The Arcanum, page 10
“I’ll be buggered,” Mullin whispered, and whapped Wally awake with a fist to the chest.
Wally blinked. “What did you do that fer?”
“Shut yer trap,” Mullin snarled, and pointed to the sidewalk outside the Bellevue asylum building. “Three o’clock. Mr. Doyle.”
Beneath a lantern, several car lengths ahead, he could make out Doyle and some woman in quiet conference. Every few seconds, they looked about in search of observers.
“Who’s he wit’?” Wally asked.
“Hooker, looks like.” Mullin scowled, puzzling over the new turn of events.
“Likes ’em dark, then.” Wally lifted a flask to his mouth and drank. “Well, you was right, boss. Let’s do this thing.”
Wally reached for the door handle but Mullin stopped him. “No. Let’s wait and see what they—”
A hairy face suddenly blocked the passenger window. “Pardon, gents! I’m bone cold out ’ere, fellas, and couldn’t ’elp observin’ some spirits in that bottle there. I’m jus’ lookin’ fer somethin’ to heal the cold, the winds just fiercely goin’—”
“Shut yer hole, ya mutt,” Wally muttered.
“Get ’im outta here,” Mullin growled, his gaze still fixed on Doyle.
“ ’Ave I interrupted a rendezvous? That weren’t me intention, boys.” The vagrant pressed his nose to the glass.
“What’d that clown say?” Wally fought with the door handle. “I’ll show ’im!”
“You wanna blow our cover?” Mullin hissed, yanking Wally back.
“Gimme a drink. A drink.” The vagrant’s voice echoed off the buildings.
Mullin had had enough. He wrestled his .45 out of its holster.
Wally flashed his badge at the window. “Police business. Go on. Get lost.”
“Police?” The vagrant shouted loud enough to be heard in Newark. “Why didn’t ye say so in the first place?” And he licked the window in thick strokes.
“Jesus!” Wally exclaimed, disgusted.
“Goddamn it!” Mullin punched the dashboard, for Doyle and the woman were nowhere to be seen.
“Motherless son-of-a . . .” Mullin was out of the car and rounding the hood as the vagrant scuttled around the back, circling his fists in the air like a pugilist.
“No call fer violence—”
“I’ll give ya some drinks, you stinkin’—”
The vagrant scampered into the shadows, cackling. Mullin fumed for a moment, then returned his .45 to its holster and got back in the car. The engine sputtered and they rolled off down the street, their cover blown.
DOYLE HELD MARIE by her exposed shoulders. They were both pressed to the alley wall. The growl of Mullin’s car drifted into the distance.
“Have they gone?” Marie asked.
“I believe so.” With the danger passed he released her, suddenly aware of their closeness. He cleared his throat and crossed the alley. “Aren’t you cold?”
She smiled. “Not anymore.”
“Marie—”
Her hand went up. “Ssh!”
Footsteps approached.
Doyle wrapped his hands around his walking stick and stepped in front of Marie.
“Non, Arthur. Pretend we embrace,” she whispered, and pushed the cane down. She took him by the arms and pulled him to her, pushing his head into the curve of her neck and cooing like a prostitute. Doyle’s hands went to her hips as the vagrant stumbled into the alley, muttering, “Threaten me to tell you something or other rat bastard mixing me up all I ever wanted to tell you . . .”
Doyle and Marie broke their hold.
“Spare a penny for a sinner, Cap’n?” And the vagrant grinned.
Marie winced. “My lord, he smell.”
“Shove off, friend,” Doyle advised.
“Get a load of them bubbies.” The vagrant widened his eyes and advanced on Marie.
Doyle placed the tip of his cane against the man’s chest. “Watch yourself,” he threatened.
“Aye, I’ll watch meself. But in the meantime, who’s watchin’ you, eh?” The vagrant’s blue eyes twinkled. “Ye’ve got the police on yer tracks, boyo. ’Ave you been a bad boy, then?”
Doyle scowled. “Who are you?”
“I’m me, myself, and mine. But who’s in that buildin’ over there, isn’t that the key question? They’re sayin’ it’s the Occult Killer, that one who’s doin’ away with all them nice Mission folk, eh?”
Doyle snatched him by the collar, ignoring the smell. “Who sent you?”
“Who sent me? Oh, ye’ don’t want to cross her if I tell ye. She’s feared by anyone with any good sense.”
“Who, then? Out with it!”
The vagrant’s eyes glanced left, then right. “They call her . . . Bess.”
“Bess?”
Marie sighed. “He had to make his grand entrance, n’est ce pas?”
The vagrant’s head turned sharply. “The papers said you were dead, Marie, but I never doubted you for a second.”
“Nor shed a tear, I’m sure . . . Herry.”
“Houdini, please.”
“Bollocks!” Doyle pushed Houdini off.
The magician spat the fake gums from his mouth and smiled. He sniffed his coat. “Goodness, I do need a bath.”
“What in the bloody hell are you up to?”
“Only saving your clumsy behinds, Doyle. You’ve got detectives following you; you’ve bungled everything, of course.” Houdini pulled the wig and beard off in one movement. “I won’t get a moment’s rest while you’re in this city, of that I am certain. In the meantime, what’s a friend to do? Let you flop along until I have to bail you out? I’m here to talk some sense into you.”
“You can’t be serious. After everything I told you?”
“Times have changed, for God’s sake. We’re public figures. The scrutiny is too great. Howard made his bargain with the Devil. Fine; that’s his problem. Now he’s reaping the rewards.”
“What did I tell you?” Marie said.
Houdini turned to her. “If I were less of a gentleman, I’d have plenty to say to you. I finished with you many years ago.”
“Va t’en!” Marie shot back, then spit on the ground. Her hand made the sign of Devil horns.
Doyle frowned. “You’ve wasted your time, Houdini. And you’ve wasted ours.”
Houdini unbuttoned his soiled coat. “There’s no talking you out of this, then?”
“No,” Doyle avowed.
Houdini’s breath puffed in the cold air as he emerged from his costume, wearing only a tattered jacket, a white T-shirt, and trousers. He shook his head. “Well, then, let’s get this over with.”
SEAMUS AND PARKS, two uniformed police officers, lingered at the chain-locked front gates of Bellevue, huddled against the cold. Their beat for the evening required them to provide extra security—against what, Detective Mullin had not said.
“Some kind of vampire’s what I heard.” Parks slapped his gloved hands together to warm himself.
“Whaddya mean?” Seamus feigned skepticism. In truth, he’d always been scared of vampires.
“You didn’t hear? The bodies they found was blood-drained. And he took the spines out.”
“The spines?” Seamus glanced at the quiet sanitarium.
“Callin’ him the Occult Killer in Fourth Ward.” Parks’s eyes always glowed with a hint of paranoia; in this case it added to the suspense. “They say this Lovecraft had body parts in his ice-box, frozen up like steaks.”
“C’mon.”
“What, you don’t believe me?”
“I don’t want my dinner comin’ up, is all. You been talkin’ all night. Give it a rest.”
“But I ain’t got to the best part yet—”
Just then, the sanitarium gates creaked open and something lumbered in their direction.
“Jesus,” Parks whispered. “Is he a guard or an inmate?”
“I hope to hell he’s a guard,” Seamus answered, feeling small even at two-hundred-plus.
The man didn’t bother with a coat. His breath steamed out of his nostrils like dragon breath. He wore black rubber gloves up to the elbows, handled a rolled cigarette clumsily, and stuck it between his lips. His dull eyes blinked with crocodile boredom as he towered in front of Seamus and Parks.
“Evenin’,” Seamus offered with a nod.
“Match,” the gorilla said.
“Sure, sure.” Parks fumbled in his pocket, produced a match-book, and threw it at him. The man, dressed like an orderly, turned like a swaying tree and headed back into the grounds of the asylum.
“Yeah, keep ’em,” Parks offered, like it was his idea.
Seamus swatted Parks’s arm. “That was the last of ’em, you bozo.”
“So go ask fer ’em back,” Parks suggested.
Seamus watched the hulking figure retreat into the gloom. “Ah, screw it.”
DISEMBODIED WORDS BIT at Morris the orderly’s ear like tiny fish. With a growl, he sucked the smoke from his crumbling butt, extinguished it between his rubber-gloved thumb and forefinger, then flicked it against a tree. He swayed on the stoop of Bellevue’s main entrance and clenched his fists. His knuckles popped. Disembodied voices in his head raged at him. Women’s voices. A grandmother with hands knotted from arthritis. She would strike Morris on the forehead with those bony fists and tell him he was stupid. Morris couldn’t learn the lessons at school, and the other children called him “Morris Doris” because his grandmother wouldn’t cut his hair. He wasn’t allowed to go back to school after he pulled a little girl’s arms out of their sockets. Didn’t matter; he couldn’t remember the lessons anyway. But Morris remembered the girl crying, thinking she looked funny with stretched-out arms like a character in a funny book. He got beat on the head plenty for that. The things he liked to do always got him beat on the head. He’d figured he’d just have to get used to it.
As a child, Morris had also discovered he had an aptitude for strangling cats. Cats frightened him, so he killed them. Hunted them. Yanked their heads so hard, their necks broke. Morris then collected the dead cats under his grandmother’s house, but eventually the smell gave it away. Morris’s nose was blocked from a childhood injury; he couldn’t smell. That was the problem. And it was too bad, because Morris loved his collection. He’d crawl under the house and lie in the cold dirt, petting the cats. They couldn’t run away like this, so Morris could pet them for hours. When his grandmother finally discovered his treasures, there were forty-eight cat bodies melting under the house. That brought him many more blows and considerable trouble with the neighbors. That was the first time he got sent away.
Morris spoke on a monthly basis with a Bellevue intern about “violent urges,” but he kept his job just fine. Morris knew they let him alone because he was the only one who could wrestle down the bad ones. They wriggled just like the cats had. It didn’t matter if Morris accidentally broke one of them, because there were always more coming in off the white trucks. Different faces but the same eyes, the same voices. Nobody ever punched Morris on the head for breaking these. They were not in short supply.
The one down there now with the whiny voice and dark eyes— he was a skinny cat, all bones. It hurt to wrestle with bones; he liked the fat ones better. But the Man with the Blue Eye had told Morris to make sure he broke him good. And it was funny, but Morris wanted to please the Man with the Blue Eye. He didn’t know why. He knew he’d get in trouble like he did with the cat collection, but the Man with the Blue Eye made it seem just fine. And he had promised Morris all kinds of work—the kind he was good at.
Morris glanced at the wad of twenties in his palm, enough to buy plenty of warm buttered rolls. Then he stuffed the wad in his shirt pocket, turned, and lurched into the empty lobby. He headed straight for the stairwell door, snatching a fire ax off the wall as he went.
18
HOUDINI KNELT BEFORE a rusting security door, squinting into a keyhole. “You’ll never learn, will you, Doyle?”
Doyle bristled. “She wants to know what happened to Duvall, just like we all do.”
“They deserved each other, you know,” Houdini scoffed. “Neither one could be trusted.”
“Does your suspicion never tire?”
“We were played for fools once. Never again. I’m sick of this whole business. This one favor and then I’m through.” Houdini fingered dozens of keys on an oversized ring. “I need a double tube. Don’t have it here.”
Doyle frowned. “You need a key? What on earth for?”
Houdini turned around. “Am I expected to dematerialize through it, perhaps?”
“No. I just thought . . . Well, you are Houdini, after all.”
Stung, Houdini stood up and removed his coat, as a man might before a bar brawl. “Hold this, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
Houdini examined the tall, imposing wall before him. They were at the back of the asylum, amidst stinking barrels of trash.
A barred window was the only break in the wall, and it was fifteen feet above the ground. Houdini backed up and spit on his hands. He clapped twice, took four long strides, and then leaped. He looked like a giant cockroach as he scuttled up the wall, gripping the tiny grooves and divots with incredibly strong fingertips. He reached the barred window in seconds.
Houdini gripped the bars and tried to wrench them out. The muscles in his back and shoulders strained, but the bars refused to budge.
He managed to slide open the window by pressing his hand to the glass and lifting. But the problem remained the bars.
It was time for Plan B.
Houdini studied the bars and the space between them, roughly six or seven inches, his eyes making precise measurements. Then he took several long, deep breaths.
Suddenly, he thrust his head between the bars. His shoes scrabbled against the wall for leverage, and were his arms to tire he would choke. By pushing all the breath out of his lungs, he was able to shrink his torso enough to force it between the bars. The process was agony; Houdini grunted from the compression on his bones and the lack of air. His head, his chest, and one arm were through, and he dangled precariously, half in and half out.
Then he forced his other shoulder against the bars, once, twice, three times, and his arm dislocated, giving him all the slack he needed. He wiggled his second arm through. Then all it took were a few snakelike movements before Houdini’s feet vanished through the window.
LOVECRAFT’S HEAD LAY in a puddle of his own urine, his eyes glassy and unblinking. Deep down in the turbulence of his mind, his sanity bobbed and tossed like a toy boat in a hurricane. His panic and dread, coupled with an already fragile mental circuitry, taxed him to the edge of madness. Yet he clung by a thread to reality, his ears attuned to every sound. In the next cell, a lunatic masturbated to the hiss of his own breathy whispers. Somewhere else down the hall, another inmate sobbed into his pillow.
Lovecraft thought of Angell Street and East Providence, his beloved home. He thought of the silence of those streets at two A.M., when he would leave the smothering bleakness of his bedroom in the house he shared with his aunts and taste the chill wetness of the Rhode Island air. Walking that desolate village, Lovecraft would meditate on the stars and their secrets—secrets he would spend a lifetime struggling to decipher. He thought of Mother—her pretty, questioning eyes and her nervous dotings; those small, shaking hands with their bitten, bloody fingernails. His syphilitic father was only a grim ogre lost to precognitive memory, a presence in Lovecraft’s life only as the gibbering terror of his fitful dreams.
Lovecraft blinked. Something had forced his mind back to the present. He listened. There. Nothing. No sound. That was the problem. Even the masturbator had stopped. They were all waiting. It was like a forest when the bugs ceased buzzing. That was how you detected the monsters, when the buzzing stopped.
Lovecraft heard it then. A footstep. Then another. Something heavy. Lovecraft’s mouth opened, but only a hoarse gasp escaped. The footsteps grew closer. Lovecraft’s lip quivered. He was ill prepared for death. And certainly not a violent death, the kind this would surely be. He grit his teeth as the footsteps rang louder, then stopped outside his door.
Keys jangled against each other, and one scraped into the lock. Lovecraft’s eyes widened. The bolt clanged back, and rusted hinges moaned.
Morris stepped inside.
The orderly’s gait was casual, disinterested even. He turned and shut the door, the ax dangling at his side. He sniffed the air and grimaced, snorting something into his mouth then spitting it to the stone floor. Lovecraft flinched, and Morris adjusted his grip on the ax.
Cellular instincts took over as Lovecraft squirmed into the corner and curled into a ball. Every muscle tensed for what he assumed would be several rending, tearing blows.
Morris swung the ax back in a wide arc and Lovecraft screamed.
But the blow never landed.
Morris looked at his empty hands. He turned around.
Houdini held the ax. “I’m sorry. This is yours?” Houdini then whipped the flat end of the ax blade up and under Morris’s jaw. Morris’s head snapped back, and he went spinning into the corner of the cell.
Then Lovecraft giggled. The giggle became a chuckle. Then the chuckle rose to chortles and the chortles to hysterical laughter.
Houdini stood there a moment, watching Lovecraft curl and roll on the ground in a cackling fit. He sighed. “About what I expected.” He snatched Lovecraft off the ground by the straitjacket straps and plopped him on the bed.
Lovecraft continued to laugh, though tears rolled down his cheeks.
Houdini fought quickly with the straps of the jacket. “Nice to see we’re of good cheer.”
OUTSIDE THE ASYLUM, Parks whistled as a curvaceous black woman sauntered toward them, a shawl wrapped over her bare arms and shoulders.
Seamus puffed out his chest. “Y’ain’t workin’, is ya, kitty-cat?”
