by Jeff Lindsay
And yet, every culture in the world throughout history seemed to believe that there was something to the whole idea of possession.
I just couldn’t get it to connect in any way to my problem. I felt like I was onto something, but no great thought emerged.
Suddenly it was five thirty, and I was more than usually anxious to flee from the office and head for the dubious sanctuary of home.
The next afternoon I was in my cubicle, typing up a report on a very dull multiple killing. Even Miami gets ordinary murders, and this was one of them—or three and a half of them, to be precise, since there were three bodies in the morgue and one more in intensive DEXTER IN THE DARK
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care at Jackson Memorial. It was a simple drive-by shooting in one of the few areas of the city with low property values. There was really no point in spending a great deal of my time on it, since there were plenty of witnesses and they all agreed that someone named
“Motherfucker” had done the deed.
Still, forms must be observed, and I had spent half a day on the scene making sure that no one had jumped out of a doorway and hacked the victims with a hedge clipper while they were being shot from a passing car. I was trying to think of an interesting way to say that the blood spatter was consistent with gunfire from a moving source, but the boredom of it all was making my eyes cross, and as I stared vacantly at the screen, I felt a ringing rise in my ears and change to the clang of gongs and the night music came again, and the plain white of the word-processing page seemed suddenly to wash over with awful wet blood and spill out across me, flood the office, and fill the entire visible world. I jumped out of my chair and blinked a few times until it went away, but it left me shaking and wondering what had just happened.
It was starting to come at me in the full light of day, even sitting at my desk at police headquarters, and I did not like that at all.
Either it was getting stronger and closer, or I was going right off the deep end and into complete madness. Schizophrenics heard voices—did they ever hear music, too? And did the Dark Passenger qualify as a voice? Had I been completely insane all this time and was just now coming to some kind of crazy final episode in the artificial sanity of Dubious Dexter?
I didn’t think that was possible. Harry had gotten me squared away, made sure that I fit in just right—Harry would have known if I was crazy, and he had told me I was not. Harry was never wrong. So it was settled and I was fine, just fine, thank you.
So why did I hear that music? Why was my hand shaking? And why did I need to cling to a ghost to keep from sitting on the floor and flipping my lips with an index finger?
Clearly no one else in the building heard anything—it was just me. Otherwise the halls would be filled with people either dancing or screaming. No, fear had crawled into my life, slinking after me 224
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faster than I could run, filling the huge empty space inside me where the Passenger had once snuggled down.
I had nothing to go on; I needed some outside information if I hoped to understand this. Plenty of sources believed that demons were real—Miami was filled with people who worked hard to keep them away every day of their lives. And even though the babalao had said he wanted nothing to do with this whole thing, and had walked away from it as rapidly as he could, he had seemed to know what it was. I was fairly sure that Santeria allowed for possession.
But never mind: Miami is a wonderful and diverse city, and I would certainly find some other place to ask the question and get an entirely different answer—perhaps even the one I was looking for. I left my cubicle and headed for the parking lot.
The Tree of Life was on the edge of Liberty City, an area of Miami that is not a good place for tourists from Iowa to visit late at night. This particular corner had been taken over by Haitian immigrants, and many of the buildings had been painted in several bright colors, as if there was not enough of one color to go around.
On some of the buildings there were murals depicting Haitian country life. Roosters seemed to be prominent, and goats.
Painted on the outside wall of the Tree of Life there was a large tree, appropriately enough, and under it was an elongated image of two men pounding on some tall drums. I parked right in front of the shop and went in through a screen door that rang a small bell and then banged behind me. In the back, behind a curtain of hanging beads, a woman’s voice called out something in Creole, and I stood by the glass counter and waited. The store was lined with shelves that contained numerous jars filled with mysterious things, liquid, solid, and uncertain. One or two of them seemed to be holding things that might once have been alive.
After a moment, a woman pushed through the beads and came into the front of the store. She appeared to be about forty and reed thin, with high cheekbones and a complexion like sun-bleached mahogany. She wore a flowing red-and-yellow dress, and her head was wrapped in a matching turban. “Ah,” she said with a thick Creole accent. She looked me over with a very doubtful expression and shook her head slightly. “How I can help you, sir?”
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“Ah, well,” I said, and I more or less stumbled to a halt. How, after all, did one begin? I couldn’t really say that I thought I used to be possessed and wanted to get the demon back—the poor woman might throw chicken blood at me.
“Sir?” she prompted impatiently.
“I was wondering,” I said, which was true enough, “do you have any books on possession by demons? Er—in English?”
She pursed her lips with great disapproval and shook her head vigorously. “It is not the demons,” she said. “Why do you ask this—are you a reporter?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just, um, interested. Curious.”
“Curious about the voudoun?” she said.
“Just the possession part,” I said.
“Huh,” she said, and if possible her disapproval grew even more. “Why?”
Someone very clever must already have said that when all else fails, try the truth. It sounded so good that I was sure I was not the first to think of it, and it seemed like the only thing I had left. I gave it a shot.
“I think,” I said, “I mean, I’m not sure. I think I may have been possessed. A while ago.”
“Ha,” she said. She looked at me long and hard, and then shrugged. “May be,” she said at last. “Why do you say so?”
“I just, um . . . I had the feeling, you know. That something else was, ah. Inside me? Watching?”
She spat on the floor, a very strange gesture from such an elegant woman, and shook her head. “All you blancs,” she said. “You steal us and bring us here, take everythin’ from us. And then when we make somethin’ from the nothin’ you give us, now you want to be part of that, too. Ha.” She shook her finger at me, for all the world like a second-grade teacher with a bad student. “You listen, blanc. If the spirit enters you, you would know. This is not somethin’ like in a movie. It is a very great blessing, and,” she said with a mean smirk, “it does not happen to the blancs.”
“Well, actually,” I said.
“Non,” she said. “Unless you are willing, unless you ask for the blessing, it does not come.”
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“But I am willing,” I said.
“Ha,” she said. “It never come to you. You waste my time.” And she turned around and walked through the bead curtains to the back of the store.
I saw no point in waiting around for her to have a change of heart. It didn’t seem likely to happen—and it didn’t seem likely that voodoo had any answers about the Dark Passenger. She had said it only comes when called, and it was a blessing. At least that was a different answer, although I did not remember ever calling the Dark Passenger to come in—it was just always there. But to be absolutely sure, I paused at the curb outside the store and closed my eyes.
Please come back in, I said.
Nothing happened. I got in my car and went back to
work.
What an interesting choice, the Watcher thought. Voodoo. There was a certain logic to the idea, of course, he could not deny that. But what was really interesting was what it showed about the other. He was moving in the right direction—and he was very close.
And when his next little clue turned up, the other would be that much closer. The boy had been so panicky, he had almost wriggled away. But he had not; he had been very helpful and he was now on his way to his dark reward.
Just like the other was.
T H I R T Y
Ihad barely settled back into my chair when Deborah came into my little cubicle and sat in the folding chair across from my desk.
“Kurt Wagner is missing,” she said.
I waited for more, but nothing came, so I just nodded. “I accept your apology,” I said.
“Nobody’s seen him since Saturday afternoon,” she said. “His roommate says he came in acting all freaked out, but wouldn’t say anything. He just changed his shoes, and left, and that’s it.” She hesitated, and then added, “He left his backpack.”
I admit I perked up a little at that. “What was in it?” I asked.
“Traces of blood,” she said, as if she was admitting she had taken the last cookie. “It matches Tammy Connor’s.”
“Well then,” I said. It didn’t seem right to say anything about the fact that she’d had somebody else do the blood work. “That’s a pretty good clue.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s him. It has to be him. So he did Tammy, took the head in his backpack and did Manny Borque.”
“It does look like that,” I said. “That’s a shame—I was just getting used to the idea that I was guilty.”
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“It makes no fucking sense,” Deborah complained. “The kid’s a good student, on the swimming team, good family—all of that.”
“He was such a nice guy,” I said. “I can’t believe he did all those horrible things.”
“All right,” Deborah said. “I know it, goddamn it. Total cliché.
But what the hell—the guy kills his own girlfriend, sure. Maybe even her roommate, because she saw it. But why everybody else?
And all that crap with burning them, and the bulls’ heads, what is it, Mollusk?”
“Moloch,” I said. “Mollusk is a clam.”
“Whatever,” she said. “But it makes no sense, Dex. I mean . . .”
She looked away, and for a moment I thought she was going to apologize after all. But I was wrong. “If it does make sense,” she said,
“it’s your kind of sense. The kind of thing you know about.” She looked back at me, but she still seemed to be embarrassed. “That’s, you know—I mean, is it, um—did it come back? Your, uh . . .”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t come back.”
“Well,” she said, “shit.”
“Did you put out a BOLO on Kurt Wagner?” I asked.
“I know how to do my job, Dex,” she said. “If he’s in the Miami-Dade area, we’ll get him, and FDLE has it, too. If he’s in Florida, somebody’ll find him.”
“And if he’s not in Florida?”
She looked hard at me, and I saw the beginnings of the way Harry had looked before he got sick, after so many years as a cop: tired, and getting used to the idea of routine defeat. “Then he’ll probably get away with it,” she said. “And I’ll have to arrest you to save my job.”
“Well, then,” I said, trying hard for cheerfulness in the face of overwhelming grim grayness, “let’s hope he drives a very recogniz-able car.”
She snorted. “It’s a red Geo, one of those mini-Jeep things.”
I closed my eyes. It was a very odd sensation, but I felt all the blood in my body suddenly relocating to my feet. “Did you say red?” I heard myself ask in a remarkably calm voice.
There was no answer, and I opened my eyes. Deborah was staring at me with a look of suspicion so strong I could almost touch it.
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“What the hell is that,” she said. “One of your voices?”
“A red Geo followed me home the other night,” I said. “And then somebody tried to break into my house.”
“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”
“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to me again,” I said.
Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.
“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.
“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it’s red. But shit,” she said, still looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are winning.”
I didn’t like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty.
“Well,” I said at last, “if the bad guys really are winning, at least there’s plenty of work for you.”
She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile.
“Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture.
“Hooray for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.
From the very beginning it was an ideal partnership. The new things had self-awareness, and that made manipulating them much easier—and much more rewarding for IT. They killed one another much more readily, too, and IT did not have to wait long at all for a new host—nor to try again to reproduce. IT eagerly drove IT’s host to a killing, and IT waited, longing to feel the strange and wonderful swelling.
But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing offspring.
IT was puzzled. Why didn’t reproduction work this time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT’s search for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT
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experimented. And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.
The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state.
The victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind, their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.
Then there was fire—fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of spectacular energy.
And finally, the whole thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much stronger, especially in the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine.
Fire, trance, young victims. A simple formula.
IT began to push the new hosts to create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts were surprisingly willing to go along with IT.
T H I R T Y - O N E
When I was very young I once saw a variety act on TV. A man put a bunch of plates on the end of a series of supple rods, and kept them up in the air by whipping the rods around to spin the plates. And if he slowed down or turned his back, even for a moment, one of the plates would wobble and then crash to the ground, followed by all the others in series.
That’s a terrific metaphor for life, isn’t it? We’re all trying to keep our plates spinning in the air, and once you get them up there you can’t take your eyes off them and you have to keep chugging along without rest. Except that in life, somebody keeps
adding more plates, hiding the rods, and changing the law of gravity when you’re not looking. And so every time you think you have all your plates spinning nicely, suddenly you hear a hideous clattering crash behind you and a whole row of plates you didn’t even know you had begins to hit the ground.
Here I had stupidly assumed that the tragic death of Manny Borque had given me one less plate to worry about, since I could now proceed to cater the wedding as it should be done, with $65
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worth of cold cuts and a cooler full of soda. I could concentrate on the very real and important problem of putting me back together again. And so thinking all was quiet on the home front, I turned my back for just a moment and was rewarded with a spectacular crash behind me.
The metaphorical plate in question shattered when I came into Rita’s house after work. It was so quiet that I assumed no one was home, but a quick glance inside showed something far more disturbing. Cody and Astor sat motionless on the couch, and Rita was standing behind them with a look on her face that could easily turn fresh milk into yogurt.
“Dexter,” she said, and the tromp of doom was in her voice,
“we need to talk.”
“Of course,” I said, and as I reeled from her expression, even the mere thought of a lighthearted response shriveled into dust and blew away in the icy air.
“These children,” Rita said. Apparently that was the entire thought, because she just glared and said no more.
But of course, I knew which children she meant, so I nodded encouragingly. “Yes,” I said.
“Ooh,” she said.
Well, if it was taking Rita this long to form a complete sentence, it was easy to see why the house had been so quiet when I walked in. Clearly the lost art of conversation was going to need a little boost from Diplomatic Dexter if we were ever going to get more than seven words out in time for dinner. So I plunged straight in with my well-known courage. “Rita,” I said, “is there some kind of problem?”
