Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  “I’m sure he’ll just use the barbecue, Mom,” said Andromeda, pushing the door closed and slamming it. So the joke hadn’t worked as well as she’d hoped. He had burned “documents” before, and had managed never to burn down the neighborhood so far. The worst that could happen, really, was that the world would contain fewer vintage copies of Penthouse and Den’s supply of Scandinavian nature and sports magazines might dry up.

  Andromeda was more annoyed at the mom than usual, for some reason, perhaps because she had shattered her peace of mind so thoroughly just at the moment when invoking the King of Sacramento had really seemed like it could pay off. How do normal kids express annoyance at their parents? Answer: loud obnoxious music. And Andromeda had access to the most obnoxious music known to man: Byron’s god-awful Swedish Choronzon CD. Of course, she would have to suffer through it too, that was the price. More as a stunt to see what it would be like to play the role than anything else, she put in the CD and turned it as loud as it would go. Then, to put the icing on the cake, she started jumping around in the kind of dance she imagined you might do to Cthulhu rock, something wild and irregular and voodoo-y, the grotesque contortions of an ancient race conducting unmentionable rites. And she sang along at the top of her lungs, too. The words were very easy to pick up. “Shub-Niggurath—the song! Shub-Niggurath—the song! The goat with a thousand young!”

  Andromeda kept it up till the Champlains downstairs started pounding on the ceiling with a broom. Another first. Part of her wanted to keep going to see what it would be like if they called the police on her, but she wasn’t that much of a rebel. She turned down the volume and sank to the floor, rather joyously exhausted, to her considerable surprise. This must have been why people did this sort of thing. Endorphins, like she got from tantooning, except from the inside and all over her body. She didn’t think she’d broken any bones.

  The horrible cacophony of Choronzon was finally fading and she was just about to remove the CD when she heard a quiet strumming that was very un-Choronzon-like and turned it louder to make sure she’d heard correctly.

  It was Byron’s voice, singing over a quiet guitar, and it was a song about her.

  Andromeda Klein, Andromeda Klein,

  Born under a lonely sign …

  She turned bright red, all over her face, well past her hairline and all down her chest. It was goofy. It was corny. He was an idiot. It was not too good. But it was also kind of great. She listened to it twenty times in a row. It made her laugh and cry at the same time.

  Whether it was the endorphins from all the jumping around to the Cthulhu rock, the crying-laughing state of mind brought on by Byron’s silly, silly Andromeda Klein song, or the fact that Andromeda had thrown a few dragon’s-teeth seeds on the brazier in preparation for the abortive invocation before everything had happened, Andromeda passed easily from semiconsciousness to her box that night. She was lifted directly out of her body on tiny clouds that felt like hands, and she floated into the dark sphere with the purplish yellowish light, then was propelled very quickly down a series of viscous, pulsing tunnels, one of which opened up to the familiar box room with the purple smoke walls, and finally dropped, almost slammed, into her box. She felt the impact on her back, and it felt rather nice: a small, satisfying thud.

  She had a pretty strong feeling she was going to see the King of Sacramento, and soon she felt his presence and felt his strong arms taking hold of her and beginning to wrap her in her silk ribbon bindings.

  “I do not have a great deal of time for you,” he said brusquely, but not unpleasantly or without kindness. “Just enough to dress you and secure you. You may ask any questions you like, until you are fully secured.”

  Andromeda found she could not move her jaw, or cause any sound at all to issue from her throat. And she couldn’t think of any questions, either.

  “No?” he said, lifting the back of her head so he could tie on her blindfold, then setting it down again. She felt the lid drop down on her box, and heard the sound of the iron clasps being fastened and locked in place. She was crying with the effort of trying to form words, even as she sank gratefully into the comfort and safety of being tightly bound in the strong, secure box.

  “Very well,” said the King of Sacramento. “I must be on my way. I will leave you with a thought or two. A man named MacGregor once endured a lifetime of ruin and pain, hounded by spiritual creatures summoned by a mere senseless act of plagiarism. Monks in scriptoria have not always understood the mischief that their uncomprehending quill scratches might do, especially those scratches which happened to find themselves scratched at auspicious times. Once summoned, such creatures can be hard to control indeed. You could do much worse than consulting Solomon’s books, even allowing that much nonsense has made its way into them. Discerning the necessary from the superfluous is the work of a lifetime, but I will tell you that were I intending to confront an infernal duke and his retinue of an evening, I would be quite grateful indeed to have in hand, at the very least, a serviceable blade of iron. Strip away what you like in the name of modernity and the fashionable theories of Vienna, by all means, but take care you are not thereby stripped to nothing, and armed only with pretense and vanity.”

  The King of Sacramento then did something strange and marvelous. He leaned over and softly, gently, and, it seemed, rather intently, kissed her on her silk-covered lips before settling her iron face plate in its groove in the lid and tightening its bolts and screws and clicking in its locks. She was seeing waves and stars against her blindfolded eyelids. The King of Sacramento’s voice was muffled and distant now that the face plate was in place.

  “And as you well know, the Lord of Peace, Restored, can produce the Lord of Sorrow through a process, or bridge, of Empress. But everything is not always so grandiose.” He rapped the lid of her box with his stick as though to signal “Job well done,” and he was gone.

  It was the tightest, most secure she had ever been in her box, in a lifetime of having been there, and it was the deepest, most satisfying sleep she had ever had. She couldn’t wait to do it again. Had she been able, she would have thrown on some more dragons’ teeth and gone right back to sleep immediately, but it was a school day.

  Had that been an invocation that she had managed inadvertently in her sleep through exhaustion and strong emotion and dangerously intoxicating perfumes? And perhaps even aided by the ill-conceived (yet undeniably barbarous) “barbarous names” growled by the Choronzon singer? She was still buzzing from the dream kiss, and from St. Steve’s text, which had arrived late last night but which she had only seen that morning: “u look good wet.” She hadn’t even ordered that one.

  Listening for Huggy often worked best in the bath; the rushing water and the rushing sound in her ears and head seeming to cancel each other out somehow, allowing the tiny, insistent, often quite cranky voice to become intelligible.

  Let me guess, said Huggy. You’re walking on air?

  “Never mind about that,” said Andromeda to the swirling silvery Huggy wisp she could barely see, somewhere in there. “Just replay what he said.”

  Huggy had Its annoying aspects, but It was a terrific memory aid, and It dutifully replayed the King of Sacramento’s words with perfect clarity and detail. I will leave the disgusting final act for you to replay all by yourself, if you don’t mind. It was talking about the kiss. That was the one bit Andromeda had no trouble remembering. Words were hard, kisses were not.

  “You’re going to be a great help on the SAT when the time comes,” said Andromeda, and it was so true that Huggy didn’t even recognize it as an attempt at humor.

  You will get the score I believe you deserve, It said with complete seriousness.

  “So,” said Andromeda, getting back to business. “Basically, I need to get a sword.”

  Bingo, said Huggy. A serviceable blade of iron. And then It was gone. Of course.

  “Who are you talking to in there?” came the mom’s accusing voice from beyond the wall, but Andromeda
’s head was underwater by then, only her eyes, nose, and mouth above the surface, and she was thinking about being locked in a box and kissed by a man in a hood with a sword and a wand.

  The dad’s paranoid barbecue of documents and other printed matter hadn’t gotten too far off the ground, to judge from the scattered half-charred bits of paper and magazine remnants lying in and around the bulbous black barbecue unit’s grill. He had even tried to burn some of his records, including some of the stock of the Light Bulb Bomb single he had put out on his own label before getting kicked out of the collective. Poor Dad, she thought. It was really rather sad. He hadn’t succeeded in burning down the neighborhood or even much of the actual “evidence.” The rain would have made that pretty difficult anyway, but most likely he had just lost interest in the project in its early stages and moved on to something else. That was what usually happened.

  The stuff in the carport, however, had been quite jumbled up and disarranged. It looked like a cyclone had hit it. The mom wasn’t going to like this at all. Papers, circuit boards, tools, wires, magazines, boxes, were all upended and scattered.

  She was unlocking her bike, looking around for any stray magazines that might be of interest to Den, when she noticed a small, crumpled and damp pile of papers that had the unmistakable look of Emily’s drawings. They must have been tucked somewhere and dislodged and accidentally excavated by the dad’s search for his own incriminating documents amidst all the remains of all the previous inhabitants this house had ever known. She picked it up and got a jolt from the mother of all synchs, because on the top sheet it said, in clear though faded and also slightly running blue ink, KING OF SAC. Closer inspection revealed that the full text was actually THINKING OF SAC, above a map of the state of California. It looked a lot like someone’s school assignment, and perhaps it had been, but then someone had scribbled little skulls and crossbones all over it, as though to mark the cities. She ran inside to spread the five sheets out to dry over her bed, noticing some of the tarot-y themes from her other Emily drawings: the flying eagle motorcycle, the crowned pentagram boy, the burning towers, the demon-alien child clawing its way out of a stick figure’s belly, though these seemed a bit less carefully drawn, yet somehow more mature. She sealed her door with a quick “Curse be on all who enter” hexagram ritual, and also said a little prayer to Isis that the mom be prevented from intruding. Now she was going to be late for sure.

  There was a smashed-up old portable tape player in the mud by one of the carport posts. Andromeda would have thought nothing of it, except that the partially exposed, grubby, and peeling label of the cassette sticking out of it had some strange writing on it, and when she picked it up it was another huge-ass synch, because though it was very hard to make out what it said, it began with a ZOS (clearly a reference to Austin Osman Spare’s Anathema of ZOS) and it ended with a 666. Now, that was weedgie.

  What could be on the tape? It was her understanding that Cthulhu rock was a fairly recent phenomenon, and this cassette was clearly very old. She removed the tape and pocketed it. She was sorely tempted to blow off school entirely and sift through the newly uncovered carport layers, but she was already near her missed-days limit for the year and she had no intention of repeating the whole asinine junior year if she could help it. Once was far, far more than enough. The total content of her eleven and a half years of formal education, including the years at the Gnome School, could easily have been covered, minus bullying and training in awkward social interaction, in a mildly paced two-week seminar.

  “Why don’t they at least give you that option?” she asked Dave, who was sitting in the middle of the driveway eyeing her coldly, clearly having no answer for that one.

  She regretted sending her “when can I see you?” reply text to UNAVAILABLE the second she pressed Send. Too much, too much. That was how she’d lost him the first time. And of course, there was no response, though to be fair, he often failed to respond even when there was no possible reason for him to be exasperated with her.

  She was giving herself the “You are such an idiot” lecture under her breath as she pedaled to school, while speed-dialing Byron’s number, and the timing was such that he picked up just as she was saying it.

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” said Byron.

  “No, not you,” she said. “Some stupid girl.” She cleared her throat, thinking about how it was no wonder he had been hurt by her offhand dismissal of the song earlier, and how he might well be hurt by her admitting to not actually having listened to it till now. “So, I listened to the song. I’m sorry, really sorry I didn’t notice it before, and …” She braked to let a bus go by. “It was, well, just thanks. It was super nice of you to do.” She felt like she was going to start crying again, so she hung up.

  That went well, said Huggy.

  Was it her imagination, or were people at school looking at her with even greater puzzlement and revulsion than they usually did? Did she look weirder than usual? She was buzzing from the electricity of the successful dream invocation of the King of Sacramento, and vibrating inside from the memory of his gentle, loving, commanding silk kiss—if she had been a cat it would have come out as a gentle purring. She worried about St. Steve. She was inexplicably emotional about the emogeekian’s dorky song, though maybe, possibly, that could just be period hormone emotions run amok. She was worried about the dad. She was thinking about Daisy. She was listening for Huggy. She was just the same as she always was, except maybe more so.

  She was also arrayed in Daisy gear: the vinyl coat, the studded belt with the skull buckle, with new holes punched in it to fit, and the knitted fingerless gauntlets. But not the wig. Rather, a plastic headband that looked kind of mod and hurt her scalp satisfyingly. Few would remember Daisy, or even know about her, but maybe they sensed the weedginess. Andromeda liked the clothes. They made her feel closer to Daisy. And maybe they would help attract Daisy and induce her to reveal more of whatever the hell she was up to out there. Daisy’s scent hovered everywhere around her as she rode, then walked, like she was in a little Daisy cloud.

  Even Baby Talk Barnes seemed to be eyeing her strangely. When he handed back her Language Arts journal, it was another fairly major synch, because the score he had given her on it was a 93. There had been lots of weedgie items in this one, the GAAP and AMY sigils, the little story about A. E. Waite learning to ride a bicycle and getting his mustache caught in a tree, and the spooky cannibalized Emily drawing of the burning church that looked quite a lot like the Tower. Maybe he was secretly a weedgie person, and this score was a coded greeting. She stared at him, expecting a wink or something.

  “Ninety-three,” she said tentatively, going up to him after class.

  “Ninety-what?” he said. She couldn’t tell whether he was teasing her, or really clueless.

  “Just, you know, ninety-three,” she said.

  “Oh, wight,” said Baby Talk Barnes, catching on. “Good jou-ah-nal sco-ah.” He always pronounced Rs as “ah” when they were at the end of syllables.

  So it was not a message after all; just a synch.

  Then came the wink. A.E., she oathed, how would she ever know?

  “I weally loved the dwawing,” he said. “Gweat stuff. I had no idea you had such talent. Mo-wa like that, please.”

  Rosalie caught up with her on her way to Nutrition.

  “Okay, Androma-Daisy,” she said. “Ran out of your own clothes or something? Anyhow, it’s an improvement over the Grim Reaper look. Leg warmers for your arms. That’s hip. So: good news. The Samoans and the Mexicans all think you put a curse on Lacey Garcia that backfired on to Empress and made her fall and break her leg. So they all want to kick your ass now. Well, more than they did before.”

  “Good news?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Rosalie, “actually, now that you mention it, that’s not really instinctively good news, is it? In fact, it’s a little bit bad. But on the bright side, they’re all scared of you now, and you can easily outru
n the big ones on those sweet little legs of yours. No, the good news is Charles has come crawling back to me and is begging for my forgiveness. He’s coming home this week and my plan is to torment him. And I owe it all to you and your gift of prophesary. So, quickly, you have to help: I need you to give me some hickeys for the big night.”

  “What? No, that would be too weird. What about Gas Station Boy?”

  “Joshua’s hickeys are no longer welcome in this jurisdiction,” she said. “Besides, I’d like a friend to do it. You’d do it for Beth, no fucking doubt. Skidding.”

  Andromeda turned bright red. Her headband itched.

  “I’ll think about it,” Andromeda finally said. The whole thing could be a big joke, or it could be real. Either way, it was nearly impossible to say no to Rosalie van Genuchten. “Not here, though. I’m sure that would be an expellable offense.”

  “Fucking pshaw,” said Rosalie. “Those socks are just not staying up on you, are they?” And she was right. Andromeda’s legs were too skinny for her over-the-knee stripey socks. She had put on two pairs of black tights underneath to add thigh girth, but it just hadn’t been enough.

  In the vacuum, while Andromeda was sadly taking off the socks, Rosalie explained what she really had meant by good news before she got sidetracked by Empress and revenge hickeys and socks. Word had gotten out about Andromeda’s special powers of “prophesary” and pretty much everyone wanted her to do their cards now.

  “You trust me,” said Rosalie, “there’s going to be a line around the block at lunch today. Try to keep it positive, string bean. And don’t say I never did anything for you. Remember to have them cross your palm with silver. Make enough money, maybe you can afford to finally put your mom in a home like you’ve always dreamed of.”

  It was in Trigonometry that Andromeda Klein looked over her Language Arts journal, and thought about MacGregor Mathers and his plagiarized conjuring missteps and the monk copyists with their senseless quills, and it clicked. The GAAP and AMY sigils in the journal. The King was hinting, wasn’t he, that simply drawing their sigils might have managed to evoke them by accident, and that now they were bedeviling her, complicating her world and causing mischief?