Headhunter

gables and the massive stone turret bulging off to one side.

The woman crossed the yard to the gardener's shed and dug out the two-handed axe.

For the next fifteen minutes Katherine Spann chopped up alder rounds. Then, having lathered up a sweat, she carried the wood, quartered and split, back into her house. She lit a blazing fire in the antique cast-iron hearth. Entering the bathroom she stripped off her clothes and turned the shower on. For ten minutes she stood in the tub with her eyes closed, languishing and relaxing beneath the sharp needles of hot water. When she climbed out, refreshed, Spann toweled herself dry with a rough brisk rub and put on a pair of blue pajamas, a maroon velour bathrobe and fuzzy sheepskin slippers. Then she toweled her hair dry one more time and shuffled out to stand by the fire.

The flames of the hearth were licking and snarling within the bricked-up cage, every so often emitting a crack like a circus master's whip.

Her world now in order and everything clean, Spann picked up a voodoo book. Then she curled up in an easy chair off to the right of the fire, cracked the cover of the Huxley volume and slowly began to read.

The roots of voodoo twist among the myths and tribes of Africa. That much she knew. What she was about to find out was just how developed and widespread that root system was.

It was now midnight.

Outside the autumn wind continued to scream in the trees.

11:32 p.m.

In an article dated September 26, 1979, the Toronto Globe and Mail informed its readers that sometime in the previous week about 800 French paratroopers and marine commandos had flown into the Central African Republic to stage a bloodless coup to end the rule of Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa. The Emperor had subsequently gone into exile on the Ivory Coast. When David Dacko, the new President of the Republic, held his first press conference he told the international journalists gathered in Bangui that 'pieces of human flesh have been found in the refrigerators in Bokassa's Colongo villa.'

Old habits die hard. Rick Scarlett thought — and he put down the book. The newspaper clipping was Scotch-taped inside its front cover.

For over an hour the policeman had been reading about how prevalent the practice of voodoo was — and is — in Africa, particularly when it overlaps with cannibalism and human sacrifice. The number of cases was startling.

In the early fifties it had surfaced dramatically among the Kikuyu tribesmen of East Africa. That was when the Mau Mau took on the British in Kenya.

As the initiate climbed the Mau Mau ladder, the oath and rituals performed increased in bestiality. One of the pledges required that whenever an initiate to the society murdered a European, he had to cut off the head and extract the eyeballs and drink the fluid from them.

In a postscript to the volume that Scarlett had been reading it was stated that in order to intensify the atmosphere of these oath-taking ceremonies, they were usually accompanied by sexual orgies and perversions involving animals. Rams or dogs or sheep were used, or whatever was available. It was said that the authenticated reports were so disgusting that they were not available for general study. They could, however, be consulted on the premises of the Colonial or Commonwealth Relations Office Library.

Although the British had crushed the Mau Mau in 1956, the same type of structure had arisen again with the Zebra killings in San Francisco. Was it now arising here?

For the last quarter hour Rick Scarlett had found that he had trouble in concentrating. That was the reason he had finally put down the book.

After dropping Katherine Spann off earlier in the evening, he'd returned to the Headquarters building up on Heather Street. He was hoping to find Rabidowski or other suitable male company, for the truth was that Rick Scarlett felt like a horse's ass.

Right from the start he had somehow felt that this woman had taken effective control of their flying patrol. It worried him that the good ideas seemed to come from her. As a boy on the prairies he had spent a number of years in Alberta. Scarlett's father had been a regular member of the RCMP posted to 'K' Division. Many a day the boy had spent with his dad up around those sandstone pillars where men like Sam Steele and Wilfred Blake had once maintained the law. When the word hoodoo had shown on the taps, a connection to the Rocky Mountains had instantly linked in his mind.

Oh God,Scarlett thought. Do you think she's gloating right now? Why did this have to happen to me immediately after DeClercq gives us a warning on tunnel vision?

Up at Headhunter Headquarters, Scarlett had not found Rabidowski. What he had found was a group of constables sitting around a tape recorder listening to a lecture by a guy named Dr. George Ruryk. Hoping for something to one-up Spann, Scarlett had joined the crowd. He had left when one of the other cops had turned to him and asked: 'Don't you think hearing this ruins your independence? I thought you were part of a flying patrol?'

Tonight as he had inserted his key into the lock of his apartment door Scarlett had wondered what Katherine Spann would be like in bed. Hot, he suspected.

It was now just after 11:30 and he was thinking that same thought.

Scarlett got up and walked over to the living room window to see if Miss Torso was dancing tonight. The window of the apartment across the street was dark and the curtains were drawn.

With a sigh Scarlett went to put on his strip and go for a run in the park.

Wednesday, November 3rd, 12:31 a.m.

From an upper floor window of Sussex Manor the old woman looked down at the groundkeeper's house in the yard. Framed in one window by firelight she could see Katherine Spann reading.

In the development of voodoo, the most important feature was the way the original African beliefs and practices were combined with Catholicism. For just as the Roman Catholic Church has a pantheon of its God and saints, so the slaves who came to the New World had a religious pantheon of their own. Thus a form of the Catholic religion became at once acceptable to these transplants from Africa.

A tvpical slave religious altar might bare a statue that was flanked by colored oleographs of St. Peter, St. George and St. Patrick. To the African these figures represented the Loa: Legba, the god who guarded the way to the world beyond; Ogoun, warrior god to the Dahomey; and Damballah, god of the snake. Under this altar the slaves would place bottles of rum or whisky, alternating them with cloth-covered bundles and white porcelain pots which were used to house their loa and the spirits of the dead. These spirits eventually came to be called by the African word zombi.

Among the slaves carried off to America there were voodoo priests, medicine men and sorcerers. It was these priests who connected the African pantheon with the Roman Catholic religion of the New World. It was the sorcerers — who in Africa had thrived during times of war and destruction — who now found their position enhanced by the confusion and disorientation rampant among the slaves. It was not long before the sorcerer rose in power and totally absorbed the profession of the priest. And out of this blurring came to flourish the practice known as voodoo.

The appeal of voodoo was basic and it spread very fast: for only by voodoo practice could the African slaves strike back at the hated white man.

After the slave uprisings in Haiti and the formation of an independent black republic in 1804, thousands of French fled the island, taking with them as many of their African slaves as possible. Ten thousand of these refugees ended up in New Orleans. With them came the practice of voodoo.

Soon there were wild group dances in that city's Congo Square. Both serpent worship and the drinking of blood were a common phenomenon. Rituals were performed around trees in St. Tammany Parish. When the backlash came in the form of waves of anti-voodoo sentiment, this practice of the black arts merely went underground. As before it was disguised as the Roman Catholic religion.

What is not common knowledge, however, is that from the very beginning of the organized use of voodoo in New Orleans, whites could be found among the secret cultists.

In August of 1850 several white women were among those arrested for dancing nude in a bloody voodoo