Dagger Key and Other Stories

“My friends and I. It’s a coordinated action. We’ve been preparing for this a long time.”

“Mike and Rem?”

“Among others.”

Sleet begins falling, sounding like a series of little slaps against the tarpaper roof, slimy drops oozing down the panes like the thick crystalline blood of some magical creature—a translucent angel, a hazy gray gargoyle—who’s been crouched up there for years. Abi studies the tattoo on the back of her hand, waiting for you to say something, but not pressuring you—it’s a conversational habit the two of you have developed, these bursts of dialogue that border on argument, followed by silences during which an accord is reached. The room seems colder and smaller than when you entered, as if it’s settled around you, revealed its mystical drab, the secret order of second-hand refrigerators and chipped coffee cups; the air is aswarm with tickings and small hums, and out in the wild world, the horn of a Chevy Suburban or a Volvo, three quick blasts, gives voice to urgency or impatience. You have a feeling of great sobriety, the sense of an enclosing moment.

“I trust you,” you say.

For the next seven days, the house reeks of bitter incense and herbal candles that Abi’s had custom made—tall candles placed at the four corners of your bed, sallow in hue, with dark thready stuff embedded in the wax. The overall scent reminds you of a Paris outdoor market (which you visited one undergrad summer), but damper and more cloying. Abi speaks rarely, but you gather she’s purifying herself for a ritual that must be performed soon. She sits naked on the bed, meditating for hours, and when she’s not in bed, she’s bent over the kitchen table, scribbling symbols on scraps of paper, which she will burn later in the special candles, as if she’s writing cheat sheets for a supernatural exam; or she’s taking baths in hot water so dense with herbs, a greenish brown matte is left in the tub after it drains. Twice a day, she asks you to fuck her Yab-Yum style, with you sitting in as close to a Lotus position as you can manage and her facing you, astride you, scarcely moving. During these encounters, her eyes roll back, the whites visible beneath half-lowered lids, and at such moments you appreciate the strangeness of her sexuality, its eerie mix of the sublime and the sensual; but you mainly appreciate her power. It’s like you’ve embraced a dynamo. She throbs and shivers, undergoes surges of heat and tremor. Even after you’ve disengaged, you feel her energies coursing around you.

You no longer doubt that she has the power to cripple you (okay, maybe there’s a little doubt), and while you can’t quite wrap your head around the whys and wherefores, how a union of crippled men and friendly, kicked-out-of-the-club angels and Tantric witches is going to be of much help to the world in its hour of need, you’ve gone a ways toward conceding that she and her pals might have the power to avert a planetary disaster, or at least to minimize it. The issue of trust…well, you understand that trust isn’t really at issue. You’ve been drawn into unnavigable waters, committed yourself to Abi’s deep, and you have no choice except to let her steer. If it eventuates that you’ve opened yourself to a particularly vile form of torment, if Abi turns out to be a psychotic, or the embodiment of a demoness, or a more ordinary crippler of men, a deluded Goth chick who’s wrong about everything, you’ll have to deal with that. And you will. You’ll find a way. You won’t be anybody’s chump. With that settled in your mind, you give up your pursuit of answers and live as happily as you can in the green house—it seems to have gone green from the fresh charge of her vitality, so much so that you half-expect the furniture to put forth sprigs of leaves and blossoms—and assist Abi by fielding her phone calls.