The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  “You say that like you’re going to let me walk out of here,” I said.

  She looked a little surprised.

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, zip tying me and throwing me in your basement doesn’t exactly bode too well for me.”

  “You came onto my property with a small arsenal.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that. I had just walked up to her front door with the magical equivalent of a loaded gun. Several loaded guns, actually. Maybe even a hand grenade or two. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable that she would take that as an insult.

  “I knew you’d show up on my doorstep one day,” she said. “Granted, I had hoped it would be under different circumstances.”

  “So what, are we supposed to be friends?”

  “Well, that depends.”

  “On?”

  “Well, I’ll put it to you like this: it’s up to you. I am willing to let you walk out of here safe and sound. Call it respect for your dearly departed teacher. Though, there’s a condition.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That thing you’re looking for, stop.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That runestone. You need to stop looking for it.”

  “Trust me, I want to.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, surveying my face.

  “You want to, but you can’t.”

  “I can’t,” I agreed.

  “That’s a shame, Jonah, and damned disappointing. You’re willing to trade your life for a little bit of money. Gretchen’s rolling over in her grave,” she said, a slight hint of disgusting in her tone.

  “It’s not about the money,” I said.

  “Maybe so,” Mama Duvalier said, standing slowly, moving with the sort of calculated caution that came with old age and aching joints. “You sure this is the way you want this to go, Jonah?”

  I sat there, staring at the floor. I wasn’t stupid. I knew which way it was going to play out, but I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to die, but my old man had sacrificed most of his life trying to make mine better. He’d spent countless amounts of money and hours putting me before himself and gained only frustration, heartache, and pain. The Carvers wouldn’t make it clean, either, if they hurt him because I didn’t pay them. They’d make the old man suffer and I couldn’t abide that.

  “Positive,” I said finally, and took a long, slow breath. I wasn’t necessarily resigned to my fate, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to fight my way out.

  “Maryse, dear?”

  “Yes, Momma?”

  “You know what to do, baby. Make it easy on him. Give him that much, alright?”

  “Yes, Momma,” the woman in the middle said. She was taller than the other two, thinner, and wore her hair in shoulder-length dreadlocks adorned with shells and beads. She walked casually to one of the shelves and lifted a long, thin bladed kitchen knife from somewhere amidst the various canning jars.

  The other two women grabbed me, pushing me down onto the floor and pinning me there. I struggled, maybe not as resigned to my fate as I’d fooled myself into thinking. Mama Duvalier’s daughters were deceptively strong, lifting my arms up over my head and stretching me out, making sure that Maryse had easy access to all of my squishy bits.

  She knelt down beside me and put the blade against my side, the tip just between my ribs, right beside my heart.

  And just like that, the lights went out.

  Chapter 14

  A certain measure of confusion comes with being plunged into sudden darkness. When the lights go out at home, say during a big storm, you sit there, staring around with a dumb expression on your mug until your brain processes a very simple idea: the lights are out.

  For the span of several heartbeats, none of us moved. Hell, we barely even breathed. There was a building tension in the air, something tangible and electric enough that it put my teeth on edge.

  “Momma?” one of the three women asked, her voice pitched to a low whisper.

  A response came in the form of a heavy thump against the floor overhead. Whatever it was, it was big and hit hard enough to send small clouds of dust raining down onto us. I didn’t take that as a good sign.

  “That doesn’t sound good, at all,” I said.

  “Shush, boy,” Mama Duvalier said.

  “What do we do, Momma?” another one of her daughters asked. She didn’t sound overly concerned about whatever it was that was going on. If anything, she sounded impatient.

  Mama Duvalier didn’t speak, letting another stretch of silence fill the basement.

  Of course, it was just a precursor to that moment when all hell breaks loose.

  The door to the basement exploded inwards in a burst of splinters and noise. A body—a very large, unconscious body—came tumbling down the stairs. The slab of humanity came to a stop at the base of the stairs and lay there, perfectly still.

  Mama Duvalier and her brood forgot about me for the moment, focusing on the commotion upstairs. Light was flooding into the basement now, almost blinding in the aftermath of the recent darkness.

  “Maryse, Gabrielle, go!” Mama Duvalier snapped, then turned her attention back to me. The woman who’d only moments ago been ready to plunge a knife into me and the other girl, Gabrielle, bolted up the stairs. Thankfully, they took the knife with them.

  Duvalier turned towards me, her eyes alit with a horrifying, absolutely blood-curdling, rage. She reached out, grabbing me by the hair, and jerked me to my feet.

  “You bring them with you?” she snarled.

  “What? No,” I stammered.

  She was about to say something, but was cut off by the sounds of utter calamity upstairs. I could hear furniture breaking, the sound of a fight, glass shattering, and a scream of pain.

  It was one of her kids.

  “Watch him,” she snapped to the last woman in the basement.

  Mama Duvalier stormed up the stairs, and I had the strangest feeling that whoever had made the mistake of attacking her home was about to find themselves FUBARed in short order. The girl she’d left in the basement to stand guard looked from me to the stairs, indecision warring on her face. I got it, a part of her wanted to go, to rush upstairs and help her family. Hell, it’s what got me into this mess to begin with.

  She looked to be around the same age as me, if not younger. Compared to her mother and her sisters, she had a much slighter build, though she easily had a few inches over her other family members in the height department. Overhead, the sounds of the fight were getting a bit more distant, like the combat had moved outside.

  “Don’t suppose you’d just untie me, would you?”

  “Shush,” she said, her eyes darting between me and the open doorway at the top of the stairs.

  “Yeah, didn’t think so,” I said.

  Something about this whole attack didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Why would they not come down here? We were all sitting ducks; the only way out was up the stairs. Hell, they didn’t even need to come down here to do us all in. They could’ve just as easily stood at the top of the stairs and sprayed gunfire downward, or thrown a makeshift bomb, or blocked off the door and burnt the place down around us. Instead, they’d lured Mama Duvalier and her daughters out of the basement, leaving me down here with, well, that was another damn good question, wasn’t it?

  “So, Warden, if you’re gonna be babysitting me, what do I call you?” I asked.

  The girl turned her eyes towards me with annoyance.

  “Right, shut up. I know.”

  “Mia,” she said, then turned her eyes back towards the door at the top of the stairs, or lack thereof.

  “Mia, huh?” I said, trying to figure out if there was a way I could talk my way out of this after all. Mama Duvalier and her other sisters weren’t here at the moment and Mia didn’t look like she was exactly overflowing with confidence, either. Both things I could maybe spin to my favor. At the very least, I may be able to buy some more time or pick up a small tidbit
of information on the off chance that I did manage to get out of here with my skin intact.

  Mia started pacing back and forth across the basement, glancing towards the door every few seconds, everything about her humming with nervous energy.

  Something hit the side of the house, loud enough to rattle the place on its foundations. A few of the jars fell from the shelves, filling the basement with the acrid smell of vinegar.

  That was all it took and Mia forgot about me, bolting up the stairs to aid her family.

  Which suited me just fine. Once she’d cleared the stairs and vanished, I squirmed over to the broken jars. It took me a minute to find a piece of glass large enough to cut the bindings around my wrists, and another minute to cut the ones at my ankles.

  Once I’d managed to get myself free, I worked my way up to vertical. My hands and feet were alight with pins and needles, and coupled with my bum leg made it almost impossible to stand. I used the shelving to brace myself. My face stung where the Carvers had cut me, but all in all the pain was mostly manageable.

  I grabbed my cane and started working my way up the steps, pausing every few seconds to try and gauge the conflict on sound alone. I wasn’t sure what was going on outside, but whatever it was, it had gone from muted thuds and bangs, to loud and violent. In the last few seconds, someone had turned the intensity way up. The air was practically humming with magic. There were powers flying around outside that I didn’t really understand or have any familiarity with, but they were frighteningly strong nonetheless.

  The stairway led up to a hallway, which led into a kitchen at one end and what I assumed was the front door at the other. There were a few more doorways along the wall heading towards the kitchen, all of them closed. After waiting a minute to make sure nothing was going to take my head off, I stepped out into the hallway.

  I’d expected a lot more for someone with Mama Duvalier’s reputation. A little more opulence, maybe, or a little more terror. Maybe some pentacles drawn in blood or something. Instead, there was just a lot of cheap furniture and ugly, floral print wallpaper. Oh, and chickens. Lots of chickens. Statues, pictures, curtains, the works. I would have preferred the bloody pentacles.

  For a minute, I considered the front door and if I’d known what I was walking into, I probably would’ve taken it. As it was, I didn’t think I’d be able to do much against whatever it was on the other side with just my cane.

  Instead, I kept close to the wall and drifted towards the kitchen, trying doors as I went. The first opened onto a bedroom. Same for the second.

  The third, however, was secured with a padlock. As a general rule, people only lock up things they either don’t want other people to take or don’t want other people to see. A slave to my very curious (and dare I say charming) nature, I really, really wanted to see what was behind that door.

  Thankfully, I had a way with locks. They’d been an obsession of mine when I was a kid, and no doubt that obsession had led a lot of the doctors towards diagnosing me with autism. Up until I’d met Gretchen, I used locks as a way to block out all the weird things I was seeing on a regular basis as a kid. I could recite specs on probably half a dozen different company lines from rote memory and learned to pick most of them in about three seconds, give or take. As a general rule, I kept a lock pick in the lining of my jacket, just in case. It took me a second to wiggle it out, but once I did, I had the lock opened in record time.

  I slipped inside and came face to face with what made Mama Duvalier who she is.

  The entire room was one big voodoo altar, complete with candles, cigars, bottles of booze, blood, chalk drawings on the floor and walls, skulls, feathers, the works. Beside the massive altar, the only other things in the room were a few waist-high stacks of books. Even those were serving as makeshift tables for spell components or ritual gear.

  Mama Duvalier was a Mambo, a voodoo priestess. It explained a lot about the rumors attributed to her. Everything I’d heard about her, the potions, the magic, the cursing of jilted lovers, all fell under that purview.

  Voodoo was another one of those things that the movies got all wrong. In movies, voodoo is all about curses and voodoo dolls, that sort of thing. A true Mambo, or Houngan, was touched by the divine. They were, essentially, descended from the Loa, the very spirits they channeled. It was those spirits that let them do the curses and create the voodoo dolls that voodoo practitioners were famous for, but it also let them control the weather, get the dead up and moving around, and all sorts of other nastiness. There were maybe twenty real-deal, full-fledged voodoo practitioners in the world, at least that I knew of. Most of them lived in the traditional locales, West Africa, Haiti, one or two in New Orleans. All of them had one thing in common though: they could summon down beings every bit as strong as angels or demons, and channel that power. They were, for all intents and purposes, the children of gods.

  I gave the room a quick once over, saw my bag sitting next to the door, scooped it up and gave it a check to make sure all of my stuff was still there. Satisfied, I grabbed a bottle of what looked like rum from off the altar (which was probably some kind of sacrilege), and a couple of the books, shoved them all into my bag and threw it over my shoulder. I was ready to wrap up my little act of spiteful petty larceny, when something caught my eye.

  Tucked in behind the altar was a small bundle wrapped in what looked like hides or leather and covered in an occult script. If I hadn’t stopped to give the room one last look, I’d have missed it completely. I have no idea how, or why, but once I saw it, I knew instantly what it was.

  The stone.

  I crossed the room and grabbed the stone off the floor. As soon as I put my hand on it, I could feel pure energy radiating off it, even through the leather and hide bindings. Though, energy was probably the wrong word to describe what I felt when I picked it up. It was potential—the potential of power, of possibilities, and none of them were good. It was like holding a bomb in the palm of your hand. The potential was there, all the faith in the old stories, in the depictions that had been carved into the larger rune stone, that mystical energy, just waiting to be unleashed.

  I shoved the rock into my bag, along with everything else and tossed it back over my shoulder. Outside, I could hear the sounds of the fighting, along with the all too close rumble of thunder. I still had no idea who was throwing down with Mama Duvalier. From the sound of it, whoever it was they were giving her one hell of a run for her money.

  I slipped back into the hallway, tried to ignore the splashes of red on the hardwood floor, and made my way towards the kitchen, and thankfully, the back door.

  I pulled the door open, stepped in front of a small, screen-enclosed back door and stopped dead in my tracks. I wanted absolutely nothing more than to get the hell out of dodge. It’s just hard to move when you get a blatant reminder of just how insignificant and vulnerable you are in the face of real power.

  Chapter 15

  The rain was pouring in a violent, nearly blinding sheet of water. I could make out a few figures through the haze, standing on the wide expanse of open grass that made up Mama Duvalier’s backyard. I could see just enough to spot Mama Duvalier and her brood amidst the torrent. All things considered, they were holding their own. That wasn’t what freaked me out when I had stepped out of the house. It was Mama Duvalier’s shadow: she shouldn’t have had one. And if she did, it wouldn’t look like this.

  The shadow stretched out behind her for at least ten feet. It was thinner than Mama Duvalier, the limbs a little too long, the shape of the clothing different. I could make out tuxedo tails and a top hat, and yet its movements matched hers perfectly.

  Their opponents flickered through the rain, seemingly disappearing from one place and reappearing at another. Mama Duvalier made a few simple motions with one hand, her daughters would gesture in their opponents’ general direction, and three or four at a time would just…disintegrate.

  I’d never seen magic or power like that get thrown around so easily. Sure,
I’d seen a few big workings here and there, but this was a whole other level.

  It was also my cue to get to stepping.

  I hit the woods at what approximates to a run for a guy with one fully functional leg. I didn’t even really know if I was going in the right direction. Though, to be fair, I considered anything away from the chaos behind me to be close enough to right that I was willing to take my chances. My mind screamed a million different things at me as I stumbled blindly through the trees, surrounded by the roar of the rain. I couldn’t help but feel elated, having gotten the prize that I’d come for from someone who, by all accounts, was terrifying. Given what I’d seen and experienced in my short foray into Casa de Duvalier, I had little reason to doubt the rumors, even if it was a little easier than I’d expected. More than that, I’d gotten out alive and, all things considered, not too much worse for the wear. Then there was fear, fear for my life, fear of what I’d discovered about the old granny witch that I’d heard so much about. Fear of what she’d do when she discovered the fact that I’d just ripped her off.

  That, however, was a problem for another day.

  I ran for what I thought was maybe ten minutes, though with all the madness going on behind me, it could’ve been a less than a minute or as long as half an hour. Everything had turned into a massive, adrenaline-fueled blur. In my flight, it all turned into trees, rain, noise, and flashes of lightning. Truth be told, it was probably the adrenaline, but there was a certain lightness in my step that if I weren’t in danger of imminent death or dismemberment, I might’ve enjoyed. As it was, I was far enough into the woods that the sounds of the fight had faded out to a distant echo, drowned out by the roar of the rain.