Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (44 page)

“What was that you said to her?” I ask Isobel, several nights after my resurrection. We’re sitting together on the floor of her loft on Atlantic, and there’s a Beatles album playing on the turntable.

“What did I say to whom?” she wants to know.

“The High Priestess. You said something to her in French, while I was still on the altar. I’d forgotten about it until this morning. You sounded angry. I don’t understand French, so I don’t know what you said.”

“It doesn’t really matter what I said,” she replies, glancing over the liner notes for
Hey Jude
. “It only matters that I said it. The old woman is a coward.”

Somewhere in North Carolina, the rhythm of the train’s wheels against the rails lulls me to sleep. I dream of a neglected Dutch graveyard and the amulet, of hurricanes and smiling black dogs. Maddy is also in my dreams, reading fortunes at a carnival. I can smell sawdust and cotton candy, horseshit and sweating bodies. Maddy sits on a milking stool inside a tent beneath a canvas banner emblazoned with the words
Lo! Behold! The Strikefire & Z. B. Harbinger Wonder Show!
in bold crimson letters fully five feet high.

She turns another card, the Wheel of Fortune.

I lie in my grave, fully cognizant but immobile, unable to summon the will or the physical strength to begin worming my way towards the surface, six feet overhead. I lie there, thinking of Maddy and the jade pendant. I lie there considering, in the mocking solitude of my burial place, what it does and does not mean that I’ve returned with absolutely no conscious knowledge of anything I may have experienced in death. Whatever secrets the Starry Wisdom sent me off to discover remain secrets. After all that has been risked and forfeited, I have no revelations to offer my fellow seekers. They’ll ask their questions, and I’ll have no answers. This should upset me, but it doesn’t. 

Now I can hear footsteps on the roof of my narrow house. Something is pacing heavily, back and forth, snuffling at the recently disturbed earth where I’ve been planted like a tulip bulb, like an acorn, like a seed that
will
unfold, but surely never sprout.

It goes about on four feet,
I think,
not two.

The hound bays.

I wonder, will it kindly dig me up, this restless visitor? And I wonder, too, about the rumors of the others who’ve worn the jade pendant before me, and the stories of their fates. Those two ghoulish Englishmen in 1922, for instance; they cross my reanimated mind. As does a passage from Francois-Honore Balfour’s notorious grimoire,
Cultes des Goules,
and a few stray lines from the
Al Azif.
My bestial caller suddenly stops pacing and begins scratching at the soft dirt, urging me to move.

In the temple, as my lover takes my hand and I’m led towards the altar stone, through the fire devouring me from the inside out, the High Priestess of the Starry Wisdom reminds us all that only once in every thousand years does the hound choose a wife. Only once each millennium is any living woman accorded that privilege.

My train pulls into a depot somewhere in southern Rhode Island, grumbling to a slow stop, and my dreams are interrupted by other passengers bustling about around me, retrieving their bags and briefcases, talking too loudly. Or I’m jarred awake by the simple fact that the train is no longer moving.

After sex, I lie in bed with Isobel, and the only light comes from the television set mounted on the wall across the room. The sound is turned down, so the black-and-white world trapped inside that box exists in perfect grainy silence. I’m trying to tell her about the pacing thing from the night I awoke. I’m trying to describe the snuffling noises and the way it worried at the ground with its sharp claws. But she only scowls and shakes her head dismissively.

“No,” she insists. “The hound is nothing but a metaphor. We weren’t meant to take it literally. Whatever you heard that night, you imagined it, that’s all. You heard what some part of you expected, and maybe even needed, to hear. But the hound, it’s a superstition, and we’re not superstitious people.”

“Isobel, I fucking
died,
” I say, trying not to laugh, gazing across her belly towards the television. “And I came
back
from the dead. I tunneled out of my grave with my bare hands and then, blind, found my way to the temple alone. My flesh was already rotting, and now it’s good as new. Those things actually happened, to
me,
and you don’t
doubt
that they happened. You practice necromancy, but you want me to think I’m being superstitious if I believe that the hound is real?”

She’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, she says, “I worry about you, that’s all. You’re so very precious to me, to all of us, and you’ve been through so much already.” And she closes her hand tightly around the amulet still draped about my neck.

On a sweltering August day in Savannah, a fastidious man who sells antique jewelry and Chinese porcelain makes no attempt whatsoever to hide his relief when I tell him I’ve decided to buy the jade pendant. As he rings up the sale, he asks me if I’m a good Christian girl. He talks about Calvary and the Pentecost, then admits he’ll be glad to have the pendant out of his shop.

I stand on a beach.

I board a train.

Maddy turns another card.

And on the altar of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I draw a deep, hitching breath. I smell incense burning and hear the lilting voices of all those assembled for my homecoming. My heart is a sledgehammer battering at my chest, and I would scream, but I can’t even speak. Isobel Endecott is straddling me, and her right hand goes to my vagina. With her fingers, she scoops out the slimy plug of soil and minute branches of fungal hyphae that has filled my sex during the week and a half I’ve spent below. When the pad of her thumb brushes my clit every shadow and shape half glimpsed by my wounded eyes seems to glow, as if my lust is contagious, as though light and darkness have become sympathetic. I lunge for her, my jaws snapping like the jaws of any starving creature; there are tears in her eyes as I’m restrained by the Sun and the Moon. The Hanged Man dutifully places a leather strap between my teeth.

Madness rides on the star-wind…

“Hush,” Isobel whispers. “Hush, hush,” whispers the Empress. “It’ll pass.”

It’s the day I leave Savannah for the last time. In the bedroom of the house where I grew up, I pack the few things that still hold meaning for me. These include a photo album, and tucked inside the album is the Tarot card that the woman named Madeleine gave me.

4.

Isobel is watching me from the other side of the dining room. She’s been watching, while I write, for the better part of an hour. She asks, “How does it end? Do you even know?”

“Maybe it doesn’t end,” I reply. “I half think it’s hardly even started.”

“Then how will you know when to stop?” she asks. There’s dread wedged in between every word she speaks, between every syllable.

“I don’t think I will,” I say, this thought occurring to me for the first time. She nods, then stands and leaves the room, and when she’s gone, I’m glad. I can’t deny that there is a certain solace in her absence. I’ve been trying not too look too closely at Isobel’s eyes. I don’t like what I see there anymore.

HOUNDWIFE

I should hope that not even the most die-hard admirer of H. P. Lovecraft’s work would dare argue that “The Hound” (1922) is a well-written story. And yet I love it. Despite all it’s garish purple-prose histrionics, the story pushes my buttons. So, it was probably inevitable that I would someday write a tribute to this minor Lovecraft tale, and in March 2010 that’s exactly what I did. Also, there really is a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb slumbering beneath the waters of Wassaw Sound. That part isn’t fiction.

The Maltese Unicorn

New York City (May 1935)

It wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabó let her walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough fetid little hidey-holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around.

But first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those two or three little things she couldn’t bear to leave the city without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected me to get there at all.

From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French Rococo nightmare of a library and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.

For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”

“After that gip you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or at least all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”

Ellen sat down in the arm chair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.

“You played me for a sucker,” I said and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”

“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”

“No, I’m going shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from going on the warpath.
And
because you played me.”

“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but, you ask them, that’s jake, cause so would anyone else.

“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch…but, wait…I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.

As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28 – right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel – I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say
accidentally
because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley sometime in the Sixteenth Century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.

Now, just how I came into possession of said manuscript, that’s another story entirely, one for some other time and place. One that, with luck, I’ll never get around to putting down on paper. Let’s just say a couple of years earlier. I’d been living in Paris. Truthfully, I’d been doing my best, in a sloppy, irresolute way, to
die
in Paris. I was holed up in a fleabag Montmartre boarding house, busy squandering the last of a dwindling inheritance. I had in mind how maybe I could drown myself in cheap wine, bad poetry, Pernod, and prostitutes before the money ran out. But somewhere along the way, I lost my nerve, failed at my slow suicide, and bought a ticket back to the States. And the manuscript in question was one of the many strange and unsavory things I brought back with me. I’d always had a nose for the macabre and had dabbled – on and off – in the black arts since college. At Radcliffe, I’d fallen in with a circle of lesbyterians who fancied themselves witches. Mostly, I was in it for the sex…but I’m digressing.

A friend of a friend heard I was busted, down and out and peddling a bunch of old books, schlepping them about Manhattan in search of a buyer. This same friend, he knew one of Harpootlian’s clients. One of her
human
clients, which was a pretty exclusive set (not that I knew that at the time). This friend of mine, he was the client’s lover, and said client brokered the sale for Harpootlian – for a fat ten-percent finder’s fee, of course. I promptly sold the Dee and Kelly manuscript to this supposedly notorious madam whom, near as I could tell, no one much had ever heard of. She paid me what I asked, no questions, no haggling, never mind it was a fairly exorbitant sum. And on top of that, Harpootlian was so impressed I’d gotten ahold of the damned thing, she staked me to the bookshop on Bowery, there in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, just a little ways south of Delancey Street. Only one catch: she had first dibs on everything I ferreted out, and sometimes I’d be asked to make deliveries. I should like to note that way back then, during that long-lost November of 1928, I had no idea whatsoever that her sobriquet, “the Demon Madam of the Lower East Side,” was anything more than colorful hyperbole.

Anyway, jump ahead to a rainy May afternoon, more than six years later, and that’s when I first laid eyes on Ellen Andrews. Well, that’s what she called herself, though later on I’d find out she’d borrowed the name from Claudette Colbert’s character in
It Happened One Night
. I was just back from an estate sale in Connecticut and was busy unpacking a large crate when I heard the bell mounted above the shop door jingle. I looked up, and there she was, carelessly shaking rainwater from her orange umbrella before folding it closed. Droplets sprayed across the welcome mat and the floor and onto the spines of several nearby books.

“Hey, be careful,” I said, “unless you intend to pay for those.” I jabbed a thumb at the books she’d spattered. She promptly stopped shaking the umbrella and dropped it into the stand beside the door. That umbrella stand has always been one of my favorite things about the Yellow Dragon. It’s made from the taxidermied foot of a hippopotamus and accommodates at least a dozen umbrellas, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen even half that many people in the shop at one time.

“Are you Natalie Beaumont?” she asked, looking down at her wet shoes. Her overcoat was dripping, and a small puddle was forming about her feet.

“Usually.”

“Usually,” she repeated. “How about right now?”

“Depends whether or not I owe you money,” I replied and removed a battered copy of Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled
from the crate. “Also, depends whether you happen to be
employed
by someone I owe money.”

“I see,” she said, as if that settled the matter, then proceeded to examine the complete twelve-volume set of
The Golden Bough
occupying a top shelf not far from the door. “Awful funny sort of neighborhood for a bookstore, if you ask me.”

“You don’t think bums and winos read?”

“You ask me, people down here,” she said, “they panhandle a few cents, I don’t imagine they spend it on books.”

“I don’t recall asking for your opinion” I told her.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t. Still, queer sort of a shop to come across in this part of town.”

“If you must know,” I said, “the rent’s cheap,” then reached for my spectacles, which were dangling from their silver chain about my neck. I set them on the bridge of my nose and watched while she feigned interest in Frazerian anthropology. It would be an understatement to say Ellen Andrews was a pretty girl. She was, in fact, a certified knockout, and I didn’t get too many beautiful women in the Yellow Dragon, even when the weather was good. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in Flo Ziegfeld’s follies; on the Bowery, she stuck out like a sore thumb.

“Looking for anything in particular?” I asked her, and she shrugged.

“Just you,” she said.

“Then I suppose you’re in luck.”

“I suppose I am,” she said and turned towards me again. Her eyes glinted red, just for an instant, like the eyes of a Siamese cat. I figured it for a trick of the light. “I’m a friend of Auntie H. I run errands for her, now and then. She needs you to pick up a package and see it gets safely where its going.”

So, there it was. Madam Harpootlian, or Auntie H to those few unfortunates she called her friends. And suddenly it made a lot more sense, this choice bit of calico walking into my place, strolling in off the street like maybe she did all her shopping down on Skid Row. I’d have to finish unpacking the crate later. I stood up and dusted my hands off on the seat of my slacks.

“Sorry about the confusion,” I said, even if I wasn’t actually sorry, even if I was actually kind of pissed the girl hadn’t told me who she was right up front. “When Auntie H wants something done she doesn’t usually bother sending her orders around in such an attractive envelope.”

The girl laughed, then said, “Yeah, she warned me about you, Miss Beaumont.”

“Did she now. How so?”

“You know, your predilections. How you’re not like other women.”

“I’d say that depends on which other women we’re discussing, don’t you think?”

“
Most
other women,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the rain pelting the shop windows. It sounded like frying meat out there, the sizzle of the rain against asphalt and concrete and the roofs of passing automobiles.

“And what about you?” I asked her. “Are
you
like most other women?”

She looked away from the window, looking back at me, and she smiled what must have been the faintest smile possible.

“Are you always this charming?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “Then again, I never took a poll.”

“The job, it’s nothing particularly complicated,” she said, changing the subject. “There’s a Chinese apothecary not too far from here.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” I said and lit a cigarette.

“65 Mott Street. The joint’s run by an elderly Cantonese fellow name of Fong.”

“Yeah, I know Jimmy Fong.”

“That’s good. Then maybe you won’t get lost. Mr. Fong will be expecting you, and he’ll have the package ready at five-thirty this evening. He’s already been paid in full, so all you have to do is be there to receive it, right? And Miss Beaumont, please try to be on time. Auntie H said you have a problem with punctuality.”

“You believe everything you hear?”

“Only if I’m hearing it from Auntie H.”

“Fair enough,” I told her, then offered her a Pall Mall, but she declined.

“I need to be getting back,” she said, reaching for the umbrella she’d only just deposited in the stuffed hippopotamus foot.

“What’s the rush? What’d you come after, anyway, a ball of fire?”

She rolled her eyes. “I got places to be. You’re not the only stop on my itinerary.”

“Fine. Wouldn’t want you getting in dutch with Harpootlian on my account. Don’t suppose you’ve got a name?”

“I might,” she said.

“Don’t suppose you’d share?” I asked her, and I took a long drag on my cigarette, wondering why in blue blazes Harpootlian had sent this smart-mouthed skirt instead of one of her usual flunkies. Of course, Auntie H always did have a sadistic streak to put de Sade to shame, and likely as not this was her idea of a joke.

“Ellen,” the girl said. “Ellen Andrews.”

“So, Ellen Andrews, how is it we’ve never met? I mean, I’ve been making deliveries for your boss lady now going on seven years, and if I’d seen you, I’d remember. You’re not the sort I forget.”

“You got the moxie, don’t you?”

“I’m just good with faces is all.”

She chewed at a thumbnail, as if considering carefully what she should or shouldn’t divulge. Then she said, “I’m from out of town, mostly. Just passing through and thought I’d lend a hand. That’s why you’ve never seen me before, Miss Beaumont. Now, I’ll let you get back to work. And remember, don’t be late.”

“I heard you the first time, sister.”

And then she left, and the brass bell above the door jingled again. I finished my cigarette and went back to unpacking the big crate of books from Connecticut. If I hurried, I could finish the job before heading for Chinatown.

She was right, of course. I did have a well-deserved reputation for not being on time. But I knew that Auntie H was of the opinion that my acumen in antiquarian and occult matters more than compensated for my not infrequent tardiness. I’ve never much cared for personal mottos, but maybe if I had one it might be,
You want it on time, or you want it done right?
Still, I honestly tried to be on time for the meeting with Fong. And still, through no fault of my own, I was more than twenty minutes late. I was lucky enough to find a cab, despite the rain, but then got stuck behind some sort of brouhaha after turning onto Canal, so there you go. It’s not like the old man Fong had any place more pressing to be, not like he was gonna get pissy and leave me high and dry.