The Book of Magic, page 20
When he reached the street, he spied the outline of a building shrouded in protective spells, set off from prying eyes. It contained more magic literature than all of the museums and bookstores in London combined, much of it under lock and key, with access to its private members and occasionally available to serious scholars. Vincent stood outside the building and breathed in the chilly morning air. When the library came into focus, it looked like any other house on the street, a tall milk-white Georgian-style building, but there was no actual address, only the numbers 17608415 on the door, healing numbers that are meant to repel black magic. He went up the steps and did his best to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. When they find the lock, you’ll have the key, Jet had told him in his dream, but he had no way to unlock this particular door, for it was forged out of iron, then encased in hazel wood and painted a slick black so that it looked like any other on the street. Quite suddenly Vincent felt a fool when he thought of his dream. Perhaps he’d misunderstood Jet entirely. A lock needn’t be made of metal. A key was not necessarily something you held in your hand. He swore softly at his own stupidity. By now Vincent knew, nothing was what it seemed.
He returned to the park, where he sat on a bench facing the library waiting for someone to arrive. Vincent had never been terribly good at being patient; he’d been a rebel, too wild to listen to reason, he’d wanted what he’d wanted, but the years had taught him something. William’s harrowing illness at the end of his life had revealed what real patience was. Wait and see, William always said. Tonight might be better, tomorrow might be pain free. As William’s health plummeted from a cancer that was untreatable, he had appeared luminous, resolved to have as many days as he could with Vincent. They stayed in bed, the windows open, light reflecting from the sea. Love of my life, the one loss I will never survive. Yet he had survived, but barely, often wondering why he was still here.
“Do you ever regret running away?” Vincent had asked William during his final day, for it was in this way they had escaped the curse; they had started new lives and never looked back. It was their last night together, but they didn’t know it. The lines on their hands were blurred, their futures unsure.
“I didn’t run away. I ran to you,” William told him.
It was the perfect answer, the one that broke Vincent’s heart. He should have been more patient, he shouldn’t have rushed through his life, for now he had arrived here, alone, in a city he didn’t know, in the early morning light, filled with an absurd desire for the past. If only he could close his eyes and be transported to Greenwich Village on his birthday when they first met, when their lives were ahead of them, when he had no patience and plunged into love.
Now he was a man who could wait when he had to. Less than forty minutes later, the librarian arrived. Now it begins, Vincent thought. And then he had the oddest thought. Here is the key.
* * *
David Ward noticed the man on the bench who was observing him. He recognized Vincent immediately, the same handsome profile that had been in magazines and newspapers after his sudden death. David had been a fan of Vincent’s back when he was young, and had listened rapt to “I Walk at Night” over and over again, wishing he’d had the courage to announce who he was, as Vincent had. This was in the days when people more often hid their sexual nature. It was easy to do, if you didn’t mind breaking your own heart. David had been married and he’d kept his most authentic self a secret even from those to whom he was closest. He’d forsaken his true self to be a family man. He’d thought there were no other choices.
He remembered the day he first heard Vincent’s song on the radio. He was still working at the British Museum back then, specializing in artifacts from Persia and Mesopotamia; he hadn’t yet been contacted by his current employers, a board of magic practitioners who understood that David Ward was good at keeping a secret. Too good, perhaps.
Before he became the keeper of the magic stored here, he’d been to the left side and had been in a state of spiritual agony ever since. Working here was a penance of sorts; he would now do good in the world where before he had been willing to do evil. His daughter, Eve, had come down with meningitis; it had occurred suddenly, on an ordinary day. Eve was ten, the light of his life, and the reason David had stayed married. He’d furtively begun a separate life on nights he was away from home, fearing that if he made an admission regarding his sexuality, his wife would be granted full custody. When Evie became ill he knew where to go for help, a practitioner of the Dark Art who often visited the museum. David went to a mansion in South Kensington knowing that in exchange for his daughter’s life, he would be required to complete a task. He knew the city was in the triangle of black magic, and that it could be found on streets and alleyways for those willing to look for such things.
David was to commit a murder on behalf of another of the magician’s clients. He didn’t even argue. That’s what desire mixed with desperation could do. He sat at a bar and poisoned a stranger’s drink. In the mayhem of waiters doing their best to help the young man having a heart attack at the bar, David had found his way out, continuing on to the hospital where his daughter had miraculously recovered. It was a misdiagnosis, the doctors said, but David knew the truth, he had traded one life for another. He had chosen the Crooked Path and he would pay for it for the rest of his life.
It was never the same with Evie. That was the price. When she’d found love letters he’d written to a man he was involved with, she called him a liar and a hypocrite and his wife told him to leave and he’d gotten into a taxi and fled in shame, without putting up a fight. He shouldered his guilt and there was no room for anything but self-recrimination. He accepted the job at the Invisible Library, and one day a black-edged note was slipped under the door and he knew that Evie was gone. She and her boyfriend had been in a motorcycle accident, skidding on wet pavement late at night. He knew it was his fault. His daughter’s original fate had caught up with her because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to slip the full dose of poison in his target’s drink. The stranger he was meant to do away with had a heart attack, but he had survived.
Even then, Vincent’s song had spoken to him in a deep, fierce way; he played it constantly for several years and could recite it word for word even now. And here was the musician himself, a man who was supposed to be dead for nearly sixty years. Instead of unlocking the library door, David crossed the street and entered the park. A message was a message, a sign was a sign, and it appeared that Vincent Owens had returned from the grave. For years, David had sought out a spell that would bring back the dead, even though he knew that what came back from the other side would be dark and unnatural. The sheer permanence of the loss of his daughter undid him in a thousand ways. But now here he was, about to meet a man who had risen. The trees in Hyde Park were leafy and green, but at this hour they appeared black. Funny, he had worn a black suit and a black tie today, as if he would be attending a funeral.
“Have you returned from the dead?” David Ward said. Necromancy was referred to as The Knowledge and human history was littered with those who had chased after a cure for death. “Is it possible?”
“I’m not back from anything. I’ve always been here.” When David shot him a puzzled look, Vincent added, “In hiding.”
“Too bad,” David said. “I thought you had The Knowledge.” It was a joke, a play on taxi drivers’ crash course in knowing the city, only the left-handed version had to do with raising the dead. David tried such a spell once and no good had come of it. Afterward, he’d been sick for weeks, vomiting up strange items: beads, feathers, earrings, cigarette butts. All of it, he’d come to realize, were items that had belonged to his daughter. He ceased fooling around with necromancy then, and was wise to have done so.
“Actually, I thought you might be able to help me.” Vincent handed the librarian his great-granddaughter’s photograph, a lovely girl Vincent had yet to meet, cursed in love, but blessed in all other things, for whose safety, he believed, only he held the key. “She’s gone missing.”
“Kylie,” David Ward said, wondering if he would remember this day as unlucky or if he would be grateful for it forever more. “I know where she is.”
* * *
Ian went running early, out the door before six. He did this every day and he wasn’t about to stop due to the attack that had, frankly, left him a bit weak even after his cure. He certainly wasn’t about to allow the presence of his uninvited guests to interrupt his schedule, even though Sally was among them. Sally, who wouldn’t speak to him, who gazed away if she caught him observing her and had once said, “Stop it right now!” Well, of course, she was right. He had no business getting involved with her, or with anyone else for that matter. As for Sally, she’d be gone before he knew it. All the same, he was affected by her presence and needed a run more than ever to clear his head.
The Americans had taken over Ian’s flat, leaving him to sleep on a blanket on the floor of the front room beside the bookcases, where he couldn’t get any rest. He still ached and his pulse was ragged. Ian hoped exercise would help to restore him. He had first considered that running might be his salvation when he was in jail, and as soon as he got out, he began to run in earnest. Each time he hit the streets, he remembered what it had been like to be locked up, as this morning he remembered being trapped inside a frozen body, spellbound and incapable of moving.
He would have to pay back Sally Owens for saving his life. Last night they’d had a quick supper of soup Franny Owens had made, using all the ingredients in his pantry it seemed. “What are you staring at?” Franny had asked him. He’d been fumbling around in a drawer, searching for spoons, then had suddenly stopped and looked up, riveted.
“Nothing,” he said, as if he were a guilty boy caught stealing.
“You’re staring at my niece,” Franny declared. “Do you think I’m a fool?”
“Actually, no. I think you’re a witch.”
“Then you’re not so stupid after all.”
“Did you think I was?” Ian found he was both hurt and offended by the notion that she’d formed a bad opinion of him.
Franny had laughed then, a lovely surprising sound. “I think you’re too smart for your own good.”
They’d exchanged a look, and at that moment he was able to see Franny as a young woman. He felt both drawn to her and afraid of her, and more than anything he felt that even at this stage, he had a lot to learn.
“I fell in love when I was fifteen,” Franny said, wistful.
“Did you?” They had lowered their voices conspiratorially. Somehow they’d leapt forward to become allies.
“I still am, even though he’s gone. Not everyone’s that lucky.”
“I suppose not,” Ian agreed.
“You could be.”
“Unlikely,” he told her. “No heart.”
Franny laughed again and he grinned, pleased to have amused her. He was an excellent liar, but apparently she saw right through him. “To find out where my great-niece is, we have to find out who we are,” Franny went on. “You’re the historian. You’re the one we need.”
Ian was grateful that Frances Owens would have such faith in him, but he felt a stab of uncertainty all the same. He gazed at the others, Sally setting the table, Gillian curled up in his leather chair talking to Ben on the phone, Vincent paging through The Magus, the volume that had changed his life when he first broke the rule not to read magic books.
“The question is, are you willing?” Franny asked, sounding as if she were his therapist. He’d been to one of those and he knew they always threw everything back at you so that you would answer your own questions.
“Willing to?” he asked.
“You know exactly what I mean.”
All at once Ian understood the discussion they were having was about Sally. “I don’t know what to think,” he admitted.
“That’s your problem,” Franny said. “You should be sure.”
He mulled her comment over in silence as they finished dinner. It was true that the one image he couldn’t dispel was of Sally leaning over him, telling him to do as he was told if he wanted to live. He could not forget the way she looked at him with her cool gray, disapproving eyes.
“Cat got your tongue?” Gillian asked Ian when he hadn’t spoken a word through the meal.
The two sisters regarded one another and laughed. Could it be? It could not, and yet the butter was melting in its dish on the table, a sure sign that someone had fallen in love.
“What do you want from the poor man? He’s just escaped death,” Franny said on Ian’s behalf. “He’s in recovery.”
Ian understood how true this was. He’d been in recovery for more years than he could count, distancing himself from people. Somehow, plummeting into that strange red paralysis had woken him. He could now see people as they truly were, despite their age. Franny as a red-haired girl who would do anything for those she loved, Vincent as a wild, free spirit walking down a city street with a wolflike dog at his heels, Gillian as a child spinning with her arms out, hoping not to fall, but not really caring if she did, and Sally, Sally was right there before him, a dark, serious girl who wished she would never fall in love, so afraid her heart would break that she had never unmasked it and had thereby broken it herself.
“Are you all right?” Sally asked Ian as she ladled out more soup.
He nodded, unable to take his eyes off her. They laughed at him when he didn’t speak and asked what sort of answer was that? Ian didn’t blame them for being entertained by his lack of speech, an unusual state for him; he was a talker, a man who could lecture for three hours straight, barely stopping long enough to take a breath. His mother had always said that his arrogance alienated people on the spot. This time he kept quiet, knowing how obnoxious he would sound if he spoke the truth. You need me more than you know.
* * *
He left the sleeping Americans and headed directly to Lancaster Gate so that he might dig around for references to The Book of the Raven unhindered by his guests. He was a member of the Invisible Library and had his key with him. When he reached his destination, he pulled on his jersey, then took the steps two at a time up to the door. He knew he was setting out on the Crooked Path, magic that had no beginning and no end and instead circled like a snake, its tail in its mouth, so that you could not venture off the route you set out upon. He had a dark side, and, he feared, a deeply emotional side as well. Ian felt the stirrings of his other self inside of him, the one who’d been a thief, locked up long ago then discarded, but there all the same, the flinty part of him that made him fearless when a wiser man would have been alarmed enough to turn away.
Sally had heard him in the front room before he left, brewing a quick cup of tea before he headed out the door. She had no reason to trust Ian, and every reason to need him. She’d thrown on some clothes, slipped on her boots, and followed him onto Westbourne Grove, where she caught a taxi in order to keep up.
“We can’t follow a runner,” the driver warned when Ian turned into the park. “He’ll be on paths.” It was a warm morning and Ian had stripped off his shirt, clearly not one to follow the rules of decorum. Just as the driver began to warn Sally that this fellow she wanted followed would likely run across the grass, Ian took off over the dewy grass and they could no longer closely follow him.
“Just do your best,” Sally suggested.
They lost him for a while, but then she caught sight of Ian crossing Bayswater, headed toward Lancaster Gate. She felt her heart pound; it was as if she were tracking a wild creature, one that preferred to disappear. Sally quickly paid the driver, thanked him for being so persistent, then got out and crossed the street. She had borrowed one of Ian’s white shirts without asking, not that it mattered. He had plenty more. He turned as if she’d called his name even before she darted up the steps to join him. “I assumed you might run away,” she said.
“Run away from my own flat?” Ian opened the door, gesturing for Sally to enter.
“I thought we might have scared you.”
“You don’t scare me.” You’re still a good liar, he thought to himself. You’ll help them as you’re bound to do, and it will all be over soon. It’s nothing anyway. It’s your imagination.
“What is this place?” Sally asked.
“A library. For people like us.”
“What sort of people is that?” She had narrowed her eyes, clearly expecting an answer she wouldn’t like.
“People who like books,” Ian said, proud of his dodgy answer.
“I like books,” Sally said. “I’m a librarian.”
“Are you?” Of course she would be. Ian found women who were librarians exceedingly sexy. It was a combination of their love of books, which always increased their beauty, along with the fact that they usually knew more than he did, which he found oddly arousing.
Sally eyed the ornate moldings, extraordinary in detail, but, in her estimation, spoiled when painted a deep, glossy red. “Awful color,” she noted.
“It’s the color of magic. That’s probably why you don’t like it.” Ian gave her a sidelong glance and when she stared back at him he felt a sort of panic. Fuck, he thought. It can’t be this.
Sally disapproved of the library. It wasn’t just the color that glazed the woodwork that disturbed her, it was the content on the shelves. “Magic ruins people, why would I like it?”
