victory. If the detective uncovered the secret of himself, then he
would come for Lavelle, well-armored and dangerous.
Lavelle paced through the dark house.
Maybe he should strike now. Destroy the Dawson children this evening.
Get it over with. Their deaths might send Dawson spiraling down into an
emotional collapse. He loved his kids a great deal, and he was already
a widower, already laboring under a heavy burden of grief; perhaps the
slaughter of Penny and Davey would break him. If the loss of his kids
didn’t snap his mind, then it would most likely plunge him into a
terrible depression that would cloud his thinking and interfere with his
work for many weeks. At the very least, Dawson would have to take a few
days off from the investigation, in order to arrange the funerals, and
those few days would give Lavelle some breathing space.
On the other hand, what if Dawson was the kind of man who drew strength
from adversity instead of buckling under the weight of it? What if the
murder and mutilation of his children only solidified his determination
to find and destroy Lavelle?
To Lavelle, that was an unnerving possibility.
Indecisive, the Bocor rambled through the lightless rooms as if he were
a ghost come to haunt.
At last, he knew he must consult the ancient gods and humbly request the
benefit of their wisdom.
He went to the kitchen and flicked on the overhead light.
From a cupboard, he withdrew a cannister filled with flour.
A radio stood on the counter. He moved it to the center of the kitchen
table.
Using the flour? he drew an elaborate veve on the table, all the way
around the radio.
He switched on the radio.
An old Beatles song. Eleanor Rigby.
He turned the dial through a dozen stations that were playing every kind
of music from pop to rock to country, classical, and jazz. He set the
tuner at an unused frequency, where there was no spill-over whatsoever
from the stations on either side.
The soft crackle and hiss of the open airwaves filled the room and
sounded like the sighing surf-roar of a faroff sea.
He scooped up one more handful of flour and carefully drew a small,
simple veve on top of the radio itself.
At the sink he washed his hands, then went to the refrigerator and got a
small bottle full of blood.
It was cat’s blood, used in a variety of rituals. Once a week, always
at a different pet store or animal pound, he bought or “adopted” a cat,
brought it home, killed it, and drained it to maintain a fresh supply of
blood.
He returned to the table now, sat down in front of the radio. Dipping
his fingers in the cat’s blood, he drew certain runes on the table and,
last of all, on the plastic window over the radio dial.
He chanted for a while, waited, listened, chanted some more, until he
heard an unmistakable yet indefinable change in the sound of the unused
frequency. It had been dead just a moment ago. Dead air. Dead,
random, meaningless sound. Now it was alive. It was still just the
crackle-sputter-hiss of static, a silk-soft sound.
But somehow different from what it had been a few seconds ago. Something
was making use of the open frequency, reaching out from the Beyond.
Staring at the radio but not really seeing it, Lavelle said, “Is someone
there?”
No answer.
“Is someone there?”
It was a voice of dust and mummified remains: “I wait. ” It was a voice
of dry paper, of sand and splinters, a voice of infinite age, as
bitterly cold as the night between the stars, jagged and whispery and
evil.
It might be any one of a hundred thousand demons, or a full-fledged god
of one of the ancient African religions, or the spirit of a dead man
long ago condemned to Hell. There was no way of telling for sure which
it was, and Lavelle wasn’t empowered to make it speak its name. Whatever
it might be, it would be able to answer his questions.
“I wait.”
“You know of my business here?”
“Yessss.”