IT WAS VERY LATE WHEN the sound of Jane tiptoeing down the hall reached Miriam’s ears. She peeked out her door and was glad to see her friend was alone as she slipped inside the upstairs bathroom. Miriam followed, knowing she’d surprise Jane—but at the same time, Smudge could obviously not be present for this conversation.
Jane was struggling out of the black dress—or rather, she was stuck in it. She was also covered in mud and had a few scrapes visible on her legs; something had befallen her out there. Unsure what would frighten Jane the least, for she had not yet noticed she was observed, Miriam coughed into her hand.
Jane went still, then turned slowly.
“Let me help you,” whispered Miriam. Even with circumstances being what they were, she couldn’t help smiling at her friend.
Jane nodded in resignation. A few moments later, she was free of the complicated and tight-fitting garment.
“I couldn’t get the clasp undone,” muttered Jane. As she pulled on her robe, Miriam saw she was absolutely covered with scrapes and bruises. “I thought I could just get it over my head, but I couldn’t.”
“So,” said Miriam, “you’ve been spending your nights flying around the countryside on a broom while wearing a black dress. Have you threatened anyone’s little dog, too?”
Jane looked startled, then sheepish; almost as if she’d been expecting something like this to happen. “Where else was I supposed to wear it?” she said wryly. Then she sobered. “It was a gift from Aunt Edith.”
Miriam went very still. She felt very badly that she’d let Edith’s plight slip her mind in all the hullabaloo.
“What is it?”
“Jane . . . I’m sorry . . . sorry about everything, and sorry for spying on you, but . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jane hastily. “Turnabout is fair play.”
“Is it?” Miriam went from almost enjoying the moment they were sharing to remembering how Jane had threatened her. “Then should I declare I’ll expose you, too? Not for the broom, I mean—but for summoning a diabolic familiar? ” She hissed this last in an undertone, lest any pointed, tufted ears be cocked at the bathroom.
This, Jane was clearly not expecting. She went pale as the tile she leaned against.
“Of all the reckless, stupid things to do!” said Miriam, still barely speaking above a whisper.
“It wasn’t stupid!” Miriam goggled at Jane. “Smudge is good. He’s helpful; he hasn’t done anything he shouldn’t. He can’t! I added so many clauses to the summoning. I thought of everything.”
Miriam realized Jane was pleading with her.
Jane knew something. She was trying to deny it, to Miriam—and also to herself.
“Everything?” Miriam crossed her arms. “I don’t think so, Jane. I think you forgot something very important. Because you forgot to bind his shadow! ”
“His shadow.” All the fight left Jane, and Miriam knew then that she’d been right. All was not well. Jane had been worrying about something—or some things, perhaps.
“As I was spying on you, after you left . . . it was the uncanniest thing I’ve ever seen. Smudge’s shadow . . . it could peel itself off the wall and do things. And as if that wasn’t bad enough—Jane, it had eyes! Holes in the shadow that blinked and looked around . . . it’s . . .”
Jane knew. Miriam saw the guilt on her face as she slid down the wall of the bathroom, melting into puddle of terry cloth and bloody, dirty legs.
“I told myself it’d just been a flight of fancy . . .” Jane whispered.
“Jane,” said Miriam, unable and also unwilling to keep the disapproval from her voice. “How could you?”
“I didn’t know! Miriam—the night the ducks were killed, Smudge was with me. And the same for—for Sam, too. So I thought—I didn’t think . . .”
“Bother the ducks. And bother Sam!”
“Steady on, Miriam—”
“I’m talking about your mother, Jane. Smudge—or whatever you summoned into Smudge—is trying to take over Nancy’s body.”
As Miriam suspected, this was news to Jane. “What?”
“Smudge’s shadow, it snuck down to the Library to . . . to commune or something with Nancy. She said it had her obedience and her demon’s. She said it’s making her take excessive amounts of diabolic essence so that her own demon can do terrible things. That’s why she’s been so distant and not attending to her duties. The Patron is dissolving her soul so your familiar can take her place!”
“Smudge would never!” Jane hissed, insistent on both his name and the point. “You said yourself, it was the shadow! Not Smudge himself. Smudge is different. He already has a body.”
“The shadow is Smudge!”
“Maybe it’s Smudge, or maybe it isn’t,” said Jane. “Maybe it’s some other demon. Smudge sleeps next to me every night, he volunteers help even when I don’t ask . . . he wouldn’t do something like you’re saying.”
“How can you know that?” Miriam loved Nancy; the truth was, she felt closer to her than she ever had with her own mother. Sofia Cantor had been distant and worried most of Miriam’s life; Nancy had been patient, kind, and generous with her time and resources. She wouldn’t let this go. “How much was there in The Book of Known Demons about this Lord Indigator? Could it have some sort of interest in possessing people?”
Jane looked uncomfortable. Miriam spent a horrified moment wondering if Jane had skimped on her research, but then she said something infinitely worse.
“Who is the Lord Indigator?”
“What do you mean, who?”
“The demon I summoned into Smudge is called the Ceaseless Connoisseur. It’s benevolent. I read and read and read about it to make sure!”
This brought Miriam up short. “Nancy called it Lord Indigator. It’s Latin, it means . . . the one who sniffs out, usually in reference to honeycombs and truffles.”
“So,” muttered Jane, “either it tagged along with the demon in Smudge . . .”
“Or Smudge was never the Connoisseur.”
Jane looked unhappy. “I’ll go look up Lord Indigator in The Book of Known Demons,” she said.
“No, I’ll do it. I don’t think Smudge should know.”
Jane blushed. “He isn’t always with me.”
“Isn’t he?”
“These days he is . . . by design. But I don’t see why he’d be suspicious if I went down there by myself. I have before. And he obviously doesn’t follow me into the bathroom . . .”
But they both took a moment to look around the room, checking for any cat-shaped shadows that might be lurking in the corners.
“I’m going to turn on the tub,” said Jane, standing up from where she’d slid to the floor. “I was supposed to be taking a bath.”
“What happened to you out there?” asked Miriam, as Jane spun the taps and the noise from the water deadened the sound of their voices.
“I fell,” said Jane. “It was my fault; I was . . . I was taking risks.”
“What kind of risks can one take on a broom? ”
“If you must know, I was spiraling down around an oak tree. A branch caught on the dress, and I panicked, and . . . whump.” Jane looked sheepish. “I’m fine though, just a little banged up. The dress too. I must have fallen on the clasp, it’s bent now, and the hem is torn.”
“I’m glad you’re all right,” said Miriam. “I’ll let you—”
“Stay,” Jane urged her. “We used to take baths together when we were small.”
Miriam hesitated. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but I do think I should go down to the Library and see what I can find.”
“But Mother—”
“Went to bed ages ago. When I was listening for you, I heard her turn in.”
Jane eyed the rising water. “Go then, but I’ll soak for a while. Come back and tell me what you find?”
Miriam carefully shut the bathroom door behind her and then took off down the hall as quickly as she was able. She did pause, though, to once again press her eye to Jane’s keyhole, but did not take comfort in what she saw there. Smudge the cat was curled up on the bed, seemingly sound asleep with his tail curled up over his nose. But behind him on the wall, in the light of the lamp Jane had yet again left on, the shadow was awake. It was grooming itself, licking its spectral paw and then rubbing behind its ears. As Miriam watched, fascinated and horrified, the shadow-cat suddenly leapt to its feet, peering around in all directions with its empty eyes, searching for something.
Miriam pulled herself away from the keyhole and went back down to the Library as quickly as possible. She headed for The Book of Known Demons.
First she found the entry for the Ceaseless Connoisseur. She could see why Jane had selected it, given the demon’s easygoing nature. It seemed like exactly the sort of demon Miriam would have selected for her own foray into summoning a familiar—if for some reason she ever decided to do such a dreadful thing.
With trepidation, Miriam began paging through the book to look for the entry for the Lord Indigator. Not for the first time did she marvel that there were wild diabolists out there in the world, summoning demons without any understanding of what they might be getting themselves into.
Then again, as she came to the entry on the Lord Indigator, Miriam realized that even with The Book of Known Demons and Société training, it was still possible to make grievous errors:
The Lord Indigator’s name is evocative in the Latin. It seeks, but it does so without interest. The pursuit is what it craves. It has the power to possess, to compel, to seek that which motivates us and use it for other purposes. One of the most powerful known demons in this book, the Lord Indigator was crowned the King of Desire by Giuseppe Giordano, the Renaissance diabolist who hypothesized the existence of the “Court of Sin.”
While the Court of Sin is today considered to be an archaic and outdated attempt to categorize a group of demons and demon-adjacent entities within the Quarry of Sensation, it is still worthy to note Giordano’s placement of this particular demon. The “King of Desire” is such an evocative epithet, and Giordano justifies his choice by pointing to the demon’s raw power.
The Lord Indigator is undoubtably brawny in terms of its ability to manifest in our world. What it can do, it does completely. This is, of course, both a good and a bad thing. The gifts it bestows are not generous, but they are substantial, augmenting mood and focus rather than anything particularly magnificent, like the ability to compel truth, or unnatural strength. But the Lord Indigator’s gifts do not seem to wax and wane with the dose of diabolic essence in the body, either. They are simply there, something otherwise unknown among the way their race traffics with ours. If that is not lordly, or kingly, notes Giordano, then what is?
The Lord Indigator was nearly renamed the Escape Artist after an incident in 1787. The Inuit diabolist Ekarak Deacon recorded that after summoning the Lord Indigator, her shadow would sometimes go missing. She discovered that her demon was stealing it to use as a vehicle for some highly unusual explorations. Sadly, a death occurred before the demon’s actions were perceived, and Deacon was forced to sacrifice herself in order to stop it from killing again.
For this reason, all subsequent organizations who have contributed to The Book of Known Demons recommend that the Lord Indigator not be summoned under any circumstances. It is not to be trusted, and trust is essential for diabolist-demon relations.
Miriam remembered Jane’s faith in Smudge’s trustworthiness and frowned.
She perused the illustration of the Court, noting with uneasy interest that the Patron of Curiosity, her mother’s demon, was also a member, along with the Ceaseless Connoisseur. But that disquiet was nothing compared to what she felt when she read the handwritten note scrawled beneath. It read:
There is some recent evidence suggesting that not only can the Lord Indigator command all demons found within the Court of Sin, but it can substitute itself for them, too. Perhaps Giordano knew more than we thought about the denizens and the hierarchies within the Quarry of Sensation?
Miriam hoped that wouldn’t prove to be the case.