by James Axler
Moving like a crab across the cold floor, Hurbon continued sketching for a few more minutes while Grant watched. Hurbon’s strokes with the marking flour were bold and sure, creating designs he had doubtless drawn a thousand times before. When he was finished, the floor looked like a spider had gotten loose with a stick of chalk. Scribbled symbols were all over, forming a loose circle that congregated in the center of the room.
Outside the house the shambling figures of the undead began to shuffle with more direction, as if becoming alerted to something new in their presence.
While Hurbon had been working and Brigid continued making her own notes, Kane went to check on Maitresse Ezili. She seemed almost as if she had been frozen, her mouth stuck in a silent scream that showed off her pearl-white teeth. As Kane neared her, the woman’s yellow eyes flickered toward him, watching his movements.
“You want out, don’t you?” Kane taunted. “Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure a way we might be able to fix all this.”
He took another step closer to the constrained woman standing in the center of the hallway. “See, you’re not complete, you’re half a person.” Kane pointed back to the kitchen and told her, “Baptiste in there—she’s book-smart like you wouldn’t believe. She says you’re an ego without an id or a superego, you’ve become detached from them somehow during a messed-up rebirth. That’s what’s made you so crazy, trapping people into this little love factory. Baptiste says that if the ego is the rider then the id is the horse, whatever that means. I guess she’s really saying that you aren’t going very far while you’re in pieces like this, you’re just trudging over the same little furrow.”
Maitresse Ezili glared at him with her lizard’s eyes, the fury burning deep within them like a curse.
Fearless, Kane brought his own face close to the woman’s. “Oh, sure, you feel that way now but you’ll thank me when it’s all over,” he told her. “If it makes you feel any better about this, the last time we met and you were whole, you almost killed me. Maybe you’ll get better at it next go around.”
With that, Kane strode back to the kitchen, leaving the magically incarcerated form of the Annunaki goddess-turned-voodoo-loa alone in the dilapidated hallway. “Don’t expect me to cut you a break, though,” he added before disappearing into the kitchen.
When he entered the kitchen, Kane saw that Papa Hurbon was back in his wheelchair, a half-dozen strange designs sketched out in white across the floor.
Hurbon’s hands were toying with the little doll wrapped in white ribbon as he spoke. “This ribbon blinds Ezili Coeur Noir to my presence,” he said. “As long as it is wrapped around the doll, she will be turned away the way you dissuade a cat, as if smelling something unpleasant.”
Grant was about to say something as he stood down-wind of the sweaty voodoo priest, but he thought better of it.
“What about us?” Kane asked as he paced into the room, glancing back at the statue-still figure of Ellie standing in the corridor.
“It works by proximity,” Hurbon told him. “Which means that so long as you’re near me and the doll’s intact, Ezili Coeur Noir won’t come near you. That’s why she hasn’t come here, and her zombie people avoid the place. The spell drives them away.”
“Ingenious,” Grant said.
“Yeah, but it’s no good,” Kane huffed. “We need to be near this psycho bitch to trap her. If your spell keeps turning her away, she’s going to start looking for another date.”
“Some good-looking dead guy with a full set of teeth,” Brigid mocked.
“So what do you require?” Hurbon asked, turning the doll over in his hands.
“Catnip?” Kane ventured.
Sitting at the scarred kitchen table using a short pencil to jot notes in her small pad Brigid Baptiste glanced up at Hurbon and the others arrayed around the table. “We need to depower her for long enough to hold her and move her without getting ourselves killed.” She raised the pad and showed Hurbon the simple sketch of the layout of the redoubt that she had drawn.
“I could hold her in the same way I have Maitresse Ezili out there,” Hurbon mused, “but that would require me to drop the spell of concealment. I don’t know…”
Grant slapped the voodoo priest on the back. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”
Papa Hurbon laughed then, a full basso roll like distant thunder. “That is not as reassuring as you think it is, Grant,” he told the towering ex-Mag.
Grant shrugged. “It’s the best we can do.”
“To bind Ezili Coeur Noir as you’ve requested,” Hurbon stated, “I’ll need to remove the hex that blinds her to my presence.”
“How soon would it be until she sees you?” Brigid asked.
“I could keep out of her way indefinitely,” Hurbon said with a smile. “But that’s not what you want me to do now, is it, my pretty little peach?”
Brigid shook her head. “If we can capture her at the redoubt we have a chance of using the fusion generator to entrap her,” she said. “So we need her there.”
“And we need her calm,” Kane pointed out. “Lilitu fought like a hellcat when she was alive. I don’t want to begin to imagine what she’ll be like this time around, what with being half-past dead and all.”
“I can hold her for a limited time,” Hurbon said, “but I’d need to tread into the Kafou, the crossroads of our world and hers.”
“Land of the chalk drawings here not enough?” Grant asked, gesturing to the newly decorated floor.
Hurbon smiled, a grossly wide display of teeth in his bucketlike jaw. “The vévés charge the batteries, but we still have to use the equipment,” he explained. As he spoke, he struggled to reach behind him for something stored at the back of his wheelchair.
Grant stood and offered the crippled voodoo priest a hand. “What are you looking for here, man?” he asked.
“There’s a hidden panel,” Hurbon explained.
Grant ran his fingertips along the back of the wheelchair until he located a disguised popper beneath the material that covered the seat. He snapped the popper open and the dark cloth covering the back panel folded back on a triangular crease. Grant saw now that the seat contained a false panel within which items could be stored. Inside, held at a sharp diagonal, was a long length of decorated leather—it was a sheath within which sat a sword of two feet in length. With the impressive length of the blade, the scabbard had just barely fit beneath the hidden panel.
“You find it?” Hurbon asked.
Grant held out the sword, laying it across his palms in the way of ceremonial presentation. “This what you’re looking for?”
“The ku-bha-sah,” Hurbon said with a nod.
Winnie gasped and shied away from the weapon as Hurbon accepted it.
Standing by the doorway, Kane peered across at the wheelchair-bound priest as he unsheathed the sword. “I seem to remember borrowing that little pig-sticker from you not so long ago.”
Hurbon nodded. “Indeed, but you had no concept of its true power.”
“Care to enlighten us?” Kane asked grimly.
“The ku-bha-sah is a ceremonial blade,” Hurbon explained as he placed the empty sheath on the table. The blade glinted in the daylight that spilled into the kitchen through the dirt-smeared windows. “It is used to cut a rent from our world to theirs.”
The three Cerberus warriors nodded warily. They had come across a knife that possessed similar properties to those Hurbon described, and it had created a dimensional rift—an infinity breach—that had very nearly ended in disaster.
“You said ‘ceremonial,’ didn’t you?” Brigid clarified after that pregnant pause. “Not actual.”
“The ku-bha-sah represents the cutting of the cross point,” Hurbon agreed, “where worlds meet.”
Then Hurbon gave out a list of instructions, things he required to perform the ceremony he had in mind. They didn’t have much time to perform his ritual, but he insisted that he would need blood to complete the arcane procedure.
“Sacrifice is key,” he said to assure them.
Brigid considered querying this, wondering that it was just a populist myth concerning the voodoo religion, but she chose not to. Hurbon was a practicing Bizango, she reminded herself, the darkest and most secretive of all voodoo schools. His ways were bound to seem extreme to an outsider.
“It matter what you sacrifice?” Grant asked.
“I have preferences, but it’s about the circle of life,” Hurbon said.
“There were mice upstairs,” Kane pointed out. “They do?”
Hurbon nodded.
“In which case they’re probably all around, then,” Grant muttered. “I’ll go look.”
Thus, with eminent practicality, Grant pushed out the back door of the mansion house to search in the undergrowth there.
Outside the door, just three feet from where Grant exited, an animated corpse was waiting, as if poised for him. It unleashed a banshee howl as it came rushing toward him.
Chapter 20
Before Grant could react, the walking undead man tossed something at him from one of his deteriorating fists. Automatically, Grant’s hand went up, batting the thing away in a flinch reaction. It was a rock about the size of a baseball, and Grant yelped as it was struck from his arm.
Then the undead man was upon him, jaws extended as he reached for Grant’s throat with black, leathery hands.
Grant gut-punched the undead man, his big fist driving into his body like a pile driver. Appropriately, it was like punching deadweight, the corpse-thing barely moving under the force of Grant’s blow.
Kane was in the doorway by then, his eyes going wide as he took in the remarkable situation. “The hell…?”
Grant reached for the undead man’s wrists as his hands clenched around Grant’s throat. “They may not be able to see the house,” Grant rasped as he fended off his gruesome attacker, “but they sure as fuck can see us!”
Kane scanned the immediate area as he rushed to help his friend, making sure there weren’t any more of the living dead things waiting to ambush him. The backyard seemed otherwise clear, but the vegetation was so dense it was hard to be sure.
The corpse-thing secured a grip on Grant’s throat, jagged nails ripping into the skin of the ex-Mag’s neck as he pressed tighter. Then Kane was behind the moving undead man, getting a solid grip around his blackened body and yanking him away from Grant.
Grant choked out another breath as he found himself pulled along by the struggling corpse-thing. The thing had, quite literally, a death grip on his throat now, and the breath was being squeezed from him in a painful rasp.
Behind the animated corpse, Kane struggled to pull the attacker off his partner. “Let go, dammit,” he snarled. “Let go!”
The corpse-thing swept its head back, smashing the back of his crown against Kane’s face with such brutality that the ex-Mag’s nose began streaming blood. Kane held on, shaking his head as dark spots whirled in front of his eyes.
Unable to breathe, Grant sank to his knees in the dirt. Desperately, he grabbed both hands around one of the undead abomination’s wrists and applied all the pressure he could. His vision was swirling; he needed to take a breath. Grant pushed against the pressure points of the corpse-thing’s wrist, trying to force him to release his uncanny grip, but the undead thing had no pressure points.
A trail of blood spattering his face, Kane kept pulling at the undead man, digging his heels into the moist earth of the yard as he tried to get him away from his friend. Some sixth sense—that legendary point man instinct of Kane’s—kicked in and the ex-Mag glanced over his shoulder. Kane’s steely gray eyes narrowed as he spied movement. At the edge of the overgrown garden, where a low fence of rotted wooden slats could just barely be seen amid the greenery, another walking corpse came trundling toward them. Perhaps she had been called here by her undead colleague or perhaps she had simply heard the sounds of the frantic brawl in the yard. Whatever, the thing lumbered toward the Cerberus warriors even as they struggled with the first corpse-thing.
The second corpse-thing appeared to be a tall woman, gangly in death even if perhaps she had not been in life. Her lifeless eye sockets were fixed on the struggling figures by the house, and she groaned in grim determination as she reached for Kane’s head.
Brigid appeared in the doorway at that moment, alerted by the noise of the scuffle. She held the metal bar she had freed from the truck, and she rushed into the yard, swinging it at the corpse-thing like a baseball batter. At the same time, the undead woman grabbed Kane’s face from behind, pulling him with such force that his back arched as he struggled against her. The metal pole slammed into the corpse woman’s chest, breaking multiple ribs and knocking her back, forcing her to let go of Kane’s face with a tangle of torn hair in her hands. The corpse woman hissed, struggling to retain her balance as she tottered back from the blow.
Brigid swung again, smacking the undead woman across the face with the end of the metal stick, keeping her distance as she slashed her again.
Kneeling by the back door, Grant gave one final, desperate shove against the wrist of the undead foe who was strangling him, and he heard a loud crack. The intense pressure of that grip suddenly eased, and Grant found himself still holding the corpse-thing’s wrist as he took a desperate breath. The left wrist bone had snapped, breaking apart. With no flesh to hold it in place, the hand had just broken away.
Still behind the undead man, Kane yanked again and found himself toppling backward with the corpse as its grip on his partner finally failed. They rolled in the dirt, the weight of the undead man pressing down on Kane’s chest.
Kane grunted as he slammed across the hard soil, his fists jabbing at the corpse-thing atop him, trying to shove him away.
Then Grant was standing, and he grasped the undead man by his remaining hand, pulling him up to his feet. Kane pushed himself off the ground and assisted Grant. The two of them grabbed an arm each and propelled the corpse-thing across the yard. The undead figure sailed eight feet in the air before hurtling into the deep grass, limbs in disarray. As he landed, chunks of diseased flesh broke away, and the two ex-Magistrates watched in disgust as his head snapped off and rolled across the ground, still hissing out a weird, angry screech long after it had been disconnected from the neck.
Behind the ex-Mags, Brigid was finishing off their other undead opponent, slamming the corpse woman repeatedly with the metal staff. Each vicious blow knocked a chunk from the undead thing’s decrepit body, and after a while it had become more a battle of savage erosion than actual combat, until there was no longer enough of the undead woman to fight back. Brigid removed her glasses and wiped the crud from their lenses.
“Let’s find this sacrifice and get out of sight,” Kane advised as he scanned the area around the house, his eyes flicking past the two corpses that lay unmoving in the dirt. “Won’t do to be caught out here again until we’re prepped for the endgame.”
Standing beside Kane, Grant was hacking, trying to clear his throat. It felt scarred, and he spit into the grass before turning back to the building. “Didn’t realize how localized Hurbon’s black magic shit was,” he snarled. “Guess once we’re out of the house we become targets again, huh?”
Brigid leaned down at the rain gutter that ran beside the back door. Beside the drainage outlet, a small grate covered an airbrick, several of its clay grill struts missing. She cupped her hands and waited. It took two minutes, but finally a mouse poked its nose out and came to her as she held out a morsel of rotten zombie flesh. She waited until it stepped close enough that she could grab it.
They had their sacrifice.
“ONCE THE ku-bha-sah is charged,” Hurbon explained after he had sacrificed the mouse and drained its blood in a pattern across the floor, “it will work in a manner that can help you.”
“‘You’?” Kane repeated, standing close to the back door entrance to the room. “You mean, me?”
“You’ve wielded the ku-bha-sah before, Kane,” Hurbon said
with a nod. “Besides, you don’t expect a crippled old bastard like me to do battle with my mistress’s army of the dead, do you?”
“And what are you going to be doing while I kick me some zombie butt?” Kane asked, glancing nervously over his shoulder to make sure nothing else was moving out there in the yard.
Hurbon reached into his leather satchel again and removed a spindle of black ribbon, placing it in his lap beside the doll that represented Ezili Coeur Noir. The doll was currently wrapped in white cord. “I’m going to hold her for you,” he said as he began loosening the white ribbon.
Then Papa Hurbon unwound the ribbon that had been coiled around the cloth fetish of Ezili Coeur Noir. Though white, the outer layer looked suddenly dirty when the hidden turns of the ribbon began to show, for the doll had been handled many times since the voodoo priest had first cast his binding weeks before.
Kane watched, feeling uneasy as he saw the doll for the first time in two months. It was a remarkably ugly thing, made more so by its subtextual association with a child’s toy in Kane’s mind. Its body was a dark color like charred wood, and twin eyes had been sewn into its face in a cotton of bright, putrescent yellow sealed with wax to make them shine. Kane had seen the doll months before, when he had visited Hurbon’s shack-cum-temple for the second time. Back then, Hurbon had been crafting the thing, shaping it for his purpose of repelling Ezili Coeur Noir. Even then, Kane had recognized the thing as Lilitu; the simplicity of its design somehow made the connection more obvious than the physical presence of her decaying body.
“Once this comes off,” Hurbon told his little audience of four in the Louisiana kitchen, “we can’t turn back. You folks are sure now?”
Kane nodded. “Quit showboating and let’s get this thing done.”
Hurbon nodded, pulling back the final fold of white ribbon. “May take a few minutes, depending on how close she is,” he explained, “but she’ll be able to see the house if she comes looking now.”
