James Potter and the Morrigan Web

by G. Norman Lippert

  William merely stared up at the three boys, measuring them. They knew about his poor, lost Fredericka. His cheeks burned. "I don't know what's in that velvet bag," he said firmly, sombrely, "and I'm sure I don't want to. This is over. You go your way. And me and Helen, we'll try to go ours. Fair enough?"

  All three boys nodded. After a moment, they backed away, turned, and ran from the alley, taking their mysterious velvet bag with them.

  William arose from his knees, and Helen leaned against him. He supported her with his left arm and she allowed him to collect her weight. She was trembling. He felt the hot weight of the pistol in her apron.

  For the first time, he wondered how Helen had gotten to the alley. She lived with her family on the other side of the wharves, some fifteen blocks away. It was the middle of the night. William himself had been staking out the alley for weeks, hoping to catch Magnussen when and if he returned to the scene of poor Fredericka's murder. Amazingly, the man had returned, just as bold as brass, walking as if he owned the whole street, or even the whole damn world. William had thought he'd been ready for him, but he had not been prepared for the man's devilish, otherworldly powers.

  But Helen had. She hadn't wasted time on words. She had shot him dead, in cold blood.

  But how had she known? How had she arrived in just the nick of time, pistol in hand, to kill the man responsible for her sister's death? It was no small mystery. For now, however, there was no time to discuss it.

  William dragged Magnussen's body into the shadows and covered it with trash. He'd have to return later to dispose of the corpse. Fortunately, the riverfront was only a few blocks down the hill. The piers would be deserted at this hour. The murderer's body might be found in the days to come, floating on the muddy river current, but then again maybe it wouldn't. Either way, William didn't care.

  Silently, William walked Helen home. Neither spoke, despite the questions that hung in the air. For now, all that mattered was that it was over. Justice—at least the base version of it that was within their meager grasp—had been served. Whoever or whatever the awful old man had been, he was dead. Fredericka was avenged.

  It didn't bring her back, and the two of them had to live forever with the stain of murder on their souls, but for now William thought he could live with that.

  He just hoped Helen could too.

  William married Helen less than a year later. Their courtship had been brief but intense, forged in the crucible of their shared experience on that fateful night. They learned that age old truth—that a mutual secret is one of the strongest intimacies, and their secret was indeed terrible and binding. They had both lost someone dear to them, and both had participated in avenging that dear one. In the years that followed, William never regretted what had happened, but he knew that Helen did, in her deepest heart. After all, it had been her hand that had held the pistol. She had ended another person's life. William wished it had been his finger on the trigger, just so that he could have spared Helen the responsibility. He was harder than her, and could have lived with it.

  And yet, amazingly, they rarely spoke of it. It was the event that had brought them together, but as the years passed, it began to seem more like something that had happened in a dream. The only time it was ever fully real to William was on the rare sleepless night, when the world was quiet and the hours seemed endless. He would lie next to his wife and wonder: how had she known to come to the alley that night? Why had she walked those fifteen blocks with the pistol in her apron? How could she have arrived at that exact moment? She'd had to have left at least a quarter of an hour before Magnussen had even arrived in the alley. It was a deeply worrying mystery.

  But William never did ask his wife how she had come to be in the alley that night, for one very simple reason: deep down, he really did not wish to know the answer. The answer, he suspected, might be even more worrying than the mystery.

  Helen bore William four children. With the birth of their fourth—a son, to William's great joy— they had finally saved up enough money to move out of the dingy warren of the wharf neighbourhood. William quit his job on the docks and bought a small farmhouse just south of Philadelphia where, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, he took up farming.

  There were lean years, and even in the best of times the family rarely had more than two dimes to rub together, but they were happy, and they were often rather fortunate. When neighbouring crops rotted in unusually wet springs, William's managed to survive. When foxes decimated nearby hen houses, their chickens remained untouched. When drought scorched other fields, William discovered a spring in a rocky glen on the corner of their property and used it to irrigate his crops.

  It never occurred to him that these were unusual strokes of luck. Nor did it occur to him that they seemed to coincide with his wife's somewhat charming eccentricities. Helen had developed a habit of walking through the fields in the mornings, talking softly to herself, or singing funny, lilting songs. William never heard her actual words. He was content to see her from a distance, meandering in the dawn sunlight, singing and petting the young plants with the flats of her hands as she went. He knew that other people might think her slightly crazy, but he knew better. Helen was a gentle, whimsical soul, and the farm life had been very good for her. It had awakened something in her, and that awakening made William glad.

  He never noticed that his soggy fields grew drier and healthier as she circled them each morning. Or that the colourful symbols she painted on the hen house might be more than senseless squiggles and interlocking patterns. Or that she had buried something in the rocky glen mere days before he discovered the spring there.

  But her son did.

  His name was Phillip. He'd been named after his grandfather, whom he had never known. He watched his mother carefully, as only a son can, both idolizing and studying her. He saw her circle the fields each morning, singing her funny little songs, but he knew that she wasn't singing to herself. She was singing to the plants as they pushed toward the sun, even to the dirt itself, encouraging and coaxing the fields in her lovely, simple voice. She made up the songs as she went. Phillip knew this because he sometimes followed her from a distance, watching with wide eyes, transfixed by his secretly magical mother.

  His sisters didn't believe him when he tried to tell them about their mother's subtle magic. They were older and wiser than him, and reminded him of that at every opportunity. They laughed at him and scorned him and told him he was a silly baby. None of this dissuaded Phillip in the least. They were too old to recognize real magic, even if it lived in the same house with them.

  One morning, Phillip saw his mother leave the house with a small tin box under her left arm and a garden trowel in her right hand. The dew was still beaded on the grass and the sun was barely a rose-tinted promise on the lip of the horizon. Phillip followed her, stealing along the edge of the east field, his bare feet swishing through the wet, tall grass.

  His mother did not sing that morning. She walked silently, soberly, carrying the tin box and trowel almost as if they were a shield and sword. At the end of the east field, she turned left, toward the edge of the property. She didn't usually walk in that direction. After all, there was nothing over there but the border fence and an old stony glen, full of bushes and scraggly trees. Phillip hid behind a stand of weeds and watched as his mother descended into the glen. By the time she stopped, he could only see her head and shoulders. She looked down for a long moment, as if examining something, and then she knelt down. Phillip could not see her for nearly five minutes. When she reappeared again, she straightened her work dress and looked up at the sky. She was not smiling, but she seemed happy somehow, or at least content. A moment later, she turned and climbed back out of the glen, carrying only the trowel.

  Phillip hid himself in the weeds and watched his mother pass. Still, she did not sing, as she did on most mornings. But she hummed. It was a quiet sound, and Phillip suspected that this time her tune was for herself alone.

  When he was su
re she was most of the way back to the house, Phillip scrambled out of the weeds and dashed toward the glen. He followed his mother's steps as closely as he could, looking around intently. After only a moment, his sharp eyes spied what he was searching for. One of the stones had been moved, and the earth beneath it was disturbed. The boy knelt and pried the stone up with both hands. The sod under it was still broken and soft. Almost reverently, Phillip combed through the dirt with his fingers until he touched metal. His mother had buried the tin box. But why? Was she planting it somehow? Was it going to grow into something? What strange magic was she working down here in the glen?

  He almost didn't open the tin box. What if he ruined the magic by peeking? Still, after a brief but fierce inner struggle, his curiosity won out. He brushed off the box, leaving it in its shallow grave, and then carefully pried off the lid. His eyes widened slowly.

  The morning light poured into the tin box, lighting its contents brightly. There were two things inside, both made of metal. One was a pistol. It looked snubby and wicked, black with oil and tarnish.

  The other was the head of an old cane, sculpted of iron, shaped like a leering gargoyle's face. It seemed to stare up at him, coaxing him to pick it up, to hold its heaviness and run his fingers over its complex features.

  Phillip did not pick it up. He sensed there was something wrong with it, something that might make it even more dangerous than the pistol. The cane's head was magic, and the magic was alive.

  The boy buried the tin box again, and ran back to the house. He had resisted the call of the evil iron cane. But he remembered it.

  And it remembered him.

  New Amsterdam was not entirely empty, despite appearances, and neither was the city of Muggle Manhattan that lay below it. Certainly, the great majority of the twin cities' inhabitants had fled in the wake of the Unveiling (or, as the Muggle press had begun to call it, The Event), but there are always a certain number of people either too embedded, too opportunistic, or simply too forgettable to come under the jurisdiction of such things as curfews, quarantine zones, and evacuation orders.

  All pathways onto the island were blockaded and guarded by military police. In the heart of the city, the deserted streets lay choked with cars, taxis and buses, all stalled in place like a great river of metal. The Lincoln tunnel was almost entirely blocked by a massive accident that had occurred during The Event. Dozens of vehicles had crumpled behind an overturned bus, forming a wall of twisted metal and gasolinescented debris. In Times Square, yellow cabs and delivery trucks sat silent, collecting dust beneath acres of dark neon. Over this, the magical signage of New Amsterdam stood equally dormant, most still hovering in place, but unlit and eerily still. The giant clockwork woman still held up her car-sized tin of Wymnot's Wand Polish, but her gears no longer cranked and her teeth no longer flashed. A nest of robins chirped and fluttered on her shoulder.

  The great economic engine of Wall Street lay dormant and locked, its doors barricaded with concrete traffic dividers and razor wire. Above this, the Global Magical Monetary Exchange building stood wrapped in black iron chains, secured with a homunculus padlock the size of a grand piano.

  The transparent skyscraper known as the Crystal City, former headquarters of the wizarding administration of the United States, stood empty, protected with its own magical failsafes and perimeter hexes.

  On Chambers' Street, the hole where the Chrysler Building had once stood was partially filled with rain puddles. The police tape which had surrounded it had mostly blown away. Ribbons of it lay plastered to the street like dead yellow snakes.

  The posters on Broadway had begun to fade and peel. Most of the letters had blown off the marquee of the Imperial Theatre, leaving only meaningless riddles. The magical theatre district of New Amsterdam, situated one block away and twelve blocks above, was cluttered with trash and programs, abandoned by fleeing audiences on the Night of the Unveiling. The grand façade of the Moxy Mage still glowed with its magical light, its signs flashing over empty bridges and archways: IN ITS TWELFTH WEEK: BLAISE LUCE'S production of THE TRIUMVIRATE! "A TRIPLE TRIUMPH" raves The Prognosticator. BOX SEATS STILL AVAILABLE!

  All over the twin cities, weeds had sprouted in the cracks of the sidewalks. Vines twined slowly over doorways. Dead leaves collected in corners. Pigeons roosted on awnings and footbridges.

  The cities' few remaining denizens moved stealthily through this, hiding in the shadows, flitting like ghosts.

  "Maybe he won't even know," a figure rasped, hunkering in the twilight shadow of a city bus. "He can't know everything, can he?"

  The speaker was a man, overweight and bearded, dressed in layers of colourless clothing and a threadbare New York Yankees baseball cap. He wheezed for a moment, his face sheened with sweat. Another figure moved next to him: a young woman with frizzy white-blonde hair cut so short that she looked, in her current state, rather like a dandelion. She was skinny and quick, moving with the practiced stealth of a longtime street person. She pressed her lips together, her eyes darting around at the deserted buildings.

  "He can't know everything, can he?" the fat man wheezed, repeating his question.

  "I dunno, Park," the woman answered under her breath. "He knows a lot."

  "But not everything," Park insisted ardently, hopefully. "You'll cover for me, won't you, Lissa? You gotta. We been friends ever since the Event. I looked out for you. You just gotta cover for me."

  Lissa nodded distractedly. "Sun's going down over the buildings. Come on, it's almost dark."

  Quietly, the two crept out of the gloom of the bus and stole along the street, past empty storefronts and dark newsstands. The Heraldium Hotel stood at the end of the block, facing them, staring severely down the length of the avenue like a patriarch at the head of a monstrous, dishevelled dinner table. The hotel looked as dark as the rest of the city, but Lissa knew that was because of the hex. Until six weeks ago, she hadn't believed in such things as hexes. At twenty-four, she had been officially homeless for three years, and life on the streets of Manhattan did not lead one to believe much in magic. Unless you were crazy. Lissa had met more than a few crazies under the overpasses and bridges, in the unofficial homeless communities of the New York underground. The crazies lived in their own little worlds of conspiracies and delusions, and magic was often a part of that. When the Event happened, the crazies turned out to be the best equipped to handle it. Where the rest of the city had stood frozen in fear, shocked senseless by the sight of the magical city that had suddenly appeared above them, the crazies had merely looked up, nodded to themselves, and accepted this new reality as one accepts the dawning of a new day.

  Lissa was not crazy, but she was eminently practical. She had followed the crazies (who no longer seemed quite so crazy, of course) and did what they did. After the Big Sleep, when the rest of the city had awoken in panic and fled, Lissa and Park had emerged into the suddenly empty city like survivors of a bomb blast. Eventually, they had encountered others. Stragglers and dregs trickled up from their hiding places, examining the empty buildings, collecting into small groups and bands. For a week, Lissa and Park had joined six others, roaming the streets and testing the locks on the storefronts. Most were shut tight, but a few had been left unlocked, probably abandoned by employees too shocked by the Event to think about the security of their jobs. Lissa and her new friends raided these establishments as needed, taking food and clothing, generally living better than they had in years.

  It never occurred to Lissa that they were stealing. As far as she knew, the end of the world had come. Ownership had become obsolete.

  Occasionally, the streets would rumble with the sounds of military vehicles. Great armoured trucks with tank treads on their wheels and huge steel plows on their fronts would lumber along the mostly clear sidewalks, knocking aside anything in their paths. When the trucks came, Lissa and her crew would hide, quickly and silently. They were good at hiding, and soon enough the vehicles would rumble on, leaving scratched tracks on the side
walks and smashed awnings and parking meters in their wakes. Coins glittered on the pavement, spilled from the broken meters, but no one bothered to pick them up. Money had become obsolete as well.

  At the beginning of the second week, Lissa and her crew had discovered the Heraldium Hotel.

  They'd seen it hundreds of times before, of course, but never really noticed it. It was just one more grand hotel, frequented by the sort of rich people who arrived in long limousines and were ushered into the front doors by men in natty red coats and hats. For Lissa, the place was simply not a part of her world. But suddenly, on the dawn of the second Monday after the Big Sleep, as Lissa and her troop turned the corner onto Lexington, the Heraldium commanded their attention like a monstrous beacon, fifty stories tall and glowing in the sunrise. Its windows glittered like molten copper. Its grand front awning spread over pristine marble steps. For the first time, there were no doormen in red coats to shoo them away. Now there were just the massive glass and brass revolving doors, completely unguarded and eerily welcoming. The doors were turning slowly, making the morning sunlight flash from their immaculate surfaces.

  Lissa and her troop had gone inside without a word. She barely remembered it. At one moment, she had been standing on the corner of Lexington and Thirtieth, staring up at the imposingly regal hotel, mesmerized by its flashing, turning doors. In the next moment, she was inside its plush lobby, surrounded by potted ferns and low, upholstered chairs. A shiny black piano stood near the elevators, playing all by itself.

  A voice had greeted them.

  That was how they had met the Collector. He had welcomed them, and introduced them to his new reality. He had promised to explain everything. He had told them of his grand plan, and their very important part in it, if they chose to accept it. And of course they had. After all, no one else had ever needed the likes of Lissa and her crew before, or invited them into their counsel. No one else had ever told them they were important.