“Give her a few moments,” I heard an older, softer male voice say. I knew that voice had a name attached to it—Yoda? No, Yoda was from Star Wars. Star Wars was on my mind because of R2-D2. And the fellow in front of me, I had seen him brushing his teeth before, so if he wasn’t my boyfriend maybe he was a brother I’d forgotten about.
He began to laugh. “Stokes,” he said, “you’re saying all of that out loud. I wouldn’t speak until you feel like yourself. But hurry up with it!” He leaned closer and whispered into my ear, “We’ve got our witch vault. Let’s go get our witch.”
Diachronicle
DAY 294 (CONTD.)
In which we meet Erszebet. And then we meet Erszebet.
FIRST TRISTAN HAD TO BREAK the news to the Maxes and the Vladimirs that they had been working all this time on a project whose end goal was magic. He did this in the one remaining non-demolished office, so I didn’t have the satisfaction of seeing it happen. They seemed to me to be biting back amusement when they filed out of the briefing: to a man, they all avoided direct eye contact and the corners of their pursed lips occasionally wiggled.
Tristan and I arrived at 420 Common Street in Belmont in earliest afternoon, to find—to our dismay—a desanctified church converted into some kind of institutional group housing. WELCOME TO ELM HOUSE read a non-elucidating pastel-blue plastic sign planted in the forecourt.
“Hmm,” I said.
“Could be interesting,” said Tristan. “Could mean someone’s messing with us.”
We parked on the street and followed the walkway around the side of the old church and across a modest lawn dotted with generic, dutiful landscaping. The old church had been built on a very large lot, much of which was now occupied by three- and four-story buildings with a decidedly mid-twentieth-century institutional vibe. The main entrance was in one of those. The inside was bland and sterile, like a hospital admitting room. There was a linoleum lobby floor and laminate receiving desk, where two bored thirty-something women chatted quietly and ignored the handful of elders beyond them, in a carpeted room full of primary-color bingo charts and large posters of MGM movie stars.
“At least it’s not a loony bin,” Tristan muttered, relieved.
All of the residents were either asleep, or muttering to themselves despondently, or staring up at a very loud screening of The African Queen. It smelled of old furniture in here, and disinfectants.
As we stepped into the lobby, a twig of an ancient woman, keen-featured and remarkably upright, immediately approached us. She was wearing a 1950s-style cocktail dress, which might have flattered her in the 1950s, but looked absurd on her now. She was clutching a large Versace knockoff bag under one arm.
Before I even had the presence of mind to greet her, she spoke in a hushed but furious tone, with a well-educated Eastern European accent: “I cannot believe how long you have kept me waiting, Melisande! It is very rude and after all this time I deserve better. I see you cut your hair. It looked better long. With those bangs you resemble a rodent.”
I stopped so abruptly that Tristan bumped into me. He began to say something, but she pushed ahead before he could: “You must be Mr. Tristan Lyons. Are you her lover?”
“Did she say I was?” Tristan asked immediately, which was a pretty good recovery.
The old woman made a dismissive tch. “No. Only she is a woman of unreliable morals, and you have a powerful secret government position, so I presumed.”
“Ma’am, how about we talk in private,” Tristan said. “You’ve cited a few things that raise security questions.”
“Of course we talk in private. You’re taking me to the ODEC—this instant.”
Tristan took her skinny arm in his large hand and stood over her, his chin a hand-span above the top of her head. “Ma’am,” he asked very softly, “where did you hear that term?”
“From her,” she said impatiently, poking me in the shoulder.
“I have never met this woman,” I said to Tristan, recoiling from her, and then to her: “I have never met you.”
“Not yet, but you will,” she retorted impatiently. “I am Erszebet Karpathy. It is absolutely time to get out of here and go to the ODEC. I dressed specially.” She gestured to her cocktail dress. “Do you know how long I have been waiting for this day?”
“Ma’am,” said Tristan. It seemed he was stalling for time until he could form a complete sentence. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Far too long,” she said.
“Her first post to me on Facebook was a month ago,” I offered.
“You’ve been waiting a month?” asked Tristan.
“Pft,” she said. “That’s because I got tired of waiting for you to find me. I joined Facebook as soon as it was available to the public, as you told me to.”
A pause as Tristan considered this. “You’re saying you’ve been waiting more than a decade for us to come and find you?”
“Ha!” It was a dry, humorless sound. “I have been waiting for more than one century and a half. And this woman”—she pressed on, before we could interrupt incredulously—“gives me the words Facebook and Tristan Lyons and ODEC and tells me this, now, this is the exact month to use those words to find you after so much time. So. We have found each other. Take me to the ODEC.”
Tristan nudged his shoulder against my back, encouraging me to speak. Was it possible he was speechless? And did he expect me to be less so than himself? “Why are you so eager to get to the ODEC?” I asked.
“Because I can do magic again in the ODEC,” she said impatiently. “Obviously.”
Tristan frowned at her. “Ma’am, I need you to know that if this is your idea of a joke, you’re making trouble for yourself. If somebody has put you up to saying these words, I need to know who it is, and why—”
“Her! It’s her!” she said irritably, jabbing her bony little finger into my shoulder again. “I would be dead right now except for her. I have stayed alive all these years because she commanded it.”
“Ma’am, I’ve never met you—” I protested again.
“Don’t you call me ma’am, you hussy! You’re older than I am.” She checked herself, with obvious effort. “That is, you were. When we met. I have now been old for longer than most people have been alive. Do you know how boring that is?”
Tristan had collected himself enough to play the polite West Point cadet card. “We’d love to relieve your boredom, ma’am. Let’s step outside and you can tell us the whole story, how about that?” he said. “Do we have to sign you out or something?”
“Pft,” she harrumphed, with a dismissive gesture toward the reception desk. “Nurse Ratched has given up trying to control me.”
“Which one is she?” Tristan glanced toward the desk.
“Tristan!” I said. “Come on. My not knowing DARPA pales compared to your not knowing Nurse Ratched.”
“I call all of them Nurse Ratched since the movie came out,” Erszebet was meanwhile saying. “It amuses me.”
“You’ve been here since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out?” I asked.
“Yes. Do you see why I want to leave? Boring.”
“Let’s get her outside,” muttered Tristan.
It was cool outside, and nobody else was out there. The uninspired landscaped path wended its way around groupings of wrought iron benches, at which the residents might have a modicum of privacy with guests. Erszebet, with a remarkable grace of movement, seated herself in the center of one bench, leaving me and Tristan to share the one across from her, squinting into the bright spring sunlight.
“This is where people argue with their children about their inheritance,” she informed us. “I have no children, so I do not have this problem.”
“If you will, ma’am, let’s start from the top,” suggested Tristan. “Name, date of birth, place of birth, basic background.”
She sat pertly upright and gave him a self-important look. “You will take notes?”
He tapped his head. “Mental no
tes, for now. Begin, please.”
“I am Erszebet Karpathy,” she said. “I was born in Budapest in 1832.”
“No,” said Tristan. “No you weren’t, ma’am. That’s absurd.”
She glared at him, and seemed to relish doing so. “Do not disrespect me. I am a witch. When magic was fading from the world, Melisande warned me that it would end soon, and the last magic I ever knew was a spell to slow my aging by as much as possible so that I would still be here, now, when we could be useful to each other. I did not want to do that, you know,” she went on, directly to me. “I could have just grown old and died. Death would have been less boring than surviving this last century. This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You should all be shot. Nevertheless,” she pressed on, when we failed to agree or even respond, “here I am. And here you are. So put me in your automobile and take me to the ODEC. I am very eager to do magic again.”
Tristan rubbed his face with both hands as if he were suddenly very tired. “Give me a moment, ma’am,” he said. He pulled out his phone. “How do you spell your name?”
“If you Google me, you will be disappointed,” she said. “I know how to keep my profile low, as you say.”
“I use a different search engine,” he said. “You’ll be on it. Just spell your name, please.”
The only Erszebet Karpathy in Tristan’s secret search engine was a thirty-seven-year-old aerialist turned legal clerk, currently living in Montreal. There was an Erszebet Karpaty living in Rome, but she was a madam, and anyhow our interlocutor sneered that the name without an h was Ukrainian, which she most certainly wasn’t.
“Then maybe Erszebet Karpathy is not your real name,” said Tristan. “Ma’am.”
“Can we go now?” she said, standing up. “I have been thinking about my first spell for decades, and I am very eager to perform it. And then I want to go roller-skating. They won’t allow that here, those toads.”
Tristan remained seated, and leaned against me to signal me to do likewise. “And what spell might that be?”
She grinned at him. “You’ll just have to see. It’s entirely beneficent, if that’s what you’re worried about. We go.”
“The ODEC doesn’t work yet,” he said, studying her face carefully. “Since you claim to know about it, maybe you can help with that.”
“You need to up the sampling rate on the internal sensors,” recited Erszebet smugly, in a triumphant tone, as if she’d just won a spelling bee.
Wow, I thought.
Testing her, Tristan replied, “It’s going to be hard pushing that much data down the leads.”
“Swap the twisted pair out for fiber,” she rejoined promptly. It was a recitation; something she had memorized the way a child memorizes “indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
“All right, let’s go,” said Tristan, standing up and again putting his large hand around her tiny arm. “The car’s right there, and you are not leaving my sight until I understand what you’re up to.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Finally.”
She did not say a word on the twenty-minute drive from Belmont to Central Square, merely stared out the window with the bored rapture of a dog or a baby. I used the silence to recollect myself. Everything this woman claimed seemed insane, and yet . . . she knew me by sight, she knew Tristan by name, she knew about the ODEC . . .
To accept her claims meant . . . it meant we were about to witness genuine magic performed for the first time in at least one hundred and seventy years. That rocks! I thought. That was much more exciting than going to New Orleans. I glanced at Tristan as he drove, but he was lost in his own thoughts, which seemed grumpier than mine.
When we pulled up in front of the building, Erszebet sighed heavily. “This is it? Pah, I thought it might be a nice place,” she said from the backseat. “This is worse than where I have been living.”
“It won’t be as boring,” I promised.
“That’s true,” she said with a sudden grin, and leaned forward to tap my shoulder. “I am very much looking forward to this.” Then to Tristan: “I think you will be pleased with the results, Mr. Tristan Lyons.”
“I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what happens, ma’am,” he said tersely.
I realized he was nervous. For what would happen if after all this, we found the world’s only surviving witch and she was a dud? He still wouldn’t tell me who he was answering to, but his derriere was on the line in a way mine wasn’t.
When we entered the building, I walked toward the professor and his wife, gesturing for Erszebet to join me, but she spared them only a brief glance, then waved dismissively in their direction and gazed at the large contraption taking up most of the space.
“Is this it?” she asked Tristan, sounding offended. “But it’s so ugly.”
“She’s a little preoccupied,” I said apologetically to Oda-sensei and Rebecca. They, in turn, were so fascinated by her appearance that they hardly noticed my speaking to them. Likewise, the Maxes stopped their sundry duties and paused to look at her sideways, nudging each other’s shoulders and murmuring between themselves. She took no interest in any of that.
“This?” she demanded again. “I go in here and I can do magic? Just like that?”
“Hang on a moment,” said Tristan, pulling out his phone. “I need to document you, since there’s no record of your existence. I need your signature and a photo.” Before she could object or even notice, he snapped a photo of her on his phone.
“You don’t need my signature,” she said. She stared at the ODEC with a rapture greater even than Oda-sensei’s, face aglow with anticipation. “I forgive its ugliness if it does its job well. I just go in and start doing spells again?”
“That’s what we’re hoping,” said Tristan.
She looked at me, her eyes dewy and bright. “Thank you, Melisande, thank you for bringing me here.” And back her attention went to the ODEC door.
“Hang on,” said Tristan as she approached it. “Let me explain what happens when it’s activated.” He opened the door with an oven mitt and gestured inside—we could all hear her expressions of surprise—and then he leaned in close to her, voice calm and businesslike, detailing what was to come.
The Odas, the Maxes, and I looked round at each other with various facial expressions, all of which were a way of saying, in silence, Holy shit. “This is really happening,” I said, my pulse dancing. Seeing Tristan and a witch standing at the ODEC door suddenly made my heart thrill. But for him, I at this moment would be grading worksheets on syntax.
I sashayed over to them. “Should we put her in the ski suit?” I asked Tristan.
“I need no protection from the forces that restore my magic to me,” Erszebet scoffed.
“But it will be cold in there, like Siberia—”
“Pft,” she said. “It will be invigorating.”
“It might invigorate you to death,” warned Tristan.
She made a face that had already, in the last forty minutes, become her signature look: a dismissive pout with contemptuously knitted brows, head tilted slightly to one side, and a brief subtle eye roll. I suppose on another sort of face—a sexy villainess from a silent movie, perhaps—it would have had a sultry quality, but on a centenarian it just looked silly.
“I am strong in ways you do not know,” she assured him.
Tristan and I exchanged looks. I felt myself increasingly thrilled that this was happening, and impressed with Tristan’s unflappable calm (although it is true his face was proverbially shining with excitement). “Stokes, suit up and be in here with her, will you?”
“Do not call her Stokes, that is disrespectful.” Erszebet scowled. “You are a disrespectful man. You called me a liar before. Do not get on my bad side. You will regret it. But”—and here she turned to me with a smile no less fierce than her scowl—“I agree
for Melisande to be with me for the first spell. It is fitting. She was the cause of the last spell.”
Tristan and I exchanged confused looks, without commentary.
“Tell us about this first spell of yours,” Tristan requested.
She shrugged offhandedly as she set her bag on the console and riffled through it. “It is nothing, it is very simple. I must simply undo an earlier spell, that’s all. Then I can begin doing what you ask of me. Hurry, Melisande.”
I left the chamber to find the snowsuit, donned it, and re-entered the ODEC pulling on the oxygen mask. Erszebet regarded me, appalled. She was fidgeting with something I could not see well—through the shield of the mask it looked like she was massaging a mop head. Before I had a chance to ask her about it, she was onto Tristan again:
“You make her dress like that?” she said to him. “I don’t like you at all.”
“It’s for her own protection,” he said tersely. He had stopped calling her “ma’am.”
Erszebet (in her outsized vintage cocktail dress) and I (in my snowsuit, balaclava, and oxygen mask) stood beside each other as Tristan, just outside the ODEC, raised his thumb and closed the door on us. There was a brief wait as Oda and the Maxes and Vladimirs went through their checklists. I glanced at the old lady across from me and felt an extraordinary combination of sentiments all at once—excitement, disbelief, anticipation, confusion, fear, hope. Had anyone told me this would be how my spring were to unfold, I’d have laughed my ass off at them scoffed. Seriously.
I remember what happened for about the next quarter second: the dim sound of the Klaxon outside, the hair standing up on the back of my neck, the lights going out. In that precise moment, a lovely aroma both floral and musky overwhelmed me, and then—as before—I lost all clarity, and the next thing I was aware of was somebody peeling a balaclava off my head. I was lying supine in a vaguely familiar office, my back propped up against that somebody’s knees.
“Stokes? You okay?”