by John Levitt
“The easiest way to do it will be for Victor to try to move the metal shim, while you try to keep it in place. Or vice versa.”
“I’ll move it,” said Victor.
That was fine with me. Victor’s natural inclination is toward action, while I’m more comfortable playing defense, thwarting things. I reached out to the safe, something with the absolute essence of holding things in place, and bound up the metal of the shim with the metal of the safe.
“Anytime,” I said.
Victor nodded and concentrated on the bowl, subvocalizing. He put his hands together and unexpectedly sent out a bolt of force, visible as green light. That was just for show; it had nothing to do with the efficacy of the spell. It hit the metal, which trembled but stayed resolutely fixed in its spot.
The whole point was to balance the opposing forces; if he had managed to flip the shim out of the bowl, we’d just have to start over again. But he hated to “lose” at anything. He muttered something and a slight smile appeared on his face as he raised his hand again.
“Victor,” Eli said warningly. “That’s perfect. Fix the balance in place.”
Victor nodded again and spread his hands apart, speaking words aloud this time, as if that was what he’d had in mind all along. A different sort of energy rolled off his fingers and splashed over the shim.
“Okay, ease up,” he told me, and I released the binding energy. Eli bent over to examine it.
“Perfect,” he said. “Any release of magical energy within a radius of fifty miles will cause it to react. The faster it moves, the more energy has been detected. An ordinary spell will only move it at about the speed of the second hand on a watch; the energy involved in accomplishing a major shift such as what Jackie plans will cause it to spin like a top.”
“When’s the last time you saw a second hand?” I said. “You need to join the digital age. And what about direction?”
“A simple energy pulse will stop its motion, and the shim will point to the source.”
I smiled. “Very neat. So you’ve established a device that shows the direction and scale of a powerful release of energy, based on a design by Richter. In other words ...”
“Please, Mason,” said Victor. “Don’t always go for the obvious.”
“Sorry. But you say this can’t locate Jackie, not precisely. So I’m not sure how useful it will be.”
“That’s true,” Eli said. “But it will give us some warning and an idea of the scale involved. At least we won’t be caught unawares. It’s better than nothing.”
“I guess.”
“Also, I imagine Jackie won’t try anything too complicated at first. She’ll do a few practice runs—I know I would, and from what you say she’s not dumb. So it might give us some additional opportunities to locate her.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, we wait.”
I WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN THAT SURPRISED IF WE never heard from Jackie again. It would be easy to screw up on a spell from the book, especially now that she didn’t have Malcolm to help her. Powerful spells that get out of hand can kill a practitioner, which would solve our problems. But no such luck.
Meanwhile, I still had a life, or a semblance of one. I finally got off my butt and scored a corporate gig with Novasca, one of the big Bay Area biotech companies. When I was young and foolish I looked down on corporate gigs. I was an artist. Well, I’m still an artist, but corporate gigs pay five times what you’d make in a club. During the dot-com boom when money was pouring out of spigots, it was more like twenty times, but those days are gone forever, and getting a corporate gig these days is a coup.
But my arm wasn’t getting any better, worse if anything, and it could end up affecting my playing. I finally went up to see Campbell, which I should have done right away. She examined the arm and listened with interest as I told her about the Shadow Man.
“I’ve heard of this before,” she said. “Not exactly the same, but close, part of the old legends my grandmother used to talk about. They steal your life, and even if you get away, they leave their mark.”
“Old legends are often based on real things,” I said. “I never used to believe that, but I do now.”
“Better late than never,” Campbell said. “We’ll make you into an expert in ancient wisdom yet.”
“Doubtful.”
She held up my arm where the sunlight lit it up. “Look.”
At first I didn’t see anything, but when I viewed my arm at a certain angle I saw what she meant. There were five faint marks on my forearm, like shadows of fingers, almost unnoticeable.
“Hmm,” I said. “The mark of the beast.”
“Not so far off. But the cure is simple, once you notice them. You just have to clean them off.”
“I have showered in the last few days, you know.”
“Yes, you’re delightful. But soap and water won’t do it.”
“Steel wool?”
“Don’t tempt me. No, it’s rather simple, as I remember. You need ... Well, I can’t quite remember, but I know someone who will.” She pulled out her cell, made a quick call, and talked briefly to the person on the other end.
“Yes, now I remember ... No, it’s not just academic interest ... Yes, I’ll tell you all about it later.” She put the cell away. “Just as I thought. Very simple, and very logical, actually. Ginger, cayenne pepper, horseradish root, thistle, sea salt, and lavender.”
“Lavender?”
“I know, that doesn’t make much sense. The lavender might be unnecessary, a holdover for an old recipe, but there’s not much point in experimenting. I’m already doing one substitute—I don’t have any horseradish root, but I do have some powdered wasabi, which should work just fine.”
As she gathered together the ingredients I asked her what else her grandmother had told her about the Shadow Men.
“Not much. She called them the darklings—creatures of the night, bogeymen of a sort. But there was one thing—whenever they appeared it was supposed to be a sign of a change coming.”
“Like what?”
“She wasn’t clear about that. I don’t think she knew, just repeated what she’d heard. ‘A big change,’ she’d say. ‘An ending and a beginning.’ ”
That made sense. Jackie was screwing around with dimensions, and if the Shadow Men were interdimensional beings, the very presence of one could be a predictor of a coming upheaval.
Campbell scrubbed my arm with the paste she’d made, the marks faded, and sure enough the feeling started to come back almost immediately.
“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you. Again.”
“Anytime. How are you feeling, other than that?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve been having a lot of headaches lately, though. That’s not usual for me.”
“Let me see,” she said.
She walked behind and put a hand on each side of my head. Her hands were warm and pulsing with energy as her fingers probed gently. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feel of her hands.
“Hmm,” she said. “You’re just fine, as far as I can tell.”
“Why the headaches, then? Stress?”
“I doubt it. You’ve had stress before—lots of it. Have you ever had headaches?”
“No.”
“I think it’s something outside you, not inside. Something’s affecting you.”
“You mean like a trigger?” I asked.
“Not exactly. All sorts of things can trigger a headache, but that just sets off what’s already there. I’m thinking something more direct, something you have no control over, like if your furnace was leaking carbon monoxide.”
“I don’t have a furnace.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said. Campbell grabbed me by the arm.
“Oh, and I almost forgot. I want you to take a look at something. It might interest you.”
She led me over to the garden of plants that had grown up almost to the front door and pointed t
oward the middle of them.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked.
“You see that plant in the middle, there? The one that’s peculiar?” I gave her the kind of look she usually gives me. She laughed, bent down, and showed me which one she meant. “Look at this.”
“Looks like a plant,” I said.
“Yes, but it doesn’t belong here. It’s like a yarrow, but it’s not, and it just shot up overnight. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve seen a lot of plants.”
That was an understatement. But this was significant. A plant that wasn’t quite normal, like an odd squirrel or a peculiar cat. Whatever was going on, it was spreading.
“Interesting,” I said.
ANOTHER BONUS OF A PRIVATE PARTY GIG WAS that I could bring Lou along. Which was important; with all the magical mayhem going on lately, a problem could crop up anytime.
The company had rented a downtown club called Park Place for the evening, and since the head honcho was that rarest of creatures, a jazz buff with money, I was in. Originally it was just going to be my trio: me, Dave from Oakland, and Roger Chu on drums, but at the last moment I called Bobby, the organ player. A three-way split is better than four, and he’s basically an asshole even if he can really play, but I knew he was hurting for money and hadn’t been playing much. He’d burned too many bridges with too many people the last few years. But I felt bad for him even if it was his own fault, and anyway that B3 sound is a big hit with crowds—maybe we’d get another gig out of it.
We set up early, and even by that time half the crowd had a good buzz on. There must have been four hundred people there, with an open bar. Even in a down economy Novasca had had a good year—they’d patented some new drug, or discovered a virus or something.
Park Place is basically a rock club, and they have a raised stage, a large semicircular space with all kinds of room. For once Bobby’s Leslie speakers wouldn’t be blaring in my ear, drowning out Dave’s bass. A tiered balcony runs all the way around, from almost over the stage to over the bar in back, with stairs at each end.
“This is more like it,” said Dave. “No more tiny little clubs for us—we’ve hit the big time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just don’t give up your day job.”
Actually Dave’s the only one of us who doesn’t have a day job. Roger works at a skateboard shop, though he’s getting a bit old for that—all of nineteen. Bobby’s been fired from as many jobs as he has from gigs, due to his sparkling personality and congenial demeanor. I don’t think of working for Victor as a day job, but without the money it brings in I’d have trouble making rent each month.
Dave, however, is a fine player who’s as comfortable playing electric in a funk band as he is playing stand-up in a jazz setting, and good bass players are always in demand. There just aren’t enough of them. Guitar players, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.
Plus, he has the look—urban black hipster, ready to get down and party at the drop of a hat. The right look is important to a band’s success—an unfortunate truth. People who see him grooving up onstage don’t know he’s a family man with two kids and a wife who keeps him on a short leash.
We played mostly jazz standards for the first set, nothing too out there, and mostly up-tempo tunes with a swing: “Well, You Needn’t”; “Four on Six”; “Straight, No Chaser”—stuff like that. Toward the end of the set, people’s alcohol intake had risen along with the party mood, so we played some jazz/funk tunes like “Walk Tall,” taking full advantage of the B3. We couldn’t play any real funk because Dave hadn’t brought his electric bass, but we got the crowd dancing anyway. And Roger was my secret weapon. He could get people dancing with nothing but a drum solo.
During the break, I altered the set list to include more tunes people could dance to, including some tunes not usually seen as jazz. Jazz purists may scoff, but they sometimes forget jazz was originally dance music. Which doesn’t mean you can’t play ballads; it just means that after you strip away all the altered chords and clever riffs, the heart and soul of jazz is all about movement. Duke said it better : “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” A deceptively simple statement. Bobby of course was annoyed at the changes.
“What is this crap?” he said, poring over the list. “I thought we were here to play jazz. This shit is way boring, way uncool.”
Dave shook his head and flashed a grin at me. He was used to Bobby.
“Cashing his check for the evening might mellow him out a little,” he said.
“I doubt it.”
You’d think after the financial and creative mess Bobby had got himself into, he’d be slobberingly grateful for the gig instead of carping about the set list. He’d never change. I couldn’t complain, though. I know what he’s like, but I’d hired him anyway. People are who they are. But his complaining gave me an idea.
“You want interesting?” I said. “Tell you what. I’ll write out a chart for us.” I scribbled for a few minutes and handed him the chart. “Chords are simple, but the time’s a bit tricky.”
It was indeed. I’d written down a variation of one of the tunes I’d heard back at Carver’s tavern in Richter’s singularity. It was in simple 7/8 time, but divided oddly and switching every eight measures to a differently accented rhythm. Bobby was a great player with real heart and soul, but technically a bit weak. He’d have to scramble to keep up. Dave would have no problem, and Roger has ears the size of elephants—one pass through and he’d be grooving with it and adding his own spin.
I saved the tune for the last of the set. If you get people engaged with the music, they’ll listen to anything, at least for a while. When we started off with it, people stopped dead in midswallow, put down their drinks, and looked up at the bandstand. They’d never heard anything like it and couldn’t decide if they approved or not. But the melody was strong, and when we settled in, people started nodding their heads and smiling. Bobby was lost at first, which served him right, but he caught on after a while and found a repeating riff that really worked.
I was having a great time until I started feeling queasy. The room blurred, like I was experiencing double vision. Bobby lost the time completely and even Dave, who’s rock solid, stumbled. So it wasn’t just something happening to me; it was something happening to the room.
My vision blurred even more, and the faces in the crowd flickered and shifted. The room shrank and became smoky. In the back of the room I now saw a fireplace with brightly burning logs superimposed over the bar that I knew was really there. Shadowy figures dressed in heavy wool shirts moved languidly through the mist.
I was back in Carver’s tavern, back in the singularity, except I wasn’t, not entirely. But it was growing stronger every second, and Park Place was receding into memory. The music ground to a halt as we all stopped playing and the singularity receded for a moment, then strengthened. My attention wandered as I stared into the fire, now closer and more real, giving off waves of heat. The party crowd noise dimmed, replaced with the quiet hum of conversation.
A volley of sharp barks brought me out of it. I looked down with some surprise and found Lou up onstage, angrily barking his head off. Everything rushed back into focus—Park Place, the bandstand, Dave and Bobby and Roger, the crowd.
A roar of laughter surged up from the audience as Lou continued his barking, not sure if I was all the way back yet. One of the crowd yelled out, “Everybody’s a critic,” and almost fell off his chair at his own wit. Actually, it was pretty funny. I bent over the mike.
“We’ ll be taking a short break so I can beat my dog.”
That got another laugh from the crowd, this one kind of nervous. They weren’t entirely sure if I was joking or not. Besides, some of them had experienced that same dislocation. Not as bad as ours, because they were on the floor of the room looking up at the stage. From their vantage, all that had happened was that the music got weird for a moment and the band suddenly grew dim. But they just attributed it to th
e lights and the alcohol consumed. What else could it be?
When we sat down for our break Bobby wasn’t laughing, though.
“Some motherfucker dosed my drink,” he said. “I almost wigged out in the middle of that tune.”
“You too?” said Dave. “I thought I was having a stroke or something.”
“You guys all right?” I asked. “How are you feeling now?”
I knew the answer, of course. Dave stretched carefully and turned his head from side to side.
“Okay, I guess. That was weird, though. You didn’t feel anything?”
“Just a little woozy for a second. Maybe it was a gas leak or something.”
“Maybe.” Dave looked dubious.
“That was no fucking gas leak,” said Bobby. “We got dosed.”
“Maybe it wore off.”
Bobby looked at me as if I was nuts, but didn’t pursue it. He’d seen a couple of things he shouldn’t have in the past, things involving me, things he couldn’t explain. So he’s understandably a bit wary of upsetting me. I’m probably the only one he feels that way about, which is why I can keep his antisocial tendencies in control most of the time.
“I didn’t notice anything,” Roger said.
That figured. Roger lived in a world of his own, one made up almost exclusively of drums, gigs, and skateboards. He didn’t do any drugs. It wasn’t that he had anything against them; he once explained that he didn’t see the point. They didn’t have much of an effect on him; that was all.
“Dave, can I borrow your cell phone?” I asked.
When Victor picked up I asked him if the Richter meter had shown anything.
“Definitely. There was a huge surge about twenty minutes ago. How did you know?”
“Things suddenly got a bit thin. I might have helped trigger it, at least as far as it concerned me specifically.”
“How thin?”
“The veils of reality as we know it were lifted from my eyes.”
“Yeah, I hear that can happen. Keep an eye out. When things get thin is when visitors push their way through, remember.”
