An Affair of Sorcerers

by George C. Chesbro

  There was nothing I could do there. Covering my mouth and nose with a handkerchief, wincing against the furnace heat, I stood at the entrance to the bedroom and gazed in horror at the bed, which had become a funeral pyre. The naked, shriveling body of Frank Marlowe was barely discernible inside a deadly ring of greenish-white fire that was burning too bright, too steady, to be a normal blaze. It was a chemical fire.

  Back out in the hall, I checked Kathy’s vital signs again. They remained steady, but her eyes, when I lifted her lids, were glassy and unseeing. I shouted at one of the stunned onlookers to keep everybody away from her, then sprinted back to my apartment and threw on some clothes. The fire department still hadn’t arrived by the time I got back. Ambulance service being what it is in New York City, I picked Kathy up in my arms and carried her down to the underground parking garage. I laid her across the back seat of my Volkswagen, then raced to the university Medical Center, horn blaring all the way. She was immediately admitted through Emergency, and I nervously sat down to wait.

  A few hours later a young black doctor emerged from the inner sanctum. “Excuse me, Doctor,” I said, grabbing his sleeve. “How’s the little girl? Kathy Marlowe?”

  The doctor was frail and walked with a slight limp. He had thick, curly black hair and large brownish-black eyes that weren’t yet glazed over by the endless pain one encounters in a New York City hospital. His flesh tone was a glistening ebony. The name tag on his white smock identified him as Dr. Joshua Greene. At the moment, he looked somewhat surprised to see a dwarf standing in front of him.

  “Who’re you?”

  “My name’s Frederickson.”

  The man’s large, sensitive eyes narrowed. “I think I’ve heard of you; or I’ve seen your picture someplace.”

  “Never mind that. I asked how the girl is.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No; friend of the family. I brought her in. Her father’s dead, and I don’t know how to get in touch with any other member of the family.”

  The doctor put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to a small alcove off the main corridor. I didn’t like the way he walked and held his head; it was too sad, a little too desperate.

  “My name is Greene,” he said quietly. “We have … a problem with Kathy.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” My throat felt dry and constricted; I could barely get the words out.

  Greene shrugged his frail shoulders. “We really don’t know,” he said, his eyes clouding. “There’s no sign of smoke inhalation, which was the first thing we looked for. Since then we’ve run a number of tests, but they’re all inconclusive. There’s no sign of any physical injury. She’s just … unconscious. She’s stable at the moment, but there are indications she may not stay that way.”

  “You mean she hasn’t regained consciousness at all?”

  He shook his head. “The child is in a deep coma, and we don’t know what’s causing it.”

  “Can’t you treat it?”

  Greene’s laugh was sharp and bitter, belied by the anguish in his eyes. “Treat what? Coma is only a symptom, and none of those marvelous machines we have in there can tell us what’s causing it.” He swallowed hard, licked his lips. “There must be something in her background—an allergy, or some obscure hereditary disease. That information is vital. If we could only contact a relative …”

  “I’ll see what I can do about finding one. What about trauma? Could severe emotional shock precipitate a coma?”

  “Maybe,” Greene said carefully. “But there’d have to be some other contributing factor.”

  “What about drugs?”

  The doctor looked at me a long time, obviously thinking about the question. “There are certain drugs that can induce coma,” he said at last. “But if that’s the case here, we’re in trouble; we haven’t been able to detect any foreign substance—yet If she was given something, we’d have to find out exactly what it was before we could reverse the effects. And I don’t think we have much time.” He paused and shook his head. “Why would anyone want to drug this little girl?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that question, any more than I knew why someone had wanted to roast her father. But I was convinced that that was the case, and I intended to find the answers.

  “Do you still have the gown she was wearing when I brought her in?”

  “The one with the odd pictures?”

  “Right. Will you give it to me?”

  “Why?”

  “I’d rather not say right now, Doctor. But I think the symbols on that gown could mean something. If I’m right, they could provide a clue to what’s wrong with Kathy.”

  “They’re just designs,” Greene said impatiently. “It’s a child’s nightgown. What could it possibly have to do with the girl’s condition?”

  “Maybe nothing. But we won’t know for sure unless you give me the gown.”

  “I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. “We have … procedures.”

  “That’s your problem, Doctor,” I said tersely. “You’re the one who said we might not have much time.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then turned away, walked quickly down the corridor and disappeared through a swinging door. He reappeared a few minutes later with the gown wrapped in a plastic bag. I glanced at my watch: it was five thirty A.M. I was suddenly very tired, my senses drugged with the kind of hypertense, nervous exhaustion that is the mind’s gambit to escape from pressure.

  I felt cold, numb, disoriented; but most of all I felt fear for Kathy—and that was all I would need to keep me going. That fear would burn away the fog inside my mind. It had to. Like Frost’s winter wanderer, I sensed that I had miles to go before I’d sleep.

  Chapter 5

  A heavy rain was falling, chilling the sooty New York City dawn. I parked on the street outside Garth’s West Side apartment house and walked a half block to an all-night diner at the corner. I bought coffee and hard rolls, then called my brother from a booth in the back. He finally answered on the sixth ring.

  “Yeah?”

  “Good morning, Lieutenant. This is a close relative calling.”

  “What the hell do you want, Mongo?” he asked groggily. “You have any idea what time it is?”

  “Frankly, no. It’s early for you, late for me. I need to talk to you.”

  “I’ve got company.”

  “What am I, a priest? I don’t want to talk to her; I want to talk to you. C’mon, brother. Would I be out here on the street calling you at this hour of the morning if it weren’t serious?”

  “Damn right you would.” He paused, chuckled evilly. “How are the tympani lessons going?”

  “Garth, let me come up.”

  Something in my voice must have struck a chord. There was a pause; then: “Okay, Mongo. But if this is a joke, I’m going to kick your ass. Fair warning.”

  “It’s no joke.”

  “Bring coffee.”

  “I’ve got coffee.”

  Garth, dressed in a robe, met me at the door to his apartment. Unshaven, his thinning, wheat-colored hair uncombed, he looked as our father had looked early mornings on our Nebraska farm where we’d grown up. Garth and I had come a long way from the Midwest, by very different routes, and had both ended up in New York within a few months of each other. We liked that, liked each other. I owed the man; he’d helped me survive a dwarf’s cruel childhood and adolescence.

  Without a word, Garth reached down into the bag I was carrying and took out a container of coffee. He opened it and swallowed a large mouthful of the lukewarm liquid. Finally he looked at me, yawned. “You look like hell, Mongo. Come in and sit down.”

  I followed him into the living room and went straight to the bar, where I poured a stiff shot of Irish whiskey into my coffee. I drained off half of it, poured in another shot. That made me feel a bit better. I took the gown out of the bag and showed it to him.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked.

  “Occult symbols
,” he said, examining the garment and nodding. “It could be a witch’s robe if it were a little bigger. Where did you get it?”

  “The little girl who was wearing it is in the hospital right now, in a deep coma. When you check the sheets this morning, you’ll find that a man by the name of Frank Marlowe burned to death in his apartment about three o’clock this morning. The girl’s his daughter. I was there, and it had to be a chemical fire; it was very hot, smelled like hell and formed an almost perfect circle around the bed.”

  Garth, wide awake now, held up his hand to stop me. “Whoa, brother. You’re saying you think somebody killed this Marlowe?”

  “Right. And whoever it was did something to the girl and dressed her in that gown. I—”

  “Hold it,” Garth said tersely. He rose and went into the kitchen. I heard him talking on the telephone, and a few minutes later he came back into the living room. He lighted a cigarette, then tilted his head toward me in what might almost have been a nod of approval. “Stop down at the station house later, okay? We’ll want a formal statement from you.”

  “When I get time. I was about to say that the girl’s doctors don’t know what’s causing her coma. There doesn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with her—at least nothing they’ve been able to detect.”

  “There are drugs that can put a person into a coma.”

  “I know. If she is drugged, the problem is identifying the drug before she dies. Obviously, whoever drugged her didn’t intend for her to die right away; she was dressed in that gown, then left outside the circle of fire where someone could find her before the blaze spread.”

  “Strange,” Garth said quietly, pulling at his lower lip.

  “Yeah. I have to find out what’s going on—in a hurry.”

  Garth got up, pulled open the draperies and stared out into the wet morning. The vanguard of the working people was beginning to fill the city, and the hissing sound of tires on wet pavement drifted up from the streets below. “What kind of son-of-a-bitch would do that to a kid?” he growled.

  “You’re the one who’s been working that side of the street; I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

  He turned back to me, ground out his cigarette and lighted another. He took a deep drug, then blew the smoke out with a sigh of exasperation. “I deal mostly with a lot of wackos,” he said. “I get groups sitting around a stinking, decaying body for a week while they try to raise it from the dead. I get small-time bunko artists, and the idiots who get taken by their mumbo jumbo. Every once in a while I tie into something big like the Son of Sam case, where some poor bastard thinks he’s possessed by demons and starts killing people. But most of the stuff I see is small potatoes—cases with losers who got tired of being screwed by the natural and hoped to do better with the supernatural. There’s always someone around to oblige them. This business that you describe, if you’re right about it being a setup, sounds pretty sophisticated; you’ve got chemicals, drugs and a locked door.”

  “I thought all the real weirdos were in Southern California.”

  “The organized weirdos are in Southern California. Not counting victims, New York really has two layers of people involved in the occult. There are a lot of cocktail-party fortune-tellers, of course, but there are also some very sophisticated people who are very much into what they’re doing.”

  “What do the symbols on the gown mean—if they mean anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Garth said, shaking his head. But I can think of a couple of people who might. The guy I’d really like you to talk to is Michael McEnroe. He’s a clairvoyant, psychic and teacher who lives down in the Village; supposed to be a real saint. The problem is that he’s in India.” He paused, rubbed his forehead. “You might talk to John Krowl. He works out of a brownstone in Brooklyn, just across the Manhattan Bridge. I’ll give him a call for you.”

  “What does Krowl do?”

  “He reads hands and tarot cards. He used to be one of McEnroe’s students until they had a falling-out of some kind. He’s a very heavy fellow.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning … he’s heavy,” Garth repeated, raising his eyebrows. “Krowl seems to be able to do exactly what he claims he can do: read your past, know your present—and maybe predict your future.”

  “Christ, Garth, you sound as though you’re starting to take this shit seriously.”

  He didn’t smile—didn’t say anything. My words seemed to have triggered a whole train of thought in him, and for the moment he was lost in it. I was about to say something else when a tall, pretty redhead with green eyes stepped into the living room. She was dressed in one of Garth’s shirts. My brother introduced her as Regina Farber.

  “So you’re Mongo,” the woman said in a throaty whisper. “I’ve heard so much about you!”

  “At your service,” I said with a bow.

  “Garth talks about you all the time.”

  “Quiet, Regina,” Garth said with a good-natured growl. “The man’s conceited enough as it is.”

  “I’ve got to get along, Garth,” I said, tapping the face of my watch. “How about giving this Krowl a call now? I’d like to see him as soon as possible.”

  “Hey, come on. It’s six o’clock in the morning. You’re not going anywhere until you get some food in your belly and some sleep.”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “Sure you are. You haven’t slept all night, and you haven’t eaten. You go out of here now and you’re going to fall right on your dwarf ass. That’s not going to do you—or the little girl—any good. You know I don’t give a damn what happens to you, but for the sake of the girl I’d like your brain to be functioning in full gear. So you’re going to have something to eat, take a bath and sleep before you go back into the arena. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can find out. Okay?”

  Garth was playing Mother. I decided to let him get away with it, because he was right.

  “I’ll make us something to eat,” Regina said, gliding on her long, slender legs toward the kitchen.

  Garth turned serious again. “You talk about witchcraft and Satanism,” he said, lowering his voice as though he didn’t want the woman in the kitchen to hear. “Ever think about Charles Manson?”

  “Have I ever thought about Charles Manson? Yeah, I’ve thought about Charles Manson; it’s my business to think about nice folks like that.”

  “I’m not sure you have,” Garth said evenly. “Not really. Here’s an out-and-out punk, a failed songwriter, failed you-name-it, and he—”

  “He was a successful butcher.”

  “Yeah, but he had power, Mongo; enormous personal power—enough to fuck up the minds of a whole flock of kids that he got to do his killing for him.”

  “Weirdos. It’s all psychological.”

  “Of course it’s psychological.” He looked at me hard, sighed. “You’re missing my point.”

  “I’m afraid so. Even Manson didn’t claim that the Devil made him do it.”

  “Look,” he said after a pause, “let me tell you about a case I just wrapped up. Last week, a woman wandered into the station house with this outrageous story. Witchcraft was involved, so it was referred to me. Well, her story turned out to be true. For the last eight months the woman had been enslaved by a ‘spiritualist’ she’d gone to for advice on how to cure her epileptic daughter. The spiritualist and her boyfriend had persuaded the woman to move in with them, along with her two kids. To make a long story short, the couple had been beating up on the woman for eight months; they’d been torturing her with lighted cigarettes, beating her with paddles and wire cables.”

  “How’d she get away?” I asked, not really caring. I was distracted by the thought of Kathy in the hospital, but sensed that Garth was trying to tell me something he thought was important.

  He shrugged. “She was never actually locked up. She didn’t have to be confined, because she was controlled. The couple had convinced her that they’d cast a spell and that she’d die if she tr
ied to escape. Anyway, she was sent out to buy some groceries and a friend saw her. The friend asked her where she and the kids had been for eight months, and she blurted out the story. The neighbor convinced her that she should go to the police.”

  He paused, blew a smoke ring, then impatiently swept it away with his hand. “The place was quite a sight,” he continued. “All red: red carpets, red walls, red altars, red candles—red everything. Satanism. Somehow, that couple had even managed to turn the woman’s kids around; the children would help beat their own mother. Up to Friday—which was the last time I checked it out—the little bastards still preferred the spiritualist and her boyfriend over their mother. Would you call that a spell?”

  I swallowed hard; my mouth felt dry, sore with fatigue and anxiety as I thought of mothers squirtgunning cyanide into their babies’ mouths in Guyana. “I’d call it a horror story. And I’m still missing your point.”

  “Have it your way, brother. I’m trying to give you some advice: if you’re going to jump into this particular pond, swim with a straight face. Believe what you want to, but never let on that you don’t take these people seriously—not if you expect to find out anything. Especially remember that when you talk to Krowl; he’ll pick up on it in a second if you try to bullshit him. Keep your usual smartass remarks to yourself.”

  “You take Krowl seriously, don’t you?”

  Garth looked uncomfortable, and he took a few moments to think about his answer. Finally, he said, “You and I come out of our background with a certain set of preconceptions that we call ‘reality.’ It’s damn hard giving up those notions, but someone like Krowl can start you thinking. I’ve seen and heard some things that are hard to explain.”

  “Did you go to Krowl for a reading?”

  “Yeah,” Garth said, lighting his third cigarette. “I’d heard about him and I was curious. What can I tell you? He wiped me out. Between a palm print and a few layouts of those tarot cards, he seemed to know my whole goddamn life. I’m talking about Elizabeth and the babies’ deaths, what section of the country I come from, the fact that I was a county sheriff before coming to New York, and even the year I came here. He even knew about … Neptune.”