by Laura Bickle
I don’t blame Mrs. Renfelter. The life we live is very different from theirs. And I want their life to be different. I want them not to have to think about deals with the devil and angry mobsters. No blood. No fire. Just fairies spinning on their strings from the ceiling and the smell of hamburgers.
Pops is sitting in a chair on the first floor, looking pissed. I notice that they’ve locked the front door and left only the night window open. If someone wants us, a buzzer will sound. We can look at them through the video camera and bulletproof glass and decide if they’re worth dealing with. Good deal.
He looks at me. “Your father is an idiot.”
“I know.” And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. “But he loves you.”
Pops snorts. “He needs to learn to leave shit alone. To accept the natural order of things.” He reaches for a lead crystal shot glass and pours from a 1958 bottle of whiskey he’s just opened. “I’m sorry for this, kiddo. I am.”
I nod awkwardly. It’s not his fault. It’s my dad’s. “Dad always thinks he can make a deal. Even with death.”
Pops downs a shot. “There’s no cheating death.”
Sid yells for me to come haul my fair share of shit. I pick up a pair of heavy ammo boxes.
In the vault, there’s swearing and bitching. Bert and my dad are preparing another set of armaments, the magical kind.
“Shut the goddamn door behind you!”
I do as I’m told, cautiously wading into the yellow light, and immediately begin to swear.
Bert is chasing a two-foot gray creature around the floor. It has wings, red eyes, and looks pretty freaking pissed. With a start, I realize it’s not the only one of its kind. Another is perched on top of the shelves, hissing, while a third scuttles, batlike, underneath a box. It peers at me over a long beak, snarling.
“What the hell is this?” I groan.
Bert snarls. “Remember those gargoyles your dad got from that architectural salvage guy?”
“Dimly. Last time I saw them, they were...inanimate.” They came off a mansion of a guy who was a contemporary of Aleister Crowley. The dude liked to practice ceremonial magic and host parties. Usually naked parties. I won’t bother to describe how much I paid attention to the naked party aspect of that with the Bunko. The dudes were middle-aged and pasty, but the women were a different story. They were nude models for these dudes sketching Tarot cards. Truly inspirational. Temperance had a particularly lovely face and a spectacular everything else...
“Yeah. Those. Well, he can’t seem to remember the word to get them back in their inanimate form.”
I glance at my father. He’s flipping through papers in a manila file folder, peering through his glasses. One of the gargoyles sashays out from under the shelves, pointed tail twitching, and bites him on the ankle.
“Sonofabitch!”
The gargoyle giggles and runs away.
“You activated them without reading the instruction sheet?”
“There is no instruction sheet!” my dad growls. He points to a stack of parchment papers. “This is all that’s left of the owner’s Book of Shadows, but it’s in Latin.”
“Awesome.” I pick up the pages at random, begin reading aloud.
“That’s what I started doing,” my dad mumbles. “And see where that got me?”
Something crashes. Something that sounds like glass.
“Well, it ain’t gonna get any worse!” Bert shouts from an unseen corner.
My finger traces down the page. “Sicut in sublimitate et in profundis. Sicut in caelo et in terra.” My pronunciation is terrible.
The gargoyles chortle and skitter away. Their claws make scratching sounds on the floor.
“Dammit... Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius.” I stare up at a gargoyle perched on a shelf. He’s flapping his wings at me like a robin defending a nest.
“A-ha,” my father exclaims, shaking a page. “Silex silicis.”
The gargoyle freezes. The red in his eyes dulls. I approach the shelf cautiously. Garnet cabochon eyes watch me, but the statue doesn’t move.
“Splendid.” Bert shoves past me and plucks the creature from the top of the shelf. It’s as inert as a knickknack. He places that one on the table, next to one frozen mid-sprint. The third is dragged out from under a shelf, flattened as road kill.
“What the hell are you going to do with those?”
“They’re gonna guard the shop, moron. Bert’s gonna install them on the downspouts.” My dad points upward with one hand and rubs the front of his pants leg. A trickle of blood is leaking from it.
“I hope you guys have a better plan than the concrete anklebiters,” I mutter.
Bert chortles, and my dad gives me a dirty look. “Yeah,” my dad says. “I do, as a matter of fact.”
Carl peers around the open door of the vault. “Is it safe?”
Bert dangles the flattened gargoyle in front of his face. Carl wrinkles his nose. “Those things are creepy.”
“You don’t have to touch them.”
“I don’t care. They’re creepy.”
“Think of them as slightly less destructible versions of the alley cats.”
Carl rolls his eyes. He hands my dad a banker’s box. “Is this what you were looking for?”
“Yeah.” My dad opens the box. “There’s some stuff I want you boys to have.”
I take a step backward. I hope this isn’t going to turn into one of those creepy ‘when I’m dead, all this will be yours’ conversations. My dad wants to have those about once a month now. He’s not that old. And with his desire to deal with devils, I’m pretty sure he’ll live forever. It’s just this thing he does to dangle expensive shit in front of our noses and say we can’t have it. Makes him feel like a big provider or something. Total waste of time.
My dad throws something at Carl. With his athlete’s reflexes, Carl catches it easily, even though my dad can’t even throw a paper airplane accurately. My dad tosses an item to me. I miss, and something metallic bounces off the floor. I follow the ringing noise it makes, feeling stupid.
I come up with a watch. It’s got a huge face and a black leather strap. It looks like one of those old radium-dial watches that glows in the dark. It’s got a big main dial for telling time, and two smaller dials for degrees and seconds.
“What’s this for?” Carl holds up a ring. He peers through it. It’s plain white metal with a bit of tarnish. Silver, I’m guessing.
“It’ll make you invisible.”
“No shit?” Carl sticks it on his pinky finger. It’s the only finger it will fit on. “How does it work?”
“Turn it around your finger three times. You’ll be invisible for as long as you can hold your breath.”
Carl fiddles with it. I blink, and he disappears. A few heartbeats later, he reappears on my right side. Carl grins. “I can’t wait to get this out on the field...”
“You’ll do no such thing. That’s for emergencies only. It’ll buy you a few seconds to get away from those assholes if they come after you. That’s all. No fucking around with it.” My dad is glowering at him. “You can use it once a day. That’s it.”
Carl smirks as he admires his hand. I can see the wheels turning in his head, and expect that he’s going to break the school track record next week when he mysteriously appears at the finish line.
“That...is pretty damn cool. Where did it come from?”
My dad squints at a pad of yellow legal paper he’s packed with the box. “It was a wedding band for a guy who went to Tibet and learned some shit from sherpas and yogis or something. I think. I can’t read my writing.”
“Hnh. Cool.”
I run my thumb over the scratches on the face of the watch. “Does this do anything?” I try not to make any assumptions. If it’s not as cool as Carl’s ring, I don’t want to be disappointed. I wind it and shake it. No ticking.
“Actually, yeah.”
“It d
oesn’t work.”
“It’s not supposed to keep time. It’s supposed to freeze time for a few seconds, depending on how tightly the mechanism’s wound. Wind it and punch the button.”
I stare at the frozen face of it. “It’s haunted?”
“Not to my knowledge. But definitely bespelled. It used to belong to a fighter pilot in World War II who shot down more Nazi planes than any other.”
Huh. I close my eyes for a moment. I can hear rushing air and the roar of an engine. Cold sinks deep into my body.
“Like your cousin’s, it can be used once a day.”
I strap it on my wrist. The band has bumps and rills worn in it. Exactly the size of my wrist. I wind it up three or four times, until I feel tight resistance in the spring and punch the stopwatch button.
The watch starts ticking.
And that’s the only sound in the room. No street noise, no humming of machinery, no dripping faucets. Nothing.
I look up. Carl and my dad are frozen in place. Like mannequins.
“Holy shit.”
I walk past my dad. His eyes don’t follow me. I poke him in the chest.
I sneak up behind Carl and slap him on the back of the head. No reaction.
The watch begins to tick louder, louder.
And sound sucks back into the room with a fwoosh. Like wind-up toys, my dad and Carl move again. The watch stops ticking. Carl rubs the back of his head, puzzled. I hide a grin.
“You are not to do anything with those, unless it’s an emergency,” my father growls. “I don’t want to get a call at the police station announcing that you guys have tried to rip off some gas station.”
I blink. My dad thinks we’re capable of doing that. He’s right—we’re certainly morally flexible, if the opportunity presents itself. But I’m sort of...charmed...that he cares enough to actually arm us like this.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Thanks, Uncle Roger.”
He grunts in response, still digging through the box. “Bert!” he yells. “Did you find it yet?”
“Find what?” I’m curious to see what my dad’s having Bert dig up. I hear boxes shifting and Bert swearing in the vault.
Bert comes out of the mouth of the vault with a wooden crate. His eyes are wide and round. He reverently places the box on the work table my father’s cluttered up. Straw leaks from the corners of the crate. “Here it is.” Bert backs away.
My father takes the nails out of the crate with the back of a hammer. He works quietly, but a gloss of sweat forms on his brow.
“What is it?” I really want to know. “The fucking Ark of the Covenant? If you guys have that, you should’ve sold it long ago.”
Bert shushes me. “It’s not the Ark,” he hisses. His skin is rippling like a pissed-off cat’s, the muscles twitching beneath the scales.
I squint at the box. It looks familiar.
“Is that what I think it is?” Carl edges back, fidgeting. He does that when he’s nervous, as if he should be swinging a bat at a threat.
My father reaches into the straw and lifts the artifact out. Solemnly, he places it on the table. A figure rendered in poured concrete stares back at me, short, stout, with a pointed hat and beady eyes.
Bert hisses reflexively.
“Oh, shit,” I breathe. “It’s...the Gnome.”
CHAPTER 18
The Garden Gnome isn’t what you think it is.
It isn’t a cute ornament overseeing the tulips and gazing serenely upon the birdfeeders in an old lady’s garden. It isn’t a beneficent creature offering deals on travel through television. It’s a ferocious, atavistic ghoul.
A ghoul, I tell you.
I refuse to touch it. I did once by accident when I was three and screamed for twelve hours straight. My father packed it away where I couldn’t see it after my mother threatened to kill him and take a hammer to the Gnome, not necessarily in that order.
The Gnome started out in a woman’s garden. It was a rose garden, full of old-world roses. She lovingly the sculpture it every few years, touching up his red cap, white beard, and little green suit. And the black eyes. The eyes were always painted black...irises, pupils, even the whites. Black as obsidian.
The lady who owned the Gnome, you see, was a witch, and not one of the friendly white witches who smell like patchouli and come by with pretty crystals to sell.
I dig those crystals. They hum like happy refrigerators. One of those witches, a woman who never completely grew out of the seventies, gave me a little crystal for a pacifier when I was a baby. Totally trippy.
This lady cast the Gnome herself in a concrete mold and put the shrunken head of her ex-husband, a pretty powerful warlock, inside. I wasn’t ever fully clear on how he died, but I do remember the image of the witch sawing his head off with a hacksaw.
Yeah. Gruesome. I’m telling you.
My father really never should’ve bought it. It technically could’ve been evidence of a crime. According to Bert, the witch told him she had possession of her husband’s body to give him a green burial, and she could do whatever she wanted with the head. She’d been using it as the guardian spirit for her house. She decided to go live with her sister in Hawaii, and wanted to offload the Gnome. Bert said she’d sold it to my dad really cheap...for like twenty dollars. That should’ve set off some warning bells in his head.
But my dad was fascinated by the Gnome. It reeks of evil. Frankly, I’m pissed to see that he still has it. It sits on the table, stinking like more than a decade of seething in darkness. It smells like freshly-turned earth, grave dust, and the skull rotting away inside it.
“Dude,” I say. “I want no part of the Gnome.” I cross my arms over my chest. I’m not touching it. Nuh-uh. Can’t make me.
“You don’t have to,” my father says. “I’m going to use it for home defense.”
A chill rattles through me. It must be contagious, because Carl gets it, too. He jams his hands in his pockets as my father takes it out of the vault, carrying it like a baby. Bert opens the door for him like a bellhop at a hotel.
I drift along in their wake, still feeling the chill of those black eyes on me. When my dad takes it to the floor of the shop, Sid swears and Pops tells my dad to get rid of the damned thing.
But he doesn’t. He takes it to the window and sets it facing the street, so that its black gaze reflects the streetlight. The Gnome seems to settle there in the barred light, growing roots in the shadows.
I shudder. I don’t want to know what that thing does, but I don’t want it awake, watching me.
EVERYONE IN THE HOUSE is restless. Whether it’s knowing that the Mob’s creeping around or the fact that the Gnome is on duty, I can’t tell. I just know I can’t sleep. Not a small part of it is not being in my own bed. I’m trying to sleep in Pops’s office. The old man is snoring in his recliner chair, and I’m flip-flopping in the Skeletor sleeping bag on the floor like a stranded fish on the deck of a boat.
I finally give up trying to go to sleep and get up. Pops is sleeping peacefully, his hands laced over his chest, a rosy color to his cheeks. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need my supervision. Besides which, it’s not like he’s by himself. Carl is wrapped up in some blankets on the other side of the room. He’s having shitty dreams, I can tell. His face twitches, and his feet sometimes kick me.
I’m pretty sure I’m the source of those shitty dreams. I did, after all, get us into an assload of trouble today. Though we seem to be in more trouble than before, thanks to the hourglass, I’m still not convinced that Young Don isn’t going to figure out what I did, or doesn’t already know. It occurs to me that he could’ve been playing nice with my dad to deal for the hourglass.
I slink out of the room and head down the hallway. My father and Sid are talking on the floor of the shop. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to talk to them. I just want a little space to try to collect my thoughts, someplace not here. I’m very damn certain I couldn’t sleep if I was in my own bed, anyway.
I push open the back door and peer into the alley. It’s illuminated by a yellow light in a cage wired to our building. I don’t see anything. But that doesn’t mean nothing is there. Cautiously, I creep around the corner to the gap between the pawn shop and the burger joint.
“Can’t sleep?”
I jump out of my skin and glance up. Lily’s perched on the fire escape with her cats. She’s wearing one of my old T-shirts and a pair of my sweatpants. Her bare toes curl over the black railing.
“You shouldn’t be out,” I say. “It’s not safe.”
“Nothing can get me up here.” She makes a sour face.
I make one back.
“Do you want to come up or not?” She raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah.” I’m not sure what all that entails, but it sure sounds better than pacing the floors downstairs and trying to avoid the glare of the Gnome.
She pushes down the ladder of the fire escape, extending it just far enough that I have to jump to reach the bottom rung. It creaks under my weight and rust flakes off on my palms. I clamber up like a kid on a jungle gym I’ve been playing on my whole life.
I crawl up beside her. “You get bored?”
She shrugs, reeling the ladder back and locking it into place with a clank and a squeal of metal. “I guess. Callie’s having bad dreams, and Rose is, too. They’re both piled in bed with Mom. Rose drank the booze she left under your bed. She says she’s sorry.”
I frowned. I don’t know how much of that’s from knowing the Mob’s out there, or the miasma from the Gnome. “Did your mom tell you what’s going on?”
“About the Mob sniffing around? Yeah.” She looks at me, pupils dilated in the gloom. “So what’s the real story behind that?”
Erf. She can always tell when I’m hiding things. She knows that I hide a lot from her, has proof that I have been. Living with a seven-foot Godzilla and not mentioning it sorta feels like a breach of trust. I imagine she probably feels a lot like I do...on the outside, looking in.
I blow out my breath. Some secrets aren’t mine to tell. “My dad sorta pissed them off. Refused to sell a pretty valuable artifact to them.”