Eric t marin ed, p.13
Eric T. Marin (ed), page 13
“He is eager,” the ifrit said, its voice warbling with its own eagerness.
“He is scared out of his mind, thank you very much,” Mick snapped. “Jamie, what—”
“Shut up, Mick,” Jamie said, and very gently put him aside. “I have a better idea,” he said to the ifrit, advancing slowly. “Why don’t I help you let go of that body, before things get really ugly, and then you can go your way, and we can go ours?”
“Jamie—!”
“Shut up, Mick.”
“You will not kill this shell,” the ifrit said. “You know its name.”
It sounded certain, but it had backed itself against the wall, and it was watching Jamie with wide, unblinking eyes, very orange now.
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“And if you understood thing one about human beings, you’d know that’s why I’m willing to kill you. That body’s in misery, and it used to be someone I knew.” He stopped, just out of arm’s reach, and stared down at the ifrit. “It’ll be quick, and then this whole clusterfuck will be over.”
“I do not want …” But the ifrit’s voice trailed off, as if it could no longer be certain what it did want, or didn’t want; Mick remembered for no reason that mongooses were supposed to mesmerize their prey by dancing for them.
“Hold still, Shawna,” Jamie said, his voice terribly kind, and then he moved.
Greased lightning had nothing on Jamie Keller, and Mick was still shocked at the idea that anyone so big could move so fast when he realized that small, dry noise he had heard, like a twig breaking, had been Shawna Lafayette’s neck. The body was just a body now, slumped and broken. The ifrit was gone.
“Is it dead, too?” Mick said hoarsely.
“Fucked if I know,” Jamie said, and it was clear he didn’t care, either. “Shawna’s better off, though. I’m sure of that.” They reached the Skylark half an hour later, without another word being exchanged; Jamie folded down into the driver’s seat with a sigh of relief and reached for the handset.
Mick caught his wrist. “Tell me first—are you okay?”
“Yeah. Adler got me down with a hex, not a cosh. Hadn’t gone face-first, I wouldn’t even have the bloody nose.” He sounded disgusted at his own clumsiness.
Mick hadn’t really meant physically. “Jamie …” 141
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“I’m fine, Mick. Let’s report in and get this over with, okay?”
Mick couldn’t argue with that, although he had a vague feeling he should. He listened as Jamie cal ed in; neither of them was surprised when Jesperson’s voice interrupted to pepper Jamie with questions. Jesperson real y didn’t sleep, and he almost never went home. The first was the result of being a class nine necromancer—a necromancer dux, they cal ed it in Britain—even if official y non-practicing; Mick often wondered if the second was as wel .
“Did you find out what killed Brett Vincent?”
“Yes, sir. And Shawna Lafayette, too. Well, part of Shawna Lafayette, anyway.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“No, sir. Because Adler’s hosting ifrits.” Jesperson’s vocabulary became briefly unprintable. “Are you sure? Adler’s only …”
“Class four, yessir. That’s what happened to Shawna Lafayette. And Brett Vincent.”
“That … oh. Oh, bloody hell.”
“Yessir. Adler and his boys, they’re talking ‘bout it like a ritual, and I know for a fact Henry Adler ain’t got the math. He can’t figure a tip without a calculator.”
“I like this even less than I thought I would. How long do you think this has been going on?”
“Dunno, sir. But I know what happened to Brett Vincent’s body was on account of them getting the phase wrong, and the stupid bastards didn’t even know the word.” 142
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Becoming aware of Mick’s goggle-eyed stare, he covered the mike with his palm and hissed, “What?” Mick just shook his head, and Jesperson said, “‘Brett Vincent’s body.’ You don’t think—”
“I think Brett Vincent’s been dead for a long time. Same way I would’ve been if Echo hadn’t come and got me out.”
“Yes, what was November Echo’s part in this evening’s escapade?”
“Echo was invaluable, sir,” Jamie said, and elbowed Mick hard in the ribs to make him stop laughing.
“Good,” Jesperson said. A pause, probably while he wrote something on one of the legal pads that littered his office like shed snakeskins. “How many ifrits do you think there are in Electric Squidland?”
“There can’t be that many,” Mick said, and now it was Jamie’s turn to look goggle-eyed at him.
“How do you figure that, November Echo?”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “How do you figure that?”
“Well, you said it yourself—and how did you get to learn so much about necromancy, anyway?”
“I don’t spend my off-hours fornicating like a bunny rabbit.
Go on—what did I say?”
“That they didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, I don’t either, but if they had to repeat the spell every so often—?”
“Yeah. ‘Bout once every five years. Ifrit starts losing its grip, and that ain’t pretty. Well, you saw.” 143
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“Yeah. And they’ve fucked up twice that we know about in the last three years—they can’t be maintaining an army of ifrits, or we’d be up to our asses in Missing Persons.”
“They must’ve lost the person who knew what they were doing.”
“Carolyn Witt,” Jesperson said, startling them both badly.
“She was part owner of Electric Squidland. Sold her share to Adler just before her arrest. And she was class seven. I think a word with Ms. Witt might clear up a great many questions.”
“Yessir,” Jamie said and yawned.
“Go home, November Foxtrot and Echo,” Jesperson said, and for a moment the rasp in his voice sounded less like irritation and more like concern. “You can finish the paperwork when you’ve got some sleep.”
The BPI raided Electric Squidland that same night, discovering things in the rooms beneath the Neon Cthulhu that would keep the state Office of Necromantic Regulation and Assessment busy for years. Suzanne Parker was not among those arrested; she had taken Mick’s advice and gotten the hell out of Dodge.
At 11:34 the next morning, Mick set two cups of coffee on the desk he and Jamie shared, and sat down opposite his partner. Although his head was clear this morning, and the world was coloring within the lines, Mick had a gloomy feeling today was not going to be a good day at all. They were facing a mountainous stack of paperwork, including the closing of a file on a seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel McKendrick who had disappeared from a Nashville suburb in 1983. His fingerprints matched those of Brett Vincent.
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Jamie pushed back from the desk, stretching until his spine popped.
“Lila going to forgive you?” Mick asked.
“Maybe,” Jamie said dolefully. “She hates my schedule.”
“That’s because you don’t have one.”
“Bite me.” Jamie took a generous swallow of coffee and said, “Do you think we’re right to say that body is Daniel McKendrick?”
“It is Daniel McKendrick.”
“Not like that. I mean, his family’s gonna be notified, and they been thinking he’s dead all this time, and now they get half a fucking body to bury? Aside from which, Daniel McKendrick has been dead all this time—or at least most of it. That body was … somebody else, if it was a person at all.”
“You mean, you think when you were sleeping with him .
. .”
“Oh, I’m sure of it. Because he didn’t give a shit when Shawna Lafayette disappeared, and now I know why.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mick asked, red-faced at his own stupid clumsiness.
“No, but I’m gonna have to put it in the report anyway.” Jamie sighed, took another slug of coffee. “It’s the reason I quit Electric Squidland. Well, one of the reasons. Shawna was a waitress in the Kaleidoscope. She caught Adler’s eye, because she was pretty and not very bright, and I was worried about it—because she was pretty and not very bright.
And then she disappeared, and nobody cared, and I asked 145
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Brett if he didn’t think there was something strange about it, and he essentially told me to mind my own business. And, you know, I’d seen him talking to Shawna before she disappeared.
Talking to her a lot.”
“Persuading her.”
“Seducing her,” Jamie corrected. “And I don’t know how many other people he seduced like that, or why he didn’t try it on with me.”
“Jamie, you’re not helping yourself—”
“You know, that’s the worst part. He let me go.”
“Sorry?”
“He let me go. Oh, he tried to make me stay on, but when I wouldn’t, he was okay with it. He never used magic on me, or tried to get me to play Adler’s little games. Hell, he never even asked me to go down to the Neon Cthulhu with him, and he must have known I would have. I think about the shit he could have pulled on me and the fact he didn’t pull it, and the fact that he fucking let me go, and … well, fuck it, Mick, I don’t know. Was I just not worth it? Or do you think ifrits can love?”
“I don’t know,” Mick said, wanting desperately to give a better answer but simply not having one. “I really don’t.” And hesitantly, almost cringing, he reached out and put his hand over Jamie’s, feeling the warmth and the strength and the roughness of Jamie’s knuckles. And Jamie turned his hand over, folded his fingers around Mick’s hand.
They sat that way for a moment, saying nothing. Jamie squeezed tighter, then let go and said briskly, “This ain’t 146
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getting the paperwork done.” But his eyes were clearer, as if some of the pain knotting him up had been released, and Mick returned to his share of their report feeling better himself.
Today might turn out to be a good day after all.
147
THREAD: A TRIPTYCH
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
For Phanitzia Barakaras
I came, I came out of the red dirt of Heraklion like a golem licking dust from its finger-webbing; I came because he called me, he told me to come, he wrote my name on a crisp white form and I stepped over the water, over the purple foam, over the breakers like dogs’ tails, I came with my feet still smelling of Cretan sand.
He ordered me like a suit: black hair, black eyes, slim hips, breasts fit to feed sons. Good blood, of course; he paid extra for the pedigree, for the fine nasal bones and the high chin that just would not sink into the chest, no matter how many rubbed-smooth coins passed under it for the purchase of a womb. Dress her up, he wrote to my mother, I won’t have my bride wander on the ship’s decks in peasant filth. And she dressed me, first of my siblings to be sold: a wide red belt and black stockings like sackcloth.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
And she put the spindle into my hands, bulging with thread, with yarn, for my baby’s clothes, for surely he’d get me with child before he got me home from harbor.
She patted my cheek.
The lines on her face were long and thin as the bristles of a bul .
The ship was so white, tablecloths covering wood like snow over stones, and all the silver, all the wax candles, all the delicate piles of carrot and leek, bright as sacrifices on the spotless plates. He made sure I was kept above the rabble, in the white and pure parts of the ship—his woman from the old country would arrive stunned and humbled by his wealth. And yet it all stank of sweat and fat flesh, it all stank of women’s blood and stale whiskey, it all stank under the talcum and white. And I said nothing while the ship crossed the sea, the wine-dark sea, I said nothing through the three-week crossing, as though I was doing penance, as though I were a nun cast into the desert to starve into holiness. I spoke to no one until the man in the brass buttons stood behind his teak vestibule and recorded my name in his book as “Annie Smith.”
Eipa Ariadne, I whispered, kathariste ta autia sas.
But he wrote me down as Annie anyway, wrote me in his great black book which must be a book of the dead, and he Charon on a raft of red wood, with a punting pole of ink, and he wrote my name in his book, he wrote my name among the other dead women crossing over the water, and I was Annie and not Ariadne, I was Annie now and some broad-shouldered man’s wife in a city called Chicago, and not Ariadne at all.
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His house was white, white and stone, and in it I stood like a smear, black on black, and my red belt gleaming. He had lemon-cake and black tea waiting. He looked at my teeth. He wanted a woman from home, he explained, as though it made perfect sense, one who would not trade an honest broom for gin. He pinched my cheek to see the color; he showed me clothes which were neither coarse nor black, lined up shoulder to shoulder like churchgoers.
“Give me that old thread, Annie,” he said kindly. “It is Annie, isn’t it? I will have a woman downtown make you a nice Sunday dress.”
I clutched my wad of scarlet to my chest, bright as a heart.
“Annie,” I answered slowly, pulling words like beads from my own mouth, “my name is Annie, yes, but you cannot have my thread. It is for my baby, when it comes.” He shrugged. It didn’t matter. Thread is nothing to a man, it is string, it is knots.
He let me finish the delicately iced cake before he took the rough-woven dress from my shoulders, before he took the wide red belt from my waist, and where there was no dress nor belt there were red lines from the rough fabric, red lines from the tightened sash: I wore the belt on my flesh long after the thing was gone from me.
Annie, he panted, and opened my legs on a long yellow couch before a cold furnace. The light slanted in like slabs of cake, and the room was full of sick and sweet— Annie, you smell like Heraklion, you smell like red dust and bullhide, you smell like old walls spiraling in and in and in, oh, Annie, you spiral in—
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I put my arms around him, shyly, tentative as a girl my age ought to be, and he rocked over me like a pendulum, and I watched my hair fall down between us, and I whispered as he cried a son into me, whispered as the couch creaked beneath me:
Theseus, oh, Theseus. Don’t you know me? Won’t you say my name?
What Cretan girl was ever called Annie?
He choked and the son spilled out of him, and I could feel little black eyes shuddering in me, and the light slanted still, and the clock hushed out the day.
He showed me the kitchen, and asked for coffee at eight.
When the boy was born, his cow-eyes blinked limpid up at me, and his hair was coarse as my dress, coarse as the tail of a bull. I rolled out my thread and rocked his crib with my foot; I rolled out my crimson thread, the thread that tumbled from me to him, a little path across the rug-strewn floor. I embroidered his little jacket and trousers with red flowers, red castles, red cows chewing cud in a red field. I embroidered old walls; I sewed seven youths and seven maidens; I pulled my needle through and through, and up came a red maze across the shoulders, and a thin path between its angles.
My son cried, and my body tightened, swollen with milk. The light slanted in like fingers, and the thread stuck in his sweaty scalp as he drank, gurgling, greedy.
In two months I was pregnant again, but I had no thread left for this second son, this other boy whose limbs were fat and pink, who had ten toes and ten fingers, and who wore the jacket 152
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when his brother grew out of it, but the trousers never fit right, never fit over his plump little legs, legs which emerged from me already downed in dark hair.
He looked at me when they put the second child to my breast, looked at me sidelong, thoughtful, as if calculating a sum.
He kissed my forehead and whispered, “What a good girl you are, Annie. What a good, sweet girl.”
The man in the brass buttons stood behind his teak vestibule and recorded my name in his books.
Annie Smith.
He listened to my husband politely, and recorded his answers like names. Like names, yes, he invoked them solemnly, pan-theon-names to be blazoned over my brow, fixed to my wrists, neurasthenic-gods thrown up into star-graves, constellations, networks of names which were not mine, but were strapped to me, corkscrewed into me. Annie-not-Ariadne, Chicago-not-Heraklion, post-partum schizoid break, anhedonia. But I knew the truth of it, I knew there was a woman waiting in his sleek black car, a woman with pale hair who did not smell of red dust and Heraklion, who had no gum-marks on her rosy breasts.
I bent my head and let them read out my new names just the same. Only once did I look up at him, did I make my eyes huge and pleading, did I murmur: Parakalo. Parakalo me parte spiti.
He rolled his eyes. He rolled his eyes and a new name was added: Defiant. Refuses to speak English. He rolled his eyes and left me with the man in the brass buttons, and my sons toddled after him, one in each hand. The younger one had outgrown his 153
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jacket, and his brown wrists stuck through the tight sleeves. His little shoes squeaked on the white floor, and the man in the brass buttons closed a cool hand over my shoulder.
It is cool in these hundred rooms, cool as stones, cool as shoals. He left me here. He did not want me. He left me here and they put a needle in the shallow of my elbow and I slept, and I woke up in the water, oh, the water was lapping my toes, my fists, foaming between fingers like wicked white whispering tongues, like sheet-corners torn loose. My hair floated damp around me; a ruin of conch scoured my back. He did not want me and I woke up in the water—I woke up in the water and the sky was blank, blank and so close. It is cool in these hundred rooms and the walls are blank, the air-conditioners like zephyrs, and there are anemone waving in my veins, red and green, red and green, and everywhere I look the strand continues on, this bleak island without a single tree, with only conch-corpses grinding away at the tide to hammer at the silence.
