Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (40 page)

∇

For only the second time in his life, Jeremiah Henley stood in the cobwebbed attic of his ancestral home. Despite Nedeau’s presence, Henley was experiencing even more anxiety than he had the night something outside himself had guided him to a secret better left buried with its bearer….

Except for the flicker of a row of three tapers, the attic was shrouded in darkness. Nedeau had covered the single window with a heavy quilt. Henley watched uncertainly while Nedeau carefully arranged the apparatus he had extracted from his suitcase.

Nedeau poured a sackful of sand into a shallow metal tray and spread it evenly across the bottom. From another, smaller sack he poured a fine black powder into a wooden bowl carved with geometric African designs. He took special care not to allow any of the powder to touch his skin.

Henley felt a queer sense of detachment as he observed his friend’s preparations. He remembered Nedeau’s almost obsessive absorption with African culture back in college, as well as how spitefully Nedeau had been ridiculed for it. All things African had been shunned by Howard students then; even the smattering of Africans attending the college were derided as “Home Boys”. More than once, Henley had privately defended Nedeau’s affinity for the “Home Boys”. Publicly, Nedeau had always been more than capable of defending himself.

Now, Nedeau was a professor in the Howard history department and taught courses in African lore. He had even spent a year in the Gold Coast, a British West African colony. Henley thought of the letters he had received with Gold Coast postage—long, enthusiastic missives full of near-incomprehensible reports of Nedeau’s studies of the magic of West African
ju-ju
men….

“I hope this voodoo of yours works,” Henley said, for no reason other to break a silence that was becoming intolerable.

Nedeau looked at him. He had removed his coat and shirt, and his bare torso was even more impressive than Henley recalled. It was Nedeau’s eyes, however, that caused Henley to recoil in dismay.

“Voodoo!” He spat the word as if it were a curse. “It would take more time than I have to explain to you the difference between that half-baked Haitian superstition and the true magic of Africa.”

Scowling, he returned to his preparations. Henley, who remained seated on a dusty trunk, could not suppress a gasp of shock when Nedeau drew a pair of long, white bones from the suitcase.

“Leopard, not human,” Nedeau said. “They were given to me by a powerful
malam
—what the ignorant would call a ‘witch doctor’ or
‘ju-ju
man’—because I spoke on his behalf in a case brought against him by a District Commissioner. We will need them tonight.

“From the hints I gathered in your letter—confirmed by our conversation downstairs—I would say you are being stalked by a
semando—
a dead-sending.”

“You mean a…zombie?”

“Worse than that. Your grandfather’s enemy must have been a powerful
malam
indeed to have launched a curse that has spanned two generations.”

“What is a
semando,
if it isn’t a zombie?”

“A
semando
is a dead thing shaped and motivated by the will of the
malam
. The animal killings are typical of a
semando
’s work, for it needs blood to build its potency to the point where it can fulfill its ultimate purpose—vengeance.”

Henley shuddered. “How can such a—
thing
—be stopped?”

“With the powder in that bowl. It is
kaliloze,
meaning that it’s deadly to any supernatural thing it touches. It will be the only thing that will save us when I summon the
semando
here.”

“What?” Henley cried. “Have you gone insane?”

“It’s the only way, man. We can’t go out to seek the creature; it’s a thing of the night and it would be suicidal to attempt to face it in its own element. I must lure it here, where I’ll at least have a chance to get to it with the
kaliloze
. And it
will
come. I have only to call it, using this oracle of sand and the bones of power. The
semando
will come, for what it wants is here—you.”

“God!” Henley exclaimed. “This is so senseless—unreal! Savage ceremonies
here
, in 1933….”

Nedeau stood up, towering over Henley.

“You asked for my help,” he grated. “If you don’t want it, say so now. If you do, then you’ll keep your mouth shut until this thing is over with.”

Henley, well aware of the meaning of his friend’s tone, fell silent. He was beginning to fear Theotis Nedeau….

Holding the leopard bones like a pair of drumsticks, Nedeau squatted before the sand-filled tray. Then he began to strike the sand with the bones, beating out a rhythmic pattern that slid and twisted like a serpent of sound through Henley’s mind. While he drummed, he chanted, singing a litany in a language Henley hadn’t heard before.

Nervously, Henley kept his eyes on Nedeau. Though the attic was unheated, beads of perspiration were forming on Nedeau’s bare chest. Reflected candlelight transformed the droplets into shimmering liquid gems. Henley moved his gaze to the sand in the tray. The yellow grains bounced and shifted to the rhythm of the pounding bones. He could almost see
shapes
appearing in the leaping sand—the shapes of graves opening at midnight….

The din of the drumming and the cacophony of the chant seemed an assault on Henley’s sanity, inexorably dragging him back to things he did not want to remember and never wanted to know. Just as he was about to shout at Nedeau to stop, a rending crash surmounted the sound of the rite.

Immediately, the drumming ceased. Nedeau’s voice fell silent. He sat stock-still, like an ebony carving, his eyes fixed in a set stare at something Henley could not see.

Then the footsteps came. Footsteps that ascended the stairs at a steady, measured pace. Footsteps that grew louder as the thing that made them slowly approached the door of the attic. Footsteps that rose and fell with a squamous, sucking sound….

The footsteps stopped.

“For God’s sake, Theotis,” Henley shouted. “
It’s here!
”

Nedeau did not move.

The attic door banged inward. Dimly, the light from the floor below illuminated the hulking, indistinct silhouette filling the doorway. The figure moved closer, catching the wavering glimmer of the candles.

Henley screamed.

The
semando
was a grotesque, misshapen thing formed of mephitic grave-mud that oozed with each sickening step it took. But it was not the lurching travesty of a body that bulged Henley’s eyes and clove his tongue to the roof of his mouth. It was the face.

Crudely molded and distorted as its features were, Henley had seen them before—in the portrait that had hung over the mantelpiece downstairs. It was the face of his grandfather, Jeroboam Henley….

Blunt, malformed fingers reached clawlike for Henley’s throat as the
semando
drew nearer. Henley could not move; sheer horror rooted him to his seat.

“
Theotis!
” he shrieked, as if the sheer sound of his terror could halt the advance of the thing with his grandfather’s face.

Then a lithe, shadowy form leaped between Henley and the approaching hell-creature. It was Nedeau, cradling the wooden bowl of
kaliloze
powder in his hands. With a swift, smooth motion, Nedeau flung the bowl’s contents full into the face of the
semando
.

For a single, timeless moment, the dust hung like a black miasma, enveloping the head of the
semando
. Then it spread across the death-sending’s carcass like a swarm of tiny, voracious insects.

The
semando
halted its advance. Its mouth opened, but no sound issued forth. Then the mud began to slough from its form, pooling viscously on the floorboards. Mixed with the malodorous mire was the animal blood that had lent the
semando
its macabre semblance of life. Only a skeleton remained. Then that, too, collapsed, leaving only a tangle of smeared bits of calcium behind.

“You did it, Theotis!” Henley cried, his voice weak with relief. “You destroyed the thing Gbomi sent to kill me.”

“It served its purpose,” Nedeau said quietly.

“What do you mean?” Henley asked.

Before Henley could move, Nedeau’s hands shot out and enclosed the smaller man’s throat in a clasp of steel. Henley struggled with a strength born of desperation, but Nedeau held him easily. He tightened his grip, choking off Henley’s outcries. But Henley’s betrayed, innocent eyes mirrored the man’s final question:
Why?

Nedeau told him.

“I never mentioned much about my family back in Louisiana, Jeremiah. I never told you how we came by our name. ‘Nedeau’ means ‘born of the water’ in Creole French. In the Yoruba language of West Africa, the word for ‘born of the water’ is…‘Gbomi.’ Gbomi—
my grandfather.
It is Gbomi who has returned, not Jeroboam Henley. Gbomi is
in me
.”

Nedeau’s voice was calm and steady, betraying no indication of the effort it took to keep Henley helpless in his grasp. His face was as impassive as a mask.

In a strangled voice, Henley managed to croak, “For…God’s sake…Theotis…I’m…your…
friend
!”

Something softened in Nedeau’s face then. His eyes blinked; his fingers began to relax…. Then, abruptly, his features contorted. An unholy flame kindled in his eyes. His lips drew back from his teeth in a rictus of sheer hatred. And the voice that issued from Nedeau’s throat was not his own. The accent was thick, alien, but the words were as plain as the dates chiseled on a tombstone.

“
Hen-lee…now, you die!
”

Nedeau’s fingers constricted. Henley’s eyes popped. His tongue protruded. His cries of pain were crushed in his throat. With an abrupt wrench, Nedeau snapped Jeremiah Henley’s neck. When his hands opened, a new corpse dropped to the floor beside another, far older one.

Calmly, Nedeau put on his shirt and coat. Before departing the attic, he overturned the still-burning tapers. For a moment, he watched the flames spread among the musty crates and boxes. Then he hurried down the stairs.

∇

The Henley house blazed like a giant pyre against the night sky. Seated in his black sedan, Theotis Nedeau watched the conflagration. He knew the fire would soon be spotted even in this isolated countryside, and the man who had thrown the brick through Henley’s window would return before long. By then, Nedeau would be gone, safely and anonymously back across the border while Canadian authorities sorted vainly through the maze of fictitious identification he had provided them.

His face remained expressionless as he remembered an earlier killing…the death in the Gold Coast of a man whose grandfather had sold a
malam
named Gbomi to the captain of a Yankee slave ship so many years ago. The Gold Coast man was innocent…innocent like Jeremiah Henley. Nedeau regretted those deaths.

But there was another man behind the mask of Theotis Nedeau’s face…the other who had been there since the day Nedeau participated in a calling-of-the-ancestors rite in the Gold Coast. Though his bones rotted in a secret graveyard in a Louisiana bayou, the spirit of Gbomi had spanned an ocean to join with, and ultimately overwhelm, that of his grandson.

It was Gbomi who taught Nedeau the
malam
’s way: all generations were part of a single continuum, ancestors and descendants all as one. Until the debts of the forebears were paid, they must be borne by the progeny….

One more death remained to be dealt…that of the grandson of the Louisiana slave-owner who had attempted to steal the spirit of an African
malam,
then slain the
malam
as a sacrifice to a god with an unspeakable name. One more death and perhaps then, the relentless shade of Gbomi would be placated. Perhaps then, only Theotis Nedeau would dwell behind the eyes that now turned from the burning house and began to study a road map of Louisiana.

Gbomi would not allow Theotis Nedeau to weep for his friend….

∇

Nethescurial

Thomas Ligotti

The Idol and the Island

I
have uncovered a rather wonderful manuscript, the
letter began
. It was an entirely fortuitous find, made during my day’s dreary labors among some of the older and more decomposed remains entombed in the library archives. If I am any judge of antique documents, and of course I am, these brittle pages date back to the closing decades of the last century. (A more precise estimate of age will follow, along with a photocopy which I fear will not do justice to the delicate, crinkly script, nor to the greenish black discoloration the ink has taken on over the years.) Unfortunately there is no indication of authorship either within the manuscript itself or in the numerous and tedious papers whose company it has been keeping, none of which seem related to the item under discussion. And what an item it is—a real storybook stranger in a crowd of documentary types, and probably destined to remain unknown.

I am almost certain that this invention, though at times it seems to pose as a letter or journal entry, has never appeared in common print. Given the bizarre nature of its content, I would surely have known of it before now. Although it is an untitled “statement” of sorts, the opening lines were more than enough to cause me to put everything else aside and seclude myself in a corner of the library stacks for the rest of the afternoon.

So it begins: “In the rooms of houses and beyond their walls—beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies—below earth mound and above mountain peak—in northern leaf and southern flower—inside each star and the voids between them—within blood and bone, through all souls and spirits—among the watchful winds of this and the several worlds—behind the faces of the living and the dead…” And there it trails off, a quoted fragment of some more ancient text. But this is certainly not the last we will hear of this all-encompassing refrain!