The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (12 page)

“The Union Navy done broke through the boom,” one of them said. “They is firing at anythin’ that move. Git outta here fella or you is gon’ git kill’.”

Jefferson hurried away, but not in the direction that the slaves went. He carried on his journey to the French Quarter. Tonight, no matter what she said, Carly was going to listen to him. And, if he could, he would persuade her to leave with him.

As he did the previous night, Jefferson looked up at Carly’s window. This time the balcony doors were closed, the room was in darkness. Jefferson felt a pang of anxiety as he hurried towards the building.

The building had once been a fine and expensive house, owned by a wealthy Creole family. Now this former regal home had been turned into a brothel. This dwelling housed girls and women on all levels of the spectrum and fees. Some catered to aristocracy, others – the basement whores – lay in cots underground and serviced the white-trash. White men, no matter how rich or poor, always seemed to need whores. Even so, girls like Carly were in the minority. She was favoured by the wealthy, and had entertained a fair amount of Confederate senior officers, too.

Jefferson pushed the thought of all those wealthy white men away. Her words still stung him but he couldn’t give up on her. Not yet. Not until he was certain she was really where she wanted to be.

Heading around the back of the building Jefferson found the entrance to the basement rooms unlocked. Carly had told him about this entrance on one of the few occasions she managed to slip out to meet him. That was before the brothel changed her, but even then she had difficulty in being around him.

“Bein’ with you makes me feel bad,” she had said once. “You is everythin’ I
thought
I wanted.”

“I love you, Carly. I’m gon’ git you outta here,” Jefferson had promised.

“That’s a nice dream, Brent. I’d like to believe it could happen. But you try takin’ me from this place you is gon’ git yourself strung up. I’m white man’s property. You knows that would be stealin’.”

Her words were intelligent like always, but Jefferson didn’t want to hear them. It was on their second to last meeting when he had been the most insistent. Begging her to come with him then.

“You don’t wan’ somethin’ that’s been all used up,” Carly said. “You deserve better’n me. Don’t come back here. Forget about me. This just ain’t gon’ work out how it was s’posed to.”

Jefferson couldn’t
forget, though, and all the times she’d been kind, juxtaposed with the one time she had rejected him, made it harder for him to let her go.

Now, he paused at the back door wondering what had gotten Isaac so spooked. What was it he had seen in the chicken’s blood? Jefferson pushed away the weird and blurred image, convinced it was all his i
magination, brought on by his desire to find the help he wanted. The thing was, Jefferson was a practical man. He didn’t believe in heaven, hell or voodoo, he had just been so desperate he had hoped for a miracle.

A creeping doubt entered his mind when he recalled Isaac’s reaction during the ritual. The houngan had been truly afraid of something.

Pushing down the nervous adrenaline that flooded his body, Jefferson tugged on the door, and as he expected, it opened effortlessly.

Once these downstairs quarters would have belonged to privileged serving slaves of the Creole household. Now, the interior of the basement smelt like hot sex and perspiration. All the time he was certain someone would see him there. One of the white pimps, or maybe one of the whores would raise the alarm. But no one came out of the rooms, and though Jefferson listened outside one of the doors, he heard no sounds from within.

There was litter and spillages of unknown origin underfoot. His shoes felt tacky as he traipsed quietly through the narrow corridor, past the whore’s dormitory and up the staircase that led, he hoped, to the inside of the house. At the top of the staircase, Jefferson opened another door. He found himself in the main lobby.

Light poured in through a tall feature window illuminating a large circular hallway with an ornate marble floor and a grand staircase in the centre. Jefferson looked around at the many doors that came off from the hallway and up to the staircase and balcony that spread around the top. He could see several rooms in the gloom above and it didn’t take him long to work out what direction Carly’s room would be in.

The house was quiet though. Too quiet. Though he had timed his visit to coincide with the end of business, he had expected some customers, servants and whores to still be around. He went to the front door, found it locked up tight as though they expected the siege outside to surge inside. Maybe there had been no trade that evening. Maybe the whore house had remained closed while outside the world went to hell.

A surge of panic consumed him. What if the white man had taken all the best girls and fled? Forgetting caution now, Jefferson took the stairs two at a time. At the top he turned right and followed the doors around to the one he thought was Carly’s. Then he paused. What if she was in there now with a customer? Could he bear to see it?

Jefferson floundered for a moment then he grabbed and turned the handle.

The door was locked.

Of course. It would be. They wouldn’t let their best girl roam free would they? But then… how did she manage to meet with him in the past?

Jefferson pressed his ear against the door then tapped lightly. No sound came from inside at all. Then he heard a strange chanting coming from the floor below. He turned and walked back to the balcony, looking down
the hallway. The sound was coming from one of the doors to the left. Though he had no idea what he was going to do, Jefferson hurried back down.

He could hear music now. This must be a ballroom. Perhaps some kind of debauched party was just beginning. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t just walk inside and take Carly. He wouldn’t get within ten feet of her before some white man would shoot him down.

Jefferson heard a door creak somewhere behind him. He sank back into the shadows beside the staircase just before a group of people emerged from the room opposite. Three men wearing robes approached the door and Jefferson pressed himself deeper into the gloom for fear of being seen.

The doors to the ballroom opened releasing a flood of light into the stairway. Jefferson looked in, his eyes adjusting, and then opening wide. There in the centre of the room was Carly.

She was surrounded by several people all kneeling in a circle on the mosaic ballroom floor. She was wearing a long black dress and she stood before a tall table on which was opened a thick leather bound book. Her hands were raised, palms upwards as though in supplication, but her eyes remained fixed on the pages of the book.

As the other men joined her, two standing on either side, one joining the kneeling congregation, Jefferson was reminded of the ceremony that Isaac had performed.
Only, Isaac had said something about daylight and dawn being crucial to keeping evil out of their magic. Carly was clearly involved in something more here than mere prostitution.

Jefferson realised he was trapped now in his hiding place unless someone closed the doors to the ballroom. But the open doors didn’t seem to worry these people. Jefferson wondered if everyone in the main house was now gathered in this room and this was why there was no need to keep their activity secret. He cast his mind back to the whore den below. He hadn’t seen anyone down there, his entry had been easy. Too easy.

“On dis night…” said Carly, “when the enemy is near, we call upon the Old Ones to help protec’ dis house. Hide us, your servants, oh Great One.”

Carly began to read directly from the book.
It was like no language Jefferson had ever heard. The robed congregation shivered in unison as the idiom seemed to vibrate in the air. There was a substantial echo after each word, far more than the space should have created, mixed with the low timbre of Carly’s voice.

Jefferson felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He sensed power. Real magic which was nothing like the feeling he had experienced that morning in the clearing with Isaac. This voodoo was different. It was black
magic, just as Isaac had said. It terrified him.

Jefferson felt an urge to run. An unnameable fear sent blood pounding through his veins. He felt like a buffalo cornered by hunters. It was a moment of
clarity that made him realise he needed to get out of there before…

Jefferson swallowed. He forced his panic down and away. Before what? This was all just strange to him. What could the magic do to him or anyone else?

“On dis night … when men die for their belief… we ask the Old Ones to protect’ this house…” Carly repeated. “Destroy all those who enter dat do not belong here.”

Carly slipped back into the strange tongue once more and the gathering raised their voices in a rehearsed response, not unlike the Christian chants that Jefferson had endured when he was a slave on the Beaugard Plantation.

Jefferson felt as though the words had pierced him. Whatever magic Carly was summoning – and he couldn’t help but wonder how it was even possible after years of deliberate atheism – was presumably dangerous to any and all intruders, himself included.

Once more he began to wonder if he should leave before things went too far. He felt a real and genuine terror, though, that froze him in his hiding place while he watched the woman he loved.

The chanting suddenly stopped. A sense of anticipation rippled through the room. Jefferson could smell it, taste it, almost like the sexual energy he could sense in the basement.

“Bring in the sacrifice,” Carly said.

A young white girl, face heavily painted, was brought in from a side room that led off from the ballroom. She was subdued, but afraid. Her thin arms trembled as she was brought before Carly.

Jefferson knew about forfeits from Isaac. Other than the death of a chicken – which Isaac had explained fulfilled the magic’s need for life energy – the voodoo priest did not condone the taking of
human life.
This
, he had said,
was black magic and it had no place in the rituals of good men
. Jefferson realised that this girl was, in fact, the equivalent of Isaac’s chicken. Jefferson didn’t know what to do. He had no responsibility to anyone but Carly. He couldn’t risk being discovered for some white whore who meant nothing to him.

The girl was forced to lie down on the floor. The robe she was wearing was pulled open, and Jefferson could see that she was completely naked underneath. He wondered how she had come to be in the hands of these people. She seemed so young and he suddenly he wasn’t convinced that she was the whore she was made-up to
be, either. What if she were just some poor innocent who had been taken by these mad men? And how could Carly be involved with this?

Carly walked towards the girl. Now she was holding a dagger which glinted in the light from the chandeliers.

“You know what you have to do?” said Carly looking down at the girl.

Four men held her spread-eagled on the floor, each holding a wrist or an ankle.

The girl didn’t struggle, but from his vantage point Jefferson could see tears roll down the sides of her face into her blonde hair.

“Dis is my sacrifice to you, oh Great One!” Carly announced. “My own blood sister, given in tribute. Give me the power to free dis city. Give me the power to seek revenge on those that have used me.”

The girl squealed as Carly ran the sharp blade over her wrists, cutting viciously into the arteries.

Two more whores appeared with bowls. They placed them under the wrists of the girl and her captors twisted her arms viciously to ensure the blood seeped into the containers. Jefferson knew it wouldn’t take long before the girl bled out. He had been shocked to see Carly inflicting the wounds but had forced himself to remain still and unobserved. Jefferson had heard of Carly’s white sister. She had been close to her. Jefferson had even believed that Carly loved her. He couldn’t believe that she had now, effectively murdered her for some obscure power.

The men and women were disrobing and all stood before Carly in their naked glory. As the bowls filled, the girl’s captors let go of her arms and ankles and left her to bleed on the mosaic floor. Two of them brought the bowls over to the table and placed them before Carly. The knife was now lying beside the book, and Carly turned the page with a blood-stained hand. The blood stains disappeared as though the book was made of blotting paper and it had sucked in the blood.

Carly then dipped her fingers in the blood and began to perform a baptismal ceremony on the congregation. She daubed blood on the naked breasts of the women and smeared it on the erect penises of the men. When she had finished, she slipped the black dress she was wearing off her shoulders, dropping it down onto the floor.

Jefferson had never seen Carly naked before. He had wanted to marry her, have her as a wife and lover for life, not use her like a whore, even though he had thought she was no virgin: none of the slaves were, the overseers saw to that. Now he was fascinated with her beauty. The slender thighs, the full buttocks, the pert and round breasts that were so perfect he felt hypnotised by them. And so did, it seemed, everyone else in the room.

Jefferson began to think that this ritual was all some staged drama that would lead to sexual debauchery. It didn’t though. And there was no doubt that the girl on the floor was a genuine sacrifice. Even so, Jefferson felt drawn from his hiding place, towards the ballroom and Carly. Her striking nakedness was like a magnet whose pull he couldn’t resist.