by Sibel Hodge
"Of course." He opened the door to a Ford Ka on the driveway next to the church and slid behind the wheel.
"Don't worry, if anyone comes in asking for you, I'll let them know you've been delayed."
"Thank you, my child." He slammed the door shut and shot out onto the main road.
Would I go to hell for that? I didn't have time to consider it as I yanked open the church door and poked my head inside, looking for Steven. There was no one on the pews or at the altar, so the only other place he could be was in the confessional box, waiting for Father McGuire.
I crept up between the pews and opened the intricately carved wooden door to the confessional box, shutting it carefully behind me. Sitting down inside, I slid open the hatch to reveal a latticed wooden window that separated the confessor from the confessee. On the other side, I could just about make out a figure in the gloom.
In the deepest voice I could muster, I said, "Do you have something to confess?" Okay, I sounded a teensy bit like the famous drag queen RuPaul, but maybe Steven wouldn't notice.
"Is that you, Father McGuire?" Steven asked.
"No, I'm afraid he's been called out on an emergency. I'm Father…" Oh, crap, what's a fatherly kind of name? Damn, I swore in a church. Oh sh…sugar, I did it again! "I'm Father Ted." Oh, God, why did I say Father Ted? That was a comedy program on TV!
"Oh, okay. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It's been a year since my last confession."
Phew! He didn't seem to notice.
"What would you like to confess, my child?" I asked, trying to make my voice deeper.
"Well…" He paused for a moment.
"It's okay, my child, take your time." Although how long would it be before Father McGuire discovered there was no traffic accident and came back? "On second thought, it's actually better if you get it out in the open as soon as possible to avoid the wrath of the lord."
"Oh no. Will I get sent to hell?"
"No, my child. I'll give you the appropriate number of Hail Marys and then you'll be absolved. Unless you take too long, then you might go to hell."
"Er…okay. Well, the thing is…my girlfriend has gone missing. Actually, she's kind of not my girlfriend anymore. We were going out with each other and then she split up with me. It wasn't anything I did. I mean, I wasn't horrible or anything, it's just that, you know, she was going through a hard time, and her friend had disappeared and—"
Oh, for God's sake, spit it out! "Actually, this is a speed confessional box so you'll need to get to the actual confession in under a minute," I said.
"A speed confessional box?"
"Yes, it's like speed dating. We find that with people's busy lives these days they like to do speed confessions rather than the usual longer ones. So you need to confess quickly, I'm afraid, to be eligible for Hail Mary redemptions. Otherwise, the penalties could be very severe from the man upstairs. You're lucky I could fit you in; we've been taking phone bookings for the speed confessions and we're up to our eyeballs in appointments. So if you could hurry it along, please."
"Right. Okay. Well, my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—has gone missing and I know something, but I don't know whether to tell the police."
"Well, you must tell them, my child."
"But if I tell them, then I'll get into trouble."
"Yes, but it's not all about you, is it? If you know what's happened to her, then you need to tell the police immediately. What do you know about her disappearance?"
"What if I did it for her own good, though?"
"What did you do, my child?" A bad, burny sensation rippled through my stomach. What the fuck has he done to her? Agh! More sweary words coming out of my mouth. Why does being in a church make me want to swear? I'll definitely be going to hell for that. Oh, well, at least it's hot down there, not like the crappy British weather. Oh, fu…fudge, I've done it again!
He ignored my question. "I was trying to help her but…maybe it's all my fault."
"What's your fault? What do you know? What did you do to her?" I pressed on. In my excitement, my voice rose to RuPaul level again.
"I…oh, God." I pictured him holding his head in his hands.
"Yes, he's listening. Carry on, my child." I forced my voice lower.
"I…"
Come on!
"If you did something you thought was good but it's not, is that bad? Will he punish me?"
"As long as you tell me about it, no, he won't punish you. Now get on with it!"
"Pardon?"
"Er…I mean, hurry up, my child. The lord wants to hear your confession now, and your time for speed confession is nearly up. You don't want to go to hell, do you?"
"I…I'm sorry. I was wrong. I can't do it. I thought I could but I can't."
I heard the confessional door open and close on the other side of the box and Steven's heavy footsteps hurrying to the entrance.
Bugger! Damn, I did it again!
I slipped out of the confessional box and walked slowly to the entrance, pondering his words. I did it for her own good. What the hell—oops, I mean, what the heck did that mean? Had he killed her? Had he done something to help her but it had ended up going badly wrong in some kind of accident?
As I was stepping out into the cold air, my pocket rang. Or, more accurately, my mobile in my pocket rang.
"Foxy," Brad said. "My guy watching Marie's house says he's followed her into town. At the moment, she's shopping. If we want to get in and have a nose around her house, we'd better be quick."
"Okay." I started the engine. "When I threw that tea out into the garden, I noticed the house backs onto some woods. We can get in from there and climb the fence at the end of her garden to avoid being seen by the neighbors." Yes, it was dark now, but I didn't want to take any chances. If Marie knew we'd been in her house, she might put a hex on us. Damn. It was too late to go back home and put my Wonder Woman knickers on.
"I'll meet you at the entrance to the woods." Brad hung up as I floored the Toyota, squealing up the road.
I parked near the woods, grabbed my stun gun from my rucksack, and put it in my pocket. I gripped it as I got out of the car and walked to the entrance of the woods. Brad was already waiting for me, thank God. Not that I was scared, you understand, just a teensy bit nervous about what to expect once we got inside. The night was starless and dark, magnifying the ominous feeling I had, and we were about to enter a house that could've been used for black magic rituals. Okay, I admit it, I was scared.
"Isn't Hacker coming?" I asked as I hustled forwards to where Brad was waiting. Don't get me wrong, I was more than capable of looking after myself, and Brad could protect himself blindfolded, but that was protecting ourselves from people and weapons we could see. What about creepy, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night invisible spirits and curses that we couldn't see?
"No. He said there's no way he's going in there."
Crappety crap. Hacker wasn't scared of anything. If he didn't want to go in there, it must be bad.
Brad handed me the chicken's foot Hacker wore around his neck. "He wanted you to wear this for protection."
I didn't know which was worse: wearing a poor, sacrificed chicken's bones, or not wearing it and being hexed. Either way, I quickly pulled it over my neck, just in case.
Brad nodded toward the woods and we silently crept through the trees to Marie's fence. Brad hauled himself over the fence first, closely followed by me. As I was swinging over the other side, my jeans caught on a nail and I heard a ripping sound.
Great! A pissy boot and now ripped jeans! Never mind a love curse, Marie's giving me a fashion curse.
I tugged my leg off the nail and with the momentum fell over the other side of the fence onto the hard, muddy ground right on my ass.
"Ouch!" I sat on the ground for a moment, waiting for the pain to subside from my coccyx.
"Are you okay?" Brad looked down at me, holding out a hand.
"I think I've broken my ass." I grabbed his hand and got to my feet, rubbing
my bum. "Bloody voodoo!"
We walked toward the house and I saw a faint light glowing in one of the upstairs windows.
"You're sure she's not here?" I whispered.
Brad nodded. "My guy's going to phone when she's on her way back."
I gave an involuntary shudder and looked around the garden for any signs of Snowy. I didn't particularly fancy getting sprayed twice in one day. As we got closer to the French doors, the rhododendron bush shuddered in a sudden breeze that whipped up my hair around my cheeks. Maybe I'd watched too many bad horror films in the past, but I had a sudden thought about skeletons rising from the dead and leaping out of the bush to attack us. Scenes from Night of the Living Dead kept popping into my head, and it wasn't pretty.
Don't be a scaredy-Fox. Nothing like that is even remotely possible. My imagination seemed to be getting an ickle bit too overactive. I chuckled to myself and shook my head as the voice of reason took over again.
"What?" Brad threw me a questioning look.
I shook my head again. "Nothing. Just my crazy imagination."
He got his magic lock-picking tool out of his pocket and I watched him make light work of the French doors. In a couple of seconds they clicked and he pressed the handle down.
We were in.
Turning on his Maglite torch, he led the way into the kitchen, which was still as messy as earlier. If I were Marie, I'd magic up one of her zombie mates to do a spot of housework. I mean, I'm not the tidiest person in the world, but this place was a mess. The local rubbish tip looked positively spotless compared to Marie's house.
We poked around the worktops and in cupboards and drawers but didn't see anything connected to Chantal. As we searched, I filled him in on Steven's non-confession.
"So we still don't know what he knows?" Brad said.
"Nope. What do you think he meant when he said 'I did it for her own good'?"
Brad shrugged. "It could be anything."
"That's what scares me. What if he thought killing her was for her own good?"
We walked down the hallway lined with books. At the end of it, by the front door, sat Snowy, staring at us. In the darkness, with the torch reflecting on his eyes, he looked like a ghost cat.
An icy chill slammed through my veins and goose bumps broke out on my skin.
Snowy scowled at us then bared his teeth, hissing as we opened one of the doors that led to the lounge.
"Scary cat," I said.
"I thought you loved all cats."
"Yeah, but that's a voodoo cat. And it sprayed on me."
"The funny thing is, I used to hate cats until I met Marmalade."
I smiled. "Yes, but Marmalade's a cutie cat. Everyone loves him."
"I think Marmalade wants us to get married so he won't be illegitimate anymore." Brad tilted his head, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Nice try!"
Inside was the same amount of clutter. Books, candles, various dolls, some made of plastic, some made of straw or cloth, bowls of stones, bits of bark, empty bottles, dice, flowers, money—you name it, Marie was hoarding it on every available bit of space.
"And I thought you were bad with clutter," Brad said. "Look at all this stuff."
So what if I had obsessive clutter disorder? I just felt comfortable with my stuff around me. And if you couldn't be comfortable in your own home, then you might as well live in a cardboard box somewhere. Although, strictly speaking, it wasn't actually my home, it was Brad's. Even though he'd been pretty good about ignoring all the knick-knacks I'd dotted around his house since I'd moved in, I was making an effort to curb my clutter fetish, and my stuff had nothing on this lot. I was positively a domestic goddess compared to Marie. It looked like she'd filled the place with a whole lifetime's supply of crap.
As we searched through the mountains of stuff, I came across a picture of a bride and groom with skulls for faces.
I showed it to Brad. "See, this might happen to us if I set the date. We might shrivel up and turn into a couple of skeletons after the wedding. This could be a sign." I waved the picture under his nose.
"A sign about what?"
"That we're not supposed to get married. That you might just disappear one day again, out of the blue. That we're not really right for each other. That it's all a mistake."
"We are definitely not a mistake. And there's no way I'm leaving you again. In fact, there's no way you're ever getting rid of me now." Brad grinned at my neuroticism. "And don't tell me you believe in all this voodoo now."
"Of course not!" I snapped.
"So what's the worst thing that can happen if you set the date?"
"Er…lots of things?" I said, but it came out more like a question than an answer.
He threw his arms up in the air and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like "Women!"
I pretended I hadn't heard him and rifled through a wooden cabinet that housed hundreds of empty bottles of alcohol. "Either Marie's a secret alkie, or these are used in some kind of ritual." Shame they were empty, I could've done with a stiff drink.
Upstairs there were four closed doors. Behind the first one was a small bathroom with a rusted bath, a mountain of hair products, a carved wooden mask on the wall that looked like a man in mid-scream, and a stuffed black crow on the windowsill. Ick.
One of the other rooms was a bedroom that had a single iron bed with a colorful hand-embroidered duvet cover. More candles and clutter. A picture of a Catholic saint.
The second bedroom had a double bed, a small metal dressing table covered with candles and dolls, and stuff that looked like it should've been thrown away about a hundred years ago. Yellowing bits of paper with weird writing, glass beads, bottles of foul-smelling stuff, a rusted machete. On the bed was a bright red duvet cover and matching pillow. Next to the bed on a small wooden table were a rickety old lamp and a couple of books. The lampshade had a red scarf draped over the top, giving the room an eerie glow. I was guessing this was Marie's room.
I walked toward the machete and stared at it. It was pretty blunt and didn't look like it had been used in a long time, but it would've been a pretty lethal weapon in its day. "Wonder what she used that for?"
Brad picked up the books on the night table, reading out the covers. "Ancient Voodoo Black Magic Spells and Gray's Dissection Guide For Human Anatomy." He glanced up. "A bit of light reading before bedtime?"
The blood drained from my face. "Omigod!" Images of the boy known as Adam and voodoo ritual killings crept into my brain again. A horrible picture of Chantal and Liza, held down in a darkened room, tied up, being sliced to death with a machete swam, before my eyes. "I'm getting a really bad feeling about what's happened to Chantal and Liza."
"You're not the only one."
The third bedroom was pretty much the same. Lots of macabre things and creepiness, but still no trace of Chantal or her friend.
We trudged back down the stairs and stood in the kitchen. That was when I spied a lump in the dirty carpet.
I kicked it and my boot connected with something hard.
I glanced up at Brad. "What do we have here?"
He pulled the edge of the carpet back, revealing a trap door.
"A basement," Brad said as he slowly pulled open the door.
I trained my Maglite down the dark stairs, but there was a small light source coming from somewhere below. Trudging down the creaky wooden staircase, we found ourselves in a whitewashed room with concrete walls.
I gave an involuntary gasp. This was Marie's voodoo altar room.
A table had been set up on one side of the room and was covered by a black cloth. My eyes swept the altar: candles galore, all lit up with shadows dancing around the room, making it feel like it was alive with ghostly spirits. Didn't anyone ever tell Marie not to leave lighted candles unattended? How irresponsible of her. Mountains of necklaces, several of which were made out of human teeth. I figured it was a pretty safe bet she hadn't bought them from the local Accessorize shop. Yet more b
ottles of spirits; two small wooden coffins, each with a skeleton doll wearing a top hat and tails lying inside; an alligator's head; two human skulls that were yellowed and looked ancient; three animal skulls that I was guessing were probably from a goat; wooden bowls filled with bones of smaller animals; plastic dolls that reminded me of Chucky, the killer doll from the film Child's Play; long wooden sticks; feathers, a bowl of fruit; a wooden cross that was crudely put together with bits of string.
"Creepsville," I said, my intestines suddenly turning into liquid goo. "I can smell zombies."
"What do zombies smell like?" Brad raised an eyebrow.
"Yucky and decaying, like the smell in this room, and the smell of Marie's tea. Urgh." I pinched my nose closed and breathed through my mouth. "Good job we didn't drink that tea. It's probably made from boiled-up zombies."
Brad's lips twitched in a smile. "It's amazing the things that go on in your head."
"Tell me about it. I have to put up with me all the time."
He inched closer to the human skulls. "They're not recent."
I eyed the skulls warily, wondering who they'd been when they were alive. Had they been sacrificed, or had they died of natural causes? I shuddered at the thought. "So this is where she does all her black magic rituals." I screwed up my face, half expecting Chucky to come to life and take a swing at us with an axe.
At the back of the altar, hundreds of photographs and pictures were taped to the wall.
"Hacker said in some of the voodoo rituals they use photos of the people they're trying to help or curse," Brad said.
"Can you see her?" My heartbeat clanged around in my chest as I wondered if I'd see Chantal or Liza's face staring back at me.
"No."
As I leaned forward over the altar, inspecting each one of them more closely, I heard a shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh noise and smelled something burning.
"You're hair's on fire!" Brad's eyes nearly pinged out of his head.
"Agh!" I glanced down at the left side of my hair and swatted it with my hand.
Ouch! Burny hands.
Probably not a good move, but at least it seemed to stop the flames before they engulfed the whole of my head.
Brad took his jacket off and swatted my head with it repeatedly to stop the residual flames.