by Jean Rabe
“I do remember,” she said.
According to the tags, she was only asking eight hundred for each, and realized they should go in a display case downstairs, as these were likely to never be noticed as ill-appropriated. Yeah, they could reduce them to six hundred, and take five if someone offered. The first was slightly more remarkable, a ram carving, weighing about two pounds, with curled horns and the body simple, front and back legs together, tail short, workmanship average for the time. The other was a round stone seal about three inches in diameter, rare because of its size; most seals were smaller. The stone was light with dark red bands shooting through it, alabaster with a smooth patina. It featured drill holes to illustrate a horse that would appear when pressed against wet clay. Bridget revised her estimate; she’d actually ask a grand for the seal … when she was done with it, and take an offer of nine hundred. Simple, but rather pretty for something so very old.
“Will there be anything else, Miss O’Shea? There’s a few Greek pieces I want to—”
“No. No. This is all. Good work on selling the tablet, Alvin.” Always Alvin, never Al, she knew. Not even his brother, another of her questionable employees called him Al.
He left, and she heard the rattle-hum of the elevator. Alvin never took the stairs.
“So tired.” She was talking to herself, but the demon cocked its head, listening. “I have never been this tired.” Her watch read: 10:35. Bridget’s probing of the buckle had put the icing on her fatigue. She’d not used her psychometry on anything so heavily laced with magic before.
The Sumerian pieces should be easy reads, but in her exhausted state, that might not be the case. She held the alabaster seal against her palm, closed her eyes, and listened to the harsh breath of the demon and the creaking of the stairs. Rob was leading a customer up, their voices flowing under a gap in the closed door. They were talking about the sets of early Bowman baseball cards and a near-mint Mickey Mantle rookie. A woman was looking for a special gift for her baseball card-collecting husband.
The seal had come from Umma, an ancient city on a river in what was now Iraq. Bridget’s arcane senses took in the image of a reed-thin man using the seal. She’d remembered seeing this image before, when she’d first acquired the seal many months ago. The man was a scholar, and there were baked clay tablets with writing on them around him. Sumerian written language predated Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Bridget knew that much of the early writing that had been discovered was not translatable. No one living knew what the language sounded like—except Bridget and the demon. The thin man with the seal addressed a boy, maybe his son. There was a similarity in tone to what Bridget had heard spoken by the Tamils in southern India. She listened closely, trying to find words that matched what the demon spewed.
From the previous foray into this piece, and into a handful of other Sumerian relics Bridget had through the years acquired and sold, she’d learned that Sumer was the name Babylonians had applied to the country. The earlier Sumerians had referred to it only as The Civilized Land, and they called themselves the Black Headed Ones. The few Sumerians Bridget had glimpsed in her visions before appeared fastidious and shaved their heads, probably to avoid lice. The land was fertile, agriculture and hunting fed a population that traveled by boat on the river and that had a bartering system of commerce. The land was wet, not like the desert that covered it today. The ancient people practiced irrigation, conducted complex business transactions, raised livestock, and their various dealings were recorded on clay tablets. There were slaves, and even they had limited rights. The man who’d once owned this alabaster seal had a slave—the boy, Bridget realized. Not a son, a slave, and the man ordered him to bring water and dates. The boy vanished, and the man stopped talking, his fingers moving over the clay tablets, reading to himself.
“Talk, damn you,” Bridget said. She nudged the vision forward, and she sat uncomfortably in the chair in an attempt to keep from dozing. Some time passed before the boy came back, and then left again, with no more words exchanged. Forward again, and the man rose and slept on a pallet of woven reeds, woke, and resumed reading the tablets. This was why Bridget had not returned to the piece after she’d first acquired it. The man was boring, probably a hermit, and Bridget was ready to give up on the seal and try the ram. The man paced in the confines of his baked brick home, then strung the seal on a cord around his neck, exited, and strolled down a path between buildings.
“Finally.” Bridget chewed on her lip and fought the urge to look at her watch; she didn’t want to drop the connection to the piece. “Now you’re being interesting. Now you’re moving. Now all you’ve got to do is talk to someone. Talk to—”
There were people on the path, all clean with shaved heads, some toting bowls filled with fruit, a woman carrying a child. Everyone chattered, but it was a cloud of sound she didn’t have time to pick through because the man with the seal picked up his pace. He went to a larger home, this one two levels high and also made of baked bricks. Two men came to the doorway and started a conversation with the seal bearer. Bridget directed all her concentration at it. Words started to match the demon’s prattle. Her mind started to translate.
Liberate.
Unshackle.
Forever.
Clay.
Stone.
Enlil.
Bridget tried to memorize the words, repeating them softly in the ancient tongue while the men in her vision continued to talk. She discovered that the man with the seal was a priest, and the women in the home—distant relations of the king—sought the blessing of the gods. The priest was invited inside, all five people present chattering now and providing Bridget with information about the society’s religion. It was at its heart nature worship, the wind, animals, water, all deified as humanlike entities. Enlil was at the top, and Bridget heard the priest assure the women that the wind would be kind this season and not uproot the recent planting; that Aldî-nîfaeti would be kept at bay, harnessed if possible and stopped from causing havoc.
Liberate.
Aldî-nîfaeti—demons.
Unshackle.
For an interminable time Bridget managed to stay connected to the seal, as the priest made his way through the city, boy-slave following and meeting every request. Bridget soaked in the words as she became soaked in sweat from expending so much mental energy. She set as much as she could to memory, but she feared it wouldn’t be enough.
“You want freedom,” Bridget said. The demon in her office desired to be liberated from Bridget and the buckle, to go home, to not be tied to anyone. “I get it. I want that for you. I want you the hell out of my life. But I don’t know how to achieve that. I don’t know how you were hooked to this buckle, how to undo it. And I don’t know how in the hell you ended up in New York.”
The demon babbled almost angrily.
Liberate, Bridget said in the ancient tongue. “So we’re crystal clear on that part. Liberate.”
The demon nodded and parroted the word in English, coming out liburrrrrate.
Bridget concentrated on the vision and pushed the scene forward again. At the end of that long-ago day, the priest went into another home, this of an apparently wealthy family, said a prayer, and called for the blessings of Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag, the latter considered the mother of the gods. The priest and his boy-slave watched as a woman festooned with gold and silver jewelry mumbled over four small alabaster bowls that had been etched with symbols Bridget couldn’t get a good look at. She placed the bowls upside down, one in each corner of the home’s lower level. They were similar to the clay bowls that had been in the forge room of the woman who had made the accursed buckle. But these were intact. The ones in the forge room were all broken. The intact bowls were similar to other pieces Bridget had seen elsewhere, in a museum perhaps, none had come through her shop.
“If Lord of Storm desires, Aldî-nîfaeti will be taken here tonight,” the priest in the back of Bridget’s mind said. “In this home and that of your brother. Taken forever,
if Lord of Storm’s blessings fall here, no longer will Aldî-nîfaeti ruin the crops and slay the livestock.” The conversation continued.
Prison.
Forever.
People.
Know—understand.
Aldî-nîfaeti—demons.
Unshackle.
Freedom.
Freedom.
Freedom.
Bridget repeated all of these words. When she couldn’t maintain the connection any longer, she slumped forward on the desk. When she woke, still slick with sweat, she looked at her watch: 12:41 p.m. Her stomach rumbled. The demon had wedged itself into a chair across from her, folds of pus-riddled fat hanging over the arms, and fetid goo running down the chair legs, disappearing before hitting the floor. Its tail twitched in time with the second hand ticking away on the wall clock.
Four of its eyes were closed, but the upper one—the fifth eye—was open wide and locked onto Bridget, holding her firmly in place. This time when the beast spoke, Bridget understood just enough.
“Bridget break prisons. Bridget unshackle Aldî-nîfaeti,” it said. “Bridget gain. Bridget break. Bridget unshackle. Bridget does not unshackle Aldî-nîfaeti … people of Bridget unshackled from life. Unshackled Tavio.”
Bridget’s people—Otter, Dustin, Michael. Bridget dropped the seal and ram into a pocket, with them and the buckle it felt like she was carrying a three-hundred-pound weight.
“Unshackled Tavio from life.” It had a smug look.
Bridget did not need the reminder that it had killed her ex-husband. She couldn’t get that burning thought out of her head. Neither could she successfully tamp down the guilt she felt. If she hadn’t taken that damnable briefcase out of Elijah Stone’s place, Tavio would be alive.
“Unshackle Bridget people from life.” Now it appeared to leer. “Unshackle all Bridget people.”
As the demon had apparently unshackled the loved ones of the buckle’s previous owners … owners without the ability to understand the ancient Sumerian dialect, and thereby unable to know the demon had a task in mind for them.
“Bridget gain prisons. Bridget break prisons. Know?”
“Yes, I know. I understand. If I don’t find the Sumerian demon bowls and break them, you will keep on killing. I’ll get the prisons, all right?” She tried to convey that in the Sumerian words she’d memorized. “There can’t be all that many intact demon bowls can there? “I’ll break them. I’ll break every damn one of them. I’ll let demons loose in New York City.” Whatever it took to keep Otter safe. “And I’ll find a way to free you, too.”
“Bridget gain prisons. Bridget break prisons.” The Sumerian tongue was coming easier to understand.
The prisons—demon bowls. They were relics Bridget had indeed seen in museums, and one had almost changed hands in this shop a few years ago. But the seller approaching her had asked too much, and Bridget knew there was no profit in the transaction. Babylonian relics … Sumerian relics. Pieces of etched pottery she’d thought products of primitive, superstitious societies that were valued by archaeologists and collectors because of their age. Like the alabaster bowls the woman in the vision had placed in the four corners of the Umma home. Like the bowls in the alchemist’s cave-like room.
Apparently the bowls had really worked to capture demons and to keep the occupants of a home safe. And now the demon sitting in Bridget’s office was demanding the release of its captured kin. Finally the beast had found an attendant who could communicate and who had the skills and shady connections to acquire the ancient pottery.
“Break prisons. Liburrrrrate. Unshackle Aldî-nîfaeti,” the demon said. All of its eyes narrowed. “Else unshackle Otter from life.”
“This day just keeps getting better and better and better,” Bridget said.
***
Twenty
“Do an Internet search,” Bridget told Rob. “Search on demon bowls, see what eBay has to offer. Get me a list of museums that display them. Sumerian, Babylonian. Sumerian preferably, but get both to be safe. We could’ve bought one a couple of years back, but the guy wanted too much.”
“But you want them now?”
“Auction houses that have some coming up for bid, antique stores. And call the captain, the one that does the Italy run. See if he can give you some leads for any bowls that might be attainable in Europe. See if Alvin and his brother have any contacts to check.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“The ones on eBay, at auction houses … buy them … however much it costs, I don’t care. Buy them now. Any of them. No, all of them. The others, in museums, we’ll make arrangements to get them somehow. As many as we can find, and as soon as we can get them. Christ, there can’t be many of them intact, as old as they are. Thousands of years old. Maybe one dozen, two at the most.”
“Sure, boss.” Rob looked only mildly puzzled. He still wrinkled his nose in her smelly presence. “You starting a pottery collection? If it’s bowls, we got some Depression-era—”
“Starting now. And Rob—”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Keep this as quiet as possible.”
“Sure thing, boss. Hey, Alvin just sold that cylinder desk downstairs. The old goober’s pretty good, eh?” He quirked the corner of us lip up in a weak smile. “You look down, boss. Thought the cylinder desk deal would help your mood.”
“You finding those bowls … that’s the only thing that’s going to help, Rob.” Bridget took a different route back to the brownstone, not wanting to revisit the intersection where she’d been briefly airborne because of the speeding van. She got home a little before 1, and she thought about stopping in the kitchen and throwing something together for lunch; her stomach continued to rumble. When had she eaten last? Instead, she opted for a shower first. She couldn’t stand the smell of herself, and she could do nothing to appease the demon until Rob managed to find some bowls for her to smash into little pieces. She’d written down the best approximation of the pronunciation of the Sumerian words she’d learned, not wanting to forget them. She put the sheet under her cell phone on the bureau, placed the buckle next to it, stripped, and went into the shower.
She continued to let the words tumble through her mind as the hot water pounded away at her stench.
Prison.
Forever.
Clay.
Stone.
People.
Know.
Aldî-nîfaeti.
Unshackle.
Freedom.
Life.
Freedom.
Freedom.
Freedom.
“Freedom for Aldî-nîfaeti,” Bridget said. “Unshackle the demons. I understand.” Bridget prayed the demon understood that she was working on its demands. It sat just beyond the shower, waiting for her and looking utterly bored.
She turned up the pressure and the water came angry against the back of her neck, as hot as she could stand it, steam rising all around and fogging the glass. Her fingers fluttered to her stomach, finding no trace of the knife wound. Maybe there was a scar, though.
The door clicked opened, and Dustin reached a hand in to turn the knob so the water ran cooler.
“Mind if I join you?”
She hadn’t expected him to visit today. “Dustin, I think—”
“Shush. Don’t think.”
But she couldn’t stop thinking … about Otter, poor dead Tavio, and how was she going to find enough of the damnable ancient bowls to satisfy the demon. One dozen? Two?
“Don’t think, Brie,” Dustin said. “Not for a little while. Don’t think. Just feel.”
The water temperature apparently to his liking, Dustin slipped in behind her and ran his hands over Bridget’s shoulders. He kneaded the muscles in her neck. “Tight, mon amour. So much on your mind, I know. I am sorry about Tavio. I heard it on the television. I called, and Jimmy said the police look for the man who did the terrible thing.” He pressed himself against her. “Where is Otter?”
“School. He went t
o school.”
Bridget let him turn her around.
“He will live here now?”
“I don’t know. Yes. I just don’t know. But at least for the time being. At least until … oh, hell, I don’t know. Yes. I think yes. I hope yes. I think—”
“Brie, stop thinking.” Dustin kissed her, light at first, then deeper. “I like him, Otter. And I like that he liked my cooking on his birthday.” Dustin tipped Bridget’s face up, the mascara and eyeliner running from her eyes in thin, black rivulets. “But I am sorry for him, too, mon amour. A boy should have his father also. A boy should have a mother and a father.”
Bridget instantly recalled her own mother, all the hours she’d worked, too many for the two of them to be close. The memories were far away, and she’d done just fine without a mother. She’d done fine making a family in the Westies, then with Tavio, and now alone. Bridget was a rich, successful woman, and she really didn’t need anyone. “Otter deserves better than me, Dustin.”
“You are a good woman, Brie. A good provider.”
“A good provider? Sure. But I’m not a good woman, Dustin. You know that. I’m—”
“A criminal?”
“Yes, and—”
“I know that. But not a common one.”
“Well, no. But—”
Dustin cut off the rest of her words with another kiss, his hand on the back of her neck to pull her close, holding her tight. Dustin breathed into Bridget’s mouth and with his free hand stretched for the soap. It was a French milled, organic bar—he’d given Bridget several. This one smelled of grapefruit, tangerine, and musk, and he leaned away slightly and brought it up to Bridget’s nose.
“Your clothes outside on the floor,” he said, “stink.” He started lathering her. “You stink a little too. What did you get into?”
