The Showstone

by Glenn Cooper

  Cal was wearing his usual travel clothes – khakis, white oxford shirt, blue blazer, his messenger bag slung over a shoulder. The sun, while moving toward the horizon, was still bright. He forgot he was wearing sunglasses and peeled them off when she appeared at the door.

  ‘I’m Cal.’

  She seemed shy. ‘Eve.’

  There was a mutual awkwardness that came from a situation that felt more like a first date than a business meeting. He checked her out in one of those head-to-toe scans that took a second but seemed to him to last longer. He was sufficiently self-aware to know he was an inveterate womanizer, but he prided himself on being a subtle and respectful one. Women always had been attracted to him and he had always enthusiastically reciprocated. If he wasn’t keen on a woman who showed an interest in him, he usually found the sweetest possible way to let her know the score. He wasn’t going to be flashing the brake lights with Eve Riley. She was more beautiful and exotic than her book-cover picture made her out. For her book, maybe she had been going for a librarian look to draw in religious types. In her author photo she had severely pulled-back hair, a blousy shirt buttoned high, and a ground-brushing denim skirt, but tonight her black hair was loose and long, her cowboy shirt was open to cleavage, and her jeans were hip-hugging. She was deeply tanned without much makeup. If her name weren’t Riley, he’d have pegged her for Native American, but maybe Riley wasn’t her maiden name. He’d figure it out.

  ‘This is a beautiful spot,’ he said.

  ‘It’s heaven. At least for me. Please come in.’

  She offered something to drink. It was the time of day when a glass of vodka usually called his name, but he took a lemonade from a frosty pitcher. It was homemade and awfully wholesome. The bungalow – from what he could see of it – exuded a singular personality. There were black-and-white photographs on the walls – hers, she said – of desert flowers, lizards, and sunsets. There was a lot of tribal pottery and a horse-hair blanket thrown over an old saddle horse. The furniture pieces were small and feminine. He might be wrong, but it didn’t look like a man was in the frame.

  When he’d finished admiring her photography he broke the ice on his visit.

  ‘You know, I thought your book was really excellent.’

  She beamed like a child. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Look, I understand the audience you’re trying to reach – the want-something-practical, spiritual-seeking crowd – but your writing is a cut above the usual how-to book and there’s a scholarship that comes through.’

  Her skin was too dark to show a blush, but she acted like she was blushing and repeated an eyelid-fluttering, ‘Really? You really think so?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘That means a lot coming from you. I mean you’re famous. I looked you up.’

  He shrugged modestly. ‘And I looked you up too. I see you got your master’s from University of Arizona. I know a few people at the history department. Carson Miller’s the chairman.’

  ‘He wasn’t chairman when I was there but his courses in Tudor and Elizabethan England were terrific. But I have to correct you, I didn’t quite get my degree. I had to drop out several credits and a thesis short when I got pregnant.’

  ‘That’s too bad. You never went back?’

  ‘It was kind of a messed-up time for me. I wasn’t ever seriously with the father and I was really young. I didn’t want to be a mother, so I put the kid up for adoption. I wasn’t going to have an abortion. Anyway, giving the baby away sent me into a downward spiral. My head wasn’t right for going back to school and I really couldn’t see racking up more student debt in the state I was in.’ The corner of her mouth twitched. ‘I started working shit jobs and that was that. I’m still in a shit job. For the city of Tucson. I issue permits for the building department. Fortunately, living out here in the middle of nowhere is cheap.’

  Cal pulled her book out of his bag. ‘But you’re an author too.’

  She laughed. ‘I sat down once and calculated the hourly wage I earned off of that book. I think it was ten cents or thereabouts.’

  ‘Well, like I said, it was very well done. I learned a lot from it.’

  She asked if he wanted to have a look at her ‘back yard’ and led him onto the patio. The desert began on the other side of her low stone wall and spread out brown and flat for a hundred miles to the Baboquivari Mountains, purple in the evening light.

  ‘You like it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s spectacular. Is this where the magic happens?’

  Caught off balance, she laughed heartily. ‘How did you know? Yeah, this is where I practice my magic.’

  ‘It seems like an excellent place for it.’

  ‘The energy. Can you feel it?’

  He wasn’t into New Age sentiments, but he had to admit that the atmosphere was special.

  She moved one of the opposing patio chairs, so they were both facing the lowering sun, and they sat there, talking toward the desert and noticing the occasional lizard flying over the flagstones in a hurry to get somewhere.

  ‘So, you inherited a showstone,’ she said. He had said as much when he telephoned.

  ‘It wasn’t a formal bequest,’ he said lightly. ‘I found it in the back of a closet after my mother died.’

  ‘It was hers?’

  ‘No, my father’s. He was an archeologist. He found it on a dig in Iraq nearly thirty years ago.’

  ‘How did you know what it was?’

  ‘He labeled it. I don’t know how he knew.’

  She asked to see it. She wanted to unwrap it for herself. One of its surfaces caught the setting sun and was reflected into his face. She whispered an apology but otherwise she was totally focused on the obsidian disk, holding it cupped in her hands, running a finger over it, lost in thought. He didn’t interrupt her.

  Finally, she pushed a rush of air through her nostrils and shook her head several times, her face flickering in gratitude or awe, he couldn’t tell which.

  ‘It’s remarkable,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Your father was right. It is a showstone. Definitely.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  She looked like she was carefully choosing her words. ‘Well, it looks very similar to one of the most famous showstones in history, the one belonging to John Dee. If you read my book you know who he is.’

  ‘I do know him. And I read your book too.’

  She rolled her eyes at herself. ‘You’re a Harvard professor, of course you know who he is. Anyway, beyond that – I just know what it is.’

  ‘Can you explain that to me?’

  She hadn’t taken her eyes off it. ‘It’s speaking to me.’

  ‘Literally?’

  She looked up at him sheepishly. ‘It’s special, really special.’

  He didn’t press her further – not right now at least – but let her see the card his father had included with the obsidian, the one marked with Dee’s name and the British Museum.

  ‘So, Doctor Dee came to his mind too,’ she said. ‘Did you talk to him about it?’

  ‘My father died in Iraq shortly after he mailed it home to the States. He fell. An accident. I don’t think that he had a particular expertise in Elizabethan England, but the British Museum was a home away from home. Maybe he saw the piece there. Have you seen it?’

  She lifted her head toward the mountain range. ‘The only place I’ve ever been to outside America is Mexico and you can practically walk there from here. I’d love to go to England. I’d love to go anywhere. When you stamp building permits all day your horizons get kind of limited.’

  ‘I would have thought that scrying can expand one’s horizons considerably.’

  She lit up to the comment and told him she was happy to hear him say it. ‘Magic takes me places, that’s for sure.’ She wrapped the stone in its cloth but kept it on her lap. ‘Tell me, Cal, why are you here? I mean, you could have emailed me a picture of your stone. You didn’t have to get on a plane and
fly to Arizona. There’s something more going on, isn’t there?’

  He hadn’t planned on it but there was something about the way she asked the question. He opened up and let the story tumble out. His mother’s murder. The killing of the bookstore owner. His home invasion. She listened with a studious stillness. She didn’t ask a single question, but he had the feeling she was processing every detail. He searched her face for reactions, but she didn’t show any, even when he told her that the intruder was looking for the 49th Call.

  ‘In your book you wrote about forty-eight calls,’ he said, ‘nothing about a 49th. Maybe you know what he was talking about. I don’t.’

  She didn’t answer right away but he noticed she was holding the showstone tighter.

  ‘I guess I’m here for answers,’ he said. ‘I can spend days or weeks approaching this academically and reading a bunch of primary and secondary sources on John Dee’s magic, or I can cut to the chase and pick the brain of a real expert. I want to know why this man killed two people and almost killed two more – me and my girlfriend.’

  ‘Did you consider that he might have killed three people?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your father.’

  The comment hit him hard and straightened his spine. He couldn’t stay seated. He got up and walked to the edge of the patio. The sun was giving up the ghost, turning the sky orange and the mountains black.

  ‘It never occurred to me,’ he said. ‘His accent. He could have been Iraqi.’

  ‘Was he old enough? In 1989?’

  ‘He was wearing a balaclava. I don’t know.’

  Perhaps she picked up on his agitation and wanted to hit the pause button, because she also got up and said, ‘I’m hungry. You?’

  ‘I’ll take you out to dinner,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing around here for miles and besides, I make a pretty good chopped salad. Later, we can do some magic if you like.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ He paused then said something that had been lingering on his mind. ‘When I rang you, you weren’t the least surprised. I got the feeling you were expecting my call.’

  She handed the showstone back. ‘I would have been surprised if you hadn’t called.’

  Over dinner Cal brought up his father again. He couldn’t shake her suggestion that the man in the balaclava was the one who had killed both his parents. He told her it was wildly out of character that Hiram Donovan would have taken an artifact from a dig and mailed it home.

  ‘Maybe it spoke to him,’ she said. ‘Maybe he couldn’t let it go.’

  ‘Spoke to him how?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘The way it spoke to me when I held it. Scryers have a connection to their showstones. The stronger the stone, the stronger the scryer, the stronger the connection.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  She smiled a little. ‘It’s a beckoning, a call to action, a call to have a conversation with angels. If you didn’t know angel language you wouldn’t understand it.’

  He started to say something but only a syllable came out before he stopped himself.

  ‘Maybe your father had some gift as a scryer and didn’t even know it. Maybe that’s why he kept it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he mumbled.

  ‘You know, the gift runs in families. Maybe you’ve got a connection to the stone too?’

  That ever-so-faint murmuring every time the disk rested in his hand.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said again.

  A weather system was pushing a bank of low clouds that blotted out the moon making the night sky blotchy dark. Eve was in her closet getting the things she needed for their spiritual action. She used the term John Dee used.

  ‘Need a hand?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Sure. Take the table.’

  On the patio she had him prop the small folded table against the stone wall while she put her other materials to the side.

  ‘Let’s wait till the top of the hour to start,’ she said. ‘It’s not a requirement or anything. It’s just one of my little quirks.’

  ‘So, I’m about to see some Enochian magic,’ he said.

  She took one of the chairs and he took another. Without the mountains as a line of reference, the desert might as well have been infinite. The air was cool and dry, alive with chirping crickets.

  ‘Doctor Dee is the father of Enochian magic, but he never used the term. Later magicians slapped that label on it. He called it angel magic. The prophet Enoch was very important to him. He was Methuselah’s father and according to the Book of Genesis, after living for three hundred sixty-five years, Enoch, who walked with God, was no more, for God took him.’

  ‘Which Christians have interpreted to mean that he entered Heaven alive,’ Cal said. ‘He and the prophet Elijah were the only people said to have ever done so.’

  ‘God, I love talking to an educated man,’ she laughed. ‘You have no idea what it’s like out here. My last boyfriend was an expert in football and beer. So, yeah, Enoch was able to talk with angels. We don’t know how he did that but maybe that made him the first scryer. They taught him their angel alphabet and their angel language and once he understood it, he was able to read the Book of Nature.’

  ‘And that gave him full knowledge of the universe,’ Cal said.

  ‘Exactly. And that’s what Doctor Dee wanted too. He wanted to read the Book of Nature himself and help usher in humanity’s return to a life of perfection in perfect harmony with nature.’

  Cal was in a rhythm with her. ‘The Hermetic tradition of spiritual rebirth through the enlightenment of the mind.’

  ‘He also had a practical goal, I think,’ she said. ‘He was born a Catholic during Henry VIII’s reign and had to basically become a Protestant to survive under Queen Elizabeth. Europe was torn apart by the split in the Church and the angels told Dee that there was another way for Christians to live, that they could reveal to him a new religion, kind of a merger of Protestantism and Catholicism—’

  Cal couldn’t help himself. ‘But even beyond that, a universal faith that would include Jews and Muslims as well as Protestants and Catholics.’

  She clucked at him and accused him of sandbagging her, but he assured her that he only knew about Dee’s theology, not the nuts and bolts of his angel communications.

  ‘Okay, five minutes to blast off,’ she said after checking her watch. ‘When Doctor Dee started his angel conversations his scryers weren’t all that good and he didn’t make a great deal of progress. There are shitty scryers, decent ones, and great ones, just the same as with anything. I imagine you’re a great professor, for example.’

  ‘And I imagine you’re a great scryer.’

  She answered without a trace of modesty. ‘Actually I am. I was born with it. I didn’t know my father, but my mother had the gift, though she was generally too fucked up to put it to practical use. From the earliest age I saw visions in pools of water and shiny things. In high school I found a book on Enochian magic and that set me on my journey. It’s why I wanted to study history and write scholarly books about Doctor Dee but, hey, it wasn’t to be. Anyway, where I was going with this is that Dee didn’t really crack the code until he hooked up with a great scryer, a man named Edward Kelley. The two of them entered into a collaboration over several years where the angels revealed to them the crown jewels – their language and how to penetrate the different levels of the angelic universe by using calls to open the gates of nature. It’s all there in Doctor Dee’s detailed diaries and notes that were discovered after he died. Even their discovery is kind of interesting. When he died his furniture from his house in Mortlake near London was sold to a dealer. A family bought a chest of his and years later, they were moving it around when they heard something shifting inside. It turns out there was a hidden compartment where Dee kept his angel diaries. That’s how we know about angel language and Enochian magic.’

  ‘From Enoch to Dee is a pretty long swath of history,’ Cal said. ‘Are we to believe that no one else
between them ever learned the language of the calls?’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that,’ she said. ‘There’s no record of anyone else but it can’t be possible, can it? There’ve always been people with the gift of scrying. Somewhere along the line, I feel there must have been others who received the knowledge.’

  ‘Okay, tell me about the calls.’

  ‘Sometimes you’ll see them referred to as keys or claves. To understand them, you’ve got to understand the Enochian map of the universe. Picture a bunch of concentric circles extending out into the universe. There are thirty circles representing a realm, each one presided over by a spiritual being known as an angelic governor. A call is a prayer or a chant in angel language that allows you to get in contact with these realms. There are forty-eight calls that were revealed to Doctor Dee. The first eighteen have a variety of special purposes I don’t need to get into. It’s the next thirty calls that are going to interest you most, I think. They’re called the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs. They connect you to one of the governors who rule the thirty Aethyrs or Aires as they’re called. The thirtieth is the lowest Aethyr. The first Aethyr is the highest. It’s the last concentric circle. It represents the pure and undifferentiated mind of God. Most experienced magicians go straight to their guardian angelic governor in one of the Aethyrs. Mine is called Pothnir. He resides in the fourth Aethyr. I reach him with the forty-fourth call.’

  ‘Can I ask what you talk to him about?’

  She looked into the darkness. ‘I’m not an important person or a big thinker like Doctor Dee was. I don’t fuss with cosmic issues. Mostly I ask his advice about small things – well, big for me but super-small for mankind if you know what I’m saying. Just talking to him helps me sometimes. Makes me feel closer to God.’

  ‘So, let me understand this,’ he said. ‘In the Enochian scheme of things, the fourth Aethyr is close to the first Aethyr and therefore God. Is your ability to get high up on the totem pole a marker for your abilities as a scryer?’

  Again, she showed little modesty. ‘I’ve never met a scryer who had a higher level of access.’

  ‘Okay, now the big question. Was this guy talking nonsense when he asked me if I had the 49th Call?’