by Rick Wayne
“Can I ask you something?” I said as she handed me the ticket. “Do I smell like dung to you?”
Let me just say, Bistro Indigenes is legitimately amazing, and not just the food but the decor. There’s this big stone hearth with a raging fire looking out over an open dining room that was relaxed yet graceful and classy, just like the hostess. I had come expecting an over-made teenager at the stand with lightened hair and a pre-summer tan, someone for the old guys with money to flirt with, someone I could bully my way past, but the woman before me had such poise and maturity that I was instantly certain there was no string of words I could utter that would convince her to act against her employer.
“Ms. Song,” she said as I walked in the door. “He’s been expecting you. I’m afraid he’s in an unexpected meeting at the moment, but he should be done soon. I have been instructed to offer you dinner.”
“Um.” I looked at the dining room. It was so busy. And everyone was so nicely dressed. I looked down at my jeans and flower-print sneakers.
But before I could answer, the hostess nodded to a heavily mustachioed Latino man, who took me to a seat at the counter that ran around the open kitchen where I watched the chefs put on a little show. They were all pretty young. And relaxed. Joking with each other. It was nice. And the cuisine . . . The menu had only two options. “Man” or “Woman.” Guests were encouraged to choose the one “with which they most closely identified.” I’m sure the chef pissed some people off with that.
A woman in a dark bandanna, about my age, produced a basket from under a counter. It was full of spindle-like rolls of thread. Spider silk. She put three or four of them on a wire spoon and dipped them in boiling water. Then she set the blanched, sanitized, and deflated nests under a heat lamp to dry. She took some dry ones and put them in a round machine—like those rotary tubs carnivals use to make cotton candy, only smaller—and added a spoonful of thick crystals, sugar maybe. Finally she rolled a wafer twirl, a tubular cookie, around the center of the machine so that it accumulated a filamentous layer of red-violet fluff. I have no idea what candied spider web tastes like, but for the “Men,” that was dessert. Their entree was fatty chicken. The meat was stuffed on the bone and fired in clay that had to be smashed open after cooking. The chefs brought out this big mallet. Each time they smashed a pot, it was loud, and the crowd cheered. I guess since it was cooked at such high temperature and pressure, the meat fused with the marrow and spices and melted in your mouth.
I chose “Woman,” because duh, and got sliced ox penis—which was like four feet long before they cut it into individual servings. It was soaked in chili oil, grilled over open flame, and served with a cold puree of parsnip, egg white, and flowering-cactus jelly that looked suspiciously like, well, you-know-what. The palate cleanser was a tiny glass of alcoholic chrysanthemum sorbet—sweet and sour, earthy and floral. And a little buzz to boot. Almost like the chef was sending you out into the world to make a poor romantic decision.
Before I had a chance to sample the dessert, the hostess came to get me. She took me back out the front and around to a side door. We walked up the stairs and the door swung open and—BOOM. There was a head, like a giant shrunken head—nine or ten feet, all gray and shriveled and nasty. Its eyes were stitched shut. Its mouth was pursed, like it was frozen in a perpetual wail. I slid past it and stepped into the living space. The floor-to-ceiling windows had a killer view of downtown. The sun was low and the light came in beams from between the distant skyscrapers. The room was like a little museum. A metal mobile hung from the high ceiling. A pair of couches faced each other in front of the windows. At the back was a wet bar. There was a big battle club and a mummified hand and some killer art on the walls, and that great view. In between the couches was a worn Buddhist stelae that he was using as a coffee table.
The hostess motioned for me to sit and said he would be out soon. I nodded and she turned to leave just as a heavy-set, blustery man with a thick comb-over walked in from a side hall, through an open pair of French doors that looked like they might have dated from colonial Indochina. He looked so out of place in his tired suit and loose tie. At the other end of the hall I saw stacked stone cubes. Each cube was deep red and capped in a different Chinese character. I recognized the radicals but I didn’t know the script. It looked like some kind of ancient calligraphy.
The man spun and yelled. “I don’t know what you expected. You can’t keep venomous spiders in a kitchen—” He stopped when he noticed me. He scowled. He took a deep breath. “Young lady, I hope you’re not here for a job.”
Then he stormed out.
I turned back to the hall and there he was. The chef.
“Ms. Song.” He was flat. Like he’d just gotten horrible news but was trying to be polite. “How nice to see you again.”
He did not look the least bit surprise to see me. He had some folded papers in his hand. It looked serious. Like, legal stuff. You know, where the back page is blue and all that. I caught the words New York City Department of Health at the top.
“Is this a bad time?” I stood.
He handed the papers to Milan, who had stepped out of the way of the retreating man.
She read them. “Again?”
“Please talk to Raul and finish the service immediately. We can begin calling next week’s reservations in the morning.”
“And the staff?” she asked.
He looked at me as he thought, as if I somehow figured into the equation.
“They may leave after the kitchen is clean.”
I pointed to the door, like I was happy to show myself out, but the chef was already walking toward those stone doors, which swung open as he approached. I looked to Milan. She nodded and I scurried after. It was so quiet up there. I passed the open door of a small office and bathroom. I think he lived up there.
I stopped in the stone doorway. “Wow . . .”
There was a high vaulted ceiling. And a tree! Like, a whole live tree inside! And this giant wall of books behind faintly tinted glass. And you could totally see where the new building had been built on the remains of something a lot older.
Étranger walked to a semi-circular kitchen that arced around the tree trunk. It was raised a step above the floor. Around it were piles of reclining pillows. To the left were huge windows covered in symbols and writing.
But I barely saw it. My eyes went right to the chair.
No, not a chair. A throne. A bone throne.
It rested inside an arched brick nook under the wall of books, which was flanked on both ends by cast iron spiral staircases. It was made out of skeletons. The arms were arms. The feet were feet. In the middle of the back, which was an array of spines, sat a human skull, wedged between the vertebrae. It stared out at me through empty sockets. Like a sexual predator.
“Thank you for coming.” Étranger washed his hands and wiped them on a towel.
I was frozen. I couldn’t move my eyes. “That chair . . .”
He turned. “Hm?”
“It looks like it wants to kill me.”
“It does.” He was serious. “Don’t worry. It is quite secure.”
He was right. It was chained crosswise to a hexagram chiseled into the slab underneath. One continuous chain stretched over it and looped through grasping metal hands that erupted from the floor at all six points of the star. They were made of copper that had long since tarnished to a spectral blue-green, as if they belonged to ghosts reaching through the rock, and they seemed to be gripping the chains with force, holding back the chair, as if it were constantly struggling to break free.
There was a Japanese screen resting against the nook, and he walked over and stretched it across the opening, hiding the chair.
Something moved out of the corner of my eye and I turned. “Oh!”
Behind me, next to the doors, was an upright, man-sized terrarium with ferns and a few large branches. It was full of spiders. But not just any spiders. Fiddlebacks. Black widows, too. I stepped back when I saw
the red marks. I could actually feel the absence of the terrarium’s front panel. It was completely open. I could’ve reached out and touched them as they perched silently on their silk.
“Won’t they crawl away?”
I had visions of sitting down to talk business and finding one crawling up my leg. One of them moved just then, and I fought the urge to shiver.
“Only if I stop feeding them.”
I didn’t want to ask what they ate. I turned away, but my eyes didn’t know where to go. There was something amazing in every direction. There was a mask and a colorful feather suit and writing on the windows and a stained glass in the ceiling and on and on. I turned around slowly.
“You’ve been having me followed,” I accused with my eyes on the ceiling. “Haven’t you?”
He didn’t deny it.
“The big guy,” I said. “With the hunch. He wasn’t one of Lykke’s. Lykke and his people were too busy getting brutally murdered to follow me all over the city. He was yours.”
He walked to the other side of the kitchen area and looked in one of the cupboards. “That is Mr. Dench. An associate of mine.”
He reached down and lifted my bag—or Kell’s bag, I guess.
“Fuuuck me,” I blurted. Then I covered my mouth. “Sorry.” But I couldn’t believe it.
My phone was dead. Big surprise. But everything was there: my wallet, the unopened tarot deck I bought at Sour Candy, Samir’s knife, all of it.
I looked at the knife. “Irfan mentioned a dagger.”
“Yes.”
I thought there would be more coming, but there wasn’t.
“I hadn’t thought about it at first,” I said, “but when I went to see Lykke, he had a picture on his wall. He was very proud. It was from an old manuscript. A man stood in a circle surrounded by all these daggers impaled in the ground. There was a noose around his neck and a gallows above, but the rope had been cut.”
Still he didn’t say anything.
“It’s an allegory, isn’t it? Like with alchemy and all that. Cutting the noose. That’s what all this is about somehow. The escape from death. Immortality.”
“The dream of the alchemists,” he said softly. “The dream of man,” he corrected himself.
“So, like, the Fountain of Youth and the Holy Grail and all that.”
“There are two universal principles, whose union begets all things. And so two gifts were made. One, the chalice or fountain, is the source of life and its master. The other is—”
“An athame,” I interjected.
“Not an athame,” he corrected as he walked back around the counter. “The athame. The original sacrificial blade, carved from the dome of the earth and gifted to the first dark priest. Cain, if you’re Christian.”
“I’m not.”
He nodded solemnly, like he was thinking.
“But what is it?” I asked.
“By intent, our destruction. One of three gifts from gods so old their names have been lost. I believe the idea was that if they gave us a big enough sword, we’d use it to cut ourselves down and spare them the trouble of doing it themselves. Much of its history is lost, but we know the Spanish took it from the Aztecs. Where they got it is less clear. It might have been carried by fleeing Easter Islanders, who found it in the wreckage of an imperial Chinese trading vessel, blown far off course by unnatural winds. Before it was banished by the emperor, it came to the Chinese from India, where it had been enshrined at the temple of Kali. Before that, it had been buried in a tomb in Bactria by the priests of Alexander, just before his great army—which nearly conquered the world—fell to chaos and turned back. Alexander himself took it from the Persians, who took it from the Hyksos, who took it from the Pharaohs, who took it from the Hebrews, who took it from the Babylonians, who took it from the Akkadians . . . And everywhere it went, ruin followed. The fall of the Aztecs. The Muslim conquest of Hindustan. The untimely death of Alexander. The plagues of Exodus.”
There was a long silence.
“Good job,” I said. “I mean, I was expecting something like that but I totally got goosebumps.”
“In the sixteenth century, after the mighty Spanish Armada—whose ships stretched from horizon to horizon—was decimated in a freak gale that swept across the North Sea, the High Arcane had finally had enough.”
“The Masters,” I said.
He nodded.
“Who were they?”
“A secret society that traced its lineage to the fall of the Templars. Their agents wrested the blade from the Inquisitors, who thought the strength of their faith could contain its evil. But no one can. The blade has but one purpose. And since it could not be destroyed—at least, not without releasing, at once, all the evil it had accumulated—it was buried. In a place of forgetting. And left to diminish over the eons.”
“Apparently someone remembered.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Unfortunately, the magic of that place was broken. Many years ago.”
I looked up at the tree behind him. I hadn’t noticed before, but there were tiny red fruits, like berries, peeking from between the leaves.
“Ms. Song,” he said with some hesitation, “it is unfortunate I must be the one to tell you this, but you are in far greater danger than you know. Your friend Mr. Raimi is making a play for the stone table, with the backing of some very powerful people. They intend to unseat a usurper, a warlock of great skill about whom little is known. He calls himself the Lord of Shadows, and he is in possession of a book, a book he is only slowly deciphering.
“Mr. Raimi’s backers have spent a fortune—several of them, in fact—to locate and acquire the blade, the first of the three gifts, which they hope will counter the power of the last. Courtesy dictates I suggest immediate shelter. But in truth . . . we must recover these items—at any cost. Even our lives.” He paused. “Where is your friend?”
