[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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
Page 139
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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 thebabalao 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,
Page 140
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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 thevoudoun ?" 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.
Page 141
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"Non," she said. "Unless you are willing, unless you ask for the blessing, it
does not come."
"But Iam willing," I said.
"Ha," she said. "It never come to you. You waste my time." And she turned [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]