I changed my mind, watching the hougan as he poured a pattern of cornmeal and salt onto the dance floor, a rust-stained machete at his side. This one was more likely a sorcerer—a bokor or caplata. This was more than Rada or even Petro worship. With Marinette Bois-Chèche invoked and what appeared to be the pending sacrifice of a black goat we were seriously into the realm of “Left-handed Voodoo,” probably a variant of the Bizango or even the Cochon Gris. Although the Ogou pantheon weighted heavily toward the realms of power and military might, it would not evoke such a dark and loathsome aspect unless black magic and sorcery were invoked at its core.
Lucky me: I had a front-row seat for the next session of Let’s Open The Gates Of Darkness And See What Comes Out.
As the chanting grew louder and more insistent, the room suddenly grew cold and a gust of wind came out of nowhere, causing the candle flames to gutter like terrified spirits.
Maybe it was nothing more than the air conditioner cutting on . . .
A greater core of darkness began to unfold in the twilight at the room’s center.
Who was I kidding? The only way this was going to get any worse was to add vampires to the mix. As the bokor approached the goat with a machete and a bowl, the wind intensified, extinguishing the candles as neatly as if someone had flipped a light switch.
My aborted vision shifted over into the infrared spectrum and I orientated on the red-and-yellow blob that represented the goat’s body heat.
That was it.
I looked around the rest of the room and only saw darkness. With a greater stain of darkness growing toward the goat like a hungry thing. There were no heat signatures for the bokor, the hougan or the mambos. Belatedly I realized that someone had added vampires to the mix: voodoo for the undead!
Give me that old time religion . . .
Once the goat was dead and started to cool, my reduced-heat signature would become more noticeable in the darkness. And even if I remained hidden throughout this morbid and messy mass, there was still a time factor: if I was trapped down here for too much longer, I wouldn’t have enough time to get back home before sunrise.
I didn’t fancy spending another twelve-plus hours on the premises.
The chanting was extremely loud and strident now so it covered the sounds of the new arrivals. Gradually I became aware of a new voice, chanting in counterpoint.
Whereas the Vodoun invocation was in an unknown tongue, the new voice was uttering pronouncements in a very different language. I couldn’t distinguish more than a word or three: it was Greek to me—in the most literal sense.
Another light source entered the room. Or two, actually. One was shaped like the outline of a man, shimmering like a chromatic rainbow in an oil slick, the black silhouette of a person at its center. The other was a giant sculpture of pale blue radiance, like a glow-in-the-dark plaster statue of a saint. Only this statue was larger than a man and appeared to duck its head as it entered the room.
The original chanting died away.
The goat bleated.
Someone took a flash picture and the room was rocked with a blast of light and heat that flung me against the back wall of the djevo and treated me to a planetarium show behind my fluttering eyelids.
* * *
I awoke to the smell of smoke.
I couldn’t have been out for more than a minute or two, but the red drapes surrounding the altar were already shading to orange and yellow as tendrils of flame nibbled at their edges. I crawled out from under the table and saw in the growing glow of the flames that I was alone.
The goat was gone, rope and all. Five mounds of ash, one of them partially flattened by a toppled drum, marked the former positions of the Vodoun congregants. The elements adorning the altar had been swept to the floor and scattered, the kewpie dolls unfettered and unpinned.
So much for keeping the security breach hush-hush.
I patted my shirt pocket as I staggered down the corridor. I still had the pictures. Maybe destroying the altar wasn’t such a bad idea after all. As I memory-wiped Reginald on the way out, I gave some consideration to reexamining my spiritual life. Maybe it was time to get religion.
Before religion got me.
Chapter Eleven
My wife was just as obedient in death as she had been in life: when I returned to the car she wasn’t there.
Something else was: the odor settled over me as soon as I closed the door and buckled on my shoulder harness. It smelled of wet leaves and musty attics—a far cry from the rotted perfume of my three previous supplicants. I looked in the rearview mirror but the backseat appeared to be empty.
A wispy voice spoke behind me: “You’re him, ain’tcha? That Baron fella?”
I swallowed. It didn’t help. “Actually, I’m not.”
A pair of ancient eyes appeared at the top of my seat in the mirror: he was behind me, crouching on the floor. “Sure you are. That old juju woman says you are. And you got the Shine. I kin see it myself.” A pair of eyes and a nose was all I could see without turning around. A saggy, billed woolen cap of faded blue covered the top of his head.
A soldier’s cap.
A Union soldier’s cap.
Circa middle 1800s.
“She says you got some neezia or sumpin.”
I sighed. “What can I do for you, son?”
“The captain sends his regards and wants to know what you intend to do about the incursion of the enemy.”
I was tired and my skin was starting to itch and burn again. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Which ones?”
“Why—all of ‘em, I guess. Them long-tooths, the carpetbaggers, the gray men.”
“Carpetbaggers?” I turned around—or tried but found myself hampered by the shoulder harness. “You don’t talk like a Yankee soldier, boy.”
“Guess I ain’t no Yankee soldier no more.” His voice was soft and sad, a whispery, ghostlike sound less real than the pale flesh crouching behind me. “We’re all not what we were anymore.”
“You-all being . . . who?”
“Twenty-third Infantry down out of Iowa and a bunch of Johnny Rebs from Colonel Harrison’s Fortieth Louisiana Cavalry. We mixed it up here in the winter of—” he paused as if searching through tattered memories, “—’63. Cut each other up pretty good. Then somebody up and shot that nigra woman. Probably an accident. Nobody knows which side and it don’t matter. She cursed both sides afore she died and pinned our souls here in the swamp where we fell.”
“Here?” I asked, looking over the BioWeb complex of buildings.
“They drained the swamps ‘bout near fifty year ago. Found some of us then and moved those remains to the local cemeteries and museum. Dug some more of us up about five year back when they built this abomination. Dug up some dragon bones, too.”
“Dragon bones?”
“Captain calls it a fossil. Says it died milyuns a’ years ago so its bones have turned to rock. They never tol’ nobody, they just put it back alongst with those of us they found. Why would they do thet? Deny a soldier his release and final ticket home?”
I shook my head. “There are laws that would have guaranteed your final interment and rest, soldier. But the people who built this place are a lawless band. They only use the laws that will serve their purposes and ignore the rest. It was more important to them to finish construction on schedule than to honor the dead.”
I saw him nod in the rearview mirror. “So other’n that little bit of excitement, the rest of us been lyin’ under the silt and clay just talkin’ amongst ourselves these past hundert-and-fifty-some year, figurin’ out what’s what and what’s not.
“And lissenin’ to the plans of the gray men,” he added with some heat. “It ain’t right!”
“The Confederates?”
“Naw, we all the same now: dead men, soldiers, patriots. This is as much my land as theirs now and we all salute the same flag. Hell, we been together so long we even talk the same. The captain wore the gray but I take m
y orders from him now as he’s the ranking officer on post. He’s the one what sent me as I’m the most presentable so far.”
“But you said ‘the gray men’.”
“The enemy. They still breathe but they souls is all dead and gray inside. They the enemy. They allied themselves with the long-tooths and now they plot the deaths of millions. The gray men would destroy everything we’ve shed our blood for.”
“The Civil War?”
“All of ‘em! Revolutionary, 1812, ‘Tween the States, WW One and Two . . .”
I unfastened my shoulder harness. “Tell me about the gray men. What are their plans?”
There was a distant ululation. “Cock’s crow: I caint stay. Come back tamorrow night and we’ll meet agin.”
“I don’t know that I’ll be able—”
“There’ll be a cotillion. Come out the west side and walk down to the pond. The captain will meet with you there.”
The door opened and the dome light revealed a human caricature that was half flesh, half denuded bone, wrapped in rags. It flopped out and slammed the door shut behind it. As it galloped across the parking lot, flapping like laundry on a line in a high wind, I could only make out thin sticks where fleshed-out arms and legs should be.
* * *
No one was home when I returned: no ghostly wife, no Deirdre, no vampire watchdogs. If the dead had come looking for me, they had long since left as the sky was starting to lighten in the east. Maybe they didn’t care for the weather. Even though the sky was relatively clear, a cold front had moved in during the night dropping the temperature fifteen to twenty degrees.
I reset the alarm system, then turned it off so Deirdre wouldn’t trigger it when she returned. Then I wandered back into my study before retiring for the morning.
The bookshelves had been sampled, the texts and tomes still grouped by subject but slightly out of the order I normally kept them in. Over on the desk, a yellow legal pad was skewed between the computer and a couple of unshelved books. I picked it up and considered Deirdre’s neat notations as I wandered back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
There should have been three or four blood packs left over from the box I had brought home last month. I usually needed a single bag every week to ten days to stop my stomach from cannibalizing itself. In a pinch, I could go without—for how long? The last time I had quit, cold turkey, I had managed to last two and a half weeks while going through the most agonizing versions of the Two-Stage process I had ever experienced.
Stage One: you’re afraid you’re going to die.
Stage Two: you’re afraid you’re not going to die.
While I had serious reservations about getting the crimson monkey off my back I was determined to keep my need in check. Except for periods of stress or injury, I’d been able to limit my intake of hemoglobin on a consistent basis.
Until now.
Still, there should have been enough O-positive in the fridge to see me through a couple of weeks in the best of times, a couple of days during the worst.
But there was nothing. And I wasn’t sure I could last until sundown.
I picked up a shrink-wrapped Styrofoam tray of raw hamburger and popped the plastic at the corner. Tilted and sipped the watery run-off. Eewwww.
Disgusting.
I parted the curtains and peered out the kitchen window. I could see the bayou in the ambient, predawn light, its black waters restive against the gray bank of grass at the end of my backyard. I calculated the time it would take to drive to the blood bank, use my passkey to boost another carton, and return home. I could do it without risking my life but the morning sun would likely negate any good a fresh pack of blood might provide.
Suck it up, Cséjthe, I told myself. You can last another day.
Under normal circumstances, I reminded myself, starting up the stairs. But even adjusting for spending the past year and a half in the Outer Limits, there was nothing “normal” about the past few days of my unlife.
Take the cast of characters that had joined my one-man traveling show of late.
Miguel de Cervantes wrote: “Tell me what company thou keepst, and I’ll tell thee what thou art.” I wondered what Mike would make of my ongoing associations with vampires, corpses, and a ghost.
Well, “maybe” on the ghost.
Maybe I could scratch ghost/wife off my dramatis personae.
Maybe along with werewolf/girlfriend.
Samuel Johnson advised that a man “should keep his friendships in constant repair” and wrote that “true happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and choice.”
Obviously, I needed a lot of work on both counts.
Like the guy in that Barry Manilow song, I was “standing at the end of a long, lonely road” and was “waiting for some new friends to come . . .”
It suddenly occurred to me that if I was identifying with Manilow songs it was long past time to pull the plug.
I kicked my shoes off and flopped on the bed. The names on Deirdre’s legal pad reminded me that I could be surrounded by far worse than I had right now.
Erzsébet Báthory had acquired a jolly group of sadists and psychopaths in her unholy hobbies. With friends like hers, the dead and the undead didn’t seem like such a great social burden.
After the influence of some of her bent and twisted relatives at an early age, there was her old nurse, Iloona Joo—referred to as “Helena Jo” in some texts. She seemed to be involved in Erzsébet’s practice of the dark arts and her sadistic inclinations early on.
Dorthea Szentes, an old maid who claimed to be a practicing witch, instructed her in the disciplines of black magic. While Dorthea—affectionately called “Dorka”—didn’t start out teaching torture as a technique of witchcraft, she eventually became an enthusiastic participant.
Erzsébet had enjoyed a succession of lovers from a young age, and marriage to Count Ferencz Nádasdy, the “Black Hero of Hungary,” did not hamper her sexual appetites for variety as he spent a great deal of time away from home on military campaigns. Two of her paramours are worthy of note. The first was an unnamed stranger, described by contemporary accounts as being slim, pale, and possessing sharp teeth. The villagers took him for a vampire. Both Erzsébet and her mysterious lover disappeared for some time. She eventually reappeared. He did not.
Thus gossip—and probably nothing more than that—linked the Dracula and Báthory clans again, albeit briefly.
Her other notorious liaison was with her maid, Anna Darvula, reputed to be “one of the most active sadists in Erzsébet’s entourage.” A stroke eventually left Darvula blind and severely incapacitated, so she had to pass the torch (as it were) to the other perverts in Castle Cséjthe. This list included the dwarf majordomo, Johannes Ujvary, also called Thorko and referred to as Ficzko (which means “lad” in Hungarian) in Erzsébet’s journals, a drunken peasant woman named Kardoska who helped obtain girls for the countess’ sadistic pleasures, and Katarina Beneczky, about whom little is known other than the fact that she was the only one found “innocent” in the subsequent trials and released.
Erzsi Majorova almost escaped punishment, as well. She came into the story after Anna Darvula was forced into retirement and was said to be responsible for Erzsébet’s eventual downfall by pushing the “noble blood is more potent than peasant blood” theory. She wasn’t around for the first trial but they eventually caught up with her and she was beheaded after a second trial.
Thorko was beheaded, too. Extra precautions were taken: the sword used in the beheading was “blessed,” the blood was drained from his body, and then his body was burned along with the bodies of his cohorts.
Iloona Joo and Dorthea Szentes were given even harsher treatment. Both were sentenced to having all the fingers on their hands—which had “dipped in the blood of Christians”—torn out, one by one, by the public executioner with a pair of red-hot pincers. After that was accomplished, their bodies were to be thrown alive on the fire.
Mercifully (if that word should even be applied here) the old nurse fainted after only four fingers were extracted. She was thrown unconscious into the fire. Likewise Dorthea Szentes, all fingers intact, who had fainted in the presence of Iloona Joo’s torture. Justice gone soft, I suppose.
Anna Darvula died well before the trial so her punishment was doubtless taken to a higher court.
One hoped, anyway.
The concepts of justice, good, and even God were starting to dim in my mind like fading memories of playing in the sun. Was it because the virus was starting to color my thinking? Or was I finally more cognizant of the greater darkness that surrounds us all?
* * *
There are dreams that come with all the clarity of being a dream but that does not make them less terrible.
I walk into the castle’s courtyard and believe the dream itself to be as monochrome as the old photographs in the trunks in my grandfather’s attic. The walls and outbuildings, the keep, and especially the great, brooding tower are all constructed of black stone, quarried from the Carpathian mountains that encroach on the land like dark dreams made manifest. The sky is nearly as black; dark, swollen clouds block the weak winter sun and are dense with the wanton power of a gathering storm.
The architecture is harsh and brutal; the icy winds that blast down the mountain passes, even more so. Only the gentle slopes of drifting snow add any touch of softness to the iron-edged tableau.
The naked girl stumbles, falling to her hands and knees, sinking up to her elbows and haunches in the frigid bank of whiteness. Her skin, as white as the snow she wallows through, is marked by purple splotches of bruise, mauve stripes of whip marks and cuttings, brick-red punctures that weep scarlet tears: the first hint of color in the black and white and gray landscape. She struggles to her feet and I see her clearly now: young and yet old before her time, her malnourished and abused body could be fifteen or nineteen.
It will never be twenty.
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 18
