The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  “Nice to meet you, Cian,” Pearl offered.

  Cian gave her a bare nod. Before he had to say anything, though, Harry had reached them. He held four metal plates, each no longer than Cian’s thumb, hanging from individual wires. Freddy’s eyes brightened, and he took the plates when Harry offered them and moved a few paces away to study them. Cian watched him carefully.

  He didn’t like the Hun. Not one bit.

  “I see you’ve met Freddy,” Harry said, as though reading the expression on Cian’s face. Harry laughed, clapped Cian on the shoulder, and said, “Don’t worry. He grows on you.” Then Harry turned to Irene, gave a huge smile, and held out his hand. “Henry Witte, although everyone calls me Harry.”

  “Irene Lovell.”

  It took Cian a moment to realize Irene was smiling. Smiling. And she hadn’t let go of Harry’s hand.

  Cian was fairly sure she wouldn’t have objected to having Harry Witte kiss her hand the way the Hun had. He snorted and caught Pearl looking at him. There was something in her face, hidden as soon as he looked at her. Wistfulness? Loss?

  Cian didn’t care.

  “Thank you for your help,” Cian said.

  Harry finally let go of Irene’s hand, although his smile hadn’t faded. “Happy to help. Golems aren’t so bad once you know the trick. Those little plates are hidden in the back of the neck. You have to cut them free. Piece of cake.”

  “So he says,” Pearl said. “Did that one break any ribs when it got you? Or will you just be bruised for the next pair of weeks?”

  Harry probed his chest and side, winced, and his smile slipped. “My own fault. I was careless.”

  “You’re hurt,” Irene exclaimed. She stepped forward, closer to Harry, and held out one hand. “I didn’t—oh, this is all our fault.”

  “Of course he’s hurt,” Cian said. “Pearl just pointed it out.”

  Harry laughed, closed one hand over Irene’s, and then let go. “I’m fine, honestly. Thank you, though.”

  And there it was again, that flicker of something on Pearl’s face. Cian wasn’t sure what it was. But he knew what he was feeling. It was the strong desire to knock some of Harry Witte’s perfectly white teeth loose.

  “Marie-Thérèse,” Harry said, moving around Irene to stare at the ghost. “We’ve had words about this before. I heard you offering this woman a deal. You know what I told you the last time I was here.”

  “You’ve made a name for yourself, Henry Witte,” Marie-Thérèse said. “Will you test me tonight?”

  “I’ll rip you to shreds and send you howling back to hell.”

  “You’re hurt, and tired, and you have all these others to protect. And I am not one of those wisps of thought and memory that you pride yourself on putting to rest.”

  Harry drew himself up, straightened his coat, and said, “Freddy.”

  The Hun glanced up from his examination of the metal plates. When he saw Harry and Marie-Thérèse, he tucked the plates away and walked over to join Harry.

  “Against all three of us, Marie-Thérèse?” Harry asked. “Pearl knows enough now.”

  Waving one hand, Marie-Thérèse floated into the air. “Enough. We have no quarrel tonight, Henry. I have a claim on the girl and the right to make her an offer.”

  Harry studied Irene for a moment.

  “What does she mean?” Cian said to Pearl.

  Pearl shrugged.

  “Very well,” Harry said. “Goodnight, Marie-Thérèse.”

  Marie-Thérèse faded like dust caught in sunlight.

  Harry motioned them towards the door, and as they reached the threshold, Marie-Thérèse’s voice caught them in a blast of arctic chill.

  “The offer still stands, my darling girl.”

  Irene was pale as the moon.

  When they were outside, Harry forced the door shut, clapped his hands, and said, “Who feels like a bite to eat?”

  Irene followed her rescuers along the darkened streets of St. Louis. The cold had settled into her ears and, combined with exhaustion and hunger, made her head feel like drum. In her mind, she reviewed the evening, projecting scenes against the sheets of shadowed houses. The men in the trench coats—golems, her brain said—and then that poor man being ripped apart in the bar, and the spiders, and the church. Marie-Thérèse leaning forward, whispering, the words as flat and still as the church’s air.

  Irene pushed away the last bit. If she never saw any of those things—golems, or massive spiders, or Marie-Thérèse—again, she would live and die a happy woman. Especially Marie-Thérèse.

  Cian glanced over at her. “Ok?”

  She nodded.

  Ahead of them, their rescuers walked together. Pearl looked back occasionally, to make sure they were still following, but otherwise the three were engaged in a quiet conversation. Cian tilted his head at them and said, “We should go. While they’re too busy to notice us.”

  “What? Why?”

  “They’re dangerous. You saw them back there.”

  “They saved us.”

  “Yes, they did. Why?”

  “Because they’re decent people.”

  Cian raised an eyebrow. It made him look even more of a dolt. “And how did they know we needed help? We were in a church in the middle of the night?”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you’ve been off your rocker all night and you’re not thinking clearly now. I don’t trust them. Especially not Harry.”

  Irene smiled. “You’re jealous.”

  “No.”

  “You are. I can see it in your face.”

  “You’ve spent half the night laughing like a girl in a fun house, and the other night frozen so you could barely walk. Your judgment might be in question.”

  Irene’s smile dropped. “And why don’t you trust them, besides their timing?”

  For almost half a block, Cian said nothing. Then, “He reminds me of someone I knew.”

  “You’re worse than a fool,” Irene said. “And I know a jealous man when I see one.”

  She picked up her pace and left Cian straggling behind. As she came up beside Harry, the conversation ended up. Irene slipped her arm through Harry’s, smiled up at him, and said, “You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you, darling? I’m dying.”

  Harry smiled back at her. It was the kind of smile any woman would have given her right eye for: bright and warm and genuine. The face behind that smile was equally appealing, handsome and dark-eyed, with the fine-boned, effortless good looks of an English aristocrat. He shook his head. “Sorry, not a single one.”

  “Drat.”

  “Miss,” the awful old Hun said. He took a silver cigarette case out of his pocket and passed it to her. “I am never without them.”

  Irene took the case, helped herself to a cigarette, and then paused while the Hun lighted it for her. For a moment, she feared he would try to kiss her hand again—those cold, withered lips against her flesh—but instead he gave a short, stiff bow, and they resumed walking. Irene offered a small smile and took a long, relieved draw on the cigarette. The flare of red at the tip seemed like the last spark of warmth in the world.

  She turned her head, breathed out a line of smoke and freezing breath, and smirked when she caught Cian’s eye.

  So. He was still there. Shuffling along, the big brute. He had a frown on his face a mile wide. Irene waved the cigarette. Cian’s frown deepened.

  A few blocks later, Harry let them into a modest brick building and led them up a flight of stairs. On the third floor, they left the stairwell, waited for Harry to unlock a door, and entered a warm, dark room that smelled of wood polish. Gaslights flickered to life a moment later. It was a small parlor, with a sofa and a pair of upholstered chairs. A few tasteful paintings—river landscapes, and one that might have been of a lake, or perhaps the sea—hung around the room, and books lined a pair of shelves. Everything bore the stamp of good money and good breeding.

  “Please sit down,” Harry sa
id. “I’ll get us something.”

  Pearl and Irene took the sofa, while Freddy sat in one of the chairs. Cian lingered near the door with a face like a thundercloud. Irene didn’t bother looking at him, although she could tell he was trying to meet her eyes.

  He had said her judgment was in question. Irene squeezed the butt of the cigarette in her fingers and wished she had her hands around Cian’s neck instead.

  “This is a lovely apartment,” Irene said to Pearl. “You’ll have to tell me where you found those paintings.”

  A faint smile creased Pearl’s mouth. “I don’t live here. This is Harry’s apartment.”

  Irene felt a surge of something. Satisfaction? Triumph? She leaned back into the sofa, studying the room anew.

  “He has excellent taste.”

  “He does indeed,” Pearl said. Her tone was neutral, but her eyes—her eyes were the eyes of a woman in love. “Harry is excellent at everything he sets his hand to.”

  “Truly?” Irene asked. “Freddy—it is Freddy, isn’t it?”

  “I prefer Friedrich, miss.”

  “Friedrich, how do you know Harry?”

  The old Hun rotated thin shoulders. “We met several years ago. I was investigating a cult operating in a village northeast of here. At the time, it was part of my research. You may have heard of some of my books, perhaps? Parting the Golden Branches, or The Cup and the Spear in Norse Fertility Rites?”

  Irene shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Of course,” Friedrich said. “Of course.”

  “Freddy is a renowned scholar,” Pearl said. “His work is often cited with Frazer and Malinowski.”

  Irene nodded and made a polite sound of appreciation, but the names meant nothing to her. Friedrich, on the other hand, stiffened in his chair. His wrinkled cheeks reddened. “Frazer,” he said. “Malinowski. Blind, self-congratulatory fools. Both of them. Their acclaim is based on an admittedly impressive accumulation of data. But where is the spark? Where are the Muses in their work? Where is the passion, or the madness?”

  “Madness?” Cian said. He still lurked by the door.

  “At its roots, all great intellectual work is tied to madness,” Friedrich said. “To see something no one else has seen before—to see all the new angles and hidden sides of the world—that is true genius.”

  Cian grunted.

  Friedrich gave Cian a long, dark look and then set about pulling off his coat. Pearl gave Irene a slow wink.

  Irene smiled in spite of herself.

  Harry returned with a tray loaded with cheese and bread and slices of roast beef. He set the tray down, said, “Bon appétit,” and disappeared again. A moment later he came with a second tray, a steaming kettle, several mugs, and a bottle of whiskey.

  “For my Irish friend,” he said, lifting the bottle and gesturing in Cian’s direction. “This is an Old Bushmills, straight from your motherland.”

  Cian stayed by the door. His face could have broken rocks.

  Irene helped herself to a sandwich and did nothing to hide her general satisfaction.

  Eventually, though, Harry’s persistent good cheer won Cian over, and he joined them—although not graciously. When they’d all eaten, and the men had relaxed with their drinks, Irene felt warm from head to toe, exhilarated, and floating in a cloud of happy exhaustion.

  “What in the world was all of that?” Irene asked. “Tonight, I mean. How did you know where we were? And what we saw—that woman in the church, those men who attacked us—was it real?”

  Her words dispersed the fragments of warmth and good cheer. Friedrich hunkered into his chair, his thin face filled with new wrinkles, and Pearl played with her long, dark hair. Only Harry seemed unmoved. He propped that very handsome face on one hand and studied Irene for a moment.

  “It was real. Can you believe that?”

  Before Irene could answer, Cian slammed his glass down and said, “Now hold on. That girl was scared to death tonight. We both were. I’m not afraid to say that. I’ve been to war, and I’ve been in a lot of rough places, but nothing came close to this. But frightened or not, I know what I was dealing with: bootleggers and mick gangs, no matter what kind of tricks they have. If you start telling this girl all those things were real, you’re liable to rattle her for good.”

  The silence lasted a moment. And then Irene said, “I am not a girl. And I don’t need you to talk for me.”

  Cian’s cheeks blazed.

  “I believe you,” Irene said. “That woman, she was a ghost? Who was she?”

  Harry nodded. “She was a ghost. Her name—”

  “This is madness,” Cian said. He got to his feet. “I’m thankful for your help, but I won’t sit here and listen to lies, and I won’t let you shake Irene up. Come on, Irene. Let’s go.”

  “It’s true,” Pearl said. She looked up and met Cian’s gaze and repeated, “It’s true. All of it.”

  “Come on, Irene,” Cian said.

  “No. I’m staying.”

  For a moment, she thought he would drag her from the apartment, but instead he just snorted and started for the door. “My thanks again,” he said and slammed the door behind him.

  Pearl reached over and patted Irene’s shoulder, and Irene let out a laugh that, even to her, sounded brittle. “I scarcely know him,” Irene said. “I—” She paused, fumbled. “I scarcely know him at all.”

  “How did you meet?” Pearl asked.

  “The truth,” Harry said. “I’m sorry, Miss Lovell, but we need to know why they were after you.”

  And that, of course, meant she had to go all the way back to the beginning. When she had finished, the three exchanged glances, and Pearl said, “We didn’t know it was Seamus, but it fits the pattern.”

  “And the Prohibition agent?” Harry said. He ran a hand through his hair and poured himself another finger of whiskey.

  “I think I have it,” Pearl said. “Give me a bit more time.”

  “What? What do you have?” Irene asked.

  It was Harry who responded. “For weeks now—”

  “Months,” interrupted Friedrich.

  “Months,” Harry said, “we’ve known that someone was trafficking in cult objects. Primarily Indian, although there were pieces from all over Europe and even a few from the Levant. At first, small things—trinkets and rings, statuettes, prayer mats. Then, more valuable items, like rare books, sacrificial implements, vessels. We couldn’t trace any of our thefts to the usual suspects, so we assumed it was someone new.”

  “Seamus,” Pearl said, picking up the thread. “We knew it was someone who had hands all over the city, but we didn’t know who. Tonight, we heard that a group of Children was trying to intercept the delivery of an ancient artifact that had recently arrived in St. Louis. That’s how we found you—we were tracking the Children, and they led us to you.”

  “But why?” Irene said. “What do I have—” She stopped. “The delivery.”

  “So it seems,” Pearl said. “Although why Seamus would entrust this artifact to your father remains a mystery, unless you can provide some answers.”

  Irene shook her head. “Why would Seamus even want these things?”

  “We have no idea. Such artifacts are dangerous on their own, but they have no true power unless they’re in the hands of someone who has delved deeply into cultic practices. If Seamus had been dabbling in cultic magic, I think we would have noticed him before now.”

  “Dangerous?” Irene said. “How? Murder and the like? Human sacrifice?”

  Friedrich snorted, but his features softened when Irene looked at him. “My apologies. It’s just that so often, people assume that cultists are nothing more than simpletons, deluded rustics, perhaps the weak-blooded dregs of centuries of intermarrying. When people hear of satanic worship, of dark magic, they think of witchcraft in distant forest glades, or in the teepees of savages. They don’t realize that there is a great difference between the poor fools who light candles on the Black Sabbath and the Childr
en.”

  For a moment, Irene didn’t know how to respond. Then she laughed. “You’re not serious, though? Dark magic and secret cults? You don’t really believe all this.”

  “You already said you believed in what you saw tonight,” Harry said.

  “Yes, and I do. Those men, I know there was something strange about them. I saw what they did. And the spiders, of course. But those things can be explained. They aren’t—they aren’t—”

  “I think we’ve reached the end of this conversation,” Harry said.

  Friedrich, however, leaned forward in his chair and said, “You make a grave mistake, miss, to say that those things were men. They are no more men than a statue, or an automaton, or one of Henry Ford’s contraptions. They are the product of sorcery, clay given breath and life, and they are the work of the Children.”

  “What are these children?” Irene asked.

  “That’s enough, Freddy,” Harry said.

  “The Children of the Therkenstrind,” Friedrich said. “That is what they call themselves. That is how they were known to the Angles, for long dark centuries, when the light of Christ was nothing more than a candle on a sea of endless night.”

  “Enough, Freddy,” Harry said. “I said enough.”

  “No,” Irene said. “I want to hear more.”

  Harry stood, fetched his coat and hers, and shook his head. “You don’t need to know more.” A smile flickered on his face. “You wouldn’t sleep a wink if you did. It’s better for all this way. You go home, go about your life, and don’t look back on tonight if you can help it.” With another, more confident smile, he held up her coat.

  Irene slid her arms into the coat, buttoned it up, and said, “Thank you for everything.”

  “I’ll see you home,” Harry said. “Now that your companion has left you.”

  “He was not my companion,” Irene said. She offered Harry a chilly smile, squeezed Pearl’s fingers, and retreated from Friedrich with a quick nod before the Hun could kiss her hand again. Then she moved to the door. When Harry joined her, she shook her head.