Andromeda Klein (36 page)

She named the screamy woman Pamela. The A.E. figure was A.E., dressed in robes like the King of Sacramento, seated at a large draftsman’s table off to the side of the stage, with a compass and a straightedge, working out the mathematical calculations and the sigilish architecture of the pieces. There was a drummer named Reg, and it sounded like around seven or eight guitarists: their leader was Jeffy, and his minions had kitten heads and were named Red, Blue, Purple, etc., after the color of their instruments and eyes.

Yes
, said Huggy.
That is exactly correct
.

The other side of the tape was not nearly as good—it could well have been a different group with a different screamy lady singing. But it was a kind of synch anyway because one of the songs went “Six six six the number of the beast.” It was what she would call association
ouijanesse—
nothing on the tape itself was weedgie to any degree, but it referred to other weedgie things, and by that measure—by sheer volume, anyway—it was certainly among the most weedgie accidentally found things she’d ever happened on. Guillaume de Machaut could actually be legitimately frightening, especially in the quiet parts alone in the dark. The 666 song was fun but silly, though.

St. Steve’s response to her “wtf <3” text came in just as she was flashing the lights to warn the nonexistent patrons that closing time was fifteen minutes away. It ran: “jj8kk!” That wasn’t in the predictionary. Andromeda could imagine no possible meaning. What was he doing, just pressing keys at random to mock her?

Andromeda was already irritated with him, so she saw red and texted back: “you sir are an asshole,” the least friendly thing she had ever sent to him by far in their entire association; and she sent it before she realized that “jj8kk!” looked a lot like a password. He must have been entering a password by mistake. But for what? Voice mail? Her heart jolted with the possibilities of
that
before realizing that the voice mailbox probably had to be linked to a particular phone. (She knew that from the mom’s bitter disappointment upon learning she couldn’t just tap into Andromeda’s voice mail anytime she felt like it without having the physical phone. For once, she understood something of how the mom must feel.) How could she use it? She probably couldn’t at all, but of course she saved the message on her phone and also wrote it on her upper bicep as neatly as she could in case it seemed like a good idea to tantoon it someday.

She accepted a ride home from Weird Gordon so she could retrieve her robe and other materials and equipment. Sneaking in and out of the house without the mom noticing was by far the trickiest part of the entire operation. She attempted a simple, quick Egyptian invisibility charm and recited a hastily written stealth incantation; whether or not they worked, the mom was, luckily, nowhere to be seen. Dave saw Andromeda, but thankfully his meow was silent.

Waiting for Byron in the shadows near the library’s magnolia tree, she risked calling UNAVAILABLE and left a message saying she was sorry for the text and if he by chance hadn’t read it yet to please delete it without reading it; it had been a mistake. Like
that ever
worked on anyone. She would have been shocked had there been a response, and there was none.

Byron disappointed her slightly by showing up on time-she had been half hoping he wouldn’t show up, or would be late enough that she could pretend to have given up waiting. But any doubts she had about facing him after realizing what an idiot she had been about telling him about her box and St. Steve and Huggy fell away in the face of his friendly and businesslike bearing as he unloaded bag after bag full of the improbable items she had specified, and picked them all up, balancing the sword on top and shaking his head non chalantly when she offered to help. If he had been repulsed by anything she had told him, he gave no indication. Maybe he just didn’t care.

They couldn’t risk any lights till they got to the basement, and Andromeda had to feel her way to the alarm to enter the code by touch, then push Byron in the right direction toward the door to the storage-basement stairs.

Once safely down there, she lit a long, handheld church taper and by that light set up the seven “lamps”—that is, seven other candles of varying heights to represent each of the seven traditional planets. She used stacks of books from the discard bins to get the right height for each, and a compass to orient them correctly. Byron simply stared, fascinated.

She didn’t have a very good text of the Goetia. A.E. had trusted no one, and the paraphrases in his
Ceremonial Magic
were so heavily blinded and trapped as to be nearly worthless. But A.E. was all she had, and he would have to do. Andromeda knew she was pretty good at writing and conducting rituals on the fly, improvising when need be.

“Pretty much all that stuff is online,” said Byron. “Why don’t you just download it?”

“We’re not going to be downloading Goetic grimoires off the Internet,” said Andromeda impatiently. There was no telling what manner of Things might be summoned inadvertently by the decrepit IHOB printer if it were allowed to spray ink on pages in sigil shapes. Besides, a printout would just look wrong and would kill the weedgie mood. There was no substitute for a real book.

She had Byron stand on the end of a rope in the center of the room as she drew a series of concentric circles with a large stick of chalk tied to the other end, and then filled in the necessary names and seals, as Byron looked on, wide-eyed.

When everything was as ready as it was ever going to be, she told Byron to strip naked and put on his robe, deliberately averting her eyes from his spidery, rather surprisingly hairy body, but noting that, no, he did not in fact have a male tramp stamp. That was a relief; it would have been even worse than mandals.

She had told him to get a silk robe of some kind, and the best he had been able to come up with was one of his mother’s dressing gowns. He only hesitated a moment. She pinned it up where it was too big and tied it around the middle with some rope. The none-too-weedgie pastel floral pattern was still visible when it was turned inside out, but it was the best he had. “I’ll make you a real one soon,” she said. She put the goggles and headphones on him and tied them tightly to his head with ribbons. Then she undressed and slipped into her white ceremonial Tau robe and Daisy’s coat, gauntlets, shoes, and wig.

“Why do we have to wear the blond wigs?” he asked. He looked rather ridiculous.

The real answer, of course: they’re special hats to turn anchoresses into Popesses.

But to Byron, Andromeda put it this way: “We want the spirits to mistake us for Solomon the King.”

“Solomon the King wore a discount platinum wig from Walgreens?”

“Yes,” she said, “he sure did. So it is written.”

The ceremony began well enough. Because Byron was essentially blinded by the goggles, she tied his leg to the table they were using as an altar so he wouldn’t leave the circle in error. He was especially sensitive to the “perfumes,” and several times said he was feeling dizzy. He described the vivid color effects he saw, and they did sound rather spectacular. The goggles created a dark mirror much more reliably and efficiently than a wine bottle or crystal ever had in Andromeda’s experience, that was for sure.

AMY departed easily and with a kind of courtly flourish, upon merely being asked, with no physical manifestation other than a light breeze. GAAP proved to be a bit more difficult. The room grew icy, Andromeda’s skin crawled with invisible spiders, and the babbling metallic ripping sound was tearing her ears apart. Byron later said he felt sick to his stomach the entire time, and claimed to have actually lost consciousness at a couple of points. He reported seeing eyes and claws. Andromeda’s own vision became patchy as well. She was, as the King of Sacramento had predicted, extremely relieved to have had a nice big sword in hand. If she was unable to command and bind like Solomon, with threats and will, she was certainly able to outlast the spirit’s patience. In the end she had to resort to smacking the spirit’s sigil with the flat of the blade till the babbling and spiders began to subside.

AMY had flitted away cheerfully, GAAP had departed in disgust, but there was little doubt that they had both gone.

Finally, she unblinded Byron and taught him how to pentagram-banish the temple. And this banishment felt unusually wonderful.

“I feel bathed in inner light,” she said.

“So do I,” said Byron, clearly astonished. “And I don’t even know what that is!” Ah, he was kind of funny, this guy. “I can’t believe that ice-cold air thing really happens.” He was still shivering.

“It really does. Almost every time anyone is there. GAAP really froze me out. I can barely feel my feet.”

“Now what do we do?”

“Clean up and go home.”

“Aw.”

“That is the weirdest, scariest thing I have ever done in my life,” he said on the way to dropping her home. She searched his eyes to see if he was joking or exaggerating, or trying to humor her, but he looked sincere.

“Thank you,” she replied.

Byron looked a bit of a wreck, actually. Andromeda advised him to take a long bath when he got home and to drink a lot of water. And she warned him that he might feel a bit depressed for the next few days.

“I’m always depressed,” he said. Now, that was something new. She’d never have guessed that. “And I hate water.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “nobody hates water. But suit yourself. It’ll hurt.”

She bounded out of the car at the spot at the bottom of the hill, as she had done so many times before after seeing St. Steve. If Byron had wanted to kiss her or touch her or anything he gave no indication. He was already looking sad and distant.

“Trust me,” she said. “Water.”

Walking up the hill carrying a sword felt quite a bit better than walking up the hill not carrying a sword. And standing in the alcove being yelled at from the bedroom by the mom while carrying a sword felt absolutely, unbelievably great compared to standing in the alcove being yelled at by the mom from the bedroom with no sword. Even looking forlornly at a cell phone that displayed zero messages while holding a sword was a bit better than the same thing without one.

There really was nothing like a sword.