Andromeda Klein (28 page)

Perhaps the message of the missing card was that the World was the correct path, or perhaps it was to suggest alternate routes instead, Judgement and the Sun through Hod, or the Moon and the Star through Netzach. At any rate, having an incomplete deck made Andromeda feel a little incomplete herself.

She had done a terrific, precise, even artful job of drawing her Tree of Life glyph, but no amount of staring at it would cause it to come alive and spin into the flashing jewel. Her desire to glimpse it again was something like lust, something she felt with her entire body.

She was about to give up and put the diagram away when the city recycling truck pulled up and idled in front of Casa Klein, and in the midst of the sputtering rumble of its engine and the shouts of the men, Andromeda detected Huggy’s voice.

Have you ever noticed
, It said,
how much better you were in her presence?

“Daisy, you mean,” said Andromeda after thinking a moment.

No, Eleanor Roosevelt
, said Huggy.
Yes, of course I mean the one you call Twice Holy, you ninny. She was a gifted natural medium. Spirits loved her. You, on the other hand: not so much. Some spirits, however, are notorious for their lack of attention to detail. SALLOS once mistook Monsieur for Solomon the Great just because he was gnawing on Henry Cornelius’s wand
.

Monsieur was Agrippa’s big black dog. Andromeda laughed, because it sounded like it was supposed to be funny. But it was true enough. Traditional magicians sometimes dressed like Solomon, wearing lion-skin belts in hopes of fooling the spiritual creatures into believing they were actually Solomon.

“You’re saying I should wear Daisy’s, er, cow-skin belt?”

I’m saying
, said Huggy,
that any anchoress can portray the Popess. With the proper hat
.

Andromeda reached up to her owl statue, retrieved Daisy’s wig, and put it on her head.

The sound of the recycling truck was fading as it headed down the road, and Huggy’s
Bingo
was a little hard to catch.

“You know,” said Andromeda, “it would save a lot of time if you guys could just, like, say: ‘Hey, Andromeda, wear Daisy’s wig more.’”

Thanks for the tip
, said Huggy dryly.
I’ll be as plain as I can. You have in your possession a whole bag of equipment-

But the truck was gone and so was Huggy.

Just to see what would happen, Andromeda gathered all the Daisy materials—the ones from the original Daisy bag, along with the items added to it from Den’s subsequent excavations. She put on everything that could be worn in addition to the wig: belt, knitted gauntlets, China flats, vinyl coat. As before, she put the strange goggles on top of her be-wigged head, and wrapped the cord around it like a headband. She put the Little One in the coat pocket with just its head peeping out. What else? She hesitated at the bottle of antidepressants, but then abruptly popped one in her mouth: one probably wouldn’t do much harm, and they had made Daisy’s dreams more vivid. She spread the rest of the stuff out, the books, the papers, the headless Barbie and the Barbies with heads, the crystal ball, Jenny the horse. The weird little music-player thing …

All of a sudden she knew what to do with that. The cord from the goggles fit perfectly in one of its jacks, and with the metallic locking sound it made she thought she could just hear another
Bingo
from Huggy. She had to get her headphones and plug them in too as the ones that had been attached and wrapped around the unit originally were broken. Then she put the goggles and headphones on and pressed Play, changing no other settings.

It was not music in her ears but pulses and toneless, gentle white noise. Lights pulsed in front of her eyes as well, but soon she felt floaty and detached and distant from her senses. She had slipped into another world. Huggy’s voice was crystal clear in the tones in her ears, though all It said was:
Bingo
. Then Andromeda saw the Universe jewel, spinning and turning endlessly inside out, even more vivid and beautiful than before. She couldn’t see the King of Sacramento but she felt him there with her somehow, and at one moment she had the distinct impression of his hands on her shoulders.

The unit’s batteries ran down soon enough and Andromeda slipped back into the mundane. She felt wonderful. So that was Daisy’s secret. She was going to have to get more batteries for that thing.

Dave had emerged from the closet and was sitting on top of Byron’s
Simonomicon
purring. So much for Simon, thought Andromeda. Even less powerful than a vacuum cleaner, in the end.

“Or maybe it’s just not turned on?” she said to Dave, who returned her stare coldly. There was still something faintly weedgie about the book, but it was a bit of a relief that its
ouijanesse
could no longer be regarded as proven by objective animal experiment: there were many, more reputable tomes whose
ouijanesse
was far more legitimate and established. Dave seemed calm, serene, like a Buddha in compact form, like a big furry egg with a Batman head.

A text from UNAVAILABLE vibrated in. She was suddenly tingly and out of breath and nervous. Earlier that morning she had texted him a request for a photo.

It had been a daring request. St. Steve hated the very idea of her having photos of him, and she had dutifully deleted the few reluctant pictures he had sent her way back in the beginning of their—what was the word for what it was?
Relationship
sounded wrong, though accurate in the sense that any two objects had some sort of relationship to each other.
Association
, perhaps, was better.
Affair
sounded grown-up and rather marvelous, and
The St. Steve Affair
would have made a terrific title for a spy novel, but that overstated things. The shadowy picture she had secretly taken of him at the Old Folks Home with her old digital camera had melted down with the camera, and even in that one, he’d had his hand in front of his face. She had loved looking at that hand, however, and she could still see it vividly, if not clearly, in her mind.

She knew there was a good chance he would be mad, and was bracing for a blow. So she held her breath and made a wincing teeth-clenched face when she pressed Yes to view the message.

“You first,” it said.

She spent the next two hours trying to take a sexy-enough phone picture to send him that she didn’t look too dumb in. It sure wasn’t easy. Finally, as the sun began to sink past her window and seep through the blinds, and turned the room slightly reddish, she was able to capture an image in which her skin looked less horrible than in real life, and to frame it so her hair wasn’t terribly involved. She would have loved to smile at him in the photo, but her smiles all looked stupid and dorky, so she pursed her lips in a kiss, and tried to make her eyes dreamy. It didn’t look too bad, unless she was kidding herself. In fact, it didn’t really look much like her at all, thank goddess.

She had imagined, but never dared, doing something like this before, and now she had done it. Instantly she felt like she shouldn’t have. But it was too late, and anyway, he had asked, something he had never, ever asked before. Perhaps it was the jewel that made it happen. Or maybe the St. Steve sigils were finally working; he was doing everything she had prayed for, even if he was still a continent away. Perhaps one of the sigils would eventually bring him back to Clearview.

It had been quite an effort, and Andromeda had had practically no real sleep the previous two nights owing to Huggy’s chatter. Imagining St. Steve receiving her picture and fantasizing about her—it felt wonderful despite her fear that maybe it wasn’t quite the right thing to do. Almost suddenly, she crashed into deep sleep.

xv.

Andromeda’s phone was vibrating in her hand, but it didn’t say “UNAVAILABLE.” It said “R & E.”

“First you say hello, then I say hello, and so on and so on,” said Rosalie when Andromeda pressed Answer but couldn’t manage to say anything. She was still in her photo position with her knees tucked under her and her arms outstretched and her face on the floor.

“What?” she finally managed to say.

“Get it together, Klein. Look, can you be ready in fifteen? I need to pick you up like right now. I’m afraid to turn the engine off now that I got it going.” Apparently she had managed to hot-wire the Volvo.

“What?” said Andromeda, still disoriented. “Where are we going?”

“To the
station
, An-dumb-eda. I will pause to let it sink in,” Rosalie said. But she didn’t pause. “Remember, we agreed ages ago, and I don’t have time to go over it again. Party at the station. Big surprise. Dress cute.”

“What?” said Andromeda, but Rosalie had already hung up.

Dave, still sitting on the
Simonomicon
, gave her a silent meow, as though he understood it all.

“Stop looking like a person, Dave,” she said. “This instant.”

Andromeda’s arms and legs were all pins and needles, as though they had really been bound with silk and rope. The room was dim, near dark. Eight-thirty. She had been asleep for four hours, and she was still half asleep now.

There was no way she could get ready in fifteen minutes. Her hair was hopeless, matted and flat on one side, curled and wispy on the other, like waving strands of seaweed. So, of course, she put on Daisy’s wig. Besides its Huggy-approved weedgie-ness, it was better than her real hair, and actually, if she held her head a certain way and unfocused her eyes a little, she looked okay as a blonde in the mirror. She was emboldened by the wig to try one of Daisy’s tight, sheer, long-sleeved shirts; it didn’t look as good on her as it had on Daisy, but St. Steve had seemed to like it and it wasn’t all that bad on her, really. Though of course, she hid it with her large black hooded sweatshirt zipped up all the way.

“Why am I even doing this?” she said to the Andromeda in the mirror, and the mirror Andromeda rolled her eyes.

The mom was still on the computer, communing with Wildman_B in the persona of Tigress_67. It would be the “real” Wildman_B rather than Rosalie impersonating him now, since Rosalie was not at the computer but in the car; though, who knew, there could have been other Wildman_B impersonators out there. Andromeda left a note on the kitchen table saying she was going to Rosalie’s and wouldn’t be home late. Tigress_67 had her earbuds in and couldn’t hear Andromeda as she crept out the door. The dad’s van was gone—so he had escaped into the night too. Good for him. Or maybe he was recording Choronzon, inadvertently summoning Cthulhu and dooming the world.

“Like I said, good for him,” she said, more for Huggy’s benefit than anything, though there was no answer. The world was annoying and if not already doomed, in desperate need of dooming.

“Twenty twelve,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”

The usual pickup spot (for St. Steve as well as Rosalie) was the corner of Cedar and Hacienda Terrace, half a block away from Casa Klein. Rosalie wasn’t there yet. The rain had cleared up, but it was windy, making Andromeda wish she’d thought to bring Daisy’s vinyl coat. She hugged herself inside her sweatshirt, her hood pulled tight and drawstrung around her face and wig, counting the minutes as they ticked by, each one making it ever more clear how unlikely it was that St. Steve would actually send a photo in response to hers.

“This is your idea of cute?” said Rosalie, cranking down her window. “Grim Reaper couture? Sorry I’m a few minutes late.”

“You’re fifty-three minutes late,” said Andromeda, sliding in, checking her phone again. “No, fifty-four.”

“Yeah, sorry, I had to make another pickup first.” Bethany Stone was in the back, leaning over. Her smile was a wonder of nature, like the aurora borealis or Yosemite. Despite the complaints about Andromeda’s outfit, Rosalie was wearing her usual getup of sneakers, pegged jeans, and leather jacket; it was the costume of the rock bands she and the rest of them were into, the boys and the girls alike. Somehow it looked feminine and pretty on Rosalie, though also rather theatrical, as though she were playing a juvenile delinquent in a high school play. Bethany looked dazzling in a retro dress with little ties on the sleeves. Andromeda was distinctly unsurprised to note that she had perfect upper arms.

Andromeda hadn’t recognized the car at first as it had backed slowly down the hill toward her. It wasn’t the Volvo. It was the old Impala that had been in the van Genuchten garage for years.

“I thought this car didn’t work,” said Andromeda.

“Oh, it works,” said Rosalie, rolling back down the hill. “To a certain extent.” Andromeda expected Rosalie to go into a three-point turn, but when she reached the corner she rolled to a stop, then continued backing through the intersection.

“Slight transmission problem,” said Rosalie in answer to Andromeda’s stare. “I managed to move the Volvo out of the way and back the Impala out of the garage, but it doesn’t seem to want to get out of reverse. The Gimpala! Poor little thing. It takes some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. Tell me if I’m going to hit anything,” she added to Bethany as she accelerated in reverse down Redwood Grove Boulevard, her neck craned and her arm across the seat back.

“You’re going to back up all the way there,” said Andromeda.

“The girl catches on fast. Great at math,” Rosalie said, to Bethany.

“On the freeway.”

“Yes, it’s not too far,” Rosalie responded, as though driving in reverse on the freeway were something people did all the time when their transmissions acted up. “We’ll be fine.”

Bethany was nodding. Funny, she had seemed so sane. Maybe people did do it all the time. Andromeda tried once more:

“You’re not worried about dying in a horrifying, bloody car crash? At all?”

“Dying in a horrifying, bloody car crash can suck my dick,” said Rosalie brightly. “I’m skidding. That’s it, Drama-rama. Fetal position, just like at home. It’ll be over in no time.”

Andromeda had lowered herself to the seat and curled up, trying to clear her mind of everything but St. Steve’s arms and Bethany’s fiery eyes so she would at least have something pleasant and worthwhile in her head when it was sliced off and incinerated in a storm of glass, steel, and fire. At least the explosion would be beautiful, and there was always a chance that her future self would be born with better hair and bones and skin and parents.

Rosalie only ran off the road a couple of times on the frontage road leading to the freeway on-ramp, and when she did she got right back on, hardly slowing down.

“Merging could be tricky,” she conceded as the car accelerated. Bethany’s method of warning Rosalie of impending collisions was to shriek loudly, which Rosalie acknowledged with an “Oh my God,” or an “Aye, aye, Captain,” depending, apparently, on the urgency of the situation.

Andromeda’s eyes were closed tightly, her fists mashed into them, her knees against her chest. But after a few jerky lurches and stops and starts, the ride became, unbelievably, rather smooth. Mortal terror and panic gave way to an odd sense of detachment, a numbness. So this is how it ends, she said to herself dispassionately. How very interesting. The numbness enveloped her. She could no longer feel the wheels on the road. It was like she was floating away. She saw flashing shapes against the dark purple of her closed lids, crying faces, coils of twisting light like tubes or tunnels, hollow tentacles with dark veins branching all through their interior. They were tunnels to somewhere, or they were structures of her brain that she was floating through, and she felt the sensation of the legs of dozens of tiny spiders swarming along them through the tunnels, through tubes in her eyes and brain.

She was close to wherever it was, as she had been during the Lacey cone-of-hate incident, which had looked rather similar; she felt that with the least effort she could slip right past the here and now, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. These gates presented themselves at such inconvenient times. Gods, we had better hope, she said to herself and whoever or whatever else was there, that riding backwards on the freeway in a car driven by a maniac is not what is required to open that gate. That would be some ceremony, very difficult to replicate, let alone survive.

What was the formula, the escape incantation?
Hekas hekas este bebeloi!

The car lurched to a stop, the flashing tubes and spiders evaporated, and she opened her eyes to Rosalie and Bethany staring down at her with alarm and something else that was perhaps on the border between slight disgust and amusement.

“You are one weird chick,” said Rosalie. “Come on, sit up. We’re there.” Both Bethany and Rosalie were rubbing her shoulders encouragingly, and she felt the life coming back into her numbed body.

“What did you just say?” asked Bethany, in a confused but not unkind voice. “Some kind of ‘Otchie-kotchie Liberace’ rhyme thing?” So Andromeda had said the banishing formula out loud.

“Nothing,” said Andromeda, still feeling like she was waking up. “No, nothing, really. Just the Cry of the Watcher Within …”

“Yes, Beth,” Rosalie said. “Get with it. It was merely the Cry of the Washing Machine. Don’t you know anything?”

Smooth
, said the Altiverse AK voice that might or might not have been Huggy. It’s getting confusing in there, Andromeda thought, referring to her head.
No kidding
, said whatever it was.

Rosalie had parked down the road from the station so they could get themselves together. For Rosalie, this meant a fairly elaborate routine of reapplying her makeup. Bethany was one of those girls who always looked wonderful with very little effort. That was like some superpower. Andromeda, for her part, didn’t see the point of any heroic efforts of beauty, especially for the sake of impressing these gas-station guys, who were not her project. This was Rosalie’s deal. They would not be interested in Andromeda, obviously, and, just as obviously, she did not want them to be. It was clear that Rosalie’s objective in bringing her and Bethany along was to give the other guys something to occupy themselves with while she focused on this Darren. Andromeda had played the role of nonthreatening distraction many times, for Rosalie and for Daisy as well, and it was too uninteresting even to waste much effort being irritated by it. Bethany Stone, on the other hand: now, there was some competition, whether or not Rosalie realized it.

As if sensing Andromeda’s train of thought, Rosalie said:

“They really want to meet you, I swear. I’ve told them all about you.” Then she added, “Oh, and you, too, Andromeda: you and your witchy ways.” Bethany’s attitude seemed to be benign, amused, self-confident indulgence. How great it must have been to be her.

They saw the wig when Andromeda took her hood off to look at herself in the sun-visor mirror, and after gasping and making a big deal out of confirming that it was Daisy’s old wig and shaking her head in a “what am I going to do with you?” way, Rosalie pronounced her verdict that it actually looked pretty good on Andromeda. “Way better than your own flat, mousy hair” was what she undoubtedly meant, but Bethany too was nodding.

“Wig circle,” she said, meaning “Wigs are cool.” “I don’t know if I’d want a used one, though.” She said it with a smile, though with perhaps a hint, Andromeda suspected, of being weirded out by the fact that it had belonged to a dead person.

Like the person who owned that vintage dress with the sleeve ties isn’t long dead
, said Huggy’s faint voice, bubbling up from under the sound of the traffic.
I promise you, she’s dead
. The question of how, precisely, Huggy could make that kind of promise was intriguing, but would have to wait for another time.

“Let me try something,” said Rosalie. What she wanted to try was to adjust Andromeda’s makeup. Andromeda felt like an idiot but let her do it, mainly because Bethany was egging her on and even put encouraging fingers on Andromeda’s palm, so it was almost like they were holding hands, almost, and she felt an ever-so-slight electric tingle from it. She even let Rosalie apply the thick, dark lipstick that never, ever worked on her.