“And you’re expecting to accomplish your vengeance through black magic?”
“Of course. I would have thought that obvious, by now.”
“The practice of black magic—that comes with a pretty high price tag, doesn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about eternal damnation, the inevitable result of selling your soul to the Devil. Which is what anyone has to do who wants to use black magic.”
For a moment there was something in her face that made her look older than her years. Morris thought it might have been despair, but it was gone so quickly he could not be certain.
“I was raised to be what I am from the cradle, if not from the womb, Mr. Morris. I never had the choice to be anything else.” She sat up a little straighter. “Not that I would, given the chance.” After a moment she said, reflectively, “And who knows, there may yet be an escape clause in the agreement you referred to. If there is, I’ll find it, in time.”
“Somehow, I don’t think you’re the first black witch to console herself with that particular fantasy,” he said. “Sounds to me kind of like somebody whistling her way past the graveyard.”
“You’re starting to bore me, Mr. Morris. Is that why you made your determined way to Salem? To bore me to death?”
“I came here to ask you what it is you want in order to leave the LaRues alone.”
“What I want?” She seemed amused by the notion. “You came here to bribe me?”
“No, I came here to bargain with you.”
“To bargain? How charming! And what do you believe you have to bargain with?”
“That goes back to the question of what you want.”
She thought about it, or pretended to. “All right, how about this? Your little friend Elizabeth Chastain has proven a more formidable adversary than I had first reckoned. I doubt she’s going to survive her injuries, but it’s possible she might. And if she does, she could eventually pose a problem for me. Only a minor one, but still...”
Morris thought he could see where this was heading, but he kept silent.
“Very well, then,” she continued. “Go back to New York, and kill that Chastain bitch for me. That should present no real problem. Apart from her grievously weakened condition, which should make her easy prey, she seems to trust you, the Devil knows why.”
“And if I do that, if I kill Libby, then you’ll give up your vendetta against the LaRue family.” Morris’s voice was utterly without inflection.
“Yes, I will,” she said gravely. “I give you my word.”
“No, I don’t think I can accommodate you on that one.” Morris let the anger into his voice now. “And even if I thought for half a second that you’d actually keep your word, the answer would still be ‘no,’ you twisted little monster.”
“Oh, well.” She seemed neither surprised nor disappointed. “Can’t blame a girl for trying. But now let me ask you something, Quincey Harker Morris: what is the one thing you fear the most in this world?”
Snakes.
Morris said nothing.
Snakes.
He tried hard to keep his mind a blank, too—but that’s like telling yourself you’re not going to think about pink elephants.
Snakes.
Morris had been eight years old when he’d stumbled upon the Diamondback rattlesnake in the grassy field that abutted his family’s back yard. It was a toss-up as to which one of them had been more surprised by the encounter—young Quincey or the rattler. But the snake had quicker reactions, and it bit the boy on the ankle before slithering back into the undergrowth. He’d run home screaming, and his mother, after tying a hasty tourniquet just below his knee, had proceeded to break every traffic law in Texas getting him to the emergency room. Although the doctors and nurses knew just what to do, and did it well, the pain had been excruciating, and he had been forced to stay off the foot for weeks afterward. Ever since then, he had been terrified of—
“Snakes, is it?” Christine Abernathy said, as if Morris had answered her out loud. “How wonderfully Freudian. Well you don’t have to worry, Mr. Morris. There are no poisonous snakes in this part of Massachusetts.” Her smile caused an icy finger to trace its way down his spine. “And, of course, no witches, either.”
Morris started to speak, but she shook her head. “No, this has become tiresome. I really think it’s time for you to go.” She made a slight gesture with one hand, and Morris was suddenly standing outside, looking at the front door he had knocked on minutes earlier. He felt no inclination to knock again.
On the way back to his hotel, Morris replayed the encounter in his mind over and over, wondering what he should have said or done differently. After a while, he concluded there was nothing in his power that would have made any dent in Christine Abernathy’s implacable malignity.
He had not come to Salem with any clear objective in mind. He had intended to confront Christine Abernathy, and he had accomplished that, for all the good it had done him. And he had wanted to take her measure. He had done that, too, and found her formidable—and terrifying. But he had no idea what his next move should be. Libby had said that it was imperative he travel to Salem immediately, and so here he was.
He wished Libby were there to tell him what he was supposed to do now.
CHAPTER 33
MORRIS SPENT MOST of the day in his room trying to figure out his next move. He had come up with several ideas, but had ending up rejecting each one for being either impractical, impossible, or suicidal. He called Cedar Sinai to check on Libby’s condition, and his stomach did a slow somersault when he learned that it had been changed from “critical” to “grave.”
Finally, by six o’clock he had had enough, and went out to dinner at a Ponderosa Steakhouse that he had passed on his way into town. Normally, he liked to sample local cuisine in the places he visited, but he was afraid that the independent restaurants here might be boosters of the city’s witchcraft tourism industry. He was in no mood to look at a menu containing fare like “broomstick beef stew” or “cauldron custard.”
Back in his hotel room, he restlessly channel-surfed the TV for a while, then decided to take a shower. He often had his best ideas while under hot running water, and an idea was something he definitely could use right about now.
Morris clicked the TV screen to black, and started taking off his clothes.
CHRISTINE ABERNATHY CAREFULLY laid out on her worktable the implements and ingredients she would need. She was vexed that the African magic fetish she was expecting had not yet been delivered, but she knew that she could cast this particular spell without it. She had meditated first, for a full hour, to clear her mind—the spell she was about to cast was a difficult one, and required utmost concentration. Considering what she was about to conjure up for Quincey Morris, she had no interest in making any mistakes.
Finally, everything was ready. She did a brief scrying first, to confirm that Morris was in his hotel room. The image that appeared in the ensorcelled bowl showed Morris, nude, turning on the taps in a shower stall. All the better—let him be wet and naked when he confronted the little gift she was sending him.
Christine Abernathy’s gaze did not linger over Morris’s naked body, but this was not due to any vestigial sense of decency on her part. Once you’ve had sex with demons, the charms offered by humans of either gender will hold very little appeal ever again.
Using a long wooden match she had made with her own hands, she lit the five squat black candles, which were also her creation. Then she touched the small flame to a chunky, yellow substance that she had placed in a small brazier, which immediately began to emit a thin stream of aromatic smoke.
She then combined several ingredients from a number of different bottles, jars, and small boxes. These she crushed with a mortar and pestle until they were reduced to a fine powder, which she transferred to a small, blood-red bowl.
She brought the bowl over to the part of her work table that contained the pent
agram. This was not drawn on the table, but rather carved directly into the wood itself. Christine Abernathy had done this years ago, with painstaking slowness and care, so as to avoid having to redraw the symbol each time she wished to work magic. She thus saved considerable time and also protected herself against the ever-present dangers of a miscalculation in the pentagram’s construction.
Reaching into the bowl with her left hand, she took a handful of powder and began to trace with it, letting the material trickle out to form a specific pattern within the pentagram. Then she repeated the process, took more powder, and did it again. And again.
After a few moments, the pentagram was full of the lines she had drawn there, long and sinuous and winding, each one the same shape: the shape of a snake.
Then she brought over to the table a very old book. Cabalistic signs were inscribed on its cover, which was made of material that only a handful of forensic experts would have recognized as human skin. Christine Abernathy opened the book to the page she had marked previously with a black ribbon.
She began to read aloud the first words of the spell.
QUINCEY MORRIS TURNED off the water, slid the shower door open, and reached for a towel. Drying himself off, he decided that although he was cleaner than he had been, he was no closer to solving his problem. He still didn’t know what the hell to do about Christine Abernathy, to whom the terms “witch” and “bitch” might both apply with equal accuracy.
Once he was done, he tossed the towel in a corner and went into the other room to get dressed. He was just opening a bureau drawer to get clean underwear when he heard a sound that puzzled him.
For an instant, he flashed on his parents’ old house in Austin, with its archaic steam heating system. Even Texas gets cold sometimes, especially when a blue norther makes its day down from Canada. There were plenty of January mornings when young Quincey would wake up to hear the radiator in his bedroom hissing away with the build-up of steam that had come from the boiler in the basement.
Morris frowned. This place was far too modern to use steam, and besides he had the damn air conditioning on, not the heat.
Suddenly he heard it again—that prolonged, inexplicable hissing sound.
Then he saw the snake crawl out from under his bed.
Morris was no expert on reptiles, but anybody who watches TV or goes to the movies learns what certain kinds of snakes look like, especially the varieties that present an instantly recognizable threat to the hero, or some other character on the screen.
Morris had seen the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, three or four times. As a result, he was pretty sure he knew just what he was looking at.
Shaking off a momentary sense of disbelief, Morris made himself focus on the two most salient facts of his situation.
One: there was a king cobra in the hotel room with him.
Two: the large reptile was between him and the door.
There were more hissing noises from under the bed. A moment later, another snake crawled out to join the king cobra. Morris did not recognize this one, but a few seconds later it was joined by something that he did find familiar.
Even after all these years, he had not forgotten what a rattlesnake looked like.
Morris was about to run back into the bathroom and slam the door when a stir of movement from in there caught his eye. He looked just in time to see a deadly water moccasin crawling out from the shower stall he had so recently vacated. He’d seen those in Texas, too.
Two seconds later, a naked Quincey Morris was crouched atop the hotel bureau, watching in horror as more and more snakes appeared from underneath the bed. He recognized at least one more variety of cobra, this one smaller than the first and differently colored, and he was pretty sure he saw a couple of copperheads among the growing collection. The others weren’t familiar to him, but he had no doubt they were deadly poisonous, just as he had no illusions about who had sent them. Christine Abernathy, he realized, was done creating illusions. She had decided to play for keeps this time.
He looked around desperately. The phone was across the room, which meant it might as well be on the moon. Besides, what would he tell the hotel operator—“I’d like to report a couple of dozen snakes in my room.” She’d probably just tell him to sleep it off.
The snakes were slithering around the room now, examining the furniture, and each other, curiously. They were showing little interest in Morris at the moment, since he was too big to eat, and was posing no immediate threat to them. Morris thought he probably had a few minutes’ grace to figure some way out of this predicament.
Then he heard the thin “crack” as the cheap wood of the bureau began to give under his weight.
Several of the snakes were looking Morris’s way now, reacting to the sound. Their two-pronged tongues flickered in and out, testing the air for more vibrations.
Panic screamed for attention within Morris’s brain, and he crushed it down savagely. He then tried to figure out what he could do to survive if the bureau collapsed and sent him tumbling into that mass of crawling, squirming death.
He knew that snakebite, even from the deadliest reptile, is not instantly fatal. It often takes an hour or more for an untreated adult victim to die.
But that was from one bite. What about twenty bites? Thirty? And even if he made it into the hall, how long would it take to persuade someone to call an ambulance for the naked lunatic who was raving about a room full of poisonous snakes? And what hospital anywhere near Salem was likely to have a supply of antivenin on hand? Eastern Massachusetts was hardly snake country.
Until now, that is.
There was a grinding sound as more of the cheap wood that made up the bureau began to give way beneath his feet.
Morris realized the bare toes of his right foot were touching something hard on the bureau’s top. He glanced down, saw that it was the hand mirror that Libby Chastain had given him back at the hospital.
What had she said? “Keep it with you, when you meet Abernathy,” something like that. He had thought at the time that Libby was trying to say that the mirror had a spell of some kind on it.
Moving cautiously, he reached down and grasped the little mirror. Bringing it up to his face, he looked in it, and was unsurprised to see the face of a man who looked scared shitless.
He didn’t know what he was expecting the mirror to do, but nothing happened.
A few feet below, the snakes kept writhing and swarming.
AT THAT MOMENT, in the Intensive Care Unit of a New York City hospital, the monitors connected to patient Chastain, Elizabeth J. (Condition: Grave) began to exhibit sudden changes that would have puzzled any medical professional, if one had been standing nearby to see them.
The EEG showed a marked change in brainwave activity, while the blood pressure cuff around one arm recorded a spike in both systolic and diastolic pressure. Respiration began to increase significantly, as did pulse rate. Although her eyes remained closed, a low moan escaped the patient’s lips.
But no alarm was tripped by the monitors, and no doctor or nurse came by to observe these highly unusual events.
IN HER BASEMENT workroom, Christine Abernathy blew out the five candles and began to put her equipment and materials away. There was a smug expression on her coldly beautiful face.
She wondered how long it would take Quincey Morris to die.
THE CHEAP HOTEL bureau gave one more loud crack, and that must have been one of the legs snapping, because the whole thing suddenly tilted forward as it began to collapse. In desperation born out of sheer terror, Morris leaped from the top of the falling bureau, across the five feet of space and onto the bed.
He had thought the distance too far to jump, but fright is a powerful motivator. Landing on the mattress, Morris used the momentum to go into a tuck and roll and came to his feet at once. Somehow, despite his exertions, he had managed to hang onto Libby’s little mirror—for all the good it was doing.
The bureau had fallen on top of som
e of the snakes. Morris wasn’t sure if any had been killed or hurt, but it was clear that the rest had been thrown into a frenzy by the crash. Several of the reptiles had reared up, hissing like mad, while the rest glided restlessly around the room, looking either for something to attack, or for a way out—Morris wasn’t sure which.
Then something appeared at the foot of the bed—the head of the king cobra. Morris had noticed earlier that the deadly snake was at least six feet long, and it was using some of that body length to rear up and examine this large, warm-blooded creature that was causing all the fuss in its new territory.
Morris and the snake stared at each other for a long moment. Then the king cobra began to crawl up onto the bed.
LIBBY CHASTAIN WAS breathing hard now, and a sheen of sweat covered her body, soaking into the hospital gown and bedclothes. Her lips moved rapidly as if she were speaking, but no sound came from her mouth. Although her eyes remained shut, the lashes fluttered rapidly, like the wings of a trapped bird.
Libby began to writhe upon the bed, twisting and straining as if in the throes of some mighty effort. Her exertions increased, and it did not take long before newly sewn surgical stitches began to part under the kind of pressure they were never meant to withstand. Libby Chastain started bleeding in several places, then other stitches started to give way and she began hemorrhaging internally. This did not stop her struggles, or even slow them down.
Some of this frenetic activity finally tripped one of the alarms wired to Libby’s monitors, and an ICU nurse came hustling over to see what had happened. Nurse Greta Beck’s eyes widened as she took in the patient’s convulsions, as well as the monitor readings, which appeared to have gone completely haywire.
Greta Beck wasted no time gawking. She sprinted to the nearest telephone and called a Code Blue for the ICU.
Black Magic Woman (Morris and Chastain Investigations) Page 29