Hazardous Goods (Arcane Transport)

by John Mackie

  I had forgotten about that.

  “You picking up a few tricks on the job?”

  “No. I don’t know what she was talking about.” And that was the fact of it. “It’s happened a couple of times, where I’ve been around a spell or something, and it doesn’t seem to work on me.”

  “Like you have a fairy godmother looking out after you?”

  “No.” At least, I didn’t think so. “It doesn’t feel like anybody’s doing anything. The spells just seem to run out of steam.”

  “Huh. Cool.”

  “Listen, you OK? I mean, this is pretty freaky stuff.”

  I glanced again, only to find a curious expression on his face.

  “Okay? I’m great. That was a blast, man. You have got the coolest job ever.” And with that he gave me a punch to the arm.

  God help me.

  As we headed to the 400 and a long drive south, we heard sirens.

  “Fire truck?”

  “One of the neighbors must have called.”

  “What do you think that crazy bitch is going to say?”

  Good question. She couldn’t exactly admit she had been screwing around with black magic. No, she wasn’t the type to accept any responsibility. She would...

  “She’s going to say we started it.”

  “Yup.” Damn. It took me about thirty seconds to realize I needed to make a call. To Amy Park.

  We were home and having dinner when Amy called with an update. I grabbed a plateful of nachos (the ones with the most cheese on them, to Ted’s displeasure) and moved to my bedroom.

  “Hey. Sorry again about calling you on a Saturday.”

  “You can call me any time you want. You’re making me look like a genius.”

  “Really?”

  Really. It turned out that my tip to Amy – that Crazy Lady was pimping out two underage Asian girls against their will – was dead on. While the fire investigators were inspecting the damage, two officers from the Ontario Provincial Police had taken the girls aside, despite the protests of her Royal Nuttiness. Turned out she wasn’t their legal guardian, they were illegals, and they had a whole lot to say about life at 441 Bristol Crescent.

  The OPP were bringing in a translator to get proper statements, but were very confident that our Crazy Lady Lucas would be charged with forcible confinement, living off the avails of prostitution, and a host of other tasty crimes.

  “Very nice.”

  “Oh yeah. They love me. Between this and the tip on Kuzmenko, I’m having to do a major dance on my sources, but no question I’m not hearing as much bullshit about being an equal opportunity hire. Maybe they’ll even let me work a few cases not involving Koreans. It’d be nice not to have to eat another bowl of pork-bone soup.”

  Hearing a woman say the words pork and bone in one sentence proved oddly erotic. I was so distracted that I let my plate tilt, and a clump of nachos, cheese and salsa sauce dropped smack in the middle of my laundry compost.

  “Shit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” I kicked a stray undershirt over the whole mess, hoping that the nachos would just disintegrate if and when I managed to toss the pile into a washer. “That’s great news. Listen, you might want to warn them about her, though. She may not be easy to keep in custody.”

  “Isn’t she like, eighty years old or something?”

  “Yeah, but she’s a nasty piece of work.”

  “Hm. Well, they seemed to think she was a handful too. I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

  I hoped so, but there wasn’t much I could do about it anyways. I didn’t see any way to warn the OPP that Miss Crazy Bitch might power up an energy spell and blow a hole in the wall of their local jail.

  “So we going to get out for that drink?”

  Without warning Ted appeared at the door to my room, eyebrow raised and munching on a chicken wing. I tried to ignore him, but he started pumping his hips and calling “Oh, Donnie! Oh, Donnie!”

  “I take it you have a visitor?”

  “Nah.” I got up and slammed the door, which at least served to muffle Ted’s ongoing porn movie sound track. “Just my idiot brother.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Oh yeah. And if he ever met you, it would eat him alive.”

  “Well I’ll need to drop by some day, then.”

  I was starting to like this lady.

  CHAPTER 14

  I awoke that night to the muffled sound of voices. Since my alarm clock read 3:18 A.M., I can’t say I was real thrilled. What the hell was Ted doing up at this hour?

  I prefer that my bedroom be cold and dark when I sleep. It gives me a sense of hibernation, of detaching from the stresses of the day, even if only for a few hours. The result, however, is that I find mornings to be a brutal re-introduction to light and noise. If anything, arising at a quarter past three seemed even more jarring.

  I stumbled into the hallway with a yawn, my bare feet landing on every jagged grain of grit on the cheapass linoleum floor. Time to sweep the hall, I thought, filing that task with the endless to-do list which only came to mind at the least convenient of times. When I was enjoying a bowl of ice cream in front of a rerun of Extreme Makeover, for example. I tugged at my t-shirt, which had somehow become twisted ninety degrees around my body during my “rest”.

  Weird. There were no lights on in the hall or the living room. Instead, Ted’s door was ajar, a soft glow lighting the gap. Christ, was he resorting to lava lamps? Ted’s history with girlfriends was as bad as my own.

  The last regular was a girl named Robin, whose most annoying habit was that if she started laughing while on her feet, she threw her hips forward as though presenting her groin for inspection. Or consideration.

  I was ready to notch the moment up to a late night visit by one of Ted’s irregulars when his voice rang out, loud and clear.

  “I know, I know. I’ll get it in for a tune up next week.”

  Quiet, then:

  “It’s fine. I’m only driving it in the city. C’mon, Aunt Nicole drove the—.”

  Again quiet, then:

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Was he talking to Mom? At three in the morning? It was so bizarre that I risked the possibility that Ted was with some girl, in the midst of some truly disturbing Oedipal role play. If that proved true, I could kiss a good night’s sleep goodbye for more than just one night.

  I eased the door open.

  And there she was. My mother, Huguette Elder, standing – no, looming – over Ted’s prone body. She was glowing like some giant firefly, the light bright enough to hurt my eyes.

  “Mom?”

  She didn’t turn. Didn’t even acknowledge me. That in and of itself was not unusual, though I would have thought that at this particular hour, she would have done me the courtesy of a nod or even an angry wave to leave her alone.

  Meanwhile Ted lay flat on his back, his head resting on a pillow as though he were talking to a psychiatrist. He was mumbling on and on about his car, his driving, road rage and my mother’s incessant concern that some driver would one day pull out a shotgun in response to Ted’s ubiquitous one finger salute.

  “Aaachooo!”

  Ted’s sneeze scared me so badly that I let out an “eeep!” and nearly tripped as I furiously backed away from the bed. Remarkably, neither of them reacted to my apparent lack of manliness.

  “Hellooooo?” I looked at both of them with frustration. They were ignoring me, plain and simple. Which might have been fine at any other time, but was not fine when they woke me at three in the morning.

  “Hey!”

  Nothing. I was getting ticked off now. In fact, I was on the verge of storming back to my room when a stray band of neurons fired deep within the void that is my skull.

  Why was my mother glowing?

  I tiptoed around her, my left foot slipping on a stray item of clothing. Ted’s room was a mystery at the best of times, so I tried not to hammer my toes off some stray table leg
.

  Having navigated my way around the room, I turned to face my mother.

  It was eerie. She was glowing. Just as strange, she was talking, but no sounds were coming out. (What do they say about looking a gift horse in the mouth?). Worse yet, Ted seemed to be answering her.

  Then the rest of the neurons in my skull fired, all at once.

  Fearstone.

  I coughed, then started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.

  My mother. Ted’s greatest fear was our mother. And I thought I was the only one.

  I glanced one more time at the remarkable golem before me, an identical duplicate of Huguette Elder, right down to the way she stood, as though anchored to the ground. Then I marched into the front hall, and grabbed the fearstone off the table by the door. It was easy to find, seeing as how it was glowing like a child’s night light. But moments after I picked it up, the glow disappeared. The light from Ted’s room also disappeared.

  Strange. I had hoped that Sol’s suggestion would succeed in muting the power of the thing. Apparently not.

  I had also assumed that since the stone had not affected me, it would not affect Ted. For some reason that thought had comforted me in recent days. If magic couldn’t affect me or my family, we could remain a bastion of sanity from the insanity around us. But if he was affected, then magic had inserted itself even further into my reality – a situation which I found extremely uncomfortable.

  I stood by the door to his room, looking down on Ted’s now calm face, a faint snore rising from the bed.

  Magic was real, and posed a threat to those close to me. It was a disturbing thought.

  CHAPTER 15

  While I blew most of Saturday on my mercy mission for Jamar, I was hoping Sunday would prove a better day, with the BBQ at Clay’s house. If nothing else, it seemed unlikely there would be another crazed witch launching home appliances at me like cruise missiles.

  Clay and Harper lived on the Credit River Valley in Lorne Park, a suburban neighborhood in Mississauga that had once been a resort community for Torontonians. Before that, the valley was the home of the Mississauga band of the Ojibwa tribe, and before them, the Iroquois.

  The Iroquois of the day would not have known what to make of Lorne Park now. The neighborhood was a nice one – fairly upscale. In Clay’s case, quite a way upscale. His lot was seventy five or eighty feet wide, by three hundred deep. I was impressed.

  Ted whistled.

  “Nice. This is your boss’ place?”

  “You don’t remember the house?” My mother sat in the back, and always gave you the sense she was peering over your shoulder. “We used to visit when you were children. The four of us.”

  The car was silent for a moment. Wasn’t often that any of us made reference to my father. After a quarter century, even the dearest of family can begin to fade in the shadows of time.

  “Why haven’t we been over since?”

  “Oh, Harper offers to have us over every year for Thanksgiving. Just didn’t seem right without your father. I see her all the time, though.”

  I could understand that. I was old enough to know many of the things we had done before my father passed away. Visiting certain parks, skating at a neighborhood rink, weekends at a campground north of the city. They had somehow become hollow places without him.

  The driveway was long enough that I was able to pull in behind Clay’s White Yukon and still leave room for two or three more cars behind me. There were several cars already parked along the road, a few pulled over so far that they looked as though they were about to slide off the shoulder into the ditch. We exited the car and my mother handed Ted a bottle of wine and a platter of crudités, still disgusted that neither of us had brought so much as a bag of chips.

  Like a lot of the older properties in the area, the Jarvis house itself was relatively small. It was a chalet bungalow, brick exterior the color of goldenrod. Tucked well off the road behind a canopy of ash and maple, none of the trees shorter than thirty feet tall. A stone walkway led from the driveway up to a pair of welcoming black doors with window cut-outs to let some light in. To the right of the doors the roof overhung a patio, well-worn wicker furniture suggesting this was a familiar leisure nest for Clay and Harper. A pine wreath hung from the door.

  I knocked. Just a habit – I can’t stand the sound of doorbells. Call me a freak.

  Moments later the door swung open.

  “Darling, thank you for having us over.” My mother hugged Harper and kissed her on both cheeks. To my knowledge she has never been to Europe, however the cheek kissing thing seems as popular among French Canadians as anywhere across the Atlantic. I’m convinced they’re checking to see if you’ve washed behind your ears.

  Harper stood an inch or two shorter than my mother, but where Mom was solid and matronly, Harper was slim. Elegant.

  “Darnell.” She took my hand and I kissed her cheek lightly.

  “And this must be Theo.”

  I snorted, and Ted gave me a short jab to the ribs. Very few got away with using our real names. Theodore in particular was touchy about the whole thing.

  He gave her a quick kiss. “Where would you like me to put this?”

  “Did you boys cook for us?”

  My mother snorted. “Yes. That would be the day. We would be bringing toast and bacon.”

  Somehow I felt like I had gotten in trouble again. What the hell did I do?

  “Well, come in. Make yourself at home. Clay’s on the back patio, and he’ll be delighted to see you.”

  I spent most of the first hour with Clay, being introduced to at least two dozen customers and friends. Pask DeMarco was there, as was Helen Findlay from Sun Consulting. The others were a blur of faces and names.

  An hour later I was tending the barbeque under the watchful eye of my mother. Ted had somehow scammed his way into serving drinks, and seemed intent on doubling up every shot he offered out. One of Clay’s nieces was starting to laugh just a little too loudly at Ted’s jokes.

  “They managed to put you to work here too?”

  Wow. Kara. I had been watching for her for the past 30 minutes, and she still managed to sneak up on me. No wonder Clay and I had been mugged.

  “Hey.”

  There was an awkward pause, then I realized that introductions were in order.

  “Sorry. Kara, this is my mother. Mom, this is Kara. From the office.” I couldn’t remember – introduce the older person to the younger person? Family member to non-family member? Whatever the order, my mother’s eyebrows suggested I had screwed it up again.

  “Kara! Very pleased to meet you.” Hug, kiss, kiss. I could see Kara was a little startled, but she took it well.

  “Nice to meet you. Donnie talks about you all the time.”

  Only a pretty lady like Kara could get away with a line like that.

  “All lies.”

  “He mentioned you were from Chicoutimi. My uncle was based out of CFB Bagotville.”

  “Bagotville? Mais oui! I worked in Bagotville when I was—.”

  Within three minutes, Kara had developed a better relationship with my mother than I have to this day.

  “Hockey pucks.”

  “Screw you.”

  “I’m telling you. Throw ten in a bucket and I’ll take them to the rink tomorrow.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be affecting your appetite.”

  Ted waved the burger at me, his third. “I’ll eat anything. You know that.”

  True. I had indeed burned a few of the burgers. But overall, things seemed to have gone OK. Hell, I had grilled a few plates of chicken breasts, and no one was on their knees vomiting. That was a personal success.

  The weather had cooperated as well. Fifteen degrees was pretty good for mid-May in Ontario. Just a shade under sixty degrees Fahrenheit – hat and mitts weather in Jacksonville, t-shirt and shorts in the Great Lakes region.

  “So what’s with this Kara babe?”

  I glanced over at Kara, still ensconced in conversation wi
th my mother, the two of them since joined by John Vranic and Jamar.

  “She works at Arcane.”

  “Get out.”

  “She’s the receptionist. Does Dispatch too.”

  “She’s the one with the potion? The love potion?”

  Who the hell told him about that? I had never mentioned the love potion incident to Ted, and had never intended to. Last thing I needed was another piece of ammunition for him to fire at me daily. Shit, must have been Melodi Roberts. That’s if the story hadn’t made the rounds to every person at Hidden Pleasures by now.

  “Yes.”

  “Smokin’. So, you see her, like, everyday?”

  “Yup. Have lunch with her once in a while, too.”

  Ted gazed at her, a little too obviously for my comfort.

  “Perky breasts, magnificent butt... she’s too good for you, man.”

  In Ted’s mind, too good for Donnie meant perfect for Ted. As I said, the man is delusional.

  “Don’t even think it.”

  “What are you talking about? I can’t just walk away—.”

  I moved in front of him, cutting off his stare and drawing his attention.

  “I’m calling dibs.”

  “You’re what? Ha—.” The laugh caught in his throat when he saw the look on my face.

  “Man, you can’t do that!”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  The first time either of us had called dibs, I was seventeen and Ted was fifteen. He called dibs on a girl in his gym class. We had agreed to the system following an unfortunate event involving twin sisters which still haunts me to this day. It had, however, been at least 10 years since either of us had called on the rule.

  “Dibs. She’s got a boyfriend. But if that ever changes, I have dibs.”

  “Man, she’s not going to go with you anyways. You already messed up big time with that stupid potion!”

  “Maybe. But I’m calling dibs.”

  “Look. Even if you hadn’t screwed up, you’ve still got to ask them out. When was the last time you did that?”

  “I don’t care. I like her.”