“What happened?” said Thomas. What’s the worst that could possibly happen to a kid like Roger?
“He went out last night,” said Annie, her eyes filling with tears. “To Elixir.”
“Did they catch him with a fake ID or something?” said Thomas. “It’s just a slap on the wrist for that.”
Annie gave him a furious look. “He went out by himself, and he was beaten up in an alley outside the club. It was really bad. No one saw the guy, but he was much bigger. Now Roger’s in a coma.”
Thomas tried to swallow. His mouth was dry and he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “What day is it?” he muttered.
“What?” Annie seemed confused and insulted, like she thought he was blowing off the whole Roger issue. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “I’ve been really sick.”
“It’s Friday,” she said carefully. “You missed a couple of days of school.” She reached over and touched his hand. “Are you OK?” He nodded, and after a moment, she dropped his hand and started looking around again. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to Roger,” she whispered. “Thomas, he could die.”
He put an arm around Annie’s shoulder and began to lead her away. He didn’t want to think about Roger or what might have happened at Elixir. Maybe it was his fault for not inviting him along. There was no way a kid like Roger could handle himself alone there. “Come on,” he said to Annie. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”
Later that afternoon Thomas dropped his backpack, cell phone, and keys onto the kitchen table and went straight for the fridge. He felt like he hadn’t eaten in days. The day had been a blur of frenzied whispers about Roger and his fight and the coma. In the back of his father’s car, he had consoled Annie and promised not to disappear again — at least not so soon. After dropping her off at her apartment, Thomas had scoured the Facebook pages of all of Roger’s friends. He found no useful information about who had gone out with him last night or what exactly happened.
His head still hurt. He reached for a slice of old quiche and started on it with his fingers, not bothering to pull back the plastic wrap all the way off the plate. Everything felt strange. Even the house had an eerie darkness to it just now, a feeling of asphyxiation. He wondered if the cleaning lady had come by today.
Earlier Annie had told him that it was Friday, that he had missed a few days of school, but he didn’t remember anything about the last few days. He knew he hadn’t taken any W, and he certainly didn’t have any other drugs lying around. He hadn’t had a drink since that night at Elixir with Nikki and Connor. So why couldn’t he remember?
His stepmother’s voice jolted him out of his thoughts. “Don’t worry,” she said as she glided into the kitchen and started rearranging a vase of flowers. She shot him a careful, reassuring glance. “About last night, I mean. I covered for you with your father. See? We are friends.” She moved the vase to a spot near a window, arranging each flower to catch the light. “These are from the PTA,” she said with the casual air she seemed to think was motherly. “I arranged for a notoriously unavailable location for some fund-raiser. I got lucky, really. Some wedding was canceled.” Then she added as she played with her enormous pearl studs, “Poor young couple.”
Thomas stopped chewing, his mouth numb, his fingers tingling. “What are you talking about?” he said, suddenly aware of his aching muscles, his stiff arms, his tired legs, the small tear on the side of his jeans — the same pair he vaguely remembered putting on in some recent memory. Had he gone out in those jeans?
Madame Vileroy raised a shapely eyebrow. “I suppose they realized they were wrong for each other, darling,” she said.
Thomas glared at her. “No, I mean last night. I was sleeping in my room the entire night.”
Nicola laughed. “That almost sounds convincing, dear,” she said. “But you don’t have to play games with me. I have a teenage son, too, you know.” Then she sighed deeply and added, while plucking a dead petal from one of the roses, “No, darling. You went out last night. Don’t you remember?”
The girl was born in an unremarkable town in Egypt and from the start showed signs of an unhappy, jealous, vengeful, and cunning constitution. Born in a time of gods and monsters, spells and poisons, she quickly learned to channel what we in the modern era would call demons, to find the way to communicate with those who lived in the underworld.
Mystical accounts of this region are diverse, but many believed that an earthbound demon began life as a human, usually one with a curse. Interestingly, recent finds in the Alexandrian cache of scrolls tell a piecemeal story, wherein the young girl’s curse was that she was plain and unremarkable. Though she was born to a family that was already destined for legend, the young girl, Neferat, was a nothing.
She began to experiment with dark magic. She lost herself in it, the incantations and potions and black-hearted oaths. She twisted ancient curses. She dug deeper into the abyss, played with deep, untouchable dusts. She mixed fire and blood in the night.
In a portion of the Alexandrian cache, a piece of papyrus states, “She began to nurture a talent for brewing vile potions” (Shankman, p. 34).
As the myths go, her transition to a demon of the Legion was remarkably quick. As early as a few decades later, the figure is referred to as “dark one.” She was in a position of great power as the pharaoh’s nursemaid, able to manipulate royals and steal the Egyptian throne for her favorite. In the process, she created the fifth great injustice of her family and completed the prophecy of bonedust — a living dust made from the bones of five members of her family, mummies who died of the cruelest injustices and were ritually preserved (cf. Book of Gates, p. 213, Simon’s translation). With this fifth one, she opened a path to immortality, which she was obliged to guard when she became the Dark Lady of the underworld.
Indeed, this bonedust — which she hid deep in the labyrinthine worlds below — was her own immortal hoard, tied closely to her ability to linger through the millennia.
Over the centuries, the demoness figure of “Neferat” steps in and out of the spotlight. In a few instances in eastern European lore, she is described as “the one-eyed witch.” The phrase links Neferat to the name she adopted later — Nicola Vileroy (Russo-Hungarian Folklore, p. 12).
As Vileroy, the demon developed a capability for gathering and corrupting the souls of ambitious youths like herself. By any understanding of the “demon,” this was her mission. But as men began to hunt for the immortal dust, Nicola found ways to hide pieces of the five mummies in the form of secret potions. Unlike any mythic figure before her, Vileroy created an unholy trinity — a three-fold path to her own immortality. This was Nicola’s survival.
— Excerpt from chapter 2, “Origins of the Demon First Known as Neferat, Then as Nicola Vileroy,” Demon Histories, by Professor Jamie West
Thomas spent most of that evening in his room, trying to work out what had happened to him. He had zero recollection of going out. Usually, if he’d drunk too much or had a strange pill, he could still remember the hazy outlines of the night or maybe one or two flashes of some girl he’d met or a song he’d heard. Sometimes he would remember something he had said, as if it were part of a dream. But a complete blackout? That had never happened to him . . . had it? Even Nikki’s tiny miracle pills hadn’t knocked him out completely. Besides, he didn’t take any W last night. Maybe Nicola was lying to get him into trouble. Wasn’t that the most likely thing? She must be messing with his mind. Probably he didn’t go out at all, as Nicola said he did, and she was just trying to scare him by implying that she would tell his father. Maybe this was her way of blackmailing Thomas so he would fall in line.
After all, when you black out, you at least remember the moments before — like when you got in the car to go to a club or when you ordered the bottle or took the drug. . . .
Wait . . . Thomas now remembered the smoothie Nicola had left on his desk to help him sleep. That was the last substance he had co
nsumed. Could she have laced it with something? It was definitely Nicola. Suddenly he felt stupid for having put something that she gave him into his body — Thomas knew by now that for all her games of nice-nice, she couldn’t be trusted. He suspected that she was the one who had gotten him arrested on the night of the wedding in the first place. He wished he had saved some of that smoothie so that he could analyze it or something — just how would one go about dissecting a smoothie? Should he take the glass to a lab at NYU or to a scientist or someone like that? Definitely not the police — that would be inviting an investigation and a whole lot of poking around into his private business.
Whatever was going on inside his house, Thomas now swore to himself — and silently to his oblivious, duped father — that he would figure it out. Wasn’t it his dream to be a lawyer one day? This was his chance to do some investigating into something that was more important than any case he would have in his future career. Better yet, this was his chance to prove to his dad that he wasn’t worthless, that he hadn’t gone off the rails after his mother died or when Belle left. This was his chance to show Mr. Goodman-Brown that Thomas didn’t belong in the family business and that being a badly paid government-employed lawyer is a good-enough calling for the son of a tycoon.
He sat on his bed and flipped through the pages of his journal. Maybe he would write an entry about this. He felt stupid at the thought, closed the book, and hid it under a pile of debate folders in his desk. Then he remembered something. He had hidden the bottle of red pills under his mattress. Maybe he could start by checking the pills to see if he had taken any last night. He rushed to his bed and lifted the mattress. The bottle was where he had left it. It looked untouched. It hadn’t even rolled from the spot he had chosen for it, exactly two inches below the mattress tag.
He poured the pellets into his hand, like Halloween candy. He had never really bothered to count them, but the bottle still looked relatively full. He dropped the pills one by one into the narrow mouth of the bottle and returned it to his pocket.
OK, so he probably hadn’t taken any W. And clearly neither Nicola nor his dad had found his stash. More than likely, there was nothing wrong with the smoothie, either. That was a wild idea to start.
What else could he do?
He sat down at his desk, considered going for the journal again. But then his glance fell on the pile of debate papers and on the medals he had won over the years. And the answer floated into his mind as easily as a line in a favorite song. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t he thought about it before?
Yes, he had had a blackout once before.
Yes, it was related to his new stepmother.
Last year, on the night he had dinner at the Faust home. Even though every moment of that night was accounted for in his memory, he was absolutely certain that he did in fact lose consciousness at some point that night. He had no proof, but he could feel it — it was the details that bugged him, the eerie perfection, the clipped conversations, the plastic look of the meal. Mostly, it was the way his memories of that night flipped from scene to scene, like a TV show. He didn’t remember going to the bathroom or making a faux pas or encountering an awkward pause the entire night.
This was the answer he was looking for. To find out more about his stepmother, and maybe even discover why so much of his recent memory was missing, a good investigator would start at the beginning.
He had to visit the governess Vileroy’s first home in New York.
He didn’t take the car or a taxi, and he didn’t bother telling his father or stepmother that he was going out. He wanted to be unseen, discreet. He couldn’t risk being found out. He waited in the street outside the apartment, a place he had lingered many times last year when he was dating Belle. A row of brownstones stood shoulder to shoulder, each of them with a slightly different door, mismatched shrubs growing outside, and in a whole range of bricks. Some had just four or five big steps in the front, while others had a dozen shallow ones. Still, they matched like siblings in a row. He remembered waiting in this exact spot on that last night — the night of the big dance — when she had run away, her face a hideous mess, and he had tried to convince her to come down and talk to him. It was around midnight now, and the street was dark, an unusual thing in New York. The windows of the old Faust place looked dilapidated and unclean. He could hear insects and rodents crawling around in the gutters above, and something smelled like mildew and old garbage.
Thomas squinted to get a better look. Was there a faint light in the apartment? A quick movement just behind a thin curtain?
And why would there be curtains in an empty apartment in the first place? He knew that Vileroy still owned this place and that it hadn’t been put up for sale. For some reason, no one ever asked about it, even in the tight New York real-estate market.
He ran to the other side of the street so he could peer farther in. It was hopeless. From the other side, the apartment was black, and even the thin sheet of fabric half covering the windows was invisible.
But then he saw it again, a quick flutter of light — like a kid with a flashlight zipping across a room. He jumped up to catch a glimpse. All he saw was a handful of insects flying out of the window and disappearing toward Lexington Avenue.
“I’m losing it,” he whispered to no one. “I should go home.”
But Thomas had come this far. He couldn’t possibly leave without at least peeking into the lobby. After all, this was an expensive building with lots of rental apartments. The least he could do was talk to some neighbors or ask the doorman for a forwarding address.
Stepping into the lobby, though, the atmosphere that greeted him was not at all what Thomas had expected.
The floor was deserted. Not just deserted but a wasteland. It was musty and full of debris. The lights had burned out, except for one exposed lamp hanging from a wire in a corner. The doorman’s desk was broken, even shredded in the corners, and the floor was covered in soot. There were dead bugs on the floor. It was as if the owners had given up on the building entirely, and the city had condemned it to rot . . . as if this one edifice had been forgotten, wiped off the rosters of real-estate brokers and construction companies, off the radars of all those New York builders that usually snap up city blocks and fixer-uppers like the last donut holes in a box of fat-free bran muffins.
Despite all the changes, Thomas couldn’t hold back the familiar pang of dread that overcame him just by stepping into the building. This was the place where bad things had happened to him. Recently the memory of that night was repairing itself. Being back here made his head hurt the way it did that night. What had happened?
Nicola had been there.
Belle had tried to save him.
Victoria had done something to hurt him.
The building was abandoned. But any good lawyer would realize that people unknowingly leave loads of evidence lying around — trails of tidbits that could be used to fill in the gaps of a story — even after they desert a place forever. He decided to go upstairs and see for himself.
The elevator was probably dangerous, so he took the stairs, trying the whole time not to be afraid of what he would find once he reached the Fausts’ floor. What was that flash of light he saw from the street? Was someone in the apartment right now? Maybe he had imagined it.
When he reached the front door, Thomas noticed the strangest detail so far. The door was made of a plain beige-colored wood, a completely ordinary, unsophisticated door like you would find in a public office building or an elementary school. It wasn’t anything like the ornately chiseled, massive entrance that he remembered from his previous visits. Why would someone downgrade a door? How could this whole place have gone to hell so quickly?
He twisted the knob. Inside, a smell of rot and disease filled his nostrils so that he began coughing uncontrollably. He took a few steps inside, but he could hardly see in the thick, windowless dark. He thought he felt something fly into his open mouth.
He was about to run out of there when
he heard someone speak.
“Who’s there?” a frightened yet menacing voice squealed in the dark. Thomas couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Maybe it was a child.
He cleared his throat. He squinted but it didn’t help.
The voice spoke again. “I said, Who’s there?” It was coming from across the room. He should just run, he thought. The voice continued, a little calmer than before. “Tell me why you’re here, or I’ll have my brother knock you out. He’s right behind you.”
In that fraction of a second, Thomas felt a breath on his neck. He whipped around.
A boy was standing within a foot of him, holding some kind of wooden plank. His face flickered in the candlelight for only a second — was it a face he knew? — before the plank came flying and Thomas staggered and fell to the floor. He groaned and tried to lift his head. The voices were gone now. He lay there for another ten minutes, breathing into the wooden floorboards, before he looked up and saw that he was back in the lobby.
London, England, in the Year of Our Lord 1520
“Well, hang me if it isn’t my old friend the governess. What are you doing in these dark alleys at night? It’s dangerous here . . . lurking about . . .”
“I have urgent business. I need your help.”
“What can an old apothecary do for a lady like you?”
“I need a baby.”
“Oh, ho, ho! How very human of you. Is it not enough being governess to the upstart Boleyn family? They have daughters for you to coddle.”
“It’s not that. I need . . . You must swear to keep silent on pain of death.”
“I will swear. But you know death means nothing to me.”
“I need a baby of my own blood. A natural son to carry on my work . . . my soul.”
“This is sad news, my old friend. Have you lost your link to the eternal?”
Another Jekyll, Another Hyde Page 6