The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel Page 11

  “I read that, too,” Trace said, “and I sure would like to get my hands on the buzzard who wrote it.”

  “So you didn’t tell that reporter Reynolds you were a Spiritualist.”

  “Hell no. I told him I wasn’t.”

  Whistler pulled toward him the embarrassing stack of letters, collected as evidence by the cop who’d brought him in.

  “‘Dear Mr. Tracy,’” Whistler read from the topmost. “‘I know that you are helping the police in the matter of the Herschel murders and I believe I have information that may be of value to you.’” Whistler glanced at Trace as if to say, See? I told you so, and tossed the note aside.

  “‘Dear Mr. Tracey, do you hold private séances? I assure you I can pay for your time, but I am desperate to receive word of my beloved Alice, dead now these three years…’

  “‘To the sykic helping the polees—’” Whistler paused to show Trace the laborious scrawl on the page, “‘if you contac the ded you ar dammed to HELL you brot down punishmint on that famly and all yor eforts will be in VAIN VANITY is the mark of the BEIST…’”

  “Look, I don’t claim to be a psychic,” Trace said, “and I sure didn’t ask these folks to bring me their troubles.”

  Whistler shook out a folded page and read, “‘Sprinkle salt and ash or earth into the vessel. Make a trail of blood leading to the vessel, and surround with lights to draw the entity…’”

  “Lemme see that.” Trace plucked the sheet from the detective’s grasp. He knew what it was—the instructions Miss Fairweather had written out for trapping the demon after he found it. He’d tucked it away with the other papers, and forgotten it in the wake of getting possessed and then arrested. She had not put her name on it, nor his, thank God.

  “If you ask me, there’s the fella you oughtta be questioning.” Trace flipped the page back onto the table. “World’s full of sick minds, but I ain’t one of ’em. And I know you don’t have anything to tie me to the Herschels’ deaths, or you wouldn’t be fishin the way you are. The evidence doesn’t show there was anyone else there, and you can’t find that Judd Herschel had a quarrel with anyone.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw the yard and the house, same as you. I know how to track. Believe me, if I knew who the bastard was did this, I’d hand him to you.”

  “I believe you might,” Whistler said. “But that’s my job, not yours, and I can’t have you impeding my investigation.”

  “How have I impeded it? I was mindin my own business at home—”

  “The city of St. Louis can’t have you discharging firearms in a public boarding-house, either.” Whistler stood, scooping up the sheaf of papers, and said to the waiting bailiff, “Throw him in the drunk tank for the night.”

  “This is horseshit!” Trace said.

  “Take a lesson from it,” Whistler said blandly. “Don’t carry a round under the hammer.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They took him through the polished, still-new hallways of Four Courts, to the jail access deep at the heart of the building. They went through two locked gates and onto a walkway that circled a large, empty amphitheater. It was suppertime, the men had all been returned to their cells, and a couple of trustees were circulating with a cart.

  “You had supper?” one of Trace’s escorts asked.

  “No,” Trace said. “Kinda got interrupted.”

  “You’ll get a plate.” The guard turned his key in the cell door and swung it open. It was dim inside, just weakening daylight from the narrow window, but Trace saw something writhe in the far corner of the room—a sick and twisting movement like a nest of worms turning over on itself.

  He stopped in the doorway, grabbing the jamb as nausea washed over him. Chill sweat prickled his neck and armpits. “What’s in there?” he whispered.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw the guard exchange a glance with his partner, and then the two of them struck like wolves—pinned his elbows back and applied a kick to the small of his back so he stumbled across the threshold. The door slammed shut and the lock clanked into place.

  “Hey!” He slammed a fist against the door, face pressed to the window, but they walked away without a backwards glance.

  Trace turned to face the room, breath coming in short pants of anger and dread. He forced himself to calm, to think. To feel, cautiously, with his extra sense.

  He wasn’t alone in the cell. He couldn’t see the coiling horror anymore, which in a way was worse than seeing it. A ragged fellow hunkered on the bunk against the wall, head on his knees. There was a chamber pot in one corner and a wooden bench running the perimeter of the room.

  Trace’s heart slowed, but the prickle of unease, of awareness along his arms and spine did not diminish. He could feel something prowling the wall near the other prisoner, like a coyote guarding its kill.

  “Hey there,” Trace said to the shivering man. “You all right, mister?”

  There was no response. Trace ventured into the middle of the cell. The darkness retreated from him, but not very far. Trace steeled his nerve and reached to touch the man’s shoulder. “Hey there, fella. You all right?”

  The prisoner jerked back flat against the wall, eyes rolling like a panicked horse. “What? What d’ye want?” His face was streaked with snot and sweat, his skin the color of whey. “I don’t have any—they took it all. They took it all!”

  “It’s all right, friend, I’m not after your dope.” Trace’s mouth curled in distaste, but at the same time a tendril of memory bloomed in his mind: the warm, dreamy sensation of being wrapped in comfort—no worries, no responsibilities.

  It had been years since he’d had a resurgence of that old craving, and he knew immediately it hadn’t come from inside himself. He backed hastily away from the bench, groping for his crucifix.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners now and at the moment of our death…” The words came easily to mind, blotted out the sick craving with thoughts of righteousness and sanity. The Rosary was one of the first prayers he had learned, at his mother’s knee; saying it in times of crisis was one of Hardinger’s tricks, one they had devised together, once Trace had accepted that the spirits weren’t his imagination, they weren’t going away, and the dope was making things worse.

  Remember who you were. Hardinger’s voice was as soothing as the prayer, in memory. Before the sickness and madness and pain. When the craving or the voices become too much to bear, go back to an earlier place … a quieter place.

  But Trace had forgotten—or perhaps never noticed, given his drug-addled state at the time—how the stillness in his thoughts heightened his senses, gave him an awareness of the world beyond what his eyes and ears could perceive. His mind flashed backwards, to the meditation sessions he and his fellow seminarians had been forced to do: forty young men kneeling for hours in various states of boredom and ecstasy. He had taken to it better than most, frightened and exhilarated by the swooning sense of leaving his body. It was one of the few times he’d really felt at one with God and with the calling his father had picked out for him.

  On the other side of the cell, the coiling horror paused in its circling to regard him with interest and enmity. He could hear it whispering to the dope fiend on the bench.

  Because it can’t get to YOU. The words sounded like Miss Fairweather’s, but the realization was his own. The power is a SHIELD, you fool. Hardinger tricked you into using it.

  The altar-boy in him shied from the thought, but his older, worldlier self was intrigued. That feeling of safety and security did seem to come from within, maybe even from that well in the back of his mind, where his soul had retreated while his body was possessed. He didn’t have to think about it—the power swelled out of him in response to the demon’s proximity. He could stretch inside it and push it to the outside of his skin and maybe—Yes, he could extend it outside of himself.

  Experimentally, he pulled it back. Felt the tendrils of temptation and fear begin to crowd close agai
n.

  Let the power out. Felt safe. Strong, even.

  Miss Fairweather knew, he thought. She knew he had this in him. Is it so threatening to your tiny Christian mind that you must deny it, rather than learn to use it?

  Damn right it was threatening, when everything he’d been taught for thirty-odd years promised damnation as the price of acceptance.

  Out in the corridor, someone was whistling a jaunty tune, heels snapping along on the iron floor.

  Trace moved to the door, keeping that new sense trained toward the dope fiend. “Hey, out there!”

  The footsteps halted, backtracked, and the whistle drew out in a long trill of surprise. “Why, Jacob Tracy!” Rex Reynolds said cheerfully. “Ain’t you come down in the world?”

  Trace recoiled from the window. “What’re you doin here?”

  “Following where the story leads, as always,” Reynolds said. “Guess that lawyer act caught up with you, huh?”

  “You’re the reason I’m in here,” Trace said. “I told you I wasn’t a damn psychic, and now that detective’s sore I’m messin with his investigation.”

  “Well, that don’t seem fair, do it?” Reynolds bared his long teeth in a grin. “Tough break, I gotta say—although having you in there wasn’t quite what I had in mind. How’re you enjoying the company?”

  “Charming,” Trace said. “There’s talk of startin a literary society.”

  Reynolds laughed good-naturedly. “Gotta be a special hell for someone like you.”

  “I reckon I can handle one pissant dope fiend.”

  The reporter’s grin darkened. “But we both know he ain’t the real danger, don’t we?” He leaned closer, waggling his eyebrows. “Fact is, that tank has a reputation for being haunted.”

  “Naw!” Trace said.

  “Yeah! Six men have taken their own lives in there since this place opened in ’71. And that doesn’t count the ones who were murdered by their fellows. Or had heart seizures. Or choked on their own puke. Hell, I heard one kid got a chicken bone caught in his throat and went thataway.” Reynolds cocked his head. “I’d almost wonder if the chief put you in there hoping you’d clear out the place.”

  “I don’t suppose someone gave him that idea?”

  Reynolds shrugged. “I sure didn’t. Whistler hates my guts.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Trace said.

  “Aw, now there’s no need to be hurtful. And after I came all the way down here to give you this.” The reporter held up a half-full whiskey bottle, with a piece of paper wrapped around it.

  Trace reached out and palmed the bottle into the cell. The note came away in his hand and he recognized it immediately. It was Miss Fairweather’s instructions on how to capture a demon—which he had seen moments ago in Whistler’s hand.

  “How’d you get this?” Trace asked, but when he pressed his face to the window again, the corridor was empty. Reynolds’s brassy whistle echoed back from places unknown.

  Trace looked thoughtfully at the brown glass bottle and the note. This was twice now Reynolds had appeared out of nowhere, bearing unlikely but useful information just when it was needed.

  Over on the bench, and at the edges of Trace’s awareness, something stirred. “What’s that?” said a raspy voice. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

  Trace glanced at the ragged dope fiend, who was staring with beady interest at the bottle. “Nothin you’re interested in.”

  He unfolded Miss Fairweather’s instructions. They were longer than he had realized, when she was describing the process. The first section made him groan—paired-off lines of square Semitic characters. Hebrew had never been his best subject. But the second part was easy:

  In the names of the Angels command the demon to leave his victim. Watch the victim carefully to determine which names or words cause the demon discomfort. Repeat those words to increase the punishment.

  That was the part he was familiar with, the Catholic rite of exorcism. Fragments of Latin came to him, though he doubted he remembered all of the prayers.

  The last bit was new:

  Thus bound, command the demon to tell you its name. You can then adjure it in the name of Angels to do your bidding. Order it to enter a bottle or box and close the vessel and seal with white wax.

  The Church definitely did not encourage the exorcist to talk to the demon or ask it questions. But Miss Fairweather said to trap the thing, and at this point Trace thought he’d rather be guided by her experience than the say-so of some priests who had likely never seen a real demon. And she’d even sent him a vessel to trap it in. Trace worked the cork out of the bottle and drew a healthy pull.

  It wasn’t whiskey.

  He spat the vile bitterness across the cell, and looked at the bottle in alarm. It said whiskey, but the label was old and smudged. It was laudanum, probably homemade. The familiar taste clung to his tongue and nostrils, and craving leapt alive in him like a rabid badger—the queasiness, the shivers, and the wretched desire for another drink to make it all go away.

  “Hey.” His cellmate was gathering his feet up under him, licking his lips. “Hey-hey. Gimme some of that. Gimme some.”

  “You just stay where you are,” Trace said, holding out the bottle at arm’s length, one finger lifted warningly. From somewhere far away Hardinger’s voice was urging him to dump the bottle, get rid of the temptation, but something else was scratching and plucking at the edges of his self-control, urging him to take another drink, whispering that he wanted it, he needed it, everything would be all right—

  With a grunt of revulsion, Trace flung the bottle at the wall. His cellmate moved with preternatural swiftness and batted it down. The bottle bounced off the wooden edge of the bench and landed in the straw with a muffled chink. The dope fiend dived after it, snatched it up, and began sucking and licking at the spilled fluid on his fingers with the avarice of a pig at the tit.

  Trace’s legs and back cramped fiercely, dropping him to his knees. Now you’ve done it, whispered a voice in his ear. Quick, take it back before it’s all gone. He’s a bantam, no trouble at all—just snap his neck and take it for yourself—

  Trace put his hands over his ears and gabbled the first bit of Latin that came to mind: “Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium!”

  The sly writhing thing in the cell with him sniggered, pawed at him with its clammy hands, but Trace thrust it away, summoned up his shield, and pushed it into place. The pounding in his head cut off so abruptly that he gasped. He heard the suckling stop, and sensed the intruder swarming away from him, surrounding the other man in the cell, settling into him.

  The dope fiend shuddered and slumped, hitched his shoulders and wiped a grimy fist across his mouth. He raised his eyes and looked balefully at Trace. “Yer a pitiful sight,” the addict said.

  “You should talk,” Trace said. “Looks like you’ve about used up that vessel.”

  The thing in the addict bared rotting teeth. “There’s always another. Your kind are always lookin’ for a way to ease the pain. Just like you, always runnin’ away.” The demon held out the bottle, waggled it invitingly. “You useta love yer medicine, din’t you, altar-boy?”

  “I never loved it,” Trace said. “I hated the stuff. I hated bein out of my head and pukin like a dog, but the pain was worse, and then the visions were worse. The morphine made them stop.”

  “But now they started up again,” the demon said slyly. “Cuz of her. An’ you let her do it, cuz the power is what you really crave. Well, I got news for you, altar-boy. She means to feed you to somethin’ much worse than lil ol’ me. Better to snuff that power out, make it useless to her.”

  Knowing what he was talking to, Trace could hardly take such a warning seriously. It was no news that Miss Fairweather wanted to use his power. And at least she had told him how to use it. The words were coming back to him, welling up alongside the power, where they had been stored down there all this time. “Exorc
isamos te, omnis immunde spiritus, omnis satanic potestas, omnis infernalis adversarii—”

  “Aw, c’mon!” the addict jeered. “Issat all you got, altar-boy? Mumblin’ prayers and shakin’ gimcracks. All you shamans is the same.”

  But Trace could feel something building in himself, a spark of brightness, of rightness that had always been there, banked and waiting, and now was flaring in reaction to this threat. He felt a shiver of excitement and looked down to see all the hairs on his arms were standing up.

  A shield, hell. This was a battering ram. A thunderhead. A hurricane.

  He felt, rather than saw, the addict recoil. But then it sneered at him. “Big deal. You got a bit of glimmer. You don’t know what to do with it.”

  “I don’t think it takes much smarts,” Trace said, rocking to his feet. “I been wrestlin with the likes of you for sixteen years.”

  The demon’s eyes widened. “You don’t have the bollocks.”

  Trace laughed. “Maybe not, but I got a notion to find out.”

  * * *

  THE BLUE TWINKLE of dawn was lighting the sky when the cell door’s lock turned over with a loud clank. Trace raised his head as the door swung inward, with the faintest of squeaks on its well-oiled hinges.

  There was some muttered conversation in the corridor outside, and then Whistler stepped through the doorway, a tin cup in his hand. He surveyed the room with polite interest, as if visiting a neighbor’s parlor.

  The addict slept, bruised but still breathing, in the far corner. There were a couple spots of dried blood on the floor, and the puddle of spilled laudanum, which Trace had kicked some straw over.

  Whistler glanced an order at the guards in the doorway. They came in, shook the addict awake, and ushered him out of the cell. “C’mon, boyo,” one of them said. “Time to go.”

  Trace sat up on the edge of the bunk. Whistler drank from his tin cup. The smell of coffee wafted across the room.

  “Rough night?” Whistler asked.

  “Had worse,” Trace said.