The Hollow Ones(34)

“Yes, a letter,” said Odessa. “I drop a letter in a blank slot near Wall Street in Manhattan and my apartment gets broken into by a British man who won’t answer my questions.”

“Earl Solomon should have prepared you better. How is dear Earl?”

“Dying. Had a stroke. He is in his late eighties and should have been retired decades ago. I go to him, he sends me to you, and I need to know what kind of scam you two are running.”

Blackwood took another sip of his tea. “Apparently he didn’t tell you much about me.”

“No, sir, he did not. Left that part right out.”

“I see. I assumed you would have some idea of what to expect.”

“Left. That. Part. Right. Out.”

“Just gave you the address, did he?”

“Well, he’s not well. I did mention that, right? He’s dying?”

Blackwood shook his head once.

She waited. “That’s it? Not curious how he’s doing? No sympathy or concern, Mr. Blackwood? That is your name, correct? Hugo Blackwood?”

“That is my name, Miss Hardwicke, yes.”

Nothing more. She was already aggravated and unnerved, but this strange man’s casual callousness really got under her skin. “He’s in the hospital.”

“Unfortunate,” said Hugo Blackwood. “For both of us.”

Odessa smiled through her shock. “So you two are close, then.”

“He has assisted me many times. I have a most favorable opinion of his work ethic and professional performance.”

“He has assisted you many times?” said Odessa. “Who do you work for?”

“For? No one.”

“British Special Branch? Security services?”

“Oh no. Not them.”

Odessa tried a reset. She opened her FBI credentials and walked over to Blackwood, leaning over the coffee table between them. “Here’s my identification. Okay?” She closed the booklet and pulled it back. “Now show me yours.”

He said, “I don’t have any.”

“No identification?”

He smiled, perhaps at her doggedness. “Should we talk about the cauldrons?”

Something about the way he said “cauldrons,” his voice like that of a man out of his own time, chilled her. “Fine,” she said. She sat in a chair angled toward him. “Tell me about the cauldrons.”

“How much do you know about Palo?” Hugo Blackwood asked.

“Palo?” said Odessa.

“I see,” said Hugo Blackwood. “The cauldrons are a major element of Palo Mayombe, a dark religion that arose out of the Spanish slave trade in the sixteenth century. The cauldron is arranged with certain religious articles, as well as totemic personal items from the issuer of, or the object of, the spell to be invoked.”

“A spell,” said Odessa.

“Spell. Wish. Curse. An invocation by any other name. For this invocation to be successful in its intention and achieve full force and power, very often the practitioner, usually a priestess, will incorporate articles of death in the Palo ritual. Such as dead animals or birds. Human bones.”

With every word, Odessa was profiling him. A professor of religion? An expert on cults?

“I understand what you are saying,” said Odessa. “And I have witnessed these things you speak about. What I don’t understand is, are you saying that these killers were followers of Palo…or victims of some sort of curse?”

“It is not so simple as that. What I have been describing to you is a religion—a practice unfamiliar to you, and unusual to this part of the world, but a religion with many thousands of adherents and practitioners who are neither murderers nor murder victims themselves. Palo Mayombe, in and of itself, is a system of faith and worship, and as such is blameless.”

“Okay…” Odessa shook her head. “So what are we talking about, then?”

“There may be darker forces at work here. Palo is a dynamic faith, one in touch with deep undercurrents of nature that are largely unexplored. Any system—any church—may be corrupted. The invocation ceremony may have been appropriated by some other entity for its own means.”

Now his logic was starting to sound squishy. “Entity?”

Hugo Blackwood sighed and sipped his tea. “There are only so many. Each religion has a name for them, but there is a basic taxonomy—no more than thirty or thirty-five kinds, really.”

His perfectly reasonable expression outlasted hers. The only reason she didn’t laugh was that this nonsense intrigued her. This man intrigued her. His relationship—or lack thereof—with Earl Solomon intrigued her.

“Now I think I will brew some more tea,” she said and moved into the kitchen, pulling down a branded Starbucks mug celebrating the city of Newark (she had purchased it ironically) and popping in an herbal tea bag, filling it with sink water.

“Most of these entities go back to Mesopotamian times,” Blackwood said. “And their sole reason for being is to harm, erode, or destroy whatever is good in the world…”

She slid the mug into the microwave and pressed the 30 SECONDS button.

“Please don’t do that,” he said.

She looked back at him. “Do what?”

“What you are doing.”