“Thanks.”
Sam went into the kitchen, fished out a mug that had a shamrock and the words kiss me, i’m irish—which struck him as odd, since Manfred Afiri didn’t seem to be a particularly Irish name—and poured himself some more coffee. He dumped sugar in, but decided not to bother with the milk, since what he’d had this morning tasted like it was on the brink of going bad. Besides, this stuff was actually drinkable. He had never liked the taste of coffee all that much, but life both as a hunter and as a college student had made him appreciate the virtues of caffeine regardless of its taste. He tended toward what Dean called “froofy” coffees mainly because the extra flavors and the whipped cream and whatnot hid the fact that the beverage itself tasted like drinking hot sulfur. And for Sam, that wasn’t just a cute simile, as he’d drunk hot sulfur once, by accident during a job, and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.
Returning to the living room, he saw Dean removing Dark Side of the Moon from the turntable and flipping it over. “So whadja find?”
Dean gently placed the needle on the edge of the record. A moment later “Money” started playing. Sam patiently waited for the look of rapture to pass from Dean’s features and his head to stop bopping back and forth in time with the cash register noises.
Then his patience ran out. “If you’re not too busy…”
Shaking his head, Dean said, “Uh, yeah, sorry. Anyhow, I found the ritual in Dad’s notebook, but it wasn’t where I figured it would be.”
Dean sat back down in the easy chair and hefted the cracked leather-bound notebook. Overstuffed with papers, clippings, and other paraphernalia, every inch of every page was covered in Dad’s unique handwriting—military neatness swimming upstream against the speed with which Dad was taking many of these notes, resulting in letters that were carefully penned for clarity but words that swerved and curved and were compressed for space and twisted around other notes. Sam had always thought that a handwriting analyst could retire on Dad.
When the demon who’d killed Mom became active again, Dad went off the grid, leaving the notebook to Dean (and by extension to Sam) to keep and use while continuing Dad’s work of hunting.
That notebook was all they had left of Dad.
Long-term, Sam wanted to convert the notebook into electronic form so they could index it and cross-reference things and generally find items in it in a manner more suited to the twenty-first century than flipping through ink-filled pages, yellowed newspaper clippings, and hastily drawn charts, none of which was sorted in any meaningful way beyond “when it occurred to Dad to write it down.” Unfortunately, their life didn’t lend itself to long-term thinking, and Sam had only barely begun the process of converting the notebook. Realistically, it would take months of uninterrupted effort, and one could argue that his life was pretty much one big interruption these days.
“Where’d you find it?” he asked Dean.
“In the back.”
Sam winced. That was where Dad filed all the fakes and phonies, the rituals that didn’t do anything, the creatures that didn’t actually exist.
Dean flipped through the notebook. “You ever hear of a nut job named Percival Samuels?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Sam said with a shake of his head.
“Back in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century—he was a spiritualist, and he was pretty high on the nut-bar scale even compared to all the other nut bars.”
“How crazy?”
Grinning, Dean said, “Well, Aleister Crowley once said he was insane, so I’d say this guy strayed pretty far from the pack, y’know?”
“So what about him? God, Dean, there must’ve been, like, a billion spiritualists back then. Most of them were con artists.”
“Yeah, a whole mess of John Edward clones running around, but without the TV show. They’d do séances, try to contact the ‘great beyond’ so little old ladies could talk to their husbands who died and kids could talk to their great-aunt Sally to see if they really hid a million bucks under the floorboards. It was bogus, but there was a lot of cash if you were any good at it.”
“So where does Samuels fit in?”
“He wasn’t any good at it, so he tried to come up with his own hook.” Dean finally finished flipping pages, having come to the right spot toward the rear of the notebook, and handed it to Sam. “He started peddling a ‘resurrection spell’ that could actually bring relatives back.”
Sam took the notebook and saw the description of Samuels’s ritual, written in Dad’s distinctive hand. Reading aloud from the notebook, he said, “‘The sigil must be drawn in precision. The Central Point is a locus of strong Anima for the Resurrected. The 4 Outside Points is a re-Creation of events of Great Importance and Power to the Resurrected at each of 4 distinct times: the Full Moon, the Last Quarter Moon, the New Moon, and First Quarter Moon. When the 4 Steps are compleat, the Resurrected will return to life.’” Sam looked up. “Sounds familiar.”
“Yeah, but it’s bogus. Samuels sold it to a bunch of people, but nothing happened, and he was arrested. He committed suicide in jail.”
Frowning, Sam asked, “Do we know for sure it didn’t work?”
Dean shrugged. “Pretty sure. Samuels claimed he obtained the ritual from ‘the rituals of the Hindustani Peoples of the Far East.’”
“Hindustani’s a language, not a people.”
“Yeah, and even if he meant the Hindu religion, it doesn’t even remotely track with any Hindu ritual. He was pullin’ it out of his ass, and trying to make it sound exotic. Remember, this was when the Brits colonized India and right after Japan and China started having serious contact with the West for the first time.”
Sam grinned. “And here I thought you slept during history class.”
“Not in the eleventh grade, I didn’t.” Dean broke into that half smile he got whenever he talked about women. “I had Miss Modzelewski. She was hot.”
“Of course.” Sam bit his lip. “Hang on.” He got up and ran across the street to the Impala to fetch his Bronx street map. Bringing it back into the house just as “Us and Them” was starting up, he looked at the coffee table, covered as it was with Manfred’s crap, shook his head, and then just sat down on the red patterned rug that rested on the hardwood floor, pushing aside some of the LPs that were strewn about. Pulling a pencil out of his pocket, he marked the Poe Cottage. Then he erased it and instead marked the approximate spot where Anthony had said the Poe Cottage was.
“What’s across the street?” Dean asked.
Sam quickly explained what he’d been told by Anthony. Then he marked the corner of Webb and West 195th, then Cambreleng Avenue between East 188th and East 189th. “Bring the notebook over, will you?” he asked Dean.
Dean did so, kneeling next to Sam. Sure enough, he could re-create a portion of Samuels’s sigil just by connecting the three dots he had.
“Yahtzee,” Dean muttered. “The location of the cottage—the original location, based on what your guy said—is the ‘locus of strong Anima,’ and we’ve already had the ‘re-Creation of events of Great Importance and Power.’”
Sam kept drawing, finishing the sigil. “Right, and nothing’s more powerful than a spell that takes a life.” He finished it and sat upright. “Well, if we’re right, then the next Poe-inspired murder will be on Monday at either Fordham Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard or at Webster Avenue just south of Bedford Park Boulevard.” After letting out a long breath, he said, “Now if we just knew who was doing this.”
“Actually,” Dean said, standing upright and moving to the couch and Sam’s laptop, “I think you may have found prime suspect number one.” He tapped the space bar to get rid of the screen saver—it was the generic Windows one, since Sam knew that any attempt to personalize his screen saver would just open the door for Dean to tease him about it, and he saw no reason to make it that easy for his brother—and revealed the Poe enthusiast website he’d found that morning.
“You found something on the site?” Sam asked, gettin
g up to join his brother on the couch.
“Kinda.” Dean traced a finger on the track pad onto an “about this site” link, which called up a description of the site and a picture of the person who ran it, who was named Arthur Gordon Pym. The man had a huge nose, small beady eyes, thin lips, a cleft chin, and thin brown hair. “Guy’s got a serious hard-on for Poe—even changed his name. Pym’s a character in one of Poe’s books. Seems to me this guy’d die happy if he got to meet his hero, and we’ve seen nuttier motives.”
Sam’s eyes went wide as two different pieces of information in his head clicked together. “Oh my God.”
“What? You know this dweeb?”
“No, but—” He shook his head. “I saw him, earlier today.” Quickly, Sam summed up the rest of his trip to the Poe Cottage, and then his abortive attempt to check the house on Webb and 195th. “Somebody pulled up to the house—it was this guy,” he said, pointing at the screen.
“All the more reason.”
“Honey, I’m home!”
Sam and Dean both looked toward the living room door to see Manfred walking in, wearing dust-covered denim overalls, work boots, and a long-sleeve shirt under a leather jacket. “Damn—ain’t listened to Floyd in a pooch’s age. Good choice, fellas.”
“Thanks,” Dean said. “Uh, sorry ’bout the mess.”
“Don’t worry ’bout it,” Manfred said. “Nice to have a house guest who appreciates the finer things in life. Anyhow, you guys’re comin’ up to the gig tonight, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Dean said.
Sam turned to look at Dean but didn’t say anything until after Manfred said, “Far out. Or awesome, I guess. Gonna go change,” and went upstairs.
“What?” Dean asked at Sam’s look.
“If the spirit is always here after their gigs, maybe we should stay behind and see if it manifests.”
“And if it doesn’t manifest until Manfred gets home, then we’ll miss out on some fine live tunes, won’t we?” Before Sam could object, Dean said, “Hey, you wanna be a homebody, knock yourself out. I’m goin’ to the gig.”
Sam thought about it and then said, “Nah, I’ll come with. It’s obviously tied to the gigs somehow, so we should check out the gigs themselves.” Also, he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of being by himself in this house for some reason. While Dean had made himself right at home, Sam felt like he was intruding. Certainly, he had no problem using the guest bed and avoiding another round of the credit-card-fraud shuffle—especially now with Dean’s face in every law enforcement database in the country—but just sitting here by himself as if he owned the place the way Dean had all day wasn’t something he felt right doing.
He wasn’t sure why, but the feeling was there. Besides, if the band really did play seventies rock, there was no way Dean was going to be paying close enough attention to anything odd about the band that might explain the ghost. He needed to be there to back his brother up.
“Sweet,” Dean said. “So we’ll do the gig, check out the spirit, maybe even get rid of it, then find the Poe geek tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Sam said.
EIGHT
The Park in Rear
Larchmont, New York
Friday 17 November 2006
Dean decided that the only way this night could possibly get worse was if he actually stuck red-hot pokers into his ears. And that was looking like a viable alternative to listening to one more note played by Scottso.
In his life, he had heard a lot of live music by a lot of mediocre bands. The low-spending necessities of the hunting life meant that three-figure arena tickets to see his favorite bands were simply out of the question. Instead, he took his live music where he could find it, in dives like the Park in Rear.
He’d seen bands in roadhouses, art houses, converted houses, and outhouses. He’d seen blues musicians in Chicago, jazz musicians in New Orleans, and cover bands in Key West. He’d seen college bands play in converted garages and garage bands play in college towns.
And in all that time, he’d never heard a band as wretchedly awful as Scottso.
That wasn’t entirely fair—he’d seen bands whose pretentiousness was only matched by the strain their emotional baggage put on their voices. As a follower of classic rock, he’d seen what years of bleating till their veins popped had done to the likes of Robert Plant and Steve Perry, and Dean’s sole consolation in watching these losers had been that they, like Plant and Perry, would spend their latter days with severe vocal damage. That would be a blessing to the music community, especially since the songs they wrote were so bad.
But those bands didn’t bother Dean as much because the only music they were ruining was their own. Sure, they played for crap, but they were playing crap anyhow, so what the hell.
Scottso, on the other hand, were covering some of Dean’s favorite songs: “Cocaine,” “Ramblin’ Man,” “Rock On,” even, God help him, “Freebird.” And they were mangling the holy crap out of them.
It started with the drummer. The only shorthaired man in the band, he changed the tempo about once every six measures, kept missing the cymbals, and had this annoying tendency between songs to do a rim shot, whether or not anybody said anything funny. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also wore purple shorts and a puke green T-shirt.
Like most bass players, this one had the stage presence of a really bored redwood. He stood straight, wearing a black T-shirt, black vest, black jeans, and black cowboy boots. His almost-black hair was slicked back, extending past his shoulders. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth. The only reason Dean knew for sure that he was alive was that his fingers did actually move across the strings, plus he occasionally bent over between songs to sip from his beer, somehow not dislodging the cigarette. A good band had a rhythm section that was locked into each other, bass and drums feeding off each other and providing the foundation for the other instruments. Scottso, however, was not a good band. Dean wasn’t even sure that the bass player and the drummer were on the same planet, much less playing the same song.
The keyboard player was the only one besides Manfred with serious gray in his hair, and also the only one of the long-haired set that tied his back into a ponytail, which just accentuated how much he’d lost on top. The bar lights glowed blindingly off his pate. He did an amazing job of matching the notes of the songs they were covering without managing any of the feeling. It wasn’t that he did anything wrong—in fact, he was better at keeping tempo than the rhythm section—but he was just soullessly playing the notes. The best cover bands did one of two things: Some made the old songs their own; others perfectly re-created the original experience. These guys were only halfway to the latter because they didn’t so much re-create as imitate. And at that, the keyboardist was only marginally good at it.
Then there was Manfred Afiri, a man whom Dean had respected right up until he opened his mouth on the stage of the Park in Rear. It wasn’t that he sang off-key. He hit the notes—although on some, all he could manage was to slap them around a little. But he had no power, no oomph, no soul, no heart. Hell, if it wasn’t for the microphone, Dean doubted he’d even be able to hear Manfred singing—which, thinking about it, would’ve been a blessing.
Dean went to the bar for something like his sixth beer—he’d lost track, knowing only that he hadn’t had nearly enough yet—and hoped this time he’d get the cute girl bartender instead of the grizzled guy one. Normally, he’d just wait for the cute girl to be available, but Scottso had put the acquisition of alcohol at the very top of his list of things to do.
Both bartenders were helping people, so he squeezed between a couple who were making out on the bar stools on one side and two frat-boy-looking types on the other. He stared at the dark wood of the bar, which looked like half the universe had scratched something into it over the years.
The girl got the two frat boys a couple of froofy drinks that made Dean instantly dismiss the two from his worldview. Then she came over to him. In fact, the �
��girl” looked to be in her late thirties, but she was quite hot. Her brown hair was tied back into a ponytail, letting her nicely round face show off on its own. She had very small eyes—Dean couldn’t make out their color in the dim light of the bar—and very full lips that he gave an eight out of ten on his personal kissability scale—maybe 8.5. Like the other bartender—who was a tall, lanky guy in his fifties—she wore a black T-shirt with a drawing of the outside of the bar in red. Unlike the other bartender—who wore it as a muscle shirt and really, really, really shouldn’t have—she wore hers nice and tight, and had the curves to make it work real well.
“’Nother beer?” She spoke with a fairly thick accent, which he figured to be local. All he knew from New York accents was how they talked on NYPD Blue, and she sounded sort of like that.
“Yeah, another Brooklyn.” One of the points in the Park in Rear’s favor was that they had Brooklyn lager on tap. Dean had last had it during a job in Pittsburgh, and he found that he’d missed it—besides, it was fitting to finally drink it in its hometown.
But the urge to switch to tequila was strong.
She grabbed a fresh glass and started pouring the beer into it expertly—holding the glass at the right angle—without even looking. “I ain’t seen y’round here before.”
Never one to pass up an opening, he said, “My first time. The name’s Dean.”
“Jennifer.” With her accent, the last syllable was more “fuh” than “fer.” “And I’m impressed. We don’t get too many newbies, y’know?”
“We’re friends of Manfred’s, actually—from out of town.”
“Got it.” She finished pouring the beer with one hand, grabbed a napkin with the other, placed it on the old wooden bar, and gently set the glass down on the napkin. “Like I said, not too many new guys.”
“Mostly just regulars, huh?”
Jennifer nodded. “Nice t’see a new face.”
Dean took a sip of his beer and said, “Well, it’s even nicer to see yours.”
“That’s five bucks for the beer.”
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