The Wiccan Diaries

  That if I looked hard enough around the city, I was almost certain to find figures of animals––in particular cats––adorned on the sides of buildings. In fountains. Tucked away in corners. Lions, tigers––not to mention the domesticated cats that stared at you like living sculptures.

  I noticed that each figure held a shield, like a crest, and that on each shield was a symbol. I recognized the one the man carried instantly. It was the symbol for vampire.

  The other one, however, held a symbol that I had seen somewhere before, but couldn’t quite grasp.

  “It’s a heptagram,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned; Marek was watching me from the dark.

  The pinpoints of his eyes were like two brilliant flames amid the dust motes and swirling chaos, and turbulent recollections, of my imagination. For I realized where I had seen that heptagram before.

  At La Luna Blu. The club that Ballard’s sister Lia, and her boyfriend Gaven hung out at––along with the rest of their motorcycle gang!

  I turned back around. Marek walked until he stood at my side. Together, we looked up at the stained glass window, neither one of us speaking. I hadn’t heard him come in.

  I couldn’t help noticing how the man and almost-man looked hostile toward one another, in the stained glass, that they were carrying shields––implements of war.

  But it was the almost-man that interested me. He was man-shaped but with the qualities of an animal. His hands were half-claws and his eyes feral. He had more of a stalking shape than the vampire––and he crouched as if he would spring. He was much taller. Even in a crouch, he stood eye to eye with the vampire.

  Ballard’s story about Romulus and Remus was all wrong. Romulus and Remus had been suckled by a she-wolf. They would have been werewolves––not these creatures. Whatever these were, they weren’t werewolves!

  I hissed.

  “I don’t think he knows, exactly,” said Marek.

  Now that I was on the cusp of knowledge, I didn’t want to lose my edge. “Who doesn’t know what, precisely?”

  “Your friend, Ballard. I don’t think he knows what he is.”

  This was unexpected. I turned to look up at Marek. He was so tall the rest of him disappeared into shadow; I realized the light filtering through the stained glass must have been the moon. Had Marek been living here this whole time? I hadn’t seen him since the night he saved my life.

  All these vampires––constantly saving my life.

  “I Gatti... they have something similar on their door,” I said.

  “That’s why I don’t go there,” he said.

  He must mean Trastevere, I thought.

  He waited for me. I thought about what to say next. I realized that he was leaving it up to me––that if I was going to probe, it was going to be my choice, not his.

  “Lennox says you work for the Lenoir. What is it you do for them, anyway, M-Marek?”

  He noticed the hitch in my voice––I wasn’t as bold as I thought.

  “You’re very brave,” he said.

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I don’t usually threaten people, no. It was an observation; spot-on, I might add. This is the threat: that you will be brave with the wrong vampire. You should ask me about the glass.”

  He spoke slowly, as if every uttered line was a set of doors I had come to, and must choose for myself, which way to go. They were not all civilized doors, either. I sensed he had some ones that would trap me, if I took them.

  “I don’t betray confidences,” I said.

  “But is it a confidence, if you decipher it for yourself? I suppose it is a trade. Cleverness for consequences,” he said. “You see too much. An unfortunate fact for vampires. However, you show judgment in your choice of silences. That makes you even more clever than just a fact-gatherer, because you have some sense of retribution––of comeuppance. It is reserved for the false.”

  “I’m not gonna talk about vampires!” I said.

  “We’re talking about Ballard.”

  “What is Ballard?”

  “I don’t think he knows,” he said again. It was annoying talking to him. Worse, because he was so unbelievably good-looking and, despite what he said, politely rude.

  He was warning me off face values. Being in his presence was like being lightheaded. He made me dizzy.

  “Are all vampires so, I don’t know, insane?” I said. “They never tell you what they’re thinking. They’re just cryptic all the time!”

  “Have you ever had associations with more to lose? With more power?” asked Marek.

  I thought about that. St. Martley’s had taught me crypticness myself.

  “I come from somewhere, too,” I said.

  “Ah. So we are both travelers in foreign lands. When I am in my own backyard, I do as I please, when I am in Rome...”

  “Cryptic again.”

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  I said of the stained glass: “They’re a vampire and something else. All I can think is the vampire is the warrior of the dark, and the other one is meeting it on the field of combat. Is it Light’s assassin?”

  “The story,” he said. “We should have intervened sooner. If we had, you wouldn’t have such half-co––fairytale notions in your head.”

  “Are you saying that story wasn’t true?” I said, beginning to realize I was talking to a Sphinx.

  “It had some plot holes,” said Marek.

  I inquired as to what these plot holes may have been. He said something about personification, “When really, vampires aren’t human. But in its marrow, it’s true enough.”

  This was rather difficult; I had to think about it some more. “So what are you saying?” I asked.

  “I’m saying that there was a third creature, the storyteller Galaxy talked about,” said Marek.

  That was a sentence I wasn’t ever going to hear again. I plundered my memory-hoard for some signpost to the right answer. Nothing. Blank.

  “And still a healthy dose of unreality,” said Marek. “Your mind won’t let you acknowledge what’s staring you in the face.”

  “A vampire?” I said. He laughed. His eyes were much more soulful than I remembered. There was more to this Marek than what I had thought at first.

  He asked me a question.

  “I think I don’t lie to myself unless the alternative is to come face to face with something really awful,” I said. “In which case, if I survived, have I played a mind game on myself, and can’t remember what really happened after all?”

  “You out-cryptic cryptic,” he said.

  “It’s a transformer, a shapeshifter,” I said, pointing to the stained glass window.

  “Tell me,” said Marek, “why, in nature, will an animal transform? A chameleon will change its color. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly.”

  “But we’re talking about human beings, not animals. Not bugs and reptiles, either.”

  “We’ll let proverbs settle it. A dog is what? Man’s best friend. But a cat can look at a king. A leopard, meanwhile, cannot change its spots. And while a cat is away, the mice will play. I prefer the Italian,” said Marek. “‘Happy is the home with at least one cat.’ Are you cat-ching on? Beware of people who dislike cats. For, in a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats. Curiosity killed the cat. And there are many ways of skinning them.”

  “But a cat has nine lives,” I said, unsure of what we were speaking about exactly.

  “All cats look gray in the dark. Maybe you’re mistaking one for many of them,” said Marek.

  “When rats infest the Palace,” I said, “a lame cat is better than the swiftest horse.”

  “True. But the cat who frightens the mice away is as good as the one who eats them––” He walked away.

  * * *

  I was alone in the maze of cardboard, dust, and abstractness, with no clear picture of how he had gotten so far into my head, but with the clear sense that he was there now.

  Marek.

  I left
the place as fast as I could, but there was no catching up to him. He would be off, prowling the night, doing whatever it was he and Lennox got up to. Like Lennox said: Investigating their own avenues. I suddenly realized that I was lost.

  “There you are,” said Lennox.

  I turned and found him.

  “I just saw Marek,” he said. “He didn’t bother you, did he?”

  “No, of course not,” I said with some chagrin. “Why would you say that?”

  But he didn’t answer. “We’ve had a breakthrough. Come on,” he said. He led me back to the library; it was my least favorite room.

  * * *

  Ballard rubbed his eyes, blearily. “So we think we know where he is. It’s just a matter of going there. Infester,” he said, when he saw I wasn’t following along. My head was too full of other things.

  “Oh. Right. Good,” I said, remembering the half-man-half-cat, and wondering if Ballard was one. So far as I knew, he had never transformed in my presence, other than becoming more dear to me. And as for Lia and Gaven and I Gatti––their gang did mean ‘The Cats.’

  Maybe I was catching on

  Chapter 17 – Halsey

  It was the first day of August, when we finally set out to find Infester. It was Ballard, myself, Lennox, and also Marek––he had decided to accompany us. Ballard gave Lia an ultimatum.

  “Everyone else deserves a holiday, so do I!” he shouted. This would be a working holiday, away from the shop.

  It was Ballard who had pieced everything together. Apparently, The Urban 411 was like a map––it led to its creator.

  Infester’s idea was that anyone who found him would be worth knowing, particularly in a foxhole, when worst came to worst.

  “Apparently the Suck has a basis in ancient lore,” said Ballard, as we descended the stone steps, to where Lennox’s car was at. The sun had chosen to come out today, and the weatherman expected high eighties.

  I thought, if there were zombies, it would be a hot box––they would be itching to get out and about, wherever they were. But we were going into the zombies’ den, if we could find it. For that, we needed Infester.

  “There was such a thing as blood guilt,” jabbered Ballard, “which is why rulers oftentimes elected others to do their dirty work for them––karmically, it kept their hands clean. I read one scribe, who said vampirism was a curse the gods laid upon mortals who killed another without getting their hands wet. The gods marveled that such men could sentence others to die. So they gave them thirst, and need of blood, hoping it would sate their bloodthirstiness. Instead, it just made them hungrier.”

  “That sounds about right,” said Marek, who laughed in spite of himself.

  Ballard, discussing vampires with two....

  “I think we just exist,” said Lennox, taking the pragmatic point of view. “But I think you’re right about the disease being related to vampires.”

  “Maybe it’s our comeuppance,” said Marek, winking at me. The prospect of adventure had awoken him. I smiled sheepishly back as we got into the car.

  There was smog without the congestion. The usually messy traffic was gone.

  “This kind of worked out, didn’t it?” I said. “If we have to battle an Undead Army, I mean.” I was only half serious.

  “Fewer people will die,” agreed Lennox. Marek said nothing.

  * * *

  Ballard sipped his soft drink, getting the last of the soda out of the ice with his straw. I looked on, rolling my eyes at him, and ate my own happy meal. There was something so wrong about going through the drive-thru with supernatural creatures that weren’t supposed to exist. I included myself among them. When was I going to come clean to Lennox about me being potentially a witch?

  He deserved to know, didn’t he?

  “So I went online to do some research,” said Ballard. “They put him in a hospital for crazy people, thirty years ago. He swore the Apocalypse was upon us. This is Infester I’m talking about. There was something about warriors and being sent down into hell––or a hell––to do battle with unspecified baddies. Supposedly, he broke out––from the mental hospital, not hell. So now, I guess Infester’s on the run.”

  “But where do we find him?” asked Lennox.

  “I thought we were going to kill something today,” said Marek. He was so huge he was getting claustrophobic.

  “I’m sure he gets tired of everyone calling him crazy. I bet he just wants to be left alone,” I said. “Infester. He probably doesn’t make it easy for people to find him. I know I wouldn’t. I would hate having people gawk at me, waiting for me to do something ‘crazy.’”

  “Crazy is knowing something and believing in it, when other people do not,” said Marek, hoping to get a gold star.

  “Fat lot of good that does us,” said Ballard.

  I picked the pickles out of my cheeseburger and wiped my hands on a napkin. “Boys! We just need to use our heads,” I said.

  Lennox found a nice traffic circle and we drove in it, around and around, with the sunlight glaring off the hood.

  I grabbed Infester’s zombie book, The 411, from Ballard, and proceeded to read from it, aloud. “‘Vigilance is the difference from falling (being bitten),’ blah blah blah, ‘in the first wave, and surviving the onslaught to regroup. In any simulation of the Apocalypse, the first seventy-two hours is like Nagasaki and Hiroshima... It is like Chernobyl and the Aswan Dam. Like the outbreak of some terrible new Plague and the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.’”

  “There. Go back to that,” said Ballard.

  I read it again. “What is it?” I said.

  “Remember that story I told you about Romulus and Remus? This may be crazy, but the guy does sound like a historian,” said Ballard. “He talks about all those disasters, right?”

  Marek and Lennox listened up.

  “Well, anyway, what about disasters that have struck Rome?” asked Ballard.

  “Have there been?” I asked.

  “I don’t get it,” said Marek.

  “Rome has been sacked a bunch of times,” said Ballard. “The history of Rome is in its roads––they were built to carry troops to parts unknown. Like that road I showed you. Via Appia Antica. Conquerors would return triumphant––gold, jewels, slaves. But there was a flip side. The roads could bring sackers back.”

  He explained about the Vandals and the Visigoths, and a bunch of other people I had never heard about before, laying siege to the city.

  “Something similar happened during Romulus’s reign. There weren’t enough women for the outlaw men, so they kidnapped them from a neighboring tribe. The Sabines.

  “Long story short, the fathers of the Sabines got real angry, and decided to attack Rome; they got a big army together and marched on it.

  “The husbands were nearly defeated and had to fall back to the Capitoline Hill. This is where they made their last stand. They would have fallen, but the kidnapped women, now their wives, begged both sides to reconcile and end the fight. So that’s what happened.

  “My point is,” said Ballard, as we drove around and around, “when Rome was attacked, when Rome was under siege, its founder, Romulus, holed up at the Capitol; it was like the Alamo. Then, of course, they all joined sides, and Rome became this great place. But Infester, being historically minded, might be there. At the Capitol. Waiting to do like Romulus did. Dig into Rome’s heart and make his final stand. And it sounds like he also has a computer. He runs simulations of the Apocalypse?”

  He slurped his soda and shut up.

  * * *

  By the afternoon, I was ready to go home. The pair of eyes on the cover of the book mocked me the same way the Codex did––like they were staring at me, taunting me with forbidden knowledge, knowledge I couldn’t acquire.

  In one eye was a sun––it could be going down or coming up. I couldn’t tell. In the other, a half moon.

  Lennox said something about graffiti. He saw it in the subway, he said. The moon and the sun would look at you
from weird places where they had been spray-painted, he said.

  The moon and the sun were ubiquitous. He felt like they were following him wherever he went, like an evil monster in a terrible nightmare. They were spray-painted everywhere. Maybe it was Infester’s way of advertising, I said. Inwardly I rejoiced at his revealing he thought monsters contained distinctions––that there could be good monsters, and bad monsters.

  It was Ballard who said we should follow the signs. “They’re graffiti, yes, but maybe they lead somewhere,” he said. We had nothing else to go on. I was trying to deconstruct the book cover. The best I could come up with was that the sun was going down on life as we knew it.

  Maybe it was like a litmus for whoever got their hands on it. Was the sun setting? Or was it rising from a dark abyss, surviving?

  “Survivor Bros,” I said, referring to the name of the publisher. “Maybe there are two of them. Bros,” I said. “Maybe Ballard is correct, and the name of the company is a direct reference to Romulus and Remus. They were brothers who survived, weren’t they?”

  “Actually, Romulus killed Remus,” said Ballard. He had told me that before.

  “I just hope there aren’t two of them,” said Marek. “Or worse: one with a split personality disorder. He sounds cracked. And I don’t like him publishing stuff he shouldn’t be.”

  Lennox parked the car. The sun was starting to go down. We’d been driving around all day.

  “Check it out,” he said.

  Anyone else would have missed it: a tiny pair of eyes scraped onto a bench. I had to get out of the car and walk up to it before I could tell. The artwork was very crudely done, but it was there. A perfect replica of sorts, of the cover of the book.

  Well, almost perfect.

  We were standing in front of the bench, when I realized what was wrong with it.

  “Look!” I said. I tapped the cover of the book with my index finger.

  “What about it?” said Lennox.

  I was so excited, I could hardly take it. “On the cover of the book,” I said, “the eye with the moon in it is half full, neither one way or the other.”