Jeff Strand - A Bad Day for Voodoo

“Yeah, it was. No, wait, it was Ribeye. Hey, Ribeye, didn’t you try to make a voodoo doll of your ex-wife that one time?” “Ex-girlfriend.”

“Right, right. How did that work out for you?”

Ribeye shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as I know, she didn’t complain about any pain, but we weren’t living together anymore, so I wasn’t around to say for sure. Made me feel better, though.” Gary slowly slid the tip of the screwdriver across the chest of the doll. “You’re sweating a bit there, buddy,” he said to me. “You really believe in this thing, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re serious. You’re deranged but serious. What do you think is gonna happen when I jab this screwdriver in here?” “Hopefully nothing.”

“Oh, hey, there are a few pins in the box. How convenient.” He tossed the screwdriver back at Blood Clot. “No sense wasting all of the fun on gouging your chest out right away, huh?”

Blood Clot picked up the screwdriver and glared at him.

I was in a state of absolute panic, but what could I do? Should I attack him? That seemed risky. Should I wait around and hope that he was only kidding? Though I hated to not be proactive, there were still multiple guns pointed at me.

Gary selected a nice long pin with a light blue head. “This one is perfect, don’t you think? I’ve always liked the color blue. Especially this particular shade. Now where should I poke it? Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.”

“Black magic is not something you should take lightly,” said Ribeye. “There are forces in this universe more powerful than anything you can imagine, things we cannot see with our regular five senses, and you shouldn’t be taunting them.”

“Shaddup.”

“I agree with Ribeye,” said Scorp. “That voodoo stuff, it can be nasty. What if all of this playing around gets you a voodoo priestess coming after you? That what you want?”

“Get lives, all of you,” said Gary. “I’m just having some fun with Paranoid Boy here. Now where, where, oh where should I stick this pin?”

What would you do in this situation? I’m not actually soliciting advice—it’s too late for that—but I’m curious. The most common answer is probably “I would never have gotten into this jam in the first place, because I wouldn’t have messed with the voodoo doll, even under peer pressure,” and the second most common is probably “Well, I at least wouldn’t have knocked on the damn garage door!”

But let’s pretend you did do all that. What would you do now?

The way I looked at it, here were my options:

1. Faint. Advantages: Easy to do. Everything is less scary when you’re unconscious. Disadvantages: Could hit head on floor. Would probably be dead before I woke up.

2. Scream for help. Advantages: Easy to do. A kindly individual might hear and help. Disadvantages: 99.9997 percent chance that Gary & Co. would shoot me before I finished the first scream.

3. Acquire invulnerability. Advantages: Bullets would bounce off of me, and the voodoo doll would be powerless against me. Disadvantages: Unlikely to happen in the next few seconds.

4. Try to fake him out. Advantages: If it worked, I might not die. Disadvantages: I was not immediately sure how to go about such a thing.

All of my options pretty much sucked raw eggs through a straw, so I went with the fourth one. “What makes you so sure that doll isn’t of you?” I asked.

Gary raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to fake me out?” “That doll needs somebody’s essence to work. By touching it, you’ve transferred your essence into it. You jab a pin in there, you might as well be jabbing a pin right into your own brain.” “That’s not how voodoo dolls work.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m comfortable with my decision,” he said, jabbing the pin into the corner of the doll’s foot.

CHAPTER 11

Oh yeah, I screamed.

Here’s what it felt like: Imagine that somebody (probably not a close friend) took a small pair of garden shears, opened the blades, pressed them against the little toe on your left foot, and then closed the shears with a crunch . The corner of my white shoe instantly turned red, and it felt all squishy inside, and the pain was beyond belief.

All of the thugs looked completely shocked.

“Look at his foot!” shouted Blood Clot, pointing as I fell to my knees. “That ain’t natural!”

“Ow!” I screamed. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

I couldn’t be completely sure, but it really felt like I was missing a toe. A toe! I’d lost a toe! I only had nine toes! Okay, yeah, this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as losing an entire leg.. .but I’d lost a freaking toe!

“Shoot him in case he’s a witch!” Blood Clot shouted, his voice filled with panic.

“Nobody shoots anybody until I say so!” Gary pointed the doll at me as if it were a gun. “Get that shoe off.”

I’d mastered the art of tying and untying my shoes over a decade ago, but now I was having serious difficulty with the whole bunny-going-through-the-hole thing. I finally managed to get the shoe off and tossed it aside, revealing a red, drenched sock. I still wasn’t entirely sure that my toe was completely off, although if it wasn’t, there was a small rock in my sock.

“Ditch the sock!” said Gary.

I yanked off the sock. Four of my toes were perfectly fine, but the fifth one was just sort of.. .well, not there anymore, except for a tiny piece of bone.

“That is messed up,” said Blood Clot.

“Let me see the toe,” said Gary.

“You think I’m faking this?” I wailed.

“I said let me see it!”

I picked up the sock and shook it a few times until my toe dropped out. I whimpered. I sniffled. I did not, however, hug it to my chest and sob, so that’s a point in my favor.

“Hol.. .lee.. .crap,” said Gary. “It worked. It actually worked.”

“Are voodoo dolls supposed to do that?” asked Ribeye. “I thought it was just supposed to make his foot, like, hurt or something.”

“Where’d you get this?” asked Gary, waving the doll at me.

“It was a gift.” I really wished that blood would stop coming out of the place where my toe had once been.

“Where’d they get it?”

“None of your business!” I’m no martyr, but I sure wasn’t going to tell this guy where Adam had gotten the doll. If Gary used a vast collection of dolls to assassinate national leaders so that he could rule the world, it wasn’t going to be because of any address I gave him.

“I wonder how much of a waterfall I can get if I stick this in your neck?” asked Gary.

So this was what it felt like to be moments away from death. It sucked about as much as I’d expected.

As Gary touched the pin to the doll’s neck, I retreated into a glorious, wonderful fantasy world.

“Hey, Adam,” I say, narrating in present tense for no particular reason, “did you throw away that voodoo doll like I asked?”

“I couldn’t,” he says. “We live in a world where voodoo dolls don’t exist. Nobody has ever heard of them. They cause no trouble for anybody.”

“What a fantastic universe!” I say, dancing around as sparkly colored lights follow me and upbeat music plays. “I want to live here forever!”

“And you can!” says Kelley with a merry laugh. “Forever and ever and ever and ever!”

“Changed my mind,” said Gary, moving the pin away from the doll’s neck. “Why end the fun so soon?”