Warren Murphy: Voodoo Die

Sacristo's father would tell people that if they didn't believe him, they could open the box. Everyone believed Sacristo's father.

One day Sacristo's father heard that someone was planning to assassinate him. Sacristo knew where the assassin lived. Sacristo and his father went to slay the man. They took Sacristo's personal bodyguard of fifty men. Sacristo and the fifty men returned with his father's body. The father had fallen, bravely charging the enemy. He was killed instantly when he led the charge. No one thought it strange that he was killed by a bullet in the back of the head when the enemy was in front of him. Or if anyone thought --it strange he did not mention it to Sacristo, who had been following his father, and was now El Presidente.

For allowing a potential enemy to kill his father, Sacristo personally shot the generals who were still loyal to his father.

Sacristo loved the bullet. It had given him everything in his Me.

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So El Presidente was not about to listen to tales that there were things better than bullets.

"I swear to you on my life it is better than bullets," said the minister of justice.

And Sacristo Corazon gave his minister a broad fat smile.

"As a figure of speech," said the minister, suddenly panicked by having wagered his life.

"Of course," said Corazon. His voice was soft. He liked the very big house of the minister of justice, and while it looked shabby on the outside there were marble floors and baths on the inside, and pretty girls who had never left the minister's compound.

And they were not even his own daughters. It was a fact of life that any family with a pretty daughter let her be deflowered by El Presidente or one of his cronies, or kept her forever behind closed doors. Now Corazon was a reasonable man. If a man prized his daughters, he could understand that man hiding them. But not the daughters of other men. That was sinful. To keep a girl from your leader, from El Presidente, was immoral.

So the minister of justice brought this thing that was supposed to be better than bullets. A missionary from the hill hospital came with a very heavy box. It was a two-foot cube and required great effort to move it.

The missionary was a doctor and a preacher and had been in Baqia several years. Corazon gave him the usual flowery praise due a messenger of God, then told him to perform his magic.

"Not magic, El Presidente. Science."

"Yes, yes. Go ahead. Who you going to use it on?"

"It's a health device and it failed. It failed to help

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and it ..." Dr. Plumber's voice crackled and faltered with his great sorrow. "It killed and it did not cure."

"Nothing more important than health. When you have health, you have everything. Everything. But let us see how it does not work. Let us see how it kills. Let us see if it is better than this," said El Presidente, and drew a shiny .44-caliber chrome pistol with mother-of-pearl handles, inlaid with the seal of the presidency and a good luck charm that, according to some of the voodoo priests, helped make the bullets go straighter, bullets having a mind of their own and at times defying the will of El Presidente.

Corazon pointed the shiny big-barreled pistol at the head of his minister of justice. "There are some who believe your box there better than bullets. There are some who bet their lives on it, no?"

The minister of justice had never realized how big, how truly big the barrel of a .44 was. It loomed like a dark runnel. He imagined what a bullet might look like coming from it. If there were time to see. He imagined there would be a little explosion down at the other end of the barrel and then, thwack, he would not be thinking anymore because .44s tended to take out very big pieces of the brain, especially when the slugs were of soft lead with little dumdum holes in the center. There was a bullet waiting at the other end of that barrel.

The minister of justice smiled weakly. There was another element here, too. There were Western ways and island ways. The island ways were rooted in the hill religion known to the outside world as voodoo. Anyone bringing in the Western magic of science was pitting it against the island magic of voodoo.

Western magic was the plane. When the plane crashed, that was island magic. The island had won.

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When the plane landed safely, it had won, especially when it landed safely with gifts for El Presidente.

So what was pitted now between the old reliable pistol and the machine of the missionary doctor was island magic in Corazon's hands and gringo industrialized magic in the hands of the bony, sad Dr. Plumber.

A pig was brought into the presidential chamber, a huge, domed, marble-floored formal room for giving medals, receiving ambassadors, and sometimes, when El Presidente had drunk too much, sleeping one off. He could lock the thick ironclad doors here and not be murdered in a drunken sleep.

The pig was a sow and reeked of recent mud, which was dried gray on her massive sides. Two men had to poke her with large sharp sticks to keep her from trampling everything in sight.

"There. Do it," said Corazon suspiciously.

"Do it," said the minister desperately.

"You want me to kill the pig?"

"It have no soul. Go ahead," said Corazon.

"I've only done it once," said Dr. Plumber.

"Once, many times, always. Do it. Do it. Do it," said the minister of justice. He was crying now.

Dr. Plumber turned the switch on the battery that started the ignition on the small generator. Three, quarters of the device was devoted to producing electricity which, in a civilized country, could be gotten with a wire cord and a plug and a socket. But here in Baqia, everything had to be overcome. Dr. Plumber felt very sad and while it was only two days since the awful accident with Sister Beatrice, she became more beautiful with each passing minute. His mind had even achieved what breast cream, exercise, and suc-

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tion cups had failed at: He imagined her with a bosom.

Dr. Plumber checked the mung supply. He checked the level of power. He pointed a small lenslike opening in the front of the box at the pig and then released the electrons.

There was a zap like a tight piece of cellophane snapping and then a smell of roasting rubber and the 350-pound pig smoked briefly, crackled once, and settled into a greenish black glop that spread across the marble floor.

Not even the hide was left. The wooden poles that had been poking the pig were cinders, but the metal points were there. They had hit the floor as soon as the pig melted. And the goo rolled over them.

"Amigo. My blood friend. My holy man friend. I really like Christ," said Corazon. "He one of the best gods there ever was. He my favorite god from now on. How you do that?"

Dr. Prescott Plumber explained how the machine worked.

Corazon shook his head. "Which button you push?" he asked.

"Oh, that," said Dr. Plumber and showed Corazon the red button that started the generator and then the green one that released the electrons.

And then a horrible accident ensued. Corazon accidentally killed his minister of justice just as Plumber had accidentally killed beautiful Sister Beatrice. The room smelled like a smoldering garbage dump.

There were goose bumps on Dr. Plumber's skin. The rays created vibrations in people standing too near a target.

"Oh, God. This is awful," sobbed Dr. Plumber. "This is horrible."

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"Sorry," said Corazon. And he said "Sorry" again when he accidentally put away a captain of the guard whom he suspected of blackmailing an ambassador from another country and not giving his president a cut. This was at the palace gate.

"Sorry," said Corazon and the driver of a car disappeared from the window of a sedan and the car went crazily off the dusty main road of Ciudad Natividado and into the veranda of a small hotel.