CHAPTER TWO

Hearts and Spades

 

The Mysterious Pharos sat crosslegged at the front edge of the stage, dead center, bathed in the harsh glare of a spotlight. He drew a playing card from the deck in his left hand, presented it to the empty seats arrayed before him, and asked, “This isn’t your card either, is it?” After a moment, he flicked the card into the darkness, where it joined a scattering of rejects, then drew again from the steadily diminishing deck. He was too caught up in his odd little game to notice the figure standing to the rear of the stage, out of the light.

The Corpse was at home in the shadows. He’d escaped into their embrace more than two years earlier, when he was still just Tristram Holt, crusading assistant district attorney. He scarcely remembered his flight from the laboratory run by mobster “Schemer” Drucci. His memories of the lab, on the other hand, remained vivid. It was a chamber of horrors where a trio of doctors alternately pumped him full of chemicals and toyed with his nerves and sinews just to hear him scream. Only later did he learn that the butchers were trying to transform him into a living bomb intended to destroy the city’s secret Crime Commission. The doctors experimented on Holt for days before he escaped, albeit momentarily. Drucci’s soldiers gunned him down on the brink of safety. They thought him dead after his bullet-riddled body disappeared into the murk of the Chicago River. The chemical slurry running through Holt’s veins and the toughness he’d built up in the trenches of the Great War kept him alive long enough to crawl from the stinking river into a hobo den in the Levee. There, in that notorious cesspit of vice, he created a new identity for himself, one in keeping with the dead man’s pallor that clung to his flesh and the cold passion for justice that gripped his soul: the Corpse.

The dark had been the Corpse’s ally in his war against the gangs and the stranger, more terrible things that plagued Chicago. So it was little surprise that the Mysterious Pharos had not noticed the Corpse creeping through the gloomy theater, past the tossed cards and up onto the stage. Someone else had, though. Someone equally at home in the dark as the vigilante.

“It’s a downbeat show, I admit,” said the woman as she stepped from of the wings. “But it beats the alternative.”

Samantha Van Ayers wore a magician’s assistant costume. It was more revealing than some, less gaudy than most, if you discounted the especially large black ostrich feather jutting from the gauze headband. She appeared comfortable enough in the get-up, but it still seemed wrong for her. She was a little too short, not quite leggy enough to carry off the role of statuesque stage dressing. A casual observer might have dismissed Samantha as hopelessly plain, until she flashed her eyes. They revealed a young woman possessed of an indomitable self-confidence born of hard travels and harder fights. It was the defiance they blazed, particularly when she smiled and cocked her head just a little, that did it. That simple shift of expression banished the illusion of plainness. It wasn’t a feat of legerdemain or a clever illusion; no one mistook Samantha for anything but remarkable once they noticed her eyes.

She took in the Corpse with a particularly defiant look as she crossed the stage to him. “Sometimes when he gets in these moods, he takes out the rabbits and—well, you wouldn’t want to be here for that. Or maybe it’d be a ghoulish enough spectacle that you’d enjoy it.”

“Maybe. Did you decipher the symbols on the key?”

Samantha started to reply, but Pharos broke in, “Do I hear the voice of the dead? Is it the Scourge of Evil himself, here on my stage?” He got to his feet and quick-shuffled the partial deck in his hands. “I have something for you.”

Pharos cut the deck, flipped up the top card, and announced, “This is no one’s, sir, if not yours. The death card for the dead man.” When his audience did not react, the magician turned the card over. It wasn’t the one he had expected. “Damn it,” he muttered.

“No, Fred, you called it correctly,” said his assistant. “You just forgot that you sent it over here.” Samantha held up the ace of spades in one satin-gloved hand. She seemed to produce the card from nowhere. “Nicely done.”

“I need information on the keys, Sam,” the Corpse said tersely. “They’re linked to this plague of suicides. Worse things, too. The people driven to slitting their wrists are the lucky ones. The keys are transforming some of the yeggs and thugs carrying them into monsters, and the changes are accelerating. So tell me what you found out. I don’t have time to stand around here while you humor your boss.”

“I know you think I’m a washed-up clown,” Pharos sneered. “Well, this washed-up clown discovered the keys’ secret.”

“He’s right,” Samantha said. The silver key she presented was a twin to the one the Corpse had taken from Sean Halloran. “If you look closely enough, you’ll see a series of tiny engravings. Some of the symbols are ancient glyphs, but the others—Fred recognized them for what they are.”

“Mathematical notation,” the magician announced with theatrical bombast. “Parts of complicated formulae. There were also segments of what I conclude will be a tesseract when completed. If you have any other keys, I’d wager a week’s worth of house receipts they carry different sections of some larger equation and other pieces of the geometric shape.”

The Corpse handed Pharos the Halloran key. After studying it for a time, the magician said, “I’d need a magnifying glass to be certain, but the formulae and segments look a little different on this one, just as I said they would. I’ll tally up the amount you owe me for our little wager, but this—” Pharos smirked and slowly, sensually, licked the key. “This gives me a good idea of how you can pay off the debt. I should have known you’d be the type to kick the gong around, dead man.”

Samantha snatched the key away from the magician. She glanced at the blotched metal and returned it to the Corpse. “Opium?”

“Halloran’s fingers had yen shee stains. Vanderbilt’s, too. Kang Hai controls the opium dens around town. Perhaps this is his doing.” The Corpse scowled. He’d battled the mastermind several times in the past year, often to a standstill.

“Some of the glyphs I saw on the key come from the East,” Samantha noted.

“I’ve seen one of them before myself, when I was in Europe after the War. The Yellow Sign, I think it was called.”

“The symbols come from several traditions. Some are totally new to me. They’re a weird mix, arranged in patterns built up around the math.”

“Which I deciphered,” Pharos said.

“Got it,” the crimefighter growled. “Now go back to playing with your cards.”

The magician smirked. “This has to be killing you—admitting you needed me.”

“No, but we’re done with this goddamn game.” The Corpse drew his pistols and pointed them at the Pharos. “One more word and I’ll cut you in half. I promise, not even God will be able to put you back together after this trick.”

Samantha guided her boss away from the vigilante and spoke quietly with him for a moment. She handed him a small bottle—dark glass, without a label. The magician clutched it to his chest as he hurried down from the stage and exited the theater through the doors that led to the adjacent oddity museum. The collection of pickled punks and medical mistakes would be empty this early in the evening; the cheap amusement parlors crammed together on South State were more popular with the late-night crowd. Pharos’s magic act didn’t even go on with its first show until ten. So there’d be no customers to raise an eyebrow as the magician shared his bottle with the trio of sideshow rejects who worked the museum and the theater for him.

The swinging door had scarcely creaked closed behind Pharos before Samantha held up a hand to the Corpse. “Don’t even think about starting with me, Tris. I wouldn’t have had to give him the bottle if you would have just let him take his bows for recognizing the symbols. It really was him, you know. He remembered them from some book he’d read about lost cities and crazy mathematics, of all things. I tracked down a copy.”

She led the crimefighter into the wings and through a maze of props and crates. Whatever glamour the objects presented on stage was lost here. The base of a gaudily painted vanishing cabinet, a prototype labeled as the property of the Great Doppo, had been gnawed by something small and hungry. The arm chopper guillotine was spattered with the reminder of an illusion gone wrong. The partial faces of wickedly goateed magicians and leering crimson devils overlooked the jumble from torn posters on the back wall. Their staring eyes followed the pair as they made their way to a table, upon which rested some papers and a single musty volume, The Geometry of Nowhere by R. E. Beckford, D.Phil.

“What do you know about the author?” the Corpse asked.

“American professor. Taught at Northwestern. Brilliant. Murdered in 1893. His severed head was found by British tourists outside the grounds of the World’s Fair. I looked him up when I lifted the book from the Blackstone Library’s rare books room.” Samantha sorted through the papers until she came to an intricate, carefully rendered arrangement of lines and curves. There were symbols spaced along the design at regular intervals. “The mathematical rigmarole on the keys is only part of it. You plot out the code on them and you get this.” She tapped the paper. “I don’t understand it all yet, but there’s some familiar stuff here. I’ve seen the underlying pattern on sacred objects woven by Chippewa shamans. They call them bawaajige nagwaagan. Dream snares.”

“Of course. The keys steal the dreams of the small-time hoods, pushing them to destroy their lives quickly. The opium would make those dreams stronger or maybe diminish the dreamer’s resistance.” The Corpse stuffed the drawing into his pocket. “It has to be Kang Hai’s work.”

“Well, there’s a difference between conscious hopes and the unconscious, but in this case, the magic seems to be targeting them both. I don’t know about it being Kang Hai, though. He might be familiar with the magic, but isn’t he usually a lot more precise in selecting his marks? More businesslike?”

The Corpse shrugged. “Maybe we haven’t figured out the whole scheme yet.”

“This seems too wild to fit his M.O.,” Samantha said. “I started to get a feeling that something was wrong not long after you left for that jaunt to the East Coast a couple months ago, and, like you said, it’s getting worse. Whatever this enchantment is, it’s starting to affect the entire city—the people susceptible to despair, anyway. I caught Fred out on stage earlier weeping like a lost child.”

“He is a lost child. But you’re not his mother.”

“I owe him,” Samantha said. “You do, too, and for more than just his help with the keys. There was that time with the Mushroom Men, for starters.”

“A favor I returned by squaring him with Branch and Crump after he scammed them last Halloween. If not for me, they would have torn out his heart and fed it to their pals underneath the Resurrection Cemetery.”

“He’s a good man. A friend. You used to understand that.”

“He’s a drunk and a grifter. Wise up. You’re wasting your gifts on him. You have the power to make this city a paradise and you piss it away conjuring whiskey and fixing botched card tricks for a hoary-eyed huckster.”

“I’ll bet the lunatic handing out the keys thinks he’s creating a paradise, at least for himself. As for the hootch and the tricks—” Samantha held up both palms to show her hands were empty, then flipped her wrists and presented two fans of cards. “Don’t be so certain that I’m not just awfully good at sleight of hand. The price for real magic is steep, remember?”

She placed the cards on the table in a neat stack and peeled down one of her elbow-high gloves. The exposed flesh was branded with a scattering of small tattoos. They were the junkie-scar reminders of all the spells Samantha Van Ayers had ever cast. The marks were bizarre: glyphs like the ones she’d transcribed from the key and secret words in languages that had been lost long before the destruction of Babel’s tower. Some were black, but many were rendered in more striking colors. The tattoos crawled restlessly across her pale skin, colliding in slow motion, merging into gruesome shapes and obscene silhouettes before separating again.

They were not painful. If anything, the look on Samantha’s face as she watched them creep across her forearm betrayed her pleasure. That was the danger of true magic: it was as addictive as any drug.

Samantha pulled up the glove. “Turning people into monsters is only a side effect of the enchantment. The bastard who created the keys is passing the spells’ cost on to his marks. He swipes their dreams, their humanity powers the magic that allows the theft. Whoever is doing this is powerful and ruthless.”

“That won’t save him from me,” the Corpse said. “Nothing will.”

“Try to remember that there are other ways to fix things than guns and bombs.”

“You don’t get to lecture me, not while you’re safe in here instead of helping me fight the cause of this madness.”

“Lay off,” Samantha snapped. “Just because the lobby’s not choked with dead bodies doesn’t mean I’m not doing my part.”

The Corpse turned to go. Samantha exhaled, recovering her calm, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Wait. Here’s your fortune.” She moved to flip over the top card of the deck she’d placed on the table, but fumbled slightly. Then, with a slight, embarrassed smile, she turned over the ten of hearts. “Well, well. It means good luck, Tris.”

Samantha slipped the card into the pocket of the crimefighter’s ragged coat and watched him disappear into the theater. Only when he was gone did she drop the card that had been atop the deck, the one she’d started to reveal before faking a fumble and palming it.

Pharos had been correct. The ace of spades was the Corpse’s card.