The Devil in Gray (34 page)

“His coffin was sunk right here, in Shockoe Creek, and this is the first time that these lower foundations have been disturbed since the station was built. Apart from that, the little girl I was telling you about … the one who can see him … she saw him entering the station through the same doors that we came in. Another time she saw a kind of a twisted cloud over the station rooftops, which she thought was a cloud of evil. She even drew a picture of it. For some reason she said it was the House of Fun.”

“The House of Fun?” Queen Aché thought about that and then she shook her head. “No … not the House of Fun.”

“Excuse me?”

“She probably understood it wrong. She meant the House of
Ofun
. Ofun means ‘the place where the curse is born.'”

“You're serious? ‘The place where the curse is born?' Hear that, Hicks? What more proof do we need than that?”

Queen Aché stepped ahead of him, deeper into the cellars, occasionally ducking her head because the ceiling was so low. Thirty feet in, she stopped, and raised her hand to indicate that they should stay where they were, and stay silent.

“What is it?” Decker asked, after a while.

“I can smell something,” she said.

“Me too. Dead rats and damp.”

“No … there is something else. Close your eyes. Breathe in deeply and hold it.”

Decker breathed in. Hicks did too, and whistled through one nostril. Decker couldn't be sure, but he thought he could detect the faintest aroma of stale herbs, like taking the lid off a jar of dried oregano.

“Smells like my grandma's larder,” Hicks said.

“That's right,” Queen Aché agreed. “Those are the herbs they would have used to seal Major Shroud in his casket.”

She knelt down and opened up her leather satchel. Out of it she lifted a canvas pouch, tightly tied at the neck with black waxed string. She set this down on the floor in front of her, and then she took out four dried apples, a glass bottle of pale green liquid, and another bottle containing a dark red liquid.

While Decker kept his flashlight shining on her, she untied the canvas pouch and tipped out a handful of dull, blackened stones.

“What are you doing?” Decker asked her.

“These are thunderstones … stones from a building that was struck by lightning.”

As if to emphasize their importance, there was a loud bang of thunder from outside, and even here in the cellar they could smell the fresh, ozone-laden draft that came with the following rain.

“I cast the stones, and then I pour this liquid over them. It is made from the leaves of the alamo tree, boiled in water. This will dispel evil. Then I say an invocation to Changó,
kabio, kabio, sile
, and anoint them with rooster's blood.”

“Okay … and what will this do?”

“It will tell me if any manifestation of Changó is here. Just watch and wait.”

Decker hunkered down beside her. She pulled the stopper out of the bottle of blood and sprayed it across the stones like a priest spraying holy water. “
Kabio, kabio, sile
,” she repeated. “
Kabio, kabio, sile
.”

They waited for over a minute. The thunder rumbled again, and this time it echoed through the cellar as if it had come from somewhere below the ground, rather than the sky.

“I guess he's not here after all,” Decker said.

“Wait. This always takes a little time.”

Another minute passed, but then Decker heard a faint sizzling sound. He sniffed, and he could not only smell damp, and dried-out herbs, but a burned smell, like meat stock burning on the side of a cooking pot. He shone his flashlight on the thunderstones and saw that the rooster blood was drying up and bubbling, and giving off smoke. The thunderstones themselves had turned gray, and one or two of them were beginning to glow red-hot.

“Changó is here,” Queen Aché said, emphatically.

“You're sure about that?”

“Look for yourself. Look at the stones.”

One by one, the stones turned to scarlet, and Decker could feel the heat they were giving off, the same dry heat as a sauna. “Changó's power is attracted to this
ebbó
. He is showing us that he is close by.”

“Yes, but
where
?”

“You won't be able to see him, but I will. I will call on Yemayá to help me against my enemies, and to give me strength.”

With that, she reached into her satchel again and brought out a plastic bag, neatly folded and tied with blue tape. She untied the tape and opened the bag, revealing a small silvery-scaled fish. She took out yet another bottle and poured a thin, sticky liquid over the fish. “Sugarcane syrup,” she explained. Then she dropped seven shiny pennies onto it.

“
Yenya orisha obinrin dudukueke re maye avaya mi re oyu
…” she sang, closing her eyes and swaying her head from side to side.

Hicks looked at Decker uneasily. “I hope we're not getting ourselves into something we can't get out of.”

“Like I said, sport, we don't have any choice.”

Hicks's cell phone rang again, but when he took it out to answer it, Decker said, “Leave it. It's only Cab getting close to boiling point.”

“…
lojun oyina ni reta gbogbo okin nibe iwo ni re elewo nitosi re omo teiba modupue iya mi
.”

Queen Aché stopped swaying and opened her eyes. She arched her head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then she said, flatly, “Yemayá is with me.”

Decker looked at her, and then took off his glasses and looked at her even more closely, because there was no question at all that something had possessed her. It was difficult to pin down exactly what it was. But she seemed to radiate an extraordinary energy, and when he took a step closer to her he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising up, as if he were standing close to an electrical transformer. She turned to look at him, and although she was still Queen Aché, with that high forehead and those erotically drooping eyelids and those full, slightly parted lips, there was another face within her face, a face that was calm and stony-eyed and infinitely old.

Decker realized that, at secondhand, he was looking at the face of an
orisha
, a goddess from the earliest days of African civilization, a creator of dynasties and magic. He had been frightened before. His nightmares about the Battle of the Wilderness had frightened him. But nothing had ever frightened him like this: the realization that there
was
a world in which the dead could live forever, and that men could walk through walls, and that none of the laws of possibility meant anything at all.

He was suddenly reminded of Eduard Munch's painting of
The Scream
—the utter terror of finding out that life has no boundaries whatever.

“What now?” he asked Queen Aché.

“We find out where your So-Scary Man is concealing himself.”

She picked up the apples one by one and placed them on the hot thunderstones. They sizzled and blistered, and gave off a thick, caramel-smelling smoke.

“Lead me now to Changó,” Queen Aché said. “Lead me through the paths of Changó Ogodo, Alufina Crueco, Alafia, Larde, Obakoso, Ochongo, and Ogomo Oni. Lead me through all his various disguises: Saint Barbara and Saint Marcos de Leon and Saint Expeditus.”

Up until now, the smoke had been billowing upward, but as Queen Aché continued her chanting it began to drift toward the opposite side of the cellars. It coiled its way past the stalagmite dwarfs, and then it seemed to disappear into the darkness, as if somebody were pulling a long gray chiffon scarf through a keyhole.

“He's there. Changó can't resist the smell of apples.”

Decker unholstered his gun, but Queen Aché laid her hand on top of his. “You must understand that you cannot kill Changó. You can only kill Major Shroud.”

“He'll do, for starters.”

“But you cannot kill Major Shroud while Changó still possesses him.”

“So how can we stop him?”

“In Santería, we believe that everybody has an
eleda
. It means their head, or their mind, but it also means their guardian angel. In Major Shroud's case, his guardian angel is Changó. While Changó is alert, he will protect Major Shroud against any attack. But
eledas
can grow hungry, and need feeding and entertainment. If you invoke Changó, and give him a
plaza
, an offering of fruit and candy, and light some candles for him, he should be distracted long enough for you to kill Major Shroud.”

She dug farther into her satchel and pulled out another cotton bag, tied with red and white string. “I brought apples, and bananas, and herbs, too.
Rompe zaraguey
and
bledo punzó
.”

“And candles?”

“Of course.” She produced three church candles, tied together with red ribbon.

Decker took the bag and the candles and pushed them into his pockets. “You're not really doing this because I threatened to shoot you, are you?”

Queen Aché gave him a strange smile, and he was sure that he could see Yemayá smiling, too, behind the mask of Queen Aché's face.

“When there is no man who can stand up against you, Lieutenant, what is left? You have to test your strength against the gods.”

“Haven't you ever—”

“Relied on anyone? Yes. Once. But one morning we both woke up and knew that I had grown stronger than him, and so he packed his bag and left without saying a single word.”

“Do you know how much I hate you for what you did?”

“No, Lieutenant, I don't. I never loved anybody as much as that.”

Hicks was shining his flashlight in the far corner of the cellars, where the smoke was hurrying away. “There's an opening here, Lieutenant. Part of the wall's collapsed.”

Decker came over to join him. Just past the dwarfish stalagmites was a narrow alcove, and most of the brickwork at the back of it had fallen inward. It looked like the wall in which the drunken Fortunato had been bricked up alive, in Edgar Allan Poe's story
The Cask of Amontillado. “For God's sake, Montresor!
”

When he probed his flashlight into the back of the alcove, Decker could see that it led to a cavity between the station walls. The cavity was only a little more than two feet wide, but in between the walls the rubble had fallen to form a kind of staircase, leading down. The smoke was steadily sliding in the same direction.

“Well … the smoke seems to think that he's hiding down here.”

Hicks grimaced, as if this was all too much for him. “The
smoke
thinks he's down here? For Pete's sake.”

Decker took an awkward step over the broken bricks and eased himself sideways through the opening. The smell of herbs was even stronger here, but there was another smell, too, and it was sickening. The smell of seawater and raw sewage, and bad fish, and half-decayed crabs.

He maneuvered himself around and offered his hand to Queen Aché, but she managed to climb through the opening unaided. The “staircase” was only a steep slope of crumbled masonry, slippery with damp, and Decker had to keep one hand pressed against the right-hand wall to steady himself as he descended. Halfway down he lost his footing and landed on his backside, sliding down six or seven feet before he managed to catch hold of a protruding beam of rotten timber and stop himself.

At the bottom of the slope was the opening to a low, pitch-black crawl space. They shone their flashlights into the darkness, crisscrossing like light sabers. The floor of the crawl space was thick with streaky black mud, and the ceiling was buttressed with dripping brick. Decker reckoned that it ran more than two hundred feet, from one side of the station building to the other.

Hicks said, “If you get caught in here, Lieutenant, you won't stand a hope in hell.”

“Has to be done, sport.”

“But if you can't even
see
him—”

“
I
can,” Queen Aché reassured him.

“Okay …” Hicks said, reluctantly, “so what's the plan?”

“I guess we'll just have to search the place on our hands and knees. Do it systematically, in squares.”

“No, Lieutenant,” Queen Aché said. “You won't have to do that. Look.”

Decker turned around. The smoke from the burning apples was drifting steadily down the staircase and into the crawl space. When Decker shone his flashlight on it, he saw that it was hurrying toward the right-hand side, about three-quarters of the way under the station, where it abruptly disappeared downward This was where the ceiling had collapsed from the floor above.

“Looks like we've found him,” Decker said.

“So what do we do now?” Hicks asked.

“We propitiate his
eleda
.”

“I thought we were just going to blow his head off.”

“Same thing, differently put.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Decker took the bundle of candles out of his pocket. Queen Aché untied the ribbon around them and lit them, handing one to Decker and one to Hicks.

“You will have to think respectful thoughts about Changó. Make him your offering of fruit and beg his forgiveness for the sins of your forefathers.”

“And you really think that will work? Think what he did to Moses Adebolu.”

“Changó saw Moses Adebolu as a traitor to his faith. You are only his blood enemy.”

“Is that all? That's reassuring. But, well, we all have to die someday, don't we? Let's go do it.”

He crouched down and entered the crawl space, the brick ceiling scraping against his back. The sewagey reek of river water was even more overpowering down here, and the greenish black mud squashed thickly into his brand-new Belvedere loafers.

As he approached the hole where Queen Aché's apple smoke was disappearing, he could see more clearly what had happened. A large section of the ceiling had collapsed, not enough to cause any structural damage to the station, but enough to cause the floor beneath it to collapse, too. He shone his flashlight on the bricks and rubble and saw, that there was a gaping cavity beneath the foundations, black as a prehistoric cave. He could also see rotting wooden uprights, and part of an old brick wall, which he took to be remnants of the old fishing dock at Shockoe Creek.