a terrible beauty

by Unknown Author

  “Is there a password?” Paul Narcisse asked Kris.

  He nodded. “ ‘We meet at the crossroads.’ ”

  “Right,” Paul Narcisse said. “Let’s split up. Caz, you go with Detective Pezzini. I’ll go in with the brothers. You and I had best keep our faces hidden as much as possible, because we’re the most likely to be recognized by those guarding the doors. Remember. ‘We meet at the crossroads.’ ”

  “All right,” Sara said.

  “Let’s do it,” Alek said. Quickly, he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. “For luck,” he said.

  She smiled at him, her pulses already hammering wildly, the voices singing in her brain. She put her hand on the back of his head and twined her fingers in his long, thick hair.

  “We'll need more luck than that,” she said, and pulled his mouth back down to hers.

  Their mouths met and opened and Sara kissed him hard, as if it might be the last kiss in her life. She was breathing heavily as she broke away and so was Alek. The voices laughed at her, thinking she was foolish. She knew what they thought and she didn’t care. For a moment she put the palm of her hand against his cheek and he caught it and bought it to his lips, then they followed the others out of the van.

  Alek and Kris and Paul Narcisse sauntered down the street. Alek, who wore a black duster that reached down to his ankles, had both his and Kris’s Jackhammers, as well as a selection of extra ammo cassettes, secreted in the voluminous folds of his great coat. Sara and Father

  Baltazar waited until they’d crossed over the hounfort’s side, then exchanged glances and followed. As expected, they were challenged at the door. Sara gave the ritual password. Father Baltazar kept his face averted and in shadow as much as he could.

  Security was'about as lax as they could hope for. The two guards waved them through almost disinterestedly. They were wearing ceremonial outfits that consisted of long flowing robes and pointy red caps with cheek flaps on either side that hung down to their shoulders. Despite the caps Sara could see crosses tattooed on their cheeks and the back of their hands. They were members of Guillaume Sam’s private gang, The Saturday Night Specials, the bangers who were the foot soldiers for his various illegal enterprises.

  * The Gervelis Brothers and Paul Narcisse were waiting for them in the anteroom where the initiates donned their ceremonial robes. Alek was having a difficult time finding one large enough to fit over his tall frame, and that served as an excuse for them to mill about until they were all reunited.

  Once properly enrobed they left the anteroom under the not-so-watchful gaze of another pair of bored Specials and followed other recent arrivals into the ground floor of what had obviously been a warehouse of some sort. Fifty or sixty zobops had already assembled.

  The building had been gutted some time in the past, leaving a huge open space that encompassed nearly all of the structure’s first floor. Clearly, Guillaume Sam didn’t care about the place’s aesthetics. It was post-industrial-depressing: bare concrete floor with piles of trash heaped randomly around the edge of a great open space supported by bare steel beams and columns badly in need of paint. The area was lit poorly by naked bulbs strung on wire. Some of the bulbs dangled from the ceilings, others from wires twisted around the pillar-like supports running from floor to ceiling. The light cast by the bulbs was fitful and distorting, throwing odd monstrous shadows that seemed to jhmp and jerk like inhuman marionettes. It was, Sara thought, vaguely unsettling even when nothing much was happening. She couldn’t imagine what it would look like during the chaotic dancing of a vodoun ceremony.

  The peristyle had been reduced to a poteau-mitan set in the usual circular concrete support whose surface doubled as an altar. The great pole was the only bit of color in the hounforts concrete and steel environment.

  Sara and the others kept to the margins of the crowd, watching as a higher-level initiate drew the ceremonial veve around the dancing pole. A couple of small chambers serving as sanctuaries, caille mysteres, as Sara remembered they were called, were clustered behind the pole along one of the warehouse’s interior walls. They were the size and general shape of office cubicles, roofed with thin, sagging, black plastic sheets. She could see flickers of movement in the chambers, but the sanctuary wasn’t well lit and she couldn’t quite make out what was happening inside the tiny rooms.

  “What do we do now?” Alek whispered.

  “Wait,” Paul Narcisse said, “for the ceremony to start. Once the dancing and drumming begins we should start to work our way around the fringes of the crowd to the sanctuary. What we’re looking for will likely be found before the altar in one of them.”

  They didn’t have long to wait. The houngan finished creating the veve on the bare concrete floor and disappeared into one of the caille mysteres behind the dancing pole. After a moment the lights dimmed even lower and the chamber took on a murky, almost underwater-like darkness. Sara became abruptly aware of the concrete and steel smell of the place, underlain with an unpleasant musk of sweat and spoiled food. It was unpleasant, but so then was the hounfort’s overall environment.

  The drummers ca'me out of the caille mysteres when Sara wasn’t watching. One moment the chamber was empty, the next it was reverberating like a concrete and steel amphitheater to the pounding of the voudon drums. The houngan led a line of dancers out of one of the sanctuaries and they began to make their way around the poteau-mitan, much like the dancers that Sara had seen at the ceremony in the Cypress Hills National Cemeteiy.

  The drumbeats echoed in Sara’s ears. There was, she realized, a qualitative difference between this ceremony and the previous one she’d witnessed. Everything associated with this ceremony was unpleasant. The surroundings were depressingly trashy. They smelled bad and looked even worse. Even the drumming, which had been thrilling and invigorating at the outdoor ceremony, was reverberating painfully in her skull. The voices complained of it to themselves. All and all it was a disagreeable experience promising even more disagreeable results. She could well imagine that evil would result from what was happening here tonight. She felt the Witchblade tingle at the edge of her consciousness.

  The bokor leading the dance suddenly jerked about, flailing his arms oddly. It was clear that he had been mounted by a loa. He disappeared into the caille mysteres and came out with the cane and hobbled walk of Papa Legba. He cried out in langage as the dancers continued to whirl around him., There was no immediate response, but the drumbeats became so loud, so wildly arrhythmic that Sara’s head began to ache.

  The pounding force of the drums drove her to her knees. She wasn’t the only one so affected. All around the room people #ere going down, a total of half a dozen or more. Some were rolling on the floor and moaning as if in the grip of brain's'eizures. The affect on her was less dramatic, just a weakening of her knees and a sudden inability of her legs to support her weight. When she went down, Alek bent over her, a concerned look on his face.

  “Sara, you okay?”

  She found that she couldn’t speak, but she nodded and leaned on the arm he offered. She used it to pull herself up to her feet. When she looked back toward the poteau-■mitan she saw Baron Samedi standing before it.

  He was an awesome figure in top hat and coat, bigger than Alek, bigger than anyone present. He had a gigantic cigar in his mouth and was wearing a pair of sunglasses which was missing one of the lenses. His exposed eye shone like the eye of one possessed, which, of course, he was.

  “Rum!” he roared in the voice of an angry bull. “Rum and food!"

  He was as imperious as a king. When one of the female initiates offered a full bottle of white clairin rum, a raw, powerful drink potent enough to intoxicate a god, he pulled the cork with his teeth, spat it out, and then downed half the liquor in a single gulp. Another initiate approached him with a bowl of chicken and rice. He shoveled the food into his mouth while juggling bowl and bottle both, alternately gulping down mouthfuls of food and rum. He finished both in seconds, and threw the containers down
on the floor where they smashed into dozens of sharp shards. He strode through the dancers, rubbing his crotch suggestively as he passed attractive female initiates.

  The chamber’s atmosphere was charged with a sudden sexual heat that Sara realized was flowing directly from Samedi. She looked at Alek, fighting the desire to throw herself upon him and rip away his clothes. He looked at her uncertainly, seemingly not as susceptible to the psychic suggestions floating in the air as she was.

  Baron Samedi roared out an order in langage. The words struck Sara’s ears like bullets. She could almost understand them. She felt she would understand if the voices weren’t badgering her, if Alek, standing so close, wasn’t such a smouldering pillar of masculine sexuality.

  Torn by conflicting sensations and needs, she clung to his arm like a drowning person would cling to a buoy. She couldn’t conceive of what might have happened next if two teams of four zobops each hadn’t brought two wooden crates out of the caille mysteres, creating a new focus of attention. They were rough-hewn, long and narrow, and Sara suddenly realized what kind of boxes they were.

  They were coffins. The men carrying them, two in the front, two in the back, set them down carefully against the circular cement altar around the poteau-mitan so that they leaned nearly upright. They were uncovered. Sara could see that they contained the bodies of Roger and Jerry Stem.

  The Stems looked no worse than if they’d been sleeping. Their faces were relaxed, their arms hung naturally and loosely at their sides. They didn’t look at all like day-old corpses—at least, no more than the Stems did when they were alive.

  At her side, Sara, heard a painful intake of breath as Alek recognized them. He made half a move toward them, checking it when he realized that Sara still leaned against him with most of her weight. She straightened, feeling strength returning to her legs, but was loath to release Alek. There was nothing, she thought, that he could accomplish by going to the Stems’ side.

  Kris Gervelis moaned as he, too, realized who lay in the coffins. Probably until that very instant he’d believed that the boys were okay, that, sure, they may have gotten themselves into a bit of difficulty like they so often did, but it was nothing that he or Alek couldn’t fix. It was nothing irreparable ... except, this time it was.

  Baron Samedi strode up to the coffins. A collective gasp went through the onlookers as he planted himself before the Stems, and began to speak again in langage.

  “We must stop him,” Paul Narcisse said in a low, urgent voice. “It’s the ceremony for zombification. We must stop him before it goes too far.”

  But Paul Narcisse’s warning came too late.

  Baron Samedi shot his hands out. He placed one large palm over the heart of each corpse, and the loa cried out an impassioned order in langage that Sara felt she understood all too well. He was commanding them to rise, to open their eyes and walk from their coffins, and as they all watched, too frozen by horror to move, the brothers’ eyes popped open.

  Alek moaned at Sara’s side. Even from where they stood they could see the awful emptiness in the twins’ eyes, the utter lack of intelligence and will. But that didn’t stop the walking corpses from stepping from their coffins.

  Alek turned his head away from the awful sight. Sara gripped the sleeves of his doak, holding him now as he’d just held her. Only the strength she willed him from the sheer force of her personality kept him on his feet.

  Then Kris, standing between them and the two priests screamed like a dying animal and all hell broke loose in the hounfort.

  Ignoring Paul Narcisse’s earlier advice, he thumbed his Jackhammer, which Alek tad passed to him in the cloakroom, to full automatic and emptied the ammunition cassette into the ceiling.

  His memory of the article in Soldier of Fortune had been accurate. It took two and a third seconds.

  It made a sound like a series of nearly simultaneous bomb blasts, partially overlapping, each blending into a roar that seemed to last for a hell of a lot longer than two and a third seconds. The stench of gunpowder smothered the air. Screams of sudden panic came from the initiates both watching and participating in the ceremony as fragments of the ceiling rained down like cement hail, knocking some initiates off their feet while dust swirls kicked up by the blasts blinded others.

  You couldn’t have a more thorough panic, Sara thought, if God Himself had stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament and in a voice compounded of booming thunder and blazing lightning condemned everyone in the room to eternal damnation in the lowest, foulest pits of hell.

  “I’ve got to reach them,” Father Baltazar shouted, reaching into the pocket of the windbreaker that he still wore under his initiate’s robes.

  Baron Samedi whirled about to face the source of the confusion. His gaze met Sara’s and for the first time a bolt of recognition ran through her. The body the loa inhabited was Guillaume Sam’s. Of course. She should have recognized him earlier, but somehow he seemed larger, more regal, and even more powerful then Sam did in normal life. ,

  The loa pointed a finger at them and purred in a low, laughing voice, “Kill,them. Kill them all.”

  Roger and Jerry St&n—or rather, the soulless animated corpses that they had become—took slow, shuffling steps forward. They were an awful parody of humanity. Their faces were stiff, devoid of emotion, their eyes were blank, devoid of will. As they made their way through the panicked crowd, their movements became more fluid, surer, and stronger, though they never totally lost their inhuman stiffness.

  * Father Baltazar was the first to reach them—or, they him. His face was heavy with anguish, as was his voice.

  “What have they done to you, my sons?” he asked, overcome by the emotion of.the moment.

  Of course, neither could reply either vocally or emotionally. Impassively, one of them reached out his arms— at this point, Sara still had no due as to which Stem was which—and tried to grab Father Baltazar by the throat. The zombie’s movements were still inhumanly slow and the priest dodged his clumsy embrace with ease.

  But in that same instant the other zombie lifted his fist and swung it downward, stiff-armed. It was an awkward blow, but Father Baltazar didn’t see it coming and it caught him right where his neck and shoulder met, driving him to his knees.

  He grunted in pain. Paul Narcisse, lips moving in a silent prayer, drew an automatic from a shoulder holster and pumped three shots into the Stem who towered over Father Baltazar, looking down at him, devoid of pity or any other human emotion.

  The zombie didn’t even grunt or stagger. The shots punched through him with no visible effect. He reached out again and this time the priest couldn’t evade his grasp. The zombie fastened his hands around the Father Baltazar’s throat and began to squeeze.

  By this time several of the zobops who had kept, or regained, their heads, had drawn their own guns and began to return fire. Bullets zinged about the warehouse like angry bees. Baron Samedi put his hands on his hips and laughed insanely.

  “Find cover!” Sara shouted, and then ignored her own order.

  . She could see that Father Baltazar was really in trouble. The priest had dropped the little golden box he’d taken out of his windbreaker and gripped the zombie’s thin arms with his own powerful hands, but wasn’t able to break the creature’s stranglehold. His face was turning red, his eyes were starting to bulge from their sockets.

  Sara ran to his side and hurled herself against the other zombie who was also maneuvering to get his hands around the priest’s throat. In an awful flash of memory, the movements of the dead Stems reminded her of the time they’d both slipped their arms around her waist in Club Carrefour. This time, however, their faces weren’t plastered with goofy smiles and their intentions were much more deadly.

  She stmck the Stem in his side with her shoulder at full running speed. It was like ramming a sack of cement, but the zombie couldn’t absorb all her inertia and he crashed down on the concrete floor, still reaching out with his hands and opening and clenching them in
strangling gestures. His legs also moved aimlessly as if he were still upright and walking.

  The creatures, Sara realized, were apparently as slow of mind as they were of body. She leapt to her feet and turned to the bne who was slowly strangling the priest. Father Baltazar had given up his futile efforts to break the zombie’s hold and'was scrabbling around on the floor trying to pick up the small golden box that he’d dropped. He couldn’t see where it was, so he wasn’t even coming close to retrieving it.

  Sara bent down swiftly and picked it up. It took a moment for the word to come out of the mist of her almost-forgotten Sunday School education, but finally she recognized that it was a pix, the small container in •which sanctified communion wafers were kept.

  She quickly opened it and saw that it contained a small stack of the white circular wafers. She remembered when receiving communion as a child she’d take them on her tongue and they’d stick to the top of her mouth and tastelessly melt away.

  What the hell? she thought. She looked at them blankly for a moment, then figured, Well, Father Baltazar must know what he’s doing. Obviously, he’d brought them along for one reason.

  She took a wafer from the container. The voices scolded her and for a moment she felt guilty as the realization hit that perhaps she shouldn’t be handling a sanctified object with her unblessed hands.

  No time to worry about finer theological points, she told herself, and stuffed the communion wafer in the zombie’s mouth.

  It was easier than she’d thought it would be. The thing could only focus on one problem at a time, and strangling Father Baltazar occupied what little'was left of his mind. He was also slack-jawed, with his mouth hanging open idiotically, so Sara was able to pop the wafer right in.

  Automatically, his mouth closed on the morsel of food and he chewed like a cow working on its cud. He swallowed and, as if he were a living thing hit in the forehead with a killing hammer Mow, immediately went down.