Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial)

by Schwartz, David J.

  “Sir,” Joy said as they shook hands.

  “Agent Wilkins; Joy. Sit down, please.” The man buttoned his sport coat and sat back against the front of the desk. “I’d love to make these briefings more convenient for you, but we can’t risk meeting too close to Gooseberry Bluff. The people we’re looking for might be able to detect that kind of spatial distortion.”

  Joy sat. The man before her was Martin Shil, her handler and superior. He had brought Joy into the bureau, trained her, and personally picked out this assignment for her. He was the closest thing she had to a father since her own had died.

  “So,” Martin said. “You’ve settled in and you’ve taught your first class. I want to hear your thoughts.”

  “There isn’t much yet. I can’t get access to Carla Drake’s belongings. The president stopped by to embarrass me in front of my first class, but I haven’t been able to get in to see him since.”

  “I’m sure he’s very busy,” Martin said. “And he has to be careful about letting his staff know that he’s invited us in to investigate them.”

  “I know. Other than that, there are some…interesting people on campus, but it’s too soon to call any of them suspects.”

  “Don’t worry about that. That’s why you’re there; we’re starting from square one. When we went in right after Drake’s disappearance we got nothing. Whoever’s responsible is good at blending in. What about the demons?”

  “Nothing there yet, either. Have the blips picked up anything?”

  “Not since June 18th,” Martin said. Blips were diviners who specialized in tracking people or magical objects, in this case nameless demons. “Talk to me about” — he leaned over the desk to look at a file — “Ingrid Ingwiersen. Conjuration professor. Do we like her for the demon trafficking?”

  “I talked to her for about two minutes at the faculty reception last week, but that’s it so far.”

  “What’d she look like to you?”

  “Honestly, she looked pretty gray.”

  “Depressed?”

  “Not just that. When someone’s really gray, it’s a signal that they could be a danger to themselves and others.”

  “OK. I want you to look into her. Make friends. Anyone else give you a funky vibe?”

  Joy managed not to smile at the way Martin said “a funky vibe.” He sometimes talked like he was on a seventies cop show, if seventies cop shows had cast patient, encouraging Indian-American men in leadership roles. “I don’t know, Martin. Everyone has secrets, you know? One of the alchemy professors dropped coffee on me right before I left to meet you; she had some dark green in her aura. It could mean a lot of things.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m frustrated.”

  “Joy. This is going to be a long process. I’m going to be patient with you, so be patient with yourself.”

  “It’s just…these people are trafficking demons, Martin. I heard about Seoul. If a shipment of them slips through on my watch, if there’s another Heartstopper because I let that happen, I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive myself.”

  “First of all, they stopped the attack in Seoul. Secondly, we don’t know that these demons are connected to the Heartstoppers. And third, that’s not your case. Let the blips and GUMP worry about that. Just get to know these people. Teach the kids.”

  “What about President Fitzgerald? He’s our contact, and I can’t even get through to him.”

  “Let me work on that.” Martin stood and crossed to the bookshelves; he picked out a slim, stapled pamphlet and carried it back. “Ready for the casebook?”

  Joy nodded and stood. Martin set the pamphlet on his desk. It had a bright-blue cover that read: FBMA Case ***2012-00765: Wilkins, J., Inv.

  Joy set her hand on the book. At first it was just a little warm. Then it started to prickle her skin, and suddenly she felt like she was falling into the book. Her legs crumpled underneath her, and she folded at the waist; she sank toward the desk and curled up between the pages as if they were bedsheets.

  Then she was standing next to the desk, feeling like she’d just had a four-hour nap.

  Martin picked up the book. It was now a slim paperback, and Joy knew that everything she knew about the case had just been inscribed there in the book, exhaustively chronicled, indexed, and cross-indexed.

  “How big do you think this case will get?” she asked.

  “Only time will tell,” Martin said, and placed the book back on the shelf.

  ***

  The moment Ingrid Ingwiersen walked in the door her sister started in on her.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Ingrid set her briefcase down near the door. “Teaching. I told you, today is the first day of class.”

  “Your class was over at three-thirty,” Selma Ingwiersen said. “It’s nine-thirty. What the hell have you been doing?”

  “Working.” Ingrid walked down the hall to the kitchen and opened up the freezer. “It’s impossible for me to get anything done here lately.”

  “Oh, and I suppose that’s my fault?”

  Ingrid was silent as she tore open a turkey dinner and put it in the salamander box — she refused to call it a MagicWave Oven. She filled a glass of water from the tap and drank it, never raising her eyes from the sink.

  “How was your class? Did you show them The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? You always do that on the first day, don’t you?”

  “Everybody does.” This was true, or as close to true as to hardly matter. Demon conjuration had ended the Second World War, sure, but it hadn’t ended war; it had just changed it in ways that people who hadn’t seen it didn’t want to acknowledge. Watching Mickey Mouse hack a walking broom to splinters and having the splinters grow into a thousand walking brooms was a neat but pointed metaphor about unforeseen consequences.

  “The dangers of conjuration,” said Selma. “The folly of those who think they can play God with the universe. I think you could come up with another way to teach your students about that, couldn’t you? Perhaps an anecdote from your own life.”

  The salamander growled to let Ingrid know that her dinner was hot, so she lifted it out and started eating it over the sink.

  “I miss food.” Selma’s voice was no longer harsh; she sounded as if she were holding back tears. “I miss beer. I miss so many things, Ingrid.”

  “I’m going to fix this, I promise.” Ingrid turned. “I just need to—”

  “Don’t look at me!” Selma shouted, and a whirlwind burst through the kitchen, blowing a family portrait off the wall, flipping the dish rack off the counter, and pinning Ingrid against the sink. She ducked her head and covered her eyes with one hand, waiting for Selma’s anger to crest and fade. Something shattered against the floor, shards skittering over Ingrid’s shoes. The salamander keened in alarm.

  When the wind stopped Ingrid uncovered her eyes but kept her gaze turned downward. She scraped the remains of her dinner from her clothes and the cabinets and fed them and the package to the salamander. It crackled at her, mollified.

  “I’m sorry, Ingrid.” Selma’s voice was so calm that Ingrid nearly believed her. “I’m really unhappy.”

  “I know you are, honey. So am I.”

  “Well, you should be. This is all your fault.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, but Ingrid knew there was no point in arguing about it.

  Six months ago, Selma had been at a mall in Minneapolis when someone had set off a Heartstopper. A Heartstopper was more or less exactly what it sounded like: an attack of unknown origin and mysterious mechanism that stopped the hearts of every living being within two hundred yards. It didn’t damage the heart or anything else, and it left the bodies in a suspended state where they did not decay, but they were essentially dead. Magic and medicine had, so far, completely failed to revive any of the Heartstopper victims.

  The attacks had come at irregular intervals, seven of them in the last twenty-six months: Halifax, Taipei, Cozumel, Kiev, Addis Ababa, Minneapolis, and — just last we
ek — Toledo, Spain. Ingrid had followed the investigations as closely as she could since the attack in Minneapolis, but her primary concern wasn’t with the cause but with the cure.

  She took out her keys. “No no no,” Selma said. “Don’t go down there.”

  Ingrid ignored her and unlocked the door to the cellar.

  “I hate you!” Selma shouted. “I wish you were the one that was dead!”

  “Believe me,” Ingrid whispered, “so do I.”

  She locked the door behind her, although she knew Selma wouldn’t follow her. That was the problem, in a nutshell. She had managed to retrieve her sister’s soul from the ether, but for reasons Ingrid hadn’t been able to discover, rather than being drawn back to her body, Selma was repelled by it. She was furious, and abusive in ways that she had never been while alive. Ingrid couldn’t even blame her.

  Selma’s body lay on a queen-size bed in the cellar. She — Ingrid thought of both the body and the spirit as her sister, even though they were both just fragments now — she was pale but beautiful. Ingrid pulled back the sheets that covered the body and grasped her sister’s feet. She massaged them carefully, flexing the stiff toes, then the knees. Ingrid moved up her sister’s body, massaging every inch of skin and exercising every joint. The first few times she had done this, she had cried. Now she just worked. She wondered what it was that kept her doing this. Hope was something she had put away on a shelf, but something about the accumulation of days taking care of her sister’s body gave her the inertia to continue doing so. That, and the angry ghost — the not-quite-her-sister — that waited upstairs.

  After she finished working the front of Selma’s body, Ingrid turned her sister over and did the back. She applied lotion to the papery skin and carefully washed her hair. She knew it was late, but she also knew that she probably wouldn’t sleep tonight anyway.

  Once she had done all she could do, she turned Selma onto her back, brushed her teeth, and pulled the sheets and blankets up over her. Then she sat down in the ugly old armchair she had set next to the bed and turned on the television. She and Selma watched a late-night talk show for a while. The host was Scottish, and that made Ingrid think of the trip she and Selma had taken to Europe to visit family in Denmark and to look at castles everywhere else. Selma had developed a crush on a backpacker they met in Munich, a Scottish girl whose accent was nearly indecipherable around her freshly pierced tongue. Remember that? she thought at Selma. She used to talk out loud to Selma’s body, but since the ghost had moved in she had decided that the real Selma could hear her thoughts. It was crazy thinking, sure, but crazy was her life.

  A news bulletin interrupted the talk show, something about Seoul and a subway. A moment later, Ingrid realized what they were saying, and she turned the volume up.

  “—lieved to have foiled an attack of the type known as a Heartstopper. Details are still coming in, but a police spokesman there is saying that they believe they may have discovered the purpose, or at least a purpose, behind these attacks, is that correct?”

  “That’s right. Seoul police are saying that they discovered an apparatus similar to that used in certain types of demon conjuration, including a vat of what appears to be human fat and blood. Investigators are now saying that they believe the Heartstoppers may be intended not as an attack in and of themselves, but as a mechanism for harvesting the life force of a large number of victims at once, in order to animate what may be a major demon. While this attack has been foiled with a little luck and good police work, this puts the previous attacks in a very different light, since it suggests that, well, I suppose it suggests that they will continue, and that whoever is conjuring these entities may have larger plans.”

  Ingrid seized her sister’s hand. All this time she had been thinking of her sister as composed of two parts, the body downstairs, the spirit upstairs. But now she understood that there was a third part. Call it a life force, energy, chi, what have you — it was what she needed to bind the other two together. Except that someone else had taken it and used it to bring a demon into the world.

  Selma, she thought to her sister. I know how to bring you back. I just need to find a major demon and kill it.

  Upstairs, the ghost of her sister began to laugh.

  Chapter 2 — Blips on the Radar

  “In premodern alchemy, there were considered to be five principles, or constituent elements. In other words, fundamental substances from which all matter was made. These were salt, sulfur, mercury, water, and earth.”

  Zelda Akbulut wrote the list up on the board. “We know now, of course, that these are not really the building blocks of the universe. Not to mention that mercury is both rare and toxic, so its use is discouraged. But the old alchemists were able to accomplish some surprising things with these substances, including one experiment which we will be attempting to reproduce in the lab next week.”

  A fortyish man wearing a suit jacket over a turtleneck raised his hand. “So this is something that may show up on exams, yes?”

  Zelda scratched at her elbows as she answered. “Anything I write on the board is fair game for the exams. Anything I talk about in lecture — anything we do in lab, anything that comes up in your assigned reading — is something that could be on the exams.

  “Now, why are we talking about premodern alchemy at all? Because it’s important to learn how the field has reconceptualized itself over time. In the past seventy years we’ve gone from being seen as chemistry’s senile grandfather to the source of countless innovations in the fields of health, beauty, construction materials, cleaning supplies, and so on.”

  Turtleneck Man raised his hand again. “So will we also be learning about the Philosopher’s Stone?”

  Zelda folded her arms across her stomach, partly because she was annoyed, but mostly to keep herself from scratching. “Briefly, yes. We won’t be attempting to create one.”

  “May I ask why not?” Turtleneck Man had a faint Eastern European accent; Zelda wondered if he commuted to Gooseberry Bluff via portal.

  “Because quite apart from the fact that Avicenna convincingly refuted the entire concept, there’s the question of resources. Lead isn’t as cheap as it was before every amateur out there decided that they were going to be the one to discover the fabled stone. Still cheap, sure; so assume the college buys lead for everyone taking this class. Then assume we buy up all the chemicals and other materials that were supposed to have been used in all twelve stages of the creation of the White Stone. Then assume that each of you spends the entire semester doing nothing but trying to recreate the experiments of the ancients. Assume that one of you even succeeds. Amazing! The odds are against it, sure; in fact it’s probably impossible, but never mind about that. One of you has succeeded in finding the secret of creating gold!”

  She had their complete attention, some of them for the first time in the entire lecture. So many kids came into alchemy thinking it was the road to easy money; every semester she had to disillusion them of the idea. She’d be lying if she said that there wasn’t a part of her that relished it.

  “So let’s assume that you’re able to reproduce your success under even more rigorously controlled conditions. Because you discovered that secret here in class, you would of course be obligated to share your notes with your classmates and myself. Your enrollment gives the college part ownership of this sort of research, so you incorporate in partnership with the school. But the school is also obligated, under the Magical Currency Destabilization Act, to share these types of procedures with the government. And under the same act, private individuals — which includes corporations — are prohibited from the mass production of precious metals. Your best bet would probably be to create limited-edition gold sculptures — some sort of collectible that you can produce in small quantities but price relatively high.

  “You could potentially make a decent profit, over time, but you’d never be a millionaire with the Treasury looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. And you’d have co
mpetitors, and the price of lead would gradually climb to nearly the price of gold — maybe even higher — and then everyone would start looking for ways to reverse the process.”

  Now they looked irritated. Some of them would want to argue with her, she knew, but she had already had that discussion so many times that she wasn’t going to let it start here.

  “This is the thing that you all need to learn about magic. People tend to look at it as a shortcut, but the truth is that it’s very often difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, and sometimes — most of the time — you’re better off doing things the old-fashioned way. You’d get more gold, and faster, by walking down to the St. Croix and panning for it.

  “Does that answer your question?”

  Turtleneck Man nodded…and raised his hand again.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Zelda said. “If I answer another question from you right now, it’ll be your last question for the semester. It’s up to you.”

  Turtleneck Man put down his hand.

  “Good choice.” Zelda checked the clock. “First two chapters in Barnhill for Friday, and no lab this week, but check your sections for next week. You’re dismissed.”

  Zelda took her time packing up. A couple of students lingered near the door as if they were waiting to speak to her, but she managed to avoid looking up, and eventually they left. Turtleneck Man was the last one to drift out.

  Zelda let out a long sigh and scratched furiously at her elbows. Teaching was usually a good distraction, but the problem was that afterward everything hit her even harder. She calmed herself and hurried out of the room before the next class started to arrive.

  Zelda knew that there was one particular area of magic that wasn’t more efficient the old-fashioned way — or rather, it was the old-fashioned way, and aside from frivolous lawsuits, no one had come up with a comparable nonmagical alternative. Zelda was under a curse, one that she absolutely deserved, but one that sometimes made her want to just give up.