“Taika!” Moreno shouted over the noise of the dogs. “Where are you?”
“Follow the animals!” said Sam.
More dead creatures heaped on the stairs, and the walls were carpeted with roaches and spiders. The air was full of buzzing flies and wasps. The flying insects streamed up to the third floor. The workroom occupied the back half of that floor, while the front was Taika’s library and bedroom. Sam and Moreno followed the creatures into the bedroom, and Sam yanked open a wardrobe which was covered in crawling bugs.
Taika was inside, a barely human-shaped mass completely coated with bugs, spiders, snakes, rats, and other vermin which had managed to squeeze through the gaps in the wardrobe. Moreno waved the Mitum around her while Sam thrashed at the creatures with a pillow.
As the animals fled Sam could see that Taika’s flawless porcelain skin was a mass of bloody bites. She wasn’t moving. Her airway was completely blocked by crushed bugs. Sam tried to dig them out, make an opening for her to breathe, but pressing on her chest just forced out more.
Moreno took her pulse and then put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “No good, man. We’re too late.”
With Moreno and the Mitum standing there, the creatures in the wardrobe began to hide or flee. Out in the bedroom Sam could see a pileup at the edge of the Mitum’s effect, where the animals pressing in from downstairs ran into the ones suddenly free of the compulsion, which quickly became an ongoing free-for-all.
The two men chased all the larger animals out of the bedroom and shoved the bedstead against the door. That muffled the barking and snarling outside, but not the occasional thwack of a bird into the one unbroken window. They ignored the birds which got in through the broken ones, as those tended to flutter about for a moment and fly out again—and then repeat the process.
“Who’s sending them?”
“Hard to say. Could be one of White’s buddies—human or non—or maybe some kind of ‘dead hand’ setup. Anyway, we need to get out of here, then I’ll stow the Mitum and we can start tracing the magic.”
“And her?”
Moreno looked unhappy. “The critters are coming after her. If we move her they’ll just follow.”
“But if we leave her…”
“She’s already dead.”
Their eyes met, and together Sam and Moreno said, “Burn it down.”
They wrapped Taika’s body in multiple layers of sheets and blankets, and laid her on the bed. Using the Mitum and a chair to clear a path, Sam and Moreno forced their way to her magical workroom so that Moreno could negate any enchantments and release any bound spirits there. While Moreno neutralized Taika’s magical assets, Sam found a can of charcoal starter in the workroom. When Moreno finished, the two of them pushed their way downstairs again and squirted starter all over the living room, then poured a trail into the kitchen. Sam tossed the can back through the door into the dining room, then lit the end of the trail with a kitchen match.
The two men went down the back stairs into the alley behind the house and walked past animals running the other way toward the burning house.
Chapter 21
“Things are calming down again. It’s time for us to stir the pot,” said Lucas at the beginning of April. Sam and Moreno had spent a frustrating week trying to determine who had killed Taika, but none of Charles White’s known associates admitted anything, even under magical compulsion. Neither Miss Elizabeth nor Isabella were likely to volunteer any information. From what little he had seen of White, Sam was willing to believe he had set up the attack on Taika as a bit of spite from beyond the grave. Sam was actually enjoying having a little opportunity to relax, so he made the trip to meet Lucas at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark with a strong feeling of annoyance.
Sam sighed heavily and looked at the altar. “Okay, okay. Who do I have to murder this time?”
“You sound less than enthusiastic.”
“It’s just…when that thing killed Alice and Tommy, and you offered me a way to strike back, I didn’t know what it was going to be like.”
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. I figured the Apkallu would be pure evil.”
“No human evil is pure. They say the late Mr. Hitler loved dogs. Are you saying the Apkallu aren’t bad enough for you?”
“Feng was a bastard, but…”
“I can provide you with a list of people he personally killed, if you wish. The same for the Count, and Zadith, and White. Even Taika. None of them were innocent.”
“Yeah, I know. I believe you. I guess it’s just all kind of abstract. I want to find out who sent a monster after my family, not punish random Apkallu for things they’ve done in the past.”
Lucas said nothing for nearly a minute. At first he looked angry—something Sam had never seen before. Certainly not this angry. Then Lucas closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was calm again, and even smiled.
“All right, then. Do you remember Miss Elizabeth? Recently she has let it be known that she might just allow herself to be persuaded to take up the reins again in New York—temporarily, of course. An experienced hand in a time of crisis, and all that. That, in turn, provoked some impolite remarks from Dr. Greene in Boston, concerning the possibility that Elizabeth is responsible for all this unpleasantness. Poor Stone is terrified of both of them, and has told me he’s thinking of resigning. That would be very inconvenient for us all.”
Sam tried to remember which faction Miss Elizabeth was part of. “She’s one of the old families, right?”
“Yes, a staunch traditionalist. So staunch that she wants us to go back to how things were in the Bronze Age, when wizard-kings could still rule cities openly. But conquering the world is a mere political matter. As Mr. Stalin put it, a million lives is a statistic. No, I think you will find it instructive to see what Miss Elizabeth gets up to in her spare time. Stalk her. Learn all you can. And I can guarantee you will discover a few things which will restore your lost enthusiasm.”
Now it was Sam’s turn to stare silently at Lucas. “Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll start poking around, and see what I come up with.”
“I ask of you no more than that,” said Lucas, with a satisfied smile.
* * *
Sam didn’t want to let Lucas lay down some trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow, so he didn’t ask him any more questions about Miss Elizabeth. Instead he did his own research, beginning as usual, at the library.
The New York Public Library’s catalog didn’t have any entries for “secret magical rulers of the world” so instead he looked under “American Domestic Architecture.” The little yellow cottage in a courtyard off St. Nicholas Avenue was a good example of Federal style, putting its construction somewhere between the Revolution and the 1820s. That in turn led him to “New York City—History” to search for maps of that part of the island from the Monroe era.
Seeing Manhattan with a tangle of country roads rather than the familiar orderly grid above Fourteenth Street startled Sam, and complicated his task. He had to figure out how to locate Miss Elizabeth’s cottage without reference to modern streets. Eventually he found Randel’s giant map of 1820 which superimposed the grid of the Commissioners’ Plan over the farms and cowpaths it replaced. The little yellow cottage in the center of a block on St. Nicholas Avenue turned out to be part of a tract belonging to the Dorn family along the old Boston Post Road.
That led Sam to the newspaper archives, looking for references to Dorns over the past two centuries. Like most Apkallu, Miss Elizabeth showed great skill at keeping herself out of the public eye. But he finally spotted her on the society page in 1953, in a black-and-white photo of a Halloween costume ball to benefit something called the Waifs’ Home. The woman wearing a very authentic-looking seventeenth-century witch outfit with a pointed hat looked just like Miss Elizabeth; in fact it was positively eerie how little she had changed in more than sixty years. The photo caption mentioned that Miss Eliza Dorn was the acting director of the Waifs’ Home F
oundation.
The Waifs’ Home Foundation turned out to be maddeningly hard to learn anything about. It didn’t advertise, never made the news, and did not issue any press releases. Unlike every other nonprofit organization in existence, the Waifs’ Home didn’t appear to want people to know what its positions were on current events.
Very suspicious.
Was this just a scam? A tax dodge, maybe? Except…Miss Elizabeth was an Apkal. An old and powerful one, too. She didn’t need to have any bogus “charity” for money laundering and exploiting the rubes. She existed on a plane far beyond that. She could ask the richest men in New York to give her bundles of cash, or send out spirits to fetch her piles of gems.
Now that he had her name—her public alias, anyway—Sam hunted for any other references to Miss Elizabeth Dorn. Evidently she believed in the old adage that a lady’s name should only appear in the newspapers three times: her birth announcement, her wedding announcement, and her obituary. He couldn’t find anything about her birth; either she had entered the world somewhere else, maybe under another name…or she was older than any of the newspapers in the library collection. Either seemed plausible.
On the way home he decided to make a detour to the little yellow cottage off St. Nicholas Avenue, just to see what kind of protection she had. Simply finding the alley was hard enough. He could only see it with his Inner Eye—to normal vision the two buildings flanking the alley appeared to be flush against each other, with no gap at all.
Even with his Inner Eye open the alley seemed determined to avoid him. Whenever he approached the entrance he got disoriented, and felt a powerful urge to turn aside. Finally Sam put the palms of his hands on the wall of the building on the left and felt his way into the alley.
That brought him up against Miss Elizabeth’s next layer of defense. “My district! No spies allowed!” To his eyes it looked like a homeless man, shirtless and bearded, reeking of weed and booze and urine, staggering toward him. “You calling me a faggot? I got a warrant!” But Sam’s Inner Eye saw past the illusion. It was no human ranting at him, but a toad as big as a man, with curved raptor claws and triangular shark teeth, all covered in bleeding, rotting, pale skin. “Why are you looking at me?” it yelled.
Beyond it Sam could sense other presences—big ones—watching, waiting. He retreated hastily, shaking his head as if puzzled by what had happened.
Miss Elizabeth’s cottage seemed impregnable. She had an impressive set of supernatural guardians, and the surrounding buildings protected the place from any mundane assault. He needed to find some other way to get at her. How to draw her out of her fortress?
When the library opened the next morning at ten o’clock, Sam stood at the head of the line to go in. He searched online and dug through every directory in the library’s collection, working backward from 1953. It took him most of the day to scan through sixty years of news, but he finally found a clue in 1898:
BREAK GROUND ON WAIF HOME
New Institute to House 50 Orphans
Schooling and Manual Training
Will Open May 1 of Next Year
The article furnished Sam with an address: Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. About a mile and a half north of Miss Elizabeth’s cottage.
The following morning Sam began a little reconnaissance of the Waifs’ Home. To avoid attention he dressed in a bright yellow vest with reflective strips, a bright yellow hard hat, and carried a clipboard. It made a far more effective invisibility spell than anything he had learned from Lucas.
He started two blocks away from the Waifs’ Home address, walking slowly along the sidewalk, stopping wherever the concrete slabs were cracked or uneven, and making meaningless notes on his clipboard. He had to dodge pedestrians, and the amount of broken glass and trash on the sidewalk was depressing.
All that changed when he crossed the last street. He could sense a difference. It felt unpleasant there. Others felt it, too: he could see pedestrians on the cross street, and pedestrians on the other side of Edgecombe, but on this side of this particular block, the sidewalk was empty. It was tidier, too—evidently nobody cared to stay even long enough to throw away a bottle or drop a cigarette butt.
Sam pushed on like a dutiful city worker, but he didn’t have to feign reluctance. Each step forward took an effort, like wading into icy water. He glanced up. Standard New York five-story apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. But on this side they were obviously abandoned.
Whatever else Miss Elizabeth’s little charity accomplished, it was certainly keeping property values down in this part of Harlem.
Sam fought his way to the middle of the block, to the actual Waifs’ Home building. He risked a single glance at it—a red brick structure with peeling white trim, Gothic arched windows, and a double door with the words “WAIFS’ HOME” carved into the marble top step just below them.
His Inner Eye showed spirits bound into the fabric of the building, all causing fear in anyone who approached. Interestingly, he didn’t get any sense that they were paying much attention to him, as the ones at her cottage had. Miss Elizabeth didn’t want ordinary people poking around the Waifs’ Home, but she didn’t seem to be too concerned about other Apkallu.
As he passed on down the block the feelings of fear and distaste receded, so that he picked up his pace and was almost trotting until he reached the next corner. It felt like coming out of a dark room into daylight.
He recovered with the aid of some coffee and a biscuit from a nearby Popeye’s, then retreated back to the Bronx. In the afternoon he returned with a rental car and his drone, and had a look at the building without any supernatural pushback. The windows were narrow, with thick iron bars on the outside—which would have seemed sinister if every other building in New York didn’t also look like a penitentiary. The building had no playground, not even a rooftop or a back yard. When he sent the drone dipping into the alley behind the Waifs’ Home he could see that all the windows on that side were bricked up.
Not much fun for the waifs, Sam decided. If there were any waifs, which he had not yet established.
The next step was to find a floor plan, but Sam discovered that the Department of Buildings had nothing about the Waifs’ Home. Apparently someone had borrowed the plans during the First World War and never brought them back.
Sam remembered a dinner date with Ash back in October, at an Italian place right by the High Line. She loved the neighborhood, and their conversation over spaghetti with clams was all about rehabbing industrial buildings. “There’s a lot of detective work, especially alterations,” she told him. “You look at the original drawings and then you look at the existing structure and sometimes it hardly looks like the same building. Owners and tenants change things—sometimes none of it’s documented, or the docs got thrown out.”
“I’m surprised you can even find the original designs for old buildings.”
“Architects are pack rats. Even if a firm goes out of business, sometimes another firm buys their archive. Or the papers will wind up at an architecture school.”
Sam went back to his place and checked his notes on the Waifs’ Home article again. The architects were Messrs Stone, Prinn, and Goodenough. Stone? He wondered if Miss Elizabeth had hired another Apkal as her architect. Possible—or not, it was a common enough name. He couldn’t find anything about them online, which meant yet another day at the library.
That night he dreamed of his son. In the dream he was standing on the sidewalk outside the Waifs’ Home, and he knew that Tommy was inside, and in terrible danger. He had to get in, but he didn’t know how. He woke himself up trying to call out.
Three days later Sam walked into the architecture school at Columbia. He had on a new suit, a fashionable new pair of black-framed glasses, and a brand-new identity as “Oscar Campos.” Mr. Campos had a brief but highly productive meeting with the assistant dean of the school, during which they became the best of friends, and he was given full access to Columbia’s collection of architectur
al drawings for as long as he wished.
After that it was simply a matter of locating the Waifs’ Home plans and taking some pictures with his phone. By sunset, Oscar Campos had ceased to exist and Sam sat in his crummy apartment looking at the images.
The Waifs’ Home was a very weird building inside. The ground floor had offices, a kitchen, and a single classroom. The two upper floors held quarters for the waifs. Each waif apparently got a private room—a windowless little cell six feet by ten. The plans specified iron sheathing on the inner side of the doors, and double bolts on the outside. Tough waifs, apparently.
The main stairway spiraled up in the center of the building, with iron gates at each floor, but the plans also called for a big freight elevator connecting all the floors and the basement. What were they going to be moving around?
The basement level was the most baffling. Half of it looked like a normal Manhattan basement—boiler room, coal cellar, water heater, storage space. Perfectly ordinary. The other half had a row of waif rooms and the freight elevator on one side of a corridor, and two large rooms on the other side. The plans called for tiled walls and floors in those big rooms, with water hookups and floor drains. Bathrooms? Laundries? The plans just listed them as “Work Rooms” and didn’t specify.
Most intriguing were a couple of doors on the basement plans, which apparently connected to neighboring buildings—one adjacent on Edgecombe Avenue and another behind the Waifs’ Home, fronting on Bradhurst. Evidently Miss Elizabeth wanted to be able to come and go without being seen.
What was it all for? Sam simply couldn’t believe that a woman who at least semiseriously urged replacing all world governments with supernatural wizard-kings really cared much about providing for waifs. And if she did, the building shown in the floor plan was about the worst possible place to raise them.
The Initiate Page 23