The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (12 page)

He followed her example and bent over the pages without touching them. Two identical pages of advertisements, Judd Herschel’s solicitation for work on both … “All the headlines about the murders are gone. They’ve changed again.”

“Place your hands on them and see what happens,” Miss Fairweather suggested.

He did, warily. As before, he felt the shiver of something alert under his fingers. The ink in the advertisement columns began to reshape itself into a blazon of blood, and Trace heard a faint, hateful whine in his skull.

He took his hands off the table. “Are they
alive
?”

“No,” Miss Fairweather said. “They are the instruments of a demon. Having served their purpose, they revert to an innocuous state, to hide the demon’s work. But your power reveals them for what they are.”

“The work of a demon.” A shiver went down his spine—excitement and dread all at once.

“You sound dubious.”

Trace licked his lips, hoping his eagerness was not as obvious as hers. “I was raised to believe that demons are real. But I been walkin around my whole life and never … even after I started seeing the spirits…”

“You have never seen empirical evidence of demonic activity?”

“I once saw a Voudou woman down in New Orleans wavin chicken bones over a child to drive the evil spirit out of him. All the neighbors pointed and shouted when the spirit flew away, but I saw nothin, even with my … power, I saw nothin. I’ve also seen men, ordinary men whose minds don’t work quite like everybody else, and people sayin they had a demon out of stupid ignorance…”

“I suppose you had that accusation leveled at you, after your powers became manifest.”

He shot her a sharp look, but her face was expressionless. He thought of that confrontation with his father, when he’d finally come home from hospital—twenty-two years old, thin as a scarecrow, with a weeping wound in his side and a barely subdued addiction to morphine. “There were … some who suggested it.”

There was a slight pause. “I trust the doctors at Richmond Sanitarium were more enlightened?”

Trace went cold. “How the hell did you—” For a second he couldn’t breathe, and then heat flooded his face and neck. He came half out of his chair. “You god-damned harpy. What gives you the right—”

Miss Fairweather did not so much as blink, but Min Chan moved subtly into Trace’s peripheral vision, reappearing out of the shadows like a bad dream.

Trace stood there, his fists clenched, washing over with shame and fury.

“That was my first recourse in locating you, Mr. Tracy,” she said calmly. “Mental wards are one of the best resources for finding true psychics and mediums. Half the time the poor sufferers consider
themselves
mad. How else to explain why they can see things no one else can?”

That was a second shock to his sensibilities. He really
had
doubted his sanity for the better part of a year—careening between the delirium of morphine and the torment of going without it. The presence of the spirits had been constant that first year, probably
because
of the opiates poisoning his brain.

“A great many soldiers came away from the war with an opium addiction,” Miss Fairweather said. “Far more than the general public realizes. It is a testament to your strength of will that you were able to overcome it. Did any of the doctors believe your story of seeing spirits?”

“One.” His own voice threatened to choke him. “Hardinger. He was a Spiritualist.”

Miss Fairweather gave a short nod. “Basil Hardinger was quite a brilliant psychologist, I understand, if prone to bouts of depression. He died shortly before you left the hospital, did he not?”

“He shot himself,” Trace said. “But I guess you already knew that.”

She tilted her head ambiguously. “I would hazard a guess, then, that during your stay at Richmond, none of the attending physicians suggested you were possessed by demons.”

“Course not.”

“Rather, they supposed your ailments were the result of overtaxed nerves, brought on by your injury and the stresses of war? And although you were raised to believe in demons, and in more recent years have been able to see and hear the spirits of the dead, you don’t entirely believe that demons exist, is that right?”

“I … guess not.”

“And why is that?”

“I suppose because … all the things that demons are supposed to cause can be caused by something else. I’ve
seen
the causes.”

“Drugs, and madness, and war.”

“Yeah.”

“And you know
you
are not possessed by a demon—you merely fell victim to the mundane evils of the world.”

Trace felt his jaw tighten.

“Let me tell you something about demons, Mr. Tracy,” Miss Fairweather said. “Unlike the spirits you see every day, which are pale reflections of once-living persons, demons are whole, sentient entities. They are not
of
our world, but they are drawn to the empty places
in
our world. They can take the form of ordinary things—animals, people, or other, benevolent, spirits. Many so-called Spiritualists, who have not the sense or experience to discriminate, are unwittingly calling up demons in the guise of a patron’s loved ones.”

The thought appalled him. “I knew there was something fishy about that table-rappin.”

“Indeed. And now you have reason to believe that a malicious entity—we shall call it a demon, for the sake of brevity—has been infecting households in south St. Louis and dispatching their inhabitants.”

“I guess so.”

“Why would you doubt it? You yourself can testify to the innocence of the victims. You saw the black emanations from his corpse. You have seen reality rearrange itself”—she waved a hand over the newspapers—“in order to conceal the work of this entity. What further evidence would you require, before you accept the reality of something you claim to believe in? Ye gods!” Her voice cracked in exasperation. “Is it so threatening to your tiny Christian mind that you must deny the possibility, rather than accept it, and learn to fight it?”

Trace raised an eyebrow. He was too old to get into arguments over his faith, and far too old to rise to insults that sprang more from a woman’s bitterness at the world than any inadequacies in himself. And she knew she had overstepped; he watched the color flood her cheeks and her eyes lower to the tabletop.

After a moment she said coolly, “I trust you were taught the Roman ritual of exorcism?”

“I learnt the words. But it has to be a priest who says ’em. An
older
priest, secure in the faith.”

Her face smoothed out into careful neutrality. “In your case, I suspect raw talent will suffice in place of experience. Our primary problem at this point will be to locate the demon’s hiding place.”

“I like the looks of that newspaper office.”

“I quite agree, although this Mr. Reynolds has also piqued my interest.”

“D’you know him? He seemed to know who you were.”

“I am not familiar with the name,” Miss Fairweather said. “However, I am active in various philanthropic societies in this city. If he reports on social issues it is quite possible he may know who I am.”

Trace shook his head. “No, he knows somethin about
this
. He knew enough to bring me the papers. And I had that vision of him manipulating the Herschels.”

“But he doesn’t work for the
Citizen
?”

“The
Times,
he said.”

“Hmm,” said Miss Fairweather. “Well, let us concentrate on the
Citizen
office for now, since we have direct evidence of activity there. Demons are not necessarily exclusive in their instruments of destruction, but they do tend to show a preference for a particular
type
of weapon, and this one appears to hold domain over the printed word.”

She rose from her chair and crossed to the library table, on which lay a heavy tome nearly as big as herself. She leafed through it carefully. Many of the pages had tattered remnants of older pages pasted down on them, and there were a great many loose sheets in the middle. “Here. There was a case in 1608, in Germany, of a demon possessing a bookmaker and causing him to enact violence against his neighbors. An exorcism was performed by the village priest, however one deduces the attempt was unsuccessful, because the townspeople burned the bookmaker alive in his shop.”

“Did that kill the demon?”

“Fire will drive them out, in most cases.” She turned a few more pages. “There are many records of demons possessing books or being suspected of inhabiting books. As I said, they are drawn to empty spaces, which is why medieval monks filled the pages with ornamentation. It occurs to me that a printer’s shop would appeal to a demon’s sense of mischief. The press can be an effective means of manipulating the masses, and our trickster seems to have honed the technique to a needlepoint.” She put her finger on the page and looked up at him thoughtfully. “In your training, were you taught a method of detecting demons?”

“Uh. No. I guess a man of God’s supposed to recognize them when he sees them.”

“An older priest,” Miss Fairweather suggested blithely. “One strong in the faith.”

Trace looked at her suspiciously.

A corner of her mouth curled. “Well, this is one area where experience counts for something.” She beckoned to Min Chan, who approached the table and handed her a leather pouch. She worked open the strings. “I will show you a simple method of detecting the demon’s presence. It’s a folk method, but a reliable one. This demon’s modus
operandi suggests it is a minor entity, unable to manifest directly or maintain long-term possession of a human host, but I will caution you to be wary. Its powers of influence are quite strong if it can compel a family to murder one another.”

“So what do you want me to do when I find it?”

“I will show you that, also,” she said, and began to take items out of the pouch.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was late afternoon when Trace made it back to Jameson’s store, and the place was busy. Boz was weighing out seed for old man Niels. Jameson was waiting on three customers at once, as usual, but as soon as he spotted Trace, he threw his hands in the air.

“It’s the all-seeing wonder himself!” The shopkeep pressed his palms together and sketched an Oriental-looking bow. “Back from your travels in the spirit world, ready for more adventures in the great unknown. Come on in, Swami, and tell us what the baseball scores are going to be.”

The lady customer gasped. “Are
you
the psychic I read about in the paper? The one who’s helping to solve that awful murder?”

“Uhm,” Trace said.

“He don’t look like no psychic to me,” said a red-bearded man, whom Trace knew vaguely, and disliked. “He looks like a gussied-up lawyer.”

Jameson shook out a folded sheet of pink paper and read in a tremulous falsetto, “‘Dear Mr. Tracy, I am desperately in need of your advice. Whose proposal should I accept? Mr. Barden is wealthy and promises me a life of luxury and pretty clothes, but I do not love him. Mr. Thomas is dear to my heart, but he has no prospects and I—’”

“Give me that.” Trace snatched the paper and glared at it, thinking—hoping—Jameson was making it up, but no, he had read the words true, and skipped over a great deal of pap in between. “Where’d this come from?”

“They’ve been trickling in all day.” Jameson held out a rainbow sheaf of pages, all addressed to Mr. Tracy or Tracey or Trayce. One simply said
to the sykic helping the polees.
“I was about to set aside a bushel basket for you.”

The lady customer leaned her heavy bosom against Trace’s arm. “Good sir, you
must
call on me as soon as possible. My dear husband left a
fortune
in bonds—only I have been unable to locate the copy of his will that left it all to me and now his family is squabbling over the estate. You
must
help me contact my late Henry.”

“Why’nt you leave your card with Mr. Jameson here,” Trace suggested, avoiding her clinging hands. “He’ll keep me informed.”

Trace hid in the back of the store until Boz had finished up with old Niels. The two of them slipped out the back and headed for their boarding-house on the next block.

“Well?” Boz said as they walked. “What’d she say?”

“She said thanks for the service and here’s the next week in advance.” Trace handed over the envelope Miss Fairweather had given him.

Boz rifled through the bills inside and whistled. “And, uh … what
service
did you do for her, all afternoon?” He leaned close to sniff at Trace’s collar, and cackled when Trace shoved him away. “You
do
kinda smell like a whorehouse.”

“It ain’t me, it’s this.” Trace took the leather pouch from his coat. It had been badly cured, with bits of hair still on and the suggestion of a toe or two.

“What is it?”

“A demon-detecting kit.” There was indeed a strange bouquet coming from the bag—rose oil, lavender, frankincense, sulphur, and something brown and dry that Miss Fairweather had called “mummy.” The last two were what stank, giving the whole a perfume like some old lady’s boudoir.

Boz wrinkled his nose. “So what’re you supposed to do with that?”

But Trace held off the telling until they were back in their room. As he’d expected, Boz was not happy to hear that Trace had agreed to hunt down the demon and exorcise it.

“
Why?
” he kept saying. “Why’d you want to do that?”

“Because there’s somethin nasty out there killin folks,” Trace said. “If it were a mad dog or a bear or some lowdown cut-throat—”

“But it
ain’t
. Do you even know you
can
exorcise this thing?”

“Miss Fairweather showed me—”

“Miz Fairweather ain’t
here
. She’s shut up in her big white house sendin you out to do her dirty work. Again.” Boz cocked his head, exasperated. “She got some dirt on you I don’t know about?”

“No,” Trace said shortly. “I ain’t doin this for her. I’m doin it cause it’s the right thing to do.”