Dagger Key and Other Stories

“Because she loved you, because she doesn’t like hurting people. Fucking jerk!” A second later she says, “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that. It’s not your fault.”

You don’t want to deny that.

“I have a…” Mauve begins, but you break in: “You said some people died tonight. How many?”

“A lot.”

“How many of them did I kill?”

“Don’t concern yourself with that. What you need to do now…”

You laugh. “Don’t concern myself?”

“You haven’t got time for guilt. Bottom’s got your scent now. It’ll find you again, you can count on it.”

Bottom, you say to yourself. Bottom dweller? Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom? Then you recall the sheet of paper that fell out of Sessions’s book. “What the hell is Bottom?”

After a second, she says, “The Bottom. Didn’t Abi explain it to you?”

“No. What is it?”

“Jesus.” After a pause she says, “You totally need protection. I want you to take the next plane you can catch to Cleveland.”

The next plane. For a moment you’re thinking astral plane, plane of existence.

“Call me after you’ve got a flight, and I’ll meet it,” Mauve says. “You have my number?”

You check caller ID. “Yeah.”

“Get out of the house now. Don’t pack. Don’t…”

“What about Abi…her body?”

“You don’t have time to worry about her. Just get out. You’re not going to be safe ’til you’re here.”

“You can protect me?”

“Yes.”

You’ve been flipping back and forth between despair and mild hysteria, but her saying this jams you up into full-blown hysteria. “Excuse me,” you say. “But it looks to me like you’re seriously fucking up here. There’s these guys with twisted spines, people are getting swallowed and spat out. It’s like you’re playing things by ear, you know? That didn’t work. Let’s try this. Oops! Lost her! Well, you better come to Oberlin and we’ll see what happens. How can you protect me when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing?”

“Okay,” Mauve says. “You have to keep it together or you’re not going to make it. This is not something we trained for, you understand? We didn’t study it in college. We found out something was happening that no one else noticed and there wasn’t time to educate the public. No time to build a consensus. Got it? We were just suddenly in the middle of the shit. We’ve had to learn on the job.”

“What’s the Bottom?” you ask again. “Are you talking about God?”

“If you don’t leave soon, you’re going to find out. I’ll explain when you get here. I can protect you. I may not always be able to, but I can protect you for a while.”

“Why? Why would you?”

“Because Abi would want me to. And because you’ve become a resource. I need another partner and you’ve been prepared…at least to an extent.”

The implication is that she intends to perform the ritual with you, or a similar ritual, and you tell her that you’re not interested in having sex with her.

“I’m not going to be your lover,” she says. “Don’t worry about that. Look at it as a job. An awful duty that might keep you alive.”

“So I’m supposed to come to Oberlin and what? Let you paralyze me?”

Angry, Mauve says, “I see why Abi didn’t tell you much—she’d have been explaining herself all the time. If you can put aside your skepticism, I won’t paralyze you. But if it needs to be done, you bet your ass I’ll do it. You’ll be taken care of, but you’re not going to be walking for a while.”

“How did your partner die?”

Silence.

“You had a partner, right? And something happened to him?” You wait for Mauve to comment and, when she does not, when all you hear from the receiver is silence, you ask, “Was it your fault or mine?”

“I’m done,” she says crisply. “You have a choice. Get out of the house or die. Catch a plane, don’t catch a plane. Absolutely up to you. I don’t really care. Give me a call if you’re coming.”