Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (22 page)

“Is he breathing?” asked Holly,
edging through the cell’s doorway.

“Yeah. But real shallow. I think
something’s wrong with the kid.”

“His lawyer said Dr. Jackson’s
coming to see him this afternoon. Maybe we better call him now.”

“Yeah. Good idea.” Snow delivered a
couple of light slaps to the boy’s face with the flat of his hand. “Didn’t even
flinch. The dude’s out of it.”

“Maybe he had some drugs hidden on
him that they missed in the strip search,” she suggested. “Could’ve OD’ed.”

Snow turned away from the bunk.
“Maybe.” He was looking at Holly and was suddenly puzzled by the strange
expression that jumped into her face. He was about to ask her what was wrong
when he was hit from behind and knocked forward into her lower legs. Holly let
out a whoop as she fell backward, her baton clattering on the tile floor.

Joe Rob crawled over his back,
mashing Snow’s face into the floor, and sprang to his feet with the nightstick
in his hand. Snow pushed himself up to his hands and knees and watched the Campbell
kid jerk Holly Stimson to her feet and shove her into the cell.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” the
escapee warned. Then he shut the cell door and turned the key. “Anybody else
out there?” He pointed the baton toward the offices.

Snow shook his head in defeat. He
knew Boots Birdwell had left for the day and was probably already cleaning
floors at City Drugs. “No. But you know they’ll catch you.”

“You don’t want to do this, Joe
Rob,” Holly told him.

Joe Rob laughed. “You have no idea
what I want, darlin’.”

“She’s right, man,” Snow agreed.
“This just makes it worse for you.”

“Save your breath, Bozo. It’s done.
Now have a seat on that bunk, both of you. If I hear any yelling, I’ll have to
come back and shoot you.”

Snow and Holly sat side-by-side on
the bunk and watched their former prisoner disappear down the hallway. A
thunderclap rattled the door’s iron bars.  “We sure fucked that up royally,” he
said, hanging his head.

“No shit, Sipowicz.”

***

She went down the wooden steps to
the root cellar, toting the head in the silk pillowslip with one hand and
holding the storm lantern with the other. The lantern’s wick burned with a
white flame and its glass bell took the light and cast it in refracted ripples
about the walls and dirt floor of the cellar. The walls were lined with wooden
shelves, and the shelves bore countless jars and tin canisters containing her
assortment of roots, herbs and medicinal tinctures. The musty smell of damp
earth mixed with the variety of odors leaking from the containers, producing an
earthy bouquet of bitter sweetness. It was an aroma Agnes had grown over the
years to love.  Even though her sense of smell had been considerably dulled by
age, she was nevertheless able to distinguish many of the individual scents
that went into the heady, aromatic mix, and each one kindled a particular
memory from her life of nearly one hundred years. 

Rooted in the center of the dirt
floor was the stump of the oak tree Fate had felled before the house was built.
Agnes had insisted that the stump be left intact and the foundation laid around
it, explaining to her bewildered son that the wide stump retained special power
she needed for her esoteric doings. Fate had put up a weak argument, citing an
infestation of termites as a reason for removing the stump, but in the end
Agnes had prevailed and the stump became the heart of the farmhouse. Fate had
made the mistake of calling her “stump witch” one time when he was in his cups,
and she had cuffed him upside the head with a rolling pin. He never called her that
again. But in truth, Agnes reckoned that
stump witch
came closer than
any of the other titles folks used to describe what she was. She thought it was
a name Rose would’ve liked. The regal Creole woman always was one to laugh at a
good joke or a perverse twist of wit. Without Rose—whose given name was
Simone—Agnes would’ve led a completely different life. It was Rose who
recognized the extent of Agnes’s inborn talent for seeing into the darkness.
“We all come from de dark, cher,” she’d said one sweltering evening as they sat
on Rose’s front porch with their feet hanging in the black bayou waters.  “But
dere are few wid de power to talk to de t’ings dat live in it. I’m talkin’
’bout de Yawahoos, Aggie. Elementals. De oldest gods in de world.” That was the
day Rose had explained that there were forces in the world able to take on the
characteristics and personalities concocted by mortals with the need to believe
in godly entities. “Dese elemental forces fill de man-made molds an’ de people
call dem gods, but dey are much more dan what people t’ink or can conceive. Dey
are more dan gods, cher. An’ dere are ways to work wid dem and’ use dere
powers. I can teach you, but it is very dangerous. One does not trifle wid de
Yawahoos.”

So Agnes had spent three years under
the tutelage of Red Queen Rose, learning the tricks of the old witch’s trade.
She didn’t call herself a witch, but to Agnes, that was what she was—and what
Agnes herself became at the end of the three years. Rose was dead now, but
Agnes was sometimes able to communicate with the Creole woman’s spirit. She did
this with the aid of a talisman Rose had presented to her at their last
parting, back in 1946. It was a finger bone attached to a strip of rawhide—the
index finger from Rose’s left hand, severed by her own right hand in a ceremony
to mark their separation by binding them together forever in the world of the
spirit. Rose had explained that in birth there is pain, blood and sacrifice,
and that she had given birth to the “new” Agnes in accordance with those same
natural laws.  Agnes had been deeply touched by her mentor’s macabre gift, and
had kept it ever since, locked away in a small wooden box fashioned by her own
hands.

But now, as she stood before the
varnished surface of the sacred stump,  the talisman of bone hung from her neck
by the strip of rawhide. She knew that her powers alone would not be enough to
complete the dangerous ritual. She would need Rose’s help in summoning the
elementals from the darkness and directing their awesome power to her own human
ends. If the elementals saw this as trifling, then she and Rose could be lost
to the darkness for eternity—a fate far worse than any ever imagined by
Christian or visionary poet. But Agnes felt that she had no choice. She was
willing to sacrifice her life in the name of vengeance and to risk her soul for
the opportunity to exact retribution from those who had condemned her blood kin
and snuffed out their lives.

She set the lantern on the dirt
floor of the cellar, then disrobed, letting the housecoat fall away. Now she
was naked, except for her glasses and the rawhide necklace with its suspended
bone. She picked up the lantern and went to a row of shelves, squinting up at
the mason jars and dark vials of liquids, all hand-labeled with yellowed strips
of paper. She found a jar marked only with a black X, and took it down,
unscrewed the lid, dipped her fingers into the jar and pinched off a
thumb-sized piece of dried root. She stuck the crumbling piece under her tongue
and left it there as she went to another shelve on the opposite wall and found
an old lard can labeled: ANOINTMENT. Setting the lantern on the shelve, she
removed the can’s lid and stuck her hand into the lard-like substance which
smelled of pine tar, cedar and jasmine, then began to smear the greasy stuff on
her shriveled teats, over her rounded belly and down to the sparsely thatched
mound of her pubis. As her skin absorbed the goop, her flesh began to feel more
pliant and as supple as the skin of a woman fifty years younger. Another dip of
her fingers into the can, then onto her wrinkled face. The smell was nearly
overpowering so close to her nose, but she kept rubbing it in until it was
adequately absorbed and her face felt smooth to her touch. She caught her
lantern-lit reflection in the glass of a big jar and she saw her face shining
with a youthful, oily sheen. She smiled at her mirror image and saw her face as
it was when she was young and vital, with tides of lust surging through her
shapely body. She was moving back in time, recapturing feelings long since lost
to ravages of age and relentless decrepitude. She was suddenly dizzied by the
sensation of flying. She reeled over to the stump and plopped down on it, her
thin rump making a raw slapping sound as she did so. She closed her eyes and
rested her head in her ointment-greased hands.

“Mercy,” she muttered.

After an indeterminate length of
time, her head stopped swimming and she did her best to collect her scattered
thoughts. The bit of root she’d placed beneath her tongue had long since
dissolved, leaving a bitter aftertaste that was nevertheless agreeable to her—a
little like the bitter brown slivers of a pecan’s inner shell. She saw herself
as a child, sitting under a pecan tree and eating pecans picked up off the
ground, her mother’s head poking through a window and scolding her for spoiling
her supper.
No, I ain’t, Momma
, she shouted back.

“No, I ain’t, Momma,” her voice
rang sharply in the close confines of the cellar. She giggled. It was a girlish
sound, young and vibrant, out of place in the gloomy root cellar. “All right
now, Agnes,” she scolded herself. “Enough Tomfoolery. Time to get serious.”

She straightened her spine and sat
stiffly upright on the stump. Her fingers closed around the bone hanging from
her neck, then she began the pidgin-Creole chant Rose had taught her many years
ago. She closed her eyes and called up an image of Rose’s coffee-colored face.
Her chanting grew louder and the visualized image of Red Queen Rose became more
distinct.

Bonjou, cher
, whispered
Rose.

Agnes opened her eyes and saw the
sorceress floating in front of her in the shadow-streaked lantern light. Her
dark eyes sparkled with a light of their own as she smiled at her old
apprentice.

“I need your help,” she said. “I
want to call up the elementals.”

The smiled died on the apparition’s
luminous face.
Pronga to
, she said.

“Be careful?” Agnes translated the
warning. “I’m past care. I
have
to do this, Rose. The line’s drawn. But
I’m not sure I can do it without you.”

Mo pa konmprann.
Rose’s image
wavered, then darkened.

“Yes, you do understand. You know
what they done to my family. To me. If you won’t help me, just say so. With or
without you, I’m gonna do it.”

The sorceress smiled again. She was
as young and beautiful as she had been in the old photos she’d shown Agnes
years ago.
You are old, Aggie, but your spirit is fearless. I always admired
dat in you.

“Mersi,”
Agnes thanked her
grudgingly.

And stubborn as a mired-up
mule. 

Agnes nodded her head, the cascade
of brittle, white hair shifting like dying moss over her bare shoulders.  

You know what you must
sacrifice. Your blood, your life. To konmprann?

“Yes, I know that,” she snapped.

All right, my little bird. I
will help you.
Rose began to whirl around, spinning faster and faster.
Welcome
de serpent!

Agnes watched with slack jaw as the
sorcerer’s apparition spun itself into a thin twist of light, then suddenly
winked out. On the dirt floor a small black snake uncoiled itself and crawled
toward her, its tongue flicking rhythmically.

Agnes took a deep breath, then
opened her legs to receive the reptile. It slithered up the side of the stump,
paused at the mossy lips of her sex, then darted inside, its slip of a tail
disappearing into the anointed lips.

Agnes gasped at the cold sensation.
She groaned and pressed her hands between her legs. Severe cramps gave way to a
pleasant tingling that was almost sexual.

Then she felt the unmistakable
presence of Rose deep inside her, and she knew she was ready. She stood and
walked on strong legs to the shelf where her ritual knife waited within a
teakwood box, removed the knife and returned to the stump. She extracted the
skull of Monroe Shockley from the pillowslip, set it on the stump, then used a
kitchen match to light a black ceremonial candle and set it on top of the
skull. She hawked up a meager wad of sputum and spat it into the skull’s left
eye socket. Then she tied three little knots in a black thread and burned the
knotted string in the candle’s flame as she mouthed words of an ancient curse. When
the thread was burned to ash, she knelt at the stump, laid her left arm across
the varnished surface and opened a vein from the crook of her elbow to her
wrist. Blood flowed freely, pouring from her arm and pooling on the tabletop of
the stump.

She chanted words she had never
heard before, and she knew the sorceress was moving her tongue for her, saying
words older than any of the world’s spoken languages—words that had spawned all
languages and shaped the minds of humanity’s ancient ancestors. Words of real
magic, echoing all the way back to the beginning of time. Growing weak with the
loss of so much blood, she kept up the chant in a trance-like state. Thunder
shook the house to its foundations, but she hardly felt it. Rain lashed the
house and pounded the roof with thousands of watery drumsticks, but she was
well beyond the reach of the rain and the impending flood. An image of the town
of Vinewood came into her mind, and a flood of darkness swept over the streets
and houses and stores until there was nothing left but the fathomless darkness.

The electricity came back on, the
naked bulb hanging from the cellar’s ceiling suddenly washing the dank place in
yellow light. Agnes saw dark shapes coming through the cellar walls, moving
toward her from all sides. With another thunderclap the light went out once
more. The flaming wick of the kerosene lantern flared, then dimmed to an
ember-like glow. The rain on the roof sounded like voodoo drums.