Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  “Wait right there. I have to finish something up. And don’t eat my cookies,” she snapped. The elderly woman shuffled off down the hallway, muttering.

  Lascaris’s gaze swept over the mound of papers on the table. There was a jar, nearly covered by papers. He lifted the lid and peered inside. There was food inside, and his stomach growled. He picked up a piece of dry pastry and gnawed on it. It was actually very good, sweet and nutty.

  He wandered into the kitchen. By his standards as an alchemist who ran a laboratory, this place was very haphazard. Boxes and books filled the countertops. He paused before a spice rack and squinted at the herbs in their little containers—the containers looked like glass, but the material was lighter and thinner. The old woman was wealthier than he thought; many of these herbs were ones he would have had to send away for, at great cost, during his time as the Alchemist of Temperance. The saffron, in particular, was fascinating.

  He took the bottles down, one by one. He dumped contents of some of them into a cup, adding some salt from a shaker he found on the windowsill. The salt was crusty, but it would do. He opened the cabinets and gazed at their contents. He picked through them, finding vinegar and some milk and eggs in a large cold cabinet. He mixed his findings together in a cup. With the salt, he sketched a series of alchemical symbols around the concoction and muttered over it, tapping the rim three times.

  He downed the contents of the cup in three gulps. When he was finished, he grimaced, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. It tasted truly disgusting. But the potion would fortify him, keep his weak bones and withered muscles going. He could control much of this body through sheer force of his magical will, but a fortifying potion never hurt.

  He rinsed out his mouth with water and then crept down the hallway. A door stood ajar at the end of the hall, emanating a lurid green light. He paused to listen.

  The old woman’s voice sounded sharply, a low whisper: “No, I have to go. You have exactly twenty-four hours to cough up that block reward. Yeah. I sent the proof of work. Twice. Get it done. Fucking tool.”

  Lascaris peered around the corner of the door.

  The old woman sat in a black chair, surrounded by whirring black metal boxes on racks. Cords and wires snaked across the floor, and shiny silver tubes reached up into the ceiling. Glowing boxes cast a green glow in the room, which felt positively frigid. She was barking into what looked like a black tiara on her head at an unseen person.

  The old woman swiveled sharply in her chair and looked up at him. “I thought I told you to stay put,” she snarled.

  Lascaris let his gaze rove over this odd dark room. He touched one of the glass panes showing an unintelligible string of words and letters. “What is this?”

  The woman leaned back in her chair and chuckled. “This is the biggest cryptocurrency farm west of the Mississippi.”

  Lascaris cocked his head. “Crypto . . . currency? Is that some kind of magic?”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” she cackled. “Not that anyone would believe you if you told on me. Sweet old Molly, the retired statistician, can’t figure out her television remote.”

  “I have no idea what any of that means.”

  “It means two trips to Aruba a year and fully funding the college educations of all seven of my grandchildren.” Molly tapped at a black tray of tiles with letters and symbols on them. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll take you to the police station. They’ll figure out what your damage is and get you back to where you belong in a jiffy.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Wait. I bet you’re an escapee from that nursing home. Bailing on that yellow gravy and early bedtimes.”

  Lascaris swallowed. “I, ah, don’t remember.”

  “It might be better for me to drop you off there, then.” She finished tapping on the tray of tiles and got up. She moved a bit quicker than before, sliding into a pink sweater draped on the back of her chair and snatching a fistful of keys and a handbag the size of a suitcase from a hook on the wall. “C’mon. I’ll get you back before din-din.”

  Lascaris’s head spun, and he followed her out to the gravel path where the turquoise blue vehicle sat. One of the modern age’s horseless carriages. Molly opened a door and got in. Lascaris copied her. He fumbled three times with the latch before climbing in on the other side. She put a key in the carriage, and it growled to life.

  Molly slowly backed out of the driveway, peering into a mirror. “You’ll be back before you know it, and you’ll forget all about this. You’ll be playing Scrabble with four-letter words by dusk.”

  Lascaris frowned. He had no compunctions about dissolving Molly and taking her horseless carriage. But as he watched her, he realized that there was a lot more to operating this metal beast than there was to riding a horse. There was a wheel, and a rod in the floor that moved, and two pedals. Lascaris realized that he needed her, at least for a little while.

  He cleared his throat. “That place is terrible. They do terrible things.”

  Molly paused, glancing at him. “What kind of things?”

  He hung his head dramatically. “They don’t feed me. They beat me sometimes. I want . . . I want to go back to my daughter. She doesn’t know that they do this to me. If I go to her, and she knows, she’ll save me.”

  Molly frowned, stopping the vehicle. The vehicle grumbled. “Man, I’m sorry.”

  “Please. Take me to my daughter.”

  She tapped her yellowed fingernails on the wheel. “Where does your daughter live?”

  “That way.” He pointed toward the smoke.

  Molly sighed and the vehicle began rolling again. “You’d better not get me into trouble, you old coot.”

  “My daughter will be happy to see me,” he said brightly. “She always is.”

  “I hope so,” she murmured, turning right on the road and toward the western haze.

  “If you find him, bring him to me.”

  Owen keyed off his radio and scratched his mustache thoughtfully. He’d put out an APB for Petra Dee’s father. He’d sent out two patrol cars to look for him—Owen was, after all, a concerned citizen and upstanding sheriff. It didn’t change the fact that Petra Dee and her husband, Gabriel Manget, had been thorns in his side ever since he’d inherited the Rutherford Ranch, however. So it wasn’t exactly duty that compelled him to find Joseph Dee. If he had a chance to ask Petra’s father a few questions outside of the prying eyes of the nursing home staff, he was damn well gonna take it. He had questions. Questions like: What are you doing in Temperance? Do you know what crazy shit your daughter is into, or are you somehow involved? What do you think about her getting married to a dead guy, anyway?

  “You never leave anything alone, do you, Owen?”

  In the passenger seat of his SUV, Anna was watching him with wry amusement.

  “No,” he said. “Well, not often. I’m inquisitive.” He knew that was his greatest character failing, not leaving well enough alone. He once thought of the whole county as something he was responsible for, and to be properly responsible for it, he ought to know every sigh and breath the underworld—both criminal and magical—took. Now he was more careful about what anthills he poked, but he still wanted to know where they were in case he decided to avoid them.

  “And you’re being inquisitive about this bad guy. Robin.” Her mouth turned down.

  “Yeah. I am,” he admitted. “I want to know if he was telling me the truth, you know?”

  She turned away.

  “Aren’t you angry? I mean . . . if he killed you, don’t you want everyone to know and for him to get what’s coming to him?”

  She was chewing on the drawstring of her hoodie. Over time, Owen had come to associate that gesture with her being deep in thought. “I don’t hate him, Owen.”

  Owen’s brow creased. “Why not?” he blurted. He was used to hating evil. There sure was a lot of it, and a lot of people got away with doing it. Including himself. He’d done a lot
of evil things himself, and he hated those things, too. He guessed that extended to self-loathing, but he tried not to think about it.

  She turned back to him, her blue eyes earnest. “If he did it, he did it because he was weak. There was something else there . . . something darker and more awful than him. He may have killed me, but I think . . . there was something else.”

  “Robin told me about a creature. A giant toad. Something he considers to be a god that told him to do it.” Saying it aloud sounded even more implausible than his usual conversations with the ghost.

  Anna shivered. “I remember that there was something. Something dark and terrible at the bottom of the well. I don’t know what it was. But it was awful.”

  Owen’s mouth thinned. Maybe there was something there, after all.

  He was determined to find out. He swallowed his fear at dealing with the supernatural, even as his missing hand ached. This was the case that had dogged his entire career. This was Anna’s murder. He owed it to her to man up and face what had caused it.

  Anna vanished. He sighed and climbed out of the SUV. He’d driven himself and Anna off the main roads, off one-lane gravel roads, back through the dry forest of the backcountry. It was too early for hunting season, but Owen really wouldn’t advise civilians to be out wandering in the woods. Yellowstone was still miles away, but smoke rose in columns in the distance. It wouldn’t do for a bunch of lookie-loos to get stuck or lost in the woods with fire so close.

  Nor could he spare any of his patrol deputies for such an odd errand. The ones he had on duty were rehearsing his evacuation plans, if worse came to worst. Those that weren’t out cruising the back roads, looking for Petra Dee’s dad, that was.

  Besides, every so often, Owen liked getting his hands dirty. And Anna’s death was his case. He’d reassigned the cold case to himself when he became sheriff, and had not given it up. He had ownership of this situation to the bitter end, on more levels than he could contemplate. And if it helped ameliorate some of those evil things he’d mentioned earlier, then all the better . . .

  Owen had driven to the well where Anna’s body had been found twenty years ago. He hadn’t been back here since that time they’d brought her up. Then, he’d been a brand-spanking-new deputy and had thrown up all over his shoes. Now that skinny file folder sat on his desk, the work of his superiors and his own investigation, yellowed with time, a reminder of things he’d failed to do.

  Owen opened his door and stepped out into the brittle, hot thicket. Mayflies swarmed, and insects grated out scratchy music from the trees. The ground was hot and dry enough for him to drive over without fear of getting stuck, but he felt it better to go on foot the last part of the way. He scanned this place, remembering Robin’s story. There should be a creek here . . . He walked a few feet to an area where the trees were densest, as if they’d had easy access to water. There was no water here now, just a dried-up mud bed. But it could have been diverted or just evaporated—the fire might have something to do with that. Either way: no toads in there that he could see.

  He crossed the forest floor to a clearing, where the old well stood. He always wondered why someone would have dug a well so close to running water. It seemed an unnecessary luxury. Yet here it was, simple sandstone, unornamented, a round portal into the dark. Maybe, long ago, there had been a small house here, and the well had been in the basement for convenience. Maybe, at the time it had been constructed, there had been no creek. Maybe the creek was the product of drainage ditches and culverts built for the nearby road. He walked back toward the road, seeing a dry culvert reaching beneath it. Maybe.

  He was procrastinating. He took a deep breath and went to the well. He clicked on his flashlight and peered in.

  There wasn’t much water there, not much at all. When they hauled Anna up so many years ago, the water’s surface had been maybe five feet down. Now he could barely see an oily black pool with his light, some fifteen feet down. And it stank. It stank just as bad as it did when Owen found Anna’s head in a rotted bucket. What else was rotting down there? More bodies?

  Feeling vaguely ridiculous, but thankful that no one was here to see him, he called out: “Pigin. Pigin, are you here?”

  The insects in the trees seemed to stop their whirring. It became very, very still. The hair on Owen’s arms stood up, and he felt suddenly very cold, like someone had dumped a milk shake down the back of his shirt.

  “Pigin? Can you hear me?”

  A voice rasped from the bottom of the well, almost too faint to hear. It had a sibilant inflection that reminded Owen too much of the hiss of the air conditioner at the mental hospital: “Lean closer, over the well, so that I can see you.”

  Owen peered into the well with his flashlight. It seemed like something moved below, but he couldn’t make out what it was. If he were a rational man, he would have supposed that he was spotlighting fish or snakes, swimming in from some underground water source. But Owen hadn’t felt like a rational man for a very long time.

  The voice echoed from below. “I see you clearly now, man with a wooden hand and shiny star. What brings you here?”

  “My name’s Owen. And you must be Pigin.”

  A small splash sounded below. “How do you know my true name?”

  “I spoke to an old friend of yours, Robin Wayne Cuthbert.”

  Laughter echoed up, the scrape of a metal spatula on a grill grate, followed by the hiss of a boiling-over radiator. “Long ago, that little bird flew away.”

  Owen squinted down into the well, trying to see what he was talking to. “What are you?”

  The creature at the bottom of the well snorted. “I am the spirit of this place, the genius loci, if you will. This place has a foul history, and I am what rose up from beneath the weight of that history. I am what existed before history. I am eternal.”

  Owen leaned against the sandstone, his fingernails digging into the grit. “I’m listening.”

  Something burbled in the muck, and it sounded like a sigh. “Hundreds of years ago, the native men and women would avoid this place, the land around this portal in the earth that men call a well. They were right to do so. Sun never fully penetrated the canopy of the forest to light the ground, and the creek muttered strangely. They gave it a wide berth, and the land was still. It was my domain, the place of death. Tranquil.

  “Then the pale people came to this land. I watched as a man built a house on this site, then sent away for his family. His wife and two children arrived. The man showed them the home and promptly left the next day to work his trade as a carriage driver for the next two weeks.

  “Gennie, the young wife, disliked the house straightaway. She longed for sunlight, and there was none to be had within a twenty-minute walk. The house was always cold, and she was tasked with maintaining the home and grounds while her husband was gone. To her fell the sewing, washing, cooking, repairs, and running the household. I whispered to her as she slept, as she worked, and she shuttered the windows and slept with a blanket wrapped around her head. But still, she felt my presence. I seeped in, slowly, over time.

  “Her husband returned for a few days every few weeks. And, much to Gennie’s dismay, she fell pregnant. Again and again, through the years—they had twelve children. Gennie cared for the children as well as she could, but she was essentially alone in this homesteading endeavor. Alone with me.

  “Gennie’s gardening efforts near the house struggled, and she dug out a garden in a distant field. That time in the sunshine of the garden was her refuge, distant from the house and the yelling of the children and undone work. She placed her fingers in the dirt and felt moments of peace.

  “But over the years, Gennie slowly grew mad, listening as I whispered terrible things to her. She sang to drown out the sound of my voice, but it crept into her dreams. She could not blot it out at night, and my words slowly sank into her consciousness.

  “She tried to fight back, of course. She took an ax and cut down trees, trying to bring light to this shaded p
lace, sunshine that would drive me out. But new trees sprang up as quickly as she cut them down, seemingly overnight.

  “She grew to hate her husband and hate her children. One night, overcome by my whispers in her dreams, she awoke. She took the ax she’d used to cut down the trees and slaughtered all twelve of her children. And she waited, in that bloody house, waited for her husband to finally return. When he did, she killed him, too, and fled into the night.

  “Eventually, the husband’s employer came looking for him and found the house of murder. It was July, and the flies were thick, feeding on the blood that had soaked into the floorboards and the rotting corpses. The townsfolk came and buried the bodies in Gennie’s garden, the nearest spot of turned earth, casting aside turnips and potatoes to inter the thirteen dead in a mass grave. It took a long time, and the townsfolk were exhausted. They left this place, vowing never to return.

  “A man, a magician of sorts, came to the house not long after. He had come to collect evil talismans for his eldritch workings. He had come to scrape the dried blood of children from the floorboards.”

  Owen sucked in his breath. He had encountered the ruined magic of one alchemist of old, and the hair on his arms lifted. “This magician . . . was it Aldus Lascaris?”

  Pigin chuckled. “Yes. Yes, it was. The alchemist knew that this place was soaked in evil, and he was fascinated by it. He collected other tokens from the house, finding a baby tooth rolled under a bed and a forgotten child’s finger stuck to a wall. He gathered these treasures carefully, in jars, and made to go home.

  “But the door was blocked by a wild and fearsome shadow. Gennie had returned, wielding her ax. She and Lascaris fought, and the struggle spilled out into the yard. Lascaris seized the ax and cut her hand off. He pushed Gennie into the well and took the hand home with the rest of his scavenged bits of blood and bone.

  “He wasn’t done with this place, though. Lascaris came back, again and again. He deposited the incriminating ruins of his experiments in the well, using it as something of a magical dumping ground. The well consumed bodies of Lascaris’s hapless victims, soured blood, and all manner of befouled potions. This . . . soup, if you will, fermented over time. It pleased me, strengthened me.”