The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel

by Holly Messinger

  “At first, it did,” Danny said. “These are the first pictures I took, when I was trying to see what I couldn’t see with my eyes. Then I noticed the pictures would change if I stared at them too long. So I put them in a box, with some scrolls and white sage, and buried them. Things were quiet for a month or so, but then I guess it got out. I tried it a few more times, but every time it escaped faster and came back stronger.”

  “Have you tried to exorcise it?” Trace asked.

  The two young men looked at each other.

  “We don’t know how, exactly,” Sol said. “The texts that describe actual exorcisms are … well, Rabbi Ernst says they’re not for foolish boys.”

  “If he even has them,” Danny said. “He says they’re deep mysteries that we’re not ready for.”

  “Supposin you told him there was a demon in the print shop?” Boz said, half-seriously.

  Danny’s mouth soured. “I told him I thought there was an evil spirit in the place. He said it was the influence of worldly things and I should be spending more time on my Torah.”

  That speech sounded familiar to Trace, excepting the Torah part. Meanwhile this talk of mysteries and Hebrew had jogged his memory. He felt in his pockets and fetched out the creased page of Miss Fairweather’s instructions. “Take a look at this. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Sol craned his neck, then grabbed for it. “This is Kabbalah! Where’d you get this?”

  “Can you read it?”

  “Yes!” Sol’s lips moved as he felt his way through the archaic words. “I’ve been looking for this rite for weeks!” He spread the page on the table so Danny could see it too, and read aloud, “‘Sprinkle salt or ash or earth into the vessel…’ Did we bring that graveyard dirt?”

  “Here.” Trace threw his packets of salt and mummy on the table. “Use that.”

  “‘Make a trail of blood leading to the vessel,’” Sol muttered, still reading, “‘and half-fill with blood, and surround with lights to draw the spirit…’”

  “Can you get us into the print shop?” Trace said to Danny.

  “Sure,” Danny said. “At least I got a key. But Mr. Avery will be working there and he may come after us with a fire iron.”

  “I reckon I can handle Mr. Avery,” Boz said. “And no offense, Trace, but are you sure you wanna try this again?”

  “Yup,” Trace said.

  “Just cuz you got lucky once—”

  Danny and Sol looked at Trace in some surprise. “You’ve done this before?” Sol said.

  In answer, Trace drew the wax-sealed whiskey bottle from his vest pocket. He hadn’t dared leave it behind in the boarding-room.

  Danny leaned close to the bottle and its clotted-looking contents. “What is that?”

  “That’s the demon I bottled last night,” Trace said. “Why’n’t you show me this dybbuk bowl of your grandmother’s?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Trace and Boz marched through the front door of the Carondelet Citizen, guns and crucifixes at the ready, to find the place quiet and still: a clock ticking on the wall, lamps burning warmly on the desk and counter.

  Avery looked at them over his spectacles. “Office is closed, boys.”

  Trace walked up to him and threw a pinch of pepper at him. The old man’s brows knit together. He set down the type fence, took off his spectacles and rubbed them, looking at Trace with faint contempt.

  “It’s not in him anymore.” Danny came in with the dybbuk bowl in his hands, and Sol behind him carrying a whole parcel. “If he’s looking at you like a bug, he’s safe. When the demon’s in him he’ll come after you instead of talking.”

  “Mister, I’m gonna ask you to step away from the bench,” Boz said. “Come stand over here,” he indicated the rail that separated the customer entrance from the workspace, “and, uh—don’t read anything.”

  Avery obeyed, without much urgency. “This is a waste of time if you think there’s cash money in here. Danny should’ve told you that.”

  “Not after your money, mister,” Trace said. “Just gonna have a little prayer service and then we’ll be on our way.” He pulled out a tangle of silver chains and tossed them to Boz. “Put one of those on him.” He pointed at Avery and then at the two young Jews. “You still wearing yours?”

  Danny popped his collar to show the Shield of Solomon he wore. Sol did the same.

  “Good lads. Let’s do this fast and get out of here.”

  “What is this, some kind of Jewish ceremony?” Avery asked, eyeing the pendant Boz gave him.

  “Let’s use the white cloth,” Sol suggested, consulting his notes, “and the white sage, and the candles, and put the bowl in the middle.”

  Sol’s notes were unclear on how exactly the bowl was supposed to work. Danny claimed it was to trap the demon; Sol argued it was more likely a place to “feed” the spirit in order to placate it, to keep it from harming people inside a dwelling. Privately, Trace reckoned whatever they got up to would hold the demon’s attention long enough to let him grab it and stuff it in a bottle.

  Danny unrolled a bundle of pale tallow candles and wedged them into holders. “There’s a box of safety matches under the front counter there,” he said to Trace.

  Trace went around the rail and squatted, scanning the shelves. When he stood up again, Boz said quietly, “Trace,” and nodded out the front window.

  In the falling sunlight, a small parade was coming up the street: ten or twelve men with a determined slant to their walk. A larger group, mostly women, followed more slowly, but with their arms folded in that way women have when they are bolstering their menfolk to do the right thing.

  Trace swore under his breath. “You think they read somethin in the paper disagreed with them?”

  “I don’t think they’re the welcomin committee. Whatever you’re doin, do it fast—I don’t wanna be the darky with a gun in my hand when the neighborhood watch rolls around.”

  Trace locked the front door, then pointed at Avery. “Get him back behind the rail.”

  “Look, boys, this really is a waste of time,” Avery said, but he ambled where Boz steered him, to his chair behind the type desk.

  “Do you remember takin after that kid with a fire iron?” Boz asked him.

  Avery looked nonplussed. “How do you know he didn’t deserve it?”

  “Where are we going to get the blood?” Danny asked, but abruptly his gaze shifted beyond Trace’s shoulder and his mouth fell open.

  Trace turned to see Rex Reynolds standing not two feet from him, as if he’d materialized behind the roller press, wearing that carrion-eating grin.

  “Well, hey!” Reynolds said. “Looks like the gang’s all here.” The grin slipped as Trace started toward him. “Now take it easy, son—”

  Trace grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him against the nearest cabinet. Things rattled and crashed inside.

  “Whoa! Easy on the threads, there, young’un—”

  “And here you are,” Trace said, “come to feed off the trouble you stirred up.”

  Reynolds’s mocking grin narrowed to something darker, more menacing. His eyes lit with sparks of red in their depths, and Trace felt the hairs on his neck stand up as the power in his brain came suddenly awake, throwing up a shield between himself and the reporter.

  “Ah,” Reynolds said quietly. “Getting smarter, are you?”

  Avery got up from his chair. “I told you not to come in here again, mister.”

  Reynolds shook off Trace’s hands and twitched his tweed back into place. “What kind of welcome is this? I thought I was bein’ plumb considerate to come down here and tell you there was a mob on its way.”

  “Why?” Trace demanded. “What did you write about us?”

  At that moment there was a loud banging on the front door. “Avery!” a voice bellowed. “We know you’re in there! We wanna talk to you!”

  “There’s a rumor going around that the proprietors of this print shop are engaged in devil worship.” Re
ynolds eyed the apparatus on the table. “So you might wanna wrap up your revival meeting before they break in here.”

  “Avery!” The banging became a crash, as if a boot heel had struck the door.

  “You.” Trace pointed at Avery. “Go out there and talk to them. Tell ‘em whatever you have to, just don’t let ‘em in here.”

  Avery gave a beleaguered sigh and shambled toward the front rail. “All right, but my type isn’t getting set. Don’t blame me if the paper’s late this week…”

  Abruptly there was a crash and a bang from the type desk, followed by a patter of lead. The upper case had flipped upside down and fallen smack on the desk, scattering a hail of letters everywhere. The little bits of type stirred, as if in a wind, and began to align themselves in ragged rows.

  “Now look at this mess,” Avery grumbled. He bent over to the type and sank stiffly to one knee. “Every time you damn kids come in here, stuff starts flying off the walls. You whippersnappers think I’ve got nothing better to do than clean up after your tricks…” Abruptly he went still, hunched over the type, head hanging down. “‘You will all die,’” he read in a hollow voice. “‘I am born of the shadows and the hearts of men—’”

  The lamps in the room dimmed noticeably. A moment later there was a scattered exclamation from the crowd outside. Trace glanced through the window and saw there were more men than before, some of them bearing torches. Then he spotted the silver star lying abandoned beside Avery’s chair. “Wait—!”

  “‘Four men were killed,’” Avery intoned, “‘when a mob attacked a local newspaper office—’”

  Boz took a long step forward and kicked at the spread of letters. They went scattering, and Avery slumped to one side like a rag doll. His mouth and eyes were slack, empty.

  A sound like angry bees began to build in the room. A cloud of ink lifted off every surface in the shop, rose into the air like black fog. It coalesced into a whirling funnel which swept across the room and toward the front door. There was a rattle and thunder as the door trembled, and the black cloud sucked through the mail slot, the transom, the keyhole.

  The crowd outside fell ominously silent.

  Then Boz said, “What are y’all waitin for? Do the damn exorcism!”

  A cry went up from the crowd outside, and footsteps pounded onto the sidewalk, crowding the building. Something crashed through the plate glass window at the front. The men inside all crouched slightly, eyes following the brick as it skittered across the floor and struck the rail.

  “Blood! Now!” Trace bawled at Danny and Sol. “Get to reading!”

  Danny popped open his cuff and flicked out a jackknife. He held his arm over the bowl and applied the point of the blade to the back of his hand. Blood spurted and he turned his fist down over the bowl so the flow dripped off his knuckles. Trace grabbed the knife from him and cut the back of his own hand, adding to the pool in the bowl. Sol began to read, gabbling the words in a gutteral sing-song.

  Boz, showing as usual more sense than anyone else, extinguished the lamps on the desk, then picked up the spilled type drawer from the floor. Holding it as a shield before his body, he hopped the customer rail and propped the drawer against the broken window. He snuffed the two lanterns on the front counter, darkening the front of the store and giving Trace a clear view of the mob outside for the first time. He caught a glimpse of torches and long gun barrels. Boz snaked out an arm to pull the wooden shutter nearest the desk, but as soon as he did a shotgun blast took out most of the shutter and the window. Danny and Sol cried out in alarm, and Boz dropped flat to the floor.

  “You all right?” Trace demanded, from his own crouching position.

  Boz rolled to one elbow and fired three quick shots through the hole in the window. Screams from outside. He knocked the shutter closed and dived over the rail to the back of the room.

  “There’s more of ‘em,” he said through his teeth. The sleeve of his shirt was turning dark and shiny.

  “You’re hit!”

  “It ain’t much,” Boz insisted, but Trace grabbed the sleeve and tore it, and felt his heart start up again when he saw it was only glass cuts, not the raw meat of a buckshot wound.

  Suddenly Danny yelled. Trace turned to see Avery advancing on the boys with the fire poker. Sol raised his hands, eyes wide, chanting frantically, and Avery laid the iron across his temple.

  It made a sound like splitting kindling. Sol dropped like a feather pillow. Avery stepped over him, his drooling, vacant grin now fixed on Danny. He raised the iron for another stroke, but Danny grabbed for the poker and Trace seized Avery from behind.

  It should have been no contest—Trace’s size and Danny’s youth against the old man—but the strength of the demon was incredible. It twisted the poker, smacking Danny across the ear with the butt of it. Then it stabbed back at Trace, who dodged and fell against the table.

  Avery grinned, black slime oozing between his teeth. He raised the poker over his head and Trace stepped inside the swing, caught the old man around the chest and felt the poker fall past his arm, smashing the dybbuk bowl into smithereens.

  “No!” Danny cried.

  Now Trace was mad. He drove one fist into Avery’s gut, felt the lungs give way with a bugle of escaping air, and punched the man in the jaw. Avery went down without further complaint. Trace swept his arm across the debris on the table, hurtling down broken crockery, ash, and salt. Avery writhed and howled, and Trace saw the black tadpoles oozing from the man’s mouth and ears, trying to get away.

  Danny dropped to Sol’s side, hands fluttering around his friend’s head. Sol’s eyes were open and Trace could see from where he stood there was no hope. He snatched the scroll from the floor and picked up Danny by the scruff of the neck. “He’s gone. You read.”

  “He’s dead!”

  “We’re all gonna be if you don’t read the goddamn ritual!”

  Danny’s eyes flickered wildly over the ruins of the table. “But the bowl—”

  “Never mind the bowl! I’ll find something else. Start reading!”

  Danny gulped and began to read. “‘By all the holy names of the angels! I beseech you in this circle to tell me the name of the evil spirit herein! I beseech you Michael, Gabriel, Shuviel…’”

  While Danny read the endless list of names, Trace ransacked the shelves below the customer counter, and then the cabinet against the wall, searching for an empty bottle or jar with a lid. He found papers, wooden boxes, broken type, broken clamps, tins full of lead bits, pencils, pens without nibs, and inkwells without stoppers. There was a battered cracker tin with a broken hinge. A couple of patent medicine bottles with the corks permanently hardened within.

  “‘Ahadriel, Yechutriel…’”

  An idea occurred to him. He moved around the corner to the editor’s type desk and yanked open the bottom drawer. Sure enough, there was a half-full bottle of whiskey wedged in between a collection of wooden spacer blocks.

  Trace yanked it out, pulled the cork, and poured the contents onto the floor. The sweet sting of whiskey burned his nostrils. His mind flashed briefly on that other bottle, in the jail cell, and its foul contents, and how it had been delivered to him. He glanced around, knowing as he did that Reynolds had vanished. Again.

  “‘Zumtiel, Zumtziel…’”

  The sound of gunfire outside made him tense, turn toward the front. Boz had wedged himself into the corner beside the broken window, peering out in the dark, gun in hand but pointed down. The crowd outside was screaming, and by the sound of it, scattering.

  “Police are here!” Boz reported.

  “Well, thank God for small favors,” Trace muttered. The sounds of riot, screams and shouts, hoofbeats and police whistles wafted in from the street.

  “‘All you who were made on the eve of the Shabbat, tell me his name!’” Danny cried.

  A hush fell over the room. There was a feeling of uplift, as though the air was sucked up in a vast inhalation.

  Ergoth, said a voice nea
r Trace’s ears. It was thick and whispery, like the wind through rotten leaves. Son of Mirsoggh and of Mygaroth.

  Big-eyed, Danny looked at Trace.

  Trace looked at Boz.

  “That a good thing?” Boz asked.

  “That didn’t happen before,” Trace admitted.

  Danny opened his mouth to say something, and at that moment the platen press behind him lurched to life. It shook itself and yawned, the iron knees flexing, the wide metal tongue on top opening wide. The front legs buckled and it lunged at Danny, jaws clanging together. Danny leapt away, and stumbled over Sol’s inert form. He went down with a yelp and scuttled back like a crab as the machine crashed at his feet.

  Trace grabbed the last candle from the table and threw it into the press’s gaping maw. A great belch of flame shot up as the grease on the rollers ignited. Something screamed, like fingernails raked down the back of Trace’s skull, the terror of the damned for fire.

  A terrific crash took out most of the front window. A flaming barrel of tar smashed through the railing and fetched up against the long roller press. In seconds it was aflame.

  Boz fired a series of quick shots through the new hole in the window, retreating as he did into the back of the shop.

  “Get Avery!” Trace said to Danny. “Drag him to the back door. Make sure it’s clear.”

  Danny obeyed, grabbing Avery’s ankles and struggling manfully.

  Boz holstered his right-hand pistol and cracked open the breech on the left, shucking the empty cartridges. “Is that it, then? We done?”

  “About to be,” Trace said. “Go clear the way for the kid.”

  Boz’s hands never paused in their reloading. “Case you ain’t noticed, the place is on fire and there’s a mob comin through the front door.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Trace said. “I don’t need you for this.”

  He could feel the thing, trapped in the nooks and crannies of the shop where it had built its nest, burning in torment and struggling to free itself. Its struggles called to that lightning-bright power in him, excited it, fed it.