Crossfire

by Dale Lucas

  The scared fellow on the ground threw up his hands. "I threw down my guns, mister!" he shouted. "Look! I got nothing! Wasn't even me shot you! Those fellas—"

  "Who was he?" the Cemetery Man barked. "The man in charge? The man who gave you all this iron and told you Harlem needed gunslingers instead of cops on the streets?"

  "Mister Debbs, sir!" the guy crowed. "It was Mister Jebediah Debbs, sir! He said this is what the neighborhood needed…. said the cops couldn't be trusted… said the rackets ran everything!"

  Dolph smiled. Yeah. It'd be nice if they did run everything.

  And then it occurred to him: he was still holding Irving's gun, a single live round in the chamber.

  The Cemetery Man was busy questioning the guy in the street, his back to Dolph.

  This was Dolph's chance.

  "Boss," Irving said, head still covered with his hands, afraid to look up.

  Dolph shushed him.

  Then he took aim over the lip of the pharmacy window.

  "You're done with this, aren't you?" the Cemetery Man asked the scared fellow under his boot.

  "Yessir," he said, nodding like a loon. "Yessir! All done!"

  The Cemetery Man removed his boot. "Drag yourself to Harlem Hospital. That isn't a fatal wound."

  The scared fellow tried to shuffle himself upright, stumbled, then managed to find his feet. He went limping away.

  Dolph pulled back the hammer. He had the Cemetery Man in his sights, dead center, right on that broad, black coat of his.

  "That goes for every one of you still breathing out here!" the spook roared. "The boys in blue are the law in Harlem! And only crooks and thugs keep order with fear, at the point of a gun!"

  One of the shifting bodies in the street spat. "Hah! What about you, Hoodoo Man?"

  Pull the trigger, Dolph told himself. Why don't you pull the trigger?

  The Hoodoo Man wheeled on the wounded vigilante, leveling his gun again. He didn't have his back to Dolph anymore—although Dolph didn't think that the spook saw him. He was too busy glaring down at the smart mouthed bastard that just challenged him.

  "Crooks and cops answer to me," the Hoodoo Man snarled. "Now, where's Debbs?"

  Dolph thought he saw fire in his black eyes beneath the brim of that top hat and all those crazy braids.

  Pull the trigger, you lummox!

  "He's over there," the mouthy jig said, not so mouthy any more. "Hidin' under them dead men! I see him plain, the fat bastard!"

  Dolph watched as the Cemetery Man strode over to a pile of dead men. He kicked two bodies aside and there lay fat, cowering Jebediah Debbs, stained red and cowering in the rain.

  "I'll not have any spawn of Satan laying hands on me!" Debbs boomed, terrified but still putting on a show.

  "Shut up," the Cemetery Man said. "You're coming with me." With that, he yanked Debbs up off his feet. Dolph's jaw dropped when the scarf around the vigilante's neck slithered off like a serpent and wrapped around Debbs, binding him fast. The Cemetery Man hoisted the fat man with one hand.

  That's when the distant sirens stopped being distant. Their whine split the night from either direction. Dolph heard the squeal of brakes. Headlights cut cross paths from either end of the block and the Cemetery Man was caught between them.

  The Cemetery Man saw Dolph.

  Dolph looked into the Cemetery Man's eyes.

  I'm not pulling the trigger, Dolph suddenly realized, because that son of a bitch already took a fusillade of lead. One shot from me won't do shit.

  Not tonight anyway.

  Dolph dropped his gun and threw up his hands.

  "Drop the heater!" one of the newly-arrived cops shouted.

  The Cemetery Man seemed to give Dolph a sneer—a promise that they'd finish their business later—then, in a series of snake-fast moves, he holstered his remaining pistol, heaved Jebediah Debbs over his shoulder, got a running start, and leapt right up onto a second floor brownstone ledge from the street.

  "Hey!" one of the cops yelled.

  The Cemetery Man crawled up the façade of the brownstone, carrying Debbs along with him. He made the roof in ten seconds, heaved himself up and over the coping, then disappeared into the rainy night.

  Irving and Benji were up now. They both looked to Dolph.

  "Come on, boys," Dolph said. "Out the back."

  They went.

  23

  Fralene, Beau and the Reverend Brown stood vigil at Uncle Barnabus's bedside. He lay peacefully, his breathing slow and steady but shallow. Since the apparent expulsion of the thing that possessed him, he hadn't moved or shown any sign of life or consciousness. Fralene had tried to call Dr. Corveaux, but Dub wasn't answering his phone. He'd promised to get her answers. She hoped to God that nothing had happened to him. If he'd put himself in a tight spot to try and figure out what was wrong with her uncle and her uncle ended up a comatose shell anyway… she wasn't sure she could bear both losses.

  Worse, ever since the demon had departed his body, it seemed to have taken up residence in the house—disembodied, but still making noise. As she and Beau and the Reverend Brown attended to her grandfather— removing all the accouterments and artifacts of the exorcism, giving him a quick bathing with a warm cloth, changing him into a set of clean pajamas—strange forces continued to assail the house around them. Fralene felt a cold hand on her shoulder when she ran downstairs to dispose of the frayed and charred binding ropes. Reverend Brown told her when she returned that he'd felt something similar—cold hands, breath on the nape of his neck, the ghost of a voice in his ear. While the three of them tried to carry on with getting her uncle clean and comfortable, a caddy containing her uncle's cuff-links, clean handkerchiefs and pocket change had flown off the bureau, catapulted by some unseen force.

  And then, after almost an hour of oppressive silence, broken only by the beating rain on the roof and some distant, indistinct sounds like the backfiring of a bevy of automobiles, there was the familiar message.

  Fralene was alone with her uncle, the Reverend Brown and Beau having both gone downstairs to make some coffee, eggs and toast. As she sat there in a chair beside his immobile, unresponsive body, the bathroom door suddenly slammed shut behind her. It was so sudden, so loud, that it shot her right up out of her chair. She was on her feet, spinning toward the sound in an instant.

  Behind the door, she heard the tub faucets turn. Water thumped into the tub.

  "Oh God," she muttered. "Not again."

  She thought that, perhaps, she should wait for the Reverend Brown to return. But after a few minutes of standing there, staring at the closed door and listening to water rumble into the claw foot tub, Fralene decided she couldn't stand it any longer.

  So she marched to the door and threw it open.

  She stared into a roiling mist now thick in the little washroom because only the hot water had been turned on.

  Just like before, there was a message scrawled, as if by fingertip, on the surface of the steamed-over mirror.

  Still here, it said.

  Fralene shut off the water, fled the room, and moved her chair from the left side of her uncle's bed—where her back was to the washroom door—to the far right side. That's where she'd been sitting now for fifteen minutes, staring straight at the washroom door, awaiting another manifestation.

  None came.

  Would they have to exorcise the whole house now?

  Beau and the Reverend Brown arrived, carrying steaming cups of coffee and a platter of eggs and toast. When they saw Fralene's straight-backed, nervous posture they instantly knew something was wrong.

  "What is it?" Beau asked.

  She took one of the coffee cups and pointed toward the washroom. "Go see," she said.

  Beau, still carrying the plate of toast and eggs, ducked into the washroom and stared at the steamed-over mirror. He turned back to Fralene. There was a look of terrible fear on his young face.

  "No way," he said.

  "You see the message," she said. "I
t's still here!"

  One of the bedroom windows suddenly rattled, as if beaten by a fist. Fralene cried out and dropped her coffee cup. The Reverend Brown managed to hold onto his. Uncle Barnabus lay on the bed, breathing, but as good as dead.

  The rapping at the window came again.

  Fralene hurried to the Reverend Brown's side and they both peered through the window out into the dark, rainy night. Rainwater poured down the pane in sheets, but they could clearly see a bulky black shadow outside.

  The shadow knocked again.

  It was the Cemetery Man.

  Fralene lunged for the window and threw up the sash. The Cemetery Man crouched on the porch roof outside. The rain beat down on him and rolled off in thick rivulets, but he didn't seem to care. He made no move to come in through the window.

  "How is he?" he asked, nodding toward Uncle Barnabus.

  Fralene shook her head. "He hasn't opened his eyes… hasn't stirred once."

  "Does there seem to be a problem?" he asked.

  "No," the Reverend Brown answered. "He just lays there. Responds to nothing. The body keeps on operating but it's like… well, it's like no one's home."

  "Come in," Fralene said. "You have to see something."

  The Cemetery Man hesitated. "I'll make a mess," he said.

  "I'll clean it up," Fralene insisted. "Just hurry, before it's gone."

  Moments later, the Cemetery Man was leaving puddles on her uncle's bedroom floor, tracking cold wet footprints across the boards and the rug as Fralene led him into the washroom. The steam was long-dissipated, but the message on the mirror was still clear. The Cemetery Man studied it, turned to study the comatose reverend, then studied the message again.

  "Is it the demon?" Fralene asked. "Is it really still here?"

  "No," the Cemetery Man said. "Not the demon."

  XX

  Doc Voodoo had suspicions as to just what that message on the washroom mirror suggested, but he didn't want to share them with Fralene. He knew he had to get back to his sanctum, to have a quick palaver with Erzulie and Legba and Ogou, and to take action as quickly as he could.

  After disposing of the dead gunman in the downstairs hall and recovering the trussed-up Jebediah Debbs from the rooftop where he'd been left, Doc hurried back to his private sanctum. He deposited Debbs on the earth floor, the fat man's arms, hands and eyes bound by the Serpent d'Ogou.

  "Where am I?" Debbs boomed. "I demand to know, you demon from—"

  Doc snapped his fingers. His serpentine scarf tightened its coils and added gag to its list of duties. Debbs spoke only in vowels after that.

  Finally, Doc summoned Erzulie and Legba so that he could speak to the two of them along with Ogou. Outside, the rain still didn't let up.

  He offered his own theory on the strange messages in the steamed up mirror, as well as the poltergeist activity.

  "Is it true?" he demanded. "It's the only explanation I can think of."

  Sounds about right, Legba answered. If some low-end Ghede in Kalfou's employ took up residence in the reverend's body for a time, he might have shunted the reverend's soul right out of its body into the borderlands beyond the Guinee Door.

  On the other side of the Guinee Door lay the borderlands to the world of the dead.

  And if that is the case, Erzulie added, then the reverend's attempts at communication from beyond that door could look at awful lot like a haunting to someone who didn't know any better. He'd be in an Otherworld that bore some resemblance to his everyday plane, but where time and space were all topsy-turvy. He'd be out of phase with the people and events around him. Given that, he could've resorted to trying to communicate by knocking down random objects and writing messages on steamy mirrors.

  "Is there any way to draw him back?" Doc asked,

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence in the center of his mind.

  Short of passing through the door yourself and drawing him out? Legba asked. No. No way that I know.

  "Then I'm going through the Guinee Door," Doc said, "and draw him out myself."

  No, Ogou said.

  I wouldn't recommend it, Erzulie added.

  We can't protect you there, boy, Legba argued. If you go through horsed, then we're trespassing on some other lwa's turf. We're breaking rules we swore not to break in the most ancient of days.

  "This is non-negotiable," Doc assured them. "I can't leave the man over there indefinitely."

  It's not indefinite, Legba said. All the dead pass through there on their way to the Far Side, like a giant train station.

  "The reverend's not dead," Doc countered. "He was forced out of his body by a trespasser."

  But he can't dwell in the borderlands forever, Legba answered. There's only two ways out: he either finds his own way back to his body and wakes, or he gets drawn by the Realms of the Dead and passes on, beyond the veil, to the Far Side. No spirit can dwell in the borderlands indefinitely.

  "So how long might it take to draw him back to his body?"

  Years, Erzulie said. And by that time, his body itself could have wasted away and died—in which case his spirit would have nowhere to return to—or his spirit and consciousness could have been driven mad by their time beyond the doorway, so he'd be back in his own body, but he'd be crazy as a loon for the rest of his life.

  "We're back to non-negotiable."

  You go after him, Ogou said, and you're inviting a war on the higher plane. And what if the reverend's not just lost on the other side? What if Kalfou's actually holding him?

  Legba hummed thoughtfully. Hard to pry an offering out of a lwa's greedy fingers.

  "I take it you speak from experience," Doc cut in. "What about a trade? Debbs there for the reverend?"

  Debbs made an inquisitive sound. Doc ignored him.

  It could work, Erzulie said. In currency terms, flesh is flesh.

  I still don't like it, Ogou grumbled.

  "This is a good man—a man with plenty of years left in him! If Rae Gooden summoned that ghede from beyond the door, then Kalfou already broke that truce. You're setting things straight, not trespassing—"

  Kalfou won't see it that way, Erzulie assured him.

  Debbs was back to struggling against his bonds where he lay. He couldn't hear the voices of the lwa—those were only in Dub Corveaux's head. All he heard was the Cemetery Man, apparently talking to himself, and only having one side of a conversation at that.

  "Enough of this," Doc snarled. He hurried to his altar and went rooting among the litter of offerings and ritual implements. In moments, he found what he needed. Chalk in hand, he moved to the nearest outer wall of the peristyle—brick, solid, two feet thick. He drew a large, upright rectangle on the brick, taller than himself, and finished it with a small, chalky circle set about halfway up its length, on the far left.

  "There," he said, throwing down the chalk. "There's my door. One of you better open it."

  He knocked three times on the brick, three more, then three more. After the ninth knock, he reached down and touched the small circle. It had become a dry, chalky, three-dimensional doorknob. His peristyle was already charged and his rituals completed at the night's opening: such simple magic—a door to the other side—was easily undertaken in such a charged space.

  But his magic could only create the door. He needed one of his patrons to unlock it, to allow him access, to shuttle him through.

  "Well?" he asked.

  This is a bad idea, Ogou snarled.

  Your power may not be as potent on the other side, Legba warned. Even if the three of us ride along.

  Doc Voodoo hove Jebediah Debbs onto one shoulder like a stack of fertilizer. Even with his super strength, the man was heavy.

  "Are you opening this door, or aren't you?" Doc demanded.

  There was a low, scuffling shift in the wall of bricks. The door had suddenly leapt forth, three-dimensional, its attendant bricks standing out from their fellows on either side or above. It sounded like a stone tomb opening after centurie
s of lying in wait.

  Doc grasped the door knob and pulled. Slowly, heavily, the brick door opened, revealing a misty blue mirror image of the room behind him.

  Then, he felt his patrons settle upon him, like layers of clothing for an explorer stepping into some cold and polar regions. Ogou wasn't his only rider now; Erzulie and Legba had joined the party as well.

  "Lead me to him," Doc said. "The faster I find him, the faster we leave."

  I still say this is a bad idea, Ogou growled.

  But they all followed him when he stepped through to brave the other side.

  24

  Doc Voodoo studied his surroundings. He was in a simulacrum of his peristyle, although herein bright blue light flooded in through the high windows and there was a strange, low roaring sound in the air, like a steady wind in one's ears on a vast, empty prairie. It was his sanctum, yet it wasn't. Looking behind him, he could still see back through the door that he'd used to access this plane. His own peristyle was on the far side—dark, shadowy, lit only by candles. Here, it seemed bright enough to be daytime… except that the bright light pouring in through the windows was not precisely daylight. It was, rather, as if someone had cranked up the moon to five or ten times its normal brightness.

  He had only been here once before, and that was after being so wounded as Dr. Dub Corveaux that he was literally shuttled here, to Death's Door. He didn't care for it. He needed to find the reverend and get the hell out.

  At least Debbs was a lighter load on this side. The fat man bucked. Doc gave him a low-powered cuff to the ribs.

  Still with me? he asked his patrons. Although he commanded his mouth to move and his voice to come forth, he did not hear himself speak. Instead, his voice sounded in the middle of his brain like a poor radio signal, muffled and indistinct, so distant it was as if someone else spoke.

  Here, Erzulie said.

  Here, Legba said.

  Wish I wasn't, Ogou said.

  Doc was satisfied. He found the stairway, descended, and eventually emerged onto the street outside the Otherworld's doppelganger of his brownstone on 136th Street.