Age of Voodoo

by James Lovegrove

  And now the very pissed-off spirits of these victims were back and had exacted bloody vengeance on a bunch of civilians no less innocent and undeserving than they themselves had been.

  After the incident, a Catholic priest went in to bless the nightclub and cleanse it with holy water. He was torn to pieces by unseen forces.

  An imam tried to do much the same, and wound up just as dead.

  Now it was Team Thirteen’s turn, and Master Chief Exton led the squad into the cavernous building with a plan to, in his words, “lay some motherfucking ghosts with extreme prejudice”.

  The ghosts attacked, but Team Thirteen were armed with guns loaded with special ammo—fragmentation rounds containing a bead of iron-mercury suspension at their core. That shit was like hydrochloric acid to spooks and spectres. Fucked them up big time. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Thirteeners had EMP-burst projectors that played havoc with the electrical fields that ghosts used to manifest themselves tangibly. The ghosts needed to adopt solid forms in order to cause physical harm. An EMP-burst projector disrupted them, like throwing a stone into a pond. It dispersed them into ineffectual ripples.

  Trouble was, these ghosts were an unusually strong variety. Master Chief Exton was startled by how much telluric energy they were sucking up from their surroundings. They were taking hits but kept on coming. And there were so many of them, so goddamn many.

  What Exton didn’t realise—what no one realised until later—was that the warehouse was sited on a Thin Patch. That was the name for places where the membrane between the earthly realm and others was, well, thin. Thinner than normal. Porous, even. Shit from other worlds and dimensions could leak through at a Thin Patch, and the other way round. The Bosniak ghosts were being fuelled by power from elsewhere, serious netherworldly power, demonic power. Something on the other side of the Thin Patch was giving them extra juice, meaning the Thirteeners’ dedicated weaponry was not having the impact it ought to.

  Put simply, the squad were getting their asses handed to them.

  Master Chief Exton sounded the retreat. Team Thirteen made for the main entrance, only to find the door shut fast, sealed by the ghosts, unbudgeable. Great big steel thing. Even a grenade couldn’t make a dent.

  Trapped. But Exton kept a cool head. The ghosts were swarming around, ragged phantom shapes swooping from the roof beams, hurtling past the DJ’s station and the bar and the dance floor. Gaping jagged mouths. Outstretched ectoplasmic talons. A fucking nightmare. But Exton kept the orders coming: “Enfilading fire. Watch your six. Cover the man next to you. Maintain pressure on these sons of bitches. They can’t keep going forever.”

  Unfortunately it felt as though they could.

  Team Thirteen started taking casualties. One man down. Then two more.

  Buckler couldn’t remember much about what happened next. His last sight of Exton was the master chief with a dozen ghosts swirling around him in an angry opalescent blizzard, slashing and rending. Exton went down with guns blazing.

  Buckler was aware that he was the last team member standing. Then everything seemed to melt and crumble. Reality shifted.

  It appeared that, with Exton’s death, some kind of quota had been met. The Bosniak ghosts had caused the requisite number of fatalities. The crimes against them had been cosmically cancelled out. What was owed had been repaid, corpse for corpse. The force that powered them was now summoning them back. The ghosts were sucked through some kind of portal, spinning in a downward spiral as though caught in an eldritch Coriolis effect.

  Buckler was pulled along with them. He was ensnared in their slipstream. He struggled but couldn’t fight it. He clung to anything he could, but the vortex was as irresistible as a whirlpool at sea. He went flailing through the Thin Patch. It felt, weirdly, like passing through a layer of cold, damp silk.

  What lay beyond?

  Hell.

  Rocks. Boiling lakes. Streams of lava. Some of the foulest, most grotesque demons the mind could conjure up. Everywhere, the sounds of torment and agony, resounding up to a sky that looked like a stormy sunset. The stench of sulphur and barbecued meat. It was just how Buckler used to picture hell during religious instruction classes at grade school, particularly the ones with Mrs Flinders presiding, a pinch-faced old biddy who seemed to exult in the Old Testament tales of revenge and suffering and the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic scourges.

  Maybe Buckler’s own imaginings and prejudices created this version of hell. Maybe it conformed to what he expected he was going to find. Maybe hell would appear different to different people. Maybe hell was personally designed, tailor-made for each of us.

  Anyway, Buckler took one moment to panic, then segued straight into evade-and-survive mode. He was a Navy SEAL, goddamit. A SEAL stuck behind enemy lines. Wherever he might be, however hostile the terrain and the natives, he had the training to cope. Even in hell itself.

  He kept on the go. He steered well clear of the horned, hooved, batwinged demons whenever they were on the march. He found high ground from which to observe the lie of the land and plot his next move. He stayed safe and alive.

  He had no idea how long he scurried and skulked in that place. There was no night and day. The sky remained perpetually the same, always orange and brown, seething and boiling. His watch did not work. His circadian rhythm was shot to pieces. Oddly enough, he did not feel hunger or thirst. He seemed to be in a kind of stasis, one long continuum of now. He slept occasionally—catnapped, more like—but never really felt tired. He would just stop for a bit, hole up, rest, close his eyes, then wake up and carry on. Time was obviously passing, but passing in no way he had ever known or could fathom.

  Often he came close to being discovered and caught. The demons had sensitive noses. They would scent him, and form packs, and hunt him, and he would flee and just somehow managed to outrun them or hide from them.

  And then there were the souls he saw, naked human figures being subjected to the worst kinds of old-school torture: torn, maimed, mutilated, eviscerated, stretched, racked, broken, burned, pierced, impaled, flayed. Punished for wrongs they had committed while alive. Raped and sodomised and brutalised and humiliated in a constant orgy of retribution and purgatorial justice.

  Vaguely he hoped to find a way out, an exit, perhaps another Thin Patch he could force himself through. That was the objective that kept Buckler going when all he really wanted to do was collapse and curl up into a ball, howling in madness and despair. He vowed to break free. He would escape hell. He shouldn’t be here. He had fallen in by mistake. Surely, under the circumstances, there ought to be a loophole that allowed accidental visitors like him to leave.

  And then one day—or night—or twilight—he got careless, or perhaps the demons finally got their shit together. He found himself surrounded by the things. They were closing in from all sides. Whichever way he turned, whichever direction he ran in, demons, demons and more demons. A whole horde of the fuckers. His luck, or whatever else had been keeping him out of their clutches, providence perhaps, had run out.

  He wouldn’t let them capture him. He drew his sidearm and stuck the barrel beneath his chin. Could you kill yourself in hell? If you died here, where did you end up? Only one way to find out. Wherever he was about to go, at least it couldn’t be worse than where he was.

  Then, salvation.

  They weren’t angels. They were just men.

  They came raging down to cut a swathe through the demons, blasting with rifles and machineguns, leaping and shooting and mowing down.

  They were Team Thirteen, and Master Chief Exton was in command.

  “Sorry we’re late!” Exton called out to Buckler. He was looking remarkably spry for someone last seen being torn to shreds by vengeful ghosts. “Been searching high and low for you. Your sorry ass was damn hard to find.”

  It rapidly dawned on the demons that they were licked. They turned and scurried off with those pointy tails of theirs between their legs.

  “Yeah, that’s right!” Buck
ler’s dead teammates yelled at their retreating backs. Demon corpses littered the ground around them. “You better run, you scuzzbuckets. Go back home to your butt-ugly mommas.”

  “Come on,” said Exton, extending a hand to Buckler. “You’ve been here long enough. This is no place for you.”

  Buckler wasn’t lying on the ground. Nevertheless he felt as though he was being helped up. Exton pulled him back onto his feet, lent him a shoulder to lean on, walked him out of there, out of the infernal pit, into the light of day...

  “THEN I TOOK another look,” said Buckler, “a closer look, and it wasn’t Eugene Exton at all. It was just some straggly-haired old geezer, a bum or something. He was babbling at me in Serbo-Croatian. Couldn’t understand a word but I figured he was telling me I was okay. That or he was pissed at me because I’d just tripped over him or something. We were outdoors. It was raining. That shitty industrial park in shitty Sarajevo. Most of the buildings still with the pockmarks left by bullets and mortar shells. The tramp got me as far as the main road and left me there. Took my wallet, boots and gun, and I was too dazed to stop him. Sweet guy. A while later some women came along. A while after that, cops and an ambulance. It had been three days since Team Thirteen entered the nightclub. Took me some time to get to grips with that. Only three days. I lay in hospital, and the American consul was trying to debrief me and get to the bottom of what happened, and all I could think was, ‘Three days? Not possible.’ Where I’d just been, it had felt a damn sight longer. Three months at least. If not three years.”

  He paused, then resumed: “So that’s it. Happy little bedtime story, huh? And I don’t have to look at you, Dove, to tell that you’re not buying a word of it. Frankly, I couldn’t give a shit. I know it’s true, right down to the last detail. That’s all that matters.”

  “Actually, you’d be surprised,” said Lex. “Yesterday I’d have said you hallucinated the whole thing. You were out cold for three days. Your mind went wandering. You dreamed about hell. Had a vision, perhaps. Nothing more than that. Today, though...”

  “Today your world’s different.”

  “Back to front and inside out. More things in heaven and earth, et cetera.”

  “To me, what I experienced tells me one thing for sure,” said Buckler. “We don’t die. Death isn’t a period, it’s a comma. There’s more to come afterwards. That’s not hippy-dippy New Age bullshit. It’s not religious dogma either. It’s fact. I’m the proof. I’ve been there, come back, got the T-shirt.”

  “Trick is,” said Sampson, “you got to make sure you don’t end up same place the lieutenant went. Play your cards right, and what’s waiting for you is like Daytona Beach during spring break—topless coeds and endless beer.”

  “I don’t recall reading about that in the Bible,” said Tartaglione.

  “Hey. The LT said hell was how he imagined it. I’m picturing heaven as being how I imagine it. You get what you expect, right?”

  There was melancholy beneath the bravado. Lex could hear it. He felt it himself. They were condemned men, joking in their final minutes of life, fighting down their dread. A last battle. A last victory.

  Footfalls in the passage outside announced Couleuvre’s return.

  Lex had made up his mind. He would demand to be next to receive a dose of V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. His motives were purely selfish. That way he wouldn’t have to watch Wilberforce and Albertine get turned into zuvembies. He wouldn’t have to bear the guilt for failing to save them from a fate that was almost literally worse than death.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE PERKS OF RANK

  BUCKLER, HOWEVER, BEAT him to it.

  “Yo! Papa Hors d’Oeuvres!”

  Couleuvre strode over to the gurney Buckler was stretched out on. “You mock me? You make fun of my kanzo name?”

  “That’s the general idea, yeah.”

  The bokor side-swiped him with a vicious punch. “Never do that.”

  Buckler spat blood. “You got your nuke now. You don’t have to convert the rest of us into your zuvembie monkeys, surely. The job’s done.”

  “The ceiling of the bomb chamber has been breached,” said Couleuvre, “but the hole is not large enough yet. I can look through but not get through. I need access to the bomb itself, and for that more zuvembies are required. Besides, it is better to have my enemies docile and under my control than not.”

  “Then start with me.”

  Couleuvre considered it. “If it will silence your insolent tongue, why not?”

  “LT, no,” said Tartaglione.

  “Ah, might as well get it over with, Tartag,” said Buckler. “One of the perks of rank—jumping the queue.”

  Couleuvre beckoned over the zuvembie who had murdered Finisterre and Leroy.

  “Any last words, Ogun’s man?”

  Buckler just grinned. “Better do it right, voodoo child. That’s all. I’m not forgiving of mistakes.”

  “Oh, there’ll be no mistakes,” Couleuvre assured him.

  The zuvembie laid hands on Buckler’s face.

  Lex averted his gaze and tried not to listen. He and Lieutenant Tom Buckler had not seen eye to eye on many things but he had nonetheless developed a grudging admiration for the man. Buckler’s gruffness and irascibility were a front, masking someone who cared deeply for his team and who led the best way: by example. He might be a bastard but he was a bastard on the side of the angels. The world would be a poorer place without him.

  Tartaglione let out a soft, low wail.

  Buckler died quietly, in itself an act of defiance.

  PAPA COULEUVRE TOOK his time over Buckler’s resurrection. For all his blitheness, he seemed to have taken the lieutenant’s warning to heart. He performed the rite slowly and carefully, keen to ensure that nothing went awry. No mistakes.

  When the dead SEAL’s eyes snapped open, Couleuvre pursed his lips in satisfaction. “Voilà. You are back and you are mine. My voice is like a drug to you now. You crave it. You need it. You wish for nothing but to hear me and do my bidding. Rise.” He unbuckled the gurney’s restraints. “Rise and obey.”

  The zuvembified Buckler heaved himself off the gurney.

  “Prove to me your loyalty,” said Couleuvre. “Kill these other soldiers. Start with him.” He pointed at Sampson.

  Buckler crossed over to Sampson’s side.

  “Hell no,” said Sampson. “This ain’t right. Couleuvre, you’re a stone-cold bastard, you know that? I hope that bomb flash-fries you. No, I don’t. I hope you get to die of something long and lingering and painful like rectal cancer, you big Frenchified sack of shit.”

  Couleuvre smirked. “How I die is of no consequence to you, just as how you die is of no consequence to me.”

  “You smug—”

  A whimper from Lab 1 cut Sampson off.

  Couleuvre whirled. “What now?” he snapped imperiously. Then his jaw dropped. “C’est impossible,” he breathed. “I never told him to...”

  On the other side of the glass, Albertine looked frantic. It was she who had whimpered. She was shying away from Finisterre, head bent, as if trying to escape his attention. Lex couldn’t fathom why she was suddenly intimidated by him more than she was by any of the other zuvembies, until he noticed that Finisterre had put his sunglasses back on. One of the lenses was missing. Presumably it had been knocked out when the glasses had fallen off his head onto the floor.

  The detail snagged in Lex’s mind, reminding him of something. Of someone.

  Couleuvre, meanwhile, had sunk to his knees.

  “My lord,” he said in a quavering sigh. “You have come. You have chosen a chwal and ridden down from heaven to grace us with your presence.” He clapped both hands onto his head three times.

  The atmosphere in the laboratories seemed suddenly charged, electrified, filled with power and a terrible, heavy sense of oppression, like the air before a thunderstorm.

  Finisterre flicked his fingers, inviting Couleuvre to come to him. The bokor went to Lab 1 with his head
bowed, and that was when the penny dropped for Lex. He recalled the figure he had seen in his nightmare, the character who adorned many a wall in the form of graffiti art and many a forearm as a tattoo.

  Baron Samedi.

  The Baron was here.

  The loa now inhabited the frame of Garfield Finisterre, who once again looked imposing and dangerous. Just as the tramp Gable had played host to Legba, so Finisterre had been commandeered by Baron Samedi.

  No wonder Albertine was so petrified.

  Death incarnate was in the room.

  THIRTY-NINE

  LIMPET SOUL

  BARON SAMEDI, THROUGH Finisterre, spoke.

  “I like this horse,” he said. “I like how he feels. I am comfortable inside him. His clothing, his physique, even the sound of his voice suits me.”

  “My Baron, my lord, my husband...” said Couleuvre in hushed tones.

  “Yes, yes.” Finisterre adjusted the sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. One eye looked down through the lens-less aperture with stern amusement. “You’re mountin’ a challenge against Bondye.”

  “Yes, my lord. Yes! Have you come to give me your blessing?”

  “That depends.”

  “Bondye is cruel and merciless. He should be made to answer for all that He has done.”

  “I know, and I sympathise,” said Finisterre. “We loa have long recognised that Bondye does not always meet His responsibilities or answer all prayers. We struggle to find a balance between what appears to be His will and what is right for you mortals. That is our role as intercessors, and our burden. Often we are no less baffled by Bondye’s ways than you are. It pains us, all the strife and sufferin’ He visits on the world. We can’t always interpret the divine plan. Sometimes it almost seems that there isn’t one.”

  “So you’ll help me? Say you will.”

  “My faithful servant, I will observe and if required will become involved. I must admit I’m curious to find out whether your bid to confront Bondye will bear fruit and, if so, what will come of it. You may, perhaps, change everythin’. Equally you may change nothin’.”