“There’s your Aztec blood,” I said.
Thom showed me around the place. Most of the windows still had their original Sandwich glass. The doors had been replaced over the life of the house, but the Holy Lord hinges— so-called because they were cast to resemble the joined letters H and L, and crafted to dispel witches and other malefic entities — had been preserved. Thom was as proud of these details as if he owned the place. A sure sign of a lifer.
“See this counter?” Thom said, bringing a fist down on the heavy surface on which the tea was made. “Notice the slant?”
“The floor must be sinking,” I ventured.
“Built that way. This place is what they call a shipshape house. Everything slopes for drainage.” He turned over a cup of unfinished tea. Brown fluid ran down at a slope and into a little gunnel, where it emptied into a white plastic bucket. “Selfcleaning, 19th-century-style,” Thom remarked, grinning.
“The original house had a dock at the rear where the tea would come in,” he went on. “One night about 1867 the Blue Moon came in during a Nor’easter. Ran smack into the back, taking out the dock, splintering the entire house and everything else. They couldn’t rebuild the Clipper — the Arkham shipyards had stopped making merchantmen — so they salvaged what they could of house and ship and built this place.”
“You’re kidding me. This house used to be a ship?”
“This,” he said, gesturing around the cramped little plumcolored pantry with its heavy rough-hewn cupboards, “was the first ship to make the Kingsport-to-Siam run. She sailed down the coast, rounded Cape Horn, up the west coast of South America to San Franscico to lay in supplies, then straight on across the Pacific to the Gulf of Siam. Did it in sixty days flat.” He opened one age-discolored cupboard. On the inside surface, a chicken-track dance of initials were carved into the wood every whichway. “Some of these were made by Blue Moon sailors,” Thom explained. “After you’ve been here a year, you get to carve your own initials in here too. It’s tradition.”
I suppressed my smile. I had no such plans. “Where do they get their tea now?” I asked casually.
“Same place as always. Siam.”
“You mean Thailand. It hasn’t been Siam since I don’t know when.”
“Guess you’re right. Miss Theresa always calls it Siamese tea. Makes it sound more exotic, I suppose. Anyway, when the Blue Moon was cannibalized to build this place, old Captain Terrill retired from shipping. The day of the Clipper ship was over anyway. When they opened up the Suez Canal, Clipper speed became obsolete. Steamships and square-riggers replaced them all. But no ship ever clipped so much as a day off the Blue Moon’s top run. That’s why they called them Clippers. They clipped off the nautical miles. Liverpool to New York was fifteen days. Hong Kong to San Francisco was thirty-three.”
I interrupted: “Where do they keep the tea now?”
“Basement. Only Miss Theresa and me are allowed down there.”
He opened a lower cupboard, and pulled out a small teakwood coffin of Far Eastern design. “I’m supposed to bring up a day’s supply at a time, no more.” He shoved the box back, closing the door. “She guards that damn tea like it was gold.”
“It is gold…for her.”
Thom laughed. “You got that right.”
As he was showing me around, I asked, “How do they get their tea these days?”
“Search me. By air, I guess. But you’re asking the wrong person. I’m a psychic, not a shipping clerk. I only know what I’ve soaked up from working here, and I don’t ask questions I don’t need to know the answers to. Heard a lot of this from Miss Theresa years ago. But as she’s getting along in years, she keeps upstairs a lot. Listens in on the readings over hidden mikes sometimes.”
“Nosy type?”
“I think they call it quality control now.”
I grunted. It was enough to know I’d have to watch my mouth as well as my mind. But I’d guessed as much. Once you get accustomed to knowing other people’s secrets, it becomes an addiction.
“You know,” Thom said suddenly, “this place is haunted.”
I countered, “What tea room worth its salt isn’t?”
“We have the usual ghosts — some of them readers who don’t know they’re dead — but that’s not what I meant.” His voice grew low and gravelly.
I leaned in close.
“One night I was cleaning up after the night crew had gone home and I looked out the window. I saw a ship — a tea Clipper. It was the old Blue Moon.”
“You’re kidding me.”
Thom shook his head solemnly. He pointed to one of the bay windows that overlooked the ocean. “It lay right out that window. If you look closely, you can make out the rotting piles of the old Tea Room dock.”
I drifted over to the window. The water was lapping against a double row of broken black pilings. I could also see that the window reflected the painting of the Blue Moon over the mantel. In the right light, at a certain angle, the painting could reflect in the old glass. So much for ghost ships, I thought. But Thom didn’t need to know that. Psychics love our superstitions.
I did two readings that day, both routine. The tips were good. They doubled my money. I went home thinking I had to get into that basement. But I needed to bide my time, too. The door to opportunity opens widest when it opens of its own accord.
By varying my shifts, I got to know the day and night crews. They were not much different than others I had worked with over the last twenty-odd years. Their stories sounded all the same. Pain makes people psychic, and Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room was awash with personal horror stories guaranteed to open your third eye — or close your earthly eyes in death. These people were survivors. I got to know every one. But I needed their trust. So I awaited the perfect opportunity.
It came just after Labor Day.
I had a bad feeling the moment I laid eyes on the man. He was Asian. Short. Brutish. There was an aura of contained violence about him, like a snake tightly coiled to strike.
“Who wants him?” Dorinda asked, dangling a slip between two bloodless fingers.
Thom almost shuddered. “Not me.”
“I read him last month.”
Starla sniffed, “Let Carl have him.”
I snapped up the slip.
The moment I sat down with him, I knew he was a dead man. I think he knew it, too. I got violence and drugs around him. Not that he used them. He dealt in them. He eyed me in a challenging way. Death was in his cold, otherwise-unreadable eyes.
I decided to go for broke.
“There is an old saying,” I began. “Perhaps you have heard it: ‘A shred of time is worth a bar of gold.’”
His hematite orbs gleamed.
“Gold you have in plenty,” I went on. “Time you have little. It is running out. You have a grave choice before you. To flee or to stay. To meet your fate, or to escape your fate.”
His voice came out of his slack mouth in thick whispers. “I cannot alter my destiny. I am tied in with family. They are my blood, and I am theirs. If I run, I die.”
“Blood relatives in this life may be blood enemies in the next,” I countered. “Why not recognize them for what they are in this, and preserve your life so that in the next, Karma is reversed?”
His thin lips became a thoughtful seal. I hammered the point home from every angle I could intuit, but I saved the best for last. I showed him what lay at the bottom of his cup.
The skull inside was a crude black curse. The client’s eyes opened, narrowed, then sank to veiled slits. A hundred dollar bill fluttered to the table top as he slipped out.