by Jason Ridler
“Ms. Lucinda Merrill.” There was nothing catty in her response. She was correcting me. “Not at all. But we are closed—”
“—and I would hate for you to spend an ounce of time here more than usual. But I’m on tour today and I would love to pay off my debts now, and not take advantage of your good nature. Please, Lucinda?”
Buzz practically hummed with violence in his clenched jaws while Ms. Merrill placed her hands on her hips. “That is very kind of you, but you should have observed the hours of operation.”
“Than may I use your washroom?” I pleaded. “I’ve been stuck on the Ten for an hour and that second cup of coffee I had at lunch is eating a hole through my kidney. Please, Lucinda, it’s been one hell of a day and I couldn’t even get here in time to do the one good thing before I hit the road. Please?” I was banking on her Midwest commitment to manners being firmly entrenched with general rules of decorum and hospitality. “I really don’t want to ruin the bushes outside.”
“Or for the love of Pete,” she said, hand waving me in. “Just go already.”
“Bless, you, Lucinda,”
I ran into the library, weaving in and out of the stacks. “No running! And you’re going the wrong way!” Lucinda yelled, but I didn’t listen. Moira’s office was in the opposite end of the library, and I needed to get there. Because Moira, bless her, was one of the rarest collectors of the arcane in the Western hemisphere. I’d hoped to chat with her about hybrid demons in a young girl’s mouth, and just my luck she was on a librarian holiday.
“Come back, Brimstone!” barked Buzz as my hand dipped into my wallet and yanked out a thinly shaved American Express made out to Mike Hunt. The stacks were thick enough to make you vanish once you turned a corner hard. Buzz prowled with heavy steps, so I grabbed some of my precious change and tossed it three stacks over as I went the other direction, hugged the wall, and ran alongside it like a rat heading home.
Moira’s office had no windows facing the library, and I thanked the pantheon of actors in the cosmic dance we call existence for such a tiny miracle. I exhaled silently, wedged in the card above the latch, and slid down.
A tender click.
Slow, silent, and soft, I pushed open the door while in the opposite side of the library, Buzz was picking up my change.
Door closed, I smelled Moira’s room as my eyes adjusted: fresh Jasmine and old Pall Malls.
Her desk was an immaculate disaster area. But I’d visited enough times that I knew where in this unholy collection of old books, ash trays and stray papers the one volume that might help. On her desk was an assortment of papers that she’d carefully laid down, a map of her administrative duties and her own travels in the arcane.
Which is why the Polaroid camera on her chair stuck out.
“Quit hiding, Brimstone!”
I stepped, gently, through the towers of arcane text and special collections while Buzz hunted for me in “Classics.” Moira’s new film hobby vanished from my mind. What I needed would not be hiding in plain sight.
The A-Z sleeves on the filing cabinet were a ruse. Paperwork for Moira was out, about, and spread around. Inside the cabinets was greater bounty. Slow and steady, I pressed the metal release with my thumb, gripped the handle, and pulled—
Locked.
Buzz may not have worked in intelligence, but he knew that if I wasn’t in the bathroom I’d go to Moira’s office. I had fifteen seconds.
I yanked a paperclip from a collection of papers and carbons on the cabinet, and another from the round magnet on her desk she called the Black Hole of Calcutta, shaped one in a lazy L hook, the other one straight, then went to work on the lock with breath slipping through my nose in time with my heartbeat. The hook rested at the bottom while the straight arm went straight for the tumblers.
“Better not be in the ladies’ bathroom,” Buzz groaned, thankfully distant . . . but not for long.
I raked through the tumblers, pulled with the straight arm, and inhaled. The lock released.
Paperclips hit the ground as I pulled the top drawer open.
The taste of magic books was like a cloying older woman’s perfume. It reminded me of Edgar and I gagged.
Moia’s private treasure chest lay before me, spines out, and I flipped until I found my target. I yanked it out, and two dark slivers fell out from the pages. I caught them between my fingers, turned them face up and gasped as the door opened.
Lights snapped on. The baton in Buzz’s hand pointed directly at me.
“Going to smarten you up, Brimstone.”
I held up the photos with a smile. “I think not, hero.”
Buzz shook but did not move. No jive, the old solder was scared.
“Ain’t technology grand? Those folks at Polaroid are wizards. No dark room needed, even when the pictures deserve to be enjoyed in the dark.”
“Give those back,” he growled.
I tucked the tome under my arm, grabbed the camera by its straps and looped its straps around my neck. “Normally the LA Free Press isn’t interested in the love lives of librarians and security guards, but given the kink nature of Moira’s photography, I think they might change their mind.”
“I’m going to kill you.” The heavy thud of thick heels approached.
“No, Buzz. You won’t. Because that would get Moira in trouble. Murdering an unarmed man in an office, and Lucinda the witness heading this way.”
He seethed, fumes damn near steaming out of his ears.
I put two twenties on the desk and pocketed the pictures in my left pocket as Lucinda popped in. “What on earth are you doing in here?”
Fury ate Buzz’s command of speech, while I adjusted my weight and held the tome so tight in the crook of my arm you could only tell I was holding it from the back. “Oh, Buzz was kind enough to open this up so I could actually pay my fine.” I started moving toward the door and Lucinda backed. “Plus, Moira had borrowed my camera for her last trip to Greece. She loves new technology and knew I’d done some photo work back when I worked for Uncle Sam in Korea.”
I tried to follow Lucinda’s lead and leave, but Buzz stood between us. “I just love the look on people’s faces when they see themselves on film,” I said. “I bet Moira took enough great pictures to make some people famous. Right, Buzz?”
The thermonuclear explosion in Buzz’s eyes detonated, but his killing hand dropped. He stood to the side, letting me pass, which I did with a quick step.
At the door, I thanked Lucinda while Buzz slammed Moira’s office door shut, checking the lock with hard tugs, and then striding to catch me before I left.
I walked out backwards to keep the book out-of-sight. “Thanks so much, Lucinda. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
She smiled, make up softening in the onslaught of the late afternoon haze. “Not at all. Thank you for clearing your fines. Oh, and where did you say you were going on tour?”
I smiled as kind as Sunday school teacher. “Oh, just running away to join the circus, as always. Afternoon, Lucinda. And Buzz?”
Cold murder was in the veteran’s eyes.
I turned, adjusting my arm so the book, tucked so tight, emerged from my crook as I showed him my backside. “Say Hi to Moira for me.”
I drove Lilith a short distance, hung down the wrong way down a one-way street, and parked behind a giant dusty Cadillac so I could catch my breath, stay out of Buzz’s blast range, and review the spoils.
But first, I stole another glance at the two pictures.
There was Buzz, mouth deep between Moira’s dark thighs, digging into her naughty bits with mouth wide open. You could follow Moira’s form like a slash, as she’d obviously held the camera up high at an angle and clicked it while they were going to work on each other. The other had her riding him, half clothed, between the stacks, her looking up at the camera as if she knew someone who’d see it, lipstick smeared, glasses crooked. The only thing he was wearing were silver bracelets.
I smiled back at Moira. “Miss ya, Moira.
” I pocketed the explicit photos, removed the camera from my neck, and turned over the book that had been soaking in my pits.
Demons of the Orient, by the Reverend Montague Summers.
CHAPTER 12
EDGAR HAD KNOWN “MONTY” SUMMERS. I NEVER HEARD SPECIFICS, except grudging respect for the “fat pastor who dug like a rat into the catacombs of every parish and bishopric from London to Luzon.” I had read his translations of Malleus Maleficuram first, for what young and bored circus roustabout could resist the tales of witch hunters during the 15th century during long hauls across Texas? Especially since books were rare as true love on the circuit. About the only other thing Edgar noted was that “Summers wrote far more books than he published,” and mentioned two by name: The Witch Lords of Africa and the volume in my hand, Demons of the Orient.
From the driver’s seat, I scanned for anything out of the ordinary. On the library side, kids took bikes out of the rack and pumped pedals to get dinner and miss a beating. The other side of the street was a handful of homeless people, barefoot as hippies and beaten by a cruel sun and cruel life, huddled under a single palm tree bent worse than a politician’s spine. No threats. Just early evening sadness. I drew my finger around the outline of the book, realizing how much they were gateways to other places real, imagined, or nightmarish.
Summers was a mix of all three, but best known for collecting the folkloric tales of the occult from Europe. Vampires, witches, werewolves, and their assorted “kith and kin” were rendered with the kind of relish you expect from a melodramatic English teacher who gave up the stage for teaching the rug rats because they could never turn down the volume of their own hyperbole. Summers loved theater and plays and every tome he cranked out was written with high emphasis on the macabre, the grotesque, the bizarre. And yet he was recording the facts as much as embellishing them, or, as Edgar said, the stories were “all documented, all true.” They just grew a little in the telling.
The book was a solid 1000 pages. Time for a Joyride.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, a mantra playing in my head: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright . . .
The opening refrain from William Blake’s poem raced through my mind with the beat of a parade drummer running late (1, 2, 1-2-3), short-circuiting my active mind so that my subconscious could bubble out of the ooze from which it ran my life without me knowing it, and offer me a deeper and fuller awareness. Edgar called it Transcendental Consciousness. I called it Joyriding: a state where my mind and body twined as if struck at exactly the same moment . . . and time became elastic. I was more than the sum of my parts and I moved like greased lightening in the world (Tyger, Tyger, burning bright) . . . fought with the conviction of a career pit fighter, made love so intense and timeless that minutes of bliss were born (Tyger,Tyger, burning bright), my favorite aspect . . .
I cracked the spine of Demons of the Orient and ploughed through the pages with my fingers moving slower than my eye, each orb sucking in the words by near osmosis while my mind carved out a new cave for the information that was comprehended at a near instant and lodged among the tunnels of my brain filled with stray and disorganized memories: opening credits to Challenge of the Yukon, featuring Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the dirty jokes Professor Fuji used to make while imitating Groucho Marx (“What a gala day, and if it was more than a gal a day I’d never get out of bed!”), and the dark shadows of Edgar’s jobs, tasks, cruelties that I’d covered in the gossamer web of denial, all of which held together by force of will as the letters, words, sentences, meaning and voice of Demons of the Orient filled in a new cave.
My skull smacked the headrest. Copper filled my mouth. The Joyride skidded to a halt. Jolting in my seat, I looked around to see the sun had dropped. Late six o’clock shadows trailed kids the passing a basketball to each other, all of them loud and hopeful future stars. I sniffed and felt the drop of a drip.
The last yellowing pages of Demons of the Orient were stained with three drops of blood from nose. Terror bit down on my nerves until memory did its work, and, thankfully, there was no evidence that I’d just raised the dead or given myself a curse by bleeding on to the work of Montague Summers. I sucked in a deep breath, then exhaled hard. Nose bleeds and Joyrides were synonymous, especially when you crammed a 1000 page tome in my head. It was worse if you did anything physical. Fighting while Joyriding was never, ever, ever recommended. Even if you won, even if you moved like Bruce Lee on the Green Hornet, you’d probably wake up and be hit with an aneurysm,
I wiped my nose, and the book in my lap expanded in my mind. Ballooning facts, connections, and even Summers’ hyperbolic voice filled my skull. Pressure grew as pages raced and the back of my eyes wanted to jump out of their sockets—
—POP!—
Tears streamed down my eyes, but my mind’s eye saw every page clear, every image evoked, every symbol catalogued, pushing to find connections, clawing through the soft tissue of fresh meanings to hold on to that which I was hunting . . . seeking . . . in the swarm of knowledge I’d ingested like a hog on a soggy donut. Three deep breaths later, I’d latched onto the one symbol and image that mattered, Summer’s voice cartoonish with glee at as it discussed salacious and sexual material . . .
All three volumes of the erotic woodcuts are worthy of study, but none carry the weight of sin and abomination like Dreams of the Fisherman’s Wife. Hokusai’s depiction of an ancient myth has many imitators but none so categorically affected as the original, for it was based on the true story of a Japanese fisherman who drowned at sea and the deal his wife makes with a Squidling and its child to save him from the underworld. While later Shinto writers and other righteous blasphemers placed a fabled ending on to the story and associating with the popular Princess Tamatori with the Fisherman’s wife, the true tale is far more important. Hokasai’s Shunga diary recalls the details of his witnessing a local fisherwoman summoning an Octopus from the deep fathoms off shore. Upon her back she had carved a hex, the Black Shinto symbol for power and seduction, what would appear to Christian eyes as a twisted cross. The blood that dropped from her hexed flesh splashed the waters and brought the leviathan to the shore, where it suckled upon her labia and engorged her with cunnilingus as she writhed in sinful ecstasies upon the lapping shore. But where the most popular version of the Shunga depicts a second Molusk kissing the woman deeply, the original is far more frightening and worthy of vigilance. For it was from her mouth that a serpent emerged, as if a malign tongue. The fisher wife birthed a demon, rooted within her, a creature born of lust and desire and the monstrous seeds of the inhuman octopi. The demon snake was thin, eyeless, and without teeth. The alleged lost Shunga showed the same woman pleasuring herself with this demon, and upon its back was etched in yellow the ancient Shinto symbol for oblivion.
I gasped. The tears upon my cheek had dried and my lungs felt as if I’d smoked a pack of Lucky Strike and tried to hold my breath. The data was close to Nico’s story, which was good, but not perfect. I only had an itch of what it meant . . . and the itch grew more annoying as I listed the contradictions: the snake thing in Maxine wasn’t thin, but big, and it sure as hell had teeth . . . it wasn’t interested in sex, but tearing Nico’s face apart. Malice, not ecstasy or oblivion.
Damn it.
I flipped to the front of the book out of habit, but I could see the translation page when I blinked. “Published in English by Arcane House, published in German by Thule Publishing.”
Thule?
My testicles retracted and the world dropped fifty degrees with each heartbeat. Edgar would scare the soul with tales of the Thule Society, the Occult Arm of the Nazi party. Norse legends, ancient Sumerian, and bullshit racial theories all fucked each other over in an orgy of nonsense that, nonetheless, also tapped into the real and dark magic of this spinning orb, and wreaked tortured havoc on its victims.
German translation of Japanese sex tome of sorcery. Axis magic? Some kind of blending?
“Fuck,”
I muttered to no one in particular, because whoever was messing with these powers was either powerful, or a fool. Or both.
From the secret embers of my childhood, a voice called out for Edgar. He’d know what to do. He’d be able to stop it. He had knowledge and power that exceeded mine by a several orders of magnitude. And he was dead, for all intents and purposes. No running home to big bad Edgar, who’d just laugh and tell me to figure it out before the world ended.
Summers riding shotgun, I started up Lilith and rolled down the street looking for a payphone, preparing for a call I didn’t want to make. Two booths had their lines cut, so I had to turn to North Broadway. I breathed ammonia and sadness as I plunked down a dime from one of the Hell’s Angels.
“Happy Knight! Where every room is your own Castle!”
“Morris? Put me through to my room.”
“Just be glad I’m a nice guy, James,” he said, tone downright frosted. “I don’t run this place on charity.”
“You’re a real Mahatmas Gandhi.”
“Who?”
“Just put me through to Nico.”
Around me the sounds of traffic and blaring guitar did nothing to sooth my nerves. Then a click. “Yes?” Nico’s voice was pregnant with expectation.
“It’s Brimstone.”
“Have you found Maxine?”
“Not yet. About to head up to your place of business.”
“Then what have you been doing?”
That tone again, as if ordering a dog to recite West Side Story as punishment for bad behavior. Can’t say I found it groovy. I blinked as my mouth followed my instinct. “Had to get gas. Also had to pay off a library debt. Sorry it’s taking so long.”
“No, no . . . I’m sorry. I’m so tired, and scared, and I saw on the news that if cops don’t find someone within twenty-four-hours—”
“Nah, that’s just what cops on TV say.” It was also true. But my gut said there was no reason to worry her about Japanese sex magic and demon woodblocks just yet.
The door rattled and pushed in. I jammed my foot down to shut it. Outside, a bearded longhair with a gimp face was rattling his angry fists. “You’re in my shower!” Glad it wasn’t his toilet. I flashed my five fingers and mouthed “minutes” and, amazingly, that had him mollified enough to just stand out there with his flannel arms crossed, chewing his lip.
