We ended up in a Waffle House a few miles away. I actually ordered waffles, because of my missed lunch, along with bacon—because Rachel’s a vegetarian and I hardly ever get the chance. Elise just asked for a Coke. Juana ordered toast and coffee.
“So.” I looked around the table. “All of you have taken classes from this guy Leonard—I mean, Lance Cody, right?”
They nodded. ”I took three classes with him,” said the Black guy, whose name was Dante Willard. “British Lit, religion, and the folklore class.”
“And Herman Weiss was in the class?” I asked. “Along with Kurt DeWald?”
“Yeah,” said Juana. “They were friends. They hung out with us when we went out after class.”
“How did you start meeting outside class?” I crammed some waffles into my mouth.
“We were talking about fairy tales,” Juana said. “The princess and the frog? And then we got into Ovid and the Metamorphoses. I was sitting next to Herman and we started talking, and he wanted to talk more after class. At first I thought he was hitting on me, but then he asked Kurt to come too because Terry had a book he wanted to look at—”
“It was an old book of Greek myths,” Terry said. “Some of them influenced Ovid, I was talking about it in class—”
“And then the next week I was sitting with Marcy,” Juana continued, “and she ended up coming, and Elise came too, and then Dante, uh, you were interested, I guess?” She shot him a look.
Dante glanced at Elise, embarrassed. “Yeah, I admit it, I wanted to hang out with—with Elise.” He shook his head. “But it was interesting, too. Herman had a lot of cool books and stuff. And I backed off when you weren’t interested, right?” he said apologetically.
Elise sighed. “Yeah, okay. I guess it’s all right. We were all just talking about stuff, and—”
The reality show drama could wait. “What about Marcy?” I asked. “How did she fit into this? What’s she like?”
The table was silent. I took a last slice of bacon and shoved my plate away, trying not to show my impatience. The more time we wasted, the farther away Marcy could be.
“Marcy was—kind of angry at the world,” Elise said. “Bored with her job, impatient with people, resentments, frustrated with her life. She felt kind of stuck, I guess, and I think taking all kinds of offbeat classes made her hope she’d find something really different to do. She wanted to change herself, somehow.”
“So what was happening tonight?” I looked around the table. “Anyone?”
The pause was long, Awkward. Embarrassed.
Finally Elise said, “Herman mentioned this book, ‘Breaking Through the Walls,’ or something like that. He said it had spells that could transform people, turn them into someone else. Marcy wanted it. Herman said you could get reprints of it, but they weren’t translated and the text wasn’t accurate. I guess Marcy got a copy of it, but it wasn’t right, the spell didn’t work. She was bugging Herman about it—”
“She was kind of a bitch about it,” Juana said. “Herman got mad and told her to forget it.”
I frowned, trying to sort it all out in my head. “So whose idea was it to go to the cemetery to Lester DeWald’s tomb and have Marcy read that spell, or whatever it was?”
Eyes glanced at each other nervously.
“It was Kurt,” Dante said. “About two weeks ago. He’d been reading about Pythiaxe in other books and online, because of his grandfather, and he figured out that there was a spell in the book that would bring him out.
“He thought Pythiaxe was trapped with his grandfather, in the cemetery.” Again Elise stared out the window, as if wishing she was anywhere but here in a Waffle House talking about this.
“Yeah.” Juana shook her head. “He said he needed someone to do the ritual and draw Pythiaxe out so his grandpa could rest in peace, or something like that.”
“He wasn’t real clear,” Terry said. “Kurt’s kind of—odd.”
“It sounds pretty crazy, now that we’re talking about it.” Dante crumpled up a napkin and tossed it across the table.
“Why Marcy? Why didn’t he do it himself?”
“Marcy wanted to,” Elise said. “Something about Pythiaxe lit her up. The freedom, the power, whatever. Like I said, she’s pretty resentful against the world.”
“But Kurt didn’t try to talk her out of it,” Dante said. “I think he—well, he’s an older guy, but you could tell he was kind of using the idea to hit on Marcy. I mean—”
An older guy? DeWald was my age, but I needed to let that slide. “Was Cody in on this at all?”
They looked at each other. Elise said, “Kurt was there sometimes waiting after class. They talked a little, like they knew each other.”
“And Weiss? He was all for it?”
“He was really worried about getting the spell right.” That was Terry. “He said there were lots of incorrect versions. He said he’d have to find the right one.”
From the library Cody had showed me? “What was supposed to happen afterward? After the ceremony?”
“We were supposed to go back to Kurt’s place and party.” Juana snorted. “Yeah, right. What was I thinking?”
Kurt’s place. Maybe I should have asked about that first. I grabbed the last of my bacon and waved for the check. “Okay, so where does he live?”
Kurt DeWald owned half of a duplex on a busy street just off the highway not far from the cemetery. Of course, he wasn’t home when I got there. Damn it.
I knocked at the other half of the duplex. A man in his 70s, irritated, had no idea where his neighbor was, hadn’t seen him all day, and didn’t even know the guy’s name. He had too many weird visitors, though, and sometimes he played his TV too loud with weird movies that he had to pound on the wall to make him turn it down.
In my car I called Rachel. But she was in class, so it went to voicemail. I sat for a moment, tired, cranky, frustrated.
I decided I needed to know more about Kurt DeWald and his grandfather, more than his neighbor could tell me and more than I could learn on my phone in a parking lot. Time to go home.
I listened to the news on the highway. A battle in Ukraine, a lawsuit against Twitter, more fighting in Washington, a shooting downtown, and, in lighter news, a string of vandalism in the northern suburbs—someone knocking over trash cans to spew garbage over the streets, smashing headlights on parked cars, breaking restaurant windows, and screaming obscenities into the night. Witnesses described a young woman running and laughing before vanishing into the side streets.
That made me worried.
It’s a long drive from Northbrook to my Lincoln Park apartment. By the time I got home Rachel was on the sofa, watching TV and drinking a beer. It was 8:30.
“How was class?” I locked the door.
“Boring. Got an extension on my paper, so I don’t have to steal one from the internet.” She turned the TV down. “How’s the missing daughter?”
“Still missing. There may be demons involved.” I hung my jacket on the hook near the door. “I hesitate to ask again and risk your wrath, but did you find out anything about, whatever it was—” My mind was fuzzy. “MIskal?”
“I sent some stuff to you, but it’s pretty basic. I asked Carrie, she said she’d get back to you.”
“Great.” Carrie is Rachel’s best friend. She knows a lot about the supernatural, more than Rachel or I do. For some reason she doesn’t like me, but she’ll usually help if it’s for Rachel. “Thanks.”
Rachel frowned. “You okay?”
I rubbed my eyes with a sigh. “Long day. Almost found her, but she ran off.” I’d gotten another email from Marcy’s parents while driving. I owed them a progress report, even if my progress hadn’t gotten me very far. Yet.
“Them’s the breaks.” She picked up the remote. “Anything I can do?”
“The night is young. I’ll let you know.”
Rachel went back to her show. I went to the kitchen to make coffee, and then headed into the office for my computer.
First I sent an email to Marcy’s parents, trying to sound reassuring without offering false hope. I looked at what Rachel had sent me on Miskal, but it wasn’t much better than a Wikipedia page—in fact, most of the stuff looked like it had been copied and pasted from Wikipedia.
There was no more news on the suburban vandal. Was it Marcy? Pythiaxe? Or just a drunken teenager? Whoever it was, I hoped a few broken windows was the worst of it. But I couldn’t count on that.
So I started looking into the DeWald family.
Lester DeWald had been born to a farming family, and grew up to become an engineer for a farm equipment manufacturer. After retiring, he bought a gas station off the 294 highway, where he fixed cars as a mechanic until a few years before his death. That was from his obituary in the local Northbrook paper.
Digging deeper, I found that Lester had been fired from his manufacturing job, not retired, after a lawsuit involving defective tractor parts. His gas station was foreclosed on after he didn’t make any payments for a year. The documentation I found suggested drugs and drinking had contributed to his downfall. He’d been arrested on drunk and disorderly charges more than once, the last time in 1998. At some point after that he went to a state mental hospital, where he died in 1999.
His wife had divorced him in 1972, around the time he was fired from his engineering job. She died in 1993. Two kids, a boy, Jack, and a girl, Janice—Kurt’s mother.
Kurt was also an engineer, with a degree from the U of I at Champaign-Urbana. He’d worked for Motorola for 15 years, then left for a smaller firm making something for laptops and tablets—I couldn’t figure out what, and I was afraid to interrupt Rachel to ask. He was divorced, no kids, and as far as I could tell from his social media, he had no current girlfriend, or boyfriend, or other kind of long-term relationship. He had one arrest for drunk driving, and a few for marijuana possession.
Then I looked up Pythiaxe.
The images that came up first were disturbing. Pythiaxe was depicted in paintings, woodcuts, and drawings as a squat, goat-faced man-beast with long twisted horns and bony fingers. The articles I found described a kind of Dionysian figure, hedonistic and pleasure-seeking. Stories about him originated in ancient Mesopotamia, a long time B.C.
I drank some coffee. I wasn’t worried about sleep. I’d be up half the night worrying about Marcy anyway. Like her parents.
I started organizing my notes for the report I’d have to write. It had been a long day, and maybe I’d missed something or forgotten a clue in the rush. Olivia, Warren, Cody . . .
Cody. Worth a shot.
“Hi! Did you find Marcy?” He sounded distracted. Hurried.
“Not yet. Almost.” I should have tackled her at the cemetery. “Look, do you know a man named Kurt DeWald? He’s a friend of Herman Weiss, apparently.”
Cody hesitated. “Uh, yeah. I know Kurt.” His voice was wary. “He was in my class, sometimes. Kind of creepy.”
“What about a character named Pythiaxe? Have you ever heard of him?”
“Yeah. Herman asked about him, in the folklore class. I had to look that one up. Pythiaxe was some kind of demon. I thought it was odd that Herman was interested in him.”
“Well, Kurt’s grandfather tried to raise him before he died in 1999.”
“Oh. He—how did you find out about that? What happened at the cemetery?”
“I’m not sure.” I felt a chill in my skin. “Marcy apparently raised Pythiaxe using the ritual from that book. Then she disappeared.”
“Wow. What about Kurt?”
”No idea, just that he’s not at his house. Any idea where he might be?”
“N-no. Sorry. I wish I could help you.”
“Yeah. Well, have a good night.” I hung up.
Now what? Whatever Kurt had in mind for Marcy—and Pythiaxe—it couldn’t be good. Where could they have gone? Anywhere.
Then it hit me.
I looked at my phone, but realized a phone call wasn’t going to be enough. So I started gathering what I hoped I wouldn’t need—my Taser and my pepper spray. I thought for a moment about the gun we keep locked in the bedroom, but decided to leave it there. I probably wasn’t going to have to shoot anyone. I hoped.
“I have to go back to Northbrook,” I told Rachel in the living room.
“Again?” She muted the TV and turned on the couch as I stuffed the pockets of my jacket. “Everything okay?”
“Maybe. Yes. I hope so.” I leaned down to kiss her. My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Carrie. “Hi, Carrie, what’s up? I’m on my way out the door—”
“I got what you wanted, dude.” She sounded pissed, as usual whenever she had to talk to me. Why didn’t she like me? No time to worry about that now, I had enough to panic over. “I’m sending it to you now. TLDR? This Miskal is some sort of demon who’s locked in eternal combat with another demon, called Pythiaxe. Pythiaxe is—”
“I know who Pythiaxe is.” I could see Carrie’s email delivery on my phone. “Okay, thanks. Gotta go.” I hung up. “Why does she hate me?”
“She thinks you’re not good enough for me.” Rachel shrugged.
“After all this time? Never mind.” I slung my jacket over my shoulders. “Wish me luck.”
“Don’t get killed.” She turned and picked up the remote. “I mean it. I love you.”
“I love you too,” I said, but I wasn’t sure she heard me before her show came back on
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