Hours later, the oil lamp flickered out and Colin stirred, closing his eyes and stretching after the long immobility. He put away his equipment and checked the time: nearly midnight.
It could have been Toller Hasloch that he’d seen in the street, but whether it had been or not did not matter now. It had been a warning.
People like John Cannon existed to be protected. No matter how strenuously they put themselves in harm’s way, it was Colin’s job—and that of those like him—to see that they never came to any. The words he had said to Claire when he’d first explained himself to her, many years ago, came back to him now: “The great mass of humanity has the right to not be troubled by forces outside the scope of their daily lives, or manipulated by forces they have no way of resisting. When I find someone interfering in people’s lives with Black Magick, it’s my duty to stop them if I can. It’s my job.”
John Cannon was hunting for a black coven. No doubt he’d already run into an example or two; there were a lot of would-be Satanists out there, filled with a collegiate desire to shock and impress the mundane world. Most of them were pretty harmless, never rising above extortion and a little forced sex from its female acolytes, leaving their members sadder but wiser overall. If that sort of thing was what Cannon faced, the man was quite right: he could take care of himself.
But Colin did not think it was. Call it a hunch, a whim, or even a genuine communication from the Inner Planes. He was certain that bigger game prowled the forest of the night; something darker and altogether more proficient than the hobbyists who made up the clientele of places like the Sorcery Shoppe. For their own sakes, as well as for the sake of those lives they might harm, Colin must stop them.
All that he had to do was find them—before John Cannon paid the ultimate price.
A fortnight later, Colin was less sanguine. As he knew from his own experience, the only time a cell—which was how he must look at the thing, after all—became vulnerable was when it communicated with outside groups. If this black coven were not recruiting or making some other sort of mundane contact with outsiders, it might take Colin years to find them. A Black Lodge might be easy enough to track down in the Overlight—though the hunt was insanely dangerous—but locating its Astral Temple gave no clue to its temporary location. Finding their real-world location required real-world means.
Unfortunately, Colin could not hunt them in person. His meeting with Jock Cannon had shown him that he was too well known to risk impersonating a gullible Seeker, and because of what he was, it was impossible for him to pretend to his quarry that he was instead a more experienced practitioner of the Black Arts.
For this hunt, he’d need help.
“Nothing.” Claire’s succinct assessment as she slid into the booth opposite him made Colin sigh.
They were meeting at an all-night coffee shop up near Columbus Circle, far enough from either of their homes so that if they were under surveillance, there was a good chance their stalkers might miss them.
His wartime habits had come back to Colin with frightening ease, as though the war were not thirty years ago, but yesterday. He’d taught them all, painstakingly, to Claire: how to follow, and how to see if you were followed. How to lose a pursuer. How to tell whether your home or office had been searched. How to leave a message for a confederate. How to run, and when, and what to do if you could not run.
It all seemed silly—theatrical, somehow, without even the shadow of a present threat to justify it. But Colin knew they would not always be as lucky as they had been a decade ago in Berkeley, when Toller Hasloch, boy Nazi, had tipped his hand so grandiloquently. So often the Shadow only manifested itself unequivocally in the moment it was about to strike.
“You’re sure of that?” Colin asked. Claire pulled a wry face.
“I’m certain,” Claire said.
The waitress came over to take their orders, and after she’d left, Claire resumed her story. Colin reached for his pipe and began to fill it.
“I didn’t Sense a blessed thing. The so-called Inner Grotto of the Court of Typhon isn’t anything much. Some drugs, I think, and probably a lot of group sex. Nasty enough, but not what we’re looking for. They’ve got an Enemies List, all right, and members are encouraged to add to it, but as far as I can tell, they couldn’t raise enough Power to blow out a candle. They’ve got a very fancy setup, though—apparently one of their members is a theatrical set designer—Mr. Cannon’s going to have a field day when he gets around to them.”
“And they were our most promising lead.” Colin sighed and struck a match. He puffed his pipe alight, giving the gesture all his concentration.
The waitress brought their orders—an omelette for Colin, a hamburger for Claire. Claire tucked into her food with good appetite.
Colin was glad to see her looking so well—he would never have involved her in this dangerous game if he had not thought she was psychologically whole. It was a little over four years now since Peter’s death; perhaps enough time had passed that Claire could finally gain enough distance from it to be willing to take emotional chances again. Lately, she’d been taking classes in small business management and was thinking about finding a career outside of nursing. Considering the dangerous state of the city hospitals, it was a move that Colin heartily endorsed.
“What now, Colin?” Claire paused with a french fry halfway to her mouth. “I’m getting pretty good at this wide-eyed innocent act, and I’m not crying quits, but …”
“Actually, I’m wondering if we’re going about this in completely the wrong way. We’ve been going after the coven and running up against a dead end. We might have better luck if we started at the other end and worked backward.”
“You mean, start with the victims … or so-called victims, anyway? Like that woman from Minnesota who wrote that book about how she suddenly remembered she’d been a Satanic High Priestess?” Claire’s lip curled in scorn.
“Not quite,” Colin corrected with a smile. “We know from Cannon’s lecture that the group we’re looking for is operating somewhere in the New York area, and it’s probably up to the traditional scare tactics to consolidate its power. We just need to find out who they’re using them on.”
“A tall order,” Claire said. “Frightened people don’t talk—they’re too scared.”
“No,” Colin agreed. “But they look for protection. And if the conventional safeguards fail them, they’re likely to fall back on instinct, even superstition.”
“Organized religion, you mean,” Claire supplied teasingly. Colin smiled sheepishly.
“Well, yes. And since these days even the Catholic Church won’t perform an exorcism without some pretty hard evidence, those poor souls who find themselves victimized by the forces of Darkness frequently find themselves appealing to their parish priest—or local rabbi—in vain.”
“Which throws them right into the laps of the occult con artists. Fee-charging lay exorcists, bogus psychics, and all that sort of unscrupulous two-legged shark. But Colin, you know as well as I do how many of those creeps are out there. As fast as we close one down, another pops up. How are you going to check every single one of them, and their clients as well?”
“I’m not,” Colin sad, gesturing to the waitress for the bill. “I’m going to check out the sharks who were scared away by a bigger shark.”
ELEVEN
NEW YORK, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1972
Tell me where is fancy bred.
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
IT WAS THE EVE OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE, AND THE ROOM WAS dark even at midday. It was the living room of an apartment on West 8th Street just off Broadway, a neighborhood that had been poor not many years before but was now steadily becoming more fashionable.
The chamber was almost a parody of the popular conception of the occultist’s Sanctum Sanctorum. The floor was painted with a Seal of Solomon copied out of the Grimoirum Verum, with addi
tional arcane symbols added around the edges for effect. The walls were covered in purple crushed velvet and held plaques representing the signs of the Zodiac, a phrenological map of the human head, a poster depicting the path of kundalini energy, a drawing of the Tree of Life, and several blowups of Tarot cards. The ceiling was draped with dense swags of multicolored fishnet, into which had been thrust a number of objects that had apparently caught the occupant’s fancy: a baby doll, stuffed animals, a hand mirror, some Mardi Gras masks, and several of the small mirrored fishing floats colloquially known as “witch balls.” The windows were hung with black velvet drapes, and the panes were covered with stained-glass Contact paper, making the room murky even in the brightest daylight.
Colin sat on the edge of a black plush couch, holding a cup of coffee untasted in his hands. Across from him, in a high, elaborately-carved chair, sat Lucille Thibodeaux.
Colin had been hunting Lucille for several weeks, though he hadn’t realized it until three days ago. She was the shark he’d been looking for: the woman who had put John Cannon on the trail of the black coven, and who might yet provide Colin with a lead to their location.
Madame Lucille made her living as a bogus voudoun priestess, catering to a largely white and totally credulous clientele that felt that something so alien to their experience was by definition superior to anything more familiar. For the right price, Madame Lucille changed bad luck to good, crafted love charms, lifted curses, and relayed messages from the dead, all without any more success than could be chalked up to coincidence and a little trickery.
The first time Colin had seen Lucille had been several years ago, when he’d been extracting an old friend, newly widowed, from the rapacious clutches of the phony medium. Then, he hadn’t been sure how old she was. Then, she’d been a beautiful exotic young woman, dressed in a theatrical gypsy fashion and wearing armloads of bargain-counter jewelry.
Today she looked every year of her age and more. Her old-ivory skin now had a sallow greyish undertone, and she hadn’t bothered to put on makeup to see him. She’d greeted him at the door in a pink chenille bathrobe, conducting him into her sitting room with what seemed a laborious parody of her former charm. In the harsh light of day, she had the gaunt, raddled aspect of a cancer victim. Even the tignon wrapped around her head looked faintly dingy.
“What you want wid Lucille, hahn? I tell you before, M’sieur, I doan’ fix curses no more, me.” Lucille spoke—when she remembered—with a fetching French accent. But when she was upset or afraid, her native inflections—a thick and almost unintelligible Acadian patois—overwhelmed her speech.
She was very afraid now.
“Lucille nobody special, cher. Lots worse people out dere. I jus’ give dem what dey ask for, me. You are a ver’ bad man, M’sieur, to bodder me so.”
“Now, Lucille, you know I’m not upset with you this time. I want to help you. Help me, and I can help you.” All of them, Colin thought resignedly, protested their innocence even before they were accused, almost as if they couldn’t help themselves. And since Lucille had urged this meeting, her protestations were doubly ridiculous.
The Creole woman sipped at her coffee. Her hands shook, rattling the cup against the saucer, and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead despite the winter weather outside.
“I should never ’ave talk to dat man,” she said fiercely. She shook her head, and her earrings flashed below her white tignon. “He was poison, dat one—poison for Lucille.”
“You spoke to John Cannon, you told me that over the phone,” Colin prompted. He already knew some of Lucille’s story, both from others he’d talked to in the past several days and from the conversation he’d had with Lucille to set up this meeting.
“He pay me to,” she said simply. “He say he want to do a book about my life, so dat I get famous an’ be on television an’ all. An’ he want to know about de dark forces dat I do battle wid, and dose who worship dem. An’ so I tell him about dat, too.”
“But they found out that you’d talked—told Cannon about them,” Colin prompted her. He could afford no mistakes, nor to leave any question unasked. He suspected that Lucille would be too frightened to meet with him twice. And if what she’d hinted at was true, Cannon was in more immediate danger than Colin had suspected.
“Dat girl, she tell dem, I t’ink. She crazy in de head, her! She say she want to get free of dem, and den she go running back to dem again, I bet!”
Slowly Colin coaxed the whole story out of her, verifying each statement carefully as he went. It had begun months before Cannon’s lecture at the Sorcery Shoppe, when a woman named Sandra Jacquet came to Lucille, wanting protection.
“An’ she doan’ tell me from what, her, not at firs’, so I give her dis charm to wear an’ charge her fifty dollar, an’ de nex’ week she come back to me an’ say, it work not so good, an’ dere dese t’ing in her apartment, an’ can I come an’ exorcise de place. So I do dis t’ing—a good job; de ingredient, dey cos’ me forty dollar. It take me t’ree hour, an she say it a good t’ink she fin’ me before somet’ing worse happen. But den I start having … de bad dream.”
“Is this the girl?” Colin asked, pulling a small photo out of his pocket.
Lucille took the photo in trembling hands and peered at it in the room’s dim light. “Dat her, I t’ink. Where she at now, her?”
Colin put the photo back into his pocket without answering. He did not think that it would help Lucille’s composure to know that her client was currently an unclaimed body in the city morgue. The pieces of her dismembered and mutilated body—most of them, anyway—had been found stuffed into garbage bags and scattered over most of a city block.
It was lucky—if that was truly the word—that the occult symbols that had been branded and carved into her both before and after death had caused Lieutenant Martin Becket of the Occult Crimes Unit to call Colin in on the case. Just as it was fortunate that the police had been able to get a fairly recent photo of Sandra, because it had been impossible to take an ID photo from what they found of the corpse.
“Tell me about Sandra, Lucille. Why did she come to you? What did she want—exactly?”
“I don’ know how she fin’ me, M’sieu, but she wan’ what dey all do. She want Lucille to lift de hoodoo. An’ at first’, everyt’ing work out jus’ fine.”
Which meant, Colin understood, that Sandra Jacquet was rich, and more than willing to pay—lavishly—for protection, without inquiring too closely into her mentor’s bona fides. At least at first. But after a few unsuccessful “purification” sessions, Sandra had become unsatisfied with the results for which she was paying. And, finding that her usual tricks were not satisfying her wealthy and openhanded client, Madame Lucille made her first mistake. She did an afternoon’s research at the New York Public Library and decided that what was needed to lift Sandra Jacquet’s curse was a séance.
It took Lucille almost two weeks to talk Sandra into it, but the girl was terrified—and, Colin gathered, the nebulous problems she was experiencing were getting worse—so Sandra Jacquet finally succumbed to Lucille’s coaxing and parted with the $300 that the faux psychic said was required to buy the necessary materials for the ritual.
In fact, Lucille had pocketed the bulk of the money as usual, and spent only a few dollars on colored candles, oregano, and a Ouija board from FAO Schwarz. But something she had not counted on had happened at the “séance”; something terrible enough to drive Lucille away from her plump half-plucked pigeon. Madame Lucille wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell Colin what had happened that April night, but her hands shook and her voice quivered as she recounted the moment at which the planchette had taken on a cold life of its own beneath her fingertips.
She broke off her narrative at that point, taking a cigarette out of the onyx box on her coffee table and lighting it with shaking fingers.
“An’ what it say den, nobody know about Lucille but her! So den I t’ink …” There was a long pause. Lucille sucked smoke into he
r lungs and blew it out in a harsh exhalation.
“I t’ink maybe dis girl, she too much trouble to keep aroun’, her.” Lucille shrugged.
After that, Colin gathered, Lucille had refused to take Sandra’s calls or to see her when Sandra came to the apartment. And eventually, to Lucille’s great relief, Sandra had stopped calling. Colin wondered if she had stopped because she was dead, or whether she had found some other equally helpless rescuer.
“But de dreams don’ stop, M’sieu. An I dream Mam’selle Jacquet, she dead but still alive some’ow, alive an’ in torment. An den I hear of dis man, an’ I t’ink maybe he can help me because he know all about de hoodoo an’ stuff.”
Colin knew this wasn’t the reason she’d agreed to speak to Cannon—this part of the tale was a pretty story made up for Colin’s benefit. Undoubtedly, Madame Lucille had contacted Jock Cannon out of sheer avarice. Cannon paid for his interviews, Colin knew that much by now. And after all, by the time she’d talked to him, the night of the séance had then been several weeks in the past, and nothing more of a truly inexplicable nature had happened since. Most people in those circumstances, Colin knew from sad experience, would rather simply concoct a soothing explanation to cover the uncanny events, and would even forget about them in time, rather than continue to live with awareness of the uncanny.
In any event, when Lucille had been interviewed by Cannon, while she’d told him perhaps more than had actually occurred in the Sandra Jacquet case, she had also passed on to him with reasonable fidelity all the names and details—few though they probably were—that Sandra had confided to her. And after that, things had gotten worse for her.
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