Greek Revival: Chapter 5

V.

It was slightly cooler than it had been the day before, and the sunshine hovered somewhere between pleasant and oppressive without tipping over into either category. Ari wiped a trickle of sweat from the back of their neck as they rounded the corner. There was the little white house. Number 247. The curtains – tasteful, airy blue lace – were shut, but there was a green station wagon that had seen better days parked in the driveway. Ari stood and watched the house for a moment. The curtains in one of the upstairs windows drifted slightly. They thought they heard a voice – a person? A podcast? – floating out from the other side of the house. Someone was definitely home.

Ari shifted their keys until they poked out from between the knuckles of their right hand like claws. Just in case. Then they climbed the front steps of the little white house and knocked on the door with their non-clawed hand.

Several long moments went by. Ari considered knocking again. They considered leaving and never thinking about the guy or the ring or their punctured arm ever again. They did neither. They continued to wait on the doorstep as another bead of sweat trickled down the back of their neck.

When the door finally opened, it wasn’t Nico Cappelletti on the other side.

It was the guy.

Ari almost didn’t recognize him. He was dressed like a real person, in jeans and a faded yellow t-shirt from a music festival several years ago. His hair had begun to grow out chestnut at the roots again, and it was pulled back in a ponytail. Outside of the distinctive sunglasses, and the fact that he caused Ari’s pulse to quicken several beats before their brain caught up, he could have been anybody.

He jumped and recoiled when he saw Ari. Evidently he had no problem recognizing them.

“Please don’t stab me,” Ari said before he could close the door.

He stopped, hand halfway back to the knob, and tilted his chin down towards their key claws. “I won’t stab you if you don’t stab me.”

“Fair enough. You’re Damian Cappelletti, aren’t you?”

“How do you know my name?” His arms were tense, and Ari held up their hands, free of key claws, in a gesture of surrender.

“You said you wouldn’t stab me. Can I talk to you?”

“About what?”

Ari reached into their pocket, causing the guy to flinch, and pulled out the iron ring, displaying it in the palm of their hand so the guy could see it. “What is this thing? Did you put it in my apartment? And if not, how did you know about it?”

The guy’s eyebrows – Damian’s eyebrows – shot up. He glanced back and forth up the street in either direction. “Why do you have one?” he hissed. “How do I know you aren’t one of them?”

“I don’t even know who they are,” Ari replied. “So I guess in that sense I can’t prove that I’m not, but… I’m not. Look, can we talk about this in, like, a nice, safe public place where there will be social consequences if either of us tries to hurt the other?”

Damian shook his head vehemently. “It’s not safe out there. They could be anywhere. In here, if you’re not one of them, you’ll be okay. You’ll be hidden. And if you are one of them, I’m pretty sure a public place wouldn’t stop you from killing me if you really wanted to.”

“What about you killing me, though?”

To Ari’s surprise, Damian snorted. “I won’t,” he said. “Scout’s honor. I mean, it’s been a couple decades since I was a Boy Scout, but still. Like I told you last time, I wouldn’t be able to go through with it.”

Ari glanced down at the ring in their palm. They thought about the drowning lizard, the coatrack, the snake sinking its teeth into their arm. Damian was almost certainly crazy. But if he was, so was Ari. And if he wasn’t, he was their only way to understand what had happened to them during the past week.

“Fine,” they said, “but I’m texting my co-worker first.”

“Fine,” Damian replied.

Ari pulled out their phone and wrote a message to Greg, telling him that they still didn’t feel well and could he please come by their place after work to check in on them? He didn’t respond – Ari assumed he was elbows-deep in the dish pit without them there to do it for him – but at least someone would now be suspicious if they went missing.

“Alright,” Ari said. “I’m good.”

Damian opened the door wider and waved Ari into the little white house.

Inside, it was dim, and a fine layer of dust had settled over much of the furniture. The walls were covered in pieces of paper and sheets of tinfoil, all of which had various drawings and letters scratched into them. Ari caught a glimpse of a sheet of foil with an ouroboros drawn on it. Tiny letters surrounded the snake and filled the empty space beneath where head and tail met. The snake was poorly rendered, but even the crude drawing made Ari’s arm sting. Antique oil lamps, most of them in disrepair, rested on every available surface. In the center of the living room floor was a limp mat haphazardly woven out of some sort of plant, and perched atop the mat was a large, long-necked bird. Damian groaned when he saw it and tried to shoo it away out the open front door, but it stared coolly at him and refused to move. The effect of these items, and the bird, was all the more jarring because underneath and behind and around them was a pleasant, tastefully-decorated suburban home. Ari wondered whether Penny or Nico had chosen the cozy rag rugs, the matching navy blue sofa and armchairs that paired perfectly with the pale blue curtains, the sturdy oak kitchen table visible through a doorway on the other side of the living room.

“Out of curiosity, why are you dressed normally this time?”

“Didn’t think I was gonna have visitors, so I wasn’t prepared to act like a crazy person. Plus I just did laundry,” Damian said, which explained nothing. He brushed past them and walked toward the kitchen. “Don’t touch anything if you can help it. I don’t know what any of this shit does or which things are magic and which are just shitty homemade decorations. Better not to mess with any of it.”

“Magic,” Ari repeated as they followed Damian into the kitchen. There were several more large birds in the kitchen, clustered around the table, staring at Damian as he entered.

“Kid, if you’re gonna get hung up on the idea of magic, this is gonna be a hell of a tough conversation. Move it.” Damian nudged one of the birds aside with his feet, and the whole flock backed up just enough to allow him to pass.

“Magoi. Pharmakeis,” Ari said aloud, Asclepius’ voice ringing in their ears. So Damian and the god, or at least Ari’s imaginary dream version of the god, agreed.

“Was that Greek?” Damian asked.

“Yeah. It means magicians and sorcerers. I’m just repeating – I had some really weird dreams – okay, yeah, I have no idea where to start with this.”

Damian pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table and sat down in it, indicating that Ari should do the same. They did so. Atop the table were two sheets of lined notebook paper. One was covered in tight, jagged handwriting in Greek and English, as well as some drawings similar to those on the walls and a few crude renderings of a map. Ari noticed a group of three capital letters written over and over: P.G.M. Whoever had covered this paper in chicken scratch had spent a lot of time trying to determine what those initials stood for, and guesses ranged from Post-Grecian Magic to Pfucking Goddamn Motherfuckers. Ari assumed the P in that one was silent. The other paper was in the same handwriting but entirely in English. It was a brief note.

Damian – if Penny and I aren’t back by the time you get here for dinner, come looking for us. Look for the PGM. Don’t trust men. Watch your back. Nico.

Damian ran his fingers over the note. Ari recognized the motion: it was the same touch they’d given the ring every morning on their way out of their apartment. Like a little ritual, the kind you couldn’t stop even though you knew it wasn’t doing anything.

“How long ago did he write that?” Ari asked.

Damian sighed. “He’s been gone since April. I called the cops, but Poole P.D. isn’t exactly equipped for this type of thing. They said they’d keep an eye out for him, but y’know. Newly divorced guy, saw a lot of action in Afghanistan, crazy shit all over his house… it looks like he finally snapped. Walked into the river or something. Unless he or his body turns up, they’re not gonna do anything about it but keep a fuckin’ eye out. Plus they talked to Penny and her new boyfriend – ‘boyfriend,’ as if she’d ever in a million years – and apparently she’s got no intention of going anywhere, least of all with Nico, so the note looks like he’s just this jealous ex-husband. I tried to get in touch with her but she ignored my calls, and the cops told me she didn’t want to talk to me. Fresh start, she said. Or the cops said she said, anyway.”

“But you don’t think he snapped?”

Damian laughed bitterly and said, “No, I think he snapped a long fuckin’ time ago when he joined the goddamn Marines. I told him not to, but he said it was something he had to do. Because Dad did it. Bullshit, if you ask me, but that’s Nico. Duty, legacy, fraternity, eagle-ity, or whatever that French slogan is. Older brother shit, maybe, I wouldn’t know. Anyway, trying to get Penny back wasn’t crazy.”

“Isn’t it? I thought they got divorced.”

Damian raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah, sorry,” Ari continued. “I did kind of a lot of snooping online trying to figure out who you were. Weird magic stuff has been happening to me – or, I mean, I think it’s magic, unless I’m just crazy, but I figured you would be the person to talk to about that, because you were spouting all that crazy shit about magic in the alley. But I couldn’t find you. So, you know. Internet stalking.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, okay. I can worry about how easy it was to find me online later. They did get divorced.”

“Why?”

Damian’s lip curled. “Penny met someone else.”

“Isn’t that pretty normal?”

“It would be if the someone else hadn’t been Eddie.”

The birds erupted into a flurry of discordant twittering. Evidently they didn’t care for Eddie either.

“Why? Who’s Eddie?”

“Her new ‘boyfriend,’” Damian said with a scoff, putting actual finger quotes around the word. “Rich asshole. About thirty years too old for her. Silver fox type of guy. It’s the fact that he’s a guy at all that’s the problem. No fuckin’ wonder Nico got suspicious.”

“Penny’s gay?”

“Penny and Nico both. Folks were starting to ask questions in the Corps and Penny was getting shit from her family about settling down. She and Nico had been buddies since the first year of grad school. Of course, they got rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell a year later, but it didn’t matter to Nico and Penny. As far as they were concerned, being married to their best friend during the week and going down to Boston to hit up the gay bars together on weekends was the best fuckin’ life in the world. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who knew.”

“But then Penny left him for a guy.”

Damian nodded, leaning back in his chair. “I guess it happened while Nico was away the last time. She served him the papers a week after he got home. He would’ve been fine with it if she’d gotten a girlfriend, but… something fucked-up was going on. He talked to me about it all the time after she left, before he left too. He was convinced there was some freaky shit happening.”

Ari considered this. In some ways, it felt easier to believe that what had happened to Penny was magic. Ari’s snake bites were inexplicable, sure, but the soul-searching, the days they’d skipped school because the nuns wouldn’t allow anyone to wear pants even though they were technically a uniform-compliant alternative to skirts, the thrill they’d felt when their first chest binder arrived to their college mailbox, the faraway feeling they got, like they were remembering someone else’s life, whenever they made their mother’s chicken adobo recipe now – to undo that, Ari thought, really would be magic. Inarguable, evident, impossible, true magic.

“It sounds like there was some freaky stuff happening,” they said.

“Yeah, well, he knew Penny better than I did, and I knew that, but I still didn’t really believe him til he disappeared and freaky shit started happening to me, too.”

Ari leaned forward. “Like what?”

Damian’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’ve already told you a lot of shit. If you’re one of them –”

“One of who?”

Damian gestured at the note from Nico. “The PGM. Whoever the hell they are. Apparently Nico couldn’t figure it out either.”

“I’m not.”

“You could be lying.”

Ari sighed. “Look. You can believe me or not believe me, but right now I think I’m the only person who might believe you that magic is real and it’s terrorizing me and you and apparently your brother and Penny.”

“Fine. But before I go further, tell me what’s been happening to you. Tell me why you have that ring.”

Ari explained everything, from their first interaction with Damian and their urge to write down everything about him to finding the ring under the relocated coatrack to their conversations with Asclepius to the snakebite that had appeared on their arm after they dreamt it. When they rolled up their sleeve to show Damian the puncture wounds, he made several excited noises, sounding like a yapping puppy.

“They hurt you through a dream!” he crowed when Ari finished their story.

“Did they? I mean, I know the snake did, but did they tell the snake to –”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. But you’re more proof that they, or their magic, or their fuckin’ dream-snakes, or whatever, can physically hurt people in the real world.”

“More proof?”

“You wanna see something gross?”

“Uh. Do I have a choice?”

Damian grinned and pulled down his sunglasses. “Not really.”

“Ew.” The syllable slipped out of Ari’s mouth before they could stop it. Damian’s right eye was a bright, sparkling hazel framed by dark eyelashes. His left eye wasn’t there. Where it should have been, there was a mottled patch of pinkish, yellowish skin, sunken into the socket, swollen where his lower eyelid should have been. The damage extended across to the bridge of his nose, where an obvious scar dotted with tiny pockmarks on either side showed that he had recently had stitches.

“Right?” Damian said, sliding his glasses back on. “It’s not healing well. They gave me antibiotics for it at the clinic, but I don’t want to go back if it doesn’t get worse. In case they start asking questions.”

“What the heck happened? And – okay, not that it’s related to your eye, but what’s up with the birds?”

“Hell if I know,” he sighed. “The birds, I mean. I think they’re mostly glossy ibises, except that big white one – I’m pretty sure that’s a white ibis. They’re not native to New England.”

“Holy crap, wait, was that what you were researching at Turner’s?”

Damian tilted his head. “Huh? Oh, wait, yeah, when you saw me and immediately started taking notes about me. You’re kind of a freak, kid, you know that?”

“I’m choosing not to take offense to that.”

“Good, it wasn’t meant to be offensive. Yeah, I read all the bird books I could find – didn’t want to risk searching anything online – but there was nothing useful. Just that their natural habitat isn’t my brother’s house. I don’t know how they got in and I can’t get them to leave. They don’t eat. They don’t shit. They don’t sleep – at least not while I’m here. They just stand around staring at me and guarding Nico’s shit. It’s creepy.”

“Huh.” Ari glanced over at the birds, which tilted their heads in unison when Ari made eye contact with the big white one. “Are they magic?”

“Who knows? If you ask me, they’re just invasive. I tried to get rid of them for a while – I figured they were some PGM shit – but then I realized this is the only place I haven’t been stalked or fucked with, so then I figured they might be protecting the place? But they don’t do anything, so I don’t see how they could protect anything, either. I dunno. I’ve given up on understanding them. Doesn’t mean I have to like ‘em, though.” He shot the birds a glare to emphasize his point.

“So what about your eye?”

He grimaced and said, “Some kind of trap, I think. When Penny wouldn’t talk to me, I went to Eddie’s house to try to get her to explain what the hell was going on. I knocked and Eddie slammed the door in my face. But I could see Penny behind him, so I waited until Eddie left and went around back and –”

“You broke into his house?”

“No,” Damian replied, a petulant note creeping into his voice. “The back door was open. I went in to try to talk to Penny, but as soon as I crossed the threshold my eye started feeling… I dunno. Big. Like when you get too high and you feel like your eyeballs are bulging out of your head, you know?”

“I don’t,” Ari admitted. “I’ve never been high.”

“Damn, for real? You waiting ‘til it’s legal here or something? ‘Cause you could just go to Vermont.”

“Uh, I’m not sure. I guess I’m just waiting until I decide I actually want to be high?”

“You know what, I respect that. Good for you, kid. Anyway, yeah, sometimes when you get too high your eyes get all bulgey and weird. And my eye felt like that as soon as I walked in, only it happened way faster than it does when I smoke, and it just kept getting worse. I called out for Penny, but I didn’t hear anything, so I tried to get further into the house to look for her. I got as far as the kitchen, and when I was looking around in there, I saw this, like, fancy carved piece of wood with an eye on it and a bunch of random letters. A lot like Nico’s weird snake drawings, actually. I looked at this piece of wood and just felt – bad. Really bad. Like something terrible was about to happen. And then my eye, uh.” Damian held up a fist in front of his face and, in a quick, frantic motion, splayed all of his fingers outward at once. “Just, pop. It fuckin’ exploded.”

Ari winced, trying and failing not to picture what an exploded eyeball would look like. “What did you do?” they asked.

“Screamed. A lot. And got the fuck out of there, obviously. I went straight to urgent care and they were like, what the hell happened to you and why aren’t you at the emergency room? And I tried to explain but I think they thought the trauma of my fucking eyeball exploding, or maybe the trauma of being uninsured, was making me make no sense. They stitched me up, anyway, but yeah, Eddie’s stupid fucking magic trap means I’ve got no depth perception now.”

“That really sucks.”

“That was only the start of it. After I got out of urgent care, I felt like I was being followed all the time. I kept seeing guys wearing rings like the one you’ve got. I’d get in my car and feel like something was wrong, and nothing would be out of place, but it would be, like – too not out of place, you know? Like, my car’s a fuckin’ mess. I keep saying I’m gonna clean it out and I never do. So over the course of the day shit would shift around, or fall over, or whatever. But everything would be exactly the way it had been the day before, like someone had put it back that way. There would be days and days where I couldn’t sleep – not in an insomnia way. I know what that feels like, I had it as a kid, but I’ve been treating it with weed and melatonin for years. It would be, like, I would just be starting to drift off and then I’d see this vision of a bat and it would wake me up. Every time I started to drift off. For days. I started going a little crazy after day two.

“Or I’d get back to the motel room and get the stink-eye from management because I kept having guys up to my room, apparently, even though I never saw them. Once I was going to get a pack of smokes and I bumped into someone who wasn’t there. Just full-on walked into somebody, but there was nobody in front of me. And once I thought, hey, maybe those guys with those rings are the PGM, and maybe they’ve got some way of making themselves invisible, shit started to make a lot more sense. This is the only place where I don’t feel like I’m being surveilled, and it’s the only place where I can sleep, so I started holing up here a lot of the time. I only brought enough stuff for a couple days up here, and I don’t wanna risk going back down to Brattleboro and getting followed, so I’ve been living out of Nico’s closet and his pantry. All that shit makes you paranoid real quick. It’s the worst feeling in the world. Wearing Nico’s clothes – and Penny’s, sometimes – dyeing my hair, trying to throw them off or trying to make them think I’m too crazy to be a real threat, feeling like I’m going crazy for real, and knowing it isn’t working and they’re still following me… I fuckin’ hate it, but it’s better than letting Nico go without a fight.”

Ari swallowed. When Damian said Nico’s name, his voice was fierce. Ari thought of Antigone, kneeling over her brother’s body, giving him his last rites, waiting for the king’s guards to take her away. Defying the sentries, defying the king, defying the entire world in service of – as Antigone herself told it – a higher law than any king’s authority. When Ari read the play for the first time, they thought Antigone might really have believed it was her religious duty to bury her brother, but that wasn’t why she did it. She did it because she loved her brother that much, and if the gods as well as the king had forbidden his burial, Ari believed she would have done it anyway, claiming a higher law than even the gods themselves compelled her to it.

“I’m really sorry. That’s… a lot,” they said lamely. They didn’t know what else to say to a man whose brother and sister-in-law had possibly been kidnapped and whose eyeball had definitely exploded.

Their phone buzzed, saving them. They whipped it from their pocket, expecting a text from Greg confirming that he’d be worried if they got murdered, but instead it was an email from Dr. Pryor with directions to his new house and a link to a New York Times article about a new translation of the Hippolytus that he thought Ari might find ‘illuminating.’ As they put their phone away, they realized they must have been smiling, because Damian wiggled his eyebrows at them and asked, “Who was that?”

“My old professor,” Ari said. “He invited me to catch up over dinner later this month.”

“A Greek professor?” Damian asked, once again sounding like an eager puppy. Ari marveled at his excitement, his ability to shake off the horror and disgust of his eyeball story in seconds. Before all of this started happening to him, Ari thought, he must have been so normal.

“Yeah. He’s one of the smartest people I know. He’s the reason I can sight-read Greek, for the most part.”

Damian clapped his hands together, startling the birds, whose presence Ari had almost forgotten. They were so still and silent, observing the proceedings like a jury. “Alright,” he said. “We both agree there’s magic shit happening. Whoever the PGM are, they’ve hurt both of us. You know Greek, and I know my brother. What do you say to a rescue mission, uh – kid? You know, I was about to use your name for dramatic effect and then I realized I don’t know it.”

Ari, feeling a fondness for Damian well up in their chest despite everything, stuck their hand out. “Ari.”

He shook it. “Short for anything?”

“Just Ari. Although my professor used to call me Aristos. Or Ariste, technically, since that’s the vocative –”

“What does that mean?”

“The best.”

“Big shoes.”

“No promises.”

“In that case, Just Ari, what do you say to a rescue mission?”

Alright, nothing so far has, but this is almost definitely going to get me stabbed for real. Possibly one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had.

“Yeah, I’m in,” they said.

“Great, okay. First thing’s first.” Damian gestured at Nico’s scribbled notes, at the papers and tinfoil tacked to the walls. “What the fuck does all of this mean?”

“Um. That’s kind of a big question. I – it might be better if I grabbed a lexicon from home and came back, because if Nico was doing some of his own magic, I don’t wanna fuck it up by mistranslating it.”

“A lexicon?”

“I don’t know why classicists and only classicists call it a lexicon instead of a dictionary. Sounds cooler and more pretentious, I guess.”

Damian’s eyebrows furrowed. “If you go, are you gonna come back? Or are people gonna show up at the door trying to have me committed?”

“I’ll come back,” Ari assured him. “I mean, I was never actually a scout, but – Scout’s honor?”

Damian grinned. “Good enough for me.”

And Ari, much to their own surprise, did come back. They carried both of their favorite dictionaries, one under each arm. The ring felt heavy in their pocket. Damian was so much less weird than they’d expected. Or, rather, he was just as weird as they’d expected, but only because magic and circumstance had conspired to drive him to weirdness. Anybody would be weird if they’d been through what he’d been through, Ari reasoned.

What he says he’s been through, part of Ari said. Maybe you’re buying into his whole thing and it’s all a lie.

He really only has one eyeball, another part of Ari said. I really have four holes in my arm. I really have an iron ring in my pocket, and I really don’t know where it came from. And even though we don’t know exactly what it was, judging by the state of the house, something really happened to Nico and Penny. They’ve really gone missing.

“If I’m gonna do this,” Ari said aloud, hefting the dictionary under their left arm – the weaker one, thanks to the snakebite – so they didn’t drop it. “If I’m gonna do this, I can’t keep re-litigating the whole effing thing in my head over and over. I have to just be cool with the fact that I believe magic is real and the people who know how to do it might want to hurt me. Right? I’m just gonna drive myself nuts – more nuts – if I don’t get cool with the fact that I believe Damian. And Asclepius. And his snake. Right? Right. Totally.”

Good enough for me.

Damian was waiting by the door for them, and he sagged with visible relief when he saw them, and their dictionaries, on the doorstep. “You came,” he said.

“And I brought help,” Ari said, handing over one of the dictionaries to Damian. “I tend to prefer the LSJ, but I brought the Smyth too just because it’s got some good grammar notes.”

“You have Greek lexicon opinions,” Damian said.

Ari let out a short, rueful laugh. “I have Greek everything opinions,” they said. “I mean, I absorbed most of them from my professors, but some of them are original. You really don’t want to get me started about the way people translate Euripides.”

“If it becomes relevant for the rescue mission, I absolutely will get you started.” Damian pulled a pen and a pad of paper from his back pocket, handed them to Ari, and gestured to the items on the walls. “So, uh, have at it, kid.”

Ari nodded and sat down beside the front door. Several of the birds – up close, Ari recognized them as ibises, just as Damian had thought – wandered over and clustered around Ari as they translated. Or attempted to translate. Much like the letters on the ring, many of the inscriptions posted on the walls seemed to be random assortments of interesting-sounding syllables, a lot like saying ‘abracadabra,’ Ari guessed. The snake drawings, at least, did have some real words.

“Damian, look at this,” Ari said, gesturing to the ouroboros. Damian, who had been staring mournfully at Nico’s note, sprang up and leaned in close to the drawing on the tinfoil. “You see that part right there?” Ari continued. “That says something along the lines of ‘please protect me, Nikos, and my body and my entire soul.’”

“Who’s Nikos?” Damian asked.

“I mean, probably Nico. In order to write his name in Greek I guess he Hellenized it to make it easier. There’s two more underneath it. They’re the exact same things except one says Penelope – I’m guessing that’s Penny – and the other says Damianos.”

Damian grimaced. “Can’t fucking believe he was doing magic on me and didn’t even tell me.”

“If it helps, it seems like he thought these would protect you.”

“Yeah, it kinda helps.”

Ari worked steadily. Many of the scribbles tacked up on the walls were slightly altered versions of each other. Some contained the same magic words spelled a dozen different ways. Whenever Nico had found a version that he clearly decided was useful, he would make three copies of it: one for himself, one for Penny, and one for Damian. When Ari had investigated the contents of the living room walls, they turned their attention to the oil lamps, several of which had scraps of paper pinned underneath them or half-burned in their shades. More nonsense words, for the most part, but the words that Ari could make out were all about seeing, dreaming, appearing; ‘come to me, spirit, without deceit, without anger’ was a popular refrain. One of the glossy ibises flapped its wings, startling Ari so badly they nearly knocked over the nearest oil lamp. With effort, the ibis heaved its ungainly body up onto the sofa. It opened its beak, gently plucked a scrap of paper from Ari’s hand, and dropped it in the oil lamp. Then it stared expectantly at Ari.

“Hey, Damian?” they called.

He didn’t respond. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, paging through Ari’s copy of the Smyth grammar, seemingly engrossed. He flipped back and forth between a few pages several times, tracing a finger beneath the words. Ari walked over and poked his knee with the toe of their boot. He glanced up.

“Huh?”

“I think one of your birds wants me to light some of these papers on fire.”

“They’re not my birds.”

“Be that as it may.”

“What are the papers?”

Ari showed him a few of the scraps and said, “I think they’re, like, divination spells? There’s a lot of asking gods to appear and tell you things. Kinda like what the ring did, actually.”

“And the bird wants you to burn them?”

“I think so? It took one of them from me and dropped it in the lamp, anyway.”

Damian raised an eyebrow. “It’s a bird.”

“You’re the one who said the birds don’t eat or sleep or poop or anything. Magic bird doesn’t seem like it’s off the table in these circumstances.”

“Yeah, but other than being creepy, I haven’t seen them doing anything magical.”

“If you don’t have any objections, I’m gonna burn the papers.”

Damian waved his hand. “Yeah, sure, go for it, just don’t set the place on fire.”

Ari had to look up a video tutorial on how to use an oil lamp before they could get the thing to turn on. Nico kept matches near the lamps – nice, very fire safe – and though Ari struggled to get them to catch, they were eventually able to light the wick of the lamp. They searched through the available scraps of paper until they found one that looked complete, or at least didn’t have charred edges, and moved to drop it into the fire. Another one of the glossy ibises (or maybe it was the same one? Ari couldn’t tell them apart) threw up a wing between Ari and the lamp.

“Well what do you want from me?” Ari said to the bird, crumpling the paper in exasperation. “Do I burn it? Not burn it? Am I gonna have to play charades with you?”

“It’s a bird!” Damian called from across the room.

The bird stared expectantly at the crumpled scrap of paper in Ari’s hand. They sighed and uncrumpled it. Nico’s tiny, crabbed writing spelled out a long string of Greek nonsense syllables, but at the end, so small Ari hadn’t noticed it before, was a lowercase x and the number three in parentheses.

“I’m supposed to say it three times?” Ari asked the ibis.

The ibis stared at them and slowly lowered its wing. Ari couldn’t help but grin.

“They’re totally magic birds,” they called back across to Damian.

He didn’t appear to hear them; he was engrossed in the pages of Smyth once again. Ari turned back to the lamp. They read aloud the syllables three times, stuttering at first but finishing smoothly and confidently by the time they reached the end of their last repetition, and dropped the paper into the oil lamp. The scrap curled into ash within seconds. The ibis strutted back over to the rest of the flock, which had clustered around Damian, looking as pleased with itself as a bird could look. Nothing else happened.

“I don’t think it worked,” Ari said.

Damian didn’t look up from the commentary. “Memeikhaneisai.”

“Woah, your pronunciation is really good. Are you sure you don’t know Greek?” Ari teased.

Damian, still staring at the commentary, moved one hand to his face – slowly, with great effort, like he was moving through molasses, like the air had become thicker for him and only him – and removed his sunglasses. His one remaining eye had gone from a lovely, but ordinary, hazel to a shimmering, glowing orange-white, like molten gold. His face around the eye had gone completely blank. Lines, crinkles, and any semblance of an expression had fallen away. Ari heard a faint elastic snap, and Damian’s hair burst from its ponytail into a brown-and-platinum halo around his head. It was standing so perfectly on end that he looked like he’d rubbed the world’s largest balloon on his hair. The overall effect was that of a porcelain doll possessed by a mad scientist possessed by a star.

“Memeikhaneisai,” Damian repeated.

“I… have contrived it? I’ve made it happen? What have I made happen?”

“Ti etheleis eidenai?” he asked.

What do you want to know?

“Damian?”

Damian shook his head. His eye burned brighter. Ari pressed their lips together, squinting into the light that emanated from his face.

“Who are you? If not Damian? Uh, ouk ei –”

Unlike Asclepius, Not-Damian seemed to have some understanding of English. He cut them off before they could finish poorly translating their questions into Greek and said, “Ego eimi Hermes Trismegistos.” Thrice-great Hermes.

“And you’re just… in Damian?”

Hermes nodded and explained, from what Ari could catch – he spoke Greek with a clipped, hurried confidence that suggested he was in much more of a rush than Asclepius and his slow, soft, deep tones – that Ari had called him and that he answered through ‘the boy,’ as he referred to Damian.

“Shoot, okay. I’m sorry, I really don’t know how to talk to gods, or daimons, or whatever – I didn’t come prepared with, like, a list of questions. Can I, like, un-summon you somehow and then call you back later? When I’ve done some research?”

Damian’s head nodded. “Nai.”

“Okay. Cool. How do I do that? Un-summon you? How did Nico even know how to do all this stuff?”

Hermes answered the second question first. Damian’s body stood, blank-faced, wild-haired, and turned its blazing golden eye on the strange woven mat on the floor of the living room. As Ari watched, the mat glowed faintly with the same light as Damian’s eye and began to unravel itself, the edges melting away into nothing, revealing a torn, crumpled piece of paper at its center. The paper had been concealed between layers of plants, woven tightly and deeply into the mat. When the mat was reduced to a pile of limp, charred green leaves, Damian’s body turned back to Ari and nodded.

“Thank you – Lord Hermes? Is that… am I supposed to have an offering for you? I’m sorry, I honestly wasn’t expecting –”

“Me kalei palin,” Hermes said, with something resembling a smile in his voice, although Damian’s face hadn’t changed. “Exhe spondein.”

Although Hermes didn’t say it, Ari felt the implied or else burning in his gaze.

Damian’s body walked over to the lamp and extinguished it. The fire in the lamp and the fire in Damian’s eye faded together, and by the time Damian’s eye was back to hazel, he had collapsed onto the couch. The lines, the expressions – the humanity – had returned to his face, and although his hair still stuck up in every direction, locks of it began to droop around his face. He stared, owl-eyed, at the ceiling, shivering. His lips quivered. His fingers were pale. Ari could see his veins through the back of his hands. In fact, all of his skin looked thin and translucent, like the heat that had disappeared from his eye had taken the rest of his body heat with it.

“Damian. Damian. Are you – you? Are you okay?”

He turned his head towards Ari, and a flash of recognition crossed his face. “I’m fucking freezing,” he said through chattering teeth.

Ari scanned the room and noticed a chunky knitted blanket decorating the back of one of the armchairs. They grabbed it and threw it over Damian, who wrapped it around himself like a cocoon, drawing his knees up to his chest.

“What happened to you?” Ari demanded when his teeth had mostly stopped chattering. “You weren’t messing with me, were you?” Dumb question. His eye was glowing.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I was on the floor. And now I’m on the couch. In between… I don’t know. I felt something, like, in me? Through me? Like I didn’t have internal organs anymore.”

“That sounds gross.”

“No, it was… nice? Nice isn’t the right word. Like all the weird squishy human shit inside me had been cleaned out and there was something better there. And warmer.” Damian shivered under the blanket. “It felt really good.”

Ari wondered if they should be taking notes. “Like, good how? Food good? Sex good? Revenge good?”

“I don’t know, kid. Sex good, maybe? Not really. It wasn’t like anything. You’re the one who has memories of the past – how long?”

“A couple minutes.”

“You’re the one who has memories of the past couple minutes. What the fuck happened to me?”

“You, uh… I think you were Hermes.”

“The god?”

“Yeah.”

“Well what did he say?”

Ari considered the final thing Hermes had said. “He told me to call him again later. With an offering. I’m pretty sure if I don’t have an offering next time, he’ll kill me, so, you know, we should probably tread lightly with that one.”

“No fuckin’ way he said that.”

“He did! He told me to try again later with an offering. Like a magic eight ball. He called you ‘the boy.’”

“I’m thirty-four.”

“And when I asked him how Nico knew how to do all this magic stuff, he showed me that.” Ari pointed at the unraveled mat with the paper in the center. As they pointed, the white ibis followed the line of their finger. It approached the torn page and picked it up gently in its beak, then presented it to Ari, who took it. The bird bowed.

“Um, thank you,” Ari said. The white ibis retreated to the rest of the flock.

“Let me see that,” Damian said, extracting a hand from his blanket cocoon and snatching the page from Ari. He scanned the paper, tracing his fingers over its lines, then handed it back to Ari. “Yeah, alright, aside from the weird snake, I can’t tell what any of this means. It’s not Nico’s handwriting, though.”

The page bore an identical ouroboros to the one Nico had drawn – or, it seemed more likely, traced – all over the walls. Aside from the snake, the entire rest of the page was written in Greek. Although the paper itself was a fairly ordinary sheet of thin white paper, the handwriting looked old. It was long, spiky, cramped, without punctuation or accent marks, and some of it was written backwards. Ari assumed the mirror-writing was on purpose, to throw off anyone who got their hands on the paper by illicit means, and if that was the reason, it was working. Ari was definitely thrown off.

“I think this might be traced from something older,” Ari said. “Nobody had paper like this back in the day, and nobody is this bad at punctuation nowadays.”

“What does it say?”

“I have no idea. You’d have to give me a couple hours with a lexicon before I understand any of this. I mean, presumably it’s – I feel kind of stupid even saying it – presumably it’s magic spells, but other than that it’ll take me a while.”

“We’ve got a while.”

As if on cue, Ari’s phone buzzed. A text from Greg letting them know that he was leaving work now and he’d be at their place in fifteen minutes. Ari glanced out the window. It was almost sunset.

“Shoot,” they said, “I’ve gotta get home so my co-worker knows I haven’t been murdered.”

“You’re not gonna tell him about this, are you?”

“Of course not. I’m not an idiot. He’d think I was crazy. Heck, I actually did try to talk to him about it and he thought there was a gas leak in my apartment.”

“Okay.” Damian paused. “I want to come with you.”

“I don’t know if I feel great about that.”

Damian sat up, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “Why not?”

“One, you still look like you’re about to succumb to frostbite. Two, Greg will probably ask questions about who the one-eyed guy is and why I brought him home from the doctor’s office, which is where I’m supposed to have been today. Three, you already said this house is the only place you’ve felt safe, so I don’t know why you’d want to leave it. Four…” Ari hesitated, trying to find a delicate way to express their reservations. They settled for the plain truth. “...I just don’t like having other people in my space. Everything is just the way it’s supposed to be, and – you have no idea how much it shook me up when I found the coatrack moved. Less than an inch and I haven’t stopped thinking about it for a week. And we don’t really know anything about each other, other than the fact that mysterious magicians are targeting both of us. So, you know. I don’t really want you in my house. Sorry.”

Damian made a face that Ari couldn’t decipher. “Good points,” he said. “I just don’t really want you to take Nico’s magic spell paper out of the house. Just in case.”

“I’ll just take a picture and translate it at home.”

“Yeah, but… look, you’re the only person who believes me.”

“How could I not? I just saw your eye get all glowy and listened to you speak a language you don’t know and watched you collapse from god-induced hypothermia.”

“Right. So I don’t want anything to happen to you, kid, alright?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “For one thing, it’s gonna be real fuckin’ tough to get another person who knows Ancient Greek to believe in magic.”

“It would be, yeah,” Ari acknowledged. “Look, do you have a phone?”

Damian nodded. He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out an antique brick of a phone, the kind with the slide-out keyboard. “Harder to track,” he said when Ari pulled a face.

“If it helps, I’m pretty sure the Greeks didn’t have cell signal-tracking spells.”

“No, but the government does. If they’re involved –”

“Then they’ll be waiting at my doorstep to take me away, considering all the online searching I did trying to find you,” Ari said. “Can I just put my number in?”

Damian handed over the brick. The color had come back into his cheeks, and he let the blanket fall to the couch around him. Ari put their number into Damian’s phone and handed it back.

“There,” they said. “You can text me or call me or whatever to make sure I’m not getting arrested. Or murdered. Or magically kidnapped.”

“Sure.” He paused, glanced over at the Smyth grammar, abandoned on the floor. “Can I hang onto that?”

“Um, I guess? I will need to bring the LSJ home if I’m going to do some work on this paper, but…” Damian’s eyebrows were upturned, his eye pleading. “Yeah, that’s fine.”

“And you’ll be back tomorrow?”

“Yeah, after work.”

Damian grimaced, but he nodded his assent. “And you’ll translate that stuff at home?”

“I’ll do my best. And I was thinking I should maybe do some digging on Gilbert Applewhite – I actually used his dissertation when I was writing my thesis, so that’s a connection, but he’s also the only real, alive person that’s been mentioned in any of these, um, visions. So I figure he might be important.”

Damian, evidently eager to contribute to the mission, said, “I can do that. If this Gilbert guy had anything to do with Nico, I wanna know about it.”

“Great. We’ll compare notes tomorrow night.” Ari stood up from the couch, laid the torn page on the floor, and snapped a picture. Then they handed it back to Damian. “Good night. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I won’t if you won’t.”

“Good night… birds…” Ari said to the flock, which did not react to their attempt at civility. They left Nico Cappelletti’s dim house with their dictionary tucked under their arm and blinked into the fading evening light. Nothing outside had changed, as far as they could tell, but for a moment they were struck by the uncanny feeling of having returned to a slightly different universe than the one they’d left. Like someone had turned down the saturation on the world by a few notches. In some way it was a different universe, Ari supposed, one where they knew, definitively, that magic existed, because they had done some more or less on purpose. They had been awake, and they’d read some words on a paper, and they’d watched Damian Cappelletti’s body possessed by an entity that was either a liar or the actual god Hermes, and either way that entity had had knowledge that neither Ari nor Damian had, and it had burned the mat to ashes just by looking at it. It had happened, and they didn’t have to try to convince themself anymore.

They dragged their feet as they walked away. Damian at the bookstore and in the park had been odd, an object of curiosity. Damian in the alley had been terrifying, a ranting madman brandishing a blade. Ari struggled to square those versions of him, versions they still thought of primarily as ‘the guy,’ with the Damian they’d left curled up on the couch, sunglasses off, his single eye staring piteously at them. They wondered again what he’d been like before Nico’s disappearance, if he’d had a job, or hobbies, or friends. Did he still write or play lacrosse, like he had in college? Did he still like to garden, as he must have to have joined the commune? Had he been charming or shy? Had he offered his doggy eagerness to everyone, or had he learned to keep it hidden most of the time? What had he and Nico been like as kids? Evidently Nico meant more to him than everything else in his life combined for him to have given up on normalcy so completely. But were they the kind of siblings who’d always loved each other, or the kind who had hated each other as children and become best friends as adults?

How much has magic changed Damian Cappelletti? And how much is it going to change me?

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.