Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (26 page)

“You always was one for knowing
things like that, Miz Odessa.” He shucked his plastic raincoat, hung it on a
tall hat rack, and sat on the worn but comfortable sofa.

“Go on and ask it,” she told him.
Her dark eyes seemed to gleam with an inner light.

Boots nodded. “It’s happening
again, ain’t it? Just like it did down in Holy Crossing a whole lotta years
ago.”

“Umm-hmm,” she rumbled. “It is,
Brother Birdwell. It sho is.”

“Can we stop it?”

She laughed a joyless laugh. “Us
old coots? Lawd, have mercy. You know we cain’t do nothin’ like that. Look at
us! We too old and used up.”

He shook his head. “Ain’t nothing
we can do?”

“I wish you’d tell me what. That
time in Florida I was still young and full of the power, and even then it liked
to killed me. You was there. You saw how it was.”

“But there must be somebody younger
who can do something. Somebody with some of the knowledge, at least.”

“Ain’t nobody like that now. I
tried to pass what I know on to my grandbaby, but she ain’t got time for such
nonsense. Folks today are soft, Brother Birdwell. They ignorant, and they don’t
want to hear about the real evil things in this world. They think they see evil
every day on the news and in the streets. They don’t know most of that’s just
outright meanness. They got no idea what pure evil is. But I reckon some of ’em
is about to find out.”

Boots sat and digested her words in
silence. Odessa Nell stroked the cat on her lap. The grandfather clock in the
corner chimed the hour. After the tenth and final chime, Boots said, “Who you
reckon’s done it?”

“That I
don’t
know. But it’s
got to be somebody powerful, somebody who knew what they was doin’. If these
old bones ain’t lyin’ to me, I’d say whoever called it up is most likely
already dead. The Yawahoos don’t be comin’ without somebody dyin’ in they own
blood, by they own hand. Somebody wanted this real bad.” She shook her head
slowly from side to side. The cat stirred and began a loud purring. “And
real
bad
is zackly what we gone get.” 

“It don’t seem right, Miz Odessa.
Don’t seem right at all. What if a good man...or woman, was to give his own
life for the sake of others, like Jesus did? Wouldn’t that count for something?
I cain’t believe a sacrifice in the name of evil carries more weight than a
sacrifice for good. That goes against everything I been preaching all these
long years.”

“You talkin’ ’bout you and me?
Lawd, we so old and we ain’t hardly got no life to give up. We got two feet in
the grave already, you and me together. We ain’t got power enough to fight
what’s comin’. I tell you, this thing was done by a conjure woman the likes of
which ain’t been seen for years. Ain’t no man coulda done it. I’m talkin’ ’bout
a conjure woman from the other side of the grave.
I feel it.
Never been
but one woman like that I ever knowed of. And she been dead a long time. Lived
and died in bayou country. But somebody round here knowed how to call her up.
Sure as we sittin’ here, that’s what did it. Best we can do is pray to the
Almighty and ask that our own sins be forgiven. Then hold tight and wait for
the axe to come down.”

“Still don’t seem right,” said
Boots. “I got to believe somebody hereabouts can find a way to stop it.”

“’Less you know more than I do,
that ain’t gone happen.”

“I don’t know much, but I got to
have faith. If I give that up, I may as well go on and hand over my soul to
Satan.”

Odessa Nell made a hissing noise.
“Satan ain’t nothin’. It’s the Yawahoos you got to worry ’bout. And they ain’t
interested in your tired old soul. All they be wantin’ is to spread their evil
darkness and feed on our fear and sufferin’.”

“God be with us,” he said softly.
The hollow sound of his weary voice fell flat and seemed to die on the floor.

“Amen,” said Odessa Nell.

The cat lifted its head and looked
around expectantly.

Cornelius Weehunt waded through the
boggy back yard to the tool shed. The rain had stopped, and the night was
filling up with fog. His head was filled with fog, too, but the voices in that
skull-fog were making everything very clear to him. He’d never heard such
voices! As sharp and clear as the sound from the best CD player in the world,
laser-sharp and irresistible. Like the voice of God spoken with a thousand
mouths. Even when the voices were saying different things at the same time, he
was able to hear them all and understand them all. The presence of the Godlike
voices somehow gave him the special power of hearing them all at once and
sorting them out and taking them to heart. Corny understood that he was the
instrument, the special tool, of the ones behind those magic voices, that he
would do—must do—whatever they told him.

And now they were telling him to go
the tool shed and get the machete he sometimes used for cutting vines off the
dogwood trees in the front yard or chopping a path through the small patch of
woods beside the house just for the fun of doing it. They hadn’t yet told him
what they wanted him to do with the machete, but he knew they would when the
time came. Corny always kept his tools in good condition, just the way his
father had taught him; he was especially proud of the way he had honed the
machete’s blade to the sharpest edge possible,
razor
sharp and free of
nicks. He could chop most anything with it. It was the same with the axe, but
he was partial to the machete. Whenever he used it, he imagined that he was in
some thick jungle, chopping his way through the undergrowth, on his way to save
a beautiful woman whose clothes had been ripped to shreds by a wild beast. He
pictured her now in his raucous mind and sprouted an erection. He fondled his
hard-on through his jeans, then opened the door, stepped into the little hut
and pulled the chain on the naked bulb hanging from the center beam of the
shed. They were all there, his tools neatly put away in their proper places and
shining in the 60-watt glare. The voices sang. They harmonized so sweetly! Like
a chorus of angels. The many voices became one, and that one overwhelming voice
told him to take the machete in his hand and test its blade against his own
flesh. He obeyed, drawing the length of the blade across his wrist. A line of
blood rose from the cut to kiss the moving blade. The mouth of the shallow
wound joined the chorus, and Corny realized with wonder that his blood was
singing. The voices were in his blood!

The night fog was billowing into
the shed now, hazing the edges of things and misting Corny’s eyes. His vision
blurred, but the voices remained as sharp and clear as heavenly bells, ringing,
ringing, ringing...

He reached up, found the hanging
chain and turned off the light. The thick fog brightened the darkness as he
left the shed and quietly shut the door. The voices softened their song to a
melodic whispering, and in those insistent whispers Corny clearly heard his
instructions. Now he knew what they wanted him to do. It was not something he
ever would’ve thought of himself. It was like something you would see in one of
those old slasher movies on cable TV, only much worse.

“I cain’t do that,” he whispered
back. But then the whispering in his skull-fog got loud again, so loud that his
head felt like it might explode, and Corny knew he
could
do it. He
had
to do it. There was no disobeying
these
whisperers.

Cloaked in lush fog, he sat down on
the boggy lawn and waited for the people in the boarding house to shut off
their lights and go to sleep.

The whispering voices altogether
bewitched him.

***

The masked man shoved Joe Rob
through the doorless doorway of the tumbledown house, and a rat scurried into
shadows thrown by the hostage-taker’s flashlight. Joe Rob stumbled over a loose
board in the floor and went to his knees. A pair of handcuffs clattered to the
floor in front of him. “Cuff yourself to that radiator.”

With reluctance, Joe Rob snapped
one of the steel bracelets around his left wrist, then closed the other one
around the iron pipe coming out of the floor at the radiator’s foot. He glanced
up at the dark sky visible through the jagged opening where part of the roof
had collapsed. “How’d you find me?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” the man said in a
voice burned raw by years of tobacco and alcohol use.

“Yeah. I wanna know.”

“When I accept a contract, I learn
all I can about the target’s social strata, his circle of associates. It’s easy
in a town this small.  Your grandmother was most helpful. When I heard of your
escape, I figured you’d show up at that trailer.”

“Who the fuck
are
you, man?”

“I’m the angel of death.”

“You’re a hit man.”

“If you wish to use that cheap
term.”

“Who’s paying you?” Joe Rob lean
his back against the radiator’s ribs.

“One Charlotte Claymore.
Affectionately known as Charlotte the Harlot, I believe.”

“You’re shitting me. Why would she
want me killed? All I did was...”

“Yes?” The man’s thin lips formed
an ugly smile in the mouth-slit of the ski mask.

“Fuck her up the ass.”

“Over her protestations, I
presume.”

“You don’t talk like a hit man.”

“Oh? And how does a hit man talk?”

“I dunno. You’re the first one I’ve
ever met.”

The man shrugged his narrow
shoulders as he shone his light about the ruins of the room. Jewels of
raindrops shimmered within the intricate patterns of a spider web in the
corner. The room smelled of mildew and rotting wood.

“How much she paying you?” Joe Rob
asked.

“That’s immaterial.”

“Huh?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is
that she wants you tortured before I deliver the
coup de grace
.”

“That bitch!”

“Aren’t they all? But sometimes
very serviceable, eh?”

“You’re gonna torture me?”

“Afraid so.”

“Fuck, man, why don’t—” Joe Rob
broke off his words when he saw the shapes moving through darkness in the
adjoining room. Three, four, maybe more. He smiled at his captor. “I think they
want you.”

“What’s that?” The hit man licked
his lips, his tongue a startling red within the black mask.

Joe Rob nodded his head in the
direction of the other room. “Those things moving around in the dark. I think
you’re the one they want now.”

The man turned and shone the light
in the adjoining room. Seeing nothing but empty space and discolored walls, he
turned back and put the beam of light in Joe Rob’s face. “I don’t know what
drugs you’re on, but I’m afraid they won’t dull the pain you’re about to
experience. Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.”

The hit man went outside to his
car, presumably to get his instruments of torture, and Joe Rob sat in the dark,
watching the shapes slither along the walls and over the floor.

“It’s not so bad, son,” said Billy
Joe Campbell. He was sitting in the open window, strumming his guitar. His face
was a phosphorescent green. “It’s some ways better being dead. You might like
it.”

Joe Rob was anxious to talk to his
father before he disappeared again, like he’d done in the woods. “Did you kill
yourself, Pop?”

“Hell no. Sumbitch shot me out back
of this ol’ honky-tonk in Mississippi.”

Joe Rob strained his eyes for a
better look into the eyes of his dead father. “Why are you here now? How come
I’m seeing you?”

“Devil’s Valley, Joey,” said the
ghost. “Devil’s Fucking Valley. Ain’t no way out of it.” Billy Joe slid his
guitar strap around so that he was wearing the instrument on his back, then
jumped out of the window and disappeared in the thick fog.

“Pop, wait!” Joe Rob tried to get
up, but the handcuffs didn’t allow it. The gunshot wound in his right shoulder
started throbbing with deep pain. “Cain’t you help me out me out here? This
sumbitch’s gone kill me!”

His executioner was back, chuckling
to himself as he set a battery-powered lantern on the floor. He was wearing a
blue-vinyl butcher’s apron. “Do your hallucinations talk back to you?”

Joe Rob glared at the masked man.
“Ain’t hallucinatin’. It’s a ghost.”

“Really.” The man held up a chain
saw. “Shall we begin the fun?”

“Whoa, motherfucker, you ain’t—”

The silenced pistol in the man’s
right hand spit two times as he fired one round into each of Joe Rob’s knee
caps. Joe Rob screamed and grabbed at his right knee with his free hand.

“That’s to keep you from kicking me
when I start separating you from your limbs.” He holstered the pistol, then
yanked the starter-cord and the chain saw came to life with a sputtering whine.

The psychic shock of knowing what
was about to be done to him was greater than the physical shock of the pain in
his knees. He knew now that the lurking shadows were not there to help him.
More likely, they were there to harvest his soul. Soon he would join his father
as a soulless ghost in a hell called Devil’s Valley. The crazy girl who had
started the unlikely chain of events leading up to this terrible moment had
been right all along when she said the dark thing wanted him. Sure as hell, it
was about to have him.

The man stood over him, leaned down
and guided the racing chain of teeth into the flesh just above Joe Rob’s left
knee. The saw teeth bit all the way to the bone, slinging shredded flesh, denim
and strings of blood into the air. The pain was unimaginably ferocious and Joe
Rob screamed. He saw his lower leg fall away from the bloody stump of his
thigh. Seeing the lifeless limb there on the floor, he couldn’t believe it had
actually been a part of him. When the chain saw started on his other leg, his
mind slipped into darkness.

A vial of ammonia broken under his
nose brought him back to consciousness, but it was a consciousness of altered
perception, of a mind fogged by physical trauma and great loss of blood. He was
dying. The abyss had opened to receive him, and its great yawning maw was about
to swallow him up. He looked down at the stumps of both legs, then he saw his
severed right arm lying across his blood-soaked lap. With detached wonder, he
noted that his right arm was still a part of him, still cuffed to the radiator.

“Smile for the camera,” said the
masked man, and then snapped Joe Rob’s picture with a Polaroid camera. The
flash seemed to set off the dark shapes surrounding them, and they capered
wildly about the room. After two more flashes from the camera, the hit man drew
his pistol, aimed at Joe Rob’s face, and said, “Nothing personal, Bubba. Rest
in peace.”

The madly circling shadows closed
in on Joe Rob, and as they entered him, he felt an unearthly coldness.

When the killing shot blew a hole
between his eyes and ripped into his brain, Joe Rob was thinking:
Rest in
peace, my ass.

***

The man in the ski mask pressed his
fingers to his victim’s throat to confirm that the young man was dead. He was.
The man took two close-up shots of the corpse’s face, taking care to center the
shot on the bullet-hole between the half-open eyes. “The cunt will cream in her
jeans when she sees these shots,” he said. “And that’s when I’ll have her.”

He was hot and sweaty beneath the
woolen mask, but it was his practice never to remove it until he had disposed
of the body and was well away from the scene of the execution. His routine had
served him well for a long time and he was not about to change it now. His
clients knew him only as Mort, and none ever saw his face. He was known as a
cold-blooded killer, but he was just the opposite; he was passionate in his
work. He wasn’t in it for the money. He killed for the joy of killing. The pay
simply made his nomadic way of life possible. Whenever there was a shortage of
clients, Mort found victims of his own to satiate his blood lust.

He got a sheet of plastic from the
trunk of his car and took it into the house and spread it out on the floor as
close to the corpse as he could without getting the bottom-side of the plastic
bloody. Then he unlocked the cuffs, dropped them in his apron pocket, and bent
down to pick up the mutilated body. The boy had been big boned and muscular,
but with both legs and one arm gone, he wasn’t too heavy to lift. Mort slid
both arms under the boy’s trunk and lifted him off the killing floor. The
corpse’s head lolled backward, and a hiss of air escaped from lungs that had
breathed their last. The remaining arm dangled toward the floor and brushed
against Mort’s left thigh. As he stepped toward the plastic drop-sheet, the
dangling arm and the lolling head came to life.  The arm swung up and wrapped
itself around Mort’s head, and the head swiveled up to allow the dead boy’s
teeth to tear into Mort’s throat. He tried to free himself from the deadly,
biting vice, but the arm and the jaws were too powerful.

Mort fell to the floor with the
corpse firmly attached. He tried to scream but the dead boy’s teeth had already
ripped out his throat and were now burrowing into the side of his neck,
chomping and snarling relentlessly, severing Mort’s jugular and gnawing all the
way to the vertebrae at the base of his skull.

Mort died with his mask on.

***

Luke Chaney came awake with a
start, and tried to brush away the hand that was jostling his bare shoulder.

“It’s me,” Ree Tyler whispered.
“You were mumbling in your sleep and thrashing around like a wild man.”

“Umm, nightmare,” he said with a
foul taste in his mouth.

“Must’ve been a dilly,” she
snuggled against him, their bodies naked beneath the sheets.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t remember much. Just
that...somebody was going after you with a big, bloody blade.”