“Sometimes, you can find a wealth of information about a certain volume just by studying the cover. That is, after all, where the eyes first begin their voyage.”
Ricky and I exchanged 'cuckoo' glances, shrugged, and then leaned in conspiratorially.
Rupert continued, “Volumes this old . . . and I assure you that this is several hundred years old . . . they were hand-stitched. Quite a magnificent amount of work, really. Leather,” he said, squinting his eyes briefly, “ . . . if this is leather, was often used to hold patterns and designs. It's quite sturdy, but over the years the skin has a tendency to flatten, and thus, your image can become almost unreadable.”
“Can you see something on the cover?” I asked, finding myself leaning in, standing on my toes to get a better look.
Rupert nodded to himself, and then looked up and Ricky and I. “Gentlemen, I think what we have here is very old. Quite obscure. Would you allow me to make a scan of this cover and send it to the national archives in Washington, D.C.?”
“How long will it take?” Ricky asked, glancing around the library. The place was quite busy for a Thursday morning. Not that I knew what the traffic was like on any other day. I guess I didn't know that this many people liked to read anymore.
Rupert scratched his bony chin with his bony fingers, “I don't imagine it would be more than about an hour for some preliminary results. And while we're waiting, we can run a language search. I assume . . .” he opened the book, thumbing very carefully through the first few pages. “Yes . . . we can use a sample of this for an advanced language search. Who knows . . . we might get lucky?”
I told him to do it, and within seconds we were following tall Rupert to a large computer center on the second floor. There were all sorts of computers and printers, and what looked like a copier—that was explained to me as a high-resolution, flatbed scanner. I didn't tell Rupert that I knew what a scanner was. I kind of liked hearing him talk.
Fifteen minutes later he had scanned the cover of the book, along with several inches of text, and we were waiting for hits to come back on the computer that he referred to as, “Merlin,” and then giggled.
As we waited, I noticed Ricky looking at the computer equipment, sizing it up. “What?” I asked.
“These puppies are old school. Way outdated,” Ricky said, almost turning his nose up.
Rupert looked perplexed, “But we had all of these computers put in less than two years ago?”
“That's like a decade in computer-years,” Ricky said. “Moore's Law, man.”
“What's that?” I asked, prying my way into the conversation.
Rupert crossed his arms defiantly across his chest, “Gordon E. Moore presumed that computer components—transistors in specific—will shrink in size, and double every year. He later revised his presumption to eighteen months. So computer power and capability theoretically grow at an exponential rate every couple of years.”
“So what you got two or three years ago . . .” Ricky said with a knowing grin.
“ . . . is outdated by now,” I finished. I knew enough about computers. I read my Wired magazine. But if you think about it, everything is outdated, the second you get it.
They both nodded.
I bit my bottom lip, my stomach growling a bit.
And then we heard a few beeps from Merlin. Rupert's eyes lit up. “We have a hit, gentlemen. We have a hit!” He raced over and printed out a copy of the text on the screen.
Then, without explanation, he headed out of the computer center, motioning us to follow him with his head. He didn't want to talk. So, we did a lot of fast walking, turning, up some stairs, down a hallway, past two storage rooms, out into another book area, then down another hallway. I was thoroughly, completely lost.
This library was like that cornfield in the Twilight Zone, the one you enter, but can never ever, exit . . . ever. But we followed old Rupert. And as we neared an office, he glanced around.
He stopped at a thick, grey door. “This is a special room. A place where we keep some, oh,” he searched for the words, “ . . . more controversial volumes.”
Ricky asked him why he considered this book controversial.
“Voodoo, gentlemen. Voodoo.”
And with that, he entered a code onto a small keypad near the door handle, and we entered the room. It was a lot larger than hotel room. There were rows and rows of books in locked glass cases.
Rupert explained to us that most of these volumes were very rare, and worth a lot of money to Black Market collectors. They were obscure, hard to find, first and second printings of books that had, at the time, been considered shocking, and blasphemous. Books that went against the Catholic Church. Poetry that spoke of things less than . . . kosher.
“Most of the books in here speak of witchcraft and mischief. The words in these books instruct the readers to practice the darkest of the black arts.” He looked at us with a warning glare, “And don't be fooled, gentlemen. In these volumes there are unspeakable acts and sacrifice and violence. These books spilt blood, be sure of that.”
“So, then,” Ricky asked, “ . . . where does our book fit in?”
Rupert continued walking, nodding to himself again as if he was having another discussion inside his head. “Well, we didn't get a hit on the exact language . . . but we got close. Our software—developed by linguistics experts at MIT—takes the various symbols, and crosses them with details about the production of the volume. And by that I mean the bindings, and cover materials. Designs. What have you. And then it gives you a 'best guess', if you will.”
He walked over to a small glass-covered cabinet and tapped his finger on top, “And the computer's best guess puts us with a section of books on voodoo and the occult, that originated in Haiti.”
“Haiti,” I echoed, as we all kind of let it sink in.
“They eat humans there,” Ricky said. “In Haiti. They call it Long Pork. They say it's better than horse meat.”
“You've eaten horse meat?” I asked, my stomach turning more than before.
Ricky answered as if I'd asked him the most obvious question in the world. As if I'd asked whether he knew how to swim. “Uh . . . yeah.”
Rupert looked visibly rattled, his Adam's apple lifting as he made a hard swallow, and slowly lowering in his thin throat.
“You'd be surprised how good it is,” Ricky added with a hauntingly satisfied grin.
“Perhaps we should take a look at some of these volumes, and see if that helps us to narrow it down,” Rupert said, lowering himself to the lock on the book cabinet.
“Voodoo it is, then,” I said. And I was wondering if the book cover was made with leather. Or if it was something else.
Something a little closer to home.
Something like Long Pork.
Chapter 8
Dallas Public Library.
8:56 am . . .
Each book had a protective plastic cover around it, like evidence in a police locker. And with each book was a small notebook with printed information. Some of it was history of the particular texts. Some of it was bits and pieces translated by curious researchers. Slices of the environment in which these documents were originally created. Some notebooks were bigger than others.
“To understand these volumes, gentlemen,” Rupert professed, “ . . . one must understand their history.
Haiti doesn't have any official religion. The country's constitution allows for religious freedom but gives special recognition to the Roman Catholic church. More than 60% of the population is Roman Catholic, and about a quarter is Protestant. Since the 1970s some radical priests have espoused liberation theology—the theory that God speaks predominately through the poor.
However, most Haitian Roman Catholics are also practitioners of voodoo (voudou, or vodun)—a religion whose gods (loas) are derived from West African religions. Most of the nation's Protestants consider Christianity to be incompatible with voodoo.
The religion of Voodoo is a creolized religion forg
ed by descendants of Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and many other African ethnic groups who had endured enslavemen. They were eventually brought to colonial Saint-Dominique (as Haiti was known then) and Christianized by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The word Vodou (Fr.) actually means “spirit” or “deity” in the Fon language of the African kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin). This religion encompasses philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit.
Humans are spirits who inhabit the visible world. The unseen world is populated by Iwa (spirits), Myste (mysteries), Anvizib (the invisibles), Zanj (angels), and the various spirits of ancestors and the recently departed.
All of these spirits are believed to live in a mythical land called Ginen, a cosmic “Africa.” The God of the Christian Bible is understood to be the creator of both the universe and the spirits. The spirits were made by God to help him govern humanity and the natural world.
The primary goal and activity of Voodoo is to sevi Iwa (“to serve the spirits”). This is done by offering prayers and performing various devotional rites that are directed at God and particular spirits in return for health, protection, and favor.
Spirit possession plays a very important role in Afro-Haitian religion, as it does in many other religions. During religious rites, believers sometimes enter a trance-like state in which the devotee may eat and drink, perform stylized dances, give supernaturally inspired advice to people, perform medical cures, and execute special physical feats. These acts are supposed to exhibit the incarnate presence of the Iwa within the entranced devotee.
“So,” Ricky read aloud, “ . . . it's all about restoring balance and energy in relationships between people, and the spirits of the unseen world.” And then he glanced over at me, like I should know something about this stuff because I claim to see spooks crawling around every now and then.
“It says here,” Rupert read, sitting at a rectangular wooden table, his chin resting between his thin, meatless palms, “that families can inherit familial spirits, along with the differing devotional practices from their elders.” He looked up, his eyes curious and speculative, “So there are whole societies that pass this along, from father to child, over and over.”
I was thumbing through a small book, about the size of a paperback novel, with several pages of strange drawings. Some of the drawings were of symbols and faces. There was a sketch of a bunch of people dancing around a fire.
Then the pictures got darker, and more supernatural.
And as I flipped the pages—silicon gloves on my hands that Rupert gave us so that we wouldn't get our 'oils' on the pages—I noticed that some of the shadows in the drawings were stretched differently. They had personality. The shadows were characters in the sketches, even if the artist hadn't intended it.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand when I turned the next page. There were drawings of people with things crawling around them. Looking at them, from the darkness. These things, they had long thin hands. Hidden in the shadows, waiting and watching.
“ . . . the priestesses are the oungan, and the priests are called manbo,” Ricky read.
And I turned to the next page, and there were three of them. Three of the spooks. The creepy little shadows that I had seen crawling around in that morgue.
“ . . . the children of the spirits are the ounsi, and the ritual drummers are the, uh, oun-togi.”
I flipped the next page and I saw a different creature altogether. This one was short and stocky, with long, skinny arms, and in its hands were knives. Knives with two blades. And it was hunched over a body that looked to be tied down to the ground. Maybe in some kind of sacrificial ritual. That creature with its arms and knives, it was cutting away at the victim. Cutting away at his chest.
On the next page, that same creature was pulling something out of the body. And even though I don't read French, nor all of the various random squiggles and dots and symbols, I knew exactly what it was doing.
I realized that my hands were sweating inside the silicon gloves. Ricky and Rupert had stopped reading, and were standing over me, looking down at the picture.
“Ah, yes,” Rupert said, “ . . . le Ramasseur.”
I looked up.
Rupert put his hand on my shoulder, “That is the Gatherer, in French.”
“He cuts out your soul?” Ricky posed, leaning down to the drawing.
And those words kept floating around in that room. Floating around in my head.
The Gatherer.
He cuts out your soul.
And, again, I feel myself shaking. Ricky and Rupert, they don't say anything. We're all just sitting there quietly. Ricky knows why I'm bothered by this image. He knows what I told him I saw when I was coming back from whatever it was that stole my life.
Rupert, he probably just thinks I'm getting caught-up in all of this stuff. He turns his head, glancing back at my book, and then down at the drawing of the Gatherer, and then to Ricky and I. And he narrows his eyes suspiciously at us, saying, “You told me somebody in your family left you that book?”
Neither of us answered.
“Do either of you have any idea what you are getting yourselves into?”
Good fucking question, Rupert.
Chapter 9
R.H. Dedmen Memorial Hospital.
Neurology Department, 2:14 pm . . .
I'm sitting in a waiting room, looking at two-year-old issues of GQ and Cosmopolitan Lady. But, since I don't remember anything that happened farther back than four-and-a-half months ago, it's all new and exciting to me.
There is one other person in the calm-blue and warm-yellow waiting room. A middle-aged woman, with short red hair and clothes that look tight and uncomfortable, is fidgeting in her chair. I lifted up a magazine for her, but she gave me one of those 'I'll scream rape' scowls. She is probably waiting for somebody. Her husband, maybe? A child? Hard to tell. Whoever it is, they're in for a nice afternoon. She looks like a snake, unhappy with its skin. An eel on shag carpet.
I thumb through the magazines until an attractive receptionist calls out on the intercom for a “Mister Jack Pagan.” I laughed, because there's only just me and this other woman in the waiting room. The receptionist then informs me that I can “ . . . proceed to Dr. Smith's office for my appointment.”
I walked through a pastel green door, into a lavender and off-white hallway. I'm so tired of 'feel-good' colors. I'd almost opt for blood dripping down the walls rather than all of this purple, green, pink, fuchsia. If I see another smiling dinosaur I'm going to hit him over his big head with a chair, then stab his eyes out until he's extinct, again.
I noticed the caseworker's office door was open. I approached and knocked politely on the threshold.
A short, bald man with sun-reddened skin, a gleaming forehead, and a neck that seemed choked by his tie, waved me in. He had a chubby smile to accent his light blue eyes. It was almost like he was part of the color scheme. Dr. Robert “you can call me Bob” Smith pointed to an area in front of his large oak desk. There was one of those brown leather 'psychiatrist' couches—where I'm sure hundreds of people have cried their eyes out—and also a big, leather chair, of the same color.
I wondered if this was one of those shrink-tests. Where, if I choose the couch, it means that daddy touched me wrong and I need to be held; but if I pick the chair, it means I need attention because my mommy ignored me.
“Sit down, Mr. Pagan,” Dr. Smith said casually. He didn't even offer his hand for a shake. Although, I'm not sure if caseworkers in the Neurology Department are even allowed to shake hands. The protocol around here is a little stuffy.
I sat and looked around the office. This guy has a lot of certificates. They all look very professional and important. Each one of them probably has an unpaid student loan attached to it.
Dr. Smith glanced down at a folder in front of him. “So . . . how . . . have . . . you,” he looked up, “ . . . been doing?”
I shrugged. I told him everything seemed fine. I was adjusting well enough. My classes were just about finished, and I was already looking for work.
“What kind of work?”
I'd like to work at a library, or a bookstore, I think. Somewhere that's quiet.
“Is your head still ringing.”
Not as bad as before, I explained. Manageable.
“And how about your appetite?”
I'm eating like a champ. I didn't mention our little jaunts to McDonald's. I'm pretty sure the hospital's staff would frown upon that.
“And your vision?”
What about it, I asked.
“Is it clear? Are you getting headaches? Do you see double.”
I considered his question. “My vision is crystal clear.”
Especially if you count the spooks and monsters that appear from the shadows.
I continued, “And my headaches are occurring less and less frequently.”
And even as I say the words my head is throbbing like there is a city worker in the back of my skull pounding a jackhammer on my cerebral cortex.
“I'd say everything is fine,” I added, just to sugarcoat it. These shrinks make so much out of nothing. I don't want to give him any ammunition.
He studied me for a moment, leaning back in his chair—a much nicer chair than mine. And he just looks past his cheeks at me, his lips pursed a bit. Then he sits forward, and the skin above his eyebrows wrinkles slightly.
“I'm worried that you may be having a bit too much success this early in the recovery.”
Oh, I tell him, that's just because of the exemplary treatment at this facility, and all of the knowledgeable doctors and staff looking after me.
And then he squints. “Right,” he says skeptically. “Hold on a second, Jack. I want you to speak with Dr. Culligan.” Then he dials some buttons on his phone and talks to somebody in doctor-speak. Something about an inkblot.
See Jack Die (Part 1 in the Paranormal Series) (See Jack Die Series) Page 5