The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  The mosquitoes must have been expecting them, Corey thought, because an army swarmed in welcome. But Corey felt good tonight, in control. A few mosquitoes wouldn’t ruin that.

  Corey arranged twenty stones he and Sean had found in the woods into a large square shape next to the fire-pit, the beginning of his ancestor altar that would help bring Gramma Marie’s spirit close to him. “There’s a lot of ritual magic practiced in the world,” Corey said quietly to Sean as he worked, thinking aloud. “But you never hear about it on the news, somebody doing what we did. I think people who can really do magic keep it quiet. Like Gramma Marie.”

  “Why?” Sean said. His cigarette tip glowed between his fingertips.

  The square of stones was finished, its four lines straight. That done, Corey laid a white bowl inside the square, filling it with holy water from a bottle he’d bought at thebotanica. Sean had helped him scavenge the area for loose twigs and leaves, so Corey spread those inside the square, too.

  “Well, think about it: Here she was, this powerful priestess, right? But she messed up.” He suddenly felt as if Gramma Marie were sitting in front of the fire’s radiance, watching, so he spoke as if she could hear him. “No disrespect, Gramma Marie, but things didn’t go right. Now it’s all these years later, and it’sstill messed up. Think about what happens when there’s an oil spill. Or an accident at a nuclear plant.”

  “It’s hard to clean up,” Sean said.

  “Right. It’spowerful. And the more power you get, the bigger the stakes. Gramma Marie wasn’t the only one with power. There are probably other people who could do all kinds of magic if they wanted to, but they stick to what they need, the basics. So the price isn’t so high.”

  “Fine by me,” Sean said. “I told you already, I’veseen it now. You made something that was gone come back, and that’s all I need, Corey. I was kidding about that other stuff we should do. Everywhere I look, I see miracles.”

  Sean was right. They knew something other people didn’t: Deathwasn’t the end, because a dead woman was communicating with him. Gramma Marie was watching him, standing alongside relatives he’d never met, people born hundreds of years ago. It was all different now.

  But Corey couldn’t forget the rest: What did you call a miracle in reverse?

  They stood in silence a moment, listening to the licking of the flames and buzzing mosquitoes. It would be time to begin soon. Toreally begin. Gramma Marie would help him open the door, but when you open a door to a place you’ve never been, you never know what can come popping out from the other side. He’d read enough horror books to knowthat.

  “Let’s say this works,” Corey said quietly. “We break the curse and we decide it’s safe to have one more wish. It doesn’t have to be the same spell—it can beanything . We just shouldn’t be greedy, because if you disrespect magic, it disrespects you back. What would you want?”

  Sean thought, but not for long. “I’d make sure nothing happens to bust up my family. Miguelito’s paperwork isn’t final, and I keep having dreams about this guy who comes to take him from us. That’s my nightmare. My dad couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t either. That’s my little bro.”

  Corey nodded. Sean’s dad was a good guy. Everything was about his kids, from what Corey could see. He’d set up his life so he wouldn’t have to do anything except raise his kids, except maybe boarding horses and occasional house-painting. Mom and Dad weren’t that way at all. Both of them would feel lost if they were shut away from the world like Mr. Leahy. Mom and Dad both seemed to believe they were better people at work than they were at home.

  “How about you?” Sean asked him.

  The taste of Becka’s tongue and teeth flooded Corey’s mouth. He saw himself in his bedroom again, squatting by the window, kissing her lips, touching her breasts. The fantasy drew him away from The Spot and Sean and his altar to Gramma Marie. Corey sighed, trying to shake away the thoughts before he got excited.

  “I want my parents to stay cool and work it out. That’s my biggest wish right now, no doubt. But I almost feel like that’s handled already, like they’ve decided on their own something has to change. So if I could pick another wish…”

  Becka’s tongue, massaging the roof of his mouth.

  “Man, to be honest, I want to get past the mystery. I want to be with a girl and not have to wonder how far she’ll let me go, or if she’s power-tripping. And not a skank who would lie down with anybody, but I mean a girl Ilike . I want to know that feeling when she wants you as badly as you want her, and she says yes. And then you get to see what she feels like on theinside . I want toknow it. All of it.” As he spoke, Corey felt fevered.

  “You don’t have to waste a wish on that,” Sean said. “That’ll happen.”

  “Not soon enough,” Corey said, realizing he’d almost called Sean T., because T. was the friend he could talk to about his true thoughts, not just movies and music and ball. “This girl Becka’s got me ready to bust. I never thought I could fall for somebody I hardly know, but I’msprung. I want to see her every day as soon as I wake up. I want to take her away and send her to school, whatever she wants. I dream about her. I’m writingpoems for her. It’s never happened like this for me. See what I’m saying?”

  Sean sighed, and he turned to look at the fire, avoiding Corey’s face. He’d kept his silence when Corey told him about Becka’s visit to his window. “Just be careful,” Sean said quietly.

  “Mos’def. Definitely,” Corey said, and checked his watch. Eleven forty-six.

  “Feast time,” he said.

  Gramma Marie’s instructions said to bring a feast that could be shared by Gramma Marie and his other ancestors, among them his great-grandfather Philippe Toussaint and his great-great-great-grandmother, Fleurette. He’d brought leftover jambalaya Mom cooked that day from one of Gramma Marie’s recipe cards, and since Mom was part of the bloodline, Corey hoped it was all right he hadn’t cooked the food himself. He also had hard candy and canned corn for Papa Legba, since Gramma Marie said he loved those foods, and he was her spiritual mate.

  With the food in place in a bowl beside the holy water, the night felt more like a party than the awful reason he was really here. He kept hoping Gramma Marie was wrong—that the demon had disappeared long ago or let go of its grudge, or that there was no such thing as demons to begin with—but the possibility that she wasright had been hard to live with these past few days. Corey stared at the photograph of him and Gramma Marie he’d found in Mom’s albums in the library; an old woman he’d never had a chance to know with the little kid he didn’t remember being.

  Corey poured the last of his bottled holy water into the soil, a libation. “Gramma Marie, please accept these offerings and help give me strength,” he said.

  Instantly, Corey felt his stomach cramp, a fist. His dinner whirled inside him.

  “What?” Sean said.

  Corey didn’t answer. Trying not to panic, he picked up the satchel and thumbed through Gramma Marie’s papers, looking for a page he’d marked with a red paper clip. He’d organized her papers: yellow paper clips for personal history, green paper clips for spells, and red paper clips signifying pages with warnings. Most of the pages with spells also had warnings, but there was one section marked with pages only in red. He found the one he wanted.

  The closer you come to harming thebaka, the more it will try to interfere with your spiritual center, which will often manifest as pains in your stomach. Cleansing baths may help ease your stomach pains, but do not stray from your objective. After banishment, thebaka will be unable to harm you, but until then, wear the ring to prevent thebaka from riding your head in the form of alwa. Make certain that nobaka orbókó who wishes you ill touches your ring. If the ring is violated, it must be passed to another in your line. In a very rare case, you might become a puppet to thebaka. I have seen such cases.

  All possession is loss of control, whether one is ridden by an ancestor spirit, alwa, or abaka. But while ancestors andlwas visit us to g
ive us guidance, abaka breathes only contempt for its host.

  The first time Corey had read the papers line by line, he’d imagined he felt a little nausea during that passage about thebaka and stomachaches. But he’d decided it was fright and nerves, exactly what had happened when he’d readThe Stand by Stephen King and felt every symptom of Captain Trips. But this was different. Although the cramp had eased now, he hadn’t imagined it. It had been sharp and specific.

  Corey closed his left hand tight, caressing the indentations on the ring with his fingertips. What had he done wrong? He’d been wearing the ring since he’d left the house, no longer afraid his mother would see it. Had he left it off too long after dinner? Had he been infected by thebaka so soon?

  Corey was scared now. More than scared. His brain felt shorted out.

  “What, man?” Sean said.

  “We have to hurry,” Corey said. “I think it’s messing with me.”

  “Messing with you how?” Sean whispered, alarmed.

  Corey shook his head, unable to answer. The night’s festive, philosophical mood was gone. Midnight was coming—the best hour to reach Papa Legba—and he’d been wasting time. He and Sean had been here talking like this was summer camp, and he was supposed to be working. With unsteady hands, Corey flipped to the next pages on banishment, all of them dual-marked with red and green paper clips.

  “We have to be quiet,” he said, and Sean nodded, taking a step back, squatting beside the fire.

  Corey methodically pulled out the other items he’d brought: the goat’s horn, copper pennies, a few drops of the dead raven’s blood he’d collected in a black film canister. He had the raven’s feathers in a paper bag, he’d filled another paper bag with chicken bones (a quick stop at KFC had taken care of that on the way home from Portland), and the final bag was full of soil from The Spot, which Gramma Marie said was some of the most powerful soil in existence.

  The guy at thebotanica had explained that the parchment was so expensive because it was made from the vagina of a virgin lamb, which had made both him and Sean chuckle because it sounded so funny. But it wasn’t funny anymore. Corey was glad he’d decided to pay the seventeen bucks for a single sheet, and he suddenly appreciated the lamb that had been sacrificed to make it. “Thank you,” he whispered, touching the parchment.

  Gramma Marie’s papers had encouraged him to use dove’s blood ink, but thebotanica didn’t have any. Corey hoped one of Gramma Marie’s old fountain pens would be good enough, because he’d found one that worked on the desk in her library. Holding the pen, Corey could imagine it in his grandmother’s grasp, between her dark, lined fingers. He’d brought everything except something flat to writeon, he realized. His tried to glide his pen gently across the paper on the ground, straining to see in the firelight. Luckily, the paper was sturdy and didn’t break beneath his pen’s point as he copied Gramma Marie’s words onto the parchment.

  Dearest Papa Legba—A treasure has been stolen from you, and I wish to return it. Please forgive Marie Toussaint for her abuse of what was yours. I ask that you will please accept the return of your sacred word and restore my ancestors and progeny to your favor. I also ask that you will open the gates to the lwas and allow them to hear my prayers as we must banish this unwelcome baka from your Crossroads Forest. Please, Papa, help me tonight. Do not forsake me for the mistakes of my ancestors.

  As soon as Corey stopped writing, his stomach cramped again. This time, he clutched himself with both arms. He knew the pain could be worse, but his suspicions about the pain’s source made it excruciating. With his heart racing, he felt light-headed. Was he about to die out here?

  Almost finished, he told himself. Go on.

  In her pages, Gramma Marie had drawn the symbols from the ring with dark ink, taking her time, detailing them. She had also drawn thevèvè symbolizing the individual gods, but the symbols from the ring were less flowery and complex, more like shapes from geometry. Corey had copied each symbol onto individual index cards, numbering each one. Careful to preserve the proper numerical order, he laid each card down on the soil until the twelve of them encircled his parchment petition. Perspiration dripped from his nose to the ground, making a dark spot between two of the index cards. He hadn’t realized how badly he was sweating, but his body felt soaked through. He was also cold, suddenly.

  The stolen word was preserved in the symbols on the ring. It had been all along.

  On a single page, by itself, Gramma Marie had drawn a large wheel without spokes, only symbols and letters. The symbols on the ring were outside of the wheel, matching letters of the Latin alphabet inside. With her key, he could write the word—speakthe word, which was more important—and offer it back to Papa Legba, its true owner. Afterward, Gramma Marie had written, Papa Legba’s silence might be broken. He should help banish thebaka.

  The word should never be spoken, except in the Returning ceremony. Your eyes must not see the word in alphabet form before it is time for your offering. You must not think of it, and you must forget it once the offering is complete. You must write it only once. The ring is ours to keep, but the key inlaid within the symbols cannot be preserved. You will write the word only once and speak it only once; afterward, these papers must be destroyed by fire. This will show Papa Legba that the word is his alone, that he may reclaim it. Only then can you make prayers to have thebaka destroyed.

  “Papa Legba, please accept your stolen word. Please open the gate for me.”

  Corey’s hurting stomach told him two things: how close he was, and how treacherous a place he was approaching. His stomach was burning now, as if he’d swallowed battery acid. But he pushed on. Referring to the wheel key in Gramma Marie’s papers—and checking it once, twice, three times—Corey slowly wrote down the first letter of Papa Legba’s word, the word his great-grandmother had uttered in a rage in 1929:M.

  Writing the single letter on the parchment wore him out. Corey hurriedly wiped his brow, afraid his sweat would ruin his precious petition. His heart was lunging into his throat. Why was writing one letter so much like taking his first step on a tightrope ten stories high? He felt dizzy.

  “Take it easy,” Sean whispered, and Corey nodded, grateful to remember Sean was there.

  Corey couldn’t focus his eyes in the firelight, so he had trouble matching the second symbol to its alphabet twin in Gramma Marie’s key. This was the double-wave, and his eyes fooled him, drawing him to a symbol that looked similar, but had a dot in the center.Shit. Forcing himself to be still and take a deep breath, he tried again.

  This time, it seemed to jump from the page: The second symbol was above the letterU . As Corey worked, he forgot both his stomach and his thoughts, matching one symbol to the next, copying them onto his petition. The word emerging wasn’t familiar:MUFR, it said so far, with eight symbols remaining for translation. He tried to keep his eyes away from the letters as he wrote them, afraid he would accidentally commit the word to memory.

  He heard a noise. Something moved in the woods near the trail, out of sight. Whatever it was, it made a sound like a whimper before thrashing as if it were shuffling from side to side, then forward. Until now, Corey hadn’t remembered the beast he’d seen in his dream the first night he performed the ceremony of The Lost, but its image sprang back into his mind—it was huge and hairy, with sharp yellow teeth that curved like claws. That beast wasn’t a dream, he thought. It was something real, about to charge out at him from the woods.

  “Shit,”Corey said in mid-stroke, his eyes torn to two clearly lighted tree trunks standing like guards before a bank of darkness.

  “Finish it. Hurry,” Sean said urgently.

  The thrashing came again, and Corey felt his bladder slacken.

  But the figure that came into view from the woods wasn’t a monster—it was Becka. Her movements had sounded erratic because of the way she was walking, as if she were weighted on one side, lurching. She stumbled, and Corey heard her sob softly, almost a wail. When she was close to the fire, Cor
ey saw dark marks on Becka’s face that might be bruises or mud. Something was wrong.

  “Becka, what’s wrong?” he said, standing up to take her arm. Becka’s eyes were red, glazed with tears. Her tears shocked him, making him feel a swoon, as if he’d lost his strength. She was trying to hide her face from him, but he needed to see her. Was one of her eyesswollen?

  A thin spot of blood peeked from her bottom lip. The blood made Corey numb with rage. Even his stomachache was suddenly gone. “What happened? Becka, tell me what happened.”

  Becka wrapped herself around him, burying her face against his shoulder. She was taller and older than he was, but she pushed herself against him like a child. Her full breasts pressed to his chest again, but this time he wasn’t captivated by her body. He needed to know what was wrong.

  “They’re coming,” Becka whispered in his ear, her breath hot. And sour.

  “Who’s coming? What happened?”

  “They’re coming here. They’re on their way.”