by M. C. Norris
“Good job.”
Cecile’s eyes fluttered open. She raised her head, and blinked at Malcolm.
“If there were fields behind the house, then that puts it on the outskirts of town. No need to go any deeper into Zurich than we have to. We ought to be able to circle the town from a distance and hopefully spot that old bus you’re talking about.” Malcom put his hand on the back of her neck. “You’ve done a great job, Cecile. This is it. Are you ready for this?”
“I think so.”
There was no turning back. As if there had ever been an option, for him. Cecile could intuit his steeled conviction in every roll of his shoulders, every push of his boots through the mud. The deeper they crawled into hostile territory, the more determined Malcolm seemed to become to reach their goal. It was all that mattered to him. He had no care for whatever happened afterward. He seemed to be owned by the bottom line, that no matter how great their odds, no matter how insuperable their challenge, if it boiled down to a situation in which they were overpowered, facing death, then it would please him to take lives until he could kill no more. It was the violent end that a man like him needed, and she doubted he’d ever quit until he got it. There was a fatalistic intensity to Malcolm, who was endowed with the raw ingredients of a true warrior, a man born with no choice but to see every fight to its bitter end, but she didn’t sense that he wanted to die. Not really. Nor did he live without fear of death. Rather, it felt as though he thought that he deserved a terrible end, as though he felt that he needed a penance to absolve a life that he thought he’d failed.
She didn’t know him. She’d only been with Malcolm for a couple of days. Maybe he did deserve a bloody end. Who was she to appraise him? He was certainly harboring more than his fair share of wrath and resent, but despite these obvious flaws, Cecile saw a lot of good in him. He had a certain tenderness, sometimes. There was a fine line, to be sure, between one who was suicidal, and a homicidal romantic, but either way, Malcolm was a volatile spirit too dangerous really to love, one forever beckoned toward some carnage that promised to complete him in a way that no person ever could. Now, that was an attractive challenge to any woman who was strong enough or stupid enough to accept it.
Nana Hess could fix a man. She’d fixed more than a few into fools who’d dogged her heels for years on end without even knowing why. For a woman who’d preached a life of independence from men, she’d taken her fair share of lovers, but she took them only as she needed them, and she was always in control of those relationships. She used men, manipulating handsome and promising men from their natural courses in life to the mindless vocation of her personal supplicants. It never ceased to be baffling. Cecile never saw her Nana as being an attractive woman, really, but even in her old age she’d inspired awe. Men were drawn to her in an unnatural way, as though they’d been hypnotized by her power, cursed with an enduring fixation that more beautiful women could only dream of instilling in their suitors.
“Your Nana is the worst hoodoo bitch that ever was!” Madame Chastant had backed her straight up into the coatroom, thrashing her skinny legs to welts with the wire handle of a flyswatter on the night she caught Cecile dropping gris-gris on her porch stoop. “Bitch put period blood in my man’s soup!”
None of it had made a lick of sense to her, in those days. Nana Hess just did things, and was accused of worse, but you never dared to question her motives. You obeyed. Cecile was sent pretty regularly on strange little errands that she learned could be more perilous than her Nana was willing to let on. There could be swift repercussions if you were caught. Nana’s ambivalence to danger suggested that it mattered less what you did than how you carried yourself as you did it, when living in a world rife with folks who’d happily do you harm. You kept your head high, wore a smile on your face, even as you marched out into that hostile world. Your little delivery, whatever it was, might as likely be a bomb as a bouquet of flowers, but you were to treat them no differently. Whatever was secreted inside those parcels and packets was Nana’s business. Not yours. You just carried yourself like a queen, just like Nana did, knowing that wherever life took you, the worst hoodoo bitch that ever was would be looking out for you. Happily assume the worst and you’d do well, every bright new morning that you rolled out of bed.
As Cecile grew older, she came to embrace her proud ignorance to those dark arts practiced beneath her roof. It was a business, after all, her Nana’s business, and if her Nana had believed that she’d have been in any way benefited by the burden of voodoo knowledge, then she’d surely have passed it on, but she evidently did not. On some level it was always apparent that her Nana intended all along for those matriarchal traditions to die along with her, as though she intuited the depreciation of superstition in a world waxing scientific, and meant to close that familial chapter with dignity and finality. It was her attitude that she impressed. You walked the streets with your head held high, and you entered every room as though you owned it, even when the folks inside that room just hated your guts and liver.
The voodoo was real. Cecile had to believe that, because her Nana was a frugal soul who wouldn’t waste her time with anything in which she didn’t genuinely believe. If she were selling nothing but hocus pocus, then she would’ve packed her gris-gris with dirt from the yard, rather than sending Cecile on a thousand midnight runs to the cemetery for fresh grave dirt. It didn’t go unnoticed how Nana seemed to coordinate the occasions of Cecile’s little errands with the visitation of certain company. She sometimes returned to find strange men, even white men, leaving Nana’s house through the back door.
Deep down, Cecile knew what was happening. Her Nana’s contempt for all mankind must’ve stemmed from whatever had happened to her when she was just a little girl, growing up in Storyville. She’d explained to Cecile that some evils were necessary to get by in life, but nothing about Nana’s business was ever allowed to be obvious. What she sold wasn’t flesh, but corruption. Hers was an exceedingly complicated model, one perhaps elevated by intrigue, made more palatable by her magical distractions. It was all intertwined, like a great heap of red yarn, unfathomable in its organization, yet somehow appreciable in its perceived outward form.
Usage of men was a learned behavior, because that level of contempt was not one that came naturally. It wasn’t until Cecile had grown old enough to acquire some level of objectivity before she realized how very different her psychology was from other women around her. All females manipulated males to some degree, but she’d never met another quite like her Nana Hess, who predated on men. She enticed them, captured them, and eventually broke them through a costly process of exploitation in a game where her customers were left thinking they’d won, while their wives were soon paying Nana from their other pocket for an act of revenge back against them. Before the swelling of her flyswatter welts had even receded, Cecile had returned to the front yard of Madame Chastant to stake down a rooster dressed in a little tweed suit and hat that had been tailored from scraps of her unfaithful husband’s clothing. Through the candlelit bedroom window, Madame Chastant gave her nod of approval.
Strange things happened around town. Of course, Cecile knew nothing about the evil glyphs chalked onto front doors, the headless cats in the graveyard with men’s names scrawled onto strips of paper jammed down their open throats. She didn’t know about the tortured gris-gris dolls, charms, and satin bags stuffed with powders, bones and metal shavings that sometimes showed up on porches, black candles burning in the night, and of course, those midnight orgies on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, where the devil himself might appear. Nana Hess walked the French Quarter as though they owned it, inspiring even the policemen to back out of her way as she passed them smiling with her head held high. In a place and time where no creature was more disrespected than a black woman, her Nana Hess had secured the lion’s share of respect. That’s all that her Nana’s voodoo was ever about.
Cecile crawled up beside Malcolm when he hesitated, and beckoned her forward. Her gaze
followed the direction of his index finger to the suggestion of a house, choked by a gang of cedar trees with raggedy, desiccated boughs. The property was isolated from its neighbors, situated further into the surrounding fields than any of the rest, leaning from its foundation on a bleak point infused by a shallow draw. Beleaguered by a bramble of mulberry and Osage thorns, countless cans and bottles gleamed in the lightning jags from all around the yellowed ruin of a wayward school bus, poking out into the field like an accusatory finger. Tucked discreetly behind the house and the shelterbelt of old cedars, and baffled on its windward side by a hedge of collected tumbleweeds, the lonely vehicle would not have been visible from any other angle but the one from which they’d miraculously approached.
“That’s it,” Cecile whispered, breathlessly, her eyes widening behind her mask. No matter how many times she’d led investigators to then scene of a crime, the gravity of the horrors that had transpired in those places never failed to affect her when she looked upon the setting firsthand. This place felt no less ominous to her mind’s eye than a grisly murder scene. She was certain that a life had been taken here in a most terrible way. Maybe more than one.
“Are you sure?”
Cecile nodded. She tried to reply, but her voice caught in her throat. The usual clawing at that door in the back of her mind heightened suddenly to the drumming fists and bloodied knuckles of some enraged ghost that still deplored this place. Its anguish was so palpable that it brought tears to Cecile’s eyes. This was going to be a bad one. Maybe the worst she’d ever visited. So much pent-up suffering. Years and years of the most unthinkable abuses, all directed at helpless victims. She felt the terror and desperation, the disorienting shock that must have followed blunt trauma, hot abdominal pain, eager blades cutting, flaying … but there was another emotion surging sickeningly up from beneath all the rest. It was one Cecile that found interesting, because it was so unusual for a murder victim. It was guilt.
“What’s the matter?” Malcolm asked.
Bad deaths left an unmistakable signature. Just like death’s smell, it wasn’t an easy one to describe, but you sure as hell knew what it was the instant it hit your senses. Sensing a bad death was a phone call in the middle of the night bearing the worst sort of news. It switched off your mind, froze you in place, and chilled you to your core. Bad deaths had happened here. Lots of them.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I’m ready when you are.”
Old Slim’s was the first bad death she’d ever smoked. That’s how her Nana Hess referred to the numbing sensation of a message whispered through that door in the back of the mind. Slim was the first to push through that door, to throw it wide open to the Land of Nod. Slim was just a cat, but he was more than that to Cecile, and that’s all that mattered in the spirit world. Her connection to that furry friend was just as strong of a bond as she’d ever had to any other human being at that stage in her life. They were inseparable. Their bond was probably something more than a girl with any sense ought to have with a cat, but things being as they were, Slim was the first ever to be there when she needed comfort from another living thing. He came to her like a gift from above, right when her little world felt like it was going to shake all to pieces and get scattered by the gray winds of change, the morning they carried her mama out the side door in a bag.
Slim was as loyal as the best of dogs. Her Nana used to laugh and carry on at the way that cat would trot along at her heels up and down the sidewalk of her Nana’s block. When she awoke every night to soaked sheets in her strange new bed, where nothing was where it should be, and she was all alone, she’d feel his gentle approach through that electric fog of night terror, purring loud and lazy-eyed upon her tummy. He didn’t seem to mind that they were in a strange new room, and he didn’t seem to think that she ought to mind it, either. He’d rub his sleek cheek against her hands, over and over, purring like a lawn mower while kneading their blankets into dough with his prickly front paws. Old Slim was her bridge between two worlds. He was a living, breathing connection between the one lost and the one gained. Every night, Slim convinced her until she no longer needed any convincing that everything in their new world was going to be alright, so long as they had each other to hold at the devil’s hour, until twittering robins heralded the dawn’s sweet light.
“Here, I want you to take this.” Malcolm slid his pistol from its holster, and pressed the dark weapon into her hand. “You know how to use one of these?”
Cecile nodded. Most everyone did, nearly a year after Z-Day. On the streets of New Orleans where she’d grown up, a familiarity with weapons and violence had come earlier, for better or for worse. She jacked a round into the chamber, checked the safety, and then, they crawled toward the bus.
She was nine, the first time she pulled a trigger. It all began at midnight, when her Nana’s phone began to ring. Cecile awoke and sat up in her bed, rubbing her eyes, and found that old Slim wasn’t where he should be, curled cozily by her side. Phones weren’t supposed to ring at midnight, even in her Nana’s house. That much she knew, but it wasn’t long before she learned that when phones did ring at that hour, bad news was probably coming from the other end of the line.
She and her Nana had shuffled out the back door and into the night, where their spooky old neighbor, Ms. Maziel, had just witnessed an awful sight. The grass and weeds were cold and wet beneath her bare feet. She clung to her Nana’s nightgown, following the sweeping beam of that flashlight around the yard until it came to rest on a pair of blinking eyes beneath the hedge of crepe myrtle.
Nana supposed that a dog had done it, because only a dog could have that much hatred for a cat to do all that had been done to old Slim. It was a memory that burned itself forever into her fragile mind, the worst thing her eyes had ever seen. He tried to rise, but could not. There was something wrong with his legs. White knobs protruded from new and ugly angles. All he could do was to cry out to her. She fell to her hands and knees and crawled on her belly through dirt and stickers, responding to his cry as on so many other nights he’d answered to her own. Despite a child’s naïve desperation to save what cannot be, Cecile knew that there would be no hope for old Slim. She gathered what was left of her furry friend into her arms and cradled him through the night until Slim’s spirit slipped away to a robin’s twittering apogee. That was the moment when Cecile lost her mind.
It began as a thin sound, fluting up through her choked throat and growing louder, courser, as her quavering lips split and she rose like a gorgon from the myrtle, her dead friend clenched in her arms, forcing the air from her lungs in a devilish scream that chilled the hearts of all those who heard it. Even the worst hoodoo bitch ever was folded her hands and began lipping prayers as she backed away. Bloodied and soiled in filth and hashed leaves, Cecile was made to see every torture that her friend had suffered at the hands of those three nigger boys, the same boys who’d soon beg for God’s forgiveness that they’d ever touched old Slim.
At the tree line, Malcolm rose, and backed into a cedar. At his beckoning, Cecile stood and slipped into the tree beside him, her pistol directed at the starless sky. The rain came harder still, hammering the ground with such ferocity that spumes of mud leapt up to their knees. Black rivulets worming down her mask wavered the image of the school bus, a place of living nightmares and stolen dreams, where the wings of something small and innocent had been clipped. It was a boy imprisoned here, singled-out from the rest of the brood, who could only stare wide-eyed and affrighted as his torturer approached the bus doors while his mother watched from the upstairs bedroom window, too powerless to intervene. The runt of the litter was born into a house that hated him, through no fault of his own.
Cecile turned back in the direction of the lilting farmhouse, and narrowed her eyes at its blanketed windows. Focusing on a single connection to the other side, she opened the door to Nod just a crack. Visions came shrieking into her mind’s eye with force enough to take her breath away. Here lived a demon king, a tyrannical ma
ster over a secret and sordid kingdom, whose subjects’ screams joined raucous music late at night when his wet brain swam with perversions, when he paid unwanted visits to darkened bedrooms. Their fear was his foreplay, and he readied himself in their doorways, locking eyes with the lost ones while milking their terror, stroke by stroke, until threads of slobber swung from his chops while those metal anthems raged. No one slept in this house, where an adjoining room’s suffering was but a harbinger of the horrors that would come knocking soon enough. No one dared hide from him, because he would find you, and when he did, it would be immeasurably worse. This house was a prison without bars where no stranger ever entered, and no one but the demon king ever left, often on the nights when the most horrendous moods came over him, when doubled-moons found him staggered through the cedar trees. He would find his way to the school bus where his little Gutterbird was caged.
Cecile jumped when she felt Malcolm’s hand on her shoulder. She should have warned him never to interrupt her when she was connected to the other side. When soul and body were pulled separate ways, and that connective fiber was stretched to the breaking point, it wouldn’t take but a yank from those grabbing arms on the other side.
