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When during one of the breakfasts in the Folly I told Nightingale a knock-knock joke, Dr. Walid finally insisted that we do something about it.
Not that I knew what he was talking about. It was worrying me – I’m normally very keen on following the instructions of people with medical degrees, especially if there are reasons to suspect that my body may not be overjoyed if I do otherwise. The problem was that this time everything seemed to be all right, literally as all right as it could possibly be, nothing was wrong… things were perfect-
ah, that was what they meant.
“Yes, that’s what I mean, Peter,” said Nightingale. “Your behaviour is not exactly what I or Dr. Walid would call normal.”
Happy equals suspicious, I thought. For a police officer it was a fair assumption.
“It feels good,” I drawled, stabbing my piece of pudding with a fork. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it, frowned and looked away.
That particular knock-knock joke wasn’t one of the funnier ones.
Granted, I had once giggled upon seeing a murder victim, but now it was far worse than that. And I had nobody to go drinking with after it was over. Well, Nightingale, perhaps, but a part of me was still vaguely aware that offering my governor to go and get drunk together might not be a smashing idea.
It happened when Stephanopoulos was taking my statement. No weird bollocks, she said.
“Inspector Seawoll enters the room,” she told the recorder. “So, when did you see the IEDs, Peter?”
“Well, I just walked into it, and there they were,” I said, and stifled the laughter that bubbled and pulsed in my throat. Finally, unable to contain myself any longer, I went into a fit of suffocating chortles.
Seawoll flinched and turned to me sharply. Stephanopoulos gave me a suspicious look.
“…what happened then?” she asked after a deliberately lengthy pause. And then, suddenly: “maybe we can get you coffee, Peter?”
Her tone was different now, and I had to admit that I did not follow. Generally, that meant either that I was screwed or that they were screwed; for the time being I decided to go with the latter.
“Yes,” I told her, “yes, thanks, coffee would be nice. What happened after I saw the IEDs? I flew off the building.”
This time I didn’t attempt to restrain myself, and soon I was barely able to breathe; my solar plexus ached from laughing.
“End of the interview,” said Stephanopoulos, and then I found myself lifted gently and dragged outside of the interview room and into Seawoll’s office. Just so you know, I could walk perfectly well on my own, but I decided not to protest. They seated me into an armchair (Seawoll, contrary to what one might erroneously derive from his otherwise Spartan ways, had purchased himself a set of cherry-coloured stuffed armchairs any deity would have been pleased to sit in) and draped a blanket around my shoulders, and Stephanopoulos got me a cup of bloody awful coffee.
I might have been a bit off, but, thankfully, my intellect remained intact. I knew exactly what they were doing: they were comforting a man betrayed and gone mad with grief. And I just didn’t know how to explain to them that I felt happy and alive and as warm inside as though somebody had conjured a werelight in my guts.
So what I did was conjure a werelight and show it to Stephanopoulos, expecting perhaps the reaction of girlish delight I’d seen on her face the day I blew up their CCTV camera; after that they sent for Nightingale, who picked me up in his Jag and took me back to the Folly. He didn’t say a word to me until we got there; and even after that it was just your regular set of “help yourself-excuse me-good night”.
I dreamt of being a fox, a big, beautiful, healthy fox; and my legs were its legs, my head was its head, its tail was my tail. I was all fox and every part of me was fox. I was running through a green sunny field, feeling all the smells as sharply as I would have felt vestigia. The herbs, warmed by the sun, spilled drops of dew onto my head and my ears. The scent of wild honey – or rather, that substance that would subsequently become wild honey – was overwhelming; tiny insects buzzed in my ears, unable to reach my body protected by rich fur. Perhaps that was it, I thought. Perhaps for animals the whole world was like one great vestigium.
Speaking of which: I scored three yaps on the yap-o-meter, and it was not a good sign at all. I knew this was not your regular “gimme food” barking; for one thing, there was nothing either in my hands or my mouth, and I was fairly certain that I ate Molly’s beef-and-cucumber sandwich about five hours ago upon being caught in one of the massive evening traffic jams on Piccadilly.
I wondered why Nightingale had sensed nothing. He hadn’t allowed me to include him as a subject in my telepathy experiment, but if anyone in the Folly could turn out to be more reliable when it came to measuring vestigia than Toby the Dog it would undoubtedly be Nightingale himself. And three yaps worth of magic were no joke, what with the extraordinary reluctance to absorb it that human flesh generally displayed.
He appeared to be sitting in the coach house, neither drinking nor watching rugby – just sitting there, so I got the kind of feeling I used to get when my mum had waited for me to come and have a Serious Talk regarding my girlfriends, my grades and my behaviour. Despite this, I still felt very happy; I was happy to see him, and happy that I was home, and even happy about Molly’s sandwiches and Toby.
“Good evening, sir,” I said warmly. Nightingale looked at me.
“Good evening, Peter,” he answered in a tone I couldn’t quite interpret. “This… thing of yours seems to be making your distraction problem worse, I see.”
“Stephanopoulos gave me a shock blanket,” said I.
“Yes, this sounds like clear enough an indication,” said Nightingale. “But I’m not sure I want to know the rest of the story.”
And rightly so, I thought. Even my abnormally euphoric self wasn’t very keen on the idea of saying aloud that I now found the events in Skygarden funny. God knows what kind of notions such a statement could give to Nightingale, what with the fact that one of his two apprentices had already turned; and I was certainly not suicidal enough to mess with a man who could conjure 2800-degree-Fahrenheit fireballs (according to my Physics textbook, such was the melting temperature of steel).
I sat on the sofa beside him and thoughtfully stared into nowhere. I still had difficulty concentrating.
“I just thought- why hadn’t you noticed it before?”
“You’d be surprised if you knew how difficult it is to determine if somebody is bewitched,” shrugged he.
“So this is what it is?” I asked, thinking well, that escalated quickly. “I’m ‘bewitched’? You don’t look terribly alarmed, sir.”
There was a pause when Nightingale opened a can of beer. Alarm there was none, that much is true; but there was uncertainty in his eyes that the small part of me still able to feel anything but sheer happiness didn’t like.
“At first I thought it could be shock,” he admitted. “I’m not very good at determining it. When I was growing up, well – let’s just say that people didn’t consider posttraumatic stress a thing.”
“Then for some time I believed it was a river glamour. But yesterday I saw Mama Thames, and she’s fairly certain the rivers had nothing to do with it.”
“Okay,” said I, blissfully oblivious to the deep shit I was about to get myself into, “could it be the Faceless Man? Or Lesley?”
Nightingale looked stricken, although whether it was because the idea hadn’t occurred to him before or because I mentioned Lesley’s name so casually I couldn’t be sure.
“Thankfully,” he drawled, “glamours used by human magicians are too complex to be sustained for a long time, let alone when there’s any considerable distance between the magician and the subject.” But I saw that he had made the connection; “magical creatures, however,” he then added even more slowly, “are another matter. And of course we cannot be sure that none of them work for-“
“But it isn’t possible to wipe somebody’s memory, is it?”
“No,” said Nightingale, “not as far as I am aware – at least not without severe brain damage.”
“So we can be sure that I didn’t do any harm yet.”
He turned to me, his eyes narrowing, and I almost heard the shhh-tch sound scanning devices in sci-fi movies make when something’s about to go off and tell you “target identified”.
No, I growled mentally. No, no, no. Crap.
“That, or the glamour makes you unwilling to tell me about whatever it is that you’ve done,” said he.
“God, no. You can’t seriously think- I can resist them, Lady Ty tried hers on me, don’t you remember? I broke her statue, but she couldn’t make me drink the water.”
Nightingale considered that.
“Yes, that’s true,” he answered finally. “But we’ve never encountered a creature who could maintain the effect of the spell for days. Frankly, I’m clueless as to where all this magic comes from.”
For a moment I was torn between offering him my ideas and shutting the fuck up. The voice of reason was insisting that the latter option was preferable, because supplying a severely paranoid Thomas Nightingale with arguments in favour of a theory according to which I was another spy of the Faceless Man sounded a tad unwise. On the other hand, withholding information from your fellow officer (especially when the officer in question is your superior) is a cardinal sin of the modern policing; and then there was that warmth my body was so full of, and angels sang in my head in sweet voices, convincing me that everything was going to be fine, I would come to no harm, and that I was charming and loved by everyone around, including, surprisingly, my governor.
“Residual magic from Skygarden?” I risked, utterly forgetting to prevent my lips from twisting into a smile.
Never before had I seen anyone’s expression change so dramatically.
After a moment of silence Nightingale sighed heavily, turned away and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“You must understand, Peter, that I… don’t mean it as an insult or as an indication of mistrust… but I’d like to have you in magical quarantine. It is either this or a leave.”
Normally I’d have chosen a leave on principle; but I knew that would make me a prime suspect, and, more importantly, I suddenly saw how much he wanted me to agree. Apparently that magical what the fuck was it again had successfully molten my backbone, because I couldn’t resist.
“Magical quarantine? What is it, exactly, and why did I never hear of it before?”
That will be due to the fact that Sir Isaac Newton hadn't had a WWII bunker with six-foot-thick walls made of a chromium-containing (judging from the shine and the utter lack of rust) alloy, I realized as Molly led me downstairs. It was the same damp, unlit corridor that led to the mysterious door with circles; but we stopped much sooner this time.
“Fuck,” I said, my intonation strangely reminding me of the way Zach usually talked. “Fuck. Is there anything else I don’t know about?”
Which was, of course, a foolish question.
Though the room was scrubbed clean, I could tell it was a long time ago that the last unfortunate sod who had happened to present a Falcon threat to the Queen’s peace had been locked there. For one thing, there were no books on the shelves (surely the inmates should’ve been dying from boredom), and the only light source was a surreal-looking Yablochkov candle. Don’t ask me how I knew that was what it was.
“A Yablochkov candle? Seriously?”
“Yes, exactly,” said Nightingale, striding into the room and stopping in the middle. “Apparently the constructors discovered the effect magic was having on anything more… technologically advanced. So that’s what they had to settle for. It’s rather inefficient, to be honest – burns out after an hour and a half.”
“Also, it is soddingly bright,” I added, and eyed it sceptically. “Can’t I just have your proper wax ones?”
“Sure,” said he. He was looking around rather sourly. “The entourage is even more ridiculous than I remember. Somebody had this idiotic notion that, since magic allegedly comes from a magician’s environment, it would be sufficient to isolate the magician from all the possible external sources of magic. I have not the slightest idea as to why they thought walls of inox would in any way help.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I assured him. “In a week the room will be full of posters of Armstrong and Cate Blanchett. It will look very cozy in candlelight.”
Nightingale gave me an assessing look.
“I am not planning on holding you here for a week – I highly doubt you’ll be able to survive such an ordeal. First of all, I’ll call Dr. Walid immediately; but even if his examination reveals nothing, from the third day on you’ll be able to come out – the network of spells around this room blunts the inmate’s magical abilities, including the ability to perceive vestigia and, by extension, sensitivity to glamours. The effect lasts for about three days and is renewable.”
I had to ask.
“Why couldn’t we just put Varvara Sidorovna in here? Did you think she wouldn’t survive the ‘ordeal’?”
“Because the spells are nowhere near to being efficient,” shrugged Nightingale. “A powerful magician such as Varvara Sidorovna could’ve, with due effort, broken out. You saw how she works with the gelu formae – the walls of steel wouldn’t have been a serious problem.”
“And the gelu formae-“ I began before I could stop myself,
“-are no concern of yours,” said Nightingale sternly. “At least for the time being. You are off training until Wednesday. I’ll get you candles and your Latin textbooks.”
That proved to be a wise move, although, truth to be told, Nightingale seemed to be rather alarmed when the next morning at seven o’clock he found me laughing heartily at Latin declensions and, upon asking what it was that I found so funny, was told that vocative was a ridiculous language form.
Concluding that Latin was worsening my condition – or whatever it was – I decided to engage in the process of thinking about my present (rather bleak, speaking logically) situation.
Contrary to what you might’ve concluded from reading the books of Colin Dexter, being a nerd (whether in the sense of loving Wagner or in the sense of loving Star Wars) is not only perfectly useless for the purpose of becoming a good policeman, but is frowned upon when they hire you for the Job. Unfortunately for the likes of me and Nightingale, it is a widely accepted opinion that a copper who spends his evenings absorbed in reflections on the way classical literature may be connected to his cases is – well, not exactly a bad copper – but certainly a nutcase.
Luckily, we had our very private branch of the Met where we could think about anything we wanted and do all kinds of perfectly crazy things like conjuring flying balls of light and muttering Latin crap under our breaths. It had been fun. Up until the moment when Brandon Coopertown’s face fell off.
But I digress. The fact that my nerd fu skills were useless meant that I couldn’t just grab the first Latin classic I happened to stumble across and start making margin notes – this way I would make no progress whatsoever. Besides, I was deprived of HOLMES, my phone, and my laptop, thus left with the very basic factual information, no evidence, and no possibility to investigate.
I decided to begin by establishing what about me creeped out Nightingale, Seawoll, and Stephanopoulos. Despite having some guesses, I still wasn’t terribly sure – my intuition was temporarily switched off, and my brain kept finding something more interesting to contemplate every time I tried to think about it.
I took Nightingale’s Parker pen that he left on my desk and composed a list of significant events that took place during the last week. It looked like this:
1. A tower block almost collapsed on top of me (the destruction of Skygarden)
2. Lesley turned out to be a mole
3. Sky died
4. V.S. was captured by Nightingale
5. Robert Weil tried (possibly innocent)
6. Nicky (?) killed chainsaw guy
I put the pen to my lips (I couldn’t, of course, chew Nightingale’s pen, no matter how much I’d have liked to), stared at the list for a second and then added, placing a broad stroke in-between the lines:
Reaction: find everything funny, laugh during the briefing, laugh at Latin cases, tell Nightingale a knock-knock joke, dream of being a fox
Now even I saw that Nightingale had a point. I would’ve locked myself down here, too, if I was him.
At the same time I had absolutely no idea how to approach the task of determining what the hell had possessed me, especially since this something was still inside my fucking brain.
Except…
Contemplating the very last line, I suddenly felt a flash of vague recollection. Then it became clearer; amazed at the vast expanse of diverse and absolutely useless knowledge being stored in my memory, I wrote:
William Seabrook
Rob Wood
fox=hash
An hour later Dr. Walid paid yours truly a visit. He looked so noticeably uncomfortable in that steely room stripped of everything but the Yablochkov candle on the main desk (which was, too, made of steel, probably for aesthetical purposes) that one might think he had a mild claustrophobia or a really, really bad experience with aluminium foil.
He performed a series of mysterious, hopefully thaumatology- and not cryptopathology-related rituals, shone a pocket torch in my eye and made me stick my tongue out.
“Dr. Walid,” I said hurriedly before he could tell me his verdict, “is there a magical analogue of hashish?”
“Funny you had to ask,” he narrowed his yellow round eyes. “Although I suppose, as a police officer, you should be able to spot the basic signs for the most popular drugs.”
“That’s actually because of Robert Wood,” admitted I, and, when he looked blank, added: “An American physicist. He wrote that, when he chewed hashish as a part of a college experiment, he hallucinated about being a fox.”
Dr. Walid’s gave me this look of his, a bit like I was from the Moon and spoke Lunar. I giggled involuntarily.
“In any event,” said he, “your symptoms would suggest you used some kind of marijuana mix – except I don’t doubt Nightingale’s words when he says that you were in here for a full day with no access to drugs of any sort, and drug intoxication wears off much quicker than that. It must be a glamour, although I cannot think of anyone who’d want to cast a drug-spell on you, Peter.”
“Well, thinking is our job,” I replied, barely refraining from tapping him on the back. Personal boundaries were magically (in the very literal sense of the word) gone from my consciousness, and I had to control myself with the help of logical reasoning. In this case it told me that, though Dr. Walid couldn’t conjure fireballs, he still was a six-foot-tall murky Scot, and that was an important factor to consider.
He seemed to hesitate.
“Can I do anything for you, Peter?”
Suddenly everyone was attempting to be nice to me. Or perhaps I imagined that, what with me being totally stoned. I was lucky not to see any hallucinations yet.
“Bring me a Cate Blanchett poster, will you?” I eyed him conspiratorially. “I can’t ask Nightingale to do that.”
If he thought I was zonkers as well as drugged, he kept his opinion to himself.
So not only was I in a magical quarantine room that, apparently, hadn’t been in use since WWII, but I was also high on a cannabis glamour. Sounds spectacular, doesn’t it?
My second visitor was, quite obviously, Nightingale. I couldn’t complain that there was too much diversity: Molly didn’t visit me on principle, Zach had never contacted me since our last encounter, and neither Seawoll nor Stephanopoulos would touch the Folly with a barge pole. And Lesley – well, Lesley wasn’t there, was she?
Despite carrying a pile of books that, I estimated, must’ve weighed about twenty pounds, Nightingale didn’t look very distressed. He was still gloomy, though, and kept frowning at something invisible.
“I brought you literature on glamours and Encyclopaedia Britannica,” he informed me. Apparently there was a silent question in my eyes, because he sighed and explained: “Not that one. The unofficial version.”
“Apparently the wizarding community didn’t suffer from an excess of imagination,” said I, and managed not to grin. That was a good sign, I decided.
“They didn’t suffer from an irresistible urge to use their imagination whenever they could, more like,” replied Nightingale dryly. I was amazed he didn’t scold me for using a Harry Potter reference (although I suppose he could’ve simply been unaware that was what it was).
There was a pause. Then he walked towards me and seated himself on my desk, his hands gripping the edge in an awkward gesture.
“Did your feelings at all change since Sunday?”
That was a good question, but you know I’m exactly the kind of guy who can answer all the questions apart from the most obvious ones.
“I’m not sure,” I said finally. “But I just used a Harry Potter reference which you didn’t catch, and I didn’t grin.”
Nightingale looked at me doubtfully.
“Was it funny?” he asked.
“Yeah- well, not Monty Python, obviously, but right now I’m finding just about everything funny.”
“…And you do not understand why I, Dr. Walid, and DS Stephanopoulos are… confused.” He had spotted my list, of course. I should’ve known better than to leave it under the Yablochkov candle.
“I know why. Logically. But I don’t understand, no.”
His shoulders hunched down.
“I’m sorry,” I offered.
“You are finding this funny, too,” said Nightingale in quiet exasperation, “aren’t you?”
He managed to catch me by the wrists before I could hug him, thank God.
“Have some self-control!” barked he, “You are literally high as a kite on magical hashish, Peter, what do you think you are doing?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked slowly, trying to be what I then thought was reasonable. “You’re upset because of me and Lesley, and because of the Faceless One, and because of Ettersberg.”
“And you are on drugs.”
There was a pained expression on his face that caused me to back off. Still, he was not so much actively pushing me away as holding me at a distance.
“That doesn’t mean that I’m acting against my better judgment,” said I.
He sighed, apparently searching for an argument that would be convincing enough to make me drop it.
“Look at it this way,” he said, “it is like the rape law. On the one hand, the fact that you are intoxicated does not mean anything. On the other hand, you may just happen to be upset when you sober up, and I don’t want to have this on my conscience.”
Being Thomas Nightingale, he unfailingly chose the one analogy that got the point across to the copper, yessir-no sir-drinking-in-the-streets-forbidden part of my brain. I instantly backed away and flopped down onto the chair (back to front, because I couldn’t be arsed to turn it). I felt at once tired and hungry, and I rather suspected that my eyes were bloodshot. In any event, I was happy Beverley wasn’t there – I vaguely remembered that one of the main signs of marijuana use was an increase in libido. I didn’t know whether it applied to hashish, and wasn’t eager to find out.
“Sir,” drawled I. “Is there such a thing as a magical comedown?”
This idea occurred to him, too, I understood from the way the crease between his eyebrows deepened.
“The magical drugs I’ve encountered,” said he upon some reflection, “were different. People who invented the venena formae used their imagination all right. And no, there was no comedown. But I must admit that your case resembles substance abuse a bit too much even to my tastes. I don’t know what will happen when it… wears off. Hopefully, it will wear off and not abruptly stop.”
…So the venena formae were a thing. Was there anything else I didn’t know?..
It was on the third day that I felt something noteworthy. For the first time since Sunday, I saw an almost-normal dream; it was a welcome change after a night of dreaming about flying milk and silver birches con polenta.
The bad news was that I wasn’t quite as happy anymore. During my morning Latin studies I caught myself staring at the list that still lay on the desk; and it was now quite obvious to me what the big deal was. I recalled, the way people recall things after a grand booze, Nightingale’s yester visit, and there was something vague and blunt throbbing in my temples, something suspiciously like embarrassment.
For a moment I allowed myself a brief wild hope that he wouldn’t remember, but of course I knew very well he would.
I didn’t know what to do about it. So I took my Star beer, put the Latin textbook aside (vocative made me feel worse) and resorted to studying the alphabetical indices of Magical Innovation: A Study of Glamours and Other Formae, Naturally Occurring Glamours, and On the Matter of Seduction Magic. The last-named especially invoked my interest. I had always suspected that if even something as bizarre as the Quiet People was a thing, incubi and succubi must’ve been just as real.
Rather to my disappointment, it turned to be dedicated to love potions and artificial glamours rather than magical creatures that could bang people 24/7.
Naturally Occurring Glamours looked more promising. It was a worn but well-maintained volume, clearly valued by its previous owner (I knew for a fact that it had only recently been brought to the Folly). The inscription on the title page informed me that it had been published in 1956 in Lincolnshire and was a reprint of a 1919 edition. The ink, though of a decent quality, had already started to fade; but the cover was still a spectacular soft Persian violet, made of some papery fibrous material. Curiously enough, the pages smelt with vanilla and dust; momentarily I had wondered if it wasn’t a vestigium, but I was still too knackered to answer this question with any certainty.
In its alphabetical index I found something that went under a mysterious name of “V, -vestigia-attracted brownie”, page 195.
Page 195 said as follows:
Vestigia-attracted brownie
is a spirit that inhabits places (for the most part, houses) rich in vestigia. Vestigia-attracted brownies normally use residual magic for their own purposes – whether vile or otherwise depends on a range of factors, including the type of vestigia, the story of a particular brownie, his/her relationships with the human inhabitants of the place etc.
They are known for possessing an exceptional talent for using glamours.
I considered that. Accepting it as a working theory felt mildly insulting. Being magically drugged and put into quarantine by Nightingale I could live with, but being magically drugged by a brownie was a bit too much. The fact that I now could call the case “Operation Weed Brownies” didn’t improve my mood.
My moroseness combined with the sheer amount of wax puddles on my desk, an obvious indication that I did nothing else but work, seemed to cheer Nightingale up.
“Hello, Peter,” said he. “You look better.”
“Better as in ‘worse’, yes,” my tone was sulky, and I couldn’t help it.
“Dr. Walid is going to run a blood test, that might help to determine the nature of-“
“-does the Folly have brownies?”
He blinked, sweeping an invisible dust speck from his sleeve.
“Brownies? I think I would know if they were there. And, in any event, what gave you the notion?”
I showed him the page in Naturally Occurring Glamours.
“Ah, this,” frowned Nightingale. “I forgot about them altogether. Of course it’s sensible to take them into account, but they’re almost extinct now. The post-War decrease in the number of vestigia-rich buildings caused the majority of them to move to other, non-inhabited places, and these… they aren’t good for brownies, first of all; and then many of them are soaked with torture- and death-related residual magic, the way demon traps are. It isn’t safe to consume.”
I imagined how after the War crowds of brownies moved to live on common graves, battlefields and murder sites. It was a bit heartbreaking.
“Right,” said I, “but, as the main authority on everything flora- and fauna-related, you’d surely notice if there were any smokeable plants in the area?”
“In theory, there are many plants on the grounds of the Folly that could be made into drugs. I just never paid any attention-“
“Are any of them magical?”
“Strictly speaking, all the plant are what you’d call magical, but-“
“Are any of them what anyone would call magical?”
“If you’d just stop interrupting me,” said Nightingale with irritation. “I was about to say that no, there is no such thing as plants that ‘anyone would call magical’.”
I was slightly disappointed. After Seduction Magic had turned out to contain nothing on succubi one hoped that at least Sweet Galenas would turn out to be real.
“Unless, of course, you count plants connected to dryads.”
He said “dryads”, and momentarily I had a weird sensation, a bit like I weighed ten pounds instead of one hundred and seventy. You get this in these modern elevators, especially those installed in skyscrapers. It’s not pleasant. For one thing, your heart suddenly decides that it would rather reside in your throat, and so do your liver and your lungs. Understandably, it gets kind of crowded.
It was supposed to mean that I was recovering, but I was of the opinion that I could do perfectly well without such signs.
“Do you have any ideas as to how to proceed, sir?”
“Well, the assumption that it must be a magical creature currently inhabiting the Folly is quite sensible,” sighed Nightingale. “I wouldn’t bet it’s a brownie, you understand, but it’s worth checking.”
I realized that I had no clue as to what to do when you suspect you have a brownie on the premises.
“I don’t suppose one stands up and shouts ‘hey brownie, please come out, I want to have a word with you?’”
“No,” said Nightingale, his tone dry. “That would be silly. And you do not call them ‘brownies’ in their presence. Believe me, you don’t want to annoy an ancient creature with an extraordinary power over residual magic.”
And here I was thinking brownies were small adorable people feeding on milk and honey. I’m sad, me.
“Am I supposed to think that this is not silly?” I asked grimly. Nightingale gave an eloquent shrug.
“It could be worse,” he said.
But I couldn’t bring myself to be too embarrassed over walking around with milk saucers. The thing was, I could finally come out of the Folly; I could breathe the fresh air and see the plants and the buildings and, frankly, just about anything that was neither a Latin textbook nor made of steel. All the colours seemed to me unusually bright; I spent a considerable amount of time staring stupidly at a purple begonia that resided in the backyard of the Folly. Its flowers were velvety. It made me want to lick them.
Nightingale prevented me from doing just that by taking the last saucer from my hands and putting it under a huge green shrub.
“That’s Salvia divinorum,” he explained. Not that it made anything clearer.
“What do we do now?” asked I. “Is it –are they going to come out of whatever plant it is? And, if yes, will they be upset upon seeing us?”
“Upset?” something about the idea amused him. “I don’t think so, no.”
And they- well, she, though I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure- came out of the bush that, according to Nightingale, was called Diviner’s Sage, just like that. As if there was anything behind or under it where she could hide. I wondered if she, like the Quiet People, lived underground.
I’m calling her a “she” purely on the basis of the fact that she vaguely resembled a human female – a teenager, perhaps, about seventeen years old, two feet tall, and anorexic. She was frightfully thin – the baggy iridescent clothes only made it all the more apparent. She was standing on her knees, raising the saucer to her lips and lapping the milk with a long, sharp tongue. Her skin tone invoked vague associations with Native Americans, but her mouth was painted dazzling white.
“Good afternoon,” said Nightingale cautiously.
“’Lo, Nightingale,” said she with a distinct Northern accent, and smiled. It was as if I downed a glass of something strong – I felt myself smiling back even against my will, and the familiar laughter was accumulating in my lungs.
He must’ve noticed this, because he frowned at her.
“Why are you doing this to him?” he asked.
“Wow, you’re so rude,” said she, putting the saucer down. “How about ‘what’s your name’, ‘how do you do’ and ‘when did you come to the Folly’?”
“Sorry, it has to wait. Do you know a powerful magician who wears a mask and uses masking glamours?”
“If you’re afraid that I’m doing this on the behalf of whoever it is you’re talking about, you’re wrong,” she pouted. “I did this because I was worried about him. He felt so upset when he came back a week ago, and I thought he could use a bit of fun. I’m not heartless, you know. I care about the inhabitants of my houses.”
Nightingale walked up to her very swiftly, bent down to bring himself level with her and looked her in the eyes. Something told me it wasn’t a simple staring contest – she twitched and gave a hiss, her small hands grabbing a leaf of the Salvia shrub. Nightingale remained motionless, looking at her still. After a moment or two he nodded and straightened.
“She isn’t lying,” he told me without turning. The brownie widened her eyes, obviously insulted beyond belief.
“Of course I wasn’t lying! I don’t lie to the Domini. I’m a good kind, I can’t harm anyone who lives here.”
Assuming the “bad kind” were anything like those brownies from the folk tales who killed the owners and set the house afire, we were lucky indeed.
“You still chose the single stupidest course of action there was,” Nightingale informed her, pursing his lips. “Did you ever test this particular glamour on other human beings?”
“Well,” said she, “no. That wouldn’t be possible, not now that the girl is gone.”
“I hope you’ll know better in the future, because Peter here is not happy about the effects of your spell, and neither am I.”
“I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly, recoiling. “I’ll stop it now.”
There was suddenly alarm in Nightingale’s eyes. He stepped closer to her;
“No,” he said with urgency, “no. No, don’t-“
But it was too late.
It felt like standing in a rising tsunami. The wave rose under my feet, mute and powerful; and the next moment I was underwater, awash with grief, remorse, shame, more grief, everything I had quite forgotten about over the past three days.
“It’s fine,” I heard Nightingale’s muffled voice. “It will pass. It is more of a physiological reaction, really. You’ve been drugged for three full days, no wonder-“
Him talking reminded me that I had the power of speech, too. I vaguely remembered how to use my tongue and my lips to produce sounds.
“I’ll die,” I finally managed, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to say anything else. “I’ll die. IlldieIlldieIlldiediedie-“
“Don’t say that,” said Nightingale forcibly, and for a moment I was afraid he’d tell me that “words have power” was no mere superstition.
I felt my lips come loose in a most shameful, childish way.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I breathed out, opening my eyes wide to prevent the tears from sliding down my cheeks. I’d be damned if I was about to cry in front of Nightingale.
The brownie stared at me in horror.
“I never knew he’d be this way,” she whispered. “I never meant any harm, I swear, I only wanted to help.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who failed at this particular task so spectacularly,” said Nightingale, and walked towards me. “Come on, Peter.”
I felt his hands on my shoulders and leant forward gratefully, torn between lying down onto the ground and throwing up on his shoes; I failed to observe, however, that he had already dragged me almost all the way to the main stairs, and I heard him shout Molly, tea the way an artillery officer would shout fire for effect.
Then I sat on the sofa in the coach house, drinking the tea and pretending that I had a cold (because I had to explain the sniffing, to myself if to nobody else). And I thought, the whole thing was fucking ridiculous and how do I even tell anybody that I was magically drugged by a brownie? Hopefully there wouldn’t be anybody to tell it to. Lesley was gone, after all.
“Don’t be too mad at her,” I told Nightingale. “She isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box. And it’s cool to have a brownie. Do you think Molly will like her?”
“Molly doesn’t get along with other magical creatures,” said he. “And she won’t be inclined to like somebody who thinks that drugging you is a good idea. But who knows.”
I sipped my tea, trying to look enigmatic. Not that I could compete with Nightingale – but then it’s easy to look enigmatic when you walk around in a white suit like the ghost of King Hamlet.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Peter?”
“When I’ll be writing a report for the Folly archives, may I call it Operation Weed Brownies?”
Unexpectedly, he gave me a hesitant half-smile.
“Go ahead.”
I was almost sure he would have normally agreed to no such thing.