The Demon Curse

by Simon Nicholson

  “Not a prison then,” said Billie.

  “Not quite,” said Harry.

  They moored the boat and climbed the rickety steps. Up ahead, light flickered through the asylum’s door, faint and yellowed. Mincing’s lamp. Harry crept toward the door, Billie pressed behind him. He felt the vibrations of her heart, and his own heart was pounding again too, making his shirt twitch against his skin.

  He went in.

  The light hovered in the distance. Its glow picked out thick cell doors, long rows of them, running off in every direction. Some were shut, and others lay partly open with only darkness beyond. Harry kept moving. He went past more cell doors and stepped into a central hallway, iron walkways hanging overhead. He saw Mincing’s oil lamp, left on a desk. Harry flinched as the spindly shape of Dr. Mincing himself flitted in front of the light, clutching something in his arms, the light gleaming off its curves.

  It was a jar. There were more of them too, lined up on a row of shelves. Something was moving inside them. Tiny movements caught the light, and shadows flickered near the bottom of every glass shape. Harry looked closer and gasped. He tried to stifle the noise with his hand, but it was too late.

  “You found me! You fools!” Dr. Mincing had spun around and was staring straight at them. “I prayed you would not! I did what I could to shake you off! You cannot blame me!”

  He stumbled away from the shelves, his arms still wrapped around one of the jars. His shaking was even worse than usual, his every muscle convulsing, and his voice was a strangled cry. Tears trickled from his eyes, and Harry noticed that the doctor’s hands were still stained with purple ink.

  Harry took a step forward and then reached into his jacket. He pulled Arthur’s pen from the inside of his pocket, tugged off the lid, and held it up. Then he stared back at the jar.

  He could see what was inside.

  Chapter 16

  “Stay back! Not a step closer!” Dr. Mincing stumbled away, clutching the jar.

  But Harry kept moving forward. He crouched down so that his eyes were level with the jar. Dr. Mincing’s fingers scrabbled over the glass, but behind them, Harry saw other shapes scrabbling too. There were about seven of them. Tiny, no more than half an inch long, they scurried so fast that it was hard to tell one from the other: a tangle of scaled bodies, thrashing pincers, spiny limbs catching the light. Harry saw a tail arched over each one of them, a sting quivering at its end, its tip dripping with fluid.

  “Scorpions!” Billie gasped.

  “From the jungles of Costa Rica!” Dr. Mincing wailed as he sank into a chair.

  Harry looked at the creatures in the jar and at the pen again. Billie was gripping the bars of a cell door, trying to steady herself as she took in the jar’s contents. But then she flinched, and Harry was scrambling back too, because Dr. Mincing had swept the jar upward, holding it over his head in his quaking hands.

  “Scorpions, yes! But not just any scorpions!” The jar teetered, and tears ran freely down his face. “Flee without delay, or I shall dash this jar at your feet and set these creatures upon you! You shall discover their uniqueness then! Just like your friend before you…”

  “His pen!” Harry held it up. “You put one of them inside. You did it with Mayor Monticelso’s pen too. I found that as well, in his office, nowhere near its lid.” The scorpions were hurling themselves at the jar’s sides, venom from their stings spattering the glass. “Even with the lid snapped shut, there would be enough space for one inside, although it would have got pretty angry in there.”

  “It’s impossible!” Billie pointed at the jar. “Scorpions—they’re dangerous, sure. They can even kill people. But send people mad, so mad that it’s like a demon’s taken them over? No scorpion’s ever done that. And a sting would leave a mark, wouldn’t it? There was nothing on Mayor Monticelso, or on Artie either.”

  “These are no normal scorpions! Your friend could confirm that, were he not in their venom’s grip.” Dr. Mincing lowered the jar but kept it tightly clutched in his arms. “I suspected from the moment you arrived at the mayor’s bedside that you were far from being ordinary orphan well-wishers. I know Tobermory Swamp quite well; the accents out there are quite particular and nothing like yours. So I kept an eye on you—I followed your friend when he made his way to the New Orleans Public Library. I watched him plucking out one book after another, making notes. From the books he chose, I saw how cleverly he was following the evidence…”

  “But he was in the magic and folklore section.” Harry kept watching the jar. “Nothing to do with scorpions.”

  “He started off in that section, certainly!” Dr. Mincing wailed. “But his research skills are clearly formidable, because it wasn’t long before he was looking through books much further up the aisle, in the madness and insanity section, consulting books that I myself have studied long and hard. I knew it would be no time at all before he was scribbling in that notebook about how certain creatures have been discovered, scorpions for example, the venom of which can take over the chemistry of the brain, sending whoever is affected into an agonizing madness, a madness that possesses them utterly.” A blink sent his tears flying, and he clutched the jar tighter. “I vowed those would be notes he would never make! He had left his pen next to his notebook, back in magic and folklore, and—”

  “You set your trap.” Harry held up the pen. “Just like you did for Mayor Monticelso.”

  “An ingenious trap, I think you’ll agree! I watched him as he hurried back, opened his notebook, took the lid off his pen…” Dr. Mincing shrugged. “Then I walked up the aisle and reshelved the books he had been consulting in madness and insanity, all in their correct places. Your friend’s writhing body technically belonged in that section too, rather than in magic and folklore.” He smiled. “But it was in my interest to allow myself a small cataloging error.”

  “Why you—” Billie lunged forward, but Harry held her back.

  “Let him talk!” He hissed in her ear. “We’ve got to find out everything. We’ll never help Artie otherwise!”

  Harry looked back at Dr. Mincing, who was dropping into a chair, gray tendrils of hair drooping over his face. He placed the jar of scorpions on his desk and started rubbing his left arm just above the wrist, wincing as though in pain.

  “What do I care for this business? Mayor Monticelso, your interfering friend—what do I care about either of them? What do I care about what lies behind the business either? It is nothing to do with me! Dark and powerful it may be, and I must do its bidding, but I care nothing for it.” He rubbed his wrist harder, pushing the sleeve up to the elbow. “You were told, I think, that I have journeyed the world, researching diseases of the mind. True, although not since that field trip to the jungles of Costa Rica. Since then, these creatures, that is all I know. Their fluids, their venom, that is all I have become…”

  His unsleeved arm rested in his lap, its flesh exposed. It was swollen all over with red sores; at the center of each was an infected pinprick. Darkened blood vessels spread away from the sores. The sleeve remained lifted, and Dr. Mincing stared down at his arm as if it were an object that had nothing to do with him, even as the darkened vessels throbbed, their contents pulsing into his body.

  “For twenty years, I have tested these creatures. Originally, their poison was weak, however intriguing its effects. But that soon changed, once my studies began. I believed some great medical secret may lie within the venom’s chemistry, and I bred the scorpions in order to strengthen that venom, to concentrate its effects. In order to do so, I allowed the creatures to sting me, a task they performed with relish, particularly once my breeding had concentrated the power of their aggression gene. And those stings allowed me to observe the effects of their poison from the closest possible vantage point.” His eyes snapped into narrow slits. “Clearly, in order not to give way to those effects completely, I had to devise other concoctions from the scorpions�
�� venom, ones that would cleanse my body of its effects, for what use is research if one is never granted a period of calm to write it up? For many years, that process worked, and I studied the venom with ease. But sadly, my body weakened—how could it not, when subjected to poisoning every day? The effects of the venom, no matter how carefully they were swept away, took hold, and now my cleansing potions merely reduce those effects on me, nothing more.” He lifted his arm. “The scorpions’ stings leave no trace—one of their many ingenuities. Sadly, the process of injecting an antidote over and over again leaves many signs, a great many…”

  His fingers flexed; the dark vessels swelled under his skin. Harry watched his slit eyelids, which were bulging with the movement of the eyes behind them. Anger, despair, a strange glee—they each seemed to be gripping Dr. Mincing in turn as he slumped in his chair. Utterly mad, thought Harry. But in among all the madness, the doctor had muttered a few words that Harry knew were worth remembering. Other concoctions…an antidote…

  “Look at what remains of me!” Mincing held up his arm. “My body, it is the site of an experiment, no more. A test tube scorched through overuse, a laboratory blackened with fumes—if only my discoveries had been put to noble scientific use, as I once dreamed! Instead of falling victim to the dark power that controls them…”

  “You devised other concoctions. That’s what you said just now.” Harry cut him off. “Cleansing potions to wipe out the scorpion venom’s effects, to cure the madness?”

  “Why yes. With skill and time, the venom can be transformed into its opposite.” Dr. Mincing reached into his pocket. A corner of his mouth twitched into a smile. “I have a phial of it right here.”

  Billie lunged again. Harry grabbed her, just as quickly as he had done before. He had seen the small corked bottle of green liquid in Mincing’s fingers, but he had seen those fingers shift their positions too, until the glass bottle was held between just two of them, ready to be dropped at any time. Too far away to catch, Harry calculated, and the asylum floor was unflinching stone.

  “You are right; I have an antidote. Only by injecting a certain dose of the contents of this bottle am I able to reduce the effects.” Holding the bottle, he waved at his desk, on which various syringes and needles could be seen, hanging on a rack. “For me, in my weakened state, such a dose merely keeps me alive—but a body affected by merely one sting, such as Mayor Monticelso and your friend, they would no doubt be rid of the disease completely. I am tracking the course of your thoughts correctly?” He looked with one eye through the phial at Harry. Then the fingers adjusted their position. “Unfortunately, there is not the slightest chance of such a dose being received by anyone, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t drop it!” Harry watched the bottle. It was held by the edges of a thumbnail and fingernail, and the floor waited below. Can’t reach it in time.

  “Drop it? It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t.” Mincing’s jaw dropped open, and a laugh spilled out, its echoes racing through the darkness. “I tried to bring this matter up before, but you interrupted me. Are you not interested? About what lies behind these scorpions and their venom, every milligram of it? The dark power! The dark power from which there is no escape!”

  The fingers around the bottle flexed; the liquid inside swayed.

  “Dark power? What are you talking about?” Harry edged forward.

  “The power has you in its clutches, whether you know it or not.” Mincing rocked in his chair, the bottle rotating against his thumb. “Think what this power has made of me and my noble scientific inquiry! Evil, nothing but evil—that is what we have been reduced to, my study and I!” He shook his head. “Drink the antidote, or smash it on the floor and watch it trickle away—it makes no difference! The dark power will have you in either case. You can be sure of that!”

  “What is it?” Harry couldn’t listen any longer. “Tell us! Tell us what it is!”

  “It? That is your first error.” Mincing kept rocking. “Her, that’s what you mean—”

  A flash of light, the whole asylum thundered, and Harry’s hands flew to his ears, trying to seal off the noise. He saw Mincing’s rocking had stopped. He was sitting bolt upright, but his head lolled to the side. Then he slumped over, his mouth open, his eyes glazed.

  A small red dot grew in the whiteness of his shirt. It darkened and kept growing. He slithered off his chair, the bottle still between his fingers. His hand hit the floor, and the bottle remained intact, cushioned by finger and thumb. Then it rolled onto the floor and rocked to a halt.

  A thud. Harry saw Billie, sprawled facedown beside him. He turned and made it about halfway around before something slammed into the back of his neck and he too fell forward. He found himself staring at the cold stones of the asylum floor, growing darker and darker, until they were completely black.

  Chapter 17

  Harry’s eyelids twitched apart. He saw the asylum—its steel walkways, its cell doors, the dark corridor through which he and Billie had entered the hallway. And then everything vanished again as he squeezed his eyes shut, wincing at the pain in the back of his head. He tried to reach up and touch it, but his arm wouldn’t move.

  It was lodged behind his back. Both his arms were. The elbows were trapped by his hip and the wrists were up between his shoulder blades, fixed in place. Harry tried to look around to see what had happened, and then he saw her, standing in a small doorway, right down at the other end of the hall.

  A pair of sequin-studded shoes. The bottom of a dress, a mass of interweaving petticoat hems. A pair of spectacles on a stem, hovering in front of two eyes. A familiar figure, and she appeared much the same as on the occasions when he had seen her over the last couple of days.

  Apart from the jeweled revolver gripped in her left fist.

  And the motionless body of Dr. Mincing, upon which one of the sequin-studded shoes was placed.

  “My apologies for being ever so slightly late,” Madame Melrose said. “Were I to have arrived a few minutes earlier, perhaps I could have silenced Dr. Mincing before he told you the information regarding my plan, which, now that you know it, makes your fate sadly unavoidable. Je suis désolée. I’m sorry, I mean.” Her fingers twitched around the spectacles’ stem, and the lens gleamed. “Or maybe I don’t mean that at all?”

  “Harry…”

  Harry glanced around to Billie. She was just a few inches away, staring desperately toward the corridor that led to the jetty and their moored boat, and then looking to take in Madame Melrose, standing in that doorway with Dr. Mincing, and the gun. Harry glanced down at himself, and he saw why neither of them could move. They were both strapped into cream-colored jackets, the cloth thick, heavily stitched, and festooned with buckles and clips, each one of which was tightly fastened. Their arms were drawn up around their backs, their fingers trapped in sewn-up sleeves, and the jackets themselves were padlocked by steel clips in their collars to the bars of a cell. Their ankles were tied too, surrounded by buckled straps.

  “Straitjackets, mes enfants. What else would you expect in a deserted asylum?” Madame Melrose slid the revolver into a pocket of her dress. “A little moldy after lying unused for several years and sized for adults, not children. But a few quickly cut extra notches in each buckle strap meant the jackets pulled perfectly tight around your smaller frames. Yes, these straitjackets are capable of their task, namely the restraint of the insane, the demented, the criminally psychotic.” She smiled. “Or in this case, the merely overcurious.”

  “You!” Billie fought against the straps. “You’re the one behind it! You’re the one responsible for what happened to Mayor Monticelso. And Artie too.”

  “And let’s not forget l’assassinat de sang-froid, the cold-blooded murder of Dr. Mincing.” The sequined shoe altered its angle on the corpse. “He may have been a sinister figure in his own right, but he still counts.”

  Harry kept struggling. His wrists were
fixed between his shoulder blades, but his hands and fingers flexed in every direction, trying to find a way out. Fighting as hard as he could, gritting his teeth, Harry saw just a single buckle by his left shoulder lift its tooth by a fraction of an inch, but then his strength gave out, and the tooth lowered back again. He stopped to gather his breath and tried not to look too obviously at the foot of the table nearby for fear Madame Melrose would follow the direction of his gaze.

  The phial of antidote. It lay by the foot of the table leg, just where it had rolled from Dr. Mincing’s hand. Blood glistened on the floor and trailed all the way across the hall to the small doorway where Dr. Mincing’s body now lay. It trailed right past the phial, Harry noticed—but there the phial still was. She’s missed it.

  “Mincing, Mayor Monticelso, Artie—why’d you do it, Madame Melrose?” Billie was fighting too, her face flushed, her head thrashing, but her straitjacket wasn’t moving either. “And the Islanders too, remember? Whatever you’re up to, they’re paying the price, aren’t they? I thought you liked them.”

  “Liked them? I take a great interest in them, it’s true, but that’s not the same thing,” Madame Melrose snapped back. “My interest dates, as I told you, from my youth, when I grew up on a cotton plantation not far from this city. Our workers there were much the same as your Islanders; they had the same color skin. As do you, I see, ma jeune fille.” She looked at Billie. “So of course I took interest in such folk, their customs and beliefs—why would I not when my family’s vast wealth depended on them? They were not only our workers; they were our property. Nos esclaves. Our slaves.”