by Dale Lucas
Flood, she said, finally looking right at him, her dead gaze putting an earth-shaking fear into him. Flood and the Queen Bee. They're the ones who wanted this of me. They're the ones.
"Now, tell me what you did," he coaxed. "Who did you beg the favor from? Who did you patronize?"
The door to the apartment suddenly burst open on its hinges. Doc saw nothing standing in that empty doorway, but he heard them and smelled them nonetheless: two hungry, snarling black beasts that might have been the size of lions, jaws slavering with pulsing cinders, brimstone smoke puffing from their dilated nostrils. Even though he could not see the hellhounds, he felt the warm darkness from their seeking gazes sweep through the room, until their fiery, darksome gazes finally fell upon the ghost of Rachel Gooden. She trembled, drew up rigid, screamed as though she were not dead at all, but only now staring down the barrel of her own fragile mortality.
But Doc knew this was worse. She was staring down the barrel of eternity. It terrified him and he wasn't even following her. But being this close… hearing… smelling… knowing… that was almost as bad.
It put a great many things in perspective for him.
"Who allowed this?" he demanded a final time, before they sunk in their teeth and claws and dragged her away. "Who did you call on, Rae Rae?"
She turned to face him one last time, her back to the open doorway and the hellhounds that had come to collect her. Kalfou, she said, voice drowned in shame. He's after the reverend—
Then they had her. The ghost was torn right off the material plane, dragged backward out through the door, erased like a wisp of smoke on a strong breeze. Doc heard the triumphant howling of the hounds and her last, eternal scream sounding into the depths of some deep, dark hole to nowhere.
Then, the room was silent.
Once more, he was alone with a corpse.
Kalfou, Ogou snarled, his voice suggesting both disdain and fear.
"Dear God," Doc said. "Was she mad? Kalfou?"
We can't do a damn thing against that son of a bitch, Ogou said.
"I know, I know," Doc answered. "I'm on my own."
18
The Reverend Adam Clayton Brown, Jr., stood in the doorway of the Farnes home, his old pewter cross held out before him, the words of a prayer tumbling from his mouth like vomit: unbidden, uncontrolled. A fat man lay on the foyer floor, rolling around in apparent agony from a very bloody nose and mouth.
And there was Barney, crouched on the hallway floor, writhing and snarling and jerking about, an infernal, obscene marionette expelling a chorus of voices speaking in many tongues from his single mouth, his eyes rolled back in his head like a couple of white marbles.
This was the moment Brown dreaded after hearing Fralene Farnes's story just a few hours ago. Perhaps this was a moment he'd dreaded all his life.
This was the moment when his faith had to stand firm. This was the moment when he had to stand fast against the ruin of his own fear. His life depended on it, as did Barney's soul.
"Get inside, Reverend," Fralene said beside him. "Go on. Beau, shut the door behind us."
Brown managed to limp forward, the cane he'd been employing since the attack hooked over his left arm. The cross stayed level. Barney remained in his sights, writhing under the weight of its power, no doubt cursing them in all those alien tongues. Behind Brown, Fralene stepped into the foyer. Her brother Beau followed them and shut the door.
Dear God, Brown thought. What now?
The Reverend Adam Clayton Brown, Jr's, first thought when he opened his apartment door to find Miss Fralene Farnes on his doorstep was that something terrible had happened. Barney had a heart attack… or a stroke… or had been murdered. Before he even knew what he was saying he spat, "What's wrong? What's happened?"
What Fralene told him proved even stranger that the reverend could have imagined.
He'd been witness to the Reverend Farnes's strange outburst at the HCCB meeting, and Brown himself had wondered just what could be eating at his old friend and fellow man of the cloth. Was it just a temporary madness—a false bitterness brought on by a fever or the sugars? Or perhaps it was simply emotional stress—Barney had been working hard of late. One too many sleepless nights, jam-packed days, or pointless meetings with a strutting peacock like Jebediah Debbs could bring the worst out of almost anyone. Brown himself had been at odds with his own life or everyone around him at one time or another, and usually took such realizations as cues to slow down, to get extra rest, and to spend more hours in meditation with the Word of God. Usually, a week of low-key living and doubled Biblical study did the trick, and equilibrium returned.
That hadn't worked for him lately, though. Since his run-in with those gunmen and being saved by the vigilante that everyone called the Dread Baron or the Cemetery Man, the Reverend Adam Clayton Brown, Jr., had found himself quite out of sorts. Distracted… anxious… fearful.
Even ashamed, mostly of himself.
But here was Fralene Farnes, on his doorstep, begging his aid with frightened eyes. Then, in his parlor, telling him a tale he could barely fathom and preferred not to hear at all.
Brown had been silent for a long time when Fralene finished her story.
"What do you want from me?" he asked, fearing he already knew.
"The Cemetery Man said we needed a holy man," Fralene answered. "Someone to cast the demon out."
"Fralene, I can't," Brown answered, too quickly and perhaps too forcefully.
"There's no one else," she insisted. "You're his oldest friend, reverend. I can't let anyone else see him like this! What would it do to his reputation? His ministry? Think about that!"
Brown thought about it. He knew it. If Barney was to come through this, his deliverance had to be affected secretly, otherwise this one possession could taint his reputation and all his public undertakings. Could Brown really surrender Barney to that sort of humiliation? That sort of persecution?
He could not.
But that still didn't change the fact that he was terrified. He wasn't just terrified of the things he would see and hear when he was in Barney's presence, or that the thing in Barney might be too hard to drive out—he was must terrified of simply not being good enough; of learning that his faith was weak, his courage a sham, his life's work and very title were all meaningless.
In the long silence that followed Fralene's petition and his consideration of it, he almost began to pray that the cup should pass from him. Hadn't Jesus prayed the same prayer, in the garden?
God didn't let that cup pass from his own son, Brown thought then. Why would He let it pass from me?
And so, with a strangled voice that sounded like little more than a croak, the Reverend Adam Clayton Brown, Jr. agreed to accompany Fralene back to her house and do his best to deliver her uncle—Brown's oldest, dearest, and closest friend—from the Devil's bonds.
All the way along their seemingly endless walk, even after they had stopped and picked up Beau at school, he fought the urge to turn and run.
They heard gunshots when they were mere steps away from the house. The three of them hurried up the walk—Brown's limp and cane not aiding his attempt at haste—then Fralene had unlocked the door and thrown it open.
A bloodied fat man lay in the foyer, and the Reverend Barnabus Farnes—Barney, dear Barney—crouched atop the fat man, a pistol leveled at his sweaty, bloodied brow, hammer cocked. Then they saw the dead man further back in the hall.
Brown was so horrified by that scene—so disgusted by this use of his old friend's body and spirit—that he acted without thinking. He drew the big pewter cross that he'd brought along from his coat pocket, leveled it before him like a flashlight, and started shouting the first holy words that leapt into his brain.
"Stay where you are!" he shouted. "Stay right where you are in the name of the Lord God Jehovah and in the name of Jesus Christ!"
The demon's answer was immediate. It dropped the gun in its hand as though it had been burned. It's whole long, thin frame s
hook like a rickety scaffold. Its eyes rolled back in its head, white and blank and horrible to behold. Its mouth—Barney's mouth—fell open wide and out came a chorus of voices and animal sounds, all cursing and shouting in tongues completely alien to Brown's ears. Even stranger was the multiplicity of voices—the sense that many, many voices spoke from Barney's solitary mouth.
But the cross… his words… they worked!
Brown forced himself to step forward into the foyer. The bloody fat man rolled around before him, moaning and distracted. Brown decided that formal words—praying words—were now required. He summoned up a psalm.
"Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me."
The Barney-thing continued to writhe and struggle under the weight of the words and the shadow of the cross. Behind Brown, Fralene and Beau edged into the foyer and shut the door.
Fralene hit the light switch beside the door.
The chandelier that came to life, hanging above the foyer, swung crazily from its chain above, making all the shadows that it cast in the foyer and front hall veer crazily back and forth, shifting and dancing all around them like a troupe of slate gray ghosts. As Brown kept praying and limping forward and the beast in his old friend kept writhing and screaming, more objects in the immediate vicinity began to tremble and dance, as though the demon's defiance infected them.
Some umbrellas and a walking stick strewn on the foyer floor all jittered like broken sticks in a gathering gale.
A mirror hanging on the wall parallel to the staircase trembled on its nail, threatening to dismount and fall.
In the parlor, off to their left, a series of small, porcelain figurines on the fireplace mantle came leaping off, one after the other, to shatter with shotgun-like explosiveness on the stone hearth.
"I am weary of my crying, my throat is dried," Brown continued. "Mine eyes fail while I wait for my God—"
"You coward," the demon snarled from the depths of its gullet, amid the continuous and insane cackle of all the other voices it spewed forth, "You fool! Come closer and I'll tear you limb from limb, you sickening little fairy—"
Another voice suddenly joined Brown's, calling out the psalm in unison with him. "They that hate me without cause are more than the hairs of mine head," that voice said, "they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty!"
It was Fralene. She was right at Brown's elbow, praying along with him. As he took his next few halting limps forward, she stood beside him, assuring him silently, with a squeeze of her hand on his arm, that she would not abandon him or let him fall. Beau joined in a moment later, taking his sister's hand and reciting the psalm along with her.
Brown anticipated the words to come. They had new meaning for him that he'd never understood—never truly felt before. "O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee. Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord God of hosts, be ashamed for my sake; let not those that seek thee be confounded for my sake, O God of Israel."
They were right up on the demon now. It threw itself back and forth between the narrow walls of that front corridor, as though it could physically throw off the holy chains that their psalm and the power of that cross laid on it. Its shoulders and arms and legs all twisted and gnarled and contorted in the strangest and most inhuman ways. Barney's head seemed to whip and tremble back and forth, the frayed end to the jittering live wire of his body.
"To the basement," Fralene whispered in the momentary pause that each took for breath between verses. "Drive it back."
Brown nodded. He kept praying. The beast kept struggling. The basement door was just a few feet away.
The front door suddenly burst open. The sound yanked Brown, Fralene and Beau right out of their prayer and both spun on their heels toward the thunder.
The front door gaped wide, and in the portal stood that frightening apparition that had saved Brown's life just the other night—the dark avenger the people of Harlem called the Cemetery Man.
Then Brown realized that they'd turned their backs on the beast. He turned again and saw Barney's evil doppelganger lunging toward them, grasping talons outstretched, mouth in a furious rictus, eyes alight with fury and madness and bloodlust.
Brown threw himself back, taking Fralene with him. Both tumbled to the floor. Only Beau managed to throw himself clear and stay on his feet.
The Cemetery Man whistled, loud and shrill—a signal of some sort.
Before the beast in Barnabus Farnes could reach them, some long, thin, crimson serpent came slithering with blinding speed up out of the open cellar door. It raced right across the carpet, coiled and sprang, then wrapped itself around Barney and brought him crashing to the ground like a roped steer.
The demon cursed and bucked against its bonds.
The Cemetery Man shut the door behind him. He looked down at Brown and Fralene, bundled in a heap on the foyer floor.
"What took you so long?" Fralene asked.
The Cemetery Man just huffed, stepped over the bound-up Reverend Farnes, and yanked him to his feet.
XX
This time, the possessed Reverend Farnes was removed to his bedroom. He struggled against his bonds and cursed them, but the crimson scarf that acted like a snake at the Cemetery Man's command held him fast while the Cemetery Man and Beau tied the old preacher to his four-poster bed with rope from the basement. In the end, the Reverend Barnabus Farnes was incapable of escape. The Cemetery Man knew knots that made Brown shudder at their tying. Beau looked shell-shocked, but he took orders well. Clearly, the boy was not afraid of the man that Harlem called Doc Voodoo.
Finally, with all four limbs tied, the Cemetery Man used the last of the rope to tie the reverend's torso to the bed, coiling it over top of him and under the old oak frame. He was well-trussed, and going nowhere, despite the terrifying sounds that issued from his snapping mouth, or the struggles of his energized old body.
A storm was brewing outside—dark clouds, thunder and rain that approached with an unyielding slowness indicating that it would probably settle upon them and drench Harlem all through the night. Big storms had a way of doing that, in the Reverend Brown's experience.
Who knows? Brown thought idly, still feeling a serpentine coil of fear in his belly, it might not be a natural storm at all.
The Cemetery Man waved Beau off, then stepped back to admire his handiwork. He nodded, satisfied, then looked to Brown and Fralene. Before anyone could say anything, the creature on the bed bucked, cackled, and spat a long litany of curses in a chorus of foreign tongues that Brown himself couldn't claim to understand.
Beau stared at the obstreperous old man. "He'd hide me six ways to Sunday if he heard me talkin' that way!"
"Rude," the Cemetery Man snarled. "I think you need to apologize."
"Go spit," the thing said. At least, that's what Brown thought he heard. The many voices all seemed to have different answers.
How could it speak like that? So many voices all at once? All of those voices spewing up out of Barney's familiar old mouth? The same mouth that delivered Sunday sermons and blessings and prayers to the sick and infirm?
You know well, he reminded himself. Just remember scripture. For all of Jesus's good and benevolent miracles, he had his seasons of doing battle with evil as well. The first account was in the Gospel of Mark, wasn't it?
And Jesus asked the man possessed, "What is thy name?" and he answered saying, "My name is Legion, for we are many…"
The Cemetery Man moved away from the bed to where Brown, Beau and Fralene stood, all huddled in the doorway. "Are we ready?" he asked.
"I don't know," Fralene said. "Are we?"
"That one," the demon said with Barney's mouth, staring right at Brown, "will never be ready. Never. The bloody, blithering, goddamned coward…"
Brown felt his guts turn to water and slosh around inside him. He turned and stepped out of the room, i
nto the upstairs hallway. There, vision aswarm with darkness and fireflies, he leaned against the wall and drew deep breaths. A moment later, Fralene, Beau and the Cemetery Man appeared beside him. They half-closed the bedroom door, allowing the four of them some small measure of privacy from the gaze of the trussed-up demon.
"Are you ready?" the Cemetery Man asked.
Brown tried to answer but couldn't find words. He shook his head.
"He's ready," Fralene said.
"I didn't ask you," the Cemetery Man growled.
"You're ready," she said to the Reverend Brown, ignoring the Cemetary Man.
"Reverend Brown," Beau said with surprising tenderness for such a young man, "you can do this."
Brown's throat felt dry as the Sahara. Outside, thunder rolled and the first rains began to patter on the rooftops of Harlem. "Fralene, Beau… I don't—"
"That's Uncle Barnabus in there!" Fralene hissed. "He's waiting for you to deliver him!"
A picture hanging just a few feet from them suddenly leapt off its nail and crashed to the floor, then went sliding down the runner in the hallway, right past the three of them, as though someone had kicked it. As Brown and Fralene turned toward the sound and watched the picture slide across the carpet, they suddenly heard the thumping of footsteps, as though someone was hurrying right toward them across the floor. The footsteps came right up to them: fast, heavy, determined.
Then a terrible cold enwrapped them. Fralene threw herself into the Reverend Brown's arms, trembling. The Reverend Brown felt it, too—a cold that penetrated him right to the bone. He shook in Fralene's embrace.
The Cemetery Man stood by and watched the whole strange series of unfolding events with scientific curiosity. His black eyes narrowed and he seemed to growl deep in his throat, a sub-sonic sound like the purr of a lion.
"I think I'm starting to understand," he said.
"Understand what?" Brown asked, trying to stop his own shaking. The cold was gone now, but its memory still lay on him like a wet blanket.