Chapter 14: Butch
Amy showed up at his bungalow at two-fifteen to find Patty helping Kirby to mount a large, flat-screen TV on the living room wall. She barged in the front door, urging him to get moving. “C’mon, c’mon. We’re late!”
“Waddaya mean ‘we’?” He shot back. “I was ready to go fifteen minutes ago. You’re the one who’s late.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, but we need to go now.” To Patty she said, “We’re supposed to meet Miss Adelaide.”
“Oh, hey, that’s different, Kirby,” Patty acknowledged. “Let’s put this down. I’ll come over and help you get it on the wall later.”
As they lowered the big TV to the floor, he asked, “So, Adelaide has a big thing about punctuality?” Both women whistled. “That bad, huh?”
“All I know is what Marci tells me,” said Patty. “And that’s a big 10-4.”
To Amy he said, “Let me grab a shirt and a tie—” She started to protest, but he overrode her. “It’ll take two seconds. Meet me out front.”
She was waiting on the front walk when he appeared, tucking in his shirt and sliding an already-tied necktie over his collar. He locked the door and moved to catch up with her on the front sidewalk.
“You need to close the gate,” she told him as he caught up to her.
“Nah, later.” He hurried past her towards the BMW SUV he assumed was her car.
“No.” She stopped. “You don’t understand. You’ve got to close the gate. I’d rather be late than leave the gate open.”
Sighing heavily, he backed up the dozen or so steps to the gate and closed it. The results stunned him, nearly causing him to dive for cover. As soon as his right hand touched the wooden gate, he saw giant pillars of light outlining his yard, rising from deep within the earth and extending far into the sky. Woven between these pillars were glowing chains and ropes of various colors that were not actually chains and ropes. They were magic, enchantments like he had seen on Adelaide’s Coupe deVille. When the gate shut, these columns of light and the spells woven through them shifted in hue and position. The closing of the gate’s latch felt like someone had turned his soul into a string on God’s own bass guitar and plucked it.
“Whoa!”
“Yep. That’s some serious spellwork. That’s your protection—and that’s why you always close the gate.”
“And what does all of that,” he gestured to the magical phenomena already fading from his sight, “protect me from?”
He waited on the passenger side of the BMW, but Amy kept walking. “C’mon, dude,” she said. “We’re walking. It’s only a block and a half.”
He caught up to her and fell in step while adjusting the tie. “How does this look?”
Eyeing him skeptically, she answered, “Good enough. And the enhancements Adelaide has had me adding to Marci’s wards around these bungalows will most definitely protect you from Abyssal Wolves, if that was what you were curious about.”
“What else?”
“Hostile magical sendings, curses, most of the magical creatures that might be used by an enemy to do harm or make mischief.”
“Well, that seems good.”
“Weather of all sorts—up to and including tornadoes—earthquakes, large pieces of refined metal—”
“Cars and trucks?”
“Exactly! And airplanes.”
He whistled appreciatively. “That seems to cover quite a bit. Anything it doesn’t help against?”
“The stupidity of leaving the gate open.”
“Point taken.”
“Actually, it will still protect you from lots of stuff, even if the gate is left open,” she admitted. “But why take any chances? Oh, and the gate in the back is part of the, um, circuit.”
“And the garage door? It’s outside the gate but gives access to the yard.”
“The garage door—and I know this is going to sound weird—only has a few protections and is not part of the circuit, but the door from the garage to the back yard is. Not much protection in the garage, I’m afraid. No, I don’t have time to explain that—and you wouldn’t understand much of it anyway.”
A block and a half later they crossed the street and stood in front of a two-story building. A sign read “The C.o.B. Tea Room” and through the broad windows on either side of the door he saw what looked to be an interestingly-appointed dining room. No two of the dozen tables within were the same and each was surrounded by what seemed to be a random selection of antique chairs. No two tablecloths were the same, either. It appeared eclectic and homey and, as he learned only moments later, it was utterly false. The building stood next to what might have been its architectural mirror image, which bore a faded sign reading “Royal Coffee” and looked abandoned.
She led him to the entrance, an overly ornate wrought-iron door inset with large panels of glass. Geometric patterns near the bottom and organic ones above inhabited a hazy twilight realm between Art Deco and Art Nouveau.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
He thought about asking why, then shrugged his shoulders and extended his left hand to her. She reached quickly for it and, by the time he caught the look in her eye, it was too late. “Ow!” he complained as he jerked his hand back, clutching his fingertip with his other hand.
“Yeah, sorry,” she said with only superficial remorse. “Just let a drop of blood form on your fingertip and touch the doorframe here.” She pointed to a spot on the left side of the door frame, about the height of her nose.
This time he hesitated. “Why?”
Patience and exasperation seemed to war within her, each flashing across her face before she exhaled. “Look, Kirby, it’s a thing. It’s just another thing. You’ve trusted me with all of the other stuff, so what’s one more thing?”
“Yeah, well, I trusted you when you said to give you my hand, and you jabbed me with a... what? A needle? A lancet?” He was not getting angry, exactly, but he did feel betrayed. “You violated my trust, Amy.”
“Look, we’re late and it was just quicker that way. You should know that you can trust me—and if you don’t know that by now, then it’s just too damned bad. And if you feel violated, that just too damned ba—” She stopped when she looked at him. “Sorry.”
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Problems, hon?” The words had formed in his head as the sheerest of sarcasm, but the look on her face transfigured them into a compassionate query.
“Yeah. Girl problems,” she said—and she sounded miserable when she said it.
Trying to grope his way forward into what was, in his experience, a delicate area, Kirby tried to come up with an appropriately sensitive response. “You mean, like...uh...PMS, or something?”
She barked a loud, monosyllabic laugh. “Ha! No, doofus! I think my girlfriend is interested in someone else and I don’t know what the fuck is going on in her head. PMS? You are hilarious!” She shook her head. “Now, put your bleeding fingertip right here,” and she indicated the spot again, “so we can go inside. Discussion of my fucked-up love life will have to wait.”
Contact between his bleeding fingertip and the doorframe overlaid his normal vision with the glowing, pulsing, shifting lines that he knew were sorcerous enchantments, magical spells, or whatever he was supposed to call them. They were what Patty had called “the mumbo-jumbo”—and maybe that was as good a name as any. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors and patterns was breathtaking. He did not know how he knew, but he knew that many different hands had worked on this dazzling—this insanely dizzying—array of unbelievable lights that began to induce vertigo as he tried to study them. Dizzy. Very pretty, though. Gorgeous, really. Dizzier. Am I wobbly? They’re—
SMACK! Amy slapped him hard on the shoulder, and he snapped out of it.
He rubbed his shoulder as she explained. “Yeah, don’t look too long at it. It keeps other magic users from studying the defenses by making them confused.”
He shook his head. “I hope it’s not like that from the inside.”
“Nah, you’ll be fine inside. “She looked at the door frame and placed one thumb below his bloody thumbprint and the other above. She said something, a few words in a language he did not recognize, and there were some things he almost saw, whorls of what might have been color. His thumbprint disappeared. She opened the door.
Stepping through the door brought another dizzying shift in perception. The quaint tearoom, with its antique chairs and Victorian ornamentation was nowhere to be seen. In its place he saw a storeroom, clean and well-organized. Metal shelving units lined the walls, neatly stacked with cardboard boxes and crates. He recognized those boxes and crates.
“This is a bar.” He eyed the crates of liquor, cases of beer, boxes of cocktail napkins, and giant jars of olives and maraschino cherries in orderly rows.
“Yeah,” said Amy. “Let the door close. We don’t want to confuse any random pedestrians.”
Kirby stepped all the way in and turned to make sure the mechanism closed the door completely. Gone was the ornate metalwork and glass. From the inside, the door appeared to be the standard metal security door one found in most commercial buildings. EMERGENCY EXIT proclaimed a white sign in red letters. ALARM WILL SOUND. Behind the metal shelves he saw windows of the same sizes and shapes as the tea room’s windows he had viewed from outside. He studied this phenomenon, eyes darting from the window to the left, then to the window on the right, then back, curious, but not exactly puzzled as to where the tearoom he had seen from the sidewalk had gone. He knew the answer: sorcery. Mumbo-jumbo. Did Royal Coffee and the other buildings on the block share similar secrets?
“You coming, dude?” Amy held the storeroom’s other door open. He must have hesitated a bit too long because she motioned to him. “C’mon.”
He followed her down a short hall, fluorescent light fixtures above and the commercial-grade tile you find in restaurant kitchens under their feet. They passed another storeroom and a pair of swinging doors set with small windows through which he could see a smallish commercial kitchen, lots of stainless steel. She stopped between two doors, one on either side of the hall. The door to his left featured a brass plate engraved “MANAGEMENT ONLY”. To the right was a door labeled with a plastic sign that read “Basement”.
“I,” said Amy, pointing to herself with an index finger, “have to go in there,” she jerked her thumb to indicate the MANAGEMENT ONLY door, “and make sure Adelaide can still see us. We are late, and her schedule is usually pretty full.”
“And I should…?”
She pointed at him and said, “You should pop down to the bar.” She redirected her finger to indicate the door labeled “Basement”. “I’m not sure who’s working right now but go and introduce yourself and tell them you’re the new guy.” With that, she vanished through the door, and he caught a glimpse of her going up a flight of stairs before the door closed behind her.
Kirby went through the other door and made his way downstairs. Opening the door at the bottom revealed a dark room. The lights were on, but the walls, floor, and even the ceiling were painted an industrial black. On one side of the large space was a dance floor, with its mirrored disco ball, light rigs, and DJ booth, all dark. On the opposite side of the room, a bar ran the length of the wall. The middle of the room was home to an array of tables, inverted chairs stacked atop them, and two rows of booths.
With no one in sight, he walked towards the bar and had a seat to wait for whoever might show up. He saw a man wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt crouched behind the bar, facing away from him, digging through things on the lowest shelf.
“Uh, hey there,” he said to the man’s back.
“Hang on,” the man said. “Just let me get this.”
“No worries. I’m in no rush. They told me to tell you that I’m the new guy.”
The man crouching behind the bar rose fluidly, spun, and leveled a gun— No, that is definitely not a gun! Regardless, Kirby sat up straight and raised his hands. The crossbow aimed at his chest looked high-tech, built from the latest composite materials. More worrying was the strange little arrow it aimed at him. He could not exactly see the sorcery that seemed to be pulsing around this squat, chopped-down version of a regular arrow, but what he was not-seeing gave the impression of being unutterably lethal. “Whoa! Whoa!” His voice was as calm as he could make it as he raised his hands above his head.
The man’s eyes scanned Kirby and caught on his right palm. A look of realization passed over his face. He raised the crossbow, aiming it at the ceiling. “Oh. You’re him. Sorry. I smelled somethin’ potent comin’, but I didn’t realize it was you. Can’t be too careful, y’know.”
And that was when Kirby realized the man with the crossbow was a woman.
She had broad shoulders, trim hips, and very noticeable breasts—and she was at least two inches taller than Kirby’s own five-eight. Even if she had not just been pointing a crossbow at his chest, he would have found her slightly intimidating.
He lowered his hands. “Um, yeah, gotta be careful.”
“But what am I telling you for, right?” She reached across the bar and chucked him on the shoulder, and he knew she meant for him to feel the substantial muscles behind the blow. He did. She extended a big hand, longer than his, but not as wide. “I’m Butch.”
“Y’know,” he said, “I’ve been accused of that myself.”
“Ha!” she laughed and chucked him again on the arm. “I’m sure you have. But it’s actually my name. And Miss Adelaide said your name was, what, Sidney?”
“It’s Jeffrey,” he corrected, “But everybody calls me Kirby.”
“Well, my name is actually Butch.” She saw the often-asked question forming on his face and quickly added, “Yeah, I had it legally changed on a bet. About ten years ago my partner bet me that I wouldn’t have the balls make Butch my official name and I bet my partner they wouldn’t have the balls to actually get married—especially to someone named Butch. We both lost—and we both won. I love that the name I go by in my head is my ‘real name’ now and I love that we’ve been married ever since.”
“Cool,” he said. He would have to unpack that later, but it was a cool story. He watched Butch unload and uncock the crossbow, then squat to stash it under the bar. “So, uh, you mentioned you smelled me coming?”
“Yeah.” She responded without looking up. She placed the short arrow that had been in the crossbow into a case for a pool cue, where it joined three just like it, and closed the lid before squatting to stash the case. “I’ve got a nose for the spooky stuff. And you fill that bill, man.” She looked up at him from where she crouched behind the bar and sniffed. “Yeah, man. That’s all you.”
“What exactly can you smell?”
“You know, man. I can smell the weird stuff, the spooky stuff. The creepies and the nightmares and the magic stuff.”
“Are you, you know, a...um...ssss,” he trailed off, hissing expectantly, hoping she would supply the word he felt more than a little embarrassed to say. When she did not, he coughed out “sorceress” in a low, rapid mumble.
“Me?” The broad grin returned to her face. She was handsome—and not in that way that certain women, like Meryl Streep, are called handsome. That grin made her look like a movie star, almost like a young George Clooney. “Shit, no! Not me! My aunt was, though. Stayin’ with her one summer, when I was a kid, was when I found out I had a nose for the weird shit. Miss Adelaide said that a nose like mine would come in handy in a place like this, so she offered me a job.”
“And has it?”
“Huh?”
“Has your nose come in handy around here?” he prompted.
“Oh, yeah. Sometimes.”
“Is that what the crossbow and those evil-looking little arrows are for?”
“Those little arrows are called quarrels, or maybe bolts. I’m not sure if there’s a difference between a bolt and a quarrel, but I was told that those are quarrels. And, yeah, they will solve most problems of the weird sort in a very permanent way. And not only are they evil-lookin’, they smell like a world of trouble, too.”
Rather self-consciously, Kirby laid his right hand on the bar, palm up. “So, if you could smell me coming, do I—does this—smell bad?”