LONDON
PRESENT DAY
The sign swaying above the shop’s door read, ‘Old Worm’s Curiosities and Ancient Alchemies’. Tucked in a narrow cobbled alley not far from the Strand, the latticed windows were filthy, concealing the curiosities inside. Rémy Dupree Rush pushed open the heavy wooden door. He winced as the bell jangled, the noise cutting into the low-level thrumming in his head that had led him here. He adjusted his guitar case, settling it against the middle of his back. He cranked the volume on his iPod and flipped up his hood. Static rather than tunes fizzed in his ears, electronic configurations of white noise. The low frequency held the thrumming to a more tolerable background noise.
A stocky white dude in a cardigan and corduroys and a middle-aged woman with red-pencilled lips looked up from their desks, assessing him. Skin surveillance, he called it. Happened all the time in Chicago. Why would London be any different? It didn’t matter that he was wearing his dad’s expensive Belstaff jacket, that his shirt was clean and pressed and his boots spit-polished, Rémy Dupree Rush was a young black man shopping.
Ignoring their lingering stares, he scanned the interior. Given how far from normal most of his seventeen years had been, he was prepared for weird, but this was some kind of freaky.
The shop was long, narrow and poorly lit, with low oak beams. A standing fan kept the stale air moving, fluttering the edges of some 1851 Great Exhibition bunting advertising ‘The Wonder Room of the Wicked’. A curved balcony papered with ancient yellowed maps hung above the congested ground floor. Animal skins, a stuffed vulture, horns of polished ivory, owls with milky glass eyes, a ferret with two heads and a preserved polecat caught Rémy’s eye. Drawers with labels in Latin were everywhere he looked, dust motes swirling where light breached the shop’s shadowy interior.
The keening in his head from the tablet around his neck grew louder. He bit the insides of his cheeks to stop from crying out. Clearly he’d found the right shop.
He walked past tables packed with specimen jars and almost knocked over a pine coffin filled with a dozen tiny mummified bodies in ruffled collars and cuffs. Skirting barrels and buckets with calligraphic labels marked, ‘Lizards’ and ‘Mice’, ‘Snakes’ and ‘Miscellaneous’, Rémy noted shelves that buckled from the weight of oversized manuscripts, thick, leather-bound books and more stuffed creatures. The shop smelled of pipe tobacco, damp wood, and old.
For a second Rémy was transported to Tia Rosa’s balcony looking out over the muddy Bayou Teche, where she’d sit smoking Tupelos, drinking Kentucky bourbon from a china cup and listening to jazz. Tia Rosa had milk crates stacked with vinyl classics of jazz, blues, Zydeco and Louisiana Creole. When they had all fled Louisiana, Tia Rosa had sold most of her albums. She deposited the money into a peanut butter jar behind her headboard for Rémy’s university fund. He’d taken the cash when he’d left.
Rémy yanked out his ear buds. The static wasn’t helping any more. The thrumming was so loud that it was hurting his teeth. As he headed towards a door marked ‘No Admittance’, the beat in his head trebled and the thrumming golden tablet around his neck burned his skin. He lifted the tablet out and over his shirt. Nestled into a corner of the shop, he spotted a tall antique cabinet with a brass lock.
He loosened the strap on his guitar case. The tablet was now a full-on orchestra of pain. From the corner of his eye, he saw the shop assistant with red-pencilled lips nod discreetly to the man with the cardigan, who walked quickly to the door and locked it.
Rémy felt a sting of satisfaction. Truth be told, Rémy Dupree Rush was thirty days, two deaths and one dark conjuring beyond giving a fuck.