The Demon Curse (11 page)

Harry's eyelids twitched apart. He saw the asylum—its steel walkways, its cell doors, the dark corridor through which he and Billie had entered the hallway. And then everything vanished again as he squeezed his eyes shut, wincing at the pain in the back of his head. He tried to reach up and touch it, but his arm wouldn't move.

It was lodged behind his back. Both his arms were. The elbows were trapped by his hip and the wrists were up between his shoulder blades, fixed in place. Harry tried to look around to see what had happened, and then he saw her, standing in a small doorway, right down at the other end of the hall.

A pair of sequin-studded shoes. The bottom of a dress, a mass of interweaving petticoat hems. A pair of spectacles on a stem, hovering in front of two eyes. A familiar figure, and she appeared much the same as on the occasions when he had seen her over the last couple of days.

Apart from the jeweled revolver gripped in her left fist.

And the motionless body of Dr. Mincing, upon which one of the sequin-studded shoes was placed.

“My apologies for being ever so slightly late,” Madame Melrose said. “Were I to have arrived a few minutes earlier, perhaps I could have silenced Dr. Mincing before he told you the information regarding my plan, which, now that you know it, makes your fate sadly unavoidable.
Je
suis
désolée
. I'm sorry, I mean.” Her fingers twitched around the spectacles' stem, and the lens gleamed. “Or maybe I don't mean that at all?”

“Harry…”

Harry glanced around to Billie. She was just a few inches away, staring desperately toward the corridor that led to the jetty and their moored boat, and then looking to take in Madame Melrose, standing in that doorway with Dr. Mincing, and the gun. Harry glanced down at himself, and he saw why neither of them could move. They were both strapped into cream-colored jackets, the cloth thick, heavily stitched, and festooned with buckles and clips, each one of which was tightly fastened. Their arms were drawn up around their backs, their fingers trapped in sewn-up sleeves, and the jackets themselves were padlocked by steel clips in their collars to the bars of a cell. Their ankles were tied too, surrounded by buckled straps.

“Straitjackets,
mes
enfants
. What else would you expect in a deserted asylum?” Madame Melrose slid the revolver into a pocket of her dress. “A little moldy after lying unused for several years and sized for adults, not children. But a few quickly cut extra notches in each buckle strap meant the jackets pulled perfectly tight around your smaller frames. Yes, these straitjackets are capable of their task, namely the restraint of the insane, the demented, the criminally psychotic.” She smiled. “Or in this case, the merely overcurious.”

“You!” Billie fought against the straps. “You're the one behind it! You're the one responsible for what happened to Mayor Monticelso. And Artie too.”

“And let's not forget
l'assassinat de sang-froid
, the cold-blooded murder of Dr. Mincing.” The sequined shoe altered its angle on the corpse. “He may have been a sinister figure in his own right, but he still counts.”

Harry kept struggling. His wrists were fixed between his shoulder blades, but his hands and fingers flexed in every direction, trying to find a way out. Fighting as hard as he could, gritting his teeth, Harry saw just a single buckle by his left shoulder lift its tooth by a fraction of an inch, but then his strength gave out, and the tooth lowered back again. He stopped to gather his breath and tried not to look too obviously at the foot of the table nearby for fear Madame Melrose would follow the direction of his gaze.

The phial of antidote. It lay by the foot of the table leg, just where it had rolled from Dr. Mincing's hand. Blood glistened on the floor and trailed all the way across the hall to the small doorway where Dr. Mincing's body now lay. It trailed right past the phial, Harry noticed—but there the phial still was.
She's missed it.

“Mincing, Mayor Monticelso, Artie—why'd you do it, Madame Melrose?” Billie was fighting too, her face flushed, her head thrashing, but her straitjacket wasn't moving either. “And the Islanders too, remember? Whatever you're up to, they're paying the price, aren't they? I thought you liked them.”

“Liked them? I take a great interest in them, it's true, but that's not the same thing,” Madame Melrose snapped back. “My interest dates, as I told you, from my youth, when I grew up on a cotton plantation not far from this city. Our workers there were much the same as your Islanders; they had the same color skin. As do you, I see,
ma
jeune
fille
.” She looked at Billie. “So of course I took interest in such folk, their customs and beliefs—why would I not when my family's vast wealth depended on them? They were not only our workers; they were our property.
Nos
esclaves.
Our slaves.”

She lifted her shoe from Dr. Mincing's corpse. Its sequins flashed, and her embroidered petticoats rustled as she walked toward them.

“Sadly, our country has changed,” she continued. “Unlike the slaves in my family's fields, the Islanders aren't useful in themselves, but they
are
useful for something they possess.
La
Pointe
des
Pêcheurs
, I call it.” She looked at them. “But you'll know it as Fisherman's Point.”

Harry's fingers, arms, and elbows kept struggling on. His body could hardly move, but his thoughts made up for it, flying around his head.
Rightfully
ours…
Daggerbeard's and Yelloweyes's words floated back into his memory, and he studied Madame Melrose and thought how entirely unlike those gnarled fishermen she was, infinitely more elegant, and yet, from what she was saying, every bit as brutal.

“Their land,” he muttered. “You want them chased off it so you can have it. Just like—”

“Very good,
mon
garçon
. But it is one thing to puzzle something out afterward, another to be the one devising it in the first place.” She smiled. “Yes,
La
Pointe
des
Pêcheurs
is a most valuable piece of land, conveniently situated on the banks of the Mississippi. Perhaps you have gathered this from that gang of rival fishermen who would be so happy to see the Islanders driven from it? Rumors have reached me of their plots, but I'm afraid there is no chance of
La
Pointe
ending up in the hands of, well, fishermen. Our country is changing,
mes
enfants
.”

She lowered herself into the chair by the desk. Next to it, a pool of blood from Mincing's body glistened; one of her embroidered petticoat hems settled on it and started drinking the blood up.

“You recall I had a group of gentlemen from Chicago with me when we met at
La
Pointe
des
Pêcheurs
? They weren't
professeurs
d'anthropologie sociale
. More useful by far, they were
grands
patrons
, businessmen, who wish to buy Fisherman's Point. Fish is still their business, I suppose, but in a far more lucrative way. They seek to build canning factories, to be blunt. Gone will be the days of fishermen living near this city of ours; they can dwell in the swamps, and the fish they find will be brought to sleek new factories, where it will be canned for transportation around the world. A profitable affair, and
les
grands
patrons
are prepared to pay a considerable fee to whoever can smooth the way toward it being possible. Mayor Monticelso was set against it, you see. To him, the Islanders' right to their land was immovable. But all problems can be solved with enough thought. And meeting with a diseased and bankrupt doctor of medicine came in handy too.”

Her spectacles tilted across to the corpse in the doorway, dumped at the end of the stripe of blood. She smiled.

“Such fascinating research. I'm sure he told you his intentions were good; he had a habit of saying that. Good, bad,
le
bien, le mal
.” She rolled the words off her lips. “These are subtle distinctions, and not ones that Mincing's diseased brain could easily grasp. He was in a desperate state when I met him—years of failed experiments had left him penniless. I offered to pay for his lodgings, his food, the clothes on his back, in return for him carrying on his scientific work
for
me
. I even found him this convenient deserted asylum to use as his laboratory! Occasionally, he would express concerns about the way in which I wished to put his scientific discoveries to use, but when I reminded him of his financial dependence on me, he generally became quiet. It is a simple matter, to control a man with no financial means. Even simpler when that man's mind has been overthrown by years of exposure to strange venoms. And it is a simpler matter still, once that man is no longer required—and has become a liability indeed—to finish with him.”

She noticed the bloodied hem of her petticoat. A frown appeared on her forehead, but she lifted her dresses by the tiniest amount and resettled on the chair. Harry struggled even harder, his gaze on the phial of antidote.
No
way
of
getting
it, no way at all.
The thought hit him suddenly, and his muscles started to shake. Cold, frightened weakness spread through his body as Madame Melrose spoke on.

“
Un
tour
très simple
, a simple affair, once I had thought it through. Remove Mayor Monticelso's opposition, and not only that, remove the mayor himself, by sending him into a deranged madness. Then devise matters so that the deranged madness would seem to be a creation of the Islanders, allowing the vile Oscar Dupont to stir up a typhoon of rage that would sweep the Islanders from the city, leaving me free to use my council position to guide through the sale of Fisherman's Point to the
grands
patrons
, in return for not only my fee but a percentage of all profits. Once again, I shall live in the manner to which I was accustomed on the family plantation! A neat affair—and it will be all the neater once the last details are complete.” Her spectacles swung back to Dr. Mincing's corpse. “The remains of my accomplice must be taken to the other end of the asylum, to be dumped through a hatch I use for such business—various alligators lurk nearby who will dispose of the body. That just leaves you,
mes
enfants
.”

Harry fought against the buckles. Sweat trickled down his face, but the only movement he could see was of the buckle over his shoulder, its tooth rising and settling down
. Impossible.
He stared at Madame Melrose, who was smiling, clearly delighted by the story she had just told.
All
of
it
unknown, unguessed by me.
His muscles grew even weaker as he thought back over everything that had happened. He thought of how skillfully he had searched Arthur's clothes and found that blot of ink. He thought how determinedly he had followed Dr. Mincing, tracked him down to this dark place. And yet all the time, a deeper mystery had been lurking, one that he hadn't guessed at all.
Missed
it…

Harry froze. Madame Melrose had lifted her revolver.

“I expect you are wondering why I didn't shoot you as soon as I found you here, rather than club you with the gun's other end?” The revolver rotated in her hand, muzzle following heel. “It was quite considered,
mes
enfants
. My plans may be conceived at great speed, but they are perfectly precise.”

She was up out of the chair. She had circled Dr. Mincing's desk, and Harry was quite sure she had no idea about the antidote, because she was standing with the bottle almost touching her shoe. But he was more concerned about what she was doing with Dr. Mincing's scorpion-filled jars, taking them down from the shelves and arranging them next to the one on the desk.

“Oscar Dupont's mob is violent and ugly. But there is no harm, for my purposes, in it becoming more violent and ugly still. And what could better produce that effect than the discovery of two further children, also in the unending grip of the demon curse?
Coup
d'éclat!
How very startling!” She turned. “The pain, I should warn you, is supposed to be excruciating. But you've seen Mayor Monticelso and your dear friend. I don't need to tell you that.”

She tucked the final jar into a leather bag hanging from her shoulder. The rest, six in all, each filled with its furious contents, she left lined up along the desk. Harry saw the scorpions, tiny arched bands of muscles, blur against the insides. He saw droplets of venom trickle down the glass from wherever the stings had struck.

“I shall keep a few of the specimens for possible further use.” She patted the jar in the bag and swept back to the doorway across the hall. “The rest, however, must be disposed of. I shall release them to roam in the swamp. The food they rely on, a rare variety of sugar cane, grows only in Costa Rica, so they will perish in time. However, kind soul that I am, I have left them the last remains of their favorite food
à l'intérieur de vos camisoles de force
.” She arrived at the door and Mincing's body. “By which I mean—and it is so very important that you understand me—inside your straitjackets.”

She spun the spectacles on their stem several times, like a windmill, and then stopped the lenses in front of her eyes. The gun muzzle pointed toward the jars on the desk, and its tip blazed. One of the jars shattered, and Madame Melrose's thumb pulled back the revolver's hammer. Five more shots and the rest of the jars shattered, one by one. Finally, the last shot faded away.