by Baen Books
In a more settled voice he said, "My first newspaper job was in St. Louis during Prohibition. It was on the drug route from Mexico to New York, but a lot of the coke and heroin didn't make it over the Mississippi. Or the reefers either, come to that. You can believe what you please, but I generally believe my own eyes. Whatever they may be teaching doctors in med school now."
Becca got up abruptly. She'd stuffed the marijuana back into a big leather purse she'd probably bought at a street fair.
"We better go now," she said to Aubrey in a harsh voice. "I told you we should see my brother instead."
Field got up from the chair, using his arms to help him rise. He regretted that things had gone this way, but he wasn't going to be lectured by a fool girl in his own house.
Though if I was Aubrey Huber's age, I might feel a bit different. Field grinned and suddenly felt better.
"Becca, sit down," Aubrey said. "Gee, I'm sorry this happened, but it's nothing to do with what I came here for."
Aubrey waggled the painting again. Becca did sit down, though the two men were now standing.
"I want you to unlock the dreams for me," Aubrey said earnestly. "If I can put real nightmares down on paper, I'll be as great as Lovecraft and Howard. I've got the talent. All I need is material like they had!"
Field looked into the boy's face and saw the hope in it: hope that an old man who'd seen and learned a lot of things during his life could help a boy with a dream. Field had been a boy like that himself, many years ago.
"I know something about dreams," Field said, choosing his words carefully. "I shouldn't wonder if there were some locked in that painting. But if so, I think they ought to stay there."
"Can you open it so that I can decide for myself?" Aubrey said, his tone sharpening.
"It might be that I could," said Field, "but I think it's better that I not. Better for you--"
"That's my own business!"
"Yes, it is," Field said, nodding. "But better for the world too, than that the sorts of things that Hieronymus Bosch knew should be loosed on it."
Aubrey began to refold the towel. "All right, Becca," he said. "We'll go see Jimmie in Memphis."
To Field he added, "I gave up medicine to be a writer. I'm going to make it, whatever that takes."
Becca hopped from the couch. "My brother knows black magic!" she said to Field. "You'd call it black, anyway. A friend taught him."
"No real friend would teach a man black magic," Field said. He kept his voice calm with an effort. "And yes, any magic that opens the way for what's in this painting is what I'd call black. That much I can feel in it."
"It was his cellmate in Brushy Mountain," Aubrey said. "The Tennessee state prison. Jimmie says he can let the dreams out, and that's what I want. What I'm going to have."
"It was just drugs," Becca muttered, but she wasn't looking at either man as she spoke.
Field sighed. "Let me see the Bosch again," he said, holding his hands out for the painting. Becca's brother might very well be able to open a way to the things in the painting: letting things loose wasn't nearly as difficult as closing them up again.
Instead of giving Field the painting, Aubrey unwrapped it and held it facing the older man. The Virgin was serene. The Child, though not a real child as a modern artist would have painted Him, had a detached glory which threatened no one.
Yet there was a threat. Field didn't need the testimony of Aubrey's father and the soldier who'd traded him the painting to know that.
"If I open the painting," Field said, his eyes on the Virgin rather than on the boy holding it, "then I'll take precautions to be sure I don't let out more than I mean to."
He looked at Becca, then back to Aubrey. "Which somebody else might not do, or do as well," he said. "That's the only reason I'd do this thing for you; but you have to let me do it my way, then. Do you give me your word as a man that you'll let me do it my way?"
"Sir, if you can let me dream, I don't care how you do it," Aubrey said, holding out his right hand. "Sure, you're in charge."
Field shook with him, wishing that this business weren't happening but determined to follow through now that it had come this far. Aloud he said, "I'm going to do this because I said I'd do it, but I want you to think about something, Aubrey Huber: this picture gave your father dreams without any need of spells to open it up, but you say you don't get anything. Why is that?"
The boy shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "Dad was, well, he didn't talk about the war really, but he'd seen things, and I guess the Brit he got the painting from had too. I'm not a veteran."
Field nodded. "That might be," he said. "Though you might think what it means that the Battle of the Bulge brought them closer to what's in this picture."
He gestured with his left hand. Though withered, his hand and arm worked normally. They just had no more strength than those of the six-year-old boy he had been when the boichumbeguacu, the largest of the coral snakes, bit him.
"But there's another way it might be," Field said. "When did you get this notion of needing the dreams to be able to write? Because you'd been writing fine without them, hadn't you?"
"Well, I've been writing, but I wouldn't call selling a book to Powell Publications 'fine,'" Aubrey said. "When I saw the painting I remembered what Dad had said about dreams, and it came to me. I'd get my chance!"
"When you saw the Bosch?" said Field. "Or was it when you took away the silver medal that your father had put there to keep something inside"
Aubrey shook his head angrily. "Look, it was the same thing," he said. "I unwrapped the picture and I saw it when I unwrapped it. Now, are we going to do this?"
"My word's always been good before," Field said. He didn't quite snap the reply, but it wouldn't have bothered him if he had. "We'll do the business out in the shed, where I was when you came by."
As he stepped into the short hallway to the bedrooms, he said over his shoulder, "I've some things to gather up. I'll be back in a tick."
When Field returned to the living room, he'd put on an old tweed sport coat. Both side pockets bulged, and the sleeves bagged a little at the elbows. He still wore the long-sleeved shirt he'd had at the forge. His gray wool pants with moth holes in the right leg were the same also.
"Before we go out...—" he said to Aubrey, taking a sheet of coarse yellow paper from the cabinet under the egg-crate shelving. He used this paper to make carbons when he was writing articles, and it was fine for the present disposable use as well. "I'll write the words you'll be saying. You have to speak them, since the spell's for you. Do you know Latin?"
Aubrey shrugged. "I had two years in high school," he said. "I can't read it now, but I can pronounce it well enough."
"That's all you need to do," Field said. Using the pen from his shirt pocket, he wrote in a sprawling hand, O spiritus Neyilon et Achalas, accipite sacrificium ut nihil contra me et contra clavem istum valeat.
He handed the sheet to Aubrey and said, "You're just asking a pair of demiurges to accept a sacrifice and not allow anything to stand against you and the key. The sacrifice is the white cockerel whose throat I cut when I made the Key of Pluto. "
He paused to reach onto one of the higher cells of the egg-crate and brought down a heavy piece of iron.
"Which is this."
The object had a loop handle and a crossbar two-thirds of the way down the shaft. It was rusty, and the crossbar had been crudely pinned and welded to the shaft.
"The key has to be made from a piece of metal found by chance," Field explained. "What I found was a railroad spike by the right-of-way where some track had been replaced. That was thirty years ago, just before the war started, and I've never had cause to use it since... but I think this is the time."
"Why did you make it if you weren't going to use it?" said Becca.
Field grimaced. It was a question he'd have preferred not to be asked, but he'd always said that if you can do a thing, you ought to be able to man up to what you'd done.
&nb
sp; "Louise and I didn't have a child and we wanted one," he said, his eyes on the Key rather than on his visitors. "I made the Key to open a way for the child. Before I used it, though, I thought again and decided that we'd regret anything we got by that method."
He looked directly at Becca. "We never had children," he said, "and that was a pain to both of us, especially as we got older. It's a worse pain to me now that Louise is gone and I'm alone. But I think I made the right decision."
Field turned sharply to Aubrey and said, "And I think you'd be wiser not to use the Key of Pluto as well, but we've had that discussion. Bring the spell and the Bosch out to the shed, and I'll bring the Key."
A ragged straw hat hung from a coat rack in the corner between the egg-crate and the rarely used front door. Field hesitated, then put the hat on and led the way back through the kitchen. A little extra luck couldn't hurt.
"Will we need hats?" Aubrey said. He paused to let Becca go ahead of him as Field held the outside door open. "The sun isn't bad, and you said we'd be inside."
"This was my father's from Brazil," Field explained, closing the door as he followed the boy out. He touched the brim. The individual palm fibers had been split so fine that they might have passed for linen. "The band's from the skin of the snake that bit me, though it lost its colors long ago. I broke its back with a canoe paddle before I passed out, and the Campas skinned it for my father."
The Campas had also eaten the snake's flesh, he was sure. Protein was scarce in the great forest.
Field opened one door of the shed and Aubrey swung the other back. They were both working one-handed: the boy hadn't given the painting to Becca, nor had Field put the key in a pocket of his jacket.
Field was used to working inside the shed, but it looked tight when he saw it with the eyes of a host. The anvil was in the middle of the space, now; he'd moved it forward to take advantage of the light through the doorway. There might be enough room still, but...
Field looked at the boy, waiting with him on the threshold. "Give me the picture to hold and slide the anvil toward the back to give us some elbow-room," he said. "And then fetch the charcoal grill that hangs on the wall there, if you would."
Aubrey handed over the Bosch without hesitation and stepped into the shed. He tested the anvil's weight by pressing the sole of his shoe--he wore ankle boots--against the base. Then he bent over and pushed it all the way to the back wall in a single smooth motion, never losing the inertia after he'd gotten it moving.
Field watched the process with a grim smile. When he was Aubrey's age, he could do the same easily; but he hadn't been that age for forty years and more. He wouldn't trade his present wisdom and experience to be young again, but there were times he missed his youth nonetheless.
Everything came with a cost. That was more true of experience than of most other things.
Aubrey lifted the charcoal grill from its hook above the workbench. Becca said, "Why do we need that? Are you going to cook something?"
"In a manner of speaking," Field said. "I've spells written on shavings of rowan wood. We'll set them to char and let the smoke touch us before we open the Bosch. Try to open it, anyway. There may be some protection in the smoke, and I'm not in a mood to turn down even a little help in this business."
He didn't add that he had a bad feeling about it, but he surely did. The boy was fixed in his purpose, so there was no point in talking further about the risk.
Field looked at Becca, wondering if it would have been safe to let this Jimmie Walsh do the conjuration. Probably not; and anyway, he'd given his word.
"Want me to put this outside, Gee?" Aubrey asked, hefting the little grill.
"I'll light it, first," Field said, bending to get the bag of charcoal under the workbench. Aubrey took back the painting while Field filled the grill--the brazier, rather, for he'd removed the grill itself so that there was only the pan for charcoal. He took a book of paper matches from his pocket.
"Shouldn't you use some kindling?" Aubrey said. He looked around for old newspapers or something else suitable.
Smiling, Field lit the Bunsen burner, then played its flame over the briquettes until hints of white ash appeared. He shut off the burner--it was fed by a twenty-gallon tank under the workbench--and carried the brazier by two legs into the driveway between the shed and the Buick's front bumper.
"Now," Field said, stepping back into the shed, "we'll get the picture ready for the ceremony. Set it on the bench there with the cloth under it for a pad."
The boy obeyed. Becca was standing very close to him, her hand on his left arm. Her expression was tight with concern. Field didn't think it was the spell that worried her: Becca didn't really believe in magic, not as anything more than a horror movie safely at a distance on the screen. But she could tell that Aubrey had completely forgotten about her, for the time at least.
"Now," said Field. "Put the dog-tags and medal back around the painting the way they were when you found the picture in the safety deposit box."
"No!" said Becca, as Field had thought she would. "Not the medal!"
"Particularly the medal," Field said, directing his words at Aubrey, not the girl. He stood straight, as though he were being sworn in before testifying in court. "You said your father believed that the medal saved him in battle. Silver has value, and perhaps a saint's image does as well; but belief has the most value of all. Your father believed the medal would protect the world against the Bosch, and thus far it's done just that."
"No, I won't!" Becca said, pulling the chain taut while she clutched the tags and medal in both hands. "Aubrey, we're married! You said I could have them!"
"You can have them back after we're finished, Becca," Aubrey said. His tone was harsh, dismissive. "I need them now."
"They can't ever be taken away from the picture again," Field said. He didn't raise his voice, but there was no give in it. "Not when it's open. I'm not sure the picture's really safe now, but it lasted five hundred years without doing worse than giving a couple soldiers bad dreams. If I unlock it, then I don't know what will come out unless it's bound by your father's belief."
"I'm going," Becca said. Field stepped aside so as not to block the doorway, but Aubrey gripped the girl's shoulder. When she tried to twist away, Aubrey jerked her back to him. She yelped in pain and tried to peel his hand away with both of hers.
"You'll take the chain off now or I'll take it off you!" Aubrey shouted. He raised his other hand with the fist clenched.
Field poised to grab Aubrey's arm if he actually struck the girl. Field hadn't warmed to Becca and he didn't have any illusions about being able to hold the younger man in a temper like his present one, but he wasn't going to die remembering that he hadn't tried to stop a man from beating a woman.
"You can have it!" Becca shrieked. "Go on and take it, then!"
She pulled back, lifting the chain, tags and medal over her head. Field thought for a moment that she was going to fling them away, but instead she simply held them out.
Aubrey took them from her hands without a word. Becca moved deeper into the shed, rubbing her shoulder with the other hand. She might have a bruise, but she didn't appear to be seriously injured.
Aubrey lifted the painting and laid the doubled chain on the cloth, then ran the tags and medal over the face of the painting and laced them through the loop underneath. He stepped away and turned to Field.
"That's how it was," he said. "Except the towel was wrapped around it and I couldn't see what was underneath. I didn't know what was on the chain until I took it out of the lock-box."
"We won't need the cloth," Field said, pursing his lips. "It doesn't add protection, and it may be that there'll be changes in how the painting looks that we'll want to know about."
He decided to leave the Key of Pluto on the workbench where he'd set it. It was as safe there as it had been on the shelf in the living room for these thirty past years.
"We'll use the protective spells, then," Field said. "Come out to the
fire."
He glanced at Aubrey and added, "Unless you've changed your mind. Then we could avoid a bit of smoke."
He grinned to show that he was joking. When Aubrey saw the smile, his expression changed from a scowl to neutral, though he sounded a little strained when he muttered, "No, I don't mind smoke."
They stood opposite one another on the east and west sides of the brazier. The mild breeze was from the south--from the Buick toward the shed--though it wasn't enough to blow a flag out from its pole. It would drift the smoke, though, which was all that was required.
Field brought a paper lunch bag from his left jacket pocket as Becca joined them. She stood near Field this time instead of joining her boyfriend--husband?--on the other side. She was still rubbing her shoulder.
Field pinched half the rowan shavings out of the bag and sprinkled them on the charcoal. Those that landed on ash where the briquettes were fully lighted began to smolder at once. The spells he'd written in a crabbed hand were illegible even to himself on the curling rowan, but they stood out as shimmering lines while the wood charred beneath the India ink.
Field shook out the rest of the shavings and stuffed the empty bag back into his pocket. He'd readied them three nights ago to use the Mirror of Lylit, but he could make more at leisure.
The wood didn't flare up. He'd soaked the shavings in water so that he could hold them flat while he wrote, and they were still a little damp.
"Stand in the smoke, both of you," Field said, stepping to his left to put himself between the charcoal and the shed. Some of the smoke would be going inside the shed also, which couldn't hurt.
Becca sneezed. "It's bitter," she said. "How does this help?"
"It's protection," Field said. "It's like a raincoat against hostile magic, I suppose you could say."
And like a raincoat, it was useful in a drizzle but a real downpour would overwhelm it. You do what you can, he thought.
Field took the nearer hand of each of the couple in one of his, Aubrey with his left and the girl with his right. He stifled a sneeze, then said in a firm voice, "Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Emanuel Paraclitus, protegite nos!"
