“There is also a theory,” Andy argued, “that Damian and Daniel Debo?n were the same person.”
“That’s not very original,” Dunia retorted. “I mean, it’s kind of a vampire trope, isn’t it? Leaving the country and returning as your own son? It’s been done before.” She put out the idea along with the cigarette, then recrossed her legs and added, “Anyway, he didn’t look a hundred and fifty to me. I wonder where those agelessness genes went.”
“Mrs. Morris,” Nate started, “back during our investigation of Sleepy Lake thirteen years ago, we spent a night in your house.”
“Not my house.”
“Debo?n Mansion. That was the night when we caught Wickley, who had been pretending to be a lake creature while he searched your—the mansion for your father’s gold.”
“Yes, I read the story.”
“Right. Anyway, despite what the papers said, we’re pretty sure we saw…some strange things.”
Dunia held a chilling Hollywood-producer kind of stare.
“Things like that in your picture?” she prompted.
“No,” Nate answered, realizing that Andy had said yes at the same time. It took him several seconds to reformulate. “I spent some time in the attic that night. I saw your father’s lab. His books. I even…well, I was eleven, but I used to call myself a detective, so I did what I believed to be my job. I went through that stuff. And…I found things that wouldn’t sit well with even the most liberal conceptions of chemistry or alchemy.”
Dunia nonchalantly held his look across the sequoia table, smoking like the Great Sphinx of Giza.
“I mean, the biological samples I saw…” he continued. “I would be amazed if they had been all obtained legally. The figures and symbols drawn on the floor had nothing to do with astronomy; they were pentacles, sort of…metaphysical phone booths designed to communicate with other existential planes. And the books I saw around weren’t normal philosophical treatises; half of them are so ancient no one alive today can read them. They are rumored to explore the sublimation of life and the suspension of death.”
A clock on the mantelpiece metronomed the pause that followed.
Curled up on her seat, Dunia gazed alternately at both visitors, Nate tensely holding his ground, Andy too conscious of the taut leather on the underside of the hostess’s pants.
At last she unfolded her legs and leaned forward. “Well, you kids already know he was a sorcerer, right? The whole town knows that.”
Tim marched past between them, ignorant of the tension.
Andy began good-copping: “We didn’t mean to—”
“The whole town doesn’t know shit,” Dunia snapped. “If they did, they would’ve burned the house themselves with Debo?n in it, and we’d all be better off. I wasn’t allowed in his lab, I never opened his books. I only peeked into his lidded flasks one time, but even I know his alchemy had nothing to do with searching for the philosopher’s stone or turning lead to gold. He was raising the dead. He wasn’t a sorcerer; he was a necromancer.”
Even Tim lifted a skeptical eyebrow at that. Andy and Nate checked with each other. She tried some follow-up.
“You mean…‘raising’ as in he actually did—”
“He talked to them,” Dunia said, her voice almost unhinged. “He kept urns of human ashes, stuff I don’t know how he obtained, and at night I heard him chanting his spells, words in dead languages whose mere sounds made my skin crawl, and then I listened to him talking. And I was on the floor below, lying in my bed, terrified, because whatever went bump in my room could not be worse than what was happening above me, what my father was talking to, what my father was shouting at. What I sometimes heard replying. What I heard replying in fear.”
Andy inserted the first syllable of an apology.
“You should’ve asked my mother!” Dunia shouted. “Ask her how a miner’s widow could be blackmailed into marrying Debo?n because he was in possession of compromising secrets that only her dead husband would know. How do you think he learned to read books that no one alive today can read?”
She turned to Andy, forcing her to stare into her vertigo-deep eyes.
“You think he lived a hundred and fifty years? I’m not sure he’s dead today! I grew tired of lawyers and solicitors telling me how sad it was that my father had failed to arrange things before his death; I’m sure he arranged things, but not for me! If he arranged anything, it was for his own return!”
“How?” Nate asked, aware it’d be the last question he would fit in. “How would he return? Who would bring him back willingly?”
“Do you think the ones he brought back for questioning submitted willingly? Willingness is overrated!”
Andy stood up, signaling they would be leaving. Tim took the clue even before Nate, running for the door.
“Mrs. Morris, I hate to ask you this, but…if we could have the key to your house—”
Dunia cut him short for the third time: “It’s not my house and I don’t have a key. No way I’m going back there. If he’s dead, good riddance; if he isn’t, we’re all better off not finding out.”
—
Before they could notice the ellipsis, they were out on the porch again, frowned upon by the somber, wrecked garden. The wooden wind chime above them clopped gently right on cue.
Andy zipped up her jacket.
“Was everybody in Blyton Hills this messed up when we were young?” she wondered.
Nate said nothing. Tim was already at the gate, waiting for a butler to open it and hand him his coat and hat. They followed him, and Andy stopped by the rusty mailbox.
“Mrs. Morris got mail. No, wait. It’s not for her.”
The white envelope in her hand had the initials BSDC written on front.
She spun on her heels, scanning the empty street and widowed gardens. She tore the envelope open and pulled out a single sheet of paper, handwritten, all caps, in a single line.
“DO NOT LISTEN TO HER—GO TO THE HOUSE.”
“Who the fuck?” Andy swore, shoving the message into Nate’s hands. “I don’t know who this is, but I’m not following his orders again. No way. He almost got us killed at the lake. We’re not stupid enough to fall for this again, right?”
Nate looked up from the sheet. Color had ebbed from his face.
“Actually, glad you bring that up.”
A breeze carrying the distant rumor of old sky battles made the wind chime clop again and brushed his hair.
“Remember that night thirteen years ago? I think I fucked up astonishingly bad.”
Nate chucked two more quarters into the pay phone and tried to mute the restaurant noise by squatting behind a flock of roadworkers lunching at the counter while he argued with the operator.
“No, madam; Arkham is the city. Ark-ham, Massachusetts; that’s where the clinic is,” he said into the phone. “The patient’s name is Acker.”