by James Axler
Kane lurched back in an unbalanced jig, but the fast-moving woman was already charging at him, her head down. Kane felt the sudden fiery pain in his chest as the woman butted him with the spines atop her head, and he fell backward, crashing into one of the lash mistresses who had been teasing her client to a zenith of sexual frenzy.
Kane’s hand snapped out and he grasped the fetuslike creature’s whip, shoving her to one side.
As the broad figure of Ellie hurtled toward him once again, Kane snapped the whip, using it to cut across her face with the force of a blade. Ellie cried out something unintelligible as the whip struck her, staggering backward and pawing at her face with her little, pudgy hands.
Kane looked at the half-formed thing from whom he had grabbed the whip, her childlike eyes open in dismay. “Much obliged, ma’am,” he said, tossing the whip back to her. She stood stunned as the whip landed at her feet and skittered across the bare board floor.
Kane was already moving again, running for the gap in the wall that led out onto the staircase balcony. In the false dungeon, Ellie was recovering, a dark stripe across her face bearing mute witness to Kane’s attack.
The Cerberus warrior ducked as the woman launched another powerhouse blow at his head, striking with such force that, if it connected, Kane felt sure he’d be nursing a broken neck. He rolled aside as the woman came rushing at him, ducking past her and out through the ragged hole in the wall.
Outside, the corridor seemed to be richly appointed once more, and Kane realized that the struggle with the crazed housemistress was affecting his concentration. If he didn’t end this fast, he’d be sucked back into the illusion of the House Lilandera and he may just never escape it again.
GRANT WAITED as Papa Hurbon sent his people out of the temple.
“Normally I’d suggest we take a walk,” Hurbon explained, “but given the circumstances…”
Grant shrugged. He had met Hurbon just once before, out in the Louisiana bayou where the man presided over the congregation of his voodoo cult. Hurbon had suffered terribly at the hands of his idol, Ezili Coeur Noir, whose demands had peaked with a sickening display of bloodletting in the form of both of her patron’s legs. Grant was unsure whether Hurbon had given his limbs willingly or not, but he had met the man shortly after the second savage amputation and he had not been happy, feeling abandoned and betrayed by his dark goddess.
“What are you doing here?” Grant asked once the dancers, the musicians, the slave girls and those guards that could still walk had left.
“Making the best of a bad situation,” Hurbon said bitterly.
“Is there a way out?” Grant asked.
“What? From this?” Hurbon looked affronted. “Now, why would anyone want to get away from this?”
“You know what this is, right?” Grant said. “It’s some kind of weird painting brought to life. That doesn’t bother you at all?”
Hurbon’s face scrunched up in bitterness as he considered Grant’s point. “When Ezili Coeur Noir came back she took my other leg and she left me for dead,” he explained. “She was a sadistic bitch at the best of times, but I loved her. You understand?”
“I’m trying to,” Grant admitted.
“But after that, your woman came—what was her name?”
“Ohio Blue,” Grant said, naming the local trader with whom Cerberus had worked a few times over recent months.
“Yeah, Blue,” Hurbon said. “Pretty blonde thing, seemed a bit soft and fluffy to me, like she thinks she’s some kind of princess, but I’d do her anyway.”
“You’re a good man,” Grant muttered sarcastically.
“Her people patched me together, but what was I left with? This!” Hurbon gestured to his missing legs. “So when she came back again,” Hurbon continued, his voice calm once more, “how could I resist her call?”
“Who came back?” Grant asked, confused. “Ezili Coeur Noir?”
“Ezili, yes,” Hurbon said. “But it was Maitresse Ezili.” Hurbon watched as Grant scowled in confusion, and realized that the powerfully built ex-Mag was having trouble comprehending. “You never followed the path, did you?”
“You mean, voodoo?” Grant asked. “No, that’s admittedly a gap in my education.”
“The spirits take many forms,” Hurbon told him, “different aspects responding to the different needs of their devotees.”
Grant nodded, beginning to see how this might function. Over the past few years he had been forced to build up a working knowledge of the false gods called the Annunaki, and so he was aware of how so-called gods and goddesses took different guises depending on time and place and on which facade they wished to present to their worshippers.
“There is more than one aspect to Ezili,” Hurbon said, “and each has her own field of expertise. Ezili Coeur Noir is her dark and vengeful side, the part of the loa that demands revenge on one’s enemies, that calls out for blood. That’s the crazy bitch who took my legs.”
“But she didn’t put you here,” Grant concluded.
“That mad whirlwind of hate? Hell, no! This whole place would be verr-rry different if she had had a hand in it,” Hurbon continued, gesturing around the temple. “You wouldn’t want to be here if she’d been a part of that.”
“I don’t want to be here anyway,” Grant pointed out miserably.
“My point being,” Papa Hurbon continued, “Maitresse Ezili, she knows only love. She cares for her children, worships life and its continuance.”
As Hurbon twittered on about his idols, Grant recalled something that housemistress Ellie had said when the Cerberus field team had entered the House Lilandera.
“What kind of house is this?” Kane had asked, his voice low and wary.
“A celebration of life,” the dark-skinned woman had replied, smiling her broad smile as she intertwined her fat fingers, their rings glittering in the light cast by the chandelier. “A place where everyone can find a friend, my darling. Just you see.”
“Shit!” Grant spit.
“What is it?” Hurbon asked, astounded at Grant’s outburst.
“I think we’ve been hoodwinked by your goddess,” Grant stated. Ellie, he realized now, was Maitresse Ezili who, in turn, was another face of Lilitu, dark goddess of the Annunaki. “What would happen if someone doesn’t want to worship life in the way this Maitresse Ezili prescribed?”
Hurbon shrugged. “That would never happen. I don’t imagine she’d take it well.”
“No,” Grant said, speaking his thoughts out loud, “neither do I.”
STANDING IN THE BASEMENT of Lilandera, amid the glowing parts of the astrogator’s chair, Brigid Baptiste holstered her TP-9 blaster and reached for the northern-most point of the pentagram that had been laid out across the floor. The headrest to the chair sat there, its eerie glow diminishing even as Brigid laid her hands upon it.
“Kane? Grant?” Brigid said, engaging her Commtact link with them. “I’m about to try something. Stand by—things may be about to get a little weird.”
“Make that ‘weirder,’” Grant confirmed over the Comm tact. “And a heads-up before you start—Ellie isn’t what she appears to be. I think she’s an Annunaki.”
“I’m about three steps ahead of you on that revelation, partner,” Kane explained over the shared link. He sounded distinctly out of breath.
“Everything okay with you, Kane?” Brigid asked, her hands still resting on the headrest.
“JUST FUCKING DANDY,” Kane snarled in reply to Brigid’s query.
At the top of the stairs, Kane tuck-rolled across the rich scarlet carpet and scooped up his Sin Eater handgun where it had been knocked from his grip by Ellie a minute or so earlier. The large-framed woman came crashing through the polished wooden door, bringing half the frame with her in her haste, the brass door handle zipping across the hallway as it broke apart.
Kane rolled up onto one knee and crouched at the head of the once-again decorous staircase, leveling the Sin Eater at the huge woman who was c
harging toward him like an angry rhinoceros.
“Just do whatever it is you have to do, Baptiste,” Kane instructed as he unleashed a stream of hot lead at the rolling form of Ellie. “And do it quick.”
ONE HAND ON EITHER side of the headrest, Brigid pulled it up from the floor with just a momentary struggle. It had been embedded into the floor a little, and the sharp point where the headrest had been broken from the chair itself seemed to be caught in a groove in the floor. But after a moment’s effort, Brigid yanked it free with such a pull that she toppled backward, landing on her butt.
Sitting on the concrete floor with the chair head in hand, Brigid looked around self-consciously. “I’m really glad no one was here to see that,” she muttered.
As if to put paid to Brigid’s lie, a voice piped up just across from where she now sat in a heap. “Are you okay, my dear?” the voice said. It was the elderly woman, the one in the chair who had appeared to be comatose just moments before. The woman was awake.
THE SIN EATER PISTOL kicked in Kane’s hand as he reeled off another swift burst of fire at the approaching figure of Ellie. The bullets struck her shoulder, neck and forehead, and she didn’t even seem to slow down, just kept charging at him across the eight-foot gap that remained between them, the bullets bouncing from her skin and hurtling away.
Kane rolled at the last possible instant, over and over as he went down the staircase, protecting his head with his arms. Ellie crashed against the walnut balcony, unleashing a fierce cry of anger and frustration.
Kane bumped down the stairs. When he had begun his roll, the stairs had been richly carpeted with cheerily perverse figures carved into the walnut banister. By the time he reached the bottom, the banister was a rotten structure with visible evidence of woodworm, and the carpet was gone, in its place just bare floorboards streaked with dirt. There was evidence of a campfire pit at the foot of the staircase, a round, charred patch marring the dirt-streaked floorboards there.
Kane righted himself, standing at the bottom of the battered staircase, pointing his Sin Eater up toward its topmost level where Ellie recovered from striking the banister. Like the bedroom and the corridor he had seen when he had meditated himself into a calming state, Kane saw now that the whole staircase was a shambles. High above Ellie was a gaping hole through which the sky peeked, and Kane saw several holes in the wall where bricks had gone missing.
Brigid’s voice came to Kane over the Commtact. “Did it work?” she asked enthusiastically. “Did anything happen?”
“Oh, it happened,” Kane assured her as he watched Ellie recover. “Things are looking mighty different to how you remember them, Baptiste.”
BEWILDERED, Papa Hurbon stared at Grant as the Grecian temple seemed to fade around them. Suddenly they were in what appeared to be a pantry, cold wind blowing in through a shattered window high up in the room. Still legless, Hurbon was sitting propped in a wheelchair beside a shelf of rotted foodstuffs, a small leather bag of his belongings hanging over the side of the chair like a saddlebag.
“What’s going on?” Hurbon asked.
Grant ignored him, turning toward the closed door of the cool larder. “Brigid, Kane—I think we’re in the back of the house, some kind of storeroom running off the kitchen. Could use some backup. Do you copy?”
“Little busy right now,” Brigid replied.
“Ditto that,” Kane added.
Stealthily, Grant moved on silent tread to the pantry door, pushing it open just a crack and peering outside. There was a kitchen out there, dilapidated with evidence of mold and the green shoots of weeds peeking through the tiles that lined the walls. It appeared to be empty.
Grant turned back to Papa Hurbon where the corpulent man sat, trying to take in the unexpected new sights all around him. “Did you do this?” Hurbon demanded, clearly unhappy.
“Man up, Hurbon,” Grant barked at him, reaching around and giving the man’s wheelchair a shove toward the door. “It’s for the best. You can’t live your life in a picture.”
Looking up at him, Hurbon glared. “You have no idea of the forces you’re meddling with here, boy,” he snarled.
“No, I don’t,” Grant agreed, “but you seem to be something of an expert. Funny how shit works out sometimes, ain’t it?”
With that, Grant shoved Papa Hurbon ahead of him into the kitchen, the tires of the wheelchair bumping over the cracked floor tiles as he hurried them across the room toward the hall.
BRIGID STARED in amazement at the elderly woman in front of her. She was still sitting in the living Annunaki chair, but she was leaning forward and Brigid could see that the chair had ceased to be attached to her with its weird, winding tendrils.
When Brigid had sat in that same chair months before, back when it had still been in Papa Hurbon’s possession, the chair had endeavored to absorb her, covering her in living tentacles that had been almost impossible to break free from. Quite how this woman had done the trick was beyond Brigid, and her naturally inquisitive mind insisted she ask.
“Are you okay?” Brigid asked.
The elderly woman smiled gently, her blue eyes showing compassion. “I believe I just asked you the self-same question, my dear. You appear to have fallen.”
Embarrassed, Brigid pushed aside the broken headrest of the chair. “That chair and I have some history,” the red-haired former archivist explained. “It has a habit of trying to swallow people whole.”
The other woman laughed falsely, a polite social affectation and nothing more. “It behaves itself if you know how to talk to it,” she explained. “However, I must admit I quite forgot myself. I feel as if I’ve been dreaming for a month.”
“We all were,” Brigid said with a knowing smile. Then she brushed herself down and, still crouching on the concrete floor, offered her pale hand to the woman. “I’m Brigid, by the way.”
“Winifred,” the woman replied, brushing her palm against Brigid’s for a moment. “My friends call me Winnie.”
“I think something’s going on in this house,” Brigid explained, “that’s happening partly because you’ve been locked in that chair.”
Winnie’s brow knitted with concern. “That would never do,” she said, and Brigid watched as the elderly woman slowly raised herself from the seat. She did so with such poise, such elegance, that Brigid felt entranced.
“How long have you been here?” Brigid asked, picking herself up from the floor and reaching for the next part of the pentagram, a side panel of the chair that had been wedged upright in a crack in the old stone floor.
Winnie looked around the basement as the light of the chair continued to softly glow. “That’s a question to which I have no answer,” she explained reasonably. “Unless you happen to know what day it is.”
“It’s the last day of April,” Brigid replied, indelicately shoving the side panel of the chair aside with a grunt.
“Le mange-les-morts,” Winnie said, speaking the words with gravity.
Brigid eyed the elderly woman with fresh anxiety. She recognized the words if not their significance—it was French and it meant “the feast of the dead.”
CROUCHING AT THE FOOT of the ruined staircase, Kane reeled off another shot as Ellie came charging down the stairs like a runaway train. His bullet struck her shoulder but the woman barely flinched and certainly did not slow down.
In a moment she was upon him, cuffing him across the face with such power that Kane was flipped over. The ex-Mag sailed across the wide lobby of the house before slamming shoulder first against one of the walls. The wall had lost its luster now, was just bare wooden paneling, much of which had rotted right through. As Kane pulled himself up, another chunk of the wall fell to the floor.
Ellie glared at him, and Kane watched as her eyes took on a lizardlike aspect, the whites turning yellow, the chocolate-brown irises narrowing into dark vertical slits. “You fail to acknowledge your betters, apekin,” she mocked, and she began to charge at him once more.
“Yeah, and you
have a god complex,” Kane retorted, aiming his pistol at the floor between them and blasting out a fierce volley of bullets.
Kane’s bullets drilled into the rotten floorboards between himself and the charging woman. As her feet hit the boards, the whole structure collapsed beneath her weight. Kane watched as the rotund woman fell through the floor, sinking about a foot down and tumbling over herself, her rich skirts flailing in the air.
Kane sprinted toward Ellie, then leaping at her as she struggled to free herself from the destroyed section of the floor. He had no idea where he was running to, just knew he needed to keep his distance from the brutal powerhouse of the Annunaki goddess-turned-woman.
Just then Kane spotted Grant entering from the shadowy far end of the corridor. He was pushing a cranky old wheelchair within which sat the familiar—though still surprising—form of voodoo houngan Papa Hurbon.
“What the hell’s going on?” Grant asked as his partner approached at a dead run.
“Back up,” Kane shouted. “We have one out-of-control goddess and she is mighty riled.”
From his seat, Papa Hurbon began to laugh, a great rolling sound like the crashing waves of the sea. “Oh, you are so naive it makes my sides hurt, it surely does,” he muttered. Even as he spoke, his hand reached into the tanned leather bag that hung on the side of the wheelchair and he pulled out—a little object made of cloth and a black ribbon on a spindle.
Grant tipped Hurbon’s wheelchair back and pulled it, dragging the voodoo priest back toward the kitchen as Kane laid down covering fire from his Sin Eater. Behind them, Ellie was struggling out of the rotten section of the flooring, tossing aside broken floorboards as she heaved herself out from the wreckage. In a moment she was on her feet once more, and began stomping toward the trio at the far end of the corridor. And then, incredibly, she stopped in place, standing stock-still as if turned into a statue.
