She couldn’t have been thirty yet; how young had she been when she was a striptease star? She hadn’t been legal, for certain.
“Grek Cohen had no master, just a mistress.”
Lady Celia nodded to Richard. She formed a sly smile.
Fred felt it again, the warmth this woman projected. An icy warmth to be sure, but persuasive. He saw the guile working on Richard too, on the thing that had been Grek Cohen. This was a woman a man wanted to shield – he would put himself between her and any horror, and think the prick of a blade-point in his spine was the first touch of a caress.
Pony-Tail stood over Lord Leaves. “Goodbye, Daddy,” she said. She had a finishing school accent, clear and sharp as crystal. She raised her bare foot to his face, stroked his slack cheek with her toes, then deftly scraped his eyes shut. “You were always my first.”
“Clouds of mystery part,” said Richard.
Pony-Tail giggled, and looked fifteen again. “Have I been naughty?”
“Does he know what you did?” Fred asked.
She looked at him, teasing and quizzical. Fred indicated Cohen.
“Does he know it was you? Booth, Schluderpacheru and Gates didn’t kidnap you in 1963. I’ll bet it was your idea. His original body is under a foundation stone somewhere, isn’t it? Did you do it yourself, or just watch? Was he happy anyway, just that you smiled at him as the concrete poured in? What a mug! Ten years on, and he’s still your pet, isn’t he? This has all been cleaning house. Had they started blackmailing you – those idiots! – threatening to expose Lady Celia Leaves as the notorious Pony-Tail? That would be one for the News of the World. Scupper His Lordship’s Festival of Morality once and for all. Or was it just money they wanted?”
She smiled, enigmatically. “You know what they really wanted?” she said, tilting her head to one side. “More than money, more than business as usual, more than power? They wanted me. They wanted me back.”
She did a few steps, hair alive around her shoulders.
“Pony-Tail . . . returns,” she said, presenting herself. “Pony-Tail . . . rides again!”
Fred fancied Cohen was smiling, appreciating her act. He had never really been fooled, but her act was just so damned good that it was impossible not to play along. Fred guessed Lord Leaves had been the same, opening his big book of spells just for a wink and a smile and a peek.
“I suppose this is your final performance,” said Richard.
“Maybe not. What with everything, I’m Queen of Soho. No one in the way. The Festival will follow my lead. Can you imagine what I can make them do? It’ll be a twenty-four-hour riot. And I can buy or run everything else in sight. Maybe I will come back, do the shows and the films and the telly. Only this time, I’ll do it for me, not them, not men, not you.”
She laid her head against Cohen’s pebbled side, a girl petting her horse.
“It’s the dancing, isn’t it?” asked Richard, fascinated.
“Very clever, Mr Magician,” she said. She bent over double from a full-stand and touched her toes, then sprung back upright, hands on hips, perfectly balanced, perfectly supple. “Yes, it’s the dancing. Daddy started me off. He brought me up to be an initiate of Erzuli, Baphomet and Nyarlathotep. Ritual dance, steps along the paths of power. I had to go out into the world, break away from the Festival, find my own dance. Then I had to go back, for a while. It was part of the pattern. Now, I have new steps, new paths, new dances. I don’t need any of them any more.”
She was always in motion, dancing to the rhythm of her heartbeat. She was a white flame, endlessly mesmerizing, lovely but deadly.
“What about him?” asked Fred.
Pony-Tail looked up at Cohen’s caricature of a face, almost fondly. “He’s my masterpiece,” she said. “How many other strippers really can dance to raise the dead?”
“You know a lot of dead people,” Richard observed.
“I’m afraid I shall know some more, soon.”
Zarana flashed anger at the woman. “You ain’t that special, you know.”
“My friend would argue with you,” said Pony-Tail, concentrating.
Cohen reacted to her change of mood, swelling into a more menacing aspect.
Richard muttered magics, which the dancing priestess dispelled with blown kisses.
“She’s not your friend, Grekko,” said Zarana. “She killed you, for a start.”
“He knows, he doesn’t care. None of them would care. Because it was me. Next to me, you’re nothing, missy.”
Zarana faced up to Pony-Tail.
Cohen’s arm rose, ratcheting like a guillotine blade. Fred stepped forward, to pull Zarana out of the way.
The girl eluded him and bore down on Lady Celia. The Queen of the Nile versus the Queen of Soho. Pony-Tail meets Contessa de Undressa. No holds barred. One fatal fall for the crown.
Zarana punched Pony-Tail in the stomach. Cohen roared.
Lady Celia doubled, hair tenting around her, then recovered in an instant and flicked out with contemptuous fingers. She twisted a clasp off Zarana’s shoulder, and the dress came apart. Zarana held the scraps to her body, hobbled.
“I can’t believe that rag is still kicking around. It was made for me.
Fred helped Zarana stay on her feet. He looked from the cockney Egyptian, awkward in the too-loose gown, to the white goddess, sinuous and unashamed in the firelight. Like everyone else, he dreamed of Pony-Tail; the difference was he knew she wasn’t real.
“After this, I suppose the big fella’s finished,” said Fred. “All work done.”
Pony-Tail cocked her head, considering. “I might bring him out for special occasions. Summoning is an effort, but he’s worth it, don’t you think?”
“You hear that, Immanuel?” said Fred. “After this, you’re going back in the attic.”
Cohen was a statue, arm up.
“Good work, Frederick,” said Richard. “Keep at it.”
“You did all this to be with her, and she’s shafted you. Again. Are you really as dim as they say? The cleverclogs. Burly Gates, Boot Boy Booth, Popeye Schluderpacheru. They all laughed at you, Grek. Know what I mean? The big ape doolally over the princess. Like King Sodding Kong, they said. When they decided to dump you, she leaped at the chance to help. It was how she bought her way out, got back into His Lordship’s house. Couldn’t get into the Royal Enclosure with a lovesick gorilla mooning about, could she?”
“None of this matters,” said Pony-Tail, bored. “Really.”
“And now you’ve done for them all, and you still don’t get the girl! Mate, you have been fitted up for a proper set of cap and bells. You must be the biggest mug punter in Soho.”
The huge arm came down. The hand closed, on Pony-Tail’s rope of hair.
“Ouch,” she said, irritated.
Cohen held her by a leash.
Fred saw a glint of annoyance in her eye, an unattractive, petty expression. Then a sense of what was suddenly lost, a bulb of panic sprouting.
Thick arms hoisted Lady Celia Asquith-Leaves, the incomparable Pony-Tail, off the floor and hugged to Cohen’s chest, her struggling body shoved into the muck and mud of its trunk. Her arms and feet stuck out, flapping and kicking. Her face sank under the surface. Grey mass surged around the screaming “O” of her mouth, then filled it, staunching her noise.
“Finally,” said Richard.
Now Grek Cohen had Pony-Tail, rather than the other way round, Richard’s gestures and incantations had an effect. The colossus, growing insubstantial, rose like a hot-air balloon, bumping the ceiling. On its excuse for a face was a last smile.
“I think a withdrawal is in order,” said Richard.
Fred and Zarana backed out of the inner sanctum. Richard followed, keeping up a stream of reverse conjurations.
“Where’s his wand?” asked Zarana.
“It’s in the fingers,” said Richard.
“Magic.”
The colossus shrank to the size of a floating man, Grek Cohen superimpos
ed upon Pony-Tail, her limbs encased in his, her face shrieking soundlessly through his battered mask, her electric eyes staring madness through his dull, dead lamps.
The carpet pulled up and spiralled around the phantasm, spilling flaming oil and rolling Leaves away. Cohen contracted to a dozen flaming points and whooshed into darkness.
The girl was gone with him, leaving only her hair. It drifted to the floor, strands crackling as they brushed flame. Swathes fell about like cast-off string.
The gorilla got the girl, which should count as a happy ending. Fred hoped never to see either again.
“The socially conscious thing would be to put out that fire,” said Richard, “before the house burns down around the guests.”
Zarana shifted a vase and disclosed a fire-extinguisher.
“Just the ticket.”
As she tossed the extinguisher to Richard, her dress finally fell off.
Fred couldn’t look away. She noticed.
“That’s better,” she said. “I was worried. I thought that cow had you under her bloody spell, like she had all the other idiots.”
After long, brazen seconds, she gathered up the gown and fastened it.
Weirdly, the little fiddle she did to reassemble her costume and cover herself struck Fred as sexier than Pony-Tail getting her kit off.
“There’s no comparison, luv,” said Fred.
Richard unloosed a surge of white foam at the flames.
XII Sexploits of a Psychic Investigator’s Assistant
Near dawn, in the big bed in her tiny room in Falconburg Court, Fred finally drifted towards sleep.
As far as he was concerned, Zarana was the real Queen of the Nile.
A warm, dry, intimate touch slid across his belly.
“Luv, I’m not sure I could manage again . . .”
She pressed fingers to his face and he realized he had spoken too soon. She planted a tongue-twisting kiss on him. He pulled her closer, as they negotiated the tangle of sheets.
The sliding touch across his stomach was still there.
Zarana broke the kiss and stroked his chest, fingertips moving towards the slithering touch.
“Freddy, meet Ramsbottom.”
He was fully awake now, and – as Lesley Behan might have it – “raring for rumpy-pumpy”. But there was a new player in the game.
“Ramsbottom?” he demanded.
“The other bloke in my life,” said Zarana.
In the pre-dawn light, Fred discovered he and Zarana were wound together in the coils of a contented snake.
“Love me, love my python,” said Zarana.
“Fair enough,” said Fred.
DALE BAILEY
Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic
DALE BAILEY IS THE author of the novels, House of Bones, The Fallen and Sleeping Policemen (written in collaboration with Jack Slay, Jr.). The latter is hardboiled noir in the tradition of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, although his editor calls it horror. It is due to appear from Golden Gryphon Press, who also published Bailey’s short fiction collection, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories.
As the author explains: “ ‘Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic’ was commissioned by the editors of the Charlotte Observer and serialized in the Catawba Valley Neighbors section of the newspaper – one letter at a time – as a Halloween feature.
“I took the assignment as a lark and quickly found myself in deeper waters than I had anticipated. The first challenge was coming up with an idea for each letter that was both sufficiently Halloweenish and surprising enough to be interesting – ‘W is for Witch’ simply wouldn’t do.
“The second challenge was telling each of the nine stories in such a limited space. The longest is just 154 words – a useful discipline in making every word count for any writer.”
HIS FOR HECATE. The moon is changeable and strange, and exerts powerful influences. Tides answer her call. Lunatics are said to respond as she waxes and wanes. The moon has two faces, a light one and a dark. In her bright aspect rules Diana, the virgin of the hunt. But in her darker face there reigns another god, unseen by sublunary eyes: Hecate, Queen of Crossroads, said by legend to reign also in Hell. Darkness falls. The harvest moon climbs the ladder of the sky, and the old year withers. We too have dual faces. We too stand at a crossroads. Good and evil. Darkness and light. There is a goddess in the moon. Pray she doesn’t see you.
A is for Abaddon, the Kingdom of the Dead. Madness comes to men too long stranded on the ice. In 1912, Captain Robert Falcon Scott perished following an assault on the South Pole. His journal survives. An unpublished entry preserved in the Rare Book Room of the British Library describes a strange experience. Three days from their final campsite, Scott and his remaining men found a stairway hacked into the ice. Down and down and down it wound, into a bottomless abyss, but no one among them dared descend. A stench of brimstone rose up from the sundered earth, the sound of distant screams. No later expedition has confirmed Captain Scott’s experience. Of one fact, however, all who brave the frozen continent are certain: Hell is cold.
L is for Lillith, the Queen of Demons. There are those who believe that Adam had another spouse, summoned out of earth in Eden to be his helpmate. Lillith was wise and lovely to behold, but she was proud as well, and loathe to submit to another’s will. Above all things she longed to rule in Eden as her husband’s equal. And so she was dismissed from Paradise, condemned to wander alone through the wilderness of a yet-unfinished world. In Eve, Adam found a more suitable mate, and so enjoyed his happiness for yet awhile. But Lillith, pining for solace and companionship in her turn, entertained demons, and brought forth a race of witches. In outer darkness, she suckles them still, and waits for her revenge.
L is for Lycanthrope. Beware the generosity of strangers. Once upon a time a poor man named Peter, walking in the woods at night, met a stranger on the path. The stranger’s eyes were yellow, but his voice was sweet and Peter had from him a kingly gift: a cloak of fine grey fur. On autumn nights it warmed him. But when the moon grew full thereafter, unholy appetites seized him and he could not abide to be indoors. Livestock disappeared, then children. Peter alone, of all the villagers, dared walk in darkness. It is said that Red Riding Hood met him once, in the depths of the haunted wood. These are merely children’s tales, of course. But a bloated yellow moon looms in the October sky, and the scent of change is in the air. Wolves walk among us always. The worst among them wear their fur on the inside of their skin.
O is for Ouroboros, the great serpent who encircles the world. The ancient Norsemen knew him as Jörmungandr, the Hindu as Sesa. Under earth he lies and under sea, in a cold abyss of stone where no human foot has fallen, in trenches fathoms deep beneath the waves, where no outer light can pierce. Vast fish ply the icy currents, blind behemoths, cyclopean shapes unseen by human eye. Ouroboros dwarfs them. A time draws near when he will awaken and ungirdle the planet at last. Cities will crumble in the deluge. Continents will sink. The earth trembles beneath an October sky. Already Ouroboros stirs.
W is for Wendigo. There are voices in the wind. The Indians knew them long ago. When polar gales swept down over plains three centuries gone, the Algonquin trembled in their lodges and whispered of the Wendigo – of families slaughtered in their beds, of betrayal and bloodstained hands, of hungry spirits in the wind that drove men to murder the ones they loved the most. The Algonquin have dwindled now. But the Wendigo is with us still. Have a care when the wind picks up on a chill October night. Lock the doors. Latch the windows. Pull the covers tight. Pray for your loved ones, sleeping in the rooms around you. Try not to think about the knives in the kitchen, or the axe in the garage. There are voices in the wind. Whatever you do, don’t listen.
E is for Eunuchs, the sexless ones. The mushroom people are not born, they grow. Deep in the sewers underneath our cities, far down in the bowels of the planet, they stir themselves to life. Who can say how they came to be, what spore of cast-off intelligence took root and flourished ther
e, in that black and foetid muck? But they exist. In their secret cities underneath our feet, they batten on human waste and nurse their hatred of the sunlit regions of the world. Their strength and courage grows. Their plans ripen. Already they creep up into our moonlit streets to snatch unwary late-night walkers and sate more sanguinary hungers. Beware the shadow under the grate. Beware the pad of distant footsteps. The assault draws near.
E is for Empyrean, the farthest reach of heaven. Lucifer fell there, bearer of God’s brightest light. For years unmeasurable by any merely human scale, he nursed in silence his cold resentments. And then, taking courage, he laid his plans, gathered to him allies among the host of seraphim, and rose up against the Lord. The Empyrean ran with the blood of angels, and on the field of combat, he fell. Divested of his name and rank among the angels, his light extinguished, he plunged into darkness. With all his bright company he fell, nine days and nine nights, into the abyss, where he took a new name and clothed himself in the likeness of the serpent. In heaven, the Empyrean was restored. But Satan too has his realm, and rules there, consort of the Queen of Hell.
N is for Necronomicon. Some books should not be read. A century ago, they exhumed it from the dust of a Fourth Dynasty Egyptian tomb. The archaeologist who discovered it perished soon afterwards. The courier who smuggled it to America was murdered mere hours after surrendering his unlawful charge. It rests now, under lock and key, in the Manuscript Archive of Miskatonic University. The Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead: 4,000 years forbidden, bound in human flesh, and linked in blood. There are those who long to read the secrets in its pages – who crave to chant its ancient incantations, and summon back to rule among us vile gods long banished to the outer dark. In secret, they plot to possess it. Some books should not be read – but will be.
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