Supernatural Noir

I said, “Yeah, the thing from before. What is it?”

“The Last Triangle,” she said.

“Where’s the triangle come in?” I asked.

“The three points of the capital E stand for the three points of a triangle.”

“So what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I want you to take a pad and a pen, and I want you to walk all around the town, everywhere you can think of, and look to see if that symbol appears on any other walls. If you find one, write down the address for it—street and number. Look for places that are abandoned, rundown, burned out.”

I didn’t want to believe she was crazy, but . . .

I said to her, “Don’t you have any real work for me to do—heavy lifting, digging, painting, you know?”

“Just do what I ask you to do.”

Ms. Berkley gave me a few bucks and sent me on my way. First things first, I went downtown, scored a couple of joints, bought a forty of Colt. Then I did the grand tour. It was fucking freezing, of course. The sky was brown, and the dead man’s jacket wasn’t cutting it. I found the first of the symbols on the wall of a closed-down bar. The place had a pink plastic sign that said Here It Is, with a silhouette of a woman with an Afro sitting in a martini glass. The E was there in red on the plywood of a boarded front window. I had to walk a block each way to figure out the address, but I got it. After that I kept looking. I walked myself sober and then some and didn’t get back to the house till nightfall.

When I told Ms. Berkley that I’d found one, she smiled and clapped her hands together. She asked for the address, and I delivered. She set me up with spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table. I was tired, but seriously, I felt like a prince. She went down the hall to her office. A few minutes later, she came back with a piece of paper in her hand. As I pushed the plate away, she set the paper down in front of me and then took a seat.

“That’s a map of town,” she said. I looked it over. There were two dots in red pen and a straight line co

“Yeah.”

“Those are two points of the Last Triangle.”

“Okay,” I said and thought, “Here we go . . .”

“The Last Triangle is an equilateral triangle; all the sides are equal,” she said.

I failed math every year in high school, so I just nodded.

“Since we know these two points, we know that the last point is in one of two places on the map, either east or west.” She reached across the table and slid the map toward her. With the red pen, she made two dots and then made two triangles sharing a line down the center. She pushed the map toward me again. “Tomorrow you have to look either here or here,” she said, pointing with the tip of the pen.

The next day I found the third one, to the east, just before it got dark. A tall old house, on the edge of an abandoned industrial park. It looked like there’d been a fire. There was an old rusted Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. The E-and-o thing was spray-painted on the trunk.

When I brought her that info, she gave me the lowdown on the triangle. “I read a lot of books about history,” she said, “and I have this ability to remember things I’ve seen or read. If I saw a phone number once, I’d remember it correctly. It’s not a photographic memory; it doesn’t work automatically or with everything. Maybe five years ago I read this book on ancient magic, The Spells of Abriel the Magus, and I remembered the symbol from that book when I saw it on the wall of the old factory last week. I came home, found the book, and reread the part about the Last Triangle. It’s also known as Abriel’s Escape or Abriel’s Prison.

“Abriel was a thirteenth-century magus . . . magician. He wandered around Europe and created six powerful spells. The triangle, once marked out, denotes a protective zone in which its creator ca

“That’s a doozy.”

“Pay attention,” she said. “For the Last Triangle to be activated, the creator of the triangle must take a life at its geographical center between the time of the three symbols being marked in the world and the next full moon. Legend has it, Abriel killed the baker Ellot Haber to induce the spell.”

It took me almost a minute and a half to grasp what she was saying. “You mean, someone’s go

“Maybe.”

“Come on, a kid just happened to make that symbol. Coincidence.”

“No, remember, a perfect equilateral triangle, each one of the symbols exactly where it should be.” She laughed, and, for a second, looked a lot younger.

“I don’t believe in magic,” I told her. “There’s no magic out there.”

“You don’t have to believe it,” she said. “But maybe someone out there does. Someone desperate for protection, willing to believe even in magic.”

“That’s pretty far fetched,” I said, “but if you think there’s a chance, call the cops. Just leave me out of it.”

“The cops,” she said and shook her head. “They’d lock me up with that story.”

“Glad we agree on that.”

“The center of the triangle on my map,” she said, “is the train-station parking lot. And in five nights there’ll be a full moon. No one’s gotten killed at the station yet, not that I’ve heard of.”

After breakfast she called a cab and went out, leaving me to fix the garbage disposal and wonder about the craziness. I tried to see it her way. She’d told me it was our civic duty to do something, but I wasn’t buying any of it. Later that afternoon, I saw her sitting at the computer in her office. Her glasses near the end of her nose, she was reading off the Internet and loading bullets into the magazine clip of the pistol. Eventually she looked up and saw me. “You can find just about anything on the Internet,” she said.

“What are you doing with that gun?”

“We’re going out tonight.”

“Not with that.”

She stopped loading. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.

After di

We turned off the main street into an alley next to the hardware store and followed it a long way before it came out on the south side of the train station. There was a rundown one-story building there in the corner of the parking lot. I ripped off the plywood planks that covered the door, and we went in. The place was empty but for some busted-up office furniture, and all the windows were shattered, letting the breeze in. We moved through the darkness, Ms. Berkley leading the way with the flashlight, to a back room with a view of the parking lot and station just beyond it. We set up the chairs and took our seats at the empty window. She killed the light.

“Tell me this is the strangest thing you’ve ever done,” I whispered to her.

She brought out the pint of brandy, unscrewed the top, and took a tug on it. “Life’s about doing what needs to get done,” she said. “The sooner you figure that out, the better for everyone.” She passed me the bottle.