Authors: Patrick E. McLean
Where the hell did the fog come from? By the time he caught her I could barely make out their shapes. If I was alive, I would have looked away. But what did it matter? I had already seen her blood soaking into the cobblestones in my mind.
The feeling of hatred for the girl was gone, drained away. Now there was just pity. And that was more in the abstract than the specific.
I left Jack in the alley and headed back to the voodoo shop. I felt used up and worn out. If having a soul meant having to feel like this, maybe I didn’t want it any more. Who would want a soul as black as mine? As black as mine, but not as black as Jack’s.
When I was alive, I was confused but I didn’t know it. This was worse. Now I knew I had no idea what the hell was going on.
* * * * *
When I got back to Marie’s place, things became more confusing. The first thing I saw was Bruce, spread-eagled, stark-naked, and asleep in the middle of the floor. Recent events had made me far less squeamish than I had been when I was alive, but this was something that I was unprepared for. His pale skin, flabby against the dark carpet, the way everything (and I do mean everything) jiggled when he snored? It was… whoa. There was nothing to say for it but it was.
Next to him lay a bag of weed and his skull and bones hash pipe. The smell of cannabis laced with formaldehyde hung thick in the air, so I suspected he was the victim of his own chemical self-abuse. But where was Marie?
I saw that The Nameless Man had been turned in his chair to face the wall. Then I heard a squeak from the kitchen, like someone had closed a cabinet with a dry hinge, but not exactly. Whatever passed for my nerves in my current state were pretty shot from my instructional stroll with Jack, and I was having trouble piecing it all together. Or any of it, really. What had happened here?
When Marie walked out of the kitchen wearing only a t-shirt, it all fell into place.
She jumped and gave a little shriek when she saw me.
“Oh, come on,” I said, “There’s no way I can look as horrible as that,” I said, nodding at the head of NakedFatBruce.
Marie gave a little shrug. I looked at The Nameless Man.
“I didn’t want him to see,” said Marie.
“Yeah,” I said. ‘Cause what else do you say to that?
She waved dismissively at Bruce, “It’s the voodoo, you know.” She said it was like she was a little embarrassed. “Momma Oya used to say that to get something from the spirits, you had to give up a little bit of yourself, y’know? Let them have their fun for a while. Maybe that was just Momma’s excuse.”
She lit a cigarette and I motioned for one. She put the cylinder of paper and tobacco between her full lips and set fire to it. The flash of the lighter revealed a weird look in her eye. I guessed that’s what smoking formaldehyde does to a person, but she could have just been insane. Not like I was in a position to judge.
She moved closer and I could hear her soft brown skin rubbing against the cotton. I didn’t feel lust, exactly. It was more like what was left after lust was amputated, the phantom itch of being alive. It was several levels worse than bring afflicted with lust.
I took a long pull on the lung rocket and enjoyed the feeling of the smoke spreading its warm fingers in my chest. Marie stayed close. As I looked into the disturbed pools of her wide brown eyes all I could see there was that girl lying dead in the alley. What had come over me? Where had those murderous urges come from? Sure, I hated my share of people -- more than my share, hell, fine, I hated everybody -- but I have never wanted to kill anybody. Not for real.
She slid a hand through the ragged, ripped fabric of my shirt and said, “I can feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“It’s in there.”
And before I realized what she was doing, she slipped her hand through a rip in my flesh. She was inside me.
Her fingertips brushed something. Then there was pain. Real pain. After all I had been through and not felt, to feel pain -- to feel pain like that was exhilarating. Like seeing the sun, or touching a live wire, for the first time. But, don’t let me miss the point, it really, really hurt.
I moaned and dropped to my knees. Marie knelt and stayed with me. She held me and whispered in my ear with terrible urgency. She reached deeper and deeper. It shouldn’t have been possible. As deep as her arm had gone, her hand should have emerged from my back. And still she reached.
Her fingers brushed it again. For an instant, that feeling of being alive flooded through me again. Her breath was warm on my ear as she whispered something quick and breathy. It was urgent, encouraging, but in a language I didn’t understand.
Then she closed her fist around something inside me and everything went white. When I was able to open my eyes again, she was kneeling beside me holding a sticky black ball.
“It’s the anger,” she said, “There was a lot of it.”
I sat up. It felt easier than it should have, as if I weighed less. “What are you going to do with it?”
“I’ll keep it for you.” She brought her face close to mine, “But I don’t think you are going to need it anymore.”
“How did you do that?”
“I am my mother’s daughter,” she said with a shrug. She didn’t seem happy about it. After a while she looked at me. “Did he tell you how to defeat The Rat?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“What did he tell you?”
“I’m not sure. He tried to get me to kill a girl.”
“Did you?” She asked this in a way that was not surprised or shocked in the slightest.
“No.”
“So, then what? Did he help you at all?”
“I don’t think so. He told me it all depended on what I believed in.”
“What do you believe in?”
I looked around the room. I saw The Nameless Man staring into the corner. The hand-painted picture of a Christ figure with three eyes on the wall above a crappy television. Bruce, in all his puffy, white, drug-induced, naked stupor and finally back to Marie, a vision of soft loveliness, sitting on the ground beside me. “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t even believe in this.”
“You don’t believe in anything?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t believe in anything.”
Marie looked at me a long time. Then she sighed as if she was going to say something. As if she was leading up to that moment where the witchy woman says something profound that makes it all make sense and prepares the hero, spiritually and emotionally, for the final confrontation.
But, in the end, she merely sighed, saying, “You’re going to die.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Couldn’t even get that right the first time.”
We sat there and neither of us said anything for a long time.
Then I heard the squeaking noise from the kitchen again.
* * * * *
When it entered the room, my non-existent blood ran non-existently cold. It could have been any rat, I suppose. The city was full of them, but I knew that it was The Rat. I looked to Marie, “What’s that doing here?”
She shrugged and lit a cigarette. When I looked back, The Rat had changed into a man with a large nose, unkempt hair and a nervous twitch. He wore a suit that looked like it was patched together at a second-hand store, but his eyes were sharp and fierce. He looked at me without saying anything.
“What?” I said, a little ashamed that I had cracked.
“You trying to weasel out on me?”
“So what if I am?” I held up my arm and showed him the scratch. It was mostly black, but there was an inch and half at the end that was still red. “I’ve still got, what, two days?”
“And I am here to see that you use them wisely.”
“You’re here for my soul, but why anybody would want that, I have no idea.”
“No,” he said, looking at Bruce and then averting his eyes from the naked mortician as if it pained him, “In fact, I was here to see her. Her mother and I had a… business relationship for a number of years, and I was hoping to rekindle the association now that she has come into her power.”
“Rekindle, who talks like that?” I asked.
The Rat ignored me and continued, “My friend, and I say my friend because I am friends with everyone, in good faith and with a full heart, I only want to help. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And with that kind of attitude, sincerely, I ask you, how can anyone see me as The Rat in this situation?”
“I can’t kill him. I tried.”
“That is not my concern,” The rat-man said as corner of his mouth twitched, “You and I have a contract, a contract which calls for specific performance.”
“Look, I want to kill him. I do. Hell, I’ll kill anybody you want. But I don’t know how.”
“Then you should make the most of your last two days.”
“You cheated me!”
“Cheated you? We had a bargain. A bargain which you entered into freely. If you are no longer happy with this bargain, then I am sorry. But a deal, as they say, is a deal.”
“C’mon, give me a hint.”
“It’s not in my interest.”
“What is he to you? And why do you want him dead?”
“Maybe I don’t want him dead. Maybe I just want your soul.”
I didn’t buy it. I may have died at night, but I didn’t die last night. “Bullshit. You want my soul and you want him dead.” This seemed to please The Rat. He nodded.
“Because he is a man like you. Except unlike you, he believes things. He believes strongly.”
“Yeah, belief. I’m getting that crap a lot.”
“As the man says, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
“Yeah, I certainly fell for your con.”
The Rat smiled especially wide at that and said, “Oh, my friend, you can’t cheat an honest man.”
“It’s a con. It’s all a con, all of it. All of this belief nonsense.”
“That’s not the point. Take, for example, Marie here.” Marie stiffened in her chair. The entire time The Rat had been in the room she had done and said nothing, but when he mentioned her name I could see how uncomfortable she really was.
“Voodoo? Black Magic? Don’t you find it strange that it has such power? Isn’t it interesting that ignorant tribesmen, slaves, the least powerful people in the New World, came to wield such powerful magic? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. I’m still working on why I don’t have to breathe,” I said. I even thought I wanted to know the answer. When the only card you’ve got left to play is smart ass remarks, you tend to play that card a lot.
“Belief,” he said, happy to answer his own question. “Her faith is a parasite, a hermit crab, living inside the outward forms of Catholicism. When the cobbler in Rome prays to St. Christopher before beginning a trip, that belief grants the image of St. Christopher power when she manipulates it as Kalfou. And so, through belief, the weak grow strong.
“Blood, oil, steel, diamonds, gold -- none of these things convey power, except that people believe they are precious.”
“Yeah, well how about me not believing in you? How does that work?” I said, spitting the question at him as if it was a curse.
The Rat just smiled. And then sensation flooded through my body. At first it was just a tingle. An itch, but soon the itch swelled to an ache. Then the ache became unbearable. I fell to my knees, grinding my bone dry joints against one another in agony. My vision grew white, and then dark. I clenched my hands so hard I felt some of the little bones in my palms break. And then I felt pain. Only pain.
Through it all though I could hear him laughing; a continuous, low calm chuckle of true enjoyment. As the pain locked me in place, he knelt down beside me.
“You think you were spared the pain? You think you are exempt from your injuries? That you get to break the universal laws? No. Your pain has been saved up for you like an inheritance. Your pain, and the pain of countless others, is waiting for you when you fail me.”
“Agrraah,” I said.
And then there was only pain.
* * * * *
By the time the pain faded, The Rat had gone. He’d made his point. I was screwed. For a moment, I wondered how life could be so unfair. But then I wondered, had I ever known life to be any other way? Life’s not fair. I must have heard those words a hundred thousand times before I left home. And it was right then, with those encouraging words from my childhood ringing in my ears that I realized what I had to do.
I opened my eyes and was rewarded with a naked mortician looking down upon me with concern. The hits just kept on coming.
“Are you okay?” Bruce asked.
“I need to borrow the hearse,” I said.
Behind the wheel, cigarette dangling from my mouth and arm hanging out the window, things almost felt right. It almost felt like I was alive again.
I didn’t own a car. If you had asked me about this I would have told you smugly that living in the city, I had no use for a car. But that would have been the bitter talking. I had always liked driving. Liked the feeling it gave me of being in charge -- the ability to point my life in a direction and control how fast I got there.
If I had been driving a few weeks ago, I would have turned the radio on and up all the way. I would have listened to music that seemed now, incomprehensibly angry. I still don’t know what Marie had done to me back there, but I didn’t feel the same.
Maybe it’s that I was close now, very close, to death. Or death part two. However you wanted to look at it, just because the clock had stopped on my life didn’t mean that time wasn’t going to eventually and inevitably run out.
At a stoplight, I looked over at the car beside me. There was a young girl, maybe twelve, riding in the passenger seat. “Smoking’s bad for you,” she said. I took a long pull on the cigarette and tightened my chest so the smoke leaked out of the tears and rips in my dried flesh.
I caught her mother’s eye above her head and slapped the side of the hearse. “Yeah baby, but smokin’s good for business!”
Then I ran the red light. It made me feel good to be whatever I was.