Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire

by Slay (epub)

  Florence winced as the girl missed a step, but wasn’t paying the attention she should have.

  “What did happen to Ruby, Mamma? Did you find out?”

  “Weren’t no accident, sorry to say. Trouble with a man.” Which was as much truth as was wise, for now. “Reckon I’ll see to it, if the Good Lord pleases.”

  “The police –”

  “Ain’t fit for this one. You needs be trustin’ me, girl. Cain’t send babes to harness an ox.”

  “If money would help...”

  Maybe Florence thought that a few dollars passed here and there would flush out a killer; maybe she thought that there were people to pay off. This wasn’t that kind of game. Mamma Lucy needed sleep – Florence Garvey needed sleep – and then there was work to be done...

  Finding a blood-walker came easy compared to dealing with one, but Mamma Lucy set to it early the next day, while steam was still blowing up into the crisp morning air, and some of Harlem’s parties were only just winding down.

  The smart set were good with idle talk and slander, but low on truths. Mamma Lucy didn’t need to be adding to that talk, and besides, she wanted word from those who knew fact from fiction. So, she walked, the soles of her feet learning the sidewalks and the cramped backyards.

  No use asking if there were strangers in Harlem – plenty of those – but she wanted to know about Ruby. Had they seen her with a particular man this last week? Had she danced her way into any scene she shouldn’t have?

  The boys who worked the numbers games and the reefer-men could have claimed ignorance, but they didn’t want to cross a two-headed woman. A runner thought that Ruby had been out on 130th a few nights ago, with some feller he didn’t recognize, and suggested a further name or two, which led the conjure-woman in turn to Gold-Tooth Benny.

  Sure, said the sharp-dressed reefer man, he’d seen Ruby, walking out with a man new enough to be watched, because money flowed around him. Borrowed a hundred dollars from Whitey Crabbe, paid it back twice the following day. Where that came from, no one knew. Craps, maybe, with the Italians, or the sort of poker games you didn’t always walk away from.

  “What kinda feller was he?” asked Lucy.

  “The kind that doan pay no dollar for a reefer, no sir. If he usin’, he ridin’ on white powder, y’gets me? High-steppin’’ like he came from Sugar Hill.”

  “He have friends?”

  Gold-tooth shook his head. “Lawd, ain’t nobody here like anythin’ ‘bout him ‘cept them deep pockets. Face all sharp and hungered, like a hound what ain’t been fed. They said he wuz called Mister Ephraim Wilson.”

  Mamma Lucy got back to the Ivory around midnight and told all she’d learned to Florence Garvey. The owner of the Ivory bowed her head, then rounded up some of her own boys and told them to go sniffing.

  The conjure-woman dressed a charcoal stick and wrote ‘Ephraim Wilson’ three times on an egg. When she cracked the egg, the yolk was black, stinking like it had been laid a year before.

  Blood-walker.

  Gina Salierno, nineteen years old and the sister of a small-time bootlegger, turned up dead early on Saturday afternoon, by the Third Avenue Bridge. The girl looked gray and drained; half her throat was gone, and no blade would have done that sort of ragged damage. ‘Animal attack’, said the puzzled cops, who confessed at the same time that there was surprisingly little blood. Gina’s many cousins went out hunting a street mongrel that had gone rabid.

  They didn’t find one.

  When word of this got to the Ivory, via a Salierno boy who’d come in to drink his way through the bar, Mamma Lucy had that itch in her shoulders like it was a fever. This time the blood-walker hadn’t made the least effort to cover up his work.

  That didn’t feel good.

  “Your sister, Lord bless her soul, been different these last few days?” she asked, standing by the cubicle where the young man was sinking bootleg brandy. He looked up at the grizzled black woman in the faded dress, puzzled. He was drunk, but not too drunk.

  “Why you ask, nonna?”

  She might as well be blunt.

  “She ain’t the first, poor girl.” The conjure-woman recalled a word spoken on a riverboat, years before. It was as good as any for now. “Got us a jettatore in town, and I’m aimin’ to see him out o’ here.”

  The mention of the evil eye knocked a couple of brandies out of him.

  “Diversa, sì. Different. She is strange, not well, since she walks with a man we do not know.” He looked around at the clientele of the Ivory, maybe half of the patrons Black, and struggled for words. “This uomo nero, he is too fancy for her but, nonna, you say there was no dog?”

  “No dog. Jess one real bad feller.”

  The Salierno boy crossed himself; the conjure-woman left him to mourn.

  As the day wore on, Florence’s boys came back in ones and twos.

  Some had nothing, others had been more lucky. A Mister Wilson, seen at the Savoy ballroom with two girls playing nice to him; a man who fitted the description Gold-tooth gave, losing heavy then winning better at craps behind the Lafayette. Ruby Jones had been behind him, champagne in her glass. That would have been the night before Ruby died.

  Mamma Lucy had no doubts now. Other girls would soon be found like Ruby Jones and Gina Salierno if she didn’t push her game. For that matter, there might already be other victims, ones that no one had found yet...

  Settling a borrowed hat over her stiff gray hair, she slipped out of the Ivory’s discreet back entrance. Ten minutes easy walk found the spot.

  To most, this was Mount Morris Park; to Mamma Lucy and those who remembered older ways, it was the Hill of Snakes, Slang Berg as the Dutch had called it. It lay across Fifth Avenue, and marked an intersection of many ways, a grand crossroads in its own right.

  The park gates opened for her, because they knew her; the empty paths guided her to the rocky berg itself. Bare-headed now, she set down her carpet-bag and waited, an old black woman alone in the half-dark.

  One of many churches somewhere distant called out nine of the clock; mice rustled under damp leaves… and a figure appeared in the shadow of an ancient osage orange. He stood there in his dusty suit before the bulk of Slang Berg. He was taller than trees, shorter than mountains. He was whatever he wanted to be, but it never impressed her.

  “Took your time,” she said, with a touch of irritation.

  “Time I got.”

  “So you says. Now tell me something useful.”

  The Dark Man nodded polite, sucking on a corn-cob pipe, straw hat at an angle, but said nothing. Lucy sighed.

  “Got me a blood-walker.”

  The Dark Man took his pipe from his mouth.

  “You talking obayifo? Or one of them firefly fellows, flitting every which way?”

  “Ain’t none of them,” said Mamma Lucy. “Would have seed that, plain. Reckon he’s born from this new America. The years go by, and the rules are changin’, Lord help us.”

  The figure came out into the moonlight.

  “Used to come easy, waiting for the women to listen, carrying jars upon their heads and hoping for secrets and good words. Sorghum beer they brought me, and wild honeycomb.” A crooked cane appeared in his left hand, and he sketched two lines crossing in the grass. “Too many crossroads these days, all tasting of this here gasoline.”

  The conjure-woman became aware for a moment of the traffic in the city all around them.

  “That ain’t news,” she snapped, “And you said it all afore. Tell me plain, what’s the play with his sort?”

  The Dark Man twirled his stick, pacing. As he did so, he lifted his head and drew in the night air. She thought that for a second she saw surprise on his dark, wrinkled face. “He’s no yearling, this one. Stacked up his strength for longer than you’ve been around, I’d say.”

  Mamma Lucy bit at her lower lip. “It’s reg’lar known that I walks where you sends me, often enough. Sure you gotten it right this time, settin’ me to figure this one?�
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  The Dark Man had the trees shiver, and the wind cut cold across the grass; the conjure-woman paid it no heed.

  “You blowin’ here and there, like you fit to be teachin’ someone a lesson,” she said. “But you ain’t the one layin’ tricks, nor liftin’ no jinxes. Ain’t your feet get sore, so don’t you go showin’ off to me.”

  Slang Berg fell quiet.

  “You’re an ornery woman.” His voice was low, even amused.

  “Ain’t that the truth. Care to give an ornery woman a helpin’ hand?”

  “Got me business in Alabama,” he said. “But you always my favorite, Mamma.”

  And so he came closer, whispering secrets, secrets from many places, even from back when his people minded the crossroads under iroko, palm and dogoyaro, and knew him well.

  When he’d done, he gleamed her a smile.

  “You be taking care, Mamma...”

  At which he lifted his straw hat – and was there no more. The osage orange settled, and long-dead snakes curled up hard in their burrows, for power had passed by them.

  Ruby had been laid to rest already, paid for by Florence Garvey. A handful of grave dirt would have to be the link to her killer. Better, thought the conjure-woman, if she’d been able to place an egg in the dead girl’s hand, to draw the man out, but she was too old to go digging folk up.

  She didn’t much like working goofer dust, but this wasn’t a time to be picky. Here she had what some would call a vampire, though she didn’t believe in such, not as that Stoker feller had it. The conjure-woman had her letters, reading plenty when she fancied – and Dracula had made her chuckle, stomach-deep. Lords and ladies, all so proper, and that Carpathian feller making such a fuss to get to England, like there weren’t enough throats in Italy or Germany. Sure as Moses she wouldn’t have had herself boxed up and shipped, like to be sunk somewhere along the way. Dang fool thing to do.

  Blood-walkers, though, they’d been around some, and they were trouble. Sucking out the soul bit by bit, drinking blood, or chewing on the meat – whichever variety they were, it all came down to stealing life that wasn’t yours. Too late for Ruby Jones, but not too late for someone to pay a price.

  She took up the grave dirt herself, from close by Ruby’s head, when the handful of mourners left. The minister gave her a glance as he put his book away, but his lips stayed tight shut.

  The speakeasy wasn’t suited to real conjure work – minds whirling around her, and people up and down, in and out, all the time – so she settled at the back of Lily’s Chicken Shack round the corner from the Ivory. Lily was God-fearing and righteous, and it only took a psalm or two to convince her that Mamma Lucy did the Lord’s work, in her own way.

  “Don’t hold with no Catholics, mind,” said the fat, flour-coated owner as she mixed herbs into her ‘special coating’. “And don’t you go noticin’ jess what I puts in here!”

  Reassured, Lily left the conjure-woman alone in the back with the sacks of flour and jars of spices. Plucked chickens hung from the beams, waiting to be jointed for the evening crowds.

  Mamma Lucy passed a raw egg over and around her awkward, long-limbed body, put the egg aside to be buried later, and hunkering down by her open carpet bag, she set to work.

  Took her a quarter hour to have the candles dressed and set right, lit around her; less time to find and mix what she needed. Her trusty lodestone was the key. She unwrapped it, and fed its polished surface with iron filings, powdered lilac, and dirt from Ruby’s mean plot.

  “He be comin’ here, by and by,

  He be drawn to this one,

  ‘Cause St Michael says so;

  He be drawn to this one,

  ‘Cause the Good Lord says so.”

  She took a mouthful of whiskey and spat nine times, before snuffing out the big black candle, then the others. Death he’d know, and the rest he’d learn.

  “He be coming here, by and by.”

  The lodestone went into her dress pocket, her mojo bag hung separate between her breasts, and she was done. The blood-walker would find her now, and she didn’t need to be around other folk for that. She thought of cragged hill and trees – and as she did so a glimmer of a new idea twitched her left eye round in its socket. A better place than some if she could handle certain things right.

  Mamma Lucy waited quiet in Mount Morris Park, letting the evening take its time. She waited with her lean behind set firm on the stone steps, halfway up the hill and the old fire-tower looming at her back. Every half hour she dressed the lodestone, and she knew that it was calling..

  When at last the blood-walker came, he came fast, shifting between trees with a jerk and a rush. She watched him shift ever closer from one bush or tree to another, closer and closer to where she sat. Moon and a handful of stars showed his face – feral, aching for something, and also puzzled. It was clear he didn’t know why he’d been drawn here.

  Then he saw her.

  “Mister Ephraim Wilson.” She spoke clear, without looking directly at him. “You done wrong, and you done worse playin’ your game with me around.”

  He straightened, presenting everything that might be called a cultured gentleman, if you didn’t know better. A stick-pin with a diamond shine, wide lapels well-pressed, and polished two-tone brogues. His eyes were narrow, dark.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, lady.”

  “Most folk call me Mamma Lucy.”

  He smiled, a wet smile. “And what do the others call you, pray?”

  “They ain’t around no more.” She stood up. “You killed a girl called Ruby Jones. More besides, but it’s her we’re talkin’ ‘bout this night.”

  The blood-walker twisted his head around as if to spot any trap.

  “I feed where I must. The names don’t mean a lot.”

  “A dancin’ girl from the Ivory Club. You took her to the backroom of the Lafayette, three nights back.”

  At that he nodded. “She was hungry; so was I. Turned out we wanted different things.”

  The conjure-woman came down a step.

  “I got a question, afore I lay you. How come there’s a blood-walker in Harlem?”

  He laughed, a scratch of nails against ribs.

  “How come there aren’t more? Mamma, this is as close to blood as you can get, here. You could lap it from the streets, some nights. As for ‘blood-walker’, well my, my, that’s so old school. This is the You-nited States, the nineteen twenties. They call us vampires now, and those sweet girls clench their thighs when we come calling.”

  He faked a lunge towards her; she stood steady, her big feet firm on the concrete steps.

  That laugh again. “Well, you called me here, though I couldn’t say how. I guess you’re some kind of voodoo lady, wishing she was Marie Laveau. Trying your luck, maybe; setting a few tricks out and hoping I was less than you feared?”

  “Ain’t no witch, ain’t never feared no blood-walker.”

  He bowed to her. “Brave, but stupid. You got a blade – won’t kill me. You got a gun in that bag – won’t do it. And don’t get me started on crosses and silver. New World, new ways.”

  She turned her head, and the moonlight caught her milk-and-honey eye, glinting, restless in her heavy skull. When he saw that, his brow furrowed; his black lips drew back to show off his sharp, perfect teeth. His canines, she noticed, were like any other man’s. Another strike for Mister Stoker.

  “Don’t think I like you, old lady.” His tone had changed under her wild eye; he jerked, shifted, and suddenly he was ten feet closer to the bottom of the steps.

  “Didn’t reckon you would, boy. Seems that you ain’t never met real hoodoo.” She pointed up to the fire tower, gaunt steel frame against the stars. Lights flickered between the girders, tiny, wavering. “Ain’t no matter what you doin’ to me now. Got me some serious jinxin’ going on up there, an’ when those candles finished, you’re gone like hog dirt off a new boot...”

  He moved then, faster than before, faster than a cat meeting a
kettle of water. Past her, up the crags; onto the summit. She saw his narrow frame cross the tower, pinching out candles or flinging them wide.

  “Should’a had me one of them fancy psy-chology degrees they handin’ out these days,” she murmured, and reached into her carpet bag for the real conjure. A rattlesnake skin, damp with lilac oil and whiskey, brushed with goofer dust and roots.

  She showed the skin plain to the four corners of this world, to the seventeen quarters of heaven. And then she took out a dollar bill, donated by a player at the Lafayette. Ephraim Wilson had handled it, the night before he killed Ruby Jones.

  “You ain’t the only thing can bite, Mister Wilson,” she said, and pushed the crumpled bill into the open head of the skin.

  Snake Hill they rightly named it, when the Dutch found every crack and cranny filled with crawling things. Shrub and grassland below, ripe with small critters on which to feed; warm rock on which to catch the sun, and all the hiding places a snake could wish for. Ten, twenty, a hundred generations of those crawling folk, and enough memory to take down a herd of cattle.

  “Maybe you all done wrong once, back when Adam was a fool.” Mamma Lucy’s voice echoed across Mount Morris Park. “But now’s your chance to set things a mite straighter.”

  They answered. Rustle and slither; the hiss of history.

  Her rattlesnake mojo tight in her hand, she sang an old psalm, and watched as the last candle went out at the top of the hill. As it did so, Ephraim Wilson turned to come down, ready to finish his business with a two-headed woman.

  He didn’t get far.

  The haints of those serpents were strange things. They offered no blood to strengthen him, nor anything firm to set his nails or teeth into. They struck deeper than skin, deeper than bone, maybe right into the wrong and the wickedness off him. The Dark Man sowed a seedling of an idea; Mamma Lucy made it truth.

  On the top of Slang Berg, a blood-walker shrieked and danced, bit on so hard he couldn’t think; bit on so hard he couldn’t run.

  Bit on so hard he couldn’t be.

  There came a shout or three from outside the park, and a police whistle split the breeze. It didn’t matter now. Whoever came would find an old black woman sipping a flask of whiskey, a carpet bag, and a few snuffed candles in the bushes. There’d be nothing up there by the fire tower but scraps and dust on trampled dirt.