The Shadow Cabinet

by Maureen Johnson

  “Oh, hello, Cressida,” Freddie said, in a chipper manner that was already starting to wear on me. “Is Clover about?”

  “He’s in the back on his tea break.”

  “We’ll just go and see him,” Freddie said.

  The girl didn’t respond except to give Thorpe a dirty look for being alive and in a suit.

  We all oozed down the widest of the tiny aisles. The books were a mix of new and used and extremely used, the spines flaked and bent and riddled with tiny white lines. These were not the kind of titles my cousin favored. Hers were things like Heaven Is for Pets and Angels Among Us. These titles were long and contained words I didn’t know, and even the ones I did know, I don’t think I really knew. The back wall was all bookcases and one maroon velvet curtain. Freddie pushed this aside and revealed a door, which she knocked on. A gruff voice said to come in.

  “You stay right here,” Thorpe said to Jerome.

  “I’ll read a grimoire,” Jerome said, before taking a long hit on his inhaler.

  I hadn’t picked badly with Jerome. I really hadn’t. I had to smile at him when he said that—and I hadn’t even known it was still possible for me to smile. In fact, once I did it, the guilt came down. I couldn’t go around smiling, not now.

  The three of us went into the room. There was a single cabinet and a teakettle and a counter-high fridge. The table was a folding TV tray, and the single chair in the room was inappropriately large—a beat-up but luxurious-looking red velvet reading chair that sagged from use. Clover himself was probably sixty or so. He was bald save for a hint of white bristle around his ears. He had a white beard that had been tapered to be thin and long, the end braided and sealed with a silver bead. He wore a black T-shirt with a brown vest over it and several necklaces—the most notable of which was a big animal tooth. In front of him was a clear glass teapot full of leaves and some kind of colorful flower bud things and a lot of stuff that looked like broken twigs, all of it floating sadly around the pot. Garbage tea. The whole room smelled like it. It reminded me of when our septic system backed up after a flood and we had to move into a Holiday Inn for two days.

  “Who’s this?” Clover said as I appeared behind Freddie and Thorpe appeared behind me.

  “Friends,” Freddie said.

  “Friends?” Clover said as we packed in tighter and Thorpe shut the door most of the way. We leaned awkwardly against the walls.

  “I know this is weird,” Freddie said. “But it’s really quite important. Something has happened.”

  Clover, like the girl in the spangly hat, disliked Thorpe on sight.

  “I don’t talk to—”

  “Really quite important,” Freddie said again. “I know how you feel about . . . I wouldn’t be here if . . . A girl is missing. We need your help. You know that story you said you had about Jane Quaint?”

  This seemed to displease him even more, and he shook his head.

  “You need to leave,” he said. “I’m not talking about that.”

  “Our friend is missing,” I said. “She was with Jane Quaint at her house, and now they’re both gone. Jane took her. She said something about taking her to the country. We’re trying to find her, and we don’t have a lot of time. She’s been missing for two days.”

  He ran his tongue along his teeth.

  “Is this about that missing student, from the news?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Her name is Charlotte.”

  “You said there’s a story,” Freddie prompted. “Please, Clover. She was in that house. She’s with Jane. We really need to find her.”

  “Is this about Sid and Sadie?” I asked. “And what happened in 1973?”

  Clover tugged on the big tooth.

  “Not with him here,” Clover said, pointing at Thorpe.

  “He stays,” Thorpe replied. “And you talk, or he comes and visits your shop all the time.”

  Now Clover was very unhappy.

  “Clover,” Freddie said, reaching over and taking his hand, “I wouldn’t do this to you, I promise, if it wasn’t important. You do good work. You help people. This is helping.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Clover finally said. “I don’t like talking about it, but I suppose with a girl missing . . .”

  He picked up the teapot and poured the disgusting liquid through a strainer and into a mug. After a moment of considering this terrible drink he’d made, he spoke.

  “What you need to understand is that things were different then,” he said. “The late sixties and early seventies—the whole atmosphere was different. Everyone knows about the drugs and the free love and all that, but there was this air that anything was possible, that society was about to turn, that a new age was coming. For us, in the world of magic, it was a very exciting time. We were really making progress. England was on the verge of coming back to its true magic roots. We were trying to show people how to use magic to bring peace and good health, how to be aware of the world around them and bring balance. But there’s always someone in every age of magic, there’s always someone who goes into the dark. Someone who focuses on the sex and power and death magic. That was Sid and Sadie. They were the worst kind—Aleister Crowley types, power trippers. They came around to the bookstore sometimes—but never looking for books. They always claimed they had more books and better ones than we could ever carry. They used to laugh at us, say we were lightweights. What they were really looking for was kids to bring into their group. This was their hunting ground.”

  “Hunting?” I said.

  “You’re too young to remember any of this—you weren’t alive—but back then, there were all kinds of gurus and cults. You had the Manson family murdering people in California because those kids thought Manson was god. There was Jim Jones making his own church, taking his followers to Guyana, and then convincing them all to commit suicide with him. Well, in London, there was Sid and Sadie. But you’ll never know what they got up to, because they didn’t want it known. They kept their business secret and behind closed doors. There was a whole group of kids—freaks, but nice enough. All these kids worshipped Sid and Sadie. They did whatever Sid and Sadie told them to do. There were ten of them, and I knew all in one way or another. Domino Dexie—no idea what his real name was, but he used to help us do stock sometimes. Nice lad. There was Aileen Emerson. She worked at a macrobiotic restaurant in Soho. Quiet lass. Ruth Clarkson—she used to read tarot in the street. Very good at it too. Michael Rogers. I didn’t know him, but lots of other people did. Prudence Malley—she was an art student who came in the shop a lot. Mick Dunstan—he was cock of the walk. Looked a bit like Mick Jagger and had the same name, so he basically lived on that. You could do that then. I think he lived in a squat up in Muswell Hill. Badge—he named himself after a song, no last name. Musician type. Always had a guitar. Johnny Philips was a straight—had a job in a chemist. George Battersby—bit of an early goth type. And Dinah Dewberry, little Dinah Dewberry . . .”

  He sipped his tea sadly for a moment.

  “I liked Dinah. She had red hair, and she rode an old military bicycle she’d pulled out of a skip and painted blue with little yellow stars. We went out once, but I think we were both too shy. It might have gone somewhere eventually, but then Sid and Sadie came along . . . anyway, there were ten of them. Sid and Sadie gathered them up over the course of a year or two. How Sid and Sadie picked their group, I never knew. And once they went off with Sid and Sadie, that was that. They’d never tell you what they were up to, but they all had an attitude. Like they knew something you didn’t. Jane—Jane Quaint—she was the head of the pack. Sid and Sadie came in one day and found her reading on the floor. She left with them, and that was that. Next thing any of us heard, she was living in their house with them. She was their right hand. She rode around in their car, bought things with their money, basically took care of business. In the end, Jane was doing the recruiting and no one saw S
id and Sadie at all. This went on for a while. Like you said, it was the end of 1973. On New Year’s that year, a lot of us in the community met for a party. We got to talking and realized that none of us had seen any of Sid and Sadie’s kids in over a week.”

  “There’s no record of ten teenagers disappearing all at once at that time,” Thorpe said.

  “There wouldn’t be,” Clover said, looking at Thorpe as if he were very stupid. “A lot of the kids were runaways, or they were older but their parents had no idea where they were living or what they were doing. You need to understand, it really was a different time. London was full of runaways. They’d join communes, or decide to live in India or California. People went missing. It happened. There was no Internet. No CCTV. You’d hitch a ride and go. And the police were different then as well. These kids were all put down as hippies and freaks, and therefore no one was going to look too hard. We didn’t talk to the police. No one cared about those kids but us. And we tried. We put out the word to people in magic communities in other parts of the world. We sent copies of their pictures. No one had seen them. We scryed for them, we held circles. What we got back was strange. Our best seer, Dawn . . .”

  “Dawn Somner?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s Dawn. She died a few days past. Good friend of mine.”

  Thorpe registered this just as I did. Dawn Somner—the psychic who had fallen out of the window a few days before. That’s where I was when Charlotte was being kidnapped. That whole scene had looked set up. Stephen was sure someone had killed Dawn and staged it. This couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “Dawn truly had the gift—if anyone could find them, it was Dawn.” Clover pulled sadly at his tooth necklace. “Dawn read cards for them over and over. Everything she was getting on the kids was bad, and confusing. What she got on Sid and Sadie, that was even stranger. She never got signs of life or death—she saw things like rivers on fire and bleeding stones.”

  “Did you ever find out what happened to them?”

  Clover shook his head.

  “A month passed, then six, then a year, then two years. There were all kinds of rumors for a while—that they had all gone to Morocco. Then people said India. Then some people said South America, or they were all in Ireland communing with the fairies.”

  “Sid and Sadie left a suicide note,” I said.

  “Suicide note, my arse. Sid and Sadie would never kill themselves.”

  “Jane could have killed them,” I said. “She found the suicide note. She got the house.”

  “Jane would never have done that,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t understand. Sid and Sadie ruled her. They were her gods. She would have killed herself in a second if they told her to. The only way—”

  He cut himself off.

  “The only way what?” I asked.

  “It’s not likely,” he said. “The only way she would have done it was if Sid and Sadie told her to. But like I said, they wouldn’t. Sid and Sadie . . . they were proper freaks, totally obsessed with themselves and their own magic. They were brother and sister, but the rumor was they were more than that.”

  “That they were a couple?” Freddie said.

  “It’s what everyone thought at the time, and it would make sense. No one else would be good enough for them.”

  “But why would they want their followers to die?” Freddie asked. “Wouldn’t that defeat the point of having followers?”

  Clover looked down at his necklaces.

  “Like I said, this is the darkest stuff, the most forbidden. Stuff we don’t keep here. Stuff I don’t even believe in. Stuff about death energy. Paranoid, crazy stuff. What do I think? I think Sid and Sadie bought a spell off of some chancer who claimed to know dark magic and saw two fools with money. If you go to Egypt and places like that, people’ll sell you all sorts, written on old papyrus. I’ve seen things like it. I think whatever they did—whatever they ingested or performed—maybe something went wrong. Maybe someone died. Whatever happened, Sid and Sadie probably had to get out. I think they left Jane in charge, and they probably live somewhere—could be anywhere.”

  “Has Jane been here recently?” Thorpe asked.

  “Jane? I haven’t seen Jane in forty years. Like I said, it was a long time ago.”

  “Then I think we’re finished here,” Thorpe said.

  “Whatever happened to your friend,” he said, “I can’t imagine it has anything to do with Sid and Sadie, or the kids. That was all so long ago. Even if they were alive, any of them, they’d be older now. If any of them had come back, we’d have heard. I’m sure of it. No point in chasing after shadows.”

  He twisted in his seat a bit. Talking about these people seemed to hurt him physically.

  “I’ll see what I can do for your friend,” Clover said. “Do you have a photograph or anything of hers I can work with?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think we’re finished,” Thorpe said again, putting a hand on the middle of my back to guide me out. “We’ll be in touch if we need to know more.”

  12

  THORPE AND I STEPPED OUT OF THE TEAROOM, LEAVING Freddie to say good-bye to Clover. Jerome was sitting on the floor, holding a book and clearly not reading it.

  “Go outside and wait,” Thorpe said to him. “We’ll be right out.”

  Jerome didn’t look thrilled to be ordered around like this, but he shut the book and stuck it back on the shelf, then shook his inhaler a few times before leaving. Thorpe guided me over to the farthest aisle. There was little privacy in this shop, and everything you said was pretty easily overheard. He spoke in a very low voice.

  “You’re a couple,” Thorpe said. “Isn’t that correct?”

  This seemed a bit personal.

  “Really? This is your question?”

  “Answer it.”

  “Well, we were . . .”

  “When did that end?”

  “How is that important?”

  Thorpe handed me Jerome’s phone.

  “Give this to him,” he said. “And talk to him. Convince him to keep quiet, at least for a few days.”

  “Me?”

  “I could threaten him, but I think it would be much easier and more effective if you asked him to comply. He has feelings for you.”

  It made me squeamish, hearing Thorpe say something like this, but he said it flatly, as if he were talking about the color of Jerome’s shirt or the time.

  “Tell him you’re fine. Convince him. Tell him you can keep in touch a few times a day by text to reassure him.”

  “I can?”

  “I’ll provide the phone, and I’ll be checking the messages.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “The alternative is having him put on a forty-eight-hour psychiatric hold,” Thorpe said.

  “But he’s not—”

  “Of course not. But it’s what I would have to do. Stress reaction to the disappearance of his girlfriend, everything he says will be discredited. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think he’s a threat. I think that, given a little information, he’ll keep his mouth shut. Do this, Rory.”

  The girl in the counter hatch eyed me as I left. Jerome was standing outside, huddling in his coat. He was clearly highly charged, but with which emotion, I couldn’t immediately tell. I sheepishly handed him the phone.

  “What did he do to my phone?” Jerome asked.

  “I don’t think he did anything to your phone.”

  “Of course he did,” he said, pocketing it. For all I knew, he was right.

  “So, what happens now?” he said.

  “Look,” I said, “I wish I could tell you everything. I wanted to tell you before, when—”

  “At school,” he said. By that, I assumed he meant “when you broke up with me after I asked you where you’d been.”

  “Yeah,�
� I said. “At school.”

  “So all this time, you’ve been with these people. Who the hell is this guy, anyway?”

  “Thorpe.”

  “Yeah, but who is he? Is he Home Office? MI5?”

  “One of those. I don’t really know the difference.”

  He repeated the words one of those silently and looked to the sky in desperation.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “I need your help. I need you not to tell anyone what you saw.”

  “I don’t understand what I’ve seen. You locked in a tomb, some guy with white hair shows up, some freaky bookshop where some guy tells you about some cult and some people who died in the seventies doing magic?”

  So he’d been listening through the door. Of course he had.

  “And who’s Jane Quaint?” he added.

  “She’s a therapist,” I said. “Mine and Charlotte’s. Charlotte went to her after the night we were both attacked, and she recommended that I go too. Jane Quaint lured Charlotte in, and she lured me in. She’s likely the last person Charlotte was with. She’s likely the person who took Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte was kidnapped by her therapist? Your therapist? And your therapist does . . . magic?”

  “It’s a really long story,” I said.

  “And this has to do with the Ripper?”

  At this point, everything had something to do with the Ripper, so I nodded.

  “The thing is,” I said, “I need to stay here to help. I know stuff, and these people? Jane Quaint and the others? They tried to get me too. I . . . got away. But they’re still looking for me. Thorpe is protecting me.”

  “Not very well,” Jerome said.