Grimoire Diabolique

“No!” she said, grabbing his hands. “Please don’t.”

“You don’t have anything to be self-conscious about.”

“Just…please…don’t.”

Hull let it rest. He was an attractive man, unabashed in nakedness. He looked clean-cut and professional. He didn’t look like what he was, and she supposed that’s why Casparza liked him.

“How does he do it?” Hull asked her.

“Do what?”

“How does Casparza get his shit out? He can’t be doing it with boats; the U.S. Navy’s all over the coast. And surveillance planes are IRing the major land routes 24 hours a day.”

“He mules the orders.”

Hull leaned up, astonished. “What, commercial air flights?”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy. Customs checks every plane inside and out, and they fluoroscope and sniff every single piece of luggage and hand-carry on every flight. Casparza’s probably moving a thousand keys a month. He can’t possibly be muling through airports, not in this day and age. He’d lose everything.”

“Just don’t worry about it,” she wearied. Her hand returned to his penis; it was hard again in moments, hard and hot and pulsing with life. “Do it to me again,” she said. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do it to you, all right. You’ll like it.” He turned her over, pushed her on her belly, and spat between her buttocks. Yet another memory, not surprising. Then he plugged his penis into her rectum, humping her hard.

’Rome, Daddy, all those other men—no big deal. It made her feel good because it reminded her of things.

She hung partway off the bed. The moon seemed to bob up and down in the window with Hull’s frenetic thrusts. Janice’s hair tossed; the makak danced dangling about her neck. Each impact beat more memories into her head, more life. The ferocious seemed to verify something to her. This is what people do, she mused. Hull’s penis was proof of life. She wanted him to come in her again; she wished he could come in her forever, for every time he did was another validation that she was something more than a shadow, more than a ghost.

He shuddered, moaning. Janice felt happy. The warm spurts felt thinner and hotter this time, spurtling into her bowel, and she was so happy she wanted to cry. But then—

—she froze.

The face bled into her—black as obsidian and utterly blank.

Raka’s face.

The priest’s voice, an echoic chord, marched across her mind.

Now, it commanded.

Still penetrated, Janice slammed the lamp down on Hull’s head.

««—»»

The warped words oozed, spreading. Truth is power. Spirit is truth.

The mist of Hull’s consciousness trickled up into the light. His eyes lolled open. Blurred faces hovered like blobs, then sharpened, gazing down. Janice and Casparza. He’d been fucking the girl, hadn’t he? Yes, and then… then…

Goddamn, he thought when the rest of the memory landed.

He tried to get up but he couldn’t.

“Ah, Mr. Hull.” Casparza’s face loomed. “Welcome back, amigo.”

Hull glanced around. The fuckers had tied him down to a table. He was nude. The hissing light from a dozen gas lanterns licked about drab canvas walls. The camp,, he realized. The tent.

He was in the big tent.

Janice stood beside the table, wan in her nightgown. Casparza stood opposed, the avalanche of flab straining against his huge shirt.

Standing by a canvas partition was Raka.

“We gain power through spirit, Mr. Hull,” Casparza cryptified. “Raka is an Obeah priest, a Papaloi. He was bred to harness the spirit.”

The black priest stood in total lack of movement, the staring face bereft of life as a wooden mask. He wore a necklace of human fingers, or perhaps pudenda, and the thing that hung from his sash was a shrunken baby’s head. But from his hand something else depended, swaying: one of those little bags on a cord, one of the makak.

“I thought we had a deal,” Hull moaned.

“Oh, we do, Mr. Hull,” the fat man assured. “But you want to know my secret, don’t you?”

“I don’t give a fuck about your secret. Just let me loose.”

“In time.” Casparza’s grin seemed to prop up the bulbous face. He nodded to Janice.

I’m fucked, Hull realized. He squirmed against his bonds. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that they were going to kill him. But why? He hadn’t crossed any lines. It didn’t make sense. Had some new mover back home put a contract on him? Had someone fingered him as a stool?

“Look, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t know what’s going on. Just let me go. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

Casparza laughed, fat jiggling.

Janice pushed in a wheeled table like a gurney. Holy motherfucking shit, Hull thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, and the least human. His eyes felt stapled open. On the gurney lay a corpse: a man, an American. It was pale and naked.

“Janice will show you,” Casparza said. “The power of spirit.”

Hull grit his teeth. Janice very deftly slit open the cadaver’s belly with heavy-gauge autopsy scalpel. She plunged her hands into the rive and began to pull things out. First came glistening pink rolls of intestines, then the kidneys, the liver, stomach, spleen. She tossed each wet mass of organs into a big plastic garbage can. Then she reached up further for the higher stuff—the heart, the lungs. It all went into the can. By the time she was done, she was slick to the elbows with dark, oxygen-starved blood.

“We can fit six or eight keys into the average corpse,” Casparza informed.

Hull frowned in spite of his dilemma. “You’re out of your mind. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Customs has been wise to it for years.”

Casparza smiled. Now Janice was packing sealed keys into the corpse’s evacuated body cavity, then stuffed in wads of foam rubber to fill in the gaps and smooth things out. She worked with calm efficiency. Finished, she began to sew up the gaping seam with black autopsy suture.

“You can’t smuggle coke into the states in cadavers,” Hull objected. “Customs inspects all air freight, including coffins, including bodies tagged for transport. Any idiot knows that. The girl said you were muling the stuff.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Hull. My mules walk right past your customs agents.”

Wha—, Hull thought. Walk?

Janice raised her nightgown. Hull’s eyes, in dreadful assessment, roved up her legs, over the patch of pubic hair, and stopped. Across her belly was a long black-stitched seam.

“Janice has been muling for me for quite some time.”

My God, was about all Hull could think.

Raka began muttering something, heavy incomprehensible words like a chant. The words seemed palpable, they seemed to thicken amid the air as fog. They seemed alive. Then he placed one of the makak about the corpse’s neck.

 And the corpse sat up and climbed off the gurney.

 My God, my God, my—

 Raka led the corpse out.

Casparza held out his fat hands, his face, for the first time, placid in some solemn knowledge. “So you see, amigo, we still have a deal. And you’ll get to be your own mule.”

Aw, Jesus, Jesus—

The scalpel flashed splotchily in Janice’s hand. Hull began to scream as she began to cut.