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A high school student finds a grimoire that shows how to make magical disguises. |
Previously: "Unexpected Windfalls"  "Actually, yeah," you answer. "I think I hit the jackpot." You explain the situation to him as you climb into the cab of your truck: that you bought a book here a few days ago for a few dollars, and now the former owner might want to buy it back for several hundred. "Whoa!" Joe gasps. "Can I see it?" "It's in my bag," you tell him. "You know," you continue as he pulls it out, "it really was supposed to be valuable. Arnholm's was selling it for, like, two hundred dollars. But they found out it was damaged when I showed it to them, so they let me have it for two." "That was dumb of them," Joe says. He slides down in the seat with the book open between his legs, and studies it. "I mean, if they thought it was worth a couple of hundred when they bought it, they should'a known it might still be worth that much!" "Well, it was on account of the damage," you say. Joe doesn't reply, though, for he seems utterly absorbed in the first page of the book. "But I guess the guy who used to own it still thinks it's worth something. "Uh huh. Say, what language is this? Russian?" "Latin, I think." "You try translating it?" "A little. It wanted my blood." "What?" Joe looks up with a sharp expression. "Yeah. One of the last sentences on the second page says something about giving it your blood. There's even a place you're supposed to press your bloody thumbprint, I think." "You didn't do that, did you, man?" "Huh? No, I—" "'Cos that's how demons can get ahold of your soul, you know." "Demons?" You glance over at him. He looks very sober. "No, I didn't—" "Yeah! I totally believe in those things, you know. Frank's always telling me not to be so gullible, but I gotta tell you, man—" He sucks in a hissing breath. "Some of the stories I've heard, read on the internet, they don't make sense if there's not, like, demons and shit out there. Fuck, I wouldn't touch nothing like this if you paid me." "Well, you're not the one who's paying to get it back," you assure him. "So who is?" he asks. His tone is anxious. You tell him the guy's card is in the bag. He digs it out. "Aubrey Blackwell, professor of archaeology," he reads aloud. He reads it slowly, sounding out every syllable, and stumbling a little over the last word, which he repeats. "Isn't that, like, Indiana Jones type stuff?" "Sure, but—" "Oh, fuck me! He is into demons, isn't he?" "What?" But Joe is sliding the book and the card back into your bag, which he zips up and pushes toward you. "You just keep that over on your side of the truck," he says as he scoots over to huddle by the passenger side door. "If you don't believe in demons and demon-cooties, maybe they'll leave you alone. Me, I ain't takin' any chances!" * * * * * Joe insists that you come inside when you pull up at his house, telling you there's a "thirty-nine percent chance of pizza" if you do. "Hey Frank!" he calls as he bursts in through the front door. "Look who I ran into while I was out! Actually, he almost ran into me!" His brother has moved to the dining room table, and is slouched over a laptop. There's a strange light in his eye as he looks up at you, and you wonder if he thinks it's a little too odd that you should show up at their house twice in one day. Confirmation seems to come when he says, "That's a coincidence." "Isn't it! Don't let it happen a third time, Prescott," Joe warns you, "or Frank'll think it's enemy action." Frank smiles thinly. "Are you back now?" he asks his brother. "You've still got homework to finish." "Oh, fuck homework, this's my week off, I've decided. Also, I've promised Prescott pizza." "What?" "Don't make me a liar, Frank." "No one can make anything out of you. I know, I've seen Dad try." He glowers as Joe flashes some kind of complicated hand gesture at him which, judging by the number of times the bird appears in it, must be a really complex way of telling him to go fuck himself. But then he relents. "Come help pick out our toppings," he says, and summons you around the table as he closes up a document and launches the web browser. "What are you doing?" he calls as Joe disappears into the kitchen. "Looking in the fridge!" Joe calls back. "I'm not ordering us a pizza if you're gonna ruin your appetite!" "You can't ruin my appetite, Frank, not if there's pizza coming!" Frank opens his mouth to reply, then frowns at the sound of a door creaking nearby. "Did you close the front door all the way, Joe?" "I 'unno," Joe calls from the kitchen. "Why don't you look?" But then he appears around the corner, and does a double-take toward the entry way. He stalks off toward it, sticking his tongue out at Frank as he passes. There's the sound of the door shutting, and a moment later he's back. "What are we getting?" he asks. * * * * * You all settle on a mushroom-sausage-pepperoni-green pepper pizza, which you agree to go pick up. You're already late getting back home, so you might as well worsen your punishment for the sake of a pizza as for nothing. "You're paying for it, too," Joe joshes with a glinting grin. "Tell Frank about your jackpot." So you tell him about the trip out to Arnholm's with that funky book, and how it looks like you can sell it back to its former owner for several hundred dollars. Frank listens with polite interest, and lets out a low whistle when you hit the punch line. "You should look at the thing, Frank," Joe tells him. "It's all in Latin 'n shit. Isn't that what you said?" he asks you. "Gitzgathuhgalibgra!" he exclaims. "Gablackgawellgahadgit, gaprezgagotgagotgit, ganowgitzgin gamighbagedgaroom! Etcetera etcetera," he adds. Frank snorts. "You sure that's Latin?" "Cross my heart, that's what it said!" Frank gives you a puckish look, and shrugs. "My brother claims to be fluent in several languages," he says. "I wish English was one of them." "You're such a liar, Frank!" Joe snarls. "I know zero languages!" "Well, let me look at the thing when you get back," Frank tells you. "It sounds interesting. I promise not to get tomato sauce on it." But it's gone from the truck when you go out to leave. * * * * * Joe is the first to notice that something is wrong. "Where's my bike?" he asks while peering into the bed of your truck. "My bike!" he repeats with a dumbstruck frown. "Did I take it in?" "I don't remember," you say. "I don't think so." "Oh, fuck!" He dashes back up the walk and runs inside. A moment later he comes hurtling back out again, rounding the corner of the porch to bend and lift the garage door. "Fuck!" he screams as he looks inside the garage. "It's not there?" you call to him. "No! Oh, fuck me! I think someone took it!" With an expression of distraught horror he runs back to stare with disbelief into the empty bed of your truck. "I know I put it there when you picked me up outside your house!" he says. You look around. It's a shabby neighborhood, a poor neighborhood, and it is all too easy to imagine someone casually lifting Joe's bike from the back of your truck and riding off with it. You feel your face graying with sympathy. "Oh, jeez, I'm sorry, man," you say. "I'll help you look—" "No, I'll get Frank to look," Joe says. "He needs to earn his keep." He runs back to the house. "He says he'll find it," he growls when he's back. "Cocksucker just says I'm blind." Then: "What's wrong?" "Someone took your bike, Joe," you tell him. "No, Frank says I'm blind, he'll—" "No, someone took it." "How can you be sure?" "Because they took my bag too." Joe looks around, as though trying to figure out what you're talking about. Then his eyes pop, and he yanks open the truck door to look in the floorboards and under the seat bench. "Your book!" he cries. "They took it too?" "I guess. After you went in the house, I got in the truck to start it, and that's when I noticed—" "But it was worth hundreds! Thousands!" "So was your bike, Joe." "No no, that was used, it was only worth, like, thirty bucks, tops. But your book, man, you were gonna sell it back to that professor!" He sounds even more angry and horrified than you. * * * * * There's nothing to do, though, but drive out to the pizza place to pick up your pizza, and you are both of you silent and miserable on the drive out and back. Frank is very sympathetic to you—and much less sympathetic to his brother, who he says was careless for leaving the bike where anyone could grab it. "Maybe it and your bag will turn up," he says as you're getting ready to leave after consuming one-third of a large pizza with them. "I mean, whoever took it probably doesn't know it's valuable, and maybe they'll chuck it away. Joe's bike is gone, though," he adds with a curl of his lip. Joe snarls back at him. Afterward, as you're getting into your truck, Joe comes trotting out to stop you. "Listen," he pants, "it's all my fault your bag got stolen," he says. "They wouldn'a stopped to look in your cab except they saw my bike, an' I guess they thought there was something else maybe in the cab." "I should've locked the doors," you tell him. "Well, anyways, we're still on for the party Wednesday," he says, "an' me and Frank, we go jogging twice a day in the neighborhood, we'll keep an eye out for your bag, in case they just threw it away when they saw they didn't want it. Okay?" * * * * * And that is the last you ever see or hear of that crazy book you found in the bookstore. Frank and Joe tell you that they looked around the neighborhood but never saw anything. They try to make you some amends by buying you a new backpack, which is a thoughtful gesture, you suppose, though they have to drop it off at your house instead of giving it to you at the party, because your dad came down on you hard after your being out late on Sunday, and took away your truck keys so that you had to ride the bus to and from school all week. After your grounding was over, though, Joe tried nudging you and Trixie together, and you do go out on a date with her the following week. But it's hard keeping in contact with each other when you go to different schools. You don't want to bother her with a lot of texts, so you don't send very many. Later you learn that she thought you just weren't interested in her, which is why she started dating another guy, one who goes to Eastman. Only a week after you met them, Joe calls you up to say that he and his brother will be pulling out of school and moving out of town in a few days: that week-long trip of their dad's was to investigate a new job, which he took. He invites you out for one last "kick-ass, blow-out party" with him and his friends. You demur, though wishing him the best of luck. There is one curious epilogue to the whole affair, which puts your loss in some perspective. Though you never pay much attention to the local news, your ears perk up at dinner one night when your dad mentions a "professor of archaeology" at the university, and the mystery surrounding his disappearance. That piques your interest, so you look it up online. The gist is that a few days after Halloween, the house of Aubrey Blackwell, a professor at the local college, burned down under mysterious circumstances. This would have been news enough, as the house was of local historical significance. More sinister was the evidence that the fire was the result of arson, with suspicion focusing on the professor, who vanished at around the same time. Whether he set the fire himself, for unknown reasons of his own, or was another victim of those who did, is not clear, and you never do find out what the story was. The End |
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