The Dire King (Jackaby #4)(20)
“Cornmeal,” said Charlie. “I made some inquiries downtown. The design is apparently called a veve. Madame Voile recognized it. She has a book about vodou invocations.”
“Vodou?” I said.
“That’s what she said. Doesn’t explain the rest, though.” Charlie gestured to the trees that formed a sort of natural backdrop to the theater. The nearest trunks had each been marred by rough carvings. One had been etched with a pentagram, another with a hexagram, and the one in the center with a sort of cross with a loop at the top. I recognized it as an Egyptian ankh. Jackaby had one or two of those among his relics back home. He had told me they stood for life and death. My mind tried to catalogue the symbols. Pagan, Judaic, Egyptian. What was the pattern?
Some sheer fabric had been draped from their branches as well. It rippled in the gentle breeze behind the stage. The scene was sinister, to be sure, and obviously tragic, but somehow the weight of it felt hollow. I should have been revolted and frightened and overwhelmed—I should have felt at least some distant cousin of the emotions that had left me reeling the first time I saw a dead body—but I wasn’t. I felt something else, instead. It was a subtler sort of unsettling, like a mosquito hum in the back of my mind. Perhaps I had begun to grow numb to the macabre, or perhaps it was simply that the stage for this latest murder was a literal stage, but I found myself curiously unmoved by all the paranormal paraphernalia and supernatural set dressing. What troubled me now was that it felt somehow irritatingly familiar, like a morbid moment of déjà vu.
“His name was Steven Fairmont,” Charlie said quietly. “Thirty-five.”
“Has anything been changed since the body was first discovered?” I asked, trying to remember what sort of questions Jackaby would have thought to ask.
“The cornmeal has gotten spread out, but otherwise it looks about the same.”
I walked up to the edge of the stage. The cloth had been folded back to reveal the man’s hand. Just below the wrist, I saw that his arm had been cut. A red, angry symbol had been carved into his flesh—a circle, underscored by a wider half circle with a straight line down from there, bisected halfway down like a cross. My old Classical Mythology courses came drifting back to me. It was the symbol of Hades—or maybe Hermes; I could never remember which was which.
How did the symbol of a Greek god have anything to do with vodou invocations? How did vodou have anything to do with ankhs and pentagrams? The buzzing hum in the back of my mind persisted. Think, Abigail. What was odd about the scene? Well, other than everything, of course. How did all the odd fit together?
It didn’t.
“You have to believe in Old Scratch if you’re going to worship him,” I said, thinking aloud.
“Old Scratch?” Charlie asked.
“Something Mr. Jackaby mentioned back at the station. All of this is wrong. It’s lazy. There’s no reason for someone who believes in vodou spirits to also invoke Hades. These symbols all contradict each other. They’re like a hackneyed vignette of the occult from the cover of an insipid dime novel.”
The hum in the back of my mind suddenly became a clear note. I had read that insipid dime novel. It had been titled The Arcane Assassin or some such. Now I realized why this all looked so familiar! The body, the candles, even the fabric billowing eerily in the wind: the last time I had seen all this, the scene had been rendered in a dramatic woodcut on a bent cover; the details had been poorly defined, but the staging was identical. In that particular installment, if memory served, the naive young protagonists were captured by a dreadful demonic cult. I remembered being disappointed that the big human sacrifice scene didn’t actually go the way it appeared in the etching. If the cover artist had been trying to prove that he had no real personal experience with unsavory occult practices, then he had succeeded. No, I thought, no self-respecting Acolyte of Evil would invoke the dark forces with such heavy use of sheer curtains.
“So,” said Charlie. “What do you think?”
“I think,” I said, considering the scene before me, “that this is all fake—it’s just a fa?ade. Someone wants us to believe there’s a lot of mystical hokum going on, but it’s all just for show. We’ve been reading the book by its cover.”
“But why go to all this trouble?”
“That’s a good question.” I shook my head. “But none of it is real.”
“That body is real enough,” said Charlie.
We glanced back at the stage. The cloth that had been shrouding the corpse lay in a stained, ruffled heap on the ground. It was quite empty. Mr. Fairmont was gone.
“Where—” Charlie began.
“Do you ever grow tired of unexplained phenomena?” I asked Charlie numbly. We both approached the stage. “Because I do. I grow very tired of unexplained phenomena. I would enjoy a perfectly logical and reasonable phenomenon just once. Just one case.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Charlie whispered, sniffing the air as his eyes scanned the clearing.
“Oh, no?” I said. I nudged the rumpled shroud with my toe. “And what makes you so sure I wouldn’t?”
His eyes caught mine, and there was a glint of admiration in his glance. “You’re here.”
I spotted it before Charlie did. I almost missed it at first, there in the shadows of the closest tree, the one marred with the ankh. The hunched figure standing at its base was facing away, nearly hidden in the shadows and partially shrouded by the billowing draperies. He was not holding still, exactly—I might have spotted him more easily if he had been perfectly still—but he was rocking ever so slightly. The motion was both natural and not completely human, like branches bobbing in the wind or clothes swaying on the line. Almost hypnotic.