Authors: Edward Lazellari
“You didn’t say your house blew up, asshole. You said you had a fire … made it seem like an inconvenience. My girlfriend hates you … What was I supposed to do?”
“Look, I need someone to get Hoshi out of a boarding room on Twenty-third. I’ll text you the address. She’s out of food and water.”
“Why can’t you—”
“’Cause I’m tied up with
stuff,
Earl. Please just do this for me. I know I’m a jerk, but you’re the only friend I have left and I need you to do this.”
“Yeah. Well—Marge likes the cat … and I’m holding kitty hostage until you pay up for the bags I fronted you.”
Seth breathed a sigh of relief. Hoshi would be okay. After a short pause, Earl asked,
“Are you coming tonight?”
“Mr. Raincrest?” a Fidelity agent motioned he was available. Seth put his index finger up—the universal signal asking for one more minute on the phone, and followed the man to his cubicle.
“What’s tonight?” he asked Earl.
“Joe’s service. His mom flies him back to Cali tomorrow. The guy’s been your friend for years … Are you going to miss this, too? Is this Mindy’s abortion all over again?”
“Thanks for getting the cat. Room three-thirteen.” Seth ended the call. Earl was one of his oldest friends; it became apparent how daunting getting out of the hole he’d dug himself into over the years would be. He really was a first-rate asshole. If it weren’t for Lelani, Cat, and even Cal, he’d truly be alone.
“What can I help you with?” asked the rep. He was a young black kid, thin, just out of college, and probably wearing the first suit in his life his mama didn’t buy for him.
“I need a trust … mutual funds—something that doesn’t need a lot of hands-on care.”
“How much are you investing?” the representative asked.
“A lot.”
“Can you be specific…”
“No. Lots of zeros,” Seth said. “The money’s coming later, but I need to open the account now.”
The representative went through several funds, throwing terms at him like “Lipper” and “Morningstar.” Seth opted for a slightly aggressive four-star fund with a consistent track record. He linked his new investment account to his bank and thanked the rep for his time. Seth headed to his bank next to make POD provisions in the event of his untimely demise. With that set up, it was time for the real business. But Seth couldn’t walk into the next establishment looking and smelling the way he did. He had to go home first.
Home.
He dreaded this moment.
2
The door had been replaced with a temporary slab of plywood and sealed with police tape. More plywood covered the big holes in the wall separating the hallway and the apartment. A second piece of board across the hall covered his neighbors’ wall where debris had blown through. Seth ripped through the police tape and made his way into his home gingerly, avoiding gaps in the floor. The apartment gave off a distinct vibe that he could not define. He chalked it up to the ash dust and the gloomy grayness it gave everything. These charred remains of his old apartment were symbolic of his life. Seth tried to see something positive in the destruction. These items represented the years he lived in selfishness and anger. The fire wiped away that past. It meant renewal—purification. Wasn’t
his
prince’s sigil the phoenix, after all—a bird that dies by combustion and reinvents itself continuously? On second viewing, a lot more stuff had survived the explosion than Seth had realized the last time he was there with Lelani.
The brunt of the explosion had been in the living room/kitchen area. Unfortunately, the bathroom behind the kitchen was a jumble of ash, twisted metal, and shattered porcelain. No showering would be done in there. The bedroom walls were blackened skeletons of their former selves, but the bedrooms suffered the least damage. In the closet hung his favorite wool peacoat, a deep navy blue with double-breasted black buttons and a wide lapel that flipped up and made him feel like a Merchant Marine officer. It smelled of smoke like everything else in the apartment, but with cold weather coming in, it would be better than the jacket he’d been using. Seth located his backpack under the charred remains of his bed. It was covered in ash, but was relatively intact. Inside, was an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes. Seth thanked the god of small things and stuffed any surviving documents and bank papers into the backpack along with the new paperwork and plastic folder he’d been carrying. His credit cards were slag, and he had tapped out all his remaining cash the day of the fire. Behind the stove, he retrieved two hundred dollars wrapped in tinfoil that had belonged to his roommate, Joe. He’d forgotten about it the day of the fire. Joe certainly didn’t need it anymore. He rummaged through more of Joe’s property and found some white T-shirts and boxers still in their plastic wrapping. Seth welled up with tears and suddenly had to sit on the floor. The underwear was from Joe’s mother—she often sent her son care packages from California. Joe freely shared their contents with Seth—homemade biscuits and jam and an overabundance of clothing. It was Seth’s good fortune that he was about the same size as his ex-roommate; more so to have had a friend with the patience and goodwill of a saint like Joe.
Seth let out an emotional barrage the likes of which he couldn’t remember ever having done before. It built up out of nowhere and took him over. He had lost his brother. Seth’s behavior after Joe’s death was abominable. Even with the mission, it would not have taken much effort to make a few phone calls—to tell friends what had happened and to offer condolences to Joe’s family. Who better than Seth knew what it was like to lose a family member to a fire? The lost, senseless, hopeless feeling that nothing in the universe makes any sense.
The vibe in the apartment continued to nag at Seth—in fact, it bugged him more now, yet was still just beyond reach of recognition. As Seth grasped at what it was, his neighbor Ramone, a portly five-foot-two South East Asian type with short black hair, ran into the living room wielding an iron skillet raised over his head.
“Rahhhh…!” Ramone growled.
He may have looked fearsome if not for the large flowery red and yellow Hawaiian shirt, white hot pants, and white Dolce & Gabbana flipflops. “Oh my God. Seth? You scared me,” Ramone said, with a trace of his Filipino accent. He was holding his chest and panting.
“I scared you?” Seth retorted. “You’re the one wielding a deadly weapon.”
“The homeless keep trying to squat in here. Chad and I shoo them away.”
“Thanks … I owe you,” Seth said.
“You look like hell, sweetie.”
“I’ve had a rough few days. Your apartment pretty much survived?” Seth asked.
Ramone nodded. “Everything still smells like smoke,” he said like a man that had spent a lot of effort scrubbing everything down.
Holding fresh underwear, Seth remembered what he had come back for. “Can I use your shower?” he asked.
“Of course. Let me tell Chad we’re having a guest first. My little magic monkey walks around naked,” Ramone whispered in a hand-to-cheek side note, as he flipflopped out of the room.
The “magic monkey” was too much information for Seth. He tried to keep the image of a hanging Chad out of his head.
Magic,
he suddenly realized.
That’s the vibe in this apartment.
A sensation at the periphery of awareness—it’s what he felt around Rosencrantz. It was the residual magic used when Symian blew up the apartment—perhaps even the spell from Lelani’s brass compact. Seth closed his eyes in an attempt to feel it out around him. It was like the smell of the ocean from a mile away, barely there and yet so. The more he concentrated, the harder it was to pinpoint; as though he were repelling the energy with the effort.
Seth decided on another tack. One of his nude models, a yogini that had always tried to get him to meditate, was obsessed with clearing Seth’s mind, opening his chakras, and expounding the virtue of nothingness. Seth had put up with it because he was obsessed with opening up her other parts for his own pleasure. He sat in the lotus position and calmed his breathing. He cleared his mind by first thinking of snow on a serene mountaintop. Nothing happened. He was too on edge. He needed something to calm his nerves before he could calm his thoughts. Seth cracked opened the Camel cigarettes and lit up. It tasted better than sweet salted butter on a croissant. He rested his arms against his folded legs, cig between his fingers and again tried to clear his mind. The energy around him grew stronger—more opaque. It drifted out of the walls, the charred remains of furniture, but he remained receptive, open, wanting nothing. Seth didn’t know how long he would need to sit there before something noticeably obvious happened. Should he acknowledge the energy when it reached him? He heard a gasp and opened his eyes. Ramone stared, bewildered.
The cigarette?
Seth thought.
“I just needed something to calm…” As Seth raised his hand with the cigarette, he noticed a faint silvery glow flickering about his hand like burning gas. He quickly realized the aura covered him.
“You’re on fire,” Ramone said.
Seth lost focus, and the light dissipated.
“Yeah,” Seth agreed. “Can we keep that between us? I’ve got a lot on my plate these days as it is.”
Ramone nodded and said, “It’s okay to come over now.” He rushed out of the room.
Seth wished Lelani had been there to explain what had happened. Obviously he was sensitive to the magic … he just didn’t know what it was good for. If the energy left every time he concentrated on it, how would he ever use it to cast a spell? Seth went to take that shower quickly, before Ramone changed his mind.
3
Seth walked into the York Avenue lobby of Sotheby’s auction house showered, shaved, and freshly changed, feeling like a new man. His friend Mitch, who served on the board of directors for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, gave him a contact for the rare books specialist at Sotheby’s. Mitch also cautioned that appointments were usually done weeks in advance. Seth had an idea this would be the case. Fortunately, he had “borrowed” Lelani’s silver flower pin with the credibility enchantment, which was now pinned to the collar of his peacoat.
“Seth Raincrest to see Alistair St. Cloud,” he said to a very serious man in a jacket and tie at the front desk.
“Is Mr. St. Cloud expecting you?”
“Absolutely,” Seth said confidently. He brandished his cell phone. “In fact, I just spoke to him. Alistair said I should just come up because his secretary would be out to lunch at this time.”
The security man’s brow clenched like he needed an Advil, but handed Seth a visitor’s pass anyway and pointed him to the right elevator bank. As Seth walked off the elevator, yet another receptionist greeted Seth. This company had more layers than Fort Knox. He gave the girl on this floor the same spiel, and she called St. Cloud’s assistant to come get him. The assistant was an older woman with short white hair, impeccably dressed, with a string of white pearls and sensible shoes. Seth told her he was there to see Mr. St. Cloud.
“Mr. St. Cloud is very busy at the moment. What is this in reference to?” she asked skeptically.
Seth noted a degree of resistance coming from the woman. He didn’t know if the silver pin was losing its mojo or if the woman’s age or intelligence had something to do with it. Perhaps she did believe him, but it was the nature of her job to hold people off regardless. Seth pulled the plastic folder out of his backpack. He opened it and gingerly pulled out a copy of
Action Comics
number one with the iconic image of the Man of Steel holding a car over his head. She took it carefully and examined it. Seth suspected the woman’s reaction had more to do with the last reported sale of this issue being well over a million dollars than her being a comic book fan.
“You have more?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“May I see?”
“I’ll show St. Cloud,” he said.
“Wait here,” she said, handing the magazine back.
A few minutes later, the assistant escorted Seth into a posh office of mahogany and brass décor. A trace of pipe smoke lingered. The bookcases were filled with moldy old texts, protected behind airtight glass doors. There was a black-and-white photo of St. Cloud in a black suit. He wore a short-cropped dark Brylcreemed haircut and thick black square-framed glasses standing behind a huge old tome on a pedestal. The brass plaque on the frame said
Gutenberg Bible 1969
.
“Are these stolen items?” asked a deep velvety British voice behind him. It exuded snobbery.
Seth turned to find the man from the photo, aged several decades, in a tweed jacket. His hair was still full, but white. His jowls wobbled as he talked.
“Excuse me?” Seth asked.
“The items you have brought … Are they stolen? Do you have any way to authenticate your ownership?”
Seth thought of Ben and Helen Reyes, the original owners of the magazines. The nexus to their home in Puerto Rico was filled with periodicals from the past hundred years. That was until they needed to build pyres in the meadow to fight nocturnal dog-men. When Seth saved these comic books from the flames he wasn’t even sure why he did it. At the time, he was certain he wouldn’t survive to cash them in. Ben and Helen had lived on top of a fortune for years, but couldn’t have cared less about the money. Ben was the caretaker of the world’s last sorcerer, a sentient tree named Rosencrantz. And that charge had cost Ben his life when Seth’s group brought violence to their home. Still, Ben was a proponent of Seth turning his life around; the money these few books would bring were the cornerstone of that plan.
“I bought them at a yard sale in a small town in Ohio a year ago,” Seth lied. “The people selling them had no idea what they were really worth. There’s no receipt.” Seth didn’t think he’d need the enchanted pin to push this one over on St. Cloud. Things like this happened all the time. It helped that there were no police alerts for stolen rare comic books, and possession was still nine-tenths under the law.
“Can I see them?” St. Cloud asked, putting on his reading glasses.