"I think," said the steward of Howe Caverns, sticking her head between them from the back seat of Wick's roadster, "that we need lunch before we consider the next pin in your map. I always feel a little emptier after I've left the cavern. You can't expect to be divinely guided on an empty stomach."
The car had felt crowded even before this small woman had invited herself along. Mica's presence could have overpowered a frat party, to say nothing of a vehicle that only notionally could seat three -- Jacqueline couldn't imagine that Wick found a reason for one passenger, let alone two (she did not consider the scarabs as passengers properly, as she served more as their vehicle). Now, she felt that she no longer belonged in this car, no matter that she was technically the belle of this ball. There was no need for this trip without her, so there was no reason for her to know either of these people. Had she met them on the street, she would not have looked at either of them twice, let alone imagined for them a world so strange as this.
Jacqueline wondered at her soul to see if she felt any pang of loyalty to her supposedly dying father. She found none. She doubted that this made her a bad person, but it did make her reason for pressing on hollower. If she bordered on indifference about the destination, who was she to get in a tiff about the convolutions of the journey? This was doubly so given that Mica's appearance had been the first that was not directly by her nebulous decree.
The steward wasn't necessarily wrong. Whatever Jacqueline had hoped to find in the cavern did not seem to be there. Instead, they found pursuing darkness that probably, but not definitely, had shut off the lights on them. As far as Jacqueline knew, the thing that had kept them at bay had been Mica's magic, so it didn't seem unwise to add a witch to the trip.
Still, Jacqueline almost argued against stopping for lunch to score a point against Mica, as though she had a solid schedule to which she should adhere. The steward was useful, but her personality was more oversaturated than Jacqueline's. She did not love the competition for being the strangest one in any space.
Now that they were on the road again, Wick waited for Jacqueline to have some bout with intuition that would guide them. She had yet to find the relevance of these locales based on so few data points. A tower and a hole. She supposed that there was something Freudian about that, but the world was composed of both. If there was a significance, she doubted it was one of genitals. Where she took them next would surely give her information enough that she could better extrapolate, even if her logic would be little better than the sort one used in interpreting dreams.
So, sure, she could go for something to eat other than the snacks she had consigned to this car.
Mica insisted that they stop only after half an hour, long enough that they were out of Cobleskill, a place that, the steward assured them, had no worthwhile dining options.
Getting out of the car, Jacqueline was not sure where Mica had Wick stop could be dancing instruction from on high. It was a diner like any other diner: chrome and neon, a window before each booth so that one could peer in at those who were eating (and those within could see nothing more exciting than a parking lot and the rushing of cars beyond).
As though she guessed this thought, Mica said, "Yes, it is just a diner, but upstate New York has about as many of these as cults. You have to figure, a few must have the right idea, and almost all have worthwhile French fries -- diners, not cults." She twisted her mouth. "I mean, some cults probably have mastered the art of French fries if they are not unforgivable ascetics, like Kellogg's cult -- but don't let the wrong people hear you call bland flakes, enemas, eugenics, and no masturbation a cult!"
"I'm sorry?" asked Jacqueline, who had to admit that talk of cults did make the conversation at once spicy, spicier than the food in this diner was likely to be -- spicier by far than corn flakes.
"Oh, I'm not sure exactly why there are so many diners," Mica mused as though wondering it for the first time. "Maybe something to do with the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park? You want to be guided by celestial forces? Having grown up in a food desert, let me tell you how a chicken club at any hour is truly a blessing."
Mica wasn't being obtuse, so this comment was funnier than obnoxious. "No," said Jacqueline. "The other part."
"Oh, cults?" The steward laughed through her nose. "I don't think they would always love being called cults. Let us say, religious movements that occasionally step into controversy the way that a jogger steps in dog shit," said Mica. "You've got the Oneidas, which was a free-love sex commune. I would have liked them, but they are mostly known for their flatware these days. More than the Shakers, who forbade sex and, not coincidently, lost new members twice over: not seducing them in, not popping them out."
"The Mormons," added Wick.
Mica gave a wicked smile. "Oh, you are treading thin ice, mister, but yes. Joseph Smith got his start as a huckster here. He found his gold plates in Manchester. And the Millerites, who thought the world would end by 1844, their Second Great Awakening turned to the so-called Great Disappointment when they woke up the next morning. You have Lily Dale, a whole town of Spiritualists set up near the Canadian border. That was ground zero for Spiritualism, thanks to the Fox sisters fucking about in Hydesville, hours away from Lily Dale. It could have been a matter of real estate prices at the time. The steward there is presently not my biggest fan."
"There," said Jacqueline. "I want to go there. Lily Dale."
Wick shook his head. "It is too far. We have only this day."
"Who are you to tell me where we can go?" demanded Jacqueline. "I thought I was the one who got to decide."
"Lily Dale is curiosity, your desire to force a new location, and a sort of desperation that drives this hasty decision," said Wick. "Not the pull of the divine. We cannot go to Lily Dale."
The words were scolding, but his tone was matter-of-fact, so Jacqueline would have felt sullen to contradict him. He was right on all counts, which suggested an insight into her personality that she doubted he deserved.
When they entered the diner, a haggard woman at the register, who looked as though she ought always to have a cigarette dangling from her bright red lips, told them to sit wherever.
They were barely seated and had given their drink orders before Mica, straightening her jacket, confessed brightly, "So, you lost one of your buddies in the cavern."
Jacqueline knew it was true before her hand caressed a carapace. Yes, she was down a bug. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"We were being followed by that whatever. It was close, and something flew out of your pocket," said Mica. "Then, it was not as close, the whatever."
"It stopped what was following us?" asked Jacqueline, meaning without saying that she had been attributing their escape wholly to Mica.
"Delayed, not stopped. I assumed your bug knew what it was doing. It wouldn't have been right to overrule that by having you go run to get it back," Mica took a sip through her straw, sensing that this sounded callous. "I'll ask the landvaettir to keep an eye out for it."
"For an insect in a cave complex," added Wick.
"It's their cave, I told you that nothing else lives down there, and the scarab is magic," said Mica, though she could not help herself from adding, "It's not going to work, though. Bug knew what it was doing. Wherever it has gone, it doesn't mean to come back."
Jacqueline wanted to be more bothered. She did have to concede that she operated by the notion that her scarabs were driven by a greater source than a hunger for shit.
Jacqueline called out Houdini, the others remaining coming as well, crawling onto her cuffs and sunning themselves by a beam through the window. She wanted the reassurance that she had not lost them all.
"You've got to stick around," she commanded.
Houdini wiggled his disagreement.
"Why not?" but this was a nonsensical question and not only because the insect had no means of answering it. They had no reason to obey her desire that they stay whole and present. And why did she want that? Because they were her key to this adventure. They were a reassurance that she had not lost a thread she did not know existed a week ago.
"God, that's awful," someone said from the booth opposite them. "What are you doing?"
The three of them looked at the pinched face of a woman, aghast at the contents of Jacqueline's hands.
"She is an entomologist," Wick lied without effort. "An insect scientist. These are docile exhibits, not vermin. Would you care to see them perform a trick?"
"This is a restaurant," she sniped. "Tell your girlfriend to put her cockroaches away."
Mica offered, sotto voce, where the woman could put cockroaches, which scandalized their persecutor enough to pretend that she hadn't heard it.
"What is the" -- Jacqueline wanted a better term for this, but Mica had already dubbed it -- "whatever?"
"I don't know yet," said Mica. "I don't suppose we will be happy to find the answer, but we will find it just the same. That's how these things tend to go: something is spooky, you avoid it a little while, then it formally introduces itself. You either accept it, integrate it, imprison it, or destroy it. The first two options tend to be the best ones for my money, but that is not always an option given readily."
Expanding on the arguable truth of this, Mica and Wick chatted, if not as friends, then as people who had enough shared context that their dialogue resembled gossip. They strayed into detailed this apocalypse or that, a vampire infestation and alien takeover, both thwarted, with casualness on his side and wry excitement on hers.
"Should you be discussing this in public?" asked Jacqueline, unsure of the etiquette but assuming this might broach decorum of keeping things quiet enough not to bother the agents.
Mica almost retorted sarcasm but instead called to the woman so offended by the scarabs. "Madam, are you aware that there was an angel who brought a plague into this world? No, no, don't you dare look away. There were gods, and we supplanted them because we had made them in the first place. They are all dead and buried. Or do you know this already?"
At first, the woman was annoyed, then disgusted, and then... something else. A blankness. Something resetting in her eyes. She turned back to her meal as though Mica had not spoken.
"The gods are not dead," Wick said evenly, though there was an edge. Not opprobrium, but not too far removed.
She smirked. "Metaphorically speaking, Wick. I am aware the endpoint of our trip is the endpoint of one of them." She turned her face to Jacqueline, though she guessed that it was not to gauge if this remark had offended the purported daughter of Anubis. "Don't worry. If you aren't involved in this world, you won't hear or see the truth. And, if you are, the truth sees you back. People with some mental illnesses don't necessarily have the filter. Children either, inspiring some of their more creative imaginary friends and under the bed monsters."
"So, I can't tell people about today?"
"You can," said Wick. "The parts they care to hear: you took a trip with a stranger to see your dying father. The rest, you can say as loudly or often as you would like, but it is the secret of the real world, not the one humans acknowledge."
That did not seem fair to Jacqueline, but its logic was unavoidable. She had never heard people seriously talk about gods or magic -- jokingly, aspirationally, creatively, sure. Never seriously. She believed now that a part of her belonged to the other world, the one Wick so breezily had called the real one, and no one could ever listen to her tell the tale.
Mica excused herself to the bathroom, though she took small pleasure in being more factual than euphemistic. "Too many free refills. Don't want to piss on Wick's seats."
When she was well away, emboldened both by the steward's absence and the freedom to be as loud as she cared to be while discussing the supernatural, Jacqueline made the most of it. "How exactly is Mica magical?"
"Not by virtue of being a steward, I assure you, but by dint of not having died from it yet."
Jacqueline dislodged a bit of fry from her teeth with her tongue, unself-conscious in Wick's presence. "Mica didn't make it seem that bad."
"Would you want to announce that sort of thing?" Wick said. "I do not know her well, but she does not seem like the type for self-pity."
"I've seen her do magic," Jacqueline said.
"She does not perform magic," he said. She noticed for the first time that he had ordered nothing and only sipped from a glass of ice water. She wanted to offer him some fries -- a common courtesy -- but thought better of it. "This is merely witchcraft."
"What distinction you are making?"
He pursed his full lips as though trying to dumb down physics for a child. "Magic is innate. Any human can do it. Witchcraft is its artifice, taking what is natural and giving it over to crystals and powders. Witchcraft gives away human birthright, as your people gave their power to the gods eons ago. No matter Mica's casual blasphemy, the gods are not gone."
"Are you aware that much of what you say is needlessly bizarre?"
"Yes."
"Why is she coming along?" Jacqueline asked.
"Why does she say, or what do I think the purpose is in fact?"
"I know what she says."
Wick considered the last of her rare hamburger. "We cannot know until we get where we are going if we did what we needed."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.