The Killings (22 page)

“But what is it? I’m having a hard time believing this. I’m not even a Catholic anymore, I stopped going to church when I was sixteen. All this you’re telling me ... spirits and loas and curses ... how can any of it be
real
?”

“It’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of
knowing
.” Dr. Alexander raised a level gaze at her. “You know what Wayne Williams did ... you
know
about the bloodshed committed by the fiend the newspapers called the Atlanta Ripper. You
know
about this new killer, the Lust Killer. And you
know
about all the other murders spanning a hundred years. Most of them young Black women. Some young gay Black men. Some transvestites. And all of them of mixed-race. Atlanta has a higher proportion of these crimes than any other city with a large African American population. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t
know
!” Carmen was beginning to feel frustrated. She could believe Robert Jackson was the Atlanta Ripper. She could even believe Grandma Sable had lived for a long time - a hundred and twenty years maybe, but surely no more; maybe it was her daughter, Tonya, that Wayne Williams had met way back when he was a child. Maybe Tonya had assumed Grandma Sable’s identity to perpetuate the myth.

But a part of her knew that wasn’t the case.

“Why did she place this curse?” Carmen asked. “To guard her great-grandson? To keep him safe?”

“Yes.” Dr. Alexander nodded. “It was originally a spell for protection. She conjured a ‘familiar’ that was designed to protect and guard her great-grandson, to keep him from being exploited and beaten by his mother’s employer. But then something happened …”

“What happened?”

“The protection spell failed. Legend has it that her great-grandson was attacked by her daughter’s employer … sexually, and when he told Sable, she went crazy and changed the spell, strengthened it, turned it into a vengeance curse. The next morning, Tonya’s employer slaughtered his entire family and then killed himself.”

My God,
Carmen thought.

“She let her extreme hatred and rage into the curse. The familiar fed on that hate, multiplied it, perverted it, so that even as it worked through her great-grandson, it began to feed on his forbidden desires. That rage and hate that Sable put into it - it was rage felt toward the White slave masters and plantation owners that beat and abused her and her loved ones that held them in bondage for so long. Marinette and Met Kalfu basked in that, as you can imagine. That’s what fuels it. Whenever the familiar attaches itself to another host, it feeds on that person’s own tastes, his own desires, and perverts it.”

Carmen shook her head, thinking about Wayne Williams telling her about Grandma Sable’s regret. “Wayne said she seemed remorseful. Did she ever try to call it back?”

“If she did, by then it was too powerful even for her,” Dr. Alexander said. “It already had a life of its own. You see, it was supposed to have left upon Robert’s passing, but it didn’t. Instead … it moved on.”

“Moved on? You mean like a flea jumping from one dog to the next?”

Dr. Alexander huffed. “You have a way with words. But yes, something like that.”

Carmen’s mind raced. This was all too much. She had to leave Dr. Alexander’s office. She had to think. Regroup. She stood up and gathered her purse. “Thank you very much for speaking to me, Dr. Alexander. I promise, what we spoke of today will remain between us.”

Dr. Alexander rose from behind his desk and escorted Carmen to the door. “I know this is a lot to absorb,” he said. “But please - take it seriously. My religion, my faith, is not to be scoffed at. It has held my people together for centuries. It has protected us, guided us, strengthened us. What Sable did - it was as far from voodoo as devil worship is to Christianity.”

Carmen paused at the door, regarding Dr. Alexander. “Earlier you mentioned Kalfu as being synonymous with Satan. Do voodoo practitioners believe in the devil, Dr. Alexander?”

“There is no one evil god in the pantheon of voodoo. There are several. And a bokor forms alliances with as many as he or she can. What we call syncretism is merely the combining of different religious beliefs. It happens within various belief systems, Vodon in particular. Kalfu is syncretized with Satan because of all the petwa loas; that’s who he most closely resembles. But it’s also believed he resembles other evil beings, some that are beyond human comprehension.”

“You mentioned Sable had reached out beyond the pantheon of Vodun. What else did she reach out to?”

Dr. Alexander was silent. His dark eyes conveyed a single emotion: fear. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “But whatever it is, I don’t want to know it. I don’t ever want to see it. And I don’t want it to know I’m here.”

Carmen thought about this, then nodded. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Alexander.” She turned to go.

“Ms. Mendoza?”

Carmen stopped.

“Don’t try to stop it. It
can’t
be stopped.” Dr. Alexander looked helpless, which didn’t bode well for his physical stature.

Carmen nodded and then left the humanities building, Dr. Alexander’s words echoing through her head.

It can’t be stopped.

This thing had almost killed her. There had to be some way to stop it. Then she had another thought. If it hadn’t died with Robert, if it had merely leapt to another host, then what happened to it after Michael Carter was killed? She remembered the security guard. Just yesterday he was honored by the mayor and the chief of police with a medal for stopping the killer and saving her life. Did the Fury leap into him? Were the killings about to begin again? She had to find him. She had to find a way to put an end to this before it ended her.

TWENTY-EIGHT

September 2, 1911, Atlanta

I killed them all
.

Realizing this drove Robert Jackson to madness. He refused to believe it. Part of him was still convinced that it was somebody else. Not Henry Parker - that wasn’t his style - but somebody else. Some hustler who hung out at one of Henry’s numerous houses or speakeasies, one of the men who smuggled liquor down from Canada or arranged for the distribution of opium that arrived at the Pacific Railway station from San Francisco. And it couldn’t be him. There was no way.

But it was.

A sudden flood of images poured through his brain, memories of heinous atrocities he’d committed, most of them formerly attributed to dreams and nightmares. After finding Pastor Marcus slaughtered like a pig in his office, Robert still denied he was responsible and tried to carry on as if things were still the same. He’d reopened his shop and cut hair during the day. By night he was quietly following up on leads from his investigation, determined to prove to the Atlanta Police that Henry wasn’t the killer. More importantly, he wanted to prove to himself that
he
wasn’t the killer. And through it all he suppressed all memory of the slaughter at Pastor Marcus’s church even when the reverend’s body was discovered. He feigned shock at the crime as the news spread and quietly went about his business, keeping his ear to the ground.

As the weeks passed, news on the street was Pastor Marcus had been murdered by the jealous husband of one of his female parishioners. Rumor had it that Pastor Marcus liked to play around with the ladies in his congregation on the side. Despite those rumors, nobody was arrested for the crime. There were few clues, and alibis were tight.

Robert let himself in his barbershop from the back door, making sure nobody saw him enter. He’d come directly to the shop from canvassing the area’s speakeasies and brothels, still trying to glean one more nugget of information out of the populace. He crept slowly through the shop in the darkness. He drifted to the lobby and looked out the front plate glass window at the empty street outside. All was silent.

Robert wheeled over to the barber chairs where he plied his trade. He couldn’t deny it anymore. The fury was
real
and it was inside of him, buzzing in his brain, making his head throb, bringing him to madness.

“No,” Robert said, panting heavily, trying to catch his breath. “I ain’t goin’ do it. No more. You’ve had your fun. Now git on out of me!”

A sharp stabbing pain erupted through his skull, sending him reeling to the counter. For a moment he felt like he was going to pass out. His vision got blurry. “Augh,” Robert panted, hissing against the pain. “Goddamn!”

Robert braced himself against the counter, head bowed, trying to ride the pain out. It ebbed considerably, but behind that was the Fury’s unending presence. It tickled in the back of his mind, skittering around like a rat, whispering to him, making its demands, fighting for control.

“No,” Robert said, summoning all his strength to keep it from sneaking in and gaining control. “No, I ain’t goin’ let you. You ain’t goin’ take me again like some damn zombi. No suh. You can
forget
it!”

The gnawing on his brain as the Fury howled in protest was excruciating. The enormity of that blast of agony left him gasping.

Weakened by the struggle, Robert slumped to the floor. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “No,” he said, his voice shaking over and over. “No more, no more, please no more.”

But it was no use. The Fury was having none of that. It warred for Robert’s mind and body and Robert refused to give in. “I ain’t goin’ out tonight. I ain’t goin’!”

He could see its intentions, see the vile plans it had for him, who it wanted him to kill and how. It wanted - screamed and demanded like some angry old woman - Robert to go to Henry’s roadhouse on Lincoln Highway, find Lisa Hathaway, and get her alone in the alley behind the roadhouse. He saw her as it saw her. A whore. A slut. A race traitor throwing up her legs for White men for the price of a shave and a haircut. It wanted to rip her to pieces and inhale the fumes of her steaming guts.

“I ain’t gonna do it!”

Even as Robert’s mind protested, his manhood, his perverse, tortured libido, responded. He could feel his manhood swell as the fantasy took form. Cutting her clothes off, raping her, sodomizing her, and then cutting her throat, bashing her head in with a stone, cutting out her sex, removing her breasts, and taking them with him.

“No! Jesus, help me!”

The Fury pushed at Robert, tantalized him with visions of Lisa’s cinnamon-brown skin, naked and bleeding, helpless, subject to his every desire. It knew what Robert wanted, knew his darkest longings, the secret lusts and fetishes that Robert had long suppressed.

This isn’t what I want. This is what you want, what you’ve always wanted. You are a killer, Robert. A rapist. A sadist. You want to fuck and kill those whores. I just helped you do what you always wanted to do. I just gave you the balls you didn’t have.

“Noooooooo! Get the fuck out of my head!”

Emboldened and stronger now that he knew what he was dealing with, Robert pushed back. Two months ago he hadn’t been able to recognize the signs when the Fury took over. His epiphany had been like waking from a bad dream and realizing the dream had really happened - he’d seen the physical evidence of the aftermath, found the Fury’s trophies in jars in his basement. He’d destroyed them all, all evidence of his crimes. And now he had to finish it.

He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but there was no way around it. He had killed those women … and he had wanted to do it, some dark and terrible part of him that he’d kept hidden away had wanted it and the Fury had found that part of him and set it free. It had become like another person, a separate personality, the sick, twisted part of Robert that blamed his mother for fucking her White employer, blamed her for the punishment he’d suffered at the hands of Mr. Jeremiah, blamed her for making a half-White baby, his sister, and letting her be taken away. He wanted his mother to pay for what she’d done. He wanted all women like her to pay. He had wanted revenge and he’d gotten it. Over and over again and all along he’d been killing, killing his mother ... no, not his mother, his
sister!
He’d been killing his sister over and over.

One final memory crept into his mind. It was the memory he’d buried the deepest, the one that had caused the schizophrenic break that separated his personality into two halves, the one that had created the darker half that the Fury now controlled. He remembered going back to Mr. Johnson’s house, the last place he’d ever been happy. He went to his old room in the servant’s quarters, lay on his old bed, and wept. Then he’d heard the sound of a baby crying and he’d known who the baby was, known it immediately. He picked up a machete from the tool shed, the one he’d used to cut tobacco on the days when he worked the fields with the other Negroes. He crept quietly to the main house, up the stairs, and into the little nursery. Robert had never had a nursery like this, filled with white lace and big fluffy pillows and Teddy bears and dolls. He’d been born in his great-grandmother’s rundown shack. This baby, this high-yellow-half-White mongrel would get all the things he never had. This baby was the reason he and his momma had been kicked out. It was the reason they had to work for Mr. Jeremiah. She was the reason Mr. Jeremiah had hurt him.

He looked down into the crib and saw the baby’s big brown eyes, black curly hair, and light tan skin, almost white. One day she would easily pass as White and she’d have the Johnson name and his wealth and what would Robert and his mother have? They would have nothing. And so Robert raised the machete and brought it down again and again and again, spattering the walls with blood, leaving the crib filled with blood as he’d taken the baby’s butchered remains and crept out of the house, off the Johnson’s plantation and into the woods, deep where no one went, where the wolves and bears would finish the job he’d started. He’d gone back home that night and Grandma Sable had washed the blood from his hands and clothes.

She’d made him new clothes and he’d never seen those blood-soaked rags again until now, in his head, as Robert remembered the first killing, the one the papers had said had been committed by wild animals, a wolf that had crept into the Johnson’s nursery and stolen their baby.