Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Just then the front door to Chocolate Weasel opened and a couple of women came out. No matter how good the place’s shielding was, I’d already found out it wasn’t topologically complete like the Devonshire dump’s: I hadn’t had to cross over an insulated footbridge to get in. That meant influences could go out through the opening, too.

I looked down at the ground glass on the spellchecker.

The microimps saw something across the street, all right, something they didn’t like one bit. Words started forming:

UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN. I felt as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water down my back. The door to Chocolate Weasel closed quickly and the damning words disappeared from the ground glass, but they remained imprinted on my mind. I’d hoped never to see their like again, but here they were.

“That’s the same spellchecker reaction I got when I probed the potion that curandero gave Lupe Cordero,” I said. “Now I know why your similarity ritual failed, Michael.”

I was glad I hadn’t had lunch yet; I might have thrown up right on the sidewalk in front of Spells ’R’ Us.

Michael shook his head. “I’m afraid your logical leap went past me there.”

“You were testing for similarity to flayed human skin substitute,” I said. “I don’t think that’s substitute in there—I think that’s real flayed human skin.”

“Yes, that might conceivably throw off the accuracy of the test.” Sometimes Michael is almost off in a virtuous reality of his own. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised he thought about the testing first, but I was. Still, he does connect to the real world. After a couple of seconds, his eye got wide behind his spectacles. “Dear God in heaven, there are thousands of square feet of flayed human skin substitute in those vats. If it is the genuine material rather than the substitute—”

“Then a lot of people have ended up dead, Huitzilopochtli is well fed, and the whole stinking world may come down on our heads.” I didn’t realize I’d started spouting doggerel till the words were out of my mouth.

Tt is now imperative—no, mandatory—that we notify the authorities forthwith,” Michael said.

Since he was right, I shut down the spellchecker (no doubt to the microimps’ relief) and took it back into Spells ’R’ Us.

“Thanks very much, gentlemen,” I said. “We appreciate the help. Now can you tell us where the nearest pay phone is?”

There’s one outside the Golden Steeples,” the manager answered, “if it hasn’t been vandalized.”

The salesman blurted, “But can’t you tell us what’s going on?”

I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s against EPA policy to reveal the results of an ongoing investigation. As I say, you’ve helped, though.”

Leaving them frustrated, we headed across Mason toward the Golden Steeples. The closer we got, the less optimistic I was about finding the phone in working order. The local street gangs had vandalized the building, scrawling tags like HUNERIC and TBASAMUND on the wall in big, angular letters. Graffiti are an environmental problem, too, one for which we don’t have a good answer yet.

And sure enough, when we came up to the pay phone, I saw that somebody—presumably the punk who went by that monicker—had carved the name GELIMER into the base of the phone and used either a tweezers or a little levitation spell to get the coins out through the narrow slits he’d cut Of course, once he violated the integrity of the containment system, the coin-collecting demon was also able to escape, and pay phones are rigged so their imps stay dormant unless he collects his fee. The phone, then, might as well not have been there.

Unless—I turned to Michael. “Are you a hot enough wizard to get around Ma Bell?”

“Possibly—with time and equipment we lack at the moment,” he said. “Finding another pay phone would be more efficient”

Ergonomics again. Whether it’s what size to make the cap on a bottle of wine or deciding to spell or not to spell, you can’t get away from it. “Let’s go back to the carpet, then,” I said. “We’re sure to pass one as we fly back to the freeway.”

We crossed over to the Chocolate Weasel parking lot. Me, I wasn’t what you’d call enthusiastic about setting foot there again, but I didn’t feel too bad because I was doing it only to leave the place for good.

Though I didn’t really need to, I picked up the map to check the route south. We could either head back to Winnetka the way we’d come and then down, or else we could fly west to…

“Michael,” I said hoarsely, “I know where we can find a pay phone.”

“Do you?” He glanced over to me. “I did not think you were overly familiar with this section of St. Ferdinand’s Valley.”

Tm not,” I said. “But look.” I pointed to the map. The next major flyway, a couple of blocks west of where we were, was Soto’s. And the next decent-sized street north of Nordhoff was Plummer. “I know there’s a pay phone there because that’s where Judy called me from.”

“Good heavens,” Michael said. “The concatenated implications—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Chocolate Weasel is involved in something really hideous, they’re doing their best to hide if it leaks out of the Devonshire dump, we find out about it (I find out about it, I mean), somebody tries to get rid of me, somebody does kidnap Judy, and then they make her call me from a phone just around the comer from Chocolate Weasel.”

“Since there is a phone at that location, and since it was undoubtedly working as recently as last night, I suggest we use it,” Michael said. He lifted the carpet off the Chocolate Weasel parking lot eased onto Nordhoff, and flew west toward Soto’s. Just getting away from Chocolate Weasel felt good, as if I were escaping cursed ground. Considering what I thought was going on inside the building, that might have been literally true.

Michael turned right onto Soto’s and flew up to Plummer.

The comer there had a bunch of little shops. I didn’t see a pay phone in front of any of them. I wondered if Celia Chang and Horace Smidley had screwed up. But what were the odds of their both screwing up the same way? Astrologically large, I thought.

“When a solution is not immediately apparent more thorough investigation is required,” Michael said, a creed which for the research thaumaturge ranked right up there with the one hammered out at Nicaea.

He parked the carpet in front of a place whose skin had two words in the Roman alphabet—DVIN DELI—and a couple of lines in the curious pothooks Armenians use to write their language. I don’t read Armenian myself, but I’ve seen it often enough to recognize the script.

Sure enough, the fellow behind the counter in there looked like Brother Vahan’s younger cousin, except that he sported a handlebar mustache and had a full head of wavy iron-gray hair.

“God bless you, what can I do for you gentlemen today?” he said when Michael and I walked in. “I have some lovely lamb just in, and with yogurt and mint leaves—” He kissed the tips of his fingers.

Even if mixing meat and milk wasn’t kosher, it sounded good to me. I hated to have to say, “I’m sorry, we’re just looking for a pay phone.”

“Across the street, behind the camiceria next to the Hanese bookstore,” he said, pointing. “I don’t know why they didn’t put it out front, but they didn’t. And when you’ve made your call, why don’t you come back? I have figs and dates preserved in honey, all kinds of good things.”

He was a salesman and a half, that one. I got out of the Dvin Deli in a hurry, before I was tempted into spending the next hour and a half there, buying things I didn’t need and half of which I wasn’t permitted to eat.