Dexter in the Dark (32 page)

“Well, actually, it has,” I said.

“I think you’ll find that the new church is quite a good fit for the modern world. The central truth of God’s love doesn’t change,” he said. “But sometimes our understanding of it can.” And then he actually winked at me. “I think we can agree that demons are for Halloween, not for Sunday service.”

Well, it was nice to have an answer, even if it wasn’t the one I was looking for. I hadn’t really expected Reverend Gilles to pull out a grimoire and cast a spell, but I admit it was a little disappointing. “All right, then,” I said.

“Any other questions?” he asked me with a very satisfied smile. “About our church, or anything about the ceremony?”

“Why, no,” I said. “It seems very straightforward.”

“We like to think so,” he said. “As long as we put Christ first, everything else falls into place.”

“Amen,” I said brightly. Rita gave me a bit of a look, but the reverend seemed to accept it.

“All right, then,” he said, and he stood up and held out his hand, “June twenty-fourth it is.” I stood up, too, and shook his hand. “But I expect to see you here before then,” he said. “We have a great contemporary service at ten o’clock every Sunday.” He winked and gave my hand an extra-manly squeeze. “Gets you home in time for the football game.”

“That’s terrific,” I said, thinking how nice it is when a business anticipates the needs of its customers.

He dropped my hand and grabbed Rita, wrapping her up in a full embrace. “Rita,” he said. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Thank you,” Rita sobbed into his shoulder. She leaned against him for a moment longer and snuffled, and then stood upright again, rubbing her nose and looking at me. “Thank you, Dexter,” she said. For what I don’t know, but it’s always nice to be included.

TWENTY-NINE

F
OR THE FIRST TIME IN QUITE A WHILE
I
WAS ACTUALLY
anxious to get back to my cubicle. Not because I was pining for blood spatter—but because of the idea that had descended on me in Reverend Gilles’s study. Demonic possession. It had a certain ring to it. I had never really felt possessed, although Rita was certainly staking her claim. But it was at least some kind of explanation with a degree of history attached, and I was very eager to pursue it.

First I checked my answering machine and e-mail: no messages except a routine departmental memo on cleaning up the coffee area. No abject apology from Debs, either. I made a few careful calls and found that she was out trying to round up Kurt Wagner, which was a relief, since it meant she wasn’t following me.

Problem solved and conscience clear, I began looking into the question of demonic possession. Once again, good old King Solomon figured prominently. He had apparently been quite cozy with a number of demons, most of whom had improbable names with several
z
’s in them. And he had ordered them about like indentured servants, forcing them to fetch and tote and build his great temple, which was a bit of a shock, since I had always heard that the temple was a good thing, and surely there must have been some kind of law in place about demon labor. I mean, if we get so upset about illegal immigrants picking the oranges, shouldn’t all those God-fearing patriarchs have had some kind of ordinance against demons?

But there it was in black and white. King Solomon had consorted with them quite comfortably, as their boss. They didn’t like being ordered around, of course, but they put up with it from him. And that raised the interesting thought that perhaps someone else was able to control them, and was trying to do so with the Dark Passenger, who had therefore fled from involuntary servitude. I paused and thought about that.

The biggest problem with that theory was that it did not fit in with the overwhelming sense of mortal danger that had flooded through me from the very first, even when the Passenger had still been on board. I can understand reluctance to do unwanted work as easily as the next guy, but that had nothing to do with the lethal dread that this had raised in me.

Did that mean the Passenger was not a demon? Did it mean that what was happening to me was mere psychosis? A totally imagined paranoid fantasy of pursuing bloodlust and approaching horror?

And yet, every culture in the world throughout history seemed to believe that there was something to the whole idea of possession. I just couldn’t get it to connect in any way to my problem. I felt like I was onto something, but no great thought emerged.

Suddenly it was five thirty, and I was more than usually anxious to flee from the office and head for the dubious sanctuary of home.

The next afternoon I was in my cubicle, typing up a report on a very dull multiple killing. Even Miami gets ordinary murders, and this was one of them—or three and a half of them, to be precise, since there were three bodies in the morgue and one more in intensive care at Jackson Memorial. It was a simple drive-by shooting in one of the few areas of the city with low property values. There was really no point in spending a great deal of my time on it, since there were plenty of witnesses and they all agreed that someone named “Motherfucker” had done the deed.

Still, forms must be observed, and I had spent half a day on the scene making sure that no one had jumped out of a doorway and hacked the victims with a hedge clipper while they were being shot from a passing car. I was trying to think of an interesting way to say that the blood spatter was consistent with gunfire from a moving source, but the boredom of it all was making my eyes cross, and as I stared vacantly at the screen, I felt a ringing rise in my ears and change to the clang of gongs and the night music came again, and the plain white of the word-processing page seemed suddenly to wash over with awful wet blood and spill out across me, flood the office, and fill the entire visible world. I jumped out of my chair and blinked a few times until it went away, but it left me shaking and wondering what had just happened.

It was starting to come at me in the full light of day, even sitting at my desk at police headquarters, and I did not like that at all. Either it was getting stronger and closer, or I was going right off the deep end and into complete madness. Schizophrenics heard voices—did they ever hear music, too? And did the Dark Passenger qualify as a voice? Had I been completely insane all this time and was just now coming to some kind of crazy final episode in the artificial sanity of Dubious Dexter?

I didn’t think that was possible. Harry had gotten me squared away, made sure that I fit in just right—Harry would have known if I was crazy, and he had told me I was not. Harry was never wrong. So it was settled and I was fine, just fine, thank you.

So why did I hear that music? Why was my hand shaking? And why did I need to cling to a ghost to keep from sitting on the floor and flipping my lips with an index finger?

Clearly no one else in the building heard anything—it was just me. Otherwise the halls would be filled with people either dancing or screaming. No, fear had crawled into my life, slinking after me faster than I could run, filling the huge empty space inside me where the Passenger had once snuggled down.

I had nothing to go on; I needed some outside information if I hoped to understand this. Plenty of sources believed that demons were real—Miami was filled with people who worked hard to keep them away every day of their lives. And even though the
babalao
had said he wanted nothing to do with this whole thing, and had walked away from it as rapidly as he could, he had seemed to know what it was. I was fairly sure that Santeria allowed for possession. But never mind: Miami is a wonderful and diverse city, and I would certainly find some other place to ask the question and get an entirely different answer—perhaps even the one I was looking for. I left my cubicle and headed for the parking lot.

The Tree of Life was on the edge of Liberty City, an area of Miami that is not a good place for tourists from Iowa to visit late at night. This particular corner had been taken over by Haitian immigrants, and many of the buildings had been painted in several bright colors, as if there was not enough of one color to go around. On some of the buildings there were murals depicting Haitian country life. Roosters seemed to be prominent, and goats.

Painted on the outside wall of the Tree of Life there was a large tree, appropriately enough, and under it was an elongated image of two men pounding on some tall drums. I parked right in front of the shop and went in through a screen door that rang a small bell and then banged behind me. In the back, behind a curtain of hanging beads, a woman’s voice called out something in Creole, and I stood by the glass counter and waited. The store was lined with shelves that contained numerous jars filled with mysterious things, liquid, solid, and uncertain. One or two of them seemed to be holding things that might once have been alive.

After a moment, a woman pushed through the beads and came into the front of the store. She appeared to be about forty and reed thin, with high cheekbones and a complexion like sun-bleached mahogany. She wore a flowing red-and-yellow dress, and her head was wrapped in a matching turban. “Ah,” she said with a thick Creole accent. She looked me over with a very doubtful expression and shook her head slightly. “How I can help you, sir?”

“Ah, well,” I said, and I more or less stumbled to a halt. How, after all, did one begin? I couldn’t really say that I thought I used to be possessed and wanted to get the demon back—the poor woman might throw chicken blood at me.

“Sir?” she prompted impatiently.

“I was wondering,” I said, which was true enough, “do you have any books on possession by demons? Er—in English?”

She pursed her lips with great disapproval and shook her head vigorously. “It is not the demons,” she said. “Why do you ask this—are you a reporter?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just, um, interested. Curious.”

“Curious about the
voudoun
?” she said.

“Just the possession part,” I said.

“Huh,” she said, and if possible her disapproval grew even more. “Why?”

Someone very clever must already have said that when all else fails, try the truth. It sounded so good that I was sure I was not the first to think of it, and it seemed like the only thing I had left. I gave it a shot.

“I think,” I said, “I mean, I’m not sure. I think I may have been possessed. A while ago.”

“Ha,” she said. She looked at me long and hard, and then shrugged. “May be,” she said at last. “Why do you say so?”

“I just, um…I had the feeling, you know. That something else was, ah. Inside me? Watching?”

She spat on the floor, a very strange gesture from such an elegant woman, and shook her head. “All you blancs,” she said. “You steal us and bring us here, take everythin’ from us. And then when we make somethin’ from the nothin’ you give us, now you want to be part of that, too. Ha.” She shook her finger at me, for all the world like a second-grade teacher with a bad student. “You listen, blanc. If the spirit enters you, you would know. This is not somethin’ like in a movie. It is a very great blessing, and,” she said with a mean smirk, “it does not happen to the blancs.”

“Well, actually,” I said.

“Non,” she said. “Unless you are willing, unless you ask for the blessing, it does not come.”

“But I
am
willing,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “It never come to you. You waste my time.” And she turned around and walked through the bead curtains to the back of the store.

I saw no point in waiting around for her to have a change of heart. It didn’t seem likely to happen—and it didn’t seem likely that voodoo had any answers about the Dark Passenger. She had said it only comes when called, and it was a blessing. At least that was a different answer, although I did not remember ever calling the Dark Passenger to come in—it was just always there. But to be absolutely sure, I paused at the curb outside the store and closed my eyes.
Please come back in,
I said.

Nothing happened. I got in my car and went back to work.