I parked the car in a daze, got out and leaned against the closed door.
I needed to concentrate, and this was… distracting? What’s the word for distracting times 100? When I had started working on the hypnotherapy with Gwen, I wasn’t sure what I had been trying to accomplish other than just hanging out with her. I clearly had real problems, and I had just realized that they were probably even worse than I’d thought.
The question floated in front of me. I could almost see it in the air.
Where had the magic come from? Or maybe, who?
I’d had nothing to do with any of that then. In fact, it was the chain of events started by that day that had eventually led me into this world.
So what was the connection?
I had no idea at the moment, but I could feel the back part of brain grabbing onto it and starting to work. Given the right inputs, it would figure it out. I’d have to wait for it.
“Hello,” said a voice.
I looked down.
A huge dog, what seemed like some kind of frightening mix of Mastiff, Rottweiler and Doberman, looked back at me through one crystal blue eye and one brown one.
“Babd,” I said. “Where the hell did you find that?”
“Fortune favors the brave,” she said.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
In answer, she walked forward and licked my hand.
I’ve had worse greetings.
“I know where Dan is,” I said.
“Do you have a plan?”
“I’m going to try to talk him out of whatever it is he’s doing,” I said.
“Do you think that is likely to work?”
“I’m thinking about talking him out of it by shooting him a lot.” I was only half joking.
“Ah,” said Babd.
“So I need to get ready. You want to come? I’d like the company.”
She nodded. I grabbed the motel keys. We found the room and went inside.
I started to gather all of the gear I’d purchased or brought from my house. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so I went all out. The leather work apron, the ridiculous looking but hopefully effective bomber hat, the work boots, the googles and the elbow length gloves. All of them were fairly tough physically, and they all had magically resistant properties embedded in their manufacture. But would the hat be enough, for example, to keep Dan from just mind controlling the shit out of me?
While I had no way to know for sure, from what I’d seen recently, it should work. I thought back to the Strip District and how he’d needed to actually have skin to skin contact with the other Praecants to exert his magical will on them. The magically damping properties of the city would give me 99 percent of the protection I needed.
In the mirror, I looked pretty stupid. However, it gave me an idea. Maybe I could pass myself off as some kind of hipster steampunk artist when I went into the Carnegie. Well, that would work as long as they didn’t see Fox strapped to my leg, which they certainly would. There would be no going in the front door posing as an artiste. Sigh. That was fine.
I started digging through the tech I’d bought. I linked the bluetooth earpiece with my phone, then popped it in my ear. I dialed the IP voice number Fox had texted me back at my house. It rang several times, then a voice answered.
“Hello Lincoln,” it said.
“Howdy Fox,” I said. “I’m going to keep this line open for the next several hours. I might need you to do some things for me. Understood?”
“Yes,” said Fox.
My phone had about a three-hour active life when engaged in a call, although that actually was just another theory. I’d never talked to anyone for three hours in a row with it. Just in case, I plugged it into one of the external battery packs I’d bought, and shoved them into my front left jeans pocket. It was a snug fit, and a little warm, but it would work and keep me connected to my artificially intelligent concierge the entire time.
So that was it. I was ready to go.
But ready to go and do what?
I was going to break my way into a back door at the museum and then improvise. I didn’t know exactly where Dan was inside or what he was doing.
“Fox,” I said, “check the local news please. Are there any reports of unusual things or crimes at the Carnegie Museum of Art and History?”
“Just a moment,” said the voice in my ear.
I waited.
“No,” said Fox. “Business as usual.”
I looked at Babd.
“Let’s go find ourselves an evil wizard,” I said.
Chapter 18
I parked in a closed construction site, down the hill behind the Carnegie Museum complex. Babd and I walked across the access road and up to the rear of the museum through the small stand of trees. Forbes Avenue and the normal busy traffic of the day cruised by on the other side of the huge building.
We passed two service entrances that were locked and had RFID card readers beside them. I was planning to make a key using the Fox trick like I’d done before but hadn’t counted on electronics. I could probably fry them with a small scale EMP, but that would most likely just lock them down.
The third door we came to still had a traditional key-based lock and no electronics.
Huzzah for poorly executed upgrades.
“Fox,” I said, “make me a key.” The handle pulsed.
I placed the muzzle of the gun against the keyhole and squeezed the trigger.
I gave it about a second, then squeezed the trigger again.
A key fell into my hand.
I unlocked the door. It was still normal business hours, so I didn’t expect to set off an alarm. Unless of course this was one of those “Emergency Exit Only–Alarm Will Sound!” kinds of doors. Which was possible. One way to find out.
But first.
“Fox, can you hear me?” I said.
“Yes,” came the voice in my ear.
“Great. The calls I asked you to make earlier? With the script? Do it.”
“Okay,” said Fox.
I was struck by a thought. How did the Fox gun in my hand know that I wasn’t addressing it? How did the AI on the other end of the phone know that I was? I called them both Fox.
Maybe it was the ability of the magical energy to somehow detect intent. I’d noted the effect before. I decided to try a quick experiment.
I said, into the bluetooth mic and consciously directing my statement toward the Fox AI running back in the hotel: “Fox, incendiary rounds.”
There was no pulse from the gun.
“I’m sorry,” said the voice in my ear. “I can’t affect the weapon’s housing at your location.”
I’d thought all along that I’d created a purely vocal interface for the gun, but it turns out it was a little more than that. One more experiment.
I thought with strong intent, as much as I could muster, about communicating with Fox-the-gun. I thought incendiary rounds.
Nothing happened.
It did require speech but also intent. That was cool.
Cool could wait for another day though.
I depressed the thumb latch and pulled the door open.
Silence.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Babd and I went in, and I quietly shut the door behind us.
The space was nondescript. Fluorescent lighting, painted block walls, concrete floor. A bunch of old signs, folding chairs and broken brass holders for velvet ropes were piled around. It looked like a last-chance storage area.
We picked our way through it, out the doorway and into a large service hall.
An old metal sign riveted to the wall indicated that the stairs to the exhibit areas were that-a-way. We followed two more signs without running into anyone, ending up at a service door. On it was a sign that read, “Treat Our Customers With Respect.”
We went through, and here was where it could get really hairy. I had no excuse to be dressed the way I was, and I had a gun on my hip. I had no idea where
Dan was, and no way to find out other than to just start looking around. I shouldn’t have a dog with me.
We were in the lower level of the museum space, with empty classrooms and a small cafe.
I suddenly realized what a colossally bad idea this was. I should have waited for the place to close, then broken in. I think that some combination of post-concussion syndrome, wishful thinking, sheer exhaustion and having to juggle too many unknowns at once had led my mind into believing this was better than the alternative. Clearly, it wasn’t. We should leave.
I was about to scamper back the way I’d come and try this whole thing again later and smarter when someone in a museum shirt came around the corner of the hallway. I braced for the worst.
“Afternoon,” she said, as she walked by Babd and I.
“Uh, afternoon,” I said.
She hadn’t batted an eye. Had she even seen Babd? Or Fox? It was a bit gloomy down here, but that was strange.
No, it was more than strange. It was highly improbable and nearly impossible.
I followed the signs that led to the main floor. I passed two more people who seemed to think that my being dressed in exotic leathers, carrying a gun and walking around with a giant dog at my heel were perfectly normal things. They paid me no more notice than they would any other person walking around the museum.
Okay then.
The stairs opened up into the section of the museum that housed the Grand Staircase. I could go up to the second, the third floor or stay down here. The nice thing about the Carnegie is that you get two museums in one: Art and Natural History. And where was Dan? I had no idea. But I was always partial to art, so I figured I’d start there.
Up the stairs to the second floor then, past the gigantic murals depicting Pittsburgh’s smoky history and angel-faced steel laborers. The guy in the armor in the painting had a long-suffering look on his face. Same, my friend.
Into the first gallery, where they have the modern art. Now, I’ll be honest. I’m not really a fan. I think that I could take the honey bottle that was stuck to the plate inside my kitchen cupboard for a year, sneak it in, sit it down in the modern art section and then spend all day listening to connoisseurs go on about how it questions the reality of the hermeneutic implied by banal domesticity. I really could.
But regardless of what I thought, the exhibits were considered Art by a lot of folks, and no one should have, for example, spray painted “D+ TRY HARDER” on Composition Concrete by Stuart David. But they had. I mean, I didn’t disagree. But still. It was rude.
I looked around and noticed that every piece of art I could see had been defaced. Most of them with dicks, actually. The sculptures had what looked like play-doh ones. The paintings had them either drawn or spray painted on.
It looked like someone had attacked the installation art with a paintball gun and a chainsaw.
Stay classy, Dan.
In spite of this, people walked around, happily ignoring Babd and my gun and ignoring the defacement on the art. I saw a nice looking family of five walk through wearing matching shirts. The kids obviously didn’t get the contemporary art, and it looked like the mom and dad were amused by it. But none of them noticed the spray paint, or the paintball splatter or the sawdust or the play-doh dicks. You know that if a junior high aged boy isn’t laughing at a giant neon orange dong displayed in public that something funky is going down.
Dan must have had the entire place under some kind of spell.
Here, in the heart of Pittsburgh.
How he was managing to power it in spite of everything I knew about magical physics being against it, I didn’t know. But he was doing it.
People had been coming in and out of the museum for days and not one item had shown up on the news. Not a peep. Nothing.
Everyone was treating the place like it was perfectly normal.
And maybe that’s why no one was noticing the out-of-placeness that I presented. Maybe Dan had some kind of super clever, subtle, skirt-the-rules-of-magical-physics-and-Ignore-That-Which-Doesn’t-Belong spell going on.
It’s the only thing that made sense.
If that was the case, it meant I didn’t have to be quite as cautious.
I drew Fox. Might as well.
“Safety rounds,” I said, omitting the “Fox” this time. If the intent properties of magic worked the way I was starting to think they did, it wouldn’t be necessary.
The gun buzzed in my hand.
Nice.
I’d be ready in case Dan just bopped around a corner while everyone else continued to assiduously ignore me.
I took a quick mental inventory. I’d been hyper-focused and vigilant since I’d come in the back door, but now I tried to let my senses diffuse. Tunneling your attention when you’re in a situation like this can lead to you being dead.
I tried to feel not like someone who was on a negotiation/assault team but like someone who was just at the museum for a couple hours of culture. I wanted to see just how strong the magic was here, even though I couldn’t understand yet how it was possible.
The magically resistant bomber hat I was wearing was clearly doing two things. First, it was making me sweat. Second, it was protecting me from the effects of Dan’s spell. But now that I was concentrating on not being adrenalized and freaked out, I could feel something poking around at the edges of my perception.
I toyed with the idea of taking off my hat, just to see how much and how quickly the spell might change what I was thinking or seeing, but I realized that that was quite possibly tantamount to suicide. Who knew what other directives were bundled up in that magical mental virus he’d constructed?
I was making all kinds of assumptions and just trusting that I was right. For example, what if Dan hadn’t defaced the art? I’d assumed that he had done it, but what if part of the spell he’d laid on the place involved compelling the viewers themselves to do it?
The art.
I was struck with a terrible thought.
“Come on,” I said to Babd.
“Do you know where he is?” she said, but I was already gone.
A couple of lefts, followed by rights, tearing past a bored guard with my gun drawn and him not seeming to care. Right into the room with the 10’ x 6’ canvas of Monet’s Water Lilies.
It’s my favorite at the Carnegie, and I know it’s boring and trite, but whatever. I like what I like.
Someone had painted goofy, google-eyed frogs on them.
Frogs with dicks.
“Damn it,” I said.
Babd came sliding around the corner, fish-tailing on the smooth marble floor. She was ready for battle.
“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s not here. Just…”
I gestured to the painting. Babd walked forward and sniffed it from end to end.
“You care for these colors?” she said.
“I guess so,” I said.
“It could use more red,” she said.
“Maybe.”
I turned my back to the ruined, priceless painting. All around me walked families, friends, individuals on their way to the next piece of art. Looking. Gawking. Pondering. Pointing. None of them seeing things the way they had really become. None of them seeing me or Babd. They swirled around us like brush strokes avoiding a planet in the gravity well of an invisible star.
I was struck momentarily by the fact that as surreal as it was intellectually, this felt no different to me than every other day of my life that I could remember from the recent past.
For an instant, the adrenaline and resolve and fear that had been flooding me since I’d begun the drive to the museum vanished from my system, black smoke retreating in the face of a hurricane, and I was deeply, horribly sad.
I sensed that there were others here who even I couldn’t see, who were worse off than me, forever hanging just outside the edges of my peripheral vision. People whose lives only existed in parts of my mind that I couldn’t access any longer.
Senseless. This was senseless, and it had
to stop. All of it. Dan. Feeling this way. All of it.
There was a warmth on my hand.
Babd pressed herself into my waist, nuzzled her head into my hand.
“You are injured,” she said.
Yes.
“I am,” I said.
“Then let us be about this quickly, so that you may rest.”
“Okay.”
“Come,” she said.
She loped off down the gallery.
I followed, and the museum goers unknowingly parted before me.
“Where are you going?” I said.
Babd made a right and went out of sight. I jogged after her.
She was on the balcony level of the Hall of Sculpture, a two-story interior space that looked down on a huge room bordered by marble sculptures, natch. Her nose was in the air.
“I scented him on the painting. He is near.”
“Scented?”
“Dog,” she said.
“Right.”
“He is nearer to this hall than our previous location,” said Babd.
The Hall of Sculpture exited to three other areas downstairs: the Grand Staircase where we’d just been, the Hall of Architecture and the Gems and Minerals exhibit. So we’d head back down the main staircase and stay on the lookout. If he was moving around, it’s possible that we’d just missed him. If he wasn’t, then we’d hit the Hall of Architecture first.
We traced our steps back through the galleries to the Grand Staircase. Before we went out into the open, I scanned the area from behind the cover of a huge column, Fox at the ready.
I didn’t see Dan anywhere in the nearby space, but there were an awful lot of people moving about down there. I’d never been the best at picking out faces from crowds. Of course, the protective/detective goggles that I was wearing would highlight obvious sources of magic, but if he wasn’t actively using it, they wouldn’t matter.
“Fox,” I said, directing my intent to the bluetooth piece in my ear.
“Yes?”
“You have Dan’s phone number, right?”
“I do.”
“Call it.”
“What should I say if he answers?”
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 30
