“I’ve got my methods,” Lafont grunted. He slapped at a small bell on the front desk. “Viv! You around? Come on!”
Arthur jumped as a reptilian head popped up from behind a dusty bookshelf. The yellow eyes and crooked teeth suddenly thrust upward as the iguana they belonged to was lifted by a graying tangle of hair it was perched atop. A short, round woman peeked at Arthur and Lafont, then walked out to greet them. She had a wide face and a grin like a skull’s as she looked from Lafont to Arthur with black eyes set in sunken sockets.
“Detective Lafont,” the woman said with a nod that nearly dislodged the lizard from her head. “What a surprise to see you.”
“Vivianne,” said Lafont.
“It’s especially surprising given that you swore you’d never be back.” Vivianne’s voice was almost as grating as the smirk she wore.
“I’m here on standard detective business. Nothing else,” said Lafont emphatically. He held out the laptop. “I need to get at this guy’s calendar for last Tuesday.”
Vivianne slithered up to the front desk and picked up the laptop. “Should be simple enough,” she said, lifting the computer close to her face for a thorough examination. She stared at the lights and ports on the side intently, sniffed at the power indicator a couple of times, and ran her thick tongue over the case. “Yes, I think I can get it.”
“See, I’m pretty sure that’s not how computers work,” said Arthur, taking a step back toward the door. “This is getting weird.”
“Nothing strange is happening!” Lafont insisted with forceful determination. “This is all normal detective work.”
“If that were true, why come to my shop?” asked Vivianne.
Lafont stared through narrowed eyes at the shopkeep and spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m…pretty sure everything is normal. Just get me into that computer.”
“Of course, Detective.” Vivianne gave a smug bow. “It will take a couple of hours.”
Lafont snorted, put his business card on the counter, and stormed out into the slush with Arthur at his heels.
The detective fumed in silence as he drove, making every turn with extra force and vigor, as if to punctuate some point in an imagined argument. Arthur, however, found that his initial unease about the strange events at The Cat’s Curios was giving way to curiosity, excitement even, by the time they reached Blue’s Doughnuts.
The store was almost exactly as they’d left it. The doughnuts remained undisturbed, and the coffee can that had served as Arthur’s substitute was empty save for a note that read, “No chocolate?” Arthur hoped to have the opportunity to ask several pressing questions concerning the strange shop they had visited and Lafont’s hunch that the case wasn’t as straightforward as originally thought. But the detective immediately sequestered himself in the back room to “think a little bit.”
Disappointed, Arthur set about his more typical duties. He started the batter for tomorrow’s doughnuts, swept the shop, and checked the balance on the cash register—it was still zero. When he had exhausted his supply of work, he sat down and started idly leafing through Nick Morgan’s receipts.
At first, the receipts seemed like customary business expenses for a consultant—mileage notes for travel to clients, software packages and programming books, and a lot of lunch meetings. He first noticed something out of place when he came across a slip for the purchase of a pearl necklace, marked as a gift to a client.
“What kind of client would want a pearl necklace?” Arthur wondered aloud, just before the phone rang. He picked it up with an unenthused, “Blue’s Doughnuts.”
“Hello?” said an unfamiliar old man’s voice, high and tense. “Hello? Young man, this is Professor Gary Hermitage. I must speak with Detective Lafont immediately.”
“Is that Vivianne?” shouted Lafont from the back room.
“No, it’s some professor.”
“Tell him I’m not interested and hang up!” hollered the detective.
“Uh, can I take a message?” said Arthur softly into the receiver, letting his curiosity get the best of him.
“You must tell him that the moon has entered the twelfth phase of Io, marking the return of—”
Arthur looked up as the voice cut off with a click. Lafont had a single finger on the cradle of the old phone. “I said, ‘Hang up,’” he growled.
“Something is going on here,” said Arthur. “This isn’t normal at all. This case, the shop, the call, something bigger is happening here. And I think you know what it is.”
“I don’t know what it is,” said Lafont. “More importantly, I don’t want to know what it is.”
“But you know it’s there!” said Arthur.
“Don’t get that look,” said Lafont. “Stop thinking that way.”
“What look?”
“That oh-maybe-magic-and-pixies-and-stuff-do-exist look,” snapped Lafont. “You’re thinking that you’ve stumbled upon some terrible and secret knowledge that changes everything, and now everything’s gonna be different.”
Arthur wanted to launch a stinging comeback, but the detective had summed up his thoughts quite well. “Well, it does change everything,” he protested. “For one thing, it makes life a lot more interesting.”
“Not if you’re lucky, it doesn’t,” said Lafont. “Listen, I’ll tell you one thing for sure about magic and cults and the dark powers: they’re a pain in the ass. Trust me, kid. A boring life is the best kind.”
“So I’m just supposed to—”
The tinny wail of Blue’s Doughnuts’ outdated phone cut Arthur off. He and Lafont looked at the ringing phone and then back to each other. With a grimace, Lafont picked up. “Hello…yeah, what do you got?”
Arthur could only hear Lafont’s half of the conversation, but the greasiness in the muffled voice on the other end of the line told Arthur it was Vivianne.
“Yeah…yeah, I, hang on—got a problem?” The detective glared at his staring assistant.
“No, sorry,” mumbled Arthur and turned back to the receipts with feigned interest.
“Okay, what was it?” Lafont asked Vivianne. “Nothing? No calendar at all?…Well what was he doing then, keeping it all in his head?…Well, yes, I suppose some people—…Oh, you do?…Well, I suppose if you have a good memory for that—…Fine! If there’s no calendar, what the hell do you think he was doing last Tuesday?”
“Seeing a good accountant, I hope,” quipped Arthur, holding up a receipt with a scrawled note on the back. “This guy was writing off diamond earrings as a business expense.”
“Oh?”
“And other jewelry. And a lot of lunches, even though Lillian says that she ate lunch with him every day.” Arthur leafed through the receipts. “I’m no expert, but I don’t think you can legally expense lunch dates with your girlfriend.”
Lafont gave him a strange look, but rather than replying the detective just spoke hurriedly with Vivianne. “Hey, can you get into his contacts? Okay, good. See if you can find an accountant in there…Really? Great. Give me the address.” Lafont hastily scribbled a note on a scrap of paper. “Got it. I owe you, Viv…Wait, how much do I owe you?…For two hours’ work? You can’t be—hello? Hello? Damn it!”
“Are we going to the accountant?” asked Arthur, already putting on his coat.
“I am,” said Lafont, slamming down the receiver. “You need to mind the store.”
“Way ahead of you,” said Arthur. He set the coffee can on the counter and propped the sign back up next to it. “Let’s go.”
Lafont only shook head in reply as he pulled on his coat.
After another treacherous hike over Portsmouth’s ill-kept sidewalks, Arthur and Lafont stood outside the office of Don Dullahan, CPA. It was in a small, red house near Strawbery Banke, the neighborhood that was home to the city’s oldest buildings and its oldest money.
“All right, we gotta be careful in there,” said Lafont, checking the Beretta that he had concealed under his coat.
“It’s just an
accountant,” said Arthur, eyeing the pistol.
“It’s probably just an accountant,” said Lafont. “But we might be dealing with the improbable here. Wipe that grin off your face.”
Arthur tried to contain his excitement as they walked through the door, and the interior of the office made it easier. They entered a small waiting area, with four chairs, a coffee table, and folksy watercolors of the harbor and lobster boats hanging on taupe walls.
“Well this is anticlimactic,” said Arthur.
“Stay on your toes,” said Lafont, ringing the bell.
A moment later, Mr. Dullahan emerged from the back office and introduced himself. The accountant was tall, but age was starting to stoop his shoulders. He had pale blue eyes and a bit of black peppered throughout his gray hair. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
“We’re looking for Nick Morgan,” said Lafont. “We hear he’s a client of yours.”
“Oh?” said the accountant. “I mean yes, he’s a client, but is something wrong?”
“We hope not,” said Lafont. “He’s missing.”
“Oh my,” said Mr. Dullahan. “Yes, come with me.”
Dullahan ushered them into a spacious office appropriate for an accountant save for the odd geometric shapes that covered the walls and the carpet. The strange lines were made from cherry inset on the walls, swaths of gray paint on the ceiling, and red carpeting cutting through green swirls on the floor, but they seamlessly met at the corners so that the alien pattern entangled the entire room.
“That’s some strange geometry,” Arthur muttered to Lafont.
The comment seemed to worry Lafont. He just shook his head.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Morgan did visit last Tuesday,” said Dullahan.
“Good,” said Lafont. “That’s all we needed to know.”
“I might be able to give you some more information about his visit,” offered the accountant, walking to a side door and holding it open. “We’ll just have to go check the files.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Lafont.
Arthur, however, caught a glimpse of something unsettling through the door, and he rushed forward to get a better view of the dim room beyond it. In the faded light he could just make out a row of yellowed shapes arranged along the back wall. Another step and he could see the empty sockets and morose grins of the skulls.
Arthur tried to jerk back in that instant, but the air felt like a thick liquid, with a current drawing him into the dark room. And now he could see that the room that this room was covered in the same sinister patterns, all of them pointing toward the door he had stepped through. He could hear shouting behind him, muffled and distant as though Arthur was underwater.
Then the pain set in. It wasn’t sharp or stabbing, but a dull ache that started in his back and worked its way out through his bones. His joints felt like they were growing pitted and brittle. His skin seemed stretched and loose at the same time, pulled by the current that was dragging him forward. Something brushed across his face, and he realized it was his own hair waving in the flow, graying as it rippled. Arthur screamed and found his voice hoarse and weak.
He heard a muffled gunshot behind him, and a moment later a meaty hand clamped down on his shoulder. Arthur felt himself being yanked back from the current. As he was pulled from the office, Arthur caught a glimpse of Dullahan snarling and leering despite a bullet hole above his left eye. A deep terror helped Arthur find his footing, and he turned and ran past Lafont as they fled down the streets of Portsmouth.
“What the hell?” gasped Arthur. “What the hell?”
“How long has he been like this?” asked Vivianne.
“We came straight here after the attack,” said Lafont.
“What the hell?” said Arthur.
“He’s saying that a lot,” said Vivianne, with more academic interest than concern.
“He hasn’t said anything else since we left.”
“Do you think he hears us?”
Arthur heard them. He just couldn’t focus on the conversation, at first because the memory of the leering accountant haunted him, and now because he had seen his reflection in several of the old mirrors that hung throughout The Cat’s Curios. He looked to be in his midseventies, with bedraggled white hair down to his waist and a curly, silver beard that hung almost as low. He reached up and touched his wrinkled cheek with a bony hand.
“What the hell?”
“So what is this guy, Viv?” Lafont asked. “There was bad trigonometry all over his office.”
“The forbidden geometry, you mean.”
“Whatever. Just tell me what we’re dealing with. Some sort of cult leader? A sorcerer?”
“I think you’re dealing with something far more…special,” said the shopkeep. “Let me find that book.”
“Must be my lucky day,” grumbled Lafont, watching Vivianne scuttle away.
“What the hell?” said Arthur.
“Sorry, kid,” said Lafont. After a moment of awkward consideration, he added, “Er, sir.”
“Shut up!” snarled Arthur.
“Oh, you’re back with us now,” said Lafont.
“I…how…what the hell happened to me?” Arthur sputtered.
“You let your guard down, that’s what happened,” said Lafont. “You should have followed my lead and gotten the hell out of there.”
“But…but what—”
“I don’t know. We ran into some sort of necromancer or something.”
“Not a necromancer. A baleful accountant,” said Vivianne, placing a thick, leather-bound book on the front counter. The old tome was opened to a page with a woodcut of a man in dark robes writing in a ledger with a quill. He would have looked unremarkable, save for the forked tongue down to his chin and the rows of skulls behind him.
“This was more than just an accountant,” said Lafont.
“Right. It was a baleful accountant,” said Vivianne. “An accountant will tell you that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. A baleful accountant can help you cheat both of them. They use the forbidden maths to extend the life span and wealth of their clients, but then they take a cut for themselves. And of course, if they choose, they can swindle you out of the time you have left.”
“Like what he did to me,” said Arthur, looking at his wizened face in the mirror.
“They can live forever stealing other people’s time. Wounds that would kill a man will take a hundred years from a baleful accountant, but what is that when you’ve stored away thousands of years stolen from your clients?”
“So Nick Morgan gets on his accountant’s bad side, and Dullahan takes the rest of his life away,” said Lafont.
“It is a bit unorthodox,” conceded Vivianne. “Baleful accounting isn’t really a flashy form of evil. Those that practice it prefer to pose as normal accountants, quietly cheating death. Many of their clients might not even know that it’s happening.”
“So they don’t usually kill young people off,” said Lafont. He picked up Vivianne’s old book, flipped to a different page, and scowled.
“Not usually. But if you cross or threaten one, and they think they can get away with it, they’re certainly capable of…ah…draining your remaining balance.”
“But how do I get it back?” asked Arthur. “How do I become young again?”
Lafont shook his head, but Vivianne looked thoughtful. “I suppose you could learn the forbidden maths,” said the shopkeep. “Then you could take up baleful accounting and—”
“Nobody’s doing anything like that,” snapped Lafont. “I don’t know if we’ll get your time back, Arthur, but one way or another we’re going to straighten this out. Viv, we’re going to need a gun.”
“Oh? I was under the impression that you always carried a Beretta, Detective.”
Lafont grimaced. “A bigger gun.”
“I thought you said we were going to straighten this out,” said Arthur as Lafont opened the car door.
“We are straighten
ing it out,” said Lafont. “Now give me the letter.”
“Why did you even buy the gun, anyway?” he asked, nodding to the .44 magnum in the backseat. The firearm was covered in strange runes, and it came with silver ammunition tipped with glass beads that held strange liquids and fragments of foreign materials. The gun had impressed Arthur when Lafont purchased it and given him hope that a slug of enchanted lead through Mr. Dullahan’s skull would end the accountant and return Arthur’s youth. But there was no magic bullet to solve Arthur’s problems, at least not in the metaphorical sense, and since leaving The Cat’s Curios the gun had remained in its ebony case in the rear of the Crown Victoria.
“Don’t worry about the gun,” said Lafont. “We can’t take on that powerful a wizard no matter what we’re packing. Just trust me and give me the letter.”
Arthur sighed and handed over the third account he’d written of the events that had left him prematurely aged. Lafont stuffed the letter into an envelope, sealed it with a strange green wax, and tossed it into the woodstove that heated Blue’s Doughnuts. The flames turned cobalt and rushed up the stovepipe with a violent sound, leaving nothing but ashes behind.
The sorcerous effect didn’t surprise Arthur at this point. The first letter had been bound as a scroll with locks of Arthur’s silver hair and placed in the center of a strange circle Vivianne drew at Lafont’s request. The scroll had folded in on itself several times at impossible angles before finally winking out of existence. The second letter had sailed onto the river in a small copper raft bearing only the pages and a lit candle. Arthur swore it wasn’t the current that dragged the raft under the water, but a thin, black tentacle that briefly surfaced for that purpose.
The letters came after a day filled with ritual. Lafont and Arthur told the story of their encounter with Dullahan to each other while wearing hats made from animal pelts, whispered Arthur’s wish to regain his youth to gold coins that they cast into fountains, and even went into the confessional booths to cajole a couple of confused priests into praying for Arthur’s condition. Arthur felt extraordinarily weary after it all. He attributed the ache in his bones and droop in his eyelids to his new oldness, which only served to further darken his mood.
Death and Taxes: An Urban Fantasy Mystery Page 2