Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  Grant had made his way back to one of the dirt-streaked windows of the kitchen, and he watched the overgrown vegetation there suspiciously as the other spoke.

  Brigid folded up her little pad and removed the square-framed spectacles she wore at the end of her nose. “What’s next?” she asked.

  “You want to combine her aspects,” Hurbon stated, “you need to get them all together.”

  “Can’t be done,” Brigid said, tapping the front of her pad. “I thought we might be able to use an interphaser to do it, but I can’t see any way to make it work.”

  “So long as we know where they are,” Hurbon said, “I can do it.” He peered back over to where the old woman who was Ezili Freda Dahomey was sitting. She appeared to be watching the whole ceremony with rapt attention. “Freda won’t move now,” he said.

  “Say again?” Brigid requested.

  Hurbon pointed to the symbols he had drawn on the floor with the mouse’s blood. “She sat and watched as I trapped her,” he explained with a chuckle. “Always was too trusting, that side of her.”

  Moving over to the doorway that led into the house, Kane checked on the figure of Maitresse Ezili. As before, she remained held in place in the corridor by the foot of the stairs, her struggles diminished to nothing. From a distance, Kane thought, she appeared dead, as if embalmed and placed in the hallway like some perverse decoration.

  “So, what’s next?” Kane asked.

  Hurbon reached into his bag one last time, bringing out a small, sharp knife with a black handle. It looked like the kind of knife one might use to pare fruit. “Now,” Hurbon explained, “different people do this in different ways but it works best if you can get a part of the person you intend to control.”

  Grant eyed the knife. “Like a finger?”

  Hurbon smiled indulgently. “I prefer a lock of hair,” he said. “Ever since Ezili Coeur Noir paid that final visit, my keenness for blood-letting ceremonies has soured. Mice notwithstanding.”

  “Understandable,” Kane acknowledged.

  “This here is what’s called an athame,” Hurbon said, turning the knife over in his grip. “I borrowed it a few years ago from a woman in Sao Paulo. A magic woman, fucking ancient she was. What they called her was the Bruja, said she’d lived forever.

  “This knife is like any other knife,” Hurbon continued, “only she’d charged it up with magic. She was crazy powerful in the ways of her craft, and she’d had this knife a long, long time.”

  Hurbon wheeled himself around so that he could cut a lock from Winnie’s hair. The elderly woman sat still, staring straight ahead as if caught in a trance, as Hurbon cut a curl of her hair with a swish of the little blade. Once he was done, Hurbon took the tiny clipping and began to fiddle with it between his fingers, working at it until it became three distinct strands. Then he plaited the strands, his pudgy fingers surprisingly deft for such an operation. With that done, he handed the tiny plait—perhaps two inches in length—to Brigid Baptiste. “I guess you’ll be the one who needs this,” he said.

  “We’ll see,” Brigid replied, taking the lock of hair and placing it safely in her glasses case along with her spectacles. A moment later she returned the case to its pocket in her jacket.

  “Now, we also have the passionate one to deal with, huh?” Hurbon said, wheeling himself toward the door. “Passion sometimes comes out as anger, don’t it?” He chuckled.

  “You seem to be taking this in your stride,” Kane observed as he stepped aside to let Hurbon wheel past and out into the corridor. “As it were,” he added self-consciously, acknowledging the man’s disability.

  Papa Hurbon glanced over his shoulder to Kane. “This whole thing is a mess,” he said. “Just happens to be the mess I’ve been practicing my whole life to deal with.”

  “That’s how it happens sometimes,” Kane agreed, thinking of his own strange life’s journey. He had been trained from birth to protect order; it was only later in life that he found out the order he had been duped into believing was the wrong one. So, in a sense, he really was still a Magistrate; it was only his jurisdiction that had changedhis jurisdiction that had changed

  While Kane followed the voodoo houngan down the corridor, Brigid and Grant stopped to study the unmoving figure of Winnie, or Ezili Freda Dahomey. Grant waved his hand in front of the old woman’s blank eyes, but she didn’t move, didn’t even flinch.

  “Like she’s not here no more,” Grant said.

  Brigid placed her hands to her face, rubbing at the tense feeling she felt around her nose from wearing her glasses. “That woman has slept through most of this little adventure,” she said. “It seems somehow appropriate that she’s out of it again, here at the end.”

  In the corridor, Hurbon stared at the impressive figure of Maitresse Ezili as she squirmed against the invisible bonds that held her. Realizing the houngan was too short in his chair to reach for the woman’s hair, Kane offered to cut a lock from her head. “You want me to do it?” he asked.

  Hurbon handed Kane the athame blade and Kane took a lock of black hair from the back of the woman’s head, two inches in all.

  Then Kane gave the blade back to Hurbon along with the pinch of hair. “We about done?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Hurbon said, still studying the woman. “Take her ring, there, from her finger. That one—” He pointed to the ring finger of her left hand. It was a gold ring holding a shining ruby, the gem a fierce red even in the ill-lit corridor.

  Kane reached for the woman’s hand and stopped, peering back at Hurbon. The man had produced the other doll, the one that represented Maitresse Ezili and had been entwined in black ribbon.

  “Is this safe?” Kane asked.

  “Why do you think I asked you to do it?” Hurbon replied with a knowing smile, clutching the doll tightly in his hands.

  Nine months earlier.

  SECOND BODY LAY shivering beside the wreckage of the escape pod as night mercifully fell in the Louisiana bayou. Naked, her skin still felt as if it was on fire from the punishing effects of the sun, red welters bubbling across her arm and forehead where they had been touched just briefly by the sun’s fearsome rays.

  The spacecraft itself had sunk lower into the mire, and Second Body could see now that it would be gone by the morning. She should be gone then, too, for being in the sun like this was dangerous for her. It had aged her terribly already, and her arms were covered in the beetlelike blotches of the sickness. She would hide those scars over time, clothe herself so that they could not be seen. The thought of clothes made her realize that she required a hiding place.

  Behind Second Body, something within the sinking wreck moved, and a stream of garbled noises came from a still-forming throat. Afraid, Second Body shuffled away, putting more distance between herself and the figure who emerged from the wreckage, enough that it could not touch her. In appearance this one was larger, wider, and it looked to Ezili Freda Dahomey—to Second Body—more like a waddling sphere than an actual person. This was Third Body.

  Third Body’s skin was dark, far darker than Second Body’s but lighter than the desiccated flesh of her first-born sister. A balance had been struck by the malfunctioning sequencers of the chalice of rebirth, it seemed. Third Body was, in a sense, a halfway house between her two sisters, an amalgamation of them and a buffer between their traits. An ego, then, to sit between base instinct and overarching morality.

  As Second Body watched, Third Body called her over. “Come now, sister,” Third Body said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “The sun hurt me,” Second Body stated, as if this explained her fear.

  “I need your help,” Third Body said, “before the ship sinks and we lose the others. I love them but I cannot free them on my own.”

  Love would be the guiding principle for Third Body, and all because the first thing she had been tasked to do after her birth was to decide whether to help the other newborns or to ignore them. The original Lilitu template would have left them to die, concer
ned only with her own survival. Once again, the personality growth had fractured, corrupted, made of Third Body something she should not have been.

  Second Body, the one who would be Ezili Freda Dahomey, helped her larger sister, dragging other bodies from the escape pod. Each body had been generated there, made in the production line of the malfunctioning chalice of rebirth. They were half-formed things with fetus faces and pulpy limbs like dough. These were the failed attempts that the broken logic of the escape pod had tried to create as a body for Lilitu. Had they grown they might have looked like the old hybrid barons, but they had been aborted as soon as they had been birthed, the mush of the swamp finally leaking into the circuitry and ruining the birthing procedure. Instead, these half-born things had just the barest of personality traits: to want. Third Body would care for them, though, and for her older sister, too.

  “We shall find a place where we can all be safe,” Third Body announced. Beside her, the rag-tag group watched the escape pod sink without a trace beneath the marsh, in much the same way as the sun had set a few hours before, when Second Body had finally been able to stop cowering from it.

  “We shall find a dark place for you,” Third Body said to assure her Second Body sibling. “A place beneath the earth.”

  Second Body smiled, the old woman’s wrinkles creasing her pale face. Third Body was love, and Second Body approved. Already, Second Body had an inkling of who her sister would be, of which face of the voodoo Ezili she would adopt. It would be the most loving aspect, the one known as Maitresse Ezili. She would take care of Second Body and she would take care of her sister-abortions. And she would care, too, for strangers and wayfarers; Maitresse Ezili would care for any outlanders who came into her reach. It would be nothing like her time as Lilitu or Lilu or any of the others. And it would be a beautiful life.

  IN THE HALLWAY of the House Lilandera, Kane warily reached for the woman’s hand. As he touched it, he felt a jolt go through him like electricity, powering through his hand and up his arm, sending shooting pain across his chest. As the jolt hit, the servo motors of his wrist holster began to whir automatically, and the Sin Eater tried to launch itself into his hand, finding its path blocked by Kane’s bent wrist. “What the hell, Hurbon?” Kane shouted.

  “You’ll be fine, man,” Papa Hurbon said. “Just remove the ring.”

  Kane shook as the strange power racked his body, feeling it running all over him, head to toe, as he clung to the hand of the housemistress.

  “It’s the binding,” Hurbon said simply. “Didn’t think she’d fight this much.”

  As he said that, Maitresse Ezili began to inch forward, her feet still in place but her body keeling slightly toward Kane. Still clinging to her hand, tremors running through his own body, Kane snagged the ring Hurbon had indicated and yanked it free, stumbling back three steps with the effort before striking the nearest wall with his back.

  As Kane looked up, the woman he still thought of as Madam Ellie reached forward, her left hand clawing for his face. Automatically, Kane drove his own hands forward like a wedge, pushing Ellie’s grasping hand away from him. She was terrifically quick, however, far more so than he had expected, and already her hand was reaching out, grabbing him by the throat. Before she could secure her grip, Kane grabbed Ellie’s wrist, forcing her hand away from his neck.

  Kane was backed up against the wall, nowhere to move to get clear of the woman’s grasping hand. She was still stuck in place, too, he realized, unable to get her legs to move. But that didn’t seem to diminish her determination to hurt him. Whatever his touch had done, it seemed to have fractured the invisible binding that held Maitresse Ezili in place, allowing her the freedom of movement in her hand and arm. With a sinking feeling, Kane recalled how strong the Annunaki overlords were in their original forms. If Ellie has half that strength…

  Kane grunted with the effort of driving that reaching hand away. It seemed that somehow this Annunaki abortion had become stronger as she was held in place, and now all of that fearsome power had been centered into her single mobile hand. Fingers outstretched, the housemistress Ezili drove her hand at Kane’s eyes, endeavoring to blind him in her desperation.

  Three feet from Kane, sitting in his wheelchair, Papa Hurbon wheeled himself backward even as Grant and Brigid appeared in the kitchen doorway after being alerted by the sounds of the skirmish.

  “What’s going on?” Grant snapped, the Sin Eater materializing in his hand.

  Hurbon ignored him. Concentrating, the voodoo priest turned the athame blade over in his hand as he watched the now-moving form of Maitresse Ezili grab Kane’s throat with her lone, mobile hand, driving the ex-Magistrate back against the wall with such force that the plaster crumbled, dust spewing across Kane’s bloodied face.

  “She’s loose,” Brigid screamed, her hand moving automatically to her hip holster.

  “I can’t make the shot,” Grant snarled, trying to get closer. Papa Hurbon’s wheelchair blocked his path and Kane’s struggling form made it too dangerous from even this brief a distance.

  As Grant tried to slink past the voodoo priest, Hurbon slapped the voodoo doll of Maitresse Ezili against the wall and drove the athame knife into its heart with a clunk, pinning it there. As the blade struck, Maitresse Ezili herself ceased moving, her eyes rolling up in her head, and her grip slackened on Kane’s throat.

  Kane stood against the wall for a moment, struggling to catch his breath and holding back the urge to cough. In front of him, Maitresse Ezili stood stock still once more, her body locked in place, the once-grasping hand fixed in a clawlike shape.

  “That supposed to happen?” Kane asked, his voice sounding raw as he cleared his throat.

  Papa Hurbon held his hands up in innocence. “She’s got a mad one for you, non?”

  Irritated, Kane strode down the corridor and handed Hurbon the ring he had removed from the woman’s hand. Hurbon took the ring and weaved the lock of hair around it, threading the black hair carefully through the claws that held the gemstone in place. Once he had done so, he handed the strange totem to Brigid.

  “You take care of this one, too,” Hurbon instructed, fixing her with a no-nonsense stare. “And if anything goes wrong, you get rid of it and you get far, far away. You won’t want to be anywhere near if Maitresse Ezili comes back for it, you understand me?”

  Brigid took the ring and pocketed it. “I understand.”

  Grant, meanwhile, had made his way up to the far end of the corridor, past where the trapped form of Maitresse Ezili stood. He stared at her warily as he passed, wondering that she might make a grab for him as she had Kane.

  Then Grant was at the front door to the House Lilandera, the Sin Eater still clutched in his grip. He pulled open the door.

  “What is he doing?” Hurbon asked as Kane and the others shuffled along the corridor.

  “Checking for hostiles,” Kane explained simply.

  “Who are we expecting?” Hurbon asked cheerily.

  Kane gave the man a stern look, and Hurbon fell to silence.

  “There’s three of them out there,” Grant confirmed, leaning against the rotten wood of the old door.

  Like so much of the house, once the illusion cast by the vision chair had been dropped, the front door had been left revealed as a tatty, ancient thing, hanging wonkily on rusted hinges, evidence of woodworm all over its blistered paintwork. Seeing this, Kane recalled how Brewster Philboyd had described the house when he had first located it on his satellite surveillance feed. He had said the place was in a state of disrepair, and Kane had been surprised to find it appeared to be in such spectacular condition when they had seen it with their own eyes. With hindsight, Kane realized that should have tipped them off from the get-go. With a sigh, Kane reminded himself of Womack’s Law: hindsight is 20/20.

  At the doorway, Grant watched as several half-alive figures strutted along the shingle drive. They had been aimless before, unable to see the house that stood right in front of their dead eyes. Now, t
hey walked with purpose, not really striding but at least walking in a definite direction. There were three of them; the others had presumably returned to the redoubt or found other things to occupy their time, whatever the undead did with their time.

  Three, we can handle, Grant assured himself. Then he turned to his companions, holding his Sin Eater aloft and using it to gesture outside. “Okay, ramblers, it’s on.”

  Chapter 21

  Grant led the way onto the grounds of the House Lilandera, now just a dilapidated old building hidden by the overgrown vegetation that surrounded it.

  Behind Grant, Brigid Baptiste and Kane fanned out, readying themselves for another batch of the undead. The red-haired former archivist used a two-handed grip to hold the metal pole she had acquired, her semiautomatic securely back in its hip holster. Kane meanwhile appeared to be unarmed, and he watched the undergrowth warily.

  Behind the Cerberus trio, Papa Hurbon wheeled himself from the house in his wheelchair, bumping down the rotted wooden stairs there and freewheeling across the shingle pathway where plants and weeds had untidily sprouted.

  Up ahead, Grant strode boldly toward the road, his eyes never leaving the three shambling figures who lurched along the path toward him and his companions. As he reached the first, a man with his rib cage on show through his unbuttoned shirt, the zombie moaned and made a grab for him. Grant wanted to be sure before he engaged more of these abominations in combat, and that grab was all he needed to confirm that he and his companions could be seen, that Hurbon’s spell had worn off.

  The zombie’s jagged brown nails slashed through the air, and Grant sidestepped in a swift, two-step dance. Then Grant’s right fist lashed out, using the barrel of his Sin Eater to smack the undead man in the face. As his blow hit, Grant squeezed down on the firing stud, and the Sin Eater came to life, unleashing a volley of bullets into the undead man’s head at point-blank range. Head smoldering, the zombie staggered backward, while his undead companions turned on Grant.