Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  I knew what she meant. What can you tell about somebody's honest responses to the One True Pol3^heism (as some of us jestingly call it) from a few minutes on the phone and everybody on their best behavior?

  And attendance at the city's most notorious occult bookstore's Open Pagan Circles might or might not be a recommendation, actually.

  "Okay. When?" I said.

  "Well, he wanted to get together on Wednesday, but Daffydd had night classes all last week and Edward works late hours three nights a week, so really the only time we could all get together soon was tomorrow."

  "Sunday?" I mentally rearranged my notions of free time and sleeping late. But I wouldn't mind seeing Daffydd again.

  Daffydd has another name when Columbia signs his paychecks. He's Belle's and Changing's on-and-off High Priest. She must be serious about this one if she was ringing him in, too. That, or she wanted backup for something else.

  I had a hunch what it was, too. Beltane — May Day in the mundane world—was in two weeks, so if Belle wanted me to help her organize a Beltane festival, she was going to have to tap me for it soon. Like Sunday.

  "Okay, Sunday's fine. Hunan Balcony down on 116th?" I said, guessing.

  The Balcony is one of Belle's favorite neutral meeting spots, being right on the "A" line and not too far from Columbia.

  "Sure. Seven o'clock." Belle hesitated, but if she wanted to talk about Glitter she certainly couldn't do it with her standing next to me. We said our good-byes instead.

  I hung up. 1 looked at Glitter. "New candidate," I said.

  "That Skelton guy?" she said. I nodded. She shrugged. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 12:18 p.m. ^>^i^

  I finished the Nifty Fifties catalog up around noon Sunday and had a whole afternoon to kill before my dinner date appearance in my official capacity as Judgment-caller and name-taker of the Wicca. I'd even dressed for the occasion, all in Urban Black: boots, jeans, turtleneck on one of its last outings before being packed away for the summer.

  1 wasn't alone in the studio, even if it was Sunday. Seiko was there, working on a project of her own. Seiko dresses like an all-night viewer of the S/M Shopping Channel, but the one time I dropped a few names from that area of reality I got nothing but a blank look. I can't think of any reason she'd feign ignorance while wearing all that leather, so I'm forced to the conclusion that Seiko wears chains and studs and leather because she likes wearing chains and studs and leather, and not for reasons of recreational athletics.

  For what it's worth, Seiko is also the one who brought the Teenage Mutant Ninja lime Jello-O mold containing the secret ingredient of two bottles of vodka to the studio Christmas party last year. Ray recited aU the verses of "Christmas Day in the Workhouse" and Mikey Pontifex actually smiled. It was a memorable occasion.

  I packed up all thirty boards of the catalog with the desktop page-for-page front aind back matter (the catalog would run about fifty pages once a printer was done with it) and left it on Ray's desk

  162 Bell, Book, and Murder

  SO he could give it the Houston Graphics seal of approval when he got in tomorrow morning. I threw my used razor blades into the coffee can full of similar razor blades that I keep beside my desk and washed out my Number Triple Zero Mars Technograph and filled the reservoir with ammonia so that it would continue being a Number Triple Zero Mars Technograph pen and not, say, a cute and useless piece of modem sculpture, and even washed out my coffee cup.

  Wasting time. If these were delaying tactics, my subconscious had a lousy sense of timing: the only appointment 1 could conceive of not wanting to go to was five hours in the future. 1 had all of Sunday afternoon before me. April in New York. The day was soggy and cool; raining again. You'll love New York, the ad campaign says. I put on my hat and coat and went out.

  This hat was the latest in a series of hats: wide-brimmed black leather suggesting that I might be the biggest attitude case east of the Pecos. I like hats, but I never seem to be able to strike up a perm£inent relationship with one. But 1 keep hoping.

  I didn't want to go home. BeUe was off taping a week's worth of little recorded squibs for WBAI, and I felt too anticipatorily broke to want to spend money loitering in any of the innumerable cafes the Big Empty has to offer.

  I had, in short, that rootless, disconnected feeling that comes of knowing there is a place you want to go, which for some reason you can't go to.

  And as Katharine Hepburn always used to say, "Human nature, Mr. Alnut, is what we are put on this earth to rise above." So 1 squared mental shoulders (try it sometime) and headed for the Snake.

  The Snake —also known as the Serpent's Truth —is on the northernmost fringe of the Village, on a street that'd be a deadend street if it weren't between Broadway and Sixth.

  The Snake is, was, and always will be the kind of occult bookstore that makes the professional god-botherers' eyes light up in greedy anticipation. It is trashy, vulgar, tacky, and unabashedly commercial, with some of the highest markups for the sleaziest merchandise known to man or beast.

  It also boasts a neon-purple industrial-strength chrome jukebox that contains every 45 that Elvis ever recorded. It is just too bad that among my many failings I can count an inability to listen to rockabilly in any form. Trismegistus, who owns both the

  Snake and the jukebox, knows this. He also maintains a Nietz-schean faith in the perfectibility of humankind.

  This is why, when he saw me coming up the street this particular afternoon, he dropped six quarters into the Mighty Wurlitzer's gaping neon violet maw and kicked the side. Elvis began telling me and everyone else within a two-block radius that he'd found a new place to dwell, with enough wof and yabber thrown in to make me hope that the speakers would explode.

  Despite this encouragement, I persevered.

  "Hi," I said to Tris, who, since he was loitering negligently against the jukebox, was also blocking my way into the Snake. Tris is not much seen in the Snake during the week, though where he goes and what he does no one knows. He keeps informed, though, and occasionally, in a truly heartwarming upswing of amateur standing over commercial instinct, Tris will ban someone from setting foot within the Snake's hallowed precincts for social crimes unspecified. 1 wondered if I'd somehow made it onto his blacklist.

  "Howdy," Tris said after a moment, moving to let me by. I was reassured. I glanced downward and saw what I expected to.

  The Boots. To be exact, bright red leather cowboy boots with snakeskin insets. Trismegistus, need it be said, has never been west of the Hudson in all his five decades, and has never been seen in any other footwear.

  I rely for a certain amount of my mental equilibrium on intermittent sightings of the Boots, and in weaker moments have been known to fantasize the making of a perverse Nashville music video starring Moira Shearer and those boots.

  Possibly my sense of humor is too obscure.

  Having sidled into the Snake at last, 1 ran headfirst into a palpable wall of Three P^ngs incense, which effectively insulated my sinuses from any other scent in the store. There was some slightly-older-than-New-Age tape dueling with Elvis over the antique sound system in the hope of encouraging the purchase of its brothers, and the narrow aisle that runs down one wall of this retail designer's nightmare and up the other was stuffed full of regulars, for whom a weekly pilgrimage to the Snake takes the place of a more conventional religious observance.

  I inserted myself into their midst, a process not unlike that of a salmon's heading upstream to spawn. Safely wedged in among them, I looked back over my shoulder in the direction of the elevated platform that holds the cash register and felt a perverse jolt.

  164 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Julian was there. He was, as usual, wearing a Roman collar, a (probably) secondhand hammertail coat, and those tiny oval clerk's glasses. In my boots with two-inch heels 1 am about half an inch taller than he is, and I outweigh him by at least ten pounds. Makes a girl feel safe at night, superior stren
gth does.

  Julian, I hasten to add, had every right to be where he was, since he was the manager of the Serpent's Truth—aka the Snake — the man who ordered the books, the candles, the gen-U-wlne Magus-Brand purple polyester acetate satin wizard robes, those commodities the sale of which kept the Snake in the black.

  He was also the man who'd given my legal name and unlisted phone number to someone I would really have preferred not to have them.

  This would have been a relatively minor crime, in the greater cosmic New York Metropolitan scheme of things, except for the fact that I had lusted after Julian and his tubercular seraphim good looks in unrequited silence for years, and to have him take just enough notice of me to sell me down the river was a betrayal on the supematurally disproportionate order of the ones you experience in junior high.

  Old scars are the rawest.

  It was another reason I'd been avoiding the Snake. And the lowering grown-up consciousness that Julian had no idea what I'd managed to do to my psychic landscape with his (actually marginal) assistance did not make me feel one whit better, thank you very much.

  So I buried myself in rapt contemplation of the Snake's antique herb collection, displayed in equally antique flint-glass jars all down the right-hand wall of the shop, and worked my way along the aisle, past the congested knot of browsers in front of the "Witchcraft and Women's Mysteries" section. The herbs had been new sometime around 1957. I didn't know about the jars.

  Eventually I made it all the way down to Theosophy and Ancient Atlantis, which meant I was about as far from Julian as it was possible to get without going into the Snake's backroom ritual space. It also meant I was in a prime position to cruise the back-wall display of Santeria accessories.

  I have no earthly need for a two-foot-high plaster polychrome statue of Saint Barbara (patroness of artillerymen and demolitions experts, a.k.a. the orisha Chango), but there's always the possibility I can talk myself into one someday. Besides, I was low on Uncrossing Floorwash and jar candles.

  "I trusted you!"

  Theatrical venom delivered in an undertone is always interesting. I opened my ears and turned sideways, as if my attention had suddenly been riveted by a four-volume boxed set of The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled.

  The dialogue was coming from the space in front of the Sainte-ria supplies. It's the largest open space in the shop—when Tris has someone here reading cards this is where the reader sets up her table.

  "—gave it to you in good faith—" The speaker was doing a good job of keeping her voice down while filleting somebody fast and furious. I turned a little more and reached for one of the books.

  "Xharina—" A man's voice this time. I almost dropped the book. I did look up. Xharina. Definitely Xharina.

  Xharina—sometimes known as Xharina, Princess of Pain—is what you might call an ornament of the Community. Xharina runs an otherwise all-male coven in Brookljm, and is a very decorative addition to any Pagan Festival, although not a real good advertisement for the Community at large.

  I don't know what her day job is, and I don't want to know. I just wish I had the money she spends on boots, let alone the price of something like the laced-in little number she was wearing today, which looked like it had started life as a Victorian riding habit before it got its sleeves removed in order to display Xharina's full-glove tats to an admiring world.

  At the moment the Princess looked like she wished she had the riding crop that went with the outfit. She was glaring up at the leatherboy who was probably one of her coveners —and, judging from the color of her complexion, wasn't going to be for much longer.

  "I gave it to you to copy," she said in a low dangerous tone. "What do you mean, 'It's gone'?"

  This was even more interesting than the admittedly interesting sight of Xharina. I could think of few things that one person would hand another to copy and get that bent out of shape at the loss of besides a Book of Shadows.

  On the other hand, the boyfriend could have come up with a better place to tell her than the center ring at Gossip Central.

  I sneaked another look around the end of Madame Blavatsky. Xharina was breathing in the jerky fashion of somebody who couldn't quite get enough air, and her Max Factor Sno-Pake was clearly outlined by the deep maroon of an approaching coronary.

  166 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "I just— I kept it s£ife, Xharina. I'd never—" The leatherboy's New York Nocturnal complexion was currently turning that shade of greenish white that is nearly impossible to fake.

  "Just get it back," Xharina said. She turned her back on him and plowed through a knot of tourists as if they didn't exist.

  More food for the legend.

  She was moving too fast for me to catch her, and I wasn't sure what I'd say to her, anyway. I knew what she'd say, though, because it was what I'd say if some semistranger came up and asked me if my BoS'd gone for a walk.

  Just like Glitter's.

  I picked up a pamphlet on the Rollright Stones and tried to herd my wandering brain cells into some kind of order.

  If I was placing the correct interpretation on what I'd just heard, Xharina had loaned her book to young Heather in Leather, from whose custody it had vanished.

  It was, of course, possible that he'd gotten careless and lost it. It was also possible that the Pope would be marching in the gay rights parade come June.

  Nothing else I did that afternoon was nearly as interesting.

  I got to the Hunan Balcony on 116th a little before seven o'clock and spotted Edward Skelton instantly. He had that desperately eager air that was too intense for even the best blind date you ever wanted to go on, because Edward Skelton's blind date wasn't any mere corporeal bimbo, but Revealed Truth Herself.

  He was also, I was pretty sure, Ned, the clerk at Lothlorien.

  I needed a beer. I pushed open the door and headed for the Please Watt Here To Be Seated sign.

  Edward lunged to his feet instantly as I came in. It could have been the immense aura of witchy power that surrounded me, or, then again, it could have been the fact that you could smell the incense on my clothes from three feet away.

  "Um, excuse me, are you . . ."he said, pushy and tentative adl at once.

  I felt an instant flaire of irritation, amd suppressed it because this is an awkward situation for anyone and he didn't need me to slam-dunk him on top of it.

  "Reservation for a party of four," I said to the hostess who showed up about then, "under Flowers."

  1 turned back to Edward as the hostess began gathering up

  menus. "I think we're both waiting for Bellflower," I said with as much pleasant neutrality as I could muster. "Why don't you come on?"

  We sat down. I ordered a Tsingtao. Edward looked surprised and ordered a Coke. I hoped he wasn't a better-living-through-dietary-fascism type, but even if he was, it wouldn't have much effect on either my life or the possibility of his inclusion in Changing.

  He was here because he was looking for a coven to join, and because he'd either met someone who'd referred him to Belle or because of her show on WBAl. They'd talked on the phone a couple of times, and now Belle'd decided to let it go a step further. If Belle and Daffydd liked what they saw tonight, he'd be invited to one of Changing Coven's open meetings.

  It's not much of an intake process, but it's all we have. You can't quantify sincerity—and sincerity alone isn't a virtue, anyway. The Craft, like all religions, deals in intangibles.

  With that much settled, I took the opportunity to make a detailed survey of Edward Skelton, Wiccan-wannabe.

  He looked like he was within hailing distance of thirty, but high or low I couldn't quite peg. I already knew that he was taller than I was. He had one of Per Aurum's medium pentacles on a leather cord around his neck and one of those big steel watches on his wrist that does everything but send a fax. A CZ stud in one ear. His hair was the darkest possible brown, a spiky buzz-cut that reminded me of porcupine quills or feathers, and his eyes were one of those extraord
inary color combinations that hazel sometimes produces: a vivid green star around the pupil, the rest of the iris light brown with a dark rim.

  But even with that promising beginning, something wasn't quite right. To this crucial meeting he had chosen to wear a white polyester short-sleeved shirt over a light green T bearing a design I couldn't quite make out through the translucent shirt. Blue jeans, dirty sneakers (when, as everyone knows, the current fashion is for dirty work boots instead). With that kind of fashion sense he was probably straight, not that it mattered to Belle, Changing, or me.

  What mattered was that I didn't like him.

  It was irrational; a telegram from the unconscious mind, swift and final.

  We don't always get these flashes when they'd do us any good. Usuadly they arrive when they're an active social embarrassment,

  168 Bell, Book, and Murder

  since, having made my mind up about Edward in the first five seconds of seeing him, I was reduced to playing devil's advocate to my better self for the rest of the evening, toting up items for the plus side of the ledger.

  Our drinks came. I resisted the urge to order a second beer immediately. My day hadn't been that bad, and my night wouldn't be either.

  "So. Have you known Bellflower long?" Edward said. "I'm Edward Skelton. Ned."

  "Yeah," I said. "We've met."

  "You were at the bookstore," Ned said, pleased with himself for remembering. I nodded, and was instantly irritated with myself for being so condescending.

  Ned began to talk. He turned out to be one of those people who show up somewhere full of questions aind then engage in a nonstop monologue about themselves. This was an unfair assessment, and I wrestled with my better nature while I consumed the first of what would be not-too-many Tsingtaos and learned that Ned was the youngest of four and the only boy, came from upstate New York, and had come to the City in the face of massive parental disapproval.