Andromeda Klein (33 page)

“You’re a good kid, baby Klein,” he said on his way out the door. “Hey, what did your friend think of that Choronzon?” He’d pronounced it correctly for that spelling, with an aspirated
ch—
he probably got the pronunciation from the band, so maybe they were Crowleyites after all. “I think I may try to produce those guys.”

“It was awful,” she said. “He loved it.”

Andromeda had decided, and Huggy agreed, that she had to change her approach with the King of Sacramento if she wanted better results. Heretofore he had been the one to instigate contact, by visiting her in her box or in the small chamber in some remote corner of Yesod while she was dreaming, but he had also been indirectly invoked by sigil magic, so it seemed at least possible that he could be conjured directly and deliberately.

She had to relax first, though, so she put on her Guillaume de Machaut CD, lay down on the floor, and tried the deep yoga breathing that she could never quite seem to get to work for her. The door swung open suddenly, striking her leg, and there was the mom, sighing with exasperation, and wrinkling her nose at the music as well as the incense.

“Thank you very, very much,” the mom said. “You had to go poking around in his stuff like that. Now you’ve set him off. You know what he’s doing? He’s collecting all his ‘papers’ so he can
burn
them and destroy the evidence before the ‘crackdown’! He just went out to get lighter fluid. He’ll end up setting the whole neighborhood on fire.” She sniffed. “And what are
you
burning in here?”

“I’m sure he’ll just use the barbecue, Mom,” said Andromeda, pushing the door closed and slamming it. So the joke hadn’t worked as well as she’d hoped. He had burned “documents” before, and had managed never to burn down the neighborhood so far. The worst that could happen, really, was that the world would contain fewer vintage copies of
Penthouse
and Den’s supply of Scandinavian nature and sports magazines might dry up.

Andromeda was more annoyed at the mom than usual, for some reason, perhaps because she had shattered her peace of mind so thoroughly just at the moment when invoking the King of Sacramento had really seemed like it could pay off. How do normal kids express annoyance at their parents? Answer: loud obnoxious music. And Andromeda had access to the most obnoxious music known to man: Byron’s god-awful Swedish Choronzon CD. Of course, she would have to suffer through it too, that was the price. More as a stunt to see what it would be like to play the role than anything else, she put in the CD and turned it as loud as it would go. Then, to put the icing on the cake, she started jumping around in the kind of dance she imagined you might do to Cthulhu rock, something wild and irregular and voodoo-y, the grotesque contortions of an ancient race conducting unmentionable rites. And she sang along at the top of her lungs, too. The words were very easy to pick up. “Shub-Niggurath—the song! Shub-Niggurath—the song! The goat with a thousand young!”

Andromeda kept it up till the Champlains downstairs started pounding on the ceiling with a broom. Another first. Part of her wanted to keep going to see what it would be like if they called the police on her, but she wasn’t that much of a rebel. She turned down the volume and sank to the floor, rather joyously exhausted, to her considerable surprise. This must have been why people did this sort of thing. Endorphins, like she got from tantooning, except from the inside and all over her body. She didn’t think she’d broken any bones.

The horrible cacophony of Choronzon was finally fading and she was just about to remove the CD when she heard a quiet strumming that was very un-Choronzon-like and turned it louder to make sure she’d heard correctly.

It was Byron’s voice, singing over a quiet guitar, and it was a song about her.

Andromeda Klein, Andromeda Klein,
Born under a lonely sign …

She turned bright red, all over her face, well past her hairline and all down her chest. It was goofy. It was corny. He was an idiot. It was not too good. But it was also kind of great. She listened to it twenty times in a row. It made her laugh and cry at the same time.

Whether it was the endorphins from all the jumping around to the Cthulhu rock, the crying-laughing state of mind brought on by Byron’s silly, silly Andromeda Klein song, or the fact that Andromeda had thrown a few dragon’s-teeth seeds on the brazier in preparation for the abortive invocation before everything had happened, Andromeda passed easily from semiconsciousness to her box that night. She was lifted directly out of her body on tiny clouds that felt like hands, and she floated into the dark sphere with the purplish yellowish light, then was propelled very quickly down a series of viscous, pulsing tunnels, one of which opened up to the familiar box room with the purple smoke walls, and finally dropped, almost slammed, into her box. She felt the impact on her back, and it felt rather nice: a small, satisfying thud.

She had a pretty strong feeling she was going to see the King of Sacramento, and soon she felt his presence and felt his strong arms taking hold of her and beginning to wrap her in her silk ribbon bindings.

“I do not have a great deal of time for you,” he said brusquely, but not unpleasantly or without kindness. “Just enough to dress you and secure you. You may ask any questions you like, until you are fully secured.”

Andromeda found she could not move her jaw, or cause any sound at all to issue from her throat. And she couldn’t think of any questions, either.

“No?” he said, lifting the back of her head so he could tie on her blindfold, then setting it down again. She felt the lid drop down on her box, and heard the sound of the iron clasps being fastened and locked in place. She was crying with the effort of trying to form words, even as she sank gratefully into the comfort and safety of being tightly bound in the strong, secure box.

“Very well,” said the King of Sacramento. “I must be on my way. I will leave you with a thought or two. A man named MacGregor once endured a lifetime of ruin and pain, hounded by spiritual creatures summoned by a mere senseless act of plagiarism. Monks in scriptoria have not always understood the mischief that their uncomprehending quill scratches might do, especially those scratches which happened to find themselves scratched at auspicious times. Once summoned, such creatures can be hard to control indeed. You could do much worse than consulting Solomon’s books, even allowing that much nonsense has made its way into them. Discerning the necessary from the superfluous is the work of a lifetime, but I will tell you that were I intending to confront an infernal duke and his retinue of an evening, I would be quite grateful indeed to have in hand, at the very least, a serviceable blade of iron. Strip away what you like in the name of modernity and the fashionable theories of Vienna, by all means, but take care you are not thereby stripped to nothing, and armed only with pretense and vanity.”

The King of Sacramento then did something strange and marvelous. He leaned over and softly, gently, and, it seemed, rather intently, kissed her on her silk-covered lips before settling her iron face plate in its groove in the lid and tightening its bolts and screws and clicking in its locks. She was seeing waves and stars against her blindfolded eyelids. The King of Sacramento’s voice was muffled and distant now that the face plate was in place.

“And as you well know, the Lord of Peace, Restored, can produce the Lord of Sorrow through a process, or bridge, of Empress. But everything is not always so grandiose.” He rapped the lid of her box with his stick as though to signal “Job well done,” and he was gone.

It was the tightest, most secure she had ever been in her box, in a lifetime of having been there, and it was the deepest, most satisfying sleep she had ever had. She couldn’t wait to do it again. Had she been able, she would have thrown on some more dragons’ teeth and gone right back to sleep immediately, but it was a school day.

Had that been an invocation that she had managed inadvertently in her sleep through exhaustion and strong emotion and dangerously intoxicating perfumes? And perhaps even aided by the ill-conceived (yet undeniably barbarous) “barbarous names” growled by the Choronzon singer? She was still buzzing from the dream kiss, and from St. Steve’s text, which had arrived late last night but which she had only seen that morning: “u look good wet.” She hadn’t even ordered that one.

Listening for Huggy often worked best in the bath; the rushing water and the rushing sound in her ears and head seeming to cancel each other out somehow, allowing the tiny, insistent, often quite cranky voice to become intelligible.

Let me guess
, said Huggy.
You’re walking on air?

“Never mind about that,” said Andromeda to the swirling silvery Huggy wisp she could barely see, somewhere in there. “Just replay what he said.”

Huggy had Its annoying aspects, but It was a terrific memory aid, and It dutifully replayed the King of Sacramento’s words with perfect clarity and detail.
I will leave the disgusting final act for you to replay all by yourself, if you don’t mind
. It was talking about the kiss. That was the one bit Andromeda had no trouble remembering. Words were hard, kisses were not.

“You’re going to be a great help on the SAT when the time comes,” said Andromeda, and it was so true that Huggy didn’t even recognize it as an attempt at humor.

You will get the score I believe you deserve
, It said with complete seriousness.

“So,” said Andromeda, getting back to business. “Basically, I need to get a sword.”

Bingo
, said Huggy.
A serviceable blade of iron
. And then It was gone. Of course.

“Who are you talking to in there?” came the mom’s accusing voice from beyond the wall, but Andromeda’s head was underwater by then, only her eyes, nose, and mouth above the surface, and she was thinking about being locked in a box and kissed by a man in a hood with a sword and a wand.

The dad’s paranoid barbecue of documents and other printed matter hadn’t gotten too far off the ground, to judge from the scattered half-charred bits of paper and magazine remnants lying in and around the bulbous black barbecue unit’s grill. He had even tried to burn some of his records, including some of the stock of the Light Bulb Bomb single he had put out on his own label before getting kicked out of the collective. Poor Dad, she thought. It was really rather sad. He hadn’t succeeded in burning down the neighborhood or even much of the actual “evidence.” The rain would have made that pretty difficult anyway, but most likely he had just lost interest in the project in its early stages and moved on to something else. That was what usually happened.