“Sympathetic Magic”

By Wrath James White

Alien Shots

Apex Publications

http://www.apexbookcompany.com

Copyright 2011 Wrath James White

She slid the needle into the doll’s throat imagining the sweet sound of the Reverend’s squeals and screams as he cried out in pain, begging her for mercy. Now he would have to acknowledge her power. Now he would know that her faith was real, her religion more than the ignorant superstition he claimed it to be.

Blood sprayed from the doll’s neck and splashed Mama Luanda’s face and hands painting her ebon skin red. She smiled with her few remaining teeth, yellowed and rotting with age, as she slid the needle in deeper until she could hear gurgling sounds bubble up from the doll’s throat as it choked on its own blood.

Mama Luanda was a master of sympathetic magic, an old time Voodun, a Hoodoo woman as her mama would say. She could make believers and non-believers alike feel the pain she inflicted on their carefully rendered effigies. Near perfect duplicates of the original molded from wax and clay and adorned with the blood, semen, sweat and hair of the intended victim. She then tortured the little dolls until their likenesses screamed their souls out into the abyss.

Despite the claims that she was growing senile, losing her touch, or, as some claimed, even losing her mind, she knew that her magic was stronger than ever. So what if she sometimes lost track of herself and wound up wandering in the neighbor’s field in her nightgown with no idea how she had gotten there? She was still the strongest and most feared Hoodoo woman in all of Louisiana.

Her cracked and wrinkled midnight skin, burning black eyes and seething nest of thick dreadlocks had haunted the nightmares of children for more than five decades. Every night in Louisiana someone screamed themselves awake from nightmares of her long gnarled talons reaching out for them--adults as well as children. In Lafayette, they didn’t fear the boogeyman, they feared Mama Luanda.

Mama Luanda raked her nails over the doll’s face and chest, savagely clawing at its waxy flesh, feeling its skin build up beneath her nails and watching the deep rivulets fill with blood. She could almost feel the Reverend squirm as she clawed through the doll’s cheek revealing its pearl white teeth and pink gums through the jagged gash in its face.

She was respected as the most powerful Voodun in the history of Louisiana. The spells she used had been passed down through ten generations of Voodoo priestesses. Her genealogy ran all the way back to the slave ship. Even the white boys didn’t dare cross her. Some of them even came to her for help. She went to the same market as those Klan boys and they always smiled and held the door for her. She knew the things they were up to at night, but they knew enough about her not to cross her either.

All except for Reverend Ike Larou.

The new Reverend seemed to have no fear of her and no respect for her, either. Every week, he preached fiery sermons warning his flock against the practice of Voodoo. Still, half his congregation would attend his church every Sunday Morning and hers in her backyard every evening. The local Catholic church had long tolerated the practice of Voodoo. Many of the Yuruba gods had even come to be known by the names of Catholic saints. The two religions co-existed harmoniously. The Baptists were another story. They wanted her gone.

Reverend Ike had called her everything from a witch to a devil worshipper to a whore and called her gods demons and anyone who practiced her religion a Satanist. He had slandered her in every way possible, ridiculed her faith, but that would all end tonight. Tonight she would teach the old preacher a little bit about the power of Voodoo.

Mama Luanda slid another needle into the doll’s eye and imagined the Reverend’s horror when he found himself suddenly blinded. The doll looked exactly like him except younger and more handsome than the old bastard had been in decades. It had the same fiery green eyes that gleamed like chips of emerald. The same perfectly straight brilliantly white teeth. His tangled nest of dirty blond hair. Only now, one of its eyes were leaking fluid like a big glob of phlegm sliding down its lily white cheeks as she punctured it and gouged it from its socket.  She began cutting off its fingers one at a time. She could almost hear the Reverend’s cries for mercy as she sawed through first his pinky then his thumb and then his index finger.

“Stop! Oh God, stop! Why are you doing this to me?”

His fingers were long and lithe like those of a pianist. Even as she sliced through them one by one and watched them tumble to the floor, Mama Luanda could not help but marvel at their beauty. She could not remember giving the doll such beautiful hands. She wondered if he would have been flattered. They were the most perfect hands she had ever made. Flawless, right down to the fingerprints and the love line that ran from where his index finger had been all the way to his wrist. She couldn’t remember ever making a doll with hands so lovely. In fact, she didn’t remember ever creating such a realistic doll. No way was she losing her touch. If anything, she was getting better. This was the best one she had ever created. Life-sized and anatomically correct. It even bled. Only, she did not remember making it. She didn’t even know how she could have made such a thing. Perhaps the spirits had guided her hands while she was in one of her trances.

Mama Luanda hefted the thing’s hand in her own as she hacked off the last of its appendages, once again marveling at her handiwork before dropping the bloody paw back down at the doll’s side and moving back up to the doll’s face. Its one remaining eye appeared to follow her movements as she reached around the side of its head to cut off its ears. The ears were almost as realistic as its hands. The lobes were long and thick and hung down almost to its jaw. She had never noticed before what big ears the reverend had.

She grabbed the doll’s ear in her finger, pinching it as if she was scolding a child, then went at it with the knife, quickly sawing through the rubbery flesh and cartilage of first one ear and then the other, leaving two bleeding holes on each side of his head. She then took the needle out of the doll’s eye and began threading it through the hole into the doll’s eardrum.

“Noooo! Nooooo, don’t! Stop! Stop you crazy bitch!”

“You should have thought of that before you insulted me and my faith!” Mama Luanda spit into the doll’s face as she let its severed ears fall from her fingers to the floor.

Had the doll talked? Maybe I am getting senile? She thought.

She plunged the knife into the doll’s heart with a smile of satisfaction, imagining the mean old preacher man falling down dead in the street from a heart attack. She sawed through the sternum and cut the heart free from the doll’s chest. After this everyone would know how powerful her magic was. No one would talk about her passing her magic on to the next generation and stepping down. Not after she stopped the good Reverend’s heart in his chest. She bit into the heart just as the real Reverend Ike came busting into her home, eyes wild with panic.

“Where is he? What have you done with him you crazy old witch?”

Mama Luanda’s smile widened as the Reverend eyes landed on the doll flayed open on the table and he fell to his knees, clutching his heart as it failed and stuttered in his chest grinding to a halt. His usually smug and superior expression contorted into a grimace of pain and horror.

“My son! Oh my God! What have you done to my son?” The Reverend’s face continued to twist and contort and then to twitch as blood vessels exploded and arteries seized. Finally he fell over dead in Mama Luanda’s living room just as the police rushed in behind him.

Mama Luanda continued to smile even as she was wrestled down to the floor beside the dying Reverend. Her magic had worked. He had felt it all.

Wrath James White is a former world class heavyweight kickboxer, a professional kickboxing and mixed martial arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print. Wrath’s most recent novels are The Resurrectionist and Yaccub’s Curse. He is also the author of Succulent Prey, The Book of a Thousand Sins, His Pain and Population Zero. He is the co-author of Teratologist, co-written with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee. Wrath maintains a blog at http://wordsofwrath.blogspot.com/.