Mr. Clarinet

"Spells. Good and bad. My mother's got a few of these. The egg can be used to make a woman fertile or barren," she said, then pointed to the foot, which Max noticed was professionally amputated above the ankle. "The foot can be used to cure broken bones or to cripple someone." Then she directed Max's attention to the hand, shriveled and grayish-green in color. "That's a married man's hand. See the wedding ring?" He saw the faded gold band hanging loose at the bottom of the second-from-last finger. "It can either make or break up a marriage. Everything you see here has two possible uses. It all depends on who's asking and who's casting. The good spells are done before midnight, the bad after. But I don't think a lot of good gets done around here."

"How did they get these?" Max asked.

"They bought them."

"Where from?"

"Everything's for sale here, Max," she said.

He looked back at what the Leballecs were doing.

Philippe had removed the cloth from where they'd been sitting, revealing the varnished wooden table it had been covering. There were markings of various sizes on the surface, indentations painted black. First and most prominent, set in two arches in the middle, facing Mercedes, were the letters of the alphabet: capitals running A to M, and then N to Z. Below, in a straight line ran numbers one to ten. In either upper corner were the words OUI and NON, and on the opposite side was carved the word AUREVOIR.

"Is that what I think it is?" Max asked Philippe.

"It ain't Monopoly."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"You said you wanted to know." Philippe smiled. "This is knowledge. You two wanna come over here."

Max hesitated. What if this was bullshit?

So what if it was, he told himself—bullshit only hurts the believer.

"I thought you charged for this kind of thing?" Max said, not moving.

"So you're going to do it?" Mercedes asked.

"Yeah."

"Good," Mercedes smiled. "Then consider it a gift from me to you. You're much more of a man than your predecessors—Mr. Beeson and Mr. Medd."

"You met 'em?"

"Beeson was very rude and arrogant. He called me a 'hocus-pocus bitch' and walked out as soon as he saw what we were doing. Medd was more polite. He thanked me for my time before he left."

"They never came back?"

"No."

Meaning they didn't believe in this shit either, thought Max. Which either made him more open-minded or a born-again fool.

"Shall we begin now, Max?"

The table was a huge Ouija board. A notebook, a pencil, and a solid, clear-glass, oval pointer were placed at Mercedes's side.

They were about to have a séance.

* * *

They sat around the table, Max in front of Mercedes, Chantale opposite Philippe, heads bowed, holding hands in a circle, as though they were saying grace. Everyone apart from Max had their eyes closed. He wasn't going to take it seriously. He didn't believe in it.

"Eddie? Eddie Faustin? Ou lŕ?" Mercedes called out loudly, filling the room with her voice.

If she was faking, Max thought, she was putting her heart and soul into it. Her face, under the strain of concentration, was even more bizarre than it had been when relaxed. She'd screwed it up so much that her features disappeared almost entirely in whorls and bunches of pinched-together, scrunched-up flesh. She was squeezing Chantale and Philippe's hands so hard her fists were shaking with the effort. They were both wincing in pain.

The room had gone a shade darker. Max thought he saw something move by the shelves and looked over. The exhibits seemed a fraction brighter and alive, vivid and empty like lit-up clothes-store mannequins on an empty, dark street. He swore he could detect movement in some of them—a pulse beat in the hand, the toes moving at the end of the foot, the snake darting out its tongue, cracks forming in the eggshell. Yet when he focused on them individually, they were utterly lifeless.

Philippe and Chantale tightened their respective grips on Max's hand, their lips moving soundlessly.

The atmosphere in the room had changed. He did not feel oppressed in there, despite all the black-magic paraphernalia, the knowledge that his predecessors had passed through here on their way to mutilation and, quite possibly, death. But now he felt a tightness creeping into his chest and back, a feeling of someone heavy standing on it.

When he first heard the sound, he didn't register it as anything special. He mistook it for the fan.

When he heard it again it was closer and louder, coming from right under his nose: a single light tap, followed by the sound of something small scraping over a smooth surface, a sound not unlike that of a zipper being done up, top to bottom, low notes ending on high.

He looked down at the board. Things had changed. The pointer had moved—or been moved—from Mercedes's side up to the letters. It was indicating the letter "E."

Chantale and Philippe let go of his hands.

"Qui lŕ?" asked Mercedes.

He saw the pointer turn, independently, to point at "D."

Max wanted to ask Mercedes how she was doing it, but his mouth was too dry and his balls ice.