The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (17 page)

Trace turned to see Rex Reynolds standing not two feet from him, as if he’d materialized behind the roller press, wearing that carrion-eating grin.

“Well, hey!” Reynolds said. “Looks like the gang’s all here.” The grin slipped as Trace started toward him. “Now take it easy, son—”

Trace grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him against the nearest cabinet. Things rattled and crashed inside.

“Whoa! Easy on the threads, there, young’un—”

“And here
you
are,” Trace said, “come to feed off the trouble you stirred up.”

Reynolds’s mocking grin narrowed to something darker, more menacing. His eyes lit with sparks of red in their depths, and Trace felt the hairs on his neck stand up as the power in his brain came suddenly awake, throwing up a shield between himself and the reporter.

“Ah,” Reynolds said quietly. “Getting smarter, are you?”

Avery got up from his chair. “I told you not to come in here again, mister.”

Reynolds shook off Trace’s hands and twitched his tweed back into place. “What kind of welcome is this? I thought I was bein’ plumb considerate to come down here and tell you there was a mob on its way.”

“Why?” Trace demanded. “What did you write about us?”

At that moment there was a loud banging on the front door. “Avery!” a voice bellowed. “We know you’re in there! We wanna talk to you!”

“There’s a rumor going around that the proprietors of this print shop are engaged in devil worship.” Reynolds eyed the apparatus on the table. “So you might wanna wrap up your revival meeting before they break in here.”

“Avery!” The banging became a crash, as if a boot heel had struck the door.

“You.” Trace pointed at Avery. “Go out there and talk to them. Tell ‘em whatever you have to, just don’t let ‘em in here.”

Avery gave a beleaguered sigh and shambled toward the front rail. “All right, but my type isn’t getting set. Don’t blame me if the paper’s late this week…”

Abruptly there was a crash and a bang from the type desk, followed by a patter of lead. The upper case had flipped upside down and fallen smack on the desk, scattering a hail of letters everywhere. The little bits of type stirred, as if in a wind, and began to align themselves in ragged rows.

“
Now
look at this mess,” Avery grumbled. He bent over to the type and sank stiffly to one knee. “Every time you damn kids come in here, stuff starts flying off the walls. You whippersnappers think I’ve got nothing better to do than clean up after your tricks…” Abruptly he went still, hunched over the type, head hanging down. “‘You will all die,’” he read in a hollow voice. “‘I am born of the shadows and the hearts of men—’”

The lamps in the room dimmed noticeably. A moment later there was a scattered exclamation from the crowd outside. Trace glanced through the window and saw there were more men than before, some of them bearing torches. Then he spotted the silver star lying abandoned beside Avery’s chair. “Wait—!”

“‘Four men were killed,’” Avery intoned, “‘when a mob attacked a local newspaper office—’”

Boz took a long step forward and kicked at the spread of letters. They went scattering, and Avery slumped to one side like a rag doll. His mouth and eyes were slack, empty.

A sound like angry bees began to build in the room. A cloud of ink lifted off every surface in the shop, rose into the air like black fog. It coalesced into a whirling funnel which swept across the room and toward the front door. There was a rattle and thunder as the door trembled, and the black cloud sucked through the mail slot, the transom, the keyhole.

The crowd outside fell ominously silent.

Then Boz said, “What are y’all
waitin
for? Do the damn exorcism!”

A cry went up from the crowd outside, and footsteps pounded onto the sidewalk, crowding the building. Something crashed through the plate glass window at the front. The men inside all crouched slightly, eyes following the brick as it skittered across the floor and struck the rail.

“Blood! Now!” Trace bawled at Danny and Sol. “Get to reading!”

Danny popped open his cuff and flicked out a jackknife. He held his arm over the bowl and applied the point of the blade to the back of his hand. Blood spurted and he turned his fist down over the bowl so the flow dripped off his knuckles. Trace grabbed the knife from him and cut the back of his own hand, adding to the pool in the bowl. Sol began to read, gabbling the words in a gutteral sing-song.

Boz, showing as usual more sense than anyone else, extinguished the lamps on the desk, then picked up the spilled type drawer from the floor. Holding it as a shield before his body, he hopped the customer rail and propped the drawer against the broken window. He snuffed the two lanterns on the front counter, darkening the front of the store and giving Trace a clear view of the mob outside for the first time. He caught a glimpse of torches and long gun barrels. Boz snaked out an arm to pull the wooden shutter nearest the desk, but as soon as he did a shotgun blast took out most of the shutter and the window. Danny and Sol cried out in alarm, and Boz dropped flat to the floor.

“You all right?” Trace demanded, from his own crouching position.

Boz rolled to one elbow and fired three quick shots through the hole in the window. Screams from outside. He knocked the shutter closed and dived over the rail to the back of the room.

“There’s more of ‘em,” he said through his teeth. The sleeve of his shirt was turning dark and shiny.

“You’re hit!”

“It ain’t much,” Boz insisted, but Trace grabbed the sleeve and tore it, and felt his heart start up again when he saw it was only glass cuts, not the raw meat of a buckshot wound.

Suddenly Danny yelled. Trace turned to see Avery advancing on the boys with the fire poker. Sol raised his hands, eyes wide, chanting frantically, and Avery laid the iron across his temple.

It made a sound like splitting kindling. Sol dropped like a feather pillow. Avery stepped over him, his drooling, vacant grin now fixed on Danny. He raised the iron for another stroke, but Danny grabbed for the poker and Trace seized Avery from behind.

It should have been no contest—Trace’s size and Danny’s youth against the old man—but the strength of the demon was incredible. It twisted the poker, smacking Danny across the ear with the butt of it. Then it stabbed back at Trace, who dodged and fell against the table.

Avery grinned, black slime oozing between his teeth. He raised the poker over his head and Trace stepped inside the swing, caught the old man around the chest and felt the poker fall past his arm, smashing the dybbuk bowl into smithereens.

“No!” Danny cried.

Now Trace was mad. He drove one fist into Avery’s gut, felt the lungs give way with a bugle of escaping air, and punched the man in the jaw. Avery went down without further complaint. Trace swept his arm across the debris on the table, hurtling down broken crockery, ash, and salt. Avery writhed and howled, and Trace saw the black tadpoles oozing from the man’s mouth and ears, trying to get away.

Danny dropped to Sol’s side, hands fluttering around his friend’s head. Sol’s eyes were open and Trace could see from where he stood there was no hope. He snatched the scroll from the floor and picked up Danny by the scruff of the neck. “He’s gone. You read.”

“He’s dead!”

“We’re all gonna be if you don’t read the goddamn ritual!”

Danny’s eyes flickered wildly over the ruins of the table. “But the bowl—”

“Never mind the bowl! I’ll find something else. Start reading!”

Danny gulped and began to read. “‘By all the holy names of the angels! I beseech you in this circle to tell me the name of the evil spirit herein! I beseech you Michael, Gabriel, Shuviel…’”

While Danny read the endless list of names, Trace ransacked the shelves below the customer counter, and then the cabinet against the wall, searching for an empty bottle or jar with a lid. He found papers, wooden boxes, broken type, broken clamps, tins full of lead bits, pencils, pens without nibs, and inkwells without stoppers. There was a battered cracker tin with a broken hinge. A couple of patent medicine bottles with the corks permanently hardened within.

“‘Ahadriel, Yechutriel…’”

An idea occurred to him. He moved around the corner to the editor’s type desk and yanked open the bottom drawer. Sure enough, there was a half-full bottle of whiskey wedged in between a collection of wooden spacer blocks.

Trace yanked it out, pulled the cork, and poured the contents onto the floor. The sweet sting of whiskey burned his nostrils. His mind flashed briefly on that other bottle, in the jail cell, and its foul contents, and how it had been delivered to him. He glanced around, knowing as he did that Reynolds had vanished. Again.

“‘Zumtiel, Zumtziel…’”

The sound of gunfire outside made him tense, turn toward the front. Boz had wedged himself into the corner beside the broken window, peering out in the dark, gun in hand but pointed down. The crowd outside was screaming, and by the sound of it, scattering.

“Police are here!” Boz reported.

“Well, thank God for small favors,” Trace muttered. The sounds of riot, screams and shouts, hoofbeats and police whistles wafted in from the street.

“‘All you who were made on the eve of the Shabbat, tell me his name!’” Danny cried.

A hush fell over the room. There was a feeling of uplift, as though the air was sucked up in a vast inhalation.

Ergoth,
said a voice near Trace’s ears. It was thick and whispery, like the wind through rotten leaves.
Son of Mirsoggh and of Mygaroth.

Big-eyed, Danny looked at Trace.

Trace looked at Boz.

“That a good thing?” Boz asked.

“That didn’t happen before,” Trace admitted.

Danny opened his mouth to say something, and at that moment the platen press behind him lurched to life. It shook itself and yawned, the iron knees flexing, the wide metal tongue on top opening wide. The front legs buckled and it lunged at Danny, jaws clanging together. Danny leapt away, and stumbled over Sol’s inert form. He went down with a yelp and scuttled back like a crab as the machine crashed at his feet.

Trace grabbed the last candle from the table and threw it into the press’s gaping maw. A great belch of flame shot up as the grease on the rollers ignited. Something screamed, like fingernails raked down the back of Trace’s skull, the terror of the damned for fire.

A terrific crash took out most of the front window. A flaming barrel of tar smashed through the railing and fetched up against the long roller press. In seconds it was aflame.

Boz fired a series of quick shots through the new hole in the window, retreating as he did into the back of the shop.

“Get Avery!” Trace said to Danny. “Drag him to the back door. Make sure it’s clear.”

Danny obeyed, grabbing Avery’s ankles and struggling manfully.

Boz holstered his right-hand pistol and cracked open the breech on the left, shucking the empty cartridges. “Is that it, then? We done?”

“About to be,” Trace said. “Go clear the way for the kid.”

Boz’s hands never paused in their reloading. “Case you ain’t noticed, the place is on fire and there’s a mob comin through the front door.”

“I’ll be right there,” Trace said. “I don’t need you for this.”

He could feel the thing, trapped in the nooks and crannies of the shop where it had built its nest, burning in torment and struggling to free itself. Its struggles called to that lightning-bright power in him, excited it, fed it.

In the drunk tank, he’d hardly had time to think about what he was doing; the thing had attacked him and he’d fought back. But he had known immediately
how
to fight it, just as Miss Fairweather had said. All those years of ignoring the power, pushing it down, had banked it and given him a measure of control.

Or maybe he was just doing what God had meant for him to do with it.

Trace held up the whiskey bottle and his free hand. “Ergoth!” he bellowed, using his cattle-range voice. “Son of Mirsoggh and of Mygaroth! You hear me, you sonuvabitch?”

A great wind blew through the pressroom, roaring across the flames and flinging paper into the air. Trace felt heat and icy cold swirl around him, felt the demon’s impotent fury at being so addressed. “Ergoth son of Mirsoggh and of Mygaroth, I command you in God’s holy name and by the names of all the angels and all your masters,
enter this vessel
!”

The roller press groaned and shuddered on its burning legs. Bits of lead type pelted Trace like hail. He shielded the whiskey bottle with his body. This thing might be limited in its powers, but it was old, and proud. It twined around him, cajoling, threatening, pleading. Trace felt for that ball of lightning in himself and let it out, a little at a time, feeding along his arms and up the back of his neck until he was sure his hair must be standing on end. He cast out with the power, let it twine through the cold dark presence of the demon, and then tightened it like a lasso. The thing squalled with fury.

“Last chance,” Trace said. “Into the bottle or I let you burn.”

It rushed at him, a gale force that nearly knocked the bottle from his hand. He clutched it to his chest, reeling under the impact, felt the cold stone weight of the thing punch him in the lungs and then coalesce, contained.

No sooner had he jammed the cork into place than hands landed on Trace’s shoulders, dragging him backwards so he almost lost his feet. His lungs were burning, and his eyes, and he couldn’t see who had hold of him, but he let himself be dragged over the threshold and down the back stoop, into the alley behind the print shop, where the sky was twinkling twilight and the air was the freshest he’d ever tasted.

He leaned into Boz’s arms, stumbling to a grassy patch across the street, where Danny and Avery huddled. Danny had a blanket around his shoulders and his head in his hands, but he looked up when Trace fell to his knees. “Are you all right? Did you get it?”

Trace nodded, hacking and unable to speak. The cold of the bottle was burning his hands. He set it down, coughing, and gratefully accepted the tin cup someone held out to him.