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

by Schwartz, David J.

  Once his will was focused, Ken leaned toward the demon bottle and spoke. “Seek,” he said, and instantly the cap popped down, inward, as though a huge amount of pressure had just been released. The iron hummed. Before it could heat up too much, Ken gripped the bottle tightly and yanked the cap free.

  The wake of the demon blew him back a step; he caught a glimpse of it, blue and rounded and mouthless, like a child’s toy. It spun up away from the porch, over the house. Then it found a trajectory and disappeared into the sky.

  Ken sighed and set the cap back on the bottle, the bottle on the porch. “Let’s go for a walk, Victor,” he said, taking the leash from its hook next to the front door.

  ***

  Joy portalled home, fell into bed, and dreamed that she had died in the desert. Her dead eyes remained open as the sun rose and the sand baked and the lizards and snakes took shelter from the heat and the vultures that tore at her and they took her eyes and her eyes expanded as the vultures ascended until her vision was the size of the sky until she saw between the grains of sand and inside the marrow of her arm bones and everything was so simple and straightforward that it was laughable…

  When she woke she lost all the answers; she could barely work out where was. She managed to shower and dress, pausing to sit stupidly on her bed, to stand under the water long after she was clean, to study herself in the mirror. It was an old game she used to play with herself — if she logged enough time staring at her own face, a hundred hours or a thousand or the square of some prime number, she would magically see what everyone else saw. Once again it didn’t work, and she finally dragged herself out of the house at a little after three.

  She stopped for coffee at the café across from the college, and on impulse she bought two cups. She had remembered something from her many perusals of the college personnel files, and she thought it was a good time to return a favor, or at least an attempted one. Maybe even to make a friend.

  There was a sign on Andy’s desk that said Back Monday, but Zelda Akbulut was in her office alone.

  “Good afternoon,” Joy said. “Can I offer you an afternoon fix? Or is it too late in the day for caffeine?”

  Dark blue wariness washed over Zelda’s aura, but she smiled. “It’s never too late.” She accepted the cup Joy held out to her. “Thank you.”

  Zelda’s office was cluttered with the expected books and boxes of documents; the walls were hung with photos of airplanes, and a model of a biplane hung from the ceiling near the window.

  “I should confess, before you drink, that I have an ulterior motive,” said Joy.

  Zelda shrugged and took a sip. “Sit down, then. I probably can’t help you, though.”

  Joy sat. “You don’t even know what I need.”

  “True. But I’m not a very helpful person,” Zelda said.

  “Because of your curse?”

  Zelda’s smile froze and began to fade. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I read auras,” Joy said. “When I first met you I noticed something encircling yours — a sort of fuzzing at the edges. And then the other day, with the coffee and doughnuts—”

  “I’m so sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. I should have realized then — there was sort of a collapse in your aura, like it imploded under the force of the thing surrounding it. A gray that just flooded over you and then retreated. I haven’t studied the auras of many cursed people, so I didn’t realize what it was right away. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Zelda nodded. “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “They never caught the perpetrator?”

  “She died.”

  “Bad luck,” said Joy.

  “Ha. Maybe,” said Zelda. “Maybe…well. It’s a long story. Is this what you need help with? Because that’s the kind of thing that could send my curse into convulsions. When I help people, it backfires. Not every time, and not always in big ways; but when it’s bad it’s really bad.”

  “It’s not an enormous favor. I actually wanted to ask you about Arthur Stag College. You worked there, right?”

  “Oh,” she said, relieved. “Yes, briefly. I lectured all over the place for a few years. That was the last place I worked before I landed here. What do you need to know?”

  “I was wondering how difficult it would be for someone from Gooseberry Bluff to get access to the archives of Stag’s personal papers.”

  Zelda took a long drink of coffee. “Not difficult, I don’t think. That whole cross-town rivalry thing is mainly perpetuated by the undergrads. Some of the faculty definitely see us as unfortunates, but they’re usually eager to help us out for just that reason. What’s Arthur got that you need?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Joy said, and kept talking because she didn’t want to answer more questions on the subject. “So did your curse have something to do with your moving around?”

  “It was…a factor,” Zelda said. Joy knew that employment discrimination based on curses was illegal, but in practice many employers found motivation to fire or refuse to hire based on other factors. In the world of academics there were always plenty of reasons not to renew a nontenured faculty member’s contract.

  “But you’ve been here, what: three years now?”

  Zelda nodded and knocked on the wood of her bookshelf. “Yeah. Partly I think I’ve learned to manage my approach better. I don’t make friends with the undergrads. I’m a bit of a hard-ass, as you may have heard.”

  Joy knew from her files that Zelda was regularly referred to as “The Alchemy Bitch” by the undergrads, but she didn’t mention this.

  “But also — honestly, this is going to sound like a bunch of crap, but I really feel this — it’s not as bad here. The curse, I mean. Have you noticed that magic is a little…different here on campus? Some things are amplified, but others — outside magic, mostly — don’t work as well, or don’t work at all.”

  “I’ve heard something like this,” Joy admitted, thinking of her debriefing with Hector Ay.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect that I’ll ever have a normal life, or that I work on a charmed campus. But it’s to the point now where I come in even on my vacations.”

  “You say it’s not charmed, but it sounds like what you mean is that it is. Like a place of power? A wellspring?”

  “Wellsprings aren’t supposed to exist.”

  “No, they’re not, that’s true. But this effect you’ve noticed — it’s not the entire town, just the campus?”

  “Yes. Philip Fitzgerald says the campus has a reservoir built up from the decades of activity here.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that. But Arthur Stag College has been there longer than Gooseberry Bluff, right? Did you ever notice anything like this over there?”

  Zelda shook her head. “No, I never did.”

  ***

  After he walked Victor, Ken went home to get ready for work. He ate some dry toast — there were flowering raspberry, blueberry, and gooseberry bushes in the backyard, but his stomach couldn’t take fruit lately. The near-empty bottle of malbec stood patiently on the counter. He showered, drank coffee, and stretched out on the deck. The mail came, and he spent a half hour browsing through the new issue of The Journal of Syncretic Divination, but it couldn’t hold his attention. He put it in his satchel to bring to the school, and he stood in the middle of his living room.

  He was fifty-eight years old. He had always expected that when he got to this age he would be content. He was successful, he was respected — even loved — but he was not content. Every day he thought about retiring, but he didn’t think he could bear it. When he was younger, this house had seemed like a sanctuary, but lately it just felt empty.

  He had a lunch of cucumber sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, drank the last of the Australian malbec straight from the bottle, and rode his bike down to the college.

  It was the sort of day that made him happy to be alive. The sun was warm on his ba
ck, the river breeze cool on his face. He passed through the town square, built after the 1965 flood, and built right. The town hall was a midcentury modern building with a sweeping parabolic roof that shouldered above the three-story Bauhaus-row storefronts that comprised the other three sides of the square. The honey-colored blocks were functional but beautiful, with shops on the first floor, professional offices on the second, and apartments on the third. As he passed through Ken saw couples eating ice cream, jugglers entertaining families, a violinist performing on the corner. If you hadn’t been so busy feeling sorry for yourself, you could have spent some time down here today, he thought to himself.

  He made it to the college at about a quarter past twelve, hauled his bike up three flights of stairs — his daily workout — and found a student waiting for him in the outer office.

  “She’s been here since eleven,” said Pam, the departmental secretary.

  “I’m sorry, Professor Song,” said the girl. “I know your office hours aren’t until twelve thirty. I just thought if I came early maybe you’d have a little extra time.”

  “Give me a minute.” Ken picked up his mail and messages. There was nothing important, but he took his time. The worst thing you could do with students was to give them the impression that your time wasn’t valuable. He hung up his bike, stretched, and drank a few glasses of water from the cooler, by which time it was 12:30 exactly.

  “Come on in, Ms.…”

  “May. Margaret May. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I just was having trouble with the assignment and I know it’s due today and I—”

  “Sit down and slow down,” Ken said. He met the girl’s eyes and breathed slowly, hoping she would take the hint and do the same. “Now. Where’s your partner?”

  “Um. Well, she…she wanted to work with her friends.”

  “What was her name?”

  Margaret hesitated. “I don’t want to get her in trouble or anything, professor. I’m very self-directed, you know? I like to do things myself. It usually goes better…that way.”

  “Have you ever done any divination before, Margaret?”

  “Yes. Sort of. Not really. Not for real. Ouija boards and Tarot cards, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Divination is social magic, Margaret. You can’t tell your own fortune. You can’t answer your own questions. A diviner always works on behalf of others; otherwise the magic is unfocused. The part that’s not magic is figuring out what people are really asking, what they really want to know. That’s also an important skill, and not just in divination.”

  Margaret sighed. “I guess…I’m having some trouble.” Her voice broke on the last word, but she blinked and kept herself composed. “I don’t really know anybody here. A lot of the students are from the local high schools, I guess? And then a lot of them are older, or they’re from overseas? I just…” She laughed. “I’m not that good at making friends with people.”

  “It’s not always easy,” said Ken. “OK, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to reshuffle the partners, so that you don’t have to feel singled out, and whoever you end up with, you are going to work with. You don’t have to like them, but you may not allow them to weasel out of being your partner. You’ll have to work a little harder on the people thing, all right?”

  Margaret nodded. “Yes, I promise. Thank you.”

  “In the meantime, you can do your assignment here, with me.” Ken picked up a coffee cup with a half inch of moldy red wine in it. “This is what you’ll be reading from.” He set it in front of her. “But first, what’s my question?”

  “OK! Right. You, sir, what can I — just a second.” She started to pull her notebook out of her bag.

  “Margaret, let’s try to do without that. Just try to remember the key points from the lecture and the reading.”

  “Key points, sure. OK, please, can you focus on what you need to know? If you — if there’s a phrase or even just a single word that summarizes what you’re most concerned about, just try to fix that in your mind for me.” She swallowed. “Was that OK?”

  “I’m focusing, Margaret.” Or trying to. He couldn’t expect a complete novice to gain any insight into the location of his dueling opponent. He tried to focus on something mundane — the growth on Victor’s front right leg, maybe — but his subconscious was already settled on one thing. “All right, I think I have it.”

  “Great!” She smiled up at him. “Um. Is there any way you could sit down?”

  Ken borrowed a chair from the outer office. Hilda gave him a sympathetic look; Ken might have rolled his eyes in return, but he was beginning to be interested in what Margaret might find. What he’d said about divination being social magic was true; every day since Philip had been gone he’d wanted to do a reading about his safety or return, but there was no point, and no one else he could talk to about where Philip had gone.

  “OK,” Margaret said when he was sitting down across from her. “Now, to focus my own energies—”

  “What comes before that?”

  “Oh, crap. Gather. Gather, focus, execute. OK, gathering now.” Margaret closed her eyes and held up her hands as if in supplication. Ken resisted the urge to tell her that the dramatics weren’t going to help; there was such a thing as overcorrecting a student. Better to get her through this and worry about the small stuff later. And indeed, once Margaret stopped talking, the energy changed completely. The sunlight streaming through his office window took on a Technicolor tinge, and there was a slight feeling of vertigo, as if the girl had become the gravitational center of the room.

  “You may state your question if you are comfortable doing so,” she said. Her voice was distorted, like a record running at too low a speed. “Otherwise please continue to focus on your foremost concern.”

  Ken said nothing. He wondered if this girl had any idea how much power she had access to. He wondered what the hell she was doing at this school.

  Margaret opened her eyes and leaned over the coffee cup with its dregs of moldy malbec. “A long, arduous journey. He will return, but he will change. He has not found what he was looking for.” She let out a breath, and then sniffed at the cup. “Oh, that’s rancid,” she said, leaning back. “What is that?”

  The energy in the room had returned to normal. Ken reached across the table and slid the cup away from Margaret, quickly enough that he hoped she wouldn’t notice his hands were shaking. “That was good,” he said. “Write it up according to the format I gave you. You can turn it in tomorrow if you need a little extra time.”

  “I can get it to you by lecture,” Margaret said. “That was actually really easy! Who’s on a journey?”

  “A friend.” Ken stood and waved as Margaret left. Her reading had been cryptic, and reassuring on its face — so why did it worry him?

  ***

  Martin’s funeral took place on a sticky, overcast Saturday morning outside DC. Joy portalled directly to the temple, one of a stream of mourners passing through the receiving doors.

  “Wilkins,” someone called, and she recognized Flood’s aura. He was wearing a white blazer over a white polo. Gray was beside him in loose-fitting white beach pants and a collarless white shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck. White was the Hindu color of mourning, and it made for an odd sort of uniform. Joy wore a midcalf white skirt and a short-sleeved white top, and tried to imagine the three of them as a trio of angels. She failed. Gray fit the bill, or nearly so, but neither Flood nor herself would be particularly convincing.

  She tracked her companions carefully as they joined the other white-clad mourners. She recognized a few more auras, or thought she did; she had consulted once on a paper about the radical instability of auras at funerals, due not only to their inherent emotional charge but to the pressure to display or suppress grief, sometimes both at once.

  Joy’s own grief welled up when she was intercepted by Martin’s wife, Veena. “Joy, it’s me, Veena,” she said, and Joy immediately burst into tears, because Veena had always b
een so considerate of her face blindness — sometimes to the point of exasperation, but always coming from a place of kindness and patience.

  “I’m so sorry.” Joy wasn’t sure her words were intelligible, but she blurted them out anyway as she and Veena embraced. “Martin was…he was so…” But her grief was too raw; she couldn’t put her feelings into words, let alone put those words in a pleasing order.

  “I know,” Veena said. “He was so proud of you, Joy. And I’m so grateful to you for surviving, and for bringing in the man who killed him.”

  Joy nodded and managed to calm herself. She released Veena, and Flood stepped smoothly between them.

  “Mrs. Shil, perhaps you remember me, I’m Benjamin Flood.”

  “Of course I remember you.” Veena shook his hand, but the tone of her voice was not friendly.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss. As you say, we have the assassin in custody. We’ll find out who’s behind this.”

  “I hope so, Benjamin. I understand you’ve taken on a great deal of Martin’s responsibility since he was killed. I hope you haven’t overreached.”

  “I…I don’t think so, ma’am. I can’t replace your husband, but I—”

  “No, you would not be a very good replacement, that’s true. If you’ll excuse me, the service is about to start. Will I see you after, Joy?”

  Joy nodded, bowing her head to hide her pleasure at Veena’s slam on Flood. Veena squeezed her hand good-bye before making her way through the sea of indistinguishable white-clad people to the front of the room. Joy stepped into the viewing line behind Flood and Gray.

  She remembered a warm day like this one, the day of Martin and Veena’s daughter’s wedding. The ceremony had taken place in this same temple, but the reception had been at a private house a few miles away. After dinner Joy and Martin had sat together on the wide porch. Martin had had a couple of drinks, and out of the blue he had started talking about work.