Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

"If you're looking for the super, he's gone. The police took him out in a bag." He seemed to derive an immense personal satisfaction from being able to say that.

  "Super?" I saiid blankly.

  The man frowned, thought about slamming his door, and decided not to. "Someone shot him, lady," he said. Then he did shut the door, but quietly.

  I turned around aind looked. There is a futile and useless push-bell beside most New York apartment doors. This one had a little white sign over it that said "Super— lA." Ned's apartment. Ned's other job.

  220 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I thought about knocking again and didn't have the stomach for it. Besides, there was no one in there to hear, was there? Someone had shot him.

  Shot him dead. Ned is dead. First he said and now he's dead. Ned is dead, dead is Ned. Did someone shoot him through the head?

  I felt faint, and cold, and unwilling to face facts. I didn't want to think about this. Ned had called for help and I'd come too late. Again.

  I didn't want to unleash the yammering guilt-monster that said this was all my fault, and 1 didn't want to face the fact that I ought to call the police and tell them that I'd spoken to Ned and when.

  Would Ned still be alive if I'd taken a taxi instead of the subway?

  Would I be dead?

  I wanted to go home.

  But I didn't go home. I went back to the studio. I even took a taxi.

  I was terribly unhappy, as if I'd missed the only chance I would ever have to meet someone that I could have loved if we had only met. But I didn't and hadn't and wouldn't have loved Ned Skel-ton. Who, between 5:15 and 6:35, had been permanently cut from this eon's performance of the Traveling Reality Roadshow.

  I wished I'd taken a taxi to his apartment.

  All the way back to the studio the wheels kept repeating the same sentence: Ned is dead, Ned is dead, Ned is dead . . .

  I'd been too late again.

  I got back to the studio around seven-thirty; it was just starting to get dark. The building was still open. If you're there after eleven you're there for the night; the super puts the outside shutters down then.

  1 was shaking so hard I dropped the keys three times before I could let myself into the studio. There was nobody here, just me and the rats and the roaches. I flipped on all the lights, even going around and turning on the tensor lamp at each workstation. I wanted light, lots of light.

  Ned is dead.

  Something didn't make sense. It wasn't just the reasonless guilt. Something didn't make sense. That was why I was afraid. Irrationality is the greatest terror of all.

  But I didn't know what it was that didn't make sense. It was

  something lurking down among the unexamined assumptions in the dark unconscious, and I was here, on the surface of my daylight mind.

  Ned was dead.

  The box. Was it why he had been murdered?

  "/ won't open it until I see you again," I'd promised. Well, now I had.

  1 went to my carrel and picked up the package he'd left with me. Still heavy, still thoroughly sealed. I grabbed a mat knife, knowing I was probably going to slice myself with it. I did; the tape was tougher than I expected and the knife got away. The razor point slid a narrow red line down my left wrist—lengthwise, the way the ancient Romans used to like to open their veins. It didn't bleed much.

  I finally got the package open.

  "Fuck. Fuck you, Ned Skelton. Fuck you, you son of a bitch," I said hoarsely.

  It was Glitter's book.

  It was Glitter's book and more. Two and three and four and five and a sheaf of printout in a data binder that had Lorelli Lee's name and address on it (six) and a slim handmade book of red leather embossed with a bull's head (seven) and another one swathed in bubble wrap that I could see had a binding chipping and cracked with age (eight).

  I counted. Eight.

  I got up. I walked around the studio. I made a list of the phone calls I was going to make and decided not to make them. I made a new pot of coffee. If the phone had rung I think my heart would have stopped right then, but it didn't.

  And then the coffee was ready and I poured it and stared into my cup and prayed to the Goddess very hard, notifying Her that I was willing to trade any amount of three a.m. craziness and anxiety attacks for the next two years for the ability to think clearly now.

  And after a while my mind stopped sprinting around my brain like a nervous gerbil and I was able to pull the timeless disinterest around myself that good magic comes from.

  You can say that the Goddess answered my prayers or that She gave me the strength to answer them myself; it doesn't matter. What did matter was that I was ready to make some preliminary decisions on what I would do with the contents of that box.

  I went back to Ned's box of stolen secrets.

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  * * * What are the Gods worth on the open market? What price a hotline to gnosis, or a designer-direct package of Revealed Truth? Can a person need religion, and, granting that, did the intensity of Edward Skelton's self-perceived need legitimize his theft?

  No. Ned's thefts were neither legitimate nor excused. I understood the desperation that could lead to what we must politely term temporary moral confusion, but it still wasn't right, or even necessary. It was just a fact that 1 had to work with, because Ned was beyond being able to do so.

  Who was stealing Books of Shadows? Ned Skelton.

  I'd always had "why." And now I had "how," didn't I? Because working at Lothlorien had been Ned's part-time second job. And now I knew what his first job was.

  Ned was a building superintendent. A nice white English-speaking strong young man to service the upscale needs of upscale tenants on the Upper West Side. And because the upscale tenants had upscale toys they also had upscale locks. State-of-the-locksmith's-art, and Ned had very nice master keys to fit them. He could come and go an3^where, invisible in a work shirt and pants and jangling bunch of keys.

  And now he'd never do it again.

  Now it was my problem.

  I liked to think that he'd realized that stealing Books of Shadows wouldn't take him where he wanted to be, that he'd been working himself up to returning them. It didn't make the position he'd put me in any easier, though. I was the one who was going to have to return them, dodging awkward questions of how I'd gotten them. If I could.

  I went through the books again more carefully.

  Here was Glitter's, unmistakable. I could find her and give it back. No problem, except maybe with the explanation. And Lorelli's, ditto —in fact, I had her home address; I could mail it to her anonymously and explain later.

  The red book belonged to Lord Amyntor (how not, with all those bull's heads?). I didn't know his read name, but Belle might. Beaner certainly did, and where to find him, too.

  That left five. One was Gardnerian, Otterleaf s. One was Xha-rina's. One was Crystal of Starholt's — she had a heavy hand with rubber stamps involving fairies. One book belonged, apparently, to "Diana-27," someone I'd never heard of, even at the picnic.

  I was able to put names to all these books so easily because one of the things a Witch puts into a Book of Shadows is her own Craft name: the name she takes when she decides to become a Witch. The name she's known by in Circle. The first page of my BoS, for example, says "The Book of Shadows of Lady Bast of Changing Coven." It wasn't much as a real-world address went, but it did mean that with a little asking around I could get these back to their rightful owners.

  And none of them, my mind informed me with irritating inclu-siveness, could possibly be the Mary, Queen of Scots, grimoire that Ned had been puffing off at the Ecumenipicnic.

  But the box wasn't empty yet. I reached in for the last item, the one so carefully wrapped, when none of the others were.

  One old book, about twelve inches square. I eased it out of the bubble wrap. The cover was dark brown leather, cracked and showing tan where the glazed surface had flaked away. The spine was hubbed and channeled; old-style book
making from when books were sewn, not glued.

  I picked it up. It was lighter than it looked. I opened it carefully.

  The pages were real vellum, which is to say lambskin scraped until it's thin and soft and white as paper. Age had turned the pages tea-colored, their edges toast-colored and chipping.

  I steadied it with one hand and opened the book carefully to the first page.

  Marie, it said. And Le Livre des Lunes.

  The Library of the Moon? No, my French was better than that. The Book of Moons.

  Not a Gardnerian book. Nor Alexandrian, or any other this-centuiy Wiccan tradition. It didn't even have the "family resemblance" that my book did to Lord Amyntor's.

  I turned a few pages. They were covered with antique writing, head to foot and gutter to margin. The script was long and looping, pale and brown with age, insanely regular even though the pages weren't ruled. The words and sentences ran together until the page blurred into an even, unreadable pattern. The noodle script was broken by a string of symbols that looked vaguely like a Celestiad script called "Crossing the River," familiar to me from hours spent with Francis Barrett and other nineteenth-century mages.

  Despite my best efforts, the edges of the pages crumbled at my

  224 Bell, Book, and Murder

  touch. I turned carefully to the last page. The writing stopped abruptly a few lines in. The rest of the page was filled with a signature, faded to brown after all these years but written large in defiance:

  Marie the Queen, by the grace of God Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

  I closed the book and set it back in the box.

  The Book of Moons.

  My life had suddenly turned into cheap pulp fiction. This called for another cup of coffee at the very least. I got it and drank it and retreated to the far end of the studio.

  I drank my coffee. I wished I still smoked.

  The Book of Moons of "Marie la Reine" —Mary, Queen of Scots. Maybe real, or maybe just a forgery, but old; you could smell it rotting away every time you opened it; a more intense, concentrated version of the pervasive odor at Lothlorien Books.

  Which did not exist anymore, because Ilona had been murdered during a burglary.

  And Ned, who had worked there, had also been burgled—a fitting karmic commentary on his covert agenda—and murdered— which was not.

  No, wait. That wasn't quite right. Ned had been burgled—at least, he'd told me he had—Monday night. But he was murdered Tuesday night.

  Why the twenty-four-hour delay?

  1 gave up on self-restraint. I went over to Eloi's carrel and picked up the pack of Camels I'd remembered seeing there, making a note to buy him a full pack in penance for looting. I lit one up and sucked the smoke in deep and then coughed and coughed while my eyes and nose ran and little blue stars crawled across my visual field and I felt giddy and slack-muscled and knew that somewhere Nicotina the Tobacco Goddess was laughing at me.

  I threw the cigarette away, soaking it carefully first. Chastened, I returned to my coffee. Everything tasted of salt, smoke, and metal. The brief flirtation with uncontrolled substances hadn't done anything but waste what little energy I had left.

  I walked back to my desk. Slowly.

  Houston wraps each of its jobs in brown paper before it sends them out. I carried seven of the books to the front of the studio. I typed out seven red-and-white labels, centering the names neatly. I wrapped each book separately in a thick, generous allotment of

  I

  Book of Moons 225

  butcher's paper, sealed each with brown package tape, and put the nice red-and-white label on the outside. I took them back to my desk and made a cute little ziggurat of them, Glitter's on the bottom, Amyntor's on the top. Then I walked around the studio some more, barely refraining from wringing my hands.

  Because Ned did not have, could not have what he'd thought he had and what I thought I'd seen. Mary, Queen of Scots, wasn't a Witch. She just wasn't.

  How do you know? A serpentine inner voice asked me.

  "I just do," I said out loud. Besides, whether she was Queen of Scotland or Queen of the May, the Witch she would have been would have been so different from the kind I was that we probably wouldn't recognize each other's rituals in a darkened room.

  So, mi?

  My heart was racing. Caffeine, nicotine, fear.

  I went back to my desk. I opened the book again somewhere in the middle. Halfw^ay down the crowded page there were some letters written larger. PorAtirer en Bas La Lune. The antique French puzzled me for some minutes, but I finally figured it out. Translated into modem and English it read:

  "For Drawing Down the Moon."

  The page crumbled where I held it and my fingers made a darker print on the vellum. I closed the book without trying to read amy more.

  Drawing down the moon. The title of a book by Margot Adler about twentieth-century Witches. The central mystery of our mystery. Say Mass and you're a priest. Draw down the moon and you're a Witch.

  And everyone who'd worked at Lothlorien was dead.

  I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty; too late to bother most of the people I knew. And I didn't want to do that anyway, until I got things straight in my head.

  Ned. Ilona. The Book of Moons. Marie, la Reine de Caledonii.

  I cast my mind back over that damned book Daffydd had loaned me, chock-full of historical facts about the universe's favorite sixteenth-century queen. Okay, just suppose what I had here was what Ned thought it was. Mary Queen of Scots grimoire. No, not grimoire—Book of Shadows. The Book of Moons of Marie the Witch.

  Just like in the ballad. Tom O'Bedlam. The Book of Moons.

  Okay. Suppose Mary was an initiated Witch. Just suppose.

  226 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Where would it have been done? Scotland is a traditional haven of the Craft: Margaret Murray found scads of examples of "surviving folk belief there in the Scots witch trial records, and even Gerald Gardner had a Scots nursemaid from whom (some say) he learned his Wicca-craeften.

  And James the Sixth of Scotland (aka James the First of England) — Mary's son—was one of the most relentless anti-Witch propagandists that history records, his philippics opening the door to that sanctimonious butcher Matthew Hopkins, self-styled Witchfinder General of all England, and the bloodiest witch-hunts ever enacted on English soil.

  A case of adolescent rebellion?

  My mother the Witch?

  Was I actually taking this seriously?

  Why had the Berwick witches (one of Dr. Murray's prize exhibits, whose capture led to one of the most famous witch triads in history) followed the Earl of Bothwell in his plan to kill James the king? Because it would put someone sympathetic to their religion on the joint thrones of England and Scotland?

  1 thought about it. It was a tempting possibility. But no, if I was going to play fair with the historical facts as 1 knew them, Mary could not have been initiated in Scotland — she left when she was six and didn't come back until she was eighteen, and after that Knox and Moray and that lot would certainly have seized the excuse of her paganism not just to boot her out, but to bum her.

  Not in Scotland.

  In France, then. At a French court whose entire sixteenth-century existence was owed to the intercession of one of Dr. Murray's other prime candidates for Wiccanhood: Joan of Arc. Ixi Pucelle, Joan the Maid. Joan the Witch. Saint Joan. Who heard voices. Who followed orders. Who collaborated in her judicial murder, to the utter confusion of friends and foes alike, at the order of—some say—the head of her coven. Some say.

  If there had been a living French Craft tradition, it could have made the jump to the French court from the French folk, then.

  I stared at The Book oj Moons.

  My speculation had now reached the outermost orbit of the supermarket press and I knew it, but I couldn't stop. Fanciful history was more palatable than factual murder.

  The French court. A royal coven, headed by Catherine de Medici, perh
aps, or by Dianne de Valois, the king's mistress, who

  raised Mary as her own daughter. What would be more reasonable, if there was a coven, than that Maiy should be inducted into it?

  Almost anything.

  In which case, where had the book in front of me come from? A top-flight modern forgery of a sixteenth-century holograph document—which The Book of Moons was—took more skill than poor Ned had possessed.

  So maybe it was real. Maybe. Could be. Might be.

  When she returned to Scotland, Mary's lack of zeal for the Catholic faiith was one of the things that made her political position so difficult. Was her indifference to the Catholic Church and her acknowledgment of the Protestants due to the fact that she herself adhered to a third faith, that of the Wicca? Not a member of the Old Religion, as Catholicism was beginning to be called, but of the Oldest Religion?

  And, banished from France, had Mary been banished from her coven as well?

  And if there was a royal French coven, and she was separated from it, then Mary spent her life trying to reclaim not merely temporal glory, but spiritual.

  Ridiculous. Impossible. There was no proof of the existence of organized Wicca before 1947-53, when Gardner began publishing.

  I stared at the book in front of me and thought hard.

  Gerald Gardner ingested all three of Murray's published revelations and on the basis of Murray's discredited scholarship proclaimed that the practice of the Craft went back centuries —at least, that's the way his critics say it happened. And once the Craft developed a more broad-based demographic, people with credible scholarly training attempted to climb the Wiccan family tree and found nothing before Gardner. From all the evidence they have been able to gather, what we know as Wicca began with Gerald Gardner.

  What would they give for concrete real-world proof that it did not? That it was, in fact, a centuries-old religion?

  I shook my head, driving the cobwebs out. If this was real, if it involved Mary, it was much bigger than that. If she could drive people like Daffydd and Beaner crazy after four hundred years of being dead when she was just an unlucky Catholic queen, imagine what her being a Witch would do.