The light was both a single entity and a composite of billions of tiny brilliant points, pulsing, revolving, and dancing, like the concentration of stars at the core of some violent galactic spiral. The overall effect was of blinding white, but if one dared to look for more than a moment, all the colors of the spectrum were present within it. Jim and Saladeen stood side by side, arms raised to cover their already tightly shut eyes. After a moment Jim sneaked a quick peek, but even that was enough to risk a retinal burn.
The light remained stationary for maybe a minute, although to Jim it seemed one hell of a lot longer. He began to fear, even though he felt no actual heat, that his clothes would start smoldering, that his exposed skin would be fried to a purple crisp. To Jim this looked like the kind of light that could put a bend in the universe and that might be equally capable of vaporizing his soul. Then, as he was on the verge of cutting and running, the awful light began to fade. Jim slowly lowered his arm as it dimmed, and the first thing he saw, among the lingering confusion of afterimages, was a group of three indistinct but apparently human figures at the heart of the glow.
Jim glanced at Saladeen. “What the fuck?”
But Saladeen had turned away, his eyes still shut. “No!”
“What?”
“NO!”
Saladeen’s explosive response took Jim completely by surprise. The man was plainly terrified, something so out of character that it left Jim at a total loss. He looked back at the light and at the three figures. The light was little more than a dying ripple of pale stars, all but gone, and now he could see the figures as they really were. And that immediately posed the question of what they really were. Humanoid, but this clearer inspection raised major doubts that they were strictly human, more like characters from a tropical nightmare. All three stood close to nine feet tall, carrying with them an air of the unnatural. The central one was a statuesque female with ebony skin, wearing a floor-length robe that, as far as Jim could tell, was tailored from sheets of frozen flame. Her head was crowned by a massive headdress of spun gold and ostrich plumes.
To her right stood an impossibly skinny male, emaciated to the point of being scarcely more than a stick figure, dressed in formal evening wear, white tie and tails and a stovepipe hat so elongated and extended that it brought his overall height to well over eleven feet. The pale face below the hat was a naked skull, molded from some virgin-white material akin to fine porcelain. The third figure was also male, but more robust, decked out like the Fourth of July in a grandiose military uniform somewhere on the scale between Hermann Goering and Michael Jackson. The primary motif among his massed insignia was a jagged lightning bolt not unlike the flash on the uniform of Captain Marvel, Jr., or Elvis Presley’s self-designed TCB logo. Jim might easily have judged this third figure as nothing more than an overdressed clown, right up to the moment that he saw the face. It was about as clownish as the face of Idi Amin, a face quite capable of talking to the severed heads of its victims for hours at a stretch, a face that looked able to sustain an immortal fury well beyond any reasonable limit.
As Jim wondered about the nature and purpose of this triple apparition, a voice inside his head, possibly some dislocated memory from the right brain, surprised him with at least half the answer. “The woman is Danbhalah La Flambeau, Queen of the Persisting Fire. The thin one is Guede Docteur Piqures, that’s Dr. Hypodermic in English. He is the ruling spirit of narcotics and those addicted to them. You’ve had dealings with him before, although you won’t remember. The one in the uniform is Baron Tonnerre, the Baron Thunder, the incarnate wrath of the gods. They are all middle-echelon Mysteres from the Voodoo pantheon. They are very old and very cold and they are absolutely real, not a part of some ambitious stiff’s fantasy. They’re also very dangerous and you’d be well advised not to fuck with them.”
Almost as though he could hear the message in Jim’s brain, Saladeen urgently grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t be looking at them, man! Just don’t be looking at them!” Saladeen’s eyes were still tightly shut, his head turned away even while he pleaded with Jim. “They can mount you and ride you. They can use you up until there’s nothing left. Don’t let them catch you looking at them, man. They carry the keys to the Masterlock.”
But it was too late for Jim. He had looked and the three Mysteres had seen him looking. As one, they turned and faced him. The light had now completely dissipated to the point that not a single tiny star remained. Now the Mysteres were solid figures, glowing with a dead-fish shimmer. Their feet did set off tiny flashes of static, though, when they moved, as if they still carried a residual charge left by the radiation. Saladeen dropped to his knees, muttering incoherently. By far the worst feature of the three Mysteres, though, was their eyes. Even from a distance, Jim could see those eyes far more clearly than he would ever have desired. The three pairs of eyes, even by the standards of the Afterlife, had no place in any human quadrant of either space or time. They were terrible windows to somewhere else, a place that Jim would never want to visit, let alone inhabit.
Dr. Hypodermic suddenly moved in a flurry of pale blue static. He was coming toward Jim, and Jim’s insides turned to a very mortal ice water. In the normal course of events, the worst that could happen to one in the Afterlife was to be sent back to a pod on the Great Double Helix without passing Go. Who knew what a Voodoo Mystere could do to you, if he caught you looking at him and took a mind to mess you up? Mercifully, Danbhalah La Flambeau gestured to Dr. Hypodermic and he halted and turned away.
At the same time, the sound of a door slamming echoed from somewhere near Sun Yat’s, and Doc Holliday came slowly but determinedly around the side of the building and down the street. The Voodoo gods shifted to face him. Distracted from Jim, they stood waiting for Doc while Jim breathed a sigh of temporary relief. It was Doc’s town; let him deal with this terrifying trio. Maybe he was prepared for tourists from the Sinister Beyond. Certainly Doc didn’t seem fazed by them. He showed no signs of hurry. His ruffled shirt, partially unbuttoned, seemed to have been hastily tucked in his black pants. A certain unsteadiness in his step suggested he was at least half in the opium bag.
The arrival of Doc also appeared to reassure Saladeen. He got slowly to his feet, but kept his eyes firmly fixed on the ground as he muttered a little shamefacedly to Jim, “I guess I just lost it.”
Jim nodded. “I was close myself.”
“This shit goes deep, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, but Doc seems to be handling them.”
“Doc’s seen it all. Either here or in his dreams. Of course, Doc’s True Bad himself.”
Jim wasn’t quite ready to believe that Doc was on a par with Voodoo gods. “Not like those things.”
“No, not like those things, but he got his depths.”
Indeed, Doc was now in conversation with the queen, the doctor, and the baron, seeming not even slightly intimidated by their size or demeanor. Doc’s voice was soft and a little slurred and Jim couldn’t make out what he was saying. The Mysteres spoke in Haitian French patois, which Jim was absolutely unable to understand. What he didn’t like, however, was the way Doc and the Mysteres kept glancing in his direction as they conferred.