The old crone gestured for me to come toward the fire. “Come closer, then. Let’s see if we can find your wayward friend.”
As soon as I took a step, I regretted it. A shot rang out, and my trench coat was perforated. I had a new hole, an inch below my unbirth hole. Son of a bitch. Couldn’t have just shot me in the same place twice, huh? I whirled around.
The younger girl, the one who was a dead ringer for a skeleton, stood there with a Colt .45 and an expression like I had just stepped on her grave. The gun was already shaking. “What? How?”
“And here I was thinking you were nice,” I said. “Guess that from cradle to grave you can’t trust a twist.”
Then suddenly my arms were up in the air like Jesus on the cross. I tried to fight, but there was nothing there to grapple with. No gorilla holding me back, no rope, no nothing. I simply couldn’t move.
The old lady talked. Only, she wasn’t a lady. “Don’t be foolish, Francoise,” “she” said. “You can’t hurt this one like that.”
I turned my head as far as I could. The “old lady” was shedding layers. When he was down to nothing but a loincloth, I saw he was as skinny as the girl. I should’ve known better.
“You need one of these,” he said. The witch doctor waved a funny little sack doll in Francoise’s face. The doll’s arms were tied up in the air. Supposed to be me?
Funny, if I wasn’t already a walking corpse, I wouldn’t have believed in magic. Didn’t, really, even after all that. “You must be the bokor.”
“Delamort,” he said, tipping his lidless top hat in my direction. “And what are you? More and more of you keep coming, but you’re not mine.”
“I was sort of hoping you could tell me that,” I said.
“Well, let’s talk somewhere more comfortable,” Delamort said. He made the doll’s legs move, and sure enough, against my will, I walked into an adjoining room. At least three or four deadheads were in there. A couple were down to heads in jars, so I didn’t know if they still counted as our kind. Sure enough, one of them was missing nothing but his legs.
“Hey, how’s it going, Ivan?” I said.
“Who are you?”
“I’m here to rescue you. Your sister hired me.”
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Not well.”
Delamort made me sit. If the main room was like a caveman’s hut, that place was like a mad scientist’s laboratory. All the deadheads were in varying states of experimentation. I assumed the ones down to their heads had been there the longest.
“So you know each other,” Delamort said, pointing between us.
“I’ve never met him before,” Ivan protested.
“Somebody hired me to find him,” I said.
“Kumaree!” A wave of relief washed over Ivan’s face. “So she got all my messages?”
Uh… “Um… what messages?”
“In Morse code,” he said. “With my toes. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”
So that was what all the random twitching was. The old bokor looked as if he wasn’t buying it, but he decided to table the discussion. He picked up a doll that was missing its legs, like a gingerbread man bitten in half on Christmas morning. Real quick, like it was nothing, Delamort sewed over the doll’s mouth. I looked over. Ivan couldn’t talk, as if his jaws were glued shut.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
“I’ll do it to you, too,” Delamort said. “Be… what’s the word? Civil.”
“Civil?” I said. “Sure. I can be civil with a kidnapper and a killer.”
Delamort laughed. Turned out the creepy old lady’s laugh was real enough. I shivered a little bit. Like I said before, funny how much physical stuff is a matter of habit.
“You cannot kill what is already dead,” the bokor said.
“Yeah, but you can blow it to chunky kibbles,” I said.
“Dead is dead,” he said.
“‘That is not dead which can eternal lie,’” I said. “Ah, hell, I forget the rest.”
Ivan stared at me, jerking his head as if he wanted to say something. I guess Delamort didn’t notice.
“You’ve been studying,” he said, “like him.”
“Are we jumbees?” I asked.
Delamort shrugged. He stood and walked around the room, looking at the other deadheads as though they were wax statues in a gallery. I’ve got to admit, he had a good point, and I might agree if I wasn’t one of them.
How can you feel bad for a walking corpse? How natural is it to be one? But then, how natural is chocolate milk for that matter? Doesn’t make it bad.
“It’s a word you could use,” the bokor said. “But you are unlike any jumbee I have ever met… or made. Walking dead, yes, but your minds are intact. If I could harness that power somehow, who knows what I could do?”
Sorry, I know I ought to keep writing, but the pen is shaking so much I can’t even read my own words anymore. I must be alcohol deprived and exhausted. Gonna grab a shot of Crow and go back to bed for a while. I’ll finish the rest of the story tomorrow.
November 7, 1934
Didn’t do anything much yesterday. I’m still recuperating from my ordeal. I went to the bar, then back to the room. I just realized I never finished my last entry. Where was I? Oh, yes, finishing up the story about that S.O.B. Delamort.
Anyway, Delamort had me locked up or paralyzed or whatever it was in his little dungeon of doom and gloom and torture. Ivan, the client, was there too, as was a whole stack of other deadheads I wasn’t getting paid to help. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to help them anyway.
“Hey, listen, Delamort,” I said, “I’m dying for a square. As long as you’ve got my arms like this, you think you could do me a favor?”
He stared at me as though I was talking some hippidy-bippidy mumbo-jumbo.
“Cigarette?” I simplified.
“Oh,” the bokor said, nodding. “Yes.”
He reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the pack of Luckies and my lighter. He stopped and stared. “Luckies,” he whispered as though it was the name of Jehovah or something.
“Yeah,” I said. “How about lighting me up?”
“These”—he flashed my pack in my face—“are for the baron.” He left the room. Crazy Haitians.
I yelled after him, “Yeah, well, I hope the damned baron brings them back!”
“Hey, shut up, bigmouth!”
I looked up. One of the heads on a shelf was speaking to me. “What?” I said.
“He’s out of the room, stupid ass,” the head said. “Now’s our chance.”
“You can talk,” I said.
“Well, sure.” He was struggling like a lunatic to throw himself off the shelf. “He never sewed my mouth shut.”
“What are you doing?”
“Why don’t you take my advice and shut up for once in your misbegotten death and look!”
I looked down. Sure enough, Delamort had run off so fast with my squares, he had left one of the little fetish dolls on the ground. Mine, maybe? The head on the shelf was rumbling forward like a motorboat, shaking and rocking and rolling for all he was worth. Thankfully he was one of the ones who hadn’t been stuffed into a jar yet.
The other heads on the shelf started jumping—if that’s what you can call it—up and down to help move their buddy. Delamort, meanwhile, was chanting or something in the other room. I was keeping my trademark wit in check so as not to call attention to us, but it was hard to bite my tongue. Then I started to smell some of that cool, soothing Lucky smoke.
“Son of a bastard,” I muttered.
Then the chanting stopped. Shit. The head fell on the floor. Double shit. Loud noise. That’s no good.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m trying!” the head said. The head still had all of his neck and what looked like a chunk of his torso scooped out from between his collar bones. It sure hadn’t been a clean cut like with a guillotine. It looked more like
someone had chiseled it out with a machete.
Between his neck and his head, he rolled back and forth from one ear to the other. The bottom chunk of his neck twisted up like a kid twisting up the chains of a swingset, then slowly reversed. He kept rolling, trying to pick up momentum. The doll was maddeningly close, but he couldn’t get to it without any limbs. I heard some froggy talk from the other room, and it wasn’t no chanting.
“Francoise!”
That word I could identify, then some more shouting. “Shit!” I said. “Shit shit shit.”
“Not… helping…” The little head case was rolling for all his worth. I was in one of those panicky moods where I could’ve pissed my pants, except I haven’t pissed since I was unborn.
Funny. That’s in spite of all the extra booze I’ve been drinking. Where does it all go? Evaporates, I suppose.
Then the starving girl was in the doorway. Damn. “What’s going on?”
Oh shit. Some luck. At least she didn’t look down and notice the head rolling around on the floor.
I didn’t look down either. “You got me, chickadee. What are you looking for?”
“What’s going on in here?” She waved her gun around again as if it mattered.
Funny what creatures of habit we are. What does it take to break us of our habits?
“Nobody here but us chickens,” I said.
Then she screamed. What, like she never saw a decapitated head rolling on the floor, tangling with a fetish doll using only its teeth? Pff.
“Uncle Delamort!” she yelled, only it sounded more like “ankle.” I just kind of guessed she meant “uncle.”
Delamort came running. He wore his top hat and his face was painted white. Weird.
“Come on, come on, come on!” I said.
“What’s the matter, darling?” he said, clutching his niece to his bosom.
The deadhead finally gnawed through my doll’s bonds. I jumped up and, in one swift motion, grabbed the head, doll and all. Francoise fired off a round, missing my head by a hair’s breadth.
“Watch the head!” the head in my hand said.
Another shot rang out.
“Put the head down,” Delamort said.
“Why should I, shaman?” I said. “You got something to offer me?”
“Let’s talk about this. You want to know more about yourself. I can tell you more.”
“Yeah, somehow I’m not so interested in what you have to say anymore,” I said. I took two tentative half steps backward.
“Kill them,” the bokor said, tapping his niece’s shoulder.
“I’ll be back for you, Ivan,” I said, “I’ll be back for all of you.” Then I went out the window.
November 8, 1934
I forgot I stopped halfway through the entry yesterday. I guess I did that the day before, too. Across the street from Hallowed Grounds there’s an old abandoned haberdashery some of our kind have shacked up in. They’re loons, mostly, the kind who can’t handle the change but don’t want to be put down, either. The Old Man sends them a case of fortified wine every week or so to keep them from making the rest of us look bad.
One of the crazies fell asleep with a Lucky in his mouth, and the next thing you know, the whole building was toasted. Ganesh has a professional fire company, but they just laughed at me when I called. I guess they’re really only for the Altstadt. So those of our kind who were around and willing started up a chain of buckets to try to put out all the boxes of outdated hats and moth-eaten overcloaks.
I guess the bucket brigade was a success. The only one of our kind who was put down was the one who started the fire. The rest of the crazies reoccupied the burnt-out haberdashery like nothing had happened, and the Old Man sent them two crates of E. & J. Gallo and called it a kindness.
But where did I leave off before the fire started? Oh, yeah, my three-story vertical express train with the end of the line being Ground Central Station. I remember that plummet like it was yesterday.
So I’m walking down the streets of Port-au-Pauper (meaning?) with a head in my hands. All the Haitians were looking at me, but I just shrugged if one of them caught my eye.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” the head said.
“Well, yeah, anytime,” I said. “I feel like kind of a screw-up though. You’re not exactly my client, and there were others back there, too.”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?”
“‘We’?” I said. “You are going to sit on my desk. Maybe in a fishbowl. I’m going to have to figure something out.”
“You’re a jerkoff,” he said.
“You’re a head.”
“I’m a person.”
“Are you?” I asked. “No, I really want to know. Am I? Are any of us? What’s the definition of a person? I’m nothing but a walking corpse.”
He made a noise like a big wad of oatmeal getting sucked up a puckered anus. “I hate philosophy.”
We walked on in silence for a while. I guess I must have started to swing him, because he asked me to stop. We got back to Hallowed Grounds eventually. I slapped the head down on my desk and leaned back in my chair to take a swig out of my flask.
“You want a taste?”
“Yeah,” he said. I gave him a little tipple. “That’s enough,” he said. “I was a teetotaler in life. Guess I don’t drink a whole lot now, either.”
“Well, you’re nothing but a head,” I said. “Not as much to preserve.”
“Get bent,” he said.
I sat there for a while taking sips. I must’ve looked pretty pathetic. A has-been detective who never was. Solved one case and then screwed up royally when it really counted.
“What’s your name anyway?” the head said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Says ‘Braineater Jones’ on your door.”
“Huh?” I took a look. Sure enough, Lazar had painted it on. More likely he had paid somebody to paint it on. Whichever. “That’s just what they call me.”
“Mine’s Alcibé,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for your life story!” I shouted and turned the head around so he was facing away from me.
After a while I turned him back. “Spanish?”
“Honduran,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what that meant. I waited a while before speaking. “What were they doing in there anyway, Alcibé?”
“Anything and everything,” he said. “I was whole before I got in there.”
“Yeah,” I said, “must be rough.”
“I’m dealing with it,” he said. “So what are we going to do about the others?”
I thought about it. Not much I could do. I should’ve called the police. Fat lot of good that would’ve done. But then, I guess I was supposed to be the new sheriff in town.
“You know what they used to do in Wyoming in the old days?” he asked.
I shrugged. I couldn’t remember what had happened last week, let alone what some folks had done in Wyoming in the old days.
“Something like this happens,” Alcibé said, “and there’s no law, except the law of your own hands and your own community. They’d bring together a posse and go lynch that son of a bitch.”
I stared at the head on my table. “I don’t know about that. I don’t see a whole lot of get-up-and-go from our kind. They mostly just try to stay out of trouble.”
“You think after you tell them what you found in there, they’ll still act that way?”
I grinned. I must’ve looked like the Cheshire cat. Or else some kind of horrible beast flashing its teeth. “Maybe if you tell them.”
I walked into Hallowed Grounds and slammed Alcibé down on the bar. The room wasn’t crowded or anything, but everyone stopped to look at us.
“This is Alcibé,” I said.
“Who are you?” some heckler said.
I slammed my fist down on the bar.
While drowning my maggots and conditioning my hair in the tub yesterd
ay, it occurred to me that I could have said, “I’m your worst nightmare” or even “I’m the guy with the gun.” Nothing clever occurred to me at that point, though. Come to think of it, I could’ve even said, “I’m the guy carrying around the head.” Ah, damn it.
“We’ve come from Little Haiti,” Alcibé offered. “I’ve been there for three weeks. I was whole when I got there.”
Folks started to get up and gather around. Even the gorilla bartender stopped rubbing the little white spot into his countertop.
I think the same heckler asked, “What happened?”
“Some Haitian Frankenstein has taken an interest in our kind,” Alcibé said. “He’s been running experiments.”
The gorilla behind the counter said, “Somebody oughta do something about that.”
Alcibé tried to look up. He clenched his eyes shut and even tried to rock around on his neck stump. I saw he was having trouble, so I grabbed him and turned him to face the bartender.
When he was positioned properly, he said, “My thoughts exactly.”
An hour later, we were walking down Keene Avenue, about thirty strong. Even the gangsters and derelicts scattered. I wondered if it was the first time we’d come together as a community. Intellectually, I knew it couldn’t be, but I wished it was. I had a gun. No doubt a few others did. Most, though, were carrying cudgels and bricks and likewise.
Little Haiti was like a ghost town when we got there. I had taped Alcibé on my shoulder like a parrot, so some of the breathers were probably scared of the two-headed corpse. I pointed at the bokor’s building.
“There,” Alcibé said.
I wanted to go in charging, gun blazing, but I wasn’t even the first one up the steps. A girl who had probably been no more than eight when she turned—but looked to be toward the end of her unlife—was the first through the door. Lamely I followed her, and the rest of the crowd behind me was pushing so hard up the steps, I barely had to move my own feet.
When we got to the apartment, Francoise was cooking a pot of something unsavory on the naked fire in the center of the room. I thought to tell my group maybe she didn’t deserve to be torn limb from limb, but the crowd was out for breather blood. The little/old girl leapt on Francoise and clenched her leg like a parasite.
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