Night Film(71)

“What does it do?” I asked.

She stared at me for a moment before answering, her face unreadable.

“It trips up the devil.”

“Trips him?”

“Stops him. Gives him pause.”

“I see,” I said, picking up the roots. “I don’t know why the U.S. spends six hundred billion on national defense. We should just make sure every American family has a set of these.”

Cleo was clearly used to—and totally unfazed by—skeptics and nonbelievers. She didn’t react, only interlaced her ring-laden fingers—skulls, Egyptian ankhs, a cat’s head—atop her raised knee.

“Did your friend take baths before sunrise?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Nora. “In really icy water.”

I was about to ask Nora what she was talking about when I suddenly remembered the strange incident Iona had described—the early morning when she’d come upon Ashley bathing in the tub.

“So she did cleansing rituals,” said Cleo, nodding.

“What are they for?” I asked.

“They grant purification from evil. For a time. They’re not permanent. More of a temporary Band-Aid. Did she wash her floors?”

Nora glanced at me. “We don’t know.”

“Was she cold to the touch?”

“No idea,” I answered.

“Did you notice if she had difficulty communicating? Almost as if she had a mouthful of peanut butter or sand?”

“We wouldn’t know.”

“What about an alarming heaviness?”

“Meaning?”

Cleo shrugged. “I’ve heard of some people, if they’re under a particularly severe curse for an extended period of time, when they step onto an ordinary scale they can weigh up to three hundred, sometimes even four hundred pounds, even though visibly they’ve grown very, very thin.”

“We wouldn’t know that, either,” I answered, though I had a sudden, unnerving vision of the first and only time I’d ever seen Ashley in person, when she was wandering around the Reservoir—that strange, trancelike bearing, the heavy sound of her footsteps cutting resoundingly through the rain.

Cleo, suddenly struck by a new thought, grabbed my BlackBerry again, frowning as she scrolled through the pictures.

“One thing I don’t see here is a reversal. When you’re dealing with black magic, you have to uncross but also reverse, so the curse boomerangs back onto the perpetrator.” She glanced up at us. “Spells are nothing more than energy. Think of it as charged particles that you’ve attracted to one concentrated place. You have to put them somewhere. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transferred. It’s the transfer I don’t see evidence of, and that’s troubling.” She tilted her head, thinking, twirling the tooth pendant in her fingers. “Notice any reversing candles in the room?”

“What are reversing candles?” Nora asked.

“White wax on the bottom, black at the top.”

Nora shook her head.

“What about a cardboard box filled with objects?”

“No.”

“No mirror box,” whispered Cleo to herself.

“What’s a mirror box?” I asked.

She glanced at me. “For straightforward reversals. You get a black candle, inscribe the enemy’s name into it, bury it in a graveyard with pieces of a broken mirror. Whatever negativity or evil aimed at you will reflect back onto them.” She cleared her throat, raising an inky black eyebrow. “Let’s go back to her room. Were there any powders or chalk marks on the floor?”

“It was dark inside,” Nora said. “But no. We would have noticed something like that.”

“But the floor was sticky,” I added.

Cleo looked at me. “Sticky?”

“As if a soft drink had been spilled all over it. Plus a couple of plastic wrappers.”

Cleo unwound herself from the twisted way she was sitting, leaning across the table, jutting out her chin.

“Did you pick up one of the wrappers?” She demanded it so intensely I caught a whiff of her breath, hot and garlicky and pungent, like she’d been drinking some strange herbal tea. She had small tobacco-stained teeth crowded together, quite a few in the back capped in gold.

“No,” I said.

“Then how do you know they were plastic wrappers?”

“That’s what they sounded like.”

She took a deep agitated breath. “Did you go inside the room?” she asked, sitting back in the chair.

“Of course. How do you think we found that thing under her bed?”

“How long ago was this?”

“Just last night.”

She looked underneath the table. “Are those the shoes you were wearing?”

“Yes.”

She stood up and strode to the back counter, returning with a pair of latex gloves and a pile of faded newspapers. She snapped the gloves onto her hands and spread the newspaper across the table’s surface.

“Take one shoe off and slowly hand it to me, please.”

Glancing at Nora—she looked stricken—I pulled off one of my black leather boots, handing it to Cleo.

Carefully—as if handling a rabid animal—she placed the boot on its side on the newspaper, the sole facing her. She fumbled in her jean pocket and produced a four-inch pocket knife, the handle intricately carved out of some type of animal bone. She opened the blade with her teeth and, holding down the boot with her other hand, scraped it slowly along the sole. She did this for minutes, ignoring us, and when she stopped, inspecting the blade inches from her nose, there was a thick brownish-black paste collected along the edge. It looked like dried molasses.