Grimoire Diabolique

by Edward Lee

  Once a girl got old—20 or so—he didn’t want them anymore. Many were given to the merc camps that patrolled the fields, others simply disappeared. But the lucky ones were saved for special duties. For Raka.

  Raka, she thought, riding up and down.

  Hull’s rhythm steepened. “You are one hot box, Janice—Christ.” Her sex made a wet, crinkly noise, like someone eating food. The sensation of motion, of heat and impact, made Janice feel dully elated. Being penetrated—now—was a transposition of sorts, a crossing of matrixes. It put flesh on her memory, life in the space where her heart used to be.

  Hull groped for her; he pulled her down, hugging her, as he ejaculated. She could feel his semen spurt into her sex. It felt warm. It was a warm gift he’d given to her, a deposit from one world to another.

  She lay back beside him. His finger traced around her breast, then tapped the makak. “What’s this?”

  My life, she wished she could say. “Just a good luck charm.”

  “Superstitious, huh? I’ve seen a lot of people around here with these things. At that camp. What is that place, anyway?” When she didn’t answer, he pushed her back. “Let me go down on you. I want to eat your snatch.”

  “No!” she objected.

  He pulled at the nightgown rumpled about her waist.

  “No!” she said, grabbing his hands. “Please don’t.”

  “You don’t have anything to be self-conscious about.”

  “Just…please…don’t.”

  Hull let it rest. He was an attractive man, unabashed in nakedness. He looked clean-cut and professional. He didn’t look like what he was, and she supposed that’s why Casparza liked him.

  “How does he do it?” Hull asked her.

  “Do what?”

  “How does Casparza get his shit out? He can’t be doing it with boats; the U.S. Navy’s all over the coast. And surveillance planes are IRing the major land routes 24 hours a day.”

  “He mules the orders.”

  Hull leaned up, astonished. “What, commercial air flights?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s crazy. Customs checks every plane inside and out, and they fluoroscope and sniff every single piece of luggage and hand-carry on every flight. Casparza’s probably moving a thousand keys a month. He can’t possibly be muling through airports, not in this day and age. He’d lose everything.”

  “Just don’t worry about it,” she wearied. Her hand returned to his penis; it was hard again in moments, hard and hot and pulsing with life. “Do it to me again,” she said. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do it to you, all right. You’ll like it.” He turned her over, pushed her on her belly, and spat between her buttocks. Yet another memory, not surprising. Then he plugged his penis into her rectum, humping her hard.

  ’Rome, Daddy, all those other men—no big deal. It made her feel good because it reminded her of things.

  She hung partway off the bed. The moon seemed to bob up and down in the window with Hull’s frenetic thrusts. Janice’s hair tossed; the makak danced dangling about her neck. Each impact beat more memories into her head, more life. The ferocious seemed to verify something to her. This is what people do, she mused. Hull’s penis was proof of life. She wanted him to come in her again; she wished he could come in her forever, for every time he did was another validation that she was something more than a shadow, more than a ghost.

  He shuddered, moaning. Janice felt happy. The warm spurts felt thinner and hotter this time, spurtling into her bowel, and she was so happy she wanted to cry. But then—

  —she froze.

  The face bled into her—black as obsidian and utterly blank.

  Raka’s face.

  The priest’s voice, an echoic chord, marched across her mind.

  Now, it commanded.

  Still penetrated, Janice slammed the lamp down on Hull’s head.

  ««—»»

  The warped words oozed, spreading. Truth is power. Spirit is truth.

  The mist of Hull’s consciousness trickled up into the light. His eyes lolled open. Blurred faces hovered like blobs, then sharpened, gazing down. Janice and Casparza. He’d been fucking the girl, hadn’t he? Yes, and then…then…

  Goddamn, he thought when the rest of the memory landed.

  He tried to get up but he couldn’t.

  “Ah, Mr. Hull.” Casparza’s face loomed. “Welcome back, amigo.”

  Hull glanced around. The fuckers had tied him down to a table. He was nude. The hissing light from a dozen gas lanterns licked about drab canvas walls. The camp,, he realized. The tent.

  He was in the big tent.

  Janice stood beside the table, wan in her nightgown. Casparza stood opposed, the avalanche of flab straining against his huge shirt.

  Standing by a canvas partition was Raka.

  “We gain power through spirit, Mr. Hull,” Casparza cryptified. “Raka is an Obeah priest, a Papaloi. He was bred to harness the spirit.”

  The black priest stood in total lack of movement, the staring face bereft of life as a wooden mask. He wore a necklace of human fingers, or perhaps pudenda, and the thing that hung from his sash was a shrunken baby’s head. But from his hand something else depended, swaying: one of those little bags on a cord, one of the makak.

  “I thought we had a deal,” Hull moaned.

  “Oh, we do, Mr. Hull,” the fat man assured. “But you want to know my secret, don’t you?”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your secret. Just let me loose.”

  “In time.” Casparza’s grin seemed to prop up the bulbous face. He nodded to Janice.

  I’m fucked, Hull realized. He squirmed against his bonds. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that they were going to kill him. But why? He hadn’t crossed any lines. It didn’t make sense. Had some new mover back home put a contract on him? Had someone fingered him as a stool?

  “Look, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t know what’s going on. Just let me go. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

  Casparza laughed, fat jiggling.

  Janice pushed in a wheeled table like a gurney. Holy motherfucking shit, Hull thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, and the least human. His eyes felt stapled open. On the gurney lay a corpse: a man, an American. It was pale and naked.

  “Janice will show you,” Casparza said. “The power of spirit.”

  Hull grit his teeth. Janice very deftly slit open the cadaver’s belly with heavy-gauge autopsy scalpel. She plunged her hands into the rive and began to pull things out. First came glistening pink rolls of intestines, then the kidneys, the liver, stomach, spleen. She tossed each wet mass of organs into a big plastic garbage can. Then she reached up further for the higher stuff—the heart, the lungs. It all went into the can. By the time she was done, she was slick to the elbows with dark, oxygen-starved blood.

  “We can fit six or eight keys into the average corpse,” Casparza informed.

  Hull frowned in spite of his dilemma. “You’re out of your mind. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Customs has been wise to it for years.”

  Casparza smiled. Now Janice was packing sealed keys into the corpse’s evacuated body cavity, then stuffed in wads of foam rubber to fill in the gaps and smooth things out. She worked with calm efficiency. Finished, she began to sew up the gaping seam with black autopsy suture.

  “You can’t smuggle coke into the states in cadavers,” Hull objected. “Customs inspects all air freight, including coffins, including bodies tagged for transport. Any idiot knows that. The girl said you were muling the stuff.”

  “That’s correct, Mr. Hull. My mules walk right past your customs agents.”

  Wha—, Hull thought. Walk?

  Janice raised her nightgown. Hull’s eyes, in dreadful assessment, roved up her legs, over the patch of pubic hair, and stopped. Across her belly was a long black-stitched seam.

  “Janice has been muling for me for quite some time.”

  My God, was about all Hull could think.


  Raka began muttering something, heavy incomprehensible words like a chant. The words seemed palpable, they seemed to thicken amid the air as fog. They seemed alive. Then he placed one of the makak about the corpse’s neck.

  And the corpse sat up and climbed off the gurney.

  Raka led the corpse out.

  Casparza held out his fat hands, his face, for the first time, placid in some solemn knowledge. “So you see, amigo, we still have a deal. And you’ll get to be your own mule.”

  Aw, Jesus, Jesus—

  The scalpel flashed splotchily in Janice’s hand. Hull began to scream as she began to cut.

  — | — | —

  THE BABY

  (UNCUT VERSION)

  Rosser kind of joggled on the bus, rocking in his seat. It was a county bus, he presumed, Russell County, one of the poorest, so it made sense that the coach lacked air-conditioning. He felt like he was cooking in his jeans, his soiled Christian Dior shirt adhered to him by sweat, his feet baking in K-Mart sneakers. He’d only lived in Luntville a week, chased here, he guessed, by either penance or bad karma. The heat seemed to be chasing him too. The bus rocked and rocked.

  Maybe I’m actually in hell, he considered. Hell can’t possibly be any hotter than this. Nor its population any uglier. The bus driver looked like Lurch. The big guy in overalls in back looked like Shrek, and the woman sitting across could easily have been a female version of Don King.

  Everything beyond the window appeared as desolate as his thoughts. Fall guy, Patsy—call it what you want. I got screwed and I can’t unscrew myself. Rosser was a project manager for a major construction company—er, had been. Now he was a fleeing felon. Ordinarily he might get a year or two in jail and be out on good behavior after a few months, when illegal cost-cutting lead to deaths. But this? It had been Barren and Franks, company’s owners, who’d charged the client for the firewalls they hadn’t really installed. Same with the extra load-bearing beams in the center of the complex. The client paid for it—they had to, via state building codes—but Barren and Franks had “forgotten” to include these items in the actual construction of the site—and pocketed the money. Hence, little more than a week after the day-care center had opened, a roof strut had collapsed, severing a gas line, and the center had exploded like something carpet-bombed. Three dozen toddlers burned up like bacon, not to mention a number of adults. Barren and Franks had greased the right palms, forged the right invoices and deposit receipts, and bribed some “eyewitnesses,” and that was that.

  Business degree from Georgetown, minor in architecture. A brand-new Audi, and $150,000-a-year salary. All gone. All up in smoke. I’m not up Shit’s Creek without a paddle, he thought. I’m in the middle of the Shit Sea without a boat.

  Rosser beat the warrant-issuing deputy sheriffs by a half hour, went to the company office, cleaned out the safe, and hitchhiked out of town. He kept hitching till he was halfway across the county, then Greyhounded here, here being Luntville, in southern Virginia, which made the little burg in Green Acres look like Harvard Yard. God Almighty, he’d thought when he first arrived. It was another world, a secret world within the Land of Opportunity. Generations of families who didn’t know what education was. Mind-boggling poverty. Unemployment. Desperation, adultery, and alcoholism as the status quo.

  A man sitting next to Rosser grinned at him in a way that seemed knowing. The grin was black. Teeth like pegs of licorice. The guy had greased-stained jeans and a similarly stained gas-station shirt with the nametag COREY. Shoulder-length stringy hair hung down from the grime-edged REMINGTON baseball hat. He just kept grinning, right at Rosser.

  Is this the guy from Deliverance? Rosser flinched, tried not to meet his eyes. Why was the man staring?

  “You runnin’?”

  “Pardon me?” Rosser asked.

  “Never mind.” Corey pronounced “mind” as “mand.” “I was, awhile’s back. Couldn’t hack it no more. Wife got fat, baby whined all night like a bad water pump. One day I’se blinked and thunk what the fuck did you git yer’self into, you moe-ron? So I split. Couldn’t stay in Stone Gap. Shee-it, wife’s family lived there—if I’d even started talkin’ ’bout divorce’n shit, her fucked-up kin’d come after me with pitchforks’n shovels.” The rotten grin, somehow, brightened. “The fuckin’ was good, though. At least good enough to knock the pig up.”

  Invigorating conversation, Rosser thought.

  The bus banged over a pothole. “Anyways, that’s how I’se landed here.” The grin, more of the grin. “Just like you, I suppose. Am I right?”

  “Not altogether,” Rosser admitted. “What makes you think I’m…running?”

  A phlegmy chuckle. “Come on. That white button-down shirt? Looks like a business shirt that you’re just wearing ’cos it’s all ya got. Ain’t no businessmen in these parts. Ain’t no business.”

  Suddenly Rosser felt foolish in the office shirt, a sore thumb. “You could say I recently elected to relocate…” He didn’t want to talk at all, but the question came unbidden, irresistibly: “How-how long ago was this?”

  The grin jolted forward. “Was what?”

  “How long ago did you leave your wife and child? Er, I mean, how long have you been here, in this area?”

  “Six, seven years thereabouts.”

  Sounded promising, at least. If this redneck grease monkey started a new life in Luntville, so could Rosser. Who would look for him here? The beard was already growing in, the hair lengthening, dyed dirty blond. The couple hundred grand he’d taken out of the safe could go a long, long time in an economy like this. He’d get some under the table job somewhere, become part of the scenery—and part of a town and population that no one gave a shit about. This was his chance.

  And better than Corey’s, right? Rosser had left no wife and child behind, and he had some smarts and an education that would covertly come in handy, so long as he laid low. Things could be worse, he realized.

  Optimism couldn’t hurt.

  “So you’re—what?—a mechanic?” Rosser inquired next.

  Corey stunk like a cross between a Jiffy Lube and an armpit. “Shore, down at Hull’s garage next to the general store,” the black grin answered. “I just do my job, get my paycheck, mind my own business. Works out just fine, ya know?”

  Just another example of what Rosser needed reinforced. A person could start a new life, an anonymous life, and leave the past behind. Certainly Rosser hoped he never saw Corey and his rotten grin ever again, but he did appreciate the confidence of his example. The past was the past. Fate had given him a new future, and Rosser was determined to make the best of it.

  The shit-hole rooming house he lived in was miles from the nearest store; hence, the bus ride. Store-brand tortilla chips and a can of spaghetti would be dinner. And at the dollar store he’d picked up several cheap t-shirts and pairs of socks. He was serious about this. Thus far it seemed that the landlady approved of him: Mrs. Doberman (that’s right, Doberman, and her name suited her). “A fine, fine young man,” she’d commented this morning when he’d left. “So intelligent and polite…and so handsome!” He’d get a radio soon, a TV, gradually accrue the barest necessities. The more he thought about it, the better he felt.

  “Check it out, Hoss,” Corey said. At the next stop off State Route 154, a heavyset woman clodded on, grocery bag under one arm, a baby under the other. She turned around, clumsily manipulating herself, as though preparing to sit down required some urgent consideration. Corey further remarked, “Jesus Christ, is it gonna take all fuckin’ day for her to sit her fat ass down?” Eventually, the woman sat down in the bench seat right behind Lurch, and the bus…lurched on.

  White Trash Nation, Rosser mused, eyeing her. Did the woman smile at him? I hope not. She smiled at Corey, he convinced himself. The woman was hideous. Broken teeth, crooked nose, frizzed hair the color of dirty dishwater. The baby hung off her left side; he couldn’t really see it save for a pudgy, dirty leg sticking out across the area of space that ordinarily would
’ve been called a lap. Wet, glurpy noises could be heard, however: baby sounds. Peeking from the top of the grocery bag were Twinkies, donuts, a six-pack of Keystone.

  Rosser wasn’t sure what Corey whispered under his breath, but he thought it was: “I’m so horny I could spit on the floor and hump the spit.”

  Her bloodshot eyes darted quickly to him again, then quickly away: a White Trash flirt. No, no, the glance was to Corey, to Corey.

  Corey slapped him on the back. “Looks like this is your lucky day, huh, Hoss? Shit if she ain’t got the hots for ya.”

  “Not for me, for you. Either that or she knows you.”

  “Oh, I know the look.” An elbow jab. “But do me a favor. Lemme have some sloppy seconds, will ya? Shee-it, bet she’d do us both fer free on account she’s hot for you. Her name’s Maxine, by the way.”

  “So you do know her,” Rosser said.

  “Any horny fella with an extra sawbuck knows her. She’s the bottom of the barrel pussy in Luntville. Just plop the fat bitch down on the floor, spread those legs, spit on that pie, hold yer nose, and stick it in. Hump it hard, hump it fast, and fill her up. A nut’s a nut, ya know? And she don’t make ya use none of that condom shit.” Another comradely slap to the back. “Not a bad lay if ya keep yer eyes closed and don’t breathe.” Corey laughed loud enough to turn several heads, just not Maxine’s.

  He still couldn’t see any details of the baby.

  “Get a load of the belly on her, huh?” came Corey’s next enlightening observation. “Gotta wonder if she’s knocked up again. Ya never can tell with some of these girls.” Corey openly rubbed his crotch. “A’course, if she ain’t, I’d be more’n happy ta fuck up her life a little more’n put another white-trash food-stamp bun in her fat cracker oven.”