Mr. Clarinet

A line of children, alternating between boys and girls, all aged under ten, were walking up to a table draped in a red-and-black silk cloth. The children were immaculately dressed in black and white—black skirts and white blouses for the girls, black suits and white shirts for the boys. They approached the table and drank from a large, gleaming gold chalice, exactly as they would have done at Holy Communion, except there was no host to swallow and no priest officiating, only a man stepping up to the table after every child had drunk and, with a gold ladle, topping up the receptacle with a thin, greenish liquid.

He saw the boy from the beginning of the video stepping up to the chalice, taking it between his hands, and draining it. Then he put the chalice back exactly where he'd found it and stared right into the camcorder. His eyes were dead space, twin vacuums sealed in a skull; every ounce of life, thought, and personality they'd possessed in the earlier shots was gone for good. The boy left the table and followed the line of children leaving the hall, his walk slow and labored, as if he had someone inside him pulling levers to make him move. All the children moved the same way, with old steps.

Max knew what the liquid was. He'd had it. He knew what it did. It was a potion—zombie juice.

Like in the movies, voodoo zombies were technically the living dead—only they weren't really dead at all, but in a deep catatonic state. They were normal people who had been poisoned with a potion that completely incapacitated them. Their minds were working. They were fully conscious, but they could neither move nor speak. They didn't even appear to be breathing. They had neither a heartbeat nor a discernible pulse. After they'd been buried, the houngan or bokor—usually the person responsible for their condition—would dig them up and give them an antidote. They would regain consciousness, only not as the people they were before, but as near vegetables. The priest hypnotized the zombies and made them his slaves—either for himself or whoever was paying him. They did whatever they were told.

Boukman had used zombies.

Max pressed PLAY.

The boy was back in the front row of another classroom, only this time his eyes were barely moving and his face was expressionless, his features not registering that he was taking in a single thing about the proceedings. The camera pulled away and showed someone addressing the class from the left.

It was Eloise Krolak, the principal of Noah's Ark.

"You fuckin' bitch," Max whispered, freezing the tape as her face came clearly into view. Her features were pointed and severe, almost rodentlike in their alignment.

He knew from then on that the rest of the tape would only get worse.

He hit PLAY.

He was right.

When it was finished, Max sat there watching the static on the screen, unable to move. He stayed where he was for a long time, shaking.

Chapter 43

MAX CONSIDERED TELLING Allain about the tape, but he held off. He'd gather his evidence first.

He copied the tape, packed the original up with the figurines, and drove to the FedEx office in Port-au-Prince.

He let Joe know what was coming. He also asked him to see what he could find on Boris Gaspésie.

He drove to Noah's Ark. He parked up the road and fixed his mirror so he could see the gate.

He walked in and checked to make sure Eloise Krolak was there. He saw her addressing her pupils the same way she was talking to the zombie kids in the video. He thought back to the video, to the things he'd seen being done to those children. He felt suddenly sick.

He went back to his car and waited for her to come out.

* * *

In the afternoon it rained.

Max had never known rain like it. In Miami it poured—sometimes all day, all week, sometimes all goddamn month—but the rain fell and dribbled away into puddles or disappeared into the ground and back into the air.

In Haiti rain attacked.

The sky went near black as rain swarmed out of dense storm clouds and swooped down on Port-au-Prince, drenching the city to its foundations, turning bone-dry earth to running mud within seconds.