“Weird, isn’t it?” Tor said. “You see now why I wanted to hire you?”
“I sure do.”
When I tossed the dish towel onto the coffee table, the scroll stayed motionless, indifferent to the movement of the air. I grabbed the sketchbook and a stick of rust Conté and sat down next to Tor to draw. I kept my eyes fixed on the scroll and let my hand do what it wanted. As soon as I finished, the scroll disappeared with a loud popping sound, as if it were a balloon stuck by a pin.
“Huh,” Tor said. “They didn’t do that before.”
When I looked at the paper, I saw no trace of the scroll. I’d drawn a line of six runes arranged inside a narrow rectangle, three marks, then a blank space, then three more. I tore off the sheet and handed the drawing to Tor.
“Whoever this is,” he said, “he’s really pissed at me.”
“What are they? Evil runes?”
“Not in themselves. There’s no such thing as an evil rune.” He paused for a smile. “They’re basically letters, you know, and you can spell all sorts of things with the same set of letters. Live is evil spelled backwards—you must have heard that kind of dumb joke.”
“Yeah, I have. So this spells out something not nice.”
“Not a real word, but a message anyway.” He pointed to the rectangle I’d drawn. “This is called a tine or a stave. Normally you’d inscribe your talisman or curse on a little piece of wood.” He pointed to each rune in turn. “Hail, Ice, Need. The blank space could represent a concept called Wyrd. Some runesters use a blank that way, anyway. Then we have Water reversed, Cart reversed, Thorn reversed. It’s a runescript that’s meant to bring me bad luck.”
Someone laughed. I looked up to see a misty figure drifting back and forth in front of the fireplace. I began to draw what appeared to be a very thin male ghost dressed like a Viking warrior. What ended up on the sheet of paper, however, was a pair of staring eyes. As soon as I showed the sketch to Tor, the apparition disappeared.
“This could get really creepy really fast,” I said.
“It did last month, yeah. That’s why I decided to look for some help. You, as it turned out. Huh. When you reveal what they actually are, they disappear.”
“Maybe it means they won’t work if you know what they are.”
“That would be good. Probably too good to be true, though.”
Several more sets of runes appeared that evening. First one of the large pottery jars, shaped like a Roman amphora, appeared in the middle of the kitchen when Tor went to pour himself a glass of mineral water. My sketch revealed another tine and the same six runes that had appeared on the earlier scroll.
“I don’t get this,” I told him. “What does this person want to accomplish by doing this? He could just, y’know, text you if he’s got a message for you.”
“You can’t text runes!”
“So the runes are what’s important?”
“I’d guess. He wants to scare me, I suppose, or just put the harmful runescript into my house.” Tor shook his head and held out his hands palm-up. “I don’t understand it at all.”
Which was not reassuring.
A little later, I went to use the bathroom and discovered a rose bush growing out of the bathtub. I ran into my bedroom and grabbed a small sketch pad to capture what turned out to be a different phenomenon altogether. This time I drew a withered, deformed plant, some species I didn’t recognize. Instead of roses, the attached blooms were giant ears. When I finished what I’d gone in there for, I brought the drawing back to Tor.
“It’s kind of like deadly nightshade,” he said. “When I was a teen-ager I studied herbal magics, and you learn what to avoid if you find it.”
“I didn’t think stuff like that grew around here.”
“It doesn’t, not naturally, but you never know what someone might plant in a garden. Plants escape, you know, or their seeds and shoots do, I should say. Look at all the scotch broom in California.”
“I’d rather not. I’m allergic to it.”
“So are most people. That’s what I mean. You never know what’s volunteered out in the hills. I guess this apparition was a threat, saying he wants to poison me. I don’t get the ears, though. They look stuck on. Not a real part of the plant.”
“Yeah, an afterthought, sort of.”
We spent a jittery evening, waiting and watching, but no more illusions appeared. Since I’d had a long day, what with my class, I felt too tired to risk staying up all night. Around two in the morning I took the pad and Conté and went to my room to go to bed. When I glanced at the writing desk, I saw that the green lion motif had vanished.
In its place stood the Greek god Hermes, holding up his snake-wound staff. The pink shrimp had swum away, and white crows had flown in to form the outer circle. I grabbed the sketch pad and drew the images, which stayed exactly the same as they looked on the desk. No illusions these—under the umpteen coats of varnish the paper images had managed to change their form and coloration.
I lifted the lid but found the same sun in the middle of the same zodiac and the same yellow fish. I did notice, however, that the sign of Leo shone with a gold leaf background, brighter than all the rest. I had the awful feeling that when the sun moved into Virgo, the desk would highlight that sign instead. Tor’s sister must have had as much magical power as he did. I wondered about their mother. Was she a sorcerer, as well? A family like that, no wonder they lived out in the countryside, away from other people.
When I got into bed, I spent a restless few minutes wondering if I could possibly go to sleep. At any minute some weird object might materialize in the bedroom. My long day, however, caught up with me, and I drifted off. When I woke, the drapes glowed from the perfectly natural sunlight behind them. I checked the time on my phone: 10:30. I got up and dressed.
In the kitchen Tor was making coffee cake with almonds and raisins. He poured me coffee, added a lot of milk, and handed the mug to me without my asking. He put the pan of batter into the oven, then sat down next to me at the breakfast bar.
“Did you see anything more last night?” he said.
“Yeah, the decoupage on your sister’s desk changed.”
“It does that. It’s an alchemical barometer.”
“A what?”
“The symbols tell you what’s going on in the house. Psychically, that is. It displays images from old alchemical texts. The ones appropriate to the energy flow.”
I stared. I was afraid to ask him how.
“But last night,” Tor went on. “What did it show you?”
“Hermes with his snake staff.”
“Okay. That means the illusions came from a powerful sorcerer.” He snorted. “We knew that already. The barometer’s real literal-minded sometimes.”
This statement made as much sense as everything else that had happened: not much.
“Anyway,” Tor continued, “I didn’t see any more illusions, either. I’m really surprised. Last month the damn things paraded back and forth all night.”
“Do you think they might have showed up downstairs?”
“I doubt it. Before I started dinner last night, I set a lot of heavy wards. I can’t set them up here, unfortunately, not and expect either of us to be able to think straight.”
The way he was smiling at me made me uneasy. Did he suspect that I had a secret? Maybe only people who had strange powers and stranger secrets could be affected by wards.
“Do wards have that effect on everyone?” I said.
“Oh yeah, or else why set them? A really powerful sorcerer could banish them, but most people would feel confused and uncomfortable. They wouldn’t know why.”
So I’d only been paranoid about it.
Tor yawned. “Speaking of confusion, I should take a nap. I stayed up till five. Once it was light, he couldn’t send any more. Major illusions like that, they’re too delicate to stand the sunlight and the—well, I guess we could call them the daytime energies. I don’t suppose you care about the technic
al details.”
Thanks to that word, energies, I did care. “This is interesting,” I said. “You mean like sunlight?”
“That, too. The world’s full of different kinds of energy. Some of them everyone knows about: light, electricity, x-rays, forces like that. But some are hidden. Those are the ones sorcery depends on. You learn to manipulate the hidden energies and use them.”
“Is it hard to learn?” Hope flared. “Does it take a long time?”
“Years. My father started teaching me when I was four.”
“That early?”
“Well, only fifteen minutes a day at first. By the time I was ten, it was up to six hours a day. Studying. Practicing. It’s like becoming a concert pianist. You’ve got to start real young, and you’ve got to work your ass off.”
Hope faded. I’d probably die before I could learn how to save my life. “Your father was another sorcerer, huh?”
“No, not really. He didn’t have much talent for it. He drank too much, aquavit, mostly, because he was so frustrated.” He paused for a heavy sigh. “It probably had something to do with his getting leukemia, all that drinking.”
“That’s really sad.”
“It was, yeah. His father, my Grandfather Halvar, was always disappointed in him. Still, my father knew how to teach. Those who can’t do, teach. Dad used to say that a lot.” Tor smiled faintly, then let the smile fade. “I don’t understand it. Usually the oldest son inherits the family talent, but my dad didn’t.”
“You’re the oldest?”
“Yeah, there’s just me and my sister.” He paused to yawn again. “I don’t know where she gets her talent from. It’s pretty strange stuff, what she can do.”
Judging from the decoupage on the writing desk, I could agree with that. Their family magic differed widely and wildly from the system my father had studied.
“I’ve really got to go get some sleep,” Tor said. “I set the timer on the oven. You can take that out when you hear the bell go off.”
“Won’t you want some of it?”
“I never eat breakfast.” He smiled at me. “But I thought you’d like some.”
I did. The coffee cake was wonderful. After I ate, I took a real bath, the first one I’d had in a long time, and soaked the last of the grease smell away in the black marble tub. Once my hair was dry, I took a nap myself in my room, to get ready for the night ahead. Both Tor and I woke up late in the afternoon. After dinner we sat in the living room and waited for illusions.
About a hour after sunset the first sound appeared. Laughter poured out of the kitchen, the creepy howling kind that serial killers make in horror flicks. It gave me nothing to draw, of course, so at first I thought we had no defense against it. When it ended, we heard a high-pitched whine like a security system gone crazy or a knife scraping across a china plate. Just when I thought I’d go crazy myself, it stopped. I gasped in relief, and Tor let his breath in a long sigh.
“That must have been hell’s hard work to create,” he said. “Maybe he’ll run out of energy.”
“You keep saying he. You don’t think a woman is doing this?”
“I don’t, no. I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure it has to be a man.”
“Not some girl you jilted, huh?”
“I’ve never jilted anyone. They always leave me.”
I’d been trying to joke, but his quiet answer rang true.
“Well, sorry,” I said. “I—”
The blast from a trumpet interrupted me, a sour, out of tune, squeaking blast that played the same four notes over and over. I clamped my hands over my ears. Tor muttered something that I couldn’t hear and got up.
He stalked into his bedroom and came back with a plastic bag of little orange cones: earplugs. When I tried a pair, they brought the sound down to a tolerable level. After a few more minutes, the trumpet fell silent. I took one of the plugs out. Tor did the same.
“We could leave, I suppose,” he said. “Go out somewhere for a drink.”
“Do you think this guy’s trying to make you do just that? Go out and leave the place unguarded?”
“If that’s his game, he doesn’t know about the security system. I’m hoping he’ll just give up. Judging from what my books tell me, creating sound illusions is a lot harder than the visual variety. Maybe he’ll run out of steam.”
We put the earplugs back in when the automobiles started gunning their engines, racing around the roof. The attack then switched to gunshots pinging off the appliances in the bathroom. We clamped our hands over our ears to supplement the foam plugs. When the gunshot noises stopped, the silence seemed to ring almost as loudly as they had.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was thinking about the things we saw yesterday. When I drew them, they went away. That gives me an idea. It’s not the drawing that did it. It’s the interpreting.”
The laughter returned to the kitchen about five minutes later. Apparently the guy had a limited repertoire. I got up and walked over to the kitchen door. Once I picked up the rhythm of the sounds, I could match them. I laughed like a maniac in harmony for just a few seconds before words began tumbling out of my mouth. I felt them as air pressure and lip movement, but except for an English word here and there, I had no idea of what I was saying
The laughter stopped. I nearly fell, but I clutched the door jamb in time to steady myself. When I turned around I saw that Tor had left the sofa and was standing just a few feet away.
“You’ve got a talent for this,” he said. “Do you know what that language was?”
“What language?”
“The one you were speaking. Go sit down. You’re pale.” He went into the kitchen.
Pale and sweaty and cold, I realized, horribly cold, as if I’d felt a blast from a winter wind. I sank into a leather chair and slid down so I could rest my head on the back of it. Tor returned and handed me a glass of cola.
“The sugar in it will help,” he said.
“But it’s so cold.”
“Drink it anyway.”
He sat down on the couch across from me. I drank about a third of the cola straight off and burped a couple of times. Sure enough, I began to feel better, physically at least. Mentally—well, something had taken over my mind and made me speak in words I couldn’t understand. Terror and disbelief fought it out, and neither won.
“What was I saying, anyway? I know some of it was English. I heard the word thief. And I think I said ‘bear’s son’ a couple of times.”
“That’s all I could understand, too.” Tor frowned, considering. “It reminded me of Gothic or Old Norse, but it wasn’t either of them. Older than they are, I bet. But I don’t get it. If he wants to accuse me of something, why disguise it like this?”
“Yeah. He could’ve just sent you a note. A first class stamp doesn’t cost that much.”
Tor laughed with a breathy sort of chuckle. The sound reminded me of the bears I’d seen on TV—chuffing, the voice-overs called it. I forced out a smile, but my heart still pounded in fear. Thief. Who did the illusionist mean, me or Tor? Did he know that I was a vampire, stealing other people’s lives, one bite at a time?
“I hope to all the gods,” Tor said, “that the bastard’s blown out his brain circuits.”
“Me, too. Do you think it’ll start again?”
Tor shrugged. Yeah, I thought, silly question.
As it turned out, the concert had ended for the evening. Around midnight we went downstairs to check on the lower flat. As soon as Tor opened the door, I felt the wards. I heard nothing, but the sensation fell in the same category as hearing those loud, high-pitched noises, or maybe staring into a bright light, or maybe smelling skunk—I experienced none of those physical sensations, but what I was sensing repelled me in the same way as they would have.
Tor made some gestures with his hands and said some words in a language I’d never heard before. The sensations vanished.
“Now we can go in,” he said.
We did. He flipped a s
witch and turned on an overhead light. We’d entered a large room which Tor had set up as a library. He had built-in bookcases crammed with books, both cheap paperbacks and expensive leather-bound volumes, as well as free-standing bookcases set here and there, equally crammed. On one side of the room stood a fireplace that, I figured, stood under the one in the living room above. This one was faced in antique brick instead of slabs of stone. Beside it on the hearth stood a chunk of rock about a foot across and flat on top. Tor noticed me looking at it.
“That’s for the nisse.” He sounded embarrassed. “It’s something I learned from my mother. She came from Norway originally. She’s pleased I keep the old custom up, so I do it.”
“What’s a nisse?”
“A house spirit, like a brownie. I put food on that rock for it now and then. On my birthday, and the anniversary of Dad’s death. Fourth of July, Christmas, days like that.”
“That’s kind of cool, actually. Does the food disappear?”
He shrugged and smiled in pink-cheeked embarrassment. I let the subject thud to the floor. As well as the rock, a couple of leather armchairs and reading lamps stood in front of the fireplace. Heavy maroon curtains shrouded the room from the view of the uphill neighbors.
“I inherited these books from my father,” Tor told me. “I haven’t even read most of them.”
Off to the left I saw a kitchen, again, under the one in the flat above. Beyond the kitchen, a hallway led into darkness. On the right I saw a closed door that, I supposed, opened onto other rooms. Tor stood looking around, then shrugged.
“Nothing’s wrong down here,” he said. “I don’t understand this. Why would he give up so easily?”
“Because he’s planning something worse?”
Tor sighed, and his face sagged into gloom.
“Yeah,” he said. “With my luck that’s probably it. Why don’t you go upstairs? I’ll set the wards again and be right up.”
I grabbed my courage with both hands and went upstairs alone. I don’t know what I expected would happen, and nothing did. Tor came upstairs in a few minutes, and we sat down in the living room.