The Arcanum (9 page)

16

DOYLE LEFT THE Manhattan Club on Fourth and Madison Square in an ill humor. His breath stank of cigars and his chest burned from gulping several brandies. He wavered in the cold autumn air and tried to gather himself.

“Need a car, mistah?”

He turned to an unsmiling black man with penetrating eyes and a tilted top hat. Something was strung around the brim of the hat, something white. Doyle could not make it out. He stepped into the back of the Lexington sedan.

“I’m headed to the—” He jolted back as the car lurched forward. “The Penn Hotel, please, and no rush.”

The coachman ignored him. Doyle leaned forward, and saw that the objects strung about the brim of his top hat were small animal bones. A severed chicken foot dangled from the front mirror.

Doyle frowned at the voodoo ornaments; his history with that religion was fraught. Among its highest priests and priestesses, he could name both hated opponents and beloved allies. And he feared it. He knew that voodoo was more than just religion. It was instead some mystical transmitter to a lawless universe of primal, passionate spirits, both beautiful and ugly.

Doyle settled back into the seat and turned his thoughts instead to the matter of Lovecraft. Houdini’s refusal made his task all the more difficult, and Doyle’s response had been to retreat into drink. Everything was different now. Houdini had become a caricature of himself. Even Lovecraft, the youngest of them, was outmatched by this new breed of conspirator.

The Penn Hotel rose in the front windshield. Doyle gathered his walking stick and long coat, but the taxi showed no sign of slowing.

“This is it. Right here.”

The taxi picked up speed.

“Driver, this is the hotel.”

Doyle watched as the doorman and the glowing stoop of the Penn Hotel rushed by his window. He banged his stick on the back of the driver’s seat.

“I say, you’ve missed the stop.”

The driver pressed down on the accelerator, throwing Doyle forward then back.

“Stop the car!” His hand went to the door handle. He pulled on it, but to no avail.

The driver kept going.

“I’m ordering you to stop this car!” But even before he spoke, Doyle recognized that he was in no position to give orders. And even if the door were to open, a dive out would most likely kill him.

The taxi careened around a corner, missing a pedestrian by inches and throwing Doyle across the seat. His head cracked the window glass. He was sobering fast as the taxi sped up Central Park West, past the Museum of Natural History. Central Park whizzed by on the right. Doyle had at first assumed that the police had found him, but the situation suggested otherwise. It seemed he’d blundered into the hands of Duvall’s killer.

He cursed himself. “Old fool.” He still knew how to fight, though. This would be one victim his captors would not forget. THE STREETS OF Harlem pulsed with activity as motorcars honked and jockeyed for position on the packed streets. The sidewalks were clotted with ticket lines and laughing couples. Club lights sparkled. The Novelty Fire played across from Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Band. Even through the closed car window, Doyle could hear the wail of jazz trumpets. There was a refreshing mix of whites and blacks together on the streets, all dressed in tuxedoes and evening gowns.

The assault on the senses was such that, for a moment, Doyle did not realize that the taxi had taken a sharp left into an alley, then screeched to a halt.

Bodies converged on the car. The back doors swung open. Doyle thrust his cane at the groping hands that reached for him, but he was dragged out from behind by the scruff of his neck. He landed on his back on the pavement. Legs shuffled in the gloom. He expected a volley of blows but none came. Instead, he was wrenched to his feet and his arms pinned behind his back. Doyle weighed two-hundred-plus pounds, yet he scarcely touched the ground as he was ushered through a rusted back door.

“Tell me what this is about! Tell me—”

The
bwwaaaaap
of a horn solo greeted him, and his words were lost in the music. The nightclub stench of cigar smoke and sweating bodies made his eyes water. He was pushed through the mob.

Doyle felt faint by the time they reached the velvet staircase. The soft carpet muted the sounds of the music. And, like Alice hurtling down the rabbit hole, he entered another world beneath the jazz club. Beaded curtains gave way to warm, candlelit corridors, where the dark eyes of suspicious children peeked out from behind cracked doors. There was a delicious combination of kitchen smells: baking breads, spicy soups, and fried meats. An attractive black girl with a jeweled necklace pulled red curtains aside as the men forced Doyle into a voodoo parlor. Circulation returned to his arms as the well-dressed black men set him free and departed.

Only the driver remained. He circled Doyle aggressively, bare-chested beneath his suit jacket. Doyle flinched as the man patted him down for a weapon. As the driver’s rough hands swept down each pant leg, Doyle surveyed the room. Hundreds of dripping candles warmed the chamber. Ornate chaises lined the walls, reminding him of French New Orleans. A rooster clucked in a small cage atop a table decorated with human skulls.

Then, without a word, the driver was gone. Doyle’s heartbeat increased. Then from behind came a rustling of skirts and a tinkling of bells. A perfume of gardenias and raspberries filled him with longing, then memory . . .

. . . then terror.

Doyle spun around.

A beautiful young woman with chocolate-cream skin stood before the red curtains, her hair tied in a tignon. She batted her long lashes. “Been a while,
non
?”

Doyle held up his hands to ward her off. “Are you real?”

The woman lifted her chin, the light flowing off high cheek-bones. She was in no rush to dispel the mystery. “What you think,
chère
?”

“I think you’re dead, drowned in a river five years ago—or so I was led to believe.” His voice shook.

“Two graveyards in New Orleans got headstones wit’ my name on ’em. Lot of folk want Marie Laveau dead.” Her hand touched Doyle’s pale cheek. “Sometimes I oblige.”

Doyle didn’t know what to feel: rage, horror, bitterness, or relief. Marie Laveau, the famed and feared voodoo priestess of New Orleans, was a living tempest. The fact that she had once allied herself with the Arcanum did nothing to allay his fears. For her loyalties were as mercurial as Duvall’s, and her influence almost as sweeping. Her power over Louisiana culture and politics was unprecedented. The mere threat of one of her curses could force judges to commute death sentences and drive adultering husbands back to their wives. A living enigma, she was a saint to many, and a demon to more. And it only enhanced her legend that there were, in fact, two Marie Laveaus. Marie Laveau the First gave birth to fifteen children, one of whom went on to carry her mother’s name and mantle.

And Marie Laveau the Second invited even more controversy than her mother, if that was possible.

And this was the woman Doyle knew, feared, and had briefly loved.

Where her mother had balanced the darker aspects of the voodoo by showing a charitable, more humanitarian side, her daughter was content to be feared as a sorceress and a witch. This earned her enemies by the legion. Corrupt politicians, racist police, rival voodoo cults—all wanted her dead. But was her magic real, as her followers swore? Or were she and her mother merely accomplished fakes, preying on the public’s fears and superstitions?

Doyle thought he knew the answer, but as he touched a face unlined by age, his thoughts turned to trickery. “You’re a daughter. Another Marie Laveau. You’re not the woman I knew.”

She took his hand, held it to her cheek. “Non. C’est moi.”

Doyle pulled his hand away. “You expect me to believe you’re eighty years old? Look at you. You’re a young girl.”

Marie cocked an eyebrow.

His head swam. “But Duvall told me . . .” He rubbed his eyes, feeling confused and betrayed.

“I lied to him, too,” she said.

He rubbed his shoulder, still sore from the rough handling. “So why all this? Why treat me like an enemy?”

“Enemies are what I protected you from,
chère.
You were followed. And we are in danger, all of us. All who knew Konstantin.”

THE LOOK IN her brother’s eyes tells her something is wrong. He
is quiet, but has always had a sense about spiritual matters.

“Something evil,” he hisses, “in the forest.”

Marie steps past her younger sibling and onto the porch, where
she is bathed in the light of the bonfire. She knows something is
wrong; her stomach tells her. Something has twisted in her belly
all day. Now she watches her dancers framed against the fire,
naked and sweating, their voices trilling, their pupils rolled back
in the sockets. They are keeping the evil at bay. But Marie senses
it just beyond the lick of the flames, hiding in the trees, waiting.

She pulls up her skirts and walks down the porch steps.

“Marie, non!” her brother calls.

Marie passes the dancers and the raging fire, and stops to pull a
torch free. Then she crosses into the high grasses, toward the trees.
She will meet this spirit in her forest.

The moment she crosses the border of the woods, a quiet falls.
She hears the dancers in the background, but nothing else. No
mosquitoes. No frogs. Not even a wind rustles the leaves. She
walks deeper into the forest’s heart, until the ground is muddy and
the willows bend in grotesque shapes.

Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap.

Marie whirls in the direction of the sound.

Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap.

Marie pushes through underbrush, her flame skimming the
ground until she finds it.

It’s a dying owl. It writhes on the ground, wings thumping.

Above her, something snaps small branches and plunges to the
earth. She hears it behind her now, flapping.

Another owl dies in front of her. They fall out of the trees. She
hears their soft bodies collide with the ground. Some plague has
struck them.

Marie walks over to one of the birds, kneels beside it. She still
hears the fluttering around her, but softer now. She strokes the
owl’s broken neck. There is no pulse. Marie covers her face and
cries over the owl. Her shaking hands cradle the body, press it to
her breast and throat.

“Konstantin,” she cries. “What did they do to you, my Konstantin?”

MARIE WALKS PAST the bonfire. The dancers have stopped.
Their chests heave from exhaustion. They watch the priestess
climb the steps of the house with a bloody owl clutched to her
chest.

She enters. Her younger brother sees her tearstained cheeks,
but knows better than to ask. Marie goes to the kitchen and places
a wooden bowl on the cutting board. Then, displaying little emotion, she takes a carving knife and guts the owl, groin to throat.
She pulls the organs free and slaps them into the bowl.

“Tell me, my love.” Marie stirs the organs with her bloody hand.
“Tell me who do this.”

Her eyes scrutinize the deep purples of the arteries, the brownish hues of the lungs. She sees patterns in the viscera. Her eyes are
dry, the tears replaced by horror. “Oh God . . . oh God.”

Marie leaves her body.

When she opens her eyes, she is in England, floating above the
British Museum. She hears guttural screams. Her attention floats
to the road, to a car on the grass by the museum fence. Young men
pull themselves free of the car to run to a broken body in the road.

Marie hurtles down to Konstantin Duvall as he gasps, “He’s in
my mind!”

The boys kneel by the body, but Duvall’s eyes are locked on the
incorporeal Marie.

“Warn them . . .” he says, “. . . warn the Arcanum.”

Marie sobs and reaches for him through the ether, but her cries
are lost in a vacuum. Life ebbs from Duvall’s body like seeping
gas. It rises like steam away from the shell of Duvall and dissipates
in the cool London night.

Then Marie feels a sub-aural hum and turns her attention to
the pulsing energy near the trees of the museum park. A figure in
a top hat stands in the shadows, watching. He shifts, and the
moonlight glints off a blue monocle. There’s something in his
arms, a book.

She cannot see his face.

He whispers to Marie through the ether.
“Yaji-ash-shuthath,”
he says, and chuckles.

Marie recoils, hurtling away from Duvall’s shattered body. She
hovers above the world. The Earth turns before her eyes. Then
suddenly she speeds into the clouds, until she floats above white
feathers in a puddle of human blood. The blood becomes a fire.
Now she is in a corridor of fire. Long bodies sway in the flames,
and gaze at her with ruby eyes.

Their squeals become screams.

They see her.

DOYLE STROKED HIS moustache as he listened.

“The owl was Konstantin’s animal spirit,” Marie told him. “It was his message. His warning.”

“What message?”

“A man with the blue eye. I saw New York City, and blood. And a book . . .”

“The Book of Enoch,” Doyle finished. “What do we know about this killer?”

Marie paused. “He is not as powerful as he thinks. He’s in danger, too.”

It was a moment of consequence. They allowed it to linger.

“So, he’s brought us together again, hasn’t he? Even in death.”

“You are still angry?” Marie asked.

Doyle’s jaw tightened.