The Insides (12 page)

“We still have a problem,” Victor says, pointing at the portal, which still hangs in the center of the room. Maybe it’s just the extra adrenaline talking but it seems to have taken on a baleful aspect, like an accusing eye.

“You
forgot
,” Ollie says, pointing the cleaver at him accusingly.

“Forgot
what
?”

“You forgot the first fucking rule of this shit: don’t make something manifest if you don’t know how to banish it.”

“I
knew
how to banish it,” says Victor.

“You
thought
you knew,
maybe
,” Ollie yells. “But you were
wrong
.”

“Fine, you want me to say ‘I was wrong’? Will that
gratify
you?”

“A little bit!”

“OK,
fine
: I was wrong. But are you going to stand around
enjoying being right
or are you going to
help
me get this thing closed before it shits another snake into our kitchen?”

For the moment, she puts aside the fact that she’s supposed to be finished with doing magic, and instead she thinks:
banishing ritual
. She’s done banishing rituals hundreds of times; it’s one of the first things you learn when you’re learning magic. You gather your will, focus it, channel it towards the disruption of whatever craziness you summoned up. Normally it’s easy, like disturbing a reflection
by dragging your fingers through still water. But this one doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy. So when it’s not easy, you reach for something that can help, something that can amplify your willpower. Wands, holy symbols, objects with deep personal significance, whatever—

“Tools,” she says. Victor shows no signs of hearing her: he’s staring abjectly into the portal. She claps her hands together to break his trance and regain his attention. “Victor! Tools! Magical implements. What do you have?”

“Bells? Sacred bells?” he says, after a moment.

“Awesome. Get them.”

“What do
you
have?” he asks her.

She considers the question for a second, tries to remember where any of her old magic shit might be. After a grudging moment
—don’t do this
, says the part of her brain that’s afraid to look at the past—she realizes that she might have something that will work. She bolts out of the kitchen, nearly colliding with Victor in the doorway.

She skids down the hall, finally coming to a stop in front of the closet. She yanks out the lumpy sack that contains Victor’s old air mattress and chucks it out of the way, letting it thud onto the floor. Behind it lies a beat-up cardboard box, the final repository of the occult claptrap that she collected in what seems like some former life. Objects with significance. She pulls it toward her and blows coils of dust off the top of the box with one sharp huff.

“OK, here,” she says, bringing the box to Victor. He’s working hurriedly to untangle a string of tiny bells that he retrieved from somewhere. Behind him, the rift undulates
calmly. “There’s got to be something in here that will work,” she says.

“Open it up,” Victor says. She hesitates, then reluctantly plants the box on the thin strip of counter between the sink and the rangetop. She braces herself for just a second, and then she opens it, for the first time in years.

She sees a silver cup, a loop of prayer beads, a lump of wax. She sees an acrylic box that contains two human teeth: one of her own baby teeth and one tooth that fell out of her mother’s head in those final bad weeks.

She digs down a layer and comes upon a dirty zip-top bag that contains things that she kept because they connect her to Jesse. Just a few things that he handled. A red plastic kazoo from one of his birthday parties; arcade tokens, from the day she took him to Coney Island. She remembers him standing before a machine, oversize mallet in hand, pounding down cartoon totems as they popped up through holes; remembers thinking that he looked exactly like a tiny wrathful god.

Seeing all this stuff delivers a whomp, straight to her chest, just as she feared. She tries to ignore it, tries to remain focused on the problem at hand—the rift in her Goddamn kitchen—instead of the larger, more amorphous problem of how to reconcile herself to every fucking thing in her fucked-up past. She fumbles with the bag, gets it open, gets the kazoo in her hand, holds it aloft with something like a gesture of triumph.

“That?” Victor says.

“This,” Ollie says.

“Not exactly the first thing one thinks of when thinking of a magical instrument.”

“Trust me,” Ollie says.

“Why the fuck not,” Victor says, and he reaches out to take it. She almost hands it off but then she hesitates; something about the idea of Victor playing Jesse’s kazoo bothers her. If anybody is going to use it for a magical purpose it should be her.

“I got this,” she says.

She puts the kazoo between her lips and blows.

A forgotten force moves from her belly up to her head, out through her face. She projects herself out into the air and tangles with the impossible shape of the rift. Everything that’s happening is invisible and intangible but it reminds her of physical grappling. Wrestling; rough fucking. The application of force and the response to force. It reminds her of Ulysses and it reminds her of Donald. And—she has to admit—it feels good. Scary good.

She sucks breath and then buzzes on the kazoo again. It shrieks. The rift quivers. Victor starts jangling the string of bells finally but that doesn’t really matter; he’s not a factor in this ritual anymore, if he ever was. He’s like someone who’s been nudged out of a threesome: it’s all between her and the rift now.

She concentrates; she frowns. She can sense the many ways in which the rift is trying to fight her but she knows just as many ways to smack it back into behaving. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

And the moment that she knows that, with certainty,
it’s over. She’s won: the rift collapses down into a single delicate tendril of smoke. She steps forward and whiffs it away with her hand.

“Jesus fuck,” Victor says.

“How about we not do that again,” Ollie says, breathing hard.

“Yeah, OK,” Victor says.

“OK,” Ollie says. Except. Except there’s a part of her that’s still exhilarating from the experience, like a kid who just got off a roller coaster, and all that part wants is to do it again and do it again right now. That part of her is already calculating how it could be done better, how
next time
she could control the experience more effectively, maybe by using the right tool at the outset instead of bringing it in later—

She looks down at the kazoo, to see if it could serve this purpose, but then she sees that the ritual took something out of it. It’s been desaturated somehow, its red gone grayish. She bends it gently between her fingers to test its plasticity and it crumbles like an old rubber band.

Nothing comes without its cost, one of the oldest rules there is. But she can’t say it doesn’t hurt, to have one more piece of the past disappear like that.

She looks up, her exhilaration forgotten, and she considers holding Victor accountable for this loss, thinks about confronting him with the pieces of the kazoo, waving them in his face. It would feel good to have someone to blame, to be able to convert the sadness to anger. But, stung and sad, she can’t muster up the feeling that there would be any point. So she stands there, still, while Victor paces around the kitchen for a minute, looking jumpy as hell.

Finally he glances into the sink. “Ew,” he says. “What are we going to do with this?”

Oh yeah: that severed worm. “Do you think it’s wrong to just throw it in the garbage?” Ollie says, after thinking about it for a second.

“I don’t know. It feels wrong. Maybe. Yes.”

“You think it’s dangerous?” Ollie asks. “I mean—it’s, what, it’s an
interdimensional monster
. It seems like maybe that’s dangerous.”

“It’s dead,” Victor says.

“Right, but—for all we know it could be doing harm just by being here, as a thing that fundamentally doesn’t
belong
in this world? Like, is this thing doing damage to the
fabric of reality
by being here, in our kitchen?”

“No? Hopefully not?”

“I’m just saying,” Ollie says, “it seems wrong to just throw it in the garbage unless we’re sure.”

“I don’t know how we can be sure.”

“Maybe we can—keep an eye on it for a while.”

“What, just leave it there in the sink?”

“I don’t
know
, Victor, I’m just trying to—”

“Wait a second.”

Victor rummages around in the cabinet under the sink and finds a paper lunch-bag, flaps it open. With his other hand he gets the tongs and lifts the two pieces of worm, drops them in the bag one at a time. One corner grows a little sodden, from leakage. He rolls the bag closed and opens the freezer.

“Really?” Ollie says. “No.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I’m not saying I have a better idea. I’m just saying I don’t like the idea of there being a
dead thing
in our freezer.”

“Have you
looked
in our freezer lately?” Victor says. “ ’Cause it looks like fucking Pat LaFrieda’s Meat Purveyors in there.”

“A dead thing that isn’t food, I mean.”

Victor shrugs. “I owned a snake when I was a teenager,” he says. “Used to feed it mice. You know where you store dead mice?” He nods at the freezer.

“OK, fine,” Ollie says. She bites her lip uneasily as he packs it in there. “I just want to go on record as saying that there was almost certainly some better solution.”

“The only other thing I could think of was to cook it and eat it,” Victor says, wrinkling up his nose a little.

“Right,” Ollie says. “ ’Cause there’s no way that
that
could have been a total disaster.”

“Hey,” Victor says, “for all we know it could be delicious. Char-grill it, hit it with some unagi sauce, serve over rice? Yummy.”

“Enough,” Ollie says. She looks up at the kitchen clock. “Shouldn’t you be on your way out anyway? Aren’t you working tonight?”

Victor looks up at the clock, then checks it against his watch. “Fuck,” he says, finally. “Yep. I gotta go.”

They head up the hall together. In the doorway, Victor lingers for a moment. “You know,” he says, “you looked awesome back there. You were like
on fire
.”

“Well,” she says, after a moment, “thanks.”

“I never really understood,” he says, “why you stopped.”

“What do you mean?” she says, unsure as to whether
she really wants to have this conversation. “Why I stopped what?”

“All of it,” he says. “Magic. I don’t understand why you stopped doing magic. You’re really
good
at it. You could have been one of the greats.”

She thinks for a minute. And then finally, she says, “It’s stupid to want to be
one of the greats
at magic. Magic is supposed to just be a means to an end. A way of getting what you want. And when you get what you want, you should stop.”

“So that’s you, then?” Victor says, an edge of irritation in his voice. “The woman who got everything she wanted?”

“Sure,” she says, affecting a theatrical blitheness. “I have a good job and an affordable apartment and a roommate who is a tiny little bundle of naked ambitions, and who hardly ever violates space-time in order to pursue those ambitions”—she gives him a smile with some venom in it; he looks demurely away—“what more, in my wildest dreams, could I possibly want?”

But the thought crosses her mind, before she can stop it:
My kid. My Goddamn kid
.

“No, you’re right,” Victor says, looking her straight in the face. “I can’t think of a solitary thing.”

Once Victor’s gone she goes into the bathroom, washes her hands finally. From there she splashes hot water on her face, glares at her reflection. She’s too exhausted to brush her own teeth. It’s been a long day. She’s still wearing the clothes that she got sick in. She strips them off, drops them to the floor.

It’s only like eight o’clock; way too early to go to sleep, but she climbs into bed with her phone nevertheless. She flips glassily between a couple of different news stories but can’t coherently assemble them into anything that matters to her life in any way.

She keeps thinking about the Inside. What it would be like if you could get in there, what you could do. She’s still not exactly sure what it would mean, to have the power that that space promises, but she has a gut feeling that you could use it to get things, that you could use it to get anything you wanted.

If those things—those worms—whatever they are—didn’t kill you first
, she thinks.
They’re dangerous
.

But maybe, just maybe, says a little voice from deep within, they wouldn’t be as dangerous if you had the right tool. Something to give you more control over the experience. A tool. Something you could use to protect yourself. A weapon.

Something like a magic knife.

No
, the reasonable part of herself thinks, trying to stuff that thought back down before it can gain momentum. But her body is already acting independently, poking at her phone, checking to see whether Guychardson’s number is in there. She scrolls through her contacts and is a little surprised to find him. She taps his name and some options pop up.

Without really thinking about it, she starts a message to him: H
EY IT’S
O
LLIE
. Y
OU GOING TO INDUSTRY NIGHT AT
O
VID TOMORROW
? M
Y ROOMMATE
V
ICTOR AND
I
ARE GOING, MAYBE SEE YOU THERE?

And then she hits send. She stares at the screen as it
goes, frowning slightly, as though she’s not quite convinced that what she’s seeing happen is entirely real.

Well, OK
, she thinks, finally.
There’s that, then
. She falls asleep while waiting for a response. The phone cradled loosely in her open hand.

When Maja was eighteen years old, Eivind, her brother, had been found in a graveyard in the foothills near town, dragged into a shallow gravel ditch, unconscious, blunt force trauma about the head, skull fractured in two places. It was the worst violence her town had seen since the war.