Voodoo Queen

by Theophilus Monroe

  This place is creepy…

  I nodded. Isabelle was right. It looked like some kind of dungeon—shackles on the wall. No whips or ball gags. Not that kind of dungeon. This was more… medieval. “I can’t believe Legba used to lock himself up in this thing every night. I wonder how he got out. If he could just let himself out, it would kind of defeat the purpose.”

  Someone had to let him out every morning… after sunrise.

  I scratched my head. I used to walk past this place each morning before my six o’clock training with Oggie. It was right around sunrise, though truthfully, since we couldn’t see the sun in Vilokan, we were more dependent on clocks to know the time of day than most people. You don’t realize how much you depend on nature to tell you how early or late it is until you’re stuck in an underground city and can’t see the sun. Chances were if someone was coming here on a daily basis to let Legba out, I’d have seen someone coming or going. Not a guarantee. I mean, maybe whoever was doing it was just waiting until all was clear, so no one would notice. Not a likely thing, particularly since in those days the old staircase leading to his office would rock back and forth making the worst of sounds anytime someone went up or down it. And I was never the only person walking through here in the mornings.

  “I wonder if there’s another access point back here somewhere. A hidden door maybe.”

  Or not a literal door, but…

  “You thinking a portal?”

  Remember before? Aida-Wedo said that Legba had created a portal in this room.

  “One that led to the slave quarters on our property.”

  And Kalfu’s veve was there, which meant it was here, too. What if Marie Laveau was the one who came to free Legba each morning?

  “Presuming she didn’t have Aida-Wedo’s aspect, she’d need a portal of some kind. One that Aida-Wedo might have set up.”

  Perhaps that’s one reason Aida-Wedo was so intent on us coming here?

  I shook my head. “Why wouldn’t she just tell us what we needed to find? The Loa make everything so much more difficult than it needs to be.”

  “Well, child,” Aida-Wedo’s voice spoke from behind me. I jumped, not expecting her to show up. She stood there, gripping a burlap sack of some kind. Whatever she held was roughly the size of a softball. “If I told you, you’d never have found the priest. You’d never know what he had to tell you. And in truth, I did not know this was your path until now. Only that there was a path here and that it was yours to find.”

  I rolled my eyes. “How long have you been watching us?”

  “Long enough, child.”

  “And is there another portal? Something you might have set up here for Marie Laveau? Something that could take us to wherever she is?”

  “Yes, child, the veve you seek is beneath the floor. Hidden from plain sight but there, no less, and just as powerful.”

  “Clever,” I said. “How do we use it?”

  “You cannot travel through the gateway by normal means. It was meant only for one who bears the likeness of Papa Legba or the queen herself to access.”

  “Pauli could do it,” I said. “Since he got Nix, the water elemental, he can shapeshift.”

  “But he does not possess the essence of either Laveau or Legba. He does not have their bones, their marrow…”

  I bit my lip. “So we’re still basically screwed.”

  “No, child,” Aida-Wedo said as she removed her bony necklace from her neck. Aida-Wedo always wore weird shit—but this one, which she’d worn only recently, was amongst the creepiest. The bones of a human hand dangled in the front, as if a skeleton were gripping at her chest. Other bones were strung along some kind of string or wire. I wasn’t sure which bones these were. I never paid enough attention to those classes in school. But they weren’t large. Probably taken from the other hand, or the feet. Aida-Wedo began placing the necklace over my neck.

  I recoiled and backed away. “Ew!”

  “These are the bones of Legba’s host, child. If you hope to pass through the veve…”

  Isabelle was laughing in my head—she didn’t mind “gross” stuff so much. She kind of reveled in it. But me? Look, I could get my hands dirty. I’d seen my share of blood. But when it came to dead people and their remains—as if I hadn’t had to encounter more than my share of that lately, anyway—I didn’t have the stomach for it.

  I took a deep breath and lowered my head. “Pauli is going to have a wise crack or two about this.”

  “He’ll call you a trendsetter, child.”

  “Dear Lord, I hope I don’t make this a trend. Wearing human bones? Only if the spring catalogers declare homicide in for the season.”

  Aida-Wedo grinned slightly—not something she did often, but it was oddly comforting to see. Her smile expanded—giving me a rare view of her slightly yellowed chompers—as she reached into her burlap sack.

  “Holy shit!” I screamed. “I mean, Legba mentioned it in his letter…”

  In Aida-Wedo’s hand was a shrunken head—but not just any head. The head of Legba’s former host, the man he’d named as Pierre Lescarbot. But when I saw it, all I saw was Legba. It was the face I knew him by, only about half the size and scrunched up as if he’d just eaten a lemon. Aida-Wedo extended her hand—the one holding Legba’s head—to me.

  I hesitated and took it, gripping it by a tuft of hair which, now that his head was smaller, made the hair seem longer than it had been before. “I’m always trying to get a head…”

  Aida-Wedo cocked her head and pressed her lips together.

  “Get it… a head… ahead. It’s a joke.”

  Her expression didn’t change.

  “Never mind.”

  Chapter Eight

  With Legba’s bones around my neck and his shrunken head in my hand, I felt a tingle course throughout my body, starting at my feet.

  “Am I standing over the portal?” I asked Aida-Wedo as she looked at me, beaming with pride as she eyed my new appearance. I wasn’t aware that human remains were in this season—but Aida-Wedo sure seemed to think they were.

  “Yes, child. She wishes you to come. You need only offer her something that you and she share in kind.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe a little magica?”

  Aida-Wedo shook her head. “It will not do, child. It must be an object. Something that you and she might have in common.”

  Marie Laveau was Catholic. Remember the first time we met Père Antoine? He said he’d baptized her. Since you are both Catholic, both Mambos…

  I nodded. There was one thing… but it had been a gift from my parents at my confirmation. I hardly ever took it off. Still, it was the only thing I had that seemed to fit the criteria. I reached around my neck and loosened the clasp on my chain. I held my crucifix in my hand, tracing the corpus Christi with my thumb. Not that I was the most devout or pious girl in the world—but I had my faith.

  For me, my faith had always been a little like my belly button. I could ignore it most of the time. But even if I renounced it, I could never get rid of it. That is, barring some cosmetic shapeshifting. And even that would be temporary. You’d think all this exposure to Voodoo, magic, vampires, and all the shit that people usually associated with the “occult” would kill my faith. At least that’s what I’d grown up to believe in the Church. Don’t dabble with that hoodoo and Voodoo, don’t mess with witchcraft and superstition. If you do, you’ll fall from grace and be in danger of hellfire! It sort of struck me, though, that people who think like that seem to put more stock in the power of whatever they deem “dangerous” than in the power of their God to protect them and guide them in the truth. It’s like they’re so fixated on whatever they think is wrong and “disgusting” that they miss the beauty of their own faith. I wore this crucifix not just out of sentimentality, not just because it was one of the last things my parents gave me before their minds started to go, but because I believed that if God is really God, he isn’t going to be threatened by stuff like magic, Voodoo, or anything
else. God has to be bigger than that—in it all, but beyond it, too. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as evil—I’ve encountered more than my share of it. But I guess my point is that sometimes it’s hard for mere mortals like me to tell the difference—and I’d rather live by my faith than fumble through life consumed by fear.

  Like Marie Laveau, I didn’t see any inherent conflict between my Catholicism and my Voodoo. Were there differences in nuance and teaching? Of course. But were these differences so grand to warrant the condemnation of one or the other? I’m no saint. Certainly not a theologian. But I do live my beliefs genuinely and, dare I say, with every bit as much faith as anyone. And I’d be amiss if I didn’t credit Isabelle for some of that. No matter how much shit I’d been through in life, she’d been through more. I mean, she was a slave. She had died. She was trapped in someone else’s body. Hard to imagine things much shittier—but she had also touched the Tree of Life, she believed in goodness, and hope, and the power of compassion. She had every right to be angry, to look for vengeance of one sort or another. But she chose another path. Kind of like the one who was represented by the disfigured figure on my crucifix.

  I kissed the image of Christ and dropped the crucifix to the floor. In an instant, the paneling on the floor started to sink, almost like a sludge. I felt my body fall slowly into the portal.

  Aida-Wedo winked at me—which I have to say, made me laugh a little. But it was strangely endearing, no less.

  I’d been through portals of various sorts before—it was usually a pretty quick experience. Something of a rush. But this one was slow-going, as if it were tasting me like a fine wine.

  Apparently it decided I was delicious enough to gulp down. After a few moments of uncertainty, my body was sucked in, quickly and suddenly. Everything turned black. Then a bright flash of light, coalescing into a shower of colors as if refracted by a prism. This wasn’t like traveling on a rainbow, not like when Pauli transported me somewhere. And it wasn’t like traveling through a gate cut by my soul blade into Guinee. It was like I was flying through a tunnel and a new reality was coalescing all around me.

  A rush of frankincense struck my nostrils—like the kind they used in the cathedral at mass. It was supposed to represent the prayers of the saints ascending to the throne of God! Was that where I was going? Had Marie Laveau gone to heaven… and now the portal was taking me directly into the presence of the Almighty?

  I felt my feet hit a solid surface. The room was spinning around me, everything was a blur. For a moment.

  You’ve got to be kidding me…

  I laughed out loud. We were standing in the middle of a head shop in the French Quarter. Not the heaven I was expecting… and based on the look of the shopkeeper who was taking a draw from a joint, I wasn’t what he was expecting either.

  “Holy fuck!” the man said—he was probably forty but was still trying to stay hip in all the wrong ways. Skinny jeans and Birkenstocks. A Grateful Dead T-shirt. I could dig that, at least.

  “Where is she?” I asked out loud.

  “You’re here for Marie?” the man asked.

  “I’m guessing if someone appears here like that, they’re probably not looking for you.”

  “So truuuue…” he said. It was like he wanted to be a hippie but was too young to pull it off. So he tried to be a modern hipster, but he was too old. So instead, he became a kind of combination of both. I wasn’t one to talk—I was an eighties hair band and nineties grunge girl at heart, precisely the era that should have been formative for this guy in his prime.

  We stood there for a moment looking at each other awkwardly. He took another drag on his joint and exhaled. I coughed as his puff of smoke struck my face. No wonder he had the frankincense burning so strong in here.

  I decided to break the silence. “Can I see her, please?”

  “Uh, yeah. She’s not exactly well.”

  “I get it, but I need to see her.”

  “No, you don’t get it. Like a few days ago, she was a total babe of a boss. But it’s like she’s added ten years every day. Unless you’re a doctor or, uh, you know, if you’ve found the fountain of youth.”

  “Yeah, I’m a doctor.” I said. “I mean, I know I look young. But I’ve seen Doogie Howser reruns, it’s possible.”

  The guy stared at me blankly for about two seconds. A slow grin spread on his face, and then he pointed at me and laughed. “Doogie Howser! I used to love that show!”

  “It was a joke, numbnuts. The point is that I’m obviously too young to be a doctor.”

  “I knew that,” the guy said. “Name’s Chad by the way.”

  “Hi, Chad. I’m Annabelle.”

  Chad gave me a stoner giggle—you know the one that sounds a bit like Woody Woodpecker might if you watched his cartoons on super slow replay. “Well, why didn’t you say so! Marie is expecting you!”

  I shook my head. Really, he was supposed to be expecting me, but it didn’t occur to him that the one person who magically appeared in the room might be the very Annabelle he was supposed to keep an eye open for? Clearly he was ate up—but I wasn’t going to say anything.

  I followed Chad through a doorway covered by a curtain of stringed beads. When I saw her, I almost couldn’t believe it. I’d only seen her and spoken to her once—but she’d carried herself with dignity. She had a sort of grace, beauty, and charm that befitted her title as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Line up twelve women in a room, anyone—well, except someone like Chad, perhaps—would know which one was Marie Laveau. Her presence was that captivating, that powerful. But now she sat hunched over in a chair. Clinging to a cane with her tremoring hand.

  “I suppose you now know why I could not come to you. Since the death of Legba’s host, my days have become years.”

  I stood there for a moment, my jaw agape. I simply didn’t know how to respond. “Your life was connected to Legba, to his host?”

  “As yours shall be, my dear, when you take my place.”

  “But Legba…”

  “He requires a host, my dear. And with the remains that allowed you to find me, these very same remains may be used to summon him. But we must act quickly. My time is short. He represents the best chance you have to defeat Kalfu. And if I should pass before he is revived—”

  “Then we won’t be able to summon him… and Kalfu… I just don’t know who would be willing to become his host.”

  “His host has already been chosen, dear.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “You’ve met him already. When you arrived here.”

  “Chad?” I asked. “You can’t be serious. He’s going to host Legba?”

  “He is suffering, my dear. His… flightiness… is on account of—”

  “Too much weed,” I said, finishing her sentence.

  Marie Laveau nodded. “But what you do not know is that he smokes to manage his pain. Chad is dying, even as I am. He wants his life to mean something.”

  “You’re dying, too! Why can’t you just host Legba?” I asked.

  “My body is already beyond its years, dear. And if I were to host Legba, I would be unable to coronate you as the new Voodoo queen.”

  I shook my head. “Why me? I don’t understand. My family is the antithesis of what Vilokan was founded to be. I’ve been an outsider all along.”

  “As was I, in life, dear. Imagine at the dawn if the nineteenth century what it must’ve been like to be born the daughter of a white man and a woman who was black and aboriginal both.”

  I sighed. “It wouldn’t be easy today, much less in the early eighteen hundreds.”

  “I spent many nights asking myself why anyone who served the Loa would look to me as a leader. I was never a slave, born a free woman. Most who practiced had been in chains their whole lives. I was an outcast—not accepted by whites or blacks.”

  “I can’t imagine…”

  “Can’t you? I’ve been watching you since you arrived. You aren’t exactly one for fitting in.”
r />   “Yes, but I’m not mixed race. I’m white, born in wealth. I don’t relate…”

  “But you are more than yourself, are you not? There is another within you—she is as much a part of you as you are a part of her.”

  “Isabelle was a slave once… to my ancestors.”

  “Only she was not so by choice. You have been a slave to your ancestors for no reason at all.”

  I squinted, trying to sort out the meaning of her words.

  “Dear, you blame yourself for what people did generations before you were born. But look at you—you befriend a lonely boy who just wants to be noticed.”

  “Pauli? He’s hardly lonely.”

  “You’d be surprised, dear. But allow me to continue, please.”

  I nodded.

  “And you risk your life to redeem the soul of one who despised you in life… a vampire, once, whom I must confess enthralled even my passions.”

  “Nico wasn’t so bad, really.”

  Marie Laveau looked at me in disbelief. “Dear, for years he could do nothing by lie next to me in bed and tell me of his fantasies to exact his revenge on you. You wouldn’t believe the ways he thought he might end you when he had the chance.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, he didn’t care for me much. But what can I say? I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. And I was partly responsible for leaving him in Guinee.”

  “It was not you who told Aida-Wedo to close the gate.”

  I sighed. “No, that was Oggie…” Even saying his name gave my stomach a sinking feeling. Damnit, I missed that guy. If only I could find him a host, too. But even if I could, his remains were basically burned by the very spell that killed him. No bone necklaces or shrunken heads left to remember him by… just my memories.

  “Nico knew in the end that it was not your fault. That’s why he never fulfilled any of his vengeance fantasies. It’s also why, in the end, he placed his hopes on you for his redemption.”

  “Niccolo the Damned, that’s what they used to call him, wasn’t it?”

  Marie laughed. “There was a time, yes, when his bloodlust was yet untamed.”