by Dima Zales
Knife in hand, she examines the body in front of her for a moment and then slices into the dead man’s chest—across the scars left from the embalming.
With my body gone, so is my ability to feel nauseous, it seems, because I watch in calm fascination as she finishes cutting a hole and jams her phone into the macabre holder, propping it up so it sits vertically inside the dead flesh.
She stares at the phone, then looks up at the digital clock, and the disgruntled look on her face deepens. She seems to be impatiently waiting for something.
Turning around, she pulls out another drawer with a body, this one a man in his nineties. Gently, she brushes the tips of her fingers over the man’s bald head and sagging muscles. She seems to dislike something about this corpse, though, because she closes the drawer and pulls out another one.
This guy is in his fifties and has a purplish tint to him.
She looks him up and down and nods approvingly.
Her phone begins to play the notes of Piano Sonata No. 2 by Chopin, commonly known as the Funeral March.
She stalks back over to the first corpse to face her grim phone stand and presses the screen to accept the call.
“Hello, Beatrice,” says an amused voice. “As I keep telling you, we don’t have to have a video conference every time. Especially when you’re in your natural habitat.”
“You’re late.” Beatrice’s voice is surprisingly perky. “I wanted to get a head start; the fresher the body, the better my lovelies turn out.”
“You must’ve used a very old one last night.” The amusement in the stranger’s tone is joined by a note of scorn. “I assume that’s your excuse for failure?”
“You never told me a seer would be involved in this.” Beatrice uses her knife to carve something on the skin of the corpse in front of her. “And you particularly failed to mention the vampires.”
“I’m offering you the chance to go under the Mandate and settle here in peace.” His voice is mocking now. “Did you think that would be easy? And besides, why should you worry about vampires? I thought they hated your kind because they fear what you can do.”
Beatrice’s face darkens. “I just don’t like having mortal enemies around. Since I’m new to this Mandate business, tell me, can it really make it so that they won’t try to kill me on sight?”
“No, it can’t pull off that kind of a miracle. But the Mandate makes it so that anyone who harms you will pay with their life. It marks you as one of us, and that provides you with something like the human rule of law. But nothing can undo their fear and hatred of your kind. Despite the Mandate, the seers still hate my kind and vice versa.” From the tone of his voice, you’d think he’s happy about the state of affairs he describes. “But, the Mandate does take the sting out of such hate. The vampires despised all werewolves back in the day, but look at things now. After centuries of the Mandate, there are marriages between them. Isn’t that what appeals to you here—our liberal attitudes?”
If I had eyebrows, I’d want to raise them at the mention of vampires and werewolves, but since I don’t, I just keep hanging.
“You’re a smooth talker, even for one of your kind.” Beatrice carves another symbol into the dead flesh. “Tell me, how am I supposed to outwit a seer?”
“He won’t risk involving himself after what she did on TV,” the voice on the phone responds, sounding serious for the first time. “He took a big enough risk setting it up. At least I assume he set that up, but I have no proof, courtesy of the vampires.”
“But isn’t she also a seer?” Beatrice stops her grisly work and makes eye contact with the phone’s camera. “Won’t she see me coming?”
“Even he didn’t see you coming,” the mystery man replies. “What can an untrained newbie hope to foresee? Despite what they want you to think, seers aren’t omniscient. If they were, free will would be but a distant memory. Keep in mind that by working for me, my powers rub off on you—which is why you’re not as dead as your ‘lovelies.’”
“Death doesn’t scare me.” Beatrice looks around the morgue as though it’s her living room. “It’s the only real mystery left in the world.”
“Is it? Well, I can help you uncover it if you keep failing like this.”
“How about instead of threats, you wire me another five hundred grand?” Her smile is all teeth. “Plus the expenses, obviously.”
“Anything else?” he asks sarcastically. “A key to a whorehouse full of virgins? Soup made from kittens?”
“There is something else,” she says, unruffled. “If I die on this job, I need you to take care of my body. I want it turned into fertilizer. I’ll email you the exact instructions.” Beatrice wipes her knife on the nearest corpse’s skin before folding it and stashing it in her purse. “It’s the ultimate recycling. When I think of how many nutrients are locked up in the ground instead of going back into—”
“I don’t have a lot of time.” The voice on the phone sounds amused again, but the command in it is clear. “Whatever you want, you will get. Just. Do. Your. Job.”
Instead of replying, Beatrice stands straighter and raises her arms toward the ceiling, as though she’s praying for sprinklers to rain down.
Multi-colored bolts of energy illuminate the room as they shoot from Beatrice’s fingers into the two dead bodies.
The lightning spreads through the corpses. They convulse like frog legs in Galvani’s electric experiments, and the chest carvings she’s made light up from the inside, as though she implanted bright LED lights under the skin.
After a moment, the bodies go still, but the carvings still shine.
“I know I’ll regret asking, but why aren’t they getting up?” the voice on the phone asks, and though I can’t see his face, I can tell there’s a smirk on it.
“These symbols are there to program in a little delay.” She points at one of the bright carvings. “I do this when I can afford the luxury.”
“Why?” It’s odd to hear an adult man sound so much like a teasing five-year-old. “Wouldn’t you want to be present when your lovelies get up? I thought you’d want to consummate the relationship when they rise to the occasion. No, wait, I’m thinking of another kind of necro.”
“This conversation is clearly over.” Beatrice slings her purse over her shoulder, grabs her phone, and without saying goodbye, hangs up.
She then looks at the two corpses with an unreadable expression and leaves the room.
I float for another second until I realize something that should’ve occurred to me in the beginning of this strange episode.
This has to be a dream.
As soon as I think the word ‘dream,’ I wake up.
Chapter Six
What a weird nightmare.
Sitting up in bed, I rub my irritated eyes and wonder if I slept with mascara on.
As the dream clears from my groggy brain, I recall the much stranger happenings that preceded it. The details of last night’s performance slowly come back to me, and I feel sure that most, if not all, had to be a dream or a hallucination.
The key question is: how much?
Did the show itself happen?
Grabbing my phone, I find that it’s dead—I was too out of my mind to charge it.
My nightstand clock shows that it’s 5:20 a.m. on Monday morning, ten minutes before my alarm is supposed to go off and nine minutes before the time in my morgue nightmare.
I get up, put my phone on the charger, and pull back the curtains.
Examining myself in the mirror, I confirm that I have heavy makeup on—evidence that I was at a TV studio, and that I came home too messed up to wash my face.
Though I’m dying to get on my computer and get some answers, I put on a robe and head to the bathroom to freshen up. Once I feel semi-human, I hurry back to my room and dress for work.
Buttoning my blouse, I open my laptop and load YouTube.
Evening with Kacie already posted last night’s show, and when I see the four million views it has
gathered overnight, chills race down my spine.
Frantically, I skim the comments below the video. While a few trolls have made some sleazy remarks about my looks, most people were blown away by my performance. The comments run the gamut from “the psychic girl was incredible,” to “what a great magic show,” to “she just got lucky”—and a bunch of stuff in Spanish.
My bare feet are cold, so I tuck them under my butt as I fast-forward the video.
“By day, Sasha works for the infamous Nero Gorin at his hedge fund,” Kacie says on the screen before going into the spiel about my restaurant side gig.
Nero, my day-job boss, might be pissed about the “infamous” bit, but the management of the restaurant is going to be thrilled about the TV plug.
With a critical eye, I watch myself perform the Queen of Hearts effect, followed by the Headline Prediction. It’s amazing how calm I look in this video, given how I was freaking out. Is it due to Ariel’s Valium, or all that hard work I put into rehearsals?
After the Headline Prediction, unsurprisingly, I don’t come back on the air. Instead, a reporter named Juan takes over with the Mexican earthquake coverage. He calls me a psychic and claims I warned Mexican authorities about the earthquake—which couldn’t be further from the truth and is probably behind some of the YouTube comments in Spanish.
That BS Juan says sounds familiar, though. It’s what Darian said, in what I hoped was the dream portion of last night’s events—the part that’s still hazy.
If it wasn’t a dream, can something else explain some of the things I saw last night?
It started with me having pleasant sensations and then passing out, which, if it happened for real, could be explained by a brain issue, such as a stroke.
Biting my lip, I Google “strokes” and “pleasure” and don’t find many results. Still, figuring it doesn’t hurt to be proactive, I navigate to the NYU hospital website and request an appointment with my primary care physician. If something is wrong with my brain, I want to get it checked out as soon as possible. On the other hand, if the problem is psychosis, my primary care physician can probably refer me to the right specialist also.
Thinking of doctors gives me an idea of what else could explain last night’s fogginess and strange memories.
Valium.
That explanation would be infinitely preferable to having had a stroke or going insane.
I eagerly type in some related search phrases, hoping for validation.
When the results of my query pop up, I’m both relieved and terrified. The drug’s side effects indeed include hallucinations, psychoses, delusions, and nightmares—leave it to me to get all of the above. Upon further study, I also learn something that Ariel should’ve warned me about: you’re supposed to avoid grapefruit with benzodiazepines such as Valium. Apparently, grapefruit blocks an enzyme called CYP3A4, thus increasing both the levels of the drug in the blood and the severity of the associated side effects. And the scariest part is that you’re not supposed to mix the medication with alcohol at all, as doing so enhances the most dangerous effects of both substances.
I definitely should’ve rejected the Sea Breeze Darian offered me.
Actually, if I’m magically rewriting the past, I should’ve never gotten tempted by Valium in the first place. No matter how much I want to be a TV magician, using a drug that messes with my neurotransmitters isn’t the way to do it. Looks like I’ll have to put on my big-girl panties and overcome my stupid fear of public speaking. Somehow.
Also, and this might be a longer-term project, I need to figure out a way to get Ariel off this poison. When she served in the Middle East, my roommate saw some things she doesn’t ever talk about. Though I’m not a shrink, I suspect she has PTSD—something she vehemently denies. She claims her bouts of anxiety are brought on by the stress of med school, and have nothing to do with the Army.
Since I’m on the computer already, I submit some forecasts to the Good Judgment Project. I first learned about it in one of my favorite non-magic books, Superforecasting. The stated mission of the project is “harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to forecast world events.”
The idea here is not very different from what I do for my day job, except these forecasts can actually bring some good to the world, instead of just making my boss and his obscenely rich clients richer. All participating forecasters read publicly available information and make educated guesses about a future event, such as who will win an election, or whether the country so-and-so will develop nukes by such-and-such date. I’m one of the top forecasters in this project, and I’m as good at it as I am at forecasting the market for Nero. The top forecasters in this project, as a whole, are reportedly “30% better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.”
As a New Yorker who lives near where the Twin Towers once stood, I find that little factoid very scary.
Realizing that I’m getting sidetracked by the internet and using up my breakfast time with things I can do from my desk at work, I shut the laptop, my stomach rumbling at the idea of food. I threw up what little dinner I could stomach last night in the studio bathroom before getting into makeup.
First, though, I need to feed my favorite creature in the world—my pet chinchilla, Fluffster.
It’s actually surprising he didn’t greet me when I woke up. Maybe he’s upset I didn’t spend Sunday night with him. Then again, he could be playing hide-and-seek.
Assuming the latter, I get up and look around. My room is decently sized for New York, which means that an eleven-inch-tall (without the fluffy tail), one-pound creature can hope to hide here, at least for a little while.
A poster of Houdini looks at me with eyes that seem to think very little of people who play hide-and-seek with their pet, especially if said pet is a type of rodent.
I walk up to the bookshelf to see if Fluffster is hiding in the same spot as last time and pull out a book—Bobo Modern Coin Magic. But the only sign of my chinchilla is the corner he chewed off out of boredom that day.
I check behind Corinda’s 13 Steps to Mentalism, followed by Erdnase’s Expert at the Card Table, with the same lack of results.
Next, I look behind my keyboard plant prank since Fluffster has been eating it on occasion, but there’s no chinchilla there.
The keyboard plant is a project I’m preparing for when my roommate Felix goes on vacation. He uses a fancy mechanical keyboard for his coding, so I got a broken version of the same keyboard on eBay and planted chia seeds in the gaps between the keys. Since the grass has grown, whenever I need a smile, I picture the look on Felix’s face when he gets back from that future vacation and sees his keyboard sprouting greenery on his desk.
The smell of coffee and pancakes wafts in from the kitchen, and my stomach does another somersault.
“Fluffster, sweetie, I’m too hungry for games,” I say pleadingly. “I’ll give you three raisins if you come out right now.”
The chinchilla doesn’t show up, though I hear an excited chirp from under my bed.
I reach for the top of the bookshelf and grab a little plastic house filled with white powder.
“I’m just going to set this dust bath here,” I say and place every chinchilla’s favorite object at the foot of the bed. “It’s only going to be there for a count of five. One.”
Fluffster loves his dust bath so much that you’d think it’s filled with cocaine (which is what it looks like) and not fine pumice (which is what it is).
A large ear shows up from under the bed, then whiskers. Then the rest of Fluffster torpedoes into the dust bath house, and he begins to roll in the white powder with movements finely tuned to be as adorable as is chinchillaly possible.
Originally from the high-elevation regions of the Andean mountains, chinchillas look like bunnies crossed with squirrels and kangaroos, but are fluffier than all of them combined. The only creature with denser fur is a sea otter, but chinchillas beat the otters on cuteness. In my (possibly biased) opinion, they are
also cuter than kittens, puppies, young Leonardo DiCaprio, and babies. Touching a chinchilla is an almost spiritual experience, as their fur is softer than clouds—a feature they sometimes pay for with their lives, as Cruella de Vil types make expensive coats out of them.
After a minute, Fluffster’s nose pops out of his dust bath house, and his facial expression seems to say, “There was a mention of raisins.”
“You didn’t come out when I said, so you only get two, and only if you promise to eat your pellets and some hay,” I say sternly. “Also, grind your teeth on that chalk I got you.”
Fluffster gets out of the bath, runs up to his bowl, and stares at it demonstratively, ready for the pellets.
I know pet owners always anthropomorphize their fur-children and think their animals are the smartest ever, but in my case, it must be true. Fluffster is a genius chinchilla, cleverer than any dog—and some people—I’ve met. He’s potty trained, and he understands at least a couple thousand words. He knows not to drown himself in the toilet (getting wet can give them fungus, thanks to that super-thick coat), not to chew through electrical wires (at least, now he does), not to leave the apartment without my supervision (meeting a cat in the hallway taught him that), and he knows to stay away from a New York City rat, should one invade our apartment again. He tried to hump the first one he met, and let’s just say NYC rats live by prison rules.
Once Fluffster is satiated, I make my way to the kitchen.
Ariel is sitting at the table in her faded Batman t-shirt. She clearly just woke up, yet she looks amazing anyway. I’m not too proud to admit to some jealousy, particularly of Ariel’s unshakeable confidence in her looks. When I was a teen, I was a mess of contradictory insecurities, going from, “Oh no, where are my boobs?” right into, “Oh no, everybody is staring at my new boobs.” Ariel, on the other hand, seems to have always been at ease in her skin. Whatever costume she wears for Halloween inevitably gets a “sexy” prefix before it, even the year she was a toaster.
We met as lab partners in biology back in college. She graduated first and found Felix on Craigslist (hopefully under housing>
