by Anton Strout
“I can take care of them as well.”
She looked up at the hole in the ceiling. “Can you make it look like the roof caved in on them? Like the building was structurally weak? I’m going to need to explain some of this insanity to other people.”
I nodded. “I can do that,” I said. “Once I dispose of your attacker.”
The woman, eyes still wide and locked on mine, gave a small, pained smile, then averted her gaze and started for the door. She was almost to the hallway when she spun around, still shaken.
“Wait,” she said, looking down at the crumpled body of her attacker. “You’re not going to leave…him in the park like the other one, are you?”
“You do not wish this?”
She gave a nervous, grim laugh, looking as if she might be violently ill any moment. “No,” she said. “I do not wish that.”
“As you wish,” I said, then added, “but you should tell no one of this.”
She nodded, her eyes glazed, uncertain.
“You should go,” I said. “I will first remove this man from here, then come back to finishing damaging this roof.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“The ocean is deep,” I said, looking down at the body. “This man will be another mystery lost to it.”
The woman moved closer, wonder on her face. “Why did you leave that other man in the park outside my family’s building?” she asked.
“As a warning.”
“A warning?” she repeated. “To who?”
I moved closer to her as well, looking down into her face and those hauntingly familiar eyes. “To anyone who would wish to harm you or your family.”
She shook her head and gave a short, nervous laugh. “Why the hell would anyone want to do that in first place?”
“I am not sure,” I said, moving to gather the man’s body up in my arms and walking over to the hole in the ceiling. I looked up through it, gauging how much clearance I had.
The woman ran over to me. “Will I see you again?” she asked.
“Hopefully not,” I said, my heart heavy with the admission.
“Hopefully not?” Was that disappointment on her face? It was hard to read these humans. “Why not?”
“If you have seen me, then I have broken one of the rules I am meant to follow. Tonight, for instance. I have failed.”
“Failed?” she said, the pitch of her voice rising, incredulous. “You saved my life!”
I considered this for a moment. “There was little choice in doing that,” I said, “but nonetheless, I failed to follow one of the other rules set upon me. I must assess what this all means.” The necklace around the woman’s neck caught my eye, something familiar to it. Still cradling the dead man, I reached one of my hands out toward it. The woman recoiled first, but let me catch it with the tip of one of my claws, and I lifted it away from her. A small stone disc hung from a metal chain, the stone itself giving off the same form of energy I felt when I was at the Belarus building.
“There is a power in this talisman,” I said. “But it is fading. It is with this as it is with your home. You must heal these things.”
“Heal things?” she said. “Heal things how? I don’t understand.”
“Heal the stone; heal the house,” I said. “The stone was once strong. Now it is not.”
“Says who?” she asked, anger creeping into her confusion.
“My maker.” I tensed my legs and leapt up through the opening in the ceiling, knocking free some of the surrounding debris as I took flight.
“And who is your maker?” she shouted up after me.
“The one who swore me to protecting your family,” I said, looking back at her frail form down in the room. “The Spellmason Alexander Belarus.”
I took to the sky, heading out to sea, the feeling of confusion coming off the woman fading the farther away I went, but the familiarity of the woman’s face hit me. I knew those features, I realized. I had been seeing them for a long time, always upon waking. They belonged to the face of the man who haunted my reccurring dreams, the man whose name I had just invoked. The woman was not just the maker’s kin; she looked the image of him.
Twelve
Alexandra
Rory paced back and forth like a panther and turned to me as I came out of the front door of the old building clutching my broken-strapped shoulder bag and file folders. She ran over to me, eyes wide.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I heard something like a car accident up on the roof. Jesus, Lexi, you’re covered in white dust. What the hell happened up there?”
I barely remembered leaving the apartment upstairs or how I had gotten back to the lobby, walking in a bit of shell-shocked haze. I’m cracking up, I thought. For the first time, I looked down at my body. Bits of plaster dust, ceiling fragments, and splinters of wood were covering just about every inch of my clothes. I looked back up to Rory, my brain having trouble processing the events of the last half hour. If what I had just witnessed was actually real and not some imagined figment due to work- and mugging-related stress, I wasn’t sure how to even articulate it. The small ball of sanity I was struggling to hold on to had me wondering whether I should even try to right now.
I fought for the most basic yet honest of answers I could use. “Roof collapse,” I said after a moment. “I’m fine. Structural integrity issues. It’s why we were working on the place. Bad build.”
“Jesus,” Rory said, still looking me over. “You sure you’re okay?”
I nodded.
“Were your workers up there?”
The mere mention of them brought a flood of images—the pile of bloody corpses—and tears formed at the corners of my eyes, but I held my tongue. Hadn’t my mysterious savior told me to tell no one? He said he would take care of the situation. I nodded.
“Shouldn’t we call the police or something?”
“No,” I said, trying to restrain the sudden panic in my chest. “Listen, Rory, it’s a real mess up there. You saw my dad and how he handled the police the other night. I’ll let him figure out how to handle this whole job site fiasco.” I didn’t know if or when I was going to ever get into that with him, but that didn’t matter much. Right now I just wanted to get as far away from this place as possible. “Can we get out of here? I’m a little bit on edge after all this.”
I didn’t have to lie or fake being shaken. It was just the why of it all that I was keeping from Rory. Part of me hated lying to my best friend, but I sat silent on our cab ride back up to Gramercy Park, wondering not only how I would tell her but if I would tell her.
The surreal nature of my evening had me wondering whether I wasn’t just flat cracking up.
Once at my front door, I convinced Rory that all I needed was some sleep to center myself again, and although reluctant to do so, she left once she saw that I was safely in my family’s building. Alone in our lobby, my mind wandered back through the night’s events, already seeming like a distant, strange, and unpleasant nightmare. So deep in thought, I found myself up in the art studio with no memory of how I got there. With two lapses in time tonight, I worried that I’d blink and end up somewhere completely different or, worse, back outside the comfort of my home, so I settled down onto my favorite comfy couch up there, half-terrified, half–in shock, one hundred percent determined not to move.
My hand snaked up to the family sigil hanging around my neck. Heal the stone; heal the house, the creature had said. What did that even mean? And what the hell was a Spellmason? Was this my mind trying to tell me in some effed-up way that real estate was the cause I was meant to embrace? Was all this mental drama its way of telling me to accept it?
My thoughts wove in and out of one another, looping around and around, getting nowhere until I was finally shaken out of them many hours later by noticing the sun rising over the city. I went to stand and stretch, and when I did, something slid off of my lap with a dull thud onto the old worn area rug at my feet. My heart caught in my throat. It was one of my great
-great-grandfather’s statues. I didn’t remember picking it up from its pedestal off in the art section up here, but I must have. That caused a chill down my spine, but the greater one came when I actually recognized the figure—a much smaller version of last night’s creature—convinced now that I had imagined it.
I grabbed it up off the rug, and, armed by the false bravado of daylight, I ran to the back of the art studio and took the stairs up to the proper roof. The light was blinding compared to the long dark night I had just stayed up through, and the streets were still relatively quiet for this time of early morning in New York City. I walked among the scattering of uncarved and half-finished blocks of stone up there until I reached the edge of the building that overlooked Gramercy Park, where the larger version of the statuette in my hand stood.
It looked like him. The creature who had saved me.
By the light of day it was still an imposing bit of work, but I felt the fool for thinking it anything more than a well-carved chunk of stone depicting an impressively striking man with long hair and batlike wings, a bit of Gothic artwork done by my great-great-grandfather. Compared to the statuette, which was perfect due to being kept inside all these centuries, the stone figure was pockmarked from the wear of age and rain, and it had even been tagged at some point along one of its legs by a street artist. My rational mind settled itself back in place as the flaws in the stone and the sheer inert quality of the piece reassured me. The bit of graffiti—the defacing of the art—made me almost sad for it, but it also brought me back to reality.
Thanks, Brain. I’ll take a hint. Overwork plus a near mugging are taking their toll.
My father wanted me to stay around the building and I had succeeded in finding a way out yesterday with Rory as my escort, but not today. I was already planning how to spend my day relaxing when I stopped, my eyes catching something. The claws on the creature’s hands. They were coated in a drying reddish-brown liquid, and although I was no medical expert, I knew blood when I saw it.
Whatever relaxation I had started to allow myself evaporated. I clutched the statuette of the creature as I backed away from the large stone version of it. I looked down at the figure, noticing for the first time a name for the piece of art etched into the bottom of the piece.
Stanis.
It wasn’t much to go on, but with a wealth of handwritten information to sift through in my great-great-grandfather’s personal library, it was a start.
Thirteen
Alexandra
There was little shame in falling asleep in my great-great-grandfather’s studio library. The shame came from waking up only a few hours later, sun high in the early-afternoon sky, lying sprawled out in one of the aisles with my head pressed into several books, drooling on the shelf as my phone went off in my pocket.
I pulled it out. Rory.
“Hey,” I said, simultaneously wiping the drool away and attempting to sound awake, but failing completely on that last count.
“Were you sleeping? It’s, like, one thirty in the afternoon.”
“Let’s just call it post-traumatic stress after the cave-in last night,” I said. “My body really needed it.”
I didn’t necessarily feel rested, but then it struck me what I had been looking for before I fell asleep. I pulled myself together, stood, stretched out my pains, and stared at the massive aisle of books towering before me.
“Fair enough,” she said. “You working today? Or are you up for hanging? Marshall said he could bring over some of the new games that came in over at Roll for Initiative. I won’t play but I’ll watch you guys and provide snarky commentary.”
I usually welcomed the distraction offered from the types of games Marshall sometimes brought over, even if I didn’t get the references or why he would be practically bouncing in his seat with nerdiness, but not today. I was on a mission to prove that I wasn’t losing my mind.
“Can’t,” I said. “Not so much a workday here, but I have some…family business I need to look into.”
“Well, okay,” she said, disappointment in her voice. “But the invitation still stands. I don’t want to get trapped too long in his store. Despite the nerd renaissance the world seems to be having, I still draw stares just for being a girl in there when I stop by. So if you ch—”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, killing the call as the enormity of my task reclaimed my brain. I tried to begin last night’s search in earnest once again, but instead just found myself standing there, staring at all the books before me. And there were more aisles beyond the one that was already intimidating me.
Thing was, I had crashed out because trying to do a general search through my grandfather’s countless notebooks was proving fruitless without knowing where to start. Much like his collection of puzzle boxes, these books were a puzzle unto themselves. Thousands of notations jumped from one book to another, but the subject matter was so cryptic and vague that unless you knew and found the starting point subject, you were kinda screwed.
So my real question was: Where to effing start?
This wasn’t my first bout of frustration with my great-great-grandfather and his organization skills. I respected the cleverness and design that went into his statues and architecture, and especially the intricate puzzle boxes that filled the shelves of his art space, but he was crap on organization.
Unless, of course, that was what he meant others to think. I mean, maybe there was a method to his madness. If I had the secrets of being a “Spellmason” to hide, would I leave them in plain sight? No, I’d hide them carefully.
The question was: Where?
The puzzle boxes…Maybe there was a connection between everything Alexander did. Despite my not understanding whatever system he had put in place, nothing he created was without purpose, so I set to thinking about what connections could be made between them all, starting with the most basic piece of the puzzle: the one thing that I knew so far.
I knew Stanis existed, and, as far as I could tell, was his most impressive creation ever, easily outdoing any piece of architecture around Manhattan. I started there by going and grabbing the statuette of him off the art studio table I had left it on. If I was looking for information on Stanis, how would this possibly relate? Looking it over, I wasn’t sure. Other than the name Stanis carved into the base of it, there were no other markings.
Unless you counted the base itself as a sort of marking. Which, I decided, was just want I wanted to do. The stone base’s shape was different from that of every other statue, roughly the shape of an octagon but with two flared-out sections on either side that mirrored where the wings of the creature hovered over them.
I had grown up knowing there were several octagon-shaped puzzle boxes scattered along the art studio’s shelves, but never really paying that much attention. Resolved, I set off to find them, running into the studio section and pulling down puzzle box after puzzle box, until I found one that held the corresponding shape. It was twice the size of my head and the stone of it was heavy, set in blocked-out areas that reminded me of a strange Slavonic script–covered Rubik’s Cube. I set to twisting and turning it, searching for some rhyme or reason to the markings on it. My knowledge of the old country’s written language was shaky, but several of the letters were more familiar than others on the moving pieces, and, keeping with my plan to simplify my approach to puzzle solving, I set about making them spell out the one word I thought might fit.
Stanis.
The box sighed with a soft click as the bottom of it popped free, a small but thick Moleskine-like notebook set into the hidden space. Age had been kind to it, perhaps from years of being perfectly preserved in the box itself, and with excitement I carefully removed it from the slot, falling into the task of unraveling my great-great-grandfather’s most hidden secrets.
The notebook, however, proved to be just as puzzling as any other book in the library. Parts of his cursive scratching were in English, other parts in a broken Slavonic and Lithuanian that Devon and I used to use as kids wh
en playing, but none of it organized in a linear fashion. In order to make some sense of it, I ran over to the regular stock of paper and notebooks I kept in the studio’s supply cage and grabbed a fresh Moleskine of my own. I settled in at one of the art tables, laying out my blank book next to my ancestor’s one, and set about trying to trace my way though his notes.
The going was slow thanks to the cryptic order of his words and the arduous task of deciphering it, but after countless hours cramped and hunched over his notes, I had assembled some notes of my own:
A reminder from Great-great-grandfather Alex, inscribed: “A book is meant to be well red” (his typo, not mine!)
—Stanis—Alexander’s most ambitious creation as a Spellmason
—Which begs me to ask: What the hell is a Spellmason? Does not come up on Wikipedia!
—Alexander studied and discovered a prowess for folk magic back in Kobryn (Belarus, Lithuanian border town), led to exploring greater power, which in turn led to joining a (secret? Since it’s not on the internetz anyway) order. ARE THERE OTHERS? Or more importantly, where did they all disappear to?
—My G-G-GF mentions that part of Spellmasonry is alchemy, using arcane chemical processes to imbue materials with different properties than they would normally have, i.e. living stone, Stanis
—A few notes on the alchemical process in Spellmasonry: “The magic practitioner must be ever mindful. Transmutation to living stone is wrought with perils, he warns of trickster and malevolent spirits that seek out, crave, vessels to occupy. Controlling the stone is an issue. Your Will will be your guide.
—But how to transmute? No reference points or how-to manual on doing something like that other than the word Kimiya…hidden elsewhere? He references there is a master book of his arcane knowledge, but I can NOT find the damned thing in the family library…so where the eff is it?
