mixed feelings, with both doubt and cautious acceptance.
Rebecca would say he was being excessively openminded.
Staring at the bottles that now stood on the shelves, Hampton said, “The
serpent slithered toward me. I backed across the room. There was
nowhere to go. I dropped to my knees. Recited prayers. They were the
correct prayers for the situation, and they had their effect. Either
that . . . or Lavelle didn’t actually intend for the serpent to harm
me. Perhaps he only meant it as a warning not to mess with him, a slap
in the face for the way I had so unceremoniously ushered him out of my
shop. At any rate, the serpent eventually dissolved back into the herbs
and powders and ground roots of which it was composed.”
“How do you know it was Lavelle who did this thing?” Jack asked.
“The phone rang a moment after the snake . . . decomposed. It was
this man, the one I had refused to serve. He told me that it was my
prerogative, whether to serve him or not, and that he didn’t hold it
against me.
But he said he wouldn’t permit anyone to lay a hand on him as I’d done.
So he had smashed my collection of herbs and had conjured up the serpent
in retaliation.
That’s what he said. That’s all he said. Then he hung up.”
“You didn’t tell me that you’d actually, physically thrown him out of
the shop,” Jack said.
“I didn’t. I merely put a hand on his arm and . . .
shall we say . . . guided him out. Firmly, yes, but without any real
violence, without hurting him. Nevertheless, that was enough to make
him angry, to make him seek revenge.”
“This was all back in September?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s never returned?”
“No.”
“Never called?”
“No. And it took me almost three months to rebuild my inventory of rare
herbs and powders. Many of these items are so very difficult to obtain.
You can’t imagine.
I only recently completed restocking these shelves.”
“So you’ve got your own reasons for wanting to see this Lavelle brought
down,” Jack said.
Hampton shook his head. “On the contrary.”
“Huh?”
“I want nothing more to do with this.”
“But-”
“I can’t help you any more, Lieutenant.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It should be clear enough. If I help you, Lavelle will send something
after me. Something worse than the serpent. And this time it won’t be
just a warning. No, this time, it’ll surely be the death of me.”
Jack saw that Hampton was serious-and genuinely terrified. The man
believed in the power of voodoo. He was trembling. Even Rebecca,
seeing him now, wouldn’t be able to claim that he was a charlatan. He
believed.
Jack said, “But you ought to want him behind bars as much as I do. You
ought to want to see him broken, after what he did to you.”
“You’ll never put him in jail.”
“Oh, yes.”
“No matter what he does, you’ll never be able to touch him.”
“We’ll get him, all right.”
“He’s an extremely powerful Bocor, Lieutenant. Not an amateur. Not
your average spellcaster. He has the power of darkness, the ultimate
darkness of death, the darkness of Hell, the darkness of the Other Side.
It is a cosmic power, beyond human comprehension. He isn’t merely in
league with Satan, your Christian and Judaic king of demons. That would
be bad enough. But, you see, he is a servant, as well, of all the evil
gods of the African religions, which go back into antiquity; he has that
great, malevolent pantheon behind him. Some of those deities are far
more powerful and immeasurably more vicious than Satan has ever been
portrayed. A vast legion of evil entities are at Lavelle’s beck and
call, eager to let him use them because, in turn, they use him as a sort
of doorway into this world. They are eager to cross over, to bring
blood and pain and terror and misery to the living, for this world of
ours is one into which they are usually denied passage by the power of
the benevolent gods who watch over us.”