by Dyrk Ashton
“It’s stuck,” he groans, pulling harder. His fingers tingle and sting, like circulation prickling after the cold.
Fi takes his other arm to help him pull.
“Wait!” Edgar warns.
“What?” Fi asks.
“It isn’t stuck.” Edgar’s gaze moves along the shelves.
Fi sees what Edgar is talking about. “Oh my God. Zeke... your arm.”
* * *
Peering through the goggles, the wampyr policeman reports that the three from the corner are gone, and the hound.
Kleron takes the goggles and looks. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. They were there, then they weren’t.”
Kleron sees Peter spin from where he stood near the corner and return to the fray. “And The Pater?”
“They were gone when he came near.”
“Slipping, Master?” Max posits.
“Hmm...” Kleron ponders. “Fascinating, and unexpected. But which one?”
“What do we do?” Luc asks.
Kleron contemplates. “We wait.”
* * *
Zeke’s heart pounds as he follows Edgar and Fi’s line of sight. His arm isn’t stuck in the wall, it’s part of it—and the wall is part of him.
Grossly misshapen, oversized and far too long, it bulges like a serpent frozen in ice. Patches of the wall and shelves are the color and texture of his blue oxford shirt, while enormous raised veins throb in the cracked and moldy plaster in time with his hammering pulse. Sticking out of the upper corner are the tips of enormous fingers of gypsum and rotted wood.
Zeke swallows hard, concentrates on moving his hand. The monstrous fingers wiggle. A piteous moan escapes his lips. Blood roars in his ears. He pulls frantically, but his arm won’t budge. And it hurts, as if all the nerves are stripped raw and exposed. The whole wall hurts!
“Stop it lad!” Edgar cautions. “You’ll injure yourself!”
“Your sword!” Zeke implores. “Cut it out!”
“Zeke!” Fi shouts. “Calm down!”
“Just cut it off, I don’t care!” Then Edgar and Fi’s hands are on him, beseeching him to stop. He slowly returns to his senses. “Oh God...”
Edgar holds Zeke’s chin with a steady hand, and his words are the very voice of reason. “Do not despair, lad. Listen to me.”
Zeke looks into his eyes, deep, clear and wise.
“Do you hear me?”
Zeke takes a shaky breath and nods. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Just try to stay calm.”
“Okay... Okay.” He swallows, concentrates on his breathing. “Be calm... Be calm.”
“Very good.”
While her uncle’s attention is on Zeke, Fi gnaws at the nails of one hand, clutching the fur on Mol’s back with the other. “What do we do?” she asks Edgar.
“First, we must all settle down. Understood?”
She yanks her fingers from her mouth, forces herself to breathe deeply, and releases the dog from her fretful clutch. Mol groans with relief.
“Peter warned me,” Zeke pants. “He made me swear, never do it again, never, not until we talked about it.”
“At length” Fi adds.
“Yeah, that too.”
“For good reason, lad,” says Edgar. “From what I understand, slipping between worlds can be very dangerous. That you can do it at all is nothing short of miraculous, I must say.”
Zeke eyes the results in the wall-arm, licks his lips. “Doesn’t seem very miraculous to me.”
“It could have been much worse.”
Zeke gulps, trying not to let his imagination run with that thought. “What do I do?”
“I could not use my sword, even if it were here. Not unless you no longer desire the use of your arm.” Zeke gulps again. “You’re going to have to slip it out.”
“What?”
“Your arm. I believe it may be trapped somewhere between. You need to bring it here, to you.”
“Will that work?” Fi asks.
“To be honest, I don’t now. I understand very little of the phenomenon, but if I recall correctly, it has been done.”
“Okay,” Fi says, trying to sound positive. “That’s good. There’s some hope, then.” Zeke blanches. “I mean, it’s going to work. If you can slip, you can do this, right?”
Zeke exhales, gathering his courage.
“Remember what Peter said,” she urges. “Feel out for it, focus on that empty part of your mind.”
Zeke takes a deep breath and tries—but there’s nothing to feel out to, and no empty part of his mind, either. It’s jam-packed and wriggling like too many eels stuffed in a Ziploc bag—all the attacks and violence and blood and Andrealphus’s terrible scream and that horrible memory of childhood abuse and my arm is stuck in a fucking wall! He pulls. It won’t budge. “It isn’t working!” he sobs. “I can’t do it! I just can’t!”
“Zeke, you have to relax, lad.”
His heart races and he’s hyperventilating. “My head... I...”
Fi tries to help. “Zeke—“
“I brought us here,” he rants, “who knows where, and now I’m fucked! We’re fucked!”
“What can I do to help?” Edgar offers.
“I don’t know!”
Edgar scowls as he considers the options. He needs to get Zeke’s mind off his arm. A thought registers. “I suppose, just a bit couldn’t hurt. Not now.”
Zeke’s eyes dart to him. “What?”
Edgar sits, folding his legs. Fi crouches next to him. A conflicted expression crosses his face, but a decision is made. “Mahisha.”
Now he has Zeke’s full attention. “Yeah?”
“You know of Mahisha from the ancient Hindu Puranic texts, yes?” Zeke nods. “This is what I have been told,” Edgar proceeds. “It’s not as if I was actually there. It is absolutely true, however, I have no doubt.” Zeke watches him anxiously. Fi bites her lip. “Mahisha’s is a tragic story, but he brought his demise upon himself. The mace he carries was made and given to him by his benefactor to police the others of his kind when he was a trusted servant. With it he can multiply himself, as you have seen. He alone has the natural ability, which his benefactor recognized in him, and the mace focuses it.”
“Magic,” Zeke breathes.
Edgar’s forehead knits. “The ancient magic, real magic, is simply science, a comprehension and manipulation of matter and energy like any other, only far more advanced.”
Thoughts percolate in Fi’s mind, of how Edgar’s shield caught the wampyrs and werewolves on fire, and how he could possibly know these things. But now is not the time to press the issue. For Zeke’s sake, she suppresses her curiosity and growing resentment over the secrets her uncle has kept from her all these years. For now.
“But Mahisha was corrupted,” Edgar continues, “and he became known as Mahishasura, The Buffalo Demon.”
Zeke tries to process what he’s hearing. He tugs at his arm in exasperation. It doesn’t move and hurts more than ever.
Edgar sees his pain, and all he can think of to do is keep talking. “Tengu-Andrealphus is quite another story. He was never good.”
“Tengu-Andrealphus,” says Zeke. “Even the name doesn’t make sense.”
“You expect anything to make sense now?” Fi can’t help it, it just comes out. She glares at Edgar. “I get the feeling nothing’s ever going to make sense again.”
“Fiona, you’re not helping,” Edgar reprimands evenly.
“Alright!” She calms herself. “Okay. Sorry.”
Zeke says, “Tengu is a magical bird demon from Japanese fables.”
“Yes,” Edgar responds. “Not to be confused with ‘Taingou,’ the dog-like demon of the Chinese.”
“And Andrealphus is...” Zeke’s voice trails off as he tries to recall the details from his reading.
“According to the European Goetia and Pseudomarchia Daemonum grimoires, Andrealphus was a Grand Marquis of Hell. From what I
’ve been told, he took that title himself, it was never bestowed upon him. His Truename is Tengu-Andrealphus, but he was known as just Tengu or Andrealphus in different places and times.” He pauses, then adds, “I hear he was also quite proficient in mathematics.”
“Yeah... But you called him something else, too. The Nightingale Robber.” Zeke squeezes his eyes shut, calling up his studies. “It’s from a Russian folktale about a highwayman in the forests of Bryansk.” His eyes open in revelation. “And he could yell really loud!”
“You have done some reading,” says Edgar appreciatively.
Zeke’s cheeks redden. “It’s kind of what I do.”
“An obsession, really,” adds Fi. She’s seen the piles of books in his tiny apartment, the one time she was there.
“The Russian stories name him Solovei-Razboinik,” Edgar elaborates. “He’s no nightingale, however, but a kind of peafowl. If you’ve ever heard a peacock’s call, you know how voluminous and unpleasant it can be. Multiply that by decibels untold, and that’s what we heard today.”
“There’s a poem that goes with the story,” Zeke interjects. He wracks his brain to recall it.
“My translation may not be the most accurate,” says Edgar, “but I’ll give it a go.” He recites the verse:
“He screams, the robber, like a wild animal.
From the whistle of the nightingale,
From the scream of the wild beast,
All the grasses and meadows are entangled,
All the blue flowers lose their petals,
All the dark woods bend down to the earth,
And all the people there lie dead.”
Zeke slumps in cold apprehension. “It’s real... it’s all real...”
“Not all, lad.” Edgar cautions. “Don’t believe everything you read, though there are seeds of truth in most of the fables and folktales of old. As there are in the great mythologies of the world.”
Zeke stares at him blankly.
Fi crosses her arms. This is supposed to help Zeke relax, how?
“Mahishasura and Tengu-Andrealphus were killed in the stories,” Zeke says weakly. “That’s not true? Peter seemed pretty surprised to see them, and from what I can tell he knows all about this stuff.”
“He does. More than anyone.” Edgar pauses as if considering what to say next, what he can say, then shakes his head minutely and continues. “The Buffalo Demon was a prodigious enemy, as you can imagine, but in a momentous battle at the end of a great and terrible war, his benefactor took to the field and slaughtered a hundred thousand Mahishas in a day, down to the very last one.”
“I’ve studied the Hindu Puranas some,” Zeke says. “They say he was killed by Durga, maybe the most powerful of all the Hindu goddesses.”
“No ‘maybe’ about it, lad. The ancient peoples of the Indus Valley who wrote the original Puranas, and the Vedas that preceded them, also knew her as Maha Nigurna Shakti and Chandika, and later, Kali. Her Truename was Prathamaja Nandana.” He pronounces the name with reverence.
It means nothing to Zeke, but sounds awe inspiring anyway.
“The story of The Nightingale Robber contains the true account of Tengu-Andrealphus’s death.”
“Ilya Muromets chopped off his head.”
Edgar nods.
Zeke’s insides are cold and empty. Ilya Muromets is a Russian folk hero who supposedly had the strength of ten men. And he’s real too.
“I feel ridiculous even saying this,” Fi pipes in, “considering those things shouldn’t exist at all, but if they’re dead, how are they here?”
A pall of gloom descends upon Edgar’s brow and his voice is tenuous. “Blasphemous, unthinkable.”
“What?” Fi urges.
“They’ve been brought back.”
“From the dead?”
“Necromancy...” Zeke shudders.
Edgar winces at the word. “Eldritch science of the most dreadful variety, abhorred and strictly forbidden.”
Fi observes Zeke’s pallid complexion and shallow respiration. “I don’t think this is helping.”
Zeke tugs half-heartedly at his arm. “Me neither,” he rasps.
“Try, Zeke, really try.”
“I can’t.”
“Use your mind, not your body.”
“I can’t do it, I said!” He yanks at his arm as if defying it to come loose. With each pull it feels like his fingers are being smacked with a hammer. “Godammit! I can’t!”
“Zeke!” She shouts with such force and determination that his breath catches in his throat.
He sobs, wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Just go without me.”
“Yeah, right.” She nudges Edgar out of the way and kneels in front of Zeke.
“Hush. That’s enough. We’re here, and we’re alive, okay? Right now, we’re okay.”
His eyes plead as he sputters, “That’s, not really—”
“No, listen to me. I want to ask you something.”
“Okay,” he gasps, trying to get his himself under control. “I’m listening.”
“Are you hungry?”
“What?”
“I am. We didn’t eat much at that restaurant.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“When we get out of here, when this is all over and we get home, we’ll have a big fat Greek dinner. I’m buying.”
Zeke chokes out a laugh in spite of himself. Despairing, perhaps, but a laugh.
“And we’ll have a stupid-huge death-by-chocolate dessert, one for each of us, and Turkish coffee.”
Edgar gazes at Fi with admiration.
“And we’re going to do whatever we can to get you to your conference.”
Zeke snorts. “I haven’t thought about that since we talked this morning. Doesn’t seem very important now. Was that really just this morning?”
“I know, right? Seems like weeks ago.”
“A lifetime.” His face becomes thoughtful.
Fi can tell he’s thinking about their “breakup.” “Sorry about that little tirade of mine. I am a train wreck, you know.”
“No, you’re—”
“Yeah, I am. Just ask my uncle.” Caught up in Fi’s tactic to help Zeke, Edgar bobs his head in agreement, but when she gives him a sidelong glance he shakes his head adamantly. “And it looks like you don’t have a choice, mister,” she continues. “You’re stuck with me, at least for awhile, whether you like it or not. No ‘break’ for you.”
Zeke smiles wanly.
“You know I’ve never asked. What’s your favorite classical music?”
“Oh... I don’t know. I don’t have a favorite, I guess.”
“While you think about it, I’ll tell you mine. Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.’”
“Yeah? I like that too.”
“My mom used to play it on her flute to warm up for rehearsal. I’d just sit and listen and imagine I was bouncing along on fluffy clouds.” Fi feels the familiar constricting sense of loss at the memory of her mom, but swallows it down. No time for that.
She whistles the short bright notes of the song in perfect tone, then nudges Zeke, bobbing her eyebrows in encouragement.
He joins in, “da-da-da”ing along—and can picture what Fi described in the frolicking tune. The notes seem to chase each other up an Escher-esque staircase of clouds in a bright blue sky. He trampolines with them from step to step, and Fi’s face is the sun.
Edgar blinks, his eyes moist. In his odd long life he’s known the most exuberant joy and profound sorrow, the most extreme yins and yangs of human experience. Right now he feels them both in equal measure. His heart swells to bursting. This is magic.
Fi slows the tempo, leans close with those lovely lips of hers, and Zeke becomes lost in her beautiful green eyes. All the pain, shame and desperation of only moments ago drain away, driven by the warm glow of her face, like rays of a new dawn banishing the darkness and chill of night.
Fi gestures surreptitiously to her uncle. He gets the hint and avert
s his eyes, even covers Mol’s, who doesn’t like it much. But as she leans closer to Zeke, Edgar can’t help but look, and Mol peeks between his fingers.
Fi shuts her eyes, prompting Zeke to close his. She inches closer. He feels the heat of the sun between them. She slides her hands to his face, stops whistling, and as their lips are about to meet, poised at the infinite crux of longing, bliss, and destiny, he embraces her—with both arms.
Fi’s eyes fly open at his touch, accompanied by a sharp intake of breath. “You did it!”
Zeke flushes, confused. “What?” Fi’s song and proximity still resonate through him and it takes a moment for reality to seep back. “Oh...” He sees, and feels, that his arm is free of the wall. “OH! Holy fuck! How’d you do that?”
Fi gives him a peck on the lips, hops to her feet and offers a hand. He takes it and stands, gawking at his arm like he’s never seen one before. “Whatever you did, it worked!”
Fi smiles and shrugs, then turns away and puffs out her cheeks at Edgar, an expression that betrays she had no idea it would.
Men are easily distracted, and she had to do something to stave off Zeke’s panic. They couldn’t leave him like that, and without him they were all ‘fucked,’ just like Zeke said. She pats Mol on the head and steps further into the room, Mol at her heels. Still, it was a cheap trick, using her feminine wiles, and she can’t help feeling a little guilty. She still doesn’t know how she feels about him (who’s had time to consider feelings?), and she’d hate to have him think she was leading him on. But none of that’s important right now, so she kicks the thought down the stairs of her emotional root cellar and trips the door.
“How’d she do that?,” Zeke asks Edgar, baffled.
“First lesson, lad, don’t slip near solid objects until you’ve had extensive practice and instruction. And second,” Edgar pats him on the shoulder, “never underestimate the power of a woman.”
Zeke blushes in understanding.
“Well, what now?” Fi asks, fixing her ponytail and grimacing at the blood and grime on her scrubs.
“My better judgment says we do no more of that dreadful slipping,” Edgar replies, “but we must return to Peter. I’d recommend we remove ourselves to a safe distance on the grounds, then slip back and assess the situation from there. Agreed?”
