The 51
A Dean Sherwood supernatural adventure
“Excuse me, but you’re the monster guy, right?”
I was sitting at a window table in Planet Caravan, drinking coffee and studying the latest issue of GQ. I had been deep in an internal debate about how many belts it took to cross the line from “versatile wardrobe” to “eccentricity” when the kid spoke to me. It took an awkward couple of seconds to find my way back to the present moment, and I tried to buy myself more time by inviting him to sit down. He was blond, wore an oversized black knit sweater and a white Oxford shirt, and was probably in the neighborhood of seventeen or eighteen.
“One of the librarians at the main branch said I should talk to you,” he said. “She saw me going through a bunch of books about ghosts and possession and stuff, and said if I wanted firsthand information I ought to talk to Dean Sherwood.”
“That’s me,” I admitted. While “the monster guy” was not a title I would have picked for myself, I did have a certain local reputation as a person who could help with supernatural troubles. Compared to my uncle Willard, I barely knew anything, but since he had declared himself retired, I’ve been the one that people—including librarians, apparently—seek out.
“My name is Nathan Rohrbach. I think I need some help.” He dug into his pocket and produced a small item wrapped in a handkerchief, a folded wedge of bills held together with a rubber band. “I heard you charge money for this. I’ve got a hundred and eighty-two dollars. Is that enough?”
The correct answer was “no,” but I didn’t say that. Nathan was slightly disheveled and trying not to seem awkward, and thus reminded me of myself nine or ten years ago. I was curious to hear what he had to say.
He unwrapped the item and set it on the table with a soft click. It was a slim pen with a maroon barrel and a gold cap, with a clip in the shape of an arrow and a domed ferrule that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. Knowing the proprietary feelings of pen lovers, I asked permission before uncapping it. Underneath was a fountain pen nib, hooded and sleek like a Sabre jet.
“A Parker 51.” I scrawled a few words on the margin of an article about Danish spa vacations. “Looks like it’s an original. It’s in good, shape, too.”
“My girlfriend gave it to me. I’m a writer,” Nathan explained. “Or, I guess, I want to be. I’m trying to be. Jeanine said I should write my first novel with this.”
“She buys you antique pens and she supports your plans to be an artist? I don’t know this Jeanine at all, but she sounds like a keeper.”
Nathan paused, and I sensed we were now getting into subjects that were awkward to discuss with a complete stranger. I tried to recompose my features to emphasize my friendly and non-judgmental nature.
“The truth is, she didn’t buy it. It’s her stepfather’s pen. She gave it to me.”
“I see. And possibly her stepfather didn’t agree to this beforehand?”
“I don’t think so. But it doesn’t matter. She can’t stand him. He’s an ass.”
“Ass or no ass, I’m not sure I can help you with stolen property. I’m not that kind of detective.”
He shook his head quickly. “No, it’s not that. I don’t care where the pen came from. The thing is …” Here he couldn’t stop himself from looking around, just to make sure none of his friends were around to hear what he was about to say. “The thing is, ever since she gave it to me, I haven’t been alone.” He rushed ahead, as if to prevent me from scoffing, which I wasn’t about to do. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like there’s always someone standing behind me. Whenever I sit down, I want to have my back to the wall, but even that doesn’t help. It’s like I know someone’s about to put their hand on my shoulder, but I can’t see them. I know—I know for sure—that it’s about to happen, but it never does and still I keep waiting for it. It’s driving me crazy.”
I refrained from suggesting that this might be a side effect of guilt and let him continue his story.
“Before this all started, I was working on a story about a haunted house, and all of a sudden I got the idea that I might be haunted myself. So I started reading up about ghosts and demons and exorcisms. I thought maybe I could, you know, take care of it myself. That was when the lady at the library saw what I was doing and suggested I should talk to you.”
I wondered which librarian had sent Nathan my way. Since I was more endemic to the local libraries than silverfish, the list of possible candidates was not small. I appreciated her estimation of my abilities, but wondered if she had violated the librarian’s code of conduct by making comments about a patron’s reading choices.
“What would you like me to do?” I asked Nathan.
“I don’t know. Figure out what’s going on, I guess.”
“All I can guarantee is that I’ll try.” I stood up. “Can I get you a coffee? It’s on me.” I felt bad enough about taking a hundred and eighty-two dollars from someone who probably had the writer’s traditional inability to earn money, so buying his coffee was the least I could do. The shop had gotten busy, and I had to wait in line behind three other people, all of whom appeared to be inaugural members of the Complicated Coffee Order Hall of Fame. I could have just stayed in my chair and signaled to Sophie—a perk of being a regular—but I wanted time to think. Nathan’s uncanny feeling was likely due to unease at accepting, and not wanting to give back, the purloined Parker 51, exacerbated by a heavy dose of psychological priming from his attempted ghost story. Could I take his money in good conscience? In my head, I heard the voice of my uncle Willard, reminding me that the entire point of this exercise is to take money from clients. But I just couldn’t do it. By the time I reached the head of the line, I had decided to make a cursory examination of the allegedly haunted pen, execute a couple of the more common testing formulae, and tell him I couldn’t find anything. I would refuse payment, advising Nathan to use the money to take Jeanine to dinner and a romantic comedy, and try not to think about—
A flash of light caught my eye as Sophie opened the little glass-fronted pastry case on the counter. As the door swung wide enough for her to retrieve a cinnamon roll, its angle briefly caused the glass to function as a mirror, reflecting the interior of the shop. For an instant I saw Nathan, leaning back in his chair and considering making a break for the door. Behind him was a shadowy, slate-gray mass, something a disinterested observer might have written off as the shape of a large passer-by through the window. But it wasn’t. This neighborhood had its share of odd-looking people, but no one had a massive, blocky torso tapering to a cantaloupe-sized head with no discernible neck. And no one had horns. The glass door completed its arc and the image was gone. I sighed, threw out my preliminary diagnosis, and ordered two cinnamon rolls to go with the coffees.
“All right,” I said, sitting down beside Nathan again. “I’m on the job.”
By the time we had worked through our coffees, I was convinced there was nothing in Nathan’s background marking him out as a likely candidate for supernatural harassment. His troubles had begun as soon as he received the pen, and it was the pen where I needed to focus my investigation. Outside, I walked Nathan to his car and tried again to get him to loan me the 51.
“Look,” I said, working hard to maintain my affability, “It may take a while to discover what kind of thing has attached itself to your pen. It’s not like a chemical analysis, where I can just dunk it in various solutions and see what changes color. There are a lot of things I’ll need to do. Long, boring things like research. Intricate, bad-smelling things like alchemy.”
“I know, but I just feel weird about giving the pen to anyone. But I don’t mind helping with research,” he said. “I’m in honors classes at Reiter. I do research papers all the time. And did you really say alchemy?”
I took two more steps before noticing that Nathan was no longer following me. At first I thought he had seen Kharma and Eileen taking out the trash and realized, as I have, that Planet Caravan employs a statistically elevated number of good-looking women. But his attention had been arrested by something in the branches of the tree above us. In the instant before I could ask what was going one, something flashed through the leaves and struck the pavement between us.
It was a length of honey-colored wood, the size and shape of a forearm, with a hand-whittled point that must have been needle-sharp before it snapped against the sidewalk. My first impulse was to smell it. It had a primeval scent suggesting this wasn’t the kind of wood you might find at the local home-improvement store. Nathan elbowed me as a figure dropped from the tree and landed in the street with bent-kneed grace. In the two seconds before it dashed down the alley between a pair of Art Deco townhouses, I registered a light-blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, dark pants, and heavy black boots.
“Did …” Nathan began. “Did … someone just throw a wooden stake at us?”
“I don’t think that was meant for both of us,” I said. “Maybe you ought to come with me.”
Fifteen minutes later we were in the kitchen of Uncle Willard’s house, where I live as his business manager, assistant, and general factotum. The house is a cozy two-block walk from the coffee shop on normal days, but the trip was made considerably longer by constant vigilance against assassins. I had spread out a flashlight, magnifying glass, several unfolded paperclips, and a Swiss army knife on the table and was studying the Parker 51. The wooden stake lay off to one side. A quick survey of a woodworking reference book had identified the wood as hawthorn, a species particularly potent against the uncanny. Nathan sat beside me, alternating between watching me work and trying not to pay attention to my uncle, who was glowering at us from his chair in the living room. Despite Willard’s habitual chilliness to intruders, Nathan was far more relaxed than he’d been earlier, which is the opposite of what I expected, given that someone had just targeted his skull for long-distance trepanning. I attributed this to the fact that the ominous slate-gray presence was now waiting impatiently outside rather than looming over him. Uncle Willard and I had spent a good deal of time and effort armoring the house against unwanted occult forces, and while our defenses were not foolproof, they would at least provide a warning if anything happened to slither its way inside. So far, Nathan’s unwanted companion had not managed this, and the only unpleasant creature we had to worry about was my uncle.
Eventually, Willard gave up the pretense of reading his book and stood in the doorway like a monolith in a cardigan. I attempted to forestall the lecture about bringing unannounced clients to the house by appealing to his vanity. “Can you give me some help with this?” I asked, handing him the gold cap of the 51. “I think there’s an inscription here. Either that, or it’s a really weird scratch. What do you think?”
He peered, twisting the cap back and forth so the faded marks caught the light. “It’s cursive Greek. The spacing is odd, like the engraver was working from a reference image and didn’t know the language. It says something along the lines of ‘a competent magician never reveals his tricks.’ Does that pertain to your investigation?”
I shrugged. “Possibly.”
Willard looked over our heads, through the window into the back yard. I could see his mind working. “A competent magician never reveals his tricks,” he repeated to himself. “I suppose that might be close enough. It’s less idiomatic, and probably easier to translate.” Then, returning his attention to us, he asked me, “You probably don’t recall the Amazing Nick, do you?”
Something tugged at my memory, but I couldn’t reach an answer. “I’ve run across it before, but can’t remember where.”
“The Amazing Nick was a weatherman for Channel Seven. I believe his complete title was ‘The Amazing Nick, the Weather Wizard.’ This was many, many years ago, before viewers preferred to receive their forecasts from people with credentials. When there was time to fill at the end of the broadcast’s weather segment, he would perform magic tricks, and always ended his patter by saying, ‘How did I do it? A good magician never tells.’ That’s very close to what’s inscribed on the pen.”
“Where does the fact that it’s in Greek come in?” I asked.
The Amazing Nick’s last name was Photopoulus, which suggests a connection.” Willard handed the cap back to me. “The pen might have been a retirement gift when he was finally eased out of Channel Seven.”
“Wait a second,” Nathan said. “Did this guy have a costume? With, like robes and a medallion?”
“I believe so.”
Recognition dawned on Nathan’s face. “I think you’re right about the pen. Jeanine’s dad is some kind of manager at Channel Seven, and he’s got this big framed display on his office wall, a shadow-box kind of thing. It’s got a bunch of pictures of a guy in a wizard costume, and a few bizarre old badges or stars attached next to it. I think they were part of the outfit from the guy in the picture.”
“Maybe those pieces were more than just decorative,” I said. “It’s possible they may have been holding off whatever was attached to the pen. That explains why the trouble only started once the pen was moved away from them.”
I gently poked around in the interior of the pen cap with one of the unfolded paper clips. The wire struck something at the apex of the cap, and a small gray packet, no larger than an aspirin, fell onto the table. A little judicious attention with the tip of a knife revealed it to be a scrap of heavy paper, folded and balled up, with a tiny discoloration where a drop of glue had adhered it in place.
“It looks like the Amazing Nick might have had some assistance with his magic,” I said.
“Personally, I don’t recall his tricks being that good,” Willard said.
“Is the paper in Greek, too?” Nathan asked, leaning in close as I rotated it around to figure out the correct orientation. When I agreed, he pointed to a ragged edge with the spidery black letters spilling out into nothingness. “It’s torn in half.”
“Common practice for a magic formula.” Nathan didn’t balk at my use of the word “magic,” which I appreciated. Sometimes, even when confronted with indisputable evidence of the real thing, people are hesitant to hear the word out loud. “Having the charm in two places is a sort of fail-safe. It can’t be modified or destroyed until the two halves are reunited.”
I checked inside the barrel of the 51, just to be sure the second half wasn’t right under our noses, then reassembled the pen and returned it to Nathan, who had been eyeing it the way a terrier eyes an unattended sandwich.
“We aren’t done, are we?” he asked.
“Afraid not. With the whole charm, we should be able to send the thing outside back where it came from.”
“What is it?”
“Couldn’t tell you. What matters now is that we get rid of it. Whatever it is, I think its business was with the Amazing Nick, not you.”
He prodded the hawthorn stake with a cautious finger. “Will that stop whoever did this?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. The first thing is to find the other half of the charm.”
From the doorway came the heavy sigh of a man making it clear how much work he’s doing on your behalf. “Wait here,” Willard said.
Within the space of two phone calls, Uncle Willard had an address for us, and soon afterward we were standing on a knoll near the back of Fairhill Cemetery, frowning at a low mausoleum with the name “Photopoulus” chiseled on the side.
“It was nice of your uncle to find out where this guy was buried,” Nathan said.
“He probably just wanted the house to himself again,” I said absently as I scanned the area. Fairhill Cemetery, once situated on a remote plot of land between the city and the river, now was bordered by a bowling alley to the north, a bakery to the south, housing developments to the east, and a strip mall to the west. A scattering of mature trees stood throughout the cemetery, but not enough to reliably screen what we were about to do. I was going to have to lean on the old cliche that people rarely paid attention to anyone who looked like they were supposed to be there. Luckily for us, this works a ridiculously large percentage of the time.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked Nathan. Ever since we’d left the house, Nathan’s posture had deteriorated, and his features had become set and tense.
“I’m not sure. I don’t think I knew how bad this thing was making me feel until it went away when we were at your house. Now it’s back, and it’s even worse. If something doesn’t change soon, I may be in trouble.”
Whenever I caught sight of Nathan from the corner of my eye, I could make out the shape of the thing following him. It wasn’t much, just a thick place in the air, but if you knew what you were looking for, it was unmistakable. I set down the sack of tools I’d brought, and zipped up the navy blue utility jacket I had put on as camouflage. The patch on the chest read “Randall’s Quick Lube” and “Tommy” under that, but the ensemble was enough to pass the eye test at twenty yards.
“Are we really doing this?” Nathan asked.
“Just be glad it’s not a regular grave. Hold the flashlight for me.”
While I worked on the lock, Nathan scanned the trees. I’m sure he was still thinking about the incident with the wooden stake earlier this morning, and wondering if the assailant was lurking in the leaves somewhere, hidden by the late-afternoon shadows. Within a few minutes I had gotten the lock open and loosened the door with a pry bar.
“Just to let you know,” I said, “things may get a little weird from here.”
I got not one word of sarcasm when the cramped interior turned out to have no occult diagrams on the walls, no passageway to a subterranean labyrinth, and not even an indignant ghost, so perhaps breaking into a mausoleum was already weird enough in the eyes of a normal person. I had been steeled for something more, since I had it on good authority that several mausoleums here connected to a tunnel that ran under Green River Road and came up somewhere in the strip mall beyond.
“Well, let’s get this started,” I said, feeling around the edge of the tomb lid for the likeliest place to insert the pry bar. “If the other half of that charm is anywhere, it’s probably in there somewhere. I’d ask if you wanted to wait outside, but it’s better if we stay together—”
The door of the mausoleum flew open. For an instant, I hoped it was only a stray gust of wind, though I knew winds strong enough to pull open an iron door didn’t just spring up with no warning. Then, when I saw the figure silhouetted in the doorway, I hoped it might have been a groundskeeper demanding to know what the hell we were doing. That would have been fine as well, since I liked the odds of my charm and my utility jacket smoothing over any awkwardness. But when the short, hooded shape raised a hand gripping a rough wooden stake, I knew things were going to get dicey.
“Who are you?” Nathan insisted, with the indignant voice of someone who has already been nearly impaled once today.
“Hand over the paper.” From the gloom of the sepulcher, I recognized the same pale blue jacket from the earlier assault, and what I had thought were slim-fit pants were actually a pair of leggings. The hood of the sweatshirt slipped, freeing a few wayward tresses. Our mysterious assailant was a girl, and barely older than Nathan.
I switched on the flashlight. Her expression was set in the hard lines often seen on the petite and cute when attempting to be intimidating. “All right,” I said, keeping my tone reasonable. “Let’s talk for a minute. First of all, I’m Dean, this is Nathan. And you are?”
“You don’t need to know my name. I’m here to destroy the demon.”
Even though I doubted “demon” was the correct description, this wasn’t the worst news I could have heard. Ever since we’d broken into the Amazing Nick’s tomb, the presence around Nathan had grown more pronounced, to the point where, even though it was largely invisible, I felt like it was about to cast its own shadow. If we didn’t find the second half of the charm, we were going to have to take drastic action, and this girl might be able to help.
“And then I’ll destroy the demon’s master,” she added, frowning at Nathan.
“What?” cried Nathan, rapidly and understandably losing his composure.
“I think you may not have all the facts,” I said, dividing my attention between the girl and the growing presence in the corner. “Who sent you?”
She shook her head. “You don’t need to know that, either.”
“It might help,” I said. “I know a lot of people who do this kind of thing. Maybe we have friends in common.”
She held the stake with both hands, a position I recognized from innumerable Hammer movies. “That’s not possible. The White Iris doesn’t communicate with outsiders.” A pause. “Crap.”
I thought I had a passing familiarity with every occultist, self-styled warlock, and heretical sect in the tri-state area, but I had never heard of the White Iris. I had no idea if it was a globe-spanning organization or just a couple of teenagers with a large manga collection and time on their hands. But that was a question for later.
The girl kept going, hoping I would overlook her mistake. “We’ve had half of the paper for years, ever since one of us found it in an estate sale. Just recently it started acting strange—moving on its own and glowing in the dark—and we realized that the second half of the incantation had become active.”
That must have been when Nathan’s girlfriend stole the pen, removing it from the protective proximity of the Amazing Nick’s other artifacts.
“We realized the demon master must be preparing to let his demon loose on the world again.”
“I’m not a demon master,” Nathan insisted, ignoring my signals to stay silent.
“If you’re not the demon master, why do you have the other half of this?” She took out a small scrap of grubby paper, sheathed in a clear plastic sleeve. At a glance, it was the right shape to be the other half of the paper I’d found inside the Amazing Nick’s Parker 51.
“I don’t have it!” Nathan’s tone suggested a degree of doubt that I could protect him from this stake-wielding lunatic. “All I have is this,” he added, waving the maroon and gold pen like a talisman.
I took the pen from Nathan’s shaking hand and retrieved the other half of the charm from between the pages of my notebook. I held the paper up to show the girl. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got it,” I said, “and I can assure you that I am by nobody’s definition a demon master, least of all—”
My riposte was interrupted by several disturbing events happening in rapid succession. The thick place in the air, marking the presence of the evil spirit, suddenly moved away from Nathan, and toward the two fragments of the magic charm, both of which had begun to glow like jack-o-lanterns.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
I assured her that this was just as much of a surprise to her as it was to me, and attempted to put my fragment away again. It had been a bad idea to let the two sundered pieces “see” each other, and breaking their connection seemed like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, my arm refused to move, and I could tell from the girl’s shocked expression that she was dealing with the same problem.
The creature was coalescing into an actual shape, becoming less translucent by the second. It drifted through the Amazing Nick’s casket and stopped between the girl and me, reaching out two lumpy paws toward the fragments. The papers flew into the air and knitted themselves together into an unblemished whole, which fluttered around the room in a sudden rush of air. Behind me, I heard the flashlight drop from Nathan’s fingers and clatter to the floor. Freed from my paralysis, I picked it up as it rolled past me, then shone the beam in his direction. I was about to ask if he was okay, but the words didn’t come out. It was obvious to anyone that Nathan was not okay.
From the shoes to the shoulders he was the same as he had always been, but his head had become a slate gray cone of leathery flesh, displaying yellowed horns, a fanged mouth with protruding tusks, and two piggy eyes full of savage elation. It bounded toward the door, and I am not ashamed to admit that I made very little attempt to stop it. The inside of a mausoleum is not exactly roomy, and I wanted to make sure that this newly-made hybrid of monster and client knew it could go around me rather than through me. The girl in the sweatshirt hesitated, gauging her chances, but jumped out of the way an instant before it collided with her. By the time I exited the mausoleum, the thing was loping in the direction of the wrought iron fence and the bowling alley beyond.
“Stay here,” she barked, clutching her wooden stake and taking off in pursuit. The monster kept making staggering diagonal lurches as it ran away, as if getting used to how its new legs worked. That gave us plenty of time to catch up before it reached the fence. Having ignored the girl’s orders, I was in a position to see her gather herself for a final spring, aiming to drive her wooden stake between Nathan’s shoulder blades. I stuck out a foot and sent her sprawling. I felt bad, in part because I knew how difficult it would be to get those grass stains out, but Nathan’s hundred and eighty-two dollars bought a certain amount of loyalty.
“If you stab him with that stake, you’ll kill him along with the creature,” I said.
“Acceptable losses.”
“Not yet it isn’t. Besides, I have an idea.”
She spit out a fragment of leaf, then looked past me, her eyes growing wide. The monster had turned, possibly curious about why we had stopped chasing it to yell at each other. This was good, in that it kept the thing from rampaging in the bowling alley parking lot, but now its attention was focused on us, and it didn’t look any friendlier. It was time to see if my idea was any good.
“Go get the paper,” I hissed to the girl.
“What?”
“The paper! The charm! The Amazing Nick’s contract with whatever this is. We left it in the mausoleum. Go get it!”
“Why?”
The monster was nearly upon us, so I had time to either shout a quick explanation or shake my head at the girl’s denseness. It should be no surprise which one I picked. Then I turned my attention to the approaching thing.
“Nathan, I know you can hear me.” I used the firm yet level tone favored by hostage negotiators. “I want to help you, but you need to help, too. Try to get yourself free, just a little bit. Can you do that?”
The monster hesitated. I took the Parker 51 from my pocket and held it up. “Here’s your pen. Remember this? Your girlfriend gave it to you. It means a lot to you. You’re going to write a novel with it. Do you remember this?”
I saw vague warping around the edges of the monster, like an imperfect superimposition of two images.
“You’d like it back, right? You can have it, but you’ve got to reach for it. Can you do that, Nathan?”
The thing’s demonic little eyes narrowed, and its left arm rose unsteadily toward the pen in my hand. At that moment I could see two faces, the monster’s and Nathan’s.
I heard footsteps crunching on the leaves behind me. The girl had returned with the paper. I checked that I could still see Nathan’s face, then yelled, “Destroy it!” at her.
“But it’s valuable!”
“I don’t care! Shred it or I’m going to send this thing after you!”
With a petulant sigh, she tore the reassembled paper into strips, and then tore the strips into fragments. It would have been better to burn it all, but she inflicted enough damage to fulfill the mystical definition of “destruction.”
For a moment the complete creature was visible in all its blobby, wrinkly glory. Then, just as it realized that the charm binding it to the Amazing Nick was finally gone, it also realized that the magic allowing it to remain in this world was gone as well. It uttered a roar, strangely high-pitched for its bulk, then dissipated into the ether.
Nathan fell to the ground, nearly cracking his head on a tombstone. Once I made sure he was stable, I stood up again. I was annoyed that the girl from the White Lilly had jumped straight to the most lethal option, and intended to speak to her like an elder brother on the issue, but she was gone. I caught a flash of pale blue vaulting over the east wall and into the trees and shook my head.
Nathan was on his feet again. “How do you feel now?” I asked.
He didn’t respond right away, and seemed confused by being in control of his own body again. “Pretty good,” he said. “Weird, but pretty good. You know how it is when you’ve been sick for a while and then you get better and feel like a completely different person? Kind of like that.”
“This is yours, by the way.” I handed him the pen. “I think you’ll be able to use it in peace from now on. Assuming your girlfriend’s stepdad never finds out.”
Nathan uncapped the pen and wrote a few squiggles on his hand, just to make sure it still worked. “Thanks.” He looked out across the cemetery, where the Amazing Nick’s mausoleum still stood unlocked and my tools waited to be retrieved. “This gives me a great idea for a story.”
“Do me a favor—change the names,” I said.