The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag (9 page)

‘The
farmhouse is about thirty yards away, and I glance back over my shoulder a
couple of times and notice that the driver is watching me very intently. I
knock at the door and I wait. Then I hear this dog barking and look back and
see a great big dog snapping at the VW. The driver is momentarily distracted,
so I duck down behind some old corrugated iron and wait to see what will
happen next. The driver shouts at the dog, and the dog ambles off. The driver
looks back in my direction. He can’t see me, smiles, turns the VW around and
drives away.’

‘This
is all bloody odd,’ I said.

‘Bloody
odd,’ said the mendicant. ‘And bloody suspicious. So I decide to take a look
around. No-one has answered my knock at the front door and the place seems
deserted so I slip round to the back of the house to see what might be seen.
And the first thing I see is the first mountain.’

‘The
first mountain?’

‘About
ten feet high. Hundreds of pieces of mouldy cardboard, thousands in fact. The
ones at the bottom of the mound look ancient, the ones at the top a lot newer.
These have all got something written on them. The same something. A single
word.
London.’

‘London?’

‘And
then I see the second mountain. A mountain of rucksacks and sleeping bags.’

‘Good
God,’ I said.

‘Good
God is right. I go back to the front of the house and I’m wondering what to do.
I figure I’ll push open the front door a couple of inches and take a careful peep
inside. And I’m just doing this when the big dog attacks me. It comes rushing
up out of nowhere and it leaps at my throat. I duck out of the way and the dog
hits the front door, knocking it wide open. As I roll over I see the dog land
in the hall, and as its feet hit the floor the floor tilts like a trap door and
there’s this terrible sound of whirling machinery. And I just catch a glimpse
of the dog as it vanishes into all these thrashing blades, howling hideously,
before the floor swings back up into place, the front door closes and all goes
very quiet indeed.’

‘Holy
shit!’ I said.

The
mendicant finished his second pint. ‘“Recycling”,’ he said, ‘that’s what the
driver called it. “Recycling waste”. I told you I’d heard strange tales and I’d
heard this one before. I’d heard tell that there are vans like that all over
England. That’s why you see so many of those old VW Campers. They clean up the
streets, recycle the dispossessed. It’s all the government’s doing, and the
minced-up meat goes to feed animals in secret research establishments.’

‘But
someone should do something. Where is this farm?’

‘Not
far from here. But it won’t do you any good. The strange thing that happened to
me on the way here was this: I went back there. Back to the farm today. But it wasn’t
there. The place had been razed to the ground and concreted over. I figure they
had secret security cameras and they saw me escape. So they destroyed the
evidence. They’re cunning, you see, cunning as—’

‘Foxes,’
I said.

And that was the mendicant’s
story. Well, the travelling salesman’s story. But the mendicant told it better.
I can’t say whether it’s really true, of course, and it certainly wouldn’t have
been true if it had been told to me by a travelling salesman, because
he
wouldn’t
have been hitch-hiking, would he? But if it is true, then it could have
explained what happened to Billy. Although, as I would later learn, what
happened to Billy Barnes was something far more sinister.

The
reason Billy’s disappearance led me to be-come involved in the case of the
voodoo handbag was this:

Billy’s
mum was a friend of my mum and so, shortly after Billy went missing, Billy’s
mum came round to tea with my mum, and my mum suggested that Billy’s mum should
have a word with me.

I had
just opened my first private detective agency, nothing swanky, just a table and
chair in the shed, but I was hungry to take on something big. A missing person
case was right up my alley, and so when Mrs Barnes came right up my alley and
knocked on the shed door, I was more than pleased.

I
ushered her in and sat her down on the half-bag of solid cement that served as ‘client
chair’.

‘So,’ I
said to Mrs Barnes, ‘how might I help you?’

‘It’s
my Billy,’ said the distraught lady. ‘He’s gone missing.’

‘Yes, I
read about it in the newspapers. Do you want me to see if I can find him?’

‘No
thanks,’ said Mrs Barnes.

‘No
thanks?’

Mrs Barnes
shook her hair-net. ‘I’m quite pleased to see the back of him, really. It’s the
handbag I want returned.’

‘Billy
took your handbag?’

‘Oh no.
Billy vanished a couple of weeks earlier. But it was only a matter of time
before the handbag went too.’

‘I don’t
quite understand,’ I said.

‘It’s a
voodoo handbag,’ said Mrs Barnes. ‘Belonged to my mum.’

‘And
what, exactly, is a voodoo handbag?’

‘It’s
an object of veneration.’

‘Like a
saint’s relic, or something?’

‘Very
much like that, yes. In voodoo there is a pantheon of gods. Papa Legba, most
benevolent of all, he is the guardian of the gates. Damballo Oueddo, the wisest
and most powerful, whose symbol is the serpent. Agoué, god of the sea. Loco,
god of the forest, Ogoun Badagris, the dreadful and bloody one, and Maîtresse
Ezilée, an incarnation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.’

‘And
the handbag was hers originally?’

‘Maîtresse
Ezilée’s, yes. From her bag the good receive favours, the bad something else
entirely.’

‘And
your mum had this very bag?’

‘Not
the real one, no. A copy, cast in plaster.’

‘And is
it valuable?’

‘Only
to those who know how to use it.’

‘I see,’
I said. But I didn’t.

‘It is
a
transitus tessera,
literally a ticket of passage. He who carries the
bag and understands its ways can travel from one place to another.’

‘And
you’re quite certain Billy didn’t take it when he went off on his travels?’

‘Quite
certain.’

What
does it look like, this voodoo handbag?’

‘About
twenty inches high, handbag-shaped, covered in skulls. You’ll know it when you
see it.’

‘And it’s
important that you get it back?’

‘More
important than anything else in the world. You see, the bag holds power, great
power. When I said that you can use it to travel from one place to another, I
didn’t mean ordinary places. The bag allows you to travel between the worlds of
the living and the dead. To enter the spirit world and return safely.’

‘Hm,’ I
said.

‘Don’t “Hm”
me, you little shit.’

‘Did I
say Hm? I meant, of course,
Yeah, right!’

‘The
bag has been held in safe keeping by my family for four generations. We are its
guardians.’

‘But I
thought you said it was only a copy.’

‘Look,
it’s the
only
copy, all right! Just look upon it as something precious that’s
been lost.’

‘Stolen,
surely?’ I said. ‘I mean you didn’t just mislay this precious object, did you?’

‘It’s
gone missing, that’s all. A policeman called Inspector Kirby came to see me
about Billy’s disappearance, and he got involved with the handbag and then the
handbag went missing.’

‘The
policeman nicked it?’

‘No, he
didn’t. It’s just gone missing, OK?’

‘If you
say so, but I really don’t understand any of this.’

Mrs
Barnes made little sighing sounds. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you
everything. But it’s a tale of terror. Of gruesome deeds and eldritch horror.
Once you know the full story you will understand why the handbag must be
returned to my family. And you will know things that few living men know and
fewer still wish to know.’

‘I’m
all ears,’ I said.

‘Then I
must whisper.’ And she whispered.

And I
listened.

And
then she whispered some more. And I listened some more.

And
then she did a bit more whispering. And I threw up all over the floor.

‘That’s
a nasty bit, isn’t it?’ she said. And I agreed that it was.

And
then she whispered a whole lot more. And then she finished.

‘And
that’s it,’ she said.

‘And I’m
very glad to hear it,’ I replied.

And
then she made me solemnly swear that I would not mention a word of anything she’d
told me to anyone else.

‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘I won’t
mention it to another living soul.’

And I have, of course,
remained true to my promise.

Maladroit Mal

Down the busy shopping street,

Tripping over two large feet,

Frightening babies in the pram,

Sneering at the traffic Jam.

Maladroit Mal,

Nobody’s pal,

Taking a chance in the open.

Over local village green,

Geeing up the beauty queen,

Yelling great and profane oaths,

Making bakers soil their loafs.

Maladroit Mal,

Nobody’s pal,

Taking a chance in the open.

Up the cut and down the dells,

Followed by unsavoury smells,

Ambling,

Shambling,

Crawling and

Gambolling.

Strolling,

Rolling,

Tripping,

Bowling.

Stumbling,

Bumbling,

Twitching,

Tumbling.

Maladroit Mal,

Nobody’s pal,

Taking a chance in the open.

6

The quality of weirdness has always been high.

BOB
RICKARD

A True History of Billy Barnes

The child that is truly
different rarely ever looks that way. It has always been instinctive in the
herd to drive off the ‘different one’, no doubt to ensure the purity of the
species. This is definitely the case with mankind. Children learn early to mock
the fatty, or the thin kid, or the one with the ginger hair, but they’re not
taught to, it’s instinctive, they can’t help themselves. They just do it. But
the child that is truly different, the individual who will one day grow up and
change society, alter the direction of the herd, this child often has a
defensive camouflage. This child looks like all the rest.

But he’s
not.

Billy
Barnes looked like all the rest. He looked a bit like Dave Rodway, with those
dark eyebrows. And a bit like Norman Crook, with that snubby nose. And he had
Peter Lord’s shoulders, and Neil Christian’s knees and Peter Grey’s feet and so
on and so forth. In fact he looked pretty much like everybody other than
himself.

Which
made him quite hard to describe, really.

But he
was
different.

And the
difference was all on the inside.

Billy
Barnes was a regular boffin. He was, quite simply, the brightest kid in the
class. In the school, probably. But he kept it mostly to himself. Once in a
while it bubbled right up, as in the notorious ‘man walks into the desert’
affair, which earned him considerable contempt and cut him right out from the
herd for a while. But he was soon back, strictly low-profile, blending in with
the rest and not looking out of place.

He was
a subtle manipulator, Billy. Always up to something, but no-one knew quite
what.

He was
different, you see.

And he
always had ‘business elsewhere’.

There
are now well over one hundred Billy Barnes web sites. These range from the
official World Leader corporate pages that list Billy’s business interests as
resource management, social engineering and off-world development, to the Unofficial
Conspiracy pages that have Billy down as the sole cause of all the world’s
ills.

Today
the face of Billy Barnes is the best-known face on the planet, but you’d still
find it hard to pick it out from an identity parade.

Exactly
how Billy rose to his exalted position of ultimate controller has never been
satisfactorily explained or fully chronicled before. Rumour has it that an
unofficial biography, exposing Billy as an arch criminal, depraved pornographer
and all-round bad egg, was withdrawn before publication and destroyed in the
great Health Purge of 2001, along with all other books, newspapers and printed
material. But that is only a rumour and the man who spread it is long dead,
cut down cruelly in a freak accident involving handcuffs and an electric drill.