The Wiccan Diaries (15 page)

“And did she?” I asked.

“Sort of.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Do you know who Emmanuela Skarborough is? Of course not.
Why would you?” He got off his stool. I watched as the bartender cleaned
something filthy out with a rag.

With the bartender’s permission, Ballard went behind the
bar. I saw him dig around. Then he produced newspaper after newspaper. Some of
them were so beer stained and cobwebby it was disgusting.

Why did I have déjà vu suddenly? He was plopping them down
in front of me. Then I realized: it was exactly like the minicab ride, my first
day here. Right down to the Succo del Gatti.

“She’s a reporter. It pays to have a pair of eyes
on the inside
. I’ll tell you what I
mean,” he said.

The headlines were all in Italian, but there was no missing
those words again:
omicidio
,
occulto
,
misterioso
. My breathing picked up despite the fact we were in a
well-lit place with lots of muscly guys to protect me, Ballard among them. He
wiped his hair back from his forehead and admired his handiwork.

“Lia finally told me what I Gatti has been doing,” he said.
“Are you ready for this? They drive around all night, finger quote, ‘protecting
the city.’ Crazy, huh?”

“What do all of these say?” I asked. I wanted details.
Who knows? Maybe this has something to do
with that
thing
that attacked me
,
I thought.

“Did you hear me? They’re, like, I dunno,
vigilantes
, or something.” He got all
excited.

I couldn’t help smiling. I remembered how ineffectual the
carabinieri (the police) had been.

“We have something called the vigili urbani, city policeman,
who patrol––it’s not unlike the night watch. But Lia says they
aren’t enough to
stop what’s coming
.
She was all Nostradamus. Anyway,” he said. “I spent today reading these
articles. Lia told me Emma was working on it too; she works with the local
paper. She’s our cousin.”

He pointed to the picture of a woman: Emmanuela Skarborough.

A reporter.

“Is she
I Gatti
?”
I asked, interested.

“She must be. It’s like the family business. Except I don’t
get to play. Except wait. That’s not true. I
do
get to play. I get to work in the grease shop. The other, not so
important, family business,” he said, dissatisfied. The smolder came back into
his eyes. “Only, get this. I’m not so dumb, right?”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“It’s just a matter of connecting the dots,” he said.

We stopped for a moment, giving I Gatti the chance to blast
past the entrance to La Luna Blu. They would be racing around like maniacs all
night on their motorcycles.
Vigilantes.
It explained a lot.

“Is that why Lia is all pissed off at me?” I asked, suddenly
cognizant of what was going on. “She thinks I’m a bad influence on you, doesn’t
she?”

“What do you mean?”

“Please, Ballard. She
hates
me.”

He shook his head. “Things have been weird for a while. This
was like, I dunno, Vesuvius, or something. It was only a matter of time before
Lia blew her top.”

I didn’t like the analogy. “And I can’t read this,” I said.
“You’re going to have to translate it for me.” I turned the paper around so he
could read it.

“All it says is––well, not
all
––
What
it
says, is there is someone creeping around, killing a bunch of people. That’s
why Gaven always insists you ride home with someone, when it gets late at
night.”

I remembered this kindness and it stultified some of my
paranoia.

Maybe I was being catty.

“Anything else?”

“Just the interesting parts,” he said annoyingly.

“And those are?”

“You have beautiful eyes,” he said. It was only a statement.
At least, I
hoped
it was.

“Ballard...”

“Well, she’s kind of well-read, is my cous. Kind of a
ruckmaker.”

“I think you mean, muckraker,” I said.

“Right. Where was I? So anyway, she’s a writer. You kinda
hafta sift through her professional b.s. she uses, to get at what she’s really
trying to say. If you know what I mean.”

“No doubt, homie. What up?”

“Word. So this article is the newest one. She calls him ‘the
Exsanguinator.’”

“And what is that?”

“It’s like this thing. It’s like, a medical term or
something. It means all the blood’s been drained. An
exsanguinator
would be someone who drains blood. He’s simply been
doing it while they’re still alive. You can see the problem?

“Now, she makes a couple of interesting leaps...” he went
on.

“Her artistic license?”

“That. The first is–– Here, I’ll read
it–– ‘...dumping the bodies, as opposed to randomly killing them.’
What she means is he, this
asino
Exsanguinator, is bleeding them
so
dry, the Questura doesn’t find any signs of violence around the so-called scene
of the crime. No blood. My cousin thinks he’s killing them elsewhere.
But does she?”

“You’re very interesting. Please continue.”

“Because, if he was killing them there, at the crime scene,
there would be a struggle.”

“One would think,” I said.

“In which the blood––well, you know.”

“It would go all over the place,” I said.

“Exactly. So no blood means he’s killing them somewhere else
and then when playtime is over he chucks them out the back of a moving van.
Whatever.”

“Point number
two
?”
I asked, taking a sip of aperitif.

“What does he do with the blood?” said Ballard.

“What does he do with the blood?” I asked.

“He’s not leaving any of it to be found. The blood must be
the thing. The blood is the thing. It’s the
reason
.
So we know that about him. He likes the blood. What else?”

He scanned the article. It was a pleasure watching him work.
“Ah. The well-read bit.”

“Explain it to me,” I said.

“Well, first there is the whole issue of the Questura, which
is the police, who seem to think something is going on regarding the occult.
When they see something they interpret as
blood
worship
I’m sure they freak out and regard it as devil practices,
especially here. We’re in Catholic City.

“Where my cousin veers off though, is perhaps realizing you
can have the, uh, supernatural, without involving the angels against Him. There
is evil in our hearts without having to look for the Devil.”

Blood... blood
, I
thought...

“She uses the story of Elizabeth Báthory to prove the point.
There
was a woman who believed in
blood. By coating herself in the blood of her victims, the good Countess hoped
to exsanguinate herself all the way to Immortality. She thought their blood
would keep her young and beautiful forever. So she bathed in it.”

“I take it she was a real person, because a lot of this
sounds far-fetched?” I said.

“Whatever’s out there killing doesn’t seem to think so,”
said Ballard. “And, yes, she was. The next point... is how do you draw blood?”

Chapter 12 – Halsey

Ballard and I sat up talking late into the night. For once,
it felt like we were getting to the bottom of things. We made plans to meet
again soon.

With I Gatti zooming around, safety was not an issue. So I
headed back home, unattended to my apartment a little after one a.m. My
landlady was not pleased.

I got to my journal ASAP. This was what I needed.

I ran a bath and crawled into the tub, taking the journal
with me. Quickly, I turned to a new page.
“It’s
me, Halsey,”
I wrote. I drew a big symbol of a triangle with a circle and
dot, followed by a heptagram.

“Ballard withholds.
Edits. I can feel him wanting to tell me things, then he only goes halfway.”

I thought about that, then dunked my head underwater.

I made sure to bring back the
Codex
from Trastevere; I no longer wanted it out of my possession.
Since scratching my name in it, the Codex felt like mine to guard.

Besides, I really
would
be a bad influence, if I continued to allow Ballard unsupervised access to
something neither one of us fully understood. I might not have been a witch but
I knew they existed.

The truth was, I needed him. I was alone in Rome.
Practically.

Lennox came and went. I hadn’t seen him in twenty-four
hours. Before that, his absences had grown even longer. It was a long time
without a steady dose of those lavender eyes.

I soaked and wrote, and wrote and soaked.

“The first one
intrigues me. Sun. Change. I don’t know. It could be an All-Seeing Eye. Or a
pyramid. There are a lot of pyramids in Rome. I forgot the most intriguing
aspect, Diary. Ballard said the circle used to be a symbol for death. Like a
skull and crossbones on a bottle of poison.”

I got out and traipsed nakily through the old joint, to
fetch out my copy of the
Codex
, and
then got back in the tub. If Lennox had bothered to show, he would have caught
a glimpse. I flipped it open to the dog-eared section on symbols.

It was no good. I was going to need the Internet for this.

There was more than just these two symbols; all of them were
hand drawn, but there were no annotations––no little notes what the
symbols could mean. Another one looked like the international radioactivity
symbol, except the circle was broken into four blades, not three.

I was tired. I drew it in the journal––or
Diary––anyway.

Obviously, I needed to know what these symbols meant.

It was the same old conundrum: How to get information?

I closed the journal and tossed it safely away from the tub.
My ablutions done, I got out and dried myself off. I wrapped the warm, plush
towel around myself, and followed my wet footprints down the hall, to my
laptop. I fetched out my hair dryer.

Ballard’s remarks had been so cryptic, especially with
regards to his cousin, the reporter, Emmanuela Skarborough. There was so much
double-talk and obfuscation. Was he being deliberately thickheaded or was he
trying to hide something? Our conversation had been fruitful but hardly
coherent.

Delta
, I typed.

Delta
gave me
something other than what I was looking for.

I went back and typed
delta
symbol
into the search engine. Everything was in Italian so I figured how
to translate it and searched like I would in the U.S.

Delta symbol
returned the Greek symbol for change.
.

I opened a new tab, and searched
theta
.

It gave me this:
.
The Greek symbol for the eighth letter of their alphabet.

That wasn’t quite the same as a dot in the center, though.

A little digging, however, and I learned that it was called
a circumpunct. When I looked up what circumpunct meant, I got Dan Brown, and
also there it was, the sun.

I made an entry in my journal, adding it all up:

“The theta, which
does
have a connotation of death, is actually a
circumpunct, which usually refers to the sun; when it’s put inside a triangle,
you get something remarkably similar to the trefoil used internationally to
denote a radioactive hazard. In other words, a warning.”

Was that what this was? Was the book
warning
me? If so, against what?

I zonked out.

I felt like Alice in Wonderland, moving across the
chessboard, except instead of squares, I was stepping across triangles, and
they all had pointy teeth, like they wanted to eat me.

In my dreams, I was surrounded by figures; they were
shadowy, on the periphery. I was turning round and round. Surrounded.

Instead of attacking me, however, they continued to motion
indistinctly, as my head went blurry. Suddenly, it felt like they wanted to
kill me. I screamed for Lennox, but he was no longer there. Instead I was in
the arms of a man, a stranger. I had never seen him before. His arms were the
only things keeping me sane.

The will of the circle was upon me. I was beset on all
sides, with one thought above the rest: that someone out there did not like me.

It was like I could read their thoughts. And they meant me
harm.

The dream ended. I was out.