“Stop it from growing.”
He glanced quickly away. There was something like madness in her eyes, and he did not want to face it.
* * * *
After that she spent much of her time in the barn. He avoided the place as much as he could, and especially the area where the straw was piled. But on those occasions when he did look in on it, he had to admit that the pile was indeed growing. If anything, it was growing more rapidly than before, and soon it would fill the entire barn.
“I’m padlocking the place,” he told her one night after supper.
“What?”
“I’m padlocking the barn. You’re not to go out there again.”
“Then you believe me at last?”
“I didn’t say I believed you or not. I just said I was padlocking the barn. You have enough things in here to keep you busy. No need to look for trouble.”
And the next morning he kept his word. A stout padlock was put on the barn door. Of course she could still get in through the cow pasture if she really wanted to, but that side faced the fields where he worked and he did not think she would try it.
When he returned in the evening from the plowing, she was busy in the kitchen, humming a little tune to herself. For the first time in weeks everything seemed normal. It was not until she was setting the table for the evening meal that he happened to notice the bit of straw that clung to her skirt on one side.
He rushed from the kitchen, down the back steps, and across the yard to the barn door. The padlock was still closed, but the hasp had been yanked from the wood, pulled free as if by some terrific force. His heart pounding, he examined the door more closely. There were marks on it, deep scratches in the old wood. But they were on the inside of the door.
The force that had pulled the hasp from the wood had come from inside the barn.
He let the door swing free and took a gentle step inside. “All right, whoever you are! I know you’re in here!”
He listened but no answer came, no movement.
“You may have bewitched my wife, but I’m something different. I can handle you, whoever you are.”
Waiting, listening, straining to see some movement in the dimness of the barn’s interior, he wished he’d brought his shotgun. Whoever it was—
His ears picked out a sound, soft, almost nonexistent. But a sound.
Regular.
Like a very soft, muffled heartbeat. A heartbeat beneath a pile of straw.
“Who are you?” he shouted. “What are you?”
There was a movement behind him and he whirled to face Doris standing in the barn doorway. “It’s big,” she said, speaking so softly he could barely hear her. “It’s bigger than you already, and it’s growing every day.”
“Get out of here,” he told her. “Get back to the house.”
“You can’t kill it. Not before it kills you.”
“Get back to the house,” he repeated. Her voice sent a chill down his spine.
When she was gone, he wasted no more time. Whether the thing in the straw was real or a product of her tortured imagination, he wanted no more of it. He brought a five-gallon can of gasoline from the tool shed and emptied it into the pile of straw. Then he lit a match and stepped back. In a flash the straw was ablaze, sending flames licking high to the roof of the barn, lighting the interior as he’d never seen it before.
He retreated before the flames, taking time only to release the cows and steers to the pasture outside. Then he headed back to the farmhouse. Doris appeared on the back porch, the glow from the flames already reflected in her face. “You think that can stop him?” she challenged. “All you’ve done is burn down a barn needlessly.”
“Call the volunteer fire department,” he told her. His voice sounded tired, even to his own ears. She spoke now of him instead of it, and he wondered when that change had taken place. Perhaps it only was in her mind after all. The fantasy of a childless woman, imagining the biggest child of them all growing larger out there in the straw.
By the time the firemen arrived, the barn was burnt almost to the ground. Bert Jenkins watched it with a certain sadness, and his wife refused to watch it at all, retreating instead to her bedroom.
After it was over, and the firemen had gone, he went upstairs to be with her. “You haven’t killed him,” she said quietly, sitting in the darkness.
“Doris…”
“He’ll come for us now. Soon.”
“Stop talking like that, Doris. There was nothing in the barn.”
“Then why did you burn it down?”
He sighed and fell silent. He could no longer talk to her. She was like a stranger in his house.
* * * *
He awakened from sleep with the odor of burnt timber still strong in his nostrils. Though it was not yet dawn, the bed was empty at his side. He slid out, quietly, and went downstairs to the kitchen, but Doris was not there.
He found her at last in the back yard, searching among the waterlogged embers of the barn. She was sobbing when he led her back to the house.
He was determined that day to call a doctor, but in the end he did nothing. There were no psychiatrists closer than the city, and he knew old Doc Rogers could do nothing for her. All through the day he stayed close to her side, and he noticed many times that she would cock her head as if listening for something he could not hear. Only once during that day did she speak, in a seemingly rational moment. “Bert,” she pleaded, “lock the bedroom door tonight.”
“Of course, dear. Don’t you worry.”
“Lock it!”
“I will,” he promised.
She was shivering in bed that night, after he’d locked and bolted the door. He tried to warm her with his body, but it was useless. He lay there, dozing fitfully, wondering what the morning would bring.
He’d been in bed for some hours when he heard it. The same regular beating sound that had come from the barn. But louder now, as if the straw no longer muffled it, or the thing itself had grown larger.
Doris sat up in bed at his side. He could not see her face in the darkness, did not know if her expression was one of terror or relief.
“It’s coming closer,” he said, more to himself than to her. “It’s in the house! My God, Doris—what is it?”
“Something,” she mumbled. “Something that just happened, out there in the straw. Beneath the straw, where it’s warm and damp and dark.”
Then he heard it, the scratching on the other side of the bedroom door, a sound made by long fingernails or the claws of some animal. He remembered the marks on the barn door.
“My god!” he screamed. “It’s come for me!”
Then she was out of bed, facing him in the darkness, and he was almost glad he could not see her face. “No,” she said. “He’s come for me.”
And she unlocked the door.
He snapped on the bedside light, holding it as a weapon above his head, and saw the creature that suddenly filled the doorway. The straw was still sticking to its moist body, the odor of fire still clinging to it like an aura. At first he thought it was some sort of mutant bear. But then he saw the claw, and before he could move it was upon him.
“Doris!” he screamed. “Get the shotgun!”
And then it was ripping at his flesh.
* * * *
The state police came to the farmhouse two days later, after a neighbor reported that neither Jenkins nor his wife seemed to be around. They found Bert Jenkins in the upstairs bedroom, his body ripped and crushed and thrown aside like an old rag.
“What do you think could have caused that?” the trooper asked his partner.
“Animal of some sort. Look at those claw marks!”
They found Doris Jenkins downstairs, her body huddled behind a sofa. She’d blo
wn away part of her head with a blast from her husband’s shotgun.
“Whatever it was didn’t attack her,” the trooper observed.
“But why did she shoot herself? Why didn’t she use the gun on the animal, whatever it was?”
The first trooper shrugged. “We’d better get help up here anyway. The thing left a trail out toward the ruins of that barn.”
“Footprints?”
“No. Bits of straw with some goo on them.”
“That’s odd,” his partner said, straightening up from Doris Jenkins’s body. “She’s got that same straw all over her nightgown, and her arms.”
The first trooper scratched his head. “It almost looks as if she didn’t shoot herself till after the thing left her. Till after she was safe.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
The trooper stared out at the trail of straw leading back to the barn. “No,” he agreed. “I guess it doesn’t.”
In many of his spy stories featuring Jeffrey Rand as well as his supernatural detective stories about Simon Ark, Hoch provides readers with rich and colorful settings and unusual surroundings from around the world. In this story, which Hoch’s friend and fellow mystery writer Bill Pronzini included in three different anthologies, a man’s singular fascination with voodoo gods and devils takes him to a jungle village in Brazil where he gets his wish.
First publication—Voodoo! ed. Bill Pronzini; Arbor House, 1980.
ABOUT “EXÚ”
EXÚ
Almost from the moment he arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Jennings knew he had come to the right place. There was something garish about the sights and sounds of the great city—something exotic and just a bit dangerous. He saw it in the paintings displayed at news kiosks, where pictures of Christ and Saint Sebastian vied for space with the spiritist divinities such as Yemanjá and the Old Black Slave.
And he heard it in the voices of the people, and in their music. That December a decade-old song of Rio, Garota de Ipanema—“Girl from Ipanema”—was popular again and he heard it sung in Portuguese in the bars and cafes of the city.
He listened, and felt the old excitement building within him. On his second night in Rio he approached a singer at the conclusion of her act and invited her to join him for a drink. She stared at him, apparently sizing him up, and then accepted.
“Are you new to the city?” she asked, sipping at the tall glass before her. “You speak the language very well.”
“New, yes. I am only here on a visit.” He laid a one-hundred-cruzeiros banknote on the table between them. “I need some excitement.”
“I do not—” she began, looking frightened.
“Where can I find voodoo?” he asked quietly, and the sound of his voice was almost obscured by the beat of the music.
She pushed the banknote away. “There is no voodoo in Rio. Only the spirit cults. Rio is a Catholic city.”
“Then tell me of the spirit cults. Tell me of Quimbanda.”
She shook her head. “I know nothing of this,” she insisted.
Jennings grew impatient. He added a second banknote to the first. “I listened while you sang. I heard it in the lyrics of your song—the mention of Saravá and Yemanjá and the other spirit gods. Tell me where I can worship them.”
She cast her dark eyes down at the table, studying the money. Finally she said, “Quimbanda is a cult of black magic. They worship the devil Exú.”
“Where?” he asked again.
Her reply was so soft he barely heard it. “The cemetery of Inhauma. Go there any night. Close to midnight.” She scooped up the banknotes and was gone from his table.
* * * *
Outside the cemetery a young woman with coal-black hair sat against a wall selling candles. Jennings was struck by the beauty of her face as he dropped a few coins in her cup and accepted a candle in return. A number of expensive cars were drawn up at the cemetery gates, and he could see the light of a hundred candles flickering in the blackness among the tombstones.
“Are you here every night?” he asked the young woman.
“Every night. They come to make an offering to Exú.”
“The devil.”
She shrugged. “If you wish.”
He gestured toward the flickering lights. “Do you believe?”
“I only sell candles.”
He left her and walked among the gravestones then, passing a black man eating fire as a circus entertainer might. There were bowls of food on the tombstones, offerings to the devil. Cigars were scattered about, and bottles of some strong-smelling alcoholic drink. There were black chickens with their throats cut, and the head of a goat resting in a bowl of its own blood.
And always the people, just beyond the edge of shadow, watching him.
Suddenly his arm was gripped from the side, and he saw a man all in black pull him away. It took him an instant to realize the man was a priest.
“You do not belong here,” the priest said to him. “Come with me!”
Jennings followed him into the darkness, more curious than anything else. “I hardly expected to meet a priest here,” he said at last. “These people are worshiping the devil.”
“Not worshiping,” the priest corrected, his pale face reflecting the candlelight. “Only making their foolish sacrifices to a deity who does not listen. My name is Father Aaral, and I have a parish church near here. I saw at once that you were not one of them, from the way you boldly walked among the tombstones. The cemetery at midnight is not a safe place for outsiders.”
“I have come here to study the spirit cults,” Jennings said.
“To study or to worship? This is not a new religion, my friend. It is, in fact, a very old religion. Come back to the rectory with me and I will give you some coffee while we talk.”
The December night was warm and Jennings had to remind himself it was only two days until New Year’s Eve. He had never gotten used to the Southern Hemisphere with its seasonal reverses. But he went with Father Aaral, because he had seen enough for the moment of dead chickens and beheaded goats.
“The spirit cults of Rio,” the priest began when they were settled in his rectory study, “are very closely allied with the Catholic Church. That is not surprising in a country that is ninety-three percent Catholic. Like the more traditional voodoo cults of the West Indies, they are a combination of African cult worship and elements borrowed from the Catholic religion. The cult of Candomble climaxes its month-long initiation ceremony by taking new members—their heads shaven and bodies painted—to hear a Catholic mass in a church or cathedral. I have had them in my church on occasion.”
“But the people in the cemetery tonight were not merely natives. Some were well-dressed white families.”
“Quimbanda is a black magic subsidiary of the Umbanda cult. It is very dangerous because in worshiping the devil one attracts all sorts. I go to the cemetery because I have heard rumors of human sacrifice, though I have never seen any.”
“I have come a long way to study these things,” Jennings said.
“Be careful you do not study them too well.”
“Where would you suggest I go?”
Father Aaral sighed. “In two nights it will be New Year’s Eve. Go to the Copacabana beach and see the Umbanda pay special homage to the ruling divinity of the sea, Yemanjá.”
“Yemanjá,” Jennings repeated. “Yes, I have seen the pictures. A beautiful, dark-haired goddess coming from the water.”
“That is Yemanjá, and the coming of the new year is her night. Go there, and perhaps you will find what you seek.”
“Thank you, Father,” Jennings said.
* * * *
But in two nights’ time he went instead to the cemetery once more, because the place held a strange fascination for him. He saw again the
lovely dark-haired girl who sold candles by the entrance and wondered if she might be the sea goddess Yemanjá. “We must go to the beach later,” he told her, but she only smiled.
Inside the gates the candles flickered once more, and the silent worshipers waited with their offerings. One young woman scattered popcorn, because that was said to be the devil’s favorite delicacy. Another broke a bottle of liquor, scattering blue flame over the flickering candles.
He walked among them as he had two nights ago, turning occasionally from side to side. He saw the blood of the chickens, and came at last to the large bowl that had held the goat’s head.
Tonight it held something else.
Tonight it held the head of Father Aaral.
He was running then, terrified, wanting only to get away. He had gone some distance before he realized that the dark-haired young woman was running with him. He held her hand, and they might have been lovers off on a spree.
“Where are we going?” she asked him once.
“To the beach. It’s almost midnight.”
“I am not Yemanjá,” she told him. “That is all a dream.”
But he ran on, dragging her along. “Did you see that back there?” he asked after a time, when they’d paused for breath. “In the cemetery?”
“I have seen many things in the cemetery. Sometimes it is better not to see too much.”
They crossed the serpentine mosaic of Copacabana’s promenade and hurried across the beach. There were more candles here—thousands of candles—and magical signs drawn in the sand. There were pictures of the blue-clad Yemanjá, and a virginal statue of her. And always the worshipers, moving in their circles. Occasionally some would venture into the surf, casting a bouquet of flowers or an offering of jewelry to the goddess of the sea.
“She will come at midnight,” Jennings said.
“She will never come,” the woman at his side said. They moved further along the beach where all was frenzy and the worshipers beat their drums while others whirled and gyrated to the music. Here a medium with a ritual cigar told a fortune, while another lit a final row of candles in the form of a cross.
The Future Is Ours Page 17