Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

It was a warm night in March, and most people were in the torch-lit garden. The Uninvited – that’s how I had come to think of them – helped themselves to cocktails and headed to the crowded lawn, and we followed.

“See those people over there?” I said to Cheyenne. “You ever see them before?”

She had to find her glasses and sneak them on, then shook her glossy black hair at me. “The square-jawed guy on the left looks like an actor. I think I’ve seen him in something. The girls don’t seem like they belong here.”

“What it is, I’m beginning to think there’s some really harmful karma around them.” I told her about the two earlier parties.

“That’s nuts,” she laughed. “You think they could just go around picking fights and nobody would notice?”

“People here don’t notice much, they’re too busy promoting themselves. Besides, I don’t think it’s about picking fights, more like bringing down a bad atmosphere. I don’t know. Let’s get a little closer.”

We sidled alongside one of the men, who was whispering something to the shorter, younger of the two girls. He was handsome in a dissipated way, she had small feral features, and I tried figuring them first as a couple, then part of a group, but couldn’t get a handle on it. The actor guy was dressed in an expensive blue Rodeo Drive suit, the other was an urban cowboy. The short girl was wearing the kind of cheap cotton sunflower shift they marked down at FedCo, but her taller girlfriend had gold medallions around her throat that must have cost plenty.

Now that I noticed, they were all wearing chains or medallions. The cowboy guy had a pony tail folded neatly beneath his shirt collar, like he was hiding it. Something about them had really begun to bother me, and I couldn’t place the problem until I noticed their eyes. It was the one thing they all had in common, a shared stillness. Their unreflecting pupils watched without moving, and stayed cold as space even when they laughed. Everyone else was milling slowly around, working the party, except these four, who were watching and waiting for something to happen.

“You’re telling me you really don’t see anything strange about them?” I asked.

“Why, what do you think you see?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe they come to these parties late, uninvited. I think they hate the people here.”

“Well, I’m not that crazy about our hosts, either,” she said. “We’re here because we have to be.”

“But they’re not. They just stand around, and cause bad things to happen before moving on,” I told Cheyenne. “I don’t know how or why, they just do.”

“Do you know how stoned that sounds?” she hissed back at me. “If they weren’t invited, how did they get through security?” She reached on tiptoe and looked into my eyes. “Just as I thought, black baseballs. Smoking dope is making you paranoid. Couldn’t you just try to enjoy yourself?”

So that’s what I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the guest dying in the pool, and the guy who had fallen down the stairs. We stayed around for a couple more hours, and were thinking about going when we found ourselves back with the Uninvited. A crowd had gathered on the deck and were dancing wildly, but there they were, the four of them, dressed so differently I couldn’t imagine they were friends, still sizing things up, still whispering to each other.

“Just indulge me this one time, okay?” I told Cheyenne. “Check them out, see if you can see anything weird about them.”

She sighed and turned me around so that she could peer over my shoulder. “Well, the square-jawed guy is wearing something around his neck. Actually, they all are. I’ve seen his medallion before, kind of a double-headed axe? It means God Have Mercy. There are silver beads on either side of it, take a look. Can you see how many there are?”

I checked him out. The dude was so deep in conversation with the short girl that he didn’t notice me. “There are six on each side. No, wait – seven and six. Does that mean something?”

“Sure, coupled with the double axe, it represents rebellion via the thirteen steps of depravity, ultimately leading to the new world order, the Novus Or dor Seclorum. It’s a satanic symbol. My brother told me all about this stuff. He read a lot about witchcraft for a while, thought he could influence the outcome of events, but then my mother made him get a job.” She pointed discreetly. “The girl he’s talking to is wearing an ankh , the silver cross with the loop on top? It’s the Egyptian symbol for sexual union. They’re pretty common, you get them in most head shops. Oh, wait a minute.” She craned over my shoulder, trying to see. “The other couple? She’s wearing a gold squiggle, like a sideways eight with three lines above it. That’s something to do with alchemy, the sign for black mercury maybe. But the guy, the cowboy, he’s wearing the most potent icon. Check it out.”

I looked, and saw a small golden five lying on his bare tanned chest. Except it wasn’t a five; there was a crossed line above it. “What is that?”

“The Cross of Confusion , the symbol of Saturn. Also known as the Greater Malefic, the Bringer of Sorrows. Saturn takes twenty-nine years to orbit the sun, and as a human life can be measured as just two or three orbits, it’s mostly associated with the grim reaper’s collection of the human soul, the acknowledgment that we have a fixed time before we die, the orbit of life. However, we can alter that orbit, cut a life short in other words. It’s a satanic death symbol, very powerful.”

I got a weird feeling then, a prickle that started on the back of my neck and crept down my arms. I was still staring at the cowboy when he looked up and locked eyes with me, and I saw the roaring, infinite emptiness inside him. I never thought I was susceptible to this kind of stuff, but suddenly, in that one look, I was converted.

We were still locked into each other when Cheyenne nudged me hard. “Quit staring at him, do you want to cause trouble?”

“No,” I told her, “but there’s something going down here, can’t you feel it? Something really scary.”

“Maybe they just don’t like black dudes, Julius. Or maybe they’re aliens. I really think we should go.”

Just then, the Uninvited turned as one and walked slowly to the other side of the dancing crowd until I could no longer see them properly. A few moments later I heard the fight start, two raised male voices. I’d been half-expecting it to happen, but when it did the shock still caught me.

He was in his late fifties, balding but shaggy-haired, dressed in a yellow Keep On Truckin’ T-shirt designed for someone a third his age. I saw him throw a drink and swing a fat arm, fist clenched, missing by a mile. Maybe he was pushed, maybe not, but I saw him lose his balance and go over onto the table as if the whole things was being filmed in slow motion. The kidney-shaped sheet of glass that exploded and split into three sections beneath him sliced through his T-shirt as neatly as a scalpel, and everyone jumped back. God forbid the guests might ruin their shoes on shards of glass.

He was lying as helpless as a baby, unable to rise. A couple of girls squealed in revulsion. When he tried to lift himself onto his elbows, a wide, dark line blossomed through the cut T-shirt. He flopped and squirmed, calling for help as petals of blood spread across his shirt. The music died and I heard his boot heels hammering on the floor, then the retreating crowd obscured my view. Nobody had rushed to his aid; they looked like they were waiting for the Mexican maids to appear and draw a discreet cloth over the scene so that they could return to partying.