Chicagoland by Gail Martin (important books to read TXT) 📕

I poured myself a glass of whiskey. It had a raw, smoky taste that reminded me of the liquor back in my native Hungary, made in hidden stills by friends and neighbors. Potent and rough, the liquor took men’s minds off their troubles.

I settled in on the couch and turned on the radio. Seems I had my pick of channels—news, music, drama, and sports. I flipped back and forth until I found one playing some of the songs I’d heard the last time I saw a vaudeville show at the theater. I sipped at my drink and leaned back to enjoy a safe momentary respite. Much as I loved spending time with West and Sarah, I needed quiet to gather my thoughts.

Unfortunately, at this point, I had too many questions and not enough answers. I knocked back the rest of the whiskey, set the glass aside on the side table, and got ready for bed. I hoped things seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep.

The next morning, I found that the hotel had delivered coffee and pastries to the parlor of our suite, a luxury I intended to fully appreciate. West woke me up before dawn whistling in the bathroom while he developed more photos, so I dressed, ate, and slipped down to the men’s room in the lobby to clean up. I had just returned when the bathroom door swung open.

“You’re going to want to take a look at this.” West bustled into the room, holding prints of the photos he and Sarah had taken down in the tunnels.

“You have the pictures already? Let’s see them!” Sarah came in from the other side, wearing a comfortable outfit with black wide-legged lounging pants and a red silk kimono-style top.

West spread out the photos on the coffee table and leaned over them. The secret room looked as if it had been set up as a bedroom or perhaps a cell since the only door was locked from the outside. I wondered who had stayed in that windowless room and why. Did the person escape through the hole in the wall or leave because the hole made the room unusable?

“I sent off a couple of telegrams to my contacts regarding the words and symbols I didn’t recognize,” West said, and I remembered the boxy “suitcase” he had brought with him, which served as a mobile station. I wondered if West had slept at all. “They’ll probably get back to me tonight. But some of these we’ve seen before.”

Over the years, I’d run across a lot of runes, sigils, and spells. There were too many for anyone to know them all, but certain symbols were more common than others, especially when it came to protection against evil.

“I’ve seen this before, and these,” I said, pointing. “They ward against the devil. Or more specifically, vampires.”

West nodded. “Yeah. That’s my thought too. So did the person in the room particularly fear vamps? Or did Capone’s gang keep a vamp prisoner down there, and more to the point—where is he now?”

I studied the words and phrases scrawled across the walls in black paint. Kirkpatrick might have dismissed them as nonsense, but I knew better. “They’re in a lot of different languages,” I said, squinting to see better. The light hadn’t been great for photography, and the pictures were rather dark.

“That one looks like English, sort of,” Sarah said, pointing to a line up near the ceiling. West dug through the prints and found an enlargement.

“Old English,” he surmised. “Like Chaucer. Not something you usually find outside a museum.”

I recognized the word, though I hesitated to say it aloud or to pronounce any of the words painted on the walls. Such things had power. “It’s giving an order for someone—or something—to ‘remain confined,’” I said, drawing on knowledge I’d gained on another case.

“It repeats here, and here—oh, and here,” Sarah noted, and as soon as she said that, I saw several other places where the word appeared as well.

“Not just that word,” West mused. “The same five lines, over and over.”

“Maybe they all mean the same thing,” I said, with a strong hunch that I was correct. “A binding spell to keep whatever was in the room imprisoned, reinforced by wording in different magical traditions, maybe even invoking different kinds of power. It would explain the repetition.”

West stood, arching his back to stretch. “I think you’re right. We’ll wait and see what my sources have to say, but that would make sense.”

“If that’s the case, then when the workmen knocked a hole in the wall, it also broke the warding,” Sarah said. “And provided a way to escape. Is that what’s ripping out hearts and leaving pools of blood? A vampire—or something else?”

“I guess we’ll have to go back down and figure that out,” I replied, figuring I’d need to do that anyhow. “But this morning, I want to have a look at Death Alley.”

“I’ll come with you,” Sarah replied.

I shook my head, bracing for a fight. “The ghosts probably can’t hurt me, and I need Ness and West riding shotgun, but there’s no reason to drag you into it. Let me go see what we’re up against, and then bring you in if there’s a way you can help.”

I saw the stubborn glint in Sarah’s eyes and the set of her jaw. To my surprise, she gave in. “Okay. I’m supposed to meet a friend at the Field Museum for coffee. I went to the gala when the museum first opened a few years back, and I can’t wait to see what they’ve added since then.”

Neither West nor I believed Sarah’s visit was a purely social call, and I suspected she knew that we knew. Still, we all maintained the polite fiction because she’d tell us what she was up to in her own time.

We went through the rest of West’s pictures. West and Sarah made short work of the coffee, but a call downstairs sent a server up with more.

“Let’s have a look