Unsympathetic Magic

by Laura Resnick

  They were books about Vodou. Puma had given them to me when I left the shop a little while ago, insisting I take them free of charge. She thought they might help me better understand the ritual we’d be attending soon.

  So you didn’t bring me anything?” Nolan was looking at me as if he’d just learned I was a shoplifter. “Not even a card?”

  “I was mugged after you collapsed last night,” I said wearily. “My purse was stolen.” It was as good an excuse as any.

  “No shit? Jesus.” He shook his head. “The cops need to do a better job around here.”

  That struck me as the sort of sentiment that the star of The Dirty Thirty should probably keep to himself.

  Nolan looked weak and pale, but he certainly didn’t seem to be at death’s door. He also talked like he expected to be back on the set within a few days to finish shooting our final scene together. If he felt any curiosity at all about why I was wearing my costume while visiting him, he concealed it manfully.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall, figuring that ten more minutes was a reasonable length of time for this visit. The next time I looked at the clock, I was appalled to find that only three minutes had passed since my previous glance. Could a voodoo curse slow down the passage of time inside this hospital room, I wondered?

  Max questioned Nolan about his health, his symptoms, what he remembered about his collapse, and his diagnosis. After a few more minutes, during which time I kept my gaze fixed on the agonizingly slow revolutions of the clock’s second hand, Max fell silent. When I met his eyes, he gave me a cheerful little nod, indicating that he was satisfied.

  Jeff started chatting with Nolan again, and for all his own self-absorption, he was smart enough to recognize by now that the way to Nolan’s heart was to pretend to be fascinated by him. A certain natural revulsion had prevented me from mastering this technique with Nolan myself, but Jeff was made of sterner stuff. Before long, Nolan was yammering away about himself in an animated manner, clearly delighted to have as attentive an audience as Jeff.

  When I announced, with considerable relief, that it was time for us to go, Jeff’s face fell. So I added, “I mean, Max and I have to go. But if you’d like to stay . . .”

  “Sure, he’ll stay,” said Nolan, not about to let his captive listener escape so easily.

  The two men gave us a quick wave of farewell, and Max and I left.

  As we exited the room, Nolan’s assistant tried to block our path. “You’re supposed to stay a half hour,” she hissed. “That’s the rule!”

  “We can’t stay,” I said. “Places to go, bokors to stop.”

  “What?”

  “I want credit for this visit,” I said.

  “You show up hours late and stay barely fifteen minutes, and you want credit?” she said incredulously. “You’re going to have to come a second time.”

  “That’s not fair!” I protested.

  Max said, “One of our party is remaining behind. Will that suffice?”

  She blinked. “Oh! The cute bald guy is staying?”

  “You like that look on him?” I said.

  She picked up her pen to make a note on the visitation log. “Okay. How long is he going to stay?”

  “Probably until Nolan gets well and checks out of the hospital,” I said.

  I got credit for the visit.

  As we rode the elevator back down to the main floor, Max said to me, ”Mr. Nolan clearly suffers from an excess of choler. I do not find it surprising that his temperament has affected his health.”

  “So you think his heart attack was strictly due to natural causes?”

  “All things considered, it is impossible to say for certain, but, yes, I believe so. In truth, based on what he says about his condition, it sounds as if he’s lucky the attack wasn’t more severe. It may not be wise for him to return to work as early as he evidently intends to.”

  I nodded in agreement, though I wasn’t sure who had the strength of will to stop Nolan, if returning to work too soon was what he decided to do.

  Biko was waiting for us outside on the sidewalk. His sword case was slung over his back. Although there were plenty of people around and it would be light for a little while longer, I was still glad he was armed, since we were about to go visit baka stomping grounds.

  “Got rid of Jeff?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. He’s not a bad guy, but he really doesn’t seem to get it.”

  I thought that statement also accurately summed up Jeff as a boyfriend, but I said nothing.

  We weren’t very far from the spot where Biko and I had met, so we started our investigation there. Biko showed us the half-eaten pigeon carcasses he had found last night. We also studied the claw marks that were nearby.

  “It was the baka,” I said with certainty when I saw the thick scratch marks on the cement wall that Biko pointed out. I felt a chill run through me, despite the evening’s muggy heat. The hand that made these marks would have been nearly as big as mine, and the claws could easily eviscerate a dog Gilligan’s size. “These marks weren’t made by a person or a pet.”

  “No, indeed,” said Max, examining them intently.

  We went next to the area where I had seen the zombie and the growling gargoyles, and where Lopez and I had later found the severed hand being eaten by carrion feeders. There was no evidence here of anything that had happened last night. I was just about to say so when someone coming out of one of the row houses shouted loudly.

  “You!”

  We all looked up.

  A white man in his fifties, balding and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, shook his fist at me. “The cops were here all morning and half the day because of you! What did you do?”

  “Friend of yours?” Biko said to me.

  I recognized the voice. “That’s the man who wouldn’t call for help for Darius!”

  “Get out of here!” The man ran over to the garbage cans on the sidewalk, picked up a lid, and brandished it at me. “We don’t want your kind around here!”

  “Oh, dear,” said Max.

  “Yo, mister,” Biko said sternly to the man. “You talk that way to my sister again, and you’ll answer to me. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Your sister?” the man blurted.

  “Yeah, my sister,” Biko said. “She was mugged here last night. Are you the jerk who just shouted at her when she was calling out for help?”

  “She wasn’t . . . She . . .”

  Biko started walking forward. “Are you the guy who let my sister get mugged right outside your own house and wouldn’t help her? Are you that guy?”

  “Uh . . .” The man wisely chose to go inside, where he locked his door—and probably shoved a piece of heavy furniture in front of it, too.

  “Hmph.” Biko glared at the closed door. “Maybe the next time a woman in the street is asking for help, that loser will do more than shout at her and slam his window shut.”

  We searched the area, but the cops had cleaned up all signs of what had happened there. So we accompanied Biko to the north end of Mount Morris Park where, very near the Livingston Foundation, he showed us where he had found the baka attacking Frank Johnson. Though the fading summer light was very dim by now, we were able to find some scratch marks on the pavement, similar to the ones we had seen a little while ago. We walked through the darkening park to the south end, and Biko showed us where he and Puma had found Gilligan’s body. Only a large dark brown spot on the cement revealed evidence of what had occurred there.

  “His blood,” Biko said quietly.

  “My dear fellow.” Max patted his shoulder.

  Ahead of us was a large expanse of grass, then a steep, rocky hill that was thick with shrubs and trees. The hill was high, ascending well above the roofs of the town-houses that surrounded the park. An old stone staircase led up the steep slope, curving to its shape, sweeping gracefully and disappearing up into the night-shrouded foliage that crowded around it. Wondering where those steps went, I looked f
arther up. Above the dark outline of the trees against the twilight sky, I saw the top of what looked like some sort of fantastic treehouse. Max and I had noticed it much earlier today, from a distance, soaring just above the treetops.

  “What is that?” I asked Biko, craning my neck and pointing up to it.

  “The old watchtower,” he said. “The last one left in New York. It’s so old, it’s been obsolete for more than a century.”

  “Watchtower for what?” I asked.

  “Fire,” said Biko. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Harlem was mostly farm country—can you picture that? In those days, they had tall watchtowers around New York, like this one. Someone would be posted at the top of the tower to keep an eye out for a fire starting. When he saw one, he’d alert people by ringing the big bell that hung below him in the tower. After the switchover to fire alarm boxes, the towers went out of use and mostly got torn down. This is the only one still standing.” After a moment, he added, “Mr. Livingston told me that. He was talking about restoring it one day, but the foundation always had so many other projects it wanted to do first.”

  “Out of use for more than a century,” I mused. “It must be falling apart by now.”

  “Yeah, I think it’s in pretty bad condition.” Biko chuckled and added, “If you go up there in the daytime, you’ll see that it looks like the world’s best jungle gym. When I was little, I always wanted to climb on it. But my mom told me she’d skin me alive if I ever went anywhere near it. Too dangerous. And by the time I was old enough to come to the park without Mom or Puma, I guess I just wasn’t stupid enough to try it. It always looked to me like the spiral staircase would collapse, or the iron bars would fall off, or that big bell would tumble down on my head.”

  “Hmm.” Max nodded.

  After a moment, we all turned by silent consent and walked out of the park, disappointed not to have learned anything new from this outing. My feet were killing me, and I was so tired that I didn’t think I could make it all the way to the subway. Max must have noticed my drooping shoulders and weary pace.

  “I must take Esther home,” he said to Biko. “I should have done so well before now.”

  I was about to protest that Max didn’t need to escort me, but then I remembered that I didn’t have my subway card, money for a cab, or the keys to my door.

  “But I think, Biko,” Max continued, “that you, Nelli, and I should rendezvous later and go hunting by night for baka and zombies.”

  A man and woman who’d been in the process of passing us on the sidewalk paused and gave us a hard stare. Whether it was because of what Max had just said, or because of my outfit . . . Well, I supposed that either reason would have been sufficient for their sudden decision to cross the street and continue their walk well away from us.

  “Who’s Nelli? Oh! Your dog, right?” Biko shook his head. “Dr. Zadok, after what those baka did to my dog—”

  “Nelli is very large, and combating creatures such as the baka is her life’s work,” Max said. “Although I am reluctant to put her in harm’s way, knowing now how ruthless the baka can be when facing a canine opponent, I feel that it would frustrate her—even insult her—to omit Nelli from our expedition. It would also be wise of us to recruit her to this endeavor, since she is well-equipped for detecting mystical adversaries.”

  There was a brief pause while Biko translated this in his head, and then he agreed with Max’s proposal. Since the baka had so far been encountered in the vicinity of the park, the two men agreed to meet at the foundation later to commence their hunt. After we all exchanged phone numbers, Biko went home, and Max escorted me to Malcolm X Boulevard, where we caught a cab.

  Fortunately, he was so absorbed in thinking about the mysterious problem at hand, he forgot to be frightened in the taxi until we ran a red light while crossing a major thoroughfare. And only a few minutes after that, we were descending from the cab outside my apartment in the West Thirties, near Tenth Avenue.

  I got one of the neighbors to buzz me into the building, then Max followed me up to the second floor, to my front door. Using his mystical abilities, he placed his hand on the doorknob, took a slow breath, uttered a few words in another language, and turned the knob.

  “There you are, my dear!” He opened the door and gestured for me to go inside.

  “Max, I just realized,” I said, “You’ve never been here before.”

  “Indeed, I have not.”

  “Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  He protested briefly, considering how exhausted I was. But I spent so much time in his home, I wanted him to at least know what the inside of my home looked like. So I insisted he come inside for a few minutes.

  “Ah, very nice!” Max said when I turned on the light.

  Actually, it was an old apartment in poor repair, mostly furnished with charity-shop furniture and hand-me-downs. But it was home. “Thank you.”

  Max looked around while I poured him a glass of cold water. The kitchen flowed into the living room, the two rooms being partially separated by a counter. A small table for four people was perched halfway between the two spaces, neither of which was large enough to hold the whole thing comfortably. The bathroom door was on one side of the living room. There was another door near it that led onto a very small balcony; it overlooked a claustrophobic space between four close together buildings and offered no privacy, but it was nonetheless a balcony.

  I had two bedrooms—a fact that had made Lopez almost green with envy on his first visit here. But the second bedroom would scarcely have passed as a walk-in closet in most other cities. In fact, now that I no longer had roommates, that was precisely what I used it for. I kept a large supply of rehearsal props and costumes in that room, as well as the overflow of my own clothes that didn’t fit in the small closet in my bedroom.

  Max beamed at me and said courteously, “I like your home, Esther. It’s very welcoming.”

  “It’s rent-controlled,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d probably be living in a phone booth an hour outside of the city.”

  Seeing Jeff today reminded me of how things had been back when I was dating him. ”I moved in here with two other girls from Northwestern University after I first came to New York. One girl slept in the back bedroom—which is only big enough to fit a twin bed, nothing else. So she had to keep her clothes in the bigger bedroom, which the other girl and I shared.”

  ”Where are your former roommates now?” Max asked, taking a seat in the overstuffed chair that we three girls had purchased together at a Goodwill shop five years ago.

  I sat on the couch. “One quit acting and applied to law school after we’d been here about a year. The other one left about eighteen months after that. She got married to a doctor and moved to the suburbs. She’s never officially quit the business, but she’s got a baby, she’s teaching part-time, and she hasn’t gone for an audition since before she got engaged.” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’ll want to come back to this life later on.”

  “Two out of three? A high attrition rate.”

  “Not really. That’s what this life is like. A lot of people who start out acting wind up doing something else. One out of three of us sticking with it is probably a high percentage compared to the field overall.”

  “Ah, but you are gifted,” he said. “As well as committed and driven. And these are qualities that cannot be measured by percentages.”

  I smiled, liking his description of me.

  Max set down his glass and rose to his feet. “You need your rest, my dear. And I must go collect Nelli and prepare for our nocturnal expedition.”

  I rose and followed him to the door. “Be careful, Max. There’s danger on the streets at night even apart from baka and zombies.”

  “I will be accompanied by a skilled swordsman,” he reminded me.

  “Ah, yes. There is that. Good night, Max. I’ll see you tomorrow, I suppose?”

  He nodded, wished me good night, and left.

  I lo
cked the door and latched the chain. Then, remembering that the keys to my home were in the clutches of the baka, I pushed a heavy chair in front of the door.

  I stripped off my clothes and dropped them on the floor. I knew I should make a list of all the things I needed to do in the morning before returning to the Livingston Foundation (such as call a locksmith and cancel my credit cards), but I was just too exhausted to think about it right now.

  I headed for the shower, and I stood under the running water, soaping, scrubbing, and shampooing until I finally felt clean. By then, I was starting to run out of warm water. I emerged from the shower, wrapped my hair in a towel, dried myself, and put on my bathrobe.

  I was plodding toward the bedroom, planning to go straight to sleep, when I noticed the flashing light on my answering machine.

  “Oh, right.” I hadn’t answered calls on my cell phone since it was stolen last night, so anyone trying to reach me would probably wind up calling here and leaving me a message. I pressed the playback button and listened to my calls.

  There was one from my mother. This was inevitable. She always managed to call when I was having a rotten day. It was some sort of psychic gift. There was little chance, realistically, that she would fail to call on a day when I’d been arrested for prostitution, mugged by gargoyles, and spooked by a big snake. And since my mother wasn’t precisely a person who focused on the sunny side of things, I was glad I had missed her call.

  There were a couple of calls from the D30 production office. One had been made before I’d called them from Jeff’s cell phone. The other call reminded me that I was scheduled to visit Nolan that afternoon.

  “Whatever,” I muttered.

  There was also a call from Thack, my agent, who’d heard about the confusion on the location shoot last night and wanted to make sure I was okay.

  And then there was one from Lopez. My heart gave a little skip. Maybe seeing me last night had made him reconsider . . . Maybe calling him for help hadn’t been such a bad idea, after all.

  He had made the call shortly before I arrived home. I smiled when I heard his familiar voice say, “It’s me.”