Spann closed the back door and walked from the kitchen into the living room. It was in no better shape.
The closet was just to the right inside the front door of the building. On entering the room she could see that it was empty, just a metal rod hung with skeletal wire hangers. The clothes that once had hung there were scattered about the place. Every stick of furniture was now buried beneath her discarded clothing. There were turtleneck sweaters and parts of her uniforms strewn about the floor. In one corner lay a pile of high-heeled pumps, loafers and running shoes. There were dressing gowns and socks and skirts and underpants here and there. There were blouses and T-shirts and overcoats hither, thither, and yon. One of her bras was hanging limply off a table surface; it reminded her of those Dali clocks, surreal and warped and melting. Not one picture upon the walls hung on the horizontal.
Sure you hate housework, kiddo, but this is ridiculous!
It occurred to her now as she stood in the room letting the mild shock sink in, that perhaps this mess was no more than the external manifestation of just how hard she had been working. While training in Regina on how to go underground, Spann had had an instructor who put the art like this: "And you women, you gotta pretend that you're nothin' but scummy sluts. No combin' your hair. No washin' your bods. No ironin' your clothes. When your pits are gettin' high as a kite, you're ready for the jungle. That's the way of survival."
This was sound advice, Spann had learned her first day on the skids. She had followed it and had survived among those who hated narcs. Perhaps she'd followed it too well.
The problem, as she now saw it, was that she had not come all the way back: she had jumped from her undercover posting right to the Headhunter Squad, donning her uniform without also taking the time to clean up and change her act. There had not been time for mundane affairs like housework and doing the laundry, And come on, girl, be honest, that's the way you like it. Housekeeping is the shits!
Tonight it took Katherine Spann almost two hours to get her home in order. Finally at 11:30 p.m. she put on her jacket and opened the door to take out the garbage. All six bags of it.
Outside the wind was howling like a banshee on a drunk. Across the pockmarked face of the moon, now high and full and yellow, rafts of cloud were sweeping by on the river of the storm. Suddenly Spann felt a chill worm its way down her spine, like a freezing finger that slowly touched each vertebra. She turned on instinct and looked back at the windows of Sussex Manor. For lately the eldest of the sisters who lived there — the one without hair or teeth — had taken to sitting up late at night behind the upper left-hand window. Several times Spann had seen her there in ghostly silhouette. Tonight, however, all she could see of the two-storied house were the three high-pointed gables and the massive stone turret bulging off to one side.
The woman crossed the yard to the gardener's shed and dug out the two-handed axe.
For the next fifteen minutes Katherine Spann chopped up alder rounds. Then, having lathered up a sweat, she carried the wood, quartered and split, back into her house. She lit a blazing fire in the antique cast-iron hearth. Entering the bathroom she stripped off her clothes and turned the shower on. For ten minutes she stood in the tub with her eyes closed, languishing and relaxing beneath the sharp needles of hot water. When she climbed out, refreshed, Spann toweled herself dry with a rough brisk rub and put on a pair of blue pajamas, a maroon velour bathrobe and fuzzy sheepskin slippers. Then she toweled her hair dry one more time and shuffled out to stand by the fire.
The flames of the hearth were licking and snarling within the bricked-up cage, every so often emitting a crack like a circus master's whip.
Her world now in order and everything clean, Spann picked up a voodoo book. Then she curled up in an easy chair off to the right of the fire, cracked the cover of the Huxley volume and slowly began to read.
The roots of voodoo twist among the myths and tribes of Africa. That much she knew. What she was about to find out was just how developed and widespread that root system was.
It was now midnight.
Outside the autumn wind continued to scream in the trees.
11:32 p.m.
In an article dated September 26, 1979, the Toronto Globe and Mail informed its readers that sometime in the previous week about 800 French paratroopers and marine commandos had flown into the Central African Republic to stage a bloodless coup to end the rule of Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa. The Emperor had subsequently gone into exile on the Ivory Coast. When David Dacko, the new President of the Republic, held his first press conference he told the international journalists gathered in Bangui that "pieces of human flesh have been found in the refrigerators in Bokassa's Colongo villa."
Old habits die hard. Rick Scarlett thought — and he put down the book. The newspaper clipping was Scotch-taped inside its front cover.
For over an hour the policeman had been reading about how prevalent the practice of voodoo was — and is — in Africa, particularly when it overlaps with cannibalism and human sacrifice. The number of cases was startling.
In the early fifties it had surfaced dramatically among the Kikuyu tribesmen of East Africa. That was when the Mau Mau took on the British in Kenya.
As the initiate climbed the Mau Mau ladder, the oath and rituals performed increased in bestiality. One of the pledges required that whenever an initiate to the society murdered a European, he had to cut off the head and extract the eyeballs and drink the fluid from them.
In a postscript to the volume that Scarlett had been reading it was stated that in order to intensify the atmosphere of these oath-taking ceremonies, they were usually accompanied by sexual orgies and perversions involving animals. Rams or dogs or sheep were used, or whatever was available. It was said that the authenticated reports were so disgusting that they were not available for general study. They could, however, be consulted on the premises of the Colonial or Commonwealth Relations Office Library.
Although the British had crushed the Mau Mau in 1956, the same type of structure had arisen again with the Zebra killings in San Francisco. Was it now arising here?
For the last quarter hour Rick Scarlett had found that he had trouble in concentrating. That was the reason he had finally put down the book.
After dropping Katherine Spann off earlier in the evening, he'd returned to the Headquarters building up on Heather Street. He was hoping to find Rabidowski or other suitable male company, for the truth was that Rick Scarlett felt like a horse's ass.
Right from the start he had somehow felt that this woman had taken effective control of their flying patrol. It worried him that the good ideas seemed to come from her. As a boy on the prairies he had spent a number of years in Alberta. Scarlett's father had been a regular member of the RCMP posted to "K" Division. Many a day the boy had spent with his dad up around those sandstone pillars where men like Sam Steele and Wilfred Blake had once maintained the law. When the word hoodoo had shown on the taps, a connection to the Rocky Mountains had instantly linked in his mind.
Oh God,Scarlett thought. Do you think she's gloating right now? Why did this have to happen to me immediately after DeClercq gives us a warning on tunnel vision?