Andromeda Klein (37 page)

Magic with a partner kicked ass over solitary magic, that was for sure. Never had Andromeda felt more confident about a practical working, not even with Daisy, even though it had achieved nothing but to correct a previous idiotic error.

Her own post-ceremony bath had the dual purpose of cleansing and giving Huggy an opportunity to reappear and congratulate her through the medium of the running taps. It had been strangely silent during the ritual, and indeed throughout the whole night.

The voice of Huggy emerged from the rushing water soon enough, sounding rather cranky.

Honestly?
It said.
The new medium works right out of the box and has lots of potential. Good choice, maybe even better than the last one. But I can’t say I care much for your sloppy, postmodern conjuring
.

“The new medium. The new medium? Byron?”

Yes, the overeager hairy little man you have somehow managed to ensnare in your web of feminine wiles. You should try scrying the aethyrs with that one sometime. He’s a sponge. AMY was all over him like catnip. Some of the Shemhamphorashers were actually jealous
.

“What’s the matter with my conjuring?” It had been completely successful, and with such dramatic effects.

I hate to break it to you
, said Huggy,
but you’re not really up there to be everybody’s friend and dazzle everyone with your “creativity” and enthusiasm. Believe me, these guys have seen it all, and I guarantee you they’re not going to be impressed with a cutesy pseudo-Solomon act. Yes, the sword is very nice, but sword or no sword, GAAP could have easily torn you up and worn you as a glove. You’re lucky he’s so easily bored
.

Andromeda meekly pointed out that the “magic sponge” they were all so excited about had seemed pretty impressed with her technique.

He would have been impressed with a paper towel. You really wish to impress him, wear heels and a miniskirt. There just isn’t any other way to do Goetia than strict traditionalism
.

Huggy had more to say, but Andromeda switched off the tap and cut her off.

“Why does my Holy Guardian Angel have to be such a jerk?” she said to the wall, but she knew It had had a point, plus she was impressed with herself for figuring out how to switch It on and off.

She slept that night with the sword in one hand and Daisy’s Little One in the other. There was no encounter with the King of Sacramento, that she could recall, but she was granted, just as she was drifting into her box, another brief glimpse of the dazzling, undulating Tree of Life Universe-jewel. Each time she saw it, it was more beautiful than the last. She had no trouble whatever waking up the next morning: even sleeping was better when you were holding a sword, it turned out.

xix.

The dad was sitting in his van with the door open, talking to a couple of people, when Andromeda rounded the corner on her way back from school the following day. She realized, to her horror, when it was too late to turn around and escape, that they were two of the youngish rock-and-roll people she remembered from the Old Folks Home: Amanda and either Frederick or Sam. Why on earth? she thought as the dad was waving her over.

“This is my daughter, Andi,” he said as she approached, hood pulled as far down her face as it would go. “She’s a big fan. Big fan. Cupcake: meet Choronzon. Sam and Amanda. They’re here to pick up their rough mixes.”

Andromeda mumbled a hi, trying her best to avoid eye contact.

Amanda seemed, as usual, too out of it to notice much of anything, but Sam recognized her, she could tell that. He smiled coolly at her, and winked. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to rat on her about being underage and hanging out in bars with older men, she relaxed a bit.

“I like the Toad Bone Ritual song,” she said.

“Do you?” said Sam, nodding quietly as though he knew something she didn’t.

Creepy, creepy guy.

“I’m trying to save the books for use by my future self,” said Andromeda Klein to Byron the Precious Little Sponge. “But your future self can use them too, of course.”

They were in her room, discussing the Greek Magical Papyri and the IHOB Endangered Books Program. Andromeda was trying to paraphrase
Liber K’s
treatment of the papyri—it would be so much easier when she had finally written it down and could just hand it to someone anytime they needed to know something.

“So,” she said, “it was a library of magical texts buried in the Egyptian desert in ancient times by an unknown conjuror.”

“He buried a whole library all by himself?” said Byron. “What, with all the librarians inside?”

“No,” Andromeda said. “Not a library
building
. A library is a collection of books. A bunch
of libri
. I meant that he hid the papyrus scrolls, not an entire building with fluorescent lights and bathrooms. They were actually buried in clay pots, I think.”

“There you go again,” said Byron. “You and your
libers
. Do you want me to get out the kitten pin?” But Andromeda waved that away.

And that was, in fact, exactly how Andromeda Klein saw the IHOB’s collection of Eejymjays. Someone had built it up, and for whatever reason, Andromeda was now the only person in a position to preserve it. True magical training could take several lifetimes, and it was only prudent to lay the groundwork so the next self to come along wouldn’t have to start from scratch. She added that she wished she knew who had built up the impressive IHOB Eejymjay Collection, and why.

“You know,” said Byron, after pausing to look at her incredulously and getting out his notebook, “for such a hardcore librarian, you really do suck at knowing about looking things up on the Internets. I’ve been trying to tell you for the last twenty minutes, but you keep interrupting me. The library was donated to the city by a man named”—he checked his notes—“Ernest James Madison Jessup. The
EJMJE
in your catalog stands for the Ernest James Madison Jessup Estate, I would bet you any money. He was one of the people who established Clearview as a town in 1912. He wrote two books on aliens. One of his wives was a spiritualist and faith healer who went insane and was convicted of trying to murder him. People were so much more interesting in the olden days.” Eejymjay had, Byron said, lived and stored his private collection of esoteric materials in the building that was now the central churchlike structure of the IHOB, and had willed the library to the city on the condition that it be preserved intact and remain open to the public.

Preserved intact: that was the same phrase Darren Hedge had used to refer to this arrangement.

“So how,” said Andromeda, “can they be selling the books off, then, if it has to be ‘preserved intact’?”

“Maybe,” said Byron, “it’s like you were saying just now, about libraries not being buildings. Maybe they think it means the building has to be preserved and not necessarily the books.”

“Yeah, maybe they’re
pretending
to think that.” The “Friends” knew what they were doing, of that Andromeda had no doubt. It was tricky. Nefarious, even. “But that’s not fair. They can’t do it then, technically.”

“They’re doing it, though. And what are you gonna do?” said Byron. “Storm City Hall? Bust in on the city council session waving a charter and say ‘Stop the meeting’?” And then the judge will say ‘It’s highly irregular, miss, but you’ve got five minutes’?”

“Yes,” said Andromeda. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” But she remained in position slouched against the bed. She was not about to go busting in on anything. Saving books from the “Friends” by using their own rules and procedures against them was more her style. And at least they had managed to save some of the books that way.

“Anyhow,” said Byron, shrugging and turning back to his notes. Ernest J. M. Jessup had, he continued, died in 1977 at the age of ninety-eight, buried by an earthquake mudslide. “You can see the spot in Hillmont. It’s right next to the junior high. They built a Dairy Queen on it.”

Andromeda was feeling slightly dazed. It was true: she really should have been able to look this stuff up for herself. Why had it taken the Precious Sponge to connect those dots for her? In spite of herself, she began to feel a little irritated at him for showing off, like some kind of teacher’s pet.

Don’t forget
, said Huggy, bubbling up,
you’re the teacher in this scenario. Just sit back and enjoy it and let him do the work
. Andromeda sat back, but found herself failing to enjoy it quite as much as she was apparently supposed to.

“Plus,” Byron continued, “he was a Rotarian and a Thirty-second-Degree Mason and one of the founders of the Steiner Day School in Clearview Park.”

“I went there!” said Andromeda. “Oh my gods! We used to call it the Gnome School.”

Byron said he knew people who had gone there, too. “It’s a weird hippie school,” he said. “With, like, rainbows and rap sessions and crafts. But I guess the founder was a little bit weedgie. Maybe some of that hung around and rubbed off on you. Started you on your journey.” He air-quoted the word
journey
.

“Maybe,” said Andromeda, finding the idea a little appalling. She was still “processing” the information, as the mom would have put it. There was amazing symmetry in the fact that the same person had been ultimately responsible for both the Gnome School and the IHOB’s collection of 133s, each of which had had such a powerful impact on her life. Excitement about the symmetry was battling her customary distaste for all things Gnome School. But Andromeda had to admit, symmetry had a slight edge and would probably come out on top in the end.

“Anyhow,” said Byron, “this Jessup character was obviously one spooky, creepy guy.” He added that he suspected they hadn’t been the first people to perform ceremonial magic in that basement. Andromeda remembered the bookmark in the
Rituale Romanum
and felt a weedgie tingle between her shoulder blades.

“Okay,” concluded the Precious Sponge. “I’ve got one more. The guy they named the school after? He was a totally weedgie guy too. He was in with all those Crowley people and in secret societies and everything. Clearview was a really, really spooky place a hundred years ago, seems like. You were born too late.”

“Tell me about it,” said Andromeda Klein.

“So why did you call it the Gnome School?”

Andromeda described some of their gnome activities and got out the Little One from the Daisy bag to show him. “Ah,” said the Precious Sponge, as though it suddenly all made sense. “That’s your little voodoo doll from the library ritual.” The Daisy smell filled the room when she opened the bag. Byron noticed and wrinkled his nose, saying it smelled like old ladies.

“Crowley,” she said, ignoring this borderline-insulting observation, “had a different approach to storing up knowledge for his future self. He wrote hundreds of books, and made sure to publish each of them in limited rare, expensive editions, so that they would be valuable enough that at least someone would want to collect them and preserve them. Most of his books are in print now, but if they go out of print, some fancy collector will be sure to have saved at least one.”

“So,” said Byron, “if anyone starts buying up all those books all of a sudden, we’ll know who it is.”

“Actually, they say he’s already reincarnated as a girl in India.”

“Man, I hope I don’t come back as a girl.”

“It’s not really your choice,” said Andromeda. But secretly, she almost hoped she didn’t either. Being a girl took a lot out of a person, and she had never felt very good at it.

Byron knew a lot of things. He had recognized the ZOS chicken scratches on the rejuvenated cassette from the description even before she showed it to him, and he couldn’t believe she was unfamiliar with the music on it.

“What planet are you from?” he said, and he sang a bit of a song in a little screechy female voice that went “Hey hey mama” something something and asked: “Is it like that?”

“No,” said Andromeda. “It’s more like …” She asked in the same screechy voice if he had seen a bridge.

“It’s the wrong album,” he said, “but that, my little alien life-form, is Led Zeppelin.”

“No, no, it’s not a man, it’s a girl,” she said. “Pamela.”

“No, it’s a group, and the singer is a guy named Plant. And of all people, I would have thought you would know that. That was our first conversation. Jimmy Page, remember? Aleister
Crowley,”
he said, exaggerating the pronunciation.

“Oh, I thought you said Jamie,” she said, a little lamely. “Really, his name is Plant?” It seemed unlikely.

He hooked his iPod to her stereo and dialed it up. And there it was, filling her room, even better now that it was loud and out in the air. The snakey song. It was just too good.

“You know,” he said, when the next song came on, “a lot of people say this song is about Jamaica, but it’s really pronounced ‘dyer-maker.’” He turned it up even louder.

There was a sudden, insistent pounding on the door. They were sitting with their backs against it, because that was just what you did at Casa Klein, but both of them combined didn’t weigh enough to prevent the mom from pushing it open, sliding them across the floor. Byron stood up, blinking.

The mom stared back at them silently, looking them up and down, from one to the other and back again, several times over, with a mystified expression.

“Well,” she finally said, “all I can say is, if you get pregnant I’m not raising the baby.”

“Nice lady,” said Byron.

Explaining the mom to a civilian was just not possible, so Andromeda opted to say nothing at all in response.

Three texts from St. Steve came in all at once, at that moment, reading, respectively: “baby don’t be that way,” “jj8kk!” and “baby don’t be that way.” What the hell was his problem? She just stood there looking at her phone.

“Are you going to take your underwear off now?” said Byron.