Speakeasy Dead: a P.G. Wodehouse-Inspired Romantic Zombie Comedy (Hellfire Universe Historicals) (2 page)

My cousin dropped her bag on a side table. “Help me roll up the carpet.”

“Do we not,” I challenged, “work, eat, and sometimes sleep in this very building?” We flipped up the fringe of the centermost rug and began rolling. Beneath it, a fifteen-foot pentagram had been set into the granite in what looked like silver but was supposedly pure solidified magic. I glanced wistfully at the Victrola with its polished mahogany cabinet and racks of records. But foxtrots were probably not on Clara’s agenda. “Why all this cloak and pointy stabbing instrument behavior?”

“I don’t want anyone to know we’re here.” Clara shook off her cap, letting the strawberry blonde curls that were her family’s pride and joy tumble dramatically around her waist. She opened her bag, unpacked a gown, and started shimmying out of the baseball jersey.

I looked away hastily.

“Are not we both,” I asked the air, “supposed to be working at the dance contest upstairs? The one you sweet-talked Priscilla into letting us hold?”

Clara, fresh out of high school, denied permission to pursue a film career by her older, wiser, and much scarier sisters, had taken over the job of managing the Fellowship’s saloon. But these were prohibition days. Good, honest drinking establishments had fallen out of fashion to be replaced by glamorous speakeasies and swank hotels. We had the safest, best-tasting homemade hooch in Arizona, Priscilla’s genius running less toward the milk of human kindness and more toward potions, but we lacked the clientele.

Lacked it, until a prosperous local family, the Umbridges, teamed up with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to build a new hotel: the Hollywood Grand, a sparkling seven-story monument to modern design, whose golden balconies, vast sweeping panes of glass, and curved steel trim were guaranteed to rake in well-heeled tourists by the ton.

With three of her four older sisters off speculating in the Florida coastline, young C. had hatched a scheme. She’d hold a dance contest during the hotel’s gala opening—piggybacking on the excitement of the big party—and use the entry fees to redecorate the Fellowship’s saloon. Clara had even managed, through pleading letters,
French
photography, and an offer of half the profits, to persuade her film idol, Beau Beauregard, to grace the contest with his presence.

Sadly, the actor had fallen off of somebody else’s wife’s balcony and perforated several vital internal organs before the contest started. But since one hundred and fifty six non-refundable contest fees were already lining Clara’s coffers, the actor’s injury seemed to me less of a blow.

Not so young C., whose love for Beau, so she insisted, was like the sun, the moon, the stars, and radio, rolled into one.

“You can look now,” she said.

I turned to gaze at cousin transformed from street Arab into lace and ecru confection, pale hair piled and pinned with her eldest and scariest half-sister’s silver comb, figure corseted into a set of curves I hadn’t suspected she possessed. For the first time, it struck me that Clara was no longer the sexless, skinny playmate of my youth.

“Close your mouth, Bernie.”

She emptied my satchel onto the low table, where my attention immediately fixed upon a glittering cleaver.

I cleared my throat. “Now, just a minute.”

Clara unfolded the legs of a serving tray and placed a silver goblet on its mirrored surface. Beside it went a rare and valuable bottle of Jack Daniels, and beside that a lumpy parcel wrapped in brown butcher’s paper containing what—given the leaking red dribble—I earnestly hoped would prove to be next Sunday’s roast.

“All right.” This game had gone far enough. “What exactly are you up to?”

My cousin thrust forward a bundle of herb-scented candles. “Put these in the pentagram.”

I crossed my arms.

“Please, Bernie?” She gave me the hang-dog kitten eyes. “This is for Beau.”

“Listen.” I shook my head. “I know you’re sad.”

Clara was not a witch, not like her sisters. She’d sworn an oath not to become a witch before age twenty-one. We’d
played
magic, as kids, the way boys and girls from normal families play doctor or Indian chief, but it was just a gag. None of our nursery games would help a dying man.

“You lost your parents,” I said sympathetically. “I lost mine.” The last decade had not been kind to families. “Now someone else you feel you care about is close to death. But this is pointless. And we’re supposed to be working upstairs.”

“Please?” The eyes got bigger. She clasped her hands. “Please, Bernie, pretty please?”

I humphed and took the candles to do her bidding, placing sandalwood tapers along the inner pentagon and mugwort and vervain inside the triangles. The candles stood up straight—without the cheap tin holders we’d used as kids.

Goosebumps began to rise along my arms.

Clara carried her tray to the pentagram. She poured a measure of Jack Daniels and tossed it back before filling the goblet. Next to the booze, she propped a studio portrait of Beauregard.

So far, despite the human sacrifice angle, I wasn’t overly worried. We’ve had adventures, Clara and I, and while they often turn out badly for Bernie—broken limbs, municipal fines, long weekends cleaning privies and chopping wood—at least my youth was never boring.

So as I say, I wasn’t panicking. The only human handy was me, and I was pretty sure my cousin wouldn’t slit my throat.

“So what—” My voice cut off as Clara produced a crystal vial.

It might have been empty. Only a witch could tell for sure, since hellfire,
demonic blood
, the source of genuine magic, does not reveal itself to uninitiated eyes. The vial could have held air or water.

Somehow, I knew it didn’t.

“Clara.” The joke was off the rose. “Clara, you can’t do this.” If she’d swiped demonic blood from her sisters, there’d be hell to pay. Literally. “You need to put that back.”

She clasped the vial and muttered a word. There was a pop as the electric light went out and scented candles burst into flickering flame. A chill rolled through me.

She’d just done witchcraft. Three years, two months before age twenty-one.

Clara had broken her vow.

“But!” I sputtered as she dragged me inside the pentagram. “But! But!”

She took her sister’s comb out of her hair and, quick as a cobra, pricked my wrist with metal tines. Blood flowed along my hand into the silver goblet to mix with Jack.

“Enough!” I yanked my arm away.

She’d used hellfire.

She’d done real magic.

“No more!”

Clara pricked herself, adding her blood to the goblet. Then she sprinkled some of the gruesome brew onto the photograph of Beau.

“Stop!” I grasped my cousin’s shoulders. She’d broken her vow. “Look, we can fix this. We’ll say I did it.” I’d never promised not to become a witch. “It’s not too late!” I’d end up chopping wood for fifty years, but that was nothing compared to what would happen to Clara—to both of us—if she got caught.

“Let go!” She shook me off.

I grabbed her arm.

“Don’t stop me, Bernie.” She struggled. “I’m going to save the man I love, and no one’s going to get in my way.” Clara lunged for her tray. When she stood up, the cleaver was in her hand. “Not even you.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“Besides, this isn’t breaking my promise.” Clara advanced. “I’m not going to become a witch.”

I closed my eyes.

“I’m going to summon a demon and be a warlock instead.”

I could have run. I could have decked her with a clean conscience and left her to face her sisters’ wrath. Instead, I did as I have always done when faced with one of Clara’s schemes. I made her job easy.

I fainted dead away.

II: It Had to be You

Perform every demonic ritual as if it were your last. It probably will be.
—The Girl’s Guide to Demons

Clara:

THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about my cousin, Bernie, is he’s basically a weak sister. That isn’t bad. Heaven knows, I’ve got enough strong sisters to build a floor-to-ceiling pyramid if you stacked them carefully and ran away fast. I’d probably have gone stark raving mad by now if there wasn’t someone softer than me to boss around. And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get anyone brighter than my cousin to follow me and my sharpened cleaver into that candle-lit pentagram.

It helps that (don’t tell him I said so) Bernie’s a shrimp. Good dancer. Handy with a catcher’s mitt. Even decent with his fists in that scrappy way small men sometimes have, but at five-foot-five and barely a hundred and fifteen pounds wet, he’s always seemed more or less destined to end up bound, gagged, and stuffed into a wingback chair in front of a pentagram.

“Clrrrha! Clrrrha!”

“Don’t struggle.” I shoved his feet, cross-legged, under his knees. “It isn’t going to help.”

We’re peas in a pod, Bernard Benjamin and me. We’ve got the same September birthday, three years apart, and neither one of our mothers lived to see our squalling mugs. His dad, Falstaff’s first and only English doctor, contracted a fatal bout of
King and Country
and died of patriotism during the Great War. Mine, a railroad engineer, lasted a little longer. On September 3, 1918, he got off the train in Chicago complaining of aches and pains. Two days later, they shoveled him into a mass influenza grave, leaving me a charity case for my half-sisters, a penniless orphan.

There’s nothing you can count on in this world except the gullibility of cousins.

“Don’t worry,” I promised. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

I covered Bernie’s legs with an old Mexican poncho, unscrewed a maple syrup tin, and dribbled blood artistically around his chair.

That was the easy part. The hard part—I gritted my teeth and entered the pentagram—was dumping a man’s foot out of my butcher parcel onto the tray.

“It’s from the hospital,” I assured my cousin.
The Girl’s Guide to Demons
says you have to include human flesh in summoning spells. It doesn’t say you have to hack the flesh yourself. “Ole Jonson lost it in a tractor accident this morning.”

My words were wasted. Bernard had fainted again.

I kissed Beau’s photograph and backed out of the pentagram, drawing my last breath as an ordinary human girl. From this point on, I’d be a warlock, a sort of super-witch who summons demons, and damn the consequences.

I hesitated, holding my vial of hellfire. That was enough demonic blood to fuel a hundred ordinary spells, and Bernie was right; if I got caught, the consequences would be dire. My sisters could not ignore this sort of theft.

“Dear Beau,” I whispered, remembering the way he looked in films, the way he looked when he’d arrived in Falstaff yesterday, perfect and whole as he waved from the train.

The way my father looked the last time he left town.

“Courage, Clara,” I muttered. “Full steam ahead.”

I pricked my wrist again and circled the pentagram counter-clockwise, drizzling blood mixed with stolen hellfire onto each burning candle.

Flames shot up. Metallic smoke writhed in the air. I knelt outside the pentagram beside my cousin and recited the incantation I’d memorized out of the
Girl’s Guide
. I don’t know what it meant. I’m not sure it really meant anything. In magic, it’s the drama—and demonic blood—that count.

“Clrrrha!” My cousin began to writhe.

“Spirits of Hell….”

The air grew clearer, cleaner, calm. I reached inside myself, just like
The Girl’s Guide to Demons
instructed, and opened an inner eye, and there for the first time I saw it: hellfire, beautiful, glittering like misting creation, rising from the outline of the pentagram to form the vertical walls of a five-pointed star.

“Clrrrha!” Bernie’s voice squeaked hysterically.

“Abaddon.” Power began to build. “Devourer of souls.” The candles melted and ran upward, brown, red, sage, into the pentagram walls.

“Prince of Perdition.”

A sense of urgency filled me. I wound the summoning spell tight, tighter, as tight as I could and let it fly. Light burst inside the pentagram, a conflagration of color that flashed and then burned low, like embers.

The pentagram walls faded. I blinked, dazzled, clearing my eyes.

The magic goblet was empty, the picture of Beau Beauregard burned to ash. With a little imagination, the lump of roast meat smoldering on Priscilla’s tray might have been a rack of lamb.

But there was no demon. A shock of disappointment rippled through me. I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers, counting to ten, then counted to ten again before I looked.

Nothing.

Except for Bernie, peeping out under the poncho, I was alone.

My demon summoning had flopped.

“Uh, oh.” I turned on the electric light and uncovered my cousin, using the butcher’s cleaver to slice his ropes. Then I looked behind me and checked the pentagram one more time.
Empty
.

“Oh, hell!”

The magnitude of what I’d done was sinking in.

Without a demon, I hadn’t become a warlock.

Without a demon, the fact I’d cast a spell made me an ordinary witch.

An ordinary witch who’d broken her solemn oath.

My half-sisters were going to kill me.

There’s a cabinet back at the family homestead, a large, well-polished walnut armoire containing the heads of all the Woodsens who’ve ever broken their vows. My half-sisters used to make me wash and braid the hair of the little girls.

Bernie rose, goggle-eyed, rubbing his arms. He took a few wobbling steps, dodging the blood, and then stopped and pulled a blue enameled cigarette case out of his baseball uniform.

“Do you—” He cleared his throat and his voice dropped two octaves. “Do you know, for one minute, I thought you’d actually pull that off?”

He lit a cigarette with increasingly steady hands.

I sat down on the sofa beside the rock fireplace.

“Right after I decided you’re completely nuts.” Bernie flopped onto a cushion beside me and propped his feet on a footstool. “Nuts, squirrels, leaves, and acorn tree.” He blew a chain of smoke rings. “With rabbits frolicking among the roots.”