Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

  “After you,” Dan said, gesturing for Abby to go first. “This being your idea and all.”

  “Let’s just hope it smells better on the inside,” she whispered, taking a hesitant gulp of air before plunging through the curtain.

  The atmosphere inside the antique shop wasn’t exactly pleasant, but it was at least well lit, and the garbage smell was replaced by the overpowering perfume of jasmine incense. The place did remind Dan a little of the back room in Oliver’s shop, but it was even more crowded here and far less organized. The ceiling was cluttered with mobiles, some made from beads and crystals, others of bone and feather. The far wall was covered with a giant display of candles, bottles, flags, and tiny tincture pots. A crooked sign had been posted above it, reading: CANDLES—OILS—DRAPO—CONJURE HAND RUBS.

  Dan wandered over to inspect the display, dodging propped-up glass cases filled with pamphlets, books, and jewelry. After all the talk about grave robbing, Dan couldn’t look at valuables like this without imagining who had once owned them, and when they’d been lost. Then, another gust of jasmine-scented air rolled through the shop. A haze of smoke made the room feel small and dreamlike.

  Dan picked up one of the candles, inspecting the label.

  “‘Les Morts,’” he read softly.

  “It’s for Voudon practitioners.”

  Dan set down the candle with a quick swivel of his head. He was no longer alone at the display, but he hadn’t heard Connor Finnoway approach. The councilman, taller than Dan by a head, reached over his shoulder and took the same candle, turning it slowly in his hand.

  “It’s a misunderstood religion,” the councilman added with a smile. “Most of these candles are for luck, for health, for love. Nothing sinister about it.”

  Dan nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. His French wasn’t great, but he didn’t know how anything called Les Morts could be for luck, health, or love.

  The councilman had changed suits, though this one was just as slick as the last. The watch on his left wrist sparkled with diamonds.

  “Mr. Finnoway?” Abby joined them. “Thanks for meeting us. I had some questions for you.”

  “Ah. No preamble,” he said, chuckling. He turned to Dan but pointed at Abby. “Very concise. I like that.”

  Dan didn’t care what he liked. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of asking Finnoway about the poem they had found, but Abby had won the coin toss. Across the room, Jordan was busy talking to a tall, willowy woman with glittering dark eyes and skin. It was impossible to tell how old she was; her features appeared delicate, timeless. The way she seemed to rule over the shop without lifting a finger or saying a word made Dan think she must be the eponymous Madame A.

  “There’s this verse,” Abby was already saying, offering the councilman a version of the poem she had copied down onto a fresh sheet of paper. “We’ve seen it twice now—once in Shreveport and once here in New Orleans. We were wondering if it means anything to locals.”

  Finnoway browsed the paper, one eyebrow quirking up in interest. “And what did Steve Lipcott have to say about it?”

  Abby blushed, glancing side to side. “I didn’t actually ask him. He didn’t grow up here.”

  “Smart of you to consult a native.” The councilman grinned, then handed the poem back to Abby. “I’ve heard it before, but not since childhood. It’s a sort of nursery school rhyme, our version of a boogeyman. You know, eat your broccoli, say your prayers, or the Bone Artists will come and take off your toes.”

  Dan glanced at Abby, but she apparently had the same thought, and she vocalized it first. “That seems awfully harsh. I mean, do you really tell children someone will take their bones?”

  “Hansel and Gretel are fattened up to be eaten. Stories for children have always leaned toward the macabre.” He grinned, showing perfectly even and white teeth. “At any rate, it’s not a popular story here anymore.” He nodded toward the poem in her hand. “That’s about as vintage as anything you’d find in this store.”

  “So they’re not real then?” Dan asked coolly. “These Bone Artists?”

  Finnoway laughed and turned back to look at the candles. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  Abby rolled her eyes and reshuffled her papers. “Now you’re just teasing us.”

  “A cautionary tale doesn’t work, my dear, if nobody believes it.”

  The curtain over the shop’s door rustled, and Dan twisted to look, finding that Finnoway’s assistant had come in, too. She appeared to be looking for the councilman.

  Dan didn’t mean to stare, but she was mesmerizing, so precisely coiffed and dressed she looked ready to stroll onto a movie set. He heard Abby cough lightly, then cough a little louder.

  Idiot. Abby was right there.

  “Excuse me for one moment,” Finnoway said, going to confer with his assistant by the entrance.

  After an awkward moment of silence, Abby said, “This trip hasn’t been even close to what we were expecting, has it? But things are okay, right? Are you doing okay?”

  “Sure, let’s go with okay,” he said. He raked both hands through his messy hair and dodged around the case of necklaces to the wall. There was a globbed line of paint running horizontally across the plaster. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m feeling, Abby. Sad? Confused? Angry?”

  He traced the thick, painted line with his fingertips, reading the numbers penned above it. It was just a date, and Dan shivered, realizing the line was marking how high the water had risen in here during the hurricane. It was a miracle anything in the store had survived.

  “Angry?” Abby paused, her fingers hovering over a rotating display of postcards and laminated newspapers. “Angry at who? Your parents?”

  “A little bit, yeah. And at Oliver, too. He should have just given me that damn box. It’s not like he needs the stupid thing, and it might actually tell me something about why my parents gave me up. Maybe I’m looking too hard for something that isn’t there. Maybe they thought they were doing something good. But I just can’t figure out why I was shuffled around Pennsylvania while they were killed in a car crash in Louisiana.” He sighed and leaned against the wall. “The point is, I don’t think I should have to bargain for something that should be mine.”

  He trailed off, watching Finnoway wander back to them.

  “I was hoping to borrow you for a moment,” Finnoway said, but while Dan expected that to be directed at Abby, it wasn’t.

  “Oh. Wait, me?”

  “Yes.” The councilman nodded toward a quieter corner away from the counter and his friends. “I didn’t get a chance to say this yesterday, but when Steve mentioned you were hanging around with the owner of Berkley and Daughters, well . . .”

  “Oliver?” Dan narrowed his eyes, wondering why exactly they needed to be speaking in hushed tones. “What about him?”

  “He’s not exactly the most savory fellow. His father had a reputation for being a notorious drunk. And in this city, that’s saying something.” Clearing his throat, the councilman glanced over his shoulder at Abby, watching her for an uncomfortably long moment. “I’m not here to help your girlfriend pick out souvenirs, young man. I’m here to give you a bit of advice.”

  “Why do you care what I do?”

  “I don’t.” He put his hands in his pockets, twisting away from the shelves of knickknacks. The politician’s smile from yesterday was gone, replaced with an angry grimace. “Oliver Berkley is a pimple on the ass of this city, just like his father and his father’s father. Steve Lipcott is an old friend, and if his nephew is going to be living here, I wouldn’t want his reputation or Steve’s to be tainted by . . . unfortunate associations.”

  Dan ground his teeth together, staring up into the councilman’s inscrutable green eyes. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Smiling, Finnoway glided away from the shelves, smoothly cutting into Abby’s conversation with Madame A. Dan abandoned his spot at the wall, joining Jordan instead. Apparently Madame A had talked Jordan
into buying a large handful of candles; they peeked out of Jordan’s bag as his friend swung around to greet him.

  “They’re for Steve,” he said immediately. “I thought I’d pick him up something while we were here.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dan peered at Madame A behind her counter. She looked persuasive enough to get a person to buy just about anything.

  “Any luck with the friendly councilman?” Jordan asked. A complimentary tea tray had been set out on a countertop near the door and Jordan was headed there, beelining for the sugar-dusted cakes arranged on a silver plate.

  “Not really. Before he had some not-so-nice things to say about Oliver, he said the poem was just some dumb fairy tale used to spook children into behaving.”

  Jordan’s brows shot up as he shoved a teacake into his mouth. “Really? No way, that’s not what Madame A said.”

  “Oh? And what did Madame A have to say about it?” Dan lowered his voice, shooting a glance over his shoulder to make sure Finnoway and his assistant weren’t listening in. The assistant was on a phone call, hissing into the mobile and pacing.

  “She said the Bone Artist thing started out as a legend, yeah, but that there was a kernel of truth to it.” Jordan matched Dan’s conspiratorial whisper. He leaned in, pouring himself a cup of pale, greenish tea. “Back during the Depression, people were so desperate for money that they started grave robbing. Apparently, around here, there was a group of people called the Bone Artists who would pay money for bones. The bones supposedly contained some of the dead person’s personality, and the Bone Artists claimed they could turn the bones into talismans to sell back for even more. So if you wanted luck, you found a lucky person’s bone and turned it over, or if you wanted money you took a rich person’s.” Jordan blew the rising steam away from his cup of tea and dunked a second cake into it. “It was big business. I guess people get real superstitious when shit hits the fan.”

  Dan shivered. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Sounds a bit like Oliver’s Artificer guy, doesn’t it?”

  It did. Dan checked on the councilman again, who was chuckling in his supremely infuriating way with Abby over some article they had found. “Why would Finnoway lie about it?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he legit didn’t know. I mean, he said he liked history, but I think Madame A has been here since like the beginning of time. It’s pretty awesome.”

  “Well, last night, Oliver acted like he had never heard of the Bone Artists,” Dan pointed out. “And now this stuff with Finnoway? I feel like one of them is covering something up.”

  “Or both of them.”

  If those thugs—the Bone Artists—were still operating, then maybe that was what Micah had gotten wrapped up in. And if so, Dan really didn’t like the idea of them holding on to his bones, planning to turn them into supposed magical talismans. Which led to his next question. “So, do they work?”

  “What?” Jordan coughed on his tea.

  “The bone talismans they were making. Were they just superstition, or did they really do something?”

  Jordan put down his empty cup, worrying his lip piercing again. “I asked, but Madame A wouldn’t answer,” he whispered. “Frankly, I think that tells you everything you need to know.”

  “Can we just talk about the fact that this Oliver bozo is definitely lying to us?” Jordan had maybe had a little too much of the sangria Uncle Steve had put out at dinner. He weaved as they walked the familiar route to Berkley & Daughters, gesturing wildly and colliding with Dan every few steps. “He lives here, right? He runs an antique shop. How could he not know about this bone-thingie legend?”

  “I’m sure he has an explanation,” Dan grumbled.

  “Are you?” Abby had brought along their combined research—both the articles and pictures she had gathered on Jimmy Orsini and the papers Dan had collected about his parents. “I know he was Micah’s friend, but that’s not much to go on. If we can trust him, why would he give us only half the story?”

  Dan wanted badly to answer, but there was nothing to say; his friends were right. Oliver and Sabrina owed them answers, and more than that, they owed him that box and whatever was inside it.

  Berkley & Daughters sat shuttered and dark, but they were expected. Dan strode up to the door and went in without knocking, determined to show Oliver that he was leaving with that box, no matter what.

  And then what?

  The question haunted him as he stepped into the simmering candlelit darkness of the store.

  “Really? Another séance?” Abby muttered. She sighed and skirted around Dan, then walked briskly to the counter, where Sabrina and Oliver were counting the cash register money and locking it away in a small deposit box.

  “We need to talk,” Dan said, following her.

  Oliver shushed him. “Later.”

  “No, now.”

  “We’re in the middle of something here,” Sabrina whispered testily. “You can wait fifteen minutes, Crawford, it won’t kill you.”

  “Trying to commune with your dear old granddad again?” Jordan slurred, not bothering to lower his voice. Dan winced.

  “That’s real sensitive of you. And no, for your information, we are not.” But Oliver shifted uneasily; it was hard to tell in the low light, but he might have been blushing. “We’re trying to reach Micah.”

  “Have you tried sending a text?” Jordan shot back.

  “Would you just give it a rest? I know it might seem silly to you, but there are energies in this world, real, tangible energies that can be tapped into.” Oliver disappeared into the back room for a moment to lock away the day’s money. When he returned, he handed Dan a bowl. It smelled strongly of flowers.

  “It’s just rosewater,” Oliver said in response to Dan’s perplexed expression. “Dip your hands in and dry them off, then join us.”

  “That’s not why we’re here. We have questions for you,” Abby replied. “We want Dan’s box, and we want to know why you pretended not to know what the Bone Artists are.”

  “Look,” Oliver said with a sigh, “you can have your goddamn box, all right? But Micah was reaching out to you, too, Dan. I want you sitting in on this with me.”

  It was a waste of time, but if fifteen minutes of playing along got him that box, Dan would do it. He flopped his hands around in the rosewater and then dried them on his T-shirt. Abby and Jordan stayed at the counter, watching, while Sabrina and Oliver escorted Dan to the round table in the corner.

  He took one of the empty chairs, sitting between Sabrina and Oliver, looking down at the clean, white tablecloth and the strange symbol drawn across it. A handful of carved runes had been spread across the table, and a small basket with trinkets sat in the middle—a scrap of fabric, car keys, a curled-up canvas belt, and a picture of Micah and Oliver together as teenagers. Dan tore his eyes away from the photo. The two boys looked so happy, so innocent, arms around each other as they posed in front of Oliver’s car. It was probably the day Oliver first got it, a monumental day in any boy’s life.

  Dan’s hands were taken and grasped, then rested on the table.

  “What do I do?” he whispered.

  The other people sitting around the table regarded him solemnly. There were seven of them, including Dan. One of the two girls to his right looked like she could be Sabrina’s sister. The others he recognized from the séance he’d witnessed on the previous visit, including the woman with the ginger hair. He shuddered.

  “Just close your eyes and focus on memories of him. If I sense his presence, I’ll ask him where his bones are being kept,” Oliver instructed. His hand was warm and slightly sweaty, but Sabrina’s was cool in Dan’s grasp.

  As a last measure before they began, Oliver put his phone faceup on the table, perhaps thinking Micah might forego the usual shaking shutters and overturned chairs for more modern means of communication.

  Dan inhaled deeply, preparing simply to sit and endure. For so long he had gone out of his way not to think about Micah or what had happened last fall;
the further away it was, the easier it became. The warden, the Scarlets, Professor Reyes, Brookline . . . He had almost reached the point where he could live with the memories, and now he was being asked to bring it all back.

  But thoughts of Micah came to him immediately. For a second, it felt as if the low, rhythmic chant of Oliver’s voice asking for Micah’s help was working like a spell, conjuring images of the school and the last seconds of Micah’s life—the punishment he’d received for helping Dan escape. Despite the overabundance of candles in the room, Dan fought off a chill. The air in the room thinned, as if it were being sucked out by a vacuum. He felt something brush the back of his neck and gasped, convulsing, his eyes opening by sheer instinct.

  His vision returned in time to see something silver shooting across the table toward him. Cold and final, it slammed into his eyeball, sending him toppling to the floor. He crashed with a shout, crumpling against the rickety chair back.

  “Dan!”

  Abby and Jordan were there, kneeling next to him while he frantically ran both hands over his face. There was nothing. No spike through his eye, no wound. Nothing.

  “I felt . . . God, I could swear. . . .”

  He rolled away from the chair and got to his knees, raising his head to meet the astonished gazes of Oliver and Sabrina.

  “You felt it, too,” Oliver said, nodding. “He was here.”

  “Something was here.” He tried to catch his breath, tilting his head back and letting it fall loose on his neck. But something in the window caught his eye. The curtains had been pulled mostly shut, but in one small gap he noticed a face—a stark white face that made his blood run cold.

  He had seen that face before, not in his nightmares but in photographs at the archives, at Uncle Steve’s. . . .

  “Something is here.”