Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (32 page)

“Okay.” Luke saw his mailbox appear
out of the fog and he slowed down and turned into the driveway. He parked under
the pecan tree and killed the engine. He touched his fingers to her cheek.
“Know this. Nothing is going to get to you without going through me first.”

Ree tried to smile. “I know. And I
love you for it. But that just makes it worse. You’re one more thing it can
take away from me before it destroys me.”

“You make it sound like it’s a
personal thing. Like this evil has set its sights on you, like a personal
vendetta.”

“That’s the way it feels. But maybe
it wants all of us. It’s already taken a hell of a toll, hasn’t it? Maybe those
folks at the boarding house saw it and felt the same way just before they died.
We’ll never know, will we?”

Luke opened his door and told Ree
to wait in the truck.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m going to take that mirror off
the wall, bring it out here and smash it to smithereens. And get Hondo out of
the house. Then we’re going to bed and sleep all day. And when we get up,
things are going to look a whole lot better.”

She attempted another smile, but
something in her eyes told him she expected things to get a lot worse.

***

Boots Birdwell wasn’t sure if he’d
slept. He didn’t feel at all rested. He remembered rolling and tumbling in bed
most of the night, but he must have slept some because he remembered the
nightmare. It had been a bad one, but not as bad as what he’d seen at the boarding
house on Poplar Street. Nothing his mind dreamed up (
nightmared
up)
could touch the terrible sights he’d seen in the waking world. The severed
head, the hacked-up bodies in bloody beds—the aftermath of the Weehunt boy’s
rampage put any nightmare to shame.

He rolled out of bed, went to the
bathroom for his usual torturous urination, and then called Odessa Nell again.
He’d called her last night after he got back from the boarding house, but all
he got was a busy signal; he guessed she’d taken the phone off the hook so as
not to be disturbed while she was performing her evil-banishing rituals. But
now it was the same thing: a busy signal. Maybe she’d forgotten to hang up the
phone.  He hoped that was it, but he feared the worst. Boots knew enough about
the Yawahoos to know they didn’t go down without a fight. He didn’t think
Odessa was strong enough to win a face-off with them now. She was old and
tired, same as he was. Her spirit was strong, but the body housing the spirit
was worn out and used up by the years. Odessa’s body couldn’t survive a direct
confrontation with the elementals.

He got dressed and drove to her
house, fearful of what he would find there.

When he entered the gingerbread
house, he knew she was dead. He’d had the same icy-fingers-on-the-back-of-the-neck
feeling when he entered the boarding house. Death houses were always the same.
Death came, did its work and left a piece of itself within the walls like an
echo that won’t stop repeating itself. It gets fainter and fainter until
finally you don’t hear it anymore, but you know it’s still there just below the
range of your hearing. Death leaves its shadow behind and it takes a long time
to fade out.

He found her on the floor. Cold.
Naked. Dead. A few candles were still burning. One of her eyes was half-open,
dead as a cat’s-eye marble, glassy and dull in the weak light.

Boots dropped to his knees and held
her cold hand. “You rest now, sweetheart,” he said softly. “Your earthly trials
are done. You go on home to Jesus.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks but he
hardly felt them. All his senses seemed to be concentrated in the hand that
held the hand of Odessa Nell. It was scaly, cold, and rubbery like a dead fish,
but Boots felt something else, something below the surface of dead flesh and
bone, and it was warm and full of life. “Odessa Nell?”

I waited for you
, said the
voice in his head. Odessa’s spirit’s voice.
They’re scattered, the Yawahoos.
And that dark thing is losing its hold. The boy smashed its old skull and that
weakened it. But be careful. It’s like a wounded animal. Wild and dangerous.
Out of control. You can beat it if you keep your faith, Brother Birdwell.

And then she was gone.

***

Where the hell
was
he?

Ree could hardly see the house
through the thick fog. She wiped her side of the truck’s windshield with her
hand, but it did nothing to improve visibility. She rolled her window down and
called: “Luke?”

What was taking him so long? He
knew she was dying for a cigarette, didn’t he? Besides, smashing the bathroom
mirror wouldn’t do any good. Evil wasn’t evicted that easily. Not the evil
she’d seen and felt when Beau fell to rot in front of her eyes.

Then she heard the music. It came
out of the fog from above—from the pecan tree?—and the haunting ringing of the
steel strings raised gooseflesh on her arms. When a man’s voice began to sing
along with the guitar’s bluesy chord progression, Ree knew it was live, not
recorded. “Who’s there?” she called.

The hoarse voice sang:

She say you don’t see why, ooh

that I will dog her ’round

It must be that old evil spirit

so deep down in the ground

She opened the door and stepped out
of the truck and peered through the fog at the pecan tree. “Who are you?” she
shouted.

You may bury my body

down by the highway side

so my old evil spirit

can catch a Greyhound bus and
ride

She bravely walked closer to the
tree. She could just make out the dark shape of a man sitting on a lower limb.
He was hunched over a guitar, and he gave no sign that he even knew she was
there. She found a small rock on the ground, picked it up and lobbed it. It
should have hit the man or his guitar and bounced back to the ground, but it
went
through
him and thumped to the ground on the other side of the
tree. As she was turning to run to the house, the music stopped and the man
spoke: “Devil’s Fuckin’ Valley, darlin’. It’s Devil’s Valley all over again.
You cain’t ever leave it and it never leaves you. Livin’ or dead, it’s all the
same.”

He dropped to the ground, swung his
guitar onto his back and loped off into the fog, alternately laughing and
humming to himself.

“Luke!” she yelled at the top of
her lungs.

***

Luke heard Ree call his name, but
he couldn’t move. His dead wife was jumping up and down on the bed, chanting a
child’s rhyme: “Called for the doctor and the doctor said, ‘That’s what you get
for jumpin’ on the bed.’ Ah root! Ah root!”

“Jenny...” Luke moved to the edge
of the bed, looking up at Jenny’s naked form. Her small breasts jiggled and her
hair billowed each time her feet came down on the mattress. She stopped jumping
and looked down at him. “You took that whore to our bed, Luke Chaney. You think
I’ll let you get away with that? Hah!”

Luke wanted to reach up and touch
her to see if what he was seeing and hearing was real, but he couldn’t bring
himself to actually do it. Real or not, it could not be good that she was here
before him. Either way, he was in deep trouble.

“Tell me, big man,” she said, her
sallow face contorted with anger, “was your little whore a good fuck? You can
tell me. I’m your goddamn
wife
.”

“But you’re dead,” he said. “You
can’t—”

“I ought to fuck you to death
myself. You think I can’t? I could do it right here and now.” Jenny jumped off
the bed and landed on the floor without making a sound.

“You’re not real,” Luke said,
backing away.

“Ah, what’s the matter, stud? Don’t
you want to know how the dead do it?”

Through the open bedroom door, he
heard Ree running up the stairs, breathlessly calling his name.

Jenny flashed him a wicked smile.
“Ah, perfect! A three-way. I could fuck you both to death. How about it? A
murderous
ménage à trois
.”

Ree came through the doorway and
skidded to a halt when she saw Luke’s dead wife. Her mouth flew open but no
sound came out.

“Just in time, you little slut,”
said Jenny. “Now we’ll see how good you really are.”

Luke grabbed Ree’s hand and pulled
her out of the room. “Run,” he told her.

They ran down the stairs and out
the front door with Jenny shouting obscenities after them.

“You saw her, right?” Luke asked as
he opened the pickup’s passenger door for Ree.

“Yes, I saw her,” Ree answered as
she hopped onto the seat. “Jenny Chaney. Two years dead and pissed as hell.”

Luke raced around to the driver’s
side, jumped behind the wheel and started the engine. “She wanted to kill me,”
he said, bewildered. “Wanted to kill both of us.”

“I got that.”

He shifted into reverse, backed up
and turned the truck around. “That wasn’t Jenny. It looked like her, but she’s
not like that. Sure, she could be jealous, but she was never that...vicious.”

“Maybe now you believe me.
Something evil is making this stuff happen, making us see horrible things.
Making people
do
horrible things. While you were in the house, I saw a
freaking ghost sitting in the pecan tree, playing guitar and singing. I don’t
know who it was, but he said something about Devil’s Valley. He called me
darlin’
.
I don’t know who the hell he was.”

He gunned the truck toward the
road. He shook his head as if trying to dispel what he’d seen in the bedroom.
“I can’t believe it. It can’t be real.”

“You better believe it. Whatever it
is, it gets people killed.”

They drove through the fog. They
were both quiet for a while. Then Ree said, “Where are we going?”

“To see Boots Birdwell. He seems to
know more about what’s going on than anybody else. Maybe he knows what the hell
we can do to get rid of these ghosts—or whatever they are.”

“God, I hope I don’t see Ben’s
ghost. I don’t think I could handle it.”

“We’re going to handle it,” he
said. “Whatever the hell it is, whatever it throws at us next, we’re going to
handle it.”

She looked over and saw grim
determination on his face.

“Right?”

“Damn right,” she said, trying to
make herself believe they could. “But right now I need a smoke. I’m sorry, but
could you stop at the Quick Mart before we go see Mr. Birdwell?”

“You bet. I could use one myself.”

***

Ron Gentry stopped at the Vinewood
BP station to gas up the hearse. He didn’t like the idea of gassing up with two
bodies in the back; it seemed undignified and disrespectful of the dead he was
ferrying on a sea of fog to the funeral home in Vidalia, but the tank was on
empty so he had no choice. As he slid the cold nozzle into the mouth of the
hearse’s tank, he told himself that this particular duo of dead passengers
didn’t really deserve much respect. Lem and Luther Porch were low-life white-trash
rednecks, shot and killed in a shootout after torturing that Partain kid. How
much respect could they deserve? Hell, it would’ve been all right with Ron if
they had piled the bodies of Old Man Porch and the third dead son on top of the
two in the back, but since they hadn’t, he was going to have to make another
trip to the Coroner’s Office after dropping these two at the funeral home, and
the round trips would eat up most of the morning. But what the hell? He was
getting paid good money. The surviving relatives wanted the dead Porches buried
in Vidalia, though they had lived and died on the outskirts of Vinewood. It
seemed like a lucky break for Ron’s employer—as long as the Porches had good
death insurance or enough personal funds to pay the bills. But that wasn’t
Ron’s worry. He was just the hired help, and he would get paid no matter what.

When the tank was full, he replaced
the nozzle on the pump and went inside to pay with the company credit card. The
old guy working the register looked like he was three breaths away from being a
corpse himself, but when he spoke he seemed to come to life with an abundance
of animation for a cadaverous old dude. “Gave me a start when you pulled up in
that thing,” he said. “Seeing it come out of the fog like that, I thought the
Grim Reaper was coming for me sho nuff.”

“No, sir, I’m not him,” Ron said
with a fake laugh. “I don’t guess the Reaper ever has to stop for gas.”

“Reckon not, haw, haw,
hee-hee-hee.” When the man laughed, his toothless gums showed, and Ron pictured
the old guy dead on the embalming table. Then he laughed for real.

He stuck the receipt in his pocket
and walked back to the hearse. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see much of
anything beyond the gas station’s three islands of pumps and the surrounding pavement
glowing in hazed light. Ron rattled his keys in his pocket as he reached for
the door handle and froze when he saw that someone was sitting in the hearse’s
passenger seat. The next thing he noticed was that the man was naked.

“Hey! What the hell...?” Ron said,
pulling the door open.

The naked man slowly turned his
head and looked over at him. The man’s one eye was only partially open, hooded
by a flaccid lid. Where the other eye should have been was an empty socket. Ron
got the impression that the man wasn’t really seeing him standing there. Then
he saw the bluish holes in the strange man’s shoulder and torso, and it dawned
on him that he was looking at a corpse. His mind rebelled at the thought. This
had to be a joke his co-workers were playing on him. No way could a corpse be
sitting in there, looking at him with a dead eye. No way in hell. Nevertheless,
he backed away from the naked man, repulsed by the sight of him. He backed into
someone standing behind him and almost said “Excuse me” as he turned to see who
was there, but a thick arm slipping around his neck and a hand grasping his hip
stopped his turning.