Nevermore

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Manfred smirked as he got up to change the record. “Well, that puts you one up on me. So, okay, say you find Roxy’s corpse. Then what?”

  “Salt it and burn it.”

  “Right, right,” Manfred said as he slid Disraeli Gears into its sleeve and pulled out Traffic’s The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, “you tol’ me that. That whole salt thing just freaks me out, y’know?”

  And you remembered, miracle of freakin’ miracles. Again Dean managed to restrain himself from saying it out loud.

  “Speakin’a freakin’ me out,” Manfred said, “the thing I don’t buy in all this is Aldo. He an’ I’ve been buddies for more years than I can count, and he ain’t the murderin’ type.”

  “It could’ve been an accident,” Sam said.

  Dean rolled his eyes. That was Sam all over, trying to find the silver lining. Recalling how Aldo had been all skittish when he first mentioned Roxy, Dean had no trouble believing that he was hiding something. Besides, they’d been thinking all along that Aldo knew what happened to her and wasn’t telling.

  “Of course,” Sam added, “if it was an accident, he should’ve reported it.”

  “Nah, he wouldn’t’ve.” Manfred swigged his beer. “Look, I don’t buy for a second that Aldo did nothin’ wrong, and I can’t see him killin’ nobody, but—well, if it was an accident, he wouldn’t’a called no fuzz, I’ll tell you that for free. Ain’t Aldo’s style, y’know?”

  “Hang on,” Sam said, “maybe we shouldn’t go digging up the yard.”

  Dean looked at his brother like he was crazy. “Exsqueeze me?”

  “I’m saying, we shouldn’t guess. We don’t know for sure the body’s there, and if it is, we don’t know where exactly, and even if we do find it, then what?”

  “Then we salt it and burn it and—”

  “And whoever killed her goes free, ’cause we’ll have burned the evidence.”

  That brought Dean up short.

  Sam went on. “We always talk about how spirits are out for vengeance, and that may be the case here, but what if she’s just out for justice, like that spirit down in Baltimore?”

  “That was a death omen,” Dean said.

  But Sam was on a roll. “Yeah, but she was mainly there to mete out justice. I don’t think salting and burning will do the trick. I mean, yeah, it’ll get rid of the spirit, but it won’t bring whoever killed her to light.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Dean said, shaking his head.

  Sam frowned. “Believe what?”

  “That you actually said, ‘mete out justice.’ Dude, people don’t talk like that.”

  Manfred nodded. “He’s right, Sam, that was some seriously whacked-out phrase-turning, there.”

  “Whatever—I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Dean sighed. Every instinct he had said that they should find the body and salt and burn it, because, dammit, that was what you did with spirits who haunted people’s houses.

  But if they did that, Aldo got away with murder. And that just did not sit right with him.

  “All right, so what do we do, genius? Use a rubber hose on Aldo?”

  Sam smiled in a manner that made Dean distinctly nervous. “Not quite.”

  It had been the preparation work that was the most difficult, really.

  In order for the sigil to be properly traced, he had to commit each of the moon-based rituals in a particular spot. Luckily, the margin for error on that spot was wide enough that he had options. For example, he just needed one of the apartments in that building on 199th Street to be empty, and one was. He was even more fortunate with the house on Webb Avenue. He would’ve settled for finding an abandoned apartment in that area as well, but it worked so much better with a basement.

  That was how he knew his cause was just. The fates had laid things out for him perfectly, made it easy for him to accomplish his work.

  All he had left was the final stage, and still with five days to prepare. This, he felt, would be the easiest of them.

  He was standing now at the corner of Fordham Road and University Avenue—or, as it was called now, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard—looking up at the two towers of the Church of St. Nicholas of Tolentine. Both towers had bells, which rang out at the appropriate times on Sundays.

  It will ring out next Tuesday as well. His heart pounded with anticipation. Finally, that would be it.

  He hadn’t gone back to the other place. For all he knew, the police had found the remains of poor Sarah Lowrance. She was a perfectly nice woman, and he was sure that she might have lived a long happy life otherwise. But she was serving a greater purpose now, and perhaps in the fullness of time, when people understood what, exactly, he was doing, her name would be immortalized, along with those of Marc Reyes, those two students, and his victim the following Tuesday—and himself, of course, in showing the world the glories of magicks.

  When he thought about it, of course, he knew better. After all, the world didn’t appreciate Percival Samuels’s genius, and he had lived in a time that was far more accepting of the world of the occult than the modern world, with its websites and fax machines and cell phones and iPods and e-mails and all the other scientific nonsense that got in the way of learning.

  But it didn’t matter. Because he would bring Poe back, back to a world that would appreciate his genius, back to a world where he could tell them the truth.

  That was all that mattered. What were the lives of Marc Reyes and Sarah Lowrance and those two students compared to that?

  Not to mention whoever he got for the final ritual.

  Technically, he didn’t need a person for the final portion. There was a bell tower on the site of the fourth and final sigil, and that meant he simply needed to re-create “The Bells.”

  The question, of course, was how. He thought back over the lyrics, much of which was the repetition of the word “bells.” Poe had a gift for rhythm and onomotopoeia that so many of his fellow American poets lacked. Reading “The Bells” felt like you were amidst the “clamor and the clangor,” able to feel the bells’ tintinnabulation as you read it aloud.

  In particular, he thought of the needs of the ritual. He had chosen “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Murders on the Rue Morgue,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” in part because all three involved corpses, and he knew from his studies that the strongest rituals involved the taking of a life, and a human life was stronger than that of an animal. But “The Bells” had no such death.

  Then he recalled one stanza:

  In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

  In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,

  Leaping higher, higher, higher,

  With a desperate desire,

  And a resolute endeavor,

  Now—now to sit or never,

  By the side of the pale-faced moon.

  And another:

  And his merry bosom swells

  With the paean of the bells!

  And he dances, and he yells;

  Keeping time, time, time,

  In a sort of Runic rhyme,

  To the paean of the bells

  Of the bells.

  Yes! That was it. He would find a victim and set him alight even as he rang the bells. A burning human would certainly dance and yell, and his or her bosom would swell in an attempt to breathe.

  It’s perfect.

  The church was closed and locked right now, of course, since it was late at night. Tomorrow, after his day’s business was done, he’d return and talk to the priest. Explain that he would need to ring the bells himself on Tuesday at midnight. He would, of course, donate generously to the church. That was the easy part. Acquiring what he needed to perform the rituals in such a way that it would leave no trace for the constabulary was an expensive proposition, but ever since his wife passed away, he had plenty of ready money. In the end, dying was the best thing she did for him, as it provided him with both the money to do what needed to be done and the lack of her nagging prese
nce to stop him.

  Thus assured that his plan was set and good to go, needing only a victim—and he had the better part of a week to find one—he turned to head toward where he’d parked his car, several blocks down University Avenue.

  However, he was intercepted by a short man in an ugly suit, one whose face he had, of course, seen before, on the front page of a rather tiresome website.

  The man, who went by the sobriquet of Arthur Gordon Pym in a misguided and rather tired attempt to show his devotion to the author, said, “It’s a truism that criminals return to the scene of the crime, but I find it rather entertaining that you choose to come to the scene of the crime before it is one.” Pym shook his head. “I should’ve known it would be you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I haven’t the faintest notion what you’re talking about.” He started to walk past Pym, but the little man simply moved so he was still in the way. “I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He did, of course, but he saw no reason to let Pym know that. “Look, I’m just someone admiring this lovely church—”

  “At eleven o’clock at night on a Wednesday? That strikes me as exceedingly unlikely, especially given that this church is the likely site for the ritual you intend to perform on Tuesday next. I barely missed you Monday night, thanks to that damned trip wire, but I can assure you, good sir, I will not let you kill again.”

  Now, suddenly, he was nervous. At first he figured to bluff his way out of it, but if Pym saw him at the 199th Street apartment, then there was no hope. He was on to him.

  And then he realized that there was plenty of hope. He grinned, giddy with the brilliance of it.

  “Something amuses you?”

  “Yes. You.” And then he punched Pym in the face.

  Pain slammed into his knuckles and wrist, and he shook it in agony. People did that sort of thing on television all the time, and the victim always fell to the floor, unconscious. Pym, though, clutched the side of his head, and blood spurted out of his mouth.

  “You hit me!” Pym cried, spitting more blood.

  Of course I hit you, you nincompoop, it’s only too bad you didn’t fall down. He had no weapons with him—his .44 was back home—so he was defenseless without what he had thought to be the surefire trick of punching Pym in the face.

  Left with no other option, he turned and ran, which had always worked in a pinch.

  His legs were longer than Pym’s, and he had the element of surprise, so he put quite a bit of distance between himself and the diminutive Poe scholar. Even as he pumped his legs to move faster down the University Avenue sidewalk, passing apartment buildings and town houses, he remembered that he had some fishing line in the car, meant to help secure his victims. He’d needed it in particular to hold Sarah Lowrance still, as she’d been particularly ornery before he was able to apply the sedative.

  Reaching into his coat pocket with his good hand—the right one was still throbbing like mad—he pulled out his car’s key chain and pushed the button that sprung the trunk open.

  Sure enough, the fishing line was right where he remembered it to be. He grabbed it, along with a baseball that had been sitting in there since he got it free at a Yankee game his wife had insisted they go to back when she was alive. Grabbing that as well, he turned around to see Pym running down the sidewalk toward him, a cell phone at his ear.

  I don’t know who you’re calling, but it’s not going through if I can help it. He threw the baseball right at Pym’s head.

  It struck him in the stomach instead, but it was enough to get him to stop running and stumble to the pavement.

  He ran up to Pym, now wheezing on the sidewalk, grabbed the cell phone out of his hands and threw it against the wall of a nearby apartment building. Then he yanked Pym’s arms behind his back and started binding his wrists.

  “What’re you doing?” Pym asked between heavy breaths. “Ow!” he added as the fishing line cut into the skin of his wrists.

  “Choosing my final victim,” was all he said in response as he tied the line tighter. He noticed a few people around, but they minded their own business and didn’t say anything. Still, one or more of them might have had a mobile phone, so it behooved him to get out of sight sooner rather than later. “Don’t worry—your name will go down in history as aiding in one of the greatest endeavors of humankind.” He smirked. “Though I doubt you’re in much of a position to appreciate that at present. Worry not, I plan to give you due credit for your sacrifice. After all, citing your sources is the heart of scholarship.”

  He got up, yanking Pym to his feet by his bound wrists. Once again fate had favored him. This was his destiny, he just knew it.

  Very soon now the answer will be mine!

  SEVENTEEN

  The Afiri house

  The Bronx, New York

  Thursday 23 November 2006

  A staple of old-fashioned detective fiction, Sam knew, was to gather all the suspects in one room. Poe didn’t do that in “The Murders on the Rue Morgue,” but that story’s descendants certainly did. The real world didn’t often work like that, of course, so having a chance to actually do so gave him a bit of what he was sure Dean would call a geeky thrill.

  He had told Manfred to have a band meeting Thursday night at his place. Manfred pointed out that they hadn’t had a “band meeting” in years—“Matter of fact, I don’t think we ever had a meetin’ that wasn’t a rehearsal,” he’d said—but he nevertheless called it, getting everyone on the phone and saying to come over to his place instead of rehearsing at Tom Daley’s.

  Tommy, not surprisingly, was the last one to arrive. Sam had noticed that he was the last one to show up at all the gigs, even though as drummer he had the most setup work to do, since he refused to keep his drum kit at the Park in Rear. “Paid too much for this snare,” was what he had said when Sam queried him on the subject Sunday night, though it was unclear why he couldn’t just take the expensive snare drum with him and leave the rest to save himself setup and tear-down time.

  When Tommy finally showed up, Robbie, the keyboard player, and Aldo were bitching and moaning about their respective day jobs on the couch, Dean and Manfred were standing by the record player discussing the relative merits of the remasterings of Robert Johnson’s recordings (leading Sam to wonder if Dean intended to mention that he’d recently met the very demon to whom Johnson had sold his soul), and Eddie, the bass player, was standing by the window, staring out it at the backyard.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Tommy said. He was wearing a bright pink shirt that Sam suspected could be picked up from orbiting satellites. The other band members were in sweatshirts and jeans, except for Eddie, who had the same all-black ensemble he usually wore on stage. “So what’s the up, here?”

  For his part, Sam had been going over the spell in his head. It was a simple summoning, which Dad had duly recorded in the notebook (confusingly, on the page right after the one on Reapers and before the one on the Calusa Indians), and Sam had the notebook at hand to consult, but there were some tricky Latin words in there, and mispronunciation could be fatal. (He still recalled, with alarming clarity, the time when he was ten and he had done his first tracking spell, only his Latin was sufficiently poor that he instead summoned a sprite, who then proceeded to wreak havoc on the cabin where they’d been staying. Dad had managed to send it back to where it came from, but he never did get the security deposit back on that place…)

  “Well,” Manfred said after fetching Tommy a requested beer, “you’re prob’ly wonderin’ why I called y’all here. It’s simple, but I don’t think you’re gonna believe it. See—I been havin’ some problems lately here in the house. These two fellas—Sam and Dean—they been helpin’ me with it.” Dean had, at this point, gotten up to stand next to Sam at the living room entryway.

  Robbie frowned. “Thought they was friends’a Ash’s.”

  “We are,” Dean said. “That’s how we found out about Manfred’s problem.”


  “And this problem has to do with Roxy?” Aldo asked.

  Dean smirked. “Gee, Aldo, why would you assume that?”

  “’Cause you been askin’ about her all week. It’s kinda pissin’ me off. That ain’t a parta my life I’m all that thrilled with.”

  “And why would that be, exactly?” Dean asked, moving toward the couch.

  “Bitch disappeared on me. No phone calls, no apologies, no ‘sorry it didn’t work out,’ no ‘can we be friends,’ she just up and left. Pissed me off, all right?”

  Sam noticed that Aldo didn’t have the usual bright expression on his face. Ever since he first saw the guitarist on stage last Friday night, Aldo always seemed pleased with the world. How much of that was his usual demeanor and how much was due to his enrollment in Alcoholics Anonymous, Sam wouldn’t have ventured to guess.

  Now, though, Aldo was as skittish as a kitten under a rocking chair, which led him to think their theory was right.

  “Thing is,” Dean said, “the last time anyone saw Roxy before she went missing was right before you house-sat for Manfred here.”

  Everyone leaned forward at that—except Eddie, who was his usual bass-player-still self. Tommy, who was seated in the easy chair in recline mode, flipped it back forward. “Missing? She’s missing?”

  “Was reported as a missing person right after that weekend, actually,” Dean said.

  Now Aldo looked confused. “What the hell’re you talkin’ about, Sam?”

  “I’m Dean.”

  “What-the-hell-ever, I didn’t house-sit for nobody.”

  Manfred put his hands on his hips. “You damn well did, Aldo—that was when I had Lucille, and you gave her insulin each morning while I was off at the family reunion thing.”

  Aldo put his head in his hands. “Dammit.” He looked up. “Man, I’m sorry, but—look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but—I really hated that cat. We didn’t get along, so when I said I’d house-sit—I lied.”

  Sam frowned. This wasn’t the reaction he was expecting, though Aldo denying he was in the house made sense if he was guilty.