by J. P. Sloan
Malosi stepped through the front door and gestured for me to join him.
“Are they finished?” I asked, hopping for the front door.
“Yeah. Guy wants to show you something.”
I stepped out into the gray daylight. A young man in a white hard hat and a reflective vest gave me a two-finger salute as I approached.
“Are we good?” I asked.
“Yeah. Everything’s kosher,” he replied. “Did a line test. All’s clear.”
“Anything unusual?”
He cocked his head and snickered. “Yeah, now that you mention it.” He reached into his pocket and brandished a highly-polished gold coin. “Found this just sitting in the box.”
I leaned in and examined it as well as I could. It seemed to be an otherwise uninteresting Sacagawea dollar. Though I was very certain it was anything but uninteresting.
“Huh,” I mumbled. “Haven’t seen one of those since 2012.”
The utility man curled his fingers defensively around it, and I had to think fast.
“Hey, I’m something of a numismatist. I’d love to round out my Sacagaweas. I’ll buy that from you for a fiver?”
His brows lifted, and he rolled the coin around in his hand. I took solace in the observation that he was still wearing leather gloves. He wouldn’t be scrubbing too much of the latent energy signature from the coin and depositing his own. I needed that coin to be as unspoiled as possible.
The young man nodded, and I fished a five note out of my wallet. He held out the coin, and I fished for a handkerchief or anything at all to catch the coin. Alas, nothing convenient was available, so with all the poise God gave a left-footed penguin, I held out my wallet for him to drop the coin into.
Malosi walked me back to the house after that awkward exchange with a chuckle.
“I would have used my shirt,” he offered.
“Yeah, that would have been arguably less clumsy, but I don’t really care at the moment. I got the coin.”
“What do you think it is?”
I gave him a side-long glance as we stepped back into the house. “Pretty obviously a hex anchor.”
“Sure it’s a hex?”
My confident smirk lost a bit of its pluck as I led Malosi down into the basement. Ches was hunkered over her desk downstairs, running her fingers over three opened textbooks on dead languages.
“How’s that going?” I chimed as I emptied my wallet onto my worktable.
Ches lifted a finger to put me on proverbial “hold” as she jotted down some notes.
“Maybe onto something,” she grumbled as she paused to erase everything she’d just written.
I nodded without her actually seeing me, and returned my attention to the bright gold coin resting on my table. I didn’t need a pendulum to palpate the energy slicing off this bastard. To answer Malosi’s question in my own mind, I had to determine the power source of the particular hermetic twist that was pinched onto this coin.
“Hex vs. curse, is the question,” I mumbled. “Hexes, I’m familiar with.”
“They’re your money-maker,” Ches offered, still buried in her book.
I added, “Simple little packages of engineered karma. A decently crafted hex saddles a person with an artificial consequence to an otherwise karma-neutral action. It’s a relatively low-energy working, and that’ll be my barometer. Anchoring a hex to something small and neatly conductive like a gold coin wouldn’t take much energy.”
“Curses, though?” Malosi asked.
“Curses require something more substantial than the practitioner’s personal energy to fire off. They require more preparation and engineering than a simple U.S. government-minted coin. I’ve crafted exactly one curse in my life. It required my own blood, a crap-load of substantially hateful intent, and approximately twenty square inches of human skin.”
Malosi nodded. “Yeah, I remember that curse.”
“I bet you do. Look, violating the laws of nature requires a squick factor several orders higher than this pathetic hex-coin.”
This had to be a hex, but what were the terms? And who had placed it in the utility pole outside my house? I had my suspicions, and the more I dwelled on said suspicions, the more unsettled I felt about my state of affairs in the Presidium’s backyard. And the terms seemed somewhat obvious.
Get involved; receive shit. Keep my nose out of this business; shit falls on someone else.
Shit certainly fell onto Zeno. A hex would have been insufficient to derail his Goetic summoning. I was vaguely aware of Zeno’s reputation, and I knew anything short of a hermetic howitzer wouldn’t have broken through his shields. This tiny hex the Presidium had saddled me with? Small peas compared to what they dropped on Zeno, which meant something.
I was on a different level in the eyes of the Presidium.
That meant everything. It was my indication, my compass for how to act.
“You going to do anything with that?” Ches mumbled.
I looked up from my table with a lift of my brow. “What?”
“You’re just staring at it.”
“And?”
“Well, you’re the teacher. I’m the student. At least that’s how this is supposed to work, right?”
I straightened up and wound my way around to her side of the table. “Yeah.”
“So, what are you going to do next? How do you clear a hex?”
“You tell me. What would you do?”
She stood up from her chair and leaned in to inspect the coin. “Well, I’d sever the connection with its power source.”
“And how would you sever the connection?”
She turned and looked my reagent shelf over, pacing along the back wall with a finger on her chin.
“You have yarrow. That could work if it’s an emotional hex, particularly if it’s in close proximity to the subject. There’s myrrh… classic clearing agent. Best if it’s a memory charm or hex that has to do with obsessions.”
I took a step to the shelves, but she held up a finger.
“No, let me do this. We’re thinking this is Presidium, right?”
With a lift of my hands, I replied, “That’s my best guess.”
“Fine. The Presidium deals in Enlightenment Era magic. Right? Franklin, Jefferson, real Founding Fathers New World deism stuff. So, I’m thinking it’s a classic correspondence hex, likely of Rosicrucian or Paleo-Masonic construction.”
“Not bad.”
She flickered her fingers along the rows of mason jars until they landed on a particularly short, blacked-out glass.
“Gold,” she whispered, then grabbed for another jar, “with quartz. A clearing, restructuring one-two punch. Should lay this out in a deosil spiral… the Golden Spiral probably, knowing their fetish for sacred geometry.”
She brandished the two jars with a smirk.
“So, how’d I do?”
I smiled, leaned across her shoulder, and grabbed the large box of Morton’s kosher salt at the end of the shelf. When she spotted the salt, her smirk melted, and she exhaled.
“Shit.”
With a slow, steady pour I covered the coin in a generous pile of salt, and tipped the spout back into the box with a tiny creak.
“Problem with your theory is that the Presidium isn’t a particular fan of the Rosicrucian system. Too much animism for their blood. Paleo-Masonic theory is… well, basically that. A theory. Borders on myth. The Masons borrowed symbology from the Egyptian Gnostics, but by and large they’re a service organization only. And, not that I’m criticizing your scheme of gold and quartz laid out in what I’m sure would be a dazzling Fibonacci pattern, gold costs something like $1500 per ounce. Salt? Thirteen cents. And it doesn’t require sacred geometry.”
Ches’s eyes narrowed, and she twisted away from me, slapping the jars back onto the shelf.
“Hey,” I muttered. “Your thought process is solid. Don’t feel bad. Or, mad, or whatever is going on, because Jesus I can’t tell.”
She lifted a ha
nd and shook her head with a quick sigh. “I’m not mad, Dorian. Please stop being you for a second.”
“What?”
“I’m allowed to feel discouraged. Okay? I get to feel this. Please stop trying to fix it.”
I shut my mouth and crossed my arms.
I wasn’t trying to fix her.
Really.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s hard to turn off the Me Machine, sometimes.”
Ches ran a thumb over her eyebrow. “So, you cleared the hex. Now what?”
I nudged the coin out of its salt pile, and held it up to the light. I felt an urge. More of a yin, perhaps.
“This made sense,” I declared. “A hex. Something simple. Something innocuous to keep me out of the Presidium’s way. But throwing a wrench in Zeno’s summoning? Doesn’t that sound a bit disproportionate to you?”
Ches lifted her hands. “What’s proportionate to the Presidium?”
“If this is a true purge, then why wouldn’t they just black-bag the trouble makers? Why go through the trouble of side-slicing Zeno’s hedge energies? It just seems a bit dramatic for the Presidium.”
“Okay?”
“I think maybe I want to take a closer look at Zeno’s property.”
Ches grimaced. “What happened to Switzerland?”
I pocketed the coin and moved for the stairs. “It looks like the Presidium is giving me a little space, here. So, I’ll just push it as far as I can until that space gets too narrow.”
“At which point you’re asking to get black-bagged, yourself.”
“The smart thing to do. The right thing to do. Screw it. At the end of the day, I’m hitching my moral compass to the people who pissed me off the least.” I added with a gesture at her desk, “You got this?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll be here actively not getting my ass kidnapped and shot in the head.”
I brushed past Malosi and wound through the front room, snatching my keys from the front table as he followed.
“Got a free hour or two, Reed?”
He lifted his chin. “Why?”
“I need a pendulum. A good one. And I don’t have time to make one.”
’d parked several blocks down Carroll Street from Swain’s Antiques and Oddities. Too many of Edgar’s neighbors had come to recognize me and my car, and I wanted to keep the exposure down to a minimum. I slipped through the wood gate at the rear of the building and ushered Malosi through.
“He always keep his gate unlocked?” he asked as we hopped up to the steel door at the rear of Edgar’s shop.
“Don’t think there’s a lot of crime around these parts.”
I caught a glimpse of two of the tall church spires stabbing into the sky down the block. Frederick was littered with churches, an echo from its history as a center of religious tolerance in the colonial times.
Tolerance.
That’s what this whole drama with the Presidium was about. How far would they tolerate unsanctioned magical activity? How did they define it? Who gave them the right to police it? All of this was something they had to revisit year after year. The answers would have to be as vague as the question itself. No one had given the Presidium the right. They just took the right upon themselves, and had done so since the old red-brick colonials surrounding me were first built.
I fished Edgar’s key from my pocket. It was a spare he leant me for special occasions when he was on a trip, or his children were on fire, or whatever reason people give people keys. Malosi let me enter first, probably out of habit. He understood how affinity worked with wardings, and I was the one with affinity to the Swains.
Truth be known, Edgar wasn’t that worried about security in general, which was bizarre to me, because he housed one of the most dangerous collections of cursed objects in the Mid-Atlantic. All of it sealed behind a hollow-core door with a length of “magic twine” wrapped around the knob.
It was yarn.
I was convinced it was just a bit of yarn someone sold him. I’d mused about it for years, wanting to reach out and just untwist it, hold it up to his face and say, “See? Yarn!”
Well, here was my opportunity, and my gut twisted with guilt. Sure, he’d given me the extra key. Sure, he wouldn’t mind if I dropped by to grab some mugwort or dried scorpions or red amber dust. He had even made me an official offer for the object of my current quest.
The Gregori pendulum.
I’d used it once before to help find Edgar’s daughter after a misguided servitor stole away with the girl’s body. I used the cursed pendulum just that once. It was intense. I hadn’t felt such clear, specific… vulgar magic before in my life. It took a hold of me, and I hadn’t ever forgotten the power in that damned thing.
I meant “damned” very literally. It is said that cursed items doom the soul of any practitioner that uses it. My soul being displaced from my body, I rolled the dice.
And here I was, rolling the dice again, gambling that the Gregori pendulum wouldn’t, in fact, seal my fate. Gambling that Edgar wouldn’t end our friendship over this violation of his trust, or that Wren wouldn’t kick the shit out of me for being here in the first place.
And most pertinent to the moment, gambling that piece of yarn wasn’t, in fact, some kind of powerful magical lock.
This wasn’t a complete burglary. Edgar had made an offer. Five large, and the pendulum was mine. This was significant, since he had effectively retired from active cursed item mercantilism. He had changed over the years. Perhaps afraid of the Presidium, perhaps given a new perspective once his two children had entered the equation. Maybe a bit of both. But he hadn’t sold an honest-to-God item from his back closet in the past four years.
It was, perhaps, simply inconvenient kismet that the Swains would be in freaking Orlando the precise moment I required the Gregori pendulum. The envelope inside my pocket held a personal check for the five grand I’d owe him for the pendulum. I slipped it out of my jacket as Malosi and I wound our way through the storage room and into the dusty antique shop. I paused abruptly when I noticed that Edgar had sold the large, fuck-ugly green couch near the front of the store. He loved that couch. I was absolutely certain he was jacking up the price just to keep it handy for Drunk Canasta Nights.
Malosi cleared his throat, and I proceeded along to the very rear of the shop where a length of old wooden cubby drawers sat perpendicular to a glass case housing the more choice of Edgar’s reagents.
And behind the glass case was the door to his special room. A closet, really. A walk-in. And inside that closet lay the most unheralded collection of distinctly rare and wicked cursed objects on the East Coast.
Malosi sidled up alongside me, tapping his fingers against the top of the glass case.
“So, here we are,” he muttered.
“Yep.” I nodded to the door. “That’s Edgar’s collection.”
“Presidium know about this?”
“I figure they probably have to, though Edgar is really, really good at keeping off people’s radar. How he manages it in those catastrophic Hawaiian print shirts really is one of the mysteries of our time.”
I eased around the end of the case and crouched down by the doorknob, eyeballing that tiny, Hellish twist of gray yarn.
“So?” Malosi nudged. “You want to hang out until the cops decide to notice we’re in here?”
“Give me a second.”
“What kind of wardings does he have on that door, anyway?”
I shrugged. “This little bastard is basically it.”
“What bastard?”
I gestured for Malosi to approach. He knelt down and stared at the knob.
“What is that?” he whispered.
“Edgar’s magical yarn.”
Malosi snorted, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“You’re kidding me!” he guffawed.
“He’s convinced it’s some kind of ball-buster. Paid enough for it, that’s for sure.”
“Well, give it a try. See what happens.”
I
gave Malosi a side-eye. “You want to volunteer for this shit?”
He eased back.
“Yeah. Thought so.” I returned my attention to the yarn. With a quick tickle of my fingers, I gave the doorknob an energy palpation. Nothing.
So, with a squint and a quick centering of my mainline chakras, I reached up and gave the yarn a twist.
It fell limply to the floor.
I gave Malosi a look. His amusement with the situation bordered on the obscene.
“Fuck you,” I grunted as I stood up and opened the door.
The inside of the closet was about as exciting as any closet might be expected. Two parallel walls held bracketed shelves with rows of shoeboxes, spangled by the occasional brown paper-wrapped parcel. There was very little color. Mostly beige, brown, and white. Tiny strips of embossed plastic from one of those old school press label makers sat stuck onto the bottom right corner of each box. I skimmed along the first couple shelves, noting the labels. Herve Trement Oculus. Palimpsest Gruning Codex. Zauberstein Gavel. Crucifix Argentine. There were several of those Argentine crucifixes. Must have been a fire sale.
Malosi hovered by the door, watching the front windows with as low a profile as his massive frame could manage. He glanced over his shoulder with a sniffle.
“This going to take long?”
I shrugged. “Can’t take that long. There’s not that much stuff here.” An odd-shaped package caught my attention. “Ooo, I think this is an actual Salem Doll!”
“Nice. We’re trespassing, by the way. Might want to snap this up.”
“Right.”
I had seen the Gregori Pendulum’s shoebox when Edgar had first offered it to me. I knew the basic size and shape, which should have helped. Turned out, not as much as I’d have thought. I managed to pull three shoeboxes of nearly identical size and color… probably all the same model of shoe. Where did Edgar get these damned things, anyway?
The first box opened to reveal a pendulum, but not the Gregori. This one was a fairly uninteresting piece of jewelry that was probably used by an important Netherworker at some point. The use of mundane items toward Netherwork is known to impart a kind of dark resonance onto the item. Not necessarily a curse in and of itself, but enough to affect the user.
