by J. E. Gurley
Ignoring Jeff’s warning, Tolson opened the door. Waters was standing there, waiting. His empty eyes stared at Tolson. A cruel smile creased his pasty lips. Tolson raised the Glock and fired three quick rounds into Waters’ chest. The bullets passed harmlessly through Waters with a sickening squishing sound as if he were a water ghost, exiting his back and disappearing into the storm.
Waters reached out his hand toward Tolson’s head. Tolson did not back away. He raised the Glock a second time. Waters stopped his hand a few inches from Tolson’s head, but ebony shadow fingers projected from his fingertips. They entered Tolson’s forehead. Tolson jerked as if electrocuted. Tendrils of smoke rose as his large mustache singed. Tolson’s body began to spasm and he dropped the Glock. He danced like a marionette, held erect only due to Waters’ hand inside his head. After a few seconds, Waters withdrew his hand and Tolson sank to the floor.
Jeff went at Waters but Lisa held him back.
“Don’t,” she cried.
Waters looked at him. “Not yet, Towns,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Your turn will come soon enough.”
“What do you want?” Jeff yelled.
Waters stepped over Tolson, still trembling on the floor. He stopped a few feet inside the door and pointed to the amulet on the door.
“Did you think it could stop me, stop us?”
“It stopped the fog.”
Waters laughed. “The fog is mindless, an elemental doing our bidding. We are beyond life and death. The dead do not die.”
“What did you do with my friends’ bodies?”
“They, too, serve a purpose,” Waters answered.
He decided to try reasoning with the part of Waters that remained. “There’s still time to get off this rig before Rita hits, Waters. We can take the emergency craft and escape.”
“You fool! There’s no escaping Rita. Katrina supplied the power to open a rift in the Gateway. Each death holds it open that much longer. Rita comes next to tear the Gateway asunder for all time. We will send its mad, hungry winds at New Orleans once more, drowning the city beneath the waves. It will become a lost city of legend, like Atlantis or Mu.”
“Why destroy New Orleans?”
“Carnage is our meat; death our bread,” Waters continued. “Each soul strengthens us.”
Something in Waters’ words didn’t ring true. “Why New Orleans? It’s mostly evacuated from Katrina already. Why not Galveston or Houston? There are millions there.”
Waters face changed slightly. His pale skin rippled as if something moved under the skin. His lips twitched and one eyeless socket blinked. He raised one hand toward Jeff before suddenly reverting to his previously stiff, cold posture.
“It is insignificant,” he said.
Waters turned toward the door.
“Wait?” Jeff called.
Waters stopped in the doorway but did not turn to face him.
“Why are we still alive?”
“You will be witnesses,” Waters said. “Afterwards, you too will become one with us.”
Lightning flashed and Waters simply vanished.
“Oh, my God,” Lisa whispered, coming up to stand beside Jeff. “I thought he was going to kill you.”
“Not yet. That means we still have a chance.”
Tolson drummed his heels on the floor. His eyes rolled beneath his lids and the color had drained from his face but he was alive.
“He didn’t kill Tolson either,” Lisa said, bending down to touch Tolson’s forehead.
“He didn’t do him any favors,” Jeff noted. He picked up the Glock and placed it in his waistband. “Help me get Tolson to a bed.”
Together, they managed to lift him up and drag him to his bunk. He was perspiring as if his fever had come back upon him.
“He doesn’t look good,” Lisa said. “Look.”
She pulled back Tolson’s shirt collar. The nearly healed gash was once again open, this time festering with yellow ichor oozing from the wound. The stench was sickening.
“There’s not much we can do for him except keep him in bed.”
Lisa looked up at Jeff. Her voice broke slightly as she spoke. “We’re going to die aren’t we?”
He yearned to say no but knew she would hear the lie in his voice. “We’re not dead yet,” he said. “If I have to die, I want to stop this bastard first.”
“We need more answers,” she said.
He shook his head. “If you mean what I think you mean…”
“I’ll do it alone this time.”
“No, we do this together or not at all.”
She reached out and lightly touched his forehead, brushing a lock of wet hair from his eyes. “I’ll get things ready.”
As she walked away, Jeff wondered if going into the land of the dead twice was asking for trouble. He mentally damned Sims. The man was never around when needed. Where had he gone now? Was he already another of Waters’ victims?
Jeff checked his watch. Time was running out. The main force of the storm would bear down on them in less than six hours. If they weren’t securely locked in the cooler by then, they would never make it.
Chapter Twenty Four
Once more, candles flickered in the emptied front office. Jeff had retrieved his lighter where Sims had left it by the coffee urn. The wind howling outside and the rain clawing at the door lent a macabre aspect to the situation, like a gothic séance.
“I don’t have any more alcohol,” Lisa said. “It might be more difficult to trance.”
“I thought of that,” Jeff said, holding up a small syringe partially filled with a milky white substance. “It’s morphine, from the med kit I took from the ship. I wish I had Sims’ damn metal hip flask.”
Lisa eyed the syringe in Jeff’s hand with trepidation and suspicion. “I don’t know—morphine? It could be dangerous.” She had grown up hearing horror stories of people hooked on morphine, crack and heroin. She didn’t trust her will power. What if she was one of those who couldn’t handle it?
“It’s only 2 milligrams,” Jeff assured her. “Not enough to be dangerous. It will only relax you, not knock you out.”
“You’re sure?”
Jeff smiled. “I’m sure. I’ve had a shot of liquid morphine before when I broke a bone out on a rig.”
She nodded. “Okay, you do it.” Lisa held out her arm and closed her eyes. She felt Jeff wrap something around her arm above the elbow. Then, a tiny sting as Jeff found a vein in her arm. He released the tourniquet and folded her arm up with a cotton ball over the wound. Before she could tell him it didn’t hurt, she felt the drug hitting her system, making her woozy.
“Whoa,” she exclaimed as she stumbled.
Jeff led her to a chair. “Sit a minute until it levels out in your system.”
She was strangely calm. Is this what addicts feel? After a few minutes, the worst of it was over. She knew the drug was in her system but she could still function.
“I’ll start now,” she told Jeff.
Jeff started the music on her I-pod. It seemed to her the storm outside was keeping time with the African drums—the low boom of thunder of the Gimbe, the crack of lightning of the Djembe and the polyphony rumble of rain of the Djun Djun. Slowly, the rhythm reached her feet and she began to dance around the room chanting. She felt the platform sway and incorporated its stuttering rhythm into her movements. Platform, storm, music and she became one.
At first, she didn’t think it would work. She felt no connection with the Loas, just a strange sense of harmony with the storm outside. The room began to change around her, the walls dissolving. She opened her eyes and was alone in a dark space.
“Jeff,” she called out but received no answer. For whatever reason, she was alone this time.
Baron Samedi did not come to her. She was outside alone in the storm. Rain soaked her hair and clothes and she felt a chill. Looking around, she could see she was on the platform but not the one from which she had just left. This platform was a rig from hell. Thick r
opes of rust and crusted blood hung like vines from the roofs of buildings that were mere shells of themselves, caved in and crumbling. Pieces fell as she watched. The deck was no longer concrete and steel. It had become a living substance firm but not hard. She could feel a pulse, like a slow heartbeat, through the soles of her shoes.
Darkness prevailed. She could see neither water nor sky, although flickering smudges of light in the distance looked like lightning. The platform was a thing of shadows. They moved like diaphanous veils across the deck, leaving pools of deeper darkness behind them. She was afraid to move, fearing the deck would disappear beneath her entirely.
“Welcome,” a voice called out. The voice was deep and echoed as if from a deep well. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, surrounding her.
“Who are you?” she asked, looking around and fearing the answer.
“Damballah Wedo,” the voice answered loudly, shaking the platform. Bits of rust and other unidentifiable substances fell on her from overhead. She cringed as a piece of something moved on her arm. Without looking, she shuddered and shook it off.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“You have moved through time. This is your future—darkness, emptiness, despair. Soon it will come to the entire world.”
“Unless we stop you,” she answered more boldly than she felt.
Laughter shook the rig. “You are here as a witness, nothing more. You are powerless to stop me or my minions.”
“Your minions?” she asked.
Immediately, the misshapen, mutilated bodies of her dead fellow workers surrounded her, created from the substance of shadows, their dead, sightless eyes seeing or sensing her in some ethereal manner. She stepped back and Sid Easton lurched forward, one ear missing, and a demonic grin on his otherwise cold pale face. He raised his arms, reaching for her, exposing the lack of entrails in his abdomen. She slapped at his arms, repelled by her contact with his cold, lifeless flesh.
“Stay away, Sid!” she screamed at him.
He stopped at the sound of her voice. Confusion caused him to lower his arms and shuffle on dead feet.
“He remembers you,” Damballah Wedo said. “Poor fool.”
This angered her. “You murdered him, all of them. Why?”
“You know why. I took their souls for power.”
“How many souls do you need?”
“Three more,” he laughed.
“So Sims was dead, too. Why isn’t his body here also, a walking zombie?” “I’m here to fight you,” she yelled defiantly, somewhat like a little girl yelling angrily with raised fist at an approaching storm.
“You cannot fight me.”
“I can try,” she insisted.
Two eyes blazed in the shadows. “The Gateway is open, ever so slightly. Life and death are two sides of the same coin. What would you do if I offered to give you back your friends as they were?”
Lisa swallowed hard. “Was he trying to bribe her? For what reason?” “All of them?”
“All of them.”
“In exchange for what?”
“You will all leave this place in the emergency craft.”
Her hopes sank. “We’ll die in the storm.”
“Perhaps, though I will do nothing against you. You will be at the mercy of the storm and no more. You may survive. You may not. Will you chance it?”
She thought of her dead friends returned to her, and of her granny. “Include Granny Iris.”
Damballah Wedo laughed. “You want a mambo? She cannot help you. No, the mambo remains where she is.”
She knew it had to be a trick. Why should he return them alive after all the trouble he had gone through? Did he know something she did not?
“Why do you want us gone?” she asked.
“A gesture on my part.”
“Maybe you are afraid of us,” she suggested.
Thunder roared and the platform shook. “I fear no one.”
“My friends are dead. I’ve grieved for them already. I don’t want to leave. I want to stop you.”
Lisa felt something invisible reach out of the shadows and grab her, wrap around her like the coils of a snake, lift her into the air and fling her across the platform. She landed hard on her back, knocking the air from her lungs. She rolled over to look at the black sky above and passed out.
She awoke still on her back. The zombie corpses of her friends stood silent vigil around her. She checked her body for broken bones but thankfully found none. She felt confused. She had no idea of how much time had passed.
“How long was I out?” she asked of the darkness.
“A day. A moment? What is time where it does not exist?”
“I expected you to kill me,” she admitted.
“Not I. Not yet.”
“But you will?” she asked.
“When the time comes, you will die.”
She laughed. Damballah Wedo shared none of her uncertainty. “I thought you said there was no such thing as time.”
The platform shook so violently that her zombie guards fell to the deck.
“Do not bandy words with me,” he said.
“It’s plain to see you have no sense of humor,” she said getting to her feet. “Let me see you.”
She sensed something behind her. She turned and stared into the glowing red eyes of an ebony face. The face rested on the body of a serpent. When he opened his mouth, two large fangs glistened.
“Damballah Wedo,” she said. “I thought white was your color.”
He hissed. “I wandered my realm and found shadows, dark and inviting, deep in time and space. They spoke to me, succored me. Now, I am a thing of shadows.”
“You’re the shadow of the real Damballah Wedo,” she said, misinterpreting his words.
Again, the platform shuddered as he writhed before her, hissing. “I am Damballah Wedo!” he said, rising to tower above her. Now the shadow casts its own image.”
She fell and bounced along the living deck. It felt like tortured flesh beneath her. She rose quickly in disgust.
“You are the father of Loas. You are good.”
He laughed. “I am Damballah Wedo, Lord over all. I am beyond good and evil. I am all things. The shadow has become greater than that which once cast it. I yearn to break my bonds, go where I wish.”
“The other Loas will stop you.”
“They fear me.”
“I don’t fear you.”
He stared at her with his blood red eyes and she felt herself slipping into them, into hell.
Chapter Twenty Five
Sims stood on the deck, exposed to the wind and rain. He could smell death in the wind, but had nowhere to run. Pain raced through his body in response to the thought of escape from his bargain. He fought back the memories as they poured into his mind, released by the greatest Loa of all to torment him. He remembered the rage that was Hurricane Katrina and the fight to get his crippled ship back to port. He remembered seeing the platform in the distance, on fire and belching black smoke but solid in a sea of gigantic waves. He remembered tying up to it, hoping for help.
He remembered walking into hell itself.
Mutilated, hacked and tortured bodies lay everywhere. The odor of death hung over the platform in spite of the strong wind, some evil hovering over the rig like the pall of smoke. He saw the Digger Man, standing in front of him, filled to the brim with the evil of the place, dripping its overflow onto the deck like spilled tar. Its blackness oozed and quivered on the deck like a living creature.
Pain, muscle twisting, bone wrenching pain filled his mind. No words had passed between them but he knew what was wanted of him, what he had no choice but do. After he did as he was bidden, he left the platform, carrying his tormentor with him, inside like a parasite feeding on the remnants of his soul. He murdered his crew, and when the storm took his ship, rode the waves heedless of the danger until picked up by the Coast Guard. Now he was back, along with Waters, a minion, to complete his task.
The pain
subsided. Sims calmly walked into the storm.
Chapter Twenty Six
Lisa was drowning. She struggled as the frigid water enveloped her, smothering her. She struck out blindly, hitting something solid.
“It’s me, Lisa,” a faint voice whispered over the crashing of waves and the peal of thunder. A face hovered above her, somehow familiar. She focused on its features, slowly recognizing it.
“Jeff?” She sobbed. She felt a surge of relief. Her descent into hell…she couldn’t remember. She remembered the beginning of her journey into Damballah Wedo’s fiery eyes when everything she believed in fell to the wayside when faced with the reality of his existence. Her body remembered the tortures she had endured but her mind had shut down under the duress. She felt a blank spot in her mind, numb and cold.
“Yes.” He pulled her tight. Rain pelted them. They were outside on the deck.
“How?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t know. You disappeared from the room. Somehow I knew I would find you out here.”
“Thank you,” she said, her words muffled by his jacket. “How long was I gone?”
“Minutes. You disappeared and I came out here and saw your body crumpled on the deck. I…I was afraid.”
Jeff looked at her oddly while she struggled to digest this information. She felt older, much older.
“Let’s get you back inside out of the storm,” he suggested. He helped her to her feet. Her body was sore and bruised; aching proof it had not all been a dream.
She sobbed. “He offered to give everyone back, Jeff, if we would just leave. Let them live again.”
“Just like that.” She could detect skepticism and bitterness in Jeff’s voice that had matched her own.
“I think he’s afraid of us.”
“It certainly doesn’t looks like it,” he answered.
“I think I know why he’s determined to strike New Orleans again.”
“Why?” Jeff stopped to stare at her. Water dripped down his face, accentuating the weariness and disbelief she saw in his eyes.
“It’s a city filled with people with knowledge of voodoo, houngans and mamboes, people with power. They didn’t abandon New Orleans after Katrina. Maybe they even fought him the first time. Katrina didn’t do the damage they thought it would. It was the old levees that failed. Maybe someone there knows how to stop him.”