The two men are reported to have an ongoing dispute regarding the untimely death of Mrs. Eleanor Sandgrove, who died in childbirth in March of this year, and who reportedly received a treatment of Voodoo blessings from the aforementioned doctor for the total sum of Seven Dollars.
The former dispute, filed at the local courthouse on April 3rd 1866, outlines the charges of Malpractice, Fraud and Trickery against the doctor, and requests the refund of Seven Dollars, for the cost of the blessing, and an additional payment of Fifty Dollars for the untimely loss of Mrs. Sandgrove.
Dispute notwithstanding, the two men have reportedly been seen arguing on or about Bayou Rd., creating a general disturbance of the peace.
In addition, after the disappearance of Mr. Sandgrove, who, according to relatives, had no plans to travel outside of the area, there have been reports of strange sightings and sounds in the vicinity of Bayou Rd. Witnesses say that late of night, a disturbing howl can be heard, sounding equal parts of man and wolf, and can raise the hackles of any who hear it. Additionally, some have even reported to have seen a strange animal in the vicinity that they believe is the aforementioned Mr. Sandgrove, who has been unnaturally transformed into the woeful beast as punishment for bringing accusations against the doctor.
This reporter believes that if Mr. Sandgrove is gone, he may have met a more natural, albeit untimely, demise, and does not put much stake in the belief of transformation through Voodoo rituals.
However, the question remains: Where is
Mr. Sandgrove?
* * *
Del felt her stomach do a slow flip as her head pounded for attention. There was something to this story, and to what she had heard tonight. The whole thing. She didn’t know how, but somehow, she knew these things to be true. An air of helplessness washed over her, very much like the day she had learned she would be sent to the orphanage. A gray cloudy future lay before her; what lay beyond the clouds, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but something was waiting for her.
Josephine lay awake with hot tears streaming her cheeks. She had taken the longest shower she could without drawing undo attention to herself, then went to bed. Confusion and anger spun her head.
She had to get out of this place. She had to. Her fingers clinched and spasmed as thoughts flew through her mind. She hated Sister Eulalie; she hated her for who she was; she hated her for what she had done to not only her, but to many kids; she even hated her for her desire to get rid of Jimmy. As weird as the kid was, he was actually pretty nice. She did like Jimmy, but he was the one thing that stood between her and Del. She could deal with Jimmy later. Right now, someone had to do something about the Sister.
She would have to kill her.
It surprised Josephine how easy the thought came to her. Sure Josephine, just kill her. It will be easy. Just wish her dead and say the magic words. Abracadabra, you’re dead, bitch.
But how would you kill someone if you really wanted to? It needed to look like an accident. She didn’t want to spend her life in jail. Did they keep poison around, she wondered? Could she get it into her food somehow? Was she really thinking about this, or…
Yes, she could kill her. Or at least, she could think about how to kill her. Maybe a fire? No, she didn’t want to destroy the orphanage. Maybe she could choke her during a Sin Washing episode. Choking leaves marks, stupid. Maybe you could smother her.
Too bad she couldn’t call up a demon and—
The wind howled a name that shook the old windows. The wind had been listening; listening to her thoughts, reading her mind. It knew what she needed.
It howled the name again. A dark name that chilled her blood and slowed it to a death crawl. It wasn’t a voice she understood, but it was a feeling. She knew instantly what she would do. The strange man in the cemetery; the man who traded in sin. She would trade the Sister to the man in the cemetery. She would win Del, forever, and he could do whatever he wanted to the Sister. Forever.
Chapter 36
Henri Guillaume waved away the cobwebs that hung from the foyer ceiling and walked into the house at 113 Bayou Rd. Dropping his coat onto the chair that had sat there since before he was a boy, a small cloud of ancient dust swirled, announcing the latest four-legged inhabitants.
“Rats,” he said as his nose flared, collecting dust mite samples. He scratched at his neck and the side of his face. The cobwebs and dust were irritating his skin.
He walked straight to the kitchen without turning on a light. Even though this wasn’t his regular home, he knew it by heart. This wasn’t the home that people would expect Henri to occupy, with his family’s wealth and his upbringing. This was an old house, years past its condemnation date; a shack to some, an eyesore; a place of worship to others. Somehow Frank had found the two brothers in this house. What a coincidence—the entire police force looking for the Glapions and Frank finds them almost in plain sight.
He sat at the old wooden table and lit an oil lamp. He liked the feel of the dark, the void of possibility, the heavy weight of nothingness. Standing alone against the darkness, one small flame flickered its essence, a tiny, hypnotic wave of light and hope. Although just a small flame, within it lay the power to do terrible damage; great things could be undone by a single flame. There was always a flicker of hope, wasn’t there? Something, someone, that stood out as a beacon. A poor lost soul that defies the odds; an orphan. Was she the tiny flame to be feared above all others? He would think on this.
Removing several files from a large satchel, he set them on the old kitchen table, vaguely aware of his visitors. He smelled them long before he heard them. Their musky essence—wet and moldering—lay a heavy scent on the dusty air.
Whiskers twitching, eyes aglow, the rats of Bayou Road and the surrounding wetlands skittered cautiously into the basement and eaves of the old house. Their long, dirty nails scratched a familiar sound into the walls, like the comforting creaks of well-worn boards.
He opened the files in front of him and turned each page with precision and care. He was always cautious of things he read for the first time. He knew to read them with one eye or the other, and to never read them out loud. Reading with one eye or the other, but not both, kept him from reading into a phrase unexpectedly. One eye comprehended while the other watched on in caution, a silent sentinel always looking ahead, skimming fragments, but never completing. Once the brain was trained for such a task, it was surprisingly easy to do, and he quite forgot it was something he had to learn as a small child.
Frang, what are you hiding? He had always been a good cop, a good detective. He had even mentored Henri in his early days, so why the deception now? He had had an unhealthy fixation with gators ever since the Glapion case that made him famous; the two brothers had used this house as a place of horror.
Henri pulled a gator tooth from his pocket and laid it on the table. One of his men had recovered it this morning from the first murder site. It took them days of hand-sifting through a layer of rotting sludge before they found it. It shone brilliantly in the candlelight, surprisingly white. In fact, Henri thought that it looked too white, as if it had never been used.
Everyone in Louisiana knew that gators could regrow their teeth, but they didn’t typically just fall out with no sign of wear. These teeth looked brand new, only fully grown. Did Frank plant them? he wondered. If so, to what purpose?
He continued leafing through the files. Picture after picture drew closer scrutiny. Semi-mauled bodies, missing face, missing brain. He imagined himself there, an invisible spirit floating in the background, watching; maybe even as a fifolet.
What would he see? Would he see the man responsible for these attacks? The beast responsible? Lapping at the brains?
It was always the brain. How fascinating.
The wind pressed against the sides of the old house, squeezing through loose openings, stirring more rat dander into the air to settle over the cobwebs like a soft powder. A fresh sheet of rain drummed against the windows, pecking a hidden messa
ge to the inhabitants; The time is near. It was as if the wind were speaking.
His mind swam through a dark miasma; knowledge of the past; dreams of the future. How dark would it be?
The rain pecked again. Three times.
The future would be dark indeed.
Eddie sat silently in the cold drizzle, crouching over the large crypt he had ascended the day before. He was unsure where he was, but knew he was where he should be. He was unsure how long he’d been there, but knew it hadn’t been long enough; not nearly long enough.
As if in a strange dream—maybe it was another delirium, but he didn’t think so—he felt bits and pieces of people’s lives as they walked past; heard bits and pieces of their stories, like a cacophony of instruments all being tuned at once. Their lives, at least parts of them, vibrated on a frequency that he could feel. He was a collection station, a radio receiver tuned to a specific channel. He was an archivist taking mental notes, storing clues for later use. He was a librarian of sin.
Crouching, feet and hands anchored to stone, shoulders hunched against the rain, he sat listening to the beautiful symphony of sin that flowed past him. If there was one thing he knew, it was sin.
When the young wife hurried down the sidewalk, in his mind he heard the notes of her latest affair. She did dirty things. She wasn’t sure why she did them, but she did, nonetheless. Her name was Hope Menarvy.
When the old man walked by, he heard a fragment of the lie-song that was building in the man’s head. A reason why he’d lost money, other than gambling it away, which was the actual truth. He had promised his wife he would stop and never lie about it again. His name was Harold Green.
As the beggar was mugged, just around the corner, Eddie felt an especially strong wave. Whether it was excitement or not, he couldn’t say; more like a small shock his body now craved. When the teenage boy drove the ballpeen hammer into the beggar’s skull, Eddie felt a bolt of heat run through the top of his head, down through his body, into his arms and legs, then out his hands and feet, straight into the stone. The heat-energy seemed to fuse his being together. He felt whole like he’d never felt before. The heat-energy forged his spine into a long curve; it was more comfortable now. It fused the inside of his arms to the outside of his thighs, permanently wrapping his arms tight around his legs. It stuck his eyelids to a perfect, half-open stare, watching forever; he didn’t have to blink now. It accelerated the growth of his toenails, now curled over the edge, forming a connection to the stone as if he had been carved from a single slab. When the ballpeen hammer sunk beneath the beggar’s skull, the boy’s name who was still holding the handle sang in his mind, archived into the music library of sin with a special red stamp on the album cover: Never to be checked out. Reserved for Him. The boy’s name was Leonard White. Eddie had met him once on the wharf of the Mississippi. Eddie had been a peckerwood then. But not now.
Eddie was now part of the tomb. No one noticed due to the heavy fog-rain, but he now blended into the crypts of the St. Louis Cemetery #1 like the other carved stone features.
Eddie was a living grotesque.
Chapter 37
Frank watched Del from across the room. She looked like she was dozing, but he imagined he felt her presence filling the room. It was a dark presence, different than the weighty gloom of the story, but no less dangerous. Frank began to understand why he had always been drawn to help Del. She was here for a reason. He could not have guessed it would have ever been a reason such as this, but he felt he needed to protect her now more than ever.
“So, she’s really a Laveau?” Frank asked quietly.
Mama Dedé nodded and squeezed her bible again. “I’ve known since da day she came. I could feel somethin’ in her, but wasn’t sure what it was. It bothered me out of several nights sleepin’, so I had to trance on it. Marie came to me that night and gave me a vision. It’s foggy now, but it was Del’s face dissolvin’ backwards into her momma’s face. It kept rollin’ backwards, face after face. Somehow it still looked like Del’s eyes, but the face kept changin’. I knew that I was seein’ her momma, then her momma’s momma, and finally it just ended with Marie. That’s when I knew for sure.”
“Fascinating,” Armand said, shaking his head slowly. “Simply fascinating.”
“A lot of people related to a Laveau somehow, Frenchy.”
“Oh, I know, and that’s not what I meant exactly.” Armand stood and moved to the bookcase. Each hand rubbing fingers excitedly as if sprinkling a fine invisible powder. He began touching books at random, although none of them held the clues he had hidden in his own library.
“The power,” he said finally, “where does it come from?”
“Da power?” Frank asked.
“Yes, where does the power come from?” Armand said, turning towards them. “I realize that many things are passed from parent to child. That’s heredity. It’s in the genes. But the power to trance?” He waved a hand at Mama Dedé. “The power to bind, or to unbind? Where does it come from? It can’t simply be learned. Some people have it, some people don’t. Why is that?”
They exchanged glances, but did not speak. The flames danced the answer onto the walls in an ancient language, then erased it without warning.
Mama Dedé watched Armand carefully. Appreciative of his careful questioning.
“It’s just der I guess,” Frank offered. “Always been out in da world floatin’ around, waitin’ for someone to pick it up.” He leaned his girth back into the chair and considered his cigar with a scholarly look. “Hell, maybe it just floats around the universe until someone comes along dat can use it.”
Armand slapped his hands together and pointed at Frank, causing him to ash his cigar onto his shirt. A low curse slipped from the side of Frank’s mouth as he slapped the ashes away.
“Genius!” he said, still pointing at Frank.
Frank’s mouth dropped open, letting his cigar droop forward. “Well I—”
Armand started a slow walk around the table, fingers sprinkling invisible powder at three times the speed of his walk. In his mind, he touched invisible books in his study; a candelabra here, an old wood carving there. He knew the clue was close; he just needed to visualize where it was in his library mind.
“Let’s see, universe… yes universe. Stars… galaxies… no, not galaxies. Stars… constellations… yes of course! Have you ever heard the strange story of Otto the Younger?”
Del raised her head from the chair, watching as Armand did his strange word association ritual. She smiled slightly in the dark, thinking this crazy group of people, as mismatched as they were, would make a wonderful family. Jimmy would even fit in here in some odd way.
The pleasant thought quickly turned sour as an image of Sister Eulalie flashed into her mind; the wicked witch flying on her broomstick.
She buried her face in the afghan and quietly wiped the water from her eyes.
Armand continued without an answer. “The Diary of Otto the Younger—quite a tragic story—was an actual diary found, oh… in the 1920s I believe, in a previously unknown tomb in Egypt. The diary details the final days of a young boy trapped in the tomb—quite a tragic story—hiding from nomads who had just killed his entire party. He desperately details the findings in the tomb: strange carved constellations—not of this sky—hidden chambers, strange figures, and hieroglyphs that describe a universal energy, that some people evolve to. That is, of course, if the translations were correct. Actually, there was a wild idea there about assisted evolution I believe, but can’t recall the details. Anyway, the hieroglyphs apparently described how individuals who came into contact with an ancient storm, or perhaps some debris from it, had undergone a transformation and were somehow tapped into this universal energy.”
He paused, realizing he was now rapidly circling the table. Frank’s cigar still drooped from his mouth.
“This transformation manifested itself in different… abilities. Some were good, and some were… evil. It was quite the sensation when the
tomb was found, especially when researchers realized that the young boy, Otto, and his grandfather had made the discovery sometime in the… 1840s, if I recall. After the party was killed, the young boy hid until the nomads tired of searching for him.”
“What’d they do?” Del asked from her chair.
Armand turned to her and paused, considering his words carefully. “Like I said Del, it’s quite a tragic story.”
“What’d they do?”
Armand cleared his throat and said, “They closed the tomb with him in it. The tomb was then buried with sand. It wasn’t rediscovered until sixty years later.”
The room fell silent as dread settled over them. Only the candles spoke in their silent, ancient language.
“How old was the boy?”
Armand cleared his throat again and twisted his mustache. “He was almost twelve.”
Del laid her head back against the chair and said nothing. Jimmy was sixteen, but sometimes had the mentality of a twelve-year-old. She couldn’t imagine how terrible it had been for young Otto.
“And how you know all dis, Frenchy?”
“It’s an interesting area of research for me. I’m writing a book on ancient curses and their origins. Quite a fascinating topic. This is how I came to know of your expertise.” He motioned to Mama Dedé. “And of course, the famous Marie Laveau and Dr. John.” He looked at Del, and suddenly felt his own enthusiasm misplaced. Del turned her face to the floor.
“Sorry,” he said. “I simply…” He let the sentence fade and took his seat.
Mama Dedé and Frank exchanged glances. Frank simply shook his head. He already thought they shouldn’t be down this path.
Turning her attention back to Armand, she said, “So what you sayin’? You think we got us an Egyptian curse now too?”
A Grimoire Dark Page 16
