Crimes of Magic: The Witch's Artifact

  Chapter 11

  I strained to look all around us as the shimmering began to subside. There was no one else in the room. I started to call for Rachel, and then thought better of it. I was standing and Gregor was lying inside a double circle much like the one that had been drawn in chalk on the floor of Moonstone’s meeting room, but this circle was part of the pattern of the tile floor. I started to walk away from Gregor and then remembered to pick up all the magical items from the floor and put them in my pockets.

  The room I was in looked like a combination workshop and laboratory. There was a large worktable halfway between one wall and the magic circle. Along that wall were built-in shelves and drawers. There were lots of decorations that looked like they were more for show than for utility. A large tapestry that looked like it might have been in a “sword and sorcery” movie covered one wall.

  There was no overhead light in the high-ceilinged room, but lots of electric wall sconces, made to look like torches, illuminated the room. The worktable had an electric chandelier hanging above it for illumination.

  The walls, other than the tapestry-covered wall, were decorated with medieval weaponry: swords, pikes, shields, etc. It had a kind of nerdy man-cave decor, more appropriate to playing Dungeons and Dragons than crafting magical devices, I thought.

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t stand around and gawk. I had a princess to rescue. There were only two doors, so I opened one of them. It was a large closet, and there was Rachel tied up on the floor with medical adhesive tape over her mouth.

  Her eyes grew wide with surprise, and I gently pulled the tape off of her mouth.

  “Professor! Thank God you’re here! How did you find me?”

  “Buster brought me,” I said as I began to untie her.

  “Where are we?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know, but it looks like we fell into a game of Dungeons and Dragons. This is a pretty nice closet. Let’s get you out and put Buster in. By the way, Buster says his name is Gregor.”

  I dragged Gregor, who was just now showing signs of life, into the closet and closed the door.

  “OK,” I said. “This is Plan B. I did my part. Now what do we do?”

  “My God, Professor, you’re amazing. You saved my ass.”

  I spent a second relishing the mental image, and then replied, “We’re not out of the woods yet, Princess, and I’m pretty much out of ideas. I think I can teleport us back to Moonstone if we have to resort to that. Gregor taught me how to do it, and I have all his paraphernalia.”

  “Do you have the artifact?”

  “No.”

  “How about my gun?”

  “No. Nothing with iron in it made it through the teleportation.”

  “Well that explains why my bra is broken. Turn around.”

  “What?”

  “Turn around, I have to get out of this broken bra.”

  I turned around and in about six seconds Rachel said, “OK. You can turn back around now.”

  Rachel stood there in her white tee shirt, tights and skirt with her bra in her hand.

  I realized that I was staring at her, so I said the first thing I could think of, “I can’t believe how fast you got that bra off.”

  “It’s pretty easy when the hooks are missing,” she said as she dropped the bra onto the floor. “Besides, I’ve had lots of practice.”

  Lack of practice, that was my problem.

  “We need to find that artifact and find out where we are,” Rachel said.

  “Let’s see what’s on the other side of that door,” I suggested.

  We walked across the lair, which was about the size of a three-car garage, and opened the second door. Outside was a hallway. Our door was at the end of the hall, and the other end had an open arched doorway through which we could see a furnished room. Each side of the hallway had two closed doors in the wall. We walked the twenty feet to the other end of the hall and entered a library. The library was smaller than the workshop and was decorated in a nineteenth century men’s club style. There were several chairs upholstered in leather, each with a mahogany end table beside it. The floor was carpeted with a large, expensive-looking oriental rug. There was a closed door at the other end of the room, and we opened it and entered a vestibule with a staircase on one side and what looked like an exterior door ahead of us.

  We opened the exterior door and were greeted with a blast of cold air. It was snowing outside which told me we were still in the northern hemisphere and in a place with a less temperate climate than Portland, or maybe at a higher altitude. It was daytime here, but the sky was overcast, and I couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon. It was about 11 pm in Portland, so we were roughly on the other side of the world.

  We seemed to be in a suburban residential area. A long driveway led to a street with houses on the other side. We walked across the large covered porch and down steps to a cobblestone parking area. I turned around and looked at the front of the house. On the front of the roof over the porch was a sign with three words painted in raised letters.

  “We’re in Russia,” I said.

  “Then I guess a taxi is out of the question,” Rachel replied. “Let’s get back inside. I’m freezing.”

  Oh yes, I can see that, I thought to myself, but I managed not to say it out loud.

  As we re-entered the house, Rachel remarked, “Where is everybody? I’m not complaining, it just seems strange to be the only people in this big house.”

  “I’m afraid that might change,” I said. “Gregor said he was on a tight schedule. Unless he was lying, something may be happening here soon.”

  “Let’s get to work then,” Rachel said. “Let’s see if we can find that artifact. It will probably have Gregor’s fingerprints on it. If his prints are also on the murder weapon, I think the police will have a pretty good case against him.”

  “Yes, the police in Portland would. We’re in Russia.”

  “No problem, Professor. You can just beam us all back to Portland. Just like Captain Pickard.”

  I really thought of myself as more of a William Shatner than a Patrick Stewart. After all, my hair is thick, like Shatner’s, or like his toupee, depending on what you believe.

  “Let’s get back to Gregor’s lair and find that artifact,” Rachel said. “Then it’s back to Portland for us all.”

  Searching Gregor’s lair was going to be difficult judging by the number of drawers, cabinets, shelves and boxes in the room. “Where should we start?” I asked.

  “We shouldn’t have to search everything,” Rachel said. “The artifact is new to Gregor, and it’s something he was willing to kill for. It will either be close at hand or locked away in a vault. Let’s hope it’s not in a vault.”

  “Let’s check that worktable,” I suggested. I opened the top drawer of the table, and there it was, the artifact, resting on a velvet cloth. Rachel used the cloth to take the artifact without actually touching it, and wrapped the cloth around the object.

  “OK, let’s get Gregor,” Rachel said.

  “What about all this other stuff in here?” I protested. “This is some neat looking paraphernalia. Who knows what kinds of powers it has.”

  “Leave it, Professor. We aren’t thieves. We have to stick to the mission, which is to catch Beth’s killer and get evidence to convict him. I say ‘Mission accomplished,’ time to go home.”

  “Of course, you’re right,” I agreed reluctantly. I didn’t bring up the fact that my pockets were full of Gregor’s magical accessories.

  “I’ll drag Gregor back into the circle. It’s too bad I don’t have your stun gun. It really facilitates cooperation.”

  We went to the closet, opened the door, and Gregor was gone.

  “That damn magician has pulled a disappearing act,” Rachel said. “Where could he have gone?”

  “Right behind you,” came a familiar Russian voice.

  Rachel and I whirled around and
saw two men. The shorter one, Gregor, was wearing his black ninja outfit, and the taller man was dressed similarly in burgundy.

  “You have something that belongs to me, young lady. Hand over now,” Gregor said.

  Gregor’s sidekick was pointing a black pistol at Rachel and me.

  “It’s not yours, Gregor, if that’s really your name,” Rachel said. “It belongs to the woman you killed and I’ve been hired to retrieve it.”

  “Previous owner is dead,” Gregor said. “I am current owner. Hand over or my associate will shoot you both.”

  “You’re using a gun?” Rachel said incredulously. “Isn’t a gun a little mundane for a great magician?”

  “Mundane but effective. This is last chance. Hand over now.”

  Reluctantly, Rachel handed the artifact to Gregor.

  “Who are you anyway?” she asked.

  “As I have said, I am Gregor; I am doctor. Not doctor like in hospital, I am Doctor of Thaumaturgy.”

  “Thaumaturgy?” Rachel said quizzically.

  “Thaumaturgy is one of the magical arts,” I chimed in. “The simplest of the magical arts, I believe. It deals with transitory magic, sometimes mechanical magic or sympathetic magic.”

  “So, you are not cowboy after all, mister lasso man,” chided Gregor.

  Me and my big mouth.

  “I think we have heard enough from lovely detective and cowboy,” declared Gregor. “Take them to dungeon. Meeting will begin soon.”

  Dungeon? He had to be kidding. Had we been transported into a cliché? This was looking more like a B movie on the SyFy channel than like a reality show.

  Gregor’s minion marched us down a stairway at gunpoint. The dungeon turned out to be a storage area in the basement. It was constructed of heavy-duty wire fencing stapled to two-by-fours. It would have made a good pit bull cage. It was empty except for us, so we sat on the floor.

  “Can you believe this guy?” Rachel said in an exasperated tone. “He’s like a cartoon magician.”

  “He’s the Boris Badenov of magicians,” I added, building on the cartoon simile.”

  “Boris who?”

  “I guess you’re too young for Rocky and Bullwinkle, a cartoon series in the sixties. Rocky was a flying squirrel and Bullwinkle was a moose. Boris Badenov was their nemesis, a Russian spy.”

  “This was the nineteen sixties?”

  “Yes it was the nineteen sixties, smart ass. They made a movie out of it about twenty years ago. Jason Alexander played Boris. You millennials have no culture.”

  “Enough trivia, Professor. Let’s see about getting out of here. I’m thinking you didn’t bring wire cutters.”

  “No. Ferrous objects wouldn’t make it through teleportation. Didn’t you notice my pants?”

  “Why are you wearing pajama pants instead of your jeans?”

  “They’re not pajamas, they’re slip-on cargo pants. My jeans would have had the same problem as your bra—no zipper or waist button once I got here. This was the only thing with pockets and no metal that I had in my bag. Also, I must say, I think your bra is entirely unnecessary.”

  “Professor! Keep your mind on our problems, and examine this cell instead of my boobs.”

  “Just saying...”

  Although our cell may have appeared to be improvised incarceration, closer examination revealed it to be very well constructed. The vertical wooden supports were firmly attached to the cement floor and to the rafters of the ceiling. They may have been constructed to support regular sheetrock walls rather than the welded wire fencing that was attached to them now. The wire fencing would have resisted normal wire cutters, although bolt cutters, if we had them, would have made quick work of it. The door was also made of two-by-fours and wire fencing with heavy hinges and a large padlock.

  “This looks pretty solid to me,” I said. “I’m afraid the only place we’ll be able to go is Portland. Our magical Boris Badenov didn’t even search us. I have all the items Gregor used to transport himself into Moonstone’s meeting room, including the piece of cabinet leg that will be our homing beacon.”

  “Are you sure you know how to do it?”

  “Gregor had to tell me how to do it, because I had his hands cuffed behind him. He had already agreed that I could keep him handcuffed, because he knew the cuffs wouldn’t make it with us here. I have excellent attention to detail, and I remember everything I did.”

  “Well start spelling, Professor. Get us out of here.”

  I took the string and charcoal pencil from my pocket and, with Rachel’s help, used the string as a radius to draw two concentric circles. Next I arranged all the symbolic items in their proper places within the circle. I placed the piece of cabinet leg on top of the wooden X in the center of the circle.

  “OK, all I have to do now is move these three items into a straight line along this radius and away we go.”

  Rachel moved into the circle with me and I was about to invoke the spell when Rachel said, “Wait a minute, Professor. We have to be able to come back here. We need something like the piece of cabinet leg to use as a homing beacon.”

  “I’m on it,” I said, and I took out my white handkerchief—a gentleman always carries a handkerchief—and placed it flat on the floor. I drew four random oblique lines on it with my charcoal pencil.

  “That ought to guarantee that it’s unique,” I said.

  Then I found a protruding piece of the wire fencing that had been cut to make the cage door, and I used it to raggedly tear the handkerchief roughly in half. I put one half in my pocket, and then I stuffed the other half into the crack between the two-by-four over the door and the ceiling.

  “That should be sufficient,” I said.

  And with that, I invoked the spell and, shimmer, flash, shimmer, we were back in Moonstone’s meeting room.

  “Good work, Professor. I can see that you may be handy to keep around.”

  Handy indeed, I thought. It was nice to be needed, or at least to be handy.

  I picked up all the magical items, which, of course, had come through with us, and put them in my pockets.

  “Where’s my gun and my purse?” Rachel asked.

  “I put all our stuff in the duffel bags,” I said, and I retrieved them from the closet. Rachel opened her bag saw the pistol, cuffs and stun gun, and took out her purse.

  “Do you think Gregor will follow us?” Rachel asked.

  “I doubt that he can find his way back to the store. I have the chunk of cabinet leg in my pocket. Even if he could come back to the store, he wouldn’t be able to find us. For all he knows, I’m Beth’s father. He knows you’re a detective, but it would be hard to trace you to the Grey Goose. I think we have some time for you to plot our next move.”

  “Let’s hit the road then,” Rachel said as she took her car keys and the store key from her purse.

  I picked up both duffels and followed Rachel down the street to her car.

  By this time, it was early morning in Portland, and we realized that we were dog tired.

  “I was pretty scared when Gregor grabbed me and got my stun gun,” Rachel said as we were driving away from Moonstone. “It was very disorienting when I saw that flash of light and then found myself on the floor of Gregor’s bat cave. Before I knew what was happening, he jumped out of the circle and grabbed a gun from a drawer in that worktable. He made me lay face down on the floor while he tied me up. That little guy can move fast.”

  “I was scared when you disappeared, too,” I said. “It took me a while to come up with a plan. When I noticed the Coriolis was still swinging in wide, fast circles, I figured Gregor was coming back to search for the computer.”

  “How did you get the drop on him, Professor?”

  “I used the rope I brought to lasso him. He didn’t know I was waiting for him, so I caught him by surprise. Then I zapped him with the stun gun and tied him up.”

  “That’s why Gregor called you ‘cowboy.
’ Who did you tell him you were?”

  “I said I was Beth’s father. It was all I could think of at the time. I needed some excuse for being in the store. I told him I hired you to find her killer.”

  “That was some quick thinking, Professor. I’m proud of you.”

  I was pretty proud of myself.

  After Rachel drove us back to the Goose, I walked Rachel to her apartment door, and Caite greeted us.

  “Thank the goddess you’re safe,” Caite exclaimed. “I was worried sick. Where have you been all night, and where is your bra?”

  “Is it that obvious?” Rachel grumbled.

  “Well duh! Just look at yourself.”

  “Thanks for your concern, Caite, but I need a shower and a nap. I’ll fill you in later.”

  And with that, Caite and the shapely Miss Chase disappeared into her apartment.

  It turns out that I, too, needed a shower—a cold one, but more than that, I needed sleep. After I went up to my apartment, I undressed and crawled into bed.