by Dan Willis
“Done?” Alex asked as she hung up the clipboard on the final table.
“Not quite,” she said, nodding to a heavy door set in the wall. It had a large, new-looking brass lock above the handle.
Alex hadn’t seen inside this room, but it was next to Jessica’s room, so it was likely to be the same general size.
“What’s this?” he asked as she pulled out a small key ring.
For a brief moment a frown crossed her lips, but she replaced it almost instantly with her sardonic smile.
“This is the reason I’m here,” she said, inserting a key in the lock. She turned it and pushed the door open. “Don’t touch the handle,” she said, reaching inside to switch on a magelight. “It’s got a needle coated in a nasty contact poison hidden inside it.”
Alex raised an eyebrow at her, but she just shrugged.
“What?” she said. “Don’t you have security measures around your valuables?”
Alex thought about his vault. The contents of it were probably worth several Gs but it wasn’t like anyone could break in and steal it. Still, storing his gear in an extra-dimensional room was pretty extreme as security measures went.
“I suppose I do,” he said, being careful not to get near the door as he entered.
Inside the room was another table and what looked like an alcohol distillery. A complex series of burners, beakers, tubes, evaporators, and valves filled the table, and Alex could see several different colored solutions at the various stages. A rack of various jars, cans, and stoppered bottles was mounted on one wall along with a clipboard and a thick notebook. There was another alarm clock on the table, and Jessica carried it outside to check it against the big clock on the wall.
“You still haven’t said what this is,” Alex said when she returned.
“My best friend is named Linda Kellin,” Jessica said.
“Any relation to the Doc?”
Jessica nodded.
“Her daughter.” She took a deep breath as if steadying herself. “Linda has polio,” she said.
Alex felt a knot in his stomach. Not everyone died from polio, but it could leave people crippled or worse.
“So you’re trying to develop a cure,” Alex guessed.
“Yes,” Jessica said. “It’s why I came to work with Dr. Kellin.”
“So, how is it going?”
“Linda...she’s in an iron lung upstate,” Jessica said, fighting to control her emotions. “We think we’re making progress, but it’s really just trial and error at this point.”
She turned her head away and wiped her eyes furiously with the back of her hand. Alex wanted to reach out and hold her, tell her it was going to be all right, but he had no idea if that was true. At best it would have been a comforting lie.
“Is that why Dr. Kellin took you on as her protégé?” he asked, desperate to fill up the sudden-yet-terrible silence. “I thought alchemists usually only passed on their knowledge to family.”
“I could ask you the same thing about Dr. Bell,” she said. “But yes, Linda is Dr. Kellin’s only family, so she had no one to pass her recipe book on to. When I told her I’d do anything to help Linda, she started training me.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Six years now,” Jessica said.
Alex was stunned at that.
“You’ve been living this way, sleeping during the day and brewing potions all night, every night for six years?” hee wondered. “When do you have time to go to dinner or catch a picture?”
“Why, Mr. Lockerby,” Jessica said, her smirk returning and mischief in her eyes. “Are you asking me out?”
Alex hadn’t meant that, not at all, but he was a trained observer and a man of action.
“Of course I am,” he lied. “Unfortunately, you don’t seem to have the time.”
She broke into her girlish giggle again.
“It’s true I have to mind the lab,” she said. “But there are long stretches when I don’t have anything to do. Usually, I read, but I can make...exceptions.” She stepped close to him so they were almost touching, and looked up into his eyes. “As luck would have it, there’s a three-hour window opening on Saturday night at seven. You can take me to dinner, someplace nice, since as you pointed out, I don’t get out much. Pick me up here?”
“I will,” Alex said, without bothering to wonder if he even had the time. For a woman like Jessica, he’d make the time.
“Now give me a minute,” she said. “And then I’ll check your nerve tonic.”
She turned to the experiment and began taking measurements and adjusting mixtures. At every step, she noted down what she had done in the book from the shelf, then checked off some things on the clipboard.
“So,” she said, pulling the door shut once she was done and re-locking it. “You shook off four bullets the other day?”
“Isn’t that supposed to be poisoned?” Alex asked, pointing at the doorknob.
“If you turn it, a needle will pop out and stick your palm,” Jessica said, her voice easy as if what she’d said were the most normal thing in the world. “I’m careful, but I forget every now and again. It stings like the dickens, but, as you might remember, since I told you last time you were here, I’m immune.”
Alex had forgotten about Jessica and the poison paint job on her nails. He glanced down and found them the same off-red color they had been before. Maybe the color was a result of the toxin.
“Now,” Jessica said, leading him over to the workbench by the windows at the front of the room. “Take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve. I need some blood.”
Alex’s face soured at that and she laughed at him.
“What’s the matter, tough guy,” she said, actually leaning against his chest. “You aren’t afraid of a little needle, are you?”
Alex had to take a breath before answering. Her presence that close was about as intoxicating as David Watson’s single-malt.
“In my experience, it’s never a little needle,” he said, only half-joking.
She smiled and patted his face.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her lips drawn up in an adorable pout. “If you’re a good boy, I’ll get you a lollipop.”
Alex took off his jacket and laid it on the table before rolling up his shirt sleeve. Jessica motioned him onto a wooden stool, then put down a syringe with a needle that looked about the diameter of a swizzle stick. He knew his mind must be exaggerating it, but he decided he didn’t want to find out. As she tied a rubber hose around his arm, he resolved to look the other way until she was done.
“Okay,” she said, a few pain-filled moments later. “All done. Hold this on your arm.”
She gave him a cotton ball and he pressed it over the puncture wound in the crook of his arm. Jessica moved to the next workbench down and squirted some blood from the syringe into a glass dish. She added some chemicals from various bottles, then heated the dish over a burner for a few seconds.
“I think I like Dr. Kellin’s method better,” Alex said, checking to see if the bleeding had stopped.
“She cheats,” Jessica said. “This would be a lot easier with a Lens of Seeing, though.”
“Can’t you just make your own?”
Jessica snorted at that.
“Dr. Kellin says I’m not ready yet.” She swirled a toothpick into the blood mixture in the dish. “So, I do things the old-fashioned way.”
Jessica pulled the toothpick out and Alex noticed that the end had turned a lime green color. She held it up to a chart with various colors on it and nodded.
“I see the problem,” she said at last. “You’ve got the wrong kind of blood.”
Alex had no idea what to make of that.
“Well, it’s the blood I came with,” he said, a little defensively.
Jessica flashed him her sardonic grin.
“I mean the wrong kind for the tonic,” she explained. “You have O-negative blood. That’s fairly rare.”
“Is that bad?”
Jessica shook her head, sending her red hair flying.
“Usually it’s a very good thing. Your blood can be used on someone with any blood type. It means you’re a universal donor. The problem is that while this tonic is fine for most people, it has a strange reaction with you O-negative types.”
Alex reached inside his folded jacket and pulled out the little flask Jessica had given him days earlier.
“So is this going to work now that Dr. Kellin adjusted it?”
“Yes,” Jessica said, moving back to him and examining the needle mark on his arm. The bleeding had indeed stopped so she pulled a Band Aid from the pocket of her apron and stuck it over the wound. When she was done, she leaned down and kissed it.
Alex could feel the silky touch of her lips even after she’d raised her head back up.
“There you go,” she said, looking into his eyes. “All better.”
That urge to kiss her was back and Alex wondered if he should bother to fight it. It turned out not to matter since his second of hesitation was enough for Jessica to step back and move away toward another workbench.
Alex rolled his sleeve back down and buttoned it, then slipped on his jacket. He had just resolved to go kiss her anyway, despite the moment having passed, when one of the alarm clocks on a workbench in the back began ringing. The sound echoed off the stone floor, filing the space with its cacophony.
He looked at Jessica and for the briefest moment; she looked annoyed. Her sardonic mask came back a moment later and she turned to him.
“You’d better go,” she said. “This will take a while.”
Alex really hated that alarm clock.
“Saturday then?” he verified.
“Seven sharp,” she said, sauntering toward the back of the lab, her hips swaying. “Don’t be late.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Alex said, picking up his hat.
18
The Rune Book
Alex opened his battered pocketwatch and the runes inside flared to life. He couldn’t see the magic, of course, but he felt the faint tingling sensation of their power as they activated. It was comforting. He’d spent most of the week wondering if his magic was waning, if the sacrifice he’d made to save the city was stealing his very identity.
He knew what Iggy would say, what he had said, that magic was a part of him, that it didn’t fade with age. Still, people went deaf and blind with age, wasn’t magic just another sense?
He was a good detective, of course, but the world already had good detectives. It was his magic, the things he could do and see that others couldn’t, that set him apart. He’d never have found Danny’s missing trucks without it. Would anyone need another detective if he lost what made him unique?
The feel of the runes in his watch was like a musical chord, ringing in his mind. He smiled as he detected a slight sourness to the sound, as if one of the notes was not quite on pitch. Experience told him that one of the runes etched into the watch’s back cover was beginning to fade. He’d have to redo it soon if he wanted to continue being able to open his front door.
Taking hold of the handle, he turned it, smiling at the memory of Jessica’s poison-snared door handle. Iggy’s runes on the front door and entryway were a far better and less deadly deterrent. No one without the proper rune combination could enter, and only a runewright could activate the runes in Alex’s watch. Only once the runes were active would the constructs on the brownstone release the door.
Alex turned the handle and pushed. Then the smile ran away from his face.
The door didn’t move.
He checked the runes, certain that they were working, and tried again with the same result.
He felt his heartbeat spike. Normally he’d have been sure that the slight sour note of the weakening rune wouldn’t affect the properties of the pocketwatch, but what if he was fooling himself?
What if he’d already lost enough of his ability that he missed the difference between a weakening rune and a defective one?
He closed his eyes and willed his heartbeat back down. One thing he knew from being a detective was not to let a first impression dictate the direction of a case.
Sufficiently calm, he reached up and pulled the chain that rang the door bell. He noticed that his hands were trembling and quickly took a shot from the flask, hoping that was the reason.
A long minute passed and he was about to ring again, when he heard the inner door to the vestibule open. Iggy’s silhouette, dressed in his red smoking jacket, appeared blurry through the frosted surface of the door’s stained glass window. A moment later, Alex heard the thunk of the door bolt being drawn back and the door opened.
“What’s the matter?” Iggy said, taking in Alex’s appearance with a single glance. Before Alex could answer, his concerned look turned to one of embarrassment.
“I’m sorry, lad,” he said, reaching out to take Alex by the arm and pull him inside. “I was looking through the...the Textbook, so I set the deadbolt.”
Alex had to hold his hands together to keep them from shaking in pure relief. The deadbolt was an extra security measure that they only used when Iggy took the Archimedean Monograph down from its place on the bookshelf. When it was locked, an extra construct of powerful protection runes activated. To hear Iggy describe it, with these runes in place, the brownstone could survive a bomb.
As Alex stepped inside, Iggy closed the door and reset the deadbolt. From this side, Alex felt the protection construct activate. If the construct in his watch had been a chord, this sound washed over him like the crescendo of something written by John Phillip Sousa. It wasn’t a physical sound, of course, but that didn’t stop the hair on his arm from rising nonetheless.
“You had me worried there,” Alex said, finally having the presence of mind to close his pocketwatch and return it to his waistcoat.
Iggy cast him an appraising look.
“Still on with that nonsense about losing your magic,” he said. It was not a question; the old man knew Alex well enough to make that deduction. “I told you it doesn’t work that way.”
Alex wanted to believe him, more than he was willing to admit, but Iggy had trained him as a detective. He knew that all the doctor had to go on was his own intuition. He’d never actually met someone who’d traded the majority of his life energy for power. Not until Alex did it, anyway. There was no way the old man could really be sure.
Still, Alex reminded himself, he could sense the runes activating in the door and in his pocketwatch, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he’d lost his magic.
It wasn’t an airtight theory, but Alex decided not to poke any holes in it.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said to Iggy. “So,” he went on, changing the subject, “why are you reading the Monograph?”
Iggy’s face grew troubled.
“Follow me,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen.
Alex hung up his hat on the row of pegs along the foyer wall, then headed after his mentor. In the kitchen, Iggy had a half-dozen books laid open on the massive oak table. Each book seemed to have several pieces of torn paper sticking out of it, marking various pages. A notepad filled with Iggy’s spidery script lay on the table, held open by an ashtray. In the center of this storm of reference material, lay two books; one squarish, thickish, and bound in black cloth...and the other tall, thin, and covered in red leather.
Alex could feel the presence of the Archimedean Monograph the moment he entered the room. It was a collection of the most powerful runes known to man, handed down from the most famous and clever runewrights in history. Iggy had found it around the turn of the century and had kept it carefully hidden ever since. Even that precaution wasn’t enough though; he’d been forced to leave his home and his family, fake his own death, change his name, and flee to America because of it. Alex knew first-hand that the legend of the Monograph drove many dangerous, desperate, and unscrupulous people to seek it. People willing to do anything to obtain it.
Alex had
learned of its existence a year ago when he managed to unravel the secret of its deadly finding rune. He’d been stunned that the book had been hiding on Iggy’s bookshelf the whole time. Iggy had been prodigiously proud of Alex for finding it, promising to reveal the book’s secrets to Alex in time. Then he had promptly forbidden him from opening it without his permission.
So far, Alex had kept that promise.
The smaller black book was the one Alex had taken off the dead-and-burned kidnapper. Several of the pages had been torn out and laid around the open books, their face-like symbols staring out from the papers.
“I take it you didn’t have any luck at the museum,” Alex said, picking up a rune that looked like a man with an enormous nose looking to the left.
“Not entirely,” Iggy said, picking up the rune book and turning to the last page. “No one knew what these were at first, but then I showed their senior Egyptologist this drawing.”
Iggy turned the book so Alex could see. On the last page, a runic construct had been carefully drawn. Or, at least Alex assumed it was a construct; the form seemed familiar at least. It was round and made up of concentric rings. Each ring had symbols like the strange runes on it. In the center was a large circle with a grotesque caricature of a man’s face, with his tongue sticking out. Almost all the runes in the rings looked like they were depicting creatures of some kind. Alex recognized birds, animals, and a few men, along with others that he assumed were mythological.
“So what is it?” Alex asked, not able to make heads or tails of the construct.
Iggy grinned at that, causing his mustache to rise up.
“The Egyptologist sent me to a Dr. Hargrave, he’s an expert on ancient languages,” Iggy said. “As it turns out, this is a calendar used by the ancient Mayans.”
Alex knew the Mayans used to live in South America and they made pyramids like the Egyptians, but that was the extent of his information.
“So the runes are Mayan?”
“The linguist couldn’t be sure,” Iggy said. “He’d never seen symbols like the ones in this book, but the calendar is exactly like one at the museum.”
