Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (31 page)

Behind him he heard the braying of
bloodhounds. Ev Tatum’s dogs had the scent and were on the hunt. As soon as he
started down the embankment, he slipped in the mud, fell and rolled halfway to
the bottom. He got to his feet and saw the train approaching, the locomotive’s
headlight carving a pearly shaft in the fog. Corny shambled alongside the
track, running to meet the train.

***

The ground trembled with the
approach of the train, and the locomotive’s single headlight was shooting out
rays of glowing fog. Corny saw it as the magical eye of a flying dragon, the
same sort of dragon that had flown his father to the Promised Land. The engine
roared. The boxcars and flatcars rattled over the crossties, sounding like a
marching band’s rhythm section gone wild. The voices were wild as well,
shouting curses in a language he’d never heard before, yet he somehow
understood that he was being cursed like no human had ever been cursed before.
The hole in his belly was beginning to hurt now, and the front of his pants was
soaked with blood, his own and the nasty-smelling stuff the dying snake was
bleeding. His legs went out from under him and he tumbled to the ground beside
the track. The big skull was knocked sideways on his head and he couldn’t see.
It felt good to be lying down and he wanted to stay there and rest a minute,
but he knew he had to get up before the train passed him by. This was his only
chance. If he didn’t do it now, the dark thing might take him over again and
make him its slave. He couldn’t be a hero if that happened. He got to his knees
and straightened the skull so that he could see out of its mouth-hole, then he
looked up at the charging train, which was about twenty yards away now. He
looked back and saw Chaney running toward him, but he was too far behind to get
here in time. Corny waved at Chaney to let him know he wasn’t mad about getting
shot and to show him that he wasn’t a crazy retard. He
knew
what he was
doing. Still on his knees, Corny fell forward across the track like he was
going to do pushups. The train was so loud now that he couldn’t hear the
voices. He turned his head and watched the locomotive bearing down on him. The
engineer had seen him and started blowing his whistle like crazy.

Corny smiled within the haunted
head of bone.

The ground quaked as the train
rushed to meet him.

The earth rocked him in its big
arms.

He laughed like a little kid on a
roller coaster.

It was the wildest ride of his
life.

***

When he saw what the boy meant to
do, Luke stopped running, bent over and rested his hands on his knees to catch
his breath. There was no point in yelling to Corny because the roar and rattle
of the train drowned out all other sound, and he was too far away to reach him
before the train did. All he could do was bear witness to the boy’s suicide.

 The engineer saw Corny stretched
out across the track and sounded his horn continuously. There was no way he
could slow down in time to avoid running over him. Though it was traveling only
ten or twelve miles an hour through the yard, Luke knew those moving tons would
easily cut Corny in half.

He could not look away as the steel
wheels sucked Corny up like meat through a grinder. His legs twisted and
flopped as his torso disappeared beneath the front of the locomotive. He wasn’t
sure, but he thought he saw blood splash up from the wheels.

The train rattled past, its brakes
shrieking. Luke felt a sick emptiness. Someone touched his shoulder. He turned
and Chief Keller was there, shouting above the din. “That him?”

Luke nodded.

“Jesus God.”

Ev Tatum was there too, reining in
his hounds.

Keller cupped his hand to Luke’s
ear and said, “Call just came in. Ree Tyler says a rabid dog has her cornered
in an upstairs room of your house.”

Luke didn’t believe he’d heard
right and asked Keller to repeat what he’d just said. Keller repeated his
words.

“I’m on the way,” Luke said and
started running back to where his truck was parked.

***

“Thank God,” she said when she
heard his truck rumble up in front of the house. She parted the curtains and
looked out to see him leap from the cab of the pickup and disappear beneath the
roof of the porch. The house had been quiet for the last ten or so minutes and
she had no idea where the demon dog was—or if it was still “alive.” She pushed
the cedar chest out of the way and cracked the door a few inches to look out.
She saw blood on the floor but no sign of the dog.

“Luke, be careful,” she called when
she heard him coming up the stairs. “He’s still out there somewhere.”

“Is it Hondo?”

“Yes.” She opened the door wide and
stepped out of the room to meet him.

There was a pistol in his hand and
he was looking about for the dog. “Stay in the bedroom while I look around,” he
told her.

They saw him at the same time.
Hondo was stretched out on the floor at the end of the hallway. His white fur
was stained with drying blood. He wasn’t moving. Luke stepped lightly down the
hall, softly calling his dog’s name.

“I killed him,” Ree said from the
doorway. “I’m sorry. I had to.”

Luke knelt down and touched his
hand to Hondo’s chest. “He’s gone.”

“I killed him and he came alive
again and attacked me. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the way it happened.” She
took a few tentative steps toward Luke.

He flashed a wan smile. “He’s dead
now. Looks like you cracked him pretty good. I saw the bat. Is that what you
hit him with?”

“Yeah. But he was dead. I felt for
his pulse. He didn’t have one. He wasn’t breathing. He was dead. Then he came
at me again.”

“Was he foaming at the mouth?”

“No.”

“What the hell could’ve gotten into
him? He’s never done anything like this before.”

“I don’t know. He was barking out
front again and when I went to see what he was barking at, he tried to get at
me through the front door. Then he came crashing through the window.”

Luke saw the hand towel wrapped
around her forearm. “He bite you?”

She nodded. A tear slid down her
cheek.

He holstered his pistol, then took
her arm and unwrapped the bloodstained towel to examine the bite. She had
washed it with soap and water and poured alcohol from the medicine cabinet on
the wound. The towel had stopped the bleeding, but it still ached like the
devil.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We’re
going to the hospital. That needs stitches.”

“I’m so sorry I killed your dog,”
she said.

“Hey, you had to. I’m sorry he did
that to you. I just don’t understand it.”

“It was like he was possessed. I’ve
never seen a dog go so wild and vicious for no reason.”

Luke gently pulled her to him and
kissed the top of her head. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said. “It’s been a
night from hell.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.” She tried
to laugh, but what came out sounded more like a whine.

Agnes Porch was no longer her
tired, old self. Her useless body was twisted down there on the cellar floor, a
lifeless lump of frail flesh and bone. She hadn’t liked dying one damned little
bit. Choking on that dark dirt had been the worst experience of her life, but
what came after death was like nothing she could’ve imagined. She drifted now
on unseen currents with luminous darkness flowing through her, the darkness
connecting her to the fierce intelligence of the Yawahoos. The darkness itself
was alive with a will of its own and that was what scared her. She sensed that
it could snuff out her soul if it so desired and that it was a natural enemy to
humanity, living or dead. The elemental Yawahoos seemed somehow to be drawing
energy from that pulsing dark thing the way earthly life draws energy from the
sun.

Red Queen Rose had been with her at
the moment of death, but then she abandoned her to direct the Yawahoos to the
feeble-minded boy who was to be the instrument of Agnes’ vengeance. Without
leaving the physical confines of the root cellar, Agnes was able to see what
Rose saw, rode the darkness with her, entered the good-hearted boy with her and
helped make the boy do horrible things. The boy (he was a man in years but his
mind was the mind of a boy) was an innocent and it was a shame that he had to
be used in such a way, but it had to be done. The town and Luke Chaney had to
be made to suffer. To die. The odd thing—the really unexpected thing—was that
Agnes was losing her taste for vengeance and its accompanying violence. Now
that she was no longer connected to her wasted body, she (her spiritual
essence) was too overwhelmed with the wonders of the afterlife to give much
thought to such a trivial thing as vengeance. Now she could see that Fate and
his boys were doomed to cling for a time to the earth they had lived and died
on, that their souls were not ready to pass on to other levels of spiritual
existence.

She believed she was ready. But to
ascend to the next tier she would have to give up her desire for vengeance, and
she didn’t know if Rose and the Yawahoos would allow that. Once set in motion,
their unholy machinations seemed unstoppable, and Agnes didn’t know how to
dissociate herself from them—or if they would allow it.

Then Rose got herself trapped in
the dying body of a snake, and Agnes could almost feel Simone’s spiritual
anguish as the little serpent twisted and writhed within the belly of the
wounded boy. It seemed that the plan for vengeance was falling apart, going to
hell in the boy’s breadbasket, and that was perfectly all right with Agnes, but
when the Weehunt boy threw himself in front the train, Simone’s snake died and
her soul was whip-shot through the luminous darkness and Agnes could feel her
screaming agony. The Yawahoos were angry, but the immense dark thing was
furious that the skull it had once inhabited was crushed beneath the wheels of
the train. Agnes didn’t know exactly what the dark thing was. It was well
beyond her comprehension. She only knew that it had changed over the aeons,
evolved from a flesh-and-bone creature that tunneled through the earth into
something that no longer needed to be housed in a physical frame. Whatever it
now was, the amorphous thing of darkness was unfettered by physical boundaries
and it could travel through the earth or above the earth with ease and
astounding quickness. She knew, too, that Simone was afraid of it.

Agnes was aware that her link to
the earthly plane was weakening. With this awareness came the realization that
she could have been so much more in life if she hadn’t been slavishly bound by
blood and familial tradition to the backwoods Porch clan. The blood-for-blood
legacy and the primitive lust for revenge had brought her low, kept her down,
destroyed her family, and now it was holding her fast to the base existence she
wanted to leave behind forever. Was this her punishment? Were the dark gods
holding her accountable for her human failings? Simone couldn’t help her out of
this spiritual predicament; she was too caught up with being Red Queen Rose the
Conjure Woman, and she didn’t want to give up her power. Couldn’t she see that
her hunger for that power held her back from higher planes of spiritual
existence?

Aggie, help me.
Rose’s
disembodied voice was a ghostly echo.

No. I don’t want this now. I
want to go from here.

Rose was enraged.
You started
this but you can’t stop it. They will destroy us if you try.

A dark energy surged through Agnes
and she saw with her soul’s eye what the dark thing meant to do next, saw it
reaching out for the remains of her loved ones even as she reached for Heaven
.
I’ve damned us all. God, forgive me!

Opposing forces ripped her soul
asunder.

***

Craig Hemphill saw the light in the
window of the tumbledown house, turned his cruiser around and drove back to
investigate. He knew no one had lived in the old house for years, so the light
in the window was very much out of the ordinary and called for a closer look.
The soupy fog in this predawn hour was already playing on his nerves; he kept
imagining things lurking inside the ghostly mists, but he figured it was due to
his fatigue. The chief had called him in on what should’ve been his day off,
and Craig hadn’t had much sleep since his last tour of duty on the graveyard
shift. Hell, the chief had called
everybody
in because of the boarding
house massacre and the suicide-by-train of the killer, so Craig knew he
couldn’t complain. And on top of all that, there had been the bizarre
funeral-home death of Skeeter Partain. The chief was going to be inundated with
paperwork and would probably have to call in the county homicide unit for
assistance with the hinky death of the Partain kid. God, what a way to go!
Having your guts sucked out with an embalming tool!

Hemphill rolled up in front of the
abandoned house and turned on his flashing lights, then he got out and walked
to the front door with a flashlight in one hand and his other hand on the grip
of his holstered pistol. When he went through the doorway the odor of carnage
hit him full-force and set off his gag reflex. He drew his gun and crept
through the empty living room toward the adjoining room bathed in a pale white
light. Thumbing back the hammer of his .38, he advanced through the second
doorway.

The bloody thing on the floor
didn’t look real. It looked like a special-effects dummy in a horror movie.
Both legs had been severed above the knees and one arm had been amputated at
the shoulder. The bloody pallet of plastic on which the body rested only added
to the unreality of the ghastly scene—as if the corpse had made his bed only to
die in it. The light Hemphill had seen in the window was from the electric
lantern on the floor by the blood-streaked chain saw. The lantern’s batteries
were apparently low; its anemic light was dying in the palpable gloom of the
murder room.

Hemphill flashed his light around
the room to make sure the person who had committed this heinous crime was not
lying in wait for another victim, then he shone the light in the face of the
victim of this real-life chain-saw massacre. What looked like a chunk of raw
meat hung from the victim’s mouth, and there appeared to be a bullet hole in
the center of his forehead. Hemphill recognized the dead man: Joe Rob Campbell,
former high-school football jock and fugitive from the city jail. Being careful
not to step in spilled blood, he checked the other rooms, then ran to the
cruiser to call it in. The chief was going to blow a fuse when he heard about
this. Hemphill was close to blowing a fuse himself. He knew he would never be
able to erase the stark picture of this atrocity from his memory. It would stay
with him, vividly painted in blood red, and even if he lived a hundred years he
would carry it to his grave.

***

The slow, steady pounding snatched
Charlotte from her sleep. She sat up and looked at the clock. A dull ache
behind her eyes reminded her that she’d had too much vodka last night. It took
a long moment for the numbers on the digital clock to register meaning in her
booze-fuzzed mind. 4:59. The little dot of light that signaled PM was unlit, so
it had to be 4:59 in the frigging morning. Who the hell was pounding on the
door at this fucking hour? Whoever it was, she was going to give them what-for
and more. The son of a bitch.

She crawled out of bed, slipped
into her housecoat and went toward the steady hammering sound.

The back door. Bad news. Nobody
came to the back door—nobody except that creepy hit man. Had he done the deed?
Was he here to collect what he was owed? She surmised that this would be his
style—to show up at five o’clock in the fucking morning with a hit man’s
hard-on and that stupid mask over his head.
God, why did I say I’d give him
a freebie?

And that knocking!
Thump...thump...thump
,
on and on with no let-up, no break in the beat, like some mindless mechanical
man who will keep on knocking until his winding mechanism winds down.

“Jesus, all right,” she called.
“I’m coming. Hold your goddamn horses.”

Thump...thump...thump...

She went through the kitchen and
stepped down onto the cool laundry-room tile. She hadn’t bothered to tidy
herself, figuring that if she looked bad enough, the bastard wouldn’t want to
fuck her.

Thump...thump...thump...thump...

Her hand touched the doorknob and
she froze. Something, some inaudible voice deep within her, advised her not to
open the door. She drew back her hand.

Thump...thump...

The pounding ceased. The sudden
silence roared in her ears.

Charlotte stopped breathing. She
backed away from the door, holding her breath.

The door came crashing inward with
a bang. The masked freak came in with it. His dark clothes were shiny with
blood. His head was tilted at an odd angle and his beady eyes were glazed,
unblinking. A sickening stench came off him and assaulted Charlotte’s sense of
smell.

Then she saw the gaping wound in
his throat and the white of his vertebrae within the ruined flesh. How could he
be standing here after suffering such a grievous wound? More repulsed by the
sight of him than frightened by the violence of his forced entry, Charlotte
turned to run back into the house but the man grabbed her shoulders and rode
her to the floor.

Just before the masked killer began
to chew her face off, Charlotte Claymore realized instinctively—at a deep and
long-dormant animalistic level of awareness—that a dead man was ravaging her
with a rigor mortis dick.

***

On the way home from the emergency
room, they swapped horror stories. Luke told her about the boarding house
slaughter and Cornelius Weehunt’s subsequent death on the railroad tracks, and
she told him about the visions she’d seen in his bathroom mirror and about her
battle-to-the-death with Hondo.

Dense fog muted the dawn’s light,
and Luke had the feeling that he was driving through an alien landscape. Ree held
her bandaged arm in her lap as if it were some extraneous part of herself she
wasn’t sure she wanted to keep. She had thirty stitches and untold milligrams
of local anesthetic in her arm, but she looked remarkably beautiful in a
little-girl-lost sort of way.

“I need a cigarette,” she said,
shattering the little-girl image.

“We’re almost home,” said Luke, and
he realized then that he wanted his house to be her home—
their
home.
“Your smokes are there, right?”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “You don’t
believe me, do you? About Hondo coming back to life.”

He measured his response before he
spoke. He placed a hand on her knee. “You were pumped full of adrenalin. That
affected the way you saw things. Hell, you did good just defending yourself.
Hondo could’ve torn you to pieces but you got the best of him. That’s what
amazes me. You’re a little bundle of dynamite.”

“I knew you didn’t believe me.”

“Come on, Shorty. Dead dogs don’t
come back to life. You stunned him with the first blow and you couldn’t find
his pulse, but that doesn’t mean he was out-and-out dead. Why make a big thing
out of it? He’s dead now. And you’re all right. That’s all that matters.”

“No, that’s not all that matters.
Something’s happening here, something nobody understands. Don’t you get it?
It’s all connected somehow. All the killings, my visions, what happened to
Beau...”

“Ol’ Boots Birdwell says Corny was
possessed by evil spirits,” he admitted. “Yahoos or something like that. Hell,
I can almost believe it. And that damned petrified skull Corny had on his head.
I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t the skull of any creature I’ve ever
seen. But I just can’t buy all this supernatural stuff. I’m sorry, but I can’t.
I’ve never seen a ghost or an angel and I don’t expect I ever will.”

“I know. I used to feel the same
way before Beau came along. But now I
can
see that there’s another world
right here with us, one most people can’t see—or don’t want to see. But the
fact is, I know it’s there. And I know something
is
going on below the
surface. And whatever it is, it scares the hell out of me. That black fog I saw
in your mirror was real. I didn’t hallucinate it, I swear to God. I could
feel
it. It was evil. And it destroyed Beau. Just ate him away like...I don’t
know...like a soul-eating cancer.”

“How can ghost die? It’s already
dead, by definition.”

“I didn’t say I understood it.
Maybe it just destroyed his connection to me. I want to believe his soul is at
rest in Heaven now. But I just don’t know. I only know he was good and that
black stuff is evil. And I think it’s what brought Hondo back from the dead. It
wanted to kill me.”