City of Dark Magic

by Magnus Flyte

He said something that sounded like “Moy strahovoy polic.” Then he set the briefcase down and picked up something wrapped in cloth on the desk. An Aztec amulet vial. Humming, he left the room with it. He was humming the Diabelli Variations.

  Distraught Max read the news of Masaryk’s death, left the paper open on the desk. The researcher hanged herself from the beam. Max shot the Nazi. The researcher pounded on the wall. Max shot the Nazi again and again. Flashbulbs popped. The young man screamed. The Russian set the briefcase down and picked up the Aztec amulet. It was like being forced to watch six films at once, all on fast-forward. She was trapped under layers of the past.

  “Sarah?” said a familiar voice.

  Sarah turned. In the midst of the chaos stood a familiar figure.

  It was her mother.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Mom? What are you doing here?” Sarah asked. Her mom looked so real, in her pale blue velour tracksuit and white Keds.

  “I came to tell you that you’re a slut,” said her mother matter-of-factly. “Now come get a hug.”

  What the—? Sarah recoiled as her mom, suddenly holding a kitchen knife, lunged at her. Through her. And then spread wings, thick leathery wings, and flew. Sarah screamed as the birdlike beast with her mother’s face pecked at her head. She fell to the floor.

  It’s not happening, Sarah told herself. But what kind of a vision was this? This wasn’t the past.

  She looked up and there was Sherbatsky, leaning over her.

  “You showed such promise,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m so disappointed in you. You really let me down.”

  Snakes, thousands of snakes dropped from the walls and began slithering through the room. Sarah screamed and writhed, willing herself not to be afraid, but failing.

  Sherbatsky morphed into Beethoven, who spit in her face.

  “Ausfall,” he snarled in German. Failure.

  The walls started melting, and then spinning, and she had the sense she was lying on the ceiling and not the floor, and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t falling.

  People were walking right through her, burning her, yelling at her. As terrifying as the other drug trip had been, it was nothing like this. This was a perversion, a nightmare. Her worst fears come to life.

  “Sarah? Are you there? Sarah?” She opened her eyes, and Max—her Max, was coming up through the trapdoor.

  “Thank God,” she said. “Help me!”

  She tried to crawl toward him, but her legs were paralyzed, and he was pulling someone else up into the room behind him—Elisa. Max smiled at Sarah and then pushed Elisa amorously up against a wall. Elisa turned her head to laugh at Sarah.

  “Well, the little bitch knows about us now,” Elisa said.

  Max kissed Elisa deeply. “It’s all been a joke,” he said to Sarah. “Of course it’s Elisa I love. She’s family. Royalty. And you’re scum.”

  It wasn’t happening. Was it?

  Grandpa Max stepped forward and shot the Nazi. The researcher screamed at the sound of her boyfriend being tortured. The skeleton stood up and danced suggestively, shaking her bones in a grotesque approximation of a striptease. The skeleton shouted at Sarah as it twitched and writhed.

  Ausfall.

  Slut.

  The man with the briefcase appeared again and screamed, “Moy strahovoy polic!” as a cascade of scarlet water poured out of his mouth. Sherbatsky began babbling in Russian, then screamed and collapsed to the floor, his body a tangle of broken bones and electrical wires. Rats exploded out of his stomach, their jaws slick with blood and entrails.

  Max was fucking Elisa from behind, except his penis was the head of a dragon. The dragon blinked and looked at her, then hissed.

  Sarah closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears, and tried to think. She curled her body protectively inside the cloak and the resinous amber smell of it overwhelmed her.

  The cloak.

  The hallucinations had begun when she had put on the cloak.

  Sarah flung it off her body.

  • • •

  It was like turning off a movie projector. Quiet. Greedily, she sucked air into her lungs. She was alone in the library again. Alone and in the dark.

  Sarah lay still for several moments, trying to pull herself together and make sense of the visions. They returned briefly, in quick bursts: the thud of a fallen body, the humming of a musical phrase, a dragon’s head penis. Ausfall. What was real, the actual past, and what was just the demons lurking in the corners of her brain?

  Her emotions felt real enough. She was as furious, humiliated, disgusted, as if it had all really happened. Maybe she was a failure. Maybe she shouldn’t trust Max. The way he had laughed at her . . . No. She had to pull herself together. None of it was real. It felt real because it was based—in horrible exaggeration—on her actual fears, her most hidden terrors. But she was still alive, in the here and now, and she had to forget those visions. Shakily, she pulled herself upright and lit another match. She found the candelabra amid a pile of glass and lit the candles, returned to the desk. It was as she had left it, the newspaper, the leather volumes, Beethoven letters. She picked these up and stuffed them in her jeans. So much for archival integrity. Whatever happened to her next, the letters were coming with her.

  How was she going to get out of here?

  A scuffling sound almost beneath her feet sent another surge of adrenaline shooting through her. Remnants of the drug? No. Someone calling her name. Obeying some primitive instinct of concealment, she blew out the candles, grabbed her T-shirt and pulled it on.

  “Sarah?” The trapdoor lifted. Here and now. This was happening here and now.

  “Sarah,” the familiar voice called into the blackness. “Are you there? Sarah? It’s Bernard.”

  “Bernard? Is it really you?” Sarah said.

  “Are you okay? I was doing my laundry and I saw you go into the boiler room and you never came out, so I got worried and followed you.”

  He climbed up into the room and Sarah hugged him, hard. He was real, corporeal. He smelled like mildew and Chanel No. 5. And . . . fear.

  “Wow, what is this place?” he said, pointing his flashlight around the room.

  “A storeroom of sorts,” Sarah said. “Thank God you showed up. The door latched behind me and I thought I’d never get out.”

  Sarah went to head down through the trapdoor. Bernard grabbed her roughly by the arm.

  “Hey,” she said. “That hurts.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t let you leave.” Now she could really smell the fear. It was pouring off him.

  “What? What are you—?”

  And then she saw it. Bernard had a small gun in his hand. He took a step back and pointed it at her.

  “Bernard? What the hell are you doing?”

  “I—I can’t talk about it. But you can’t leave.”

  Bernard’s hand holding the gun was shaking violently. Sarah remembered reading that nervous criminals were the most dangerous.

  But this was Bernard. An expert in Rococo. A slightly odd but far from homicidal man. He had cried harder than anyone over Eleanor’s death. He was sewing them all costumes for the masquerade ball.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” she said softly. Keep him calm.

  “No!” yelped Bernard. He raised the gun a little higher.

  “You’re not a killer,” she said. “I know you.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, trying to steady the gun with his other hand. “I messed up. She got to me, and I messed up. But I never killed anyone. And now they’re going to blame it on me.”

  “Tell me what happened and we can figure a way out of this.”

  “No, we can’t,” said Bernard, who was starting to cry. “I locked you in. I called her and told her you were down here. Now she wants me to kill you. Or she’s calling the police on me for . . .” He couldn’t say the words.

  Sarah scanned the room out of the corner of her eye. “Whatever it is, we can figur
e i can figt out,” said Sarah in as normal a tone of voice as possible. “I know some very good lawyers.”

  “No, I have to kill you,” squeaked Bernard.

  “Killing me is only going to make things worse, not better.” Sarah was inching toward the letter opener. If she could distract him . . .

  “I wanted to just tie you up and leave you here until she arrived.” He was crying openly now.

  “Much better idea,” said Sarah. “Or even . . . we could go out together and I could protect you from her. It’s Marchesa Elisa, isn’t it?”

  Bernard nodded, miserably.

  “Tell me what happened,” Sarah said, trying to infuse her shaking voice with all the kindness and sympathy she could muster. “We can figure out what to do together.”

  “She came to my workroom,” Bernard said. “She was interested in my projects. She was so nice, asking questions. She collects snuffboxes, too. She said if it was up to her, a lot of the objects would be made available to serious collectors, people who would really understand and appreciate them.”

  “Like you,” said Sarah. “I get it. Go on.”

  “We went to lunch,” Bernard continued. “She talked about Max, about how he didn’t care about the things the way we do. She made me a present, an exquisite eighteenth-century snuffbox shaped like a turtle with diamond eyes.”

  Sarah nodded, trying to look understanding when really she wanted to scream. You’re going to kill me over a fucking snuffbox? But she didn’t want to interrupt Bernard, who was clearly desperate to talk.

  “She wanted to be kept current with what was being discovered at the palace,” Bernard said. “Just so she could keep an eye on Max, make sure he wasn’t messing things up. So when I heard about things, I told her. I mean, they aren’t secrets. Everything goes through Miles, too.”

  “Like the letters Eleanor found in the chimney,” Sarah said, dully.

  “Yes. And then. It was supposed to be a joke,” Bernard pleaded. “I was supposed to hang it up in the cage. It was only because I was big and strong, she said. It was too heavy for her. Elisa said it was a prank to promote a nightclub for a friend of hers.”

  “Hang it up—?” Sarah stuttered. “You mean . . . Eleanor?”

  “I didn’t know it was her!” Bernard started crying again. “The bag was left for me at the front gate. She told me it was a mannequin dressed like a go-go dancer. You know, like the girls they have dancing in cages at all those after-hours clubs in cellars? I was supposed to hang it up in the cage over the well. Like an advertisement. The marchesa told me not to unzip the bag until I had hung it up or the costume might fall off. So . . . So I did. And when I unzipped the bag . . . Oh God. Oh God, oh God.”

  Oh God, Sarah agreed.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Bernard sobbed. “Eleanor was my friend. I would never have . . . I can’t stop seeing her face. And the . . . blood. I ra. blood.n. I ran out of the courtyard and I called the marchesa. I didn’t know what had happened. I couldn’t believe she would have done such a thing . . . I thought there must have been some kind of mistake. I told her that we should call the police, but she just laughed. She laughed at me. And she said that she had set up a camera in the courtyard and she had video of me hanging up Eleanor’s body and running away.”

  “She’s bluffing,” Sarah said, her mind reeling. But Bernard shook his head.

  “She sent me a picture. She texted it to my phone. Oh God, I am so fucked.”

  “She’s not going to get away with this,” Sarah said. “Bernard, listen to me—”

  “No!”

  “Bernard—”

  “Shut up!” he sc

  reamed. “Shut up and turn around!”

  “Please,” said Sarah.

  “Turn around!”

  If she turned, she was dead. She tried to keep her eyes on his.

  He grabbed her arm and spun her around. God, he was strong.

  She kicked hard at him, grabbing for the gun, and he shrieked and threw her against the wall. She crashed to her knees. Bernard towered over her. Sarah covered her head with her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Bernard.

  Sarah closed her eyes. She heard the click of the safety. Some sniffling.

  Then, as she stiffened her body, a dull thunk, and then a heavy crashing noise. No. That wasn’t the gun. She was still alive. She opened her eyes.

  Bernard was in a heap on the ground. And standing over him was Nico. Standing on a chair. Holding something in his hands. He smiled and offered it to her.

  “My dear girl,” he said. “I think you dropped your sledgehammer.”

  FORTY

  Sarah stood over Bernard’s body. She nudged his stomach with her foot. Nothing. Was he breathing?

  “Is he dead?” she asked Nico. She knelt down. Bernard was breathing but out cold. He had a goose egg forming on the back of his head, although his skull seemed intact.

  Nico was not paying attention to her or Bernard. He was scanning the flashlight over the contents of the room.

  “Nico!” Sarah said sharply. “How did you know?”

  The little man turned and glanced at the pile of Bernard.

  “Oh, Bernard’s been following you for days,” said Nico, almost absentmindedly. “And I’ve been following him.”

  Nico’s eyes were jumping rapidly, greedily, from one artifact in the library to another.

  “Nico!” Sarah hissed again, stamping her foot. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  But the little man was prowling about the room, running his hands over the objects. He picked up the Infant of Prague, laughed sardonically, sat it down, and patted the ruby-eyed skull like he was greeting a familiar dog. He picked up the leather briefcase.

  “What is in here?”

  “Um, I think it’s documents that prove the KGB killed Kennedy,” Sarah said.

  “Mmph,” said Nicolas, shrugging his tiny shoulders and dropping the case. “Bor-ing.”

  “I found a book by John Dee and Edward Kelley,” said Sarah. It seemed like she should tie Bernard up somehow, in case he woke up. Or at least take his gun. Sarah picked it up, gingerly.

  “I’ve probably read it,” Nico said. “Dee was a very gifted mathematician and scientist. And a true alchemist. But Edward Kelley was a fraud. Even Tycho made fun of him. And they were friends.”

  “Well, I think Tycho Brahe’s diary is on the desk,” Sarah snapped. “If that’s more your speed.” Sarah crouched next to Bernard and stared into his unconscious face. “Nico, help me with—” Sarah turned to look at Nico, who was frantically flipping through the books on the desk. With a wary glance at Bernard, she joined him.

  “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Sarah felt a surge of excitement.

  “Can you read it?” she asked. “Nico, do you understand it?”

  Nicolas was riffling through the pages, almost ripping the corners in his haste. His finger moved up and down the columns.

  “No. No. No,” he muttered. “It’s not here. Where is it? He wrote it down. I know he wrote it down.”

  He continued searching frantically through the book. Sarah tried to ask him a question, but he shouted at her to be still, be quiet. She had never heard him speak so violently. At last he let the book fall to the desk and staggered backward, crashing into the desk chair. It was the first time Sarah had seen Nicolas move clumsily. She held out a hand, but he ignored it, slumping down and holding his head in his hands, groaning.

  “What is it?” Sarah asked, truly frightened now. She crouched down on her heels and looked at Nico, who was rocking back and forth, his arms wrapped tightly around himself.

  “Oh, it’s been so long. So long.” He fell out of the chair and crawled underneath the desk.

  “Leave me here,” he cried. “This is where I belong.”

  “Nicolas,” Sarah said, trying to keep her voice calm, but very firm, the way you needed to with horses and student musicians. “What are you talking about? Of course I�
�m not going to leave you.”

  “That is what Sophia said,” Nicolas groaned.

  “Sophia?”

  “The master’s sister.”

  “Max has a sister?”

  “Tycho Brahe’s sister,” said Nico, fiercely. “He is my master. Or was.”

  Sarah took her eyes off Nico long enough to look quickly over her shoulder. Bernard still wasn’t moving, but did they really have enough time for a sixteenth-century history lesson? They should be figuring out how to secure the library. And what to do with Bernard. “As soon as Max gets here, we’ll . . . figure out what to do with all of this,” she said, hoping to get Nico back on track. “I mean, Max will figure it out. Don’t worry.”

  “Sophia died,” Nico said, his voice hollow. “And the master died. With so much work unfinished. To think he understood the heavens as he did without ever having looked through a telescope. To have learned so many secrets. But not all of them. Oh, when will it end?”

  “When will what end?”

  “He made me drink it,” Nico whispered. “Held me down. It was a joke to him. He didn’t know it would work. I should have known.”

  Sarah reached under the desk and grabbed the little man’s arm. The contact seemed to bring him back to himself. His ravaged face cleared. He stopped rocking back and forth. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he looked at Sarah again, the ghost of a smile played around a corner of his mouth.

  “Dear me,” he said. “Look at me. Under the table.”

  Sarah nodded. “You want to come out?”

  She pretended to inspect Bernard’s condition, in order to give Nico a moment to compose himself. When she turned back around, he was straightening the books on the desk into an orderly pile.

  “Nico?”

  The little man tapped the cover of Tycho’s journal.

  “You want to know if it’s here? The formula for the drug? Your drug?”

  “Is the formula there?” Sarah tried to keep the desperate hope out of her voice.

  “I believe it is,” Nicolas said. “It’s here. Tycho was very clever. He knew how to keep secrets.” He paused. “Did you know that he kept a dwarf named Jepp?” Nico seemed very tired, but more or less sane. “Did you know that?”