Tales From the Black Chamber (15 page)

“Oh geez.”

John turned in the driver's seat. “You look great. Wait, wipe the corner of your mouth. No, the other one. Just a little drool.”

Anne rolled her eyes and groaned. “Dignity, dignity, my kingdom for some dignity!”

“Tell you what,” said John. “You go inside and take a nice hot bath. I'll run up to the China Gourmet on Connecticut and get us some dinner and bring it back. There's a liquor store right there, too, so I'll grab a bottle of wine. And we can skip the breviary tonight. I don't know that we'll be all that productive.”

“Get two bottles,” said Anne imperatively. “And, no, I think with a bath and some food—how's their kung pao chicken?”

“Great.”

“Okay, get me some hot and sour soup, some pot stickers, and some kung pao chicken.”

“Pot stickers?”

“You know, the little dumpling things?”

“Oh, sure. Steamed or fried?”

“I'll leave that up to you.” Anne smiled and climbed out of the car.

8

The bath was heaven, and Anne fell asleep in it. She woke feeling terrific, aside from the bathwater in her mouth. She dried off, enjoying the thick, fluffy towels someone had outfitted the place with (Claire? Wilhelmina? Mrs. Garrett?), and got dressed in some Redskins sweats she'd picked up at the mall. It felt disloyal to the Broncos, but they were thick and warm and they hadn't had any Broncos gear. She pulled on a pair of thick socks and padded down the stairs. She wasn't halfway to the bottom when the smell of Chinese food hit her, and she went down the rest of the way double-time.

“I am
famished
,” Anne said, moving very quickly to the table.

John was pouring white wine. “I hope you like it.”

“I think I would like fiberglass insulation at this point.”

They had a very pleasant dinner, chatting casually, but mostly Anne enjoyed the tasty food and the wine, which John had chosen well. After dinner, Anne opened a bottle of red wine and poured them each a glass. “Okay,” she said, not tipsy but mildly euphoric, “Let's talk about the breviary.”

“You sure you wanna talk shop?” John asked.

“Well, it's that or watch some TV.” Anne got up and sprawled her long body on a couch, wineglass in hand.

“Honestly, I wouldn't mind some TV,” shrugged John, following her into the living room.

“No, no, no. I'm feeling good and I'd really love to see what we can do with the breviary. Let's just talk a bit about it without getting into the weeds. What's in the book?”

John plopped down into an armchair, closed his eyes, and thought. “Well, the text, of course, the marginalia, and that doodling and laundry list and stuff in the back.”

“Right. And outside?”

“Binding, glue, no lettering or design on the cover.”

“Now, we've verified the text, right?” Anne asked.

“Yep. And most of the marginalia we've seen is pretty pedestrian and doesn't have any of the oddness you sometimes see in encoded messages,” John said. “Although we're not experts.”

Anne was curious. “Does the Black Chamber have a code expert?”

“No,” John said. “Joe McManus is probably pretty knowledgeable about them, I'd guess, though electronic encryption is more his thing; but he's not a cryptographer. And I don't think he can read Latin.”

“But if we gave him some words we suspected were code, he might be able to discern some sort of pattern that'd indicate there was a text to decipher?”

“That hadn't occurred to me,” said John, opening his eyes. “He well might be able to. It's math at bottom, right? We could get him a frequency distribution of letters in Latin from somewhere—hell, it's probably on the Internet.”

“Now, what about that stuff on the endpapers? Do you think that list of sundries he scribbled in there could be a cipher? Or the prayers? Or the names of people and their addresses?”

“It could be,” said John. “I mean, there's no weird capitalization or underlining or odd words interpolated, but you never know. Maybe we can transcribe that tomorrow and give it to Joe.”

“Why not tonight?” Anne asked. “I mean, there are guys with machine guns and creepy magic spells out there looking for us—looking for me, really. We really shouldn't give them more time to find us—me.”

“I agree, Anne,” said John, “but look, it's late in the evening, Joe's a family man, and I don't think a few hours will make a difference. Let's let him rest, we'll rest, and we'll all attack it fresh in the morning. We can also run it by our scientists. You didn't meet them today. I think they were working on something in their lab. Or playing Halo over the LAN, knowing them. They're very, very smart. We've got Raphael Stoll, a physicist, and Eulalia Park, a biologist—and medical doctor, as well. They sort of overlap on chemistry. Lily takes the organic, I guess, and Rafe the inorganic.”

Anne took a big sip of wine. “Eulalia?” She found herself almost giggling.

John gave an amused snort. “I know. I guess it sounded American to her parents when they came over from Pusan. She's from Portland and is probably a genius, so don't hold her name against her.”

“I take it she uses Lily.”

“Yes, indeed. And she's E.S.S. Park in the medical literature. Eulalia Sun-Sook Park.”

“How did she get involved with the Black Chamber?”

“Long, long story. Short version: pretty much like you. The incumbent Doctor had died—of natural causes, I hasten to add—and she had come to our attention a couple years earlier when she had been involved in something strange. We convinced her to join us and help keep a lid on the Weird.” John rubbed his neck. “I imagine she probably could have become world-famous by publishing scientific papers on what happened, but she was more than eager to help us cover it up.”

“Cover it up?” Anne asked.

“That's part of the job. You'll see in the Presidential Charter. Basically, we're to keep tabs on weirdness, stamp it out where we can, and keep too many people from finding out about it.”

“So we're the Men in Black?” Anne asked.

“I wish I were as good looking as Will Smith, if that's what you mean.”

“Ha.”

“To answer your question: sort of. Honestly, most everything we run into ends up so ambiguous and odd that it's not all that hard to keep a lid on it.”

“But doesn't that impede science and people's right to know what's out there?” Anne frowned and took another sip of wine.

“Remind me of where in the Constitution the Right to Know is?” John joked. “No, this isn't about cover-up for the sake of cover-up, or trying to keep a monopoly on occult knowledge in the government's hands. It's trying to keep the Weird at bay and its existence a secret, insofar as it's possible, lest someone discover it and try to do bad things with it. Like our necromancer friend. If whack-jobs out there knew that you could do that kind of creepy shit, you don't think you'd get a bunch of loons getting ordained as priests, quitting, downloading the spells from the Internet, peeping in girls' locker rooms, or worse?”

“Speaking of the Internet, doesn't it complicate your life a lot?” Anne asked.

John waggled his hand. “Well, we worry about it a lot, and Rafe and Joe and Lily have spent a ton of time working on programs for scanning for material, others for scrubbing servers of specified code, and even more for breaking into secure sites that we think might be hiding something. But to tell the truth, we haven't had a single really worrisome incident on the Internet. In general, those who desire this kind of knowledge also want to keep it all for themselves, so their paranoia and secrecy work for us. But we assume something bad on the Internet is inevitable, and we hope that our preparations are at least partially adequate.”

Anne crossed her arms. “If I accept the lawfulness and desirability of your, er, our cover-ups—and I can't say that I yet do—isn't it really hard to do?”

“Not really,” John said. “First, the culture doesn't accept weird occurrences. We're all science, all the time. Oddball stuff gets shoved onto sketchy cable documentaries and is considered the province of eccentrics. Second, really explicit encounters are very, very rare. You'd be amazed what most people can rationalize. Third, some combination of legal threats, large sums of cash, and/or assurances that they're part of a secret elect, will generally obtain most people's silence, especially given that they know they're likely to be mocked and treated like a lunatic if they tell the truth anyway. And, honestly, I think most people want a reason to forget. Tell me you wouldn't rather forget that face in the mirror.”

Anne tapped her wineglass in thought. “You're probably right. I've lain in bed wondering how I could ever tell a friend or even my parents what had happened to me. And I don't think I could. They'd immediately conclude I was mentally ill. Heck, I was ninety percent of the way towards convincing myself that I was mentally ill.”

John smiled. “Yep, but I'm glad that the offer of a sizable salary, my insistence on the classified nature of our work, and your initiation into the most secret organization in the U.S. government have bought
your
silence.”

Anne laughed and drained her glass. “On that note, sir, good night.”

Two weeks passed, during which Anne almost got used to never seeing her own reflection. On her fourth day, she'd been trying to do something with her hair in the ladies' room, and Wilhelmina had come in. Anne shrugged helplessly, and Wilhelmina immediately came over and began coiffing her, saying, “Oh, let me help you, sweetheart. This has got to be hard on you. I know you're young and you've got your looks, but I remember those days and I'd have gone crazy without a mirror. Girls have to know they look good to feel good, am I right? Tell you what, you bring in whatever you normally use on yourself and first thing, I'll make you up.” Anne had tried to demur, but Wilhelmina was insistent. Anne thanked her—feeling so grateful she wondered if she were vainer than she thought—and told herself that, well, she didn't really wear much more than a little eyeliner and lipstick, so it wouldn't really be too much of an imposition.

Anne came to like her other coworkers as well. Rafe Stoll, the Scientist, turned out to be a quiet, funny guy of about six feet with black hair and startling blue eyes. She'd broached the topic of how magic could be reconciled with science. He'd laughed. “Well, if you held a gun to my head, I'd posit that it was some sort of means for causing a large-scale quantum entanglement or quantum teleportation, since it's clearly a violation of the principle of locality—and of course it fits perfectly with Einstein's description of
spukhafte Fernwirkung
, ‘spooky action at a distance.'” She'd laughed at that. He'd continued, “Of course, translated from the Physickish, that means, ‘Uh, it's magic?'” and they'd both laughed.

Lily Park was a little tougher to warm up to. Maybe five-one in heels, wearing a white lab coat over a series of interchangeable dark suits, she had sharp, excellent features set in a wide, flat, Hangukin countenance. Her eyes were often a bit red, as if from fatigue, and her manner could be distant and self-contained, which after a while Anne ceased ascribing to hauteur or aloofness, but rather to the fact that she constantly seemed to be preoccupied with some sort of complex mental gymnastics. If she was the genius John said she was, she was living proof of the maxim that the brilliant are never bored.

Every day, they'd all meet in the morning for an hour or so to kick around ideas for finding the necromancer, as they decided to call him. Given the historical association of necromancy with Catholic clergy, Mike Himmelberg had suggested asking some of the Black Chamber's contacts within the Church. Anne was a little surprised that they had multiple sources in the Catholic hierarchy around the country. “There's a surprising amount of overlap between our bailiwick and theirs,” Mike had explained. “And when you've seen some of the same strange things, you tend to trust each other.”

The problem had been, however, trying to figure out how to find the necromancer, who—even if their guess was correct—was, as Mike said, “a beadle in an abbé stack.” Lily had suggested that an element of the FBI's profiling practices might help: identify those clerics whose background indicates that they'd be inclined to evil practices. Mike said, “Hmm, so we just have to get a list of all the Catholic clergy in the country, then do background checks on all of them to see if they tortured animals as a kid. Ay yi yi.”

“Poor you,” joked John. “Mike already owes the Archdiocese's official exorcist a slew of favors,” he explained to Anne.

“Worse, I owe him two hundred bucks from poker,” Mike mumbled.

“There's an official Washington exorcist?” Anne asked, surprised.

“Sure,” said Mike. “A few of the big archdioceses have them. Although they don't admit it. I want to say New York and Chicago admit they do, but they won't reveal the exorcists' identities. D.C. portrays itself as more ‘modern,' so they've never announced they have one. Too medieval, you see. But they do. I met him investigating an incident in West Virginia one time. He'd gotten there independently.”