by Harvey Click
The two women seemed to be the only ones up. Coffee was already made, and Dexter poured a cup, found his jacket, and went to the front porch.
The sun was lifting the fog out of the hills, and the brisk morning air cleared the unpleasant dreams from his head. It would be a nice day for driving. He’d waited a year for this trip, and now he looked forward most of all to the chilly nights in his tent, wrapped up in a sleeping bag with Mary. His misgivings about bringing her along dispersed with the fog. Trying to figure out what was so special about her made no more sense this morning than trying to figure out what had happened last night in the vault. Some things defied analysis.
He came inside and found Naomi in the dining room, eating saltines with her coffee. She was wearing the same black dress—or did she have a dozen like that?—and looked as if she’d scarcely slept.
“Good morning, Aunt Naomi,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”
“Like the dead,” she replied, but she put her hand to her mouth and yawned.
“Have you seen Mary?” he asked.
“No.”
Mary was usually an early riser. He wondered if she was awake but reluctant to leave her room until she knew he was up. Always a stern chaperone, Naomi had assigned her a downstairs room near her own. Dexter tapped lightly on the door and got no response. He hated to wake her, but he wanted to get an early start. He knocked again, then opened the door.
The room was empty. He heard a noise in the hall, and Naomi appeared in the doorway with Miss Barkley behind her.
“She must be in the bathroom,” Dexter said.
Naomi glared at him and ordered Miss Barkley to take her to the study. She pulled the key from the pouch at the side of her wheelchair, where she always kept it, but the study door was already unlocked. Dexter followed the two women into the dark room.
The portrait of Ebenezer was on the floor, and the safe that it usually hid hung open. The Talking Horn was gone.
***
Dexter kept telling himself that he was going the wrong direction: he should be heading up to Canada instead of back to Ohio. He’d planned the research trip long before Mary Ash walked into his life, but now all he wanted to do was find her and find out why she’d stolen the Horn.
He had no idea how to go about doing this. There was no way to get information from her friends because she didn’t have any that he knew of; no way to learn anything from her license plate number because she didn’t own a car. Even if he broke into her apartment, he knew he’d find nothing. He’d never seen much of anything there but the furniture that came with it, not even a TV. Possibly everything she owned was in her duffel bags; she’d packed pretty heavily for the trip.
Yesterday she had said, “Just try not to hate me.” Dexter didn’t, but he wanted to hear her explain why he shouldn’t, and he couldn’t imagine an explanation good enough. All the hours they’d spent together must have been lies, not just her words but even the things her body had told him, maybe even the sounds she’d made in her sleep.
Forget the lies and stick with facts, he told himself. She’d said something about a burning house and things getting started before you’re born. What house, what things, and what the hell did they have to do with the Horn?
“Everything’s all fucked up,” she had said. “Nothing’s what it seems.”
There, at least, were a couple of honest-to-God facts. They’re piling up, he thought. He angrily hit the accelerator and passed a car creeping along at the speed limit.
He kept thinking about how old and ill Naomi had looked this morning, wrinkles eroding her face and a crumb of saltine cracker stuck to her lip. The last living kin he could tolerate was dying, and his foolishness had ruined what was probably their final reunion.
Their anger enflamed by hangovers, the cousins had congregated in the study to accuse him of conspiring with Mary, but Naomi had barked at them to leave.
“You stay,” she told Dexter.
She touched the frame of Ebenezer’s portrait, leaning against the wall beneath the open safe, and she stared at the dust on her finger.
“All my life in this detestable old house, like a dragon guarding its heap of gold,” she said. “If someone had stolen it seventy years ago, maybe today I’d have children and grandchildren around me instead of that rancorous rabble out there.”
“I’ll try to find it,” Dexter said. “But I’ll be honest, I don’t have any idea where to look.”
“Why bother?” Naomi said.
A peculiar sound emerged from her throat. At first Dexter thought she was coughing because he’d never heard her laugh before.
“Years ago, I was the one the Stones always chose to be Listener,” she said. “Ebenezer’s words still torment my dreams, those few nights when I sleep well enough to dream. Age fumbles around in my head and muddles my thoughts, but old age is nothing new. I’ve felt those cold fingers in my brain since the first time I heard the Talking Horn. It didn’t allow me such foolishness as youth.”
She wrapped her shawl tighter and shivered.
“I know things about it I’ve never told anyone,” she said. “I suppose you’re aware that Ebenezer murdered a child to acquire it, but that’s not the worst I could tell you. If you believe the thing’s a key to heaven, you’re sadly mistaken. The only door it unlocks is better left shut. I should have hurled it into the quicksand years ago. So if you wish to go chasing after this woman Mary Ash, that’s your prerogative, but I want nothing more to do with the damnable curse she took with her.”
He wasn’t fooled by Naomi’s laughter. The Horn was her life, voice of an ancestor who still cared enough to visit each year, and Dexter had caused it to be stolen.
The evening sun glared through his windshield, and as he pulled down the visor a scrap of paper fluttered out and fell in his lap. He was about to wad it up when he recognized Mary’s printing:
REMEMBER BRIGHT TIMES
See 5-13-12-10-16-17-4-19
Move first of rest to last
The first line seemed like a nasty joke, and the rest made no sense—just one more piece of nasty nonsense to cap the day. His anger sank into something worse, his rain-against-the-window mood. It was raining the day when the high school principal called him into his office to tell him his parents were dead, and as Dexter stared out the office window he saw the rain blurring the world he’d always taken for granted, dissolving it and washing it away to the sewers. Remember bright times while you watch them dissolve and turn to shit, and while you’re at it try to decipher a Dear John riddle. See 5-13-12 . . .
He pulled over to the berm and found a pencil in the glove compartment. While trucks roared past, he wrote out the fifth letter of the first sentence, the thirteenth letter, and so on. The letters formed a name he recognized: M. H. Grimes. He stared at it, bewildered. How did Mary know Michael Grimes?
“Move first of rest to last,” the note said.
The letters left after Grimes’ name had been taken out were REMBERBITTE, and moving the first letter to the last spelled “ember bitter.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? Maybe “ember bitter” was what she had left him with, what she’d turned all the bright times into. Very funny.
The swollen sun was shutting like a bruised eye when he pulled back onto the freeway. So Mary was somehow mixed up with Michael Grimes. Dexter had met him at an anthropology conference hosted by the university in the middle of June. During the lunch break Grimes had introduced himself, a slight, dapper man about seventy wearing an expensive suit and carrying a walking stick carved to resemble a serpent. His eyes, behind silver-framed glasses, were silver-gray like his hair, and a silver incisor glittered when he smiled. Though he described himself as merely a dilettante, he showed a wide knowledge of the medicine practices of the Iroquois and other tribes. Dexter told him his office hours and invited him to drop by sometime.
The following Monday Grimes knocked on his office door, and they spent a pleasant hour chatting. Grimes said his
lifelong hobby was collecting books and artifacts associated with magic, but his erudition obviously extended far beyond the occult. The few occultists Dexter had met impressed him as unsavory crackpots, cloaking themselves in esoteria to hide their own banality, but Grimes was different. His silvery eyes were bright with a zest for learning, and he was well versed in every subject their conversation touched on. Dexter was charmed by his quaint manners and the faint smile he wore as if he were amused by something only he could see.
“In my own amateur investigations,” Grimes said, “I’ve heard stories of various objects used in spirit-talking ceremonies that emit a cold purple light. Perhaps you’ve also heard of such a light—no?”
His curiosity whetted, Dexter told him about the article he had submitted.
“You should think twice about publishing this,” Grimes said. “I daresay there are people who’d do anything to possess such a marvel.”
“My article wouldn’t help them much,” Dexter said. “It doesn’t say who owns it.”
“Merely admitting that you know of such a thing carries its perils,” Grimes said. “Perhaps you’d inform the owner of this Talking Horn that I’m prepared to offer a substantial sum for it.”
“I’m sure the owner doesn’t want to sell it.”
“You may name your price,” Grimes said. “Trust an old man’s advice, selling is much safer than publishing. Here’s my card.”
That was the last time Dexter had seen him. A couple weeks later Mary walked into his office. Obviously the two of them had worked together to steal the Horn, but why had she identified her cohort in her note? It made no more sense than anything else today.
By the time Dexter got home, it was too late to call Grimes. The sad job of unloading his bags and camping equipment could wait till morning. As he hunted for the house key, he saw that he didn’t need it because the back door had been forced open.
He came in and stared at the kitchen floor strewn with forks and knives and broken dishes. Apparently Naomi’s hobgoblins had already paid a visit.
***
Sometimes long months go by with nothing worthwhile happening, and then all of a sudden fate smiles and everything happens at once. Joe Ryver was in West Virginia negotiating to buy some hilly wasteland when he got word that an operative named Verner Kelby had somehow managed to get himself killed in Columbus, so Ryver drove up that way because he happened to know that the locket Kelby always wore around his neck contained a spectrehole, and there was always a chance that whoever killed him didn’t know that. It turned out to be a lucky hunch, because the locket ended up in a second-hand store and Ryver got in from West Virginia just in time to find the woman who had bought it.
So number thirty-nine was in the bag, and that left only one more to go. And that last one was maybe close at hand, because not even one hour after he had sent Linda Hall down through the deep good-bye, word leaked out about an article written by somebody named Dexter Radcliff, and there was Ryver just a few minutes away from Radcliff’s house while the nearest Society punks were many miles away still scratching their empty heads and trying to digest the news.
Sometimes fate just smiles.
So Ryver drove to Radcliff’s house and took papers and flash drives and anything else that might contain information. Then he drove to a piece of hilly land he owned southeast of Columbus in an area called Hocking Hills, but by the time he set up camp the sun was coming up and he was so tired that he slept till the sun was heading back down.
Now it was dark and peaceful, stars bright and a soft breeze blowing up the ridge and a warm fire blazing. He loved a good campfire, loved the crackle and heat and smell and the sharp red tongues of flame that made wolves respectful and made their eyes and teeth flash in the night. After looking through piles of Radcliff’s papers, he threw them into the flames and watched them curl into ashes as they charred, his memory casting back to cold gray ashes that dusted five wooden crosses and an inferno that had blazed long ago.
Christsake, it’s been a long time, he thought. The lid above his dead eye flickered, and he felt cold and old despite the fire.
But payday’s almost here, he thought. Kelby’s locket made thirty-nine holes he’d given to the Man. Find this Talking Horn, and that would make number forty, and forty was the deal. Cypher was a bastard, but he’d always been good to his word.
Ryver spit in the fire and grinned. Retirement was going to be sweet, hunting and fishing on his pieces of land where no man could find him. He owned twenty parcels of wilderness in twenty different states, twenty-one if the deal in West Virginia went through, and nobody else knew about them, not even Cypher or his punks. Being left alone was about as close to heaven as he wanted to get.
He threw Radcliff’s computer CDs into the fire and watched them melt. The new punks could probably find something useful on them, and he didn’t intend to give them a chance. In the old days he always worked alone, but anymore he wasn’t supposed to scratch his ass without ten new assholes watching.
He looked over some mail he’d found in the front room beneath the mail slot, bills and ads and a little note from someone named Naomi Radcliff with a return address in upstate New York. It was a single sheet of stationery dated last Tuesday and written in a shaky hand:
Dexter,
You know perfectly well that you are not permitted to bring a stranger to the Talking Ceremony. I am disappointed that you would even ask. Nevertheless, I look forward to your unaccompanied arrival this Thursday.
Miss Barkley has been complaining ceaselessly the entire week about having to prepare the house for guests. I tell her that if she would clean it once in a great while throughout the year, then each and every autumn would not need to commence with such a crisis. I have half a mind to dismiss her, and hesitate only because I’m certain no one else in the entire country would employ the poor woman.
Sincerely,
Aunt Naomi
Ryver pulled off his boots and stretched out by the fire. He wanted a couple more hours of sleep before starting another long drive.
Chapter Six
Saturday morning Dexter found Michael Grimes’ business card and called the Cincinnati number, but there was no answer. He spent some hours sorting through the burglar mess. The only things missing seemed to be his computer, computer CDs, flash drives, and papers, and luckily he had copies of everything important locked up in his office at the university. Whoever had robbed him was no ordinary thief, because his gun collection hadn’t been touched. Shooting was one of his hobbies, and he owned combat handguns along with target pistols and rifles. Last night he’d slept with his .45-caliber Colt 1911 beside his bed, ready to change the thief’s mind if he decided to return.
He tried Grimes’ number again after lunch and still got no answer. Though little had been stolen, much was ruined, hard things broken and soft things sliced open. That vase had been his mother’s, one of her few valuable possessions. Dexter put the pieces in a sack, intending to save them as a keepsake, but then threw the sack angrily into the garbage with the rest of the rubble.
He went to the workout room in the basement and lifted weights until he was drenched with sweat. He pummeled his punching bag and practiced karate kicks, but none of it helped. He kept thinking of Mary’s solemn mouth mouthing solemn lies. He went upstairs and tried calling again.
“Grimes,” the quiet voice said.
“This is Dexter Radcliff.”
“Yes, of course, Dr. Radcliff. I was thinking of you. Yesterday I purchased a copy of your article. By the way, I noticed a typo.”
“The Talking Horn’s been stolen,” Dexter said. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”
“I thought it might be, once you advertised its existence. I believe I warned you—no?”
“Someone ransacked my house too,” Dexter said.
“Ah, that’s a shame. I hope you weren’t harmed?”
“No. Do you know Mary Ash?”
“I’ve made her acquaintanc
e,” Grimes said. “Is she involved?”
“How would I know?”
Grimes chuckled. “Perhaps we both know things we aren’t willing to say.”
“Yeah, but I think you know more than I do.”
“Let’s say I know more than I’m willing to say over the phone,” Grimes said. “Come visit me this evening for dinner. Pack a suitcase and plan to spend a few nights.”
“Why would I?”
“Because news travels quickly in dark societies. Apparently someone has already visited your house to inquire about the Talking Horn. I daresay there will soon be others.”
“They’re too late,” Dexter said.
“But they don’t know that,” Grimes said. “I trust you’re taking measures to protect yourself, but they won’t work against the occult guilds. Their assassins are swift and deadly and can hide in the shadow of a dust mote. They have their ways of listening, so let’s not say any more over the phone. Can you make it for dinner?”
“Tell me how to get there.”
***
Ohio State scored another touchdown against Notre Dame, but Mark Burton stared dully at his television screen, unable to remember what was supposed to be so exciting about touchdowns. He told himself that he was experiencing grief, and grief passes, and someday he’d be yelling and spilling his beer again at every good tackle, but he didn’t believe it. Everything had changed, even football. What was the point of all this running and grunting? It wouldn’t bring Linda back from the pit.
The cops seemed to think she had run off with another man, but he knew she was dead because he had heard her calling to him out of the pit. Whatever that ugly hole was, it wasn’t a place for the living and it didn’t look like a good place for the dead.