Rook & Tooth and Claw (8 page)

Uncle Umber went across to a small antique desk, pulled open the drawer, and rummaged around inside.
A few moments later, he reappeared, carrying a small linen bag tied with thin black string and sealed with black sealing-wax. He grinned, and held up the bag between finger and thumb, and shook it. “Do you know what this is? This is memory powder, the people in Dahomey used to call it
loa
powder, because they thought it was made by the lesser spirits, so that they could see Vodun.”

“Vodun?”

“That’s right, Mr Rook. Vodun, the greatest god in Dahomey Fon folk belief. It was after Vodun that voodoo was named.”

He held it out and Jim took it. He sniffed it, and it had the strangest smell, a smell that reminded him of dreams and drying grass and some long-lost flickering picture of his mother, turning around in front of a sunlit window to say—

He looked up, and Uncle Umber was smiling at him. “Memory powder,” said Uncle Umber. “But you never know if the memories are true; or if they’re false. I could give you a memory with memory powder, and even a lie-detector wouldn’t be able to show if you were telling the truth.”

“So what am I supposed to do with this?”

“It’s very easy, Mr Rook. All you have to do is to blow the powder over one of your students, and then tell him or her that – why, didn’t they see Tee Jay smoking behind the science block at the time when he was supposed to be stabbing his friend?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it, Mr Rook. The memory powder will do the rest.”

Jim offered him the bag back. “I can’t do anything like that, Mr Jones. All of my students are my own personal
responsibility. If any one of them should come to any harm—”

Uncle Umber flared his nostrils. “Don’t try to be pious with me, Mr Rook. You promised that you were going to be my friend. Unless you do this thing, your class will suffer a tragedy like nothing they have ever experienced before.”

“Listen, Mr Jones, if you touch any one of them—”

“You’ll do
what,
Mr Rook? You’ll kill me, and spend the rest of your life in jail? You said you came here for Tee Jay’s sake, didn’t you?
This
is for Tee Jay’s sake.”

Jim said, “If Tee Jay
wasn’t
smoking behind the science block, then where was he? If he didn’t have anything to do with Elvin’s death, then why do you have to cook up this cockamamie alibi?”

“You don’t understand. Tee Jay had to be there when Elvin died, to see.”

“You mean he
was
in the boiler-house, after all? He stood there and watched you cut Elvin to pieces? You’re sick, Mr Jones. You’re very, very sick.”

“I’m just keeping the lamps lit, Mr Rook. Far more terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity.”

Jim said, “Forget it. I’m not going to poison any of my students. No way.”

Uncle Umber gave him another grin. “Then try it on yourself first. Go home, and tell yourself one thing that never happened to you, and then sniff a pinch of the powder, and see what happens. It won’t kill you, I promise. It’s only made of roots and hair and ground-up bones. I wouldn’t hurt you, Mr Rook. Like I said to you before, I need a friend.”

Jim looked Uncle Umber in the eyes, trying to challenge him, trying to show him that he couldn’t
play with children’s lives. But there was no feeling at all in Uncle Umber’s eyes, nothing but cold-blooded indifference, that in the end he had to turn away.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it. But only for Tee Jay’s sake. And when Tee Jay’s free, I want you to send him home to his family, where he belongs.”

“Tee Jay will only go where he wants to go, Mr Rook. He’s an independent spirit.”

Jim had hardly been home five minutes when there was a knock on the door and Mrs Vaizey came in, wearing a wide floppy straw hat, a pink bikini with a lobster motif on it, and a white nylon cardigan. “Jim! I was hoping to catch you!”

He quickly opened one of the kitchen cupboards, took down the china jar in which he usually kept his snipped-out shopping premiums, and dropped the bag of memory powder into it. He didn’t want Mrs Vaizey to get wind of what he was doing. “How’re you doing, Mrs Vaizey? Haven’t run out of bourbon, have you?”

“No – no – nothing like that, sugar. I’ve been doing a little research today, on your behalf, and I’ve found out some
very
interesting things.”

“Oh, yes?” said Jim. He went to the fridge, took out a can of Coors and popped the top, noisily sucking up the froth.

“How long have you had that cheese?” asked Mrs Vaizey, peering into the dairy shelf. “It looks like it’s ready to run the 200 metres.”

“It’s gorgonzola, Mrs Vaizey. It’s supposed to look like that. Now what are these very interesting things you found out? I’m kind of bushed.”

“Oh, yes … well, I looked it up in
The Occult Review.
In the past ten years, there have been fifteen
recorded cases of people who claim that they have seen other people when nobody else can – just like you and your man in black.”

“Are these ghosts we’re talking about here?”

“Ohhh, no. Not ghosts. Not ghosts at all. Every one of those manifestations was the image of somebody who was actually living at the time. But here’s the interesting bit: they
all
emphatically denied being at the locations at the time they were seen.”

Jim thought of Uncle Umber, with his eye-witness evidence that he had been back at home when Elvin was killed. Jim had seen him at the college, and yet all the time he had been back at his apartment near Venice Boulevard. “So what’s your conclusion?” he asked Mrs Vaizey.

“I think my first hunch was absolutely right. The man you saw was having an out-of-body experience. His physical body was lying somewhere else, in a state of trance, while his spirit went out walking.”

“I saw him again this morning,” said Jim. “He came to the college and confronted me. He said he wanted me to be his friend.”

“Well, he would. Spirits have only limited powers, outside of the body; and out-of-body experiences are very taxing. If he were to stay out too long, his physical body would be at risk of a stroke or a heart-attack.”

“What I don’t understand is how he can be nothing but a spirit and at the same time be able to hurt people. He was floating on the goddamned ceiling, for God’s sake, and when I tried to push him he just wasn’t there. Yet he cut our security guard’s face, right in front of me; and of course he stabbed Elvin, too.”

Mrs Vaizey said, “Spirits have been known to bruise people. You can wake up in the morning and find purple fingermarks all over your body. They’ve strangled people, too. A force doesn’t have to be visible or touchable to do you harm. You can’t see the wind but it can blow you over. You can’t touch smoke but it can make your eyes water.”

“Smoke … that’s it,” said Jim. “That’s just what Elvin’s sister was talking about. She overheard Elvin and Tee Jay talking about sacrificing a chicken, biting its head off, and they told her to keep quiet about it or else the smoke would get her. Elvin’s father said his grandfather used to give him the same warning, when he was a little boy. If he didn’t behave himself, the smoke would come to get him.”

“It’s not just ‘smoke’,” said Mrs Vaizey. “It’s ‘
The
Smoke’. It’s what they call out-of-body experiences in Haiti. A man can rise from his body in the night to steal things that he wouldn’t be able to take in his physical form; or to make love to a woman who would never normally let him touch her; or to take revenge on his enemies.”

“Voodoo,” said Jim. “He said so himself.”

“You mean you
talked
to him?”

Jim nodded. “I talked to him in his spirit form, at the college, and I talked to him in the flesh. He wasn’t difficult to find. He’s Tee Jay’s uncle, his father’s brother, a guy called Umber Jones. He virtually admitted what he’s done; but then there’s absolutely no way of proving it, is there? The guy was at home, and he’s got himself a witness who’s prepared to back him up.”

“And he wants you to be his friend?” asked Mrs Vaizey.

“He’s threatened to hurt some of my students if I don’t.”

“Oh, yes; and he would, too. What does he want you to do?”

“I don’t think I ought to tell you. I don’t want any one of my students put at risk.”

“I can’t help you if you don’t confide in me, Jim.”

Jim shook his head. “I can’t. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to any of those kids.”

Mrs Vaizey pressed her hand over her mouth and stood thinking for well over a minute. Jim stood watching her, feeling as if he had been riding on a rollercoaster all afternoon, shaken and tired and slightly sick.

At last Mrs Vaizey lifted one finger. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said. “It won’t be easy, but I don’t see any alternative.”

“Any alternative to what?” asked Jim.

“Give me a drink,” said Mrs Vaizey, and she waited while Jim poured her the last of the bourbon. She swallowed a large mouthful, and then she ran her tongue around her teeth. “If you want to use The Smoke, you have to have a
loa
stick, a spirit stick. Every
houngan
has one, so that he can draw symbols in ashes to summon the spirits. I guess you could say that it’s the voodoo equivalent to a magician’s wand. It has to be carved from a ghost oak, from Western Africa, and it has to be carved from a ghost oak which grows in a cemetery … a tree that’s been nourished on human flesh.

“Without his
loa
stick, your new friend will still be able to leave his body, as we
all
can, but he won’t be able to call on the spirits to help him, which means that he won’t have the power to hurt anybody in the physical world.”

“So what do you suggest we do?”

“As I say, there’s no alternative. We have to take it away from him.”

“But how the hell do we do that? We can’t exactly break into his apartment and go rummaging through his closets, can we?”

Mrs Vaizey looked up at him and her expression was deadly serious. “Not in the flesh,” she said. “But we can do as he does, and leave our bodies, and visit him as ghosts.”

Jim said, “Come on, Mrs Vaizey. This is beginning to leave the ground.”

“But it’s true. Everybody can leave their body, if they wish. You did, when you nearly died, and you almost didn’t come back.”

“All right, let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s possible. But even if it’s possible, how do you do it?”

“I’ll teach you, if you like. But you won’t have to, not this time. If you tell me exactly where this Umber Jones man lives,
I’ll
do it.”

“Is it dangerous? I can’t let you do it if it’s dangerous.”

Mrs Vaizey gave him the briefest flicker of a smile. “Yes, Jim, it’s dangerous. But life is dangerous, and we don’t stay in bed all day, frightened to go out, just in case an airplane falls on our head, or the ground opens up underneath our feet.”

“Look, if there’s any risk at all, I’d rather do it myself.”

“
No
,” she said, with surprising firmness. “If your friend were to find you when you were out of your body, you wouldn’t stand a chance. You don’t try to do your own wiring, do you? You call an electrician. This is one job that you ought to leave to a professional.”

“Well … if you say so,” said Jim. “But I can’t say that I’m too happy about it. When do you want to do it? Tomorrow maybe?”

“Tonight.
Now.
The sooner the better.”

Chapter Six

Mrs Vaizey prowled around Jim’s apartment, sniffing the air and rearranging books and ornaments.

“Which way’s east?” she asked.

“Er … that way.”

“East is very important. All evil spirits come from the east. You don’t mind if I use your couch, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then go down to my apartment, go into the kitchen, and open up the left-hand cupboard. You’ll find two brass incense-burners inside, and a pack of incense. Bring them up here, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

Jim said, “How do you know all of this voodoo stuff? I knew you read horoscopes, but I never realised that you were into black magic, too.”

Mrs Vaizey went over to the couch, picked up a newspaper that was sprawled across it, and rearranged the cushions. “I wasn’t always an old lady living in a low-rent apartment block in Venice, you know. My father used to work for the State Department. I spent most of my girlhood in France and Morocco, and a year-and-a-half in Haiti. We had a Haitian housemaid who taught me all about the
loa.
There is Legba, who seduces women; and Ogoun Ferraille, who looks after men when they are fighting; and Erzulie, the spirit of purity and love. Then of course there is Baron Samedi, who devours the dead.

“By the way,” Mrs Vaizey admonished him, “you mustn’t call it ‘black magic’. It has some of the same rituals as black magic, like sacrificing chickens. But it’s a mixture of Fon culture and Roman Catholicism, and it has the power of both.”

Jim said, “I’ll go find your incense, okay?”

In less than twenty minutes, his apartment was thick with incense smoke. The only light came from a single table-lamp with a nut-brown shade. Mrs Vaizey was lying full-length on the couch with her eyes closed, her cardigan drawn around her wrinkled brown stomach. She had spread a sheet of newspaper on the rug and drawn a complicated design with white ash that Jim had brought her from the barbecue. “Any ash that has been used to burn flesh will do,” she had told him, and he just hoped that Oscar Mayer wieners counted as flesh.

Now she was muttering a long, droning incantation which seemed to Jim to be a mixture of Latin, French and some other language which he couldn’t understand. He recognised fragments of it, bits and pieces of the Catholic mass, and something to do with ‘
sang impur’,
or bad blood, and and ‘
la mort et la folie
’ – death and madness.

She had allowed Jim to sit and watch her, but she had made him promise not to move and not to say a word. He stayed in his armchair in the darkest corner of the room, while the incense-smoke eddied all around him. He coughed twice, and she opened her eyes and gave him a disapproving look, but it was obvious that she was entering into some kind of a trance, because her pupils were unfocused and her eyelids were trembling. He had opened another can of beer but so far he had left it untouched. Mrs Vaizey’s droning was so hypnotic
that he was practically falling into a trancelike state himself.

“
Libera nos a malo
,” she mumbled. “
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie
.”

Without warning, it suddenly felt as if the air in Jim’s apartment were under intense pressure. He went momentarily deaf, as if he had closed a car window at high speed. Mrs Vaizey shuddered, and her left hand fell sideways across the couch. Her mouth was open but she had stopped chanting, and her face was the colour of cheap newsprint. She let out a reedy little gasp, and then another one, and then her head dropped back and she looked as if she were dead.

She had warned him about this; but he was anxious, all the same. He got out of his chair and walked across the room and crouched down next to her, taking her hand. Her fingers were very dry and very cold, like a lizard with silver rings around its legs. He felt her pulse and it was so weak that it was barely detectable, but this was another aspect of out-of-body adventures that she had warned him about. “The body can’t live for very long without a soul. That’s what makes humans what they are.”

He hesitated for a second or two, but then he reached his hand over her face and lifted her eyelid. Her pupils were totally white, as if she had suffered a heavy concussion. “Mrs Vaizey?” he said, quietly. Then, louder, “Mrs Vaizey! This is Jim Rook! Can you hear me, Mrs Vaizey?”

He shook her shoulders, but all that happened was that her head lolled from side to side. She felt as if she were dead – and not only that, she felt as if she had been dead for two or three days. “Mrs Vaizey? Mrs Vaizey? Can you hear me, Mrs Vaizey?”

The pressure in the room gradually eased. Jim continued to hold Mrs Vaizey’s hand, but he sat back, more relaxed. Her pulse may have been faint but it was regular, and showed no signs of faltering; and she was breathing distinctly, with her mouth open, like someone involved in a very deep dream.

He looked up, and it was then that he felt the ice-bath sensation of total shock. Here he was, holding Mrs Vaizey’s hand while she lay on the couch. But Mrs Vaizey was also standing by the front door, staring at him.

At first he couldn’t speak. His throat was completely constricted with fear. But then he managed to say, “You’ve done it. My God, you’ve done it.”

She made a complicated sign in the air with her hand; like a benediction. Then she spoke, and her voice sounded reedy and distant, as if she were speaking on an answerphone in an empty office, with nobody to hear her. “
I’m going now, Jim … I’ll bring back the loa stick… and then you can … mmmmmlllooowwaaaaahhh
…” Her words trailed away into a long, echoing distortion.

She waited for a long, long moment, still staring at him. Then, abruptly, she turned, and walked through the door. It was open only a half-inch, but she seemed to flow through it in the same way that Uncle Umber had flowed through the door of the geography room, like a shadow, like smoke.

After she had gone, Jim looked down and realised that he was still holding Mrs Vaizey’s hand. That is, he was still holding the hand of Mrs Vaizey’s
body,
but this was a body without a soul, not dead, but not capable of life. He let go, and folded her arm over her cardigan. Then he sat back and watched her in the way that people at airports watch the arrival
gates, waiting for their friends and their loved ones to reappear.

He checked his watch. He still hadn’t touched his beer. It was 7:06 precisely.

At seven forty-five he got up and went to the window. Over Venice, the sky was the colour of a bruised cheek. He hadn’t smoked in years but he felt like smoking now. He glanced back at the couch. Mrs Vaizey hadn’t moved, although she had whispered once or twice, nothing that Jim had been able to follow. It was strange, standing over another human being who was so utterly helpless. He couldn’t tell where she was or what she was doing. He began to wish that he had prevented her from going. The incense was all burned out now, but his apartment still smelled like a church.

All of a sudden, Mrs Vaizey’s right arm flapped up. She twitched on the couch as if she were falling asleep, and her reflexes had tried to jerk her awake. She said something like, “
Agnus
—” but then she fell back into her coma.

Jim knelt down beside her and felt her forehead. She was cold, desperately cold, and her pulse-rate seemed fainter than ever.
Oh Christ,
he thought, what’s going to happen if she dies? How am I going to explain the presence of a dead seventy-five-year-old woman on my couch, wearing nothing but a bikini and a cardigan?

He thought of dialing 911. After all, Mrs Vaizey’s life was worth more than his reputation. But then Mrs Vaizey appeared to settle again, and breathe more evenly, although her fingers kept on trembling, and her head flopped from side to side, as if she were searching for something.

Maybe she was. Maybe she was searching for the loa stick.

It was almost eight o’clock. Jim sat on the end of the couch, worriedly drumming his fingers against his half-empty beer can. Mrs Vaizey’s condition hadn’t changed, but now and again she had whispered a few words, and once she had almost sat up. He wished to God that he had a way of knowing where her soul was, and what she was doing. She had said that Umber Jones would probably keep his
loa
stick well-hidden. What if she couldn’t find it? What if Umber Jones found her first?

Eight-fifteen came and went. Mrs Vaizey was still breathing and her heart was still beating, but she felt as cold as if she were dead. Every now and then her fingers jumped or her feet shifted, but it seemed to Jim as if she were further and further away. This was a body that had no soul, and somewhere near Venice Boulevard there was a soul that had no body – a whole personality, disassembled.

Jim took hold of her left hand and chafed it between his, in an effort to warm it up. “Mrs Vaizey, come on. It’s time you came back. Forget the spirit stick. It isn’t worth it. We’ll find some other way of dealing with Uncle Umber.”

Mrs Vaizey murmured, “
Monstre
…”

“Come on, Mrs Vaizey,” Jim urged her. “Just come back. You said it yourself: your soul can’t stay outside of your body for too long.”

“
Monstre
…” Mrs Vaizey repeated. “
Monstre
…”

“Please, Mrs Vaizey, you don’t have to do this. You’d be better off coming back and then we can work out some different way of doing it. Come on, you know all about voodoo. There must be
some
way
of getting rid of Uncle Umber without risking your life to do it.”

At that instant, Mrs Vaizey’s eyes opened. She stared up at Jim, and her expression was one of total desperation. Not fear. It was that stage beyond fear, when people have given up hope that they’re going to survive, and simply want to die with the least pain possible.

“Mrs Vaizey!” said Jim, and clutched both of her hands, tight. “For God’s sake, Mrs Vaizey, hang on in there!”

“
Monstre
!” she screamed, her mouth opening so wide that she almost dislocated her jaw. “
Monstre
!”

Jim slapped her. He didn’t really know why. Maybe it would shock her into waking up. Maybe it would bring her soul back.

She started to shudder, gently at first, but then faster and harder, until the whole couch was jostling and the cushions dropped onto the floor. She flung her head from side to side, and thick white foam began to boil out of her mouth. Jim gripped her wrists and tried to keep her still, hoping that she was going to tire, but she kept on thrashing and shuddering so violently that he could scarcely hold her.

Suddenly she stopped, and glared into his face. He had never seen so much concentrated fury and contempt, and he was so alarmed that he almost let go of her. “You bastard!” she spat at him. “You liar! You told him you were going to be honourable! You told him you were going to be his friend! A fine friend you turned out to be!”

Then, right in front of his eyes, something terrible began to happen. Mrs Vaizey’s mouth puckered inward, as if her face were nothing more than an empty rubber mask. Her nose collapsed into her mouth, and then her
cheeks were drawn in, too. Her eyes stared at him mutely, as glutinous as oysters, before they, too, were sucked down into the crumpled hole where her mouth had once been. She was literally consuming herself – disappearing down her own throat.

Her head unrolled into her neck with a sticky, slithery sound unlike anything that Jim had ever heard before. It was Mrs Vaizey’s brain-tissue, sliding down inside her.

She was still tense, still quivering, even though she had no head. Jim let go of her wrists, and stood up. Her shoulders were beginning to be dragged into her neck now, as well as her cardigan. Her arms were pulled in, right up to the elbows, and for a moment the two of them protruded from her neck, jostling together as if they were waving. Her hands were pressed together in a momentary mockery of prayer, and then they disappeared, too.

Jim backed further and further away, but he couldn’t keep his eyes away from her. Her collarbone stuck up beneath her skin in a V-shape before it was dragged inward. Her ribcage dropped inward, rib by rib, and Jim heard her lungs collapse with a punctured sigh. She was only two-thirds of a woman – headless and armless, yet her stomach continued to swell, and swell, and her flesh and bones and gristle and fat continued to pour into it.

Her legs doubled back under her, and her feet were drawn into her stomach first, before her shins and her knees. For a moment there was nothing on the couch but a grossly-distended stomach with two suntanned thighs on either side of it, and Jim was horribly reminded of a giant Thanksgiving turkey. Then there was a last crackling noise, as her thighbones were drawn in, and all that remained was a lumpy, bloody stomach-lining, as big as a garbage sack filled to bursting with offal and bones and connective tissue. It was stretched so thin that
Jim could see Mrs Vaizey’s right hand pressing against it, with all her silver rings.

Shaking uncontrollably, he managed to walk stiff-legged to the kitchen, where he vomited warm beer into the sink. He was cold and sweating and he couldn’t even begin to think straight. He couldn’t understand what he had seen, or how it had happened. However, he was sure that Umber Jones had done it. What had Mrs Vaizey said?
It’s a mixture of Fon culture and Catholicism, and it has the power of both.

After a long while he rinsed out the sink with a sharp blast of cold water, and then splashed water in his face. It was no good him falling to pieces. Mrs Vaizey must have been aware of the danger of what she was doing, and yet she had volunteered to do it, anyway. Maybe she had wanted to end her life doing something strange and spectacular, instead of slowly ebbing away in a sunset home.

Now he knew why Mrs Vaizey hadn’t allowed him to come along with her. Sending your soul out to burgle a man like Uncle Umber wasn’t a game for novices. God alone knew what kind of spell he had worked on her, to force her to devour herself.

He went back to the living-room and confronted the terrible thing on the couch. Somehow he was going to have to dispose of it, without anybody finding out. Fortunately, nobody had seen Mrs Vaizey come up to his apartment, as far as he knew. But it would be madness to call the police. What would he say to them? “She just sort of imploded”? “She ate herself”? “Her soul was out burgling this voodoo
houngan
and he got real angry and turned her inside out”?