Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  More than she knew.

  I stepped down into the deeper darkness and set my face toward the heart of the night.

  Chapter Four

  It was one-ten in the a.m. when I turned the Merc off the road and started up the winding drive. The vinelike branches of a dozen weeping willow trees stroked the roof of my car like fleshless fingers; my tires swirled up a backwash of crushed pink mimosa blossoms made bloody by the glow of the taillights. I was bracing myself for—what?

  My accident victim from earlier this evening wanting to call Triple-A? Mr. Delacroix, returned from his fiery tryst with my pop-eyed vampire?

  I parked in front of the garage and walked across the vast, sloped lawn, expecting a troupe of reenactors from The Night Of The Living Dead. Instead I was treated to a diorama of Van Gough’s Starry Night: not a soul, living or shambling dead, in sight.

  I walked the boundaries of the “yard” twice, the motion sensors triggering the house “security” lights that, perversely, made me an easy target for hidden assailants while effectively destroying my night vision for the next fifteen minutes. And it took that long just to run primary and secondary checks of the immediate area.

  If you’re thinking that floodlights are a useless security feature for someone with infravision, let me tell you now that it doesn’t mean diddley-squat when your intruders have the thermal equivalent of ice water in their veins. Still, being outside with the lights on me wasn’t part of the original design concept.

  I cut corners on doing the full perimeter sweep: proof that I had been wise to cut my military career short. Though not as short as the men I’d helped court-martial back all those years ago. Funny how you can face down a real monster in the here-and-now, yet find yourself more haunted by the ghosts of old memories.

  I kicked an old pinecone into the woods and wondered whatever became of Birkmeister and his men. I had no real hope of finding out as their records had been sealed along with mine. One way or another, Uncle Samuel made us all disappear as a means of cleaning up the mess that had been made. I had gotten off easy.

  But was it because I was innocent? My JAG lawyer had certainly made that case.

  Or was it because my testimony had simplified matters for the military tribunals charged with laying the entire matter to rest?

  I felt a flash of nearly forgotten anger—more proof that not everything that is buried, stays buried. I shook my head and turned to survey the slope leading back up to the house. Screw Lieutenant Lenny and the rest of the squad. That was then; this was now. I decided that I wasn’t primed—mentally or practically—to do a wider sweep of the woods that bordered my property on two sides. And it just wasn’t practical to step off the banks and into the waters of Gris Bayou in the back.

  Still, there was plenty of lawn in-between. Not to mention pecan and oak and willow and mimosa and magnolia and dogwood trees—although they had lately begun to do battle with creeping vines of wisteria, clematis, trumpet, and honeysuckle. While I paid to have the grass cut regularly, the shrubbery had taken advantage of benign neglect. You could hide a whole marching band of corpses in my front yard—never mind the odd, ambulatory cadaver. Unkempt kaleidoscopic bursts of azaleas and lilacs and creeping phlox and fiery explosions of dwarf burning bush had mutated since Spring into unidentifiable, alien greenery that resembled kudzu on steroids. They had gone on to multiply like riots of bacterial blooms infecting a green petri dish. Some days I felt more like George of the Jungle than Milton the Monster.

  I looked back at the silhouette of my stone-and-brick two-story house that was more fortress than home. Three—Mama Samm had said “three stories.” Or tree to be precise. Did that mean she was less informed than she thought?

  Or was she counting the subterranean level—the one with the safe room and the gun vaults that didn’t show up on the official blueprints?

  Stepping up onto the porch, I felt an unaccustomed grittiness under my left foot. I unlocked the door, rekeyed the alarm pad, and switched on the porch light. A mound of gritty white powder had been scuffed over and onto the doormat. Picking up a pinch, I rubbed it between my fingers and touched it to my tongue: salt.

  Okay.

  I studied the rest of the porch more carefully. Maybe I saw a couple of small stains on the concrete that hadn’t been there previously. Or maybe not: Maybe it was residue from the accident guy who had dropped by earlier this evening. Hey, who studies their porch on a regular basis? I suppose someone, somewhere, is on intimate terms with their doorstep—but not because the ghost of his dead wife called him at the office to report an arrival of the departed.

  I sighed and pushed the door open. My life would have been simpler if I had just gone ahead and died in the crash that killed my wife and daughter. Or if I’d become truly undead after my transfusion in Bassarab’s barn. Being stuck somewhere between alive and undead made everything infinitely more complicated.

  “Honey, I’m home!” I locked the door behind me and rekeyed the alarms. “What happened to our company?” I walked through the dining room and the den, half-expecting to find a stiff, relaxed and ensconced in my easy chair and making small talk with my now-you-see-her-now-you-don’t wife.

  Ex-wife.

  Or, rather, deceased wife: ex-life.

  I went through the entire house, basement and bathrooms included: no dead bodies, no ectoplasmic ex.

  Olive Purdue didn’t hear a voice on the other end of my phone call because there was no voice. My wife was more than a year dead and the dead don’t come back and behave like refugees from a Thorne Smith story.

  Yeah, tell that to my absent paramour.

  Not that it would do any good. When Lupé stormed out of the house nearly two months before, she made it clear that I had to decide, once and for all, whether Jenny was just a psychic manifestation of the hemophagic virus mutating my brain cells—or the actual ghost of my dead wife. Either way, I was to resolve the situation so there would be no further ménage-a-haunts.

  If I couldn’t . . .

  I gazed at Lupé’s strong, dark features in a photo on the fireplace mantel. Her bronzed skin, dark eyes, and smoky black hair bespoke her Latin American ancestry more than her second-generation French Canadian heritage. Her features were strong and sensual in contrast to my dead wife’s delicate porcelain beauty. There were no pictures of me. Cameras had a difficult time capturing my actual image now that I was becoming . . . what? The jury was still out on that issue. And since the my photos prior to the crash included Jenny or Kirsten, I had put them away months before meeting the woman who best understood my twilight existence.

  If only she could understand my inability to let Jenny go in the more literal sense. If only I could. While I tended to agree with her theory that Jenny was only a manifestation of my inability to permanently “commit,” I had yet to figure out how to exercise the marital clause of “ ‘til death do us part.”

  Perhaps “exorcise” was more apt.

  Sighing, I walked into the den and booted up the computer. While I waited for it to churn through the latest infestation of Microsoft Windows, I scanned my bookshelves for material on Elizabeth Báthory and voodoo, telling myself that the dead don’t go AWOL from the local cemetery and ring doorbells at midnight.

  And, of course, there’s no such thing as vampires.

  * * *

  It took a little digging to run down “Marinette Bois-Chèche.”

  Vodoun or voodoo is not a set theology, per se. When African slaves were transported to the New World, they brought a range of belief systems as varied as the tribes and countries of their origins. As tribes were blended with other tribes, separated, then diluted by subsequent generations, these beliefs were mixed and muddled with the white man’s religions—particularly Catholicism—producing a general form and structure identifiable as voodoo but by no means definitive across time and geography.

  The supreme and most powerful voodoo “god” is Damballah-Wedo, whose symbol is the snake and is sometimes merged
with the image of Saint Patrick because of his reputed influence over all serpents. I skimmed over a chapter on the symbology of snakes in myth and religion and noted that Ayido-Wedo was Damballah’s “wife”—“the moon to his sun.” Their children or “companions” are the Loa who manifest in over two hundred variants or avatars and are divided and shared among fifteen or so different sects.

  Of course, the various source materials were mildly contradictory at best. And trying to quantify the Loa was nigh impossible. They weren’t really gods or godlings, angels or demons. And “spirits” was such a generic, all-purpose term as to be virtually useless. The Loa were, well, just the Loa.

  And, even then, they weren’t always who you thought they were since they manifested different “aspects.” As this happened rather frequently, each aspect or manifestation was identified through a variation on each one’s name. Erzulie—or Ezili or Maîtresse Erzulie—for example, was the idealized figure of womanhood, the Loa of love and beauty. And, like most women, she expressed herself through a wide range of identities. There was Erzulie-Séverine-Belle-Femme, Erzulie as a beautiful woman; Erzulie Taureau, the aspect of Erzulie as the bull; La Grande Erzulie, the aspect of Erzulie as an elderly, grief-stricken woman; La Sirène or La Sirènn, the sea or serpent aspect of Erzulie; and Tsilah Wédo, the aspect representing wealth and beauty.

  Like most characteristics of Vodoun there was a flip side. Erzulie could also manifest in facets of vengeance and ugliness. Some of these were Erzulie Mapiangueh, Erzulie Toho, Erzulie Zandor, and—most interestingly—Marinette Bois-Chèche. Unfortunately, there was little else chronicled beyond the names. Just a list of a few additional aspects—Erzulie Boum’ba, Erzulie Dantor, Erzulie Dos-bas, Erzulie Fréda, Erzulie Fréda Dahomin, Erzulie Gé Rouge and Erzulie Mapian.

  If this doesn’t make a compelling argument for the simplicities of monotheism, I don’t know what does—even the concept of a Three-in-One trinity seems terribly uncomplex by comparison.

  And the confusion didn’t end with these multiple personality disorders: there were sects or families of Loa who couldn’t seem to make up their minds as to who belonged to which clan. And then there was the little matter of form and intent as applied through invocation and ritual. Most voodoo was practiced in the Rada or “right hand” forms—healing, blessing, purification, praise and thanksgiving. Petro, on the other hand is for cursing your enemies, raising the dead, invoking evil spirits, and basically turning Loa’s bad boys loose to raise some Hell. The vast majority of Vodoun’s adherents practiced Rada rites and had nothing to do with the Petro perversions—Hollywood notwithstanding. But it was another example of how the same Loa could be invoked for both good and evil.

  The Gédé clan, for another example, was the Loa of the dead—but they were also potent healers and the protectors of children. Their colors were purple and black. Baron Samedi, the head of the Gédé family, was a powerful arbiter of justice between the living and the dead, and very popular for a cadaverlike spirit who hangs out in graveyards. But, then, he was a snappy dresser, wearing top hat and tails and, as everyone knows: “The clothes make the man.”

  Another clan, the Ogou, comprised the warrior Loa whose dominion was often symbolized by the sword, metalworking, fire, lightning, and the color red. Different “aspects” of the Ogou were said to manifest as Ogou Baba, a military general; Ogou Badagris, the phallic or fertility aspect; Ogou Bhathalah, the Loa of alchemy; Ogou Fer or Ferraille, Loa of the sword, iron and metals; Ogou Shango, the Loa of lightning; and Ogou Tonnerre—or Baron Tonnerre, the aspect of thunder.

  I sat back in my chair and contemplated Mama Samm’s cryptic warnings. She had said the Ogou cast a long shadow here. Meaning . . . what?

  It took nearly another hour of digging to find a significant reference to Marinette Bois-Chèche, also listed as Marinette Bras-Chêche, Marinette Congo, and Marinette Pied-Chêche. There wasn’t a whole lot of material on her—a single sentence, in fact, was all I could turn up.

  “Powerful and violent principal female Loa of the Petro rite.”

  That didn’t sound good as the Petro spirits were already considered to be “highly vengeful, bitter, and most dangerous” of all of the vodoun Loa.

  So whom was Mama Samm trying to warn me against?

  The Witch of Cachtice?

  Elizabeth Báthory?

  And what would happen when she finally “put her red dress on"?

  * * *

  Normally—a word that was becoming more and more infrequent in my vocabulary—I went to bed around sunrise and slept through the day. Tonight I decided to retire early. I wanted to get a running start on the Delacroix matter and I was just plain exhausted.

  Jenny “reappeared” as I put the finishing touches on my makeshift first aid. The electrical burns had settled into a dull ache but my leg still throbbed as if the wound from the vampire’s claws had occurred just minutes before. I had smeared antibiotic ointment into the red furrows and was taping an old but clean pillowcase around my calf when the medicine cabinet opened in the bathroom and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide floated out and down to the edge of the sink next to the toilet.

  “Did you clean the wounds thoroughly?” she asked.

  I let it bleed and then rinsed with alcohol.

  “I’m not a mind-reader, darling; you have to answer out loud.”

  “Not if you’re a figment of my imagination.” I wrapped a few more strands of tape to add pressure as well as anchor the bandage. “Where have you been?”

  “I don’t know. One minute I was looking out the window at the dead person on the front porch. Then I was someplace far away and it seemed to take me a long time to get back.”

  “You’re telling me you had some kind of blackout?”

  The bottle drifted back up to a shelf in the open cabinet. “Why do you ask? If I am a figment of your virus-ravaged imagination then you already know.”

  “Yeah? Humor me.”

  The mirrored door swung shut and I fancied I could see her dim silhouette in its silvered depths. “Why, hunkered down in the stygian pit of your subconscious, of course,” she said sarcastically, “awaiting my turn to torment you afresh—just like the rest of the fairytale creatures that have haunted your life this past year.”

  “The real Jen never used words like ‘stygian’.”

  “The afterlife has a way of expanding one’s vocabulary. But you’ve got bigger problems than whether or not I’m real.”

  “Not according to Lupé.”

  I heard her sigh. “I know you blame me, Chris, but I think she has issues.”

  “Hell yes, she has issues!” I sputtered. “You’re the issue!”

  “If I’m not real, then how can I be the issue? Wouldn’t that make you the issue?”

  I grunted. “Me . . . you . . . she made it clear that she didn’t want to come back until this particular issue was settled.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is, here. I thought I’d made it clear from the very beginning that I approve of her. I think she’s very good for you.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It may be one of those woman things that we men are kind of clueless about but I think she doesn’t appreciate being ‘approved of’.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. What am I supposed to do? Disapprove? I’ve gotten a lot better about knocking before I come into the bedroom. Let’s face another possibility: She just may not be the right woman for you.”

  “Not the right woman for me?” I jumped up and stalked back into the bedroom. “She’s a werewolf, for God’s sake!”

  “And . . . ?”

  “My God, Jen! I’m infected with one-half of the combinant virus that turns the living into the undead courtesy of a blood transfusion with Count Dracula—”

  “Prince, not count,” she corrected, “Vlad Drakul Bassarab.”

  “—I’ve shared blood with a lycanthrope and sampled Tanis leaf extract,” I continued, ignoring the interruption. “I’ve got vampires an
d metamorphs from at least three major enclaves hunting me, a dead wife haunting me. Then there’s this necrotic virus ticking away in my brain like a time bomb that, when it goes off, will blow my eccentric little coping mechanisms into a total disconnect from reality. What kind of normal woman is going to put up with that?”

  “You’d be surprised what ‘normal women’ are capable of putting up with,” she answered quietly. “But you’ve got a bigger problem, right now.”

  “What? The dead guy on my porch tonight?” I fell back on the bed. “I think you must have been mistaken. There was a car crash just down the road and the driver—who was pretty banged up—came by earlier to use the phone. It may have been him coming back. . . .”

  “What? You don’t think I know dead when I see it? No. And I’m talking about that vampire that seriously jacked you around tonight.”

  I crammed the extra pillow under my throbbing leg to elevate it. “He’s dead. Case closed.”

  “Maybe the virus is starting to rot your brain. What if he was rogue?”

  That stopped me. “What are you getting at?”

  “As I see it—or as you do since I am only a figment of your imagination—there are three possibilities. One, there is an enclave in Northeast Louisiana . . .”

  “Not bloody likely,” I said. “I looked at all the maps back in Seattle. The only demesne in Louisiana is down in New Orleans. There are only eighteen in the entire country and there hasn’t been a new enclave since the 1960s. There will probably never be another enclave—the other demesnes wouldn’t permit it.”

  “So that leaves us with two possibilities, darling. Your vampire is either a rogue or an enforcer.”

  During last year’s Seattle sojourn, Stefan Pagelovitch had acquainted me with the demesne system by which territory was divided and held by the various undead populations. These little “underground” fiefdoms were quite jealous of their own autonomy and, as a rule, only cooperated on the issue of rogues.