“What’s that?” asked Jim.
“One of your class will suddenly remember that he saw Tee Jay at the very time that he was supposed to be stabbing Elvin Clay.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“He saw him smoking behind the science block, that’s what I mean.”
“But the cops have talked to every student in the school. Nobody saw him doing that.”
Uncle Umber tapped his forehead with a long, dry finger. “They will, Mr Rook. They will.” He held out his hand in front of his face, palm uppermost, and gently blew. “All you have to is to puff a little dust their way, Mr Rook, and they will remember anything you want them to remember, forever. Polygraph proof.”
He beckoned Jim toward his apartment. Inside, it smelled even more strongly of incense, and Jim sneezed three times before he could go any further. There was a dark hallway, its window shuttered, its walls painted oxblood red. Three skulls were hung in a triangle. They had twisted horns and pointed noses, and they were probably nothing more bizarre than oryx, but Jim was beginning to think that anything was possible. Standing in one corner, half-hidden by the thick black velvet drapes, was an ebony statue of a beautiful naked woman with the head of a snarling dog.
Uncle Umber led Jim into a large living-room, whose walls were entirely lined with black-and-red fabric. It was furnished with two leather sofas the colour of clotted blood, a black carpet, and a huge coffee-table strewn with books and magazines and strings of beads and all kinds of other bizarre detritus, such as bones and feathers and wedding-veils. One side of the room was taken up with charts and diagrams and something that looked like an astrological map, although it was covered with drawings of scorpions and beetles and oddly-deformed children.
In the opposite corner stood a wooden carving of seven naked men, all joined together with the same long spear.
Jim said, “I’ve seen that before.”
Uncle Umber looked at him in surprise. “You’ve seen the piercing ceremony? Where?”
“I mean I’ve seen the same image. Tee Jay drew it in his art lesson.”
“Tee Jay is very expressive, Mr Rook. Very creative. He is also very proud. He finds it difficult to do what he’s told.”
“There are times, Mr Jones, when, for the common good, everybody has to do what they’re told.”
Uncle Umber went across to a small antique desk, pulled open the drawer, and rummaged around inside. A few moments later, he reappeared, carrying a small linen bag tied with thin black string and sealed with black sealing-wax. He grinned, and held up the bag between finger and thumb, and shook it. “Do you know what this is? This is memory powder, the people in Dahomey used to call it loa powder, because they thought it was made by the lesser spirits, so that they could see Vodun.”
“Vodun?”
“That’s right, Mr Rook. Vodun, the greatest god in Dahomey Fon folk belief. It was after Vodun that voodoo was named.”
He held it out and Jim took it. He sniffed it, and it had the strangest smell, a smell that reminded him of dreams and drying grass and some long-lost flickering picture of his mother, turning around in front of a sunlit window to say—
He looked up, and Uncle Umber was smiling at him. “Memory powder,” said Uncle Umber. “But you never know if the memories are true; or if they’re false. I could give you a memory with memory powder, and even a lie-detector wouldn’t be able to show if you were telling the truth.”
“So what am I supposed to do with this?”
“It’s very easy, Mr Rook. All you have to do is to blow the powder over one of your students, and then tell him or her that – why, didn’t they see Tee Jay smoking behind the science block at the time when he was supposed to be stabbing his friend?”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it, Mr Rook. The memory powder will do the rest.”
Jim offered him the bag back. “I can’t do anything like that, Mr Jones. All of my students are my own personal responsibility. If any one of them should come to any harm—”
Uncle Umber flared his nostrils. “Don’t try to be pious with me, Mr Rook. You promised that you were going to be my friend. Unless you do this thing, your class will suffer a tragedy like nothing they have ever experienced before.”
“Listen, Mr Jones, if you touch any one of them—”
“You’ll do what, Mr Rook? You’ll kill me, and spend the rest of your life in jail? You said you came here for Tee Jay’s sake, didn’t you? This is for Tee Jay’s sake.”
Jim said, “If Tee Jay wasn’t smoking behind the science block, then where was he? If he didn’t have anything to do with Elvin’s death, then why do you have to cook up this cockamamie alibi?”
“You don’t understand. Tee Jay had to be there when Elvin died, to see.”
“You mean he was in the boiler-house, after all? He stood there and watched you cut Elvin to pieces? You’re sick, Mr Jones. You’re very, very sick.”
“I’m just keeping the lamps lit, Mr Rook. Far more terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity.”
Jim said, “Forget it. I’m not going to poison any of my students. No way.”
Uncle Umber gave him another grin. “Then try it on yourself first. Go home, and tell yourself one thing that never happened to you, and then sniff a pinch of the powder, and see what happens. It won’t kill you, I promise. It’s only made of roots and hair and ground-up bones. I wouldn’t hurt you, Mr Rook. Like I said to you before, I need a friend.”
Jim looked Uncle Umber in the eyes, trying to challenge him, trying to show him that he couldn’t play with children’s lives. But there was no feeling at all in Uncle Umber’s eyes, nothing but cold-blooded indifference, that in the end he had to turn away.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it. But only for Tee Jay’s sake. And when Tee Jay’s free, I want you to send him home to his family, where he belongs.”
“Tee Jay will only go where he wants to go, Mr Rook. He’s an independent spirit.”
Jim had hardly been home five minutes when there was a knock on the door and Mrs Vaizey came in, wearing a wide floppy straw hat, a pink bikini with a lobster motif on it, and a white nylon cardigan. “Jim! I was hoping to catch you!”
He quickly opened one of the kitchen cupboards, took down the china jar in which he usually kept his snipped-out shopping premiums, and dropped the bag of memory powder into it. He didn’t want Mrs Vaizey to get wind of what he was doing. “How’re you doing, Mrs Vaizey? Haven’t run out of bourbon, have you?”
“No – no – nothing like that, sugar. I’ve been doing a little research today, on your behalf, and I’ve found out some very interesting things.”
“Oh, yes?” said Jim. He went to the fridge, took out a can of Coors and popped the top, noisily sucking up the froth.
“How long have you had that cheese?” asked Mrs Vaizey, peering into the dairy shelf. “It looks like it’s ready to run the 200 metres.”
“It’s gorgonzola, Mrs Vaizey. It’s supposed to look like that. Now what are these very interesting things you found out? I’m kind of bushed.”
“Oh, yes … well, I looked it up in The Occult Review. In the past ten years, there have been fifteen recorded cases of people who claim that they have seen other people when nobody else can – just like you and your man in black.”
“Are these ghosts we’re talking about here?”
“Ohhh, no. Not ghosts. Not ghosts at all. Every one of those manifestations was the image of somebody who was actually living at the time. But here’s the interesting bit: they all emphatically denied being at the locations at the time they were seen.”
Jim thought of Uncle Umber, with his eye-witness evidence that he had been back at home when Elvin was killed. Jim had seen him at the college, and yet all the time he had been back at his apartment near Venice Boulevard. “So what’s your conclusion?” he asked Mrs Vaizey.
“I think my first hunch was absolutely right. The man you saw was having an out-o
f-body experience. His physical body was lying somewhere else, in a state of trance, while his spirit went out walking.”
“I saw him again this morning,” said Jim. “He came to the college and confronted me. He said he wanted me to be his friend.”
“Well, he would. Spirits have only limited powers, outside of the body; and out-of-body experiences are very taxing. If he were to stay out too long, his physical body would be at risk of a stroke or a heart-attack.”
“What I don’t understand is how he can be nothing but a spirit and at the same time be able to hurt people. He was floating on the goddamned ceiling, for God’s sake, and when I tried to push him he just wasn’t there. Yet he cut our security guard’s face, right in front of me; and of course he stabbed Elvin, too.”
Mrs Vaizey said, “Spirits have been known to bruise people. You can wake up in the morning and find purple fingermarks all over your body. They’ve strangled people, too. A force doesn’t have to be visible or touchable to do you harm. You can’t see the wind but it can blow you over. You can’t touch smoke but it can make your eyes water.”
“Smoke … that’s it,” said Jim. “That’s just what Elvin’s sister was talking about. She overheard Elvin and Tee Jay talking about sacrificing a chicken, biting its head off, and they told her to keep quiet about it or else the smoke would get her. Elvin’s father said his grandfather used to give him the same warning, when he was a little boy. If he didn’t behave himself, the smoke would come to get him.”
“It’s not just ‘smoke’,” said Mrs Vaizey. “It’s ‘The Smoke’. It’s what they call out-of-body experiences in Haiti. A man can rise from his body in the night to steal things that he wouldn’t be able to take in his physical form; or to make love to a woman who would never normally let him touch her; or to take revenge on his enemies.”
“Voodoo,” said Jim. “He said so himself.”
“You mean you talked to him?”
Jim nodded. “I talked to him in his spirit form, at the college, and I talked to him in the flesh. He wasn’t difficult to find. He’s Tee Jay’s uncle, his father’s brother, a guy called Umber Jones. He virtually admitted what he’s done; but then there’s absolutely no way of proving it, is there? The guy was at home, and he’s got himself a witness who’s prepared to back him up.”
“And he wants you to be his friend?” asked Mrs Vaizey.
“He’s threatened to hurt some of my students if I don’t.”
“Oh, yes; and he would, too. What does he want you to do?”
“I don’t think I ought to tell you. I don’t want any one of my students put at risk.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t confide in me, Jim.”
Jim shook his head. “I can’t. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to any of those kids.”
Mrs Vaizey pressed her hand over her mouth and stood thinking for well over a minute. Jim stood watching her, feeling as if he had been riding on a rollercoaster all afternoon, shaken and tired and slightly sick.
At last Mrs Vaizey lifted one finger. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said. “It won’t be easy, but I don’t see any alternative.”
“Any alternative to what?” asked Jim.
“Give me a drink,” said Mrs Vaizey, and she waited while Jim poured her the last of the bourbon. She swallowed a large mouthful, and then she ran her tongue around her teeth. “If you want to use The Smoke, you have to have a loa stick, a spirit stick. Every houngan has one, so that he can draw symbols in ashes to summon the spirits. I guess you could say that it’s the voodoo equivalent to a magician’s wand. It has to be carved from a ghost oak, from Western Africa, and it has to be carved from a ghost oak which grows in a cemetery … a tree that’s been nourished on human flesh.
“Without his loa stick, your new friend will still be able to leave his body, as we all can, but he won’t be able to call on the spirits to help him, which means that he won’t have the power to hurt anybody in the physical world.”
“So what do you suggest we do?”
“As I say, there’s no alternative. We have to take it away from him.”
“But how the hell do we do that? We can’t exactly break into his apartment and go rummaging through his closets, can we?”
Mrs Vaizey looked up at him and her expression was deadly serious. “Not in the flesh,” she said. “But we can do as he does, and leave our bodies, and visit him as ghosts.”
Jim said, “Come on, Mrs Vaizey. This is beginning to leave the ground.”
“But it’s true. Everybody can leave their body, if they wish. You did, when you nearly died, and you almost didn’t come back.”
“All right, let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s possible. But even if it’s possible, how do you do it?”
“I’ll teach you, if you like. But you won’t have to, not this time. If you tell me exactly where this Umber Jones man lives, I’ll do it.”
“Is it dangerous? I can’t let you do it if it’s dangerous.”
Mrs Vaizey gave him the briefest flicker of a smile. “Yes, Jim, it’s dangerous. But life is dangerous, and we don’t stay in bed all day, frightened to go out, just in case an airplane falls on our head, or the ground opens up underneath our feet.”
“Look, if there’s any risk at all, I’d rather do it myself.”
“No,” she said, with surprising firmness. “If your friend were to find you when you were out of your body, you wouldn’t stand a chance. You don’t try to do your own wiring, do you? You call an electrician. This is one job that you ought to leave to a professional.”
“Well … if you say so,” said Jim. “But I can’t say that I’m too happy about it. When do you want to do it? Tomorrow maybe?”
“Tonight. Now. The sooner the better.”
Chapter Six
Mrs Vaizey prowled around Jim’s apartment, sniffing the air and rearranging books and ornaments.
“Which way’s east?” she asked.
“Er … that way.”
“East is very important. All evil spirits come from the east. You don’t mind if I use your couch, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then go down to my apartment, go into the kitchen, and open up the left-hand cupboard. You’ll find two brass incense-burners inside, and a pack of incense. Bring them up here, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”
Jim said, “How do you know all of this voodoo stuff? I knew you read horoscopes, but I never realised that you were into black magic, too.”
Mrs Vaizey went over to the couch, picked up a newspaper that was sprawled across it, and rearranged the cushions. “I wasn’t always an old lady living in a low-rent apartment block in Venice, you know. My father used to work for the State Department. I spent most of my girlhood in France and Morocco, and a year-and-a-half in Haiti. We had a Haitian housemaid who taught me all about the loa. There is Legba, who seduces women; and Ogoun Ferraille, who looks after men when they are fighting; and Erzulie, the spirit of purity and love. Then of course there is Baron Samedi, who devours the dead.
“By the way,” Mrs Vaizey admonished him, “you mustn’t call it ‘black magic’. It has some of the same rituals as black magic, like sacrificing chickens. But it’s a mixture of Fon culture and Roman Catholicism, and it has the power of both.”
Jim said, “I’ll go find your incense, okay?”
In less than twenty minutes, his apartment was thick with incense smoke. The only light came from a single table-lamp with a nut-brown shade. Mrs Vaizey was lying full-length on the couch with her eyes closed, her cardigan drawn around her wrinkled brown stomach. She had spread a sheet of newspaper on the rug and drawn a complicated design with white ash that Jim had brought her from the barbecue. “Any ash that has been used to burn flesh will do,” she had told him, and he just hoped that Oscar Mayer wieners counted as flesh.
Now she was muttering a long, droning incantation which seemed to Jim to be a mixture of Latin, French and some other
language which he couldn’t understand. He recognised fragments of it, bits and pieces of the Catholic mass, and something to do with ‘sang impur’, or bad blood, and and ‘la mort et la folie’ – death and madness.
She had allowed Jim to sit and watch her, but she had made him promise not to move and not to say a word. He stayed in his armchair in the darkest corner of the room, while the incense-smoke eddied all around him. He coughed twice, and she opened her eyes and gave him a disapproving look, but it was obvious that she was entering into some kind of a trance, because her pupils were unfocused and her eyelids were trembling. He had opened another can of beer but so far he had left it untouched. Mrs Vaizey’s droning was so hypnotic that he was practically falling into a trancelike state himself.
“Libera nos a malo,” she mumbled. “Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.”
Without warning, it suddenly felt as if the air in Jim’s apartment were under intense pressure. He went momentarily deaf, as if he had closed a car window at high speed. Mrs Vaizey shuddered, and her left hand fell sideways across the couch. Her mouth was open but she had stopped chanting, and her face was the colour of cheap newsprint. She let out a reedy little gasp, and then another one, and then her head dropped back and she looked as if she were dead.
She had warned him about this; but he was anxious, all the same. He got out of his chair and walked across the room and crouched down next to her, taking her hand. Her fingers were very dry and very cold, like a lizard with silver rings around its legs. He felt her pulse and it was so weak that it was barely detectable, but this was another aspect of out-of-body adventures that she had warned him about. “The body can’t live for very long without a soul. That’s what makes humans what they are.”
He hesitated for a second or two, but then he reached his hand over her face and lifted her eyelid. Her pupils were totally white, as if she had suffered a heavy concussion. “Mrs Vaizey?” he said, quietly. Then, louder, “Mrs Vaizey! This is Jim Rook! Can you hear me, Mrs Vaizey?”
Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 8