Hell Rig (25 page)

She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t know.” She paused. “Maybe…maybe I’m here to end this horror,” she answered with more certainty. She stood and examined her work. She moved a few candles around. “I guess I’m ready.”

Lisa held out her hand. Jeff handed her the Southern Comfort. When their hands touched, he held on for a few seconds and rubbed a finger over the back of her hand before releasing it. She smiled and took the whiskey. Taking a long gulp, she winced at the taste and finished the bottle. Next, she lit the candles, chanting softly as each candle flickered to life. The room took on a ruddy glow as the candles ignited the Sterno. Jeff sat down in a chair as Lisa turned on the I-pod and began swaying to the drumbeat. Her lips moved but he could not hear the words she spoke.

As the music became more frenzied so did her movements. She clasped the Papa Legbe charm with both hands. Her Erzulie Danto medallion was still hanging over the outer door as protection from the fog. She danced around the room, twisting and turning seductively, ignoring Jeff completely. Her closed eyes seeing something beyond the confines of the room. Her hands reached out to it, drew it toward her as one beckons an old friend.

Suddenly, she froze in place and began to tremble. Her eyes snapped opened, revealing only the white of her corneas—a lusterless dead, fish belly white.

Jeff half rose from his chair and called out to her in concern, “Lisa?”

She turned toward him, seeing him somehow with those dead eyes. She shook her head to silence him. He sat back down but still held onto the chair arms tightly. The candles began to smoke heavily, a dense dark, charcoal gray smoke, and the room grew darker and colder. Light, a pallid ghost light, filled the room from an unseen source. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure emerge from the shadows as if stepping through an open doorway, a tall black man in a black suit, top hat, dark glasses and a smoking cigarette dangling from his thin, pale lips. He smiled, showing two gold upper teeth.

“Greetings,” he said, staring at Jeff.

* * * *

Lisa gasped as the shadows parted, revealing a man. “Baron Samedi,” Lisa called out to him.

“You called and I came,” he said in a deep baritone voice. “What is your need?”

“This place,” she began. “It is controlled by something evil. To fight it, I must know what it is.”

He laughed and the walls shook. “Fight it? You cannot fight the wind. You cannot stop the sea or seize the thunder, girl.”

“This place is possessed by something dark and evil. Reveal to me what it is?” she pleaded.

His face became stern. “I am forbidden,” he said.

She noticed that although he knocked the ashes off his cigarette, it did not grow shorter but remained the same length. “Someone must talk to me, tell me.”

“You whine like a child and a child you are. ‘Tell me’, you say. You could not understand the powers at play here even if I did tell you. Forces are at work here, girl, dark evil forces.”

“In the name of my Granny Iris, I implore you.”

Baron Samedi sighed. He raised a single, skeletal finger and smiled. “Very well.”

The room swirled, disappeared and changed into a dark tunnel lit by flickering torches. Lisa drew in her breath in surprise. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.

“What is it?” Jeff asked.

She turned to stare at him. “He brought you too. Why?”

“Where are we?” He reached out and touched a clammy, damp stone wall.

“The gateway between worlds, I think, but it looks like catacombs, ancient tombs.”

“Why tombs?”

Lisa laughed. It was a short harsh burst. “For my benefit, I believe.” She did not reveal to him her horror of graves and the dead. She removed a torch from a cobwebbed sconce and began to walk. Jeff took the next torch they came to. They passed several niches in the walls. Most were empty but a few contained partial skeletons and skulls, eyeless sockets followed their every move. The air was heavy with the stench of death, both ancient and recent. Their footsteps echoed loudly.

Small sounds, like claws on stone came at them from the darkness. As they stopped to listen, the sound grew louder.

“What’s that?” Jeff asked.

Lisa cocked her head to one side, listening. “There is a junction ahead,” she said. “Maybe we can get our bearings.” She began to run toward it.

Jeff remained listening to the sound.

“Hurry,” she coaxed him.

They had taken only a few steps when the first wave of rats scurried from the right hand junction and rushed toward them, a furry mass jostling and tumbling over each other in their haste.

“Rats!” Lisa screamed.

She glanced behind but knew they could never outrun the rush of rodents, even if there was a place to run to.

“Oh, my God,” she moaned as realization hit her that she must confront her fear. “I hate rats.”

As the first rats swarmed around her feet, she wrapped her arms around Jeff and closed her eyes in a vain attempt to ignore the damp, furry mass scrambling around her. Jeff picked her up in both arms like a child and held her above the swarm. After a few minutes, the sound of chattering and scraping receded down the corridor. The rats had not molested them.

She opened her eyes and saw they were gone. She let out her breath and turned to face Jeff. “Thanks,” she said.

He smiled as he set her down on her feet. “Where are we going?”

“The Gateway,” she answered. She knew somehow they were going in the right direction.

“Then what?”

She looked at him. Grim determination filled her eyes, but also a hint of fear lurking just beneath the surface. “To the Land of the Dead. The dead know everything.”

“This Baron Samedi, he won’t tell you what you want to know.”

“He might, but you can never tell what is truth and what is half-truth. He likes his little jokes. The dead have no such lust for mirth. They speak the truth, always.”

“Won’t this force try to stop us?”

“I hope the laws of life and death are still intact. If so, he cannot harm us here, only frighten us.”

“And if they’re not?”

“We might never leave this place.”

Jeff snorted. “Gee, glad I came.”

“I didn’t expect you to come. Baron Samedi must have a reason for wanting you here.”

“Yeah, like maybe he’s working for the Digger Man and wants to get rid of both of us at the same time.”

“Digger Man. Digger Man,” echoed down the corridor in voices other than his own, followed by a reverberating chorus of laughter.

Jeff stopped in his tracks. “I don’t like this,” he said in a nervous voice.

“We have no choice,” Lisa reminded him. “We can’t go back now.”

As they neared the second corridor, the stench of death grew stronger and sounds like the rattling of chains and stifled screams drifted down the passageway. An eerie red light made the torches unnecessary, but Jeff and Lisa both held onto them.

Sitting in a wooden rocker was an old black man, his shiny bald head beaded with perspiration. He fanned himself with an old cardboard fan, the kind provided by funeral parlors. The writing on it read ‘Napoleon Suskind, Mortician’. In his other hand, he held a bottle of Hires root beer with a bent soda straw stuck in it. He looked at them, smiled and took a sip. Like the Baron’s cigarette, the level in the bottle did not drop. The faded wooden rocker creaked as he rocked forward and back. To Lisa, it was the sound of snapping bones.

“Hot as Hades, isn’t it,” he remarked and laughed loudly, slapping his knee with the hand holding the fan.

When neither responded, he shrugged.

“Sometimes a little humor helps break the tension. I am Papa Legbe.”

Jeff looked at Lisa with a question in his eyes.

“He guards the gates to hell. He’s like Baron Samedi’s boss.”

Papa Legbe laughed again. “Don’t tell him that. He thinks he runs the place. I just sit here mostly and remember old times. Sometimes I’m called upon to make a decision, but mostly I just sit and rock.” He sounded wistful, as though bored with his lot in life, or death, as it may be.

“We need you,” Lisa said.

“Yes, I suppose you do,” he said, nodding his head. “It seems the balance between life and death has been tilted slightly askew. The Gateway stands ajar. Things long dead reach through and grab onto the living, trying to pull themselves back into the world. Some are very powerful and they have breached the Gateway. You came to stop them?”

“I came for answers.”

He stopped rocking. “Answers are dangerous things. Even questions can be dangerous at times. From whom do you seek your answers?”

“You.”

He smiled. “I cannot answer you. I am forbidden to take sides. I merely guard the Gateway.”

“Yet the Gateway is open.”

“Nevertheless,” he answered. “I guard it still.”

“Oh!” she said and stamped her feet. “You’re useless.”

He looked at her with pity in his eyes. “Seek answers from someone who tells the truth.”

“The dead speak the truth,” she said, calming down. Was he trying to help?

He nodded and resumed rocking and fanning. “If they speak at all. Some refuse to meddle in the affairs of the living.”

“Then I need to speak to someone with whom life and death are no mystery.”

“A
mambo
? You wish to question a
mambo
?” He stopped rocking again and raised his eyebrows. “Those who have mastered the Vodun arts reside in a special place here, neither alive nor dead. They await Judgment Day.”

Lisa thought of her grandmother. She drew in her breath sharply.

“My grandmother was not evil,” she challenged. “Why should she await Judgment Day here in this dark place?”

The old man smiled. “Evil can arise from good intentions as well as bad. To deal in the Vodun arts places great responsibility on one’s shoulders.” He sighed. “I should know.”

“I must see my grandmother.”

Papa Legbe nodded. He pointed down the corridor with the fan. “You may pass.”

As he spoke, he and his chair receded into the distance until lost in the shadows. She felt no sense of motion yet knew she was traveling great distances in both time and space. The torches flashed by rapidly, firefly specks in a spring night.

At last, they slowed. It was a wider room, circular with many small corridors or rooms in the partially hidden walls. A single brazier burned in the center of the room casting its feeble light to the edges of the room but no further. She could hear noises in the darkness—sighs, prayers, weeping. She felt great sorrow around her, welling like water from the walls and floor.

“Where are we?” Jeff asked.

She shook her head, peering into the openings. A shadow moved.

“Why you here, child?” a voice filled with sorrow and regret asked from the shadows.

Lisa gasped. Her heart pounded madly in her chest. She placed her hand over it as if to keep it from leaping out. “Granny Iris?”

An old woman stepped from the shadows into the light, a fair-skinned mulatto. Her expression showed concern, unease.

“It’s me, Lisa!” Lisa cried out. She ran to the woman but Granny Iris backed up, disappearing into the shadows from which she had emerged. “Do not touch the dead, girl. Didn’t I teach you anything?”

“Oh, Granny,” Lisa sobbed, stopping short. “Why are you here?”

Granny Iris reappeared from the shadows across the room. “I’s got to be judged.”

“You were a good person. You helped people all your life.”

“Maybe so, but I’s got to be judged just the same.”

“How…how long?”

“Who knows girl. Maybe ‘til Gabriel blows his horn.” She slapped her knee and laughed.

“It’s not fair,” Lisa cried.

“Fair ain’t got nothin’ to do with it, girl. You dabble in the black arts and you got to pay the piper.” She looked at her granddaughter with sympathy. “You got troubles, girl?”

Lisa sighed. “Yes.” She began to relay what happened to them so far. Granny Iris raised her hand and stopped her.

“I know all about it, dear,” she said. She shook her head slowly and sighed. “I know.” She moved along the edge of the room and looked at Jeff.

“This here your man?” she asked.

Lisa blushed. “He’s my friend, Jeff Towns. He’s helping me.”

Granny Iris walked around Jeff, peering up at him, sniffing him. He stood still under her scrutiny. After she had made her circuit, she said, “He’s a good man. You chose well. If Baron Samedi let him come with you, he must have
ashe
.”

Jeff looked questioningly at Lisa.

“
Ashe
means power,” she told him,

He laughed. “Hardly.”

She shrugged. “Well, maybe so. The Baron likes his little jokes, but I sense something in you, boy, something good, and something powerful. You take care of my little Lisa, you hear?”

Jeff nodded.

“What can we do?” Lisa asked.