Lost Angels Page 8

  Grant dropped a tiny Indian tetraskelion on a leather thong back into a display box between them. "But you oblige her."

  "She spends a coupla thou a year here, my friend. A veritable patron, in the old, renowned sense of the word."

  The thought occurred; burst out: "You don't have a customer named Mrs. Saks, do you?"

  His eyes narrowed. "You a PI? Hey, I got all the entrapment flubs I need this year, ace." The humor drained from his face, leaving it swarthy.

  "No, no" Grant said, trying to restore order. "Just a vagrant thought. I knew—"

  "Never heard of her:" he said, relaxing.

  "Oh." His attention returned to the package, the papers he had brought. "I was wondering if you could tell me about these."

  The clerk took the candle first, hefting it in his hand, not opening it. "Yeah, I said to myself when you came in, 'this guy ain't no practitioner’, you know what I mean? Now, I don't care one way or the other - I mean, we exist but to serve." He stepped back for gesturing room. "But it's been my experience, limited though it may be in this game, that, ahh - guys like you who wander into places like this, your newspaper reporters, your snoops and PIs, your tourists - usually wander out shaking their heads, like I'm the one who's crazy. Without purchasing anything. This ain't a library, John Henry. You planning on wasting my time, or you got a legit interest?" He placed the wrapped candle back onto the counter, pointedly, and waited with folded arms.

  "Legit enough to even allow for a consultation fee:" Grant said, without grinning.

  "You've just entered the realm of the occult:" the clerk said, smiling wide and toothy, looking like Rasputin in a beret. "I am Jade Wing, your humble guide." A stage bow.

  And the meter is now running, Grant thought, amused.

  "And this thing:" he said, unfurling the candle like a toilet-paper streamer from the windings of sack, "this guy is ... ahhuummm ... tallow candle. Made out of sheep fat. What'd you do, leave it sitting on your dashboard in the heat? Dumb." He flipped it in the air; caught it. It glistened with beads of oil prompted by the temperature.

  Grant remembered now: He had not shown Jennifer the candle. He'd left it in the car. Gradually the sweltering heat had molded one side of it to the juncture of seat and backrest; now the thick, greasy cylinder had a crude corner.

  "You're gonna ask me what's it for." Jade Wing said from behind a pointed finger. "Basic spellcasting ordnance. Like I said, sheep fat. You can't buy it at the Mayfair Supermarket with the chip dips and bargain liquor?'

  "Or cardamom:" Grant said.

  "Yeah, right! I mean, you may have noticed, but they don't make that many black candles. Gotta get 'em at an occult dimestore like this, or maybe mold 'em yourself." He stroked his goatee. "Presuming you have a fat sheep." He joggled his eyebrows and winked. "The M-16 of witchcraft. Use it for almost anything?'

  "You're beginning to sound less like a 'practitioner' yourself?'

  "Oh, hey - this is a pickup. I mean, don't kid yourself, I'm a knowledgeable employee. I did the groundwork. But this place isn't mine. I can tell you've never met Annabella. Miz Darkmoon. A very strange lady. Wears her hair in a huge Victorian bun; long dresses, like Morticia on The Addams Family. Too much eye makeup by half. Long fingernails. I mean"- he set his fluid, expressive face into neutral, as though posing for a sculptor - "do I look to you like some kinda warlock?" He shook his head at the density of the uninitiated. "Man, I look like Joe Suburban next to the regulars."

  "How about these?" Grant produced the three pages of white typing bond on which he had done pencil rubbings of the designs on the headboard of the brass bed. "Can you tell me what these symbols mean?"

  Jade stared, squinted, stared again, his eyebrows arching into a little peak of intrigue. "Hey wow?' he said. "What a mess." He fanned the three pages across the counter, and with a nod of permission from Grant, began to sketch the rubbings into bold, black lines with an indelible marker, making small sounds of recognition, yeah, yeah, and this goes like…

  "Bells ringing?"

  "Tiny ones, my man. I know some of these, but some I don't. Have to check the shelf; get some references. Just a sec, okay?" He was already moving.

  "Sure." Grant was perversely pleased to see that whatever books Jade needed were obscure enough to be slotted into the very topmost shelves. He dashed up the ladder like a lithe, rakishly dressed lizard.

  The bad part of the nightmare had followed the mirror replay of Montgomery Mantell's death.

  As if the moment his father's life had winked out was a cue, Grant's eyes snapped open to meet themselves, in the mirror. It was, not like surfacing from sleep; he awoke feeling more like he had just wrestled out from beneath a massive weight that had immobilized him and blotted out his consciousness by force, some dark fugue he now feared Dr. Byrd had pinpointed with hideous ease. He saw the reflection of his face -not the vampire demon, but his own normal face. He saw the reflection of the shining brass bed in which he lay. And he saw something else. The image of his father shaded to transparency; the candle smoke fogged the room. In the mirror, the bed was alive with writhing, naked bodies. Diaphanous hands fisted the bedpost knobs, sweat-sheens dulling the brass. Ghostflesh jerked together soundlessly, coupling in an abstract that rendered numbers and sexes indiscernible, a thrusting frenzy of bestial rut. Grant lost his breath. He was not in the reflection. And Jennifer was not in bed beside him.

  They've got her was his only panicked thought.

  His hands grabbed uselessly through the twisted rills of sheet. She was gone.

  He damned his brain for making his eyes accuse the mirror so readily. But she was not among the orgiasts. Was the triphammer pounding of his heart against his ribcage evidence that he was awake? Was this still the dream, the nightmare?

  Mockingly, the faces of the madly fucking troupe seemed familiar. If Grant's presence was real, they did not acknowledge it. The melding bodies boiled together, wrenched apart. The wisps of dead candle-smoke began to dissolve them.

  Grant focused his eyes painfully. They watered, as if from the stench of a putrefacting corpse. They saw.

  Beyond the bed, in the darkest corner of the room, the reflected blackness of his real room, behind him, he saw a blocky shape overseeing the tableau. Its ursine skull cut just short of the canted reflection of the ceiling. It watched with faceted diamond eyes, eyes that glinted hard blue-silver with the lust to turn the coital ritual into a carnage of feeding.

  It was black, unfathomable, definitely there.

  It shifted its attention from the group to the observer, the nonparticipant, the silent watcher beyond.

  The sound Grant made was primal, scoured clean of civilized distraction. His left hand swept the heavy coffee mug free of the night-stand and hooked it into the face of the mirror. Both disintegrated. A down-shower of steely glass splinters exploded toward him with an ear-grating, metallic din. The shattering noise swept him beneath an avalanche of sound; needlelike shrapnel sought him, and he shielded his eyes with a forearm and screamed, a long braying sound that chafed his throat and failed to exceed that of the deadly hailstorm of breaking glass.

  He uncovered his eyes at last.

  He saw himself, peeking out from behind his hands, panting hard now, still alone in bed. Jennifer was not reflected because she was not there at all.

  Naked, he scrambled from the bed, stealing yesterday's clothes from the bathroom, hurrying out and slamming the bedroom door. Max wasn't around, either. Quickly, too nervously, he grabbed cash, keys, and the pencil rubbings he had done of the brass headboard days previously, during the polishing stage. He fumbled them and they fanned. When he gathered them, he dropped his keyring. His movements began to betray his panic. He fled with a hard slam of the front door.

  He could not force himself to recheck the bedroom. He knew that if he had, he could have verified that the coffee mug was gone from the nightstand and nowhere to be found. And that the mirror might be intact, unbroken, still waiting.

  The b
eige business card on Darkmoon's bulletin board resolved into readability: MISS MIRIAM - Profundo conocedor de las Ciencias Ocultas y Consejero Espiritual de Fama Internationale.

  He was back again, confused.

  Spanish, stupid; it's a foreign language, remember?

  Fortunately, Jade Wing had not noted him. He was still mountaineering among the dust of Darkmoon's bookshelves.

  Safely locked into his Pinto, Grant had finally discovered Jenny's note - laid blatantly atop the pencil rubbings, totally overlooked in his, er, altered state of consciousness. Signed love. A surge of 100-proof idiocy wormed his cheesy grin to a rictus of embarrassment. She had probably kissed him goodbye for the day and he had probably grunted and rolled over.

  Her answering machine would do him no good; he'd turned up a Hamburger Hamlet and begun to drink coffee - to help his mind get linear again, and then until he could no longer sit still, unacting. Beds That Eat People; hadn't he caught that at a grindhouse somewhere a year or two back? Awake, in the real world, it was no longer the supernatural histrionics of sleazy horror films that unnerved him but the reasoned likelihood that he might face-first into his banana-creme pie, with no twinge or mental klaxon of warning - and then he would be alone, with the dream-state.

  The eyes had been like mean little chromium ball bearings, he thought - rather the way Max's eyes had glinted in the mirror, earlier, And he had definitely heard the sharp crack of the heavy porcelain mug introducing itself to the fragile glass.

  Looking at the note signed love made him feel more a renewed occupant of the real world. It was like a notarized letter of transit for hazardous terrain, folded now into quarters and stowed safely in his shirt pocket. He had reread it a hundred times. Jenny almost never left written evidence of her passage or feelings. It would take longer to discover whether she was a letter writer or not.

  "Still with us, ace?" Jade Wing was leaning toward him, elbows on the glass, head propped in hands.

  Again, Grant refolded the note and pocketed it. "I have some other questions - more general, I think, than -"

  Jade held up a hand. Stop sign. "If it's about the notice board, that stuff is Annabella's fault. I can't endorse individual covens. The competition knows automatically, and they toss revenge magic at you for favoritism." He balanced forward on the counter to peek at the Black Forest cuckoo clock mounted near the ram's head. "Hey, noon-and-a-half. Lunchtime!" He squatted, dropping out of sight, and Grant heard him rustling a paper sack around.

  "Do you have to leave?"

  "No sir" came Jade's voice. "Annabella's out sick with the shingles. Ran right around her waistline; made her walk funny, so she's home trying to magick it away. I'm marooned here till nine tonight. A lot of the regulars don't come in till dusk anyway. I mean, at this moment I got nothing better to do than help you, if you'll be patient. Undivided professional attention is rare to chance across, y'know?" He surfaced with a fistful of fudge cookies, building a little column with them on the countertop next to the books he'd selected, popping them into his mouth whole and dusting the crumbs on his chinos as he riffled through one text, marked a place, consulted another, munched. Grant wound up bringing him a Diet Pepsi from the 7-11 on the north side of Beverly Boulevard.

  "What are your other questions?" Jade shouted hollowly as Grant re-entered. "Maybe I can put all this into some kind of perspective if I can get a bigger picture."

  "You're supposed to be the expert," Grant said as Jade cracked his cold can and drank. "Tell me what all that has to do with, uh, fornicators."

  Jade tapped the rubbings. "The reason this looks so confusing is that it's a bunch of different symbols run together, as far as I can tell." He drew a pencil circle around one, to isolate it. "See? There you have a variation on the Greek cross, that thing you were looking at awhile ago." He pointed to the display box. "A swastika. A pagan fertility symbol, a solar emblem signifying the female principle in Nature." He circled another. "This little squiggle is a rune for the succubus - female sexual demon - and this one is for the incubus."

  "Male version of same?"

  "And this thing is called the satyrica signa the sign of the satyr. A little penis shape. And here's a set of 'Lilith bars’ a kind of perverted cross. Know your Bible?"

  "Lilith was supposedly Adam's first wife. Supposedly a succubus. But this thing over here is the Zracine Vile - signifying spirits that tease you when they're benign. When they get pissed off, they kill you. The hexagram enclosing the symbol is protective. And most of these symbols are in octets, groups of eight, enclosed by octagons. Eight is the number of regeneration and again, fertility. But over here are some perfectly mundane astrological signs - the barbed M for Scorpio; the 69 for Cancer. In astrology, the eighth house is the house of death." Jade shook his head, appearing honestly perplexed. "Are these from a gravestone, or a wailing wall somewhere I don't know about?"

  "They're from the headboard of a bed. The symbols are all along the frame, on all sides, and the foot-board"

  "Jesus. Carved out of wood?"

  "Solid brass?"

  "Are you serious?" He skipped it. "Bright yellow brass or dull gold brass?" He waggled his head. "You are serious?'

  "It's bright yellow."

  "Then it's brass with a low copper content. Called 'high brass.' Know anything about brass, ace?"

  "It's a bitch to polish."

  "Okay?" Jade was clearly eager to explain. "Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. High brass is about seventy percent copper or less. The more zinc, the tougher - that's called 'cartridge' brass; they make bullets out of it. Into that you put a very small percentage of lead, to improve machinability - high-wear clock parts are made of leaded brass - plus tin and nickel to increase resistance to corrosion and wear. Enough nickel lightens the color more. Are you with me so far?"

  "Copper, zinc, lead, tin, nickel" said Grant.

  "And iron. Mix 'em all together and you get brass. Each metal has protective significance in one form of sorcery or another. Is it a big bed? All one piece?"

  "Super kingsize. And completely covered with symbols like those." He felt on the brink again, ready to slam the brakes.

  "Looks like what you got is the biggest goddamn protective amulet in history." Jade wiped his lips. "If I was a righteous fornicator, like Aleister Crowley, I'd kill for that bed."

  "I'm thinking about selling it" Grant said, to bait him. "Maybe Crowley would be interested?"

  "If he was alive. He died in 1947. He was what is lightly referred to as a voluptuary He sort of stirred the occult together with Rosecrucianism, Eastern religions, a lot of coke, heroin, and sexual gluttony. He was an alloy. Believed that orgiasm allowed mystic communication with the forces of magic; that each orgasm he had took him closer to becoming one with the power, understanding and mastering it. He started his own church, even established an abbey in Sicily. His gospel was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’"

  "He'd put the bed on the altar?" Grant was almost lost.

  "The bed would be the altar for somebody like that," said Jade, flustered. "Don't you get it? With a bed like that, you could whistle up sexual demons, imps, incubi, succubi that could do things to you they've never even dreamed of down at the Leather Castle. And you wouldn't have to worry about them gobbling you up afterward. Or during. The protected circle inside the bed is like a pentagram. See, succubi, for example, are designed to seduce mortals, and usually wind up frightening them to death. Inside the arms of the bed you've got nothing to worry about; you can fornicate your little heart out, and the forces of darkness can't lay a glove on you."

  "What about sex with a normal person?"

  "Who can say? It'd make good sex into great sex, great sex into transcendant sex - do what thou wilt, literally."

  "Could it cause nightmares, sleeping sickness?" The morning's overdose of coffee was starting to pump acidic bile up his throat.

  "Not the bed. But if I was a bully, and couldn't punch you out because you were inside a fence,
I'd still try to lob rocks at you over the fence, you get what I mean?"

  "Wear me down... "Grant said, with no inflection.

  "If something - some entity or force - was pissed off at you but only capable of pestering you long-distance because you had protection ...?" He raised open hands; Quiet! Sabe? Half of Jade Wing's statements curled up at the end, sounding like questions even if they were not. Grant had known this peculiar pattern of speech since grade school.

  "So if I had protection, so?"

  "The bad guy might sock you with dizziness, fainting spells, or bad dreams. Sudden feelings of personal danger. Vertigo. Hair loss. Everything from fear to pimples. The Navajo Indians call it the ghost sickness. It feeds on the ego." He smoothed his stiff, gleaming mustaches between his fingertips.

  "I don't know any demons." But I might have inherited one or two.

  "You don't have to. They might know you, though. Easy." He pulled a thin volume from the bottom of the stack he'd brought and let it fall open to a page marked by a mauve ribbon - "here. You light the candle - it doesn't matter that it's been lit already - and recite this, over and over." He indicated a short paragraph. "Might help if you did it on the bed. Keep saying it for, I don't know, five minutes or so. It's simple. Fewer words than the Equal Rights Amendment. Just make sure the candle doesn't go out, or you have to start over."

  Grant felt like fainting. Evil spirits had nothing to do with the feeling that surged up inside of him as Jade rambled.

  "Mind you," he said. "Unless you get specific, a lot of this is conjecture. But you seem to be going pale at key moments; I'd wager that you've felt the pull of the old strings, supernaturally speaking, and recently, too. Stop me when I get outrageous." He restacked the books, the rubbings, and stuck his pencil and marker back into a cup shaped like a skull. "But of course, you don't really believe in any of this shit, do you?" Eyebrows up.