sniffing the smoke, and one time in a trance she told him that you—you’d have been maybe four years old—told him you’d one day outsmart him, and he’d die because of it.” She stared at him in apparent puzzlement. “He could have killed you—but he loved you.”
“Outsmart him? That’s—” Tom was at a loss for words.
“I know. Impossible. See you around, kid.” She turned and opened the door, and then she was hurrying away down the corridor.
Tom closed the door, bolted it, and shambled back into the bedroom. He looked at the four pipes that still lay on the bedspread; he had been keeping his father’s talisman without even knowing it, and somehow he had let Vivian take it. At least she would keep it away from Blaine and Colin and Imogene. At least she loved him.
“I’m sorry, father,” he said softly to the remaining pipes.
He bent to pick up his bus pass bookmark from the floor, and looked at the black spine of The Outsider. Vivian had said it was worth some money, and that the allowances might stop. If they did stop, he supposed he’d have to go live at his father’s house again, and every single room of it would now be a place where his father was achingly absent.
Sadly he pulled The Outsider out from between the other books—and he nearly dropped it, for it was heavier than he remembered, heavier than it had seemed when Vivian had been handling it. And it brought back a sudden vivid memory of the moment the book had passed from his father’s hands to his; it had been early on a spring morning last year, and Tom had still been in his pajamas when the old man had surprised him by showing up at his door with the book.
For a moment now Tom just stood beside the dresser, with no recollection of what he had been doing; then he looked at the book in his hands and at the computer sitting on his desk in the corner, and nodded.
He crossed to the desk and pulled out the chair and sat down, laying the book beside the keyboard. He knew how to get to Google, and now he brought it up and typed in sell lovecraft book. He had to flip open the book to see how to spell Lovecraft.
What appeared on the monitor screen were a lot of eBay and AbeBooks pages, but he knew he could never figure out how to sell the book through those sites; and there were a lot of sites that just seemed to be people bragging that they had Lovecraft books. But at last he found a bookseller’s list with a sidebar saying that he bought books. The man was in L.A., so Tom nervously punched the 818 area-code number into his phone.
The Book of Magic Page 26