WHEN FINCH’S CORPSE and Horton’s stomach had both stabilized, Calvin sent Horton out into the night. Horton had explained that while that night had been his first introduction into the exact methods of cleaning, he was old hat at taking out the trash.
“I knew a guy who worked at this factory before they closed it down,” he’d said. “Used to make parts for the machines that extrude plastic for dildos and shit. Anyways, there’s a swampy part out behind it.”
“Used it before?” Calvin asked as they loaded the considerably lighter Mr. Finch into the trunk of Horton’s car.
“Let’s just say that when archeologists from the future find this spot, it’ll look like those tar pits in California.”
“La Brea.”
“Yeah, those ones.”
Now, as Calvin sat in bed—finally in bed—in his guest room down the hall from Jeremy’s bedroom, he wondered what those archeologists would make of scores of human bones, some with cement shoes no doubt, interspersed with defective dildos and silicon labiae. “They’ll judge us by our trash,” he said into the empty room. “That’s fair.”
The laptop balanced across his legs chimed and he looked down to see the files he’d requested had been uploaded to his hard drive. As his plane had been touching down in Detroit, Calvin had asked for the data through Thom Neary who had forwarded the request onto the research team at the Vatican. Calvin chuckled at the short note Neary had appended to the file: You joining a different company, kid? They might have wilder parties, but we have a better dental plan. Calvin clicked on the attachment icon and began to read about the mechanics of possession as practiced in Voodoo.
Voodoo had originated as an animist religion in ancient Africa, based on a pantheon of gods called Loa. When the slave trade ripped the Africans from their homeland, they brought their religion with them. Over the next couple of hundred years of its evolution Voodoo ingested and incorporated several aspects of other faiths, including Catholicism. While many ceremonial and iconoclastic similarities existed between the two, Voodoo still relied on the old ways to commune with the spirit world. Possession was key.
Calvin read account after account of the faithful enacting ceremonies designed to open their bodies so the Loa could “ride” them. The dogma stated that the only manner by which to truly appreciate, commune with, and pray to the gods was to allow them complete access to and mastery of one’s body. The file even contained several pictures and the language required to call the Loa. During possession, the worshippers were capable of supernatural abilities. Incidents of telekinesis and telepathy as well as knowledge of past and future events unknown to the possessed individual were well-documented.
Expulsion of the Loa was not covered. It appeared that because possession was so desirable, there was no need to find a way to keep the Loa out. They seemed to leave the faithful whenever they saw fit, sometimes after a few minutes, at most a couple of days. The whole point was to attract and hold the Loa, to merge fully in a spiritual symbiosis. The Loa got to experience the flesh, gorging themselves on dance, sex, food, adrenaline, life. The faithful got the “ride” of their lives from their beloved gods.
After an hour of scrolling text, a huge yawn rolled through Calvin’s body and yanked at his eyelids. He checked the clock in the corner of the screen, 3:48 AM. He was still on West Coast time, two hours earlier, but it had been a hell of a hard day and he had another one planned for tomorrow, or today, as it was.
He had just about all the information he could use. The data demonstrated how to call a spirit and meld with it, but did not provide the final bytes of information required to bring his plan to fruition. Calvin had the idea that he would have to write that verse himself and just hope that it would work.
He powered down the computer and pulled it off his lap. He noticed the warmth from the little machine now that it was gone. It was amazing the things you didn’t notice as long as they crept up on you. The best chefs were said to cook lobsters in slowly heating water. The doomed arthropods don’t feel a thing even as the temperature rises and they’re boiled alive, leaving the meat untainted by fear and pain-fueled adrenaline.
Calvin switched off the light and snuggled down into bed, left arm bent over his head. He thought of the hot water into which he’d been thrown and wondered who was turning up the heat. He closed his eyes and thought of the verse he would have to create, the ritual designed to ultimately expel a spirit rider.
He slid into sleep and found himself walking up the aisle at St. Michael’s Cathedral. Finch sat on the altar, juggling a couple of crucifixes and a dildo. His face was paraffin, the features melting and running into each other. He opened a mouth that was little more than a dark recess in which Calvin could just make out the stump of a tongue and said, “Legba.”
Dressed like the Pope himself, Thom Neary stood up from a front row pew and began to alternately toss crucifixes and dildos to Finch, calling, “Hup! Hup!” like a circus performer. On the other side of the isle, Tiesha sat robed in deep blue, a laptop computer open on her knees. She winked at Calvin and said, “I dig what you done with the place, Padre.”
Calvin looked back at the melted juggler, noting the white tips of bone where the fingers should have been. His arms blurred as he kept up with Bishop Neary’s cocks and crosses. Finch opened that nightmare orifice again. “Legba kissed me,” he gurgled. “But he’s in love with you.”