by Brian Hodge
THE DARKER SAINTS
By Brian Hodge
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2012 by Brian Hodge
Cover by James Powell
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir, over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, Picking The Bones, from 2011, became the first of his books to be honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater as one of the 113 best books of modern horror.
Recent and upcoming works include a lengthy novella, Without Purpose, Without Pity; a collection of crime fiction, No Law Left Unbroken; and an updated hardcover edition of his early post-apocalyptic epic, Dark Advent.
He lives in Colorado, where he’s currently engaged in a locked-cage death match with his next novel and other projects. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Connect with Brian online through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
Book List
Novels
Dark Advent
Deathgrip
Mad Dogs
Nightlife
Oasis
Prototype
The Darker Saints
Wild Horses
World of Hurt
Collections
Falling Idols
Lies & Ugliness
Picking the Bones
The Convulsion Factory
http://www.brianhodge.net
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For Beth Massie; the first decade and counting.
“Rejoice … ten true summers long.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once more, many thanks go to my agent, Lori Perkins, and to Jeanne Cavelos and Tony Gangi of Dell Publishing, for their unrelenting faith and humanity, and other favors great and small.
For various contributions to this novel, thanks to Jeff Hamilton, R.N., C.E.N.; State’s Attorney Gary Duncan; Rex Scott, C.P.A.; Barry Jackson; Allan Laird; Libby Curtin; and Poppy Z. Brite.
Thanks to Angel, Betsey, Dallas, and Lee, just for being their generous selves.
And as always, thanks and love to Doli, Clark and Donna, Wayne, Gerald, Yvonne and Jeff, Kurt and Amy, Bill, and a lot of others who, if by now you don’t know who you are, just ask to make sure.
“What one man does, another can undo.”
— Haitian proverb
THE DARKER SAINTS
Chapter 1
Red Bayou
The shantytown emerged out of a humid dawn, its humble dwellings like tombstones poking up through morning fog.
Finch Webster had humped his Chevy out of New Orleans a few ticks past three o’clock. Weekend anglers could withstand no end of self-abuse. Dorcilus Fonterelle rode shotgun, and in the backseat wavered a bristling clutch of rods and reels and the odd tacklebox or two.
“Watch what you say down here,” Finch told Dorcilus. “They’re so backwards they think the missionary position is a new twist.”
Dorcy just laughed. He did that a lot. Six years in America, fresh off an overcrowded Haitian boatlift, and everything was still a hoot.
Bayou Rouge, what there was of it, brooded, tiny and sullen. Extreme south Louisiana in soggy Terrebonne Parish. Even at dawn, mid-July was a sauna, the air suitable for slicing, thick and heavy with a green-gray scent of decay. Bayou Rouge was a clearing where the swamp had given up, accessible by one chuckholed road paved with crushed oyster shells, and boasting its own zip code to prove membership in the twentieth century. Population fell on the double-digit side of a hundred, plus an untallied assortment of swamp rats living deeper in the bayou, hermits in stilt houses who defined overpopulation as anything more than two people per square mile. Time stood still, an anthropologist’s dream. Finch would wager that at least 95 percent of these Cajuns were descended directly from the area’s original settlers, booted out of Nova Scotia in the late 1700s for refusing to pledge allegiance to the British crown.
Finch saw what looked to serve as the local drinkery, a ramshackle log hovel at a precarious tilt, and wheeled over to park several yards away. He killed the engine and the silence was awesome. Just a droning backcountry lethargy of frogs and insects and the occasional proud rooster.
Finch and Dorcilus eased from the car, muscles in protest, too many miles of too many chuckholes. Finch’s bad knee ached, the left one, and he flexed it a few times to work out the stiffs. He had to piss. Pick a tree, any tree. Cypress and swamp oak lorded over Bayou Rouge like indifferent kings, adorned in robes of Spanish moss.
Finch noticed the look of vague consternation on Dorcilus’s face — bad memories, like a whiff of something foul. “What is it?”
Dorcilus glanced about at the shacks, the small animals trotting here and there. Chickens, piglets, dogs, barely domesticated. The wind shifted and brought with it the more savory aromas of brewing coffee, frying bacon.
“Very much like home was, this is.” Dorcilus had lost little of his accent since immigrating, the Caribbean French lilt. “Too much.”
Finch relieved himself and, with only the faintest limp, was stepping back from behind a tree and zipping up when his eyes grew better accustomed to the gloom in the absence of his headlights. He noticed the scattered shadows. Ones that moved, blinked, toted guns the size of blunderbusses. The welcoming committee. Finch opted for down-home friendly and offered them a big wave. He leaned into his car and laid a toot on the horn. It echoed, rolled through swampland, deeply distressed the balance of nature.
The pub’s door banged open and out grumped a fortyish Cajun. Faded brown pants, white shirt with suspenders, a dark bramble of a beard. He fro
wned painfully at the car and uttered rapid-fire epithets in French. English was a second language down here, and while it was the only one Finch had ever spoken or intended to speak, the meaning was clear indeed: Lay off that horn.
“Sorry.” Finch smiled. “Mr. Duchamp?”
“Which one?” asked the Cajun. It came out in that gumbo-thick accent of theirs, sounded like Wheesh wonn?
“Um … Emile. Emile Duchamp?”
The man nodded, patted his chest. “You done got him.”
“Great. We’re Webster and Fonterelle, from New Orleans. We’re the ones had that recommendation to you for a day’s guide?”
Duchamp nodded, sure, sure you are, most natural thing in the world. He turned toward distant neighbors, who waited in the shadows with patient eyes, hawk-sharp. He waved them off, and only then did they go about their business, their guns lowered to relaxation. Close-knit little hamlet — these were people you did not cross. Brothers’ keepers, one and all.
Duchamp flipped a fingertip through the motley layout of gray and brown houses, toward an opening in the tree line. “Dock’s down that way, boat’s ready to go.”
Dorcilus started pulling gear from the Chevy, and Duchamp smiled, showing teeth as strong and serviceable as a Clydesdale’s. “You boys done come on time, you did, surprise me.”
Finch smiled. Yokel charm was so hard to resist. “Not used to that, are you?”
“Ah, non. City boys, heeee, most ’em don’t even know what sunrise she look like.” He grinned and nodded, motioned they follow him around to the side of the building. The murmur of conversation drifted out from a screened window, along with the scent of sizzling ham and eggs. Finch’s stomach growled envy. The day-old fast-food breakfast biscuits nuked in the microwave before leaving New Orleans suddenly seemed too long ago, too far away.
Duchamp stopped beside an ancient soda bottle machine, one of the flat, water-cooled kind, like some carbonated coffin. A Bubble-Up logo was barely visible through a web of rust, and a fringe of dry weeds sprouted around the base. Duchamp opened the lid to pluck chilled six-packs of beer from brownish water.
“We gone need these.” He winked. “The day, she be a hot bitch today.”
“Bait shrimp,” Dorcilus said. “You still have bait shrimp, as we heard?”
Duchamp raised a collapsible wire mesh cage from the same water, and when spilloff rained on his shirt he couldn’t have cared less. Inside the cage were the biggest shrimp Finch had ever seen, restaurants included. Already peeled, the shrimp went beyond jumbo, as wide as a closed fist with the thumb curled outward for the tail.
Duchamp nodded. “Shrimp. Good ’nough?”
Finch saluted toward his cap brim with one of the rods. “I’d say we’re in business.”
The sun rose, the day sweated on, and Bayou Rouge turned into one monstrous acreage of steaming misery. Duchamp spent most of the time hunkered aft, hand on a trolling motor that kept them growling along the brackish water. Herons and egrets swooped in graceful arcs to skim the surface. The place was a riotous honeycomb of lakes and marshes, streams and swampland, bordered everywhere by woodland so thick that little short of napalm would hack through. Every bit as tangled as Duchamp’s beard, and he knew it just as well.
The hiring of a Cajun guide for the day had made perfect sense, as far as Finch was concerned. Come down here, kill some time, might as well take advantage of local resources. These swamp rats knew just where to drop a hook and line.
After four beers and around forty bites — half of which had been Louisiana’s armor-piercing mosquitoes, penetrating his defense of Off! Spray — Finch decided he couldn’t fish worth a damn. Were it as simple as dropping a line from a cane pole into a hollow where Duchamp pointed, he might have stood a chance. But mastery of rod-and-reel technology eluded him. He thumbed the release too late when casting, sent the baited hook or lure splatting down three feet from the boat. Or too early, and whizzed hooks a hair’s breadth from piercing his earlobe. He jousted futilely with cypress knees, tangled lines into Gordian knots and had to have Duchamp cut him free. He strangled himself when he hooked tree limbs, accidentally freed more than one fish he’d actually managed to catch when the slippery bastards finned him. Fishing — so relaxing, indeed. All the while, Duchamp chuckled with amusement, and Dorcilus reeled in catch after catch as easily as picking them off ice in a fish market.
It was the kind of sour grapes that would make this evening a lot easier.
Finch Webster was suffering the ill effects of a severe identity crisis. Thirty-two years old, third-generation Louisiana born and bred, and still he fit nowhere within the given social designations. He was no Cajun, nor a Creole. Entrenched solidly in the inner city, he was no coon-ass, and too liberal to be a true redneck. Nothing. It hadn’t helped that his forebears had come down early this century from Delaware.
Lately, though, luck seemed to be turning around, a niche opening for him. Things like that happen, you keep in tune with the right streets, patronize the right places, show the proper respect to the proper guys. Fortune had smiled, Lady Luck had hiked her skirt. These men of respect had doled out a few low-level jobs, and Finch had begun trucking loads of contraband out of New Orleans this past year, up to Baton Rouge, to Shreveport. Done a good job, hadn’t fucked up, hadn’t gotten greedy and demanded a bigger slice of pie before sufficiently proving the size of his stones.
A place to call your own, people to call your own. It wasn’t too much to expect out of life.
Take this guy, this Haitian refugee, Dorcilus Fonterelle. Given that shared French ancestry, he likely had more in common with Emile Duchamp than with Finch himself. Weird world. Dorcy shows up six years ago, like a foundling on the United States’ doorstep. He and twelve others, all of whom had no love for Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime in Haiti, had packed onto a sixteen-foot rowboat, managed to dodge the Coast Guard, and washed up days later on a south Florida beach. Two dead, the rest dehydrated and blazed by an angry sun. Dorcilus was the only one to be granted asylum, in that he had somehow proved his life to be in danger from the secret police. The remaining survivors were branded economic refugees and deported back home, and Dorcilus Fonterelle migrated northwest to New Orleans. A factory worker, now living the American dream at three hundred a month for rent.
Luck of the draw, Finch supposed, that they had ended up living in the same apartment building. He’d palled around with Dorcy two, three times even before he was getting paid to do it. Do the Bourbon Street crawl, hit a few strip shows. The baser instincts could provide a bridge between even the most disparate backgrounds.
Finch liked him. Honestly.
But a job was a job.
By evening, nature gave glorious testament to how Bayou Rouge had earned its name. The sun was an hour or more from setting, though still low enough to slant over land and marsh, filtering through trees and painting the waters darkly rose. It was rich, robust, ephemeral and eternal in the same stroke.
Emile Duchamp brought them back to the dock and they disembarked. Dorcilus beamed as he hauled along a stringer almost too heavy to carry with one hand. Finch mostly scratched mosquito bites; a wonder he had any blood left at all.
Duchamp sidled up to him, jostled him good-naturedly with an elbow. “Now, you’s lookin’ too thirsty to pass up a nice cold one at Belisaire’s, you is.”
“That the hole you crawled out of this morning?”
“One and the same.”
“Lead on.” Finch looked back to Dorcilus. “Okay with you?”
Indeed it was. They had run out of the beer too long ago.
Duchamp peered with mock disdain at the puny stringer Finch dangled. “Maybe we fix up a nice bowl of gumbo for you.”
They trooped back through the village, the smell of food heavy and rich and down-home exotic. On a tiny nearby porch, a rugged old guy in coveralls sawed away carefree on a violin while another squeezed a small accordion along with him. Elsewhere, a young craftsman planed wood shavings from a
rough-hewn coffin; they littered the ground at his feet in stiff curls.
Trapping must have gone well today. Finch noticed that a wooden rack, which had been empty at dawn, was now occupied to half capacity, freshly skinned muskrat and mink and raccoon yielding wet pelts stretched from nails to dry.
The inside of Belisaire’s set new standards for rustic, but it was civilization, and that was good enough for Finch. Low of ceiling with raw log walls, and a few tables made from old whiskey barrels with plywood nailed on top. Alligator hides, split at mid-belly and peeled away to either side, hung flat on two walls. After quick introductions and no small amount of French chortling, Finch and Dorcilus took seats at a corner barrel. Finch hooked one foot around a stray chair’s leg, drew it closer so he could elevate his bad knee, take some weight off.
Belisaire himself came over, nearly as round as his tables, and plunked down a cold long-neck Lone Star in front of each of them. Three bucks a beer, highway robbery — must be all this high overhead. Dorcilus paid and didn’t complain.
Finch looked behind the bar, nothing more than a Siamese quadruplet version of the tables, and saw several barroom cases of Lone Star. He smiled, smelled contraband all the way across the room. Probably a hijacked truck, across the border of a state that was as far away for these rubes as Malaysia.
“Emile tells me you boys, you be needin’ some food in you,” Belisaire said after pocketing the six dollars.
Finch kicked back in his chair and eyed the Lone Star with one warily cocked brow. “How much?”
Belisaire slapped him on the shoulder with a rich roar of laughter. “Special today! Free on the house for shit-out-of-luck fisherman, haw!”