Darkfall

the clientele he was looking for — those people of the Caribbean and their descendants who, having been transplanted to New York City, had brought their religion with them.

Jack opened the door, a bell announcing his entrance, and he went inside, closing out the bitter December wind.

The shop was small, twenty feet wide and thirty deep. In the center were tables displaying knives, staffs, bells, bowls, other implements, and articles of clothing used in various rituals. To the right, low cabinets stood along the entire wall; Jack had no idea what was in them. On the other wall, to the left of the door, there were shelves nearly all the way to the ceiling, and these were crammed full of bottles of every imaginable size and shape, blue and yellow and green and red and orange and brown and clear bottles, each carefully labeled, each filled with a particular herb or exotic root or powdered flower or other substance used in the casting of spells and charms, the brewing of magical potions.

At the rear of the shop, in answer to the bell, Carver Hampton came out of the back room, through a green bead curtain. He looked surprised. “Detective Dawson! How nice to see you again. But I didn't expect you'd come all the way back here, especially not in this foul weather. I thought you'd just call, see if I'd come up with anything for you.”

Jack went to the back of the shop, and they shook hands across the sales counter.

Carver Hampton was tall, with wide shoulders and a huge chest, about forty pounds overweight but very formidable; he looked like a pro football lineman who had been out of training for six months. He wasn't a handsome man. There was too much bone in his slablike forehead, and his face was too round for him ever to appear in the pages of Gentleman's Quarterly; besides, his nose, broken more than once, now had a distinctly squashlike appearance. But if he wasn't particularly good looking, he was very friendly looking, a gentle giant, a perfect black Santa Claus.

He said, “I'm so sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

“Then you haven't turned up anything since yesterday?” Jack asked.

“Nothing much. I put the word out. I'm still asking here and there, poking around. So far, all I've been able to find out is that there actually is someone around who calls himself Baba Lavelle and says he's a Bocor.”

“Bocor? That's a priest who practices witchcraftright? “

“Right. Evil magic. That's all I've learned: that he's real, which you weren't sure of yesterday, so I suppose this is at least of some value to you. But if you'd telephoned—”

“Well, actually, I came to show you something that might be of help. A photograph of Baba Lavelle himself.”

“Truly?”

“Yes.”

“So you already know he's real. Let me see it, though. It ought to help if I can describe the man I'm asking around about.”

Jack withdrew the eight-by-ten glossy from inside his coat and handed it over.

Hampton's face changed the instant he saw Lavelle. If a black man could go pale, that was what Hampton did. It wasn't that the shade of his skin changed so much as that the gloss and vitality went out of it; suddenly it didn't seem like skin at all but like dark brown paper, dry and lifeless. His lips tightened. And his eyes were not the same as they had been a moment ago: haunted, now.

He said, “This man!”

“What?” Jack asked.

The photograph quivered as Hampton quickly handed it back. He thrust it at Jack, as if desperate to be rid of it, as if he might somehow be contaminated merely by touching the photographic image of Lavelle. His big hands were shaking.

Jack said, “What is it? What's the matter?”

“I know him,” Hampton said. “I've… seen him. I just didn't know his name.”

“Where have you see him?”

“Here.”

“Right in the shop?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last September.”

“Not since then?”

“No.”

“What was he doing here?”

“He came to purchase herbs, powdered flowers.”

“But I thought you dealt only in good magic. The Rada.”

“Many substances can be used by both the Bocor and the Houngon to obtain very different results, to work evil magic or good. These were herbs and powdered flowers that were extremely rare and that he hadn't been able to locate elsewhere in New York.”

“There are other shops like yours?”

“One shop somewhat like this, although not as large. And then there are two practicing Houngons—not strong magicians, these two, little more than amateurs, neither of them powerful enough or knowledgeable enough to do well for themselves — who sell the stuff of magic out of their apartments. They have considerable lines of merchandise to offer to other practitioners. But none of those three have scruples. They will sell to either the Bocor or the Houngon. They even sell the instruments required for a blood sacrifice, the ceremonial hatchets, the razor-edged spoons used to scoop the living eye from the skull. Terrible people, peddling their wares to anyone, anyone at all, even to the most wicked and debased.”

“So Lavelle came here when he couldn't get everything he wanted from them.”

“Yes. He told me that he'd found most of what he needed, but he said my shop was the only one with a complete selection of even the most seldom-used ingredients for spells and incantations. Which is, of course true. I pride myself on my selection and on the purity of my goods. But unlike the others, I won't sell to a Bocor—if I know what he is. Usually I can spot them. I also won't sell to those amateurs with bad intentions, the ones who want to put a curse of death on a motherin-law or cause sickness in some man who's a rival for a girl or a job. I'll have none of that. Anyway, this man, this one in the photograph—”

“Lavelle,” Jack said.

“But I didn't know his name then. As I was packaging the few things he'd selected, I discovered he was a Bocor, and I refused to conclude the sale. He thought I was like all the other merchants, that I'd sell to just anyone, and he was furious when I wouldn't let him have what he wanted. I made him leave the shop, and I thought that was the end of it.”

“But it wasn't?” Jack asked.

“No.”

“He came back?”

“No.”

“Then what happened?”

Hampton came out from behind the sales counter. He went to the shelves where the hundreds upon hundreds of bottles were stored, and Jack followed him.

Hampton's voice was hushed, a note of fear in it: “Two days after Lavelle was here, while I was alone in the shop, sitting at the counter back there, just reading — suddenly, every bottle on those shelves was flung off, to the floor. All in an instant. Such a crash! Half of them broke, and the contents mingled together, all ruined. I rushed over to see what had happened, what had caused it, and as I approached, some of the spilled herbs and powders and ground roots began to… well, to move… to form together… and take on life. Out of the debris, composed of several substances, there arose… a black serpent, about eighteen inches in length. Yellow eyes. Fangs. A flickering tongue. As real as any serpent hatched from its mother's egg.”

Jack stared at the big man, not sure what to think of him or his story. Until this moment, he had thought