It wasn’t enough
25Oct
I dodged calls from Hammond, and from my brother Fred. I can only imagine the one called the other. I went to Sully’s, my favorite dive bar, the kind of place that didn’t care if you broke the city’s no-smoking ordnance, and sat in a booth at the back with a cigar. It was the middle of the afternoon so the place was nearly empty. Not that you could tell the time of day. Sully’s was old school. No windows. A holdover from the days when you didn’t want your churchgoing neighbors to know you were backsliding. It was just as dim in the afternoon as it was at night. A permanent smoky dusk.
I lit my cigar slowly and sipped Ouzo, with a grimace, from a tiny glass. I don’t like Ouzo, which was my way of limiting how much I drank. I lifted my box of tricks from the floor and opened it. I took out the round ampules of holy water, tied together on the same length of cord like a string of grenades, and set it on one side of the table. I took out the giant salamander claw, dried and crisp, and dangled it in front of me on the string tied to one end. I set it by the ampules. I took out the Coptic cross and the shiny bezoars and the tarnished silver coins and the rest of it. Soon, it was empty.
I looked at it all. I moved the wax voodoo doll I’d confiscated from a homeless man in Midtown to one side. I put the broken wand next to it—one half, tapered at the tip, opposite end splintered and frayed like a cut rope. Then I removed the talisman from around my neck and set it between.
That was it. That was all I had. The rest of it was either a fraud, a mystery, or nothing with a chance of helping in a battle against a wizard.
I took another drag from my cigar.
It wasn’t enough.
I put the rest of it back in the box and closed it. I put the talisman back around my neck and slipped the wand into the left pocket of my jacket and the wax figure in the right. I finished my Ouzo in one gulp, coughed once, and dropped the cigar into the glass. I left a twenty on the table—surcharge for the municipal violation—and waved to Sully and walked out, box under my arm.
Ever notice how there are some places that just can’t seem to support a business? Places where one restaurant after another opens and then goes out of business? No matter what the owners try, nothing seems to work. That’s what a curse looks like. It’s what happens if you’re not paid up to your local witch. Or at least, that’s what I learned from the story of John Blymire of York County, Pennsylvania. Blymire suffered years of unexplained illness and repeated turns of bad luck. Eventually, his health and finances deteriorated to the point that his future looked both short and grim. Racked with a debilitating cough and unable to find work, he slipped deeper and deeper into a depression, often not leaving his rural farmhouse for days. He lost weight. He didn’t shave or cut his hair, which made him quite the spectacle. But it wasn’t until an old lover paid a visit and mentioned curses that John seriously considered the possibility.
York County is old Dutch country. To this day, barns and farmhouses there bear stars and circles on their flanks—hex signs to ward off black magic and foul spirits. Way back when, everybody knew there were witches in the dells. None of the surviving accounts detail what he paid for her services, but we know Blymire paid a visit to one—Nellie Noll, known locally as the River Witch of Marietta. John left his house at sundown and made his way up the dirt wash to the dry embankment where Nellie lived, in a shady grove under the roots of a willow tree. He knocked on the wood three and three and three times and turned once in a circle, and a door opened.
After tasting a bit of his blood, which she spat in disgust, Nellie Noll told the bearded, wild-haired, cough-ridden Blymire that he was indeed cursed. She casted tiny bird bones from a wooden cup like dice and said the culprit was none other than his rural neighbor, Nelson Rehmeyer, with whom John had had repeated conflict. The pair had argued about everything, it seemed—politics and religion and the best way to bring in the harvest and water rights and the proper border of their land, but mostly about the old lover who’d since become Nelson’s betrothed. Nellie explained that Rehmeyer had acquired a copy of an old German spell book, “The Long Hidden Friend,” and he was using it to hex Blymire, whom she said was dying as if by slow poison.
The solution, she counseled, was simple. Blymire merely had to find the book, the source of his neighbor’s spells, and bury it in secret, preferably at midnight, with a lock of the man’s hair closed inside.
Blymire wasted no time. After cutting his hair and beard, he went to town and recruited the help of a young friend, Wilbert Hess, aged 18, and within days, the pair visited Nelson Rehmeyer in his home and attempted to procure the book by argument and coercion. When Rehmeyer turned them away with a shotgun, the pair recruited another accomplice, the sickly John Curry, aged 14, who was also believed to have been cursed, and on the night of November 28th, the three men broke into Rehmeyer’s home just before midnight, tied the man to a chair, and searched from basement to attic.
They were unable to find the book. Rehmeyer, it seemed, had taken the wise precaution of hiding it, and hiding it well. He admitted as much to his assailants after bragging that Blymire’s predicament was due payment for years of insult. Enraged, Blymire struck the man and demanded to know the location of “The Long Hidden Friend.” When Rehmeyer refused, Blymire hit him again. And again. And again. And kept hitting, releasing years of anger and frustration. Lost crops. Failed ventures. Cold nights and dinners of stale bread.
Eventually, at 12:01—when the clock on the mantle stopped—Nelson Rehmeyer died suddenly as a result of his injuries. Fearing there would now be no way to lift the curse, Blymire frantically doused the body with kerosene from a lamp on the mantle and then lit it in the hope that burning the man and his house would take the book with it—or at the very least hide the evidence of the crime.
It did not. For as soon as the flames took and the three men fled, the fire mysteriously went out just as fast as it had started, leaving a beaten, partially charred corpse and the entire wooden house completely intact, where it still stands today. The body was found, and after a brief investigation by the sheriff, the three accomplices, who’d made little secret of their schemes, were arrested and charged. The curse, it seemed, had worked its awful magic and John Blymire was convicted of murder and died in prison.
All of this, by the way, took place in 1928, the same year Albert Fish murdered and ate ten-year-old Grace Budd in nearby New York City. It was also the year a Civil War-era prison in Brooklyn was bought and converted into a slaughterhouse. The company managed to survive the Great Depression but not the rise of the supermarket. It went out out business in the late 60s, and the lot was abandoned, becoming just another bit of urban rot that spread through the city in the stagflation of the 1970s.
It wasn’t until booming property values triggered a wave of urban renewal that the space was bought again and converted—first, into upscale shopping, and then into a restaurant, which closed a few years later when the owner died suddenly, aged 46. The unit was then purchased by one Etude Étranger. The chef converted the upper floors to a workshop and opened his bistro on the ground floor, where it remains.
After 9/11, the structural plans for various historic landmarks around the city were removed from public view, accessible only by permit. The idea was to make it difficult for any would-be terrorists to pack one of the city’s many abandoned underground spaces with explosives, Guy Fawkes-style. But those plans are available to police officers, provided they have justification—such as a warrant application to search just such a landmark as part of a murder investigation.
The original building had a well for sewage, a well that had to be bypassed when the modern sewer system was built. There’s grate access in the tunnels below the street. Beyond that, there’s a short brick passage and a door—a metal door studded in bolt heads, like something left from the original prison. It’s sealed of course. There’s not even a handle on the outside. But Granny Tuesday gave me instructions: say the magic word.
I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”
You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.
You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.
The next chapter is: (not yet posted)
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