Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Had Miriam ever found it out?

  The Crossing ritual had settled my mind, despite my usual misgivings about the Craft as a full-service religion. Miriam was now beyond any earthly hele or lQ, aind we had done what we could to speed her safe on her way. Having done that, I had the emotional distance to sort things out in my mind.

  Unfortunately, I didn't like what I found.

  Item: Last Friday, the day she died, Miriam called me. Upset. Very upset. She had to see me. I knew Miriam frequently but not intimately. Since then I'd had cause to wonder how well Miriam thought she knew me.

  Item: Some time after her call Miriam Seabrook, age thirty-two, lay down and died. Literally.

  Item: From all the written evidence, Miriam was into a pretty bad-hat form of Neopaganism. I thought about the phone call I'd intercepted at her apartment and decided it didn't prove anything at all.

  Item: In the wee small hours of this very Friday morning, somebody phoned me up to try to stop tonight's ritual and to tell me with menaces that "MiriEim didn't need my help." So far, this was my only grounds for thinking that any of this had to do with Miriam's new religion.

  Item: Somewhere between last Saturday and this afternoon, somebody entered Miriam's apartment with a key. They turned the place inside out looking for something, but didn't take anything of mundane value that they found. Oh, yes —and they locked up when they left.

  Item: Miriam's athame was missing—at least, it hadn't been there when / searched the place.

  60 Bell, Book, and Murder

  These were all terrific facts. It was just too bad they didn't add up to much.

  Miriam had been scared before she died. True, her coven had probably been head-tripping her, but did I trust Miriam to be scared only for a good reason? No. Did 1 see any connection between Miriam's phone call and her death? No.

  Did 1 want to find out more about the Khazar Trad and whether it was them Miriam was scared of?

  You figure it out.

  I was one of the last people to leave Belle's. It was about three in the morning and we were down to coven and one or two hangers-on—the kind of people who leave any party about ten minutes after the host has gone to bed. Lace had left a couple hours ago, probably to cruise some of the dyke bars in the East Village and find something to stuff in the big empty of never being able to share a joke with Miriam again.

  Belle wanted me to stay the night, but Beaner and The Cat already were—and besides, there's something about wandering the city at this hour. It's one of life's riskier pleasures, but if you haven't got a taste for risky pleasures, why live here?

  I hit the street. It was empty. The air had that peculiar softness it acquires, regardless of the season, after three o'clock in the morning. The sky would be showing light by the time I got home, probably, and the predawn breeze was already up.

  Spanish Harlem moves farther north and west every year; most of the shops down on Dyckman are bilingual. But even they had given up and gone to sleep. It was just me, and the long wall of High Bridge Park on my right. My boots made sharp quiet sounds on sidewalk the color of old pewter.

  There is beauty in the city's artificial stone. But there's a lot more harm. To the Environment, people call it, as if it's nothing to do with them. As if, if the Environment were all gone, there would still be someplace to live.

  Illiteracy has a lot to ainswer for. Environment is just a long word for where-you-are.

  I heard footsteps on the street behind me. Probably somebody leaving Belle's after me, wanting to catch up. I slowed down and made the automatic, ever-so-subtle, look-over-the-shoulder gesture.

  Nobody. So I picked it up again, heading down the hill.

  Footsteps. And now that they'd stopped and hid once I was very

  interested in them, so I stopped dead and looked outright, because maiden modesty kills more New Yorkers every year than AIDS.

  Nobody.

  Or was that a flutter of movement from somebody ducking into something just out of my line of sight?

  Why find out for sure?

  So I crossed the street and didn't hear siny more footsteps.

  The Dyckman/200th Street Station is the next-to-last stop on the A line. It is down one of those bad old twisty subway stops, and no matter how many "Off-Hour Waiting Area" signs the MTA puts up, nobody is going to wait in them for fear of missing their train. Waiting in them wouldn't make you amy safer, anyway.

  The station has a long flight down, then a landing with a right angle to another half flight of stairs. Then you're down at token-booth level (closed, at this hour). From the bottom of the stairs you can't see the top.

  The platform is on the same level as the booth, cut off from it by a combination of tile walls and a big iron fence with a set of old-fashioned wooden turnstiles. You can't see the whole platform from the token booth area, which can be unnerving.

  The station extends the width of Broadway and there are accesses from both sides. You can walk across Broadway from below if you're of a mind to, and go up the stairs at the other end, or you can pay your fare, go through the turnstiles, and have your choice of uptown £ind downtown trains.

  I'd just reached the right-turn landing and was starting down into the station when I heard footsteps behind me, skipping down the stairs. I did one of the basic Directed Imaging exercises real fast—"Visualize a cloudbank. Now wrap it around you so that you're wearing a cloak of mist. Nothing can reach you through this cloak" —and hurried out onto the platform. If the footsteps were following me I wasn't sure I could get across the station and up the other stairs before they saw me —and even if I did it wouldn't be a lot of help.

  For once I beat the fare —I didn't want the person following to hear the turnstile go clunk. I got out of line-of-sight and stood in the comer by the pass-under to the uptown trains wearing my cloudbank and pretending I was uninteresting so hard my teeth hurt. I felt the wind on my face that meant a train was moving in the tunnel, and concentrated on making it come here fast.

  I heard the footsteps outside the token booth. I couldn't be seen

  62 Bell, Book, and Murder

  except from the platform itself— I wondered if he was a scofflaw, too, or would think it worth paying a dollar-plus to make sure I wasn't here.

  The footsteps crossed the area in front of the token booth, then started up the steps on the other side.

  The train pulled into the station. I lunged into it before the doors finished opening and crouched low between the seats pretending I wasn't there. If my shadow got on the train at all he could hopscotch cars at the next station and find me.

  The doors closed and the train began to move. I saw someone run down the steps to the platform, but it could have been anyone.

  Anyone at all.

  So much for Friday.

  The trouble was that all of this could be coincidence, or my nerves (which I'd used to think were good), or something real— either sacred or mundane.

  And I had no way of finding out which, you should pardon the expression.

  In fiction it's different. The detective goes around asking questions, stirring everyone up —and he gets answers. Even Kinsey Millhone gets answers.

  If I tried that, everyone including my best friends would shut up like a clam.

  We've lived with secrecy for too long. In 1963 when the Craft came over from England and the only kind of Witch there was, was Gardnerian, we hid. Nineteen sixty-three was before the Summer of Lx)ve. People advocating love and peace and trust were slightly to the left of UFO cultists on the Cultural Weirdness Scale. We learned to be secret to keep from losing our jobs and our kids and our credit ratings.

  After the Glorious October of'79, when Margot Adler published Drawing Down the Moon and Starhawk published The Spiral Dance and Wicca and Neopaganism became boring instead of threatening, the habit of secrecy remained — even though by now the only ones asking questions were our own.

  Oh, some secrets should be kept, and some should be revealed at
the right time, but the simple fact is that keeping secrets and saying "I Can't Tell You" is fun for those of us who are full-grown in body only, and they have no intention of giving it up. The only way to get answers is to convince your listener you already know them.

  The way to find out exactly how Miriam Seabrook died wasn't by asking questions.

  Saturday. Miriam's directions would have been easier to follow if she hadn't left out every other one. Fortunately, I figured out from the street names that I was going to Queens, or I never would have known to take the uptown train.

  I wasn't followed, this time.

  I had no idea if I was going to the Khazar covenstead, or if I could even find it from Miriam's directions or recognize it when I had. And even if I could do all those things, what was I going to do then?

  I replayed Miriam's last phone message in my mind. Whatever its cause, her fear was genuine.

  And she'd called me. Wh)^

  Think about it. She had a lover and she had a coven. If the problem was in the Read World, she'd have called Lace, not me, as Lace, believe it or not, is very good at dealing with other people's problems. If her problem was magical-with-a-K, she'd have called someone in her coven, right?

  The only reason I could think of for her to call me was if the problem was her coven. Which brought me back to Square One, and, as it might be, Miriam's deathbed request.

  Help her. And if she was dead, find out why.

  Most of the "subway" lines in Queens are elevated, and any time I go there it gives me the feeling I've wandered through a space-warp into Chicago—rows and rows of tenements built before World War II interspersed with the occasional McDonald's sign.

  I counted stops until I reached the right one and got off, looking for Miriam's landmarks. It was dark under the tracks, and Manhattan felt about a million miles away. I located the bridal salon and the tavema and started walking.

  Why was I doing this? I wasn't the Occult Police. Even if Miriam's covenleader was the original bad hat there was nothing 1 could do. I couldn't prove it to the mundane authorities, and nobody euer gets thrown out of the Craft. Not even Geordie Angel, who runs that fraud mail-order Christian Wicca course from a post-office box in Idaho and who, at the last Neopagan event he attended, slugged a friend of mine in the face. In front of a dozen witnesses, and of course no one even thought to charge him with assault.

  Nobody cares. This is the essential meaning of entropy. And if nobody cared, then what I was doing was pointless, wasn't it?

  64 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Or was I just cruising to become a legend in my own mind, like all those well-known subway vigilantes?

  I turned down a street that had a Gulf station on the right emd a deli on the left and a laundromat at the end —according to Miriam's directions, the place she'd gone was on the right side of the street.

  No restaurants. That meant she'd been invited into a private home, which is a little unusual on a first meeting.

  It's unusual because there are a lot of kinks out there. I'd told Miriam and told her, and in the end I guessed it hadn't helped at all.

  Miriam hadn't written the building number or the street name down, of course —the directions said something about "third door, seventh floor." Third door—or building—was the only one on the street that looked as if it could have that many floors. I went into the lobby.

  The names on the buzzers for the seventh floor were either missing or seemed to date from when the building was new. No clue there as to which door Miriam had disappeared behind, but all the samie I wanted to get out of there.

  It was June and I'd never been here before, but I had a sudden flash of how the street would look in winter—cold and dead and sterile. Or worse, how it would look once everyone was gone, and the houses were all burnt-out grafitti-covered shells.

  I did not run all the way back to the subway stop. I did not

  While I was waiting for the subway back to normalcy I wrote down the address I'd just been to. 1 felt creepy, as if I'd just burgled a funeral home or wandered into one of those strange rites only found in Thomas Tryon novels. I needed a good dose of Earth-plane reality, and I knew just where to get it.

  Chanters Revel is decorous and politically correct. It is a credit to the fistful of Dianic, Feminist, and Goddess-oriented traditions it serves. Aphrodisia lets questions of religion pass it by—it's an herb store, period, and has no affiliations to shake a stick at. Weiser's, East-West Books, and Star Magic are all massively disinterested in what their clientele is into.

  The Serpent's Truth is wildly partisan and unashamedly trashy.

  They say it's in the Village, and they lie —as Edna St. Vincent Millay once similarly said in connection with Vassar and the Hud-

  son River. The Official New York Northern Cutoff Point for Greenwich Village is Eighth Street (except in the minds of real estate salesmen), and The Snake is almost a dozen blocks north of that, up where the real estate's cheap —or was, back when anything in New York was cheap.

  The Snake shares its street with the back of a parking garage, an S&M bar, a commercial photofinishing lab, a sleazy Greek coffee shop, and a store whose plate-glass window says "Novelties" — and lies. You can recognize The Snake by its Beyond Tacky neon sign. To be fair, the sign was there before The Snake was, and is almost certainly the reason for the store's name.

  In the long decades of its career, the sign has lost adl of the neon tubing that went to make up whatever name the previous business had. All that's left now is a neon picture of a walking stick with a bright green snake wrapped around it. When the sign's lit, the snake coils up and down the stick and flicks its tongue in and out. It fits, somehow.

  Today the front window contained a crystal ball on a light-up stand, a selection of grimoires and magic wands, some ritual swords (stamped out of pot metal and liable to bend), and a dressmaker's dummy with a full set of Genuine Wizard's Robes on it, including a long pointy hat with silver stars that I coveted unreasonably. The store has double narrow doors, meant to both be open, but as usual only one was, and the six-foot-high Day-Glo Technicolor Mighty Wurlitzer jukebox containing every record Elvis ever made blocked the other half. Once you made it past that obstacle you were confronted by an eight-foot-high plaster statue of the Goat of Mendes and a jewelry case full of pentacles, bat earrings, and pendants made out of glass eyes. Some of them had made their way into my wardrobe in days gone by. The whole shop was Tourist City.

  The Snake is not, and never has been, good press for the Community. It gets dished a lot. Just about all you can say in its defense is that it's been around a long time (it opened sometime in the early sixties), it provides a highly visible intake port for people looking for the Craft or something like it, and it has done less harm to more people than televangelism.

  It is also definitely a more interesting place to be than the Revel. I slid in past the jukebox. When I'm especially unlucky, I get to the shop when Tris has decided to play it—the thing has speakers that'd make Metallica blush with envy.

  66 Bell, Book, and Murder

  There was the usual haze of frankincense up near the ceiling, and the whole back wall was filled by the lighted glass cabinet Tris (the owner) had just put in dedicated to the orisha-and-floorwash crowd. Between the floorwashes and the jewelry case were the books: Wicca on the right, Magick on the left, Rosicrucianism and what-have-you down the middle. There were also herbs, thun-derstones, herbal smudges, do-it-yourself voodoo-doll kits, can-dleholders in the shape of gargoyles, wishing mirrors, scrying glasses, stained-glass pentacles, salt-and-water bowls, and polyester acetate wizard robes like the one in the window.

  To say the stock is overcrowded is an understatement. The place is a retail designer's nightmare. If Tris (it's short for Tris-megistus, actually) ever cleans this place he'll find the Lost Ark of the Covenant in the storeroom. Guaranteed.

  Julian was at his usual post, behind the cash register. The checkout is on a built-up platform that raises it about
eighteen inches off the floor. Julian resembled a scrivener in a Herman Melville story.

  When the jukebox is running I deduct ten points from my Karma Batting Average. When Julian's behind the desk it's a plus ten. It was with a moderate amount of difficulty that I reined in my libido. Ah, if only . . .

  Not that Julian's to everybody's taste: Unless your fancy runs to pale, tubercular intellectuals with lank black hair you won't have much use for him. Julian is, among other things, a Ceremonial Magician. I've heard it said that he's the only person ever to have actually done the entire Abra-Melin Ritual, which takes a year to perform and requires you to own your own lakeside cottage.

  His sexual preferences, if any, are a mystery to the entire Community, which is good as it keeps me (barely) from acting like an utter fool in his presence, further encouraged in this laudable aim only by his utter indifference to me except as a source of Visa receipts. It would be a lot more comfortable if I could reciprocate said indifference, but there's precious little hope of that. Maybe it's those silly little glasses.

  "Hi, Julian, got a minute?" I asked. I wasn't being overfamil-iar; he may have a last name, but I've never heard it. And on this occasion I had a perfectly legitimate reason for engaging him in a conversation unrelated to spending money.

  Juliain peered down at me and glare turned his glasses white.

  Sigh. He was, as usual, wearing a Roman collar (which he may be entitled to, for all I know), a secondhand hammertail coat, and those tiny oval clerk's glasses. I have always admired Julian's fashion statements. They make no concession to the twentieth century, which is why he makes such an admirable manager for The Snake.

  "Oh hi, Bast," Julian said vaguely. "Your books are in."

  This is Juliam's standard greeting to me. When I tell him, as I do, that I haven't ordered any books, he either tries to convince me that I have (in an amnesiac moment) or that I would have if I'd heard of them.