Dagger Key and Other Stories

If pressed to do so, I might have acknowledged Jo’s right to value her duties, but I was unreasonably angry at her. Angry and petulant. I kept to my room for a day and a half after that night on the beach, lying around in my boxers and doing some serious drinking, contemplating the notion that I was involved in a romantic triangle with a member of the undead. On the morning of the second day, I realized that I was only hurting myself and had a shower, changed my shorts. Still a little drunk, I was debating whether or not to see what was up in the rest of the house, when someone knocked on my door. Without thinking, I said, “Yeah, come in,” and Jo walked into the room. I thought about making a grab for my trousers, but I was unsteady on my feet and feared that I’d stumble and fall on my ass; so I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to act nonchalant.

“How are you feeling,” she asked.

“Peachy,” I said.

She hesitated, then shut the door and took a seat in a carved wooden chair that likely had been some dead king’s throne. “You don’t look peachy,” she said.

I’d cracked the drapes to check on the weather and light fell directly on her—she was the only bright thing in a room full of shadow. “I had a few drinks,” I told her. “Drowning my sorrows. But I’m pulling it together.”

She nodded, familiar with the condition.

“How come you didn’t tell me your boy could do tricks?” I asked.

“Josey? What are you talking about?”

I told her what Pellerin had been doing with the ocean water and she said she hadn’t realized he had reached that stage. She hopped up from the chair, saying she had to talk to him.

“Stay,” I said. “Come on. You got all day to do with him. Just stay a while, okay?”

Reluctantly, she sat back down.

“So,” I said. “You want to tell me what that is he was doing.”

“My previous patient developed the ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields. He did some remarkable things. It sounds as if Josey’s doing the same.”

“You keep saying that. Remarkable how? Give me an example.”

“He cured the sick, for one.”

“Did he, now?”

“I swear, it’s the truth. There was a man with terminal cancer. He cured him. It took him three days and cost him a lot of effort, but afterward the man was cancer-free.”

“He cured a guy of cancer by…what? Working his electromagnetic fields?”

“I think so. I don’t know for sure. Whatever he did, it produced a lot of heat.” She crossed her legs, yielding up a sigh. “I wish it had stopped with that.”

I asked what had happened.

“It’s too long a story to tell, but the upshot was, he built a veve…Do you know what a veve is?”

“The things they draw on the floors of voodoo temples? Little patterns?”

“That’s them. They relate to the voodoo gods, the loas.” She flicked a speck of something off her knee. “Donnell…my patient. He built the veve of Ogoun Badagris out of copper. Several tons of copper. It was immense. He said it enabled him to focus energy. He used to walk around on top of it and…one day there was an explosion.” She made a helpless gesture. “I don’t understand what happened.”

Neither did I understand. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that Pellerin might be some kind of green-eyed Jesus; yet I didn’t believe she was lying.

“What do think was going on with him?” I asked. “With Pellerin. I mean, what’s your theory? You must have a theory”

“You want to hear? I’ve been told it’s pretty out there.”

“Yeah, and nothing about this is out there, so your theory’s got to be way off base.”

She laughed. “Okay. The bacteria we injected into Josey was the same strain we used at Tulane. All the slow-burners have reproduced those designs in one way or another. It’s as if they’re expressing the various aspects of Ogoun. Doctor Crain’s theory was that because the bacteria eventually infested the entire brain, the patients used more of their brains than normal people—this resulted in what seemed to be miraculous powers. And since the bacterial strain was the same, it prevailed upon the host brain to acquire similar characteristics. That makes a certain amount of sense as far as it goes, but Crain was trying to explain voodoo in terms of science, and some of it can’t be explained except in voodoo terms.”