Chapter #5Return to the Scene of a Crime by: Seuzz   Previously: "In Which You Apply Yourself Without Knowing It" 
"You sure you didn't break it when you dropped it back there?" Carson Ioeger asks.
"Shut the fuck up," you retort, and shake the divining rod. It rattles. Which it shouldn't, as it's carved from solid oak. But you don't tell Carson that.
He glances around, and you do too. Maybe he's got the same feeling you've got, of being watched. You always get that feeling in libraries, deep in the stacks, where people can peer at others between the shelves without themselves being spotted. The stacks of the Keyserling College library are creepier than most, though. The library is built like a maze, with the shelves lined up at odd angles and forming corridors that branch and twist and dwindle into dead ends, which makes it very easy to fancy you're being stalked and spied upon by a malicious Minotaur. It's musty, too, and the distant drone of the computer workstations is a mindless murmur.
You shake the rod to clear it, as you would a thermometer, and tell yourself that the rattle doesn't signify. Then you close your eyes, relax your arm, and let the rod drift of its own accord.
Except it doesn't drift. It just keeps pointing at the bookshelf into which this one narrow corridor has dead-ended. "Yes?" says Carson as you peer near-sightedly at the rod.
"Let's go find some light," you sigh.
It takes several minutes to disentangle yourselves from the worst depths of the stacks and find a line of windows. They give an unobstructed view westward, and if you peered hard enough you might be able to make out the Westside High School campus, all the way across town and across the river. You've given some thought to driving out there -- this is your first trip back to Saratoga Falls in more than a year -- but work comes first. So you ignore the view and turn the rod over slowly in the palm of your hand, studying the fine scrollwork that winds about it.
It's a thing of your own design, a tracer of ley lines. Nash Carnes, the expert you've been studying with for the past year, has called it your finest effort to date. Nash isn't stinting with the praise, but you could tell he was genuinely impressed with it. So it was with at least a little bit of vanity that you pulled it from your satchel when you saw it might be useful on this job.
Carson chortles softly. "I love it when one of you guys comes down with limp dick syndrome."
"Does this look limp to you, asshole?" You wave the rod under his nose. "So when I shove it deep up inside you -- And what's with this 'you guys' crack? You're one of us, man. At least as much as I'm 'one of them'."
"I'm just an associate," he replies.
"I'm only gonna tell you one more time to stifle it," you retort. "Because it hurts when you talk that way."
"Alright." He shrugs his lanky shoulders. "I'm just giving you shit."
"I know that," you mutter, and go back to peering at the scrollwork. "It's the way you're giving me shit that hurts. Am I really treating you like a second-class Stellae?"
"No."
"Really, I'm not?"
"No, you're not, Will," Carson sighs.
"So why are you -- ?"
"Alright, I get it! Jesus!"
"Tsht!" You whap him in his hollow chest. "You know better than that, Ioeger. Be careful who and what you invoke."
"Right, I'm sorry about that, too."
"Because I was in Japan a couple of months ago, asshole, and I forgot myself and said -- " You glance around nervously before continuing in a much softer voice. "I said 'Great Buddha,' and I wasn't talking about the quality of the statue I was looking at. And then this thing came rolling out of the shrine and just about squashed me."
"We're not in a church, Will, so Jesus Christ probably isn't going to -- "
"Yeah, well, we don't know exactly where we are, do we?" You glance around again. "You're the one who nosed this place out, so you should know that -- Oh, and that's another reason I won't hear you slagging yourself." You fix him with a sharp stare. "We had me and Joe and Frank and Rick and Kali and Nash and even Charles passing in and out of town over the past few months, but it took you to sniff out that there's something funky going on in this library. Stars, Carson, if that's not enough to prove you're -- "
"Okay, you made your point!" Ioeger is blushing deeply now, and his eyes and mouth are haggard. "I'm glad you're so fucking impressed with me. But could be I was wrong about this place. Your dooba-bobby doesn't seem impressed with it."
"My dooba-bobby is most definitely impressed with it. Trouble is -- " You frown back at the stacks where you'd been balked. "Trouble is, this job might be too impressive for my dooba-bobby." You shake it again, and again it rattles. "Come on, let's get out of here. Let's go someplace, look over your notes again."
* * * * *
Yes, it's been more than a year since you've been back to Saratoga Falls. That's not long enough for the town itself to have grown strange, but it is enough time for you to have grown out of comfort with it. So when Carson turns onto Twentieth after leaving the Keyserling campus, you make a face. "Let's not make it the Flying Saucer," you tell him, meaning one of Saratoga Falls's many bizarre coffee houses. "I don't think I could take -- "
"We're not going to the Flying Saucer." He turns sharply onto a side street. "New place. Belongs to a couple of guys I know. You'll like it."
"They have anything to eat?"
"That's another reason I picked it. I'm starving."
Carson has always been skinny -- his limbs are like sticks tied together with rubber bands -- but since becoming an "associate" of the Stellae Errantes, the ancient and elite company of occult warriors that found and recruited you two years ago, he seems to have lost even more weight. There are hollows in his cheeks, and his old jeans are held up by a belt that's twisted and knotted about his waist because there weren't enough holes for it to function as designed. Maybe it's the smoking habit he's picked up. He lights a cigarette immediately after parking and dismounting in the shabby retail/restaurant district west of Keyserling, and he grimaces when you make like you want to go on. "Give me five," he says, and turns a quarter of the cigarette to ash with a deep draw.
You look around while waiting for him to satisfy his nicotine fix. The small parking lot is surrounded on four sides by tall brick buildings -- the refurbished storage facilities of a once-bustling railroad yard. Colorful murals decorate the blank walls, advertising a sporting goods store, a refurbished furniture retailer, two restaurants, a juice bar, and --
You make a face and turn your back on Arnholm's Used Books. That's where you found the Libra Persona your senior year in high school. A centuries-old grimoire of fearful ingenuity. It contained spells for making magical disguises. Some special sense had warned you off it after you'd bought it, and you'd tried to get rid of it. But it had fallen into the hands of persons too weak-willed to resist its temptations, and you and Carson had almost come to grief at the hands of some would-be doppelgangers before meeting agents of the Stellae Errantes and helping them to put it all to right. They were the ones who discovered you had the same mystical mix of alchemical elements as they -- you were a mislaid member of the same order -- and they recruited you into their ranks, along with Carson, who'd shown such courage and wit that they wanted him as an "associate" member of the order. So in a way you owe your life and career to Arnholms' and their willingness to trade in the most exotic kinds of books.
But you've not been inside Arnholms' since that adventure, and it still gives you the creeps to think about them.
"Okay, I'm done," says Carson, and you turn just in time to catch him pinching the cigarette out. He slips what's left into the ragged remains of his camo jacket.
"You're saving the rest for later?"
"Waste not, want not. You know there's no money in this work." He lopes past you toward the parking lot exit.
"So I guess I'm paying for your meal?"
"Yours too. But it's cheap." You have to hustle to catch up to him. He always had long legs, too, but as he's gotten skinnier, they seem to have gotten longer.
Traffic is paused at the nearest light, so you and he dash across the street, straight at a rust-colored brick building with darkly tinted windows. The single word "BRUCE" is stenciled on two of them. Not "Bruce's", just "BRUCE." You don't remember knowing anyone named that, but Carson had a wider circle of friends, and he still lives in Saratoga Falls, at least technically.
The interior is dark, like a pub, but it's loud, for the walls are cinderblock and the floor bare concrete. Scores of college people -- faculty and students alike -- crowd around scarred wooden tables. Carson tugs you up to an order station, where a short, blond girl with pimples mans a register. "Welcome to Bruce can I help you?" she blurts out in a nasal blast.
"Yeah, I'm lookin' for Justin or Connor!" your colleague shouts at her, for he has to yell to be heard over the din. "They in?"
"Just a minute!" She steps back through a gloomy doorway.
"Can we eat someplace quieter?" you yell in Carson's ear. "I wanna keep our voices down if we're gonna talk about -- "
"We'll probably eat in the back!" he replies. "Connor 'n Justin'll wanna hear about it too!"
"What are you talking about? Who are these guys?"
"You'll remember 'em! They'll wanna hear all about it anyway! They're the ones put me onto the Ticktock Men!"  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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