License to Ensorcell

by Katharine Kerr

  “What did Harry do?”

  “Yelled bloody murder and picked up the bowl and dumped the whole batch over Jim’s head. He looked like Santa Claus.”

  We shared a good laugh.

  “But Michael and Brian were watching, and they got scared. They were what? About six. They went howling out of the kitchen and ran upstairs and hid somewhere. It took me an hour to find them.”

  “I’m not surprised. I’ve never seen a house like your aunt’s. That day I questioned Brian? I nearly couldn’t find my way downstairs again.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet. I—” The words that I’d been meaning to say disappeared. “Oh, my God.”

  “What?”

  I put my coffee down, then stood up and walked a few steps, as stiff as a zombie.

  “Nola, what?”

  “I just thought of something obvious.”

  I heard Ari get up. I took one more step and walked into a section of the gray library where the shelves shot off in all directions. None of the books slid or tumbled off, not even on the shelves that went straight up. The angel was standing behind a dark oak lectern. When it turned to look at me, I noticed it wore pince-nez. It opened a book and shoved it in my direction.

  “Family history,” it said. “Family future.”

  I was propped up on the couch next to Ari, who had his arm tight around my shoulders. I leaned my head against his chest—yes, he smelled like Ari, all right, witch hazel and all. I reminded myself that he was real and the angel only an image.

  “I’ve done that again,” I said.

  “Yes.” He sounded annoyed. “I told you that you needed to eat something.”

  “You were right, okay? Don’t get mad at me, Ari. I don’t have the energy for a good satisfying fight.”

  “I’m not angry,” he snapped. “It’s frightening, seeing you drift off and fall like that.”

  “Fall?”

  “Yes, fall! This time, I’m glad to say, you weren’t standing on a sidewalk when you went down.”

  I pulled away, then turned a little so I could see his expression: dead serious. “I didn’t realize I fell before,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you knew. What would happen if you were crossing the sodding street, and you dropped like this?”

  “Nothing good.” I considered the situation for a minute or so. “I’d probably take up permanent residence in the Beyond.”

  He growled under his breath. “I saved you a piece of that pizza. You’re going to shut up and eat it.”

  I shut up, then got up and followed him into the kitchen. While he put the pizza onto a plate, I contemplated the vision. The meaning seemed clear.

  “If there’s another gate in San Francisco to these deviant levels, what do you bet it’s in the Houlihan house? It was built by generations of people like me.”

  “A good bet, then,” Ari said. “Assuming these levels exist.”

  “Always assuming that, yeah. What I wonder is why our two perps didn’t find it when they burgled the place.”

  “Good question.”

  “They might have been looking in the wrong rooms. Uncle Jim mentioned that they tore the boys’ rooms apart. A gate wouldn’t be up there.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, now that you mention it. I need to go take a look.” I reached for my phone. “I’ll just call Aunt Eileen—”

  “Eat first.”

  I ate. I put milk in my coffee, too. I was beginning to wonder how important being a size four really was, compared to, say, avoiding a fall into trance in front of moving streetcars. Once I’d finished my breakfast, I called Aunt Eileen and asked if she’d be home.

  “So Ari and I can drop by,” I said.

  “I’m always glad to see you,” she said, “but why?”

  “For reasons too strange to say over the phone. I’ll tell you when I see you. Will it bother you if Ari comes along?”

  “No, dear, of course not.” She sounded resigned. “I’ve always liked your boyfriends, you know. It’s just that I wish you’d wait to sleep with them until you’re engaged at least. At least!”

  “Every girl needs a hobby.”

  When Aunt Eileen sighed in deep martyrdom, I decided I owed her some kind of explanation.

  “You see,” I said, “sex is real important to me. With all my talents and training, I could end up floating around my inner world if I wasn’t careful and never making contact with reality again. Sex keeps me in my body.”

  I waited while she thought about my remark.

  “But don’t you think,” Aunt Eileen said eventually, “that taking up modern dance would work as well?”

  “Er, no. Sorry. Uh, see you soon.”

  I signed off fast.

  My current impetus toward sinful behavior was running hot water in the bathroom sink so he could shave. For a moment I sat on the couch and stared out at nothing; then I remembered that I had to file an ensorcellment report. I’d put it off long enough.

  I logged onto TranceWeb. First I procrastinated by reading the latest from NumbersGrrl; then I got down to it. I found the correct form and began to fill out the routine heading. The image of Doyle’s face, grinning mindlessly as the blood soaked through his shirt, rose up in my mind and made it hard to type. I forced myself to write simple clear sentences, as I filled in one little box at a time. Place where ensorcellment occurred. Others present at site. Person ensorcelled. Reason for ensorcellment. I could see him raise the rifle and sight downhill at the two police officers. Outcome of ensorcellment attempt.

  That was the hard one, the outcome. I found myself thinking of Pat, who must have bled as much as Doyle. More, maybe, as he struggled to drag himself to the road and safety.

  “Nola?” Ari walked out of the bathroom. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I said and started to cry. “My poor brother!”

  He strode over, took my hands, swept me up, and pulled me into his arms. I clung to him while he stroked my hair and murmured a few words in Hebrew. What they meant didn’t really matter. I managed to stop crying. He pulled up his T-shirt so he could wipe my face with the hem.

  “We’re a fine pair,” he said. “Walking wounded.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, aren’t you?”

  He pulled the shirt back down, then kissed me. “Better now? We need to get over to your aunt’s.”

  “Yeah, we do. I’ve got to log off first. It’s this damn ensorcellment report.”

  He turned and looked at the computer screen. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Well, actually there is. You just can’t see it.” I took a look myself to make sure. The form still filled the screen. “Let me just get this over with.”

  While I typed in the last few statements he stood behind me with his hands resting on my shoulders. I figured that since he could read nothing onscreen, I wasn’t giving away any Agency secrets. I finished, hit send, and logged off TranceWeb.

  “That is the most peculiar thing I’ve ever seen,” Ari remarked. “When you hit a key, I’d see a little spark on the screen, no letter, just a spark, and then it would disappear into what looked like thick fog.”

  “It’s clever, isn’t it? The pride of the Agency.”

  I shut down the computer before we left, though. No Agency operative keeps their computer always on. Chaos has its hackers.

  In the chilly morning Aunt Eileen was wearing one of her favorite Fifties acquisitions, a navy blue and pink paisley patterned quilted skirt, mid-calf length, formed into a squishy sort of cone by the starched petticoats underneath. She’d topped it with the baby blue twinset she’d found at Goodwill the week before. For shoes she wore a pair of blue flats and not the fuzzy slippers. For such small favors we are thankful.

  With Uncle Jim at work and Brian in school, the house sounded empty when we came in, as if every word echoed in some huge cavern. My mind was playing one of its usual tricks, I realized, objectifying my idea that a spot somewhere inside
led to spaces larger than anyone had suspected. Aunt Eileen ushered us into the kitchen, where, she informed us, she was baking cookies.

  “They smell good,” I said to Aunt Eileen. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, dear,” she said. “Now what’s all this that’s too peculiar to say over the phone?”

  As best I could, I explained: deviant worlds, gates between same, Michael’s developing talent. Eileen listened carefully, asked questions now and then but looked not the least surprised or startled. It occurred to me that she’d heard stranger stories, over the years, about members of her family. Pat’s lycanthropy, in particular, had staggered everyone.

  “Well,” she said when I’d finished. “That is interesting. I’ve always felt that this house had secrets. When I was first married, Jim’s mother was still alive, you know, and she came to live here with us. She told me that she was sure the house had ghosts, but I never heard or saw them. Neither did Clarice or Jimmy, when they still lived at home, and certainly Brian’s never said anything about them.”

  “Sean heard them, though.”

  “That’s right, but I always thought that Sean had gotten the idea from Nanny Houlihan.”

  “I suspect he heard the same voices she did, is all,” I said. “You know, I should call Sean.”

  “I would, dear, really. I’d be interested in what he has to say about all this.” She glanced at Ari. “Sean is Nola’s older brother. It’s Daniel, Maureen, Sean, Nola, Kathleen, Patrick, and Michael.” Her voice wavered on Pat’s name. “I wanted Nola’s mother to name Michael something else, because of all those awful jokes, Pat and Mike, you know, but she wouldn’t.”

  “I gather,” Ari said, “that she’s a woman of strong opinions.”

  “How very tactful you are.” Eileen favored him with a smile. “I should get out the photo album, and—”

  Ari’s phone rang and saved us both. He got up, answered, and wandered out into the hall to talk with Sanchez, I assumed, since he was speaking English. Aunt Eileen leaned across the table and whispered to me.

  “He really is attractive, but, Nola, honestly! You don’t have to sleep with every good-looking man you meet.”

  “I don’t. Maybe one in a hundred. If that.”

  She rolled her eyes to invoke heaven. I could hear Ari talking out in the hall.

  “You’re not having a joke on me, are you?” he was saying.

  A pause while Sanchez apparently reassured him that no, whatever it was was no joke.

  “I’ll bring O’Grady with me,” Ari said next. “Her lot will want to know about this.”

  Another pause.

  “Very well, then, we’ll be right down.” Ari clicked off his phone and returned to the kitchen. “Nola, this is one for your agency.”

  “I was beginning to get that impression,” I said. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.” Ari turned to Aunt Eileen. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Houlihan, but I’ve got to take Nola away. Police business. They need us to look at some evidence.”

  “I understand, dear. But why don’t you just call me Aunt Eileen?” She smiled at him. “You might as well.”

  Every other boyfriend I’d ever brought around had turned icy cold at this suggestion—politely, mind, but icy all the same at the thought of being swept up into my family. Ari actually smiled. “Thank you,” he said, “I will.”

  As soon as we got into the car, Ari turned toward me. He laid one arm along the back of the seat.

  “Think back to yesterday,” he said. “The two corpses went to the morgue at about what? Sixteen hundred hours? They were put in the usual cold storage drawers. This morning there’s not much left of them. They’re disintegrating.”

  My turn for the open mouth and sheer disbelief. “What do you mean, disintegrating?”

  “Rotting flesh, crumbling bones. We’d best get on our way there, or there might not be much left to see.”

  “I can’t go to the coroner’s office in a pair of old jeans and a Giants T-shirt.”

  “Good point. Home first, then.”

  In honor of my supposed important job with the government security apparatus, I wore a gray skirt suit with a dark blue silk blouse and heels. By the time we reached the coroner’s complex in City Hall, the two corpses had been moved to a special room. Sanchez waited for us in an antechamber, where the tech, a somber Asian woman, made us all don lab coats, surgical masks, little plastic shower caps, and plastic gloves. For a final fashion touch we slipped big blue slipper-things over our shoes.

  “We’ve taken samples for lab work,” she told us. “The coroner is pushing everything through as fast as he can. You know, I’ve worked here for twenty years, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Are you going to freeze the remains?” I said.

  “If we can. We’ve been taking photos every fifteen minutes. You’ll see why.”

  We did. She ushered us into an icy-cold examination room. Fluorescent lights gleamed and reflected off the pale green tile that covered the walls, floor, ceiling, and counters. The smell of disinfectant hung so strong in the air that it penetrated the pressed fiber masks we wore. Under that smell lurked another, a rich decay of dead meat. What was left of the two corpses lay naked on stainless steel tables, side by side.

  All of their skin had vanished and most of the flesh to the point where I had no idea which was Johnson and which was Doyle. Gobbets of a sticky black substance stuck to the bones of hands and feet. Red lumps clotted the long bones. The rib cages had collapsed over the gooey remains of organs. The skulls had lost so much flesh that I could see exactly how the plates of bone were disintegrating. Rather than turning spongy or powdery, they had broken up into crystals, little sharp-edged cubes.

  Sanchez made a gagging noise and left the room. Ari turned decidedly pale above the edge of his mask, but he stayed. I was too fascinated to feel disgust. The appearance of the bones resembled—what?

  “Pixilation,” I said aloud. “They look like a digital image that’s breaking up, only in 3-D.”

  “That’s it!” the tech said. “I knew it reminded me of something.”

  It also reminded me of the way Chaos creatures turned to smoke or powder when a ward touched them, but I kept that to myself. Another line of inquiry presented itself.

  “Where are their clothes?” I said. “Doyle bled heavily when he was shot. I wonder if the blood’s still on his shirt or if it’s decayed away.”

  “I’ll check that. Have you seen enough?”

  “More than enough, thanks.” I glanced at Ari.

  “Yes, quite,” he said.

  We returned to the antechamber and stripped off the medical gear, which went into a special plastic bin for later destruction. The reigning theory at the moment was that both men had suffered from some sort of disease along the terrifying lines of Ebola.

  “Have they identified any kind of virus?” I said.

  “Not yet,” she said. “The really odd thing is, they looked perfectly healthy when they came in. Well, aside from being dead.”

  On the off chance that a disease had indeed caused the rapid decay, I ran an SM: Danger check on the room behind us. It picked up nothing but a faint whisper of old peril averted. Unfortunately, I had to keep this good news quiet. The tech made a phone call and discovered that on coroner’s orders, the dead men’s clothing had been placed in isolation in sterile containers.

  “I’ll have to look into that for you,” she told me. “I’ll pass the information on to Homicide when I get it.”

  With that we could make our escape. I needed open air. While Ari fetched the car from the underground lot, I stood on the sidewalk in front of City Hall and luxuriated in pale sunlight. Across the street in Civic Center Plaza, the rows of plane trees lifted bare branches to the clearing sky. A few homeless men sat on one of the benches under the trees, merely sat, barely speaking, wrapped in odds and ends of torn sweaters and jackets. Immediately behind me rose the high gray steps that led up t
o the glass and gilded bronze facade of City Hall.

  I walked back and forth and put some hard thought into what I’d just seen until a cab pulled up and distracted me. A Chinese-American man in a business suit got out, not very tall, with thinning gray hair, carrying a briefcase, absolutely nothing unusual about him except he looked extremely familiar. As he hurried up the steps toward the ornate doors of City Hall I realized that rather than being someone I personally knew, he was Vic Yee, the investigative reporter who’d broken the story about the Army’s attempt to impound the Portals monument. If he’d come down to City Hall on the track of a story, it would be something more subtle and probably more important in the long run than the sensational death of the Silver Bullet Killer.

  I wondered if he’d heard about the disintegrating corpses. It seemed unlikely, but I hoped he had. If the coroner was holding any information back, Yee would ferret it out. By the time Ari drove up, I had a theory of my own. I got into the front seat and buckled on the safety belt.

  “Any ideas about the decay?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It looks like more evidence for the deviant level theory. I’ll have to consult with the Agency expert before I can be sure.”

  “You’ve not been sure about any of this,” Ari said. “Carry on.”

  “Okay, here’s what I’ve learned so far, mostly from the expert’s e-mails. If deviant levels exist, every one of them is going to have its own individual nature. Anything that exists within them will be part of that nature, not ours, and that includes human bodies. She told me that the atoms of our bodies are sort of woven into the structure of our universe. We don’t exist like eggs in a basket, separated by shells from everything around us. We’re actually one of the properties of space-time. It’s kind of like a tapestry or embroidery. You can’t just cut one motif out of it. It’ll unravel. Okay?”

  “I’m following you so far, yes.”

  “Our two Chaotics were in the wrong level, not the one they were born in. Here’s my theory, and it hasn’t been confirmed, okay? They were cutouts from the cloth, and so they could unravel. The matter in their bodies would be unstable while they’re here, especially without the life force to sustain them.”