Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

They were soon on their way to meet Danielle’s coven.

There came a point where the cab could go no farther, and they must walk through a gangway, so-called for the habit of gangs slipping from sight, usually after a robbery.

Audra led the way. Ransom gestured to the cabbie to hold for their return. To assure the man’s allegiance, Ransom waved an extra large bill in the air.

Jane whispered, “Do you believe this? How these children live under such pressures. Amazingly, profoundly sad.”

“Perhaps so, but how is it relevant to my case?”

“Our case,” she corrected him.

A part of him wanted to burst her idyllic bubble about Dr. Fenger, tell her of the deal he and Kohler had cut with Senator Chapman, but he held off. Again he asked, “What’s it to do with our case, then?”

“I’m not sure, but I have a feeling it is…somehow relevant.”

They soon found Danielle’s camp-its epicenter an abandoned old livery stable near a burned-down warehouse shell. A nearby drainpipe large enough to drive a horse dray through-part of a reservoir system-ran alongside this area.

Danielle looked like a youthful man instead of a woman, a sad weariness to her features, but she could not be much older than King Robin. She too held a large stick, cleaned of its bark and varnished, as a scepter, and she too barked at people in the language of muleskinners.

Once she decided that Alastair, Jane, and Gabby could be trusted, because she trusted Audra, she opened up. Her first words were, “I gotta disagree with King Robin and his followers. This war shouldn’t be treated like some kinda secret holy society that keeps others out. I want converts!”

Alastair liked this girl’s attitude. She meant to spread the word of the war between Heaven and Hell going on now in the Prairie City and across America.

As a result, Danielle quickly warmed to her topic.

“One demon working for Satan is the worst, and children know her by her English name here, but she also has a Spanish name”

“Bloody Mary,” said Audra.

Danielle whispered, “La Llorona.”

“The Crying Woman,” said Alastair, knowing a little Spanish.

This impressed the homeless children gathered about Danielle, several of whom were Spanish. Alastair raised his shoulders as if to say “what,” when Jane and Gabby stared at him, sharing a look of surprise.

“The woman weeps blood,” one child added.

“Blood,” echoed another, “and sometimes black oil tears.”

“From ghoulish empty sockets.”

“And she feeds on a child’s terror,” added Danielle. “It’s why you can’t be scared, and why you can’t be a child.”

Why you can’t be a child , the adults rolled over the comment in their minds, thinking how sad the words, when a sudden chorus of the homeless children began talking over one another.

Danielle silenced them all with her upraised scepter, a thin stick. “When a child is killed accidentally or murdered outright, La Llorona sings out in delight and joy.”

“And if a child goes missing?” asked Ransom.

“She is feeding on him…or her.”

“Ffff-feeding on a child?” asked Gabby.

“If you wake up at night and see La Llorona, and you hear her song,” began Danielle, “you have to go with her, cause…just because…”

“-cause it’s like being hypnotized,” added a young black girl.

“You’re chosen, you gotta go,” Danielle grimly said.

A stunted boy with a withered arm said, “Bloody Mary’s clothes’ll be blowing back, even in a room where there’s no wind.”

“If you see her, you know she’s marked you for death,” explained Danielle.

“But you’re not afraid to say her name,” said Alastair. “I thought if you said her name aloud, you brought her anger down on you? No?”

“Robin’s a good leader, but he’s wrong about this,” she explained. “You show the demons any sign of fear…they even smell it, you’re dead. That’s how it really goes.”

“What about the angel lady I heard about?” asked Alastair. “The Blue Lady of the Lake, is it? Tell me something about her.”

All the children began jabbering at once, talking over one another, anxious to tell all they knew of this lady, one shouting, “She’s like my mum was!”

“She’s kinda like my mum,” repeated one boy with a thick British accent. “Has aliases.”

“But the Blue Lady’s secret name?” Jane wanted to understand their thinking. “Nobody knows it? So her power is limited? Can you tell me any of the Blue Lady’s aliases?”

“One is Alia,” Audra blurted out, emboldened in her new role as emissary between Danielle and the strangers.

“Another is Elisyan,” said one of the older boys.

Danielle added, “That’s all we know.”

Their secrets keep them safe, Alastair thought, and they keep their secrets safe…almost. So much symbolism.

Alastair began questioning Danielle about her life. Her parents had emigrated from France and had kicked around New York for years and had relocated to Chicago on the hope of finding work as tailors. Instead, her father abandoned them. Her mother now worked in a sweatshop in the garment district, and Danielle pretty much lived on the streets, “Hating the hole mum pays rent on,” she finished.

Alastair elicited additional information from Queen Danielle. Her mother had gone through three attempts to get clear of an addiction to heroin, and was trying to get her life back in order. Danielle was French on her mother’s side, Spanish on her father’s side, which accounted for her jet black hair and exotic features.

Gabby asked, “So what is the Blue Lady’s most secret name?”

The children erupted with answers again all at once: “That’s for you to find out.”

“It’s useless if someone just tells you what it is.”

“Even if they did know it.”

“You gotta find out all on your own.”

“Anyone says it out loud is turned into an angel for the war.”

They began addressing one another now. They shared many beliefs with Robin’s band.

Gabby cautiously asked, “Then if, say, for instance, that you and your friends are on a street corner when a carriage comes racing down on you and only one of you knows her secret true name and yells out this name, then only the one will live?”

“No ma’am,” said Audra.

“You don’t get it,” said Danielle. “You see her and she whispers her real heavenly name, then you gotta go with her.”

The tallest boy in the group added, “You’re dead, yeah, but you got eternal life as one of hers and that’s Heaven, see?”

“And it makes you superhuman,” said another.

“So you can fight the Devil.”

“Got it,” said Gabby, fighting back a frown.

“It’s a spell that takes your soul up,” Audra further explained, “and it’s very loving. She says: ‘Hold on’ a lot, meaning, things’re going to get better for us.”

A freight train rushing toward the center of commerce suddenly came up, its roar deafening, so close were they to the tracks. It shook the earth around them.

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nodded vigorously at this. “I’ve seen her. The Blue Lady,” he murmured.

A rustle of whispered “me too”s rippled through the small circle of initiates.

Alastair thought, They instinctively know to curry favor with Danielle; that to remain under her considerable protection, they need only agree with everything she says. “And where is Leather Apron in all this? Is he Zoroaster?”

Danielle’s features turned suddenly stony, and she glared at Audra as if she’d like to strangle the younger girl. “Damn you, Audra! How much of your guts did you spill to these outsiders?”