by J. E. Gurley
“This place,” she began. “It is controlled by something evil. To fight it, I must know what it is.”
He laughed and the walls shook. “Fight it? You cannot fight the wind. You cannot stop the sea or seize the thunder, girl.”
“This place is possessed by something dark and evil. Reveal to me what it is?” she pleaded.
His face became stern. “I am forbidden,” he said.
She noticed that although he knocked the ashes off his cigarette, it did not grow shorter but remained the same length. “Someone must talk to me, tell me.”
“You whine like a child and a child you are. ‘Tell me’, you say. You could not understand the powers at play here even if I did tell you. Forces are at work here, girl, dark evil forces.”
“In the name of my Granny Iris, I implore you.”
Baron Samedi sighed. He raised a single, skeletal finger and smiled. “Very well.”
The room swirled, disappeared and changed into a dark tunnel lit by flickering torches. Lisa drew in her breath in surprise. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.
“What is it?” Jeff asked.
She turned to stare at him. “He brought you too. Why?”
“Where are we?” He reached out and touched a clammy, damp stone wall.
“The gateway between worlds, I think, but it looks like catacombs, ancient tombs.”
“Why tombs?”
Lisa laughed. It was a short harsh burst. “For my benefit, I believe.” She did not reveal to him her horror of graves and the dead. She removed a torch from a cobwebbed sconce and began to walk. Jeff took the next torch they came to. They passed several niches in the walls. Most were empty but a few contained partial skeletons and skulls, eyeless sockets followed their every move. The air was heavy with the stench of death, both ancient and recent. Their footsteps echoed loudly.
Small sounds, like claws on stone came at them from the darkness. As they stopped to listen, the sound grew louder.
“What’s that?” Jeff asked.
Lisa cocked her head to one side, listening. “There is a junction ahead,” she said. “Maybe we can get our bearings.” She began to run toward it.
Jeff remained listening to the sound.
“Hurry,” she coaxed him.
They had taken only a few steps when the first wave of rats scurried from the right hand junction and rushed toward them, a furry mass jostling and tumbling over each other in their haste.
“Rats!” Lisa screamed.
She glanced behind but knew they could never outrun the rush of rodents, even if there was a place to run to.
“Oh, my God,” she moaned as realization hit her that she must confront her fear. “I hate rats.”
As the first rats swarmed around her feet, she wrapped her arms around Jeff and closed her eyes in a vain attempt to ignore the damp, furry mass scrambling around her. Jeff picked her up in both arms like a child and held her above the swarm. After a few minutes, the sound of chattering and scraping receded down the corridor. The rats had not molested them.
She opened her eyes and saw they were gone. She let out her breath and turned to face Jeff. “Thanks,” she said.
He smiled as he set her down on her feet. “Where are we going?”
“The Gateway,” she answered. She knew somehow they were going in the right direction.
“Then what?”
She looked at him. Grim determination filled her eyes, but also a hint of fear lurking just beneath the surface. “To the Land of the Dead. The dead know everything.”
“This Baron Samedi, he won’t tell you what you want to know.”
“He might, but you can never tell what is truth and what is half-truth. He likes his little jokes. The dead have no such lust for mirth. They speak the truth, always.”
“Won’t this force try to stop us?”
“I hope the laws of life and death are still intact. If so, he cannot harm us here, only frighten us.”
“And if they’re not?”
“We might never leave this place.”
Jeff snorted. “Gee, glad I came.”
“I didn’t expect you to come. Baron Samedi must have a reason for wanting you here.”
“Yeah, like maybe he’s working for the Digger Man and wants to get rid of both of us at the same time.”
“Digger Man. Digger Man,” echoed down the corridor in voices other than his own, followed by a reverberating chorus of laughter.
Jeff stopped in his tracks. “I don’t like this,” he said in a nervous voice.
“We have no choice,” Lisa reminded him. “We can’t go back now.”
As they neared the second corridor, the stench of death grew stronger and sounds like the rattling of chains and stifled screams drifted down the passageway. An eerie red light made the torches unnecessary, but Jeff and Lisa both held onto them.
Sitting in a wooden rocker was an old black man, his shiny bald head beaded with perspiration. He fanned himself with an old cardboard fan, the kind provided by funeral parlors. The writing on it read ‘Napoleon Suskind, Mortician’. In his other hand, he held a bottle of Hires root beer with a bent soda straw stuck in it. He looked at them, smiled and took a sip. Like the Baron’s cigarette, the level in the bottle did not drop. The faded wooden rocker creaked as he rocked forward and back. To Lisa, it was the sound of snapping bones.
“Hot as Hades, isn’t it,” he remarked and laughed loudly, slapping his knee with the hand holding the fan.
When neither responded, he shrugged.
“Sometimes a little humor helps break the tension. I am Papa Legbe.”
Jeff looked at Lisa with a question in his eyes.
“He guards the gates to hell. He’s like Baron Samedi’s boss.”
Papa Legbe laughed again. “Don’t tell him that. He thinks he runs the place. I just sit here mostly and remember old times. Sometimes I’m called upon to make a decision, but mostly I just sit and rock.” He sounded wistful, as though bored with his lot in life, or death, as it may be.
“We need you,” Lisa said.
“Yes, I suppose you do,” he said, nodding his head. “It seems the balance between life and death has been tilted slightly askew. The Gateway stands ajar. Things long dead reach through and grab onto the living, trying to pull themselves back into the world. Some are very powerful and they have breached the Gateway. You came to stop them?”
“I came for answers.”
He stopped rocking. “Answers are dangerous things. Even questions can be dangerous at times. From whom do you seek your answers?”
“You.”
He smiled. “I cannot answer you. I am forbidden to take sides. I merely guard the Gateway.”
“Yet the Gateway is open.”
“Nevertheless,” he answered. “I guard it still.”
“Oh!” she said and stamped her feet. “You’re useless.”
He looked at her with pity in his eyes. “Seek answers from someone who tells the truth.”
“The dead speak the truth,” she said, calming down. Was he trying to help?
He nodded and resumed rocking and fanning. “If they speak at all. Some refuse to meddle in the affairs of the living.”
“Then I need to speak to someone with whom life and death are no mystery.”
“A mambo? You wish to question a mambo?” He stopped rocking again and raised his eyebrows. “Those who have mastered the Vodun arts reside in a special place here, neither alive nor dead. They await Judgment Day.”
Lisa thought of her grandmother. She drew in her breath sharply.
“My grandmother was not evil,” she challenged. “Why should she await Judgment Day here in this dark place?”
The old man smiled. “Evil can arise from good intentions as well as bad. To deal in the Vodun arts places great responsibility on one’s shoulders.” He sighed. “I should know.”
“I must see my grandmother.”
Papa Legbe nodded. He pointed down the corridor with the fan. “You may
pass.”
As he spoke, he and his chair receded into the distance until lost in the shadows. She felt no sense of motion yet knew she was traveling great distances in both time and space. The torches flashed by rapidly, firefly specks in a spring night.
At last, they slowed. It was a wider room, circular with many small corridors or rooms in the partially hidden walls. A single brazier burned in the center of the room casting its feeble light to the edges of the room but no further. She could hear noises in the darkness—sighs, prayers, weeping. She felt great sorrow around her, welling like water from the walls and floor.
“Where are we?” Jeff asked.
She shook her head, peering into the openings. A shadow moved.
“Why you here, child?” a voice filled with sorrow and regret asked from the shadows.
Lisa gasped. Her heart pounded madly in her chest. She placed her hand over it as if to keep it from leaping out. “Granny Iris?”
An old woman stepped from the shadows into the light, a fair-skinned mulatto. Her expression showed concern, unease.
“It’s me, Lisa!” Lisa cried out. She ran to the woman but Granny Iris backed up, disappearing into the shadows from which she had emerged. “Do not touch the dead, girl. Didn’t I teach you anything?”
“Oh, Granny,” Lisa sobbed, stopping short. “Why are you here?”
Granny Iris reappeared from the shadows across the room. “I’s got to be judged.”
“You were a good person. You helped people all your life.”
“Maybe so, but I’s got to be judged just the same.”
“How…how long?”
“Who knows girl. Maybe ‘til Gabriel blows his horn.” She slapped her knee and laughed.
“It’s not fair,” Lisa cried.
“Fair ain’t got nothin’ to do with it, girl. You dabble in the black arts and you got to pay the piper.” She looked at her granddaughter with sympathy. “You got troubles, girl?”
Lisa sighed. “Yes.” She began to relay what happened to them so far. Granny Iris raised her hand and stopped her.
“I know all about it, dear,” she said. She shook her head slowly and sighed. “I know.” She moved along the edge of the room and looked at Jeff.
“This here your man?” she asked.
Lisa blushed. “He’s my friend, Jeff Towns. He’s helping me.”
Granny Iris walked around Jeff, peering up at him, sniffing him. He stood still under her scrutiny. After she had made her circuit, she said, “He’s a good man. You chose well. If Baron Samedi let him come with you, he must have ashe.”
Jeff looked questioningly at Lisa.
“Ashe means power,” she told him,
He laughed. “Hardly.”
She shrugged. “Well, maybe so. The Baron likes his little jokes, but I sense something in you, boy, something good, and something powerful. You take care of my little Lisa, you hear?”
Jeff nodded.
“What can we do?” Lisa asked.
“It’s all beyond me, dear sweet Lisa. I just waded in the shallow waters of voodoo. Dabbled at doing good for folks. I wasn’t a full-fledged mambo. You need someone who done went in all the way.”
“Who?”
Granny Iris held out her hand. “Wait. I’ll fetch her.”
Granny Iris retreated into the shadows. Lisa stood, shoulders slumped and chin pressing against her chest in defeat. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jeff move toward her as if he wanted to hold her in his arms but stopped short, perhaps sensing that she preferred to be alone in her sorrow.
A few minutes later, a second woman, black, tall and willowy, stepped into the light.
“I am Mama Cariou,” she announced. “I think I can help.”
Lisa stared at her. “I’ve heard of you. You just died, during Hurricane Katrina.”
Mama Cariou opened her mouth and wailed. A cold wind whistled around them. The flames flickered. The stones seemed to shudder beneath her feet. Mama Cariou lowered her head. When she raised it, her emotions were under control. A brief smile flickered across her lips. She nodded. “It is so. I have not yet become used to death.”
Lisa’s heart almost broke under the great weight of sorrow in Mama Cariou’s words.
“Can you help us?” she asked.
“I’ll do what I can. I started this.”
“You? How?”
“Digger Man came to me in my little shop afraid of what he saw coming. I gave him power for his gris-gris. It was too much power for him to control, I guess. Something in the storm, some Loa in Katrina, took him over, used him to murder all those people. Each evil death weakened the doorway between life and death just a mite. That Loa wants to escape its ageless death, become human or maybe more than human. Part of it lives on that oil rig. The rest of it is coming for you.”
“The rest of it?” Lisa asked.
“Hurricane Rita,” Jeff said from behind her.
Mama Cariou smiled and nodded. “That’s right, son. Hurricanes contain much power, the power of wind and wave and lightning. A Loa can harness this power and compel it for its own purposes. This Loa wants more death, more bloodshed, so it can break the barrier between life and death for all time, live among us as a god.”
Lisa’s face had turned pale. “Which Loa?”
“Damballah Wedo,” Mama Cariou whispered.
The name reverberated from the stone walls, shaking the entire room. The fire in the brazier flared and shot to the ceiling, flooding the room with a blood red light. Mama Cariou fell to her knees and cried out. A vague, human-shaped shadow stood in the red flames. Scanning the chamber with coal black eyes, it focused on Lisa and began to laugh. The room quaked. Damp moss, lichen and crawling things fell from the ceiling like rain. Lisa quickly brushed them from her hair in disgust. Slowly, the flames subsided, became yellow once again as the figure vanished with the laughter.
“Was that Damballah Wedo?” Jeff asked.
Lisa turned to him and nodded. “He is the creator, the father of all Loas.”
“I thought the creator was a good Loa.”
“So did I,” she answered. “Something must have happened.” She began to look around the room for Mama Cariou. The old woman was gone. “Granny Iris.”
The shadows began to close in. Dancing fireflies surrounded them. “Go back, child,” her grandmother called from the darkness. “You mustn’t linger near death too long, remember. Beware of the eagle.”
Lisa felt the room spin. The fireflies made a band of light around them, spinning. She grabbed Jeff’s hand and held it tightly. She closed her eyes against the vertigo that threatened to overwhelm her. When she opened them, they were in the front office on the rig. The candles spluttered, as if in a sudden gust of wind. No wax had run down their sides.
“We’re back,” Lisa said.
“Did we even go anywhere,” Jeff said. He looked at his watch. “No time has passed.”
“I feel fine,” she said. “The alcohol is gone from my system.” She found a chair and sat down. Her legs felt rubbery. The floor felt unsubstantial beneath her.
“Oh, granny. Was it a dream?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeff answered.
“You remember?” she asked.
He nodded. “Granny Iris said, ‘Beware of the eagle.’ What does that mean?” He tried to remember what Doug Peters, the young boy on the supply ship had said about an eagle.
“An eagle doesn’t mean anything to me,” she answered.
Jeff rubbed his forehead. It felt tight from lack of sleep. “Maybe I imagined it all.”
“We both couldn’t have the same hallucination. It was real.”
“But…” he began. He raised his hands and dropped his protest before voicing it.
“At least we know what is happening,” she said.
“But not how to stop it,” he reminded her.
She sat down heavily beside him. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Jeff, my Granny,” she sobbed.
He
leaned her head against his shoulder. “I know, Lisa, I know,” he repeated as he stroked her hair gently.
“You guys have got to see this,” Ed said excitedly as he burst into the room. With a quick glance, he took in the pentagram and candles, then looked back at them. “What?”
“Never mind,” Jeff said. “What’s happened?”
Chapter Twenty Two
Tolson sat up in bed. His skin was pale except for two dark circles surrounding his eyes, but he was smiling.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Lisa asked. She stared at the thermometer she held in her hand in disbelief.
“Well, my shoulder hurts likes hell and I can barely move my arm, but I feel fine.”
“I don’t understand it,” Jeff said, scratching his head. “You were at death’s door.” He looked at Lisa, his eyes posing a question.
“Maybe it was the antibiotics,” Ed suggested.
“They shouldn’t work this fast,” Jeff replied.
“It was Baron Samedi,” Lisa said. “He’s trying to help.”
Sims snorted.
Lisa replaced the thermometer in its case. “His temperature is down to 99. That’s almost normal.”
“Come on, guys,” Tolson said. “Don’t stare a gift horse in the mouth. Let’s get the hell out of here. Where’s the supply ship?”
Jeff looked at Tolson. “Sunk. The crew’s dead.”
Tolson’s face clouded with rage as he clenched his fist. “Waters?”
“It looks like it,” Jeff answered.
The look of rage passed as a new thought came to him. “What about the emergency craft?” he asked.
Jeff shook his head. “Hurricane Rita will be here in less than twenty four hours. We wouldn’t stand a chance in it.”
“Hurricane Rita? I’ll risk it,” Tolson said. “I don’t want to spend one more minute on this damn thing.”
“Ed thinks we can ride this one out,” Lisa told him.
Tolson shot a baffled look at Ed. “Have you forgotten about Waters? The son of a bitch is crazy.” He looked around the room. “Where’s Mac?”
It was Ed’s turn to convey bad news. “Dead. Waters killed him.”
Tolson fell back and held his arm over his face. “Too bad. I liked Mac. He…”
He sat up again suddenly, wincing in pain as he did so. “What about Big Clyde? It seems I saw him…in a dream.” Tolson rubbed his temple as if coaxing a memory.