Alafin laid the book on the desk. Black leather, red-trimmed edges on the pages. Leather straps for closure.
DuLac, Parks, and Marie gathered round the book and desk. Alafin adjusted the lamp; the book gleamed.
“Colonial period,” said Alafin. “Written when Africa seemed a banquet for Europeans to consume, like a greedy plague.”
Marie stroked the cover. She hesitated, knowing that once opened, her life would be forever changed.
Unlike Christianity, with its command not to be tempted by the snake, voodoo proclaimed all knowledge good. Like a snake eating its own tail, renewing itself by shedding its skin, knowledge was infinite, necessary to being human. There was no “two-edged sword.” In voodoo, Prometheus would have been celebrated, never chained.
Gently, Marie opened the frayed pages, originally a kind of beige, with red, a reddish-brown, leaking from the edges into the page’s interior.
“That’s blood,” said Parks.
DuLac rubbed the paper between his thumb and fingers. “This page, it isn’t flesh, but something close.”
“Cowhide,” said Alafin. “Seared with elaborate woodblock prints. These, too, dipped in blood. Pages upon pages. All handcrafted. Art embodying the caution. Embodying life and death.”
“Amazing,” exhaled Marie.
“One of the few books in the world documenting African vampires. It was written by a 1920s missionary. A priest and a village shaman. A unique partnership. Written to warn. Bear witness to humanity’s sins begetting sins.”
Picture upon picture: African villages, straw-thatched huts, women tilling the soil, carrying infants on their back, children playing by the roadside. Men conversed in small groups, their heads and eyes averted. In the far-left corner, two officers looked down at a splayed body, blood draining from its wrist.
Another: a seemingly unending chain of Africans, each whispering in another’s ear. Officers were dragging a man into jail.
Another: moon high and full, a deserted plain. Amid the stalks and high grasses, there were a dozen bodies, emaciated, drained, their wrists blood speckled. A pride of lions ignored them. A soldier with a bayonet, gleaming black boots, counted out coins to a barefoot villager.
“But there’s nothing about race here,” muttered Parks.
“Are you sure, Detective?”
“The officers are all white, the villagers black. Colonialism. All about race. Class. Part of the psychology. Whites were wazimamotos. Colonizers. See, the officers are implicated in the killings. Explicitly, here, they’re dragging a man to jail. Everyone knows he won’t return. He’ll be killed. They’ll say: ‘wazimamoto.’ ”
“It’s a metaphor,” said Marie.
“Yes. But it’s also suspected to be real. Evil takes physical form in the world. The loas teach us that. The gods, themselves, can be reflections of hate, jealousy, envy. See this—a small group of black men, wearing badges—men who were probably given power similar to a deputy. They’ve become spies on their own community. Traitors. Africans, literally and mentally, colonized.
“Wazimamotos could be either a white spirit punishing blacks or a colonized, assimilated black—”
“You mean an Uncle Tom?”
“Yes. A black feeding on its own. Similar to African kings who sold their enemies into slavery. That was evil. But a wazimamoto can also be someone who commits evil because he identifies with his oppressors, he wants to be the colonizer, the master. These black men here are wielding machetes, dismembering this black man—and, by extension, metaphorically dismembering, destroying, their noncolonized selves.”
“But a free Africa is still engaging in slavery, brutality.”
“I’m not saying, Detective, that evil behavior doesn’t exist. It’s rampant in all cultures. Throughout history. The Incas’ sacrifices. The Romans’ feeding of Christians to lions. You need only to read today’s paper to know that across the globe, evil thrives. I’m speaking about motivation. Sometimes evil is a product of self-hatred. Learned behavior. When individuals identify with the oppressor. Intraracial, not interracial, prejudice. People feeding off the blood of their own people. Oppressing within their social group to cull favor with the colonizer, the enslaver.
“In these instances, the motivation stems from the legacy of the first evil—a people systematically demeaning, brutalizing, another people.”
Marie slammed the book shut. As a physician, she’d seen some of evil’s physical results. But she wasn’t required to think of the source. For her medical work, it didn’t matter; as a voodooienne, it did.
The three men watched her.
“Tea?” asked Alafin.
“Oui,” said DuLac.
“Scotch,” said Parks.
“I have that, too.” Without asking, Alafin poured a drink for Marie.
She sipped. The heat in her mouth felt good. “It possessed me. No, that’s not right. It was inside me. But it didn’t overtake me. I was conscious.”
“So it’s not a god, not a true spirit loa. But other,” said DuLac.
“A human creation,” said Alafin. “Wazimamoto.”
“How can that be? It’s a monster,” said Parks. “Besides, we don’t live in a colonized world.”
“Are you sure?” asked Alafin.
“New Orleans is the epitome of colonization,” said DuLac. “Multiple colonizations taken to their logical conclusion.”
“We’re all Americans.”
“Some living better than others,” said DuLac. “Why is it that the more pigment you have, the more oppressed you seem to be,” said DuLac. “Not just in New Orleans. But especially in New Orleans.”
“Aw, come on, DuLac,” said Parks. “New Orleans has a black mayor. Black police chief.”
“It also has a legacy,” said Alafin, “from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonial distinctions detailing the worth of a black—house slave, field slave, a Creole, free colored, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon.”
“Who still controls the wealth?” said DuLac. “It’s not by accident the majority of Charity’s patients are black, brown, and yellow people.”
“Look. Can we get back to evidence?”
“In part, I think you’re both right,” said Marie. “Racism still influences New Orleans. How could it not? A historical port city, home to slavers. Colonizers who owned people as easily as ships, cargo. But the Civil Rights era has happened. African Americans have defiantly staked their claim and right to be.”
“Oui,” said DuLac. “We’ve always been a proud people.”
“Yet racism, colonialism, still brutalizes. Perverts,” said Marie. “Like a disease spreading, its power would lie at the source. At the historical nexus when its power was unfettered, rampant. If wazimamotos exist, they would exist not as twenty-first-century vampires, but as a remnant from the nineteenth, eighteenth—”
“Yes,” said Alafin. “That would make sense. The point of cultural contact. When the conflict in society, within the self, would be at its worst.”
“That means—” said DuLac, understanding.
“Our vampire is a ghost. A creature from the past.”
“Aw, come on. Speculation is well and good, but I can’t convict on theories. Hell, I can’t arrest what I can’t see. It’s like trying to lock up Rudy and JT. The ghosts Doc says she sees.”
Marie raised her brow.
“Okay, okay. You see them.”
“And?”
“I think I’ve felt them. That’s as far as I’ll go, Doc. Shit.” Parks downed the scotch. “Okay. I felt them. Ghosts. Invisible dead.”
“Don’t light a cigarette in here,” said Alafin.
“Probably send the place up in flames,” DuLac said wryly.
“Have another drink, Parks.” Marie poured the shot.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Parks gulped the alcohol.
Marie leaned forward, reopening the book. A white missionary taught a group of native children.
Parks read over Marie’s shoulder. �
��Reeducation.” His scotch-tainted breath was sweet. “Why the multiple languages?” he asked. “They all say the same thing? ‘Reeducation’?”
Alafin nodded. “English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaner/Dutch—all of them at one time colonized Africa.”
“Just as French, Spanish, Americans did—”
“Enough already,” said Parks. “Why the draining of blood, Professor? Murder is murder. Why not just slit the throat? Crack a skull?”
“Here,” Alafin turned to the last page. “This is the African dialect. Ibo. A kind of epigraph. It says, in effect, that bloodsuckers are emblematic of western culture. Dracula, nosferatu were brought to Africa. Not the other way around.”
“And this,” asked Marie, her fingers tracing letters that had been written on the back binding. A rough scrawl, in blood.
“What does this say?”
“The unsayable. It’s name. Wazimamoto. This is the only place in the book where the word is written out. The last page. Africans believed saying the name would call it.”
“So they used a code,” said DuLac.
“Parks,” said Marie. “These are like the markings in Preservation Hall. Rudy, I mean the creature had been trying to name itself.”
“What are you saying?” asked DuLac.
“There was blood above Rudy’s body,” said Parks. “But no blood left on or in his body.”
“Amazing.” Alafin nearly crowed with excitement. “There are origin myths. Tales about how such creatures are born. Knowing one’s name, being able to say it, is powerful.”
Marie stroked the pages tenderly. Starting from the beginning, she flipped the pages. Arrested.
“What do you see?” asked Parks.
“From the beginning you see fragments of the name. An angled line at first. Then another. Then the angles meeting.”
“It’s on every page with a death.”
“Yes. After each draining.”
The next to last page, the angles met, twice: VV. A young woman lying in the grass. Her neck arched back. Hair fanning across her breast. Her simple shift hitched high on her thighs. Her left arm thrown over her head, palm open to the sky, fingers gently bent. Puncture wounds. Deep, red.
“The first letter there. Completed,” said Alafin. “Buried in the corner.”
Parks’s fingers traced the VV.
Marie turned to the last page. “It named itself. Tantamount to coming into being. Like a child learning to spell, to say its name.”
“Relying on blood, on killing,” said Alafin, “to create the first letter. Does it know what it is—or does the killing account for its knowing, its awareness of self? Maybe it isn’t even aware of its self.”
Marie thought of the markings on the wall in Preservation Hall. Agwé’s sign. Rudy had tried to scratch his salvation. Like the book, the first letter of wazimamoto had been scratched in blood. The evidence team had confirmed it.
“Rudy’s blood,” said Parks.
“What?” asked DuLac.
“This letter,” said Marie, tracing, “was drawn with a victim’s blood.”
“Incredible,” said Alafin. “Scribing its self into being.”
“Yes and no.” She spoke slowly, thinking, trying to articulate connections. “If it’s a ghost—then wazimamoto is what it is—its genus, vampire—but not its name. It would’ve had a life once—before becoming a vampire. A different name.”
“Why didn’t it write it?” asked Parks.
“Maybe it didn’t know it,” said DuLac. “Its name. This isn’t a normal ghost. JT and Rudy are present day, presumably with present-day memories. This ghost—this wazimamoto, has been where? For over a century. Do ghosts have memories?”
“Uncharted territory,” said Marie.
“So little we know. Much we don’t,” said Alafin.
Marie’s palms covered the name—wazimamoto. The page felt alive.
“Written in blood. Draining blood. Again, why blood?” asked Parks. “Serial killers do it to demonstrate control. But a ghost?”
“All cultures revere blood,” answered Alafin. “To lose blood is an offense that violates more than life, it violates human dignity. Implying the capturing of one’s essence, the bloodlines. And who is to say the soul doesn’t reside in the blood? Theologians talk about the heart—the engine of our blood—as our soul’s resting place, our desires animated from the heart’s blood.”
“Anne Rice couldn’t have written it better,” said Parks, mumbling.
“Facts, not fiction,” insisted DuLac. “Are you such a poor policeman that you abandon facts? What your eyes see? You saw what that thing did to the dancer. To Marie.”
Parks studied his hands, clenching, then unclenching them. “Part of me still doesn’t want to admit to what I saw. I don’t understand anything you’ve all been saying. It’s gibberish.”
“Chaos,” said Marie, nudging him toward acceptance. Understanding.
“I’m comfortable with chaos. But this is a mystery. Mystical.”
“That’s why you have me, Parks. The three of us,” she said, her look embracing Alafin and DuLac.
“I feel I’m back at square one. Resisting. I’m being honest.” He looked frankly at Marie. “Everything in me says I can’t go down this path. I’m on it, been journeying. But part of me wants to turn around, keep trekking. Like I never met you. Any of you.” He tapped his chest. “Look. If I can’t smoke, give me another drink. I can’t believe this,” Parks said wiping his sweating brow, “drinking on the job.”
DuLac poured. “Why’d you become a cop?”
“I hate seeing people victimized. No one should be hurt. Ever.”
“You hate what it did to me?” asked Marie.
“Yes.”
“Hold on to that, Parks,” said DuLac.
“It isn’t done with me,” said Marie.
“Or with others,” said Alafin.
“What do we know?” asked Marie. “Follow the evidence. Music calls it—as it calls the spirits. But, unlike a spirit, it can’t possess. It inhabits, controls the body but not the self. This vampire—this wazimamoto—”
“This response to colonialism,” said DuLac. “Racism—”
“We’re living in the twenty-first century,” said Parks.
“Exactly,” said Marie. “The invisible dead. A ghost from some other time.”
“It straddles both worlds,” said Alafin.
“Multiple worlds,” said Marie. “Past. Present. African. American. Old World. New World. Mythic. Real. Living. Dead.”
“Why does it kill?”
“The policeman’s question.”
“Motive, Doc. Like your motivation for evil. Crimes don’t happen without it.”
“Don’t they?” asked DuLac.
“Never,” Parks said, adamant. “Even when it seems there isn’t motivation—a crazy man losing control—still, the cause is there, just buried. Maybe he was abused. Took mind-bending drugs. Thought his victim was an alien. Even when motives are unknown. Or seemingly not there. They’re there. Motives move people. Cause them to act.”
“But this isn’t a person,” said DuLac.
“Parks still has a point,” said Marie. “It kills. Why? Why bother, after centuries, to kill? What’s gained by the method of killing?”
“Food?” said DuLac. “A need for sustenance?”
“Control,” said Alafin. “Claiming power.”
“A taste for cruelty,” said Parks
“Vlad the Impaler,” said Alafin.
“Stoker’s Dracula,” responded Parks. “Cruel, hungry.”
He went to the window and pulled the cord, opening the blinds. “I’ve got to hit the streets. Sun’s going down. Isn’t that when vampires thrive? Besides, the French Quarter is jumping, half lit with booze. If music calls this thing—this wazimamoto—I can’t think of any place better than Bourbon Street.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I don’t think that’s wise, Marie,” said DuLac.
“You needn’t ask.”
DuLac embraced her. “Take care. Parks, if you let any harm come to Marie, I’ll hurt you myself.”
Parks opened the office door; light rushed in from the hall.
“Professor.” Marie wanted to ask one final question. “What does Agwé have to do with this?”
“He may be trying to control the creature.”
“He’s done a good job so far,” quipped Parks.
“Or else,” said Marie, “that’s where it was born. Became reanimated. Inside Agwé. The Mississippi. Flowing out to the Gulf—”
“—out to sea,” said Alafin.
“All the way to Africa,” said DuLac.
“An ocean littered with bones,” said Marie. “Souls.”
“You remember that, Marie,” said DuLac fiercely. “A lost soul. Not a god. And it feared you. Your name.”
“You’re not just a woman,” said Alafin.
“I know. Je suis Marie Laveau.” Then Marie smiled, brilliant and expansive. “Thank you, Professor.”
Alafin bowed.
“DuLac. I promise to take good care.” Marie paused. “Of Detective Parks.”
DuLac chortled. “Touché.”
“Let’s go, Detective,” said Marie.
“Women. Worse than vampires,” said Parks.
“Don’t get me started on detectives,” said Marie. The two of them bickered down the hall.
It had been human. Once.
He’d been?
He couldn’t remember his name before or after enslavement. He just remembered promises of freedom. But freedom never came. So he killed for it.
Afterward, a woman had helped him.
A woman had betrayed him.
He’d once been a man. Standing, walking, on two legs.
She’d spoken his name. Lovingly. Hatefully.
ELEVEN
BOURBON STREET
FRIDAY EVENING
The French Quarter was jumping. The sky was layered, orange, gray, and black. Neon lights of blue, red, and pink reflected off the pavement, the windows. Some tourists waved carnival glow sticks—green, yellow, blue.
The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy Page 12