by Boris Bacic
Cheryl expected to start seeing things happening soon, but long minutes went by without any unusual occurrences. Soon, she had let her guard down. She no longer felt nervous. If anything, she was bored, and her ass was starting to hurt from sitting on the wooden floor. The entire time, Fabiola chanted the words tirelessly, over and over, until Cheryl memorized them—even in Haitian Creole.
And then, after an unbeknownst amount of time, Cheryl noticed something out of the corner of her eye.
There was a wisp of pink smoke swirling in the corner of the room…
At first, it slowly glided through the air. But then it increased in size, coming from an unknown source of the room, until the wisp coiled like a snake and gyrated in the air. The smoke looked almost as if it had come from a cigarette, except it wasn’t dispersed out in various directions and uneven, but rather it continued to twist through the air as one giant wisp.
Fabiola’s chanting grew louder and faster, repeatedly raising the gifts presented to Ezili Freda and lowering them as the smoke randomly slid through the air like a snake, drawing ever-closer to the vèvè. Cheryl didn’t take her eyes off the smoke. She thought she saw a humanoid face there, but she dismissed it as her overactive imagination.
The smoke now slowly danced around her head, veiling her vision with a shade of pink. And then, just as Cheryl inhaled, the smoke violently entered her nose and her mouth. She felt a burning sensation sliding up her nostrils and through her sinuses, rushing all the way down her throat until it reached her chest.
She felt the urge to cough violently, but she suddenly realized that she no longer had any control of her body. She started shaking violently.
And then, there was nothing.
Chapter 32
Fabiola watched as the pink, odorless smoke entered Cheryl’s mouth and nose. The girl gagged momentarily and then froze. She started convulsing, first slightly, and then it turned into epileptical-like shaking. Cheryl threw her head back, and the convulsing stopped.
She was frozen for a moment before jerking her head forward. She looked around the room in confusion, mouth slightly agape, shoulders relaxed. Her eyes locked with Fabiola’s, and the mambo knew that she was no longer staring at Cheryl, but at Ezili Freda.
“Thank you for answering my call, Ezili Freda,” Fabiola said. “You are even more beautiful than the last time we met.”
Cheryl’s mouth morphed into a brusque smile. Her eyes fell on the vèvè and the gifts in front of it, and her face lit up with fascination.
“Oh!” she uttered as she reached for the emerald-decorated ring.
She put the ring on her finger and outstretched her arm in front of herself, admiring how her hand looked with the ring on it. Fabiola noticed a drastic change in Cheryl’s facial expressions and body language.
Fabiola had met Ezili Freda a few times in the past, and although she didn’t like dealing with this particular loa due to her high-maintenance nature, Fabiola found that she was the best fit for Cheryl. Had it been Jill who decided to be possessed, then invoking Ezili Danto would have worked better.
The first time Fabiola witnessed the drumming ritual, she was only six years old and had found it bizarre. People were dancing and singing to sounds of drums, until one of the young male dancers began convulsing. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, and his dancing drastically changed. He got on the floor and started slithering like a snake—and he did it with such finesse!
Fabiola had thought originally that he was just faking it, but after some time, the young dancer lost consciousness. When he woke up, he claimed he had no recollection of what happened. Fabiola remained unconvinced, but continued practicing Vodou as per her parents’ request.
At the age of thirteen, she experienced being the chwal—or horse—for the first time. She remembered dancing to the drum beat, and the next thing she knew, she woke up on the floor, with people cheering and praising her. She learned later that the loa they summoned was Ayizan, and they even showed her the video of her dancing. Sure enough, it couldn’t have been her because the dancing was much more complex and elegant; something she had never learned in her everyday life.
She became more interested in Vodou after that, and went on to become an initiate, until she finally climbed to the rank of mambo. By that time, she had decided to move to America for a more prosperous future—something Papa Legba told her to do during one of her services to him.
Cheryl placed more rings on her fingers and admired her decorated hand from various angles, grinning at the shiny objects. Fabiola patiently waited until the loa got bored with the jewelry and moved on to the lipstick. Fabiola held up a small mirror in front of Ezili Freda as she watched her put on the lipstick.
She pouted and pursed her lips, swiveling her head left and right, examining how the colors looked from various angles.
“You look so beautiful, Ezili Freda. I admire your beauty,” Fabiola praised.
She had to flatter Ezili Freda. She was one of the more demanding loa who didn’t go for simple gifts—like Papa Legba, who simply preferred roasted corn and tobacco for his pipe. No, Ezili Freda preferred flattery and expensive gifts, and she was also known for being jealous. That’s why Fabiola always advised men who wanted to invoke her to never speak about their partners, or have any evidence of a potential partner in the room when summoning her.
Ezili Freda took the mirror from Fabiola and admired her own reflection. She giggled from time to time, something that looked so unnatural for Cheryl, despite the fact that Fabiola had only known her for a very short time.
“You are really beautiful, Ezili Freda. You are the most beautiful loa,” Fabiola repeated.
Fabiola hoped that Cheryl would be able to find her mom in the crossroads soon, because all of this flattering was making her cringe.
Chapter 33
It couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds since everything had gone dark. One moment, Cheryl was in the room with Fabiola, the pink smoke swirling around her, and in the next, she was standing outside somewhere, surrounded by a thick fog.
She carefully observed the area surrounding her. She was standing on a beaten-down dirt path, except it seemed like it was more than just a path. It was quite wide, at least as far as the part unobscured by the fog stretched. The ground was flat, giving it a feeling of a large dirt street, rather than a naturally formed pathway.
It was night, or so Cheryl thought. Everything around her was dark, but not too dark. It was as if she were standing under a starless sky, and yet some sort of light similar to moonlight came from somewhere.
“Fabiola?” Cheryl called out, her voice barely audible in the air.
There was no response. Of course not. What did she expect? To hear Fabiola’s voice booming from somewhere like a celestial entity, guiding her through the crossroads? No, she was on her own here.
But what should she do? Wherever she turned, there was nothing but fog. In her mind, she repeatedly chanted the sentence that Fabiola told her, if only to avoid forgetting the words. The fact that she could use that as her ticket out of here gave her a sense of assurance. Besides, could something bad really happen to her at the crossroads? She wasn’t physically here, right?
Just then, she saw a signpost, barely visible through the fog. It was pointing in one direction down the path, but whatever had been written on the wooden board was so badly scratched up that the letters were indiscernible.
Cheryl spun around once more, making sure to stay somewhat close to the signpost out of fear of losing sight of it. There was nothing else around. Cheryl didn’t want to move. What if she walked into the fog, following where the old signpost was pointing, and ended up lost forever? Fabiola told her not to go into unfamiliar areas, and Cheryl assumed that the crossroads were vast.
She continuously spun around in circles, and when she realized that there was absolutely nothing else that she might have missed, decided that following the signpost was her only option. She took a deep breath and broke into a gai
t forward.
Almost as soon as she did, the fog began dispersing—ever so slightly. It retreated enough for Cheryl to see just how wide the road was—and it was surprisingly much narrower than she had originally thought. It stretched about eight feet in width before revealing walls that cordoned off the path on either side.
No, not walls. Houses. Old, dilapidated makeshift structures slapped together from wood, mud, and rusted metal, made in a way that they provided shelter from the elements, but not looking fit for living inside them.
She wasn’t on a trail; she was on a street.
The alleyways between the houses were filled with an even thicker fog, and Cheryl did her best to stay in the center of the street to avoid those creepy alleys as much as possible. The fog was still somewhat thick ahead of her, but she was now able to see at least ten feet ahead.
Cheryl had no idea how long she walked for—it could have been five minutes or fifteen minutes—when she saw the outlines of figures not far ahead. She stopped dead in her tracks and held her breath.
There were three of them, and they stood close to each other, in the middle of the road. From here, they looked like their backs were hunched over and they faced away from her. Cheryl continued staring, but no movement came from them. Maybe they weren’t figures at all, but some sort of statues?
Tentatively, she continued walking forward, not taking her eyes off the figures. As the fog retreated forward, she suddenly realized that there were many more than three of them. She watched as dozens of them appeared all over the street, some standing in the middle of the dirt road, others farther back near the houses, and she saw a number of them in the dark alleyways.
Cheryl observed the figure closest to her, which was only a few feet in front of her. It was a gaunt, cadaverous man with bones protruding tightly against his skin at every spot on his body. His head slumped forward in a droopy facial expression, his back kyphotically hunched forward, his arms lamely dangling at his sides. His knees were slightly bent, looking as if they would barely be able to withhold the weight of his own body. He wore some kind of tattered, dirtied robes that looked like they may have come from the middle ages.
Cheryl walked around the figure in a wide arc to the right, but kept her eyes fixated on it. She wondered if all these beings were imitations of humans or something more macabre—maybe a husk of a human long since gone. She looked forward at the army of statues—
A moan to Cheryl’s left caused her to jump. She jerked her head towards it, eyes wide, heart leaping into her throat.
The gaunt man had moved!
Cheryl clasped her hands over her mouth, suppressing a terrified scream. The man slowly raised his head and raspily moaned once more, before letting it droop back down again. It was as if he barely had the strength to lift his head, even for that brief moment.
As if on cue, Cheryl saw the other figures on the street moving, too. How had she not seen it before?
Most of them stood still, with their heads, or one limb, occasionally moving briefly, in a near-futile manner. Some of them were shambling down the street or aimlessly walking in circles. Not all of them were as decrepit as the first figure Cheryl had laid her eyes upon. In fact, most of them simply looked tired. They had tortured expressions on their faces, their backs concaved forward, and they dragged their feet on the ground. A small number of them, however, looked like they had retained a lot of their energy—they rocked back and forth like junkies, their eyes darting in various directions with terrified stares, and some even muttered incoherent words.
The longer Cheryl stood in the middle of the street, though, the more she started to realize how harmless they actually were. One of the figures saw her—she was sure of it because its eyes met hers—and yet, it just continued wallowing in its own misery, whatever that misery was in this case.
Were these the dead that Fabiola warned her to stay away from? Have they been stuck here for so long that they became mere shells of their former selves? Is this what would happen to her, too?
Is this what was happening to Mom right now?
Cheryl pushed those questions away and looked ahead for the best route to avoid touching the people. They were densely converged in one spot, and Cheryl knew there was no way to circumvent them. She looked back and saw the foggy road, but to her amazement, the houses she passed by earlier had been swallowed up in a dense fog.
She could only go forward, and she would need to navigate around and sidle between the figures to make her way ahead. Without stalling any further, she started walking slowly forward.
At first, it was easy. All she needed to do was avoid the figures in a wide arc. But pretty soon, she got to the densely packed area, and she had to stop to examine where the widest gap was. She found one a few feet to the right—a narrow, two-foot-long gap between a young woman and an elderly man.
She sidled between them, step by step, holding her breath in the process. She flinched and stopped when the woman snorted, but once she was sure that she was safe, she continued walking sideways.
From there, Cheryl had to navigate in semicircles, eventually breaking away from the crowded area and continuing down the road. The number of people here was much sparser, but Cheryl still had to detour around them by getting close to one of the dark alleys. She did her best not to step close to it until she saw the silhouette of an elderly black man peeking from the fog, staring right at her. Cheryl quickly moved her gaze away and broke into a trot to get past the alleyway as soon as possible.
But then, the man spoke up with a heavily accented voice, “Pst. Child. Over here.”
It came out as ‘Ovah heah’. Cheryl jerked her head towards him. She could now see the man’s features a little more clearly. Although it was obscured by the darkness, Cheryl saw the creases and wrinkles that decorated his old face.
“Yes, you!” the man called out, when he realized that he had Cheryl’s attention.
“What do you want?” Cheryl timorously asked before realizing that she probably shouldn’t have spoken to the man at all.
He must be one of the dead, and Fabiola warned Cheryl to ignore them.
“Come closer, child.”
Kom closah, child.
His accent sounded African, Cheryl thought.
“No. You can tell me what you want from there,” she shook her head.
The man grinned, showing yellow teeth under pink gums. The fog somehow seemed to have cleared away, further revealing his form. Cheryl noticed an old straw hat on his head and a bushy beard that went nearly down to his stomach. He was wearing a cape of some sort, and under it, a shirt and pants. He was barefoot, sitting on an old barrel, holding a pipe in his hand.
“You are new here, are you not?” he asked.
“No. I’m not gonna stay here long,” Cheryl said.
The old man threw his head back and cackled. This unnerved Cheryl. Once he was done laughing, he looked back at Cheryl and asked, “Say, child. You wouldn’t happen to have some tobacco, would you?”
“No,” Cheryl retorted.
She wished that the situation was less dreadful, so that she could give him a more ironic answer.
I don’t go around carrying tobacco in my pockets when traveling to other dimensions, sorry.
The old man simply nodded with a disappointed look on his face.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You are looking for your mother, yes?”
That caught Cheryl’s attention.
“Yes! How do you know?!” she almost took a step forward, before remembering not to approach the dark areas.
The man shrugged.
“I always recognize new faces.”
“Tell me how to find her,” Cheryl demanded.
She did her best not to sound too desperate. She didn’t want the man to think that he had her wrapped around his finger.
“If you want to find your mother, all you need to do is look, child,” he said.
He put the pipe in his mouth and pointed to Cheryl’s right, even tho
ugh he couldn’t see the street from here. Cheryl followed his finger, and her eyes widened when she saw it.
The fog cleared up in one area, and Mom’s house emerged a bit further down the street, incongruously towering above the slums surrounding it. Cheryl looked at the old man, wanting to express gratitude, but had no idea what to say. The man had a smirk on his face.
“Go on, child. But be warned. You might not like what you find.”
Cheryl nodded to him and, without a word, broke into a jog towards the house. That was the place she needed to visit, no doubt about it. She didn’t even care about the figures on the streets anymore. She narrowly avoided them—and once even brushed one with her shoulder—but continued running until she reached the house.
Once she was in front of it, she spent a moment in awe. It looked so strange to see it out here on this desolate road, surrounded by the other unfamiliar structures. There was no green lawn, no driveway, no paved walkway leading up and down the street. It was as if a giant crane had picked up the house and moved it here.
Cheryl climbed the steps of the porch and stopped in front of the door. What should she do? Knock? Go inside? Ring the doorbell? Suddenly, she felt something akin to dread building up inside her. It was a feeling that only intensified the closer she got to the house.
Something told her that no matter how she entered, the evil inside—whatever it was—would be alerted to her presence, and it wouldn’t matter if she was stealthy or loud.
Without delaying any further than necessary, Cheryl grabbed the doorknob, twisted it, and firmly pushed the door open, ominously revealing the darkened interior.
Chapter 34
“Lee, make sure he’s strapped in tightly!” Jill shouted.
She was standing next to a tree where the zip-line ended. The park was brimming with excited voices of both adults and children who had come for a zip-line adventure. There were various zip-lining challenges people could take, with some of them being as high as fifty feet, and going down in an almost vertical slant.