by Diane Duane
“Sure, no probs. Got time for lunch today, if you do.”
“It’s been quiet this morning,” Annabelle said. “I might take half an hour.” The veiled woman stopped in front of the counter, put her bag down. “Talk to you shortly. Bye.” She hung up, and as she did, the woman reached up and put back her veil.
Annabelle found herself taking a breath of surprise, one that she tried to keep from being too long or obvious. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been expecting to see under that veil—someone very old, perhaps, uncertain about their looks, possibly even disfigured—but not this: not this astonishingly young-looking face, clean-cut, high-cheekboned, almost fierce. The hands she had seen as thin from across the room were not, as she’d at first assumed, much wrinkled with age: they were just very slender, very fine-boned. But the hands would not long hold anyone’s attention while those eyes were on you. They were a brown so dark they were almost black: and though the hair pulled back from the brow above them was long and silver-white, Annabelle somehow felt sure that it had once been nearly the same color, a dark malt brown—maybe with the occasional russet highlight speaking of hours spent out under some southern sun. “How can I help you, ma’am?” Annabelle said.
“Well, I have these—” The lady bent a moment to go rummaging in that bag again. Strange how so Midwestern an accent could come from such an Italianate face: but then there’d been a lot of Italian blood around here for many years. Annabelle found herself looking, not at the hands now, but the sleeves of the kaftan as the lady rummaged. The garment’s color, that nondescript beige, now seemed a lot less important as Annabelle realized it wasn’t actually a kaftan at all, and was made of some kind of slubbed silk, fabulously lustrous, multiply wrapped and draped. Vintage, Annabelle thought. Or antique— She was beginning to think that what she had here was one of those wealthy, eccentric older ladies, unmarried scions of trust-fund families, who occasionally escape the keepers in their city penthouses and run off for a few hours to do something, anything, unsupervised.
“Here we are,” the lady said, and brought up an armful of rolled-up things that rustled, placing them carefully on the counter.
They were almost the same color as the kaftan: at first glimpse, Annabelle thought they were perhaps rolls of the same silken material. But as she got a better look, she saw she was mistaken. The lady took one of the rolls and spread it out; it crackled softly under her hands. The material was something like a thick, coated paper, softly glossy, written all over with beautiful abstract patterns—some kind of lovely, non-repeating linear design. “Oh,” Annabelle said. Old wallpaper? she thought. But there was no reason not to put the best possible construction on what was before her. “I see. …Table runners? Yes, they’re very handsome, aren’t they?” She stroked the surface of one: the ink or caustic used to produce the dark patterns could be felt as something slightly raised. “But there’s not much market for this kind of thing the past couple of years, I’m afraid. Right now the ‘naked table’ look is all the rage—tablecloths are out, not even placemats are in any more. Napkins are still hanging on, but…” She shrugged: it was one of those fads that came and went in home design, and Annabelle for her own part looked forward to the day when it would pass.
“You’re not interested, then,” the lady said.
Annabelle sighed, unable to simply ignore the disappointment in the voice. Often enough some senior citizen would bring a package of some unidentifiable herb or some attic-derived artifact that he or she thought was rare, trying to make a little money off it—or in some cases, just looking for a little contact with another human being. Overheads or no overheads, Annabelle thought, how much would it cost me to make this lady feel a little happier than she is at the moment? “Well,” Annabelle said, “it would depend on the price, of course—”
“Three hundred and eighty-nine thousand, five hundred and twelve dollars,” the lady said. “And seventy-six cents.”
Annabelle’s eyes widened. “Uh,” she said. “Uh, no, ma’am, I’m sorry, I don’t think I can quite see my way to spending that much for them. My apologies.”
“That’s quite all right, dear,” the lady said, “quite all right.” And she gathered up the armful of rolls again, dropped them into her bag, smiled at Annabelle, and turned away.
Annabelle let out a breath and raised her eyebrows. And seventy-six cents, she thought, bemused. Mrs. Kaftan had stopped by the cookbook display near the front of the store, and was fussing with her bag again, rearranging her rolls. There’s one for the books, Annabelle thought. George’ll be fascinated to hear about this, I bet. I wonder, does the number mean something, or… But she abruptly lost her train of thought as Mrs. Kaftan came up with several of those rolls and a cigarette lighter, flicked the lighter into life, and touched it to one end of the rolls.
“Uh, excuse me, ma’am?” Annabelle said, hustling out from behind the counter. But it was already much too late. Mrs. Kaftan dropped the rolls onto the floor and stepped back, watching with a rather clinical interest as they burst enthusiastically into flame. Dear Lady above us, did she soak those in lighter fluid or something, look at them go—
A second later the smoke detector began to screech, and the sprinklers directly above the spot where the scrolls lay burning merrily on the floor went off instantly—Annabelle had made sure that they were reset that way, after that last time with the fire elemental. But the sprinklers’ aim wasn’t at all what it should have been, and they managed to soak everything but the spot where the flames were rising. Out in the mall, the area fire alarm went off, clanging enthusiastically as Mrs. Kaftan turned her back unconcernedly on the burning scrolls and headed out into the concourse.
Annabelle was much too busy stomping on the scrolls to see where the lady went. She shortly became busier still as mall security showed up, and the shopping center’s fire officer and his staff, and about half a dozen other people who had no particular business responding to a fire alarm. The crowd wound up taking up most of the front of Annabelle’s retail space, but there didn’t seem much point in any of them being there—the fire had burnt itself out within a matter of a minute or so. Nothing remained of the scrolls but a few charred scraps, and a scatter of soot and ash.
“I can’t believe how fast they went up,” Annabelle said to the fire officer: “it was as if they were soaked in something—”
“Not much smoke,” the fire officer said, looking around him thoughtfully. “You got lucky. The ventilators’ll clear it out in half an hour or so.”
“Random vandalism…” said one of his subordinates. “Been seeing too much of that kind of thing lately.”
“Or some kind of grudge, maybe,” said the center’s publicity manager. “Like the people who turned those basilisks loose in Macy’s because they’re still not over the name change from Marshall Fields—”
“Or someone looking for an insurance payout,” said the building’s business manager, a little pale man in a shiny suit.
Annabelle gave him a look. “What kind of payout?” she said. “Are you suggesting I set this up?”
“No, of course not, but—”
“You’ve never seen this woman before?” the fire officer said.
Annabelle shook her head. “Never.”
“Well, we’ll put a banning order on her,” said the head security officer. “She won’t get back in.” He glanced out into the mall, then looked over his shoulder at his assistant. “Get down to the office and pull the recording from the number three and four cameras on this level. One of them will have her.”
The assistant disappeared—literally: he was a licensed teleport, as most of the security people were. One by one the interested parties started to go away, leaving Annabelle staring at a sooty, scorched patch of floor and at the business manager, who was looking at Annabelle as if she was just as besmirched. “It’s always a problem,” he said, “when a business starts attracting the wrong kind of clientele—”
This is the same song that wh
at’s-her-name the unit management lady was starting to sing the other day, Annabelle thought with some annoyance. Begins with a B. Barbara…? “Mr. Farnsworth,” Annabelle said. “This is not a conversation we need to be having right this minute. Right now, I need to scrub this floor—”
Farsnworth hastily took himself away, probably not wanting to be associated with any labor so plebeian. But he wasn’t through with her yet, as Annabelle discovered about ten minutes later as she finished cleaning the floor up. That was when one of Farnsworth’s minions arrived with a stack of papers, the incident report Annabelle had to fill out.
Half an hour later, when George finally arrived, she was still muttering in astonishment at how much paperwork one crazy lady with a few rolls of antiquated wallpaper and a twenty-five-cent lighter could produce. Now it was George’s turn to lean over the counter as Harl had done, but with a lot less mustache-twirling: for all his six feet of height and what he called his Serious Lawyer suit, George’s fresh face and big blue innocent eyes made him look more like an escaped choirboy than anything else. “You’re not even going to have time for a sandwich, at this rate,” he said, watching her start signing the bottoms of the forms.
“Yeah, I will,” Annabelle said, glancing out at the concourse. “Wednesdays are usually dead, and this one’s deader than usual, fire or no fire. I’ll close up for an hour.”
“And you never saw this lady before?”
Annabelle shook her head, signed the last form, pushed the paperwork away. “It’s all a mystery to me,” she said, reaching under the counter to get her purse out of the locked drawer.
“You should do a scrying when you get home,” George said, heading out to stand in front of the store while Annabelle pulled out her keys and started the security gate rolling down out of the ceiling above the doors.
She ducked under the gate and stood looking up and down the concourse for a moment while the gate clanged into place: she knelt to spell the padlock closed, then stood up, dusting off her knees. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “Where’s lunch?”
“Your choice. Plantain City or Dodo’s.”
They walked down the north stairway together. “No more pastrami,” Annabelle said, “not after last week. What’s at Plantain City?”
George went off into one of his patented restaurant reviews, in this case involving much Jamaican food and some spices even Annabelle wasn’t entirely sure she could identify. After the fourth or fifth lovingly described entrée, she stopped him, laughing. “I will never understand how such a desperate foodie is working the paralegal side of the street!”
“Because it’s a foodie that likes to be able to afford being a foodie,” George said. “And today was payday, so the jerk chicken’s on me. But, seriously, ‘Belle, if Miss Amateur Arson shows up again, call me first and I’ll do lawyer magic at her. The last thing you need is to lose all that high-priced stock to some dementia-ridden firebug. Has the insurance company ever paid off on that fire elemental thing?”
She sighed as they headed out the center’s doors into the street. “Still working on it.”
“I told you, you should have called me first. Make sure you do it next time!”
*
She promised him, of course: and she promised him again, over the jerk chicken, and again, on the way back to the store. The afternoon was perhaps mercifully quiet after that: from lunch to closing time Annabelle sold nothing but a cast-iron frying pan, a copy of Cordon Bleu Cooking For Dummies, and two ounces of leaf malabathrum—guaranteeing the demure young woman who bought it, at the very least, an extremely interesting bath if she and the friend who might be in the tub with her both knew the cantrip that went with the herb.
Annabelle closed up the store and caught the bus home to South Lawndale, still musing over the veiled woman, who hadn’t struck her as anything like a firebug, despite what George might have said. All right, Annabelle thought as she headed up the front steps of her condo and got out her house keys, maybe I’m not a mental health expert, but crazy? She wasn’t crazy. There had been something very thoughtful about those eyes: crazy would have seemed the exact opposite of what was behind them…
She let herself in, shut the front door behind her, and just stood there in the hallway for a moment. But it wasn’t the hallway she was seeing: it was those scrolls…
Don’t ignore your instincts, she remembered her scrying instructor telling her. When you’re seeing, see. And the advice had paid off often enough.
Annabelle slipped out of her coat, threw it over the coat rack, and went into the living room. There she turned on a couple of lights, for it was starting to get dim outside. Twilight’s always good for scrying, she thought. Not quite day, not quite night, both sides of the border visible. When’s nautical twilight today?
Then she shrugged. Never mind, don’t waste time fiddling around in hopes of maximizing the effect— Annabelle went over to the old maple breakfront, touched her thumb to the keyhole patch on the right-hand door, and pulled it open, rooting around for a moment among the ceramic pots and cups and other bric-a-brac there. Now where’s that mirror? Normally she kept a small one here in case of situations like this. But it was nowhere to be found. Did I borrow it from myself to do my makeup the other night?... Oh, heck.
After a second she muttered, “Never mind, it’s about time I got some new powder,” and went out to the hallway to go rooting in her purse. The compact, at least, was where it was supposed to be. Annabelle went back into the living room, sat down on the couch in front of the coffee table, opened the compact, and put it down on the table, turning it carefully so that when she sat back it would reflect nothing but the white of the ceiling.
Annabelle tucked her legs up under herself and got comfortable, then allowed her gaze to drop gradually to the mirror, as if by accident. That seemed to be the main trick to catroptomancy, at least when Annabelle was doing it; sneak up on the optic, sneak up on the hidden reality, don’t let it see you coming…
But apparently it had seen her already. The mirror went pale, not with any reflection of the ceiling’s white paint, but with the strange glossy texture of the rolls that Mrs. Not-Really-A-Kaftan had spread out for her. More an ivory color, Annabelle thought, as the long dark scrawls of the design ran down the mirror—almost as if someone was holding it in her hand, running it down one of the rolled-out scrolls. Of course. It’s not paper: it’s parchment. The smooth side of a piece, not the skin side. She had been fooled into thinking the material was something modern by how excellent its condition had been. Very carefully kept. For how long, I wonder?
The view in the mirror didn’t change. And not just designs. Writing—This too was something you had to sneak up on, being careful not to press too hard. The mirror would show you the truth, if the truth was at all accessible: but you had to keep your own preconceptions well away from the scrying, for fear of skewing it. The black writing writhed as Annabelle watched it—paled, shimmered, then shifted. Suddenly it looked like English-language cursive done in a very regular hand: but it was hard to read, having been written with a broad-nibbed pen. Annabelle dared not look too hard at the mirror, but here and there a word became plain as the writing flowed by. Water… irresistible, and… the basic human necessity… must take time to… in the fire, but… chicken…
Chicken?? Annabelle thought, incredulous.
And the compact’s mirror cracked from side to side.
“Oh, damn,” she muttered, “I rushed it.” Annabelle sighed and swung her feet down off the couch, picking up the compact. There would be no more scrying today: one a day was her limit. She glanced around to make sure that no splinters of glass had jumped out when the mirror broke, then closed the compact, got up, and headed for the kitchen, pausing only to dump the poor broken compact back into her purse. I’ll get a replacement tomorrow, she thought. Meanwhile, just the thought of chicken is making me hungry. Oh well: make some dinner, think about this…
*
But dinner d
idn’t help her get any closer to working out exactly what she should be thinking about. Annabelle spent the rest of the evening quietly, then slept on the problem. Sleep didn’t help either. She woke up no more enlightened about what she’d seen than she’d been when she went to bed, and went off to work as usual.
If possible, it was even quieter than it had been the day before. Annabelle occupied herself with casual stock-taking and dusting the cookware on the hanging racks until, about an hour before lunchtime, the phone finally rang. She hastened toward it, oddly pleased. George, probably. Wait till he hears about that scrying. “A Taste of Spice, good morning, this is Annabelle, how can I help you?”
“By getting out of retail, it doesn’t suit you,” her mother said.
Annabelle rolled her eyes. She loved her mother dearly, but the two of them had a gift (as her father put it) for “winding each other up the wrong way”. The fact that her mother was telling her exactly what she’d been thinking herself just somehow made matters worse. “Mom,” she said. “I thought you said you’d be out getting your hair done this morning.”
“They canceled on me, Sheila came down with that bug that’s going around. You should be careful you don’t catch it too, working in a public place like that.”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Annabelle said. It would be really nice if someone came in now, even if they weren’t going to buy anything from me. Come on, somebody get in here and make me seem busier than I really am…
“Besides, it’s sales, you’re not the kind of person for sales,” her mother said, making the word sound as if she was discussing indentured servitude. “If it’s spices and food and whatever you want to be working with, you should open a restaurant! Everybody raves about your cooking! Every time we have a dinner party, everybody’s always saying, why doesn’t Annabelle open a restaurant? But you know best, you had to get yourself into this retail thing, you work terrible hours, evenings and weekends, how are you ever going to meet a nice—”