The words stopped tumbling inside her brain. Instead, she held onto a simple thought that gave her at least a little bit of courage.
Forget it all. Just, forget.
She took a breath, and nodded to him that she would be all right.
With another quick squeeze of her hand he turned and opened the basement door.
Then he turned to look over his shoulder at her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
The door stayed open behind him. The gaping darkness reached out for her. She could smell the dankness now, the same odor that she remembered from the nightmare of laying inside that pentagram, naked and vulnerable, while those hooded figures chanted over her and invited a spirit entity to invade her body.
Deep in her belly, something squirmed.
She whined behind lips she kept tightly pressed shut, and she wrapped her arms around her stomach, pressing down on the thing that had moved in her.
This was her body. She would be damned if she gave it up willingly to something else.
Only, she had no idea how to stop it.
She began counting seconds in her head, listening for Carlson to be coming back up the basement steps, or to shout to her, or scream, or any other of a hundred horrifying scenarios that she came up with as she counted the minutes slowly away.
At five minutes, the panic she had been fighting off threatened to overwhelm her.
“Carlson?” she whispered.
And then she counted. A minute passed.
“Carlson,” she said, a little louder. “Where are you?”
This time she lost track of what number she got up to.
She snatched her own cellphone out of her pocket, turning on the flashlight app just like Carlson had, and she aimed it into the basement doorway.
There was nothing there.
The door creaked on its hinges.
Katie stared at it. Hadn’t this been locked when they were here before?
“Hello there, pretty lady,” a deep and dry voice said from behind her. “Welcome back to my home.”
She spun and lifted the phone in front of her as if it was a magical shield that could protect her. The light cast harsh shadows against the face of Xavier Holsten. He grinned the morbid smile of a corpse.
“I knew you would come back to me, Katie Pearson.”
Chapter 22
Katie ran. It was surprising just how often that was the answer to the problems in her life.
The light in her phone swung wildly around her as she moved through hallways and made turns and collided with furniture that was draped with sheets.
In her wake, the sheets billowed up like ghosts.
“Hey, pretty lady,” Xavier said from behind her. “Where you going?”
Wherever she turned, he was there. She was lost after ten steps. The rooms were endless. The hallways turned on themselves in impossible ways and she was sure she should have crossed over that central hallway at least once more by now. She knew about building layouts. She understood the way houses were built.
This was impossible.
In front of her the hallway ended in a wall. It was a dead end.
When she spun around, wanting to dodge away before Xavier could catch her, there he was. Standing there, as if she hadn’t moved at all. Just waiting for her to turn around.
Katie found herself back at the stairway, right beside the open door to the basement.
She held her cellphone up, pointing the light in his face, trying to surprise him enough that she could do...something.
“Stay away from me!” she shouted. “Stay back, I’m calling 911. I mean it!”
Through his teeth, his pink tongue slithered obscenely.
She never saw the hand he swung at her until it was smacking her in the side of her head. Loud noises deafened her ear, and stars pinpointed themselves on the darkness that swallowed her up.
When she woke up, she was tied to a chair.
She struggled, and she tried to tear her arms away from the ropes holding them tight. They burned her skin, and refused to let go.
Take a breath, she told herself. Take a breath, and think. She opened her eyes to find candles burning on a table, and on shelves, and nothing else in the room except the chair she was sitting on, and the chair Xavier sat on.
He was facing her with the chair turned around backward, with his arms crossed over the ridge of the low back. His right foot was tapping along to music that only he could hear.
“There’s my pretty lady. I want to tell you a story.”
Katie tried to scream for help. The gag in her mouth prevented her. Now that she felt it there, it gagged her, nearly choking her, and for a moment she had to fight to breathe through her nose. She tried to push the wad of fabric out with her tongue but it was stuck fast, and the more she tried the more she gagged and at one point she felt like whatever was in her stomach was about to come up and she knew that if it did she would aspirate and drown to death on her own vomit.
So she slowed down, because there was no other choice. She met his grinning face with a glare, hoping her eyes conveyed every vile thing she was thinking about him in that moment. She tugged on her bonds again, and found that it wasn’t just her hands that were tied down.
She was similarly bound at the waist, and at her feet, and at her elbows. Xavier had thought of everything. She was trapped as surely as if she was a fly in a spider’s web.
And Xavier was the spider.
“You listening now?” He hummed a little bit of his tune before nodding, as if she had given him an answer. “Good, good. Now. This be a long tale, so make yourself comfortable.”
Then he laughed like he’d made the funniest joke in the world. Katie tried to kick at him but her foot was held to the chair’s leg so tight, and all she could do was shake her chair back and forth.
Maybe if she got the chair to tip, and fall. Maybe it would break. Maybe it would make so much noise that Carlson would hear her and come running--wherever Carlson was.
Where was he?
“Okay, now, story time.” Xavier slapped his slender fingers together and rubbed them with glee. “Once upon a time, there was a woman named Madame Marie Laveau, lived here in New Orleans. She was a powerful voodoo queen. Very pretty, too. Had such big power that even now, people visit her grave and leave little gits asking for her favor. That was how powerful she be. Major big power in the voodoo world. That was Marie Laveau.”
Katie glared, but she felt the heat of it melting away. The story he was telling her, about this Marie Laveau woman, was flowing through her. It was pulling at her mind.
Reigning her in like a horse being ridden.
“Ah. See you listening now. So.” Xavier made a motion with his hands that somehow conveyed the importance of what he was saying. “Madame Laveau was born of White folks and Black folks. Her mama was Black. Her father was half of each. Born free she was, not in slavery. That was a big thing back in 1800. Made her something special right from the start.”
Katie had an image form in her mind. There was a woman, a beautiful dark-skinned woman, proud and free and confident. She smiled, and looked straight at Katie.
The breath caught in her lungs. Except for the color of their skin, they were identical. It was like looking in a mirror darkly.
It was the face she saw in the memories of what had happened in the basement. The other her, the one who forced herself into Katie’s soul.
Madame Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen.
“Never been a woman as strong in voodoo as Madame Laveau. Cured illnesses. Raised up politicians and brought down the evil. Made a White salve owner break out in boils all over his skin. All over,” he chuckled. “Wife wouldn’t go near him no more. No one wanted to touch him. Made him so angry he swore he’d kill Madame Laveau. Too bad all those boils popped, all at once, and his heart with them. Nasty bit of business. Never cross a voodoo queen. Bad things happen.”
Katie shook her head to clear her thoughts. The image of Madame Laveau dis
appeared. She stared hard at Xavier. She couldn’t talk, not with the gag, but he seemed to know what she wanted to ask.
“What this have to do with you? Oh, easy enough, that is. Been a long time since voodoo had someone to champion the faith like Madame Laveau did. Like Papa Doc Duvalier. Like Emmanuel Arthur Edwards.” He stood up, swinging his leg up over the chair. Then he cupped a hand to her face, holding it pressed there as she tried to pull away. “And now, like you. You gonna be the new Madame Laveau. Just need some education. Just need some help.”
His fingernail scraped along her cheek.
“Don’t worry, pretty lady. I’m gonna see to it.”
Chapter 23
Katie wasn’t going to let him do this.
He was going to have to untie her to get her down in that basement and when he did she would beat on him until every bone in his skeletal-frame body was broken.
She sat, patiently waiting for him to undo her feet, or her hands. Her feet would be good, too, because then she could get back to running away. Unless the hallways shifted and twisted on her like they had before.
Her muscles tensed as he stepped around her. This was it. This was it!
From behind, he grabbed the chair. He tilted her back until she was looking up into his face. Then he smiled at her again, and dragged the chair.
He was pulling her across the room. The sound of the legs against the sagging wood across the floor was loud in her ears. He wasn’t going to let her go. He was going to keep her as his captive, and force her to be part of his whacked out vision.
She thrashed around in the chair, cutting the skin of her wrists against the ropes. Her ankle twisted the wrong way. The gag was in the way, and she needed to scream.
Tears stung her eyes as she shouted against the gag, the sound muffled and shrill and beyond panicked. There was terror in her voice. Stark, naked terror.
“Gonna make you understand,” Carlson kept saying, over and over. “You will lead us into a new great age. You will lead all voodoo and the loa will bow to your will.”
The back legs of the chair caught against something, and he tugged, and tugged, jarring the bones in Katie’s spine.
“Gonna make you see.”
Thud. The chair smacked against something.
“Gonna make everyone see.”
Thud.
“Even--”
Thud.
“If--”
Thud.
“It kills--”
THUD.
The chair toppled over to the side with Katie still strapped to it. She could see the way her blood had soaked into the restraints at her hands now. How much had she lost? How much could a woman lose and still not die?
Above her, Xavier swore in both French and English. Katie didn’t understand it all but she got enough of it to get the gist. He took hold of the back of the chair again, starting to lift her back up, to drag her to the Hell that was waiting for her in the basement.
Desperately, Katie tugged her right hand against the ropes, just as hard as she could.
A raking sort of pain lanced its way up her arm as skin tore and blood drooled from her flesh. Her hand moved.
And then it was free.
She was blinded by the pain for a moment but the reality of what was happening to her woke her up again. She was injured, and it didn’t matter. This bastard was going to end her life in a voodoo ritual that would either kill her, or rape her mind away until she was someone else. She would be his puppet, and someone else would be pulling the strings.
Like Hell.
She spun her arm around behind her and caught his face with her nails. His skin tore under her fingers.
His screech split the silence around them. He let go of the chair and it crashed her to the floor again, this time landing her on her shoulder. She felt something go crunch that should never make that sound.
“You witch!” Xavier shouted at her. “Why you do this to me? Why? Why?”
Katie wasn’t listening to him. With bloody fingers--her blood and his--she tugged at the cloth wrapped around her face and stuffed into her mouth but her fingers were slipping and she couldn’t get a grip but then, but then, it was unravelling and she pulled it away and the gag came spooling out of her mouth and she could pull in a deep, deep breath.
“Carlson!”
She screamed his name just as loud as she could. Screw it, if there were other people in this house and they heard her she didn’t care. She wanted to be out of this nightmare. They’d come to learn why Xavier had done this to her and now she knew and it didn’t matter if she died here, in this spot, tied to a chair.
So she yelled for him again.
“Carlson!”
It was Xavier who came to her, not Carlson. It was Xavier who slapped her with the back of his hand, leaving her ears ringing. It was Xavier’s bleeding face that hovered over hers, grinning still, eyes wavering with madness in the candlelight. Blood ran down his cheek from the three gaping lines where she’d scratched him.
“I can make you a queen,” he promised, “or I can make you dead and give your body up to the loa. You decide.”
She found the will to spit bloody saliva at him. It struck him on the side of his face, and she watched it trail down the line of his jaw, and drip from the edge of his chin.
His smile never left his face.
“Your choice,” he told her.
What she hadn’t seen, until that moment, was the knife he slid out from behind his back. The edges of it were wavy like a river, tapering down to a point that caught the candles’ glow and gleamed with a hunger for blood.
He raised the knife up in a two-handed grip, closing his eyes, chanting words of voodoo power.
Katie couldn’t move. Her legs were still bound. Her body was still tied to the chair. The only thing free was her one arm and she heard herself begging him don’t do it, don’t do it, as she twisted herself over as far as she could and put her bloody hand to the floor and tried to drag herself away from him. Her fingers slipped along the floor boards in the mess of her own warm, red blood.
Tears in her eyes, she looked back up at Xavier.
In the hollow of his throat, a steel blade appear, slicing through his neck from behind, blossoming with red gore like some obscene flower.
Xavier’s eyes went wide, and his lips still tried to form the words of his voodoo spell even as blood began spurting out of his mouth.
His hands dropped his knife. It landed point first into the floor, inches from Katie’s face.
Then he fell away, crumpling like old bones no longer held together by their body. He crumpled into a heap on the floor with his blood still oozing out of him.
Carlson stood there, breathing heavily as he bent to pull the butcher knife out of Xavier. He must have gotten it from the kitchen, Katie thought, hysterical laughter threatening to overwhelm her if she didn’t stuff it back down inside.
She was alive.
Chapter 24
“Sorry it took me so long
He didn’t waste any time using the knife to cut her free. Then he was holding her, and her blood was soaking into his shirt but he didn’t care.
“You saved me,” she whispered to him. “Oh, Carlson, I can’t believe it. He was going to kill me. He wanted me to be the reincarnation of some voodoo queen. He was going to do...I don’t know what. He was insane, Carlson. He was going on and on about making voodoo great again. That it needed leaders and I was going to be one and oh, damn, Carlson! I saw my face. I mean, not my face, but it was my face and I just can’t...I can’t!”
“He’s gone now,” Carlson promised. “You’re lucky I found you in time. Hard to say what he would have done with you if I hadn’t gotten back in time.”
“I don’t want to think about it.” Katie clung to him. Now that things were calm again she could feel the pain everywhere in her body. From the ropes, from being tossed around, and from the torn skin at her wrist. She hurt everywhere.
He stepped back from her, ju
st enough to carefully hold Katie’s arm, examine her wound, purse his lips in thought. “This needs to be wrapped. You can’t leave it like this.”
“It hurts,” she moaned. Dear God. Dear, dear God, how did this get so messed up? “Is it over? Can it please be over?”
He reached over to a nearby end table that had been draped in a white cloth. It was dusty, but as he pulled it off he shook it off, and slapped it against his thigh, before tearing off a long strip of it. He wrapped it tight around her wrist several times like a bandage. The blood had already started to stain the cloth red as he tied it off with a square knot.
“That will do for now, ma chere.” He told her. “Let’s get going.”
She flexed her arm, and wiggled her fingers. It still hurt, but not as much. “What about him?” she asked, pointing down at Xavier’s body. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“I think I’ve disposed of enough dead bodies for a while. Let tomorrow sort him out.”
“That must be one of those voodoo sayings,” she said, although the joke fell flat. “I’m serious, Carlson. He’s dead. Does that mean it’s over?”
“Some things that smell done, are just beginning to boil.” He shrugged. “That’s another bit of voodoo wisdom. I think it fits the moment pretty well. Just like the one about how you haven’t lived, until you’ve lived in New Orleans.”
Katie looked down at the death mask that was Xavier’s face. She wasn’t sure that any saying about living had much to do with this moment in time, here in this house, where death and black magic had found them, sight unseen.
“I just want to go,” she told him. “We came here to find out what Xavier had in mind for me. Now we know. I just want to leave this place behind and forget any of this ever happened.”
“I agree. We should go. Xavier might be gone, but if he called on the loa of Madame Laveau, then we really do need to get moving. Before she finds us, I mean.”
She searched his face, seeing the urgency there. “Then you think this was all real, too? You don’t think it was just ghosts?”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 91
