Darkfall

was for him?
    He stood there for a while, thinking about it, as thousands of snowflakes fluttered like moths around him.
    Eventually he realized he ought to call Faye and explain the situation to her, warn her to be certain that she wasn’t followed when she picked up the kids at Wellton School. He turned to the pay phone, paused. No. He wouldn’t make the call here. Not on the very phone Lavelle had used. It seemed ridiculous to suppose that the man could have a tap on a public phone-but it also seemed foolish to test the possibility.
    Calmer-still furious but less frightened than he had been-he headed back toward the patrol car that was waiting for him.
    Three-quarters of an inch of snow lay on the ground. The storm was turning into a full-fledged blizzard.
    The wind had icy teeth. It bit.
    VI
    Lavelle returned to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of his property. Outside, winter raged; inside, fierce dry heat made sweat pop out of Lavelle’s ebony skin and stream down his face, and shimmering orange light cast odd leaping shadows on the ribbed walls. From the pit in the center of the floor, a sound arose, a chilling susurration, as of thousands of distant voices, angry whisperings.
    He had brought two photographs with him: one of Davey Dawson, the other of Penny Dawson. He had taken both photographs himself, yesterday afternoon, on the street in front of Wellton School. He had been in his van, parked almost a block away, and he had used a 35-mm Pentax with a telephoto lens. He had processed the film in his own closet-size darkroom.
    In order to put a curse on someone and be absolutely certain that it would bring about the desired calamity, a Bocor required an icon of the intended victim. Traditionally, the priest prepared a doll, sewed it together from scraps of cotton cloth and filled it with sawdust or sand, then did the best he could to make the doll’s face resemble the face of the victim; that done, the ritual was performed with the doll as a surrogate for the real person.
    But that was a tedious chore made even more difficult by the fact that the average Bocor -lacking the talent and skills of an artist-found it virtually impossible to make a cotton face look sufficiently like anyone’s real countenance. Therefore, the need always arose to embellish the doll with a lock of hair or a nail clipping or a drop of blood from the victim. Obtaining any one of those items wasn’t easy. You couldn’t just hang around the victim’s barbershop or beauty salon, week after week, waiting for him or her to come in and get a haircut. You couldn’t very well ask him to save a few nail clippings for you the next time he gave himself a manicure. And about the only way to obtain a sample of the would-be victim’s blood was to assault him and risk apprehension by the police, which was the very thing you were trying to avoid by striking at him with magic rather than with fists or a knife or a gun.
    All of those difficulties could be circumvented by the use of a good photograph instead of a doll. As far as Lavelle knew, he was the only Bocor who had ever applied this bit of modern technology to the practice of voodoo. The first time he’d tried it, he hadn’t expected it to work; however, six hours after the ritual was completed, the intended victim was dead, crushed under the wheels of a runaway truck. Since then, Lavelle had employed photographs in every ceremony that ordinarily would have called for a doll. Evidently, he possessed some of his brother Gregory’s machine- age sensibility and faith in progress.
    Now, kneeling on the earthen floor of the shed, beside the pit, he used a ballpoint pen to punch a hole in the top of each of the eight- by-ten glossies. Then he strung both photographs on a length of slender cord. Two wooden stakes had been driven into the dirt floor, near the brink of the pit, directly opposite each other, with the void between them. Lavelle tied one end of the cord to one of the wooden stakes, stretched it across the pit, and fastened the other end to the second stake. The pictures of the Dawson children dangled over the center of the hole, bathed in the unearthly orange glow that shone up from the mysterious, shifting bottom of it.
    Soon, he would have to kill the children. He was giving Jack Dawson a few hours yet, one last opportunity to back down, but he was fairly sure that Dawson would not relent.
    He didn’t mind killing children. He looked forward to it. There was a special