by Jeff Lindsay
I stood there for a minute trying to think. I wasn’t doing very well at this. I realized my heart was pounding and my stomach still felt full of sand. I’d had this feeling of hopeless dread since I’d started out and it wasn’t going away. And if I kept making simple, stupid mistakes—
I remembered the big key ring on the man in the wheelhouse and called myself a handful of bad names. I should have brought it. Of course they would have Anna locked up.
I took a deep breath and turned around. I went carefully back outside and up the stairs. I opened the wheelhouse door and stopped in the doorway with no breath.
I had left the two sailors unconscious and securely taped only five minutes ago.
Now they were gone.
The wheelhouse was empty.
Chapter Twenty-Six
A lot of things went through my mind in the half second before reflexes took over. Then I was inside the door, crouching out of sight with the greasy little gun in my hand.
I followed the gun all around the room with my eyes. Nothing moved. Nothing was out of place. There was no way anybody else could be hidden anywhere in the room.
I spun around to cover the door. I counted to one hundred and nothing happened. I duck-walked quietly to the doorway and looked out.
There was still no sign of life anywhere on deck. Nothing moved, nothing had changed.
Somewhere below I heard a muffled thump. I held my breath. And then, as if to make sure I didn’t miss it, the sound came again, THUMP.
Then quiet.
The seconds stretched into minutes and nothing else happened. My knees were aching from staying in a crouch for so long. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I was panting in breath through clenched teeth, but nothing happened.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that. It must have been several minutes. All my muscles had knotted, my shirt was soaked with sweat and my throat was almost closed from the dryness in my mouth. My heart had settled into a steady pulse of 175. I was close to the point where I would scream just from waiting for something to happen. And then it happened.
The drums started.
At first it was no more than a faint vibration in the deck. I thought it might even be soft footsteps and I flexed my fingers on the pistol, getting ready.
But the volume grew slowly, steadily, and soon it was a soft throbbing; urgent but patient, so overwhelming that I felt my heartbeat start to keep time with the drums.
BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—
A little louder, a little more urgent. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight out. I still couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. It was everywhere without being centered in any one spot. It seemed to be in the steel of the deck. I could feel it in the soles of my feet as much as I heard it.
BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—
I have faced junkies with knives, cold killers with guns, drunks with broken beer bottles in their hands, and I had not felt as helpless as I did listening to those drums. For a gun or a knife there is a direct threat and a way to deal with it. You can plan a response or an attack.
None of my instructors in the Rangers or at the L.A.P.D. Academy had ever had anything to say about how to deal with voodoo drums. You can’t put a restraining hold on a sound. You can’t punch it or kick it or slap handcuffs onto it.
But it is just as aggressive, just as dangerous, as much a threat to your health and sanity as a stiff hand to the solar plexus. Because it gets inside you and tells you to do something, anything, just get up and do it and make the drums stop.
Which was exactly the wrong thing, the stupid thing, to do. When you have no idea how many enemies you’re facing or how they’re armed, or even what they intend to do, you find a secure spot with cover and elevation and stay there. A place like the wheelhouse, where I was now. I could see anybody who tried to approach me from any direction and probably shoot them before they shot me. I was fine where I was. Couldn’t be better.
No matter what the sound made me want to do, I was not going to charge down the stairs and try to find the drums, make them stop, do something stupid. I was going to stay right where I was and make them come to me. That was my best chance. No doubt about it. Forget the damn drums.
So I took a deep breath, looked carefully around the deck, and started down the stairs with the gun ready.
I moved across the deck in a crouch, as quiet and smooth and ready as I could be.
The drums were louder now. Not faster, but more persistent, overwhelming the other sounds of wind and water. I could hear three separate drums, blending together, keeping one rhythm, but playing with it around the edges. The sound pressed itself on me, blotted out everything else. I couldn’t think, could hardly swallow. The rhythm was taking over everything. I felt like I was breathing drums.
BOOM-ba-de-TRUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—
There were several large outdoor loudspeakers on the deck. I hadn’t noticed them before. Maybe because they hadn’t been blasting out voodoo drums before. A pair of them were bolted to the top of the wheelhouse. As I saw them the volume seemed to go up another notch, and the rhythm got more demanding.
BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—
I slid behind a crate. Were they watching me? Trying to startle me into something? Because it might work. It was working. I scanned the deck again and moved quickly across the open space to the door.
The door below wasn’t latched. It slid open without sound. Not that I could have heard anything over the drums. I stepped into a darkened hallway and moved quickly to one side of the doorway, then dropped to a knee, closing the door behind me. A doorway makes a great frame for a target, especially when you are backlit by moonlight. I was being stupid, yes, but cautiously stupid.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness. The hallway was empty. There was one faint light shining, coming from under a closed door at the far end of the hall.
They were herding me. There was no question about it. The drums had come out of the silence to make me move and there was only one place to go. Now there was only one spot of light and in the darkness of the hall it seemed to me that the drums were coming from there, from somewhere in that faint bar of light, and it pulled me forward like a candle pulls a moth.
Even knowing that, knowing that somebody wanted me to do just what I was doing, I did it anyway.
Part of it was that I couldn’t stop myself. I had to get to the drums, make them stop, get that crazy rhythm out of my head.
But the other part was what Deacon would have called Rambo pride. I wanted to face this son of a bitch and say all right. You want me? You got me. And then I wanted to get my fingers around his throat and squeeze until his evil God damned eyes popped out.
I had never met this Patrice du Sinueux, never seen him face to face. And I had never wanted so badly to kill somebody.
It looked like I was going to get my chance. The idea of sneaking quietly onto the freighter, grabbing Anna, and sneaking away, was gone. It had died when the drums started. Or earlier, when the two guys in the wheelhouse had vanished.
Now it was face to face. Step into the monster’s lair and slay the dragon, or end up as just another pile of bones outside the cave.
I straightened to a crouch and moved down the hall toward the light.
Even here in the interior of the ship the sound of the drums was overwhelming. The road company of Chorus Line could be coming up behind me wearing their tap shoes, and I wouldn’t have heard them.
BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—
I took my time moving along the hall. I paused carefully at each door, watching for any kind of set-up. But the hallway was empty, except for me and my invisible herdsman.
I could feel the sweat on my palm around the pistol’s grip. I stood still for a moment, just two steps away from the lighted door, and wiped my hands on my pants. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate.
This was it. Behind that door was the big spider, and I had come here to squash him. I�
�d thought I could tiptoe past his web and take away one of his bugs. He’d let me know that wasn’t possible.
Of course, there might be no one there. Maybe they were all down in the hold, playing the drums and drinking rum and this was all my imagination working overtime.
But I didn’t think so. I was mortally sure that I would open the door and come face to face with Patrice du Sinueux. That’s what he wanted. He had driven me down here to this meeting as surely as if he’d taken me by the hand and led me.
I was going to open that door and come face to face with a truly evil man, and I was going to kill him. That was the only way now.
I took another deep breath, held the gun ready, and kicked open the door.
The drums stopped.
A man sat behind the desk in a circle of light. Just one man. There was no one else in the room, just him and me and he was sitting, unarmed. He was either stupid or so confident in his magic he didn’t think he’d need any help.
He was a light-skinned black man, with a slender build and close-cropped hair. His hands were resting in front of him on the desk. They were clean, strong-looking, manicured, and the fingers were much too long.
A deck of oversized cards stood on the desk at his elbow and as I entered he was stroking it with the fingertips of one hand.
Behind him was a steel coat rack. A black silk top hat was perched on top. A pair of white gloves was thrown over one branch and an elegant black cane hung from another.
And wound around the rack was the biggest snake I have ever seen.
It was twenty feet long and it was thicker around the middle than my leg. It had a pale yellow color with soft grey markings and a huge, wedge-shaped head that it lifted at me, its tongue flicking in and out.
The man at the desk moved. He opened a drawer of the desk. My eyes and my gun snapped over to cover him. He looked up at me and smiled. His eyes were a startling light green and they locked onto mine.
“Bon soir, Billy,” he said in a voice like the silk of the hat. He waved one of those long elegant hands. “Come in. Sit.”
“Let me see your hands,” I said.
He took his hand out of the desk, with mocking slowness. He was holding a small saucer and a razor blade. “This will not harm you,” he said, sounding like somebody I couldn’t see was tickling him.
I couldn’t think of much to say to that. I watched him as he placed the saucer on the desk and, as he began to speak, calmly slashed his arm and begin to drip blood into the saucer.
“I have raised Bebe from the egg,” he said, nodding at the snake. “I have given him a special taste.” He looked up. His blood was dripping into the saucer and the snake was starting to uncoil towards him. He smiled, a pleasant smile. “For blood. He likes human blood.” He shook his head happily. “Very unnatural. His kind, they do not normally like the human blood. It was very hard to teach him, but well worth it. He has been a great help in my work.”
He pursed his lips and whistled, a soft trill of a whistle that was strangely intimate.
The snake wound down from the coat rack and onto Cappy’s shoulder. He whistled again. The snake moved its huge flat head down to the saucer and began to drink.
“To him, he knows it means he will soon be fed, you see? And I have trained him to take the blood and then—” He gave me a beautiful smile. “—then he wrap himself where I say and squeeze. Very helpful with the sacrifices. For Papa Legba.” He laughed, then shrugged. “A parlor trick, yes. But it is very impressive, to the peasants in particular.”
“Your snake killed the old man. And the sailor, Oto,” I said, trying to keep my eyes on him. But it was almost impossible not to watch the snake.
“Two in one night,” he said with great satisfaction. “I was not sure he could do it. But he did,” he crooned to the snake. “Ey, Bebe?”
“Put the snake away,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “He will not hurt you,” he said. “He is not hungry, not for two, three more days.” The last s trailed off into a long, soft hiss.
“Put him back,” I said again.
He shrugged. It was a dark version of Honore’s shrug, saying of course, what’s the point, only because I want to, you’re a coward and a fool, I’ll get you anyway. And with one slow hand he guided the big snake back onto the coat rack and then slapped a bandage onto the razor cut.
“And so?” he said. “Now I am helpless, without my Bebe. So now what will you have me do?”
It’s not possible to get across the insult and menace he managed to put into those words. But as he spoke, smiling and leaning back in his chair, the hairs stood up on my neck and without thinking I took a step towards him, leveling the gun at a spot between his eyes.
He made no move to defend himself, pretending not to notice my gun, as if he believed that I would never dare to shoot him, or that bullets wouldn’t hurt him.
I hoped to surprise him. I moved right up to the desk, the gun aimed at the center of his forehead. I couldn’t miss at this range. But I also couldn’t shoot him when he was just sitting there, smiling. And not before he answered at least one question.
“Where is she,” I said, in a voice that sounded crude and raw next to his sleek French accent.
He raised an eyebrow and tapped his fingertips together. “She has not been harmed,” he said. “I am saving her for something very special.”
“So am I,” I said.
He laughed, three light, musical syllables. “You will be—disappointed.”
“You will be dead,” I said, taking the last step to the front of the desk. The barrel of the gun was only about eighteen inches from his forehead now but he still gave no sign that he had even noticed it.
Instead, he reached for a can of soda at his elbow on the desk. I could see the snake tattoo on his forearm. He picked up the can. A brightly colored drinking straw poked out the top. I didn’t recognize the label on the can, but as he brought the straw to his lips something else filtered in through my rage and tension.
There was no sweat on the outside of the can, no circle of water on the desk where it had been sitting. We were in the tropics and this man was drinking room-temperature soda.
Or—
I was already moving sideways as he whipped the straw out of the can and blew. He was fast, so very fast, and I felt myself doddering clumsily to the side as he pointed the straw at me.
A cloud of powder came out of the straw. Most of it missed me as I lunged to the side, but I felt a light stinging on the side of my face, an unpleasant odor in my nostrils, and an instant numbness spreading from my cheek into the rest of my face.
“Good night, Billy,” he said in his delicate laughing voice.
I straightened and looked at him as I felt all the power drain out of my body and then I—
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The fireworks were endless this year even though it was too dark to see them. They exploded without light over and over in reds and greens and yellows. The wooly blackness was hung with the swirls and patterns of the millions of dark bursting rockets and below them I sank toward the ground that was falling away from me just a little bit faster.
And now the rockets burst into bones, whole skeletons forming in the sky, red viscera dangling from the ribs. And still slowly falling, I became one of the skeletons as I fell out of my flesh in a dark red burst.
My bones rattled and burned with a cool green glow, the luminescent green of rot. I felt my skeleton begin to dance without me and I was afraid.
One coil of the darkness wrapped itself around a passing skeleton and became The Snake. At first I thought it was dancing, too. But then I saw that it was making the bones move to its own pattern and the mouth on the skull was opening and closing slowly, saying, “Help me.” And I felt The Snake coil on my bones, moving me to its bone dance.
My mouth was opening and closing to the same rhythm, but I couldn’t hear the words. I could hear nothing but the pounding clash of the falling bones and the laughter of
the snake.
And I fell and danced and cried for a time longer than there are words to tell.
And after this unbearable long time I finally smashed into the earth and shattered into cool darkness.
• • •
There was rhythm. I could not move but at last I could hear and there were drums and I could feel and there was pain.
All of me burned with a terrible fire and the pain in my head was like a living thing trying to eat its way out but I could not move even a little to try to ease the pain.
I was as dull and stupid as it was possible to be and I could not understand where I was or what was happening or why my whole body felt like it was rotting off my bones, melting away in terrible heat.
But slowly—oh, so slowly—I came back. Just a little bit at a time, but I came back. First there was awareness. I was. That was enough for a while.
And then from nowhere two words popped in: Billy Knight. Those words meant something. I let them echo in my head. Billy Knight. Billy Knight. Billy Knight. I said them too often and they lost all meaning again. It scared me.
I was just scared for a long time. Nothing more. There was no room in me for anything more complicated.
After a while the fear pushed that thought back into my head. Billy Knight. I knew what that meant. Billy Knight.
That was me.
I was Billy Knight.
I could feel my brain move up another level, a little faster, as the thought took hold. Okay. I had a name. That was good. Now on to the tougher questions. Where was I? I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t hear much except drums. I gave up. Where I was seemed too hard.
Why did everything hurt? I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to feel like this, like my whole body was smoldering in a slow fire. I could almost remember a time when it didn’t feel like that.
A few more brain cells came online and I remembered something else. Oh, right. If you’re being burned, move away from the fire. That thought made me happy for a few minutes. I knew what to do.
