The Demon Curse

by Simon Nicholson

  “Witchcraft! Evildoing!” Brother Jacques’s eyes still glared. “What right do strangers have to spread lies of our practices! Many times, we have offered to explain these rituals, to make it clear that they are harmless, but no one will listen!” He rose and took Auntie May’s stick. Fire flowered from its end as he lifted it to his face, and the flames made his wrinkles shift their shapes. He crossed to the other side of the hut and lifted the stick, and the darkness above him gleamed with curves of light. Harry saw, hanging up in the roof, hundreds of brass jars, each one intricately engraved.

  “Watch this,” Billie whispered. “It’ll explain everything.”

  Her fingers were still around his wrist. Harry looked at his friend and wondered if he would have recognized her if he had just arrived in the room. Her smile was gone, her body tense, tightly held.

  “Our people arrived in this city nearly one hundred years ago,” the old man said. “We came from an island, and the village that was once our home, we have always been told, sat on a bank of land like this one, next to a river near a sea. We settled here and made it our home—our own special neighborhood of this great city of New Orleans. But even then, I believe, there was suspicion regarding our…”

  “Our ways,” finished Auntie May.

  Brother Jacques beckoned, and a child hurried toward him, holding a pole. Brother Jacques pointed, and the child angled the pole up into the darkness and fetched down one of the jars. The jar settled on the floor, and Brother Jacques bent over it. Harry heard shuffling noises, and he saw that everyone in the hut had moved very slightly forward.

  “In each of these jars, three spirits dwell. One is from the trees; one moves upon the earth; the other belongs in the sky. We keep these spirits together, and we nourish them with what they desire.”

  With a dull scrape, the jar’s lid lifted. Brother Jacques drew out a tiny net bag filled with large, blackened seeds. Next, a handful of hawks’ feathers tied together with a cord. Finally, he lifted out something pale and coiled, which Harry saw was the dried skin of a snake. He heard Arthur whisper in his ear.

  “Voodoo. I’ve read about it in books, back in the New York library.” Arthur’s eyes gleamed. “It’s a religion, started off in West Africa, but it’s traveled to the islands of the Caribbean and it’s here too, in New Orleans. Fascinating stuff, all about the spirits of nature and—”

  “Voodoo. That is one name for it.” Brother Jacques was putting the three items back in the jar. “But there are many names for it, and none of them matters, for it is the spirits themselves that concern us. We offer them these items, seeds, feathers, the skin of snakes—ordinary in themselves, yet far from ordinary in their effects. Using them, we bring the spirits of the world among us, and we do so with care, with respect.”

  “It is no witchcraft,” Auntie May said. “We heal the sick, and we comfort the troubled, nothing more.”

  “Why would we do otherwise?” Brother Jacques sealed the jar. “We know the spirits’ power. We know their power, should folk choose to carry out curses, to inflict harm. Handled with evil intent, they can become demons, it is true—demons every bit as powerful as the city fears! But why would we bring among us such creatures when we know, more than anyone, the evil they can do?”

  He lifted the jar. Harry saw engraved patterns on the brass: plants, birds, the gleaming scales of a snake. The patterns glowed as Brother Jacques slotted the jar onto the pole and lifted it into the roof’s darkness.

  “Mayor Monticelso knew this.” Auntie May leaned forward. “He sat here, and he saw us at our work. He studied the ways of our people until he knew them almost as well as we. Why, you can read it yourself—here is his book!”

  It had been passed to her by another Islander, a small volume bound in red leather. Essays on the Peoples of New Orleans. Arthur took it and flicked through the pages, and Harry glimpsed printed sketches of some of the items he had just seen: the seeds, the skin, the feathers. He studied them as Auntie May spoke on.

  “Mayor Monticelso knew the truth! He knew that these rituals are used only for good.”

  “But who will believe us?” Brother Jacques’s voice cut through. “When the mayor himself lies in the grip of this evil? An evil that has every appearance of being the work of a demon, I cannot deny it. But no demon of ours!”

  “Already the city has made up its mind.” Auntie May shook her head. “Already they rise up against us. Those who protect us will fall from power; those who attack us will be swept to power in their place. That Oscar Dupont! And how can we defend ourselves? How can we clear our name? We are the accused—no one will believe a word we say!”

  “But unless the truth is discovered about what happened to poor Mayor Monticelso, our time in this city, in this village that we know so well, is short!” The old man’s eyes flashed but with a different sort of light. Harry saw tears in them. “I know it! We will be swept away! We will be driven from our homes!”

  The whole hut shook; the windows rattled in their frames. All around, the Islanders were shouting with anger, indignation, and fear, and the darkness throbbed with their cries. Auntie May reached toward Billie, sitting at Harry’s side.

  “Oh, child!” Her arm hovered. “What a time you have chosen to return to us! Why, I believe it is the very end of our time. The end of our time at Fisherman’s Point. The end of our time in New Orleans!”

  “Never, Auntie May—never.”

  Billie grabbed Auntie May’s hand. Then she threw both her arms around her, embracing her. The other Islanders reached in, and once again, Billie disappeared among their encircling arms. But Harry caught a glimpse of her face, and he saw that her jaw was tight, her eyes narrow with determination. He felt his own jaw tighten, his own eyes narrow. He turned to Arthur.

  “You were right, what you said before, Artie,” he muttered. “It’s odd, all right.”

  “What’s that, Harry?” Arthur looked up, still flicking through the pages of Mayor Monticelso’s book.

  Harry reached into his jacket and took out the pale green letter. He opened it up and ran a fingertip under the words that were written there. The Order of the White Crow. He scanned the rest of the letter several times.

  “Knocked out, locked in suitcases… Not only that, but we arrive in a city where some of Billie’s oldest and most precious friends live. Not only that, but we arrive here at the exact moment when those friends could do with some help, when they need their names cleared from the accusation of a mysterious crime.”

  His finger moved down to the last words on the letter. He was about to read them out but realized Arthur was saying them anyway, from memory.

  “Prepare yourselves for your first investigation…”

  Harry nodded. Folding the letter up, he slid it into his pocket. He put his arm around Arthur’s shoulder.

  “Who knows the truth about how we’ve ended up here?” His grip tightened around Arthur. “But I’m sure glad we did.”

  Chapter 5

  Harry woke up.

  He made out the straw mat beneath him and the wooden slats of the hut with the first rays of morning light gleaming through them. Smoke curled through each of those bright beams, and Harry heard the clatter of cooking pots. He breathed in the odors of coffee, rice, and fried fish, and across the hut, he saw Auntie May and some of the other Islanders, crouched around the fire, stirring spoons in saucepans and chopping vegetables. Billie and Arthur were a few feet away, sleeping next to him on their own straw mats, and Harry noticed that Billie seemed a little troubled in her sleep; her breathing was fast, and she seemed to be muttering something. He reached across to pull the blanket up around her, tucking it under her chin. Her breathing slowed, and her face smoothed out. Harry lay back on his mat.

  He gazed up at the beams of light crisscrossing above him and lifted his arm. His hand stretched toward the light, his fingers flexing, moving between the slanting
rays, trying to dodge them. A favorite game—and there was no reason not to play it now.

  He closed his eyes and let the memories drift in. The sounds of the hut changed; the smells changed too. Harry detected the warm fragrance of bread, the small loaves his mother made every morning. He heard, very faintly, voices speaking Hungarian, the language he had once known so well, and in among them he made out the low whispers of his father’s voice, reciting prayers. He could see him too, his father, those tired eyes, those drawn features, and his mother’s face hovered just behind, tired and drawn too.

  The voices changed. There were no prayers now, only fearful mutterings, talk of money and debts that he hadn’t understood back then and made no sense to him now. Harry opened his eyes, but the memories kept hold. Fear. His father’s lips trembled with it, his words trembled with it, and fear had trembled on through every one of the days, weeks, and months that had followed. The Scattering, they had called it. The family had broken up, sent off across Europe to wherever there might be hope for them, which in his case had meant ending up alone in the hold of a ship sailing across the freezing gray Atlantic. Four weeks the voyage had lasted—four weeks of filth, hunger, and sickness, followed by the cold, hard months on the streets of New York…

  Harry squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them as wide as he could. The memories faded, and he concentrated on his fingers, still skillfully finding their way between the rays of sun. He doubled the speed. He had invented it back then, this game—back in the Budapest slum, back in his home where the light had streamed through holes in the tiles over his bed. It had distracted him, to focus on nothing but these tiny complicated maneuvers, these impossible challenges of dodging the light, and he had played it ever since, crouched in the hold of a ship, sitting in a rundown Manhattan boarding house. A distraction—but it is more than that too, he reminded himself. In a way, this little game had been the beginning of it all, of his unusual quickness and skill, of his ability to pull off the most ingenious tricks, and the thought made him lift his other hand up to the rays of sun too, so that both sets of fingers were flexing, dodging, darting. He doubled their speed again, but still not a single one strayed into the light.

  “Harry?”

  Billie was sitting up on the straw mat, rubbing her face, and Arthur was struggling up too. Harry nodded at them both and let his hands drop out of the air. His friends were getting up and heading toward the middle of the hut, where Auntie May was serving breakfast with the other Islanders. Harry sat with them, eating fish, rice, and potato. He felt the muscles of his fingers ache from the speed with which he had played the game. But a little bit of practice would probably turn out useful, he told himself.

  For helping Billie and her friends.

  He saw Billie whispering to Auntie May. The old woman was muttering back, her face agitated, her hands grabbing at Billie’s clothes. Harry tried to listen, but they were deliberately keeping their voices low, so he concentrated on eating his food instead, washing it down with a mug of the Islanders’ sweet coffee. A few minutes later, he followed Billie and Arthur out onto one of the jetties and climbed down off it into a small boat. Billie’s brow furrowed as her hands moved about, untying ropes, gripping the rudder.

  “I never knew you were able to sail, Billie,” said Arthur as they glided off.

  “Never been in a boat together before, have we?” Billie let a rope slide a little further through her fist and then wound it around a cleat. “Brother Jacques taught me. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.”

  She looked back over her shoulder at the huts of Fisherman’s Point. Then she swung back and her hands moved fast, hoisting the sail. It stretched in the wind, and the boat shot through the water, Billie leaning right out over the side, balancing it with her weight and staring ahead.

  “What were you and Auntie May talking about just now?” Harry asked.

  “I was telling her our plan, that we’re going to clear their name,” Billie muttered. “And she was trying to stop me, saying it’s too dangerous.”

  “She could have a point,” said Arthur, looking across the river toward the buildings huddled on the other side. “It’s a sinister business, all this.”

  “I told her she didn’t have a choice,” Billie continued. “None of the Islanders can investigate, can they? No one’ll believe them, like Brother Jacques said! Besides, the way things are going, it’s not even safe for any of them to set foot in the city…”

  She tightened the sail. The boat picked up speed, and she leaned out even further, keeping it on its course. And she stayed like that, her gaze fixed on the city ahead, until they were nearly across the river, gliding toward the same jetty where Harry and his friends had first met the Islanders the previous day.

  “So, how are we going to start, Harry?” Billie said.

  “We’ve got to get into city hall and see Mayor Monticelso for ourselves,” Harry replied. “If we’re going to put the Islanders in the clear, we’ve got to find out what actually has happened to him. Get a closer look at him, talk to the people who are looking after him, discover as much as we can. This state he’s fallen into—maybe it’s some terrible illness that no one knows about.”

  “Unlikely,” said Arthur, taking out his notebook. “He’s been in the hospital for days, remember, and looked after by doctors. They’d have come up with something by now.”

  “Then maybe he’s been given some kind of poison?” Harry went on. “He’s mayor of a big city; people in power have enemies, don’t they?”

  “Doctors would have discovered poison too.” Billie’s face was grim. “Y’know, I can’t help thinking about what Brother Jacques said last night. About how he and the Islanders use their spirit magic for good, but that others might not do the same.”

  “Handled with evil intent, they can become demons, it is true—demons every bit as powerful as the city fears,” Arthur read out from the notes he had made. “Yes, I’ve been thinking that too.”

  “A real demon curse,” said Billie. “Set upon Mayor Monticelso by who knows who…”

  Harry said nothing, but he couldn’t help tightening his grip on the boat’s side. His eyes flickered shut, and he saw the mayor again, that face with all blood drained from it, those struggling limbs. His body is alive, and yet his mind seems entirely out of his control was what the doctor had said. Could it be that he really had been taken over by some kind of dark force?

  Harry shook his head and forced his eyes open, dispelling the troubling thoughts as the boat glided up to the jetty. Billie pulled in the sail, Arthur tied the rope to a mooring post, and they climbed out and set off into the city.

  “Who knows what the truth is?” Harry said. “But one thing’s for sure: The Islanders aren’t anything to do with it.”

  “You’re right there,” Billie agreed.

  “And that’s what we’ll prove,” finished Arthur. “As for getting into city hall and seeing Mayor Monticelso, I’ve got a plan for that too. Let’s pay a visit to the New Orleans Public Library, shall we?”

  He set off down the street. Billie hurried after him and Harry started following too but then noticed something and stopped.

  Another street curved off to the left. It was the same street he had run along the day before, hurrying away from the city hall with Arthur. He could make out city hall down at the end of it now, its roof and the tops of its pillars, but he wasn’t interested in that. Instead, he focused on a point about halfway along the street, the exact same point where he had seen the driver and the other uniformed servants laughing and smoking by the cab with its coat of arms.

  The two pickpockets were there.

  Daggerbeard and Yelloweyes, that’s what I’ll call them. Harry saw them quite clearly, hovering in the entrance to an alleyway, the very same alleyway into which they had ducked after carrying out their snatch. He remembered the bundle of keys, their metal flashing in the sun, and he
could see Daggerbeard’s hand was clutching something. He saw that Yelloweyes was holding something too—a small sack. It hung from his hands, and both men were peering into it. Yelloweyes’s fingers gripped the sack’s opening, making it twitch, and his mouth twitched too as he muttered to Daggerbeard, who was nodding. Both men, Harry noticed, kept swiveling their heads and glancing up in the direction of city hall.

  “Harry?”

  “Come on, we’ve got to get started!”

  Harry looked around. A short distance away, Arthur and Billie were waiting, Arthur holding his notebook and pen, Billie waving him on.

  Pickpockets, thieves, that’s all they are. Probably nothing to do with it.

  And he ran after his friends.

  • • •

  Harry sat next to Billie on a bench in the marble entrance hall of the New Orleans Public Library. Fans turned overhead, sending air spiraling downward. Over by the reception desk, Arthur was finishing his conversation with the librarians, who were handing him a slip of paper, which he signed. Stuffing it into his pocket, he walked back toward his friends.

  “Easily done,” he said. “Thanks to being a member of the New York Public Library, I managed to get a special pass here. Put you two on it too, as guests. The newspapers are up on the fourth floor: the New Orleans Post, the Louisiana Mail, everything.”

  He led them up a flight of steps. Pushing through some double doors, he swept into one of the reading rooms, a domed space with gleaming desks, and set off along one of the aisles of bookshelves. Harry and Billie followed, the spines of thousands of books flashing past. Harry smiled as he watched Arthur swing his arms and click his fingers happily as he walked. Halfway down the aisle, the tweed-suited boy even paused to tug out a couple of books and, after studying them with interest, tucked them under his arm.

  “Feeling at home, are we?” Harry asked as Arthur hurried on toward a spiral staircase.

  “Absolutely. Apart from anything else, they use the same classification system as the New York library, and I know that pretty much backward.” Arthur reached the top of the staircase, hurried off down another corridor, and thudded through a teak door. “Anyway, let’s get to work.”