“I guess I could,” Annie replied, feeling gently bullied again, but not knowing how to refuse.
“Thank you, dear.” Dita stood and leaned over, surprising Annie by giving her a brief kiss on the cheek and leaving behind the smell of lavender and roses.
It should have been a kind act, but Annie fought the urge to wipe at the spot. As Annie tucked the slip of paper into her purse, she headed down the metal staircase and heard Dita call out that odd parting phrase again, “Good luck!”
This is crazy. Annie made her way down the steep, narrow steps into the darkness, feeling her way. The only light in the stairwell flickered on above her head for a brief hopeful moment and then went out again. Dita had been right. It took her an hour to find the place, but it wasn’t in the country like she’d assumed it would be. It was in the middle of a place that looked like a small version of Chinatown-complete with signs in strange languages. She found the brick building next to an open marketplace selling everything from candles to crystals.
Her feet hurt. She had to park two blocks away and walk in heels. A block or so before she found the building, she had seen two boys sitting on the sidewalk playing some sort of game. Annie recognized it as she passed. Pick-Up Sticks. She stood for a moment and watched them. Kids still play that game?
She was surprised they weren’t inside playing video games. When Annie stepped over the flood of their sticks, they just looked up at her and smiled.
Edging her way down into the darkness, she felt dizzy and nauseous. She reached into her jacket pocket, remembering she still had the honey cake Virgil had given her the day before. She broke off a small piece. The taste surprised her. It was like honeyed coffee- rich and thick.
How far down does this go? She peered into the darkness and couldn’t see anything.
Behind her, she could see the faint glow of daylight, where she had passed a bar called The Boatman and had met a grizzled old panhandler sprawled at the entrance marked “The Elysian Fields” in scrolling letters. Annie frowned, still shaking off that half-creepy, half-sad feeling she got whenever she met the homeless.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he had asked, his voice rasping through what was left of his teeth.
“You’re gonna give me a penny for my thoughts?” Annie had smiled in spite of herself.
“You give me a penny,” he had corrected. “And I’ll tell you your thoughts.” She had given him a penny, but had hurried past him before he could speak again. Maybe she didn’t want to know what she was thinking.
Annie couldn’t resist another small bite of the honey cake as she moved down the stairwell. The stairs ended and a deep red light at the bottom illuminated a sign indicating that the store was to the right and classes to the left.
The woman in the office upstairs had said she could find Kora in the store, so Annie turned right. At least the passageway was lit, even if it was with hazy red lights.
As she neared the end of the hallway, Annie was paralyzed by a deep growl in the darkness ahead of her. The sound came closer and she took a step back, her hand reaching out to steady herself against the cinderblock wall. A large black dog came into view under one of the red lights, and Annie gasped, stepping further back.
“Kirby!” The faint voice came from somewhere on the other side of the wall.
The dog turned its head in the direction of the voice and whined. Annie thought the dog might be friendlier now, having been admonished, and reached a tentative hand out, but the dog growled again, baring its teeth. She straightened, putting her hands in her pockets and considered the stairway behind her. The moist honey cake gave her an idea. Squatting down again, she made a kissing noise, holding out a bit of the cake. The dog came forward, tentative, his nose working. He took the offering from her fingers. His tail was wagging now and Annie sighed, relieved, and stood up again.
“Bark worse than your bite, huh, pal?” She moved past him toward the end of the corridor. He followed her, nosing her hand to see if she had more for him.
Around the corner, the passage ended and Annie found herself under one of those caged red light bulbs at a door marked with a strange symbol and the word Apollyon. She frowned. There were no other doors and the corridor had come to a dead-end.
Annie shrugged. This must be the place! End of the line! She opened the door and it swung easily. The room was all basement—cinderblock walls and pipes that ran across the ceiling. The fluorescent light over her head flickered. It was clearly a book store, filled with shelves, but there were all sorts of other strange, occult novelties, tarot cards and glass fairy baubles and statues of various gods and goddesses. Annie stared at a huge red Buddha on the floor that had a sign near his faded belly that read, Rub Me.
She could smell incense and located the source on a desk that held an ancient cash register. The incense burner was in the carved out top of a human skull replica that glowed with the light of a candle inside. Annie made a face.
Lovely. Gotta remember to put that one on my Christmas list. There were no customers milling about.
“Hello?” Annie called, looking for the source of the voice that had called the dog. Annie thought she saw movement behind one of the book shelves and called out again. “Kora?”
The dog beside her barked and the door behind her swung shut, the force of it making the skull light flicker and go out. Annie started, gasping, and her hand went to her throat. The dog licked her other hand as if in apology and trotted off behind the desk where wisps of smoke were coming out of the skull’s eye sockets.
“I heard you!” came a muffled voice.
Annie turned at the sound of a door, and a girl entered the room looking like she should be going to a funeral. Annie understood the whole goth-girl rebellion thing, but she had never found it attractive. I guess that’s the point? The girl was wearing the requisite black lipstick, heavy make-up, dark eye shadow.
Her long hair was dyed a deep black with red streaks. Annie eyed her combat boots and Beetlejuice-striped thigh highs and suppressed a smile.
As the girl stepped under a glowing black light that Annie hadn’t noticed on the ceiling, her black t-shirt glowed with a purple ghoulish image of a skull.
Annie took a step back in surprise as the girl advanced. The skull disappeared as she moved to stand under the fluorescents.
The girl smiled at her and extended a tiny, almost childlike hand in greeting. Annie noticed her nails were long and painted like some bizarre reverse French manicure, black on the bottom and white on the tips. “I’m Kora. You were looking for me?”
Annie looked down at the girl, whose head barely came to her shoulder.
She wasn’t as young as she looked, Annie judged. The tattoo and the belly ring and the eyebrow stud make her look younger somehow.
“Yes. I’m here to pick up something for Dita—” Annie stopped, realizing that she didn’t even know Dita’s last name. Not that mattered. People seemed to know who she was, regardless.
“Ah, Dita! She said you were coming.” Kora smiled and Annie saw the flicker of a tongue stud. “You want the beauty box. Stay right here!”
Annie waiting, wondering how Kora had known she was coming if they had no phones. In fact, how did one run a business without a phone, exactly?
Kirby came trotting back around the corner in her direction. He stopped for a moment to be petted before going to sit by the entrance, as if waiting for something.
Kora returned holding a wooden box about half a foot square. It was carved with an intricate pattern, something that seemed familiar to Annie, although she couldn’t say why. It was unrecognizable as any concrete image, and she thought perhaps it was something Celtic. She reached out her hand to touch it.