Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (28 page)

***

Ree Tyler wiped herself with Luke’s
harsh bathroom tissue, then got up and flushed the john. She went to the sink,
filled her cupped hands with water from the cold-water tap and washed her face
in it. As she daubed her face with a hand towel, she watched her reflection in
the mirror over the sink. Her hair was mussed from their sweaty bedroom
activities, and she noted that her graying roots were showing again.
Time
for another dye job.
She replaced the towel and studied her face in the
mirror. Wrinkles around her eyes and in her forehead were more pronounced, and
she wondered if her smoking really did cause extra wrinkles. Maybe now was a
good time to give up tobacco—now that she had Luke. After Ben died, she had
smoked more, using tobacco as a way of coping with the stress of being left
alone in the world. With Luke in her life, that particular stress would be
eliminated; so, she reasoned, now she should be able to kick the habit once and
for all
. As soon as I finish my last pack, that’s it. I’ll quit cold-turkey.

She lowered her gaze to her breasts.
In the mirror they looked heavy and unusually voluptuous on her small frame,
but they didn’t sag too much, considering that she was well into middle age.
Luke surely appreciated them. Hell, he practically worshiped them, she thought
with a smile. His wife Jenny hadn’t been big in the boob department, she
recalled, so Luke was probably getting his first real taste of a big set of
knockers. Ree cupped her breasts and lifted them a little
. Still got a few
years before they start drooping toward my navel. Then I’ll get a boob-job.

She turned away from the mirror and
had her hand on the light switch by the bathroom door when she heard the
whisper. She froze, then turned toward the mirror. Beau was there; the outline
of his face was blurry, but it was Beau, beyond a doubt. But why was he
appearing in Luke’s bathroom mirror? She’d only ever seen him in the antique
mirror at the shop. “Beau?” she whispered, modestly covering her breasts with
her hands.

A look of profound distress showed
itself in his face as his image grew more distinct. His deep-blue eyes were
filled with pleading, and she knew he was trying desperately to tell her
something, but she couldn’t make sense of the buzzing whispers in her head. He
raised his hands and began to motion wildly. His dark cloak billowed as if
blown by a stormy wind.

“Beau, what is it?” she asked the
ghost in the mirror.

His ageless, princely face
darkened, and Ree suddenly went cold. She shivered, hugging herself against the
otherworldly chill as Beau began to age right before her wide eyes. Deep lines
appeared in his face, the flesh beneath his eyes became puffy and sagged like
loose bags of bruised tissue, and his eyelids grew droopy, hooding his murky
eyes. His thick, dark hair went gray and thin, and his whole aspect seemed to
be shrinking.

But the wildly accelerated aging
didn’t stop there.

She watched with growing horror as
her guardian angel began to decay and molder like a corpse in some hideous
time-lapse video. His desiccated skin blackened, then crumbled and flaked away
from his skull. The whites of his eyes turned yellow and the eyeballs shriveled
like dried blue berries, then tumbled from their sockets. His cloak slipped off
his once-proud shoulders to reveal bones covered with patches of leathered
skin. Finally, his skull collapsed inward upon itself, and the mirror filled
with an inky fog.

She stared helplessly into the
mirror at the swirling black mist and knew that Beau had been taken from her
forever, that whatever had taken him was wholly evil. And whatever it was, it
was still here with her.

***

Odessa Nell anointed her hair with
sandalwood-scented oil as she sat naked on the floor before the four white
candles burning on the altar in her sanctified devotional room. Protected by
the magic circle painted in red within the rectangular confines of the room,
she called upon the Archangel Michael for his protection as well.

She had known for years that this
night was coming, and now that it had finally arrived, she didn’t know if she
was strong enough to fight the evil. She longed for the youthful strength and
energy she’d had as spiritual leader of the brothers and sisters of Holy
Crossing, but no amount of longing was going to return her to the
state-of-grace and seat-of-power position she’d held in the little community on
the edge of the Everglades. Time had changed everything. Attitudes had changed
with each new generation, and not for the better. Nowadays folks didn’t believe
a woman could be a strong spiritual leader. They didn’t understand that a woman
was naturally closer to the world of the spirit than a man could ever be. Just
as a woman could bring a new spirit into the world by giving birth, a woman of
true wisdom could deliver her people into the world of the spirit. But the old
days were gone and the old ways were all but gone with them. The secret
knowledge passed down from Odessa’s great-great grandmother the slave was going
to die with Odessa—not because she was unwilling to pass the secrets on, but
because she had found no one willing to accept the teachings. The magic of
science and technology had all but replaced the spiritual magic. Folks still
went to church and prayed in the name of Jesus Christ, but most of them
worshiped material goods and reserved their wonder for the high-tech gadgets and
conveniences that made their lives easier. It was a crying shame, but she knew
crying wouldn’t help.

Odessa had known for years that
something dark and wicked inhabited the crust of the earth here in Vinewood.
Why it was so, she didn’t know. Some places made better homes for evil than
others; whether it had to do with electromagnetic power grids as some
speculated, or whether it had to do with the kind of people who lived on the
land, it didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that the Yawahoos not be allowed
to tap into that dark power and use it for their destructive purposes. If the
elementals wedded their sinister designs to that ungodly darkness, then the
marriage made in the cellar of Hell could give birth to something the world had
never seen before. Something that could spread well beyond the tainted ground
of Vinewood. She clasped her hands together and prayed aloud until she lost her
voice to hoarseness.

***

Corny went from room to room,
methodically hacking each occupant to death and leaving them in their bloodied
beds, their souls cut loose from their vile bodies. He moved in a daze, his
mind fogged, blinded to the horror of his deeds. The voices urged him on; they
stroked him, soothed him, baby-talked him, and showed him the rightness of his
actions.

It is written. Written in blood.
Cut the vines! Free the souls!
They sang. They chanted, they crooned, they
demanded.

And Corny obeyed.
Good boy!

When he tried the door of the
writer’s room, he found it locked. “What do I do now?” he whispered. The voices
told him to go on to the next room and to come back for the writer after all
the others were freed. He slipped soundlessly into John Henry Jackson’s room,
stood over his sleeping form and raised the blade. The old man sat up with a
start. “Cornelius? What in hell are you doing, son?”

Corny gripped the machete’s handle
with both hands and swung the blade as if he were swinging a bat at a fastball,
going for a homer. The blade chopped into the old man’s upthrust arm and he
yelped in pain and surprise.

Silence him!

Corny grabbed a pillow and crammed
it over Jackson’s face, pushing him back down on the mattress. Straddling the
man’s thin frame, he held the pillow in place until the muffled sounds ceased
and the old man quit struggling. Then he cut the vine and John Henry’s head
fell away from his scrawny neck. The voices instructed him to pick up the
severed head and take it with him to the landing at the top of the stairs.
Looking down the steep stairway he grew dizzy and afraid that he might tumble
down the stairs. Still, he complied with the voices’ wishes and tossed the head
down the steps like a bowling ball with teeth and hair. It bounced and thudded
to the bottom, coming to rest against the front door of the house. Ignoring his
dizziness, he followed it down to the first floor and proceeded down the
shadowy hallway to Elsie Royal’s room back by the kitchen. As the only female
boarder, the widowed Mrs. Royal had the only rented room on the first floor
because as Aunt Mattie had explained to him, it would be improper for a lady to
be sleeping upstairs where all the male boarders lived. Down here on the first
floor she had her own private bathroom and shower. Corny thought she must be in
her middle fifties because her hair was mostly gray, but she had a good figure
for a woman of that age, and he sometimes fantasized about watching her undress
for a bath in the old-timey tub with the claw-feet, soaping those big tits and
washing between her legs. As he tried her door, his erection pushed against his
zipper in pulsing anticipation of seeing her in her nightgown or maybe even her
birthday suit. The door was locked. He didn’t wait for the voices to tell him
what to do this time. He knew he couldn’t break the solid door open by throwing
his body against it like cops do on TV, so he crept to the kitchen, got the
screwdriver from the tool drawer and went back to the door and began to unscrew
the bolts holding the doorknob and locking mechanism to the wood. He thought he
was being quiet but Mrs. Royal gave him a start when she cried, “Who’s there?”
He removed the last screw and the knob and lock fell to the floor with a thump.
“Who is it?” the woman shouted.

He pushed the door open.  Elsie
Royal was sitting up in bed, staring at him with eyes as big as hen eggs. The
lamp on her bedside table was on and he could see her nipples poking the thin
cloth of her pink gown. Then he saw the gun in her hand. It was a small pistol,
but he didn’t doubt that it was real and that it could hurt him real bad if she
shot him with it.

“Cornelius, what—” Her eyes got
even bigger when she saw the machete in his hand and his blood-spattered
clothes. “Oh, my Jesus!” she said. “Get away from me! I’ll shoot you!”

At the same instant a loud knock
rattled the front door and somebody shouted, “Police! Open up!”

Corny turned and ran out of the
woman’s room, cut through the kitchen and went out the back door. The things
making the voices in his head were angry now. They didn’t like not having their
way, and they took it out on him by having the snake writhe wildly in his
belly. Warm liquid began to ooze from his rectum, and he was sure there would
be blood mixed with his runny shit. He ran through the foggy night, the
bloodied machete swinging with his right arm as though it had become a part of
him. “Where do I go?” he asked, panting and driving forward on his strong legs.

The hole
, the voices
chorused.

The hole? Corny slowed his pace,
unsure of what they meant. Then they flashed a picture in his mind of the big
sinkhole in Main Street, and suddenly everything made sense. He ran across the
street, cut through dark yards, setting every dog in the neighborhood to
barking, and then he ran for the sinkhole, finally unafraid of what awaited him
there in the unnatural darkness in the bosom of the earth.

***

Luke parked beside the squad car
with its rack of lights flashing, jumped out of his truck and raced to the
front door of the boarding house. Boots Birdwell was standing just inside the
door, much of the color gone from his nut-brown face. He looked old and
deflated, as if his many years on earth had all at once caught up with him and
sucked out the last remnant of his lost youth. “We too late,” said the old man.
“Boy killed four of ’em and run off before they could catch him.”

The Luke saw the decapitated head
on the floor to the right of the door. It was resting on its left cheek, a
small patch of blood pooled beneath its smooth-cut neck. “Jesus Christ!
That’s...Is that John Henry Jackson?”

Boots avoided looking at the head.
“I don’t rightly know.”

“Jesus.”

Voices drifted from a room in the
rear of the house: the shrill, excited voice of a woman, and the clipped
baritone of a male. Luke looked at Boots Birdwell. “Corny Weehunt did this?”

Boots nodded. “I know that boy. He
got a bad brain but a good heart. Wasn’t his fault. They made him do it.”

“What do you mean? Who made him do
it?”

The old man arched his hoary brows.
“Evil spirits. Elementals. We call ’em by their African name. The Yawahoos.
That’s how they do. Find a weak spot and burrow in like ticks on a dog. Boy
never would done this on his own. Wasn’t in him to do it.”

Luke put his hand on the old man’s
bony shoulder. “How’d you know about this, Boots?”

“Odessa Nell called me up and said
she saw it in a vision. You know her, don’t you? Lives in that gingerbread
house out past the Southside cemetery. She’s old now, but there was a time when
she was a powerful spiritual leader. The Lord truly touched her, Mistuh Chief.
She still has the sight, but there ain’t much fight left in her. Same as me.”

“I know of her,” Luke said. “But I
don’t understand all this stuff about evil spirits and Yahoos or whatever you
called ’em. You’re saying Corny’s possessed, right? That he’s not responsible
for his actions?”

Boots nodded, sneaking another look
at the severed head. “He’s not responsible for
their
actions. Which is
what this terrible thing was.”

The sound of an approaching siren
filtered in from outside. Rufus Tilley came out of the back of the house in a
shuffling trot and dashed into the bathroom to throw up.

“Ain’t but two left alive,” said
Boots, inclining his head toward the bathroom. “Him and the lady back there
with Officer Snow. Boy even killed his own aunt.”