“Thank you so much for helping me…”
The seasons were changing, and night was coming earlier now. A man stood in the door of the antiques shop, bowing to me, Riviere, and Elaina; behind him, I could already see the stars twinkling in the sky.
“Try to be more careful from here on out,” Riviere said, waving at the man with a pale hand and giving him a disinterested look. Instead of nodding, he bowed again, and then he turned and disappeared into the darkness.
The shop was quiet except for the jingle of the bell as the door closed behind him. The moment there were no customers left, the thread of tension that had been holding us up was cut, and Riviere heaved the deepest of sighs.
“I’m so tired…” She sat down on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. She always seemed especially spent after disenchanting something. As she pulled her glove back on, she said, “Would you get me some tea?”
“Gladly!” I said, and I hurried to make the dark tea, as a little way of thanking her for her effort.
As I got the drink, Elaina asked, “Would you like to close the shop early today?” I’m sure she saw how tired Riviere looked, too.
“Not a bad idea,” Riviere said, adding as she peered out the window that it was already fully dark out.
“And to think, it was just twilight when that guy came in,” I said. It was autumn, all right. I set three teacups on the table.
The man, Julio, had walked in our door almost exactly an hour before.
“Excuse me… Do you have…do you have any sancta that might help me?” he had finally asked me after wandering in a daze among the shelves. He was obviously pretty out of it. I wasn’t sure what to say—that was a fairly vague request.
His pallor was poor, and I decided to start by having him sit down and tell me what was going on. What had brought him in today? Was something the matter? I peppered him with questions like a doctor evaluating a patient.
“Urgh…”
Julio presented with terrible fatigue, and eventually he opened up to me about what was going on. He’d been fired from job after job, he said. He worked as hard as he could, yet no one appreciated what he did. Until just the other day, he’d been using a sancta to help his work go better, but the antiques shop where he’d been getting them was out of stock. At a loss for what to do, he’d decided to try our place.
“Do you have any…Look-Again Cigarettes here?” he asked. Or some kind of substitute sancta for them? He was desperate for something, anything that would help him.
Riviere put a hand on Julio’s shoulder. “You’re under a curse,” she said, looking at him with sharp, perceptive eyes. “What really draws people’s attention to the Look-Again Cigarettes is the smell of the tobacco. It affects the user just as much as everyone else, until they become obsessed with the cigarettes.”
The more you used them, the harder it was to stop thinking about them. That, she said, was the nature of this sancta.
She had obviously detected the veritable miasma of cursedness that clung to Julio the moment he entered the store. She interrogated him about the situation even more thoroughly than I had.
“Who sold you this sancta?” she asked.
“It was Antiques Carredura,” he said—a name we knew very well. She sold sancta in order to make people unhappy. She would appear seemingly from nowhere and vanish before you knew it—she was this country’s nightmare.
“Oh, I see.” Riviere nodded at the name, understanding—and took off her glove.
Job done, she took a sip of her tea. “Ah, delicious.” She let out another sigh, and I could hear in it how tired she was.
Elaina was right; today would be a good day to close early. I zipped over to the door and flipped the sign to the CLOSED side. That would protect us from any more customers showing up, at least as long as nothing really out of the ordinary happened.
No sooner had I had the thought than the bell jingled again and the door opened.
“Is Miss Riviere here?” asked the newcomer. I recognized him and his black uniform—he was a policeman.
“Ah, Henri.” When she saw him, Riviere’s expression darkened. Henri specialized in cases involving sancta, and when he came knocking at our door, there was usually only one reason. “Has she appeared again?” Riviere asked.
“I’m afraid so.” Henri made a beeline for where Riviere was resting on the sofa and placed something in front of her. “This is the sancta that was used in the incident.”
It was a preserved butterfly specimen.
“What’s that?” Elaina asked, looking a bit grossed out.
Atop its board, the butterfly’s wings drifted slowly up and down. It was pinned in place, already dead, and yet the butterfly didn’t seem to realize that. It wanted to fly away again.
“This sancta was found in the possession of a man we arrested today for stalking a young actress.” Then, loudly enough that we could all hear, Henri said, “What is this sancta, and what does it do?”
Riviere gave him a puzzled look as she replied, “Didn’t the man tell you?”
“We asked, but there’s always a possibility he was lying.”
“I see. Yes.” She let out a breath, then nodded and looked down at the insect. “This is called the Memory-Guiding Specimen. You think of someone you want to meet and pull out the pin, and the butterfly will guide you to them. Perfect for when somebody is lost.”
“All right,” Henri replied, apparently satisfied that the man had been telling the truth. He nodded, glad.
I wondered where this sancta had come from, though. It didn’t seem like the healthiest thing to have around.
“Where did he buy this?” Riviere asked, even though she probably knew the answer.
“From a woman dressed in mourning clothes, he said.”
Riviere looked at Henri, expressionless, and nodded. Maybe she even seemed a bit frustrated.
That was not a person we wanted to hear about twice in one day.
“Do you think we could use this sancta to track her?” Henri asked. So he’d come here to do more than just report to us. Pointing to the butterfly, he said, “We’ve been unable to track down Carredura, but wouldn’t this sancta lead us right to her?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Riviere said, shaking her head. “This specimen isn’t capable of that.”
“It isn’t? But why not?”
Hadn’t Riviere just said that it could go to anyone you were thinking of? Henri looked very confused.
Riviere said simply, “Because that woman is not an ordinary person.”
That explanation sounded vague—but it certainly made everyone in the room fall silent.
When I thought about it, it actually explained a lot. She wasn’t an ordinary person, which was why she could make other people unhappy so easily. It was why she had gone all these years able to evade both Riviere and the police.
“Who or…what is Carredura?” I asked before I knew what I was saying.
I’d met so many people who had been in crisis because of her. Like Julio, the guy who had just left our shop, and Freja. She toyed with people’s hearts, and she was hiding somewhere in town at this very moment. I hated the thought.
Surely, Riviere must know something about her.
There was an extended, heavy silence, and then Riviere heaved her umpteenth sigh of the night. “I could tell you…but it’s a very long story.”
“I don’t mind. Please tell us.”
She was quiet for another moment, but then she nodded. “All right. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane.”
Then she began to relate the tale of Antiques Carredura, and how she came to be a most unordinary person.