by Derry Sandy
Jenna paused again, she had stopped sucking on her cigarette for a while and it had burned down to her fingers. She discarded it and rolled another.
“But Lazarus’ man-servant appeared out of nowhere. He killed those three men so quickly with his bare hands, they didn’t have time to scream. If I had any doubts about the type of people I was dealing with I knew now. I ran out of the alley and went home. By the time I got there the man-servant was already back and, of course, he never said anything, but now I knew I was a prisoner of sorts, that this man would not let me go far, that he was my shadow.
“One day Lazarus came to the house. He was the very embodiment of handsomeness and fine tailoring. He behaved as if he had not been absent for the last ten months. He told me I was pregnant with his child. This was a shocking bit of news seeing that I had not seen him since the night he first came to my apartment. I had not been touched by any man in that way since the day I came to the house. I laughed and told him he was crazy. But he looked at me and said that it would be a girl and she would be very special.
“I was afraid. The entire occurrence was deeply unsettling. Before Lazarus left he cautioned me to eat well. I missed my blood that month and I denied it. I missed my blood for another month and I denied it. Then certain smells began nauseating me. My face grew fuller, then my abdomen began to rise. I was pregnant. Immaculate conception or whatever you might call it. Seven months later there was a knock at the front door. By this time I was the size of a heifer. Lazarus’ manservant ushered in a tiny woman. She could have easily fit five times into my maternity dress. She was a midwife, dispatched by Lazarus right on time, as all things with him are. At the sight of her I immediately went into labor.,” Jenna said.
“The child was a girl, I picked the name D’mara and Lazarus approved, D’mara Lockhart. She is the reason I remain in this world, the reason I am helping you today.
“For what it’s worth he was a loving father. After her birth he spent far more time at the house and for a while we were actually a family, strange as that might seem. Then one night when D’mara was four years old she awoke from a nightmare and calmly said that her father was coming to kill her.
“I tried to convince her that it was a bad dream, but there was no changing her mind. She said that we had to leave now and that she knew how to hide us from the ugly man. I had no idea where we would go and I felt silly for letting my four-year-old daughter convince me of such foolishness. But I asked myself how she knew she had to hide us from Lazarus’ manservant. How did she know he could and would follow us? I had never told her about the night in the alley.
“I packed quickly, some clothing and money. But when I opened the bedroom door the silent manservant stood there, blocking the way. I ordered him to move and he simply grinned with teeth the color of urine-stained enamel. Then D’mara repeated the command in her little voice. At first nothing happened, then the man began to sweat. His smile faded, his knees began to tremble, and blood sprung from the corners of his eyes like tears. It was clear that some monumental struggle was taking place. He was fighting a command that the very fibers of his body were compelling him to follow. Finally, he fell to the ground and we stepped over him. D’mara commanded him not to follow and we hurried out into the night.
“I saddled Lazarus’ gray mare and placed D’mara in front of me. At first the horse would not budge, and then D’mara commanded it and it broke into a gallop like a gazelle. There was a crash of glass above and behind us. The manservant had leapt through one of the upper storey windows and landed about one hundred feet behind us. He began running after the horse, he lurched a bit at first, overcoming D’mara’s command by sheer force of will. But then he began to run and he was fast, faster than the galloping horse. The thoroughbred mare ran at full tilt but he was gaining. Then he dropped to all fours and started closing in even faster.
D’mara reached into the saddle bag and produced a silver revolver. She told me the horse would hold its course so I need not worry about controlling it but that I needed to shoot the man since she was not strong enough to pull the trigger herself. The gun was loaded and I turned around as far as I could and fired an awkward one-handed shot at our pursuer from the back of the sprinting mare. Luck was on our side, the bullet struck him in the face. He stumbled and fell in a cloud of dirt and dust and the horse widened the gap. I did not spare a glance back. D’mara whispered something into the horse’s ear and it ran harder and faster into the night. Somewhere behind us I heard a terrible roaring howl, like an angry, wounded animal.
The horse galloped for hours, and then suddenly it collapsed, dead, throwing us both. We got up and checked ourselves for broken bones. I realized I could hear the sea.
“Beyond a low rocky cliff were wooden boats beached on the sand and a man preparing to leave on a dawn fishing run. We found a path down. I made up a story about an abusive husband and told the fisherman we needed to be taken to Venezuela. So he took us there, dropped us off on a lonely beach, and said he would check back at sunset to see if I had a change of heart.
“I knew we could not stay in Venezuela. Lazarus and his man would find us quickly. For the next eight months we travelled around South America, finally settling with an Amerindian tribe deep in the Guyanese rain forest. D’mara said that the tribe’s magic combined with her own abilities would help protect us from the lackey’s tracking skills. So we stayed. We learned to hunt, fish, and grow manioc. We learned how to grind cassava flour. The year we stayed with the tribe was the most peaceful time of my life.
“But then Lazarus’ man found us. D’mara was out hunting agouti with a friend when they were attacked by a jaguar. Her friend was killed, but D’mara managed to kill the cat. She tore out its throat, the men who found them said. D’mara had been mauled badly and had lost a lot of blood. She was completely unconscious when they brought her back and remained in a coma for a week. Whatever she was doing to hide us appeared to require some degree of consciousness so the protection dissipated while she was comatose.
“Lazarus’ man came for us in broad daylight. He simply walked out of the forest smiling his piss-colored smile. I gathered D’mara in my arms and ran. The villagers knew instinctively that he was something that needed killing. They feathered him with arrows and pin-cushioned him with poison darts. He ignored them and came after me, walking. He knew I could not get far carrying D’mara. Then the village elder blocked his way and spread his arms. Lazarus’ lackey could not advance. They stood about a foot from each other smiling into each other’s faces, one straining to move forward, the other straining to hold his ground. The air around them became so thick that it warped the view through the space between the opposed men.
“I slung D’mara over my shoulder. There was no gray mare this time but I did have the silver revolver. I handed it to a tribe’s man, told him to empty it into the lackey’s face, then I ran into the bush. The lackey caught us an hour later. His face was a red ruin of bullet holes, but his forearms were covered in blood and gore and I knew he had killed the tribe’s folk.
“I put D’mara down and drew a knife, knowing I could not beat him. I rushed him and he toyed with me, dodging the knife centimeters before it would have struck. He moved like liquid and my arms were soon heavy. I made a desperate slash and he caught the knife blade between a thumb and forefinger as if it were a sitting butterfly. He yanked it out of my grasp and his hand flashed by my face in a blur. He walked past me and, when I tried to follow him my legs would not move. I looked down and my entire front was crimson.
“I fell never to rise again. The last thing my living eyes saw was him placing a small black box on the ground. The box grew to a cube about two-feet high. He picked up D’mara from where she lay, slung her over his shoulder, got on his knees, and crawled into the box. I followed him. I did not realize how at first, but when I glanced behind and made eye contact with my cooling corpse and I knew.
“I went after my daughter. I needed to protect her even thought I was dead
and even though she is stronger than me. Lazarus or Lucien or whatever he is calling himself today knows I’m around. He may even know that we contacted you. As long as he holds D’mara I am bound to him.
“Rohan was not supposed to survive the attack in the forest, but Lucien did not care, after all Rohan was just one man. But then you survived the woman he sent to kill you, the rescue raid to retrieve Cassan was successful, and you killed the people he sent to kidnap Lisa. The captured spirits in the places we haunt are all whispering that he is taking you seriously now and will double his efforts to see you all dead and Stone blotted out.”
Kat took a moment to soak it all in. She struggled to make sense of it all and to determine how this information would help them defeat Lucien. “So what do you advise.”
Ghita spoke for the first time in hours or was it days. “He wants to open the Grey, it has been his obsession for years, but first he needs power, and lots of it. Lucien discovered a repository of power left over from the collapse of Amerindian civilization. When a civilization dies, that civilization’s gods also die, and when those gods die they leave behind raw power, sort of like a collapsed star. This power can be tapped by those who know how. The repository is impure and unpredictable, but it is massive, more than enough to open a permanent hole to the Grey. To tap this power he needs a key, Lisa stole his key and so he needs it back.
“Aside from power he needs knowhow. The specific knowledge he needs is held by the person who opened the hole that triggered the Recompense, the Amerindian medicine man’s apprentice Bitol. Lisa inadvertently stealing the key bought you some time. But he has dispatched his man Gershon to search for her and Gershon is a force of nature.”
“Well, there are no problems then, even if he can get the key back from Lisa, that apprentice is hundreds of years dead,” Kat said already suspecting how Ghita would respond.
“He isn’t dead, not anymore,” Ghita continued. “As Jenna said, Lucien is a powerful necromancer. His abilities are not limited to animating the dead, he has also learned how to awaken past incarnations of people who are still alive. A few years ago he awakened the apprentice. The result is that two incarnations, past and present, of the same person are now dwelling simultaneously in one body. Lucien has not found that person yet but it is inevitable. Lucien and Gershon are very good at finding what they want when they want it. My advice? Find and kill Lucien and do this before he gets to Lisa and the apprentice.”
“How do we find and kill him?”
“It will not be easy. When he is injured or when one body gets old, or when he grows tired of it he simply takes possession of another. We do not know his original identity. However, the bottled spirits in the walls of the house in Laventille whisper a story of a young obeah man whose name has been lost in time. He believed that mankind’s relative safety in the Absolute, a safety further enhanced by the protection of the Order, was an ill-conceived notion. He believed that the walls between the Absolute, Grey, and Ether should be broken down and that the most powerful beings should inherit the whole. The society of his obeah-man brethren did not like his idea. They tried to convince him otherwise, going as far as trapping him inside of a silk cotton tree, where they left him, unable to move, for a year. At the end of the year they took him out and again showing uncharacteristic patience, they asked him to reconsider. The young man was beyond convincing. The obeah men saw that there was nothing to be done but to execute him.
“Executing a real obeah man is not easy. It requires rituals and attention to detail to ensure a complete death. They buried the young man up to his neck in the earth, and inserted a long metal funnel down his throat. They then heated ten pounds of pure silver in an iron vat until it was molten and alive like mercury. While chanting the required words they poured the entire contents of the vat down the funnel and into the belly of the hardened young man. Then they cut the head off the body and burned both pieces at separate crossroads and scattered the ashes into separate bodies of running water.
“This young nameless obeah man was special, however. He evaded death. As the molten silver seared into the walls of his stomach he separated his spirit from his body and possessed the nearest living creature he could find, a crapaud. You must, of course, appreciate how difficult this was, he had to time the separation just right so that his body did not go limp too early, nor could he allow the body to completely die with his spirit still inside.
“Now there are several abiding rules of spirit travel and one of them is that you should never possess an animal lest you forget your manhood. But the young obeah man had no choice, he was not yet sufficiently strong in the power to oust the incumbent soul of one of his captors, animals however have no souls and thus possessing them is easy. He was inside the crapaud for several months before he remembered that he was indeed a man. And so, the young obeah man strengthened his craft of possession, he began going from body to body, like some sort of metaphysical hermit crab. The story does not say where he ended up. But I assume that this young obeah man grew in strength until he could take possession of a human body once more.”
Katharine and Kariega exchanged shocked looks. Katherine was sure his thoughts mirrored hers. The method of the execution, the stubborn arrogance of the young obeah man, could it be coincidence? Katharine turned back to Ghita who had not noticed Katharine’s reaction to her news.
“As for Lucien’s servant, the man only seems to grow stronger with age. I have seen the lackey, stabbed, shot, run over by automobiles, beheaded, and burnt. He is implacable and ruthless and perhaps truly immortal.”
“We will put his immortality to the test,” Kat said with an air of finality.
“You must,” Jenna replied. “I want my daughter safe from them. Lucien controls her in some way. Not completely, but he can call on her and he can inflict pain. He wants her to lead his army of maboya. Without a strong leader they are feral and she is the only one with the strength to do it. He raises other captains from time to time, but all his attempts at making another true leader have failed.”
“I think your daughter grabbed Lisa and is helping her hide, I sent Clarence after her and they both went invisible to Lazarus..”
“Yes, she can do that, hide metaphysically, like she did in South America. She has gotten better at hiding but Gershon has also gotten better at tracking. Sending Clarence after them was a good idea, Clarence is not as strong as Gershon or D’mara for that matter, but maybe he will buy them critical moments they need to survive.”
Kat nodded solemnly and turned to Ghita, about to ask her to share how she came to be trapped in Lucien’s service when she felt a familiar metaphysical pull. Tarik was calling her back, this could only mean that something was urgently wrong.
She turned to Kariega. “Our son is calling me back. Something has happened in the Absolute. I must return.”.
“Come then, we can show you the best way . There is a man in Cumana village, people call him Crayfish. Find him, tell him Jenna sent you, he can tell you some of the parts we have not had the time to share. Every detail counts. Also we cannot contact you again, Lucien has been preoccupied with his plans and this has allowed us greater latitude than we usually have, but opposing him is a risk.”
The two women rose to their feet. Kat turned to Kariega. He wore a stoic look on his face but Kat could tell that it pained him to see her go.
“Do not wait for me any longer. You must go to the Ether, Kariega.”
“Since when does Katharine tell Kariega what he must and must not do?” Kariega replied in exaggerated indignation. “How can I rest on my laurels with the ancestors while the Order rots?”
Katharine did not argue. She knew he would not cross until they could cross together and she loved him for his stubbornness. She hugged him fiercely and kissed him so hard her mouth felt bruised, “Until next time then, sir.”
Ghita and Jenna began walking away and she turned to go after them. Shepherd rubbed his massive head against her as she moved past. When she glanced
back to get one more glimpse of Kariega, he was gone. His absence mirrored an emptiness in her chest, which the lump in her throat was unable to fill.
Chapter 26
Lisa was famished and parched. She felt like she had not eaten in days, but that could not be right, the trip into the Grey had been instantaneous. One minute she had been holding D’mara’s hand and touching the box, the next minute she was here, wherever here was. As far as she could tell ‘here’ was a massive sugarcane field that stretched towards the horizon in all directions as far as the eye could see.
She lay on her back atop a grassy knoll that she imagined was the very center of this world. D’mara was nowhere to be found. The sky above was a cloudless sea-green in lieu of the usual blue. It was as unnerving and alien as it was beautiful. A single black vulture wheeled in the green expanse. The air was clean, crisp and easy to breath absent of the stench of industry and mankind. Everything was silent except for the susurration of the sugarcane in the breeze.
Lisa considered her next steps. This was the Grey, the place that spawned the thing that broke the table at the Watchers’ House. She should find shelter, but where could she go?
She rose and began to walk through the cane. She looked into the sky, trying to determine the sun’s position to at least track her progress in some way. She noted that where before there was just one vulture, there was now a dozen. The birds formed a feathery vortex as they circled effortlessly in the air. The sun looked like what it should, perhaps a bit bigger and brighter than the one she was used to, but that might just be because of this smog-free air. Lisa recorded the sun’s position and continued to walk.
After a while she glanced at the sky again. This time there was a cloud of vultures, hundreds of them and the foot of the vulture vortex seemed to be anchored directly above her position. Concern bloomed in her chest. The big black birds literally seemed to be pointing out her location, anything for miles that knew how to read the signs would know where she was. She began to run as fast as the cane would let her, occasionally checking to see if her hypothesis about the vultures was correct.
