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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