Summoned (17 page)

Great, the Servitor was thinking about expanding its menu to include major livestock. “That’s crazy.”

“Worrying,” O’Conaghan said.

Someone put a hand on Sean’s shoulder. It was Gus, who said, “The paper mentioned a possible hoax. Do you think that holds water, Detective?”

“It might, and it might connect up with an odd thing I noticed in the old industrial park. Looks like somebody’s been playing around with pagan rituals there, drawing pentagrams and lighting fires.”

Sean felt his jaw slacken, but he managed to keep his mouth shut. All he had to do was go on looking O’Conaghan in the eye like any innocent person would. Gus had taken over the talking: “The killings could be animal sacrifices, you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know what to think,” O’Conaghan said, looking straight at Sean.

“Me, neither, sir,” Sean got out.

“Which is what I told you a few minutes ago, Detective,” Dad said. He was trying to sound all cool, like Gus, but Gus did it a lot better. “I’m sorry, we can’t help you.”

For another couple seconds, O’Conaghan’s stare fixed Sean. Then O’Conaghan turned back to Dad. “I’m sorry I’ve held you up, Mr. Wyndham. If you remember any odd detail about what you saw yesterday, I’d appreciate a call.” He handed Dad a business card. “Again, sorry for inconveniencing you. Have a good trip.”

That was it. O’Conaghan returned to the cruiser. After it pulled away, Dad flung the business card like a Frisbee and it spun into the barberry bushes by the porch steps. “What was all that crap? And Joe—why’d he have to drag Sean into this?”

“The detective probably thinks it’s weird how I ran to look at Hrothgar,” Sean said. “He must think I know something,”

“Bull.”

Gus retrieved the business card. “His curiosity
is
curious. So is his mention of the pentagram.”

“Yeah.” Sean couldn’t shake the idea that O’Conaghan had read his guilt in his face, but he also remembered, he realized now, that there’d been a spark of real sympathy in O’Conaghan’s eyes. A cop wouldn’t feel sorry for a perp, would he? Even a sort of accidental one.

“He can think what he wants,” Dad said. “It’s probably illegal for him to come snooping around us. What do you want that card for, Gus?”

Gus was tucking it into his wallet. “If we need to talk to the police, we might want to call Detective O’Conaghan first. At least he’s already shown an interest in our problem.”

Dad just shook his head as he headed for the Volvo. When he was out of earshot, Sean whispered to Gus, “Good idea, saving the card.”

Gus tipped him a wink and nodded after Dad. “Father Hen,” he said.

Shouldn’t Gus say
Father Rooster
? No time to ask, because Dad was yelling for them from the passenger seat. Sean and Gus hustled into the car. If Dad had been driving, they’d probably have peeled off, zero to sixty in five seconds.

Good thing Gus was driving.

12

Their
stop at Horrocke’s Bookstore was a wash. Horrocke offered them espresso, then blinked in mild astonishment when Dad turned it down and launched into a curt interrogation. All he got out of the old guy was, dear no, Horrocke had no idea where the book and clipping had come from. He had no idea who Redemption Orne could be, apart from the historical figure. Solomon Geldman? The gentleman must mean the famous alchemist, author of
The Keys to Eternity
. Horrocke had a copy of the Prague edition, if they cared to see it, 1705, in excellent condition, and quite a bargain at $7,500.

They didn’t care to see the book. Out on the sidewalk, Gus persuaded Dad to let him have first crack at Geldman. As it turned out, Gus could have saved his breath.

Unbelievable
was the exact right word: Sean could not believe it. Fire hadn’t crisped the pharmacy. Bombs hadn’t leveled it. Those were catastrophes his brain could have handled. Instead, in the two weeks since he’d bought the powders time had beaten Geldman’s to a pulp. Corrosion pocked the yellow bricks and the formerly spring-green trim. Plywood covered most of the second-floor windows. The shop windows had survived, but behind a thick coat of grime they displayed only dust and the two teardrop urns. One urn dangled by a single chain. From both the ruby and emerald liquids had evaporated, and spiders now spun webs inside the streaky glass. On the rusted canopy frames, shreds of canvas hung like mummy-flesh from bones; on the cornice, the gilt legend
GELDMAN’S PHARMACY
had faded to illegibility.

Sean couldn’t blame Gus for asking, “Are you sure this is the right place?”

They were on the corner of Curwen and Gedney. Next door was the Portuguese grocery. Across the street was Tumblebee’s Café. “It was here,” Sean said. “Dad, the day we came to take out the windows.”

Dad’s voice grated with fresh frustration. “Sean, this place hasn’t been ‘here’ for decades.”

Sean rubbed a porthole through the grime on the nearest window. He peered in at a floor littered with smashed bottles, dented tins, and drawstring bags gnawed open. The scale that had stood outside lay near the entrance, a pink ticket tongue protruding from the fortune slot.

“Let’s go,” Dad said.

“Wait a minute, Jere.”

Gus crossed the street to the café, where a woman in a bee-striped apron was delivering drinks to the sidewalk tables. “Excuse me,” Gus said. “How long has that shop over there been closed?”

The woman frowned at Geldman’s. “We opened eight years ago, and it’s been like that the whole time.”

“You’d think someone would put in a new business.”

“I wish,” the woman said. “I looked into it at City Hall. Some foreign company owns the place. They pay the taxes on time, so the city claims it can’t do anything.”

She went back into the café. A student-type guy at one of the sidewalk tables volunteered, “I think it’s haunted.”

Sean stepped away from the window.

“Oh?” Gus said.

“The Portuguese are weird about it. When they go by, they cross themselves. The old Poles do, too. Maybe it’s where Evil Eye hangs.”

“Who?”

Another student-type guy laughed. “There’s an urban legend, some dude who goes around the North End at night. If he looks at you, he can suck your soul right out through your eyeballs.”

“Pleasant,” Gus said. “Did you ever see anyone go inside the pharmacy?”

“No. Who would?”

“Oh, kids.”

“Yeah, maybe. But they’d have to go at night, and then Evil Eye would get them.”

Gus laughed along with the two guys, then headed back to Sean and Dad. “That was productive,” Dad said sourly.

“Possibly. We could go to City Hall ourselves and find out who owns the property.”

“Why? Sean—” Dad cut himself off. He shook his head abruptly, like a wasp had landed on it. “Sean made a mistake. He bought the powders somewhere else.”

Heat rose up Sean’s neck. “Dad, if you think I’m a nutcase, go ahead and say it. I remember where I went.”

The way Dad flinched, Sean might as well have swung at him. He recovered snake fast, grabbed Sean’s elbow, and turned him toward Geldman’s like he was a little kid who needed to acknowledge some mess he’d made. “Didn’t you hear what that woman said?”

“It was open; it was totally different!”

“I can’t deal with this, Sean! Either you
are
crazy, or you’re lying to me again. Don’t keep saying you got the powders here. It’s impossible. You know what
impossible
means, right?”

Gus shoved between them, breaking Dad’s grip. “Okay, Jeremy.”

“The hell it’s okay. Sean, if you’ve been buying drugs from somebody—”

Sean ducked away from them both. Across the street, the student types goggled at this new development. He went back to his porthole and dropped his forehead on the gritty glass. Had he ever been inside Geldman’s? It was a memory no different in quality from every other memory in his head, from the yellow dump truck Mom had let him pick out all by himself when he was three right up to the taste of Rachel’s blueberry pie that morning. But maybe Dad had asked the right question. Did Sean know what was impossible anymore?

Behind him, Dad and Gus conferred in whispers. Inside the pharmacy, across the frosted panels over the counter, two shadows wavered, one man-sized, one slender and childlike.

They were gone before Sean could call Dad and Gus.

“Sean,” Dad said. No grating, no rage. Plain weariness.

Sean looked into his eyes. “I’m not lying, Dad. Maybe I
am
crazy—”

“No, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Luckily, before the apologies could get too intense, Gus said, “Both of you need to stop throwing around the
c
word. It’d be a better use of our time to get in touch with Helen Arkwright.”

Dad didn’t even blink, so getting in touch with Ms. Arkwright must have been what he and Gus had been whisper-debating just now. “To get the dismissing ritual?”

Gus shrugged. “Orne claims he took both rituals from the MU
Necronomicon
. If that’s true, he had to fill out paperwork to see the book, and Ms. Arkwright might spot likely suspects in her records.”

“We’ll ask her to check the records,” Dad said. “We’ll tell her about Orne, the ritual, the killings. But we won’t mention this Geldman’s craziness.”

The
c
word again, but Sean didn’t call Dad on it. Seeing Helen Arkwright was at least a step toward the ritual, and to prove he could be sensible Sean resisted taking one last look through his porthole, to try to catch shadows behind the ruined counter.

From
her office on the third floor of the library, Helen could look down the MU common from end to end. It appeared normal, hypernormal, in fact, the epitome of a New England college green. Her visitors, on the other hand, were not what she’d expected a Monday afternoon to bring her way. Jeremy Wyndham, so down-to-earth when he’d evaluated her windows, had shown up with a story about would-be wizards and hoaxes. Telling it obviously embarrassed him; he turned often to his brother-in-law, the professor from Brown. Gus Litinski was a good advocate, adding cogent details to Jeremy’s strange account. Sean, its principal actor, said nothing. From the way he fidgeted, Helen suspected he’d been warned to keep quiet.

When Jeremy finished, Helen lifted the plastic bag that contained Sean’s clipping. “Given the content of the circled ad, I don’t see how this can be anything but a fake. As for Nathanial Horrocke, he has an untarnished reputation with the library as a rare-book dealer. I doubt he’d be involved in a hoax like this.”

Sean glanced at his father. “I don’t think Mr. Horrocke made the clipping, either. And I don’t think it’s a hoax.”

Jeremy coughed. Litinski spoke: “A hoax is our working theory, but before we go to the police, we wanted to find out if there’s any special significance to Orne’s summoning ritual.”

“Professor Marvell’s the one who would know. I’m afraid he’s out of the country right now.”

“Is there some way we could contact him?”

Helen had Marvell’s number in her wallet, but would he want her to give it out? “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

Sean leaned toward her desk. “Please, Ms. Arkwright. I bet Professor Marvell would want to help. I bought his
Infinity
book. He seems like he’d get into the mystery and all.”

The urgency in Sean’s voice made her uncomfortable. Actually, the whole situation was uncomfortable; it was like a pop quiz in Mythos management, and as hard as she’d been studying, she wasn’t sure she was ready. “He might, Sean, but maybe there’s something I could do in his place?”

“Well, see, Uncle Gus thought you could check the Archives records. Because if Orne got the ritual out of the MU
Necronomicon
he had to fill out forms, right?”

“Definitely, and meet criteria for access.”

“He couldn’t just be screwing around.”

“No, he’d need to show he was a serious scholar. I can tell you that no ‘Redemption Orne’ has requested the
Necronomicon
since I came. I wouldn’t forget a name like that. Besides, don’t you think it’s an alias?”

“Very likely,” Litinski said. “There might be other clues, though, inconsistencies that would make you think an applicant wasn’t legitimate.”

That kind of record review would be time-consuming. It could also be interesting, a little detective work to break up her reading. Besides, Jeremy suspected the hoaxer of killing pets and breaking into his house. If so, the hoax had gone beyond a joke. Helen pulled over a notebook. On a blank page, she wrote “Redemption Orne.” “Do you know any other names Orne might use?”

“Reverend Orne,” Sean said. “He wanted us to call him that, anyway.”

Helen added “Reverend O.—actual minister?” to her list.

“You could look for another name in your access records,” Litinski said. “Someone who might be Orne’s accomplice, a Solomon Geldman.”

She had written down the name before recognition hit her. “Geldman?”

Again Sean glanced at his father before he spoke. “The ritual called for Powders of Zeph and Aghar. Orne wrote I could get them in Arkham, at Geldman’s Pharmacy.”

“The pharmacy across from Tumblebee’s?”

Sean’s reaction startled the hell out of her—he sprang halfway up, fell back, then anchored himself to his chair with both hands. “You’ve been there?”

“Sean,” Jeremy snapped.

But why shouldn’t Sean ask her that? “Sure. I go by it every morning when I get my coffee. Mr. Geldman seems like a very nice man. Hardly accomplice material.”

Sean’s eyes widened with shock or excitement or a potent mixture of both. “You’ve met him?”

Helen hesitated. What kind of reaction would a
yes
elicit? “I have,” she said.

Litinski leaned around Jeremy to put a restraining hand on Sean’s arm. “Ms. Arkwright, could you describe the pharmacy?”

“You haven’t been there?”

“Please. Could you describe it?”

The request was as odd as Sean’s outbursts, but she’d played along this far. “Let’s see. Very quaint, I guess you’d say. A scale that tells your fortune, a soda fountain, and no regular drugs, just herbal remedies. Oh, and this is a funny thing. The window has two vases hanging from chains. One has red water in it and the other green.”