Aeon of Horus

by Paul Neuhaus

  Daughter’s voice was hoarse. She tried to speak but could not. Mother turned at the waist and picked up a wooden cup. After a long drink of water, the girl could speak, but her voice was still quiet. “There’re things inside me,” she said. “Alive things.”

  Mother gathered her cuff into her hand and used it to dab away the water that had flowed over the child’s lower lip. “Yes, I know.” She flashed an angry look toward the men, but, before she turned again to her offspring, her expression softened. “Are they hurting you? The alive things?”

  Daughter shook her head. “No.” She paused, trying to find the right words. “They’re singing to me,” she said.

  This drew a favorable reaction from the men who nodded and muttered to one another.

  “And what song do they sing?” Mother said, her voice tender.

  Again, the little girl shook her head. “Not a song. A poem. A poem of the world. Of all the worlds. But… this morning the poem has changed.”

  “Yes?”

  “The alive things say they’re ready to go.”

  The menfolk became even more animated. Mother turned to them with a harsh “Sshhh!” and they quieted down.

  Ignoring the men, Daughter said to Mother, “Will you hold my hand?”

  Crying, Mother, took her child’s fragile fingers.

  Daughter closed her eyes and, at first, it looked as though nothing further would happen. Then the little girl bent upward at the waist and her head dug deeper into her down pillow. She screamed and the adults in the room panicked. The men started to scatter and bump into one another. Again, Mother chastised them and quiet returned.

  The girl remained bent for an unnaturally long time, every muscle in her tiny frame straining against the skeleton underneath. It seemed too, that she had stopped breathing. Every inch of her spoke of anticipation, of a force desperate for release. She rocked from side to side and moaned with a voice which was not her own.

  Once more, the men grew terrified and Mother admonished them.

  When everyone returned their attention to Daughter, they were shocked to see her emit multi-colored vapors. From her mouth, from her nostrils, and from her ears came wispy phantasms. These creatures—revealed as living entities by the deliberateness with which they moved—came together into a single strand and drifted upward through the small cracks in the thatch roof. When they were gone, the little girl’s body remained taut. Mother began to cry harder. Why isn’t this over? Why isn’t this over? Daughter dropped down onto her behind, her torso pivoted upwards, and she vomited.

  Her vomit was made of fire.

  The jet of super-heated air and flames shot through the window and dissipated over the perfect green grass.

  Daughter fell down onto the bed, no longer a rigid child-shaped frame, but a little girl on the other side of a life-threatening fever.

  One man whispered, “Aja”. Then another. Then another. Soon, they were saying the word over top of one another and Mother could do nothing to stop them.

  Quinn awakened from a fitful sleep, irritated a troubling vision had spoiled her first opportunity for an easy night’s rest. Then she remembered this was the second such dream she’d had in less than a week. First the meeting on the island with the woman on her throne, and now this young girl recovering from a fever.

  Only it wasn’t a simple fever.

  The child had been given the same tincture Quinn got more than six months ago. The injection that catalyzed her magic powers. With that realization, it all came together for Henaghan. The girl in her sickbed, the woman on the throne—they were one and the same person.

  It was Aisling, the long-ago liberator of mankind.

  At first Quinn wondered why she was again having visions. They had stopped when the tincture ran its course. Indeed, she’d not had even one since she’d come into her powers. Was someone somewhere trying to tell her something? Did the visions have a purpose? Why had the visions returned now? Why was she seeing moments from the life of her mystical predecessor?

  Grabbing one of Molly’s pillows, she hugged it to herself and realized she was both excited and afraid.

  Cameron Blank came over every Tuesday night and his daughter made a fine meal. He was dying of cancer, but insisted upon coming to them rather than the other way around. “The day I can’t come to you,” he would say. “Is the day I want you to pass me through the wood chipper.” Molly and Quinn both said they’d be more than happy to pass him through the wood chipper, and Cam took no offense.

  The old man, bald and drawn from chemo, dropped his coat over the arm of one of the couches and sat down. Quinn joined him. “Is this the couch we’re using this week?” Cam said. “I don’t wanna violate any couch protocols.”

  Quinn smiled. “This is a sit-on-whatever-goddam-couch you want kind of house.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I come here. You rug munchers are so open and free.”

  Molly was passing by with a platter of scratch-made dinner rolls. She placed them on the table with one hand and swatted her father’s head with the other. “Daddy! What I’d say about the lezbo talk?”

  The elder Blank adopted a wounded persona. “Hey, it’s not my fault you two are a couple of diesel dikes.”

  Molly groaned as she returned to the kitchen. Quinn laughed. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” she said. “But I think we’re lipstick lesbians. Dikes are more like—”

  “Birkenstocks and camouflage cargo shorts?”

  “Well,” Henaghan said, suppressing a grin. “I don’t wanna stereotype, but…”

  Molly reentered carrying a roast chicken. She was in time to hear her father say, “Hey, seriously though, I don’t care about any of that shit. If you guys are happy, who’m I to bitch about all the pillow biting?”

  Quinn laughed again. Molly said, “Fucking hell.” Both girls knew that Cam loved taking the piss out of people. He teased them both relentlessly but there wasn’t a mean bone in his body.

  The younger Blank picked up a little bell and rang it. An affectation. She preferred it to saying “come and eat” to the two people barely three feet away. Quinn watched her girlfriend with bemusement and affection. Molly had her weird side.

  As Henaghan rounded the couch to the table, she said, “Hey, Cam, I got something I wanna ask you about…”

  “Okay,” Cameron said. “But first I gotta say hello to my one true love.” He rose off the couch and walked over to Annabelle’s cage. Annabelle adored the ex-cop. Whenever he approached her cage, she would coo. If he stuck his finger through the bars, she would happily perch on it. She showed no one else the same level of affection, not even Quinn. “How’s my girl?” the elder Blank said to the little bird, and Annabelle cheeped at him enthusiastically. He reached through the bars and stroked her feathers. She leaned into his caresses. After a moment, he turned his attention back to his hosts. “I’m gonna marry that bird,” he said.

  “Blech,” the redhead said. “Why don’t you guys get a room?”

  Molly sat down next to Quinn. “Go ahead. Marry the bird. Just wash your hands before dinner.”

  Cam shrugged off his daughter’s request. “Molly m’dear, I am going to die. If, before that happens, I get some kinda weird bird sickness, you can give me hell. For now, don’t come between me and my girlfriend. Now then,” he said, picking up the platter of rolls, taking one and passing it on. “What can I do you for, Miss Henaghan?”

  Quinn said, “Well, as you know, we had a guy croak here yesterday.”

  The elder Blank nodded. “Molly said as much. I’ve always thought it was bad form to bring up stiffs before a meal.”

  Henaghan looked sheepish. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was violating stiff etiquette. But hear me out… This guy shows up. He dies almost immediately then a detective appears like a second and a half later. Says he’s been tailing the deceased. He talks to us for a minute then some flunkies show up to take the body away.”

  “Did he show you I.D.?”

 
; Quinn nodded.

  “What’d it say at the top of his badge?”

  “I don’t think it said anything at the top of the badge.”

  “Mmm. And you say the flunkies came in and took the body away just like that?”

  Again, Quinn nodded.

  “Yeah,” Cam said. “That wasn’t a real cop.”

  Molly dropped her fork on her plate with a ding. “You can tell just from that?”

  Cameron looked at his only child. “I was L.A.P.D. for thirty-two years. It should’ve said ‘Detective’ across the top of that shield. Mine said ‘Police Officer’. The forgeries always miss that part. Plus there ain’t no way in hell a good investigator’s letting the M.E. anywhere near a body until he’s scrutinized and documented his crime scene. He wasn’t a cop.” Then he grinned. “Elementary, my dear lezzies.” The old man took a bite out of his roll and chewed good-naturedly. Before he finished, he returned his attention to his daughter. “So,” he said, his mouth full of white glop. “You still pissing the bed?”

  Both women made noises of protest. Quinn came to her partner’s defense. “She’s not pissing the bed.”

  “Isn’t that what we mean when we say ‘night terrors’?” Cam said, looking back and forth between the two women.

  Henaghan rolled her eyes. Across the table, Molly’s head was sinking into her shoulders. She looked like a turtle. “She’s not pissing the bed. Otherwise we’d have to buy rubber sheets. Do you have any idea how expensive rubber sheets’d be for a California King?”

  “Okay, okay,” Cam said, raising his hands in protest. “What do I know?” He picked up his cloth napkin from his lap and dabbed at the edges of his mouth. “You want my advice?” he said to the junior Blank. “I think you should talk to somebody about it.”

  Molly’s blue eyes grew huge. “What?! Didn’t you once say you’d eat a bullet before you a let a skull cracker anywhere near you?”

  Cam grinned. “Yeah, but I was still a cop then. You’re supposed to say macho shit like that. We had to be better than the sissified civilians we served and protected. Seriously though, go talk to somebody. What’s it gonna hurt?”

  Molly turned to Quinn, her eyes flashing. “You put him up to this, didn’t you?”

  Henaghan raised her palms. “I did no such thing.” She turned to Cam. “Tell her.”

  Cam turned to Molly and whispered conspiratorially, “Just between us two, she’s been lobbying me to tell you to get your head shrunk for weeks. You know I could never resist the charms of an Irishwoman.”

  Molly glared at Quinn with fresh venom. Quinn repeatedly swatted at Cam’s shoulder. “You old son of a bitch!” she said.

  “Look at this, would you?” the elder Blank said to the younger. “Is this what goes on around here? Abusing terminal cases?”

  Molly put down her fork and knife and folded her arms in front of her breasts.

  Cam finally had enough of the swatting and he shooed Quinn away with his napkin. “Alright, alright.” He turned back to his offspring. “She didn’t put me up to it. I do think you should talk to someone. And that oughta mean something to you considering how against psychiatry I’ve always been.”

  Both Quinn and Cam looked at Molly for a long moment. As much to get out from under their scrutiny as anything, Molly said, “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  After Cam left for the evening (which wasn’t late considering his age and condition), Molly retreated to the bedroom and shut the door. Quinn thought that odd, but decided not to investigate right away. Her partner was probably writing in her journal. (Dear Diary, Quinn and my dad are both dicks.) After surfing the internet for a while, Henaghan poked her head in to see Blank sitting up in bed, staring straight ahead with the comforter up to her chin. “Have you been like this this whole time?”

  The older woman’s eyes focused and pointed toward the younger. “Like what?”

  “Looking forward with your eyes all out of whack? I thought you’d be writing or reading a book or something.”

  “No,” Molly said, sitting up. She pushed the comforter down around her waist and her demeanor seemed to invite Quinn to sit down next to her. Quinn took the implicit invitation, sitting on top of the blanket with her legs curled up underneath her. “I was thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “You never met my mom. She died four years ago. Cancer. The same cancer that’s got a hold of Cam. Life can be a pretty fucked-up thing. Anyway, you’ve seen the movies and TV shows. What it’s like to be the wife of a cop. That’s one of the things they almost always get right. Even though the details about procedure and whatnot are way off. A word of advice: don’t ever watch a police show with my dad. He’s a fountain of bullshit-calling. My mom… Sheila… She was the Worried Wife. Her entire adult life was spent white-knuckled while Cam did what he did. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it was all those decades of worry that opened the door to the cancer. Now, after almost being murdered, having a guy croak in my vestibule, and knowing about your powers, I’m afraid I’m turning into my mom. Just this creature that’s completely made of worry. She eased into it. She married my dad when she was nineteen. Me, I’m coming to it late. And it’s coming out of me as these night terrors.”

  “What should we do?” Quinn said.

  “Well, there’s one thing we could do, and it wouldn’t even involve me getting therapy… “

  “I can’t wait to hear it,” Henaghan said.

  “If you could quit being some kind of fucked-up wizard policeman, that’d be great.”

  The redhead smiled. “‘Wizard policeman’?” She’d never thought of herself in those terms. Although, since she had role-played as Batman a time or two, she couldn’t say Blank was completely off the mark.

  “What else would you call it? You’re a wizard policeman. And it’s not like that’s gonna stop anytime soon. You killed those monsters that were running L.A. Hasn’t that left some kind of power vacuum?”

  Quinn’s smile faded. Her brow furrowed. “You would think. But it’s been quiet. Weirdly quiet.”

  “The calm before the storm?”

  Henaghan shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, anybody who’s ever watched the History Channel knows power vacuums don’t last. People are dicks. I’m assuming supernatural people are doubly dicks.”

  “Hey,” Henaghan said, feigning injury. “I’m a supernatural person.”

  Molly smirked. “Present company excepted of course. Anyway, I feel like there’s a storm coming. And you’re gonna be on the frontlines.”

  Quinn grinned again. “Fuck yeah, I am! Because I’m a wizard policeman!”

  The older woman picked up one of Quinn’s pillows and hit her with it. “Don’t tease me,” she said. “I’m being serious.”

  The smaller woman yanked the pillow away from the larger and slid up the bed so that she was could lay next to her. “I know you’re being serious, but, if trouble comes, it won’t be anything I can’t handle.”

  Molly’s eyes narrowed and she shook her head. “That’s exactly what Cam used to say to Sheila.”

  “Yeah, but he made it all the way through to retirement without getting killed. Doesn’t that prove my point?”

  Blank folded her hands on her lap. “I dunno,” she replied. “Does it count that it killed my mom?”

  When Quinn showed up again in Darren Taft’s apartment, Taft was on the toilet taking a shit. Worse, Quinn was with him in the bathroom. “Oh! Jesus Christ!” Taft said, locking his knees together and throwing both hands over his groin.

  Henaghan was mortified. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she said, backing through the door into the living room. There she waited until Darren flushed and came in.

  “What the fuck?” Taft said. “You literally just left.”

  Quinn nodded. “Yeah, I wanted to time it as close as I could since I knew you’d be here.”

  “Thanks for that. Man can’t even take a shit in his own castle.”

&n
bsp; “About that…” the petite woman said. “You should maybe see a doctor, ‘cause that smelled wrong.”

  “What do you want?” The heavyset man was irritated. Quinn would be too in his shoes. He moved around her and plopped down on his couch.

  Henaghan sat down too, keeping a safe distance between herself and the cranky storeowner. “I got a statue,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about it.”

  “How’d you get a statue? You were just here like ten minutes ago.”

  “Not really. Since I talked to you, it’s been like—”

  He cut her off. He’d momentarily forgotten about the twisty nature of space, time and reality. “Tell me about the statue.”

  Quinn leaned in, eager to get past the earlier incident with the shitting. “It’s a bird. Like a hawk or something. A predator bird. Not like a chicken. It’s about yay-big…” She held her hands about a foot apart. “It’s got gold eyeshadow—Egyptian-style—and it’s wearing a little crown that looks like a two-liter Coke bottle.”

  Darren’s irritation melted away. In fact, his jaw had gone slack. “Where did you get this statue?”

  “A guy brought it to me. He gave it over then he croaked in my entryway.”

  “He brought it to you specifically?”

  Quinn nodded. “He called me Aja.”

  Taft nodded. “‘Messiah’. Do you know what this means?”

  Henaghan shook her head.

  “It means word’s getting out after you did whatever you did that I don’t wanna know about. You’re developing a reputation.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Both probably. The world’s not that simple. At any rate, this dead guy—whoever he was—thought he could trust you with a priceless Tilted heirloom.”

  The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me what you know.”

  Darren sighed and stood. “I’m gonna need a belt. I’d offer you one, but you’re not really here.” He disappeared for a moment and returned with a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. His idea of a belt. He took a long swig before speaking again. “What you’ve got, Georgia, is a one-of-a-kind statue of the Egyptian god Horus—and it’s a falcon, not a hawk.”