Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim 2)

“You get used to it. Like herpes or a missing leg.”

“I want to see inside.”

“Not yet. I need to do something first.”

I grab a bag from the backseat, get out of the Lexus, and go around to the passenger side. Brigitte watches as I dump a pile of powders, plants, and the piece of lead I use for certain kinds of circles.

“Lovely. I get to see magic?”

“You get to see magic. I hope these ingredients are still good. They’re Kasabian’s. My roomie’s. He hasn’t done this kind of hoodoo in a long time.”

“What kind does he do?”

“He shits out of his neck.”

Brigitte stares.

“I’ll explain later.”

There’s a mortar and pestle in the bag. I pass them to Brigitte along with a bag of ingredients.

“Take these leaves and seeds and grind them up into a powder. I need to go be da Vinci.”

I take the lead and draw a circle in the car’s shadow so it will be hard to see if someone wanders by. The image isn’t complicated. A pentagram facing north inside a double circle. Outside the circle I scribble words in Latin, Hebrew, and Hellion. Not a spell. More a friendly “hi and thanks for stopping by” kind of stuff. It’s pretty random, but better hoodoo than it sounds. If you think it’s easy saying anything in Hellion that doesn’t come off as a veiled threat, you’d be wrong. I suck at milk-and-cookies magic, but I need to attract as much wildlife as possible without blowing it up.

“Your powder is ready. What kind of magic are we doing?”

“The Vigil will have left an alarm on the house. Probably angelic, and those detect conscious life. That’s animals, insects, and us. Anything can go inside or be magically controlled to go inside. We can’t turn the alarm off, but we can give it a migraine.”

The powder goes into the center of the circle and I lean over it to whisper some bits of greeting magic I sort of halfway remember. Brigitte is smiling, trying not to laugh. I look like I’m whispering sweet nothings to a pile of dirt, not exactly the two-fisted hoodoo she was counting on.

When I get tired of cooing to the pavement, I dump powdered sulfur onto the pile and mix it all together with my hands. Get out Mason’s lighter, spark it, and throw the mess up into the air as hard as I can. I touch the flame to the tail end of the cloud and the sulfur catches, igniting a twenty-foot pillar of fire.

The fire is gone as quickly as it came, but by the time the last powder embers hit the ground, I can already hear what I was hoping for.

Around us and above us there’s a rustling sound. The birds arrive first, settling into the vacant lot by the house, chirping, cawing, and pecking at the ground. Rats and mice swarm out of the sewers and warehouses, followed by insects. The crawlers cover the ground like a massive undulating carpet and the fliers drop from the sky like a black, glittering fist. Cats and dogs, the smartest animals of the bunch, so the hardest to convince, get there last. They head right for the house, circle it, mark the boards, and climb onto the roof. The birds and insects finally get the idea and head in that direction. As soon as they’re moving, I grab Brigitte’s hand and we start to run. The animals know we’re coming. Yeah, they’re dumb, but this is hoodoo and it would be a pretty shit spell if you ended up crushing all the wildlife you’d just called.

The bugs and mice and rats part like the Red Sea and Brigitte and I run through the field to the house. By the time we’re there, the walls and roof are a solid mass of feathers, fur, and shiny carapaces. There’s no way the alarm can read and separate this much life at once. I pull out the na’at as we go up the steps and slash the lock. The door swings open on its own. It’s dark inside. Brigitte gets out her flashlight. I take her back to the kitchen and out through the missing porch. She gasps when she finds herself in the Springheels’ sprawling California ranch house.

“This is beautiful.”

“If you’re Ronald Reagan, I guess.”

“The idea of it, I mean. The beauty hidden within the rot.”

“Sure. That’s what I meant, too.”

I find the lights as Brigitte wanders around the living room touching the furniture, then going to the big windows that open out over the desert.

“I’d like to see the desert.”

“It’s not hard to get to from L.A. Maybe I’ll show you sometime.”

“Maybe.”

There’s a big side table against the wall across from the windows. I go through all the drawers. I’m not looking for clues. I’m looking for the half pack of stale Marlboro Lights I find in the middle drawer. I take a long sniff and I’m in love.

“Junkie,” says Brigitte.