From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  He would have preferred traditional drums, but such a sound would only draw unwanted attention to what they did here tonight. In that sense the work of a voudoun and a bocor were similar. Whether it was for a religious ceremony, or a calling up of magic, the spirits paid more attention when they employed the three drums—petit, seconde and maman—each with their own specific, designated beat, as well as the sounds drawn from an ogan, a bar of iron, to focus the energies of the ritual.

  The difference here was that there was no congregation to impress. Here there was only the magic. Papa Jo-el could have done without a rhythm at all—using only the drumming of his heartbeat, the fire in which his offerings would burn and the vever he would draw on the ground for what must be done. But the rhythmic slap of the Etienne brothers’ hands on their knees made the focusing easier, and it kept them busy—too busy concentrating on maintaining the complexities of the beat to interrupt him in his work with questions or warnings that were no longer necessary.

  This was a spirit matter now; in such, he was the guard.

  From his black bag he took small pieces of kindling, which he set up on the pavement in the shape of a small pyramid. Returning to his bag, he took out a handful of dried liverwort and herbs, which he stuffed into the side of the pyramid. He bowed his head over the wood for a long moment of silent meditation before lighting the liverwort. Smoke wreathed upward, heavy with the pungent scent of the herbs that had been sprinkled into the moss earlier that evening in his hounfour—the temple up above The Good Serpent.

  With maize flour, he drew his vever before the fire—a complex, cabella-like design to invoke the loa. When it was completed to his satisfaction, he sat on his heels and began to slap his palms against his own knees, playing the third counterpoint to the rhythm that the Etienne brothers were maintaining: petit to their seconde and maman. Once the trinity of the rhythm was established, he began to chant softly.

  A smile touched his lips as he felt the spirits that walked this night draw closer.

  Here we go, Billy Ryan had thought as he watched Jim enter the Tombs behind Papa Jo-el and his bodyguards. The meet was on. He didn’t recognize the guy, but he was white. He figured it had to be one of the wops, though he wasn’t dressed right. The Italians did like their suits.

  He gave the guy a bit of a head start, waited for a cab to go by on Gracie, then slipped across the street himself. It wasn’t until Papa Jo-el and his boys settled down to business in the middle of the abandoned intersection that he revised his earlier impression of the other man following them. The guy hunkered down out of sight and started to take something out of the canvas pack he was carrying.

  Shit, Ryan thought as he caught the gleam of metal. It wasn’t a meet. It was a hit.

  But then he realized the guy wasn’t putting together a gun. He was setting up a camera—telephoto attached to a monopod, camera body fixed onto the long lens.

  Ryan tried to work out what was going down here. What gave? Who was this guy and just where the fuck did he fit in?

  About then the Etienne brothers crouched down and started to slap their knees. Ryan worked his way in closer through the rubble, choosing a position from which he could see clearly what was going on in the middle of the intersection, but still keep an eye on the photographer. He watched what Papa Jo-el was doing and shook his head.

  Christ, they were really into this crap, weren’t they?

  He began to get the feeling that what was going down here tonight didn’t have anything to do with the Slasher or a payoff. It was just some weird voodoo shit. But he stayed all the same, curious now as to how it would all play out.

  Jim watched the proceedings through his telephoto. The 300mm lens brought everything up so close that he almost felt he was right there among the three men.

  He’d been afraid, at first, to take any shots, sure that the sound of his shutter would alert the men to his presence. But once the two bigger men began their impromptu drumming, he realized that they wouldn’t hear a thing. He shot through a whole roll, motor drive whirring softly. He took long shots of the whole scene, close-ups of the men’s faces, then various pictures of what Pilione was doing while his companions continued to slap their knees.

  When the roll was done, Jim crouched down behind the rubble where he was hiding and removed his film. He stowed it in the pocket of his jacket and inserted a new roll into the back of his camera. He continued to watch the men in the intersection, going through the whole process by feel alone. At this point in his career, he could change films on automatic.

  He snapped the back of the camera closed. When he brought the camera back up, balancing its weight on the monopod, he saw that something was happening. There was more smoke than should have been possible from Papa Jo-el’s tiny fire.

  Maybe Pilione had put some damp leaves on it, Jim thought.

  He focused on the smoke, twisting the zoom on the lens to bring it in as close as he could. And then his whole body started to feel numb.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said in a hoarse whisper, the words almost choking in his throat.

  This place was more like a graveyard than he had thought, Papa Jo-el realized. The night was thick with spirits, invisible presences drawn by his summoning. Many were errant souls, temporarily cast adrift by the stasis that held their bodies as they slept in the nearby buildings. They were hovering now like moths around the crossroads, curious and uncertain, fear clouding their minds. When they woke in the morning, they would remember nightmares.

  The loa were there, as well; their drumming presence counterpointed the rhythm that woke from palms slapped against knees. They, too, were curious, but they had no fear.

  And then there were the dead.

  There were many who had died in this no-man’s-land—lost, restless spirits still bound by the trauma that had filled their unhappy lives and the unfortunate circumstances of their deaths.

  Not you, not you, not you, he would tell them as he studied them one by one. The one I seek has fresh blood upon his soul.

  Each spirit he addressed so faded back into the night, freed from his power to wander restlessly through the desolate blocks of the Tombs once more.

  His eyes were open, but he looked beyond the littered streets, into the hidden world of the loa, searching, searching. But the spirit he sought found him first.

  Smoke billowed on the pavement, rising from its cracks in a dark cloud that took shape, then a physical presence, with alarming speed. Its body was a massive corpulent thing, a white mountain of dead flesh dwarfing the bulky shapes of the Etienne brothers, who continued to slap palms to knees on either side of Papa Jo-el. Its features were unremarkable; its face was wide and fat, a bland, common face, save for the eyes, which burned from fleshy sockets like a pair of smoldering coals. Hunger raged in their fire; they existed only to invoke terror, to freeze the prey before it was slain.

  But Papa Jo-el had no fear of the spirit. No matter its monstrous presence, or the speed with which it had gained a physical shape, he had still been prepared for its appearance.

  “You have been summoned by my power,” he said. He spoke in Creole, using the words of magic that would mean nothing to his hidden watchers but which all spirits understood. “I command you.”

  Its voice, when it replied, was a sound one could only imagine issuing from a grave.

  “Bullshit!” the creature roared.

  From its side, it lifted a hand holding a hunting knife with a twelve-inch blade. It brought the knife up, plunging it into Papa Jo-el’s chest with such force that the voudoun was lifted up, from a crouch to his tiptoes, until he was right off his feet. He hung, impaled on the blade, calm words of power swallowed by a scream of pain.

  For long moments the Etienne brothers were frozen where they sat, staring at the terrible, impossible tableau. Then, like mirror images, they rose liquidly to their feet and charged the creature. It flung Papa Jo-el’s dying body from the end of its blade with such force that it landed a half-dozen yards fro
m where they stood. Blood sprayed from its knife as it brought the blade around in a long sweeping arc to meet the brothers’ attack.

  It cut through Marcel’s throat, through windpipe, jugular veins and carotid arteries, until it severed his spinal cord. Marcel staggered back, eyes wide with fear and pain, body collapsing, blood spewing from between his fingers when he reached up to hold his throat together. It was a useless gesture. He died before he hit the ground.

  The blade emerged from Marcel’s flesh in another long bloody arc as Jean threw himself upon the creature. The force of his attack should have knocked the killer to the ground, but the monster held firm. Its left hand caught one of Jean’s arms, snapping the bone as it threw the bodyguard away. Jean tumbled to the ground. Before he could rise, the creature had him by the throat in a grip that couldn’t be broken.

  The blade plunged into his chest, was pulled out, thrust in again. The creature stabbed him, over and over again, until it seemed that all he held at the length of his left arm was a slab of sloppily butchered meat.

  The creature let Jean’s corpse fall to the pavement. It lifted the blade to its mouth and licked the blood from it; then its head went even farther back, and it howled at the night skies—howled and howled as its body dissolved back into smoke and then was gone.

  Ryan hadn’t seen the inside of a church in years, but he made the sign of the cross all the same as he stared upon the carnage left in the creature’s wake. Everything that had brought him here was forgotten—Papa Jo-el, profit, the photographer. For the first time in his life, panic rose inside him with the force of a tidal wave, and he simply fled.

  It wasn’t just the brutality of the killings. He’d seen worse in his time, been involved in worse in his time. But there was something about that … that thing that had killed the niggers. It was like the creature had left a finger in his head--like it had left a piece of itself inside him. An echo. A voice. A cold voice carried on a midnight wind. He could hear it whispering, whispering … .

  All he could do was try to get away from it.

  How long he ran, he didn’t know, but by the time he finally fell against the side of a building, his lungs dragging in painful breaths, he was blocks away. He let himself slide to the pavement and sat there with his head bowed, his back against the wall. A litany ran through his head.

  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus … .

  And under it, that cold whisper. No words, nothing intelligible, just a voice, an awful voice.

  Jesus.

  It wasn’t for comfort that he called on the son of a God he’d long since stopped worshiping. It was just the only word that seemed able to move across the terrorized field of his mind. The litany helped push the cold whispering back, away, until he could almost ignore it.

  Slowly his breathing steadied and his ability to think returned to some semblance of normality, although after what he’d just seen, he didn’t know what was normal anymore.

  No wonder the cops couldn’t track down the Slasher, he thought. Fucking guy was a monster from one of those B horror flicks.

  He shook his head. What the hell was he thinking? No matter what he thought he’d seen go down in the Tombs, there had to be a rational explanation.

  Oh yeah? a part of him asked. Then why were you so scared you almost crapped your pants getting out of there so fast?

  Billy Ryan knew he was a lot of things, but a coward wasn’t one of them. He’d never panicked before. He didn’t even understand the mindless fear that had overtaken him. He’d seen it before, trapped in the eyes of men just before he killed them, when they knew they were going to die, but he’d never understood it before.

  But now …

  The midnight voice stirred deep in his mind.

  Cold sweat still beaded his face. His shirt clung wetly to his back. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket and looked northward, up the block, back the way he’d run. Slowly he got to his feet. He pulled his .38 from the holster at the small of his back, checked its load, then replaced it.

  Fuck this, he thought.

  He was going back. He had to see just exactly what had gone down. If he didn’t go, he didn’t think he could live with himself. He couldn’t live with what not going would prove him to be. He’d be just another chickenshit small-time hood without the balls to stand up and be counted when the chips came down. He’d be jumping at shadows, questioning everything for its risk, whether it was dealing with one of Mickey’s “problems” or just taking a piss.

  But when he got back to that intersection in the Tombs, the creature was gone. As was the guy with the camera. All that remained were the corpses of the three men he’d seen butchered by something that couldn’t possibly exist, and the echoing whisper that was going to drive him insane, if he hadn’t already gone straight around the bend.

  Looking down on the creature’s handiwork, he felt the cold voice growing stronger. The midnight wind carried its whisper through the emptiness inside him. All he had to fight that voice was his fear.

  Jim hadn’t bolted, not right away, though his every sense screamed for him to just get—out of—here.

  But he couldn’t move. He leaned against the rubble he’d been hiding behind, using it for support to keep him from just falling flat on the ground, and stared out at the intersection. It was deserted now—except for the bodies. And something else: a whispering sound that seemed to be more in his head than originating from any external source.

  Slowly he got to his feet. He shuffled forward, holding the monopod in both hands, ready to wield his camera like a club if anything jumped out at him, but the night was preternaturally still in the wake of the sudden violence he’d seen enacted before him just moments ago. He had the disquieting feeling that the whole world had died; everybody in it had just gone away, and he was left to wander alone in its ruins.

  When he got to where the bodies lay, his nostrils filled with the sharp metallic smell of the blood that seemed to be everywhere. He hated that smell. It was something he never got used to, no matter how many accidents he’d covered.

  His stomach did a quick flip as he looked on the corpse that the killer had finished last.

  “Jesus,” he said softly.

  His voice sounded flat to his ears, distanced, empty. He felt as though he were in some surrealistic wasteland—a painting, a photograph, not a real place. All that peopled it was his fear and the soft whispery sound that he still couldn’t place. It was like a name being called over and over again—not his, not recognizable, just repeated endlessly.

  Get out of here, he told himself. Now, before the thing that did this comes back.

  But he couldn’t seem to move. All he could do was look upon the carnage and shiver.

  It wasn’t always possible, but most times he was able to use his camera to distance himself from a situation such as this. The lens provided a buffer against reality. Tonight he couldn’t even think of setting it up and taking another shot.

  A rustling in the weeds at the far side of the intersection had him turning around, camera raised defensively. He shuddered when he saw the rat that froze at his movement. It scurried back into the weeds, and he started to back up himself. He took one step, then another. He stumbled over a buckling piece of pavement, caught his balance, but he still couldn’t turn away to watch where he was going. He had the sure sense that if he did, the killer would reappear and kill him as well.

  He didn’t turn until the rubble finally hid the bodies from his sight; then he fled, running back to where he’d parked his car, as though all the fiends of his childhood nightmares were on his trail. When he reached the car, he tossed the camera into the backseat, never considering the possible damage the rough treatment might do to it, and quickly slipped behind the wheel.

  He locked the door and put the key in the ignition, but then he got the shakes so bad that he couldn’t seem to start the car up.

  Now he knew where the look of terror on Niki’s face had come from.

  But what did any
of it have to do with him?

  The graffiti flashed in his mind. Red lips, blackly outlined. The dyslexically spelled name. NIKI.

  He put his hands in his face and leaned his brow against the top of the steering wheel.

  What he had seen was impossible. That … that thing … just appearing out of the smoke—called up by some makeshift voodoo ritual. What did the priest have to do with the killings? Why would he have called up that thing to kill those girls? Why had the monster turned on him?

  He could see its face again as though he still had the camera to his eye, the telephoto bringing its monstrous features into an awful close-up. It was almost familiar, that face, but he couldn’t place it.

  He shivered—nightmare tremors still crawling up and down his spine whenever he thought of what he’d seen. The whisper in his head wouldn’t go away.

  That monstrous thing …

  What did it have to do with Chelsea—the girl he called Niki?

  He remembered the look on her face when he’d called out to her earlier. Her terror …

  What did it have to do with him?

  It was a long while before he could finally start the car and drive. He didn’t go home. Instead, he drove as though in a daze, straight to The Star’s offices on Perry Street. The security guard had to call him back to sign in and looked at him with concern as he scrawled his name and the time on the appropriate piece of paper, held in a clipboard.

  “Are you feeling okay, Mr. McGann?” he asked.

  Jim hardly heard the man. He just nodded and muttered something as he headed for the bank of elevators at the far side of the lobby. He got up to the lab without running into anyone else, and souped his two films. Being busy helped keep the memories at bay, but he started to shake again while he was waiting for the negatives to dry—violent tremors that rattled his teeth against each other. The sound in his head grew stronger. It was like the buzzing of hundreds of flies, or like a dark, cold slithering that uncoiled and threatened to fill his head with its insidious presence. It was all he could do not to lie down on the floor and let it all just take him away. He hugged himself, waiting numbly for the feeling to pass, for the sound to die down.