Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  The celebration continued through the day, fifteen hours of nonstop dancing until exhaustion and hysteria began to show. The djévo room was hot by then, thanks to the flaming torches that lit it, the candles on every surface. The smell of sweating human bodies filled the air. People had thrown aside their shirts; some of them had even stripped naked. Papa Hurbon sat on a chair on a raised stage in the room, and he had become drunk on heady wine as his initiates continued to twirl and cheer. It was a party, a celebration of the loa spirits who had walked the path before them.

  Ezili Coeur Noir stepped from the shadows then, the giddiness of life spread in front of her. She bent until her mouth was close to Hurbon’s ear.

  “It begins now,” she told him in a whisper that seemed to have all the power of a crashing tidal wave.

  Hurbon, her obedient lapdog, nodded and stood, swaying a little with drink. The ku-bha-sah, a ceremonial sword used to part the corporeal world from that of the voodoo spirits, sat in its decorous sheath beneath Hurbon’s chair, where he had placed it hours earlier, when all of this had started. He pulled the sword from its sheath and the blade glinted in the flames as he carved an extravagant swirl through the air.

  The music stopped, though Hurbon did not remember commanding it so, and a hush descended on the room. “The blade, ku-bha-sah, has cut through the gossamer-thin veil to the spirit world,” Hurbon explained, “and revealed to us a mighty loa, our protector, Ezili Coeur Noir.”

  She had been there among them all along, and yet it seemed as if she was being seen for the first time. Blessed ceremony and its effect on the weak-minded was an Annunaki weapon from days immemorial. Ezili Coeur Noir appeared, in that moment, to become taller, as if her very bones had elongated inside her emaciated frame. A cheer went around the room as she parted the shadows.

  “You will show your devotion to me,” the queen of all things dead instructed, “by letting blood.”

  There was a gasp from the people in the djévo, sixty-something people taking in their breath as one, followed by nervous laughter from some of the younger members of Hurbon’s congregation.

  Hurbon himself did not feel nervous. This would be a beautiful act, he knew—why should a loa knowingly hurt him or his people? It was beyond credibility.

  Ezili Coeur Noir’s sick eyes scoured the crowd for a moment until she saw Nina, her shirt open to the navel, her smooth, coffee-colored skin glistening with sweat. “It’s your time,” Ezili Coeur Noir said, her eyes fixing on the girl’s like a rattlesnake hypnotizing its prey.

  Without a word, the girl stepped forward, stiffly marching to the raised area of the room, her arms frozen at her sides like an automaton.

  Ezili Coeur Noir had watched Nina for many hours. She was graceful and she clearly loved to dance, used it to flirt with the men, to draw attention to herself. Dancing brought her joy.

  “Give me your leg,” Ezili Coeur Noir said, her yellow eyes still fixed on the girl’s.

  Without hesitation, Nina reached for the meat cleaver that rested in the remainder of the sheep’s carcass, her fingers wrapping around its handle without looking, her eyes remaining fixed on Ezili Coeur Noir’s. Then she swept the blade down, the reflected candle flames sparkling across its silver edge, and hacked into her own leg, just below the thigh.

  She grunted just a little with the effort, but Nina didn’t scream, even though her sister was shrieking with terror from her place in the crowd. Nina withdrew that square blade and a thick line of blood appeared along the top of her leg like some magician’s trick as she swayed just a little in place. Then the blade of the meat cleaver swept down again, and she had embedded it in her own leg a second time with a savage blow. This time, the blade sunk so deep it hit bone, and Nina toppled over, sagging to the floor as her blood gushed over the raised wooden stage. And, as she hit the floor, Nina began to laugh and to weep with joy.

  Ezili Coeur Noir watched as the girl withdrew the blade and swept it down again, plunging it into her own limb, hacking through the flesh and the bone there. Her own face was as death, an emotionless mask, but she felt the blood spilling across the stage, its warm, red fingers reaching out until it touched her bare toes.

  Nina was the first. Another twenty-three people amputated their own legs for Ezili Coeur Noir that evening, including Papa Hurbon himself, screaming that he could see the spirit world even as he drove the ceremonial blade of the ku-bha-sah into his own flesh. Ezili Coeur Noir had been born of pain, and pain was all she truly understood. Pain and death.

  By dawn, Ezili Coeur Noir was satiated. Blood painted the whole of the temple, that ragged, disheveled little wooden structure out in the middle of the swamp. Blood was the link that made life in people. Ezili Coeur Noir was, or would be, the queen of all things dead. And since all things must die, she was, by default, the queen of the Earth. Blood was hers.

  Chapter 18

  Papa Hurbon’s busy hands looped another twist of black ribbon around the little doll as he sat in the kitchen of the House Lilandera with the Cerberus rebels and the elderly woman called Winnie watching him.

  “When she came and took my other leg,” Hurbon admitted, “I thought I would die from the pain alone. Didn’t matter about the blood loss, just the pain was enough to finish me. You know?”

  Grant nodded solemnly. “I have an idea.”

  “Your boss—Ohio—came along,” Hurbon continued, “and she patched me up. I would have died otherwise, but she wouldn’t have that on her conscience now, would she? Like I said, soft and fluffy little princess, that one is. I think she only came back to ransack my place, figured she could overpower me after the mess you’d all made of my people.”

  Hurbon was talking about Ohio Blue, the independent trader with whom Kane’s team had worked in an under cover capacity, posing as her lackeys so as to access bottom-feeders like this voodoo priest who had stumbled upon alien technology. Now was not the time to correct his assumptions, the Cerberus team knew.

  “After that, I got the fuck out of there,” Hurbon finished. “I couldn’t face her if she came back again—I’m running out of limbs.” And he began to laugh at his own sick joke.

  “So how did you end up here?” Kane asked from his guard position at the open doorway. “Or is it obvious?”

  “Maitresse Ezili called to me,” Papa Hurbon explained.

  Kane nodded, encouraging the man to go on.

  “That’s the one standing outside,” Hurbon said, holding aloft the rotund doll he had wrapped in a long strip of black ribbon, “the one I’m binding. She’s another side of Ezili, dedicated to passion and to love.”

  Brigid brushed the hair out of her eyes as she spoke, “She’s the same person, then? The same as Ezili Coeur Noir?”

  “The same but different,” Hurbon replied, “like branches from the same trunk. Each one goes its own way, finds its own path, but they are all still a part of the tree, are they not? Ezili takes on many different faces depending on emotion. Ezili Dantor, Ezili ze Rouge, Ezili Freda Dahomey—these are all parts of the whole.”

  A silence fell upon the kitchen as Hurbon finished explaining the nature of the voodoo spirits and each member of the group there tried to take in everything he had told them. In that silence, Hurbon twisted another loop of the black ribbon over the voodoo doll in his hands. In the corridor beyond the room, Ellie—or more accurately, Maitresse Ezili—was still struggling to move, but she remained held in one spot, unable to go forward or backward.

  Brigid began to see it all now. It was mixed and confused, like some fever dream brought to life, but it did finally seem to make some kind of sense. Lilitu had died in combat on Tiamat—Brigid had seen this with her own eyes—but the living spaceship had revived her, her motherly devotion absolute. However, Tiamat had been dying at the time, too, her body disintegrating as fire took hold in her depths.

  “The rebirth process couldn’t be completed,” Brigid concluded. “Things were wild at that moment, explosions firing off everywhere, so it produced
a fractured version of Lilitu.”

  “Fractured?” Kane queried uncertainly.

  “Ezili Coeur Noir and Maitresse Ezili—or Ellie, as we know her—are parts of the same person, but they’re physically separate,” Brigid said. “It’s like Lilitu’s personality was split across two people.

  “With no moral shackles constraining her darker personality, the aspect we’ve met as Ezili Coeur Noir has become nihilistic, devoted to death and destruction,” Brigid continued. “An id freed from the restraints of the ego.”

  Brigid’s cheeks flushed as she warmed to her subject matter. “This is basic Freudian psychology, manifesting itself in a literal, physical form,” she continued. “Ezili Coeur Noir is the id, while the loving, life-affirming Maitresse Ezili out there is the ego.”

  Sitting across from Brigid at the table, Grant shook his head, confused. “Care to run that by us again?”

  “The ego is the organized and realistic part of the psyche,” Brigid explained as she drew on the wealth of information stored in her encyclopedic memory. “Effectively, Ellie out there has been trying to do good. Like she said, this whole house is dedicated to the affirmation of life. Even the name of the place—Lilandera—is just another corruption of her real name, Lilitu.”

  “It’s a whorehouse,” Kane pointed out. “And your organized and realistic personality out there trapped us in illusions and tried to kill me when I broke her hypnosis.”

  Brigid nodded thoughtfully, trying to see what it was she was missing. “Maitresse Ezili is operating like some kind of extremist,” she mused. “Just like the Ezili Coeur Noir aspect, her personality isn’t being constrained by anything.”

  Out in the corridor, the figure whom they had identified as Maitresse Ezili was still struggling as if against an invisible cage, but her efforts had diminished, and the fight seemed to be going out of her.

  “There are other people here,” Kane told Brigid. “Once I saw through the illusions I saw they were…well, weird-looking things, like fetuses, only grown to adult size in that form. They tried to seduce me.”

  There was a stifled gasp around the room, and the elderly woman called Winnie fanned her face as if embarrassed for Kane. “You poor, poor dear,” Winnie said. “That’s a terrible, wicked thing.”

  Kane thanked her with a stern nod. “They seemed to be guided by just one thing—desire. You think maybe they could be parts of Lilitu, too?” Kane suggested.

  “More bodies,” Brigid agreed, nodding, “malformed parts that didn’t grow properly, operating with only the most primal personality traits. Lilitu’s rebirth process must have been like something out of a nightmare.”

  “There are so many aspects to Ezili,” Hurbon agreed, understanding the situation from his own frame of reference.

  Brigid ran her hand through her brightly colored hair, trying to see what it was she was missing. “Id, ego and superego,” she said, speaking to herself. “There’s a third major aspect out there that’s missing from this equation.”

  “Could it be these seductresses that Kane met with?” Hurbon asked.

  “No, they’re vessels,” Brigid concluded, “mindless abortions that I believe only have the most basic components of Lilitu’s personality within them.” In her mind’s eye, Brigid was tracing back through the literature she had read on the pioneering psychologist Sigmund Freud. “We still need to identify the superego, the moralizing, critical aspect of her personality. The judge keeping the id and ego in check.”

  It was suddenly so obvious that Brigid almost fell from her seat, her breath catching in her throat. “Mr. Hurbon,” she asked, “is there an aspect of your goddess that you’d associate with judgment?”

  Papa Hurbon scratched at his jowls for a moment, his fingernails grinding against the darkening line of stubble there. “Ezili Freda Dahomey, I guess,” he proposed. “She’s above the normal folk, like a landowner or—” He stopped then, too, following where Brigid was looking.

  They were all now staring at the elderly woman with the exceptionally pale skin, the aristocratic lady who had called herself Winnie.

  “You told me that your name was Winifred,” Brigid said, and the woman nodded.

  “Freda,” Hurbon said, his voice soft. “Freda Dahomey. As I live and breathe.”

  Like a grandmother proud of her children, Winnie smiled and gave them a single nod. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  Nine months earlier.

  FIRST BODY CLAMBERED out of the wreckage of the escape pod as the man called Papa Hurbon bowed. She lurched forward on malformed legs, her ungainly gait a series of stuttering, rocky steps. He had called her Ezili Coeur Noir, Ezili the black-hearted, and she had begun to recall a life that might yet be.

  Behind her, still hidden among the wreckage of the spacecraft that was gradually sinking into the bog, another figure had emerged from the chalice of rebirth to observe this exchange. Unlike the first, Second Body was more finished, a properly crafted thing. Where First Body had dark, rough skin like a lizard’s scales, Second Body glowed with luminescence, and the ooze of amniotic fluids still clung to her pallid form. Her hair was chalk-white and her flesh was pale, too, almost without pigment. Where First Body had been born almost as a dead thing, Second Body seemed vibrant with life in that moment, a beautiful, shapely young woman’s body within which surged the memories of Lilitu, rushing in to fill an empty vessel.

  When First Body stalked away from the crash site, Hurbon struggling beneath the weight of the astronavigator’s chair beside her, Second Body took her first tentative step out into the open air. Lilitu’s memories slotted gingerly into place. This was Earth, the primary outpost of the Annunaki, she recalled.

  Second Body brushed at her cooling skin, wiping the amniotic goo from her bare arms, shaking it from her naked body. High above, out there at the edges of the atmosphere, Tiamat had self-destructed, and the burst of ectoplasmic force was only now dissipating from the ionosphere. Second Body looked up, as if sensing her dragon mother still up there in the stars. There was thick tree cover here in the bayou, and Second Body tilted her head as she sought a gap in the leaves through which to see.

  Her form was graceful where First Body’s had been ugly and strained, with shapely legs taking long strides across the boggy marsh with surety and poise. Her white hair seemed to shimmer in the light as she walked toward the spot in the clearing where the golden rays of the sun struck the ground. As Second Body reached that spot, the sun struck her body for the first time as it carved a path through the cover of the trees.

  Second Body seemed to wither beneath the sun’s rays, her skin blistering. She stepped back into the shadows, her skin smoldering as if she had been on fire. Something is wrong, the still-forming mind of Lilitu realized. The rebirth procedure had failed to complete; this body was defective, flawed. There was an absence of melatonin in this body, so it could not color, could not tan. Without such simple protection, the sun’s rays were deadly to Second Body, and having been touched by this elemental enemy, her body seared with burning pain.

  There had been a disease that struck the Annunaki, a rare genetic disorder called scarabae sickness. It scarred the body, causing it to fail and forcing its sufferers to hide themselves from the sun, lest their bodies burn away.

  Cowering in the shadows of the escape pod, Second Body watched as her pale form became wizened, wrinkles of age puckering the flesh, making it old before it had ever managed a proper taste of youth. Second Body hid in the darkest shadows of the wreckage as her body spasmed and her pituitary gland fizzled, popping with the hormones that should have made her grow. For an hour or more she remained there, racked with searing pain so potent that it obliterated all other thoughts.

  When she had finally emerged again from the ruined escape pod, Second Body was no longer a shapely maiden. Like the Moon, she had gone from maiden to crone, living in a pale, twilight body close to the end of its life. Lilitu’s memory had almost entirely wiped, a kindly, bland sort of senility taking its pla
ce.

  Strangely, from the point of view of the old Lilitu, Second Body would be broken, for she had nurturing qualities unutterably alien to Lilitu’s true nature. In actuality it was a self-preservation instinct gone awry—her first steps on Earth had almost killed her, the sun’s fearsome rays poisonous to her new form. In defence, she had sought to shelter herself and so, by extension, those she came into contact with.

  This old woman, this Second Body, would be Ezili Freda Dahomey. The seeds of the identity dwelled somewhere deep within her, and Papa Hurbon had stirred them when he had named her sister, her deathly First Body.

  “YOU WERE CASTING the illusions,” Brigid said to the old woman sitting at the kitchen table. “You used the mechanics of the chair to somehow… I don’t know, make people see perversions. Why would you do that?”

  “Because the perversions were there anyway,” the woman who had been revealed as Ezili Freda Dahomey, voodoo loa, explained. “I simply tried to make them palatable. Admittedly, I became a little caught up in the dream after a while—sitting in that chair can become very confusing.”

  “So,” Kane said, making his way from the doorway to address the white-haired old woman, “you’re basically Lilitu.” As the final word left his mouth, Kane raised the Sin Eater in his hand and targeted the woman right between the eyes.