Camp Arcanum

by Josef Matulich

  “I can tell you have been pining for our tantric rituals under the stars,” he said in an oily tone. “Every girl needs a little of that old black magick.” His thumbs caressed the undersides of her breasts through her corset, as if she might mistake his meaning.

  Brenwyn peeled his fingers off her body and pushed him back a few feet. To be so close to a man that her mind could not read or touch, that was disturbing enough. To have his hands on her—the knowing tools of an empty vessel—brought to surface too many past mistakes.

  “Keep your hands off of me,” Brenwyn snapped. “It is bad enough people in the street see me speaking to you. I know I should not bother telling you this, since your ego clings to its little delusions to survive, but even the magick was not that good.”

  “I made the earth move for you,” he murmured and drew closer.

  “The earth always moves,” she said. “You do not have the power to change that.”

  “But soon I will,” he said. “You know that everything is falling into place. Soon I will have everything, be everything, you won’t be able to resist me. And then you will have to come crawling back to me on your belly.” His hands were on the naked skin of her shoulders now.

  “I do not need to oppose you,” she said, refusing to indulge in images of being on her belly or knees before anyone. “I just need to keep me and mine out of your way when it all collapses.”

  “And Mr. Sindri?” Jeremiah leaned close, as if whispering to co-conspirator. He still felt to her like a dead thing, but his eyes were alive. “Do you think he will be as easy to kill as the others?” he asked. A tone of sick pleasure colored his words.

  “I would not try that,” Brenwyn warned. “I do not think he would like it. He might even take offense. And just think what kind of damage a ‘skin bag’ of that size could do to you.”

  Jeremiah shrugged and pouted, as if he had just been told a little thing, like there was no lemon for tea today. “Don’t worry, you’ll have your turn with him,” he responded. “I have foreseen you two together. He’s even prettier naked.”

  “Clair-voyeurism?” Brenwyn made no effort to hide her revulsion in her voice. “I have had enough.”

  “You haven’t had nearly enough.”

  Jeremiah suddenly pulled her close and kissed her. His lips were still moist and delicate, but that now brought to mind the underside of a snail. He let her go and scampered away before Brenwyn could slap him.

  “See you around the bonfires, Maggie.” Jeremiah danced away down the sidewalk, waving. “Blessed be!”

  Brenwyn turned back for her shop, her celebratory dance now a hurried retreat. For the thousandth time, she damned herself for letting him under her skin so easily.

  * * * * *

  Eleazar was out marking trees again and muttering under his breath as he sprayed an “M” on a tree.

  “Mark that tree, tote that cooler. Unfurl the mizzenmast.”

  Eleazar sprayed an “A” on the next.

  “Stop tormenting Michael or we’ll make you sleep with your wife.”

  Eleazar marked a tree with an “R”. He was writing “martinet” in honor of Michael. Or Marc, for that matter.

  “No one appreciates the years of hard work it takes to become an accomplished ren faire performer and libertine.”

  Eleazar marked two more trees and backed away.

  Something brushed wet and cold against the side of his head. Eleazar reached up reflexively and pulled it down. He found the thing to be a bloody pelt turned inside out. Eleazar turned quickly to see more.

  A skinned rodent of unknown heritage hung mere inches from Eleazar’s face. Its jaws were wide in a silent snarl, its paws still covered in fur like socks and mittens.

  Eleazar shrieked and leapt back. He pulled his rubber chicken from his belt, ready to swing in his defense.

  As he calmed down and looked over the grove, he saw dozens of little corpses and pelts hanging from the trees around him. He lowered his chicken when the dead squirrels and rabbits failed to spring to the attack.

  A stone-lined fire pit in front of him had the stubs of multiple black candles around it. Pentacles, ankhs, and tattered tarot cards were strewn everywhere. Some miscreant had marked circles and other shapes on the dead earth with powdered chalk.

  Eleazar backed away slowly.

  “More witchcraft of the darkest kind,” he muttered to himself. “Oh, this is certainly not good,” said Eleazar as he turned back to camp. “I’d better get the Master.”

  * * * * *

  Marc stepped into the Arcana bookstore, a little more anxious than usual. His mind had been going over Brenwyn’s invitation all last night, but he wasn’t sure if this was the right place for answers.

  “Good morning, Mr. Sindri,” Musetta said before she slid through the beaded curtain that screened the back room.

  Marc made a quick visual inspection of the store.

  “What?” she asked evenly.

  “I’m looking for the surveillance cameras.”

  “I don’t have any," Musetta said. "I assume you came here for something more than a security check?”

  “Musetta, I need advice,” he said. “I’ll be glad to buy a few books to make it worth your time.”

  “The advice is free.” Musetta assured him. “What’s the question? Brenwyn?”

  “Mostly. That and how to harness your grapevine for the continuing war on terror.” He absently browsed through a bin of wand wood marked as harvested from lightning struck trees.

  “Let’s concentrate on the immediate. What’s troubling you about her?” She was being “oh-so-pleasant” again and that worried Marc. He always felt that pleasant people were either delusional, clueless, or up to something.

  “She’s invited me to the movie marathon and I’d like to know what to expect.” Marc tried to make it sound like he hadn’t been thinking about this for a solid day.

  “I don’t tell the future.” Brenwyn must have learned that sphinx-like smile from her.

  “Right,” Marc scoffed. “Maybe you can tell me what usually goes on?”

  “Just a few hundred women watching a few bad movies.”

  “Just women?” That seemed very suspicious to Marc, smacking of female mysteries and gender conspiracies. Coincidently, he was looking over a display of clay and stone figures modeled on the Venus of Willendorf. Patterns seemed to fall into place in Arcanum that would make paranoids feel right at home.

  “Except for the Brotherhood of the Phoenix. Gay male witches,” Musetta explained. “Normal men find it hard to breathe in an atmosphere so charged with estrogen.”

  “I see.” Marc wandered among the displays as he continued his questioning. “Has anything strange ever happened there?”

  “All the time. Are you familiar with Orpheus and the Maenads?”

  “No,” Marc said. He was sure it was more New Age hocus-pocus. He’d have to ask Michael when he got back to Camp Arcanum.

  “Excellent,” said Musetta. She turned to organizing a display of joss sticks and incense. “Sometimes the lights flicker if the women get excited. The projector will go out from time to time. Once their print of The Witches spontaneously burst into flame.”

  She half-smiled at that, apparently a fond remembrance.

  “But I don’t remember anyone being turned into a toad or anything . . . except that one time.” She looked off into the distance for a moment. “No, wait, that was Jeremiah.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I am underplaying,” Musetta’s tone was almost serious now. “Brenwyn must want you there very much. She hasn’t invited a man there in the longest time. It wouldn’t be fair to frighten you off with ghost stories.”

  “I feel like I’m being set up for something.”

  Musetta laughed softly.

  Marc casually picked up a pewter skull ring from a display of stones and crystals.

  “Don’t touch that!” Musetta snapped.

  Marc set the ring back down like
a hot coal.

  “I’m sorry. Is this valuable?” he asked.

  “It’s not mine,” Musetta said. “One of Jeremiah’s little acolytes must have left it here.”

  Musetta extracted something like a pair of salad tongs from under the counter and used them to pick up the ring.

  “So, shoplifters in Arcanum leave merchandise?” Marc asked. He expected this to be the start of another elaborate story.

  “It’s not merchandise,” Musetta stated. “It’s a time bomb.”

  “It doesn’t smell like Semtex to me,” he said, playing along with the nonsensical proposition. “Too small to be dynamite.”

  Musetta passed her hand closely over the ring and shuddered.

  “Yecch. This nasty little thing is just crawling with negative vibrations.” She fixed him with a careful look over the top of her glasses.

  “And what would that do, then?” Marc asked. “Stain my aura?”

  “Being a Man of Science and Technology,” Musetta said, “you should know that matter and energy are inseparable. Negative energy causes negative effects.”

  “Like a slow painful death?”

  “Only in the most dire scenarios,” she replied. “You could most likely expect nightmares, illness, maybe some accidents.”

  “You could get that just from the power of suggestion,” said Marc. “You’ve heard of psychosomatic disease.”

  “A very rational explanation.”

  “Besides,” Marc added, “how much ‘energy’ could you store in a little thing like that?”

  “Size doesn’t matter,” Musetta said, and then she smiled. “For a well-crafted spell, that is. It uses its power to draw more negative vibrations to it, which gives it more power, which lets it draw in more vibrations, and so on and so on.”

  “A positive feedback loop,” Marc said. “Pretty damn sophisticated for a piece of dime-store jewelry.”

  “Exactly,” said Musetta with a nod.

  The entire time they had been discussing the ring, Musetta had been waving it around, held in the jaws of those plastic tongs. Marc’s eye couldn’t help following the flash of light off of the red rhinestones of the skull’s eyes.

  “Just imagine,” she said, “how much power this object could gather around you.”

  He had more than enough “negative energy” in his history, he had to admit, but he didn’t want to stand here discussing that with some batty old woman. Overtaken with an impulse he didn’t understand, he snatched the ring from Musetta.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered, “stop it already.”

  “I’d put that down, if I were you.” Musetta didn’t sound upset, almost a forced calm, like someone talking a jumper down from a window ledge.

  Working for years with people like Michael and Eleazar, Marc was willing to engage in a little “Let’s Pretend” time, but he had his limits.

  “Look,” he said, “this is just a cheap piece of pewter, not the One Ring to Rule Them All.”

  “It is more than that, Mr. Sindri.”

  “I know,” said Marc. “Nothing in Arcanum is what it seems.”

  “No,” said Musetta, “it isn’t. And if you’re going to stay here much longer, you need to learn that lesson on a much more visceral level.”

  Marc noticed he was standing with his arms closed across his chest and the ring clenched in his fist. He relaxed and let his arms drop to his sides. Still, he held the ring tight in his right hand.

  “What do you suggest?” he said.

  “You have the ring there in your hand,” Musetta said. “Tell me what you feel.”

  Marc felt a nervous twitch in the pit of his stomach, but he wasn’t sharing that with Musetta. Any sensations he had at the moment he was ascribing to nerves and suggestion.

  “It’s cold,” he said. “There’s a rough spot under the chin. However . . .”

  Marc brazenly put the ring on the smallest finger of his left hand.

  “It does fit my pinky perfectly.”

  “Well, I hope you two will be very happy together,” Musetta said. She put away her tongs and did her best to ignore him.

  “Until it turns me into a toad?”

  Musetta frowned and clicked her tongue.

  “Brenwyn would be so disappointed.”

  The mention of her name brought Marc back to his first train of thought.

  “That reminds me . . .” Marc started.

  “You have to do something for me first,” she said, pointing at the ring. “Get that thing out of my shop. When you’re done with it, just bury it. I don’t want it coming back here.”

  Like the damn thing would sprout legs and sneak into the store through a basement window, thought Marc.

  “No problem,” he said amiably. “Now, about Brenwyn . . .”

  “It’s obvious,” Musetta said, “that you still have a lot to learn.”

  “I suppose so,” said Marc.

  “There’s nothing more for us to discuss.”

  “All right,” said Marc. “I’ll see you later.”

  Marc left, ostentatiously admiring the way the way the ring’s red rhinestones sparkled in the sunlight. In a glance over his shoulder, he saw Musetta standing at her door. She had an expression of sullen disappointment that reminded him of his mother.

  Chapter 5

  Planting Jewelry by the New Moon

  THE ROOM IN MARC’S DREAM was the same faded green Marc remembered from a half-dozen Sindri funerals. The plastic plants and green velvet drapes that had been jungle hideaways for him at five now just looked tired and depleted. Forced to be the grown-up here, his face was clean-shaven, his black clothing a seldom-worn suit. This funeral was on his shoulders. His father, always spare with words, was now totally silent in mourning as he shrank into a corner behind the relatives.

  One of the flock came up to Marc. He had no face, just another black suit and a grim aura.

  “We feel for your loss,” the faceless relative recited. More gathered around him like carrion crows.

  “She was a good woman,” one of the black shades said. “Everybody loved her.”

  “If there’s anything you need,” another intoned earnestly.

  Marc heard the same words a dozen times that day, simply coming from different heads. He pressed through the crowd, slowed by their sympathies.

  “We feel for your loss,” another phantom called out to him.

  He was dragging through them, as if the air between them was as thick as mud.

  “If there’s anything you need,” whined one woman in black as she clutched at him. Claws like a vulture’s sank into the sleeve of his jacket.

  The well-wishers already surrounded his father; the white-haired old man visibly grew smaller as he was slowly crushed by the weight of the combined grief of the room.

  “If there’s anything you need.”

  Marc’s head felt light. Somehow, he had to reach the other side of the room.

  “If there’s anything you need.”

  “I need to see my mother,” Marc said urgently.

  He found himself beside the coffin then. It was a brushed aluminum bullet of a thing: clean, bright, and featureless. The inside was quilted white satin. His mother with her white hair and dress became part of the lining’s embroidery.

  Marc looked up from the coffin. There were flowers all around it. He pulled a red rose from one arrangement and held it to his nose. It had no scent, in his dreams they never do, but he could still remember the scent of roses. Roses had always been a favorite of hers.

  He slipped the flower under her hands, which were clasped on her chest. He tried to not think about how they felt like nothing more than cold meat.

  “Mom . . . I . . . I’ll take care of Al. I’m on the clock.” He glanced over his shoulder at his father surrounded by the flock of mourners. “I’ll keep an eye on Dad, too. It looks like he needs it.”

  Marc couldn’t say anything more. His stolid mask was slipping and he felt himself in danger of breaking
into tears. He couldn’t allow that. It would draw the scavengers to him.

  There was a sound behind him. It was a groan and a squeal—a noise you could expect from a distressed puppy. Marc’s mask slid back into place instantly.

  He turned and saw his father and the relatives were gone. The room was empty except for his big brother Allen. He had his arms wrapped around himself and rocked from side to side for comfort as he kept making the disturbing noises. Allen was unshaven; his hair looked like a rat’s nest. The closest he and Dad could get him to funeral clothes was his green windbreaker, jeans, and sneakers.

  Marc walked over and tried to put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Allen twisted away and averted his eyes. As bad as his father was, Allen was worse. Marc would have to talk him down if there was any hope of getting to the graveside ceremony.

  “Hey, Big Bro. How you holding up?” Marc’s smile and warm tone of voice felt like the worst kind of lie; it made him bleed inside to see Allen like this. Deception was the only tool he could use to deal with Allen’s illness. He had been raised to hate lies, but a tool, he could accept that.

  “I’m okay,” Allen whined.

  “You sure?”

  “Fine. Really good.” Allen hunched farther away from him, curling in on himself while still on his feet.

  “Did you take your pills today?” Marc asked.

  “They’re poison,” Allen groaned. “The doctors are working for the Qliphotics. They want to poison me because I know.”

  “Come on,” said Marc, “you know that’s not true, don’t you?”

  Allen grunted uncomfortably

  “I checked these pills out, Al,” said Marc. “You know I take good care of you now, don’t you?”

  “I guess so.” Marc knew that tone of voice. Allen was giving up, shutting down as the stimuli became too much for him. Marc moved the conversation in another direction for his brother’s sake.

  “You want to say goodbye to Mom?” Marc asked.

  “That’s not her.” Allen twisted his eyes away from the coffin. “It’s a decoy. They took her away to put her back together with their machines inside her.”

  He wished he could shake Allen, tell him the conspiracy was all in his head. That would cast Marc as a new villain in Allen’s involved delusions: another loved one replaced by a Qliphotic assassin.