Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (7 page)

“So, what, after high school you’re going to quit the Squad?” Matt huffs.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, about anything!” I say. “God, Matt, life doesn’t begin and end with the team, you know.”

Matt’s jaw drops open, as though my statement was the most scandalous thing he’s ever heard in his life. Thankfully, Sara cuts off whatever indignant rant he’s getting ready to spew out all over me.

“Carrie, is that your phone?”

I’m about to say no, it must be someone else’s, because I turned my phone off when I got to school and haven’t —

Oh no.

“What?”

“That is my phone.” I doubt anyone else has Bruce Springsteen’s
Rosalita (Come out Tonight)
for their default ringtone. “But I haven’t turned it back on.”

Missy’s eyes pop. “You don’t think...?”

I do think. The last time my phone turned itself on, Archimedes was testing out his influence over all things electronic and computerized — but it can’t be him, right? He’s still in Byrne Penitentiary, right? We filled out depositions for his court case and everything! Concorde wouldn’t make us do that if he weren’t going to trial, would he?

Sara, picking up on my skyrocketing anxiety, lays a hand on my shoulder. Human contact, it helps ground me.

Teeth clenched, I look at my phone to see who’s calling. “Who’s Astrid?”

“Who’s Astrid?” Stuart echoes.

“I don’t know anyone named Astrid.” I press the little green phone icon on the touchscreen. “Hello?”

“Hi, Carrie, this is Dr. Enigma.”

“Oh, hi!” I say. Whew! Hooray for unfounded panic. “Hi, Dr. Enigma, uh, what’s up?”

Matt and Stuart perk up at the mention of her name. Boys.

“I have some information on your playmate from Saturday,” Enigma says, “thought you might want to bring your team by to get the low-down. You busy?”

“No, we’re out of school for the day, so...”

“You know where That New Age Shop is in south Kingsport?”

“I don’t, no.”

“Forty-two Kingsport Road. My apartment is on the second floor, forty-two and a half. Take bus thirteen,” she says, and she hangs up.

“What did she want?” Missy asks.

“She wants to meet with us at her place.”

“Oh. Wait, how did she get your number? And how did she call you when your phone was off?”

And why did my phone bring her name up, when I know for a fact she’s not in my directory? And how the heck did she know which bus we should take?

No, not creepy at all.

SEVEN

I bring the others up to speed. The boys gloss over the weirdness, and jump right into making themselves presentable for Dr. Enigma. As they primp and preen, they speculate about what she’s into so they can adapt their personalities to match. It’d be cute if it weren’t so pathetic.

“I bet she hates stage magic,” Matt says.

“Why would she hate stage magic?” Stuart says.

“Because she can use real magic. People like Criss Angel and David Blaine, they’re, like, poseurs compared to her. It’d be like how Godsmack would feel watching a bad Godsmack tribute band.”

“Ahh, gotcha,” Stuart says, now that the theory has been placed in a familiar context.

South Kingsport has a heavier Old New England vibe than the center of town, with lots of old buildings that have been maintained and repaired, but never replaced or refurbished. Most of them look like they might have originally been houses or fancy seaside inns a century ago; the more modern structures are the oddballs in the line-up.

The bus drops us off at the head of Kingsport Road, near (isn’t this convenient?) a corner coffee shop that Matt says is owned by the same guy who owns the Coffee Experience. The Isle of Java (love the name) is number five on Kingsport Road, so we cross the street and start walking.

We find number forty-two a couple blocks down. The ground floor of this quaint brick building houses a New Age shop called, no kidding, That New Age Shop. I’m torn: is that clever or completely lame?

“You said Dr. Enigma was at forty-two and a half?” Matt says.

“Yeah,” I say, and I see what he’s getting at: there’s a small slab of brick wall where a door leading to the second floor should be. I’m about to suggest we look around back when a voice calls down to us. Enigma is leaning out a second floor window.

“Come on up. The door’s unlocked,” she says.

“What door?” I say. “There’s no door he—”

There’s a door here.

Dr. Enigma flashes a playful grin. No, not creepy
at all
.

I expect to walk into an apartment decorated with animal skulls and an iron maiden, but the décor is surprisingly, disappointingly mundane. It has a first apartment feel, complete with mismatching furniture and a lack of regular housekeeping. Matt’s face brightens when he spots a
Reservoir Dogs
movie poster hanging on one wall.

“Pardon the mess,” Enigma says. “Haven’t had much time or, frankly, inclination to clean.”

“We understand. You’re a busy super-hero,” I say, and she laughs at me.

“No, I am most definitely
not
a busy super-hero,” she says, her fingers making air quotes around
super-hero
.

“But you’re part of the Protectorate,” Missy says. “And you have a super-hero name.”

“I’m an
associate
member of the Protectorate,” she clarifies, tapping one of the fuzzy black ears on Missy’s cat ear headband for emphasis. “I advise them on cases involving anything supernatural, mystical, magical, or extradimensional, and on occasion, when they need some extra firepower, I lend a hand, but if I ever,
ever
put on a dopey costume — no offense — Mindforce is under orders to slap me. As for my name, it’s not my super-hero name, it’s my name.”

“Your real name is Astrid Enigma?” I say.

“Astrid Lilith Enigma,” she announces, “and I do in fact hold a doctorate, in parapsychology. But you guys can call me Astrid.”

“We can do that,” Matt says.

“Good. Can I get you anything before we get down to business? Soda? Juice? Coffee?”

How about a mop to clean up the drool pouring out of the boys’ mouths? Enigma —
Astrid
is wearing plaid flannel pajama pants, a tank top that exposes a matching pair of tribal-style tattoos snaking across her collarbones, and her hair is up in a messy knot, but she might as well be prancing about in a skimpy bikini, the way Matt and Stuart are acting.

“No, we’re good, thank you,” I say. “You said you had some information for us?”

“I do. I thought you’d want to know what you’re dealing with.”

“Yeah, absolutely, but, uh, isn’t the Protectorate handling this?”

“This is your case, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah, we’re all over this,” Matt says with a hair too much enthusiasm.

“Got some payback to dish out,” Stuart adds.

“Don’t be so gung-ho, hotshot,” Astrid says. “This isn’t your everyday, run-of-the-mill super-powered nutter.”

“Then what is she?” I say.

Astrid leads us over to a dining nook with a high pub-style table, where an iPad lays incongruously among a half-dozen books, each the size of the unabridged dictionary in the school library. “The woman you fought a couple days ago, I’ve encountered her before. More specifically, I’ve encountered the thing riding her.”

“The what doing what?”

“Stick with me, because this gets a little weird. The woman you called Stacy Hellfire is the latest meat suit for a particular imp I’ve run into quite a few times. It’s a sick little thing. Prefers women for hosts, and likes to give them cutesy names like Stacy Hellfire. The last time we crossed paths, it called itself Dina Diablo, and before that, Acheron Jane.

“I suppose you could think of it as a demonic mercenary. Most entities of that nature resent being summoned and bound into service, but this one, it loves the chance to cause trouble on our world. And it’s got a frustrating knack for escaping before I can snuff it.”

“Um, question?” Matt says, raising a hand. “You’re telling us we fought a woman who was possessed by a demon?”

“That’s the long and short of it.”

“A demon,” Matt repeats. “From Hell.”

“Hell’s real?” Missy squeaks.

“
The
Hell, where the souls of the damned experience eternal torment to pay for their earthly sins? No one knows if that actually exists, not even me,” Astrid says. “That remains one of the great mysteries of the universe. What I
can
tell you is that there are several alternate planes of reality that have been mistakenly identified as Hell; everything people think they know about
the
Hell is based on these other dimensions — many of which are home to creatures one could rightly call demons.”

“And this — what did you call it? — imp came from one of these not-really-Hell places?” I say.

Astrid picks up, of all things, the iPad, and pulls up an image of a bizarre creature. It’s humanoid, in that it has a head, arms, and legs, but it’s twisted and hideous. Two corkscrewing horns protrude from its head, and a stringy tail hangs off its backside. The image is in black and white, a hand-drawn illustration, but I imagine its skin to be the color of rotting meat.

“That, ladies and gents, is an imp. In Hell, quote-unquote, this is the lowest of the low,” Astrid says. “Imps are like cockroaches: numerous, stupid, filthy, and useless, except to demons higher on the food chain. However, even a weak demon is powerful by earthly standards, which is why some morality-impaired magic-users use them as servitors — disposable minions,” she says, predicting my next question, one of several whirling around in my head. Look, I’ve just been informed that I share the universe with parallel dimensions filled with monsters, so you’ll have to forgive me if my brain is not firing on all cylinders at the moment.

“If it’s a minion,” I finally say, “that means someone sent her —
it
— here for a reason.”

“And I have a good idea who and why,” Astrid says, her tone turning dark. “The who is a necromancer by the name of Black Betty. She’s powerful, skilled, and an expert at causing trouble.”

“Necromancer?” Matt says. “As in, she raises and controls the dead?”

“That’s the colloquial definition, but in my circles it refers to anyone who deals with heavy-duty dark magic. As a rule, necromancers are bad, bad news. They tend to be unstable.”

“Unstable. By which you mean —”

“Screaming insane, and Black Betty goes above and beyond the call of duty there, which is what makes her so dangerous. Normally, it’s damn near impossible to figure out what her game is.”

“Normally? You think you know what she’s up to this time?”

Astrid pokes at her iPad, pulling up a map of Massachusetts. It’s marked with four red dots, starting up near the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border. “Four libraries have been broken into over the past week or so: the one at Bradford College in Haverhill,” she says, pointing to the first dot, “the Ipswich Public Library, the Boston Historical Library, and the Mugar Library at Boston University.”

“That’s where my dad works,” Missy says. “Not in the library, he works in the genetics lab, but he told me someone broke into the library and trashed the place for no reason.”

“Oh, there was a reason, all right. You might ask, what is so special about these libraries?”

“Really awesome periodicals sections?” Matt says, eliciting a polite snicker from Astrid. A grin stretches across his face (and, I notice, a scowl of equal intensity appears on Sara’s).

“All of these libraries have, in their respective historical collections, items once belonging to one Mister Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”

Astrid says this with an air of gravity that is totally lost on me, but Matt and Stuart gawp in unison.

“
The
H.P. Lovecraft?” Stuart says.

“The H.P. Lovecraft.”

“Who?” I say, and Matt reacts — well, like he always does when I say I don’t know someone.

“Only the greatest horror fiction writer ever,” he says.

“Except writing fiction wasn’t his day job,” Astrid says. “Little-known fact: Lovecraft was himself a paranormal investigator. He amassed what was at the time the most extensive collection of arcane research in the world. After his death in 1937, his collection was dispersed to various academic and historical institutions throughout Rhode Island and Massachusetts.”

“You think Black Betty is looking for something that used to belong to Lovecraft?” I say.

Astrid taps her nose. “You got it. And not just any something.”

“If you say the Necronomicon, I swear I’m going to crap a brick in my pants,” Matt says.

Astrid smirks. “Then I won’t say it. This place is messy enough as it is.”

EIGHT

She’s teasing. Sort of.

Astrid thinks Black Betty might be looking for the book Lovecraft took as his inspiration for his (semi-) fictional Necronomicon: the
Libris Infernalis
— loosely, the Infernal Book, a collection of major-league dark magic.