Clan Novel Giovanni: Book 10 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Justin Achilli

  Wednesday, 21 July 1999, 11:18 PM

  Laffitte’s

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Jake sat down. The bar had a low ceiling and French doors, looking—as did all of New Orleans’s buildings—as if it had been there for over a hundred years.

  Of course, most of them had.

  But Jake hadn’t come to Laffitte’s to wonder at its architecture. Nor had he come to suck down prodigious amounts of tourist-grade daiquiris like the “vampires” at the other tables. No, Jake had a personal matter on his mind.

  He looked around the room, which teemed with gay, frivolous, wasted life. Weekenders in for an early debauch, locals who scammed the patrons for either cash or ass, frazzled bartenders and an enormous shit-sack of a man perched behind the piano, doing his best to sing songs that the bleary drunkards knew. Half of them were torch songs sped up to double-time and the other half were what counted as “oldies.” Jake smiled at that thought. An “oldie” was a song recorded in the 1950s or ’60s. He’d been around for forty years before that—what did that make him?

  It didn’t matter. None of the drinkers saw him, or cared if they did. To them, he was simply a boozy comrade-in-arms, crawling the bars for a good time and a cheap drink. He was no threat—have a drink on us!

  No one at this bar had any idea what he was. Or what the woman he was here to meet was. Marcia Gibbert, fellow Kindred. She’d had a keen interest in New Orleans for the past few weeks, having arrived from—Anaheim?—just less than a month ago. Whenever she and Jake met, people thought they were a couple, a pair of eccentric, black, nouveau-riche lovers. The truth of the matter was that Marcia was looking for information on a five-thousand-year-old killer and that Jake was willing to profit from her deranged crusade. He didn’t care about whatever it was that was bothering her; she had called it a family matter and left it at that. Jake understood. As a Brujah, he knew that some Kindred were quick to make judgments based upon one’s lineage. He had her pegged for a Follower of Set. Maybe a Gangrel or even another Brujah. Possibly even Caitiff, but she didn’t seem as grungy as most of the ones he’d met had been. Whatever; it didn’t matter. She had cash, and it wasn’t like Jake could hold down a day job. Maybe he could take the morbid tourists on a midnight tour of graveyards….

  Marcia walked in, stooping below the low doorjamb. Peering through the smoke, she saw Jake, who waved her over to his table with an unmarked manila envelope in his hand. Suppressing the look of excitement that wanted to flash over her face, Marcia Gibbert calmly ordered a drink to keep up the charade and joined Jake at his table.

  “You find something for me?” Marcia smiled. She knew Jake didn’t have too much invested in her, but there was no reason not to be cordial.

  Jake looked his guest over. She had broad features and fair skin, maybe even mulatto. And her eyes were blue, which was uncommon. Still, it wasn’t his affair. He was here for money, so enough with the paranoia. “I found something you might like, yes. I’m afraid it’s not big on facts—it sounds like it was written by a drunk or an opium addict, but you might find some of it useful.”

  He pushed the envelope across the table, waiting to see her reaction. If she whisked it away or made an effort to hide it, maybe it’d be worth his time to follow her later and see what she was up to. Then again, if it was really a family affair as she had said, it might be the location of one of her clan’s oldest Kindred which, while interesting, was certainly not something he’d want to see firsthand.

  Marcia opened the envelope deliberately, unwinding the string slowly from around the clasp, and pulled out a sheaf of yellowed papers that had torn or softened around the edges. They had been written in an even, decorative hand, the ink damaged here and there by moisture or the acids in the paper.

  I don't suppose Blind Tom had always been blind. He had the look of a man who'd earned it. That left eye of his, with the milky blue-white luster, and the right eye, vanished under a livid scar that touched his nose, made him a fright to look upon. I think I can even remember him with both eyes (or at least one), but as long as I can recall hailing hailing him by name, I know I called him Blind Tom.

  We had terribly good times, Blind Tom and I. Before I was born, he was the quartermaster or the sergeant or some such, but since losing his sight he took up living in the storm cellar underneath my mother's house. Mamma left me with him—she felt safe with him protecting me, I guess—during the day when she went to tea with her lady friends or took to town on errands. Blind Tom and I played at soldiers, or explored the patch of forest near the house. Sometimes we threw rocks at the gators from the trees, but Blind Tom never seemed to enjoy that as much as I did. He said, “Don't spit at the Devil when he's in his own house.”

  To be fair, I should say that I was a nervous child, always sick or worried or sleeping, and prone to spells of prodigious energy. Mamma laughed, “You see ghosts! You see the children of the woods dancing under the moon!” When she put it so fancifully, I couldn't help but laugh along, hoping our mirth would keep the…things…at bay. And for the most part it did.

  But the charms of laughter couldn't last forever. “Long about my eighth birthday, I would sometimes wake to a peculiar sound beneath my room in the wee hours. It sounded alternately like a goat's scrabbling, a mad hen, or Blind Tom signing in church. I cried out for my mother, but the sounds would stop before she could attend me.

  “Lord's sake, my son, you'd think the gators were come to take you away!” I knew these sounds weren't gators, though; gators sound like hogs, or Blind Tom when he's had too much wine. Mamma would always make them end, though, and I thought nothing of it when I rose each day thereafter.

  Blind Tom showed signs of being tired as I got older, and he seemed to be careless with himself. Too many times, I would find cuts on his worn face or fingers torn and bleeding.

  “Why you want to be so curious, boy; ain'tcha know curiosity killed the cat?

  “I cut masself shaving,” he'd answer, or, “I slammed my fingers in that damned cellar door.”

  My nervousness had a certain tendency toward the clever—some might say I was precocious (though I've heard others call me fey). Before too long I noticed that the horrible sounds beneath my bed always preceded a new nick or blister on Blind Tom's frame. My interest piqued, I had to divine the truth.

  “Blind Tom, was you making all that racket under my room last night?” I asked innocently.

  “Boy, you mind me and do it well,” Blind Tom took a tone with me that I had never heard from him before. It was stern, demanding. It was a mode of speech I had never heard from my mother, whom Blind Tom said spoiled me, who doted or capered whimsically on my every word.

  “That's Old Scratch underneath your floor, and you just keep to your covers when you hear him dancin' ’round.”

  I couldn't believe such a thing! I must confess it frightened me awfully. My mother lost her patience with me that night, as I refused to go to bed after numerous admonitions. She finally carried me to the bed and tucked me in herself, warning me that I'd have more to worry about than a simple spanking should I choose to flee the safety of the cover, she'd leave me for the gators in the swamps, or the brownies in the woods.

  She didn't have to worry. Not two minutes after she left my room, those noises started, and there was no way I was leaving my bunk. I called and called for her, but she figured I was in a spell or crying wolf and knew better than to heed my summons.

  I don't know how long it went on, but after what must have been hours of bed-wetting terror, it was morning. I said nothing at breakfast that day, and my mother looked at me curiously, but went about her errands as normal.

  “Blind Tom,” I asked in awe, noting a pronounced limp in his gait, “what was all that commotion underneath the floor last night?”

  “Dammit boy. I told you to mind your own affairs, didn't I? I said before that's Old Nick down there, and you'd best leave him to his own wickedness!”

  And again that night, my mother ushered m
e to bed though I gave a chase like the dickens. When she finally caught me, I had exhausted myself, and helplessly collapsed in a heap as she deposited me in my bed.

  After her shadow disappeared from the doorway, the sounds started up again, this time sounding like a mad piper playing an infernal tune. Frozen with fear, I started at the ceiling, rigid, lest move too greatly and tumble into Lucifer's hands. Again, I wet myself that night, adamantly determined not to leave my sheets until dawn broke.

  Mamma remarked that I looked sick the next morning, and that I should rest in the dayroom until she returned from Madame Poncelucard's home (upon whose newly engaged daughters she would be calling that day). She told me she would have Blind Tom check on me, to make sure I wanted for nothing at all.

  The day went by in a delirious blur, and sprites cackled at me from the dayroom's long shadows, or so I thought. In the early afternoon, Blind Tom came in to inquire after my wellbeing and I observed in him a distinct favoring of his right arm. It may have been the poor light filtering past the burgundy drapes, but I thought I saw dark blood staining his coat by the dubious arm.

  “Blind Tom,” I begged, and a tremor colored my reedy voice, “do you know who stirred up all that ruckus last night under my floorboards?”

  Blind Tom sighed before answering, tired and old. “That was the Devil, my boy, now never ask after him again.”

  The Devil! Under my mother's house! Unthinkable and yet palpably real came Blind Tom's response. Did he truly expect me to believe that with all his peculiar wounds and exhaustion, it wasn't him down there raising Cain?

  Needless to say, I dreaded the bedtime looming that night, which came mercilessly early with my mother's suspicion of my impending illness. For long hours, I peered at the ceiling, hoping to block out the sounds when they arrived.

  The noises came late that night, and upon their arrival, I had steeled myself with an unyielding resolve. Terrified as I was, I could not abide this vile and mysterious wolf in sheep's clothing working his evil beneath my house. Surely he was down thee preparing some awful spell to vex me with consumption or smallpox or—blindness. How jealous was he that he resented the vigor of a small boy so he could contrive to strip the child of his sight?

  The gorge of my terror rising, it took only the tinny strains of that cursed pipe to drive me from my bed. With the white tails of my nightshirt flapping, I grabbed a candle from the hall table and lit it with the embers of the kitchen cookfire. I bolted into the night from the kitchen door, running around the house to where Blind Tom's cellar door stood. Sure enough, the dreadful piping rose from therein, and I knew that I must disturb his curse or suffer his own bitter fate.

  Throwing open the door, I shrieked “Blind Tom! Break your spell!” and leapt into the poorly lit rocky bowels of my mother's house, candle guttering and almost setting my nightshirt aflame.

  There before me stood Blind Tom, shocked at my arrival. As he turned to me—an action that suggested he once had sight—I saw his lips, split and bloody around a horrid hornpipe, forcing out the tune as sweat speckled his forehead and stained the front of his jacket.

  Just then I heard a deep rumbling, and Blind Tom whipped back around too late. An invisible force wracked his body and his head snapped back with violence. Blind Tom crumpled to the ground, dropping the pipe and coughing out one final gout of sticky blood, rasping, “Damn you boy. I told you to stay back. Now he's loose.”

  In shock, I stared down at him, but looked up as the crumbling sound formed the ominous word: “Tomorrow.”

  There, in the dim far corner of the room, stood a dead man wearing a black robe or cowl. His vicious mouth curved into a horribly satisfied smile. He spoke to me, and his voice was like steel dragged over a rock. “Thank you, boy. I have work to do and men to see.” That awful apparition faded into nothing, leaving a room swathed in shadow and heavy air.

  It was then that I fled from the storm cellar, running north until I collapsed and never looking behind me. For days, every bit of energy I could muster served to propel me further and further from that hellish place. Even after I crawled out of my exhausted, starved mania and into whatever town it was I never spoke another word. And I have never returned to my mother's house, where the dead walk and only terrible night-songs can keep them at bay.

  “What is this? Where’d it come from?” Marcia asked Jake, her eyes wide and her words quick. “Who gave it to you? Did they see anything that this paper describes?”

  “Damn, slow down.” Jake pushed himself away from the table a bit, as if to calm the conversation with distance. “More important is, do you want it? And what can you pay me to make it worth me giving it to you?”

  Marcia, no stranger to dealing with Kindred, opened the bidding low—cash was disposable, especially to the Giovanni. “I’ll give you six thousand for it, as long as you answer the rest of my questions. I’ve got it here, in New Orleans, cash, that you can have tonight.”

  “Six large for some dead man’s diary? Sounds pretty steep. Must be worth something. I wonder what else you have?” Doing his part to further the endless dance of the Jyhad, no matter how small the individual motion, Jake held out.

  “My most immediate offer is the cash. Sixty-five hundred, tonight.” Marcia countered.

  “Tell you what, sister. I don’t need money. I’ll give you the papers. I’ll even give you the background. But you owe me. I can call on you once, at any time, for a small favor. It won’t necessarily require that you be here, but you’ll have to help me when I need it.” Marcia pretended to mull it over for a minute. Jake wanted some sort of minor boon, the kind of promise the Camarilla thrived on. Small price to pay, if this was at least a recent and reliable record that the ancient killer she sought had once made its refuge here. “Deal,” she said.

  “Sweet,” Jake quipped as they shook hands. “Now what else you need to know?”

  “Well, first of all, what is this? Is it a piece of something larger?”

  “No, it’s a journal entry someone I know found in a storm cellar of one of the houses by the swamps. The rest of the papers in the satchel were just records—finances, birth certificates, deeds that had been voided and so on. It didn’t sound like you were looking for any of that.”

  “No, I’m not. I just need locations—where was this?”

  “Within twenty miles of here, I’d say. I can get you there.”

  “Was there anything else in the cellar? Any makeshift tombs or anything like that?”

  “Jesus, keep your voice down. These people are drunk, not stupid. And no, the place was picked clean. It’s been deserted for about forty years—someone bought the estate a while back for pennies on the dollar, but no one’s moved in since.”

  Marcia looked incredulous. “How can you have a cellar in a swamp?” She raised one eyebrow, letting Jake know that she was hoping to catch him in a lie. It would be easy to fabricate this sort of thing; if she found out that it was false, he wouldn’t be any worse for the effort, and if she never found out, she’d have repaid her favor for nothing.

  “The house was built over a grotto. The storm cellar’s a natural rock cave that’s above the water table. They just built a storm door over the cave mouth and put the house right next to it. I think there’s a mention of the rock walls in the journal itself.”

  “Okay, so how do we know that this house is the one in the journal? It says he never went back.

  “Look at the back side of the last page—this thing was sent as a letter, back to the house itself. And I did a bit of research, finding the name Poncelucard on a property title for a piece of real estate about half a night’s walk away. The title was dated back to 1860, which is presumably when the Poncelucards bought their house. Also, and I don’t mind praising my own cleverness here, the house where this was found has a rotten set of burgundy curtains in what might have been the dayroom. That doesn’t prove anything in and of itself, but it’s a minor detail that matches.”

  “So, you found this at the mans
ion?” Marcia continued.

  “No, someone I know did. I just checked out the details afterward. I have to stand behind my merchandise, don’t you know.” Jake smiled, which Marcia returned demurely.

  “Well, I’ll respect your secrecy.”

  “You don’t want to know if I made any copies?”

  “I don’t care if you did.”

  “And you don’t want to see the house?”

  “I have the address.” Marcia pointed to the back of the last page.

  “So, we’re good on the favor.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “We are, indeed.”

  “Good luck, then,” Jake remarked, without a hint of a smile. “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

  “Thanks, Jake. I’ll be making my usual exit.” Jake rolled his eyes as Marcia rose, “accidentally” knocking over her drink so no one would see she hadn’t touched it. She barked, “And I never want to see you again!” before storming out of Laffitte’s, not loud enough to make a huge spectacle, but with enough drama to convince all the drunks that she and her “boyfriend” had had a falling out.

  A red-faced man at the table behind him tapped Jake on the shoulder. “Aren’t you going to go after her?”

  Jake shook his head without looking at his commiserator. “No, we’re done. I’ve seen her for the last time.” He wondered if it would prove to be so.

  Friday, 23 July 1999, 12:27 AM

  The Tabernacle

  Atlanta, Georgia

  An addled youth in an orange shirt and oversized pants, obviously under the influence of some hallucinatory demon, staggered past the bar. He shouted something at one of his group of friends, which took the other fellow by surprise, who in turn gave an “Oh, my God” look to another member of the group before finishing what remained of his plastic bottle of beer in one enormous gulp.

  Isabel Giovanni and Marcia Gibbert exchanged knowing glances—should either of them need vitae before the evening’s close, it would be ready for the taking. Of course, it would also likely be laced with no end of designer chemicals and more organic substances. They had both affected the clothing styles of the assembled concert-goers: straight-legged khakis far too large for them and tiny T-shirts that clung to their torsos. Marcia had braided her kinky hair into cornrows; Isabel pulled her straight, black tresses into a pair of ponytails. They blended into the crowd perfectly.