Treasure Chest

by Adam Bennett

  She was clever, I thought, to use a thin veneer of science to hide the ultimately unexceptional and fraudulent methods of her glorified fortune telling. It was a good grift, all in all, and if I had any patience for grifting I might have run a similar one myself. But I had been invited for the usual reasons; to scare off the vulnerable rich from magical hokum which they might otherwise become patrons of. Elise, bless her naive soul, had been born rich, and as such had no earthly sense of practicality. We had connected over a case of stolen jewellery, and she was bemused enough by my lack of nonsense to keep me on retainer.

  I stopped at the steps in front of the museum and considered my approach. Surely, Elise had told this Madame Moreau I was coming, and it was possible that any of the sources I had bought information from would have warned her as well. There was a trick to exposing charlatans, and that trick relied in part on those charlatans being at ease. I would have to make her comfortable somehow, not let on if I knew how she pulled off her tricks. Otherwise she would play it safe, and it would be much harder to prove her lack of magical ability.

  I wondered which high society skinflints might be inside, and smiled to myself at the thought of ruining their fun. This kind of fakery was nearly exclusive to those whose boredom matched their wealth. I was neither wealthy nor bored, but I was eager for any excuse to ply my trade. If I could pester the rich and powerful at the same time, who was I to complain?

  I left my coat and hat with the doorman and walked through the closed museum toward the travelling exhibit on prehistory, taking in the sights of the regular exhibits shrouded in shadow as I passed them. There was something unsettling about the shapes in the dark, but as I approached each their details became clear and the uncanny feeling subsided. It was amazing how much one could be unnerved by the mounted skeleton of an elephant simply because the spotlights underneath it weren’t on. I hovered a bit too long over a miniature display of the Zulu surrounding the British, then remembered I was late and quickly moved on.

  The prehistory exhibit had been set up at the back of the museum, and the large gallery room was lit exclusively by candles. Elise stood talking to an elderly woman in a mink coat, and a few other people lingered near a pair of wax neanderthals. An ornately carved wooden table had been set up in the centre of the candlelit room, and standing behind it was a woman I assumed to be Madame Moreau. She was younger than I had assumed she’d be, with tightly bound locks of curly black hair and a skin tone that gave her away as Romani. She was talking with a middle-aged man, laughing politely at his jokes and pretending not to notice as he stole glances down at her loose fitting gypsy clothing. There was a sharpness behind her eyes, indicating either zealous belief or contemptuous superiority.

  She glanced over at me and excused herself from the conversation she had been having, then approached me with a suspicious look. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said with a slight accent, “this is a private event.”

  Elise pushed a loose lock of blonde hair behind her ear and headed over, drink in hand and smiling broadly. “I’m afraid I forgot to mention my plus one, Madame Moreau,” she said.

  Moreau looked at her, then at me. I extended my hand to shake hers. “Adam Davis.”

  “I know who you are, detective,” Moreau replied. “To be frank, I’m surprised you didn’t use a fake name.”

  “Would you have been fooled?” I asked. She shook her head and I flashed a disarming smile. “Then I suppose I made the right choice.”

  Elise took my arm. “Oh, Adam, you must meet Mrs Bette,” she said as she pulled me away from Madame Moreau. “I’m sure you’ll be absolutely charmed.”

  “I’m sure I will,” I said as Madame Moreau glowered at me.

  After a few minutes of idle conversation, Madame Moreau ushered us to her ornately-carved table. There were seven of us, including her, and she and I seemed to be the only ones who worked for a living. I sat directly across the table from her. Elise, the pretty young heiress, sat to my right, and to her right sat the easily-amused Mrs Bette. On my left was a burly old man in an expensive coat, and to his left was his equally burly wife who was wearing a hat made of fox fur. The middle-aged man who had been leering at Moreau sat beside her, almost uncomfortably close.

  Moreau waved her hands over the wooden table, then swept her hands out to her sides to present it to us. On the surface of the table was carved a full alphabet, along with the numbers zero through nine, and a ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ in the upper corners. Lining the edge of the table were intricately carved representations of animals. From where I was sitting, I could see a large ape, a sabre-tooth tiger, and a crocodile. So this was her ouija board and her zodiac. She had upgraded her equipment. Thin metal poles stuck up six inches out of the table in front of each of us, and a beautifully-decorated planchette made of glass sat overturned beside Madame Moreau.

  “This is the Hereditary Communicator,” Moreau said with wry solemnity. “It is not a thing of superstition, but of the science of the long dead.”

  I tried to hide a smirk as Elise and I shared a look. Moreau pointed at the carved animal shapes around the edges of the circular table. “All souls are eternally reborn,” the madame continued, “across class, race, and even species.”

  The old couple to my left balked. Moreau was doing a better job of irritating these people than I was. I gently felt around under the table with my knee, trying to find some sort of mechanism to make the table shake or move the glass planchette.

  “Mankind is an animal like any other,” Moreau said with a smirk, “and all of the savagery of the Great War stands a testament to it. We are not given providence by an all-knowing creator, we are tribally-inclined apes desperate to justify our feral behaviour.”

  I thought maybe I was starting to like Madame Moreau, but then all scams are built on a foundation of truth to disguise their lies. As I looked around the table, I could see that the attendants of the séance sat in silent fascination, each waiting for what Moreau might say or do next.

  “Take hold of the Genetic Divining Rod in front of you with your dominant hand,” Moreau said, gesturing at the small silver-coloured poles sticking up from the table’s surface. We all reached out and gripped the metal poles, then looked back to Madame Moreau for the next instruction.

  The Madame held up her left hand and showed us her palm. It was heavily scarred, with criss-crossing healed scratches over its burnt-looking surface. “When I take hold of the Focuser Rod in front of me, your Diviners may become warm or even give you a light electric shock. I assure you, there is no danger. I am going to draw the metaphysical energy from your hands into mine. I may cry out in pain, but I urge you… do not let go of the Divining Rods.”

  Madame Moreau reached out with her scarred hand and took hold of the gold-coloured rod sticking up from the table in front of her. “I am about to enter a trance state,” she said eerily. “When I do, I will begin to siphon and redirect your past life energy. This may feel strange, or even uncomfortable.”

  She bowed her head, letting her curly locks of black hair fall down in front of her face. As she did, she began to mutter in some nonsensical language. Her hand shook as it tightly gripped the golden rod. “Focus all of your energy on me,” she said. “Open to me the cycle of your souls.”

  She began to chant again under her breath, and all at once my hand felt hot. The rod I was holding was being warmed somehow, and I was almost impressed. Somewhere in the thick wooden table must be a heating coil. Her gimmicks were certainly original.

  Moreau moaned gutturally. A small cloud of smoke began to rise from her hand as it gripped the gold-coloured rod, and the smell of burning flesh filled the room. Elise looked over at me nervously, and I gave her a look that I hope communicated calm. I wondered how Moreau’s burning hand trick was done; a tube running down her flowy sleeves or some hidden opening on the golden rod?

  A crackle of electricity rose in the room, and Mrs Bette cried out in sudden pain as her hand was shocked. By reflex, she let go of the silv
er Divining Rod in front of her.

  “No!” Moreau cried out. “The pain is fleeting; you must hold!”

  Mrs Bette looked at me and I nodded. She put her hand back around the metal rod and Moreau began to chant again. She was really going the distance to sell this bit; it was an impressive level of craftsmanship.

  Another quiet crackle of electricity rose around us as I scanned the room for hidden phonograph horns. The sound must be coming from underneath the table, I concluded; perhaps she had fashioned noise-makers that produced a small static charge.

  “Ow! It hurts!” the old burly man cried out.

  “Hold!” yelled Moreau as more smoke rose from her hand. “Hold, or let loose your souls to unholy Primordia!”

  The crackling suddenly stopped. Candles all around the room flickered and went out. The table began to shake underneath our hands. This was a cheaper trick than her others; perhaps she wasn’t the master showman I had come to believe.

  Moreau threw her head back and cried out, then went eerily silent. The guests all looked around uneasily, hardly able to see each other in the relative darkness.

  “All of time is open to us now,” Madame Moreau said in a bizarrely low voice. “Primordia awaits.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. I was frankly delighted by her commitment to the ceremony, and more than that I was impressed by her range of talents. Not only was she talented and charismatic, but she was astoundingly brilliant at changing her voice.

  “Souls surround us; ectoplasmic remains of who and what we once were,” Moreau continued in a low growl. “Who wishes to know the beast inside them?”

  Moreau began to shake, raising her free hand and extending it toward the heavens. On the table, the glass planchette began to move. Elise gasped beside me and the old man to my left swore under his breath. I knew this trick; a magnet moving underneath the table moved the planchette above. But whatever part of the planchette was metal, it was well-disguised.

  The planchette moved over top of the letter ‘G’ and stopped for a moment. Then, it jerked back to life and moved to ‘L.’ Then ‘A,’ ‘D,’ ‘Y,’ ‘S.’

  “Gladys,” I said quietly. The burly woman in the fox fur hat looked over at me with frightened eyes. She must have been Gladys.

  “What soul is kin to Gladys?” Moreau growled into the ether. “What beast was she when the Earth was young?”

  The planchette began to shake, then slid suddenly across the table to an animal symbol near Elise’s friend Mrs Bette. We all sat silently in the dark, waiting with baited breath to find out what it was. Mrs Bette leaned her head down towards the planchette and squinted her eyes.

  “A snake,” she said finally.

  Gladys balked.

  “Then return her to her former nature!” Moreau shouted. “Let her slither with the creeping things and bite with poisoned fangs!”

  I looked over at Gladys uneasily. I couldn’t make out much of her face in the dark, but her silhouette was clear. Her hand was shaking on the silver rod, and I could see beads of sweat glistening in the low candlelight on what must have been her forehead. Then, as if pulled by an unseen hand, her head raised and her neck extended. The shadowed outline of her arm thinned and twisted as her face shrank and her nose elongated.

  It must have been some kind of trickery, or forsaking that a shared delusion, but I swore I saw her hair fall away and shiny scales spread across her terrified face. She cried out in pain, and as she carried on her voice warped and thinned until it was nothing more than a throaty hiss.

  The rest of the guests stared in gape-jawed horror. Moreau threw back her head and laughed wickedly, then stretched out her free hand as if grasping at an invisible presence. Sweat beaded her forehead, and her eyes were tightly closed in an expression of fervent prayer. I swore she was glowing; I could see details of her face that I couldn’t see on the others in the darkness, and there seemed to be an aura of light that danced around her like a catching fire.

  Elise clasped her free hand to her mouth as her eyes widened in terror. Next to her, Mrs Bette had her eyes closed, unable to look upon the transformation happening in front of her. I looked back at the dark silhouette of Gladys, unsure if my eyes could be trusted. It must be a trick of the light, or some imperceptible drug affecting the objectivity of my senses.

  Moreau cackled again, then bowed her head and began to mutter. Smoke rose again from her hand clutching the golden rod, and the crackle of electricity returned. Her hand began to glow brightly. The sudden light was overpowering in the darkness of the room, and I closed my eyes. When the light faded, I opened them, and saw Gladys, restored to her proper shape as though she had never been changed. She hadn’t truly, of course, but Madame Moreau’s trick had been deeply convincing in the moment. I sniffed the air for traces of an unseen drug, but detected nothing.

  Gladys began to quietly cry as Moreau raised her head and looked around the table with her emerald eyes. “Who now must be shown their old nature?” she asked with a sickening smirk.

  The planchette began moving again. It stopped on ‘E,’ then ‘L,’ ‘I,’ ‘S,’ and ‘E.” Beside me, Elise was shaking her head in fear. It was then that I noticed the strangest thing; despite our sudden shock at the sight of Gladys’s assumed deformity, none of us had let go of the silver rods in front of us. Even now that I was aware of it my hand’s grip did not waver.

  “No, no, no,” Elise said quietly to Madame Moreau. “Please, no.”

  Moreau stared at her with cruel satisfaction. “And what is the former nature of her soul?”

  The planchette shot across the surface of the table to an animal shape between the burly man and I. I looked over at the white-faced Elise, then down at where the planchette had stopped. “It’s some kind of cat,” I said.

  “The panther,” Moreau said with a wicked smile. Then, in her low growl, she continued. “Come, o claws! Grow, o fangs! Let her stalk the jungles again, as its vicious queen!”

  Elise cried out. I turned to her, and this time there was no distance to separate me from what was happening. Her eyes thinned and yellowed. Her mouth pushed outward and opened as fangs sprouted from behind her teeth. Coarse, black fur sprouted from underneath her hairline and covered her face, and her free hand began to twist unnaturally on the wooden table as claws stabbed through her fingertips and plunged outward like curved knives. Her scream became the blood-curdling shriek of a peak predator.

  “Stop this!” I yelled at Madame Moreau. “Can’t you see your game is hurting her?”

  “Game?” Moreau bellowed in her demonic growl.

  “Whatever you’ve done to us, you need to stop it,” I yelled back. “You’re terrifying her!”

  Moreau let out a throaty laugh and threw her head back again. Her hand smoked and began to glow, and before long it was bright enough that I was once again forced to close my eyes. When I opened them, Elise was herself again. She was shaking like a leaf, and her eyes were wide and tear-streaked. In the table in front of her hand were four long scratch marks.

  “We’re leaving… now!” I barked at Moreau. “The session is over.”

  The glass planchette shook and began to move across the table. Moreau cackled. “The call of Primordia beckons another!” she said in feverish ecstasy.

  The planchette moved to the ‘A,’ then to ‘D,’ ‘A,’ and ‘M.’ Of course she would choose me; I was ruining the mood she had so carefully cultivated, and worse still I was an unbeliever. Elise shrunk back away from me in sudden fear. Mrs Bette gasped and winced in anticipation.

  “And what savage thing was he once?” Moreau asked quietly.

  The planchette slid across the table and stopped on an animal shape in front of Elise. For a few seconds, she couldn’t bear to look. She just stared at me in fearful silence, breathing shallowly as a few tears slipped down her cheeks.

  “Speak it aloud,” Moreau commanded.

  “The… t-the ape,” Elise stammered.

  Another silhouetted figure rose behind
Moreau. It was huge, hulking over her like a monster. It stepped forward and through her, then lumbered weightlessly through the table towards me. It extended a giant hand and entered my chest, and sudden colour flooded my vision.

  Everything around me glowed with feral vibrancy. The trees were neon green, the sky was electric blue, and with every breath I inhaled an overpowering aroma. I looked down at my hands to see that they had grown. They were strong hands, with fur-covered knuckles and bulky, powerful palms. I strode forward through the glowing forest around me, bounding on my closed fists to pick up speed. I leapt off of a cliff and onto a thick tree, then slid down the side and jumped down into a pristine river. The water was cool on my face, and impossibly refreshing. I pulled myself out of the water and continued running around gnarled trees and over rotting logs.

  I suddenly stopped. There was something wrong in my jungle. I could feel it. I ran on all fours through tall grass and into a clearing, where a man in khaki explorer’s gear stood with a smoking rifle over a dead gorilla. I grunted, then let out a bloodthirsty roar and bolted forward. The hunter fired and missed, and within a second I was on top of him. I smashed a fist into his chest and delighted in the sound of his ribs splintering. With my other giant hand, I twisted his arm and tore it off. I could feel every tendon stretch and snap, and the sound of his muscle tearing filled me with a righteous glee.

  I threw his torn arm away and pressed both hands to his head. With the smallest amount of pressure, I crushed his skull. Blood and grey matter seeped through my fingers as I grunted in primal victory. I had avenged my kind.

  Then, suddenly, my mind was my own. I looked down at my human hands and found them sticky with blood. I stumbled backward and fell to the muddy ground, then wretched at the sight of the now headless man. What had I done? What horrible urge had driven me to it?