by Dale Lucas
These were his decisions. He was quite proud of them. He felt, in fact, like the only brave and thinking man in Harlem.
Because I killed them, he thought. Farnes and Brown and Ms. Walker—they needed that haint in the hoodoo garb to save their quivering necks! But not me! I needed only my courage and my strength and my bare hands!
If they couldn't do what was necessary themselves, he would happily do it for them.
8
It took Mambo Rae Rae the better part of the week to prepare. The sort of wango she was about to unleash was sensitive, frightening stuff. Missteps had to be avoided, because they could prove disastrous—even fatal. She consulted her reference books (largely useless except for some particulars regarding circles of protection) as well as her personal diaries. In those diaries, she kept records of all the rituals she had ever witnessed, so that she could later recall the details, the mishaps, and those actions that proved most efficacious. It was the little things, often, that got one in trouble—omitting a crucial phrase, offering the summoned lwa inadequate or offensive gifts. Rae Rae had to do everything right, or the only person who ended up hexed might be her.
Following her initial study, a trip to Bellevue was in order. There, she called in a favor from a regular petitioner and initiate—a laundress with access to a number of corridors and stairwells. The young lady guided Mambo Rae Rae through the Bellevue labyrinth and into an unused basement chamber beneath the lunatics' wing. There, Rae Rae took a measure of soil from the earthen floor, knowing that the grief and madness poisoning it would have powerful namh, for both the summoning and the hex packet she'd have to use on the reverend.
Once the earth had been secured, Mambo Rae Rae spent several hours over the next two days observing the Reverend Barnabus Farnes himself. He usually rose early, spending the first hours of his day in Biblical study and contemplation. He took a simple breakfast, then spent the rest of his morning and afternoon attending to church business, sometimes visiting needy members of his congregation. Usually, he didn't return to his home again until well after dark. Then, after supper with his niece and nephew, he'd retreat again into his study for more reading, and perhaps some writing before he finally took to bed around ten o' clock. Rae Rae assumed the evening sessions were probably when he prepared his Sunday sermon. What else could he be doing, bent over his writing desk, scribbling away with a fountain pen as the Good Book and other tomes lay open around him? She saw him at work in this way through the side window of his house, two nights in a row, and the sight made her both sad and angry.
So serious, she thought. So studious. Does the man derive any joy at all from his own faith? Or is it all just an academic exercise to him?
Well, she would just have to remind the Reverend Barnabus Farnes that all the unseen powers—from the god he served to the lwa she held commerce with—were more than abstract ideas in dusty old books, more than Sunday sermons and rules inscribed on stone tablets or reproduced in cross-stitch for parlor walls. Those powers were alive, and they were about to lay their dread gazes upon the Reverend Farnes in a most direct and unpleasant fashion.
Around nine o'clock on a Thursday evening, Rae Rae set out to accomplish the first phase of her plan. She borrowed a broken-in Holmes sedan from a hotel maitre'd who often paid her for love charms and Tarot readings, then lit out for Queens. Although clouds cloaked the stars and there was no moon to speak of, no rain was forecast for the evening. She would enact her ritual under the open sky, in the most remote location that she could think of which also met the ritual requirements.
Her destination was a wasteland of soot and ash known colloquially as Mount Corona, but officially, it was the Corona Ash Dump, in Flushing. The only mountains in Mount Corona were mountains of ashes hauled from furnaces and butt-cans all over the city, deposited out on Flushing's edge like the ghosts of hills flattened by the city of skyscrapers and high-rises she left behind. She needed a crossroads and she needed privacy. On a moonless midnight, she guessed the ash fields would offer both.
She arrived at the intersection of Corona Avenue and an unmarked country road with only an hour to spare before midnight. She parked her borrowed car off the road, its headlamps pointed into the intersection. With no moon or stars, no street lights or civilization near, her only light were those two glaring orbs at the nose of the car and a small lantern that she'd packed in an old, picnic basket with her other ritual implements.
Rae Rae left her picnic basket on the road's verge, withdrew a fat shard of chalk from her coat pocket, and went to work. She sincerely hoped no one would drive past as she saw to her business. Aside from the fact that she might look silly—or if it was a cop, get arrested—there was the very real risk of compromise or infestation; of the forces she dealt with slipping through the protective barriers she would establish and fleeing into the world via any unprotected passers-by. It would behoove her to move fast.
She worked by the garish light of the car's headlamps—a light that spread in a shallow arc across the intersection, throwing every stone and ripple into sharp relief and making of her own shadow a slanting, elongate giant. In the intersection, she drew a large circle, and around the circumference of that circle she drew protective veves and inscribed words of power. Satisfied with her handiwork, she fetched a corked bottle of good, imported rum infused with gunpowder and placed it in the very center of the circle. If all went according to plan, the lwa she intended to summon would manifest inside that circle, and the words of power and veves she had inscribed around it would keep it well bound.
Next, she drew another circle—this one much smaller—just outside the larger circle, on the south side of the crossroads. This would be Rae Rae's second line of defense: an extra, added layer of security between she and the powers she hoped to invoke. With any luck, two circles of protection and proper liturgy would keep her safe.
At least, she hoped they would.
Kalfou was not to be trifled with.
Mambo Rae Rae had only seen Kalfou summoned twice in the whole of her forty-three years of life. Both manifestations were memorable in the worst ways, and still sometimes terrified her when she dredged up their memories and dwelt on them too long. One of the mounted horses had squatted by a bed of smoldering coals, scooped up an enormous handful, then opened his mouth and shoveled them down his gullet. She remembered the smell of burning flesh as he held the coals… the choked, inhuman laughter he'd offered as he chewed and swallowed them. The laughter had been Kalfou's. The screams that followed when Kalfou dismounted and departed were the horse's.
The other manifestation had been a young woman—a beautiful girl whom everyone agreed was the prettiest maiden in the village. When Kalfou mounted the girl, she'd astonished the onlookers with an absolutely gut churning sexual display, dancing and exposing herself so lewdly that even Rae Rae—no Puritan, and no angel—had been shocked. When her dance was done, the girl had shattered a number of rum bottles left on the Petro altar and eaten the broken glass as though it were rock candy. She wasn't so pretty after that.
Kalfou. The Lurker at the Threshold. The Haunter of the Crossroads. Chaos Incarnate. He was Papa Legba's vile twin, eager to throw the doors between the two realms wide at the slightest provocation and set terrible powers loose in the mortal world.
Rae Rae took an awful risk, calling Kalfou alone like this while simultaneously trying to bind him, denying him a horse to ride. He could take that as a sign of her mistrust, her fear, or her ignorance and burst his bonds just to prove he could. She might end the night burrowing into one of those ash mounds nearby under his control, then suffocating once he'd departed. Of course, it was possible that, having no horse to ride—no mouthpiece—he would not be able to make his presence known. She would have to simply make her petition and depart, hoping that he left the pwen she asked for in the rum bottle after he'd finished it all. That was sometimes the way of things with the lwa: results were not immediate, but left pending some behind-the-curtain manipulation.
Part of her hoped that would be the case. She didn't relish facing Kalfou alone on this ash-littered crossroad in the middle of the night.
Rae Rae emptied the rest of her implements from the picnic basket: a knife; a kwa-kwa rattle, to provide some rhythm for her Petro song; a small, red velvet bag filled with six silver dollars and some of the lunatic earth from the Bellevue cellars; and finally, an old flour sack, tied shut, moving the slightest as she lifted it out of the basket. There was a black tomcat in the flour sack, caught that very afternoon after she'd enticed it with a dish of laudanum-laced milk.
The mambo took the flour sack and her ritual knife out to the center of the big circle. There, she laid the bag down beside the bottle of gunpowder-laced rum, gently probed the cat's shrouded shape with her fingers, and plunged her knife into the kitty's throat. It squalled a little when pierced, then mewled sedately as its lifeblood flowed out of it. Rae Rae left the dying feline in the blood-stained sack and moved hastily into her own circle.
She turned her back to the big circle and knelt in her own. Wiser boukour than she recommended keeping one's back to Kalfou in such situations, lest you engender his fury or worse—invite him to mount you. The car was still parked on the opposite side of the big circle, headlamps pouring their harsh light over the crossroads and throwing her shadow out before her, a long, lean, darksome marionette that scarcely seemed human, even as it matched her movements. She considered doubling back to the car to turn off the lamps, but the offering was already bleeding its last inside the summoning circle. She had to get started.
The mambo stitched a rhythm with her kwa-kwa rattle, and began her song. She was astonished by how quiet and deserted the world around her felt, out here in the middle of nowhere, on a night blacker than a coal vein and twice as cold. Tendrils of ash skirled off their scudding mounds as winds whispered through the wasted grounds, making shadows of their own as they danced between she and the car lamps at her back.
She closed her eyes. Beat time with the rattle. Sang. So alone, in the center of those roads to nowhere, she started to hear sounds in the world around her that could not be real. Small scuttlings magnified. Sarabandes made of phantom breezes. A chanting voice in the rattle that shook in her hands, stitching the terrible, unyielding tripartite beat.
The blood was spilt to draw him. If she wanted to petition Kalfou, she would now have to offer him payment.
Still keeping time with her rattle, still singing her song, Rae Rae lifted the little red velvet bag, heavy with silver and poisoned earth. She sang the last verse—the verse about a suitable offering and gratitude eternal—then pitched the bag backward over her shoulder. It landed seconds later with a musical tinkling, somewhere behind her.
Then, Mambo Rae Rae waited. Her song was over. To finally open the door and bring Kalfou through, only one action remained.
She bent forward, kissed the paving three times while saying Kalfou's name in between, then finally made fists and rapped them in rapid succession on the same patch of asphalt.
She kept her eyes shut. She listened. She hoped.
If he manifested, there would be some indication: words on the wind… a new tremulousness to the air… the sudden arrival of a flock of crows or a bevy of dump rats, acting as Kalfou's envoys. Anything was possible. She need only listen for it.
Because she would not open her eyes. She could not. If she opened them and saw something—a new shadow cast alongside her own by those glaring headlights—dear God, Mambo Rae Rae might go mad!
She waited. The temptation to open her eyes—to crack them just the slightest, like a child playing possum for a parent trying to drag them out of bed—was almost unbearable. But she fought the urge. If she opened her eyes, even the slightest, and saw something moving in the light of the headlamps, she might be further tempted. She might want to open her eyes all the way… to look over her shoulder.
But she knew that someone—something—might be standing in that circle if she turned and looked over her shoulder. And she would not want to meet that someone's gaze. Not now. Not ever.
A new breeze mowed through the ash lands that surrounded her. Somewhere she heard the flap of small, leathery wings. Insects seemed to be swarming over her bent knees, but she knew that was just aching muscles and an active imagination.
She waited.
Waited.
Shit.
Did she do something incorrectly? Were the circles of protection a misguided addition? Had her song not been loud enough, or long enough? Perhaps the tomcat wasn't a suitable offering? Kalfou, being famously hostile and recalcitrant, might not appear for anything so base as a stray tom. If it had been her tomcat and not a stray—an animal she owned and felt some care and affection for—that might have made a difference...
She counted to twenty, slowly. Still, she heard nothing. Felt nothing. There was only the susurrating nocturne of the night breezes through the ash lands; the great, high lonesome of a Queens wasteland at midnight. Mambo Rae Rae sighed. She would have to approach this differently… get the help she needed in some other way.
She opened her eyes.
There was a long dark shadow in the light of the headlamps that as not her own.
A cold hand fell on her neck and caressed her, so cold it burned like red-hot iron.
Mambo Rae Rae shot to her feet. Reflex had almost forced her to bolt from the circle—to run, as far and as fast as her feet could carry her. But she resisted the urge. Her feet stayed planted. She kept her back to the great summoning circle, but her eyes lay on the broad pool of light that stretched before her… that separate, alien shadow that swayed behind her own.
He was here now. Kalfou. She knew it. It had been his cold-hot hand on the back of her neck.
A series of terrible sounds rose behind her: canvas, tearing slowly under strong, sure hands; small, wet twigs cracking and breaking; a viscous sucking mingled with the gnashing of teeth on cold flesh.
Kalfou was eating the tomcat. It took every ounce of Mambo Rae Rae's experience and self control to keep her feet planted inside her protective circle. She forced her eyes to rise from the shadow that rocked and gamboled around her own. She focused on the slope of an ash-pile a hundred yards beyond her protective circle. After a few moments of enduring those terrible sounds—Kalfou, eagerly tearing away at his offering—something flew into her peripheral vision on a low, flat arc, hit the verge of the highway, and tumbled off into the patchy, dead grass beside it.
The feline's remains. Broken. Bloodied. Mangled by strong hands and teeth.
Mambo Rae Rae drew a deep breath, her chest suddenly feeling like it was bound in a corset. The light from the car headlamps made it possible for her to see her breath bloom in the near-darkness. Had it grown colder out here since Kalfou's arrival?
Of course it had.
I should never have done this, she thought. Never, never, never, ever.
Kalfou spoke, his voice in the very center of her brain, moaning like an autumn wind through the eaves of a drafty old house.
You dare call me out for a bloody black stray and a bag of coin?
She wanted to scream but fought the urge. She had business to transact. She had to see to it, or all of this—the moral hazard she'd undertaken, the terror of occupying this circle while Kalfou manifested just a stone's throw behind her—would all be for nothing.
"I called you for business, dread Kalfou," she said, her voice sounding strange and distant in her own ears, like someone else's voice, speaking someone else's words. "Hear me and help me if you would, then be on your way if what I offer isn't pleasing to you."
There was a long silence. Dear God, could she feel him standing right behind her? At the very edge of his circle and hers? Banked coal eyes boring into her, cold hands ready to reach out and caress the back of her neck again? She wanted to turn around—needed to turn around, to assure herself that he wasn't there, that his terrible hands weren't about to fall on her.
No. Not one look. Not a single glance,
however oblique. Dealing with him was dangerous enough. Looking upon him could be the end.
Instead, she made her request. "I need an in-dwelling," she said.
You want me to horse someone? he said, disdain and contempt dripping from his voice like spittle from a lunatic's lips. As he carried on, the sound of his voice grew to an elemental roar in her mind and even in her ears—the sound of a cyclone tearing across a prairie, hungry for your shotgun shack and its pitiful earthen foundations…
Me? he continued. Dread Kalfou? The Haunter of the Crossroads? The Lurker at the Threshold? You want my might and power and sublime corruption poured into the stinking, leaking, rutting vessel of some sad, sorry mortal—
"Not you," Mambo Rae Rae corrected. "Someone in your employ will do just fine."
Who's your victim? he demanded.
"A holy man," she said. "An uppity, meddling old Christian. I have punishment to be meted, Kalfou, and one of your eskó spirits could do me a great favor by breaking this horse who's earned my enmity. Use the rum bottle if you like, once you've drunk your fill. This is no demand, only a petition. I gave offerings in good faith. I beg your aid now."
Mmmmmm, Kalfou purred. Been a looooong time since I had me a Christian holy man…
That elemental voice made of wind and ruin gave something like a long and pensive sigh. Rae Rae saw the shadow that attended her own flicker in the garish light, as though its form were mutable, its substance, variable. Then, she heard the tiny sound of her bottle being lifted from the paving.
Kalfou drank all the rum and gunpowder in a single, long draught.
It's done, Kalfou said. Take your vessel and be on your way.