Bad II the Bone (34 page)

“You didn’t tink I would forget yuh. No, no, no. Because of you I spent four years in lockdown. Because of you I’m still recovering what is mine. Yuh tink your organization was a match feh me? I don’t need an army to vanquish you, I have deh hosts of Hell at my disposal. But don’t fret Deacon, I’ve been promised a special place in deh pit for a bad man like you. So hush, you will have to wait while I speak to my breddrin’ Spokes.”

Y grunted from the fist to her ribs, her body buckling in with the force but just managing to twist her torso
minimizing the impact.

He was strong.

And strength for strength, she didn’t stand a chance against him but conflict was more than raw strength. Y braced herself. His upper cuts came thick and fast and Y kept deflecting his energy with her sore arms. He roared his frustration aggravated; he wasn’t inflicting the kind of damage he was expecting. He leapt up, hurtling towards her with his knee extended like a seasoned Thai boxer.

Y read him too late.

His knee smashed into her chest, lifting Y off her feet with the force and depositing her some feet away. She skidded to a stop at the edge of shadow and light, glaring at him, from her knees, a sharp pain stabbing into her chest, stars popping before her eyes.

Unsteadily she stood up.

His grimaces seemed to say, why won’t dis gal go down?

Y flexed her chest and flashed her arms, a routine that was meant to erase the pain of their last tangle.

This time she came at him.

His reach was long so he swung at her from a distance and fo
llowed up with a straight thrust kick that she side stepped and parried with her forearm. Close quarter combat favored small narrow frames and Y fitted the bill. She got in close and personal ramming her elbow and the heel of her hand into his pressure points. His body language switched from confidence to uncertainty. He tried to counteract the flurry of blows but Y just kept blocking his awkward attempts and hurt him, her anger rising a notch. He was gritting his teeth as the pain started to eclipse him. He was unable to move backwards as the shadows were nipping at his heels and unable to move forward as the bitch was on him like a itchy sweater.

He was losing energy, stability and his self control dwindling.

He roared again, kicked out with a last ditch attempt to take back some advantage but Y caught his leg, pivoted it upwards and toppled him on his back. He was up on his knees quickly but Y had already sprung up on his torso, both feet smashing into his chest and using it like a springboard catapulting herself away from him. Y landed clumsily from tiredness but she didn’t care. The force sent him tumbling away from her like a disjointed hay bale and that’s where he came to rest.

The sigh of relief whistled through his teeth, when he realised he was in the safe zone. He relaxed and his arm flopped in the shadows and that’s all it took. The darkness snarled to life like a shapeless velociraptor, dragging him into its embrace. He thrashed violently. A mist of crimson like an aerosol spray tinted the air and screams like his body and soul were being ripped apart
rose up into the vault above. The chorus of his agony was celebrated by the caverns acoustics.

Then there was silence.

The grotesquery that stood in the shadows was doing its best at being a corrupted facsimile of Darkman but even in t
he gloom it was struggling to keep the form together, swaying slightly, its balance wavering from time to time. Spokes watched it with the intensity of a man whose life depended on reading its body language, watching as the creatures struggled to maintain the illusion of the Obeah man. An arm would fall off, quickly replaced with more minions molding themselves to replicate the limb but lacking the same coherence every time they had to reconstitute themselves. The telepathic connection Enoch had established between everyone in the cavern was waning too because his words of anger had become a whisper until they ceased to be sensed altogether.

Spokes knew without the guard ring he would be dead and even the awesome powers Darkman wielded, his
vows to the evil Gods, could extend so far. He was flesh and blood after all. But the promoter did not for a second take him for granted. Their lives were a precarious balancing act right now that still favored Darkman’s decision to slaughter them or offer them a reprieve. Spokes had a feeling this would be his most important negotiation to date.

Life and death.

Acidic bile rose up in his throat, a nervous tick tugged on the corner of his mouth and clammy sweat drenched him. He swallowed erratically, trying to keep the contents of his stomach down but he had to focus elsewhere, he had to build a most convincing case in this pressure cooker moment. Spokes let the facts and figures, pros and cons, indications and contraindications of everything that had happened and everything he had observed soak into him. They started making connections and links in his mind. He thought of Jimmy and how he would handle this and tried to channel his friend’s gift for negotiation into the present situation.

Tentatively Spokes and Patra stepped away from the cover of the boulder, hand in hand like nervous children and made their way the short distance to what was left of the circle and the box that sat in the middle.

It had to be now.

Spokes could feel it.

He forced authority into his voice.

“So we at a Tivoli Garden standoff den?” Spokes boomed.

“Well I think it best we don’t waste each other’s time, pardy.

This is what you want, don‘t it?” Spokes bent
and flipped the latch on the old wooden box that had been at his feet all this time and reached into it. He hesitated.

The thought crossed his mind that he had never actu
ally handled the totem inside. With care borne of fear and inquisitiveness, he scooped his fingers under the rock and lifted it up. It never dawned on him to examine it closely. He just knew the effect it had but gazing at it now, it was a beautiful thing to behold and it was heavy too. His fingers tingled pleasantly as he became comfortable with it in his hands. The geode looked like an ugly sandstone colored rock from the outside but a portion of the exterior shell was split open to reveal the crystals inside. The crystalline structure was layered with deep purples, blues, clarets and whites each segmented area twinkled seductively like natures attempt at a Faberge egg. The interior was riddled with twinkling miniature stalagmites and stalactites erupting from the crystal bed, that bent and refracted light in the most exquisite of ways.

Spokes stared into its shimmering depths, transported into another dimension of stars, galaxies and universes and he was suddenly imbued with a sense that anything was possible.

He held the John Crow stone high over his head.

The weight was uncomfortable; its surface rough and pitted. A steady pulse of incandescence radiated from
its interior and you knew this was power of a kind modern man rarely came across. The powerful African totem that had kept the club successful had also kept lands perpetually fertile and bountiful for centuries. Darkman had taken it from his home in St Thomas to replenish it in Ghana where legend says it was forged. For five years it remained here, providing the club with a glittering reputation but dooming his lands back home for lack of it. Spokes knew all this and felt a pang of regret and sorrow.

“Jimmy died protecting your secrets.” Spokes said, his voice hollow. “Up to his last breath, he wanted these treasures to be safe an’ dats what I did. Me nevah involve in yuh downfall. You did that yuself. You an’ dat pussyclaat bwoy Deacon.”

Deacon flinched as eyes fell on him.

Enoch Lacombe’s dark copy cocked its head. It was either lo
sing coordination or reacting to his words, Spokes didn’t know which.

“Try to kill wi and I drop it and you have nothing. All gone,” Spokes boomed.

Enoch was motionless, his dark skin formed from the hell creatures blending more and more into its habitat of shadow around him like rain clouds. And around that was the host of unblinking red luminescent eyes, waiting for the command to overcome them.

“If we hafe dead, so be it. But you go home with nothing. Without this, what do you have?”

Dark Pickney completely surrounded them and every slither of darkness was bristling over with them. Patra moved closer to Spokes, feeling the confinement and the smell of sulphur and excrement.

“Rass!” Spokes swore, feeling something scurry over his foot and explode passing through the charmed ring. Patra kicked out at something that skittered past her feet and it too exploded into dust.

Spokes looked down and realised what they were doing in amazement and horror.

“Goddammit.”

They were sacrificing themselves and for every dead demon a gash was left open in the circle of protection, a way in.

“Damn it!” Spokes shouted. “Do yuh think I won’t smash this rass to pieces? Test mi again,” as he backed up raising the stone
even higher over his head, the creatures kept a respectable distance. One of them screeched its impatience and then the others joined, in a strangely grating but rhythmic chorus that echoed off the high ceiling and into the tunnels.

“We not dying without a fight, you know that right?” The voice rose sweet and confident into the confines of the cave. Spokes shivered at the sheer optimism
of Y’s projected voice and was looking around to see where it was coming from. It was Patra who directed his gaze to the right place with a point of her finger. Then he saw the light coming towards them like a beacon and the scurrying, almost panicked retreat of the hell creatures. The blue tinged light became brighter and a path was being made for the wielder of the light as they came forward. In moments he saw them more clearly. Suzy had her arm around Y’s neck for support. She hopped on her good leg and crooked her injured thigh, high enough from the ground to facilitate easy transport. Y’s left hand held Ms Wong’s waist tightly and her right hand held the katana straight ahead, glowing brightly like it had been pulled from a blacksmith’s hearth.

Dark pickney scuttled away from it in waves and Y and Suzy hobbled towards the refuge of the circle with faltering steps. Half way to them and once a path had been cleared Patra came ru
nning. Taking up Suzie’s unsupported shoulder, they moved as one to where Spokes stood. The katana grew more intense as Patra joined them and the power of three was almost blinding. With Spokes in the middle, they huddled together and the glow cocooned them all. Their audience, although cautious, crowded in on them, keeping a safe distance from the light but even with this unexpected mystical advantage, the sheer numbers of the monsters would easily overcome them.

“Jesas Christ man, I have a way we can all leave here satisfied. You get what you need and I get what I need.” his voice was filled with tremors as the night creatures flowed forward from the su
rrounding darkness. Thousands of eyes ringed them with thousands of voracious appetites.

“How we doing?” Y rasped.

“Mi have dis.” Spokes cleared his throat dramatically. “Let us go man, you take your treasures including the John Crow stone, the trinkets and I keep some of the money for Jimmy’s family.”

Darkman turned away and started to head back into the cat
acombs. Spokes was feeling the weight of the stone over his head but he kept it ready to be destroyed before they overwhelmed them.

The facsimile of Darkman was turning away from them.

“Face me when I’m fucking talking to yuh, obeah bwoy!” Spokes screamed at Darkman’s departing back. “Jimmy left two boys fatherless because of you.”

“They are going to grow up without the ma
n who loved them the most in this world. How dat make you feel?” A bone shuddering chill racked Spokes as the hell things, mimicking muscle fiber, nervous system and circulation in the pseudo Darkman, pulled the body to a stop in response to Spokes angry outburst.

Darkman drooped his shoulders despondently and turned to face him. But there was something different about him, his
demeanor skewered. The familiar Frankenstein image of him composed of these hell creatures disappeared for a moment and he seemed to be sheathed in a phantom image of his real self, his human self. It looked like he was cradling something in his arms. Spokes focused and was taken back as his eyes discerned the figure of a phantom infant snuggled protectively to his chest and him with a repetitious hushing movement that was reminiscent of any loving father and their child.

Fatherless,
Spokes thought.
You care about deh youths. So you’re not completely heartless after all
.

And then as if
to reaffirm to him his anger was brutal and remorseless he casually swung a spectral severed head dripping blood and gore in his right hand. His movements were reminiscent of an old reel projection from the nineteen-twenties accompanied by ethereal scenes of a distant sitting room that had been reduced to a slaughter-house. You almost felt like it was an image of something taking place somewhere else. It was like a glimpse of a place where the corporeal body of Enoch Lacombe resided, all safe and sound.

“Kiss mi muma,” Spokes said under his breath watching the hell things fall away from his torso and arms leaving a ghostly si
lhouette of the real man behind. The ghostly Darkman stared at them for a long while, watching what was being done with interest.