Rick Wayne's Blog, page 85

A spell you can touch

Google was right. The Barrow Street Bookstore was permanently closed. Anyone who somehow heard about an underground book shop would show up to find the place empty, covered in dust, and almost certainly wouldn’t keep looking. Sort of like wearing your camouflage in plain sight.

Irfan walked to an old door, complete with old fashioned knocker, set to one side of the shop. I think it had been painted a deep violet once upon a time, or perhaps midnight purple, but now it was more dark brown than anything, and badly stained and scuffed. It had a Victorian topper over the frame, at the center of which someone had nailed a brass number one, despite that the vacant shop to the right was number 39 and the brick four-story to the left was number 43. Past the brick four-story was a churchyard bounded in a wrought iron fence. The church itself was on the corner further down — all neat and geometric, like something Thomas Jefferson would’ve attended. The grounds of the yard rose several feet over the sidewalk and undulated with four neatly mowed grassy mounds, between which were set paving stones. It looked like the kind of place you might stroll with a parasol and a hoop skirt while starving street urchins peered at you through the bars of the fence with dirty faces.

Irfan banged the knocker three times, then opened the door and stepped in and waited for me on the other side. She shut it firmly behind us. The hall inside was floored in checker-print vinyl. The only light came from the long window over the door, and the slant beam faded to darkness at the back, where the hall turned sharply to the right. That meant it had to pass behind the brick four-story next door. I caught a faint whiff of turpentine.

I followed her around the corner and down a staircase lined in faded brown wallpaper. I heard something bump into something else above me and looked up instinctively, but there wasn’t much room to see between the railing that curved to the top floor, where it seemed there was an opaque skylight.

“Don’t worry,” Irfan said, stepping to the basement. “That’s just Charles.”

“Charles?”

“The Fifth. He comes for the books.”

At the bottom, we turned again and headed back in the direction of the churchyard.

“Where is this place?” I asked.

“There.” She pointed.

At the back of the hall was another heavy wood door painted like the one up front. The top of the frame was a stone block. Pressed into the middle of it was a horseshoe. I saw a solid brass plaque, badly tarnished, set into the wall near the handle. At the top it said:

THE BARROWS

        Est. 1676 (A.D.)

The letters A.D. were off-center in parentheses, as someone saw the original version and got worried people might get confused as to which 1676 they meant.

Below that was a dedication:

REINTERRED 1848

at this location with

Generous Donations from

THE ROEBLING FAMILY

& H. Morton Ramsay & Sons

& Eleanor Peas

A second, smaller plaque was affixed to the wall just underneath the first:

REDEDICATED 1931

with special dispensation from

The Archdiocese of New York

“After you,” I said.

“I can’t.” She nodded to the horseshoe.

I looked at it. “Um. Whatever.”

She pulled a Fiji water bottle from her expensive handbag and took a drink.

“Fine. Then wait here.”

She gasped a little, like I’d just stiffed her out of a tip.

“I’ll be outside,” she said and walked away.

I tried the door, but it didn’t budge. It was solid, more like an exterior door than an interior one.

“It sticks,” she said as she climbed the stairs.

I pushed hard once, twice, three times and it popped free with a shudder. Beyond was a narrow space. I wouldn’t call it a foyer because it was irregularly formed and barely bigger than my closet. There was a brick ceiling above and a foot-and-a-half drop to an uneven cobblestone floor below. I was sure then that the door I just passed was the far wall of the building and that I had just stepped out of it. To my right and left were archways that had been completely bricked over. The cobblestones disappearing into the mortar at the bottom, which made it seem that an alley or pedestrian walkway had once run along where the building now stood. Across the gap was a step up and another door whose single glass pane revealed a well-lit shop on the other side. The glass was nearly filled with painted letters:

THE BARROWS

Since 1676

Anson Verhoeven,

Proprietor

No soliciting

All sales are final

The door creaked loudly, as if by design, and right away I got that unmistakable sweet smell of must and old books. The interior looked like a Victorian library. The space was much longer than it was wide and bookshelves covered the walls on either side. The ceiling was a little higher than in a normal shop, as they were in the old days, and there were a pair of very narrow metal staircases attached to tracks in the shelving so that people could peruse the higher shelves. To my right was an old leather chair, pulled back from the corner just enough to let someone browse snugly behind it. It was stacked with books. To my right was an old brass telescope. A curved brace marked degrees horizontal while a perpendicular one marked degrees vertical in precise ticks. The worn slats of the hardwood floor were the color of rich chocolate. Light came from a simple chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. The loops and arms were brass. I was sure it had burned gas at one point but had since been fitted with electricity. Black wires wound around the arms on their way to the lightbulbs at the end, which poked from fluted glass fittings.

The top shelves of the wall to my left held the oldest books and were locked behind glass-paneled cabinets whose polished brass fixtures were scuffed at the margins and around the keyholes. At the back was a high wood counter and an oak door, maybe to a stock room. There was a pendulum clock, ticking softly, and a long display shelf full of oddities and antiques. Hanging over them in the last bit of open space under the ceiling was a line of various ornate frames — some small, some quite large. All of them had tasteful little museum lights to illuminate their contents, but all of them were empty. I could see straight through to the brick.

In the very middle of the floor was a kind of circular podium made of polished walnut that displayed books in 360 degrees — some open, some closed. The book facing the door was large and hardbound and opened to colorful illuminated pages. But it wasn’t old. The pages were white and the corners crisp. The copyright at the front said 2009. I looked at the cover. The Red Book (Liber Novus) by Carl Jung. Signed by the author.

“Are you sure you have the right place?”

The door to the stock room had been opened and an old man with an Amish beard stood scowling at me. He wore denim coveralls on top of a simple short-sleeved collared shirt and had wire spectacles resting on top of his head, like he’d been tinkering with a clock or something and stopped to see who was at the door.

He took one look at me and asked “Is it Wednesday again? Already?”

He turned about as if looking for a wall calendar.

“Excuse me?”

“Ah, wonderful. You are excused,” he said with relief, raising his hand to the door, as if he expected me to turn around and leave at that exact moment.

I took Kell’s book from her purse and held it up.

“I’m Sorry, but I think my friend stole this the other day.”

His face was so old, his wrinkles magnified every expression, which in this case seemed to be confusion. And disgust. He shuffled forward.

“Yes. She did.” He had a faint European accent.

“Well, I’d like to return it.”

He took out a pocket watch. “Took long enough.”

“I just found it.”

“Not you. The spell.” He put the watch away. “This isn’t a library,” he said with a snap, pointing to a small sign above the punch-key register at the back:

THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY

It hung above another small sign that said:

CASH ONLY

Both signs were next to a much larger one that said in very clear letters:

BEWARE OF TROLLS

“You take the books,” he said, “you buy them.”

“But I didn’t take — ” I sighed at his indignant eyebrow-raise. Those suckers looked like brooms. “Fine. How much is it?”

He walked to the counter and tossed his glasses on it. He pressed the heavy levered keys of the antique register until a bell chimed.

“Two hundred and five dollars and nineteen cents.”

Leave it to Kell to steal the most expensive damned book in the store.

It wasn’t really. But that’s what it felt like.

I set the book on the counter and dug in my purse.

“Your friend was clever,” he said. “She came with one of my best customers so as to avoid suspicion later.”

“I really doubt she had some kind of master plan to steal a book, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” I handed him two hundred and ten. “You know Lyman?”

“I don’t have change,” he said.

“What?” I started to object. Then I took a breath. “Fine. Whatever.”

I called it a theft tax. The register dinged loudly and the drawer slid open. He put the money inside. He totally had change.

He eyed me eying the drawer, like I was a thief as well. He shut it hard.

“No,” he answered my question. “Thank you for your business.” He raised an arm toward the door. “Good day.”

“I don’t suppose you could help me,” I asked.

“Probably not.”

“Dude. Can you at least pretend to be helpful?”

“It wouldn’t be very convincing.”

I held up The Sacred Marriage. “This is, like, a history book.”

“It’s not ‘like’ a history book,” he said. “It is a history book.”

“Yeah. Fine. That’s what I said. Do you have any books on alchemy? And — ” I stopped. I was going to say ‘like’ again. “The sacred marriage that aren’t history? More like . . . I dunno, a how-to guide or something.”

“Alchemy isn’t a programming language,” he chided. “There are treatises. Monographs. There are not, as far as I know, any ‘how-to’ guides.”

I waited. I hate people like that.

He pointed to the books.

I looked around the rectangular room. I turned my palms up.

“Ah. Of course.” He scowled, deeply, and shuffled toward the back door. “With the exception of the volumes under glass, which will be beyond you, the books are shelved alphabetically by author. Where an author isn’t known, by subject. Where several subjects are covered, by the Erskine Codex reference number. If you are not going to make a purchase, I will kindly ask you to show yourself out. Good day.”

He shut the door hard to emphasize the point.

Jerk.

I spun slowly in a circle. It was books all around. I had no idea what I was looking for and just started opening volumes at random. Most were giant walls of text that went on for hundreds of pages. Half of them weren’t even in English. It wasn’t long before I started appreciating those. They at least gave me a reason to rule them out swiftly. After a while, I heard the door to the back open again and the old man stop with a start. I’m pretty sure he thought I had left a half hour ago. I was squatting in front of the bottom shelf holding a very heavy book I hoped was some kind of encyclopedia. It wasn’t. I’m not sure what it was, actually. A bestiary, I guess.

He cleared his throat. “This is a bookstore. NOT a library.”

“You said that. Can’t I just — ”

I was turning my head to argue my case when my eye caught the title, in between all the others. I replaced the big book in my hand and pulled out the thin hardbound volume one shelf up.

The Long Vacant Cupboard.

“Hmpf. Should have done that the first time,” he said.

“Done what?”

He squinted at me for some sign of recognition.

“You really don’t know anything? You’re not even a Wiccan or one of those girls who cut themselves to feed the vamps?”

I shook my head.

“How did you — ” He stopped himself. He harumphed again. “A book, young lady, is the most magical thing there is. It is the only spell” — he lifted a faded leather-bound from the shelf — “that’s patent.”

He slapped the cover as if to show it was real. “A spell you can touch.”

He shook it at me.

“A spell?”

“Yes. A spell. You know what that is, don’t you?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Words,” he said, “that make magic.”

“I know what a spell is.”

“They’re about the only magic left. That regular folks can touch anyway.” He looked at the shelves. “But even they’re going away.”

He re-shelved the tome in his hand.

“If a book is magic, then how is magic different than anything?”

“Who said it was?” he asked, as if I’d just told him people were spreading nasty rumors about him.

He started to speak again but I interrupted him. “She stole the book when you were giving the speech, didn’t she?”

He shuffled over and snatched The Long Vacant Cupboard from my hands.

“The books are for sale.”

He turned to put it back on the shelf.

“Fine. How much is it?”

He checked. “You’re in luck. This is the third edition with the rambling introduction by Sprague that no one ever reads. Eighty-nine ninety-nine. Plus tax.” Then he shelved it.

“Jeez, dude. I need to eat.”

“So do I,” he objected. “We buy books as well.”

I looked at the one by my feet. The Sacred Marriage. The one I’d just bought. I handed it to him.

He took it and examined it thoroughly. Like he’d never seen it before.

“I’ll give you forty dollars for it.”

“WHAT? I just gave you two hundred!”

“Depreciation,” he said.

What. An. Asshole. “A hundred,” I replied.

“No.”

I held out my hand. “Then give it back.”

He looked at it in his. “Fifty.”

“Eighty or I walk.”

He scowled. Then he turned for the back. “Criminal,” he muttered.

“Dude, I’m not the only one.”

I took money out of my purse, added it to what he handed me, and grabbed The Long Vacant Cupboard from the shelf.

“I’d like to buy this book,” I said all innocently.

He shuffled to the counter and retrieved a calculator with fat buttons. He tapped. “That will be ninety-seven dollars and twenty cents, please.”

I counted out a hundred dollars in fives and twenties and handed it to him. We walked to the register where he recounted them in front of me.

“I don’t have change,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Whatever. Just give me the damned book.”

He scowled again. “Language.” He handed it to me.

“Manners,” I retorted with bug eyes. “Can I sit? Or are you gonna charge me for that, too?”

“It would seem so.”

“Can I move — ” I stopped.

The chair had been cleared. The books had been set on the floor.

I looked around. I didn’t see or hear anyone.

“Thank you, Charles,” the old man called sarcastically. “Always did have a thing for young girls,” he muttered. He turned for his workshop, then snapped back to me. “We close promptly at 5:00.”

“Five? Who the hell closes that early?”

He looked at his watch. “That’s one hour and forty-seven minutes.”

I flashed the clock on my phone. I waggled it and pursed my lips like ‘Oooooooo, a magic lighted timepiece!’ He squinted in disgust and retreated back to his work room.

So, the book pretty much said the same thing the old man did — that there was a time when magic was part of the world, same as anything else, which is why everyone in every pre-modern culture everywhere believed in it, but that there are only bits and pieces left, that everything else has been obscured by The Masters, also sometimes called the High Arcane, who were like a council I guess, made of the most powerful practitioners of every age. They’re the ones who said no one could talk about magic and stuff directly. Like, it was forbidden. Some really talented people were allowed to write about it, but they had to use ‘keys and ciphers’ to keep everything esoteric. Alchemy, for example, wasn’t actually about turning lead into gold, even though that’s what everyone thinks. It’s really about the deep structure of creation. Not like atoms and stuff, but below that. Resolving the conundrums of existence. The whole thing with lead and gold was a cipher, a riddle to throw off the greedy and foolish. Those who were too stupid to realize it, who got bewitched by the lure of wealth, got hung up there and wasted their lives chasing after a fiction.

The truth was much simpler. As it usually is. Gold is bright, like sunshine. It’s a light metal that’s easily made into different things. Lead is heavy. Dull. Dark. Impenetrable. Not even Superman could see through it. In the symbolism of turning lead into gold, gold represents wealth of knowledge and all that. And lead is ignorance. So, alchemy is the transmutation of ignorance into knowledge — ultimate knowledge. That’s what it was all about, the search for Truth. But that wasn’t what they were trying to do, not the real alchemists anyway. There were lots of different alchemical “investigations,” but the big thing everyone wanted to produce was the lapis philosophorum, the ‘stone of truth’ or something like that. But not like a rock — more like an opal or a gem, like how all the old sutras refer to the teachings of the Buddha as a jewel. That’s what the lapis is, the “jewel” of ultimate knowledge — namely, how to be like God, a return to the divine state pretty much every religion says existed way back at the beginning.

Sounds like heresy, right? And it is. Which is why these guys ‘The Masters’ have been working for hundreds of years to suppress any investigation into the “sacred marriage,” which I gathered was a bit like combining matter and antimatter. To keep the knowledge from falling into the wrong hands, the steps and ingredients — the recipe, I guess — for combining the male and female principles were encoded in alchemical ciphers, like the athame and the chalice. The old Taoist sorcerers were apparently the real masters — mixing yin and yang and all that. Chinese mythology is definitely full of xian, long-lived sages like the famous Eight Immortals, each of whom rode a dragon and who could transfer their power to a relic or tool that could be gifted to ordinary men.

Only nobody knows how to do it anymore.

Supposedly.

I heard the shuffle of the old man’s feet on the floor. At first I thought he was coming to shoo me out. But when I lifted my head to defend myself, I saw he had a teacup and saucer in his hand. He set it carefully on the broad arm of the chair.

“Charles thought you might like some tea.”

I looked at the time on my phone. It was almost 5:30. And no messages from Kell. Go figure.

I looked at the tea. It was hot.

“Ceylon,” he said, turning toward the back. “I’m afraid it’s all I have.”

“I thought you closed at five.”

“We do.” He nodded to the front door.

It was shut and the open sign was turned inward.

I scrunched my brow. I hadn’t even noticed.

“It seemed a shame to break the spell,” he said without facing me.

I looked at the tea. It was steaming. I took a sip. It was warm, and I realized how safe I felt there, curled up in an old chair with a dust-and-vanilla scented book. But my eyes were getting tired. I’d been reading for a couple hours and I was losing concentration. I thumbed to the back, where there were a bunch of text-heavy tables that looked like they’d been assembled in old movable type, with strong lines and a highly serifed font, and I turned from one to the next: Schools of Magic, Classical Symbology, Mystical Doctrines, the basic six circular summoning diagrams, several timelines, including a list of all reigning Masters “From the Fall of the Templars to the Destruction of the Eye of Annemundu,” and so on.

I stopped at The Orders of Practice. It had script titles in the first column and block descriptions in the second, with a third reserved for notable examples, not all of which were filled. A Magician, it said, is any practitioner of magic. That term, however, tended to be avoided because it didn’t distinguish from the stage magician, who offers nothing but mechanical sleight-of-hand. For that reason, the title Illusionist was similarly shunned.

A Conjurer is anyone who brings forth that which was not there. A Summoner, then, is a Conjurer that brings forth a creature from another realm, such as a demon or evil spirit. Diviner is the formal name for fortune teller. This includes the ‘low’ variety like palmists and tarot card readers as well as the more specialized schools: anything with the suffix ‘-mancy’ in the title. Most of what historians know about the ancient Shang dynasty, for example, comes from their widespread practice of plastromancy, where they inscribed questions on turtle shells before piercing them them with hot irons and interpreting the cracks that ran through the characters.

A Seer is anyone who has visions, which don’t always have to be of the future. Most of your run-of-the-mill psychics fall into this category. Similarly, a Medium is anyone who carries messages from one place to another, such as between the dead and the living. The table also noted that Mediums, also called ‘Sensitives,’ were also particularly prone to possession.

A Witch is any practitioner of witchcraft, which can be of the light or dark variety. Despite the common misconception, though, a witch isn’t necessarily female. Rather, it’s simply that ‘earth magic’ attracted more women than men because, first, women were historically excluded from the more arcane schools, and second, the Druids, the founders of the art, had no such chauvinist proscriptions.

A Warlock, on the other hand, is specifically a ‘master of the dark arts’ and includes both men and women. Here there was an asterisk pointing to a footnote at the bottom of the page where the author admitted to omitting ‘the Shamanists and Witch-doctors.’ As practitioners of the most ancient form of magic, he said, there was no agreed-upon definition, nor did the shamans themselves adhere to one or another school but preferred instead to ‘salt and pepper their practice’ with bits from every tradition ‘like leeches.’ It sounded a lot like how the learned men of the British Empire used to write about the culture of the Far East.

On and on it went: Wizard, Sorcerer, Thaumaturge, Alchemist, Magus, Malefactor . . . And on to the second-to-last entry: Enchanter/Enchantress. I read it aloud.

“A master of mind-magic; a caster of spells over others, often with the help of sprites and spirits whom they keep as familiars.”

Familiars.

I packed up and set the empty tea cup on the counter and called “Thank you.” When I didn’t hear a response, I walked out the door and back up the stairs. Irfan was waiting for me on the sidewalk outside. She was leaning against the door frame thumbing her phone the way people do to pass the time — not particularly interested in what the screen was showing her but rapt with attention for lack of a better diversion. I had the sense she’d been like that for the duration, a bit like a dog tied to a bike rack, endlessly expecting its master’s immediate return with no sense of the moments that passed. She saw me and put her phone in the pocket of her camo-print jacket. She’d rolled up the sleeves while I was gone. She didn’t ask if I’d gotten what I needed or how it went inside.

“I’m hungry,” she said and started walking.

“Um. Okay.”

I followed several steps back, trying to digest everything I’d just seen and read. After sitting still for so long, getting up and waking felt good and stirred my thoughts. I wouldn’t have minded a walk along the river, which is where we were headed, but Irfan stopped instead at a small pizza joint. The menu on the wall suggested they mostly sold by the slice. I guessed most of the customers were local as well since the only seating was at three high tables along the front window. Each was barely two feet across and had a pair of matching bar stools — save the one with the blue rather than orange cushion.

We ordered from an older man in a white T-shirt and matching apron with stocky shoulders, a wide head, and a permanent sneer, like the left side of his upper lip had been damaged or something and couldn’t fall all the way over his teeth. Even in his elevated shoes, he was barely taller than me. Irfan got cheese. I got pepperoni. She paid and I sat at the table in the corner, near the stock room door labeled NO ADMITTANCE. When she joined me, I had my eyes closed.

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” I said.

“You have to close your eyes to think?”

“Shut up.”

She sighed and took out her phone, or so it seemed from the sound. I was trying to tune it all out, but another customer came and went, and then our slices came out of the oven. The old man called and Irfan got up to get them.

“This is about the only thing you all do well,” she said.

Mine came with pools of red-orange grease in the cheese, like meltwater on top of a glacier, and I pulled a couple napkins from the holder on the table and dabbed them over it.

Irfan stopped mid-bite to look at me in confusion. “That’s sacrilege.”

The orange-and-purple light from the long neon NERO’S PIZZA sign hanging above us reflected off the glass and hit her eyes.

“Sue me.”

“Nero will do you worse than that.”

I glanced to the kitchen. The man with the grizzled face was sweeping the floor. I caught him just as he turned back from a healthy glower.

“I don’t get why he’s so infatuated with you,” she said with a mouthful.

“Meaning what?”

“Your attitude is shit, for one. You have a nice body, I guess, but your clothes look like you left them to dry in a pile on the floor.”

I shifted a little on the stool.

“And you reek of death.” She scrunched her nose. “It’s like he marked you as his property or something, like a dog pissing on a tree.”

“If you say so.”

I tore into my pizza and we ate in silence.

“How do you know what death smells like?” I asked finally.

It took her a moment to answer.

“I saw him once,” she said. “A long time ago. In the desert. There was that sweet stench of dried dung on top of the dust of ages. That’s what you smell like.” She took another bite. “Dung and dust. I don’t know how he can stand it.”

I held up my middle finger. “I hate to break it to you, but Bastien couldn’t care less about me. He only pretends to because he hasn’t ‘had’ me yet.”

“That old bit? Seriously?” She rolled her eyes and took another bite. “Okay, whatever.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“For the record,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think he’s pretending. I think he thinks you’re a challenge or something. Like, none of his charms have any effect. I saw it the other day. For a moment, it seemed like he had you, just like all the others. But then your soul sparked and threw it off.”

“My soul sparks?”

She nodded. “Like it was ripped in half.”

I set my thrice-bitten slice down on the grease-stained paper plate. Irfan had already eaten hers halfway to the crust. I grabbed a napkin and wiped my fingers.

I ran my thumb over the symbol on the back of my hand.

Lots of Westerners don’t realize this, but those red characters you see collected on the sides of Asian painting aren’t part of the work. They’re legal seals, either the artist’s or whoever he sold it to, plus whoever they sold it to, and so on — stamps of ownership on a masterpiece, put there by rich men who wanted to make sure everyone knew it was their property.

Dung and dust.

I tossed my crumpled napkins onto my pizza.

“My mom freaked when I wouldn’t go pray for safe travels before I left,” I said, staring at my hand, “I’m pretty sure she went on my behalf. She definitely went to the fortune teller then. She goes every new year. Chinese new year,” I added quickly. “And any time there’s a big change. Lots of people do. The woman apparently told her I was going to die here. In the US. So now, every time there’s a shooting or whatever, I get a panicked call from home. That kind of thing is the only news that makes it over there. So even if it’s way out West or whatever, a thousand miles from New York, Mom’s always sure I was one of the victims. I get an earful if I don’t answer right away.”

A car honked incessantly on the street outside. When it finally stopped, two men yelled angrily at each other for several seconds. The sun had gone down and it was dark and I tried to see through the window but the glare from the neon made it hard. I could see motion but no detail. I leaned and looked up at the sign. It hung half an inch from the glass. There was a metal rim around it, presumably to focus the light toward the window, but that meant I couldn’t actually see the bulbs, just their reflection.

It seemed to me there was a lesson in there. But when I glanced back to Irfan, she was looking at me from under her brow. It wasn’t pleasant.

“Your heart is starting to believe. But your head is still holding on.”

A young couple walked into the pizza shop speaking hushed and silly to each other, as if laughing at the entire rest of the world.

“How do you know that?”

“Because you’re not afraid. Not yet. But when you finally accept the truth, you’ll see the world as it is, and you’ll be terrified.”

For a moment her eyes flashed as if they were on fire. But when I blinked to clear my eyes, it seemed like it was just the purple-orange glare from the neon.

I looked to the couple ordering at the register. He had one arm around her back, and she twisted hers around to meet it. Their fingers intertwined. He was jokingly trying to get her to order something with anchovies, much to the annoyance of the old man, who looked at me looking at him.

He knew, too.

I looked around at his humble little pizza shop, at the menu placard on the wall, at the white ceiling tiles, at the big stainless steel oven behind the display rack. He was doing what he needed to survive, same as anyone.

“So why don’t more people believe?” I asked.

“HA!”

Irfan laughed so loud the couple stopped their joking and turned. But she didn’t care. She leaned forward again and started speaking faster.

“There’s a university down the road. Go ask the professors what they think of the priests. There’s a church on the corner. Methodists, I think. Go ask the priests what they think of the politicians. Go to Washington and ask the politicians of one party what they think of the other. All of you cretins are utterly convinced that billions — literally, billions of other humans live every day of their lives in utter delusion and that only you and those few like you have somehow managed to escape.”

The more she spoke, the faster the words came and the more her accent changed. She didn’t sound English anymore. She didn’t sound female either.

“And all those others huddle in their groups and chuckle at yours and say the same thing. This is what you all believe. And then somehow you’re shocked to learn you might’ve had it wrong, as if such a thing weren’t physically possible, as if gravity would sooner reverse than any any earnest group of humans be wrong about anything, despite that you believed every day of your life that almost all of them are!”

She stood from the stool.

“Monkey brains. All of you. You’ve always been like this. Always. You’re only a few generations removed from the trees and yet you act like you’re the — ”

She choked and grabbed at her throat, at her collar. She bent and coughed toward the floor. Once. Twice. Then she grabbed her bag with a growl and stormed out.

I ran after.

“HEY!” The old man slapped the counter so hard it shook. “Clear your damned table!”

I ran back, scooped up our plates and napkins, and dumped them in the trash. By the time I hit the sidewalk, Irfan had already crossed the side street at the end of the block and was approaching the main road just past the large building on the corner.

“Wait!” I called. But she was way too far to hear.

I ran down the sidewalk, dodged a man on a bike, and made it across the side street just in time to avoid being hit by a car. But by the time I passed the alley that ran behind the big building, Irfan was long gone.

“Shit!” I stomped.

“I have to,” she said.

I spun. She was leaning against the corner of the wall with one foot resting on it, as if in a moment, she’d gone completely around the building and down the alley behind. Or else something had picked her up and returned her.

“I have to wait,” she said back in her English accent. “I don’t have a choice.”

Her purple lip quivered. But it didn’t really hit me until she swallowed hard, like her collar was too tight. I realized then that she hadn’t appeared that day at Bastien’s until after I had touched the lamp, and that he had told me not to, and that Bastien had insisted she was just a friend, and that he had stumbled over the word. I thought that was because they were sleeping together. I thought the dog collar was some kind of sexual thing. It was vaguely arousing, to be honest, and I more than a little wanted him to put it on me.

But just then I wondered if Bastien hadn’t stumbled over the word for a different reason.

“He sent you,” I accused.

She nodded. “I was supposed to keep you out of trouble.”

“So you took me to a bookstore?”

“No one ever gets into any real trouble in a bookstore. They only get into trouble when they get out.” She looked up at the night sky. She stood from her lean and started walking. “Come on. I’m supposed to bring you.”

“Bring me where?”

“He wants to see you. Don’t worry. You’ll love it. They aaall do.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

[image error]

Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas

Knocking.

Ugh . . .

More knocking. Harder this time.

Then again. Over and over and over and over.

“Fuck! It’s busted!” I called without opening my eyes.

My fucking flat was turning into fucking Grand Central. Fucking hell.

Samir pushed in. My eyes were still shut. I couldn’t see him. But my nose caught a waft of cologne. I sure hope it worked on gay men. I couldn’t stand it.

“What happened to your door?” he asked.

I sat up on the couch. I had to push harder than I expected. It felt like my chest was made of lead.

“Huh?” I opened my eyes finally and winced.

“Have anything to do with yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Fuck.

“Yeah, you know, the day before today. Mom told me about it. She saw you on the street through the upstairs window. She said she came down later to check on you but you never answered the door.” He looked at me disapprovingly. He leaned closer and did the same. “Have you seen your face?”

I touched my eye.

“Ow.” It was still tender.

I got up and went to the bathroom and whistled at myself. The prick got me good. I had a nice, fat bruise under my eye. But it was my hand that caught my attention. There was a symbol on the back of it, like something you’d get stamped on you at the door of a club or concert, but this was hand drawn in red and black. I smudged it with my fingers, but it was marker ink and didn’t run. I licked my finger and tried again. Nothing.

“Shit.”

I’d have to wait for it to wear off naturally. It looked sort of like a graphic script, like the loops and lines made intersecting calligraphic characters in Arabic or Thai or something. But it also looked a little like a snarling face.

I stepped out and looked at the box of markers on the floor, along with the rest of my art supplies. Samir was fiddling with the half-installed hardware on the door.

“Cerise, what’s going on?”

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Fine? You look like the frickin’ Bud Light dog. Who hit you?”

“Just some asshole. It’s nothing. I can handle it.”

He lifted his starched, pressed Sheepshead Bay T-shirt and grabbed the sheathed knife clipped to his belt. It had a black rubber handle. The blade wasn’t more than four inches long, but it looked serious enough. I don’t know if he had it because he was gay, because he was driving, or just because. He handed it to me.

“Don’t you need that?” I asked.

“Apparently not as much as you.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “Really. She’ll come wandering back in a couple days with a new dude in tow, maybe even a ring on her finger, and everything will go right back to how it was before. Fifty bucks says the new one will be richer than Lyman. Probably younger, too.”

“You said that already.” He pressed the sheathed knife into my hand.

“I did?”

I dropped it on the kitchen table, next to the book, which I grabbed instead. I couldn’t grip my friend in anger so I gripped her stupid book instead. It looked old, like the books at Bastien’s. It had a cloth cover, but it was machine bound. Early 1900s maybe.

I read the title again out loud. “The Sacred Marriage: Alchemy, Witchcraft, and the Life Eternal.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s called a book. It holds words so you can read them over and over any time you want.”

“Whatever. Someone’s a bitch today.” He walked to the door. “I gotta work.”

“Yeah.”

He was right. I was mad. I was mad everyone. I was mad at my best friend for bailing and leaving me to deal with the shit in her wake. I was mad at Bastien for just assuming he could bat his eyelashes at me like that. But mostly I was mad at Lyman and his fucking dick squad.

And my door was busted and my body was sore and I was completely dependent on the Suleiman family, even for the basics of life, and to get out of it, it looked like I’d actually have to use Lyman’s money, which was tantamount to admitting I couldn’t handle my shit myself like a grownup. I felt like I had absolutely no control over anything — my home, my career, my friends, my love life, not even my own body. Apparently I’d just slept for 14 hours or something.

I clenched my teeth. “Did your mom mention seeing a guy here yesterday?” I asked. “Bald, wearing a funny coat?”

“A coat?” he asked. “It was like 80 degrees yesterday.”

“Dude. It wasn’t my coat.”

He shook his head. “No. Why? Did he give you the fancy word holder?” He nodded to the book.

I picked up a flipflop from the floor and threw it at him. It missed by a mile — let’s say on purpose — and it bounced off the door. He left with a grin.

“Better fix this before dad sees!” he said, wiggling a finger through the gap in the door.

I looked at it. I looked at the book in my hand. I held it up. I knew she was always big into astrology. But this was new. I opened it and flipped through the pages. At the center was a collection of full-color illustrations, drawn in the fairy book style and printed on a different kind of paper. I stopped at a two-page spread. An oval stone, shimmering like an opal, hovered in the air between a naked man and woman with arms outstretched towards it. Between them, under the stone, grew a flowering tree.

I leaned forward and read the caption. “The Tree of Life and the Lapis Philosophorum.”

I flipped to the next page. “Whoah . . .”

A flame-tongued demon dribbled blood from its lips. Around him were various objects at the points of a pentagram. Below him was an altar covered in the fallen blood from his mouth. One one side, a pregnant woman held up a chalice. On the other, a dark-robed man held a snub blade. Both their genitals were exposed. He was erect.

The caption read: The athame is the ceremonial dagger, representing the masculine principle, just as the chalice, or grail, represents the feminine.

I scowled. Why would she have this?

Shit, where would she even get it?

I turned the page again and something fell out. It was a card. A tarot card.

I picked it up and turned it over.

The Devil. A naked man and woman stood on either side chained around their necks to a ring on a heavy stone at the center. On it stood the great horned beast. Bat wings stretched from his back. An upside down pentagram was carved on his chest.

Someone had scribbled in Sharpie on the side: vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.

It wasn’t Kell’s handwriting. It looked like a man’s.

So she had seen him.

“Bastiennnn . . .” I whined. “Come on, man. Don’t fucking encourage her.”

I sat on the couch, pulled my denim jacket over my lap, and rested the book on top. I don’t know what I expected a book on the occult to sound like, but it was so serious. And scholarly. But then, I guess this was more of a history book than anything.

Did you know that Isaac Newton, the supposed father of science, was totally into alchemy and Biblical numerology? Everyone always acts like he was trying to show how the world was one giant machine, but according to this guy, that all came later, a deliberate propaganda. He says historians know it too. Apparently, Newton spent the last years of his life obsessed with cracking the secret numerical code he thought was hidden in the Bible, and also persecuting some German guy named Leibniz. And supposedly he was part of some secret group called The Masters and Mr. Leibniz was in trouble for revealing things they said he wasn’t supposed to. That part was actually really interesting. They had this whole rivalry that went on for years.

I looked at the cover. “Why do you have this?”

I lifted The Devil card from between the pages. The old goat-headed scratch stood there with the naked man and woman chained before him. They looked to each other like they wanted to screw, despite their bonds, while the devil had a slight menacing smirk on his face, like he knew something we didn’t. It was the douchebro smirk. I slid it back.

I turned the book over and opened the back cover. There was a stamp on the inside.

THE BARROWS

NEW AMSTERDAM

No address. A quick Google search didn’t turn anything up either, which was odd. Search companies compile most of their own information. They want to be as accurate as they can. You actually have to formally request an exemption to get left out their results. They closest thing I found was The Barrow Street Bookstore, which Google told me was permanently closed.

I looked at her lavender purse on the floor. Right where I’d left it. I walked over and pulled the straps open. I took out her phone. It was dead and required a kind of charger I didn’t own. I didn’t know her passcode anyway. We loved each other dearly but every good relationship has healthy limits. After that there was makeup. Lots and lots of it. And lots. Some in bags and some loose. Including the world’s smallest bottle of hair spray.

“You don’t even use hair spray,” I whispered.

I turned the bag over and dumped it. A hair brush. An unused toothbrush still in the wrapper. An empty bag of chips. A stopped wristwatch. Thirty-seven cents. No cash. And a bunch of old receipts and ticket stubs. I pulled one from the mess. My mouth dropped when I saw the date.

“You bitch. You totally went to The Toadals concert without me.”

I shook the bag again to make sure I got it all and something small and metal hit the floor.

Keys. But they were tiny — more like to a locker or mailbox than to a car or front door. There were two of them, identical, on a simple wire ring. I slipped them into my pocket and scanned the mess on my floor — all of it, mine and hers combined.

Not counting rent money, I had two hundred and thirty-four dollars in my checking account. Plus the hundred Lyman threw at my head. I took the world’s fastest shower, skipping my hair, and slipped into my black Gordon Liu T-shirt — The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, AKA The Master Killer. I stuffed the book and keys into Kell’s now-empty bag along with my wallet, her compact, and a pack of tissues. I looked at the bag in my hand.

“Fuck. I can’t believe I’m actually carrying a purse.”

I found my mirrored aviator sunglasses on the way out the door. I kicked them accidentally and they slid into the wall. I put them on to cover the black eye. I stopped for a moment at the door and looked at the knife on the table. It sure looked menacing, all thick and black with a sheath of heavy nylon weave. I walked out and shut the broken door behind me.

Ten seconds later I burst back in and grabbed the knife. I walked to the ATM at the bodega, where I took out my very last two hundred dollars, and headed back to Sour Candy.

“He’s not here,” Fish said from his throne behind the counter.

“Did he say where?”

“Naw. I don’t mean he stepped out, lady. I mean he left. Moved out. Whatever you said spooked him real good. I told you.” He wagged a fat finger at me. “I told you you was trouble. You and Vicky both.”

I stood there for a second.

Spooked?

It was dark in the shop with my sunglasses on and I took them off without thinking. Fish whistled.

“Damn, girl.” He saw my eye. “What happened?”

I turned my glasses around and looked at myself in the reflection. My left eye was puffy and totally bruised. No amount of foundation was going to cover that shit. I shrugged.

Without asking for permission, I went right for the stairs and up to the third floor. Fish yelled after me that it was a waste, and he was right. The room was empty, save for the hookahs and other junk. Even the oil lamp was gone. The mattress was leaning against the wall. But there was a single card on the middle of the floor. Face down. I walked over and picked it up.

The Fool.

I shoved it in the book with the other. The Devil. I took it out and read the Latin again. Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. I walked back downstairs. Maybe it was because I had a tarot card in my hand, I dunno, but the first thing I noticed in the shop was a tarot deck in a stiff plastic case. It was hanging on a rack next to a Jesus Christ action figure, complete with karate-chop arm. I wasn’t sure if that was to beat the devil or stop you from masturbating. I pulled the deck from the rack. It was totally not what I was expecting. It came with a free download, a way to get guided readings by yourself through your phone. I guess there really is an app for everything.

I heard the door bells jingle while I was reading the instructions on the back. It was a few moments before I noticed it was too quiet. I couldn’t hear any other customers in the store, despite that someone had clearly come. I listened. I walked around the aisle of Japanese toy figurines. Nothing. At the end of the row was a bunch of stuffed animals. I pulled my mirrored aviators from my pocket and put them on a large hanging Bug Bunny. Then I walked back around to the occult section. If I craned my head from there, I could see the reflection. No details at that distance, but motion at least. Sure enough, there was a guy in the shop, pushing six feet probably, and solid. Dressed like an off-duty cop. He glanced at the sunglasses on the bunny, turned, and walked out casually like this wasn’t the place he was expecting.

I ran to the front and pushed through the door, tarot deck still in my hand. Fish yelled and Mick ran ofter me. He hopped the counter like he was a TV cop sliding over the hood of a car, but there was no need. I stopped as soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk. The big guy was walking away nonchalantly. He kind of hunched a bit, like he was perpetually under a cloud.

I wasn’t surprised I was being followed. All it meant was that Lyman had figured out that the number he’d gotten from me was shit. In truth, I’d already called it from the landline in the Halal market. It belonged to some random dude Kell had run into at a coffee shop. She gave him some sob story about losing her phone and asked to borrow his. I’d dangled it in front of Lyman to see his reaction. Not that I was surprised. But at least now I knew he was bluffing.

I went back inside and paid Mick, who clearly didn’t remember me from the last customer in the shop, when the doors jingled again and Irfan walked in. Same shaved head. Same dog collar, like it was part of her style, something crazy to wear instead of a choker. She was in a neon blue camo-print jacket, tight leather pants, and knee-high boots. She had a very expensive Balenciaga bag slung over her shoulder that looked brand new. Her full lips were covered in purple lipstick, and they pouted a little when she saw me. She started perusing the shop disinterestedly, like she was waiting for me to finish and leave.

Fish wandered in from the back and pushed through the curtain of beads.

“I told you, Spence. I told you you was trouble. You and Vicki both. Told my man, too, not that he’s got any sense when it comes to either of you.”

“You coulda told me she’d been here, Fish.”

“That wouldn’t be for me to say,” he said mockingly in a fake British accent. I think he was making fun of Irfan.

“Was she buying or selling?”

“That ain’t for me to say neither.”

“She’s pregnant, you know.”

He cursed and shook his head.

“If you sell her drugs, I’ll find out and tell everyone and you’ll have a mob of angry white girls outside the shop with tiki torches and pumpkin spice lattes.”

He snorted.

“You ever heard of a place called The Barrows? I think it’s a bookstore?”

“Books?” Fish shook his head in silence the way I’d expect a bookseller would if you inquired about drugs at the register. “Naw.”

The door jingled again. But it wasn’t another customer. Irfan had bailed — suddenly, as if my question had bothered her.

“Thanks Fish!” I turned and hurried out the door.

“Stop scaring all my peeps away, Spence. I’m not telling you again!”

I wasn’t out the door more than five or ten seconds after Irfan, but she was already three blocks ahead of me and in real danger of moving out of sight. I didn’t know how she could move that fast. I followed her around the block. I followed her under scaffolding perched over the sidewalk in front of a barber shop. I followed her past a narrow discount leather clothing store that pushed their round racks of clothes outside and nearly to the street to force the passersby through them. A man in a turban stood on the curb, leaning against a post, and kept watch on his wares.

That’s when she disappeared. I marked the spot with my eyes and trotted to it — a capped metal post, like an unused pipe, that erupted from the concrete at the corner of a building, near a gap too narrow to pass.

“Why are you following me?”

I recognized the accent. I looked up. Irfan was sitting on the ledge of a fire escape, boots dangling over the side.

“Why did you run?” I asked in return, neck craning.

“I didn’t run. I got tired of waiting on you and your inane questions. You shouldn’t keep poking him like that, you know. Kingfish is a dangerous man.”

“I can handle Fish. But thank you.”

“He’s got a picture on the wall in there — ”

“The crucifixion kid,” I interrupted. “Yeah, I’ve heard it. Everyone has. Like, ten times. Don’t fuck with Kingfish. Got it.”

She snorted. “Suit yourself.”

She got up and hopped nimbly over the railing and then to the ground. She had muscular legs.

“How did you get up there so fast?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “Why are you following me?”

“I’m looking for Bastien. Duh.”

“That’s all?”

I looked to the side. “What other reason would there be?”

“Right.” She started walking.

“Where is he?” I started following.

“Bastien? Haven’t the foggiest.”

“You don’t have to cover for him.”

“Who says I’m covering for him? Maybe I just don’t like you.”

She walked to the end of the block and crossed the street and walked into the convenience store on the corner. The man behind the counter looked to be about 80. He wore a red polo shirt with a name tag that said HARV. Irfan snagged an expensive bottle of “artesian water” from the refrigerated case and walked to the fountain.

“Are you just gonna keep following me until I give in?” she asked.

“That’s the idea.”

She grabbed a cup from the dispenser and began to fill it with purple slush, which churned like a washing machine in its reservoir over the spigot.

“You’re like a little biting fly, you know that? Bzz, bzz, bzz. You’re gonna get squashed.”

“Is that a crack about my height? Wow, so very clever. How ever did you come up with it?”

She watched the cup fill slowly in twisting blobs. “Okay. Fine. Take your three.”

“My three what?”

“Questions. Two more.”

She grabbed a clear plastic lid and a straw from the rack.

“That’s not fair.”

“Who said anything was fair?”

She flashed me a close-lipped smile as she pulled a bunch of napkins from a dispenser and crumpled them tightly into a ball between both palms. She pressed hard for several seconds and them blew long and slow between her thumbs, the way you’d blow on a fire to stoke the embers without kicking up the soot. Then she dropped the wad into the open rectangle cut into the counter. It disappeared into the trash can underneath which was almost full of paper waste.

She grabbed her slush and her water and walked to the front, where she put on her best ditzy American girl accent.

“Um. I think you’re machine is broken or something. I wanted a whole Power Grape Slush not three-fourths of a Power Grape Slush.”

She showed the old man the cup, which she hadn’t filled, and he scowled at the machine over the stack of paper towels in the middle row.

“I’ll charge you for the smaller size.”

She giggled. I rolled my eyes.

The clerk rang her total and she handed him a five. The register drawer dinged open, which is just about the time the fire rose from the trash. I could see it in the round mirror over the cigarette rack, the one the staff used to keep an eye on the store when they were stocking the shelves.

The old man cursed loudly and ran for the fire extinguisher, which was all the way in the back in the hall by the restrooms. Irfan put the water in her bag, leaned across the counter, pulled a wad of twenties from the till, and walked out with her slush.

Fuck.

Once again, in the moment it took me to reach the door, she was already down the block. But she wasn’t running. She had her blue neon camo-print hung off her smooth shoulders and she was slurping her purple ice.

I heard the old man yell from the other side of the automatic doors and I took off at full speed, leaving him with a growing blaze.

“They have security cameras in those places, you know.” I said to her, out of breath.

“So?”

“Where’s Bastien?” I asked, nearly out of breath.

“I told you.” She turned back to me as if to emphasize her next words by showing her purple lips. “I don’t know. You’re not very good at this game. One more.”

“Whatever. Just take me to The Barrows.”

“The Barrows?” She made a face. “That’s not a question.”

“Fine. Can you please take me to The Barrows?”

“Why would you wanna go to that old place?”

“Can you take me or not?”

She stopped. “Yes. I can. But I’m afraid those were your three and that means this is goodbye.” She said it like a game show host consoling a departing contestant.

“Dude, you just said you could — Fuck!” I stomped.

“Ta-ta.”

She waved. But she didn’t wave like she meant it. She wiggled her fingers, like she was taunting me, before ducking down an alley. It was so fast, I actually took another step and had to move back.

“How does she keep doing that?”

I couldn’t see her. Just a pair of rolling trash bins and a couple locked steel doors. But there was a T intersection and I headed for it. I stopped there and listened. I thought I heard steps to my left. I ran. There was another street far ahead, but another alley broke to my right halfway there and I turned. I made my way to the back, where I turned right again into a narrower space marred in the grime of centuries, the kind of stain that you couldn’t remove with steel wool. The buildings that rose on either side of me were close enough together that I almost had to walk sideways. I saw the exposed end of a single window-mounted AC unit two floors up and lots of paint worn to flecks. Pipes ran up and wires ran across. There was one door, but it was immovable.

I walked to the end and turned right yet again. It felt like I was moving in a tightening spiral. I heard a soft giggle, which is when I realized the noise from the road had faded. Now there was only the occasional rustle of pipe water. After barely ten yards, I turned right again into a covered alley lined in sliding glass doors, as if there had been a pair of small shops here once, one on either side, back when this was a tenement ‘hood. The glass was closed and locked and frosted with age, and I could only see the fuzzy shadows of the junk stacked on the other side — irregularly shaped boxes, one on top of the next like you see in storage rooms and old hardware stores. And there was something round, like a hula hoop or something. A pair of faded advertisements, curling and torn, looked like they were from the 1960s. Past them, there was only brick. A dead end.

A shadow moved on the other side of the glass.

Had she gotten inside? I tried the slider door, but it didn’t budge.

I listened. But there was nothing.

A shadow moved again, this time on the left. And then another. Then another to my right. It seemed like the rooms on both sides were full of people. But there were no voices. No footsteps. Just a bobbing motion of people walking back and forth. And there was no sound, as if what I was witnessing were the shadows of the past.

They stopped suddenly and turned to me, as if all of them had just been made aware of my presence. They crept closer to the glass and pressed themselves to it, one after the next as if walking into each other, until the panes dimmed to gray. I heard a cluster of distant voices as the metal door frames shuddered and creaked.

But that was it. Then it stopped.

Irfan was there. At the dead end. She looked confused. She moved forward and I thought she was going to run, so I charged and tackled her, American football-style, and we hit the pavement hard. Her slushy splattered on the ground behind her. I was determined not to get my ass kicked again, especially not by a girl — even one that was a full head taller than me — and I moved immediately to pin her arms. I straddled her and strained to hold her down, anticipating a fight.

But there was no need. She didn’t push back, not even to shift my weight, despite that I was sure my butt was pressing painfully against her liver. She just lay there, hands over her head, looking up at me, expressionless, like a long-caged animal.

“You got me,” she said with a whiff of sarcasm.

I got up, a little sheepish. I thought she might run. But she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t move at all. I was standing and she was lying still on the ground looking at me like I had green skin.

“You are the strangest girl,” she said.

I shrugged.

She stood and dusted her hands on her neon blue camo-print. She picked up her expensive Balenciaga bag and examined it for dirt.

“Fine,” she said. “The Barrows. But then you have to do something for me.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: A spell you can touch

[image error]

It’s called a book

Knocking.

Ugh . . .

More knocking. Harder this time.

Then again. Over and over and over and over.

“Fuck! It’s busted!” I called without opening my eyes.

My fucking flat was turning into fucking Grand Central. Fucking hell.

Samir pushed in. My eyes were still shut. I couldn’t see him. But my nose caught a waft of cologne. I sure hope it worked on gay men. I couldn’t stand it.

“What happened to your door?” he asked.

I sat up on the couch. I had to push harder than I expected. It felt like my chest was made of lead.

“Huh?” I opened my eyes finally and winced.

“Have anything to do with yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Fuck.

“Yeah, you know, the day before today. Mom told me about it. She saw you on the street through the upstairs window. She said she came down later to check on you but you never answered the door.” He looked at me disapprovingly. He leaned closer and did the same. “Have you seen your face?”

I touched my eye.

“Ow.” It was still tender.

I got up and went to the bathroom and whistled at myself. The prick got me good. I had a nice, fat bruise under my eye. But it was my hand that caught my attention. There was a symbol on the back of it, like something you’d get stamped on you at the door of a club or concert, but this was hand drawn in red and black. I smudged it with my fingers, but it was marker ink and didn’t run. I licked my finger and tried again. Nothing.

“Shit.”

I’d have to wait for it to wear off naturally. It looked sort of like a graphic script, like the loops and lines made intersecting calligraphic characters in Arabic or Thai or something. But it also looked a little like a snarling face.

I stepped out and looked at the box of markers on the floor, along with the rest of my art supplies. Samir was fiddling with the half-installed hardware on the door.

“Cerise, what’s going on?”

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Fine? You look like the frickin’ Bud Light dog. Who hit you?”

“Just some asshole. It’s nothing. I can handle it.”

He lifted his starched, pressed Sheepshead Bay T-shirt and grabbed the sheathed knife clipped to his belt. It had a black rubber handle. The blade wasn’t more than four inches long, but it looked serious enough. I don’t know if he had it because he was gay, because he was driving, or just because. He handed it to me.

“Don’t you need that?” I asked.

“Apparently not as much as you.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “Really. She’ll come wandering back in a couple days with a new dude in tow, maybe even a ring on her finger, and everything will go right back to how it was before. Fifty bucks says the new one will be richer than Lyman. Probably younger, too.”

“You said that already.” He pressed the sheathed knife into my hand.

“I did?”

I dropped it on the kitchen table, next to the book, which I grabbed instead. I couldn’t grip my friend in anger so I gripped her stupid book instead. It looked old, like the books at Bastien’s. It had a cloth cover, but it was machine bound. Early 1900s maybe.

I read the title again out loud. “The Sacred Marriage: Alchemy, Witchcraft, and the Life Eternal.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s called a book. It holds words so you can read them over and over any time you want.”

“Whatever. Someone’s a bitch today.” He walked to the door. “I gotta work.”

“Yeah.”

He was right. I was mad. I was mad everyone. I was mad at my best friend for bailing and leaving me to deal with the shit in her wake. I was mad at Bastien for just assuming he could bat his eyelashes at me like that. But mostly I was mad at Lyman and his fucking dick squad.

And my door was busted and my body was sore and I was completely dependent on the Suleiman family, even for the basics of life, and to get out of it, it looked like I’d actually have to use Lyman’s money, which was tantamount to admitting I couldn’t handle my shit myself like a grownup. I felt like I had absolutely no control over anything — my home, my career, my friends, my love life, not even my own body. Apparently I’d just slept for 14 hours or something.

I clenched my teeth. “Did your mom mention seeing a guy here yesterday?” I asked. “Bald, wearing a funny coat?”

“A coat?” he asked. “It was like 80 degrees yesterday.”

“Dude. It wasn’t my coat.”

He shook his head. “No. Why? Did he give you the fancy word holder?” He nodded to the book.

I picked up a flipflop from the floor and threw it at him. It missed by a mile — let’s say on purpose — and it bounced off the door. He left with a grin.

“Better fix this before dad sees!” he said, wiggling a finger through the gap in the door.

I looked at it. I looked at the book in my hand. I held it up. I knew she was always big into astrology. But this was new. I opened it and flipped through the pages. At the center was a collection of full-color illustrations, drawn in the fairy book style and printed on a different kind of paper. I stopped at a two-page spread. An oval stone, shimmering like an opal, hovered in the air between a naked man and woman with arms outstretched towards it. Between them, under the stone, grew a flowering tree.

I leaned forward and read the caption. “The Tree of Life and the Lapis Philosophorum.”

I flipped to the next page. “Whoah . . .”

A flame-tongued demon dribbled blood from its lips. Around him were various objects at the points of a pentagram. Below him was an altar covered in the fallen blood from his mouth. One one side, a pregnant woman held up a chalice. On the other, a dark-robed man held a snub blade. Both their genitals were exposed. He was erect.

The caption read: The athame is the ceremonial dagger, representing the masculine principle, just as the chalice, or grail, represents the feminine.

I scowled. Why would she have this?

Shit, where would she even get it?

I turned the page again and something fell out. It was a card. A tarot card.

I picked it up and turned it over.

The Devil. A naked man and woman stood on either side chained around their necks to a ring on a heavy stone at the center. On it stood the great horned beast. Bat wings stretched from his back. An upside down pentagram was carved on his chest.

Someone had scribbled in Sharpie on the side: vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.

It wasn’t Kell’s handwriting. It looked like a man’s.

So she had seen him.

“Bastiennnn . . .” I whined. “Come on, man. Don’t fucking encourage her.”

I sat on the couch, pulled my denim jacket over my lap, and rested the book on top. I don’t know what I expected a book on the occult to sound like, but it was so serious. And scholarly. But then, I guess this was more of a history book than anything.

Did you know that Isaac Newton, the supposed father of science, was totally into alchemy and Biblical numerology? Everyone always acts like he was trying to show how the world was one giant machine, but according to this guy, that all came later, a deliberate propaganda. He says historians know it too. Apparently, Newton spent the last years of his life obsessed with cracking the secret numerical code he thought was hidden in the Bible, and also persecuting some German guy named Leibniz. And supposedly he was part of some secret group called The Masters and Mr. Leibniz was in trouble for revealing things they said he wasn’t supposed to. That part was actually really interesting. They had this whole rivalry that went on for years.

I looked at the cover. “Why do you have this?”

I lifted The Devil card from between the pages. The old goat-headed scratch stood there with the naked man and woman chained before him. They looked to each other like they wanted to screw, despite their bonds, while the devil had a slight menacing smirk on his face, like he knew something we didn’t. It was the douchebro smirk. I slid it back.

I turned the book over and opened the back cover. There was a stamp on the inside.

THE BARROWS

NEW AMSTERDAM

No address. A quick Google search didn’t turn anything up either, which was odd. Search companies compile most of their own information. They want to be as accurate as they can. You actually have to formally request an exemption to get left out their results. They closest thing I found was The Barrow Street Bookstore, which Google told me was permanently closed.

I looked at her lavender purse on the floor. Right where I’d left it. I walked over and pulled the straps open. I took out her phone. It was dead and required a kind of charger I didn’t own. I didn’t know her passcode anyway. We loved each other dearly but every good relationship has healthy limits. After that there was makeup. Lots and lots of it. And lots. Some in bags and some loose. Including the world’s smallest bottle of hair spray.

“You don’t even use hair spray,” I whispered.

I turned the bag over and dumped it. A hair brush. An unused toothbrush still in the wrapper. An empty bag of chips. A stopped wristwatch. Thirty-seven cents. No cash. And a bunch of old receipts and ticket stubs. I pulled one from the mess. My mouth dropped when I saw the date.

“You bitch. You totally went to The Toadals concert without me.”

I shook the bag again to make sure I got it all and something small and metal hit the floor.

Keys. But they were tiny — more like to a locker or mailbox than to a car or front door. There were two of them, identical, on a simple wire ring. I slipped them into my pocket and scanned the mess on my floor — all of it, mine and hers combined.

Not counting rent money, I had two hundred and thirty-four dollars in my checking account. Plus the hundred Lyman threw at my head. I took the world’s fastest shower, skipping my hair, and slipped into my black Gordon Liu T-shirt — The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, AKA The Master Killer. I stuffed the book and keys into Kell’s now-empty bag along with my wallet, her compact, and a pack of tissues. I looked at the bag in my hand.

“Fuck. I can’t believe I’m actually carrying a purse.”

I found my mirrored aviator sunglasses on the way out the door. I kicked them accidentally and they slid into the wall. I put them on to cover the black eye. I stopped for a moment at the door and looked at the knife on the table. It sure looked menacing, all thick and black with a sheath of heavy nylon weave. I walked out and shut the broken door behind me.

Ten seconds later I burst back in and grabbed the knife. I walked to the ATM at the bodega, where I took out my very last two hundred dollars, and headed back to Sour Candy.

“He’s not here,” Fish said from his throne behind the counter.

“Did he say where?”

“Naw. I don’t mean he stepped out, lady. I mean he left. Moved out. Whatever you said spooked him real good. I told you.” He wagged a fat finger at me. “I told you you was trouble. You and Vicky both.”

I stood there for a second.

Spooked?

It was dark in the shop with my sunglasses on and I took them off without thinking. Fish whistled.

“Damn, girl.” He saw my eye. “What happened?”

I turned my glasses around and looked at myself in the reflection. My left eye was puffy and totally bruised. No amount of foundation was going to cover that shit. I shrugged.

Without asking for permission, I went right for the stairs and up to the third floor. Fish yelled after me that it was a waste, and he was right. The room was empty, save for the hookahs and other junk. Even the oil lamp was gone. The mattress was leaning against the wall. But there was a single card on the middle of the floor. Face down. I walked over and picked it up.

The Fool.

I shoved it in the book with the other. The Devil. I took it out and read the Latin again. Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. I walked back downstairs. Maybe it was because I had a tarot card in my hand, I dunno, but the first thing I noticed in the shop was a tarot deck in a stiff plastic case. It was hanging on a rack next to a Jesus Christ action figure, complete with karate-chop arm. I wasn’t sure if that was to beat the devil or stop you from masturbating. I pulled the deck from the rack. It was totally not what I was expecting. It came with a free download, a way to get guided readings by yourself through your phone. I guess there really is an app for everything.

I heard the door bells jingle while I was reading the instructions on the back. It was a few moments before I noticed it was too quiet. I couldn’t hear any other customers in the store, despite that someone had clearly come. I listened. I walked around the aisle of Japanese toy figurines. Nothing. At the end of the row was a bunch of stuffed animals. I pulled my mirrored aviators from my pocket and put them on a large hanging Bug Bunny. Then I walked back around to the occult section. If I craned my head from there, I could see the reflection. No details at that distance, but motion at least. Sure enough, there was a guy in the shop, pushing six feet probably, and solid. Dressed like an off-duty cop. He glanced at the sunglasses on the bunny, turned, and walked out casually like this wasn’t the place he was expecting.

I ran to the front and pushed through the door, tarot deck still in my hand. Fish yelled and Mick ran ofter me. He hopped the counter like he was a TV cop sliding over the hood of a car, but there was no need. I stopped as soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk. The big guy was walking away nonchalantly. He kind of hunched a bit, like he was perpetually under a cloud.

I wasn’t surprised I was being followed. All it meant was that Lyman had figured out that the number he’d gotten from me was shit. In truth, I’d already called it from the landline in the Halal market. It belonged to some random dude Kell had run into at a coffee shop. She gave him some sob story about losing her phone and asked to borrow his. I’d dangled it in front of Lyman to see his reaction. Not that I was surprised. But at least now I knew he was bluffing.

I went back inside and paid Mick, who clearly didn’t remember me from the last customer in the shop, when the doors jingled again and Irfan walked in. She was in a neon blue camo-print jacket, tight leather pants, boots, and the same dog collar as before, with a very expensive Balenciaga bag over her shoulder which looked brand new. She saw me and scowled. She started perusing the shop disinterestedly, like she was waiting for me to finish and leave.

Fish wandered in from the back and pushed through the curtain of beads.

“I told you, Spence. I told you you was trouble. You and Vicki both. Told my man, too, not that he’s got any sense when it comes to either of you.”

“You coulda told me she’d been here, Fish.”

“That wouldn’t be for me to say,” he said mockingly in a fake British accent.

“Was she buying or selling?”

“That ain’t for me to say neither.”

“She’s pregnant. If you sell her drugs, I’ll find out and tell everyone and you’ll have a mob of angry white girls outside the shop with tiki torches and pumpkin spice lattes. You ever heard of a place called The Barrows? I think it’s a bookstore?”

“Books?” Fish shook his head in silence the way I’d expect a bookseller would if you inquired about drugs at the register. “Naw.”

The door jingled again. But it wasn’t another customer. Irfan had bailed — suddenly, or so it seemed.

“Thanks Fish!” I turned and hurried out the door.

“Stop scaring all my peeps away, Spence. I’m not telling you again!”

I wasn’t out the door more than five or ten seconds after Irfan, but she was already three blocks ahead of me and in real danger of moving out of sight. I didn’t know how she could move that fast.

I followed her around the block. I followed her under scaffolding perched over the sidewalk in front of a barber shop. I followed her past a narrow discount leather clothing store that pushed their round racks of clothes outside and nearly to the street to force the passersby through them. A man in a turban stood on the curb, leaning against a post, and kept watch on his wares. And that was when she disappeared. I marked the spot with my eyes and trotted to it — a capped metal post, like an unused pipe, that erupted from the concrete at the corner of a building, near a gap too narrow to pass.

Or was it?

I leaned forward, then back again, eying the space between the brick, which seemed unremarkable except for the fact that it was so small. One wondered why the architect didn’t add four more inches of room. I stuck my hand in, then my body, sideways, and found it more roomy than I expected. I made my way to the back and into a small alley marred in the grime of centuries, the kind of stain that you couldn’t remove with steel wool. The buildings rose on either side of me. I saw the exposed end of a window-mounted AC unit two floors up and lots of paint worn to flecks. Pipes ran up and wires ran across. There was one door, but it was immovable.

I walked to the end and turned a corner and thought I heard the sound of footsteps. As I wound deeper into this gap-maze, the noise from the road faded and all I heard was the occasional rustle of pipe water. I turned into an alley lined in sliding glass framed in metal, as if there had been a pair of small shops here once, one on either side, back when this was a tenement ‘hood. The glass was closed and locked and frosted with age, and I could only see the fuzzy shadows of the junk stacked on the other side — irregularly shaped boxes, one on top of the next, and the handles of an old bicycle. A pair of faded advertisements, curling and torn, looked like they were from the 1960s.

A shadow moved. On the other side of the glass.

I listened. But there was nothing.

A shadow moved again, this time on the other side. And then another. And another. It seemed like the rooms on both sides were full of people. But there were no voices. No footsteps. Just a bobbing motion of people walking, one after the next.

Then they turned to me-all at the same time. The shadows crept closer to the glass and pressed themselves to it, one after the next, until the panes dimmed to gray. The frames shuddered and creaked and I felt the glass bow outward toward me.

Irfan walked across the gap at the end of the alley, and I ran after her just as everything shattered. I tackled her to the ground. I was determined not to get my ass kicked again, especially not by a girl — even one that was a full head taller than me.

“How did you do that?” she asked in that thick accent.

“How did I do what?”

I was straddling her. I had her arms pinned over her head and was straining to hold her down, but there was no need. She wasn’t pushing back, not even to shift my weight despite that my butt was pressing against her liver. She just lay there, hands over her head, looking up at me like nothing had happened.

“Fine,” she said. “You got me. Let’s not make a big deal out of it.”

“Who are you?”

“Irfan. Two more.”

“Two more what?”

“Questions. One more.”

“Wait. That’s not fair.”

“Who said anything was fair?”

She was limp under me and staring up expressionless, like a long-caged animal. I looked at the dog collar. Suddenly I felt cruel, like I was pressing a defenseless child into the carpet or something, and I got up. I thought she might run. But she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t move at all. I was standing and she was still on the ground.

I looked at the alley. The glass was completely intact and there was nothing on the ground. I was about to ask something stupid like “What the hell is going on?” which is what anyone would say in that kind of situation, but I caught myself.

“Why did you bail back there? When I mentioned The Barrows?”

She laid there looking up at me.

“You don’t want to answer me because you know where it is,” I said. “Don’t you?”

Still she didn’t move.

“Okay. Fine.” I pointed at her. “Then I order you to take me.”

She stood and dusted her hands on her neon blue camo-print. She picked up her expensive Balenciaga bag and examined it for dirt. Then she looked at me like I was the biggest inconvenience of her life thus far. She sighed and started back down the alley.

“Whatever. Let’s get it over with.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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The stench of death is upon you

I walked home with a plastic bag in one hand and a smoothie in the other. I was running out of cash and had no idea how I was going to pay my cell phone bill, which was already past due, but I sprung for the smoothie anyway after getting what I needed — finally, I was sure — to fix my front door. Seeing Bastien was much easier than I expected, which made me feel a little stupid. I’d been procrastinating in my search for Kell and now there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. But mostly I felt good, like I’d passed a really hard test. Like I was finally over all of it. I was totally in a good mood — until I saw the black limo waiting across the street just down from the Halal market. It was all sleek and curvy, like a reef shark. I slurped the last dribbles of my treat to myself and tossed the cup into a trash can before passing the rear of the vehicle to cross the road. I pretended not to notice it.

Bouncer-man stepped out from the driver’s side. “Mr. Raimi hasn’t heard from you.”

“I mailed him a full report,” I said without stopping. “Typed and double-spaced with proper margins and everything. Mrs. Cho would be very proud. He should have it in a couple days.”

“He’s losing confidence in your ability to hold up your end of the bargain.”

“Well, I tell you what.” I turned and started walking backward across the street toward the market. “If I don’t deliver, I promise I won’t make him pay. How’s that?”

“He’s wondering if you require additional motivation.”

I stopped. It was the way he said it. Made me wanna kick him in the balls.

“Is that a threat?”

Bouncer-man opened the door to the back. “He would like a word.”

“We all want things.” I turned again for the door.

“Ms. Song,” he called insistently.

I didn’t stop.

“Ms. Song!” Lyman’s voice. Like a boom.

He was in the back of the limo. His mostly bald head was poking out. I shit you not, he was in the douche uniform: khakis and a striped Polo under white cardigan with a colorful border. Big & Tall size.

“I’m working on it,” I called. I waggled my hand to shoo him. “Go foreclose on people’s homes or inflate the price of lifesaving medicines or whatever.”

“Do we have to shout?” He looked around. “Can you get in the car? Please?”

I sighed and walked back to the limo. Bouncer-man shut the door behind me. It was very quiet. I was facing Lyman. He looked like he was sick. His eyes were dark and I got the sense he’d been coughing when the door was closed, which was maybe why bouncer-man had stepped out first.

Across the seat from me was the black guy with the long face who’d searched the motel room. He glowered menacingly.

I rolled my eyes and dropped my plastic bag in his lap.

“Hold that.”

“You may not appreciate it,” Lyman began, “but cash is expensive. Every hour that a dollar isn’t invested, it loses — ”

“Come on.” I made a disgusted face. “You’re not gonna give me a million dollars. Okay? It’s insulting. I’m not that stupid.”

He looked at me. He pulled down the center cushion in the seat back, which revealed a compartment. Inside was a metal suitcase.

“No way . . .”

He took it out and opened it on the seat next to him. The lid raised and I gasped.

“Holy fuck.”

It was full of ten-thousand-dollar stacks, but different than the one he’d given me. These bills had clearly been used. They weren’t in terrible shape, but they weren’t all neat and crisp like the others.

The car was deathly quiet for several seconds.

“This is five hundred thousand dollars,” he explained in neat and tidy words. “I’ll have another case just like this in the morning. Unmarked, non-consecutive bills. Just like you asked.”

“Fuck me . . .” I couldn’t help it. That was a lot of goddamned money.

He motioned to the front. “William doesn’t think we need you. He knows some men. Ex-cops, ex-NSA, who would guarantee results for a fraction of the cost. Understand?”

I was still looking at the money.

“Convince me,” he said.

“She texted me,” I defended my lack of progress. “I got a number.”

He smiled in a very self-satisfied way, like the everyone in the world had just stopped what they were doing and they’d all shouted what a smart guy he was.

“I told you she trusted you. I knew it. You’re the only one.” He nodded to the bodyguard in the seat next to me.

My eyes got big. I reached for the door but it bouncer-man locked it from the front. I felt a big hand on my shoulder. I turned and the black dude with the narrow head punched me. Like, hard. My head flew back and bounced off the window hard enough to make it ring.

“Owww . . .” I didn’t know whether to grab the back of my head or the front. My nose was running. My eye was hot and was starting to swell. I was gonna get a shiner, just like Kell. “Assholes,” I breathed.

They took my phone. It was locked, of course, but Lyman just nodded again and his bodyguard grabbed my arm. I made a fist and tried to fight him, but the fucker was strong and he worked my thumb free and held it on the reader. My phone unlocked and I scratched his face with my free hand. I think I got his eye. He screamed and elbowed me hard. It was a reflex and he didn’t hold back. It hurt even more than the punch. I flew back and hit the side of the car and fell to the floor.

That’s where I was when the door opened and William bouncer-man dragged me from the limo. He just dropped me right on the road. I watched from the asphalt as Lyman got what he needed from my phone and deleted the text so I wouldn’t have the number. Then he tossed my phone to the street. It bounced and slid.

I picked it up. The screen was all cracked. “You fucking dick!”

“Thank you for your help.” Lyman pulled a single hundred dollar bill from a stack in the case. “This ought to cover your time.”

He crumpled it and threw it at me. It bounced off my hair. The door shut and the limo pulled away, almost running over my foot, which I yanked out of the way at the last second.

“Asshole!”

I tongued the inside of my lip. The back of my head stung. My eye throbbed. And I was pretty sure I was going to have a fat, tender bruise on my chest from where dickless elbowed me. I sat up on the pavement in the middle of the road and sniffed. My eyes were watering and I needed to clear my nostrils. I ran the back of my hand across my nose. I had almost forgotten what getting your ass kicked felt like. I felt bad, but honestly it wasn’t the worst beating I’d taken. A couple years before, Kell and I got arrested for brawling on the street. Some drunk lesbians were yelling gay slurs to our friend Rey, who was super skinny and very, very shy. He just wanted to leave, but Kell and I were drunk too, and high, and words got said and things got out of hand very quickly. I don’t think any of us intended to fight. All I remember is being so angry at them. They were lesbians — they were supposed to know better!

The fight was epic. Punching. Screaming. Kicking. Hair pulling. The works. The police came and broke it up. They had us all line up and sit with our backs to the wall. Kell and I looked like shit. Hair a mess. Cuts and bruises everywhere. Spots of blood on our clothes. We were outnumbered and totally got our asses kicked. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alive. Kell, too. I’m sure that’s why neither of us said anything. We just sat there like darkening bruises as the police processed the lesbian gang. We had stood up for our friend and we were feeling good. We were soaking in it like a hot bath and neither of us wanted to do anything to break the spell.

All I could think as I was sitting in the road in front of my apartment was that I would’ve killed for a joint just then.

A car screeched to a halt behind me and honked. The dude got out barely a second later and started yelling at me to get out of the road. He was in a blue and green track suit with a soccer logo.

“Girlie!” he yelled. “Do you understand English?”

It was so funny I almost laughed. His accent was so thick he was damned near unintelligible.

“Is that what you call it?” I sniffed and wiped again.

He moved toward me, like he might drag me out of the way or something.

“Touch me and I’ll eat your balls.”

He was about to retort when a white turd landed on his cheek. He wiped it and looked at his hand.

“What the . . .”

We both looked up.

Birds.

Lots and lots of fucking birds. Crows, mostly, but sparrows and starlings as well, just like before. They descended as a angry, quarreling flock and landed on rooftops and street signs and cars and everything. There was chirping and cawing and flapping. None of them stayed still for very long, which meant there was a constant swirling mass of feathers, so many that they actually stirred the air.

A crow dove over the guy in the track suit.

“HEY!”

He barely had time to duck before another came. He crouched to the street, where I was already thankfully planted, and swatted over his bald spot.

I felt something brush my hair, which gave me the willies, and I shook my hands around my head. But another came. And another. And another. It seemed like they were closing in, getting lower and lower and lover until WHOOSH. They scattered. Just like that, the whole menagerie took to wing and flew into the air in all directions, as if in fear for their lives.

Track suit guy had his head craned to the sky.

“What the fuck?” There was a tiny wet spot on his crotch. “What the hell was that?”

“A murder,” a man said behind me.

I was still sitting on the ground. I dropped my head back and looked at him upside down. He stood with his hands in a fantastic coat.

A coat. In June.

Still, I can see why he was so fond of it. It was awesome. It was an old-style chuban, like they used to wear on the mainland centuries ago, only the buttons had been replaced. These were all different. One was stamped metal. Another was polished amber. Whatever had been printed on the fabric had long-since faded to wisps. Now it appeared as an early morning fog, or maybe smoke from a campfire.

He was looking at me. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he wasn’t particularly short either. His skin was an odd color — it had a faint ocher hue — and he was completely bald.

I glanced up one more time to the sky. The last few birds were fluttering away. But by tilting my head back and then forward like that, I caused my nose to run. I sniffed and tasted blood. I touched it and saw red.

“You are bleeding.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket as if he were a stage magician. It had the initials H.H. embroidered in the corner.

“Thanks. I’m okay. My apartment’s right here.”

I got up and moved toward the door, one finger pressed to my nostril.

“Finally!”

Track suit guy raised his arms as if to praise Allah that I’d gotten out of his way. A car honked behind his and he told them what he felt about it in colorful language.

“You are Cerise Song?”

Bald guy knew my name. I stopped to reply, but I had to wipe my nose again.

“May I have a moment?” he asked.

“Uhhh . . .” I didn’t feel like arguing. I backed to the door. “To be honest, the lock’s busted and I couldn’t stop you anyway, so — FUCK.” I looked up in frustration.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. It’s just.” I raised my hand toward the end of the street. “They drove off with my . . . Never mind.”

I went in and trotted up the stairs. I walked into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. When I turned off the spigot, I heard him at my front door. I came out with a tissue hanging from my left nostril. He was staring in silence at the giant sparkly clitoris in my living room.

“It’s . . .” I started.

His eyes moved over the couch and the floor and the little kitchen nook. My place was a mess. There were like worn panties lying around, plus an open box of tampons, along with the art and everything. There was no place for him to sit.

“What is it that you wanted, Mister . . . ?”

“My name is Étranger.”

The name got me. “Have we met?”

“I don’t think so. I would have remembered.”

I’m not sure if he was complimenting me or his memory.

He handed me a card. “Perhaps you have been to my restaurant.”

Bistro Indigenes. With the name in print, it all came back. I held up the card. “Mory.” I nodded.

“Excuse me?”

“Dr. Sandoval. He was my aesthetics professor. He used to rave about you. Holy shit — excuse me.” I covered my dirty mouth with the card. “He’d freak.”

I loved that class. It was the only one I attended regularly. Professor Sandoval was this funny little Puerto Rican Jew with a thick Brooklyn accent. He’d go off on Kant and baseball in the same sentence. He loved Étranger’s food — his art — but could rarely afford it on a teacher’s salary.

He told us about the Cirque Gastronomique, this food art series Étranger did — and about the Eros Gastronomique in particular. It wasn’t just a dinner. It was a complete sensual experience that “penetrated a wet cave,” an ocean grotto exposed by the tides, with a stunning view of a red-hued sunset over the Indian Ocean. There were candles and lights strung overhead, and the courses were served with an increasing urgency as the tide returned over the duration of the meal, thrusting in and out. Dr. Sandoval said the diners swayed, not just with the waves but in tension between the desire to savor and the desire to hurry and finish before the waters returned and drowned them. As he told us the story, he stood on stage with his eyes closed making this face. I swear he was going to pop in his shorts right in front of the class.

But my guest seemed uncomfortable with his notoriety. Or just annoyed with me perhaps. “You paid a visit to the home of Lyman Raimi recently.”

“So I did.”

I started feeling queasy and went to the kitchenette for a glass of water.

“Can I offer you anything?” I called. “I’m afraid the only soft drink I have is water. And Red Bull. But you don’t look like a Red Bull man.”

“May I ask the reason for your visit?”

“Reason?” I put three ice cubes in a glass, filled it with the half-empty remains of a vending machine water bottle, and added a dash of Southern Comfort. “What makes you think there was a reason?”

“Lyman Raimi is very ill and doesn’t accept guests.” He said it like he knew from personal experience.

“Is that so?”

I walked to the couch. I was going to offer him a seat, but it was covered with crap. He saw me looking at it.

“Sorry.”

I pushed clothes and a blanket and Kell’s plastic bags to the floor with my art supplies and everything. A book fell free. It clunked on the hardwood and landed near my guest. He looked down at it. He picked it up. He read the spine.

“An adequate history,” he said. “Although you might prefer The Long Vacant Cupboard. For the introductory commentary.”

He handed it to me, which is when I noticed his palms were tattooed.

“Um. Thanks.”

I scanned the title quickly. The Sacred Marriage: Alchemy, Witchcraft, and the Life Eternal. I walked it to the kitchen table as he lowered himself to the couch. He stood immediately. There was one item left, apparently — my magic eight ball. He lifted it and sat again and held it in his lap with two tattooed hands. He had perfect posture.

“May I ask your business with Mr. Raimi?” he said.

“That’s funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“He is a collector. Of sorts. He recently liquidated most of his fortune in order to acquire something of great value. An artifact, thought lost.”

“Lemme guess. It belongs to you.”

“No. It belongs to The Pit, which is where it should be sent.” He looked at me with concern. “Are you certain you do not require medical attention?”

“Huh?” I yanked the tissue from my nose. The tip was red.

He motioned to my eye. I touched it and flinched. It felt flushed and tender. I was going to have a helluva bruise.

That really pissed me off.

I walked back to the kitchen. “I’m very sorry,” I called back to him. “I’m not usually in the habit of getting my ass kicked in front of total strangers. I usually reserve that honor for my close friends. It’s just been a really . . . strange couple days.”

“I would suggest it is going to get stranger,” he said.

“Oh? And why’s that?”

“The stench of death is upon you.”

I swallowed the last of my drink and almost choked. What do you say to something like that?

“Gee. And I took a shower yesterday and everything.”

I dumped the ice in a towel. The movement made my chest hurt. A painful stiffness was spreading across my entire trunk. I walked back into the living room holding the ice pack to my eye. The sensation wasn’t pleasant. I was really starting to feel like shit. I just wanted to sit. I walked to the couch and plopped down.

“I believe you may have a concussion,” he said, studying me.

“I’ll live.”

But there was certainly a dull throb resounding in my head. It bounced back and forth like a wave between the walls of my skull. And I was starting to feel nauseated.

“A visit to the hospital would be wise,” he suggested, leaning toward me slightly.

I shook my head, which hurt. I shut my eyes, which also hurt, albeit a little less, and leaned my head back.

“I don’t have insurance. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

I felt the cushions shift as he got up from the couch, which was cool because I really didn’t want to have to ask him to leave. But he didn’t leave. He put his tattooed hand on my forehead.

“Sleep.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Axl Salles

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This is the part where you lie

Once upon a time, if you were looking for me, odds are I was either at school, at The Corn Cob Couch, or on my way to Sour Candy, a head shop and music store, among other things, with everything you always wanted but knew you’d never use crammed into about a thousand square feet. They had an amazing collection of art books that I loved, all deviant and transgressive stuff. Kell liked the scented candles in glassware printed with “The Saints of Rock” — Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain done up like they were Catholic saints with robes and raised palms and serene faces. There were wind-up toys, ball gags, flavored condoms, plastic models from Japan, posters, bongs and hookahs, vintage ash trays, boxed magic tricks, and a wall of used cassettes and LPs. But I’m not sure how much money they made from all of that. I knew it as the safest place on Long Island to get rave drugs. It was where I got my first hit of 2C-B, back when I had student loan money and plenty of time for that kind of thing.

Actually, it’s not the doing of the drugs so much as the hours of headache and nausea the next day. I have limited time off and better things to do — like sleeping, or art — than lie moaning on the bathroom floor swearing to myself that I’ll never do it again.

But it’s not like I made a decision to stop. It just kind of happened. That’s how it works, I guess. When you’re in school, of course, life changes are scheduled for you well in advance. This is when the school year ends. This is when you’re braces come off. This is when your cousin is getting married. This is when you graduate. You get older and they take off the training wheels and no one tells you when things are going to change. They just do, completely on their own, and you hardly have any say in it, and even when you do, you don’t even realize until it’s too late.

I looked up at the hand-painted plywood sign over the door. Sour Candy hadn’t changed. I wasn’t if that was good or bad. I pushed through the front door, which jingled weakly, like even the bells were stoned.

“Well, shit. Lookit dis.”

I walked around a rack of colorful luchadore masks and saw Abel Rawley lean forward in his chair behind the counter. It squeaked loudly. The man had to weigh 250 pounds at least. He was Haitian by birth and had a bald head and a black beard that ambled unevenly across a heavy face.

“Foley!” he called to someone in the back. “Get your mick ass out here and check this out.”

Abel was known as Kingfish around town, or just Fish if you knew him. He had a fat, pinkish scar one millimeter over his right eye which he hid with dark sunglasses, even at night. If you ever saw the scar, you knew you were in trouble. He was sitting behind the counter in a brass-studded, high-backed maroon leather office chair, like something you would’ve seen at a bank in 1975. One of the wheels was busted, so it wobbled oddly as it rocked. The leather was torn at the corners and worn and cracked on the arms.

A tall, skinny white guy with bad teeth and slicked-back hair stepped through the curtain of beads.

“What’s that?”

He was in a white T-shirt. His eyes were totally bloodshot.

“This is Spence, man, the chick I was telling you about. The one with the sick tatt.” Fish turned to me. “Mick here thinks this weak shit on his arms is gonna get his scrawny ass laid.”

Mick showed me his arms. He was in the process of getting sleeves done. The usual motifs — snakes and flowers and skulls and shit.

“It’s nice,” I said noncommittally.

“Thanks,” Mick said.

Fish slapped his hands together and laughed like I’d just told the best joke he’d heard that year. “She don’t mean it, you fool.” Fish motioned to my side. “Show him.”

“Come on, Fish,” I whined.

He made mocking noises. “Woman, I ain’t ask you to show him your snatch.”

I sighed. Kingfish wasn’t the type of man you said no to. Especially if you were about to ask him for a favor. I lifted my T-shirt on my right side and showed them my tattoo. Most of it anyway. It ran from my upper thigh to the back of my shoulder in one fluid piece.

A piece of hard candy fell out of Mick’s mouth and stuck to the counter.

“See?” Fish said. “That’s what I’m sayin’. Now that’s a masterpiece. Not your dumbass — ”

“Can we talk?” I asked, shirt raised.

“Hold on, I gotta get a picture.” He started for the back, as if he’d left his phone there despite that I could clearly see it on the counter. “Pull them jeans down a bit so he can see the rest.”

“Fish!” I objected.

“What is it?” Mick asked, leaning closer. “Like a peacock or something?”

“Naw!” Fish seemed more offended than I was. “Ya dumb mick. It’s a phoenix.”

“Phoenix?” He got even closer. “Where’s the fire?”

“Actually, it’s a fenghuang,” I explained. “A Chinese phoenix. Lots of feathers. No fire.”

“Tell him about the ink,” Fish said as he pushed through the chains of beads dangling in the doorway. He walked with a pronounced limp.

“What about the ink?” Mick asked.

“It’s nothing. He’s making a big deal of it.”

“Does it like glow in the dark or something?”

“Umm. No?”

I started to pull my shirt down, but then I remembered Fish wanted a picture, so I stood there awkwardly, half-disrobed, as Mick leaned over the bar to get a closer look at my side.

“It’s just, they mix it themselves,” I explained. “In the shop. It’s like a really old recipe.”

“I didn’t know inks had recipes.”

I could feel the air from his breath on my skin.

“In the East, it usually comes in a powder that you mix with water in a bowl to do calligraphy and stuff.”

There was a loud noise in the back.

“You’re from the east side?” he asked, standing straight again. “You look more Asian to me.”

I was starting to think Mick was tripping balls. I was also pretty sure Mick wasn’t his real name.

“Used on pirates and shit,” Fish said as he emerged from the back, as if we were still stuck on his last comment. “Goes back like five hundred years ago, man. I’m telling you, this thing is legit. I mean, look at that. It’s like it could come to life or some shit.”

He held up a Polaroid that I would’ve bet all ten grand he took off a hipster on the street. As in stole.

“I been telling everyone about that thang. Now I can show,” he said with a satisfied sigh. He was breathing like he’d just run up three flights of stairs.

“Seriously?” I said. “You’re gonna put it on the wall?”

Behind the counter to my left, near the hall to the bathroom that said “For Employees Only,” the wall was full of photos, handwritten notes, stickers, magazine cutouts, ticket stubs, and one very important yellowed condom that the original owner insisted had been inside Sophia Lauren “when she was hot,” or so the handwritten note informed us.

There was a click and a snap and whine as the paper ejected.

“What you worried about?” His voice went up two octaves. “That’s the greatest fucking tattoo in the city, woman.” He shook the print. “Alright. Come on back, Spence. Let’s get you straightened out.”

That’s what Fish said when he was going to sell you drugs.

“I’m not here for that,” I objected.

I followed him through the beads and down the short hall to the office. The walls were stained and scuffed. Someone had punched through the dry wall in one spot. The flattened red-pattern carpet looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed in an ice age, and there was all kinds of random crap stacked at the sides and corners, leaving only a single narrow walkway. The musty smell of rot was strong enough even to overpower the mix of hash smoke and incense.

He plopped into a different office chair, equally old, which groaned under his weight. The back of the room was stacked nearly to the ceiling with all kinds of odds and ends. It would’ve taken months to sort though it all.

“I need to talk to him.”

“Who dat?” he joked.

He reached for a bottle and poured himself a glass. I’m pretty sure it was straight rum. I could smell it from where I was standing.

I made a face. “You know who.”

“So talk. Man ain’t no slave.”

“Come on, Fish. You know what I mean. I need to know where he’s flopping.”

“See, now that’s different. Man goes lookin’ for trouble, it ain’t for me to say. But you asking me to ship it.”

The photo was slowly developing. I reached over and picked it up to look.

“You think I’m trouble?”

You could totally see my sideboob. I tossed it back.

“Took my boy Ringo six months to get straight. You ain’t seen what he went through.”

“I can guess.”

“Look at this.” He reached to a box on the floor, one of several, and removed a small glass vial, colored midnight blue. He handed it to me.

“What is it?”

“The man’s latest. Potions. Good for what ails you, know what I’m saying?”

“Potions?” I ran my fingers over the vial. “Jesus. Microbrews and beard oil weren’t enough? What’s next? Carrier pigeons and whale oil lamps?”

He laughed. “Try it. Might set you right. How long since you got high?”

“No comment.”

“You tighter than a church lady’s ass, Spence.”

“No, thanks.” I set the vial down. “I just wanna talk.”

“About what?”

“Cut me some slack, man. I just got half naked in front of a total stranger.”

I lifted the photo as if it were Exhibit A.

“It was very nice to meet you,” Mick called from the front.

I think he put same wet candy back in his mouth. That’s how Fish sold a lot of his drugs — mixed in the candy just before it went into the cooling pan, then smashed with a hammer and sold by weight. Kids could take it to raves without their parents suspecting.

“I’m not asking you to set anything up,” I said. “I just wanna know where he’s staying.”

Fish sighed. “Upstairs.”

“What?” I scowled. “Like, here?”

He nodded.

“He’s living at the Sour Candy?”

“Got a mattress in the storage room. Third floor. Top of the stairs. Can’t miss it. Whole top floor smells like leather and honey.”

Yeah, I thought. That’s what he smells like.

“Thanks, Fish.” I headed for the side hallway.

“Spence!” he called. “Don’t give me regrets.” He said it like regrets were the clap.

The rest of the narrow building looked — and smelled — pretty much like the shop. I walked to the very top of the stairs, which had the same flattened and worn carpet as the hall. There were two doors on either side of a short hall that ended at a window. The left door was open. I saw another window at the back, in between more stacks of boxes and quite a few plastic-wrapped hookahs. There was a mattress on the floor, stacked high with blankets, next to a hot plate whose cord snaked to the wall. The second room was much smaller, judging by the location of the far wall, but the door was shut.

Staying with a friend, she said.

A “friend.”

Okay, so, technically, I met him first. Not that it matters, I guess. It was at The Corn Cob Couch, this underground venue out in Flushing. He was in a vintage formal dinner jacket over a colorful 70s cartoon T-shirt almost identical to the one I was wearing. We passed in the crowd and approved of each other’s choice of garment with a silent nod. He got up on stage and introduced one of the bands. I made sure I stayed in sight and he found me after and invited me to a party. I took my best friend. It’s not like I was gonna go alone.

In hindsight, I think it was also a test. I mean, I could’ve asked someone else. But if he was gonna be around, which I’d hoped, then he’d meet her sooner or later, and I’d learned it was better to just get it out of the way — before I got my hopes up.

“Here’s my super-gorgeous friend. Are you sure you’re still interested in me?”

As it happened, it wasn’t him I needed to worry about. Kell’s whole demeanor changed when she saw him. She walked right up and started flirting. She asked later if it was okay — like a million times. I’m pretty sure they hooked up that night. They went out again and she came home in a rapture. She had their whole future planned: wedding at the drive-in with a slasher flick playing in the background, honeymoon in some Mexican border town sharing hookers and doing every kind of drug known to man, home to a loft with a view of the river, maybe a kid or two down the line. Adopted, of course. She’d talk to me for hours about everything that happened on their dates, usually longer than the date itself. It was unnatural — the worst kind of fatal obsession — and when the inevitable happened, she cratered.

That was right around when Rey died. I went over to her place and found her strung out on God-knew-what. Nearly catatonic. She’d hung all her stuffed animals. She had a collection of fuzzy monsters with neon fur, and she’d strung them from the ceiling with tiny nooses wound out of toilet paper. So I made her puke in the toilet and stayed with her a few days to get her straight. I took her out. We went shopping for dinner dresses and crashed this big gala at The Met, just for shits and giggles. Lyman was there. He didn’t need much encouragement. Kell was a knockout in that dress, boobs saluting like sailors. She swore the whole thing with him wasn’t serious, that she wasn’t even sleeping with him, that she had her own room and he was gone most of the time and she had full use of the mansion, so why not? It was just to get her mind off the rest of it, she said.

Thing is, I believed her.

Now she was pregnant.

I peered into sleeping area. I saw a lidless cardboard box full of leaning LPs. I stepped to them as a toilet flushed on the other side of the door across the hall.

“Love Like Blood,” he said, standing right behind me, looking at the record in my hand.

I smiled without turning. He knew that was my favorite track on the album. The Killing Joke. 1985. It was a first press and unopened.

I replaced it. “Why do you have these when you don’t even have a record player?”

“You don’t collect something like that to play it. Except once in a blue moon maybe.”

“Says who?”

I turned to glance at him. He was in sweatpants. Other than that, he was barefoot and shirtless. I could see the tattoo of the church that covered his abdomen. Kell always said it had a Russian prison vibe. I think she was right. The spire rose between his pects, which sported a sun on one side and a crescent moon on the other. His shoulders and forearms were spotted with various objects and icons: a leaping dolphin, a dripping flask, an eye, a tree, a five-pointed star, a snake in flames, and so on.

“The needle wears down the grooves, slowly but surely.”

He lifted another album from the set. Neil Diamond. Touching You, Touching Me.

“Nice,” I said with a laugh.

I looked at his hands. All ten of his fingers sported a different ring. I saw a turquoise band and a silver skull and yellow plastic with a green gem. I’m sure he got that one out of a cereal box or something.

“Each play is a tiny act of destruction,” he said. “That’s why people like vinyl.”

“I thought it was the superior sound quality.”

“Whatever, man.” He scowled and gripped the record. “This is a living thing. It gets born, grows old, and dies.”

Kai and I hardly shared a single musical interests, but Bastien and I liked all the same old bands. We used to have competitions, usually while he was waiting for Kell to get ready, where we’d try to stump each other with lyrics. I usually won.

He usually let me.

He put the vinyl back carefully. He smiled at down at me, genuinely. “It’s good to see you, Cerise.” His voice was soft and warm.

God, he was so gorgeous.

Okay, let’s be honest. Women are at least as hung up on appearance as guys. And he had it. All of it. The stylishly messy hair that hung in front of his smoky eyes. The chiseled jaw. The lean abs with the line of thin hairs in between that led your eyes straight down. He was tall but not so tall I’d need a stepladder to kiss him, stylish but not obsessed with it, confident without being completely and utterly cocky. He was the guy every girl in the room wished would notice her, if not for a night of carnal desire then at least for the selfish pleasure of shooting him down.

“This is the part where you ask how I’ve been,” he said within inches of my face. “And I lie and ask you the same thing. And you lie and we both pretend not to know the other is lying.”

He was sporting the faintest beginnings of a Tony Stark ’stouche. I wasn’t sure about that. He was also close enough that I could tell there was nothing under his sweatpants but his naked body.

I stepped away. “So be a rebel. Tell the truth.”

“I’m great. And you? Let’s see.”

He smiled and picked up the tarot deck that rested on a stack of old magazines. He plopped down on the seat cushion on the floor, next to the hot plate, and jerked his head to move his hair out of his eyes.

I saw a brass oil lamp on the floor in the corner. I though it was a hookah at first because it had a similar shape, with a long fluted neck, but up close I could see the reservoir and the wick poking from the lip at the top. It looked like a giraffe sticking out its tongue. I put my hand on it so I could tilt it and see the crisscrossed carvings, but Bastien raised a hand.

“Ehh. Better not touch that.”

But it was too late. I already had my hand on it. I pulled it away and I rolled my eyes where he couldn’t see.

“Oil lamps and carrier pigeons . . .” I muttered.

He cut the deck in two, and with one deft move, he spread the entire deck out on the floor. He motioned to it.

“Pick a card.”

I crouched and looked.

“Nononono.”

He swiped the cards up and started shuffling again.

“What?”

“That’s not how you do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t use your head. Close your eyes.”

I did, and I heard him spread the cards on the floor again.

“Now, relax. And when you open your eyes, listen to the little voice. It’ll take you right to a card.”

“Oka — ”

“Wait.” He put his ringed fingers to my eyes. “I’m serious. Don’t think about it. Just go right for the first one.”

“I got it,” I objected with a smile.

He took his hand away. I took a breath. I opened my eyes and went right for the first card I noticed.

“Okay?” I asked him, my hand resting on it.

He nodded and I turned it and set it down.

“The Seven of Pentacles,” he said. “Reversed.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

He held it up to explain it to me. “A man with a hoe is admiring the harvest he’s just reaped. He’s tired, but months of hard work have paid off. If the card was drawn upright, it would mean success through perseverance and long-term planning. But reversed . . .” He made “tsk-tsk” noises and put the card back.

“Whatever. That card would apply to, like, 99% of the population.”

“Very Occupy of you.”

He studied me while his ring-covered fingers deftly maneuvered the tarot deck like a stage magician. That’s why Fish called him Ringo. Because of the rings. Fish had a name for everyone. Kell was Vicky. I was Spence. We got them at the same time. Fish said Kell was all Victoria’s Secret — you know, the classic voluptuous look — whereas he said I looked like I bought my clothes at the corporate novelty shop in the mall. It was not a compliment.

“Hang out at the Couch much these days?” he asked as he shuffled the deck with his ringed fingers.

“The Couch? Dude. They totally shut it down. Last year. They’re turning it into condos or a theme park or something. It’s really sad. I cried.”

“Cried?” He snorted derisively.

“Hey! It’s like the death nail of my youth. We spent so much time there. As long as it was running — I dunno. It was like I could go back, you know? After it closed . . . that’s it. Youth over. Exit here for adulthood.”

The Couch was really an abandoned factory. There was a huge fence lined lot out back that was crisscrossed in weeds. Facing it was a high loading dock which served as a wonderful stage. There was even large overhang to keep off the rain. It was perfect. Some guys starting hanging out there to smoke weed, not least because there was no way the cops could sneak up on the place, and no way they could stop anyone from running even if they did. It was just too big. Someone had left a ratty old brown couch in the lot, which was the only furniture, so that became their meeting spot. One day, someone brought a corncob pipe in lieu of a bong, as a kind of joke, and the name stuck. By the time I’d heard about it, there was a big eclectic mix of old furniture people had brought, including a wood student’s desk from some old grade school.

I studied him. “How did you not know it shut down?”

He shrugged. “Been busy. That’s too bad. That place was great.”

“Best. Venue. Ever.”

“Eh . . .” He made a face. “I could take you someplace.”

“Oh? Is that what you’ve been up?”

I can’t tell you how he did it, but he drew a card from the middle of the deck with one hand. He had cut it and he had half propped between the fingers of his right hand and he twisted them around the deck such that his thumb pushed a single random card free, which he snatched with his left.

The Seven of Wands, upright. A man on a ridge held up a staff with two hands as six others jabbed up at him from below. He braced himself, legs wide, and there was a look of anger on his face, as if he were defending his high position from many enemies. Interestingly, his shoes didn’t match.

“Both sevens,” I said.

“That significant?” he asked coyly.

I looked up from the card and met his eyes — all smoky and gorgeous.

“I dunno. Seemed like a funny coincidence, I guess.”

“They always are, aren’t they?” He took the card back and began shuffling the deck again in that fancy one-handed way, giving me that look. “It’s good to see you, Cerise.”

“You said that already.”

Things were quiet for a moment. I looked down and noticed a short stack of books in the corner. Not just books but old books. Hardbound. I walked over to them and lifted the first. It had a velvet cover with blunted edges and nothing on it except the title.

“Ogrosticon Orduum?” I asked.

He just watched me, smirking.

I picked up the next one, which was blue.

“The Long Vacant Cupboard?”

He nodded to the stack as he leaned to lay sideways on the floor. It stretched his abs.

“Go on,” he urged. “There’s also Smales’s Compendium of Lesser Travesties. And The Key of Solomon. And volume six of ‘The Reign’ of Massius Crane. The one on the start of the war.”

I bent to pick up the third book to get at the fourth, which I could tell had an ornate cover, but the Ogrosticon fell from my arms and hit the floor. That’s when she woke — the sleeping girl under the covers. She pulled the blanket off her and squinted in confusion.

“Bastien?”

She had a British accent and dark African skin with a single black star tattoo on her chest, right between her perfectly symmetrical C cups, the ones with playfully perky nipples. Her head was shaved and she wore absolutely nothing but a dog collar around her neck.

“Who’re you?” the girl asked. She wasn’t upset. She was just curious.

I gave him a look, replaced the books, and stepped toward the door. I stopped when I saw the sketch on the wall. It was one of mine. He’d hung it. It was the only thing he’d hung, in fact — a fuzzy pencil sketch I’d done of him and Leindre-with-the-big-hair. The funny thing was I remembered crumpling it and throwing it in the trash. And yet here it was, hanging from an exposed stud without a crease.

“Cerise.” Bastien hopped up and trotted over to block the door. “Come on. That’s just Irfan,” he whispered. “She’s just a friend. I promise. You’d like her. You have a lot in common. You both hate me.”

He looked down at me for another second, pleading. I could smell leather and honey.

“I don’t hate you.”

“You hungry?” he whispered. “We could grab something.”

I laughed once and pushed past his shirtless, tattooed chest.

“If you see her, tell her that her douche billionaire play toy offered me a million dollars to bring her pregnant ass in. I’m pretty sure he thinks she’s gonna do a Johnny Rotten on his kid and is trying to head her off at the pass.”

“Pregnant?” he asked, surprised.

“I’ll cover for her as long as I can.” I walked down the stairs. “But I figure she’s got maybe a day before he sicks the dogs on her for realsies. If he hasn’t already.”

“Wait. Are you serious?”

I kept walking down. “About which part?”

“Cerise!” he called.

But I left.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Raul Urias

[image error]

A million dollars!

I walked up the stairs to my flat. I could see from the top landing that my front door wasn’t quite shut all the way. The gap was slight. If you weren’t the person opening and closing it every day, you might not have noticed. But I did. I stood silently and listened.

Nothing.

I heard Abdul open the door to the street and start up the stairs. I didn’t want my landlord to see my place — not just the mess but the giant clitoral effigy. I pushed the door open and peered inside as his steps reached the landing. Nothing seemed out place.

Abdul passed the hall as he walked around to the steps to the third floor. I closed the door as casually as I could. He smiled and nodded and I listened to him walk up. I checked the bedroom, bathroom, and closet. All clear. I went back to lock the door, which is when I noticed it didn’t click like it used to. I locked and unlocked. I opened the door, shut it firm, and did the same, but the latch never engaged. Anyone could push into my place.

“Fuck,” I sighed.

Someone had broken in while I was out. I could guess who.

I walked around the living room, stepping lightly over all the mess. They didn’t seem to have taken anything. Not that I had anything to take. I didn’t even own a TV. I went to the kitchen nook and checked under the silverware drawer. Baggy was still there. Thats when I saw the stack. Ten thou, sitting on my kitchen table.

I stared at my busted door. It feels genuinely creepy to know someone’s been in your place when you were out. Even though I knew who it was and why, it still wigged me out. I didn’t want to be there right then.

There was a local hardware store two blocks down and three up, but it was small and closed early and I wasn’t sure they’d have what I needed. There was a big warehouse chain store a few stops away in the other direction, but that meant schlepping to the station and back. I sighed and grabbed my denim vest. Thirty minutes later, I was in the checkout line listening to the clerk with the heavy Indian accent tell me sheepishly that my card had been declined. By the time I got to an ATM, purchased the replacement hardware, and made it home, I was frustrated at every thing and everyone, even the random guy who cut me off running for the train. That feeling stuck with me while searching high and low for my little apartment tool set, and raged again when I found it was missing some of the pieces. I could tell right away because the handles were all the colors of a rainbow, and some of the colors were missing.

I sat on the floor by the door and unscrewed the old handle while imagining what I would do with a million dollars. It wasn’t until I had both it and the new hardware in pieces on the floor that I realized my shitty plastic apartment tool set didn’t have the right kind of screwdriver for the new handle.

“Shit!” I threw the one in my hand and it bounced against the wall.

I propped a chair in front of the door and stormed to bed. I even set an alarm. I had work the next day, which meant I had to wake up at a reasonable hour. I was in the bathroom getting ready when I got a text from someone who wasn’t in my contacts. It was just a string of numbers.

ARE THEY GONE??

I didn’t recognize it, but then I have exactly zero of my friends’ numbers memorized. If I ever lost my phone, I’d pretty much be fucked.

                                          KELL?

WHAT DID THEY DO?

WHERE ARE YOU?

STAYING WITH A FRIEND

WHAT DID HE SAY??

WE NEED TO TALK

K. I’LL FIND YOU

TODAY

KELL?

A MILLION DOLLARS!

KELL???

I hit the phone icon to dial the number, but an automated message came through the speakers telling me it was invalid, which meant she’d blocked me.

I growled to myself and read the messages again.

‘Staying with a friend.’

I could guess.

Half an hour later, Samir Suleiman and I stood on either sides of the register in his family’s Halal market, hunched over the counter with our chins resting on our hands. We were staring at the stack of bills which sat in the space between us.

Ten grand. Minted fresh.

“Smell it,” I told him.

“What?”

“Smell it. Seriously.”

“I’m okay.”

I picked it up and took a whiff at the edge.

“Last Eid,” he said, “we had a really good day at the shop. There were thousands of dollars in the drawer. Dad was gonna carry it to the bank stuffed into one of those leather deposit bags. I told him we needed a gun, but you know how he is. I made him take a knife. I had to actually block the door until he finally agreed.”

He was standing on the shop side. I was behind the counter in a white apron.

“You shouldn’t be walking around with that.” He pointed.

“Dude. What was I supposed to do?”

“So what happens now?”

He flipped his key ring around his finger. He was about to head out. He was wearing his fashionable jeans with the fancy stitching on the butt and a tight dragon-print T-shirt that showed off his muscles. He kept the sides of his head shaved. The short black hair on top was styled up to make a kind of front-to-back ridge.

I looked at the clock on the wall. “I dunno.”

“But what are you gonna tell him?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Fifty bucks says she shows up in a week with a new guy in tow and a ring on her finger. A hundred bucks says he’ll be richer than Lyman. Younger, too.”

“Ouch.”

I took the blue hijab from under the counter and fixed it on my head.

“Hey, man. I love her to death, but she once spent a weekend in Atlantic City with a guy who hit on her at the meat counter at Whole Foods. I didn’t even know she was gone. She came back wearing this really expensive Chanel jacket. And I mean really expensive. It looked amazing on her, though. It was all shiny and black with all these dangling gold buckles and everything. She never said where she got it, but I could guess. I thought maybe she rolled the guy — when he was drunk or something. But maybe not. Maybe he had a really good night at the casino. Maybe he called her his good luck charm — you know, as an excuse to rub her all night — and then felt like he had to split the cash. Or maybe they went shopping on the casino promenade and he bought her the jacket. Some guys really get off on that shit.”

“And then what? She just bailed on the guy?”

“Probably. I doubt he ever knew her real name.”

“What happened to the Chanel?”

“Ha. She totally pawned it at the end of the season. Got like a grand or something.”

I looked at myself in the reflection of the lighted glass case just to the side of the register.

“You gonna be okay today until Mom gets in?”

“Yeah. Totally. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

I’d taken Samir’s place in the shop. He’d been working for free, as children do when there’s a family business. Naturally, after he graduated high school, he wanted his own money. And his own place. He had a fancy new electric car and started doing rideshares in his free time, but since the best times to make money driving were also the hours Abdul needed him in the shop, the whole thing quickly escalated to an all-out family crisis. I’m sure to his parents it seemed like they were losing their son, especially given their increasing suspicions about his lifestyle and how he never seemed to show any interest in girls.

As it happened, that was about the time I lost the second of three short-lived jobs. I came up late on the rent and Samir suggested I take his hours at the market in lieu — as a sort of temporary solution to defuse the immediate crisis. Abdul said no but Mrs. Suleiman intervened.

“It’s only temporary,” she said.

That temporary situation had remained in place ever since.

I pulled the hijab down a little. “I can’t keep doing this, you know.”

“I know.”

But he didn’t have an alternative.

Neither did I.

“Not that I don’t trust you implicitly,” he said, “but if doucheman doesn’t hear anything, what’s he gonna do? I mean, a guy like that, he’s not just gonna drop it, right? Not with a very expensive paternity suit baking in your friend’s oven. She could take him for a lot more than a million if it came right down to it. What’s his Plan B?”

I tried not to think of him naked on top her.

Or vice versa, I guess.

I shrugged. “Maybe he’s serious. Maybe he wants to be the dad he never had.” I paused. “There was something weird though. He mentioned Bastien.”

“Oh, really?” Samir smiled and winked.

I rolled my eyes.

Samir said Bastien was the most beautiful man he’d ever seen. “I still say he’s bi. What straight man styles his hair like that? Oh! Shit.” He pointed to the TV on the wall. “This, this, this. I wanted you to see this.” The sound was low, and Samir hunted for the remote.

“What?”

“This.” He turned the volume up, but then spoke over it. “This company wanted to develop this old lot into an office complex with chain stores and everything on the ground floor, but this preschool or daycare or whatever that’s been there for, like, years or something didn’t want to move. The article I read said that without this place, working people in the neighborhood would have to drive forever to take their kids somewhere and at that point it stops being cost effective for them to stay. Which is totally what those assholes want, right? Get the low-rent payers out and build more condos for the corporate stiffs.”

“Gentrification. I get it.”

“Right. So they built the thing anyway. Of course. But they did it around the school, like an L-shape. It’s called the Redtail Center or something. Only, in a total dick move, when they changed the plans to accommodate the daycare, they made it so the back walls of the parking garage run along two sides of the school, around the playground. And there was already a building on one side. But now — There.” He pointed to the screen. “That’s what it looked like. Four-story concrete. That’s what the kids played in every day. A prison yard.”

He was right. It was worse even. Prison yard don’t usually have two-story walls.

“So check this out.” He kept pointing to the screen.

The anchorperson on the television was describing more or less the same situation but considerably less enthusiasm. Someone, it seemed, had gotten over the side gate and into the playground behind the daycare and painted a mural over those two walls. On the left, some popular superheroes appeared to be punching the concrete blocks, which scattered to reveal a big green playground with rainbows and stuff behind. On the back wall was a river scene with flying dragons and some video game and anime characters.

“Did they say what the Redtail people were going to do?” I asked.

He shook his head as he watched the screen. “If they take it down it’s only to be complete fucking corporate assholes who felt entitled to property they didn’t even own. It’s not like they even have to see the mural on that side.”

We listened as the lady on the screen explained that some local residents had petitioned the city to declare the mural a cultural landmark so that the corporation couldn’t remove it without permission.

Samir was beaming with schadenfreude. “The cool thing, though, is that no one even knows how the guy did it. They’re telling the kids it was magic elves or something.”

I shrugged. “If someone had the right dimensions, they could cut projection stencils for each color layer and then use a strong light to make shadows on the wall. Then it’s just a matter of tracing with the paint, basically. With rollers and spray cans, you could get that done in a few hours pretty easy.”

He turned the TV down and handed me the remote as a customer walked into the store. Samir swiped the ten grand and walked to the back, lost in thought, like he he was trying to remember where he left his phone or something.

“You want any of this before I put it in the safe?” He held up the money.

I shook my head.

He shut and locked it and stood there for a second. Then he walked around the counter again. He leaned across it and kissed the side of my face, right by my weird eyelid.

“You rock that thing like a pop star. Anyone tell you that?” He meant the hijab.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

He pointed to me as he walked past the customer, a regular. “Don’t let them give you any shit today,” he joked.

The man told him to take a hike.

That night, I went back onto the roof and sat by myself behind the big sign looking down on the world. I took my colored pencils with me and a sketchpad and I drew Lyman with a tongue of money. Then I drew a black-eyed Kell sitting on the sidewalk, back against a brick wall, smoking a pregnancy test like a spliff wearing nothing but the Chanel and a pair of panties.

A police car went by with siren blaring. Somebody was having a bad night.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Chiba Kotaro

[image error]

This is kidnapping. You know that right?

I woke around noon to find a strange man standing over me.

I shrieked and fell backward to the floor between the bed and the wall, claws up, ready to scratch the fucker’s eyes out.

But he just stood there, hands at the sides of his black suit, while his companion, a tall, thin black man with narrow sideburns, checked the closet and bathroom and under the bed.

“Not here,” he said. “But the window in the bathroom is wide open.”

The man in the suit looked to me like he was waiting for an explanation.

“It was hot last night,” I said.

“Check outside,” he ordered.

The man with the narrow sideburns left and my silent interrogator glanced to the functioning AC unit under the window at the front, then bent to pick up one of the boxes of cordials from the floor. There was a sticky cluster of empty chocolate shells inside. He counted the number of boxes around the room.

“I got hungry,” I said.

He tossed the box in the trash. The skin of his cheeks was pockmarked and his hair was pomaded. He looked like door security for a pay-by-the-bottle club in midtown. He even had the requisite merino turtleneck in place of a shirt and tie.

“Put some clothes on,” he said flatly. “Mr. Raimi would like to see you.”

I looked down. I was in nothing but a Care Bear T-shirt and grandma panties. “Who?” I feigned.

Bouncer-man was not amused.

“What happens if I tell him to go fuck himself?” I asked. “This is breaking and entering, you know. Just because this is a motel — ”

“Trust me.” He picked up my jeans from the floor and tossed them to me. “It’s in your best interest to come.”

“Is that a threat?”

I slipped them on and went to pee. Bouncer-man just stood square-legged and watched as I walked to the bathroom. I leaned against the wall for a moment and let my heart calm down.

“Fuck, Kell . . .”

I shut the window across from the toilet. I expect she was in there when she heard them at the door and bailed. I figured the best thing I could do for her was to lure them away as quickly as possible. I peed and put my hair back and skipped my face and teeth. When I stepped out, my chaperons were waiting by the door, both of them. I swiped my aviators off the table by the door where she’d left them.

“Don’t you need that?” Bouncer-man nodded to the front corner of the room, near the door.

Kell’s purse.

“Duh.” I pretended like I meant to fix my hair one more time in the mirror before poking the sunglasses into it and slinging the purse over my shoulder. It was heavy.

Damn, girl.

Bouncer-man and his friend took me uptown via high-tech limo. They sat up front. There was a large touchscreen panel in the back that controlled the temperature and the music and the wifi and the privacy window and everything. Four of the seats had their own foldout screen, like on an airplane. I spent the whole ride rolling the windows up and down and streaming parts of various TV shows I’d never seen, one on each screen.

We stopped in a private parking spot in front an old stone block mansion, more tall than wide and wedged carefully between two old school brick condo towers. The mansion’s first three levels were obviously part of the original structure. The block stone had dark runoff stains at the edges of the gutters and frames that spoke to old age. A huge bay window jutted from the second and third floors, suggesting there was a single tall space behind, like a ballroom or long dining hall. The top floor was a later addition, although the architect had done a good job of blending the styles. The front of it was all windows, but they were tinted and impenetrable.

Bouncer-man and I went right in while the other guy did something with the car.

I stopped in the middle of the foyer. “Never been in a house with its own elevator.”

“Mr. Raimi is waiting,” he said, urging me to the grand staircase that curved around both sides of the elevator shaft.

I followed him up. The steps were shallow and wide and covered in soft carpet, like something out of a really nice hotel. The two sides of the staircase wound like DNA strands around the elevator, whose door alternated direction. On the second floor, it opened toward the front, but since that’s where the stairs met on the third floor, there it opened at the back. It was so cool, a really nice design.

The fancy stairs stopped at the third floor and I was led down a hall to the steps to the fourth floor addition. I stopped halfway. The first door on the left of a long carpeted hall was cracked open, as if someone had just been inside, and I caught sight of a canopy bed, unmade, and a mess of clothes and crap.

I walked to it and pushed the door wider.

Had to be Kell’s room. She had her own bathroom with a separate tub and a glass-walled shower with built-in tile seat and TWO shower heads, one on each side. The tub had jets, of course, and sat next to a window with a view of a courtyard below, like a little garden.

Bouncer-man reached past me and shut the door. Then he took my arm, gently but insistently, and led me back to the stairs. He made me go first this time, and as I climbed to the top, I wondered what it was like to live in that house every day. The butler guy was also a pretty good chef, from what I understood, and she could just call down and say “Make me some sandwiches!” and he’d bring up a platter with a selection: one open-faced with seared Ahi tuna, one with imported Black Forest ham and aioli on lightly toasted brioche, and one PB&J.

Okay, I made that up, but that’s what it seemed like.

The top level definitely had a mid-century, Frank-Lloyd-Wright-y feel. The stairs were a single set of simple planks that jutted from the wall with open air between. The railing was solid glass. There was a waterfall in a nook at the top, near where the elevator exited, and a library-office straight ahead, which is where I was directed.

I stepped into the room, which was empty.

“Wait here,” bouncer-man said.

The formal desk was on the right side of the room so that the occupant had a clear view of the windows, the door, and the boardroom table at the other end. Interestingly, the desk was missing a chair. Over it hung a five-foot portrait of Lyman Raimi standing before a wall of chiseled rock. In the middle of the space was a fancy couch and matching armchairs. Everything smelled like new carpet.

The view out the windows was killer but not nearly as interesting as the individually framed book pages that lined the oak-paneled walls of the room. They were all from very old manuscripts. I browsed as I waited, moving around the occasional furniture.

I was studying a very large page, almost like a poster, when Lyman rolled in. He was a very large man, which I’d been told, but he was confined to a wheelchair, which I had not, which made me wonder if that as a recent development. He wore a loose padded house vest over a collared shirt. There were leather slippers on his feet.

I beat him to the punch. “I told your guys like twenty times on the way over that I don’t know where she is, so if that’s why I’m here, it’s a gigantic waste of everyone’s time.”

“How do you like it?” He was just a smidge out of breath. He nodded to the page in front of me.

Most of it was handwritten text. The scratch was so old that the once-black ink had faded to pale brown. Some of the letters were all but invisible, to the naked eye anyway. I knew from school that you could resurrect stuff like that with infrared imaging, and that they often found older texts underneath the visible ones. Parchment and vellum were very expensive back in the day, so books deemed useless — or dangerous — were sometimes erased, by soaking in lye or something like that, so the pages could be reused for more “uplifting” works, like a treatise on the Gospels.

“It’s from the eleventh century,” he explained with a little bluster. “Nearly a thousand years old.”

“Is that when the eleventh century was?” I asked sarcastically. “Huh. I didn’t know that.”

Most of the framed pages were walls of indecipherable text with little hand drawn diagrams, but the sheet in front of me was a full-page illustration. A naked man, crudely drawn and out of proportion, stood under a gallows. The rope that had held him had snapped and part of it dangled from the wood. He held a flaming staff and there were symbols all over his body that matched those in the circle on ground around him. Three long knives, each different than the other, poked up from the foreground.

He pointed to the symbols. “Remind you of anything?”

I squinted. The UV-protective glass preserved the document inside but made it a little difficult to see with the glare form the big windows behind me. “Sort of looks like a circuit diagram.”

There were zigzags and T-junctions, all of which ended in a small circle, just like you’d see on an electrician’s layout.

“People forget that modern science grew directly out of alchemy,” he explained. “Back in the day, there wasn’t a difference.” He motioned to the pair of chairs in front of the desk. “Please have a seat.”

I knew he wasn’t very old, in his mid 50s, but he looked older than I expected. Illness will do that I guess.

I stood in place. “This is kidnapping. You know that right?”

He tossed his phone to me with a smirk, as if urging me to call the police. I caught it, but I just as easily could’ve missed. It was the latest model. Very light. Very slim. And there was no case, as if to underscore that he was rich enough not to care.

I made a face and laid it on the desk as he slid some files from the top into a drawer. When it shut, I heard a slight rattle, as if from a bottle of pills. Or three.

“Please. Sit,” he repeated.

I could see his head better then. It looked like he’d had horrible hair replacement surgery. Everything else was cut short. He coughed once and cleared his throat.

I ignored the chairs by the desk and walked to the couch. It was soft and I sunk in comfortably. I put Kell’s purse on the seat next to me and my flower-print Keds on the coffee table and made myself at home.

“Fair enough.” He rolled over to me, grabbing his phone on the way. He had hands just a tad too small for his body. “How was your trip to Coney Island?”

“Good, actually. I had never actually been. It’s one of those things you always say you’re going to do but then never do. But now I did, so I’m glad.”

“By yourself?”

“I figured you were busy.”

He chuckle-snorted. “We haven’t met before. Have we?” He extended his hand.

“Not sure,” I said, ignoring it. “I’m sure I would’ve forgotten.”

“You’re the best friend.”

“So she tells me. But I have my doubts.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m here and not her.”

“I see.” He seemed to be enjoyed my casual insults. “You’re not an easy person to find.”

“Really? Seems like your guys did alright.”

“But you’re not where the government thinks you are, are you? Do you even have a lease agreement with the Arab or is it all under the table?”

“The Arab? His name is Abdul, thank you. And since you seem to know everything, you tell me.”

He took out his phone and read the screen. “Ce-Lei-Zi Song. Hong Kong native. Granddaughter of Wai-Ling Lau, a local restaurateur of some renown, it seems. Merit scholarship out of high school to the Bruxton School.” He glanced to me. “Impressive.”

I shrugged.

“Dropped out second year, shortly after being arrested for assault?” He looked to me again, this time in surprise. I think his idea was that I’m hardly big enough to assault anyone.

I shrugged again.

“Charges were dropped. Second arrest for vandalism a few weeks ago. Charges pending.” He put the phone back in his vest pocket. He was breathing just a little too hard. “Here on student visa, too. How does that work?”

The U.S. Immigration office hadn’t quite figured out that I’d quit. I might have encouraged that misunderstanding.

Lyman nodded to bouncer-man, who was standing silently off to one side, and the man slapped a stack of cash on the coffee table hard enough to shake it. It was brand new, by the looks of it. Even the little paper band around the middle was crisp. The label had a bank logo and said $10,000.

I sat up. I’d never seen that much money. I took it and flipped through the bills instinctively. They were stiff and had the pleasant feel of fine stationary. The smell of fresh cash hit my nostrils.

“Damn,” I said with a snort. “Now I know why rappers are always making it rain.” I sniffed again. And again. “Fuck. Someone should bottle this.”

“I believe they’ve tried.” He sat back. He was smirking. “You know, I was never cool like you and Kelly Ann, even when I was younger. Of course, I’m sure that’s very clear to you.”

I set the cash back on the table.

“I was always a sickly child. My mother didn’t let me go to a party until I was in college. I felt so awkward and left as soon as I could get a ride. I hated driving, you see. Always have.”

“Is that your excuse for kidnapping? You’re too rich to know better?”

“Let’s be clear,” he said, leaning forward on his knees, “I just want what’s best for Kelly Ann. Did she tell you what happened?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Haven’t seen her.”

He smiled again in that casually amused way and leaned back. “You don’t have to lie, Cerise. We’re on the same side. I promise.”

“I’m not lying,” I said as earnestly as I could. “Until your goons showed up, I thought she was still crashing on the princess bed downstairs. So what happened? You hit her or something?”

He stiffened a little then. “Ah,” he said, as if everything were suddenly clear. “The only reason I sent William” — he motioned to bouncer-man — “to fetch you was because this meeting is urgent. I’m going out of town again this afternoon and I was sure you and I would want the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“To help Kelly Ann.”

I reached for the cash and flipped through it again. It was so much denser than I expected. Like it could stop a bullet. “That what this is for? To buy my ‘help?’”

“No,” he said with a half-annoyed grin. “The money is for your trouble. And any expenses you might have.”

“Expenses?”

“You’re unemployed, aren’t you? Call that a gift. From a friend of mutual interest.”

“Mutual interest?” I made a face.

I tossed the money to the couch.

“Kelly Ann trusts you. I’m certain of it. You might be the only one, actually. She dislikes her parents intensely.”

“It’s a little more than dislike.”

“Yes, she told me what happened. It’s a deep shame. Still, now she has loyal friends like you, which is more than can be said of most. It’s why I’m certain she went to you. Or will,” he added.

“Kell can take care of herself.” I stood and lifted her purse.

“What about her ex-boyfriend? The one with all the rings. Surely you don’t have any loyalty to him.”

“What about him?”

“Any idea where we can find him?”

He thought Bastien would be Kell’s second stop. He was probably right.

“You got your way, rich boy. I came. I listened. Next time, I’m pressing charges.” I started for the stairs.

He stood. “How much do you want?”

I just shook my head and kept walking. Bouncer-man stepped forward like he was going to block me, but Lyman stopped him. “No. William, please. Cerise!” he yelled. “Please, you’re not using your imagination.”

I stopped. It was a helluva insult for a monied douche like him to say that to an artist. I tried to come up with an absolutely devastating reply. It took half a second too long.

“There must be something you want,” he said. “A large donation to charity perhaps? In your name. Save the environment or something. Or how about an endowment for young artists? Be creative.”

“Dude.” I laughed. “Maybe this is news to people like you but you can’t buy a friendship. Okay? It’s not even a question of money.” My mouth hung open as I searched for a better explanation.

“I’m not asking you to betray your friendship,” he said.

“Whatever’s going on between you and Kell is her business.” I started to leave again.

“How much?” he insisted.

It was the way he said it more than anything. It was so quick and so loud — like he was just throwing words at me and hadn’t actually listened to a single thing I’d said.

“A million dollars,” I joked without breaking stride. “In non-consecutive, unmarked bills.”

Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?

“Deal,” he called.

I went to flip him off from the door, if only for making a joke of it. But then I saw his face. He wasn’t joking. He was serious. Or at least seemed to be. He was rolling around to the couch, looking down at the carpet with a scowl as if contemplating how to pull it off.

“It would take a few days,” he said. “An instrument other than cash would make it considerably easier.” He leaned with a grunt and lifted the ten grand from the cushion. “The government is very particular about large cash withdrawals. But then, something tells me bonds aren’t an option.” He chuckled to himself.

Ass.

“I’ll need assurances from you,” he said flatly. “For that much money, I need to know you can deliver.”

I stepped back into the room. “You’re gonna give me a million dollars to tell you where Kell is.”

“No,” he corrected. “I’m giving you a million dollars to find the child she’s carrying in her womb before she does it irrevocable harm by drowning her self-inflicted sorrows in methamphetamine. Or whatever the kids are doing these days. I’m not proud of my behavior, Cerise, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what she’s like. My doctor tells me the first few weeks are vital.”

I was scowling in disbelief. “A million dollars,” I repeated, incredulous.

He nodded. “In nonconsecutive unmarked bills. That was the order, correct?” He handed me the ten grand from off the couch.

I took it absentmindedly.

“Does that mean we have a deal?”

I squinted at him. “Let me sleep on it.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of time. I’ll give you five hours to decide. I’ll have landed by then. William can give you the number. After that, you’ll have 48 hours to deliver.”

“Two days? Why? What happens then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’d rather not find out.” He nodded to bouncer-man, who stepped toward me as if to show me out. “Oh, and Cerise. Please keep me apprised of your progress.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Gerhard Human

[image error]

Random acts of chaos

I shuffled out of my bedroom, hair like an 80s rock star, and saw Kell sitting on the floor with an open Ked’s box — my Ked’s box — perusing all my sketches. The ones I’d bothered to save, anyway. Most go in the trash with the notebook whenever it’s full. I was well past the point of trying to save everything I did.

“Hey!” I stood there. “Invasion alarm.”

“Is this him?” She had the sketches laid around her in an odd arc, and she lifted one to show me.

It was Kai. His head anyway. He was looking just to the side of the viewer and smiling that crooked smile.

She turned it back and looked. “He’s got eyes like yours.”

“That’s how we met.” I stood over her, trying not to snatch the lot and cart it off to be buried under my bed. “Everybody freaks when they find out we have the same birthday.”

“You guys were born on the same day?”

I made bug eyes at her, like “See?”

She looked at the sketch again and set it down.

“He’s a few hours older than me.” I gave up on my dreams of privacy and sat down on the floor next to her so I could see what she saw. And preemptively grab anything too private.

She locked arms with me. “And this?” She held a sketch of the dearest old man I knew.

“My Uncle Wen.”

“The herbalist guy? Wow, he’s even got the Fu Manchu beard and everything.” She stopped herself. “Sorry. Was that racist?”

I scrunched my face. “Yeah kinda.”

“Is that smoke swirling around his head?”

I shrugged. “Could be. Or incense maybe. Or steam from a tea pot. His shop was always a feast of scents: old teak and dried flowers and pipe tobacco.”

“That’s so cool.” She grabbed another sketch from the arc on the floor. “This is your mom and dad, right?”

I nodded.

“They look so sweet.”

I took it. They were round and beaming. “They can be. When they’re not worrying about everything.”

“They’re parents,” she said, as if that both explained and excused it.

She flipped through the box and pulled out the exact sketch I didn’t want her to see — an oval face with bowl of dark, neatly parted hair and a flower-print collared shirt buttoned all the way to the top. His skin was smooth and brown and he wore an expression of casual engagement — not sad, but not quite all the way happy, like he was enjoying himself but was worried everything might turn bad at any moment. That’s how I always remembered him. Reynaldo Santos, from Colombia, our third Musketeer. The three of us were inseparable freshman year. Rey killed himself shortly before finals, second year. Kell had already dropped out by then, but it hit her hard — harder than me. He was like a little brother to her.

His death certificate said overdose, but we knew the truth.

Kell looked like she was legitimately going to cry. I tried to pull the thick page from her fingers, but she held on. It was a sheet from a ream of rough-edged traditional Japanese paper my mom had sent while I was still in school. I’d drawn him with colored charcoal. I think it captured how soft he was. He was such a mild mannered boy — so quiet you’d barely know he was there. Kell and I were the only ones he really opened up to. Just not enough, we found. In the time we knew him, Rey was on three different medications. None of them seemed to chase the demons away.

“That’s enough,” I said. I pulled harder and Kell let go. I gathered a few of the sketches and put them in the box. I slid the rest to the side with my marker set and toolbox full of paint.

Kell sniffed. “You’re so talented.” She stood and got a tissue.

I thought she might be crying but she sneezed in the bathroom, like really loud — so loud there was an echo.

“What was that?” I asked.

She was laughing from the doorway, wiping snot from her nose. She looked pregnant then. Not her belly of course. She just seemed full. Fertile. Abundant.

There was a folded paper I didn’t recognize among the sketches near my bare toes.

“Don’t,” she said as I reached for it.

“Excuse you.” I opened it.

It was some kind of over-complicated star chart with lines and arrows radiating out from the center of a set of concentric circles, like a radar screen. A column of text boxes at the side explained the significance of the various marks. The label at the top had Kell’s birthday and gender. It looked like something you’d get online. For money.

“I can’t believe you fall for this stuff.”

She walked out and snatched the paper. “It’s not astrology. It’s real.”

“It looks like astrology.”

“What-ever. You told me everyone goes to the temple all the time back home and drops money in a box and prays to the spirits of your dead grandparents or whatever and then picks random fortunes out of a big bin.”

“Yeah. They do. Just like how in winter, people here bring a dead evergreen into their house and decorate it with pretty baubles to entice the sun to come back. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what you’re supposed to do.”

She helped me to my feet. “What are we gonna do with this?” She nudged the giant clit with her foot, but it didn’t budge. “Damn, girl. That shit’s heavy.”

“Yeah, the frame is plumbing pipe. I needed something that would survive the fire, like a blackened skeleton.”

“Fire?”

“We were gonna douse it and burn it. A giant clitoral effigy.” I dropped on the couch.

She snorted. “Where? Please tell me on the front lawn of some douche church.”

“Ha. How about somewhere where it wouldn’t be considered a hate crime?”

She wiped her nose with the tissue again.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Am I terrible if I keep it?”

Whoa.

It was too early for existential questions. I’m sure I didn’t do a very good job of hiding my reaction.

“I’m not serious,” she said. “I just keep thinking about what it would be like. You know?” She leaned against the door frame. “Holding it in my arms. You could be godmother and the three of us could just go somewhere. Disappear. You could do art, like you were meant to, and I could be a mom and you both could help me be a better person.”

I got up and hugged her. “Stop it. You’re not a bad person.”

She nodded at the words I didn’t say — about the baby — and stepped away, wiping her nose.

“What would we do for money?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Why didn’t he come with you to New York?”

“Who?”

“Duh. Kai.” She sat on the floor with her back against the couch.

I joined her. “Um. Why are we talking about my ex?”

“Because all we ever do is talk about me and how I fuck everything up.”

I think she was still a little upset that I hadn’t opened up about him before.

“That’s not true.”

“Which part? That we’re always talking about me or that I fuck everything up?” She paused. “I’m sick of me,” she said softly. “Why won’t you say what happened? He cheat on you or something?”

I snorted. “No.” Kai would never.

“Then what?”

“Shit, we were just kids. We barely knew ourselves, let alone each other. After — you know — what happened, shit just got really weird. What was I supposed to do? Marry a 17-year-old boy? Raise a kid? Give up New York and school and everything?”

She stared at me for a moment. “I dunno. What do you think you were supposed to do?”

Kell’s preggo stomach came to the rescue. It growled audibly and she checked the time. “Shit.” She hopped up. “Come on,” she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s go out.”

“What? Right now?”

She grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet.

“We haven’t even showered!”

It wasn’t like her, at all, but I figures she was pregnant so what the fuck. I threw on some clothes and we went to the store. Kell held the door to the street open like she wanted me to go first. Then she led us right past the bodega down the street to the big chain superstore by the train station. It had been a long time since she and I had done something mundane together, like grocery shopping, and we joked around like we were back in school. I’m sure we annoyed the other shoppers — except the guys checking her out. She didn’t even seem to notice. We raided the candy aisle and the cheap plastic toys. Kell pulled about four feet of red vine from a big barrel and grabbed the world’s largest bag of cheesecorn. I reminded her that she didn’t even like cheesecorn, but she pointed to the bag where said it was the world’s largest and asked me how could we not get something like that.

I got a cart then and she stopped the wheel with her foot when we happened by the “family planning” section on our way to frozen foods. She grabbed a very large box of condoms, the largest they carried, and tossed it in with the rest.

I took it out. It was purple and heavy. The label said 100-count. I held it up. “Seriously?”

I was going to put it back but she grabbed it from my hands.

“When was the last time you got laid?” she asked.

An elderly woman and I made eye contact as she passed in the aisle.

“So, what, now you want me to make up for lost time?”

“Exactly.” She walked away with the box in her hands.

I pushed the cart forward like I was going to run into her out of anger and she hopped on the front and I pushed her — laughing — to the bakery.

“What about Darren?” I asked out of the blue as she was perusing the magazines.

She made a face and replaced the latest Vogue. “What about him?”

“He’s nice.”

“So are toaster ovens.”

She walked down the aisle and snagged one of each of the softcore porn mags, pulling them one at a time from behind the plastic tabs that hid their covers. We went to the register and she produced a very large wad of cash from her soft lavender purse. She paid the cashier without a word. I took the plastic bags and followed her out. She had put a plastic Optimus Prime mask in the cart and she wore it on the top of her hair like a WWI helmet. She bit the curl of licorice dangling from her lips.

“Are you really suggesting I go out with Darren Freebooty?”

That was her name for him. At those odd times she dropped her phone in the toilet, or came up just a little bit short on grocery money, she’d give Darren a call. Which, you know, that’s his choice, I guess. I just hope he got something out of it.

“Dude’s gotta be in love with you,” I argued.

“God knows why.”

I froze on the sidewalk. “Please stop. You’re preggers and hormonal.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“No. But maybe you should refrain from making any life-altering decisions for a few days.”

“If I do that, then I’ll just go back to how things have been. I won’t end up changing anything. You made your statement. It’s my turn.”

“Statement?” I asked innocently. “What statement?”

She smiled at me knowingly. “It was on the news, bitch. I know your art when I see it.”

I made a face. “Are you mad?” That I’d done it without her, I meant.

She shrugged. “It was really cool.”

We walked back toward my flat, but she took a wrong turn about halfway.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“You’ll see!”

I sighed loudly and shuffled after her, groceries in hand.

She stopped in front of a dour stone building opposite the next closest station. It had once been a church, and an old one at that, but now it was a bank. On the side, in place of stained glass, there were tall ads featuring tastefully dressed men and women smiling earnestly over a company logo: two letters, TW, joined in a distinct script — some dead white dude’s initials, I figured. The corporation’s marketing team had reduced to a pair of valueless capitals with the word National at the end, which gave the whole thing a vaguely patriotic feel.

“I’m going to open a bank account,” she said resolutely.

“You have one.”

“That was my parents’.”

“Wow. This is a big deal, then. Your own account.” I reached for her arm. “Do you need me to come with?”

“Shut up.” She pulled away. “It is a big deal! Feels like surrender.”

“Oh, whatever. It’s just a checking account. How do you not already have one?”

“How do you not carry a purse?”

I scowled at hers. “Those two things are not even remotely the same.”

“This is the gateway,” she said, looking at the spire over the door. “This is how it starts. Right here.”

“Retail banking?”

She nodded. “You do it for awhile and it doesn’t seem so bad, right? Shit, maybe it even starts to feel good. So you do little more every time. Then you figure what the heck, you’ll go ahead and finance that luxury SUV, for practical reasons, because you’re not a kid anymore and you can handle it. Next thing you know, you wake up strung out on the heavy shit. You’re balancing your portfolio in the mornings before work and complaining to your friends about the marginal tax rate.”

I stepped up the stairs and held out a hand. “Come on. We’ll do it together.”

“No,” she said and pulled me back down to the sidewalk. “I need to do it myself.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded without taking her eyes from the gray stone facade.

“Well, hurry up. I didn’t charge my phone last night.”

She nodded resolutely and started up the steps. “Wish me luck.”

“Kell?”

She stopped.

“Maybe you should take Optimus off your head first.”

She pulled the mask free and tossed it to me like a frisbee. It arced to the side and I had to chase after it before it hit the road.

“Just for that,” I called, “I’m eating some of your red vine.”

I put the mask on my head and sat on the steps with the groceries while she took care of business. I used the last of my phone’s battery on a Go Fish-style pattern matching game. Cheerful chimes announced I had passed another level.

As they faded, I heard a mass chirping of birds. It seemed there was a flock nearby. After a moment, the sound got unusually loud. And close. And I heard the flapping of wings. But not the tiny flaps of sparrows and starlings. These were heavier. And there were lots of them.

I mean, lots.

I passed my eyes over the three- and four-story buildings around me. I looked up and down the street. But I couldn’t see where the sound was coming from. It wasn’t until I turned completely around that I saw what had settled on the roof and spires of the church-turned-bank.

Crows. Tons of them. Smaller than ravens, somehow seemed less mischievous too. More menacing. Like winged hyenas.

Despite their number, they were almost silent. Most of the noise came from the smaller birds, who hung around the crows like giggling groupies, watching as the larger birds peered around, like they expected the cause of their gathering to reveal itself at any moment and provide them a carrion feast. A few of them hopped here or there for a better view or to escape a feverishly scratching neighbor. But mostly they just waited on the slant roof as the sparrows and starlings flitted between them and the handful of thin trees that lined the street.

People on both sides of the road had stopped to watch the strange gathering. I was about to get up for a better view when suddenly the crows started cawing over each other, as if called to cue by an invisible conductor.

Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw.

Their calls overlapped, like the chatter of an audience before a show, and drowned every other sound. It seemed to me like they were all telling each other the same thing, and that they were each surprised to hear it.

Caw! Caw? Caw. Caw.

Caw?

Caw! Caw! Caw!

Kell came through the front doors with some of the bank employees. They all stopped on the walk in front of the old stone church and stared up at the gathering on the roof while the sparrows and starlings flitted about. The smaller birds were low enough I could almost reach up and touch them. I had fears one of them would end up in my hair, and I shuddered.

Kell had a paper folder in her hand with the same a smiling couple on the front over the bank logo.

“Are you done?” I asked over the noise.

She nodded, head craned to the spires on either side of the roof.

Caw. Caw! Caw. Caw.

A white blob hit the sidewalk near my foot. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

She grabbed my hand and we started running and then skipping down the sidewalk together like little girls. The grocery bags bounced around and hit my leg. It felt silly. And fun. And we laughed.

We ate a late lunch in the park with a bunch of people in business suits. Then we hopped a train and headed south.

“Where are we going now?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

“I haven’t even had a shower yet,” I objected.

Turns out the condoms weren’t for me at all. We walked through the doors of the Sunrise Valley Active Senior Community, which was holding it’s annual Summer Social that night, and she left the open box in the common room. There was a box of brochures near the door with a little plastic sign that said “Please Take One.” She swiped it and set it by the open box. A pair of old ladies chatting in the corner by the window saw us and giggled. They were so cute.

The cheesecorn and porno wasn’t for us either. We found some homeless guys under a trellis and gave it to them. They thought we were punking them at first and wouldn’t take it. Then this guy named Delmar came out for the box and went right for the porn.

“Alright!”

He was a veteran. He showed us this wicked arc of a scar that cut a crescent moon into his abdomen and explained he’d had a length of his intestines removed. He said there were gremlins in the Lincoln Tunnel and trolls under the Brooklyn Bridge and things in Central Park that didn’t have a name and only came out at night and we needed to be careful.

Kell got a room at a cheap motor inn near Coney Island. It had a single queen bed and brown curtains and we showered and relaxed and hit the boardwalk just as it was getting dark. I tried to win this giant pink bunny but failed miserably.

I ate a funnel cake while she used the restroom.

On the one hand, it was so totally like her. All of it. Showing up out of the blue. The mysterious wad of cash. Random acts of chaos. On the other, there was a strange air of finality to it all, as if this were going to be her last party, so she was going to make the most of it. It wouldn’t be the biggest. It wouldn’t be the craziest. But it was the last, so it had to mean something.

We stayed up late that night. She honored her promise not to drink or smoke, although I could tell she was struggling with it. We sucked the cherries and syrup from the centers of five boxes of cordials and got a sugar high and jumped on the bed and I laughed more than I had in a long time and I remembered why everyone always wanted to hang out with her and why I was always so proud that, of all the people she knew, I was her best friend.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: This is kidnapping. You know that right?

cover image by Sarolta Ban

[image error]

Didn’t you just pee on that end?

She showed up out of the blue a few days later. My very best friend. I turned around the bodega on the corner and saw her sitting on the sidewalk under the yellow-orange street lamp, next to a couple opaque rubbish bags from the nail salon next door. There was something white sticking from her mouth, bigger than a cigarette. A thermometer maybe. And she was holding an ice pack over her eye. It was fresh, which meant Abdul had probably given it to her. I could see him as I approached, peering out between the painted letters of the shop window, making sure the crazy white girl with the black eye was okay sitting alone on the street.

He raised a hand when he saw me coming.

“It’s all right,” I called through the glass. “I’ll take care of her.”

Abdul Suleiman was the 50-something owner of the Halal market under my flat, and my landlord. He had a sloping bald head with an arc of black stubble around the sides. I don’t want to stereotype anyone, but pretty much every time I saw him, he had a meat-stained frock hanging around his neck and a knife in his hand. I took that to mean he was pretty much working all the time.

Kell had her bangs pinned back and wore a colorful silk jersey jacket over a half-length Ninja Turtles T-shirt that showed off her flat stomach. Her sleeves were rolled, exposing the full-sleeve tattoos on her arms. She watched me approach, then stood.

“You’re wearing my jacket,” I said. I forgot I let her borrow it. Months ago, when the weather was cool even in the daytime.

She lowered the ice pack and I could see the shiner under her right eye. It didn’t look all that new.

“Do you have my sunglasses, too?” I hadn’t been able to find my favorite mirrored aviators. They were over-sized and made it seem like my eyes were huge. I loved them.

She pulled them from the jacket pocket and put them on. They reflected the yellow streetlight. I must have left them in the jacket.

I looked at the white plastic sticking from her mouth. It definitely wasn’t a thermometer. It was a pregnancy test.

I scoffed. “Didn’t you just pee on that end?”

She waggled it up and down with her tongue.

I swiped it and looked at the result.

Positive.

“He didn’t hit me,” she said. “Okay? I fucking freaked when I saw the result and hit my head on the toilet.”

She was still gorgeous, even with the bruise. Every time we got together, I was very aware of how not-gorgeous I was.

I got my keys and opened the heavy door between the market and the hair salon. She grabbed the plastic bags by their necks when she stood, and I realized they weren’t rubbish. They were her things. Not even all her things. Just some stuff she’d grabbed in a hurry.

She saw me looking and shrugged. “Got kicked out.”

I sighed.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” she said softly. “Okay? Just say you haven’t heard from me or something. Promise?”

I pointed silently to the stairs and she walked up.

Abdul and his family lived above me, on the third floor. There were two studio units on the second. I had the one facing the alley in back. The other seemed to be in a constant state of renovation, which was fine with me. It meant I never ran into anyone. I think Abdul was holding it in the hopes that his 25-year-old son, Samir, would get married and move under his parents. I suspect they were in for a disappointment. On multiple fronts. Samir was a total player, and gay.

I watched my friend saunter up the stairs. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me. Sauntering. She had platinum blonde hair and looked sort of like a hipster Marilyn, with the same round hips but a narrower waist and ginormous eyes. And absolutely perfect skin, right down to the beauty mark over her full lips. And of course those boobs, which bulged casually out the side of everything she wore, like she just didn’t know what to do with them. She was the original femme fatale.

“It’s called a bra, bitch,” I said on the way up.

She raised a hand and flipped me off.

There was a strong light on the second-floor landing, and I grabbed her hand and turned it over. The ends of her nails were scuffed and the polish had been scraped off in a couple places near the tip. There was a thin brown hair — short, like a man’s — underneath one.

She pulled her hand away and scowled at me.

I could guess how it went. Kell told Lyman she was pregnant. He blamed her. Or something. They had a fight. Shouting and throwing things, knowing Kell. At some point, she took her claws to him. Probably got an ounce of flesh, too, before he hit back.

I stuck my key in the door. “I at least hope you got in a couple good ones.”

“You know it, bitch. That toilet didn’t see me coming.” She swung a mock punch.

“I thought you were gonna move out,” I said as we walked into my place.

“Please don’t lecture me, okay? Can you just be my friend tonight? You can be my mom tomorrow.”

It was a testament to our friendship that I didn’t have to tell her what a disaster my flat was. Let alone make excuses.

She stopped in the door and looked at the two-meter tall, unfinished paper-mache clitoris, complete with dimple and subcutaneous wings. “Sweet. This the new one?”

“I dunno,” I said, frowning at it. “I thought so. But now I think it’s just kinda cliche.”

My flat had one open space that served as living room, dining room, and kitchen. It was heated by a radiator in the corner and cooled by a window-mounted AC that blocked one of the two windows at the back. Across from the front door was a narrow bedroom and closet-sized bathroom. I had an Ikea table, two chairs, a secondhand couch, and no TV. The carpet was littered with spray cans, boxes of markers, construction paper, stacks of newsprint, dirty dishes, clothes, and dozens of casually discarded shoes. And one giant clit.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know . . .” I sighed. “I don’t know anything anymore.” I took the bottle of Patron off the Ikea table and carried it to the kitchen nook, whose side wall was a kind of scrapbook of inspiration.

Kell dropped her plastic bags on the couch, tossed my silk jacket and sunglasses on top, and sat under the wall at the front. It was plastered in sketches and plans — some new, some old.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just, why am I doing all this if I’m not even brave enough to pull it off.” I removed the silverware drawer from its groove and reached into the gap underneath and took out a baggy. “Does it really count as art if I’m not taking any risks?”

She turned to the sketches on the wall behind her and ended up laying flat on the floor. “We’re a team, man.” She dug a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. “If I get arrested, I’m totally taking you down with me.”

“Yeah . . .” I took a bottle of sangria from the fridge and got a glass with ice. “Can I at least know what you’re doing for money these days? Or is that a mom question, too?”

She sat up with a grunt. Her loose, half-length shirt revealed the underside of her left breast. She inhaled the cig. “I’m hooking. Downtown.” She exhaled. “Outcall. Only the best. Make five grand a night.”

She looked up at the ceiling as she spoke, as if she were contemplating what that life would really be like.

“Cool,” I said. “Give me a loan?”

“Whatever. You’d make more than me, with that ass.”

“And no boobs? Please.” I walked over and handed her the drink. “One Dragon Ball Special.” Sangria, Red Bull, a shot of Patron, and an illegal pharmaceutical. On ice. I had an unlit joint between my fingers.

She snuffed her cigarette in a dry cereal bowl I’d left on the floor and took both. “You give alcohol to all the pregnant women you know?”

“Only the ones who smoke.”

She downed it in three gulps. “Yum. I forgot how good you are at that.” She shook the remnants of the drink in her hand. “How come you’re better than me at everything?” She lit the joint and dragged.

“Is that my invitation to the pity party?”

She thought in a visibly dramatic way, moving her head back and forth as she looked to the ceiling and put a finger to the corner of her lips. Then she nodded in the affirmative.

“Because I’m Asian,” I answered. She handed me the joint and I took it. I leaned against the wall and slid down it next to her. “And Asians are better at everything.” I took a hit.

She exhaled hers. “Jesus. That explains so much.”

I wrapped my arm under hers and rested my head on her shoulder. A long moment passed like that. She kicked the ice pack across the hardwood. It bounced off my purse and hit the big clit.

“Not what we thought, is it?” I asked rhetorically.

She knew what I meant. Life after art school. She took the joint from my hand. “I quit because of you.”

I sat up. “What?”

“I saw what you and Rey were doing and knew I could never be like that. So what was I going into all that debt for?”

I glared at her, but she wouldn’t return my gaze. “That’s stupid.” I yanked the joint back.

She exhaled and smiled. “It’s okay, though. I mean, it’s not your fault. I don’t blame you or anything. I used to think you were so cool.”

“Ha. Used to.”

“You know what I mean.”

“That’s funny seeing as how I was the one everyone tripped over in the rush to be friends with you.”

“To fuck me, you mean.” She fake-smiled. “Big difference.”

She put a hand to my cheek and I turned away. It makes me uncomfortable when people look at me closely. At my eyes. They don’t quite line up. My left is just a little crooked. Kell said that meant I could’ve been a runway model — because I had a beautiful imperfection. Never mind that I’m at least a foot and a half too short.

“You still haven’t told me about him,” she said.

“Who?” I feigned.

“Oh, whatever. I’ve only asked you like a hundred times.” She stood. “I don’t wanna talk here. Let’s go on the roof.”

I groaned and she grabbed my hand and pulled. We used to have so much fun sneaking up there. Back when we lived together. Before she moved out. To save our friendship. I couldn’t believe we used to live in that tiny place together. I looked at the rubbish bags on the couch. Apparently we were again.

I was excited.

I was terrified.

The great thing about having the flat facing the alley is that we could go out the window in the “kitchen” and step right onto the fire escape. From there, we could reach the roof without making hardly any noise. Abdul had told me repeatedly that I wasn’t allowed. But he never did anything. Other than get mad.

“It happened to me,” I blurted. I don’t even remember being conscious of thinking it. I just spoke and out it came. The truth.

Kell was sitting on the gravel with her back against the half-wall that surrounded the roof. There were metal braces bolted to it that held up the Halal market’s large yellow sign. Good for obstructing us from passersby. Man, we had so much fun up there.

She studied me, like she was trying to decide if I was telling the truth. “How come you never said?”

I shrugged.

I think that hurt her feelings.

Actually, I know it did.

“What did you do?”

“Went to the doctor. A traditional one. Not, like, a Western doctor. Kai’s uncle — ”

She sat up fast. “Is that his name? Kai?”

I nodded.

“Really?” She was like a kid with a new toy. “That’s so cool.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Kai. It just sounds cool.” She looked at my stomach. “So that was it? You popped a pill and . . . No more bun?”

“Ha! Hardly! Uncle Wen — he’s not really my uncle. That’s just what we called him. He was Kai’s sifu from when he was like six. But now he just does medicines and stuff. Like, a herbalist.”

“He gave you something?”

I nodded. I walked to the edge and peered over. The sidewalk below was dark, which meant the shop was closed and the lights were off.

“I was soooo sick. Shaking. Throwing up and stuff. Like, for days. And when it passed . . .” I looked down. “I thought I was gonna die.”

She looked out over the city for a minute before turning back to me. “Passed?”

“Yeah. What do you think happens?”

“I don’t know! I thought Nature had a way of just shuttin’ that whole thing down.”

I laughed. I pulled on the edge of the roof and leaned back. I lifted my feet on my heels and looked at the points of my toes.

“What are you gonna do?”

She rolled her head back and forth against the wall. There was an unlit cig between her fingers. She was fondling it.

“Are you gonna keep it?”

“I just need time,” she said under her breath.

“Kell — ”

“Just a couple days. Okay, mom?” She wasn’t looking at me. “A couple days.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “Just . . . no more alcohol? Okay? Party’s over. At least until you figure it out.” I waited for a response. “Please?”

She broke the cigarette in half and threw it over the side. “FUUUCK!” she screamed.

I watched her put her hands in her hair. Then I screamed too. “FUCK!”

She bent over and screamed louder. And longer. And hard and real. “FUUUUUUUUCK!” It ended with fists shaking and a guttural snarl through gritted teeth.

We looked at each other a moment, right as Abdul burst onto the roof. He flung open the door, knife in hand, ready to defend his home, his family, and his livelihood.

He relaxed when he saw who it was.

Kell fought back a giggle, like we were sixteen and causing trouble in class. But I was legit sorry and said as much. Abdul had moved to the States to escape a war in his homeland. I’m not sure he ever really did.

I pushed Kell down the stairs and we ate chocolate syrup. That’s all I had. I squeezed what was left into two glasses and handed her a spoon. Kell sat on the window sill with one leg in and one leg out and I was on the kitchen floor. We talked until sunrise.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: Random acts of chaos

cover image by Betsy Cola

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The alligator man

I sprayed bleach solution over everything — just to be safe — before wiping it all down and throwing it in the dumpster behind the fried chicken chain. I stashed the clothes in my bag. I’d have to dump them elsewhere. Not that I expected a manhunt or anything, but you can’t be too careful. I walked briskly into the night down a quiet street in Queens and didn’t notice anything strange at all until the light reflected by the sidewalk under my feet seemed suddenly to get a little dimmer. Fearing someone was behind — which would’ve meant they’d snuck up on me without so much as a breath or shuffle — I spun.

But the street was empty. A streetlight had failed further down. The road was silent and empty.

A few strides later, it happened again and I turned and saw a second lamp dim. Then almost immediately a third, closer still. It seemed as though some faraway control mechanism had rebooted — or perhaps the lights were going through a maintenance cycle and in a few moments, all would be reliably lit again.

I started walking again just as the fourth went dark behind me, and then the fifth over my head. I looked up just in time to see its orange coils fade and leave me in a cone of shadow. There was now a long gap in the lit street, as if someone had cut the light like a cake and removed a rectangular slice from the air. I got that prickly sensation then, like when you go into the basement by yourself. You know it isn’t rational, but you rush all the same. And I did. I started walking briskly. A couple times my stride turned to a brief trot. I made it up the stairs and through the sty and to the platform just in time to catch the next train, which was just as well because I was completely alone on the platform.

I was alone in the car as well. I couldn’t see anyone in the adjacent cars either, forward or back, which at that time of morning was more reassuring than eerie, and I took a seat and leaned my head back and shut my eyes — happy for once to be bathed in strong fluorescent light, free of eerie shadows and bright enough to keep me awake until my stop.

With my head back and eyes closed, I became vaguely aware that the ambient light around me had changed again.

I opened my eyes.

The second train car toward the rear was dark. It looked like all of them after that were as well. I couldn’t see any illumination except the passing lights of the tunnel.

Then the lights in the next car flickered and went dark.

I sat up.

The lights over my head stuttered and and made me blink just as a sharp-dressed black man stepped through the door, presumably to escape whatever malfunction had blinded the rear of the train. He was maybe 60 and very gaunt. He wore an expensive charcoal suit, and wore it well. It had gray pinstripes and looked tailored. His necktie was very narrow, almost completely straight, and it matched the color of the suit. He wore a brimmed hat with a satin sash and he walked with a fancy cane that tapped the floor with each step. His cuff links, belt, and shoes were all some kind of reptile hide — polished and shiny. He looked like a cross between a pimp and an undertaker.

“Miss,” he said to me, tipping his hat politely.

People don’t usually talk to each other on the train. But then, the two of us were the only ones within sight of each other. It almost seemed ruder for him not to acknowledge me, and I responded with a polite, tight-lipped smile.

He sat across from me, one seat down, and settled with a sigh like he’d been walking for hours. He took off his hat and set it on the seat next to him. He had hardly any hair left. What was left was gray-white.

He caught me looking at his boots.

“Alligator hide,” he said.

He had a mouthful of gold and yellow teeth, minus a couple that were missing. He pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped something off the toe of his boot.

“Under-appreciated, if you ask me. It’s tough. But flexible. And gets downright soft over time.”

He had a throaty voice, not so much like a smoker as much as a man who’d spent his entire life shouting — an auctioneer perhaps, or a lounge singer.

“It’s certainly distinctive,” I said.

He nodded to me. “Just so.”

The shaft of his cane was solid black and lustrous, but I couldn’t tell if it was painted wood or obsidian. He held it loosely by the neck and rocked it back and forth. The tip was polished silver. The knob on top was a grinning skull.

The train slowed and he looked like he was going to get off. Then he stopped. He looked at me.

“This your stop?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Just a few more,” I said with a polite smile.

He sat back. “Then I’ll ride witcha.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

The train stopped and the doors opened, but my companion stayed put.

“I’m old fashioned,” he said in that throaty voice. “I know it ain’t popular. I know these days old men like me are supposed to let young ladies like yourself take care of themselves.” He shook his head. “But that’s not how I was raised.”

The movement of his jaw when he spoke pulled his skin taut over his skull, like there wasn’t much of anything underneath, like his skin was just as much a part of his clothes as the pinstripes.

I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

The train started moving again and we sat in silence as it rocked back and forth over the tracks.

“Miss,” he said, leaning forward cautiously, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but are you okay?”

“Me?” I frowned. “I’m fine. Why?”

“You sure? You’re not in a spot of trouble maybe?”

My face turned sour.

“It’s just,” he said, motioning to my bag on the seat next to me, “I couldn’t help but notice a ski mask there when I sat down just now.”

I closed the top by turning the handles over each other.

“Now, I know it wasn’t polite to look. But here you are on the late, late, late train.” He chuckled. Then he motioned to my head. “With a little bit of perspiration on your brow, and I thought — ”

“I was out,” I said. “At a club. It was hot.”

He eyed my bag.

“It was a costume party.”

“Odd month for costumes.”

“Newest summer craze,” I said. “All the cool kids are doing it.” I looked around the empty car and wondered how rude it would be if I changed seats.

He smiled in understanding, sat back, and crossed his legs, which revealed more of his fancy boots. There were skulls and flowers in the stitching near the top. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your accent.” He twirled his cane in his right hand. “Very faint. If you was older, I’d say you’d been here awhile. But you young yet, which means you worked hard at it — putting the past behind you. How’d you do it? Wait. Lemme guess. Lots of American TV.”

“Deadly, but effective,” I joked. I turned my face toward the front of the train to signal the end of polite conversation.

“But just there under the surface.” He pointed the skull knob toward me and made wave shapes with it in the air. “There’s a little something else. Like how you say ‘rubbish.’”

I scowled again and thought back over the conversation. Had I said rubbish?

“Here they say ‘trash,’” he explained. “And it’s not ‘flat.’ It’s ‘apartment.’”

My brow stayed knit. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“My guess, you’re from Hong Kong.” he said. “What brings you to New York?”

Only he didn’t say that part in English. He said it in perfect Hong Kong Cantonese.

I mean, perfect.

I stared. Call me racist, but there’s just something terribly incongruous about a black man speaking Chinese like a native. He had no accent. None.

“School,” I answered. I glanced to the route map above the car doors and confirmed there were just two more stops.

We were quiet a few more moments as the train slowed and the next station was announced. I wondered if I should hop off.

He must have saw it on my face because he sat back and relaxed considerably. “Oh, don’t mind me. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

I watched the doors open.

I watched them close again.

The train started moving, and we rocked with it for another minute or so.

“It’s just really something,” he said softly. “After all these years.”

I didn’t look at him. It was way late and I’d been rushing on my feet for hours. I was tired and I just wanted to get home.

“You should know I ain’t never met the man, ’cept once in passing. Like this.” He moved the cane back and forth between us.

I got up and stood by the door. It didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt me. It seemed like he was just old and lonely. But I was ready to bolt just in case.

The old man brushed lint off his suit pants like he was annoyed. He replaced his hat on his head. He took out his handkerchief again and polished the silver skull at the top of his cane. Then he stood and faced me.

He seemed taller then, like the tip of his hat was brushing the ceiling. He brandished the cane. “But here he thinks he can come into my house . . . And take what’s mine.”

The conductor announced the next stop and I felt the train slowing. I gripped the bar by the door with two hands. The lights in the car flickered. The ones in the rear cars all returned and suddenly everything was a little brighter. Then it was too bright.

“You tell him,” he said to me. “You tell him when you see him that I’m ready. And don’t you think for one damned second that that thing” — he jabbed the tip of his cane at me suddenly, at my side — “will protect you.”

I flinched, but it was unnecessary. The rounded silver tip stopped dead at my skin as if striking the walls of the train. I thought — but couldn’t be sure — that I even heard the clink of metal.

I was freaking as the train squeaked to a stop. I was practically bouncing up and down for the doors to open. When they finally did, I made right for the stairs. I only glanced back once.

The old man had removed his hat with one hand. He swung it wide and bowed to me formally.

“See you real soon,” he called.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: Didn’t you just pee on that end?

cover image by Matthew Griffin

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