Tempter (18 page)

Despite the oppressive swampland heat, Jerry shivered like a naked man in a snowstorm. All he could think about was the day he painted the Crash logo on the band’s drum kit and how proud and excited Alex had been. He wanted to cry, but all he could do was shake.

“That hurt.”
Rossiter suddenly lifted his face from the pool of bloody vomit, his voice as petulant as a child’s. “You actually caused me
pain
,” he said, the gore congealing in his mouth slurring his words. Rossiter staggered slightly as he regained his footing. “I’m going to enjoy taking you apart, piece by piece.”

Jerry cursed himself for not waiting for Aggie. Being killed by this dead-eyed horror was what he deserved for trying to be something he was never meant to be: the hero. He squared his shoulders in anticipation of Rossiter’s attack.

“Leave him be, Alex!”

Rossiter froze in mid-step, turning to stare behind him in the direction of the doorway, his gore-slimed face registering confusion. For a fleeting moment Jerry could see the man he used to know, trapped within a hell made from his own flesh. Then the shock that had sealed him away from the pain of his shattered leg dissolved, plunging him into blessed unconsciousness.

Tee was dressed as Rossiter had first seen her, in the white muslin and red kerchief of a mambo. Around her neck were cowry shells and about her waist was cinched a simple belt holding a ceremonial rattle.

“Move away from him, Alex!” she said, her voice barely trembling, despite her fear. “In the name of The Seven I command you! This man is under my protection! I don’t want to kill you, but I will if I must.”

“You have to do better than threaten me with death, witch!” he laughed, sending a fresh gush of blood from his mouth. “I don’t scare easy and I don’t
die
at all. See?” He ripped open his ruined shirt and cast it aside, laughing as her eyes widened at the sight of the stitching where his heart should be, and the gaping puncture wound just below it.

“There’s nothing to fear, Tee! It hurts when the Master makes your heart his own--I’ll admit that. But he makes sure you don’t remember much about it. Once your heart is consecrated to his service, everything is so great! It’s better than sex, drugs, and rock’n roll! You can trust me on that, Tee.” He stretched out his hand, beckoning her to join him. “C’mon, let me take you down…where nothing is real.”

“Stay back, Alex,” Tee said sternly. “I mean it.”

“What are you going to do? Shake your rattle at me?” he smirked as he continued to move forward, his eyes gleaming like rubies. He could see the fear in her eyes, smell it in her sweat. Her blood was singing to him, its message as primal and urgent as a mating call.

Tee reached behind her back and pulled the .357 Magnum from the hidden holster clipped to her belt and aimed it at her lover’s head. “I’m beggin’ you, Alex. Don’t come any closer.”

“Don’t you get it, you stupid bitch?” he snarled in defiance. “I’m fucking
bullet-proof!
”

There was a thunderous report as the top of Rossiter’s skull disappeared in a spray of brains, bone and congealed blood. His lower jaw dropped open, revealing a tongue that writhed like a worm on hot pavement. His hands reached for where his face used to be, only to have his finger close on a squelching mass of ruined cartilage. The hands fluttered helplessly for a moment, like birds in flight, before he collapsed.

Tee groaned and leaned against the wall, fighting down the urge to puke. Her eyes burned and her sinuses felt as if she had snorted a pint of Clorox. She refused to cry. There would be time enough for that later. Maybe.

She stepped around what was left of Rossiter and knelt beside the white man sprawled on the floor she assumed was Jerry Sloan. His right leg was a mess, but he was still alive. But where was the woman Aggie had sent her to protect? Her eyes flickered toward the huge double doors on the opposite side of the foyer. She saw light seeping from underneath the jamb and smelt the familiar odor of burning incenses. She could hear a masculine voice intoning something in a strange language. Her hand automatically went to the ceremonial rattle at her hip; the
asson
was so cold it burned to the touch.

She looked down and saw that the rattle was now sheathed in blue-white witchfire. The glow pulsed in time with her heartbeat and a strange, tingling energy shoot up her arms and down her legs. The witch-fire abruptly flared, wrapping its cold flame around her, causing her to close her eyes against the glare. When she opened them again, there was someone else looking out.

Jazrel pulled the
asson
from her belt and kissed it, whispering the name of her grandfather. It was time for the walls of Seraphine to come tumbling down.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Five black candles set in their own wax cast flickering light over the obscene tableaux within the points of the inverted pentagram etched into the ball room floor. Tempter stood naked between Charlie’s spread thighs, one hand cradling his penis, swollen with stolen life and oozing a mixture of inert sperm and clotted blood. The
Aegrisomnia
lay on the floor at his feet, its pages opened to those concerning ritual defilement and the mutilation of sacrifices.

Before he could lower himself onto her helpless body, the huge double doors of the ball room flew open, striking the walls with such force that they sagged on their hinges, and Jazrel strode into the room, her head and shoulders cloaked in a foxfire halo.

“Let the woman go, Legendre!” she commanded, her voice echoing as if she was speaking from deep within a well.

“I no longer answer to that name, conjure woman.” Tempter replied with a sneer. “If you wish to speak to me, call me by my shadow-name.”

Jazrel walked the rim of the chalk circle like a panther pacing the confines of its cage, Tempter following her step-for-step from his side of the pentagram. A sourceless breeze entered the room, tugging at the candle flames holding down the points of the pentagram. Every step of Jazrel’s bare feet crackled like static on a telephone line.

“There is nothing you can do to stop me, witch-whore,” he snarled. “You are in my sanctum, the very locus of my power! Go back to your brothel and suck the seed from drunken longshoremen and high-yellow pimps!”

Jazrel shook her kerchiefed head, her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “You don’t understand, do you? After all that time spent in the Place Between Places, you still haven’t learned. Didn’t you ever wonder how I could trap you within your own lair, where your magic is strongest? You know the power that lies within blood and flesh: wherever blood is shed, the ground is charged with its power. Did you forget Narcisse’s crimes? The horrors he visited upon my people?”

“Crimes?”
Tempter snorted in derision. “How can you commit crimes against one’s own property? Their lives belonged to him, to do with as he wished! And he wished to shore Seraphine’s foundations with their bones and wash its bricks in their blood!”

“Exactly,” Jazrel said with a smile. “And in doing so, he sealed your fate.”

The priestess removed the ceremonial rattle from her belt and began to shake it, chanting in a language older than the Caesars. At her summoning, a pale material the color of milk and the substance of smoke began to seep from the walls and rise from the floor. Tempter’s sneer faltered as the weird vapor increased in volume and took on the form and features of dozens of women, children and men, dressed in rags and bearing the mark of the lash upon their phantom flesh. One ghostly figure stood out in particular: a powerfully built male, his cheeks and brow bearing the ritual scars of an
obeah
. The ghost of Jubal glowered at the grandson of his murderer with all the malice of the unavenged dead.

Tempter retreated to the heart of the protective circle, holding the
Aegrisomnia
to his naked breast as a shield.

Jazrel opened her arms and gathered the souls of her kinsmen to her, her head thrown back in both rapture and sorrow. With each spirit that passed through her, the sourceless wind grew in strength, lifting her skirt and snatching away her kerchief like a naughty schoolboy. The priestess’s plaited braids writhed about her head and shoulders like a next of snakes. The room filled with the smell of ozone as the dead of Seraphine lifted their savior in their ghostly arms.

“Your dead relatives mean nothing to me!” Tempter shouted defiantly, his hair crackling in the supercharged air. “Your jungle magic may be powerful, but it is too crude a weapon! You caught me unawares last time, but not this one!”

Jazrel pointed a slender, glowing finger at Charlie’s prone figure. Her blue eyes locked with Jazrel’s dark brown ones, and all that was Charlotte Calder disappeared, leaving only Eugenie Legendre in her place. Unmindful of the pain it caused her borrowed flesh, Eugenie yanked herself free of her bonds and rose to greet her long -lost husband. The wind caught her laughter and twisted it into a scream.

The pain was so huge there was no way to judge its scale. At first it lay across his body like a blanket, and then it began to slowly retract until it was only in his right leg. Jerry opened his eyes and saw a wrinkled face with an off-kilter eyeball peering down at him.

“Aggie,”
he whispered, his voice ragged.

“Lay still,” she ordered. “I gotta put that leg of yours in a splint.”

“Rossiter….” He struggled to sit up, straining to see where the red-eyed creature night be hiding. “He’s here….”

“He’s dead, honey. He can’t hurt you no more.” She sounded like a mother reassuring her child the bogeyman was no longer hiding under the bed,

“Dead?”
Jerry blinked in confusion. His head felt stuffed with sawdust. There was a sound of ripping cloth followed by white-hot agony shooting up his leg. Jerry bit his lower lip so hard it started to bleed.

“There, that should keep things from rubbin’ together in there,” Aggie said, stuffing a bitter-tasting root into his mouth. “Chew on that: it’ll help with the pain.” She shook her head. “You may be stupid as pig shit, but you’re no coward, white boy. I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks. I think. How did you get here?”

“I rode my broom!” she laughed. “Just kiddin’. I drove my damn car, how else do you think I got here? I would have been here sooner, if I hadn’t gone off in the ditch.”

“The girl, the one I saw dressed in white...is that your granddaughter?”

“More like my baby’s grand-baby. Little fool ran on ahead of me. You and her are a
lot
alike.”

“I thought you said you were the last of your line?”

“I
know
what I said, boy. I was wrong, is all. She’s a wild card. If I knew she existed before hand, I would never have gotten you involved. As it is, it never occurred to me that both women were reborn.”

“Reborn?”

“Your woman and Ti Alice. Although, come to think of it, that explains some things I was at a loss to understand before.”

“What do you mean? I thought you were in cahoots with those gods or Loa or whatever the hell they are.” Jerry asked, panic in his voice. The fact Aggie was unaware of her own descendant was more distressing to him than his being attacked by Rossiter. “Why didn’t they tell you she was your grandchild?”

“Because I never asked them,” Aggie replied, matter-of-factly. “The Loa answer only those questions put to them. Now, do you think you can stand?”

The thought of getting on his feet made Jerry queasy. “I don’t know.”

Aggie pointed to the weird light spilling from the ball-room. It looked like an electrical storm was going on inside. “You better decide quick. I don’t’ think we have much time left before this place comes down around our ears.”

Tempter snarled like a cornered animal at the women on either side of him. He was safe from the mambo’s magic as long as he remained inside the protective circle, but he had not taken into account the witch having an accomplice within the pentagram. He moved cautiously, trying to keep a safe distance between himself and Eugenie, while still keeping out Jazrel’s reach.

“Poor Donatien,” Eugenie said, her voice echoing from across the void. “You were always so fond of plots and schemes. But you never took the actions of others into account.”

Tempter spoke a word of power that formed on his lips like a dagger of black ice and spat it at his dead wife, aiming at her right eye. Eugenie raised her hand and moved it clockwise, as if cleaning an invisible windowpane. The black ice shattered harmlessly and fell to the floor, where it turned into wriggling black tadpoles, which she then ground into paste with her bare heel.

Jerry stood slumped in the open doorway, staring in awe at the tableaux before him. Aggie stood beside him, propping him upright. Her mouth was set in a grim line as she watched the battle.

“What the hell--?” he gasped. “That’s Charlie!”

“That is her flesh, yes,” she agreed. “But her soul is that of another, older spirit— Eugenie Legendre.”

Jazrel’s burning fingers traced the sign of Legba and Chango in the empty air. The
vévés
rotated like pinwheel mandalas, and then launched themselves at their target, spinning through the air like circular saw blades.

Tempter recited a spell that jumped from his lips like the tentacle of an octopus, snaring one of the spinning
vévés
. The second, however, avoided the counter-spell and struck him squarely on the chest. The necromancer screamed as his flesh sizzled like that of a slave’s under the branding iron. He shouted and a cloud the color of midnight billowed from his jaws. It was thick and viscous and smelled like burning rubber, with sharp-toothed, bony things that looked like they belonged in the lightless depths of a subterranean cave swimming inside. The demon fog enfolded the trio and Jerry lost sight of Charlie. Aggie’s fingernails bit deeply into the artist’s arm, but he barely felt it. The wind inside the room grew stronger, forcing him to shield his eyes from the stinging grit it stirred up.

The demon-cloud sobbed like an oboe as it was torn apart, and dark, slime-coated things fell to the floor. There were creatures that looked like fat, pulsating commas clinging to Jazrel and Eugenie, but as the cloud was dispersed the things squealed and dissolved like salted slugs.

Some of the shadow-things tried to flee, and something that looked like a cross between a frog and a scorpion scuttled past Jerry and Aggie. The old voodoo woman quickly ground it under the heel of her shoe.

“My father is a vain man,” Aggie stage-whispered to Jerry. “He believes
he
is the fulfillment of Jubal’s curse. But he is not the Legendre destined to bring Seraphine down upon itself--
she
is!” she said, jabbing a bony finger at her great-granddaughter.

Jazrel and Eugenie approached their enemy from within and without the protective circle, as Tempter was now too weakened by his exertions to fend them off. His face had grown even gaunter than before, and his deflated penis hung between his thighs like an over-ripe banana. Eugenie lunged, digging her nails deep into the wizard’s exposed flesh. Despite its leathery appearance, the skin covering his body tore like rotted silk, and fluid the color of motor oil leaked from the wounds. The droplets of quasi-blood spattered the floorboards, obliterating the outline of the pentagram.

There was an eerie, collective shout of triumphant from Jazrel, as if a hundred ghostly voices spoke through her mouth, as she swept down upon her prey like a barn owl snatching up a rat, while, at the same time, Eugenie wrapped her arms about her former husband. All three were then borne aloft by a howling wind from nowhere, spinning around in some bizarre mid-air aerial threesome, all arms and legs and naked flesh. At first Jerry thought the women were covering Legendre’s body with caresses, until he saw Eugenie yank on his hair, exposing the shining skull underneath.

The necromancer’s scalp fell away and was caught by the wind and added to the rest of the detritus it chased through the room. His skin grew brittle and discolored, the cheekbones punching their way through the desiccated flesh. His nose collapsed inward, and his lower jaw sagged like a door with a busted hinge, no longer held shut by its muscles. Jazrel’s hand darted into his gaping mouth and extracted a ball of black-red light the size of a Christmas tree ornament.

As they claimed their former tormentor’s life-force, Eugenie and Jazrel surrendered his withered body to the tender mercies of the dead of Seraphine. The two women bobbed in the eye of the storm and watched as the souls of the dead slaves spun the earthly remains of Donatien Alexander Legendre around the room like a load of dirty laundry. Jerry clamped a hand over his mouth and nose, fearful of inhaling wind-borne particles of rapidly disintegrating corpse, while narrowly avoiding being impaled by a flying human rib.

Jazrel whistled to the ghosts and the cyclonic wind disappeared as suddenly as had begun. The women, one black the other white, spun slowly downward, hand-in-hand, like leaves caught in a gentle eddy, until they hovered an inch or two above the floor, facing one another. The mambo caressed Eugenie’s borrowed face, and Eugenie squeezed the hand of her dead lover’s dark hand. And when they kissed, the walls of Seraphine burst into flame.

Jerry recoiled from the heat, but could not take his eyes from the women in the center of the blaze. Aggie tried to drag him away, but he stubbornly clutched the doorframe. “I can’t leave Charlie in there!”

“Don’t fret about her!” Aggie shouted over the sound of the fire spreading through the mansion’s rotting timbers. “She’s in good hands! Don’t’ fight me on this, boy, less you want that other leg broke, too! What happens next ain’t for your eyes to see. Now get a move on!”

Reluctantly, Jerry hobbled after Aggie as best he could through the billowing smoke to the front door of the dying mansion.

Jazrel cradled the darkly glowing ball of light that was all that remained of Tempter in her right hand. Eugenie intertwined her pale fingers with her lover’s dusky ones and together they offered up the spirit of their enemy to the Collector Of Crosses.

There was a slow, scraping sound, like that of a shovel striking the lid of a coffin, and the roof of the house disappeared. Baron Samedi, his gaunt face shining like the moon, peered down at them as if he was studying the interior of a child’s dollhouse.

The Lord of the Dead reached forth a bone-thin hand and deftly plucked the offered ball of squirming, negative energy from their hands, rolling the sorcerer’s corrupt soul back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, as if judging the quality of a good cigar, before popping it between his fleshless lips. The King of the Graveyard’s laugh sounded like a horde of bats leaving their cave. Then as suddenly as he had arrived, Baron Samedi was gone and Seraphine’s roof returned—only now it was on fire.