The Arcanum (22 page)

35

SOMETHING TICKLED HOUDINI’S memory. A warning lost and forgotten.

The air hummed.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs to the wine cellar; a catacomb of tall shelves reaching out in all directions. He touched the air in front of him, almost expecting to feel a pane of glass between himself and the rest of the cellar. There was definitely something odd about the place.

He noticed the humming again.

He knew something was wrong, yet the danger slipped from his mind’s grasp.

“You can’t fool me,” Houdini heard himself say.

“Ehrich . . . vielleicht bin ich nicht . . . da wenn du zurruck . . . kommst . . .”

Directly in front of Houdini, some thirty paces away, the pale, withered face of an old woman floated from the shadows, then retreated.

“Mother?” Houdini stepped forward, tentatively.

“Get dock . . . in Gott’s nahmen . . .”

“Mother!” Houdini ran toward her, into the darkness.

“ . . . in Gott’s nahmen . . .”

Houdini emerged into an old storage area filled with milk crates and vegetable boxes. The train of a gray dress slid up the last few steps of a basement staircase.

“Mother, it’s me,” Houdini called.

“. . . in Gott’s nahmen . . .”

Houdini took the stairs two at a time until he reached the landing of the first floor.

Only it was the first floor of his Harlem brownstone.

Houdini was home.

The door clicked shut behind him. There were no lights on, only moonlight spilling through the dining room windows and across the table.

Dinner rotted on the table. Flies crawled over a sour pork roast.

“He’s in my mind.”

The words were low and intimate, the sharing of a sinister secret.

Houdini whirled. Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone cross into the kitchen.

“Julie?” Houdini crept down the hallway, his heart thumping. “Julie?” He pushed open the kitchen door.

“He’s in my mind.”

A woman darted from the kitchen into the dining room through another swinging door across the way.

“Julie, are you all right?” Houdini could barely speak due to the wafting stench of rotting food. Maggots and silverfish swarmed over the sink, and the chunks of meat piled therein. It didn’t look like food; it looked like—

“He’s in my mind.”

She was behind him.

Houdini spun around to face Julie Karcher. She stood in the doorway, chewing on her fingers. Her lips and chin were bright with blood streaming from her chewed fingertips and down her forearms, staining the bunched sleeves of her blouse. But Julie just kept chewing. In her fear, she had not noticed that her nails were gone and that she’d begun to devour her own hands.

Houdini spoke with effort through the lump in his throat. “Julie, stop. Your fingers.”

“He’s in my mind,”
she said, then backed away through the swinging door as suddenly as she had come.

Houdini followed her. “Wait!”

Julie sat by the dining room window, staring out onto the street, biting on her forefinger. Skin squished under her teeth.

“Julie, where’s Bess?”

Julie looked at Houdini for a moment, then said, “Sleeping.”

Houdini backed slowly out of the dining room, then turned and launched himself up the stairs. “Bess! Bess!” He flew through the bedroom door.

Bess looked up at him with sleepy eyes. “Hi, peanut.” She plopped her head back onto the pillow. “Come to bed.” Bess’s hand patted the space beside her, and Houdini saw she wasn’t wearing her nightgown. “Come to bed, love.”

Houdini removed his tie and jacket, let them drop to the floor. “Something is wrong with Julie.”

“She’s just overtired.”

Houdini sat on the bed to remove his trousers. In T-shirt and boxers, he climbed under the covers and stared at the ceiling.

“I thought I saw Mother . . .”

Bess’s hand reached around and caressed his chest. Her warm breasts pressed against his arm. She breathed in his ear.

Houdini turned around and kissed her, pulling her naked hips to his.

“Mmm, scratch first.” Bess kicked the covers down, exposing her body. She rolled onto her belly. Houdini obligingly started at her neck and scratched downward.

“Shoulder blades,” Bess murmured.

Houdini scratched her shoulder blades.

“Harder.”

“Any harder and I’ll give you red marks, peanut.” Houdini stroked a hand across her curving backside.

“Cheater.”

“Of course.” Houdini smiled, resuming his ministrations.

He was allowed to look, though, and saw his handprint on Bess’s buttock, dark in the moonlight. He touched it; it was blood.

“Bess?” Houdini sat up and turned to his wife. She wouldn’t answer. Her neck was bent in a strange position, her eyes lifeless. Her back was covered in blood. Clawed savagely, torn into the flesh between her shoulder blades, were the words:

FEAR ME

Houdini wailed and he kicked himself off the bed, onto the floor.

“. . . in Gott’s nahmen . . .”

Houdini spun around to see a tiny, withered woman in the doorway, hair pulled tight in a bun, hands extended.

“. . . in Gott’s nahmen . . .”

But her face was that of Darian DeMarcus.

“No!” Houdini roared. He freed the ivory-handled pistol from his trousers and fired—once, twice, three times.

The shots reverberated off the walls of the cavernous cellar. What followed was a damning silence. Houdini wiped his forehead with a shaking hand; it was slick with sweat. There was a stutter of high heels.

As the smoke cleared, Madame Rose stumbled out of the shadows.

Houdini gazed at her with horror.

She wobbled, as though drunk, then took two steps forward. She attempted to speak, but a gout of blood spilled out from between her lips instead, dribbling down her black dress.

The pistol fell from Houdini’s hand.

“M-M-Madame?”

Madame Rose looked down at the clean, red hole in her left breast just above the seam of her strapless gown. She looked back up at Houdini with surprise, then her knees buckled and her skull cracked against the cement floor.

“God!” Houdini dropped to his knees by her side. He cradled her limp body. “Madame Rose?”

But her eyes stared vacantly into space.

DOYLE EXCHANGED A look with Paul Caleb as the gunshots rang out, and both men surged toward the kitchen, followed by a man in a Santa Claus suit. Tyson was not far behind them. But most people seemed to assume that the shots—and the scream that followed—were nothing more than another creative expression of the Halloween spirit.

But for the first time that evening, Abigail looked up from her seat and could not see Doyle.

Isabella chirped in her palm.

Abigail’s eyes scanned the room, which now seemed filled with a growing unease. Most conversations resumed, yet there was a distracting sense of something amiss. Abigail’s eyes searched every stranger’s face until they fell upon the eyes of the sheik, who stood watching her.

Abigail rose from her chair.

The sheik approached her.

Abigail turned and ran into the opposite hallway. She crashed into a man in a gorilla suit, spilling his gin and tonic before careening off toward the stairwell. Her hand had just reached the banister when she saw a demon surging down the stairs toward her.

Abigail screamed and whirled, only to find herself grasped firmly in anonymous arms. A door to the outside opened nearby, and Abigail was borne kicking into the night.

DOYLE STOOD NEAR the bottom of the wine cellar stairs with Paul Caleb and the man dressed as Santa Claus.

Houdini was on his knees. Madame Rose—Erica DeMarcus—lay dead in his arms. Blood coated Houdini’s hands and he looked up at Doyle desperately.

“Doyle? What did I do?” he asked.

Barnabus Tyson trundled down the stairs and gasped like a woman.

Doyle and Caleb both turned at the interruption, and saw other party guests staring down into the stairwell. “Close that door,” Caleb ordered. “No one is to come down here.”

Tyson knelt beside Houdini and took Madame Rose’s lifeless hand in his own. “Dear Lord,” he said, and tears came to his eyes.

Doyle could do nothing but walk to Houdini and help him to his feet.

“Harry . . .” Doyle’s voice trailed off.

The man in the Santa suit absently pulled his beard and hat, revealing the bulldog mug of Detective Mullin.

A grim resolve set in Caleb’s jaw as he stepped forward, registering Mullin’s presence. “Detective, find a back route out of this house. There can be no witnesses, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Detective Mullin freed a set of handcuffs and snapped them around Houdini’s wrists, removing the costume cuffs Houdini already wore. The escape artist never stirred.

“Mr. Houdini, sir, you’re under arrest and the charge is murder,” Mullin said.

Tyson looked up at Houdini with tearstained cheeks. “How could you?”

Houdini tried to explain. “I thought I saw . . .”

On instinct, Doyle stepped between Mullin and Houdini. “I don’t think we can leap so readily to conclusions, Mr. Caleb.”

“What? No hello fer me, Mr. Doyle?” Mullin growled.

“I assure you, there’s an explanation,” Doyle insisted.

“Let me guess. ’E’s your pal, too, now, eh? Step aside, sir.” Mullin elbowed Doyle out of the way as he took Houdini by the collar and marched him toward the back of the wine cellar.

“Watch him, Detective. We don’t need him slipping out of those handcuffs,” Caleb warned.

“I’ve an extra set in the car, sir,” Mullin assured him before vanishing into the shadows with Houdini.

“The situation appears clear enough to me,” Caleb said, turning back to Doyle. “We’ll take Houdini out the back and try to keep everything under wraps until a thorough investigation can be done. I’m no more interested in dragging his name through the mud than you are, and the last thing we need here is reporters.”

“I’m going with him.”

Caleb barred Doyle with an arm. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. If I were you, sir, I’d start working on my story. For you’re beginning to take on a rather prominent role in a rather dirty business.” Caleb pulled out a handkerchief and plucked the ivory-handled revolver off the floor. “Perhaps, once you have dropped off your niece, you can pay me a visit downtown.”

“My—?”

Doyle launched up the stairs.

MARIE AND LOVECRAFT sprinted across the rolling lawn, circling around the driveway then curling back to the south end of the mansion where the party echoed louder and the windows gleamed with light.

Then there was a cry, cut off by silence.

“That was Abigail,” Lovecraft exclaimed.

The two began to run, ascending a small rise. Before them unfurled a breathtaking view of Westchester—all the way to the distant shimmer of the New York skyline. And much closer, at the bottom of a steep, wooded hill, the ragged graves of the Willow Grove Cemetery.

Marie raised her voice as loud as she dared. “Abigail?”

No answer. The only sounds were the muted strains of the string quartet.

Beyond the covered pool and the slate patio sat a gazebo. At the edge of the manicured lawn was a gardener’s shed. Its latched door banged loose in a growing wind.

“There,” Marie pointed. “Come on!”

They reached the shed and pulled the door open. It smelled of mulch. It was dark and moist, cobwebbed. A wheelbarrow lay tilted on its side. Rakes and hoes hung on rusty nails. Large rusted clippers sat in buckets with balled-up gloves beside a hose coiled up like a sleeping rattler. In the center of the floor was a three foot by three foot moss-covered door. A heavy iron ring lay in the center. Two large plywood planks, the perfect size to conceal the door, had been tossed aside. But the giveaway to Abigail’s trail was Isabella fluttering against the beams of the shed’s ceiling, panicking to escape.

Marie seized the iron ring and pulled. The door moaned on its hinges, and wet, stale air wafted out of the hole.

Lovecraft paled. “It’s the entrance to the tunnels.”

Far below, they heard a muffled squealing.

Marie took the first step. “She’s down there.”

But Lovecraft just stood frozen.

“Howard, get the hell over here,” Marie insisted as she vanished into the hole.

Lovecraft shook his head, suddenly overcome with terror.

“To hell with you, then,” Marie’s voice echoed up from the tunnel staircase.

“Marie?” Lovecraft stepped forward, then turned around, eyes wide with panic. “Marie, don’t leave me alone.”

But there was no answer. Lovecraft stared down into the hole. Then, with an agonized moan, he descended.

36

THE STAIRCASE LED Lovecraft and Marie about a hundred feet underground to a narrow, dank tunnel carved out of earth and living rock, all of it supported by aging wooden timbers. The ceiling was not even six feet high, and the passageway narrow, forcing Lovecraft and Marie to walk single file. They pulled torches from the wall and lit them, but the fire’s light did little against the featureless darkness. Screams echoed in the distance. As they stumbled forward, they passed branching tunnels that led to even deeper and more secret places.

Lovecraft craned his neck, straining to remember their route as the tunnels forked, then forked again.

“Did we go right?” he said.

“Ssh!” Marie counseled, and stopped to listen.

But all they could hear was their own harsh breathing—until a ghostly wail split the dim light.

“Va!”
Marie dragged Lovecraft forward.

The narrow passage forked in three directions, and Lovecraft panicked.

“It’s a labyrinth. We’ll never get out.”

“I can see light,” Marie responded.

They proceeded cautiously, aware that they were approaching the heart of the unknown.

“What’s become of the others? If they got Abigail—”

A horrendous squeal cut through the tunnels. One of the creatures was close—too close. But whether it was in front or behind them, Lovecraft couldn’t tell. Instead he buckled over, struggling to catch his breath.

“Go on,” he gasped. “I can’t.”

“What you doin’, Howard?”

Lovecraft grew paler as he fought to breathe. “I’ve pushed it too far. The exposure to the Mythos . . . it’s too much.” He trembled, but as he put out a hand to brace himself, he encountered something wet and slick. Lovecraft turned and regarded the slimy face of a dead woman. He jerked his hand away. The corpse’s white hair was still knotted in a bun.

Corpses were everywhere, surrounding them—five and six bodies deep. Like the Roman catacombs, the bodies were piled into holes in the earthen walls. Most were decayed to skeletal remains, with hair and nails grown wispy-white and claw-long. They wore the disintegrating remains of Quaker clothes. The maidens still had scarves tied under their bony jaws.

Lovecraft bit his lip to keep from screaming, and Marie yanked him forward by his jacket sleeve.

“Abigail?” she called.

“Don’t do that,” Lovecraft begged.

But the earthen walls just absorbed the sound. Suddenly, Marie paused.

Lovecraft bumped into her. “What?”

Marie pointed to a set of black doors at the end of the corridor.

“The church,” Lovecraft whispered.

“Oh, God, no!” Abigail’s terrified voice rang out from the black doors.

The true import of the moment made Lovecraft weak with terror. But then all his differences, all his failings—all the otherness that separated him from his fellow man—fell away like a snake’s shed skin. All that was left was a single, surging will to survive.

And the vessel for that survival was Abigail.

Lovecraft shoved past Marie and charged down the tunnel, his fears transmuted by rage and a primal instinct to defend. The black door loomed ahead of him; inhuman squeals screeched from behind it. Lovecraft screamed and bared his teeth as his shoulder connected with the door, buckling the aged planks.

The door shattered inward, and Lovecraft tumbled headfirst into Hell.

The scale and dimensions of the church were overwhelming, and every inch of it was meant as a visual mockery of the Christian Church. There was a short transept and a nave, flanked by double aisles and square chapels. There were enough pews for a congregation of two hundred—a chilling thought in itself—but that was subsumed by the cumulative effect. The mighty columns were adorned with early gothic carvings of disemboweled souls and copulating creatures. And the figures, who in any other cathedral would be Old Testament kings, were instead grotesque demons: hideous mixes of animals and people with slicing fangs and barbed tails. The floors were drenched in blood and gleamed in the light of flaming black candelabras. The air was thick and cloying from the thousands of black roses hanging from the ceilings, and the rotting, excoriated animals hung over the altar, their entrails dripping from an upside-down cross.

Eleven monstrous demons swathed in monklike robes and hoods wrestled Abigail onto the altar, her red cape half torn off her body. Her legs kicked impotently. They spread her thin arms open as she was forced face-first on the viscera-stained block. Shining steel scythes cut the air.

“Leave her be,” Lovecraft bellowed as he scrambled to his feet and readjusted his grip on the torch. Three of the squealing creatures turned and flowed toward him. Lovecraft swung his torch in wild, soaring arcs. As tiny embers showered the room, the dried roses and brittle wooden figures adorning the columns burst into flame. Tendrils of fire lanced out in all directions. The flames reflected in the ruby eyes of four more creatures as they converged on Lovecraft.

“Back! Stay back!” Lovecraft jabbed with his torch. The demons circled, gurgling to each other. The phlegm-coated sounds rolled deep in their lungs.

Several sickles sunk into a pew just inches from Lovecraft’s arm and he instinctively wrenched the torch around and struck one of the beasts in the side of the head. Fire exploded, followed by squeals of rage and agony.

By now, the cathedral was an inferno.

An arm like a tree branch whacked the back of Lovecraft’s head, toppling the demonologist from his feet. His torch flew in the other direction.

The legion was moving in for the kill, when a shriek spun them around.

Marie stood, barefoot, astride two pews, her eyes rolled back. She chanted unintelligible words as white smoke poured out from between her lips. Her body shuddered as she clawed the air with her hands.

Before the demons could advance, other forms filled the broken doorway of the church. Heads bobbed and torsos swayed as the firelight spilled over the corpses of the catacombs, stumbling forward on skeleton legs—hands reaching, mouths open in silent screams, eye sockets black and empty. Some were children in their now ragged Sunday best. A mother with patchy blond hair and most of her teeth cried weirdly, clutching her rotted infant’s body to her lean breast.

Marie shrieked and moved her arms like a symphony conductor, white smoke still flooding out of her mouth.

The demons turned on the zombie intruders, lopping off heads and arms, flinging body parts across the transept.

But still they came—a marionette army. Some pulled themselves along the floor, their legs missing, grabbing at the demons’ robes, biting at their hands with clicking jawbones.

The demons squealed and hacked, reducing the mother and her baby to a cloud of corpse dust, beheading a white-bearded pilgrim, and cutting a grandmother still wearing her yellow wedding gown in half.

Lovecraft sat up as the skull of a six-year-old girl landed in his lap. A piece of his mind broke off and he felt it go, like a loose tooth falling out—another small piece of his sanity swept away. And from that point forward, Lovecraft knew he would always have a phobic terror of little girls with blond ponytails.

He screamed as Marie grabbed at his shirt and dragged him into one of the side aisles. Marie looked scarcely better than the animated corpses.

“Howard . . .” She fell into his arms, her lips gray, her eyes fluttering.

“Mr. Lovecraft,” a voice called out.

Abigail waved both arms from the altar and pointed to a side door.

Lovecraft threw his satchel, with the Book of Enoch, over his shoulder, and dragged Marie to her feet.

“Marie, please walk!”

But she was spent, so Lovecraft took her in his arms and dragged her to the altar.

The demons were making short work of the corpses, and now came at Lovecraft en masse, a wall of grasping arms and swaying heads with sticklike noses. They squealed like pack animals. Lovecraft lunged for the door behind Abigail as a wall collapsed behind him. Fire, rock, and timbers came raining down, crushing several demons.

Lovecraft dove through the door, propelled by a gush of hot wind and billowing sparks.

DOYLE MUTTERED GRIMLY as the Silver Ghost surged into the tunnel of trees and toward the stone gates and the perched gargoyles that marked the head of the drive. The Rolls swerved to a stop and idled at the appointed meeting place, but though Doyle leaped out of the car and jogged to the road, there was no sign of the others. He checked his pocket-watch. It was 10:50.

He plunged into the woods, dried leaves crackling underfoot. His cries fell on a chilling silence, as if the estate had swallowed his companions whole. He cursed his willfulness, his flawed strategy. Darian had taken their measure and bested them with ease. Even knowing it was a trap, they’d taken the bait. Now here was the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle blundering through the woods like a panicked child. Who was he to presume he could fill Duvall’s shoes? Maybe he wasn’t as inured to the criticisms of the press and the British public as he thought. Perhaps it was pride that had thrust him back into the game, and to what end? To watch the others die as Duvall had? Houdini, an accused murderer? Sweat streamed down his face and into his moustache as he stumbled out into the clearing on the southern side of the mansion. Green hills rose and dipped before dropping steeply to the Willow Grove Cemetery some two hundred feet below.

Branches snapped to his left.

Doyle lunged behind a tree. He heard something large push through the bushes. Whoever it was, it snorted and spit into the grass, and Doyle detected the scent of ammonia—a scent he’d encountered recently. He peeked around the trunk and spotted Morris only a few steps away, carrying a Winchester shotgun. He was dressed as an Italian opera clown, with a white and black face and a circus tent for a gown. Morris’s misshapen head swiveled, studying every shadow. A cigarette pack crinkled in his grip. He lit a match on his tooth and sucked in smoke. Doyle was about to sneak away but his shoe caught a twig and it snapped.

Morris turned and aimed.

Doyle dove forward, tearing through the brambles. Wood chips exploded in his face as a shell tore into a tree. Between his thundering footsteps, he heard two more shots and the impact of bursting shells.

Morris stormed after him, much faster than he looked. He gained on Doyle with every stride. Doyle darted left, ducking under a fallen tree, then cut right. Morris just obliterated the tree, plunging straight through it.

Doyle reached the edge of the forest, which opened onto a clearing. The gardener’s shed sat fifty feet in front of him. Even from this vantage point, he could see black smoke seeping from the edges of the window and leaking out the front door. Doyle ran to the shed and threw open the door. He saw the hole in the earthen floor, the aged pine door, and instantly knew.

Something slammed him from behind, and Doyle pitched forward into the far wall, tools raining down around him. Morris loomed above him, flicking the rifle open to reload it. Doyle found a shovel and swung it, knocking the gun from Morris’s hands. He swung again, and the shovel snapped in two across Morris’s forearm. The giant instead took Doyle by the collar, lifted his two-hundred-plus pounds effortlessly, and bashed him to the wall. Doyle’s hands clawed at the orderly’s face as Morris wrenched and hurled him into the other wall, which collapsed. There was a deafening crunch, and Doyle landed on the grass.

He looked up in time to see Morris ducking through a huge hole in the side of the shed. Doyle attempted to stand, but Morris hammered a fist into his jaw. Morris then hefted him to his feet and threw him into the side of the shed. Doyle landed, gasping, stars bursting behind his eyes. He pawed frantically through the grass and found the wooden handle of a pair of rusted hedge clippers. When Morris reached for him again, Doyle pulled the clippers open, locked them over Morris’s fingers, and snapped them closed.

Morris howled and ripped his hand away, minus the halves of three fingers. Blood spurted from the stumps and the giant lumbered back, horrified.

Doyle lunged to his feet and limped off across the clearing, hearing Morris’s cries of agony fade in the distance.