Moonlight Binding Magic

by Charlotte Munich

  “Amazing,” I murmured, following Linus back onto the street.

  The prospect of having a venue to play in had galvanized the band. When Linus and I came back with our marvelous news about the old barn’s transformation, the others insisted we start rehearsing immediately. We needed to up our game and be incredible onstage, Thom had decided.

  I didn’t remind him that Tristan had hired us without ever hearing us play or asking us a single question. This could all just as easily be a dud. But I was glad our band had found a new dynamic: any impulse to move forward was a good thing, and lost in the dead of winter for a moment, we’d needed it sorely.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon putting together a set of covers for our first live event, and then we moved on to something I’d written in the morning, about our nightly visit to the barn. Since it was so fresh, it inspired the guys to create some interesting twists, and within an hour we had the first skeleton of a promising new song.

  We were fleshing it out, engrossed by the work, and I was belting out the chorus, which went something like this:

  Stop it, you’re living with ghosts

  Open your eyes and see the dust

  Feel the moonlight melt your bones

  …when a sharp rap on the widow made me jump and cry out shrilly.

  I laughed immediately at the ridiculous sound I’d produced and ran to the front door to open it. We’d closed the shutters for the night to keep in what little heat we could enjoy inside, and it took me some time to disarm the old mechanisms before I could let the visitor in.

  It was Tristan, or rather, the more normal-looking Clovis version of Tristan who posed as his assistant. I still hadn’t figured out why the guy needed to sustain two personas, but to me, it was clear as day that they were one and the same.

  Today, “Clovis” was wearing dark jeans, black boots, and a black wool sweater under an open black wool coat that instantly made me feel chilly for him.

  “Hi,” he said, “is this where the band lives? Judging by the noise you’re making, I’m going to say it is.” He noticed me. “Oh. Yes. Same lady as yesterday. Goodnight.”

  Without his dark sunglasses, you could really see these nearly owlish eyes I’d noticed the day before. He blinked at the shrill glare of the ceiling lamp, which prompted me to offer:

  “Do you want me to dim the light?”

  His eyes must be very sensitive if he lived in the dark and wore sunshades at night.

  He looked at me quizzically. “Yes, please.”

  “It’s nice to see you again,” I said, silently adding, without that crazy wig and costume.

  “Likewise.”

  “Things seem to be moving very swiftly at the barn,” Linus congratulated him, while I dealt with the lighting options in the living room. “We visited today. We were looking for Tristan.”

  “Oh,” Clovis said, “Tristan had to take care of some things in the city. He’ll be back in a couple of days. Meanwhile, he instructed me to liaise with you guys.”

  I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what this charade meant. I’d told the guys I was one hundred percent positive that Clovis and Tristan were one and the same, but none of them was buying it. Even right now, they believed him. No one was frowning or looking lost. They bought his act, hook, line, and sinker.

  “What can we do for you?” Thom asked in his business voice.

  The previous evening, he’d given me an earful in the car about the band being a democracy, and how I needed to respect that.

  “Was that one of your songs you were playing?” Clovis asked, looking at me.

  “Unh, yes, but a very new, very rough one,” I said.

  “It sounded rather good to me. Who wrote it?”

  “Victoire kickstarts most of our writing,” Linus said helpfully.

  Clovis smiled.

  “It’s wonderful that you’re feeling inspired,” he said, looking at me in such a way that I heard: It’s amazing that I inspired you.

  I blushed.

  “As I just said, it’s nowhere near ready for outsider ears.”

  Clovis nodded.

  “Tristan told me that he’d hired you, in a manner of speaking, without even quizzing you about your style of music. Would it be okay if I listened in to your rehearsal? This way, I could inform my boss about what you’re playing. It would help him organize the barn’s cultural schedule in a way that makes some sense.”

  It was a very polite and convoluted way of saying, For all I know, you play like shit and my weirdo boss, who by the way is also me, is having second thoughts about letting you onto his stage.

  I smiled.

  “Of course, of course,” Thom said in his best salesman voice.

  He went on to explain how we could play from any repertoire but preferred rock ’n’ roll. Clovis nodded, and when Thom was finished, we played a variety of songs for our visitor, ranging from loungy, almost pop-style music, to invigorating beats, and even violently brutal hard metal songs. I loved every one of the tunes we played. I loved crooning and yelling and roaring. I felt as if there was nothing my voice couldn’t do. I didn’t think I had a voice, rather an ability to become any voice I chose. And I don’t think I’d ever sung as well as I did that evening, smack dab in the middle of nowhere with no audience at all except for that eccentric maybe-client.

  When we were finished, I met his gaze with a dead-on smile, my heart beating fast in my ears and feeling very alive.

  “So,” I asked cheekily, “how was that for a kickass set? You think your boss made a mistake hiring us?”

  “Nope,” Clovis said. “I’m satisfied. What about your own songs? You didn’t play any of these.”

  “We only have a dozen that are completely ready,” Thom explained. “We wouldn’t rotate them to death anyway.”

  “I still want to hear them,” Clovis insisted.

  So we played the song about the girl lying stuck in a metallic wreck, the song about the guy who doesn’t want to work as a banker, the song about the nice woman with the eggs, the song about the farmer who compensates having a small dick by launching his dogs after the gypsies.

  “Maybe not that one,” Clovis suggested. “At least not on opening night.”

  “Right,” Linus laughed. “We wouldn’t want your customers to feel unwelcome.”

  Clovis’s grin was almost threatening when he agreed. “No. We wouldn’t. We love all our customers and want them to feel right at home.”

  He left towards midnight, declaring himself very hungry, because he hadn’t eaten yet. We offered him food, hoping he wouldn’t take us up on it, because there was only so far you could go with a basket of eggs. He declined and bade us goodnight, disappearing into the darkness.

  5

  I had weird dreams that night. I usually welcome weird dreams. They’re the stuff art is made of. They’re the sounds our brains make when they rewire themselves to erase the grooves in our minds and pave the way for new travels.

  Still, it was never fun waking up at three in the morning in an ice-cold room with my heart beating like a demented drum and the weird feeling that someone was just there, sitting heavily on my chest.

  I slept on the third floor, under the roof, in a large room with a bathtub by the window. There were spiders, and mold in the corner, but I didn’t mind too much. I liked having my space, my bathtub with its crooked lion feet, and the little balcony outside my window, because I knew it would be great come spring. Beside the bed and the tub, the room was completely bare, except for a cupboard that held all my things. The ukulele slept with me in bed, because it made me feel safe.

  But waking up from that nightmare, it was as though a presence shared the room with me. A ghost, or some other invisible creature that wasn’t completely malevolent—it was really rather neutral, with a mind of its own.

  “Hi,” I whispered into the darkness, praying really hard that nobody would answer but talking, nonetheless. “I’m Victoire. Would you like me to sing something for you
?”

  I picked up my ukulele on the pillow with hands that shook a little and started pinching chords in the dark. The basic harmonies soothed me gradually, and after a minute or two, I started composing.

  You sit on my stomach but you need a bath

  Go rest in the tub and we’ll speak when you’re wet

  Don’t think I will rest while you watch and you laugh

  It was all very chilly and silly, and I ended up alone in my bed, laughing and hugging my ukulele and feeling at home for the first time in that cold house.

  The next day when I woke up, the weather was awful, abysmally dark with fat, low gray clouds that brought out the ugliness in the dull green fields. Yet I felt strangely serene, almost content. Whatever ghost had visited me that night, I’d made my peace with it.

  I stretched languorously and decided to take a bath in my very own tub while cloud watching. I chose a favorite disk of mine by The Pixies, because I loved their explosive energy and the way the simple yet efficient arrangements brought out the raving crazy in the lyrics. The water was tepid, so I didn’t linger, but it felt very satisfying to use the room to its full potential. I dried myself, chose jeans and a warm sweater to wear, braided my hair, and put on some eyeliner and mascara.

  I wasn’t the first one up for once. Thom and Sam were already downstairs, writing. I approached them, curious to see what the last events had inspired in them. I gave them each a peck on the cheek. Sam hugged me and tried to ruffle my hair. Thom pulled my loose braid and smiled mischievously.

  “Look, new song.”

  What they’d come up with was really interesting, even more so when he tried some chords, and I offered more words. I started singing, and pretty soon, we were composing at full speed. Sometime later, Linus came back from his morning run, glowing pink and smiling from ear to ear. He instantly sat down behind his drums, and we just took off from there. It was magical. It was like flying. Even though we were wildly different persons, it felt as though we were one beating heart.

  And then, during a short lull, my cell phone rang.

  When I picked up, a feminine voice, rich and velvety, almost sultry, greeted me.

  “Victoire Destel?”

  “Speaking,” I said, intrigued.

  “Hello, this is Dora Vinok, from Anubis Self-Storage. I have a contract here in your name, ending today. Since you haven’t extended your lease, I suppose you’ll be picking up your stuff. I’m calling to see when you can swing by and get your key.”

  “Wait. What?”

  She started repeating herself, so I cut her off gently. I’d heard her the first time, all right.

  “But, see, I never rented one of your spaces, so you can’t have an expired contract in my name.”

  “I have a contract in your name, with your phone number,” she insisted. She also gave me my date of birth and my social security number.

  “Okay,” I said, at a loss.

  Someone had rented a room at this storage facility, in my name. What the hell?

  “Where are you?” I asked her. “How long has that contract been in effect? Who signed it?”

  “I believe you did,” the woman, Dora Vinok, replied with some impatience in her voice. “Four years ago. Our storage facility is in the suburbs of Moulins.”

  This conversation was getting stranger by the minute. Moulins was the nearest sizeable town, a half-hour’s drive from our place. I’d never set foot in the medieval town before last October, when we’d decided to move to the country after the big plague had sucked our finances dry.

  “Four years ago,” I repeated. “Could you give me the exact date?”

  “Unh, just a second…” She set down the phone. From very far, I heard a ruffling of paper.

  “Everything okay?” Linus asked from the dining room table.

  I nodded, feeling slightly nauseous now. Ms. Vinok was back on the phone already.

  “You signed that contract on May 7th, and your driver delivered the boxes at our storage facility on May 9th, four and a half years ago.”

  “What the…” I gasped.

  “What time can you get here?” she asked in a brisk voice.

  “I can’t…I mean. Okay. What time will you be closing today?”

  “We’re open for business from six to eleven tonight,” she said.

  I frowned at the weird opening times.

  “And before six?”

  “Not possible.”

  I sighed and told her I’d be there at six fifteen.

  “Are there a lot of boxes?”

  “I can’t tell you that. If you can’t remember what you stored in there, you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself.”

  I thanked her and ended the call, feeling irritated and very weird.

  “What was that?” Thom asked.

  I heard my own voice from far away.

  “Apparently, someone used my identity to store stuff in Moulins somewhere four years ago, on the very same day I had my accident,” I explained.

  None of the guys knew what to say. There wasn’t much to say anyway. There was only one thing I could do: go to the appointment, get the key, open the storage unit, and solve the strange puzzle.

  6

  Four years earlier, I’d been in an accident. I’d fallen eight floors in an old elevator and ended up alive and relatively unscathed but trapped in a cage of crumpled steel. The fire department had to cut me out of there, and it took hours. When they finally got to me, I’d passed out from fear and exhaustion but had barely a broken bone—just a line fracture in my wrist and two cracked ribs. They told me I could have died, and by their mystified tone, I gathered that I should have.

  This happened in a nineteenth-century building in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, the chic area in the southwest, near the Bois de Boulogne. I’d gone there to see an old lady because I hoped she’d sell me her piano. But when I’d arrived at her apartment, a younger man had opened the door. He’d told me his grandmother had died that very same day, and he wasn’t selling her things.

  This had all happened on May 7th, four and a half years earlier. I’d had my lucky ukulele, and it, too, had emerged intact from the wreckage, but for a small dent in the cheap wood. It wasn’t valuable or anything, just precious to me.

  I’d spent the rest of the day at the hospital getting checked up, and I’d slept through May 8th, a national holiday. On May 9th, I was nowhere near Moulins and had nothing to put in storage anyway.

  At five o’clock the night of Dora Vinok’s unsettling phone call, I borrowed Thom’s car and drove it to Moulins, alone with Linus. The other guys had offered to come, out of care, curiosity, and boredom, but I didn’t know how much space I’d need to retrieve “my” things.

  Linus and I spent the whole journey to Moulins speculating.

  “Maybe this unknown, secret benefactor wanted to make it up to you for your accident,” Linus said. “Maybe it was the guy who didn’t want to sell you the piano.”

  I just snorted.

  “Maybe I got hit on the head in my fall, and I went to Moulins but forgot about it. I bet you there’s nothing in that storage box. If there’s something, I hope it’s valuable and I can sell it.”

  “Let’s just make it a fun trip into town,” Linus offered.

  We arrived at the offices of Anubis Self-Storage sometime after six, as announced. A foggy night had wrapped itself around the deserted industrial area, and the near-empty parking lot was lit by a blaring sign depicting a sneering jackal. Again, very atmospheric. I parked the car, pulled the brakes, and we made our way to the offices. In a tiny storefront, under flickering neon tubes, a woman with dark curly hair wearing a well-cut gray tweed suit sat at an office desk between huge piles of papers. She was doing her nails in a deep, rich plum, and she looked furious.

  She glanced up when I pushed the door and it chimed. She must have been in her mid-twenties, with smooth alabaster skin and liquid dark eyes. She wore dark plum lipstick, and I could see the tip of a stylis
hly pointy shoe jumping nervously under the table.

  “You’re late,” she complained in a low, velvety voice that I recognized instantly.

  “Dora Vinok?” I asked.

  We couldn’t be more than five minutes late, and she’d said the store would be open till eleven.

  She didn’t confirm her identity, nor did she ask who I was. Instead, she grabbed a file from a pile on her desk and handed it to me without bothering to stand up.

  “Your paperwork’s here. The key’s in there somewhere. Storage boxes are on the right side of the entrance, facing this way.”

  I took the file and was relieved to find it feather-light. I opened it. A small magnetic key was stuck to the first page with adhesive tape.

  “Thank you,” I muttered.

  Dora Vinok had gone back to her manicure and ignored me completely. She didn’t even glance up again. I turned on my heels and Linus followed me outside.

  Notwithstanding her wildly unprofessional attitude, Anubis’s business must be booming, because their storage facility was huge. Even so, we didn’t see anyone there as we walked through the long corridors in search of box 221.

  We had to circle the block twice before we finally found it, in a blind spot, between two malfunctioning fluorescent lights. Somewhere along the way, I’d grabbed Linus’s hand in a death grip. There was something about this place that made me very, very nervous.

  “You don’t have to go in there, if you don’t want to,” he said, patience incarnate as always. “They might throw your stuff out, but who cares? You won’t be missing it, will you?”

  “No, it’s okay. I want to know what’s inside.”

  “You want me to go see for you?” he offered.

  I smiled and shook my head. It was a very sweet offer, but I wasn’t taking him up on it.

  “Okay, here we go.”

  I swiped the magnetic key across the lock. It gave a sickly, badly tuned beep. There was something seriously wrong about that place, if even the electronic equipment couldn’t give you a precise note.