The Perils of Effrijim

by Katie MacAlister

  He leaned closer, the stale odor of cigarette smoke clinging to him, making my nose wrinkle. “And you don’t fear them?”

  I shook my head again, edging even further away.

  His dark eyes lit for a moment with a deep red light, making him suddenly look a whole lot more ominous than a simple customs inspector. “You should,” he said, then turned away, gesturing the next person in line to his table.

  “Hoo, I guess there’re weirdoes all over the world,” I mumbled to myself as I pushed my way through the crowd toward the exit, careful to keep both hands on the handle of the black case. My clothing and personal items I could afford to lose, but this job was last chance—my only chance of getting ahead since the dot.com I owned went belly up. If I messed this up, I’d be jobless again. With no unemployment benefits left, and a beach bum to support, I had to have work, something that would allow me to live while paying Alan the huge wad of money the court decided I owed him.

  Men. Bah!

  It took me another fifteen minutes to figure out the signs in the airport concourses and find where the taxis were. Beth, Uncle Damian’s secretary, said Orly had signs in English, but Beth lied—not only was there no English, nothing I saw written on the signs matched the handy little phrases in the French for Francophobes book I had bought to get me through the next day and a half.

  ”Um...bonjour,” I said to a bored-looking taxi driver who stood leaning on his car, picking at his teeth. “Parlez-vous Anglais?”

  “Non,” he said without stopping the teeth picking.

  “Oh. Um. Do you know if any of the other taxi drivers parlez Anglais? Knowez-vous if le taxi drivers parlez Anglais?”

  He gave me a look that should have shamed me, but I was beyond being ashamed of going to France without knowing a single word of French except what I found in the guidebook. I had a job to do, I just wanted it done.

  “Look, I’m doing the best I can, OK? I want to go to the Rue...oh, just a sec, let me look in the book...” I hugged the black case to my chest with one arm while I rooted around in my bag for the French guide. “Je veux aller à la Rue Sang d'Innocents.“

  The taxi driver stopped picking his teeth to grimace. “That is the worst French I have ever heard, and I have heard much bad French.”

  “You do speak English!” I said, slamming my guide shut. “You said you didn’t! And I can’t help it if what I said was wrong, that’s what the book said.”

  “It wasn’t much wrong, but your accent...” he shuddered delicately, then with a sweeping bow, opened the door to his taxi. “Very well, I will take you to the Rue Sang d'Innocents, but it will cost you.”

  “How much?” I asked as I slid into the back seat, still clutching my case. I had the euros Uncle Damian had given me, but I knew they were only enough to cover my hotel bill for the night, two meals, and minor incidentals like the taxi rides.

  The taxi driver tossed my bag into the other side and got into the front seat. “The journey will cost you thirty-six euros, but the ride will cost you more.”

  “Huh?”

  He smiled at me in his rear view mirror. “By the time we arrive at the Rue Sang d'Innocents, you will know how to say three things in French. With those three things, you will be able to go anywhere in Paris.”

  I agreed to his terms, and since I was early for my appointment with Madame Deauxville, had him wait for me while I ran into the hotel where Beth had booked me. I checked in, dropped my bag on the bed, pulled a comb through my curls so I looked less like a crazed woman and more like a professional courier, and dashed back downstairs to where Rene and his taxi were waiting for me.

  At five minutes to five the taxi pulled up next to a six story cream-colored building with high arched doorways and windows graced by intricate black metal grills.

  “Wow,” I breathed as I leaned out of the window to peer up at the house. “What a gorgeous building. It looks so...French!”

  Rene reached backwards through his window and opened my door. I grabbed my things and got out onto the cobblestone street, my mouth still hanging open as I stared up at the house.

  “You see that all the houses here are old mansions. It is a very exclusive neighborhood. Ile Saint-Louis itself is only six blocks long and two blocks wide. And now, you will pay me exactly thirty-six euros, and recite for me please the phrases I have taught you.”

  I dragged my eyes off the house and smiled as I handed Rene his money. “If someone annoys me, I say voulez-vous cesser de me cracher dessus pendant que vous parlez.”

  “Will you stop spitting on me while you are speaking,” Rene translated with a nod.

  “And if I need help with anything, I say j'ai une grenouille dans mon bidet.”

  “I have a frog in my bidet. Yes, very good. And the last one?”

  “The last I should reserve for any guy who hits on me when I don’t want him to—t'as une tête a faire sauter les plaques d'egouts.”

  “You have a face that would blow off the cover of a manhole. Oui, tres bon. You will do. And for your meeting with the important lady, bon chance, eh?”

  “Thanks, Rene. I appreciate the lessons. You just never know when you need to tell someone there’s an amphibian in your bidet.”

  “One moment, I have something for you.” He rustled around in a small brown bag for a moment, then pulled out a battered card and handed it to me with the air of someone presenting an object of great value. “I am available for hire as a driver. You pay me, I drive you around Paris, show you all of the sites you must see. You can call me on my mobile number anytime.”

  “Thanks. I don’t know that I’ll be in Paris long enough for a chauffeur to drive me around, but if I ever need a driver, you’ll be the one I call.” I saluted him with the card, then tucked it away in my neck pouch.

  He drove off with a friendly wave and a faint puff of black exhaust. I turned back to the impressive building, squared my shoulders, and after a quick look around to make sure no one was watching me, stepped into the doorway to press the buzzer labeled Deauxville.

  “I am confident,” I muttered to myself. “I am a professional. I know exactly what I am doing. I am not at all freaked out by being in a different country where the only thing I know how to do is complain about frogs and insult people. I am a cool, calm, and collected. I am...not being answered.”

  I buzzed again. Nothing happened. A quick glance at my watch confirmed that I was two minutes early. Surely Madame Deauxville was in?

  I buzzed once more, leaning on the buzzer this time. I tried putting my ear to the door, but couldn’t hear anything. A glance at the window showed me why—the walls of the building looked to be at least three feet thick.

  “Well, hell,” I swore, stepping back so I could look up at the building. I knew from the instructions Uncle Damian had given me that Madame Deauxville was on the second floor. The red and cream drapes visible through the slightly opened windows didn’t move at all. Nothing moved anywhere on the second floor...or on any of the floors, for that matter. Since it was a pleasant June evening, I expected people to be arriving home, bustling around doing their evening shopping, strolling down the street, gazing upon the Seine, etc., but there was no movement at all in the house.

  I looked down the street, the hairs on the back of my neck slowly standing on end. There was no movement on the street either. No people, no cars, no birds...nothing. Not even a flower bobbed in the slight breeze from the river. I looked behind me. The cross street was the Rue Saint-Louis en l'Ile, a busy street with stores and restaurants, and lots of shops. It had taken Rene ten minutes to navigate a couple of blocks because the traffic and shoppers were so dense, but where I stood the noise of said traffic and shoppers was oddly filtered, as if the whole of Rue Sang d'Innocents was swathed in cotton wool, leaving it an oasis of stillness and silence in a city known for its liveliness.

  “The word creepy doesn’t even begin to cover the situation,” I said aloud, just to hear something. Unease rippled through me as I held my cas
e tightly, giving Madame Deauxville’s bell one more long ring. The skin on the back of my neck tightened even more as I noticed that the door to the building wasn’t shut properly.

  “Someone must have been in a rush to leave this morning,” I told the door, trying to tamp down on the major case of the willies the silent street was giving me. “Someone was just late for work, and they didn’t quite close the door. That’s all. There’s nothing foreboding in a door that hasn’t been shut all the way. There’s nothing eerie in that at all. There’s nothing creepy about a street...oh, blast. Hello?” I pushed the door open and took a step into a tiny hall. The entrance narrowed into a dark passage beyond a brown-paneled stairway that led upwards. “Anyone here? I’m looking for Madame Deauxville. Hellooooooo?”

  I expected the last notes of my hello to echo up the stairwell, but strangely, my words were muffled, as if they had been absorbed into the walls, filtered by the same strange effect that kept the street outside as quiet as a tomb.

  “I would have to think of a tomb,” I grumbled to myself as I carefully closed the door behind me, turning to start up the stairs to the second floor. “There are times when it absolutely does not pay to have a good imagination.”

  There were two doors in the tiny hall stretching the length of the second-floor stairs. One bore a silver plate with the word Deauxville written on it in a fancy script that screamed expensive. The other door, I assumed, was a second entrance to the apartment. I stepped up to the main door, one arm holding the case tight to my chest, the other upraised to knock. Just as my knuckles were about to touch the glossy oak of the door, a wave of dread and foreboding, a sense of something being very, very wrong swept over me. The sensation was so strong I stepped backwards until the coolness of the paneling seeped through the thin cotton of my dress. I clutched the case and struggled to breathe, my chest tight with dread. The feeling of unease that had set in as soon as Rene left swelled into something much more frightening, leaving me with goose bumps on my arms, and a warning voice in my head shrieking at me to leave the building that very second, if not sooner.

  Something horrible had been in that apartment. Something...unnatural.

  “I am confident,” I ground out through my teeth, and forced my feet forward to the door. “It’s just an eccentric collector, nothing evil. There is nothing to be afraid of. I am a professional. I can do this.”

  The door swung open at the first brush of my hand against it.

  I stood frozen in the doorway, the skin on my back crawling with horror as I looked down the short hall into what must be the living room of the apartment. Tiny little motes of dust danced lazily in the late afternoon sunshine that streamed through the tall floor-to-ceiling arched windows, spilling in a ruby pool on a carpet of deeper red. A bouquet of fresh flowers sat on an antique table between two of the windows, the sharp scent of them detectable even from where I stood. The ceilings were high, cream-colored to compliment the robin’s egg blue walls, the edges scalloped with intricate molding. Along one wall I could see a highly polished antique desk, with a red upholstered matching chair sitting before it at an angle, as if its occupant had arisen just a moment before.

  Everything was lovely, beautiful, expensive, just exactly what I expected in the apartment of a rich woman who lived in an exclusive area of Paris.

  Everything except the body, that is. Suspended from a chandelier, a woman’s body was doubled over, hanging from her hands tied behind her back, her body swinging slightly above a black circle of ash that had been drawn on the lovely red carpet, a circle inscribed with twelve symbols. The dead woman was Madame Deauxville, of that I was sure.

  “J'ai une grenouille dans mon bidet,” I said, and wished fervently that the worst of my problems were frogs.

  MORE ABOUT THE BOOK

  Cat Got Your Tongue was written for the My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon anthology, and featured two characters from my Dark Ones Series. The story plot came about when readers of A Girl’s Guide to Vampires, and Sex and the Single Vampire noticed just how skittish one of the characters, Raphael St. John, was whenever someone mentioned his golden eyes. Readers were convinced that Something Was Up, and I was only too happy to oblige them by writing the story of just why Raphael got a bit weird when paranormal things were mentioned.

  CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE?

  Chapter One

  “It wasn’t until the seventeenth century, though, that life at Fyfe Castle took a dark turn.”

  “It did?” I glanced around the room. It was pretty dark even though the sun hadn’t yet set, shadows seemingly smudged into the vast grey stone walls of the castle. Narrow window slits reluctantly allowed thin rays of Scottish sunlight to shoulder its way into the passage, but provided less illumination than the somewhat tattered electric candles which had been screwed into the stone wall. “Darker than this, you mean?”

  The woman leading the way paused to look over her shoulder, her eyebrows raised. To be honest, I was encouraging her to talk just because her lilting Scottish accent sounded so delicious to my American ears. “Castle Fyfe has always had a dark and mysterious past. But when the seventh laird took ownership, all who lived here learned what fear truly was. He had a terrible temper, did Alec Summerton...Sir Alec he was then, later the earl of Seaton.”

  “That’s the ghost you mentioned earlier?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows (this always makes me think of Groucho Marx, and while it works well for him, it’s very jarring when a woman tries it.) and tossing a lascivious grin to the man behind me.

  Raphael rolled his eyes (this is one of those phrases that’s become rather awkward from overuse), and hoisted up the two suitcases, following as Fiona the castle hotelier started up the famed Fyfe staircase.

  “Oh, no, the ghost isn’t Sir Alec, although some say he does haunt the lower levels of the castle. Mind the ceiling just here, won’t you, Mr. St. John? It’s been the bane of many a tall man such as yourself. No, it isn’t Sir Alec who is the best known ghost here, Mrs. St. John—it’s his wife, Lily Summerton.”

  Raphael ducked to avoid a low beam as we marched up the stone staircase. Although I wasn’t as tall as he was, at roughly six feet in height, even I had to bob my head to get through without braining myself. “Don’t tell me—she’s the Grey Lady?”

  “Green, not grey,” Fiona answered with a roll of her Rs. She paused and gestured vaguely around. “This staircase was built in the early seventeen hundreds, in case you were wondering. It’s known throughout Scotland as the finest example of its kind.”

  “I can see why.” I waited until she continued up the stairs before waggling my eyebrows again at my husband. It had been a long train ride up to Scotland, and I was anxious to get to our room. “So, this ghost haunts the room we’re staying in? Does she do anything in particular, or just float around and wring her hands while moaning about her lost love?”

  “On the contrary—she says nothing, just appears briefly before people, gives them a searching glance, then sighs sadly, as if disappointed, and disappears into nothing.”

  “Sounds like a typical moody woman,” Raphael muttered.

  “Hush, male of the species. This is all very fascinating,” I said, hoping Fiona would continue.

  “Here’s your suite.” She threw open a modern-looking wooden door and escorted us into a bright room. “This was the laird’s private suite. The later lairds, that is. It used to be Lily Summerton’s room, in fact. The original laird’s room was on the floor below -, but later lairds had the room moved up after Sir Alec died. When the last Lord Seaton bequeathed the castle to the National Trust, it was decided to make his rooms available to the public. You’ll have all the privacy you want, since these are the only rooms we let. The caretaker will be here, though, in case of emergency. His office is just off the tearoom, on the ground floor. The toilet is through that door. This is the sitting room, and to the right is the bedroom. I’ll just make sure everything is proper...”

  “Wow,” I said, wide-eyed as I took in the
heady scent of beeswax and antiques. The room was furnished as if the owner of a hundred years past had just stepped out of the room, with a few discreet nods to technology.

  “Very nice,” Raphael said, setting down the suitcases. “Worthy of a honeymoon?”

  “Oh, yes. You think this stuff is real?” I asked in a low voice as I ran my fingers along the back of a rosewood settee upholstered in blue and green crushed velvet.

  “At the prices they’re charging? They’d better be.”

  “Good thing we decided to leave the kidlet with Roxy, then. I’d hate to see what Zoe could do to this lovely room. Maybe I should just call to check—”

  Raphael stopped me before I could pull my cell phone from my purse. “You called half an hour ago, Joy. I can’t imagine that even Zoe could get into trouble that quickly.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  His lips curved in a rueful smile. “Well, all right, I can imagine it, but I’m sure Roxy has her well bribed with all sorts of sweets and promises of visits to the zoo for her to be behaving badly.”

  “I suppose,” I said slowly, quelling maternal worry.

  “You’re acting more like a worried mum than a blushing bride,” my husband said.

  “That’s because I’ve been a mother for two years and a bride for less than a day. I know, I know, it’s just separation anxiety, and it’s perfectly normal. I’ve already had the lecture from Roxy, Bob. You don’t need to fire one up as well.”

  “Bob?” Fiona emerged from the bedroom, frowning as she glanced at a card in her hand. “Has there been a mistake somewhere? I had you down as Mr. and Mrs. Raphael St. John, here for a honeymoon visit of a week. Is that not right?”

  “Yes, it’s right," I said, laughing a little as I grabbed my suitcase and took it into the bedroom. I whistled at the sight of the giant four-poster bed, determined to put my worry behind me.

  “Bob is a nickname,” Raphael told her. “Joy’s a bit rattled because it’s our first time away from our daughter. She’s just two years old.”