PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES

Part I

By Meriades Rai

When Francine Chevalier returned to her apartment at twenty minutes to midnight she was immediately aware of an unfamiliar odour that soured the darkness. She assumed it down to the lack of homemaking skills that her deadbeat poppa had always seen fit to mention – garbage that needed disposing of, or a sink full of dirty dishes – but this stench was different. It was harsher, earthier, and more… insistent. Perhaps she should’ve been concerned, but she was tired after an extended ten-hour shift at The Cat Lick Club and soaked to the skin after walking six blocks in the rain. And so, whatever the stink was, she ignored it.

Francine had made many mistakes in her young life. This would prove to be the one that killed her.

It had been raining constantly in New Orleans for two weeks now. One more day and the whole city could float out into the wash. It was a wonder Francine remained healthy, being habitually wan and frail and with the flu playing havoc with the schedules at the club. The sickness had left three of the other girls bedridden in recent nights, hence the longer shift. Jacqui Castelle, the Creole woman who owned the club, had been bitching ceaselessly about her poor luck but the situation was nowhere near as desperate as she claimed. The Cat Lick was one of the French Quarter’s most successful strip bars, and it wasn’t as if Jacqui didn’t have a host of dancers eager for the extra hours, especially late in the evening when the spring tourists were abroad and the tips were heavy. The turn that Francine had just pulled may have left her exhausted and with a pounding headache that just wouldn’t quit, but every additional dollar was another small step along the road to a brighter future. For Francine, that future was Broadway. The identikit dream of a hundred thousand girls just like her, maybe, but a dream she’d clung to throughout three long years of waiting tables and dancing and a little prostitution, because she knew she had the talent; she just needed opportunity to show up and knock, rather than a landlord demanding rent.

The apartment was small and neglected. Leaving the lights out to conserve electricity, Francine instead undressed in a haze of indigo-blue neon that filtered through her bedroom window from the bar across the street. She kicked off her heels, then peeled off her skirt and blouse, damp from the rain, and finally her nylons and underwear. She was used to removing her clothes with a far more provocative flourish, of course, performing for faceless audiences four or five times a night, but there were no hungry eyes feasting upon the gentle curves of her naked body now. At least, that’s what she thought.

Another mistake.

Shrugging into a threadbare robe, Francine caught a glimpse of her neon-edged reflection in a dressing table mirror. Her long hair was flaxen and lank, her narrow face drawn. With her make-up flaking after ten hours under hot lights she not only looked tired, she looked old. No one would have believed she was still only eighteen. Was it really only three years ago that she’d been that scared, pretty girl from Eunice, Louisiana, seeking the anonymity of the big city? New Orleans could be grim, but at least it offered protection against the spectre of an abusive father, with his belt and cigarettes and bourbon breath; he’d never find her here, never be able to follow through with his drunken promises that he would beat her to death just as he would’ve done to her momma has she not skipped out in the dead of night eighteen months past. At the time, Francine had damned her mother for a lack of courage, but she knew better now. Sometimes it was best to run. She turned away from her reflection, not so pretty any more, but still so very scared.

And that’s when she suddenly glimpsed something move out in the darkening hallway, a shift in the shadows. Just a flicker out of the corner of her eye, but then again, more definite. Francine froze, her heart skipping in her throat and her eyes wide. Another movement. And then she heard breathing, and the slow shuffling of feet, and a figure emerged from the black into the filtered neon.

Francine screamed. She stumbled backwards, reaching out for the dressing table without looking away from the intruder framed in her bedroom doorway. The fingers of her right hand nudged against perfumes, a hairbrush, a small, jade jewellery box that had once belonged to her grandmother… and then they closed around the handles of a pair of scissors. Francine considered screaming again, but she didn’t live in the kind of neighbourhood that acknowledged cries for help. It was the kind of neighbourhood where windows were quietly closed, where televisions and radios and air-conditioning units were turned up full, where eyes and ears were shut tight in a mime of the deepest sleep. No one was coming to save her Francine realised, as she brought the scissors up to protect herself. In her young life, no one had ever come to save her.

The smell upon the air was suffocating now. Ripe and foul, a concoction of musk and spice and rot. The pounding in Francine’s head was fierce, an incessant drum beat that threatened to split her skull from the inside out. And mixed into the thrumming there was something else. Laughter. Cruel, mocking laughter. The figure moved slowly into the bedroom, and it brought the stench and the darkness with it. Outside, the neon flickered. Francine saw a broad, ivory smile set against black skin, and white eyes with black, pinprick pupils absent of colour. She raised the scissors to her chest, trembling…

…and she glanced down in horror as she realised that the blades were pointing inward, not outward. It was her right hand that was directing them, but she wasn’t moving that hand herself. It was travelling of its own accord. Similarly, the fingers of her left hand were involuntarily reaching for the neckline of her robe – and were now grasping it, pulling it to one side, exposing the flesh of her breasts.

Francine heard herself moan, a frightened, animal sound. “No…” she whispered, tears beginning to brim in her eyes. “Please, no.”

But her left hand continued tugging at her robe, roughly now, whilst her right hand kept pushing the scissors towards her until the cold steel point of the blades came to rest against her skin between the curve of her bosom, just below her clamouring heart.

No, Francine thought again. This was impossible. This couldn’t be happening. This—

Her hand spasmed involuntarily, then began to exert pressure on the blades, digging sharply into her flesh until the blood came… and then still further.

From that moment, the neighbourhood couldn’t ignore those terrible screams that carried on the warm night air no matter how much they tried. Shrieks of panic and unspeakable pain, as neon flickered in the dark and the Louisiana rains continued to fall. Eventually, someone called the police, but by then it was over. At the last stroke of midnight, ten minutes after she had begun to scream, Francine Chevalier finally – mercifully—fell silent.

Jericho

I’m sitting at my desk in my gloomy, third-storey office staring at my reflection in the window.

Let me tell you, that’s a damn fine face, right there. You wish you had a face like this. You had a face like this, you’d stare at it too. Think Denzel, with a little more tip-and-wink. Or Morgan, but less worldly-wise. Yeah, you know it’s going on. Trouble is, this handsome mug of mine is currently wearing the kind of pout that you’d just have to slap, given the shot. You’d think at my age—somewhere between thirty and a random number of your own personal choosing—I would’ve grown out of sulking. But, hell. As the song says, it’s my party and I’ll cry and be a miserable old bastard if I want to.

That number you thought of? Add one. It’s my birthday. Better step aside, y’all, whilst I do my happy dance.

And how am I spending my special day, you ask? Friends and family? Free drinks at the bar? A cake? Uh-huh. Cake my self-pitying, recently divorced, not a single card through the door, thirty-something ass. This morning, the weather channel consoled me with the news that I could at least wile away the afternoon gazing down on Toulouse Street in bright sunshine. Toulouse is a wide thoroughfare coloured with the scarlets and golds and indigos of shop awnings and market stalls selling everything from fresh shrimp to lacquered gator skulls, where men in lazy sun-hats barter with vivacious Creole women in headscarves and beads and flouncy skirts so short they’d be illegal in any other state. Man, I swear; in New Orleans, on the sixth day God created legs, and on the seventh day he rested just to watch ‘em strut on by.

But the weather channel lied. Today, just like every other damn day for the past two weeks, I can only see the backwash of a steady, heavy rain. It’s raining harder than a widow’s tears. It’s raining like Gene Kelly’s got a plane to catch. It’s raining enough to make Noah kick the tigers in the ass when they go ambling up the ramp as if they’ve got all the time in the goddamn world. It’s New Orleans rain, the worst kind of rain there is. New Orleans rain disturbs the soil of ancient, sacred ground that shouldn’t be trespassed upon and it runs dark like blood in gutters thick with cypress leaves and old secrets best left buried. This city is below the water line. Here we have to bury our dead above ground, in cemeteries filled with crypts and mausoleums, because the wet earth just can’t contain them. The earliest settlers here tried it, and after a few tropical storms all the coffins rose to the surface and spilled their rotting corpses for everyone to see. As I said. The worst kind of rain.

My name is Jericho Drumm, and New Orleans is my city.

I wasn’t born here. In my heart, maybe I still don’t belong here. But something keeps me here, and has done for six years now. It tastes like unfinished business, and I reckon it always will. Sometimes I think I died long ago, and it’s my dislocated spirit rather than my physical body that wanders these streets on those sultry nights when it’s just too damn hot to breathe, let alone sleep. Believe me, when we’re talking spirits, I’m not just being cute. I’ve witnessed this very thing happen to people, exactly as I’ve described, and a lot worse besides. Ghosts, zombies, malignant forces… remember, this is New Orleans. People say New York is the town that’s seen everything? Well they don’t know the half of it. And, for that matter, neither does Haley Joel Osmet. You think you see dead people, kid? Well, welcome to the city that invented the idea. Here, if you don’t see at least three dead people every day, you’re just not trying hard enough.

It’s half past midday. I’m devouring a po’boy with fried oysters and chilli—Cajun chilli rather than Creole, with mesquite and cayenne, the kind that’s so hot it can make your mama cry—and absently polishing Abraham, my raven, with a complimentary napkin. Don’t knock it. It’s therapeutic. That’s when I receive my first visitor in three days. The rain’s kept most of my potential clients from my door, maybe scouring the telephone directory for a listing of my name. They won’t strike gold. My number’s unlisted, for the same reason I don’t advertise my services; if someone needs me—if they need me enough—then they’ll find me, in person. Either that, or I’m as lazy as The Devil in July.

Usually I don’t care for visitors. I think, this time, I’ll make an exception. Trust me, if you could see what I can see right now, you would too.

Standing in the doorway of my office is a young woman so outrageously fine that if my eyes weren’t already watering from the po’boy then they’d be set to glisten any time now. She’s wearing a lightweight raincoat, ankle-length, the colour of cranberries. Not everyone can look good in cranberry, but it helps if you have the kind of high breasts and swing-me-daddy hips that give your body the suggestion of a query mark looking to punctuate. She has black-cat-at-midnight hair that hangs in clusters of rain-damp ringlets about a delicate, half-moon face. She has cocoa skin and full lips, and droopy, dusky-lidded eyes the colour of sin if sin came chocolate-coated. It’s those eyes that make my skin prickle. I’ve heard of come-to-bed eyes. It’s just that I’ve never previously encountered the kind that also tell you what you can expect once you get there.

This woman hasn’t been deterred by my lack of a public telephone number, or the rain. I feel obliged to give her a moment of my time. Maybe more.

“Mister Drumm?” she asks, in a voice like molasses cut deep with the kind of Creole drawl wherein hard vowels are either quick or they’re dead, and sound like they’re bad beyond redemption. She says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know whether to wait or just come on through. There’s no secretary at the desk.”

Ah’m sahr, ah din’ know whethah to way-ut. Man, I could listen to inflections like that all day.

“I don’t have a secretary.”

The woman regards me curiously. “But there’s a desk right out there.”

“I said I don’t have a secretary,” I tell her. “I didn’t say I don’t have a desk for the secretary I don’t have.”

I smile to underline my witty repartee. The woman in the cranberry raincoat doesn’t smile in return. Maybe my act needs work. We stare at each other for a long moment, the heavy silence broken only by the steady hwup-hwup-hwup of a large ceiling fan circling overhead. The blades of the fan stir the hellishly hot air like a tourist spooning his first bowl of gumbo. The woman takes to glancing around my office, possibly searching for something that will inspire an expression upon her beautiful face that doesn’t equate to chewing live snails. Best of luck with that.

The walls around us are adorned with framed photographs of various men and women—mostly men—in garish outfits posing for the camera. The largest and most impressive of these pictures depicts two such individuals, one of whom is black and broad in the shoulder and devilishly handsome, the other a seemingly youthful figure in a brash red and blue costume and mask. The latter calls himself Spider-Man and spends far too much time upside-down than is likely good for him. The good-looking gentleman beside him sometimes goes by the name of Brother Voodoo. I swear, if my recently arrived guest asks me which one I am, I’m retiring to a sweet potato farm in Arkansas.

The woman is taking her time, sizing everything up with those never-forget-me eyes. She observes the shelves lined with ancient, leather-bound books on subjects ranging from black magic to—well, to blacker magic—propped between ornamental skulls of all shapes and sizes. She lingers on the unlit candles that have, in the past, dribbled wax onto the bare-board wooden floor like they just couldn’t contain themselves. She scans my antique, glass-fronted display case containing gris-gris pouches and ceremonial masks and ceramic dishes with all manner of colourful powders. And, finally, she looks back to me, and Abraham, whom I was recently polishing so respectfully.

I should mention that Abraham, my pet raven, is dead. Most things I come into contact with are, after a fashion. And—unlike dead birds of the stuffed variety—it’s immediately obvious that Abraham is deceased considering that there’s no pretence of feathers and eyes, only an intricately restructured skeleton with varnished bones that seem to gleam even in this rain-shadowed half-light. Most visitors regard Abraham with something between unconscious fascination and unequivocal horror. I’ve often been tempted to fix his little raven skull on a hinge so that I might tap it with my finger and squeak, “Nevermore!” just as a means to lighten the mood. However, there’s a time and place for talking dead raven shenanigans, and this isn’t it. Even I know that.

I stand up from behind my desk and do my best to appear abashed. “My apologies,” I say, “It’s been a slow day. Won’t you take a seat, Miss…?”

The woman hesitates, and for a moment I’m convinced she’s going to turn that voluptuous tail and sashay out of my life forever, leaving me more desolate and bereft than perhaps would be appropriate considering our relationship has so far lasted barely more than a minute. However, it seems my heartstrings are to be spared. She makes the decision to step forward, that incredible body moving with an easy grace beneath her coat, her steep-heeled shoes clicking sharply on the wood. When she takes a chair on the other side of my desk the cranberry falls away to reveal a pair of long legs that taper sleekly from the hem of a black skirt at mid-thigh, down to a pair of ankles as sharp as those heels.

I’m not wearing a tie, but I loosen the collar of my shirt all the same. Rain or no, New Orleans afternoons tend to be hot. It’s just that some are hotter than others.

Her dark eyes never leaving me, she says, “You can call me Melissa, Mister Drumm. You mind if I smoke?”

“That depends. Do you tend to start fires?”

“It’s been known,” she says. Sauce. And then, as she fishes her cigarettes and matchbook from the pocket of her coat, she flashes me the first hint of a crooked smile that I know will come to stay with me forever. It’s only fair. Since the moment I looked up from my birthday-treat fried oyster po’boy and saw her in my doorway I know that I’ve been grinning like a Disney cartoon.

Her smile makes me glad. Most people who visit me are scared – not of me, although my office can unnerve them with its eccentric, dead raven-influenced decor, but of whatever it is that has driven them to seek me out. I deal with some pretty creepy hoopla, that’s for sure. Melissa’s likely scared as well, but I think she’s also a person of great character, regaining her humour in mid-stride mere moments after stepping out of her world and into mine. I suspect that we’re going to get along famously.

“I can’t pay you,” she says, bluntly.

Maybe not so famously. My grin melts like twin scoops of vanilla ice cream on hot waffle on a lazy Sunday morning. “Some people say honesty is the best policy,” I say, magnanimously. “Then again, some people also say Beyoncé ain’t all that, so maybe some people are just best ignored. What is it you want from me that you can’t pay for?”

“To find my friend, Francine. She’s disappeared.”

What I do, I do very well. Jobs are irregular, but when they come along I tend to be rewarded richly for my services. Enough to rent a place to live, an office, and to put food for the table. Not enough for a secretary, as we’ve established, but then I always have Abraham. Unfortunately, I think Melissa has sought me out under a misapprehension. If Abraham was a proper secretary he would have sorted all this out before it got this far, not to mention sent me a birthday card. I remind myself to reprimand him later.

I sigh and meet Melissa’s gaze across my desk. I say, “I’m sorry,” and I truly am. Damn, am I sorry. “I don’t do missing persons. I’m not the police, or FBI.”

“I know,” she says, “You’re a houngan.”

“And I’m not a private investigator.”

“I know,” she repeats, patiently. Her eyes are smouldering like chestnuts at Christmas. “You’re a houngan. Y’all wanna tell me you’re not a fire-fighter, too?”

“I’m not a fire-fighter. I’m a houngan.”

“That’s good,” Melissa says, “Because a houngan is what I need. My friend who disappeared… I suspect that voodoo is involved.”

I don’t reply to this, at first. I just watch her face, and she watches me right back. I lean forward, ready to speak. She crosses her legs. She isn’t wearing nylons but I swear her skin’s so smooth it whispers just the same. Birds suddenly appear, stars fall down from the sky, and angels decide to create a dream come true. Happy Birthday, Jericho. I clear my throat, and count to ten.

“Why voodoo?”

Melissa half-smiles. “Because I’ve already been to the police, Mister Drumm,” she breathes, her words laced with no little bitterness. “They tell me that Francine has probably run away, to another city. Off to seek her fame and fortune. They tell me there’s no question of foul play, and definitely no chance that voodoo has played any part in her disappearance.”

I frown at this. “And your point is…?”

“My point, Mister Drumm, is that when I went to Francine’s apartment yesterday I discovered the police there – working extremely diligently for a case that doesn’t involve foul play. And they told me what they did without me having even mentioned voodoo.”

I raise an eyebrow. “This is New Orleans,” I say. “Whenever something goes wrong, the police invariably have to reassure everyone that there’s no voodoo in the mix. Heart attack? Could be voodoo, ma’am, but it’s more than likely it’s too much boudin and dirty rice. Broken heart? It could be voodoo that caused your husband to run off with a blonde waitress half his age, ma’am, but if we delve deep enough we might find that the grand-canyon cleavage and the hot-hip wiggle played the tune. Cat up a tree? It could be voodoo, ma’am, but only if the person casting the hex is really lacking in imagination.”

Melissa is smiling. I grin back. Sometimes I forget how amusing I am. It’s nice to be reminded.

“I appreciate your attempt to be amusing, Mister Drumm, but I was born here in New Orleans. I’ve lived here for twenty years. I know about hysteria, and the need to keep things in perspective.”

“Attempt to be amusing?”

“Mister Drumm, please. I need your help. I know that something terrible has happened to Francine. Perhaps something more than terrible. And I know that voodoo is responsible.”

I admit, I’m a little uncomfortable at her conviction. I find myself studying her, and it isn’t just because her skin is as rich as a ghost pearl wrapped in satin or her eyes are as deep and dark as the kind of dreams you feel guilty for having but which you never want to awaken from. It’s because, in that moment, she suddenly starts to become familiar. I can’t quite place it, but there’s something about the languid set of the eyes, the pout of the lips, and the curl that I can judge is working through that body semi-hidden beneath her coat like a cat dancing on a fence in the moonlight.

“Why are you so sure about all this, Melissa?” I ask, my mouth dry.

Her eyes glitter. “It runs in my family,” she tells me. “It has done for generations. An ability to sense when the magic of the Loa is at work. Perhaps you’ll understand when I tell you that my full name… is Melissa LaVeau.”

And, suddenly, I do understand. I understand, and I wish I didn’t.

Outside, the rain shows little sign of relenting, and there’s thunder beginning to roll in from the Gulf like bad news on a Monday. It figures. From this moment, I know that a raging storm is pretty representative of what I’ve got coming to me sometime soon.

New Orleans rain. The worst kind there is. Happy Birthday, Jericho.

The LaCarriere mansion was an old, abandoned plantation house hidden back amidst the cypress groves and the cattails on the near bank of the Mississippi a mile or so south of New Orleans. Dilapidated and close to being reclaimed by the bayou, it’d once been home to a woman by the name of Marie LaVeau, bastard descendant of the original LaCarriere line and the most infamous of the many voodoo witches to have been birthed in this darkest of cities. Since LaVeau’s time, the house had been cursed, and all those who’d tried to tame it had met with a gruesome fate. Now it was rumoured to be haunted by, among others, the spirits of two dozen slaves slaughtered a century past by their white master. The man’s wife and two daughters had been claimed by scarlet fever within a month of one another, causing him to lose his mind and go wild with a meat cleaver – purportedly as advised by the wandering spectre of none other than LaVeau herself. But this was just one of a hundred macabre tales attributed to the evil of the Voodoo Queen.

Such campfire myths were nothing unusual in this part of the world, of course. But to Wesley Robicheaux, LaCarriere was the only one of New Orleans’ cornucopia of haunted houses that mattered at this particular moment in time. That was because Davy Clayton and Todd ‘Toad’ Ambuson were right behind him, goading him on and poking him in the kidneys with sticks and calling him chicken, all in front of Davy’s sister Casey Sue.

“Y’all let Wesley be, Toad,” Casey Sue yelled when Toad gave Wes an unexpectedly violent shove that almost sent him sprawling. “If he don’ wanna go in there, he don’ hafta.”

“Yea, Wes, you don’ wanna go, you don’ hafta,” Davy whined in an approximation of his sister’s voice. “But if you don’ go, Case ain’ ever gonna kiss ya like she promised.”

Davy and Toad fell about laughing. Wesley looked around miserably to see Casey Sue bowing her head, her cheeks flushed. She was so pretty, Casey Sue, with her corn blonde hair and blue eyes. She still wore girlish skirts and t-shirts, even though she was going on fifteen now, and Davy and Toad teased her mercilessly about it, but there was something about the way that Casey Sue was filling out that made Wesley’s mouth dry up like a creek in high summer and his tongue flip around like a pink-eyed frog half-crazed with thirst. Sometimes he just found himself staring at her newly budding breasts, and then he’d blush, fire-engine red, even if no one else had seen.

“Ah’ll kiss whoever ah wanna, an’ he don’ hafta go nowhere,” Casey Sue snapped, staring at her brother defiantly. But she didn’t look across at Wesley, and nor did she make a move towards him.

Wesley swallowed, as if in an attempt to force his heart back down into his chest, but it remained lodged in his throat. “S’cool, Case,” he mumbled, not as loudly or confidently as he would have liked. “Ah’m not scared. Ah’ll go.”

“Damn chicken, ain’ gonna go nowhere,” Toad snorted, but he was regarding Wesley suspiciously. He was a chubby, grubby little oik who more resembled a pig than any other creature, but he was as handy with his fists as he was with his tongue and no one ever pointed out his porcine qualities more than once. In contrast, he was more than happy to be likened to a frog. Go figure.

Wesley glared at Toad, then at Davy, and finally looked across at Casey Sue. “Y’all save your best kiss for me, Case, h’okay?” he said, winking.

Casey Sue broke into a beaming smile, her cheeks pink. “You show ‘em, Wes,” she said, her voice high and flustered.

Davy and Toad said nothing more. They just stood, clenching their sticks. Their eyes were wide as they watched Wesley stride forward with more determination than he could possibly have felt towards the old plantation house. He pushed through the curtain of branches hanging down heavily from the trees, disturbing clouds of insects into the muggy late afternoon heat, his sneakers squelching in soft ground underfoot like he was dancing over quicksand. Spring had brought a measure of richness to the city’s gardens these past weeks, but out here there was no kaleidoscope of southern magnolias nor mountain laurel or Cherokee rose to soften the sombre mood. Wesley kept looking straight ahead, forcing himself to breathe deeply as the dark house loomed closer. Soon, he had crossed the patch of land between the house and those three other youths who had accompanied him so far but no further.

The air was heavy and clotted, and deathly silent. No birds sang – no katydids or whippoorwills – and there was no drone of mosquitoes or whirr of cicadas. LaCarriere was far enough along a dirt track from the nearest highway that the surrounding trees would swallow any hum of traffic. The only sound in Wesley’s ears was the skip of his heartbeat. The sun winked in and out of existence overhead in a sea of grey that suggested the rains that had plagued the city for the most of the day, and indeed for the past two weeks, would be returning soon enough. For now, however, the languid humidity was like the dry rasp of cats’ tongues upon his skin.

Wesley was sweating profusely, his heart fluttering. He wanted to run back the way he had come, pick up his bike, and pedal the hell out of there. The house felt wrong. Terribly wrong. He thought of Casey Sue. To be more exact, he thought of kissing Casey Sue, and of maybe reaching out and laying his hands softly on that chest of hers that held him so enraptured. She was the most beautiful girl in the world, and they were going to get married one day, so help him. But she wouldn’t want to marry a chicken.

Wesley stepped up onto a veranda rimmed with intricate ironwork that had once been beautiful but which was now overgrown with ivy and strangleweed. He gingerly tested the weight of warped wooden boards beneath his feet. They creaked but didn’t give way. Wesley took another step, then another.

The front door stood before him, sheathed in a rusted wire grill thick with cotton candy webs and dead bugs. Wesley could see nothing but darkness through a small, dirt-encrusted window. He began to reach for the door handle, but hesitated. Fear gripped him, and wouldn’t let go. He had to do it. He had to go inside. That was the dare. He was here now, on the veranda, it was almost done. All he had to do was open the door, go inside, and close the door behind him. Wait for a whole minute. Then get out of there and run like hell.

That was all.

Wesley forced himself to close his trembling fingers round the door handle. It was warm to the touch, and swamp-greasy. He twisted, and the handle moved stiffly. He pushed. The door stuck, momentarily, then opened. Wesley turned his face away as he was hit by a flux of hot, fetid air. He choked on it, and almost stumbled backwards. But he remained firm.

Thinking how much he loved Casey Sue, Wesley stepped forward into the fierce darkness of the hallway beyond the front door. The air was vile, like the stagnant water that pooled in the worst areas of the bayou where even gators didn’t linger. The shadows crawled, and steamed, and dripped. He pushed the door closed behind him.

As he was enshrouded by sudden gloom, Wesley closed his eyes tight shut and began to count. Not too quickly. It would all be for nothing if he counted too quickly.

One. Two. Three. F –

“Wesley?” came a familiar voice. “Wesley, come’n see.”

Wesley opened his eyes, his breath catching in his throat like a cube of gristle-meat that refused to be swallowed. It was Casey Sue’s voice, and it was coming from somewhere up ahead. Wesley squinted into the gloom. A little way along the hallway there was a door set into the right hand wall. Casey Sue had spoken from a place behind that door.

“Wesley?” came the voice again. “It’s dark. Ah can’ see nothin’. An’ ah’m scared. Wesley? Wesley?”

Casey Sue sounded more than scared. She sounded terrified. Wesley found himself moving forward, and no longer counting. He wondered if Toad and Davy Clayton had somehow convinced Casey Sue to follow him into the house, perhaps through a side-window. Teasing her, prodding her with sticks, hurting. Bastards. Evil, spiteful, little bastards. Wesley’s rage welled like bile.

He saw his hand reaching out for the handle of the door that stood between him and Casey Sue, and he was alarmed. Although he instinctively tried to pull back, it made no difference. The air was filled with silence no longer, but instead trembled with a low, steady beat, like the dull echo of drums. It was a deep, insistent sound. Wesley found that once he had attuned himself to it he couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t concentrate. The beat reverberated in his head, slowly building, rattling his teeth and shaking his blood.

Wesley turned the handle and opened the door.

The room he entered wasn’t dark as he expected but rather lit with candles, casting flickering shadows over walls cloaked with webs still infested with the bloated skitter of the spiders that had spun them. Wesley hated spiders, but he paid no heed to them now. Not when there was something much worse to contend with.

The air was rancid, laced as it was with the thick stench of death that emanated from the corpses suspended from hooks in the ceiling.

There were six bodies, all naked, all women. The hooks were impaled through their mouths and out through the backs of their skulls. In one case there was a dislocated jaw that hung loose in folds of flayed skin, as if the head had come apart like a rotten fruit and it had been necessary to re-hang it on the hook. Each face was bloated and discoloured, with eyes bulging and syrupy in their sockets. The chest of each corpse bore a series of deep wounds across the breasts that, in all cases but for one, were congealed and encrusted with old blood. The pattern of the wounds was the same in every instance.

There was a seventh body, again female, this one wrapped in swathes of black fabric. This body lay upon the floor beneath the six dangling corpses. The woman’s flesh, where exposed, was ivory and smooth like polished marble, streaked with the blood that’d slowly dripped down upon her from the one body suspended above whose wounds were still fresh. Wesley just stood, and stared. The drums beat in his head, and his brain was already beginning to blister. As he watched, the ivory-skinned woman turned her head slowly towards him. Her eyes were wide and black as jet, set deep into a face cast with exquisite beauty, and her lips were blood red. Slowly, she smiled, revealing a jaw splintered with jagged teeth about which a long, black tongue slithered hungrily.

“Come, boy,” the woman hissed, her eyes growing wider. “Come to Nekra…”

Outside the plantation house, it was beginning to rain. Thunder murmured faintly in the distance. A storm was coming. Toad Ambuson and Davy Clayton were shouting at one another about how it’d been five minutes since Wesley had disappeared past the front door of LaCarriere and how one of them was going to have to go in after him. Then they heard their missing friend begin to scream, an unholy shriek that carried on the heavy air and echoed amidst the trees as the rain thickened into hard pellets.

Toad and Davy ran. For a moment, Casey Sue remained still, her eyes wide and glistening with tears just as the sky overhead was shimmering. Then, she turned and ran as well. None of them looked back.