THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: COLLECTIONS

The second house (outside of Philadelphia) went fine. Nine days total for the job; two in a Best Western eating pizza and looking at floorplans… the rest watching and waiting off the road near the house. The house was big and I guess what was most striking about it was that it was curved. I don’t mean it was circular, I mean the house had no squared edges. Every corner, every joint, every wall. Curves. Just thinking about that I could see my long-dead contractor father’s eyebrows crawl up his forehead as he added one, two, three, zeroes to the end of that bill. 

Anyway, no one was home (which is just the way we like it). According to the office, BRIDGES JIM, 45 YOA, was on a buying trip in Thailand. Didn’t have to ask for what, it’s books. It’s always fucking books. Anyway. Empty but curved, like I said. Expensive teak doors like portholes, but cheap locks like shit. It was maybe an hour twenty, an hour forty minutes to get everything open. The safe was the worse part, and it was maybe forty minutes of LOUIS’s time which, in the grand scheme of things was pretty average. Usually, I could do it, but I didn’t recognize the model. Something new. 

Inside the box, two crap books and the target that matched the photos. RUSSELL said it was the target. Good enough for me. We spent fifty more minutes or so loading up the truck with all the papers we found in the house. “I don’t care what it is, throw it in,” is what RUSSELL said, so I did. We all did what RUSSELL said. He took the calls from the office. As far as we were concerned, a year in, he was the office. Money came through him, so, even though he didn’t always act like it, he was the boss…by default. 

So we loaded it all up. The book, every piece of print in the house, two computers and a hard drive. Then twenty-five minutes driving out into the snow covered woods where we had stashed the other car. We torched the book — which the internet told me sold in 1997 for 1.25 million dollars — nine boxes worth of papers, and the truck. 

I was never tempted to take off with any of the stuff. I knew who these people were. Anyway, this is just an example of the strange shit I’ve seen. 

My “job” was usually like this. Waiting around in motels. Creeping around someone else’s empty house on weekdays. Never seeing the people in the photos on the walls there in real life. Spying. Stealing. Then back to the Best Western. Bagels. Plastic wrapped coffee cups. Muted TV showing the news and commercials for things I’ll never, ever buy.  

Five days later…we moved on to the third house on the list (outside Newark). DEVAUGHN KEISI KRIS, 61 YOA. Dutch. The house was small and clean and in the sprawl between cities people call neighborhoods these days. Compact. Pristine. The target was a book that was sometimes called the Aldaraia and sometimes the Book of Soyga. 16th century book on demonology. The famous British occultist Dr. John Dee once owned two copies of it, and then one of them appeared in Zutphen in the Netherlands 60 years later. Then, it turned up in the private collection of the DeVaughn family in 1799. 

Then it was looted by the Nazis in 1943, and returned to the DeVaughn family in 1955. With them since then. Kris being the third DeVaughn to possess it. 

We know the book is in the house because of the purchase of the hermetic book safe in 1988. There’s only one problem. The old man doesn’t leave the house. His groceries are delivered by couriers. His lawn picked up by school children. The car, tarped and parked permanently on the side of the house. No one says anything bad about him. 

Five days of watching this time. Motel 6. RUSSELL made a pass on the house himself. When he came back, he was uncharacteristically good humored. The old man was funny, he said. The old man had a sense of humor. But he wouldn't say why. The old man was sharp, but he didn’t suspect anything. 

Late the following night we park at the train station and hike the four blocks to the house, sticking to the unlit streets. It’s raining. No one is out. We gather in the backyard, blocked by the high hedges, and in the drizzle, the masks and pistols are handed out. They’re for show, mostly. RUSSEL smirks and I ask him what’s up?

“I’ll tell you later.”

RUSSEL somehow gets the back door open. Inside, we fan out. An old man’s life. Old photos in blue. A running, silent static-filled TV set. 

“The safe is upstairs,” RUSSELL says, so I leave LOUIS down below and creep about. It’s my speciality, after all. Two empty bedrooms deviod of furniture, and a bathroom piled with yellowed stacks of newspapers. Nothing else. Then, the thought appears in my mind, whole and without any connection to anything: How did he know the safe was upstairs?

When I come back downstairs, RUSSELL is standing at the bottom waiting for me. 

“Where’s LOUIS?” I whisper. 

“Oh…here,” RUSSELL says, looking bewildered, still smiling. 

“Where’s the old man?”

I click on the flashlight and light RUSSELL up, bringing my gun in my other hand up along with the light, so he might miss it behind the beam. RUSSELL’s eyes flash back pink and glowing, and even though his skin is lit, it’s like the light is going through him. Like it doesn’t touch him. And then I look on the wood floor and yellowed wallpaper behind him. Something comes loose in my chest. Something cold which unravels down my throat from my brain to my guts.  

RUSSELL’S shadow is that of a deformed thing; something sinewy and long and cruel, with a spray of claws at the end of each hand and a face like knives. Something made for blood in the way a butcher’s knife is made for blood.

“Oh, he’s still very much here, young man.” RUSSELL says, and his voice rises, yowls, and ripples like an animal playing at speech.