Darkfall

  9

  Jack finished his brandy, put the glass on the coffee table, and said, “There’s a big hole in your explanation.”

  “And what’s that?” Hampton asked.

  “If Lavelle can’t harm me because I’m a righteous man, then why can he hurt my kids? They’re not wicked, for God’s sake. They’re not sinful little wretches. They’re damned good kids.”

  “In the view of the gods, children can’t be considered righteous; they’re simply innocent. Righteousness isn’t something we’re born with; it’s a state of grace we achieve only through years of virtuous living. We become righteous people by consciously choosing good over evil in thousands of situations in our day-to-day lives.”

  “Are you telling me that God—or all the benevolent gods, if you’d rather put it that way—protects the righteous but not the innocent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Innocent little children are vulnerable to this monster Lavelle, but I’m not? That’s outrageous, unfair, just plain wrong.”

  “You have an overly keen sense of injustice, both real and imagined. That’s because you’re a righteous man.”

  Now it was Jack who could no longer sit still. While Hampton slumped contentedly in an armchair, Jack paced in his bare feet. “Arguing with you is goddamned frustrating!”

  “This is my field, not yours. I’m a theologist, not legitimized by a degree from any university, but not merely an amateur, either. My mother and father were devout Roman Catholics. In finding my own beliefs, I studied every religion, major and minor, before becoming convinced of the truth and efficacy of voodoo. It’s the only creed that has always accommodated itself to other faiths; in fact, voodoo absorbs and uses elements from every religion with which it comes into contact. It is a synthesis of many doctrines that usually war against one another—everything from Christianity and Judaism to sun-worship and pantheism. I am a man of religion, Lieutenant, so it’s to be expected that I’ll tie you in knots on this subject.”

  “But what about Rebecca, my partner? She was bitten by one of these creatures, but she’s not, by God, a wicked or corrupt person.”

  “There are degrees of goodness, of purity. One can be a good person and not yet truly righteous, just as one can be righteous and not yet be a saint. I’ve met Miss Chandler only once, yesterday. But from what I saw of her, I suspect she keeps her distance from people, that she has, to some degree, withdrawn from life.”

  “She had a traumatic childhood. For a long time, she’s been afraid to let herself love anyone or form any strong attachments.”

  “There you have it,” Hampton said. “One can’t earn the favor of the Rada and be granted immunity to the powers of darkness if one withdraws from life and avoids a lot of those situations that call for a choice between good and evil, right and wrong. It is the making of those choices that enables you to achieve a state of grace.”

  Jack was standing at the hearth, warming himself in the heat of the gas fire—until the leaping flames suddenly reminded him of the goblins’ eye sockets. He turned away from the blaze. “Just supposing I am a righteous man, how does that help me find Lavelle?”

  “We must recite certain prayers,” Hampton said. “And there’s a purification ritual you must undergo. When you’ve done those things, the gods of Rada will show you the way to Lavelle.”

  “Then let’s not waste any more time. Come on. Let’s get started.”

  Hampton rose from his chair, a mountain of a man. “Don’t be too eager or too fearless. It’s best to proceed with caution.”

  Jack thought of Rebecca and the kids in the car, staying on the move to avoid being trapped by the goblins, and he said, “Does it matter whether I’m cautious or reckless? I mean, Lavelle can’t harm me.”

  “It’s true that the gods have provided you with protection from sorcery, from all the powers of darkness. Lavelle’s skill as a Bocor won’t be of any use to him. But that doesn’t mean you’re immortal. It doesn’t mean you’re immune to the dangers of this world. If Lavelle is willing to risk being caught for the crime, willing to risk standing trial, then he could still pick up a gun and blow your head off.”

  10

  Rebecca was on Fifth Avenue when the thumping and rattling in the car’s undercarriage began again. It was louder this time, loud enough to wake the kids. And it wasn’t just beneath them, any more; now, it was also coming from the front of the car, under the hood.

  Davey stood up in back, holding onto the front seat, and Penny sat up straight and blinked the sleep out of her eyes and said, “Hey, what’s that noise?”

  “I guess we’re having some sort of mechanical trouble,” Rebecca said, although the car was running well enough.

  “It’s the goblins,” Davey said in a voice that was half filled with terror and half with despair.

  “It can’t be them,” Rebecca said.

  Penny said, “They’re under the hood.”

  “No,” Rebecca said. “We’ve been moving around steadily since we left the garage. There’s no way they could have gotten into the car. No way.”

  “Then they were there even in the garage,” Penny said.

  “No. They’d have attacked us right there.”

  “Unless,” Penny said, “maybe they were afraid of Daddy.”

  “Afraid he could stop them,” Davey said.

  “Like he stopped the one that jumped on you,” Penny said to her brother, “the one outside Aunt Faye’s place.”

  “Yeah. So maybe the goblins figured to hang under the car and just wait till we were alone.”

  “Till Daddy wasn’t here to protect us.”

  Rebecca knew they were right. She didn’t want to admit it, but she knew.

  The clattering in the undercarriage and the thumping-rattling under the hood increased, became almost frantic.

  “They’re tearing things apart,” Penny said.

  “They’re gonna stop the car!” Davey said.

  “They’ll get in,” Penny said. “They’ll get in at us, and there’s no way to stop them.”

  “Stop it!” Rebecca said. “We’ll come out all right. They won’t get us.”

  On the dashboard, a red warning light came on. In the middle of it was the word OIL.

  The car had ceased to be a sanctuary.

  Now it was a trap.

  “They won’t get us. I swear they won’t,” Rebecca said again, but she said it as much to convince herself as to reassure the children.

  Their prospects for survival suddenly looked as bleak as the winter night around them.

  Ahead, through the sheeting snow, less than a block away, St. Patrick’s Cathedral rose out of the raging storm, like some great ship on a cold night sea. It was a massive structure, covering one entire city block.

  Rebecca wondered if voodoo devils would dare enter a church. Or were they like vampires in all the novels and movies? Did they shy away in terror and pain from the mere sight of a crucifix?

  Another red warning light came on. The engine was overheating.

  In spite of the two gleaming indicators on the instrument panel, she tramped on the accelerator, and the car surged forward. She angled across the lanes, toward the front of St. Patrick’s.

  The engine sputtered.

  The cathedral offered small hope. Perhaps false hope. But it was the only hope they had.

  II

  The ritual of purification required total immersion in water prepared by the Houngon.

  In Hampton’s bathroom, Jack undressed. He was more than a little surprised by his own new-found faith in these bizarre voodoo practices. He expected to feel ridiculous as the ceremony began, but he didn’t feel anything of the sort because he had seen those Hellborn creatures.

  The bathtub was unusually long and deep. It occupied more than half the bathroom. Hampton said he’d had it installed expressly for ceremonial baths.

  Chanting in an eerily breathless voice that sounded too delicate to be coming from a man of his size, reciting prayers
and petitions in a patois of French and English and various African tribal languages, Hampton used a bar of green soap—Jack thought it was Irish Spring—to draw vèvès all over the inside of the tub. Then he filled it with hot water. To the water, he added a number of substances and items that he had brought upstairs from his shop: dried rose petals; three bunches of parsley; seven vine leaves; one ounce of orgeat, which is a syrup made from almonds, sugar, and orange blossoms; powdered orchid petals; seven drops of perfume; seven polished stones in seven colors, each from the shore of a different body of water in Africa; three coins; seven ounces of seawater taken from within the territorial limits of Haiti; a pinch of gunpowder; a spoonful of salt; lemon oil; and several other materials.

  When Hampton told him that the time had come, Jack stepped into the pleasantly scented bath. The water was almost too hot to bear, but he bore it. With steam rising around him, he sat down, pushed the coins and stones and other hard objects out of his way, then slid onto his tailbone, until only his head remained above the waterline.

  Hampton chanted for a few seconds, then said, “Totally immerse yourself and count to thirty before coming up for air.”

  Jack closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and slid flat on his back, so that his entire body was submerged. He had counted only to ten when he began to feel a strange tingling from head to foot. Second by second, he felt somehow ... cleaner... not just in body but in mind and spirit, as well. Bad thoughts, fear, tension, anger, despair—all were leeched out of him by the specially treated water.

  He was getting ready to confront Lavelle.

  12

  The engine died.

  A snow bank loomed.

  Rebecca pumped the brakes. They were extremely soft, but they still worked. The car slid nose-first into the mounded snow, hitting with a thunk and a crunch, harder than she would have liked, but not hard enough to hurt anyone.

  Silence.

  They were in front of the main entrance to St. Patrick’s.

  Davey said, “Something’s inside the seat! It’s coming through!”

  “What?” Rebecca asked, baffled by his statement, turning to look at him.

  He was standing behind Penny’s seat, pressed against it, but facing the other way, looking at the backrest of the rear seat where he had been sitting just a short while ago. Rebecca squinted past him and saw movement under the upholstery. She heard an angry, muffled snarling, too.

  One of the goblins must have gotten into the trunk. It was chewing and clawing through the seat, burrowing toward the interior of the car.

  “Quick,” Rebecca said. “Come up here with us, Davey. We’ll all go out through Penny’s door, one after the other, real quick, and then straight into the church.”

  Making desperate wordless sounds, Davey climbed into the front seat, between Rebecca and Penny.

  At the same moment, Rebecca felt something pushing at the floorboards under her feet. A second goblin was tearing its way into the car from that direction.

  If there were only two of the beasts, and if both of them were busily engaged in boring holes into the car, they might not immediately realize that their prey was making a run for the cathedral. It was at least something to hope for; not much, but something.

  At a signal from Rebecca, Penny flung open the door and went out into the storm.

  Heart hammering, gasping in shock when the bitterly cold wind hit her, Penny scrambled out of the car, slipped on the snowy pavement, almost fell, windmilled her arms, and somehow kept her balance. She expected a goblin to rush out from beneath the car, expected to feel teeth sinking through one of her boots and into her ankle, but nothing like that happened. The streetlamps, shrouded and dimmed by the storm, cast an eerie light like that in a nightmare. Penny’s distorted shadow preceded her as she clambered up the ridge of snow that had been formed by passing plows. She struggled all the way to the top, panting, using her hands and knees and feet, getting snow in her face and under her gloves and inside her boots, and then she jumped down to the sidewalk, which was buried under a smooth blanket of virgin snow, and she headed toward the cathedral, never looking back, never, afraid of what she might see behind her, pursued (at least in her imagination) by all the monsters she had seen in the foyer of that brownstone apartment house earlier tonight. The cathedral steps were hidden under deep snow, but Penny grabbed the brass handrail and used it as a guide, stomped all the way up the steps, suddenly wondering if the doors would be unlocked at this late hour. Wasn’t a cathedral always open? If it was locked now, they were dead. She went to the center-most portal, gripped the handle, pulled, thought for a moment that it was locked, then realized it was just a very heavy door, seized the handle with both hands, pulled harder than before, opened the door, held it wide, turned, and finally looked back the way she’d come.

  Davey was two-thirds of the way up the steps, his breath puffing out of him in jets of frost-white steam. He looked so small and fragile. But he was going to make it.

  Rebecca came down off the ridge of snow at the curb, onto the sidewalk, stumbled, fell to her knees.

  Behind her, two goblins reached the top of the piled-up snow.

  Penny screamed. “They’re coming! Hurry!”

  When Rebecca fell to her knees, she heard Penny scream, and she got up at once, but she took only one step before the two goblins dashed past her, Jesus, as fast as the wind, a lizard-thing and a cat-thing, both of them screeching. They didn’t attack her, didn’t nip at her or hiss, didn’t even pause. They weren’t interested in her at all; they just wanted the kids.

  Davey was at the cathedral door now, standing with Penny, and both of them were shouting at Rebecca.

  The goblins reached the steps and climbed half of them in what seemed like a fraction of a second, but then they abruptly slowed, as if they had realized they were rushing toward a holy place, although that realization didn’t stop them altogether. They crept slowly and cautiously from step to step, sinking half out of sight in the snow.

  Rebecca yelled at Penny—“Get in the church and close the door!”—but Penny hesitated, apparently hoping that Rebecca would somehow make it past the goblins and get to safety herself, if the cathedral actually was safe, but even at their slower pace the goblins were almost to the top of the steps. Rebecca yelled again. And again Penny hesitated. Now, moving slower by the second, the goblins were within one step of the top, only a few feet away from Penny and Davey... and now they were at the top, and Rebecca was shouting frantically, and at last Penny pushed Davey into the cathedral. She followed her brother and stood just inside the door for a moment, holding it open, peering out. Moving slower still, but still moving, the goblins headed for the door. Rebecca wondered if maybe these creatures could enter a church when the door was held open for them, just as (according to legend) a vampire could enter a house only if invited or if someone held the door for him. It was probably crazy to think the same rules that supposedly governed mythical vampires would apply to these very real voodoo devils. Nevertheless, with new panic in her voice, Rebecca shouted at Penny again, and she ran halfway up the steps because she thought maybe the girl couldn’t hear her above the wind, and she screamed at the top of her voice, “Don’t worry about me! Close the door! Close the door!” And finally Penny closed it, although reluctantly, just as the goblins arrived at the threshold.

  The lizard-thing threw itself at the door, rebounded from it, and rolled onto its feet again.

  The cat-thing wailed angrily.

  Both creatures scratched at the portal, but neither of them showed any determination, as if they knew that, for them, this was too great a task. Opening a cathedral door—opening the door to any holy place—required far greater power than they possessed.

  Frustrated, they turned away from the door. Looked at Rebecca. Their fiery eyes seemed brighter than the eyes of the other creatures she had seen at the Jamisons’ and in the foyer of that brownstone apartment house.

  She backed down one step.

  The gobl
ins started toward her.

  She descended all the other steps, stopping only when she reached the sidewalk.

  The lizard-thing and the cat-thing stood at the top of the steps, glaring at her.

  Torrents of wind and snow raced along Fifth Avenue, and the snow was falling so heavily that it almost seemed she would drown in it as surely as she would have drowned in an onrushing flood.

  The goblins descended one step.

  Rebecca backed up until she encountered the ridge of snow at the curb.

  The goblins descended a second step, a third.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I

  The bath of purification lasted only two minutes. Jack dried himself on three small, soft, highly absorbent towels which had strange runes embroidered in the corners; they were of a material not quite like anything he had ever seen before.

  When he had dressed, he followed Carver Hampton into the living room and, at the Houngon’s direction, stood in the center of the room, where the light was brightest.

  Hampton began a long chant, holding an asson over Jack’s head, then slowly moving it down the front of him, then around behind him and up along his spine to the top of his head once more.

  Hampton had explained that the asson—a gourd rattle made from a calabash plucked from a liana of a calebassier courant tree—was the symbol of office of the Houngon. The gourd’s natural shape provided a convenient handle. Once hollowed out, the bulbous end was filled with eight stones in eight colors because that number represented the concept of eternity and life everlasting. The vertebrae of snakes were included with the stones, for they were symbolic of the bones of ancient ancestors who, now in the spirit world, might be called upon for help. The asson was also ringed with brightly colored porcelain beads. The beads, stones, and snake vertebrae produced an unusual but not unpleasant sound.

  Hampton shook the rattle over Jack’s head, then in front of his face. For almost a minute, singing hypnotically in some long-dead African language, he shook the asson over Jack’s heart. He used it to draw figures in the air over each of Jack’s hands and over each of his feet.