by Jenn Bennett
Tiers of synthetic putting greens lay just ahead of us, most of them choked with real weeds growing between the seams of plastic grass. A few others were flooded. All of it was sad and silent—no children, no cars passing in the distance.
“When I was a kid, my dad and I came here,” Lon said. “Used to be an A&W next door. We’d get root beer floats after we played.” A nostalgic smile lightened his face. “He’d always let me win.”
“Do you miss him?” I asked, trying not to think of my own parents.
“Sometimes,” he admitted at length. “Jupe was just a kid when he died. I wish he’d lived long enough to see him grow up. He was better at expressing his feelings than I am.”
I was surprised to hear him admit this. “If you ask me, what you do is more important than what you say.” Had I understood this a few years ago, my life might’ve been different. My parents lied to my face my whole life, then ditched me before I’d finished high school. I couldn’t imagine Lon forcing Jupe to live on his own at seventeen—no matter the circumstances, not in a million years. “Besides, it’s not like Jupe needs a role model for expressing himself. He’s expressive enough for both of you.”
He squinted down at me and suppressed a smile. “Maybe you’re right.”
We meandered past a gigantic Mother Hubbard shoe on hole twelve and a morbid decapitated crocodile on the tenth hole. The missing head was three holes down, its too-wide eyes mocking us atop the bank of a pinball obstacle.
After a few minutes of walking, Lon stopped at the seventh hole. The final resting place for the ball in this course was beneath a colorful castle. But that’s not where Lon’s eyes were. He was studying the cartoonish King and Queen statues that flanked a small bench at the beginning of the path: King Bull and Queen Cow, to be precise. They stood upright on two legs, both dressed in medieval finery, now faded and grimy. A miniature forest of weeds grew up around them.
Their frozen bovine faces stared back at us. The Queen’s black fiberglass nose had broken off and been plugged with an orange golf ball.
Lon pulled out his phone and opened a JPEG of the scanned Polaroid, held the screen in front of him and squinted. “Look.”
I slipped under his arm and compared the image on the screen with the dreary vista in front of us. The elusive dark shape in the foreground of the photo matched the outline of the Queen’s torso—her molded blond hair, crown askew, and the sign she was holding on her shoulder that read: USE THE HONOR SYSTEM WHEN COUNTING STROKES.
Behind her, the same two palm trees stood in the distance, only taller. I squatted low to get a different angle. “How in the world did you remember this?”
“I broke her nose,” Lon said, shoving the phone back into the front pocket of his jeans. “An accident. Was swinging my club around. Reared back and poked a hole through one of her nostrils with the grip. Looks like someone else punched the rest of it out.”
We stood together in silent memorial for the defaced Queen.
“What now?” I finally said. “There must be something important about her.”
“Important enough that Bishop either swallowed the photo to keep someone else from getting it—”
“Or someone shoved it down his throat in anger,” I finished. “Trying to hide a secret.”
And maybe that someone was Frater Merrin. He bit Cindy Brolin—as Lon said, the magician certainly wasn’t innocent in all this—and may have even murdered the original seven kids taken in the ’80s. Stands to reason that he could’ve done away with Bishop.
“Help me look.”
As the sun shone intermittently behind shifting dark clouds, we circled Queen Cow, ripping away weeds to examine her for clues. No writing, no scratched message in any strange magical alphabet. But when I was inspecting her face, I brushed the Honor System sign she held in her hoofed hand. The sign was loose, and a dull pink light glowed from inside the sliver where her shoulder met the back of the sign.
“Lon! Here. Same pink charge that was in the cannery on that door ward.”
“Dammit.” Lon tried to pry the sign away, but his fingers slipped off once, twice. . . .
“Same spell, as well,” I confirmed. “Keeps people away.”
I took out the red ochre chalk and wrote out the counterspell I’d used on the door in the cannery, letting my spit dribble slowly into the hidden crevice. With a fizzle, the pink glow disappeared, but before I could pat myself on the back, the golf ball suddenly became dislodged and fell out of the cow’s broken nose, bouncing as it hit the golf path. We watched in surprise as it rolled away.
A cracking noise brought our attention back to the Queen. The fiberglass sign had split away from the body. The resulting dark crack gaped open; something shiny was down in there.
“Is it safe?” Lon asked, peering closer.
“I think so.”
He reached a few fingers inside, twisted his hand, and slowly retrieved an object from the crevice—a tarnished silver tube, maybe a foot or more in length, a couple inches in diameter. Milky white glass capped either end, reminding me of a fancy kaleidoscope. A long leather strap suggested that it was intended to be worn around the body.
“What in the world is”—a louder crack! interrupted my words—“that?”
The Queen’s entire body was splitting like a fissure on an ice-capped lake. The crack ran down the length of her side in one direction, up her shoulder, and across her face in the other. As it continued to deepen unnaturally, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. I really didn’t like this magick. Didn’t like it when we first encountered it in the cannery, and didn’t like it out here in the abandoned putt-putt course.
With my hand on Lon’s arm, I took a step back, attempting to pull him along with me. He wouldn’t budge. The rigid muscle under his jacket might as well have been stone.
The front of the Queen buckled and swayed. I muffled the urge to yell “timber” as the crack ran across the base and the molded fiberglass shell began falling away from its inner wire armature.
“Move!” I shouted, yanking Lon. In a daze, he staggered backward as the fiberglass crashed into the cement in front of us and shattered into sharp pieces around our feet. At the base of the armature, the fissure grew. It radiated like a spiderweb and ran into the cement under the bench . . . then up and over it, across King Bull. Continued to spread down through the golf path, burrowing wide, ragged crevices into the ground. Mud seeped down into the dark spaces it left behind. I backed up and nearly tripped over the wood border than lined the course, righting myself on the muddy, synthetic grass.
“It’s a spell,” Lon said dazedly.
“Of course it’s a spell!” What else would it be? The fissure spread up nearby trees, crackling the bark . . . it created a filigree pattern up the side of the castle obstacle.
We doubled back over the castle fairway and stopped at the next putting green as one of the smaller trees dropped branches and the side of the castle fell apart. The magical crack continued to spread.
“Do something,” Lon snapped.
I cut him a dirty look. “Do what?”
Lon gave me a sidelong glance, his expression a mixture of alarm and anger. “What you did in the cannery!”
We jumped and cried out in surprise as the castle armature tipped and fell over with a boom, shaking the ground. The crack had destroyed everything around hole seven and was overtaking the surrounding greens.
He was right; I had to do something. I tried to will my Moonchild power, but nothing happened. It was dead. I couldn’t understand why—how could it snap into action without my calling it up in the cannery, then refuse to surface when I tried now? Frustrated, I climbed a small hill on one of the courses, and tried again. Again, nothing.
“I can’t!” I yelled as several trees split, the wood groaning in protest.
“Try harder.”
“I’m trying, asshole—I told you, I can’t!” Then something hit me. A big, gigantic Duh. “It’s daytime! No moon! I need the moon to dra
w power.” It had been night or near-night every time I’d used it in the past—in the Hellfire caves, when my parents were trying to kill me, and in the cannery. It was midafternoon now.
His face fell. He knew I was right.
“Can you manually cast the spell that you used at the cannery?”
“I’d have to circle the whole golf center with chalk. There’s not enough time.”
“Try again to use your ability,” he suggested, panic in his voice. “Maybe it’s possible when the moon’s not out, just harder. Take a few breaths first.”
Mumbling obscenities, I closed my eyes and attempted to calm myself enough to call up the power. Attempted to block out the image of the spell spreading through the town and destroying buildings like some sort of apocalyptic magical plague. Tried instead to visualize the experience of the blackness pushing away my surroundings and the blue pinpoint of light appearing.
“Come on, come on,” Lon muttered.
Something clicked inside me; it crouched at the edge of my consciousness. I could just feel it connecting. Maybe I could pull it up if I tried harder. . . .
“Shit!” Lon yelled.
My eyes flew open. The entire park was cracking and crumbling as if a silent earthquake had hit. The fissure was spreading faster. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if it touched us.
Apparently Lon didn’t either. “I think we’re done here, witch.”
He grabbed my hand and we fled like rabbits, hopping down terraces and cutting through the courses. Mud seeped into the hems of our jeans as we stumbled through underbrush and soared around the maze of dead course obstacles, past the unassembled dinosaur—
The ground suddenly cracked below my feet. My shoe snagged, midrun. I face-planted into the mud, the wind knocked out of my lungs.
Lon’s yelp of surprise floated over my head. I couldn’t breathe. Desperately I clawed at a puddle as my lower body sank. A horrific rumble shook my bones. Metal creaked behind me.
I couldn’t see. Mud stung my eyes. I felt Lon’s hands wrap around my wrists like steel bands. He pulled, but my foot was stuck in the earth. When the section of metal dinosaur came crashing down, it sounded like a bomb. An explosion. A car wreck.
Pain ripped through my leg.
I think I screamed, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t hear it. The ground was swallowing me. My leg was trapped under a metal dinosaur torso. Lon’s hands slipped away from mine. I struggled—fought, pulled, thrashed. . . . I was feral. Completely out of my mind.
My body was sinking faster. The dinosaur was weighing me down. I stopped fighting and clung to a crumbling sliver of ground.
I was going down.
Buried alive. What a horrible way to die. I’d often imagined myself being torn apart by some primal Æthyric demon, or poisoned after testing a bad batch of medicinals—maybe even shot down while fleeing an FBI agent, come to collect me for my parent’s heinous crimes.
But not this.
Not half-blind and suffocating in a whirlpool of mud.
Something pressed against my side. The steady vibration of the quaking ground was punctuated by three stronger thuds that reverberated through the metal dinosaur like a struck gong. It was Lon, kicking at it. On the fourth kick, the pressure lifted from my pinned leg. I yanked. Lon yanked. My knee found purchase on a tree root beneath the sinking ground, and I climbed, grasping fistfuls of wet grass above my head.
Lon grabbed the back of my jacket and hoisted me as I scrabbled to heave myself aboveground. My hip had barely cleared the unnatural sinkhole when I felt myself being sucked back down again. I wedged my fingers inside an expanding crevice. My jacket and shirt nearly slid over my head as Lon strained and yanked me forward.
“Up!” he yelled, not giving me a moment to rest.
Pain shot through my leg when I tried to stand. The earth shook and I wavered on my feet.
“Move—go!”
Lon gripped my waist and tugged me along. I faltered, then limped, then jogged, ignoring the pain. It only took me a few seconds to run without aid. We sloshed over the rumbling mud, outrunning the earthquake.
The fence was only a few yards away. Lon glanced back at the advancing fissure. “Climb,” he instructed, securing the mudied silver tube inside his jacket.
No trash can on this side, so he boosted me up with his hands splayed across my ass. Under better circumstances, I might’ve appreciated this more, but it was all I could do to pull myself up and over the damn fence, even with his help.
Lon started climbing before I’d finished, pressuring me to drop. He slipped by my side and jumped down, then reached up to help me.
“Oww!” I cried out in pain. The leg of my jeans was torn and stuck on the fence.
The ground shook with crashing trees. The fissure was a few feet away. I twisted to jerk at my caught pant leg, grunted and tugged. The denim ripped, I fell into Lon’s arms, and we tumbled, knocking over the trash can as we crashed to the ground.
Lon groaned as we untangled and pushed ourselves back to our feet, preparing to run again. Then everything went silent. No quaking. No sounds of destruction.
“It stopped!”
I glanced back at the park. The fence was still standing. A couple of aftershocks made us both jump, but when we were sure that it was really over, I warily peered through the chain link. Sure enough, the craggy fissures had crept all the way to the fence, then inexplicably halted. The entire property looked like it had been nuked and then swallowed by the earth. Nothing was standing but the brick entry building and the fence; the courses were just a mass of crumbled obstacles and fallen trees.
We surveyed the decimated land for a long moment, both of us breathing heavily. I squeezed my eyes shut, then reopened them, hoping to find everything restored. Maybe it was magick, like the cannery. That had been an illusion—the bugs had disappeared; they weren’t real. This was.
“Did you use the Moonchild power?”
I shook my head, trying to catch my breath. “No. Wasn’t me.”
“What stopped it, then?”
“Hell if I know. The fence? Maybe it was just a ward that covered this property.”
“I hate this magick,” Lon mumbled.
Understatement of the day. Shock and relief mixed inside me. More than a little anxiety, too. Sure, I was thankful to be standing alive on this side of the fence, but the weird Æthyric magick—if that’s what it was—was screwing with my head. It’s hard to play the game when you didn’t know the rules. I inspected the fence for markings, seeking something that might’ve been placed to contain the spell. Nothing.
“You’re bleeding.” Lon bent to inspect my leg, pushing back my torn jeans. Blood and mud swirled over pale skin. The cut was a couple of inches long and it throbbed. “We need to clean this.”
We could both be dead right now, trapped underground. What would Jupe do without his dad? My heart clenched painfully at the thought of him being left alone if something happened to Lon. Things were simpler when I had only myself to think about.
Cold wind bit through my damp clothes while the distant sound of a solitary car chugged along on the deserted highway. “Can we please go home now?”
I limped to the SUV. Lon cranked it up and turned on the seat warmers. While the engine idled, he retrieved hand wipes from the glove compartment and helped me gently clean the mud from my cut. It stung something crazy, and it was sore. A bruise was already blooming on my shin.
Lon took the silver tube out of his pocket and turned it in his hands.
“Huh.”
“What is it?” I leaned over the armrest for a closer look.
The tube was beautiful, engraved with a floral pattern that wound around hidden sigils. In the center was a single word constructed from the same foreign alphabet used on the mandalas in the cannery. Apparently Bishop’s Polaroid really had been a threat to somebody.
“Look,” he said, pointing to one end of the tube.
A small keyhole.
Lon opened the armrest compartment and dug through it, retrieving the box that held Bishop’s key, which looked to be the right size.
“Is your leg okay? Can you make a few more minutes? I want to open it here,” Lon said. “If it’s got some weird spell attached to it, I’d rather it not destroy my house and kill my kid.”
Outside the SUV on the rough parking lot I drew an antimagick spell, then kindled Heka with electricity that I pulled from the power lines above us. I couldn’t feel any residual magick inside it, so Lon inserted Bishop’s key. The lock snicked open. We backed up and waited for a few seconds. Nothing happened. No magical crack in the parking lot. No giant magical cockroaches.
Lon lifted the unlocked cap and cautiously peeked inside the tube. Inside was a scroll of parchment paper. Old paper, old ink. Lon’s obsessions. He carefully withdrew it for inspection.
I whistled. “Look at that.”
He blew out a long breath. “Vellum.” He took one glove off to feel the paper, then sniffed it. “Iron gall ink, probably. See where it has caused the paper to disintegrate?” He unrolled the top of it with delicate precision, wincing as it crackled. We studied the handwritten text together.
It was a spell, written in a strange language, but not the same as in the mandalas and on the tube, and peppered with crude drawings of sigils and seals.
“Well, well . . . what do we have here?” Lon murmured.
My heart raced. “What is this? Do you know this language?”
“Looks like Old Nubian or Coptic. Maybe I can translate it at home.”
“Most of this looks foreign to me, but this symbol here is a key,” I said, pointing. “It’s used with other symbols in spells to unlock doors.”
Lon peered at it and tried to make sense of the surrounding symbols.
“I wonder if this is part of Merrin’s bargain with his demon.”
“I don’t know, but the alphabet engraved on the tube isn’t earthly,” he said, “it’s Æthyric. And we need to translate it.”
