Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  Pharos cut the deck, flipped up the top card, and announced, “This is no one’s, sir, if not yours. The death card for the dead man.” When his audience did not react, the magician turned the card over. It wasn’t the one he had expected. “Damn it,” he muttered.

  “No, Fred, you called it correctly,” said his assistant. “You just forgot that you sent it over here.” Samantha held up the ace of spades in one satin-gloved hand. She seemed to produce the card from nowhere. “Nicely done.”

  “I need information on the keys, Sam,” the Corpse said tersely. “They’re linked to this plague of suicides. Worse things, too. The people driven to slitting their wrists are the lucky ones. The keys are transforming some of the yeggs and thugs carrying them into monsters, and the changes are accelerating. So tell me what you found out. I don’t have time to stand around here while you humor your boss.”

  “I know you think I’m a washed-up clown,” Pharos sneered. “Well, this washed-up clown discovered the keys’ secret.”

  “He’s right,” Samantha said. The silver key she presented was a twin to the one the Corpse had taken from Sean Halloran. “If you look closely enough, you’ll see a series of tiny engravings. Some of the symbols are ancient glyphs, but the others—Fred recognized them for what they are.”

  “Mathematical notation,” the magician announced with theatrical bombast. “Parts of complicated formulae. There were also segments of what I conclude will be a tesseract when completed. If you have any other keys, I’d wager a week’s worth of house receipts they carry different sections of some larger equation and other pieces of the geometric shape.”

  The Corpse handed Pharos the Halloran key. After studying it for a time, the magician said, “I’d need a magnifying glass to be certain, but the formulae and segments look a little different on this one, just as I said they would. I’ll tally up the amount you owe me for our little wager, but this—” Pharos smirked and slowly, sensually, licked the key. “This gives me a good idea of how you can pay off the debt. I should have known you’d be the type to kick the gong around, dead man.”

  Samantha snatched the key away from the magician. She glanced at the blotched metal and returned it to the Corpse. “Opium?”

  “Halloran’s fingers had yen shee stains. Vanderbilt’s, too. Kang Hai controls the opium dens around town. Perhaps this is his doing.” The Corpse scowled. He’d battled the mastermind several times in the past year, often to a standstill.

  “Some of the glyphs I saw on the key come from the East,” Samantha noted.

  “I’ve seen one of them before myself, when I was in Europe after the War. The Yellow Sign, I think it was called.”

  “The symbols come from several traditions. Some are totally new to me. They’re a weird mix, arranged in patterns built up around the math.”

  “Which I deciphered,” Pharos said.

  “Got it,” the crimefighter growled. “Now go back to playing with your cards.”

  The magician smirked. “This has to be killing you—admitting you needed me.”

  “No, but we’re done with this goddamn game.” The Corpse drew his pistols and pointed them at the Pharos. “One more word and I’ll cut you in half. I promise, not even God will be able to put you back together after this trick.”

  Samantha guided her boss away from the vigilante and spoke quietly with him for a moment. She handed him a small bottle—dark glass, without a label. The magician clutched it to his chest as he hurried down from the stage and exited the theater through the doors that led to the adjacent oddity museum. The collection of pickled punks and medical mistakes would be empty this early in the evening; the cheap amusement parlors crammed together on South State were more popular with the late-night crowd. Pharos’s magic act didn’t even go on with its first show until ten. So there’d be no customers to raise an eyebrow as the magician shared his bottle with the trio of sideshow rejects who worked the museum and the theater for him.

  The swinging door had scarcely creaked closed behind Pharos before Samantha held up a hand to the Corpse. “Don’t even think about starting with me, Tris. I wouldn’t have had to give him the bottle if you would have just let him take his bows for recognizing the symbols. It really was him, you know. He remembered them from some book he’d read about lost cities and crazy mathematics, of all things. I tracked down a copy.”

  She led the crimefighter into the wings and through a maze of props and crates. Whatever glamour the objects presented on stage was lost here. The base of a gaudily painted vanishing cabinet, a prototype labeled as the property of the Great Doppo, had been gnawed by something small and hungry. The arm chopper guillotine was spattered with the reminder of an illusion gone wrong. The partial faces of wickedly goateed magicians and leering crimson devils overlooked the jumble from torn posters on the back wall. Their staring eyes followed the pair as they made their way to a table, upon which rested some papers and a single musty volume, The Geometry of Nowhere by R. E. Beckford, D.Phil.

  “What do you know about the author?” the Corpse asked.

  “American professor. Taught at Northwestern. Brilliant. Murdered in 1893. His severed head was found by British tourists outside the grounds of the World’s Fair. I looked him up when I lifted the book from the Blackstone Library’s rare books room.” Samantha sorted through the papers until she came to an intricate, carefully rendered arrangement of lines and curves. There were symbols spaced along the design at regular intervals. “The mathematical rigmarole on the keys is only part of it. You plot out the code on them and you get this.” She tapped the paper. “I don’t understand it all yet, but there’s some familiar stuff here. I’ve seen the underlying pattern on sacred objects woven by Chippewa shamans. They call them bawaajige nagwaagan. Dream snares.”

  “Of course. The keys steal the dreams of the small-time hoods, pushing them to destroy their lives quickly. The opium would make those dreams stronger or maybe diminish the dreamer’s resistance.” The Corpse stuffed the drawing into his pocket. “It has to be Kang Hai’s work.”

  “Well, there’s a difference between conscious hopes and the unconscious, but in this case, the magic seems to be targeting them both. I don’t know about it being Kang Hai, though. He might be familiar with the magic, but isn’t he usually a lot more precise in selecting his marks? More businesslike?”

  The Corpse shrugged. “Maybe we haven’t figured out the whole scheme yet.”

  “This seems too wild to fit his M.O.,” Samantha said. “I started to get a feeling that something was wrong not long after you left for that jaunt to the East Coast a couple months ago, and, like you said, it’s getting worse. Whatever this enchantment is, it’s starting to affect the entire city—the people susceptible to despair, anyway. I caught Fred out on stage earlier weeping like a lost child.”

  “He is a lost child. But you’re not his mother.”

  “I owe him,” Samantha said. “You do, too, and for more than just his help with the keys. There was that time with the Mushroom Men, for starters.”

  “A favor I returned by squaring him with Branch and Crump after he scammed them last Halloween. If not for me, they would have torn out his heart and fed it to their pals underneath the Resurrection Cemetery.”

  “He’s a good man. A friend. You used to understand that.”

  “He’s a drunk and a grifter. Wise up. You’re wasting your gifts on him. You have the power to make this city a paradise and you piss it away conjuring whiskey and fixing botched card tricks for a hoary-eyed huckster.”

  “I’ll bet the lunatic handing out the keys thinks he’s creating a paradise, at least for himself. As for the hootch and the tricks—” Samantha held up both palms to show her hands were empty, then flipped her wrists and presented two fans of cards. “Don’t be so certain that I’m not just awfully good at sleight of hand. The price for real magic is steep, remember?”

  She placed the cards on the table in a neat stack and peeled down one
of her elbow-high gloves. The exposed flesh was branded with a scattering of small tattoos. They were the junkie-scar reminders of all the spells Samantha Van Ayers had ever cast. The marks were bizarre: glyphs like the ones she’d transcribed from the key and secret words in languages that had been lost long before the destruction of Babel’s tower. Some were black, but many were rendered in more striking colors. The tattoos crawled restlessly across her pale skin, colliding in slow motion, merging into gruesome shapes and obscene silhouettes before separating again.

  They were not painful. If anything, the look on Samantha’s face as she watched them creep across her forearm betrayed her pleasure. That was the danger of true magic: it was as addictive as any drug.

  Samantha pulled up the glove. “Turning people into monsters is only a side effect of the enchantment. The bastard who created the keys is passing the spells’ cost on to his marks. He swipes their dreams, their humanity powers the magic that allows the theft. Whoever is doing this is powerful and ruthless.”

  “That won’t save him from me,” the Corpse said. “Nothing will.”

  “Try to remember that there are other ways to fix things than guns and bombs.”

  “You don’t get to lecture me, not while you’re safe in here instead of helping me fight the cause of this madness.”

  “Lay off,” Samantha snapped. “Just because the lobby’s not choked with dead bodies doesn’t mean I’m not doing my part.”

  The Corpse turned to go. Samantha exhaled, recovering her calm, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Wait. Here’s your fortune.” She moved to flip over the top card of the deck she’d placed on the table, but fumbled slightly. Then, with a slight, embarrassed smile, she turned over the ten of hearts. “Well, well. It means good luck, Tris.”

  Samantha slipped the card into the pocket of the crimefighter’s ragged coat and watched him disappear into the theater. Only when he was gone did she drop the card that had been atop the deck, the one she’d started to reveal before faking a fumble and palming it.

  Pharos had been correct. The ace of spades was the Corpse’s card.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The House of Dreams

  The building at the corner of Vine and Vedder had been mistaken for lucky at one time. The Great Chicago Fire had singed its mansard roof and charred its tower, but its odd, oblong windows watched intact as the neighboring structures were consumed. When the conflagration was finally contained, the recently completed three-story home had no neighbors for a few blocks to the west and for half a mile to the east, all the way to Lake Michigan. The desolation stretched much farther than that to the north and south. Stories circulated about angels emerging from the tower to extinguish the threatening flames. No one could swear to having witnessed the miracle firsthand, though even the most ardent skeptics admitted that a strange wind—notable even in the Windy City—could sometimes be felt hissing through the hallways and around the yard.

  The building became a symbol of defiant hope on the North Side. The locals all predicted a great destiny for it.

  Then the people and businesses inhabiting the place failed, one after another, in increasingly public and disturbing fashion. For four decades, wealthy families slid into poverty and the noblest of undertakings soured into scams. After a raid in 1911 revealed the horrors inside the Newsboys and Bootblacks Home that had taken up residence there, the Northsiders finally gave up on the building at the corner of Vine and Vedder. Those who had once believed the tales of angels began to cross the street rather than pass through its shadow. A succession of sleazy tenants, culminating in the opium den that opened there late in 1926, only strengthened their loathing. The local wisdom now had it that whatever good fortune the place would ever possess had been mortgaged away to save it from the flames.

  “Kang Hai would never set up a hop joint here,” whispered the tong enforcer crouched in the alley across from the house. He watched a sailor shuffle unsteadily up the walkway and the steps to the front porch; like the three other junkies who had arrived since nightfall, the sailor found the route challenging. A hulking guard opened the front door to assess the would-be customer. The thug stood well over six feet tall. He wore a wide-sleeved tunic and had a bandana tied over the lower part of his face like a cheap stick-up man or a train robber from an old Tom Mix two-reeler. He eyed the silver key the sailor presented before stepping aside to admit him.

  As the door thudded shut, the enforcer scowled, then scanned the alley for something unseen. “Do you feel that wind? It’s the breath of Hell.”

  The figure lurking behind him in the darkness shifted slightly. The horrors perpetrated upon him by Drucci’s doctors had left the Corpse’s senses dulled, but from time to time since they’d taken up their position across from the house he’d felt the touch of chill, unseen fingers. They reached through the hot summer night to trace the scars on his face and the puckered reminders of old bullet wounds on his arms and chest. “Whatever it is, it’s not from Hell,” the Corpse said. “It’s cold.”

  “Some of the chambers in Mingfu are frozen,” said the enforcer. “Even Dante knew that about the Dark Mansion.”

  “So this is a gateway to Hell. It won’t be the first I’ve walked through. If you’re afraid, leave.”

  The enforcer slipped a silver-bladed hatchet from his belt and twirled it with surprising deftness, considering the two missing fingers on his right hand. “I gave Kang Hai my word to aid you in closing down this rat hole, shi. I am afraid, but with me, honor always conquers fear.”

  “We’ll see about that,” the Corpse replied. He checked the satchel slung over his shoulder and unholstered his guns. “We’ve been staking the place out long enough. There’s only the one guard at the front door and the other entrances are boarded up. The front’s our best way in.”

  The crimefighter watched the tong hatchetman creep across the street to the cover of the wooden fence surrounding the house. He didn’t trust the enforcer. He’d only accepted his presence as a necessary condition for Kang Hai’s cooperation in identifying the opium den connected to the silver keys. The Chinese mastermind, known as the Celestial Executioner and the Hand of a Thousand Rings in the secret circles of international crime, was a force to be reckoned with around the globe, though Capone and Moran and the other prominent Chicago gang bosses were too narrow-minded to think a mere “oriental” could challenge them in their own city. Kang Hai was content to let them wallow in that delusion. It made conducting business far easier than it would have been, had they recognized his true status.

  Kang’s reaction to the silver keys ruled him out as their creator; when the Corpse presented them, he reared back in obvious and uncharacteristic fear. The strength of that revulsion told the Corpse everything he needed to know about the gravity of the threat, too. Fortunately, the crimelord had a good idea which den utilized the keys as passes—the proprietors could not get opium in Chicago, save through his network—but he had not known about their use of magic. “Those keys are the tools of madmen or fools,” Kang Hai said. “You are a suitable force to contend with representatives of either of those classes. Allow me to direct you to their doorstep.”

  Kang would not discuss the keys further and brusquely ordered one of his men to accompany the Corpse in the assault on the opium den. The crimefighter recognized the enforcer assigned to him by his missing fingers, which he’d blown off the man’s hand himself the previous summer, during a skirmish at a tong stronghold.

  As the Corpse crossed the street to join the hatchetman at the fence, he wondered if it wouldn’t be simpler just to finish him off then and there. They had located the den, and the enforcer might betray him during the fight. The killer was living on borrowed time after the stronghold raid anyway. Only the arrival of Kang Hai’s clockwork spiders had prevented the Corpse from adding him to the body count at the tong lair, one more deserving casualty in his war on corruption and chaos.

  The Corpse tightened his grip on his automatics, b
ut didn’t fire. It wasn’t Samantha’s admonitions about violence that caused him to hesitate, though; he found himself admitting, albeit grudgingly, that the tong enforcer might still prove of some use in the assault. The Corpse let go of his desire to kill the man. As he did, the keys in his jacket pocket, trapped within a folded ten of hearts, pulsed with blue light.

  When he saw the eerie radiance, the Corpse said, “We have to take the fight to them now. Whatever is holed up inside this place knows I’m here.”

  They vaulted the fence and sprinted across the small yard. The hatchetman silently veered off to leap onto the long, railed porch. Keeping the enforcer in his sights the whole time, the Corpse cut toward the walkway as if he were going to charge right up to the front door. When he reached the lowest steps to the porch he stopped abruptly, then rolled to his left—just before the door flew open and the masked guard squeezed the trigger of the Tommy gun clutched in his hands. Bullets chewed up the ground where the crimefighter had been standing an instant before.

  The guard stalked onto the porch, the black barrel of the machine gun jutting before him. He leveled the gun to fire a burst into the scraggly, heat-wilted bushes alongside the path, but a hatchet shattered his left wrist and sent the Tommy gun clattering away from him, down the steps. The guard turned to see Kang Hai’s minion grip his hatchet to strike again. This time the enforcer aimed for the wicked scar that ran from the man’s hairline down between his eyes. Just before the blade struck, the masked thug raised his left arm, hand dangling on its savaged wrist, to check the blow. The blade skinned away part of the tunic’s wide sleeve before lodging in the forearm with the wet thud of metal biting into meat and bone.

  The wounded hop joint guard laughed.

  That’s what the bizarre, rolling cough coming from behind the bandana mask sounded like to the enforcer as he tried to wrench the hatchet free. Through the rent in the sleeve, he could see where the blade was stuck. The flesh there was dark, swollen, and matted with uneven patches of thick hair. The wound did not bleed. The hatchetman had assumed the tunic was intended to ape the garb of the Chinese who served in Kang Hai’s opium dens. He knew now that the loose-fitting garment was meant to conceal the guard’s hideousness.