by Harvey Click
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “At least I’ll be able to hear the window break if it tries to get in.”
Grimes smiled. “Very wise,” he said. “He who sleeps with one eye open sees his dreams more clearly.”
Chapter Fourteen
“In Damascus once I met a man
whose silver eyes shone bright.
He looked at me, so youthful then,
and thought he’d seen the light.
As Paul the saint was stricken blind
on the road so long ago,
my hapless paramour lost sight
of all he used to know.
Long nights I dream of things I’ve lost,
and there I am again,
midst minarets, bazaars and mosques,
and the tomb of Saladin.”
“That’s rather touching,” Grimes said when Letha’s song was finished. “Surely you’re not beginning to miss me?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “My young admirers keep me occupied. They worship me, you know.”
“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said.
She smiled her coy smile and played with her hair. Though she was only an illusion in the screen of ether, he could smell her perfumed skin. Her sleek pink evening dress looked like one she’d worn years ago in Tangier.
“Still, it might be fun to see you again,” she said. “Old men know some places to scratch that young boys can’t seem to find, and I confess I’ve been itching to travel. Maybe we could meet in Paris, or how about Athens?” She giggled. “Remember that business at the Parthenon with the poisoned broach?”
Grimes grinned and puffed his cigar. “That was just a harmless prank,” he said. “Besides, I prefer Madrid.”
“I could be there tomorrow,” she said.
“I could too. The only problem is, you wouldn’t be. You’re trying to lure me away from my house—no?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I am. Rumors say your gypsy housefly’s selling you out for a couple shekels. If you don’t get your dead ass out of there real quick I suspect it’s going to be even deader than usual.”
“I don’t waste my thoughts on fools such as Burne,” he said. “But I do waste them on you from time to time. Look me in the eye and tell me something, Letha. Will I ever see you again, in the flesh I mean?”
“You won’t if you’re dead, so get the hell out of there.”
She vanished from the ether screen, but Grimes could still smell the soft scent of her perfume. It brought memories of minarets, mosques, and countless nights in faraway hotels. He smoked his cigar and smiled.
***
Ten o’clock Monday morning, Johnny Burne dropped off the Mercedes at a service station and walked around the corner to the New Society Gallery. An oil change made a good excuse for coming to town, but he’d rather be safe at home. The problem was, Grimes’ house didn’t feel safe anymore. Nothing felt safe anymore.
The sign on the door said closed. He didn’t want to argue with it, but when the punks in the grocery store parking lot told him to show up or die they probably meant he should knock even if the sign said closed. He stood there tugging his earring and rehearsing all the conditions he wanted before he’d help them nab the old fuck, but he doubted these people granted many favors. A pair of noisy crows flew over his head, and the omen didn’t look good. He wondered if it was too late to walk away. Maybe if he told Grimes the truth, the old man would help him out of this mess.
He was still tugging his earring and wondering whether to knock or walk when the door opened and the green-eyed bitch gave him a look that said he should have walked. Her black tee-shirt advertised NOW, and Burne figured in her case it meant National Organization for Witches.
“Tell your boss I’m here,” he said. “Tell him he can come outside if he wants to talk because I’m not coming in.”
She pulled a Walther PPK from her hip pocket and said, “Tell him yourself.”
The gallery was dark and empty, and a strange hollow silence echoed off the walls when she shut the door behind him. Muffled street noises sounded miles away in another world where there was a snug bedroom filled with all the nice things he owned. She led him to the desk at the rear of the long room and said, “Take off your clothes.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “I’ve got three friends waiting outside with bigger guns than that. All I have to do is give the signal.”
She cocked the Walther and said, “You’ve got three seconds to shut up.”
She watched him undress. Burne noticed a silver pendant hanging from her neck, some kind of ugly flower or butterfly or something. Then he realized it was a vagina.
“Lose the jewelry,” she said when he was naked.
He removed the three rings the old man had given him but kept his amulet. “I need this so Grimes can’t eavesdrop,” he said. “It’s Hermesium.”
“He can’t eavesdrop here,” she said.
“You don’t know Grimes. He can see right through your shielding like glass.”
“Not this shielding,” she said. She took his amulet and sniffed it. “This is nothing but lead, you idiot.”
Lead my ass, Burne thought. Maybe she didn’t know anything about Hermesium or Longevitals. Maybe the Lost Ones were a bunch of amateurs.
“Grimes doesn’t train idiots,” he said. Strange, but now that he was selling out the old man he felt proud of knowing him. “You’re the idiot if you think you’re dealing with some dumb old fuck.”
“I can see what I’m dealing with,” she said. “A blubbery white asshole with a big mouth and a little pink weenie.”
Burne glanced at his groin. Those eyes would shrivel anyone’s pecker. She opened a door hidden behind a tapestry and said, “In here.”
He stepped into a room with one very dim ceiling bulb and one chair in the center of a bare wood floor. The bitch shut the door, and something said, “Sit down.”
It was a choir of airless voices roaring quietly out of nowhere, a blur of deep rumbles and rustling whispers and different accents all slurred together. Burne sat down, and the big wooden armchair felt chilly against his naked skin.
“Your name?” the voice asked.
“Johnny Burne.”
“How do you know Michael Grimes?’
“I’m his apprentice.”
“How long have you been with him?”
“Three years.”
“Why are you betraying him?”
“I don’t know. He’s too old.”
“Are you his lover?”
“When he wants me.”
“How often?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Your mother’s name?”
“Olivia.”
“Her address?”
“She’s dead.”
“Can you bind a memory?”
“No, he hasn’t taught me that.”
“Can you work a wire?”
“No.”
“Education?”
“Two years of college at Antioch.”
The questions came too quickly and were too mixed up for Burne to prepare his answers. He felt helpless and humiliated with the bitch and her gun behind him.
“How did your mother die?” the voice asked.
“My father strangled her with a coat hanger.”
“Why?”
“He was drunk and he didn’t like her.”
“How did you meet Grimes?”
“At a party in Yellow Springs.”
“How tall are you?”
“Five foot ten.”
“Do you know Lully’s words of power?”
“Yes.”
“Name them.”
He could only name four.
“How old were you when your mother was killed?”
“Sixteen.”
Burne suddenly saw where the voice was coming from. A dim flicker of illuminated dust motes hung in the shadows of a dark ceiling corner. They formed a vague figure that resembled a desiccated corpse dangling from a noose.
“Do you take drugs?” it asked.
Burne was so startled by the apparition that he forgot to answer. It shifted quickly like a cobweb disturbed by a fly. “I said, do you take drugs?”
“Just ritual drugs, that’s all the old man allows.”
“What company does he keep?”
“Someone named Dr. Radcliff is there now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess Grimes wants a new apprentice.”
“Who else comes there?”
“Some Indian woman named Bitter Ember, she was there for a while.”
“Did you ever have sex with your mother?”
“Just once.”
“Describe it.”
The questions went on, and Burne wondered what time it was. Maybe an hour had passed, maybe longer. Grimes would be suspicious.
“Get the green egg, Katerina,” the flickering specter said. “We’ll scorch his brain.”
Burne didn’t like the sound of that. He turned and watched the bitch open a cabinet and take out a metal box and place it on a little wheeled table. She put on a pair of dark goggles and wheeled the table a few feet in front of his chair.
She leaned down to his face, goggles blank like insect eyes, and whispered, “This is the part I like best. This is the part that hurts.”
Her thin lips stretched into a tight grin, and she returned to her place behind his chair.
The lid of the box opened, and pale green light pulsed out, some epileptic blotch of brain-bruising sickness so ugly that Burne didn’t care about Grimes or the Lost Society or whether he lived or died, he just wanted out of this room filled with throbbing green disease pounding his skull like a hammer. He ran to the door, but it was locked.
Katerina got a hold of his legs and pulled him down. He banged his chin, and the rough wood floor spit splinters into his bare balls as she dragged him across it. She yanked him back into his chair by his ponytail and bashed his head with the side of her gun.
The specter glided out from its dark ceiling corner like a spider on a thread. It was a flickering picture of every creep Burne had ever hated, his father and cops and teachers and old lovers and dozens of other bullies, all their faces running into one another like a stack of photographs shuffled by a cardsharp.
“Use the iron web, Katerina,” the blur of voices said.
She pulled something from her pocket shaped like an arrowhead but as big as a pack of cigarettes. Dry spray hissed out of the tip and bound him to his chair in a cocoon of sharp white wire.
The specter drifted back up to its corner like torn newspaper faces tossed by breeze. “Use the egg again,” it said. “Mr. Burne needs to learn his alphabet.”
Katerina leaned down to his face and whispered, “This is the part I like even better. This is the part that hurts real bad.”
She adjusted her dark goggles and stepped behind Burne’s chair. The lid opened, and pulsating green light bruised his brain blank. He was asleep and awake, alive and dead. The lid shut, and he remembered a favorite toy lying in his crib. It was pretty, and he was trying to grasp it, but his hands were tiny and numb.
The lid opened again, and he thought A B C D E F G.
***
The church was a cold dark cavern. An aged priest in a flowing cassock shuffled through the shadows toward a beautiful iron candelabra. It held ten blazing candles forming the points and interstices of a pentagram.
“Behold the star of the microcosm,” he said. “Quench the flames thusly and make them yours.”
He extinguished the candles one by one with a long iron snuffer.
Dexter awoke feeling rested and restless. The window screen still lay in a puddle on the floor, and his left wrist still throbbed. He got up and eased the drape open with the tip of his dagger. The window was still shut and locked.
He opened it and couldn’t see anything out there that shouldn’t be. The sun was bright, and its short shadows said it was pushing noon. The chilly breath of damp grass reminded him of the trip he’d planned to take with Mary. Wherever she was, he wouldn’t find her here. It was time to leave.
He packed his bag and carried it downstairs. The door to the New World room was open, and he saw Grimes packing his treasures into boxes. The display cases were almost empty. The old man’s back was turned, and Dexter didn’t feel like saying good-bye.
He went to the fireplace in the front living room and got the iron poker. It was heavy, about four feet long, and nicely pointed. He brought it back to the foyer and pressed the tip against one of the studs in the front door. The poker rang faintly with a tingling magnetic pull that grew heavier as he touched each iron stud, following the odd order that the priest had used to snuff the ten candles in his dream. It began to glow red on the fifth stud and hummed white hot when it touched the last one.
“Iron makes it weak,” Grimes had said.
Dexter smelled the voider’s zoo-stink as he stepped out. His mind felt clear like running water, and his senses glowed as bright as the poker. He heard a hundred sounds too small and far to hear, the buzz of bees working the wet weeds, the purr of dragonfly wings pattering a puddle, the scurry of rodent feet in the dust beneath the porch. Leaves fluttered in the breeze like doll’s clothes hung out to dry, but on one tree they moved more than they should.
There it was, crouched on a thick bough halfway up.
He walked across the yard with his poker blazing white and grinned up at the thing. It sat there still as a staring gargoyle, so Dexter pitched a rock. Bronze leaves spun down as the thing scurried through the branches and leaped to another tree.
“I’m leaving,” Dexter yelled. “If you want to kill me, you’d better hurry.”
He turned his back and strolled toward his car, taking his time. Last night’s dreams flashed like Tarot cards in the back of his mind, and he knew he had dreamed this moment, this bright noon dance of iridescent insect wings and the damp sigh of grass behind him as the creature crept closer. He kept walking until he heard the sharp suck of breath that meant it was throwing something, then he spun around and hit the pitched rock like a baseball with his poker.
The voider was armed with the sword Dexter had dropped two nights ago. Good. Dexter was in the mood for a fight.
It advanced in an awkward crouch, holding its sword in both hands like a club. Dexter parried its first clumsy attack and riposted with a quick thrust that sank the glowing poker tip deep into its shoulder. It roared furiously and slashed the empty air where Dexter had just been while he darted behind it and jabbed its soft hairy butt. He found some more soft meat beneath its armpit and ducked as its sword came whirling around like a helicopter blade.
The poker was dripping with blood, and with each wound the ape-man grew clumsier. It leaped and screamed with rage and beat the ground with its sword. Dexter lunged as it tripped over a branch in the weeds and staggered toward him off-balance. The bloody iron pierced its gut, and the thing fell backward howling and clutching the wound with both hands. A carrion reek farted out of the hole.
It was helpless now and easy to kill. The only problem was its face. The new skin growing over the bone on the right side was hairless and human. The ruined eye oozing pus was probably still blind, but the pale new lid and arched brow looked familiar. This was Dexter’s face. He had seen it in his mirror thousands of times and had heard the same cries of pain and terror coming from his own throat.
He remembered Grimes’ words: “Loving your enemy makes it easier to kill him.” Dexter plunged his poker through the good eye and dug it deep into the soft brain. The creature raised its head once and fell back in the grass.
Grimes stepped out from behind a tree and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Radcliff. It’s said that to become a sorcerer you must first kill yourself. I daresay you’ve done it quite nicely.”
“I’m leaving,” Dexter said. “If you try to stop me, I’ll kill you too.”
Grimes’ silver tooth glinted in the sunlight. “Then you’d be a great s
orcerer indeed,” he said. “But I’ve already put your bag in the car, so let’s part as friends.”
“You must be leaving too. I saw you packing your toys.”
Grimes shrugged. “We both need to be alert. By now the cognoscenti know you can’t lead them to the Horn, but watch out for straggling amateurs. Their stupidity makes them dangerous. You must remember your training even when you sleep.”
“Is this what you call training?” Dexter asked. He touched the voider’s body with his shoe. “The only thing you taught me is how to hallucinate.”
“It’s true you weren’t here long enough to learn much,” Grimes said, “but I was able to activate your prior training. You have some very impressive skills.”
“That’s a lie. No one’s trained me.”
“Someone has,” Grimes said. “You’ve been taught fathom-two noesis. Your skills are primarily martial, and I would certainly hate to be your enemy.”
“Then tell me where Mary is.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” Grimes smiled. “Cheer up, Dr. Radcliff. Surely it’s better to lose your woman than your head.”
“I’ll make trouble for you, Grimes. I’m going to dog your steps just like this creature. The only difference is, I’m no illusion.”
“Oh? And was that an illusion trying to pull you out the bedroom window last night?” Grimes jabbed the voider’s face with his walking stick, and flies buzzed up from the eye sockets. “The flies seem to think it’s real,” he said, “but perhaps they won’t get much nourishment.”
Dexter stepped away from the carcass. It was already beginning to rot and gave off a horrible stench.
“Give me just one straight answer before I leave,” he said. “Why did you keep me here?”
“For the same reason that you published your article,” Grimes said. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I’m a professor, and professors have to publish. It was a stupid mistake.”
“Are you a stupid man?” Grimes asked. “I daresay you knew it would cause trouble. I even warned you not to publish it, remember? Look to yourself for the answer, Dr. Radcliff, and look to the words of your ancestor. Then you’ll know why you started all this trouble and why I kept you safely out of it.”
