Charming (33 page)

C
hoo’s basement was a concrete room half again as large as the house above it, with thick metal poles spaced eight feet apart to help support the weight of the upper level. There were no rugs or pictures or tattered sofas or old TV sets because these weren’t things you’d find in an army surplus store.

The left half of the basement was a series of aisles formed by crates, duffel bags, boxes, and footlockers. What was at least a two-year supply of MREs (meals ready to eat) was stacked against the west wall almost to the ceiling, and I spotted three flamethrower units and seven grenades laid out on a plaid blanket like a picnic in hell. The smell of cordite and grease was strong in the air, and umbrella stands full of machetes were strategically spread out over the room.

The right half of the room was a small-scale machinist’s shop full of industrial drill presses, band saws, sanders, vises, acetylene torches, and a big-ass smelting furnace.

At half an hour early, I was the first one there. It was a little awkward initially. Choo offered me a beer, which I declined, and he didn’t have any cute little sandwiches or polite conversation
on hand. It didn’t take long, though, for us to start talking about weapons.

“These are the guns we’ll be using.” Choo indicated ten handguns laid out side by side on a long aluminum folding table covered by a blue cloth. Each one had four magazines and a suppressor spread out beneath it. “These are Glock 31s, .357 SIGs. The magazines hold ten rounds. Hollow points.”

I nodded. Hollow points got their name from having a small pit hollowed out of the center of a bullet tip. Notches are made at the opening of the pit, which causes the tips of the bullets to fold back like a banana peel when they hit the target, instead of being compressed inward. This increases the size of the hole the bullet makes as it spreads into lead petals like a blossoming flower while tearing through a person. It also slows the bullet down once it’s past the skin, making it less likely that the bullet will exit cleanly through the body.

I picked up one of the Glock magazines and ran my fingers over the small holes in its side (these are called
witness holes
and allow gun owners to visually confirm their bullet count). Then I smelled my fingers just to verify where the smell I’d picked up was coming from.

“Verbena,” I said. “Nice.”

Verbena is an herb that is the floral version of holy water. According to legend it was the herb they packed in Christ’s wounds after he was stabbed with a spear—which may or may not be true. Verbena was considered a holy herb long before Christ came around—Greeks and Romans used to brush their altars off with it—and the medieval church might have made up that cross story because it liked to try putting new Christian spins on old pagan traditions that refused to die out. That’s how Yuletide became Christ-mass and then Christmas, after all.

Either way, it’s possible to soak bullets in a distillation of
verbena the same way Italian mobsters used to soak their bullets in garlic, but you want to take some precautions to make sure the bullets don’t become sticky and more likely to jam. Spray some PAM in with the water while the verbena is boiling, disassemble your gun, polish everything with a product called Gun Scrubber, and don’t buy cheap bulk federal ammo.

The resulting bullets still won’t kill a vampire, but the vampire’s body won’t push the bullets out because the tissue right next to them won’t heal. Instead, the entry wounds will seal behind the bullets, and the vampire will be left with these hunks of metal burning like a bitch inside it. You can disable a vampire with the bullets if you shatter a knee or an elbow, and if you lodge one of these bullets in a vampire’s heart or brain, it will cause the vampire’s system to shut down. It will be unconscious until the bullet is removed or the potency of the verbena fades or its organs evolve a way to work around the wounded area, all of which can take anywhere from hours to days.

“I never even heard of verbena until Dvornik told me about it,” Choo confessed.

“Most people haven’t,” I said. “A lot of vampire lore never made it to the big screen. I saw an episode of some TV show about vampires that called it vervain.”

Choo walked down the table and pointed out six steam canisters like the ones he had used at Steve Ellison’s house. “Thanks to Molly, these are full of compressed holy water again.”

I whistled appreciatively. “Will open tunnels make those things more or less effective?” I asked.

“I’m thinking they’ll fill up about twenty feet worth of tunnel with steam before punking out,” Choo said. “Throw one in front of a vampire and you’ll buy yourself a little time. Throw one behind a vampire, and you should drive it toward you.”

“Good,” I said.

Choo grunted. “Better you than me.”

“Got anything else?” I asked.

He showed me eight WASP Knives full of vaporized and compressed holy water and seemed a little hurt by my tight-lipped reaction.

“Anything else?” I repeated.

He scratched his head. “Got some magnesium flares, some riot shields and body armor with crosses painted on them in glow-in-the-dark paint, some wooden escrima sticks with sharpened points, stuff like that. Got a sonic emitter that I can’t use because it’ll hurt you more than the vampires, and those meditation tapes you gave me work better anyway. We can’t use anything with too big of a bang down there either, or we might bring the tunnel down.”

“Here’s the thing I don’t get, Choo.” I gestured at the stuff all around us. “How did you become like that Q guy in the James Bond movies for Sig and Dvornik? This place looks like an ATF raid waiting to happen.”

Choo’s smile was a wince that was trying to be polite. “I used to be a supply sergeant in the army. I still have some old connections.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” I said.

He fiddled with some wooden daggers that were carved in the shape of Philippine throwing knives and basically useless to him—vampire reflexes are way too fast for anything thrown by a normal human to be effective against them. “After a few years in the army, all I wanted was to be my own boss.” He looked at me to make sure I was keeping up. “Exterminating houses seemed like a good way to make decent money when I got out. A lot less trouble and risk than starting a restaurant and less training than you’d need to be an electrician or a plumber, or at least I thought so at the time.”

“Makes sense,” I said neutrally.

“So anyways, I’d been exterminating for a year abouts when I got this job. Some couple was trying to sell a house that had been vacant for a couple of years, and they wanted me to get rid of anything strange in it. That’s how they put it… anything strange.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

He snorted. “Now you got to understand, vermin have never much bothered me. It’s not because I grew up in the projects either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I know you grew up around here,” I said.

“You can smell that too?” he demanded.

I tapped my right ear. “I’m good with accents.”

He grimaced and went on with his story, if that’s what it was. “The one pest that does kind of get to me, though, is ants. My momma used to love to talk about Africa when I was a kid. She was always reading me African children’s stories about Anansi and the Masai and about all the different kinds of animals and shit. She was a real good storyteller.”

I laughed. “She told you about killer ants, didn’t she?”

Choo gave me a grin that was both affectionate and chagrined, but it was aimed at his mother, not me. “Oh yeah. She called them
hordes
. Man-eating ant hordes. In Africa millions and millions of them will come boiling out of the ground all at once and nobody knows why. They’ll march together for miles and miles eating everything in their path, so thick on the ground and trees you can’t see anything else. And Momma would describe how these stampeding elephants and zebras and giraffes and such would get trapped between the river and these ants and how the ants would strip them down to their bones in seconds.”

“Nice,” I said.

“I don’t know how old I was… three maybe, or four.” Choo held up his thumb and index finger. “But when I was an itty-bitty, I used to stomp on any ant I could see. I guess I figured I was keeping them from building up.”

I wondered if that was why he’d been drawn to the idea of being an exterminator. It’s weird, the seeds that get planted in our youth without our ever realizing it at the time.

“And one day, my friend and I found this mound of dirt and there were some ants on it. Red ants. Big red ants. I’d never seen an anthill before, and nobody had ever explained them to me. So I stomped on the ants.”

Choo laughed ruefully. “Next thing I know, I’ve got ants crawling all up my shoes and legs. I couldn’t move. I just stood there looking at them, watching them crawl all over and up me, and I really thought I’d kicked open some door to some ant horde. Then they started biting me, and I wasn’t paralyzed no more.

“Ants were stinging and my friend was screaming at me, and I’m running my ass off slapping at myself while I run, but I wasn’t going to stop and take off my pants for nothing. It wasn’t because I was embarrassed either. I knew I had to get as far away from that hole in the ground as I could. By the time I made it home I was about half crazy and covered with ant bites.”

“That would do it,” I agreed.

Choo stopped to make sure I was still with him. “So I go to this house to spray it, and the place has already got this bad feeling. You ever walk into a house and just felt something bad about it? Like you just know serious things have been happening there?”

He laughed before I had a chance to respond. “Forgot who I was talking to. Well, this house is putting off the strongest bad vibe I ever felt in my life. It’s empty, but it don’t feel like it’s empty, you feel me? I just know I’m being watched. I know it.”

Choo rubbed his eyes. “So I finally go down to the basement? And you know what I see?”

Ants, obviously, but he needed to say it. “What?” I asked.

“I see at least a couple thousand ants on the wall,” Choo told me. “And they’re spelling the words
GO AWAY
.”

“It wasn’t a coincidence—the fact that it was ants, I mean.” I remembered what Sig and Molly had told me. “Whatever was in that house, it was one of those geists that can get inside your head.” My geas protects me from that kind of mind-messing, but from what I hear, the beings that can peel back your psyche like a fruit and take a bite out of it are the worst of the worst. Maybe the ants were a hallucination, or maybe the geist could summon and direct organisms with low intelligence.

Choo laughed. “I used to watch these clips of black comedians talking about how there was a reason movies about haunted houses always had white people in them. I think Richard Pryor was the first one—he said that if a black man ever walked into a house and heard a demon voice say, ‘Get out!’ he’d say, ‘OK,’ and that would be the end of the movie.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I couldn’t move. It was like standing on that anthill all over again,” Choo said. “Knowing I’d kicked over something a lot bigger than I ever wanted to. I just stood there and stared until the ants started to move toward me.”

Choo cackled. “Then I moved. I ran like hell until I got back to my van, and then I drove like hell.”

“But that wasn’t the end of the movie,” I said.

“Naw, it wasn’t,” Choo said, shaking his head. “I went back. To this day I couldn’t tell you why.”

“Is that when you got in touch with Molly?” I asked.

He nodded. “I wish I hadn’t. That thing… whatever it was… it used to be a little girl who got abused. And then it
became a grown-up who did its own abusing. And then it killed its own children when the eldest got too old to control and then it committed suicide.”

“It showed you all that?” I said.

Choo abruptly left and went upstairs. I waited. When he came down again he was holding a beer. He picked up right where he’d left off as if nothing had happened, staring stonily at the empty air in front of him without looking at me. “It didn’t show me all that. It made me live all that. I felt things that I would never feel… but they were my feelings because I was the one feeling them and that’s the thing I can’t get past.”

He took a long pull on the bottle of Heineken. His hand was shaking. “That dead bitch violated me. She wore me like a suit. There just isn’t no other way to put it.”

I didn’t have anything to say.

“Do you know how Molly finally got rid of it?” he asked finally.

“No,” I said.

“She said she forgave it, whatever that means.” Choo seemed angry and bemused at the same time. “Can you believe that shit? That thing put Molly in therapy, and she says she forgave it to death.”

I started to say something, hesitated, then decided to hell with it. There was a part of me that wanted to express some of the emotions still roiling around from my own recent experience in this area, and he had a right to know. “Not all exorcisms are acts of aggression. You know, ‘Begone evil spirit, I compel you!’ and that kind of thing. Some of them are acts of kindness.”

Choo’s head tilted down and his mouth tightened. He wasn’t buying it.

Well, I wasn’t selling it either. He could take my words any way he wanted. “See, sentient geists are rare. The reason that
most of their psyche is intact is that the messed-up part of them that is anchoring them to this earth was the major part of their personality. Their lives were completely screwed up and miserable, and they’re angry and lashing out like wounded animals. It doesn’t matter how forcefully you say the words, or fan the holy smoke, or scatter the ashes from the sacred fire, or dance the dance of your ancestors or whatever the hell you’re doing; most rites and ceremonies are about connecting that lost spirit directly to a higher power that it should have been joining in the first place. It’s like you’re plugging something into a light socket. You wouldn’t be able to survive tapping into the light socket either, so you have to use tools and steps to insulate yourself. Except instead of electricity, we’re talking about a source of pure unconditional love.”