THREE

Moondoggy thought this whole thing was just completely uncool.

It started out the way it always did: Moondoggy needed money for grass. This wasn’t unusual, since Moondoggy frequently had trouble securing gainful employment, and dealers had trouble giving him grass when he couldn’t pay for it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work. Michael James Verlander—who had started calling himself “Moondoggy” after he turned on, tuned in, dropped out, and moved to San Francisco six years earlier—just wasn’t always hip to the whole “taking instructions” scene. It had derailed his career as a roadie. He’d been a good one, too, for the Dead and Ten Years After, and a few others.

Lately, though, the gigs had been drying up.

Finding things, though, Moondoggy had always been good at that.

So when Albert Chao came to him in the bar one night, and told him he was looking for a piece of paper that was part of a spell, Moondoggy was with it. His ex was a waitress at the bar, and Albert was one of the regulars.

Moondoggy knew some guys who knew some guys who dealt with that kind of spooky stuff. Albert promised some serious bread, and that meant Moondoggy could buy more grass.

So first he went to the head shop in Haight-Ashbury where Ziggy sold his comic books. Ziggy used to hunt freaky stuff all the time, till he lost his legs. Now he went around on crutches and wrote and drew comic books about a guy who hunted monsters.

Moondoggy bought one of his comics, and in exchange Ziggy gave him the name of a guy in the Tenderloin. The guy in the Tenderloin passed on another name to Moondoggy in exchange for the comic book, which was handy, since Moondoggy hated Ziggy’s comics and was just going to throw it out anyway.

That was when he hit the snag.

The guy in the Tenderloin sent Moondoggy back to the Haight to a chick named Sunflower, who’d been looking to score some really good LSD. Her usual supplier had got himself pinched by the fuzz, and her other pushers had stuff that had been stepped on way too many times.

That wasn’t the snag. That was the easy part. Moondoggy never bothered with acid—that stuff supposedly broadened your horizons, but he generally preferred to deaden his. But he knew how to get the best LSD in the Bay Area. In exchange for introducing Sunflower to the acid king, Moondoggy could finally score the spell fragment for Albert Chao.

No, the snag was that he had to go to Dolores Park.

Moondoggy walked down 25th Street, rubbing his arms against the November cold, approaching an imposing Victorian façade halfway down the block. He was only wearing his bell-bottoms, Birkenstocks, and the tie-dyed shirt his ex had given him as a birthday present before they broke up. He used to have a denim jacket, but it had disappeared at some point. He might even have sold it for some grass. He couldn’t remember.

The place he was apartment-sitting was in the Inner Mission on Guerrero near 22nd. It was only a ten-minute walk to Dolores Park, but it may as well have been another planet. There were very few people on the street, and the ones he did see were going straight from their fancy sports cars to their front doors. Other people peered at him from behind their lace curtains.

None of them bothered with the cold. Weather was for peasants.

Any minute, he just knew someone was gonna call the fuzz.

His knobby knees wobbling, he walked up the stairs to the Victorian’s front door, which had been painted a sickly green color.

Knocking on the door, he felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind coming in off the bay. The door made a hollow sound, like he was banging on someone’s coffin.

For several seconds, nobody answered. This was all starting to get too heavy for Moondoggy.

Just as he was about to give up, go back to his pad, and figure out what to tell Albert, someone opened the door a crack. It made a piercingly loud creak, and he winced.

Someone was standing on the other side, but it was dark in there, and Moondoggy couldn’t make out a face.

“Uh, how’s it hangin’, man?” he said haltingly. “Sunflower sent me?”

“Are you Moondoggy?” replied a voice that sounded like crumpled paper.

“Uh, yeah, that’s me, man. I’m just here to pick up the spell fragment.”

“Do you understand that what I am about to hand you is not complete?”

Now he had recovered his nerves, Moondoggy was starting to get cranky.

“Look, man, I didn’t go to college or nothin’, but I know what the word ‘fragment’ means, okay? I’m just here to pick the thing up, know what I’m sayin’?”

There was a pause.

“Wait here,” the crumpled-paper voice said, and then the door shut with a loud slam that ruffled the hairs in Moondoggy’s beard.

“Coulda at least let me in,” he muttered, rubbing his arms again. “Shoulda made Albert pay me in advance.”

He wasn’t sure how much time passed—Moondoggy had never owned a watch, which was another reason his roadie career hadn’t lasted all that long—but eventually the green door squealed open again.

It opened wider this time, so that Moondoggy could see the cat who was standing on the other side. He had skin that was more wrinkled than the elephants at the circus, and wispy white hair in spots on his mostly-bald head. Liver spots covered his crown.

There were some concert posters on the wall, which surprised Moondoggy. He wouldn’t have thought that cats who dealt in spells would like good music, but there was the poster from when the Dead played at the Fillmore back in February and March.

Was that this year, or last? He was never good with dates.

A gnarled hand held out a scrap of paper that was as crumpled as the old man’s voice.

“Be very wary of this,” the man said. “It is part of a spell that can summon a vile spirit from the very depths of Hell.”

“Uh, yeah. Heavy.” Moondoggy took the proffered scrap and looked it over. It looked like a bunch of nonsense. He didn’t know any languages except for English and Spanish, and this didn’t look anything like either one. With a shrug, he shoved the piece of paper into the back pocket of his bell-bottoms.

“Thanks, man. Hey, were you at that Dead show at the Fillmore? ‘Cause it was—”

The door slammed again.

“Guess not.” Turning around, he started down the stairs. With each step, he felt an ever-increasing desire to put as much distance as he could between himself and the gloomy Victorian house.

So he walked as fast as his legs could carry him back to the Inner Mission. Moondoggy felt more at home here. There were people, and nobody looked twice at him. Best of all, there weren’t creepy old cats with weird voices and spell fragments.

Finally he arrived home.

Of course it wasn’t exactly Moondoggy’s home. The pad actually belonged to his friend Freddy, who had gone east for Woodstock back in August. Then he’d decided to stay in New York and become a famous folk musician. Last Moondoggy heard, Freddy had got a gig at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. Lots of people got their start at Folk City, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, and Doc Watson, so Freddy had figured if they could do it, he could do it.

Of course, Freddy didn’t even know how to tune his guitar right, so Moondoggy wasn’t holding out much hope. But as long as Freddy was chasing his dream, he had a place to sleep, and that was all that mattered.

He just hoped that Freddy wouldn’t mind what had happened to that fancy mug of his. Freddy claimed he’d been cutting down on the caffeine anyhow, so he probably wouldn’t even notice.

He climbed the three flights of rickety stairs up to the apartment, fumbling through the pockets of his bell-bottoms for the keys. His arrangement was handy—Freddy didn’t charge him rent, just asked him to feed Viola Lee, his cat, and that hadn’t been an issue for weeks.

Reaching his destination, Moondoggy instinctively stretched his hand out towards the doorknob.

But then the door opened.

“Far out,” Moondoggy muttered, and a chill ran up his spine, but he quickly calmed his nerves. “Musta forgot to lock it.” It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time. In fact, that was why Viola Lee was no longer his concern.

Stepping inside, he heard the sounds of Led Zeppelin playing from his—okay, Freddy’s—turntable. That was when Moondoggy knew something was wrong. For one thing, he hated Zeppelin. For another, he’d been gone for a couple of hours now. If he’d left a record on, the needle would be at the end of the side. No way would it still be playing.

Walking cautiously down the short hallway and into the pad’s tiny living room, he found someone sitting on the couch.

“Albert?” Moondoggy asked, relief palpable in his voice. “Are you early, man? Not that I’m complainin’ or nothin’.” He vaguely recalled asking his neighbor to look out for Albert. Timing wasn’t one of Moondoggy’s strong points.

Albert just smiled. He was a young Asian, and if Moondoggy remembered right, he was half Chinese and half Japanese. He had his dark hair in a bowl cut that made him look like an Eastern Paul McCartney—or at least what McCartney looked like back in the day, before he grew the beard—and he had a flat face. The tip of his nose stuck out a bit, which was freaky. Albert wore a white Nehru jacket and black slacks, and looked way too elegant to be hanging out in a dump like this.

He stood up.

“I’m working on a timetable, ‘Doggy. You see, this spell functions best on the night of the new moon.” The look on his face said that he expected that to mean something.

“Far out, man,” Moondoggy answered with a nod. He’d never really paid much attention to the lunar cycle, so he had no idea when the new moon might occur. Digging a hand into his back pocket, he pulled out the scrap of paper the old man had handed him. “Here you go, man. You got my bread?”

Snatching the crumpled paper from Moondoggy’s hand, Albert peered at it intently.

“All in good time, ‘Doggy. I have to make sure that these are solid goods.”

Moondoggy nodded.

“I can dig that.” There’d been plenty of occasions when he’d bought some grass without checking to make sure it was good, often to his regret. Always best to inspect the merchandise.

Albert pulled a much more pristine slip of paper out of the pocket of his Nehru jacket. Unfolding the paper, he held it next to the wrinkled one Moondoggy had given him.

Then he broke into a wide grin.

There was something wrong in that grin.

“Excellent.”

“So can I have my bread now?” Moondoggy asked. He really wanted to get this over with.

But Albert seemed to have forgotten that he was there. He was chanting something now, and while Moondoggy didn’t recognize the words, he had a creepy feeling they were the strange ones he’d seen on the scrap of paper.

While he usually prided himself on being pretty laid back, he was beginning to get pissed off. He didn’t like being ignored, and he had important things to do.

“Hey, man, go cast your spell on your own time. I gotta go score me some grass before I meet up with my old lady, and....”

Then the coffee table caught fire.

“Aw, man!” Moondoggy cried, jumping back. Freddy might not miss the mug, and cats ran away all the time, so he wasn’t sweating that, but the coffee table? That Freddy would notice! He grabbed a blanket and moved to smother the flames.

But then he froze.

The coffee table was already burned to a pile of ash, but now Moondoggy could see a figure standing inside the fire. The flickering light of the flames cast odd shadows.

Albert had a huge grin on his face.

“Yes! It worked! Finally! It’s even better than I thought!” Then he regarded Moondoggy with a pitying expression. “I must apologize, ‘Doggy. You see, I misled you in the bar last week when I informed you that I would be able to pay you handsomely for the service of providing the rest of the spell.”

Moondoggy couldn’t take his eyes off the figure inside the fire. The man exuded waves of malevolence, and he was holding something, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The flames licked higher toward the ceiling.

As Albert’s words sunk in, with a shudder Moondoggy turned his attention back to his visitor.

“Whaddaya mean, man?” he said plaintively. “You’re not gonna stiff me, are you?”

“I mean,” Albert said slowly, “that if I had the money to pay you, I would not require the spell needed to bind the Heart of the Dragon.”

“The who of the what?” Moondoggy was still enraptured by the fire that kept burning but didn’t move or spread to the rest of the apartment. And by the man inside it. This was as heavy a scene as he’d ever encountered.

Then the man raised his arms, and Moondoggy saw a curved sword that was also on fire. The man waved the sword back and forth several times, sending the weapon whistling menacingly through the air, the fire sparking and dancing.

Albert spoke again.

“And I’m afraid I can’t leave any witnesses to what I’ve done, either.”