Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

  “Potato chips?”

  Philip snapped his fingers. “Yes!”

  Hector let himself relax a little; Philip didn’t seem to be upset with him, just a little manic with hunger. “No. I don’t think they do.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Hector, I wanted to talk to you about the security.”

  “Ah.” The tension was back. “Right. Look, when I started we talked about the cats and the library security, but that was all Larch’s thing, and I—”

  “No no no. I don’t care about that. I mean, I care. Obviously I care, I’m in charge. These things are my responsibility, ultimately. But I mean security in the larger sense.” Philip held his arms open to indicate security in the sense of a large balloon, or perhaps a yoga ball.

  “Well, I hadn’t redrawn the wards yet when the incident in the library happened, so I didn’t replace them until fairly late, but there was no interruption and there were cops all over the place the entire time.”

  “The wards, yes. The, uh…”

  “The sleep ward, and the panic ward. That’s what you meant, right?”

  “I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of the, of our, of…the more confidential security measures here.”

  Hector swallowed. “Philip, do you want me to ask Edith to order you a sandwich or something? You seem kind of off balance. I’m sure someone could run something over from the cafeteria.”

  “Oh, what a great idea! Edith!” Philip walked halfway toward the office door, seemed to remember he had an intercom and turned back toward his desk, then just shook his head and jogged over to the office door and leaned outside. Hector heard him talking excitedly at Edith, but none of it was decipherable from where he sat.

  “And a couple of bags of potato chips!” Philip shouted as he reentered the office. “Hector, do you want something?”

  “I’m fine. I had lunch.”

  “Good.” Philip sat in the visitor’s chair next to him. “Now about the confidential security.”

  “Philip…I don’t know what you mean.”

  Philip winked. “We agreed not to talk about it, right? But it’s OK, because I’m giving you permission to talk about it now. I’m asking you to. Not quite ordering, exactly, because this is a friendly conversation. We’re friends.”

  This was news to Hector, but he thought it would be bad form to say so. “Of course. But…Philip, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. There isn’t any confidential security, unless it’s so confidential that you haven’t told me about it.”

  He made eye contact with Philip as he said this, and Philip locked eyes on his and leaned forward as if he were looking for cataracts. He breathed in through his nose, and Hector could almost have sworn that he was being sniffed.

  “You’re telling me there’s nothing?” Philip said it loudly, and with his mouth right next to Hector’s face, so that Hector could not help but jump.

  “There are the wards, and all the departmental counterspells against summoning pranks and illegal portalling, but that’s really about it. Again, as far as I know.”

  “Dammit!” Philip stood so quickly that Hector was relieved not to have knocked skulls with him. “They’re going to walk right in here and…” He walked over to the window and stood looking out.

  “What?” Hector asked. “Who’s going to walk right in here?”

  “Nothing,” said Philip. “I mean, no one. Right. Sorry to have…the inconvenience, and everything.”

  “Am I in trouble?” Philip was keeping something from him, that much was clear. “Is this about the campus, or about you? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Philip laughed. It wasn’t a very reassuring laugh, but he came back to the desk and patted Hector’s shoulder. “Not at all, not at all. Let me know if you have any thoughts. Sorry, I have to be going, another meeting.”

  Hector stood and moved sidelong toward the door. “You should really eat something, Philip.”

  “Right, of course. Thank you, Hector. Have a good day.” And with that, the door was shut, and Hector was on the other side of it.

  “Is he not well?” he asked Edith, but she just frowned and clicked her pen at him before turning back to the paperwork on her desk. When he’d first started at the school Hector used to take Edith’s demeanor personally. He was a charming guy; everyone said so. But Edith disliked everyone, as it turned out, except for those she merely distrusted.

  Hector turned to the crow but didn’t approach it. Its feathers shone in the light from the narrow window, and it stared at his belt buckle. “So, the bird?”

  “I’m calling him Christopher.” That wasn’t what he’d meant, but he knew that Edith knew that. She was just being Edith.

  Hector concentrated on the bird. Corvus brachyrhynchos, the common American crow. They were curious, intelligent birds, which made them perfect for his security spell. There were crow species nearly everywhere in the world, except for Central and South America. Growing up Hector had tried bonding with all sorts of birds, most successfully with red-throated caracaras, an intelligent bird of prey that filled a similar evolutionary niche. But even with them he’d never had the sort of success that he’d had with crows.

  He shut his eyes and saw what the bird saw, namely his own belt buckle, which was just the sort of shiny and distracting thing crows loved to see. This particular bird was hurt but not sick, mature but not old, and about as tame as a crow ever got.

  “What are you feeding it?” Hector asked.

  “Are you kidding? He eats everything. Gummi Bears, walnuts, coleslaw. He went after a mouse yesterday, but with his wing hurt he was too slow to catch it.”

  “We have mice?”

  Edith Grim-Parker managed to express an encyclopedia’s worth of impatience, exasperation, and contempt in a single sigh. “Maybe you should have your student put up one of those anti-vermin wards, Professor Ay. Maybe she can keep the rodents out.”

  The Chicago office of the FBMA was supposed to have been built in the shape of a powerful letter or rune of protection, but if that was so it was from a language that Joy had never encountered. She had seen an aerial view—someone in her class at the academy had gotten hold of a photograph and passed it around, just to see if anyone could figure out what alphabet it was from—but to her it just looked like a rabbit with pierced ears, and that was assuming that she was looking at it right side up. None of the higher-ups would talk about it, and it had been built long enough ago that it was possible that there was no one alive who remembered.

  Whatever its occult meaning, the practical effect of the building was that in order to pass from one “ear” to the other, you had to walk all the way down to the main tower and then back up. So when she was told to report to room 1455, it meant a half-mile walk, an elevator ride, and another half-mile walk. By the time she reached the briefing room she was ready to kill the next architectural wizard she came across.

  She quickly forgot that when she stepped into the room and saw AD Flood waiting there for her. “It’s about goddamn time,” he said, throwing a small paperback book on the conference table: Joy’s casebook. “I want an update. Right now.”

  Joy didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t sure how the geas—or geases, plural—was going to interact with the casebook’s magic, but she had put Flood off for two days already. She laid her palm on the book.

  There was the immediate, familiar sensation of being folded into the book, plunging in—but then there was a jerking sensation, as if she’d reached the end of a bungee cord. She hung, suspended, over a dim intelligence hungry for data, but there was a net between them, filtering each item that it gave up—the geas. She plunged again, like a dream of falling before sleep, and then hung again, and then fell. She lost count of how many times this was repeated, of the slow negotiations between magics. And then she was on her feet beside the conference table, sweating, her heart pounding, her legs about to give way underneath her. This was not the usual restful experience of debriefing; this was the exhaust
ion of being caught between energies.

  She dropped into the nearest chair and slid the book toward Flood.

  “Getting tired, Agent?” He wasn’t even looking at her. The book was now a slim hardback, and he flipped back to the index. “Did the woman give you a name?”

  “She just referred to herself as the Emissary,” Joy said.

  “What’s this italicized—” Flood flipped through the pages. “There’s a sketch here,” he said after a pause. He held the book out to her. The verso page held a fine-penciled likeness of the Emissary.

  “That’s her,” said Joy.

  “So you saw her.”

  “She…it was like she took hold of my perception. She wanted me to see her. She knew…she knew I wouldn’t, without…whatever she did.”

  “So you’re fixed now?”

  She ignored that. “I assume you already spoke to my security detail.”

  “She told me about the bodyguard. Would you rather talk about how you let them walk away?”

  “I was in shock. And frankly, I was pretty sure I couldn’t have stopped her if I’d tried. Did you miss the part where she was tinkering with my brain?”

  “I heard the part about her making your brain work like it should. Tell me what happened after Agent Brooks made contact.”

  “Can we discuss Agent Brooks for a moment? I have…not reservations, exactly, but questions.” Joy felt bad for bringing it up, but the fact was that she wasn’t sure she felt safe having a girl half her size protecting her.

  “Agent Brooks’s job performance is not in question here. She’s already foiled two attempts on your life.”

  All the weight in Joy’s upper body dropped into her stomach. She couldn’t speak.

  “Tell me what steps you took to attempt to apprehend this Emissary,” Flood said, as if he hadn’t just told her that someone was determined to see her dead.

  “Uh…I immediately placed a call via crystal to this office and had Agent Brooks call Chicago PD. Unfortunately we were unable to maintain visual contact; Agent Brooks saw them take the staircase down toward street level, but we never saw them emerge. I considered pulling the emergency brake, but that would have just left us stranded on the tracks.”

  “Where do you think they went?”

  Joy shook her head. “I don’t know. But I think they came from somewhere else.”

  She was a little surprised that the information slipped past the geas, but there it was.

  “Somewhere else?”

  “Sir, I’m beginning to suspect that we’re dealing with extra-dimensional adversaries here. It would explain how it is that we can’t trace Carla Drake, and it could also explain how it is that we can’t backtrace our Larch-panther.”

  Flood snorted. “And what evidence do you have to back up this fantastical theory?”

  “None as of yet. It’s just a hunch.”

  “I am supremely uninterested in your hunches.” He sat down. “Get comfortable, because we’re going to go over this casebook in detail. I don’t care if it takes us the rest of the day.”

  Joy didn’t make it back to her rental in Gooseberry Bluff until it was nearly dark. It was the breezy tail end of a warm day. Joy had spent most of her life in the south, and her six months at the FBMA Academy in upstate New York had been during the summer. She had a feeling that when the weather turned cold here, it would do so abruptly and irreversibly; part of her was OK with Flood wanting to pull her out of Minnesota before that happened.

  On the other hand, maybe she should just take herself out of here on her own. She’d been compromised twice over, thanks to Philip Fitzgerald. She was withholding information from her superiors, not by choice, but knowingly. The first was grounds for removing her from the case; the second might be grounds for dismissal. And yet she felt like she was close to finding something much larger and more dangerous than she’d been sent to investigate; the fact that someone was still trying to kill her—and that the Emissary was trying to turn her—would seem to reinforce that conviction. Although Agent Brooks’s identification suggested that the Emissary was simultaneously trying to turn her and kill her.

  There were four large file boxes on her porch, with an envelope taped to the lid of one. The note inside read “Carla Drake’s papers. Edith said you requested them last week. Sorry for the delay.” It was signed by Philip Fitzgerald.

  “Don’t think this makes us even,” she muttered at the boxes, and hauled them inside.

  She took a shower, put on some sweats, ordered a pizza, and settled in to look through Carla Drake’s papers. There were copies of old exams, reams of notes on her Agrippa biography, and numerous drafts of lectures and papers. Joy skimmed through most of this, pausing occasionally to read something that caught her eye, until she realized it was after eleven o’clock and she’d only just finished looking through the first box.

  The second box was mostly journals and materials from various academic conferences, but near the bottom she found a manila folder labeled WRONG MAN. It was empty, but it fell open in a way that suggested it had once been swollen with material. There were notes scribbled on the inside cover:

  - “Great Man” theory - Carlyle

  - Multiverse theory - James

  - Boleskine - Victoria - Cefalù

  - A Domesticated Beast?

  - Can Larch be trusted??

  Larch, again. Joy needed to get in to question the librarian, somewhere between teaching and looking through stacks of papers for tiny clues. If Carla Drake had gone to Larch for help, it might explain a lot of things—once Joy answered a few dozen more questions.

  Joy was familiar with the Great Man theory: it was the idea that history was driven by those who did great deeds, rather than by the forces that shaped those people and their times. It was a theory from the nineteenth century, little discussed now. Perhaps the Wrong Man idea was Drake’s response to this? The meaning of “multiverse theory” seemed obvious. Boleskine was a former home of Aleister Crowley—perhaps Victoria and Cefalù were as well? Crowley’s nickname was the Beast. What was Drake pointing toward? Domesticated in what respect?

  Joy scoured the rest of the boxes for any more mentions of Crowley or the Wrong Man, but she didn’t come up with anything more. She would look again when she wasn’t exhausted.

  She trudged to her bed and lay down, but her mind kept spinning. What could Carla Drake have found that could be so dangerous that the Emissary and the rest of order would want to make her disappear? And what did it have to do with Aleister Crowley? She couldn’t stop turning the notes over in her head, no matter how much she tried to meditate herself to sleep.

  Insomnia, again. The odd hours she kept, combined with the endless questions raised by her job, were probably the worst things imaginable for her sleep schedule. The anchovies on the pizza she’d just eaten probably weren’t helping either.

  She groaned and turned on her bedside lamp, hissing at the sudden light. She shaded her eyes and blinked a dozen or so times. She needed to think about something that wasn’t about the case—she wished that she had bought a TV, or at least taken a novel out of the library before it had become a crime scene.

  The storybook that the Emissary had sent her was on the kitchen table; she got up to bring it back to bed and lay paging through it. The illustrations made it look like a kids’ book, but the stories seemed more complex than that, and more adult.

  One of them was titled “How Otter Lost His Head and Got It Back Again,” and it went like this:

  Otter was having trouble sleeping. He went out to hunt every morning, he came back home at the end of the day, but he tossed and turned all night. He kept his wife awake too, until finally she kicked him out of her bed.

  One day Otter was coming home from the hunt late at night, and he passed Turkey. Like all of his kind, Turkey slept with his head under his wing, but all Otter saw was his friend Turkey without his head.

  “Hello there, Turkey,” said Otter.

  “Hello, Otter,” Turk
ey answered without raising his head.

  “Pardon me, Turkey, but didn’t you used to have a head?”

  “Of course I have a head,” said Turkey.

  “Then where is it?”

  “It’s right here,” Turkey said, with his head still tucked under his wing.

  Otter looked all around where Turkey was perched, but he didn’t find his friend’s head. But Turkey was ignoring him and trying to sleep, so Otter went home.

  “I think I know how to get a good night’s sleep,” Otter told his wife. “My friend Turkey just takes his head right off when he goes to sleep. It’s much more restful that way, and you don’t even need a pillow!” And before his wife could tell him what a bad idea it was, he took an ax and cut his own head clean off.

  Otter found that having his head cut off, instead of being restful, was so painful that he couldn’t relax at all. He asked his wife to place his head back on his body, but she couldn’t get it to stay. She made Otter spend the night in the cellar, and in the morning he walked over to his sister Beaver’s house with his head tucked under his arm. Otter asked Beaver if she could help him keep his head on. Beaver tsked at Otter, but then she fashioned a collar out of bark and sealed it around his neck so that his head would stay on.

  Otter thanked Beaver for her help, but he didn’t like the collar. It was tight, and it itched, and every time he saw it he was reminded of how foolish he had been. So Otter went to some of his friends. He asked Raven for a rib, which he fashioned into a needle. He asked Rabbit for one of his long whiskers, which he made into thread. With these things Otter’s wife sewed his head securely back on his shoulders.

  Otter brought the bark collar back to his sister, Beaver, but Beaver would not accept the return of her gift. She dammed up the river where Otter lived and hunted, so that it stopped flowing, and she sent Ant to drive Otter and his wife out of their home. Bee chased Raven from the skies, and Wolf killed Rabbit. Beaver moved on to another river, and another, driving Otter and his friends ahead of her, until there was no place left on Earth for them to hide.