by Derry Sandy
Wrise fished out a set of lock picks from his pocket but before he could go to work Rohan interrupted him. “The door. Try the knob. It looks unlocked.”
Wrise placed his hand on the handle and turned, the door was indeed unlocked. That niggling feeling hardened in the pit of Rohan’s stomach.
“Something is off here, guys,” Rohan rasped into the intercom. “I feel baited.”
“And I feel really exposed in this hallway,” Wrise hissed.
“There is one individual seated in the room. Back to the door,” Richard whispered into the com.
Voss finger-counted down from three and Wrise turned the knob all the way and opened the door quickly. They entered rapidly but quietly. Voss trained his gun on the seated man, who from behind appeared to be asleep. Rohan and Wrise cleared the room. Rohan closed the door quietly.
“Confirm that it’s your boss,” Voss said to Wrise.
Wrise approached the man with his shotgun trained on him, Voss and Rohan covered Wrise without approaching. When Wrise was close enough he clapped a hand over the man’s mouth and the man turned around with a wild look in his eyes. Then the two men apparently recognized each other.
“This is Cassan Davilmar.” Wrise said. “Boss, we came to get you out of here.”
“It’s about bloody time,” the man replied in a gruff whisper, a look of relief crossing his face.
“So how do we get out of here?”
“Out this door, down the hall past the guards and out the back,” Voss said matter-of-factly.
Cassan chuckled, “I tried that way before and it’s no good.”
“What do you mean?” Voss asked.
“Well, there’s a good reason why I am not secured to this chair, why the door is not locked, and why the guys next door aren’t really paying attention. This house is sentient. As long as it wants you here you’re not getting out. Dammit, here I was thinking that you folks had a plan, but as you will soon see, you are just as stuck as I am.”
A feeling coalesced in Rohan’s stomach as if a nest of young rats had made their home in the walls of his gut. He opened the door. Where there was formerly a hallway there was now a freshly erected brick wall. The mortar between the bricks was still soft. Rohan yanked a brick free of the wet mortar. Behind that brick there was another brick and he knew that he could probably pull bricks out for millennia and there would always be another behind it.
“See.” Cassan said as he settled back into the chair. “The little girl knows the way out, but she’s under orders from someone else.”
“What little girl?” Voss asked.
“That one, in the corner.” Cassan said pointing. All the heads in the room whipped around. In a corner behind them stood a lovely Indian girl wearing a red and gold sari. She was barefooted and had the all the makings of a future beauty. Cassan’s lips peeled back to reveal a sickeningly sweet smile. “Hello Ghita, how are you today, you weird child.”
Rohan, Voss and Wrise stared. “How did you get in,” Rohan asked recovering first.
“I’m the housekeeper, and you shouldn’t be here. Lucien will not be happy.” Ghita replied.
“Then let us out before Lucien finds out we are here,” Voss replied.
“That is the exact opposite of my duty as the housekeeper,” the girl responded as she sunk slowly into the floor as if it was quicksand and vanished.
“She does that from time to time,” Cassan said airily.
“What the hell was that?” Wrise hissed.
“She’s some sort of poltergeist I think, but she has a very strong presence here. She can move things, use keys, open doors. I have even touched her. She seems to exist on the cusp of being alive but not quite all the way here, or maybe she is on the cusp of being dead but not quite ready to take the hint. I get the sense that she’s not here willingly. But Lucien, has her on the payroll somehow.”
“Who is Lucien?”
“Lucien as it turns out is the name of the person who arranged for the pickup and delivery of the box from the warehouse.” Cassan said after Wrise had quickly explain Rohan’s and Voss’ involvement. “I carried out a commission, facilitating the delivery of a message, you might say, to an obeah woman, but I was not supposed to find out who the sender was. I think my knowledge of that information is why I was brought here.”
“Tell us about the box, your relationship with Lucien and with the obeah woman who came to you. Tell us everything,” Rohan whispered to Cassan.
“Well I guess that’s a fair request, seeing as we are probably going to have time to develop a lifelong friendship trapped here in this house.” Cassan settled into the chair and crossed his legs at the ankles, slouching into a more relaxed pose. “I possess a talent and that talent is fearlessness. Now, this is not to be confused with recklessness, I act with the same modicum of caution toward the preservation of life and limb as any of you might, but ever since I was a child I have been fearless, I take risks.
“Uriah, my esteemed brother is terribly risk averse. He has never done anything exciting in his life and when he dies, his family will weep respectfully and his eulogy will be filled with phrases like ‘he was a real standup guy’. I am not my brother. My epitaph is likely to read ‘He slept with my wife and he owes me money’ Uriah’s uptight personality is part of the reason I am making him run the business in my absence. It brings me great pleasure to think about him sitting awkwardly in my office doing everything in his power to get back to his grey little London office.” Cassan smiled as if he really was enjoying his brothers dutiful discomfit.
“Uriah and I grew up in London with our parents who had emigrated from Trinidad and Guyana. They wanted to expose us to better opportunities. In the case of my brother, this worked. He did the whole Oxford scholar thing, married a nice British girl with solid Hindu roots and has a lovely family. He did everything by the book written by Mummy and Daddy Davilmar.
“With me, the parental lessons did not take root. I dropped out of high school, got into fights, was arrested numerous times. Then I was stabbed, almost to death, spent six months in the hospital, three of which I was comatose. When I got out my mother and father packed me off back to Trinidad to live with my maternal grandmother in Caroni. That, ladies and gentlemen, was the turning point in Cassan Davilmar’s life. Hold please I need to use the bathroom.”
Cassan rose, walked to the door, shut it, and re-opened it. Where there had previously been a brick wall, there was now a small bathroom. Cassan went in and closed the door behind him, after a moment there was the sound of a toilet flushing and he came back out.
“Anyone thirsty?” He shut the door and opened it again and there was a vending machine from which he retrieved a bottle of water.
“What’s going on here?” Voss asked his eyebrows tightly knitted.
“I honestly have no idea, whatever I want I can get it, if I focus on my desire while opening and closing the door. And to answer your burning question, no, the house does not provide hookers, believe me I’ve tried. It won’t let me just imagine my way home either. Any attempt to escape and you either get the brick wall or a doorway to another part of the house.” Cassan opened the bottle of water and drank. “Ahh, that’s some good water, but I suspect it’s the same water that was in the toilet. The house has a dark sense of humor, last night I wanted a steak dinner and I opened the door and there was a dead rotting cow pinned to the ceiling with a pitchfork.
“But to continue my story, I moved to Trinidad to live with granny. Granny is a bit of a dabbler, not a full-fledged obeah woman but she has been known to cast a curse or two and she can read the weather. Not just today or tomorrow’s weather but years in advance, she always knows if we will have a particularly parched dry season or if the rainy season will swell the Caroni River so that we could fish for tilapia off the back porch. When Granny saw I was fearless, she asked me to help her with some things, spells, magic, stuff like that. She always lamented that the world was becoming a place where those of us who believ
ed in Obeah were thought of as unsophisticated and backward. It had come to the point where we had to hide who we were. That is how the idea for my business came about.
“Necromancers, obeah men, mayalmen, witches, they all needed a place to store their paraphernalia anonymously and safely. They needed a security deposit box, a transfer service, a bank vault. Someone who could move their items of power around without asking questions. Someone who could stuff the ghouls back into the coffins if they escaped. Someone who could feed their Buck while they went on vacation, somewhere to store the ashes of their dead obeah-man grandfather, which by the way you do not want sitting on the mantelpiece in a regular urn. But that is another tale.
“I met those needs. Soon I became their chief facilitator and a broker. People came to me because I was good. But even putting my client service talents aside, I was the only one in the business. It has been a wild success. We were literally turning customers away. Then I received a vial of what seemed to be blood, from an anonymous sender.
“The contract was for us to act as a middle man and to simply pass it on to a certain woman who would come to my office in the Kings and Commoners. I was to ensure that she drank the contents of the vial then and there. Now understand this, I don’t pass out business cards, but neither am I in hiding. People who need to find me, can do so relatively easily. So, it wasn’t strange that I allowed her to come to the office.
“The woman showed up, she drank the contents of the vial, then she went temporarily insane or maybe she was possessed, who knows, but she grew powerful. I could feel the change. She trashed my office while in the grip of her possession and had to be restrained. While under the influence of whatever was in the vial she revealed that she was supposed to raise some dead people to kill a soucouyant. That’s all well and good, except that I knew this soucouyant. Her name is Katharine and she is one of the founding members of the Kings and Commoners. Though I do not count her a friend and while I believe her abrasive and aloof nature might well have driven someone to desire her death, we members of the K and C are a small group and we look out for each other as a matter of policy.”
Rohan held his composure as he stored away this new bit of information about Kat. She was not just a member of Kings and Commoners, but a founding member. Although he would not admit it to her, he was increasingly impressed with the reach of the soucouyant’s influence.
“My interest was piqued,” Cassan continued. “I could have shot the Shouta woman in the face then and there but I had no real fear that Kat was in danger. Kat is, after all, hewn from a slab of granite. So I let the woman go and sent Kat a warning, to which she never responded which is typical of her. As for the vial, I sent that to a friend at a forensic lab to see if they could run some sort of DNA trace. Long odds, particularly in Trinidad, I know, but it was worth the effort. As it turns out the stuff in the vial was blood. Even better my forensic friend was able to get a DNA match. The blood belonged to Lucien Sardis, a wealthy businessman who was supposedly killed in a robbery years ago.
“His DNA was in the crime scene repository under cold cases. But the plot thickens. The blood itself was fresh, meaning that Lucien Sardis is walking around with power in his veins. I have no idea why an obeah man with that sort of power didn’t simply think to have his record wiped. Hubris, maybe. Whatever the case I start looking for this Lucien, and the things I uncovered gave reasons for pause.
“Mentioning his name gets doors slammed in your face. Powerful people got nervous. A woman, one of the weekend wiccans, as I call them, told me that she had heard that some obeah man was giving people power upgrades if they did tasks for him, but the people who took the deal all turned up dead. Two days later she was butchered in a home invasion. There were parts of her in almost every room of the house. The Watchers’ Guild wielded their influence to suppress the goriest details, but from what I heard even her fish tank was filled with blood. The moral is, when the name Lucien is mentioned death follows. I was still digging when the black box was delivered. The rest of course you already know.”
“What happened to the thing that grabbed you,” Wrise asked.
“It died once it got back here. The divinium bullets messed it up.”
“Divinium?” Rohan questioned.
“Silver melted down and tempered in lycan blood becomes something else altogether. Divinium they call it, a divine alloy. It is the ideal thing for killing greyborn of all varieties. It is more effective than pure silver and far more durable. How do you guys not know this?”
“The Order has not exactly been innovating these last few years, fewer lagahoo and the like.”
“As I hear it, the thing on the tape ate a lot of those bullets,” Voss said.
“Well, divinium is not cheap. The raw materials are not easy to come by. Silver is expensive, and we don’t exactly have vats of lycan blood lying around. We usually have one divinium bullet for every five regular bullets in a clip,” Cassan replied.
“Why are you still alive, Davilmar?” Rohan asked. “It seems to me that you should have been killed already if this Lucien is as nasty as the rumors suggest.”
“Good question, and one to which I have no good answer. To be honest, I think he wants to ply me for information, maybe about my secret clientele, the Full Black crowd. Maybe he just wants me to sweat a bit. Maybe he had other uses for me.” Cassan paused for a moment. Just as Rohan was about to ask another question Cassan interrupted him. “Oh look, she’s back,” Cassan said. Everyone turned and the girl in the sari was there, beautiful as a picture and hauntingly melancholy.
“What do you want? We’re obviously not going anywhere,” Cassan huffed.
“I want to give you a chance to leave. But to escape you must play a game. You can say no, but then I promise you, you will stay here for the rest of your lives or until Lucien decides to kill you.”
“A game? What are the rules of the game?” Rohan asked.
“There is only one rule, survive. The house will try to kill you and it has many means of doing so.”
“What do you get out of this Ghita?” Cassan interjected.
“I want you to deliver a message for me. Tell the soucouyant to sleep, that I wish to speak to her. Tell her what I am.”
Sleep, what does she mean? Rohan thought. Aloud he said, “Sounds simple enough but what exactly are you?” Rohan said assuming that ‘the soucouyant’ meant Kat.
“A bottled soul. Do we have a bargain?” Ghita asked.
“Yes. We have a bargain,” Rohan replied, eager to accept any opportunity to escape the house.
“What about the things in a basement? Do we have to deal with them?” Cassan asked.
“The goal is to escape. The house is infested with bad spirits. Once I let you out of this room I will be unable to protect you further. The house may employ any means to kill you including the release of the creatures in the basement.” Ghita’s voice was like a melody, even as she relayed the frightening news.
“Wait, what creatures?” Rohan asked.
Cassan chuckled. “People. At least they used to be people. Lucien does something to them and now they are…different. At first they look like ordinary men and women but after some time the effect of whatever Lucien does changes their physical appearance and they look like the thing that grabbed me and took me through the box.”
“They are Lucien’s maboya and you might have to face them,” Ghita responded. “The house will decide.”
“Well let’s get this show on the road then.” Wrise said as he checked that a round was in the chamber of his gun.
“Good. Leave through the door and remember that the only rule is survival. You do not want to die here in this house. It is not a good thing to die here.” With that Ghita vanished, not through the floor this time. She just faded away slowly like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.
“Through the door, she said.” Wrise muttered as he positioned himself on the side of the door, handing Cassan his side arm. Cassan checked to see t
hat a round was in the chamber.
Chapter 17
The men gathered along the sides of the door, Voss and Rohan on the right, Cassan and Wrise on the left. “On three…two…one.” Voss pushed the door gently and it swung open, not back unto the hallway but unto the guard’s room to reveal the four-man security detail Richard had identified via the thermal scope. The house had already begun trying to kill them.
The men froze in mid-laugh at some bawdy joke. Wrise wasted no time. He shot the nearest man in the chest. The suppressor muffled the percussion of the twenty-four-gauge round to a loud whisper. That act precluded any possibility of peaceful negotiation. The other three guards went for their guns and the escapees cut them down in a hail of automatic weapons fire. One of the men did not immediately die and with a last effort depressed a switch affixed to the table-top. Wrise finished him off with a headshot, but not before flashing white lights began to pulse in the room and in the hallway.
Richard’s voice came over the communicator line. “Guys, hello, hello can anyone hear me?”
“Hey buddy, we hear you loud and clear.”
“What the heck happened, Ro? You went silent. It’s almost sunrise.”
“It’s a long story, but we have Cassan and we need you to keep eyes on us through the thermal scope. Can you see us now?” Rohan asked.
“Yes, you’re in the guard’s room. Four cooling bodies are on the floor. There are also flashing lights outside the building. Did you trigger some sort of alarm?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Hold on, three large vans are coming through the front gate. About ten men in each. All armed.”
