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Schooling Valdan Mechaieh
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
It was a balmy afternoon on the sands of Newport Beach when Valdan Mechaieh–playing hooky in the month of May, his seventeenth birthday–first sensed his ice soul.
He’d been in science class with Dr. Wall. That bloated blimp bastard had actually tried to make him study for and retake a test Valdan had failed. He’d mentioned something about the behavior patterns Valdan used today would be harder and harder to break in the future. That old fart pretended to care but didn’t know a damn thing about his life. He told the old man that he hated science because it was pointless and he would never use it in his life. Besides, he’d show that stupid jerk: He’d make a life for himself without him and his stupid science.
Valdan had involuntarily leaked a few tears and asked to go to the locker-room restroom, at which point he grabbed his gym bag, ducked out of school and puttered his moped out to Newport. The Pacific waves were a sedative. Wind rippled palm leaves overhead. A couple on the pier talked in low tones of white hills like garbage trucks. A bus screeched to a halt on West Balboa Boulevard. Bell chimes announced someone shuffling inside the 7-11. Sailboats scraped their hulls against the marina.
A trickle of sweat slid down the crease of his spine. He arched his back a little so his Black Flag T-shirt wouldn’t cling.
All sound ceased… but for a final wave clapping the shore. Not even the slightest of breezes stirred the palms. An icicle crept down where the sweat had trailed. Mechaieh shivered. He flicked icy half-pellets stuck to his forehead. The pellets sat on his towel like the half shells of albino ladybugs. Mechaieh had not puzzled out their essence until they melted…. Waves clapped the shore, the bus pulled away, and boats again scraped the marina.
Mechaieh lay on his towel, trying to recall what he’d been thinking when this all occurred, when he’d received this gift, this sensing of another soul. Valdan’s grandmother, a Jew of the more Heterodox variety, once explained there were thirteen souls for humans to discover. Was this the fourteenth?
Mechaieh sat up. Now he had something to use against Dr. Wall! He’d freeze time, go look up the answers and then fill out a test. That’d show him mastery.
The Road Home
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
We drove. No light outside but eye-reflections of hedgehogs in the road, around which Sotehn swerved. No light inside except the speedometer and the yellow-dim beam of the flashlight I held on the copy of the Psalms of Enoch which my master, Lulnon, read aloud.
We didn’t want any other light. On the dashboard stood a figure of the Baptizer made of pale plastic that glowed in the dark. It was nearly three in the morning, and its glow had faded hours ago. If it brightened again, that meant a nephalim really was pursuing us, as Sotehn had said, and it was gaining.
I leaned from the back seat to keep the light shining over my master’s shoulder. The car smelled of sun-cracked vinyl upholstery. Most days, I was content learning distilling, compounding, and the rest of the alchemist’s craft. Ever since that bridge over the dry streambed, and the voice that came out of the water that wasn’t there, I’d wished I’d been apprenticed to a cobbler or a wool merchant like my brothers.
An hour later, while Lulnon read haltingly from a copy of the Psalms of Noah with very small type, I thought I saw the figure begin to lighten.
“There,” said Sotehn before I’d found my voice to speak.
We’d be fine once we reached the city. The priests had renewed the designs on every road leading in just last week, retracing the protective geometry with chalk I’d helped my master compound from the bones of animals sacrificed at the temples.
Setehn touched the sigils painted in a ring around the Baptizer, invoking each planetary angel by name as he touched its sign. The yellow-green glow went cloudy for a moment, then came back bright as before. Maybe brighter.
“A strong one,” Setehn said. “Probably newly wakened.”
The glow intensified as the city drew closer. Even with sodium lights along the road now, I could see it. Ahead of us, the chalk designs just visible against the road black.
We passed over them. I slumped back in relief.
“No,” said my master, “we are betrayed.”
The figure still glowed. The bones hadn’t been blessed after all.
“I’ll lose it in the market,” said Sotehn, and, knowing how familiar he was with the maze of alleys there, I had no doubt he would.
But an unholy creature walked the city, and someone had opened the way for it.