Hard Spell

by Justin Gustainis

  I once asked a warlock why spells contain all those "thee"s and "thou"s, ad other stuff that nobody says anymore.

  "When it comes to theory, no one is more conservative or fundamentalist as a magician," he'd told me. "It would make Southern Baptists look wild, by comparison. Lots of the spells in use today were first translated into English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when people did talk like that. The belief is, if a spell works, you don't mess with it, even to update the language. You'd never know what effect even the smallest change would have – until it was too late."

  Rachel took some powder from a jar and sprinkled a generous amount into one of the bowls. It immediately burst into flame, even though the bowl was nowhere near the candles, or any other heat source. "Speak to me now, George Kulick. Give to me the sight of thy death, and of he who did bring it upon thee. Let me see as thou hast seen, know as thou hast known, and learn as thou didst learn. Grant unto me the Insight into thy departure from this life, George Kulick, that I might take vengeance against thy tormentor."

  Things began happening very fast, then. The candles on the altar went out, all in the same instant. The incense stopped burning as if it had been doused with water. The small cloud of smoke that had borne the outline of a man dissipated into nothing.

  Then Rachel Proctor collapsed to the ground. A few seconds later, she started writhing and screaming – screaming like one of the damned.

  I stood outside Room 8 of Mercy Hospital's Intensive Care Unit and looked through the window at the still form on the bed. Rachel lay there, mercifully quiet, surrounded by machines that hummed and beeped as they kept track of every biological process of her body.

  "At least she doesn't seem to be in pain now," I said to Charlie Mulderig, who's been a doctor at Mercy for as long as I can remember.

  "No, she's not," Charlie said softly. "It wasn't easy. She's under very heavy sedation. For a while, I was afraid we were going to anesthetize her."

  "You mean, like in surgery?"

  "Exactly like in surgery. The pain centers of her brain were going crazy. And, apart from the humanitarian concerns, there was a real danger that she'd have a stroke if it continued."

  "Jesus."

  "Problem is," Charlie continued, "you can't keep someone under surgical anesthesia indefinitely without a substantial risk of brain damage. Fortunately, we found a combination of painkillers that worked, at least for the time being."

  "What the fuck was causing it, Charlie? Far as I could tell before the EMTs got there, there wasn't a mark on her."

  "There isn't a mark, in the sense you mean it. No evidence of trauma, anywhere on her body. And we found no evidence of anything internal that might have caused it, like a ruptured appendix or a kidney stone."

  "It must have been the magic, then." I ran down for him what Rachel had been doing just before her collapse.

  Charlie shook his head. "When it comes to magic, you're talking to the wrong guy. I don't pretend to understand that stuff. In fact, according to everything I learned in med school, magic ought to be impossible."

  "Except that it isn't."

  "No, I've seen too much evidence to the contrary."

  "Yeah, me, too."

  "I can imagine," he said. "Oh, yeah, that reminds me: I did find out something that may be of interest to you. As she was finally going under, Ms Proctor stopped screaming and started muttering intelligible words. Well, more or less intelligible."

  Charlie produced a folded sheet of paper from a pock;&nbs his white doctor coat. "One of the nurses wrote some of it down, after they'd got her stabilized."

  He unfolded the sheet and peered at it over the top of his glasses. "Apparently, she was saying something like I'll never tell you, you sick fuck. You'll never get the book, never. I gather it went on like that for a while, repeating the same stuff, over and over."

  He refolded the paper and handed it to me. "Here, for whatever use it is. I wonder who she thought she was talking to?"

  After a few seconds I said, in a voice that I barely kept from breaking, "She was talking to whoever tortured and killed George Kulick."

  "The necromancy worked too fuckin' well," I told Karl the next night. "Not only did she raise the spirit of the late George Kulick, but he was able to get inside her head, somehow. That's gotta be what happened."

  "I thought you said she'd set up protections against that stuff," Karl said.

  "That's what she told me. But she'd never done one of these rituals before. Maybe she messed up somehow. If she did, it's my fault. I'm the stupid sonovabitch who pressured her into it."

  "Or maybe Kulick was just stronger than she expected. The dude was a wizard, after all."

  "Could be either one, could be both," I said. "She was trying to plug into Kulick's last moments, and it looks like she succeeded, big time. All of a sudden, she was right where Kulick had been, at the end."

  "And Kulick was being tortured. Which means that Rachel–"

  "Was going through the same thing – at a nerve level, anyway. Not so much as a bruise on her, but she still felt all the stuff that had been done to Kulick. I didn't think even magic could do that."

  "Why not?" Karl said. "They do it with hypnosis."

  I looked at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "My cousin Cheryl's a therapist. You know, like a shrink. I guess she uses hypnotism in her job. Helping people recover memories, stuff like that. She told me once that when she was in school, they had 'em watch movies of some of the experiments in hypnosis. From like thirty years ago. Stuff that you couldn't get away with today. One guy in this film was put into a real deep trance, right? Then the hypnotist told him he was on fire."

  "Bet I can guess what happened then," I said.

  "Fuckin' A. Cheryl said the guy was on the floor, screaming like he was being burned alive."

  "Just like Rachel, who thought she was being tortured to death."

  "Cheryl said it took days to get that guy's screams out of her head."

  "I've got a feeling," I said, "that it's gonna take me a hell of a lot longer than that."

  "It's Charlie Mulderig, Stan. I'm calling about Rachel Proctor."

  "Hey, Charlie. How is she?"

  There was a brief silence, then: "She's gone, Stan."

  I felt an icy fist reach into my stomach, grab my guts, and twist them.

  "Stan? Are you there? Stan?"

  "Yeah, Charlie, I'm here." I cleared my throat, then did it again. "What happened? Heart failure?"

  "No, Stan, I'm sorry for… Rachel isn't dead, as far as I know. She's just – gone. Missing. Her bed in the ICU is empty."

  The icy fist loosened its grip, but only a little. "Did she regain consciousness, Charlie?"

  "Not according to the nurses, and they were checking on her every hour or so. And if something had gone bad at any time – iegular heartbeat, sudden drop in blood pressure, something like that, the alarms built into the monitors would have gone off at the nurses' station. Those were still functioning, by the way. We checked."

  "Could some nurse have missed something? Maybe forgot one of the hourly checks?"

  "No way, no how. The ICU nurses are the best in the hospital, Stan. They do not fuck up, and that would constitute a major fuck-up."

  I closed my eyes and tried to make my miserable excuse for a brain work. "You've got surveillance cameras over there, Charlie. I've seen 'em."

  "Yeah, we do, and I know what you're thinking. There's one trained on the hallway right outside the ICU. Our security guy is reviewing the disc now."

  "There's no other way out of there, except for the windows, is there? And the ICU's on the fifth floor."

  "Exactly. However she left, conscious or not, on a gurney, in a wheelchair, or walking, she had to go along that corridor. We'll find her – well, find her image, anyway."

  "Give me a call when you do."

  I put down the phone and sat at my desk, staring at nothing. I was thinking about magic – and about disap
pearing acts.

  I didn't hear back from Charlie until the next night. He called right after I came on shift.

  "So, how did she leave the ICU, Charlie? Was it under her own power, or was she taken?"

  There was a long pause before Charlie said, "We'd like to discuss that with you face-to-face, Stan. Can you drop by Mercy sometime tonight?"

  "Who's we?"

  "The head of security. And me."

  "All right, Charlie, I'll come over now, if the boss doesn't need me. But give me the short version now – how did she get out of there?"

  "There actually isn't a short version, Stan. That's why we'd like to discuss this with you in person."

  Arguing with him was just going to waste time I could better spend driving to Mercy Hospital. "I'll be there in twenty minutes," I said. I asked Karl to stay at the squad and call me if anything urgent came in. Then I got moving.

  The head of security at Mercy was an ex-cop named Sam Rostock. He'd let himself go to seed after leaving the force, to the point where his belly now hung over the belt of his Wal-Mart grade slacks – but I guess muscle tone isn't too important when your toughest job is getting people to leave the hospital after visiting hours are over.

  I sat down after the introductions – which were unnecessary, but Charlie didn't know that. I was looking at Rostock but speaking to Charlie when I said, "So what was so important that you couldn't tell me about it over the phone?"

  "I checked the video feed from the camera that's aimed at that hallway," Rostock said. "The one outside the ICU. Checked it twice, for the period when what's-her-name, Proctor, was brought in until an hour after she was declared missing."

  I expected more, but Rostock stopped talking and just sat there, looking at me. It was impossible to read his face – he'd been a cop, after all.

  "There's nothing, Stan," Charlie said finally. "No indication that she left the ICU, either under her own power or with assistance. Nothing."

  "I don't suppose that a body was wheeled out of there, in a body bag or under a sheet, maybe," I said. "Or somebody in a wheelchair who'd suffered bad facial burns and was heavily bandaged – anything like that?"

  "Of course I checked stuff like that – you think I'm stupid?" Rostock said. "And it wasn't hard to do, because not one patient, living or dead, was taken out of the ICU during that period. Not one."

  I ran my hand through what was left of my hair a couple of times. "What about visitors? Did you check to see whether one more visitor left there than went in?"

  "My God, I never would have thought of that," Charlie said, softly.

  "Well, I did," Rostock said, but without the defensiveness in his voice. "Same time period – an hour before she was admitted, in case somebody was already in there, visiting in another room, to an hour after she was found gone. Every damn visitor that went in there is accounted for. And this is spring, so nobody's wearing hats or scarves that could hide their face. The ones who came in, went out. And only them."

  "Except for the nurses and doctors," I said.

  "Not bad," Rostock said, as if he meant it, "but I thought of them, too. Every doctor, nurse, and med tech working here is somebody I've met personally. I make a point of that. Plus, each one has a photo on file with Human Resources, the same picture that's on their ID badge. And with the computer system we have, I was able to do close-ups on the faces of everybody who passed through that door, in either direction. Nothing suspicious. Nothing even close."

  The three of us sat there for a while. "Okay, then," I said, finally. "Let me summarize the facts, such as they are." I ticked them off on my fingers as I went along.

  "One, Rachel Proctor was brought into the ICU, from the ER, at 4:18am two days ago. Two, Rachel Proctor did not leave the ICU through its only door, and getting away through the fifth-floor window is only gonna work if you're a bird. And three, Rachel Proctor is undeniably gone."

  I looked at each of them. "Accurate?"

  Their silence said it all.

  "So, what happened was impossible, except that it did," I went on. "And there's only one thing that makes the impossible happen, these days – and that's magic."

  "Why would Rachel use magic to make herself disappear?" Karl asked me. "If she wanted to leave the hospital, all she had to say was, Okay, I'm all better – release me."

  "Yeah, it makes no sense. Unless she wanted to disappear from sight for a while, you know, hide from somebody. Or something."

  "Hide from who?"

  "Maybe from me. Can't blame her for that – I'm the asshole who got her into this mess, whatever it is."

  "Don't start with that again, all right? The chick's all grown up, and everything. She knew what she was getting involved in – probably better than you did. And nobody held a gun to her head that I know of. Or a wand."

  "I know, but – what did you say?"

  Karl looked at me. "Just that nobody forced her to–"

  "No, about a wand."

  He shrugged. "I said wand cause it seemed more, like, appropriate for a witch, that's all. What's the big deal?"

  "I don't know how big a deal it is," I told him. "But you just reminded me that Rachel's not the only one in this case who can work magic."

  Karl frowned. "What are you talking about, man? Who else in this mess can…?" He let his voice trail off and his eyes went wide.

  "Exactly," I said. "George fucking Kulick, that's who."

  I started to explain to Karl the idea that had just occurred to me – but then the old man came to see us, and that changed everything.

  Louise the Tease, our PA, came back to tell us that we had a visi. We call her that (not to her face) because her size 8 body is usually crammed into a size 6 dress, but she refuses to date cops – something about not wanting to take her work home with her. Louise said that someone up front was asking for whoever was working the Kulick murder.

  Karl and I looked at each other, then did a quick game of paper-rock-scissors. His paper wrapped my rock, so I stood up and headed for the small reception area. On the way, I had a brief fantasy that George Kulick's killer had walked in to confess, and we'd be able to close this case out tonight.

  Yeah, and a goblin will be the next pope.

  Whoever had the steel in his spine to do all those things to Kulick wasn't going to get all mushy and remorseful about it now. I just hoped that whoever had come in wasn't going to be a waste of time.

  It turned out to be an old guy, thin and pale, but not frail looking. His iron gray hair was combed straight back to form a widow's peak. The gray suit had probably been new during the Kennedy administration, and the white button-down shirt underneath it had been washed so often that it was closer to beige. He wore it buttoned to the neck, with no tie.

  "I'm Detective Sergeant Markowski," I said. "I understand you have some information about a case we're investigating."

  The old guy got to his feet smoothly. He had none of the shakiness about him that you'd expect from somebody who looked to be in his seventies. That got me wondering.

  "My name is Ernst Vollman," he said, his voice firm and clear. "If you refer to the murder of George Kulick, yes, I thought some conversation on the subject might be mutually beneficial."

  Mutually beneficial wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but I let it slide. Instead, as Vollman came closer, I put out my hand to shake.

  I don't usually do that with civilians – whether they're suspects, witnesses, or informants. I like to maintain a certain distance with the public, but this time I made an exception. It seemed like he might have hesitated for a moment, but then Vollman took my hand and shook it briefly.

  I noticed two things about that handshake. One was a sense of strength you wouldn't expect in an old guy. He didn't go all macho on me and try to squeeze, none of that bullshit. But suddenly I was aware that if he put his mind to it, he could break every bone in my hand without raising a sweat.

  The other thing was, his hand was cold. I know that old folks sometimes have circulation
problems in their extremities, but this went way beyond that. This guy was cold.

  That's when I knew for sure.

  I gestured toward the squad room and followed Vollman toward the door, working hard to keep my face blank. Ernst Vollman represented something that Karl and I didn't have five minutes ago: a lead. So I was going to be very nice to this old man, for the time being. Even if he was a fucking vampire.