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Chapter Ten

The needle slid into my flesh as though skin and muscle were pretty illusions, distractions from the truth of vein and artery. As my blood welled up in the VacuTex tube, I told her the story of a man who spent most of his life being a pretty ordinary guy. Grew up normal in Middle America, went to school, bungled his first year in college and dropped out to do a hitch in the Navy. Picked up some training in radio communications and a Ph.D. in the school of Man's Inhumanity To Man.

I didn't go into the details of a Mississippi manhunt that became a jurisdictional dispute with the Coast Guard and ended up with my being loaned to a special ops group run by the Feds—a bollixed operation that went terribly wrong and gave new meanings to the words "collateral damage." The subsequent courts-martial were something I had tried to forget—with the blessing of my dear old Uncle Samuel, who had warned everybody involved against telling old stories that should stay dead and buried. It was my first real lesson in how evil can taint even the innocent despite its best efforts to do the right thing and that telling the truth is rarely expedient. . . . 

Instead I skipped ahead and over the return to collegiate life, the examined life and a masters degree in English Lit, the pretty coed who became a lovely wife, then mother, and cut straight to the chase of a family vacation gone just as wrong as that Naval assignment fifteen years before.

How a chance detour and the instincts of a good Samaritan at a house fire in Weir, Kansas, got me overpowered in a moldering barn, knocked on my back, and forced to give blood to a burned corpse that should have been dead but wasn't.

To this day it seems an equitable exchange to Prince (never "Count") Vladimir Drakul Bassarab V: the unholy transfusion that revived his undead flesh also gifted me with one-half of the combinant virus that transformed the dead into the undead. Since I wasn't dead and never received the other combinant half of the super virus that resided in the vampire's saliva, the results were unforeseen but immediately catastrophic: I blacked out afterward and drove into the path of an eighteen-wheeler.

The virus had already mutated my biochemistry, enabling me to cheat Death.

My wife and daughter had no such advantage.

Chalice filled three glass ampoules and withdrew the needle. The puncture resealed itself before she could cover it again with the cotton swab.

"Now what?" she asked, not quite meeting my eyes.

"Now you spend a little time running tests on those samples," I said. "After you're convinced that I'm telling you the truth, you decide the next step."

"The next step?"

"For treatment. I want to be cured. I want the effects reversed. I want to be human again."

"S-sure," she said, a little shakily. Humor the psycho until you can safely call down to security. 

"Oh," I said, "and Chalice . . ."

"Yes?"

"Look at what's happening to my eyes."

She looked, of course.

And that's when I gave her the rest of her instructions.

I left Chalice in her lab, figuring I'd find my own way out. She was engrossed in running the first of many tests on my blood samples and hardly noticed my departure. I didn't know how much of that was my post-hypnotic conditioning and how much was her obsession with what she had just glimpsed under the microscope.

My greater concern was how circumspect she might be while running those tests. It was one thing to plant subconscious commands to keep my test results a secret. While she might be mentally blocked from telling anyone about my condition, I couldn't completely guard against my blood samples being inadvertently seen by others. I could only cross my fingers and trust in those opportunities being reduced by Chalice working the night shift.

And I had to take some chances if I was to take advantage of the BioWeb facilities in the time I had left.

As I retraced a portion of my tour on the way out, I ran into one of the security guards making his rounds. It was no big deal to leave him without any memory of having seen or spoken with me. I could have avoided running into him altogether by heading directly for the exit but there were several rooms I had missed on the original walk-through and, like Charlie Rich, I wanted to know what went on behind closed doors.

There were storage rooms and utility closets behind most of them but I hit pay dirt on the third floor. I opened a door designated Gen/GEN and walked into an Antarctic whiteout.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the white-on-white-on-white furnishings without risking retinal burns. Everything was white from the carpeting to the ceiling, with counters and cabinets and monitors and keyboards and banks of computer casements that were distinguished here and there by a black line, a colored LED, or a chromed edge.

"Looks like a Clean Room," I murmured, considering the shelves of paper booties, hair caps, and plastic gloves inside the doorway.

"No," said a voice, "by Clean Room standards this is actually a rather grubby room." A portly bald man emerged from behind a bank of monitors. "May I help you?" Imagine Santa Claus without the beard. Wearing a lab smock like Delores Hastings wore a muumuu.

"Samuel Haim," I said, shaking his gloved hand. "Oops, sorry."

"Not to worry, I've finished running tonight's samples." He stripped off the plastic gloves and deposited them in a slot in the wall. "Are you here for the story?"

Was I? This was too easy!

"I'm Spyder Landon."

"Spyder?" I asked. He didn't look like a "Spyder."

"Well, of course, you've got the basic PR packet and human resource materials. I guess you'll write me up as Walter Landon."

I nodded sagely—hoping to look as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

"I'm afraid this is a little unexpected," he went on. "I mean, I've been asking for five years now when we're going to go public with the Genetics/Genealogical project, but I expected a little more warning."

"Well," I said, "you know how it is."

He nodded. "I wasn't expecting you until next month but I guess they want to get something out to coincide with the big bash."

I shrugged. "They don't tell me the whys and wherefores anymore than they do you."

He grinned. "I'll bet. You're new aren't you? How long have you been with the PR Department?"

"Uh—a week."

"I'll bet it took them six months to get your security clearances, though."

My turn to nod. "I'm having to run to get caught up."

"So that's why you're here on the graveyard watch: getting additional background. I figured Dr. Coane would be the only source quoted."

"Dr. Coane?"

"Well, Phillip is the project head, after all. And then there's the matter of security clearances for certain areas of information. Can't just go printing all of the dirty doings behind the scenes, can we?"

"Well," I said, "of course not. But they told me not to worry. They'll run my article through Security and censor anything that seems unseemly before sending it out." Then I told him to tell me about the project as if I didn't already have the background materials filed away in my cubicle downstairs.

"Why don't we start with a little demonstration," he suggested, handing me a set of gloves, booties, smock, and paper hat. "Put it all on: it's still a grubby room but we do use some Clean Room technologies to keep surface and airborne contaminants down."

I looked around the room trying not to fall over while I slipped the paper coverings over my shoes. "Very impressive."

"Impressive? Hah! This is just the tip of the iceberg. The terminals and the sequencers are connected to other labs and a series of Crays in the basement. But this is where you see magic performed. Remember the Human Genome project a few years back?"

I nodded, adjusting the cap over my hair.

"BioWeb completed the sequencing seven years before the others. You didn't read about it because it was all hush-hush government business."

"Amazing," I murmured.

"Not really," he said dismissively. "We had a head start, better equipment, faster computers, and an unlimited budget. Let me show you something that's really amazing." Landon opened a cabinet and retrieved a foil strip. Opening the foil revealed a plastic swablike apparatus. "Do you mind working up a little spit?"

"You're going to run my DNA?"

"I'll do better than that, Mr. Haim: I'm going to run your family tree. Open wide."

I almost refused. Signing the mortuary's guest book had been a serious security blunder. Giving out DNA samples was better than sending the FBI my fingerprints. But I had come here to see what BioWeb had to offer in decrypting my unique condition. I wasn't going to get very far if I suddenly got shy about running tests. I opened wide and Landon took a saliva sample with some mouth scrapings.

"Now forget everything you've seen about gene sequencers," he said, crossing the room and selecting a series of buttons on one of the cabinets, "they are sooo last millennium." A panel slid up and he placed the swab in a tray and pressed another series of buttons. The tray retracted and the door slid shut.

"Over here, now." He led me to a series of monitors and activated two of them. "In a moment we'll have your genetic profile sequenced and catalogued." As he spoke, the first monitor began to fill with numbers and strings of code.

"Damn, that's impressive!" I said, meaning it this time.

"No, it's just fast. Faster than anything else the rest of the world has right now. What's impressive is what happens next."

The second monitor began to run a list of names and dates. There were locations mixed in and cross-referencing codes as well.

"What is it doing now?'

"Who has the most complete genealogical library in the world?" he counter questioned.

"That's easy," I said, "the Mormons."

He shook his head. "The government does. The Mormons don't realize it but their Salt Lake City data banks have been tapped for years and we have everything that they have and then some."

I stared at him. "You're stealing data from the Mormons?"

"No. A certain agency of the United States government steals data from the Mormons. And not just the Mormons, I might add. And then a member of that agency makes the data available to us. To which we add genetic information to as many listings as we can."

"You're telling me you're building a genetic database on American citizens?"

"No," he said. "We're building a database on the human race. Past and present, with an eye to the future. And we're not using the information to harm anyone. It's purely for research."

I almost said: "That's purely bullshit." If the government was involved in gathering genetic information on people it was bound to be misused, no matter the original motive. But I kept my mouth shut: I wasn't going to maintain a low profile by arguing with the BioWeb staff and I certainly wasn't going to change corporate policy on this visit. "I still don't see how it's possible," I said grudgingly. "Even if you could get a sample from everyone alive today, you couldn't do profiles on people who've already died."

"Why not? It's been publicly done on the corpses of recent murder victims and on remains as old as forty-thousand-year-old mummies."

"But the logistics—"

"Of exhuming every grave in every cemetery in the country?" He nodded. "Unlimited court orders and an army of backhoes wouldn't make The Project practical in anyone's lifetime. Fortunately, there are shortcuts."

"Shortcuts?"

"A little EPA Trojan horse legislation about thirty years ago. Required testing for cemetery groundwater contamination. Over the years we've refined the design but the original concept is pretty much the same: a mini core-sampling auger that drills down four to eight feet and collects samples at the appropriate depth." He grinned. "Oops! If anyone actually exhumes a coffin and discovers a hole, well, that's fairly rare and—hey—accidents do happen, you know. One man with one of our present rigs can sample ten bronze or steel caskets in an hour, upwards of thirty if they're the older wooden models.

"Here, let me show you one of the latest shipments." He got up and walked to the back of the room. He pressed a button and the rear wall slid open like something from an old Matt Helm movie.

Behind the sliding panel were stacked racks of finger-sized glass vials, maybe three or four hundred in all. "I'll have to run these babies through the sequencer and database before sending them down to the vault. Of course, we can only store about fifty thousand of these samplings on site. Every month they move several hundred lots from the vault to a gargantuan storage facility back east."

"You were sampling DNA before it was anywhere near decoded?" I asked.

He shrugged. "The Powers That Be knew it would just be a matter of time. They wanted to be ready when—" He stopped and gave me another look. "How much are you actually cleared for?"

"I'm cleared," I said. With a little, reassuring push. "I'm just playing Devil's Advocate for the purpose of story perspective. How complete is your database?"

"Depends. There are millions, if not billions, of samples yet to be collected. But the database is actually functional thanks to a pattern-sequencing system that analyzes DNA patterns in genealogical cascades and can fill in the gaps with ninety-two-percent accuracy."

I waved my hands. "Wait a minute, wait a minute! Let me get this straight. You're saying that you've got software that takes the genetic profiles already in the database and—and uses those known patterns to figure out what's not been catalogued? I mean, it guesses what the missing samples should look like?"

He puffed up a little and an expression of annoyance flickered across his ruddy features. "I would hardly call data extrapolation 'guessing'! Most of the existing computer programs run statistical models based on samplings from one region of each DNA sample—the mitochondrial DNA that is passed from the mother to subsequent generations, for example. Even the GEODIS program developed by Templeton only analyzes DNA from ten locations in each genetic sample for biological population studies.

"Our program, on the other hand, actually studies twenty-two different sites per sampling. We will continue to gather DNA samples to verify and complete the existing gaps, but the database can extrapolate variations in DNA patterns based on earlier and later configurations within a genealogical line. For example, your DNA has already been decoded and the computers are now running your sequences for matches with other related patterns in the database. In a few minutes we should be able to look at your family tree, going back at least twenty generations."

The computer beeped and the monitors froze their displays.

"Here we go. This is you. Your genetic map and the significant tags." He frowned as he studied the monitor. "Without running any of the details, I must say that your overall pattern looks a little unusual." He tapped a sequence of keys. "You might want to come back during the day and have Dr. Coane look over your tags in detail—that's not my area. But we can take a look at your Six-factor."

"Six-factor?"

"Yeah, genealogically speaking, everyone's just six generations away from being related to Kevin Bacon." He rewarded himself with a hearty laugh.

Then he stopped.

He stared at the screen and his eyes lit up. A huge smile bloomed across his face.

I looked and saw one of my deepest nightmares come true.

I slipped out of the Gen/GEN lab nearly a half-hour later. I might have finished up in ten minutes but I wanted to make sure my samples were thoroughly destroyed and my records were thoroughly purged from the database—not just deleted but scrubbed off the hard drives and any backup sectors on networked machines.

The fact that Spyder Langdon knew who my forebears were was a warning shot across my bow. That he found my lineage significant had tripped every alarm wire in my head and body. His reluctance to assist me in purging the lab of my samples and the computer files of any reference to my deoxyribonucleic acid structures—even under psychic duress—necessitated some serious "pushing." More like extreme psychic shoving and shaking and pummeling. When it came to forgetting that we had even met, I found it necessary to be "insistent."

Maybe a little too much so: I left him sitting at a blank monitor, an even blanker expression in his eyes, and a dribble of spittle linking his chin and the spacebar on the keyboard.

If I was lucky he would remember nothing of our meeting this night.

If he was lucky he might remember something of the past year.

I was now monster enough that I could bet more on myself than on him.

It took another hour to find the other room I was looking for.

I had sensed it shortly after entering the BioWeb complex. A preternatural heaviness pervaded the air trapped inside the building. It was something more than the stink of disinfectant and the vague vapors of distant reagents circulating through the whispering vents and air returns. It was like there was a little more darkness hiding around the edges of the track lighting and between the shimmer of fluorescent tubes. Now, away from the distraction of other people, the presence of Something Else became more palpable, the sense of oppression more tangible.

I tried to focus on sensing an increase or decrease in the area of effect as I moved through the building. It was as if the whole complex was lightly saturated with a mild toxin but removed from the source. I was about to give up when I discovered a second set of stairs leading toward the basement. I had checked the basement level early on. If you're going to hide something diabolical or store something unmentionable, basements are "high" on the list of dark, out-of-the-way places for nefarious nooks and crannies.

The BioWeb basement level, however, housed nothing but the physical plant for the complex: boilers, furnaces, heat exchangers, generators, transformers, and miles and miles of pipes and conduits. Two service elevators and a back stairwell accessed it.

Except I had just stumbled across a second set of stairs leading down from the ground floor and there had been only one set of stairs when I had walked through the basement about forty minutes before.

So where did this one go?

One way to find out. I started down the stairs.

I went down and down.

And down again.

Past the level of the basement and another turn and a flight down.

And a dead end.

The stairs ended in a cubicle-sized landing with no visible exits. Overhead a single red lightbulb glowed angrily, enmeshed in a steel cage. The far wall was also colored red, with an elaborate green pictogram at its center. The two-foot by one-foot image looked three-dimensional. I walked up to the design and grasped it with my hands. It was a metal sculpture, an ornate grillwork that stood away from the wall by an inch or so.

The design was familiar. I vaguely remembered seeing iron grillwork very similar to it somewhere down in the French Quarter during my last visit to New Orleans. I considered the pair of idealized swords that flanked the grid of rectangles criss-crossed into interlocking triangles with curlicues and lightning bolts and hammers and stylized flames.

I had seen this pattern more recently. . . . 

In a book somewhere.

And the color red was linked to it somehow.

"Swords . . ." I murmured, " . . . lightning . . . hammers . . ." Hammers?

Hammers—metal—the forge.

"Vodoun," I whispered. "A symbol—no—a vèvè of the Loa." But which one? Something clicked in the back of my mind. "The Goo-goo Battleaxe," I chuckled, butchering the pronunciation again. I cleared my throat and said it correctly this time: "The Ogou clan. Ogou Bhathalah, the Loa of alchemy. Ogou Ferraille, the Loa of the sword, iron and metals. Ogou Shango and Ogou Tonnerre, the Loa of lightning and thunder."

As I spoke the name of the Loa, something clicked again, only this time it came from behind the wall. Voice activation and password recognition security: voodoo gone high-tech. I pushed against the metal grill and the wall swung back on silent hinges.

The darkness beyond wasn't complete. A series of candles flickered in recessed alcoves providing a dim pathway into the unknown. The sense of oppressiveness that had infused the air upstairs now made breathing seem difficult.

On more than one occasion I'd remarked that Mama Cséjthe didn't raise no dummy. But she wouldn't hesitate to say that her clever baby boy could still make some bonehead decisions from time to time. Example: I stepped forward into the near darkness.

The wall swung shut behind me.

Part of it made immediate sense, I reasoned, as I moved slowly between the parallel rows of flickering points of light. The Ogou clan of Vodoun spirits was supposed to manifest in matters of war and alchemy. If they were tied to BioWeb's viral and genetics research, then the alchemy connection was apparent.

But what about war?

Mama Samm had said something about the fifth seal and the end of the world. The Book of Revelation tied the opening of that seal to the unleashing of great plagues that would devastate the earth. But those Biblical end time plagues were associated with the appearance of the Whore of Babylon, not some Johnny-come-lately third-world religion like Vodoun.

Voodoo was a mangled meld of African tribal spirit worship overlaid on a distorted template of Catholicism. It utilized a doubling approach to its principal gods, matching each Loa with a Christian saint, bestowing a dual identity of sorts.

So, maybe the Whore of Babylon had an "altar" ego among the Loa.

Maybe the Whore of Babylon—or Lilith—was also Marinette Bois-Chèche.

And if "magick" was involved, it might explain the darkness that Jenny had described or the odd sensation that had made my skin crawl since walking through the front door.

I looked around. The candles lining the walls were red. Red was the primary color of the Ogou pantheon, so that fit. But the Ogou clan wasn't typically known for significant acts of evil. And their sacred spaces were, as a general rule, located out of doors. Not underground, deep beneath a high-tech biological research facility.

The "aspect" or manifestation of the evil Marinette, however, would alter everything, corrupting even the pure motives of scientific research.

Up ahead, the darkness was starting to fade in patches. Glimmering eyes grew in intensity, became more candle flames. The pathway opened up into a larger area. A voodoo temple space: the hounfort.

My eyes were adjusting to the dimmer light sources and I could make out more details, now. I was entering the peristil or dancing area for the Vodoun ceremonies. The floor was hardened dirt and, at its center, was a great pole extending from the floor to the ceiling: the poteau mitan. Beyond lay the djevo or altar room, glowing like a great, rectangular ruby against a larger dim backdrop.

I moved toward the altar, a large table draped with a black cloth and decked out with a profusion of objects. There were bottles covered with colored sequins and glass beads. And here was a small bottle, nearly a match for the finger-sized glass vials in the Gen/GEN lab, but marked as containing a Zombi-astral—a spirit from a corpse kept in a glass container like a hoodoo battery for certain spells.

For most people the word "zombie" conjures up the Hollywood image of a corpse shuffling about like a retarded sleepwalker. That or the stage persona of White Zombie front man, Rob Cummings. But while I had seen more than my share of the walking dead recently, they didn't actually fit the true voodoo zombie profile.

The walking "dead" documented as parts of Petro and Congo rites were actually living people, not reanimated stiffs. They were the result of a bokor or sorcerer lobotomizing the victim's personality and higher brain functions through hypnosis, autosuggestion, and a complex pharmacopoeia that included fish, frogs, and ferns.

The puffer fish (Sphoeroides testudineus, S. spengleri), the porcupine fish (Diodon hystrix), and the balloon fish (D. holacanthus) have all been cited as ingredients from a variety of sources, but the most likely culprit is the Fugu species whose skin, liver, intestines, and ovaries are overripe with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. This particular neurotoxin is not only a hundred times more deadly than strychnine, but a single puffer has enough joy juice to wipe out a roomful of people. The Japanese consider Fugu sashimi an exquisite delicacy that, properly prepared, will cause one's lips to tingle, one's senses to soar, and produces a pleasant near-death experience for the adventurous gourmand. Improperly prepared, you are either unpleasantly dead in short order or paralyzed for life—however long and equally unpleasant that may be.

You might remember that this is a delicacy to the culture that also produced seppuku and the kamikaze. For those not sufficiently put off by the mortality rate of Fugu fans there's a little death dish called chiri that specially licensed chefs will prepare for those diners who would rather "play chicken" than eat it. But I digress.

Moving down the zombie recipe list, you can go from Fugu to Bufo: the toxic glands of the toad, Bufo marinus. Down in Colombia, the native Indians discovered that toasting these toads over a fire produced a yellow liquid that dripped from the carcass: curare. Once they figured out that arrows and darts dipped in frog fondue were fatal no matter where the victim was hit, precision marksmanship went right out the window. In small amounts, the Bufo toxin would prevent oxygen from entering the bloodstream and cause massive heart failure. In smaller amounts, it could paralyze without killing but the horrific hallucinations that it produced would make you wish for death anyway.

Then there were plants like Albizzia and Datura stramonium, known in Haiti as the zombie's cucumber and in North America as jimsonweed. Producing a topically active neurotransmitter-blocking drug, the plant could induce disorientation, hallucinations, amnesia, coma, convulsions, and death. It had a long history of "curing" marital infidelity in Africa. "Permanently" in most cases.

The bokor had their own recipes for mixing such biotoxins along with ground spiders, powdered human bone, colored clays, lemons, and various leaves and branches of other plants such as Jamaican dumb cane (Dieffenbachia seguine) that paralyzed the mouth, throat, and vocal cords.

But I continue to digress.

The only truly "dead" zombies in Vodoun were the zombi astrals, being the spirit—or "ti-bon-ange"—of a dead person caught and kept in a bottle for medicinal or healing purposes. Think of it as something akin to a psychic battery. Since the soul is eternal, it keeps going and going and going. . . . 

I wondered what spell this little bottled soul was running.

Around it upon the altar were small statues and porcelain dolls encompassed about with lengths of chain and cages of wire. Colorfully framed photos and drawings were propped up against machetes and knives and axe heads. Kongo packets, shredded palm leaves, and small mirrors were scattered here and there. A series of defaced medallions bound a clutch of kewpie dolls that had bead-headed pins stuck into their arms, legs, eyes, ears, torsos—each seeming to have its own, distinct pattern of torment. Bowls containing offerings—salt, cayenne peppers, Tabasco sauce, rum, palm oil and palm wine, cigars, roasted yams, and green plantains—formed a border around the table's edges. One bowl held blood, a deep maroon shading toward black as it coagulated. An ancient glass retort bubbled over an invisible flame while a dozen black candles and another half-dozen red candles provided eighteen dancing tears of shimmering light, casting fantastic shadows upon the red satin drapes that covered the back and side walls of the djevo.

At the center of the altar, wrapped in a whorl of scarlet silk, was a realistic drawing of a nude woman performing an obscene act with a crucifix—my money was on it being a representation of the vile Marinette Bois-Chèche. Her face was turned away so that her features were obscured. And the crimson cloth it nested in was a dress.

Perhaps The Dress.

The one that the Whore of Babylon would put on when the sun turned black, the moon turned to blood, and the stars began to fall like rain.

But that wasn't what caused my knees to go all rubbery and hungry motes of darkness to gather at the edges of my vision. Two photographs were displayed across from each other, the left one elevated to be ascendant, and the one on the right positioned upside-down and in descendant mode. A photo of a gray man wearing a gray suit held no special significance other than the fact that someone had drawn a military helmet over his head and medals on his chest with a ballpoint pen. On the other side was an inverted wedding photo that had been torn in half, lengthways, and then scotch-taped back together.

A very familiar wedding picture.

The same ballpoint pen used on the other photograph had blacked out Jenny's eyes and mouth and drawn fangs that protruded cartoon like from my lips. An "X" was deeply marked into the center of my chest.

A blackness rose up inside me and I leaned against the table, the stink of shriveled blood rising toward my face like foul incense.

What was I supposed to do? I was just one man!

Something had stirred the dead to leave their graves and seek me out by night. Something was mounting a psychic attack that affected my perceptions in the form of the ghost of my dead wife. Vodoun magicks were being invoked in the name of the Loa who ruled the realms of alchemy, the forge, and the military. The government—or some "aspect" of the government—was making a list and checking it twice. No doubts in my mind whether it was naughty or nice.

End of the world prophecies and an ancient demoness who was the mother of monsters.

In retrospect, the fact that vampire enforcers were in town and Erzsébet Báthory was involved seemed a minor annoyance: we were already at Defcon Four.

Except . . . 

Oh, God.

If Marinette Bois-Chèche could be a manifestation of the Whore of Babylon . . . 

Then why not my great, great-times-great grandmother, Erzsébet-the-Hun?

How could I thwart the schemes of an ancient vampire who commanded the undead might of the entire East Coast and God knew what biotoxic witches brews in this high-tech chamber of horrors? Even Dracula had gone to ground for fear of her power. And I knew Pagelovitch wouldn't risk the lives—or unlives—of his enclave over some fortune-teller's half-baked prediction or my questionable, fevered dreams.

It was way past time to leave town.

But where could I go if Erzsébet Bois-Chèche ended up destroying the world?

I thought about demolishing the altar, but they would only put up another one. And know that someone had penetrated security. I pushed away from the table and turned to leave.

Then turned back.

Screw the element of surprise—it was an illusion of security that I no longer had! I grabbed all three pictures and tucked them into my shirt pocket. As I did, I felt the little gris-gris packet that Mama Samm had given me. Ti-bon-ange. I reached for a candle but hesitated as sounds reached my ears from the candlelit hallway. I dove beneath the altar.

Moments later two men and three women entered the peristil, leading a goat. Crouching under the table, I could see the goat better than I could see the people. The women wore loose sack dresses and were barefoot and barelegged. The men wore loose shirts and pants with the legs cut off at mid calf. They were barefoot as well.

Imports, I guessed; not locals. While Vodoun doesn't hang out a shingle or erect well-lit signs like most churches, they tend to be known within certain circles in their neighborhood. I had checked into those circles during my past half-year of residency and hadn't heard a thing about this sort of going on. Báthory probably recruited them in New Orleans. Or maybe even Haiti. This was no Entertain-the-Tourists shtick so E.B. probably spared no expense in acquiring the Real Deal rather than apprentice wannabes.

The goat was tethered to the great post while one of the men squatted at the outer edge of the dance floor and began beating a drum. I was no expert but I had done enough research to recognize that someone was setting up to raise a Baka, a possessive spirit. Not a ritual for the squeamish or faint of heart under the best of circumstances.

All things considered, these were not the best of circumstances.

The women began to dance, bare feet shuffling along the packed earthen floor. They would be the mambos or hounsis. The men—they would be hougans—began to chant.

The language wasn't a French variant like some of the invocations I had run across in my research. It was more likely some African dialect like Yoruban, so I couldn't even take a wild guess here.

I changed my mind, watching the hougan as he poured a pattern of cornmeal and salt onto the dance floor, a rust-stained machete at his side. This one was more likely a sorcerer—a bokor or caplata. This was more than Rada or even Petro worship. With Marinette Bois-Chèche invoked and what appeared to be the pending sacrifice of a black goat we were seriously into the realm of "Left-handed Voodoo," probably a variant of the Bizango or even the Cochon Gris. Although the Ogou pantheon weighted heavily toward the realms of power and military might, it would not evoke such a dark and loathsome aspect unless black magic and sorcery were invoked at its core.

Lucky me: I had a front-row seat for the next session of Let's Open The Gates Of Darkness And See What Comes Out.

As the chanting grew louder and more insistent, the room suddenly grew cold and a gust of wind came out of nowhere, causing the candle flames to gutter like terrified spirits.

Maybe it was nothing more than the air conditioner cutting on . . . 

A greater core of darkness began to unfold in the twilight at the room's center.

Who was I kidding? The only way this was going to get any worse was to add vampires to the mix. As the bokor approached the goat with a machete and a bowl, the wind intensified, extinguishing the candles as neatly as if someone had flipped a light switch.

My aborted vision shifted over into the infrared spectrum and I orientated on the red-and-yellow blob that represented the goat's body heat.

That was it.

I looked around the rest of the room and only saw darkness. With a greater stain of darkness growing toward the goat like a hungry thing. There were no heat signatures for the bokor, the hougan or the mambos. Belatedly I realized that someone had added vampires to the mix: voodoo for the undead!

Give me that old time religion . . . 

Once the goat was dead and started to cool, my reduced-heat signature would become more noticeable in the darkness. And even if I remained hidden throughout this morbid and messy mass, there was still a time factor: if I was trapped down here for too much longer, I wouldn't have enough time to get back home before sunrise.

I didn't fancy spending another twelve-plus hours on the premises.

The chanting was extremely loud and strident now so it covered the sounds of the new arrivals. Gradually I became aware of a new voice, chanting in counterpoint.

Whereas the Vodoun invocation was in an unknown tongue, the new voice was uttering pronouncements in a very different language. I couldn't distinguish more than a word or three: it was Greek to me—in the most literal sense.

Another light source entered the room. Or two, actually. One was shaped like the outline of a man, shimmering like a chromatic rainbow in an oil slick, the black silhouette of a person at its center. The other was a giant sculpture of pale blue radiance, like a glow-in-the-dark plaster statue of a saint. Only this statue was larger than a man and appeared to duck its head as it entered the room.

The original chanting died away.

The goat bleated.

Someone took a flash picture and the room was rocked with a blast of light and heat that flung me against the back wall of the djevo and treated me to a planetarium show behind my fluttering eyelids.

I awoke to the smell of smoke.

I couldn't have been out for more than a minute or two, but the red drapes surrounding the altar were already shading to orange and yellow as tendrils of flame nibbled at their edges. I crawled out from under the table and saw in the growing glow of the flames that I was alone.

The goat was gone, rope and all. Five mounds of ash, one of them partially flattened by a toppled drum, marked the former positions of the Vodoun congregants. The elements adorning the altar had been swept to the floor and scattered, the kewpie dolls unfettered and unpinned.

So much for keeping the security breach hush-hush.

I patted my shirt pocket as I staggered down the corridor. I still had the pictures. Maybe destroying the altar wasn't such a bad idea after all. As I memory-wiped Reginald on the way out, I gave some consideration to reexamining my spiritual life. Maybe it was time to get religion.

Before religion got me.

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Contents
Framed

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Contents

Chapter Ten

The needle slid into my flesh as though skin and muscle were pretty illusions, distractions from the truth of vein and artery. As my blood welled up in the VacuTex tube, I told her the story of a man who spent most of his life being a pretty ordinary guy. Grew up normal in Middle America, went to school, bungled his first year in college and dropped out to do a hitch in the Navy. Picked up some training in radio communications and a Ph.D. in the school of Man's Inhumanity To Man.

I didn't go into the details of a Mississippi manhunt that became a jurisdictional dispute with the Coast Guard and ended up with my being loaned to a special ops group run by the Feds—a bollixed operation that went terribly wrong and gave new meanings to the words "collateral damage." The subsequent courts-martial were something I had tried to forget—with the blessing of my dear old Uncle Samuel, who had warned everybody involved against telling old stories that should stay dead and buried. It was my first real lesson in how evil can taint even the innocent despite its best efforts to do the right thing and that telling the truth is rarely expedient. . . . 

Instead I skipped ahead and over the return to collegiate life, the examined life and a masters degree in English Lit, the pretty coed who became a lovely wife, then mother, and cut straight to the chase of a family vacation gone just as wrong as that Naval assignment fifteen years before.

How a chance detour and the instincts of a good Samaritan at a house fire in Weir, Kansas, got me overpowered in a moldering barn, knocked on my back, and forced to give blood to a burned corpse that should have been dead but wasn't.

To this day it seems an equitable exchange to Prince (never "Count") Vladimir Drakul Bassarab V: the unholy transfusion that revived his undead flesh also gifted me with one-half of the combinant virus that transformed the dead into the undead. Since I wasn't dead and never received the other combinant half of the super virus that resided in the vampire's saliva, the results were unforeseen but immediately catastrophic: I blacked out afterward and drove into the path of an eighteen-wheeler.

The virus had already mutated my biochemistry, enabling me to cheat Death.

My wife and daughter had no such advantage.

Chalice filled three glass ampoules and withdrew the needle. The puncture resealed itself before she could cover it again with the cotton swab.

"Now what?" she asked, not quite meeting my eyes.

"Now you spend a little time running tests on those samples," I said. "After you're convinced that I'm telling you the truth, you decide the next step."

"The next step?"

"For treatment. I want to be cured. I want the effects reversed. I want to be human again."

"S-sure," she said, a little shakily. Humor the psycho until you can safely call down to security. 

"Oh," I said, "and Chalice . . ."

"Yes?"

"Look at what's happening to my eyes."

She looked, of course.

And that's when I gave her the rest of her instructions.

I left Chalice in her lab, figuring I'd find my own way out. She was engrossed in running the first of many tests on my blood samples and hardly noticed my departure. I didn't know how much of that was my post-hypnotic conditioning and how much was her obsession with what she had just glimpsed under the microscope.

My greater concern was how circumspect she might be while running those tests. It was one thing to plant subconscious commands to keep my test results a secret. While she might be mentally blocked from telling anyone about my condition, I couldn't completely guard against my blood samples being inadvertently seen by others. I could only cross my fingers and trust in those opportunities being reduced by Chalice working the night shift.

And I had to take some chances if I was to take advantage of the BioWeb facilities in the time I had left.

As I retraced a portion of my tour on the way out, I ran into one of the security guards making his rounds. It was no big deal to leave him without any memory of having seen or spoken with me. I could have avoided running into him altogether by heading directly for the exit but there were several rooms I had missed on the original walk-through and, like Charlie Rich, I wanted to know what went on behind closed doors.

There were storage rooms and utility closets behind most of them but I hit pay dirt on the third floor. I opened a door designated Gen/GEN and walked into an Antarctic whiteout.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the white-on-white-on-white furnishings without risking retinal burns. Everything was white from the carpeting to the ceiling, with counters and cabinets and monitors and keyboards and banks of computer casements that were distinguished here and there by a black line, a colored LED, or a chromed edge.

"Looks like a Clean Room," I murmured, considering the shelves of paper booties, hair caps, and plastic gloves inside the doorway.

"No," said a voice, "by Clean Room standards this is actually a rather grubby room." A portly bald man emerged from behind a bank of monitors. "May I help you?" Imagine Santa Claus without the beard. Wearing a lab smock like Delores Hastings wore a muumuu.

"Samuel Haim," I said, shaking his gloved hand. "Oops, sorry."

"Not to worry, I've finished running tonight's samples." He stripped off the plastic gloves and deposited them in a slot in the wall. "Are you here for the story?"

Was I? This was too easy!

"I'm Spyder Landon."

"Spyder?" I asked. He didn't look like a "Spyder."

"Well, of course, you've got the basic PR packet and human resource materials. I guess you'll write me up as Walter Landon."

I nodded sagely—hoping to look as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

"I'm afraid this is a little unexpected," he went on. "I mean, I've been asking for five years now when we're going to go public with the Genetics/Genealogical project, but I expected a little more warning."

"Well," I said, "you know how it is."

He nodded. "I wasn't expecting you until next month but I guess they want to get something out to coincide with the big bash."

I shrugged. "They don't tell me the whys and wherefores anymore than they do you."

He grinned. "I'll bet. You're new aren't you? How long have you been with the PR Department?"

"Uh—a week."

"I'll bet it took them six months to get your security clearances, though."

My turn to nod. "I'm having to run to get caught up."

"So that's why you're here on the graveyard watch: getting additional background. I figured Dr. Coane would be the only source quoted."

"Dr. Coane?"

"Well, Phillip is the project head, after all. And then there's the matter of security clearances for certain areas of information. Can't just go printing all of the dirty doings behind the scenes, can we?"

"Well," I said, "of course not. But they told me not to worry. They'll run my article through Security and censor anything that seems unseemly before sending it out." Then I told him to tell me about the project as if I didn't already have the background materials filed away in my cubicle downstairs.

"Why don't we start with a little demonstration," he suggested, handing me a set of gloves, booties, smock, and paper hat. "Put it all on: it's still a grubby room but we do use some Clean Room technologies to keep surface and airborne contaminants down."

I looked around the room trying not to fall over while I slipped the paper coverings over my shoes. "Very impressive."

"Impressive? Hah! This is just the tip of the iceberg. The terminals and the sequencers are connected to other labs and a series of Crays in the basement. But this is where you see magic performed. Remember the Human Genome project a few years back?"

I nodded, adjusting the cap over my hair.

"BioWeb completed the sequencing seven years before the others. You didn't read about it because it was all hush-hush government business."

"Amazing," I murmured.

"Not really," he said dismissively. "We had a head start, better equipment, faster computers, and an unlimited budget. Let me show you something that's really amazing." Landon opened a cabinet and retrieved a foil strip. Opening the foil revealed a plastic swablike apparatus. "Do you mind working up a little spit?"

"You're going to run my DNA?"

"I'll do better than that, Mr. Haim: I'm going to run your family tree. Open wide."

I almost refused. Signing the mortuary's guest book had been a serious security blunder. Giving out DNA samples was better than sending the FBI my fingerprints. But I had come here to see what BioWeb had to offer in decrypting my unique condition. I wasn't going to get very far if I suddenly got shy about running tests. I opened wide and Landon took a saliva sample with some mouth scrapings.

"Now forget everything you've seen about gene sequencers," he said, crossing the room and selecting a series of buttons on one of the cabinets, "they are sooo last millennium." A panel slid up and he placed the swab in a tray and pressed another series of buttons. The tray retracted and the door slid shut.

"Over here, now." He led me to a series of monitors and activated two of them. "In a moment we'll have your genetic profile sequenced and catalogued." As he spoke, the first monitor began to fill with numbers and strings of code.

"Damn, that's impressive!" I said, meaning it this time.

"No, it's just fast. Faster than anything else the rest of the world has right now. What's impressive is what happens next."

The second monitor began to run a list of names and dates. There were locations mixed in and cross-referencing codes as well.

"What is it doing now?'

"Who has the most complete genealogical library in the world?" he counter questioned.

"That's easy," I said, "the Mormons."

He shook his head. "The government does. The Mormons don't realize it but their Salt Lake City data banks have been tapped for years and we have everything that they have and then some."

I stared at him. "You're stealing data from the Mormons?"

"No. A certain agency of the United States government steals data from the Mormons. And not just the Mormons, I might add. And then a member of that agency makes the data available to us. To which we add genetic information to as many listings as we can."

"You're telling me you're building a genetic database on American citizens?"

"No," he said. "We're building a database on the human race. Past and present, with an eye to the future. And we're not using the information to harm anyone. It's purely for research."

I almost said: "That's purely bullshit." If the government was involved in gathering genetic information on people it was bound to be misused, no matter the original motive. But I kept my mouth shut: I wasn't going to maintain a low profile by arguing with the BioWeb staff and I certainly wasn't going to change corporate policy on this visit. "I still don't see how it's possible," I said grudgingly. "Even if you could get a sample from everyone alive today, you couldn't do profiles on people who've already died."

"Why not? It's been publicly done on the corpses of recent murder victims and on remains as old as forty-thousand-year-old mummies."

"But the logistics—"

"Of exhuming every grave in every cemetery in the country?" He nodded. "Unlimited court orders and an army of backhoes wouldn't make The Project practical in anyone's lifetime. Fortunately, there are shortcuts."

"Shortcuts?"

"A little EPA Trojan horse legislation about thirty years ago. Required testing for cemetery groundwater contamination. Over the years we've refined the design but the original concept is pretty much the same: a mini core-sampling auger that drills down four to eight feet and collects samples at the appropriate depth." He grinned. "Oops! If anyone actually exhumes a coffin and discovers a hole, well, that's fairly rare and—hey—accidents do happen, you know. One man with one of our present rigs can sample ten bronze or steel caskets in an hour, upwards of thirty if they're the older wooden models.

"Here, let me show you one of the latest shipments." He got up and walked to the back of the room. He pressed a button and the rear wall slid open like something from an old Matt Helm movie.

Behind the sliding panel were stacked racks of finger-sized glass vials, maybe three or four hundred in all. "I'll have to run these babies through the sequencer and database before sending them down to the vault. Of course, we can only store about fifty thousand of these samplings on site. Every month they move several hundred lots from the vault to a gargantuan storage facility back east."

"You were sampling DNA before it was anywhere near decoded?" I asked.

He shrugged. "The Powers That Be knew it would just be a matter of time. They wanted to be ready when—" He stopped and gave me another look. "How much are you actually cleared for?"

"I'm cleared," I said. With a little, reassuring push. "I'm just playing Devil's Advocate for the purpose of story perspective. How complete is your database?"

"Depends. There are millions, if not billions, of samples yet to be collected. But the database is actually functional thanks to a pattern-sequencing system that analyzes DNA patterns in genealogical cascades and can fill in the gaps with ninety-two-percent accuracy."

I waved my hands. "Wait a minute, wait a minute! Let me get this straight. You're saying that you've got software that takes the genetic profiles already in the database and—and uses those known patterns to figure out what's not been catalogued? I mean, it guesses what the missing samples should look like?"

He puffed up a little and an expression of annoyance flickered across his ruddy features. "I would hardly call data extrapolation 'guessing'! Most of the existing computer programs run statistical models based on samplings from one region of each DNA sample—the mitochondrial DNA that is passed from the mother to subsequent generations, for example. Even the GEODIS program developed by Templeton only analyzes DNA from ten locations in each genetic sample for biological population studies.

"Our program, on the other hand, actually studies twenty-two different sites per sampling. We will continue to gather DNA samples to verify and complete the existing gaps, but the database can extrapolate variations in DNA patterns based on earlier and later configurations within a genealogical line. For example, your DNA has already been decoded and the computers are now running your sequences for matches with other related patterns in the database. In a few minutes we should be able to look at your family tree, going back at least twenty generations."

The computer beeped and the monitors froze their displays.

"Here we go. This is you. Your genetic map and the significant tags." He frowned as he studied the monitor. "Without running any of the details, I must say that your overall pattern looks a little unusual." He tapped a sequence of keys. "You might want to come back during the day and have Dr. Coane look over your tags in detail—that's not my area. But we can take a look at your Six-factor."

"Six-factor?"

"Yeah, genealogically speaking, everyone's just six generations away from being related to Kevin Bacon." He rewarded himself with a hearty laugh.

Then he stopped.

He stared at the screen and his eyes lit up. A huge smile bloomed across his face.

I looked and saw one of my deepest nightmares come true.

I slipped out of the Gen/GEN lab nearly a half-hour later. I might have finished up in ten minutes but I wanted to make sure my samples were thoroughly destroyed and my records were thoroughly purged from the database—not just deleted but scrubbed off the hard drives and any backup sectors on networked machines.

The fact that Spyder Langdon knew who my forebears were was a warning shot across my bow. That he found my lineage significant had tripped every alarm wire in my head and body. His reluctance to assist me in purging the lab of my samples and the computer files of any reference to my deoxyribonucleic acid structures—even under psychic duress—necessitated some serious "pushing." More like extreme psychic shoving and shaking and pummeling. When it came to forgetting that we had even met, I found it necessary to be "insistent."

Maybe a little too much so: I left him sitting at a blank monitor, an even blanker expression in his eyes, and a dribble of spittle linking his chin and the spacebar on the keyboard.

If I was lucky he would remember nothing of our meeting this night.

If he was lucky he might remember something of the past year.

I was now monster enough that I could bet more on myself than on him.

It took another hour to find the other room I was looking for.

I had sensed it shortly after entering the BioWeb complex. A preternatural heaviness pervaded the air trapped inside the building. It was something more than the stink of disinfectant and the vague vapors of distant reagents circulating through the whispering vents and air returns. It was like there was a little more darkness hiding around the edges of the track lighting and between the shimmer of fluorescent tubes. Now, away from the distraction of other people, the presence of Something Else became more palpable, the sense of oppression more tangible.

I tried to focus on sensing an increase or decrease in the area of effect as I moved through the building. It was as if the whole complex was lightly saturated with a mild toxin but removed from the source. I was about to give up when I discovered a second set of stairs leading toward the basement. I had checked the basement level early on. If you're going to hide something diabolical or store something unmentionable, basements are "high" on the list of dark, out-of-the-way places for nefarious nooks and crannies.

The BioWeb basement level, however, housed nothing but the physical plant for the complex: boilers, furnaces, heat exchangers, generators, transformers, and miles and miles of pipes and conduits. Two service elevators and a back stairwell accessed it.

Except I had just stumbled across a second set of stairs leading down from the ground floor and there had been only one set of stairs when I had walked through the basement about forty minutes before.

So where did this one go?

One way to find out. I started down the stairs.

I went down and down.

And down again.

Past the level of the basement and another turn and a flight down.

And a dead end.

The stairs ended in a cubicle-sized landing with no visible exits. Overhead a single red lightbulb glowed angrily, enmeshed in a steel cage. The far wall was also colored red, with an elaborate green pictogram at its center. The two-foot by one-foot image looked three-dimensional. I walked up to the design and grasped it with my hands. It was a metal sculpture, an ornate grillwork that stood away from the wall by an inch or so.

The design was familiar. I vaguely remembered seeing iron grillwork very similar to it somewhere down in the French Quarter during my last visit to New Orleans. I considered the pair of idealized swords that flanked the grid of rectangles criss-crossed into interlocking triangles with curlicues and lightning bolts and hammers and stylized flames.

I had seen this pattern more recently. . . . 

In a book somewhere.

And the color red was linked to it somehow.

"Swords . . ." I murmured, " . . . lightning . . . hammers . . ." Hammers?

Hammers—metal—the forge.

"Vodoun," I whispered. "A symbol—no—a vèvè of the Loa." But which one? Something clicked in the back of my mind. "The Goo-goo Battleaxe," I chuckled, butchering the pronunciation again. I cleared my throat and said it correctly this time: "The Ogou clan. Ogou Bhathalah, the Loa of alchemy. Ogou Ferraille, the Loa of the sword, iron and metals. Ogou Shango and Ogou Tonnerre, the Loa of lightning and thunder."

As I spoke the name of the Loa, something clicked again, only this time it came from behind the wall. Voice activation and password recognition security: voodoo gone high-tech. I pushed against the metal grill and the wall swung back on silent hinges.

The darkness beyond wasn't complete. A series of candles flickered in recessed alcoves providing a dim pathway into the unknown. The sense of oppressiveness that had infused the air upstairs now made breathing seem difficult.

On more than one occasion I'd remarked that Mama Cséjthe didn't raise no dummy. But she wouldn't hesitate to say that her clever baby boy could still make some bonehead decisions from time to time. Example: I stepped forward into the near darkness.

The wall swung shut behind me.

Part of it made immediate sense, I reasoned, as I moved slowly between the parallel rows of flickering points of light. The Ogou clan of Vodoun spirits was supposed to manifest in matters of war and alchemy. If they were tied to BioWeb's viral and genetics research, then the alchemy connection was apparent.

But what about war?

Mama Samm had said something about the fifth seal and the end of the world. The Book of Revelation tied the opening of that seal to the unleashing of great plagues that would devastate the earth. But those Biblical end time plagues were associated with the appearance of the Whore of Babylon, not some Johnny-come-lately third-world religion like Vodoun.

Voodoo was a mangled meld of African tribal spirit worship overlaid on a distorted template of Catholicism. It utilized a doubling approach to its principal gods, matching each Loa with a Christian saint, bestowing a dual identity of sorts.

So, maybe the Whore of Babylon had an "altar" ego among the Loa.

Maybe the Whore of Babylon—or Lilith—was also Marinette Bois-Chèche.

And if "magick" was involved, it might explain the darkness that Jenny had described or the odd sensation that had made my skin crawl since walking through the front door.

I looked around. The candles lining the walls were red. Red was the primary color of the Ogou pantheon, so that fit. But the Ogou clan wasn't typically known for significant acts of evil. And their sacred spaces were, as a general rule, located out of doors. Not underground, deep beneath a high-tech biological research facility.

The "aspect" or manifestation of the evil Marinette, however, would alter everything, corrupting even the pure motives of scientific research.

Up ahead, the darkness was starting to fade in patches. Glimmering eyes grew in intensity, became more candle flames. The pathway opened up into a larger area. A voodoo temple space: the hounfort.

My eyes were adjusting to the dimmer light sources and I could make out more details, now. I was entering the peristil or dancing area for the Vodoun ceremonies. The floor was hardened dirt and, at its center, was a great pole extending from the floor to the ceiling: the poteau mitan. Beyond lay the djevo or altar room, glowing like a great, rectangular ruby against a larger dim backdrop.

I moved toward the altar, a large table draped with a black cloth and decked out with a profusion of objects. There were bottles covered with colored sequins and glass beads. And here was a small bottle, nearly a match for the finger-sized glass vials in the Gen/GEN lab, but marked as containing a Zombi-astral—a spirit from a corpse kept in a glass container like a hoodoo battery for certain spells.

For most people the word "zombie" conjures up the Hollywood image of a corpse shuffling about like a retarded sleepwalker. That or the stage persona of White Zombie front man, Rob Cummings. But while I had seen more than my share of the walking dead recently, they didn't actually fit the true voodoo zombie profile.

The walking "dead" documented as parts of Petro and Congo rites were actually living people, not reanimated stiffs. They were the result of a bokor or sorcerer lobotomizing the victim's personality and higher brain functions through hypnosis, autosuggestion, and a complex pharmacopoeia that included fish, frogs, and ferns.

The puffer fish (Sphoeroides testudineus, S. spengleri), the porcupine fish (Diodon hystrix), and the balloon fish (D. holacanthus) have all been cited as ingredients from a variety of sources, but the most likely culprit is the Fugu species whose skin, liver, intestines, and ovaries are overripe with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. This particular neurotoxin is not only a hundred times more deadly than strychnine, but a single puffer has enough joy juice to wipe out a roomful of people. The Japanese consider Fugu sashimi an exquisite delicacy that, properly prepared, will cause one's lips to tingle, one's senses to soar, and produces a pleasant near-death experience for the adventurous gourmand. Improperly prepared, you are either unpleasantly dead in short order or paralyzed for life—however long and equally unpleasant that may be.

You might remember that this is a delicacy to the culture that also produced seppuku and the kamikaze. For those not sufficiently put off by the mortality rate of Fugu fans there's a little death dish called chiri that specially licensed chefs will prepare for those diners who would rather "play chicken" than eat it. But I digress.

Moving down the zombie recipe list, you can go from Fugu to Bufo: the toxic glands of the toad, Bufo marinus. Down in Colombia, the native Indians discovered that toasting these toads over a fire produced a yellow liquid that dripped from the carcass: curare. Once they figured out that arrows and darts dipped in frog fondue were fatal no matter where the victim was hit, precision marksmanship went right out the window. In small amounts, the Bufo toxin would prevent oxygen from entering the bloodstream and cause massive heart failure. In smaller amounts, it could paralyze without killing but the horrific hallucinations that it produced would make you wish for death anyway.

Then there were plants like Albizzia and Datura stramonium, known in Haiti as the zombie's cucumber and in North America as jimsonweed. Producing a topically active neurotransmitter-blocking drug, the plant could induce disorientation, hallucinations, amnesia, coma, convulsions, and death. It had a long history of "curing" marital infidelity in Africa. "Permanently" in most cases.

The bokor had their own recipes for mixing such biotoxins along with ground spiders, powdered human bone, colored clays, lemons, and various leaves and branches of other plants such as Jamaican dumb cane (Dieffenbachia seguine) that paralyzed the mouth, throat, and vocal cords.

But I continue to digress.

The only truly "dead" zombies in Vodoun were the zombi astrals, being the spirit—or "ti-bon-ange"—of a dead person caught and kept in a bottle for medicinal or healing purposes. Think of it as something akin to a psychic battery. Since the soul is eternal, it keeps going and going and going. . . . 

I wondered what spell this little bottled soul was running.

Around it upon the altar were small statues and porcelain dolls encompassed about with lengths of chain and cages of wire. Colorfully framed photos and drawings were propped up against machetes and knives and axe heads. Kongo packets, shredded palm leaves, and small mirrors were scattered here and there. A series of defaced medallions bound a clutch of kewpie dolls that had bead-headed pins stuck into their arms, legs, eyes, ears, torsos—each seeming to have its own, distinct pattern of torment. Bowls containing offerings—salt, cayenne peppers, Tabasco sauce, rum, palm oil and palm wine, cigars, roasted yams, and green plantains—formed a border around the table's edges. One bowl held blood, a deep maroon shading toward black as it coagulated. An ancient glass retort bubbled over an invisible flame while a dozen black candles and another half-dozen red candles provided eighteen dancing tears of shimmering light, casting fantastic shadows upon the red satin drapes that covered the back and side walls of the djevo.

At the center of the altar, wrapped in a whorl of scarlet silk, was a realistic drawing of a nude woman performing an obscene act with a crucifix—my money was on it being a representation of the vile Marinette Bois-Chèche. Her face was turned away so that her features were obscured. And the crimson cloth it nested in was a dress.

Perhaps The Dress.

The one that the Whore of Babylon would put on when the sun turned black, the moon turned to blood, and the stars began to fall like rain.

But that wasn't what caused my knees to go all rubbery and hungry motes of darkness to gather at the edges of my vision. Two photographs were displayed across from each other, the left one elevated to be ascendant, and the one on the right positioned upside-down and in descendant mode. A photo of a gray man wearing a gray suit held no special significance other than the fact that someone had drawn a military helmet over his head and medals on his chest with a ballpoint pen. On the other side was an inverted wedding photo that had been torn in half, lengthways, and then scotch-taped back together.

A very familiar wedding picture.

The same ballpoint pen used on the other photograph had blacked out Jenny's eyes and mouth and drawn fangs that protruded cartoon like from my lips. An "X" was deeply marked into the center of my chest.

A blackness rose up inside me and I leaned against the table, the stink of shriveled blood rising toward my face like foul incense.

What was I supposed to do? I was just one man!

Something had stirred the dead to leave their graves and seek me out by night. Something was mounting a psychic attack that affected my perceptions in the form of the ghost of my dead wife. Vodoun magicks were being invoked in the name of the Loa who ruled the realms of alchemy, the forge, and the military. The government—or some "aspect" of the government—was making a list and checking it twice. No doubts in my mind whether it was naughty or nice.

End of the world prophecies and an ancient demoness who was the mother of monsters.

In retrospect, the fact that vampire enforcers were in town and Erzsébet Báthory was involved seemed a minor annoyance: we were already at Defcon Four.

Except . . . 

Oh, God.

If Marinette Bois-Chèche could be a manifestation of the Whore of Babylon . . . 

Then why not my great, great-times-great grandmother, Erzsébet-the-Hun?

How could I thwart the schemes of an ancient vampire who commanded the undead might of the entire East Coast and God knew what biotoxic witches brews in this high-tech chamber of horrors? Even Dracula had gone to ground for fear of her power. And I knew Pagelovitch wouldn't risk the lives—or unlives—of his enclave over some fortune-teller's half-baked prediction or my questionable, fevered dreams.

It was way past time to leave town.

But where could I go if Erzsébet Bois-Chèche ended up destroying the world?

I thought about demolishing the altar, but they would only put up another one. And know that someone had penetrated security. I pushed away from the table and turned to leave.

Then turned back.

Screw the element of surprise—it was an illusion of security that I no longer had! I grabbed all three pictures and tucked them into my shirt pocket. As I did, I felt the little gris-gris packet that Mama Samm had given me. Ti-bon-ange. I reached for a candle but hesitated as sounds reached my ears from the candlelit hallway. I dove beneath the altar.

Moments later two men and three women entered the peristil, leading a goat. Crouching under the table, I could see the goat better than I could see the people. The women wore loose sack dresses and were barefoot and barelegged. The men wore loose shirts and pants with the legs cut off at mid calf. They were barefoot as well.

Imports, I guessed; not locals. While Vodoun doesn't hang out a shingle or erect well-lit signs like most churches, they tend to be known within certain circles in their neighborhood. I had checked into those circles during my past half-year of residency and hadn't heard a thing about this sort of going on. Báthory probably recruited them in New Orleans. Or maybe even Haiti. This was no Entertain-the-Tourists shtick so E.B. probably spared no expense in acquiring the Real Deal rather than apprentice wannabes.

The goat was tethered to the great post while one of the men squatted at the outer edge of the dance floor and began beating a drum. I was no expert but I had done enough research to recognize that someone was setting up to raise a Baka, a possessive spirit. Not a ritual for the squeamish or faint of heart under the best of circumstances.

All things considered, these were not the best of circumstances.

The women began to dance, bare feet shuffling along the packed earthen floor. They would be the mambos or hounsis. The men—they would be hougans—began to chant.

The language wasn't a French variant like some of the invocations I had run across in my research. It was more likely some African dialect like Yoruban, so I couldn't even take a wild guess here.

I changed my mind, watching the hougan as he poured a pattern of cornmeal and salt onto the dance floor, a rust-stained machete at his side. This one was more likely a sorcerer—a bokor or caplata. This was more than Rada or even Petro worship. With Marinette Bois-Chèche invoked and what appeared to be the pending sacrifice of a black goat we were seriously into the realm of "Left-handed Voodoo," probably a variant of the Bizango or even the Cochon Gris. Although the Ogou pantheon weighted heavily toward the realms of power and military might, it would not evoke such a dark and loathsome aspect unless black magic and sorcery were invoked at its core.

Lucky me: I had a front-row seat for the next session of Let's Open The Gates Of Darkness And See What Comes Out.

As the chanting grew louder and more insistent, the room suddenly grew cold and a gust of wind came out of nowhere, causing the candle flames to gutter like terrified spirits.

Maybe it was nothing more than the air conditioner cutting on . . . 

A greater core of darkness began to unfold in the twilight at the room's center.

Who was I kidding? The only way this was going to get any worse was to add vampires to the mix. As the bokor approached the goat with a machete and a bowl, the wind intensified, extinguishing the candles as neatly as if someone had flipped a light switch.

My aborted vision shifted over into the infrared spectrum and I orientated on the red-and-yellow blob that represented the goat's body heat.

That was it.

I looked around the rest of the room and only saw darkness. With a greater stain of darkness growing toward the goat like a hungry thing. There were no heat signatures for the bokor, the hougan or the mambos. Belatedly I realized that someone had added vampires to the mix: voodoo for the undead!

Give me that old time religion . . . 

Once the goat was dead and started to cool, my reduced-heat signature would become more noticeable in the darkness. And even if I remained hidden throughout this morbid and messy mass, there was still a time factor: if I was trapped down here for too much longer, I wouldn't have enough time to get back home before sunrise.

I didn't fancy spending another twelve-plus hours on the premises.

The chanting was extremely loud and strident now so it covered the sounds of the new arrivals. Gradually I became aware of a new voice, chanting in counterpoint.

Whereas the Vodoun invocation was in an unknown tongue, the new voice was uttering pronouncements in a very different language. I couldn't distinguish more than a word or three: it was Greek to me—in the most literal sense.

Another light source entered the room. Or two, actually. One was shaped like the outline of a man, shimmering like a chromatic rainbow in an oil slick, the black silhouette of a person at its center. The other was a giant sculpture of pale blue radiance, like a glow-in-the-dark plaster statue of a saint. Only this statue was larger than a man and appeared to duck its head as it entered the room.

The original chanting died away.

The goat bleated.

Someone took a flash picture and the room was rocked with a blast of light and heat that flung me against the back wall of the djevo and treated me to a planetarium show behind my fluttering eyelids.

I awoke to the smell of smoke.

I couldn't have been out for more than a minute or two, but the red drapes surrounding the altar were already shading to orange and yellow as tendrils of flame nibbled at their edges. I crawled out from under the table and saw in the growing glow of the flames that I was alone.

The goat was gone, rope and all. Five mounds of ash, one of them partially flattened by a toppled drum, marked the former positions of the Vodoun congregants. The elements adorning the altar had been swept to the floor and scattered, the kewpie dolls unfettered and unpinned.

So much for keeping the security breach hush-hush.

I patted my shirt pocket as I staggered down the corridor. I still had the pictures. Maybe destroying the altar wasn't such a bad idea after all. As I memory-wiped Reginald on the way out, I gave some consideration to reexamining my spiritual life. Maybe it was time to get religion.

Before religion got me.

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