Fathomless (9 page)

Other afternoons they bicycled in town or on the Miskatonic River Trail. Daniel had bought a Jamis road bike that must have cost a couple thousand dollars, but that was no big deal since (as Eddy had learned) his dad was a corporate lawyer. Sean couldn't hate on him—Daniel let one of them ride it half the time, a favor Sean returned by being the go-to guy for drives to the beach.

The biggest beach was in Kingsport, but Eddy and Sean liked the smaller one between the Arkham Harbor jetties. It was decent for swimming; the jetties hosted enough sea life to make snorkeling worthwhile; and kayak access was easy. Under normal circumstances, Sean would have opted for swimming every day, and Eddy the mermaid would probably have lived at the beach every second she wasn't basking among the Archives' tomes.

The problem was that Daniel had a phobia of water, especially the ocean. Before their first beach trip, he'd told them about a rip current that had grabbed him when he was a toddler, how it had sucked him away from shore and almost drowned him. Since then he hadn't set foot in surf or even the shallow end of a pool. It blew in hot weather, but he didn't mind hanging out near water, or even out on one of the jetties, as long as there weren't high waves that might pull or knock him in.

Privately, Sean and Eddy agreed they'd do most of their water stuff on the afternoons when Daniel was with Geldman. Whatever he said, it had to be a drag to stand around while they had fun. It was also a drag for Eddy. The phobia was Daniel's one flaw in her eyes. In a selfish way, it was good to know there was one thing Sean could do better than him. Even if it wasn't practical magic.

On their second Monday at the Arkwright House, over a Sean-made breakfast of Cheerios and strawberries, Daniel relayed Geldman's invitation to visit the pharmacy that afternoon. Eddy nearly exploded pink milk in her rush to accept. Back from work, she spent an hour trying to figure out what you'd wear to meet the most awesome wizard in Arkham and ended up back in formal library gear, a white blouse and navy skirt. Then she started nagging Sean to change. “Show up looking sharp, maybe Geldman will take you on as a student.”

“I bet he can only have one at a time, like a Sith master.”

“Then maybe he'll give you a letter of recommendation.”

Sean changed into a fresh T-shirt and genuine leather flip-flops. He considered raiding Daniel's room for a squirt of his cologne, but since Eddy knew how much he hated cologne, she'd have realized he was mocking Daniel's superior prepitude, and she probably wouldn't have appreciated the joke in her current state of pre-Geldman nerves.

They arrived five minutes early, to find the pharmacy was “closed.” Standing in front of the sooty display window, Eddy looked ready to bawl. Sean got her to walk around the block, slowly, and the next time they approached it, Geldman's Pharmacy was open for business. Its bricks were buffed to a sunflower yellow, its trim painted a fresh leaf green. Snowy lace curtains billowed from the windows of the second-floor apartment, and the scale sunned itself outside the shop door. Eddy stared at the fabled urns, upside-down teardrops again hanging level on their chains, the right brimming with emerald liquid, the left with ruby. Sean looked beyond the urns to shelves holding bottles and tins and drawstring bags, to the mahogany counter topped with frosted glass panels, to the candy-cotton-pink and spearmint-green soda fountain. No one was in sight unless he counted the shadows wavering across the counter panels, and he did count them, and there were three.

Eddy pointed across the street, where the owner of Tumblebee's Café hustled drinks to the outdoor tables. “Is it true what Daniel said? If you're standing next to the pharmacy and it looks open to you, you're invisible to people who see it as closed?”

“Right. If you can see it like it really is, you're covered by the same ward of illusion. Check this out.” Sean waved an arm and yelled: “Hey! How about a couple iced mochas over here?”

“Shut up,” Eddy hissed, but when no one outside Tumblebee's glanced their way, she waved, too. “Yo! Want to see Sean drop his shorts?”

No one reacted. “Class act,” Sean said.

“Yeah, but I proved no one can see or hear us.” She walked to the door practically on tiptoes, as if she might scare the pharmacy closed again. When she came up to the scale, she started.

It had protruded a square of blue cardboard from the slot beneath its face. “That must be for you,” Sean said.

“Why?”

“You're closer to the scale than I am.”

Eddy plucked out the square. It was a sort of clamshell, from which she extracted a slip of onionskin paper. During the Servitor crisis, Sean dreamed he'd gotten a Geldman scale-fortune crimped into infinite folds, unreadable, but Eddy opened hers easily, and scanned it, and flushed. “What's it say?”

Flush deepening, she read it again. “I'm supposed to come in.”

Through the onionskin, Sean saw there was a lot more message than that. “What else?”

“Never mind. Put in a nickel and get your own.” Eddy refolded the fortune and slipped it into her skirt pocket. Then she pushed into the pharmacy.

Sean didn't have a nickel, so he followed her inside and across the glossy tiles to the counter door through which Geldman stepped. Instead of shaking the hand Eddy extended to him, Geldman took it between his and bowed over it. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Rosenbaum. Helen Arkwright tells me you're a promising scholar in my favorite field.”

Eddy hadn't even started to blush outside. “Thanks, Mr. Geldman. I've wanted to meet you since Sean told me about the pharmacy.”

Actually, her initial opinion had been that Geldman was a nutcase quack who ought to be arrested for selling dangerous drugs to minors. But why spoil the moment? When Geldman released Eddy's hand, he gave Sean's a hearty shake, none of that bowing stuff. “And you, Sean, studying magic with the Order of Alhazred! I'm glad.”

“And I'm glad I can say thanks in person, Mr. Geldman, for how you helped Helen find the dismissing spell.”

“I couldn't have done otherwise, since my Powders helped you summon the wrong familiar.”

Daniel came out of the hidden regions of the pharmacy, fiddling with his neck brace. “You guys made it,” he said, like anything short of a Category 5 hurricane could have stopped them.

“Actually, we got here early,” Eddy said. “While the pharmacy was still—do you call it closed, Mr. Geldman?”

“Or asleep, or even dead.”

“It gives me the chills when it's shut down.”

“As it should.”

“This way, open, it's—”

Eddy wordless was an unnatural phenomenon. Daniel threw Sean an anxious look, but Geldman watched her with placid attention, as if she were still speaking. “Exactly,” he said. “But allow me to introduce you and Sean to my ward.”

He meant the girl who'd stepped out from behind Daniel. Had she stood there all along, unseen? Possibly, because she was only about ten, shorter than Daniel and super-slender. Yet shouldn't Sean have noticed her glow? The whole girl shone, from her cascade of pale blond hair to her bare feet. In between were a heart-shaped face, arms exposed from shoulder to wrist, and a white dress plain as a pillowcase—a pillowcase draped over a lamp burning 200-watt bulbs. He blinked, squeezing out tears. When he'd swiped them away, the girl had spun her dimmer switch to low, because she looked normal. Well, pretty much. Her eyes remained the inhuman blue of forget-me-nots, and radiance still seeped from her slim feet, of all places. Feet!

Daniel smiled at the girl as if she was his kid sister, nothing special yet totally special, and she gazed at him with the corners of her delicate lips uptilted. Eddy looked at her as she'd looked at the revived Geldman's Pharmacy, wedged between wonder and terror.

Except for the reflection of the girl's glory that lingered in his eyes, Geldman remained the same old Geldman. “Miss Edna Rosenbaum—,” he said.

“Please, Mr. Geldman. Just Eddy?”

“Eddy, then, and Sean. This is Cybele.”

Eddy extended her hand, so Sean stuck his out, too. Cybele didn't shake their hands; instead, she touched her fingertips to theirs. Magic happened, the transfer of a cool spark and the passage of a breeze scented by flowering grass. Weird how Sean knew the scent from somewhere, from more than one somewhere, in fact.

The smell dissipated before he could remember. Cybele was speaking in a voice as high as a young girl's but much more measured, mature: “You're welcome here as Daniel's friends, but you're also welcome for yourselves.” She looked at Geldman. “Aren't they, Guardian?”

Geldman bowed his head.

Guardian, so was she as young as she looked, after all? With magicians, appearances could deceive. Cybele might be the older of the two, and Geldman already struck Sean as much older than Orne.

“Cybele, Daniel,” Geldman said. “Could you show Eddy around? I'd like to have a word with Sean in back.”

In back were the hidden regions Daniel—and Helen—had always squirmed out of describing, as if a taboo against telling fell on the few lucky beholders. Finally Sean would get his own look! On the other hand, words from authority figures were usually bad news. And inescapable, like now, as Geldman directed him to the counter door with a gesture that subtly twisted invitation into command.

Daniel raised one hand, forefinger and thumb joined into an
O.
Well, he'd been with Geldman more than a week—he had to know whether a torture chamber lurked in the depths of the pharmacy.

Sean followed Geldman into a white corridor with white doors to either side. At the end of the corridor was an equally bland and antiseptic door that Geldman swung open to another world, or was it to another time? Candles lit a large parlor, Victorian to the max with its red wallpaper and curvy-carvy furniture. Candles in a triple octopus of a chandelier, candles in candelabras and candlesticks and jars. Candles on the mantel, in the fireless fireplace, scattered on every flat surface except the floor, which boasted a carpet animated by the candlelight into a jungle of coiling vines and skulking beasts. Beside the stairs to the second floor stood one of those desk-bookcase combos that antiquey people called secretaries. The back wall featured two heavily curtained windows, or at least Sean supposed there were windows behind the curtains; not a photon of outside light made it through the layers of lace and velvet. Opposite the stairs were the fireplace, and two armchairs, and a tea table, and a bird on a brass perch behind the chair Geldman had taken. Helen
had
told Sean and Eddy about Geldman's familiar, an African pied crow, “pied” not because he was baked under a crust with twenty-three other blackbirds but because he had this white bib, and his name was?

“Boaz,” Geldman said.

Sean approached the perch. The crow eyed him, head thrust forward, beak open. “Does he, ah, bite?”

“Not very often.”

Better not risk it. Sean retreated to the armchair across from Geldman's. The hem of his shorts brushed candles, and he jerked around, sure he'd set himself on fire. He hadn't. As if to demonstrate why, Geldman lowered his palm into a dozen flames, all the way to the wicks. When Sean fingertip-prodded a flame, he found it gave off no heat. If anything, it was cold. That also explained why none of the candles was dripping wax. He sat, and when the chair cushions swallowed him up comfortably, he didn't even wince. Magic lived everywhere in the room, and it felt like?

It felt like home.

“So, Daniel,” Geldman said.

“Daniel, sir?”

“Cybele said he's your friend, so it must be so. You don't resent him for becoming my apprentice, while you've yet to find a master?”

“No. It's not his fault if the Order doesn't think I'm ready. Professor Marvell says I'll get a mentor next year. Not you, though, I guess?”

“Not me. My skills and Daniel's needs are a better match. Cybele is also here, with talents that can benefit him.”

“That's great, Mr. Geldman. And, really, I'm okay.”

Boaz flapped his wings. “Sour face can't lie,” he screeched.

He obviously meant Sean. “I'm okay with
Daniel,
anyhow,” he told the bird.

Boaz sidled over to a food cup attached to the perch and pecked out peanuts and apple chunks. Apparently he was done, for the moment, with Sean.

Geldman? Nope. “May I take it that you question the Order's management of your studies?”

Sean shrugged. The armchair thoughtfully plumped up behind his shoulders. “No. Well, yes. Daniel's starting practical magic right off. That proves there's more going on with me than, ‘Oh, it's your first year, so theory only.'”

“What else could be going on?”

He gazed into the candle flame nearest him. “Did Orne ever tell you about a connection between us?”

“He told me you were his descendant.”

How long ago had he told Geldman that? Before Sean's first visit to the pharmacy? “Professor Marvell just found out. Maybe he's having second thoughts about training Orne's ten-times-great-grandson.”

“I see.”

“Like, would you give a pyro a box of matches?”

“Or even one match.”

Geldman understood. Sean lifted his eyes to the wizard's. Heavy lids half obscured them, but beneath the lashes, a hundred light motes glinted, reflected candle flames. “Now, I may be wrong, Sean.”

But?

“There may be something to your concerns.”

Since Sean had expected Geldman to toe the Order line and dismiss his worries, that answer was a mild shock: mild because something that would have upset him elsewhere had little sting in the parlor. While most of the candles were white, those on the tea table were green; they gave off a fragrance like the one that had accompanied Cybele's touch, flowering grass and herbs newly mown. He remembered where he'd smelled it before. After the Servitor's ichor had burned Helen, Marvell treated her with a balm labeled
CYBELE'S #1
, and Sean had often snuck whiffs from the jar, because the smell alone was enough to loosen the knot of guilt any glimpse of Helen's bandages had tied in his midsection. Whatever made the smell, in balm or candles, acted like magical Valium.