The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I slid down to my carpet with my spellchecker in my lap.

My stomach made small unhappy noises. Hoping they wouldn't turn into large unhappy noises, I flew on up into St.

Ferdinand's Valley. The brown dirt and yellow-brown dry brush of the pass were getting to look very familiar.

The Corderos lived in a neighborhood that had been upper middle class maybe thirty years before. A lot of the houses still looked pretty nice, but it wasn't upper middle class any more. Gang symbols and tags, mostly in Spainish, were scrawled on too many walls, sometimes on top of one another. And the houses, even the nice-looking ones, often held three, four, or more families, because that was the only way the new immigrants could afford to pay the rent.

The house the Corderos lived in was like that. Three women and a herd of kids not old enough for school watched me while I set up the spellchecker. All the men, including Ramon Cordero, were out working. Lupe held poor little Jesus and nursed him while she tried to keep track of a toddler who looked just like her.

One of the women - her name was Magdalena - spoke good English. She translated for me when I said, "First things first. Let me check that bottle of tonic you were telling me about, Mrs. Cordero."

Lupe Cordero rattled off something in Spainish. The woman who wasn't Magdalena disappeared into the back part of the house. She came back a minute later with a jar that had started out life holding tartar sauce. It was half full of a murky brown liquid. Lupe made a face. "Don' taste good," she said.

I actuated the spellchecker with Passover wine and a Hebrew blessing. My rite was close enough to what the women were used to - a Latin prayer and communion wine - that they didn't remark on it, not even to say I'd omitted the skin of the cross. I was almost disappointed. "Soy JwKo" is one of the Spainish phrases I do know.

I unscrewed the lid of the ex-tartar-sauce jar, sniffed the current contents myself. The brown liquid didn't smell like anything in particular. I reminded myself that Lupe had drunk it without ill effect, and that Father Flanagan had told me few curanderos trafficked in - or with - anything dangerous. That reminded me: I asked Lupe, "Want to tell me the name of the person you got this from?"

She shook her head. "Don' remember," she said stubbornly. I shrugged; I hadn't expected anything different.

I started to stick the spellcheckers probe right into the liquid, but the microimps inside the unit started screaming as soon as I got the end of the probe over the rim of the jar.

The women exclaimed bilingually. I decided I'd better not put the probe in until I saw what the spellchecker was screaming about.

Words started showing up on the ground glass as the microimps tried to tell me what was wrong. They'd been programmed to write in what was mirror image for them, but they were so agitated that they kept forgetting. It didn't matter, I could follow either style well enough.

The ingredient listing came first: ocdi (maguey beer to you), ocelot blood, ferret flesh, dragon blood - I blinked a little at that one, but the Aztecans have dragons, too. Then the spellchecker's imps started writing UNIDENTIFIED - FORBIDDEN over and over and over. I'd never seen the spellchecker do that before. I never wanted to see it again, either.

"Ceuak," I muttered under my breath; sometimes English lacks the words you need. I almost wished Judaism had a convenient gesture like the skin of the cross. I could have used one just then. To say I was flummoxed is to put it mildly.

"Let's try it again," I said, as much to steady myself as for any other reason. I tried again, from square one, shutting down the spellchecker and reactivating it. You have to be careful if you do that more than once in a short time: the spirits inside can take on too many spirits from the wine and lose memory. But it did make them stop screaming.

This time I reversed the normal order and had them analyze the sorcerous component of the tonic, not the physical ingredients that went into making the complete magic.

That's what I tried to do, at any rate. The screaming started again as soon as the probe got anywhere near the jar.

I looked at the ground glass to see what the microimps had to say. They expressed their opinion in two words:

UNIDENTIFIED - FORBIDDEN. They wrote those two words until the whole screen was full, then started underlining them. Whatever had gone into that tonic, in analyzing it I'd sent a boy to do a man's, or maybe a giant's, job.

Even moving the probe away didn't calm the spellchecker imps. They stopped underlining only when I closed the jar as tight as I could. Even then, none of the usual commands or invocations would clear the ground glass or make them stop screaming. I had to shut down the spellchecker to get them to shut up.