by J-F. Dubeau
But that would put the boy, the only family he had left, at tremendous risk. Get your hand looked at. Get some sleep. Get your priorities straight. He’d failed at the first two tasks, but he could still get the third right.
In lieu of an explanation, Crowley used his good hand to pull open a desk drawer. He took out a thick, letter-sized envelope. Judging by the size and shape of the bulge in the paper, it contained an impressive stack of cash. Crowley slid the envelope over to his son.
“Take it. Put it in your pocket and go.”
Daniel looked at the contents. Crisp, bank-fresh bills in denominations of hundreds and fifties were stuffed into the overflowing envelope. Thousands of dollars in cash, easily. Crowley had initially taken out the money for bribes, but he’d decided it would be better in Daniel’s hands. Getting his priorities straight.
“Go where?” the boy asked, confused.
“Anywhere. Go hang out with your friends in Sherbrooke or take a trip south of the border. Just get out of Saint-Ferdinand for the rest of the summer.”
The inspector could see the struggle behind his son’s eyes. He’d seen the same thing in his own face during the last weeks. The desire to leave it all behind warring with his responsibilities. Hopefully, Daniel was smart enough to listen to the former.
Reluctantly, the teenager took the envelope. He tried to put it in the back pocket of his jeans, but it turned out to be too thick. Instead he pulled out a business card and placed it on the desk, mirroring Crowley’s gesture of sliding it over.
“This guy’s the one who told me about Sasha.” Daniel tapped his finger over the name. Chris Hagen.
“He the one who told you about a god, too?”
“Yeah.”
The inspector could see his son wasn’t telling the whole truth. That didn’t matter anymore to Crowley. He’d find the god. His gut reassured him of that every time he felt so much as a hint of doubt. The important thing now was that Daniel leave Saint-Ferdinand tonight.
“You know I didn’t tell you about Sasha for your own good, right? We’re the Crowley boys, Dan. We don’t let things get between us.”
Daniel seemed to consider the question with care. He tapped on the card again, his finger landing on the Sandmen logo. “This Hagen guy says he’s a reporter. He was still loitering around our place when I left. He says he’s been wanting to talk to you for a while.”
Hagen. The name hadn’t crossed his desk or been brought to his attention at all. No one like that had requested an interview or a statement. He also wasn’t part of the group that met with Crowley at the church once a week. Yet there it was on his card: the Sandmen logo.
“I’ll take care of him,” Stephen said, picking up his car keys from the desk. “Get out of Saint-Ferdinand. I’ll call you in a few days when I’m done here. I . . . I have a lot that I need to tell you.” His son nodded glumly, then turned and left the police station.
DANIEL
IT WASN’T OFTEN that people would call a Saint-Ferdinand summer “cold.” “Cool,” perhaps. “Refreshing,” for the rare optimist in the area. But mostly the season was referred to as “insufferably humid” or “goddamn hot.” This morning, however, after a full night of sleepless worry, driving, mourning, and arguing, Daniel Crowley stepped out of his car and found that it was, indisputably, cold.
The moisture in the air had condensed into a thick fog that hung low to the ground. The carpet of smoke added a layer of mystery to the circus, making it that much more forbidding.
When last he’d come here, Daniel hadn’t exactly felt welcome. The owner, Cicero, had made it clear that the teenager would find no help between the tents and attractions. This was enemy territory for a Crowley, but this time, he would insist on walking away with answers.
The hope of bringing Sasha back to life had been short-lived. The truth that Daniel could sieve from the night was that Hagen had tried to trick him into revealing where the god was held, or perhaps pit him against his own father.
In spite of the early hour, there were already signs of life at the circus. Shadows moved in the fog, and lights were being turned on here and there. The strong man with the handlebar mustache was making his way back from a porta potty. He seemed alert but unsurprised to see Daniel.
The smell of bread and eggs cooking mixed itself with the thick cold air, traveling out of a big open tent. Daniel’s stomach began to growl as he realized he hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day. Guided by either logic or hunger, the teenager decided that the best place to get directions to Cicero would be the mess tent. Other performers were also gathering there, eating their fill before the long day of preparing the circus for its grand opening. One would expect a sense of excitement and anticipation, but everyone hung their heads as if they were attending a funeral.
“Have a seat.”
The voice was from Dustin, the man Cicero had sent to get Daniel a water bottle. He was pointing to a folding table that could seat up to six people. There was a pile of utensils at the center, along with salt and pepper shakers and a bottle of ketchup.
“Actually, I’m looking for—”
“We know what you’re looking for,” Dustin interrupted. “Sit and I’ll get him for you.”
Resisting the urge to argue and hoping to get something to eat in the bargain, Daniel did as instructed. He took a seat at the end of the table, his back to the exterior of the tent so he could keep his eye on the rest of the people there.
An old woman emerged from the growing crowd. She walked on wobbly legs, carrying two plates of food while a cane she obviously needed hung from her right wrist. She wore the accoutrements of a classic circus fortune-teller: innumerable bracelets of beads and hemp covered her arms, and her head was crowned in an elaborate turban. She wore a dress made from half a dozen layers of colorful fabric, which were all covered by a thick wool coat to protect her frail form from the morning chill. Daniel stood to help her, but she waved him off.
The fortune-teller put down the plates of food and lowered herself into a chair with much effort. In a habit born of years of repetition, she reached for the salt and pepper, adding very little of the first and too much of the second. Then, without bothering to look at Daniel, she grabbed a fork from the middle of the table and started to eat.
“Bacon and eggs. No toast,” she said, pointing at his plate with her fork, a piece of egg flopping at its end. “All protein, no carbs. Right?”
“I’m looking for Nathan Cicero,” Daniel said while getting his own utensils. The eggs were overcooked, but the bacon was crispy without being burned. The food was welcome, and it surprised him how much filling his stomach helped get his thoughts in order.
“I’m his secretary. Talk to me.”
“I don’t know if you’ll understand. I need to talk to Cicero. We met earlier this week, and now I need his help.”
“We all understand, Mr. Crowley.”
Daniel was done being surprised that people knew his name. They knew his father and they knew him.
“I don’t think you do. I need to talk to Cicero, or people are going to die.”
The old lady raised her eyebrows in what might have passed for surprise but was more a vague acknowledgment of an already-known fact. She nodded while chewing her last bite.
“Oh, we know about the deaths. We’ve known for a long time.”
“Are you here to stop them?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Crowley. We could no more stop these deaths than we could stop the sun from setting. We are here either to play our part or to bear witness. Do you know why you are here?”
“I’m here to understand what’s going on so that I can put a stop to it.”
The old lady let out a long sigh and pushed away her empty plate. She then proceeded to steeple her bony fingers and rest her emaciated chin on top of them. Her skin was gray and had the texture of paper, thin and fragile, but her eyes were piercing and focused.
“Look around you, Mr. Crowley. Hardworking men and women
. Acrobats and freaks. Some performers, some toiling behind the scenes. All of them know more than you do. Most of them have been at this for longer than you’ve been alive. Some, like Cicero, have been dueling with this god since before your grandfather was born.”
She nodded at Daniel’s disbelief. “That’s right. Nathan is older than any man alive. Older than any man should be. Older than he cares to be. We’ve all been touched by the god of Saint-Ferdinand somehow. We’re going up against something far greater than we are. Lives will be lost.”
Daniel did as instructed, and looked around at the others in the mess tent. He was surprised to find each one of them looking back at him. The old woman was right. There was something unique about these people. A hodgepodge of athletic trapeze artists, strong men, dwarves, extensively tattooed curiosities, and even a few clowns. A man wearing the attire of a carnival barker nodded at him, and a beautiful girl with sad eyes, dressed in a lavish Victorian-era costume, gave him a smile. Such a diverse crowd had not been assembled in Saint-Ferdinand for as long as Daniel could remember.
Yet there was also something unnatural to them. A haunted look in their eyes. The acrobats moved with a precision that didn’t happen in nature. The ink on the illustrated man seemed to move ever so slightly. A stage magician in full regalia tipped his hat with a gloved hand, his eyes glowing slightly beneath the chapeau. There was more to these people than Daniel had first thought.
“Are these the kinds of gifts my father is hoping to get from that thing?” Daniel said.
“Do you know what’s the worst thing about this creature here in Saint-Ferdinand?”
Daniel shook his head.
“It’s not how it can kill with a gesture or torture the souls of those who are already dead. It’s not the vast power it wields or the terrible gifts it can offer. You’d think it might be that it’s alien to both our way of thinking and how we interact with reality. That it sees us and knows us but doesn’t care. All of that is terrifying in its own right, but what really makes this thing terrible is how it changes us. Not just by its touch but by how we react to it. It makes us into monsters, just as we made it into a god of hate and death.”
The teenager contemplated that statement. It had happened to the Craftsmen decades ago. It had happened to William Bergeron and the rest of the Sandmen years after that. And, over the course of the past few weeks, it had happened to his father. All of them, monsters.
“Eat,” said the old woman, pushing herself to her feet with her cane. “When you’re ready, I’ll take you to see Cicero.”
RANDY
WHIPLASH DIDN’T BEGIN to describe it. In fact, comparing what Randy had been through to any physical experience would have come up short. Like saying that suicidal depression was a close cousin of exhaustion.
The medical examiner’s soul had been stretched, pulled like taffy across a distance both physical and spiritual, between his body and that of Penelope LaForest. When the link was severed and the girl ejected him from her flesh, the one end of his essence still attached to the physical realm yanked him back.
A soul had no nerve endings. Randy had studied the dark arts long enough to know that, but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel. It just did so in a much more raw and fundamental way.
Randy felt the full force of that spiritual pain. The experience would have broken a mind unprepared for the peculiarities of working with the dead. But even for the amateur necromancer, the episode was traumatic. One moment, he’d inhabited a body completely unlike his own; then, through tremendous torment, he’d been forced to fill the flesh that had been empty. His own body now felt alien. Too skinny and too frail, it wasn’t the vessel he’d spent most of his adult life inhabiting.
His eyes and mouth were dry. Nobody had bothered to close them for him. Muscles cramped, finally released from the position in which they’d been frozen. His mind, though, was pleased with the return to the status quo. Penny’s brain had been young and supple, but too different for him to use efficiently. It was a new car filled with modern gadgets: capable of so much, but nearly useless to a driver familiar with a beat-up old manual-transmission truck.
“Whu . . . huh . . . Erica?”
Randy blinked rapidly, trying to moisten his burning corneas. He opened and closed his lips to secrete sufficient saliva to help him speak. Through his blurry vision, he could see the psychologist’s worried face.
“Randall! Oh my God, are you okay? I thought you were dead.”
He was resting next to the bars at the corner of his cell closest to Sam Finnegan’s. The very spot where the old man had choked him. The place where he had died. Or near enough to loosen the bonds of his flesh. Erica’s eyes were wild with fear, her cheeks wet with tears. Yet she was still there, more worried about his safety than her own.
“He is dead. We’re all dead,” Sam Finnegan said from his side of the wall.
Randy sat up, head spinning, his throat in agony. His tongue felt swollen, and he couldn’t hear well from his left ear. Even with his medical experience, he was having difficulty deciding which symptoms were from being choked half to death and which were from having abandoned his body for the better part of an hour.
“Has he been this chipper the whole time I was gone?”
Erica glanced at Finnegan. “He’s been mostly quiet. Muttering to himself. I . . . I did most of the yelling. I’m surprised no one’s come down to check on me.”
“I had Penny tell Matt everything was fine on my way out.”
“You never left your cell, Randy,” Erica said. “Please don’t ask me to believe all this . . . supernatural nonsense.”
“Erica . . . ,” Randy reached between the bars and gently took her hand in his. He rubbed his thumb on the tops of her fingers in a circular pattern, trying to soothe her. “You saw Audrey’s ghost. How much more do you need?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I imagined that. We’re people of science, Randall. How can any of this be real?”
“Ask myself that question on the regular,” Sam said. His voice was lower to the ground, suggesting he’d probably sat down on the floor. Randy tried to ignore him.
“It’s real, and it happened twenty years ago, too,” the medical examiner said. “But you should forget everything you’ve seen, and leave. You’re a smart woman, Erica. Please save yourself.”
“You’re not answering my question,” she said.
“I can think of two options,” Finnegan interjected again. “My favorite is like you said, Doc—none of this is real. It’s all just a figment of my deranged mind, y’know? Maybe when Amanda passed away, I just . . . pop! Blew a breaker. Now I’m just makin’ up stories for myself in a nice padded room. No one got hurt. No one gonna get hurt. And I didn’t have to hurt nobody.”
It was a terrible thing, thought Randy—to long for a broken mind in exchange for erasing all the horrors he had committed to keep the god contained. It only served to highlight how horrible the last two decades must have been for him.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said. “I’m sorry you were left to deal with it on your own.”
“Ain’t no changin’ things now,” the madman said with a chuckle. “Lotsa people gonna die, no matter what.”
“Why do you say that, Sam?” said the psychologist.
“Don’t matter why, Doc. McKenzie’s right: you need to leave. Saint-Ferdinand ain’t safe. It never was, but it’s going to get much worse, real soon.”
Randy squeezed Erica’s hand in his. His fondness for his protégé had always been something he’d kept in check. She was his student, of course, and any kind of relationship with her had been forbidden. After she graduated, age became the excuse. Then social differences. In time, the medical examiner had accepted that having her as a friend was good enough. But now, with the gravity of the situation pressing down on him, he regretted never doing more than admiring her from a distance.
“Please,” he said to her. “You need to go.”
“No. I want to know what’s
happening. I want to know how to stop it.”
“Ain’t nothin’ you can do,” Sam explained. “But that don’t matter, does it? You’re one of them people. Yeh just can’t leave well enough alone, especially if you think you can help. One of them ‘heroes.’”
“I don’t believe in doing nothing if I can help.”
“Ain’t that what I just said?”
Erica pulled her hand from Randy’s. He hoped she would leave. Forget him. Forget Saint-Ferdinand. With any luck, they’d all overestimated the god’s rage. Perhaps it would be satisfied to butcher only those who’d imprisoned it for so many years.
Then she turned her head to where Audrey’s ghost had stood. Randy knew what his one-time student was thinking. It was the trait that made her such a skilled therapist. That goddamned compassion. Not just for Audrey or for Penny or even for him. It was her empathy for the entire town that motivated her decision to stay.
“What happened eighteen years ago?” she asked him.
“Greed,” Randy answered after a deep sigh. “The whole point was to destroy this thing. This god of hate and death. The Saint-Ferdinand Craftsmen’s Association was the first to try. People like Cicero and my father scoured the globe, looking for secrets, making up their own.”
“We do love our secrets, don’t we?” Sam mused.
“Right.” Randy cleared his throat. “Well, then came Edouard Lambert.”
Erica gave him a confused look. It was a name she hadn’t encountered in all the files she’d read and the people with whom she’d met.
“Lambert split from the Craftsmen. Started his own thing,” Randy continued. “The Sandmen, he called them. Whereas the Craftsmen, they were originally more of a social club. It’s when they stumbled upon the god that their purpose changed. The Sandmen, though, are a beast of a different nature. They didn’t want to kill the god. They wanted to keep it sleeping and have it do their bidding.”