Miles and the Magic Flute

by Heidi Cullinan

  But Warren was a memory that lingered, and now he was here, grinning a devil’s grin around the wad of what was undoubtedly chewing tobacco in his mouth. Miles, still trapped by the staples in his sleeve, felt panic rise.

  “Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t Miles Larson, come home to Summer Hill with his tail between his legs.” Warren tossed a sneer to Daryl and Ham, his sidekicks from school days and apparently now as well. “Should have figured the fag would come work for the dykes.”

  The tone was just right, and so was the pitch, and he even had the gang of thugs with him again. The primal memories rose up almost as a Pavlovian response, and Miles cowered.

  And then, like someone had flipped a switch, rage swept through Miles hot and sharp. He turned, ripping his sweater loose. He didn’t even pause when the gesture put a hole in it—he only stalked up to the edge of the counter and pressed his palms against the edge of it so he could glare at the thug right in the eye.

  Warren took a step backward, his eyes wide and full of surprise.

  Miles grinned a nasty grin and tightened his hands into fists.

  The gesture made his thumb brush against the circle of the silver ring he’d stolen from Katie, and Miles’s mental switch flipped back, the rage retreating to a simmer again.

  He lifted his chin to give Warren his most brittle smile. “Warren. What can I do for you?”

  Daryl and Ham had cardboard boxes in their arms, and at Warren’s nod, they put the containers on the counter that stood between them and Miles.

  “Came to pawn my shit, dumbass.” Warren nudged the one he’d put down and gave Miles a curt nod. “And you’re giving me top dollar, you little cocksucker, or I’ll beat the living crap out of you.”

  Ten years. It had been ten years since high school, and Miles had done a lot in that decade. He’d been a team leader in his department, and if they’d called him back from his layoff, he would have stepped right back on track for his shot at junior VP. He couldn’t even remember the last time someone had threatened him with physical violence, and he was pretty sure that when they had, he’d just ignored them and kept walking. Now here he was back home, and Warren Fucking Lehman only had to look at him sideways and he was fourteen again, afraid of being hung up over the post of the bathroom stall by his underwear again.

  And just like that the rage was back. Cower to Warren Lehman? Fuck that.

  This time Miles very carefully kept his thumb from touching the ring as he gave Warren another saccharine smile. “It’s so good to see you haven’t lost your small town charm. By the way, how’s work going?”

  Warren glowered. “I’m laid off, fucker, just like everybody else.”

  Miles nodded in empathy he absolutely didn’t feel. “That’s too bad.” His heart pounded, though, and he felt as if he were split in half, part of him trying to scramble to safety while the other stepped boldly into harm’s way. The ring pulsed gently now, but so did the rage. Miles picked at the threads the staple left on the edge of the hole in his sweater and cleared his throat, trying to collect himself.

  “I’m sure you’ll find something eventually.” He tossed the threads he’d pulled out into the trash, shoved up his sleeves, and approached the boxes. “Let’s see what you have.”

  What Warren had, of course, was pretty much junk, and even as much as Miles hated him, it was sobering to see what Warren had of worth to sell from his miserable little life. Four CDs, two Blu-ray boxed sets, a Blu-ray player, an outdated cell phone, a portable stereo, a toaster, and a percolating coffee pot. Miles was still learning this gig, but he was already pretty sure Warren was looking at twenty bucks, tops, and that was only if Miles was feeling generous. Which he wasn’t.

  Warren, who apparently knew this, too, tightened his hand into a fist and rested it on the edge of the box as Miles peered into it.

  “Hmm,” Miles said, buying himself some time. He had a few words with his angry self, pointing out that if Warren hit him he’d get charged for assault, but Miles would still end up with a busted face. The rage wasn’t much moved, and the next thing Miles knew, he’d pasted on the false smile again. “I can take the electronics, but Patty doesn’t do CDs or Blu-ray. Try eBay.” He scanned the lot once more, then kept the smile in place as he said, “Fifteen.”

  Warren slammed his fist on the counter so hard even Daryl and Ham jumped. “You little faggot.”

  Inside Miles panicked, but the rage still drove, and it leaned forward, grinned terribly, and whispered, Yes.

  Behind Miles, a door slammed into the wall. “Is there a problem?”

  Miles didn’t know how Patty did it. She was big, but she wasn’t tall, and honestly, as a woman, she should have been instantly dismissed by someone like Warren, especially when he had Dumb and Dumber as backup. But Warren didn’t dismiss her. In fact, he backed up and toned down quite a bit just at the sight of her. It calmed the beast inside Miles, too, leaving him with mental space enough to feel queasy at the thought of how close he’d come to becoming a greasy streak against the wall.

  No one paid any attention to him now, though. This was a stand-off between Warren and Patty.

  “This stuff’s worth more than fifteen dollars,” Warren said, still angry, but less aggressive about it. He gestured to his boxes, then to Miles.

  Patty came forward and peered into the boxes before giving Warren a very heavy look. “Miles was being generous. I would have quoted you ten.” When Warren made more noise, she raised a finger at him. “Listen here, buddy. I buy what I can resell. Everybody here is in the same shit you are, which means I am up to my eyeballs in everybody’s useless garbage they should be putting on garage sales. You can take ten dollars right now and say thank you to me and sorry to Miles, or you can pick up your goddamned boxes and get out. Because my taking your shit for ten dollars is a favor. If you don’t act appropriately, the favor is rescinded. Understand?”

  Warren was red-faced and furious, but it was also clear he knew he was beaten. But rather than agree to the ten, Warren reached into the box farthest from him and pulled out a small black case, a case Miles realized he’d overlooked as part of a DVD box set.

  “This has got to be worth more than ten.”

  Patty took the box from him and opened it, and Miles gasped.

  It was a flute. A very small flute made of what was very possibly silver. It didn’t look like most flutes Miles had seen, and he should know, since he’d played one in high school. This flute was all one piece, looking almost like a piccolo, but it was longer, and it had no covers for the holes or any levers of any kind. There was etching in the metal, delicate swirls and whorls, and some writing that reminded Miles of Elvish in the Lord of the Rings movies.

  He could have sworn the light shifted in the pawn shop the second Patty opened the case.

  Patty took the flute out carefully from the velvet lining and weighed it in her hand. “You steal this, did you?”

  “It was my grandma’s, or something.” When Patty just raised an eyebrow, Warren added indignantly, “I found it in a box in the attic.”

  Miles would have laid good money that the flute was stolen. At any rate, he was pretty sure Warren’s grandmother had been dead fifteen years.

  “Hmm.” Patty turned the flute over a few times, rubbing her finger across the holes, inspecting the ends. Then she put it back into the box and closed it with a snap. “Fifty. For the lot.”

  Miles suspected Warren would have fought this price earlier, but after nearly walking out with only a ten spot, he let out a sigh of relief and held out his hand. But when Patty opened the register, she pulled out a pair of twenties and a five. When Warren opened his mouth to object, she gave him a feral smile and braced both hands on the counter, trapping his money in her palm as she leaned closer to address him.

  “Haven’t you heard about my policy, Warren? I counted five slurs out of your mouth once you came through the door, four aimed at Miles and one at Julie and me. That’s a dollar each. Outfront Minnesota thanks y
ou for your generous contribution to their effort to bring marriage equality to our state and further the rights of LGBT persons.” She held out the money, her smile turning sweet. “And you have a very nice day.”

  Warren snatched up the money with a glare and nodded at Daryl to pick up the box of DVDs & CDs. “Bitch,” he murmured, but under his breath as he led his sorry little posse back out the door.

  Miles watched them go. “Aren’t you worried they’ll retaliate in some way?”

  “The county sheriff is next door, and Julie keeps him neck-deep in baked goods. Anybody messes with the lesbians who run Patty’s Pawn Plus will shortly get a visit from the law, and that’s a fact well-known in Summer Hill and several neighboring communities. Plus, Warren knows damn well I can aim my gun and reload faster than his fat little fingers can manage. Though that protection won’t automatically extend to you, so I’d stay out of shadowy alleys and parking lots.” She picked up the box that held the flute and handed it to Miles. “But first do some research on this for me. I have the feeling we just made one hell of a deal, but I don’t know where to sell a flute.”

  Miles watched Patty pick up the boxes, noting the way her biceps bulged as she lifted them. Patty was the butchiest butch he’d ever met. She was short, but she was stocky, and her features and build were so mannish that he almost found her attractive. He didn’t like the tattoos, though, that snaked around her shoulders and down both arms. She did, and so did Julie, which was probably why Patty was wearing a tank top even though it was so cold in the shop that Miles was considering putting on gloves.

  Except it wasn’t cold now, Miles noted. He’d been freezing before Warren came in, but now he was quite warm. Maybe it was from being so angry? Miles looked down at the flute, still open in its case. When he looked at it, the feeling of warmth increased. And when he touched the metal, he could have sworn he smelled summer. The ring on his finger had warmed, too, and the rage was entirely gone now. He felt good, really good.

  He felt the phantom brush his cheek again, and he snapped the box shut.

  “I’ll have to go back to the trailer to research,” Miles said.

  “That’s fine,” Patty said, picking up another box. “I’ll call over if we get busy.”

  The cold had come back, and Miles shivered. He looked down at the black box in his hand and frowned. It was just like the forest again, except this time he wasn’t in the forest. Was whatever this was following him around?

  God, did he actually just ask himself that?

  “Patty,” he said at last, “how do you know if you’re going crazy?”

  “You’re not crazy,” she said matter-of-factly and thumped her box down. “Just neurotic and sulky. You’ve always been that way.”

  Miles sagged. “I just don’t feel very stable. I keep seeing things. Smelling things.”

  “You’ve been out of work for six months. Your boyfriend is dating a muscle-bound hottie he met in a bar. You’re bankrupt and friendless and living back in the shit town you grew up in, holing up in my double-wide and working in my redneck pawn shop. You’re a snotty, proud bastard, and right now life is rubbing your nose in the shit. If you weren’t seeing and smelling things, I’d worry.” She clapped a hand on his shoulder and nodded at the door. “Now go make me some money on that flute. And don’t let Julie turn the heat up over sixty-five.”

  Feeling somehow even more frustrated after Patty’s rational dismissal, Miles tucked the flute against his side and headed for the door. A cold, biting wind met him there, no trace of summer at all. The tinkling sound he heard wasn’t magical, just the bell above the door.

  The fact that it followed him all the way back down the road until he reached the trailer park must have been his sullen, pouty, snotty imagination.

  PATTY AND JULIE lived in a double-wide trailer in the trailer park behind the pawn shop. It was the same trailer Patty had grown up in, back when the pawn shop had been her dad’s, but it was a lot nicer now than it had been when Miles visited Patty during high school. The outside was still a dingy gray, but the inside was clean and sparkling. That was because of Julie.

  Julie was everything in a woman that Patty wasn’t. She was slight and tall and shockingly beautiful, a state only heightened by the fact that she never wore any makeup whatsoever. Julie was absolutely granola: she kept a garden in the lot beside the shop, and she spent the whole summer either weeding or canning. She traded her vegetables for wool from local farmers, which she spun into yarn, then dyed and either sold it at local farmers’ markets or on the Internet. She cooked, she knitted, and she raised chickens, even though she herself was vegan.

  She was in the kitchen when Miles opened the door to the trailer, bent over a pot at the stove, her shining blonde ponytail limp and curling from the steam as she wiped a hand absently on her blue-checked apron. This lovely domestic image was ruined, however, by the fact that the whole trailer reeked of a manky, sour smell that Miles couldn’t place and frankly didn’t want to. He gagged, pinched his nose, and tried in vain to find a space in the room that wasn’t clogged with the stench.

  Julie frowned in apology. “It’s the dye,” she said, still stirring the pot with a wooden spoon. “I’m staining some yarn, and if it turns out well, I’m going to sell it on Etsy. Just another half hour and I’ll be all done.”

  Miles kept his nose pinched as he hurried around the table toward the narrow hallway. “Just going back to my room,” he said.

  Julie put down her spoon and turned toward him. “Miles, before you go, I need you to look at my food processor for me. It isn’t working right, and I need it to mince some garlic for hummus I want to sell at the co-op.”

  “I’ll look at it later.” Miles ran down the hall and shut the door behind him.

  He could still smell the dye, though, and he ended up having to open a window to get rid of it, which meant that he was even colder here than he’d been in the pawn shop. Grumbling, he fished in his drawer for a second pair of socks, donned a sweatshirt and wrapped his comforter around himself at the desk as he settled in at the computer.

  He didn’t even know where to start. He googled “flute,” which buried him in worthless nonsense. He went to eBay and checked their prices, but the only things selling were regular modern flutes. He tried “flute collectors” and got a few interesting possibilities. Noting the emails and bookmarking the pages, he continued his scan, thinking he should try looking for some auction sites, too, both for musical instruments and for antiques. It looked like he might be able to get a couple hundred dollars for it, which would make Patty very happy—though to sell it, of course, she’d have to either give more money to Warren to buy it outright or wait a month before he came back to get it. Except something in him felt like it should be worth even more. If it were real silver, the metal alone should be worth that, shouldn’t it? He wished he knew what questions to ask.

  Frowning, Miles’s thumb rubbed against the silver ring, letting it soothe him while he considered his approach.

  In the end, Miles emailed a few of the collectors, describing the flute in detail. He also took a few photos of it and attached them to his emails, figuring the gesture couldn’t hurt. He checked eBay again, making sure he’d exhausted all the categories, then closed the browser, ready to take a break on social media. But as he moved his cursor to his bookmarks bar, he caught himself whistling, and he remembered the weird light and the bells and the way the shop had seemed to warm.

  He paused, and then on the premise that googling never hurt anybody, typed, “magic flute.”

  He got over one million hits, all of them having to do with Mozart’s opera.

  Miles rolled his eyes at himself, but he grinned too. No such thing as magic in Minnesota. He drove the point home by scrolling through page after page of search results, each one more mundane than the one before. On the seventh page, he saw a link to “Terris’s Faerie Realm” with the preview listing necklaces and silver charms for sale, and he felt bold enough to click throug
h, thinking surely the lineup of Wiccan baubles would chase away the last of his paranoid visions of things that haunted him in the woods.

  But when he clicked the page, it was black. The whole screen was black, in fact, except for the menu bar.

  Miles waited several seconds for the site to load, but nothing ever happened. Frowning, he hit the back button to try again.

  Nothing happened. The browser stayed where it was, neither loading nor returning to the search page. When Miles tried to close the application, it was frozen. His mouse could move fine, but he couldn’t select anything.

  “Come on.” Miles clicked the mouse three times in angry succession.

  The whole room went black.

  Chapter Three

  For in that place, I know the way—

  there is one to save and one to slay.

  One to kill and one to play.

  And one Lord o’er all to make them stay.

  MILES LET OUT his breath in a soft gasp. It seemed to echo in a way that didn’t fit the room. His tiny bedroom was also an office, and outside of the bed, desk, dresser, and shelving there was about three square feet of available space in the center of the room, most of that taken up by the office chair. And yet from the way his breath echoed and by the simple feel of the space around him, Miles would have sworn he was in a large, high-ceilinged room, empty of furniture and likely lined with marble. He was still seated at his desk, and he had the mouse in his hand, but he was fairly sure the desk was somehow no longer in his bedroom. And neither was he.

  It was cold too. Yes, he had the window open, but there wasn’t a breeze any longer. The air didn’t move at all. This was a different cold. Deep cold, like the bottom of a cave. Cold like winter. Miles couldn’t smell Julie’s dye any longer, but he was definitely smelling something. Something… off. Manky. Damp, dirty, and maybe even furry. It smelled like a basement, but it smelled like a basement where several unfortunate animals had died a long time ago.