Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I bent my head closer. The earth itself seemed to be writhing. For a second or two, I didn’t understand what I was looking at Then I did, and ice ran through me: it was a tiny earth elemental, busfly digging itself back into its proper home.

Fire and water are the opposing elements we most commonly notice, but earth and air are opposites, too. Matt Arnold had talked about sylph-esteem and sylph-discipline, but if those two guys had tossed an earth elemental down onto my carpet, that was nothing short of sylph-abuse.

The elemental had gone now, though, back to its own proper home. I tried the starting spell. My carpet lifted off the ground as smoothly as if nothing had ever been wrong with it Very carefully, looking every which way as I went and wishing for eyes in the back of my head, I flew on home.

All the way there, I tried to make some sense out of what had happened, the way theologians wrestle with God’s will.

Was it just a couple of hooligans out to have some sport with whoever drew the short straw? That’s the sort of random violence that gives Angels City flyways a bad name, but this time I wished I could believe it. I couldn’t, though.

Those two guys on that rug had been waiting for me in particular. I’d noticed them sitting a few feet off the ground in the parking lot while the church slowly flew by on Anglewood Boulevard. If they’d wanted to head up The Second, they’d had all the time they needed to do it. They’d just waited.

But why? Again, I didn’t have much trouble coming up with an answer: it had to have something to do with the case of the toxic spell dump. I did my best to remember what the two punks had looked like. All I could come up with was swarthy and dark-haired. They might have been Persians or Aztedans. They might have been hired muscle, too: Israelites, Druzes, Indians from the Confederation or from India, even Hanese or Japanese. I hadn’t got a real good look at then, and an awful lot of people in Angels City match up to the description swarthy and dark-haired.

I came to that dispirited conclusion about the time I set my carpet down in its parking space back at my block of flats.

Somebody was going downstairs from his carpet as I was coming up from mine. He gave me an odd look as we passed on the stairs, but I didn’t think anything of it past wondering what was haunting him that afternoon.

Then I turned the knob to my own flat. Judy sat curled up on the couch in the front room, reading a book on the Gamda Bird I’d picked up a few days before and hadn’t got around to putting on a shelf yet What started out as her smile of welcome turned into something else when her mouth sagged open in surprise. “Good God, David, what happened to you?”

A lot had happened to me, but I asked foolishly, “What do you mean, what happened?”

She sprang to her feet, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me to the bathroom mirror as if I wasn’t to be trusted to do anything that required rational thought on my own. “Look at yourself!” she commanded I mentally apologized to the fellow who’d stared at me while I was coming up to my flat I looked like someone who’d been French-kissed by a vampire: streaks of blood ran from the comers of my mouth and had dripped down onto my shirt. Before I wore it again, I’d have to go visit Carlotta or somebody else with a vampster. All my clothes were disheveled, as if I’d been through a carpet crash in them.

Funny how that works, I thought vaguely.

“What happened?” Judy said again.

So I told her, in as much detail as I remembered: pieces seemed blank, while others that happened only moments later were there in incredible perfection—I could have described exactly how every tiny dod of dirt wiggled and wavered as the earth elemental pushed its was through them after it rolled off my carpet. I started to, until Judy’s face told me that wasn’t something she needed to hear.

“You could have been killed,” she said when I was through.

“That was the general idea,” I said. “If I hadn’t been wearing my safety belt, or even if I’d been going faster when they dropped the elemental on me—” I didn’t care to think about that, much less talk about it I turned on the cold water, splashed it onto my face. That, and then burying my head in a towel to dry off, gave me an excuse not to talk for a couple of minutes.

Then I tried to unbutton my shirt That was when I discovered how bad my hands were shaking: I had a dreadful time making my fingers hold onto the smooth little buttons. After watching me struggle with the first two, Judy took over. As in everything she did, she was quick and deft and capable.

The feel of her fingers fluttering against my chest inflamed me as if she’d turned into a succubus. I’ve heard that living through a battle makes you homy. I didn’t know about that, not firsthand; I hadn’t been in a fight, let alone a battle, since I got out of primary school. But by the time Judy got to the last button, I couldn’t wait any more. I grabbed her and kissed her—not quite as consumingly as I’d had in mind, because my tongue was still sore.

“Well,” she said when she came up for air. Before she could say anything else, I kissed her again. “Well,” she repeated a minute or so later, and (his time she managed to go on: “It’s a good thing I drank the cup of roots when I got here instead of waiting till after dinner.”

It turned out to be a very good thing: for the next half hour or so, I forgot all about what had happened on The Second. The only problem with making love to put aside your problems is that they’re still there when it’s over. Sitting up on the bed afterwards, I said, “You’d better be careful, too, honey. You’ve gotten yourself involved in this case. If they come after me—whoever they are—they’re liable to come after you, too.”

“That’s non—” But it wasn’t nonsense, and Judy must have known it, because she didn’t finish the sentence. She sat up beside me. Her nod made her jiggle most pleasantly, but her voice was serious as she replied, “What have we gotten ourselves into here?”

I thought about Charlie Kelly and Henry Legion. “I don’t know,” I said grimly, “but I’m going to find out.”

Dinner at the Hanese place was good. In fact, dinner was probably wonderful, but we were both too distracted to enjoy it as much as we should have—and, not meaning to be crude, my rear end hurt. And when we flew to the restaurant and then back again, I kept looking over my shoulder, wondering who was behind us… and why. I almost jumped out of my skin when a carpet zipped by closer than it should have, but it was just a couple of teenage lads with more machismo than brains.

When we got back to my flat—safe, sound, and overfed—Judy said, “I want you to do something for me.” Like some people you may know, Judy has a Serious Voice. She was using it now.

“What is it?’I asked.

She said, “Before we went out, you said I should be careful from now on. Well, you should, too. I want you to start doing what they do in the thrillers: leave for work a few minutes early one day, then a few minutes late the next. Don’t get onto the freeway at The Second every morning, or off it there every night. The same for Wilshire at the other end of your commute. Don’t make yourself an easier target, I mean.”

I started to laugh, to tell her that was all silly stuff. But it didn’t seem silly, not after those guys had tried to do me in.

“Okay,” I said, and found myself nodding. “You do the same.”

“I will,” she promised.

I wondered if we ought to stop seeing each other for a while. If she’d said she wanted to do that, I wouldn’t have let out a peep. But I didn’t suggest it myself. Maybe that was selfish of me. In fact, I’m sure it was, a little. But the main reason I didn’t was that I was pretty sure she was in too deep to turn invisible so easily.