Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (33 page)

He smelled the familiar odor of
dead flesh. The hand on his hip slid into his pants pocket. Ron struggled to
get free of the cold grasp of the one holding him but the man was too strong.
He
wants my keys
, he suddenly realized. Then the groping hand came out with
the keys and Ron was shoved to the pavement.

The man with his keys was also
completely naked, his torso split open in the Y-shaped incision of an autopsy,
his ribs showing beneath the flaps of flayed skin and his trunk empty of
internal organs. The man was completely bald, his head shining in the amber
light filtering through the fog. Ron recognized him: Lem Porch, also known as
Cowboy.

“No fucking way,” Ron said from the
pavement.

Moving awkwardly, Lem Porch slid
his naked body into the driver’s seat and tried to stick the key into the
ignition switch.

Ron couldn’t move. He wanted to get
up and run, but his ass seemed frozen to the pavement, and he wasn’t sure he
could make his legs work well enough to stand up, much less run. All he ended
up doing was shouting: “Hey! Hey! “

The dead man behind the wheel
finally succeeded in getting the key into the switch, but apparently couldn’t
remember which way to turn it to crank the engine. Finally the engine started
and the hearse lurched forward with its driver’s door still open.

Ron Gentry managed to get to his
feet and started running toward the toothless old man coming out of the
station. “Call the cops!” Ron shouted. “They stole my fuckin’ ride! Jesus, did
you see that?”

***

Ree used the lighter from the dash
to light her cigarette.

Luke said, “Let me have one of
those.”

“I thought you were joking,” she
said. She pulled one out of the pack, lit it with the ember of hers and handed
it to him.

He took a drag, inhaled too deeply
and coughed. “Whoa, that’s nasty. Not like I remembered at all. Can’t believe I
used to smoke a pack a day.”

“I think they taste better after
you kill off a few taste buds and smoke enough to get the nicotine monkey on
your back. Makes all the difference.”

“I guess.”

He took another drag, then tossed
his smoke out the window.

Ree said, “I was thinking...maybe
what I saw in your bathroom mirror wasn’t really Beau. He only used to appear
in the antique vanity mirror, so why would he all of a sudden show up in your
bathroom?”

“You got me.”

“Because it wasn’t really Beau.
Like that wasn’t really Jenny...or her ghost we saw in your bedroom. You said
so yourself. It was an illusion, created by whatever’s behind all the other bad
things that have been happening. The evil spirits. I know people can be
possessed by demons, but I didn’t know a whole town could be. But that’s what
seems to be happening.”

“If you’d said that to me yesterday,
I’d think you were out of your mind.”

“But now?”

“I’ve seen enough to know better,”
he said. “That or we’re
both
crazy as hell.”

She blew smoke out the crack in her
window. “I want to go to the shop and see if Beau will come to me in the vanity
mirror. If he hasn’t been destroyed, he may have some more information we can
use.”

“If he does, I hope it’s a little
more helpful than ‘give up tobacco’.”

Ree took one more pull from her
cigarette, then tossed it out the window. “Easier said than done.”

Luke slowed down and started
looking through the fog for Birdwell’s little house on Sycamore Street. “Can’t
see shit in this fog,” he said. “This is like you’d expect to see in London.”

“Yeah. With Jack the Ripper lurking
in it.”

“Shit, Shorty, get your mind out of
the spook house, will ya? We’re jumpy enough already.”

“Sorry.”

“I think that’s it.” He nodded
toward a modest house with an old pickup parked at an odd angle in the narrow
driveway. “That looks like his truck.”

“The lights are on. Somebody must
be home.”

Luke parked behind the old Ford and
killed the engine. “Well, let’s see what he can tell us about our spooks.”

***

Delbert Hicks crept down the steps
to his grandmother’s root cellar. The electricity was out, so he was using the
flashlight he’d found in the kitchen. The old woman hadn’t been answering her
phone, so Del’s mother had insisted that he drive over from Vidalia and check
on her and tell her that the bodies of her menfolk had been released to Cox
Funeral Home. He hadn’t wanted to come. He didn’t want to see that boiled skull
again, or smell the awful smell it gave off while it was boiling in the big
pot, but sure enough, the smell still hung in the kitchen like the odor of
rancid meat cooking. He loved his grandmother, he supposed, but some of her
witchy doings scared the hell out of him.

He was scared now. He’d searched
the whole house and the barn and hadn’t found her. The only place left to look
was down here in the root cellar. In the dark. With a flashlight with weak
batteries. And with the rotten-meat smell of Monroe Shockley’s boiled head
still in his nose.

He didn’t really expect to find her
down here in the dark. Not alive, anyway. But he knew her special stump was
down here and that this was probably where she would’ve done her conjuring or
spell casting or whatever the hell it was she did.

He went down the steps slowly,
reluctantly. He stopped halfway down and put the beam of weak light on the
stump in the center of the cellar. The skull rested on the stump. What looked
like melted candle wax coated the top of the skull and hung like dark icicles
from one of the eye sockets.

“Granny?” he called.

He moved the light over the dirt
floor. His breath caught in his throat when he saw the thing on the floor by
the thick stump.

“What the hell
is
that?” he
asked aloud.

It looked like somebody had made a
body out of dirt the way kids on a beach make a castle out of sand. His natural
curiosity pulled him to the bottom of the steps, but when his feet touched down
on the cellar’s dirt floor, he stopped cold. He smelled death. Delbert was well
acquainted with the smell of death. You didn’t grow up in this part of the
country without smelling plenty of dead critters in the fields, in woods or on
the side of roads, and he was familiar with the way a dead human stinks up a
house when it (his Aunt Clara) lies undiscovered for several days on the floor
of a house in high summer. What he smelled now wasn’t as strong as poor Aunt
Clara’s stench had been, but there was no mistaking what it was. Or where it
was coming from.

The dirt-covered shape by the stump
was Grandma Porch.

He made himself walk toward her,
keeping the beam of light on what would be her head. The way she was covered
with blackish dirt reminded Del of the tar baby in that Uncle Remus story he’d
loved as a kid.

He didn’t want to touch her (when
you touched the tar baby, you got your hands stuck fast in black tar) but he
knew he had to see her face so that he could tell his mother that he was sure
this thing on the floor was Granny Porch. He pulled his soiled handkerchief
from his back pocket, squatted down and wiped some of the dirt off her face.
Pale, wrinkled skin glowed in the Rayovac’s light. There was no doubt who this
was, but he couldn’t just leave the old lady with dirt on her face, could he?
He started wiping her face clean but stopped when he saw that her slack mouth
was crammed full of that dark dirt. His stomach seemed to do a back flip and he
almost hurled his grits-and-biscuit breakfast. He stood, turned around and was
about to run up the stairs and out of the house, but froze when he saw strange
shadows rippling all around him. These shadows didn’t seem to have anything to
do with the light from the Rayovac. These shadows were not cast by anything in
this world.

These shadows were alive.

When he regained control of his
legs, he bounded up the steps and ran as hard as he could to get away from
those shadow-things he was sure Granny Porch had conjured. She had conjured
them up and they had killed her, sure as sin.

“Mistuh Chief,” Boots said with a
weary nod. “Ma’am. Y’all come on in.”

He stood aside and Ree entered the
old man’s cozy little house. Luke followed, thinking that Boots had been
expecting them.

“I got some coffee on,” said Boots.
“Be ready in a minute.”

“Sounds good,” Luke said. He noted
that Boots looked every bit the old man he was, as if his characteristic spark
of eternal youth had finally flamed out.

“Y’all have a seat.”

Luke and Ree sat on the sofa, and
Boots sank back into his old easy chair.

“Odessa Nell’s dead,” Boots said.
“I just now came from her house. They were taking away her body when I left.”

“What happened?” Luke asked.

“She died fightin’ the evil. Before
her soul departed, she told me the dark thing’s wounded. And dangerous like a
wounded animal.”

  “The Yahoo things?”

“Yawahoos,” Boots corrected. “She
said
they’re
scattered. But this something else.  She called it ‘the
dark thing’ and said something about that boy smashing its skull and that
wounded it. I don’t know what that was about.”

“Cornelius Weehunt dug up this
weird skull down in the sinkhole on Main Street and was wearing it over his
head. When he lay down in front of the train, he was wearing it. I don’t know
what kind of animal that skull was from. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Like something out of a monster movie.”

“I reckon that’s what Miz Odessa
was talking about then.”

“But how could smashing an old
skull have any effect on this ‘dark thing’? Whatever it is.”

“I don’t rightly know,” said Boots.
“All I know is that the laws of nature don’t always  work the same as the laws
of the supernatural. How did Jesus raise the dead and come back from death
Himself? There’s powers we don’t know nothing about.”

“That’s so true,” Ree said. “God
did raise Jesus from the dead, but we don’t know
how
He did it. Which is
why so many educated people
don’t
believe it.”

Luke rubbed the rough stubble on
his chin. “Damnedest thing,” he said, “when Corny turned and waved to me just
before he stretched out on the track, I got the feeling that he was telling
me...that he’d come to his senses and was trying to tell me that he knew
exactly what he was doing and that it was...all right, and that even though I’d
just shot him, he understood why I’d done it. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just
how I want to interpret it. Maybe he waved ’cause he was completely out of his
mind.”

“Maybe you have to trust your first
feeling about it,” suggested Boots. “Could be the boy
did
know what he
was doing. Maybe the Lord was guiding him to do it. But what matters is that he
hurt it and now it’s out of control. That’s what Miz Odessa said. She said
I...we can beat it if we keep our faith.”

“I saw it,” Ree said. “I saw this
black boiling cloud in the mirror and I could
feel
the evil coming off
it. It destroyed my guardian angel.” She laughed; it was a mirthless,
near-hysterical laugh. “I’m sorry. I know how psychotic that sounds, but that’s
what I saw with my own damn eyes.”

“I believe you, Miz Tyler. I’ve
seen things in my time that you wouldn’t want to believe.”

“I saw a dead dog come back to life
and try to kill me.”

“You got me beat there,” Boots said
with a little twist of a smile on his lips. “I never saw the dead walk. But I
know they can.”

Luke said, “We both saw my dead
wife. She spoke to us. But I don’t think it was really her. It was an
imitation. A damn good one.”

“Evil, like Satan, is Lord of Lies.
It can take a true thing and twist it all around just to confuse you or make
you despair. I think that’s why it killed those folks at the boardinghouse. Not
because it wanted to kill ’em, but to make the living despair.”

“Like terrorists,” Ree said. “Like
those evil bastards who took down the World Trade Center Towers.”

“That’s right.” Boots leaned
forward in his chair, propping his thin arms on his knees. “But this is
different. When the author of evil is wounded and out of control, I don’t know
we can expect.”

“The author of evil...” Ree
repeated.

Boots flashed a self-conscious
smile and shrugged. “I am a preacher, you know.”

“No, it makes sense,” she said.

“Miz Odessa said we can beat it by
keeping our faith strong.”

“That’s all well and good, Boots,”
said Luke, “but I need specific details. I have no idea how to fight whatever
the hell this thing is. How can we fight a black cloud?”

“I doubt it’s really a cloud,” he
said. “If it’s anything like the Yawahoos, we’ll never really see it. Its
shadow maybe, and we already seen its effects, but I don’t think human eyes are
made to see something like this.”

Luke sighed in frustration. “If I
have to rely on my faith in God, I’m in trouble.”

“Mistuh Chief, folks find God in
different ways. You start where you are, where you live. Have faith in yourself
and those you love. That’s where you’ll find the Lord. Might be he’ll find you
first.”

“Nice sentiment, but I don’t think
we have time for spiritual discovery. And stop calling me ‘Mistuh Chief.’
Luke
will do just fine.”

“Luke it is.”

Luke shifted his hips on the sofa
so that his pistol’s butt stopped digging in his side. “All right. If this
thing possessed Corny and made him do what he did, then it’ll be needing a new
pawn to move around the board. Who would be its next likely target? Did it
choose Corny because he wasn’t right in the head? Will it go after the next
mental defective it can find?”

Ree said, “It’s like we’re playing
some kind of souped-up Dungeons and Dragons game. Is there some game master or
wizard we should consult? I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this is going to help
us.”

“Odessa Nell was the closest thing
to a wizard we had,” said Boots. “Now we just got ourselves. And the Lord.”

Luke wanted to tell the old man to
stop preaching, but he held his tongue and reeled in his frustration.

“And,” Boots went on, “according to
what she said, the Yawahoos are scattered, so I don’t think we have to worry
about them now. They’re elemental spirits, probably conjured up by a witch with
bad intentions. If they’re scattered, then whoever called ’em up is most likely
out of the picture now. They can’t really be controlled for long anyhow. When
you call on them, you’re playing with fire. This other thing I don’t know
nothing about. All I know is Miz Odessa believed we could beat it ’cause it’s
hurt.”

“And out of control like a wounded
animal,” Ree added.

“And it can make us think we see
ghosts and it can raise the dead,” Luke said, scarcely believing his own words.
But how could he not believe them? Hadn’t he seen Jenny jumping on his bed and
heard her venomous curses? “Boots, can these ghosts actually hurt us?
Physically?”

“I don’t know. I never heard of
ghosts hurting the living. And I know lots of folks who say they’ve seen
ghosts. It’s usually demons that do the hurting.”

“But what we saw might not have
been real ghosts,” said Ree. “You said that wasn’t really Jenny we saw.”

“So maybe it was some sort of
hallucination, drawn from my own mind and turned against me.”

“But I saw her too,” Ree reminded
him. “And the man I saw in the tree I’d never seen before. He didn’t come from
my mind.”

Luke shrugged. “We’re not getting
anywhere trying to make sense of all this. Boots is right, we dealing with
things that don’t obey natural laws. One thing I do know: Agnes Porch vowed
revenge on me and the town. If somebody conjured up evil spirits, she’s the
prime suspect. I think I’ll pay her a visit. She’s as good a place as any to
start.”

“But this other thing, this dark
thing,” said Boots, “I doubt she’ll know anything about. And that’s the thing
we got to worry about now. Besides, if this lady you’re talking about
did
conjure the Yawahoos, then she’s probably already gone. Dead or turned into a
turnip.”

Ree looked askance at the old man.

Boots caught her look and said, “
Mentally
like a turnip. Not physically.” He smiled at her. “I ain’t
that
crazy.”

“Well, what do
you
propose
we do?” Luke asked him.

“Reckon I’ll get myself ready for
church. I’m preaching over at the Church of the Holy Savior. After that, I
don’t know. I’ll have to pray about it. Wouldn’t hurt for you to ask for the
Lord’s guidance either.”

Luke blew out a big breath.

Boots Birdwell sat up straight and
said, “I’m reminded of a Bible quote.”

“Uh-oh,” Luke muttered.

Ree elbowed him.

Boots quoted: “‘Behold, I give unto
you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the
enemy and nothing shall by any means hurt you.’ Luke 10:19.”

Ree said, “How about this one? ‘For
these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be
fulfilled.’ Luke 21:22.”

Luke looked at Ree, then at Boots
and shook his head. “How about this? ‘Whatever
can
go wrong,
will
go wrong.’ Murphy’s Law, chapter one, verse one.”

***

After he turned onto the blacktop,
Craig Hemphill saw the hearse weaving from one shoulder of the road to the
other and turned on his flashing lights. He tapped the siren to send up a
single whoop as he accelerated and closed on the vehicle in front of him. The
fog was still pea-soup thick and visibility was poor, but that didn’t explain
the erratic driving of the vehicle’s operator. Nobody but a drunk would be
weaving up the road like this. A drunk or a driver who’d just suffered a stroke.

The hearse didn’t slow down or
alter its erratic course, so Hemphill cut loose with the siren. Unless the
drunk driver was stone-deaf, he would get the high-decibel message this time.

The dark hearse rolled on its merry
way. It didn’t speed up, didn’t slow down. The driver seemed totally oblivious
to the fact that a police car was in pursuit. Hemphill was pissed off now. The
driver was heading for downtown Vinewood, where the streets would be busy with
vehicles en route to local churches for Sunday school meetings. Vehicles with
kids in them. Whole families on their way to worship.

Hemphill waited for the hearse to
weave to the right, then he floored the accelerator and shot forward, coming
abreast of the meandering hearse. He looked to the right to see who was driving
the dead-meat wagon. Craig was cranky and tired, still bummed out by the bloody
scene he’d happened upon a few hours ago in the abandoned house, and his usual
patience was in very short supply. The drunk son of a bitch behind the wheel of
the hearse was begging for a taste of roadside justice, and Craig was in a mood
to oblige. He couldn’t make out the driver’s features through the thick
fog—except for the fact he was bald as a bowling ball. The chrome-domed jerk
was either ignoring an officer of the law or he was so drunk he didn’t even
know Craig was there beside him with lights flashing and siren wailing.

He goosed the gas pedal and shot
ahead of the hearse, then swerved sharply to the right and pulled in front of
the offending vehicle. The hearse’s front bumper clipped the right rear door of
the cruiser. He slowed his speed and attempted to force the hearse off the road
and into the ditch. He was gambling that the driver wouldn’t step on it and
spin the cruiser around and into the ditch, but given the apparent degree of
the driver’s inebriation, he figured such a maneuver was beyond the drunk’s
present capability. If he was wrong, he was screwed.

Hemphill wasn’t wrong. The hearse’s
snout pushed against the side of the cruiser like a living creature—a great
black shark came to mind—before finally slowing down and stopping on the soft
shoulder of the road. Relieved and thankful that his dangerous gamble had paid
off, Hemphill stepped out of his squad car and unbuttoned the snap over the butt
of his pistol as he came around the rear of his vehicle, fully prepared to use
force if the perp offered the least bit of resistance. With enough adrenaline
surging through his bloodstream to charge a dead battery (chemically
impossible, but that was how he felt), Craig grinned when the bald-headed
asshole started climbing out of the hearse. When you’re stopped by a cop, you
don’t get out of your vehicle unless and until the cop tells you to; otherwise,
your actions could be interpreted as resistance—which was exactly how Craig
Hemphill wanted to interpret this bozo’s stepping out of the vehicle. His
stepfather had been a drunk and had bullied and beat him until Craig was big
enough and pissed-off enough to fight back, and on that memorable day, young Hemphill
had administered a beating the redneck stepfather never got over. Till the day
he died of cirrhosis of the liver, old Bubba Oates couldn’t breath through his
crooked beak without whistling like guinea pig. And that was precisely the sort
of beating he wanted to give this drunk-ass peckerwood. But when the driver
came out from behind the driver’s door of the hearse, Hemphill suddenly lost
his desire to give the guy a bloody thrashing.

“What the fuck...?” Craig said when
he saw the naked abomination zombie-walking toward him. The fact that the guy
looked exactly like Lem “Cowboy” Porch was not so startling as the fact that
his chest and rib cage were split wide open. It looked as if his innards had
been scooped out with a giant spoon.

Hemphill’s mind balked. The
repulsive visual image his brain was transmitting had to be a fluke. Some wires
had crossed somewhere, short-circuiting the whole cerebral shebang. That, or he
was having some delayed shock reaction to the grisly scene earlier this
morning. One or the other, because this thing his brain was telling him he saw
could
not be real
.