NecronomiCon Providence

If you’re just entering Providence Noir, take a look at: Chapter I, Chapter II, or Chapter III.

April 26^th, 2012. 11 am.

“Dawlah aw fifty cents a book! Dawlah aw fifty cents a book!”

The woman was older and somewhat haggard. Heavy set and pale with deep frown lines and hair dyed a dark red that was nearly purple, she stood on the flatbed of an old, blue, Chevy pickup truck, handing boxes of old books to a lean, darker-skinned gentleman of somewhat indistinguishable age. She wore a jean jacket and a Boston Red Sox t-shirt. He wore an old flannel and a ratty blue baseball cap pushed low over his eyes.

“Dawlah aw fifty cents a book! Dawlah aw fifty cents a book!”

They were parked on South Main Street, the border between downtown Providence and College Hill, right across the street from The Cable Car, a small, artsy cinema and coffee shop. Most of the passersby, an odd mix of businessmen, filing clerks, and art students, paid little notice to them. Occasionally, a typical looking student wearing a backpack would stop and peruse for a minute or two, but would usually wander away. This happened a few times until Carmela, a thin, brown-skinned brunette with wide-set eyes and curly, shoulder-length hair, stopped to look.

“Oh, badass,” she exclaimed, kneeling down to examine one of the boxes, a look of bewilderment on her face. She wore a black leather scooter jacket, a purple v-necked t-shirt, blue jeans, and red Chuck Tailor high-tops. “Blavatsky. Spence. Crowley. Regardie.” She said, looking up at the older woman and pushing a lock of curls behind her right ear. “Did you say a dollar or fifty cents a book?”

The woman nodded, her jowls jiggling slightly as she did. “Yep. Dat’s right.” Her Boston accent was as thick as treacle. “Ya like books, huh?”

“Of course,” Carmela said, matter-of-factly, gazing back at the box. “I love ‘em. Holy shit! Four Kenneth Grant books. McLean’s Hermetic Journal.” She looked up at the woman again, astonished.

The woman looked down her nose at Carmela and squinted, sizing her up. “Ya like deese kinds a books?”

The darker-skinned gentleman turned to look at Carmela. His lined, leathery expression was completely unreadable, but she felt an unnatural chill creep up her spine. His dark brown, nearly black eyes seemed to bore into her. She went on anyways, doing her best to hide her unease.

“Y-you’d better believe it. Where the hell did you get all of these?”

The heavy woman and leathery man exchanged a somewhat disconcerting glance. She spoke.

“My, ah, uncle passed away and we’ve got ta get his place cleaned up befaw dey sell it. I gawtta whole fuckin’ apahtment fulla books like deese. Hundreds of ‘um. You int’rested?”

“Definitely,” Carmela said, looking back at the books. That’s an old hardcover version of Levi’s Transcendental Magic, she thought to herself.

The older woman nodded. “How many wouldja buy?”

“Hell, if they’re all like these, probably all of them,” Carmela replied. “Granted, I’d have to see them first, but my friend Jared and I are actually planning to open a used book store. These are perfect.”

The leathery man wandered up to the older woman and whispered something to her. She nodded.

“I’ll tell ya what. If you can get awl of da books outta my uncle’s place today, I’ll give awl of um to ya fer two hundred bucks.”

“Are you serious? I’ll call my friend right now!”

The woman nodded. “Yeah, I’m serious. Call ya friend. My uncle’s place is right ovah in Fawx Point. I hope ya friend’s gawtta truck uh somethin.”

About an hour later Jared showed up in his ’96 Ford Explorer, his colorfully tattooed left arm hanging out the window, cigarette held loosely between his fingers. Carmela had run back home and picked up her Volkswagen Golf, and the two of them followed the beaten-up blue Chevy up and over College Hill toward the Fox Point neighborhood. Glancing now and then at Jared in her rear-view mirror, she watched him take long drags from his cigarette, occasionally scratching his short, red beard, his face holding its usual half-squinting expression. She had met him at a coffee shop a few months after moving back to Providence from the West Coast, maybe six months ago. He had become a friend, and a loyal one at that, but it was obvious that he harbored more than friendly feelings for her, and she didn’t know what to do about the situation.

He was certainly handsome, but his perpetual drinking was a problem for her. He almost never left home without a flask of whiskey in his pocket. After two years of her ex-boyfriend Matt, she couldn’t dream of dealing with another alcoholic. She didn’t mind a drink every now and then, but both Jared and Matt seemed unable make it through the day without a drink, and then unable to stop before getting obliterated. She could remember Matt, sitting on that ragged old couch they used to have in their apartment in Echo Park, too drunk to stand and sweating, explaining to her just how shitty of a girlfriend she was, or how disrespectful it was for her to disagree with him in public, or how she was obviously cheating on him with that guy she spoke three words to at the bar. And the sex that rarely happened, she shivered, was a sad drunken mess. She hated him, but not nearly as much as she hated herself for putting up with it for so long, for actually believing him, believing that she was a shitty person and a terrible girlfriend when she was anything but. Two fucking years, she thought. She had always considered herself a strong, intelligent, and independent woman, and yet she put up with stupid, childish, energy-sucking guilt trips and unfulfilling sex for two years of her adult life. Pathetic.

Her self-deprecation was put to an abrupt halt when the blue Chevy suddenly pulled over and parked. She followed suit, as did Jared behind her. Get a grip, Carmela, she thought to herself, shaking her head. Don’t let the past ruin the present.

The older woman and leathery man got out of the car and wandered onto a small gravel driveway flanked by two three-unit apartment houses. The driveway quickly became a dusty yard for another three-unit set back from the street. Jared and Carmela trailed behind them, occasionally casting furtive glances to each other. The old front door, desperately in need of another coat of white paint, squealed in protest as it was opened. Three flights up a narrow staircase with wood-paneled walls brought them to an olive green door.

The woman unlocked and pushed the door open. Reaching around the corner and flicking a switch, the fluorescent ceiling lamp flickered to life, illuminating the room. Carmela could see walls lined with bookshelves nearly bursting at the seams. A waft of stale cigarette smoke greeted them as they entered.

“Ho. Lee. Shit,” she said.

The apartment was tiny, but might as well have been a small library or used book store in its own right. The few walls not covered with books were stained a brownish yellow, presumably from tobacco smoke. The whole place smelled like an ashtray.

The woman looked at the two of them sternly and extended her hand. “Two hundred bucks.” Carmela noticed that she was now wearing a pair of navy blue cloth gloves.

Carmela nodded and reached into her pocket, pulling out a small roll of ten twenties. The leathery man was giving her that disconcerting look again, and she stifled a shiver. She was about to turn away toward the bookshelves when he spoke to her with a thick, hispanic accent.

“I know you,” he said slowly.

Carmela squinted. “Excuse me?”

“I know you,” he repeated, the words coming out with an almost forced control. “I never forget a face.”

Carmela looked to Jared, who shrugged and adjusted his black baseball cap, eyeballing the older gentleman.

The leathery man continued in his thick accent, unabashed. “You used to own a nineteen eseventy-six Monte Carlo. Black, with a dent in the driver’s eside rear quarter-panel.”

Carmela nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah that’s right. But. But I sold that car a few years ago, before I moved back here from…”

“Los Angeles.”, he said, finishing her sentence for her, using his raised finger to punctuate his speech. “You were parked near the entrance to Griffith Park. I offered to fix the dent for you, but you… declined.” He placed an extra stress on the word “declined”.

“Holy shit. Yeah… Yeah. I actually remember that,” Carmela said. “You had another guy in the car with you, and you were driving a silver car, like a Toyota or something, right? But seriously how…”

“I never forget a face,” he interrupted and grinned coldly.

Carmela just nodded, finding it difficult to pull her eyes away from his. She tried to guess how old he was, but had no idea. One minute he looked a weathered forty-five, the next, deep in his sixties. The thick woman abruptly inserted herself between the two of them, handing Carmela a small brass key.

“A’l leave da utha bawxes in the yawd fa you two. Lawck the daw when ya leave, den trow the key trew da mail slawt.”

Carmela took the key gingerly. “Th-thank you.”

The shorter woman was somehow able to look down her nose at Carmela disapprovingly, and made the sign of the cross in the air in front of her. “And may Gawd bless you.”

She turned and walked out the door with the leathery man before Carmela could respond. The door shutting firmly behind them.

Carmela waited until she heard their footsteps trailing down the staircase before looking to Jared. “Well that was fucking creepy,” she said quietly.

Jared was too busy staring at the bookshelves to hear her, however. Hundreds, probably thousands of volumes by his estimate, stared back at him.

“This is gonna take a while,” he said. “I’ve got a few boxes, three milk crates, and a bunch of grocery bags I was saving as poop baggies for when I walk Chief. I’d say we might be done by sunset. Maybe.”

Carmela nodded. “Lets get cracking, then. I don’t want to be in here any longer than I need to. Those two give me the fucking heebie-jeebies.”

They were not finished unloading things until well into the evening. Carmela’s tiny studio apartment was crammed tight with stacks upon stacks of books, magazines and journals, all reeking of stale cigarette smoke. The woman’s uncle was apparently named George Jencks, and had written his name in blue or black pen on the inside cover of every book in his library, along with a date, which Carmela assumed was the day he had acquired it. The library itself had been an entirely disorganized mess. If there had been a system to it, it certainly was not one a sane person would invent.

“Author: Campbell, Joseph. Title: The Masks of God.”

Jared was standing and slowly dictating the names of authors and books to Carmela, who sat cross-legged on her living room floor, notebook computer in her lap. They both knew there was no way they were going to catalog all of the books that night, but they reasoned that they might as well start on a few piles before going to bed.

“Author: Campbell, Joseph. Title: The Hero With A Thousand Faces.”

“Got it,” said Carmela. “Next.”

“Author: Um… Ick? Aik? I-C-K-E. David. Hmm,” Jared said. “Why does that name look familiar?”

Carmela finished typing and smiled up at him. “He’s a crazy conspiracy theorist type.”

“You mean like the JFK assassination was an inside job? Fake moon landing? John Dillinger’s alive and living in Mexico type stuff?”

“Nope. Way weirder than that,” she said. “He claims that Freemasons like you are actually shape-shifting reptiles who flew here in a spaceship from the Draco constellation and currently control world politics.”

“Draco constellation?” Jared laughed. “Most of the guys in my lodge have enough trouble finding their cars after a night on the town. Some of the older ones can barely go to the bathroom without help.”

“Hardly what I would think of as ‘mighty alien overlords’,” she smirked.

Jared thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, though, old man Sweeney does kind of look like a lizard. McBride too.” He smiled.

“Hah. Well, I will have to remember to curtsy properly when I meet them.”

“Just don’t give them any of the secret handshakes you learned from reading Duncan’s Ritual, alright? They’ll think I taught ‘em to you, and I’ll be in a world of shit, reptilian or otherwise.”

“Deal,” she said. “What’s next?”

“Ahem. Author: Hall, Manly P. Title: The Secret Teachings of all Ages.”

“Speaking of Freemasons,” Carmela said dryly.

“Manly? Really? Who the fuck names their kid ‘Manly’? I bet he got the crapped kicked out of him in middle school for that one. I wonder if he’s got a brother named ‘Strapping’ or some shit like that.”

“That would be amusing. I suppose it’d be better than a sister named ‘Girly’.”

“Especially if the sister turned out to be a total butch.” Jared laughed. “All right. Moving forward. Author: Crowley, Aleister. Title: The Book of Lies. Hmm. Ya know, I’ve always meant to read some Crowley. Seems like an interesting dude. Kind of a Satanist, right?”

“Not exactly, no. Have you studied any Qabalah?”

Jared shook his head. “Nah, not really. I mean, there are a few books on it in the Lodge that I’ve flipped through, but I don’t remember much from ‘em. Why?”

“Because its kind of necessary if you want to understand a lot of what Crowley says.” Carmela stretched her arms behind her back. It was an innocent enough stretch, though Jared had difficulty not noticing the swell of her breasts jutting forward through her t-shirt. However, he was able to maintain eye contact with her as she spoke. Barely. “Especially if you want to read that book in your hands,” she continued, jarring him from his reverie. “Most of its in Qabalistic riddles.”

Jared began flipping through the pages, eventually stopping at one. “Hmm. The Way to Succeed, and the Way to Suck Eggs. Hey, that was in a Ministry song, wasn’t it?”

Carmela nodded. “Yep. Psalm 69. Got it on my Ipod, actually.”

“Nice. And who doesn’t enjoy mutual oral, really?”

Carmela smiled and nodded, but said nothing.

“Moving on,” said Jared, clearing his throat. “Author: Lis… Lisewski? L-I…”

“Hang on,” said Carmela, placing her laptop on the floor and rubbing her eyes. “I think… I think I need to sleep. I’m sorry, Jared, but I’m fucking exhausted. Can we continue this tomorrow or something?”

“Sure. Sure, we can do that. I have work until, like, seven or so, but I’m free after that.”

Carmela stood up. “Cool. I’ll give you a call tomorrow then.” She walked over to the door and he followed closely. “Thank you so much for all of your help today. I owe you big time.”

“Nahh,” Jared replied. His exhale wafted toward Carmela, and she could smell whiskey on his breath. Must have been taking swigs from his flask in the bathroom. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m glad to help. Besides, I’m gonna want some of these. I’ll wait until we have everything cataloged, though. Have a great night.”

“Thanks. You too. Talk to you tomorrow, then.” Carmela reached out and gave Jared a warm hug, and he reciprocated, though he held it longer than usual. He could feel her relax for a second and then squeeze again before relaxing completely, waiting for him to release. He could feel his skin warming as he held her, tingles on the side of his neck, hairs on his arm beginning to stand on end. Finally, he released abruptly.

“Talk to you then,” he said, heading quickly out the door and down the stairs. Carmela watched him as he descended, eventually closing the door. She sighed.

“What am I going to do with you, Jared?” she said to the room quietly, shaking her head.

The looming stacks of smoke-stained books did not reply.

If you’re just entering Providence Noir here, Check out Chapter I, or Chapter II.

Chapter Three: Bridges

Providence Noir Chapter 3

Excerpt from the personal memoirs of Jonathan Sousa. Entry dated April 27^th, 2012.

The basement room is painted a dark, midnight blue, and is lit by four orange candles which sit upon individual altars, one set against each of the four walls. The smell of frankincense permeates the area, wafting from a thurible in the corner. I have drawn a circle in orange chalk on the floor adorned with occult glyphs of various meaning and correspondence, and some pillows rest in the center of it. The temple preparation did not take very long – a few basic banishings and visualizations, nothing particularly difficult for an experienced practitioner.

The Hag’s insights had given me a new strategy. Prior to our meeting, I had attempted to find the perpetrator through my usual scrying methods, but he was smart enough to cover his tracks. Some kind of invisibility charm or shielding method, I gather. What I hadn’t taken into account was the possibility of two people being behind the disappearances.

I take off my long, black robe and hang it on a peg in the corner of the room, suddenly feeling the cool air of the cellar upon my skin. In the same corner stands a cabinet with various ritual paraphernalia. I choose a small bottle of cinnamon-scented oil and dab some on my finger. I then anoint my forehead by drawing a glyph with the oil. The oil makes the skin above my eyebrows tingle, and I intone a simple blessing in Latin:

“Quia tuum est regnum et potesta et gloria in saecula, Amen.”

Mabel had mentioned Bartzabel, a wrathful spirit of Mars. The guy we’re looking for must be all about battles and confrontation. Headstrong, cocky. Thinks like a fighter, and in the case of kidnapping young girls, a fighter who understands the necessity of stealth. Clever, but not clever enough.

His accomplice – the girl, however, is a submissive, enthralled by her mighty warrior. Probably thinks nothing can harm her if she’s near him, and he’s more than happy to enforce that opinion. She’s just a servant, though. A fuck toy. A notch or two higher on the totem pole than the girls in the cages, of course, but still expendable.

As such, I’m willing to bet that whatever shielding method he’s using does not apply to her.

And if she’s not shielded, Ariana can find her.

I choose a small black statuette from a different shelf in the cabinet. It is made of a crude, fired clay in the shape of a horned, winged, gargoyle-like creature. Humanoid and feminine in general appearance, but faceless and jet black, except for a small, intricate orange glyph drawn on its torso. I kiss the forehead of the figurine and anoint it as well.

Walking into the center of the circle, I sit cross-legged upon a pillow with the statuette still in my hands.

Ariana was one of the first servitors I ever enchanted. At the time, I was obsessed with finding obscure occult books that usually ended up tucked away in the back of used book stores. Ariana was my hidden knowledge locator, my own personal St. Anthony. Over time, her list of duties expanded to include more than just books.

Settling down into meditation, my mind is racing. I feel hyper, almost caffeinated, though I don’t think I’ve had any tea in at least a few hours. Three very deep and slow breaths help me to concentrate energy into my extremities, visualizing an orange light surrounding the figurine that emanates from my hands. I start regulating my respiration, slowing it down and counting my breaths, drawing myself inward. My stomach muscles are kept tense, and with each breath, I feel myself getting warmer. I slowly chant the word “Nalathasa” over and over, and feel myself geting heavy, my limbs gradually melting into the cushions and the concrete floor beneath. My forehead continues to tingle, and the statuette in my hands now seems to radiate a heat of its own. I concentrate energy into the center of my forehead and…

I am sitting upon a hard, clay-like surface. Surrounding me is a blasted land, an open steppe or high desert by the looks of it, hard-packed dirt and straw-colored long grass, occasionally pocked by sickly, leafless, greyish-brown shrubs. The dimensions of the place are bizarre and somewhat alien, messing with my concepts of perspective. A rock I intuitively know to be half a league from my current position almost seems close enough to touch, and is balanced precariously at an odd angle that defies physical laws. Mountains loom in the distance. Grey, jagged peaks, like the broken teeth of some colossal alligator, pierce a translucent purple-colored horizon. I sit facing the mountains in a wide circle of reddish-brown clay, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. Surrounding the circle are eight rectangular stone slabs lying down flat upon the ground. In the center of the circle, crudely drawn in a white, chalk-like substance, is a large, ominous looking eye. Radiating from the eye are eight thick lines, also white, ending in arrowheads that each point to one of the slabs.

I stand up and my long coat stirs in the breeze. I can hear a low mournful note in the distance, though whether it is the wind resonating through the cliffs or the distant howl of some carnivorous beast is unknown to me. Suddenly, another sound is heard to my left, this time much closer. The flap of leathery wings.

I hear the gentle scrape of her claws against stone as she drops gracefully on to one of the slabs to my left, wings unfurled majestically. She is nearly eight feet tall, not including the pair of foot-long horns that curl up from her forehead, and is almost entirely jet-black in color, her skin having the appearance of a slick, rubbery, latex-like material, the only color found being that of a bright orange tattoo of sorts, an intricate glyph that decorates her chest and sternum. Sleek and lean, her body is muscular yet feminine, with the visible swell of nipple-less breasts and somewhat wide hip-bones. Spidery fingers terminate in long, sharp claws, and a long barbed tail undulates on its own, like an overgrown housecat’s. She is entirely faceless, a blank slate where eyes, nose and mouth should be. Her wings fold up behind her like a cloak, and she bows to me, crouching upon the stone slab. I bow in return and she stands, awaiting instruction.

“Ariana,” I say quietly, “I wish for you to find someone for me. A young woman with curly dark hair and a tanned complexion, of Martial corporature. Submissive yet insidious, enslaved to a violent, egotistical master.”

I walk over to her and touch the back of her clawed hand. As I do so, I visualize my memory of Mabel’s ramblings while in trance, imagining the memory to be a small, glowing bubble of bright light, which I pass down my arm and through my hand. When it touches Ariana, her skin ripples as it is quickly absorbed, and I feel her shudder slightly.

“She lures the innocent and unsuspecting to him,” I continue. “He will be shielded, but the stink of Bartzabel will be upon her. She’ll be hiding somewhere surrounded by woodlands. Find her for me, Ariana, and I shall reward you. It is my will for this to be. So mote it be.”

Ariana gives the briefest of nods to me and crouches, exploding upward in a three-story jump with but a single push of her powerful legs, her coriaceous wings unfurling in a smooth, graceful motion. She catches the wind and soars toward the sky. I watch her as she leaves, and do not turn away until she is but a speck on the horizon. I press my left forefinger to my lips and close my eyes.

I open my eyes to the waking world where I am still sitting naked and cross-legged upon some pillows, statuette in hand, my left foot nearly asleep. The candles around me are shorter, of course, but I had not been in the astral plane for very long. Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes.

I close the circle, perform a quick banishing, replace the figurine and leave my ritual chamber. I’ll be hearing from Ariana sometime tomorrow. The walk upstairs is slow and meditative, my legs slightly stiff from sitting cross-legged.

Upstairs, I find Selene reclining on the couch with a thick book in her hand, a small wrinkle between her slightly furrowed brows. I stand there for a moment or two before she notices me, and she looks up at me over her glasses and smiles.

I had not re-robed myself after my meeting with Ariana, and the sight of her is more than enough to begin my arousal.

She marks her page and lays her book down upon the coffee table. With, slow, deliberate motions that seem to take an eternity, Selene removes her glasses, her shirt, and her purple, laced bra, exposing her pale breasts and nearly rose-colored nipples. Finally, she lets her hair down and kneels before me, a wicked glint in her greenish-blue eyes.

Its rare that I ever get phone calls in the middle of the night, least of all from the cops. As I sleepily button my shirt and get ready to leave, I go over the details of the conversation in my head.

“Johnny? Hey Johnny. Sorry if I woke ya, but I think we need you down here, buddy.”

It’s the voice of Joe McDermott, Detective for the Rhode Island state police. He’s also the only person I know who calls me “Johnny”.

“Hey Joe.” I yawn over the phone and look over to the neon green glow of my clock radio. Its 2:57 am, which means I’ve been asleep for maybe an hour. “What appears to be the trouble this morning?”

“We’ve got a murder victim on our hands but… uh, things are uh… different. Its not your everyday stabbing in the park. I think it might be related to the missing girls, but I’m not sure. More of a gut feeling. Found more of those sigil things you talk about.” Joe’s breathing is heavier and more stressed out than usual, so he’s probably close to having a stroke by now. “I’d say this shit is right up your alley, but I don’t want to insult your alley. Johnny, this one’s a gigantic fucking mess. I’m sorry, but I need you to come down and see this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

That statement alone has me up and putting my pants on. Joe’s seen some pretty gruesome sights in his day. I notice that Selene is now awake and turning over to look at me, a mere bed sheet covering her lovely form.

“Alright Joe,” I say, “where are you?”

“The rusty old drawbridge off of Gano Street. You can’t miss the flashing lights. Might as well be a cop convention.”

“Getting dressed. I’ll be right over.”

“Something rotten in Denmark?” Selene yawns and sits up, hugging a nearby pillow as she does so.

“Seems that way, “ I say, buttoning my shirt. “You have work at nine?”

Selene yawns again and nods. “Yep.”

“I should be back well before then. If not, just lock the doorknob when you leave. Don’t worry about the deadbolt.”

“Okay”, she says sleepily.

I lean over the bed and kiss her gently on the lips. “Sweet dreams, beautiful.”

“Mmm. Thanks, handsome. Take care and come back soon, okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

It takes me about three minutes to drive to the location, a quick hop from East Providence over the Washington Bridge, and I pull into the parking lot attached to the small park closest to the crime scene. Walking past a soccer field and some grassy hills toward a copse of trees, the scene lit by flashing blue and red lights, I eventually reach the line of yellow police tape, where McDermott is waiting for me, chatting with a state trooper in full regalia. Joe’s wearing a grey polo shirt and black slacks, a 9 mm Beretta clearly visible in his shoulder holster.

“Thanks for coming, Johnny,” he says, shaking my hand as the trooper wanders over to a squad car. “Prepare yourself. This one’s rough. The guy’s been gutted in a way I’ve…”

“Is this that occult expert you were talking about, McDermott?” Interrupts a stern voice behind Joe. He turns toward the voice and I follow suit. A tall, lean, stone-faced older gentleman is walking toward us. Probably ex-military, by his bearing and inflection. The voice is that of one used to being obeyed. His hair is cut very short, almost spiky, and is nearly slate-grey in color.

“Johnny,” McDermott says, “this is Lieutenant Hodge. Lieutenant, Johnny Sousa.”

“Mister Sousa,” he says, looking directly in my eyes as he attempts to crush my hand in his grip. I squeeze firmly in return and meet his gaze. I’ve played this game before.

“Pleasure to meet you. Good handshake,” he says, eventually nodding and letting go.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. Same to you,” I say, the slight hint of a smirk on my lips. “Now then, how can I be of assistance?”

“We’ve got a mutilated body with a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo attached to it. You’re the mumbo-jumbo expert, apparently, so McDermott here thought you might be able to tell us what it all means. I hear you helped find the perp in the Lewiston case, after all.”

“I’ll do what I can to help, Lieutenant. Where’s the body?”

Hodge raises his arm and points toward the river. “On the shitty old bridge. Where else?”

The bridge. The Seekonk River Drawbridge, to be exact. Built in 1908 as a railway bridge, and originally known as the Crook Point Bascule bridge, it spans a narrow section of the Seekonk River as it empties itself into Narragansett Bay. It was closed in 1976 and left to rot, the drawbridge up at about a 60 degree angle. Though most of the metal and rails are still intact, albeit rusted and pocked with graffiti, some of the wooden portions of the structure have become decayed and unstable. As I gingerly walk my way towards the murder scene, following McDermott, I hear the lapping of the river beneath my feet. There are regular breaks in the wood, and dangerous open drops down to the brackish water below, beyond the reach of my flashlight beam.

We eventually reach the elbow joint of the raised bridge, and the scene is almost too ghastly to fathom. My response is not emotional in the slightest. I’m completely numb as I take in my surroundings, mostly due to disbelief. Everything seems plastic or theatrical — like something out of a shitty horror movie. This can’t be real, I think to myself, but the blood stains at my feet certainly look real, and as the terrible gravity of the situation finally sinks in, my vision blurs sickeningly for an instant before focusing on the horror before me.

“Some of the nearby folks heard a bit of a commotion, but nothing too bad,” explains Joe quietly, his face wreathed by the glow of his flashlight and the reflection of other lights along the river. “They’re used to college kids or gutter punks coming out here and making a bunch of noise, ya know? But apparently there’s a guy who likes to walk his two pitbulls around here late night when he gets home from work. ‘Bout an hour ago he was taking a walk and his dogs went apeshit. Freaked out and barked like crazy at the bridge. He went to investigate, and then called us.”

“That’s his vomit over there.” McDermott points to a small spot off to the left with his flashlight. I can see a liquid stain and little pink chunks of semi-digested something or other. Its just a diversion, however. I need to look back at the main mess, as much as I might not want to. The shadows cast from my flashlight don’t help matters, of course, giving the already grisly scene an even more horrific feel.

What’s left of the man at my feet is dressed as if he has stepped out of the 1920′s. A brown fedora perches upon his head at an odd angle, and he wears a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow pads. A beige button-down pinstriped shirt, now terribly mangled and bloodstained, adorns what is left of his torso, and his brown necktie has been tightened to the point of obvious strangulation. Considering the state of the rest of him, I can only hope he was strangled first.

He has been entirely disemboweled, his entrails split and severed in a myriad of bizarre ways. Slick, ropey intestines have been pulled out of his abdominal cavity and strewn about in complicated patterns, a spiderweb of intricate designs carefully laid out around his body. His eyes have been removed entirely, and complicated sigils have been carved into his forehead and cheeks, presumably with a small and exceedingly sharp knife or razor, mouth agape in a rictus of silent torment. His arms and legs are spread out in a morbid mockery of the Vitruvian man, and drawn in blood about the body, on the old wood and rusty metal portions of the old drawbridge, are more sigils. I can recognize some of them. One or two from the Grimorium Verum, a few others appear to be based on some variant of Spare’s sigil construction method, not dissimilar to the sigils found at the girls’ dorm rooms. Others are wholly alien to me, and seem to warp and change beneath my gaze. The longer I look at them, the more difficult it is for me to observe an underlying shape or structure. I shake my head quickly in an attempt to snap out of it, and pull out my pocket notebook, busily starting to jot down all of the details.

On to Providence Noir: Chapter IV – Carmela

If you are just entering here, check out Providence Noir: Chapter I – The Hag.

Chapter Two: Arthur

“You have a shrewd but prosaic mind, and you cannot conceive of an entity that does not depend for its existence on force and matter. But did it ever occur to you, my friend, that force and matter are merely the barriers to perception imposed by time and space? When one knows, as I do, that time and space are identical and that they are both deceptive because they are merely imperfect manifestations of a higher reality, one no longer seeks in the visible world for an explanation of the mystery and terror of being.” -Frank Belknap Long, The Hounds of Tindalos.

April 3rd, 2012.

Arthur surveyed the room. He had seen a lot of therapists’ offices in his life, and this one was typical in many ways, but somewhat atypical in others. There was the prerequisite big wooden professional desk with a short pile of folders stacked neatly upon it. There were some photos there as well, but they were facing away from him. He assumed that they were family photos of some kind. He was sitting on the couch he knew from years of experience to be the patient’s couch, primarily because it was the comfiest-looking couch in the room, but also because it was conveniently located next to an end table that displayed a box of tissues, a water pitcher, and an empty glass. The couch itself was a puffy, brown leather thing that made it nearly impossible to sit up straight. The moment you put your butt down upon it, the rest of you just sank in slowly until you couldn’t help but snuggle into it. Why resist being comfortable? Arthur thought to himself. Might as well be reclining happily as you explain to a complete stranger just how fucked up your brain is.

There were plants everywhere. Vertical shoots of water bamboo in stone-filled glasses appeared here and there, hanging plants with drooping vines seemed all over the place, and some kind of ivy snaked its way up a bookshelf and curled itself around the nearby window frame. One white wall was adorned with a red and beige screen-print of a dancing couple, male and female by their dress, though their heads were sugar skulls reminiscent of the Mexican Day of the Dead festival. On the other wall was an odd abstract painting akin to a Pollack. Splashes of vibrant colors, mostly green, blue and purple, with a diagonal slash of bright crimson bifurcating the cooler colors. A Buddha statue sat in the corner off to the side. Not the fat, goofy, smiling Buddha with the droopy earlobes that his mom used to have in the hallway, but a lean and peaceful Buddha, sitting lotus-style in a simple robe atop a small bamboo table, the very model of quiet contemplation.

And his doctor? Easily the hottest therapist he’d ever had. Big, blue-green eyes stared out at him beneath chestnut-brown bangs, the rest of her hair up in a casual bun, with two dark brown chopsticks holding it into place. She had pale skin with a light dusting of freckles along her cheeks and the bridge of her button nose. Her only visible wrinkles were smile lines that framed a pair of full, rosy lips.

“All right. We are recording. Doctor Selene Caldwell. Therapy session with Arthur Danelian, age thirty-four. The day is Tuesday, April third, two-thousand twelve.”

Oh yeah, she asked to record the therapy session. Arthur snapped out of his reverie the moment she placed the small, black voice recorder on the arm of the couch. And I said yes. His doctor sat cross-legged on a brown leather computer chair looking at him across the room. She was wearing khaki pants, a modest, lavender blouse, and a white, v-necked, button-down sweater. Heelless, brown slipper-shoes adorned her feet. Hard to refuse eyes like that. At least she’s not wearing something sexy. Then I’d be acting a total fool.

“Alright Arthur,” she said in calm voice, opening a small moleskin notebook, ball-point pen in hand. “Let’s begin, shall we?”

“Uh.. O-okay,” he stammered. Chill the fuck out, he thought to himself, taking a breath. Last thing you need is to develop a crush on your therapist.

She tilted her head to the side slightly. “Is that sage I smell?”

“White sage, yeah.”

“I thought so.” She nodded.

“Yeah, my uh… my mom used to burn it all the time.” Arthur scratched the stubble beneath his chin. Should’ve shaved. “I hated the smell of it at first, ya know. But.. I dunno. Eventually… Eventually I got used to it. I kinda like it now, truth be told. Reminds me of her, ya know? And her old apartment in Woonsocket, too.”

“In what way?” Her voice was cool, tranquil.

He shrugged. “I dunno. It feels warm. Comfortable. I liked that apartment.”

Doctor Caldwell scratched a few things into her notebook. “Tell me more about the apartment. What did it look like?”

Arthur sighed and shifted a bit, attempting to sit up straight. Curse this overly comfortable couch. “Uhh. Well, it was this little two bedroom thing near an old mill. I used to take walks in the woods near the river there after school. It was a white three-family house, and we were on the top floor. Slanted ceilings, ya know? The walls were painted this like.. this like weird, pastel blue color, except for the bathroom, which was white and pink tiles with some cheesy looking clam shells. My bedroom was small. Had a little 13 inch TV that I’d play video games on, twin bed, and typical teenage boy posters. You know, a ferrari here, a swimsuit model there, Pearl Jam somewhere in the mix. The living room had this big, brown, cloth couch that was a little worse for wear. It smelled like white sage all the goddamn time cause she’d always burn it in that room. Had this big purple tie-dyed tapestry against the wall. Celtic knotwork circle in the center of it.”

Arthur ran his fingers through his somewhat greasy dark brown hair. Fuck, I must look like hell right now. Should have taken a shower, at least.

“So now burning sage reminds you of your mother and that apartment,” she said, a statement more than a question.

“Yeah. She always said it uh… it banished negative energy. And I believe her. It does. For a little while, anyway. Its just some things… Some things don’t stay away for very long.”

“The demons?”

“Demon. Singular,” he corrected. “He’s been fucking with me for the past three years.” Three fucking years.

“Since your mother passed?”

Arthur nodded, then swallowed before he spoke. The words came out a bit weakly. “A few months after that, yeah.”

“I notice that you refer to it as a ‘he’. Why is that?”

“He… uh. Well, he doesn’t have tits, for one thing. Hah hah.” His laughter sounded less like laughter and more like a nervous exclamation.

Caldwell smirked, the smile line on the right side of her face framing those full lips. “A lack of breasts denotes masculinity?” She asked.

“Sort of.. Heh. I guess. I mean he’s got a man’s body. Well, mostly. He’s covered in scales and like, weird hairs, but he’s got a dude’s torso. Lean and muscular. Long fingernails, more like claws, really. He’s got this fucked up kind of squid face. And these disgusting, wriggling tentacles with little barbs on the ends.” Arthur could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end, and a cold feeling develop in the pit of his stomach. He shifted his position on the couch.

Selene watched his obvious unease and shifted herself, pulling her legs in so that she was sitting in a half-lotus position on her leather chair, leaning forward slightly. “Do you see him regularly?”

“No. He usually doesn’t show himself.” Anger began to creep into his voice. “Not physically, anyways. Prefers to scratch at my door or bedpost, or snarl in my ear in the middle of the night. Knocks over a lamp or two sometimes. Mostly he’s invisible, but I can usually tell when he’s arrived. The noises. The scratches and the… the fucking… fucking snarls in my goddamn ear.” Arthur realized his voice was beginning to raise in volume, but he didn’t care. He continued unabashed, his face flushing slightly. “Photos falling off the dresser. Shit like that. But even before that, I can tell. I know it when he enters the room. Everything gets… colder.” The edge was suddenly gone from his voice. He sounded small and frail. “And it smells weird. Like that smell before a thunderstorm, only its…wrong. Greasy. Like someone shoved that ozone smell in a box and it rotted.” The last word came out more like a croak.

“So you can smell and… sense him before he ever really reveals himself.” She looked at him with that pair of big, blue-green eyes. He looked at the the water bamboo, then the Buddha statue, and then to her again. A veritable gauntlet of peaceful serenity, he thought to himself, and here I am, the maelstrom of madness to fuck it all up.

“Yeah… uh… Yeah.” Arthur sighed and shook his head. “After that, I know I’m not going to sleep for the rest of the night. Not for very long, anyway. I’ll burn some sage and chant like my mom used to and it’ll work for a little while. A few hours, maybe, so if I’m exhausted enough or can calm myself down enough I might be able to catch an hour or two. Maybe. Sometimes he scratches me. Or bites me. Shit like that.”

Selene nodded calmly. “I see.”

Arthur sighed again, not knowing where to look. He settled on a section of beige carpet on the floor. “Sometimes he leaves marks on me. Not usually, but on a really bad night. Yeah. Sometimes… uh… sometimes I wake up bleeding.”

“When was the last really bad night?”

He swallowed. “Uh… Friday night. That’s when he gave me this.” Arthur reached down, still looking at the carpet, and rolled up his pant leg to the knee. Were he looking up, he would have noticed Selene’s eyes widening. Instead, he merely felt his face flush.

“For the record,” she began dictating to the recorder, “Arthur is lifting up his pant leg. I see four long cuts or scratches across his shin, scabbed over.”

Arthur heard the sound of a pen scribbling furiously against its pad. When he looked up, Caldwell was just finishing her writing, and had a tiny furrow line between her brows when she looked up at him.

“The… demon… did that to you?” She placed extra emphasis on the word ‘demon’. Her posture, even in her half-lotus, seemed tense. Splashes in the pool of serenity.

“Yeah,” he said. “That was… that was a rough fucking night. Worst one in months, really.”

She leaned back, correcting her posture, back flush with the leather chair behind her, head slightly down, mimicking the Buddha statue. “Please tell me about it, if you’d like.”

“Uhhh. Well, it started out like a relatively normal night. Went home after work and made some mac and cheese. Watched a few old Star Trek reruns. Ate some oreos. Played online poker for a bit. Then I went out for drinks with two guys from work. Tim and Dante. We went to some little sports bar on North Main first. Had a few beers. Watched the Celtics game. Then we went to Dave and Buster’s and played some video games. They flirted with some girls at the bar there.”

“Did you take part in the flirting?”

“Yeah, a little, I guess. There was a little brunette there that was kind of cute, but I think she was more interested in Dante. Besides, I’m a mess these days. Last thing a girl wants is a weird insomniac. Heh. Especially one who thinks a demon is after him.” That nervous laughter again.

Selene said nothing. Her face was once again placid and smooth, the furrow between her brows gone.

Quit sniveling, Don Juan. Self-deprecation sure does get the ladies wet, don’t it?

Arthur sighed again, and leaned his head back against the couch, settling his eyes on a slightly darker patch of cream-colored ceiling. “A little later that night, when I was asleep, I had a nightmare, and the… the pain woke me up.”

“Do you want to tell me about the nightmare?”

Arthur avoided her gaze and glanced back at the Buddha. Suddenly, tiny cracks began to spiderweb themselves up the brown stone statue, starting at the base. He saw a tiny piece fleck off here and there as the fissures crept their way to the acorn-like crown of its head. Suddenly, the statue shattered into a powdery dust that cascaded down slowly, settling as a brown dust upon the beige carpet. He shook his head again and the vision disappeared, the Buddha statue was still there, perfectly in tact, completely unmarred.

All I touch, I destroy.

“Some of the details are hazy, but yeah…” Arthur cleared his throat, looking back to his familiar patch of carpet.

“I remember walking to this house on the outskirts of town,” he began. “This weird, Adam’s family looking house. There were some people with me. Friends, I guess, though I didn’t recognize anyone specific. Just that there were like three other people with me. Maybe four. Yeah, four others apart from me, so five of us, altogether. It was night time, and we were all wearing hoodies. I remember that part. Heh. Good thing we weren’t in Florida. Might’ve gotten shot.”

Selene looked at him blankly.

Tough crowd. Christ, I’m parched. Arthur reached over to the pitcher of water beside him and poured himself a glass. Some of it splashed onto the wooden table, and he wiped it up with a convenient tissue before taking a healthy gulp of water.

“The house was pretty much a mansion,” he said, putting the glass down and placing the tissue in his pocket. “Big fucking place. Huge, really. Like a big ornate Victorian gone to shit. Creepy looking, like a classic haunted house. It was black in color, or almost black. I mean, it uh… it could’ve been like a really dark blue or purple or brown. It was dark out so it was hard to tell. It was up on the top of this small hill with trees all around it. Big fucking trees. Like, old and gnarly. I remember the ground being weird. Like, it was spongy under my feet, like some kind of padded astroturf, though it looked like normal grass. Normal dead grass, anyway. Brown and cut short…Yeah.

“So we uh, we walked up to the house quietly. We were all being sneaky, like we were a bunch of teenagers snooping around, waiting for the old lady next door to yell at us or something. Heh heh. This one guy leading the group of us looked hispanic, I think, and he had a white and black striped hoodie on. He uh.. He opened one of the first floor windows and we all climbed inside.”

A short silence followed. Caldwell broke it.

“Then what happened?”

“We uh… whew… we uh…” Arthur’s face began paling a bit, and when he spoke, his voice raised in pitch. It became breathy, as if each word needed to be pushed through an invisible membrane, else it would not leave his lips. “We started looking around. The first room we were in was a living room. There was this thick, wine-red carpet on the floor and green and brown ornate furniture. The walls were like this dark brown wood grain. Old books on the shelves. Only two of us had flashlights. Me and the hispanic guy. We all walked through a doorway into a lobby with a big staircase that lead up to the second floor. The hispanic kid and two others said they wanted to go upstairs, but that me and the girl should look around more on the ground floor.”

“The girl?”

There’s always a girl, don’t you know? Always one either just out of reach, or tearing my heart to pieces.

“Arthur?”

Wake up, asshole. “Yeah, sorry.” Arthur shook his head quickly and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at the carpet again. “There was this girl there with us. Tiny little thing with big doe-eyes. I think her hair was brown, but I couldn’t really tell with the hood up.”

Caldwell shifted her other leg. She was now sitting full lotus on her chair, still jotting things in her little notebook. “Did she look like the girl from the bar?”

“Nah, not really. I mean, they were both about the same size. Like, no taller than five-two. Both pretty and petite, but totally different faces.”

“Alright. So the three guys went upstairs. Where did you and the girl go?”

“We went into the next room on the first floor. So, if you were facing the stairs, we had come from the left, and we headed toward the room to the right.” Arthur gestured with his hands as he spoke, in a manner akin to a tour guide, though he avoided looking directly at Selene. “The door was open, and the room was empty. Bare. The first room we walked into with the couches was completely furnished. I mean it was dusty and old, but totally intact. Even the lobby looked furnished. Paintings on the walls, and a big fucking vase in the corner, like four or five feet tall, blue and white. This next room wasn’t. It was completely stripped, like only the drywall was left. Moonlight shining in through the windows. It was kind of small, and there was another door. The girl said we needed to go downstairs, but said she was scared. I… uh… opened the door, and there was a staircase leading down.”

Selene suddenly stopped writing in her notebook. “Wait. The girl said the two of you needed to go downstairs, but you didn’t see a staircase until you opened the door?”

“Yeah.”

“So the girl knew about the staircase before you opened the door.”

Arthur felt his entire body go cold with that revelation. His face grew more pale, and little beads of sweat formed on his brow. He began to shiver.

“Ye-ye.. ye-yeah,” he stammered. “I uh… I guess she did. I didn’t think about that before. That uh.. that makes a lot more sense.”

The once-calm patch of beige carpet began to shift and move as Arthur stared at it. He blinked a few times, but it continued to undulate sickeningly. He could feel the ‘whump-whump’ of his own heartbeat thumping in his forehead, and he began wiping his suddenly sweaty palms against his jeans.

Of course. That fucking cunt knew all along.

“Please, go on.”

He heard Caldwell’s voice as if she spoke through a tinny little radio on the other side of the room. His mouth was terribly dry, swallowing was nearly painful, but the water glass seemed a mile away. He continued anyway, his voice almost a whisper.

“Well, uh… she held onto my arm and we walked down the stairs slowly. Wooden stairs. Really fucking loud. Every step echoed through the entire place, even though we tried to step quietly. The basement was unfinished. Concrete. The first room there had like a weird green color to the walls. Like a light green, kinda pukey. There were some broken chairs stacked in the corner to my left, and an old work bench to my right with rusty tools. There was a big steel door straight ahead on the other side of the room, and I wandered over to it and put my ear against it. I heard this click-clicking noise on the other side. Like the clicking of a dog’s toenails on the floor or something. I told the girl to grab some tools from the workbench that we could use as weapons if we needed to, and she uh… she uh.. she let go of my arm.”

Arthur let out a long exhalation. Selene watched as he rubbed his palms against his jeans. He’d lift them briefly, but they would shake, and he’d plant them again on his jeans. His breathing was obviously labored and sporadic.

“What happened then?” She spoke quietly, gently.

“Then the.. uh… t-the door started shaking.” Arthur’s voice raised in pitch, and began to tremble like his hands. “Just a little bit at first, but t-then violently, like something was t-trying to get out. I turned and told her we needed to find the others and she started l-laughing.”

“She started laughing?”

Arthur’s eyes were completely unfocused now, staring off into the void. It was obvious to Selene that he no longer sat on her brown leather couch, but stood instead in the basement of his nightmares. He began raising his voice.

“Y-yeah. Yeah. L-laughing. She was facing me with h-her back to the tool bench and she started laughing. She said that the others were already dead. And then these two… creatures came out of nowhere. They were kind of human, like zombies, almost. I mean, they were dead, I remember thinking that, but like I knew that they were al… al.. already dead, but they they weren’t r-rotting or anything. They had this grey skin stretched tight against their frames, and claws and teeth like needles, and they started picking flesh off of the girl’s face and neck and eating it. And she just kept fucking laughing. She was staring at me and these fucking evil things were eating bits of her flesh and she just kept fucking laughing at me. I was shivering uncontrollably and the door behind me was shaking and fucking blood was running down the girl’s face and throat and these things were eating her and she was laughing louder and louder and louder and louder. Then one of the creatures suddenly ducked low and slashed my legs with its claws, and I woke up. I sat bolt upright and I was bleeding for real. And my bedroom door was shaking and I knew it was him again. I could smell that rotted ozone smell and I knew it was him… He’d fucking found me again.”

The final sentence was a whimper at best, half the volume of the tirade that preceded it. Arthur’s labored breathing reached a level of near hyperventilation as he sat with his head in his hands, clutching at his greasy hair while staring into nothingness. Selene let him breathe for a minute or two, and did not speak until a somewhat steady rhythm was established, and his eyes seemed to focus again.

“Arthur.”

“Yeah?” He cleared his throat.

“Do you keep any sharp objects by your bedside at night?”

“Yeah, uh… a pocketknife, sometimes. Its uh… its no use, though.”

“No use?”

“Against him. I can’t hurt him with it. I’ve tried.”

You should try using it against yourself, fuck-up.

Selene nodded and jotted something into her notebook. “Was there one by your bedside on Friday night?”

“No. No, it was… in the pocket of my jeans, on the other side of the room.”

Selene cocked her head slightly to the side as she looked at him this time.

Like a dog when it hears a fart. She doesn’t believe you, asshole.

“I see,” she continued. “So when you woke up and you realized the demon had returned, what did you do?”

“I uh.. I turned on all the lights. Burned a bunch of sage. Swore at the thing a bit first, then chanted.”

“Did the shaking continue?”

“No. It uh… it stopped. After I burned the sage, and chanted some lines from my mom’s old journal. I burned the sage in every room. Then decided to stay up watching a bunch of goofy videos online. Didn’t dream of going back to sleep. Doubt I’d be able to if I tried.”

On to Providence Noir: Chapter III – Bridges