"That Cab again?" Decker asked.
"He says he wants you back at headquarters, no arguments." "How does he sound?"
"Enraged."
"Not apoplectic yet? That's good. Tell him to give me twenty minutes."
They parked on East Main Street, right outside the station entrance. Over to the west, the sky was growing gloomy, even though it was only a few minutes past midday, and the clouds had a strange bruised appearance, purple and red.
They pushed their way through the swing doors. Inside it was dark and unexpectedly chilly, and they all took off their sunglasses. The steep stairway was coated in concrete dust and the whole building echoed with hammering and drilling and shouting.
They climbed the stairs until they reached the arrivals' lobby.
Mike Verdant saw them and gave them a wave. He
290
crossed the floor of the lobby, stepping over hydraulic hoses and lengths of timber, and held out his hand.
"Come back for another look, Lieutenant? You're in luck—we're just about to reinstall the decorative railings."
"Actually we want to pay another visit to the crawl space."
"Really? I don't think there's anything down there, only debris."
"All the same."
Mike looked dubiously at Queen Aché. "You want to take this lady down there too?"
"That's the idea. She knows what we're looking for more than we do."
"Well . . . okay. But you have to wear hard hats, and I ought to lend you some coveralls. It's pretty slimy down there."
He came back with hard hats and three bright-yellow coveralls with CRDCD lettered in red on the back—City of Richmond Department of Community Development. They stepped into them—Hicks almost overbalancing as he caught his shoe in the leg hole—and buttoned them up.
Mike said to Queen Aché, "Pardon me . . . but do I know you?"
Queen Aché looked down at him haughtily. She was at least four inches taller than he was. "Give thanks to God that you don't."
Mike turned to Decker, pulling a face. Decker shrugged as if to say, That's the way she is . . . don't push it. Mike said, "Here . . . you're going to need these flashlights."
They went back down the staircase to the East Main Street entrance. As they did so, they heard a bellow of thunder, and through the dusty glass of the swing doors they could see spots of rain on the sidewalk outside.
291
Mike led them to the break in the wall that led to the lower level. "I'd come with you but I have to put in those railings. One half inch out of line and we're screwed."
"That's okay," Decker said. "I think we can manage from here."
When Mike had gone back up to the arrivals lobby, Hicks said, "Lieutenant----do you really think this is a good idea?" "No, but what else are we going to do?"
"I don't know. But we know how powerful this So-Scary Man is. Think of the way he pushed us both over, in the hospital. Maybe we should try smoking him out of here with tear gas, or knocking him out with nitrous oxide."
"Hicks, we don't have the time, and I can't see Cab authorizing a SWAT team, can you? Besides that, I'm not sure whether tear gas or nitrous oxide would have any affect on this joker at all. For Christ's sake, he's dead, or the living dead, or whatever you call it in Santeria."
Queen Aché said, "Egun, the ancestors, who are dead but still live. That is why I call my followers the Egun."
Hicks said, "I still think this is too risky. Either that, or we're wasting our time."
Queen Ache pointed her finger directly at Hicks, as if she were picking him out in a lineup. "You believe, don't you? You're a believer. You pretend that you're a skeptic, but you know that the dead can walk amongst us, and that spirits can talk to us from beyond the grave."
Hicks looked uncomfortable. "Let's just do it, shall we, if we're going to do it?"
"Why do you deny it?" Queen Aché persisted. "Why do you deny your roots? Do you really choose to spend the rest of your life in the soulless world of the white people? The dog has four legs but walks only one path."
"Come on," Decker said. He climbed into the hole in the wall, clambering over heaps of broken brick, shining his
292
flashlight up ahead of him. "You next, Your Majesty. Hicks, you watch our rear ends."
Once they had negotiated the bricks, they found themselves in a low, vaulted cellar. The walls and the ceiling were black with damp and encrusted with salt. In the far corner, the salt had built up against the brickwork in a series of lumpy gray stalagmites, which looked like a gaggle of hideous dwarves, some of them with swollen heads and others with hugely hunched backs.
"Must have flooded here pretty often," Decker remarked.
Queen Aché said, "The city flooded on the day when I was born. My father always said that it was an omen from Yemayá, that I too would flood the city one day."
"Well, you certainly flooded it with second-rate smack."
They penetrated farther into the cellar, flicking their flashlights left and right, but there was no sign of a coffin, or a niche that the So-Scary Man might have used as a hiding place. No bunched-up blankets, no newspaper bedding, no discarded Coke cans. Over in the left-hand corner, however, it looked as if a large section of the floor had collapsed into the crawl space below.
"What makes you sure that he's here?" Queen Aché asked. Although she was standing still, and her face was serious, her shadow was dancing on the ceiling right above her, as if her spirit was mocking them.
"His coffin was sunk right here, in Shockoe Creek, and this is the first time that these lower foundations have been disturbed since the station was built. Apart from that, the little girl I was telling you about . . . the one who can see him . . . she saw him entering the station through the same doors that we came in. Another time she saw a kind of a twisted cloud over the station rooftops, which she thought was a cloud of evil. She even drew a picture of it. For some reason she said it was the House of Fun."
293
"The House of Fun?" Queen Aché thought about that and then she shook her head. "No . . . not the House of Fun."
"Excuse me?"
"She probably understood it wrong. She meant the House of Ofun. Ofun means 'the place where the curse is born."
"You're serious? `The place where the curse is born?' Hear that, Hicks? What more proof do we need than that?"
Queen Aché stepped ahead of him, deeper into the cellars, occasionally ducking her head because the ceiling was so low. Thirty feet in, she stopped, and raised her hand to indicate that they should stay where they were, and stay silent.
"What is it?" Decker asked, after a while.
"I can smell something," she said.
"Me too. Dead rats and damp."
"No . . . there is something else. Close your eyes. Breathe in deeply and hold it."
Decker breathed in. Hicks did too, and whistled through one nostril. Decker couldn't be sure, but he thought he could detect the faintest aroma of stale herbs, like taking the lid off a jar of dried oregano.
"Smells like my grandma's larder," Hicks said.
"That's right," Queen Aché agreed. "Those are the herbs they would have used to seal Major Shroud in his casket."
She knelt down and opened up her leather satchel. Out of it she lifted a canvas pouch, tightly tied at the neck with black waxed string. She set this down on the floor in front of her, and then she took out four dried apples, a glass bottle of pale green liquid, and another bottle containing a dark red liquid.
While Decker kept his flashlight shining on her, she un‑
294
tied the canvas pouch and tipped out a handful of dull, blackened stones.
"What are you doing?" Decker asked her.
"These are thunderstones . . . stones from a building that was struck by lightning."
As if to emphasize their importance, there was a loud bang of thunder from outside, and even here in the cellar they could smell the fresh, ozone-laden draft that came with the following rain.