M.L.N. HANOVER: Unclean Spirits

bringing wet cloth and hot tea, offering to call a doctor and fearing I’d call a lawyer.

Chogyi Jake knew better, having seen the flicker of lost time, but no one else questioned our version of events. By the time Aubrey and Ex came down, deep in conversation, the little gash on my head had stopped bleeding and the hotel management had dropped down from hyperventilating to concerned. Everyone got introduced around, but I had the strong impression that Karen was waiting to talk until we were someplace less public.

My first impulse was to go back to one of our rooms, but with all five of us, it seemed like a tight squeeze. Instead, Karen led us out of the hotel and into the French Quarter. I could tell the others—Ex especially—were bursting with questions. Anytime we got close to the subject of riders or magic, she steered us away.

We walked down Chartres toward Jackson Square, which was, Karen said, the center of the tourist trade. The streets were narrower than I’d imagined, and the balconies over the sidewalks made the buildings seem to lean across toward one another, as if they were greeting each other without including us. In the middle of a block, Karen steered us into a dark corridor with ancient wooden stairs clinging to one wall. We turned into the shadows under the stairway, walked down another shadowy corridor with ivy growing up the stucco on the right,

and came out into a wide brick courtyard. Tables and chairs of wrought-iron filigree were scattered under wide, shady trees, and a white man in a soft linen shirt and pressed khakis appeared seemingly from the foliage itself to guide us to a table.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Karen said as we took our metal seats. “I’ve used this place before. They’re very good about leaving you alone when you want to talk. And the crawfish here are excellent.”

“Good to know,” Ex said through clenched teeth. “Now would someone tell me what the hell happened back there? Jayné tripped?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“It found her,” Karen said. “The rider I’ve been tracking down. It tried a preemptive strike.”

“Okay, hold on,” Aubrey said. “What exactly is this thing?”

“Have you ever heard of loa?” she asked.

“Afro-Caribbean gods,” Chogyi Jake said. “Voodoo spirits.”

“And a kind of rider,” Karen said. “The sphere of influence between Haiti, Cuba, and the southern coast of the United States is practically alive with them. I’ve tracked eight hundred cases of people being ridden by loa since I started paying attention.”

“Eight hundred?” Ex said.

“They aren’t all confirmed, but yes. That’s the ballpark. By which I mean eight hundred in the past ten years.”

Karen raised her hand, waving linen-shirt guy over. While the idea of that many riders sank in, she ordered three plates of crawfish and drinks for all of us. The man nodded and vanished. Around us, ferns and tree limbs bobbed gently in a soft breeze.

“Usually, they stick together,” she said. “There’s something about them that other riders don’t seem to like. The one I found in Portland had come from Port-au-Prince. If it hadn’t gotten so far out of its home territory, I might not have put it together.”

“What was it doing in Portland?” Aubrey asked at the same time I said, “How did it find us?”

Karen smiled and leaned forward. The neck of her blouse gaped a little, showing the curve of her breasts. Ex cleared his throat and looked away but she didn’t take notice.

“Just because the loa tend to stick together doesn’t make them a great big happy family,” she said. “There are struggles within the population. They form alliances with each other, they disrupt each other, they fight for power. For horses.”

“Horses meaning host bodies,” Aubrey said.

“Meaning victims,” Karen said. “The one I found had lost some kind of internal power struggle. It had been cast out.”

“Voodoo politics,” I said. “Sounds like high school. The unpopular demon has to go sit at a different lunch table.”

“More like gangs fighting over turf,” Karen said.

“They might shoot each other to control some particular street corner, but if an outsider comes into the city, they’ll all band together against it. Even with the internal struggles, there’s a protection that comes from being part of the community. Exile strips them of it.”

“So the loser rode Joseph Mfume out to Portland,” Ex said.

“Where it tried to establish territory of its own,” Karen said with a nod.

“What can you tell us about how this particular rider behaves?” Aubrey asked, shifting forward in his seat.

Before Karen could answer, the waiter returned, a second man trailing behind him. They carried three wagon-wheel large platters that, when they put them on the table, almost didn’t leave room for the drinks. At least a hundred tiny red bodies were curled in each one along with small bowls of red sauce and melted butter. Karen scooped one up, pulled off the tail and sucked at the remaining body chitin. A slow smile spread across her lips as she dropped the empty crustacean back on the plate and started stripping the shell from the tail meat.

“You just don’t get these in Boston,” she said. “Lobster, yes. Clams. Crab. But there’s nothing like Louisiana crawfish.”

I picked one up. Its dead eyes reminded me of the shining snake’s.

“Pinch the tail off and suck the head,” Karen said with a smile.

Well, if she could do it . . .

The hard red shell pressed against my lips, and something hot and salty slid into my mouth. I was prepared to gag, but it tasted good. I considered the small red crustacean skull with pleased surprise.

“You were asking about the rider,” Karen said to Aubrey, making the statement an apology. “It’s a subtle form. It doesn’t kill the horse or displace its soul, just lives in the back of his head and changes him. In this case, it changes him into a serial killer.”

“To what end?” Chogyi Jake asked, picking up a crawfish of his own.

“Don’t eat that one,” Karen said. “If the tails aren’t curled, it means they were already dead when they went in the boiler. To what end . . . I think it’s a way to enforce isolation. Mfume started with his fiancée, for example. It eliminates the people who are nearest to it. Kills the people the horse loves.”

“In order to protect itself from being discovered,” Aubrey said.

“Or to break the spirit of the person being ridden,” Ex said. “If it doesn’t displace the original personality, then Mfume was there. He was watching himself rape and slaughter his lover, and didn’t know it wasn’t him doing it.”

“Exactly,” Karen said. “He felt the excitement. The pleasure. He had all the release that a normal human

killer has. By the time he understood what was really happening, it was too late. He was crazy.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “He figured it out? He knew?”

“He did,” Karen said. “It’s how I knew that it wasn’t over. Even after we caught him, we’d only caught the body. The horse. When it left his body, Mfume told me everything. He begged me to find it for him.”

“To kill it,” I said.

“To bring it back to him,” Karen said. “By the time it was over, he was in love with it.”

“Okay, huge ick factor,” I said.

“I’ve been tracking this thing for the last decade, one city to another,” Karen said. “Six months ago, it finally came back home to the land of voodoo. Something happened within the loa that either lifted its exile or made it impossible to enforce.”

“Something about the hurricane,” I said, thinking of Eric’s ruined house and the devastation that surrounded it. The strange X mark on the door. The ring like a dirty bathtub that marked the buildings we’d seen driving in. High water.