The Devil You Know

I should also tell you that I do have a job—a real job that pays the bills, at least occasionally. But at the time currently under discussion, I was taking an extended holiday, not entirely voluntary, and not without its own attendant problems relating to cash flow, professional credibility, and personal self-esteem. In any case, it left Pen with a vested interest in putting alternative work my way. Since she was still a good Catholic girl (when she wasn’t being a Wicca priestess), she went to Mass every Sunday, lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, and prayed to this tune: “Please, Madonna, in your wisdom and mercy, intercede for my mother though she died with many carnal sins weighing on her soul; let the troubled nations of Earth find a road to peace and freedom; and make Castor solvent, amen.”

But usually she left it at that, which was a situation we could both live with. So it was an unpleasant surprise to me when she stopped counting on divine intervention and told me about the kids’ party agency she was setting up with her crazy friend Leona—and the slimy sod of a street magician who’d given her an eleventh-hour stab in the back.

“But you could do this so easily, Fix,” she coaxed over coffee laced with cognac in her subterranean sitting room. The smell was making me dizzy—not the smell of the brandy, but the smell of rats and earth and leaf mulch and droppings and Mrs. Amelia Underwood roses—of things growing and things decaying. One of her two ravens—Arthur, I think—was clacking his beak against the top shelf of the bookcase, making it hard for me to stick to a train of thought. This was her den, her center of gravity—the inverted penthouse underneath the three-story monstrosity where her grandmother had lived and died in the days when mammoths still roamed the Earth. She had me at a disadvantage here, which was why she’d asked me in to start with.

“You can do real magic,” Pen pointed out sweetly, “so fake magic ought to be a doddle.”

I blinked a couple of times to clear my eyes, blinded by candles, fuddled by incense. In a lot of ways, the way Pen lives is sort of reminiscent of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations: she only uses the basement, which means that the rest of the house apart from my bedsitter up in the roof space is frozen in the 1950s, never visited, never revised. Pen herself froze a fair bit later than that, but like Miss Havisham, she wears her heart on her mantelpiece. I try not to look at it.

On this particular occasion, I took refuge in righteous indignation. “I can’t do real magic, Pen, because there’s no such animal. Not the way you mean it, anyway. What do I look like, eh? Just because I can talk to the dead—and whistle up a tune for them—that doesn’t make me Gandalf the bastard Grey. And it doesn’t mean that there are fairies at the bottom of the sodding garden.”

The crude language was a ploy intended to derail the conversation. It didn’t work, though. I got the impression that Pen had worked out her script in advance for this one.

“‘What is now proved was once only imagined,’” she said primly—because she knows that Blake is my main man, and I can’t argue with him. “Okay,” she went on, topping up my cup with about a half-pint of Janneau XO (it was going to be dirty pool on both sides, then), “but you did all that stage-magic stuff when we were in college, didn’t you? You were wonderful back then. I bet you could still do it. I bet you wouldn’t even have to practice. And it’s two hundred quid for a day’s work, so you could pay me a bit off last month’s chunk of what you owe me . . .”

It took a lot more persuasion and a fair bit more brandy—so much brandy, in fact, that I made a pass at her on my unsteady way out the door. She slapped off my right hand, steered my left onto the door handle, and kissed me good night on the cheek without breaking stride.

I was profoundly grateful for that when I woke up in the morning, with my tongue stuck to my soft palate and my head full of unusable fuzz. Sexy, sweet, uninhibited, nineteen-year-old Pen, with her autumn bonfire of hair, her pistachio eyes, and her probably illegal smile would have been one thing; thirty-something Earth Mother Pen in her sibyl’s cave, tended by rats and ravens and Christ only knew what other familiar spirits, and still waiting for her prince to come even though she knew exactly where he was and what he’d turned into—there was too much blood under the bridge now. Leave it at that.

Then I remembered that I’d agreed to do the party just before I made the pass, and I cursed like a longshoreman. Game, set, and match to Pen and Monsieur Janneau. I hadn’t even known we were playing doubles.

So there was a reason, anyway, even if it wasn’t good or sufficient, why I now found myself facing down these arrogant little shits and prostituting my God-given talents for the paltry sum of two hundred quid. There was a reason why I’d put myself in the way of temptation. And there was a reason why I fell.