Storm Front

You know, sometimes I think Someone up there really hates me.

Chapter Eight

By the time I got home, it was after two o’clock in the morning. The clock in the Beetle didn’t work (of course), but I made a pretty good guess from the position of the stars and the moon. I was strung out, weary, and my nerves were stretched as tight as guitar strings.

I didn’t think sleep was likely, so I decided to do a little alchemy to help me unwind.

I’ve often wished that I had some suave and socially acceptable hobby that I could fall back on in times like this. You know, play the violin (or was it the viola?) like Sherlock Holmes, or maybe twiddle away on the pipe organ like the Disney version of Captain Nemo. But I don’t. I’m sort of the arcane equivalent of a classic computer geek. I do magic, in one form or another, and that’s pretty much it. I really need to get a life, one of these days.

I live in a basement apartment beneath a big, roomy old house that has been divided up into lots of different apartments. The basement and the subbasement below it are both mine, which is sort of neat. I’m the only tenant living on two floors, and my rent is cheaper than all the people who have whole windows.

The house is full of creaks and sighs and settling boards, and time and lives have worn their impressions into the wood and the brick. I can hear all the sounds, all the character of the place, above and around me all through the night. It’s an old place, but it sings in the darkness and is, in its own quirky little way, alive. It’s home.

Mister was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs that led down to the apartment’s front door. Mister is an enormous grey cat. I mean, enormous. There are dogs smaller than Mister. He weighs in at just over thirty pounds, and there isn’t an undue amount of fat on his frame. I think maybe his father was a wildcat or a lynx or something. I had found Mister in a garbage can about three years before, a mewling kitten, with his tail torn off by a dog or a car – I was never sure which, but Mister hated both, and would either attack or flee from them on sight.

Mister had recovered his dignity over the next few months, and shortly came to believe that he was the apartment’s tenant, and I was someone he barely tolerated to share the space with him. Right now he looked up and mrowed at me in an annoyed tone.

"I thought you had a hot date," I told him.

He sauntered over to me and rammed one shoulder playfully against my knee. I wavered, recovered my balance, and unlocked the door. Mister, as was his just due, entered before I did.

My apartment is a studio, one not-too-large room with a kitchenette in the corner and a fireplace to one side. There’s a door that leads to the other room, my bedroom and bathroom, and then there’s the hinged door in the floor that goes down to the subbasement, where I keep my lab. I’ve got things pretty heavily textured – there are multiple carpets on the floor, tapestries on the walls, a collection of knickknacks and oddities on every available surface, my staff and my sword cane in the corner, and several bulging bookshelves which I really will organize one day.

Mister went to his spot before the fireplace and demanded that it be made warm. I obliged him with a fire and lit a lamp as well. Oh, I have lights and so on, but they foul up so often it almost isn’t worth turning them on. And I’m not even about to take chances with the gas heater. I stick with the simple things, the fireplace and my candles and lamps. I have a special charcoal stove and a vent to take most of the smoke out, though the whole place smells a little of woodsmoke and charcoal, no matter what I do.

I took off my duster and got out my heavy flannel robe before I went down into the lab. That’s why wizards wear robes, I swear to you. It’s just too damned cold in the lab to go without one. I clambered down the ladder to the lab, carrying my candle with me, and lit a few lamps, a pair of burners, and a kerosene heater in the corner.

The lights came up and revealed a long table in the center of the room, other tables against three of the walls around it, and a clear space at one end of the room where a brass circle had been laid out on the floor and fastened into the cement with U-shaped bolts. Shelves over the tables were crowded with empty cages, boxes, Tupperware, jars, cans, containers of all descriptions, a pair of unusual antlers, a couple of fur pelts, several musty old books, a long row of notebooks filled with my own cramped writing, and a bleached white human skull.

"Bob," I said. I started clearing space off of the center table, dumping boxes and grocery sacks and plastic tubs over the brass circle on the floor. I needed room to work. "Bob, wake up."

There was a moment of silence, while I started getting some things down from the shelves. "Bob!" I said, louder. "Come on, lazybones."

A pair of lights came up in the empty sockets of the skull, orangish, flickering like candle flames. "It isn’t enough," the skull said, "that I have to wake up. I have to wake up to bad puns. What is it about you that you have to make the bad puns?"

"Quit whining," I told him, cheerfully. "We’ve got work to do."

Bob the Skull grumbled something in Old French, I think, though I got lost when he got to the anatomical improbabilities of bullfrogs. He yawned, and his bony teeth rattled when his mouth clicked closed again. Bob wasn’t really a human skull. He was a spirit of air – sort of like a faery, but different. He made his residence inside the skull that had been prepared for him several hundred years ago, and it was his job to remember things. For obvious reasons, I can’t use a computer to store information and keep track of the slowly changing laws of quasiphysics. That’s why I had Bob. He had worked with dozens of wizards over the years, and it had given him a vast repertoire of knowledge – that, and a really cocky attitude. "Blasted wizards," he mumbled.

"I can’t sleep, so we’re going to make a couple of potions. Sound good?"

"Like I have a choice," Bob said. "What’s the occasion?"

I brought Bob up to speed on what had happened that day. He whistled (no easy trick without lips), and said, "Sounds sticky."

"Pretty sticky," I agreed.

"Tell you what," he said. "Let me out for a ride, and I’ll tell you how to get out of it."

That made me wary. "Bob, I let you out once. Remember?"

He nodded dreamily, scraping bone on wood. "The sorority house. I remember."

I snorted, and started some water to boiling over one of the burners. "You’re supposed to be a spirit of intellect. I don’t understand why you’re obsessed with sex."

Bob’s voice got defensive. "It’s an academic interest, Harry."

"Oh yeah? Well maybe I don’t think it’s fair to let your academia go peeping in other people’s houses."