Dreamwalker (3 page)

Chapter Six

Eight tired cabs parked tail-first in a darkened warehouse on Atlantic City's west side. A ninth was in its final resting place, missing doors and an engine. The sign on the outside of the building read the same as the stencil on the cabs' doors: ISLAND CAB CO. The mottled concrete floor bore witness to the fleet's myriad non-fatal fluid leaks.

Seven drivers leaned against fenders or sat on hoods. Two passed some small talk about the Knicks and the weather. Most stared at the floor or off into space. No one mentioned Manuel, the eighth driver. Each cabby cast an occasional furtive glance at one of the two adjoining rooms at the rear of the building. The one on the left, with
Dispatcher
painted over the scratched picture window drew no interest.

The windowless room on the right was their focus. One dented, black, steel door opened to the shop. Gold letters on it spelled PRIVATE. The seven men on the shop floor were willing to keep it that way. Manuel was in that room now for an audience with Jean St. Croix, two beefy goons, and The Chair.

A seat in The Chair never ended well.

Manuel's view consisted mostly of the soles of St. Croix's boots. He sat in The Chair facing a rough wooden desk. St. Croix sat on the other side, leaned back, fingers steepled, snakeskin boots propped up before him. He stared up at the ceiling in calm contemplation.

St. Croix hadn't said a word since entering. Manuel hoped this was a good sign.

Tiny and Stoner stood behind and out of Manuel's view. St. Croix never went anywhere without them. Manuel sensed the two burly bodyguards were there, the way someone knew a dark cloud blotted out the sun without looking up.

The Chair was a sturdy affair, straight-backed and handmade of oak thick as a forearm. Word was St. Croix brought it with him from Haiti. Manuel squirmed in the seat. Half-inch white rope bound his wrists to The Chair's arms and his ankles to its legs. Burgundy drops of previous guests' dried blood specked the rope. Sweat beaded on Manuel's bald head and rivulets of it ran down his scrawny sides.

He prayed for a show of mercy.

“So, Manuel,” St. Croix said, brushing a dreadlock back from his face, “you've worked for me for how long?”

The Creole cadence in his Haitian accent was almost encouraging, as if Manuel was here on an interview. A spark of hope ignited.

“Three years, Mr. St. Croix,” Manuel answered. It was actually two and a half, but more seniority might buy him something here. Perspiration dripped from his eyebrow and stung his eye.

“The boys and I treat you well?” St. Croix circled to the front of the desk. He stood between The Chair and the desk and leaned back. “I put food on your table. I keep your parole officer off your back, no?”

As if on cue, one of the human walls behind Manuel stepped up behind The Chair. He wrapped his meaty hands around The Chair's back and braced his feet against the legs.

Manuel's mouth went dry. He nodded jack rabbit quick and exhaled tiny sharp breaths that were supposed to say “Si”.

“Yet,” St. Croix continued, his voice pond water calm, “you delivered a few grams short, no? You see, our customer is smart enough to know what a half-kilo should weigh. He checks these things at the price he pays for heroin.”

Manuel looked down at the floor, unwilling to meet St. Croix's eyes, fearing they would burn right through him. St. Croix leaned forward and lifted Manuel's head by the chin.

“You keep a little commission, no?” St. Croix's voice rose, like wind before a thunderstorm. “A little service charge for you to take home to that Spic whore who shares your bed? Admit your mistake, Manuel. The truth is always best. After all, mistakes happen.”

Manuel felt a door to survival open. St. Croix was just scaring him straight. Own up to his screw-up and it would all be okay.

“Si, Seňor St. Croix,” Manuel said. “I took a little. I never did that before. I never do it again. My girlfriend is pregnant and—”

Rage swept across St. Croix's face. The bodyguard leaned into the chair in preparation. The color drained from Manuel's cheeks. St. Croix sat up on his desk. His right leg cocked and shot forward with lightning speed. The thick heel of his boot buried itself in Manuel's crotch.

His testes burst. Pain exploded like an atomic blast below Manuel's waistline His surprised, primeval scream echoed off the walls. An expanding pool of blood and urine covered the seat and dribbled on the concrete floor.

“You lying sack of shit!” St. Croix bellowed. “You steal from me for weeks, humiliating me to customers, ruining my reputation. Only a punk is jacked by a nobody like you.”

St. Croix plucked the tire iron from on top of his desk. He raised the metal rod over his head. Manuel whimpered for mercy through his tears.

With a full overhead swing, St. Croix brought the iron down on Manuel's right hand. The sickening sound of snapping bones filled the room. White, sharp shards punctured his skin. A wave of new, sharper pain washed over the first. He screamed again.

“You stole from me with that hand, you cowardly bitch,” St. Croix screamed. “How about this one?” He raised the tire iron again and bashed Manuel's left hand. The iron struck at an angle and severed Manuel's pinky. The digit hit the floor with a wet splat. Manuel screeched and then sobbed, unable to look away from the finger that pointed back at him from the floor.

St. Croix ripped the front of Manuel's T-shirt to the waist. He flipped the tire iron around in his hand. St. Croix pressed the flat, pointed end between Manuel's ribs. Blood seeped around the tip as it scraped his skin.

Manuel's pain was beyond comprehension. His mind went numb and his head sagged in surrender. Drool dripped from the corner of his mouth and stretched to his chest.

“The penalty for theft is very large, Manuel.”

St Croix thrust the iron into Manuel's chest. It felt like a hot poker. It punctured Manuel's lung with a pop and exited through the slats in the back of The Chair. St. Croix gave the iron a twist and left it there. Manuel babbled in snippets of whimpering, unintelligible Spanish. St Croix leaned in close.

“Now, I'll tell you what happens here,” St. Croix said, his voice back to normal. “When I pull this out of your punctured lung, it starts to fill with blood. Slowly, agonizingly, you will drown in your own fluids. You will have plenty of time to realize how foolish it is to steal from Jean St. Croix.”

He removed the tire iron with one slick pull. Manuel inhaled. His chest slurped a sucking sound. With each subsequent pained, choking breath, his head made a bobble-headed jerk.

St. Croix returned to the other side of the desk. He looked over Manuel's shuddering head at the two enforcers.

“Take him out for the men to see,” he said. “When he dies, take him ten miles out and feed him to the sharks.”

The two men lifted The Chair off the ground and carried it out the door like a nightmarish sedan chair. Manuel mindlessly gurgled and coughed up bright red blood. The door closed behind them with a thud.

Chapter Seven

St. Croix understood the importance of fear. Respect worked for Boy Scout leaders. Admiration worked for soccer stars. But with the criminal element, nothing worked as well as sheer terror. When the occasional expendable crossed the line, he made him an example for the remainder. Now no one would dare lighten their deliveries for at least a year. And then, he'd cull the herd once more.

If the men knew his true nature, he could dispense with these shows of force, enjoyable as they might be. Knowing he could touch them anywhere, awake or asleep, none would challenge his authority.

But once they knew what the outer shell of Jean St. Croix hid, their fear would make them spread the word. Then the world he had woven around him would unravel, perhaps both worlds in the end. He was safer behind the mask, his stay here extended the longer no one knew about the moonlit night of spells in Haiti all those years ago.

Jean St. Croix's life turned onto the path to Atlantic City when he was seventeen. It was the last choice he ever made alone.

Decades before the devastation of the 2010 earthquake, Haitian society had imploded. The slums of Port Au Prince were as close to hell-on-earth as the Caribbean ever saw. They surrounded the city's pockets of affluence like beggars waiting to gather the wealthy's cast-off crumbs. Shanties of tin and concrete block lined the narrow streets. Hundreds of thousands scrambled each day for the means to survive until nightfall. The thick, humid smell of decay filled the air, a constant reminder that people and their futures came here to die.

Jean repaired mopeds in a lean-to behind the tiny home of Celanie Cerat. The withered old woman was a practicing priestess, a mistress of a darker art. For the true power in Haiti did not rest among the corrupt officials of the government or the overwhelmed clergy of the Catholic Church. The true power lay in voodoo.

Voodoo had been part of Haiti since the first slaves were forced to work the land. A mix of African and Native American beliefs, the rituals were the conduit for contacting the spirits, or the
loa,
who could influence actions in the corporeal world. On the island, voodoo was no act of faith. It was a science. So accepted was the reality, and the danger, of voodoo, that until 1953 it had been banned by law.

This last full day of Jean's life, he sat under a window in the back wall of Celanie's home. He absentmindedly ran a brush through the bore of a carburetor as he eavesdropped on the business being transacted within.

A woman came for Celanie's intervention, to call the power of the
loa
to fight her son's recurrent rash. Celanie performed the ritual of calling upon the
loa
to intervene. As she did, St. Croix mouthed the words he had memorized in perfect sync with her incantation. Coins jingled as the woman paid her fee and departed. Jean whispered the priestess's words to himself one more time, focused on delivering the proper inflection, the tone that the
loa
would find appealing.

“Don't think I don't know what you're doing,” Celanie's voice sounded from above him.

Startled, Jean dropped the carburetor into the dirt. He whirled to see Celanie. Age had tightened her skin to a corpse-like fit, and her hair was a short mass of wiry gray strands. She stared down with eyes that offered no quarter.

“I'm just working here,” Jean said.

“I am old, but not foolish.” Celanie had the raspy voice of a chronic chain smoker. “You offer me rent you cannot afford for this space. You only work the hours when I see clients. Your back has worn the paint from the wall beneath my window. You seek to speak to the
loa
.”

Jean stood and faced her. “You are the most powerful priestess. Everyone says so. Who better to learn from?”

“I need no apprentice,” she said. “And would never take on a boy. Especially a boy like you.”

“Like me?”

“I see what is in your heart. You seek communion with the
loa
for all the wrong reasons.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Seventeen and on your own?” Celanie said. “No family, no friends visit you? That raises some suspicions. So I asked around. I know about your parents.”

Jean bristled. At age eight, his parents were murdered by the Tonton Macoute. Every Haitian knew to fear the organized gang of street thugs that ruled Port-Au-Prince's lawless streets. Six machete-wielding members smashed through the front door of the St. Croix house in the dead of the night and slaughtered them.

“The city is of full of orphans,” he said.

“But not one's with souls that shelter so much darkness. Vengeance bubbles inside you. I can smell it on your breath.”

“And why not?” Jean answered. “Alfred Marc Dési's men killed my parents. Hacked them to death in the room next to mine. Why shouldn't he pay for that crime?”

“And you are the judge and jury to decide?”

“I am the victim who should decide.”

“The
loa
help, they do not hurt. They provide insight, guidance. What I do cannot help you.”

Jean stepped forward and placed both hands on the window sill. He looked down on the much smaller woman.

“But if you called the
petra loa…
”

Celanie recoiled with a fierce look of contempt. The
petro loa
were evil demons who possessed the strongest magic, and had no qualms about using it.

“The
petra loa
,”
she spat. “Only a fool calls on them. It is like unleashing a hurricane. The power will sweep you away before you know what is happening. Once you open their box, they do as they wish.”

“Not you,” Jean pleaded. “Your magic is strong. I've seen you work. They would listen to you. Dési is evil.”

“Enough,” Celanie said. She pointed a gnarled, arthritic finger at Jean. “You will gather up your things and leave. Now. You invite danger you cannot comprehend. Don't come around here again. If you do, I won't need to call the
petra loa
. I have more than enough human friends who will teach you a lesson.”

She slammed the window shut.

He packed his tools and parts into a milk crate on the rack of his moped. As he feared, she didn't understand. How could she? She didn't watch her parents get senselessly butchered, cases of mistaken identity. He rolled the bike around to the front of her house.

But it was more than that. She was old and weak. He was young and strong. She didn't want to admit he could handle powers she no longer could. He'd use the
bokor,
the shadowy side of voodoo magic, and become a high priest with powers to eclipse hers. That was her real fear.
Loa
,
petra loa
. All the same thing, just spirits
.
He'd seen her control the
loa
enough times. He could control their darker brethren.

He cast a glance over his shoulder at Celanie's front door as he kick-started his bike. The old woman stood there, fire in her eyes, spindly arms crossed across her bony chest.

If she thinks this matter is settled, she's in for a rude awakening
, he thought.

That night, Jean returned to Celanie's house one last time. While she was out, he rooted through her talismans and gathered into a paper bag the elements for a summoning ceremony. Perhaps when this was all over, he'd thank her for these donations to his cause. He snuck out and pushed his moped several blocks in the dark before starting it. He headed to the site for his ceremony.

He'd found the perfect location, a burned and abandoned farmhouse on the city's edge. He wouldn't have the opportunity to learn more from Celanie, but what more was there for him to learn? The only difference between a ceremony that called a
petra loa
instead of a
loa
was preceding the summons with a live sacrifice.

Jean stole a black chicken on the way to the farmhouse and stuffed it in a burlap rice bag. The clear sky and three-quarters moon lit the passing landscape in a faded half-light. He killed the moped's lights. The last mile and the turn up the driveway passed in darkness.

Searching the
petra loa
pantheon, Jean had decided to call Cauquemere, a spirit who traveled the world of nightmares. Cauquemere could spin nightmares so horrid that people had died of fright during them. Rumor was that, with his intercession, what manifested itself in a dream would also manifest in real life. A plague of boils in a woman's nightmare would truly cover her body in the morning, or a man dreaming his legs were severed would wake up to find himself in three unequal pieces. Such a spirit could penetrate the defenses of Marc Dési undetected.

At the house's open threshold, Jean paused. Once he crossed to the room he'd chosen for the ceremony, there'd be no turning back. Celanie's warnings echoed in his memory. The sound of his parent's final, pleading screams at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes drowned her out. He carried his two sacks into the farmhouse.

Darkness blanketed the stinking urine-soaked corners of the house. Jean extracted two tapered black candles from the paper bag. He lit them and placed them around him in the room's center.

He took a baggy of salt and surrounded the candles and himself with a thin white circle. The priestess always performed this protective measure to shield herself from the
loa
when she summoned them. They couldn't cross salt. People who had been possessed by demons often mutilated themselves, the spirit within forcing them to deliver one more sacrifice. Jean was here to become Cauquemere's master, not his vessel.

He placed a small hand mirror against one of the burning tapers. A mirror was Cauquemere's portal into the world, his periscope from which he could view this parallel universe. Jean pulled a stick of incense from the bag and held it over the flickering candle flame. The orange fire licked the edge until it smoldered and sent a thin gray wisp into the air. Jean blew softly on the tip of the stick. It glowed red. He set the incense aside and the sweet smell of ivy and resin filled the room.

Jean took a deep breath, drawing the recognizable scent into his lungs. Celanie used this scent often. The smell's familiarity calmed him.

He pulled the terrified chicken from the rice sack. It squawked and flapped its wings in protest. He grabbed it by the neck and twisted its head clean off. The decapitated bird struggled in his arms. Blood pumped from the neck and Jean sprayed it within the salt circle. The chicken went limp and he threw the carcass aside into the darkness.

He pulled his ultimate talisman from the sack, Celanie's wand. The crooked cypress stick was barely six inches long, the twisted tip of a dead branch, shellacked with a fine, glossy sheen.

He tapped the small mirror with the wand's tip.

“Cauquemere,” he invoked. “My enemy is Alfred Marc Dési, who deserves just punishment. So that you can come forth in his dreams these next seven nights, I free you through this mirror.”

The wand trembled in his hand. He gripped it harder, but it moved of its own volition. He looked into the mirror and the reflected shadows shifted. They swayed back and forth in the frame, as if blown by a breeze. Then the shadows began a slow counterclockwise rotation, blending into one dark, spiraling mass.

Jean sensed a presence. Not in the room yet, but very close. Stronger than he thought it would be. Much stronger. His pulse accelerated.

“No problem,” he assured himself. “You can do this.”

“Cauquemere,” Jean said, voice cracked with fear. “Make Alfred wither in pain, fear, and illness. Make his nightmares become reality.”

Power filled the room, a mushrooming charge of static electricity. The wand shook violently in his hand, as if it would float in the air if released. A hurricane-like cloud of darkness swirled in the mirror , strong and destructive, ready to roar ashore.

The glass in the mirror pulsed back and forth, heaving to escape the confines of the frame. The powerful, malevolent force beyond the mirror's glass beat against the glass.

The wand shook Jean's arm all the way to his shoulder. He checked the protective ring of crystals around him. His heart skipped a beat as he realized his mistake.

He sat inside the circle of salt with the summoning mirror, not outside. The ring that should protect him from the
petra loa
instead trapped him with it.

The mirror shattered outward. A smoky, roiling mass blew from the frame and struck Jean square in the chest. A dark consciousness, rotten, rank, and evil, seeped into him through every pore. He struggled to push back the invader.

A final surge of wicked force washed into his mind. A thousand visions of unspeakable torture and violent death flashed before him.

Jean St. Croix winked out of existence.

Cauquemere had yearned for this moment, this opportunity to cross from the world of the
loa
to the tactile world of human perception. He had walked in this world many times, but always enslaved by some voodoo practitioner, as a dog on a leash. Now he roamed as a wolf, free to travel within the shell of Jean St. Croix. He'd no longer endure a patient wait for the call of some priestess to let him momentarily taste the sweet sights and smells of the waking world. Masquerading as St. Croix, he wouldn't attract the attention of the few who had the skills to send him back to his reality. While he already ruled there, with one foot in each reality, he could rule both.

With full possession of St. Croix, Cauquemere left just enough of the foolish child alive to run the body at rest. By daylight, he walked the tactile world as Jean St. Croix. But when St. Croix slept, Cauquemere's consciousness returned to the reality of the
petra loa
and the unlimited power he exercised there. So thrilled with his newfound alter ego, he even adopted the appearance of St. Croix in his nightmare creations.

While as St. Croix, stripped of his magic abilities, he discovered the source of human power. Fear and force. Unencumbered by the weaknesses of compassion and morality, he could build an empire that rivaled the one he commanded on the
loa
plane. But not in Haiti. Opportunities were limited on the small island, but dangers were not. The farther he was from masters of the voodoo arts, the less likely his discovery. He needed a richer, softer target, where force would not so easily be met with force, where the powers of voodoo were unknown and could be wielded without warning. He needed to cross the Atlantic to America. The United States seemed to have an unlimited supply of black market capital and insatiate vices.