Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (22 page)

Ferraro likewise seemed tense. Shoulders tight, shotgun always at the low ready, as if anticipating a surprise ambush around every corner. She treated every shadow, every crevice—some not even big enough to conceal a shit-caked rat—as if it might somehow conceal an army. Paranoid, yes. But in this line of work a little cultivated paranoia could often save your ass.

I breathed out a long sigh of relief when we finally cut through another confining alley, partially blocked by an emaciated woman sleeping in a wheelbarrow, and caught sight of Pierre-Francois’s place. Instead of a single family hovel, it was actually a small complex of interconnected buildings surrounded by a high wall of thick, pitted concrete, broken only by a solid iron fence.

Three buildings, cobbled from stone, concrete, and red-brown mud instead of rusted tin like most of the places in Cité Soleil
,
poked up from behind the crude outer wall. If Pierre-Francois hadn’t changed the layout—and I doubted he had, since he was a man solidly stuck in his ways—the far left building would be the
Hounfour
, what amounted to a Voodoo temple, the right would hold his personal Loa shrine and safeguard his witch-jars, and the center would be his shop and sleeping quarters.

I darted from the shadows, crossing the empty stretch of roadway with Ferraro close behind.

The moon above—full and bright, though partially obscured by a floating band of gray cloud—cast everything in an eerie silver light. It was probably just my overactive imagination, but that eerie moonlight seemed to conjure vague specters of the dead in my peripheries. Ghostly humanoid forms, wispy, indistinct, and ethereal. Whenever I tried to look at ’em straight on, though, they were gone. Just empty night. A shiver ran across my back as I moved—Pierre-Francois was a powerful spiritist, so maybe it
wasn’t
an overactive imagination.

A dull throb of energy hit my senses as I drew nearer. A pulsing wave of static power brushing up against me like spider webbing. Wards, emanating from the gate. Not that I was especially surprised. If I lived in this shit-hole I would’ve buried my house in a mountain of wards powerful enough to fry a rampaging horde of slathering doom beasts. Say what you will, but I’m a big believer in the philosophy of nuclear deterrents. I faltered, raising one hand, signaling Ferraro to stop.

“Wards,” I whispered over my shoulder in explanation before pulling in a fistful of Vis. After breathing out my mounting unease and inhaling steady, sure-hand focus, I conjured a wispy probe, equal parts air and spirit. The unobtrusive little construct floated out, licking up against the concrete wall, reading the constructs built into the stone like a trashy pulp magazine. Nothing remained hidden.

The wards were complex things, though not especially powerful, at least not against someone like me.

There were a few weak offensive workings that’d give any would-be invaders a nasty kick in the teeth, but mostly they were defensive things. Constructs designed to prevent hostile, uninvited noncorporeal entities, like lesser demons or spirits, from gaining access to the compound, which was a real problem wherever Voodoo was practiced. Voodoo
Houngans
like Pierre-Francois or Bokors, like the Voodoo Daddy, were notorious for enslaving unwilling souls and using them for a wide range of things.

Spirits could power dark rituals, augment a Bokor’s unnatural abilities, or be sent into the dreams of an enemy. Incorruptible covert spies that could glean info straight from the subconscious mind.

Most homes have a naturally occurring
domicilium seal-,
which would accomplish more or less the same thing, but Pierre-Francois’s compound had no such protection, since it doubled as a religious and community center of sorts. Which was good news for me. That same seal would’ve made working with the Vis an unruly and unreliable affair, but without it, I could damn well bust in and sling power without a problem.

It took me only a handful of seconds to break his wards down shotgun style, and from there it was simply a matter of pushing my way through the iron gate, which swung inward without a hitch. The heavy-ass thing wasn’t even locked. But then, no Haitian Rube would ever think of robbing from a boneman. That was a surefire way to get your spine ripped out through your asshole, then shoved right back down your throat. It’d be smarter to walk up to a disgruntled mountain troll, slap him in his face, kick him in the groin, then insult his mother.

No, Pierre-Francois wasn’t worried about robbers, he was protecting himself against any powerful spirits he may have unwittingly offended. That, or other bonemen.

“Oh my god,” Ferraro said, covering her mouth with one hand as we walked into a small courtyard hidden behind the wall. The general reek of Cité Soleil can only be described as absolutely heinous, but even that smell dimmed in comparison to the odor wafting around inside the compound. It drifted from the mounds of corpses—mostly animal, but a few human—in various stages of decay piled up just about everywhere. There were crude wooden tables stacked with skulls—cats, dogs, rodents, birds, gators, snakes—and another table heaped to overflowing with skins and feathers, bits of hair and drying gristle.

The few human corpses were piled along the right-hand side of the wall, stacked like cordwood and bound together with thick strips of cracked leather.

Disgusting is an understatement and unnerving doesn’t even begin to cover it. Walking into this place was like that scene in a horror movie where the intrepid heroes happen upon some dilapidated cabin in the backwoods, which ends up being filled to the gills with ghoulish souvenirs. They stumble in and you can’t help but scream at ’em from the couch,
“No! Don’t go in there, you fools! Can’t you see this place is a friggin’ portal to hell?”
But, of course, the heroes never listen. And, much as I wanted to turn back and run for the hills, this place was actually a safe haven compared to the rest of this infernal city.

“What the hell is this place?” Ferraro asked, her words a mix of horror and revulsion. That question was quickly followed by another. “This is where your informant is? The guy who runs this place should be turned into the World Court for crimes against humanity. Then someone should burn this place to the ground. Absolutely disgusting.”

“Why do you think they call him a boneman?” I said, partially turning toward her. “This guy is a priest, but he’s also a fetish maker.”

“Which is what?” she asked, eyes perpetually scanning the courtyard, searching for potential threats.

“Fetishes are like talismans—necklaces, bracelets, charms—which act as totems of power. Bokors, basically black-priests, use ’em to enslave souls and enhance their voodoo skills. Mostly, Pierre-Francois makes totems of protection for regular folks. They’re supposed to do lots of things—bring good luck, offer protection from disease, keep you safe from dark spirits. The usual.”

“Nothing about this is usual,” she replied, voice flat, gaze sweeping over the piles of strange and macabre material. “Do they work?” she asked. “These fetishes?”

“Most are worthless garbage.” I shrugged one shoulder. “Takes a lot of effort to make the real deal, and the process is dangerous, since you gotta truck with the
Loa
to produce ’em, and the Loa are fickle. Real temperamental. Just imagine giant, sadistic, demonically powered toddlers. Most of the Loa are like that. But Pierre-Francois is the real deal, and he certainly can make fetishes that’ll do all kinds of cool shit. Provided you’re willing to wear a necklace made of pig intestine, human ears, and alligator teeth.”

She blanched at the words, color draining from her face.

“Now, speaking of ears,” I said, “let’s go bend his a little.”

I looked left, toward the Voodoo temple, the Hounfour, which was in many ways the heart of the Haitian community. Though statistically Haiti was eighty percent Catholic, it was one hundred and ten percent Voodoo, and religious life revolved around that building. Practitioners would go there to worship, to invoke the ancient spirits of the Loa
,
to dance to the wild drums, and to perform their bloody sacrifices: chickens, goats, pigs, though sometimes other things got added to the menu.

Like unlucky humans or halfies who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Most of the Voodoo ceremonies took place at night, but the building stood dark and quiet, empty of life. “Stay close and don’t touch anything,” I said, moving toward the center building, weaving my way amongst the tables and piled corpses, careful not to disturb any of the unsettling contents. The middle building was an unremarkable concrete box, covered in some kind of drab, chalky pink paint. A heavy wooden door barred our way, but as with the front gate, this one wasn’t locked.

I heaved it open with a grunt and immediately squinted against the sudden, harsh yellow candlelight flooding into the courtyard. There were candles everywhere. Some in old lanterns dangling from the ceiling, others on ornate bronze candelabras. A few haphazardly dotted dusty shelves; an absolute fire hazard.

“Who there?” a man immediately called from within, his voice dry and raspy, heavily coated with the twang of French-Creole. “You come here lookin’ for easy pickins, you come lookin’ in the wrong place.” The soft slide of a shotgun pump followed. “I be half blind, but I can’t miss wit’ this baby. You walk away now, or you walk away with a face full ah buckshot. And if dat all I do, it’ll be a lucky day for you.”

“Relax, old-timer,” I said, blinking sporadically against the harsh illumination until my eyes finally adjusted.

The room wasn’t big, maybe ten feet wide, but long, stretching back twenty or thirty feet, with a low ceiling covered with, well …
things
. Spikey, dried blowfish dangled from pieces of twine. Dead bats, wings tightly bound to their desiccated bodies, swung lazily in a barely there breeze. There were small broken skulls. Mummified cat bodies. Bloated corpse toads from the Hub.

The walls were painted a pale pink and had elaborate sigils and symbols scribbled on in eye-searing green. I could make out a few of the markings, but most were foreign to me, though I had little doubt they were invocations to various Loas—seals for protection, prosperity, or blessing. A series of crude wooden shelves clung to the left-hand wall, snaking from the front of the shop to the back. They were heavily laden with jars and plants, books and bones, powders and unlit candles.

A rootworker’s dream.

“I know dat voice.” The words came from a closed door at the far end of the shop. It swung out on squeaky hinges, revealing a wizened old Haitian, stooped with age. The man hobbled into the room with a shuffling gait, one leg dragging a little. His skin was deeply black, but also washed out from age, and even from where I stood I could see the rheumy white of cataracts covering his eyes. He clutched a formidable double-barreled shotgun in arthritic hands—pointed our way, of course. He was also decked out in fetishes: necklaces, bracelets, anklets, all made of bone and feathers, fingers and teeth.

He was also bare-assed, manhood-flopped-out naked. Other than the gross fetishes, I mean.

He didn’t lower the shotgun, but he did shuffle forward a few more steps, sniffing the air, almost tasting it like a snake as he moved. There was a faint stirring of wind. “No, that can’t be right,” he mumbled more for himself than us. “Ghede Nibo”—he gestured vaguely around him—“he tell me that be Yancy Lazarus, but I
know
that can’t be right. That ugly
salaud
wouldn’t ever show his face ’round here. Can’t be.” He shook his head slowly, back and forth, back and forth.

“Good to see you too, Pierre-Francois,” I replied. “It’s been a while, but I’m glad to see you still look like something a cat vomited into an old shoe.”

SEVENTEEN:

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Pierre-Francois glowered at me, face scrunched up in agitation: a look that said he was debating whether or not to serve me up a fatal dose of lead poisoning. Then he snorted. “Yancy Lazarus”—he shook his head and sniffed again—“can’t believe you got the balls to show your face ’round here. And who dat wit’ you? Nibo, he says you got a lady companion. Pretty one.”

“My partner,” I replied.

He grunted. “A mage?” he asked, finally dropping the barrel of his weapon.

“No,” Ferraro said in a flash. “I’m a United States Federal Agent. One with a tactical shotgun and a very limited tolerance for bullshit.”

His brow furrowed and his lips protruded in an ugly pout, but then he nodded slowly. “Well, get in here, then, the both of you,” he said, waving us forward with one hand. “The spirits are thick tonight. Eager. Get that door closed before they done creep in.”

Ferraro complied, pulling the thick wooden door closed with a thud.

“Alright now, go on and take a seat, there.” He gestured curtly toward a pair of rickety-ass stools positioned around an equally rickety looking table toward the back. “I be back in a minute, need to make myself decent.” He turned and limp-shuffled back into his little room, grumbling the whole time, slamming the door shut behind him.