Aces & Eights

by Dale Lucas

  The reverend saw Dub eyeing the bottle, went rooting in a drawer, and brought out another small tumbler. He poured some for the doctor without asking if he wanted it, but Dub took it happily and gulped it down.

  “What’s your story? You’ve got Fralene scared half to death.”

  The reverend poured himself a shot of brandy and drank it down. He shook his head. He seemed loath to meet Dub’s eyes, as though he were afraid he might be taken for a lunatic. “I’m a reasonable man, doctor. But today, I saw some unreasonable things.”

  Dub leaned forward, clutching his empty glass. “Such as?”

  The reverend met his gaze now. “I need to know you’re equal to listening, and making no judgments.”

  “Reverend,” Dub said, “did you touch an adjacent plane? Is that what this is about?”

  Dub was afraid that the statement might as easily close the reverend off as open him; he might think—quite wrongly—

  that Dub was sporting with him. But Dub was dead serious, and the reverend saw that, and he nodded. “I believe in God, doctor, and I believe in the devil. I believe Jesus Christ was born from a virgin and I believe he rose up, bodily, after dying and resting in a tomb for three days. But until today, I never once, with my own eyes, saw evidence of the supernatural in this world of brick and mortar and steel and electric lights. It ain’t the end all and be all. I’ll go to sleep tonight like always and wake up tomorrow and go about my business, and after awhile, the pall of what I saw may recede into some dark, forgotten corner of my mind. But right now it’s still fresh, and I’m still puzzled and scared.”

  Dub felt his face harden; his eyes narrow. He needed to do his best not to give too much away; not to tip his hand or reveal more than necessary about his interest in the matter.

  The reverend misunderstood Dub’s hardened face. “You think I’m crazy, boy?”

  “No sir,” Dub said. “I’ve seen two or three strange things in my life too. Grew up in Haiti, remember? Traveled in Europe, too. There’s a lot of strange things in this world. Some folks see ‘em and dismiss ‘em. They choose not to believe their own eyes and ears; choose to forget they ever saw such things, and deny they’re real when others do the same. But that ain’t me. I know you’re straight. The way you’re scared by the whole mess tells me you’re straight. If you weren’t scared, then I’d be worried.”

  “You ain’t gonna tell Fralene,” the reverend said, and it wasn’t a request; it was an order. “She’d think I was crazy and she’d start watching every move I make; judging every little thing I do; thinkin’ I’m goin’ senile or crackers or some such.”

  “Where was it?” Dub asked. “What did you see?”

  The reverend sighed, whistling again. “Started in the afternoon, when that Merriwether woman, the one they call the Queen Bee, came to me for an exorcism.”

  Then the reverend unfolded his tale and Dub listened.

  XX

  It took some fancy talk about shell-shock and the weight of a clergyman’s position and such, but Dub eventually convinced Fralene that her uncle was safe and healthy, just suffering a little work-related stress, and that he should be back to normal in a day or so. He offered that she could call him again on the matter if he didn’t seem to sleep well for more than a night or two, or if she saw him being forgetful or suffering fugues. But otherwise, he lied, it was just the normal weight of a position of influence and responsibility, and all the reverend needed was a talk with a fellow man about the weight of such things.

  Fralene rankled at that, wondering if her uncle needed to talk so damned bad, why he didn’t just talk to her. Dub almost gave her a few words about the bonds that men shared as the bearers of weight in the world, but he figured that wouldn’t fly, so he just shrugged off her protests with smiles and dismissals designed to deflate the whole issue.

  “He’ll be fine,” he said to her at the front door. “Just give him some time. And thanks again for the ham and beans.”

  Fralene nodded and slipped into a quiet reverie, still leaning on the half-open door. Dub decided to mix pleasure with business. “When do I get to see you again?”

  That snapped her out of it. Fralene smiled a little. “Maybe this weekend? I’d like to stay close to home for a couple days.”

  “Sure,” Dub said, and put his hat on, signaling that it was his time to go. Part of him wanted to lean in and give her a little peck on the cheek or forehead; nothing predatory; just an indication that he cared. But he didn’t manage, and simply nodded his goodbyes and headed home. It was well after dark now and he had a lot to mull on the way.

  The reverend had told him a fantastic story. The Queen Bee had come to beg a cleansing at Aces & Eights, and the reverend had been intrigued by the request and done as asked. Once inside the club, however, he’d been immediately aware of something wrong about the place; a lingering, almost palpable darkness; strange drafts and phantoms at the periphery of his vision; movements in the load-bearing members of the structure and terrible, belligerent manifestations in the light and shadows. He’d done his best to do battle with whatever laid in wait there, but the force alive in that club had fought back, violently. After losing the light and nearly being crushed by a falling piece of scenery, the Queen Bee’s bodyguards had ushered their regent and the reverend out into the light, and forbade either to go back inside. The Reverend Farnes had confessed to Dub that, even though he’d put up a fight and pressed to be taken back inside to keep fighting with the beast hiding there, he’d secretly been pleased that the bodyguards held their ground. He’d fought to go back in because he thought it the right thing to do; but he really did not want to go back. If he never saw the inside of Aces & Eights again, he confessed, it would be too soon.

  Dub absolved the reverend of any shame—who wouldn’t be terrified and find themselves unequal to such a task, especially when they’d never encountered such a thing before? That seemed to settle the reverend a little, but Dub could still tell that the old man felt like a failure somehow. Dub couldn’t tell him that the truth was, it would take more than just the reverend’s faith to pry the malignancy out of that club. No doubt, it would take full-bore magic of a sort the reverend would have been loath to acknowledge as potent, let alone useful in pursuit of a virtuous end.

  But that’s why Dub bore his burden, wasn’t it? That’s why he was a horse for the lwa: so other people—better people—wouldn’t have to be.

  XX

  He was tired and he wanted to go home, but he had one more stop to make before doing so. Thus, he marched a few more blocks eastward, and found himself skulking in a shadowy alleyway directly opposite the front façade of Aces & Eights.

  There were lights burning within and the shadows of movement on the few illuminated windows. The Queen Bee’s drones, no doubt, burning the midnight oil in preparation for the big opening. Were they changing out the light bulbs that had burst that afternoon, even as he watched? Whispering among themselves about the drafts, the accidents, the sense that often pervaded one in solitary moments in those darkened corridors, or in the labyrinthine basement?

  Being familiar with the bad juju that the place exuded, Dr. Dub Corveaux felt it even from this distance. No doubt, his senses were sharpened by Legba’s pendant. But he imagined that even if he didn’t have Legba’s mojo for maji helping to sensitize him at the moment, he might still get the same sense of dread and foreboding that he now felt as he lingered in the shadows and studied the non-descript brick building opposite him.

  Using the sensitivities bestowed upon him, he reached out, extending the gaze of that sixth sense he now wielded into the lease spaces on either side of the club. One was a dry-cleaners; the other a neighborhood grocer. Luckily, the owners didn’t live in the apartments above the mercantile spaces—his sixth sense told him that the upstairs spaces were all used for storage and the like. But already, Dub could feel the shadows in each of those spaces deepening. The dry clean presses were getting hungry, like long un-fed lions at a zoo. Ther
e would be more accidents soon; malfunctions; the destruction of property on loan for cleaning. At the grocer’s, Dub could already sense that some of the canned products were souring long before their appointed time; some of the shelving sagging, eager to snap and dump heavy contents onto unwary clerks or customers; that there were eggs in the big icebox that might suddenly have live, misshapen little chicks inside them.

  The pall from the curse engine in the basement of Aces & Eights was spreading like vapor from its proper domain toward its unwary neighbors. Pretty soon, it might infect some of the blocks adjacent, if the flowing waters of the sewers beneath the paved streets couldn’t provide suitable magical barriers against it. Bad happenings would follow soon—tomorrow, maybe the next day. How long before the sickness reached into the street? A shoot-out that killed innocent bystanders? Some hapless kid getting run down by a speeding car? Seeds of vileness, hatred and malignancy growing right up out of the sick waters in the sewer pipes below them?

  The curse engine wasn’t just mucking with the Queen Bee’s business. It was on its way to being a blight on all Harlem.

  Dub breathed deeply, exhaled, felt just how tired he was. How alone.

  He’d have to get some sleep tonight. There would be legwork tomorrow, while the sun was shining.

  And, most likely, bloody business when the sun went down.

  Chapter 10

  Dr. Dub Corveaux rose early and wrote Cecile a note instructing her to reschedule all his appointments and turn away all walk-ins. He’d be out of Harlem for the day, on some personal business. Then, hat on his head, he snatched an egg sandwich at a corner greasy spoon and hoofed it toward the train station at Lenox and 125th Street.

  He kept a growing list of the names of various specialists in and around Manhattan; folks whom he may never have met or spoken with, but who he heard of by reputation or encountered through research; folks with odd specialties and past-times.

  Folks he might need to dig up when questions abounded and answers eluded.

  One of these specialists was a fellow who’d hung out an investigator’s shingle in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn two or three years back; a young misanthrope from Rhode Island named Howard Randolph. His reputation as poor company preceded him, but by all accounts, he was also a bookworm of the first order, well-versed in all sorts of major and minor arcana because he made a little money on the side writing chillers for the pulps. Dub still remembered the strange symbols he’d seen on the skull talisman in the Aces & Eights basement the night before—he’d even managed to write down an approximation of one sequence. Maybe this Randolph character could give him some clue as to where the symbols came from or what they meant.

  So, egg sandwich devoured, he took with him a bright green apple as a snack and a copy of a new literary journal that was just making the rounds, called Fire!!, and set out on his long journey. By mid-morning he was on Canal Street, and an hour after that, he’d made it to Brooklyn Heights. From there, he began the long walk out to lonely Red Hook on its peninsula at the ass-end of the borough.

  Red Hook itself was a labyrinth of squalor. It lay near the old Brooklyn waterfront in sight of Governor’s Island, its crowded, grubby streets carving a tangle of Dickensian alleys and byways between its brick warehouses and tenements that made him instantly long for the neat, gridded streets of Harlem. The population was a miasmatic mishmash of immigrants—Mediterranean sorts, mostly, with some Anglo and Negro elements thrown in like dashes of salt and pepper for texture and flavor. Suddenly, Harlem, even its darkest corners, seemed a glittering modern metropolis. Red Hook, by Dub Corveaux’s reckoning, was all noise, clutter, and filth, its chatter a counterpoint to the lapping of turgid waves at its piers and the intermittent groans of tug and barge whistles from the harbor.

  He heard the tongues of a hundred different nations spoken; smelled smells that he’d never imagined and hoped were accidents, not purposeful concoctions; and generally, felt like the one angel set loose in a forgotten corner of Dante’s hells. The foreign longshoremen and immigrants who populated the little borough-within-a-borough gave him the evil eye, seeming to will him away with belligerent glares and breathy mutterings to their hoary old saints or forgotten gods. Dub just kept walking, clutching the piece of paper in his hands bearing Randolph’s address like a talisman of good fortune.

  Finally he located the place, though he saw no indication that a private investigator lived or worked there. Instead, the address was home to a little hat shop, crammed in between a Kosher bakery and a Turkish tobacconist. The numbers matched, though.

  There was a little bell above the door that tinkled merrily, and his first impression of the hat shop was of coziness and cheer. It was a little dark and cramped, but the proprietor had scented the place with jasmine, and the hats themselves—mostly for ladies—were of all sorts of gay colors and designs.

  There were only two people in the shop besides Dub. One was a small, compact old woman, probably of Jewish descent, dressed all in drab black and purchasing a funereal bonnet to match. The other Dub supposed was a shop girl, a handsomely pretty, hearty woman of about his own age with strong but not unattractive features and quick, dark eyes. When she saw Dub, those dark eyes seemed to flash suspicion followed by a strange sort of hope. Dub couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind.

  He stood and said nothing as she wrapped the bonnet for the old woman (whose expression suggested that Dub had brought a stink into the shop with him), and finally the old lady waddled out on her way and Dub was alone with the shop girl. She folded her hands on the little counter beside an ancient cash register.

  “How may I help you, sir?” she asked.

  Dub brandished the paper bearing the address. “Pardon me if I’ve made a mistake, miss. I was looking for a Mr. Howard Randolph and I—”

  Before he could finish, the woman had turned, snatched up a broom, and thrust the handle against the ceiling, making four solid thumps before putting the broom back where she’d found it. Dub must have been staring, for the woman smiled, and he decided that he liked her instantly. He liked that crooked, knowing smile. “Howie’s upstairs, sir. He’ll be right down.”

  “So I’m in the right place?”

  She studied him. “That’s debatable. But if you’re looking for Howard Randolph, yes; you’re in the right place.”

  “Your brother?” Dub asked.

  “My husband,” she said, and offered her hand. “Mrs. Sonya Randolph.”

  “Dr. Dub Corveaux,” Dub said, taking her hand lightly and shaking it. A moment later, he heard quick footfalls on a back staircase, and another moment after that, a curtain hiding a narrow back corridor was drawn aside and a thin, wan fellow with a receding hairline and a pronounced under bite appeared. His eyes almost leapt out of his long, horsey face when he saw Dub, but after just a moment of fear and wonder, the look subsided, and the fellow turned to Sonya.

  “Is there trouble?” he asked, as though Dub couldn’t hear him.

  “No, Howard,” the woman said. “This nice gentleman is looking for you.”

  Howard Randolph looked at Dub again, suspicious, furtive, then once more spoke to Sonya in barely a whisper, as though Dub were not even present. “What does he want?”

  Dub decided to cut through the red tape. He offered his hand. “Forgive me, Mr. Randolph. I’d heard you were an investigator and that you specialized on the side in... curiosities.”

  Randolph stared.

  “Occult matters?” Dub offered.

  Randolph looked fully thrown for a loop now. He seemed to weigh a number of thoughts in succession, without offering a word, then finally cocked his head toward the back hallway. “Come in, then. We’ll talk.”

  Dub, his hand never taken even as a courtesy, nodded and followed the pale, thin figure through a hallway barely wide enough to pass, and up a cramped back staircase. As he went, he heard Sonya Randolph speaking from the shop to her husband.

  “Don’t be rude, Howard!” she called, and
Dub detected a note of sarcasm in her voice. “Offer the man some tea!”

  The apartment was directly above the hat shop, a cramped little cell in an urban hive consisting of a miniscule sitting room, a little kitchenette with a hot plate and a sink, and a bedroom jutting off to one side. Though tiny, the place was crammed, floor to ceiling, with books old and new, and strewn with hundreds of magazines. Collections of Leftist essays and old, yellowed National Geographics reposed beside issues of Weird Tales. The books on the sagging floor-to-ceiling shelves were a puzzling mixture as well: collections by Dunsanay, Blackwood, Poe, and Baudelaire beside dry scholarly texts on geology, architecture, and New England history. Dub saw a few books in Russian and supposed those might belong to Mrs. Randolph, since she had the look of European Jewry about her, even if her accent was pure Brooklyn slum. As Dub finished his study of the cramped shelves and their contents, he noted that Randolph had with-drawn into the bedroom, and now emerged again, tying a tie round his neck and working his narrow, stooped shoulders to settle a suit coat upon them. With a great air of officiousness, the pale, horse-faced little man swept a chair away from a small writing desk poised by the front window and offered it to Dub, setting it right in the middle of the only free space on the floor of the room. Dub sat. Randolph studied him for a moment.

  “Do you have money?”

  “If you can help me,” Dub said.

  “Let me see it,” Randolph answered.

  Dub produced his wallet and fanned it open, revealing a parcel of bills therein. Randolph’s eyes flashed in disbelief and incredulity. Then, he swept back a stray lock of his thinning hair and cleared his throat.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Dub offered his hand again. The little man still didn’t take it. He withdrew it. “Dr. Dub Corveaux. Practice up in Harlem. I’m looking into some strange matters thereabouts and I heard you were well-read and possessed of some”—he studied his book-laden surroundings—“peculiar research interests.”