Harry Turtledove: The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I didn’t know how well the spirit would stand up under serious interrogation, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Shows how much I knew, doesn’t it? I guess I’m naive, but I thought the automatic anathema that falls on anyone who tampers with Church property would be plenty to keep snoops at arm’s length. I’m no Christian, but I wouldn’t have wanted an organization with a two-thousand-year track record of potent access to the Other Side down on me.

Of course, the veneration of Mammon goes back a lot farther than two thousand years.

I stopped by Brother Vahan’s office on the way out so I could thank him for his help, too. He looked up from whatever he was working on—none of my business—and said two words: “That bad?”

He couldn’t possibly have picked that up by magic. Along with the standard government-issue charms, I wear a set of my own made for me by a rabbi who’s an expert in kabbalistics and other means of navigating on the Other Side. So I knew I was shielded. But abbots operate in this world, too. Even if he couldn’t read my mind, he must have read my face.

“Pretty bad,” I said. I hesitated before I went on, but after all, I’d just pulled the information from his files. All the same, I lowered my voice: “Three soulless ones born within that circle in the past year.”

“Three?” His face went suddenly haggard as he made the sign of the cross. Then he nodded, as if reminding himself. “Yes, there have been that many, haven’t there? I talked with the parents each time. That’s so hard, knowing they’ll never meet their loved ones in eternity. But I hadn’t realized they were all so close to that accursed dump.”

An abbot does not use words like accursed casually; when he says them, he means them. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t noticed the apsychia cluster around the dump. That wasn’t his job. Comforting bereaved families was a lot more important for him. But the Thomas Brothers collected the data I used to draw my own conclusions.

“Elf-shot is up in the area, too,” I said quietly.

“It would be.” He got up from behind his desk, set heavy hands on my shoulders. “Go with God, Inspector Fisher. I think you will be about His business today.”

I didn’t even twit him about turning One into Three, as I might have if I’d come out of his scriptorium with better news. Blessings are blessings, and we’re wisely advised to count them. I said, “Thank you, Brother Vahan. I just wish I thought He was the only Power involved.”

He didn’t answer, from which I inferred he agreed with me. Wishing I could have come to some other conclusion, I went out to my carpet and headed over to the Devonshire dump. I drove around it a couple of times before I set down. Scout first, then attack; the army and the EPA both drill that into you.

Not that I learned much from my circumnavigations. You think dump, you think eyesore. It wasn’t like that. From the outside, it didn’t look like anything in particular, just a couple of square blocks with nothing built on them, nothing, at least, tall enough to show over the fence. And even that fence wasn’t ugly; ivy climbed trellises and spilled over inside. If you wanted to, you could probably climb those trellises yourself, jump right on down.

You’d have to be crazy to try it, though. For one thing, I was certain catchspells would grab you if you did. For another, the ornaments on the perimeter fence weren’t just there for decoration. Crosses, Magen Davids , crescents, Oriental ideograms I recognized but couldn’t read, a bronze alpha and omega, a few kufic letters like the ones that lead off chapters of the Qu’ran … Things were being controlled in there, Things you wouldn’t want to mess with.

They weren’t being controlled well enough, though, or babies around the dump wouldn’t come into the world without souls. I dribbled a few drops of Passover wine onto my spellchecker, murmured the blessing that thanked the Lord for the fruit of the vine.

The spellchecker duly noted all the apotropaic incantations on the wall… and yes, there were catchspells behind them. But it didn’t see anything else. I shrugged. I hadn’t really expected it to: its magical vocabulary wasn’t that large. Besides, if the sorcerous leakage from the dump was so obvious that anybody with a thirty-crown gadget from Spells ’R’ Us could spot it, Charlie Kelly wouldn’t have needed to send me out to look things over. Still, you’d like things to be easy, just once.

There was a parking lot across the street from the entrance. I set my carpet down there, chanted the antitheft geas before I climbed off it. I do that automatically; Angels City has had big-city crime for a long time. Leave a carpet unwarded for even a few minutes and you’re apt to find it’s walked with Jesus.

I crossed in the crosswalk. They still call it that here, though in a melting pot like Angels City it also has symbols to let Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Parsees and Buddhists, and several different flavors of pagan (neo and otherwise) get from one side of the street to the other in safety. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you’re a Samoan who still worships Tanaroa. Run like hell, I suppose.

The entryway to the Devonshire dump projected out several feet from the rest of the wall. A guard in a neat blue denim uniform came out of a glassed-in cage, tipped his cap to me. “May I help you, sir?” he asked politely, but in a way that still managed to imply I had no legitimate business making him get off his duff and step outside.

I flashed my EPA sigil. At a toxic spell dump, that effectively turns me into St. Peter—I’m the fellow with the power to bind and loose, at least. The guard’s eyes widened. “Let me call Mr. Sudakis for you, Inspector, uh, Fisher, sir,” he said, and ducked back into his cell. He grabbed the phone, started talking into it, waited for his ear imp to answer, then replaced the handset in its cradle. “You can go in, sir. I’ll help you.”

Help me he did. The gate was the kind with the little wheel on the bottom that retracted in back of the fence. He pushed it open. Behind it was a single, symbolic strand of barbed wire, with a placard whose message appeared in several languages and almost as many alphabets. The English version read , ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO UNAUTHORIZED ENTER HERE. Dante always makes people sit up and take notice.

The guard moved the wire out of my way, too. Behind it was a thin red line painted on the ground which went across the gap where the two sections of wall came out to form the entryway. The guard picked up a little arched footbridge made of wood, set it down so that one end was outside the red line, the other inside. He was very careful to make sure neither end touched the strip of paint. That would have breached the dump’s outer security containment, and doubtless cost him his job no matter how many backup systems the place had.

“Go ahead, sir,” he said, tipping his cap again. “Mr. Sudakis is expecting you. Please stay within the confines of the wires and the amber lines inside.” He grinned nervously. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that—you know more about it than I do.”

“You’re doing what you’re supposed to do,” I answered as I mounted the little footbridge. “Too many people don’t bother any more.”

As soon as I’d got off the bridge, the guard picked it up and put it back on his side. The amber lines on the concrete and the barbed wire strung above them marked the safe path to the administrative office, a low cinderblock building that looked like a citadel in both the military and sorcerous senses of the word.

I looked around as I walked the path. I don’t know what I’d expected—blasted heath, maybe. But no, just a couple of acres of weeds, mostly brown now because nobody’s spells have been able to bring much rain the past few years. And yet—