Night Film

93

I reached Enchantments five minutes after closing time.

The door was locked, but a handful of customers were still browsing inside.

I pounded loudly on the glass. A woman stepped out from behind the register.

“We’re closed!”

“I need to see Cleopatra! It’s an emergency!”

She shook her head and stepped to the door, unlocking it.

“Dude, I’m sorry, but—”

I barged right past her, racing by the few remaining customers to the counter in the back.

“Is she here?”

A punky blond kid on the stool only stared in confused alarm. I dashed past him, yanking aside the black velvet curtain.

“Hey! You can’t go in there!”

I stepped inside, finding Cleo seated at the round table, conferring with a young couple.

“This is an emergency. I need your help.”

“He barged right in,” said the blond kid hurrying in behind me.

Cleo looked unruffled by the intrusion.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re pretty much finished.”

The couple scrambled to their feet, grabbing the plastic bag of herbs off the table, and nervously filed past—giving me a wide berth—stepping after the blond kid through the velvet curtains, leaving me alone with Cleo.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the figurine. It felt strangely heavy in my hand, heavier than before.

“My daughter had this in her pocket. What the hell is it?”

Cleo rose, stepping toward me. She was wearing a white embroidered peasant blouse, jeans, her red Doc Martens, her hands and wrists laden with the same silver bracelets and rings as before. She scrutinized the serpent without getting too close to it and then turned, stepping to the cluttered shelves in the back, returning with a pair of latex gloves.

She snapped them on, carefully took the figurine — as if it were a dangerous explosive — and took it over to the table.

“You just found this?”

“Yes.” I pulled up a metal folding chair, sitting across from her. “But I’ve seen it once before. Another child I encountered recently had it.”

She turned it over in her hands, shaking it, listening to the interior.

I could see now, in the strong red light overhead, the wood was intricately carved, every scale, fin, and tooth polished and pointed. The beast’s leering expression looked lecherous, lips curled back, tongue protruding.

“Could it be used to mark a person?” I asked. “Give them some type of, I don’t know, devil’s marking? Have you heard of something called huella del mal? Evil’s footprint?”

Cleo didn’t seem to hear me, setting the serpent down at the center of the table. Bending forward, with great concentration, she grabbed it by the tail — which coiled up and over the body — sliding the figurine in a slow counterclockwise circle. She did this three times, the only sound in the room the figurine’s jarring rasping on the wood.

Suddenly she whipped her hand away as if she’d been scalded, the snake falling onto its side.

“What?” I asked quickly.

She looked disconcerted. “You didn’t see that?”

“No. What?”

With a deep breath, Cleo reached out again, grabbing the tail.

“Watch the shadow,” she whispered.

I was so flooded with adrenaline, I could hardly bring myself to focus on the deliberate movement.

And then I saw what she meant.

The shadow—resolutely black on the table — did not naturally follow the object. Instead, it froze as if snagged on something invisible, quivering with tension, the shadow’s tongue elongating, pulling far out behind the figurine before swiftly snapping back into place and moving normally. Amazed, I blinked, leaning in, certain my eyes were playing tricks on me, but within seconds, it happened again.

And again.

She reversed the direction, moving the figurine clockwise, and the shadow behaved ordinarily.

“How is it possible?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She set down the figurine. “I told you I’m not proficient in black magic. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“But you’ve read something about it. In your extensive witch education.”

She looked at me. “I can’t help you. You need to visit a real practitioner of black magic.”

“I don’t know a real practitioner of black magic. I only know you, so you’re getting to the bottom of this, even if it means we sit here for two weeks figuring it out.”

I leapt to my feet, the folding chair falling backward with a crack as I raced to the back of the room. The counters were disordered, burnt candles and ashtrays, scraps of paper scribbled with recipes for spells, battered notebooks, plastic sachets of powders marked YES and NO, jars of black ashes. The shelves were crammed to the ceiling with musty texts.

Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.

Cleo was suddenly beside me. “Calm down.”

The Evil Eye. Book of Tobit. The Essential Nostradamus. I yanked down Encyclopedia of Popular 19th Century Spells from the top shelf, black paperbacks showering the floor, a red pentagram on the cover.

“You’ll make it worse,” Cleo said. “Potent black magic around an unstable mind is like enriched uranium near a fuse.”

I opened the encyclopedia, scanning the contents page.

“There might be another option,” Cleo said. “But it’s a long shot.”

I looked at her. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

She looked grudgingly at her watch, sighed, and moved to the back corner, where there was a small sink, stacks of notebooks, and a bulletin board propped on the counter laden with papers. She lifted the pages, looking for something, riffling through hand-drawn maps of Witch Country, Pennsylvania, a pamphlet from The Crystal Science League, the timeline of John the Conqueror, photographs of Enchantments employees, the Magical Practitioner’s Code of Ethics. She inspected a small scrap tacked underneath a postcard of a demonic-looking man and took it down, grabbing the cordless phone off the counter.

I stepped beside her.

It was a faded classified ad circled in red pen and torn from a newspaper. It read simply FOR THE GRIMMEST SITUATION ONLY, followed by a phone number, the area code 504.

“That’s your expert? Are you kidding?”

“I said it was a long shot,” Cleo snapped, dialing the number.

I took the paper. On the reverse side there was a half-torn headline that read FLOODING SUSPENDS, and above that, The Lafourche Gazette, November 8, 1983.

“No answer,” Cleo said.

“Try again.”

Sighing, she pressed redial.

After another three tries, she shook her head.

“I’m sorry. I don’t even know what the number is. The paper’s been here forever. No one knows where it came from. Come back tomorrow and we’ll try—”

I grabbed the phone, pressed redial, pacing, my heart pounding with every unanswered ring.

It can’t end like this, not with my daughter vulnerable to some dark hell I’d unwittingly unleashed on her. As I silently repeated this, I realized with a wave of sickened understanding that Cordova must have chanted the very same thing when he’d learned Ashley had run over the devil’s bridge.

This truth I’d been chasing, slowly it was becoming my own.

Suddenly, the ringing stopped. There was a click on the line.

I thought for a moment it had gone dead, but then I heard faint wheezing.

“Hello?” The connection was full of static. “Anyone there?”

“Who’s calling?”

The voice was a prehistoric gasp. If it was a man, woman, or creature—I had no idea.

Cleo, frowning, grabbed the phone.

“Hello?”

She cleared her throat, her eyes widening in surprise.

“Yes. This is Cleopatra at Enchantments in New York City. I hope it’s not too late to be calling. We have the grimmest situation.”

She fell silent, seemingly being reprimanded, but then she smiled at me, relieved, and hurried back to the table.

“I understand. Yes, ma’am. Thank you. If you want to check the stove I’ll wait.” Cleo paused, taking a deep breath, staring at the black figurine. After a minute, in a bland, clinical voice, she succinctly explained the situation.

“And the inverse shadow is totally misbehaving,” she added.

She fell silent, listening, her face grave.

After ten minutes or so, she put a hand over the receiver.

“Go to the bookshelf,” she whispered. “See if you can find a book called Symbols of Black Alchemy Animal and Mineral. Should be on the top shelf.” She listened for a moment, frowning. “Green cover.”

I raced to the back. It took me just a minute to find it, a thick hardback by C.T. Jaybird Fellows. I yanked it down, carrying it back to the table.

“We need to identify the animal before she can help,” Cleo whispered.

I flipped open the book, scanning the musty pages, the drawings of animals discolored, the type old-fashioned and faded.

Dragon. Heart. Liver. Deer.

“I understand.” Cleo squinted at the figurine. “Fins, a tail with a small suction on the end. Like something between a snake and a fish.”

Pig. Goat. Tiger. Worm.

“Look up leviathan,” Cleo whispered heatedly.

Owl. Pillar. Pine Tree. Leviathan.

The colored picture on the page for leviathan was nearly identical to the figurine. It had the same leering face, the distended tongue.

“That’s what it is,” announced Cleo happily into the phone, sliding the book toward herself, gazing down at the entry. “Out loud?” She cleared her throat. “ ‘The leviathan is a primordial sea serpent and one of the Dukes of Hell,’ ” she read. “ ‘Dante designated the creature the incarnation of total evil. Saint Thomas Aquinas described him as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, envy—the monstrous craving for that which you don’t have. In the Middle East, he represents chaos. In Satanism, he’s a demon of the inferno, which can be harnessed by the witch or warlock and discharged into the natural world for destructive means.’ ”

She paused, listening.

“Let me ask him.” She eyed me. “How many children did you see with this?”

“Two.”

“Did they have anything linking them? Did they go to the same school, have the same hobby, were they distantly related by blood? Anything like that?”

I couldn’t answer. My mind was spinning. Because I’d suddenly recalled Morgan Devold’s house, when his daughter, wearing that cherry-covered nightgown, had tiptoed after me down the drive. She’d been holding something in her fist, something small and black. It was this figurine.

“No,” I said. “There were three. Three children.”

“What did they have in common?”

I rubbed my eyes, trying to calm down, to think.

“They were between four and six years old. They had contact with a certain woman. The one who laid down the killing curse on our shoes. Ashley.” I’d said this, really only considering Devold’s daughter and the deaf child at Henry Street. But then the conclusion of my own words hit me: That meant Sam had encountered Ashley.

But that was impossible.

Cynthia never allowed Sam to talk to strangers. Yet she’d found me at the Reservoir. It wasn’t so vast a leap, then, that she’d found my child.

“How did they act?” Cleo asked. “Any strange behaviors? Whispering? Twitching or tics? Trancelike countenances? Any talk of death or violence?”

I couldn’t answer her. The horror of what I’d unknowingly done made me feel as if the room were caving in on me.

I’d brought the Cordovas right to Sam.

It’s a tapeworm that’s eaten its own tail. There’s no end to it. All it will do is wrap around your heart and squeeze all the blood out.

“Hello?” Cleo prompted.

Why in hell didn’t I turn away when I had the chance?

“Excuse me, but we have a real live black witch on the line,” Cleo hissed, clamping her hand over the receiver. “We interrupted her while she was gutting a milk snake for an intranquillity spell. And she sounds like she’s three breaths from going tits up. If I were you, I’d focus. How did the children behave?”

“I didn’t see my daughter with it. My ex-wife found it in her coat pocket. But she seemed normal.”

“What about the others?”

“One child was deaf. He was upset when he dropped it. He nearly had a tantrum, but calmed down when I returned it to him.”

“Irrepressible imprinting,” Cleo whispered hastily into the phone, then glanced at me. “The third?”

Devold’s daughter.

“I wasn’t around her,” I said.

“You saw nothing out of the ordinary?”

I thought back to that night, the dark yard strewn with forgotten toys, shivering trees, the dog barking in the distance, baby screaming.

“Her favorite doll was found decomposing in a kiddie pool,” I blurted.

Cleo was startled. “A baby doll?”

“It’d been missing for a few weeks. They’d looked for it everywhere.”

“And?”

“Her father fished it out, gave it back to his daughter, even though the thing looked demonic, eyes missing, clumps of hair falling out.”

Cleo waved me on impatiently. “What happened when he gave it back?”

“She was very upset. She cried. But later she chased me down the driveway, cradling the doll, and attempted to give me the figurine.”

“Definitive evidence of doll magic,” Cleo blurted excitedly into the receiver, relaying what I’d just explained. She listened for a minute.

“All right. I’ll try it.”

She stood up, hurried to the back of the room, scribbling something on a yellow slip of paper. “I’ll tell him. Thank you.”

She hung up. Without a word, her face somber with concentration, she crouched down, rummaging through the cabinets, pulling out books, candles, and balled-up newspaper. She returned carrying a pair of electrician’s pliers, a red bowl, a black-and-white reversing candle — the same kind she’d given us during our last visit — and some tweezers.

She meticulously laid out the items on the table like a doctor preparing a makeshift surgery.

“We’re dealing with doll magic,” she announced flatly, lighting the candle.

“What’s that?”

“Poppets. Voodoo dolls stuck with pins. It’s a doll connected by magic to a person to control their behavior. They’re pretty common. This leviathan was bound by sympathetic magic to each child, which explains why the boy didn’t want to let go of it. And we’re about to find out why.”

She sat down stiffly, closed her eyes, whispering something. She picked up the figurine and placed the head between the pliers. With one hand covering the serpent’s body, she squeezed the handle, hard. It didn’t budge. Cleo’s face began to turn bright red, the bracelets and pendants clanging louder on her arms the harder she squeezed, her face wincing as if in pain, gnashing her teeth.

Suddenly, there was a loud sucking pop. Something flew past my face, hitting the wall, and fell to the floor with a sharp crack.

Right beside my feet, there was now a small black rock wrapped in copper wire.

“Don’t touch it,” Cleo shouted.

A strong smell of sulfur filled the air. The figurine was not solid wood as I’d thought, but a thin shell. Using the tweezers, Cleo was cautiously emptying the contents — a gold-brown liquid, bits of dark hair and mud — into the bowl.

The sight of it, knowing this had been intended for Sam, made a wave of nausea rise in my throat. I’d been so arrogant believing Ashley had been a viable way to get to Cordova, to avenge myself, get my life back, when I hadn’t realized that I had my own fragile corridor. Sam. He’d reversed my own plan back onto me. It was as if the man had had access to my head. Now there would be no end to it.

“Is my daughter cursed?” I asked.

Cleo blew out the candle.

“What do we do?” I pressed. “Tell me.”

“Nothing,” she answered flatly.

“Nothing?”

“This figurine contains a protection spell. It’s not malignant. Quite the opposite.” She smiled at my bewildered face, standing and moving to the back, returning with one of the volumes of Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork. She sat down, flipping through the index.

“ ‘Compelling oil,’ ” she read after paging to the entry. “ ‘Commanding oil, calamus, a piece of obsidian rock,’ which is volcanic glass wrapped in copper wire — that’s what flew onto the floor.” She glanced at me sternly. “It’s a molten wall of protection.” She grabbed the bowl, swirling the contents. “The leviathan was used to ward off any evil that tried to advance upon the child. The spell inside protected the carrier. Any child given this toy would play exclusively with it for the heyday of the spell. About a hundred and one days. Any other deeply loved toy would have to be confiscated and hidden, so as not to compromise the potency. To submerge it out of sight in a body of water is ideal. That was the first hint this was domination through doll magic. This person—Ashley—must have stolen the doll, hiding it in the pool so as not to compromise the effect of the figurine on the child. But when the doll was returned to the little girl, she reclaimed her beloved toy and could no longer play with the leviathan. The protection was broken.” She frowned. “There’s one slightly weird detail that the witch mentioned.”

“What’s that?”

“In magic, you fight like with like, so using the form of the leviathan, the symbol of envy—thou shall not covet—Ashley seemed to believe these three children would be envied and coveted. Any idea why?”

I could only stare at her, incredulous.

The exchange. A simple transfer of debt. Ashley knew her father, Cordova, and her brother, Theo, would come looking for her after she escaped from Briarwood. Encountering the children in her path as she tracked down the Spider, she must have been concerned Cordova might try to use them, one soul for another, in a final attempt to save her life. This led to the rift between Ashley and her family, Marlowe had said. Because when it was finally explained to her, Ashley wanted to accept her fate. But Cordova was always searching for a way out. He did until the very end.

“My daughter …?” I managed to ask, my voice hoarse.

“She’ll probably be fine.”

“Probably? You’re not sure?”

Cleo stared at me. “A tornado knocks a house down, killing the owner, and it’s a tragedy. Then you learn a serial killer lived there and the same act becomes a miracle. The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops. Sometimes not even after death.” She stood up, grabbing the yellow scrap of paper she’d scribbled on, handing it to me. “This is where you send payment to the witch. Any amount you think is fair. She prefers cash.”

It was a P.O. box in Larose, Louisiana.

“What do I owe you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Just go home.”

I gazed down at the beheaded leviathan, capsized on the table. It actually looked as if it had faded to a slightly lighter shade of black, as if it’d started to wilt like a flower clipped from its life-sustaining branch — though perhaps it was just my imagination. I’d walked into this room with a belief that I could distinguish between what was factual and what was an invention of the mind. Now I wasn’t sure I knew the difference.

I stood up, the chair shrilly scraping the floor.

“Thank you,” I said to Cleo.

She nodded, and I stepped back through the black curtain, leaving her staring after me.

All of the customers were gone, the lights switched off so the scarred wooden floors were doused in orange light spilling in from the street. Two workers waited behind the register, speaking in low, worried voices, though they fell silent as I walked past them and unlocked the door.