The Scarlet Gospels (7 page)

“Like I said, I'll see what I can do. But I'm making no promises. Harry's a busy man. And weary, though he won't admit to it. So be warned: I care about his welfare as if he were my own flesh and blood. If this business in New Orleans goes sour because of something you fail to tell me here and now, I'll have an undead lynch mob chase down your lily-white ass and hang you up from a lamppost in Times Square until Judgment Day. Understand?”

“Yes Miss Paine.”

“‘Norma' is fine, Carston.”

“How did you—”

“Oh, come on now. I can see your dead, naked ass and you don't know how I know your name?”

“Right.”

“Right. So here's what we'll do. Come back tomorrow, early in the evening. I'm less busy then. And I'll see if I can persuade Harry to join us.”

“Norma?” Carston mumbled.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“Don't thank me yet. When you hire Harry D'Amour, things have a tendency to become … complicated.”

 

5

The subsequent meeting had gone smoothly enough, the dead Mr. Goode giving Harry the number of a security box filled with cash (“for those little expenses I didn't want my accountant asking me about”) from which Harry could take as much as he felt appropriate for fees, flight, and hotel costs, with enough left to cover whatever problems might pop up that would need “Monetary Lubrication” to ease them away. All of this brought D'Amour to where he now stood: before Carston Goode's House of Sin.

It wasn't much to look at from the outside. Just a wrought-iron door in a twelve-foot wall with the number painted on a blue and white ceramic tile and set in the plaster beside it. Carston had been able to supply Harry with a detailed description of the kinds of incriminating toys Harry would find in the house, but he hadn't been in any condition to supply keys. Harry had told him not to worry. Harry had never met a lock he couldn't open.

And, true to form, he had the gate open in under ten seconds and was walking up the uneven paved path that was bordered on either side by pots of various shapes and sizes, the mingled fragrance of blossoms as intense as a dozen shattered perfume bottles. Nobody had been there to take care of Goode's garden in a long time, Harry noticed. The ground was slimy with decayed petals, and many of the species in the pots had perished for want of attention. Harry was surprised at the state of the place. A man as organized as Goode would surely have made arrangements to keep his garden looking nice and neat, even when he wasn't there to view it. So what had happened to the gardener?

Four strides farther, Harry reached the front door and he had his answer. There were thirty or more fetishes nailed upon the door, some small, clear bottles containing scraps of God knew what, and one small clay representation of a man, his cock and balls no longer between his legs—but tied with glue-caked string around his face. The genitals were upside down, so that his testicles could be painted as eyes and his penis as a jutting nose that was daubed bright red.

Not for the first time during this trip Harry glanced around looking for some hint that his employer's spirit was somewhere nearby. Harry had been in the company of phantoms often enough to know what tiny signs to look for: a certain strangeness in the way shadows moved; sometimes a low-velocity hum; sometimes the simple silence of nearby animals. But Harry sensed nothing in the sunlit garden to suggest he had Goode's company. It was a pity, really; it would have made the search-and-destroy mission ahead a damn sight more entertaining if Harry had known the owner of the House of Sin was witnessing everything.

There was a thick line of what was undoubtedly dried blood poured across the house's threshold, its sacrificial thrashing source catching the lower half of the door in its death throes. Harry took out his pick again and quickly opened the two locks.

“Knock, knock,” he muttered as he turned the handle.

The door creaked but failed to move. He worked the handle back and forth a few times to be sure it was functioning, then put his shoulder to the job, with all hundred and ninety-seven pounds of him to back it up. Several of the bagged fetishes gave up the smell of their contents as he pressed against them: a dust of incense and dead flesh. Harry held his breath and forced the door.

There was more creaking, then one loud crack that echoed against the courtyard walls and he was in, stepping away from the fetishes before he took another breath. The air was cleaner on the inside than out. Stale, yes, but nothing that instantly set off alarm bells. Harry paused for a moment. The phone in his pocket rang. He answered.

“Impressive. Every case we've done together you've been on the line as soon as I step into—”

“Shit?”

“No, Norma. The house. I've just stepped into the house. And you knew it. You always do.”

“Lucky, I suppose,” Norma said. “So is it a den of sodomy?”

“Not at the moment, but the day is young.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Well, I ate several pastries and had three cups of the best damn coffee I ever drank. So, I'm ready to go at it.”

“Then I'll leave you to it.”

“Actually, I got a question for you. We got fetishes covering the front door, some jars with some kind of shit in them, a little clay man with disfigured genitals, and blood on the threshold.”

“And?”

“Any idea what that's all about?”

“Doing what fetishes do. Somebody's trying to keep the wrong things out and the right things in. Do they look new?”

“A week or so, judging by the blood.”

“So it wasn't Goode's doing.”

“Definitely not. Besides, this is fairly elaborate stuff. Is it possible Goode did serious magic down here?”

“I doubt it. Way he talked, he was using the magic as a way of getting his guests naked. He might have bled a chicken or drew up some phony circle to give it some flavor, but I don't think it was anything more than that. Regardless, be careful. They do things differently down there. Voodoo is potent shit.”

“Yeah, and some of it's on my shoe.”

The conversation ended there. Harry pocketed his phone and began his search.

 

6

Harry had only signed off with Norma for a minute, no more, when his exploration of the three small downstairs rooms brought him into contact with a patch of intensely cold air in the kitchen, which was a sure sign of a presence from the Other Side. He didn't attempt to retreat from it or spit out the dozen verses he could recite that essentially meant “Get thee the fuck out of my way.” Instead he stood perfectly still, the air so chilled his breath formed a dense cloud at his lips, while the cold patch circled him and circled again.

Back in New York, when Harry finally left the force he had sought a different type of protection. His queries soon brought him to one Caz King, a tattoo artist known for his expertise in arcane symbology. Caz tattooed visual defenses against dark forces on the bodies of his clients.

Upon his instruction, Caz attempted to commit to Harry's body every alarm system in his arsenal that was applicable to all forms of nonhuman life that Harry might encounter. Caz had done a thorough job, because the symbols and codes were soon fighting for space. Best of all, the alarm system actually worked. Even now, one of the small identification tattoos Caz had drawn on Harry was twitching, telling him that his chilly, unseen visitor was something called a String Yart, a harmless, nervous entity that resembled, in the words of those who'd studied them, a monkey made of loosely configured ectoplasm.

Harry uttered the command, “No go, Yart,” the first two words calling into life the complex design Caz had spent a month of nights inking onto Harry's chest. The design was intended to be a universal repellant and it worked beautifully.

Harry felt the ink get a little hotter under his skin and then suddenly the patch of cold air left his vicinity. He waited a few seconds to see if there were other curious presences here who also wanted to inspect him, but nobody came. After two or three minutes of looking around the kitchen and finding nothing even vaguely interesting, Harry went into the other two rooms on that floor. One had a dining table, polished but still much scratched. There were large metal fixtures beneath each corner of the table, placed there, he assumed, to make binding someone to the table easy. But that was all Harry found in either room that he'd need to deal with before leaving.

Upstairs, however, was a different story. On the floor inside the first of the three bedrooms there was a four-foot-high bronze statue of a satyr in a state of extreme arousal, the lewd mischief of his intent wonderfully caught by the sculptor. Carston, it soon became apparent, had quite an eye for erotic antiques.

On one wall of the first bedroom was an arrangement of Chinese fans spread to display the elaborately choreographed orgies that decorated each one. And there was more antique erotica on the other walls. Prints that looked like illustrations to pornographic rewriting of the Old Testament, and a large fragment from a frieze in which the orgiasts were interlocked in elaborate configurations.

There was a double bed in the room, stripped back to a stained mattress, and a dresser, which contained some casual clothes and a few letters, which Harry pocketed unread. Buried at the back of the middle drawer, Harry found another envelope, which contained one thing only: a photograph of what he took to be the Goode family, standing beside a pool, frozen forever in a happier time.

Finally Harry had an image of Goode—his grin unforced, his arm tightly clasping his happy spouse to his side. The kids—three girls, two boys—all seemed as guilelessly happy as their parents. It had been good to be Goode that day, no question. And much as Harry scrutinized the father's face, he could see no sign that Goode was a man with secrets. All the lines on his face were laugh lines and his eyes gazed into the camera lens without a trace of reticence.

Harry left the picture out on the top of the dresser for later visitors to find. Then he moved on to the next room. It was in darkness. Harry stayed at the threshold while he found a light switch.

Nothing he'd seen in the house so far had prepared him for what came into view when the single naked bulb hanging at the center of the room went on. Here, finally, was something he could entertain Norma by describing: a leather sling hanging from the ceiling supported by heavy-duty rope. It was a black hammock designed for those special folks who rested best with their legs held high and wide.

The windows in the room were sealed up with blackout fabric. Between the window and where Harry stood was a comprehensive collection of sex toys: dildos ranging in scale from the invasive to the inconceivable, whips, switches, and old-fashioned canes, two gas masks, coiled lengths of rope, plastic cylinders with rubber tubes attached, screw-down presses, and a dozen or so items that looked like esoteric surgical equipment.

It was all meticulously clean. Even the faint pine odor of disinfectant was still present. But however bizarre and intense the ceremonies of pain and violation here had been, they had left nothing in the room that caused Caz's tattoos to warn Harry of imminent trouble. The room was clean, by both bacterial and metaphysical standards.

“I see your point, Mister Goode,” Harry murmured to the creator of this chamber of possibilities, absent though he was.

Harry moved on to the next room, which he fully anticipated would contain proof of further escalation in Goode's debaucheries. He opened the door, which was the only one
inside
the house that had sigils etched into it. Harry was unsure whether it was for keeping unwanted guests out or dangerous elements in, but he was certain he would soon find out. He flipped on the light—another bare bulb hanging on a ragged cord—to illuminate a room that, compared to the previous one, was a model of decorum. The windows were blacked out here too and, like the rest of the room, they were painted a light gray.

Harry's tattoos gave off a warning twitch when he stepped over the threshold. He'd come to be able to interpret the subtle differences in the signals over the years. This warning was the equivalent of a blinking amber light. Some kind of magical working had been performed here, it told him. But where was the evidence? The room contained two plain wooden chairs, a bowl filled with what had been dog food, he guessed, its dried-up remains still attracting a few lazy flies.

With its bare boards and its blacked-out windows, the room was certainly set up for magic. There were two oddities in the room's construction, which Harry had noticed the moment he surveyed the room: the right-hand window was placed too close to the corner of the room, which meant either that the architect had done a lousy job or that the room had been shortened at some point in its sordid history, with the faux wall put up to create a very narrow and as yet unseen fourth space.

Harry went over to the wall, looking for some way in, the multiplying of the signals from his tattoos indicating that he was indeed getting warmer in his ghostly game of Marco Polo. Harry looked down at the palm of his left hand where Caz had painfully drawn the Searcher's Sigil. For an instant Harry was back on 11th Avenue and the hand was not his but that of the demon.

“Spit!”
Harry heard the word bounce off the walls in the claustrophobic space.

“Go fuck yourself,” Harry said, and drove the vision from his head as he pressed his tattooed hand to the wall.

Now he was on to something. A silent imperative, one that didn't slow its work by traveling by way of thoughts, took hold of Harry's hand and moved it over the wall, lower and lower, until his little finger was brushing the ground. Harry felt the Searcher Sigil's exhilaration at the hunt, quickening as his hand closed on its invisible quarry. There was a mark on the gray paint barely darker than the rest of the wall. And before Harry even realized it, his hand had already elected his middle finger to finish the job. It pressed lightly on the spot, there was an audible click, and then Harry was obliged to stand back as a door, exquisitely concealed by the gray paint, swung open on silent hinges.