Bee never rang her parents and told them about the attack, instead spending more and more time at the Art School, locked in her studio. Her light, airy sculptures, already getting more and more inward-looking following the break in, turned into dense compact masses crumpled on the floor. She made them from tar and lead and stone, with pieces of text embedded in them.
"Dark," was the way Bev described them, but Bee called them therapy, and insisted that they helped her come to terms with the attack. She took to waiting for the others before walking to the bus stop, and liked to spend evenings with her friends, causing Cat no end of trouble fitting in all the extra work she was used to doing as well as her supermarket job, and her landlady's occasional chores.
As she could no longer spend whole nights at the Art School, Cat put work on Golem aside and decided to concentrate on the book Bee had bought her. It was not a large book, but it was beautifully made, with a plain, honey-coloured cover, made from leather that was so old and oiled it felt as soft and supple as skin. The pages were a heavy vellum, folded to half quarto size, and bound in collections of eight leaves with waxed silk thread. But inside was the real beauty, as far as Cat was concerned. Each page had hundreds of words on it, all written out long-hand in a beautiful copperplate hand, perfectly aligned and sized. Two hundred words a page, all in alphabetical order. One hundred and twenty pages. Twenty-four thousand words, all waiting to be recorded and classified. Cross-referenced and ordered. She grinned with anticipation.
Today she'd booked a quiet room in one of the video suites and was preparing to record some of the words. She checked the desk and squared up everything on it. Reel-to-reel recorder, check. List-book, check. Handheld mechanical counter, check. (She wasn't going to get caught out with her usual miscounts). Microphone, check. Small bag of wine gums, check. Can of coke, check. She glanced around the room, making sure the sound-proofed door was closed and, with a happy grin, began.
"Abscedo, abscedere, abscessi, abscessus, abscido," The room, lined with felt tiles, kept echoes to a minimum, and made the words sound a little dead. She clicked her counter with each word to keep place.
"Abscidere, abscisus, abscisio..." She stopped suddenly, something about the last word had resonated in her head, echoing more than the previous words. A flashing light caught her eye, and she found the recorder had turned itself off.
"Damn," she muttered. Rather than count her way through the wordlist (a difficult task for her at the best of times), she reset her counter and rewound the tape deck.
"Abscedo, abscedere, abscessi, abscessus, abscido, abscidere, abscisus, abscisio..."
Again, that strange echo. She looked down, again the recorder had turned itself off. Typical Art-School stuff, abused by the students and never really maintained properly.
This time she dug her phone out of her bag and set it to record.
"Abscedo, Abscedere, abscessi, abscessus, abscido, abscidere, abscisus, abscisio..."
Her phone made a strange sound and died in front of her. No power, nothing. She shook it, tapped it lightly on the desk, nothing. She glared, then smiled and asked nicely, pleadingly. Nothing. She cursed loudly, two hundred and fifty images not yet transferred to her computer, all that work wasted.
(Not really just work, a small and honest part of her mind reminded her. At least a hundred and fifty pictures were of shelves at the supermarket that she'd been taking pictures of and telling herself they weren't work. Just interesting).
She sat for a long time in the sound proofed room. She hated losing work, even crap not-work, before it had been recorded in her journal. It felt wrong, as though something had been removed from her, something important, something substantial, and it left her unsettled and out of sorts. She glared at the phone again, then at the book, then settled down for a good long mope.
Finally, she reached over and turned on the recorder before reading out the words again. And again. And again.
.....
Bev was not too keen on being dragged out of her studio. Luckily it was after six, she'd finished painting, and was feeling hungry. Still, she continued to swear at Cat as she was dragged along the deserted corridors towards Bee's space. Not really much point in objecting when Cat was in one of these moods, but she felt she had to register a protest of some sort.
They reached Bee's studio, and Cat hammered on the doors, with no response. They could tell Bee was inside by the off-key singing.
"Must have her head-phones on high," muttered Cat, grabbing a handful of raw peanuts from Bev, who was hungrily snacking. She was still objecting when Cat clambered onto a chair and pushed her hand under the plastic sheet that covered Bee's studio. She flung the handful of peanuts into Bee's studio then removed her hand. There was a shout from inside, and Bee flung her door open.
"What the hell is going on! I'm trying to work in here!" Bee's dandelion hair had been gathered into an uncharacteristic bun, with a number of paint brushes poked through it. When she saw Cat and Bev standing at her door, she looked a little flustered and tried to close the door a little. The two girls looked past Bee and saw her coffee machine steaming slightly. There was a small coffee cup on her bookcase.
"You swore you'd text me when you were going to have coffee!" shouted Bev, waving her finger at her friend. "Left me to work myself to death, dying for my art, pining away ..."
Cat knew B2 could go on in this way for hours, in fact she rather enjoyed doing it. (Something to do with having lots of brothers and sisters who simply ignored anyone not obviously dying or giving them presents). Normally she would have let Bev get it out of her system, but this was important, so she pushed past Bee and into her space.
"Shut up!" she shouted, "I've got something amazing to show you."
.....
"You broke my phone!" was all Bee could say. "My new iPhone! My Christmas present!"
Cat admitted to herself that maybe she hadn't really thought this part of her amazing discovery out that well. "But didn't you see what happened? I said some words and it stopped working! It's magic! I know magic!" She did a little dance in the middle of the studio. Bee continued to look distraught.
"Could have been pure chance," said Bev. "Coincidence. Cosmic Rays. Sunspots. Definitely not scientific proof." She crossed her arms and looked down her nose at Cat in a superior way.
"But my iPhone!" was all Bee could say. She was almost in tears
"If it's just chance," said Cat, ignoring Bee's whining and looking at Bev, "Let me try it on your phone."
Bev spluttered a bit, and Bee stopped complaining for a moment. "Yeah, Ms. Scientific Proof, let's blow up your phone! See how you like it."
B2 continued to object, but nothing could be done but for them to go to her studio at once and recover her phone.
.....
"That was my brother's!" said Bev, holding up her phone. It, too, was dead. "And I'd only just put credit on it!"
"It's only a bloody Nokia," said Bee, considerably cheered up by the loss of Bev's phone. "Mine was a new iPhone."
"Yeah, but we're not all made of money, Miss Melbourne Moneybags Barista!" She pulled a face.
Bee looked a little defensive. She had wealthy parents, both lawyers, and was an only child. "I work every summer holidays and spent my gap year working in a cafe saving to come here!"
"Yeah, but your phone was a present. Not paid for by yourself. Not half belonging to your little brother!" This was said in a near wail and was particularly galling to Bev. She was an older sister, more used to commanding her minion-siblings than to apologizing to them. In the competitive climate that was her close-knit family she could foresee a rapid demotion from her top dog position. Not that she didn't love them all, it was just easier to love someone from above (especially when they did what she said).
The two friends frowned at each other, considering more harsh words, before Cat interrupted their glaring competition with a sly grin. "You want to learn the magic word?"
.....
By eleven o'clock they were exhausted, having run around the Art School, book in hand, trying Cat's words on anything they could find, and, incidentally, doing several thousand dollars' worth of damage. They'd learnt that it was just one word, abscisio, that affected things, and it worked best on electronics (they'd fried the CCTV and walkie talkie of Cat's friendly neighbourhood security guard, Joey, when they'd tried it out near the front desk), and it hardly worked on electrical items. They could sometimes dim an electric light briefly, and perhaps make a car engine stutter (it was a student car and misfired anyway). It didn't matter how loudly or softly they said the word, it would still work, though just mouthing it didn't seem to be effective. Most weirdly, it seemed impossible to memorize the word; they'd all needed the book in front of them to say it. Finally, they all noticed the strange silence that accompanied the word when it was spoken, and the curious way it seemed to echo even in an open space.
"Almost like the word is, I don't know, bigger than it really is," mused Bee.
"Or louder in some way," added Bev.
"Yeah, or as if the space increased somehow, became more echo-y. Like when you touch a big bell, you know, not a noise as such but sort of a potential for sound, a sort of anticipation." Bee was nodding when Cat interrupted.
"Abloco," she said, voice echoing strangely. She had the book opened on a workbench in front of her and had been muttering the list of words. Bee and Bev looked around cautiously for some change. Nothing seemed different.
"That definitely felt like the other one, but I can't see what it did," said Bee. She stuck her head outside her studio space and looked around. Nothing seemed different.
She moved closer and looked over Cat's left shoulder, starting to mutter the words on the page. Bev moved up on the other side and joined in.
"Aeger," said Bee suddenly. The other two girls stopped reading suddenly.
"That felt a bit strange," said Bev, touching her stomach lightly.
"Yeah, a bit sick," said Cat. "Here, let me try it. Aeger,'" she said firmly.
Both Bee and Bev touched their stomachs. "That was bit stronger!" said Bev. "Made me feel like I'd had a bad curry." A sly look crossed her face and she stepped back from her friends. "Aeger!" she whispered, pointing at them both.
The other two girls flinched, and Cat prepared to say the word back to Bev, when Bee held up a hand.
"I don't think we should do any more." The other two looked at her in surprise.
"What do you mean?" asked Bev.
"This doesn't feel right. We're just running around doing stuff without thought. I mean, stop and think for a minute; what does that word we just used actually do? What if it doesn't just make you feel sick, what if it actually makes you sick, and the more you use it the worse you get."
"Like cancer you mean?" said Bev. Her mother had been ill five years ago with breast cancer, and she still remembered the horror of chemotherapy, her mother's pale face and plummeting weight before she'd started to recover.
"And where did the book come from? Who did it belong to before Cat? What are the words? And if you had a book of magic, would you let it be chucked out with a pile of junk? Forgotten? Get sold at auction?"
Cat thought for a moment. Bee was definitely the most level-headed of them. And she raised some good points.
"You think we should stop?"
Bee pulled an incredulous face. "Are you mad? This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me. Of course we shouldn't stop, it's just that we ought to be more careful. Use the words judiciously. Take notes. Find out where the book came from; maybe the auction house would have an address."
They were just planning their investigation when Cat's security guard friend, Joey, turned up. One of the post-grads working late into the night had had enough of the shouting and called security. With a hurt look at Cat, Joey chucked them out, telling them not to try to work after hours for a long time.