Vigilantes of Love (21 page)

He walked back to his squad and decided to take a ride over to Eleanor’s house. Bourbon wasn’t dead yet, but at the rate things were going, it wouldn’t be long. And her Voodoo might be the city’s only hope.

The road to Eleanor’s wound beneath a canopy of cypress branches and grey moss, through a maze of sloughs and swamps and overgrown ponds. While her business was, necessarily, in the city, her real work was done here. To commune with the spirits of nature, one had to actually spend some time there.

Ribaud had first met Eleanor after Emily was taken. He’d been depressed and nearly suicidal at the time, and took a leave of absence from the force. He’d spent hours hanging over the second story balconies on Bourbon, drinking himself into oblivion. He watched the rowdy women from New York and Los Angeles and Chicago holding up their tank tops to earn strands of beads in response to calls of “show us your tits.” Most would wake with headaches the next day and little idea of what they’d done the night before. And most would be gone long before the night of the full moon. They escaped the retribution his Emily had not.

One afternoon while wandering the still-quiet street, he’d poked a bleary head into Eleanor’s Arcana and idly ran his hands across the bags of powders and talismans of bone and feather.

“Do you have one to bring back the dead?” he’d asked, a challenge in his voice, but desperation in his eye.

A woman with skin the color of deepest chocolate flashed a smile that held no humor. “We do not speak of such things,” she said.

“My wife was killed by a curse,” he said, “and I want her back. Isn’t that the point of Voodoo?”

“Tell me more about your wife,” the woman said.

He had.

He’d told her about the way Emily had looked up at him through lashes black as pitch. He’d told her about the way she had pursed her lips in a moue that could make men laugh, melt and cry all at once. He’d told her about the night they pledged their love in the reeds at Standing Point, their voices barely audible above the hum of the locusts and cries of the nightbirds.

“If she loved you so much, she would still be yours,” Eleanor suggested.

“Everybody can make a mistake,” he answered. “She was a creature of the senses, always at war with her desires. But in her heart, she always was mine.”

Eleanor said nothing.

“If you are a Voodoo queen, why don’t you stop this curse?” he’d asked. “It’s killing more and more innocent people every month.”

“They’re not innocent,” she whispered.

“They don’t deserve to die,” he said.

He’d left Eleanor’s shop angry that day, but he’d soon returned. An idea had hatched in his mind, and he couldn’t let it go. He began to drink less, and lobby Eleanor more. He got up in the mornings looking forward to the day’s debate at her shop. They’d talk for hours about Voodoo, morality, the curse, and its punishments.

Eventually, she agreed to seek a way to stop the curse, though grudgingly, as it was not a spell of her own spinning. She said she might be able to find a way to halt its spread, but warned that she could never bring back his Emily.

Last week, she’d thought she was close. He’d stopped by the Arcana after work and she had run out to him from the back room, holding a yellowed scroll in one hand and what looked like a rotted turnip in the other.

“This could be the key!” This time, her smile was not cool. “I’ve been looking into some of the things I brought back from Africa, and I think that if I can get one last ingredient, I might be onto something.”

Ribaud pulled his squad down the rutted path that led to Eleanor’s house. It hid beneath the emerald shadows of a forest of heavy branches. Eleanor lived where life was always ripe. Nature overran every attempt by man to tame it here, and that was exactly where she had wanted to live. At a nadir of natural energy.

He knocked on the old wood door, and at his touch, it fell open, letting a thin slice of sun slip inside.

“Eleanor?” he called.

There was no answer.

He stepped inside. The hum of the swamp faded away.

“Eleanor?” he called again, and stepped into the living room. Voodoo masks and shelves filled with all nature of colored vials adorned the walls. The room was painted a deep red, and above a small brick fireplace was an array of statuary, naked brown voodoo women carved in mahogany, and demon serpents wrought in stone. An obsidian knife lay on the wooden floor, blade pointing into the dark hole of the fireplace.

The kitchen counters were empty of food or spell, and Ribaud stepped through the dining room and into the dark shadows of the hall. Even in the full light of day, the sun never found a hold inside Eleanor’s house.

Hers was a citadel of night. A church of the moon.

Grit cracked under his shoes as he stepped into the arch of her bedroom. A yellowed shade covered most of the one window in the room, but there was enough light to see the dark stain across the unmade bed.

“She’s gone,” a tired voice said from his left. It came from a shadowed form sitting in a small wooden chair just beyond the window.

“Who’re you?” Ribaud asked, startled.

“It doesn’t matter,” the low voice sighed. “I loved her. And now they’ve taken her.”

Ribaud looked from the shadow in the chair to the stain on the bed. In all his visits with her, Eleanor had never mentioned a man in her life. Let alone men.

“She came home late last night,” the man said. “And this morning she was gone. Was she with you?”

The chair creaked as the man slowly levered himself upright. He was a big man, a man of iron power, but Ribaud wasn’t afraid. He could see the light in those dark eyes was gone.

“No,” Ribaud said. “Not with me. I came to see if she had gotten closer to curing this curse.” He paused, but the man didn’t react. “It took my wife, too,” he added.

The man laughed then, a low, tortured gasp.

“There is no cure for love,” the man said, and sank back in his chair. He turned his head to stare out the thin slit of glass not covered by the shade.

“And there is no cure for lust, either.”

Ribaud stepped back out of the room and into the hall. The house still sheltered the fetid smell of them. The hall and bedroom were ripe with the stink of rotting detritus, the scum that slimed the banks of a swamp.

It stank of the shallow water stirred by the bubbles of decay at high noon in summer. The smell was anchored in the footsteps leading to and away from the bed. Already drying to a mottled grey, the swamp mud from the feet of Eleanor’s killer led through the living room and out the front door. A black-green smear coated the doorknob and the wood surrounding it.

A tear bled to his chin as Ribaud retraced his steps and left the house of Eleanor Trevail, the most powerful Voodoo priestess in all of New Orleans.

There would be no stopping Marie Laveau’s misbegotten curse.

There would be no stopping the growing army of the moon.

There would be no stopping the fickle human heart.

They had come and gone again, and there would be no cure.

Ribaud would continue to clean up the blood in their wake, until there were no hearts left to break. In twenty-nine more days, they would be back.

The Vigilantes of Love.

In October of 2000, many of his horror tales were collected and published in hardcover by Delirium Books as
Cage of Bones and Other Deadly Obsessions. Vigilantes of Love
followed three years later. His more recent fiction collections include
Needles & Sins, Creeptych
and
Deadly Nightlusts.

Since the original publication of
Vigilantes of Love
, Everson has published four novels through mass market paperback publisher Leisure Books –
Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13
^th
and
Siren
. His first novel,
Covenant
, won a Bram Stoker Award upon its original limited edition release through Delirium Books in 2004.

Everson is the co-founder of Dark Arts Books (
www.darkartsbooks.com
), a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), a past participant and publications director for the Twilight Tales Reading Series and the assistant editor for the Necro Publications book line. From 1999-2002, he served as a fiction editor for
Dark Regions
magazine. He moonlighted as the pop music critic for a suburban Chicago paper from 1988-2008, which led him to also pen “dark music” review columns for genre magazines like
Wetbones, Midnight Hour
and
Talebones
. Though it has been a decade since he last appeared on stage with a band, he remains a closet composer and recorder of pop songs. His instrumental compositions for Lone Wolf Publications can be heard on the
Bloodtype
and
Carnival
CD-ROMs. His music also appeared in the 2003 Chicago production of Martin Mundt’s play
The Jackie Sexknife Show.

Despite an omnipresent nagging dream of relocating to warmer climes, John still lives in the west ‘burbs of Chicago with his wife Geri, his son Shaun, and an assortment of birds, fish and a petulant iguana. Find out more about his fiction, art and music at
www.johneverson.com
.