The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 39

I’m not sure if I’m asleep or just in a kind of trance – or maybe oxygen deprived – when I first hear the sound. It comes from a long, long way off – like China. It’s a muffled scraping noise, one that means nothing to me, that’s happening independently, that seems to exist in a separate universe. I observe the sound with the detachment of a machine, one of those monitors in a museum, for instance, silently tracking humidity and temperature, keeping a record for future perusal by some sentient being.

The sound goes on and on, and gradually I adopt the idea that my new universe will contain this sound. I’m not sure how I feel about it because the sound is not actually pleasant, now that I contemplate it as a permanent condition. Now that it is omnipresent. Now that it occupies most of my consciousness. I cannot feel much – the wood against my fingers, the ragged surface of the breathing tube. I can see nothing. Smells are confined to the odor of my own body, the pine wood, the manufactured smell of the plastic pipe.

The only thing that changes is the sound, and so it comes to absorb all my attention. After a while it seems to me that the sound is actually inside my own head, that I’ve somehow invented it.

It’s not until a shovel hits the wood that I’m jolted into the perspective of a true observer, that the sound represents an event in time. It’s the sound of a metal implement striking the wooden object in which I am encased. The realization propels me out of my trance state.

I am buried alive and someone is digging me out.

Immediately, I’m inundated by a tsunami of fear and claustrophobia. I’m buried alive!

And I’m overcome with terror that whoever is digging me out will stop. Coming out of my trance, I don’t at first remember how I got where I am or even where that is. An earthquake or an avalanche, a terrorist attack? What I do know is that I can’t see, I can’t breathe, that I’m trapped and panicked.

I try to shout – wanting to offer some sign that the effort is worth it, that whomever my rescuer might be, there’s a person down here. I want to shout out: I’m alive. I’m here. Don’t give up.

What emerges from me is nothing like what I intend. It’s not a shout, not even a scream. It’s more like a moan or a growl, so low-pitched I doubt anyone could hear it. It’s almost as if my voice lacks the velocity to break the sound barrier.

By the time the coffin is raised, and the cover pried off – a process that takes a long time – I remember how I came to be buried alive. I wonder, as they work on my exhumation, how long I was under. While I was buried, I lost my bearings in time and space. For a while, I even lost the idea of me, of Alex Callahan. Time seemed to expand infinitely. At first, I counted my breaths in cycles of one hundred, but eventually, I started losing track, and then I seemed to forget the proper sequence of numbers and then it seemed pointless. I went insane for a short time, screaming and writhing and trying to claw my way out, an effort that left my fingers raw and bleeding. I used the pain, for a while, to keep my spirits up. As long as it hurts, I told myself, I’m alive. A new Cartesian deduction. Dolor ergo sum. Or something like that.

I felt regret about it: disappearing. It would be tough on my parents and Liz. My main concern was for the boys, because I considered myself their last chance. Others might go through the motions, but everyone else had given them up for dead. That thought carried me for a while. By thinking of Sean and Kevin, by recounting every memory of them, by summoning up their faces and their voices, I was able to keep my head together for some time. And I had a vision of them, which I was persuaded was true, that I am still persuaded is true.

Somehow my mind slipped the temporal-spatial chains and delivered me to a room I’d never seen before. It was as if I were in the center of the ceiling, looking down. The boys were asleep in wooden bunk beds of the bulky, rough-hewn “western” sort. They slept under burgundy-colored fleece blankets, Sean on the lower bunk, Kevin on top.

Kevin stirred, under my gaze, and turned over from one side to the other. His mouth was open and I could see that his two new front teeth, which had just begun to emerge from his gums when the boys arrived from Maine, were almost fully in now. The edges had a vaguely scalloped appearance, ridges that must wear down over time, and the teeth looked too big for his face, as such teeth do. And then the vision vanished and I was back in the dark, trying to summon up anything, Christmas at the in-laws’, Sean’s face when he saw the bike under the tree.

Eventually, though, I suffered a collapse of the will. Diment had buried me alive. He was Boudreaux’s friend. If I thought his kind look promised anything, it was wishful thinking. I wondered if Pinky would be able to track down my grave.

And then I passed beyond regret, into a new arena, where I was beyond any interest in myself. This is the way I think I survived. I gave up. I obliterated every thought because they all circled back on themselves: “What if I turn over?” always led to “Can I turn over?” And so on.

In a way, it was a relief to give up. To stop counting, to stop focusing on my pain, to stop thinking of Sean and Kev, to stop hoping. To stop thinking that Alex Callahan had any importance in the universe. To stop thinking at all.

As the nails are pried off, the screech is the loveliest music I’ve ever heard. When the lid comes off, I’m blinded by the light and my eyes reflexively slam shut. Hands grasp my arms and sit me up.

“Come on now, take it easy. Don’t try to open your eyes just yet. Just let the light filter in through your lids like.”

Someone holds a paper cup of water to my lips and I gulp a few sips, a messy process. I try to lift a hand to my face to wipe my lips, but the hand shakes so badly I can’t really do it; I just bat myself in the face.

“That’s okay,” says a voice I recognize as Diment’s. “You be all right. Didn’t I tell you, man? You jez have to trust. Body don’t like bein’ pinned down like that, that’s all. But you be all right, same as I promise. Just take it easy. Let the world welcome you back, brother.”

More water. It’s delicious, an elixir. As is the damp air against my skin, which provides an exquisite rush of sensations. And the sunlight through my eyelids, flickering and patterned through something I can’t see, is a revelation after the darkness.

“You a new man, now. You reborn. We gon’ stand you up, come on.”

Strong hands under my arms lift me to my feet.

“Open your eyes, Alex. Jest a little, tha’s right, now a little more. Step out onto the earth.”

The world is still bleached out, like an overexposed photograph, but I can see enough to step over the side of the coffin onto the dusty earth.

“Oh, yes!” a female voice calls.

“He one of us now!”

Their voices are sweet and wonderful, the most dulcet music. In fact, liberated from the coffin, I am drenched in sheer wonderment. The humid air against my skin, the sun, the trees rustling in the breeze, the dirt… I tremble with delight. I even start to cry, tears of joy and relief.

“Oh, yes! Now he see!”

On the ground to my right is an intricate design made out of a white powder. It’s lacy and beautiful.

“That’s a veve,” Diment tells me, following my gaze. “That help bring the loa here.” He leans down and, with his fingertips, stirs the design into the dust.

The members of the bizango are gathering flags and drums, and stuffing the bottles and plastic plates and cups into trash bags. Some of their faces are smeary with white powder. They look worn out, as if the night was a difficult one for them, too.

Once again, it’s as if Diment can read my mind. “It not restful when the loa come into you. You shake and fall down and then you dance. We all tired now – you the only one get any rest.” He laughs his alarming laugh.

I’m outside Diment’s place, sitting on a disintegrating rattan chair in a little concrete patio hidden behind the structure. It’s just a concrete slab, with a cable spool for a table and two sagging chairs. To the right are some animal pens or chicken coops of different sizes, handmade of bamboo and interlaced with vine. One of them holds a speckled hen, but the others are empty. The hen sits compact and motionless with the exception of her bright eyes.

I’m back in my own clothes and I put in a call to Pinky from the BMW’s phone to let him know I’m all right. Now I wait for Diment to come out. Usually, I hate to wait, but for the moment I’m without impatience. The night underground propelled me into a new mindset. It would be overstating it to say that I feel “reborn,” but I do feel refreshed and alive. And free of my normal impatience, my usual restless chafing against the constraints of any schedule not designed with me at its center. I take heart from that strange vision of the boys in their bunk beds, which reaffirmed my belief that they’re alive.

“You know why I agree to help you?” Diment asks when he joins me, maybe half an hour later. The old man looks tired, his color bad, his rheumy eyes bagged and exhausted.

“No.”

“Twins. You seek your boys and they are twins. It is for this. Otherwise, I am an old man who does not like to miss his sleep. Twins are very special in vaudoo. Above every other loa – which be the spirits in charge of the whole world, the living and the dead – above all of them, is the Marassa.” He nods.

“The Marassa?”

“Oh, yes, they the twins. They make the rain fall, they make the herbs that heal the sick. The two in one – they symbolize the harmony of the world as it should be, the balance of the earth and the sky, the fire and the water, the living and the dead.”

“The twins.”

“So it is,” Diment says in his mellifluous voice. “So it is this way. The twins not entirely, what you say, friendly, oh, no. They get angry, sometime. They jealous. Things go out of balance. But in vaudoo – twin children in a family, this a thing of great importance. They are” – he searches for the word – “a reminder of the mystery. You must have ceremony for them – this you must do if you find your sons, yes? This you must promise me.”

“Ceremony?”

“In their honor. Every year. You listen now. Every once a year. Christmas, this one possible day, but the celebration must be apart from the Christmas celebration, so that may be not the best choice. January fourth, that a second appropriate day.”

“That’s-”

But he holds up his hand to stop me.

“The third one is the Easter eve, the day before the Christian Easter. If you not have ceremony for the twins, it bring unhappy days.”

“It’s no problem,” I tell him. “We always celebrate. Their birthday is January fourth.”

This stuns him, almost scares him. “You are sent to me. So I may serve the Marassa.” He closes his eyes, mumbles, crosses himself, lets his head fall to his chest. When he opens his eyes again, he looks so tired I ask him if he wants to rest for a while.

“Look, I need to get Pinky’s car back to him,” I tell him. “I can come back later.”

“No, no, no, no.” He draws his open hand down over his face. “I tell you now what I know about Byron. I might know one or two thing. We can hope-” He makes a gesture, his hands rising into the air. “We can hope it help you.”

My mood sinks. It doesn’t sound like he’s got any hard information about Boudreaux’s whereabouts.

We’re interrupted when a woman arrives. She wears a long faded dress and has bare feet. She’s nervous and very deferential to Diment. She holds a white rooster in her arms, confining it in such a way that it does not struggle. Diment makes a little bow in my direction and gets up to inspect the bird. He pulls its wings up and pushes its feathers apart here and there. The bird makes a clucking sound every once in a while and moves its head in little jerks, its red comb wobbling, its bright eyes staring. “It’s good,” Diment says, and instructs the woman to put the chicken into an empty pen. The bird goes inside in a flurry of squawks and feathers. The woman closes the pen by inserting a stick through a double loop of vine.

“She bring this for the sacrifice,” Diment says, when the woman leaves. “She come back later. You are here first.”

My mind vaults to the chicken blood on Kevin’s shirt, the one the police found in my closet.

“You’re going to sacrifice it?” Until Diment spoke of sacrifice, I’d been thinking the hen was there to lay eggs. And the rooster, was – I don’t know – a pet.

Diment nods. “You don’t like this.”

I shake my head as if to dismiss his idea, but he’s right, of course.

“That don’t surprise me. You think it primitive, I’m right?”

“I guess.”

“Sacrifice the core to all worship, go way back, all the way back, I’m thinking. The god or the gods create the entire world and give you life in it. To honor the god, you perform the ritual, you give him back one of his creature, you give the life of thing back to nourish him.

“Sometime, we have hard times. We have drought or the animals fall sick. Yet even then the animal for the sacrifice cannot have disease. Cannot have flaw. So to give the healthy animal back in hard times, that hard to do. But hard times when you need the loa most of all, yes?”

“I understand the idea, but-”

Diment makes a harsh and dismissive gesture, puts his hand on my arm. “Let me ask you one thing: You a Christian man?”

“Sort of.”

“The Christian faith built on sacrifice, you understanding, yes? God ask Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, then God relent. He take a lamb, instead. He take a lamb instead of Isaac. He take a life. No, he not require the son of Abraham, but God require this of himself. He sacrifice his only son, let him to die up on the cross in the hot sun, spill his own son’s blood, take his own son’s life. Not a chicken, not a bull, not a lamb – his only son. And Jesus, he know ahead of time. Don’t he say at the Last Supper – ‘This is my body, this is my blood.’ The communion – this rite. It’s about sacrifice, no? You drink Jesus blood, you eat his body.”

“You’re right,” I tell him. “You’re absolutely right. But-”

“You still think to kill the chicken – this somehow backward, yes? Let me ask you: How you respect life if you don’t respect death? Let me tell you – you think I a bloodthirsty man, I like to spill the blood?”

“No. But-”

“You live in your head,” Diment says, shaking his own head sadly. “Alex, you must also live in your body.” He thumps his chest. “You must live in here. You must learn to live in here.”

“I live in my body.”

“No. Three hours out of the ground and already you back up here.” He touches his head and sighs, a deep, fatigued sound.

“I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head.

“I think maybe Byron still practices sacrifice,” I tell him. “He left one of the boys’ T-shirts at my house, soaked in blood. It made the police think I’d killed my sons… until they tested the blood.”

“Byron – he like to kill things, yes?”

I don’t know what to say.

He holds out a hand toward me in a gesture of… benediction. “No. Byron… like the owl or the panther.” He shakes his head. “He hunts, he spill blood for his own self, to slake his own thirst. I try to teach him how to use that, but…” He shakes his head.

“What do you mean?”

“That dog,” Diment says. “He come my way, about that time. I tell him that dog was a waste. I tell him, ‘you piss away your power, boy, you got nothin’ left.’ And he ask, what power is that? So I tell him: the power you get when you put the hurt on things. The power you get when creatures be dyin’. The power of the sacrifice, yes?”

“And what did Byron say?”

Diment shrugs. “He asked me to teach him.”

“About what?”

“Magic.”

“Like card tricks?”

Diment shakes his head. “No, no, no. He already know that kind of thing. Byron – he could make you look the wrong way, every time. He wanted to know about the Mysteries. He wanted to know about the sacrifice, what we call the ‘real magic.’”

“And you could teach him that?”

“Oh, yes. But I can’t talk of this with you. You don’t understand. You don’t even understand your own faith about sacrifice. I tell you this: Something look like magic, this not always so.” He taps his temple. “You can’t see what happen, you can’t see the true cause.”

“But you could talk about it with Byron?”

He nods. “I could teach him. I did teach him.”

“Like what? What did you teach him?”

“I teach him the loa, the signs and the meanings, the sacrifice, the dance, everything to bring the power of the other world into this world. How to help the spirit move on when somebody die. How every spirit have a place in this world, how to get the spirit come here without they hurt you. How to make the juju, the mojo, the veve. How to do every kind of thing I know how to do. Even how to get the spirit on your side to put the hurt on someone. I teach Byron everything I know. I teach him the herbs and leaves. And he use that to kill.”

“His father.”

“Yes.” Diment nods slowly. “I teach him the ways. But he not really learn.”

“What do you mean?”

But Diment just shakes his head. “He use everything only for Byron. That not the way. That the very first thing I try to teach him, with the little dog. He pretend to learn. But he stay the same way. The same Byron.” I see tears in Diment’s eyes. He shakes his head hard, as if to dispel them. “He come by here when he gets out, you know that?”

“From Port Sulfur?”

“Yes.” He wags his head. “After those many year. He spend a few days with me. I hope… he’s changed. So many years, he’s a man now. But-” He shakes his head. “He the same Byron, only stronger. I am happy when he go away again.” Abruptly, Diment stands up.

“You come.”

I follow him inside, into the room with the altar. He steps forward, mumbles something, and plucks from the crowded array of objects what looks like a postcard. He hands it to me.

The light is bad – just a couple of candles and the Christmas tree lights. And what I’m looking at reminds me of the cards opticians use to test for color blindness.

“What is this?”

“You look,” Diment says.

It still seems to be no more than a smear of colors. I have to stare at it for three or four minutes before it gives up its secret. Concealed within a field of bloodred blobs are a pair of clownlike faces, their eyes gazing implacably at the viewer.

“What is this?”

“Turn it over.”

A printed note identifies the painting as

The Marassa by Petit Jean,

Port au Prince, Haiti, 1964.

“The twins,” Diment replies. “You see?”

“Right.”

“And you see it’s addressed to me. And look what Byron say.”

In the message box, across from the address, is a handwritten note:

Finished with the Castle.

Doing real magic now.

“What’s ‘real magic’? What does he mean?”

“The twins,” Diment says. “They guard the gates to les Mystères. Without them, you can’t do real magic.”

“But what is real magic?”

But the old man ignores me. He taps the postmark with his forefinger:

Aug. 10, 2000

Point Arena, CA

“For vaudoo people, this a most important day. Sacred to the Marassa. This is why Byron sends the card that day. August tenth. You might say” – Diment smiles his terrifying smile – “this is our vaudoo Easter.”

“You think Byron lives there? Point Arena?”

“I don’t know. This is the last card I get from him.”

Three years ago. I’m not exactly hot on his heels.

I look at the signature, which is a scrawl. I squint, but there’s no way it looks anything like Byron.

Diment looks over my shoulder. “The name?” he asks. “That’s ‘Maître Carrefour.’”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s the name Byron used when he worked as a magician. On the stage,” Diment adds.

“Worked. But not anymore?”

Diment shakes his head.

“Why not?”

“You saw the postcard. He says he’s doing real magic, now.”

“But what does that mean?”

Diment inclines his head, frowns. “What it means is you make the world do your bidding, with the help of the spirit. You come to be one with them, they work with you, you make thing happen.” He wags his head, a slow steady motion, like a metronome, his eyes closed. “That what it mean to me. With Byron, I don’t know,” he says.

“This thing about a castle…”

Diment shrugs. “I don’t know what he means wi’ that, either.”

“And Carrefour?”

“Ah, yes. That I can tell you. Maître Carrefour is like… you would say a patron saint,” the old man tells me.

“Of what?”

Diment looks at me, shakes his head. “Sorcery,” he says.