Tenth Man

Change should have been coming. He’d given the lady a twenty and the cost of the thing was somewhat less than that.

The thing, sitting as it was, a perfectly still grayish lump in a cardboard box, resembled nothing so much as a pudding over-boiled. Fifteen was ridiculous, but seventeen was an outrage. There was no way the pet store clerk was going to get a twenty out of him.

He waited, hand out, because change should be coming.

The clerk shut the cash drawer with her hip, then turned her great, bespectacled eyes on him. She raised an eyebrow in the direction of the upturned palm.

“Last one I had,” she said in the slow voice of a woman who knows, simply knows, that the person in front of her is an idiot. “In Italy they sell them for five-ninety per pound. You got a steal.”

Standing there holding his palm out with the thing, so valuable overseas, sitting immobile in the complimentary cardboard box, he began to feel embarrassed.

“It would seem.”

“So, you just starting out?” the clerk asked.

Just starting out? What an insult. Saul wanted to tell her that he was a professional, had been for years. He wanted to say this was, in fact, his second familiar, but then would come all those inexorable, uncomfortable questions, “What happened to the first one?” and “What were you doing in the Janion anyway?” and the like.

“Been at it for a while,” he decided to answer, patting the greasy, fleshy lump in the box. His hand came away smelling like cabbage.

“A while?” she asked. He nodded and dug a crumpled business card out of his pocket.

“Hornsby Magic.” she read. “Locate Lost Items — Reasonable Rates. Oh.” She looked him over again, squinting through the thick, black-rimmed glasses. “Are you taking new clients? Because I’ve lost something and I really need it back and all the other psychics are sort of creepy.”

He laughed. The other psychics are sort of frauds he wanted to say but decided against it. “I can take a new client.” He retrieved the day timer from his coat pocket. “There’s an opening at five-thirty.”

“Perfect. How much?”

He considered his usual rates, and then he inflated them. “Twenty would to do.”

The air was blustery and warm, and fat blue clouds piled up above the tall tower blocks and radio towers, luminous minarets piercing the low-hanging sky. Café owners pulled shut their doors; streetlights flickered on and off again. Saul pulled up the collar of his coat, gripped the carboard box harder in his hands. Head down, he hurried under eaves and bridges, but the sky opened up before he could get home.

Hissing where it hit the streets, the rain came down in a sheet, blocking off the view of Beacon Bay and the bridge. Red taillights and stop lights glared up from a road steaming shiny and black. Garbage brightened and rainbows of oil swirled down, into toothy sewer grates.

As it did in spring, the rain passed like a curtain blown before the wind. The sun spread over the rain-washed city. Humidity and light sprang up. Saul began to sweat. He hurried down Beach Street to the stone stairs that lead up to the finest view in the city.

Veterans’ Garden loomed above him. He went up the steps two at a time, then paused to rest once and look out over the sea. Saul shifted the weight of the box, easing numbness in his fingers. Inside, the little creature scuttled round, licked or rubbed against a fingertip, and was still again.

The sky was still wild and blue and purple. Below him on one side the distant mountains across the strait were yellow and white. Ships taking golems from the Audel factory to fight against the city of Shier dotted distant mountain flanks. Below on his left was the Janion, the old hotel with one foot in the sea.

Built too close to the changing tide line, the lowest floor of the hotel was lapped by waves. The rust-red front, the boarded-over windows, all of it still stood, useless and proud, uninhabitable and defiantly undestroyed.

Two women chatting passed behind him, going from the Beach Street up the narrow stairs to the walk and the park on the hill above. Saul hefted the box again and started up after them.

They disappeared into the gardens and Saul went along his own path. Sometimes a snatch of memory assailed him. He heard the thoughts of walkers, of old men who came to tend the gardens and leave wreaths for long-dead comrades, of young mothers pushing strollers, like snatches of distant songs. The nearness of the familiar seemed to tune in the sounds, make the air thick with thought and memory, make even Veterans’, with its cool calmness and its emptiness, seem to press down on him.

He had four clients tonight, clients he had to take despite his warring wants of sleep and privacy. Since most of the wizards in the city had been driven out by new licensing rules, Saul’s business had picked up. What was good for business was bad for anonymity. There was plenty of demand for his work, and he worked as hard as he dared.

The fees from tonight’s work were likely enough to cover the cost of his groceries and something to feed the familiar. The work would be easier, too, he told himself, now the business with the other familiar was done.

He dreaded the monotony of working hours. The requests he received were always the same. He already dreaded the inevitable pictures of lost cats, the buggiera that he would find in a tree in Park West one moment and then, an hour later, in the down town core. He already resented the fat old women and their missing toy poodles.

When he got home he was tired and irritable again. The rain had fallen hard enough to soak his trousers and his jacket and make the cardboard box soggy, but not enough to cool him or whisk away the abominable humidity that plagued the city. He went up in the elevator, heard the familiar crawling and snuffling around the sagging cardboard, and sighed.

The morning had been lost to wandering around paying bills, the afternoon to chasing what seemed to be the last available familiar in the city. The pet store, nearly ten blocks from home, had provided him with a box, but he knew bus drivers, knew they would not allow Saul to bring the creature on board. He kicked shut the door.

The little light was flashing on the answering machine, a red eye that winked at him. He set down the box and opened the cover. The thing inside, perfectly still, greyish, pudding-shaped, developed first a bubble, and then something like a pale eye developed in that place. It rolled up to what was ostensibly the top of the amorphous familiar’s body, and swiveled madly as it around the apartment.

Saul tugged his shoes off as he listened to the messages. His five-thirty pet store clerk had canceled, the woman having found what she had been looking for. Another had confirmed. His five pm wanted to come tomorrow, and the deep voice of the man who booked him at six-thirty wanted to be sure of the address. Saul dialed the number, watching the familiar inch around the carboard box like a slug.

“Yes, hello, this is Saul Hornsby from Hornsby Magic.” Efficient, automatic professional mode. “I got your message. Yes. It’s right across from the park actually.” He opened the fridge and rooted around. Leftover salad was wilting in a cut glass bowl. He took it over to the box. The familiar formed a soft peak, eye scrambling over the grey skin to look.

“Yeah, big cream-coloured building. Pretty new, you can’t miss it. The sign’s outside.”

He put the salad down in the box and stood back.

The familiar extended a probiscus of grey flesh to feel the contours of the bowl, the brown-tipped lettuce, the soggy tomato slicking the glass with a rotting sheen. Another and another probiscus extended from the lump of flesh, each examining whatever it came in contact with; caressing the lettuce, picking up tomato and holding them close to the little, opalescent eye.

“No, it’s cash only, if that’s all right.” He stifled a yawn. “Good. See you then. Bye.”

He hung up and left the phone on the coffee table, and cupped his chin in his hands. The familiar had sent out so many feelers that it seemed to be enveloping the salad bowl. More pale little eyes had appeared, each swiveled as probisci tasted and touched the salad. Saul leaned forward and watched. One pale eye turned slowly toward him.

“You hungry, little guy?”

The lump of flesh shivered. The bowl was almost completely obscured, the probisci were waving pieces of lettuce and the orange rounds of carrots. Saul could hear now the sounds of mastication, of digestion. It was eating, smacking its lips together, devouring the salad, examining the component parts. It looked up at Saul, formed a slit in its greyish mass like a mouth. It grinned.

Saul it said, at last making contact.

“Yes, I’m Saul,” he agreed.

He felt the creature probing his mind with the same intense curiosity it exhibited on the lettuce and sat back, allowing the creeping thing to wander. You are Saul. He waited, calm and patient, while the creature searched through his mind for information. I?

The consciousness was as undeveloped as its body. You’re a familiar he said and the creature gripped the thought.

Familiar. What shape? Familiar. It linked the word to Saul’s memory like a game of word association. Cat. Toad. Broom. Witch. Wizard. Familiar.

“I like cats.” Saul said. In his mind, image after image flashed. It was as if the creature had discovered every Hallowe’en cut-out he had ever seen and was leafing through them; Witches, cats, candy, children, doors, old women with curlers, patterned pillowcases, costumes, witches, cats...

Cats.

“Well, one cat would be fine.”

The creature in the sagging cardboard box contracted. It moved away from the salad bowl, leaving discarded as inedible the gelatinous seeds of tomato like a smashed egg in a nest. When he reached in and took the bowl away, it arched upward to examine his hands.

Saul is master. It will feed us, therefore it said, coming to this conclusion slowly. Saul is not to eat.

“That’s right.”

It shivered, its grey-green mass shifted like a muscle tightening. Saul sat forward, watching the process with a fascinated disgust. Two legs and then another two emerged. White tipped feet, orange fur-like stockings. The body began to emerge. Yellow-orange and striped. Grey-green eyes, a small white nose. It looked up at him, matching form with an image located in Saul’s memory.

Cat. It said triumphantly.

“Very well done.”

Saul got to his feet and opened the balcony door to let some air into the place. “The apartment is yours, just don’t claw up the furniture if you’re going to be a cat, okay? What do you like to eat?”

The familiar thought of the dog food at the pet store. Saul was treated to a memory of the creature gorging, its greyish body inside the big paper-lined bag, eating until bloated and swollen to twice its size. It remembered being found by the clerk. Saul felt vicarious pride in the mess and ruckus it had caused.

“Dog food it is.”

The familiar leapt out of the box and curled on the couch.

By the time the first client buzzed, the familiar was purring. its grey eyes narrowed in a half-sleep, a strand of clear spittle hanging from its mouth. Saul had cleared the apartment of the ditrius of his life, made a pot of tea and placed two mugs out by the candles on the coffee table. He had a generic blues album on the stereo and the blinds pulled back so the client could see the view down to the park, to the sea, to furnish conversation if things did not go well.

“Please, have a seat.” He offered, moving the familiar.

Stay. It said, meaning the couch.

Go. Saul answered. The cat glared.

The client settled stiffly on the couch. Her face seemed made up of little pillows, two for her cheeks and another under her chin. She smiled at him and fumbled with the catch on her purse.

“Now, you wanted a scrying, is that it?”

She nodded. “My little Biscuit has been missing for days.”

He felt a little pang of dissapointment. Pets again. “And Biscuit is a...?”

“A dog, Mr. Hornsby. A one-year-old dachshund. Terribly friendly. Reddish-brown with a little black nose. Do you,” she gulped in air, “do you do this often?”

“All the time, Mrs. MacNeil.”

“And, do you have much success?”

“Yes. We have a very high rate of retrieval.”

Her hands were white on the clasp of her purse. “I brought some things, like you asked,” she said as she opened the bag. From within she produced a chewed black leash with a metal clip at the end and a yellow comb with fine, reddish fur stuck in the teeth.

Saul took the leash and comb. He ran the leash through his fingers, the oil of the dog’s coat was still on it. It still carried that warm, dusty-sweet smell of a dog. He closed his eyes, imagined a park overlooking the ocean, where the sky was bounded on one side by houses, on the other by the horizon. He imagined himself among the other dogs. Something rubbed against his legs, he familiar, twining, purring. its fur crackled with enegry.

Doing? It asked.

I’m looking for this dog.

The familiar had not been a cat long enough to adopt appropriate feline aloofness, so the creature reached out unhesitating, collected the thoughts it touched and returned to Saul with a mind full of them. He cruised through the dog park, then up along the network of streets that were growing dark.

On a street close to the dog park, Biscuit was rooting in a garbage bin. Hungry, thirsty, brain busy with so much sensation, so much sight, so many voices and car horns and radios playing, so many scents, a myriad of scents. Now he was aimlessly padding up and down the streets, unable to remember where home was, his own trail so long ago gone cold.

Stay he told the dog. Biscuit, stay. It started, looked around, but in the absence another, better course of action, it sat down and waited.

When he opened his eyes, Mrs. MacNeil had the cup in her lap, the milk coagulating in tea half-drunk. It was pink with dusk beyond his windows, the city was coming, shimmering, to life. She was staring at the view with a dull, glazed look.

He cleared his throat, moved a little so she would not be startled when he spoke. “I think I’ve found him.” He said, and traded the leash from his own cup of tea. “Two doors down from the corner of Fort and Nineteenth. In front of a big blue and white house. He’s having dinner in the dustbin there.”

“My Biscuit?” She whispered. “He’s alive?”

“I’ve asked him to stay but you know how dog’s minds are.” She gave him a look of shock and he smiled at her expression. “It’s twenty-five for the consultation, plus ten for the pin-point location.”

She found the money in her purse, collected the leash, the comb and hurried to the door. She was gone before Saul could wish her good night.

He went back ot the living room and streched out on the couch, indulged in his favorite mantra of depression. There has to be something more to do than find people’s lost pets. Something, anything is better than this.

The familiar leapt up, purring, drooling, and lay down on his chest.

Proceed to chapter 2...

Copyright © 2006 by Tamara Sheehan

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