The Demon of Montreal Page 4

  Curious now, she inspected the carefully ransacked closet, plundered to leave only spring season clothes behind. She stepped toward the dresser on the other side of the room and, opening the top drawer, confirmed her suspicion—every black article gone, which left Christmas and birthday presents, many of which Trisha had given her.

  The bathroom? Same. Totally empty. Trisha sat on the end of the bed.

  Thank God, oh thank God she’s not…dead? No, she wasn’t, the note was a fake, Trisha knew. She could feel it in ways unexplainable, but still the question remained…where did she go?

  She stared into her own thoughtful space, considering options and combinations of events. She stared sightlessly for some moments when her eye, of its own accord, focused on a black hoodie on the floor.

  A black hoodie. Abby left this behind? She picked it up and understood. Puke-stench stung sharp and rife. Trisha tasted her vegetable soup as she swallowed back the gag and plugged her nose.

  The garment was damp. There was something to this hoodie. Trisha checked the pockets. Lint, an empty cigarette pack and a wrapper. No, not a wrapper, a strip of paper. A thin strip that had been twisted and coiled. One that looked very much like it had once lain inside a fortune cookie.

  It was blank. A vague remembrance flickered of the other night. Trisha had known something was wrong with Abby’s fortune, but she hadn’t paid it any attention.

  Trisha dropped the hoodie and straightened the paper between two manicured fingernails, noted the anomaly, and dropped it onto the desk that held Abby’s computer. Only it didn’t fall from Trisha’s fingertips. It defied gravity and clung to them.

  Of course, static-cling. Trisha flicked her fingertips, freeing them of the small strip only to have the paper rebound back to her fingers where it clung once more.

  Trisha’s eyebrow rose. This was some static-cling. She moved her fingers in a wave pattern and watched the wrapper dance about on the backs of them.

  Some kind of magic trick? This is totally bizarre.

  Carefully now, she plucked the fortune from the backs of her fingers and pinching it by either end, laid it down on the table’s surface, flat. She let go and pulled her hands back. The paper lay prone, not moving.

  She sighed. “That was weird.”

  She poked around the apartment looking for clues and, getting caught up in an old photo album until somewhere around 12:00 a.m., she realized she hadn’t checked the computer.

  She logged on using Abby’s favorite pass code: fuckoffanddie666. She was in. She navigated to the web browser and clicked.

  The browser history dropped down with the first item on the list being ‘Best ways to die’ and other searches of a similar nature, followed by various U-Tube searches of one kind or another. She sat back and eyed the web browser, then glanced nervously at the blank fortune lying beside her. It didn’t move. “Okay, let’s see what it means.”

  She typed in her own search: “My fortune is blank.” Her search rendered a host of picks and she began navigating to each one and scanning them. It seemed other people had received blank fortunes at one time or another and posted about the phenomenon. She continued for a bit, when one post in particular caught her eye: “Blank fortunes and the occult.” She clicked on it, got some mumbo jumbo about voodoo, decided it was stupid and clicked off.

  She sat back. “Oh, Abby, what have you done now?”

  She plucked up the fortune again and eyed it in the light. “Hmm…so you’re my big clue then, are you?” She noticed the time. “I gotta get out of here.”

  Absently, she pocketed it and Abby’s house key in her purse in case she wanted to get back in for some reason, and left.

  As she drove she thought of her options. The police were out. Filing a Missing Persons Report was just that, filing. No, if Abby was off the grid, it was because she wanted it that way. If she was running, she was running from herself and Trisha was going to have to do some amateur sleuthing of her own if she was going to find her.

  Chapter Nine

  Trisha met with Steven to inform him of Abby’s disappearance. Nothing much came of their meeting, save for one thing—Steven agreed the note was a fake. Because, he’d said, if Abby really meant to do it, she would have done it in such a way as to leave no doubt, no loose ends. Abby never did anything halfway. Full throttle or nothing at all.

  The observation was exactly what Trisha needed. She hugged Steven and felt in their brief but close embrace, the love he still held for her family, and for Abby.

  “You know,” he said, “I would’ve never left if I could have—”

  She hushed him and kissed his cheek. “I know.”

  * * * *

  In the days that followed, she examined every clue again. Her mind gnawed on every tiny detail from the placement of the razor to the style of handwriting in the letter, the clothes in the closet, and of course, that one tiny, insignificant scrap of minutiae—the blank fortune.

  A dozen library books and several internet sites later led her to the neighborhood of Sainte Michel, her car idling beneath her.

  “It’s now or never,” she said aloud.

  She stared at the red brick of the government subsidized housing project. Her heart beat noticeably as she contemplated stepping foot into the home of the houngan, a voodoo priestess. The moment seemed surreal, a culmination of the last two weeks converging in this one unlikely place. A feeling gnawed at her. Perhaps from her internet research, or maybe just the nature of what she was about to do. The logic that led her to seeking the advice of a voodoo priestess to find her sister seemed suddenly a very sketchy prospect. Suddenly, the resolve that had been so solid, appeared as if it might crumble within her at any moment.

  Voodoo? Trish, are you nuts? Maybe. All I know is there is something to do this blank fortune that’s still in my pocket undamaged despite an accidental washing and three attempts to mislay it. No, the situation is nuts, maybe, but not me. Today I find my sister. Or at least find out where to look.

  A small Haitian boy, wearing Flintstone underwear and an afro that needed serious pruning, answered the door. The apartment was smoky…cigarette-smoky.

  The boy called out something in what she presumed was Haitian and pulled Trish inside. He jumped about, evidently happy to have a visitor, while keeping his eyes glued on Trish with understood fascination. Trisha felt like a cop or a reporter standing in the middle of the cluttered and dimly lit living room that smelled of smoke and boiled cabbage.

  She did not feel at ease to remove her coat and when she sat on the couch, did so with the reserve of a person about to leave. The boy called out the unfamiliar words again and then got to business showing her his G.I. Joe collection.

  Trisha feigned interest and wondered why she’d come.

  The floors creaked to the sound of a slow body in motion and Trisha looked up from a Cobra figurine. A heavy set woman of about forty stood in the living room wearing a pair of too-short white shorts and a pink tank top that did little to support her overbearing and sagging breasts. She smoked a cigarette.

  “Trisha?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Nice to meet you.”

  “You don’t gotta lie,” she said. “You ready?”

  “Oh, yes.” Trisha took a step forward.

  The woman exhaled. “Not with me,” she said and nodded to the boy. “His grandma.”

  The front door opened and standing on the threshold stood a frail and elderly black woman in an orange dress. “I am ready for you now.”

  The woman took Trisha by the hand, across the hallway to an open apartment, one festooned with orange and black crepe paper wreaths. The old woman pointed to her shoes, then made motion to take Trisha’s coat.

  Inside, not one inch of the apartment went without décor. Talismans, statuettes, shrunken heads—or at least things that looked like shrunken
heads—combined with tribal art wall hangings, candles, candles and more candles. The air was laden with cloying incense and wax perfume.

  Trisha sat down at the kitchen table at the old woman’s behest and gazed across a line of flickering flame at the priestess.

  “You come, lady, to find a lost soul, yes?”

  Trisha swallowed. It was true enough on several levels. “Yes,” she said.

  “And the soul that is lost?”

  “My sister.”

  “Oohh,” she said. “You love her very much, no?”

  Trisha felt tears catch in her throat. “Yes ma’am, very much.”

  “I can tell by the way you say it,” said the woman. “Better the more love. Easier to find with more love, eh?”

  Trisha brought out the fortune paper from her coat pocket. “Um, I was hoping you could tell me something about this,” she said.

  She handed the thin paper across the table to the old woman, her hands shaking self-consciously.

  The woman plucked the paper from her fingertips and propped a pair of reading glasses on the tip of her nose. She gazed upon the paper, no expression. After some moments she leaned back in her chair and looked with hard eyes across the table. “How you know to come here?”

  “I—I thought that you would know what it means.”

  The old woman squinted. “A trick?”

  “No,” said Trisha. “No trick, I swear.”

  “Then how you know?”

  “I don’t know. I—I did research. In the library. Apparently there is some legend, involving—”

  “Voodoo?”

  “Yes.”

  The crone raised the fortune toward her. “This yours?”

  “No,” she said, and more quietly, “it’s my sister’s.”

  The woman sat back again, shaking her head. She whispered something.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I say your sister gone forever.”

  “What do you mean, forever?” Trisha resisted her internal panic alarms that threatened to uproot every shred of her sanity. “Please…please tell me. I have to know. I have to know what’s happened to her. I have to do something—anything.”

  The old woman closed her eyes, initiating an unnerving silence. At last her expression softened and she said, “I make some tea and then tell you everyt’ing I know.”

  Chapter Ten

  The priestess set the table with a fresh pot of tea and platter of cookies and sweetbreads to rival any holiday spread. Trisha selected three different cookies with her tea, not because she was particularly hungry for them, but because she did not wish to appear rude.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, ma’am.”

  The old woman’s lips curled into a smile. “You call me Mambo Roslyn, eh.”

  Once the tea cooled a bit and Trisha had eaten at least one of her cookies, the woman sat back and licked her lips.

  “You know of what we call loa?”

  She pronounced the word like lo-are.

  “Spirits?”

  The old woman’s eyes widened, as if she were speaking to a child at bed time. “More than spirits, Lovely. Guardians! What you whities might call angels. Loa watch over us. Loa protect us. Loa give us power.”

  Trisha felt her nerves relax.

  “Except one,” said Mambo Roslyn.

  Trisha swallowed.

  “No one know what he do. No one. Until the end come.”

  “The end?” Did her voice just squeak?

  “The end,” repeated Mambo Roslyn. “He take them in the name of the The T’ing and for the ultimate service to everyt’ing. He is dark loa. He is death angel. He is…”

  * * * *

  “A clockmaker,” said Simon Marchant. “Family business.”

  The woman before him should have been pretty. Her physical endowments certainly did not lack, but her lips, pressed so close—too close together—made plain austerity of her expression. Depleted of their corpulent fullness, those lips turned down at the edges in a perpetual frown. Her skin was pale, too pale, too much like frost or snow.

  “Tell me then, Clockmaker, what brings you to Montreal from…where did you say…Paris? Surely a man of your stature and, I am sure…wealth, would have interests elsewhere, oui?”

  “Madame, I mean you no deception. I come here for personal reasons, not business. I want only a quiet room and one meal a day. I will need nothing more. And—and I will give you no grief, you have my word. My word.”

  “And my girls?”

  “Of course your girls have nothing to worry about.”

  She leaned back in her velvet skinned chair and settled into his gaze. “They are not prostitutes these girls, Monsieur, and this house is a gentlemen’s house, you understand?”

  “Yes, Madame. I would not presume it any other way and I assure you, I am a gentleman in every way.” He shifted nervously in his seat.

  He had seen one of the girls when he had first arrived, experienced her lingering eyes on him, half-hidden behind a rousing lace fan and feather hat, and he had smelled her sweetly perfumed skin. He had known her ilk at once, but did not resent her for it. Such was her beauty to command allegiance with a passing stare.

  Madame Laroux’s girls did not take on the scent of the slums, but eschewed class and sophistication in both manner and decorum.

  “My rate is two dollars a week, two-fifty with dinner, non-negotiable. Girls are extra.”

  Marchant nodded. “A fair price.”

  She shrugged. “You don’t look so frightful to me.” Her eyes wandered about his person, head to chest and back again. Was that a smile he saw flicker across those lips? She leaned forward, the tops of her white bosoms pushing up over the neckline of her pinstripe bustle dress, a sight he found intensely erotic.

  Her eyes met his. “Sad maybe, but not troublesome. Dinner is served daily at seven o’clock, for one hour. Even Sundays, no exception and no refund. You miss it, you eat elsewhere, oui? But then, I trust a clockmaker will have no qualm with schedules.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Simon Marchant had not intended to take up residence in any bawdyhouse. Indeed, he hadn’t even known that such uses were taken with Madam Laroux’s estate. He had merely fallen victim to the charming architecture and inviting glow of lamp light blazing inside the windows. The chill in the air and street mud on his shoes had done the rest. Not until he’d come in, did he realize that other purposes were invested into this rooming house.

  He did not mind.

  He was an easy man. Now. He had not always been so, but life had worked a hard trick on him a year ago and he no longer took the precautions of a younger man. A more reckless nature had begun to lay roots in his soul. A girl in his bed would be welcomed, though he doubted he would initiate a first request.

  There were a great many things about the man now called Simon Marchant that had changed, for one, his name. He was neither Simon Marchant anymore more than he was from Paris. He was Simon Kadoza, a French-English speaking Hungarian immigrant. Personal histories could be blurred easily and he saw no harm in such a ruse. He needed to start over. He needed everything new.

  Only one thing stayed the same. He was indeed a master clockmaker, owner of the company handed down by his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. He’d been the sole heir to Kadoza Clockworks, one of the few Hungarian clockworks companies that did not migrate to Vienna at the close of the fifteenth century. He had sold it one month prior to his decision to immigrate.

  Montreal offered a lot of things to a man still young enough to enjoy them but not too old to kill him. Montreal was, after all, a metropolis of the West, a boom town on the lip of the Saint Lawrence River.

  He preferred Canada to the United States, perhaps because half the bloo
d in his veins ran French from a mother raised in the wine country of Bordeaux. Montreal was new, unlike any part of Europe. It still held its innocence.

  He sat down on the bed in his room. It was cold and sure to get colder as the night turned. He rubbed his shoulders and inspected the contents of the potbelly stove. A few lumps of clinker, nothing more. He would request some fresh coal before turning in, but he would not need it just yet.

  Now he must perform the deed. He had not had the privacy to do it during the last two weeks of travel and this had taken its own kind of toll. He locked the door and removed his shirt. His hands trembled a little as he loosened each button and slipped them through the eyelets.

  He shed the garment and studied himself in the tarnishing mirror. Had his smooth chest grown thinner since last he’d had a good stare? Indeed, his whole body seemed more waif-like. Good food had been hard to come by in his travels.

  Perhaps now, with the Madame’s cooking…

  He turned to the side and pulled the skin taught. The once purple welts on his back had turned to frail pink lines since last he’d given penance. Each open wound had closed without infection. The time was ripe now. He would lay in a good one tonight, for his guilt and his shame and the images that haunted had grown heavy in the days since he’d left Budapest.

  Half wondering if this were an outcome of his prolonged loneliness, he untied an inner pouch of his travel bag. He had not so much as spoken to anyone for anything more than ordering a meal, besides Madame Laroux, in the last month.

  Had he realized that before now? How cut off from his fellows he was?

  From the pouch, he withdrew a wooden shaft. He ran his fingers along the carved post to the small acorn shaped finial at the hilt end. The tip sprouted nine thin leather fronds. He inhaled a deep breath and faced the mirror.

  His chest muscles flexed and relaxed. He jerked his arm back in one flaccid and well-practiced motion.

  The whip sang. The sting came fast and sure, the pain biting deep into his flesh. He repressed a groan, having acquired some skill at plying this ministration in close quarters, knowing how to keep it quiet, though by the end of the session he would not be able to curb his wails. Already he felt sweat bead on his brow and the skin of his back. Already he felt that throbbing swoon.