“What does recontres mean?” Colin asked. Gertrude barely restrained herself, as she obviously wanted to giggle. I threw a scowl her way.
“It’s a place where no self-respecting deader would be caught in, which will be the perfect spot for us to hide in until one of the infected leaves the hotel. If Gertrude thinks she can learn from one of their dead, then that’s what we need to get her.”
“I can sense who is alive and who is not, if I’m close enough to it,” Gertrude added. I added that little perk to what the swamp witch could do.
We walked onward towards the shop. Along the way, we passed by some ominous street markers, dead bodies with their chests ripped open. A few even had their heads missing.
“I can usually sense another demon, if it is old enough and close to me,” Calidum volunteered.
“Concerning that, is this how demons normally reproduce? Do they need humans to birth their young?” I asked.
“I’m too young to know,” he replied flatly. Perfect. I knew that I was setting my expectations a little too high with him, but really, he was a demon. Shouldn’t he know these things?
“No one’s told me what recontres means yet, and as the only French I know is archaic, all I know with certainty is that it is not a word used in summoning,” Colin said. I couldn’t help myself when I snickered out loud. Calidum loped ahead, which I interpreted to mean that he was going to scout out the shop for us.
I pretended to not hear Colin, until we finally reached the store in question, which was situated across from the eastern corner of the Hotel Château Cyprès. Calidum darted back to us, and after he jumped up around my neck, he said nonchalantly, “It is a lady’s underclothing store.”
Colin blanched, until I grabbed the crook of his elbow and forced him into the store with us. The door was open and the showroom was a dark cavern. Normally this would raise warning bells in me, but we waited a moment and when nothing came out to eat us, I strode more fully into the shop with Colin still in tow.
Gertrude stayed back by the door and said, “I’ll keep the first lookout.”
“You still have that salt and iron on you?”
“Yes,” she said as she patted the pockets of her new coat, one that she borrowed from one of the dead constables.
“Calidum, can you keep an eye out for the infected?”
“It will be easy, since they smell different,” he said before he took off across the street to sit on the awning above the hotel lobby door. I halfway wondered if it would have been better to have him torch the place with his demon fire, but there might still be some innocents trapped in there.
“Come on Colin, let’s investigate the back of the store.” He had brought one of the lanterns from the constable’s office. He relit it and then we walked slowly towards the rear.
He had been silent the entire time we had been in the shop. But now he asked, “I’ve seen illustrations of some of these things.”
“Wait until you see the back room.”
He gulped loudly in response.
Chapter 15
Sobek
Rule number four: Trap rather than chat.
I had only been in the back room once myself, and that was when I was much younger. According to our elders, it was the prerequisite coming of age ritual for every girl in Assumption Parish.
On the month of a girl’s sixteenth birthday, their mothers would bring them by Renee’s Recontres, which was not owned by anyone named Renee at all. The actual owner of the shop called herself Sophie St. Claire, but I suspected that was an alias too. Her French accent was certainly fake enough, since we heard her slip up and lose her accent on a number of occasions while shopping with our mothers. When that happened, she sounded as if she came from the rougher parts of New Amsterdam.
She was a bear of a woman, easily over six feet tall with only a sixteen inch waist. But what mostly drew my attention were the three large moles which were featured prominently on her face. One was above her right eye, one on the lobe of her left ear, and the last one was on her chin. In fact, I rather thought they made their own version of the Bermuda triangle.
If the rumors were to be believed, one might be forced to call her handsome. Once I had even overheard several men in the parish referring to here as Mistress Sophie. Gossip had it that she had a secret bedroom where men came to experience the joys of the baser instincts. I heard that those usually involved hand cuffs and whips.
The back room we had been escorted into was not a bedroom however, but was rather a treasure trove of toys that select adults liked to use in the privacy of their own boudoirs. I was thankful that all three of our mothers had gone shopping elsewhere after they deposited us here, because I found the lesson that I shared with Bethany and Rose that day to be most embarrassing, if enlightening. Although it was almost seven years ago, I remembered it as if it were yesterday.
···•Ͽ Ѡ Ͼ•···
“You insert that where?” Bethany had asked.
“Look again at the anatomical model Miss Bethany,” Ms. St. Clair reproved her.
“And it doesn’t hurt?” Rose had asked.
“Heavens no, so long as it is done correctly,” she replied.
“Isn’t that a rug beater over there?” Bethany pointed out for our attention.
“It indeed was,” Ms. St. Claire informed us, while I eyed my escape routes.
···•Ͽ Ѡ Ͼ•···
Now, I wondered if Colin knew what half the things in this room were intended to do. Did he spend the small hours of the night looking through books with scantily clad women in precarious positions while using rug beaters inappropriately? I blushed and was thankful for the shadowy interior.
There were no windows back this far into the shop and precious little light bled in from the front room where the thunderstorm was still raging and night had fallen. Periodically the walls would shake from thunder, and flashes of lightening would illuminate the hallway leading into the back room.
Colin stood at the door for a moment and sniffed deeply. Then he turned back at me and said, “There is no one alive in there, but there are some that are dead.”
I took out my Pinfire and an athame. I slid the stick of ochre down the finger sheath and locked it into position, just in case I would need to summon or trap something quickly. He took out his double action revolver and then he slowly opened the door. The top hinge of the door had been damaged, so the bottom edge of it dragged along the floor as he pushed it open. Once that was done, no one moved for a few moments, waiting to see if anything undead would jump out and attack us.
Then he lifted the lantern up to reveal a room appeared to be full of people. I almost started firing willy-nilly, but as the wobbly light skittered over the tops of their heads, I realized that the ten or so people in the room were in reality only mannequins. Their torsos and legs were arranged in odd angles, while their arms and heads were piled up in the middle of the room.
Some of them were partially clothed wearing next to nothing, while a couple that were closer to the middle appeared fully dressed, but only if one considered feathers and lace as outfits. I then looked down and noticed two very human bodies lying next to each other on the right side of the thousand square foot room.
Colin set the lantern on one of a sewing table, and then he took to walking the periphery of the room, his deep breaths indicating he was doing more than just walking.
“Are those two really dead?” I asked as I approached their prone bodies. He didn’t answer, but continued inspecting the room. I got within three feet of the two women, both of which were laid face down. I wanted to check their pulses, but was wary. I closed my good eye and tried to imagine myself checking them, and I was pushed forward through time and space without physically moving. I saw through a wavy kind of vertigo an image of myself checking their pulses and finding that they were indeed dead.
“Something’s happening outside,” Gertrude called out to us.
Colin was at the opposite side of the r
oom from me, and at her words, he stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t think it is raining anymore,” she replied with trepidation.
“That’s not a bad thing,” I told her while I edged around the mannequins, eyeing them suspiciously.
“I should not have said that it had stopped raining.”
“Now you’re talking nonsense Gertie,” I told her. “Either it is or it isn’t.”
Then several things then happened at once. First, I spotted a magchain that would be perfect for me to use on a wall across the room. Next, I heard Gertrude say that is was raining scabs. Did she say scabs? Then I was grabbed from behind and something pointy was placed to my neck. Colin launched towards us with a growl, and the sharp object was pressed harder against my skin.
“What do you want? Because if it is her death, you would have been done with it by now,” Colin said.
“I want you to leave,” a female voice hissed close to my ear. “She can stay.” She must have been an Ordinary transformed into a reverent or a long dead deader, judging by her quickly deteriorating vocal chords and rotten body odor. I agreed with Colin, she was not going to kill me outright. Whomever was behind this obviously wanted Colin dead and me alive.
“Basil, there is someone finally coming out of the building!” Gertrude called back towards us.
“In the middle of a scab storm?” I called back to her, which made then undead press the blade harder against my neck.
“Scabs? No, I said scarabs, as in a plague of beetles!” Apocalyptic weather? What was next?
“Having a little problem in here!” I yelled loudly to cover up the cocking of my gun.
Colin eased closer to us. “I will never leave her side, so you will have to go ahead and kill me. Why not try it now?” he taunted her.
This caused the woman to nick my skin with her weapon of choice. I felt a drop of blood slide down my neck.
“They need her. She is a bridge maker like no other.” This caused me to go ramrod straight. I didn’t fancy being called a bridge maker, since the last one to do that had been a dastardly Cthulhu.
“You can even make a bridge to your grandfather,” she spat at me.
“Impossible,” I hissed.
“It is not, this I can promise you.”
“If you promise to reunite me with Victor Beckenbauer, then there must be a price you will want me to pay for it,” I said.
“You are the greatest Summoner of your generation.”
I laughed and said, “Apparently, I am also one of the least educated ones.” Colin gave me a twisted grin.
“Whilst that may be true, you are the strongest, and the only one who can do what needs to be done. The rest is elementary.”
I doubted that anything they wanted me to do would be on an elementary level. “What do you need me to do?”
She hesitated, but then stated, “We need you to summon Isis back to Earth.”
“You are crazy. She is an Egyptian myth!” is what I said, but what I thought was, did I know enough about her to be able to take down a cult that worshipped her?
“Not when you succeed in summoning her.”
“And when I can’t, you will naturally kill me.” What made them think I could summon an Egyptian deity? I didn’t think I could summon Grandfather from the ghost realm. What realm would a deity reside in?
Even if Isis existed in Earth’s past, somehow people learned how to push her through a door and lock it tight behind her. If it was a doorway barring our worlds, that door might be impossible to open and close again.
I pointed my gun down, and then released the hammer. The bullet shot through her foot, hopefully shattering at least half of the twenty-six bones within it. She was already in poor shape, and unsurprisingly, she lost her balance. Colin took full advantage of her misstep and moved into our space, first wrenching me away from her, before ultimately breaking the undead woman’s arm, which forced her to drop the knife – one of my knives I noticed. Filthy filcher.
I turned around and discovered that it was Sophie. She was a mess too. If there was one thing I knew about her, it was that she would have been horrified to see the how the decay of death had robbed her of what little looks she had left. When he pushed her away from himself, she fell back. When her head hit the floor, it was not unlike watching a watermelon burst as it hit the ground at a Fourth of July picnic.
“Uh, oh,” I heard Gertrude gasp from the front of the shop. I picked up the athame that Sophie had filched from me and then I went to the wall across from me. I snatched the chain off of it. I next threw myself down onto the floor, and slid off one of my boots. It was the quickest route to getting to some flesh that wasn’t my hand, neck, or head. I had to make sure the wound I was about inflict upon myself was deep enough to gather enough blood to do what I needed to do with it, but a wound that required stitches would do me no good right now.
Once the boot was off, I used the athame to slice open my calf about two inches in length, just deep enough to have plenty of blood to coat the chain. Now that Sophie was sprawled out on the floor without a head, Colin checked the other dead bodies. He made sure that it would not rise again. His strength astounded me, and I wondered if we could ever have a physical relationship, because at times, he seemed entirely too strong. It would do me no good if he accidentally crushed my hand while holding it.
Once he was done doing that, he asked me, “I’m going to see what Mrs. Basquiat is rambling on about.”
“Go,” I told him. Then he went to the front room.
I wished that I had the time and tools to engrave a few marks into the magchain too, but after spreading my blood across it, the chain should enable me to create an impromptu casting circle until the blood flaked off. I could now use it to banish demons or hold the undead. If I banished demons with it, without the markings, it would be anyone’s guess where they would be sent. Anywhere was fine with me, so long as it wasn’t here with us.
I next looked for an aerosol can that was filled with nano-siccoaqua. It could water proof wet and dry things alike for a time. I remembered the merits Sophie sang of it whenever she needed to prevent untidy liquids from spilling onto one’s underthings. There had to be one here somewhere. I finally found one under a wig display, and gave the chain a few quick coats. I next got up, and looped it around myself.
While walking the short hallway to the main room, I wondered what Captain Carlisle would have thought about Colin. Would he have approved of him? Did it matter anymore? I thought our personalities were more compatible, and he understood my work like no other. But he would inevitably run off to Washington when this case was over and abandon me. It would be just like when Stephen died, and I would be left alone once again. I decided right then that my heart was my weakest organ.
I strode into the main room, with a renewed determination to analyze each new challenge with a calm and collected logic. I was startled when I heard deep pounding on the front display windows, making it rattle in its frame.
“That is not what I think it is, is it?” I heard Gertrude say just before I saw it for myself. I could only just make out a shadowy silhouette of a man with an elongated head, which looked somewhat like an alligator head.
I had heard of all sorts of mutations that had come from the radioactive sludge dumped in the southern part of the La Salle River that banked this town. I even knew of labs who purposefully spliced animals together to create new mutations, and if they failed, that they would release those failed attempts into it. Those in turn would breed with the local animal populations creating something entirely different, but this was so far beyond that.
I wracked my brain for the Egyptian name of such a deity, but Colin filled in the gap for me. “Sobek.”
“No, it is just another kind of swamp draug… a Southern swamp draug of an alligator,” Gertrude said, allowing skepticism to taint the tone in her voice. Then another one joined the first. Great, now there were two of them.
�
�If they are, can you pilot them?” Colin asked.
She bit the inside of her cheek, and then hesitantly she replied, “I think I could to do it.”
“If they aren’t dead, then we’ll take care of them,” I said before I cocked my gun, trying to rally the troops.
We didn’t have much time, but I laid the chain in a circle about ten feet from inside of the door’s entrance. I wasn’t going to be trapped away from our only exit again.
Since the gator twins hadn’t even tried the doors to see if they were open yet, it proved to me that they weren’t being controlled by Necromancers, or at least not very well. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
Judging by the open greed in her eyes, Gertrude obviously wanted to control them, but I was doubtful she could commandeer them. Next, I looked for Calidum, and as usual, he was nowhere to be found. Typical. Personally, I thought he enjoyed watching me squirm my way out of dangerous situations.
Colin, however, was watching me like a hawk as I added a few finishing touches on the chain to make it stronger. It was more than a little unnerving that the glass sounded as if it was going to break at any moment. He inspected where I twisted the ends of the chain together. Then he took out a needle nib tool and began engraving a few marks into the metal.
“What are you writing on it?”
“There is a lot of power infused into it, so I am trying a little experiment,” he replied just as he was finishing.
“Colin, we need this to work, not to fail miserably. What did you do?”
“I’ve added sigils for the fifteenth dimension, in addition to a few others.”
Before I could even comment on the ludicrousness of doing that, Gertrude opened the door. Two alligator men rushed into the store barking at us as Gertrude shot them full with bullets. The salt would follow next. Colin and I stood on the other side of the circle, hoping to lure them to my circle, if things didn’t go her way first.
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