Cameron West – call him West; only his dear, gray-haired mother back in Minneapolis calls him Cameron, and then only when she wants something – is a Caucasian male of Swedish descent. He is a private detective whose main beat is Los Angeles.
West stands 5’10”. The scale puts him at 166 pounds, most of it visible in his shoulders and arms. At the time of this introduction, West is 41 (born October 5, 1883). His brown hair has started to recede at the temples, and while his blue eyes miss more details than they used to, he refuses to wear glasses. He punches, shoots, and endorses his checks with his right hand, in that order.
JANUARY 17, 1925: NEW YORK
I never liked New York City. Too many subways, not enough sun. Give me LA any day. But when a friend asks you to come, as Elias had done, you put on your best hoofing shoes, pack up your gun, and you get on the first train headed to The Big Apple that you can.
I should have had my gun with me. Unfortunately, it was back in California, still held by the Santa Barbara Police Department after the mess with Ling-Sue Harris and her dope smuggling ring. Captain McAllister had been a buddy since our Army days, but even he couldn’t pull the strings necessary to get me back my piece before my train hauled out of La Grande Station for points east. If I couldn’t get my own gun back, I’d need to find one, preferably before the next murder I stumbled into.
I’d like to blame Elias for getting me mixed up in one of his investigations, but blaming a dead man – a dead friend – for my own troubles didn’t sit well with this private detective.
Poor Elias.
I’ve known lots of journalists in my time. None of them could make the world seem more terrifying than it is yet still somehow make sense of it all better than Jackson Elias. His stories of headhunter cults in the Amazon and sinister Indian Thuggees had kept me awake on many a midnight stakeout. When I went to the LA book signing for Elias’s The Black Power, I’d expected him to be a severe, pasty-ass academic. Instead, he was an affable, athletic Negro with a wicked wit and a taste for red meat and good beer.
We hit it off better than any woman who’s ever left me in the morning.
It had been a while since I’d last heard from Elias. We’d catch up whenever we happened to be sharing towns, of course. He’d tell me his stories of exotic international cults, and I’d tell him my stories of conventional American sleaze. So, when I got his telegram asking me to meet him in New York City, to talk about the Carlyle expedition, I thought he was just looking for an extra pair of ears and eyes, maybe a little freelance muscle. I had no idea I’d stumble onto his freshly carved corpse in his hotel room my first night there.
At least I wasn’t alone. Three other friends of Elias – Doctor Frohme, Molly St. Claire, and Neptune Lewis (I call him Junior) – stumbled into the shit with me. A good thing, since we’d had to deal with Elias’s murderers then and there.
Junior took out one of the crims with his own knife, a mean-looking blade I found out later was called a panga. Molly got off one hell of a shot through the second punk’s neck, from four stories up. Miss Molly might be a crim herself, but with that kind of eye, I won’t split hairs. She might be able to split mine with a bullet. As for the third assassin, I managed to wrangle him to the floor while the doc tried to find something to tie him up with. We eventually locked him down with a pair of handcuffs, and I kept him from killing himself with a cyanide capsule.
My fingers still sting a bit from yanking that thing out of that murderer’s mouth.
Maybe I should have let him die, since he ended up doing so later, after the police had picked him up. But I wanted to know why they’d murdered Elias. And why him and his buddies had carved that weird symbol that looked like either a mouth or an asshole into Elias’s forehead. Unfortunately, he clammed up. After a quick search around Elias’s room, we decided to skedaddle out of there before the cops showed up.
They say you can trust the police. And by you, I mean not me. Because in my experience, dirty cops are as commonplace as dirty socks. They need to prove they’re trustworthy before I’ll hang around the scene of a murder waiting for them to arrive.
What happened next? It’s kind of a blur. There was the lecture by Professor Cowles, the Australian archeologist, and our introduction to Doctor Lemming, a local eccentric who seemed to specialize in horror stories. He told us about the Cult of the Bloody Tongue and a kind of African walking dead known as a chiimba, as well as some nameless god as tall as a mountain with no face but a massive tongue that could swallow the world, or something like that.
Talk about heebie-jeebies.
I do better with real-world stuff than mythology, so I went with the team when we hoofed over to Emerson Imports. We’d found the name on a card in Elias’s things, with the name “Silas N’kwane” written on the back. Emerson didn’t have much for us, except to recommend we check out a place called Juju House in Harlem.
Side note: The doc might not have the steadiest hands in a fight that I’ve seen, but she’s good at getting info. Not requiring fists, either, which was a nice change for my knuckles.
Juju House was basically an African trade shop…on the outside. Silas N’kwane ran the place. He was an odd, intense character. I don’t think he blinked once during the whole time we talked with him. He didn’t have any info for us, though Junior thought he saw something interesting under the rug behind the counter. Of course, one can’t just go pulling up rugs from under people’s feet, no matter how much they might intrigue you. So, we did what you’d expect us to do. We waited until N’kwane was gone and broke into the place.
Junior’s point of interest was a trap door to a basement beneath the shop, but I was more interested in what was past the curtain behind the counter. Turned out, just a sad bedroom with a commode. But in N’kwane’s suitcase was the damnedest thing: a kind of mask/headdress thing with the exact same mouth/asshole symbol that had been carved into Elias’s forehead. Attached to it was a tongue. A real tongue. It looked human. I left it in the case and the case in the room because N’kwane was coming back. Another African man, bigger and a lot more menacing, was with him.
We got out of there in a hurry. At least nobody saw us.
The next day was Elias’s funeral.
Colton Ramsey, Elias’s lawyer, and Jonah Kensington, Elias’s publisher, were both there. So was Prof. Cowles and his daughter Eva. Some reporter and a cop, too, that I learned after the fact was a Lieutenant Poole, who’d been part of the investigation into a series of stabbings in Harlem with remarkable similarities to Elias’s death. Also in attendance, for some reason, was Erica Carlyle, of the same Carlyle family that ran that doomed expedition to Africa four years ago, about which Elias had said he had more information in his telegram that started this whole mess.
Luckily, the doc and Molly were there to make some polite requests on our behalf.
Erica Carlyle was accompanied by her lawyer, Bradley Grey, who’d given us the runaround in our uneventful meeting the day before. They deigned to give us an audience, after the doc informed Ms. Carlyle that Elias had had information about her brother’s expedition. But first, Ramsey invited us to the reading of Elias’s will.
I didn’t think journalists had a lot of dough, but apparently, Elias’s books made him substantial moolah. He had no family, though, so he left all his money to us.
Junior, I could see; Elias probably saw himself as something of a mentor to the kid. And the doc had a medical background, which required money. Molly I’m not sure about, unless he was as enamored of her shooting prowess as I am. But me?
I guess I’ll never know why he chose me to be in that select group of beneficiaries. It was like grabbing a baton in a race, though, and filled me with a grim resolve. From anyone else, a windfall like that would have meant a month or more of me living the high life eating rare T-bones and drinking expensive lagers. But coming as it did from Jackson Elias, that money made me more determined than ever to find out who’d done this to him, my friend.
A private investigator doesn’t have many friends. I’m not going to lose any more. Not if I can help it.
The others have notes on the fine points of Elias’s investigation and where it coincides with ours. Like how Ms. Carlyle doesn’t believe the African tribesmen hanged for the murder of her brother’s expedition were guilty of the crime. Or how Hilton Adams, currently imprisoned in Sing Sing, could be responsible for Elias’s death despite the similarities in the stabbings. Or how Captain Robson of the NYPD was most definitely taking bribes from Silas N’kwane for some reason, and how Robson had probably framed Adams for those Harlem murders in the first place.
I didn’t care much about any of that at that moment. All I cared about was avenging Elias. And the key to that was back at Juju House, with Mister Juju himself, Silas N’kwane.
We went back in force. Molly had her guns; Junior had his twin flashlights. (Have you ever been hit in the head with a flashlight? It’s like a sap. But made of metal. With glass in it. It hurts.) I didn’t have anything but my fists, but that suited this former Army middleweight just fine.
When we got there, there was already a party. We’d seen about a dozen figures go inside, followed by a strange pounding as if on massive drums, and chanting that turned into an ear-splitting noise of howling, singing, and maniacal laughter.
I got the mask as proof of the kind of sicko N’kwane was. We could hand it over to the cops; Ramsey said he trusted Lt. Poole. If nothing else, Cowles or Lemming might have some academic use for it. But it wasn’t staying in Juju House.
Junior wanted to take the trap door to the basement, where all that racket was coming from. At least he had the sense to grab one of the shop’s spears before he headed down.
The doc decided to keep a lookout while Molly and I made sure Junior didn’t end up like Elias.
We didn’t even make it halfway down the steps.
The chamber beneath the shop was more like a cavern. It glowed with a sickly red light all its own. The cacophony of voices and pounding feet made the stairs shudder. And maybe I’m just not familiar with the way things go in Harlem, but a dozen or more people in hooded black robes chanting and stomping as a helpless person bloodied by welts cries for their life at the edge of a giant circular pit is not my idea of a friendly gathering.
I only got a glimpse of what was slithering around – up? – in that pit, but it defied interpretation. A mishmash of faces and bodies squished into a single form, like a bunch of dolls melted down in a pot and forced into a single nauseating blob of pain and malevolence. It grabbed that poor person crying for their life and pulled them into the pit. There was a scream. A crunch. What sounded like a gulp.
No way could we fight that thing.
I’d have been the first one up those steps if the doc hadn’t come down them after us, babbling about something coming toward the shop upstairs. Molly can be pretty persuasive with her gun, though, and she and the doc led the way back to sanity. Almost.
The doc’s “something” was a man. A big Negro with unblinking white eyes and his innards hanging out, shuffling toward us with a slow but steady gait. Just like the chiimba Lemming described to us a day earlier.
I don’t know what possessed me to grab Junior’s spear and charge that walking corpse thing, but I did. I like to think Elias was somehow helping from beyond the grave, giving me the strength to spear the chiimba through the chest and shove it to the ground, pinning it there to the concrete. How it still tried to grab us after all that, I’ll never understand.
Molly voted to set Juju House on fire. I gave her a fast second. There was nobody innocent under its boards, not anymore.
We slammed the door to the basement shut. The doc and I stabbed more shop spears into it, wedging it closed. Junior pushed one of N’kwane’s giant stone idols onto the door, trapping the cultists down there for good.
By chance, there was a trash barrel fire nearby. Molly rolled that barrel to the edge of Juju House and tipped it over. The burning debris and embers fed on the rugs and clothes and wooden crates in the shop. Eventually, the fire would make its way to the chamber beneath the shop. That stone idol would take out the stairs and anybody on it. The flames would find more air, more cloth. Flesh. Bone. It would burn a long, long time into the night. Before it was done, New York would be a long way behind us.
Thank God. I still needed to get my gun.
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