afternoon, on the street in front of Wellton School. He had been in his
van, parked almost a block away, and he had used a 35-mm Pentax with a
telephoto lens. He had processed the film in his own closet-size
darkroom.
In order to put a curse on someone and be absolutely certain that it
would bring about the desired calamity, a Bocor required an icon of the
intended victim. Traditionally, the priest prepared a doll, sewed it
together from scraps of cotton cloth and filled it with sawdust or sand,
then did the best he could to make the doll’s face resemble the face of
the victim; that done, the ritual was performed with the doll as a
surrogate for the real person.
But that was a tedious chore made even more difficult by the fact that
the average Bocor-lacking the talent and skills of an artist-found it
virtually impossible to make a cotton face look sufficiently like
anyone’s real countenance. Therefore, the need always arose to
embellish the doll with a lock of hair or a nail clipping or a drop of
blood from the victim. Obtaining any one of those items wasn’t easy.
You couldn’t just hang around the victim’s barbershop or beauty salon,
week after week, waiting for him or her to come in and get a hair cut.
You couldn’t very well ask him to save a few nail clippings for you the
next time he gave himself a manicure. And about the only way to obtain
a sample of the would-be victim’s blood was to assault him and risk
apprehension by the police, which was the very thing you were trying to
avoid by striking at him with magic rather than with fists or a knife or
a gun.
All of those difficulties could be circumvented by the use of a good
photograph instead of a doll. As far as Lavelle knew, he was the only
Bocor who had ever applied this bit of modern technology to the practice
of voodoo. The first time he’d tried it, he hadn’t expected it to work;
however, six hours after the ritual was completed, the intended victim
was dead, crushed under the wheels of a runaway truck. Since then,
Lavelle had employed photographs in every ceremony that ordinarily would
have called for a doll. Evidently, he possessed some of his brother
Gregory’s machine-age sensibility and faith in progress.
Now, kneeling on the earthen floor of the shed, beside the pit, he used
a ballpoint pen to punch a hole in the top of each of the eight-by-ten
glossiest Then he strung both photographs on a length of slender cord.
Two wooden stakes had been driven into the dirt floor, near the brink of
the pit, directly opposite each other, with the void between them.
Lavelle tied one end of the cord to one of the wooden stakes, stretched
it across the pit, and fastened the other end to the second stake.
The pictures of the Dawson children dangled over the center of the hole,
bathed in the unearthly orange glow that shone up from the mysterious,
shifting bottom of it.
Soon, he would have to kill the children. He was giving lack Dawson a
few hours yet, one last opportunity to back down, but he was fairly sure
that Dawson would not relent.
He didn’t mind killing children. He looked forward to it. There was a
special exhilaration in the murder of the very young.
He licked his lips.
The sound issuing from the pit-the distant susurration that seemed to be
composed of tens of thousands of hissing, whispering voices-grew
slightly louder when the photographs were suspended where Lavelle wanted
them. And there was a new, disquieting tone to the whispers, as well:
not merely anger; not just a note of menace; it was an elusive quality
that, somehow, spoke of monstrous needs, of a hideous voracity, of blood
and perversion, the sound of a dark and insatiable hunger.
Lavelle stripped out of his clothes.
Fondling his genitals, he recited a short prayer.
He was ready to begin.
To the left of the shed door stood five large copper bowls. Each
contained a different substance: white flour, corn meal, red brick