Black Magic Woman (Morris and Chastain Investigations)

by Justin Gustainis

  Morris had popped the trunk of the Mustang, to reveal several bundles of thorny sticks, some with blossoms still attached. The odor released by opening the trunk was pleasantly reminiscent of a greenhouse, although it dissipated quickly in the hot, dry air.

  “These are branches of wild rose,” Morris said. “They’ve been demonstrated to have a binding effect on vampires—or leeches, if you like.”

  Mitch peered suspiciously at the bundles. “What’s that mean—‘binding effect?’”

  “Well, for example, if you put one on a vampire’s coffin, he can’t leave it, even after dark. Has to stay inside.”

  “So, what, you ’spectin’ us to go in there—” Hank made a head gesture toward the Goliad, “and put these things on a bunch of coffins? Are you fuckin’ crazy?”

  Before Morris could reply, Mitch said, “Mister, what he means is, we know a couple fellas went in the Goliad after this all started, lookin’ to settle things with the leeches. Broad daylight an’ all—they wasn’t stupid. But they didn’t come out again, neither.”

  Morris shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t go in that place, day or night, and I wouldn’t ask you fellas to do it, either. They’ve probably got booby traps, deadfalls, who knows what other devilment set up inside there. But, see, the binding effect of wild rose works in a number of ways.”

  He broke a bundle and picked up one of the branches. “Put this across a door and fasten it there, a vampire can’t go out that way.” He pointed across the street, at the front entrance of the Goliad. “Like that door over there, say.”

  Hank and Mitch were looking at Morris now with more interest than they had shown since his arrival.

  “You take another branch,” he went on, “put it across a window, and no vampire is gonna leave through that particular window, long as the branch stays in place.”

  Morris gestured at the contents of the Mustang’s trunk. “Like you can see, I brought lots of wild rose branches with me—enough to seal up that hotel tighter than Huntsville Prison, at least as far as vampires are concerned. But I’ll need you fellas to help me. I picked up some carpenter’s staple guns, and I expect you know where to scare up a ladder or two.”

  After staring inside the trunk for a couple of seconds, Mitch scratched his head in puzzlement. “So what are you fixin’ to do—keep the fuckin’ leeches bottled up inside the Goliad forever? That dog just won’t hunt, Mister. Sooner or later, these rose bushes of yours is gonna start to rot, and then—”

  Morris held up a hand, palm out like a traffic cop. “That’s not what I had in mind, not at all. I don’t figure to keep the vampires penned up indefinitely. I just want them confined for three days—well, three nights, to be precise.”

  “Yeah, okay, say we can hold ’em for three days and nights,” Hank said. “What happens after that?”

  Morris told them.

  Three days later

  4:48am

  MORRIS OPENED THE rear gate of the rust-spotted old cattle truck, and Hank Dexter helped him set the ramp in place. The four heifers were reluctant to move, but Mitch McConnell climbed into the truck bed with them and shooed them down the ramp, one at a time. Each cow already had a length of stout rope tied loosely around its neck, and Hank and Morris used these as leashes to lead the animals to predetermined positions and then tie them in place.

  They tethered one of the cows to a lamp-post, another to a nearby parking meter. The other two were secured to the truck itself—one rope was tied to a door handle, and the other was made fast to the cattle truck’s front bumper. The whole tableau was situated in front of Emma’s Cafe, which placed it directly across the street from the Goliad Hotel.

  Even though well used to people, the animals were skittish. This may have had something to do with the new sights and smells confronting them, but it probably owed a lot more to the enraged howls and screeches that were coming non-stop from inside the Goliad. The men were bothered less by it than the cows were—after all, they had been listening to that insane cacophony for the past two nights.

  Mitch checked all the knots, then joined the other two men in the middle of the street. They were both looking toward the Goliad.

  “Sounds kinda like a loony bin during a earthquake, don’t it?” Mitch said.

  “It’s worse now’n last night,” Hank observed.

  “Sure it is,” Morris said. “They’re hungrier tonight. That was the whole point, remember?” He peered at his watch in the uncertain light of the street lamps. “I make it 5:06. How about you fellas?”

  Hank checked the luminous face of his Timex. “Prid near, I’d say.”

  Mitch just nodded.

  “Better get in position, then,” Morris said. He looked at Hank, who was drawing a big hunting knife from a sheath at his belt. “You sure you’re okay with this part of it, podner?”

  “Reckon so,” Hank told him. “I worked in a slaughterhouse for a while, when I was younger. Ain’t fixin’ to enjoy myself, but I’ll get it done.”

  “All right then. You fall back to Emma’s when you’re finished, and Mitch, you’ll let him in. Then the two of you are gonna uncork the bottle, right?”

  “That’s a big ten–four,” Mitch said. He looked at Morris closely for a long moment. “You take care now, y’hear?”

  “I was plannin’ to,” Morris said with a tight grin, and turned away. As he jogged off into the night, he called over his shoulder, “Remember the Alamo!”

  MITCH MCCONNELL STOOD inside Emma’s Cafe and tried not to watch as Hank Dexter slashed each cow’s throat. Hank moved so quickly that the last beast to receive his attention was only starting to low its distress when the sharp blade of the hunting knife flashed beneath its chin.

  “I don’t much like this part of it either,” Morris had told them. “But we need blood out there, a lot of it, and it’s got to be fresh. If it’s any consolation, the poor damn cows won’t have to suffer very long.”

  His butcher’s work done, Hank ran for the front door of Emma’s. Mitch let him in, then closed and locked the door again. Each of the double doors had a big glass panel in it, and those panels now bore a large cross, done in black paint. The same holy symbol had been painstakingly applied to all the windows in Emma’s—and to every door and window along Main Street, as well as every structure in a two-block area. “That business about vampires having to ask permission to enter a dwelling the first time is bullshit,” Morris had said. “But what you hear about the effect of crosses, now that’s the truth. The gospel truth, you might say.”

  “You done good, podner,” Mitch said, as Hank wiped his knife blade off on a napkin.

  “Bet them cows don’t think so,” Hank said, his breath coming fast. “He said two minutes, right?”

  “Yeah, more or less. Better check your watch—you got the one glows in the dark.” They had left the lights off inside Emma’s. Crosses or no, they had no desire to call attention to themselves during the next few minutes.

  It seemed to Mitch they waited half an eternity, while the pandemonium coming from the Goliad seemed to double its crazed intensity, and then double again. Finally, he heard Hank say, “All right, I reckon it’s time.”

  They felt around on the floor for the objects they had left there earlier: two metal tubes, which until recently had been legs of one of the cheap cafe chairs. Around each tube was now tied the end of a length of 150-pound test fishing line. Each thick black filament ran under the door, over the sidewalk, across the street, and right up to the front door of the Goliad Hotel. Both of the lines were knotted securely around the branch of wild rose that was stapled across the hotel’s double front doors. One fishing line would probably do the job, but two was safer. “We can’t afford any mistakes,” Morris had told them.

  “We take up the slack first,” Hank said tensely. Each man began to roll a tube in his hands, which pulled the loose line in under the door and wound it around the tube. In a few seconds, both lines were tight, exerting tension on the branch of wild rose ac
ross the street, along with the big staples that held it in place.

  “Okay, then,” Hank said. “Slow and steady.”

  They braced their feet and began to pull, then harder, then harder still. Suddenly, the lines went slack again, which told Hank and Mitch that they had succeeded.

  The branch of wild rose was now gone from the Goliad’s front doors.

  Nothing happened for a long time—two, maybe three seconds. Then the doors of the Goliad burst open like the floodgates of Hell.

  THERE WERE SEVENTEEN of them, and they battened on those bleeding, frightened cows like sharks on a herd of fat seals. Some of the vampires went directly to the gushing fountains under the cows’ throats, while others used their fangs to open fresh wounds of their own. A few went down on hands and knees in the street and began to lick from the spreading red puddles that had formed there. None spared a glance toward Emma’s Cafe. They saw and smelled and thought of nothing but the blood. It was not the human variety that they preferred, but it was warm, and it was fresh—and it was blood.

  Hank and Mitch were standing well back from the windows to avoid detection, but they could still see the spectacle outside. After a few moments, Mitch heard Hank mutter, “Ah Jesus goddamn piss-ass fuck. Goddamn it, shit!”

  “What is it, podner? What’s the matter?”

  Hank shook his head a couple of times. “Jolene’s out there with the leeches. She’s one of ’em.”

  Mitch didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet.

  “I kept tellin’ myself, maybe they didn’t do her yet, ya know? I was hopin’ maybe they’d like, I dunno, save her, to fetch and carry for them in daylight, or somethin’.” Hank shook his big head again, like a boxer trying to get past the effects of a haymaker before the next round starts. “Fuck, who’d I think I was kidding? Just myself, I guess. Like fuckin’ usual.”

  He pulled out one of the chairs from a nearby table and sat down heavily. Still unsure what to say, and afraid of making it worse by coming up with the wrong thing, Mitch decided to leave Hank alone with his pain for a while. He turned his attention back to the carnage in the street.

  Now that he started looking at the vampires as individuals, he could recognize Hank’s wife Jolene easily enough. Along with Walt the barber, Tom Jesperson the sheriff, and three teenagers who used to hang around the pool room all day long when they should’ve been in school. In fact, every one of the creatures out there gorging on the cows’ blood was someone Mitch had once known.

  It took him a few seconds to realize what that meant.

  “Where’s the fuckin’ Master?” he said out loud.

  Hank took his head out of his hands and looked up. “Huh? What’re you sayin’?”

  “The Master. The dude that come into town and started all this vampire shit. That’s what Jack told us they’s called, remember? Masters. Well, I know every damn person out there, known ’em all for years, same as you. So, who’s the fuckin’ bloodsucker that begun it? And where is he?”

  Hank peered across the street, at the open doorway of the Goliad. Inside the hotel, back a little way from the door, he thought he could just make out something red... no, two somethings. He squinted hard, and suddenly knew what he was looking at—eyes. A pair of eyes, glowing red.

  “Oh, fuck,” Hank said quietly. “The bastard’s still inside.”

  “Fuck is right,” Mitch said, pointing to the left. “Lookee there.”

  Walking rapidly along the sidewalk across the way, staying in shadow whenever possible, was Quincey Morris. Carrying a fresh branch of wild rose in one hand and a big staple gun in the other, he was headed directly for the Goliad Hotel.

  MORRIS WAS FEELING cautiously optimistic. Everything actually seemed to be going according to plan, and he knew how rare that was. Robert Burns had famously written, “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley,” and Morris’s English Lit professor at Princeton had once interpreted that last part to mean “Things usually get fucked up beyond belief.” Still—so far, so good.

  If his luck held, this whole mess should be over in another fifteen minutes or so. Then he could help with the clean-up, maybe grab a few hours of sleep, and be back in Austin by evening.

  The creatures across the street were still gorging themselves on cows’ blood and paying no attention to what might be going on behind them. As he crept along, Morris mentally rehearsed his moves for the next few seconds: close the hotel doors, quickly staple on a fresh branch of wild rose, jump in his Mustang parked a few yards away, and take off before the vampires knew what was going on. Then let things take their course.

  He had reached the Goliad and was just taking hold of one of the front doors when he realized that Bobby fucking Burns was proved right again, as the Master vampire leaped out from the hotel entrance and took him by the throat.

  The impact of the Master’s charge put them both on the sidewalk, the vampire on top. Morris had the breath knocked out of him, and the impact of the back of his head on the concrete hadn’t helped, either. But he knew that unless he did something right now he was on his way to joining the ranks of the undead, and he was not going to let that happen.

  He’d lost his stapler in the fall but still held the other object he’d been carrying, and as the Master vampire brought those predator’s teeth down to tear out his throat, Morris jammed the branch of wild rose between the creature’s jaws and pushed back, hard.

  None of the experts who have written about the vampire’s nature, not Van Helsing, or Blake, or Tregarde or any of the others, has been able to explain convincingly why the undead are repelled by certain natural substances, such as garlic, wolfsbane, or wild rose. Perhaps it is a sort of allergy, or there may be a deeper, spiritual meaning. But for pragmatists like Morris, wondering why these things work against the undead is far less important than knowing that they do.

  The Master reared back, gagging. He yanked the branch of wild rose from his mouth and flung it aside, furiously spitting out small fragments onto the sidewalk. That only took a few seconds, and then the Master turned back to his victim—only to be struck hard by Morris’s open palms, just above the eyebrows. The impact against the vampire’s forehead was enough to break the small plastic bubbles, each about the size of a pregnant quarter, that were glued to Morris’s hands.

  Earlier, he had cut the bubbles from a sheet of packing material, and then used a small-bore hypodermic needle to carefully fill each one with about 50 cc of holy water—most of which was now running into the Master vampire’s eyes.

  The effect, similar to what you’d get from sulfuric acid splashed on a human, was immediate and devastating. The Master clutched his ruined eye sockets and fell sideways onto the sidewalk, howling in agony.

  Morris did not waste time staring at the creature. He picked up the branch again, and, after a few moments’ fumbling, found the stapler where he had dropped it. Scrambling to his feet, he hastily closed the Goliad’s front doors and then affixed the branch of wild rose across them, putting on three staples, just for luck.

  Then he turned around and saw that luck was something he was shit out of.

  Seventeen vampires were standing in front of the hotel now, and they were all looking right at him, their faces full of rage—and hunger.

  WATCHING FROM INSIDE Emma’s, Hank and Mitch had been in turn worried and elated as Morris was attacked by the Master vampire and then bested him. But as the Master screamed out his anguish, they saw the feeding vampires finally began to take notice. One after another, they had abandoned the blood of the now-dead cows and turned toward the Goliad Hotel.

  “Oh, shit,” Mitch said. “He’s fucked now. Some of them bloodsuckers is between him and his car.”

  “Yeah,” Hank replied. His eyes were slits of intense concentration.

  “Maybe he’s got some more of that holy water he used on their Master. That might—”

  “Shut up and listen,” Hank said through clenched teeth. “Got me a idea.” It took him only a few seconds
to lay it out for Mitch, whose eyes went wide as he listened.

  “You can’t be serious about goin’ out there, man,” Mitch said. “Christ, there’s a whole shitload o’ them fuckin’ leeches, and we’re—”

  “I’m goin’,” Hank rasped. “Either alone, or with you to back me up, but I’m goin’. Which way’s it gonna be?”

  Mitch took in a big breath then let it out. “Okay, okay, all right.” His voice sounded shaky. “Let’s do it before I get me some sense and change my mind.”

  Hank nodded, and drew the knife from its sheath. “Just let me cut the line off of these here chair legs.”

  AS THE VAMPIRES advanced on him, Morris tried to formulate a plan of action. Trouble was, he seemed as fresh out of options as he was of holy water.

  He decided to try a desperate dash through the crowd of undead, in the hope that surprise and momentum might allow him to smash through them before they could react. Then he could try for Emma’s, or perhaps the cab of the cattle truck. Either way, he wouldn’t have to hold out very long.

  He knew that his chances weren’t good. There were probably too many of the vampires for his half-ass plan to succeed. But he was damned if he was just going to cower there, like some heroine in a bad horror movie, and wait for them to take him. If they wanted his blood, they could damn well fight him for it. He was gathering himself for the rush when he suddenly heard Hank Dexter shouting: “Hey, you fuckin’ leeches! Over here!”

  Several of the vampires turned at the sound of Hank’s voice. Morris could see Hank standing on the sidewalk in front of Emma’s Cafe, and it looked like Mitch was positioned a few feet behind him.

  “Still hungry, are ya?” Hank yelled. “Then how ’bout some of the real stuff?”

  Hank held his hands out before him, revealing long, hairy arms in a shirt-sleeved shirt. The right hand held the hunting knife, and in a quick, economical motion Hank slashed the blade across his own left wrist. Arterial blood began to spurt immediately. Hank waved the wounded arm wildly back and forth, spattering his blood on the street in an arc that looked black in the streetlights. There was near hysteria in his voice now as he screamed, “Come get your dinners, you low-rent motherfuckers!”