“And I think if I’d gotten kicked out of a Series game I’d been looking forward to, I might do the same thing.”
“You have a goat?”
“I have a moose,” I said.
He blinked at that for a second, didn’t understand it, and decided to ignore it. “If you know that, then you know that many people believe that the curse has held.”
“Where the Series is concerned, the Cubbies have been filled with fail and dipped in suck sauce since 1945,” I acknowledged. “No matter how hard they try, just when things are looking up, something seems to go bad at the worst possible time.” I paused to consider. “I can relate.”
“You’re a fan, then?”
“More of a kindred spirit.”
He looked around my office again and gave me a small smile. “But you follow the team.”
“I go to games when I can.”
“That being the case,” Donovan said, “you know that the team has been playing well this year.”
“And the Cubs want to hire yours truly to prevent the curse from screwing things up.”
Donovan shook his head. “I never said that the Cubs organization was involved.”
“Hell of a story, though, if they were.”
Donovan frowned severely.
“The Sun-Times would run it on the front page. ‘Cubs Hire Professional Wizard to Break Curse,’ maybe. Rick Morrissey would have a ball with that story.”
“My clients,” Donovan said firmly, “have authorized me to commission your services on this matter, if it can be done quickly—and with the utmost discretion.”
I swung my feet down from my desk. “Mr. Donovan,” I said, “no one does discretion like me.”
TWO HOURS AFTER I had begun my calculations, I dropped my pencil on the laboratory table and stretched my back. “Well. You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” said Bob the Skull. “I’m always right.”
I gave the dried, bleached human skull sitting on a shelf amid a stack of paperback romance novels a gimlet eye.
“For some values of right,” he amended hastily. The words were conciliatory, but the flickering flames in the skull’s eye sockets danced merrily.
My laboratory is in the subbasement under my basement apartment. It’s dark, cool, and dank, essentially a concrete box that I have to enter by means of a folding staircase. It isn’t a big room, but it’s packed with the furnishings of one. Lots of shelves groan under the weight of books, scrolls, papers, alchemical tools, and containers filled with all manner of magical whatnot.
There’s a silver summoning circle on the floor, and a tiny scale model of the city of Chicago on a long table running down the middle of the room. The only shelf not crammed full is Bob’s, and even it gets a little crowded sometimes. Bob is my more-or-less-faithful, not-so-trusty assistant, a spirit of intellect that dwells within a specially enchanted skull. I might be a wizard, but Bob’s knowledge of magic makes me look like an engineering professor.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you missed?” I asked.
“Nothing’s certain, boss,” the skull said philosophically. “But you did the equations. You know the power requirements for a spell to continue running through all those sunrises.”
I grunted sourly. The cycles of time in the world degrade ongoing magic, and your average enchantment doesn’t last for more than a few days. For a curse to be up and running since 1945, it would have had to begin as a malevolent enchantment powerful enough to rip a hole through the crust of the planet. Given the lack of lava in the area, it would seem that whatever the Billy Goat Curse might be, I could be confident that it wasn’t a simple magical working.
“Nothing’s ever simple,” I complained.
“What did you expect, boss?” Bob said.
I growled. “So the single-spell theory is out.”
“Yep,” Bob said.
“Which means that either the curse is being powered by something that renews its energy, or else someone is refreshing the thing all the time.”
“What about this Sianis guy’s family?” Bob said. “Maybe they’re putting out a fresh whammy every few days or something.”
I shook my head. “I called records in Edinburgh. The Wardens checked them out years ago when all of this first happened, and they aren’t practitioners. Besides, they’re Cub-friendly.”
“The Wardens investigated the Greek guy but not the curse?” Bob asked curiously.
“In 1945 the White Council had enough to do trying to mitigate the bad mojo from all those artifacts the Nazis stockpiled,” I said. “Once they established that no one’s life was in danger, they didn’t really care if a bunch of guys playing a game got cursed to lose it.”
“So, what’s your next move?”
I tapped my chin thoughtfully with one finger. “Let’s go look at the stadium.”
I PUT BOB in the mesh sack I sometimes tote him around in and, at his petulant insistence, hung it from the rearview mirror of my car, a battered old Volkswagen Beetle. He hung there, swinging back and forth and occasionally spinning one way or the other when something caught his eye.
“Look at the legs on that one!” Bob said. “And, whew, check her out! It must be chilly tonight!”
“There’s a reason we don’t get out more often, Bob,” I sighed. I should have known better than to drive through the club district on my way to Wrigley.
“I love the girls’ pants in this century,” Bob said. “I mean, look at those jeans. One little tug and off they come.”
I wasn’t touching that one.
I parked the car a couple of blocks from the stadium, stuck Bob in a pocket of my black leather duster, and walked in. The Cubs were on the road, and Wrigley was closed. It was a good time to knock around inside. But since Donovan was evidently prepared to deny and disavow all knowledge, I wasn’t going to be able to simply knock on the door and wander in.
So I picked a couple of locks at a delivery entrance and went inside. I didn’t hit it at professional-burglar speed or anything—I knew a couple of guys who could open a lock with tools as fast as they could with a key—but I wasn’t in any danger of getting a ticket for loitering, either. Once I was inside, I headed straight for the concourses. If I mucked around in the stadium’s administrative areas, I would probably run afoul of a full-blown security system, and the only thing I could reliably do to that would be to shut it down completely—and most systems are smart enough to tip off their home-security company when that happens.
Besides. What I was looking for wouldn’t be in any office.
I took Bob out of my pocket so that the flickering golden-orange lights of his eyes illuminated the area in front of me. “All right,” I murmured. I kept my voice down, on the off chance that a night watchman might be on duty and nearby. “I’m angry at the Cubbies and I’m pitching my curse at them. Where’s it going to stick?”
“There’s really no question about that, is there?” Bob asked me. “Home plate,” we said together.
I started forward, walking silently. Being quiet when you sneak around isn’t difficult, as long as you aren’t in any rush. The serious professionals can all but sprint in perfect silence, but the main thing you need isn’t agility—it’s patience and calm. So I moved out slowly and calmly, and it must have worked, because nobody raised a hue or a cry.
The empty, unlit stadium was … just wrong. I was used to seeing Wrigley blazing with sunlight or its lights, filled with fans and music and the smell of overpriced, fattening, and inexplicably gratifying food. I was used to vendors shouting, the constant sea surge of crowd noise, and the buzz of planes passing overhead, trailing banners behind them.
Now Wrigley Field was vast and dark and empty. There was something silently sad about it—acres of seats with no one sitting, a green and beautiful field that no one was playing on, a scoreboard that didn’t have anything on it to read or anyone to read it. If the gods and muses were to come down from Olympus and sculpt unfulfilled potential as a physical form, they wouldn’t get any closer than that hollow house did.