Chapter 15

 

I sewed together the last stitch on my “doll” as Mambo Hannigan approached my workstation.

“Is there a reason why your doll’s arms and legs are all extended downward?” the Mambo asked, clinging to the beads of bone that dangled from her neck. She was a pretty woman behind all her accoutrements—dark skin, her black hair straightened and at shoulder length. She dressed, though, in a way that fit every stereotype of Voodoo I’d ever seen in movies. A long, plain dress ornamented with various trinkets that looked as though they’d been carved from bone. Cow bone… I told myself. Maybe chicken bone, that would be even easier to manage. Somehow, I doubted that was the case.

“That’s because it’s not a person,” I said, beaming with pride over my work.

“The instructions were clear. You should attempt to fashion the image of someone whom you feel some kind of responsibility for.”

“My dog isn’t a someone?” I asked, scrunching my brow. I’d sewn together a doll that vaguely resembled Letty. With her having to spend the better part of each day in the dormitory kennel, I thought having a Voodoo doll of her might allow me to pet her throughout the day. After weeks of lectures about how dollcraft is meant to aid those in need, something of a healing art rather than one that should be exacted in vengeance, I thought stitching up a doll of my dog was a good place to start. Not to mention, acquiring her fur and nail clippings was much simpler than trying to ask a human being for those things. It might be easier if you were from a Voodoo family, since they were used to this kind of thing. Still, I didn’t know anyone who I could ask for their toenail clippings and a tuft of hair without coming across as some kind of weirdo. I mean, Ashley might have done it, but it just seemed odd making a Voodoo doll of my own sister. I know… it’s supposed to be meant for good things, for blessings. But the whole thing was a little creepy no matter how I looked at it.

“Well, Miss Mulledy,” Mambo Hannigan said, “your choice is unconventional but not altogether unacceptable. You must, nonetheless, present your doll to the class and explain why you saw fit to make your dog the benefactor of this assignment.”

I simply nodded as I returned my focus to my doggy doll. I admired my work. It didn’t look a thing like Letty. It resembled what might happen if geneticists ever decided to cross a rat with an armadillo. It was so damn ugly that it was cute.

“How exquisite!” Mambo Hannigan exclaimed, hovering over Nico’s workstation. I rolled my eyes.

“Who are you making, anyway,” I said, looking across the table at Pauli, who’d been hiding his work from view by propping his folder on edge.

“It’s personal,” Pauli whispered.

“You realize we have to show-and-tell these things when we’re done, right?”

Pauli’s eyes widened, as if he’d completely dozed off when the assignment was explained and hadn’t a clue. “We do?”

“Yeah,” I chuckled. “Even have to explain how we went about acquiring all the raw materials.”

Pauli bit his lip. “Shit.”

“Didn’t think this one through?” I asked.

“You could say that,” Pauli said, dropping his folder for the first time. What he showed me resembled something of a three-legged person… only the middle leg was just slightly shorter than the other two. I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be a leg…

I covered my mouth to prevent my laughter from disturbing the entire class. “Is that what I think it is?”

“What do you mean?” Pauli said. “I don’t know how you could know my ex. You’ve never met him.”

I shook my head. “I mean, was it necessary to be so anatomically correct?”

“For the kinds of blessings I want to bestow upon him, damn straight!”

I cocked my head sideways. “But how did you get all the raw materials?”

“Honey, I already had everything I needed.”

“You have your ex boyfriend’s toenails?” I asked, not believing him for a minute.

Pauli rolled his eyes. “Of course not. That would be weird. I had one of the alternatives…”

A combination of things like toenails and hair were most common when constructing Voodoo dolls. Though, while more difficult to acquire in most instances, there were a few particularly DNA-heavy fluids the body produces that are sufficient on their own. Blood is one of them, but I was pretty sure “blood” wasn’t the one Pauli was speaking about.

“You have his… semen?” I asked in disbelief.

“There’s a stain on my blue dress!” Pauli exclaimed. For some reason, I didn’t think he was actually making a Bill Clinton joke… he was serious. “I haven’t washed it in more than a year!”

“That’s so gross!” I said, chuckling through my words while shaking my head. Out of a combined sense of disgust and genuine amusement. I wasn’t entirely sure if I was disgusted or amused. Probably a combination of both.

“Mind your own,” Pauli said, propping his folder up on edge to deflect my view of his doll.

“You’re still going to have to present it to the class,” I said, grinning widely.

“I’ll just lie about it. It isn’t like they’re going to cut it open to see what I stuffed inside.”

“They aren’t exactly going to miss that third leg,” I said.

“Honey, I’m not ashamed of that! I’m proud!”

“Proud?” I asked. “There’s no way he’s that big.”

“Honey, when he was with me… he was at least this big.”

“The thing goes down past his knees,” I said, my jaw dropped.

“Mmmmmhmmmm,” Pauli said, nodding with a wide grin.

“I don’t believe you. No guy is that well-endowed.”

“You’re just running in the wrong circles, honey,” Pauli said. “All white boys at that Catholic school you went to?”

“It was an all-girls school,” I said. “And I’ve made out with my share, but never went all the way.”

“You’re holding out?” Pauli asked, as if he didn’t believe me. In truth, it was as much because of Isabelle as anything. As much as I hated the way she’d kissed Mikah without my consent, I’d kissed more than a few boys in my time, to her chagrin. But she’d never let things go any further. She’d start lecturing me mid-tryst about the Virgin Mary, or whatever. Imagine the priest… standing right here. What would he think? It was a real mood killer.

“I’m just saving myself,” I said, which was only partially true.

“For marriage?” Pauli asked, dropping his jaw as if I’d just told him the craziest thing he’d ever heard.

“Maybe,” I said. “It just has to be the right guy.” That wasn’t a lie. Until I find a guy who both Isabelle and I liked, who I could trust, it wasn’t going to happen. And even then we’d probably end up with jealousy issues.

“You must have high standards,” Pauli said. “I’ve met three or four right guys just this week.”

I rolled my eyes. “And you must have no standards.”

“I do have standards!” Pauli insisted in a high-pitched voice. “Six inches, minimum!”

I laughed. “Not the kind of standards I was thinking about. And I don’t want to know how you know that three or four guys you met this week meet those standards… keep those details to yourself.”

“Oh the stories I could tell,” Pauli said, gazing into space.

“Speaking of stories,” Mambo Hannigan interrupted, stepping into view. “I’ve promised Nico he could present first. You two will present first thing next week.”

I felt mildly relieved. At this point, I hadn’t given it much thought at all what I’d say when it was my turn to present. I mean, I made a doll of my dog. Scanning the room, it looked like Ellie was working on something that more closely resembled the Incredible Hulk than any man I’d met as of late. Sauron’s could have easily been mistaken for a Raggedy Ann or Andy. I had to admit, though, that I was mildly curious about Nico’s doll, if for no other reason than he’d been working on it with his back turned toward my position the whole time, as if intentionally to deflect my view.

“Could everyone turn their attention to Nico, please,” Mambo Hannigan announced. “As some of you know, those who belong to College Samedi have a unique ability as dollcrafters to affect either the living or the dead.”

I turned to Pauli, biting my lip. He simply nodded, as if to confirm that this was common knowledge.

“Mr. Freeman, would you kindly explain your ambitious project to the class?”

“Yes, Mambo Hannigan,” Nico said as he held his doll out for all to see. It resembled a young African American girl. It was more detailed than most, though by appearance it’s almost always impossible to discern who a Voodoo doll is meant to represent. “I’ve created a doll meant to hopefully evoke the aid of a young girl from the other side. Her magic was used to banish our school’s headmaster.”

Holy shit… Isabelle said. You don’t think?

I coughed over my shoulder, briefly eliciting a stare from Nico as he continued to speak.

“In recent weeks our college came into some information about the Baron’s disappearance. We now know where it occurred, who was involved, and even why.”

I could almost feel Nico’s eyes shooting lasers into my skull. How did he learn about this?

Kalfu… Isabelle said. When he read Ashley’s mind. Somehow he must have gotten word to someone here.

Isabelle was probably right. But why would Kalfu want to see Baron Samedi return? If what Papa Legba had said was true, Samedi was actually a dedicated protector of the school. What had happened to us, supposedly, an unfortunate result of Messalina’s machinations.

“We believe that by harnessing this spirit’s power, we might finally have what we need to free the Baron and return him to our college.”

I was torn about how I felt about Baron Samedi. Years of nightmares are difficult to ignore. Though, I had promised I’d consider Papa Legba’s request. He insisted it would be key to my own emotional well-being, blah, blah blah. But the decision was Isabelle’s as much as it was mine. It was her magica, after all, that would need to be added to the rite. If Kalfu didn’t somehow get this information across, Legba was the only other one who knew all the details. Even Oggie didn’t know much about what had happened. He’d never asked, and I’d never gone out of my way to tell the story.

Still, Legba had said he knew about all this because he was there the night it had happened. If that was true, then he’d always known. Why wouldn’t he have come up with this plan years ago?

I quickly raised my hand.

“Questions can wait until the end of the presentation, Miss Mulledy,” Mambo Hannigan said.

“It’s okay,” Nico interjected, raising his hand as if he felt he had some power to dismiss Mambo Hannigan’s attempt to impose order on the process. “I’m happy to answer a question.”

“I only see one issue with this,” I said, lying in part. In fact, I saw a number of problems with it. Most of them, however, I couldn’t speak about openly in class. “How do you know that this spirit is willing to help? We learned already in this course that the coercion of the will is strictly forbidden in dollcraft.”

Nico smiled widely. “The dead do not have a will. Their decisions in death are governed by the lives they lived.”

That’s not true! Isabelle protested. I might have died, but I sure has hell have my own will.

“How do you know that?” I asked, shaking my head incredulously. “I mean, is there any basis for making that claim other than College Samedi tradition?”

“And do you suppose, Miss Mulledy,” Mambo Hannigan interrupted, “that College Ogoun has any greater insight than College Samedi regarding the condition of the departed?”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “It’s just logic. If you don’t know for sure if someone has a will, I mean, apart from tradition. If you don’t have any science or evidence, isn’t it better not to act rather than risk violating a person’s soul on the basis of a tradition?”

Nico rolled his eyes. “This is why the Academy shouldn’t let outsiders join…”

Miss Hannigan cut him off. “It is not your place, Mister Freeman, to question a Loa’s choice of an initiate.”

“My apologies,” Nico said, a shit-eating grin still spread across his cocksure face. “I simply mean to point out that our schools have traditions for a reason. If we constantly revised our art in favor of modern science, we’d lose our arts entirely.”

“A fine point, Mr. Freeman.” Mambo Hannigan’s countenance was immediately softened. “The modern sciences have little to offer when it comes to affairs of the deceased.”

“I simply think it’s a question we should consider. Say you’re wrong. Say you offend this spirit by manipulating her to do this ritual. If she had the power to banish a Loa, isn’t it risky to evoke a spirit with such power if you aren’t certain you can control her?”

Nico and Mambo Hannigan laughed in concert. “That’s precisely what College Samedi is most equipped to do, Miss Mulledy. Though perhaps you should consider if the arts of war taught in your college have any ethical implications of their own. What is war if not coercing the will of others on the premise that might is right?”

“Sometimes those who have the power also happen to be on the moral side of history,” I said. “Sometimes force is needed for the greater good, to keep the peace, to thwart evil.”

“And freeing one of the arts’ most important Loa is not something you would deem in the interest of the greater good?” Mambo Hannigan said. Nico simply stood there, his arms folded across his chest.

“All right,” I conceded. “You have a point. I’m sorry for interrupting the presentation.”

“It’s always important we reflect on the ethics of our arts,” Nico said, clearly sucking up to Mambo Hannigan in the process. “Thank you for your questions. They helped me sort out my own feelings on the matter.”

I rolled my eyes, which in turn elicited an even wider closed-mouthed grin from Nico. I wanted to smack the smugness right off of his face.