The rustle of tree branches against the leaded glass windows of the church was like brushes on snare drums.
‘Do you have any idea how unique you are, Rémy?’ asked Vaughn.
‘I don’t know about unique,’ said Rémy. But I could tell you about lonely.
Em was carefully sifting through Annie’s journal, its leather-bound pages open on the makeshift coffee table. A handful of musical scripts were fastened together with paperclips, others were stapled or glued, but all were handwritten in thin letters that were a combination of cursive and printing.
‘My mom’s first journal entry after my dad’s death was about the strange mark on the wrist of the hit-and-run driver who killed him,’ said Rémy, leaning over the journal with Em. ‘I saw it again on a guy in a blue coat at Old Worm’s when he came at me with a Taser.’
‘He sounds like the dead guy Em and I found today at the shop,’ said Matt.
‘Someone died?’ asked Vaughn, half rising from the chair. ‘What happened to the body?’
‘The flies ate it,’ said Em. ‘There was nothing left.’
‘Big bastards the size of your fist,’ said Matt with a shudder.
‘They’re Don Grigori’s,’ said Rémy, bile rising in his throat at the thought of the flies doing the same to his mother and Tia Rosa.
Vaughn looked pale. ‘This is very bad. Too many bodies and too many unknown factors. We need to get more help on this.’ He glared at the twins. ‘More experienced help.’
Rémy picked up the journal, rubbing his finger across the creases in the leather.
‘My mom spent years digging through the archives trying to find out what that mark meant, and how it was related to the Conjuror’s mark I bear on my neck and that she had on hers.’
‘Can we see the mark?’ asked Em.
Rémy slipped off his hood and turned his back to them. The pink puckered lines of the mark were clear and raised against his brown skin. ‘My mom eventually found a similar mark mentioned in the papers of a slave ship that came to America a few years before the Atlantic slave trade began in full. She found out about it around the time she learned about the Camarilla protecting the creatures in the painting.’
He picked through the scraps and notes of the bulging book until he found the pages he was looking for. ‘My mom copied these words into her journal from the letters that she found in the plantation archives. AB is the overseer, Alonzo Blue.’
March 19, 2004: Notes from AB letter dated 1803 to his daughter in New Iberia.
The first Conjuror came to America in a slave ship.
In 1797 a lone ship drifted up a tributary of the Mississippi. Alonzo Blue, overseer of the Dupree Plantation, spotted the two-decker bobbing in the choppy water. As word spread of the ship’s strange arrival, the field slaves vanished into their damp huts, closed their shutters and shoved pellets of hardtack into their ears (see journal vol. 2 append. III, Dupree Family Archives, 1806). They could sense what was coming.
At dusk the voice of an angel singing a wordless aria could be heard, like the fluting sound of the breeze through the sugar cane, or the delicate notes of the harpsichord in the big house’s front parlour. The music floated from the ship in a pulsing silver mist, above the moss-draped oaks, through the rubber trees dripping with wet lichen, dipping and darting across the indigo fields until it reached the party at the plantation house, where handsome guests were sipping sweetened rum from tulip-shaped glasses on the wide veranda.
At the cool touch of the mist, the guests’ fingers twitched, their limbs stiffened, their eyes fluttered and their glasses fell to the wooden planks of the porch. The women’s ears trickled blood on to the lace of their white cotton dresses. The men’s collars sliced into the throbbing veins in their necks.
The music stopped.
Out on the delta, the wind stilled and birds appeared to perch on every part of the silent ship: ravens as black as coal and as big as buzzards, like feathered gargoyles on a floating cathedral.
There must’a been a bird for each slave’s soul. The ship looked at any moment like it might rise up off the water and fly.
With his head throbbing from the music and the mist, Alonzo Blue tucked a pistol into his breeches, cloaked his body in sackcloth against the mosquitoes, hooked his machete over his shoulder and dragged the rowboat from the boathouse on to the bayou.
The tall live oaks towered over him like giants standing knee-deep in water, their branches scraping the cloudless, starry sky. He lassoed his rope to an iron ring on the side of the now silent, feathered ship and hoisted himself on to the deck.
Every bird on the ship took flight.
Alonzo Blue saw the girl first, her hair shining like velvet in the moonlight. She was sitting on the deck naked except for a bloody sheet wrapped around her waist, the excess cloth gathered beneath her protruding belly. Like the blessed Virgin, she cradled her infant at her breast.
But it was the grotesque tableau laid out behind her that sent the overseer to the side of the ship, where he vomited into the water’s murky depths.
A young man, a slave with the Conjuror’s mark on his neck, had been drawn and quartered, each piece of him set out in its correct anatomical position, except for one part of him that had been shoved into his mouth.
There were no other survivors. The carcasses of fat bluebottle flies carpeted the deck.
The silence stretched as each of them finished reading the entry.
‘That’s horrible,’ said Em at last.
‘So you think you’re descended from the baby?’ said Matt at last.
‘Yes,’ said Rémy. ‘According to the birth records for the plantation, Alonzo Blue persuaded the surviving family members on the plantation that he would take the slave girl for himself and raised her child as his own. According to my mom’s research, in another letter she discovered, the child had the mark of the Conjuror. I think that’s why I have the same name as the plantation: Dupree.’
‘Because your mom and you are descendants of that slave girl,’ said Em.
Remy nodded, unfolding a photocopy of a property deed that was tucked in a pocket at the back of the journal. ‘A chunk of bayou belonging to the plantation was signed over to Alonzo Blue at the close of the eighteenth century. He lived well into old age.’
‘Makes you wonder what else got off that boat, doesn’t it?’ said Em, thinking about the horror Blue witnessed on that slave ship.
‘The passage your mom copied from the archives mentions flies,’ Em said aloud. ‘Flies seem to be Don Grigori’s calling card, so I’m guessing he slaughtered the slaves.’
‘This is 1797,’ Vaughn pointed out. ‘The only way Don Grigori could have been present would be if the painting had been cargo on the ship.’
‘It was,’ said Rémy. ‘According to my mom’s research, Alonzo Blue removed it from the ship along with a trunk of gold, jewels and silver from the hold. I think he must have stolen some of the gold and used it to buy the Dupree land a few years later when he could claim to have saved for it. The house he built still belongs to my family. But I don’t think anyone understood what evil had been bound in the painting. The painting stayed in the plantation house until the Dupree line died years ago. Then it disappeared. My mom did her best to trace it, but… well. You know the rest.’
‘This was your father’s line or your mother’s?’ Vaughn asked.
‘My mother’s. My dad was from London,’ Rémy said. ‘They met at a concert when she was performing at the Royal Albert Hall.’
‘If the portrait was in the plantation house collection from 1797 until twelve years ago,’ said Em, working it out, ‘what happened twelve years ago to set this all in motion?’
‘I did,’ said Rémy. ‘When I fled from Don Grigori in the museum as a boy, he saw the mark on the back of my neck.’
Vaughn grabbed his phone and his jacket. ‘I need to make some calls. Do not move. Any of you.’
When Vaughn was gone, Rémy tucked the journal and its contents back beneath the lining of his guitar case. He pulled on his hoodie, and then his jacket.
‘Going somewhere?’ asked Matt.
‘My mom was a rare and special person, but all the music in her head and the knowledge she was gathering was too much for her.’ Rémy’s voice shook. ‘It broke her mind and her heart. It came down to my Tia Rosa to raise me and do her best to protect both of us. Whatever these two creatures in that painting are planning, I’m going to stop them. I’d like your help, but if you can’t give it, I’ll understand. Either way, I’m not waiting around for the cavalry.’
‘I think we know where that painting is,’ said Matt, tugging his jacket from beneath his sleeping bag. ‘Em and I could fade into it, inspirit Don Grigori and this Grand Inquisitor and bind them permanently into the portrait. How hard could it be?’
Vaughn came back into the room at that moment.
‘Are you kidding me? You’re seventeen years old,’ he yelled. “You are not to have anything further to do with this. Am I clear?’
Matt looked mutinous.
‘Am I clear?’ Vaughn repeated. He and Matt glared at each other.
Em sat at the edge of the chair.
Back off, Matt.
‘Sure, Vaughn,’ said Matt finally. ‘Whatever you say.’
Vaughn looked suspicious. ‘I mean it.’