Night Film

45

“You mind expounding on that?”

Cleo only carefully set down the knife and stood up, striding to the bookcase at the back of the room.

“Look,” whispered Nora, inspecting the cracked soles of her own motorcycle boots. They were spangled with the same dark blotches, like wads of black gum. She yanked off one, scrutinizing the sole in the overhead light. I could see sand and thread, maybe even fingernails, mixed into the paste, glittering splinters of what looked like glass.

Cleo returned with a hulking stack of encyclopedias. Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork by Harry Middleton Hyatt, read the spines. They looked ancient, with orange covers tied together with a frayed black ribbon. She sat down, picking up volume one and flipping to the contents page, slipping her index finger down the entries. When she came to the end — apparently not finding what she was looking for — she slammed it shut, moving on to volume two.

I grabbed the book she’d just put down. It reeked of mildew, the pages yellowed. It was published in 1970, and a splotch of red liquid — tomato sauce or blood—had dried along the seam of the title page. Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork. Beliefs accepted by many Negroes and white persons, these being orally recorded among Blacks and whites.

General Description of Beliefs p.1. Belief in spirits, ghosts, the Devil, and the like p. 19. Timing of spells and recurrence of the effects of spells over time p. 349.

The book appeared to be an encyclopedia of spells, some of the entries short, others extensive. They were transcribed interviews with backwater southerners with thick accents, their accounts written out phonetically. For example, on p. 523 under the title heading Mojo hands grouped somewhat alphabetically according to their major ingredient (e.g. buckeye nuts, needles, black cat bone) was the following entry:

669. Jest a — yo’ see yo’ git a snake — yo’ can take a rattlesnake an’ dry his haid up, pound it up, an’ den yo’ kin go to work an’ use dat as goofer dust. Kill anybody.

[Waycross, Georgia]

“I found something similar,” muttered Cleo, inspecting the bottom of my boot before returning her attention to the page in front of her. I craned my neck to read what she was looking at.

Volume four, More conjure work utilizing human body parts and waste.

“ ‘The Black Bone trick,’ ” she whispered, tucking a chunk of purple hair behind her ears. “ ‘Frayed hemp rope, gum arabic, and goofer dust.’ Your friend used a slight variation. I see some dark brown sand in here, some seaweed, too. She must have picked this up someplace exotic. You put it down on the floor in a quincunx, which is a makeshift crossroads. Your enemy unknowingly walks through it. Immediately it sticks to his shoes, and within hours it’s eating away at his life.”

“Eating away?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

She shrugged. “I’ve heard of comas. Heart attacks. Abruptly losing everything you love, like your job or family. Sudden paralysis from the neck down.” She raised an eyebrow. “Have you felt any strange sensations in your legs?”

“I woke up with my foot asleep this morning,” said Nora worriedly.

Cleo nodded as if expecting this bad news. She then tilted her head, grabbing that tiger-tooth pendant around her neck, rolling it in her fingers.

“One thing that troubles me is something you said before. The plastic wrappers all over the floor. I don’t think they were plastic wrappers.”

“What were they?”

“Probably snakeskins. If they were filled with graveyard dirt, she combined all of this with a killing curse.”

“And that’s …”

“Like it sounds. It’ll kill you.”

“The surgeon general says the same thing about cigarettes.”

She only stared at me. “With cigarettes death takes decades. With this you could be dead within weeks.”

Nora looked stricken.

“Anyone ever told you your witchside manner was a little harsh?” I asked.

“There’s no point sugarcoating black magic.”

I tried smiling at Nora for reassurance, but she ignored me, staring at the curse-riddled sole of her shoe as if it were a cluster of malignant tumors.

“Graveyard dirt,” I said. “That means our friend collected dirt from a graveyard?”

“Yeah. And it’s not easy to get. You have to do it at a certain time of night. Under a certain moon. You have to know whose grave you’re taking it from. How the person died. Some witches believe the best dirt to use comes from either a murderer, a baby less than six months old, or someone who loved you beyond all reason. You also have to know where you’re digging in relation to the body, if it’s above the head, heart, or feet. You have to leave something behind, too, as a token of appreciation. Money or whiskey usually works. You mix the dirt into the snake sheds and goofer dust.”

“What’s goofer dust?” asked Nora.

“The H-bomb of spell materials. When you goofer someone, you’re spiritually poisoning them. It comes from the Congo, the word kufwa, which means to die. The powder’s usually a yellowish color, but you mix in the graveyard dirt so it’s dark and can’t be spotted. It’s really powerful because it eats away at your mind without you even realizing it, poisoning your reasoning and your love. It pulls apart the closest friends, isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. It’ll drive you mad, which in some ways is worse than death.”

“So our friend had something like a PhD in witchcraft,” I said.

“She had a major proficiency in dark magic. Absolutely.”

“And what is dark magic? Voodoo? Hoodoo?”

“It can mean any number of things. It’s a blanket term for all magic that’s used for evil purposes. I’m not an expert. My training is in Earth goddess, fertility spells, spiritual cleansing, that kind of thing. A lot of the black stuff’s underground. Passed down through generations. Secret meetings in the middle of the night. Old leather-bound journals filled with spells written backward. Attics stockpiled with the really obscure ingredients, like deer fetuses, lizard feces, baby blood. This stuff is not for people with queasy stomachs. But it works. Does your friend come from a family of occultists?”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“Well, she thought she was cursed. She tried hard to stop it, reverse it back onto the executioner. She wanted to kill him. That’s what it looks like to me. So maybe she didn’t expect you to walk through it, but someone else, maybe someone who put the curse on her. I suggest tracking your friend down and asking her.”

Nora shot me a wary look.

“Here’s what I can tell you,” Cleo went on, clearing her throat. “Scrape the trick off with a knife or razor blade. Make sure it doesn’t touch your skin. Wrap it in newspaper and throw the materials away at a crossroads or a freshwater river.”

“Guess that rules out the Hudson.”

“I’ll also give you some reversing candles.” She headed to the back again, crouching beside a cabinet, digging through shelves. “Again, I really don’t have experience with this. You should consult a witch doctor with a specialty in black magic.”

“Where do we find one of those? Disney World?”

“Google it. Some names will come up. But all the really legit ones are in the Louisiana bayou.” Cleo returned to the table, handing Nora two candles, black by the wick, white at the base.

“How much are those setting us back? A couple hundred bucks?”

“No charge. It’s unethical to charge people who come in suffering from dark magic, kind of like someone coming into the emergency room with a fatal gunshot wound. You do what you can to save their life. Money’s irrelevant.”

Thoughtfully rolling her tiger’s-tooth pendant between her fingers, Cleo watched us pull on our shoes. Nora, collecting the candles, explained that it had actually been three of us who’d been inside the room, so Cleo dug out a third reversing candle and then escorted us back through the store.

It was even more crowded. A dapper elderly couple inspected the skull candles. Four teenage girls browsed incense. A young man with the desperately preppy look of an unemployed Wall Street analyst perused a pamphlet: Enchantments’ Fall Class Schedule.

Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes.

Dexter must have given the orange-haired kid at the register the lowdown, because they stared in fascination as we filed past them.

Cleo opened the door for us, shooing away the Persian cat.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Nora bleakly, stepping outside. I paused.

“What if I don’t buy any of this? I was raised Catholic.”

Cleo stared at me blankly, though for a moment, I swore I caught an amused gleam in her black eyes.

“Then I guess you have nothing to worry about.”

She slammed the door closed with a preoccupied expression and darted through the milling crowd, doubtless racing to her red-light lair at the back of the shop.