The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Roman

  She opened her mouth to say something else but then looked over my shoulder. “Friend of yours?” she asked.

  I turned to see a man wearing a coat and hat walking toward us. I had time to register the bandages flapping around his feet and face, his eyes burning at me. The mummy from the British Museum. Then it lunged at me, grabbing on to my jacket with both hands and carrying us both over the side of the bridge with its momentum. I managed to knock its hands free of me as we fell, and we hit the river separately.

  I’d once wasted an afternoon taking a tour boat up and down the Thames. The guide told us the water of the Thames was actually quite clean, that it just looked dirty from the sediment stirred up by the tides. He said you could dip a glass in it and once the sediment settled at the bottom, the water would be clear enough to drink. I didn’t believe him.

  Don’t swallow the water, I told myself as I sank under the surface. Don’t swallow the water.

  The mummy reached for me again as we went down, some of its bandages floating free around it now, but I kicked off in a random direction and it faded away. I dove deeper and zigged this way, zagged that way, hoping to lose it in the murk, until my lungs couldn’t take it any more and I rose back up into the light.

  Directly into the path of a tugboat. I threw myself to one side in the water, it swerved the other way, and everything worked out. A man on the deck threw a life preserver into the water and hauled me in, pulling me up over the side of the boat. I spat up the water I’d swallowed and then looked back at the bridge, a few hundred feet behind us now. I saw the princess running away, disappearing into the city. I wasn’t sure how much grace she had left, but it would probably keep her alive long enough she could cause some trouble. Oh well, what was done was done. But I was glad I hadn’t raised her in her own body. An anonymous body turning up somewhere was one thing, but the body of a dead princess showing up outside the official tomb was something else entirely.

  I thanked the man who’d fished me out of the Thames, and he just shook his head and muttered something about tourists. The captain of the tug steered us toward the nearest dock.

  I squeezed the water out of my shirt and watched the wake of the tug. There was no sign of the mummy, and no one else seemed to be looking for it. No one had seen us fall other than the princess. I wondered where the mummy was, and pictured it walking along the bottom of the Thames after me.

  So, maybe there was something after all to the legends about pharaohs’ curses.

  The tugboat pulled up alongside a wooden dock long enough for me to disembark, and then the men went down the river without so much as a backward glance, ignoring my wave of thanks. No doubt some code of the sea thing.

  I climbed the steps up to street level, before there were any more surprises, and lost myself in the crowd of people heading to their early-morning jobs. It being London and all, no one paid any attention to my soaking clothes. I dried them with a bit of grace and then stopped at a pub for a breakfast of eggs and toast and black, black tea. The British do tea like the Spanish do wine. Which says a lot about their respective histories. I flipped through a paper while I ate. I tried to come up with a plan to deal with the mummy, because I had a feeling it was going to keep chasing me. The undead are kind of single-minded that way.

  But I forgot all about that when I turned the page of the newspaper and came across a photo of the art dealer I’d talked to on the train. There was also a photo of a bloody knife. It was the knife I’d used on Remiel. The one I’d left behind in the Gaudí church.

  I stared at the photos for a moment, then read the story that went with them. It said the art dealer had been coming back from the fair at Maastricht when he’d been stabbed to death in the washroom of the train. His eyes had been gouged out. A cross had been carved into his face using the knife. Police figured it happened before the train had even left the station. A conductor said someone had hung an out-of-order sign on the washroom door shortly after boarding began. I thought again of the feeling of danger that had woken me on the train.

  So the art dealer I had been talking to hadn’t in fact been the art dealer. Who had I been talking to on the train then? And why?

  The only witness to Remiel’s death had been Cassiel. He was the only one who could have found the knife. But I couldn’t think of any reason why he’d kill and mutilate the art dealer and pretend to be him to engage me in small talk.

  I replayed the Barcelona trip in my mind, but I didn’t see any moment where I thought someone else had been watching. And even if they had, why this?

  And why the eyes and the cross?

  There was only one answer.

  I downed the rest of my coffee and stared out the window, at the passing crowd.

  Judas.

  GHOSTS IN THE WOODS

  Penelope took me back to her cabin, which was more of a shack in a clearing in the woods than any sort of proper structure. It took us an hour to hike there, and I didn’t notice any paths among the trees, which meant people didn’t come this way often. I offered to carry Penelope’s camera gear for her, but she just laughed.

  “If I needed a man to carry my camera, I’d be back in the city, sipping tea and waiting for you to hold the door open for me,” she said. “Do you see any doors out here?”

  I couldn’t help but smile, despite feeling the way I usually feel after a resurrection. Hung over, hungry and angry. Yeah, she definitely had spirit.

  “No doors,” I agreed.

  “Not except for the one you came through,” she said, eyeing my clothes again.

  I still couldn’t shake the feeling there was something familiar about her, but I didn’t sense any danger, so I didn’t know what to make of it. I put it in the back of my mind for the moment, because there was another subject I was more curious about.

  “So have you actually seen any angels out here?” I asked.

  It was a bit of a trick question. Most people who said they saw angels or gorgons or any of my other acquaintances were generally a bit mad. Or a lot mad. The smart creatures and gods had learned to make themselves invisible and blend into the crowd once humans had taken their place in the world and history. The ones that weren’t smart were extinct. But every now and then I’d come across a person who had an eye for them. Usually they worked in museums or libraries or for certain government organizations. But not all of them. And if Penelope had seen an angel, well maybe she knew which way Gabriel had gone.

  “I haven’t seen him yet,” Penelope said. “But I’ll find him someday.”

  Ah well. I’d have to search out Gabriel on my own again then. So it goes.

  “And what will you do when you find him?” I asked. “Take a photo?” I nodded at the camera.

  She glanced at me, then away again. “The camera isn’t for the angel,” she said. “It’s for the others.”

  “What others?” I asked.

  “Whatever others I can find,” she said. “Ghosts. Wood spirits. Faerie folk. I was about to take a photograph of what I think was a sasquatch when you erupted out of your grave and scared it off.”

  I considered her words and she looked back at me and smiled again.

  “You think me mad, don’t you?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “Why else would you want a photograph of a faerie?” I didn’t add that faerie being what they were and all, there was nothing interesting about photos of them. They just looked like more people on the street. Or, I guess in this case, in the woods. Also, I was pretty sure sasquatches didn’t exist.

  She laughed. “There are many people in the world who are interested in such photographs,” she said.

  I thought about that for a second, and then it all came together for me.

  “Spiritualists,” I said, and she nodded.

  This was the age when many people thought they could communicate with ghosts in the afterlife, or even see other things walking among us, if only they had the ri
ght equipment. Ouija boards and crystal balls and the like. Their hearts were in the right places, but unfortunately most of them were victims of fraudsters, willing to believe in doctored photographs of the faerie dancing in wood glens and such. As if the faerie hung around in the forest these days.

  “Now you think me a fraud,” she said, still smiling.

  I shrugged. “I’m not one to judge what others believe,” I said. “If they’re interested in your photographs, so be it.”

  But I had a hunch there was more to this situation than that. If she wanted to create fake photographs, she could have done it much easier in woods closer to her home, wherever that was. So why was she all the way out here? Was she actually searching for a real angel?

  We waded through a stream and mist sparkled around us. A rainbow arched overhead. I caught sight of the skull of a goblin hidden among the rocks in the water but I didn’t say anything. She stepped over it without seeming to notice. Well, so much for her having the eye for such things.

  “So why did you come all the way out here?” I asked her. “The wilds of British Columbia aren’t exactly where I’d expect to find angels.”

  A clever bit of misdirection, that. Hopefully it would distract her from asking what I was doing out here.

  She reached the other side of the stream and waited for me to cross. She looked at the rainbow, which would have made a nice shot, but didn’t bother setting up her camera.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just had a feeling. It’s as if I were drawn here.” She looked back at me. “What about you?” she asked. “What brought you out here?”

  “We already covered that,” I said. “The climbing accident, remember?”

  Her expression said we both knew that was a lie, but then she turned back to the woods and we carried on anyway.

  We eventually arrived at her shack, which looked like it was in danger of collapsing into itself. Moss grew on every surface, and the roof sagged down in the middle. It looked as old as me.

  “Did you build this?” I asked as she forced the door open. The frame was warped, so she had to put her shoulder to it.

  She shook her head as she led me inside. “I’m a photographer, not a mad trapper,” she said. “I found it here when I hiked in. The place was abandoned, so I made myself at home.”

  The inside was dark on account of there being no windows, but enough light came in through the open door I could look around while Penelope set down her camera gear. It was a simple affair: a table and stool made of rough pieces of wood, a bed in a corner, a stove in the other corner with some chopped wood nearby. Bottles of chemicals half-hidden by a curtain that was probably her darkroom area. Not your typical woman’s dwelling.

  And then there were the photos hanging from clotheslines on the walls. They were of meadows or forests like the graveyard where Penelope had found me. And they all had the things that would have made the spiritualists happy: will o’ the wisps that could have been real wisps or maybe just swamp gas. A footprint in mud that could have been the mark of some strange creature even I didn’t know or simply a deformed bear. An insubstantial form moving between some crosses in another graveyard that could have been a ghost or could have been a trick of the light.

  “How many graveyards are out here anyway?” I asked, looking at that photo.

  “This area was home to a prospecting boom for a while,” Penelope said. She took a can of beans from a box on the floor and opened it with a can opener from the box. She stuck a spoon in the can and handed it to me without bothering to warm the beans. “A lot of people died out here with their dreams.” She shrugged. “But they left a lot of handy shelters.”

  She sat on the lone stool and watched me eat the beans, which didn’t take long at all. They didn’t do anything to stop the hunger inside me, but I nodded my thanks like they did.

  “So what’s your real name?” she asked.

  “How do you know Cross isn’t my real name?” I said.

  “You carry yourself like you’re hiding something,” she said. “And you looked away when you told me your name. I’ve known enough men to recognize that as a sign they’re pretending to be someone else, for whatever reason.”

  Maybe she did have an eye after all.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, and she nodded and let it be. She picked up her camera gear and carried it to the darkroom area. I spent some more time looking around the shack. It was only then that I saw the photo tucked into one corner. A closeup of the rocks of a stream bed. The goblin skull in the centre of the photograph.

  THIS IS HOW THE FAERIE TRAP YOU

  I didn’t know how Judas was involved in my search for Mona Lisa, but I knew he was. I had no doubt he’d killed the real art dealer and then sat across from me in that train, masquerading as the dead man while he told me to go to America. I just didn’t know why. I ran things through my mind again and again at breakfast, but the only answer I could come up with is that he had somehow learned about Cassiel’s promise to deliver him to me if I found Mona Lisa. But then why show himself at all? Why not go deeper into hiding, so that even Cassiel couldn’t find him?

  It was impossible to think like Judas, which meant I’d never have the real answer. And, in turn, that meant there was only one thing I could do.

  Carry on with my original plan like I didn’t know Judas was involved.

  I went to Heathrow and lifted the wallet of an American businessman from his pocket while he complained to someone on his phone about the bad weather. Like there was any other kind in England. I used his credit cards to buy a plane ticket to Dublin and a new backpack. I try to change my gear as often as I can while travelling. With all the DNA testing and drug dogs and chemical sniffers and such these days, you never know what’s going to get you into trouble. I once got thrown into a jail cell in Turkey because of some traces of hash in my bag—and I’d stolen the bag from the pilot of a Lufthansa flight. No more of that. Do your part for the economy and buy new, everyone.

  On the plane, I settled into my seat and ordered a couple of drinks. I pretended not to see the businessman whose wallet I’d stolen a few seats ahead of me. I didn’t feel any vague sense of danger like I had on the train, so I just passed off his presence on the plane to one of those coincidences. And it was.

  I figured the businessman had already cancelled his credit card, so when we landed in Dublin I stole a new one from an airport cop. I also took the cop’s driver’s licence, because I’d be needing a car. I left the businessman’s credit card in the cop’s wallet. I was going to see the faerie, so I was trying to think like them.

  I rented a car at the airport with my new ID and picked a random direction out of the city. I didn’t know where I was going. Looking for the faerie is like trying to summon Alice. They’re right here among us but you still have to search for them. And you never know what you’re searching for.

  I found them in the deep, dark hours of the night a short distance outside of Dublin. Or maybe it was the wee early hours of the morning. Or just really foggy. Whatever. The difference only matters to vampires. I could give you the exact location, but it doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t be there if you went looking for them. They won’t be there if I go looking for them again. The faerie get bored easily. Let’s just say this time they were camped out in an abandoned pub set back in a field shortly after Conolly’s Folly. If you don’t know that particular landmark, it’s a strange archway made of stone slabs and obelisks on the grounds of Castletown House. Another faerie hangout for a while, because of the things it used to attract. These days, though, its only visitors are tourists.

  I could tell the pub was abandoned by the boarded-up windows and For Lease signs nailed onto the walls. But even in the car I could hear the music and laughter from inside. And the parking lot was crowded, with only one empty space. That sort of invitation is a sure sign of a faerie pub. And if you’re still not convinced, well then, you’ll ju
st have to trust my experience in this matter. I parked and stretched a bit while looking around for other signs of life nearby. But there weren’t any, not even another car on the road. When I was done putting things off, I took a deep breath and went inside.

  It was wall to wall with people. I had to tap a man on the shoulder just to be able to step inside enough to close the door behind me. They were a friendly bunch, though—everyone who looked my way toasted me with their drink, and when I finally made my way to the counter the bartender poured me an ale without me even asking.

  Yes, definitely a faerie pub.

  I leaned against the bar and sipped my drink, which tasted of flowers and spices and charcoal and a few other things I couldn’t identify. The good thing about faerie ales is that no one glass tastes the same as another. They didn’t have the patience for mass brewing. Or recipes.

  I looked around for a few moments before talking to anyone. I wanted to get a feel for the mood of things before I went to work here. You had to be careful with the faerie. They can buy you another round or stick a blade between your shoulder blades with the exact same smile on their faces.

  A band on a riser in a corner played snippets of songs that sounded familiar—a lyric I recognized here, a drum beat or a guitar chorus there. They switched from electric guitars to acoustic and then to banjos and violins. The stage was littered with instruments. The drummer turned to pots and pans sometimes, then back to his drum kit. It was a chaotic, never ending jam session, and it should have been a mess, but I found myself tapping my feet to the hidden rhythm that began to emerge from it. I toasted them. They nodded at me and kept playing, sweat on their faces and soaking their shirts. Everything seemed pleasant enough so far, but I knew that didn’t mean anything with the faerie.

  The bartender pushed me another ale, and I discovered I’d finished the first one he’d given me already. Some of the people around me crowded closer. They asked me questions all at once.