Hart & Boot & Other Stories

by Pratt, Tim

  I told him one of my standard half-truths, that I’d made a lot of money day-trading a few years ago and that I was spending most of my time now reading and making art for my own amusement. My true ambitions are rather different, but I could hardly tell a stranger that my goal in life is to rack up a mostly positive karmic balance and eventually make a bid for immortality.

  We stopped at the front steps of my building, a weathered old townhouse that had been divided into flats. I glanced skyward, though I knew full well what the moon had to say. It was dark of the moon tonight, a good time for new beginnings, as any enterprise undertaken tonight would only grow in the following weeks as the moon waxed. I hadn’t cultivated a new lover in many months—the last one had fulfilled all my wishes and, as he’d requested, was now living happily at the bottom of a local river, slowly decaying into the bottom-mud and learning the languages of fish and pollution. In another hundred years or so, if the river didn’t dry up entirely, he might become a minor river god. Kasan had appeared just in time. I had certain things to accomplish over the course of the next month, and the energy that came with a new lover could serve well to fuel those endeavors.

  “Want to come upstairs for a while, Kasan?” I asked. I’m beautiful. I’m desirable. I know how to sense when a potential partner is interested. I can say these things with no particular pride, because such powers require relatively small magics to achieve. People seldom say no to me. I never compel anyone to make love to me—such mental domination is possible, but it’s also essentially rape, and cannot be condoned. I entice my lovers with beauty, and bring them back again and again by giving them the best sex they’ve ever had. There’s no magic to that, just years of experience and sensitivity to the needs of my lovers. I am good at what I do. Sex is my vocation and my devotion.

  Kasan wanted me, and agreed to come in. I led him upstairs, to the apartment on the top floor, where I’ve made my lair for these past half-dozen years. “It’s a nice apartment,” he said, and it is, wine-red couch, tapestries in muted blues, and lots of bookshelves crammed with everything from a complete run of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights to paperbacks with their covers ripped off that I’d bought from street vendors.

  “It is nice,” I said. “You should see the bedroom. It’s even nicer. But there’s a dress code in there. You’re not allowed to be dressed.”

  Kasan stripped so fast his clothes might have been on fire, and his body was lean, young, and excited.

  I took his hand, feeling excited myself. Sex is my life and livelihood, but I haven’t grown tired of it yet, and a new partner always thrilled me. I took him into my bedroom.

  Some time into the second round of lovemaking, he stopped moving long enough to touch my shoulder and get me to turn my head and look back at him. “I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I never asked your name.”

  “Delanie,” I said. That’s what it had been for the past few decades, anyway.

  “Rhymes with felony,” he said, grinning. He had a toothy, bright smile, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

  “We’re not committing any of those, unless you’re under eighteen and you didn’t tell me.”

  “Nope. I’m legal. Just turned twenty last week.”

  “That explains the twice-in-an-hour thing we’re doing here. So, birthday boy—ever had anal sex ?”

  He seemed surprised, but he agreed readily enough. Most men do. For my part, I like anal well enough, if I’m in the right mood, but the main reason I wanted to do it was magical. There’s a different flavor of power to sex when it’s explicitly, incontrovertibly non-procreational, and all that potential power of creation can be turned to other uses. (Oral sex works just as well, but I have to take the seed into my body for maximum effect, and I’ve never liked the taste.) Plus, in this culture at least, there’s a whiff of the transgressive about the act which further fuels its potency. We’d have a lot of anal sex in the next month, if things went my way—I needed the power. I had to renew my life force soon, and restore the wards on my building, and there were certain other rituals to be performed, steps on the long road to true immortality and the bottom rung of godhood.

  “You can lose the condom,” I said, handing him a bottle of lube. “I’ve got a recent clean AIDS test, if you want to see it.”

  “Aren’t you worried about catching something from me?” he said.

  “Should I be?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then I’m not worried,” I said. He could have every disease known to humankind, and it wouldn’t hurt me; that’s one of the benefits of magical life-extension. I don’t have to worry much about purely physical threats.

  I lay face-down, and with only a little awkward fumbling and guidance from me, he slid in. When he orgasmed, not long after, he bit down on my shoulder, his teeth breaking the skin. He apologized for the bite afterward, embarrassed, looking away. “I’ve never done that before. I just lost control.”

  “I’ve had worse,” I said, dabbing at my shoulder with a damp cloth. It wasn’t a very deep bite. “I’m flattered I had such an effect on you. Give me your number, and in a couple of days we’ll see if I can make you lose control again.” He scribbled down his home phone, cell number, pager, fax, and e-mail address. He was so eager, I wanted him all over again. In four weeks or so I’d reveal my powers to him and offer to invoke a vision to find his path to greatest happiness, and help him toward it, as I did for all my lovers. It was a small reward in exchange for how much I drew from them during our month-long liaisons, and it kept me in favor with certain forces that were far above personal mortal concerns, but nevertheless retained an interest in human affairs.

  “I, uh, have to get up early tomorrow,” he said, gathering his clothes, not looking at me.

  “No worries,” I said. I wouldn’t have let him stay the night anyway; I had work to do. Most of the men I picked up wanted to sleep over, though. His desire to leave was probably just due to the shyness I’d sensed earlier. I doubted he was very experienced with women. We kissed goodbye at the door, though it was a bit hurried and awkward, and I wondered if I was his first one-night stand. I found his nervousness rather endearing.

  After his footsteps receded down the stairs, I went to my bedroom and opened the walk-in closet to my shrine, the stone altar, the crystals and figurines, the beads and candles, all the physical bric-a-brac that helps me focus and externalize the power that grows inside me each time I make love. I renewed the daily protections on my building—I had many old and formidable enemies—then went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of shiraz. I stayed up for a while, reading a bit, and went to bed when the moon set at 3:30 a.m., still warmly pulsing from the power of the night’s sex.

  ***

  I spent the following morning rearranging all the fictives in the building, because it’s dangerous to leave them in one position for too long. I owned the whole building, and every apartment but mine was filled with cheap furniture and those incredibly expensive, creepily realistic life-sized sex toys known as “Real Dolls.” The dolls are made down in San Marcos for about $6,000 each, and they appear convincingly human at first glance. I didn’t have any interest in the dolls as masturbation aids, but since they have articulated skeletons and realistic (if silicone) flesh, they’re human enough to fool all sorts of nasty spirits who have a tendency to think all people look alike anyway. In the old days I made do with scarecrows and, later, mannequins to create my fictives, but their effectiveness was questionable at best. The dolls were the next best thing to hiring real people living in the other apartments, which was a bad idea for many reasons. Every day or two I moved the dolls around, posing them at various stations of life—at the sink, in the shower, sitting around in the living room. They all carry little tokens of my body, bits of my hair woven in with their own, mostly, or fingernail clippings tucked in their mouths, under their soft rubber tongues. There are creatures looking for me, tracking me by half-remembered scents, and having bits of myself
secreted away in so many lifelike figures scrambles their ability to detect me, and where they should see me they see a blur of too many bodies, and move on in confusion. The fictives have other uses, too—anyone attempting to harm me magically is likely to affect one of the dolls instead.

  In apartment 2-B, I found one of the dolls melted into a lumpy puddle of rubber, stuck to the carpet. The dolls are rated to survive temperatures in excess of 400 degrees Fahrenheit, so this wasn’t a simple case of my leaving her by the sunny window for too long. Bits of her steel joints poked up gruesomely through the skin-toned silicone, and her eyes stared up from widely separated points in the mess. I shivered—someone had aimed a devastating attack at me some time in the past couple of days, and I hadn’t gotten any warning of it at all. The protective spells that surround the building are supposed to erupt in divers alarums if anyone attacks me magically, but in this case, nothing had happened except the melting of my silicone proxy.

  I needed to clean up the doll, but I wasn’t sure where to begin—she’d fused solid to the carpet. I’d have to buy some industrial solvents or something. In the meantime, I needed to investigate, and find out who’d attacked me, and why.

  ***

  Before I could start a ritual meant to uncover the psychic spoor of whatever malevolent entity had targeted me, someone buzzed at my front door. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and went down the creaky stairs to the foyer, where I opened the pebbled-glass door.

  A man in a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie stood on my steps, holding a clipboard bulging with papers. “You own this building?” he said, looking down at his clipboard.

  “I do.”

  “I’m the building inspector. I just checked out the exterior, and just to let you know, there are going to be a lot of fines. You’ve got structural problems, the fire escapes are deathtraps, I can tell right off that the windows in the back are too small for emergency fire exits... well, it goes on. You’ll get a copy of my report. I’ll need to come in to the building and inspect a couple of the apartments, too.”

  “Why, exactly, are you doing an inspection?” I asked. He still wasn’t looking at me. This would be much easier if he’d just look at me.

  “Routine,” he said, which was no answer at all, though it wasn’t the first time a building inspector had come by—I’d used magical persuasion to sidestep such an inspection when I took over the building, and there was apparently an unresolved file about this property at City Hall. I’d have to deal with it eventually, but I had too many other things to worry about now. At least this problem was easily remedied. I was still filled with power from my time with Kasan the night before, and I could twist this man’s will in a moment.

  I touched the inspector’s chin with the tip of my finger, and he looked up at me, surprised. Once he looked into my eyes I said, “I’m sure you’ll find everything in order.” It wasn’t a question, or a request; it was a command, and I put the force of my powers of compulsion behind it. Something twinged inside my head, a sudden flash of migraine-intense pain, there and gone in an instant. I kept myself from wincing, though the pain worried me. “I’m sure those other things you noticed are fine, too. You should probably check again and reconsider your report.”

  He frowned and looked back down. “No ma’am, I don’t think so. I’m fairly thorough. I’ll come back to do the interior inspection later this week. My office will call you to set up a time.” He walked away.

  I stood in the open doorway for a moment, then shut the door and leaned my forehead against the glass.

  My powers had failed me. That building inspector was no adept-in-disguise, I could tell, and I hadn’t felt any sort of protective spell wreathing him. My power simply hadn’t worked, and that hadn’t happened to me in more decades than I could count. I’d long since moved past the awkward early years of hit-or-miss magic, into a realm of greater mastery. I might fail at more ambitious magic, if I tried to expand my skills or did my work sloppily, but a simple compulsion laid on an unsuspecting human? It should have worked. It should have been as easy as breathing.

  I went upstairs again. Whoever had attacked me had done more than just melt one of my fictives. They’d somehow interfered with the flow of my power, and I could not allow that. I’d do my ritual, which should at least point me in the right direction, and I’d find out which old or new enemy had decided to come for me.

  ***

  The ritual didn’t work.

  The candles burned, the crystals sparkled, the words filled my mind, but it didn’t work; I was like a boat on becalmed seas. My sails were useless, without the wind of magic to fill them, and my magic was gone, as if I’d used it all up trying to compel that little building inspector. This was bad on more than one level. Without magic, I couldn’t renew my life force, and in another week or so I would begin to age and die, the years catching up with me exponentially. On the first day after I failed to renew the spell I would age one year, on the second day two years, on the third day four years, and so on, the amount doubling each day. A week later my body would be over a hundred and fifty years old, and I’d be dead.

  That was assuming I survived this week. Without my magic to maintain the protective spells on my building and keep the fictives activated, various old enemies would probably take the opportunity to strike. I had a day, perhaps, before those protective spells weakened. The whole reason I’d slept with Kasan the night before was to gain more power to work these magics, and now some assault had drained me.

  Which meant it was time to call Kasan, and get him to come over again. A marathon session of fucking would fuel me enough to strengthen the protections on my building, at least, even if I had to cast the spell during the act itself, letting the power pass through me and directly into the workings of magic.

  I called Kasan’s home number, and a pizzeria answered. Annoyed, I called his cell phone. The number was not in service. His pager number went to a nursing home. I tried his e-mail address, and it bounced. His fax number didn’t go to a fax at all, but to a local used car lot.

  I pressed “Stop” on the fax machine to cut off the querulous voice of the car salesman coming over the speaker. Kasan had given me fake contact information.

  I was surprised, and a little hurt, and a lot suspicious. I had apparently misjudged him—it now seemed likely that I wasn’t his first one night stand, and that he had the fuck-and-slip-away technique down to a science. He’d certainly fooled me with his shy-and-awkward approach, and I was normally a good judge of such things.

  Unless. Was Kasan something more sinister than an opportunistic lover? Was he an enemy sorcerer in disguise? Had he fucked some kind of poison into me, something to steal my abilities? How could I possibly find him, and find out? I wondered if I was being paranoid, grasping at remote possibilities because I couldn’t figure out how to investigate more likely ones.

  I sank down to the floor, wanting to curl up and whimper. I’d begun studying magic in order to protect myself, to control my destiny, to author my own fate, so that I would never be helpless or dependent on anyone else. And now that power had been taken away from me. I didn’t know how to cope.

  I forced myself back to my feet. Curling up in a ball did not qualify as coping, and if I didn’t know what to do next, I’d just have to think about things until I did.

  * * *

  I walked around the asphalt multi-use path until I reached the wooded side of the lake, a little natural realm in the midst of downtown, the tops of buildings visible over the trees. The day was springtime-cool, blue and clear, and the lake reflected the sky like a mirror. It was too pretty a day to be thinking of last resorts, but here I was.

  I went into the trees until the path was invisible behind me, and only the occasional flash of light reflecting on water showed in front of me. I knelt on the leaves beneath the oaks, before a large stone, rounded as if it were the top half of an egg buried in the soil.

  “Barry,” I said. “I need it now.”

  I waited.
After a moment the leaves rustled, and the earth opened up before me, the rock rolling aside as if pushed by invisible hands. Dirt began to slide apart, neatly piling up in heaps on either side of the growing hole.

  Down at the bottom, a lump of dull, round stone the size of a coconut rested. It rolled up out of the hole, coming to rest between my knees. The dirt poured back into the hole.

  The wind rose, blowing my long hair, lifting it off my shoulders. Barry had always liked it when I wore my hair up, to show off my neck. He’d been a good lover, and a good friend. Ever since he’d been a little boy he’d had dreams in which he was bodiless and all-seeing, a spirit of the wind. After our month was over, many years ago, I helped him attain that wish, sacrificing his body and his mortality to become a local spirit of the lake and the oaks. His desire was not so different from mine, though the path I followed took far longer, and had far greater potential rewards. Barry would only exist for so long as his grove of trees did, while I sought true immortality. Still, he would live long past his normal human span, in happiness and contentment, and I’d helped him reach that point. As thanks, he’d been watching something for me. I picked up the lump of cold stone and brushed clinging bits of soil away, slipped it into a canvas grocery bag over my shoulder, and stood up. “Thanks, Barry,” I said, and headed back home.

  I set the stone orb on my altar, then picked up a perfectly mundane claw hammer. I cracked the orb with the hammer, and it split neatly in two, halves falling to reveal the sparkling crystals inside. It was a geode, beauty hidden in a drab exterior, but it was more than that, too—it was my life savings. I’d made this object many years before at great cost, draining myself of power over several successive months, pouring it off into this orb. I’d done no other magic for the half a year it took to make this orb, and using it now was almost painful, like being forced to spend your life savings on emergency medical expenses. This was magic, my magic, but not contained within my body, and so safe from whatever corruptive influence had tainted my powers. The orb was a one-use device, unfortunately, and its power would be expended on whatever spell I cast now.