From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  THIRTEEN

  It was a cool night, for which Jim McGann was grateful. By the time he left Meg’s apartment, he needed to clear his head. He and Cindy hadn’t recaptured that momentary physical intensity that had crackled between them just before he’d spotted Niki outside Shooters earlier in the evening, but they had shared a growing sense of intimacy all the same.

  They sat outside on the apartment’s small balcony overlooking Lee Street, sipping coffee and enjoying each other’s company without the necessity for conversation. An album by the Irish composer Enya was playing on Meg’s stereo inside. From the open window behind them, the soft wash of keyboards and multitracked voices slipped out of the apartment to eddy about them on the balcony, counterpointing their introspective mood. When Jim left a little later, Cindy stopped him in the doorway and gave him a long, lingering kiss before she closed the apartment door.

  He paused outside the building to lean against its brick face. Jesus, he thought, savoring the cool air on his face. What a night.

  He’d never met a woman like Cindy before. She was about a half-dozen years younger than he was—which was true of most of the women he’d dated or had relationships with, but unlike them, she was so together. So there. And when he was with her, enclosed in the aura of her attention, she gave him the feeling that no one else existed for her. It was an odd sensation, but definitely not an unpleasant one.

  All they’d done in the end was share a good-night kiss, but he felt closer to her, after knowing her for just these few short hours, than he did to people he’d known for months. He didn’t think he could have handled more than that one kiss. Not yet. Not tonight.

  He knew he was grinning foolishly, but he didn’t care. God, he felt good. It had been a perfect night. Just perfect except—

  A pale white face flashed in his mind.

  Except for that incident with Niki.

  His grin faltered, then slipped away. Remembering the look of terror on her face, he couldn’t suppress a shiver. He pushed away from the wall and walked briskly to his car, but once recalled, Niki wasn’t so easy to leave behind.

  He got into the car and started it up, then left it in neutral, the engine idling. He turned the heater on low to take away the sudden chill that had settled over him.

  That look, he thought, remembering Niki’s fear. What the hell had she seen when she looked at him?

  It was as if she’d looked on death. As if she’d just recognized the Slasher and realized she was next up for the knife.

  Okay, he told himself. Let’s not get carried away.

  He started to review what he knew of her. First off, her name wasn’t Niki; it was Chelsea. Cindy said she hung out up around the Tombs, squatting in the deserted buildings there along with who knew how many other runaway kids and homeless people.

  Those two bits of information didn’t exactly illuminate the situation.

  That look in her eyes …

  He took a breath, let it out slowly.

  What else did he have? She was connected to the Slasher. How, he didn’t know, but her terror and the way she’d been drawn to the crime scenes had to mean something.

  Maybe she knew who the Slasher was?

  That was possible. It didn’t explain her fear when she’d seen him, when he’d called out to her. Niki. The name from the graffiti. She hadn’t said a thing when he used it, but her panic had been real. And her fear. So the name meant something to her.

  He worried at it for a while longer before finally putting the car into first and pulling away from Meg’s building. But instead of heading for home, he drove north, toward the Tombs.

  Billy Ryan had patience—he had it in spades. When you rushed into a situation, all you did was make mistakes. In his business, mistakes could be fatal. And all it took was one.

  So after his little visit with Mike Fisher, he drove back to the Harbour Ritz, where he went to his room and slept through the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening. He had a feeling sleep was going to be at a premium tonight. When he got up, he showered and shaved, then ordered in a late dinner from room service. He didn’t leave the hotel until the clubs were starting to close.

  He drove out to Upper Foxville and pulled up across the street from The Good Serpent Club just as things were winding drown inside. Staying in the car, he watched the last patrons leave. He waited until the staff left and all the lights in the club went off; then he waited some more, until the only lights in the building came from Papa Jo-el’s offices, up there on the second floor. He was just about to get out of the car and cross over when a door opened near the entrance to the club and his quarry stepped out onto the pavement, flanked by a pair of tall, broad-shouldered bodyguards that, with Papa Jo-el’s diminutive size, looked like a pair of giants.

  They do grow those niggers big, he thought.

  He slid lower in his seat so that they wouldn’t spot him. He wasn’t looking for a confrontation—just a little discussion. If he stepped out of the car right now, could be one or the other of those big black hardcases might get the wrong impression.

  He waited for them to get into their own vehicle, but they just walked down the block, Papa Jo-el in the middle, carrying a little black bag, the bodyguards flanking him on either side. Ryan reached under his seat and pulled out the .38 Special that was stowed there. When the three men got to the end of the block, he disengaged his interior light, then got out of the car. Clipping the .38’s small holster to the back of his belt, he set off in pursuit, maintaining a discreet distance.

  He wondered about that bag Papa Jo-el was carrying.

  Could be a payoff, he thought. A little installment of blood money for victim number four, brought down in Mickey’s turf.

  The way things were working out, Ryan was quite prepared to put off his discussion with Papa Jo-el—maybe indefinitely. What he learned tonight might well make the whole need to talk debatable.

  Right place, right time, he thought. Mrs. Ryan’s oldest son always did have Lady Luck looking out for him.

  All we look upon is illusion, Papa Jo-el had thought as he waited for the night to grow still. He sat in his office, listening to the music that came up through the floor from the club below, watched the lights of the cars going by on the street outside as they reflected on the walls of his office. The flickering play of light and dark only seemed to add to his introspective mood.

  Illusion.

  This world held a hidden world where the loa dwelt. What we saw here was only what they wished us to see.

  Illusions.

  And what was the illusion that made up the Friday Slasher? Papa Jo-el wondered. What was the truth that hid behind the killings?

  The killer was not his responsibility. He knew that. But he also knew that if he dealt with the Slasher—finally, irrevocably, sending its restless spirit back to Zilet en Bas de l’Eau—his influence in this city would become a thing that could be physically weighed and measured, not merely in monetary profit, but in the power that his name would hold.

  That power would be an illusion—for it belonged to the loa—but they would allow him his use of it. The loa required their rites and the respect of their priests and mambos and followers. Profits in the physical world, monetary or the widening of one’s personal influence, were for the strong man to hold, did he but have the courage to grasp them.

  It was different here from how it had been in New Orleans. There he had been but one houngan among many, his influence small, his congregants few and of no true importance. He soon saw that the power he sought would take too long to amass there, with all the grand shows that the other priests could present before the people.

  Papa Jo-el had a true gift; he was bocor—magician—as well as priest, but that gift was not enough to lift him quickly through the ranks of the other houngan. Better to leave, he had realized. Better to go to another city, where the competition was not so severe. Better to come to Newford, where there was but one voudoun church, its priest old.

  Cla
rvius Jones had not been pleased with Papa Jo-el’s arrival, less so when he came to understand how Papa Jo-el mixed racketeering with his priestly duties. But there had been little Jones could do, for unlike Papa Jo-el, he was not a bocor as well as a priest. The two houngan had quickly come to an understanding that they would share the believers of Newford. The people would decide which of the two they would follow.

  Jones’s congregation was still large, but that was changing. With what Papa Jo-el meant to accomplish tonight, it would change even more. And his success would make his influence felt beyond the sphere of religion. It would be felt in the criminal community. It would be felt in the halls of justice.

  All illusion, of course. All part and parcel of this world. But sweet, nevertheless—and profitable.

  So he waited for the night to still—for the nightclubs to close, for the streets to empty, for the arrival of that time of the night that belonged to the spirit world. In the heart of its darkness, he would deal with this restless spirit that fed on the blood of young prostitutes whose hair gleamed like honey in the streetlights of the Zone.

  Below him, the music from the club finally stilled. Some time later Marcel and Jean Etienne came to him in his office, where he waited.

  “Ah, mes cheres,” he said. “Is it time?”

  Neither of his bodyguards responded; the question was merely rhetorical.

  They went outside, out into the night already filled with the murmurs and stirrings of restless spirits. Papa Jo-el could feel them all around, he was so attuned to the spirit world at that moment. He left more worldly concerns to his bodyguards, the Etienne brothers. They had their own finely tuned senses, focused on the physical world and the possibility of a threat arising from one of the many less-than-reputable competitors of Papa Jo-el’s business dealings, but they never noticed the man who slipped from the red Camaro at the end of the block and shadowed them as they walked the dark streets on either side of their employer.

  Like any native of Newford. Jim knew that you didn’t park in the Tombs, day or night. By the time you got back to your car—even if you’d been gone for no more than a few minutes—everything of value would have been stripped from it: hubcaps, wheels, stereo, doors, engine parts. So he parked a few blocks south of Gracie Street, in the middle of a long row of tenements between a ’67 Caddy and a Toyota, and hiked back to where the blight of no-man’s-land began. He brought his Canon and the 300mm telephoto, along with a collapsible monopod, all of it stashed away in a nondescript canvas bag so as to preclude tempting the denizens of the Tombs.

  It wasn’t all that great an idea to go walking around in here at night, either. Jim knew that as well, but he didn’t feel as though he had any choice. He was driven by the image of Niki’s—Chelsea’s, he corrected himself—face. Something had scared her badly, and he was determined to find out what, even if it meant daring the Tombs at night. She was in here, somewhere, hiding from God knew what. But he was going to find her. He was going to help her. He was going to chase that terror from her face because no one, especially not a kid, deserved to live with such fear.

  He paused when he reached Gracie Street and looked across to where the Tombs began.

  Though a funereal quiet hung over the dark streets of the rest of the city at this time of night, you always knew that life went on under the cover of darkness. People slept in the buildings, looked after their apartments and postage-stamp yards, parked their cars alongside the curb. There was order, even if it slumbered. There was hope.

  The Tombs wasn’t like that. Jim had been in there before at night and knew what to expect. Even by day, the place had a desperate air of neglect and desolation about it. Jim could remember what it had been like before half the buildings were razed and, when the developers’ money ran out, the street people claimed it for their own. It had always been a slum—for as long as Jim had known it—but now it held a deeper darkness at its heart.

  Despair and hopelessness walked hand in hand through its rubble-strewn streets, for all the blissful smiles of the junkies and the parties of the runaways and bikers who made it their home. It was a land of the lost, block upon squalid tumbledown block stolen from the city and changed into a nightmare country where only the despairing and hopeless lived. The laughter and music that spilled from the runaways’ squats always seemed too bright, too brittle. The very air held a kind of need, like a junkie who’d waited too long between fixes.

  Jim hated the place. He’d signed God knew how many petitions to have it cleaned up.

  “And then where will they live?” Meg had asked him once.

  They were standing in line at a checkout counter in a Chinese grocery over on Flood Street. Meg had refused to sign the petition.

  “What are you talking about?” Jim said. “They’ll go back to wherever they came from. There’s government agencies to look after people like that.”

  Meg simply shook her head. “It’s too late for them to go back,” she said. “For most of them, there’s no place to go back to.”

  Jim sighed, remembering. Meg was right. At least here they had shelter of a kind, their own rules to live by. And company, he supposed.

  He squared his shoulders and was about to cross the street when movement a block or so down on his right caused him to step back into the shadowed doorway behind him. He watched as three figures crossed Gracie Street at a diagonal, heading for the Tombs. His eyes widened slightly when he recognized the small black man who walked in between his two enormous companions.

  Jim wasn’t particularly superstitious, but there was something about the little voodoo priest that gave him the creeps. He’d gone along with Mary Harper to take photos for a feature she was doing for The Star on the man’s church. Papa Jo-el Pilione had been polite and helpful—even when Mary asked him about his alleged ties to the drug trade and loansharking operations—but looking through his lens at the man, Jim had gotten the feeling that there were snakes crawling around inside his head—hundreds of snakes that fed on the poverty of his congregation and those victimized by his racketeering. They looked back out through his eyes with a thousand hungry gazes.

  When he and Mary left the man’s offices above The Good Serpent, he felt as though he needed a shower. Souping his negatives later at the paper, and running off some contact sheets, those snake eyes still peered out at him from behind Pilione’s bland gaze. He knew from Mary’s article that one of voudoun’s deities was the serpent god Damballah—from which Pilione’s club had gotten its name, he supposed—but when he thought of the man, the serpent that came to his mind was the snake from the Garden of Eden. The one that fed on strife. It was its little cousins he saw in the priest’s eyes.

  What was Pilione doing here? Jim wondered, but he knew the answer even before he asked himself the question:

  Something to do with voodoo.

  Not real magic, or anything like that. But something to fuel the hold he had over his congregation. Something else that had come out of Mary’s research was the rivalry between Pilione and the more established church headed by an older priest named Clarvius Jones. The only reason Jim could see someone like Pilione in the Tombs at night was profit of some kind, and since he was too high up to be dealing on the street, the profit motivation had to be connected to his church.

  Jim hadn’t been working for the paper long enough to completely lose the drive that had made him such a successful freelancer. Part of that drive was born of an insatiable curiosity. He couldn’t help wanting to know what was going on when something puzzled him. And then there was that competitive need to be first with the best shots, to get the scoop on the rest of the paparazzi, with whom he jostled for placement of his photos.

  The same intuitive streak that had gained him any number of stunning on-the-spot shots told him that whatever was happening in the Tombs tonight with a voodoo priest was going to be newsworthy.

  He waited until the trio had entered the Tombs before he slipped across the street to follow them.

  Pap
a Jo-el needed to be outside tonight and he needed the city’s streets, but he wasn’t such a fool to think he could do what must be done where a chance cab or patrol car might happen upon him, conducting a ritual in the middle of a cross-street. So he chose a deserted part of the Tombs; a graveyard of buildings seemed a most appropriate place for the calling up of the dead.

  He paused at a place where streets had once met, running northsouth and east-west. This would do. The street signs were long gone, but the name of the intersection wasn’t important. What was needed was merely the crossroads, a barriere, a natural gate through which he would summon the spirit he sought.

  Marcel Etienne touched his arm as he was about to lay his black bag down on the broken pavement underfoot.

  “Someone watches,” he said.

  “Where, mon cher?”

  Marcel shrugged. “I don’t know.” He glanced at his brother. “But I feel eyes upon us.”

  Jean Etienne nodded in agreement.

  Papa Jo-el closed his eyes and sifted through the impressions that the night carried as it stalked the city around them. Vaguely, he could sense the presence of people, but no danger. Their thoughts were curious about what they saw as intruders, but he could read no enmity in their minds.

  “There are always people in this place,” he said finally. “But they are only the lost and the lonely; they will not trouble us.”

  Marcel nodded, but he still looked uneasy.

  “Trust me in this, mon cher,” Papa Jo-el said.

  He regarded the brothers, one at a time, holding each man’s gaze for a long heartbeat. His teeth gleamed white in the darkness.

  “It is time,” he said.

  The brothers moved to either side of him once more. Sitting on their heels, they began to rhythmically slap their knees with the palms of their hands. Papa Jo-el closed his eyes, letting the rhythm enter that place deep inside him where the gift of the loa that made him a bocor slept.