Darkfall

herbs, powdered flowers.”
    “But I thought you dealt only in good magic. The Rada .”
    “Many substances can be used by both the Bocor and the Houngon to obtain very different results, to work evil magic or good. These were herbs and powdered flowers that were extremely rare and that he hadn’t been able to locate elsewhere in New York.”
    “There are other shops like yours?”
    “One shop somewhat like this, although not as large. And then there are two practicing Houngons -not strong magicians, these two, little more than amateurs, neither of them powerful enough or knowledgeable enough to do well for themselves-who sell the stuff of magic out of their apartments. They have considerable lines of merchandise to offer to other practitioners. But none of those three have scruples. They will sell to either the Bocor or the Houngon . They even sell the instruments required for a blood sacrifice, the ceremonial hatchets, the razor-edged spoons used to scoop the living eye from the skull. Terrible people, peddling their wares to anyone, anyone at all, even to the most wicked and debased.”
    “So Lavelle came here when he couldn’t get everything he wanted from them.”
    “Yes. He told me that he’d found most of what he needed, but he said my shop was the only one with a complete selection of even the most seldom-used ingredients for spells and incantations. Which is, of course, true. I pride myself on my selection and on the purity of my goods. But unlike the others, I won’t sell to a Bocor -if I know what he is. Usually I can spot them. I also won’t sell to those amateurs with bad intentions, the ones who want to put a curse of death on a mother-in- law or cause sickness in some man who’s a rival for a girl or a job. I’ll have none of that. Anyway, this man, this one in the photograph-”
    “Lavelle,” Jack said.
    “But I didn’t know his name then. As I was packaging the few things he’d selected, I discovered he was a Bocor , and I refused to conclude the sale. He thought I was like all the other merchants, that I’d sell to just anyone, and he was furious when I wouldn’t let him have what he wanted. I made him leave the shop, and I thought that was the end of it.”
    “But it wasn’t?” Jack asked.
    “No.”
    “He came back?”
    “No.”
    “Then what happened?”
    Hampton came out from behind the sales counter. He went to the shelves where the hundreds upon hundreds of bottles were stored, and Jack followed him.
    Hampton’s voice was hushed, a note of fear in it: “Two days after Lavelle was here, while I was alone in the shop, sitting at the counter back there, just reading-suddenly, every bottle on those shelves was flung off, to the floor. All in an instant. Such a crash! Half of them broke, and the contents mingled together, all ruined. I rushed over to see what had happened, what had caused it, and as I approached, some of the spilled herbs and powders and ground roots began to… well, to move … to form together… and take on life. Out of the debris, composed of several substances, there arose… a black serpent, about eighteen inches in length. Yellow eyes. Fangs. A flickering tongue. As real as any serpent hatched from its mother’s egg.”
    Jack stared at the big man, not sure what to think of him or his story. Until this moment, he had thought that Carver Hampton was sincere in his religious beliefs and a perfectly level-headed man, no less rational because his religion was voodoo rather than Catholicism or Judaism. However, it was one thing to believe in a religious doctrine and in the possibility of magic and miracles-and quite another thing altogether to claim to have seen a miracle. Those who swore they had seen miracles were hysterics, fanatics, or liars. Weren’t they? On the other hand, if you were at all religious-and Jack was not a man without faith-then how could you believe in the possibility of miracles and the existence of the occult without also embracing the claims of at least some of those who said they had been witness to manifestations of the supernatural? Your faith could have no substance if you did not also accept the reality of its effects in this world. It was a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before, and now he stared at Carver Hampton with mixed feelings, with both doubt and cautious acceptance.
    Rebecca would say he was being excessively open-minded.
    Staring at the bottles that now stood on the shelves, Hampton said, “The serpent