A Plain-Dealing Villain

by Craig Schaefer

  I panned slowly from right to left, snapping pictures, hunting for a safe. The lens zoomed in on an open doorway as I tried to get a good look at the room beyond it.

  The air in the doorway blurred.

  I glimpsed a curlicue of white light, like a frosty breath in the winter air. Then it was gone. For a second I wasn’t sure if I’d seen anything at all. I slowed my breathing, focused, and stared intently into the camera’s viewfinder. I moved the lens again, slowly sweeping across the loft.

  Another blur. My index finger hammered the button like I was a paparazzo stalking an A-list celebrity. I caught a third blur, on the far side of the room, and snapped off another flurry of pictures.

  I couldn’t get a magical read on the blur—I’d need to get closer for that—but whatever it was, it was fast. Fast, nearly invisible, and guarding a necromancer’s home turf. Great.

  I scanned the rest of the loft. Over on the far left side I found Ecko’s home office. He’d gone all-in with mahogany fixtures, a plush high-backed leather chair…and a wall-to-wall bookshelf behind his desk, where I could barely make out the edge of a black steel safe.

  While I tried to get a good angle on the safe, moving down to another window, something else caught my eye. Four clay jars, about a foot and a half tall and almost as wide, sat upon a glass credenza in his office. They lined up neatly side by side, each lid topped with what looked like a sculpted animal head.

  Even from across the street, they radiated power. Their energy tasted like razor blades and misery, and just looking at them through the camera’s lens set my teeth on edge. At maximum zoom, I could see the faded Egyptian hieroglyphs, inscribed in red pigment that spiraled around each jar.

  The jars were bad news, I knew that much, but past that I was at a loss. Some kind of cursed artifact? A ward to keep people like me out of Ecko’s office? Between the jars and the blur, I needed more than a handful of Mama’s special powder before I walked up those stairs. I needed information.

  I snapped a few final shots, slung the camera strap over my shoulder, and walked back out to join Stanwyck and Elaine.

  “Think I’ve got everything we need,” I said. We said our goodbyes, promised to be in touch, and gave her a bogus address and a number for a burner phone about to be tossed into the nearest trash can.

  Stanwyck didn’t say a word until we were back in the car. As he cruised down Wabash, taking advantage of the sluggish traffic to take it nice and slow, I leaned low in the seat and got another few shots of Ecko’s storefront from ground level.

  “How’s it look?”

  “Dodgy,” I said. “Once we get back to the motel, I’ll dump these pictures to my laptop. That’ll let me check for extra cameras, disguised motion detectors, all that fun stuff.”

  Specifically, I thought, the “fun stuff” that only I can deal with.

  * * *

  Stanwyck dropped me off. He wanted to prowl the neighborhood a little and work out our escape route. I sat at the table in my motel room, curtains drawn, with a takeout carton of General Tso’s chicken and a lukewarm can of Pepsi at my side as I flipped through the photos on my laptop.

  One picture, shot through an open door and giving me a clear view of the opposite side of the loft, exposed a rugged plastic box bolted under one of the back windows. That explained the missing fire escape. The box was for a rolled-up chain ladder, something Ecko could unfurl and climb down in case of an emergency. I knew it on sight because Bentley and Corman had one in their apartment too. All the benefits of a back exit and none of the risks.

  We’d have to go in the hard way: through the shop downstairs. I pondered our options while I clicked through the pictures, frame by frame. No such thing as an impregnable security system. There was always a weak link, a crack in the armor. Finding it, that was the trick.

  I clicked to the next photo, and a face stared back at me.

  It emerged from the blur in the doorway, translucent and silver like a reflection on glass. A lunatic’s face, mad-eyed and shrieking with what could have been horror, pain, or bloodlust.

  In the next picture, taken a second later, it was gone.

  I advanced slowly now, my finger hovering over the arrow key. The next few shots were empty. Just Ecko’s apartment and his art.

  I tapped the keyboard and called up the next picture. Two arms, fused at the shoulder and bent into impossible, bone-breaking angles, hovered in midair at the edge of a streak of light. A human head—not the first one, this one had long tangled hair and milky eyes—lay on Ecko’s carpet. A bloated tongue protruded from its open mouth.

  The next picture just showed the streak of light, fading to half its size. In the one after that, it was gone.

  I retraced my steps. I remembered trying to catch the doorway blur, then the one in the middle of the living room…there’d been one last ripple in the air, the big one right near the door to Ecko’s office. I rushed through the pictures, clicking through the photos racing headlong toward that final moment to see what I’d captured.

  I hit the arrow key one last time and froze.

  I’d captured it, all right.

  It nearly filled the frame, so big it would have to squeeze through the loft’s doors to move around. Or squirm through. I couldn’t take it all in at first. My eyes darted around, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. There were broken arms and opposite-facing legs, a bloated torso lined with sewn-on hands that grasped and pinched. And there were heads. I counted five, sprouting like tumors from the creature’s body, including the head on the floor being dragged along by a tentacle of meat.

  A man’s head and torso rose up from the back of the creature, spine curved like a scorpion’s tail. His one arm aimed directly at the camera lens, pointing an accusing finger. That was when I realized all of the heads were staring right at me.

  And screaming.

  They had seen me photographing them from across the street. While I was watching the loft, they were watching me.

  I shut the laptop’s lid and sat very still, alone in my motel room. A moment later, I got up and turned on the television set, tuning it to some inane sitcom. The silence wasn’t my friend.

  12.

  Hearing Bentley’s reedy voice on the phone was a touch of home. I was a stranger in a hostile land, but I still had a compass to get me through.

  “Dr. Halima Khoury,” he said. “If anyone can advise you, it’s her. Back in the…well, more years ago than I’d like to say, she helped Cormie and me with a sticky bit of trouble out in California. She moved east about a decade ago and took a position as a conservator with the Field Museum. We still correspond with her occasionally.”

  I hadn’t given him all the gory details, just that I was going up against a necromancer with a passion for antiquities. Between Ecko’s creature and the jars with the Egyptian hieroglyphs in his office, I needed some local expertise.

  “And she’s clued-in?”

  “She’s an accomplished sorceress, yes. You can be frank with her. In fact, I recommend it. She has precious little patience for dissemblers.”

  “Thanks, Bentley. Can you give her a call and vouch for me?”

  “I’m thumbing through my Rolodex as we speak. Daniel…are you going to be gone long?”

  “No, the job’s going down tonight. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said quickly. I heard the but coming before he said it. “But we saw Jennifer last night. One of her…close business associates, one of Nicky’s men, has gone missing. Allegedly, he’d been seen meeting with Agent Black.”

  Nicky. The memories of my own visit to his kill-house in the suburbs, and the torture session he’d forced me to watch, were still fresh. I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

  “She should stop looking for him,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  “She knows.”

  “Nicky’s cleaning house. Black’s stepping up the tempo, trying to scare him. Sounds like it’s working. He’ll go after anyone he remotely thi
nks might do him wrong.”

  Like Jennifer, I thought. The best thing Bentley and Corman could do was stay as far away from her as possible. I knew this, just like I knew they wouldn’t do it. We protected each other. That’s what families were supposed to do.

  “You know Jennifer,” Bentley said. “When she gets her dander up, there’s no talking her down.”

  “Just sit tight. I’ll get the job done, take a red-eye to Austin and drop off the package, and then I’ll be on the next flight home. Then I’m going to do what I should have done weeks ago: sit the two of them down in a room together, and nobody leaves until they come to terms. Jen and Nicky don’t have any reason to fight, especially not with the feds in town. If they’d just talk to each other, they’d figure that out.”

  “Shall I sweep up the back room at the shop?” Bentley asked, his tone dry. “Perhaps two chairs with handcuffs this time?”

  “You know, it’s not a bad idea. Don’t worry, Bentley, I’ll fix this. See you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The Field Museum reminded me of a Greco-Roman temple, with its sweeping flight of stone steps and towering Ionic columns. Fifty-foot banners draped down from the eaves, advertising a traveling exhibit in bright gold lettering with a picture of a roaring jaguar in midpounce.

  The inside wasn’t any less impressive. I pushed through the glass doors and felt cool air-conditioning wash over me as I stood at the edge of a lobby bigger than Grand Central Station. The reconstructed skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex loomed over the ticket counters, large as life, head turned as if sniffing out fresh prey.

  “Her name is Sue,” said the woman at my side. She looked to be in her forties, with almond skin and a long, narrow face framed by a pale blue headscarf that matched her eyes. She wore an employee badge clipped to the waist of her ankle-length dress. “One of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered. Our pride and joy.”

  I wondered, for a brief instant, what a necromancer like Damien Ecko could do with the skeleton of a T. rex. I shrugged the idea off. Nobody’s that good.

  “Dr. Khoury,” I said, turning to face her. “I assume Bentley told you I was coming.”

  Psychic tendrils snaked through the air, violet and glistening, meeting between us. As they brushed, I tasted what little of her leaked out from the edges of her mental shields. Ink-stained hands and long hours in dark libraries. Sandalwood and ritual.

  She read me the same way. I wasn’t sure what she sensed—you never know how you look in someone else’s eyes, much less their second sight—but she gave a faint nod as we reeled back our senses. A magician’s handshake.

  “It was good to hear from him,” she said. Now she offered me her physical hand. Her grip was firm and dry. Almost oddly dry—her skin had the texture of wax cloth.

  “I need to know about Egypt. Well, I think so, anyway.”

  “You came to the right place.” She smiled and gestured for me to follow her across the vast lobby floor. “The ancient Near East is my specialty. Come, let’s walk the exhibit. Maybe you’ll see what you’re looking for.”

  We walked through a recreation of an Egyptian tomb, where ancient walls—carved out of the original stone and flown across the ocean—stood on display behind sheets of Plexiglas. Faint traces of pigment still stained the rows of hieroglyphs, worn away by time, and I could only imagine how colorful they must have once been.

  “I’m embarrassed to admit this is a blank spot in my education,” I told her. “Everything I know about ancient Egypt comes from old Universal monster movies.”

  “The real history is infinitely more interesting. But less Boris Karloff. An unfortunate trade.”

  I decided that I liked Halima.

  We descended a winding staircase to the exhibit hall below. As we strolled through the dimly lit cases, looking for a spot to talk away from tourists’ ears, one display stopped me in my tracks. It was a sarcophagus, its top carved to resemble a young woman’s face. Her sculpted hair flowed down over the coffin’s husk, which was painted from end to end in ornate imagery. Animal-headed gods stood in procession under unfurled wings, while the young woman’s wide, open eyes looked up at the heavens.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Halima stared into the display case enraptured. “Her name is Chenet-a-a. She lived in the third intermediate period—about three thousand years ago—when elaborate mummifications were more popular than ever before. A good time to die.”

  “Why is her coffin so bright, while the tomb walls upstairs barely have any paint on them? Is it a reconstruction?”

  “All original. This was an inner coffin. It was kept securely inside a larger, plainer wooden sarcophagus. This material is called cartonnage. Barely stronger than an eggshell. If we tried to open it, it would crumble to pieces at a touch.” She looked over at me and smiled. “So we let her sleep.”

  I saw a couple of pots and jars on the ground around the coffin, but nothing like what I’d glimpsed in Ecko’s office.

  “What about sealed jars? Four of them, a little under two feet tall, with animal-head lids. That mean anything to you?”

  Halima led me around the corner, past a massive stone sarcophagus, and pointed into another case. They weren’t an exact match, but the jars in the case and the ones I’d seen at Ecko’s were birds of a feather.

  “Canopic jars,” she explained. “Used during mummification to store and protect the vital organs of the deceased. Those heads aren’t animals. They represent the four sons of the god Heru, or Horus in the Greek idiom.”

  “So they’d put…brains in those things?”

  She laughed. “No, the brain was discarded entirely. You ought to know, Mr. Faust: the heart is the seat of your power. As for the jars, they stored the liver, intestines, stomach, and lungs. They’d be interred along with a mummy’s sarcophagus, keeping their body pristine and safe for their voyage into the West.”

  “So that’s the historic use.” I glanced over my shoulder, making sure nobody was close enough to overhear. “Next question: what could a necromancer do with canopic jars?”

  Her smile vanished.

  As she spoke, I could feel her probing me again, intently, like a finger poking at my chest. “Before I answer that, you must tell me something. And speak truly.”

  “Ask.”

  “Chicago, like your own city, I must imagine, has a very insular occult community. All of the influential powers know one another, or at least know of one another. And you are here to steal something. I can always smell a thief. Tell me: who is your intended prey?”

  I thought of ten different denials and snuffed each one out before they could reach my lips. I remembered what Bentley had told me about her patience. Either I could take a chance and lay my cards on the table or walk. No middle option.

  “Damien Ecko,” I said. “That a problem?”

  “I have known Damien Ecko for a very long time.” The way she said it, I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Are you in the habit of making powerful enemies, Mr. Faust?”

  “I wish I could say I wasn’t.”

  “I’d be surprised if you’ve met one more powerful than Damien. He has his fingers in many different shadows.”

  “You should have met a lady named Lauren Carmichael,” I said. “Trust me, I’ve been in some tight spots before. Besides, if things go right, he’ll never know it was me. That is…assuming you aren’t going to tell him.”

  The faintest ghost of her smile returned. “No. In truth, each of us would be pleased to see the other one gone forever. I am not a violent person by nature, though, and…well, he made an attempt on my life once, many years ago, and he learned a valuable lesson from it: peaceful does not mean weak. Since then, we’ve agreed to keep to our personal corners of the city and stay out of each other’s business.”

  “Sounds like me and an old business associate of mine,” I said. “Doesn’t always work, though. So Ecko has jars like these in his office. He’s also got this…thing.”r />
  “The abomination, yes.” Her lips pursed tightly. “I’ve seen it. And your observations are not unrelated. There are paths of ancient Egyptian sorcery—heka—intended to pervert the rites of holy internment. With such knowledge, a magician could use the trappings of a sacred burial to prevent a soul from moving on. To keep it here, binding it in shackles of misery and pain, a slave to the sorcerer’s will.”

  “Lovely. So if these jars are keeping that thing on a leash…”

  “Breaking them will free its tortured soul. That’s assuming you can even get close enough to try. I assure you, the creature has been ordered to defend those jars, and it will fight like a demon to keep itself in chains. And don’t forget: one isn’t enough. Until all four jars are sundered, it will still be under Damien’s control.”

  “Fortunately,” I said, “I’m really good at breaking things.”

  Halima gave me a small smile, but she looked anything but amused. “I would wish you fortune, but if fortune favored you, you wouldn’t be here. I’ll be praying for your soul tonight.”

  I cracked a smile. “You’d be the first.”

  “Then guard it well. For it would be better for your soul to fall into the depths of perdition than for it to fall into the hands of Damien Ecko.”

  13.

  I got back to the motel right around sunset. Stanwyck was out in the parking lot with Coop and Augie, helping to unload canvas sacks from the back of a battered panel van. An animated and smiling cartoon faucet posed on the side of the van next to the words “Drip Bros. Plumbing, Las Vegas, NV, Est. 1978. We Do It All!”

  I pitched in, grabbing a sack that weighed at least fifty pounds and clanked when I hauled it over my shoulder, and we all ended up in my motel room with the door dead-bolted and the curtains drawn tight. I turned on my laptop and pulled up the photos I’d taken at the loft—a selectively pruned collection, leaving out the shots of Ecko’s pet monster.

  “We’re good on wheels,” Stanwyck said. “I’ve got a place to stash the car, for the switch, and I found a perfect boost just a few blocks from here. A Lincoln with local plates, and the mail piling up says the owners haven’t been around in days. Nobody will report it stolen until we’re long gone.”