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Becky’s tip might’ve been a lucky break, but I had a bad feeling about the way this was playing out. This particular job had too many unknowns. A bunch of suits I didn’t know. A trigger happy landowner. Then came the coincidence that Hank was going to be out of his house the same night I happened to arrive.
I don’t believe in coincidences.
I considered not going, but I wanted to put this job behind me. Meeting Araceli had been more than coincidence too. I wanted to find out where she’d learned her craft. Everything about our brief encounter said Old World, a line of magical questioning my mentor wouldn’t have anything to do with. Explorers brought nothing but death to his people. To him, their religion and industry had silenced magic or corrupted it, or both.
The other person I needed to have words with was the old hoodoo conjure. His disappearing act had been impressive. Stepping through shadows or root walking, I’d never met anyone with that level of power. And the nest of wards? Playa had some serious skills.
Of course, maybe somebody else had laid those down to keep him in...
I found the cemetery the hoodoo conjure had mentioned down a dirt lane half a mile from the manor. Perhaps the one place in town where my ride could blend. As darkness fell, I became another shadow among the unlit field of monuments.
Hallewell had to pass by on his way into town for poker night. His truck would be the only one approaching from that direction. Nothing to do now but wait.
I’d gone back to Baltimore exactly once since finding Atofo. On that trip, I’d spent time at a cemetery too.
One of Kitterling’s cases had me searching outside DC for a lost door knocker of all things. Nothing magic, just a demonic little face gripping a ring of iron between fanged teeth. If any of the trinkets we found were going to be magic, I’d have guessed that one. Too damn creepy not to be. Italian baroque or an older, Roman artifact, I never knew the origin.
But being so close to home had made sticking to Atofo’s rule hard. Since I couldn’t see my son without putting him in danger, I went to visit my wife instead.
Going face to face with a spirit had its dangers. Walking the paths of the dead in my condition draws the wrong kind of attention. When I cross over to speak with Atofo, he keeps me safe. Unless of course, he’s being straight up cruddy.
His little lesson of opening me up to the troubled spirits under his feet had been fresh on my mind when I visited Keandra’s grave. I lost my nerve about trying to contact her. But I did quietly whisper to her tombstone that night.
“Aye, sweetheart!” I could almost hear her say.
It was the mating call of the trenches. Men and boys on their stoops and corners would call out to the ladies with the phrase. I rarely had the nerve as a young man. It felt foolish. And most of the ladies didn’t like it. Or pretended not to.
Keandra, she’d called out to me. That’s how we’d met. That’s what she did, turn things around on you.
I spoke at her gravesite mostly about Izaak. About how my mother had already swept in and tried to show him all the love she had. I tried to explain how it was I had to leave him.
“Baby, you know I’d be there with him if I could. This magic, this cure, is the only thing keeping me alive,” I’d said. “There are rules.”
I could hear her fiery response, plain as if I’d stepped into the Below and took her hand. “No! I put up with you becoming a damn cop, I won’t have you making rules and regulations for our family, you hear me? You get your ass over to your mother’s house and you hug our child! Take him with you! No made up rule is gonna tear apart this family. And you damn sure better not be stepping out, cause I will reach up out of this grave and take hold of what’s mine!”
Sitting beside Keandra’s grave, I saw that finger wag in my face and the tilt of those smooth, lustrous shoulders. Always with the halter tops, cause damn she could. I took comfort in her imagined fury. I wanted nothing but to reach out and pull her close and feel her warm skin as she struggled to stay angry. Press my lips against the tight curls along her scalp and inhale her essence. But I sat quiet, my hand on the cold stone, head bowed. Then I left.
I cranked down the window and stared out into the rows of people buried head to toe. Centuries of them. A lot had changed since that day in Baltimore. I could feel more of the spirit world, I could summon more of its power. Question was how much of a hold it had on me now.
Atofo teaches that being taught to fear death was one way magic had become hidden to the world. Those in the know understand cemeteries are a primal source of magic. Ghost stories and movies with zombies crawling out of the ground made the living afraid of their ancestors.
He once told me a story how his people would sometimes bury their dead chiefs with more than just bling. They’d toss in a firstborn child from another family. Sounds brutal, but the infant’s kin became elevated to the highest status in their village. One with the chief, they didn’t eat no scrapple. They ate the First Fruits of the hunt and harvest before anybody else. Hung with royalty. Married into it. They became Kings and Queens for eternity.
In the old neighborhood, death had no such meaning. A boy would die before becoming a man and the world would shrug. He’d be mourned by his people or whatever. Maybe his crew would promise revenge and go kill another young black man. Then it was on to the next funeral. An eternal cycle, death the only reward.
I’d be damned before Izaak would fall prey to any of that. He’d be an Eternal King of the living. I’d show him how to navigate the streets and find a nice, boring life. He’d have his own kids. They’d bounce on my knee, laughing and happy, safe from the evil in This World and the others.
Distinct rectangular headlights burned their signature into the muggy air. They spread through the intersection and were devoured again by the trees. I rolled up the window.
“There we go,” I said to myself. “One early model Chevy.”
I grabbed my medicine bag and hopped out. Using a pinch of the salted earth, I traced a barrier around Bubonic. Nothing wrong with being overly cautious with other practitioners about.
The melancholy comfort of the cemetery left as soon as I entered the woods. I stuck to the edge, keeping the gap where the road ran in sight. Like cemeteries, night wasn’t bad or evil in a spiritual sense. That wasn’t what bothered me.
After sundown, the volume for my mojo wasn’t on ten. Atofo might be stuck in the Below, but his people venerated the sun. Any sacrifices I made would be costlier. That’s why I decided to rely on my Timbs to get to Fenwick Hall.
Thick brush tore at every step. Crashing through it all, I heard another matching crunch, but farther away. I froze, trying to see into the trees and only finding a maze of shadow.
I knew a few spells for stealth. One would allow me to take the form of a deer. Atofo’s people used it for hunting and raiding parties. Casting it required a fresh foci and I didn’t keep deer parts in my Crown Royal bag.
Whatever, no way in hell I’d use that magic now. Turn into an animal out here, and I’d likely become an episode of Wild Kingdom.
As a shaman, I was supposed to be comfortable with the natural world. But snakes and bears and packs of coyotes were predators with no code. Hell, I could feel those wild eyes on me now, like the sightless gaze of the zoo in Kitterling’s study.
Yeah, definitely being watched. Noise be damned, I stepped double time.
By the time I reached the estate’s wall, the possibility of facing just another clown with a shotgun sounded good.
Fenwick didn’t have security lighting. A more silent approach across the mowed and wooded lawn got me to the stables with no trouble. The building had a faint baked-in smell of manure, but no animals. His truck? Confirmed gone.
He’d left the front porch light on, so I slipped around back. In the yard beyond I could just make out the lines of trellises and perfectly trimmed bushes against the jagged forest silhouette. Some kind of garden.
I found an exterior door on the new tower addition. But the deadbolt lock was even newer.
All this magic to heal wounds, influence people, turn into Bambi, or drop enough spells to become a raging battlefield berserker and I had nothing to pop a lock. Made sense. Atofo never needed to bust into a deadbolted hut.
Only way I knew inside was a boot to the sweet spot. No mess for now. I moved on to the older, central portion of the manor.
Here’s where Hallewell’s attempt to be recognized as a historic landmark would get him more than a plaque on the wall. The single sash window was the same as the ones at Kitterling’s place. From experience, I knew a knifepoint would be all I needed to get inside.
Sensing no obvious magical wards, I jimmied the window open and crawled through.
Now that I’d made it inside, I decided to risk a minor spell. Crashing through the trees was one thing. I needed him not to come home and find his place blindly tossed. I needed to see.
I drew Atofo’s blade and made a small incision on my palm. A quick chant to the spirits Above and I used the owl feather to brush the blood across my eyes. Night became day.
I was in a small parlor, a mirrored layout of the front half of the manor I’d seen in the vision. Pictures hung like darkened portals. The hearth yawned under a wooden mantle. A chair and an old style stereo cabinet made up the only furniture. No obvious place to hide a sword.
To my left was the entryway. I crept further inside, my Timbs creaking on the wooden floors. At the foot of the stairs, I could only see the banister ringing the cut out to the upper floor. In the entry, architectural elements were the only decorations. Plaster and friezes, chair rails and crown molding, casings designed to mimic marble columns above entries — all fancy details Kitterling would be ‘chuffed, I dare say’ to know I’d remembered.
As I took it all in, memories came flooding back.
This was the hall I’d already been in. In the vision, I’d been carried to the left of the front door. Again, I felt myself drawn that direction. Chasing my own hallucinations wasn’t why I’d come here, but I had to see the room where I...or my spirit’s vessel, had been taken to die.
Walking heel to toe, I stopped at the front door. From there I gazed straight through the other small parlor into the former field hospital. Those floor to ceiling windows painted the room beyond in fallen columns of moonlight. The pull of the memory carried me through the parlor.
The former field hospital had been made into a dining room. Above, the ceiling vaulted as high as the second story. A table big enough to feed an occupying army filled the center. I strayed onto the rug-covered floor to place a hand on one of the many chairs. I needed to feel and know this was the true reality because the images wouldn’t quite leave.
I retraced the path of the litter I’d been carried on. A liquor cabinet sat in the spot where the bed had been. On top was a Victorian tantalus with two of the three crystal decanters locked up. One was out, half full and unstoppered.
I followed the stringent odor of a well-aged scotch to the floor where a shattered tumbler sparkled, the puddle of liquor not yet evaporated. Then another smell struck my flushed sinuses and I drew my gun.
You never forget the smell of a corpse. Imprinted at a young age, I once found one in a boarded up row house where a couple of my friends and I were playing. Needle still in his arm, the junkie had mostly been a bundle of worn jackets. Rats had found him. He’d been there long enough to bloat in the winter chill.
I’d seen plenty more before I became a cop and since. Smell alone, you can tell how they died. A slow decay isn’t the same as a chest full of lead. Getting vented by a knife? That was the worst. This, this was beyond even that.
Gun ready, I moved cautiously toward the odor’s source. The smell pressed in from a Butler’s pantry which opened into the kitchen. Flayed open between a hutch full of antique dishes and a well-stocked pantry was Mr. Hallewell.